This article originally appeared in The Journal of Daoist Studies, Volume 17, 2024. The online version can be found here.
Forest Bathing (Jap.: shinrin yoku 森林浴) is the practice of immersing oneself in nature expressly for its physical and psychological health benefits. The term was coined in Japan in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama 秋山智英,, then Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries in Tokyo. The practice was envisioned as an antidote to the tech-boom and corporate burnout of Japanese office workers and the accompanying rise in cancer and autoimmune disorders. Research in Japan and elsewhere has since confirmed the health benefits of the practice, such as increased heart rate variability, lower blood pressure, increased "natural killer" T-cell production, stress reduction, and a greater sense of well-being, to name a few.
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The practice has come a long way since then, spreading worldwide, especially through the work of Amos Clifford and the organization he founded, the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT). Forest Therapy involves a session of Forest Bathing led by a trained guide who offers "invitations," practices that invite the participants into a deeper relationship with nature. These invitations involve bringing awareness to the senses to cultivate an embodied sense of presence, then turning it outward to cultivate a deeper connection with nature through relationship and community with the more-than-human-world.
The Daoist connection to Forest Bathing in China goes back to at least 2005 when Abbott Ren Xingzhi 任兴之 of the ancient Daoist temple Louguantai 樓觀台, established the Heavenly Harmony Garden Forest Bathing Area (Tianxie yuan senlin yuchang 天諧園—森林浴場) at Tiejia Ecological Daoist Temple 鐵甲生态道觀 on Mount Taibai 太白 near Xi'an. (Ren 2006)
When I began training as a Nature and Forest Therapy Guide with the ANFT, I quickly noticed the many conceptual and practical similarities between Daoist practice and Forest Bathing. In this paper I outline a few.
Intention
What turns a simple walk in nature into Forest Bathing? It is our intention. When we head out into nature specifically with its health benefits in mind, we are Forest Bathing. In Daoist terms this is a form of nourishing life (yangsheng 養生). When Forest Bathing, we also maintain an embodied sense of presence and walk slowly and mindfully, attuning our pace with the forest to receive the most beneficial effects of the practice.
In terms of Daoist cultivation, our intention when we head out on a Forest Bathing walk is to return to our original nature (benxing 本性). We might also say we are returning to our "roots" (ben 本) in nature and "harmonizing our brilliance and joining with the dust" (heguang tongchen 和光同塵). We acknowledge that as humans we are part of nature, not something uniquely superior to the rest of life. Just as we evolved in a reciprocal relationship with nature, in Daoist terms we might say that we "mutually arose" (xiangsheng 相生) with it.
This is the foundation of our spiritual journey. We seek to return to who we were before the conditioning of society and life's many travails created fictional narratives about ourselves, which we then internalized. When we begin to peel away the layers of stories and untruths about ourselves, we are returning to a state of natural simplicity (pu 樸) or what we sometimes think of as our "uncarved state" in Daoism.
In terms of Forest Bathing, this is like the preliminary stage of a walk. It happens in the first few minutes when we go out into a natural area and we take some deep breaths, drawing the world of grasses and trees we are inextricably linked to into our lungs, pulling oxygen out of the air and into our bloodstream where it permeates our entire system. Then we release carbon dioxide and other waste gases back into the air, where they become available for the trees and plants around us in a symbiotic exchange that links us back to life on earth for millions of years. We embody "the unity of humankind and nature" (tianren he yi 天人合一). We can also become aware of the fact that we are "bathing" in the atmosphere (tian 天) like fish swim in water.
The fresh air found in the forest has a great concentration of negatively charged ions; it also contains phytoncides released from trees, found to have beneficial effects on our immune systems. We might consider these microscopic beneficial airborne chemicals as a form of qi 氣 in the Daoist and traditional Chinese medical sense. We can also draw a parallel between the quality of the qi in the environment and modern systems like the Air Quality Index.
As our breathing deepens and we take in the sights and sounds of the natural world around us, we begin to feel the stresses and strains, worries and anxieties of the work-a-day world loosen and dissolve. Our conditioning begins to drop away, if we allow it, and we begin to remember our original selves as we return to a naturally relaxed and alert state of awareness which we can equate with the Daoist idea of clarity and stillness (qingjing 清静).
