Forest Monk Pre-Training Guide (for all of us! =)

Description

This video serves two purposes -- as a pre-training guide for incoming resident Forest Monks, and for the rest of us, as a starter-guide for a range of skills and adaptations that can help us become more mentally, physically, and emotionally resilient.

Chapters --

2:10 Cold Conditioning

5:19 Go barefoot or try minimalist footwear

9:11 Wean yourself off of pillows

13:39 Basic situational awareness

15:41 Meditation

18:50 Get off of sugar, or try getting fat adapted

21:31 Cut out alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine

23:39 Getting in shape

26:37 Learn to use chopsticks

The Power of the Cold Shower: https://youtu.be/jglxMHd4uxI

Cold Shower Inspiration from a 6-Year Old: https://youtu.be/Lk6pdknlC3A

You can stand beside me as I make these videos by becoming a patron on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/rewilduniversity

Check out our online video course, "ReWild Your Mind", for many more methods of cultivating a clear, powerful, and positive mind-set. http://rewildu.com/online-courses/rewild-your-mind-online-course/

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

hello everybody

that last video I put up about asking for your help I have been completely overwhelmed by the amount of support coming in and the thing so many of you have said in those comments I'm not sure if I can express enough how much it's made me feel like I am NOT alone in creating these videos it's really something that we're all doing together and so many of you standing beside me and so many of you expressing how much these videos mean to you I'm just feeling so pumped out thank you you've given me a great gift I had promised a really fun little video and I guess it's not gonna be super little because I'm what I'm doing here is this video has two functions one is for forest monks that are actually coming out here to stay a tree wild University I'm gonna be sending them this link because then they can look at this and it's gonna give them things that they can do before coming out here to kind of give them a head start so it's a pre training before the forest monk training for the rest of us I thought this could be a really fun way to see you know what some people that are gonna go into some pretty extreme stuff how they are being asked to prepare and you might be able to take some of these training suggestions and then apply them to your life I'm not gonna go into a great detail with any of these but I'm just going to try to give a few hints of some places where we can make some powerful changes in their lives and I'll also try to remember to drop a few ideas of resources along the way so I hope you enjoy it cold conditioning

when you live in the woods you're naturally going to be thermo regulating that means that your body is going to have to adapt to different temperatures right now most of us were living in a climate control condition we can go all day long sometimes without stepping out of a temperature that's within 1/2 degree range of what we feel comfortable in we can change that and we can really expand our comfort level so that we can be comfortable with 5 10 20 degree variation on either side of that comfort range here's how we do it I have to start getting a little uncomfortable in order to get comfortable so today I don't know it's probably 45 a little bit windy there's no Sun I can come dressed up like this or I can take off a layer and then suddenly my body has to do a little bit of work and the more I work that part of my body the more I exercise it like anything else that we exercise the stronger it's going to get so one of the easiest ways to Koken to can do the cold condition is going to be to shed one layer you can take cold showers we have a video on YouTube about it my two young daughters come and talk about it if you need some extra inspiration but this idea of shedding one layer and letting yourself be a little bit uncomfortable will really make a difference over time here's one little tip or trick if you will and that's that we can really transform our experience of cold if we learn to release into it so if I sit out here and I clench I'm gonna clench kind of emotionally mentally but I'm also going to clench my muscles and when I clench like this I exaggerate my sensation of I roll my shoulders back open myself to the sensation there will be a two three five second kind of shiver but then suddenly I'll realize that when I'm open to it that sensation of cold is not nearly as cold as it felt before not asking anybody to go out and get hypothermic or frostbitten but if you're gonna walk a block or walk out to your car or go out to the mailbox ask yourself do you have to wear all the clothes you're gonna wear or can you just walk out there open yourself experience that cold for the moment that you're in it the more we do this the more we adapt it's that simple another thing we encourage is that people who are going to come here try going barefoot or wear minimalist shoes there's a number of reasons for this first of all in the woods it's just plain quieter if we have really bulky shoes with hard bottoms we tend to crunch things we can't feel the ground anymore and so we're a lot louder it's tougher to get clothes closer to animals or wildlife and definitely tougher if we're playing scenario games or sneaking up on each other if you have those big clunkers on the other thing is that I think over time we're gonna come to find that if we seal off you imagine I always had my hand sealed up in a cast or in a in a mitten that it would kind of have an effect on my whole system in the sense that this is very important receptor and this takes in a lot of information about the world and if those are closed off then I'm missing something on a daily basis our feet are the same way they're incredibly sensitive and they have a great ability to when we walk through the woods for instance we can tell you know about rainfall we can feel tracks with our feet there's amazing things that we can do just by having our feet free if you would see Richard for instance who's out here right now be amazed I mean he can go anywhere barefoot and just run an incredibly terrain that I wouldn't run on barefoot he's really taking the time to develop his feet and so our feet are perfectly capable of taking on that kind of you know extreme use for most of us so we can get our feet a little bit healthier just by cutting back on how much we wear shoes all we have to do is take off our shoes I just have sandals on here but and I take them off then my feet like it just really spread out so the toes can spread out wide and there's all kinds of tendons and muscles throughout the foot that want to be strong and engaged but when they're squashed into a shoe when they're squashed into a shoe then they're kind of become well they actually become kind of malformed what happens is that the toes are kind of crushed in by the shoe that smooshes them in and over time even our bones will change the muscles tendons become really weak

