Matt Breen: Firstly, thanks for coming on.

For those that don’t know, Shannon Kara is not only part of the R4R community, but an occupational therapist, clinical director and doctoral student specialising in nature-based interventions for neurodivergent and intellectual disability populations.

Shannon Kara: That’s right.

Matt: You’ve written a book, which is good here. It’s a good book. I’ve read it, and it weaves together your personal struggle, real-world application and research.

But I want to start this interview with a question that you ask some of your clients: what has your body lived through?

Shannon: Wow. That’s a fabulous question, Matt.

My body has lived through so much physically, emotionally and spiritually. As an occupational therapist, I can talk clinically, but from a human perspective, it has lived in fight or flight for a really long time.

I guess if we wind back a little bit, I had my son very young. I was 20 and thought that a successful life meant you bought a house, you got married, you had children, and that’s A plus B equals success and happiness.

However, what I discovered was that living on eggshells and trauma really impacted the way I functioned in my life.

Matt: I want to take a quote from your book to go into this a little bit further. These are your words:

“By day, I was a web designer who loved turning messy ideas into clean, usable sites. I was the user-centred professional who could read a client’s needs before they ever found the words. At home, that same attunement kept me on high alert. I learned to read the signs, the change in his footsteps in the hallway, the way his breathing thickened, the way the air in the lounge room went heavy and still before anything was said. My nervous system was permanently tuned in.”

What followed in that chapter was nothing short of horrific. Maybe it sheds light on how you said you’ve lived through quite a bit.

Shannon: It has.

For me, coming here today, I haven’t really spoken about this to anyone out loud, because it’s something that I felt was private and you didn’t talk about.

I think we’re starting to normalise what happens at home through domestic violence, and naming it, and not being ashamed that it happened.

I became very tuned in to other people and I could detect their mood. When I say “they”, I mean my family, my husband, my son’s mood. I could almost pre-empt that I needed to clear out for the day because I didn’t cook bacon and eggs the way he wanted it.

If I was at home and that wasn’t served up in the way he expected, he would either throw it across the room or send my son to his room, and that’s when the pacing and the spitting in my face and all the other things would happen.

So that tuning in was my super talent at that point in time.

Matt: It protected you.

Shannon: Yeah, 100%.

It was really hard. You go to work and everything’s okay, but meanwhile, you might have had two hours of someone screaming at you because you served up sausages and mashed potato instead of steak and eggs for dinner, because that’s what they expected.

But at work, I still had to function. I still had to get to work. I still had to look after my son. I just became this overachiever in keeping everyone at bay, keeping everything down.

Matt: Just coping as you went on.

Shannon: Yeah, 100%.

Matt: There are two little tangents that came to mind as you were speaking. Obviously, thank you for sharing.

One tangent was that it was also a cycle, right?

Shannon: Yeah.

I was working as a web designer for a global company, doing user-centred design. Then I had a career change and became curious about helping people. So I stopped working as a web designer and I moved on to become an occupational therapist.

During that time, I worked at a women’s refuge, Karinya House, and I started to understand the cycle of power and abuse. That’s when I saw the pattern. It unfolded and I could actually see it plain as day.

We’d go through the abuse phase, then the apology, then everything would be fine, and then we’d keep on going. At that point, I kept justifying to myself, if I did this better, or if I didn’t say that, it would stop.

But I learned the hard way, or the long way, that it takes time to discover that it’s not going to stop, because I can’t change the pattern. It’s on the other person.

Matt: That was a real challenge.

I had a flashback of a stat that complicates it. I think it’s quite a high number, that 90% of people who are abused love their partner.

Shannon: Spot on.

Matt: Which means you’re trying to figure out how to make it work while it’s not working.

Shannon: Yeah.

That’s the part where I think it takes a woman, or a person in an abusive relationship, seven times to actually leave. They’re stuck between that rational thinking of, “I love this person,” but then the emotional abuse and the lack of safety is conflicting. It’s hard to understand and reason with yourself.

Matt: In these moments throughout this time, you started to stumble on coping mechanisms, like your first iteration of coping mechanisms.

