Anchoring with Nature: An Eco-Spiritual Journey on the Oneness of Being with Dr. Fred Provenza

Can you imagine sitting down to chat with a plant, asking it to share its innate wisdom with you, and then taking the nourishing messages of its flavors into your body as food and medicine? Well, guess what, whether you know it or not we all do this to some degree everyday.

Tune in for an enriching conversation with  renowned Range Scientist, Dr. Fred Provenza and myself, your Land Food Life Podcast host Kara Kroeger.  In this conversation Fred beautifully weaves his journey, from uncovering the remarkable functions of plants as food for livestock to appreciating their profound role in our social constructs, health, and spirituality.  Together, we explore the powerful lessons that can be learned by recognizing the threads that weave all beings - humans, plants, insects, animals, land, and water - together and how anchoring ourselves with nature can regenerate our frazzled nervous systems and  ecosystems. 

Fred also shares about a time period  when life pulled the rug out from under his feet, which opened the door to an ineffable feeling of oneness with the universe. Drawing inspiration from Fred and I's personal experiences, we explore the transcendental peace that can emerge from facing life-altering situations, like a health crisis.  Through our personal anecdotes,  we offer a unique perspective on cultivating  an eco-centric vs. an ego-centric lifestyle through  tethering ourselves to nature as a means of deepening our relationship with self and all that surrounds us.

Books Referenced:

Nourishment by Fred Provenza
The Art of Sheepherding by Fred Provenza
Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
The Power of Now by Echart Tolle
The Soul of the Indian by Charles Eastman
The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I'm your host, kara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience, studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Hello Land Food Life Podcast listeners, this is your host, kara Kroger. Thank you again for choosing to spend some of your time with me today. In the midst of so many and often truly conflicting choices, there is a still quiet voice and knowledge within each of us that always knows the answer to what we are seeking. Our intuitive selves, the spiritual part of us that is innately connected to our deepest truth, is always attuned to what we need in body, mind and spirit. Today we are joined by my friend and colleague, dr Fred Provenza, and we are going to chat about the oneness of being and how learning to tap into your inner and eight knowing when considering your health, food choices and the state of the environment, can help you feel connected spiritually and physically in nourishing ways that also raise the quality of life for all beings on this planet. Fred has a PhD in range science, but I really want to emphasize that the work that he's done in this profession has had really profound impacts far beyond the range, and early on in our interactions, fred and I discovered that we share a mutual spiritual lens through which we view agriculture, nutrition and land management and, being a nutritionist and agro-collegist, I was super excited when I discovered Fred's book, which is titled Nourishment what Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom.

Speaker 1: 2:46

It is truly all the things that I love wrapped up in one book. It's about animals, plants, insects, humans, nutrition, soil, ecology, phytonutrients and health and wellness for all beings. I mean, what else could I ask for, right? Well, aside from that, it also presented much wisdom and many thought-provoking questions regarding the connectedness of all things, and when I met Fred in person, we quickly discovered a camaraderie around our spiritual experience of the oneness of being and the understanding of energy frequency and resonation in us and natural systems that surround us. So the teachings from Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, among others, are common threads that weave our conversations together, and it is these threads that make me so excited to have Fred on the show to share the plethora of insights he brings to the table.

Speaker 1: 3:43

So Fred was a faculty member at Utah State University in the Department of Range Science from 1982 to 2009. And his work there focused on groundbreaking research that laid the foundation in understanding behavior-based management of landscapes. So his research efforts led to the formation in 2001 of an international consortium of scientists and land managers known as behave, and these folks seek to enable people to understand the behavior of all beings, and the focus is to help people learn to appreciate that it is our differences that are our collective strength in sustaining communities and landscapes to integrate diverse ecological, economic and social values and services. Fred is now retired and lives in Ennis, montana, with his wife, sue, where they have their homestead, and he also still willingly and with a big smile on his face, participates as a mentor to many people carrying on this work and many new research endeavors. Welcome, fred. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Speaker 2: 4:54

It's wonderful to be here with you, cara. What a wonderful introduction to this discussion that we'll have conversation that we're going to have.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Yes, I'm very excited about it too. We always can go off on many different paths when we speak, and I just love how it is always so connected to divine source. At the same time, I know that you love plants as much as I do and that a great deal of focus in your life has been placed on understanding the phytochemicals in plants and their effects as medicine in both animals and humans. And as you've studied these plant chemicals over the years, what have you learned from them spiritually with regard to using them as tools to nourish and heal?

