Kenton's "Backstory"

Description

I've had so many requests for this that I finally did it. It ended up being pretty long, but I hope that it can inspire some of you to find the courage I didn't have, and find your "heart calling".

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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

greetings everybody I have had a whole bunch of requests that kind of came all at the same time for me to do a back story video sort of a little mini biography that shares well I guess I just want to share with you all more about me so many of you have shared parts of your personal life with me and I want to share back and then people have also been asking how I got to this place where I am in my life and so I just would like to share the story I guess I'll start at the beginning which is my childhood and I I was very lucky to have a childhood where I had parents that that got along pretty well at least it seemed you know to my child's eyes they ended up getting divorced later in life but but there was a lot of nature in my life we lived on the edge of of woods and I got to go out and explore a lot there was a little kind of stream by us and I would be able to go canoeing all the time my brother and I would catch Turtles we would catch Turtles by hand and and let them go and I remember one time we caught so many and we kept putting them in the bottom of our canoe and we decided before we let them all go we would go home and show our parents and we showed our parents and they call up the newspaper and somewhere I don't have the picture anymore there's this picture of us with I don't know 30 turtles at the bottom of our canoe and so that was that was a real blessing because I had woods available to me and I think that started me off with just a love and appreciation of nature and the adventure that it can bring into our lives

this combined with a love of dungeons and dragons my brother and my cousin and I we would we would play D&D and pretty soon we kind of evolved out of playing it with dice and paper which I think had a little bit maybe too many rules for us and we would often play what we called fake D&D and fake a D&D was going out into the woods and picking up sticks and it was all in our imagination and we would battle orcs and find treasure and the imagination seemed so real to us those were good times and that I think instilled in me this love of adventure believing that the world was more magical and mysterious then you know then school and teachers and things were were implying at that time in my life I I got to start martial arts in life which was a blessing it was just kind of standard Taekwondo but you know now that I look back at it it was more of a hybrid even though it was under that taekwondo umbrella but but that started me off with a love of physical fitness and martial arts which is carried through and and then there was school in school was really tough for me I I would fake sick as often as I could I just did not like school and that was maybe the toughest part of my childhood was was going to school every day and being a kid that probably today would have been you know labeled as ADHD or something because when I was supposed to be doing my lessons at school I was drawing battles and Dragons and spaceships and looking out the window and imagining you know what monsters I was gonna fight after school when I would go play fake D&D out in the woods it was his pretty torturous and I did not get good grades because when I would get home you know and then I'm supposed to be doing homework the woods were calling me my fake swords were calling me all these this richness of creativity and in adventure in my mind was such a contrast with sit down pay attention eight hours a day at this at this desk so as I reflect back on my childhood you know I I wish I would have had the opportunity to home-school or or have some kind of alternative schooling because the standard schooling was it was just time in sixth grade I made a decision to not drink pop anymore I'd been drinking coca-cola and everything else in my life and so for some reason I just said I'm going to stop drinking pop and that I think was the beginning of a an exploration into self-discipline and I was very good about not drinking pop I really held to that that was the only health center choice that I made I still was eating tons of processed food and candy every day and so it wasn't an overall commitment to health but at least I had taken one you know that sugared liquid out of my diet and and so I think that was probably the initial trigger event they got me interested in in health and again it also launched an exploration into self-discipline during this time my circle of friends revolved mostly around my brother Nathan and then our friends white crow and Swift Fox this is Jacob and Elizabeth and we would go adventuring in the woods and we'd have camp outs and explorations it was those were really really good times there are two other big influences in my life at this time the one was a dream that blossomed in me and that dream was to become an author I want to say this started when I was 15 or 16 and I started writing my first fantasy novels and I wrote this big trilogy that was was set in a fantasy land and and I just that's all I wanted was to be an author and that was that was my dream you'll see that will continue to come into my life as as the story goes along the other big influence was you know probably my best friend in childhood Eric and he and I the many many adventures I could recount that pushed the boundaries of propriety and intelligence we we basically almost wanted to be ninjas or something and we we practice these skills we I had a ninja outfit we would go night stocking at night in our neighborhood and try not to be seen by anybody we developed a really strong skill set I think of patience being able to sit and watch something being aware of our surroundings being able to move quietly of developing self-discipline one game for instance

