Walking With Horses in Nannup offers ‘bush bathing’ for mental and physical wellbeing

Walking with wild-born horses in Nannup is helping people get in touch with nature to improve their wellbeing.

This form of “bush bathing” is akin to the Japanese practice of shinrin yoku, inviting people to immerse themselves in the nature sessions.

Katherine Waddington from Wadi Farm HerdLife runs Walking With Horses sessions and said the purpose was to help others reconnect with themselves.

“In the last five years or so, the practice of forest bathing has been out there and become very popular,” she said.

“In the modern world, the modern human is losing their ability to understand their own behaviour, let alone recognise and understand behaviour of others about them, and that’s other humans as well as other animals.

“There’s more and more an underlying current of anxiety in society generally.

“We’re so out of touch with ourselves and with our own behaviour, because society (and) the pressure of constantly doing is stopping us from being.

“It’s just that people need to take a break and step away from that, and get into a space where they can reconnect with themselves.”

Horses, Ms Waddington said, and particularly wild-born rescue horses, helped others get “in touch” with themselves.

The practice of Shinrin Yoku, or forest bathing and immersion, stems from Japan and South Korea, with Ms Waddington saying she aimed to combine the idea with walking near on-lead and off-lead horses, inspired by years of rehabilitating wild horses.

She said on the walks people also enjoyed wildlife on the property such as kangaroos, birds, and emus.