With my latest Naked and Afraid: Alone episode airing on January 5th, on Discovery, I wanted to share the things that I have learned from my previous experiences that often don’t make the show. With the whole TV thing aside, there are so many valuable lessons that I learned while pushing my edges that don’t always get talked about on the show.
Impermanence
Everything is temporary and passing. Nothing is forever. No feeling, no emotion, no storm, no cold night, no starvation. However, when we find ourselves in hard times it is quite natural to feel as though this experience will last forever. “My sadness will never go away”, “I will always be angry”.
When I was cold and wet in Namibia and shivering with my whole-body in a cave, staring at the Eastern horizon, and waiting for the sun to come up, it felt like I would never be warm again. But the sun did come up, and I was warm again.
All things do pass, and they pass even more easily if we can acknowledge the difficulty in the moment. “This is a moment of intense sadness, and I know this will pass someday, but right now I am sad”. A little sentence like that is all it takes to help move things.
So the next time you are in a hard situation, realize the impermanence of it all. Perhaps that will then help you feel the emotion or gravity of the situation a bit more and then you can “zoom out” and know that it too shall pass.
2. Human Super Powers are Real
During my latest challenge in South Africa I was alone, and most of my time was spent hunting Impala with my homemade osage hunting bow. After about 10 days of not eating, being alone, sleeping through lion and leopard calls and being generally uncomfortable, I felt my senses heighten. My vision was intense, direct and clear. I learned all the calls of the animals around me and what they meant. I knew the cycles of the day and the tracks all around me. Pretty soon after a while I felt SUPERHUMAN. But really I believe I was just feeling what it feels like to be a baseline human, a human that is fully alive and connected to their landscape. We have just forgotten what that feels like in our lives of Netflix, couches and air-conditioning.
During those days, I connected to one particular male impala (ram). Since the rut was starting, he was starting to isolate from the herd, so that gave me chances to stalk him individually. Day after day I would connect with this one ram, but never get a shot at him. After a week of near starvation, I was becoming more animal and more connected to the spirit of all things. Eventually on Day 9 I had a dream about this Ram and I became him, and he became me and I woke realizing that he was my chosen prey. I had missed other closer shots to impala days before, but finally on day 10, the ram from my dream presented himself and I knew that was my shot. Even though he stood at over 20 yards (I had missed shots at 7 yards) I knew I was suppose to take the shot. Everything felt right and I knew that it was meant to be. So I shot, and I hit him directly in his Aorta, so he dropped about 60 yards away.
I still to this day don’t take much credit for the shot. It felt like spirit was aiming for me. I felt totally connected to everything and all I had to do was trust in it.
This is just one small example of the SUPER POWERS I felt. I also had premonitions of people’s death and knew when certain things happened to my loved ones back home.
But the main conclusion of this last 21 day challenge was that I will never play small about our abilities as humans to do amazing and unbelievable things.