Washington - In my bare feet, out in the forest, under a soaring canopy of western red cedars, Sitka spruce and vine maples wrapped in beards of moss, I was trying hard to “fox walk” as we'd been taught — carefully shifting my weight from one foot to the ball of the other and stepping gingerly, in order to move soundlessly and blend in with my surroundings.
Not that I'd fool any fox trotting nearby with my bright blue jacket, Halloween orange shirt and crackling joints.
Maybe I was trying a little too hard.
“You should have seen your face!” my friend, Meg said later, bursting out in laughter. “You had this deep frown of concentration. I wanted to shout out not to take it all so seriously!”
Meg and I had gone “forest bathing” with about a dozen other people on 40 acres of wilderness dubbed Linne Doran, or The Pond of the Otter in Gaelic, in the foothills of the Duvall Mountains just north of Seattle. I had come to report and write a story on this new US fad that started in Japan, where tech-weary souls attempt to soothe themselves in the woods through a practice known as Shinrin-yoku.
Meg, one of my oldest and truest friends and always a few steps ahead of me, had come with me just because it sounded fun.
Ironically enough, the forest bathing, or “forest therapy” movement is taking off in a big way in Silicon Valley, where the US Shinrin-yoku organisation is based, and here, in the Silicon Rainforest, home to Microsoft, Amazon and a host of other high-tech companies, where the Wilderness Awareness School is starting this new day-long “Unplug and Recharge in Nature” program we were attending for stressed-out, plugged-in, tech-addicted people to find calm.
I knew it was a good story because I was looking for the same thing myself.
Before turning off our phones and venturing out into the woods to find a “sit spot” to just pay attention to what was happening around us in the world beyond the digital, our instructor, Warren Moon, executive director of the school, likened our modern addiction to technology to being caught in a spider's web. A spider injects its prey with poison, which doesn't kill, but merely immobilises. The heart still beats as the spider feeds. “Just like a plugged-in lifestyle lulls you into a kind of waking sleep,” Moon said.
I've been struggling with that waking sleep. I can get lost for hours working on a computer, exchanging emails, trying to clean out the inbox and going on wild Internet goose chases. In a kind of tech trance, I've come to family dinners late, chosen to go back on line rather than take a walk with my husband, even listened with half an ear to my children, impatient to get back to whatever was calling in the virtual world.
In the past few years, my relationship with technology has changed utterly, and not for the better, as journalism has gone digital. The worth of our stories is judged more and more by the digital traffic we drive, and the pressure to become a “brand” with a big and growing social media following has intensified.
I don't argue with the goals. In a world disrupted by technology, legacy media, like anything in nature, must adapt or die. And, truly, the point of telling any story is to share it. Sharing stories widely helps us understand our world, makes apparent what binds us together as humans when it's so easy to forget, and has the power to change things for the better.
But I come from an era when the story, not the storyteller, or the storyteller's brand, was paramount. When tooting your own horn was unseemly at best, and crassly self-promotional at worst. So I'm an uncomfortable and awkward latecomer to social media.
I've grudgingly learned to respect how Twitter and Facebook and other mediums can connect you to people, stories, data, research, wonder, awe and whole new worlds of fascination within seconds. Though I'm not proud to admit it, there have been days when I've almost obsessively checked social media, like an unconscious tic in the hopes that the “likes” and “shares,” friend requests and “follows” will keep ticking up and prove I'm a worthwhile brand.
When you add up all the little interruptions, I've no doubt lost hours that would be better spent reporting, thinking, writing or with flesh and blood friends and family.
I know better. I've read the productivity and happiness research that shows you do better work and you feel better about life when you create concentrated time to work, and limit not only the time you spend on social media, but also the number of times in the day you check it. And on good days, I do that. But the days aren't always good, nor am I.
In the forest, Warren Moon told us that sometimes, we go into the woods to find ourselves, and our “original instructions” that are so easy to lose as wed seek to live up to the ideal Facebook images streaming through our phones. He asked us to just watch and see if the forest offered any “medicine,” or lessons, as we bathed.
In the morning, as Meg relaxed and let her imagination wander, seeing shapes in the trees, and swept away in a peaceful sense of timelessness, I'd been trying too hard, frowning in concentration to get forest bathing “right.”
