7/17/2023

151. FOREST BATHING: skogsterapi med Clifford Amos (English)

This episode of Biohacking Girls podcast features an interview with Clifford Amos, a leading expert in forest bathing, or Shinrin-yoku, a practice that involves immersing oneself in nature to improve health and well-being. Amos discusses his background, the origins of forest bathing, the differences between the Japanese and American approaches, and the benefits of this practice for mental and physical health. He emphasizes the importance of slowing down, engaging all senses, and being present in nature to experience its transformative power. The hosts, Alette and Monika, share their personal experiences and discuss how forest bathing can help address stress and rumination, offering an alternative to more invasive treatments.

Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to Biohacking Girls podcast. We are the show's host, and I am Alette. And I am Monika. We are good friends and colleagues, and we put together our experiences and knowledge to inspire you to become your own biohacker and optimize your life.

We follow new research and trends and ask the questions we think are necessary. Yes, we share information about biohacking, life coaching and fitness, and we hope you will feel inspired and ready to take a step to get in the best health-oriented form. Welcome to the Biohacking Girls podcast.

We are writing 2023, and on the trend list of well-being and good feelings, there is a topic called forest bathing. There has also been a lot of debate and hashtagging in the biohacking environment. Forest bathing, we have used it ourselves and we have talked a lot about it, but do you really know what it is?

Yes, we also wondered a lot about that, and today we have actually brought along someone who we have had some coaching with in this exciting topic, Amos, who will be our guest today. He can explain a little more, because it is like we have biohacked now the last three years, so you still notice that something is missing, and it is a little of what we are going to talk about today that will be very exciting.

Yes, because this with forest bathing is something we are looking for. And as you say, Amos Clifford is from California, but he is based in Arizona and is a leading voice within Shinrin Yoko, which is inspired by bathing therapy in the USA.

This is a movement that integrates nature and the forest in therapy to get better health, education and protection. Amos Clifford has also studied Buddhist philosophy and is the founder of Creek Dharma Center. He has written a fantastic book called Your Guide to the World of Buddhism.

Welcome to Biohacking Girls podcast.

There Amos, thanks for tuning in. How are you? Oh, I'm well this morning. I'm in Arizona in the United States right now and I'm at home with my cats.

and the weather is beautiful and I feel really good this morning. Thank you for asking. How are you doing? We are doing great as well. We have nice weather here in Oslo. Your background is California, but you moved to Santa Ynez Mountains? I moved to Arizona about two years ago.

Well, the general manager of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy was living here. She had moved here with her family. And we were coming out of some very difficult business conditions because of COVID. And I felt like I needed to be living near the office.

So I know that we could accomplish a lot of things through Zoom, but it's better. Like here, Jackie is our general manager. I can go over to the office and there's a very nice forest trail where we can go for a walk for an hour through the trail. And that's how we have our meetings.

it's a lot better than zoom so imagine uh the forest is my office but we we have read your beautiful guide at the book forest bathing it's such a great book uh we will link to the book afterwards but uh thank you let's just start with uh your background with forest bathing how it started uh amos well i think as with many people who are drawn to this practice

My beginning goes back to my childhood. I grew up in the city of Santa Barbara, but up in the foothills behind Santa Barbara, an area called Mission Canyon, which is basically a big oak forest with houses scattered among there. And so

I just spent a lot of my childhood in these beautiful oak forests and riparian woodlands where the creeks would run through and really got it into my bones that way. And then for many years, I also worked as a wilderness guide in these youth education programs where we would take youth at risk on 21-day journeys deep into the wilderness in the Sierra Nevada area.

And that's where I really started learning about what it means to be a guide. And a guide is a different thing than a therapist or a teacher, you know, and in the practice we do now.

When we train people, we're training people in what we call the way of a guide. It's a very particular way of working with people. And we can circle back to that later in this conversation, if you like. And when I was in my late 50s, I was holding the question, what do I do in this late part of my career that can really be of service to people and to the planet?

And I really held this question for a couple of years and was exploring a lot of different ideas. And during that time, I continued to do quite a bit of work in wilderness and natural settings. But it was more my personal work. It was like going out on vision fast ceremonies and things like that.

