Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #198 Mansal Denton

Episode Date: May 9, 2021

Mansal is back for round two and we have some big stuff to talk about. We get into all that he’s been up to with a book he’s writing as well as his usual Sacred Hunting work. We’re also working together on a hunt in Hawaii this August. Look for that link below. Otherwise, enjoy fam. Connect with Mansal:   Website: sacredhunting.com  Instagram: @mansaldenton  Facebook: Mansal Denton  Twitter: @mansaldenton  Show Notes:   Living 4d with Ibrahim Kareem EP 97 Chekinstitute.com Spotify Apple   Hawaii Axis Deer Hunt sacredhunting.com/island-kyle  Sponsors:   Biohm Health Find out the Micro/Micobiome of your gut by going to guttesting.com/  and use code KKP for 20% your test. Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp for some Green Juice, it’s my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Sovereignty They have revamped their flagship product to bring you PURPOSE+, it’s back and better than ever. Head to sovereignty.co/kyle to grab my favorite CBG Nooropic and use codeword “KKP” for 20% off. Four Sigmatic These homies are hooking it up even fatter than usual with UP TO 40% off select products and free shipping. Go get it fam!  Foursigmatic.com/KKP Connect with Kyle:   Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com  Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome to the show, everybody. We've got my boy, Mansell Denton, back on. For those of you that don't recognize Mansell by name, he is the guy that I have been on a couple of sacred hunts with. Absolutely phenomenal guest. And we dive deep into everything Mansell's been up to. He's writing a book. Of course, Mansell's one of Dr. Will Tegel's mentees. I guess that's how you call it. So he's drawn a lot of wisdom. If you liked last week's episode with Dr. Will Tegel, you're going to love this one.

And also check out the links in the show notes because we will be offering a few spots that are left for our hunting trip coming up in Hawaii. And of course, we'll be diving deep into that on this episode. There are many ways you can support this podcast. Leave us a five-star review. That way other people get to check it out with one or two ways that the show has helped you out in life. And check out our sponsors.

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to grab my favorite CBG supplements. Again, sovereignty.co slash Kyle. And of course, one-click it in the show notes. Last but not least, the best coffee on the planet, Four Sigmatic Coffee is absolutely phenomenal. And this episode is brought to you by it. So we've got some great

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these guys back their products with 100% money back guarantee. Love every sip or get your money back. We've worked out an exclusive deal, like I mentioned, for Four Sigmatic with this Kyle Kingsbury podcast and their best-selling mushroom coffee, but it's just for my listeners. So get up to 40% off plus free shipping on mushroom coffee bundles. To claim this deal, you must go to foursigmatic.com slash KKP. That's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash KKP. Again, only you wonderful listeners are going to get a hold of this. So get it while it's hot. And without further ado, welcome my dude, Montel Denton, back on the podcast Montsel Denton welcome

into my home and back on the show brother thank you my friend always glad to be able to come hang out with you guys you guys just did another sacred hunt out in Hunt Texas got our boy Nate and his boy Matt staying here at the house

for a few days a few nights before the hunt and a few nights after so i've been able to pick up little tidbits and fun stuff from it but i want to hear about that i didn't obviously go on this one with you guys just finished a trip to costa rica for fit for service and don't want to be gone too too many uh weekends out of the year. So she'd been gone nine days from the fam, but you know, we've had a lot going on in both of our lives since the last time you were on this show, you in particular, you know, you've had, I think 15, sacred hunts since the last time you were on the show. Let's,

let's chat about that and let's chat about your new book that's coming out. Yeah. Yeah, man, it's been a great honor to have men's trust to walk them through this process. And it's also given me a completely different perspective on what hunting is. It's one thing to participate in an activity. It's another thing to teach it. And the wisdom and the learnings

that come from teaching it are completely different. Super fun. Hell yeah, brother. So unpack some of these hunts, what you've gleaned from them. Talk about it. What's been a big difference on some of these trips, the more experience that you have, you know, obviously when we, when we, how you organize them as you take somebody who's into hunting like myself and you, and I'm, I'm saying this loosely, I want you to fill in the gaps, but you grab somebody who's got a following who's into hunting, uh, for them to reach out to their audience and then put together a hunt based on people that want to hunt with, say, myself and yourself together. So you got guided experts. I'm no expert on hunting, but I thoroughly love it and learn something each time I go.

And that's kind of how you organize these groups, and you do this full-time, right? It's not a full-time deal. This is a full-time deal, and I love, really, I love cross-pollinating and curating experiences. And so, you know, for someone like you, it's like getting to bring your gifts and your perspectives into the hunting container. You know, Matt and Nate, whom you've been staying with, they're both, they have so many gifts. You know, Matt's a Navajo hunter, so he brings a lot of traditional culture which is something that i am really focused on and he's been doing it from birth so it's just a little bit of a different perspective and nate's a chef they're both moving at and czech practitioners so we get to play with movement and things like that and it's it's it's a cross-pollination for some of these experiences

that's so unique. And obviously when you add the things that I've been constantly refining in these experiences, it becomes much more a container for transformation than just an opportunity to learn the skill of hunting. As great as the skill of hunting. As great as the skill of hunting is, there's so much more that can be taken from it. So much more to learn about life, so much more to see through the lens of hunting as a metaphor for life. And so I've added,

you know, various journaling prompts, some of which you've participated in, which can be really powerful, like just writing a love letter to an animal that you're going to hunt. So you're anthropomorphizing that this thing, you know, has a spirit and can understand and you're really imagining it in your mind's eye. You're sharing the love that you have with it. It completely changes the subconscious relationship with the act of hunting. And that's just one example. We do, you know, breath work and medicine work and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. And I particularly loved that journaling prompt because it makes it a little bit more tangible and more real. You know, like when in fighting, when you'd fight, it's not like a video game where you fight a question mark and the random character shows up on the screen and, oh, who's the next guy?

Now I go against the boss. It's not that. But people think about when you raise animals. And my wife raised a lot of animals for slaughter on the farm. And she was there to help birth some of them and then was there with the slaughter of some of them. And they'd give them names. And you think about that a lot of the time, people don't want to name their farm animals because they know they're going to use them for food and they don't want that connection.

