Become a Consultant

As a Forest Therapy Guide, you understand that the right setting can transform an ordinary walk into a profound journey of connection and healing. Now, imagine taking your experience and knowledge even further by becoming an ANFT Certification Consultant. In this role, you will help create and curate Forest Therapy trails, spaces, and places that are intentionally designed and recognized for their ability to support deep, immersive forest bathing experiences.

As an ANFT Certification Consultant, you will collaborate with land managers to develop environments that are safe, accessible, and deeply aligned with the principles of Forest Therapy. Your expertise will ensure these spaces become more than just trails – they become sanctuaries for connection, reflection, and reciprocity.

Join us in expanding ANFT’s global network of certified Forest Therapy trails, upholding the integrity of this practice while elevating the work of guides like you. Take the next step in your journey and help create spaces where connection thrives.

What Is an ANFT Trail Certification Consultant and what do they do?

ANFT Certification Consultants are experienced forest therapy guides who have expanded their expertise beyond guiding to play a vital role in shaping landscapes that foster deep connection with nature. These professionals work closely with land managers to identify, assess, and enhance spaces, ensuring they support immersive and relational forest therapy experiences.

As a Certification Consultant, you become a trusted advisor in curating meaningful forest therapy environments. You provide expert guidance on optimizing natural spaces – enhancing their safety, accessibility, and capacity to invite connection. Through detailed assessments, documentation, and tailored recommendations, you help transform trails and landscapes into intentional spaces for healing and reflection.

Additionally, you support land managers by developing Forest Therapy invitations, which can be integrated into signage and self-guided materials. This ensures that even in the absence of a guide, visitors can engage in meaningful, self-led nature experiences.

By becoming an ANFT Certification Consultant, you expand your professional offerings while contributing to a growing network of certified forest therapy locations worldwide. This role allows you to deepen the global practice of forest therapy, ensuring that more people have access to spaces intentionally designed for connection and restoration.

If you’re passionate about creating pathways for connection and want to elevate your impact, consider becoming an ANFT TSP Certification Consultant today!

Certification Pathway

Earn Your Certification as an ANFT Trails Consultant

Who This Course is For? This course is designed for Forest Therapy Guides who wish to expand their professional practice by becoming ANFT Certification Consultants. Through this training, you will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to support and guide land managers and organizations through the process of certifying trails, spaces, and places as ANFT Certified Forest Therapy Locations. If you are passionate about creating immersive, healing natural spaces and wish to play an active role in curating and refining these spaces, this course is for you.

This course is open to:

- ANFT Certified Guides: Forest Therapy Guides who have completed guide training (immersion does not need to be completed yet).
- Forest Therapy Guides trained by an ANFT approved organization.
- Forest Bathing Guides trained by a non-approved organization who have also completed the ANFT Relational Forest Therapy Course.

Course Description

The ANFT Certification Consultant Course equips experienced Forest Therapy Guides with the expertise to support land managers and organizations in curating and enhancing intentional spaces for healing and nature connection.

This certification enables you to professionally evaluate, assess, and consult with land managers and organizations seeking Forest Therapy Trail, Space, or Place designation, ensuring that these environments are optimized for deep sensory engagement, ease of access, safety, and ecological integrity.

Key Learning Areas:

A comprehensive framework for site assessment, including safety, existing design elements, ease of access, ecosystem health, and management considerations.
Tools for collaborating effectively with land managers and organizations seeking certification.
Hands-on opportunities to apply learning through real-world site evaluations, proposals, and recommendations.
A structured Keystone Project, where participants complete a full site assessment, develop recommendations, and prepare a proposal—the first entry in their certification consulting portfolio.
Access to a robust support community of other consultants and mentors, with monthly meetings to discuss projects, ideas, and opportunities.
Optional Annual Immersion – an opportunity to meet other consultants, attend workshops, and deepen your practice.

Why This Matters

At a time when environmental preservation and human-nature connection are more crucial than ever, ANFT Certification Consultants play a key role in designing and advocating for spaces that support well-being and ecological stewardship, while helping to support experiences that are accessible, immersive, and intentional.

