This was the playful reaction from a Japanese friend during my recent visit to Japan—the birthplace of shinrin-yoku (forest bathing). It highlighted a beautiful discovery – that in everyday Japanese, the term shinrin-yoku has evolved since the 1980s when it was coined. Beyond referring to a specific set of practices, it now expresses something that we don’t a word for in English: simply hanging out in nature, opening oneself to its presence, as an everyday thing.
“It’s sort of like when you say ‘going for a walk,'” my friend explained, “except you don’t even need to be walking. In English, you’re always doing something in nature – like walking, picnicking or meditating. But for us, shinrin-yoku is just what everyone does on weekends. It’s funny to think you can train people in that.”
Yet beneath this casual simplicity lies a profound cultural intentionality—a fundamental principle permeating Japanese life. You cross a threshold and remove your shoes; unlacing them becomes a mindful transition into a new space. Objects seem to glow with intention, noticeable in the careful two-handed offering of a shopping bag, the thoughtful presentation of food, or even the deliberate way tea towels are hung up in the kitchen. Looking down the carriage on Tokyo’s crowded subway, there is not a garish colour in sight; the passengers’ muted clothing palettes seem to reflect a visual calmness chosen intentionally. Even fear has its own intentional space, as my daughter and I discovered in Kyoto’s haunted doll horror house – not an experience we will quickly forget!
Interestingly, despite its Japanese origins and extensive scientific validation, I also discovered that formal shinrin-yoku sessions in Japan remain minimally integrated into Japan’s national healthcare system. Structured sessions at certified Forest Therapy Bases usually come at a cost, and council-subsidised sessions, while they exist, aren’t widespread. Despite over 40 years of evidence, you can’t go to your doctor in Japan and be prescribed Forest Bathing as a mainstream health intervention that you can claim on National Health Insurance.
This insight surprised and intrigued me, especially as we work to integrate nature-based practices into the NHS here in Britain. It highlighted the distinction between institutional support for therapeutic practices and embedding intentional nature connection into everyday life as a cultural habit.
Perhaps, inspired by Japan, our goal in the UK might extend beyond structured forest bathing sessions. Could we aim to nurture a broader cultural intentionality toward simply being in nature—absorbing its presence in ways beyond walking, talking, or meditating—and perhaps find a new everyday word that captures the essence of that connection, just as the term shinrin-yoku has now become in Japanese?
The Sun has reached its’ zenith, and all over Europe people are lighting ceremonial fires to celebrate this mid-Summer festival of light, and the male fire element. We have also been holding fire circles to celebrate this time, possibly the only remnant of pagan times still part of our consciousness. It may seem strange, counter-intuitive or an act of denial of climate change to be lighting a fire at this time, but fire is not so much the problem, it’s the humans using fire that is causing the imbalance.
I have been reflecting on the myth of Prometheus, the child of the marriage of Gaia the earth element and Uranus the sky. Of course it makes sense to see this Demi-god now as representing lightning, and our early ancestors discovering fire from Prometheus’ gift. Prometheus (meaning ‘forethought’) had a soft spot for the lowly humans living in the cold and dark and gave them the gift of fire (stolen from Zeus) which enabled the creation of civilization as we know it. Now the planet burns, and we rain down fire on innocent civilians.
Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta reminds us that we have largely lost touch with the fire in our bellies, relying as we do on our thinking brains – overthinking everything and failing to connect with the feeling brain of the gut – ‘The Savage Self’ as I call it, the part of us that unites heaven and earth, the part that literally processes the produce of the earth, the same earth that we have fought over for eons. Tyson says we have ceased to be a part of those ecological, symbiotic feedback loop systems that are sustainable and connect us to Heaven and Earth, lightning and fire, head brain and gut brain working together.
It is our gut that “governs terrestrial relations and is in constant communication with land and all our human and nonhuman kin.”
