Ever since last April, Patrick Pepper’s ears have been ringing.

His hands tingle. He drops things. His words don’t come out with the same machine-gun delivery.

Too much light, and he feels like his head is full of water. Too much sound, and he’s equally fuzzy.

Nineteen months ago, he was electrically shocked while working as a maintenance man at the Columbia Center.

“When that voltage locks on to the human system, every part of you starts to flex,” Pepper said. “You can’t control yourself. You can’t breathe. It feels like hot lava hands are squeezing you out of your body.”

But that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part came after the accident, when Pepper realized he was a different man.

He had lost his awareness.

“I could sit and stare at a wall for hours and be totally entertained, which was disturbing,” he said.

He also lost his patience. He found it increasingly difficult to track situations and stay calm, or to deal with trying personalities.

“I used to have the ability to care about what people needed,” he said. “Now, if somebody’s poisonous, it’ like automatically, I can’t handle it.”

But he’s getting there, slowly.

Through physical therapy, counseling, qigong, floating: They’ve all played a role in Pepper’s healing process.

But for his emotional recovery? He credits the ManKind Project, “kind of like an AA group for being male,” and the Bloedel Reserve’s Strolls for Well-Being.

“It’s totally self-work,” Pepper says with a grin.

For many strollers, the Japanese Garden is a special place; it’s where their journey first begins. A guidebook, thick with wisdom from Lao-Tzu, Kalidasa, Thoreau, Thich Nhat Han and others, sets the scene, encouraging the stroller to pause, reflect and let go of weighty thoughts and emotions.

In front of the Torii Gate, the journal instructs: “Be aware of the beauty of the earth and the water around you. Sense that you belong here, at this time, for a purpose…”

The topic, awareness, is difficult for Pepper. He doesn’t want to be aware of his symptoms, which dog him day and night. But even as the journal stirs him up, he knows that he is growing, even in the discomfort.

“When I put my attention out there,” he says, gesturing toward a tree, “things get quieter in here”— his head —“at least for me.”

In subsequent weeks, Pepper takes on possibility, connection, transition, journey, forgiveness, joy, freedom, trust, reflection, gratitude, fulfillment — 12 themes in all as he moves throughout the reserve.

One day he’s near the Bird Marsh, holding his 7-month-old daughter. She shows him “joy” as she stares up into the canopy, wide-eyed and mouth agape. It’s an emotion that’s been rare since the accident.

Another week, he walks behind the old house to the Puget Sound Overlook. His mission is “forgiveness.” His mind drifts back to what happened. He still hasn’t forgiven himself.

“I was the assistant safety director; I had never had an accident at work,” Pepper explains.

Three weeks later, the theme is “trust.” He is learning to trust himself and the environment around him.

The strolls are based on “Shinrin-yoku,” also called forest bathing, a Japanese healing intervention prescribed to reduce chronic stress and depression.

Sally Schauman, a former Bloedel trustee and professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, brought the concept to Bloedel after hearing about a similarly-inspired program at the Morikami Gardens in Florida. Together with Dr. Ruth McCaffrey, a nursing professor at Florida Atlantic University who founded the Strolls at Morikami, Schauman helped develop a curriculum customized to Bloedel.

Since its pilot last fall, the free program has had more than 150 participants.

They come for all sorts of reasons: transition, grief, illness, to get away from stress. Some are facing the ambiguity of retirement; others are just new to the area, looking to get connected.

“There really is no one that can’t benefit from this reflective thinking,” said Bloedel’s Erin Jennings. “You don’t need to be in crisis to take stock of your life.”

Solitary, quiet, private — it’s the ideal setting for self-reflection. Participants report that they feel safe, and, because of that safety, that they are able to let their guards down. They like the stillness, the fact that nothing is competing for their attention.

They also like the freedom of the walks. Strollers are encouraged to jumble the order of the book, pick a walk as the need arises, take their time, respond to the prompts in whatever ways they see fit — be it journaling, drawing or simply observing nature.

Then, at the midway meeting, the Strollers come together, to share what they’ve discovered.

And sometimes the breakthroughs are startling.

Karen Gerstenberger signed up for the pilot program last fall. A writer and avid walker, she thought the program presented the perfect intersection of her physical, artistic and spiritual goals. She figured she’d grow stronger; she’d been uncharacteristically plagued by debilitating health issues for several months — severe back pain, an agonizing root canal procedure, surgery to remove a spot on her ear — and hadn’t been able to exercise like she was used to.

“I knew I could at least walk as far as each stroll,” she said.

And while that was true — Gerstenberger did grow stronger — for her, the biggest change was unexpected.

Week by week, as she snapped photos of trees, ferns, leaves and flowers, she unknowingly chipped away at a 30-year-plus mental block.

As a studio art major in college, Gerstenberger had been a painter. But for three decades, she hadn’t touched a brush.

“I wanted to, but every time, I would try, it would be really painful and I could just hear critique,” she said.

But something happened at Bloedel; Gerstenberger began to regain her confidence.

Each visit, she’d bring along her phone, intending to be present, to be in the moment, but she couldn’t stop taking photographs.

“I’d say to myself, ‘OK, bring your phone but put it away and only take it out if you have to,’” Gerstenberger recalled. “And then I would leave here consistently with 30 to 40 photos. I couldn’t not photograph.”

It wasn’t that Gerstenberger was cruising through, ignoring the journal and its pauses.

“Taking photos was my way of stopping and looking deeply and having so much joy in what I was seeing; I wanted to take it home,” she said.

Eventually, the photos gave way to drawings, and “the block just broke open,” Gerstenberger said.

“I found I could draw with joy instead of fear and trepidation. It was this huge pleasure as the joy started to bubble up.”

A year later, and Gerstenberger is painting passionately, in every spare moment.

In September, she went to a workshop in Portland taught by Flora Bowley. Gerstenberger had admired Bowley’s work for a long time, but she’d been reluctant to spend the money on classes and take the resources from her family.

But going through the “Artist’s Way” and the Strolls for Well-Being encouraged her to make the leap. And to share her work with others: Gerstenberger’s already booked a show for 2017.