Journeys & Bothies
Field notes on Nature, Therapy and Belonging.
Written by David Girling – Lecturer, Therapist and Sauna Owner, formerly Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) in Outdoor Education and Learning at UHI, now working across eco-therapy, paddlesport and place-based wellbeing in Highland Perthshire.
These reflections grow out of time spent on the water, in forests, in classrooms, in counselling rooms, and beside the fire. They explore how people find regulation, meaning and connection through movement, nature, ritual and shared space.
This is not about fixing or optimising. It’s about paying attention, to place, to patterns, and to the quiet ways people return to themselves.
Ritual • Connection • Community
@wellbeingjourneys @wildemberbothy
Why Sauna Belongs in Nature
Field notes from Loch Tay
There is something quietly different about stepping into a sauna beside open water. Not in a spa, nor a hotel complex, but on the edge of a loch, with weather moving through, hills holding the horizon, and steam rising into cold air.
At Loch Tay, our sauna sits almost at water level. The depth of the loch stretches out in front, the ancient hillside rises behind, and in between the two you find yourself sandwiched in a place of hot and cold. Stillness on the bench, movement in the landscape. It’s a simple set-up, but psychologically it’s doing far more than most of us realise.
We often talk about sauna in terms of physical benefits, circulation, muscle recovery, immune response. And there’s good evidence for all of this. Research into heat exposure and cold immersion suggests that alternating stress and recovery can support cardiovascular health, regulate inflammation, and improve mood. The body experiences sauna as a kind of positive stress: intense, but contained, followed by relief. In physiological terms, it’s a safe way to practise moving between activation and rest.
But what tends to get missed in modern sauna culture is the role of place. A sauna in a leisure complex regulates the body. A sauna in nature regulates the whole system, body, attention, nervous system, sense of self.
The psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan describe something called Attention Restoration Theory: the idea that natural environments gently restore our capacity to focus, because they don’t demand anything from us. We don’t have to process signage, screens, noise, or social performance. Our attention softens. It becomes receptive rather than effortful. Water, in particular, seems to amplify this effect. Wallace J. Nichols famously described this as the “Blue Mind” state, a calm, meditative mode that humans reliably enter around lakes, rivers, and seas.
You feel this at Loch Tay. People come out of the heat and don’t rush to speak. They sit. They watch the water. Breathing slows. Shoulders drop. There’s often a long pause before anyone reaches for their phone, if they do at all.
From a therapeutic perspective, this makes a lot of sense. Modern psychology increasingly understands mental health in terms of nervous system regulation. Stephen Porges’ work on Polyvagal Theory suggests that we are constantly scanning our environment for cues of safety or threat, not consciously, but biologically. When the environment feels safe, predictable, and non-demanding, the body shifts into a state of rest, digestion, and social connection.
Nature provides these safety cues in ways that built environments rarely do. Open horizons. Natural rhythms. The absence of artificial noise. Even the smell of wood and water. These are not just aesthetic features; they are biological signals that tell the body it can soften.
This is where the difference between an elemental sauna and a commercial spa really shows up.
In many modern wellness spaces, sauna becomes another form of optimisation: a service to consume, a treatment to book, a product to improve yourself with. It’s private, efficient, controlled. Useful, but strangely disconnected.
An elemental sauna, by contrast, feels more like a ritual. Ritual doesn’t mean spiritual in a grand sense. It simply means something repeated, embodied, and shared. Sitting on the same benches. Entering the same heat. Stepping into the same cold air. Watching the same water. Over time, the body learns the pattern. It begins to associate the place itself with safety, release, and connection.
In nature-based therapy, this is sometimes described as place attachment, the idea that certain landscapes become psychologically meaningful because they hold experiences of regulation and emotional shift. We don’t just feel better in these places; we start to feel better because of them.
At Loch Tay, people often describe something similar. Not just “I enjoyed the sauna”, but “I feel different here”. More present. Less defended. More open to conversation, or to silence. The hills and water seem to do some of the work for us.
From this perspective, sauna is not just about heat. It’s about re-entering relationship, with the body, with the environment, and with each other. Sitting in a shared space where nobody is performing, producing, or achieving anything. Just sweating, breathing, cooling down, and returning.
In a culture that moves fast, speaks loudly, and measures everything, this kind of experience is quietly radical. It doesn’t ask us to improve ourselves. It asks us to feel ourselves again.
And perhaps that’s why sauna has lasted for thousands of years across so many cultures. Not because it’s efficient. Not because it’s on trend. But because it creates a simple, repeatable way for us to remember what it feels like to be embodied, connected, and held by the world around us.
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.”– Simone Weil