In the afternoon, I fox-walked to a different “sit spot” farther off the path in a patch of sunlight. Suddenly exhausted, I lay down on my back on a bed of dead leaves and soft, loamy soil. A slight breeze exhaled through the quiet woods. I watched the pine trees wave soundlessly in the breeze and listened to the light patter as their needles fell onto the vine maple leaves beneath them.
I drifted in and out of sleep, startled awake now and again by the buzzing of a fly near my ear. Looking up into the vine maples, lit electric by the afternoon sun, I noticed one leaf on a slender branch flailing nonstop, awkwardly, almost wildly in the breeze, as if it were saying, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” Keep that attention-seeking up, I thought to myself, and you'll be the first to fall from the branch.
I smiled, ruefully, in recognition.Maybe I'll need more than two 20-minute forest baths to shake off this wild technology panic, to tear myself out of that familiar waking sleep state, I thought. I shifted on the slowly decaying pile of fallen leaves. Like anything in life, I know I have to adapt or die. To find a way to connect, to share, to friend and to like in my own way, to find the joy and lightness in the virtual world. And to know when it's time to power down and go for a walk in the real one. Perhaps, I thought as my eyelids again grew heavy and my frown eased, if I keep coming back to the woods, I can begin to learn how to live better in both.
* Schulte is a former staff writer at The Washington Post who now works at the New America Foundation, where she will be researching and fostering policies that she hopes will help people live well-balanced lives.
Tech workers are turning to the Japanese practice of 'forest bathing' to unplug
Before they were to find a “sit spot” in the forest, resisting the urge to check their phones and just pay attention to the nature around them, before they played games under soaring western red cedars like “blindfolded ninja” to sharpen their senses, a group of stressed-out workers who spend most of their days inside, tethered to their devices, faced the toughest challenge of the day.
Turning those devices off.
The group of about a dozen had signed up for the first-ever “Unplug and Recharge in Nature” day organised by the Wilderness Awareness School on 40 acres of forested land just outside the high-tech corridor that is home to Microsoft, Amazon and a host of other high-tech companies. They'd come to the woods, many said, because after spending so much of their time in the addictive and information-loaded virtual world, they felt a need to reconnect with the real one.
One worker said he is barraged by 10 000 emails a day. Another said he routinely spends as much as 18 hours straight online. They've seen technology both make their lives easier and more difficult, they said, enabling them to connect and driving a wedge between them and those they love.
The group is part of a small but growing movement seeking to counter the noise, distraction and pull of the virtual world by learning to sit still and pay attention in the natural one. It's called “forest bathing.”
The practice originated in Japan the early 1980s, where it's called Shinrin-yoku. And it has been gaining ground in the United States, where recent studies have found that people spend as much as five to seven hours a day in front of screens and check their smartphones several times an hour — some almost incessantly.
A US Shinrin-yoku organisation is now based in Santa Rosa, Calif. More nature retreats, such as Earthwalk Ways in Fredericksburg, Va., offer “forest therapy.” And as research is beginning to show that “bathing” in the natural world is associated with lower stress levels, a boost to natural killer cells in the immune system, better mood, self-esteem, physical fitness, memory, attention and creativity, among other benefits, some psychologists are beginning to offer “eco therapy.” Doctors, among them Robert Zarr, a pediatrician at Unity Health Care in the District, and “physician champion” of DC Parks Rx, are even prescribing time outside rather than pills.
“It's kind of funny that we have to have a 'fad' to get us to do what humans have always done — go outside,” said Warren Moon, executive director of the Wilderness Awareness School and leader of the day's forest bathing activities. But, he readily admitted to the group, he'd organised the day because he needed it, too.
The 20-year-old wilderness school caters primarily to children to stave off what some call “nature deficit disorder” as fewer and fewer children have unstructured playtime outdoors. But, Moon said, the school began hearing from parents and adults that they needed time outside, too.
“We're targeting the modern high-tech worker, or someone who's always plugged in and wants to counterbalance that fast-paced, stressed-out lifestyle,” said Moon, a former mechanical engineer. “I struggle with it as well. I run a wilderness school and I'm on the computer most of the day.”
After joking halfheartedly about how cool it would be to post on social media about their experiences — “We could use 'hashtag forest bathing!' “ said one — the group headed outside to loosen their limbs and learn how to use a wider range of vision, called “owl eyes,” to observe the natural world. Some removed their shoes and, on the soft forest floor strewn with pine needles, learned to slowly transfer their weight from one foot to the ball of the other in order to walk quietly, “like a fox.”
