If you go down to the woods today — and you should — leave your smartphone behind. Find a spot by a bamboo grove or take shade under a camphor tree and immerse yourself in the total effect of shinrin-yoku, or "forest bathing."
This is the message Qing Li, a doctor at Nippon Medical School and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Therapy, has been promoting for the past 25 years: The forest can save us, or at least heal us. First, however, we need to find the trees and make time for it.
Last month saw the culmination of more than a decade's research by Li into forest bathing distilled into a new book "Shinrin-Yoku: The Art and Science of Forest Bathing," published by Penguin in the U.K. and the U.S., and slated for translation into 18 languages. It's a big, thick book, beautifully illustrated, and it makes for easy and enlightening reading.