Dana Stroschein

I was born and raised in Ely and now live in Meadowlands, Minnesota, but the woods still feel like home in a way I don’t think I could ever fully explain to someone who didn’t grow up in beautiful northern Minnesota.
I grew up on Beacon Hill, across from the Ely Golf Course, just on the edge of the woods. My family were loggers, so I spent many of my earliest years in the woods between Ely and Isabella with my dad. Growing up in Ely started with fireflies in jars and swimming at Shagawa or Fall Lake beaches, and later meant riding your 4-wheeler to school, hunting on the way there, and then jumping back on after cheerleading practice so we could hunt all the way home. Hiking to Basswood Falls or somewhere else just as beautiful, and being surrounded by nature on the weekends was typical and often routine.
I spent most of my adult life in Alborn, Minnesota, about 100 miles southwest of Ely. Our home sat on 40 acres of wooded property surrounded by county land. My kids had the benefit of growing up much like I did, wild and free in the great outdoors. It’s one of the greatest gifts that their father and I could give them. Now I’ve been divorced for several years, and I’ve settled in Meadowlands, just minutes from the beautiful Sax-Zim Bog.
No matter where I’ve called home, these woods and forests have always felt like healing. My mom used to tell me, “There is healing in the woods, my girl.” If you had the benefit of growing up in “the woods” here in the beautiful Northwoods of Minnesota, you’ve likely be exposed to that healing our entire lives before we even knew that’s what it was. Healing just looked a little different than people expected or understood.
It looked like coffee on a dock before sunrise. Like neighbors checking on each other after a storm. Like kids running barefoot through pine needles without anyone worrying too much about it. Like disappearing quietly into the woods for a while when life became too loud.
Back then, nobody called it grounding or forest bathing. We just called it “being outside.” We drank water out of hoses, came home covered in mosquito bites, and learned early that boredom usually disappeared if you walked, or rode your bicycle, far enough into the woods. We didn’t have phones or cameras. We were 100 percent engaged in what we were doing. We were living mindfulness without even realizing it. We were truly living in the moment. I miss that. Life has gotten busy. And noisy.
Throughout my life, I used to wonder why my mom would sometimes just walk off into the woods by herself. I think I understand better now. At the time, I thought she was just trying to get away for a little peace and quiet. And maybe she was. But now, looking back as an adult navigating a chronic inflammatory autoimmune condition while working and raising children, I see she instinctively understood something long before science began catching up to it and before I had enough life experience to even try to understand it.
The woods heal people.
That’s why she would tell me that. Because it’s true. Not in some magical fairytale kind of way.
In a real, biological, nervous-system-regulating way. As a kid, I didn’t realize that just going outside was helping me, too. Looking back, whenever things hurt emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, I wandered outside. Into the trees. Down dirt roads. Alongside the water. Somewhere quieter than the noise in my own head.
Now I find myself returning there intentionally. Often. Not always as an escape, but more often as a “treatment.” Not instead of medical care, but alongside it. While modern medicine absolutely has its place, I’ve realized there are parts of healing that cannot happen under fluorescent lights and inside rushed appointments alone. There is something profoundly regulating about hearing wind move through trees, feeling your breath slow naturally near water, feeling your toes in the grass or the mud, closing your eyes and listening to a chorus of birdsong, or realizing you haven’t checked your phone in over an hour because a hawk circling overhead somehow feels more important.
And it turns out, there’s science behind that feeling.
Research on forest bathing — or Shinrin-yoku — has shown measurable health benefits from time spent immersing in nature. Studies have shown reductions in cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, the one that makes it hard to lose that “stubborn belly fat.” Exposure to phytoncides, the antimicrobial compounds released by trees and plants, appears to improve immune function by increasing natural killer cells, which help the body defend against illness and disease. Nature immersion has also been linked to reduced inflammation and improved vagal tone, helping activate the parasympathetic nervous system — the system responsible for rest, digestion, repair, and recovery.
In simpler terms: The body calms down in the woods.
And when you live inside a body that often feels inflamed, overstimulated, exhausted, painful, or unpredictable, calming down matters. A lot. People often talk about autoimmune conditions as though the body is simply “attacking itself,” but I think many people living through these experiences understand it feels much more layered than that. Stress matters. Trauma matters. Sleep matters. Grief matters. Connection matters. Environment matters. The nervous system and immune system are constantly talking to each other. The body keeps listening to how safe the world feels.
Not long ago, I sat quietly near the edge of the creek just before sunset and watched and listened to the myriads of birds coming through on their migration patterns. Goldfinches, blue jays, orioles, evening grosbeaks, and so many more. I even had a nuthatch land on my hand. I sat close to one of the bird feeders for a long time. Long enough that the birds remembered that I was supposed to be there. Another living being sharing space. I assured them I was no threat. It felt like a sort of reunion. And for the first time in days, my shoulders unclenched. Nothing about my circumstances had changed at that exact moment, but my body had. The tension softened. My breathing slowed. I felt present again.
Today, a large part of my own healing — emotional, physical, and spiritual — involves creating more moments of safety. More walks in the woods. More bare feet on the earth. More birdsong. More noticing dragonflies and deer tracks and pretty rocks. More remembering that human beings were never meant to live entirely disconnected from the natural world.
Mother Earth is our true home, just like the bear and the cedar tree and the muskrat and the owl. And maybe that sounds simple, but simple does not mean insignificant. Hope matters too. Not blind positivity. 
Not pretending everything is “fine” and “I got this.” Real hope. The kind that says: My body is struggling, but it is also trying. The kind that says: I can participate in my own healing.
And healing, I’ve learned, is rarely either/or. It is both/and. Medicine and movement. Science and ceremony. Doctors and cedar trees. Research and ancestral knowledge. Treatment and story. Stories heal too. Every time we tell the truth about what hurts, something softens. Shame loosens. Isolation weakens. We remember we are not the only ones trying to make peace with a body that doesn’t always cooperate. Maybe that’s part of why I keep writing.
And perhaps that’s one of the many reasons I keep returning to the woods.
Because the forest asks nothing from me except presence.
And sometimes, presence itself is medicine.
Dana Stroschein, MSW, LICSW, is a psychotherapist, writer, and mother living in Meadowlands, Minnesota, near the Sax-Zim Bog, and she was born and raised in Ely. She is of blended Ojibwe and Norwegian descent, and her writing weaves personal narrative with cultural and psychological insight—often grounded in raw honesty and a touch of humor—exploring identity, belonging, and the complexities of healing. She also writes the series “Notes from the Bog” and has previously authored work under the name Naazhanayikwe.