Am I my animal nature? Am I beyond it?
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What is rewilding?
Rewilding ourselves is understanding our bodies as human animal bodies and having a relationship with wild nature. It is about learning to be humans in touch with our own embodied nature, with medicine and food we put into our bodies, and with how our bodies survive on the planet. It's called rewilding because humans come from the wild and have spent 99.99% of our history in direct, constant connection with the wild.
Scientific research shows that we are healthier and happier the more we are connected to nature. If you’re like me and most folks, technology often competes for our time and attention. I've been enjoying a weekly phone fast where I turn my phone off for 24 hours and see what my brain does. As someone continually steeped in nature, I've been surprised by how re-centering this practice has been for me. I found that I sing more, journal more, and have far more energy for cleaning and creativity!
Recently I had time for braiding the tall grasses around my pond to make beautiful bracelets for my daughter. This is a practice of rewilding- using our hands and nature to create. There are lots of ways to re-wild from small things to major life changes. We don't need to live without electricity- though that's also cool- to rewild our hearts. We simply need to create time and space for moments of embodied soul connection with less processed earth elements.
One organization that helps people rewild is Rewild University. They say, "Like our environment, which is forever altered due to human intervention, human nature has also been irrevocably shifted. Rewilding isn’t about trying to go back to living as hunter-gatherers. Rather, it is about examining our cultural paradigms, seeing how they affect our physical, mental, and emotional health, and reclaiming our birthright as human beings."
Rewild University teaches classes on wilderness living skills, rewilding your mind, rewilding your health, primal fitness, ancestral skills, and nature entrainment.
(See more at:
https://rewildu.com/what-is-rewilding/) I'm not affiliated with Rewild University, but I share their goal of helping us examine how we are living and rediscovering our innate and intimate connection with nature, in our minds, hearts, and physical interactions.
Is rewilding for me?
If you desire a life of more connection, embodiment, and intuitive wellness, then yes. What is your growing edge? What are you curious about learning? If you are not comfortable or at home in your body, or its movements or energy throughout the day, then rewilding practices might help.
How could you shift a little bit more toward the wild?
Have you been wanting to make your own clothes or grow your own herbs?
Perhaps you want to find a sense of belonging in your ecosystem. Maybe you have allergies or a disability that makes it hard to be outside, and you wonder how you could engage nature more.
Or is there something in nature that makes you nervous or unsettled? Sometimes our instincts draw us toward interacting with nature but we're unsure if it's safe. A guide can help you learn what's safe. Sometimes we just need permission to play and somebody to affirm that our longings are healthy- that there is time and space for them, and they will not be judged.
Besides my workshops, Steve Hester offers Lawrence-area workshops exploring our heart's true desires for relationship with nature, getting clear about it, and playing with the land. It's a piece of exploring what our personal journey of rewilding might entail. We could also make a commitment to ourselves to sow into our lives more love with mother earth. If you already have a specific desire, I can point you toward resources for learning or implementing it.
What about spiritual evolution toward the immaterial?
In some spiritual traditions there's a belief that we are inherently not our bodies and need to transcend the body. They teach that our lower nature is acting (negatively) like animals and that our lowest chakras (energy centers in the body) of physical security and sexuality are to be transcended to attain higher levels of consciousness.
I've been observing how this works in my life and others. Honestly, I don't think it's a healthy goal for us all to aim at transcending them. If we do try to transcend them, we need to first fully know them and have a healthy expression of them. The master Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan says we must remember we have primitive bodies. The yoga master Swami Sivananda says we should repress our desires- we need to learn ways to interact with them.
Being in denial of or in avoidance of our unmet needs for safety and healthy sexual expression doesn't automatically create maturity or spiritual evolution, it can create spiritual bypassing. Spiritual bypassing is taking on spiritual beliefs or actions that bypass reality and create harm. To learn more about spiritual bypassing, read my two newsletters:
I think rewilding is a deep attunement to the incarnation of our souls, or the “temple of the spirit” that is how we are able to have a life on earth. It is honoring the vessel of the body as well as our relationship with all other beings, which most religions teach is a sacred relationship. Still, I contemplate how rewilding fits in the various narratives of how humans are evolving.