You said you took yourself out of the environment sometimes. What else?

Shannon: What I discovered was that my fight-or-flight response was to go for a walk after dinner. That gave him time to decompress, but also my son and I would be out exploring together. He’d ride his BMX and I’d walk, and we’d walk up to where there were horses.

I discovered through that movement and walking that I felt safe. It took me minutes to de-stress, not hours. It just made me feel freer.

What I was understanding interoceptively, so internally, was that movement helped me feel safe and regulated. It returned me back into that regulated state.

What was really beautiful at that time was that because we weren’t looking at each other, talking at each other, my son and I were side by side, moving along. The conversations were really natural and we talked about lots of things.

I feel like that experience with him over a long time really cemented our relationship as mother and child, but also as people supporting each other through a really yucky situation.

Matt: That side-by-side thing is proven in a lot of places. I know Men’s Shed sees it. We certainly see it at R4R when people are walking with each other.

Those coping mechanisms sounded like they helped, but it also sounds like it wasn’t enough.

Shannon: Yeah.

Where I became curious was that I couldn’t think my way out of it. I didn’t need more tools. I needed to know more.

I was always outside in the garden, and then I wanted to study why this was working for me. I definitely became curious about the science behind it.

Matt: But one day, the coping mechanisms kind of stopped helping you, didn’t they? On a walk with your son.

Shannon: Yeah. I came to a moment where I felt like the only way out of this situation was if I was going to die or he was going to kill me.

I kind of froze. I became stuck in that moment.

Matt: So you had a realisation. The penny dropped. With that came, “I’ve got to change this. I can’t stay anymore.”

Shannon: Yep.

That’s when I started my plan of leaving.

Matt: I didn’t actually plan to talk about this, but I think it’s probably worth going on a tangent. What does a plan look like?

Shannon: That’s a really tricky thing.

For anyone trying to leave an abusive relationship, be it emotional, physical or financial, that’s the most risky time for a person exiting a relationship, when they’re planning to leave.

It’s about not giving the cue.

For me, because I was the sole breadwinner, I had to actually plan a longer game to leave. I had to make sure I had money. I had somewhere to go. I had to get everything organised, because if I went back, it would probably end really terribly for me physically.

I had to leave permanently.

With the help of my family, and my family are very supportive and they could see the signs, they helped me organise a house, removalists and everything, so I could just do this swift uplift and be gone.

But for people without that, it’s really hard. It’s hard to escape. It’s hard to have money. If you’ve got children, you’re thinking about their safety.

Having a plan might mean engaging with crisis supports, making sure your phone is charged so you can call for help, or having someone in your team, in your family networks, where if you send an emoji, like a pineapple, that means it’s your SOS for help and to call the police.

Having plans to that level of detail matters, because you can’t predict what the other person is going to do in that level of crisis.

Matt: It’s equal parts confronting and fascinating that it’s kind of like an operation.

Shannon: It is. It’s like a covert operation.

Matt: It just shouldn’t be that way, but it obviously is.

Where can people go to get help with this? Because some people don’t think this way. How can they get help to plan?

Shannon: I think looking at crisis centres, women’s crisis centres. I can’t think of the name off the top of my head.

Matt: We’ll put it in the show notes.

Shannon: Also contacting the police. I know places like Karinya House, and there’s another refuge in town, but they’re not crisis accommodation.

Even contacting family. It’s literally having an escape plan or a safety plan for yourself, and making sure that person doesn’t realise what you’re doing, because that’s when the control starts to happen. They’ll start to block access.

It’s really tricky. They might tug on the emotional heartstrings of, “It’ll be different from now.” Or they’ll cut your money off, block access, take away the car keys, let down your car tyres. People go to lengths to protect what they control.

Matt: Confronting.

After you had the realisation that you had to go, what happened?

Shannon: It probably took about six months to actually leave. So, treading water.

The other challenge from my experience was that we were from different cultures. I’m from a middle-class Australian Canberra local family, and my husband was from New Zealand. He was Māori. Abuse and violence was just part of the culture. It was part of that alpha male culture. I’m generalising here, this is my experience, but for him, he was entitled to have this life and I was going to provide for him. Violence was normal.

