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:
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: [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.
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AuthorI'm Dr. Dave, an eclectic shaman. I lived and worked in Bolivia and Peru for over six years, where I and was trained by Andean Shamans, and today practice eclectic shamanism. Archives
June 2020
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