Primal
A part of me died, and was reborn in nature
By Case Bradford
I felt trapped.
My mind was stuck inside a body I did not want to inhabit. I was 25, but instead of enjoying what should have been the prime of my life, I was dysfunctional, depressed, and suicidal.
“Suicidal thoughts are not about killing yourself; they are about killing a part of yourself.”
Walking alone near Venice Pier in Los Angeles, I heard this sentence through my headphones. At the time, I listened to dozens of podcasts. I can’t remember where these words came from, or who said them, nor was that relevant to me at the time. I remember their impact. I stopped, turned off the sound, and stared out at the ocean waves rolling out of the Pacific twilight and bathed in the dim glow of the lamplit boardwalk.
At some point in our lives, we all face challenges like this one: realizing that change—even, or especially, difficult or painful change–is necessary to escape and transcend stagnation and decay.
Life flourishes with innovation, and courage is required to undertake the risk that comes from creation—to seek a new path, find a better way of being. To forge a superior version of self, we need to let go of our old one. As we sense this calling, our intuition is our best guide to show us the path ahead. We start to watch and listen carefully, working out which specific ideas to implement, often through experimentation. I leaned towards health and fitness but saw others forge different pathways as ‘The Way to Go’.
Hearing your own voice is difficult; it has probably always been that way, but maybe never more so than in the 21st century. We're awash with contradictory commands, with many claiming to have cracked the formula for a happy and fulfilled life. That's why intuition is so important. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” When you find an idea or perspective that strikes that iron string, that resonates with you, have the courage to follow it.
Every one of us has a unique path ahead. We who walk it are irreplaceable. One needs only to look at our fingers, their intricate patterns, to remind oneself that nobody else possesses that code. But there are also great commonalities in our human experience. Forces of nature flow through us all, and we can weave them into our daily lives.
The idea that resonated with me to lead a higher life was a return to nature—a primal way of living. The natural world is a resource available to us all. By re engaging with the world at this raw, unconstructed level, the part of myself that was alienated from modern life and holding me back was overturned.
Immersing myself in nature, I realized that its value is obscured in modern society. The sun is healing, especially during sunrise and sunset when the rays are milder. Getting sunlight in your eyes allows you to feel its energy. Being barefoot on our soil, whether that’s grass from a field, sand from the beach, or a stone from a mountain, sends healing signals due to our Earth's electromagnetic energy flow - it is called grounding or earthing, and it is a transformational, freely accessible way to elevate vitality. Being near wild water provides us with a sense of oneness with the natural flow of life. Being in wild water, even just by immersing our feet, is how we tap into this feeling.
I enjoy my movement training bare foot on Earth and bare skinned in the Sun.
Nature extends to what we eat, too. Finding “real food” is not as easy as one might think today. Motivated by unrestrained profit, the companies that stock our kitchen cabinets have taken necessary elements for life and turned them into artificial versions that only resemble the original. Artificial colorings, preservatives, anti-caking agents, emulsifiers, hydrolyzed protein, autolyzed yeast—the list of unappetizing sounding nuts and bolts that hold together readily available “food” is dizzying. Our age could be described as the Age of Toxins. Common sources include nonstick cooking pans, seed oils, polluted tap water, polyester clothing, plastic cutting boards and bottles, and many more.
Our body is resilient and powerful, but we must take care of it to reach the full potential in our minds. As the Roman maxim suggests, mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body).
I prefer to listen to what feels right when it comes to my culinary preferences. I buy real food that has been grown near me without pesticides. Local, seasonal organic food is the most authentic, pure food there is. I would encourage others to trust their intuition to guide their food choices; what feels natural often is natural. Our body signals us what we need better than any so-called “nutritionist.”
When it comes to staying fit, I avoid the term “working out” because exercise no longer feels like work. Words are powerful; they echo in our minds, impacting the perception of our actions. I prefer to say movement training or, even more simply, flow. Flow because the aim is enjoyment, and a flow state is an accessible, powerful state we are able to tap into when we enjoy our training. A flow state lies in a delicate balance between effort and relaxation. I find this state is easier to access when in nature, as I am connected to our primitive source. Almost all my training is performed outside on the beach or in the grass, barefoot and shirtless.
I also use the term ‘flow’ because, aside from training sessions, I strive to keep my blood and lymphatic system flowing. For this reason, I rarely sit on a chair; I prefer standing at a desk while working. This helps keep my energy high and mood balanced. Walking or cycling instead of driving is another way to access our inner flow state. Dancing is a great one, too.
Sleep is vital to our functionality. Philosophers as early as Aristotle and Plato stressed the importance of balanced sleep—getting enough rest to recalibrate the body but not too much as to fall into the trap of idleness in our minds. Deep sleep, or REM sleep, is downstream of a few simple strategies. Try going for a walk in the sun every morning after waking; that way, your body associates sunlight with activity and nighttime with rest. When the sun sets, dim all the lights in your home, especially if you have LED lights. Turn your screens red (flux software is an example) or wear red lens glasses to protect your brain from blue light, which signals daytime and awakens your mind at a hormonal level, making sleep elusive and shallow.
What about the world as it extends outside of our body?
Loneliness is a widespread phenomenon in modern society, yet it’s said to be nearly as harmful to our health as smoking a packet of cigarettes a day. Sharing our joys, fears, and dreams gives meaning to them to endure any obstacles ahead. But we must make sure that we choose the right people who share our vision and that we are present while we cultivate our relationships with them. We must not seek company for the sake of it, in that case solitude is preferable. We should seek to find our tribe. We should place our phones elsewhere and look into people’s eyes for deep, enriching conversations. We should also share activities with them to strengthen our sense of common cause. One way I was able to cultivate positive friendships was to host movement meetups at the beach in Los Angeles and bring like-minded locals together for barefoot soccer, football, sparring, training, and playing around.
We are all placed on this earth with a purpose, whether we are aware of it or are oblivious to it. To fulfill our destiny, we need to create something bigger and outside of ourselves by using the gifts we are endowed with. We should create more than we consume, which, in today’s age, riddled with distractions from the virtual world, becomes an increasingly complex task to undertake.
Victor Frankl, an American neurologist, wrote about the power of purpose in Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl found that those who endured the concentration camps best from World War II possessed a strong sense of purpose. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” As soon as we are able to ascertain what road lies ahead of us, almost any kind of suffering becomes tolerable. Without a path in sight, existence itself becomes intolerable, or only tolerable by some form of entertainment, which today we find by scrolling and watching shows aimlessly. I understood that, in the first place, my purpose was to reconnect us to nature’s source, to return to a more elementary life. I rediscovered the value of a state of nature as a corrective to the alienation that modernity produces.
If you are in a similar position to where I once was, suffering and confronting the fear of killing a version of yourself—I encourage you to rise to the challenge so that the dormant hero within you can be born, and reborn again and again.
Case Bradford is a health and vitality advocate and host of the podcast Peak Earth.