And really the invitation that you're bringing forward is to name the animal you're going to kill and to build that relationship with them in light of the fact that you're going to kill them. Like to, to understand, like you want to harness a deep connection and reverence for the animal that's going to feed and sustain you. And I'm really dreaming into that. Like it, the moment I had written about my animal, when we went out to hunt, it was during the snow apocalypse here. It's always funny to give something like that a name. Like it almost like,

it takes away the mystical nature of it. You know, it's kind of like, oh yeah, snowpocalypse 2020, and fuck all that. When we had the worst snowstorm in 30 plus years in Texas, we were out in Hunt, Texas, about two hours west.

And when we had that journaling prompt, I mean, it hit all of us like a ton of bricks and me specifically, I started getting downloads on when it was going to happen, you know, and I knew very specifically it was going to be on the backside of a ceremony, you know, that we were, we were holding together and you were guiding us through. And sure enough, every time I went out, even if we'd see them, there wouldn't be the right shot. We were hunting on it specifically, but out there in the ranch that we attend to, they've got everything from bison to elk

to red stag from Argentina, animals from Armenia and all over Europe. And it's really cool because you can't, there's nowhere you're going to find the international level of animals like that. You know, animals literally from all over the world. And unfortunately, the snowstorm took out quite a few of them, you know, ones from India and warmer weather climates.

But all that to say, you know, this journaling prompt that seemed super simple at first, I think was the doorway into me starting to receive information around how this animal was going to present itself to me, when it was going to happen, and to be prepared for that. I just had your mentor and one of my mentors, Dr. Will Tagel, on the podcast Saturday. And one of his thesis ideas that he's really getting downloads around from his current ways of entering into altered states of consciousness centers around how nature itself is trying to bring us back into resonance with it. And that broader perspective of consciousness has been trying to get our attention for long enough. You know, and with all these awesome practices from plant medicines to breath work to the original vision quest, no food and water four days,

like the ways that we change the dial on the receiver to open ourselves up to a different spectrum of consciousness. And now what he's prompting us, he's basically saying that, you know, to open ourselves up to a different spectrum of consciousness. And now what he's prompting us, he's basically saying that, you know, nature's no longer waiting for our participation in that and no longer waiting for us to push pause on our daily lives and connect, you know, out on the vision quest

or in the sweat lodge. Nature's going to come to our doors. And that's what he was saying this snowstorm was. You go without power, you can't turn your heat on or even in reverse. He's like, only since 1968 here in Texas did we have air conditioning. That meant every single summer,

you dealt with the summer heat. So to frame like how consciousness operated around that, he was working with somebody in big oil and he tells a story in the podcast, but he said that they would wait, you know, until the temperatures dropped before they would stay, you know, at their house. He's working at some giant high rise and he's like, it's a sex day. I can go home with my wife and have sex. It's finally cool enough to make love to my wife. And so, you know, it's a funny story, but you think about that, like how nature was interwoven with us.

There wasn't as much of a disconnect. Now we've got refrigeration. We've got all these other things. And I'm talking about this many times on the podcast, even all the way to like shipping, you know, you can ship bananas and berries from Mexico and Panama year round. You always have fruit. You're not connected to the seasons in that way. But these disconnects are breaking down because of the consciousness of nature itself is reconnecting us whether we want to believe it or not. And it's going to show us a couple of things. But one of the things he's alluding to is the ability for nature to humble us in our return to the sacred hoop. And that to me is powerful medicine. And that's something that I think we can tap into on these sacred hunts.

Yeah. It's no surprise that he's my greatest mentor and teacher that I've worked with for seven years now. Just hearing you talk about that, I can see how his essence and being has kind of integrated itself through the experience because we are going on a sacred hunting experience to do essentially that, to humble ourselves, to be at the mercy of forces that are of nature, not in our control. Perfect example, it doesn't matter how comfortable a hunting camp is. You can have a lodge and you can have all these things. If you want to hunt successfully, you have to hunt at sunset and sundown,

or sunrise and sundown. And at this point in time, that means staying up late. That means waking up early. It means you have to rejig your entire itinerary and plan for the day because you're on the earth's time. And that is a level of surrender to something outside of our control, just an example of it, that we don't have in our day-to-day.

And when you're actually hunting itself, it's the greatest example I tell all of the hunters who come on a sacred hunting experience, paying attention to the wind is your major guide and because you know these animals their sense of smell is way superior to ours it's their strongest sense they're using that in order to evade predators and we have to be in communication with the wind. We have to be sensing what the wind is doing and we have to be fully capable and willing to surrender that the wind will change.

And you get into a certain valley and the wind starts whipping around. I've had hunts where I've gone three hours on a stock of a specific animal and then 20 to 30 yards from that animal, the wind switches, he smells me and he's gone. And sure, it's devastating, but it's a practice of being in relationship with nature

in the way that Will is suggesting we're being forced to do. Yeah, absolutely. We get little trickles of that and it's, I've always found, I mean, it's, it's, it's no different than, um, you know, saying yes to the challenging experience right up front. Like if you, if you have a choice to, obviously there's a, there's a surrender that can happen, um, through agreement and there's a surrender that can happen through agreement and there's a surrender that can happen because you're forced to surrender, right? And those are two different things, but ultimately the teaching is there

and there's many ways we can get to learn the lesson of surrender. But I always find it more beneficial, at least for me, the more practices that I have that allow me to surrender with grace, because I see the benefit on the other side. Like the more often I say yes to an ice bath, the easier the ice bath gets, but that also bridges into other things.

You know, like it builds a resilience in me that goes well beyond the physiological adaptation that happens from the cold or the mental adaptation that happens from being able to, to will myself into silence and stillness while I'm in freezing temperatures and my body recognizes it could die if it stays in there too long. You know, those types of practices, when we say yes to, often bring back the most benefit. You know, you don't get stronger by squatting the bar each day. You get stronger by adding more weight to it. And saying yes to showing up for back squats or for, you know that's not gonna be the most fun per se unless you learn to love that.

