درسنامه اصلی

Coaching Lesson

Hi. I’m AJ Hoge. Welcome to this month’s VIP lesson. We’re going into the far deep past in this lesson. But first let’s start with the present, this winter.

This has been a difficult winter for me. In fact, most winters for me are kind of difficult. When it’s dark outside, there’s not much sun, it’s cold. I really don’t like the winter and don’t do well in the winter. I end up spending a lot of time indoors and that happened and has happened, has been happening, still happening now, this winter.

So I’ve been indoors a lot this winter. Been on the computer a lot this winter, not getting much sunlight. I’m in Japan this winter and here in the city, in Osaka, it’s usually quite gray, kind of dark most days.

And, after months of this I felt this kind of malaise. That’s a nice vocabulary word, malaise. It means tiredness or fatigue. When you have a malaise it’s kind of this low energy feeling that you’re not motivated, you don’t have much energy, this kind of malaise.

Just indoors a lot, on the computer, for fun watching videos, comfortable, warm, but every day kind of the same; not outdoors very much.

And so, little by little, day by day, week by week, I could feel my vigor spiraling downwards.

Vigor means your health energy, your physical and emotional energy, vigor right, ahh. If you have vigor it means you’re healthy and strong and energetic. If you don’t have vigor you’re kind of weak and tired. So I could feel my vigor going down, down, down, circling downwards, spiraling downwards with each week, mentally and physically.

Now, I have no real terrible problems happening in my life right? I’m indoors. I’m safe. I’m warm. I’ve got plenty of food. Everything’s fine, but just this kind of malaise.

And this got me thinking, like what’s going on? Why am I like this and why do I get like this sometimes? This happens to me a lot, especially in winters.

Then I thought back to another time in my life many years ago. I was hiking in the mountains of Tennessee in the United States. It was a winter day, and I had decided to go hiking in the winter.

Not only was it a winter day, it was a brutal day; very, very tough day, meaning the weather was terrible. It was cold first of all, cold. Not quite freezing but just above freezing, so a little above zero Celsius maybe three or four degrees, Fahrenheit probably 35-37 degrees, something like that.

Not only was it cold but it was pouring rain, not just a little light rain, pouring rains. We’d say pouring buckets of rain, right or it’s raining cats and dogs, kind of an old style idiom people used for pouring rain.

And not only that, howling wind, whoosh, super strong wind, howling. Howling is the sound that a wolf makes, “Ahh-wooooooo”. But if we say howling wind it means the wind is so strong that it makes that noise like, whoosh, right. It almost sounds like wolves howling, because the wind is so strong; so howling wind.

So I was hiking along in this terrible weather and there were no trees in this part of the mountain. So there was no shelter, no shelter from the wind, no shelter from the rain.

I had to come in and make my camp, and at that time I was not using a tent for camping, only a tarp. A tarp is just a big plastic sheet basically you use on top of you, but there’s no bottom of the tarp.

So I had to set this tarp up in the howling wind and rain, which was not easy. My dog was with me and my dog was actually quite like a little wolf. She looked like a little wolf and was kind of wild.

So I had to setup everything and try to put a plastic cover over my backpack so it didn’t get completely wet, while I set up the tarp in the wind. It was not easy.

Finally I got the tarp setup and threw my bag in there, and crawled in and my dog crawled in with me. And, for that whole night I slept on top of a pad and had to put some leaves, anything I could find, grass really. There were no leaves actually now that I think of it, only some grass and things. So the ground wasn’t so wet.

And that’s how I slept that night with the wind howling, the rain beating against the tarp and you know what? It was wonderful. It was thrilling. There was something about it that was so exciting. I felt so alive, walking through the mountains in that weather and sleeping in just the tarp, covered by the tarp so I stayed dry. But, you know, I could feel the wind coming into the tarp. I was just barely covered. I wasn’t inside a safe little bubble inside of a house.

It was thrilling! I felt alive. I had a lot of vigor. My energy was high. Mentally and physically I felt strong and alive, something about it, being out in the elements. I’m looking out a window now that’s why I’m looking over here, looking out the window outside right now, outside my apartment.

Being outdoors in that weather, it was like it brought up something wild in me, something primal. Primal means very, very old. It means something that goes deep, deep, deep inside us, inside our biology, inside our humanity that is old, old, old; older than civilization, primal.

And that weekend of hiking and camping under those conditions out in the wild like that, it turned on something primal inside of me, something powerful. The opposite of how I have felt this winter, being comfortable indoors all the time.

See, we need this vigor. We’re missing this vigor in our life oftentimes, and because of that, we can become quite bored. This is the problem with modern civilization. Now, I’m not saying that modern civilization is all bad, it’s quite good.

It’s nice that we’re not all constantly dying from diseases. It’s nice that we’re not constantly being killed by wild animals. So clearly there are some great parts of civilization, I do not deny it. I’m talking to you on video right now, a great part of civilization. The Internet, great part of civilization.

However, there is a dark side to civilization and that is that it can become too comfortable, it can become too predictable, and because it’s too comfortable and too predictable and too abstract. Abstract means just only in our minds only, not physical, not real, right you can’t touch it.

So this civilization sucks us, pulls us into this world where everything is predictable and safe, and comfortable and abstract all in our minds, you know. The Internet can do that to us as well.

Tame, tame– the opposite of wild is tame. Civilization makes us tame. The problem with that is it becomes boring. That boredom, that predictability sucks out some kind of primal energy, that vigor that we have. Because millions of years of evolution have programmed us genetically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically to be outdoors in the wild.

Think about our ancestors. Think about how tough they were, those hunter gatherers, those tribes, before agriculture, before cities. Even now there are still a few tribes in the world that live like this. Think of how tough they are.

