Wellness & Spas

How 'Forest Bathing' Turned a Skeptic into a Tree-Hugger

Though it became popular seemingly overnight, forest bathing has technically been around since 1982—and some say even longer.
Mohonk Forest Bathing Trail
Courtesy Mohonk Mountain House

Açaí bowls, healing crystals, Yanni's music: I file a wide breadth of things under the banner of ‘New Age’ and exhibit a kind of aggressive, if perhaps undeserved, skepticism toward all of them. The last time I dipped into that category was almost ten years ago, at a yoga studio in a hip Philadelphia neighborhood. The only person of South Asian descent in the room, I looked on in dismay as the instructor led chants in Sanskrit, and a Ravi Shankar Pandora station played softly in a room decorated like an Epcot Center exhibit. I left limbered up, but feeling more than a little disconcerted. I’m also, raised as I was in sprawling hubs of humanity like Delhi and Jakarta, decidedly a city boy: Drop me into the middle of a busy intersection in Bangkok and I’ll sniff out a good meal, but give me a four-person tent to set up on my own and I won’t know which direction is up.

A few weeks ago, I was understandably surprised, then, to find myself kneeling in dirt, transfixed by the sight and sound of a red-and-black striped centipede making its way through an obstacle course of dried-out leaves and twigs. No, I wasn't mid-way through a hallucinogenic trip—I was forest bathing.

Forest bathing became popular seemingly overnight. In a single afternoon, I saw it popping up on a multitude of spa menus around the country, viral videos on my Facebook feed, and wellness articles. The Washington Post called it the U.S.'s "latest fitness trend," comparing it to the way yoga swept east across the country after making landfall in California 30 years ago; the Huffington Post identified it as "a true antidote to stresses that ail us." I had questions: Did it entail finding a creek, a lake, and literally bathing in a forest? (No.) If it really just involves walking through the woods, is it any different from, well, a walk in the woods? (It is.)

Forest bathing, as a term, dates back to 1982, when Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries began promoting what they thought were physiological and psychological benefits of shinrin-yoku, or “taking in the forest atmosphere,” basically being present in the forest through slow movements and focus on the senses. Since then, it’s become common practice at spas and treatment centers—as well as in the daily routine of many—in Japan and, increasingly, around the world.

My forest bathing guide for the day is Nina Smiley, PhD, director of mindfulness programming at Mohonk Mountain House, a Victorian castle resort surrounded by 40,000 acres of woodlands, two hours north of New York City. She speaks in the soothing just-above-a-whisper voice you might expect from someone with that title. In describing what she teaches, she uses "forest bathing" and "mindfulness in nature" interchangeably, emphasizing the need to be in the moment and detached from the worries of your everyday or the notifications waiting on your cell phone. (She asked me to put away any recorders or cell phones during the experience for that very reason.)

For Smiley, forest bathing is all about “taking the time to call out the sensory experiences that are with you in nature and to feel nurtured and supported by the woods, by the trees, by the experience.” The end result, she says, is good for the mind and body. And while mindfulness is a meditation practice millennia-old, doing it surrounded by greenery takes it to another level. “Being mindful in the moment anywhere brings you to your center, to your core,” Smiley says. “And being mindful in nature has all the added benefits of being surrounded by trees, and plants.”

Here’s how forest bathing works: With a guide, or on your own, you walk slowly—very slowly—through the woods, tuning into multiple senses, feeling the shifting terrain under your feet, noticing the smell of your environment or of a single leaf that catches the eye. You are encouraged to gently touch newly sprouted buds that feel like they're coated in glue, and paper-like leaves that are on the verge of death—squeeze too hard, and they crumble into dust—to zero in on that difference, taking the time to see the details of a forest from multiple angles. It is, in a way, mobile meditation: It’s not strenuous like a hike or casual like a nature walk. It’s exercise for the mind, versus the limbs, and the end-result should be a lower heart rate, a lingering sense of awe at the natural world, and a general feeling of tranquility—all things I felt after two hours walking the trails with Smiley.

There are no rules set in stone. The whole idea is to disconnect from the confining structures of our daily life. When Smiley wanted to point something out during the session, it was never an order. Rather, she would “invite” me to look up and notice the way the light was bouncing through the canopy, or she’d “encourage” me to close my eyes for a few minutes, just to be able to notice the difference when I opened them again. I had the feeling that if I had done something that within the confines of daily, urban life would be labelled strange—beyond, of course, closing my eyes and touching rocks, or smelling sticks, which I did plenty of—there would have been no judgement.

Smiley never corrected me, either, even when I admitted I was doing something wrong. Occasionally, even as I tried to focus every ounce of my being on the present and the stimulation in front of me, my mind would drift. I would think, for example, of this very story—how I was going to write about it, the questions I’d ask Smiley once the forest bathing was over. When I told her this, in the middle of the experience, she pointed out that, at least then, in those moments of drifting, I’d be able to recognize the difference between my two mental states—worry and presence. She was right; I did.

