Grounded by Ruth Allen

I’ve been growing increasingly interested in studying how disconnection from nature affects our minds and bodies — and, by extension, how reconnecting with nature might repair some of that damage.

So when I was gifted Grounded by Ruth Allen, its subtitle immediately spoke to me: How connection with nature can improve our mental and physical wellbeing. The book itself is a piece of art: a beautiful hardcover with thick pages and gorgeous photographs throughout. It’s the kind of object you enjoy holding.

Something about the text, however, felt… off. It took me a long time to articulate why.

The book is written by a psychotherapist and contains many of the familiar self-help and therapeutic expressions one might expect. At times, it reads like a guided meditation — the sort where a single idea takes half a page to express, padded with flowery language. Simple concepts are stretched thin. As a reader comfortable with psychological terminology, I could follow along, but I suspect many readers would feel lost or discouraged after only a few pages.

One example that stood out was a yoga exercise intended to support grounding. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t clearly understand the posture being described — the language obscured rather than clarified the practice.

That said, because nature disconnection underpins many of my own struggles, there were passages that resonated deeply. One in particular stayed with me:

“We become a cultivated thing for others but work against ourselves. We can get caught in a holding pattern of anxiety and despair, feeling that the life we want is passing us by, or that the person we are can never be seen.”

The book does include a few lists of practical exercises, and these hold most of its value. Suggestions for spending time alone in nature, or for creating small personal adventures, are genuinely useful.

However, around 97% of the book focuses on how to use nature for personal wellbeing. Then, almost as an afterthought at the very end, comes a short chapter offering ideas for giving something back to nature.

To me, that’s not true nature connection. It risks reinforcing the same extractive mindset — seeing nature as a resource to be mined for our benefit — rather than framing the relationship as something reciprocal, broken, and in need of repair.

While Grounded is aesthetically beautiful, only a handful of pages felt genuinely useful to me. I don’t see this book as a cornerstone for my own path toward facilitating nature connection for people who feel disconnected and ungrounded. It’s not something I would recommend to beginners, nor to those who already grasp the basics and are looking for a more grounded, practical guide. It feels as though it was written by a psychotherapist for their peers, rather than for the general public.

That said, it would look perfectly at home on the table in a therapist’s waiting room — the kind of book you might dip into for five minutes, leave feeling vaguely uplifted, and then promptly forget once the day resumes.