Transformational Forest Bathing: A Window to the Otherworld

What in the US we call “Forest Bathing” is typically described as an ancient Japanese practice called Shinrin Yoku, but it’s roots are much broader than that. People from animistic cultures around the world have, for thousands of years, engaged in a variety of similar nature-based practices. Buddha became enlightened under a Bodhi tree, Jesus and Mohammed took to the desert, Sufi and Christian mystics, all Native American nations and many other indigenous nations from around the world go into nature to be in communication with the Sacred. I am writing from the perspective of Celtic mysticism as that is the one most familiar to me.

These cultures share many similar beliefs. One key common concept is that humans are not the only sentient beings to inhabit the planet, in fact, that all forms of life are sentient in some way including animals, plants, fungus, stones, elements (water, air, fire, earth) and the planet itself. This is not to say that stones have the same form of consciousness as humans or humans have the same form of consciousness as trees but that all life forms have some form of consciousness, they are alive; Spirit, the Sacred moves through them.

This is a worldview that has fallen out of favor in the Western world in the last 500 years or so as the dominant paradigm of materialism has taken over. The dominant narrative holds that animism is “primitive” and “unscientific” and so it is essentially dismissed. Materialism states that only matter, that can be measured by our instruments, exists. This materialistic framework has no way of accounting for human consciousness including our lived experience, our thoughts, emotions and dreams never mind such phenomena as telepathy and communication with the dead.

Consciousness is a problem for the materialistic worldview and it’s study has been sidelined from major scientific institutions and funding sources for hundreds of years. The study of, and acknowledgment that we are indeed, conscious continues to poke a large hole in the thin veil of materialism that the institution of science keeps trying to pull across the world. From this place it is impossible for mainstream science to even entertain the concepts of animism, so it is dismissed and ridiculed.

Meanwhile the lived experience of us humans, including the staunchest materialists, is that we are indeed conscious, that we have a inner life of emotion, imagination, dreams and experiences that is not made of matter and cannot be measured by our instruments. Anyone who has ever interacted with an animal knows in their bones that they are conscious. Children naturally exist in a world of talking trees and animals until it is socialized out of them and they start to think it is “childish” and they should grow up.

Take a moment to contemplate the possible social, environmental and spiritual consequences of this massive shift in worldview over the last 500 years or so.

Image by Tanya Dahlin on Pixabay

Celtic mysticism acknowledges two worlds. One is this world of stones, water, trees, goats, humans and everything we can detect with our five physical senses; the “seen” world. This world exists within the Otherworld, the “unseen” world, the world of Spirit, spirits of the stones, water, trees, goats, humans and so on. What happens in the Otherworld is just as important as what happens in this world. An old Irish proverb goes as far as to tell us, “The problems of this world can only be solved in the Otherworld, and the problems of the Otherworld can only be solved in this world.”

In this framework life is seen as a continuous flow, an exchange of information between the seen and the unseen. For humans this can look many ways including making offerings to the unseen, receiving guidance from the beings of the Otherworld, offering prayers and gratitude, reading the signs and omens from the Otherworld to know how to act in this world. A continual weaving back and forth of Spirit and Matter, of the Sacred and the Mundane, of the seen and unseen.

The natural world, the more-than-human world is seen as a portal to the Otherworld for humans. Celtic peoples traditionally performed their ceremonies outdoors, often in groves of trees, in constructed stone circles, by lakes, wells, springs and rivers or on hillsides and mountain tops. The enclosure of these sacred sites in Northern Europe only began as Christianity spread north and churches we built, often directly on top of the old sacred sites.

As we have moved away from this ancient worldview and into the world dictated by materialism, most of us have lost the ability to perceive and be in communication with the Otherworld.

If you don’t believe it exists there’s no point being in touch with it.

The ceremonies we (I’m referring to Celtic peoples) used to use as portals to the Otherworld are now no longer easily found and the senses we use to be in touch with the Otherworld have atrophied like unused muscles.

Those senses are still there waiting for a workout. As for the ceremonies, many of the specifics may have been lost over the centuries but some of the key elements remain, waiting for us to craft new ceremonies for our communication with the Sacred.

Transformational Forest Bathing, as I practice it, is a training in opening up these senses so we can be in touch with the Otherworld. It is practice in dropping the hubris of believing we humans are the only sentient beings on the planet, of making known our intention to be in touch with the unseen and of opening up our perception to be able to hear what we are being told, what we desperately need to hear.

I grew up on a hill farm in Scotland running around the vast fields my senses wide open to the Otherworld without any understanding of what I was doing, no language for it and no social context in which to share it. I then went on to be trained as a scientist. I have a PhD in Psychology which many “hard” scientist would discount as “science” but nonetheless all those years of schooling indoctrinated me into the dominant, materialistic dogma of modern science. I have since then come around the spiral, this time with new information and life experience to again spending my days roaming through the natural world (now a forest in the Southern Appalachian mountains) in communication with the Sacred.

The Transformational Forest Bathing afternoons are one way I offer this medicine to others so you can experience, for a few hours, what it is like to live in both worlds. At the end you then choose to continue that practice or drop it and return to the dominant narrative. The choice is yours, I’m simply holding open the door for you to peek in.