we played one day I said I handed and it Eric my BB gun and I said it wasn't a real powerful one but they said Eric I want you to hunt me down and we're not smart enough to use any eye protection or anything like that and we were running around this my house and and he was hunting me with the gun and I remember trying to climb this ladder up onto this balcony deck and I saw him come around the corner as I was getting up there it's almost to the left to the deck and then boom right in my butt I remember a time he threw a throwing knife and it hit me right here and bounced off there's still a little scar where it hit oh my gosh the things we did were not smart and they also built skills that I in a way maybe could not have been built if we had been playing it safer Eric went on into the military and did some pretty elite kind of military stuff and of course I went on to another bath all this time the love of nature was growing and the dream of being an author was really strong inside of me and so I was still writing stories and short stories and books I would send out letters trying to get an agent but but no one would take me on and I at the same time of course was reading books and the the fantasy books kept me engaged with with that sense of adventure but Tom Brown juniors books those hit me hard and whatever people say or think about Tom Brown you know whether the truth or non truth of grandfather I don't even get involved in any of that to me whatever the back whatever the truth is his books really inspired me and I would read those books I just by the time I was 16 17 years old what I wanted to do was I just wanted to go stop going to school and go live for a year out in the woods so I wrote a letter this is before email or anything I wrote a letter to Tom Brown and said can I come out to the Pine Barrens and and just live out there in the woods near your camp for a year and of course he was pretty big by then already and I never heard back I also wrote a letter though to a man named Tamarack song up in northern Wisconsin I had seen one of his Flyers up in the local Cooperative food food cart and when I asked the same thing and he wrote back to me and you know bless his heart for being so open to a young idealistic man that really didn't know anything about wilderness skills as we all know we can read about the wilderness skills but to actually go out and do them that's a completely different thing and so he wrote back and he said Kenton a year in the woods I'm not quite sure if I'd want to open that door quite yet but if you want to come up this summer and be my apprentice you can't well I was overjoyed this seemed like an opportunity from from heaven so I I went up to the teaching drum and and I spent the summer there and that was I was a hugely powerful experience for me and there's a thousand stories I could share from the teaching drum of crazy strange things but it was in my memory at least I mean this was a long time ago now

what 30 years ago about it was a lot of alone time in the sense that there wasn't as much going on as I thought would be going on up there so there was a lot of time for self-reflection and during my time there I had a very powerful spiritual experience I've talked about it in other videos and I won't go into it here but but essentially I I broke it down I went into a place of deep despair and it's that dark night of the soul essentially and in that experience something blossom down and I found a piece that was beyond anything I had experienced before I can't really tell anybody about it but but it infused me at the end of my time at the teaching drum I had a big decision to make I did not want to complete high school that last year of high school seemed like it would be unbearable to me I just wanted to go off with some of the people that had left the teaching drum at the end and I wanted to go off and and live in their community out west but I went back to school and I'm glad I did because in going back to school I think that was probably the first time I met Rebecca which my relationship with her guided the rest of my life up until now I was Rebecca and I developed our relationship it started very slowly and we were there were friends and had a great friendship that eventually blossomed into more and someday I'll have to share the story of our of our love but it's it's hard to explain what was there somehow we both just knew that that we wanted this connection in a disconnection was going to be the central part of our life I saw other relationships around me where it was people were centered on for instance their career or you know their big focus was whatever their other life passion was and then their partner was part of that kind of their partner but a Rebecca and I it felt like this is going to be the foundation of our life is our connection and so we embarked on this quest together to really just develop our relationship develop our connection develop our inner selves she had grown up Lutheran I had grown up basically atheist no religion but after my experience at the teaching drum we started to explore Eastern religions and Buddhism and Taoism and as we explored those we would read Alan Watts and and we would have these amazing talks we'd go canoeing and it had these talks and how these realizations come to us and it was amazing journey together right when she finished high school we got into my truck and we drove into the North Woods of Wisconsin Minnesota and Michigan I had a little money set aside and we thought we would buy some land and we'd set up my tepee and we would just live in the woods when we got up there we got really scared and we decided okay we're gonna go live near my dad so we went down to the town in Wisconsin where he was living and we got an apartment and even though we were on our spiritual quest and exploring life we started to get kind of sucked into making ends meet so we worked as in factory jobs temp services she was a waitress I was a prep cook at a Japanese Chinese restaurant we worked at a pizza place together we just had all these these jobs and those are very developmental years for us it also felt to me like they were years where we are kind of lost we were just trying to pay the bills and sometimes it was really hard our our jobs would you know come and go and we weren't making much money at all sometimes we didn't have enough money for food I my family wouldn't like hearing this we didn't tell them but we were really hungry we even were dumpster divers for a little bit because we just didn't have enough to make ends meet but eventually we we saw that we were just kind of caught in a rut and we said okay we're gonna move out to Crested Butte Colorado and we had been there a couple times skiing with my family and it seemed like this little European village up in the mountains it was about 9,000 feet and big ski hills and stuff up there and so we we put everything into my into our truck it was just you know here's our truck and then there was this pile of our stuff on top of it and we set off for Colorado Colorado was again a very powerful time in our life of growth we had a lot of conflict between us during that time and trying to figure things out

