A Forest Monk's Town Adventure

Description

During their programs at ReWildU, Forest Monks take journeys into town. It's usually an invaluable experience, being able to see our culture from a fresh perspective. Here Garrett shares what he discovered.

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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

[Music]

greetings friends when people come to reviled University it's about much more than just learning primitive skills to other things that we focus on a lot are reshaping our view of our culture the main way we do that is by spending time away from it then going back and seeing it with fresh eyes another aspect is trying to reshape some of our default mechanisms for seeing the world particularly away from fear or hate based reactions to love and compassion based responses both towards ourselves and others today in this video you're gonna meet Garrett you're gonna hear about him stepping out of the woods and back into civilization for a little bit what he noticed I think particularly touching for me was seeing his attitude toward people who are battling with extra weight on their body seeing that shift in change to a very compassion and love based response so I think you'll find this interesting today ok hi everybody this is Garrett and you're here for four months you know putting up with lot of mosquitoes and yeah all kinds of you know challenges got here June 4th June 4th now the other day so what we do here reweld University is not just all in the woods so sometimes we're for instance going into civilization from the town and and trying to do something for instance like we went into town and tried to see it what what it looks like when you've been out of our culture for a while and then we were trying some approaches to to people but just do you want me to tell how I just tell us tell us your adventure all right so I decided to go on a hike to Hayward and and finish out my route that I was gonna take perform so maybe it's probably ten Mott you finished it was maybe a ten-mile hike through the woods or okay okay so good distance it was like five miles through the woods and then when I came to the road I had like I think it was like twelve miles left okay on the road okay beautiful scenery and stuff so yeah and so that morning I just decided to go out and finish up my hike and so like I learned a deep appreciation for vehicles and old farm ladies who let you hit hike FS ago yeah yeah so on my way there I ended up having to walk on the highways on highway 77 and the scenery was beautiful but I just saw everyone just zooming by and their cars and it was like wow people aren't really in a hurry we have to go 55 miles an hour or more to get anywhere and it's like wow we are we are all in a hurry in a way it's we like you just realize it you can snap your fingers and just halt it put everything to a halt like I just piques my imagination a little bit what would happen you just stopped everyone and suddenly like let them look at what they were doing without like where they were who is around them yeah yeah oh this but but you were noticing people just yeah go go go just it didn't matter like I don't know just when I drove I was the same way like 90 miles an hour everywhere passing people so it's like I come to the kind of a little bit of introspection that so that was good and so I make my way there on the highway and I also noticed just all the smells of the vehicles and just how like how like how nosy they are like the noises that they make it they're actually just being out here and then being on the highway it's constant noise like I don't know how anyone lives on the highway because this is constant noise so I got into Hayward and I immediately went to the ATM to check out my bank account and I realized or I should just check my my thing and I was like oh gosh I'm not gonna have enough money for anything when I come back home and it just hit me like what am i I'm just a my gonna worry about this all the time like are you am I seriously gonna sit here and worry about something that I have no control over right now like hmm like it took me into the moment and it made me just enjoy the rest of the day like like I wasn't worried about anything the rest of the day wasn't worried about money I wasn't worried about this and that was it just seeing the your mind's tendency to uh uh take that yeah thing you have no control over as you say yeah and then it could from there I mean you could just ruin your entire day right yeah worrying about that thing mm-hmm but that that translated beyond that into other yeah experiences that you had yeah like it was like I'm went in and bought myself a Berea this time at the taco shop that he told me about yeah like it was just not worrying about the cost of that burrito burrito just tasted ten times better wait oh I suppose you could buy it and the AH but it cost me seven dollars or whatever yeah I mean you're gonna be in debt the rest of my life oh you ain't even taste it you're so why buy in the first one yeah and then later on in the day I forget the name of her but I sat down and talked to this I think she was in her 30s I thinking I talked up I just sat down on this bench I I had a doughnut doughnut in it and a bottled milk and I just sat down I say hey what's up and talk to her and we ended up talking about a lot of different things like like I told her about my weariness of going to college and stuff and she's like ah college is great it's the only thing I would do twice I mean I was just like well I know that I do this doughnut and milk twice he's like ah hey living in the moment I guess I was like yeah yeah that was what else did you observe about our culture our society and then we live in I observed that I okay so you imagine what our ancestors long before like warming before City long before city life long before civilization I imagined what the things that they would do there mmm whether it's like like a spear throwing competition they're just like playing around or in the woods or something or like hunting you know like and I realized that the only Nexus of like relation that most of us have with the other man next to us is through the things we buy and that the only Nexus of relationship anymore is economic and it's not it's not it's it's purely economic I think like yeah I guess that's kind of when I does it observed you ad I felt some interesting observations about okay so we were looking around and the rule of body morphology seem to be that yeah people are almost everybody's pretty overweight yeah but you did something interesting because a lot of people will look around and say oh look at everybody in the master wait all these disgusting fellow what but you didn't do that at all it was like no it astonishes me because I realized that wow there's this many people who feel who are overweight they obviously have to feel that sort of like they have to deal with that on a regular basis and it's like wait a minute all of these people around me you're you're telling me that they all made the conscious choice to be overweight and I was like there's no way that that is possible like when the majority of people around you have that extra extra weight it doesn't seem to me like they themselves are