It was not uncommon for him to see his dad beat up his mum after coming home drunk from the night on the booze with his family. That was their norm.

So for us, we had this mismatch right from the beginning of what our norms were in our lives and our families.

Matt: You’ve prompted me to think, and it was very clearly articulated, but it also came through your words. You wanted that type of behaviour to stop with you and your son.

Shannon: That’s right.

I was really concerned that I couldn’t protect him from seeing all of this trauma and the ongoing impact.

While my ex-husband was very smart in doing it at times when he wasn’t home, there were periods when he was home. Even though he’d say, “Boy, go to your room,” he could still hear it.

That part of me was like, this needs to stop. I cannot have this intergenerational trauma and abuse continuing. This cycle has to stop.

It took so much effort and determination to end this relationship, because ingrained in me was, “You’ve got to be married. You had a child so young. This is what life looks like to be successful.”

So for me to say that I was this single mum, I felt like a failure. There was so much complexity to this environment, but at the end of the day, my son was my guiding light. I had to do this for him because I didn’t want him to repeat this pattern with his family.

That was the motivating factor in the end.

Matt: It’s clear as day. Kudos to you.

When you look back, are you almost amazed at yourself?

Shannon: It’s more that I’ve packed away that experience and I choose to not think about it anymore.

I wouldn’t say amazed. The way I see it, I’m a visual thinker, is I just keep moving forward. I keep propelling. If I can help one person live a better life, if I can show people that if you don’t give up on yourself, you can get through the hard stuff because you’ve been there before, then that’s okay too.

For me, it’s about acknowledging that it happened, but not dwelling on it, because I’m not my past.

Matt: Yeah, 100%. You are what you do.

You touched a little bit on it, and it would have been really hard for you, because you said one of your coping mechanisms was to become this overachiever. You did everything.

Shannon: Everything.

Matt: You also said you had these markers for what a successful life looked like. Then you have to make this decision that acknowledges that you can’t keep going. In your mind, you’re going against what your marker for success is at that time, which is married life.

I know when my mum was diagnosed with cancer, I lost a big part of my identity. Everything would be okay if you can make it so. I know what it’s like to be without a belief structure or identity.

What was it like for you?

Shannon: It was really hard because my role and my identity was, I really don’t want to say his name, but I was his wife. That was who I was. I wasn’t a person. I was his wife.

For me, not being the wife of this really staunch Māori guy who was well respected, it kind of went, “Well, who am I as a person and what is my purpose here?”

It took me a long time to figure that out. But through this interesting journey, I feel like I’ve found who I am as a person, what my role is and what my purpose is in life now.

It’s been very interesting.

Matt: I’m glad. Again, thank you for going into that, because I do believe these sorts of stories help people.

Even if they’re not similar, the idea of going through something and overcoming it and becoming a stronger version of yourself is an important narrative that we need to tell ourselves.

You spoke about it being a new beginning. What did that new beginning look like? When did you start to feel like you were walking out of this?

Shannon: I feel like I’m in my new chapter now. Honestly, I feel like it’s just now, in 2026, where I feel like everything is coming into alignment. I feel like I’m meant to be where I am.

It has taken all of that time. A decade of learning and pivoting and restructuring what I do and how I live, but also being comfortable with myself and going, “It’s okay.”

So, it’s taken a decade.

Matt: A decade. I’m not shocked. After my dad’s death, that was a decade of figuring it out.

Shannon: That’s really interesting, isn’t it?

Matt: I reckon there’s a lot of it because people don’t want to deal with hard stuff.

Shannon: Fair enough.

Matt: If we don’t have to wade into the waters to help figure out what’s going on in our heads and lives, why would we? Until we’re forced to. Then we do, and then we’re happy we did.

But I imagine it wasn’t a watershed moment where you go, “I feel good now. I felt terrible for the past 10 years.” It sounds like you built yourself up again.

Shannon: Yeah. It’s that slow burn, that build.

It was about getting my family stable. Then I looked at what brings me joy. Working for the web, or the cloud, this invisible thing, was not satisfying. I’d invest so much time into identifying information architecture for a website and then someone would go, “Let’s just put a red button and put ‘click here’,” and my brain would be exploding.

