Your Guide to Forest Bathing (Expanded Edition): Experience the Healing Power of Nature

INTRODUCTION

You carry a forest inside you. It is a mirror within of the great forests of the world. This book is an invitation to bring those inner and outer forests together.

Forest bathing is a practice that belongs in each person's palette of self-care strategies. It is also a powerful path of activism for those who are called to help heal the broken relationships between people and the more-than-human world. Humans are not separate from nature and have no free pass to escape the effects of the traumas we inflict upon it. Healing of people and forests happens together, or not at all. The medicine that brings healing is in the relationship. Forest bathing is a potent tool in this supremely important work.

Like many practices, it is easy to begin, but also like the most satisfying practices, there are layers of complexity and delight in forest bathing that reward us when we make it a regular part of our lives. This book is a guide to get you started.

I will share some of the core methods of forest bathing. I also touch on some of the philosophy. When we are forest bathing, we work with the forest as our partner. One of the key sayings forest bathers return to as a cornerstone of our philosophy is, The forest has your back. While we must make an effort, paradoxically it is by relaxing into the forest's embrace that we are most likely to receive its benefits. And these benefits are many. Some are discussed in this book, but others await your discovery.

As your partners in this practice, the trees and forests welcome you. They recognize and call to your inner forest. Take a moment right now to remember a tree that was in some way important to you early in your life. Maybe you walked by a ginkgo on the way to school and for one week each autumn it lit the breeze with golden leaves. Or perhaps there was a huge maple hidden away in the woods near your home—a tree that you felt only you knew about. Maybe you'd go there anytime you really needed to be alone. It doesn't matter if you cannot recall (or never knew) the name of the species. What matters is the connection you had with that particular tree—the felt sense that is a part of being in relationship. What was your relationship with that tree?

As your tree emerges from the landscapes of your memory, what details do you recall? How old were you at the time? When did you first see the tree? What were the circumstances? How did you and the tree interact? Did you climb it, shelter under its limbs, build a fort in it, harvest its fruits?

What do you recall of the tree itself? Picture its size; the feel of its bark, leaves or needles; how it changed through the seasons. It could be that only now, as you get in touch with the memory of that tree, are you beginning to see new dimensions of the place it held in your life. Filling in the details of your first encounter with a tree, let the memory take the shape of whatever magic your imagination offers.

My earliest memory is of trees. I am in a crib in my bedroom on the second floor where there is an open window. As the sky slowly lightens with the dawn, I hear the trees greeting the morning with song. In a high quavering voice, the oranges begin their dawn chorus: Oranges! Oranges! We are Oranges! It is a song filled with great joy. The lemon trees answer: Lemons! Lemons! We are Lemons! and their anthem is equally joyous. Back and forth, on that threshold between the night and the new day, they sing. Those songs are the earliest stream of the soundscape of the forest within me. I don't know how I knew that some trees were called oranges and some lemons. My heart is touched with this mystery and how it hints at layers of relationship between people and trees that are beyond the reaches of our cultural imagination.

My singing trees are an example of how trees touch our lives, often in ways that are so gentle and so much of the moment that we may not even notice the connection until, in a moment of later reflection, there comes over us an awareness of the fullness of their offering. It is when we look back that we realize the abundance of their gifts. This is the slow, patient nature of trees. When we spend quiet time in the woods, or in a park, or even our yard, our inner trees—the ones we remember as friends from long ago—are there as well. The stirring in our core, the simple glory of the present moment that is rooted in the ecologies of our memory—this is at the heart of forest bathing.

• • •

Forest bathing can be an occasional event, but it is when we make it a regular practice that we realize its full benefits. While we may not be able to get to a forest every week, most of us can find a way to incorporate at least some of the benefits of forest bathing into our lives, through simple ways of continually renewing and deepening our connections to the more-than-human world of nature.

All over the world people are taking up forest bathing to reconnect to nature and to find relief from the everyday stresses of life. They are receiving many benefits and blessings. My belief is that the desire to be in forests and seek solace and healing among the trees is deeply encoded in the human psyche; it's in our DNA. Our species evolved among the trees and in the savanna environments where forests and grasslands meet. Long ago, our bodies learned to benefit from breathing in the exhalations of the trees, that rich mix of freshly minted oxygen and other aerosols that benefit our moods, our hearts, our mental capacities, our immune systems, and more.

The relationship has always been reciprocal: we exhale the carbon dioxide that the trees breathe in. Our forebears learned to tend the trees, to prune them, to periodically burn away the understory of plants before the fuel load endangered the forest. When societies forget how to tend the trees, they start to remove forests, and inevitably deserts appear, springs run dry, weather patterns change. These are the times we are in. Somehow, as a species, most of us no longer know trees as our relations and view them instead as crops to harvest in service of purely human aims.

This is one of the reasons why forest bathing is important for our times. The trees need us now. They call us back into the groves of their congregation with offerings of healing. And we come to them precisely because we remember in our bones the power and beauty and generosity of the trees. We deeply intuit that it is our birthright to recall their songs.

I've experienced forest bathing in many of the great forests of the world. I've walked among ancient oaks in Serbia that rival the size of some of the coastal redwoods in California. I've conversed with the most ancient of bristlecone pines of the high, cold mountains where Nevada and California meet. I've lain on the friendly soil in the New Zealand forests where the kauri stand in their magnificence. In Japan I was held between the roots of a hinoki cypress named The Ancient One, who shed raindrops from its branches onto my upturned face. I feel most at home in the oak and bay woodlands of the California coastal ranges, because they are where I spent my childhood and where I live today. Among all of these forests, in the company of their trees, I have come to know a quiet transformation of my heart and mind. At first in whispers, and over time in voices more audible, the forests are teaching me to, once again, hear how the singing of the trees is a chorus woven in harmony with the song of my life.

• • •

This book is an invitation to trust your inner forest to guide you into a delightful practice among the trees. Whether you live in the countryside, suburbs, or the city, this book offers you a framework and specific activities you can use to explore forest bathing on your own. I won't make any promises, but I will say this: the experience can be profound, even transformational.

Nomenclature: What's It Called?

The exploration of forest bathing in this book is based on the practice I and my colleagues at the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT) have developed. We refer to what we are doing as forest therapy. We are inspired in part by Japanese practices, but we don't attempt to replicate their methods, which have developed in a way that is a great fit for unique aspects of Japanese culture. The Japanese term for this practice, shinrin-yoku, translates literally as forest bathing. That is the origin of the title of this book and the term we use most often throughout it. I view the terms shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, and forest therapy as almost interchangeable. There is only a subtle difference, in that forest therapy implies that the practice is taken up with an intentional goal of some type of healing best done with a trained guide. In Japan, besides shinrin-yoku, guides will sometimes describe what they do as "sbinrin-therapy. The methods they employ are focused on boosting wellness and preventing disease. Forest bathing" suggests to me a more casual experience