Invitations in Forest Therapy: How the Practice Opens Your Senses

An invitation, povabilo in Slovenian, is the small sensory prompt a forest therapy guide offers before letting you wander off on your own. "Find a place to sit, and give yourself permission to do nothing." "Listen to the music of this place — how many separate sounds can you pick out?" That is the whole of it. An invitation names one way of paying attention, sets a rough amount of time, and then gets out of the way. There is no correct answer and no lesson about the forest hidden inside it.

Invitations are what a forest therapy walk is made of. In the sequence I trained in at the wellness college in Ljubljana, a walk of two and a half to three hours holds five or six of them, each lasting ten to thirty minutes and each followed by a few minutes of circle sharing where you speak or stay quiet as you prefer. I choose which invitation to offer and when. The forest supplies everything else. Clifford and Page describe the guide's job in a line I keep returning to: the forest is the therapist, and the guide opens the doors. If you would rather see the whole shape of a session first, it is set out in what to expect at your first forest therapy session.

What makes a good invitation?

A good invitation is sensory rather than intellectual. It points you toward smell, sound, texture, movement or light, and it leaves your analytical mind with nothing to grip. The moment an invitation starts explaining which spruce you are looking at, it has turned into a nature lesson and the door closes again.

It also stays open to interpretation. Two people who receive the same invitation on the same morning will come back with experiences that barely overlap, and both are right. I have watched one participant spend twenty minutes with a single beech leaf while another walked a wide circle and remembered mostly the wind. Neither did it wrong.

And it carries no prescribed outcome. Nobody is asked to relax, to feel grateful, or to have a breakthrough. Those expectations are exactly what stops people from settling. The last quality is length: one or two sentences. Anything longer starts to sound like instructions, and instructions ask you to perform.

Nine invitations from real walks

These come from the invitation collection I work with, and I have offered every one of them in a Slovenian forest. Read them slowly. The Slovenian names are the ones I say out loud on a walk.

Prostor za sedenje, the sit spot. Find a place to sit, and give yourself permission to do nothing. You pick a fallen trunk, a patch of moss, the base of a tree, and then you stay there for fifteen or twenty minutes with no task at all. This is the oldest invitation in forest bathing and often the hardest. Participants often report that after the first restless few minutes the forest seems to come toward them rather than the other way around.

Sedenje ob vodi, sitting by water. Sit near the stream for ten to twenty minutes. Notice how the water moves and what it sounds like. Touch it if you want to. Water changes a walk. The sound gives the ears something continuous to rest on, and the surface never repeats itself, which is the kind of gentle, undemanding interest Kaplan called soft fascination. I usually place this one in the middle of a session, when the group is ready to go deeper but not yet ready for silence.

Prisluhnimo zvokom, listening to the soundscape. Listen to the music of this place. How many separate sounds can you pick out? Wind in the canopy, a woodpecker, a distant road, insects, your own breathing. Counting keeps the mind busy enough to stop commenting, and after a few minutes most people stop counting without noticing.

Sledenje vonjavam, following scents. Get to know this place through your nose. Wet leaves, moss, bark, soil, resin. You can close your eyes if that helps. Smell reaches emotion and memory before language does, which is why this quiet invitation is often the one that moves people most. In a Slovenian beech forest after rain it barely needs any introduction from me.

Pohajkovanje z odprtim srcem, wandering with an open heart. Put a hand on your heart and let it lead where you walk. This one sounds sentimental written down and feels different in the forest, where nobody is watching and there is no route to follow. People walk more slowly than they expect to, and several have told me afterwards that they stopped bracing for something.

Posnemanje drevesa, mirroring a tree. Find a tree that draws you. Notice how it holds its branches and how its roots take the ground. Now let your body take that shape. Adults expect this to feel childish and it rarely does. You are borrowing a posture, and a spruce that has stood through forty winters holds itself with a steadiness worth borrowing for a few minutes.

Zrenje v oblake, cloud gazing. Lie down and watch the clouds. Lying on the forest floor asks for a certain trust, in the ground and in the group. The canopy moves, the light shifts through it, and the horizon disappears. I keep this one for late in a walk, when nobody is trying anymore.

Lov za zakladom, the heart's treasure hunt. The forest is hiding a treasure that only your heart can find. Walk slowly. What calls you? Nobody is looking for an object, although some people come back with a stone or a curl of birch bark. What they mostly come back with is the quality of attention they carried while looking.

Opazovanje vzorcev, watching patterns. Find a pattern in nature that draws you: branching, leaf veins, the way water runs around a stone. Stay with it. Branching repeats at every scale in a forest, and following that repetition settles the mind in a way that is closer to looking at a fire than to studying anything.

Why do invitations do anything at all?

Time among trees on its own already shifts the body toward a calmer state. Park and colleagues measured lower cortisol, lower pulse and lower blood pressure in forest settings compared with city settings across 24 Japanese forests, and a later meta-analysis by Qiu and colleagues found that sessions of around twenty minutes or longer show a clearer effect than very short ones. The most recent pooling of this evidence, by Andrade and colleagues in 2026, is more cautious: across eleven studies heart rate fell by about four beats per minute and mood measures improved, while salivary cortisol did not move in any meaningful way. That is the ground the practice stands on, and it is softer ground than most pages on this subject admit — the honest version is in nature and the nervous system.

The invitations add something the research is less able to measure: they give your attention somewhere to go. Kaplan's attention restoration theory describes natural settings as full of soft fascination, material that holds you without demanding effort. An invitation makes that explicit. While you are counting sounds or following the smell of wet moss, you are not rehearsing tomorrow's meeting, and after two hours of that most people notice the difference in their shoulders before they notice it in their thoughts.

Worth saying plainly: forest therapy may support relaxation and wellbeing, and it is not a medical or psychological treatment. The studies behind it mostly involve small samples and short follow-ups. If you want the honest version of what the evidence does and does not show, I wrote it up in what the research says about forest therapy.

Can I try an invitation on my own?

You do not need a guide to try an invitation. Pick one, ideally the sit spot or the soundscape. Walk to any forest or city park — if you are near Ljubljana, several are a bus ride away — put your phone on a timer for fifteen minutes and leave it in your pocket, then do only what the invitation says. Notice what your body does in the last five minutes rather than the first five.

What a guide adds is the part you cannot do for yourself: choosing the right invitation for this group on this morning, holding the time so you never have to check it, watching the weather and the ground, and keeping the circle safe enough that people say true things. If you want to feel the difference, come and walk with me. If you are weighing up guides rather than walks, here is what to ask one before you book.