I thought, I’ve got to do something to help people.

I discovered occupational therapy because my niece was born in tachycardia with a rare genetic disorder, and every six weeks they were going to Sydney Children’s Hospital. Tumours ate her ulna in her arm, and she had to see occupational therapy for a splint.

I was like, “What is this splinting stuff? This is really interesting. I want to play with that stuff.”

I became curious. That led me to kiss goodbye to my 12 or 13-year career in public service and consulting, and go and study my master’s in occupational therapy.

That was my aha moment, where I was like, if I can help one person be able to make a cup of coffee and not spill something on themselves, or be able to get their mail because they had anxiety and couldn’t leave the house, then I feel like I’m achieving something.

When I compare that to working for the cloud and the “click here” button, it was more satisfying.

Matt: What a sliding doors moment. It’s a confluence of things, isn’t it? Exiting one chapter, and then something else happening around you that prompted you to go somewhere else.

Through your struggle, and it came to me before we went into this interview, struggle forces us to cope.

Sometimes we’re lucky where the coping mechanisms are good. I had good friends and good exercise habits, so I landed on my feet in a sense. I had other bad coping mechanisms, but that was more thinking patterns and stuff like that.

You stumbled across coping mechanisms that are going to take us into this next phase of your life. What were the first coping mechanisms, and how did they build throughout that traumatic time?

Shannon: Movement. Just getting out the door and walking with my son.

Then when I moved, I thought that was a new beginning, and I needed to fill my time, because I’m not very good, like you, with the unhelpful thinking style and being too much in my head.

So I discovered running. I felt good. Some days I really didn’t feel like running. I’d be like, “Oh God, I don’t want to do it.” But I said to myself, “Just five minutes out the door.”

That was my little mantra. The other mantra was, “Feet on the floor, out the door.”

Matt: Feet on the floor, out the door.

Shannon: Yeah. Five minutes, and if I was feeling crappy after five minutes, I could go home. But guess what? I never went home. I just kept going.

Matt: It’s a good trick.

Shannon: It was about how to get this horrible thinking style, or I like to give the unhelpful thinking styles a name. You can give the person in your head a name like Karen, or whatever name you want, and you can tell Karen to go away.

Matt: Karen’s out there.

Shannon: Sorry, Karen. They’re already getting a rough shake. We’ll have to come up with a new name.

But telling that person in your head to just go away for a minute and quieten down, that’s what I started to do.

Matt: That’s interesting. I’ve got three kids, and one of them, Jimmy, is very careful. Like his dad when he was a kid. Like his dad now, a bit risk-oriented.

I’ve started to teach him to say, “Shut up brain, I’m going to do it anyway.”

Shannon: There you go. You’ve got your own version.

Matt: It’s quite funny hearing a five-year-old say, “Shut up brain. I’m going to do it anyway.”

Shannon: I love that.

That’s what we need to instil, these tools for life, in our children and ourselves. Our brain stops us from doing so much.

As an occupational therapist, with that lens, I’m always about, “Try first, then decide.” Try a new hobby, try a new occupation, whatever it is. Give yourself a chance to try it and experience it before you just shut down an idea.

I love that phrase that you’ve got.

Matt: Have a crack, see what happens.

You just lit up when you were speaking about these things. You’re obviously passionate about it.

Shannon: Yeah, 100%.

That’s the lovely segue. When I did become an occupational therapist, I worked in an acute mental health setting. People would present in ED in crisis. You help them bed things down, but it’s just that one point in time.

I also looked after people in the community who were past the crisis stage, but they were still unwell. I saw that movement with them just changed them. They lit up too.

I’d have people presenting at ED to come and ask me to go for a walk with them, because movement, this passive way of engaging in nature and moving, made us feel good.

Matt: You made me think about something I wrote down for you. You were at a point where you started to take people out of the clinical setting and for a walk down by the river.

You said you were a little bit worried that it was unprofessional, but then those fears were immediately quelled because you could see the impact it was having in real time. Side by side, walls were coming down.

