Matt's 11-Month Forest Monk Program, Episode Six

Description

Matt is brought down to the yurt for the duration of deer rifle season, and shares some thoughts on meditation, slow-cooked bacon, and delivers another of his friendly challenges.

He'll be taking a Christmas vacation at home, and then rejoining us at ReWild University's new location in the vast northern wilds where wolves and loons will sing him to sleep at night.

Become part of our online Forest Monk community at patreon.com/forestmonk

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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

perhaps you notice a difference in my surroundings good job good perception you did it that's right I've moved down to the yurt and this is where I will be staying all the way until our move in December when we're going to go up to a different place of north and okay I like it here this is cool look I have a fire and I have a fire all the time it's awesome it's warm here yeah tons of firewood that I don't even have to cut myself so cool some challenges to move into the earth especially food is going to come up I feel like I went straight back to being a total novice as soon as I came here I don't know anything about cooking on this fire and this is a stove has like soapstone on it which holds heat for a really long time but it doesn't get very hot in the first place so you have to really think ahead with your cooking right now I've got a pot of bacon on there that I put up in there i got up at two o'clock in the morning to stoke the fire and i put that on there and it's still not done I don't know how it's going to take but I think part of the problem was I just had the fire too low and I stoked it this morning and it should be getting nice and hot that shouldn't make the bacon cook faster boom

Oh

there's a lot of birds down here way more birds down here than up in the forest super cool we've got Cardinals and chickadees and cat birds and ducks is even ducks in the pond those are fun to watch splashing around and diving for plants in the water you think that the forest would be the place to go to look for birds right but apparently they're so spread out up there I don't know maybe they like being down here because this is the water source that they can drink out but you know up in the forest but even if they're up there and like way up in a very top of that tree and just shunning me they don't want to come down and socialize these ones I'm here super friendly and it's nice to hear the chirping around all day flying around before I moved down here to the earth I did a couple of special meditation days I did two hours per meditation session so that's two hours per day and that was kind of interesting I learned some things from that the first day I set myself down and I was like okay I'm going to meditate two hours focus as much as I can for as long as I can like the iron determination to focus on my breathing and that was hard to do is it just it's so much easier to just slip off into thinking or other random places and when you do that you realize that you're not focusing anymore and then you have to rent yourself back to focus and like you get all I should have been focusing I need to improve I need to do this better I think I proved my perfectionism is getting in the way there and it's just not a very meditative experience the second day I just set myself down and I was like I'm going to sit here for 20 helps doesn't really matter what I do as long as I sit here two hours and as long as I'm here I may as well pick something front of mind to focus on so well I'll focus on my breath and that was much less boring I found um when you're literally the only thing you have to do is nothing it's surprisingly easy to get boring bored but I didn't really get bored that time I didn't check my watch as much like during the whole two-hour session I think they only checked my watch one time to see how much time i had left it was kinda slutty well it will beep eventually so I'm just gonna sit here until it does part of the reason I was getting bored on the first day I think was a faulty assumption that I would be happier somewhere else doing something else and I don't think that's really true cuz when i finished on meditation I like I went over to my camp and I had breakfast started you know doing my work for the day walking around or whatever and that wasn't actually that much better or more pleasant than just sitting in one place on a log watching the sunset

