Becoming Vitally Aware in Nature with Jamie Retherford Part 2 (of 2)
“Nature teaches us resilience. When a forest burns down, it’s going to come back stronger.”
YOUR KEY INSIGHTS FROM jamie
Setting a forward progression
“There was one moment when we were just training, and I remember just running with a squad of people. SWAT is about 13 people, we're in our kameez, we've got the war paint on, and we are just yelling and howling our Marine Corps chants. It was a visceral feeling I could feel in my chest. I can't believe I get to do this for a living. It was like a Lord of the Flies moment where you were just totally free. It wasn't chaotic. You were totally free, doing exactly what you should be doing, and you're in the exact place that you should be. And everything aligned. I felt so happy, howling at the moon with my buddies and running through the forest. I just felt alive.
I can't recreate that to the tee. But I try to every morning when I wake up. There's a scientist named Andrew Huberman. At Stanford, he said that the best thing that you could do for yourself when you wake up in the morning is to get out and get some sunlight. Because that tells your body it's go time. Some of the most enlivening, life-affirming things that I've learned from nature, is the breathing exercises, fasting, and then being in the heat, and not accommodating for it. You know, we didn't have air conditioning returning to a natural way of living, that doesn't really interfere with your body's processes of protecting itself and being that resilient.
When you're out in nature, you're less likely to multitask. Natural things don't typically do that. When you multitask, it's more likely that you're stressed. And I find that a lot of times when I wake up in the morning, and the first thing that I do is head to my computer, it's not enlightening. I kind of have to drag for a couple hours before I feel really awake. But if I do start with that, walk outside, and get sunlight.. maybe my husband joins me or I'm listening to a really cool podcast, but it's set forward progression that your brain registers as progress. We're going somewhere, we're doing something, we're growing. We're learning.”
Regression
“So one of the big topics I wanted to focus on is regression. And like you said, you lose the capacities that you don't exercise. One of the stories that I wanted to bring up is there was an anthropologist named Margaret Mead. A student once asked her when she was doing a lecture, what was the first sign of civilization? They were thinking the answer would be a clay pot, tools, sharpening objects, hunting objects, and she just paused and thought about it for a little bit. And she said, the first sign of civilization was a broken femur. And it's the longest bone in the body. Before humans, the broken femur did not exist in nature. If a tiger broke a femur or a lion broke a femur, you're dead. Some hyenas would eat you because nobody's going to protect you. She basically explained her answer and I want to make sure I get it right because it's very beautiful and poignant. She said, if you're only operating on the law of the jungle, it's survival of the fittest rules. So no healed femurs are found in nature. But the first sign of civilization was compassion seen in a healed femur. So basically, it was people staying with you, offering you physical protection, human companionship, gathering and foraging your food while you were healing. It could take about six weeks for you to get back to your full stature where you could go out and make food for yourself and run around.
So I'm talking about regression, starting your day off with something like a blank screen and email. While it might feel like we're engaging with others, it's not in the way that nature intended. And that's actually taking a step back. When you progress, which is what we want to do, it's being out there, getting that exposure to sunlight, talking to somebody, moving your body forward. That is really sort of healing and increases your intuitive capacity, and probably your focus as well.”
nature teaches us the odds
“So I always try to do baby steps. If I'm feeling especially overwhelmed, I know I can spend five minutes out in the grass just laying there. And that's sort of a life affirming thing. You know, we've talked before and I just want to emphasize what you said, that a lot of people try to remove danger from their lives. But, that's not reality. And the biggest thing I could say is to just understand and take from nature how hard it is, and accept that. And then once you accept that, you can use that to your benefit. Instead of getting crashed upon the rocks, you could say, “Oh, well, it's supposed to be this hard”, and then adjust accordingly. But there's a lot of things and people try to remove that from their life. And that's sort of a shame because we already learned with need. That's a regression. And, we want to progress. The five minutes is just a function of probabilities. If I don't feel like I can have five minutes out of my day, I can have five minutes out of my day. And then once I feel that progress, that enlivening feeling, I can probably stretch it out to 10. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes it is really just five minutes. But once you get used to that feeling of being out in in nature, and then having that life affirming gratitude, compassion…maybe that wasn't your goal, but you will have a lot more life-saving moments, to get back to your story. If you play the odds right.
And so, nature teaches us about the odds. There are things that are very definite, but there are also things that you can work with. You might escape the clutches of a bear. And you have an awesome story to tell. Or, if you cross this ocean, she'll catch your fish and then you can live for another day. But, there's a lot of stuff that have climatized ourselves to just because we're fencing ourselves off from that exposure. So I would just say, the easiest, most simplest thing is get out in nature. Then you can get into all the crazy weird stuff like you and I do…which is the cold plunges, the breathing, heat shock proteins, cold shock proteins.
There's so many things that are hard in life, there's so many things that can make you upset, but you should have a lot more things that can make you happy. And you should have a lot more things that can create compassion, engendering moments for you. You shouldn't play the probabilities so that you close yourself off from those wonderful stories that can frame the perspective of the rest of your day.”
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