2026-09-08 - Living Letters - Returning to Our Nature Pt. 2
I recently let go of about 15 journals I had filled over the years. Before they left my life, I found a note from an earlier version of me, trying to name the philosophy underneath the life I wanted.
What surprised me was not how much had changed. It was how much I was already living what I had written, through the ways I move, sleep, garden, and stay connected to the people I love.
This Living Letter continues Returning to Our Nature. It asks whether regulation can begin with something smaller and more ordinary than we imagine. Not a complete reinvention of your life, but one change your body can actually feel.
Transcript:
Hey, how’s it going?
So, this Living Letter is a follow-up to the previous Living Letter that I posted. If you haven’t heard it yet, go back and listen to it.
I was going through some journals. I just had a huge purge of about 15 journals that I’ve written over the years, and I came across a section where I was brainstorming my philosophy on life.
A few years ago, I had written down that part of my philosophy is the return to our truest nature, the return to who we are as animals.
This helps me formulate more of how I think about my life and how I want to live my life. But it also helps me think about how I want to work with people and help people bring equilibrium back into their lives, to bring their lives back into a balanced state.
This part of my philosophy, returning to our nature, also supports our natural ability to regulate emotions and stress so that we don’t fall into cycles and patterns of chronic stress that then lead us to chronic illness.
I listed a few teachers in my last recording, but really, my greatest teacher is my own life experience, just like your greatest teacher is your own life experience.
Living here in Mexico has really taught me what it means, or what it has meant for me, to come back to my own nature.
Living here in Mexico, I have such a spacious life, where I have a lot of opportunities to spend time outside. I’m a gardener. I love plants. I get my hands dirty.
While I’m gardening, I’m moving around my yard. This isn’t quite exercise, but it is intentional movement. I lift heavy things when I am outside gardening.
But I also add exercise, right? I strength train three or four times a week. I also do cardio once or twice a week. I stretch my body. I’m a big yogi.
And so, part of returning to my nature is this piece that I live in a body. I have a body that is able, that can move, that can grasp, hold, and hang. It can squat and lift, push and pull.
Part of being an animal is also eating things that are grown from the earth, right?
Jerry and I rarely eat highly processed foods. We sometimes do. Sometimes we’ll get a bag of potato chips, but it’s not part of our main diet.
We eat a lot of beans and vegetables. I eat organic meat. Jerry is a vegetarian. He doesn’t eat meat.
But part of living, or having a lifestyle that is sustainable, is also getting up before sunrise. It is going to bed at the same hour.
My sleep hygiene is really on point. I go to bed around the same time. At 8:30 or 9:00 p.m., I am out. I wake up around 4:45 or 5:30 without an alarm clock, and I get my day started.
In this book that I’m reading, Indoor Epidemic, and also in Andrew Huberman’s work, there is this idea that morning light is so essential to allowing our bodies to naturally release the hormone cortisol so that we can get our day started.
That blue light emitted by the sunrise signals to our bodies that it’s time to go. This is why I like waking up before the sun rises, because I get that natural hit of energy.
Coffee is not the first thing I go to in the morning. I actually go for tea and water. Then, about two hours in, I have my first cup of coffee.
But another part of my nature, and your nature too, by the way, is community.
Right now, I have about two friends here in San Miguel whom I consider my best friends and whom I see frequently.
Shout out to Scott and Andrew for being my friends and my lunch partners. Sometimes we hang out beyond lunch, and that really fills my cup.
Then I have other community members whom I see every once in a while. We hang out. We have dinner.
But I also have my community back in the States, whom I get to check in with every once in a while, right? Guys like George, Brandon, and Jason. These are guys in my life whom I constantly connect with.
And so, this philosophy, which may be the body of work that I’m crafting right now, really means that I am trying to live a life that is natural to me.
I get up with the sunrise. I go to bed at an early hour. I eat healthy food. I move my body. I have purpose. I have meaning. I have community. I get my hands dirty.
There’s all this research around the gut microbiome and the bacteria found in soil, and how that’s really good for our gut, which is also good for our mental health, and how our gut microbiome supports our brain health.
But I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is a reiteration of what I said in my last recording, which is that we are not meant to constantly be chased by a bear or a tiger.
The modern tigers today are the emails we receive, the notifications on our phones, the deadlines, and perhaps the loneliness we feel.
These modern bears also consist of how our bodies respond to unhealthy foods, like highly processed foods, which then dysregulate our nervous systems and give us fewer resources.
When we have fewer resources, it’s really hard for us to regulate stressful emotions and stressful experiences.
And so, if we really want to start seeing changes in our emotional health, but also in our physical health, part of the answer is to return to our nature, to return to who we are as animals.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are hunting and gathering. No. What this means is that we imitate a life that our ancestors had.
I just named some of those things, some of the ways our ancestors lived, right?
Yes, we have the privilege of having grocery stores, where we don’t have to hunt or gather our food, but we can still eat healthy food.
We don’t need to go on long trips or excavations to find our next meal. But we do have treadmills, and we have the outdoors, where we can walk.
So I hope this encourages you.
If you’re feeling a little out of whack in your life, if you’re feeling stressed and it’s constant, and you feel stuck, what if one of the simplest ways forward is to make a small change in your life?
Maybe it’s starting to walk for 15 minutes a day.
Maybe it’s waking up 10 minutes before sunrise, going outside for 15 minutes, and letting that blue light into your eyes.
Maybe it’s asking your friend out to dinner once a month, right?
What if these small changes in your life create bigger changes for the rest of your life?
Just a thought.
Let me know what you thought, what you think. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Sending you all so much love.
