Wild Mind - Returning To Our Essential Nature

Blending psychology, wilderness, and non-duality to take you on a meditative journey into the heart of your self-less being. The colonized mind pollutes our ability to recognize our essential nature by creating a protective small self that relies on the external world. However, we also have a Wild Mind, a metaphor for how natural, spontaneous, and organic our minds can be when we leave them to regenerate, compost & expand themselves. From our rewilded and transparent mind, we are better able to recognize our undivided Self.

This 20-minute talk and 15-minute meditation have to complement soundscapes and wildcrafted sound effects to help make this theme a visceral experience, not just a concept.

Thank you for sharing, commenting, or simply being present with this work.

Love Sez

Transcript

Dear wild soul,

I know the ways you fear your own mind.

I know how inescapable the past may seem to a mind that refuses to be present.

I know how enslaved the body can become to the authority of an old story.

It may feel like a ferociously wild place to live at times.

One without order,

Gentleness or love.

But let me show you how it is actually the taming of your mind that has led you to believe that your mind could ever harm you.

Allow me to take your hand and show you how beautiful wild mind can be.

Without its domestications,

Separations and colonizations.

Allow me to remind you of all the ways wild mind is akin to the vast and unexplored wilderness that has an innate ability to regenerate,

Heal and surprise you without an unrelenting need to better it,

Control it or avoid it altogether.

If you,

Like I,

Like all of us,

Have felt no true lasting freedom in your life,

Then you too are held captive by a mind that has no freedom itself.

How can it give you what it does not know itself?

How can mind stay indigenous to its own unique landscape if it must abide by imperialist ways not intuitive to its native wisdom?

A tamed mind,

Dear one,

Is deeply reliant on others and external environments.

Like an exotic flower planted in a climate-controlled greenhouse,

A mind that has been taken out of its natural habitat cannot survive without constant maintenance.

A tamed mind requires every thought and every action to serve as its protection.

And what is it protecting?

Its sense of self.

As a newly planted cutting,

Taken from the wild,

Assumes that it is the only one of its kind in a big conservatory,

So too does a domesticated self not remember its connection to its original source,

Still growing out in the meadows.

This small self believes that just because it looks different from other plants,

Transplanted too behind these thick glass panes,

That it must be separate,

Alone and vulnerable.

This sense of separation is what a tamed mind protects.

Forgetfulness that we are propagated from something deeply wild,

Still connected in sense and cell to an unfettered source,

Is the cause of most of our suffering.

A high-maintenance mind is thick in beliefs of control,

Individual doership and memory.

A tamed mind has been severed from its instinctive nature and contorts itself to perform under the poor conditions of expectation,

Betterment and yield.

An oppressed mind becomes fragile and decorative,

Rather than robust and functional.

Nothing about the habituated and conditioned is free,

Which makes it easy to understand why we feel like the mind is against us.

Whereas in truth,

We are really feeling the pain of its longing to return to its wild.

We feel the ache of an imprisoned mind waiting by the window,

Wishing to play outside.

Wild mind has no sense of a solid and separate self,

Unlike tamed mind.

It knows that the more untampered it is,

The more transparent it becomes,

Allowing us to sense what we truly are.

When we are able to be what we are,

We understand that our true sense of self is the knowingness of wild mind and all its beautiful creations.

Awareness,

What we essentially are,

Is our original and foundational wholeness.

It is that sense that our mother plant is still sprouting,

Out there in the mysterious wild,

Waiting us to feel our way home.

From practices that avoid the mind entirely,

Based on its illusory nature,

To ones that finally comb the mind for traces of ego,

There is a middle way,

A way that actively rewilds the mind,

By observing,

Nourishing,

And surrendering it back to its peaceful and self-healing qualities.

Wild mind is not savage or disorderly.

It is the epitome of well-being,

Of peace and equilibrium.

It is lupine in nature,

Protective of only what engenders its freedom.

It's regenerative in its processes,

Constantly letting go and expanding itself according to its cyclical nature.

After all,

Wild mind is organic.

Despite how ethereal it can feel,

Wild mind heals itself by diversifying its ideas,

Leaving monobelief systems that deplete its rich psychic soils to die away.

Wild mind knows that it does not contain consciousness,

But that consciousness contains it,

Making it an apprentice to something much greater than itself.

Wild mind is not just a mind,

But a body-mind,

An inseparable symbiosis,

One ecological unfolding we call being alive.

Wild mind is not a master,

But a wayfinder,

Navigating life with heart at its helm.

Wild mind has nothing to seek.

