Aruna Neela Bahadoorsingh Khan, Interdisciplinary Artist & Originator of Botanical Stitch Meditations(TM), Founder and Chief Creative Director of MOON BLOOM STUDIO for Healing Arts, was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up surrounded by rainforest. After moving to Canada as a child, she began to understand –later in life- how deeply those early landscapes had shaped her sense of self.
Her professional path, rooted in nonprofit work, creative education, and community engagement, eventually led her to Forest Therapy Hub, where she found both language and structure for the work she had long been doing through intuition and experience. Today, her practice focuses on expressive arts as a nature-based therapeutic approach, particularly for women navigating periods of transition and loss of identity.
Early relationship with nature
“So I’m originally from the Caribbean. I’m from Trinidad and Tobago, so lush rainforest was always a part of my upbringing. And then at 8 years old I moved from that beautiful paradise to another paradise, Vancouver, British Columbia.”
“Only when you move away from something you come to realize what you have taken for granted. This is the aha moment where I realized that nature has such a significant impact on us.”
“As humanity has distanced themselves from nature, what we’ve also found is that people have also had a larger disconnection from themselves and other people, which was kind of simultaneous with nature and people themselves.”
Seasonal rhythm and personal change
“During COVID in 2021 when I turned 50 I woke up one day and I looked around me in bed and I said where did Aruna go?. Where am I?”
“I realized for the past two and a half decades I was known as somebody’s wife. I was known as somebody’s mom, somebody’s this, somebody’s that. I had this overwhelming realization of utter emptiness.”
“And I realized that mother nature shows up every year. She never has a moment in spring where she’s like, ‘You know what? I was too depressed in winter. I’m just not going to like, no flowers this year’.”
“I was born as a very creative person… I really like and need to be creative. I found myself amalgamating all the different art forms in a collage… I was using pressed botanicals. I was stitching on paper. I was using found objects. My art has helped me express my inner thoughts and feelings… but in order to move forward, I need something to help me move forward.”
“By aligning myself with seasonal wisdom, I was able to go through something that was so debilitating to me in midlife. As I did that, a rhythm started happening within me. And then my life became a ceremony. It became a ritualistic cycle. We cannot subscribe to this self-destructive mindset that has taken over the world of 365 days a year.”
Forest Therapy Hub and Expressive Arts
“Through Forest Therapy Hub, I found this whole new world and there was this specific area that spoke to me and that was expressive arts. This component in the FTHub framework is the one I want to research more and put out to the world and help people.”
“So anybody taking training… you might find your spark in one small sliver of the Forest Therapy Hub curriculum because it is massive. When you go narrow and deep, you can contribute to that area to help make Forest Therapy even that much greater.”
How her work supports others
“My goal in life is to teach other women holistic wellness through nature-based therapeutic art, which I specifically call Botanical Stitch Meditations.”
“This saved my life because it touches on so many different things… setting an intention… centering yourself… to focus on an aspect of self and it could be self-love, courage, calmness.”
“That repetitive motion is so calming and it really helps to take out even for a moment the pressures of your real life and help you to gain therapeutic healing in this way.”
Botanical Stitch Meditation Club
“I’m now starting a group called the Botanical Stitch Meditation Club where I’m going to invite just a small group of people to help me develop a monthly club. I’m going to give them all sorts of things like templates and all these magically empowering botanical stitch meditation paper projects. I realized that we need to find the magic in the everyday”
“We are all born and brought to this earth for a purpose and we are all here to contribute to humanity in a way that only we could do. When you do your own little things… you don’t know what impact you are having on other people and other people’s lives.”
“So it’s a combination of helping women to discover self-love, self-courage and a little bit of stardust through nature and ritual meditation.”
Ph: Forest Therapy Hub and Aruna (MOON BLOOM STUDIO for Healing Arts)
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