Robin Daly: Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. My name’s Robin Daly and as well as being the regular host of the show, I’m the founder of the UK charity Yes to Life, which supports people with cancer wanting to learn about and use integrative medicine as their route to health and wellbeing.

Today’s show is going to be looking in detail at our relationship with nature and why this plays an important role in our wellbeing. It’s going to include a short experiential session, which you might like to join in with. If you can take me with you, or if you’re on listen on demand and can press pause, why not pop outside of pick up a small piece of nature.

It could be a stone, some moss, a leaf – whatever catches your eye! I’ve got a small piece of ivy ready to go. So do join me in this exercise if you’d like to. My guest today who will be leading the exercise is Sonia Dibbin. Sonya leads groups of people in forest bathing sessions, amongst other things, a relative newcomer on the scene of supportive therapies, but one that’s beginning to get more and more attention. I’m talking to Sonia over the internet – thanks very much for coming on the show today.

Sonya Dibbin: Hi Robin, you’re very welcome!

Robin Daly: Great to have the opportunity to explore an increasingly talked about pursuit: forest bathing. I was thinking about how there must be a lot of old school medics sitting around raising their eyebrows and tutting the whole idea of the NHS wasting time and money on what you might call ‘soft medicine’ such as forest bathing, when it could be investing in more hyper-expensive cancer drugs. How would you respond to critics who say this type of therapy isn’t really medicine at all.

Sonya Dibbin: I do come up against that sort of thing fairly regularly. Often there’s a pause and a sigh, which I’ve tried to shorten and to hide somewhat because it is actually infuriating. And I’ve been doing this now for over two years and I still get asked the same questions and I still receive the same responses, although it is, as you say, getting a bit better known. There is actually a huge amount of science that backs up the practice of nature connectedness. Forest bathing is one of the ways that you can increase your nature connectedness.

There’s a lot of research going on in the UK at several universities to look at this measure, this psychological construct of nature connectedness and looking benefits that it brings. What is it that you need to develop a nature connection and what are the benefits. The benefits go way beyond the end of the forest bathing experience.

These are benefits that impact your physiological health, your physical health, your mental wellbeing, the way you behave with nature and the way you behave in the environment. Seeing yourself as part of nature and protecting it – it’s so much more than a pill.

Robin Daly: Okay. Well, we’re going to dig deep into all of that in the rest of this interview. That’s fantastic. There’s quite a few complementary lifestyle approaches. They’ve been around for a while. These days, there can’t be that many people who’ve never even heard of reflexology, even if they didn’t have any idea what it is. But I’m guessing that we actually have got quite a few listeners who are wondering what on earth forest bathing is, and may be picturing people splashing about in the river with the soap and the flannel.

Can we get the basics covered? What is forest bathing and where does the idea come from?

Sonya Dibbin: Yes. So that is one of the questions that I’m often asked. “Ooh, that sounds cold. Do I have to go swimming?” But no, you don’t need to. I’m certainly not going to make you go swimming, but if you choose to go swimming, that’s absolutely fine because that’s one of the key elements of the practice – it’s all very much invitational.

We don’t walk very far. It’s nothing like your average walk and there’s no swimming involved. There’s no mandatory swimming. What it does involve is a small group, ideally four to 10 people, and then we’ll walk into the woods and that will take five minutes of a walk into the woods, and then we’re fairly stationary or moving incredibly slowly for the next three hours while I facilitate a series of mindful exercises and meditations that help the participants slow down both physically, but also mentally – this constant chatter in the mind. It’s about quietening the mind to give it a break because the mind is constantly going isn’t it? And then in the process of that, you’re able to let your guard down a little bit and connect with some of the thoughts, feelings, emotions that are safer to block and to not connect with. It’s helping to work through some of that discomfort. And also you’ll experience a drop in heart rate and the stress level cortisol will reduce.

It’s just all about being very calm, very slow. Remember – we’re human beings, not human doings. For those three hours, it’s like an escape from reality. You have no other responsibilities. You can just relax and be guided by me. We call them invitations because of this invitational aspect.

