Exploring the 12-Step Philosophy in the Wilderness
“You don’t move trees; you walk around them. No clever argument will let you “off the hook.” Try arguing with a storm? You can talk all you want, but the bottom line is you’d best find or create shelter, get your poncho on. Life is full of uncontrollable circumstance. Try controlling another’s thoughts. Try to force love, or respect from another. Wilderness is rich with metaphor. Wilderness is a metaphor for life. It is our ancestral home and it is the mother of all living things. It is also the home of our friends and our family. Wilderness is sometimes defined as the natural world unaltered by man. But wilderness is really a perception, your perception.”
The wilderness, sometimes unlike the “real world,” hosts a number of very specific and mandatory truths. Without plumbing, kitchens, beds, heaters, grocery stores, or television, you must learn to hydrate, feed, warm, provide comforts, and think for yourself, all the while organizing your daily routine to serve not only yourself, but the needs of your group. This will become your ritual, as the wilderness has its own.
As you experience the rhythm of survival on nature’s terms, you will begin to understand the nature of powerlessness and the need for manageability. This is the first of the 12 steps. Through the beauty, peacefulness, and serenity of nature, the loneliness and solitude, and the removal of societal distractions, you will embrace the teachings behind the 12-step philosophy.
While living in the wilderness, you will experience many trials and challenges. Each night, you will be given the opportunity to process with your group the way in which you lived those experiences, thus raising your awareness of self and the world around you. As part of your spiritual journey, we offer meditation groups and time for reflection, and will help you find what we call a “medicine spot,” a beautiful and powerful spot of your very own in the wilderness where you can reflect on your thoughts and write in a journal. These times of introspection give you the opportunity to explore Step three.
In order to work through Step four, you will be given the opportunity to explore your past behaviors and thoughts, with the support of your group and staff, thus taking a fearless moral inventory of yourself. If you choose, you may share your personal inventory with your group, therapist, and/or staff. This is a fifth step.
Working through the first four steps of the 12-step model brings about awareness, humility, and acceptance. Sharing ourselves truly with our community and a higher power brings about trust and support. The next step is to begin ridding ourselves of the “baggage,” or defects of character, that we carry.
One way to determine these defects of character is to assess your wilderness skills. What negative emotions or patterns do you see when you approach your skills? Do you avoid them? Do you get frustrated or angry with the process? Do you look for the “easy way out?” Are you naturally so good at the wilderness skills that you struggle to find meaning in them? Are you looking? Just as the wilderness is a mirror for our own powerlessness and unmanageability, primitive wilderness skills are a mirror for our emotional state of being.
The wilderness experience is replete with opportunities to meditate on and revisit who we were and who we harmed in our past. If you are willing and able, you may have the opportunity to explore the eighth and ninth steps with your therapist during individual sessions.
As for exploring who you are today, you will have the opportunity each evening to discuss with your group how your day went and if you achieved your personal and group goals. By living in a community of peers, we become aware of the importance of personal accountability for the benefit of the community. The tenth step consists of continuing to take a personal inventory, and when wrong, promptly admitting it.
“I only went out for a walk and concluded to stay out until sundown. For getting out, I discovered that I was really going in.”
-Robert Frost