Speaker 2: 5:41

I'm going to go back in time, cara, to answer that question. For me it started really, really simply. I had no idea where any of this would lead, but I think I'd never really seen a plant until my sophomore year in college, during that spring semester when I took plant taxonomy and we had to go out and make a collection of 50 plants as part of that course, and that whole semester opened up a world to me that I didn't know existed. It makes me wonder when I think about that. How many worlds within worlds within worlds am I still not aware of actually? But the plant part of that was so amazing to start to learn and recognize these plants, and it set me on a lifelong quest simply to know what plants exist in the environments I live. You know there are thousands of these different plants, and so it was a first step for me simply to learn to identify and recognize all the beautiful, beautiful, wonderful grasses form shrubs that live in all the areas that I've lived. That led then, through no intention of mine actually at all, to coming to more appreciate, beyond their names and their beauty in that sense, the many functions that they play in systems, and it was goats and black brush. That got me started down that path. You know we were using goats to prune this shrub and stimulate new growth and the goats didn't want to eat this new growth. So that took me totally into the chemical ecology part of things, learning that this new growth is very high in a particular kind of condensed tannin that deters goats. And that led me into a realm of scientific endeavor that had been going on probably for the last century but really was gaining steam there in the 60s and 70s and 80s, of chemical ecology and what people call chemically mediated interactions between plants and animals. And in those days people were primarily. We were all focusing on plant defenses, how plants protect themselves from being eaten too much, and that fit, of course, with what I was seeing with the goats. That was amazing to see all the work being done with everything from bacteria and insects to birds and fishes and mammals. You know it's just a tremendous amount of research going on and so much was being learned about plant defenses and the ways that plants protect themselves, the ways that plants communicate with one another. For instance, if a caterpillar is munching on a plant, some plants will send up volatile signals, compounds and other creatures, birds or insects learn to recognize those cues say there's food over there on that particular plant. So just amazing kind of understanding was coming out of that whole area of plant defense.

Speaker 2: 8:55

My views have evolved since those days to and enlarge to this whole idea of not only plant chemicals as defenses but their roles as medicines for animals. We've come to recognize there's this whole health benefits that animals can learn to use plants to self-medicate. Beyond that then, of course, are the whole health and nutritional aspects of plants in the environment. So I've come my views of plants have evolved very much over the years from simply recognition of plants, identification, to their multiple roles. I often like to say that plants turn dirt into soil and diverse mixtures of plants termed soil into homes, grocery stores and pharmacies for really for all life, terrestrial life on the planet. So I've evolved in my understanding of plants.

Speaker 2: 9:51

I've come to appreciate this whole research area that looks at plant consciousness. Plants are conscious and perhaps even sentient. I can appreciate that, and what I think now, as much as anything, is just the beauty. I'm struck by the well, and I have been since I took plant tax on me. But I think now as I look at plants in the different grasses, forbs, shrubs, trees that grow around, just their beauty, and trying to imagine what it would be like, I guess, actually to be a plant. I would love to. Sometimes I feel like being a human is becoming far too constraining. I think it would be quite interesting to be a blue bunch of wheatgrass or oak cherry or something, for just for five minutes, to have the experience of what people write about when they talk about plant consciousness and plants having 20 or more different senses and the ways that plants interact with one another and the environments they inhabit. So I think plants are absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2: 10:58

Where my wife, sue and I live now in Ennis, we have worked very hard to encourage all of the native plant species that grow here to be most of our yard, our 1.5 acres and I'm struck by the number of people who will often stop when they're even when they're driving down the road and say how beautiful the yard looks and it's these native plants that they're looking at.

Speaker 2: 11:25

Then you come to realize the importance of that diversity for all life and how those plants then, as you were saying to me, link us spiritually with because they connect everything in the system. I think plants are absolutely amazing. They're the givers of life and if we can come to. Not that everyone needs to be the same, but I think a first step is to recognize the individuals right. That's what that taxonomy class did. For me is to recognize all the hundreds of these, rather than just plants growing there, if you even see that. To recognize all the different species of grasses and flowering plants, the forbs and the shrubs, and to just be we caught up in that incredible diversity and then to appreciate what that's doing to nurture all life on this planet 100%.

