Journeys & Bothies
Field notes on Sauna, Nature, Therapy and Belonging.
Written by David Girling – Lecturer, Therapist and Sauna Owner, formerly author and Programme Leader of the BA (Hons) in Outdoor Education and Learning for the 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
Wellbeing Journeys - eco | adventure therapy page
Why Sauna Belongs in Nature
Field notes from WildEmber Bothy Sauan, Kenmore, Loch Tay, Scotland
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.
Community Through Connection
Field Notes from WildEmber Bothy Sauna, Loch Tay, Scotland
What I notice most running the wood fired sauna at WildEmber Bothy by the loch in Scotland is how quickly connection forms between people who arrived as strangers.
Most sauna sessions here are unique. New faces, different groups, people passing through for a single visit, alongside a few regulars. There is no fixed membership and no shared history to draw on. And yet, within minutes of people arriving, something familiar forms.
People arrive polite and slightly contained, towels wrapped, finding a place to sit. Then the sauna door closes, the heat builds, and the room settles. Someone shifts position. Someone asks how long they have been coming. Someone offers to pour the water on the stones. Within minutes, a small social world appears.
What stands out is how little structure is required. No introductions, no facilitation, no planned activity. Just shared heat, shared cold water immersion, shared time beside the loch in nature.
Inside the sauna, many of the usual social markers fall away. There is no obvious status, no job titles, no clear signal of who anyone is outside the sauna space. Everyone is wearing roughly the same level of clothing, exposed to the same temperature, sharing the same physical experience.
In a fairly modest Western culture, this matters. We normally manage how we are seen through clothing, roles, and conversation. Sociologists have long described everyday life as a form of social performance, where identity is signalled through external cues. In a sauna, much of that is reduced. Not dramatically, but enough that people meet first as bodies, then as stories.
You do not need to perform. You can talk, sit quietly, or simply breathe. Silence feels normal. Laughter comes easily. The usual social effort drops away.
The body also does part of the work. Sitting in heat together, stepping into cold loch water, and recovering side by side creates a shared physical rhythm. Research in psychology and nervous system regulation shows that shared physical stress followed by relief increases trust and social bonding. The physiological experience supports the social one.
People who have never met before sit through the heat together, encourage each other into the water, laugh at the cold, then sit afterwards with tea at the WildEmber Bothy site. Connection becomes real. Not deeply and not permanently, but genuinely human.
It is the closest thing I know to the old idea of a local gathering place where you are known by name. By a second visit to the sauna, we often recognise you, greet you, and welcome you back. That simple recognition is often enough to create a sense of belonging.
Over time, I have come to see the sauna as a social leveller. Not because everyone becomes close, but because everyone becomes similar in the space. Similar levels of heat, vulnerability, and presence. Without uniforms, offices, or technology, people relate on more equal terms. Social psychologists describe this as a reduction in status cues. When those cues are reduced, interaction becomes simpler and more direct. People listen more. They take turns. They notice each other.
This pattern is consistent with wider wellbeing research. The places most often recognised for long and healthy lives, often called Blue Zones, are not defined only by diet or exercise, but by strong social connection and shared routine. Shared meals, shared time, shared daily practices. The Roseto Effect showed similar results, where tight community networks protected health even where lifestyle factors were not ideal.
What matters most is not only what people do, but that they do it together.
Public health research now consistently links social connection with improved mental health, lower stress, and greater resilience. Even brief, repeated social contact has measurable benefit. People do not need large networks, they need regular moments of being seen, included, and at ease with others.
A mobile sauna in nature, set beside a Scottish loch, turns out to be a reliable place for those moments to happen.
At WildEmber Bothy, the sauna and wellness tent are designed as simple community spaces. Wood fired sauna, cold water immersion, nature based wellbeing sessions, and trauma aware, ecotherapy informed practice all sit alongside each other. Not as performance or spectacle, but as grounded, relational experiences in natural settings.
People arrive as individuals and often leave as a group, even if they never meet again.
This is not presented as a solution to loneliness or a cure for modern life. It is something quieter and more practical. A reminder that human connection forms easily when the environment supports it.
Given heat, water, nature, and shared time, community appears.
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.”– Simone Weil