Nonaction and Mystery
In Forest Bathing, although we have a basic intention to undertake the practice, we should hold it lightly. We should let nonaction (wuwei 無為) inform our walk by not clinging too tightly to plans and ideas, or concepts of right and wrong. We can have a general idea of what we are doing but should not feel tied to a strict itinerary of tasks to be completed or accomplished. We let nature speak to us, surprise us, delight us! If we take any preconceived notions into the experience, we may spend the entire time in our heads instead of in the woods, entangled in the brambles of our own thoughts. We may miss the forest for the "trees" of ideas about whether we are doing it right or whether this a good use of our time. Pretty soon we are lost in thought and no longer present in the forest at all, even though it surrounds us.
We want to embody that attitude of nonaction, of non-contrived action, on our walk by practicing carefree wandering (xiaoyao you 逍遥遊) as recommended by the Daoist sage Zhuangzi. This matches what later Daoists and Chan Buddhists call "cloud wandering" (yunyou 雲遊). It means drifting through the landscape in a light and relaxed manner. As Wang Chongyang 王重陽 (1113-1170), the founder of the Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) school, recommends in his short treatise on basic practice, as we wander, we should not simply, "relish the spectacular scenery of mountains and rivers and enjoy the colorful blooms of flowers and trees," but also, "seek our inner nature and life destiny (xingming 性命) and search for mystery and wonder" (xuanmiao 玄妙) (Komjathy, 2013, 108)
Another way to express this "wonder and mystery" is the experience of awe. In Japanese aesthetics this is called yugen 幽玄, an awareness of the universe that triggers an emotional response too deep and pro-found to put into words. Pronounced youxuan in Chinese, this term was used by Daoists and Buddhists to refer to profound mystery or truth beyond intellectual understanding.
This kind of wandering was also beautifully described by our own American sages, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. As Muir told the writer Albert W. Palmer,
Do you know the origin of that word "saunter"? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages, people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, "a la sainte terre," to the Holy Land. And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not "hike" through them. (1911)
When we cloud wander or saunter through the forest, our walk takes on a different quality. We are in no hurry to reach our destination. Our journey becomes a sacred pilgrimage. Every step is a step deeper into what Daoists call a blessed land (fudi 福地). As Thoreau put it, "So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn" (1914, 99).
Thoreau also offers an alternate derivation for saunter which mirrors cloud wandering. "Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering" (1914, 4). Every step, then, is a step closer to our true selves as we listen to nature's wordless teachings (buyan zhi jiao 不言之教) and the profound mystery (youxuan) beyond what we can adequately put into words.
This "teaching without words" is what the natural world offers us when are able to listen. It happens when we make space in our lives for nature's wisdom to permeate our consciousness. Many people will be familiar with this idea of a "teaching without words" from the Zen tradition, called Chan in China. It is the form of Buddhism most heavily influenced by Daoism, especially as it expressed by the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi. The Daode jing stresses naturalness and spontaneity and flowing with the natural course of things. The Zhuangzi uses many colorful stories and examples from nature to make its points which are often paradoxical and iconoclastic in nature, much like the Zen literature of later centuries.
This wisdom from the natural world or Dao sometimes resonates within us as a felt sense or an inner knowing which we may have trouble articulating. We "listen" (ting 聽) for the wordless teachings like a taijiquan practitioner "listens" with their whole body-mind. In Forest Therapy, this is called heart sense. We might see something in the woods which resonates with a particular problem or question we carry in our heart-minds. We may find that suddenly that question has been answered by the way a tree sways in the breeze or the way a stream meanders with the lay of the land and flows around boulders and feel a resonance in our bodies.
The way water flows is an example of nonaction. Water has no intention. It just flows the way it flows, following gravity. Its own nature is to flow downwards, but its nature also changes with the conditions it finds itself in. If it is hot, water evaporates. When the conditions are right this water vapor forms into clouds which flow across the sky. Or it may form into dew, or frost, or fall from the clouds as rain, snow, or sleet. Daoists took this mercurial nature of water as an example because of its adaptability. If we can follow water's example and adapt to the changing conditions of life without struggling, without striving, we stand a much better chance of finding harmony and tranquility in our lives. We stand a greater chance of finding serenity in our relationships as well as in our own heart-minds.
