Tag: forestbathing

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Counselling and forest bathing: An update

I woke to snow this morning. A bright day with moisture droplets sparkling on the lime trees opposite my house. A cold day with the thermometer down to 14C in my living room. And I have turned to my to-do list, as is appropriate for that January feeling of new beginnings, putting things into place while I wait for a hint of spring in the air. Today that meant a bit of light painting as I prepare to sell this house and then the search for a suitable room in which to meet therapy clients.

That’s the big news. I completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychotherapeutic Counselling at Staffordshire University and I’ve gone on to begin my Masters research with them. I primarily want to work with clients outdoors, bringing all the healing of nature into the work. But even I understand that torrential rain or gale-force winds may not be conducive to therapeutic conversations. So I’m looking for a room to hire for when we’d rather have a comfy seat and a roof.

I didn’t quite know what would happen to my outdoor work – as a forest school leader or as a forest bathing guide – when I began the counselling course. I knew something might have to give but tried to keep it all up to begin with. But I wasn’t really prepared for the overwhelming emotional toll of the course, of the depths of personal reflection and exploration involved. (I’ve since realised I’m probably a highly sensitive person, which explains why I felt that so strongly. See Elaine Aron’s website and books for more!) Forest school work naturally dried up and although I could have gone looking for new sources of work, I let it go. I miss working with children in the woods and I’d love to have the occasional opportunity to do so again. I don’t miss working within school bureaucracies or having a car full of musty tarps and firewood so much.

Forest bathing

My initial model of offering forest bathing sessions or my ‘Forest School for Grown-Ups’ sessions was difficult to manage. They are of necessity small group activities. But that means I often found myself as the dates approached worrying if I would have enough participants. I hated the couple of occasions when I had to let down those who had booked because there just wouldn’t be a big enough group to make it work. So for now I’ve switched this to a bespoke service people can commission me to provide. I can offer individual forest bathing, or tailored sessions for small groups – friends, families, social groups, businesses looking to help staff with self-care and nature’s route to creative thinking. More info here.

Counselling

And in my new role as a counsellor I am offering people the chance to take their therapy outside and benefit from all that nature can offer us. This is a fairly new practice for counsellors that is really starting to become more popular – but it’s also an ancient practice in which we recognise that healing comes only in connection with the bigger world we are part of. For anyone who knows about counselling modalities, I’m person-centred with a dash of integrative. The focus is on providing a nurturing space in which you are fully heard and fully accepted as you are, without judgment. There’s more about my practice and the facility to book an initial inquiry call at Counselling Directory.

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Forest Bathing by Stealth

Forest bathing is really a simple idea – slow down, use all your senses to take in the natural environment, sit a while. But sometimes the biggest barrier to doing those things is that we feel we’ll look, frankly, a bit weird. There are those of us who don’t give a monkey’s what other people think, and oh how I aspire to be like that. But many of us can’t quite shake off that lurking self-consciousness. There is strength in numbers so joining a group event can help, but that’s not an option at the moment. So how can you get in some quality forest bathing time without people staring? By using stealth tactics to hide in plain sight…

1. Viewpoints: We expect people to stop to admire a big view. Head for high points, places where there might be a bench, a rocky outcrop, a ledge to sit on. In my local area, I’m thinking the benches at the top of Runcorn Hill or the viewpoint on Frodsham Hill, the rocky bits at Stenhills, the bird hides at Wigg Island. Take the chance to take in the expansive view, but while you’re there look close up at what’s around you. On the rocks at Stenhills today I found a luxuriant patch of moss dotted with sparkling water droplets, the in-your-face yellow of gorse flowers and the rustling dry leaves of a young oak tree.

2. Photography: A phone camera will do. Once it looks like you’re taking a picture, people expect you to stop and take time to compose the perfect shot. The trick is not to spend all your time viewing nature’s beauty through the lens. Use it to distract other people while you take things in more directly – the colours, shapes and textures you’re surrounded by. You could go a step further and take a sketch pad – the ultimate excuse to stop and observe in detail.