Speaker 1: 12:23

Yeah, they have so many different comments I could make about so many of the things that you just said. But really coming to understand plants as individuals and that each of them have a very, very specific gift that they're giving in that environment is just a beautiful thing to learn and develop. Because it takes a long time to kind of sink into the communication with plants. I mean, plants and humans communicate all the time and we are constantly in communication, but a lot of us don't recognize it. But then when we seriously sit down and try to communicate, you know, like, create a more intentional communication with plants, it can really be profound and it takes a little bit of time to develop that right to become the observer that allows you to hear the messages that plants are putting out, and that can happen from literally sitting with a plant and feeling its energy and hearing what comes to your mind. But it can also come from food, right, and when we eat food it's a message that just goes into our body and tells our body to do something or not to do something, and so that's a form of communication. So, yeah, it's just a really extraordinary thing to learn and also just to make comments on being a plant that you want to be a plant.

Speaker 1: 13:57

I love this. The other, actually yesterday morning I woke up and I had a lot of work on my plate and I was feeling a little anxious, and so I laid in bed for a minute and I pretended to be a flower and I felt just the breeze on my petals and I felt rain drops coming down and I felt the legs of you know an insect crawling on me and I just it was very calming and it was a really fun way to just kind of get out of the humanness and move into another realm of just connecting with nature and feeling the frequency of nature in that way. So Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 14:39

Yeah, that's perfect what you were saying. You know, one of the comments you made made me think too. The place we live here in Innis is really a rock pile. It's just, it's rocks everywhere. So we've put in deep beds all around the place and we love to grow vegetables, herbal, medicinal kinds of gardens, and now that the winter is setting in, why the last of the plants other than the carrots that we've got buried? But the last of the plants are going, and the last of the tomatoes? And that's something too that I think is amazing that growing plants in that sense, and you and having those plants provide nourishment for your body.

Speaker 2: 15:24

As you were saying. The plants that you grow yourself in good soil and picked ripe, there's no, you can't beat that compared to buying food at the grocery store. We bought some little tomatoes here recently and there's just no flavor whatsoever compared with the ones that you grow and pick ripe, right. So that whole relationship, then, with plants, from the seed to the growing and providing resource, water for the plants and so forth, and then they give gifts to you, as you're saying, in the form of nourishment for our bodies.

Speaker 2: 16:05

We've planted probably well over a hundred species of native shrubs, too, very producing shrubs, and Sue loves to make jams and jellies from those as well, and so the birds appreciate them too. So it's this giver of life and that recognition, and I think if you can grow plants yourself and I know maybe not everyone can do that, but if you can grow some of your own food, it's a very rewarding kind of relationship. It's a way to become very grounded and centered. I was reading of a study recently that was done in the UK, at Cambridge, on their iconic one of their iconic lawns that was planted back in the late 1700s, and they took a part of that and planted a mix of wildflowers of all different kinds of wildflowers and then they looked at what that meant Ecologically, economically, socially, ecologically, it tremendously increased the diversity of life below ground, above ground insect life, bird life because you've got this diversity rather than one species.

Speaker 2: 17:18

You've got this tremendous diversity and it would have done that below ground as well. Economically, you usually cut costs because you're not fertilizing, you're not cutting lawn anymore. It also helped to fix far more greenhouse gases. And then, socially, people far preferred the diverse mixture of plants to the monoculture when they were asking surveys. What do you think here?

Speaker 2: 17:44

So again expanding on that thing that we're talking about, but one can think you know, in terms of climate and what's going on with climate, if a person's concerned about that, and you know there's a lot that's going on in farming communities nowadays about the ability, through different practices, to either fix or not fix carbon and reduce methane emissions. But we can each be farmers in our own little way if we take and encourage diverse species of diverse mixtures of native species, and that out here in the air at West, that gets you out of having to irrigate because the plants that grow there naturally evolved in those environments. You don't have to water like you do a lawn, for instance, and so we can each participate in helping to mitigate changing climates, warming climates, through simply an act like that of thinking about what are the native plants that grow here and how can we encourage them on our place.

Speaker 1: 18:47

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 18:48

It's an important thing to think about.

Speaker 1: 18:51

And you know, having grown up in Texas, where water is scarce and becoming more and more scarce and just suburb after suburb after suburb, with lawn after lawn after lawn, witnessing that and the care and concern that people put into their lawns is extraordinary. And if we could put that care and concern and direct it just towards another direction, where there's a little bit more consciousness around water conservation through the types of plants that you're putting in your yard, would be an awesome thing. And you know, that's not just unique to Texas, right, there's tons of places all around the world where we could make huge impacts. I mean, the majority of water use goes to landscapes, you know. So it's really important to create a mindset around that. And you can even have grasses, right, like buffalo grass is a great grass for Texas that you can put in your lawn. That is still a lawn grass, but it uses much less water. So find those native species of grasses that you can put and still enjoy your yard, but not do the water sucking grasses there.

