Nature Was My First Therapist: A Story of Healing Through Play and Disk Golf

Disc Golf Changed My Life — Nature’s Way of Regulating a Nervous System

In my early twenties, I was nearing the edge of what I could carry. The pain of my childhood had filled every crevice of my being, and survival felt like a full-time job. I knew—viscerally—that if something didn’t change, I’d either end up dead or in prison. Both were real, looming possibilities.

At twenty-two, I began clawing back a sense of agency. I started letting go of the relationships and behaviors that were quietly (or not-so-quietly) destroying me. I got a new roommate—a college student, living a life I wasn’t sure I could have, but desprately wanted. One day, he invited me to go disc golfing with a couple of his friends.

That first round of disc golf was the most fun I’d had in over a decade. From age thirteen to twenty-two, I’d been locked in survival mode. Genuine, agenda-free play—especially with other people—had long disappeared from my life. But here I was, laughing in the woods, completely unskilled and carefree. I brought my two dogs along, and we ran wild together through the trees, hunting for lost discs and getting gloriously muddy.

That day sparked something in me. Disc golf became my new obsession—not because I was any good at it, but because it replaced something toxic with something alive. It brought me outside. It got me moving. It gave my dogs joy and brought me back to a time in life when I’d felt connected to the earth beneath me.

Soon, I found a larger, wooded course about 45 minutes away—deep, quiet, and far from the city. I started going several times a week, sometimes playing multiple rounds. Eventually, I got brave enough to take off my shoes.

And that—standing barefoot in the forest—changed everything.

Growing up, I lived in a body on high alert. My nervous system was flooded with cortisol, adrenaline, and fear. My baseline was panic. I didn’t know calm. I didn’t know safety.

As children, we’re supposed to co-regulate with adults—we learn to soothe and settle by being near someone whose nervous system knows how to do that. But in my world, there were no regulated adults. The nervous systems around me were in chaos, and so my own developed accordingly.

But nature… nature was different. When I stood barefoot in the woods, I was in the presence of something ancient, steady, and undemanding. Slowly, gently, the panic began to subside. Even if just for a moment, my body remembered what peace might feel like.

That was enough. Enough to keep going back.

Over the next ten years, nature became my refuge. It was good for me, good for my dogs, and asked nothing from me but presence. I began climbing trees barefoot and staying up there for hours, swaying with the wind, letting the trees hold my weight. It felt as though the grief, fear, and sorrow in my body were slowly draining into the earth. Or maybe the earth was absorbing it and handing back stillness in return.

This wasn’t the entirety of my healing—I still had work to do, responsibility to take—but it was the first time I’d felt attuned to something stable enough to co-regulate with. The forest became the mature nervous system I never had access to as a child.

And it didn’t just offer peace—it reawakened my ability to play.

For so long, I’d forgotten how to play. I had to grow up too fast. But play is essential to healing. It’s how we learn, grow, and reconnect with what’s alive in us. And I had the perfect teachers: my dogs, Smokey and Layla.

Every time I started slipping back into old patterns, they pulled me out. Their joy was infectious. They knew how to live—freely, instinctively, in tune with the moment. By following their lead, I found my way back to the rhythms of life I thought I had lost forever.

Together, we returned to the woods again and again—until it felt like home.