Heidi Jade is walking to recover from PTSD and finds it’s the small things that help.

“A pīwakawaka always brings a smile to my face and makes me stop and admire,” says Heidi Jade.

At 48, Heidi has struggled for years with PTSD following childhood abuse. She’s found that exercise – walking especially – is beneficial, especially when she can see birds flitting around her.

Healing is a slow process and talking things out, with a psychologist’s guidance, helped her to understand herself.

And it was not long before walking, and talking, became part of her life.

“I had two very good friends who just walked with me and shared my journey; it’s an incredible gift to give because not many people can listen to all your problems without giving advice or being overly sympathetic. They just listened. And walked. It was one of the most enormously healing things for me.”

She bought walking shoes and clothes. “At first it was driven by escape, I just wanted to get away from everything, but as I went through my counselling it changed, and I wasn’t escaping things – I was finding myself as I walked.”

Now she’s in a topping-up stage where walking is about getting perspective and being resilient: “I think the thing that calls to me the most is when you round a bend in a track and come upon a view with the horizon stretching out farther than you can see. That always makes me stop and remember how vast the world is and how small my problems really are.”

And increasingly, Heidi considers it a privilege to interact with nature: “There are a lot of things in my life that I can’t control, and I can’t change that there are negative things happening for me. But I can choose something better to think about, and to see and to experience – and walking does that for me. It makes me stop and notice and you’re just filled with this sense of awe about how beautiful it is out there in the world.”

Join Heidi and thousands of others in doing the Walk1200km challenge – it’s never too late to start. Sign up here.