On Rewilding
It’s been a rough return. Once you’ve been broken wide open—once you’ve seen the truth—you can no longer look at your life with the same eyes. You can’t pretend that everything is fine and keep on keepin' on. You have no choice but to fix things, to remold your life. But there are no handbooks to the process, no YouTube tutorials. And the complications are myriad.
Some six months after returning from Scotland—after kneading and reworking my marriage, my body, my mind, after examining and rexamining where exactly we’d gone off track—I looked around and saw the problem.
“We’ve become too domesticated,” I declared to my husband. “It doesn’t suit us. We need to re-wild.”
He claimed to be more salvaje than me, citing his protectiveness and territorial character as proof. But that’s ego. It’s not that we need to return to our animal nature (certainly not the worst parts of our animal natures). To be wild as a human is to reach our full Human potential.
I’ve spent these last weeks exploring this idea and teasing out its elements.
What ReWilding Means:
Radical Honesty
Radical Honesty means being truthful to yourself about your needs and desires, rather than avoiding difficult truths and the hard work they imply. It means not lying to our partners to protect their feelings, while denying our own truths. It means constantly questioning the structures, traditions, and social norms to discover if they do, in fact, serve us, or if they only further distract and entrap us. Radical Honesty means telling the Truth of who you are and what you believe to friends, family members, neighbors, and colleagues.
Strength In Vulnerability
To be radically honest one must be able to stand strong in one’s vulnerability. We must be able to put ourselves out there and speak our truth at the risk of rejection and ridicule. We must be present with others with our hearts open, listening. Standing strong in our vulnerability gives others permission to do the same. This revealing of our true selves is a peeling away of the onion to expose the tender core.
Connection
Hard truth: We only connect deeply with those whom we are vulnerable with. How many people are you deeply connected to? How many do you hide your Truth from? What would this world look like if we could all stand together with our Truths bared for all to see? Are we connected to our own deep Truth? How many of us even know ourselves?
Eagle Vision
Connection is also an understanding that we are merely a point in a vast, unknowable network—and not the center point. Whether we recognize it or not, we are all one community, with each being and every element of nature playing its part. When we work with Eagle Vision we show respect and compassion to all the elements of this web, as we know they are us and we are them.
Eagle Vision also helps us to keep perspective: when life throws a wrench in our plans it helps us to see that wrench as a mere grain of sand. We set our best intention, let go of the result, and move in the direction of our Knowing.
Living In Tune
To live In Tune is to be connected to our deep knowing, our deep truth. When you sit quietly and let all the fears that have been instilled in you drop away, what comes up? When you listen to the signs around you—when you open your mind to the hints sprinkled through the passing of your days—what direction do they lead you in? When fear, guilt, or a sense of scarcity are our driving force, we are not living In Tune. Knowing comes from beyond these.
Intuition
Intuition is this opening of our minds to our deeper knowing. The answers are always there; the wisdom is already within us—only we are so accustomed to looking outside for answers. If we haven’t yet developed the ability to tune into our own inner wisdom, it can help to use tools that reflect it to us from the outside. That can be observing signs in nature, using tarot cards, or paying attention to moments of synchronicity. The key is to quiet the fear-driven chatter and to open our minds to the answers that are within us.
Faith
Faith is accepting that we are not in control and being comfortable with that. We set our best intentions, understanding that we might not get the results we planned for, but knowing that we are still safe. It’s taking what we are given and making the best we can with it. Faith is letting go.
Curiosity
What are you living for? Are you running the treadmill solely to survive, pay the bills, and be comfortable and moderately happy until you die? Or are you here to learn and grow? The quotidian speed of our lives is enough to bash our natural curiosity into a miserable pulp. But without that curiosity—that thirst for learning and growth—we are little more than animals intent upon our survival. What fans the flames of your curiosity?
Joy
When we live true to all of these elements we give space for Joy to arise naturally. Joy does not come from striving for happiness, but from cultivating gratitude and creating space for it to flourish within us.
Have you experienced your free and wild Self? What was it like? Do you have practices to help cultivate connection with that self? What do you do to ReWild? I’d love to hear about it! Leave me a comment below, or send me an email with your story.
