Forest Therapy as Medicine: One Encounter at a Time

by Kathleen McIntyre, LCSWA

There was a time when humans turned to the forest for everything: food, shelter, stories, guidance, and healing. The Earth was teacher, healer, and relation. The clay of our bodies remembers this. Even now, a slow walk in the woods or a pause beside a stream can bring a deep exhale, arising without effort.

Forest therapy is a practice of remembering. It invites us to receive nature’s medicine: calm for the nervous system, clarity for the mind, nourishment for the heart. And in turn, we are invited to let this medicine flow back outward, shaping how we live, how we love, and how we care for the Earth.

Why We Need Nature’s Medicine

So why call nature medicine? At its heart, medicine is anything that shifts our state toward greater well-being; whether that shift happens in the body, the mind, the emotions, or even at the level of the soul. Medicine can be preventive, helping us stay balanced and resilient, or curative, supporting us through stress, pain, or illness. Nature does both.

And the most astonishing part? Nature’s medicine doesn’t require effort. We don’t have to climb a mountain or meditate in a redwood forest. Simply resting our attention on a tree swaying in the wind, or feeling sunlight warm our skin, can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of us that says: You can rest here, you are safe.

Science affirms what many of us feel. From cortisol levels and MRI scans to mood assessments, study after study confirms that time in nature reduces anxiety and depression, lowers blood pressure, enhances immune function, and lifts mood. But beyond the data is something deeper: a felt remembrance that we are part of something larger, that we belong.

Forest therapy offers us a way back to this belonging; a pathway of remembering, accessible in any landscape, at any pace.

Nature Reflects Truth

In the human-made world, truth often feels blurred. Images are edited, headlines manipulated, stories distorted until it becomes difficult to know what is real. Surrounded by screens and constant noise, we can lose touch with our own inner compass.

But in the forest, truth is unfiltered. The call of a bird, the sound of water flowing, the feel of wind against your skin; these experiences are not manufactured or manipulated. They are real. And when we place ourselves in the presence of what is real, something stirs. We begin to remember the difference between illusion and truth, between distraction and what deeply matters.

This is part of the reclamation forest therapy invites: by immersing ourselves in what is steady and true, we remember how to trust our senses, how to listen to the body’s wisdom, and how to live from the truths that rise within us.

This is medicine for our times. In the honest embrace of the natural world, the masks we wear fall away. What once felt urgent or heavy loses its hold. Our perception expands. We awaken to what matters, and we remember that we are part of something larger, older, and profoundly true.

Healing Through Presence

For many, trauma lives quietly in the body: tension in the shoulders, shallow breath, a heart that never fully rests. Forest therapy offers a gentle container where the body can begin to soften. With the steady presence of the forest, even the simplest invitations: feeling the ground beneath your feet, noticing the rhythm of your breath, listening to the subtle language of the woods, can open the doorway for healing to gently unfold.

Each moment of presence is what it is, complete in itself. When we pause long enough to notice the warmth of the sun on our skin or the texture of bark beneath our fingertips, wisdom and connection become available. These are moments of remembering: remembering the body’s belonging to the Earth, remembering that healing can come in simple, grounded ways.

This is the quiet power of forest therapy: healing doesn’t arrive all at once, but reveals itself through presence, through safety, and through the steady rhythm of one encounter at a time.

Community as Medicine

Forest therapy is not only an individual practice; it flourishes in community. When we gather together, something extraordinary happens: the forest speaks not just to us as individuals, but through us to one another.

What one person shares may be exactly what someone else needed to hear. A noticing of light through the trees, a story of stillness, or a moment of gratitude can land in another’s heart as if it were their own. Sometimes we search for words and cannot find them, then someone else speaks, and it gives voice to what was already stirring inside us.

In this way, awareness becomes communal medicine. Each person’s noticing is a gift, expanding the circle of experience, opening new pathways of connection.

As forest therapy guides, we learn to hold this sacred space of sharing and listening, where people feel safe, seen, and heard. And in doing so, we remember something ancient: that healing is magnified when we come together, and that community, like the forest herself, holds wisdom far greater than any one of us alone.

A Path Toward Reciprocity

The medicine of forest therapy does not end with the individual; it ripples outward into how we live and the choices we make.

As an educator, I once believed that if people understood how ecosystems worked, how watersheds, carbon cycles, and biodiversity sustain life, and if they saw how human actions disrupt these systems in ways that circle back to harm our own health, they would naturally want to protect the natural world. I thought knowledge would be enough to inspire change.

But what I discovered was different. Facts, even urgent ones, rarely move people to act. What transforms us is connection. When someone falls in love with a tree, it breaks their heart to see one cut down. When they feel the Earth as a relation, reciprocity arises naturally, not from duty, but from a deep desire to care for what cares for us.

This is why the work of forest therapy and eco-therapy is so essential now. In a time when both humans and the Earth are longing for healing, this practice reminds us that our well-being is inseparable from the well-being of the natural world. And when we remember this, we begin to live with greater reverence, reciprocity, and care.

Small Encounters

Forest therapy is medicine for body, heart, and Earth. It heals through presence, through truth, through community, and through the reciprocity it awakens. And it does so not in sweeping gestures, but in the quiet power of small encounters. This is how transformation happens, one encounter at a time.