Forest bathing: what it is, and how to get lost in order to find yourself

And it is precisely there, in slowing down, that something happens, perhaps something unexpected. A sort of beneficial short circuit. The body deflates from stress, the mind frees itself from an invisible traffic jam. The research data says so, of course, but first of all the eyes of those who come back from the woods and tell their loved ones about it say so.

Mind you, it isn’t only a matter of relaxation. There is science in all this. Cortisol falls, heart rate variability rises, breathing changes rhythm. Everything returns to a more natural state, closer to what nature designed us for. Walking slowly among the trees, not to arrive but to be there, to enjoy the path, reduces sympathetic activity (the stress kind) and switches on the parasympathetic, responsible for relaxation. We aren’t talking about poetry. It’s biology.

And if forest bathing returns us to our deepest and most contemplative side, outdoor training – what some call outdoor functional fitness – brings us back to the elementary, pure, unfiltered physical gesture. Doing squats against a bench, pushing, pulling, jumping onto a rock. It is a return to the body, whose control we take back in order to feel it again in both material and immaterial ways. It is not the activity carried out under the lights of gyms, nor the kind judged by algorithms, but one that adapts to uneven terrain, uncertain weather, changes in the wind.

And just as forest bathing teaches us to breathe with the trees, outdoor training teaches us to be with ourselves even in effort. Especially in effort. And this happens outside the walls of home, or of work. Outside the schedules we are forced to keep. It happens in a place we visit less often, nature, in a different way of inhabiting time. The slow, deep, gentle kind. The kind that truly helps us find ourselves again.

There are moments when body and mind ask for a pause. Not a pause from work, but a pause from how we live everything. Forest bathing and outdoor training, in different ways, open a gap. They offer a space. They promise no miracles and sell no solutions. But they throw open a possibility. And, as always happens when something is truly radical, they start from the simple. Breathing. Touching the bark of a tree. Feeling the rain on your skin. Lifting a knee. And then again: listening, observing, feeling.

It is no small thing, in times when everything seems to have to happen immediately. In the end, it is simply a small, luminous and peaceful form of resistance.