Forest Bathing

Part One

“There needs to be a willingness, and almost an invitation from nature for it to have a positive effect,” said my friend Margaret Hansen (Maggie) as we sat down to tea on a bench at the edge of Gazzam Lake. We’d each separately spent hours walking in these woods and sitting on this bench. This was our first time here together, the second day of spring.

“Don’t you find it generally inviting?” I asked.

“Oh, so inviting,” she said softly.

I had met Maggie one sunny day in the fall on the main trail winding through Gazzam Lake. I was out in the afternoon, which is not my habit, and our dogs facilitated the rest of the happy accident of our meeting. 

As they sniffed and wagged at each other Maggie and I began to chat. “I’m here for my forest bath,” she must have said, because my interest in this casual encounter suddenly sharpened and I needled her with questions: Why did she use that phrasing? What did she know about forest bathing? Did she want to have coffee and tell me more?

Maggie was not only a regular forest bather, but also a researcher who focused the end of her career on shinrin-yoku. Within a five minute conversation I connected her name to a research paper—a compendium of all the various benefits of total nature immersion—I had referenced extensively in my own professional writing. 

Shinrin-yoku—which translates to forest bathing—was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, Japan’s Director of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. The concept of shinrin-yoku—which is simply moving through a forested setting engaging with each of the five senses—was a creative solution targeting a pair of seemingly unrelated issues. A National Geographic piece from 2019 reports: “The purpose [of developing shinrin-yoku] was twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests.” 

And it worked. Accompanying shinrin-yoku’s rise in popularity in Japan throughout the nineties was a wave of research closely verifying—by a wide spectrum of metrics—its efficacy in supporting human wellness. Most simply put, “Forest bathing has positive effects on human physical and mental health, especially in enhancing immunity, treating chronic diseases, regulating mood, and reducing anxiety and depression.”

Neither the research nor the concept is limited to Japan—so much of the practice is ancient and intuitive, so much research from across the world is focused on the myriad ways humans benefit from close relationship to nature—but it does seem to have really been distilled and demonstrated most comprehensively there. 

When Maggie and I met again she reminded me of the journey that led her to shinrin-yoku as both a researcher and practitioner. 

Maggie began her career in the late seventies as a medical-surgical nurse. In the nineties, in an educational partnership between El Camino Hospital where Maggie worked and San Jose State school of nursing, she discovered an aptitude for teaching in clinical settings. She got a masters degree in nursing education from San Jose State so she could continue teaching. She was offered and accepted a clinical teaching position with De Anza College and later with the University of San Francisco. She began lecturing on pathophysiology in addition to teaching in clinical settings. 

“I was nicknamed ‘the weeder,’” she laughed, “If you could make it through my course, you were good. Pathophysiology is the bones of being a nurse, and critical thinking, and understanding of the human body from a physiological point of view. It’s rigorous.”

Running alongside the golden thread of Maggie’s shining career was the less visible thread of her personal, at times acutely painful life. She remembered first finding solace in nature as a six year old when her parents divorced. She remembered her mother’s garden in southern California, filled with fruit trees, and summers spent in the San Bernardino Mountains as a Camp Fire Girl. “As a child, I always felt more comfortable in nature, or more at home,” she acknoweldged.

“As opposed to your actual home, or in groups of people, or in school?” I clarified.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Maggie nodded vigorously, “Emphatically yes! I was totally calmer, just a different person.” This proved to be a valuable bit of self-knowledge, identified at a young age. 

She completed a doctorate from the University of San Francisco in four years. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study technology-based nature interventions in post-surgical patients in Iceland. While there, she developed, designed, and taught a graduate level course on Integrative Medicine at the University of Iceland. She discovered a natural talent for technical writing, an interest in the intersection of wellness and technology. Nature was there too, ever present in her curiosity about what gave patients better healing outcomes.

“Nature and my beliefs about healing were intertwined early on in my life. And I think it had to do with how it healed me as a child. And that continued throughout my life.”

The thread of the personal, painful narrative caught the light again. When Maggie was still in her early thirties, her beloved sister Diana Clare—“a second mother” ten years older than Maggie—died of cancer. Two months later, Maggie was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Reeling from her sister’s death and awaiting a critical brain surgery while parenting two small children, Maggie began experiencing debilitating anxiety. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Intuitively, she began spending as much time as she could in nature. Reflecting on this experience, she noted how it influenced her research interests. “I’m really interested in the effects of nature on depression, the psych/soc aspects of nature,” she spoke in the same abbreviations peppering her reviews—phsys, or physio, psych, soc—a beautiful layering to witness.