And you can learn to love it. Back squats, one of my favorite exercises. But to the point of hunting, you're up against different terrain. Depending, I mean, like I was hunting in Hawaii and on Big Island and some of the other islands, but Big Island alone, it's so big and there's so many different animals and locations to hunt at various elevations. And the terrain changes

immensely, you know, depending where you're at. Like it can go from like, you know, this kind of hard lava and grassy, and then it can go up to like these giant jagged boulders where you take one wrong step and you're going to tear your knee, you know, I hear it's almost like walking lunges, you know, getting through parts of the mountain. And then of course, you know, where we're at out West, um, it was pretty cool, but it was mostly like hill country, you know, there was some ups and downs, nothing crazy. And then at the same time, like hauling a, hauling a, I thought I was going to do the John Wayne shit and throw it on my back. And I was like, no, no, no, I'll take a hand with this, grab a horn, you know, and had one of the guys grab a horn. We drug it back to the little buggy and hauled it back that way. You know, and I have no problem humbling myself enough to do that so I don't come out of one of these injured. You know, it's a different scenario

without technology around and things like that. And likely, you know, depending where you're at, you're going to feel just the animal right there on the spot and not have the luxury of hauling it back and having a cable system and all these other nice things. But I say that because, you know,

each one of these hunts that I go on, there's a different terrain. There's a different environment. depending what time of year it is, we're up against the elements and those could be different. You know, Hawaii had paper thin, sick of stuff on. And, you know, I'm sweating around the clock. I'm sweating right when I get up at 5am just because it's humid and the temperature's there. And then, you know, you guys just went and it was just starting to heat up in Texas. You know, that's much different than when I was field dressing my odd dad and it was six degrees outside, you know, just totally different. But all of these things are tuning us into what's happening right now, the circadian rhythm of the terrain, there's the light-dark cycles. There's so much, like I said, I call it earth time. And attuning to that, attuning to the specific type of hunting is a completely different challenge too.

Duck hunters, they don't get a lot of credit for sitting in extremely cold ponds in December, you know, laying there waiting for birds to come. You know, sometimes hunting in the blind can not feel as action oriented, but you do that in Michigan with your hands freezing and you're trying to do archery, that's a whole different type of endurance. Then you got public land hunting for elk where you're going, you know, like I did 50 miles in a week in Idaho, just up and down mountains, up and down mountains. And the incredible thing that I found in a lot of those situations is how much that can provide a type of medicine. You know, one of my experiences when I was hunting for elk on public land like that, we were not getting great sleep in camp,

you know, in a campsite, we're going 50 miles, you know, in the course of a week. And we're, it's just so much elevation change. I'm not eating that much food. There was a moment where we had to cross a mountain and it was pure shale rocks. So everybody's kind of like slipping and sliding. I'm not scared of heights, but I'm not comfortable with heights. And I'm going around there and it's like, by the end of that shale mountainside,

I was so triggered that I got super emotional. I was questioning, why am I here? What am I doing hunting? I'm so naive. Why am I in my relationship that I'm in? Like it was just like a deep medicine ceremony. I got back to camp and I started crying. I started crying. I was emotional.

And it was like physically I was so beat down that I was open to spirit providing me with humbling. And that shows up in so many different ways. You know, at a certain point during these sacred hunting experiences, I started to notice and almost use as a, like a key performance indicator, how many men go through some type of like serious emotional experience, whether it be crying or, you know, just something really intense. And it's, it's really intense. And it's really high. It's a really high number of men that have something profound come. And, you know, there's many different specific types of medicine, but it's all of the earth. Like I always say, I'm just a facilitator.

I bring people to the greatest teacher that there is, which is the earth. Yeah, it reminds me of Burning Man. You know, like there's there it's, it's par for the course at every burn that someone that you're going to have a breakdown at least on one day. And it may not last all day. It may be as short as five minutes and maybe five hours, but at some point you're going to get fucked up, you know, and it's, and it could be, you know, a combination of recreational drugs or alcohol or,

or plant medicine or any of these things, but that's not it. It's the elements. It's the dust storms. It's the super cold temperatures at night and the super hot temperature during the day. It's dehydration. It's the amount of people that are there. And it's the whole thing. It's the container that has been set. Now, I'm not going to go back to Burning Man again with this vaccine law that they're trying to propose to people, which is in essence, the man itself. I mean, they might as well burn a giant hypodermic needle in the center of the fucking playa for what they're trying to pull off here. I don't think a lot of people are going to show up to that, but there's parallels. There's parallels between that. And I think on these, on these hunts, they can be super frustrating.

I've only hunted public land once. I did it around Thanksgiving with my buddy up in Northeastern Oregon in the town of Joseph. And it was a rifle hunt. And we didn't see the ass of one elk till the last day. And it was gone like that. No shots fired, 15 miles a day. It had snowed day one and then it warmed up and then it cooled off and there was ice on the ground. So every fucking step was a crunch. I was like, we're not going to get anywhere near these animals. And he had hunted there

most of his life and had some ideas about where to go, but public lands vast. And we're covering a lot of ground, going up, going down. And just like he said, our sleeping situation was decent, but at the same time, there were times where I broke down. There were times where I was like, what the fuck am I doing out here? This is a waste of time. I'm away from my wife and kids. I'm not going to come home with anything. And there was medicine in that experience. There was medicine in coming up short. There was medicine in understanding,

like you don't always come home with an animal, right? And then when you do get that, you know, when I was hunting in Hawaii for axis, and we're going to talk about this upcoming hunt, we have four axis deer. I was the only guy out of the whole group that didn't leave with one. Everyone else, Ben Greenfield, Peter Attia, Kyle Tierman, everyone else got an axis deer or multiple axis deer. And I got none. Thankfully, I got to eat it the whole time I was there. But going back now, I have a much deeper level of

respect for that animal. It's not easy. It ain't whitetail. Not that whitetail is easy, but it's not whitetail. It doesn't taste like whitetail. It tastes better. Everything about it's better and more challenging. So I'm super pumped for that. But I bring that up because every experience has its lessons. Every experience has its learning and every experience goes beyond the act of killing an animal. They go way beyond. It's stretching into parts of the psyche that we can point to and allude to,

but you don't fully understand it until you're in it. And still long after that, you're unpacking things. Just like making a trip to the Amazon. Long after that experience, you're going to unpack more and it's going to unfold in different ways in your life. And I think that one of the cool things about the hunt is it's legal. Like we can do that, you know, and we can bring us back into a level of harmony and resonance,

not only with nature, but with our food and what we eat and cultivating that for ourselves is so empowering. And it's something that's been lost that we can take back now. Yeah. I've had friends, to your point about unpacking over time, I've had friends who've gone through the experience and a month later, they're having a conversation with somebody and they realize mid-conversation that they didn't do anything to make the kill that they did.

