Center For Nature Informed Therapy

Help design the next CNIT T-shirt.

We’re opening this up to the community.

CNIT is looking for an original T-shirt design that reflects the spirit of nature-informed therapy, but we’re keeping the direction intentionally open.

Your design can be simple, bold, hand-drawn, graphic, playful, symbolic, abstract, nature-inspired, text-based, or something completely unexpected.

The only real question is:
Would people want to wear it?

The winning designer will receive:

$150 artist honorarium
2 free CNIT T-shirts
Artist spotlight

After submissions close, finalists will be shared and the CNIT community will vote for the winner.

Submissions are due by 07/05/27.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdkc598Q2XmjsWlGTreBxCMQiOvpmuV2blY-NAgYavPbZ3ytw/viewform

Artists, students, designers, doodlers, clinicians, nature lovers, and creative community members, we’d love to see what you imagine.

We’re inviting the community to design the next CNIT T-shirt.

The direction is intentionally open. It can be simple, bold, hand-drawn, graphic, playful, symbolic, abstract, nature-inspired, text-based, or something we haven’t imagined yet.

Winner receives a $150 artist honorarium, 2 free shirts, and an artist spotlight.

Finalists will be shared, and the CNIT community will vote for the winner.

Submit by 07/05/26
https://www.natureinformedtherapy.org/tshirt-design-contest

"Healing doesn't always begin with words." Sometimes it begins with an image, a rhythm, a stone chosen from a path, or a slow walk under trees.

Our latest blog explores why expressive, embodied, and nature-informed approaches open doors that direct questioning sometimes keeps shut, and what the research says about why that matters.

Read When Words Are Not Enough: natureinformedtherapy.org/post/when-words-are-not-enough-expressive-arts-therapy

If this resonates with how you think about your work, consider our upcoming training Beyond Talk Therapy: Nature, Music, and Expressive Arts. natureinformedtherapy.org/beyond-talk-therapy-expressive-arts-training

For the past two weeks, CNIT has had the privilege of facilitating two Nature-Informed Therapy retreats in the Alps—one for the general public and one for students and faculty from Monmouth University.

Across both groups, participants described the experience with the same words: "once in a lifetime," "transformational," and "I'll never forget this."

Through hiking, reflection, mindfulness, community, and the healing power of nature, we witnessed meaningful growth, connection, and awe.

We're grateful to everyone who joined us and are hopeful to bring this magical experience back in Spring 2028. 🏔️💚

The body settles into a different rhythm out here — Slower mornings. Longer silences. The kind of attention you can’t buy back at the end of a week glued to a screen.

This is what we showed up for. Not a vacation, not a workshop. Six days of living a little closer to the ground, alongside people who came for the same reason.

Human. Nature. Healing.

🌿🇦🇹 The Center for Nature-Informed Therapy is honored to be facilitating a study abroad experience in the Austrian Alps for students and faculty from Monmouth University.

Over the coming days, 11 students and 2 faculty members will immerse themselves in the principles and practices of Nature-Informed Therapy through hiking, mindfulness and meditation, gratitude practices, reflective journaling, therapeutic activities, and meaningful connection with the natural world.

Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Alps, this experience invites participants to slow down, cultivate presence, explore their relationship with nature, and discover how the outdoors can support resiliency.

We are grateful for the opportunity to partner with Monmouth University and to introduce the next generation of helping professionals to the healing potential of nature.
🌲⛰️💚

The final dispatch from Payton, written from Santiago.

Three weeks of walking end in a cathedral square: old friends and new ones, tears, hugs, and the moment a Spanish priest says four words Payton has been hearing in every language for three weeks. Todos nosotros somos uno. We are all one.

This closing letter is about a pattern many Camino walkers shared with him along the way: that despite expecting the trail to be spiritually significant for its solitude, the moments that stayed with them were almost always the ones with other people. A Tennessee couple bonding with an Italian couple over charades and shared wine. A blistered foot that slows down a whole group. The one bottle that gets passed around.

Read the full letter, including a link to Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center research on the lasting benefits of small loving moments with strangers, at natureinformedtherapy.org/blog.

Thank you, Payton, for these three weeks of words and photographs. A compilation reflection drawing the journey together follows on our blog within two weeks.

When did you last share a table with someone new?

From Payton, written in the final miles before Santiago.

He calls this one An Untitled Meditation. It moves from a quiet "thank you" offered to a stretch of forested path, to Thich Nhat Hanh's reading of the Diamond Sutra, to a Spanish proverb tacked on a moss-covered tree along the trail: All the things that hurt, also made you move forward.

A passage worth sitting with:

"The more time that I have dedicated to mindfulness and gratitude, the less of myself I have found. In fact, I believe that the moments in my life when I have come closest to enlightenment are those when I have lost completely any definition of what self is or means, or what separation exists between it and the universe."

Read the full reflection at natureinformedtherapy.org/post/trail-notes-05-losing-the-self-padron

This is what nature-informed practice looks like in the wild: paying attention, letting the landscape speak, walking at the pace of your own thinking.

When have you felt least like yourself, and most at peace?

From Day 2 in the Bavarian foothills.

A circle of people. River behind us, no walls, no screens. Just a slow morning, an open sky, and the kind of quiet most of us forget exists.

We come here to remember something modern life doesn’t make room for: that healing happens in relationship with the more-than-human world.

Reciprocity, not extraction. Presence, not productivity.

Restoring balance through nature-inspired healing.