Connect with nature®

About

What is Forest Bathing?

Forest Bathing is the practice of taking in the forest through your senses. In other words, bathing in the atmosphere of the forest. It is simply spending time in nature and connecting with it through all of your five senses.

We all know how being in the natural world makes us feel good, whether that is a city park or a National Park. This is because humans evolved in nature, we are genetically determined to spend time and love being outdoors. But over the last couple of centuries humans have lost touch with nature and our natural senses. In Britain, we spend an average of 8 hours 41 minutes on electronic devices and 90% of our time indoors.

Contact with nature is vital for our health, happiness and wellbeing, and just as when we are connected with nature, our health improves, when we are separated from it, our health suffers.

Forest bathing and spending time in nature has been scientifically proven to reduce blood pressure, lower stress, lower blood sugar levels, improve concentration and memory, ease depression and anxiety, increase energy, boost the immune system and help with weight loss. Some of these benefits can last for up to a month after a single forest bathing session.

Benefits of a Guide

Having a qualified Nature Therapy Guide with you is a great way to fully experience the process and understand how to do it by yourself. A guide can help you slow down, connect with nature, feel more comfortable in the natural world and find practices that suit you. Let the guide provide the framework to rewild your senses, while nature does the therapeutic work.

If you would prefer one-to-one sessions instead of being in a group of up to 10 people, this can be arranged by contacting Joss.

About your Nature Therapy Guide

Joss is a qualified Forest Bathing Practitioner (Nature and Therapy UK, 2022) and has a BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the University of Sheffield.

Joss started her career in animal care roles, and then moved into visitor experience roles in order to engage families with nature. Joss’s interest in forest bathing began in 2021 while working for Natural England as a visitor warden, where she spent all day immersed in nature, feeling the benefits, and felt she had to share the feeling with others.

Joss has just finished working in the Peruvian Amazon, and has returned to work for the National Trust, so is passionate about the natural world and believes that only a genuine love of nature, inspired through connection, will give us the desire to care for it and protect it.

When Joss leads the sessions, she has:

  • Public liability insurance
  • Outdoor First Aid
  • Forest Bathing Practitioner, Nature and Therapy UK
  • Natural Mindfulness Guide Training
  • Mental Health First Aid
  • Community Dementia Link training
  • Safeguarding Certificate
  • Nature Connectedness: For a new relationship with nature, University of Derby
  • Walk Leadership Foundation course, Ramblers, walking for health
  • Tracks and Signs, Fields Studies Council.

“… your [Joss’] guiding is in tune with the nature around us. This is what I am looking for from Natural Mindfulness guides, a congruence between your true nature and the nature around you. 

Another way of describing this is 

A guide looks, sounds and feels like they are a part of nature, not apart from nature.”

Ian Banyard (2023), Wellbeing Author, Nature Connection Wellbeing Guide, Guide Trainer & Nature Conscious Community Builder.

“Having a chance to detach and relax was great, I feel very ground and chilled now, had a great time. Thanks Joss!”

Oli

“I felt very much at peace and keen to try and take more time to just stop and take notice of the small things. A wonderful experience that I would love to do again.”

Victoria