Through this course, you will develop the ability to evaluate and enhance the therapeutic potential of natural landscapes, ensuring that designated Forest Therapy Trails provide safe, enriching, and meaningful experiences for all who engage with them.

What’s Included in This Self-Paced Course

This flexible, self-paced course blends theory, experiential learning, and practical application:

Video Lessons: Engaging, short-format videos that allow you to absorb key concepts at your own pace.
Experiential Activities: Deepen your understanding of relational forest therapy and site evaluation through direct experiential exercises.
Guided Assignments: Practical exercises designed to build skills in site assessment, consultation, and certification process navigation.
Downloadable Resources: Access assessment checklists, proposal templates, and reference materials to support your consulting work.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this course, you will have a foundational understanding of:

The ANFT Trail, Space, and Place (TSP) Certification Process – Learn the key assessment criteria and procedural steps for certifying trails, spaces, and places.
Relational Forest Therapy Principles – Understand how the land itself plays an active role in Forest Therapy and how to design experiences that foster deep nature connection.
Site Assessment & Consultation Best Practices – Develop the skills to evaluate ease of access, site safety, overall ecological health, and opportunities for deepening sensory immersion within natural landscape settings of all types.
How to Curate Spaces for Deeper Sensory Engagement – Learn how to refine landscapes to invite presence, mindfulness, and deep connection.
How Invitations Influence the Experience – Explore best practices for designing invitations and strategically placing interpretive signage to guide participants’ experiences.
How to Guide Land Managers & Organizations – Develop skills in collaborating with organizations, conservation groups, and private landowners to support the certification process.
Creating a Certification Consulting Portfolio – Gain hands-on experience with site assessments, recommendations, and proposals, forming the foundation of your consulting practice.

What Does a Certification Consultant Do?

In a time of climate crisis and ecological disconnection, the need for intentional healing spaces has never been more urgent. Forest Therapy Trails are more than just pathways – they are carefully designed experiences that invite people into deeper relationships with nature.

As an ANFT Certification Consultant, you will:

Assess the ecological, sensory, and structural qualities of landscapes to determine their readiness for Forest Therapy Certification.
Collaborate with land managers to enhance ease of access, address any safety concerns or awarenesses, and identify and enhance immersive qualities of trails.
Help design and refine natural spaces to create experiences that promote well-being, reciprocity, and connection with the land.
Advocate for nature-based healing spaces at a time when they are needed most.

More than a certification process, this work is about re-envisioning our connection with the land. Forest Therapy Trails serve as invitations to foster a deeper relationship with the more-than-human world, cultivating a foundation of reciprocity, stewardship, and mutual care.

Expanding Your Impact as an ANFT Certification Consultant

By completing this course, you will:

Expand your guide knowledge and apply it in new ways, broadening your impact beyond guiding.
Earn a new professional certification that sets you apart as a leader in the field of Forest Therapy.
Become part of a growing network of ANFT Certification Consultants, collaborating to create healing spaces worldwide.

Now, more than ever, we must invest in spaces that heal.

Consultant Feature:

Natalia Laverde-Bohórquez

Natalia Laverde-Bohórquez wears many hats. She is a talented conceptual photographer with a BS in Social Communication & Journalism as well as Master’s degrees in both Organizational Communication and Social Anthropology. She is also an ANFT Certified Forest Therapy Guide, ANFT Certification Consultant, and Creator and Director of the Fundación El Bosque y la Niebla. Natalia is dedicated to researching and supporting socio-ecological processes of reconciliation in the (OEMC -UN) and the rehabilitation of La Ilusion nature preserve, where 45 hectares are protected and restored as one of the last pockets of humid Andean forest west of Bogotá.

Today, she takes time from her busy schedule to share the unique insights she has gathered from being involved in the certification process as not only a guide and consultant, but also the land manager. Balancing these loads is no easy feat but Natalia was gracious enough to explain how the process she developed allowed her to achieve success and bring her vision to fruition.

Tell us how you first got involved with certifying trails, spaces & places for ANFT?