It was an offering. The animal offered itself. The situation was such that he was able to make good on it. But honestly, so much of the experience is is in my judgment

and the way that I try and curate these experiences for the purpose of transformation and for the purpose of having these insights. And that's why having some type of medicine work can be so powerful as well because myself personally, living in a city, living in the paradigm that we live in, sometimes it's really challenging for me

to completely connect to the subtle teachings of nature and getting a little bit of context or perspective through some type of medicine can be super helpful. Yeah, absolutely. And to your point, I think Nate came back. He's sitting here watching behind the camera. Just jumped on his podcast yesterday, but he was talking about the necessity to tune into the land

and let the land tune you prior to the medicine and prior to the hunt itself. And it's something that I had first really recognized with Porangi, you know, working with him in Sedona. Um, and I, I'd, you know, there's been a couple of experiences, medicine experiences where, you know, the bulk of us were out there early on the land with Perongi meditating, you know, in the caves or meditating out where the old cultures had been and really tuning into the harmonics of that, of the energy field in Sedona, which is powerful. And just getting settled, you know, really, really reviewing why am I here right now? What is it that I'm trying

to cultivate? On a very practical level, what am I giving birth to? What seeds am I planting? And what am I needing more understanding and awareness around? And with that space, as we enter into the medicine space, so much more is revealed to us. So much more becomes clear. Contrasted with guys that would drive up from LA and just, hey, we're not gonna make it a day earlier. We got held up doing this. We got a little bit ungrounded. And then they show up like right as medicine's getting served

and they're on a fucking completely different wavelength. That's happened a couple of times. Obviously, you've learned from it. But of course, people aren't just showing up willy-nilly to these sacred hunts saying like, hey, all right, I'm ready to go. I got my gun. It's not like that.

But we've had to learn from those mistakes, I guess you could call them, with Sedona and other places in particular. But that idea that Will talks about so much in his books and in Walking with Bears, that there are eco-fields that exist. And the eco-fields is the harmonics of a particular area with everything there from the birds to the insects, to the plant life, to the rocks and the geometry of the land itself that holds its own resonance.

And that resonance is speaking to us and informing us constantly. You know, I forget the paper they were talking about, you know, it might've been the forest bathing article that came out, which is such a funny ass term, but I've spoken about this a couple of times before on the podcast, but they did a study in Japan where people who spent 30 minutes on a 30 minute walk, three days a week in Japan, either in a city versus in a forest. And in the city, they saw the walk improved a couple of

things, a couple of parameters, but no major differences. Whereas in the forest itself, there was a 60% reduction in depression without any pharmaceutical inputs, right? 60% drop in depression if you spent 30 minutes a day, three days a week walking through the forest. And the reason for that is plants are communicating consistently and they do it through smell with pheromones. And then of course

the energy field itself uh and that's you know some people may not may not yet be aware of subtle energy and things like that i think uh i'll link to an episode that paul check did with dr ibrahim kareem uh founder of biogeometry it's one of my favorites on living 40, but they take a three hour deep dive in a subtle energy. But point being is that the planet, you know, that's an avatar pen or pen G or Pandora or whatever. Like we think of that like, Oh wow. You know, they're connecting to their animals with their little velvet thing behind their head and they're doing all these different things. And it's like, that's our fucking planet. It's ours right now. It's always been ours. Ours is communicating constantly. Ours is conscious.

And we have the ability to step into that. What Will calls, and I think he wrote his thesis on this, eco-physics was the eco-field, how it's always engaging with us. But the eco-field of the city is different. And I was telling him about this, my tiny ass backyard in my suburb, we're planting bamboo trees and banana trees and different things like that. And it doesn't feel big enough. And then I had the remembering, as Charles Eisenstein says, that any decision made, any act that's made for the good of all is felt through the all consciousness because there's no separation. And as I had that remembering,

this hawk was circling right above me and started to cry out. And I was like, oh, fuck, just fucking floodgates, the synchronicity. But he's like, you're building your own eco field that's gonna hold resonance for your entire community the more you plant and the more your neighbors plant. And that's gonna tune people in. And what's cool is we see,

I see a ton of people in this neighborhood that all have flower gardens and there's tons of butterflies and hummingbirds and bees. And these things just show up as you do that, right? And biggest little farm, as they start to put into the land, the offering is made and the resonance is there. And you see 89 barn owls show up.

You see like all these different systems come in and form a whole ecosystem on just 200 acres. And they, in seven years, create effectively the Garden of Eden, you know, on a barren wasteland, an old apricot farm. And, you know, all that to say, like, wherever we go, wherever we hunt, we're going to tune into that field. And that has its own medicine. You don't really know it until we experience it. And even then we're just getting a taste of it. We're immersed in it, but for a short blip in time. It's not like we're going to live there for six months or something like that and really find out what Kauai is all about or really find out what the mountains of Colorado are like. One of the, the beautiful things about the, the, the experiences that I curate is that when we actually go into medicine work,

we've already spent a day out on the land and now I take everybody's cell phone. So they're disconnected from the outside world. They've just started to connect to the subtle now in nature. And sure enough, people have much bigger, like life-changing profound experiences with lower doses because they're sensitized to their natural environment and the way that i look at nature in all these different areas where we hunt it's it's akin to a lover every lover is different with different needs different desires different reflections of things and and we have to attune to each of these eco fields just as we do different lovers and one of the things that i find really spectacular is to learn and

i just follow my curiosity but learning about the traditional peoples that were on the land before anglo-settlement colonization and everything really helps to give me a sense of what language that land speaks because those people were so intimately connected with the earth they were so formed by their environment you know the Comanche who are local to this area would open up a vein on their horse's neck to drink blood to survive in the harshness of Texas and the Texas panhandle in this environment. And of course, this environment created an incredibly hardy people. And so there's this really close interplay between indigenous cultures and what the land is. And it's something that not only do I bring it into the hunts,

but I think it offers us a portal, especially for beginners who don't fully know how to connect with the subtle energies of the plants, of the environment, of the mountains, et cetera, gives kind of a portal into those realms. And of course, just feeling and taking the time to feel what it is like to be in a place is so powerful too. And when we go to Hawaii, that'll be something that we focus on upon arriving before we even get to the hunting. It's just like a lover. You got to build the trust.

