A Walk in the Wood [#2] - Recorded on 5/11/2021

Replay on Zoom:

Transcript → Book Study Group [#31]

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I particularly enjoyed hearing about Joe’s plan to work with Vicki to help families in Santa Barbara (initially?) by using the book as a gateway for engaging both children and their parents in Forest Breathing.

Vicki and I met at a get together at a Dharma friend’s house, and she fell in love with the Winnie the Pooh book. She’s been teaching. I’ll let you, I’ll let you say what you’ve been teaching, and you saw and you saw the connection between the two. And until COVID hit, we were putting together a program for the Santa Barbara, but it’s Botanical Gardens right gardens to meet with families, read the stories together, and then I would she would then take the kids on a nature walk, and I would teach the grown up, the parents and grownups, some meditation practices and that was our program was going to be we’re going to do it sometime.

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Re. forest bathing, clinical medicine is testing the process, and it has been confirmed to be helpful to our health: “The beneficial effects of a twenty-minute pine forest walk will remain in the immune system’s memory for about thirty days.” This quote is from an interesting memoir by a biochemist, botanist and Celtic plant lore expert, Diana Beresford-Kroeger. The book is called To Speak for the Trees. She says Celtic healers in ancient times recommended “walking in pine forests to aid in breathing and to rid the lungs of the toxins of colds and flus.”

This is another confirmation of the wisdom of our dear pooh bear and his aimless walking in the woods, if there was any doubt!

One thing that really blew my mind in the book is that she says trees have hormones that are very similar to some biochemicals in humans - case in point, “Plants contain the sucrose version of serotonin as a working molecule.” and “By proving that the tryptophan-tryptamine pathways existed in trees, I proved that trees possess all the same chemicals we have in our brains . . . They have all the component parts necessary to have a mind or consciousness.”

offtopic * hope that’s ok * I also have Diana’s gardening book - she gardens in Canada, which has a northern temperate climate - and there are interesting tidbits from her biochemistry knowledge of plants. She almost sounds like a plant physician at times when telling you what a particular plant might like. This is because of her intimate knowledge gained from her biochemistry & botany background combined with training in Celtic plantlore. That book is called A Garden for Life. And in my to read list, Arboretum America, about North American trees. She tells you how to grow many native species; something that can really help the planet. Includes much about the medicinal uses of trees and how they contribute to a habitat.

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