This shift — from patient to planet, from extraction to reciprocity — isn’t just theoretical, we’ve lived it. These are the stories that shaped our shifts:
ROOTED IN RESILIENCE: Barry Williams
From traction to the trailhead, Barry’s journey is a story of defiance, devotion, and deep connection to the natural world.
When Barry was a kid, doctors told him he’d be walking with a cane by his twenties. Diagnosed with Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease, he spent six months in traction and several years in leg braces, learning early what it meant to live inside a body that demanded patience.
But Barry had other plans. He became a tri-state all-around gymnastics champion, team captain for golf and lacrosse, and competed in downhill ski racing — a walking contradiction to every prognosis he’d ever been given.
His early career took him from the world of technology into the sky, where he became a professional skydiver and mentor to others learning to face fear and trust themselves in freefall. By his thirties, after a hip resurfacing, two shoulder surgeries, a neck fusion, and an elbow repair (his doctor literally said he must have come from “the bargain bin”), Barry turned again to the one practice that had always helped him heal: hiking.
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, his rehabilitation wasn’t in a gym or clinic, it was on the trail. Each step strengthened not only his body, but also his faith in what nature could restore. That’s where he found peace, purpose, and the clarity to share that healing with others.
Together, Barry and Sydney built a life around that belief. His love of the outdoors created the space for Sydney to listen, heal, and thrive — and from that soil, Hiking My Feelings®, Wellness in the Wilderness Consulting, and Reciprocity Rx™ all took root.
Barry embodies the spirit of this work: grounded, capable, endlessly patient, and rooted in relationship with the land, with himself, and with every person he welcomes onto the trail.
FROM PATIENT TO PLANET: Sydney Williams
In 2017, Sydney Williams was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Her body was calling for help, but she didn’t yet know how to listen.
In the years leading up to her diagnosis, she’d battled panic attacks, burnout, and the kind of silent grief that accumulates after loss — twenty-three friends gone in four years during her time as a competitive skydiver. She was running on adrenaline and empty promises of “I’m fine.”
So she started walking. At first, those walks were about blood sugar and stress management. But step by step, the outdoors became her refuge. Birdsong replaced the echoes of her inner critic. Light through the leaves softened her edges. The trail offered space for her body to remember what safety felt like. Nature became a member of her care team.
In 2018, after completing the Trans-Catalina Trail, Sydney’s first instinct wasn’t to text friends or family — it was to reach out to the Catalina Island Conservancy. That trail had changed her life twice, and she wanted to protect the land that had helped her heal. “How can I help?” she asked. That question became the heartbeat of her work.
She began to wonder if this experience could be recreated. Could she build spaces where others might feel what she felt on those trails — where healing wasn’t transactional, but relational? Could she create a judgment-free environment the way Barry had for her, weave in practices for self-reflection and connection, and give back to the land in real time?
Together, Sydney and Barry have done just that with thousands of people since launching Hiking My Feelings®. What began as one woman’s journey from patient to planet has grown into Wellness in the Wilderness Consulting and now Reciprocity Rx™: a movement reminding people that the medicine we most need isn’t something we take — it’s something we tend, together.
THE SCIENCE OF CONNECTION: Dr. Melissa Sundermann
For Dr. Melissa Sundermann — known affectionately as Doctor Outdoors — the trail has always been both classroom and clinic.
A lifelong athlete and adventurer, she has found her greatest lessons not in lecture halls but in the quiet wisdom of the natural world. Whether running through mist-covered forests or paddling across a still lake at sunrise, Melissa has long believed what research now confirms: nature itself is the best physician.
A double board-certified physician in Internal and Lifestyle Medicine, Melissa has spent more than twenty-five years helping patients address the root causes of chronic disease through nutrition, movement, sleep, stress management, and community. What she’s discovered — through science and lived experience alike — is that nature enhances every one of those pillars in ways modern medicine cannot replicate. Time outdoors lowers cortisol, reduces inflammation, strengthens immunity, and awakens a sense of purpose that no prescription can match.
As the Founding Chair of the Nature as Medicine Subcommittee for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), Melissa works to bridge evidence-based research with accessible, everyday practices that reconnect people to the world outside. Her mission is simple and profound: to remind us that nature is not a luxury or leisure activity, it is essential to our well-being.
Through her work with Reciprocity Rx™, Melissa brings the science of nature-based healing into the soul of this work. Her approach grounds the data in lived humanity, showing that the same force that heals our bodies can also heal our relationship with the Earth itself.
