MINDFUL REWILDING
When I lead outdoor programs and retreats, I often invite participants to remove their shoes for periods of slow, mindful walking in nature. One beautiful trail I like to use runs along a stream where the ground is smooth and easy on the feet, especially for those who don’t have calluses from years of going barefoot. I invite everyone to close their eyes and slow their breathing. We feel the sensation of our feet touching the earth, and as we begin to walk, we stay connected to our breathing. We move without any talking or social interaction. A five-hundred-yard stretch of trail can take thirty minutes to cover at our mindful pace. We are unhurried, in the moment. You can try this yourself in your own neighborhood or home, and take as long as you like.
Afterward, we gather back together as a group, sit in a circle, and pass a stone around from one person to another. Whoever holds the stone has the authority to speak, and everyone else listens with compassion to the speaker’s observations and experience. What I hear them say time and again is that they have not walked barefoot on the earth for ten, fifteen, or even more years. After one group walked barefoot across an expansive lawn toward a tree they had chosen, one participant said that he found it difficult to maintain his balance without shoes, that he had almost fallen over three or four times. It had been twenty-five years, he said, since he had walked barefoot on grass.
The simple practice of walking barefoot on the earth and bringing awareness to the sensual experience of contact and connection can be life changing. It’s about so much more than just being barefoot. It’s about opening yourself to sensual contact and relationship with nature. It’s about a willingness to feel and connect with the great web of life that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds us all together.
Making physical contact with the earth through the senses is one of the pillars of human rewilding. Another is connecting to where our food comes from and participating in its procurement. Whether you forage for wild berries or grow tomatoes, dig for clams in a tidal flat or at the edge of the surf, fly-fish for trout or bow-hunt for whitetail deer, rewilding is about reestablishing a connection to your place in the food chain and to the other living things that sustain our lives.
Rewilding is actually a vast subject, and it can pertain to the rewilding of ecosystems by reintroducing species that were extinguished, such as wolves or bobcats, or to the rewilding of human life by exploring ways of connecting with the earth and living more in harmony with it. Some people focus on wilderness survival, while others geek out on natural or primal movement patterns for the body, exploring how to go barefoot and move gracefully and powerfully over the land. Others are drawn to ancestral skills, such as friction fire-making, shelter building, animal tracking, or flint knapping to make ancestral tools. Still others explore plant medicine, foraging, wild food harvesting, or shamanic healing practices. Any one of these subjects could take up an entire book, but I’ll keep our focus on personal rewilding, or the practice of mindfulness in nature, which connects us to our original natural or wild essence.
At one time across the continents, all of our ancestors lived close to the earth, its seasons, cycles, and many life-forms. Today, many people in the developed world are far removed from contact with nature and living lives of constant stress. Most people today recognize more corporate logos than the flora and fauna in their bioregion. Modern environments are often “ecologically boring,” as environmental activist and journalist George Monbiot writes, and do not refresh the mind or support the health of the nervous system.1 Think about the average office environment or chain store, with its fluorescent lights, few windows, stale air, and computer screens. These places dull our senses, and their sterility can make us sick. Health crises that arise from sedentary lifestyles have increased dramatically around the world, and these diseases track closely with the disruption and destruction of our climates and planet.
Perhaps separating people from the earth is a purposeful effort by modern companies and governments. For the further we individuals are from intimately knowing our lands, the easier it is for organizations to destroy environments and the clean air and water on which we depend, in the name of progress and economic growth. With so many people spending so little time establishing healthy bonds with nature, who will speak for the planet? Where will the future earth stewards come from?
Rewilding offers a way out of this unsustainable cycle of existence, and it gives us a variety of ways to live in closer relationship with the earth, which also allows us to live in deeper relationship to the self. Our bodies, senses, minds, and hearts are but one expression of one species, one manifestation of the living earth. When we draw closer to the field of life pulsing through our feet, flowing through our lungs, and moving through our digestive tract, we are communing with a larger, more expansive model of who and what we are. In this sense, rewilding is also a journey of self-realization that leads us into nature, both the natural world we find within ourselves in deep meditation and the natural world we find in the forests, oceans, fields, and mountains of this living earth. In either case, it is a journey of self-discovery.
The great historian and theologian Thomas Berry put it this way:
In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe. Such a statement could be made about any aspect of the universe because every being in the universe articulates some special quality of the universe in its entirety. Indeed, nothing in the universe could be itself apart from every other being in the universe, nor could any moment of the universe story exist apart from all of the other moments in the story. Yet it is within our own being that we have our own unique experience of the universe and of the Earth in its full reality.2
Rewilding is an endeavor to be awake, alive, and aware on a planet that is crying out for us to listen and respond with skill and wisdom. It is a journey of coming home to our human selves, to a reunion with our sensing and feeling animal bodies. In rewilding we awaken to the miracle of life, give thanks for every breath, and assume our role as caretakers of this precious and sacred living earth. We remove the shoes that insulate us from the energy flowing in the grass and through the earth and stones. We open our windows and listen to the language of birds, wind, and clouds; the voices of thunder, rain and space; and the sounds of the moon and the stars.