But forest bathing is not just about a relaxing of the mind. A study in 2010 by researchers at Tokyo’s Nippon Medical School, for example, took sample groups to 24 different forests across the country and found, when comparing biodata with city-dwelling populations, that those that had participated in forest bathing had lower concentrations of the "stress hormone" cortisol, lower blood pressure, and lower heart rates. Another study, this one from 2009 in South Korea, looked at three groups of people suffering from depression and put them through therapy sessions in three different environments—a forest, a hospital, and, as a control group, regular outpatient therapy. After four weeks of treatment, the forest group saw a 61 percent remission rate—much higher than those at the hospital (21 percent) or in the control group (5 percent).

Of course, some of this could still be purely psychological—the calmness you feel in a forest setting triggers a physiological response you’re not going to get waiting on a crowded, muggy subway platform for an elusive train. But other studies, like this one from 2009, actually noticed a physical interaction occurring between humans and the trees around them. Specifically, it found that after a forest bathing trip, subjects had significantly higher numbers of so-called natural killer (NK) cells, a type of lymphocyte that boosts the immune system’s defenses against viruses and cancers. That boost lasted more than seven days after the trip. Further studies from the same research team suggested that the immune boost was, at least in part, a result of exposure to phytoncides, a substance emitted by plants and trees.

Lacking a system of biometric scanners attached to my skull, I had no way of knowing what was going on with my cortisol levels, brain function, or NK cell count when I eased out of the forest bathing tour, but I can attest to feeling better. When I sat down to take notes on the experience, I felt a sense of clarity and my usually distracted and cloudy memory was, for a few glorious hours at least, razor-sharp. I recalled details of what I had experienced, the things I had seen and touched. I wasn’t sleepy, but I felt calm. I sat up straight, but didn’t tense up. Even now, weeks later, I’m able to transport myself back to a singular moment on that trail when, letting a handful of dried pine needles fall from my hand and get picked up by a breeze, I felt a sense of childlike awe at the diversity and beauty of the natural world that I have rarely experienced. The ramifications of what this could mean in the context of future travels—how I could take more out of an experience, remember it more vividly simply by zoning in to the present—are numerous.

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The Shamans and Wellness Gurus People Are Traveling For

Mileece, who goes by one name, is an experiential artist who creates immersive environments that recall a pre-industrialization Eden, and for 20 years has used the bioelectrical data emitted by plants to make music. Her practice, in short, is inextricably linked to the tenets of forest bathing. In a quasi-forest bathing de-brief I had with her following my own experience, she also echoed much of the skepticism over the New Age-y veneer coating the practice. To her, forest bathing is a marketing campaign of sorts, a manifestation of a human tendency to need to put labels on things in order to give them value. That is not necessarily a bad thing, if it means more people experiencing nature.

Some, like Mileece, believe that "forest bathing" as a 30-year-old concept is actually just a packaging of a practice as old as humans. She sees our move towards industrialization, our obsession with technology—relatively recent trends—as unnatural buffers we’ve built between us and the natural world. “We used to sit in a forest—that’s what people did,” she says. “It all harks back to pre-industrial life, but now we have to label it and give it terminology.” Peer-reviewed journal articles observing the health benefits of forest bathing add another layer of legitimacy—suddenly, going out into the forest and being present is encouraged, because it’s good for us.

Mileece's theory is that forest bathing is about communicating in a way the forest understands—namely, in the present. “The language that we speak with the planet is the language of now. It’s not a language of thoughts from the past or the future. It’s not thought-based. It’s presence-based,” she says. With forest bathing, you notice a difference in the way your mind is functioning (or, rather, not functioning) “because you are able to communicate, at least receptively, the livingness of this earth.”

It’s not exactly scientific, but at least anecdotally, this was a revelation: In Mohonk, the moments where I drifted out of the present, when I thought about the bus I had to catch back to New York City hours into the future or whether I had remembered to lock my front door hours in the past, were markedly different sensations. I felt suddenly, almost violently, removed from the environment around me. As Mileece says, if you want empirical proof of our reliance on plants, put your hand over your mouth and nose, stop breathing, and see how you fare without the oxygen given off by the trees around you. Call it what you want—forest bathing, shinrin-yoku, mindfulness in nature—but this kind of interaction with nature allows us to reconnect with a world that gives us life, one we emerged from hundreds of thousands of years ago and, eventually, exploited to build the cities we now call home. The feeling I got forest bathing, and in the short stints of it I've tried out since, may have fallen short of an epiphany on the role plants play in our very existence, but it did renew an appreciation for its beauty and fragility—even just in watching a pine needle fall, a centipede crawl, or light bounce between the leaves.

That’s all to say, think twice about slipping into judgments if you see me, eyes closed, heart rate lowered, touching the bark on a tree in Central Park. I invite you to join me.