ABSTRACT
The chapter suggests ways of working through story, thematic work, enactment and movement. It explains the use of ritual in therapy, suggesting ways of structuring activities in opening and closing sessions, establishing group territory, enabling sharing, honouring the Earth and seasons, expressing grief, exploring women's experience and creating forms for initiation. The chapter examines how collective themes, expressed in cultural artefacts such as story and myth, can enhance health professionals therapeutic work in the outdoors, giving them metaphors and symbols to work with and drawing people together around common experiences. It also explores how collective psychological, cultural and spiritual experience can be expressed through ritual and ceremony, and at how these shared experiences can become catalysts for creative work. Working with mythological themes helps health professionals to develop the imaginative dimension in outdoor therapy, bringing psychological depth to the process. Group sessions commonly begin and end in ways which can be considered to be rituals.
