“I believe that if we are to make a change, that change starts with re-developing a relationship to the earth: all change is relational, heart based. A clever argument, a great sermon, a good speech, a great advertising campaign speaks to the head. However, when they are in relationship with a being, people change.” This Inside Forest Bathing interview features forest therapy guide Kimberly A. Knight, M.Div., chaplain and digital strategist, offering forest bathing walks in The Netherlands and the U.S., and interweaving her work as a pastor with reconnecting to the natural world. Kimberly: “I am a person who is built to seek spiritual meaning, and help others find this. The forest is work that is happening for me right now.”
Interview by Marjolein C. Groot, 22 November 2023
Wanting to connect with my place in nature
It was during the pandemic that Kimberly Knight listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ on audible. Kimberly: “It really shook me to the core that I wanted to reconnect with my place in nature. I struggled with feeling connected to this country. The culture is different, the language is difficult, and I was working at the American School, so I wasn’t really integrating so fully.”
Kimberly, a U.S. citizen who migrated to The Netherlands in 2018 with her spouse, started to explore the Dutch parks and forests, and felt connected to the land. “This connection made me feel the need to go deeper, to understand it better. I wanted to have the skills to help other people feel connected to the land in this way.” She signed up to become a certified forest therapy guide.
Kimberly laughs. “Of all things, my training cohort was named ‘Wild Tulip.’ Being located in The Netherlands, I thought of course I am going to be in the Wild Tulip cohort.” Kimberly knew there were other training programmes out there, but the one the Association for Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT) offered just felt like the right one. “The most thorough training, the most globally recognised. World class. It was wanting that seal of approval.” Kimberly: “I decided I needed to change my life and invest in that. So, I did.”
Spirituality and care for the earth
The core of what has called Kimberly – a trained chaplain with a background in the church world – to become a forest therapy guide is spirituality. Kimberly: “And care for the earth. It’s just the right calling for me.”
One of her main worries in this-life time is how we as humans have mistreated the earth, and how we are depleting our natural home. “I believe that if we are to make a change, that change starts with re-developing a relationship to the earth: all change is relational, heart based. A clever argument, a great sermon, a good speech, a great advertising campaign speaks to the head. However, when they are in relationship with a being, people change” she says.
As a queer person living in the American south, Kimberly experienced that those times her rights had been affirmed by another person were because they had a relationship with her, or other queer people. According to Kimberly, relationship is how people change their hearts, and then change their minds, and their behaviour. “By inviting people into relationship with the natural world, they can re-discover that for themselves. I believe that the likelihood that they are going to change their behaviour to more sustainable behaviour increases, because their relationship has deepened.”
Way of the Guide
Early in her training with ANFT, Kimberly came to understand what the organization calls ‘the way of the guide’, the manner in which their certified guides facilitate the walk in nature. “This very much resonated with how I was trained to be a chaplain: in that open omni partiality, accompanying, trust in the forest. A trained chaplain never imposes any world views, theology, or anything like that. You are there as what they call a minister of presence, to accompany and witness other people in wherever they are on their journey.”
Whether it’s a chaplain trusting the person and their relationship to the divine, or the guide trusting the participant and their relationship to the natural world, to Kimberly, it’s the same thing. “This is spiritual care.” It felt like a natural evolution of where she is theologically. Kimberly: “I am a person who is built to seek spiritual meaning, and help others find this. I consider myself more like a Celtic Christian – although I hold the Christian story dear. It’s a walk in the wood that is my cathedral, my church. The forest is work that is happening for me right now.”
Participants from all over the globe
Kimberly offered her first forest therapy walks to the teachers at the American School of The Hague, where she worked at the time, at personal development days around wellbeing. “That was a really nice, sort of built-in audience.” She wants to bring forest therapy to more international schools. “Not just for the students, but to help the faculty. These are often very stressed professionals. The burn-out rate with teachers is very high. I would like to help them before they go on to burn-out, share nature with them.”
Through Airbnb Experiences, Kimberly started to offer walks in the Amsterdam Forest and via Meetup.com, she created a meet up. “Just to sort of build my reputation here in Leiden, so people would come back and reach out to me. It has since grown from there.” Kimberly also guides in the Panbos, in Katwijk. “It’s right against the dunes, really lovely.”
Participants come from all over the globe. Kimberly: “Because I was offering my walks in English, and I am so clearly American, I thought I would have primarily international visitors.” But that has not been the case: she has a many Dutch people joining as, for example, international students. “They very much want to connect with nature, meet people and do something different.”
Treating nature as an inanimate backdrop
Kimberly watches people joining her walks initially almost marching, at fast pace and their shoulders up around their ears. “By the end of it, they are walking in a languid way, really slowing down. No longer realizing how uncomfortable it was for them at the start to move slowly.” Participants share with Kimberly how good they feel when they calm down, touch nature and notice things, like all the different kinds of bird songs, various trees or presence or different colours of green. “They start realizing how they have treated nature like an inanimate backdrop to their life, and want to change this.”
A touch stone for slowing down
Kimberly recalls a teacher from the American School, who took a stone with her that Kimberly gave her during the tea at the end of the walk. “I told participants that if they wanted, they could take with them one of the smooth stones that I had brought to the walk. As a memory, literally as a touch stone for slowing down when they needed to.” The teacher had a young child and shared the touch stone with her. The child now asks for the stone when she feels she has to calm down. Kimberly: “To feel in touch with nature.”
Despite being the guide, Kimberly says she moves into a different space in her own head and body during a walk. “By the end of the walk, I feel calmer, completely self-actualized. I am 100 percent my best self when I am offering the walks to other people. I can feel that in my own body.”
