"I can't wait to tell you…."
— M. Amos Clifford
Relational Forest Therapy Academy
There is a way of guiding, of being in the world, that explores the landscape as a web of relationships. We find ourselves. We find each other. A few hours away from the constant onslaught of screens, we have a break from the tamed world. We reset.
Relational Forest Therapy has many benefits. It takes little effort to visit your favorite AI and ask it to explain the benefits of forest bathing. When we add the relational domain, a whole world of benefits opens up. This is about kindling the light inside your heart. About connecting the layers of the worlds beyond — perceived beyond that which the tamed world permits.
We've been doing this longer than any other group. Thousands of guides, dozens of countries, every continent (OK, not every continent; if anyone we've trained is guiding in Antarctica I haven't heard of it). The training you would have received had you chosen another company would almost certainly be based on our revolutionary methods. The ANFT Relational Forest Therapy Academy has the most experienced trainers, the longest lineage, the leading creative minds.
If it sounds like I'm bragging, you're right. We are proud of who we are and the ripples of healing that our trainees spread throughout the world. Here's what I can say confidently to you if you have read this far: you were born to be a source of wonderful ripples. ANFT was born to help you live in to that.
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Academy of Place
See this image? The redwood trees? That was us before we became ANFT. That's Cooper's Grove, on Sonoma Mountain. I lived nearby. I took upon myself to tend the grove. I loved the feel of that identity: "Grove Tender." A couple of years in, a day came where I was resting, sitting with my back against the center of those three trees in the photo. And they spoke to me. They told me they were grateful for how I cared for the grove. And confirmed that I did so with their permission. But there was something else they asked of me: "Sometimes, don't bring the trash bags, don't labor. Just be here with us; just enjoy."
That day, as I walked back to my home, I wondered: "Who is tending who?"
It was not long after ANFT was founded that we started getting requests from land managers and those who owned private forest land. They wanted to know: how can we encourage forest bathing here? Each inquiry a seed, from which has grown the Academy of Place. We have developed a process where we train Forest Therapy Guides to consult with land managers. They walk the land. They learn its ways. As guides they know that forests are landscapes of invitation. They see those invitations, how they live and inhabit the land. Upon this a process of developing trails optimized for that particular land is initiated. And a newly ANFT Certified Forest Therapy Trail is made. Each trail a partnership opportunity for guides, healers, nature enthusiasts, educators.
Each trail a place of its own stories. One I hope to visit soon is at the Singapore Botanic Garden, a World Heritage Site. How wonderful is that? Forest Therapy woven into world heritage. Dang. We done good.
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Academy of Applied Forest Therapy
Years of worldwide collaborations; we've watched how those we have trained find ways to bring the heart of the practice into their work. Doctors, psychotherapists, parents, teachers, social workers, yoga teachers, life coaches, and many more… they have shown us how our core teachings enhance their work. The dimensional quality of integrating The Way of the Guide. The Language of Invitation. The Standard Sequence; and the other things that Guides learn how to embody in the forest.
From these interactions a new curriculum has developed. It's best suited for guides, those who have been initiated through training into an operational perspective and methodological vocabulary. The Academy of Applied Forest Therapy will bring the wisdom and support that will help you integrate your love of relational forest therapy into the patterns of your life, professionally and personally.
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Opus Academy
From the very beginning, my earliest experiences and experiments with guiding forest therapy walks, I have held a question. Who are these people who come on these walks, and why do they come? They weren't patients. They weren't students. They weren't clients. So, what then were they?
It took over a decade before I came to what is now my working answer to these questions. They are people with a deep desire to meet themselves, to encounter that deeper layer of life that quietly and continually whispers: "there is something true in life; something I know; and that I have to remember." This is the motive of pilgrimage.
I recognized that the walks I guided were, for many — not all, but perhaps a majority — a brief pilgrimage. And the point of pilgrimage is this: for the true self and the true work of one's life to emerge together. We call this the "co-emergence of Self and Opus." This is the aim of the Opus Academy: to support the pilgrimage thread running through our lives.
We have co-developed — with lands and with each other — a practice we call alchimage. The word is a portmanteau, woven of alchemy, pilgrimage, and the superpower of the heart's imaginal intelligence.
Groups come together for journeys lasting 10 weeks, consisting of weekly meetings and a set of simple but powerful practices. The weathers of alchemy occur, responding to these practices. Self and Opus co-emerge. Witness and celebrate this together. Traditional walking pilgrimages emerge from those inspired to organize them: the Camino de Santiago; the Kumano Kodo; the Peace walk of the Julian Alps; any of the experiences curated by the British Pilgrimage Trust. We've learned not to try to predict what pilgrimages will occur, but to watch and trust that they will emerge when the timing is right.
I will tell you a secret (well, it was a secret until I told you just here): the opus work, the practice of alchimage seems to me to be the capstone of my life's work. And that's saying something, coming from the guy most responsible for bringing relational forest therapy into the world. Relational Forest Therapy has been the powerful launch pad for me, and for many. We each find our own next steps; ANFT does not train you to guide the way our trainers guide; we train you to guide the way you guide. That way exists in you now; it is part of your Self, part of your Opus.
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The Forest Threshold
Forests have always been places of passage from one chapter of life to another. To enter the forest is rarely simply to enter a landscape; it is to cross a threshold into a territory where familiar identities and assumptions may be challenged, where unexpected encounters become possible, and where the path that emerges may not be the path we imagined when we began.
The Forest Threshold is a way of understanding guided forest experiences — and a residential retreat that lives it. A walk may begin with a carefully held structure, but what it opens into cannot (and should not) be prescribed. Beyond the threshold lies an infinite field of possibility: wonder, grief, play, memory, belonging, beauty, revelation, and sometimes a changed sense of one's place in the living world. We explore the deep roots of this pattern through myth and fairy tale, depth psychology, sacred landscapes, and cinema — and we make room for both the luminous and the difficult.