I am an ANFT Certified Forest Therapy Guide. In one class, one of the instructors commented about trail certification. The nature preserve that we have, already had some trails but as we are always seeking to improve the spaces to offer the best experience and the best access to conservation areas, it caught our attention not only to certify the preserve but also to offer that service, and contribute to the quality of the experience in Colombia and other countries. That’s why I got certified as a Certification Consultant.

Tell us about the project

Since 2007 my husband and I have been restoring an area of 45 hectares of cloud forest in Colombia, in the Andean region. We have seen how the forest and all its beings have responded positively to our actions and how the vestiges of ancient inhabitants have been left imprinted on the mountainous landscape. Originally, the property had a narrow road that the peasants used to go to the nearest town. Troops from the first civil war in Colombia in 1861 also passed through there, and of course we have also found Muisca indigenous elements left behind. When we arrived, that trail was still visible and was the only way to get to know the preserved cloud forest that was at the top of the mountain, a very steep trail covered with humid Andean jungle. Today it is still preserved but we do not use it much so as not to damage the vegetation. We needed a new path that would allow us to walk across the entire property from side to side.

The old pastures, desertified by potato monoculture and extensive livestock farming, adjacent to the most preserved forest, had the marks of the path that the cattle made to graze on those hills. To make less effort, the cattle climb the slope in a zigzag pattern, leaving the terrain very compacted in their path and without vegetation. We used part of those cattle paths to trace the “senda de reconciliacion”, which is the main two-kilometer trail that crosses the reserve (2008). We let the forest grow on the sides with spontaneous regeneration and seeding, so to build the new trail we did not have to cut down or deforest, it was the opposite: a process of reconversion of the forest around a path.

Not only is that path traveled by us or our guests, camera traps have shown how ocelots, sloths, rabbits, birds, and other animals such as porcupines use that path. They are also part of the history of the area and the preserve La Ilusión, and make their own paths that intersect with ours.

The trail was used for nature hikes but when we started guiding forest therapy walks, we realized that we needed to adapt a section to offer a better experience not only for the client but for the guide.

That’s how it all started.

What has surprised you most about the process?

What has surprised me the most is how a path can offer you a profound experience in just a few meters, and how small details in the place can be decisive in the quality of the experience. A trail can tell stories and be part of the history of a community, it is a encounter place between past and present.

What do you find most challenging about the process? Can you share what your experience was like being both the consultant and the land manager for this project?

In my case, being a Certification Consultant and owner of the property at the same time has required rigor and objectivity. Although I am clear that a Certification Consultant does not build the trails, I think the most challenging thing has been precisely playing with both roles.

My husband has been a key player in the certification process because although he has been in the entire cloud forest restoration process. He has not been directly involved in the construction of the trails, nor in the consulting, so he can give me his point of view, freely and with constructive criticism. I think that being an ANFT Certified Forest Therapy Guide and already having experience guiding on the trails of the preserve has made it easier for me to realize what type of elements are needed in certain areas. On each walk people live the paths in a different way and that is very enriching. Being a forest therapy guide -and an Anthropologist- allows me to translate what the walker experiences and how the spaces can be analyzed under the light of the “embodied space” concept, as Appadurai would say.

Is there anything you learned during the process that would like to share with others interested in becoming an ANFT Certification Consultant?

One of the things that I believe is important is that before starting the certification process for a given trail, you go as a consultant and undergo a guided forest therapy on site, that will give you a deeper perspective of the place. Connecting to or knowing the space, the place or the path from the heart is vital to understanding and respecting the nature and identity of the place.

What else can you tell me about your experience?

A trail is not only the physical space in which a guided forest therapy walk takes place, it is also a liminal and magical space in which people find answers and ask themselves deep questions with the help of the forest or the ecosystem in which they live. So, the consultant must think about the physical elements of the place that make these liminal states possible and somehow reconcile with the sacredness of the spaces to offer the best recommendations.

Do you anticipate supporting and consulting with other land managers that are interested in pursuing certification?

Yeah. I believe that obtaining a certification of this type has to do with high quality standards. My greatest motivation is to help property owners who also do ecosystem conservation find the best ways to navigate their property and understand the ecosystem in which they live to solve the gap between humans and the more-than-human-world.