Ecological and Human Rewilding
Man always kills the things he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map. ALDO LEOPOLD
For hundreds of thousands of years, our species lived intimately with the earth. We were in the wild and of the wild. Efforts to rewild ecosystems aim to protect lands from human development, creating wildlife corridors that allow animals to move from one area to another and reintroducing keystone species or apex predators, whose presence is essential for the overall health of the ecosystem in which they evolved. When these animals are absent, imbalances occur. For instance, whitetail deer populations now overpopulate suburbs around the country because natural predators are lacking. This leads to a variety of negative ecological impacts, such as soil erosion and the destruction of plant species on which other animals depend; the loss of native species, including birds; and the overgrowth of nonnative species. It also results in sickness and starvation of the deer themselves.
Internationally respected environmentalist Bill McKibben has proposed that half of the earth’s land and water be set aside as wild in order to minimize humankind’s negative effects on the planet’s systems. In such a model, rewilded ecosystems would only require minimal human management because they would in essence regulate themselves with a natural balance of predator and prey. The intelligence of the living earth would be in charge, as it was before humans became such a dominating force.
Other proponents of rewilding ecosystems advocate for the reintroduction of apex predators, such as mountain lions in North America, wolves in Scotland, and even elephants in Europe. Apex predators could not only help restore ecological balance but also contribute to the psychological well-being of the people who live near them. In his book Feral, George Monbiot writes about an interesting phenomenon: people all over Great Britain frequently report seeing wild large cats. These sightings of ABCs (Alien or Anomalous Big Cats) number well over a thousand, and the authorities have thoroughly investigated every report — though no large cats have been found to exist or to breed there. Monbiot posits that humans have an innate need to be in relationship with large predators, that their existence is inextricably bound with our own. Without them, we feel a sense of emptiness and loss.3
This psychological need for the presence of large animals, especially cats, historically our most feared predator, is deep and may lead to the large volume of false sightings. Perhaps this is similar to the phantom pain that a person missing a limb experiences (when the brain produces pain in neurons that correspond to a limb that is absent). Perhaps our minds produce phantom images of a vanished member of our natural world. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson refers to humankind’s fascination and need for interaction with other life-forms as “biophilia,” while Native American scientist and professor of environmental biology Robin Wall Kimmerer refers to our modern disconnection from other life-forms as “species loneliness.”4
To the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves. E. O. WILSON5
Recently, while walking out my backdoor one morning to see what new animal tracks I might find, I noticed that the goldenrod growing along my border with the woods was trampled in a big circular path. The trail, which had been thoroughly compressed, led to a patch of black raspberries. It was clear that a black bear had been here very recently and that the bear had enjoyed a meal. In fact, I had been out there just an hour before and not noticed the trail, so the bear may have been by just moments ago. When I came back out, I had my daughter Cora with me and showed her the bear trail. Her eyes went wide. It’s exciting to live so close to such animals. The week prior, while I was sipping my coffee and listening to the morning chorus of birds, a large bobcat crossed the backyard and headed into the forest. The furious alarms from jays and robins followed that cat into the woods and beyond. What a gift it is to share the land with such beautiful and powerful beings!
Living in the hills of western Massachusetts, I feel fortunate to have black bears, coyotes, bobcats, and even the occasional mountain lion pass through. Spending time alone in the deep woods and knowing that these creatures also share this land awakens a great hope in me. I grew up in Connecticut before the return of the wild turkey and the emergence of the eastern coyote, and when there weren’t any bears around. As a young man in those woods, I longed for some greater encounter, even a taste of danger, more than what the deer and ticks could afford me. Just knowing that these powerful creatures are here now sharpens my senses. I am more alert and aware. I know that these other beings are not out to get me, of course, but I also know that they are faster and stronger than I.
Off the coast of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, seals have returned to the waters, and they’ve been followed by great white sharks who come to feed on them. Over the past few years, during our family trips to the Cape, I have noticed that these powerful predators shape how I feel in the water. As with the bears and the large cats near my home, I know that I am back on the food chain when I see seals swimming just ten to twenty feet offshore because I know that the great whites are hunting nearby, however unlikely an attack is.
In the Berkshires, people love talking about bears, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, fishers, and other wild predators that live in the region. Like Monbiot, I wonder if this fascination is a longing for connection with the alpha predators that held such an important role in our lives for hundreds of thousands of years. The bear and the wolf are mega-entities in the human psyche. Some anthropologists believe that the earliest evidence of human religious behavior was the worship of the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus), whose remains have been found in the Chauvet Cave in France, along with magnificent red paintings of these enormous bears. These creatures were the gods of old. They were the teachers, spirits, and ancient dangers of a world before humans developed written language.
