The rain had been falling all morning, the kind of steady Pacific Northwest rain that soaks the moss until it glows extra green, and then, at the exact moment we were meant to begin our rewilding session, it stopped. A woman who had traveled to stand on this ground stepped onto the beach, and the sky opened over her like something exhaling. I have witnessed this more times than chance can explain. The weather does not perform on cue, and yet again and again, when a woman arrives ready to set something down, the land seems to lean in and meet her.
I want to tell you what a rewilding session actually is, because the phrase gets used loosely now, and because the real thing is both simpler and stranger than most descriptions allow. It is not a themed photoshoot with a flower crown and a fog machine. It is not a hike where I happen to bring a camera. A rewilding session is a few hours held in reverence in which a woman is returned to herself in the presence of the wild, and I am there to hold the space and to keep the record. The photographs are the residue of something that already happened in her body. They are proof, not performance.
The word beneath the word rewilding
Rewilding began as a term for land. Conservationists used it to describe the practice of letting ecosystems return to their own intelligence, removing the dams and the fences, reintroducing the wolves, and then stepping back to let the whole living system remember how to run itself. What surprised people was how far the effects traveled once the keystone creatures came home. Rivers changed course. Forests thickened. The land did not need to be managed back to health so much as it needed to be trusted back to health.
The same word has since crossed over into the inner life, and for good reason. Psychological rewilding describes the deliberate work of restoring the parts of our inner world that have grown distant from the rhythms of the natural one, of reconnecting with an older, ancient human nature that our modern days have paved over (Psychology Today; Psyche). The premise is quietly radical. It suggests that wildness is not something you acquire or perform, but something you already are underneath the fences you did not choose. A rewilding session, then, is not about becoming someone new. It is about removing what was placed on top of who you have always been.
I think often about La Loba, the old bone woman at the center of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves. La Loba lives out in the desert, and her work is to gather bones, the bones of wolves especially, the parts of a creature that everyone else has forgotten. When she has collected an entire skeleton, she sits by the fire and she sings. She sings until the bones grow flesh, until the wolf stands, until it runs off across the canyon and, somewhere in its running, turns into a laughing woman. Estés offers this as an image of the wild woman archetype, the instinctual, knowing self that most of us have been quietly taught to leave for dead. A rewilding session is a small act of La Loba’s work. We are not adding anything. We are gathering the scattered bones of a woman and singing over them until she remembers she can run.
What we actually did in the rain
Let me stay concrete, because the abstract can drift toward the kind of performative spirituality I want no part of. When that woman stepped onto the land, we did not rush toward the camera. We began instead the way I almost always begin, with one small act.
She pulled a card. I keep an oracle deck for this, not because I believe a printed card holds prophecy, but because the act of drawing one asks a woman to name, out loud, what she is carrying. The card becomes a doorway rather than an answer. Hers spoke of justice and release, and so that is where we went. We sat, breathed, and she pondered. At the close of the session, she performed a ritual of letting go, giving to the ocean the burdens she has been carrying for so long she ceased to notice their true weight. There is a particular hush that arrives when a woman finally sets a burden down. The ocean received it. And the land lent support.
As if the wild had been listening, a bald eagle came. It circled slow and unhurried above the clearing, the way something ancient watches over a homecoming, and behind her, a rainbow rose out of the rain in the distance. I staged none of it. I could not have. This is the part that people who have not experienced a rewilding session find hard to trust, and the part that women who have experienced one never forget. When you show up genuinely open, the unseen world meets you halfway. It has been doing this for far longer than we have had cameras to catch it.
Why the body believes it, even when the mind resists
I hold a PhD in child development and psychology, and I came to this work through years of studying how humans grow, so I am not inclined to hand you mysticism where science will do. Although I do believe science, poetry, mysticism, and earth-based cultures are all useful in understanding the same set of phenomena (see Lyanda Haupt’s book Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit for more on this). And the science here is unambiguous. We are not built for the lives most of us lead. The biologist E. O. Wilson gave us the word biophilia for the idea that human beings carry an inherent pull toward other living things, a hunger for the rest of life that evolution wrote into us long before it wrote cities (Wilson, via forest medicine research).
When we answer that pull, the body responds fast and measurably. Studies of the Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, show that time spent immersed in a living landscape lowers cortisol, the stress hormone, reduces blood pressure and heart rate, and shifts the nervous system out of its fight-or-flight vigilance and into the parasympathetic state, the rest-and-digest calm where healing and repair actually happen (forest bathing meta-analysis; Motive and forest medicine review). This is why a woman can arrive at a rewilding session braced and articulate, all her defenses in good working order, and within an hour her shoulders have dropped and her voice has changed register. Her mind may still be narrating, but her body has already decided to trust the trees. The camera simply waits for the moment the two agree.
This is the quiet promise underneath a rewilding session. You do not have to believe in anything. You only have to arrive. Your nervous system knows the language of moss and water and open sky far better than your thinking mind does, and it will begin speaking it the moment you stop interrupting.