And then I saw this article in Outside Magazine written by Florence Williams. You may be familiar with Florence. She wrote quite a wonderful book called The Nature Fix and has more recently written a book on heartbreak. But she wrote an article in Outside Magazine, and it was featured on the cover of the magazine. It said, take two hours of pine forest and call me in the morning.

So I thought, well, that's interesting. And I read that and it described this practice in Japan as Shinden-yoku. And some of the things that I really liked about that, as it was described, was that it was very accessible. People didn't have to be athletes and be able to hike for miles and miles. And they didn't have to go way off into wilderness areas. They could go to a place nearby. And I liked that.

So, you know, for a while I considered, well, maybe I could guide these vision fast ceremonies. But if you take like a pie chart of all the people that will consider a 12 day vision fast ceremony, it's not even a hairline on that pie chart. Hardly anyone will do that. Now, the ones who do that, it'll have a big impact in their life and probably a ripple effect. But I wanted a bigger slice of the pie. So I was looking for something that would be more inviting to more people.

So I started looking more into Shin'en-yoku and I really couldn't find any clear descriptions of exactly what the practice was.

But I had enough background, and it's just kind of the way I am, that I thought, well, I'll just make a practice that incorporates these principles of moving slowly and being in your senses and having tea in the forest with a group, things like that. So I spent about a year. At that time, I had quite a few mentees I was working with, and me and my mentees and some of my colleagues would go out into the forest and

And I just tried different things. And after probably after about a year, it became really clear that there was a particular sequence of events, which we now teach people as a standard sequence, that it reliably helped people in a three hour time period really connect with themselves and with the world around them.

in a way that was meaningful to them. The meaning that each person found was unique to them. So I don't prescribe meaning. I don't tell people what they should get out of it. But instead, my interest is in helping to structure an experience where most people will find something deeply meaningful.

So the practice that we develop is, we now call it relational forest therapy. And I would say that the Shinrin-yoku practice in Japan is a major part of the lineage, but what we do is not the same as the Shinrin-yoku in Japan.

So there's a lot of overlap. I've been out on quite a few walks in Japan with the Japanese guides, and every one of them approaches what they do a little differently, though there are some common themes. And there's some overlap in what they do and what we do, but there's also some significant differences. But what's the major differences in Japan's method and yours? Well, one of the things in Japan is...

They have really very beautiful purpose-built trails that may go for a mile or more. And there's usually a building that you begin in, and they will take blood pressure, and they'll take a little bit of saliva to do a salivary amylase analysis. They'll do that at the beginning. They have little portable machines to do that.

And then at the end, you come back to the same machine that you did the pre-test on and you do it again and they record. Well, I don't do that. To me, it's like if they've gathered, you know, 100,000 data points on that, that's enough.

Would you see any difference like in the HRV by measuring? I'm sure you have tried that. Some people do. I don't personally. Whenever I've done that, I have the opposite of the intended. So according to the measurements...

They might interpret that as I have more stress, but it's incorrect. I'm just really engaged and curious all the way through the walk. Like I'm kind of excited. So what they're measuring in me is engagement and excitement. And this is, I think, a pretty good illustration of where there are

subtleties and even simple scientific designs that can perhaps compromise the capacity to interpret the results. Now, I think that what I just described is true for me, but these places, they get thousands and thousands of people. And so over a large collection of data, the outliers like me kind of disappear.

And there's a central tendency or an averaging that can be trusted. And so they've done a lot of that. Another difference I would say is that in Japan, the guides typically will be having conversations with you as you're walking along the trail and they'll be teaching about things. Like they'll stop under a conifer tree and they'll say, no, there's this thing called phytoncides. And we don't do any of that. The guides don't talk. We don't do any naturalist education either.

Because we want to keep, as much as we can, we want to encourage people to keep their experience in their bodies, in their senses, in their hearts. And we don't want to move into the head space any more than we have to, you know, in the cognitive processes. And that's by design. It seems to work pretty well for...

Most people we've we've trained guides now and I think 65 countries and and our way of practice seems to fit all of those cultures just fine without much modification.

