Becoming Nature: Learning the Language of Wild Animals and Plants

Description

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.

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.

"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 *