What the children in the forest taught me
Long before I made photographs this way, I spent my time teaching young children outdoors, in the kind of nature and forest preschool where the classroom is a desert, a stand of cedars, or a beach, and the curriculum is mud and weather and long, unhurried hours with nothing in particular to accomplish. I came to that work with a doctorate in child development and a head full of theory, and the children promptly taught me what the theory could only gesture toward. Give a child a real morning, unstructured in the truest sense, with a creek and a fallen log and no adult narrating what she ought to make of them, and you watch something visibly loosen in her. Her body settles, her attention lengthens, and her imagination unfurls into worlds richer than any lesson plan I could have handed her. As Erin Kenny so eloquently put it, “Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.”
The science underneath what I was witnessing is sturdy and, to my mind, urgent. The pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, in her book Balanced and Barefoot, makes the case that unstructured outdoor play is not a charming extra but a developmental necessity, that a child rolling down a hill or spinning until she is dizzy or balancing along a log is building the vestibular and proprioceptive systems that underwrite balance, coordination, focus, and the capacity to sit still and learn later on (Hanscom, via review). When we strip that movement away, when we fill a childhood with screens and schedules and the low hum of adult anxiety about safety, the body pays a price we are only beginning to measure. Play in the wild is not how a child avoids the real work. It is the real work.
Richard Louv, who wrote the foreword to Hanscom’s book, gave us the phrase for what its absence costs. In his book Last Child in the Woods he named nature-deficit disorder, not a clinical diagnosis but an honest description of what happens to human beings, and especially to children, when they are severed from the living world, a severance he links to rising rates of attention struggles, anxiety, and depression (Louv, Last Child in the Woods). Watching the children in my care, I saw the inverse of that deficit, the visible flourishing of small humans returned to the element they were grown for. They were not being entertained by the forest. They were being made whole by it.
Here is the part we forget. We do not outgrow that need, we only learn to override it. Louv himself followed his children’s book with one for the rest of us, The Nature Principle, arguing that adults reap the very same harvest from the wild that children do, the stress hormones lowered, the attention restored, the mood lifted, the body remembering how to rest (Louv, The Nature Principle). Our species spent nearly the whole of its history out under weather, in direct daily relationship with land and season and other living things, and the few generations we have spent indoors and online are a blink against that inheritance. The longing so many women carry, the restlessness they cannot name, the sense of being subtly unwell in a life that looks fine on paper, is often this ancient mismatch speaking. A rewilding session is not indulgence then, and it is not decoration. It is a grown woman being returned, however briefly, to the conditions her body was built inside, the same return that made the children in my care come alive.
The wild feminine and the divine feminine
You will see two phrases orbiting this work, and I want to be plain about what I mean by them, because both have been diluted almost past meaning.
The wild feminine is the instinctual self Estés wrote about, the woman who knows things in her body before she can defend them in her mind, who feels the turning of the seasons in her own tissue, who has been domesticated by a culture that rewards her for being pleasant and available and small. Wild feminine photography, when I make it, is not about looking untamed for the lens. It is about catching the exact instant a woman stops managing how she appears and simply is, unguarded, present, at home in her own skin among the trees.
The divine feminine is the older, larger current the wild feminine flows within. Across many cultures and traditions it names the sacred, creative, life-giving force that has been pushed to the edges of religions built around a masculine center (The Good Trade; Psychology Today). To reclaim it is not to adopt a new belief but to honor something a woman tends to know already, the sacredness of her own body, the wisdom of her own intuition, the truth that she moves in cycles rather than straight lines. Divine feminine photography, in my hands, means photographing a woman as though she were already holy, because she is, and letting the images give her back a face she may not have seen since girlhood.
I say all of this without a shred of costume mysticism. There is no script a woman must recite, no aesthetic she must perform. The wild feminine and the divine feminine are not brands. They are simply names for parts of herself that the ordinary week gives her no room to feel.
If any of this is landing in your body as you read, my free Wild Feminine Field Guide is a gentle place to begin. It is a companion for the woman who feels the pull but is not yet sure what to do with it, a way to start rewilding at home before you ever stand in front of a camera.
For the mothers especially
The woman in the rain had a two-year-old at home, yet she deserves, all women deserve, to spend a few hours being no one’s everything. I do not think that is indulgent. I think it may be one of the most necessary things a mother can do, and I say that as someone who studies how mothers are actually made.
There is a word, matrescence, coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael and revived by the reproductive psychologist Aurélie Athan at Columbia, for the profound becoming a woman moves through when she enters motherhood (The Motherhood Center; Athan, Medium). Athan calls it a “seismic shift,” and she means it whole, a becoming that remakes a woman in her body and her mind, in the way she loves and the way she works, in her sense of meaning and of the sacred, with no quiet corner of her left untouched. It is, in other words, an initiation as total as adolescence, and yet our culture gives it no rite, no threshold, no marking. A woman is expected to hand over her whole identity and keep smiling through the transition as though nothing enormous is occurring. The old myths knew better, which is why so many of them send the woman down into the dark before they let her rise, the same descent to the dark mother that every real initiation asks of us.
