Reclaiming Our Natural Connections with Jon Young

welcome to reclaiming our natural connections with John Young visit us on the web at owl Inc Mediacom story that I want to share is the story that came to me very recently about a person who'd been on this planet 50 60 years I won't tell you where they're from or who they are but this story really represents something that I've heard a lot of in the last few years and it just points it's something that I think we're all aware of but maybe we don't take time to think about or talk about with others but I would just like to create a little space now and just say let's invite this awareness among ourselves this individual had well for the last 30 years been experiencing some difficulty in his emotional spiritual awareness life that he just was a was on a medication for many years for 30 years or so he's been taking this medication and finally realized one day that he just didn't want to do that anymore but he didn't really want to wake up to the sound of the world around him either and so he started to do some nature awareness experience work and he was spending time getting to know the deer in his yard and wandering around a little bit he saw some birds that really encouraged them and caught his eye songbirds that lived in the brush and started to find that just these few minutes that he spent with him each day and was only a few minutes a day because he's a busy guy as a full-time job got a family to support he started to notice that there was a change in the way he felt about his life and he started to get a feeling inside himself that he hadn't felt since he was 9 or 10 years old and it was a kind of remembering what does it feel like to be alive on this earth and he realized that for decades he had shut that off and now he wanted it to come back but when he turned on the switch and got the feelings back again they were too loud for him at first and he started to really think about how can I work with this and he began to engage in a mentoring process in nature where he would go outside and look around a little bit and come back in and ask himself questions and looking field guides and maybe get on the internet and look up an animal or a plant or a bird and over the course of a couple of years he found he was able to reengage with the world again and that's when he said you know I feel like I don't want to take this medication anymore and so he started working with his health practitioner and they began to work on releasing his relationship with this chemical dependency that he had had developed for so many decades and it was it difficult at first and it was painful for him but with the help of his health practitioner and with nature and with his relationship to building his awareness again with the animals and the plants and the trees he suddenly found himself home again and when I heard this I just about broke into tears because I realized that these simple things that we take for granted learning about a flower or enjoying watching a hummingbird at a beautiful red flower and your back deck or something or watching a dragonfly skim over upon these things we can take him for granted but for some people they haven't had those things and so long they forgot what it's like but that it's medicine for people it's a form of nutrition and health that like in the old days when we thought we didn't really need calcium for our bones you know just a few decades ago people didn't think there was such a thing as nutrition a lot of people thought it was just you know silliness but now everybody knows oh yeah you have to have calcium for your bones I also think we're in an age now where people are starting to wake up to the fact that nutrition is also spiritual and that having relationship with with animals and plants and birds and trees is a way of getting nutrition for your being and that optimal health can be achieved you know through taking vitamins that eating good food and getting exercise but without that nature connection something is missing and that the most vital health there is to be attained is yet to be experienced without that connection and I hear story after story and I gather from a hundred different affiliates now worldwide these kinds of stories are coming in people are really truly experiencing another level of health and happiness due to their relationship with nature and so we're here to think about to celebrate to share stories to share teachings and little tools that we can use to reintegrate nature into our lives in a way that can bring us back to the most optimal health and happiness that we can experience on this earth you know some days we wake up in the morning and we get out the door and we head on to work and you know we get three-quarters of the way across the driveway before we realize we're even outside and sometimes that first awareness that we're outside is because we stepped on something or hit a puddle and then we're like oh yeah I got to pay attention and we get in the car and we drive three-quarters of the way to work before we realize that we're driving and for our minds they're so busy working on the problems of the day or maybe the problems of yesterday or or maybe the problems of last week or the challenges of tomorrow you know or reviewing again and again that conversation you have with somebody yesterday and then we get to work and we get inside and we just we just get at it and you know the day goes by the clock tells us it's time to go home and you know we can go on like this for years and somebody recently said to me you know I retired after 30 years and it's been a few months now that I've stopped working and I I thought about something that really scared me and it was that those last 30 years I cannot separate them into separate days but my memory makes them one day it's like one solid memory of work but it only occupies one day's worth of space in my consciousness and it's like I never really did anything for 30 years but the other things that I really remember are the times that when I was out with my friends doing something I've never done before the moments with my family and those are the things that really stay with me and it's almost as if that work thing never really happened you know I really reflect on that and I reflect on a lot of things that after you know this 2008 marks the 25th anniversary of my work as a nature mentor it's the 25th anniversary of wilderness awareness