listening to the birds so we get this idea in our mind that we'd rather be somewhere else pretty much any time we're doing anything that isn't holding all of our attention but just just accepting the faint that the universe is giving you my fate is just it here right now do this thing and it's no better or worse than anything else I think that's an important thing some cool things did happen while I was meditating I ran across a huge black squirrel we just ran all the way from the other side of the forest right along the branches on the ground right up to me and SAT there staring at me and wiggling his tail like the way squirrels do when they're trying to warn each other of something I don't know why they do that like okay squirrels are pretty well camouflaged right there the same color is the trees so why would they sit around wiggling their tail when they know there's something dangerous nearby because that draws all the attention to them I don't understand it but this one wasn't the same color as the trees it was black it was super cool and it was big and fuzzy and just stared at me for a few minutes and then ran away hopping along the trees and they're so agile it's awesome and the day that i left my campsite the whole deer population of wisconsin was there to see me off I saw seven doze and a book all walking in like a congo line down at the bottom of my hill I'll just drooping by my camp I don't think I've ever seen that many deer in one day before it is crazy talking should be talking okay do i need to hold that this so when Matt was building his fire blindfold I was trying to indicate like he had built up a pile of leaves and lit them on fire and so they were burning and he was kind of moving it and part of it had rolled off and fallen off to the side and I wanted to indicate to him that his fire had moved from where he thought it was because he was putting more leaves over here and I was like okay I grabbed his hand and held it over the fire so I could show him oh this is where the heat is coming up and he misunderstood me and thought I was trying to get him to take more leaf so he just kind of put his hand in the flames directly it was kind of like touching the fire like oh should I get more leaves oh okay and then didn't act like it even bothered him and sitting there thinking I wonder you know like if he had seen that would he have put his hand on it like oh that's hot you know like you would normally react when you literally touch a fire but it seems like you know whenever you're blindfolded that doesn't quite like you you don't you're not tricked into thinking it's hotter than it is you're actually feeling the actual heat directly our visual self is basically over reacting to that situation yeah he would seem like he didn't even care and he as he was lighting his matches he was checking it by touching that are like he was holding the match right up next to the tip and it would be on fire and I would have liked dropped the match probably if I had been doing that but didn't act like it matter and moved it down and oh I have a challenge for people this week and this relates to something that Brett helps me see which is that once we've already concluded what we're trying to do and given up and decided to go do something else if we stay behind and keep looking for a little bit longer so I mean as interesting things may start to happen so far it seems like when I get a hand real kool for instance it only seems to happen after I've already put in all my work all all my effort into this cull put in all power and my ok I've done that's all I've got I hadn't gotten the coal and then I do like three or four more until I'm absolutely exhausted and then I checked that and I've got Nicole it's it's those couple of extra spins after I've already given up and decided to walk away that made the difference and this is true with other things as well I was doing a species inventory on on one of the islands at the place of north and I was trying to check out all the different things that lived on the island you know compare that to what it's going to be like in the winter and stuff like that should be interesting but I did two circuits on the little island counted every plant species really mushroom every squirrel that there was to be found and you know this took like it an hour at least hour and a half so by then I was pretty tired of looking at plants and I was ready to go so I was just finishing my second lap around the island and I was pretty happy to be going back almost finished when I stumbled across this little tree that had been chewed down by a beaver and I looked at that for a few minutes and I thought that was interesting and then I decided to walk away and as I wasn't walking away i found a leaf that I didn't recognize I hadn't seen this leaf any

or else on the island so I looked at it for a little bit wondered what wanted about it decided I didn't care that much and then decided to walk away but then I turned back and realized okay I just gave up and decided to walk away now what else can I discover from this and I traced that leaf back to a tree that had been that had fallen by the side of the path and it was the same theory that this fever it shoot down and it was still bright red well almost to the other trees around there had turned brown and I hadn't even seen this bright red tree lighting on the side of the path on the first time I walked around the island and it was a totally different tree than i had seen before when i was doing my species inventory so all i did was decide to go back and have one more look at the situation before walking away and i discovered a whole story of a tree that had been chewed down by a beaver and it had these fancy red bright red leaves and it was a tree that I hadn't ID before so I think there's a certain power in this kind of thinking where you've already used all your assumptions you've already you know got gone through all your preconceptions and you satisfied your internal story and then you go back and look one more time and see what is really there so that's my challenge for people to try is when you find that you've given up on something and you're right about to walk away from it go back and look at it one more time and interesting things may start to happen okay I tried that bacon I was cooking and oh oh my gosh so good I mean you keep bite it and your teeth go all the way through it you don't have to gnaw on it or anything my gosh so full of flavor if you ever get a chance to cook bacon on a wood stove overnight you gotta do it oh my gosh well