Sheaf & Vine: a deck for the tame and the wild - my ecotherapy project
Contributed by Year 3 trainee Gianluca Campanella.
The idea for my ecotherapy project came from a water bottle. During this summer’s World Cup, a football coach threw one, and someone watching called it dysregulation.
In therapy circles it’s a useful, hard-won word. It describes a nervous system pushed outside the range where it can cope. But nothing had broken down here: a charge rose with nowhere to go, found an object, flew, and was gone. Bodies have been settling themselves that way for as long as there have been bodies.
The word didn’t describe the moment so much as draw a curtain over it. Something raw and animal had happened, and the vocabulary tidied it away. A furious man is standing next to you; a dysregulated one is a subject for discussion. I began to wonder how often we reach for careful words at exactly the moment plain ones would leave us face to face with an animal, usually our own.
The ancient Greeks made room for both the tame and the wild. They kept a god for each and never set them against each other. Demeter gives the grain: the planted row, the settled year, the mysteries one is initiated into. Dionysus gives the vine, and arrives whether or not the town is ready, wreathed in ivy, bringing the state no one asked for. Athens held festivals for both and thought a city needed each.
I think a therapy room does too. We need containment, contracts and careful pacing. We also need room for what arrives uninvited: grief that won’t be scheduled, laughter that spreads, a body that shakes.
That’s the thinking behind Sheaf & Vine, a deck of 92 words drawn from ecology, therapy and the body. Each card gives the word, its root, and a short account of what it does. Like the two gods, it comes in two halves: Sheaf for therapy as something domesticated, Vine for therapy as something wild, a pairing I’ve borrowed from Nick Totton’s Wild Therapy.
This brings me back to where it all started. Ecotherapy works with our relationship to the natural world, and reminds us that we are animals in it, not minds watching from behind a curtain. So, the question behind my project became a practical one: what happens when you lay the vocabulary of the therapy room next to the language of fire, fungi, flocks and floods?
Quite a lot, it turns out. Co-regulation sits comfortably beside Flock, where thousands of starlings each track a handful of neighbours and become one body over a pier at dusk. Regulation finds an unlikely ally in Sigh: lungs kept to a perfectly steady rhythm collapse, which is why ventilators are set to sigh. Completion, the defensive movement finally allowed to finish, has a wilder twin in Tremor, shaking that no one authors and no one can slow.
None of this is meant to replace the clinical words. The point is to keep both piles on the table, so the tame words can’t quietly paper over the wild things they were made to describe.
The cards are made to be drawn one at a time, at random, rather than read in order. There’s no right way to use them. You might draw one before a session and notice what it stirs, bring one to supervision, or use one as a prompt in a group or for journalling. Try drawing a Sheaf card and a Vine card together and seeing what conversation they strike up.
There’s a copy of the deck in the Homa library, if you’d like to hold the cards in your hands. I’ve also made a digital version, free for anyone to use, at
If you try it, I’d love to hear which cards found you, and what came up.
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