making that choice I think that like what surrounds them makes the choice for them like the donut shop the ice cream shop those are all things that pertain to our like our taste buds the most those are the things that hit our sensors the pleasure sensors the most and those obviously are the things that produce those are the things that make money those are the things that produce a profit so back to the economics yeah but it's actually shaping our bodies is what you yeah you're kind of observing yeah I mean we could say you know we can be really hard ass and say yes you decide whether you're gonna have weight on your body or not but it's not that easy of a decision yeah look at everything stacked against you we have to cultivate so much discipline so much willpower so much everything in order to stand against a donut I mean you experienced it yourself I mean it it's it's wired into us pretty so us I was also pretty happy with with what happened with me in the donut I saw all these huge demo nuts in there I was like oh man no I just don't want anything that big anymore I just want the smaller one so I'm glad I made though and I think I'm glad I switched over on that one so I mean I could have gotten the huge donut but and then you talked about stuff pulling your eyes here and there I think we talked about that movie I can't remember with the sunglasses or you kind of oh yeah yeah yeah see the hidden ideology behind everything yeah but but definitely I mean you walk down that Main Street and it's like look look look here look don't be me over here mm-hmm every direction you look stuff is yeah it's pulling you what did that feel like coming out of - I got a headache honestly really I was like wow there's just just like you can't even concentrate on what's in front of you like it's weird like you think oh I'll go to the CD shop oh I'll go over there hmm you kind of it does kind of pull you around in a way but ya know just being in the woods for so long and like training your awareness I was able to look I was able to get like details out of the scenery around me and that was kind of cool yeah yeah notice that you pointed out some really interesting things that most people wouldn't they just glaze over yeah yeah in a way when you see the details of the scenery around you it just makes your entire world ten times richer it's weird right

it's kind of cool yeah I mean again on the fat people I like I could have looked around and said wow these disgusting fat people around me they don't they're too stupid that they can't realize that that you're overweight and that they shouldn't be eating sugar or whatever but it was much more profound than that it was it wasn't a hatred it was more like a love for people rather than mmm rather than hate like how could you like I can't bring myself to hate a small child who was fed sugar and you know he doesn't how do you hate someone for that you know how you so the negative the negative talk like that like that these people sort of thing seeing yourself as separate like if you're gonna try and help people out there they're not gonna see you as helping them

they're gonna see you as their enemy you're trying to take away our sugar but when you decide that you love these people instead it's much more they understand you I think that's a bank is a powerful thing because there's all these divisions that we make you know young old fat and healthy and and skin colored whatever you know we can find any kind of dividing line as humans we seem to be very good at that and then to just ostracize people that are on the other side of that line but that was just really powerful when you looked around to me and you and you weren't judging I could tell when your eyes you weren't yeah judging my bust the same look at me shoving this down that down the mountain you know like I enjoy all the same pleasures all the same things that these people do the only difference is that like I've had the opportunity to realize yeah so often it's like but you know the thing we're criticizing over here I'm usually harboring that oh I saw like trying to have to look at it yeah right but but to see wow there's so much that actually bonds us together and that's where I think again like you said we can make changes because we're we're seeing hey I'm not better than you yeah I'm not above you in any way and I just write just different places that was actually pretty cool like not seeing all the fat Oh everyone's overweight miss but like seem that I am no different Liz Wow share your thoughts in the comments below you know I think what I like about this I didn't experience when I came back from the teaching drum for three months and again from Nepal for a month early you know it's a long time ago

was pretty westernized cuz I'm so old but you know have you had times when you've been able to step outside of our culture and then step into it and what did our culture look like with that fresh you know relatively fresh view or kind of outsider's perspective it's I think we have a really interesting world we've created around ourselves yeah but when we don't see the details our eyes just kind of gloss over yeah and we're not really aware of most of what's going on sometimes when we see it it's a little interesting what we've got going so to share any observations you have thanks for watching [Music]