It knows itself as the abundant resource to which all is sustained.

Only a tamed mind needs to be fed by others.

All wild mind needs is space,

Quiet,

And the occasional forest fire to strip away all that is worn and weary,

Turning the barren into the blooming from the ash of what no longer serves.

You cannot grow a wild mind.

Only leave what is already here to grow in its own intuitive way.

Wild mind knows the future is created by patterns,

And if there is to be a change it must allow something new,

Something small and seemingly insignificant to take root.

It knows with time and patience this small sapling of a change will affect the whole,

Transforming the entire landscape with just one new species.

Wild mind is always open to change,

Living so intimately with the cyclical nature of life.

It never holds death away from anything that has had its time,

Nor does it delay birth from anything that longs to be part of the world.

Wild mind is simplicity.

It sees high walls and concrete slabs.

Not as something to abide by or suppress itself beneath,

But concedes by its own nature.

Wild mind eats the sun,

Turning the light of awareness into soul nourishment.

Wild mind has no concept of separation.

What is it separate from when all it can see is itself?

Just as a wilderness knows nothing of its own wild,

When the light pours through it,

It knows itself only as light.

When night falls,

It knows itself as the slumber beneath each eyelid.

Wild mind is a timekeeper.

It knows itself as the face of a watch.

Everything outside of it is timeless,

Boundless,

And eternal,

And what do you need,

Dear one,

To remember your wildly alive mind?

Trust that you were made perfectly self-sustaining when something,

Someone,

Or some aspect of yourself tries to convince you of your helplessness.

The easiest way to know what tames you,

What corrals you,

Is to feel your body.

This physical,

Integrated land that bears the colonization of your childhood,

Your culture and life experience.

If your natural state is harmony,

Then where do you feel imbalance?

If your natural state is wild,

Then where in your body do the wolves need to return home?

Where are the tell-tale signs of tightening,

Pruning,

Keeping in,

Keeping up,

Bearing down,

Turning away,

And where is their softness,

A light and lifting swell that pulls you towards the ocean of each moment?

Where is their stale and depleted land within you?

And where is their organic matter,

Cracking through the dirt,

Unfurling,

Blossoming and then wilting,

Falling away,

Becoming compost for what's to come?

Is not this body,

The very compost from which the future is born,

Wild is not a special quality reserved for uninhabited mountains and uncharted seas,

But a mysterious yearning seeded within each and every living thing on the planet?

Inside the orchid growing on the thirty-first floor,

Inside the wild garlic sprouting from the restaurant leftovers in the alleyway,

We are all pulled by an invisible thread to become what we are,

Through an innate slant that tilts us towards freedom,

Just like a flower head searches for the sun through a carpet of shadows.

We long to make contact with what we are,

Nothing in the wild is anything but itself,

The wild does not reject itself,

Restrict itself,

Contain itself,

Because someone else decides its nature is inconvenient,

Abnormal or unwanted.

The wild does not call itself by names we deem appropriate,

Nor grow in accordance with some progressive instructions we've formulated,

Just as wild mind does not think in order to grow,

It just grows because that is its nature,

That is its inclination and all acts,

Thoughts and words sprout from it spontaneously.

Like scented flowers,

We cannot split the wild up into sections of good and bad,

Preferable and undesirable,

Because to do that would mean to deny the interconnectedness of all life.

Darkness depends on light,

Sky depends on earth,

And moss on north,

Just as we cannot separate the mind into parts we like and dislike,

This internal culling is what causes us soul deep imbalances,

Because we vilify the swampland and spiritualise the mountaintops.

You cannot know what you essentially are through the mind,

Even a wild one,

But you can return to its transparent nature,

An essential creativity,

Which allows you to be what you are,

That is why the mind is seen as our greatest barrier and doorway to freedom.

Let us see the mind now for what it is,

A spontaneous and wondrous place full of wild medicine,

The exact medicine we rely on the external world to give us,

In fear of our own insufficiency,

Let us come into stillness together and venture inwards to this inner landscape that exists within us.

You may close your eyes,

Still the body by allowing your attention to focus on the breath,

Like trees give oxygen to this planet,

So too are your lungs the bringer of life to this body,

An infinite number of spontaneous occurrences unfold inside the body because of this breath,

Processes you cannot control and functions you may not even be aware of because you don't need to.