3. A brew or a snack: It seems normal when we’re out for a ‘proper’ walk in a beauty spot to take a drink and something to eat, to find a bench, a rock or a tree trunk to sit on and rest for a while. And I can see no reason why you can’t do this in your local area too (lockdown rules excepted – check the latest on picnics!). A hot drink, in particular, guarantees you some time to sit and relax while you wait for it to cool enough. You could always go hardcore and take a flask of hot water to make your own fresh nettle tea – expect questions from passers-by, but if, like me, you’re the only adult in your house, it can be nice to have a face-to-face conversation with someone. Anyone…

4. Litter picking: This is one I’m determined to do more of and I believe that if I contact my local council they will supply a litter picker and bags. If you’re litter picking, you will be slowing down and looking around you – just make sure you take time to take in the nice stuff as well as the rubbish. And doing your good turn for your community is on the list of mental health wins. Expect more conversations with passing strangers, but hopefully positive ones.

5. Take a child: Ok, not just any old child; you could get in trouble. At the moment, it will have to be your own if you can muster one up. The smaller the better. Small ones have no idea that a walk is about getting somewhere and will meander and get distracted by every bug and pine cone. And you can do the same, because everyone will understand that it’s the kid’s doing. Larger ones can become problematic but still provide a helpful foil. My son has just reminded me of when I lay down in a woody area at the National Trust’s Dunham Massey to look up at the sky through the autumnal leaves, to his utter mortification. He won’t be pleased to hear this, but I probably wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been there.

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Those special trees of our youth

On a foraging course this autumn, we visited a 550-year-old sweet chestnut. It’s an astonishing tree, twisted and spreading wide like something straight out of a fairytale. Knobbly enough to be easy to climb – and rewarding the intrepid with a good view of a beefsteak fungus, though this one was a bit small to harvest for our group cook-up. 

The chestnut’s trunk was vast. I reckon it would have taken at least half a dozen people reaching round to encircle it. Many of its branches had dead limbs and splits riven with grooves and swirls as if they had been sandblasted, but its leaf cover was still that special fresh green that only the sweet chestnut maintains all summer long and its nut yield was bountiful though they were the small nuts of a northerly climate beyond its natural range.

It got me thinking of a book I’d been reading on forest bathing, in which the author asks readers to think back to their own memories of trees. Of trees that were special in a way they can be only for children. Not necessarily the biggest, or oldest, or prettiest, but the ones that shaped our interactions with the natural world. 

Trees like the willows with horizontal trunks reaching out over Budworth Mere beside the path at Marbury Country Park in Cheshire. Trunks my brother and I balanced out along, feeling so daring, so adventurous as the surface of the lake beckoned. 

Trees like the staghorn sumac in the garden of friends. It was one of those situations where the back corner of their garden bordered the back corner of ours so a gate had been installed. The sumac was in their front garden and we used to line up sitting along a branch, me and my brother and the two other kids. I was the youngest. 

Now I think about it, I can’t imagine a staghorn sumac ever being big enough for four kids to sit in and I wonder if my memory is quite right. But I distinctly remember those big fuzzy red seedheads so perhaps our sitting tree was next to a sumac.

There were the cherries that lined the edge of the cemetery on the way to primary school and gave a glorious show of pink exuberance in May, before the blossoms turned brown and slimy and coated the pavement. The trees – unknown species but I would guess sycamore – on the other edge of the cemetery which deposited a layer of browny red leaves over the pavement well worth a good kicking in the autumn. There was either less dog poop around then or I was too young to worry about it. 

It wasn’t all fun and games. There was a tree I insisted on climbing on a primary school residential trip to Delamere Forest – keen to show off my tomboy status – and in which I ignominously got stuck and from which I had to be rescued by the teacher. The shame.

