How Has Nature Changed You?

Description

I share a story that changed my life, and ask you to share something that happened to you in nature that had a profound effect on who you are today.

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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

I'm assuming that most of you who are here on this channel you have some appreciation for nature or have had some experiences out in nature I don't quite know how nature does it but I find that when people come out to reweld University nature seems to give people exactly what they need and it does that done a very individual basis so that some people encounter all sorts of fears some people encounter boredom as their mind tries to quiet down from all the distractions of civilization some people encounter just the raw elements of cold and heat and bugs some encounter a profound sense of peace and stillness and it's it's a little mystical almost the way nature seems to know what you need and hands it to you and here I'm hoping that we could share some tales some stories about things that happen in nature that changed us in really profound ways then in reading through the comments we can see each other's stories and take some inspiration and wisdom from them this could be something joyful that happened do you it could be something terrible that happened to you either way but out of this experience how did you grow how did you learn what happened to you I'm gonna share a story and this is when I was quite a bit younger and I was it with a group of people doing a feed the mosquitoes adventure and what it is is is the concept that you go out you take off as much clothes as you're comfortable with and you let mosquitoes bite you for a period of time and I wasn't heading this up I was just along for the ride it was in this swamp where there are a lot of mosquitoes I mean a lot of mosquitoes and and they're in that swamp everybody was sitting you know with their shirts off and kind of in their underpants and and letting mosquitoes bite them people were crying tears in their eyes but I was kind of this young like oh I can do anything kind of teenager that I mean if you could see my teen self I was just was very confident in myself even though I had inner unconfident but on the exterior I tried to be very confident in the woods and so I sat there rather stoically while other people were squirming and then the leader of the event said okay this is over and everybody got into their tents as night came now of course being so gung-ho about everything I didn't have a tent I just had this little cotton sleeping bag that was kind of already wet from being down in the swamp water and and I crawled into it and that's when this night this dark night of the soul began for me it was it was the mosquitoes I mean they just kept coming and coming and coming and I'd go under my sleeping bag and it would be too hot so then I'd come out and they'd bite me and they'd bite me and AH before I'd been stoic but now I was sitting there by myself then one hour turned into two hours turned into three hours time slowed down if you've ever been an experience like this you know I was looking up at the night sky and I became convinced that the Sun was never gonna come up again because those three hours they seemed like about 20 hours and I was being tortured I would go back and forth between breathing and swatting mosquitoes and inside of me there was just tension rising anger frustration this feeling of deep anxiety that I I could not get out of this situation

and I started to just cry and cry and there wasn't anybody in that group that I felt I could go to and say you know I'm in a really tough place here can I come into your tent and get some shelter so I just sat there crying in my sleeping bag and and they kept coming and it went on and on I swear this happened for 30 hours it felt like it just went on and on and spiders were crawling into my sleeping bag and I was I had become by them very sensitive very freaked out I had been creating all this in my mind this this rolling kind of vicious cycle that was dragging me down into this pit of despair and the fear that I experienced that night it just was overwhelming there came a time when

it built up to a climax I wanted to scream and get out of my sleeping bag and run home even though I was you know 100 miles from home and I was desperate and that is when something broke inside of me and the thing that broke I believe was the part of me that felt as if my willpower could conquer anything because up until then in my life I thought I had an ironclad will but here my willpower it failed me miserably and as soon as that will broke I felt this sudden sense of relief this feeling flooded over me and my my tears turned into a smile and I suddenly could feel those little pricks of the mosquitos all over my face and neck and they were the tiniest little sensations they didn't actually hurt and I could hear the mosquitoes which before had been this maddening sound and it was just this buzzing sound that became almost like music I remember getting out of my sleeping bag I was naked I got out of my sleeping bag and I started walking off into the swamp and I would have been completely freaked out to wade through that swamp before reaches are monsters who knows what was in that that's one but here I was covered with mosquitos naked walking through the swamp at night and I had no fear

and in that moment there was this overwhelming sensation of peace that words cannot describe and that it when I when it came back to civilization after a few months because I was out in the woods for a while I I remembered that feeling because that feeling stuck with me in the woods to quite a large extent and I wanted to share that with people I didn't know how I didn't know what that was that it happened to me I had no words for it a way to describe it so so I came back to civilization and and kind of got back into the cycle of things and lost myself for many years but but during that time I started to explore Zen and Taoism and some of the Eastern philosophies that started to speak of and describe experiences close to what I had experienced out there in the woods and as the years passed I continued to explore ways to try to find that state again to understand my will my sense of ego and self and how that had a certain power but how it also had certain limits and how I could continue to invoke that feeling of total release and vulnerability that happened that night which paradoxically gave me strength to laugh that's something that moments before was driving me into tears and despair so that's my experience that's that singular experience in a way shaped my life

and has resulted in Rewald University in these videos and and having people out here so it's very pivotal for me if you would like to share your experience something amazing frightening life-changing that happened to you out in nature please share in the comments below we'd love to hear about these things in your life that that really made a difference and I think we'd all love to read it so thanks my friend [Music]