You got to build the relationship before you start to negotiate the give and take. Yeah, absolutely. You don't just show give and take. Yeah, absolutely. You don't just show up and whip it out. There's a caressing and a tuning in for sure. You got a book that you've been writing and rewriting for some time now. Unpack that for me. Tell me what it's about.

I know nothing yet. I think you mentioned it briefly on the last podcast, but bring us up to date on what you're trying to harness with this. You know, I've read a lot of books. I get paid to read. I enjoy reading. And a lot of my favorite books have been recommendations from you. So I know like what you're tracking is the stuff that I'm really into. And I know that this has been, all the books that we read influence what we teach and what you're writing is a lot of what you've learned and alchemized and want to teach now.

So unpack that for me, brother. Yeah, well, when I think about all that hunting has provided me in the way that I do it, I want to provide something for people to get the sense of what it is, but I want to do it in a way that they feel. And for much of my life, and I think the current paradigm is is very oriented toward the mind and and having uh intellectual arguments and studies and all that stuff and that's great and that has a place but especially with nature and my relationship with it it is so heavily feeling based and so oriented in how that connection, that reverence, et cetera,

creates a feeling of being at home. And similar to Boyd Vardy's book and how it's short, it's stories, but it feels so good, right? You read it and you just feel good as you read it. And that's really what I wanted to create. I wanted to take not just my stories of hunting, but also the stories of so many of the participants who have gotten to shepherd through the experience. I've gotten to learn from their experience in our own way, that has been, yes, something that I want to share with others. And we're storytelling creatures. The first stories that were ever told by our species before we were verbal creatures was the story of a footprint in the mud. It was a story that was told of an animal walking this way and then running this way

and we're starting to piece together what this animal is doing. That's a story. And that's what I wanted to create with the book is stories and parables that provide context, uh, for us to, to, to view our own life. And, you know, perfect example, we just went on a hunt, we got back this weekend and one of the, the men who, who participated, he, uh, the first night he shot an animal and he witnessed the guts hanging out of this animal on a shot that wasn't a perfect shot. And they tried to track it and they lost it and they couldn't find it at night.

And he has this experience of Friday night of the low of the lows. I could tell in his body language, I kind of wanted to coach him through it and be empathetic and recognize that there was a lesson in there specifically for him. And that the only way to reconcile could be to just be present to that teaching. Sure enough, the next morning they go out, they're trying to find the animal and they find him. He finds it specifically. And he has this elation and this joy. And I shared with him, you cannot have that joy and that elation of finding the animal if you don't have the despair of the night before. And so these lessons start to become evident with people who participate in the experiences. it's knowledge, it's wisdom that many of us are,

we have a relationship with the wisdom or we've maybe heard of it or it's not something that's super new. My observation is when it's in the context of a story and a story that touches us so deeply as a species that has hunted for so long, it is kind of a way of sneaking in the medicine with the candy, so to speak. And that's what I want.

I want people to read the book, to listen to this podcast, to come on and experience whatever it is that they do and just recognize that hunting is a practice and it's a practice that can transform your life. It's not just a way to get meat or to get closer to your food. As great as those things are, It's a, it's a tool for transformation. Yeah. It's, it's funny you mentioned that because I, on this last hunt, like it, it, it, I had a shot, uh, the last time that I was on, I had a shot for the odd dad

pretty quickly. Um, you know, towards the tail end and it it went high over the animal's back. I wasn't really geared in. And the rifle kicked me so hard in the chest that it centered me. And I was like, okay. But now we had to track because they were gone. And through the five laps that we took over this property, I was crunching through the mental of the why.

Like, why am I here? And it was really breaking down any story that I had on the why. It was breaking down the story of, I'm gonna feed myself and be able to feed myself and feed my family and my tribe and my community. And it was like, all that's bullshit. Not this time.

This time for me was about engaging in death for life. That the understanding that those two lines are on the same line of polarity, the extreme of birth and death are one thing. They're in one circle, right? Where you draw the demarcation of a birth and a death, that's on there, but it's still the same circle, you know, and really viscerally understanding that I will participate in killing for the sake of killing to give life, you know, and it was a very, you know, Kali energy, which is, you know, something that's not, I haven't spoken a lot about it on this podcast. We've taught a lot about it in Fit for Service. But really, you know, the energy of death and destruction

to bring forth something new, you know, and it was engaging with that energy for no other reason than to engage with that energy. You know, and that to me was a first and it was like, I had to agree to that or else I wasn't going to get an animal. And sure enough, as I'm grappling with that, like, no, it has to be more than that. It has to be something else. It has to be to feed. It has to be all these things. And I could see how easy it is for me to go into a grocery store and buy

meat. Now, the bulk of my meat is consumed that way right now. You know, like I'd like to say that the majority is game meat and the majority is the animals I hunt. And that's not yet the case. You know, I don't have a freezer full of meat yet. Maybe that'll be the case one day. But even still, if that is the case and it becomes that way, it'll become that way or it won't. But that's not the point behind it.

The point is that I was being shown is I have access to that. I have wealth for that. It's not, you know, the story and the narrative that I had used before to take an animal's life was that it was like I was dependent upon killing the animal for food. And that's nonsense. I'm not, you know, I can buy, I can purchase, and there's no issues with that. And at the same time, if I could say yes and participate in that way with engaging with death's energy, that that was my experience this time. And then that's what I needed to engage with this time. And as I said, yes to that, you know, our boy Barry's like 200 yards. And I'm like, I mean, the wheels are spinning in my mind and I finally just acquiesced

and I'm like, okay, I'm going to engage. This is the reason I'm here. And boom, he whispers 200 yards. And I look right ahead and there they are. And I was like, holy shit. I mean, the timing, you know, when you think of God's timing and the inner, you don't have to call it God, but like if everything is consciousness and quantum physics understands this, it's not an airy fairy thing. Like all is God, you know, I love Paul Selig and all is ever nothing is, is a quote that I throw out often on this podcast. There's a much more visceral understanding though, when you see how things link up in the divine matrix. Like when one thing, when a decision is made in my mind,

that's not vocalized and nature's response is immediately, like to the second, within a second, a fraction of a second, you know, the synchronicity in the backyard of, no, my backyard does matter. You know, it actually does matter the bamboo that I'm putting in the ground and the oxygen that it's giving and the carbon it's sequestering actually does matter however small it is. And then ping the hawk right above me. The timing that happens with these realizations and understanding can only be the workings of an intelligent creation, an intelligent creator. And to feel those things, they're often missed in our daily. So the more time that I can give to my meditation practice, to being in nature, to doing transformative experiences like a sacred

hunt or a medicine journey or a fast, you know, any of these things that change my resonant field and allow my awareness to expand, they're unforgettable. And I can't place any one of them higher than the other. I can't say that ayahuasca is more important to me than a sacred hunt or that, you know, meditation is more important than gardening. They're all fucking tuning forks. They all matter and they all affect me in various ways that improve my life immensely. Yeah.