we worked as housekeeping inspectors up at the ski hill and actually didn't do much skiing the few times I did go skiing and went with my boss and she would take me on ski hills that were off the I mean I was a pretty good skier but probably not good enough to do to go on the hills that she was taking me on but that was some really cool intense kind of backcountry skiing off the main routes we we liked it in Colorado this the nature was amazing but funnily enough there was a there was a real culture of marijuana in Crested Butte and pretty much everybody smoked marijuana and Rebecca I have no problem with people that smoked marijuana all through school and everything people like all my friends basically you know smoked pot at one time or another I was totally cool with that but we found and it really surprised me that because we didn't smoke marijuana we weren't really included in the way that we were hoping for there in Crested Butte and so although we made some good friends and had some good connections we never really connected into the community in the way we hoped and so we also kind of miss this woods the rich air the the higher humidity being closed kind of denseness of the Wisconsin woods and so we moved back home soon after Colorado I had another powerful experience in my life my brother was oh man my brother's such an adventurer he spent a year living in Nepal and he spent two years living in Mongolia up with the nomads he wandered through India and Southeast Asia spent a lot of time in Thailand but when he was in Nepal I had the opportunity to go and spend a month with him we went tracking he spoke to Battin so we get to go into the Tibetan refugee camps and I got to see another part of the world this was quite quite a while ago in Nepal it was back before that that communist takeover and it was it was beautiful it was you know I got to meet people with leprosy I got to taste different strange foods I got to meet those Tibetan refugees that had had come down it was eye-opening in a lot of ways and time with my brother was also powerful I was sick a lot spent a lot of time having liquid come out of both ends at once Rebekah and I then moved to a small town in in Wisconsin called Menominee and we bought a house in the city it was at the time when it was really easy to buy a house and Rebekah just went in and she talked to the the president of our bank had convinced him that we would be able to pay our lawn and and so we bought this little house in town it was the first time we kind of owned something and the housing market went off we ended up selling that house in town and we moved out into the country to a little place called Sweetwater that's what we called it and it was it was a little town we had five acres and a little stream coming through and a kind of Golden Age blossomed in our life during this time we we were doing some interesting things we started our own job doing interior painting and sometimes some construction and remodeling new things and this this job was awesome we could make our own hours we made really really good money it seemed great we also got a job as the directors of entertainment for a newly forming Renaissance Fair we were friends with the person that was starting it and he got together all these investors and and we built an entire village and created this Renaissance Fair and Rebecca and I got to hire entertainers and trained people to be actors in the village it was it was fun you know a part of me that's really always been drawn to that that reenactment thing you know you think about the Viking re-enactors or here we have colonial reenactors and things like that where they'll be kind of the trade the Native American people and trappers rendevouz yeah that's what they're called and so so I love that whole concept of going back in time before there were cameras and watches and computers and telephones to be part of that in such a way was was amazing and we were horse trainers at that time I was training some horses to be in the parades and to really be able to deal with the stresses and rigors of being in a parade and Rebecca was a belly dance teacher and I was a drummer and so we performed it ran fairs and we performed at parties and all kinds of events Rebecca and I at that time also became NASM certified personal trainers and so we were working with people to improve their fitness I was teaching martial arts at that point we just had all this stuff going and it was it was fun we're making a lot of money everything seemed really good except something was missing and you can probably all relate to this whether it's something you've experienced in the past or something you're experiencing right now where everything in your life can seem like it's just it's lined up everything is good but something's missing and we couldn't pin down what that was but we knew them even though we were doing all these interesting things we weren't in our heart place we weren't really doing what was what we were meant to do if that makes sense and so despite all this there was a longing in us and that longing had a strange blossoming and here's what happened I still we still were writing and we both now shared this dream of becoming authors and and while we were writing there was always this longing like there's office other stuff