The body is selfless and deeply caring even when it fails itself,

All that's required of you is to breathe knowingly,

Become the quality of this breath,

Intentional,

Slow,

Silent,

I'd like for you to invite into this space the situation that you're currently struggling with,

Something that's causing you to feel off-balance,

Distracted or lost,

Just allow it to surface in your mind,

In any shape it takes form,

Physical sensation,

An energy,

Thoughts or internal words,

As you hold this struggle lightly in the background of your mind,

Imagine standing in an open field,

It's dark and thundery,

With only a few shards of light that tear through a thick sky,

The land just ahead of you has been heavily ploughed,

All you can see is never-ending straight rows,

These deep furrows are all dried up,

Cracked and hard,

There are a few wilted pale shoots,

Caught captive in the clench of hardened soil,

As the wind blows,

Small loose stones clatter across the surface of the ground,

There is no life here,

No movement,

No growth,

Your current struggle has created this in a landscape,

Someone else has helped shape these narrowing lines,

Someone who didn't know the wild and unfettered nature of who you were,

Someone who was not free or life-giving to themselves,

You have two options,

You can spend all your energy replanting the seeds that have died here,

You can use the tools you have acquired to pry open the earth and pour fertilizer made from someone else's garden,

You can spend all your energy weeding these rows and setting up an irrigation system from someone else's dam to help bring desperate moisture to this place,

You can watch intently each day the progress of each burrowing seed and suffer the despair of a poor harvest or rejoice in the short-lived season of summer,

You can try to heal this inner landscape with this part of you who is standing here,

Separate and at the mercy of what feels out of control,

Or dear one,

You can step back,

Rest and allow this place to be rewilded,

Let me show you the ways you are powerful and free,

Let me show you the illusions that have tamed you and the love that roams wildly across these lush plains inside of you,

Let me show you how unconditional you really are,

Allow the heavens to open up now and let the rain pour,

Watch how each drop gets sucked up by this dusty earth,

Watch how the water pools and then turns into a flowing river,

Not straight and efficient,

But curved and meandering in its hips,

Able to nurture life in all its secret folds,

Watch how a forest suddenly stretches and yawns across the horizon,

Lush and green awake,

Listen to how the birds begin to return home to the boughs and the mammals to their burrows,

All belongs to and is connected with each other,

Watch how the sun reaches the wet earth below your feet and how quickly the soft green grass grows,

Watch these suffering and straight rows sink beneath the tall grass and dancing wild flowers,

Feel the warmth on your face,

Take in the scent of damp hot earth,

Take a long intentional breath here,

Allowing all to spring and root,

To stretch and settle,

Without your effort,

Your effort,

Without your need to categorize this place,

Watch how a mountain slowly rises in the distance and hikes playful clouds upon its shoulders like a beloved father,

Listen to the life that creeps out from every corner of this place,

The soundscape of soul,

An instinctively balanced ecology created to celebrate life force,

This landscape has it all,

Loss and shadows,

Joy and belly aching humor,

All experiences constantly upwelling and falling away,

Blooming,

Fruiting and then disappearing into the earth,

As you look upon this vibrant inner landscape,

Bring your attention to the space in which it is held,

The space between the grass and the trees,

Inside the soil and the clouds,

The space beyond what you can see,

This space is love,

This is how the heart loves,

It holds all without judgment,

And it holds the mind within itself,

Love and wild mind are not separate but interwoven,

Nothing is untouched by love,

By love,

Nothing exists outside of it,

It is all encompassing,

Your struggle,

The arid landscape you feel needs fixing,

Action and control is held by and within the heart,

All you have to do is give your mind some quietude,

Some distance,

A chance to be,

And you will find this struggle will be made into something else,

All you have to do is surrender your pain to this place,

And keep coming back to the love all is held within,

And see in you with wild eyes what this mind can create from aches debris,

The greatest truth of this inner wilderness is that you are not actually standing here looking out at this scenery as if you were separate from it,

What makes this place wild is not the river,

Not the trees or the mountain,

But you,

Who you really are is the wild infused into everything,

The kernel of knowingness that knows this place,

You are the soulful pull of nature towards its own becoming,

You are the home to which all births and returns,

The nature that is true,

Remove the image you have of an eye who stands and looks at this inner landscape,

And imagine becoming the wild nature within everything you see,

Sense awareness infiltrating everything at once,

As if you were the seed that lives inside the heart of all beings,

Now let the image of your inner landscape fade until it disappears completely from view,

Leaving only space,

Only love,

Just be here gently present with the darkness in front of your eyes,

There is no I here,

No sense of a small and separate self,

Just a loving knowingness of your physical sensations,

Sense your whole body,

Its internal energy,

Its organic spontaneous nature,

Its empty fullness,

Both fully human and fully divine,

Know that you are held by an infinite and unbreakable love and that it is interwoven into the spacious cells of your body,

