Rochelle Calvert, PhD, CMT, SEP, BCBA

Rochelle Calvert, PhD, CMT, SEP, BCBA, is a licensed clinical psychologist, Certified Mindfulness Teacher, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, author, program director, and professional educator specializing in trauma recovery, mindfulness, somatic awareness, ecotherapy, and nature-based contemplative practice.

For approximately two decades, Rochelle Calvert has studied and taught mindfulness through psychotherapy, professional education, courses, seminars, and immersive retreats. Her work explores how present-moment awareness, carefully paced body-based practices, and contact with the natural world may support people experiencing trauma, anxiety, emotional dysregulation, disconnection, and chronic stress.

Rochelle is the founder and Clinical Director of New Mindful Life, which offers mindfulness-based, nature-based, and Somatic Experiencing–informed therapy and education. She also serves as Director of the Ecotherapy Certificate Program at Southwestern College and New Earth Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Professional Background of Rochelle Calvert

Rochelle Calvert brings together clinical psychology, mindfulness teaching, behavioral analysis, trauma education, and experiential nature-based practice.

Her professional preparation includes certification through the International Mindfulness Teachers Association and the Mindfulness Training Institute, training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction through the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, and professional education through the University of California San Diego Center for Mindfulness. Her official biography also identifies her as a Certified Awake in the Wild mindfulness teacher and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

Rochelle previously served as professional training director for the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness. Her teaching experience includes Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, mindful eating, mindful parenting, workplace mindfulness, and nature-based contemplative practice.

Her clinical and educational work invites practitioners to understand mindfulness as more than a relaxation technique. Mindfulness can help clients notice thoughts, emotions, sensations, impulses, and environmental cues with greater clarity, but it must be introduced with attention to safety, consent, culture, and the client’s capacity to remain present.

Mindfulness and Trauma-Informed Psychotherapy

Mindfulness is one of the defining areas of expertise for Rochelle Calvert. In clinical practice, mindfulness may help clients observe difficult internal experiences without immediately reacting, suppressing, or becoming completely absorbed by them.

For trauma survivors, however, closing the eyes, focusing intensely on bodily sensations, or remaining still can sometimes increase distress. Trauma-informed mindfulness should therefore remain flexible and collaborative.

A therapist may offer choices such as:

• Keeping the eyes open
• Looking around the room
• Noticing external sounds
• Practicing while walking
• Using brief periods of attention
• Focusing on a neutral object
• Shifting away from sensations that become overwhelming
• Stopping the exercise whenever needed

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health reports that mindfulness-based approaches may help some people with anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms, while also emphasizing that findings vary across conditions and study quality. Mindfulness should therefore be presented as a potentially useful component of treatment rather than a universal cure.

Clinical Events’ article on integrating mindfulness into trauma therapy provides additional guidance on grounding, pacing, emotional safety, and adapting present-moment practices for trauma-affected clients.

Somatic Experiencing and Nervous-System Awareness

As a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Rochelle Calvert helps clinicians and clients examine how stress and trauma may appear through physical activation, constriction, breath changes, muscular tension, numbness, restlessness, collapse, or difficulty remaining connected to the present.

Somatic Experiencing International describes Somatic Experiencing as an approach focused on how stress, shock, and trauma affect the nervous system. The method commonly emphasizes tracking sensations, increasing awareness of available resources, and working with activation in manageable amounts.

Somatic work does not require clients to retell every detail of a traumatic experience. Instead, therapists may support clients in recognizing present-moment responses and developing greater capacity to move between activation and relative stability.

Rochelle’s approach encourages professionals to notice physical and emotional responses without forcing a particular explanation. A sensation may be clinically relevant, but it should not automatically be treated as proof of a hidden memory, a specific diagnosis, or a single trauma narrative.

Clinical Events’ guide to somatic therapy techniques for trauma clinicians examines orienting, grounding, interoception, movement, titration, and other body-aware interventions that can complement traditional psychotherapy.

Nature-Based Mindfulness and Ecotherapy

Nature-based mindfulness is a distinctive focus of Rochelle Calvert. Her work explores how outdoor settings, sensory awareness, movement, natural rhythms, and respectful contact with the environment can support psychological presence and relational connection.

