The aim is not to be the Wild Man, but to be in touch with the Wild Man.

- Iron John, A Book About Men

Your wild man is on the verge of extinction.

If you don’t pick up weapons and defend his boundaries he will be soon be gone.

The machine has removed the wild man from his cage, not to set him free , but to take him back to the lake and drown him.

We have lost many wild men already and you may be one of them if you feel disconnected, weak, confused, frustrated, hopeless and lost. 

If you have no purpose. 

If you have no mission. 

If you have no strength.  

If you have no focus. 

If you have no resolve.

When life gets overwhelming from endless trivial tasks and meaningless responsibilities you lose sight of where you are going. 

Where is your true north? 

Today’s environment with it’s increasing speed and endless demands for our attention make it nearly impossible find space to just stop, to think and listen. 

To have the conditions for the voice of your genius to speak

That voice was symbolized by this mountain just outside my window in the local First Nations myths. 

They called him MistaPeo.

The greatest guide. 

 

 

Habitat of the Wild Men

“We are infused with our modern habitat. Our ancestors were also infused with theirs. Their feet touched the dirt.Their faces weathered in the sun.The microorganisms in the soil became one with their bodies. They got cold or hot and couldn’t do much about it. People needed to depend on each other for survival. All of these factors, large and small, formed a distinct set of stimuli: low energy dense food, total darkness at night, daily temperature flux, shivering, high omega 3's in the diet, daily exposure to fresh air and sunshine, daily physical exertion, high levels of vitamin D, low to no EMF, and several other factors all worked together. In that habitat obesity and metabolic disease are highly improbable. It’s extremely difficult to have metabolic disease, obesity or cancer in the ancestral habitat. The conditions are stacked against you.  “

- Joel Green, The Immunity Code.

I often have the feeling of drowning in my own life by doing things I don’t want to be doing. 

The machine has created endless tasks of meetings, text messages, emails, banking, shopping and social media. 

I finish one and two or three more appear. 

Then I come home to my family tired and wired, 

All these tasks involve a screen, being indoors and not moving my body.

Meanwhile outside my office window - physical work, the sun, the earth, the forest and that mountain call me. 

The habitat I came from and need to be calm and strong.

To return there, to place my body back in it’s natural habitat, I first have to make the choice then next put effort into swimming out of the screens and the tasks. 

I have to put a pause on my responsibilities -  work and family so my mind can settle and get quiet again. 

I have to put up boundaries that for a period keep technology out and let nature in. 

When I touch the earth with my feet, see the fire with my eyes and feel the sun on my skin then I can hear the answers to the deep questions every man must ask himself.

What is my mission in life? 

Am I working on the things that really matter to me? 

How can I become a fully developed man physically and psychologically?

What is blocking me?

What can I stop doing?

What is my life saying to me?

 

 Weapons For The Wild Men

These are all questions and challenges I’ve faced in my own life which some  I have the answers to and others I am still working out. 

I’ve picked up some weapons along the way that allow me to defend my boundaries and stay connected to the wild man.

They help me stay focused on my mission and hear the voice of MistaPeo as I attempt to navigate our new habitat. 

This battle is not against one person but a machine emerging from many people. 

As Ralph Waldo Emersons said

" These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. "

Society has created products that make us addicted and destroy our bodies and minds in the process. 

You can see the effects visibly in men that have lost their shapes and speak absurdities.

To stop this machine and defend my sovereignty, strength and creativity I've had to stand my ground.

To say -

“Enough. Stop there. You will go no further into my home, my mind and my body. “

In my wild mens retreat I will share with you these weapons and how to use them. 

1. Burn Off Dead Wood

Thinking Time - Each morning we will spend time thinking with a twist. Jordan Peterson called it “burning off dead wood….and you are mostly dead wood”. When I wake up in the morning I spend some time just thinking and writing.

I’ve prepared my mind the night before with a question for the MistaPeo. Then when I get up, before my wife and daughter, I spend some time in front of the fire or a candle drinking my coffee with specific herbs and then just listening and writing. 