This pure sensing simply being with what is here inside your body,

As what you are is freedom,

Knowing the mind as a tool and not an identity is freedom and it feels more than natural,

It feels like home,

Take a moment to rest with what is,

Nourish yourself with this wild knowingness,

Pull it in and allow it to belong,

And when you are ready you may open your eyes,

We need a wild mind in order to glimpse our true nature,

Because unlike the smog burdened ego,

Wild mind is naturally light-footed,

Spontaneous and self-regenerative,

Without understanding our primordial selfless mind,

We identify with a man-made self that believes it can control everything and suffers in its futility,

We identify with a mind that can be split from the body,

A mind that is binary and in need of constant protection,

It is our loss of heart,

Of our instinctive nature,

Of the recognition that we are wild,

Not just a part of it,

That has caused us to lose our spirit's ecology,

To function from our taming conditions might sound like we just become meek and compliant,

But on the inside we become raging forest fires,

Reactive and invasive to all that comes into contact with us,

Suppression of our intuitive need for freedom and our fundamental misidentification with the separate self causes us to become so profoundly hardened that the soul goes into hiding for lack of tenderness,

Just as it takes a while for your bare souls to become friends again with the ground,

So too does it take a little time for the mind to remember the texture and quality of its innate and free nature,

Every time the mind gets caught up in fear,

Anxiety,

Discontent or prolonged sadness,

It is speaking from and functioning from its dry and withered furrows,

Suffering is only possible from the tame mind that believes it contains a separate and solid self that is reliant upon others,

Rather than interconnected with others,

To rewild the mind is to understand the truth that your body does not contain love,

But that you are held within love's boundless nature,

Every thought,

Every emotion,

Every state of being arises and falls away within love's ground,

Loving awareness is the loom upon which the weft and warp of the body-mind is woven,

As you begin to free the mind,

That is what it will be able to offer you in return,

The freedom to know yourself and most essentially,

To be yourself knowingly,

Wild mind allows you to have an intimacy with life that no tamed condition will ever be able to offer,

So rewild what is already here and allow what needs to come home,

A place by the open fire,

Leave your struggles to rest in the rich soil of a mind that is creativity itself,

Give equal presence to all thoughts knowing you are not them and that they hold no truth,

Knowing that you are the wild that is life itself,

Thank you for your time,

Your presence and for your heart,

Thank you for allowing me to show you the nature that we share and I hope you will only take what seeds are yours to plant,

Leaving all else to become compost for something else to grow.

Reviews

Thank you.
I experience a deep feeling of nurturing listening to your meditations.🦋

I experienced such a clear sense of what it would be like to let go and rewild my mind with this meditation! Thank you for the inspiration and encouragement provided in your heartfelt words … I hope that I can bring all of myself to meet this truth as I continue my journey!

Thank you for this poetry and sound meditation. I love the idea of re-wilding. It is helping to transform my old thought patterns and limiting beliefs.

Words escape me to describe the power of Sez’ poetry. Your words reach my soul and I’m so grateful. 🩷

Words feels so small. Perfectly liberating for mind, heart and soul. It changed it all in this now.
Thank you 🤍🙏🤍

💕beautiful and truthful. Your poetic, wise and delicately chosen words are a gift 🙏

Wow! So beautiful! My heart was full of love during this entire meditation. Thank you ❤️

Sez, I am enough and your message, I am wild, tells me a why to enough. Thank you. I will return to contemplate your insight.

Sez, you deep wisdom goes underneath the skin. Thank you.

Sez, this was absolutely breath takingly beautiful. So so deep and authentically true. Thank you for such exquisiteness.

You're reading my mind! Thanks for the voice, your voice for sharing this stunning now more transparent truth.🖖

I am so touched by this meditation and the truth of their poetic words that I am only able to say thanks for sharing this with us

Thank you for sharing this beautiful meditation. I was missing your heart guidance 🙏

An amazing reminder of how far I can get from who I am and how I can return to my wildness of being.

So beautiful and profound, thank you dear Sez for this insightful offering. I will listen to it a few more times to receive all it's wisdom. Love and many blessings to you dear heart 💚x

Wonderful. So glad I took the time today to hear this.

Thank you for this amazing journey into being our authentic selves. 🙏🏼🥰

Thank you Sez, you continually draw me into this wild beautiful free place where I belong, where we all belong ❤️

Thank you for your wisdom. Your words leave me feeling grounded and intentional about my own journey. I am so grateful.

Beautiful…thank you Sez for helping me to remember…🙏