Many spiritual traditions say that human beings came from the Earth and also from the spiritual realms, and that we may be returning to the ethereal realms. In the Mayan traditions, humans were made from corn. In the Judeo-Christian traditions, humans were made from the dust of the ground. In humanist traditions, humans evolved from hominids, a lineage that separated from the gorillas and chimps about 5 to 8 million years ago.
What about in your tradition? How and why humans were made or came about is a much larger conversation, but it's worth considering as we discuss if/why humans should stay intimately connected with or rewild themselves with the earth.
Let's say that we humans are part earth/body and part spirit/ethers/heaven/energy. Most spiritual traditions are trying to help humans remember that we are spiritual beings, because throughout history we have forgotten our true nature of joy and compassion, and so we have treated each other and other earth beings in hurtful ways.
But what if we've also forgotten that we are of the earth?
What if we have been too separated from nature in the past 75 years, so much that we’ve dissociated from our bodies?
Perhaps we’re too stuck in our minds and/or in our unregulated nervous systems. We ruminate on thoughts and become anxious or despairing, unable to relax even when things are good. Sometimes we spend too much time watching shows, giphys or tiktoks, or performing routine tasks without verve, instead of centering in our own being.
Perhaps we’ve become “homo spectator” or “passive watchers” of the screen instead of “homo sapiens” who “know” through full-body interaction with the world.
To know is to apprehend (to handle) and to comprehend.
As we spend more time on phones and computers, our necks and heads are literally drooping forward. We came from "homo erectus" but may not be so erect any more.
If we believe that our bodies were created to be inextricably interlaced with the flora and fauna of the earth, maybe we’ve forgotten that. Maybe if we remember that the vehicle of our spiritual energy is healthiest in deep direct connection to raw nature, we give our spirit a healthier vessel that better supports its self-realization work.
If our physical bodies are interlaced with spiritual energy, and we want spiritual development, to create wellness with our bodies makes sense. If what rewilding does is put us in a place of embodied knowing, natural joy, and clear wisdom, then to rewild makes sense to me. It makes felt sense to me.
I think we must learn the body first, to know it and integrate it well, if we ever do want to try to transcend it. Then, perhaps, we could become like yogi sadhus who live for months just breathing air (breathatarians) or like Tibetan masters who stay "alive" for weeks after clinically dead (google “thukdam”).
When we feel whole and fulfilled, content and united with all beings, mutually integrated in the web of one shared single species of the planet, our sex lives will be healthier, not based in psychological dysfunction but in a healthier self-and-other-knowing. Our quest for security will not be a quest for domination but a realization that through shared interdependence, we can live from a place of security. When we have less fear driving us towards selfish hoarding, we center in trust and mindfulness that honors our needs as well as the needs of others. I think it's about integrating ourselves back into harmony with the natural world, so that we heal psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, and we can experience the higher states of bliss and transcended consciousness without a need for our wounded, isolated ego to fret about sex and safety as much of the time.
Bayo Akomolafe, PhD, opines that it's humans' intense need for security that has actually gotten us into this climate change predicament,
"...our ancient quests for permanence and longevity helped shape, ironically, a planet inhospitable to our unexamined survival."
(Coming Down to Earth, Presence: an International Journal of Spiritual Direction and Companionship, vol. 29, No. 01, p.19).
What's it like for Shannon?
Some good friends gave me a plant holder for my birthday. It was a meditating tiger, a perfect combination of wild and serene. I love to meditate and be contemplative. I love to roll in the dirt too. My being is flexible and able to be present and responsive to the conditions around me (most of the time). Being wild is not about being out of control or disrespectful. It's actually deep engagement with the most fulfilling joy and aliveness we all carry inside.
Of course, I struggle. I’m no where near perfect, if perfect even exists; so in spiritual terms, I’ll say that I’m on the path engaging practices without having achieved full self-actualization or self-realization. I have ego wounds I continue to work on healing, and my spiritual practices help me see my mind’s fears and coping strategies. Unity consciousness (compassionate awareness of my beautiful belonging in the Oneness of life) comes and goes. That’s why I keep practicing, and intimacy with the earth has been a significant part of my healing and wholing journey.
And, I was just one of those kids- now adult- who was born to be wild.
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