Becoming Nature

by Song, Tamarack

• ISBN13: 9781591432111
• ISBN10: 1591432111
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781591432128
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-03-27
• Publisher: Bear & Co
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

A step-by-step guide to animal communication, connecting with your primal mind, and immersing yourself in Nature

• Includes exercises for learning how to become invisible within Nature, sense hidden animals, and communicate with wild animals and birds

• Explains how to approach wild animals and form friendships with them

• Details the intuitive awareness of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their innate oneness with Nature

Animals and plants are in constant communication with the world around them. To join the conversation, we need only to connect with our primal mind and recognize that we, too, are Nature. Once in this state, we can communicate with animals as effortlessly as talking with friends. The songs of birds and the calls of animals start to make sense. We begin to see the reasons for their actions and discover that we can feel what they feel. We can sense the hidden animals around us, then get close enough to look into their eyes and touch them. Immersed in Nature, we are no longer intruders, but fellow beings moving in symphony with the Dance of Life.

In this guide to becoming one with Nature, Tamarack Song provides step-by-step instructions for reawakening the innate sensory and intuitive abilities that our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied upon­--abilities imprinted in our DNA yet long forgotten. Through exercises and experiential stories, the author guides us to immerse ourselves in Nature at the deepest levels of perception, which allows us to sense the surrounding world and the living beings in it as extensions of our own awareness. He details how to open our minds and hearts to listen and communicate in the wordless language of wild animals and plants. He explains how to hone our imagining skill so we can transform into the animal we are seeking, along with becoming invisible by entering the silence of Nature. He shows how to approach a wild animal on her own terms, which erases her fear and shyness.

Allowing us to feel the blind yearning of a vixen Fox in heat and the terror of a Squirrel fleeing a Pine Marten, the practices in this book strip away everything that separates us from the animals. They enable us to restore our kinship with the natural world, strengthen our spiritual relationships with the animals who share our planet, and discover the true essence of the wild within us.

Author Biography

Tamarack Song has spent his life studying the world’s aboriginal peoples, apprenticing to elders, and learning traditional hunter-gatherer survival skills. He has spent years alone in the woods as well as living with a pack of Wolves. In 1987 he founded the Teaching Drum Outdoor School in the wilderness of northern Wisconsin. He is the author of several books, including Entering the Mind of the Tracker.

Table of Contents

In Honor of My Teachers

To Know Nature Is to Become Nature

A Different Approach to Connecting with Nature

Relearning the Old Way

To Know Nature Is to Know Yourself

Transformation through the Animal Mind

Step 1    Remember Nature Speak, the First Language

The Personality of Nature Speak

Why We No Longer Talk with Animals

How Nature Speak Works

Where We Get Stuck

Relearning Nature Speak

Nature Speak and Domestic Animals

What to Expect from Nature Speak

Step 2    Learn the Silent Language of Birds

How Birds Teach about Themselves

A Bridge to Nature Speak

How Birds Teach about Other Animals

From Symbolic to Direct Communication

How to Learn Their Silent Language

Rock Dove

Red-winged Blackbird

Great Northern Loon

The Anatomy of a Birdsong

Step 3    Awakening the Animal Mind

My Coming Out

I, the Animal

Our Two-Track Brain

We, the Conflicted Species

Thinking without Thought

Beware of the Rational-Mind Trap

Knowing the Experiential Mind Set

Letting Go of Goal Orientation

How to Live in the Now

What It’s Like to Be in Animal Mind

Step 4    The Time-Media Trap

Leaving Tools, Entering Relationship

A Fresh Perspective on Cultivating Relationship

Our Brains on Media

Media Creates Reality

Re-attuning Our Ears to Nature Speak

It’s All in the Mind

Seeing Is Not Always Believing

Audiovisual Material Meets the Animal Mind

Time by Dictate

Step 5    Be Where the Magic Happens

How We Live Can Help Us Find Animals

Dawn: The Place to Begin

Next, Attune to Our Body’s Rhythms

Step 6    Enter the Silence, Listen, and You Will See

The Dynamic of Silence

Learning to Listen

Listening Beyond Words

Honing Our Listening Skills with Shadowing

Big Ears: A Deep Listening Example

Deep Listening and Time

Looking Versus Seeing

The Problem with Seeing Too Much

A Lesson in Listening

Step 7    Energize and Attune Your Senses

The Awareness

Overcoming the Barriers

The Stories

The Exercises

The Answers for Step 7

Step 8    Walk and Paddle Quiet as a Shadow

Natural Walking

Shadowing Canoeing

Step 9    Turn Invisible and Instill No Fear

Seeing through Our Biggest Blinders: Prejudice and Fear

How to Become Invisible

To Stand Out Is to Blend In

Be the Landscape

Visibility: A Survival Strategy

Step 10    The Best Tricks for Seeing Animals

What to Do When We See an Animal

Step 11    Become the Animal

Imagine

Step 12    To Touch an Animal

Counting Coup: The Concept

Learning to Count Coup

When Noble Fare Is Far Away

To Touch the Soul

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1    List of Stories

Appendix 2    List of Exercises

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

About the Artists