somebody's pretty interested in this become really weak and my foot really loses its ability to open up and spread out again so doing a little bit of barefoot ness you can start in socks and it can be walking around on carpet just don't wear shoes inside if you have a lawn or grass you can walk around there on the grass and just let your feet feel move it doesn't wonderous things this is my daughter Mirabelle who some of you know she has secret plans to take over my youtube channel eventually making more videos another thing that I asked forest monks to do is to consider weaning themself off of pillows today we're going to show you the reason why structurally why we ask people to think about it just for the good of their posture if you notice a lot of people as they get older you start to get a four-word neck job yeah and we're gonna see where that comes from at least partially so we're trying to return people to a more upright posture and yeah exactly and there's just the fact that when they come out here you're going on survival adventures and in living out in the woods hauling a pillow around is very inconvenient so being able to go without a pillow or just to use something a lot less fluffy than the usual pillow can really make a difference in the woods here when Mirabelle's lying down we can see that her cervical spine feeds right into her spine everything's really nice and aligned when she's laying in bed that way without a pillow this is a little bit of an over exaggerated pillow but we're doing it so that you can see what's going on here look what this does to her neck so there comes and then it's sitting

this jutted forward frying your neck it's not very comfortable she sleeps without a pillow all the time and so she's adapted to not having a pillow where for a lot of us if we've slept on a pillow for a long time our muscles our bones they've adapted to this and it's gonna be a little uncomfortable at first to adapt back to not using a pillow so give yourself some time what you can do is you can wean yourself down so if you're using a really fluffy pillow then you can move to something a little less fluffy like this there this is still creating a little bit of an angle but much less and if you wouldn't try this long term an easy way to do it is just to not to not buy a new pillow to let your pillow unloved over time and over a year - it's just going to get thinner and thinner and thinner if you're not very broad-shouldered then you can even lie on your side and your neck is gonna come out pretty straight you might want to use maybe a very thin pillow to give yourself sort of a straightness if your broader shouldered then your neck might be cranking down a lot when you sleep and it might be more appropriate to use a pillow on your side a little bit so I sleep on all angles if I'm on my front or my back I don't use a pillow but then I have this real thin one that's worn down over the years that I'll use if I'm on my side no pillow at all yeah remembering that we're spending eight ten hours a night perhaps sleeping so what are we doing to our to our neck to our spine

