What if the goal isn’t to eliminate pain? But to change your relationship with it.
Not by forcing positivity. Not by chasing the next miracle cure. But by learning how to stand in a forest, breathe, and gently step outside the storm long enough to see it clearly.
That’s where mindfulness in the forest becomes powerful. Not as an escape from pain, but as a way to interrupt the pain cycle itself.
Benefits don’t emerge from merely experiencing mindfulness as a state. Instead they happen when we cultivate mindfulness as a personal trait.
Chronic pain is never only physical. It is neurological, emotional, and deeply shaped by our stress response.
This is not to say that you don’t experience actual, real, physical, deep pain. Only that our pain experience can be altered according to how we choose to interpret it. Which is especially important in chronic pain when so often there are no answers or treatments.
Pain feeds on:
Fear of what’s coming next
Hyper-vigilance in the body
Frustration over what we’ve lost
The endless search for a fix
This creates a familiar loop.
Pain → tension → fear → more pain.
Mindfulness, especially when practiced in nature, doesn’t deny this cycle.
It teaches us how to step out of it.
Don’t stress the ‘could haves’, if it should have, it would have.
MINDFULNESS (n):
“The practice of being aware of your body, mind and feelings in your present moment, thought to create a feeling of calm.”
Finding Harmony: In Nature’s Whispering Wisdom
Mindfulness anywhere can help.
Mindfulness in a forest does something more.
Natural environments gently regulate the nervous system without any concentrated effort on our part:
Heart rate slows
Breathing deepens
Muscles soften
The brain shifts from threat mode to restoration mode
Research on shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) shows that time in forests lowers cortisol, reduces blood pressure, and increases parasympathetic nervous system activity (the part of us responsible for rest, repair, and emotional balance.)
In other words, the forest doesn’t erase pain.
It loosens pain’s grip.
Captaining the Currents of Our Existence
Mindfulness helps us understand the waters in which we are swimming.
If you live with chronic pain, the pain is not you.
It is the water around you.
Some days you can float on your back.
Some days you need the survival position.
Some days you just enjoy swimming. (But those days are few and far between.)
Some days you simply tread water and keep breathing.
Mindfulness helps us step just far enough back to see,
This is the water. This is not my identity.
That small shift changes everything.
Untangling Hope: Innovative Lessons for a Brighter Tomorrow
In the podcast Untangle: What Does it Mean to Live a Good, Meaningful Life? Despite the (really) Hard Stuff, philosopher Kieran Setiya reflects on living with chronic pain and the trap many of us fall into. Hoping only for a cure. His story resonates with me. Because it is also my story. Is it yours too?
For years, he moved from doctor to doctor thinking, maybe this one will fix it. When he stopped, something unexpected happened. He felt freedom. Less frustrated. More grounded in how he would actually live his life.
At first, he thought he had rejected hope.
Later, he realized he had simply changed what he hoped for.
Not hope for a magic solution.
Hope for a life that would still feel meaningful. Even if pain remained in the background.
He describes the exhausting seesaw many of us live on:
hope → despair → hope → despair.
And suggests something radical. Getting off the seesaw altogether! That doesn’t mean stop seeing doctors or looking for answers. What it does mean is this.
The real question isn’t:
Should I hope or despair?
It’s,
What is realistic to hope for right now?
Mindfulness in the forest supports exactly this shift. Grounding hope in lived possibility instead of fantasy cures.
Choosing Joy in a Body That Hurts
It’s been said that one person’s joy ride is another person’s panic.
I love riding on the back of my husband’s motorcycle. Joy.
I love sitting at the front of a sailboat as it bounces across the water. Joy.
Someone else might question my sanity.
I don’t like roller coasters that go upside down. Panic.
I have no desire to drive an F1 car. Panic.
I question the sanity of people who enjoy those things. Which made me wonder.
What influences our desires? Our thoughts? Our emotions?
Are we just born joyful or grouchy? And that is how we have to live out our days?
