Free Gift -- Forest Monk Training Handbook

Description

I'd like to give all of you a free gift of the training handbook for this year's ReWildU program. I felt that it might hold some gems for some of you =) You can link to it here: http://rewildu.com/2016-forest-monk-training-handbook/

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

starting in August I am beginning the most intensive training that we've ever offered here a tree while the University it's an 11-month live in training and it struck me the other day that the training manual that I made up for students in this program might be something that would be inspiring or useful to all of you when students come out for this program they're going to be living monastic alee and what I mean by that is if they're living on site and instead of coming into the training and then going back to the regular lives there immersed in that training for a full 11 months now most of us probably you know don't want to take the next 11 months and completely devote it to holistic shifts in our physical being and our mental being in our emotional being but I think it's probably safe to say that almost all of you who are watching this are engaged in training at some level in the sense that there's something that you're trying to grow or evolve or shift inside of you it might be the way that you treat other people might be your diet might mean that you want to change how much you exercise or move in life it can be anything but again I think probably most of you are here because there's something that you're looking to shift in your life at some level so what I'd like to do is is offer this up as a free gift and I'm just going to put a link at the end of this video to my website where you can go to the student section and there it is it's not pretty i don't have any pictures on it or anything at this point maybe I'll pretty it up at some point but it just goes over first of all what people will experience when they first come here whether a little bit about what their daily life is going to be like and that might just be fun and inspiring to read and then it talks about you know when we're out in the woods for most people time dilates so back in civilization I've got this and this and this on my schedule days fly by these for me in the woods and for most people have seen time slows way down as soon as you're out in the woods and once you start living in the woods it really slows down and so one of the challenges that people face out here is what do I do in this moment because my day feels like it's four days long and it stretches on and on and you know I they can get boring I'm just I'm sitting out here i have a stretch of five hours in front of me there's no schedule there's nothing being asked of me what do i do and this training manual it answers that question of what you do by giving you a tool that I call the three pillars of training and it applies to those of us that are living regular lives in in houses as well because we often come up against that we have this moment right now what should I do check the email play a video game watch a movie call my dad what am I going to do with this moment and a lot of times our lights can just get into sort of an autopilot movement from one thing to another for a lot of us of course it feels like we're always trying to play catch-up and and then zoning out on TV because we feel stressed out this ship's our entire approach to what we do with our time I'm going to describe a little bit about the three pillars of training and if you want you can just take what you get from this video otherwise again at the end of the video I'll link to that training manual it's the forest monk training manual and you can read through it and see what else you get from it because it has a lot of stuff in it that I won't cover the idea behind the three pillars of training or that if I say if this moment in my life I'm going to start devoting myself to personal growth and evolution then we look at each moment and I'm going to apply the three pillars of training to this moment the three pillars are movement meditation and awareness what that means is that if I'm here I'm like oh bored what am I going to do I have this choice I can engage in movement I can move engage in meditation I can engage in awareness and giving myself those three choices it instantly takes my mind away from oh well there's that cool show honor this or that too here is this precious moment right in front of me how can I engage with it and I have these three tools of engagement that really will help me sink into this moment

movement means that in any more like any moment I can look and see what's my body doing in space from sitting in a couch and I'm like this my body's in this in this state of it feels like relaxation but this isn't really relaxation because what's happening to me here is my body is is weakening and it's adapting to this posture and then over time my back is going to start hurting I'm never going to be able to get comfortable so it's always trying to be comfortable here's one aspect of movement can I adjust my posture if I'm sitting can I can I lean back a little bit engage my abdominals maybe I sit and I'm going to sit in a beat if I am watching that movie can I stretch while I'm watching a movie can I do push-ups or plank or yoga I like to divide movement into three basic categories the one is lifestyle movement and that's what I'm talking about here my regular life I'm standing talking to somebody can I stand on one foot are there ways that I can shift my body slightly out of balance so that muscles my sense of balance my agility perhaps are having to engage where if I'm just slumped everything sort of out of engagement so that is lifestyle movement and it's fun because we can start to play with it in any moment of our life even when we are watching a movie or relaxing sitting around a campfire perfect place it can get kind of goofy because you know instead of just sitting around the campfire people are sitting around the campfire and talking in a yoga pose or something and it's different it's a different paradigm but once you get used to it your body's starting to engage all the time and it's actually fun the second type of movement is is play and that's something we do a lot of out here chasing each other through the woods climbing trees exploring play if we adults especially can relearn how to play because a lot of us have forgotten we get incredible workouts without even noticing that we're working out the last part of movement and to me kind of the least important is deliberate movement with a lot of this call exercise with lifestyle movement and with play we get these enormously great fun workouts and then we can supplement it with the liberabit movement in the training manual have all kinds of exercises unfortunately I don't describe them all because when students are here you know teaching them exactly how these exercises they're done so I'd probably have to do a different video for every exercise that's not the not the purpose of this but there it is you can take a look and maybe some of those deliberate movement things will give you some ideas of some different exercises that you could incorporate into your life meditation I covered meditation in another video I tried to strip it of all dogma and just make it simple and I kind of gave it a little bit of a scientific bent there here in this training manual we go deeper into different kinds of meditation and how they can change how we process mentally and physically a lot of it it just shifts us away from a fear-based or reactive based approach to life into a more interactive based approach to life really if you meditations nice because if you want to get mystical about it you can if you want to be scientific about it you can and you don't have to cross that line so wherever you are in your world here meditation it makes sense push-ups for the for the mine this is the way I put it in that other video the last part is awareness and awareness is the most difficult to explain and so it's not explained in depth though I do talk about it in some interesting ways in that handbook but awareness is developing taking our awareness away from inside which we do with meditation for internal state to our apparently external world and that means being aware of my body and its movement and you know a simple a simple exercise that's in here is is what I call I think in the handbook i call it the dance and what you're doing there is that when you take something and you're going to place it you do it deliberately often I could catch myself flopping things down my movement could be sloppy when I catch myself being sloppy you know if I stumble sure sign that I'm not being aware of my movement then I stopped sometimes I'll actually take a couple steps back and redo that movement and do it with conscious awareness of how my movement is going and when we start to move with awareness then you stop bumping into things and feeling so clumsy in the world and awareness also then comes into all of our environment other people and of course if you're living in the woods we can become very aware of of the natural environment of our ecosystem of the wind of the clouds changes in weather animal sign sounds of birds so so much I think that it would be fun for you to check out this this handbook I think most of you will get something from it and again it's just a free gift just enjoy it use it for whatever you like you can you can copy paste it and print it out and you know add your own things or take things out my hope is that it's going to inspire you to focus in on whatever it is that you maybe want to shift in your life right now and consider engaging in conscious training and saying for the next week for the next month for the next year we're going to be conscious about my training and this gives the tool the three pillars that I can apply to any moment in my life I hope you enjoy the handbook if you check it out and that the three pillars of training and coming useful in some way in your life thank you much my friends talk with you soon