Great. And one of the biggest wellness trends this year is force bathing. And I have to admit that both of us have to admit that we didn't actually understand force bathing before we read your book and we had Zoom calls with you. So it's really worth digging into it because force bathing just sounds like jumping into a lake or just enjoy the scenery around you.

But why do you think so many biohackers are using this hashtag, forest bathing, and use this as like their go-to to release stress? Share some thoughts around that. Well, I haven't really heard of this, that a lot of biohackers are using a hashtag here because I don't really follow social media. But I do think that, you know, when I started ANFT, the term forest bathing was not known. Right.

Shinnyoku, those terms were not known much outside of Japan. And in fact, there was no other company or organization training people in these methods outside of Japan and Korea. Korea has a very, very strong forest wellness component going on. So I realized that one of the first barriers that we had was just getting the terminology into the culture.

Well, because it's new and it sounds kind of cool, a lot of journalists were interested. And so we very quickly had a lot of interest from journalists, many different kinds of journalists. Like, you know, I did a section on the NPR show, All Things Considered.

No, to the best of our knowledge, that show. And also on National Geographic, they sent a crew out and followed me around for a couple of days. And all of this press kind of brought it into people's awareness. And now there's something like 50 different companies that are trained people in some version or another of forest bathing or forest therapy.

Many of them are started by people that we've trained, but I don't think they train the same way that we do. I don't know because I haven't taken their trainings. But as the idea spread, it has a particular kind of appeal that we've seen before. So it comes from the mysterious East.

And it has a kind of an exotic name. And people get really interested in that. And next thing you know, you start seeing people marketing using that. Just like with the term Zen. You know, Zen came to the West and pretty soon everyone was using Zen in their marketing. Yeah. You know, like whatever it was. You know, like I'm drinking Zen coffee in my Zen coffee cup. And

And now we have, I know there's a band called Shindinyoku or forest bathing. And there's, I see a lot of kind of commercial products that say something like forest bathing on them. So it's really gotten into people's awareness, which I think is a good thing. However, I think that there's a mistake that a lot of people make when they hear the term forest bathing. I've heard this many times. People say, oh, I've been doing that my whole life.

Probably not. So why don't you just walk us through a session of forest bathing to understand and to help us and the listeners really dig into the philosophy of it. How does it start? How long does it last? How do you do it? Okay, well, I can speak for if I guide a walk. And I think that many of the people who we've trained, there's over 2,000 people we've trained now. I think many of them guide similarly to this, but...

We also encourage people as guides to guide in a way that's authentic to them. Like try it the way we teach you and then discover what's really right for you. Okay. So the way I guide is if you came with me on a walk, we would spend about three hours. We wouldn't go more than maybe 300 meters in that much time.

But it's not like we're just being bored. It'll be very engaging. So we'll start, first of all, with just some introductions. I'm curious to know why people showed up. And then we go into the forest and we stand or sit in a circle. And I guide a series of invitations that help people shift their attention to a domain of here, where we are here in this moment now, and how our bodies are experiencing that.

So the first part is 15 or 20 minutes of just noticing our senses coming into our body, noticing the feeling of our body, noticing what's going on in our heart region.

And so we'll do that for a while. Now, see, this is when people say, oh, I've been doing forced bathing my whole life. Most of them don't do that. They don't just pause for 15 or 20 minutes. And so this is why I think that it's easy to make a misconception. Then the next thing we'll do is, well, we'll ask everyone, we'll give them an opportunity to share just what are you noticing so far in this walk. Then we'll walk for 15 or 20 minutes very slowly.

much more slowly than people have maybe ever walked. And we won't go very far, you know, in that much time. And one of the things that we'll invite people to do is while they're walking slowly is to notice with all of their senses inside and outside what is in motion in the environment around them.

The environment's not just external. Like the inside of my body is continuous with the environment around me. It's connected to that. So we just notice what's in motion. Then we gather up again and we ask people, well, what are you noticing now?