Or do we choose? Can we choose our thoughts, our desires and thereby influence our emotions?
What if, even in a tangled mess of pain, emotions, relationships, and loss, we are allowed to choose joy?
Not reckless joy.
Not denial.
But brave joy.
The kind that says:
I will still step into wonder.
I will still feel exhilaration.
I will still live.
That is what mindfulness in the forest has given me.
I get to decide.
And honestly?
There’s no need for recreational anxiety around here. There’s enough regular anxiety to go around.
Inward Insights: The Wisdom Within
Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.
-Marcus Aurelius
The forest helps us dig. Quietly, gently, without force.
Mindfulness reduces activity in brain networks that amplify pain through rumination and emotional reactivity, lowering perceived suffering even when pain remains.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
-Simone Weil
When we give attention to our own experience. Without judgment. We change how pain lives in us.
Nature’s Cradle: A Forest Therapy Practice
Interrupting the Pain Cycle (7 minutes)
You can do this in a forest, park, or anywhere you can sense the natural world.
1. Arrive (1 minute)
Stand or sit comfortably. Let your eyes soften. Notice three natural textures. Bark, stone, leaf, snow, or water.
2. External Anchor Practice (2 minutes)
Choose one steady element in the landscape. A tree trunk, rock, horizon line, or patch of ground.
Let your attention rest there. Softly.
When your mind drifts toward pain or worry, gently return your awareness to that anchor.
This shifts the nervous system from internal threat scanning to external safety awareness. Especially helpful if breath-focused practices feel uncomfortable.
3. Name the Water (2 minutes)
Silently say:
This is pain. This is not me.
Notice sensation as experience, not identity.
4. Choose Your Stroke (2 minutes)
Ask yourself:
Do I need to float, swim, or rest today?
Let your body answer.
Mindfully Brave
For a long time, I thought mindfulness meant becoming calmer.
What I didn’t expect was that it would make me braver. Braver about feeling, braver about choosing joy, braver about living fully even when my body hurts.
The forest didn’t take away my pain.
It gave me back my choice.
Key Takeaways
Mindfulness in the forest teaches us:
Pain is real. Suffering is optional. Hope doesn’t have to live on a seesaw.
We can step out of the waters long enough to see them clearly. And then choose how to move within them.
Or as one forest therapy guide once said quietly on a trail,
We don’t come to the woods to escape life. We come to remember how to live it.
Trek Into the Frosty Adventure
If this spoke to you, you may also enjoy my post on finding connection through group forest therapy walks, where I explore how shared presence in nature reduces isolation and builds resilience for people living with pain and fatigue.
Faeloria (n):
The beauty that comes from the wounds you thought would destroy you.
Research at a Glance: Why This Works
Bottom line.
Mindfulness in the forest doesn’t cure pain. But it interrupts the feedback loop that keeps pain amplified by fear, stress, and resistance.
For those interested in the research, check out the following links. Let me know what you think in the comments.
1️⃣ Forest environments reduce stress hormones and activate relaxation responses
The 2010 Shinrin-yoku studies show forests lower cortisol, pulse rate, blood pressure, and increase parasympathetic nervous system activity (relaxation response).
A recent systematic review shows forest bathing decreases negative effects and enhances mindfulness and introspection. Key components of emotional regulation and pain resilience.
5️⃣ Mindfulness meditation itself has measurable effects on pain perception
Comprehensive reviews of mindfulness meditation include clinical and experimental insights into how it reduces pain intensity and unpleasantness across conditions:
Sight: late morning and early evening light on bright, blue clear days Sound: shushing of steps in the snow Taste: hot teas with honey Smell: evergreen trees Feel: the touch of cold noses and toes
I remember a morning in spring. There was still a noticeable chill in the air. I slipped outside, to the sights and sounds of my summer second home.
My muscles were tight, my mind crowded with worry and pain—nothing dramatic, just persistent soreness that has become my constant companion.
