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How the ancient Japanese practice of Shinrin Yoku, and the tree we already carry inside us, can heal a sensitive nervous system from the inside out.
I was crouched in the moss at the edge of a forest last week, watching a tiny juvenile eastern newt make her way across the forest floor toward the base of a tree. She started climbing it in the cutest and courageous way. I named her Frida. And without thinking, I whispered to her: you can do it.
She did not need me. She was already climbing. But something in me needed to say it out loud, because in that moment, I was not only talking to her.
I have spent years studying the nervous system, first as a neuroscientist and then as a Certified Forest Therapy Guide and Yoga Nidra teacher. And what the forest keeps teaching me, in ways that no science laboratory ever quite could, is that we are not separate from nature. We are exquisitely wired for it. Especially those of us whose nervous systems feel everything a little more deeply than most.
This is what I want to explore together: why the forest is not just a nice place to walk, but a biological homecoming for sensitive nervous systems. And why even closing our eyes and imagining a tree can offer our bodies something remarkably close to the real thing.
Shinrin Yoku (forest bathing) is a Japanese practice that refers to the experience of immersing yourself in the atmosphere of a forest and the healing molecules in the forest aerosol. It is not just being in a forest, it is walking slowly, noticing with all senses, allowing them to soften and receive.
Shinrin Yoku was born from a very modern ache. In 1982, Tomohide Akiyama, then director of Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, gave the practice its name and launched it as a national health initiative. Japan was knee-deep in its technology boom, and a new kind of exhaustion was spreading through its workforce, what came to be called technostress. Akiyama saw an opportunity to address both a public health crisis and the urgent need to protect the country’s vanishing woodlands by giving people a reason to return to them.
The first official forest bath took place on July 29, 1982, in the Akazawa Shizenryo Forest of Nagano Prefecture.
What began as a government health program would go on to become one of the most studied nature-based therapies in the world.
Decades of research have shown something remarkable. Time spent among trees measurably lowers cortisol, reduces blood pressure, slows heart rate, and shifts the nervous system away from sympathetic bracing and toward parasympathetic ease. Trees release compounds called phytoncides, and breathing them in has been shown to increase immune system activity and lower stress.
For a highly sensitive nervous system (one that processes sensory and emotional information more deeply than the baseline) this effect is not subtle.
It is profound.
The forest is special because it is one of those rare containers that does not ask anything of us. It does not require performance or productivity. It is not loud. It simply holds us, the way a canopy holds shade for everything beneath it.
The relationship between sensitivity and nature is not incidental. It is foundational. And I think it is worth going a little deeper into why.
As sensitive people, our nervous systems are constantly absorbing and processing far more information than most. Bright car lights, city noises, notification sounds, even the emotional residue of other people. All of it arrives at once, and our systems, exquisitely attuned as they are, take in nearly everything.
This is not a flaw.
It is simply a great deal of incoming information for one nervous system to metabolize every minute and every day.
A forest is different. The sensory information there is rich, but it is coherent. Birdsong follows a pattern our bodies recognize from millions of years of evolution. Light filtering through leaves moves slowly and rhythmically rather than flickering or demanding attention. The temperature shifts gently rather than abruptly. Even the silence in a forest is rarely complete silence. It is a gentle hum that our nervous systems can process without immediately reacting.
In other words, the forest does not overstimulate a sensitive nervous system the way modern environments often do, because nothing in it is fighting for our attention. Everything simply is, at its own unhurried rhythm, and we can finally match that pace instead of constantly outrunning it.
Research on highly sensitive people specifically has shown that we tend to show even stronger physiological and emotional responses to natural environments than the general population, both in terms of stress reduction and reported feelings of restoration. This means that a system that takes in more background noise than average can also perceive more deeply the secret songs of the forest. The same depth of processing that makes a loud restaurant exhausting is what makes a quiet grove of trees feel almost sacred.
Our sensitivity is not a liability in nature. It becomes, instead, the very thing that allows us to receive what the forest is offering at a depth most people never reach.
This is why I so often say that highly sensitive people are not poorly suited to this world. We are, in many ways, still wired for a world with more trees in it.
The Inner Tree
Something I have come to understand deeply, both through my training as a neuroscientist and as a Yoga Nidra teacher, is that the tree is not only something we visit. It is something we already carry inside us.
In the Japanese animist tradition, there is a beautiful idea that everything holds a soul, and that we are each the keeper of our own inner tree. Our inner tree is our body, our mind, our purpose moving through this particular life. Roots that draw nourishment from what is ancient and stable within us. A trunk that bends with the wind without losing its centre. A canopy that filters what reaches us, letting in what nourishes, and offering protection from what overwhelms.
Being the keeper of our inner tree is both a responsibility and a form of agency. It means recognizing that no one else can tend our roots for us, and also that we have always had the capacity to do so.
I thought of Frida climbing toward the bark. She was not looking around. She was not asking permission. She was simply moving toward something rooted and old. Toward the tree.
We are doing the same thing, every time we choose to slow down.
Why Imagination Alone Can Change Our Nervous Systems
Here is something I find genuinely remarkable, and it is at the heart of every Yoga Nidra journey I guide.
Yoga Nidra (yogic sleep) is an ancient guided rest practice that brings the body into deep restoration while the mind remains softly, quietly aware.
Neuroscience has shown that the brain does not always distinguish clearly between a vividly imagined experience and a lived one. When we close our eyes and genuinely imagine standing beneath a tree (e.g. feeling bark beneath our palms, hearing wind move through leaves) our nervous systems respond with many of the same physiological shifts we would experience in an actual forest. Heart rate can slow. Breath can deepen. The vagus nerve, which governs the shift between alertness and rest, can begin to downshift.
This is why guided imagery is not a lesser substitute for nature. It is its own legitimate gateway into nervous system regulation, one that is available to us at any hour, in any season, regardless of where our feet happen to be standing.
In my Yoga Nidra journeys, I often guide students into forests that exist nowhere but in the felt sense of the body. An emerald cave, a canopy filtering golden light, a tree whose roots reach as deep as the years we have lived, a singing ocean. These are not just fantasies. Imagination is one of the most powerful healing modalities, bringing us into a liminal space, like a meditation, using the brain’s own capacity for embodied imagination as medicine.
A Small Practice to Try Together
Find a comfortable position, or simply pause wherever you are.
Close the eyes, if that feels comfortable, or soften the gaze toward the floor.
Imagine a tree. Any tree. Perhaps one from childhood, perhaps one never actually seen—simply whatever surfaces.
Notice its roots first, reaching down into the soft and nourishing earth. Notice the trunk, solid and breathing. Notice the canopy above, filtering sunbeams into sparkling patterns.
Take three slow breaths here. On each inhale, sense the drawing of nourishing energy up from the ground. On each exhale, feel the breath moving down through an invisible trunk within, down into roots that have always been there, waiting.
We are the keepers of this tree. We always have been. And we can bring it with us every single day.
What a Salamander Taught me about being Highly Sensitive
Watching Frida climb toward the bark that afternoon, I understood something I had been trying to put into words for a long time. Our nervous systems are not broken. They are not too sensitive for this world. They are climbing, slowly and deliberately, toward something ancient and rooted that they have always known was there.
Whether we are standing in an actual forest, or sitting at a kitchen table with a tree held only in our imagination, our nervous systems are capable of receiving the same fundamental message: we are rooted. We are held. We can be sovereign.
The tree is already inside us. We just have to remember to tend it.
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