Do you remember a special tree from your childhood? A good climber in your garden or a great source of conkers in the local park?

The book is M Amos Clifford, Your Guide to Forest Bathing: Experience the Healing Power of Nature.

The tree is at Chirk Castle, near Wrexham, North East Wales, and they know how old it is because there are records of tree planting on the estate.

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The journey to Nature Connect NW

Many of us have spent some time this year – 2020, the year of Covid – reflecting on what life is all about and where ours is heading to. And it’s been the same for me. All my forest school work went on hold in March. Luckily, I have an office job too (now done from home) that’s kept the bills paid.

For me, it’s been a curious convergence of ideas, interests and activities. Mindfulness. Permaculture (bear with me and I’ll explain). Community. Exploring locally. Getting a bike. For a long time, I’d daydreamed of delivering my own woodland activities rather than always doing it freelance for other organisations. I liked the idea of doing it more locally, in my own community. I liked the idea of being free to develop activities in my own way. And, let’s admit it, I liked the idea of earning a bit more money.

The beginning of lockdown was quite calm for me. I realise I’m fortunate that my friends and family have remained well and that I had the option to work from home in my other job. Life became smaller, simpler and more gently paced. I took my daily exercise around Wigg Island, along the Bridgewater Canal, up on Runcorn Hills, or on my allotment. In a stroke of luck, I’d bought a bike earlier in the year, before the lockdown rush, and this widened my world to Moore Nature Reserve and the St Helens Canal without having to get in the car. It was still a very human-scale world. The weather helped. Week after week of uncharacteristically settled, warm, sunny weather. The allotment needed a lot of watering, but it was lovely to be able to spend so much time outdoors, even if much of it was only in my diminutive back yard.

But my brain started whirring away, as brains do. And I started to fill my time up with new things. I took an evening class in permaculture – facilitated by Covid since these things were now happening on Zoom. So I was able to join the folks at North Devon Permaculture in a way I couldn’t have if I’d had to travel there. I read a lot on the subject too. It’s kind of about growing your own food in an environmentally way – but it’s also so much more than that; it’s a way of designing the systems in your life and in society so they all work together in a regenerative way. Sounds a bit airy fairy, I know, but I like the way it helped me look at work and life as a whole, to think about what my values in life are, to integrate my newly awakened realisation that I need some kind of community in my life. Who knew? I’m an introvert. I’m not keen on ‘people’ en masse, but I do value real connection to individuals.

Meditation sessions at the Odiyana Kadampa centre in Northwich were another thing that went online, meaning I could attend. I work some evenings and I’m a single parent, so although my son is now old enough to be left alone for a short while, I’ve spent years cramming ‘me time’ into his stays at his dad’s (I think this has actually given me more time do my own thing in terms of running for the hills at a weekend than many mums get, but mid-week evenings have been a no-no). And I found an eight-week mindfulness course with Breathworks in Manchester. I’d looked around previously for such a course I could get to in person with no luck, but now I could do it. So I moved from years of reading books and dabbling in mindfulness to embedding it more fully into my life.

As I was applying permaculture design principles to my life, I formulated my mission: to help more people connect with nature in the way that I find so wonderful. Around that are ideas of being part of that regenerative culture, of getting off my backside and doing something truly beneficial. Of using my unique set of skills and experiences in communications, teaching, knowledge of nature and development of mindfulness practices in a positive way.

One thing led to another and one day I finally found myself picking up the phone to get quotes for insurance and ask the council about using public parks and find out from the chamber of commerce if there would be any help or advice available for a forest bathing-stroke-forest school venture in Halton. Before I knew it, I was writing a risk assessment and practising my session on friends and friends of friends who kindly agreed to be guinea pigs without really knowing what it was all about. I took the advice of my mentor at the Liverpool City Region Enterprise Hub to set a date for  my first session and get on with it, wrestled with WordPress and Eventbrite and launched myself on the world.