Shinrin-Yoku: The Practice of Forest Bathing

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 4 June 2026 · Updated 29 October 2026

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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.

What is forest bathing (shinrin-yoku)?

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.

Where forest bathing actually comes from

The term shinrin-yoku was coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, then Director of the Japanese Forestry Agency, part of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Park and colleagues, 2010, credit the term to the ministry itself). 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 just over 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. Some of the best-known work comes from Dr Qing Li of Nippon Medical School, one of the researchers in a field Japanese scientists call “forest medicine.”

In a 2010 review, Li summarised three small studies by his group, begun in 2005, in which Japanese adults (12 men, then another 12 men, then 13 female nurses) took three-day, two-night forest trips, with blood and urine sampled during and after the trips and compared with samples from a normal working day. On the forest days the activity and number of natural killer (NK) cells — white blood cells that can kill virus-infected and tumour cells — were significantly higher, and urinary adrenaline, a stress marker, was lower, in both the men and the women. In the second group of men the raised NK activity was still there at the check 30 days after the trip, which led Li to suggest that a forest trip once a month might sustain it; in the nurses it was reported as lasting more than 7 days. A tourist trip to a city, taken by 11 of the same men, produced no such rise.

Why might a forest do this? One hypothesis points to phytoncides — airborne, volatile compounds with antimicrobial properties that trees release. Li’s group detected phytoncides such as alpha-pinene and beta-pinene in forest air but almost none in city air, and suggested that they, along with lower levels of stress hormones, may partly explain the rise in NK activity. Other studies report lower cortisol, lower blood pressure, and a tilt toward the body’s “rest-and-digest” nervous system: in field experiments in 24 Japanese forests, Park and colleagues (2010) had 280 male university students (average age about 22) walk for about a quarter of an hour and then view the scenery for about as long, and found lower salivary cortisol, pulse rate and blood pressure and greater parasympathetic activity than in city settings.

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.