And people will start making a shift from the first time people say, we ask, what are you noticing? They'll say, well, I notice, you know, that there's birds out here. By the second or third time we ask that, they'll say, I noticed that there seems to be something happening in my area.

in my back and shoulders, like a kind of relaxation that I haven't felt before. So they'll start shifting to the actual noticing of what's happening within them that is of relevance to their journey. So now we're about maybe an hour, not quite an hour into the walk. So at this point, we'll do two or three more invitations. They usually involve people going off and having a little adventure,

And a lot of these adventures involve what we call the imaginal capacity. So they can be edgy for people. By edge, I mean they can be outside of people's normal way of experiencing the world. So they take a little step out of what is ordinary. So an example of that is if it feels right with the group, I might say, you know, there's a lot of trees around us and just notice if there's one that seems to be

really appealing, it's calling to you in some way. And I wonder what it would be like if you went to that tree and introduced yourself and allowed it to introduce itself. And if some kind of conversation might come out of that, some kind of friendship or relationship. So people go out and they'll have these conversations, amazing interactions with trees. And they'll come back, sometimes they'll come back, they're just like, especially the ones who are really skeptical. A lot of people at the

And I'll say, I'll usually say, well, I'll just go try it out and see what you think. Those are the ones who'll come back. They'll have a lot of tears on their face because suddenly their whole world has shifted because they received something of value that they felt came from the tree. Now, this rarely does this have to do with I heard words spoken. It has more to do with something happened inside of me. Some images or knowing or something came up for me that seemed really true and important.

So we may do two or three things like that in this section of the walk, and it'll take another hour and a half or so. Typically, we'll then go to what we call sit spot.

Which is, we just say, find a place that you like and sit there for 20 minutes. We don't give any other instructions like, oh, make this meditation or mindfulness or follow your breath or anything like that. Because by now, people are really connected to their senses, to the world around them. They're connected to their inner process. They don't need any more instructions anymore.

All they need to do is sit down in a place that they like for 20 minutes, and we call them back. And at the end of that time,

We'll be closing the walk, and we usually do that with tea. So if it's me, I will have gathered a few herbs along the trail, have a little backpacking stove, and I'll brew tea and make a nice little layout of teacups, and we'll gather around, and we'll have another round of sharing, like what's happening for you now, that kind of sharing, and we'll share tea together.

And usually the first cup of tea we give back to the forest is an expression of gratitude, though by now everyone is feeling a lot of gratitude towards the forest. Yeah, and that usually wraps it up. It's right around three hours by the time we get there. We haven't gone very far. For most people, it's about a five-minute walk back to wherever they left their car.

you know, from wherever we ended up. But it is a very, it's a qualitatively different way of connecting with nature than most people have experienced before. And I include in that people who have spent their whole lives in nature, people who've been

you know outdoorsmen or bird watchers or naturalists or something they'll come on the walk and well i remember one guy who's traveled all over the world getting his um his bird list you know how people are in they they keep a list of all the birds and there's this kind of real eagerness to get more birds on that what do they call it their life list i think

And so there's one guy who had quite an extensive list of birds that he'd seen in many continents all over the world. And after one of these three hour walks, he said, you know, I don't think I'll ever experience birds in the same way again, because he had learned to not just look at birds and check them off.

but to notice with his senses to invite in the presence, how the birds were present for him emotionally and even spiritually. And so that's a big shift. And I hear those kinds of things pretty often when I'm guiding. And I don't tell, like I would never take a bunch of birders out and say, we are going to transform how you experience birds. I wouldn't do that because I don't know. I don't know if that's going to happen or not.

But it happens enough that I feel like a good percentage of people who go on a guided forest therapy walk have an experience that they find meaningful for their lives at the point in life where they are. Yeah.

So as a guide at that point, my job is to just listen and not judge and just accept what they come up with. And we call that the act of witnessing. Because if people get a chance to share that and they're witnessed by the group or by other people, then that experience, that meaning gets into their bones better. If they don't get to share it,

They'll wander off and maybe forget it in a few days. Well, I don't know. Maybe they will. Maybe I don't. They won't.

There's a lot I don't know about what goes on with this practice. It feels nice just listening to you talk about it. And we are part of nature. We've been forever part of nature. So I'm sure everyone will get something out of it because it's just the last couple of hundred years that we are just removed ourselves from nature. So I'm so glad you're doing this and making us connect again.