And what you identified, the feeling is so critical because how long have you known intellectually about this relationship with death? I mean, we're not unintelligent beings. We know that something has to die for this meat to arrive. What you got to experience, and at least what I heard from that share, is that you felt it at a different level, right? And that's the key to embodying so many of the virtues that we hope to embody is to really feel that

knowledge become wisdom. And I call that relationship with death, death medicine, which is something that is very present in the sacred hunting experiences. There's something about taking a life that is opening the portal. We're tearing through this kind of cookie cutter, helicopter, parent, protected world. Even though we're killing an animal, it is creating an opportunity for us to mentally go to those places. And even on our hunt, there was multiple instances of that happening besides that own share, which I'm glad you shared that. We hadn't connected about that. If you remember Brian, as he's thinking about his daughter who died last year and who he said comes and shows herself in the form of birds. We're sitting in a cave and this bird just comes up right behind me. And he starts bawling, crying

because of the timing showing, you know, his connection to his daughter and his daughter showing up through that bird. And man, I cannot tell you how many men have completely transformed their relationship with death, whether it's the suicide of a friend that they never fully processed or, you know, mutual friends of ours whose fathers are going through, you know, cancer and things like that, or the list goes on and on and on. It is so powerful to have a relationship with death, but here's the thing. When you have a relationship with death and you really can come to grips with it and wrestle with it and be intimate with it, what happens to life is completely amazing. Yeah, it's full expression, right? We're no longer in the safety

bubble of, and we see this in so many ways. Dr. Zach Bush talks about that, you know, our disconnect from the death as a ceremony, you know, when instead of, you know, mourning and having, you know, your dead relative either in your house or outside your house for days, you know, your dead relative, either in your house or outside your house for days, you know, before some type of burial or thing is enacted. Instead, they're, you know, pumped full of formaldehyde and fucking painted, you know, some weird, I mean, I've seen a few dead, I remember the first time I saw a dead body

at a funeral with the makeup on. And I was like, that's not, that's, that's not this kid. You know, I had a friend die. I on. And I was like, that's not, that's, that's not this kid. You know, I had a friend die. I think when he was a freshman, I might've been a sophomore in high school and I could barely look at him. And at the same time, I couldn't look away, but there was like, it was like the face paint on this thing was so unnatural. I was like, what the fuck did they do to people when they die? You know? Um, it's, it's, and even that, you know, there's a lot of closed casket funerals. Like there's, there's a disconnect and a severance from that. There's a severance within our food. You know, we see that in food ink, the, this thing shows up perfectly packaged and neatly on the counter

and it's marketed in a certain way. And it's, you know, you see, you know, grass on the front of it and you're like, oh, cool. It must've been grass fed. And it's just, you know, some feedlot fucking cow that lived in its own feces for the last six months of its life. Whatever the case is, it's marketing. It's a different thing. And if there's no act in fully understanding that, there's no reciprocity. It doesn't mean, like I said, I don't kill all my meat. I'm still buying stuff from the grocery store. I'm buying the highest level animal products that I can,

but at the same time, participating in that reconnects us to an inherent part of ourselves that's been lost in modern culture. And I'm not saying it's nefarious or the deep state did this on purpose. It's none of that stuff. It's just, there are things that we have been disconnected from and the little decisions that have been made long enough over time where we veered off course. And this is one of the ways that we can bring us back on course

is in fully integrating ourselves with the death process. Yeah, there's fantastic quote, St. Andrew. He says, if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. And this practice of hunting and being connected is just this constant practice of being intimate with that life death, you know, cycle. And I don't think it's nefarious. I don't think it's intentional, you know, minus the incentives that financially, you know, push us

down certain rabbit holes, but. Well, food is, food is nefarious, at least on the financial portion. I'm talking about the death of humans and how we handle human death. I don't know if that's nefarious or not, but it's certainly not in accordance with how previous cultures viewed death and how previous cultures were connected to death. Most cultures used to have sky burials and they would put the body on some elevated platform and the idea was that they would it would be an offering

back to the earth. The birds would come take some, the bear would come take some, the other scavengers would come take the body and it would go back to the earth. And in fact interesting side note, but you look at anthropologists, they create stories of what humans look like from fossil records, right? And oftentimes the anthropologists will see these fossils that are together in a

skeleton. They'll say, oh, it was a brutal life. Their existence was tough based on all these markings and injuries. Well, there's a good argument to be said that any full intact skeleton is somebody who would have been outcasted from their tradition or their culture. They would have been independent humans that are not part of a culture and therefore would not have been put on a sky burial

when they died. So we have this like view that life was so hard and so violent when in fact it's just a poor data set as far as what we're looking for. But anyway, yeah, the relationship with death in that regard is one of cycles. We've taken from the earth, we're giving back to the earth. And I think it's dangerous or it's unproductive for an individual to not be intimately connected to his or her own mortality.

