There’s no WiFi in the forest, but Felicia Eckersten provides a much better connection. A connection with yourself. We have the world she grew up in to thank for it: a primaeval forest in the middle of Skåne with a meandering river running through it. Here’s how to walk out of the woods completely relaxed after a forest bath in nature with Felicia.

“Save the planet” is Felicia’s shocked reaction to a plastic bag floating in her river. She paddles ashore. The ducks are nervous; what is this lady with her hat doing in our river? “Sorry guys.” She slides her paddle under the sandwich bag and lifts it on board. She carries on her journey as if she is the new Greta Thunberg. She is not alone. Felicia leads a fleet of women in canoes who have all signed up for two days of mindfulness in the forest. I am one of them. The only two men who signed up for this adventure are filmmaker Josiah and photographer Frits. Forest bathing is mostly a women’s event, led by primordial woman Felicia.

Hi, I’m Felicia
Felicia is everything which makes Sweden Swedish. She’s tall, blonde, pretty, and she loves nature. A friluftsliv-girl who happily takes everyone into her forest to experience life as it should be: with both feet on the ground, breathing from your stomach, and staring like a child, full of wonder.

That is what friluftsliv is all about. The outdoor life. “Friluftsliv for my thoughts.” By writing this, Henrik Ibsen coined this typical Scandinavian word. However, according to fjord landscape specialist Willem van der Bilt it was polar adventurer, diplomat, and folk hero Fridtjof Nansen who invented the word. Van der Bilt says: “According to Nansen, friluftsliv is about finding the balance between body and mind in nature. Outdoor sports as a means, reflection as the goal. A bit of new age basically.” I can already feel it. Rain is about to fall just when we want to have lunch. It is true that there is no such thing as bad weather in Sweden. Certainly not if your parents are called Per and Susanne and immediately hand out ten umbrellas as soon as the first drops begin to fall.

The two days of mindfulness consist of canoeing, hiking, and yoga. All together you call this ‘forest bathing’. At first, I thought forest bathing was about a jacuzzi in a mossy forest. It turned out to be something completely different, something Japanese. “Are you about to go tree-hugging?” my friend asks after I read the Wikipedia page to him. ‘Shinrin-yoku is a form of nature therapy from Japan. The term translates to ‘forest bathing’ and is a form of mindfulness: the concept means that you immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the forest and experience the surrounding nature with all your senses. This heath mania started in the 1980s and was picked up by various lifestyle magazines from 2016.’

A soft shy woman’s voice: “Hello everybody, we are going to do an exercise.” Felicia tells everybody to follow her into the forest. We gather round in a circle and listen carefully to what she has to say. She pinches a raisin between her thumb and index finger. Usually, I eat these within a nanosecond, but that is not today’s intention. Felicia asks us to look at the raisin as if we have never seen one before. “Please close your eyes and smell it. Squeeze it between your fingers and watch how it bounces back. Please keep it in the sunlight and discover the colours of this majestic creation of nature. Put it on your tongue without swallowing it. What do you taste?” At home, I would consider this a bit too much. But Felicia has left an impression on me. I realise how quickly I normally eat, like a lizard that in a split second -plop- eats anything that moves.

When I return to my canoe, I notice I am paying a lot more attention to my environment: the waving cattails in the reed, an elegant line of dancing seagrass under my canoe; and next to me a pond skater, Gerris lacustris, an insect that walks on water without getting its feet wet. My senses seem supercharged. After the mindfulness training the dragonflies appear to be bluer, I see more butterflies and look, over there, a cow standing near the water.

Per and Susanne meet us with a bowl of nettle soup and a hug, which is also very Swedish: the hug. Billabong nestles on Felicia’s father’s lap.
“So, how was it?” he asks.
“Beautiful”, I reply, and I place myself near the fire.
Not much later, I knead my dough around a long stick. I put the stick in the fire for a while. Suddenly several new sticks appear, just like the ten umbrella’s that appeared earlier this afternoon during lunch. It hasn’t rained since, by the way. The Swedes are right: There is no such thing as bad weather.

In this setting of dancing sparks comes a practical announcement from Felicia. “It might be a good idea to put our tents up, now that it is still light”. She is expecting us at her parents’ house afterwards. We are going to pick tomatoes in the backyard, as well as carrots, lettuce, artichokes, and black currants.

Sleep under the stars
“Did you also hear that cat meowing tonight?”
It is the first thing I ask when I open my tent. I have no complaints; I slept like a moose. The moss provided a soft mattress.

One of the other women thinks she heard a deer last night, a grunting deer. I clearly heard a cat. It turns out to be a cat owl. Felicia knows exactly where its nest is, to the left of the fourth row of trees; a nest with three young ones.  A cat owl, I had not heard of it before. That doesn’t say much, though, because I also hadn’t heard of forest bathing before. Speaking of forest bathing, it is time for yoga. We grab our mats and stretch out our arms to the treetops. It is still early, but slowly, the sun gains its strength.