Shinrin-Yoku: The Practice of Forest Bathing

By Tim Yu · Updated 2026-06-04

Shinrin-yoku (森林浴) is a Japanese term that literally means “forest bath” — the practice of spending slow, unhurried, senses-open time immersed in a forest for health and wellbeing. One honest note up front: this is not a Buddhist practice. It is a modern Japanese wellness idea, coined in 1982, that happens to rhyme with Buddhist mindfulness and with Buddhism’s reverence for nature.

The short answer

To “forest bathe” is simply to be in a forest, slowly and attentively, with no goal beyond presence. You walk without a destination, leave the phone behind, and let your senses open to the trees, the light, the sound, and the air. The word comes from Japanese — 森林 (shinrin, “forest”) and 浴 (yoku, “bath”) — and the “bathing” is meant in the sense of soaking in an atmosphere, not getting wet.

It is worth being clear about what shinrin-yoku is and isn’t, because it is frequently mislabelled. It is not an ancient Buddhist or Zen discipline, despite how often it is sold that way. It is a modern, secular, Japanese public-health practice with a precise and recent origin. What it shares with Buddhism is a family resemblance — a way of paying slow, sensory, present-moment attention — and that resemblance is real and worth exploring. But the practice belongs to forestry and wellness, not to the Dharma. (Any unfamiliar terms are in the glossary.)

Where forest bathing actually comes from

The term shinrin-yoku was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, then the director of Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries — the country’s forestry agency. The motive was as much practical as spiritual. Japan in the early 1980s was urbanising fast and living an increasingly high-speed, technology-saturated life, and the agency wanted both to offer city-dwellers a restorative antidote and to encourage people to value, visit, and help preserve the nation’s vast forests. In other words, forest bathing began life partly as a public-health initiative and partly as forest promotion — a government campaign, not a monastic teaching.

That origin matters, because it is the single most common thing people get wrong about shinrin-yoku. You will see it described as a “centuries-old Japanese tradition” or an “ancient Zen practice.” It is neither. The term is barely four decades old. What is old in Japan is a deep cultural intimacy with forests and mountains — woven through Shinto, folk reverence for sacred groves, and yes, the nature-steeped sensibility of Zen. Shinrin-yoku draws on that long affection for the forest. But the named, packaged practice is a modern invention, and honesty about that is part of taking it seriously.

The science: real, but modest

What lifted shinrin-yoku from a national slogan to a global wellness phenomenon was that researchers began to study it — and found measurable effects. The best-known work comes from Dr Qing Li of Nippon Medical School, a leading figure in what Japanese researchers call “forest medicine.”

In a widely cited 2010 study, Li and colleagues took adults on multi-day forest trips and measured their immune markers before and after. They found that forest bathing significantly raised the activity and number of natural killer (NK) cells — a type of white blood cell involved in fighting infection and tumours — and lowered urinary adrenaline, a stress marker. Strikingly, the boost in NK activity lasted more than 30 days after a single trip, which led the researchers to suggest a monthly forest visit might help sustain it. A comparison trip to a city produced no such effect.

Why might a forest do this? One leading hypothesis points to phytoncides — airborne, volatile compounds that trees and plants release, partly as their own defence against insects and microbes. Breathing this forest air, the theory goes, is part of what shifts the body toward a calmer, more resilient state. Other studies report lower cortisol, lower blood pressure, and a tilt toward the body’s “rest-and-digest” nervous system.

Here a note of restraint is owed. This research is genuinely promising but still modest: many studies are small, short, and hard to fully control (you cannot easily blind someone to whether they are in a forest). The effects are real enough to take seriously and more than enough to justify a walk in the woods — but they do not make forest bathing a medical treatment or a cure. The fair summary is the unglamorous one: spending unhurried time in nature appears to be good for body and mind, in measurable ways, and forest bathing is a simple, low-cost way to do it.

How to practise forest bathing

The method is almost comically simple, and that simplicity is the point.

Slow all the way down

Find a quiet patch of woodland — a forest is ideal, but any green, tree-rich place will do. Then slow down past the point that feels normal. There is no distance to cover, no summit to reach, no step count to hit. A forest-bathing “walk” might cover only a few hundred metres in an hour. You are not exercising; you are soaking.

Put the phone away

Leave the phone in your pocket, on silent, or behind altogether. No photos, no podcast, no tracking. The whole value lies in unmediated attention, and a screen is precisely the thing forest bathing is meant to be a rest from.

Let the senses lead

This is the heart of it. Open each sense in turn and let the forest in:

• Sight — the play of light through the canopy, the layers of green, the small movements of branches and insects.
• Sound — leaves, wind, birdsong, your own footsteps, the spaces of quiet between them.
• Smell — soil, bark, leaf litter, rain; the particular scent of a wood (this is the phytoncide-rich air the research points to).
• Touch — the texture of bark, moss, a leaf; cool air on the skin; uneven ground underfoot.
• Taste — even the crispness of the air as you breathe slowly.

Stay an hour or more if you can. Sit for a while. Do nothing in particular — attentively. If the mind wanders, that is fine; gently return it to the senses, the way you would in any practice of attention.

Forest bathing, mindfulness, and the Dharma

If this sounds a lot like meditation, that is no accident — and it is the most useful way to understand the relationship between forest bathing and Buddhism. The technique of shinrin-yoku is essentially applied mindfulness: slow, deliberate, present-moment attention to sensory experience, with the goal-driven, planning mind set aside. A Buddhist practitioner stepping into a forest bath would find the inner gesture deeply familiar.

There is also a genuine resonance with the way Buddhism regards the natural world. The tradition has always located practice in nature — the Buddha is said to have awakened beneath a tree, taught in groves, and died between two trees — and Buddhist reflection on our place within the living world treats nature not as scenery but as kin and teacher. Forest bathing, in its quiet attentiveness, echoes that sensibility.

But resonance is not the same as identity, and this is where care is needed. Shinrin-yoku has no doctrine, no ethics, no goal of awakening, no lineage, and no path beyond wellbeing. It does not ask you to understand suffering or its end. Buddhist mindfulness, by contrast, is one limb of a whole liberative path — a means, ultimately, toward insight and the easing of suffering, not toward a stronger immune system or a calmer afternoon. To collapse the two — to call forest bathing “Buddhist,” or to imagine that a restorative woodland walk is the same thing as Buddhist meditation — does justice to neither.

The honest and generous way to hold it is this: forest bathing is a fine, evidence-touched, modern practice that the Buddhist tradition can warmly recognise without needing to claim. You can forest bathe as pure wellness; you can also bring a meditator’s attention to it and let it deepen. Either way, it sits comfortably in the wider landscape of Eastern-flavoured wisdom that the modern world has drawn on — provided we are clear, as we should be everywhere on this subject, about exactly where it comes from and what it is.