When guests come to my retreats at Kripalu and see signs that advise them to be aware of bears, their eyes widen, as my daughter’s did, and they smile. They enjoy the sense of adventure that a wild animal’s presence brings, the idea that they are somewhere where bears roam and that they might encounter one on a trail. This is primal stuff. The fascination with which people respond to the presence of our wild friends speaks to our loneliness as a species and our need for connection with the more-than-human world.
My barber is a local man who lives on the other side of my mountain. He often shares with me reports about a black bear who lives in our woods. According to him, when the bear stands on its hind legs, a white patch of fur in the shape of a heart is visible on its chest. He calls the bear “White Heart” and says the creature is old, large, and legendary. I’ve never seen White Heart, but I love the story. One day I hope to see him standing in the goldenrod, eating black raspberries. What I love about White Heart is that the bear is a local legend on our little mountain. Once upon a time, every forest, mountain, and little hamlet had its own legends. I hope rewilding will give that to us again.
Sightings of mountain lions have also long been reported in western Massachusetts. The state says that there is no evidence that mountain lions are breeding here, but if they’re not living here, they certainly seem to be passing through. One mountain lion that was killed by a car in Connecticut in 2011 had traveled 1,500 miles. And according to my barber, a hunter friend had the following experience.
While sitting in his tree stand one October during hunting season, the hunter got the funny feeling that he was being watched. He turned to look behind him but saw nothing. When he lifted his gaze to follow the trunk of a white pine up above his position, there in the crook of the tree, thirty-five feet off the ground and fifteen feet above him, he saw the body of a dead deer! What animal is strong enough to carry a dead deer thirty-five feet up a tree? There’s only one: a mountain lion.
When my barber told me this story, I got a chill, as I would from a science-fiction or horror movie. Is this story true? It certainly could be, and I can imagine how humbling it would be to see something like that. It was an indication for that hunter that he was definitely not the only predator in those woods.
Modern life shields many of us from those kinds of experiences, though you certainly don’t need to be a hunter to draw closer to the cycles of predator and prey. You need only to make a habit of sitting outside in a regular spot to watch the birds. Before long, a whole other world will begin to open. We’ll explore some practices for peaceful encounters with nature and our relatives later on in the book.
Domestication Antidote
Modern people have become domesticated. We trade a part of our essential wildness to be part of society. We trade our time at jobs for food, shelter, and the other essentials we need for survival. The term domestication comes from the Latin word domesticus, which means “belonging to the house.” Considering our modern, sedentary, and indoor lifestyle, “belonging to the house” seems an accurate description of most people’s lives today. In creating safety, creating places without edges, without danger, without risk, we have removed the element of gravity, the downward pressure that strengthens bones, muscles, and will. Domestication has brought us comforts, but not a sense of accomplishment, gratitude, or humility.
With personal rewilding, we relearn ways of being in relationship to the earth, ways that predate the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Making a fire or a shelter is not just done for utility; it can be a work of art, a reverent expression of our love for the gifts of life. World-renowned founder of the Tracker School, in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Tom Brown Jr. learned from his teacher Stalking Wolf, an Apache tracker, that ancient skills were always taught with thanksgiving and reverence for the living earth.
Acquiring and using these skills is profoundly transformational. The bow drill, for example, involves birthing fire by creating friction. You use a small bow that turns a spindle on a hearthboard to create smoke and eventually a small coal that, if handled carefully and attentively, can be breathed into fire in the palm of your hand. When I demonstrate this technique, people are often brought to tears. There is something primal, ancient, and profound about taking part in this ceremony. Before people experience it, however, they often ask me, “Why do you need to know how to make fire with a bow drill?” It’s as if they think that because we have matches now, there is no value in knowing the old ways. I can’t blame them for asking, since they have never experienced what it is like to embody the archetype of Prometheus and bring forth the element of fire through sweat, focus, dedication, and surrender of the ego. It changes you.
Are we different from our wild ancestors who lived outdoors year-round and hunted, gathered, or grew their food in relationship with the seasons and the living earth? And if we have changed, can we rediscover and reignite our essential wildness and intimacy with nature’s forces?
I believe we can, and I’m eager to share with you the methods and practices I promote to rewild my students. First, let’s explore a little about the effects of domestication on us and why we would want to supplement our “sivilizing” (as Huck Finn spelled it) with rewilding.