In our small fire circles and on the Water and Fire retreat this weekend, we will welcome fire as our ally, to cleanse, transform and illuminate our lives, we will honour the eternal Spirit of Fire – the symbol of life and passion, and we will take great care to consciously acknowledge the dual nature of fire.
In Japan both the creative and destructive sides of fire are reflected in their mythologies. Kagu-tsuchi is the Shinto god of fire known as ‘he who starts fires’. He was born from 2 creator gods and his heat was so strong he burned his mother as he was born. Horrified his father cut him up and scattered him across Japan becoming the 8 sites of Japanese volcanoes.
Happy Beltane Everyone! Now I’ve got your attention-this short epistle is all about sex, and animism and inter-loving…
The lush growth and energy of Spring is here in abundance. Out in the Dartmoor Atlantic rainforests the infamous nocturnal Ash-Black slugs (largest land slug in the world) are mating, their penises entwined in a hanging double helix.
Plants too, are joining in the mating game with Bluebells, Wild Garlic and Alexanders bursting forth with colour and delight. Nowhere is the coming together of the sexes more exemplified than the Cuckoo pint, or Wild Arum Arum maculatum. This wonderful (and poisonous) plant with around 200 country names like Lords and Ladies and Jack-in-the-Pulpit emerges each Spring, its pointed tip thrusting up through the soil – a verdant green cone that opens to reveal a hood or sheath called a Spathe and a central purple-brown spike called a Spadix. They resemble the vulva and the penis in union together, but they serve an even more elaborate purpose.
The Spadix heats up by as much as 15 deg. and starts to emit a pungent fecal aroma that attracts the Owl midge flies who then become ensnared by the Spathe in fine hairs at the base of the Spadix where they stay overnight pollinating the female flowers before they are released in the morning to visit another Arum. Nature is just so ingenious, so absurdly miraculous, audacious, and well, real!
And to think we are part of that crazy continuum too. I feel my body as one with that profound animistic relationship with the living world, with plants, insects, birds, sunshine, fungi, rocks and sky. I am inter-being, I am family; I am reminded that I am also my ancestors, and I am the forest, primordial crucible of creation, of love personified in flesh. I am conjoined with all the thronging, humming, rising chorus of fecundity, growth and change. The Cycles of Life are relational, we are relational beings. Surely that is what a Beltane celebration is – the joy of new life after the death of the old. The tortured prophet died and was reborn on the 3rd day of Ostara; the flowing of Oestrogen, fertility and renewal that follows, the pagan rituals associated with concupiscence. The path to access this unstoppable force of regeneration is through the instincts and intuition, softening into the heart, into trust and surrender, into the body – into Mary Oliver’s “soft animal” alert like a deer, maybe a deer preparing to give birth, timing the event with the new lush growth of grass and Bramble.
So Sisters and Brothers get out in the forest and enjoy the sex and rebirth happening all around you.
I had originally been thinking about death as a theme for this piece, but I then went on to consider forest bathing in relation to other topics like childhood, trauma, AI, the ‘pathologisation’ of our differences and the control mechanisms of a culture that seeks to subdue us and prevent our true connection to Nature from being actualised, but in the end I circled back round to death – and life, and an image of intertwined black and white circles and heads came to me.
It feels as though the Spring Equinox (equal days, equal nights) is that tugging point or pivot between two evenly balanced forces with the weight of momentum towards the light thanks to Blackbird and Lesser Celandine, aided and abetted by Primrose and Frogspawn. It can feel as if the scales have finally tipped towards the welcome return of the light, and warmth.
We may sense that we have moved beyond the clutches of death, or maybe by being out in Nature every week we have observed the diurnal cycles and simply moved with what is, we may have witnessed the colossal revolutions of celestial mechanics within the humble shadows on the unclothed soil, we may have felt deep inside our animal instincts the fire of life growing, echoing out into sidereal time and space. Sidereal time is how astronomers measure our position relative to the stars, which is different from Solar time – our position relative to the sun. Celestial or sidereal time and solar time come into alignment on the Vernal (Spring) Equinox. This is the exact point (March 20th 9.02) when the sun appears to leave the Southern Hemisphere, cross the celestial equator and be perpendicular to the Earth in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun rises on the horizon in the East and sets 12hrs later in the West. For this reason, the Spring Equinox has been of great importance for many cultures and calendars right across the globe.