Speaker 2: 20:10

Yes, as you say, what we're talking about is a transformation of consciousness and awareness From, I often think, now, kind of total control. We want a monoculture of one species of grass, no dandelions, no clover, no, you know just not. So we weed and feed and do all these things and then mow. And it takes a total transformation of consciousness because nature's kind of messy, you know. You look around our place here you've got all kinds of different species. It's not uniform at all, it's kind of chaotic in its own way.

Speaker 2: 20:46

And but you come to recognize and identify the different species of grasses, as you were saying, and all the flowering plants, so that people get blown away looking at the flowering plants that are growing in our yard, from local weed to Markster, to flax, the blue flax, to on and on and on and on. But it takes a transformation of consciousness. You know, we learn to appreciate certain things. And when you learn to appreciate a monoculture of Kentucky blue grass, for instance, in many of the places I've grown, you know to think of a yard with all kinds of different things growing there and nothing neat and uniform. That takes a total transformation of consciousness. But if you come to appreciate the things we're saying what that means for biodiversity and for creating homes, grocery stores and pharmacies for life. Then you can start to think maybe that is a good thing.

Speaker 1: 21:45

Exactly Well, and another aspect of it is you have to change your consciousness around death and decay as well when you choose to go that route, because nature is going to be in different cycles with different plants at different times in terms of their death process, and so not everything is going to look live and beautiful and robust all at once. Right, Everything's going to be kind of moving through its own cycle and I think we're taught right to not appreciate something that's dying or in the death process and really taking that in and changing your mindset about the beauty in that process. Right, Watching something withering and finding what is beautiful about that withering plant, as opposed to that it just needs to be removed because it's starting to look unsightly in comparison to the living plants. Right, you know, creating flower arrangements out of dead plants and finding the beauty in that and bringing it into the home and appreciating it I think is something that happens more when you start moving into living in these types of systems in your yard or in nature in general.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Yes, absolutely, Kara. We're really trying to make a point of that and to pitch that it's so valuable on so many levels as we've been saying that there's no question about that. We need people to think about that, think about how beautiful that can be.

Speaker 1: 23:21

You had a five-year bout with depression that was followed by cancer a decade later, and you've said that those experiences filled the void for you and really broaden your perspective by connecting the strands and the web. You'd explored all your academic life and these experiences really allowed you to see an infinite whole, one that transcends all of time and space and links the physical with the metaphysical. And so, following surgery for cancer, you had an expansion right that went from more of an intellectual cognitive process to a more experiential, non-cognitive, more intuitive way of thinking. Can you tell us a little bit about that? And you mentioned that there was two years of an ineffable peace right and a feeling of oneness with being and unconditional love that really just took over. So can you talk a little bit about that experience and how it played out for you in your life and how these realizations as you had, that experience changed your relationship with food and nutrition, both personally and in your research?

Speaker 2: 24:36

What happened after the surgery for cancer really was a surprise to me. I had never had any. It was never been talked to about that, never had any clue of what that was. But I found that after the surgery for colon cancer, when I was lying there in the hospital under the care of these wonderful nurses that would come in during the day, the hustle and bustle during the day and then the quiet during the night, and it was a Christmas time, the Christmas lights shining through the room.

Speaker 2: 25:09

As you mentioned, this ineffable peace and the word ineffable is the right word because you just can't put it into words. I mean, we all have times when we feel at peace, and sometimes more peaceful than others. But this was transcendent. It was absolutely amazing, this peace that came over and this sense that everything this will sound corny, that everything will be all right for all eternity. Not for right now, not for forever. It's just. There's nothing ever to fear, nothing ever to be worried about. The peace was just and that lasted for a couple of years, no matter what was happening. Soon I was near to divorce as we've ever been. In those days it was an incredibly stressful time for me and for her and for, but it was still. It was like this peace was still there, no matter what. Just trying to get up in the morning was a chore, just to try to get up in the morning and go face the world and go teach and do the various things, but this peace was just with me.