How are you finding the contrast between clinical and practical?

Shannon: That’s what I found really interesting.

I was in a rural New South Wales town, and you’d have people present, and you could see the pattern. I seem to identify patterns in people for some reason. That’s my superpower.

I noticed that by saying, “Hey, we’re going to walk down to the river,” it was almost like we became two people just going for a walk. It changed the clinician and client role, and we became just two people having a chat.

There was so much doubt that I was not being professional, you’re right, and I wrote about it in the book. What I was seeing was that people were starting to thrive. They were then going to the gym. They were meeting friends for coffee. All by me taking it out of this white clinical setting that is cognitively overbearing.

You’ve got bright lights. You’ve got hospital sounds. Then when you go into nature, you can hear the rhythmic movement of the river, you hear your footsteps, you can hear birds.

All of that brings down our nervous system. From a scientific perspective, that’s soft fascination.

I can talk about all the science, but that’s in our DNA as humans. We’ve forgotten that. We are so smart with technology and being indoors, but the simplest thing that we have, and the thing that’s always there, is nature and being outside. We’ve forgotten.

I think my job is to help people remember. With Running for Resilience, outdoors is our friend.

Matt: Well, it’s the perfect segue again.

This book is the next chapter. It’s putting in everything you’ve been through, everything you went through, into real-world application with the work that you did, and then you’ve weaved it all together from an academic setting.

What is Thrive in Nature?

Shannon: What I discovered, and I guess this is my beautiful Running for Resilience part two, was that when I left acute mental health, I discovered R4R many years ago. That was for me to switch my brain off, to be out and co-regulate with people.

Then I started social prescribing. I don’t know if anyone knows what that is, but basically, instead of giving people a prescription for a medication or to do therapies, it’s telling people, “Your script is to go out for a walk for five minutes.”

So I started recommending R4R. For the neurodiverse population I work with, they need to know: is there a toilet? What’s the sound like? What time is it? Are there places to go if it’s raining?

They need all these questions answered. The beauty of R4R is that it’s expected. The same thing happens every week. The same format. The same sort of intro. There are friendly people to greet you.

All of these worries and concerns kind of dissipated for people, and they kept turning up.

I was like, what is this secret sauce at R4R? I need to know more about it.

I had this magnet on my fridge for three years. I went to the World Federation Occupational Therapy Conference in 2022, and Boston University were doing a doctoral degree in OT. I had it on my fridge for three years. Then I got an email about an information session and thought, maybe I need to find out about R4R and study a doctorate.

So I enrolled at Boston University, got in to my surprise, and started studying why nature and people with neurodiversity and intellectual disabilities were responding. At the back of my mind, I was like, what is the sauce here? I need to find the answer.

Matt: What is the sauce?

Shannon: It’s consistency.

It’s also having the understanding of the environment. What is the flora and the fauna? It’s having an understanding of the expectation. Do I have to run? Do I have to walk? Understanding that they can choose to participate or not.

They can choose to walk or not. They have the ability to have their own autonomy but still be part of the group.

With all the clients I work with, I work with an adult population, all of my neurodiverse clients want to make friends. They just didn’t know how.

But somehow, and I still haven’t got the answer to this, that secret sauce at R4R is friendship and community. Seeing someone and just saying hello, or making eye contact. I think that’s part of it too, the community aspect.

That connection with others is so integral to the success of R4R. When you look at other running programs or communities around, it’s the friendship and the community.

Matt: I’ve got to say, living down the coast, I miss a lot about Canberra, but I also miss a lot about R4R. One of the things I miss most is that little community of neurodiverse people.

The smile on Paul’s face whenever he’s wearing his merch. He’s just rocking up. He’s great.

Maybe my favourite day was World Down Syndrome Day, where Kayla got up and spoke in front of everyone. Joe gave us a big rev. I left that evening on top of the world.

Shannon: Me too.

Kayla and I worked on what she was going to say through this natural conversation, and she was so proud to do that. The fact that she also brought her boyfriend along and he was there cheering her along, my little heart was glowing so much. I was so proud.