Nature-based practice may involve:

• Mindful walking
• Listening to natural sounds
• Observing changes in light or weather
• Tracking physical sensations outdoors
• Connecting with trees, plants, water, or landscape
• Practicing environmental orientation
• Reflecting on belonging and interdependence
• Exploring grief connected with environmental change
• Participating in nature-based rituals or contemplative practices

These interventions do not require access to remote wilderness. A therapist may use a garden, park, courtyard, tree-lined street, open window, natural object, or imagery connected with a place that feels meaningful to the client.

Rochelle’s work emphasizes that nature should not simply be used as a background prop. Ecotherapy can invite a deeper examination of relationship, reciprocity, belonging, environmental grief, cultural history, and the ways human well-being is connected with the wider living world.

At Southwestern College, she directs an Ecotherapy Certificate Program focused on relationships among people, place, self, community, and the more-than-human environment. The current college program identifies her as its director and describes her work in mindfulness, Somatic Experiencing, and nature-based education.

Ecotherapy as an Adjunct to Clinical Treatment

Nature contact can offer meaningful emotional and sensory experiences, but clinicians should avoid overstating the evidence or suggesting that time outdoors replaces appropriate psychotherapy, medical care, crisis intervention, or medication when these are needed.

Nature-based interventions should be adapted for clients with disabilities, allergies, medical conditions, sensory sensitivities, environmental fears, mobility limitations, unsafe neighborhoods, or traumatic associations with outdoor environments.

Therapists should also consider:

• Physical accessibility
• Weather and environmental hazards
• Confidentiality in public locations
• Emergency procedures
• Transportation
• Cultural meaning
• Client consent
• Boundaries outside the office
• Insects, animals, heat, cold, and air quality
• The possibility of being observed by others

Ethical ecotherapy requires the same careful assessment, documentation, informed consent, and professional competence expected in any other clinical setting.

Author of Healing with Nature

Rochelle Calvert is the author of Healing with Nature: Mindfulness and Somatic Practices to Heal from Trauma, published by New World Library in 2021.

The book integrates trauma education, mindfulness, somatic awareness, nature-based meditation, and reflective practices intended to help readers reconnect with bodily experience and the natural world. The publisher describes it as a guide to understanding trauma and using accessible mindfulness and somatic nature practices to support healing.

The book includes practices related to grounding, sensory awareness, emotional regulation, natural elements, movement, connection, and restoring a sense of aliveness after overwhelming experiences.

Although the exercises can provide supportive education, the book should not be described as a substitute for individualized trauma treatment. Readers with severe PTSD symptoms, dissociation, active safety concerns, or significant emotional instability may benefit from working with a qualified clinician before undertaking highly activating practices independently.

Awake in the Wild and Outdoor Retreats

Rochelle Calvert is a trained Awake in the Wild facilitator and leads nature-based mindfulness retreats, professional trainings, workshops, and contemplative experiences.

Awake in the Wild practice combines meditation with sensory engagement and direct contact with natural environments. Participants may explore stillness, movement, listening, interconnection, environmental awareness, and the experience of being present within a living landscape.

Rochelle’s retreats are intended to create more sustained opportunities for practice than may be possible during an ordinary therapy session. Her current professional offerings include courses and retreats in mindfulness, Somatic Experiencing, ecodharma, nature-based meditation, trauma care, and healing relationships with the Earth.

Retreat-based work should still include thoughtful preparation. Participants may have different physical capacities, trauma histories, cultural relationships with land, and levels of experience with meditation. Clear expectations, accessibility information, informed consent, and alternatives are therefore important.

Healing With Nature Trauma Care Education

Rochelle also leads the Healing With Nature Trauma Care Certification Program, a year-long educational experience integrating trauma physiology, mindfulness, somatic practice, nature connection, ancestral and intergenerational themes, personal reflection, and Earth-centered community work.

The training reflects her broader view that practitioners should remain engaged with their own self-awareness and healing rather than approaching trauma care only as a collection of techniques to be applied to other people.

This does not mean clinicians must disclose personal experiences to clients or achieve perfect emotional regulation before practicing. It means they should recognize how their own activation, values, assumptions, grief, and relationship with the environment may affect their therapeutic presence.

