My Story: How Forest Bathing Found Me
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My path into forest bathing didn’t begin with training or a career plan. It began with finding my way back to myself after trauma. In 2014, my life ruptured open in an instant. I was in a near-fatal scooter accident that launched me thirty feet into a dry creek bed. I woke up in the hospital, unable to move, my ribs broken, bones fractured, organs punctured, and my nervous system in complete shock.
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The physical healing was challenging and painful, but the deeper wound was harder to name. It was as if parts of my spirit had scattered on impact. I was diagnosed with PTSD, and my primary care physician wanted to put me on antidepressants. Even in that state, I knew deep down that I wasn’t depressed — I had experienced a profound trauma. Something in me sensed that there was gold in that darkness, something worth meeting rather than numbing. I wanted to sit with the discomfort, understand what had cracked open, and allow myself to become someone new.
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Before my accident, I wouldn’t have called myself a spiritual person. But in the months that followed, as I leaned into this inner work, something unexpected began to unfold.
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As I slowly started to walk again, the forest became the only place where I felt whole, or at least less fragmented. There were moments—leaning against the trunk of a redwood, watching golden light shift through the canopy, hearing a single bird call echo across the ravine—when I felt connected to something larger than myself. Something steady. Something compassionate. Something ancient.
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I didn’t have language for it at the time, but the experiences were unmistakable.
A sudden rush of gratitude.
A sense of joy that came out of nowhere.
Moments of quiet bliss in the middle of so much pain.
A deeper awareness that softened the fear and disorientation I carried.
These were the early seeds of what I later learned were core Buddhist principles—presence, interconnection, impermanence, compassion. But at the time, I had no framework. I was simply a person in a broken body being held by the forest in ways that felt mysterious and profound.
Nature became the first teacher I ever truly trusted. It helped me piece together the internal fragments that no surgeon, physical therapist, or even mental health therapist could reach. It awakened a part of me I didn’t know existed—my spiritual self, my intuitive self, my sense of belonging to the greater living world.
It was the first place where I felt myself again, and the first place where I felt something greater moving through my life.
Discovering My Path in Ecotherapy and Forest Bathing
Less than a year after my accident, I enrolled in the Integrative Health Studies Master’s program at CIIS. I didn’t fully understand why, I just knew I needed to follow what felt like the next true link in my healing. In my first semester, I discovered the fields of ecotherapy and ecopsychology, and suddenly everything made sense. What I experienced in my recovery wasn’t imagined. It was a known pathway of healing: humans reconnecting with the living world as a way to restore the mind, body, and spirit.
As I followed that thread, forest bathing became the heart of my academic work as well. I ended up writing my master’s thesis on the practice, exploring its transformative potential and the science behind this ancient way of being in relationship with nature.
Forest bathing crystallized everything I was learning and remembering during my healing journey. When I completed my first Shinrin-Yoku immersion and then later certification with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, I felt a profound alignment. This wasn’t just a practice I loved, it was a calling.
Spiritual Training & Meditation
Around this same time, I began studying with Lama Lar Short and the Grace Essence Mandala (GEM) teachings, a heart-centered Tibetan Buddhist lineage rooted in compassion, subtle energy, and awakening innate wisdom. I started this work just before entering graduate school, during a period of profound transition. GEM helped me understand trauma through a spiritual lens—how shock can fragment the subtle body, and how presence and compassion can gently bring us back into ourselves.
I discovered Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work in 2019, and then deepened into advanced study in 2024. His teachings on breathwork, neuroplasticity, heart–brain coherence, and the science of healing became an essential part of my own recovery, helping me recalibrate my nervous system and release long-held fear patterns.These spiritual and meditative lineages now quietly shape how I guide, bringing steadiness, humility, intuition, and heart to every session while supporting others in reconnecting with their own inner wisdom.
Integrative Health as a Calling
I never expected to start a nonprofit, but when I moved back home to Sonoma County, just a week before the 2017 Tubbs Fire, I felt a deep calling to serve. That fire opened my eyes to the immense toll disasters take on both first responders and community members.
In response, I cofounded Integrative Healers Action Network (IHAN), which brings trauma-informed integrative health services to those impacted by California’s growing wildfires. Through this work, I’ve seen how essential integrative health and medicine is, and how practices like acupuncture, meditation, environmental health, and nervous-system regulation can support people in profound ways.
Service has fed me deeply. It helped me understand my own pain after my accident and gave me a path to share the tools that supported my healing.
I am a strong advocate for integrating forest bathing into U.S. healthcare systems, much like in Japan and South Korea, where time in nature is prescribed as a therapeutic intervention. I believe this is the future of medicine—a return to the understanding that the Earth is part of our healing.
Environmental Policy & Caring for the Earth
Long before my healing journey, my life was rooted in caring for the Earth and all of her inhabitants. I was a political science kid in my undergraduate years, passionate about changing the world, advocating for justice, and protecting the planet. Early in my career, I worked in Washington, D.C. for the Sierra Club, supporting political campaigns and environmental policy initiatives. I cared deeply then, and I still do, about the impact humans have on the natural world.
Although I no longer work directly in politics, forest bathing has become my way of continuing that mission. My work now lives at the intersection of integrative health, environmental healing, and community resilience. A part of me will always want to influence public policy, and I do so more indirectly now through IHAN’s environmental health work and by helping people reconnect with the natural world.
This practice changes people. I’ve guided thousands of individuals from many different backgrounds, and the common thread is always the same: people reconnect—with themselves, with their senses, and with the Earth. And that reconnection naturally fosters reciprocity.
This is how a new world begins: one quiet, heartfelt transformation at a time.
Hospitality + Wellness Tourism in Sonoma County
Before stepping into the integrative health fielf, I spent years working as a hospitality director in the Sonoma County wine industry. Those years rooted me deeply in the art of welcoming people and creating meaningful experiences shaped by the land. I never expected that skill set to merge so seamlessly with my healing work, but guiding forest bathing is, in many ways, an act of hosting. It’s tending to people with warmth, presence, and care while honoring the sense of place that Sonoma County teaches so well.
Living in Sonoma County. the land that helped stitch me back together, has allowed me to welcome people from all over the world into this work. I’m deeply grateful for my many partners across Sonoma County’s hotels and wineries, and for my ongoing collaboration with Sonoma County Tourism. Through this support, forest bathing has been featured on The Today Show, Wine Enthusiast, and even The Real Housewives of Orange County—a delightful surprise that still makes me laugh. Every bit of press feels like a blessing. My hope is that more people discover the healing forest bathing offered me, and I’m grateful these platforms help that reach ripple out.
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Why I Guide
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This work is my heart work.
It is how I give back to the forests that held me through my healing.
It is how I honor the teachers and practices that helped me rebuild myself from the inside out.
And it is how I support others in finding connection, clarity, and grounding in a world that moves far too fast. -
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Forest bathing is accessible, gentle, and profoundly innate to us as humans living on this Earth we call home.
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You don’t have to be good at anything to do this. Forest bathing isn’t a skill you need to master or a practice that requires effort. You simply show up exactly as you are—even with the tired parts, the tender parts, the broken pieces—and allow yourself to be open, curious, and maybe even a little playful. From that place of honesty and softness, nature does the rest.
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My hope is that these experiences not only support your own healing, but also awaken a spirit of reciprocity, a desire to care for the Earth that cares for us, and to give back to the landscapes that offer so many quiet gifts.
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I am endlessly grateful to do this work, and to do it here in Sonoma County, on the land that healed me and continues to guide me home.
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