Forestfulness® Protocol:
the first Italian scientific method
Forestfulness® means self-awareness throughʼsoul of the forest. Awareness is the key.
The steps, when placed one after theʼother, they draw a path, naturally introspective. If moved consciously they lead us to two different objectives: an external one, the set goal, and an internal one, a greater knowledge of ourselves.
There gradualness The importance of this achievement becomes evident at a certain point in the journey, as only well-placed, measured, and conscious steps are able to restore value to the space explored and the time spent.
It is therefore essential that there be a logic to the proposal of "immersion in the Forest-Self," just as, in the same way, it is a priority to decide to exist and occupy one's own space in life, before being able to embrace oneself.
What is stimulated more than anything else is theʼI listen which, in a broad sense, is transversal to all the senses, to every practice, to every stage of the path, because it allows us to resonate with all things and recognize ourselves in them. Listening with all the senses to the processes of nature, grasping their plasticity, resilience,ʼefficiency and what characterizes a space as an ecosystem (internal and external), allows us to learn and make those processes our own, thanks to this resonance.
We enter one step at a time, and each step is deeper and more conscious than the last. For this reason, the protocol is divided into several stages: "the six steps.". Each of them is proposed by alternating a metaphorical language, symbolic and/or poetic, which each therapist can tailor to their own predispositions, to a rational language, in the proposal of activities, because this stimulates both hemispheres of the participants in a more intense involvement, also from an emotional point of view.
Sara Nardini, Forest Therapy according to the Forestfuness® method in Landscape, community and sustainability. Edited by Ilaria DallʼAuction. 2025. Proceedings of the Summer School 2024. Mountain Union of Municipalities ofʼReggio Apennines.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow...
Forestfulness® has been structured on the basis of years of experience inʼaccompaniment in the woods, for the purpose make this practice unequivocally effective, providing one tool for well-being, even therapeutic.
First Italian scientific protocol, It has been used since 2020 in an important research in collaboration with CAI (Italian Alpine Club) and CNR (National Research Council) and in a subsequent research between 2021 and 2022 carried out in Veneto and Trentino which validated itsʼeffectiveness.
It is now a tool for further research aimed at evaluating its validity in relation to specific pathologies.
In August 2025 it comes presented in Vancouver, Canada at “The Second International Conference on Forest Therapy – Healing with Nature.”
They say about us
Micaela Monti — Psychotherapist, Bologna
I had the pleasure of participating in the Forestfulness® training program. I say pleasure because the first thing that struck me was definitely the passion and care with which Sara developed this protocol and helped us experience it.
The benefits ofʼImmersion in nature is well known and I already had experience of meditative practices but this path opened up many channels for me, offering me the possibility of entering into a more intimate contact with nature.ʼenvironment I was immersed in. Walking in the woods is beneficial, being accompanied to enter into a relationship with them while maintaining an inward gaze is therapeutic. There is noʼThere is a time when I enter a forest and I don't stop to greet a tree or a plant, with the respect and reverence with which one addresses teachers.
Every forest has its own characteristics, and discovering the studies that have been done on the physiological changes they generate in us is pure wonder for me.