That inclusivity part is really important because they want the same things that all neurotypical people want. They want to feel love. They want belonging. They want to be the best they can be. They want community.

I think that’s so important.

Matt: I really like their company. Neurodiverse people, and kids as well. I think what it comes down to is it’s such a genuine, authentic, base-level operating system in a sense.

You talk about the things they want to square off before they come. Is there a toilet? Is it predictable? What’s the expectation?

They’re actually things that everyone thinks about, but a lot of us just go, “I’ll worry about it later.”

There’s a little clue in there. It’s a very, in a good way, simplistic view of R4R. The more we can make those things as simple and easy as possible, the better experience everyone is going to have.

Shannon: That’s right.

Our sensory system, or our nervous system, scans that environment for threats before our brain catches up with what’s happening. It’s always scanning: are we safe? What do I do if I’m not safe?

With R4R, you’ve got the water, so blue therapy, and there’s lots of emerging research around the benefits of being near water for humans. You’ve got the green therapy, which is being out in nature to help regulate us.

R4R is helping us to develop autonomic flexibility, our ability to come back to that regulated state over and over again through understanding the environment, but also through that beautiful rhythmic movement of walking or running.

That’s all the key elements of it. It’s just an amazing thing to have.

Matt: It’s cool to hear.

Let’s zoom out. Let’s talk about this. Thrive in Nature. Thrive isn’t just succeeding, it’s an acronym. What for?

Shannon: I developed a roadmap for people to have little bits of tools in their toolkit. I talk about this all the time. It’s not a physical toolkit. It’s tools that we need and have as humans.

I started to unpack how I was using nature to regulate myself, but also what I’ve been researching at a doctoral level.

Thrive is an acronym. We don’t all get to the same destination by following the same roadmap. We might take different ways.

Thrive is a series of moves that people can do in everyday life to help them feel good and function well. I have a whole framework that I’ve developed. You can be active in nature or you can be passive in nature.

Matt: Thrive stands for a few different things that are in the book. Tune in.

Shannon: Yes. Tune in is the first one.

Matt: Harness nature.

Shannon: Yes.

Matt: Regulate, integrate, visualise and value, and then expand.

Shannon: Yeah. You don’t have to move through all those steps in that order.

You might start when you’re looking at thriving yourself and ask, what are my values and my vision? What do I want to do?

Whether it’s, “I actually just want to be able to move and walk around outside without having a panic attack,” or my values might be that I value integrity and kindness, so I’m going to start greeting people at the supermarket.

The roadmap itself is not to work through in a circle. It’s to take elements of it and weave it into your daily life.

Just tuning into nature might be starting a new habit, like in the morning looking out the window, having a glass of water outside, or taking a phone call and walking around the block.

It’s about how we can use nature in everyday life to help us regulate and come back to that rest and digest state. If we start using our nervous system to help regulate, the more times we can come back to that safe state, the more able we are to function in our daily lives, so we’re not stuck in fight, flight or freeze.

Matt: I’m already applying these to myself, but also seeing it in your story too. Tune in. You’re obviously tuning into the environment around you, but as it was stretching out and you were getting more fatigued, you started to tune into how close to burnout you were.

Shannon: Big time.

Matt: Now you’d be able to notice the flags, which makes it easier for you to say no to a certain commitment or things like that.

Shannon: That’s a work in progress.

At the end of the day, I like people pleasing. For me to say no is really challenging. But identifying the signs of burnout, that’s what nature helps us do.

Five minutes in nature helps relieve anxiety and depression. Even if you’re feeling super tired, going for a walk can help wake you up. But I know that if I am really, really tired, I need to pay back. I need to scale back on things.

Saying no is a really active process for me.

Matt: Which is made easier by the V part of it. Values. Defining who you are as a person, or what you value.

Shannon: Yeah. Boundaries come into values as well. Being confident and competent in yourself to say, “No, that doesn’t align with what I’m working on now. Maybe it did in the past, but not right now.”

Matt: These things help you regulate, but what’s integrate?

Shannon: It’s about how you can weave little sips of nature into your daily life, which I spoke about. Integrate is really about being more active in our intentional use of nature.

