It is a rainy weekend here as I write this blog. With Memorial Day tomorrow, I find myself thinking of the losses I have navigated in my life - and the ones still ahead. I think of the past versions of me who moved through grief, perhaps a bit more clumsily, and the things she taught the person I am now. How this version of me is stronger than she was, though also a bit more worn and tired - though not entirely in a bad way. In a way that gives me peace. The way old wood is stronger because of its rings.

When I think of the practices that have helped me find a path to peace through some of the harder chapters of my life, I keep coming back to walks in the woods. The woods have always been my church. My sanctuary. Walking among the trees my medicine.

They are where I played as a little girl, hiding behind enormous trees carved by the soldiers who hid among them as they bravely fought in World War II so that my country, my family, I could be free. I think of a particularly profound wood-walking when all of my senses seemed heightened as I waited for the arrival of the boy who would make me a mother. And I think of the woods that hold the body of my dear sister-cousin Noor, taken far too young by ALS, the mosses protecting her where she lays. The sun-filtering trees. The licorice smell of ferns in fall. The soft earth and gnarly roots underfoot. The chirp of bird and squirrel and insect. They bring me back to my center, every time, with little effort on my part- all I need to do is walk.

And while this practice feels sacred and personal and private to me, I know I am far from alone in experiencing healing this way. I know because I hear it in the stories of kindred spirits. I know because it is embedded in healing themes throughout history, across differing spiritualities and cultures. I know because research can now explain - in measurable, concrete terms - what many of us feel deep in our bones.

Cultures across time have understood, intuitively and explicitly, that the forest is not merely habitat. It is medicine. It is witness. It is a place to bring the unbearable and let it be held by something older and larger than yourself.

The ancient Celts built an entire cosmology around it. Their sacred alphabet, the Ogham - possibly the oldest written script in Western Europe, carved on standing stones across Ireland, Britain, and the Isle of Man between the 4th and 6th centuries CE - was named entirely for trees. Oak for strength. Yew for immortality and transition. Birch for new beginnings. Hazel for wisdom. Rowan for protection. Each species held specific healing properties. Each had a purpose. The druidic nemeton - the sacred forest clearing where the human met the spiritual - was not a metaphor. It was a therapeutic practice. A place to grieve, to mark transitions, to restore.

Some of the yew trees the druids walked among are still alive. A Taxus baccata can live three to five thousand years. There are yews in Scotland and Wales today that have witnessed wars, plagues, famines, and the quiet grief of ordinary human lives. It is hard to overstate the impact of standing in the presence of something that has lived through that much.

The Japanese understand the powerful healing nature of the forests too. Their practice of shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, dates back centuries and has been carefully studied since the 1980s. In Indigenous traditions across North America, the forest is not simply a resource but a living relative, a relation, a being deserving of reciprocity and reverence. In many African healing traditions, grief rituals are conducted outdoors, in nature, held by the land. The Stoics walked in natural spaces to think clearly and to reflect on challenges. The Romantic poets prescribed it for melancholy. Nearly every contemplative spiritual tradition - Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Indigenous- has recognized the forest as a place where the ego quiets and peace awaits.

Three intersecting bodies of science are converging to explain what those who are grieving and healing have discovered for millennia.

Trees - especially conifers, oaks, and old-growth species - continuously release volatile organic compounds called phytoncides into the air. These are not simply byproducts of photosynthesis. They are actually part of the tree's immune system, and - even cooler still- they interact measurably with ours.

Decades of Japanese research on shinrin-yoku have produced consistent findings: phytoncide inhalation lowers cortisol, reduces blood pressure and heart rate, and - amazingly - increases the activity of natural killer (NK) cells, the immune cells responsible for identifying and destroying diseased or damaged cells in the body. In one landmark study, a three-day forest immersion produced NK cell increases that persisted for thirty days afterward. How amazing is that? Even though it didn't exactly come as a surprise my mind was totally blown when I learned this!!! The forest is, quite literally, boosting your immune system. When we say we feel better after time in the woods, we are not imagining it. We are experiencing a measurable physiological event.

Grief is far from simple being an emotional experience. It is a somatic one. Anyone experiencing grief can tell you how heavy it can feel, how hard it can be to move, how physically painful the grief can become. Research by bereavement scientists like Mary-Frances O'Connor has shown that grief activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. The body literally hurts. In grief we see that cortisol levels rise, inflammatory markers increase, sleep architecture is disrupted and the immune system gets suppressed. Prolonged grief can get trapped in the body - in the fascia, the gut, the musculoskeletal system.

