Patron Q&A Video Two

Description

My patrons help me to create these Q&A videos by posing questions for me. In this video, the questions are --

How do you deal with mosquitoes? 0:13

How can we deal with loneliness? 6:52

Can you share a little of your "backstory?" 13:36

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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

this is the monthly Q&A video that my patrons on patreon are helping me out what so thank you for everybody who submitted questions this month the first one is about mosquitoes and this is this is so cheap of me because I should be doing this at a time when there's 500 mosquitoes around me just attacking from all angles and Here I am it's almost mosquito list today and uh seem to be tough believing what I have to say about mosquitoes here but people are asking what do I do about them spray or just how do you do with them this is something that I get wow I've had some powerful experiences myself within the seed house and I get to watch students go through this because almost everybody that comes here is staying long enough to hit some part of the mosquito season and mosquitoes can be maddening they it's not only the fight but it's the psychological aspect

constantly around us to be really tough to do a lot of wasps today too so the key is here in the north we don't really have diseases that you have to watch out for and northern United States so we get to really experiment with mosquitoes in a way that you couldn't quite do if you were in some other areas where they can contain often life-threatening diseases if you're out living with mosquitoes you have no choice but to surrender you've probably heard me talk about this over and over again because to me this is how I do some of the wild and crazy stuff that I do out in the woods is all through this process of surrender I've found through my teens that I was trying to develop just an ironclad willpower and when it right came down to it I will power it didn't cut it it could deal with things up to a certain point but then it breaks and this surrender gives you a strength and power that makes you look like you have a willpower beyond anybody but no real power in other words no mental effort is required the mosquito land I have a choice I have a resistance choice like don't you little or god this hurts if this is going to be terrible

or I can just let it be and when I let it be I'll notice that the actual sensation that's happening is not all that intense most of the pain of a mosquito bite is up here in the way that I resist it it's the same thing that people experience with the cold out here I lay down my underwear in the cold I'm like oh bad it's bad when lay down in the cold and I just feel the actual sensation encounter with curiosity instead of resistance it's an intense sensation but not a bad one same thing with the buzzing that the zone can be annoyance work can be a music one of the students here nicolette he might have seen in some videos she transformed mosquitoes in an incredible way by the end of the season she had one most mosquito II seasons I've seen here a long time she was identifying different species of mosquitoes by the sound that they make and she just would dance with the mosquitoes in a way that was amazing but she had to do that by surrendering and ceasing to fight them and then the magic part is that I think she discovered that the only fight that was ever there was the one in her head and she was able to transform this negative experience into something that just didn't faze her anymore so that is my perhaps unfortunate unfortunate answer about mosquitoes I don't have some mixture of herbs that works to repel them just let go and experience them and it doesn't mean after you've learned how to let go that you might not brush them off you're probably not going to kill them anymore there's no reason to but you might brush them off same way that a leaf might fall on your shoulder and you might brush it off not necessarily because it's unpleasant you just interacting with your world and that's an important important thing to remember about this radical surrender of vulnerability it's not about sitting there and taking it the classic example is an abuse situation you know man or woman is being abused in a domestic situation the idea is not sit there and take it but if we can actually see what's going on step away from our resistance to the experience will tend to see it very very clearly and then something that we just don't want to have right now whether that's a mosquito bite or I've realized this domestic situation is not serving me we can step away from it with ease it doesn't have the huge impact that it does when I'm again in that domestic situation thinking oh my gosh I can't leave being filled with Gil will they change their ways you just see the situation you can step away so radical vulnerability does not mean being pushed around it means no longer being ruled by our own resistance the subtle but important distinction