You never have to do anything you wouldn’t want to do, but they were always very enjoyable. And I don’t think anyone’s ever said they didn’t want to do it. After each one we reconvene as our small group and everybody has an opportunity to share thoughts, feelings, emotions with the group and again, if they want. That can be wonderful because you’ll have somebody who will have really connected with a childhood memory and be filled with joy having not felt these kind of feelings since childhood, and then you’ll have someone else who just can’t stop looking at a leaf that’s spinning around as the wind gently blows and they’re just fascinated by this. They’ve never taken the time to stop and notice. You’ll have someone else who’s connected with grief or something a bit heavier. Each person brings something entirely different and it’s a very personal experience, which is why I like to keep it to a small group, because then you’ve still got that intimacy.

Robin Daly: Sounds like a very accessible kind of meditation. Meditation, I think for a lot of people, feels like “I could never do that, I go bonkers if I sit still for three minutes.” But this feels like a leading into a meditative state that is dead easy.

Sonya Dibbin: Exactly, and that’s exactly what it is. People are becoming more aware that meditation doesn’t have to mean sitting still with your fingers in this uncomfortable position, balanced. There are so many different ways of doing it right. And I’m not knocking that.

It is absolutely focusing on the present moment. It’s quite unusual to get into that headspace and have that mental clarity where you have forgotten everything else that’s going on. You’re totally immersed in your little moment with nature and that’s why it’s three hours because it actually takes about an hour for people to actually calm.

If you think of most wellbeing practices, you’ve got one hour and it’s probably useful and you get a lot from it, but then I’m going to take you much deeper on a forest bathing experience and you’ll have even more of that freedom from everything else that’s going on.

Because what you’re doing is connecting deeply with nature as you go through this. Everyone says the time flashes by, they can’t believe it’s finished, they could have stayed longer and they’re starting to look at nature in a new way and that’s what it’s all about.

Robin Daly: From the perception of a lot of people I think, including me, forest bathing seemed to arrive fully formed from nowhere a little while ago. I’d never heard of it and then there is. But that’s not really true, is it?

Sonya Dibbin: It started about 40 years ago. Now I’ve been saying about 40 years ago for a while, but it was in 1981 back in Japan. And it was introduced by their equivalent of the NHS, their health body, because they were having a stress epidemic. They are the most densely forested country on earth, but they’re also highly populated as well, with a lot of people living in urban areas. They also take a lot of self-worth and sense of self from their occupation, from their work. People were working harder and longer and living and spending more time in these small little cubicles. And what was being noticed was this increase in stress and the associated health issues that were coming as a result of this.

They actually started, believe it or not, in urban areas where there weren’t forests, but they started introducing an outdoor meditation practice in urban areas using parks, small bits of green space that they could find, and they started testing and noticed this is having a beneficial impact and the results are going on beyond the end of the session.

You don’t just immediately go back to your previous level of heart rate and stress and all the rest of it. These benefits were going on. Then they took it further and started working in forests and recording the results of what was happening in forest walks – that was even more worthwhile. They found that the phytoncides, which are produced by trees as part of their defence mechanism. When they’re under attack from beetles or fungus or whatever, they will produce these phytoncides a bit like an essential oil. You can’t really smell it but it’s there.

When you’re in the forest areas, you’re breathing in more of that, and that is then proven to impact your production of cortisol, your heart rate, the production of white blood cells that fight off things like viruses and cancer. Those benefits, the physiological benefits were staying well beyond the end of the session as well as all the mental wellbeing benefits.

That was 40 years ago in Japan. Then it spread to what it spread across Asia. You probably know in Scandinavian countries they have this sort of thing. They’ve always adopted an outside style of life. Eventually it’s reaching Europe, America, and Canada, and it’s starting to get much more popular now.
I’m still very new at this and there aren’t very many of us, but it is gaining in popularity.

