ReWildU Patrons' Q&A Video One

Description

I'm trying a new experiment at the suggestion of one of my patrons. This Question and Answer video takes questions from my Patreon patrons and has me answer them for everyone to hear. This will be a monthly video -- let me know if you like it!

This month's questions:

Are there natural ways to get to sleep if we're experiencing sleepless nights? 0:51

What is a basic food available in the wild that could get us through a few days? 4:40

How can we get family and friends involved with our rewilding/bushcraft adventures? 6:19

If we live in the city and work in an office, how can we rewild ourselves? 8:22

How do we deal with losing physical abilities through sickness, injury, or age? 10:52

How can teens find peace growing up in today's culture? 13:16

Here is the book I reference in the video --

"The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs" by Tristan Gooley.

You can stand beside me as I make these videos by becoming a patron on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/rewilduniversity

Visit http://rewildu.com/classes/ for unique educational opportunities in rewilding, wilderness skills, mindfulness, martial arts, primal fitness, and more.

Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

one of my patrons on patreon suggested an idea that patrons could pose questions to me and that would create sort of a QA a question and answer video and I'm going to try this out for a couple months and see how it works I'm kind of excited about it because people are throwing out questions that are a little all over the place but they're all relevant I think too many of us and so it might be a chance for me to be able to just share some of my experience with dealing with some basic life issues especially issues that we might encounter as we're starting to explore the rewilding concept trying to get closer to nature in our lives the first question was about sleep deprivation if I experienced him or had have experienced it before and some ways to deal with that natural ways to get to sleep without taking pills or things like that and so I've definitely had experiences sleep deprivation not only having children so having you know an external source that's keeping me awake during the night trying to you know deal with potty and diet and everything else that little ones entail but also there's been times in my life when I've experienced you know rough places where my mind is just going and I think this is what a lot of us tend to think of when we talk about sleep deprivation it's our mind is just going and going over the things during the day so there are a couple things that have really helped me some kind of odd external instead of internal methods that can be used a fair amount of people say if they try those cold showers that it puts them into a place of restfulness even though they're strangely invigorating a lot of people report a really good night's sleep after it I think it's because it raises our cortisol its kind of puts us into fight or flight and naturally after that we tend to rest well though wim HOF method that I'm using I'm I'm not going to go over how to do the breathing exercise right here but if you do check online you can find examples of it and so there's a breathing exercise which is essentially it almost like a hyper ventilation and it also involves a lot of mental focus because you're just trying to focus on the feelings of your body that it's been another one that I've heard is worked really well for people to just ease them into sleep there's there's the hard work you know a lot of times we're going to get our best sleep when our bodies worked really hard during the day that might be chopping wood carrying water might be doing a really really intense workout in the afternoon it leads us writing prepared for bed mentally this is this is mindfulness that we're talking about when a mind is going you know it's been called monkey mind before it just runs and runs on us that's where practicing meditation practicing basic mindfulness helps us to recognize what's going on in our mind and to learn how to break out of that cycle of having I run away with itself a simple basic meditation that I've used with some people before is what I call rabbit hole watching and you close your eyes there's you know you're trying to sleep close your eyes you imagine a rabbit hole and imagine that thoughts are like a rabbit and wait for that thought to come out and just wait for it and when it comes out you can let it hop away and go back to watching this retrains our mind each time a rabbit thought comes out it's like a mental push up and retrains our mind to focus on mindfulness and watching instead of running away with thoughts which really really can be taught another question was basic foods in the wild what can you eat out here that's going to get you through a couple of days this is a tough one because it varies you know according to your ecosystem that you're in what part of the world your end so I'm not going to show specific plants but I will show a technique and actually it's really interesting because Matt the 11-month student is doing his gauntlet challenge today so he left for three items and he's spending from morning through the night to the next morning without using those three items and without eating any food except for a wild gathered food and he is charged with trying to wake up tomorrow morning with a decently full stomach instead of just fasting all day long here's the technique I shared with him that can work really well it's called grazing so right now usually we think of food we think of making a meal and making a meal is great but if you're walking through the woods you're hiking or something and you know you know 10 good safe wild edibles you can graze as you go along and you know you walk along and pick that and put it in your mouth and eat it and just as you're going oh if you hit a berry patch you stop and you eat a whole bunch of bearings you eat as you move instead of thinking move move move stop sit down cook and eat then move again grazing this next question is a really important one in my mind because a lot of us that are exploring bushcraft rewilding it can feel like a very solo pursuit and we have our friends and our family that we wish we could get involved but this stuff can look pretty counterculture sometimes and so I hear from a lot of people that are saying i love this i'm really passionate about it but it's really hard to find space for it because my family just isn't into it at all so the key with introducing rewilding is or any kind of nature Appreciation i think is to show your passion for it whenever we try to push something on somebody it usually backfires if I'm saying you know you've really got to check this out and really like this is so cool sometimes that can create a little bit of resistance but if we just start doing things like we learn a really interesting tasty wild edible and we bring it back and just have a little bowl of it on the table for everybody to try if you can peek people's curiosity and the next step might be yeah do you want to see where this came from I can show you the plan we can pick some of our own they're even tastier when they're warmed by the Sun or right off the bush sometimes it's it's doing a hand drill fire or showing somebody a bow that you made on your own that's going to spark that interest and peak that interest and then you can slowly bring people and again key is not to try to force it or to try to tell people how cool innings but to show them through your passion and often then people will wonder a little bit what's that what's that person so passionate about what could be exciting them so much and then you can get them to start to follow rewilding in the city you live in the city glued to a computer most of the day how do you do this I like to really remember that you're wiling isn't it's not just nature out here it's our inner nature that's really essential to remember but we're natural creatures too and that even this this culture that we Forge which sometimes can feel like it puts barriers between us and the rest of the natural world in a way it's it's own natural world because we're natural you could say that anything we create is natural we look at it that way we can start to see even the city as as really cool if you read Tristan Ghoulies book ever I'll put it in the description the title and that book has a whole section about the city and starting to see why is it that consistently businesses on one side of the street fail and ones on the other side and street don't learning to read where marks in the sidewalk around a row of cars or feet we can start to see that the city is its own jungle and we can do tracking there we can notice behavior of the strange upright Apes that walk around and all the funny strange things that they do we can also bring the other aspects the personal aspects of rewilding like primal fitness into being glued to a desk and that might be that I squat on my chair and type or I get an exercise ball and I lean back a little bit engage my abdominals if I'm watching something on the computer reading something can I do that in some kind of crazy yoga pose trying to engage your body your mind your senses as much as you can and we can do a lot of the fun practices that we do out here in the woods like blindfolded and trying to cook and eat a meal if you're at your lunch break you're sitting down your co-workers might think you're a little weird when you put on that blindfold but it's going to be a great topic of conversation and you're going to get that full experience of opening up your other senses what about we have lost a lot of our bodies powers its physical abilities through injury or a chore bad health choices whatever it is how can we still enjoy nature and and enjoy our body and that for me i think is it is a perceptual shift you know i can look at myself and I can go while I'm in great shape for 44 year old I can just you know jump around do flips I Wow or I can look at Olympic athletes or even just parkour guys in town and I can look and say wow I my body can barely move and so I can just realize that I'm where I am with my body and you know all I can do is move this finger then my physical challenge can be moving that finger a little bit further moving in a little to the side whatever our body can do there's a place where we can explore can we increase its potential

