ABOUT ME

I am a clinical psychologist and climate aware practitioner. While my career as a psychologist began back in 2005, my awareness and relationship with the natural world and our human relationship to it began in childhood. This continues to shape my ideas, commitments and how I can contribute during this time of climate change and associated social ecological challenges. I have worked across sectors in community mental health, private practise, leadership and organisational wellbeing, and volunteered in spaces of community health and climate psychological health.

My purpose is in progressing our personal and collective emotional and social wellbeing as we live in climate change. This includes how climate change impacts people and communities directly (through extreme weather events and biodiversity loss) and indirectly (such as feeling uncertain, dread or anxiety about the future, or grief for extinctions and ecosystem loss).

Responding to climate change involves being aware and responsive to the underlying driving forces, of which there are many, such as a dominant culture that is focused on hyper-consumption, competition, individualism, inequality and separation from nature. These forces shape how we experience life and can undermine our potential for mental health and holistic wellbeing. These are big, messy, painful realities to accept, let alone respond to. Yet, radical acceptance - that this is, accepting what is happening and seeing this with our eyes and hearts open - is a pre-requisite for compassionate, responsive and effective action. 

Individuals and communities with compassion capability are a powerful force. 

Compassion is an inner and collective resource, a capability that is both natural and learned. It’s a feeling and behaviour that we can refine and grow.

Just like nature moves through cycles and phases of life - like growth, rest, hibernation, activity, damage, repair, regeneration, transformation, learning, evolving, flourishing – so do we, as individuals, groups and cultures. Here, self and collective emotional care practises are central to staying grounded in challenging times and for responding in creative and effective ways.  

Through Compassionate Nature, I curate individual and collective offerings that are strategic and focused on capability building and connection. I apply evidence-based strategies and approaches for building social and emotional wellbeing that are tailored to where we are at, whether this be in a proactive, purposeful stage of life, or a burned-out challenging phase of life, or following life disruption and in the process of recovery and healing.  

About compassionate nature

Compassionate Nature is an empathy business for care-givers, leaders and advocates responding to social and environmental issues. Created by clinical psychologist Bronwyn Gresham, it is built on the concept that self and collective care is often an (ironically) overlooked aspect of the sectors that are in service to community and other beings.

What does compassionate nature refer to?

Compassionate nature refers to our natural internal capacity to respond to challenges in our lives with insight, self-awareness, skilfulness, creativity and efficacy. It recognises that human beings are natural caregivers, collaborators, and creators.

Having a compassionate nature entails the skill of turning towards difficult experiences, feelings and predicaments, and then responding in some way that is beneficial. This is hard. If done without compassion activated, it can drive exhaustion, empathy fatigue, disconnection and avoidance. Therefore, our natural inclination to care about others and the world around us requires tender care too. Thankfully there is a diversity of inner qualities, values and skills – psychological, emotional, and social – that come both naturally to us and can be learned. They can be brought into direct awareness, experienced, learned, generated, rehearsed, and developed.

In sum, Compassionate Nature is about feeling equipped and inspired to care, and equally, embodying care practises to inspire others.

• It is about collective capability to respond well to the significant and complex challenges life presents us.

• It is about finding one’s unique nature and responding in authentic and emotionally nourishing ways.

• It is about weaving and dissolving the separation between self and other, recognising that our individual emotional wellbeing is shaped and regulated by our collective wellbeing. We cannot have one without the other.

Why does the logo feature bird wings and a river?

That just like a bird has two wings needed for flight, our emotional social and psychological health needs wings, opposing forces that are in constant balance for social cohesion, safety and purpose in these times of environmental and social upheavals. The heart in the words refers to compassion and courage, who require love and clarity of purpose. The river refers to our life’s journey and purpose and our window of psychosocial resilience, how we flow through obstacles, create movement and reconnect with relationships and nature.