Sometimes, when I move on all fours across the woodland floor, something in me begins to listen differently.

It is not listening with ears, exactly, although they do prick, tilt. It is not my mind listening for information, but the skin, the muscle, the blood. It’s a kind of whole-body orientation that belongs to the animal beneath the language. The one that does not ask if it’s safe,  it simply knows, or it doesn’t.

When I let this part of me lead, I do not feel like I’m moving through the land. I feel like I am  part of it,  one moving element within a larger, breathing field. My  rhythm slows. My  gaze softens. I start to feel less like a self, and more like a body. And not just any body, but  a prey body. 

Attuned. Responsive. Alive to everything.

And yet… there are no wolves here. No big cats. No bear or lynx or waiting teeth.

I live in a country,  like much of Western Europe,  that has long since eradicated its apex predators. And still, my body moves like prey.

So I find myself asking:

What happens to the part of us that is born to be hunted when nothing is chasing us?

Spiritual Dogma, Performance, and the Return to What’s Real

We thought we were walking away from control.

When we left religion, or the systems we had grown up in, we told ourselves we were free. We found breathwork, the moon, movement, ceremony. We said we had returned to the wild.

But something old came with us.

The need to perform. To be good. To belong. To have the right language, the right body, the right spiritual hygiene. We did not burn the temple. We just changed the costume.

And for many of us, especially those of us who work with the body, the sacred, or the mythic, there has been a quiet knowing: that we’re still tangled in something we didn’t mean to carry.

I have been sitting with this. Watching how even the language of “masculine” and “feminine” can become a new doctrine. How wildness becomes another product. How sacredness becomes another mask.

For most of us, the separation begins early. Not in a single moment, but in many small ones that stack quietly over time. A cry that’s met with silence. A trembling dismissed. A truth corrected. A hunger shamed. These moments, though often invisible from the outside, begin to pull us away from ourselves.

We are born wild. Not reckless, but wild in the truest sense, unshaped, whole, and fully alive to instinct and sensation. Our first movements are not performative. We reach, cry, sound, not to be seen, but because that’s what life does. We are mammals, first and always. We arrive like wolf cubs, expecting to be met.