Speaker 2: 26:17

What's really ironic to me, kara, was it wasn't until something like 23 years later, our daughter, jess, brought a book home that she'd read, titled the Power of Now by Eckhart Tall. I picked that book up one evening, and I started reading first few pages, and he was describing exactly what happened to me. He was describing what had happened to him, though, and that he had suffered from depression and incredible anxiety for most of his life Up until that point. I think he's in his early 20s, and he went to bed one night, kara did. He said I can't stand to live with myself anymore, and then he started thinking who is this self that I can't stand to live with? And that night he was transformed. The next morning, when he woke up, he was an enlightened being. That's the term that they use for this thing. I didn't realize that. I didn't have a clue, which is good, actually, in a way, but reading about his account it's like, oh my goodness, that's exactly.

Speaker 2: 27:28

And he came as close to anyone to putting what I experienced into words, this feeling of had oneness with whatever you want to call it being the great mystery I love. I'm reading, or I read, a book just recently, the Soul of the Indian by Charles Eastman. It's an interpretation and he was born and raised Native American, but he talks about how they approach the great mystery and they go there for a couple of days to be alone and in the quiet and they get all the words out. Words can't touch that. And I'm reading his accounts. I have to think that that's where they have that experience, that enlightenment, experience of that oneness with being, and so that did totally transform, totally transform me, that experience. But it wasn't, as I say, until 23 years later that I knew people even talked about that. I had never heard, actually, that I'd started reading many books by Eastern and Western Mystics and so forth, and of course that's what they talk about is enlightenment and, as Thall says, this idea of surrender, of shutting down the ego and simply surrendering.

Speaker 2: 28:49

And that's, I think, what happened to me with the cancer. It's just like you know well, this is it? I can't do anymore. I was running as fast as I could run, typical Western American, right? I mean, that's what we do. We run, run, run just as fast as we can run, and I often wondered to get where. And I'm not condemning it on saying that's what I did my whole life. But, boy, cancer stopped me absolutely in my tracks and it was a surrender. And it's a real humbling kinds of thing, because you think this could be it. You know, I mean, it's been many years that was 1999, been many years, so but those feelings that overcame me, well, I've got cancer, this could be it. And then all the things that you're going through, including the surgery I think it was. It led to an incredible surrender. Or you just, you just let the ego and everything go and you figure it's not in my hands. And then, all of a sudden, there you are, you know, at one with being. It's a wonderful thing.

Speaker 1: 29:53

I wanted to share, and I don't know if you and I have talked about this before, but at the beginning of COVID I had a similar enlightenment experience, but it lasted for all of two minutes, two to three minutes. I woke up one morning and I had just this complete feeling. Everything felt 100% complete. Everything was very neutral. It was just like there was absolutely no up or down to my emotions in any way, shape or form. It was just this complete feeling of contentment and just a real surrender, as you were talking about.

Speaker 1: 30:35

And I had been doing really starting to up level my meditation practice during that time. You know we were at home and there was just so much going on and you know. So the one of the main words that I used to get myself in that meditative state was surrender, surrender, surrender, and just would say that you know, repetitively to allow that surrendering to occur within myself. And yeah, I just woke up one morning. I was laying in bed, I opened my eyes and I was like whoa, something is really different here. But it was just. It was. It was unbelievable, it was a really beautiful feeling, but it literally lasted like two minutes and then it went.

Speaker 1: 31:17

So it's really interesting to me how you know your experience was for two years, right, and my experience was for two minutes. And I always wonder. I've wondered since then and I've wondered in hearing other people's stories some people that last for the duration of their life. But there's, there's kind of like a moment usually where people have that experience and then they move back into these other. They're normal ways of being. I mean not exactly because you're so changed by that understanding and having that sensation in your body Like it changes you forever, changes you for the long haul. But it always is interesting to me that it's like a switch in a sense that gets turned on or off. And why is?

Speaker 2: 31:59

that. I'm so happy to hear that. Kara, I was going to ask you and you know, as I've gone along, after reading Eckhart Tahl's book I started to speak a little bit more about these kinds of things. But not many people have ever come up after I talk about that or stuff and say I've had that experience. So I wonder how many people do. And I've wondered, as you are. I'm reading Eckhart Tahl. That sounds like he was just in that deep, deep state that we're talking about for several years. And then he talks in the book about how the intensity of that comes and goes and, as we're talking right now, I often thought it would be fun to visit with him about that topic of the coming and going and the intensity of those different yeah, yeah, it's interesting, it's the experience of that.

