Dear Friends (some of you really are my friends)
As some of you know, I teach herbalism, but I also teach herbal survival to classes in my home and in some universities at their request.
I will be giving a lecture on the topic very soon, and I decided to give a preamble on the survival mindset. This is what I came up with, and I would be gratefully for comments on it. Please remember this is just a short intro to several hours of teaching. Thanks for you help.
Doc


Mindset for Survival

First we decide to survive. It may be a conscious or unconscious decision, but it is a decision. Once it is made the question of “how” comes into play. A hostage needs a different set of skills to survive than a person trapped on raft at sea. A soldier alone and separated from his unit behind enemy lines will have training a sole survivor of a plane crash in the high Sierra will not possess. A hiker lost in the wilderness may only need to survive long enough for a Search and Rescue team to find them, while a person who has survived a catastrophic disaster may realize that help might be weeks away.
Yet these individuals will have on thing in common. A survival mindset.
The mindset is not the decision to continue living; rather it is the combination of determination and experience that will make survival a possibility. It varies from person to person. It includes lines of morality which may or may not be elastic. A pacifist parent might kill an attacker who threatens their child. A vegan may bend to killing a small animal for sustenance. A caspar milquetoast personality can suddenly find a fortitude of physical and emotional strength they never imagined.
Religious or spiritual beliefs can help or hinder the mindset. It can bring hope or comfort in dark moments, or it can lead the person to believe that a deity of some sort will send rescue. This can dangerous when the situation requires only personal effort to survive. (Cynics may say that god helps those who help themselves, but in my experience god hasn’t helped anyone, so I must only rely on myself or those around me.)
The survival mindset is helped by knowledge, both practical and theoretical. Training in first aid, wilderness first aid, and outdoor survival is a practical consideration for people who enjoy the outdoors. Self defense and predator awareness (human predators at least) is a must for women and children in most urban settings. SERE classes can benefit employees of multi-national corporations as well as soldiers.
Today it is my firm hope you will take these lesson on herbal survival as part of your mindset. Plants can be utilized for food and medicines during the most dire of circumstances. But they can only be useful IF you make the decision to decide and have the mindset to do so.
So students…make your decisions NOW…and let us get started.