Guided Walks In The Woods At Columbia Springs Help Cure What Ails You

Welcome to the woods. Stand still, close your eyes and open your senses. Imagine your feet growing roots that burrow deep underground. Lie down on the leaves and notice the chill of the ground, the sweep of the sky. Walk slowly and pause to notice mundane miracles that don’t normally demand attention: the roughness of rocks, the softness of moss, the hidden spiderwebs, the tiny stream that flows from nowhere and disappears again. In Japan, this practice has been named “Shinrin-yoku,” which translates as “forest bathing.” It’s not just a sweet sensation in search of a reason; driven by soaring rates of anxiety, depression, diabetes, cancer and other ailments associated with living in concrete jungles, science has begun to explore what happens to the human body when it’s removed from all that and plunged into pure greenery. The positive results are so striking, it might be a little hard to believe them.