Meet your guide…
Martha (Mattie) Miller Decker, Ed.D.
Dr. Mattie Decker is a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT), an educator and a writer. Mattie is also a mindfulness teacher, a Zen practictioner, an Episcopal oblate, and a retired professor of education. She is certified in wilderness medicine and first aid. Mattie likes to share this saying from her forest bathing mentors: “The forest is the therapist. The guide opens the door.”Shinrin-yoku in Japanese and Forest Bathing, are names for the medicine of being in the forest. Spending time in nature in a way that invites healing interactions, includes not only such benefits as cultivating wellbeing but each invitation is crafted to help participants slow down and open our senses, giving the forest access to our emotional, physical, and psychological and spiritual being. We discover our RELATIONSHIPS with the more than human world and how our presence may assist nature.
This guide has no scheduled walks.
This guide has no published videos.
The Zen of Welcoming Winter Walks
from "In Deep Winter":
We are in deep winter now. All is quiet in the forest. I want to know this stillness and this rest. It’s as if all the earth is calling out, “slow down now, pay attention to this wisdom from the land . . . You can do thi