“It definitely helped my anxiety to spend time in nature,” she remembered of her cancer at 33. “When I took the children into the forest it would get even better, being there with them. We would do a family walk every Sunday in the woods. I could relax.” 

Later in her life, cancer struck a second time. She’s totally healthy now, she noted gratefully, and believes her regular practice of forest bathing is partly to be credited. 

“I think that nature inherently protects me from getting cancer again,” she stated confidently. Her own research review has highlighted the fact that the aromatic signatures of trees contribute to human synthesis of white blood cells, the kind that fight cancer cells.

“If I do get cancer again, then my choice will be really to get down on my hands and knees and snort mushrooms, snort phytoncides,” she laughed at herself. “Give me that moss over there too! There are medicinal qualities to this whole place!” She mimed an exaggerated mad grab of the forest’s bounty, held a lichen draped branch to her face and inhaled deeply. We both laughed.

In 2015, toward what was supposed to be the end of Maggie’s career as a professor at the University of San Francisco (USF) School of Nursing, she read Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki’s research on shinrin-yoku  and the physiological effects of slowly walking through nature using all the senses. 

Commonly prescribed and practiced in Japan for its stress relieving effects, Maggie’s search surfaced similar research from around the world—Korea, Italy, Poland—all with compelling evidence that a simple practice of moving slowly through a forested landscape engaging with each of the senses had myriad positive health outcomes. Maggie and a team of colleagues set to work writing a review of the literature and publishing their findings in the 2017 paper “Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing) and Nature Therapy: A State of the Art Review.” 

I asked Maggie how her research informed her practice of spending time in the woods. She noted that she doesn’t come here for exercise and doesn’t think of her walks in the woods as workouts. “I want to lower my heart rate, not raise it,” she delineated. “I’ve slowed down a lot.”

With that distinction, she oriented me to her practice.

“My gateway sense is my smell,” she said, pausing and turning her nose up into the air in a quiet bend of the trail. “That’s my breath, so I’m breathing in whatever is here. I don’t really know what’s here!” she laughed, “Other than I smell pine trees, I smell dirt, like that smell when the sun hits the dirt?”

I smiled inwardly, unaware of a single pine tree in the forest. I knew exactly what she was talking about though—we were smelling the beneficial aromatic signatures of fir and cedar—I’d learned this from reading Maggie’s research. 

“The next [sense] is vision,” she continued. “Oh, and I become very grateful for my vision. I get into this deep sense of gratitude just staring deep into the forest. All that green.

“And then I go to touch; touching the bark; putting my hand on the needles of the pine tree; that would lead me into putting my nose closer.”

She held up a chunk of decomposing wood. “I’m really interested in how this feels. The texture. The beautiful colors. Here’s a smell—” she offered the chunk to my nose.

I leaned in and inhaled deeply. “Oh, that’s a great smell,” I said, and I meant it. 

“Isn’t it?”

“It’s how I want to smell when I die,” I said.  

“Me too!” she agreed.

She placed the wood back on the forest floor where she found it and moved on to the trunk of a young bigleaf maple. “This moss begs me to touch it. It feels like cornsilk. And that mindfulness, really trying to feel the qualities of this moss, brings me right into the present moment.”

This quality of presence made Maggie an excellent walking companion; she was quick to be delighted and entirely engrossed in the physical experience. I loved her orientation—she was looking to be awed. She was there to access her sense of wonder, and she was never disappointed.

“Can you imagine, this came from a seed!” she said, craning her neck to stare into the canopy of a cedar while affectionately patting its solid trunk, carpeted in a low pile of seafoam green moss.

“Maybe we can take this exercise and apply it to our partners,” she offered wisely when I asked her what such a practice translated to in a life. She talked about getting curious, how we can learn to practice close observation in a forest and apply it to the challenges in our lives, our relationships. “You know, ‘help me understand you,’” she said. “Nature is the best teacher.”

“This place slows everything down for me. Even if I have a monkey mind, or stuff going on in my life that may be challenging, how does this experience [of forest bathing] affect that challenge, and how I respond to that challenge?” she asked.

Concluded next week.