school of school I started in 1983 and you know it marks 25 years of me watching people on this journey and working in some cases with people as long as 25 years and for me to see the impact long-term of these relationships of nature on people's lives is to be able to say to you without any uncertainty in myself at all that you really need to have relationships with nature and not informational relationships but a much deeper and more holistic relationship with nature and that's what we're gonna really explore now so what about you know the work what about the 30 years I don't really think you know and talking to this individual we chatted about it some we don't really think it's necessarily that you were at work for 30 years that the whole thing disappeared into one memory but that you allowed yourself to fall into a way of experiencing the moments where you didn't really experience the moments and what you were doing instead was thinking about last week or thinking about the conversation thinking about what's tomorrow thinking about a lot of different things but not noticing your outside until you step in the puddle or maybe on the banana slug you know and that's when you say well I better slow down here and you know I'm as guilty as the next person here I work a lot of hours every week coaching people on this journey and sometimes I'm many steps out the door before I realize I'm outside too and it has to do with you know what we make important and it has to do with what kind of reminders we have and it has to do with the culture that we set up around ourselves that will help us succeed in bringing more power into our awareness in life or fall back into the same pattern again so that 30 years later we realize that whoops we probably should have done a better job organizing our cultural experience in our life here so ultimately you know what I hope to achieve in this session with y'all is to provide for you a set of tools a way of building some things into our everyday life some skills some tools some awareness and stories some information some research all of which adds up to some new patterns that we might invite into our experience and try on you know I'm not claiming that you know this is like the way that there's something here that I have that you can just open up and read it and do it exactly this way and it's going to work for you rather what I have is principles and these principles are solid wisdom gained not only from my own direct experience but the experience of hundreds of others who are also mentoring folks in nature and also related to the skills of passing awareness between generations which has been my fascination for the last thirty years how do skills of awareness skills of connection to nature pass between generations so smoothly in some cultures and don't pass at all and other cultures and I happen to be living in a culture right now and maybe you two where we haven't got a great track record for passing awareness from generation to generation maybe I'm getting salty and cynical in my older age but I really feel like you know maybe in the last couple of decades we've actually gotten worse at passing awareness between generations and not better and that worries me a little bit I'm not hopeless about it I have a lot of hope because I see a movement growing in this in this land right now and also around the whole northern hemisphere and different parts of the world it's starting to catch on where people are actually consciously choosing awareness again and they airing out ways to weave awareness back into their communities into their life into their everyday processes so that the 30 year work journey is a journey of awareness they're not one or the other but how can we weave awareness back into our everyday experience and make it a meaningful part of that you know the thought that occurs to me that creates this whole need for this conversation to even exist is one about what is it to be a human being what does it mean and I'd like to look at it from the point of view of health and nutrition for a second and just say the way we defined ourselves as human beings just a few decades ago my friend Gary likes to say we used to think that we could put a rubber belt on our butts and turn on a machine and get jiggled and we'd lose weight and get healthy that way or you know like I said before you don't really need to eat calcium that's just a farce but now you know people are all understanding that you know it really takes exercise to be healthy in our physical body and it takes good food and in some cases supplements to you know have health in our biochemistry and that it also I'm saying takes some nutrition in terms of your relationship and connection to nature to have a healthy consciousness or mind and what does it mean to be a human being why is that so it's not so hard to see it you can understand that deer are very vital and powerful beings and you wouldn't want to like wrestle a white-tailed deer in close quarters you know if you think they're weak and kind of slow and lazy just try to wrestle one sometime and be reminded what it feels like to grapple with the power of a wild being you know they know what to eat they know how to eat they gather the food from the landscape in their wandering around they eat just the right things for themselves and they get strong and they get powerful and they exercise themselves and you know from their relationship to the world around them from the natural world around them they get everything they need they get the water they get the food and they're very strong beings as a result they're so vital and when you when you interact with them at close range and when you spend time in nature and you watch them you just can't help but admire how powerful and beautiful they are especially when you watch a whitetail stand up against a six-foot fence and you know you think AHA you're trapped against the fence and you walk a little closer and all of a sudden he surprises you by crouching just a little bit and and one clear bound us goes right up and over the top you know and it doesn't even faze him and it just goes up and over the fence like it's not even there and you're thinking to yourself wow no I don't think I could do that and then you watch you know just how how healthy and strong a squirrel is when it runs up a tree you know I always pause and just stand in amazement sometimes I get tired running up a flight of