of embodied healing
The physical health benefits of guided forest bathing walks include:
Accelerated recovery from illness
Reduced stress
Boosted immune system
An overall feeling of wellness
Lower heart rate and blood pressure
Improved mood and sleep
Learn more about the scienceThe forest is the therapist; the guide opens the doors.
Clifford May
of reciprocal relationship with nature
As an ANFT-trained forest therapy guide, my role is to facilitate walks (both in-person and online) to help you slow down and reconnect with yourself and the land through a series of “invitations” that encourage opening the physical and heart senses.
Gaia Forest Bathing walks are not hikes nor a simple wander in the woods. These walks are designed to help us become present, open the senses, and foster reciprocal relationships between people and the more-than-human world.
The full experience is 3 hours long; participants report that they are surprised by how quickly the time passes. These nature immersion walks are suitable for all fitness levels, but if you have mobility challenges please let us know so we can make any needed accommodations.
I am certified in Wilderness First Aid to help keep everyone safe on our in-person walks and have successfully completed the 6-month training course to be an ANFT Forest Therapy guide.
Having a trained guide for a forest therapy walk enables you to fully relax and drop in. My role is to hold a safe and sacred space on these walks so that you can be deeply present and receive the gifts that Gaia holds for you in any given time and place.
Who knows? Maybe you will discover that you have gifts to offer in return.
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
of tending and mending our relationship with Gaia
A spiritual guide by profession, I have long sought an earth-centered practice that is grounded, un-fussy, and appropriate for persons of all religious persuasions and of no religious tradition, alike.
Tending our relationship with Gaia, the living earth, is an ancient human preoccupation as reflected in the ritual calendars of the world religions and the oral traditions of indigenous peoples across the globe.
With the climate crisis upon us, relating well to the more-than-human world has taken on a new spiritual and practical urgency, and yet the old earth-honoring ways practiced by our ancestors are lost to most of us in the West.
In this time of profound ecological need and loss, forest therapy offers a container for tending and mending our relationship with the living earth.
Instead of a university built of bricks and books, forest therapy walks invite us on a step-by-step journey of reuniting with our extended kinship network of wind, oak, stone, swallow, and river through the pleasures of direct engagement, awakened senses, and embodied knowing.
By returning to our family in the forest, by lavishing precious gifts of time and attention upon our more-than-human elders, we find that we are richly rewarded. Perhaps our troubles quiet, or our grief is contained, or we see ourselves reflected in the beings around us. There is no right way or wrong way of doing a forest therapy walk. In this practice, no single outcome is more important than another.
But when we show up, when we pay attention, when we seek to return some measure of beauty back to Grandmother Gaia who supports, feeds, and clothes us, we have taken the first steps on our collective journey toward reweaving the world in love.
“In an indigenous perspective we see ourselves as an offering, just as everything we see is a gift to us. It is not healing or constructive to see ourselves as just the recipient of beauty. We must also be a gift to that beauty.”
Malidoma Somé