It's Not What You Think
This isn’t a normal website or company. And this is not a normal page.
The biggest barrier most people put up to Evolve Wild within themselves. If I’m saying my piece well, I’m speaking to a part of you that intuitively knows and agrees with these concepts, but still immediately balks at it. I know, I did too. Even after I had a life-changing realization working in wilderness therapy and a life full of outdoor perception-altering experiences. It turns out every objection that I had to it, and likely yours as well, doesn’t really hold up.
With that, here are the 8 most common excuses people make for not coming out, and why they don’t actually flesh out.
You Think: It's a Call To Get People (or You) To Live On The Land Again
Honestly, I didn’t know how to word that title. But I hear it sooooo often.
It goes like this: I tell people what I do, and why I do it. Their first response is something like: “Yeah, but do you really think people will go back to living in the woods again?”
NO! Of course not! Absolutely not. That’s nowhere in anything I say, ever. But somehow, that’s what a lot of people assume I’m getting at.
We have evolved to where we alter the land radically and do so with increasing efficiency. We’re a technological and social species. We’ve built an entire human-centered world, that simply abandoning it would have massive consequences (think nuclear reactor power plants, if nothing else). We’re never going back to living completely in the woods, or at least certainly not in our lifetimes.
The issue is that we’re living as though we’re not part of the natural world or our immediate ecosystems at all. We act in isolation, not community with, the natural world. That’s how we view our relationship with it. That’s what I’m trying to change, that relationship.
We don’t have to go back to living on the land to align ourselves with it. We DO have to spend time in it, and love not only it, but who we are while we’re there, and then incorporate the insights, wisdom, and connections we find while there into our human societies.
In other words, we have to harmonize with it, not isolate ourselves from it or completely abandon our human capabilities, technology and society and immerse ourselves in it.
We could re-create our human society where the lives of all beings are considered and even contribute to the whole. That sounds way more beautiful than living in huts again.
You Think: It's Therapy / for your mental health
I write about the differences a lot on this site. Simply though, what if you don’t actually have any issues or problems today? What if you are just a human being living your life? That life may or may not be strongly aligned with your deeper values, or offer you true peace and a feeling of growth and fulfillment, but it’s not a problem. It’s just your reality.
Now recognize that you are living in a society that puts all that stuff on you. It forces your co-operation to continue your existence, but it does it for it’s own ends. And, while it’s demanding all your personal time and other compromises you make to exist on it’s terms, it’s destroying the natural world and getting us all worked up at each other, threatening the very existence of all life on the planet. We contribute to it, and it is a difficult path. But we should be the ones shaping it for our needs.
Therapy, in my eyes, helps you to cope with being you that exists in the world today. Evolve Wild, on the other hand, helps you get out of that world and away from all of the stuff it puts on you, connect with your deeper self, go on a journey of true self discovery, and become a free, radical force of love and change!
So no, I don’t see this as simply therapy, or limited to the mental component of your human experience.
You Think: You already know all Of This
I try to speak directly to your deeper human nature, which you already know somewhere. Regardless of how much prior consideration you have to what I say, it should strike you in a way that you already get. “Of course getting outside makes me feel better. I don’t need you to tell me that! I certainly don’t need you taking me camping to prove it!”
Great! Your ego quickly and effectively pushed the essence of this straight out of your consideration. Now go back to doing whatever you were doing before that wasn’t serving any of what you already knew. It’s just your situation.
If you agree with what I’m saying, but you don’t practice, you don’t deepen your awareness of it. It isn’t an unfolding, evolving thing. You have to listen to that part of yourself and live into it to see where it takes you.
When you practice and live into your deeper beliefs, you do more than expand more than your awareness. You live into the experience, into an entirely different reality. And you grow.
Simply just being able to recognize the concepts behind all of this as true is a great start, but it’s just the beginning.
You Think: You Can / Already Do this Yourself
People who get outdoors feel where I’m coming from with a lot of this stuff. So you think you can do it yourself. But from start to finish, everything about an Evolve Wild Experience is different.
Let’s look at some different aspects:
Prior To The Trip:
If it wasn’t for the amount of prep time it takes just to spend the night outdoors, you would do it a lot more. It takes days, a lot of physical and mental energy, money, gear and stress to prep. Usually it’s just easier not to do it at all, and people choose a less stressful, less meaningful way to spend their free time.
Before we even see you, we’ve spent hours getting the gear, prepping the food, getting the sites and more. We know where to go and how to get amazing spots. You can just show up and be present.
During the Experience:
There’s a lot of work in just cooking and cleaning. This takes away from the time that you’re here, and the space where you are letting go of your mind and tasks.
Plus, there is an intention behind our trips that you typically can’t recreate with your friends or even your family (though that can be powerful in itself). During our trips, there are several ways that you can engage with the environment, such as paddleboarding or rafting, yoga, and more, depending on the experience.
Also, there’s a level of depth, and the opportunity to engage with a human community that values these types of things the same way you do. That can move forward after the experience too. In fact, if your time out with us was meaningful, we encourage it.
You Think: It's a Cult!
People at times respond with “It’s a cult” or jokes about it, when I tell them what I’m doing. Honestly, I get that it sounds kinda culty. I mean we really don’t get into the types of topics I delve into much with others. We’ve become guarded around these kinds of topics, as religion has become such a culturally traumatizing issue for people around the globe.
But I get that some people are worried that I’ll do something crazy. Don’t worry I’m not trying to get you to live in a commune or the woods (see above). I do want you on team “Let’s really change the world for the better,” but you deciding how you can best do that in your own way and space is key to all of that anyway.
The only thing I’m trying to do is to help you find peace, work towards finding your true gift to the world, develop into a wise, healthy and happy human, and make real progress towards making things better during one of the most critical times we’ve ever seen.