One Mind Mountain

02/01/2025

A happy New Year 2025 to everyone!
明けましておめでとうございます！

With its preparations & purifications, auspicious shrine visits, and the simple enjoyment of lounging about and indulging in fancy New Year’s dishes, Japan is for me the country where New Year’s celebrations feel just right. Last year, despite many hardships, I was lucky enough to be able to make a visit at this quiet time of year. Wandering around, I couldn’t but revel in the eye-candy of shimekazari [ 注連飾り ] the New Year’s decorations on the front of homes and businesses, as is one of the country’s New Year’s traditions.

In Japan, there is a Shinto god/spirit for just about everything ~ every event, energy, undertaking, endeavor…and New Year is no exception. With their sacred ropes and other symbolic and auspicious elements, shimekazari act as invitations for toshigami-sama [ 歳神様 ] to make a descent from their heavenly realm and visit the home or business. “Welcome!” is what these pretty creations are saying…“Welcome!…and look after us in this new year.”

16/04/2024

Full-on sakura time in Japan!
🌸🌸🌸
These pics are from Shinjuku Gyoen, a fabulous spot for sakura in Tokyo.

12/03/2024

I was so eager to post those winter photos last week, that I totally forgot about autumn! Here’s a selection of photos taken on the island of Shikoku, just as the autumn leaves are fading. Shikoku is the smallest of Japan’s four main islands and is extremely mountainous. The mountains (and cities) are dotted with Buddhist temples, 88 of which form a pilgrimage circuit. I was lucky enough to be able to savour just a bit of Shikoku’s pilgrimage culture in autumn!

08/03/2024

As promised, some photos of recent travels in Japan. First up, the cold northern winter. These pics are from the area from Sendai to Aomori, more or less the “tsunami coast.” It’s a part of Japan I’ve spent a lot of time in, both professionally and personally. It’s gorgeous in the big snow, and you can also warm up later with a hot soak in an onsen. Which is exactly what I did ;-)

14/02/2024

Four years now, living amidst the pine forests of Dalat in Vietnam.

With their slim pines and grasses, their ferns and pink wildflowers, all the ingredients are the same in each forest I visit, and yet they are all unique in mood, in color, in their openness or intimacy.

In this photo, one of my favorite places to visit and forest bathe, especially at dawn, which can look misty and moody, like here. It's a place of rolling open meadows, hills and valleys, views of distant peaks, and an every-so fairy tale grove of pines with a stream winding through it. With mists and water buffalo, and early-morning spider’s webs twinkling in the warm sunlight, it’s also where my participants and I have had some of our most magical experiences.

Who wants to come forest bathing?

12/02/2024

My best Tết wishes to everyone from pretty, springtime Dalat!

09/02/2024

Pretty koi play at my feet in a pond I visited for calm and solace quite often late last year. Especially bred to produce these vivid colors, ornamental koi are symbols of good fortune and prosperity in Japan. You see them everywhere in ponds and water gardens. You’ll also see them on traditional textiles and in the koi-nobori kites of the Boy’s Festival, in May each year.

In Vietnam, where the lunar new year is just around the corner, koi have an important role to play in getting the Kitchen God back to heaven before the new year comes. And they can turn into dragons—rather nice with the Year of the Dragon coming! Here in Vietnam, koi carp fish are a symbol of dedication, transformation, power, and luck.

Let’s hope these Vietnamese koi do their job well for this lunar new year!

Happy Tết, 2024, everyone!

New Year and the period after are just gorgeous weather-wise with clear skies and warm sun on your skin. If you’re in town and interested in forest bathing, do get in touch with a PM and we’ll see what we can line up. 🌲❤️⛰️

04/02/2024

It’s been a long long time since I’ve actively posted on this page, but here we are between the solar and lunar New Year celebrations, and at 節分 [setsubun] in Japan and Imbolc in the Gaelic tradition, both markers of the start of spring in the northern hemisphere.

And so, I’d like to take this opportunity to express my greetings to everyone who has been following this page. May 2024 be a good year, wherever you happen to count it from.

Let me explain a little why I’ve been away:
2023 was a huge year for me. I traveled internationally for 5 months and suffered a severe injury (away from home) that involved recovery for 4.5 months. So that didn’t leave much time to be actually here, on the ground, in Dalat.

I am now recovered enough, have enough energy, to be moving around again. So I’m back in Dalat again and very happy to be surrounded by the pine forests that I’ve grown to love over the years (my photo for this post was shot in one of them!).

Are you heading to Dalat over the Tet holidays or after?
If you feel some deeply relaxing forest bathing [shinrinyoku] or reiki would be right for you, please do get it touch. We’ll see what we can do!

I’ll leave injury pictures where they are in my Iphone, but over the coming posts, I’ll be happy to share some photos of 2023’s many travels.

16/02/2023

Being in the natural world and connecting in a slow, meditative, sensitive way that opens you up to all the detail and all the glory. Without even mentioning the word "shinrin-yoku" he's talking 100% about it!

The concrete jungle and the rat race suck up our time and energy. Our lives revolve around paying bills and staring at a computer screen. We feel stressed ...

03/02/2023

Walruses and forest bathing

A poetic, beautiful, and sometimes uncanny video that speaks so much about our relationship with the natural world. It runs 25 mins, and there are not many words, so it's very accessible to everyone, irrespective of mother tongue.

What does this have to do with forest bathing? Read my last post on the energetic opening of the heart.

A lone scientist on the coast of the Siberian Arctic finds that warming seas have taken a toll on the walrus migration, as documented in a film by Evgenia Ar...

01/02/2023

Forest bathing is good for your heart.

It has been shown to lower blood sugar, blood pressure, pulse rate, and blood viscosity. It has been shown to lower the risk of heart disease.

This is all true, but this is only part of it.

Forest bathing is also known for its “mental health” benefits.
It helps reduce feelings of anger, confusion, and hostility and helps boost emotional intelligence. Are these not realms of the heart?

This is also all true, but it is still only part of it.

When forest bathing is done as a relational practice and not one that only focuses only on such health benefits, it opens and activates the heart’s energy, the heart’s resonance with the greater-than-human world. We come to feel our connection and kinship with all living beings.

Not through the intellect. For this is not an idea.
We come to f-e-e-l this in the heart and in our being.

For now, I can only describe this as a kind of knowing and sensing, whose energetic center is the heart, but that resonates our entire being.

In the forest, in the way of relational forest bathing, the heart is happy, deeply happy. It has expanded and resonates in a realm much much bigger than the workaday world. It comes to feel our connection with all things and to feel the language of things speaking.

So now we come to the deepest core of the “good for your heart” of forest bathing.

- - ❤️ - -

With my heart in such a state, on a hillock that is a beloved and potent forest bathing spot, I came across this heart on the forest floor. I do not know if it was created by the human hand, or not. It did not really matter. For even if it was, I could feel the forest speaking, through the heart.

- - ❤️ - -

If you enjoy words and images such as these, I invite you to follow me on reverie.garden
on Instagram where you will find a lot more in this spirit.

27/01/2023

Over the last few days, Dalat has burst into pink. Sakura blossoms and the new year spirit are everywhere.

CHÚC MỪNG NĂM MỞI!

May your year be filled with life force energy, lots of nature communion, and peaceful, restful days.