GUIDE & NATURE BASED THERAPIST

Shae is an ecotherapeutic guide and therapist who holds a Masters degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and a graduate certificate in Ecopsychology. She has a passion for the revitalization of the human relationship with the natural world, and the integration of relationship with plants, animals, wild landscape, and authentic community in the therapeutic process. She is inspired by the meaningful impact plants and animals— both in the wild and on the farm— have on people, and loves partnering with animals in particular in educational and therapeutic processes.

Shae is committed to contributing to the cultural movement of reconnecting self and community with nature. She understands a healthy relationship with the natural world to be foundational to mental and psychospiritual health and overall wellness.

In 2019, Shae co-founded Seedkeepers Forest School, and served as a Co-Director and Instructor from 2019-2022, serving children ages 3-9. Prior to this, Shae worked as a senior field guide in the field of wilderness therapy, working with children and adolescents, and supported the launch of Emerald Arrow, a wilderness therapy program for young adults ages 18-30.

Following this, Shae developed and led trainings for wilderness therapy field guides with Blue Ridge Therapeutic Wilderness, where she worked as Program Developer. This led to her pursuing her Masters in Clinical Mental Health, where she collaborated with professor Bethany Novotny to develop ETSU’s Nature-Based Therapy Graduate Certificate. Shae now serves as Co-Director of the Earth School at Fauna Forest Farm, as well an adjunct professor in ETSU’s Nature-Based Therapy graduate certificate program. In 2025, Shae joined the Summit Counseling team, and continues to offer nature-based therapy for individual and groups at Fauna Forest Farm in Jonesborough.

She has long had a love of supporting children and adults on their journey of remembering their roots in the earth, and specializes in facilitating meaningful nature-based therapeutic experiences.

She continues to pursue a vision of a soulfully-rooted cultural reunion of modern-day human societies and the natural world.

GUIDE & THERAPEUTIC MENTOR

As a therapeutic mentor, ritual guide, and group facilitator, Kevin offers himself in service to the healing and enlivening energies that flow deeply through our inner lives, our communities, and the natural world. His work begins with deep listening — attending to the true needs and desires of the soul, whether they are freely expressed or buried beneath layers of protection, depression or amnesia. It is his conviction that when these deeper energies are contacted and courted, the renewal of purpose, meaning, belonging, vitality, and becomes genuinely possible.

Drawing on depth psychology, parts-work, psychodramatic processes, myth and story, creative expression, Jungian dreamwork, and the ancestral technologies of ritual and rites of passage, Kevin guides people back into living relationship with their inner life, with nourishing community, and with the natural world. His deepest hope is that in serving individuals and groups in this way, something larger can constellate: a deeply nourishing culture of connection, meaning, and vitality that has always been our birthright.

Kevin is currently immersed in Ritual Studies at East Tennessee State University, exploring ritual and rites of passage through the interwoven lenses of Depth Psychology, Anthropology, and Religious Studies. He also serves as a recovery guide at Red Oak Recovery, where he leads wilderness immersion ceremonies, experiential therapeutics, and psychoeducational groups for men in recovery. And in the margins of it all, he is excitedly bringing a Rites of Passage program for teens to life this coming fall.