stairs but these guys are running up a vertical tree and you know I did you ever think about that what it would feel like to run up a tree straight up using your fingertips you know it's not easy to do but these guys are healthy and boy if we could have that kind of health if we could have that kind of vitality if we could have that kind of strength what we could do and you know I admire the wild things and I see how powerful they are and how strong they are but you know what they have they that we don't you know they have connection with nature by definition they have it and I say that because you know I've had plenty of fat house dog that I bring in the car you take him out to the Pine Barrens and we drive along a dirt road for a little while and within 15 minutes they're completely wasted and they look like they're gonna die the poor thing so I have to kind of put him back on the car seat I'm thinking well I better not exercise you too much you know but I've also had then house dogs when I had a farm back in 1983 when I first started wilderness awareness school and this this one dog I had scout he pretty much ran for a living he just loved to run and he was really trim and lean and I thought now maybe I could raise this guy to be more like a wild animal just for fun so I worked on that I fed him a lot more wild foods that I had rode killed things and stuff like that and gave him regular food too but tried to keep them lean on the on the regular food and try to get him as much wild stuff as I could as much like the foxes and coyotes diet locally as I could possibly give him and I kept thinking okay he's a relationship to the wolf so you know try to give him some more big game then I took him to the Pine Barrens and I just let him run alongside my truck and I always watched him pretty carefully and said to myself okay if he starts to look tired and if his tongue really hangs out I'm gonna let him come in the truck and rest like one of the older fatter dogs I had before this so I figured Scout any day now you're gonna get tired and want to get in here but Scout was an outside dog he spent all his time outdoors when we weren't down in the Pine Barrens driving around he was on a nice farm in a rural county north of the Pine Barrens in New Jersey and he just spent his days tripping around on the landscape when I brought him to the Pine Barrens and tried to tire him out he didn't really get tired and he found this rhythm in his trot that he could maintain all day and all night and I hold that out to you because you know I was really putting him through nature mentoring in a certain respect I was trying to maintain his connections to the original source of all life for all things and when I did that with him it was the best exercise program I could have given him but it was a lot more than just nutrition and exercise it was a form of biomimicry really how can I imitate the way of the Fox or the way of the coyote or the way of the wolf for this dog and give him a rich experience and I started to realize that I had given him such a powerful and beautiful experience in some ways I started to feel jealous of him because I was trying to learn to be a tracker and naturalist myself at that age you know and really model something to the young people I was working with and you know Scout definitely had it over on me but the nice thing was that Scout and I were a good team and we formed a partnership I learned a lot from watching him and he was willing to learn from me too and we learned to communicate silently and we could spend time out in the forest together going out and sitting alone in quiet places we could even walk up on deer together and he would sit behind me real patiently he didn't have to chase him although he couldn't resist chasing groundhogs for some reason just don't know what that was but we learned a lot you know from watching each other and I learned so much thinking about him as a symbol what kind of nutritional experience was he getting you know the nutrition of the energy of his life was that connection to nature he seemed to draw power from it and he seemed to have endless energy from it and he could run all day and I started to realize that his tracks that he left on the ground began to resemble the tracks of the wolf and the coyote in that he was very deftly depositing one foot right on top of the other in a very very clean direct register trot or a side trot that might as well have been a wolf so I started to see the wild characteristics emerging in this dog yet I also saw that he was fully the dog in relationship with the human and in that way his wildness was in no way a negative thing but it was a beautiful thing he was great with children he was great with visitors it was almost as if he was getting so much satisfaction from his life that he could tolerate and even put up with us as human beings when we were all in the house for too long he was patient because he knew his time was coming he could get out there and do stuff in a good way it's like he never wondered and I look back on scout and I think about him and I think about how so many people I've worked with over the years have been on that same journey and have reached that same place that Scout has a place of contentment knowing that they're in relationship with something that's the source of all life and relationship not necessarily in the academic or informational sense but relationship in the way that we are related to our dogs are our cats where we have a familiar feeling when we see the song Sparrow every single day when we walk outside on our way to the car we have that opportunity to make that relationship with that song Sparrow and we have that opportunity to make that relationship with the tree that we pass by every day it's really a matter of stopping and taking some time and giving it a little attention in little doses until we begin to build a feeling that makes me want to greet someone you know if I walk down a city street and I don't know anyone I'm not really inclined to want to say hi to everybody I pass but when I see somebody that I know I want to stop and say hello and I want to exchange a little energy with that person you know a little greeting a little friendliness a little eye contact just a moment of relationship shared and celebrated and in that same way when I walk on my land here where I live now in California when I hear that winter wren make a little sound over by the