Speaker 2: 33:06

But it's amazing, isn't it? It really is, and it lets you realize, I think, as you did, that if you can, can surrender and if you can quiet. I think we're so busy in society, doing, doing, doing. We've really become human doings, and I think, reading Eastman's book the Soul of the Indian, I think it would be so nice. One can just imagine the experience of if you were living with the natural world as all of our ancestors were. Right, they were all indigenous not that long ago. It's not, I mean, it's the way. You don't have that weren't born and raised that way. Neither were indigenous peoples nowadays, actually. But I can imagine that you could be living in that state of at-oneness virtually all the time If you were in the natural world.

Speaker 2: 34:03

You were foraging in the natural world and we think, boy, that must be all they spent their time doing when I was writing Nourish, but reading in the anthropological literature, they had far more time to enjoy being alive than we do. I mean, we have had this conversation with many people about how much they have to work just to try to keep up, and Sue and I had those conversations back. We went to Australia in 91-92. We sold this house that I'd worked like a slave on and was a slave to. We didn't own it, it owned us. We went to Australia for a year and when we came back we said no more, we're going to try to get out of these loops. We're going to try to not buy an expensive place.

Speaker 2: 34:50

We end up on two and a half acres, boy, we grow steer and lambs each year and huge gardens. But the main thing, we built a very modest place because we don't want to run that fast anymore and of course we were running fast with the work. But economically, the way things are set up now, I mean we just think people have to run, run, run so fast and then do you even have the experience of the beauty, the mystery, the awe, the wonder of being alive on this planet. You know, I spent seven years working on a ranch in Colorado. I wasn't born and raised on one and I just started out my senior year hauling hay there and then worked for all the years through college and then ran the place for a couple of years. But what I want to say is I've never felt so grounded and centered as I did in those years on the ranch.

Speaker 2: 35:46

This growing plants, irrigating things were mostly done by hand. Then We'd irrigate the crops, we'd grow some grain, we'd irrigate all that grain up and irrigate it. We worked with animals. We had sheep, we had cattle. We had cattle were up on the high mountains and we'd move them roughly once a month From pasture to pasture by horseback.

Speaker 2: 36:10

I don't know what it's like to be an ant, but I used to look at the ants and I used to think I can relate totally to your seasonal cycles in the spring of growing things, in the summer growing as well, and in the fall harvesting things, and then we'd butchered hogs on the ranch which we would raise and we would make our own sausage. We hunted. It was just. It just felt so natural, just so, like I said, I've never felt more grounded and centered in my life, and that's, you know, speaking of the indigenous peoples and their links with landscapes, it's amazingly overpowering kinds of feelings and it gets you very close, probably, to those, what we've been talking about, of a next step towards surrender and enlightenment, of that.

Speaker 2: 37:08

You are one not only with that but with all, that is, with the great mystery. And I wonder, as we've broken our linkages with the landscapes we inhabit from the days when our ancestors were indigenous, to the small farms and ranches, which is really what I was on. It was a small place, you know, for a family, but it definitely wasn't the industrial kind of agriculture that we have nowadays. It was very personal many, many different plant and animal species that were being raised. I wonder, and then, to where you?

Speaker 2: 37:50

know, we live mainly in the cities and food comes from the grocery store and so forth. As we break our linkages, what do we lose? What do we lose in all that? And I honestly think some of what's happening nowadays and who knows how it'll turn out, I certainly wouldn't even try to speculate. But with changing climates, uncertain availability of fossil fuels and so forth, if it couldn't be a chance for us to have a transformation that could be really good, as horrible as it might seem, to become more grounded and centered, to reconnect with this planet and move away from our kind of technological, ecological ways of being to much more spiritually ecological ways of being.

Speaker 2: 38:42

We're a part of the web of nature. We're not perhaps so clever as we think. We are homo sapiens. Sapiens, not twice wise humans, yeah, yeah, Maybe absolutely A humility, huh, and a surrender, a surrender in that sense.

Speaker 1: 39:01

I lived on a ranch in Uvalde, Texas, for a year or so, but I frequented the ranch and helped with the management a lot for many, many years and I totally 100% agree with you it was the most connected I was to nature ever and you just learned so much. You have to go out and you've got to process, cut a tree that fell down over the road or whatever. So you go out there and you wind up seeing all of the insects that were living in that tree. You see the turks tail mushroom growing on the tree and when you cut into the tree you see it's mycelium inside, how it's infiltrated. You go to butcher a chicken and you open the crop and you see everything that they're eating and how they connected with the earth as they were eating. You go to dig a fence post right and you're digging in the soil or the rock it's actually rock but you're sitting on the ground and you're going to be visited by creatures that are inhabiting that space where you're digging that fence post, and whether it's a plant or an insect or whatnot. And then after the end of the hot day, you go jump in the river and you're going to sit there and you're going to watch the other animals come to drink, or to those that are living in the water. It's just, it's magnificent, right. It's just life unfolding before you in this very calm way.

