AYURVEDA
by Julie Devi Hale, LMFT, ERYT
Photo by Kyle Wolfe
Shinrin-Yoku
The Practice of Forest Bathing
F
or as long as I can remember, the forest
has been a place of healing for me. As a
child I would gravitate to the woods for
hours. As an adult in this modern, multi-tasking
world, it has been harder to keep up the habit
regularly. I mean, really - if you go outside, you
should be exercising and checking your watch to
hit that magic number of 10,000 steps. Right?
Wrong. Finally, I have discovered some
real science about the positive effects of being
in the woods - the practice known in Japanese
as Shinrin-Yoku (English translation, ‘forest
bathing.’) In 1982, the Forest Agency of Japan
spearheaded Shinrin-Yoku encouraging peo-
ple to walk outside to reduce stress. Because
of this movement and the subsequent research
studies, I now have 21st-century clinical data
telling me to go chill out in the woods! As of
2017, more than 127 research papers about
Shinrin-Yoku have been published in the
scientific literature.
For example, this mindfulness-based
method is medically proven to reduce blood
pressure and stress hormone levels, increase
the NK cell count in the immune system, and
even decrease blood glucose levels in diabetics
-- just to name a few superlative benefits.
Here’s how it works. You’re not hiking, or
even walking. Shinrin-Yoku is more like wan-
dering. You walk for two hours and go....
maybe a mile? It doesn’t matter. What matters
is that you put your phone on airplane mode,
and open up all eight of your senses to your
surroundings.
Yeah, eight, did you know that? I didn’t.
I’m assuming you can get to five on your own,
then there is proprioception, interoception,
and the vestibular system. For the purposes ofbrevity, I have to leave it at that, but I highly
recommend you explore your own.
So, you spend time ambling in silence and
seeing what draws your focus. What kind of
focus. Sound? A movement in your peripheral
vision? Or if you open up all eight senses to
one tree or view - what do you experience?
It’s that same mindful, magical feeling we
all seek; that space where the monkey mind
falls into the background and you begin to
feel, dare I say it? At peace. Inside and out. At
one, with it all, dropped away from the trick
of duality that our ginormous, ego-driven,
prefrontal cortex sometimes plays on us.
Then, we can build on that feeling through
a myriad of methods; we can store it up so it
sustains us long after we’ve left the woods.
Nature is alive, and talking to us. This is not
a metaphor. —Terence McKenna