Nonuke the Wild
When I was five years old, my parents adopted a Siberian Husky and named her Nonuke, a take on Nanook of the North, the 1922 documentary about the Inuit people, and also a nod to my parents’ role in the antinuclear-power movement following the accident at the Three Mile Island power plant. As a little boy, I was thrilled to finally get a dog. I imagined her sleeping on my bed and being a loyal and loving companion. When we brought her home, I asked if I could walk her. But when my dad handed me her leash, she took off running so hard and fast that I was literally dragged down the gravel road on my chest for fifteen feet. Cut, scraped, and crying, I was astonished by her raw pulling power and saddened that she wasn’t the docile companion I had hoped she would be.
Nonuke went on to break every rope and lead we ever put on her. No matter how we tried to train her and keep her home, she always escaped. Once she jumped out of my dad’s Jeep on the highway, and another time when she was loose, she attacked a poodle that walked in front of her mate’s house. One Saturday, she returned to us after being gone for days, bounding out of the woods with a deer leg in her mouth, as happy as I ever saw her. Whenever it snowed, she was in ecstasy. Once when we were out in the snow, she ran at me so hard from behind that she flipped me up and onto my back before I even knew she was coming. Then she turned toward me with her big tongue hanging out and her eyes smiling, so perfectly in her element. She was a husky, and huskies need to run. Nonuke couldn’t live on a leash, in a crate, or in an apartment. It wasn’t in her nature, and she never surrendered. She always broke free and expressed her wildness — no matter what.
Like many people today, I often wish I didn’t need to drive a car at all. Although I love my work and must travel to my workplace, I often feel trapped in my modern lifestyle. With a mortgage, grocery bills, and all of the other aspects of life that require money, I feel compelled to stay on the hamster wheel, even though I know I am contributing to the degradation of the earth. Sometimes, in meetings at work or sitting in a chair for hours at a time, I feel cooped up and jittery. I want to stand up and move. I watch my coworkers chewing gum, clicking their pens compulsively, adjusting their papers, rearranging their folders, and moving their phones from here to there and back again. I can feel their urge to move, and I know the self-control required to sublimate these ancient impulses. I look out the window and feel the way I did in second grade, counting down the minutes to recess or the end of the day, the time when I could kick off my shoes and climb a tree. Nonuke wouldn’t sit still. She would break free.
We can all learn how to break free, a little at a time, in spirit, mind, and body. First, though, we will identify what we’re missing so that we can restore what we need.
Reversing Ecological Boredom
George Monbiot coined the term “ecological boredom” after he had lived in the field as a journalist for years, covering the wild and dangerous gold boom in the rainforests of Brazil.6 After he returned home to Great Britain to live in suburbia, with a lawn to mow and a dishwasher to empty, Monbiot found that something important was missing, something he had discovered in Brazil. Back in the safe and predictable developed world, he missed the experience of sleeping outside in the rainforest, in spite of the danger of bandits. He also missed the day-to-day struggle to survive. He missed the sense of being alive that he experienced in the wild, a feeling that did not follow him home.
I sometimes call this ecological boredom “life-force deficit.” It’s a loss of sensory stimulation from the ecosystems and life-forms that our nervous systems evolved with. Addressing this loss is part of the impetus for human rewilding. Sitting at a desk, staring at a computer, being inside an office, cut off from sunlight, fresh air, and the sounds of nature, we live an indoor life, a life of the house. I am reminded of Theodore Roszak’s book The Voice of the Earth, in which he talks about the dramatic change in the human environment, from the sensory rich and diverse outdoors that our hunter-gatherer ancestors experienced every day to the sensory dull and limited indoors we now inhabit. This makes us prone not only to lifestyle diseases (obesity, heart disease, and diabetes, among many others) but also to increased psychological disorders.
In many societies, we are expected and encouraged to consume products for the health of the economy, aiming for infinite growth. As a result, we find ourselves cut off from the earth, which is deemed a resource rather than the source of our lives. I believe the shift needed in our time is to again imagine the earth as the source of life. Our goal should not be to consume but to be fully alive and awaken to our true calling as stewards and caretakers of this precious earth. Rewilding can help us do this.
The living earth is our natural habitat, and the more we are cut off from it, the deeper we sink into poor health, sadness, and ignorance. Perhaps the violence we see in our societies results from the ongoing violence to our home planet. As Luther Standing Bear so wisely said, “A lack of respect for green growing things soon leads to a lack of respect for people too.”7 How can we feel fully alive as a species if we are not only disconnected from our natural habitat but also actively destroying it?
In my early twenties, I took a job as a wilderness counselor to at-risk youth. I moved to the mountains of western North Carolina and lived outside with ten teenagers. Many had serious anger-management, self-regulation, and impulse-control issues. I lived and worked in that environment for three long years. It was grueling, dirty, frustrating, emotionally exhausting, and exhilarating. I led my groups on long canoe trips down remote rivers, sleeping on the banks, eating over fires, and drinking river water that tasted of sulfur even after mixing it with Kool-Aid and iodine tablets. The other counselors and I bonded, as we pulled together and relied on one another to get through the days. When the kids were asleep, we swapped stories about our crazy days until we fell asleep in our sleeping bags. In winter, we would wake to find our boots frozen so stiff that we couldn’t get them back on our feet.