Speaker 1: 40:43

I think you said well, I don't know, I don't know what happens. You know, with all where we move forward from here, with all this technology, I think the thing that is the scariest to me about it is the nervous system dysregulation that the majority of people are feeling, and that dysregulation is so consuming, right, it takes over so many people's lives and nobody's being taught the skills to learn to regulate their nervous system amidst all of the technology that we are being infiltrated with, and so I think that you know I've done a few different podcasts talking about nervous system regulation and tools for that, but I think that one of the teachers that I study with said the most important thing that any of us could learn to do at this point on the planet in which we're living is to learn to regulate our nervous system so that we can overcome so much of this technological barrage, and a huge piece of that is to get out in nature.

Speaker 2: 41:49

I couldn't agree more with you know, with all the technology now, phones at your fingertips 24, seven, all the things that are available on those phones from news of the day, constantly to you, to you name it. You know when do you ever let your nervous system rest?

Speaker 2: 42:08

When you let the nervous system just chill out as you say meditation is one way, but for me, going back to what you just said, simply being in nature, simply taking the time to observe, to observe like I like to do. You know, we had a huge snowstorm come through, got really cold here and stuff, but now it's warmed up again. And sitting there in the sunshine in the late afternoon and watching, just just looking, looking at the beauty of all the plants that are around the birds. It's a meditation, is it not? It's calming and quieting. You're not. You don't know what's going on in the news, what's happening politically or the wars that are engulfing the world. You're just taking that time to let your nervous system calm down, right To calm calm, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 43:02

Yeah, it's amazing, and then it can lead, as you said to surrender and to this, this enlightenment that we were talking to right, that experience of that and that incredible, ineffable peace and that oneness that can all come from that. And it's for any one of us, right, any one. It's not like it's not just for some Eastern or Western guru, it's for everyone?

Speaker 1: 43:35

huh, absolutely yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that in my initial beginning of delving into teachings on enlightenment, I had a very esoteric upbringing, so my aunt, my mother and my grandmother were always reading different things and sharing them with me. But I read the Yoga Sutra probably in 2018, and that's when I really started doing the meditation. But when I read the Yoga Sutra, I was just like, well, this isn't possible for me, right, like you read some of it and you're like this just isn't possible. This just sounds so far advanced from anywhere I could ever be right. But the reality is is that sometimes those books make it more complicated than it really is right, and as you begin to just sit in stillness and be in practice with this, you realize, oh, this isn't as far away as I thought it was. And I think the other piece of it is that is our natural state. It's not like we are going. We're trying to do something unnatural. That is the natural state, and the normal state that we're operating in is not the natural state.

Speaker 2: 44:57

I totally agree, kara, and think what you just said, how totally different what that is from the way we come to view it right. That's the notion of the perennial philosophies too that posit that the goal really of all of the some 4,200 various religious traditions that have evolved on this planet ultimately that's what they should be about is that union with the transcendent right and for everyone. Not just Eckhart Tahl talks about that quite a lot, he said, you know, echoing some of what you said, and he makes the point the ego likes to keep it that way that you know we can't accomplish that as a mere human, when in fact that's the furthest thing from the truth, that's the ultimate, as you say, the state for each one of us, and that the further notion of that is that each of us needs to find that path, to find our path. No, two of us are alike to find that path back, but I think that commonality of shutting down, all the chatter that goes on through meditation, however a person does that, and that idea of surrender, I think those are kind of elementary ideas that underlie all of this. I often think of these cultural inflections, these things that are inflected in time and space, and we come to think that that's who we are and what we are. The same with the world's religions. You know the many, many of those. I see those as inflections in time and space, but the elementary idea is what you were saying, right Is that we are at one with the transcendent. We need to wake up to that, huh.

Speaker 2: 46:44

And then when we think of some of the religious teachers and the various traditions and we think, oh, I could never do that and in reality that's what we are right. They just woke up. The Buddha woke up to that right, and Christ and so forth, they simply woke up. But I wasn't taught that way. Actually, to be honest with you, I was not trained in that way, and so I'm having this experience for a couple of years, not even under knowing what that is, because it's never part of the vocabulary. It's never and I'm not criticizing the tradition that I was raised in. It was wonderful, but that simply wasn't talked about.

