KATE BAST | nature + forest therapy guide
shinrin-yoku madison
TREE TONIC for BODY MIND SPIRIT
Time in Nature is the best gift
Feeling stressed, burned out, anxious or disconnected?
You need a restorative Shinrin-Yoku, or Forest Bathing, walk.
This gentle guided and immersive experience uniquely activates your senses,
calms the mind, and brings the present moment alive.
Kate Bast, certified nature and forest therapy guide, helps you find stillness, peace, relaxation - and much more through the beautiful and unique practice.
Shinrin-Yoku is about just BE-ingness and connection, with Nature and its myriad health and wellbeing benefits.
Both individual and group walks are available. Visit Book Online to set up a walk or contact me if you have questions.
- Kate Bast
proprietor and certified nature and forest therapy guide
2026 registration links and more events coming soon, including:
Seasonal Walks
Forest Bathing at Olbrich Botanical Gardens
Forest Bathing + Foragaing Natural Resources Foundation
Field Trips
Gift certificates available.
Group and employee wellbeing walks available
Book your company's 2026 employee wellness experiences.
forest bathing + nature connection
What is Shinrin-yoku? In Japanese it means "forest bathing," or immersing oneself in the atmosphere of nature. The Japanese coined the term in the 1980s, but really, connecting with, living with Nature, and being in relationship with Nature is not new to humans. We've just seemed to forget how to do it.
It is not a hike (no cardio!). Nor is it a naturalist walk filled with facts and data, nor psychological therapy nor even mindfulness.
It is meditative. It is a slowing down and experiential noticing, your senses fully activated to drop you into a state of just beingness.
Time in nature increases our creativity and focus, and softens rumination, anxiety and depression.
It is also healing, with plentiful evidence-based research documenting the positive health benefits: lowered pulse rate and blood pressure, decreased stress hormones, increased Natural Killer cell response, improved immune function—and more.
The positive effects last several days.
The forest is the therapist. Nature provides the medicine each of us needs. The guide opens the door.
"We need the tonic of wildness. ...We can have never enough of nature."
—Henry David Thoreau