When I emerged from that journey and landed back home in stuffy Old Lyme, Connecticut, I felt bored, isolated, and deeply lonely, the way Monbiot had. I tried working as a substitute teacher and then as a waiter, but my soul said, No. I had to get out of the domesticated world of shopping malls and formal education, where people talked about investments, new cars, and local gossip. Life at camp had been brutal. I had faced bears, bullies, and rattlesnakes. I survived lightning storms in the middle of lakes, swimming with alligators, and eating fried Spam. Back home, I felt like nobody, just a dude in his late twenties trying to scratch together some money for rent and food. I didn’t have a tribe, and I didn’t feel very alive compared to the intensity I felt at camp.
My ecological boredom was closely tied to a sense of spiritual boredom. The years at camp had awakened a deep yearning to turn inward and find a place of peace and healing. One of the days when I was having a very difficult time at camp and felt at the end of my rope, I prayed to Spirit for help. At that exact moment, as tears streamed down my face, I looked up and a very large black bear stepped out of the rhododendrons ten feet in front of me. We locked eyes. Then that bear backed into the forest and was gone. I felt that my prayer had been answered.
In the local paper I found an advertisement for Kripalu Yoga classes and dropped by that evening for my first class. I found a space and got settled. As I closed my eyes and began to follow the teacher’s instructions, something gave way in my heart. The pain of my time in the woods began to rise, tears started to flow, and I could feel a warm energy moving through me. It felt so good, and I felt so safe. The teacher led us through a series of postures, and my body opened. I was breathing. I was feeling. All the tightness and tension started to melt away.
When I opened my eyes after Savasana, Corpse Pose, the sun had set, and the full moon was shining brightly through the window, bathing the room in moonlight. My tears had dried on my face, and I felt refreshed. Kripalu Yoga felt like coming home.
Following the memory of that experience, I went on my own adventure, and I began to deepen my practice of yoga and meditation. The present-moment awareness, conscious breathing, and inner peace I found through these practices ultimately led me to Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, where I began teaching yoga, met my wife, and settled down. In finding Kripalu, I not only found an inner space that was calling to me, I also found an ecological body that felt like home. The hills, valleys, lakes, streams, and fields of the Berkshires seemed to trigger almost a cellular feeling of being home and at ease. Arriving here, I experienced a love of place. Like biophilia, the love of nature and other beings, this “topophilia” let me know I was welcome and that I belonged.
The morning after my wife and I were married, I went outside to get something out of our used Subaru Outback. The car had come with a pin in the shape of a grizzly bear on the driver’s visor, so we called the car “the Bear.” That morning, as I approached the car, the interior lights were on and the driver’s side door was open. I thought someone must have broken in during the night. Upon closer inspection, I noticed a muddy paw print with five claw marks on the door by the handle. It was a bear’s paw print. One of my bear friends had gotten into the center console and eaten the granola bar that I had left there. The steering wheel, dashboard, and center console were covered with the dried film of bear saliva. A black bear had been sitting in the driver’s seat of my car on the night of my wedding!
Over the years, the message of this bear visitation has become clearer to me. If I were interpreting a dream in which this happened, I would say that the bear was sitting in the driver’s seat of my life and that bear energy is guiding me as I move along the road of life. When waking life becomes as magical as our dreaming life, when the wild visits us, even as we are seeking it, these are rare gifts indeed!
Perhaps you too have felt the presence of the sacred in nature. Feeling a sense of connection and a deepening relationship with the living earth, its landscapes, and other life-forms connects us with ways of being that are in our ancestral history. It doesn’t take months or years of meditating outdoors to have an experience of connection with nature. Oftentimes it only takes a few minutes of sitting still and paying attention with curiosity.
Natural Mindfulness
As I write these words, I sit at my desk in the Berkshires, just a few miles from Kripalu, looking out my bedroom window onto my backyard. It’s early spring. I take a deep breath and sigh, inviting my attention to rest in the present moment, taking in the beauty of the earth before me. The grass is still the color of hay, and the tree limbs are bare. The mountain that rises up into the sky before me is bathed in late afternoon sunlight, as is the shimmering little brook that flows at its base. The window is open and a light breeze is tickling the wind chimes in the crabapple tree outside. There is a stillness on the land and a quiet beauty. This is my spot, the place where I sit, ponder, write, and gaze (frequently) out the window, just as I did as a kid at school. I treasure these moments watching the robins look for worms and the mallards nesting in our marsh. From here I can watch the crabapple tree turn bright pink in May and the blueberry bushes blossom and fruit through the summer. This is where I watch river otters play and muskrats swim and where I listen to the turkeys gobble, the pileated woodpeckers call, and the woodcocks bleat.
