Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. ~ Lao Tzu

Take a Bath in Nature

I’ve spent a lot of time in nature, a lot of time on hiking trails, sometimes weeks, sometimes months and bathing is always an issue. Most of the time, you bathe when you go into towns to resupply and sleep in a bed for a night. Of course, sometimes you do bathe on the trail. And while you want this to be the way it happens in every western film, rarely have you hung your clothes on some branches and suddenly notice the attractive woman bathing as well. You know the scene, she asks you to turn away as she gets out and then steals your clothes and runs away. It of course always turns into a meet cute for the big macho cowboy, lose this image of bathing on the trail. Usually it’s a wash rag and a stream, some soap, not much of a bath and even less privacy. Once in the Himalayas it was really fancy, a metal bowl of hot water, standing in the November sun at 15,000 feet, stripped down to my underwear and using a wash cloth and the bowl. Honestly, it was maybe the greatest bath I’ve ever had.

But tonight I’m not talking about bathing in the traditional sense, what I’m talking about tonight is bathing in nature, you most often hear it referred to as forest bathing. Shinrin-yoku (Japanese: 森林浴, 森林 (shinrin, “forest”) + 浴 (yoku, “bath, bathing.^[1]“)), also known as forest bathing, is a practice or process of therapeutic relaxation where one spends time in a forest or natural atmosphere, focusing on sensory engagement to connect with nature. This practice likely originated in Japan but has also become popular in Finland, South Korea, and most recently in America.

The simplest way to explain this is just taking time to disconnect from life and be in nature. There is no mystery as to why this is as beneficial as it is for your health. It’s just a great idea to disconnect for ten or fifteen minutes and be in nature. We know that things like bird songs can help calm our nervous system and make us less stressed and anxious. As someone with a background in evolutionary biology this makes perfect sense to me. At the core of our lizard brains, for all of those hundreds of thousands of years that humans were wondering around in nature, birds singing meant safety. If you’ve ever been sitting in the forest and suddenly the forest goes quiet, you’ll instantly feel nervous. Animals go quiet in the presence of things that might eat them and all those centuries ago, those things might eat us as well. So when the birds were happily singing, we would, and still do, feel safe.

So my friends, in these anxious times, find some way to do small bits of nature. You just need to get far enough off of the concrete to get away from traffic and human sounds. You don’t need absolute natural quiet. Natural quiet is a term used to describe being far enough out in nature that you can hear no human sounds, this is not an easy thing to achieve. But you don’t need that, you just need it quiet enough so the sound of nature is the primary sound and human noise is limited and in the background. Spend ten or fifteen minutes walking or sitting in a place like this is enough to make you feel better. And you can even find this in parks in cities sometimes. It’s important to have your phone off, and also to really engage your senses. Take time to feel some leaves, (make sure you know what poison ivy looks like), crumple some pine needles in your hand, roll them around and breathe in the aroma. Close your eyes and just listen for a bit. Disconnecting from life, and using all of your senses to experience nature will help you have a happier day my friends.

I’ll end this tonight with two quick memories of forest bathing and one moment of what I call mountain bathing and even desert bathing. I think you can do this type of thing in any type of environment, not just forests. The desert absolutely works, and you can do this sitting on the shore of the ocean, a river or a lake.

There was a day on the Appalachian Trail (AT) when it had turned into a really hot afternoon, I think I was in Virginia and I just needed a break and it absolutely turned into a forest bathing experience. I found a stream, a really lovely rock to sit on and I pulled off my shoes and soaked my feet in the cool stream. The sun was breaking in around through the trees, the trickling of the stream was really soothing. A little breeze blew through and I could smell different plant smells and I spent about fifteen minutes sitting there watching the biggest damn bullfrog I’ve ever seen, hop, swim and crawl around in the stream. Honestly, it felt like I was in the Lord of the Rings watching Gollum kick around in the river.

One of my absolute favorite moments on the AT was when we were heading into a trail town in North Carolina. We were flying along and I was hiking with another hiker and we came over a little ridge and dropped into a little bowl in the forest and I just stopped. My friend asked if I was alright, I said yes, I’m just gonna stay here awhile and he went on. This little bowl of forest was amazing and I sat down off the trail on a log and just took it in for about twenty minutes. It was a green, beautiful forest and everywhere there were little white and pink flowers in bloom. It was a fairly windless day and because of that, the aroma of the flowers was just settled into this depression. This is forest bathing, disconnected from the world and sitting in a beautiful forest, listening to the birds and having the most amazing floral smells wafting around you, it was spectacular.

I’ve had a lot of great desert bathing experiences but most recently I have been camping in Valley of the Fire State Park over the Winter Holidays each year. I found a spot my first time there that I visit every time. It’s about a mile hike off the road, not really on a trail, where there’s a rock finger sliding up out of the ground. At the base there is the most amazing purple rock and it leads up to wind blasted sandstone with various colored lines running through it. Sitting on the back side, in the shade near sunset you can’t hear the cars and the desert opens up in front of you in every direction and in every imaginable rock color, really spectacular.

My most amazing nature bathing experience happened in the Himalayas at what I have since that day referred to my favorite place on Earth. I spent thirty days hiking in the high passes of the Himalayas. We went through three valleys during the month and the second valley we went into was the Gokyo Valley. This valley is special because as you climb up to almost 17,000 feet in this valley you pass the seven sacred lakes of the valley. These lakes are revered and not to be entered. During the hike there was a peak, an ice saddle called Kangtega, and for some reason I was really drawn to it. On our hike up the Gokyo valley a couple miles short of the tea house we’d be stopping at for the night, there was a spot above the second sacred lake. After getting to the tea house, I hiked back down and spent three hours sitting on a large rock above the lake with Kangtega in the distance and just was, for hours, it was my favorite moment in the Himalayas.

I think my blood pressure dropped ten points just writing this post, the links above almost all lead to previous travel blogs I’ve written, be well and have a happy day my friends. ~ Rev Kane