A rewilding session can become that missing rite. For a mother, the wild does something no spa day can. It reminds her that she existed before she was anyone’s, and that the self she set down is not gone, only waiting, like La Loba’s bones, for someone to sing over them. It’s reintroducing wolves into her wilderness and renewing the course of her creative river. When she leaves, she carries images of a woman who is unmistakably herself, not a tired figure at the edge of the family photo, but the whole and wild center of her own life. Her child will one day see those pictures and understand that their mother was a person, luminous and real, and that is no small inheritance.
The wheel keeps turning, and so do you
One of the deepest gifts of this work is that it returns a woman to cyclical time. The modern world runs on the straight line, the endless forward push of productivity that treats rest as failure and sameness as virtue. The living world knows better. It moves in wheels, through dark and light, fallow and flourishing, the long descent of winter and the insistence of spring. To rewild is, in part, to remember that you were built for this same music, that your energy and your creativity and your need for retreat rise and fall in seasons, and that honoring those rhythms is not weakness but wisdom (Psyche).
When a woman stands on the land during a rewilding session, she is stepping, however briefly, back into that older calendar. She is letting the place teach her body what her body already suspected, that she is allowed to move slowly, to lie fallow, to shed and to bloom in her own time. The photographs I make of her in those hours become talismans of that permission. She hangs one where she will see it on the hard days, and it tells her, wordlessly, that the wild woman she met in the forest is still in there, keeping the fire, gathering the bones.
How a rewilding session differs from a photoshoot
Women sometimes come to me having tried the ordinary version first, the styled shoot with the borrowed dress and the golden hour and the instruction to tilt the chin and think of something happy. There is nothing wrong with those photographs, and they can be lovely. But many women describe the same quiet disappointment afterward, the sense that the images captured how they were arranged rather than who they are. The camera recorded a surface and missed the person underneath it.
A rewilding session inverts the whole order of operations. In a conventional shoot, the woman shapes herself to the image the photographer has in mind. In a rewilding session, the image forms itself around the woman as she actually is, once the land has helped her stop performing. I am not directing you toward a look. I am waiting for the moment the wild loosens something in you, and then I am quick enough to catch it. This is why the results feel less like portraits and more like evidence, the visible trace of an hour in which a woman came back to herself.
It is also why the wild is not a backdrop in this work but a participant. The eagle and the rainbow and the rain that stops on cue are not set dressing behind the subject. They are collaborators in her return, the unseen world doing its half of the work while I do mine. Divine feminine photography made this way does not decorate a woman with nature. It photographs the conversation already happening between her body and the ground she is standing on, because she is nature. We all are.
What to expect if you come
People often ask what a rewilding session requires of them, and my honest answer is almost nothing except willingness. You do not need to be photogenic, whatever that word is supposed to mean. You do not need to have your inner life sorted out. You do not need the right clothes or the right words or a spiritual vocabulary. You need only to be a woman who feels, however faintly, the pull toward something wilder and truer than the week she has been living.
We begin gently, with something small and honest to help you arrive. We let the land set the pace. Sometimes there are tears, and that is welcome. Sometimes there is laughter, the loose, surprised laughter of a woman remembering she is more than her responsibilities. Cackling is even better. I move around you quietly, catching what is real, never posing you into someone you are not. And then it ends, and you drive home changed in some way you may not be able to name for days, and later the images arrive to remind you it was not a dream.
The rain that stopped over that woman was not a miracle I arranged. It was the wild doing what the wild does when we finally come close enough to be met. A rewilding session is simply the practice of getting that close, of standing on the ground with your defenses down and letting the living world, and the lens, witness you being exactly who you already are.
If you feel the pull, I would love to sit with you out among the trees. You can start with the free Wild Feminine Field Guide, or, when you are ready to be met on the land, read about a rewilding session here. The bones are already there. We only have to sing.
Sources & further reading
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. The book that named the wild woman for a generation, and the source of the La Loba story of gathering and re-ensouling the bones.
- Marc Bekoff and others on the psychology of rewilding, on reconnecting the human heart to its ancient, biophilic nature. Psychology Today
- Psyche Guides, How to reconnect with your wild nature, a grounded, practical companion to inner rewilding and cyclical living. Psyche
- Research on shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, and its measured effects on cortisol, blood pressure, and the parasympathetic nervous system. Meta-analysis and forest medicine review
- E. O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia, the inherited human pull toward the rest of life. Forest medicine overview
- Aurélie Athan and the concept of matrescence, on the total becoming of a woman entering motherhood. The Motherhood Center and Athan on Medium
- On the divine feminine and its reclamation as an embodied, sacred practice. The Good Trade and Psychology Today
- Angela J. Hanscom, Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children. The developmental case for wild, unstructured play and the sensory systems it builds. Overview
- Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, and its companion for grown-ups, The Nature Principle. The books that named nature-deficit disorder and argued that adults need the wild as much as children do. Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle
