By 2050, the United Nations states that 75% of the world’s projected 9 billion population will live in cities. So, is it so surprising that as a species we have become disconnected from nature… and forests, in particular, where we have lived for most of our life on earth?
We are also, increasingly an indoor species. The World Health Organisation names stress as the health epidemic of the 21st century. Since its inception in Japanese culture in the 1980’s, Shinrin-yoku, meaning ‘Forest bath’, has proven to affect health and wellbeing beneficially in a myriad of ways.
Forest Bathing/Shinrin-yoku - a Japanese practice reconnecting people with nature, alleviating effects of stress and burnout, developed in the 1980s during tech boom. Research into the practice has continued since then, and expanded worldwide.
Forest bathing is an exploration of the forest with all your senses. Not just your 5 senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, each of which is actually a complex process; it includes our internal senses that shape the way we behave in each moment. An experience becomes sensual when we notice how an interaction affects us. For example, merely placing our hand in a shallow stream initiates feelings…our senses note temperature, motion, texture, etc., but also responses such as joy, pleasure, tension, even fear.
To move forest therapy participants toward a sensual experience we, as guides, invite them to share how they feel outside, and in. This becomes an intimate experience, when communicating with oth-ers how something is affecting us, which in turn creates a sense of community.
Guides facilitate a journey… The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT) sets core guiding principles and skills, that begin with:
‘A guide works in partnership with the more-than-human world to accompany and support others on the journeys through which they find and manifest their medicine.’
An individual’s medicine being a unique expression of who they are, and how that affects and supports their wider community.
The ANFT model of Forest Therapy - inspired by Forest Bathing, was developed by Amos Clifford and others, creating a framework that includes many other elements. Among those is a practice of listening to each other in a sharing circle, in-between a series of “invitations” to engage the body senses.
Why? When we remember who we are through time spent in nature, we reconnect with our deeper selves, our inherent wilder inner beings, and are able to rebuild and recreate relationships with others, the more-than-human world and the earth. Our hearts feel safe to let the walls come down. Stories are heard, and held. Studies have shown that nature connectedness is enhanced, and also that pro-nature behaviours grow from a continued practice.
The journey to remembering, re-wilding ourselves, reclaims the fragments of ourselves that we may have ‘lost’ along our life-paths... so it is a path to wholeness.
The walk includes a mindful consideration of all that you encounter along the way, tending the land, plants and all beings. We listen, and attend to our feelings as they arise, noticing and acknowledg-ing. Perhaps meeting some of our edges...where our comfort zones are prodded. Approaching these edges with love and tenderness.
Opening our hearts, body touching the earth.
To listen to the podcast with Amanda CLICK HERE
Amanda Bond BSc MA MBACP, ANFT Certified Forest Therapy Guide, Co-Chair ANFT Europe Council, Edgewalker Nature Connections
To find out more and connect with Amanda Bond, see her links below:
https://www.facebook.com/AmandaBondHumanNatureProject/