But how can this help us with our immune system? How does it help us? Well, this is where a lot of the research that the Japanese pioneered and a lot of other researchers have since replicated in different ways. And what they noticed is that if you measure stress indicators, things like salivary amylase or cortisol,

or heart rate variability. What seems to happen from these practices and from exposure to nature is that our nervous systems get a kind of reset where there's an internal coherence in how our nervous systems are operating. And that then supports a much healthier response

immune system and more effective immune response to challenges. And there's quite a lot published on this, I think. I touch on it a little bit in my book, but I don't recommend my book for those who are specifically interested in really diving into the science of it.

So I like Miyazaki's book for that. I actually don't think we need that much science to know that nature heals. It's intuitive, I think. I don't know. That was my feeling as an author, too. I keep wondering, who are we trying to convince with all this research? And in my imagination, like there's this one person at the top of the pyramid of the global health insurance industry.

We're trying to convince that one person so that health insurance and physicians will start incorporating these kinds of practices. But I'm not saying that that's actually the reality. That's just where my speculation goes when I'm wondering who are we trying to convince.

But I have noticed that there's a certain percentage of people who show up for walks when I guide who come because they read something about the science. And it's almost like, well, the science said that this would be okay, so I'll try it out. And I hope that we can learn to listen to sources of knowing and of understanding that are maybe difficult to fit within the paradigm of scientific method.

So an example of that would be, what is the intelligence that lives in my heart and how is that guiding me? And there are researchers that are looking into this, but I think it's not something that's in the mainstream of science at all.

So we're a little bit out on the edges of that. And, you know, I didn't put a lot in my book because I agree with you. I personally don't need the science to be convinced. The fact that it's backed by the science might be the motivation to do force baiting. For some people, yes. Yeah, for some people. And then you start joining a group or a guide and you get convinced in other manners because you actually start listening to your body. Yeah.

We are really interested in the mental health process in this stressful world we are living in. So to walk like you say, not go there, but go here, like 300 meters and spend four hours. We are always measuring and in the sympathetic state of mind to lose weight and train and build muscles. So there's a term called rumination.

You write about it in your book. Could you explain to us what that is? It's pretty common. People who have ever been through a period of major depression probably know about this. It's when your mind gets stuck in a loop or your emotions get stuck in a loop and you keep thinking one thing or having one kind of experience over and over again. Usually it's pretty discouraging.

You know, like it's a sort of ain't it awful that these things are happening in my life or isn't it terrible what's going on in the world or something like that. And your mind gets stuck there over and over again. And so one of the findings fairly early on in the research here was the investigators took people who had chronic long-term depression into the forest and they were measuring a lot of different variables, you

you know, like to try to figure out what changed. And one thing that really popped out in their measurements was that the tendency to ruminate was interrupted. So this rumination factor in depression was interrupted. And that's a really positive thing because what happens then is that we have more opportunity. If we get out of the little

or prisons that we're in, we have more opportunity to experience ourselves in the world in different ways. And we may very well find the doorway or passage into a more fulfilling way of life. There's this term about, what is it called? I think it's called the default functioning of the mind. And some therapies are designed specifically to interrupt that.

Like some of the psychedelic therapies, ketamine therapy, for example, which is used for people who've had long-term, very resistant to treatment depression, and six clinically guided sessions of intravenous ketamine therapy will often have a major beneficial impact on that. And one of the theories of that is that the ketamine has interrupted

the default state so that people can now move into other states.

But I don't think we need to do psychedelics. In fact, I did a seven-walk series once that Ralph Metzner was in the group. Now, Ralph Metzner, if people are schooled in the history of psychedelic therapy and exploration, they'll know this guy's name because he's like one of the top voices in that. He has since passed away. But, you know, he's a very famous guy.

And so he was a part of the group. And eventually the other group members like put it together with, oh, this is that guy. This is that Ralph Metzner. So they started asking him, well, tell us about, you know, your experience with psychedelics. And his answer was, no, you don't need to know that. What we are doing here is everything you need to do. That was his impression. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so that was a great answer to rumination and also to, okay, science, what's backed by the science and to actually move into forest bathing and just noticing to see what happens to you. What kind of clients do you have? All walks of life or do they come several times, one time? Yeah, I can mostly speak from my own experience, which doesn't necessarily represent every guide's experience.