Robin Daly: It’s very interesting, because it’s not a tradition. It is a modern occurrence, but the fact that they had more of these types of problems sooner in Japan has presumably been the reason they’ve come up with a solution like this long before we did. Nobody in the NHS was talking about forest bathing 40 years ago, that’s for sure. It’s interesting the way it’s evolved.

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how you came to be doing this because it’s an unusual thing to be doing. And as you say, you’re quite new to it. So how did that happen?

Sonya Dibbin: Would you believe as a kid, I didn’t even a pair of wellies. My family were always unhappy, let’s say miserable, if it wasn’t sunny. If it wasn’t sunny and dry, then everyone was miserable in my family. I found this incredibly tedious. And I knew I felt most at home in nature. I’ve always been nature mad, but we were not a family that went out in the rain.

I suffered with the seasonal affective disorder. I used to hate winters. Really can’t bear the dark. I’d be terrible in Scandinavia. I would not get on well at all. So I didn’t like the dark couldn’t bear the rain and the wind. This has haunted me my whole life and was always there.

Then five or six years ago, I became pregnant with my son and I just instinctively knew – the best gift I’m ever going to be able to give this boy is a love and appreciation of the great British weather and everything that comes with it. That will mean that he’s not miserable for 300 days a year.

When he was born, I made an effort to get out every single day with him. I was off work for seven months and we went out every single day. It doesn’t matter what weather it was, he’s wrapped up in his buggy or pram.

Because I live in a village, I’m surrounded by farmland and woodlands. I started noticing that despite very little sleep, and struggling with breastfeeding, and the relationship with his dad breaking down – despite all of that I was feeling really quite good. And I put this down to having had the time to be able to get out into nature daily. Up until then, I’d been working long hours and full-time roles.

I started looking into it: what is nature for wellbeing? I started learning a bit more about it and that’s when I came across forest bathing as a practice and other forms of nature connection. I was then put on, as I call it, redundancy watch. I was given a couple of years, notice when I went back to work, that the whole team was being replaced. The roles were all moving to Malaysia and Mexico and Poland. The UK IT team were going. But in that timeframe, because I had the warning I could plan and they were very supportive of you planning, I thought, well here I am mid-career, if I don’t do what I’m really passionate about – and I am so passionate about this now. I just decided to go for it and never looked back. Two years ago, it wasn’t expected to pandemic just as I launched. But I felt the experience personally: I no longer have seasonal affective disorder.

In fact, I cannot believe it – this winter, for me it was the most magical winter I’ve ever experienced. I think a few people have said, “we had a good winter” because we had some real cold weather and that crisp hoarfrost here. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that, where you get these, you get a thick hovering of ice crystals. I’m into my nature photography as well, so I’ve got the most incredible photographs and also memories in my mind. And I actually said to myself, wow, winter is one of my favourite seasons.

There are only four, I know, but it has replaced summer. Now I go spring, then autumn, then winter, then summer. The thought of saying that every time it rains, I now don’t have that sinking feeling of feeling glum and miserable. Instead I’m able to think, you know what, we need rain for life. If we didn’t have rain, our plants and gardens would look terrible. My pond is filling up. We can go puddle jumping. You can do wonderful things. Watching the rain drops, falling in the puddles – all of these things come fresh to mind now, and it’s completely transformed my life.

Robin Daly: I want to go back to our eyebrow raising old school professionals who are going to say, well, come on how on earth do you become any sort of expert in taking people out in the woods.

Sonya Dibbin: It’s actually quite an involved training. I did see one the other day for £20 that you can buy online: forest bathing guide.

And I think that happens to most types of qualifications these days. But I can tell you, it was eight days residential in the Forest of Dean. We were a group of 20 and there were students with me from Colombia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Ireland, Canada, the US, amongst others.

There were about three English people there. It was fantastic. And because there aren’t actually that many companies that are doing the training, people tend to travel from all over. You get three or four slots in a year where they do this training, so you travel for it. And of course, the Forest of Dean for me was two hours up the road. Leo was two and a half or three and his dad could have him for that eight-day period. It all just worked out amazingly and I thought, “I have got to go for it”. They had an absolute blast, the two of them together for eight days beause I think they’d only had a couple of days together before that without me being there.

