When you open up all your senses, you connect with the forest and connect with yourself

So my message is knowledge and understanding of the natural world. The creative practice that I would like to save It’s forest arts therapy. Why? Because we humans come from the forest, right? We’re just monkeys without hair, wearing clothes and have this anthropocentric belief that we are something more than other species. But we actually lived 7 million years in the forest. So I would like to save this practice because it brings you back to the forest, brings you back to your roots, and it asks you to open up all your senses. So hearing, seeing, smell, taste and touch. And when you open up all your senses, you have this opportunity to connect with the forest and connect with yourself with mindfulness practices, with playfulness in the forest. There are a lot of exercises and methods that you can do. You can take forest materials and make a statue out of it. Maybe an artwork. But there is a practice that I love the most, it’s called «Shinrin-Yoku», in English, Forest Bathing. And it’s a Japanese practice about immersing all your senses into the forest. And it actually heals you mentally and physically. Let’s say first, physically, it lowers your blood pressure, it lowers your levels of cortisol. Scientists made saliva research and found out that just 20 minutes of forest bathing lessens the cortisol for 20%. I think a bit more. And yet, I think for us, it’s healing. Maybe I also forgot to say that I don’t know if you heard about mycorrhizal relationship that plants and fungi have, and I think that we should be more like them: networking, working together to help each other. Like kind of to save the planet. Save yourselves, ourselves and each other.

I just finished studying, actually. I am an art teacher and now I study arts therapy and I’m a nature enthusiast, so I somehow want to connect arts therapy, like sculpturing or drawing with movement therapy and put it into the forest environment. But I’m not there yet. I’m writing my master’s on forest bathing and forest arts therapy. So, yeah, thesis, I don’t know when it will be finished, but I will do some more workshops in between. And I started to work as a mentor at Kolesnikova Institute. Let’s call us mediums that translate artworks into these crazy workshops for kids, like really out of the box workshops for kids. And yeah, that’s it for now. I paint to just flush away every day stress of life and I go to forests, but I want to research more like bio art because we have so much nature in Slovenia and we all like spending time in it. So why not make it like a creative practice?