in our life but we would give all that up just we could be authors that's what we want to do Rebecca and I love to write these these fantasy novels and as I look back at all the novels we've written they all have heart in it where it's not just to me we were trying to tell stories that would help people out in some way or another and so so we were writing there was this longing and and here's that blossoming it's just weird one day we're we were driving down the road and it was winter and I looked at the end of the road and here was a turkey going across a field and it was just kind of wading through the snow the wild turkey if you don't have it in your country wherever you're watching it's a really big bird people consider them to be really dumb but in the story I'm about to tell we learned a lot about them and came to respect them a lot but anyway I saw this this bird crossing the field and I said Rebecca I want to run after one of those and chase it down and and catch it with my bare hands and then let it go but I want to I want to do this and Rebecca bless her heart she basically gave me a year to do this she became the person that you know she was earning earning the money for us she had added web design onto there and so as we did everything else in our lives I kind of cut back on most of the money earning stuff in my life and I started training to try to catch a turkey and I would run every day and all these funny stories that she would help me in this training as is you know I would be super motivated and then I would give up and have this huge fluctuation and so here I was spending all my time running after turkeys in the woods and these birds are fast I mean they can run they can run faster than a world-class sprinter and then they can fly so in a way I never had a chance but it was a it was a powerful quest for me and and I developed my physical self I learned a lot about discipline and how undisciplined I could be and at the end of this whole adventure I wrote a book that chronicled that year and it was a very humorous book and we said hey let's try to get an agent again it was different than anything we had written before because it wasn't you know a fantasy novel it was basically a real-life account and we tried and tried and tried to get an agent and then all of a sudden we got an agent and she was a really top level agent and she was super excited about her book finally it seemed like our dream was coming true we were going to be authors and it was that was the beginning of a huge disappointment because our agent tried valiantly to find a home for that book to get a publishing house to take it and she had numerous editors that were interested in it but at the time it was it was not a good time to try to sell a book the market was really tough and I think the chasing turkeys thing was just it was too weird and I had no platform to be able to sell a memoir which was that what this was labeled under you really needed a platform you needed some outreach and I had absolutely none and so eventually it became clear that she had tried her best and that it wasn't going to happen and it was a huge deflation for Rebecca and I it just felt like everything had been pulled out from under us we still had our painting job we still had the Renaissance Fair job so things were still good we're still doing you know the personal training and and training the horses but we felt trapped our dream had failed and the the life we had even though it was good it felt like a trap because we couldn't get out of it we knew somehow we had to get out of it we knew that to find our heart place we had to be doing something else but the money was really good the job was really good you know owning our own business it just it seemed like it would be completely foolhardy to give that up and then you know I want to say God came in and and with a wisdom that we could not see destroyed everything we had almost within the space of a month here's what happened our painting job that had been so good in steady was based on one one account basically at this big healthcare facility and that we lost that that account the Renaissance Fair it imploded there were too many investors that were fighting amongst each other and and it collapsed Rebecca fell off a horse she broke her pelvis in two places and could not even walk she had to go through the process of learning - from being bedridden to being in a wheelchair to being in a walker and then finally learning to walk again which obviously took a long time our house the roof had a flat roof started to leak so badly that when it rained outside it was raining equally inside and then the well pump the pump at the bottom of our well went out so that they had to bring in heavy machinery and dig everything up and do this huge excavation in order to try to fix our water problem in the house all this happened at once and we were just crushed there was everything we had that we thought was so stable that we had been afraid to give up to go after our dream it was just it was stripped away and so I had to just care for a Rebecca because you know she couldn't get out of bed and and we just had all of our means all of our money drained away and we went you know deep into debt trying to pay off medical bills it just it was bad and it was really good