And similarly, it's dangerous to be disconnected from the death that we create as far as our food is concerned. Because what happens when we're disconnected, you can start to see with some of these you know meet alternatives and things like that and i think there's some well-intentioned motivation behind there but i think underlying a lot of the the motivation is is a disconnect and the path to hell is paved with good intentions. But if you're disconnected from that process, then it can create poor side effects. Yeah, we got a lot of poor side effects in the world right now. We definitely have some poor side effects. What else do you got in there for, you know, in the book that you want people

to know about that might illuminate some of the teachings and the wisdom that you've gleaned from these experiences? Yeah. Well, I think first and foremost is is how much of a, almost a savior in a way, a deep, deep connection with the earth can be. And we live in a society where everybody has challenges, whether it be depression or anxiety or isolation or a lack of meaning. And to have a relationship with the earth that really treats her like a mother, like Mother Earth, that I find to be one of the most long-lasting relationships, the relationship that'll serve the most, that'll be the most helpful during significant challenges,

when you feel alone, when you feel depressed. And if you can learn to turn to her, then it is this, it's just, it's, it's another way of saying like love, like turning to love and being able to feel the, you know, the experience of unicity and oneness that comes through a psychedelic experience. The more you can really attune to nature and develop that relationship, the more that it can just come from being in nature. You don't need the big blast yourself

to the moon psychedelic experience in order to feel that oneness and unicity. Yeah, and if you start, if you can build that connection prior to the psychedelic experience, you're likely starting in a better set, a better mindset going into that. There's no, better may not be the best word,

but I've certainly come to the altar on my knees many times. And I've had challenging experiences I've spoken about on this podcast many times with medicine, but at the same time, if I can attune and come in, I've had just as many journeys where I've come in not needing a whole lot from the experience because I feel so home and interconnected with all things. And those experiences are fucking amazing. You know, like I get, I get just as much out of those experiences too,

because it's, it's the stuff that's not on my radar. It's, it's maybe not going to be so much work. It's kind of what Kalindi I was talking about, you know, prior to my 30 gram dose that made me interested in it. And he said,

when you come to a place, you know, all these tools from ayahuasca to iboga and all these things, they're, they're great healing agents and can be used with that intention and do very well in the right container with the right curanderos at the helm for healing. But at a certain point in time, you come to a place of having been healed. You know, you've done your work and then it becomes about exploration. You know, it becomes about changing perspective and opening up and becoming a

co-creator. And it's less about fixing or re-looking at different areas of the past, maybe shedding some of that baggage, which is very important work to be done. Certainly, culturally, we've been shitting on each other for thousands of years and there needs to be amendment there. But once we've come to a certain point in our lives where a lot of that work has been, you know, those mountains have been moved and we're in a place where now it's, we have one question whatever equal field we're in, feeling grounded and at home and centered in our body, having that root chakra lit and knowing wherever I'm at, I'm home. Like when you can start to feel that in the world, no matter which part of the world or the earth that you're on,

you feel at home, that's a pretty remarkable feeling to have. And entering into altered states of consciousness, whether it be breath work or fasting or any of these different modalities from that place, that too is a fantastic way to engage in altered states. And I think that's, that's something I think where we're going to see a lot more people heading

towards as you know, you see the psychedelic Renaissance going on, but also all these other modalities coming out and really being pushed to the forefront from Wim Hof and Stanislav Graf with holotropic breathwork, Anahata, shamanjelic breathwork. We're learning more and more about the caves.

Aubrey's doing a documentary on his darkness retreat for six days in darkness and the amount of DMT he was secreting on the six days, full visionary, it's pitch black and he can watch his urine come out like an electric faucet into the toilet. Like he could see everything in the room in total darkness because of the amount of DMT he was secreting, right?

So like, and maybe that's just a little teaser trailer for what's coming, but there are so many ways we can engage into shifting our consciousness. And it is so necessary right now that we shift our consciousness, that we begin to see outside the box, that we look for innovative ways to engage in our lives to contribute to the whole. And that we recognize that we're a part of the whole.

We're not king of the fucking mountain with all things under us, under our dominion. We are a part of something, a power that is greater than us. And we have the ability to influence it on a great scale, you know, but it takes the respect and reverence and humility to engage with it appropriately. And that's what nature's offering us right now. Yeah. And, and you know to bring it full circle to some of what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast this writing a letter to the animal that we'll be hunting naming that animal it's all a way of recognizing that we're not the king of the mountain and holding that tension there that tension, there's a few different ways to approach that, the death relationship. One is to say, oh, it's natural, so we're going to do it. You know,

some people don't name their animals because they don't want that connection. It's natural, we're just going to kill them. The other way is to completely avoid it. I'm going to be vegan. I'm not going to eat meat, whatever. And there's something that's so unique and beautiful about having both the poles and that tension at the same time, feeling the joy and the excitement and the pride and the grief and the sadness, same time. And that is the oneness that is our existence. We've got good, we've got evil, we've got everything that exists in the external world we have within ourself. And there's certain practices that allow you to experience that. And nature is for sure one of them. I forget who was on Paul Cech's podcast, but they were talking about this. To bear the cross is to hold the tension of poles and extremes. And if you look at a cross, it's head to feet,

positive, negative, it's left to right. And the very center of that is right where our heart is. It's right in that middle center chakra, you know, where the seat of the soul lies. And to be able to hold that and bear the cross is the ability to see through the illusion of polarity. It's the ability to see through good and evil, to see as God sees, you know, and that's, that's a really, I don't, I haven't mastered that yet. There's been moments in time where I felt that and what you're speaking to, you know, the, in the, in, in the specifics of killing an animal, you know, I've really felt that, you know, that was, that was a big piece in my last, I didn't know whether to fr freaking cheer or burst out into tears. Like I felt like if I was like, yeah, I would have been like, yeah, you know, like with a whimper attached to it. Cause I had all the fucking feels all at once simultaneously. And there's very few experiences in life that can grant us that, that can give us access to that. And bringing up Will again, one of the things he talked about on our podcast

was that these experiences are sensual. They're beyond the intellect. The intellect is engaged, but it's beyond that. Paul Cech talks about Ken Wilber a lot with spiral dynamics. And when we traverse the planes of consciousness, if we do it correctly, When we traverse the planes of consciousness, if we do it correctly, we don't jump and ignore everything that comes below that.

They're fully integrated. It's integral. We have to become integral beings. We don't just land at the top and then everything else is nullified. We land at the top and everything that came before it is integrated into that experience, which would include the mental, the emotional, the physical, all these other bodies of awareness that we engage with, all senses engaged.