woodshed I want to stop and I want to see if I can see him or her for a second and just make eye contact for a second say hello where I walk out my back door and the hummingbird is visiting the hanging plant visiting the flower there and I I just want to stand there and watch for a second yeah I can get to the office I know I have something to do over there it's gonna take me a few seconds to walk over there and I'm gonna lose a few seconds right now but am I really losing those seconds I had such an enjoyable time in the 30 seconds that I interacted with that hummingbird this morning I kind of forgot what I was doing where was I going and then I remembered oh yeah I'm going over to the office to get something for this very recording but I stood there and and had a moment a moment of just total gratitude and happiness to greet a friend the hummingbird that comes to visit that flower every day and you know I think 30 years from now when I look back I can remember that moment with the hummingbird is a very distinct moment it's not lost in my work day maybe you heard Stellar's days if you were really listening just now you can hear him past the the background hiss of this tape maybe you heard a little sound and I hear that Steller's Jay and his brothers and sisters a lot here and I know when they have to say something that gets my attention they tell me when the hawk is flying in the yard and you know that's not just an idea that's a reality they make a very particular sound when the hawk flying and it caused my attention and brings me out of my thoughts provided I create a little bit of a muscle memory around the Steller's Jay provided I create a little muscle memory around the winner in around the hummingbird around the direction of the wind around the sound of the stream that's still flowing in the drought you know we just build these relationships because your dog won't let you ignore her him when you walk through the door you know that the dog is gonna make sure that you greet hello I'm here lick whine whatever you got have stop and reconnect with your dog even if you just went outside for five minutes and came back in you got to stop and reconnect with your dog it might be easier for us to keep relationships with nature if the trees would do that to us too every time you walked outside but they don't and it's up to us to find ways meaningful ways to build those relationships back in it's not a question of whether or not there's value in those relationships those relationships are a source of nutrition there's no question as to whether or not we need those relationships it's obvious now thank you Richard Louv thank you for your book that tells us about nature deficit disorder finally people are saying yeah there's something to this but it's not the information that we gain about the animal on the website that's going to bring us that relationship with nature that's just information about nature we can really use that website to gain a lot of strength and building relationships but it's not about information it's about relationship and this whole series you knows about reclaiming our relationships with nature and we're going to do that in many different ways as we sit together maybe you know we all talked about it this morning and I'm sitting here right now with an audience and this audience came out for this recording session and a lot of them I know from a long long time I met a new friend today who lives nearby but a lot of people have known for many years and we've been on this journey of nature mentoring together for a long time and so it's it's a really a great thing to be sitting here but we all thought about you too you listener we thought you know over the last 10 years native eyes between 1997 and 2007 has been listened to by over 30,000 people or so and some people have told us they've listened to that that series that audio series over 200 times I was kind of shocked when I heard that but you know I I thought one of the things that that really meant a lot to me was how much people appreciate it that we took the time to create this opportunity for them because when they're in traffic and they're sitting in their cars and they're listening it really makes a difference and so maybe you're in your car right now and we're all thinking of you and we all talked about it before we started this session we know we're really thinking about you and we really do want to offer something to you and to let you know that we're here and that we're on this journey with you and know that this is right now just a moment in time you know it's not really just a moment in time and that every generation from here on has to know how to help their children reconnect with nature again if they've lost that connection so that they can have the optimal health and it won't be long before everyone knows this and that it's all around the world people are realizing just like they know now calcium they take it for granted yes you have to eat good food in order to be healthy you know you need to exercise in order to be healthy people are going to be saying you need to be connected to nature in order to be healthy and right now we're on the early side of the curve right now nobody exactly knows what that means yet what does it mean to be connected with nature how do we evaluate whether or not we are well hopefully we can start that conversation with some helpful tools because 25 years of experience has shown me a few things about connection with nature but more so if it was just me wouldn't trust myself there are so many hundreds of people out there working with these tools and feeding back to each other and sharing information that now I feel like I can share these with confidence and know that you know they'll be valuable to you otherwise I wouldn't waste my time or yours I just want to make sure that we do the best we can to share things for you to help you on your journey and maybe to help you reconnect a little bit more soundly so you have more health and vitality in your life and that you can bring this to your families too and so that's what we all wish for you that we can remember our connection to nature and become members of the natural community again you

Channel: ShikariMentor

Views: 8,749

Rating: 4.9459457 out of 5

Keywords: Jon Young, nature, coyote mentoring, tom brown jr, tracking, coyote's guide

Id: i2iPc19FfYI

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 03 2011