They had a great time and I went and got totally immersed in the Forest of Dean. If you’re going to learn to be a forest bathing guide, that is a really good place to do it. Every morning was theory, learning and exploring. I’m a qualified therapeutic counsellor from 12 years ago and some of those techniques have come in handy. For example, I mentioned the sharing circles and people will bring whatever they bring to those sharing circles. And I can use some of my counselling skills to make sure that I’m very present and able to hold a safe space for the group, depending on what comes up.

Some of it was around that, but much of it was around deepening your own personal connection to nature so that when you’re guiding the group, you’re really guiding from the heart. It isn’t just taking people on a nature walk. You’re not walking, you’re not identifying species, you’re not doing things like having a picnic or having a camp.

It goes way beyond just spending time in nature. It’s about deepening that connection. And then every afternoon for eight days, we were guided on a three-hour experience. The last couple of days we did our own. We split into groups and we did it with people because we were on a holiday park and so there were guests staying there as well who would come to stay in the forest. And so on the last two days, for free we guided some of the guests who had volunteered to come and experience it.

In the evenings, we did campfires and storytelling, and it was really developing the bond with the group because it’s actually quite an emotional process, much like the counselling training. When you do that, a lot of it is looking at yourself, trying to connect with yourself. Like with the Johari window – sometimes you don’t know your own stuff that’s going on for you because you can’t see it, because you’ve blocked it so well. It’s about getting in touch with that and bringing it out and making sure you’re working through this stuff, or at least you’re aware of it so that you can be a very capable guide when you take people out. It is a therapeutic experience, much more so than a nature walk. When I explain that to people, honestly some people will still look at me and say, “yeah, it’s a nature walk.”
There’s not really a lot I can say to that, other than “come along and try it.” Everyone says to me at the end, “Wow. I had no idea what to expect, but that’s just blown me away.”

The intention is that this becomes part of someone’s regular self-care practice. The benefits that I speak of are scientifically proven, but they won’t last forever. The intention would be that you would build it in at least once a month. Practice ideally a bit longer, if you can. This lockdown, because I had Leo at home I couldn’t get out and have enough of my own time quietly in the woods. I could absolutely feel my stress and anxiety rising. I was responding to situations in a way that I hadn’t responded for a number of years. I’m like, “I remember that. That used to happen to me years ago.”

The more you do it, you keep your chilled-out level there. But if you stopped doing it, then it’s going to revert.

Robin Daly: It’s a bit like good nutrition. It’s no good just doing it for a period and then going back to the junk. You’ve got to keep it up.

Even if bathing is something that is new to listeners, the idea that getting out in nature is good for people has come to the fore because of this pandemic in a way, and at a speed that would have been unimaginable before. The connection between nature and good mental and physical health – it’s kind of arrived, and in a pretty unexpected way.

It’s a big jump in thinking about healthcare from being all about drugs, to a general realisation that many kind of common sense basics, such as good nutrition, exercise, sleep, relaxation, socializing – these are all actually the foundation of health and wellbeing.

Interestingly though, these are not just a nice idea. The science is there to back them up. And I think you’ve been saying this is the case too, with forest bathing. Do you want to say a little bit more about the science side of it? What research has been done?

Sonya Dibbin: Yes. It’s really interesting, actually.

Most recently, the Forest Bathing Institute in the UK has now replicated some of the studies that were done in Japan and they have found the same answer. That has actually led to the Surrey Healthcare Commission moving forest bathing into its list of green prescription activities.

With some of this stuff, it’s hard to measure how well you feel, but as best as they can, they’ve proven there’s some physiological and wellbeing benefits associated with this practice based on… I can’t remember now if it’s two or three hours, to be honest in their particular study, I think it’s two hours.