I wandered toward the trees, the sound of the wind through the leaves soft but insistently present. I closed my eyes. I felt my breath slow. My shoulders dropped. And, almost imperceptibly at first, the ache that had built over a winter, within me softened.
That moment wasn’t some mystical escape. It was evidence of something real: the mind-body connection responding to something ancient: nature.
This post is a little more technical than some of my others. In this post, I want to walk you through the science behind how nature calms the nervous system, lowers pain perception, and gives the body a chance to remember how to rest.
This is not just a nice idea or a self-help quip. I see it working in my life, and the research backs it. I share some of that research in the links provided. Feel free to check it out or to give those links a hard pass.
Mind Meets Body: A Dialogue of Perspectives
Healing is not forcing the body into a state of ‘perfection.’ It’s listening to what it has been trying to say.
-Dr Joe Dispenza
First: we are not two separate things. The nervous system is constantly sensing, interpreting, and “talking” to our organs, muscles, immune system, and even to our thoughts and memories. That internal sensing is called interoception — our body’s ability to monitor its own internal state (heart rate, gut sensation, breathing, tension) and for the brain to make meaning of it.
When we live under chronic stress or chronic pain, that conversation becomes distorted. The sympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system (fight-or-flight) is persistently overactivated. Our brain becomes hypervigilant to threats, amplifying pain signals, even in places that may no longer need it.
But there is a counterbalance: the parasympathetic state (rest-and-digest) — a state where the body repairs, digests, heals, breathes deeply.
Engaging that side is essential for true resilience. And nature offers a powerful entry point into that parasympathetic realm.
Querencia
{Spanish concept}(n) a place where one feels emotionally safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn.
Nature’s Remedy: Calming the Nervous System
The forest is not merely an escape, it’s a return — a remembering of who we are.
-Unknown
Here is where the “nice idea” begins to feel like a compelling method.
1. Visual contact with nature calms brain & autonomic activity
This overview demonstrates that simply viewing natural elements—flowers, green plants, wood—induces shifts in the brain and the autonomic nervous system, compared with urban or non-natural environments. Link
More recently, neuroscientists have shown through brain imaging that exposure to nature lowers pain perception by reducing neural signals associated with pain processing. Link
In one study, subjects viewed virtual nature scenes while receiving mild pain stimuli, and the brain’s “pain network” lit up less strongly than when viewing urban scenes. Link
2. Nature reduces physiological stress markers
Time outdoors helps shift us from sympathetic arousal toward parasympathetic. Essentially, nature helps us “come out of our heads and into our bodies.” Link
Forest bathing (shinrin-yoku), for example, has been associated with lowered cortisol, reduced blood pressure, decreased heart rate, and improved immune function. Link
3. Attention restoration & easing mental fatigue
One pillar in environmental psychology is the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which states that when we gaze at nature’s “soft fascinations”—rustling leaves, flowing water, birdsong—we can rest our directed attention (the kind used to suppress distractions) and recover cognitive capacity. Link
When our cognitive resources are less taxed, the brain has more “bandwidth” to regulate our threat systems and lower baseline arousal.
4. Pain modulation is emotional & contextual
Pain is never just a signal from tissues; it is affected by context, anticipation, emotion, and attention. One fMRI study found that anticipation of pain modulates how strongly sympathetic nervous responses occur, and that the brain’s anticipatory circuitry has a top-down influence on peripheral responses. Link
In simple terms, if your brain predicts threat, your body braces for it — heart rate rises, muscles tense, and pain signals grow louder. But when your mind learns to recognize what’s happening without adding fear, it begins to change that loop.
This is exactly what happened to me.
After my hysterectomy, I wasn’t able to take any hormone replacement treatments — they aggravated my other conditions. My body still struggles today to regulate temperature. I hot flash every thirty minutes. Down to a minute. I’ve timed it.
After about a year of this, my body simply couldn’t keep up. The constant swing from sweltering heat to shivering cold became unbearable. There was no rest. No pause between storms.
