How Forest Therapy Helps Us Receive the Nourishment We've Been Missing
by Kathleen McIntyre, LCSW
It’s curious, we eat nourishing food, we spend time with people we care about, we have meaningful experiences; yet so many people still move through life feeling depleted, lacking vitality and a feeling of aliveness.
Why?
Because many are under nourished at the whole system level of body/mind/emotions/spirit. Nourishment happens when we can digest or integrate a moment of connection, food, a beautiful moment… really taking it in.
Receiving nourishment is actually an active process involving the nervous system, our attention, our ability to reach out and bring in, and our ability to connect with the moment.
Forest therapy can be a practice of learning to receive nourishment, teaching our mind/body/emotion/spirit to truly take in the moment.
How does forest therapy help us do this?
1. Creating Safety
Without a sense of safety, we can constrict, brace, or close off.
Our nervous systems are beautifully designed to protect us. When they perceive danger, whether real or imagined, they shift into survival. Scientists often describe this as moving away from a "rest and digest" state. In these moments, digestion, restoration, and even social connection become less of a priority as the body prepares to protect itself.
Food, connection, beauty, wonder, and joy can all be present, but they often pass right by us. Not because they aren't nourishing, but because our system isn't yet ready to receive them.
Quite honestly, the world doesn't always feel like a safe place. Many of us carry stress, uncertainty, grief, or old wounds that keep our bodies subtly braced.
Forest therapy can create small pockets of safety, to where we can soften, open, and actually receive the nourishment right in front of us: the beauty of a bird song, leaning into the strength and holding of a tree, being with others who are delighting and connecting with the natural world.
2. Slowing Down
Even when something wonderful happens, we rarely pause long enough to let it become part of us.
Our brains are constantly taking in information, but they don't integrate every experience equally. Research suggests that positive experiences need our attention. They need time. When we linger with moments of joy, awe, beauty, or peace, those experiences have a greater opportunity to be received by our body/mind/emotion/spirit system rather than simply passing by.
Forest therapy helps us to slow down time. We move into forest time, which is very different from human-made-time. This pace is restorative and supports us in “rest and digest”, fully receiving the nourishment of the moment.
3. An Invitation to the Present Moment
Nourishment can only be received in the present moment.
Yet many of us spend much of our lives somewhere else, thinking about what happened yesterday, worrying about tomorrow, or moving through the day on autopilot. We often miss the richness and nourishment of what is happening right in front of us.
Forest therapy gently brings our attention back to the present moment.
Rather than thinking about Nature, we begin experiencing her directly through our senses. We notice the warmth of the sun, the feeling of the Earth beneath our feet, the movement of our breath, the song of a bird, or the texture of bark beneath our fingertips.
As our attention returns to what is happening right now, we become more available to receive the nourishment that has been there all along. The present moment is where connection happens. It is where awe, beauty, peace, and vitality are experienced. Forest therapy continually invites us back to this place, where the living world can nourish our body, mind, emotions, and spirit.
Perhaps this is why so many people feel called to forest therapy right now.
We aren't simply looking for another wellness practice. We are hungry for a way of being that helps us feel alive again.
This is the work of a forest therapy guide.
Forest therapy guides help nourish a world that is starving for connection, vitality, and belonging.
If this way of being stirs something within you, we'd love to welcome you into the Heartwood School of Forest Therapy. Together, we learn to create spaces where people can slow down, soften, and rediscover the nourishment that has been waiting for them all along.