‘I’m a Certified Mindful Outdoor Guide—Here’s What That Means and Why It’s Important’

A plunge in the ocean. A barefoot walk in the grass. The wind in your hair and the sun on your face. When you’re in need of a mental or physical reset, nothing hits quite like a moment in nature.

Journalist, naturalist, and entrepreneur Angel Elliott Massie has savored that fresh-air feeling for as long as she can remember. “My relationship with nature has always felt ancestral—like something I was born knowing, even before I could name it,” she says. Experiencing a mind-body connection to the outside world at a young age ultimately inspired her to become a Kripalu Center certified mindful outdoor guide, leading people back to their senses and the earth.

To Massie, the link between mindfulness and the outdoors is “inseparable, really. The forest doesn’t rush. The river doesn’t apologize. When we step into nature with intention, we’re invited into a different rhythm—one that encourages stillness, listening, and reverence,” she says. “Mindfulness in the outdoors is about remembering how to be—not just do.”

Through her work as a mindful outdoor guide and the cofounder of Wanderland Outdoors, a luxury outdoor experience initiative, Massie is on a mission to redefine the way people relate to the wild—and bring it back to a place of recentering and reverence.

How Massie has found mindfulness outdoors

When Massie thinks back to her earliest memories outside, she remembers an insatiable curiosity in the form of collecting leaves, climbing trees, crabbing, and splashing in the Chesapeake Bay. As she’s grown, that relationship has become more sacred. “Nature is where I come home to myself—where I remember I’m not separate from the world, but deeply of it.”

To help share those feelings with the world, Massie and her husband, Bobby, founded Wanderland Outdoors. Through guided experiences fishing, hiking, horseback riding, dining, and more, Wanderland Outdoors aims to create space for all people to reconnect with nature in a way that feels joyful, empowering, and restorative, she says.

“For so long, the outdoors has been gate-kept—not by the earth, but by systems and narratives that said who belonged in nature and who didn’t,” Massie says. “I wanted to shift that. I wanted my children to see people who look like them fishing alpine lakes or meditating beneath aspens. We’re reclaiming our relationship to the land, not as visitors, but as stewards, storytellers, and descendants of those who’ve always belonged.”

Massie’s simple practice for immersing yourself in nature

Between guiding mindful outdoor experiences with Kripalu and managing excursions for Wanderland Outdoors, Massie devotes a major portion of her daily routine to the outdoors. But reaping its benefits doesn’t have to take much time or effort at all, she says.

To tap into your own mind-body connection in nature, go simple. “Take a walk without your phone. Sit beneath a tree and listen. Touch the bark, breathe in the air, feel your feet on the ground," says Massie. "Any green space will do. You don’t need gear or a trail map to begin—just curiosity and a willingness to notice.”

Those simple moments have been transformative for Massie throughout her life. “Nature has softened my anxiety, steadied my breath, and offered clarity during life’s messiest chapters. It’s also served as a place to grieve, to heal, to reconnect myself with my natural state. Physically, it invites me to move with joy—to hike, to fish, to be present in my body. Mentally, it has been a salve, a space where I can feel both small and infinite at once.”

And most importantly? “Nature doesn’t require you to look or act a certain way—it only asks you to come as you are,” she says. So take Massie’s advice and give yourself a few minutes a day to connect mindfully with the wild, whether it’s just outside your window or a long and winding road away. “Let go of the polished, performative self and remember the part of you that howls, that laughs loud, that dances barefoot in the rain. It’s a return—to joy, to freedom, to your most unfiltered self.”