because finally that that foundation that had seemed so secure had revealed itself to not be secure and and we were sort of at a dead end and we call up a friend of ours actually had been a former client of mine and said could we come live on your land we there was a yurt that somebody had up for sale and so our new mortgage was $100 a month for this yurt paid to a person instead of a giant Bank and we took that yurt and we lived for a year on our friends land and bless their hearts they they gave us a place to rebuild ourselves and that is a year that reweld university began we unite Europe we wrote another novel and started trying to get agents for it and we started reweld University I made my first videos I think the first one was harvesting burdock stabbings and eating them that was right there on their land when we were living in the Europe talk about a formative year and just we had just had our first baby Mirabelle and so we had this this little baby with us and we were living without electricity or running water or anything and we were able to go up to that house and in write on the computer to do our writing Wow it was super hard in a lot of ways and yet it was what we needed and I'm not sure if we ever would have had the courage to give ourselves what we needed because there was that stable base that we had and it was essential that that stable base was gone so that we could break away and find out what we were capable of

rhe Wilde University really started changing things for us we were taking on people that came and lived in the woods finally all the skills I had been developing my whole life and you know in conjunction with Rebecca or or meditation or spirituality or wilderness skills and martial arts the primal Fitness all of that suddenly came together into this umbrella of Rewald University and we felt like we were doing finally what our heart thing was it was amazing to work with people out in the woods and really get to experience what it was like to help people through hard places I got to work with addicts we got to work with criminals and people that were really in tough places that's how Rewald University kind of started and and those initial experiences I'm finding out that Rebecca and I had this skillset that could help people come out of really tough places and come into something new finally felt like we are giving our gift to the world since then reweld University has just been growing and the the videos have become kind of the big the big thing in the sense that they seem to be reaching out and touching people in ways that I I never could have imagined and so although I'm you know still working with clients and taking people out into the woods

more and more I'm realizing that I want to focus on the videos and make that kind of the passion at the same time Rebecca and I have not given up on the writing we're still we're still writing novels and putting them out and hoping that at some point we'll finally get an agent and we are working on a rewilding book that we may end up self-publishing I don't know but but we still have that love of writing and so that's still strong in our hearts even though it's been decades of trying and failing I'd like to think that it's actually been decades of continuing to grow and learn more about it and refine our writing skills as I look to the future I just I think I hope that Rebecca and I can continue to reach out with these videos with our writing can continue to touch lives we feel so blessed right now in so many ways you know we have our little family we have two girls now and we have a community of people around us who are amazing people and we we get to get these comments from people and these emails from people that say that the videos are literally changing their lives and that has made more difference to us than anything you know I think we always dreamed for some reason we always dreamed of having a lot of money and thought of the good things that we could do with that that money and we found that even though our income ends up being often below poverty level really low you know sometimes just above that even though we don't have that much we have tons to give and we've been able to give money to people we've been able to give our videos to people we've been able to give opportunities to people and we love that our biggest lesson I think in life right now is learning to receive and for whatever reason that's just really tough for Rebecca and I and it might sound whoo but in some ways I think that's the the block with the writing is you know this belief that nothing that good could happen to us you know that we could actually get our books published and in being able to share those with the world and also you know derive income from them and so I think it was it last year or the year before I learned about patreon and and kind of became convinced to try this and that was super hard for Rebecca and I because the thought of anybody giving to us was oh but but now I feel like we have this community of we have a hundred people now and patreon that are that are supporting our work and Wow and so right now I'm just feeling really blessed in my life and as I look forward I want to share that blessing with other people and I guess my hope with this video is that in hearing this story you can come to believe that you can do the same thing some of you have but I know a lot of you also feel trapped and this culture is really good at that it's good at trapping us in debt it's good at trapping us in security and comfort and the big lesson that I hope this video brings across is that in that comfort we can be comfortable but if we are not doing what is really in our heart then something big is missing and it's almost it's almost our duty to give that to the world

because the gift that each of us has inside of us is something that the world needs our culture does not give a clear way often to give that gift to the world and you know if you are a musician or you're you're an artist you you know have this this crazy dream in your head you've probably heard people say it can't happen can't happen why even try get a steady job do what's secure I can understand that rationale but from my own experience I can also say that on the other end of losing everything feeling like you've lost everything there's a regrowth that can happen and who knows you know you look back and would you have changed anything I don't think I would have changed anything but it's sobering to realize that if that that month of tragedy after tragedy didn't slam down on us and we hadn't lost the house and lost all our money and gone into debt and everything that maybe we'd still be there painting the inside of buildings and there's nothing wrong with that some people might that might be their passion and their joy but for us Rebecca and I it wasn't and I don't know if we would have escaped or had the courage to break free of that and to create Rewald University and to do this if everything hadn't fallen apart my hope is that you can be more courageous than I was and that if there is something in your heart that you can find a way to give that to the world you've heard me say it before but we need you the world needs us to to really give our gifts to really give our heart there's there's so many forces telling us that you're just a consumer that you're just someone here to pay taxes to earn money to scrape by but that's not what we are and so if I can leave you with some encouragement it's just to believe in yourself to try to find a way to give your gift to not give up even if you've been trying for decades to make your dream come true I believe in you there's so much what this world needs right now from you so please share it be courageous reach out to others give your gift to the world thank you my friends I'm sorry I'm just really honored that you're all a part of this with me you've changed my life in a huge way and I just Wow I don't know what to say but I'm very grateful that all of you are here with me on this channel in my life in the ways that you touch me in my family through the comments through your emails thank you

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