Over the five years that we have lived at the foot of this little mountain, I have grown to care deeply for this land. I feel bonded to it. I have planted apple trees and blueberry bushes and watched over the years as our baby balsam has grown taller than us all. We put in gardens that feed us and year after year watch a family of robins struggle to bring their babies to maturity. I’ve seen bobcat, bear, fox, and coyote. Herds of deer bed down in the thicket, and families of grey and red squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, raccoons, and skunks prowl through our yard at night. On this land, my children run barefoot in the grass and look up at the great sky to see Canada geese honking, osprey soaring, and red-tailed hawks circling. Sometimes I look out this window and watch the children sitting quietly in the light from our only sun, as they enjoy a snack and wiggle their toes in the breeze. They abide in these moments much like other animals resting in the afternoon light, exuding a regal tranquility that mirrors the qualities of the living earth that holds them.
Mindfulness is the practice of bringing attention to what is happening in the present moment while letting go of judging the moment as good or bad. Mindfulness practice requires some detachment. To do it, we must rise above our thoughts, feelings, and sensations in order to engage in self-observation, or what we call “witness consciousness” in Kripalu Yoga. It’s not that you stop feeling — quite the opposite — but rather that you make the choice to feel fully. You choose to breathe into whatever may be happening right now, instead of distracting yourself from it.
In mindful rewilding, mindfulness is a tool to train yourself to be here now, with the earth as it is, as you allow yourself to lean into pleasant experiences in nature and enjoy them fully. If you want to, you can follow anything that feels good, that pulls your attention into the experience of being fully alive. Over the years, I’ve found that the living earth offers these moments much more often than I once thought possible. As we develop the ability to be more present in our body and on the land, our senses begin to speak to us in ways that might surprise. Of course, there are plenty of uncomfortable sensations to be had along with the pleasant ones, such as intense heat and humidity, being wet and cold, insect bites that itch. We abide with these, too. In mindfulness practice, we observe that our experience is always changing, and we watch as our habitual patterns show themselves to see if we can respond rather than react to them. We notice the stories that run through our minds, like television shows, as we make up what might be happening. Our stories can be very compelling, even when we know they might not be true, and our stories may cause us to take action. Even in nature, outside our comfort zone, we may notice our minds spinning stories. Mindfulness practice can help strengthen the observer or witness or eagle vision, so that we can see our inner workings from a higher perspective, so that we can see through the manufactured stories and become more discerning in our actions.
When I get home from a long day at work, I take off my shoes and walk barefoot on the grass. I inspect the stream and look for animal tracks in the mud or the snow, depending on the season. I squat down and listen to the birds talking to one another, and I watch and listen to the great white pines whooshing in the evening breeze. In the winter, I walk barefoot through the snow and strip down to my boxer briefs and bathe in the ice-cold stream. But that’s another story. After being in an office all day, dealing with computers, meetings, right angles, stale air, and constant social interactions, being in nature is the perfect balance. I don’t have to be someone; I can just be. I don’t have to focus my attention just here, as I do throughout the day when sending emails and holding meetings. Instead, I can let my senses open up and take in the miracle of trees, the flowing brook, the birds, clouds, wind, and the cool touch of the evening grass.
With my bodily senses totally immersed, my attention is absolutely in the present moment, though it is not focused. It is free to flow and to follow the beauty of the way nature moves. This is a natural form of mindfulness, in which I surrender to the presence of the living earth and allow her dance to carry me fully into the present moment.
In natural mindfulness, we come to the outdoors with no agenda, opening our senses and being entertained or entranced by the movement and qualities of the land, the land from which we sprang and the land that sustains us with every breath. We allow our attention to be called to things that bring us peace, joy, or awe. A flickering fire or a gentle breeze is a friendly companion and a doorway to meditation. There are so many ways to experience the wonder of now.
When I’ve been cooped up for too long, whether at the office or at home on the weekends, I tend to get anxious, irritable, and reactive. But whenever I step outside and take a deep breath, the fresh air immediately helps to shift my focus from my anxiety to the beauty of the land and all the things I am grateful for. When I feel cut off from the pulse of the earth and the seasons, cut off from fresh air and the uplifting presence of trees and other nonhuman life-forms, I notice myself become a bit callous and hard. The constant bombardment of problems and global catastrophes that my television, computer, and smartphone show me can sometimes overwhelm me. I wonder if much of the pain and suffering we see in the world today is the result of our being indoors too much, if they are the result of ecological and spiritual boredom. Exposure to the beauty and scale of nature, to its mountains, open spaces, and infinite sky always gives me a healthy perspective.
I am not going to be in this body forever. The universe is so big, and life so precious and fragile. Our species can reclaim our once wild selves and appreciate once again our natural habitats, which are the best catalysts there ever were for mindfulness and perspective.
