Writing my recently published article, When Does Nature Become Therapy? Reconsidering Therapeutic Experience, Agency, Professional Guidance, and Commercialisation in Shinrin-Yoku, Forest Bathing and Forest Therapy, stirred various emotions within me. Some were familiar, others less so. It has been seven years since I left my university job in Kyoto, Japan, to pursue what I am doing today. And now, looking back, I find myself asking a question that perhaps I have never fully answered: What convinced me to make that decision? Was it ever a matter of being convinced? Perhaps it was something closer to an inner knowing, gradually emerging from my experiences in nature. Or perhaps there was one particularly powerful encounter that changed something within me. I cannot say for certain. It might just as well have been the cumulative effect of countless encounters with forests over the years.
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