Description
Book SynopsisAnimals 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. 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.
Trade Review“I love the way Tamarack explains that you must get away from thought to understand animals. He is referring to verbal thought with language and entering the animal’s sensory-based world that has no words. To understand animals, you have to get away from words and enter their realm of visual, auditory, and touch sensation, which are linked to emotions.
Becoming Nature will help connect you to the natural world.” * Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human *
“Do you often feel rushed and far removed from feeling the peace of delighting in the natural world around you? Tamarack Song gives a way to return to heightened sensory awareness and fulfilling kinship with wildlife. Enriched by his background in environmental education, wilderness survival, and wildlife conservation, the author guides readers with a variety of exercises to an active experience with Nature around and within us. Here are practical steps you can take to better know Nature and yourself.” * Penelope Smith, author of Animal Talk and When Animals Speak *
“Tamarack Song teaches how Becoming Nature is our natural and innate state of being.
Becoming Nature is beautifully written and filled with practices to help us reconnect with the natural world. This is an important and powerful book to help us improve our personal health as well as bring back balance and harmony to the planet and all in the web of life.” * Sandra Ingerman, coauthor of Speaking with Nature and author of Walking in Light: The Everyday Empow *
“Following up on his successful book, Entering the Mind of the Tracker, Tamarack Song now offers readers 12 steps for learning to move from observing nature to becoming nature. His system teaches the intuitive skills of our hunter-gatherer Ancestors using story and experience rather than traditional study. He tells readers that we all have innate, though largely ignored, primal aptitudes for these skills which are imbedded in our DNA. This is a powerful call to leave the virtual/intellectual world and reclaim our roots in the natural world.” * Anna Jedrziewski, Spirit Connection New York, April 2016 *
“Tamarack’s approach, as the title suggests, is founded primarily on the ideal of oneness, as in “becoming one with nature.” On the other hand, as suggested by the phrase in his subtitle, “learning the language of…” he teaches observational skills as the basis for the process of becoming one. The book is quite detailed and technical in its approach, even though it comes from a spiritual perspective of oneness.” * Intuitive Connections, Henry Reed, April 2016 *
“The writing is personable, and Song’s generous inclusion of tales about his own journey to ‘become nature’ adds a loving quality to the text. Whether urban dweller or off-grid subsistence homesteader, anyone can benefit from the collected wisdom Song shares in this latest offering--these lessons from a lifetime of learning-by doing-inspire faith in the limitless potential of one who has truly become nature.” * Foreword Reviews, Patty Comeau, May 2016 *
“As Song reminds us, we have innate sensory and intuitive capabilities inherited from our hunter-gatherer predecessors; it's just that in our modern world we've lost this perception, although it's still imprinted in our DNA. Song has designed a series of exercises, supported by experiential stories, to help us expand our awareness to include the world around us and the plants and animals within it. He also has solutions for leaving behind our precious electronic gadgets.
Song encourages us to let our imaginations transform us into the animal we seek to become and enter Nature's silence invisibly. Most of us won't ever have the opportunity to interact with animals in the wild, yet Song's wisdom can help us discover that Nature resides within us all.” * Nexus, June 2016 *
Table of ContentsIn 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