second question is about loneliness and I'm glad someone asks us because it's again something I get to watch students go through it's something that has always been a big resistance point of mine and it's something that they're doing research on right now starting to see how damaging loneliness can be and starting to pay more attention to it in our society particular with a lot of our older people who are put into situations where there's not really many people paying attention to them anymore loneliness is an exceedingly strong invoker of resistance for I'd almost say most of us a lot of us are most of us this this feeling over comes up so I haven't seen any of the episodes of a loan but I hear that's a lot of times with the really battling with his loneliness and loneliness like any other emotional state the key to transforming it is seeing that the emotional state is not automatically correlated with our external state so they used to think this about stress right the old stress test would say have you moved recently have you gone through a divorce as anybody in your family died and then they tell you how stressed you were of course over time they found that one person could have just had a new job and moved and gotten a divorce and had their their father died and they're not stressed at all another person could have everything in there everything in their life just lined up perfectly when you're looking at it from the outside and there's stressed beyond belief so we always have a choice of how we are going to respond or react to external stimuli loneliness usually comes about when there's no people around us or there's people around us with whom we are not able to find ourselves in relation ship with could be that we don't speak their language we just don't jive with them with our political religious whatever beliefs that we hold sacred the the key here in the case of loneliness is to see that there's my external it starts to invoke starts to trigger reactions and as that reaction comes up really feeling lonely we tend to story tell so reaction comes the initial like visceral reaction and then on top of that we story tell when we tell stories you start to think oh my gosh I wonder what what my kids are doing right now is it worth it being out on this on this camping adventure you know away from them for two weeks because I'm missing what they're doing today and you know so for me then I'd missed my wife run oh there I should just head home I start telling stories and what that does is that increases the physiological reaction so I start to feel stronger more loneliness the more that I feel the more I tell stories and this becomes a self-feeding cycle that increases increases and get stronger and stronger and really leaves me devastated that's a reaction and it's our our trained reaction this or response storytelling enters into the cycle now if there's a Bissell visceral reaction and I can develop mindfulness and realize hope there goes my mind starting to tell stories instead I can come back and actually feel or experience that visceral reaction that's the seat that's the beginning of any of these resistance based emotions when I can actually feel it I'll open feel a sensation how may be kind of a tightness through here and breathing shallowly and I just watch that experience that sensation what tends to happen is that just like mosquitoes just like laying in the snow I find that oh this sensation is not as huge and horrible in devastating as I think it is when I can come back again and again and notice that visceral reaction and I come back even if I have started storytelling I come back in my mind to that feeling just experience that feeling that's when I can start to transform from reaction to a response I begin to get lonely my response mindful response is that a mindless reaction is I feel the sensation I experience it don't bury it is not an act of will like oh god just can't think about this force it away to stopping noticing the storytelling coming back to that visceral sensations you do that again and again it starts to train our mind into mindfulness toward our emotional mental state that is one of the keys to living a life that is fulfilling and rewarding is not being taken for right by our mental states by our reaction based mental state learning to respond mindfully and get back to the rut even storytelling about why you're feeling lonely can take us on a little storytelling adventure and make us feel bad mindful attention to the root sensation try practice it see if you experience and of course in the comments let me know if you if you've tried this there had experience with it the last question I'm going to respond to in short because this could be a very very long video and a few people over time have asked about this and I'm not trying to hide my past in any way but there's just a lot of formative stories that i would tell i think that kind of brought me to where I am in life right now but the short version is that I grew up in pretty good circumstances I mean we can all look back at our childhood and probably think of things we would change but I had a pretty stable childhood home up and tell from my early teens I think when my parents were divorced but i also had woods around me and me and my brother and my cousin when he was around we would go out into the woods and our world was very infused with imagination we played some dungeons and dragons and that transformed into what we call real D&D which meant that we took sticks and when we'd go out into the woods and we would battle orcs and search for treasure and have incredible adventures out there with our wooden swords that I think got me started not so much with wilderness skills but with this idea of nature being a place that brings out really positive qualities in us because that brought out playfulness I think of my early nature years as being the most explorative and kind of growing years for me we would go out and catch Turtles on the stream by hand and catching release and we would explore and try to cross fallen trees it instilled a sense of adventure and it equated nature with that sense of adventure later my teens I started to really start to develop a sacred feeling for all of life and I couldn't stand even seeing somebody mold along and when I started seeing people you know cutting down big swathes of trees and destroying forests and I it wasn't Greenpeace I was thinking about it was what's earth first I wanted to go join that and and I started to develop a really negative view point about humankind I basically saw us as a as a cancer or parasite on the earth and I wasn't wise enough at that point to notice that that was doing me a disservice because I generally walked around feeling yeah inside not enjoying life and oh so much energy was taken up with that negativity inside myself that I couldn't bring out positivity anywhere around me as I went on in my ears I started reading tom brown's books I think those are influences on a lot of us and some of you probably are great big Tom Brown fans others detractors I think the important thing to remember for me is that those books were inspirational to the young Kenton and that was the only thing that mattered just that they inspired it got me out into the woods and got me thinking about trying to start fires and things like that by the time I was about 16 I was very sure that I wanted to live per year in the woods just wild and I wrote a letter this is pre-internet or anything like that I mean internet was there but you weren't sending emails to people so I wrote a letter to tom brown and I said can I go out to your school and live for a year on your land and I sent that out in the mail full of childhood hope and just never heard back from him a few months later I saw an advertisement in our local food co-op for a place up near tomahawk Wisconsin is called the teaching drum and and I wrote to him and I asked the same thing he responded back and sent me this really loving letter that said you know I can't remember exactly what it said but but the idea was I'm not sure if you know I don't know you if I'd be comfortable just having you live for a year out by me but why don't you come up for the summer and become my apprentice whoa coolest thing ever so in my my 17th year I went and I stayed at the teaching drum and I spent a number of months there and that was very transformative it was there's an interesting situation he was kind of just create tamarac who runs the place was kind of just starting the school at that point and I got a lot of just me time in nature and I think in some ways you know that was that was part of tamaracks wisdom was leaving things alone and letting nature do its magic so they came back from that with fair amount of culture shock when I saw this world again but but after that I started to shift and something positive had happened there that's one of those big experiences I could talk about but that positive experience that had kind of brought me to my edge and brought me into a full surrender it transformed the way I see things and I didn't have the same negative viewpoint about humans anymore and over the years that kept evolving and I started to love our species and to realize you know the earth is probably going to go on with or without us why don't I just be positive about humankind because there are some really cool things about me were really weird-looking right kind of just well I happen to be basically pink with a tuft of hair here and Tufts of hair and rear twice's and what the heck's going on no claws here's my retractable claws weird but also kind of cool and so I started to love our species and to make some big transformations in my life and how I thought about the world and I thought about humans I explored a lot of religious traditions because I grew up non-religious and

