Foraging for wellness with Vicky Manning

Foraging is about much more than just food. Discover how expert forager, Vicky Manning uses foraging as a gateway to unlocking your wellbeing

Foraging is an ancient practice that used to be an integral part of human survival. These days foraging offers a relaxing experience that transports you from the worries of modern life. A time to forget work-life stress and look to wellness and decompression.

Vicky Manning uses foraging to connect people with nature and show them the health benefits the great outdoors can have. Vicky describes herself as a wilderness therapeutic practitioner, trauma-informed coach, forager and outdoor educator. She is a committee member of the Association of Foragers. Based in Scotland, she runs The Little Foragers Kitchen, which offers a variety of foraging and wellness experiences. 

Foraging is a passion Vicky has carried with her since her childhood excursions with her grandparents, collecting wild edibles that they used for medicine and cooking. She is now devoted to sharing her expertise.

“Spending time outdoors in a natural environment is good for your health because plants give us lots of chemicals called Terpenes,” she says. 

Terpenes are any large group of volatile unsaturated hydrocarbons found in the essential oils of plants. They are responsible for the fragrance, taste, and pigment of plants.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences found: “Terpenes are abundant in higher plants, citrus, conifers, and eucalyptus and are widely distributed in the leaves, flowers, stems, and roots of these plants.”

At California State University, another team of researchers found that specific terpenes could have healing effects, “One such Terpene is curcumin which holds anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anticancer, antiseptic, antiplasmodial, astringent, digestive, diuretic, and many other properties.”

Vicky uses foraging as a gateway into the benefits nature can bring us, especially as a way of dealing with stress. 

“Foraging makes you slow down. If you’re going out to collect a particular plant, you need to stop and slow down and look very carefully at what you’re collecting. If you don’t, you could pick the wrong thing, and you could kill yourself,” she says. 

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Although there are dangers for inexperienced foragers, she says, “The added bonus is that you’re outdoors in the natural environment and you’ve been exposed to all of these Terpenes which have a beneficial effect on your physiological and mental health too.” 

An important part of Vicky’s mission to provide wellness through foraging is her Trauma Therapy programme – an eight or 12-week programme, that takes a small group of people out into a natural environment with the aim of “empowering individuals to take control of their own health and wellbeing through the power of the great outdoors”. 

“The activities that they’re doing are very mindful, they have to focus on what they’re doing,” says Vicky. A combination of breathing exercises, bushcraft, building fires and shelters and cooking creates a “community aspect outside of their comfort zone”. 

Overcoming new problems through new experiences is what Vicky believes is the transferable skill people need to conquer their problems in everyday life. She provides an example:

“If you are having a stressful, awful time out with the group, but you managed to get the fire lit and it’s absolutely pouring with rain, that’s a real achievement”.

“It warms people’s confidence up and empowers them to think, if I can cope with this, now I can cope with whatever’s happening in their personal life.” 

The programme provides an intimate experience that focuses on putting the mental health and the wellbeing of individuals at its centre. The experience is all about learning new practical, outdoor skills, but also learning about yourself and how to better your wellbeing. 

“People are encouraged to share if they want to, but they don’t have to. And everybody gets treated equally, nobody is treated any differently because of their issues,” says Vicky. 

Nature wellness has seen an increase in popularity in recent years, with the first Nature Therapy Conference held earlier this year, providing a space for therapists, practitioners and anyone who works therapeutically outdoors to share their practices, through workshops and guest speakers. 

“Foraging and mindfulness go hand in hand” says Vicky, it is a journey where “everybody succeeds and nobody fails.” 

For more information about the Little Foragers Kitchen please visit the website or find them on socials.

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