“Think of a question you have about your life. Now find a tree and place your hands on the bark. Feel the tree. Listen to the tree. Don’t leave until you have your answer.”

This was a literal thing that was said to me during my first “forest bath”—a mindfulness-based hike I was hoping wouldn’t be too hippie-dippy. Spoiler alert: it was. Rather than some profound pearl of wisdom from Mother Nature herself, all I could hear was the sound of my own voice inside my head saying, What the hell are you doing here? Do you think they’ll notice if you leave?

As a health and wellness journalist, I like cold, hard, clinical science. I abstain from any activity involving incense, I have absolutely zero desire to try Ayahuasca. But I’m also curious, and I’m a sucker for a good hike, which is how I ended up non-ironically hugging a tree with 10 strangers.

“Forest bathing” may sound like new age-y nonsense, but the core philosophy is really about how being outdoors can facilitate calming of the mind and body.

A forest bath, I’d learned after I’d RSVP’d to a friend’s event, involves no literal bathing. (Thank god, since the idea of stripping down like a wood nymph would have crossed way too many lines for me. To say nothing of the splinters!) Called shinrin-yoku in Japan where the practice was first created, forest bathing is simply the practice of mindfully walking through a natural space—touching the bark on the trees, inhaling the cool mossy scent of the dirt, feeling the splashes of sunlight peeking through the leaves and falling on your skin. It’s a literal manifestation of stopping to smell the roses.

“Mindfulness in nature, or forest bathing, provides an opportunity to calm the mind and body, while also being supported by nature,” Nina Smiley, Ph.D., director of mindfulness programing at the postcard-worthy Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York, and author of Mindfulness in Nature, told me much later.

In theory, it sounded lovely. In practice, it meant I was talking to trees. I was instructed to “place” all my anxieties on a leaf and then cast it away, a little ship of worries now owned by the breeze. I munched on vegan chocolate bark made with flowers foraged from the trail. I worried increasingly about my relationship to reality with every step.

After we’d sat in a circle in a meadow reflecting on Mother Nature’s messages and closed the experience mindfully, I high-tailed it to find the nearest Uber, pizza, and glass of wine. My dip into the world of forest bathing had brought me way the hell out of my comfort zone.

The transformation of my mood after forest bathing was not a single epiphany so much as a slow, natural healing process that enhanced my ability to be mindful in otherwise chaotic situations.

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But in the days following, I started noticing some odd after-bath effects: a calmer response to emails that would have normally thrown me into a tailspin of anxiety, an awareness of the dozens of shades of green in the tree outside my window, a sense of how the air in San Francisco where I live always smells marine and deliciously briney, even in its more urban center.

Then there was a slowly awakening sense of curiosity in new things, even a desire for adventure. One of the main themes of the bath was focusing on the idea that nature is a powerful and pervasive force—no matter what’s going on in our busy, social media-saturated lives, Mama Nature will always have our backs. We meditated on being empowered by that—taking more risks and following our inner compasses. Coincidentally or not, I found myself doing more of that in the weeks after the forest bath, saying yes to more things out of my comfort zone and ditching some of the narrow-minded hang ups that had kept me from trying new things (like any restaurant that put flowers on the menu, the meditation class at my yoga studio, or the makeup counter at Whole Foods).

When I stopped to reflect several weeks later, I realized my new age-y encounter with the wood nymphs had actually made a pretty significant mark.

Though it freaked me out, I wanted more. So I scheduled a hike with Smiley—a true expert in forest bathing—on her turf at Mohonk just before peak foliage season (picture hiking trails with views so good you can almost see all the way to Manhattan and a crystal clear lake that looks like it was taken from a Wes Anderson film) to ask her about how a skeptic like me could be more open-minded about adopting some of the tenets of forest bathing.

“It has long been known that nature nurtures,” she told me. “The interest in forest bathing speaks to the desire for ways to calm, center, and strengthen the body, mind, and spirit. Minds are saturated with information overload, and many feel the need to be constantly multi-tasking and digitally connected, creating an addiction to busyness.” Guilty.

With an expert guide, I hit the trail with a different set of priorities (and a formal request to skip any hugging of and/or talking to trees), namely to slow down and use all of my senses to really take in each moment rather than focus on getting a workout or a view, like I normally would on a hike. “The vibe of forest bathing is very different,” Smiley says. “Once you’re outdoors, forest bathing is only a mindful breath away. Once you understand how to do this—and how it feels to calm the body and clear the mind—you can do this walking down a city street, appreciating nature in the middle of an urban setting.”

It turns out that forest bathing doesn’t actually require a forest at all, just an outdoor space where I can be fully present.

Three hours later, I was stepping off a bus in midtown Manhattan at rush hour—a place I’d usually hug a thousand trees to avoid. Normally, I’d grab a cab and get the f**k out, but in the spirit of a little mindful adventure, I decided to walk through the heart of the city and practice some of what Smiley was preaching. I was surprised to find there’s a shocking number of flowers in Times Square—on an early fall night, with the right mindset, it’s almost a lovely stroll.

At first, my hang up with forest bathing was the new age-y nature of the idea—and to be clear, I’m still skeptical about the whole getting answers from trees thing. But the surprising sense of being more open-minded and adventurous about integrating natural healing into my wellness routine and—at the risk of sounding too hippie-dippy—my life, made me a convert. “Bringing the principles of forest bathing into everyday life means understanding that being fully present in the moment is a powerful way to enhance well-being,” Smiley says. If that means opening my eyes and mind wide enough to find a moment of serenity even in the concrete jungle, I’m willing to at least try to see the forest for the trees.