Falling In Love With The Earth

Have you ever felt like you were falling love with the whole earth and everything in it?  Heidi, my wife, and I went for short walk yesterday in the evening after a day-long rain storm.  I could smell the freshly washed air, the scent of the trees in the breeze, and we stopped at a honeysuckle bush and harvested some honey from the styles of a few of the honeysuckle flowers [1].  The sun was setting and the light was perfect, the kind of light that gives photographers orgasms, and I sat down on a log in the forest and cried tears of joy and love.

This morning, while reflecting on the experience, I decided to do a little research on the practice of Forest Breathing or Shinrin-Yoku.  The belief of Shinrin-Yoku practitioners is that there is medicine in simply being in a forest.  Medical research, most of it conducted in Japan, seems to bear this out.  For example:

• The average concentration of salivary cortisol, a stress hormone, in people who gazed on forest scenery for 20 minutes was 13.4 percent lower than that of people in urban settings. Leisurely forest walks, compared with urban walks, show a 12.4 percent decrease in cortisol, a 7 percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity, a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 5.8 percent decrease in heart rate.

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• Men who took two hour walks in the woods over a two day period in a 2007 study exhibited a 50% increase in levels of natural killer cells,the body's disease fighting agents.

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• 13 female nurses on a three-day trip in a 2008 study demonstrate that the trip-produced anti-cancer proteins lasted more than 7 days after the trip.  

Pachamama, mother earth, nourishes and protects us just as do our human mothers.  Love her back, and get outside and enjoy her presence, make it a daily part of your life.

Peace my friends,

Dr. Dave


Notes:
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[1]  Here is a link to a web site with fotos so you too can harvest honeysuckle "honey".

[2]     I have placed a 16-page PDF file on the resource page that contains the abstracts and links to many published research reports on the benefits of forest bathing.