It’s two hours being very slow and mindful and immersed in these forests as compared to going for a two hour walk in the woods or doing two hours of meditation indoors. They’ve also been able to prove that the results are aligned. They give the same level of improvement as a number of other therapies that are already prescribed on the NHS. They’ve done some comparisons.

That’s happened and they are working with the University of Derby who are massively into this whole world of nature connectedness. They’ve got several different studies with several different universities going on, looking at the benefits of nature connection.

This is where it’s a bit broader than just simply forest bathing but they have proved that there are five pathways to nature connectedness, which is a psychological construct that can be measured. It’s through the sense of beauty, emotion, meaning and compassion. When you add all of those together regularly, you’re going to benefit the individual, benefit the nature and benefit the environment as a whole.

That’s when you start to see feeling compassion for nature and pro-environmental behaviours. That’s where we want to be, because it’s blatantly obvious that our relationship with the natural world at the moment where we just use it, deplete it, and see it as something for us to consume doesn’t work. We need to change what we do.

If we go back to the Japanese research, they were very specifically able to prove as compared with a walk in an urban area versus a walk in a forest. Because they’ve now got 30-odd forests that are designated therapy forests.

They’ve got some special places that are all built around relaxation. People don’t go there with their dog and families and have big games and things. This is specifically for relaxation. They have proven that by taking cortisol samples from the mouth, you get a significant drop in cortisol production and that’s the hormone that causes stress, and that has, as we know, a massive amount of connected illnesses and diseases that follow off the back of consistently high cortisol. That sustained reduction in cortisol production lasts for a long time.

They took some people into the woods and they did a whole weekend. You can imagine how chilled you’d be off of that. And they had three weeks where their stress levels did not begin to rise again, no matter how they were back to normal life. That’s one of the main improvements.

Also the heart rate – if you’ve got high blood pressure, that reduces and your heart rate variability is also much better and on a more even keel, doing the right thing. There’s increased count of white blood cells, which are the cells you want that are going to be fighting off the baddies. There’s an increase in the count of those cells, but also in the activity of those cells.

You’re getting more of the good stuff. Plus you’re also kind of activating it simply by slowing down and spending quiet, peaceful, mindful time in nature. For at least two hours on a fairly regular basis.
Robin Daly: Amazing. Wow. That’s very interesting. And what they’re doing at Derby sounds spot on.

Sonya Dibbin: It’s so interesting!

Robin Daly: When I contacted you about being interviewed, you offered as part of the show to do a guided sensory nature connection exercise which takes a few minutes. This is where the listeners will need to get their object from the gardens, from nature that I mentioned at the beginning of the show. If you’re on listing on demand, why not press the pause and get out there and get yourself something from the garden.

If you’ve got a garden, find something before you continue to listen. I’ve got my little bit of nature here ready to go. So off you go take us on a guided sensory nature connection exercise.

Sonya Dibbin: Just wiggle about a bit in your seat to get yourself comfy. You don’t want any sort of tension or stresses and strains. We’re going to relax for the next five minutes. You’ve got nowhere else to be. You don’t have anything else to do other than be here and present for these next five minutes – that is the delightful gift that I’m giving you right now. What I’d like you to do now, if it feels okay, is close your eyes and just make sure you’re comfortable with it straight spine, if you can, but it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. You want to be straight, sitting tall but comfortable, releasing any tension in the neck, just feeling into where you are right now and relaxing. Taking a couple of deep breaths and hold your nature object in your hands. I’ll invite you to explore it, using your hands, maybe your fingertips at the start.

Hold it in one hand and use the other hand to explore and then change hands. Perhaps you’re able to rest the object in the palm of one of your hands and notice how it feels. Is it perhaps lightweight? Is there a kind of feathery touch? Is it heavy or damp or cold – just noticing. There’s no right or wrong.

Perhaps putting the other hand on top so you’ve enclosed your object in your hands and you’ve now got it between the palms. You can connect with it using touch, both of your hands is moving the object around. Rolling your hands, rolling the object between your hands, exploring it with your sense of touch.