Then I started to notice the toll — not just physically, but mentally. My nervous system was on edge all the time, anticipating the next wave. I realized that the dread itself — the bracing — was its own kind of suffering.
So I tried an experiment. When I felt that familiar rush rising, I paused. I prepared but didn’t brace. I reached for my water, turned on the fan, maybe sat down if possible. I still remind myself in those moments: this will pass. The less weight I give it — but the more gentle attention I offer — the easier it is to ride out.
These days, my hot flashes still come every thirty minutes. But they are not as draining. They are little blips on the screen — reminders that my body is doing its best to find balance. And in meeting that discomfort with compassion rather than panic, I’ve discovered something powerful: the way we feel our pain changes the way we experience it.
A Walk on the Healing Side
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
-Rumi
Not long ago, back pain had eaten away my joy. I was down to minimal movement, scared of flare-ups, medicated, trying every therapy that sounded promising. Yet my life was shrinking.
I decided on a small experiment: every morning for two weeks, I would walk down the lane of our farm (or sit quietly under a tree if I couldn’t walk). I would try to notice one thing—perhaps a bird’s call, the play of light on water, a soft breeze. No goal, no agenda.
Day 1: I came back discouraged — I didn’t feel anything.
Day 4: My back still hurt, but I felt… calmer. My breathing was softer.
Day 8: The pain seemed less urgent. The thoughts around it quieter.
By day 14, I don’t know if the pain was less in absolute measure, but I am less ‘in it.’ I have more distance. More space.
Over months, I was able to move farther, sit longer. The pain never vanished, but its domination receded.
My story is not unique. What I was discovering is that the mind-body conversation can shift — the “volume” of pain need not always be maxed out.
The Secret Sauce: How This Works for Me and You
If you have felt that creeping tightness, that locked jaw, that ache that feels like both body and memory. When I walk through forested trails, when I sit by a lakeshore, when I simply stare at mossy bark and inhale the green air, I feel a shift. The chatter quiets. My breath lengthens. My internal tension softens. The pain, though still there, becomes less commanding.
The science shows these are not placebo effects. They are biological responses rooted in ancient neural circuits. We evolved in natural worlds. Our nervous systems know these landscapes. They remember how to open.
If you struggle with chronic pain, anxiety, overthinking, or tension, nature may be a tool you undervalue — not a luxury, but a medicine written into our being.
How to Make the Mind-Body & Nature Practice Relatable, Real, and Sustainable
Here are some practical suggestions (adapt to your pace):
Start small. Even 5 minutes of forest view, or stepping outside to touch grass, can activate calming circuits.
Engage the senses. Smell, listen, feel textures, watch movement. Let nature draw you back from rumination.
Use “indirect nature.” If you’re indoors, look out a window, use nature audio, or view images/videos of nature — these have shown measurable benefit.
Pair movement & stillness. Walking in nature is stronger than walking elsewhere.
Be consistent. The cumulative effect matters. Some studies suggest 120 minutes per week in nature correlates with better well-being. Link
Watch your attitude. Let go of “must heal fast” thinking. Allow nature to be patient, gentle.
Journal your experience. Track tension, mood, pain before and after nature time. Over weeks, patterns can emerge.
Epiphanies and Reflections: To Our Journey’s End
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
-Lao Tzu
We live in an era of constant stimuli, complications, and demands. Our nervous systems were not built for perpetual alarms. The ancient pulse of wind through leaves, water over stones, soil underfoot — these are languages the body still knows. Nature asks us lowly: come back. Listen. Breathe.
So next time the ache presses, try this: walk quietly through green, or sit beneath trees, allow your senses to soften, invite rest. You may find that pain loosens its grip, that your nervous system sighs, that mind and body remember their trust.
Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all.
-Dorothy Hunt
Perhaps part of the answer is: to slow down. To open to nature. To let the body learn again.
SUNBEAM ACRES 