Forest Bathing

Renew Your Connection to the Natural World

Forest bathing is a nature connection experience inspired by the Japanese practice of Shinrin-Yoku. These immersive experiences offer the chance to break away from the stress of daily life and to find healing and nourishment through intimate engagement with the beings with whom we share our place.

While offering a renewed sense of interconnection with the natural world, forest bathing also allows access to beneficial nervous system states that can support our long-term health and well-being. Research has proven that forest bathing boosts immune strength, improves cognitive functioning, and reduces stress, anger, anxiety, depression and sleeplessness.

Offered through a series of guided invitations, the walk will help participants move beyond the chatter of the thinking mind and find a deeper sense of embodied engagement, enabling access to new ways of being and a transformed relationship to self and others. This intentional practice of embodied presence cultivates access to powerful experiences of curiosity, awe, and wonder that are essential for resilient engagement with this era of dramatic change and transformation.

No experience necessary,  just an open heart and willingness to connect. Enrollment is limited to 15 people.

FAQs

  • Weather: Walks are offered rain or shine
  • Accessibility: Garden paths are dirt/gravel and include some stairs and slopes.
  • What to Bring: Check out this quick reference guide >>
  • Scholarships: There are a limited number of scholarships available. Please contact connect@temenosrising.com to apply. Include your requested walk date and how the walk will support your well being.

About the guides

Click on each tab to read about the guides
A picture of Irene Bailey
Irene Bailey (she/ her) is the founder and Program Director for Temenos Rising and a Certified Forest Therapy Guide. Irene is honored to design and facilitate nature connection offerings to support the remembering that we are intimately and inseparably connected to all life. Over the past 20 years, she has worked with numerous environmental and sustainability education programs as an educator, leader, mentor, and wilderness guide. She holds a MS in Leadership for Sustainability Education and is trained as a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain. Irene supports the creation of safer spaces in the natural world and offers herself as a conduit to the natural world so that others can get the healing and nourishment they deserve to live well. Her foundation for sharing her gifts with the world is rooted in gratitude, wonder, joy, and compassion.

A picture of Heater Dorfman
Heather Dorfman, LMSW (she/her) is a Certified Forest Therapy Guide and founder of Rose and Cedar Forest Therapy. After many years of supporting children, youth, and adults who are grieving or in crisis, Heather now partners with the natural world to offer Forest Therapy - a gentle, accessible, supportive and trauma-sensitive practice. In addition to guiding Forest Therapy, Heather offers organizational consulting and training, and is an adjunct professor of social work. In all of these realms, Heather works for a world of liberation, and for the thriving and connection of all beings.
Heather Burns from Temenos Rising
Dr. Heather Burns (she/her) is the director of Alderroot Healing and Renewal, where she is a  holistic healing guide and intuitive mentor. She designs transformative experiences that invite whole person learning and healing, connecting people to their deepest selves, to each other, and to the living earth in meaningful ways. Heather holds space for reconnecting to ways of being that honor trust, wisdom, intuition, embodiment, joy, rest, and groundedness.

Heather has been a leader and tenured professor in higher education for many years and has taught and published extensively on many topics including: sustainability education, collaborative leadership, holistic self-care, self-compassion, eco-spiritual & transformative teaching and learning, ecological design, and deep ecology. Her new book, published in 2024, is Transformative Sustainability Pedagogy: Designing and facilitating eco-spiritual learning. Heather is also a Forest Therapy Guide, a Permaculture Designer, a Reiki Master and Tarot reader who enjoys supporting healing through intuition, energy work, and invitations that connect us to our more than human kin.