FOREST BATHING
This is a new term for me. It means more than ‘earthing’ or ‘grounding’. And, in case all of those terms mean nothing to you, let me explain. ‘Grounding’ is a word that used to mean ‘having a basic training or instruction in a subject or a skill’. That’s still one of the meanings, along with ‘grounding electrical wires’, ‘laying groundwork’, ‘designing an embroidery background’ or even ‘not allowing airplanes to take off’. But ‘grounding’, these days, can also mean ‘getting in physical contact with Mother Earth’ as in ‘walking or standing barefoot on grass, sand or mud’ or ‘gardening with bare hands’, which can create a sense of balance within your body and mind.
The practice of grounding or earthing is a therapeutic technique of getting in touch with your inner or spiritual self, going to a safe place where you are in control, where you can heal from the physical and emotional stresses of urban life, and feel better. In case you can’t go outside, or don’t have a backyard or park nearby, there’s grounding equipment available. But I won’t go into that here.
Let’s look at ‘forest bathing‘. Where did this expression come from? Well, it seems that in 1982 the Japanese government coined the term ‘shinrin-yoku‘ (forest bathing)—based on ancient Shinto and Buddhist practices—in response to a public health crisis. High levels of stress at work or school, long hours and insufficient restorative sleep resulted in some people, young and old, dying at their desks or committing suicide. The rate of mass migration of people from rural areas to the cities and the increase of auto-immune disease were causing serious economic and health problems, so they needed to do something.
Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki, a researcher who worked at Japan’s Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute (FFPRI), started to study why we feel relaxed when we experience nature. For his first forest bathing experiments, on an island called Yakushima, he researched the effects of cedar on stress hormones in the human body. He has written two books: Shinrin Yoku: The Japanese Way of Forest Bathing for Health and Relaxation (2018) and Walking in the Woods: Go back to nature with the Japanese way of shinrin-yoku (2021). He has also published more than 150 articles as a result of his years of studying the effects that walking or viewing forest landscapes has on our senses, our brain and our mood.
Last week, I learned of the Global Institute for Forest Therapy (http://www.giftoftheforest.com/), GIFT for short, which offers programs about forest therapy. I went to a Metro Vancouver Forest Bathing session in Pacific Spirit Regional Park, lead by a forest-therapist-in-training, from 9:30 to 12:00 noon. The key takeaway for me was not a lot of facts and figures about our forests, but rather mindfulness training of how we should slow down and appreciate the sights, sounds, smells, feel and even a taste of the forest, in the form of Douglas fir tea, prepared with freshly harvested and washed sprigs of small fir branches brewed in a French press pot. Dee-lish!
Fiona