My Background

I have a BA in English.  This tells you I can form a sentence and took 20 years to pay off student loans.   I also transcribed patient records for hospitals around the country for 20 years, so I have a wealth of understanding of medical language and modern healthcare.  

Experiences more relevant to Healing Outdoors are the incredible opportunities I've been graced with: Learning about Southwest desert plants from a high school botany teacher, river rafting the San Juan River in Utah and sea kayaking the Owyhee Reservoir in Idaho and San Juan Islands of Washington in college, and hiking and exploring much of the Oregon Coast.  I have designed and completed several marathon walking distances (26 miles) on my own and walked an officiated marathon.  Passion for  personal restoration and healing by connection to the natural world has been a consistent theme of my life. 

Since 2005, I have been asked to use my "life degree" as a parent caregiver in the following ways:  

1) Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Team in Training (2015), walked full Portland marathon and raised $2,400.  

2)  CureSearch fundraiser through Ultimate Hike program (2013)

3) Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) Patient Services Committee (2009-2011)

3)  LLS First Connection Volunteer (on call list for parent-to-parent phone support)

4)  Relay for Life Advocacy Chair and Guest Speaker (2008)

5)  Seattle Children's Hospital/Seattle Cancer Care Alliance Oncology Family Advisory Board Member (2008-2010)

6)  Guest Speaker, Seattle Ronald McDonald House Charities 2005 Auction (raised $225,000 for families in crisis)

7)  Coursework in Ecopsychology with Institute of Global Education/Project NatureConnect (2013-2014)

~Erin Waterman
Founder of Healing Outdoors

Breaking Open - Our Story

NOTE:  I started to write this article as a companion for parents facing childhood cancer, but I want to honor my child's request not to publish the details of her story and photos illustrating her journey.  This makes it a challenge for me to publish the full truth.  In lieu of a book, this article was written as a retrospective summary of the experience.

Erin & Carli - 2005

“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.” 
- Helen Keller


"Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” 
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times


Have you ever noticed adverse events can seem to cluster in Life?  I am not entirely sure this phenomenon can be fully understood or explained, but I do know it enables either tremendous spiritual and personal growth or catastrophic destruction in all of us.  I have witnessed the "cluster effect" in my own life and in countless other lives so consistently that the phenomenon must exist. 

It can be tempting to believe one is "cursed" at times like this, somehow deserve whatever is happening in our lives because of something we did or did not do, or that we are somehow unique in going through tumultuous, life-shifting events.  The years 2004 through 2007 were such a time for me. 

I had just come out the end of a two-year divorce.  I had begun a new relationship and my boyfriend had a catastrophic event causing me to sign papers for him to be airlifted to the nearest trauma center.  Thankfully he rebounded and survived, though our relationship ended several months later under the weight of circumstance. 

A month following my partner's crisis, my then 3-year-old daughter became ill with a "preschool illness" for a month. After several trips to the doctor office and our local emergency room, we were sent to Seattle Children's Hospital in the middle of a night as she struggled to breathe.  One week of hospital treatment for "severe pneumonia" turned into the realization we were facing cancer in the form of a tumor around her heart.  Her cancer treatment and complications lasted 2-1/2 years.  Half of that time we were required to live away from home and I gave up my newly signed lease on a rental home.  Carli spent her 4th and 6th birthdays in the hospital. 

I distinctly remember pushing through the double doors to the cancer floor holding my daughter's hand and feeling I had entered a movie.  Or some strange planet I was never supposed to see.  Amazingly I heard a small incongruous voice say "You belong here."  Possibly intuition, this tiny voice continues to instill the hope that I can do something to help others who find themselves there. 

The first week after my daughter's diagnosis and the first time I opened the broom closet to do my family chore at the Ronald McDonald House, some graffiti was written inside the door by a child:  "Die well, my friends."  This was the first time it hit me like a ton of bricks, "You're not in Kansas anymore."  I felt stunned, horrified, sad, scared, misplaced, angry, very alone all at once.  My intention from then on has been to attempt to help others feel less alone than I did in that moment. 

One of the most emotionally draining things about living inside the cancer treatment world, whether or not your own loved one is given a favorable statistical outcome, is watching all the other families around you go through their own journeys.  You soon realize there are no guarantees for anyone, and the only power you do have is to focus on breath and surrender to whatever is.  And even in your own child's darkest hour, there is someone much worse off around the corner.

In crisis, our greatest gift to one another can be simply to listen.  This is the positive side of walking through cumulative shared grief, and I am forever grateful to other parents for sharing with me their fears, struggles and coping strategies. 

The Ronald McDonald House is like a hotel for people who are not there by choice but people who are guided by the compass of the love for their children. I came to see that each child represents a piece of each parent's heart, and there is tremendous power in living in a community that is directed by heart.

I learned I was stronger, more positive and less of an introvert than I had known myself to be, as I took on a role of welcoming people new to the communal housing and to the cancer floor.  I also formed wonderful relationships over the months with families from divergent ethnic, religious and economic backgrounds, because all those differences became immaterial in the face of constant concern for our children.  Five of the families I became most close to over time lost their children, some years after I lived with them.  Many more like my own child survived.

Like many survivors, the only thing I found I could do with my experience that eased my psychic pain was advocating for those on a similar or rougher road.  I spoke for those families who could not act because their grief was too great.  And I supported parents facing their child's life-threatening illnesses and being forced to make "non-choices" to administer what I like to call Haz-Mat treatments in order to save their child.  

Recent surveys in Europe and the United States show the majority of childhood cancer survivors themselves have few posttraumatic stress symptoms.  But very few researchers are asking the same questions of caregivers.  It is my opinion through anecdotal experience that parents/caregivers of young children carry the emotional burden of the child's experience far longer than many children do. 

I urge every caregiver in this situation to seek help if posttraumatic stress symptoms of hypervigilance, flashbacks, out of the blue crying jags or emotional spikes start affecting your day-to-day life more than you would like.  I learned to think of what I went through as the emotional equivalent of the physical condition my child endured.  Parents are survivors too.

I am now developing Healing Outdoors to allow nature reconnection as a form of healing into the lives of caregivers.  Reconnecting to the natural world provides countless benefits of allowing people to feel more centered, less stressed, and more supported.   

Nine years nearly to the day after rushing my daughter to the hospital, I completed a November 2013 marathon walk (26 miles) to raise funds for CureSearch while bringing my daughter's "Hero Beads," each bead representing a piece of her cancer journey, with me to nature for blessing and release.  

A cycle was finally completed, and this walk somehow fully integrated my trauma experience.  This is great news for parents and caregivers in the thick of things to remember:  "It will not always be this way."  

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I share a poem passed to me by a hospital chaplain during my darkest hour that expresses perfectly my desire to meet traumatic pain with healing from the natural world: 


Through the great pain of stretching
beyond all that pain has taught me, 
the soft well at the base
has opened, and life
touching me there
has turned me into a flower
that prays for rain. Now
I understand: to blossom
is to pray, to wilt and shed
is to pray, to turn to mulch 
is to pray, to stretch in the dark
is to pray, to break the surface
after great months of ice
is to pray, and to squeeze love
up the stalky center toward the sky 
with only dreams of color
is to pray, and finally to unfold 
again as if never before
is to be the prayer. 

--Mark Nepo, "God's Wounds"

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