Being more experienced in guiding, she now catches her invitations in the moment, based on who’s there and what the forest has to offer. “I now really trust the forest and want anyone to have the experience they need, no longer having a notion of what kind of experience I want them to have.”
Eco-spirituality
Kimberly shares her work in forest bathing and eco-spirituality also at religious and inter-faith gatherings. For her, forest bathing and spirituality are intertwined. This Fall, she offered a ‘Wild Church’ in the U.S. Kimberly: “A rewilding of spirituality. We gathered outside, in a beautiful Florida State park, and I prepared a scripture and nature poetry.” After that, she took the participants on a forest bathing walk and used invitations that drew on the language of creation and a creator. Kimberly: “The invitation to go out and find a tree and greet it worked so well. First participants felt a bit silly, but afterwards they shared how deep and calming it was. They kept talking about their trees.”
In Little Rock, Arkansas, together with psychotherapist Rachel Pinto, Kimberly co-hosted “Our Sacred Nature”, a 3-day weekend sanctuary for LGBTQIA+ individuals to find solace in the natural world, fostering resilience and deep spiritual renewal. Kimberly: “It was especially for those people who have felt rejected by their families and their faith, as a place for them to reimagine and create their own spiritual practices and rituals through the lens of nature. The retreat was so loving, grounding, and ultimately accepting.” The retreat included sound healing, yoga, mandala inspired creation and Kimberly offered forest bathing walks.
The place, on land originally the home of the Osage Nation, had an outdoor labyrinth, surrounded by trees, and in the corner an old stone chapel. Kimberly, who is also a Veriditas trained labyrinth guide, offered a labyrinth session as the closing ceremony. Kimberly: “The things that you experience in labyrinth are your own thing, but when you are in it with a group, you start to notice how you move in the world versus how other people move in the world. Are you slow, are you fast, and how to navigate taking and giving space in the labyrinth together? A beautiful and powerful experience.”
Nature as the centre of wellbeing
Kimberly says she has two sides of her brain that she works with. “One is this digital strategy, website building, social media person. The other is this calling to nature.” She feels fortunate to be able to now only use her digital powers for good through her company Wildwood Wisdom, by helping other nature connection professionals with their social media and telling their stories. “Nature therapists, artists. Nature is at the centre of my spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing. It just is.”
Meeting the leaders of the art
This Fall, as ANFT’s digital landscape coordinator, Kimberly had the chance to attend the 5th International Congress Forest and Its Potential for Health (ICPH) in Kranjska, Slovenia. “We drove out of the airport and it was into a forest. Mountains and water, the clearest I have ever seen in my life. Just spectacular.” Kimberly learned about the latest insights in nature therapy, but also connected with representatives from the tourist industry. “They talked about reimagining the tourist industry, shifting their relationships with the land, and inviting people into more holistic encounters with different areas of the globe. Not using up the resources of the planet or damaging nature, but developing a deeper relationship.”
She met people from all around the world, forest therapy guides and researchers, including Dr. Qing Li, one of the world’s foremost experts in forest medicine and immunology, who studies forest medicine to find out all the ways in which walking in the forest can improve our well-being. Kimberly also met ANFT founder M. Amos Clifford. “Presenting and talking, thoughtful, but also just being silly and laughing. The leaders of the art.”
Getting the word out
Kimberly’s biggest challenge in offering her walks right now is getting the word out. “An experience can be hard to explain.” She wants to connect with organisations, bring forest bathing to their teams. “Here in The Netherlands, there seems to be quite a growing forest bathing community, with forest bathing guides working to make deeper connections within the medical community. But it is not yet as widely recognised as for example in the U.S., where daily 3-5 articles emerge about ‘the miracle of forest bathing’, and much more guides offer forest bathing walks. I don’t think a lot of people here in The Netherlands have any idea of what forest bathing is about. Do they have to put on their swimming suit?”
Making friends with the rain
Another little challenge for her can be the Dutch weather. “Pouring rain, not a fan. Recently, it had been raining for weeks here, I spent time in the Leidse Hout park, trying to make friends with the rain. Making a mandala for myself in the pouring rain. But I am still not friends with it.” She laughs. “I am often very mad at the rain. I think I will take the online course for forest therapy guides by ANFT guide Stana Luxford Oddie about how to guide in winter and cold weather.”
Guide gathering in Europe
Kimberly says she really wants to work with other ANFT guides to develop a co-created retreat in Europa, to take place in late spring or summer 2024. Kimberly: “A guide gathering, a sort of extended meet up, to connect, guide each other, and deepen or own skillsets.” Not meant to make any money from it, sharing meals. Further, she would very much like to offer more 3-5 days nature retreats with other ANFT guides, where participants can do forest bathing, but also yoga, sound healing, art journaling, and related activities. “We can work together and collaborate in different modalities.”
Develop a Wild Church community
As part of her forest therapy guiding, Kimberly also wants to offer a consistent ‘Wild Church’ experience for LGBTQIA+ individuals, on a Sunday, once or twice a month. “A gathered community coming together to experience however they understand the Divine, and create their ow spiritual meaning in nature – a rewilding of spirituality.”
Kimberly: “I do use the term ‘rewilding’ often. An ecological term about how we are repairing the ecological damage we as humans have done. It’s a very powerful process, of returning the earth to itself. Low impact, no intervention. Letting nature just be nature. That’s how I understand the spirituality of this, just letting us be our natural selves.”
You can find more about Kimberly A. Knight here.
stillnessnature.com 