when our body isn't our body can also be kind of distracting you know I've references in other videos where I feel like my physical fitness sometimes keeps me from writing or doing other things that are more quiet or sedentary so if my body is no longer capable moving around a lot other other things I could do you know besides like watching TV or distracting myself could i right could I do art could i join some forums online communicate other people who are suffering finding things that are constructive that engage the talents that I do have because there's always we can look at what we don't have or we can look at what we do have so what do I have and how can I use that to not only increase my own richness of life but to reach out to others and make this world a more magical amazing place the final one is growing up as a team how do we keep ourselves peaceful in today's world you know as a teen right now it's really difficult there's so much media coming at us and sometimes there's a glorification of being kind of what's always been there I think it for teens being kind of like disgusted and feeling bad and I know I grew up with that and it's seductive in some strange way to feel like there's something something good about just kind of raging at the world but

I think if we can look and see a median stuff that's coming in at us if you're a teen and look at that stuff and realize that it has a power has a seductive hypnotic power are you going to fall into that hypnosis are you going to see what's in your heart and see what do I really want to experience in the world and what do I really want to give to the world I want to walk around saying the world is stupid doesn't do me any good because it just makes me feel disgruntled and upset with life and it doesn't do any good in the world it's actually being the very thing that I'm criticizing the world we all have the power to say I recognize the hypnosis stuff that's coming in you know what I'm not going to take that pill over and over I'm going to wake up to my heart to what I feel this world could be and I'm going to take a positive approach because a negative approach is easy so what all that media is trying to like keep ingrained the positive approach that's the warrior approach that's the powerful approach it says I'm taking responsibility for myself and my actions and then I'm going to look at how I can shift the world positive ways complaining again doesn't do me any good it's what the media is doing all the time we want to just be like that media that's designed to lure us and it's designed to trigger our emotions and to guide our thoughts we don't need to buy into that your heart knows you have warrior nature positivity inside of you if your teen right now you are part of a generation that is going to make credible choices in this world you have the power to shape this world and amazing what is dream what can it be and then make it come true thank you all i hope you liked this do let me know what you thought of it i know it's kind of scattered but i hope that some of these questions touch home for some of you and i would like to know if this is something you'd be interested in me continuing or not i'm going to keep it to patrons I think just because it's an it's just a narrower field and already with the number of patrons I am getting a lot of questions coming in so for that reason I'm going to keep it the questions there instead of asking everybody for questions cuz that would overwhelm poor little Kevin so thank you my friends we'll talk soon