This fulcrum or balance point can be wrestled back in favour of winter at any point we become complacent and bring out the shorts and sandals; At the start of the astrological year (Aries) we have both the death of the previous year and the life of the new year in either hand. I realized whilst writing this that my own birthday falls close to the equinox and is framed on either side by the anniversaries of the deaths of my younger brother in February, and my mother in April.
Life comes and goes, new life is born, new souls enter as others depart, the wheel keeps turning, we gaze up at the same stars our ancestors used to plot the movement of time and the celestial spheres, we are a small but unique part of this vast living, breathing dynamic universe, making our unique contribution to the whole, circles within circles, yin within yang, the dark and light forever joined as one. Nature’s wisdom and abundance crucially offers us guidance, structure, pathways to understand the value of life and death cycles free from the cultural biases that manipulate or disfigure our perceptions. New life in Spring is the manifestation of pure joy and it seeps into our animate, awakening hearts, but it emanates from the composting rich humus of past lives and events. Happy Equinox – enjoy the Spring.
Happy Imbolc everyone! Also known as Brigid’s day, St Bridget’s day and Candlemas.
This is the first festival of the calendar year and the second of the Celtic wheel of the Year. It’s one of my favourite festivals of the Celtic year and it is traditionally celebrated as a feast of blessing the lactation of ewes, the return of the light (hence candles) and the flowing of springs and wells, though I associate it mostly with the mating of frogs! In other words, it is time to start thinking about the year ahead and asking for help to allow the fluid juices of growth and abundance to flow copiously. It is a time to propitiate the goddesses of old, the once and future Divine Queen. It is these sincere prayers, always both practical and spiritual (the theme of our new course – see below) that re-binds us to the wheel of life; of the land, the water, earth, weather, and the vagaries of life – the plants and animals that we depend upon are recognised in conscious supplication. We bow our heads, and anoint ourselves with earth’s sacred living waters.
Yet how many of us can say that our lives depend directly on springs, wells and indeed the breast milk of ewes. That unfortunate detachment from what sustains us leads to a forgetting of these powerful rituals, rituals embedded not only in the fabric and heartbeat of the land we inhabit, but also deep in our own hearts, in our bones – quite literally. The reciprocity of prayer and sacrifice acknowledges the interdependence of all beings – including us, and we remember Nature wants us too.
Up here in the ancient ‘pueblos blancos’ of the Alpujarras mountains, a region where the moors took irrigation seriously we find many water channels (Acequias), wells and sacred springs, they are marked on maps, they even have roadside signs to them, As I sit writing outside, I can hear the nearby spring gushing down the hillside. Our house is right next to the ‘Fuente alegre’ which translates as the joyful spring. Higher up the mountain we visited a very famous healing spring that was renowned throughout Andalusia – the ‘Fuente Cuesta Viñas’, a remarkable place where 4 springs all converge, each one with different healing properties. The water emerges from the ground almost warm, and in 3 of the springs the water oxidises on contact with the air, indicating its’ extremely high iron content, the grotto is rust red. The 4th spring emerges carbonated, it’s water fizzing with life and tastes of a cocktail of replenishing minerals that alkalinise the body, and flush out toxins. Unfortunately, like much of rural Spain, the area has become depopulated of younger generations, and the Spring has fallen into neglect and disrepair, the toilets and bar area broken and vandalized, litter and graffiti on the walls. It was so sad to see such a beautiful gift of the earth abandoned in this way, and we reflected that many people just aren’t that interested anymore, they care less about water from the ground, when they can buy it in bottles, and large multi-nationals like Coca-cola and Danone are gradually buying up the Spanish springs and draining the water table. Let’s hope that this spring stays open and free to everyone to discover its’ healing waters in the future.