yeah and so what you know remembering that that Maxim that we are always adapting no matter what we're doing we're spending eight or ten hours a night adapting ourselves to having her neck jutted forward then that becomes a contributing factor to having that jutted forward posture yeah as we get older so again doing this for the good of your posture but also when you go out into the woods it makes things a lot easier because you either are fine without a pillow or you're able to just take your shirt you know roll it up a little bit and make a very minimalist pillow and you'll be just fine back behind me these girls are great at situational awareness awareness in general when I say situational awareness I'm I'm talking a little bit differently than when I use awareness of our interstate so I'm really talking about being aware of our environment and you know you watch the deer here and they are they're always looking listening they're aware they don't often get locked in and this is a great skill to have out in the woods here's a perfect example if I am walking down a path and I get locked into watching the person in front of me or as usually happens watching the path for ruts and rocks but I'm gonna step on then I might miss the lobster mushroom let's write off the path to the right or I might miss those deer and so by learning in our culture I call it well it's called foveal fishing this is a little central circle of vision where it's clearest it's why when we read our eye has to scan because we have a little part of our vision that's that's most clear and when I'm locked in to that I miss so much by learning to tune in to my peripheral and just to pay attention to when my mind gets locked and say wait I'm gonna look around a little bit this comes in so useful in the woods and our culture D trains it so this is another thing that I ask forest monks to think about a little bit before they come out here they can have a head start on this then when you get into the woods you're going to notice a big difference in how much you see and how much you perceive meditation if you can implement even a small amount of meditation into your life can make a huge difference if you are more mystically minded then you can there's a lot of places you can go with this as far as if there's you know if you have God in your life then you can you can make your prayer just a feeling of love towards God whatever it's gonna be in this case I'm going to talk about a non mystical approach to meditation really thinking of it as push ups for the mind it's been proven again and again that even a small amount of meditation each day actually physically changes the structure of our brain and what I mean is that areas of our brain shrink in size in mass especially the ones the parts that have to do with our fight-or-flight kind of response and the parts of our brain that have to do with compassion with being able to look more rationally and calmly at a situation those grow to meditate the best way to do it is to try to establish a habit so you have to have something that is going to be your marker and for most people it's just having a certain time in the day you're gonna wake up in the morning you're going to brush your teeth and then at 7:30 you can sit down five minutes

five minutes that's all sit down for five minutes close your eyes you can be in any kind of posture you want it doesn't have to be anything special close your eyes and try to just pay attention to your breathing