Sun Salutations - Each morning I have a ritual that includes the thinking time then after a yoga practice of Sun Salutations that takes 10 to 15 minutes. What you don’t do at this time is just as important as what you do.  I have done this for 19 years and travelled to India to learn from the source of this yoga practice.

I’ll share with you what I learned and how you can do it yourself. Most western men have locked up hips and can’t sit on the floor. This is a problem and I’ll show you how to solve it. 

2. See the Sun. Carry Water.

Getting morning sun on your skin and in your eyes while grounded into the earth is one of the most important things you can do for your sleep and your soul. I add in a Farmer's carry with water jugs on the sand for an extra workout.

Adding this routine on top of your morning yoga practice will keep you rooted in source and your life purpose instead of swirled around like a leaf in the wind by daily events.

The yogis and many indigenous cultures regarded the sun as the central authority.  This one mental shift supported by the physical actions I just described can be life changing.

3. Wild Man Eating

Nutrition isn’t that complicated if we simply remove technology such as refrigerators and grocery stores then see whats left.

As hunters living in nature food wasn’t always readily available. There would be periods of fasting and then periods feasting. We can mimic these cycles plus amplify the signals of each with food and supplements.

I learned how to do this from Joel Greene, author of the book Immunity Code, when I became one of his first health coaches. 

I will share with you the weapons he created known as the amplified fast, the inflammation spin down plus the 2 day core eating pattern.

4. Wild Man Moving and Resting

Wild men ate meat that they got from hunting. While we won’t actually hunt in this retreat we will mimic the pattern and inputs as if we did.

The first 3.5 days are going to be hard. You will be uncomfortable and you will suffer. I aim to tailor the weight you will carry to your fitness level so we can find that edge where you have a challenge but don't get wrecked from it.  You may want to prepare leading up to it. 

On day 4 the hunt will end and you will feast on meat 🍖. Not muscle meat. Tha is for the dogs. We will eat organs on the fire. (vegan and vegetarian options are available)

After you will rest, pack on muscle and sleep like never before. Most importantly you will have earned the right too.  

5. Cooking with Fire

There are two types of natural light. Sun and fire. How often do you see and feel either of them? If you are like most men it's never. 

There is one simple way to add fire into your life which is to cook with it. The next level for modern man is instead of sitting in lawn chairs is to do a flat footed squat which most men can't do. 

Sitting on the ground cooking with fire was something we did for most of history and returning back to this practice is one of the big levers you can pull to cultivate health and feed the wild man.  

6. Hot and Cold

Sauna and cold dips. Getting uncomfortable with extreme temperatures are two ways to increase mood plus a ton of other health benefits.

The key is dose - how much and at what time. Joel Greene taught me how to add hot and cold into the ancestral eating pattern so they have the most efficacy while not overdoing it and getting diminishing returns.

There is another issue to consider for men when using the sauna that will help mitigate the damage to testosterone.  

7. Hacking your Habitat

Probably the most important and most difficult weapon to implement for wild men is manipulation of your habitat. 

There is almost no where you can go that doesn’t have you bathing in EMF Smog like Wifi, blue light with flicker, insulated from the earths magnetic field and drinking polluted water. 

Well except my retreat center that is. 

After being fed up with constantly being forced into environments that weren’t designed for health I created my own which is likely the first of its kind in North America. I designed everything in this building to block out pollution to allow the healing and nourishing forces of nature to felt. 

8. Learning from Indigenous Wisdom

Lets's talk about results. Let's talk about specifics like the tissues you have on your body - fat and muscle. 

Not vague unactionable generalities like theories and morality. 

These guys above are in there 40's, 50's and 70's. 

I believe that indigenous cultures knew more about how to live in harmony with nature than we do. They were immersed in it and as a result connected to it and able to hear it.

I started to look to their ways not because it was politically correct and just another way to virtue signal on Instagram but because they had better results. 

Reading  the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price was a major paradigm shift that sent me down the path of learning the history of he first nations in my birthplace. I wrote a post about here.

In this retreat we will hear from some local first nations knowledge keepers about what life was like before