But say if I'm promoting a walk series, like seven walks in seven weeks, I like to do that, particularly around change of the season, because that way people really over seven week period, they see if we go to the same trail, they really see and experience the change of the season. Typically, say I have 12 people who sign up for that. Eight of them will be women.

in their 50s to 70s. That's the biggest group. And I wondered about that. And one time I was with a group and I said, why do you think this happened? Why is it you guys that are showing up and I'm not getting a bunch of kids and stuff? And what came out of that was they wanted to be out in nature.

They didn't feel safe going alone and they didn't want to go with a hiking group because they felt like they'd slow down the group and be annoying. And they read that this would be really slow and not go very far. And it would be a group experience. So like, oh, that works for me. So that's what I got out of one conversation with a small group of women who were on one of my walks. Now, I have worked with many, many different kinds of groups and

And I know that the guides that we've trained, some of them specialize in different, like some specialize in working with children, some specialize in working with veterans. We've trained one guide who is a, she's a physician. She teaches at Harvard Medical School. She incorporates taking the

the doctors who are students there out on forest therapy walks because she's trying to help them learn this as a way to promote their own well-being. I mean, it's nice if we have doctors who are sane and healthy, right?

And so she's trying to work on that. So there's just a lot of different groups. It just depends. So we are beach girls, both of us. We go to the beach as much as we can because we live in a cold country and we travel to Hawaii and to Spain. So would the beach be a good place to do a forest bathing or is it just forest because the name is forest? Could you just run through some beautiful spaces to start practicing? Yeah.

Of course, we would come and join you on a group first, but just to have an image of where to go. Yeah.

No, I think the general practice anywhere that you're in a more or less natural setting will help. I've had really good success, for example, in the middle of very busy cities, like in Madison Square Park, right in the middle of New York City. Really? I've had very good success there. Wow. And one of our trainers who lives in New Zealand does her work on the coast. Wow.

And the shore, the beaches. And she lives in a place where there are often dolphins present in the waves. And she'll take people out into the waves to interact with the dolphins. And that seems good to me. Personally, I had an experience once in Hawaii where I went out on a boat to go snorkeling, you know, with a group.

And the water was really deep. And when I got off the boat, I was afraid. I just felt scared, like I want to get right back on the boat. And then the thought occurred to me, why don't I just do the standard sequence here? So I did. I just started floating and I started noticing with my senses the

what was happening in the environment around me and I started noticing in my heart, I really relaxed. And I was the last one back on the boat because I basically did the whole forest bathing experience while snorkeling. And among you, it's a beautiful forest underwater with a lot of really interesting wildlife and a lot of really potent sensory experiences. And

And so my feeling is that this is a practice that can be done anywhere. I think elements of the practice, like one of the elements, the sit spot element. I sit on out on my front deck here in my house when the weather is

I'll just sit out there with my morning coffee and just sit. And I get to know the birds really well doing that. They get to know me. It's one of the things, if you do sit spot in the same place, the local wildlife get to know you and they just start accepting you. And then they start acting, instead of hiding all the time, they start acting like normal birds or deer or whatever. We have quite a bit of wildlife here.

We have in our yard, we see deer and javelinas and bobcats and coyotes. We know that lions come through, but I haven't seen them yet. And so we have a lot of wildlife here. And so just being right here,

At home, I don't even have to go anywhere. And so it's just the practices, the principles. Like if you learned to do yoga in a yoga studio somewhere, you know you don't have to go to that yoga studio to do yoga. You can do that anywhere. You can do that on a mountaintop or in your living room or whatever. So you do this every day? No. No. No.

So how often do we do this? Or how often is recommended? If I'm doing a sit spot when the weather's good, it's just turned good enough now to do this again. We've had a lot of snow this winter. And because I've gotten older, my body doesn't regulate temperature as well as it used to. So when there's good weather, I just go out and...

sit out there unless I have a meeting with podcasters then I stay in here. You can you know I know we're just recording audio but you can see behind me there's a window here. Yes, yes. And there's a like a window bench seat right there. Me and my cat spend a lot of time right there because outside of that window is a ton of birds going on.

