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

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The bestselling guide to forest bathing with a new section of hands-on forest bathing practices and space for journal entries and reflections.

Simply being present in the natural world, with all of our senses fully alive, can have a remarkably healing effect. It can also awaken in us our latent but profound connection with all living things. This is “forest bathing,” a practice inspired by the Japanese tradition of shinrin-yoku. It is a gentle, meditative approach to being with nature and an antidote to our nature-starved lives that can heal our relationship with the more-than-human world.

In Your Guide to Forest Bathing, you’ll discover a path that you can use to begin a practice of your own that includes specific activities presented by Amos Clifford, one of the world’s most experienced forest bathing experts. Whether you’re in a forest or woodland, public park, or just your own backyard, this book will be your personal guide as you explore the natural world in a way you may have never thought possible.

From the Publisher

In the practice of forest bathing we immerse our senses in the special qualities of the fluid, oceanic ambience of the woodlands. We walk slowly so we can focus our senses on the myriad ways the living forest surrounds and touches us. Feel the breeze on your skin; hear the gurgling voices of the brook and the calls of birds; see the movement of trees in the wind. By giving attention to your senses, you turn down the volume on the cacophony of inner thoughts. Your senses bring you into the present moment, where you can take in all the forest has to offer, welcoming it, letting it settle inside you. When the forest is allowed its place within you, it supports your body’s natural capacity for wellness and healing.

Many forest bathers feel that their time in the woods is a form of meditation. Some call it mindfulness in nature. And mindfulness practice does share with forest bathing an emphasis on sensory experience. The principle is simple: sensory experience is always immediate, unlike discursive (story-based) thinking, which involves us with the past or future or just anywhere that is not here and now. Thus, anytime our attention is focused on our senses, we are being “mindful,” because we are present. Forest bathing distinctly emphasizes sensory noticing and deemphasizes heady preoccupations like the familiar naturalist focus on learning facts. In this fundamental way forest bathing is indeed like meditation.

Finding Your Best Places for Forest Bathing

Suitable places do not always conform to typical ideas of what constitutes a nature trail. I once had a positive “forest bathing” experience in a mall parking lot, where I interacted with a young tree growing in the island between parking areas. Clearly, forests are ideal, but you can make do with what is in your neighborhood. You don’t have to be in a forest to do forest bathing.

An Ethic of Tenderness

Many people have learned that “leave no trace” is a general ethical principle to follow in nature. I agree that it is a good principle in protected and fragile environments, such as alpine meadows that have very brief growing seasons. However, it is not the ethic I recommend for forest bathing. An alternative is “wild tending.”

Reciprocity

It is a strongly ingrained cultural habit to think of nature as a collection of resources. Forest bathing opposes this assumption. One of the beautiful areas of inquiry in forest bathing has to do with how we can give as much as we receive. We call this “reciprocity practice.”

Guided by Invitations

Forest bathing follows a series of invitations from the forest. Part of developing your practice of forest bathing is honing your ability to recognize and choose from a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of invitations. Invitations are not exercises or assignments to accomplish. They are more like a flow of improvisational dance, with the forest as your partner.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Red Wheel; Reissue edition (August 1, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590035135
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590035139
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 7 inches