Behavioral Analysis and the BCBA Credential

The current Clinical Events page and Southwestern College catalog list Rochelle Calvert as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. The Behavior Analyst Certification Board describes the BCBA as a graduate-level certification for independent practitioners qualified to provide behavior-analytic services and supervise other behavior-analysis professionals.

Rochelle’s earlier professional biographies connect her behavior-analysis background with work involving individuals and families affected by developmental and behavioral concerns. This foundation may contribute to her ability to consider observable behavior, environmental context, learning history, reinforcement, and practical skill development alongside mindfulness and somatic treatment.

Behavior analysis, mindfulness, and somatic practice come from different professional traditions. An integrative clinician should remain clear about which framework is being used, what evidence supports it, and whether it fits the client’s needs and goals.

Mindfulness Training for Clinicians

A major purpose of Rochelle’s professional education is helping clinicians integrate mindfulness without making it feel abstract, inaccessible, or disconnected from treatment.

Mindfulness can support the therapist’s own ability to notice:

• Emotional reactivity
• Urgency to fix the client
• Distraction
• Countertransference
• Bodily tension
• Assumptions about the client
• The impulse to move too quickly
• Moments when the therapeutic relationship needs repair

For clients, mindfulness may support awareness of thoughts, feelings, urges, behavior, and physical responses. The clinician’s task is to help the client use awareness in service of meaningful goals—not simply to become better at enduring distressing conditions that should be changed.

Rochelle’s programs have included MBSR, MBCT, mindful eating, mindful parenting, workplace mindfulness, clinical mindfulness, and nature-based approaches.

Ethical and Inclusive Nature-Based Practice

Nature-based treatment must remain culturally responsive. People do not all experience land, wilderness, outdoor recreation, or environmental institutions in the same way.

A client’s relationship with nature may be shaped by:

• Indigenous identity or ancestry
• Migration and displacement
• Racism or exclusion in outdoor spaces
• Agricultural or labor experiences
• Natural disasters
• Climate grief
• Poverty and unequal access to green space
• Religious or spiritual values
• Disability and accessibility
• Family and community traditions

Clinicians should avoid assuming that a forest, mountain, beach, or outdoor retreat will automatically feel safe or restorative. The client should be invited to define what connection, place, nature, and safety mean within their own life.

The work of Rochelle Calvert encourages practitioners to approach the natural world with reciprocity rather than treating it solely as a resource for human wellness. Her programs include attention to environmental responsibility, community engagement, and repairing relationships with the Earth.

Explore Upcoming Clinical Events

Professionals interested in Rochelle’s areas of expertise can continue their learning through current Clinical Events programs focused on somatic practice, trauma, attachment, mindfulness, and nervous-system regulation.

Working with Developmental Trauma and Attachment from a Somatic Lens takes place on August 15, 2026 and explores attachment, somatic awareness, regulation, relational repair, and trauma-informed clinical interventions.

Trauma and Dissociation: Navigating the Complexities in Clinical Practice is scheduled for September 5, 2026 and addresses dissociative responses, grounding, stabilization, therapeutic safety, and readiness for trauma processing.

Clinicians can also explore Ethical Healing Frontiers: Trauma-Informed Practice That Transforms on October 3, 2026, along with the full Clinical Events continuing education calendar for additional workshops on trauma, mindfulness, somatic therapies, attachment, ethics, and integrative clinical care.

Additional therapist-focused resources are available through the Clinical Events Blog, including articles on somatic therapy, mindfulness in trauma treatment, polyvagal-informed care, dissociation, and nervous-system regulation.

Learn With Rochelle Calvert

The professional work of Rochelle Calvert, PhD, CMT, SEP, BCBA, brings together clinical psychology, mindfulness, Somatic Experiencing, nature-based therapy, behavioral analysis, ecotherapy education, contemplative practice, and trauma-informed care.

Her approach encourages clinicians to recognize that healing may involve more than insight or cognitive change. Clients may also need opportunities to develop bodily safety, present-moment awareness, emotional flexibility, connection, and a renewed sense of belonging.

By integrating mindfulness and somatic awareness with respectful engagement in the natural world, Rochelle Calvert offers mental health professionals a thoughtful framework for expanding trauma care while maintaining consent, flexibility, cultural responsiveness, and clinical responsibility.