We might take a walk around the block a little bit longer when we park the car, or it might be that we play with the kids a bit longer outside.

It’s about how we can weave these little moments in nature into our daily occupations.

Matt: It makes such a difference being in nature. I can see it so clearly with kids. With my kids, you can just see them light up.

I’m taking Jim fishing. Jim’s caught four fish before I’ve caught my first, so he’s doing quite well. Partly because I just love watching him. He’s just in the zone. He’s just casting. He’s just there. I’m like, that’s so cool. He’s got not a care in the world.

Shannon: He’ll be a fisherman for life.

That’s called the flow state from a scientific perspective. When you are engaged in that activity, nothing else is happening. You’re just so focused.

That’s the state that we should try to be at, being at one with ourselves and just being part of that occupation.

When you unpack fishing, you’ve got your visual input, you’ve got the sound, you’ve got your body position. There are so many sensory systems engaged, giving you all those beautiful cues to our brain, our operating system, that we are okay, safe and regulated.

Fishing as an occupation is a great de-stressor.

Matt: I’m going to have to get over my seasickness, because he’s going to love it.

I think this is a really important one: expand.

I want to use the example with the neurodiverse community, but also anyone. One of the things we’ve realised with Wednesday is that big crowds can be lonely sometimes and they can be intimidating.

It represents a behaviour I think we can all be better at. When something is up there that scares us, we need to find ways to walk towards it, but in a way that doesn’t overextend us, which is what you speak about.

Shannon: Exactly.

It’s checking in with yourself, that interoceptive awareness of, my heart’s starting to race, or I’ve got this feeling in my gut where I’m going to be sick. It’s really tuning into how we are, but also looking at the cues our brain is telling us.

When we start to wake up from sleep and we’re like, “I’m still thinking about that thing,” how do we shut that off? How do we move past that so it doesn’t hold us up and brings us back to that regulated state?

It’s really tricky.

Matt: You said earlier in this conversation that now feels like your best self, in a sense. You feel like you’re where you’re meant to be and you’re going where you want to go.

Where is this taking you? What are you doing?

Shannon: What am I doing?

I’m weeks away from becoming a doctoral graduate from Boston University.

Matt: So you’re weeks away from being doctor.

Shannon: Yeah. I’ll be Dr Nanny, thanks.

Matt: Dr Nanny, because you’re a grandma as well.

Shannon: Yeah.

Matt: Well done. Put your hand up on a plane if anyone needs help.

Shannon: No, I don’t do blood and vomit and anything else. That’s why I’m not a nurse or a real doctor. I’m a doctor of occupational therapy.

My research has been really interesting. My clinical supervisor, who’s the head of the program at Boston, has been so supportive.

I did a pilot study with a small group of participants, and that produced some of the interesting evidence. A lot of the evidence came out of COVID for people with neurodiversity, because nature was our only safe occupation. They discovered nature and walking in nature.

What the evidence shows is that it’s small groups in nature.

Matt: Small groups.

Shannon: Yeah, for neurodiverse people. Three or four people in a group is probably as big as it should be, because some people have sensory defensiveness or auditory avoiding behaviour. Loud noises can stimulate people.

I started doing a pilot study about nature. I meet with people in the community. We do a mood check-in before we go out on our walk and then a mood check-in after. This is teaching them how to understand their moods.

Generally speaking, a lot of neurodiverse people don’t really understand our moods or the moods of other people or facial expression. I’m trying to teach people how to regulate.

They might turn up and say, I’ve got one client who says, “I’m feeling neutral,” which means she’s okay.

Matt: I can hear the voice. That’s so good.

Shannon: But at the end of the walk, they feel good, happy or relaxed. Another one says, “I feel spiritual.”

What this shows is that through the walk and my program, they’re able to identify changes in their body.

My pilot study developed a little template of how we can engage in nature. As a group, we decide where we go. We do a meditation, so educating people around breathwork, because we know breathing helps with our brain and helps regulate our nervous system. We also do nature art, and then we check in.

What that really showed me was that by having these expected, regular R4R-like activities in nature, people are coming back.

That’s been my study.