I started incorporating elements of those wisdom traditions into my life and and started to see that instead of trying to change my outward war world so much I made the biggest changes when I changed myself and then change sort of happened automatically in the world around me and in a microcosmic sense I always explain this is it for an example as going through the checkout line at the grocery if my internal state is kind of like then and then and I walk through that line I'm going to tend to get a response pretty predictable response from the grocery person if I walk through that line positive and joyful you get a very different engagement that happens naturally essentially just because my internal state that grocery person and then I'm spreading smiles where I go and if I keep doing this I can develop spreading thoughtfulness I can develop spreading compassion and so that is my life goal right now is trying to find anywhere inside of me where I'm harboring resistance or I'm harboring negativity on acting out of reaction and to try to transform in a way that not only brings me more joy and peace in life what allows me to shift the world around me more positive ways and that's basically where I am at this point is is continuing to explore that I got to explore that in my relationship with Rebecca we spent 20 years together before we decided to have children and we did a lot of exploration now there's two children in my life and they are helping you to explore even deeper and if I found one thing it's that I am ever a student I can never be a master or I've stopped growing so that's my goal in life is to always be a student always explore more always be as engaged as I can with the world it's an ongoing journey thank you much for watching and thanks for to all the patrons who have submitted questions and I think I'll keep this tradition up because I've heard from a lot of you that you enjoy it so real aprox