But they endured that kind of harsh weather without all of our technology. They had to hunt for their food. They couldn’t just walk down to a store and buy it. They had to endure pouring rain, lightning storms, blizzards, right, big snow storms, terrible cold, terrible heat, bugs, dangers, wild animals, all of that and they survived, and that’s why we’re here today.

Well those genetics right, that’s still us. We’re still the same, so why are we so weak now? It’s because of this excess of civilization, the comfort, predictability, the abstraction, it makes us soft. It makes us weak. It also makes us bored.

So if you find yourself getting bored in your life, it’s because you have too much civilization, too much comfort, too much predictability. If you have this kind of feeling of malaise, right, this kind of low energy, not very motivated by much, not very inspired, kind of ehh feeling. Again, you have too much civilization, too much abstraction, too much indoors, too much predictability, too much comfort, too much modern life, not enough vigor.

So, what is the solution to all of this? So you know, maybe some people are fine, I know it’s not everybody. There are people who just love the comfort and they can just be comfortable, predictable and everything easy and they’re fine, but I’m not that way. I can’t stand it. It makes me crazy.

And I know a lot of Effortless English members, especially VIP members, you are the same, you’re a little restless. You need some challenge. You need some meaning in your life, not just always being comfortable, safe and easy. So this lesson is for you.

One of the great ways to recover that vigor, that feeling of being thrilled and alive, that feeling of strength and power in your life. That feeling of meaning, that feeling of being connected to the world, to the universe, the answer is primal. We have to go back, back, back, back, back to our ancestors.

I have talked about this in other lessons. It’s a powerful, powerful point. I want to convince you of this again, that oftentimes nowadays in the media, etc. we’re always trying to think of the future, the future, the future, but sometimes, many times the answers are actually found in our far, far past.

Because we have forgotten the wisdom of our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, even millions of years ago.

We have forgotten the wisdom of our ancestors. We have forgotten the strength and power of our ancestors. We’ve become too weak, too soft and that makes us bored, lazy, tired, sick, and fatigued and that kind of malaise. So primal, get back to your primal roots when this happens to you. I’m doing this myself right now, doing my best.

What does that mean? Number one, you have to reconnect to that past. Think about it. How did people live? I’ll give you a few ideas now. In the commentary, in our interactive mini story lessons, I’ll give you more information about this. But right now a few points then go to the commentary and I’ll give you more specific ideas.

1. One is to eat more like our ancestors.

Food is important. Food affects your brain. Food affects your mood, and of course, it affects your body. You are what you eat. This is an idiom in English and it is true, you are what you eat.

About 10k years ago humans started agriculture. We started farming, growing wheat and all these other grains and things. But, we have not evolved from that really. Our bodies are really made to be hunters and gatherers. So you need to look at, what did our ancestors eat?

Right, they were so powerful and strong, just that they survived those harsh environments. They were strong and powerful. How did they eat to be so strong and powerful? Look into that, we’re going to talk about this in the interactive lessons a little more, and I’ll talk about it in the commentary as well.

How did they eat?

What did they eat?

Also importantly, what did they not eat so much?

Our modern diets make us weak, and of course, fat, and give us diseases and all that stuff.

But we’re actually much more diseased than our ancestors. So eat, get back to eating like a caveman. Get back to eating like a hunter/gatherer, like our ancestors. That will increase your strength and power and vigor. Very important, food is super important for everything mentally, physically and emotionally, even spiritually.

1. Okay, another big one: get outdoors. I’m pointing outside my window again. Get outdoors.

The reason that that hiking and camping experience was so powerful for me is because I was out. Not just outdoors like in city, not just in some safe campground. I was out in the wild right. That kind of powerful weather, that incredible awe is the word, that wonder, that humility that you feel when you are in the wilderness and especially when nature is showing its power.

It’s a strange feeling. On one hand you feel small right, I mean the wind, the rain, and the cold you feel a little bit small, that’s humility which is good. But, on the other hand, you feel a connection, you realize you’re a part of this, that there are ancestors and us today. We’re connected to this.

This is what we’re supposed to be.

We grew up, we evolved being part of nature, not separate from it. And when we hide indoors all the time it creates that separation. Again, that’s why we lose our energy.

But when you’re outdoors, especially in the wilderness it reconnects you to that power of nature and it wakes up your own nature, your own strength, your own vigor. It wakes it up and brings it back to life and that’s why you feel so strong and powerful when you’re in those situations, when you’re outdoors.

So, eat like a hunger/gatherer and get outdoors a lot more and especially, get outdoors in even really bad weather. We’ll talk about that more in the commentary.

Finally, challenges. This is something I talk about constantly, all the time and I’ll never stop talking about it, because modern life is too easy, too comfortable. It’s too easy to be lazy.

Therefore, we have to actually voluntarily, we have to choose our own challenges. We have to choose our own difficulties; otherwise, we become weak, bored and tired, and our life actually gets worse.

But, if we choose difficult things, even though we don’t have to we just choose difficult, hard challenges, physical challenges outdoors, especially physical challenges, because we so rarely have those now, in modern life. We’re not forced to carry heavy, huge things a lot. We’re not forced to go out and hunt for our own food. We’re not forced to walk miles and miles and miles gathering food.

And so we’ve become weak physically, which affects us mentally and emotionally. So tough physical challenges are very important, but we have to seek them out. We actually have to create them. So those are three things right there…

1. Eat like a caveman/woman

2. Get outdoors, especially into nature and especially into the wild if you can and especially during bad weather.

3. Hard challenges, especially physical ones.

We’ll talk more in the other lessons. See you there. We’re gonna get primal this month.