Invitations
The basic building blocks of a Forest Bathing walk are invitations, prompts or pointers intended to give the participant or practitioner an entryway into a deeper experience of connection or relationship with nature through engendering a state of curiosity and open receptivity. All invitations are given in the spirit and expectation that the participant may or may not choose to follow them. Even if a practitioner follows them initially, the forest or nature itself may invite him or her into a completely different experience for the allotted time.
One of the axioms of Forest Therapy says, "The Forest is the therapist. The guide opens the doors" (Clifford). We may think of these "doors" in terms of the senses, or the doors of perception as famously formulated by William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite" (Blake, 1790; 1988). In Daoist terms, the doors may be entry points to mystery and wonder, expressed in the first chapter of the Daode jing, "The mystery within the mystery, the gateway (or doorway) to all wonders." In Forest Bathing, the doors are more like thresholds. While individual invitations may serve as doors, the walk as a whole is a liminal journey of crossing over thresholds, both literally and figuratively.
Each invitation experience is followed by a sharing circle. Practically speaking, this allows the guide to reassemble the group, making sure they have not lost anyone. It also allows the participants to share any insights or experiences they wish to express in a safe, non-judgmental environment. The shared experience of participation in the invitations as well the opportunity to be heard in the circle contribute to a sense of community among the participants.
Typically, a guide will pass a "talking piece" of some kind around the circle to designate a speaker. If participants do not feel like sharing, they simply pass it on. During my guide training, this reminded me of the Daoist inspired tradition of "pure conversation" (qingtan 淸談), when ancient Chinese literati, such as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, used a ruyi 如意 scepter as a "lecture baton" (tanbing 談柄). Ruyi literally means "as you wish" and symbolizes that the bearer "has the floor," so to speak. While also symbolizing royal authority they were commonly used by Daoists, Buddhists, and court officials. They can also be seen in Daoist iconography. They were made of precious or semiprecious materials such as jade, crystal, or gold, but most often produced from wood and carved into motifs that evoke nature, such as mushrooms, flowers, trees, or animals.
The Threshold of Connection
A Forest Therapy session in the tradition of the ANFT typically divides into three stages, demarcated by crossing thresholds—physically, symbolically, or both.
First is the Threshold of Connection. Traditionally the beginning of a liminal journey, as outlined by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1960), is called the main threshold or "rite of separation." It happens when we consciously step out of our everyday lives and the world we are accustomed to. We set aside our to-do lists, plans, anxiety about the future, and regrets of the past, and step into the present moment. When practicing Forest Bathing, we view our usual everyday mindset in human civilization as one of separation from the more-than-human-world and so we view this threshold as one of connection rather than separation. It is returning rather than leaving and as such similar to the idea of Daoism as a path of return. As the Daode jing says, "Return is the movement of Dao."
In a sense, we make this transition as soon as we decide to venture forth into nature and rekindle our connection with it, both with nature as a whole and our relationships with the many individual beings we encounter there. But most of us have a hard time turning off the monkey mind and letting go of day-to-day worries.
The Threshold of Connection facilitates this process. It begins with a few invitations aimed at rooting us in our body and in the earth. In the world today, we typically find ourselves living from our heads. We may be so disconnected from the rest of our being that we feel like a disembodied head much of the time, as if our body is just a vehicle that moves our head around from place to place, like a fleshy Uber. When we slow down and pay attention to our breathing and become aware of our bodies again, our experience of life shifts.
If we have become numb to life, this shift can be quite dramatic, and the renewed sense of embodiment can be quite intense. If we have not been completely cut off from a lived sense of embodiment, the shift is not quite as dramatic, but we still enjoy a deeper sense of being and connection to the world around us. Instead of nature seeming like simply an inanimate background or stage upon which we move, we begin to sense life all around us. We may feel the breeze on our skin, then notice that the same breeze rustles the leaves of a nearby tree. Next, we may notice a bird chirping in that tree. As we pay keen attention to our senses, our awareness grows to encompass everything around us and we begin to return to a sense of place, a sense of being embedded in the world.
A liminal space is an in-between space. In Forest Therapy, we usually think of this as between our usual state of mind, that is, the stories that inform our awareness or worldview, and the wild world of nature. On the one side are the stories that go far back in human civilization, of which we may be completely unaware, yet they structure many of our views. On the other side is the wildness of nature. We do not aim to go completely feral on a walk of Forest Bathing, yet we are opening ourselves to hearing new stories, to another way of viewing things than the stories we live by in our daily lives.
