Why Nature Has Always Been My Medicine

By Nisarga Eryk Dobosz · 24 August 2026

Picture a child on a bike, free-wheeling down a forest trail in July. Sun breaking through the canopy in golden flashes. Wind on his face. The resin-sweet smell of pine warming in the afternoon heat, mixing with dust and the sound of his own laughter. No destination, no clock, just the pure aliveness of being outside, alone with the trees and utterly free.

That child is still somewhere inside me. And nature has been my biggest resource ever since.

Since I was five

When I was five, my parents moved our family, my brother and me included, to a house at the edge of the forest. That is where I grew up, with a view of the trees from nearly every window. I watched them shed and bud, darken and blaze, go bare and fill in again: four seasons on repeat, like a slow breath the whole forest was taking together. Every time I felt disconnected, from myself, from joy, from my own energy, nature brought me back. Not as a metaphor. Literally: a walk outside, hands in soil, eyes on the horizon, and something in me would recalibrate.

On my spiritual journey that closeness never left. So when I was in India in 2008 and it came time to receive a new name, there was really only one direction it could go. I took the name Nisarga, Sanskrit for nature. Not because I wanted to romanticise the natural world, but because it had already, quietly, become the ground I stood on.

Now: Lesvos

These days I live on Lesvos, a Greek island that feels like paradise for exactly this reason: I can be outdoors almost every day of the year. Dancing under the open sky. Swimming in the sea. Running the coastal paths. Walking for the simple pleasure of walking. Working the soil in the garden, hands dirty, sun on my back. This isn’t leisure squeezed in around “real life”. This closeness to nature is my life, and I believe it gives all of us more purpose, more joy and very possibly more years.

Nature is never still: coherent breathing

Here is something worth sitting with: nature is never static. Rivers move. Leaves turn. Tides pull in and out. Everything alive is oscillating, breathing, cycling. I think that is exactly why the practices that support us most involve rhythm and movement rather than force or control.

Take coherent breathing: inhaling for 5.5 seconds and exhaling for 5.5 seconds. It sounds almost too small to matter, yet this unhurried rhythm is one of the best-studied tools we have for calming the nervous system. At around 5.5 breaths per minute your breath, blood pressure rhythm and heartbeat fall into phase, a state researchers call resonance. It shifts the body out of stress and into repair, and studies have shown measurable improvements in heart rate variability, stress hormones and even cognitive performance after just a few weeks of practice.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the rhythm which best regulates us is slow, cyclical and steady, the same qualities that define a forest, an ocean or a season. When we breathe like this we are not inventing a hack. We are remembering a rhythm nature has been running the whole time. We work with this kind of breath in the BBTRS® training.

The science is catching up

I first heard Dr. Zach Bush talk about this in an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience. Bush, a physician triple board-certified in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care, has spent much of his career making the research-backed case that human health cannot be separated from our connection to the natural world. He points out that practices like forest bathing measurably shift the nervous system out of sympathetic “fight or flight” and into parasympathetic recovery, which is part of why forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) became part of public health in Japan.

Research on natural light tells a similar story. A well-known University of Colorado Boulder study found that one week of camping, with no artificial light after dark, was enough to re-sync people’s internal clocks to sunrise and sunset. A follow-up study found that even a single weekend outdoors shifted people’s melatonin timing significantly. Our bodies are still listening for nature’s signals, even when we have stopped sending them ours.

An ancient knowing

Long before any of this had a study attached, cultures around the world knew it in their bones. In Hawaiian tradition, nature isn’t a backdrop; it is the main character. The prayers, the hula and the mele (songs) are woven directly from the land, the ocean, the wind and the volcano. They tell the story of a culture whose identity is inseparable from, and deeply grateful to, the natural world that sustains it. That is not folklore for its own sake. It is a technology of reverence, refined over generations, for staying in right relationship with what keeps you alive.

Coming home

Whether it is a child free on his bike in a forest, an islander swimming in the sea each morning, or ten slow breaths timed to nature’s own rhythm, the invitation is the same. Go outside. Move. Breathe. Let the trees, the wind and the water do what they have always done for us, long before we had language for it.

Nature was never just scenery for me. It is medicine. It is memory. It is home.

Nisarga Eryk Dobosz is a bodyworker and trainer (BBTRS®, MER®, BCST, Lomi Lomi) and founder of the Body Awareness Institute. This article is for education and self-care. It is not medical advice and does not replace care from a doctor or therapist. It was first published on nisarga8.com.