Speaker 2: 47:28

It was this separation, in a sense, rather than this realization that we and all things, I like this, some of what a friend that works very closely with indigenous people in Canada says everything is their brother, you know, everything is their relative, the rocks, they're all alive, all those things. But to me it's a recognition again of that oneness that we are all a part of that transcendent and ultimately, that deep mystery, 100%. As I was teaching at Utah State, one class in particular, I used to think of that a lot, how we really are. One consciousness, you know, what's happening everywhere affects all of us, right? It's like a global consciousness. And how do you change that consciousness? Well, you have to start with yourself, right? If you can't do it with yourself, it's not gonna happen anywhere else. And then for me, anyway, through acts of loving, kindness for others, it's a way to try to share that, to be kind to other people, loving kindness.

Speaker 1: 48:38

Indeed, absolutely, amen. Well, fred, I think we're pretty much coming up on time here, so I just wanna say thank you again so very much for joining us and for sharing all your wisdom and insight and stories with us. Is there anything that you wanna leave the audience with in terms of where they can learn more about you, or your book or behave, or any last remarks that you wanna share?

Speaker 2: 49:07

Well, I'd just say thank you, kara. I think that the topics that you wanted to touch on today are of utmost importance for what's happening nowadays in the world. I certainly people have to do practical things of making a living and so forth and so on, but there's this whole other aspect of life and living a life that's grounded and centered and hopefully at peace with oneself first off, and then with all life around you. I think I just very much appreciate that you are doing this podcast and that you asked me to be here with you. Then you've mentioned nourishment and the behave program and those kind of things. Those are certainly gateways into the work that we did over the years.

Speaker 2: 49:57

Nourishment was an attempt, really. I wrote it after I retired and so I moved to the backwoods of Colorado. We were living 12 miles in on Gravel Road, off the main highway, living at the transition zone between Aspen and Conifer Forest and these great parklands of South Park, 9,500 feet elevation. When we moved there I thought, you know, I don't wanna study anything anymore, I wanna be like I was when I was a little boy, just absolutely enthralled with all the wild creatures and, of course, all the life. But I did miss. I did miss the hustle and bustle of the university and all the activity, and nourishment was a way to try to say, look, nobody's gonna read 300 journal articles or it for different kind of journals.

Speaker 2: 50:48

But maybe it could write a book that tries to summarize the essence of some of that, and so that was a chance in it. It helped me make the transition in a way to write down those thoughts and to try to put them in words. So it's a nourishment, was an attempt to do that. There is for people who don't like a book. I did do an audio book adaptation of nourishment that we finished the recording last August, so it just came out last, I think October, november, I forget when it came out and it's the essence of nourishment, but I took out some of the detail that was in nourishment and updated and elaborated on some things, including some of what you wanted to talk about today this whole business of enlightenment, and when I wrote nourishment I hadn't read Eckhart Tolle's book and so I do a lot more reflections in that last part of that, on that and as well as other issues. So those are all ways to have more, if a person wants it, on what we've been talking about.

Speaker 1: 51:55

Awesome. Yeah, I've been meaning to listen to that. As for the book nourishment, there's a lot of science in the book and so it's a very dense read. But what I also love about nourishment is that I can just go pick up nourishment and just open it to any page and just start reading and have my mind blown so you can read it front to back and get all the juicy details. Or you can also just open it up at any given page and find something that's gonna be really, really interesting. And yes, it is very specifically about animals and food and phytonutrients and grazing, but there's just so many things that are woven into it.

Speaker 1: 52:40

Well, thank you for all your work, fred, and all of the beautiful information that you've put out into the world and all the people that you have inspired. I know it's many. Again, thank you so very much and I look forward to this coming out. And I also just wanna mention to folks who might be interested in learning more from Fred if they haven't delved into it, there's YouTube videos of lectures that you've given, I believe, online, so that's one way to look at some of the where he gets more technical, into some of the research that he's been involved in in some of those talks. So thank you again, fred, and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week.

Speaker 2: 53:27

Well, kara, I'll say too thank you for all the wonderful work that you're doing and trying to talk about the kind of topics that we discussed today, and the breadth and depth that you're going into. On all that, thank you.

Speaker 1: 53:42

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. All right. Thank you, listeners. We'll see you again on the next episode. Take care Well, my friends. There you have it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Land Food Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit landfoodlifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at landfoodlifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail, tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks. Same time, same place. Bye for now.