Before There Were Practices

Most of my trail practices were born long before anyone called them Samatha, Vipassana, or Pranayama. I was seventeen, sleeping in a car, trying to finish high school without coming apart.

Back then, there were no teachers and no names for what I was doing. Only survival. One breath at a time.

When you don't have a home, you don't borrow calm from anyone else's nervous system. No room that reliably holds you, no rhythm that belongs to you by default. Whatever steadiness you have, you build yourself out of breath, repetition, and moments that ask as little of you as possible. Back then, it didn't feel like learning.

It just felt like discovering that the woods asked less of me than people did.

The Nine Months

I was put out on my seventeenth birthday. I'd planned to leave at eighteen. I was already working, trying to line things up. I thought I had time, but the morning of my birthday that fiction collapsed, and I was gone. Unprepared in every way that matters.

For the next nine months, I lived out of my car. I worked before and after school, I slept parked in front of friends' houses. Showered when I could, cleaned up in school bathrooms after PE. I finished high school, barely, not because I was resilient, but because stopping would have cost more than continuing.

There was no drama in it, no cinematic hunger or triumph. Just constant calculation: where to park, how to stay unnoticed, how to keep going without attracting attention, how to stay functional. When survival is the baseline, you don't look for healing. You look for whatever keeps the machine running.

What I didn't have during that time (nor before) was external regulation. No stable adult presence. No predictable emotional environment. No place where my nervous system could stand down because someone else was watching the perimeter.

So my body did what bodies do, it adapted. At the time, I didn't think of it as adaptation. It felt like tension, vigilance, a constant readiness that never fully powered down. Looking back , I recognize it was a system doing exactly what it was designed to do under early trauma and sustained uncertainty. But even the most hardened system needs somewhere to come down off red alert.

For me, that place was the woods.

Finding Ground

Once I found a sliver of stability (late in that stretch, after I connected with others who'd been in similar trouble and managed to rent a room) I started hiking again. Not casually. Obsessively. Washington, Oregon, California. Every chance I got, I was out there, often alone.

I would have said I was "getting out of my head." What I was actually doing was giving my nervous system an environment that made sense to it.

The trail didn't ask me to perform. It didn't require explanations. It didn't escalate unpredictably. There were clear inputs: weather, terrain, fatigue, hunger. Clear feedback. If I moved too fast, I paid for it. If I slowed down, things stabilized. Cause and effect without manipulation.

Out there, vigilance could soften into awareness. Attention could open instead of locking down. Breath could find its own rhythm without being told what it was supposed to do. I didn't call any of it regulation. I didn't have language for it. I just knew I could breathe differently out there. Think and feel differently.

Pattern Recognition

It was clumsy, intuitive, shaped by need rather than philosophy. But it worked.

I watched how certain people moved. How they breathed in the cold. How they stood still without stiffness. How they carried effort lightly, even when the terrain was demanding. No one explained anything to me. They didn't have to. My body was paying attention.

One woman I met spent long stretches barefoot, even when the weather was rough. At dawn she'd stand in the wind, breathing sharply, deliberately, like she was stoking a fire from the inside. I didn't know what I was seeing then. Years later I'd recognize elements of Pranayama, of Tummo, of what would eventually get branded and sold as technique. At the time, it was just something that worked.

From someone else (quieter, steadier) I learned stillness. Not collapse, not zoning out, but a kind of resting attention: the mind placed gently, like a hand on water. I wouldn't learn the name for it until much later: Samatha. Back then it was simply how he didn't waste energy.

From another encounter came observation: sensation without commentary, pain without narrative, discomfort allowed to exist without immediately becoming a problem to solve. Vipassana, though I didn't know it yet.

None of this was formal. None of it was clean. These weren't practices I was studying. They were patterns my nervous system recognized as useful and filed away for when I'd need them.

Fieldcraft, Not Spirituality

What I understand now (and didn't then) is my nervous system was building a toolkit in the absence of safety. These weren't spiritual practices. They were fieldcraft.

Ways to stay present without becoming overwhelmed. Ways to settle without shutting down. Ways to ride intensity instead of being flattened by it. I wasn't seeking insight. I was seeking functionality.

And the trail was an unforgiving but honest teacher. If I pushed too hard, my body told me. If I ignored fatigue, it corrected me. If I fought discomfort, it escalated. There was no reward for dissociation out there. No benefit to pretending I was fine when I wasn't. Presence wasn't a virtue. It was required.

Decades later, when I found myself standing on a trail locked in a standoff with a charging horse (my body lighting up with old memory before my mind could catch up) it wasn't instinct that saved me. It was rehearsal.

When I dropped into stillness, when my breath settled and my attention widened, I wasn't improvising. I was using a pattern laid down long before, when regulation wasn't optional and escape wasn't available.

Years after that, in an ICU at 4:27 a.m., when machines were failing and medicine had run out of answers, I reached for the same thing. Not hope. Not belief. Breath. Observation. Presence without expectation.

Those tools didn't come from a studio or a teacher or a book. They came from necessity, from a time when my body learned, quietly and stubbornly, how to stay here.

Inheritance Under Pressure

This is the part that often gets misunderstood. When people hear "practice," they imagine intention. Choice. A healthy person deciding to improve themselves.

But some practices aren't chosen. They're inherited by the nervous system under pressure. They emerge because something has to keep you alive, functional, oriented in the absence of support. They aren't elegant or optimized. But they're durable. And long after the original conditions pass, they remain.

Sometimes they save you. Sometimes they cost too much. Often, they do both.

Inner Trailcraft isn't about learning new techniques. It's about recognizing the ones your body already carries and understanding where they came from. Not every adaptation is a wound. Not every survival strategy is pathology.

Some are skills forged without permission, in environments that didn't care whether you thrived, only whether you lasted.

I didn't know I was learning regulation when I was seventeen and homeless. I just knew the woods gave me back something I couldn't find anywhere else.

Almost forty years later, I'm still using what I learned there. Not because it's spiritual. Because it's practical.

These aren't heroic memories. They're origin stories for the tools my body still reaches for when everything narrows. Inner trailcraft was born in parking lots and the narrow strip of trail between panic and breath. Just one body's toolkit, forged under specific conditions that may have nothing to do with yours.

Where This Thread Continues

→ Field Notes: The Dance of Memory and Mirror
A moment on the trail where the body’s memory surfaced before the mind caught up.

→ Series Zero: Act Zero: Prologue
The moment decades of unspoken practice were all that remained.

← Back to Inner Trailcraft

*Peer reflection, not therapy advice. Your healing journey is uniquely yours.*