Although Moon suggested wearing browns and greens to blend in, Heather Fitzpatrick headed toward her forest “sit spot” in a bright magenta jacket. The assignment was to wander through the forest and find a place to sit and “bathe,” or just pay attention to the surroundings, until Moon called the group back in 20 minutes with a crow call.
Fitzpatrick, a management consultant, who has been “110 percent connected” while working 60- to 70-hour weeks, including weekends, sat under a canopy of vine maples, with moss-covered branches and pointed leaves lit electric green by the morning sun.
At first, she worried she wasn't doing it right, as if forest bathing were another technique to learn. Then, she resisted the urge to itch — she'd broken out in stress-related hives along her forearms again. Then she began thinking of all the things she had to do — for work, for her clients, for her two kids, for the nonprofit groups she advises, for the Girl Scout troop she leads. She instinctively kept reaching for her phone, because e-mailing notes to herself is how she tries to remember everything.
Then a leaf floated lazily down in front of her. “It scared the hell out of me,” Fitzpatrick later told the group. “I'd been so lost in my thoughts I didn't even notice it.”
Walking along the forest path, Michele Martaus, 36, who relies on e-mail and online scheduling for her vocal coaching business, said she came to the day in the woods to get more distance from technology. “With the Web, it's all about what you know, so you always feel 'less than,' “ she said. “Out here, you recognize how small you are, but also how you're an integral part of it all. With technology, you always have to have the answer. Here, it's okay not to know. To wonder.”
Martaus, who moved to the Seattle area in 2014 precisely to be closer to nature, sees it as “absolutely beautiful” when the Web connects people during disasters or through such tumultuous events as the Arab Spring. But she's seen that same connectivity lead to disconnection in life. “Good God, Tinder,” she said of the popular dating app that she said her long-term former boyfriend was addicted to. “That's why we broke up.”
As they foraged for lunch — not in the forest, but in the school kitchen — many reflected that they didn't want to rid technology from their lives. They just didn't want technology to so dominate them anymore. “This is the career I've chosen,” said Nick Tomczek, 36, a “super plugged-in” IT consultant. “I just need to balance the inability to step away from it.”
Don DeVange, 34, a web developer who runs a marketing firm, doesn't want he and his wife to keep catching each other on their phones when they're with their 11-month-old daughter. “We don't want her to think what's on the screen is more important to us than she is.” Still, in the forest, he found himself imaging the layers of the forest canopy as the layers of a Web program.
Jen Ruch, 33, who finds herself indoors and online more than she'd like in her work for the Audubon Society, dragged her husband, Clint, along to forest bathe to get away from the technology that has become “incessant, invasive and impossible to turn off.” Clint works in cybersecurity, doesn't use social media and wouldn't give his full name because he carefully guards his online personal information. At work, he juggles 10,000 incoming e-mails a day, and for fun, he plays video games. He studies human-computer interaction. “I understand the grip technology has on people. We tend to sit down on the computer and just go mindless,” he said. Even he realises that when he's spent too much time online his thinking gets “cloudy.”
So, after a day of forest bathing, walking softly, learning about medicine wheels, patterns in nature and life cycles, watching spiders weave webs, listening to the songs of nuthatches, the squawk of jays and the annoyingly unrelenting chirruping of one really high-strung squirrel, were they all itching to get back online?
“I'm itching to get back to my sit spot,” said videographer Debra Bouchegnies one, who found herself fascinated by a spider spinning a web that she'd failed to notice until her “bath time” was nearly over. Another commented on how peaceful it was not to have to know what time it was all day. Clint said he found the experience “humbling.” “It makes you realise how little control you have.” Heather Fitzpatrick said she felt relaxed for the first time in months. And Michele Martaus marvelled, “I feel like I'm seeing things for the first time.”
Moon suggested they find “sit spots” in nature near their homes, even in their own back yards, and sit and pay attention at different times of day, and in different seasons of the year.
As the group brushed the leaves and pine needles from their clothes, put shoes back on and readied to leave, Moon's assistant, Kyle Koch, a former software engineer-turned-outreach coordinator for the wilderness school gave them a farewell warning: “Know that you're going back to the plastic world,” he said. “I encourage you to hold onto this feeling as long as you can, before you hit the power button.”
The Washington Post