And then bring it to your nose, have a little smell, just noticing if there were any scents you might pick up, anything on your hands as well. And that’s all okay. Whatever it is, is okay. Then bring the object down the side of your face, perhaps to your cheek, maybe across the forehead.

Use your sense of touch, but using your face. Notice whether that feels enjoyable or pleasant. If anything is uncomfortable, simply stop. Continue with your eyes closed and engage with your object, with your sense of touch.

Now, bring the object up to your ear and just touch the side of your ear with that object. Notice how it feels. We don’t often touch our ears with these types of things. Perhaps you’re very much able to hear what it sounds like and play around with it.

There’s a big element of fun in nature connection. Maybe twist it around right close to your ear. Roll in your fingers. Does it make different sounds? If you like it, you can do it in a bit more.

Just have a little play and then I invite you now when you’re ready to open your eyes and look at your object. As you look at it now, still also using all of your other senses. I wonder whether your object maybe carries a slightly different meaning for you. Now that you’ve had more of an up-close and personal experience with it, has it become something more? Perhaps notice it you’re able to notice more about how it looks, how it feels, how it smells, how it sounds, perhaps there’s little detail in there that had previously gone unnoticed. Just spend a moment or two with your item.

Then perhaps send it some gratitude for that experience taking some breaths and bring yourself back to the moment to get on with your day.

How was that?

Robin Daly: Interesting! I can’t say it’s like anything I’ve quite done before. I’ve got a piece of ivy here – as this is radio people don’t necessarily know. The sensation of a piece of ivy across the forehead and the top of my head was fantastic. I couldn’t believe how good it was.

Certainly I did notice a huge amount more detail about it afterwards. Particularly the amazing mirroring of these hugely different sizes of leaves, even the tiniest ones, which are absolutely minute, are little tiny baby versions of the big ones. It was all the detail.

Thank you.

Sonya Dibbin: I absolutely love it. And much as you’ve just described, your experience is one that you wouldn’t necessarily have had before and you would never have thought about before. But it proved to be quite a pleasant experience! And you’ve learned, you’ve noticed. It’s this getting people to notice nature for much more than it is.

Ivy is an interesting one because I used to think that ivy was a bad thing because it killed trees. It doesn’t kill the tree and in fact, it’s incredibly useful to so many different types of insects and of course our bees. The ivy flower is a late treat for our bees that keeps them going over from autumn into winter.

My relationship with ivy, as an example, has completely changed. And that’s the type of thing that forest bathing is trying to help other people develop as well, because it all is resulting in more pro-environmental behaviour. That’s what it’s all about. Unless we sort ourselves out and start treating nature in a different way – we’re not going in a very good direction – let’s remember we are nature. Human beings are part of nature. We’re not separate to it.

Robin Daly: Thank you for that. That’s the important thing. It’s not us in it – it’s all the same thing. We haven’t much time left, but I just want to bring it round. We’ve mentioned cancer but only in passing. I’m just interested to know – are many of your clients people with cancer? Do they find that this is particularly helpful for them?

Sonya Dibbin: I’ve got a few customers who have, or have had cancer. I’m just thinking of one lady in particular when I say this. She has found it very helpful in processing her feelings about her diagnosis and about what the future might hold because the experience is a very supportive yet intimate group of people.

Although though people come, and at the start they can be quite nervous because usually people come alone. They don’t know anyone else, and then they don’t know quite what to expect. After allowing some time for everyone to settle down, they realize that there’s nothing to be worried about. What she’s found is that she’s been able to connect with her feelings and actually express her grief and her anger and her frustration and her feelings that this is unfair.

All of that stuff goes on. Each of her individual invitations that she does, she’ll go and have her 20 minutes or so experience because quite often people are on their own for this. Although we’re all relatively close by, she’ll go and have her experiences and then she comes back and quite often, she’ll talk then just for a minute or two and sometimes in tears, but often her tears happen while she’s alone.