All the time. We put bird seed out there every day. And for me, that's a part of my practice. Yeah, put bird seed out and get to know the birds. And the deer come and steal the bird seed too. And a lot of squirrels. And so that's a part of just maintaining some kind of sense of relationship or connection with what's going on.

And how about the trees? We sometimes joke about you can speak to the trees and have a conversation with trees. But actually, when I read your book, it feels very close to every living thing in the forest. Well, I think so. And I would, over time, I've expanded my

my awareness of that. Like at first I would have been really skeptical by any proposal that stones are living things that you can communicate with. I'm not skeptical about that anymore. I've had some very profound experiences with stones, but the communication is not taking place

in a conversational, like using words to exchange it, it involves what we call the imaginal capacity. And so the imaginal capacity is, it's not the same as imaginary. It's related to imagination, but it's a different thing. And one way to think of it is, if you have this intelligent field around your heart that reaches out beyond your body,

that the things that you encounter, the other beings that you encounter, are making an impression on that intelligent field. Stones will do this. So they have their own image that's a kind of sentience or intelligence. The stone intelligence is very different than ours, but it's still there. And it makes an impression on the imaginal field that emanates from our hearts.

If we learn to pay attention to our heart's

what our hearts are receiving, then that's how the communications come through. And the way they're listening to us out there, the way a stone or a tree is listening to us, is they're listening to a particular image that we bring. So they're not listening necessarily to the words, so the words will be related to the image. So what I mean by image, I think it's very closely related to intention.

So if I'm out in the forest with a loving intention and I want to understand more about how to be of service to the forest and how to live my life in a way that is congruent with the purpose I was born for and so on, that intention is the image that the beings around me are aware of.

And so the image that I carry meets through the emanation of the imaginal capacity, which is located in the heart intelligence. These images meet. And when they meet...

They have a creative process where something new emerges. That's the communication, that new thing that's emerging. And your heart will let you know that. It may come up in many ways, like it'll filter up into your mind. It may come into your dreams. It may come into fantasies. You might get images or pictures. You might even get...

a strong connection to memory, something that you haven't remembered a long time ago that happened in your life. And suddenly you're sitting with a stone and this memory comes up. I say, pay attention to that memory. Maybe ask the stone, why is this memory coming up here? And feel into that with your heart, with your whole being.

And I think that it's been my experience, and I've observed this with other people, there's a pretty good chance that something meaningfully significant to you, to your life and where you are in your life now, there's a pretty good chance that that will emerge. Wow.

Thank you, Amos. This has been a really meaningful conversation for Monica and me, and the listeners is going to enjoy this. So they need to know how to find you. Well, the website for ANFT is a, like association, n, nature, f, forest, t, therapy, anft.earth.

So it's not a dot com or it's a dot earth. Earth, of course. Yeah. So go there. Yeah. And you can learn a lot about what opportunities are available. And the things that I've been sharing with you, particularly around imaginal capacity and communication, I don't think we teach that very consistently. Right.

And so for people to learn more about that, I would encourage them to come to one of the workshops or retreats that I lead. And I don't think we have any listed on the website right now, but I will be at two events we have coming up.

in the UK in I think the first week of June. We have a guide training immersion and that's a part of the training that people get. They come to four-day immersion. We'll have two trainers there, one from the UK and one from Portugal who will be

really working with that group. And we do a lot of question and answer, and I'll be there as sort of a guest. Then after that, we'll have a gathering of guides. People are interested in this practice and both at a very beautiful place in, uh,

Yorkshire in the UK. So that's, that's a place to start. Yeah. Wonderful. And we'll, we'll put that in our show notes, your webpage and also where they can find your book. Thank you. I really enjoyed the book very much. So I hope the listeners would grab a copy as soon as possible. And yeah,

Thank you so much for tuning in and sharing your knowledge with us. We really, truly appreciate it. Yes, thank you so much. Well, it's really an honor to have the opportunity to share these ideas and to help disseminate them more in the world. And I really appreciate you and I'm very grateful to both of you for the work you're doing here. Thank you. Have a great rest of the day. You too.