Earth Time
When I was a therapeutic wilderness counselor at a camp in North Carolina, the staff and students would all travel down to Florida for three-week canoe expeditions. These were usually pretty rigorous journeys, both physically and spiritually. The kids didn’t always get along or follow the rules, yet the success of the trip depended on everyone’s ability to work as a team. When that broke down, things could get miserable fast.
Still and all, just being on the river in canoes, we’d slip into another kind of time. After about a week on the river, we’d get into a flow. I used to call it “river time.” The character of the liquid road we were traveling seemed to alter our perception of time. In some ways and for certain periods, there was no time. I’d be reading the currents, watching the skies, listening to what was up ahead, living very much in the moment, which I think is something inherent in rewilding. In his book Affluence Without Abundance, anthropologist James Suzman compares the lived experience of time in hunter-gatherer societies with that of people living in modern societies:
This is one of the big, big differences between us and hunter-gatherer cultures. And I’m amazed that actually more anthropologists haven’t written about it. Everything in our lives is kind of future-oriented. For example, we might get a college degree so we can get a job, so that we can get a pension. For farmers it was the same way. They planted seeds for the harvest and to store. But for hunter-gatherers, everything was present-oriented. All their effort was focused on meeting an immediate need. They were absolutely confident that they would be able to get food from their environment when they needed it. So, they didn’t waste time storing or growing food. This lifestyle created a very different perspective on time.8
In yoga, Buddhism, and other contemplative traditions, mindful awareness is cultivated through the regular practice of meditation. But I have noticed, and perhaps you have as well, that when I spend extended periods of time in nature’s elements, a state of flowing awareness in the present moment emerges organically. Suzman says, “Today people [in Western societies] go to mindfulness classes, yoga classes, and dancing clubs, just so for a moment they can live in the present. The Bushmen live that way all the time!”9
The widespread interest today in yoga, meditation, and connecting with nature reflects our need to escape the ceaseless challenge of contending with the demons of future and past that is life in modern society. The ancient Greeks spoke of two kinds of time. One they called Chronos, which is linear time, cutting straight into the future like an arrow and leaving behind the past. The other they called Kairos, which is circular time, ever spiraling round and round. In Kairos time, we find the circle rather than the line. In nature, things move in circles. Each seasonal cycle brings back familiar beings, sights, sounds, smells, textures, and flavors. We age as we are carried through these circles. Many indigenous cultures studied the way life moves in great spirals, and they had faith in the curative properties of spiral energy.
In rewilding, we enter the spiraling waters of Kairos, an opportunity to rest our weary minds from their burdensome preoccupation with the future and the past. We return home to the eternal now as we experience it through our earthly bodies in relationship with our dynamic and beautiful home planet.
Mindfully communing with the forest is a profound practice of self-discovery. Every tree, stone, plant, insect, movement of wind, shaft of light, patch of shadow, and flying bird have something to teach us if we can empty our minds and open ourselves to them. During a summer solstice retreat, I asked each member of the group to seek out a spot in nature and to sit there for thirty minutes and simply to observe their surroundings. Afterward, when the group came back together to tell their stories, one young woman shared the following.
She found herself staring at a standing dead tree, rotten inside and barely holding itself up. As she stayed with her curiosity about this tree, she began to think of her father. She shared that her dad, like the tree, had managed to stay upright and breathing long after he had stopped growing or actively engaging with life. He hung on to his life after he had stopped really living. Being with the tree, she was able to see the ways in which it was a host for other kinds of life. She saw that it had its own wisdom and teachings to share, and she found comfort in the tree and some healing of the expectations she had of her father.
Mindfulness is a discipline. Because the mind’s nature is mercurial, it wants to move, imagine, analyze, strategize, judge, interpret, and often to worry. To practice mindfulness is to yoke the mind and train its attention to the experience happening right now. It is a practice of directly perceiving reality (as much as is possible with our limited senses), of rising above and letting go of the mental filters that color our experiences. It is a practice of being with life just as it is. In some forms of mindfulness, we close our eyes and direct our awareness internally, to the vast territories of consciousness, sensation, and space in the mind-body. In the yoga tradition, this is called pratyahara, or inward sensing. Other forms of mindfulness open awareness to interface directly with the external realm of the senses, with the vast territories of earth’s elements (earth, fire, water, air, and space) moving, expressing, and flowing through nature.
The practice of mindfulness can help to illuminate both your inner and outer perception of reality. Your outer perception, your senses, which perceive the world, developed in relationship with the environments our ancestors evolved in. Your sense of hearing developed over millions of years in relationship with the songs of birds, the trickle of water, the crackling of fire, and the many other manifestations of the life force on earth. The smallest sound can convey an abundance of information that can be life-saving — the sudden silence of birdsong, the quiet trill of a squirrel, the snap of a twig by a predator.