Then she just comes back and talks about it afterwards, just for a minute or two. What she is finding is that it’s very helpful for processing through some of the feelings that she has. They’re very valid feelings, but how do you work through them and stop them kind of controlling you?

She’s more able then to say “that’s real, I know that, but it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t have to be there at the forefront of my mind all the time. I’m finding ways of dealing with that.” That’s the one that springs to my mind, mostly because she comes when she can, but also what I teach on these experiences, with a good amount of discipline, is that you can do it on your own as well.

That’s the other thing that she said, because though you don’t get the sharing circle aspect and the supportive thing, you do get the immersive experience and the quietening of the mind. That’s the bit that she’s also said is incredibly useful because she can practice it outside of her monthly experience.

Robin Daly: I think that’s one of the things I’ve got most from this is that the benefits of mindfulness to people with cancer are well-established. They’re well-known, but I think for a lot of people, it does feel a bit of a foreign land, whereas the woods, not so much.

This is a much more accessible way actually, for people to get the benefits of mindfulness in a way which is supported and in a way which is simple. It seems very accessible to me. I hope a lot of people would choose to do that as an adjunct to everything else they’re doing. It’s something completely different, like mindfulness is.

Sonya Dibbin: And a lot of it you can do even in your own garden. Slightly adapt that the experiences and do them in your own garden. That is really liberating as well to think “well, hang on a minute, I’m just going to go and spend an hour outside doing these two exercises. Leave my phone in doors.” And that that makes it even more accessible. If people have a garden that they can do this in themselves.

Robin Daly: All right. We’re out of time. Thanks so much Sonya – I can certainly attest to the merits of nature.

I’m lucky enough to have ended up living in the woods myself. I hope this show’s going to encourage lots of people to take the plunge if that’s the right phrase for forest bathing following the show. But thank you very much. Do you want to just quickly tell us where they can find out more about you and what you do?

Sonya Dibbin: Yes. Thank you Robin. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be here so thank you for asking me. My website is adoreyouroutdoors.co.uk and if you go and visit that, you can see s variety of different nature connection experiences that I offer. Forest bathing in particular, I do across Hampshire and Berkshire in several different locations.

And I’m very excited to be getting going again as of April.

Robin Daly: And people can contact you direct through the website,

Sonya Dibbin: Yes, that’s the easiest to say go there because it’s all there.

Robin Daly: Okay. Thank you very much, Sonya.

Sonya Dibbin: Thank you!

Robin Daly: Bye-bye!

If you joined in with that mini session, I hope you found it interesting. If you weren’t prepared for it with a little bit of nature, but would have liked to joined in, remember that the show along with over 300 others, is on listen on demand. If you go to the Yes to Life website – that’s yestolife.org.uk – and click the link to the Yes to Life show that’s on the homepage, you’ll find a search facility there where you can find any past show, searching by guest name, topic, or keyword.

This is the last addition to the Yes to Life show before the Yes to Life Online Congress on the 27th and 28th of March. The subject of the event is nutritional science in cancer, and the subtitle is ‘exploring increasing consensus and unanswered contradictions’. We have a brilliant line up of speakers for you, including such luminaries as Sheila Dillon of the BBC Food program, Dr. Penny Kechagioglou, senior NHS oncologist and advocate of integrative medicine. Dr. Catherine Zollman, medical director of Penny Brohn UK, Dr. Nasha Winters, naturopathic doctor. functional medicine practitioners Jo Gamble, Victoria Fenton, Mark Bennett, and many, many more.

It’s going to be a weekend packed with cutting edge nutritional science and deep clinical insights and not be missed by anyone wanting to find out more about the potential of nutrition to affect the course of cancer and chronic disease. To find out more and book your place, go to the Yes to life website – that’s yestolife.org.uk – and click the link in the banner, right at the top of the home page. This will take you to the dedicated event website.

Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed a foray into nature, and that you’ll join me again next week for another Yes to Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye!

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Kindly written by Literary & Transcript Editor Maria Mellor