Walking is one of the most evidence-supported interventions for processing grief because it engages the body and the bilateral brain simultaneously. Walking is rhythmic, alternating left foot then right foot  then left again. That alternating rhythm facilitates the same kind of bilateral stimulation used in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a trauma therapy with robust clinical evidence. Emotional memories, including grief, are processed differently when the body is in bilateral rhythmic motion. They become less locked and easier to integrate.

Walking on uneven, organic ground such as the forest floor with its tree roots, soft earth, decomposing leaves has an even greater impact. Every step requires micro-adjustments through the feet, ankles, knees, hips, and spine. These micro-adjustments engage the fascial and proprioceptive systems in ways that flat pavement cannot. The body must pays attention to itself and its surroundings in a way that reorganizes the nervous-system from the bottom up. You are, in the most literal sense, building physical strength and resilience with each step over uneven ground while simultaneously metabolizing the emotions you carry.

Researchers Dacher Keltner and his colleagues at UC Berkeley have spent the last two decades studying what awe does to the human body and brain. The findings are striking.

Awe suppresses the default mode network - the part of the brain responsible for self-referential rumination, the mental loop that keeps us trapped in grief, worry, and regret. It induces what researchers call a "small self" effect: a felt sense of being part of something larger that temporarily loosens the grip of personal pain. Awe also increases prosocial behavior, reduces inflammatory cytokines (those same markers that rise with chronic stress and grief), and creates a kind of time dilation - minutes in awe feel fuller, slower, more spacious.

Old trees produce awe almost without exception. There is something about encountering a living thing that is hundreds of years old - something that has stood through storms, droughts, and centuries of human struggle - that puts our own suffering into a perspective that feels not diminishing but, somehow, dignifying. Your grief is real and it is part of a larger story. Both things are true at once.

The physical act of walking in nature - particularly over uneven terrain - builds what exercise scientists call "functional strength": the kind of strength that transfers directly to resilience in daily life: balance, proprioception, core engagement, joint stability. A 2019 study in Scientific Reports found that trail walking, compared to road walking, produced significantly greater improvements in balance, lower-limb strength, and mobility in participants of all ages.

There is something beautiful- and probably not the least bit coincidental about this. The same walk that metabolizes grief also builds the physical body's capacity to carry weight. Strength and healing happen in the same place, through the same practice.

When I say the woods helped me grieve, I am describing, in clinical speak,  a multi-system physiological and neurological experience available to us all. I am benefiting from phytoncides supporting my immune system, I’m helped to process intense emotion through bilateral rhythmic movement, my nervous system gets reorganized through proprioceptive engagement, and the awe-inspiring company of the trees quiets the loop of rumination that can come with loss and regret. What I am describing here is an ancient knowledge - one that Celtic, Japanese, Indigenous, Sufi, Stoic and many other cultures have long understood and encoded into sacred practice long before we had the instruments to measure it.

Memorial Day is about so much more than barbeques and the start of summer.  Memorial Day  asks us to reflect and invites us to consider the weight of the losses we have lived. It asks us to honor what has been given and what has been taken. It offers us a pause to stand with our grief without avoiding,  minimizing, medicating it away. The trees do not need us to rush through this. They simply stand there showing us how to center in the face of grief, holding the grief  alongside us.

Woo as that may seem it is so much more. Even science says so.

You do not need to travel to Ireland to find a Celtic grove- though if you are there channel some of that good energy for us please! You do not need a national park or an ancient forest. You need one tree and twenty minutes.

The Practice:

Find the oldest, largest trees near you - a city park, a piece of conservation land, a trail, even a quiet street lined with mature oaks or maples will do.

Walk there slowly. Not a workout pace. A pace that allows you to notice.

As you walk, let yourself bring to mind one person, one loss, one difficult chapter of your life that you have been carrying. Hold it gently. Try to resist analyzing, just connect to your body and let the sadness be there.

On the walk home: Notice your nervous system. Is it different from when you left? What has shifted? Whatever you notice is OK.

You are not fixing your grief. You are integrating it. There is a difference and that difference matters.

Grief lives in the body, and the body heals in the forest. Walking among trees lowers cortisol and boosts immune function through phytoncides, facilitates emotional processing through bilateral rhythmic movement, builds physical strength through uneven terrain, and quiets rumination through awe - all at once. Ancient cultures across the world encoded this wisdom into sacred practices. On this Memorial Day weekend, the woods offer an invitation: not an escape from what we carry, but a companion for carrying it.