About Joy Trails Experiences

At JoyTrails, there are several different ways that I share my experience and love of Forest and Nature healing. Learn below what experience suits you, and how Nature can Nurture you today.

Shinrin Yoku- Forest Bathing

This is a gentle immersion into the forest.

Imagine diving deep into nature’s gloriousness and literally absorbing all that nature generously gives us. It is slow, a bit meditative, and involves a number of gentle techniques to ‘unlock’ nature for you personally.

Once you stop arguing with your overproductive frontal cortex (Yogi’s call this your ‘monkey brain’!- you know it, don’t you?! ), your body and your mind will relax and engage with letting the natural environment around you work its magic.

As your passionate and gentle guide, I will take you through a number of practices to help you get into feeling, rather than thinking, and the beautiful environment we are in then does the rest.

We will do a number of practices with breaks in between before we dive deep for a while where you find true relaxation, peace, and joy.

Forest Therapy

Forest Therapy or Nature Therapy is about It’s being in nature to physically and joyfully reconnect. It is less meditative and more a verb- more action, fun and creativity. It’s about getting out of your head by physically touching and interacting with the natural world around you.

Once you put away your inhibitions and play, you find that nature interacts back. This may sound a little bonkers from a true-blue scientist, but I’ve done it hundreds of times, and it’s real. 

I think in these modern times we forget that up until 1986 we as humans across the globe were mainly a rural dwelling species. That is, we mostly lived in areas with nature all around us. But since that fateful year, we are now mostly all living in cities. And cities do not have a lot of nature in them. It is not a coincidence that we are now struggling with a lot of dis-ease. We have been taken away from our natural ecosystem. 

I get very excited about the science around this- did you know our sensory receptors in our eyes are tuned exactly to frequency ‘nature’ ? (Williams, F, 2017, The Nature Fix.) So we are getting more short sighted and the more headaches than we used to…

Anyway, I’ve digressed. Nature therapy = Let’s go and play, interact and let nature help you. Leave the forest or beach refreshed, smiling and calm. We get all of those same juicy benefits of Shin rin Yoku, we just did it extra physically and joyously. 

And let’s face it, when was the last time you climbed or hugged a tree? There are many ways to interact. I will guide to to export your creative side and get some pytonocides at the same time. (I’ll even tell you what they are!)

I can take your whole family or school class out for a Nature Therapy Session, because children naturally interact with nature and have not lost their natural connection to it like us sensible grown-ups!