Entering the forest in this manner is like undertaking a liminal journey: you get to have one foot in each of these worlds. If you are being guided on a walk, there can be a little more freedom to let yourself go. You can immerse yourself in that "otherworld" and allow your guide to keep tabs on you. If walking by yourself, this is also possible assuming that you know the area well enough not to get lost or, if lost, can reorient yourself and find your way back.
The Threshold of Liminality
The middle part of the journey is the Threshold of Liminality. This is where we explore our connection to the more-than-human-world and cultivate relationships with the many non-human beings with whom we share the earth. While we may find ourselves enjoying an experience of oneness with nature as a whole, it is also important to cultivate relationships with individual beings.
If we only relate to nature as a whole, we can easily fall into the familiar habit of viewing it in an abstract and impersonal way, albeit a more mystical one. This is often our default mode in the day-to-day world of human society, so it is important that we are also open to meeting (and greeting) individual beings in nature. Thus, we build community: by becoming aware of the individuals within that community and entering into reciprocal relationships with them. If we only focus on the whole, we can remain trapped in the familiar experience of what has been called "plant blindness" where we are unable to distinguish different plants from each other.
When we come into relationship with individual beings on a walk, we begin to recognize them and notice what makes them distinct from other species and even unique as individuals. This is not an analytic observation or a checking off boxes for a taxonomic classification, however. Rather, it is a form of direct perception. We may experience a type of nondual awareness through our experience of an individual being in nature. At times like these we may feel like we are in relationship or even identify with the whole of nature through an individual being. But it is also helpful to remind ourselves that the space we occupy on our walk, a particular forest, meadow, or the like, is home to the beings who live there. When we remember this, we can be good guests while visiting.
There are times when we can be overwhelmed with a sense of awe when immersed in nature; this is often what happens when we first let our day-to-day thoughts and worries drop away. When our minds quiet down and the mental chatter subsides, we may feel as though we are seeing the world for the first time or at least in a much deeper, richer way than usual: all our senses are heightened. The world around us has not suddenly become a "blessed land" or magical realm—rather, we are open to it and aware of it in a way like never before. When we experience a sense of awe at the mystery of life, we are experiencing youxuan, a profound sense of awe at the mystery of life that is beyond words.
Another name for Daoism is "gateway to the mystery" or "mystery school" (xuanmen 玄門), implying a sense of threshold or liminality. When we enter the forest in such a way that we open ourselves to the mystery of life and enter into a liminal state, we are entering the gateway to the mystery. We can find this anywhere in nature: it need not be deep in the forest. It could be in our own backyard. As John Muir famously said, "Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life" (Berg, 1978).
Daoism also has a form of meditation that matches the idea of stepping out of our usual frame of mind and our stories about our lives and the world: sitting and forgetting (zuowang 坐忘). It means to sit still and let go of all our usual ideas about life. As we release our usual thought patterns and all the various unexamined ideas that shape our way of being, we may experience new insights. We may have epiphanies, or eureka moments. We may even forget our sense of self as a separate isolated individual, at least while meditating.
The classical passage appears in the Zhuangzi, where Yan Hui reports to his teacher Confucius.
Yan Hui said, "I'm getting there!"
"How so?" Confucius asked.
"I can sit and forget!"
Confucius was startled: "What do you mean, 'sit and forget'?"
"I let my limbs and physical structure fall away, do away with perception and intellect, separate myself from body-form and let go of all knowledge, thus joining Great Pervasion. This is what I mean by 'sit and forget'."(ch. 6; Watson 1968, 90; Graham 1981, 92)
While Daoists may release all awareness of their surroundings in this practice, during Forest Bathing, we do not go quite this far. Still, the process begins in a similar manner. As we immerse ourselves in the forest, we forget the stories we tell ourselves, the concepts, ideas, and knowledge we hold. We open to new stories and the "teachings without words" that bubble up in our consciousness through our relationship to the more-than-human-world. We may also forget ourselves and join the Great Pervasion (datong 大通) of nature or of Dao. We may find the forest acting as a mirror for our minds which only shows us what is genuine, authentic, or true (zhen 真), our perception stripped of fantasy and delusion. Just as meditation or pure awareness is often likened to a clean or clear mirror, Forest Therapy can serve in a similar manner. We might also think of this "mirroring" as a sympathetic resonance (ganying 感應) between the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of our own body-mind.