And that's a different experience than reading it in a book or taking our word for it by listening to it on a podcast. Hopefully these wet the taste buds and give you a taste of what it could be like. So you want to experience it for yourself, but to engage in that, you know, anything, whether it's a vision quest, a plant medicine experience, it is visceral. It is sensual. All the senses are engaged and that's what makes it unforgettable. You know, I've mentioned this before, but it's so apropos. Ted Decker talks about the avocado. If you want to know the avocado and you've never had one before, I can describe it. I can paint it for you. I can describe the texture of the skin, the softness of the flesh, the taste of it, the coloring, how it goes from a dark green exterior to a light green,

like a lime green, and then a yellow on the inside when there's a big hard seed, brown seed in the middle. None of that lets you know the avocado until you eat an avocado. It's the sensual nature of eating an avocado that lets you understand the avocado. And the same goes for any of these experiences. And it's, I feel a great sense of gratitude for the work that you're doing specifically because I get to tag along with these experiences and, and, you know, bring this crew of listeners that. I don't get to do that with a vision quest even, you know, like I'm not qualified to have someone sit at a sacred site for four days, no food, no water, and be the guy that's in charge of keeping them alive. I'm not qualified for that. I'm not a black belt, you know, but to, to be able to participate in something like a sacred hunt, which is on that level, Like I said, there's no one is higher than the other. You're going to get a ton of medicine from these experiences.

It's been a real pleasure to be able to offer that alongside you. And we've got one coming up in Hawaii. Tell us about Hawaii. Tell us about the animals we're going to be going for and the terrain and the harmonics of the land, brother. Yeah. Well, I'll just start by saying it's the most fun, the most rewarding hunting experience I've ever had was Hawaii. And specifically on the island of Molokai.

Molokai is one of the not so often visited islands. It's not super touristy. In fact, it's mostly locals that live there, mostly native Hawaiians. And it is such an incredible, essentially it reminds me of like the moon or Mars. It's just this deep red earth and has unique foliage. Mesquite,

mesquite trees are everywhere. Somehow I think they were imported at some point. But these mesquite trees are everywhere. And that's really important because that is the key food source of the axis deer. So these axis deer, there's 20,000 axis deer on Molokai and about 6,000 people. So they are in these huge herds and they eat the mesquite pods. And there's a reason why people use mesquite wood and they smoke meat with mesquite and things like that it is a very good flavor and as you know axe's deer already is unbelievably delicious

so you combine their diet with mesquite and it's the best meat that i've ever had but the hunting experience itself is so unique because it's you're essentially hunting these animals that are in herds. And you don't often see that big of a herd of Axis deer in, for example, like Texas where they're free ranging. So you might see like 200 of them that are migrating every day. They migrate to water to drink like near the city and then they migrate away during the day. And so you're first trying to see if you can catch them on that migration. If you don't, then you're spotting them and you're stalking them.

And some of the most vivid memories I have are just seeing a mountain on across the Valley and just seeing these like ants crawl. You just like ants crawling along. And then I look at the binoculars and I'm like, wow, there's like 200 axes deer. And then we're on the chase, you know, we're trying to cut them off by, you know, going through all these different mountains and yeah it's just it's an exceptional experience and as you know as anyone who's been to Hawaii knows it it has a special energy and it has a close connection to the native peoples that have been there for so long and so there's different you know holy sites and and sacred sites on the island of Molokai. And something that I bring into a lot of these experiences is doing a hike in silence where we are having the opportunity to connect with the land and to really get in resonance

with the place that we're going to be hunting. So it's, yeah, it's by far my favorite experience and I'm excited to share it with the crew of good like-minded men, just like the last one. Yeah, absolutely. And ladies are welcome too. You know, we had that question before, Sarah Gustafson, Alex Ruchinsky's amazing wife and dear family friend has expressed interest in coming on the age. She's like, do women go on these? And I'm like,

not typically, but they're invited. Like, absolutely. Like, you know, I know a lot of the ones that you put together are specific for men and men's work. And that can be very powerful, but there's so much, you know, to this for, for anybody, uh, male, female, whatever you identify as in between, like it doesn't fucking matter to me. Um, we want you there. If you want to be there for the experience, because the experience is going to touch us all in different ways. And there's medicine for each of us. And a lot of the, the, the lessons that we each pick up as individuals

when shared amongst the group is medicine for the entire group. You know, Paul Chuck talked about that when we were doing his, uh, his painting workshop about a month or two ago. And he was saying, pay special attention. And we painted the first day, these mandalas. And the next day he broke them down from an art therapy standpoint. And he said, pay special attention. And we painted the first day, these mandalas. And the next day he broke them down from an art therapy standpoint. And he said, pay special attention to as I'm speaking to these other people, don't just tune out and wait for me to get to you.

Because everyone that was drawn here was drawn here for a reason. And the way the universe works, consciousness works, God works, it's by design that you're gonna glean something from everyone's breakdown. And that's been the case for me on every one of these hunts is understanding like there is medicine inherent to each person's experience.

And there's stuff that I can learn from every single person's experience. And, you know, this is going to be phenomenal. I'm super pumped for it. It's August 20th through the 24th, correct? Yeah. So those are the dates. I will have a landing page eventually, but we're going to link to your website

for the landing page as we open this up to people. And that's something I've really been looking forward to and I'm excited for, because it's been almost two years now since I've been out that direction hunting and I'm really looking forward to it I'm excited for because it's been almost two years now since I've been out that direction hunting and and uh I'm really looking forward to it brother yeah yeah I'm I'm super excited to to be back out in Hawaii first and foremost be back on the land and connect with those animals and that land but also just to be able to to you know co-create experiences with you

and bring people and the people that you bring. Nothing is on accident. I got an opportunity to meet Nate, and that led to us collaborating on things and so many relationships that have formed. It's beautiful to get to see what happens when you bring people who are of like mind, who have a desire for transformation and connection into one place together. As you

know from Fit for Service and all the facilitation that you do, it just creates some some amazing uh opportunities so yeah they can visit sacredhunting.com slash island kyle and that'll take them right to more information and some amazing pictures i'm not appropriating by by by that by that website island kyle although that does have a cool ring to it all right y'all uh thank you muscle for joining us again we'll run it back you know we're going to have many of these. This is the third of many. I don't think it's been our third episode together. Fantastic, brother.

I love you, brother. I'm looking forward to August with you. Love you too, man. Thank you.