Let’s discuss how to use immersive gardens to destress and tap into a sense of calm you might not experience often.
Though immersive gardens are designed for visitors to let go, there’s a series of do’s and don’ts to follow if you want to get the most out of your experience.
What is an Immersive Garden?
The terms immersive garden and sensory garden are usually used interchangeably. Both refer to gardens that are designed to awaken the senses of touch, smell, sound and sight through careful plant choice. Visitors are invited to interact with the plants via these senses.
The goal is to make the experience full and immersive, helping users fall into relaxation and let go of their everyday worries and default-mode rumination. With our perception engaged in unusual textures, sights, sounds and smells, our usual fight-or-flight, problem-seeking orientation goes offline, and we naturally feel a sense of release. The muscles relax, the heart rate slows, and the senses heighten.
This can take us beyond mere relaxation and into states of inspiration, wonder and creativity.
Tips for Destressing
As I mentioned, there are some do’s and don’ts to follow if you want to experience these benefits. Some might seem basic or trivial, but together they make it much more likely you’ll truly immerse yourself.
First of all, turn your phone off. You can’t let go of your usual worries and obligations if your phone is repeatedly beeping. Every time it beeps, by association you’ll be taken from the present moment back to your everyday life, and you’ll no longer be paying attention to the garden. It’s a small but vital step, not to mention a much-needed break from tech saturation.
Second, I encourage you to keep chit-chat to a minimum. Sure, if you’re with a friend, you can share your thoughts on the garden now and again, but talking about work, family and gossip is guaranteed to keep you stuck in everyday mode. You want to remove associations, not carry them into the sensory garden experience. It’s best to save these topics for the coffee shop afterwards.
Finally, give yourself over to the garden. Feel it, see it, hear it, smell it, as though you’d never visited a garden before. Be like a child: interacting with plants without a care in the world. Try to experience the garden as it is, in all its fullness, beyond your ideas and interpretations.
Not only does this take you out of the thinking mind, it awakens that inner wonder and inspiration within you, which is deeply healing. As we live our normal lives, we lose contact with these faculties because of our routines and habits, and life comes to seem dull. You can use your visit to immersive gardens as a way to counteract this tendency.
With those three simple steps, you’re well on your way to deeply destressing during your visit to immersive gardens.