Becoming Nature
Video Appendix
Becoming Nature by Tamarack Song
This webpage contains videos of the different exercises and games discussed in Becoming Nature in order to aid the reader. All videos are located on the Teaching Drum Outdoor School Youtube channel, along with our extended video collection.
Book Description:
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.
Click here if you’d like to purchase additional copies of Becoming Nature.
The Stone People Game
Learn the nuances of nonverbal communication and intuitive listening by playing a version of the Stone-People Game with the trainees in the 2013 Guardian Training. The game was gifted to the Teaching Drum by Alana.
The Stone Tracking Game
The Stone Tracking game provides training in camouflage, and at the same time in discernment. While the stone tracker teeters on the edge of his awareness, the stone concealers work together to hone their skills of distraction and illusion.
The Stick Game
Leave your rational, conditioned mind behind and join the year-long Guardian Training initiates in the Stick Game. Find your intuition in that place where thinking can only make you flounder. Note: this is the challenging Cherokee version, which is played with five long and four short sticks. Some people find the Ojibwe variation, which has only four long sticks, a bit easier to master.
The Spiderweb Game
Come sit with guardian trainees for a few rounds of the deceptive spider web game. Can you abandon your assumptions, open up your intuition, and join in the fun?
The Drumstalk
Wrap a blinfold on, and listen to the other senses as you mold yourself into the forest, during the drumstalk.
Native Walking
This video fleshes out the concept of native walking introduced in our Native Walking Introduction video. Learn what some call woods yoga – the art of weaving yourself through the landscape, as native humans and animals do, and as our ancestors did. Leave the trail and limiting habits behind, and get in touch with your body’s natural agility and balance. This footage was taken in the 2013-14 Guardian-Warrior Training Program.
Solo Canoe Workshop
Learn how to pilot a solo canoe from Tamarack and the guardians, including techniques for long-term voyaging and stealth paddling.