Those familiar with Zen practice may find that the ideas of dropping off body and mind, forgetting the self, and wordless teachings sound very familiar. The Japanese Zen master Dogen said, "To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things. To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off" (Okumura 2010). When we forget the stories of our disconnected selves and join with the Great Pervasion of nature during Forest Bathing, we can receive the wordless teachings of connection and be verified by the community of the more-than-human-world.
The Threshold of Incorporation
The final phase of a walk of Forest Bathing typically consists of an invitation of "sit spot" followed by "forest tea." Many people will be familiar with the idea of a sit spot. This is a place we go to sit and observe nature. Outside the context of a Forest Therapy walk, this could be a spot we return to frequently in a local nature center or park, or even our own backyard. As I write this I am sitting on my front porch, listening to the hum of crickets and cicadas, punctuated by the squawking of blue jays and crows. Every so often a chipmunk runs past, returning some gathered food to its burrow under the porch.
Often, we think of meditation as a turning inward, and it usually is. But we can also meditate by turning outward. In the context of a walk, we simply find a spot that attracts or calls to us and spend the allotted time there observing nature and see what happens. When we relax in a sit spot, we can easily forget our usual sense of self and become absorbed in the natural world around us. We may be drawn to the sound of the breeze through the leaves of a tree or the call of a bird. We may watch a squirrel as it sits on a fallen log, nibbling a maple seed. When we become absorbed in the world around us, especially in a natural setting, it is easy to forget the self and be verified by all things. When our world becomes small and ego-driven, we often pay attention to the thoughts in our heads as if they were real and feel as though things around us do not actually exist or are not important. Similarly, when we lose ourselves in an activity or in the world, we see life as real, yet it does not often require conscious thought on our part.
On the other hand, when we relax in a sit spot and just observe the natural world, we engage in a timeless activity that our ancestors undertook for as long as our species has existed. In Daoism this is called observation (guan 觀). The character consists of two parts. The left shows a stork or heron, while the right is the word for "to see," "to observe," "to perceive." When we are as still and observant as a heron in the shallows, watching for a fish, we certainly experience a deeper perception of the natural world. We can begin to perceive the patterns (li 理) of Dao manifest in the natural world and the cycles of nature.
Sit spot also marks the winding down of a walk, which then ends with a forest tea. This serves as a final opportunity for participants to share their experiences before heading home. It is the end of the walk and the beginning of the Threshold of Incorporation. This "incorporation" may be literal if the guide has foraged ingredients for the tea from the surrounding area. Guides often look for ingredients such as spruce tips, pine needles, or other herbs or flowers to be used in the tea. In this way we "incorporate" the forest and our experience by literally bringing it into our bodies. Even when this is not possible, the final tea serves as a time to transition back into ordinary consciousness before we drive home and return to our everyday lives. The walk may have ended, but the process of incorporation may continue long after we've left the forest as any insights gained during the walk continue to integrate themselves into our lives.
Two Chinese characters seem appropriate to sum up this process, both pronounced xiang, 相 and 想. The first means mutual: it consists of the words for "tree" 木 on the left and "eye" 目 on the right. The second means "to imagine," "to have a mental vision of something." It has the same elements as the first plus the word for "heart-mind." The mutual seeing we experience in the forest as we both see and are seen by the beings who live there can resonate in our heart-minds, spurring new thoughts and visions about our lives and a deeper sense of community with the more-than-human-world. As Frank Inzan Owen says, "We can go into the trees (木) to look (目) with our heart-minds (心)" (2023)
Although a single walk of Forest Bathing can be profound, to continue cultivating our relationship with the more-than-human-world, it is important to return often so that, like Woodcarver Qing in the Zhuangzi (ch. 19), we can "return and immerse ourselves in the mountains and forests and continue to observe their heavenly nature."
References
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Clifford, M. Amos. 2018. Your Guide to Forest Bathing: Experience the Healing Power of Nature. Newburyport, Mass.: Red Wheel Books.
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Komjathy, Louis. 2013. The Way of Complete Perfection: A Quanzhen Daoist Anthology. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Okumura, Shohaku. 2010 Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen's Shobogenzo. Boston: Wisdom Publications
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Palmer, Albert W. 1911. The Mountain Trail and Its Message. Boston, New York, Chicago: Pilgrim Press
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