The Story Behind the Book

Forest bathing was new outside of Japan. In the United States I had started the first organization to bring it to the west, as “Relational Forest Therapy.” By 2015 the company I founded, ANFT, had already been invited to train groups of guides internationally.

I started getting calls from publishers and literary agents. They had the same invitation: will you write a book on Forest Bathing. One of them stood out. Christine, an editor at RedWheel/Weiser, told me that in the small world of book publishing she was aware that there were already several titles on the topic in the works. “If you contract with us, I promise yours will be the first one published in English.”

The first one. There is value in that. I agreed. Paperwork was signed. And I was given a six-week deadline for submitting my manuscript.

For three of those weeks I was in Japan. It was October of 2017. This was my first of what would be many visits to Japan. I visited the Forest Therapy roads at Okutama, Shinano Town, Akasawa. I met guides and at Chiba University the researcher Miyazaki Yoshifumi and his team. In his lab he wired me and my three companions to machines, and we became experimental subjects. Three weeks passed quickly. I wrote not a word. I simply experienced, absorbed, learned.

Meanwhile, the Tubbs Fire was raging in Sonoma County, California, where I lived. It burned on Sonoma Mountain where my home was. It was impossible to get information about what homes had burned and what had survived. My wife and I arrived home and were met by National Guard at the turn on the road up the mountain. Showed our ID and were permitted through. Houses on our street were burned, but ours was intact.

Over the next three weeks, the book poured out of me easily. Sitting in a café, fueled by coffee, I simply documented the system that I had developed before going to Japan. What is in this book is not a copy of what is practiced as forest bathing in Japan. But it honors that tradition, recognizing it as an essential strand of the lineages of relational forest therapy.

The book is called “Your Guide to Forest Bathing,” a title chosen by the publisher. But I have always felt the title misses much of the message. It is about forest bathing, but about much more than that.

At a conference in Portugal a young woman ran up to me, visibly excited. She said, gratefully, “Your book has changed the way I do my work.” What is your work, I wondered. Turns out she is a pharmacist who was specializing in Ketamine therapy. Others joined us, all with happy reports about the influence of my book. I would have loved to drill down on what they were telling me; how, exactly, does what is in this book influence ketamine therapy? I can guess, and if I ever see her again I will ask.

In Lithuania at another conference another young woman shyly approached me to ask me to sign her copy of the book. Holding it in my hands, I was surprised to see that almost every page was highlighted, passages underlined, marginal notes inked in abundantly. “Tell me about this copy of your book,” I invited. She said: “My favorite book ever. Means so much to me; I feel like I am in it, it is much my experience in the forest.”

I am telling you these stories because they are meaningful to me. And I hope you will buy the book. I hope that if you were not committed when you began reading this, you are now. And I hope to see you someday, that you will bring me your copy, introduce yourself. And permit me the joy of signing.

— M. Amos Clifford, founder of the Academies of Nature and Forest Therapies