The joys of “Natural Meditation”

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert, and this video is all about how we’re meant to be in nature, and it’s speculative. I don’t know for a fact, nobody does, but we learned to meditate in post-agrarian times, times when people learned to grow food because we had gone away from some other kind of lifestyle. And if you look at the animal kingdom generally, and mammals generally, they have a certain behavioral pattern in nature that we typically do not have in our lifestyles, that we replicate in our lifestyle today through meditation. That’s what this video is about.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, if you ever look at animals in the animal kingdom, watch gorillas in the wild, or big cats, or any number of our mammal relatives, there is a lot of time spent completely chilling out. Like, I’m talking really chilling out, just taking in the moment.

And of course, in our civilized world, and I expect this was true as soon as we began to be living in communities that centered around agriculture, and then of course civilization has grown and grown and grown, and there’s now so much more activity in civilization beyond growing food. But ever since that began, we found ourselves in very busy lifestyles, and lifestyles where we had something more to think of, when to put down food, when to harvest, where to store it, who to trade with, all these things that became a part of our lifestyles that are true now in the last, say, ten thousand years that wouldn’t have been true before in our hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

And when we look at places like this, where I’ve been camping for the last several days, it is pretty easy to get into a truly, truly deeply relaxed groove. How behind me here, my two sons are paddling around on the lake with a fishing rod out, pretending that they’re catching fish, but mostly doing nothing. They’re just taking in the scenery, they’re looking at the beautiful trees and the gorgeous sky, and breathing the fresh air, and there may not be a lot of thinking going on. There’s really an ease in which we can be comfortable with the moment.

I was hiking up the mountain earlier today too, and again, although the work was hard, I could feel my body exercising. The space was so quiet, the setting in nature was so perfect and undisturbed, the air so clean, the views so good, that my mind wasn’t churning with things that I needed to do. And that’s why I think we learned to meditate 10,000 or 2,600 years ago, or however long ago we began to meditate. It’s because we were trying to find something that came more naturally to us from pre-agrarian times.

And if you can imagine that, as a way of achieving a meditative state, it’s about being in a state of awe. Awe is that positive emotion where we just go, “Ah, it’s so beautiful and big.” I might be standing over the Grand Canyon or watching a meteor shower, but there’s all kinds of little moments of awe, just gorgeous, beautiful natural settings. And if we can remind ourselves that that’s why we go to nature, is to be able to experience those little moments of awe, one after another, just going, “Ah, so beautiful, so relaxing,” and maybe that’s its own meditation. It’s a meditation on nature.

So, that’s what I’ve got to share this week. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, click the like button. If you want more of this kind of content, please subscribe to my channel. You get a new video every Sunday morning, and not always from a place as pretty as this, but maybe sometimes. Bye for now.