pick one sensation of breathing so it might be the air coming in and out of my nose or might be the feeling of my chest moving against my clothing or the muscles of your ribs expanding and contraction contracting or your belly if you want to bail breathe the point though is to try to just pay attention to your breath when your mind wanders off that's a good thing it's not bad it's a good thing it means that now you have a chance to bring your mind back to your breathing and when you do that you just did a push-up for your brain you just taught it to be off yet when it's in monkey mind to come back to stillness and that's the real benefit not sitting in stillness very few of us can do that and that does not need to be our goal but if we can be off in monkey mind come back to stillness that's it meditation another big thing that changes for people when they come out to take part in the forest monk program is their diet to prepare for that really the biggest thing you can do and this does good for all of us is to try to get off of sugar there's one thing you can do with your diet would be to get off sugar and probably trans fatty acids but sugar is the one that's so common so prevalent in our food and most of us are pretty addicted to it when I tell people this I have to say we have to learn how to read labels because it's not just gonna say sugar there are a lot of words for sugar and it might be brown rice syrup and multo dextran and cane syrup and all different names for it if you look online a little bit you know names for sugar in nutrition labeling then you'll be able to see a list of those names and become more savvy about where there's hidden sugars in the products that you're eating people cut back on the sugar there might be week two weeks when you feel kind of crappy as you get off of sugar really you're getting over an addiction but once you get over that period you're gonna feel a lot better if you want you can take this even further and try to get fat adapted I'm not going to explain exactly what that adaptation is the daily apple marks daily apple if you would type in marks daily apple fat adaptation you'd see a good article on it but it's not about going into ketosis and I hope I'm not throwing out terms that a lot of people aren't familiar with but but it's about getting a balance between being able to burn sugar and burn fat essentially and so when we become fat adapted it's a huge advantage out here because we no longer are feeling so dependent on food if we're gonna miss a meal and that happens a lot out here because we're out on some adventure or something you don't even feel hungry it's no problem to miss that meal and then you can make up for it calorie wise you know in a future meal but you're not having that hangry feeling where you just feel so hungry and you start to get irritated I ask that everybody that comes out to take part in the forest Monk program that they are off of tobacco caffeine and alcohol and to me it makes sense in our regular lives - there's you know there's some studies that say red wine is actually good for us for our heart but to me these are substances that I find don't add a whole lot to my life you know there's a pleasant feeling of having some alcohol in your system but over time I've had to question is it really that Pleasant because weight to me it feels more pleasant to have a clear mind to be really able to engage with people and you know if I'm using the crutch of alcohol in order to engage socially it just doesn't it doesn't feel the same to me it doesn't feel as honest it doesn't feel as genuine as when I can open up some doors inside myself be a little bit vulnerable to somebody try to cap crack a joke and you know nobody laughs and have to deal with that feeling of embarrassment or social faux pas these are all really good things for us because they help us to grow and develop as a person and so to me that's why I don't like to use those things myself and then the students out here we just have a drug alcohol free tobacco-free campus and so it's important when they come out here that they're not dependent on those substances but for you if you're using some of those things maybe just stopping in question a little bit the role that they play in your life and try a week or a month or a year without them and see what you think you might find that there's things waiting on the other side of there that maybe weren't expected getting in shape as soon as you get out into the woods you're having to move it's you might have to move camp for some reason and you're carrying things back and forth you might be carrying big logs breaking firewood chopping wood there's a thousand things that you do that involve just using your body and sometimes our bodies are you know our culture can get used to being underused so starting to move your body and what I advocate you know people when they come out here they're gonna be learning very specific movement styles we do kind of a primal fitness thing where we're trying to move our body and in its full range of motion but unless you have some guidance in that here's some things that you can do that can kind of start you off I encourage people to get some cardio and not talking about running long distances for hours and hours and hours but doing things that gets gets your heart up and going it might be kickboxing it might be dancing there might be some trail running and if you are already in fairly good shape you can move to hit HIIT workouts where you are getting a lot of cardio benefit but you're doing it without doing that kind of long-distance cardio thing I used to be a distance runner and I've moved away from it just because I felt like it it was starting to affect my joints and things and so now I try to do shorter distance type things but that's just me bodyweight exercise as far as building strength I've had people come out who are just built from weights and making bench way more than I ever could but when they're trying to climb tree or do something that's really functional often that strength doesn't translate over quite as much as you would think and so bodyweight exercise calisthenics and there's a lot of good resources on YouTube if you want to start you know exploring calisthenics but using our bodyweight there is really an unlimited amount of progression or we can make things more and more difficult on ourselves and it's gonna build a really functional strength that then when you go out and you try to you know swing branch to branch or climb a tree or you know vault over a rock you're gonna be able to do those settings so even if you're not going the forest monk route these are some things that can really help you to become a little bit more fit the last thing is a little strange people give me a quizzical look when I suggest this but it is learn to use chopsticks and the reason is that you know often people out here they're gonna start with maybe a metal fork and a spoon but we're gonna try to transition away from using those things in other words we're gonna say at some point maybe let's give up that fork and you're gonna make something that you're gonna use instead chopsticks are easy to make and they're very functional for eating and once you know how to use chopsticks they're great around the campfire often you want to move a coal from one place to another or you're gonna colburn a bowl and you want to pick up a call and be able to sit it and place it being able to know how to use those chopsticks allows you to really move coals around and grab them and pick up that piece of nice meat that you dropped into the fire and lots of advantages so learning to use chopsticks ok that's it what I was hoping here is that this could be a guide for forest monks that are coming in some things to do for pre-training before you engage in the actual forest monk training

but for the rest of us just some tips and some ideas if we're looking for places that we can make some little changes in our life here are some ways you can start out quick piece of advice and that's that remembering that when they do studies on willpower they're finding that if we try to take on 10 things at a time we usually are gonna fail but if you say this month I'm going to say cut back on my pillow use and that's gonna be my one kind of self-improvement goal then as I do that I'm able to dedicate my willpower to that and I'm probably gonna be successful and then the next month after that's settled in I feel comfortable with it then I might say okay built up some willpower practice now I'm gonna take on a big one I'm gonna try to cut out sugar and then boom you try to take that on but only take that on of course everybody has different amounts of willpower you might be different but for most of us remember to take on one of these challenges at a time we'll probably make a real difference please do in the comments share anything about any of these subjects you know if you've tried going without a pillow if you've tried going barefoot what it's been like for you to try to go sugarless if you've tried that or to change your diet struggles with trying to stop drinking or stop you know smoking tricks tips so anything about changing our life in a training context and how you have implemented it in your life the difference is that it's made and encouragement for others so that they can see you know what you've done and hopefully be inspired to make some positive changes thanks for watching