Guided walks in the woods at Columbia Springs help cure what ails you

Welcome to the woods. Stand still, close your eyes and open your senses.

Imagine your feet growing roots that burrow deep underground. Lie down on the leaves and notice the chill of the ground, the sweep of the sky. Walk slowly and pause to notice mundane miracles that don’t normally demand attention: the roughness of rocks, the softness of moss, the hidden spiderwebs, the tiny stream that flows from nowhere and disappears again.

In Japan, this practice has been named “Shinrin-yoku,” which translates as “forest bathing.” It’s not just a sweet sensation in search of a reason; driven by soaring rates of anxiety, depression, diabetes, cancer and other ailments associated with living in concrete jungles, science has begun to explore what happens to the human body when it’s removed from all that and plunged into pure greenery.

The positive results are so striking, it might be a little hard to believe them. But Elizabeth Koch believes, deeply. She’s a current trainee with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides, which is based in California but looks to Japan for its inspiration. In Japan, Koch pointed out, there’s a deep cultural connection between people and nature — but there’s also a modern drive to work oneself to a stressed-out death. It’s a real enough problem to have been given its own term too: “Karōshi,” or “overwork death.”

That’s not the problem for Koch, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. In January 2016, she said, her prognosis was months to live. Now, at the end of 2017, she’s feeling great about earning her certification as a forest therapy guide and launching her own private consulting business: Northwest Nature and Forest Therapy. Meanwhile, she volunteers to lead as many as 15 participants at a time on “Forest Bathing” walks through the woods at Columbia Springs Environmental Education Center. (The next outing is set for 10 a.m. Jan. 6; visit www.columbiasprings.org to learn more. The price is $30.)

The Columbian agreed not to distract folks doing the walk with cameras and questions. We enjoyed our own sample outing with Koch and Columbia Springs volunteer manager Erik Horngren in mid-November — just when heavy rain was starting to fall.

Looking up

When that happens, Koch said, what can you do but get into it? The point of these outings is to heighten your senses and fill them with nature, and they’re structured around numerous optional “invitations” to stop and delve deeply. So, when it started teeming a few weeks ago, she said, her invitation to the group was to get into water.

Notice how it pools and trails. Notice how it makes leaves on the ground bob up and down. Take off your glasses and look up. When’s the last time you remembered that rain is more than a nuisance?

Another “invitation” is an introduction to the forest. That’s exactly what it sounds like: an exchange of friendly greetings, maybe even a little chitchat. Pick out a tree that speaks to you. Introduce yourself. See if the tree has anything to say.

“Silly as that sounds,” Koch said, “it’s not silly when you’re doing it.” Some walkers get awfully intimate with their chosen trees, she said — hugging them, sitting upon or even inside of them.

“It’s really up to you. Anything goes,” she said. That’s an important feature of forest bathing, she said. It’s her job to facilitate the connection between human and nature, but each person’s needs and personality — and what each person gains from the experience — is entirely individual.

“It’s meant to get you where you need to be,” she said. “It’s designed to heighten your senses and bring your mind into your body. Then back out again.” To help with that last part, Koch always winds up her outings with a Japanese-style tea ceremony — complete with a pine-needle brew that steeps as you wait. (Pine needles are rich in vitamins A and C, Koch points out.)

The whole slow-moving experience can last as long as three hours. That may seem impossible on Columbia Springs’s short trails, but covering distance is never the point.

“When you go slower, it makes it easier to find things like this,” said Horngren, displaying a ruff-skinned newt in his palm. “I spend so much time here, but doing this makes it new and different.”

“It’s rare to slow down and look at a lot of detail,” Koch said. “You start noticing the littlest of things. You develop that sense of mindfulness.”

Getting dirty

Koch came to nature therapy when her husband read about it in The Columbian. “This is ideal for you,” he said. “It’s totally made for you.”

That’s because Koch grew up on Vermont acreage where she gardened and chopped wood and spent much of her free time happily “mucking about” in the woods. “We got dirty and came home dirty a lot,” she said. The result was a deep love of nature, she said. “It’s my spiritual connection.”

Training in nature therapy meant traveling to California and living in a group camp for a while, she said. Other trainees came from all over the world. There was some review of the scientific literature, but lots more heading out into nature for the intimate experience.

“I enjoyed it tremendously. And it was rigorous,” Koch said. “There’s a very specific and deliberate purpose to each segment of the walk.”

By then, Koch had been living with her cancer diagnosis for years. “I’m always looking for things that promote healing,” she said. “If I can promote a deeper connection with nature for people, and help nurture the planet, and realize some health benefits for myself too — that’s a win-win-win.” Koch’s day job is working with special education students in the Vancouver School District, and she said she is eager to find ways to share the proven benefits of forest bathing to kids with, for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “Some doctors are now even giving prescriptions to kids to spend a certain amount of time to spend in nature,” she said.

Koch has yet to run into anybody who hates this experience — not even city slickers who start out feeling uncomfortable in the wet, muddy woods. Whether or not you dig dirt, she said, the health benefits still accrue.

“Everybody is into this. The positivity I receive from other people is the best part,” she said. “It’s uplifting to hear them share their experiences.”