The Healing Power of Nature

Wendell Berry, novelist, poet, essayist, and environmental activist, passed away on August 31st of this year at the age of 92. Berry wrote of the rest and peace he experienced in nature in his well-loved poem The Peace of Wild Things. Many poets, authors, and sages, including Berry, Thoreau, Emerson, Mary Oliver, and John Muir, wrote of the healing power of nature. Muir called this healing effect the 'tonic of wildness.'

It has long been known that spending time in nature soothes the soul, a balm for weary hearts. Shinrin-yoku, which translates as forest bathing, originated in Japan in the 1980s as a way to promote the benefits of exposure to natural environments. Dr. Qing Li, author of Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness, recognized the negative impacts of workplace stress on his culture and he began to research ways to foster physical and mental health in his patients through focused time spent in nature.

Inspired by Shinrin-yoku and practiced worldwide, forest therapy is a slow restorative walk in a natural setting. A trained guide facilitates a special sequence of elements as participants are invited to pay close attention to what they are noticing. While both hold much value, a nature therapy experience is quite different from an interpretive walk during which one is focused on the world of ideas and identification. Through the experience of a guided forest therapy walk, we stop to see, smell, touch, hear, and feel with our heart that which makes up the meadow, stream, and forest, and the beings who live within.

At the start of a forest therapy walk, a threshold of connection is crossed as the group enters the natural setting with focused attention. Like a bridge which carries us over rivers or roads, this threshold allows us to consciously and slowly cross from the tamed world where cares threaten to overwhelm us, to a world in which we know that we are part of nature and that we belong. It is here that we become acutely aware of what we are sensing around and in us. By consciously activating our senses, a state of relaxed and heightened awareness is achieved and we are able to more deeply feel our relationship with the rest of the natural world.

When we practice a deep sensory connection with nature, we experience startling and refreshing effects on our total person - body, mind, and spirit. In addition to feeling a sense of calm, discovery, and transformation, forest therapy participants often report a sense of feeling supported, embraced, nurtured. At times, deeply-rooted memories, messages, and emotions surface. Research also documents physical effects such as slowed heart rate, lowered blood pressure, and a boosted immune system via phytoncides, chemicals the trees are giving off at all times.

While the ideas of forest and nature therapy can be put into practice on one’s own, it is most often a guided group experience. By gathering together with others, absorbing the forest atmosphere through the senses, and sharing with one another what we are noticing, we learn together to listen more deeply to what nature has to communicate. As we slow down, breathe deeply, and intentionally focus on the pleasures of being present in the moment, we set the stage to be able to connect deeply with ourselves, with others, and with the more-than-human world.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.