I presented it at the American Aspire Conference last year in Philadelphia. I presented the research again in Australia at the Australian Occupational Therapy Conference. I’ve just come back from the World Federation Conference in Bangkok, presenting my research and nature to the world stage.

It’s exciting and nervous at the same time that someone from Canberra is looking at nature and why people with neurodiversity need it.

Matt: It’s funny you’ve just labelled those two emotions, exciting and nervous, because I remember in 2019, it was a penny drop moment. It was in the lead-up to the Canberra Raiders playing in the grand final.

I would get flutters of this sensation in my chest, and I was very clearly associating it with excitement. Then I thought, you know what? That feels almost identical to when I was going through the hardest time of my life.

That big sensation in the chest is just like this. It’s a bit of fight or flight.

I was like, isn’t that interesting? Sometimes all you need is how you interpret the information.

Shannon: Exactly.

Matt: So only excitement. And nerves mean you care.

How has the information been received?

Shannon: Really positively.

This is my ultimate goal: I want to educate other occupational therapists around the world on how they can normalise and use nature in their everyday practice.

I’m developing an online program for people to learn how to use Nature for Life, which is the program, and how to apply the Thrive framework to their clinical settings.

Matt: It’s great.

It’s not to diminish the complexities and specifics of certain types of treatment. They all have their place. We’re just trying to emphasise what we know works in tandem with the other things.

Shannon: Exactly.

Matt: Benny has been really articulate in how he speaks about the nervous system and how maybe it should be used more in tandem with mental health, at least for some conditions.

What you’re doing is bringing it back to the basics, and it seems to work.

Shannon: Before we can build resilience psychologically, we need to develop it physiologically.

Being able to go for a walk for five minutes, for 10 minutes, or go for a two-minute run, that physical resilience will help us cognitively in the long run.

That’s what we need to keep emphasising. It’s not about getting your best run or getting the best time. It’s about turning up and tuning into yourself time and time again, so we can become regulated and have that flexibility.

As humans, we experience all emotions. It’s not normal to just be flatlining all the time. We need to go up and down, but to return to safety. That’s the superpower part of how we can regulate ourselves.

That co-regulation with R4R is important.

Matt: It’s a belief that you can get back to that point where you feel good, isn’t it?

Shannon: Exactly. Homeostasis.

It might take a little bit longer, but I know that I’ll get there eventually. Then tuning into your little butterflies, like, “I’m holding my breath. Okay, relax the shoulders and breathe.”

Matt: At least it mitigates it somewhat. It might not fix it, but at least it gives you a sense of control, which is sometimes half the battle.

Shannon, I’ve got two questions for you.

One is, because it’s so good to hear that you’re thriving, to use the proper word, what would you tell yourself if you could go back to when you were in that traumatic period of life that you spoke about earlier in the podcast?

Shannon: That’s a really good question.

I would say, believe in yourself. You know it’s not right. You can do this.

Matt: That’s great. That’s a great message I think anyone can hear.

The last question is, if you could interview anyone on this podcast, or if you want someone to come on the podcast, we like chucking it out in the universe. Who would you like to see on the R4R podcast?

Shannon: Oh God, that’s a really good question.

You know who I love listening to? Robert de Castella.

Matt: Oh yeah.

Shannon: I love his metaphor when he talks about running as a metaphor for life. You’ve got to keep pushing up the hill and you’ll get there eventually, and then you can coast down. I love the way he speaks.

Matt: He’s great.

I was so shocked and so happy to realise that there was this world champion runner from Australia with just a big moustache roaming around. I was like, how is this man not more of a cultural icon? This is incredible.

Maybe we’ll get him on, because it’s definitely up his alley.

Shannon: Okay.

Matt: And he’s local too. Maybe you’ll interview him. We’ll see.

Shannon, thank you so much. Can people read this? How can they?

Shannon: Thrive in Nature is available on Amazon. If you just Google Thrive in Nature, you should find it there.

Matt: Beauty. We’ll put it in the show notes as well.

Thank you very much. It was a tough discussion, but also a very good one.

Shannon: Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed chatting with you.

Matt: Hooray. Hero.