The same is true of all our other senses. They developed in nature, too. Being mindful of your perceptions of the living earth helps move you out of the mental plane, where we easily abstract and objectify nature, and into an embodied experience of being woven into the fabric of life on this planet. When this happens, you have the opportunity to come home to your body and life presence in a powerful way. You have the chance to be soothed by a very old and wise friend, a being who has always fed, clothed, and sheltered you. When you begin to feel a part of your landscape and relate to the other life-forms around you as your relatives, rather than as inanimate or less-evolved objects, you begin to feel more connection. No longer estranged from your home planet, your great earthly mother, you begin to feel part of something much greater than yourself.
Through the path of mindful rewilding, we bring awareness to our breath, which helps us get out of our discursive “monkey minds,” the incessant chattering of thoughts, and brings our awareness instead to our body and the present moment. As we connect with the body, we connect to our senses, and when we connect with our senses, we begin to wake up. It’s as if we are dreaming our lives away when we allow our attention to be absorbed in our internal mental chatter. Our hunting and gathering ancestors attended to their senses and interacted with a dynamic living earth. Our fascination with our smartphones and screens is an externalization of our monkey mind’s predisposition to be anywhere other than here now. When we awaken to our senses and their engagement with the living earth, we see trees as other living things with whom we share this planet, and we recognize other human beings as our kindred. We see this precious earth as our extended self, and we receive the holy air as a gift, as the gift of life. These experiences can change us, forever. When we take these practices into nature and see and feel the presence of this living earth in all its many wondrous forms, it is possible to glimpse Eden and Shambhala, the true paradise that earth can be.
The practice of mindfulness has significant effects on the structure of the brain. Scientific studies show that mindfulness practice reduces the size of the amygdala, the watchdog region of the brain that is involved in processing fear, emotion, and our response to stress.10 Mindfulness has also been shown to increase the size of the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain associated with executive decision-making, planning, and strategy. In addition, mindfulness practice appears to decrease the connectivity of the amygdala to the rest of the brain, while increasing the connectivity of the prefrontal cortex, which appears to reduce reactivity to stressful situations and enhance thoughtful response.
But how does it work? When we sit and bring our attention to our breathing, the mind tends to wander. We watch our breath for a few moments, and then we start thinking about dinner or something that happened at work. When we notice our attention has drifted, we come back to the breath. We may find that when we notice our mind has drifted, there is a reaction, such as, Come on! I am bad at meditating! Why can’t I stay with my breath? This is where mindfulness becomes truly profound. At that moment, we also witness our response to noticing that our attention has wandered: Oh, I just judged my wandering mind. What good does that do? Let me just let that judgment go and return to my breath. Rather than reacting to the fact that the mind wandered, we observe the reaction with compassion and then come back to the practice, to our breath. With enough practice, mindfulness becomes a habit and begins to show up when we are not on our meditation cushion, or log or boulder if we are mindfully rewilding outside. This natural mindfulness begins to show up in our relationships, work, and life in general.
Imagine that you are walking mindfully through the forest and you suddenly see a snake in the middle of the trail. Now, let’s say that you are afraid of snakes and have a whole identity built around this fear. But let’s say that you’ve also been practicing breath-based mindful meditation a lot since the last time you saw a snake. This time when you see the snake, you have an instant startle response and you back up, but then you immediately drop into the place of observing your own reaction. You notice the fight-or-flight response, and you pause. The snake is ten feet away and shows no interest in you. Instead of running away, you keep a safe distance and observe the snake. Rather than being controlled by habitual responses, you assess the situation. You are not in danger. For the first time in your life, you are not being controlled by your fear, and you begin to experience a sense of curiosity instead of terror. The reality of the snake and your stories about snakes are different. You take a deep breath and watch the snake. As you spend time in its presence, you begin to create a new neural pathway in your brain, as you begin to associate this encounter with interest and curiosity instead of terror and reactivity.
How many other ingrained fears might you reshape in this life with mindfulness? Can you see how you might apply this natural mindfulness to situations at work or with your family? This practice can be transformational. For rewilding, the practice of mindfulness is essential. It allows your reintegration as a human being into earth’s wild places in a way that brings greater calm, clarity, connection, and confidence.
You don’t need to be a hard-core outdoor person, a wilderness guide, an ancestral skills expert, a proficient meditator or yogi to take a step in the direction of your wild, alive, and wise self. You need only to start with this breath and a desire to connect with life. In the chapters ahead, we will explore some of the simple, time-tested practices and insights that have come down to us through the wisdom traditions of yoga, Buddhism, and indigenous cultures. Remembering how to breathe with awareness, listen to the earth, walk with awareness, and kindle a sacred fire can open doorways into another state of consciousness and way of being. Sometimes what we need is not more but less. Sometimes we need to let go and let nature show us the way.