Most of the shinrin-yoku studies that get cited, the ones from Chiba University and the Nippon Medical School, were run in spring and autumn. Not summer, when the forest is loud and hot, and not winter. The researchers chose the months when the forest was doing the most, and when a person walking slowly through it had the most to attend to.
Autumn is the better of the two, and the reason is not the colour.
What autumn does to the walk
The instruction in shinrin-yoku is to walk at half pace and attend to one sense at a time. In summer, the senses are crowded: heat on the skin, insects, the smell of everything at once. Attention has nothing to hold onto because there is too much of it.
In autumn the forest thins. The light comes in lower and reaches the ground. The smell changes to leaf and damp earth, which is one smell rather than twenty. Sound carries because the leaves are dry. And underfoot, for the first time since spring, there is something: the leaves are there, and every step reports on them.
That is why the researchers went in October. A forest in autumn is a forest that has already done the sorting. One sense at a time is easier because the season has made it so.
The three things to attend to
Underfoot first. This is the sense most people skip in every other season, and in autumn it is the loudest. Dry leaves, wet leaves, the difference between them. Walk slower than feels reasonable and listen to what the feet report.
Then the light. Autumn light comes in at an angle that summer light never manages, and under trees it does the thing the Japanese call komorebi more clearly than at any other time. Stop, stand, watch the ground for a minute.
Then the air on the face. Cooler than the body for the first time in months, and the difference is information. The cortisol drop the studies measured is not from the trees alone. It is from the body noticing that the temperature has changed and that it is not in danger.
The practice
For the weeks the leaves are on the ground, walk once a week for thirty minutes in the nearest place with trees. At half pace. One sense per ten minutes: feet, then eyes, then skin.
Write one line afterwards. Which sense had the most in it.
Most people find it was the feet, and that they had not walked on leaves on purpose since they were children.
What people notice
The first is that the walk is shorter than it feels. Thirty minutes at half pace is about a kilometre, and it is a kilometre that takes the whole thirty minutes to notice.
The second is that the season moves fast. The leaves are on the ground for four weeks, and each week the walk is a different walk. That is the calendar the Japanese split into twenty-four: the forest in the second week of October is not the forest in the fourth, and a person walking slowly enough can tell.
The third is the temptation to photograph it. Autumn is the season that gets photographed most and walked least. The practice is the walk.
Where this fits
The shinrin-yoku guide covers the research and the method. The thirty-minute version fits a lunch break. Komorebi is the one-minute version under one tree. This is the season the research chose, and the reason it chose it.
Thirty walks on paper. The Shinrin-Yoku Log keeps thirty walks on paper. The four weeks the leaves are down are four different walks, and the log is where that shows. You get it by email, free. → Get the log ($6)
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This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living: