Imagine waking up to serene, misty mornings, a fresh breeze giving you the most beautiful start to the day. The weather is ready to take off all your summer weariness, leaving you mesmerised and letting you breathe the luxury of a calm, slow-paced life. This is a snippet of Dhofar life during the season of Khareef.
Families reuniting and spending real time together in the greens of wadis amidst waterfalls and streams flowing is a much-needed respite from the fleet-footed flow of digital life and trails left by sweltering summer.
No man-made, perfectly conditioned infrastructure can match the comfort and peace that nature provides to a racing brain and rapidly transforming challenges of concurrent lives everyone is living.
A research article in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine on PubMed Central states: “The concept of nature as medicine is not new, and decades ago Edward O Wilson was instrumental in raising awareness of our need and desire as a species to connect with the outdoor environment.”
Wilson, along with Erich Fromm, coined the term Biophilia to describe the innate human connection to nature and other living organisms. The word ‘biophilia’ is derived from the Greek words ‘bios,’ meaning life, and ‘philia,’ meaning love or affinity.
This connection can be seen in our appreciation of natural beauty, our love for animals, and our desire to be surrounded by plants and green spaces. The concepts of biophilia and evolutionary biology highlight the connection between humans and the natural world and present the importance of preserving and nurturing this connection for the benefit of our physical and mental well-being.
This approach, known as ‘biophilic design’, seeks to create spaces that promote health, happiness, and productivity by incorporating natural elements such as plants, water features, and natural light into the built environment.
If we take an insight into the health benefits of nature as medicine, they are remarkable and totally worth incorporating into our lives. To enlist a few, spending time in nature improves immunity, the body's natural ability to kill toxins, thereby reducing the chances of cancer, infections, and healing to set in. The cardiovascular, neurological, hormonal, and emotional health improves, and that is why we find our stress levels dropping and our happy hormones surging whenever we are in the lap of nature.
This well-established Japanese therapy, Shinrin Yoku, or ‘forest bathing’, involves immersing oneself in a natural environment and experiencing it through all the senses, such as sight, touch, and hearing. This practice unveils marvellous responses to boost one’s emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing.
These days, everyone is hit with this common ailment of burnout; both physical and mental - because present-day life isn’t possible without constant exposure to digital screens, be it for work or for constant dopamine addiction.
However, the real dopamine lies in nature, in the drizzly mornings, on the beaches, in the foggy mountains, getting wet in waterfalls and splashing in crystal-clear streams. Or just doing nothing and being present in the moment, letting the thoughts flow, the raw conversations and healing begin to wrap you underneath.
And Dhofar is the space that holds this treasure of ‘nature as medicine’ that is ready to serve and heal the exhausted minds, the brain-rot victims, and fake dopamine addicts. Once you get a taste of nature as medicine, you’ll keep returning to it whenever the worldly storm takes a toll on your senses, and you'll realise that nature was always there to accommodate everyone as the happy, go-to place.
DR NISMA HARIS
The writer is a general physician, content creator
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