We're so lucky, Monica, that we have so many exciting guests on the podcast. We learn so much. I feel like I've been on a forest bathing after this conversation with Amos. And I'm wondering what you're most interested in talking about when we go out next time. You're asking if we're going to talk about a stone or a tree? Yes.

I choose three. You choose three. I choose enough three as well. And I think that all living life communicates either via roots or via life with each other. We are busy with earthing and we like to walk on the earth and on the beach. I like to pick up trees. I like to pluck.

I've never felt anything with stones other than that it's aesthetic. That's what I find so strange, because I have a picture of you when you're on the beach. I see my back for you when you bend down and just look at the things that are down in the sand. There are a lot of stones, so I'm a little surprised that you also chose wood.

But it can also happen that it is a form of force baiting. The point is that you should not go far down in the sympathetic hunting mode, but you should be here in the parasympathetic mode and see, as he says, all the changes first, then you will observe what happens around you with birds, and at the next stop you will begin to observe what happens physiologically with the body, the

I think forest bathing is much more correct for me as a biohacker than ketamine treatment. If I should have any stress, what about you? Absolutely. I go for forest bathing any day, except for taking chemicals or trips with different types of ketamines. Absolutely.

So if you are interested in forest baiting, we will put links below. And we recommend you to read this beautiful book. We will share all information under the show notes. And I hope you will be inspired this week as well for our podcast. We hope so, and have a nice week. Happy biohacking! Let's go into the forest and do this. Yes!

We remind you that you must speak to your own doctor or diet manager about diets and other questions related to medicines and supplements. Information we share cannot be used to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any symptoms or conditions.

Mentioned in the episode

Forest Bathing

A practice of immersing oneself in nature to improve health and well-being.

Shinrin-yoku

The Japanese term for forest bathing.

Amos Clifford

A leading expert in forest bathing and the founder of Creek Dharma Center.

Creek Dharma Center

A center founded by Amos Clifford that focuses on Buddhist philosophy and practices.

Your Guide to the World of Buddhism

A book written by Amos Clifford on Buddhist philosophy.

Santa Barbara

A city in California where Amos Clifford grew up.

Mission Canyon

An area in Santa Barbara where Amos Clifford spent his childhood.

Sierra Nevada

A mountain range in California where Amos Clifford worked as a wilderness guide.

Outside Magazine

A magazine that published an article on forest bathing in Japan.

Florence Williams

The author of the article on forest bathing and the book The Nature Fix.

The Nature Fix

A book by Florence Williams about the benefits of nature for human health.

Shinden-yoku

The Japanese term for forest bathing, which is a practice of immersing oneself in nature to improve health and well-being.

ANFT

The Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, an organization that promotes forest bathing.

NPR

National Public Radio, a radio network that aired a segment on forest bathing.

National Geographic

A magazine and media company that covered forest bathing.

Madison Square Park

A park in New York City where Amos Clifford has guided forest bathing sessions.

Harvard Medical School

A medical school where one of Amos Clifford's trainees is a physician and teaches.

Hawaii

A state in the United States where Amos Clifford had a forest bathing experience while snorkeling.

Ralph Metzner

A prominent figure in psychedelic therapy and exploration who participated in a forest bathing series led by Amos Clifford.

Ketamine therapy

A therapy that uses ketamine to treat depression.

Miyazaki

An author whose book on the science of forest bathing is recommended by Amos Clifford.

Rumination

A mental process where one gets stuck in negative thoughts and emotions.

Yorkshire

A region in England where a forest bathing guide training immersion and gathering will be held.

Biohacking

A practice that involves optimizing one's biology and health.

Earthing

A practice that involves connecting with the Earth's energy by walking barefoot.

Sympathetic nervous system

The part of the nervous system that is activated during stress and fight-or-flight responses.

Parasympathetic nervous system

The part of the nervous system that is activated during rest and relaxation.

Ketamine

A medication used in ketamine therapy for depression.

Participants

Host

Alette

Host

Monika

Guest

Amos Clifford

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