Bless all the sacred springs and wells of the world and the joy and sustenance they bring us.
January saw us hitting the local beach here at Wonwell in the sunshine and cooking up a lovely feast with friends to welcome in the New Year.
February 1st we celebrated Imbolc at our local Ashburton healing Well and later at the Chalice Well gardens in Glastonbury. A very magical time in a special place.
March saw us taking a much-needed break and catching a dose of sun in Lanzarote, an Island singularly lacking in trees! But stunning volcanic landscapes.
April and Spring is here, everything is greening up in those translucent verdant glowing colours. Ferns uncurl and forest bathing courses start again. Late April sees Stefan attending the Remembering Earth Time Spiritual Ecology retreat at Sharpham House in Devon.
May and we are now full ensemble, full throated choir of joy. We attended the amazing Bhakti festival in Dorset and also the Nature and Neurons conference on The Gower in Wales.
In June Cow Parsley and Hogweed are doing their thing, and we started on a new collaboration with the amazing people at the Together drug and alcohol project. This was an offshoot of the Woods 4 Wellness programme, and we had some great sessions which we hope to repeat in 2025.
Also In June thanks to Primrose’s hard work we also successfully became a CIC so we could get funding to run our outreach projects.
In July Stefan finally launched his book Wild Life, and we started running the new Plymouth University Clinical Psychology Ecotherapy sessions at Mt Edgecombe, a short ferry ride from Plymouth.
August – we were busy with courses but found time to attend the glorious Medicine Festival and meet up with lots of friends and with the help of Tanya, Emma T. and Elena we ran an early morning Forest Bathing walk with 43 people in the beautiful Wasing estate.
We also started on another new collaboration with The Pelican Project in Exeter for young adults with autism and other complex needs, This project is called ‘Pelicans in the Wild’, and ably assisted by Sonya and Jane and other guest teachers we have had such a blast out in Nature.
September and we headed up to the Forest of Dean for ‘Deeper into the Woods’ our Advanced Diploma training. This was a new venue for us, and I can honestly say it was one of the best weeks of my life, with an incredible staff team of Amanda, Pina and Andrew who held the space so beautifully, and a wonderful group of dedicated students who endured some wild weather, a memorable night walk, and evenings round the fire.
In October we ran our last 2 courses of the year, popped over to Spain and in the mountains of Catalonia helped with the Almond and Walnut harvest and took part in a beautiful ritual to honour the Madonna in the local church. We also had our official Wild Life book launch at Eastgate Bookshop in Totnes with the venerable Harry Hilser asking the questions.
November was memorable for some severe flooding here and our last Pelicans session of the year with the obligatory sausages, hot chocolate and marshmallows round the fire.
December. We are winding down now, heading into the darkness and sowing seeds for next years courses and projects.
Primrose has gone on maternity leave and we welcome Natalia who has settled in amazingly well, and started to take over the office role alongside her fund raising activities. We have also now been joined by the equally wonderful Jade Kellett who is doing some of our Social Media work.
I would like to thank you all for such a fabulous year in the woods and as we enter our 8th year of trading I look back on all our achievements and I think the growth of our forest bathing community means the most. Without you we are one hand clapping, and it is with the amazing diversity of students, mentors, teachers and practitioners that we grow stronger, wiser and lead this new wave of an exciting, dynamic discipline with our courage, grace, humour and humility and above all our gratitude for the bounty of Nature.
I invite you all to join me on the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21st) to give thanks for another year of life, and pause to remember those who have passed and those yet to come and what sort of planet they may inherit from us.
A special massive thank you to Primrose Matheson for her incredible hard work, diligence and patience over this last year and we all wish her well with the birth of her next child any moment now. Blessings!
Finally a plug: Stefan’s book is a bloody expensive stocking filler but it will keep you amused, engrossed, perplexed and engaged over the long winter months by the fire, so please check it out at any reputable bookseller priced £24.99 and published by Singing Dragon.
