Nick Goldsmith - Rewild Your Mind Use nature as your guide to a happier, healthier life

To my boy Finn

May you always be able to find the same level of connection and sense of grounding in the present, that I have from spending time in the great outdoors.

No matter what you go on to face in life, know that the answers lay within and are never far from your grasp.

Contents

Excuse my French, but Nick knows his s***. He knows about the great outdoors, and he also knows, based on his own personal experiences, how getting out into the wild can benefit your mental health and wellbeing. As someone who has been through mental health issues myself, and who has also spent a lot of time outdoors in the military and on other adventures I can tell you that this book is on point. Its raw, thought-provoking and inspirational. Its also wise and passionate.

On every page, you sense Nicks passion for spending time in the natural world and rewilding yourself. Reading this book is like spending time in Nicks company hes always encouraging you to be in nature, and always has something to teach you. Nick and I are both former Royal Marine Commandos, and we met more than ten years ago in the jungles of Belize on exercise. I cant think of another former Marine who loves being in the wild as much as Nick does. For years, Nick has been keeping me informed about the new life he has built for himself in nature, which has been great to see. All his best stories, his deep knowledge and his insight are in these pages, which will teach you how to thrive in nature and, even more importantly, how to enhance your health and wellbeing.

As Marines, we demonstrated a Commando spirit every day. That same spirit runs through this book from cover to cover courage, determination, unselfishness and cheerfulness in the face of adversity. And always being able to find the silver lining in a situation. The great outdoors also teaches you that. This book is for anyone and everyone who wants to get back to nature, and to feel happier and healthier. And I think that must be all of us.

Jason Fox
August 2022

Nature saved my life. Nature stopped me from switching myself off.

Thats not some hyperbolic first line to hijack your attention its the reality, as raw as it sounds. If I hadnt had a deep love and connection with nature, I wouldnt be here today. I would be a statistic yet another burned-out Royal Marine Commando who survived daily contact with the enemy in Afghanistan but was unable to deal with the aftermath, with the coming home part. Psychologically, war had turned me inside out. I was fried. I had reached a point when I didnt care whether I lived or died, when I felt as though I might just switch myself off.

Nature pulled me back from the edge.

That, in essence, is why Ive written this book. The fact that nature kept me alive is something Ill never forget, and which I reflect on most days. Now, I want to show you how to rewild yourself, because whatever your story it will make you happier, healthier and more at peace with the world.

This isnt intended to be a dark read. Rather, I hope youll find it an inspiring, hopeful and practical book, and that my love and gratitude for nature will come through on every page.

Im going to be encouraging you to go wild every day, as well as showing you how to forest bathe, sleep under the stars, forage for food and talk openly around a campfire, among other ways of rewilding yourself. I like to think that if you can master the outdoors, you can master yourself.

First, though, I need to share my story so you can understand why I found myself numb from top to toe, not caring whether I was here or not, and the only place that felt right for me was in the woods, immersed in the wild. By reading what happened to me, you might start to appreciate why I believe so strongly in the healing power of nature, and why I feel that, after so much darkness in my life, nature is the light.

ACTIVE SERVICE

Four gnarly tours of Afghanistan, where staying alive was a daily struggle, left me broken and self-loathing, and facing a firefight of a different kind. I was diagnosed with complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Complex because it was the result of layer upon layer of devastating, disturbing and life-changing experiences.

Every day on those tours, we fought up close with the enemy, running through cornfields and into compounds, sometimes with our bayonets fixed, and I was often the first man in. Clearing rooms in a compound, I was throwing in high-explosive grenades and using a gas-operated, belt-fed weapon system that was capable of firing 600 rounds per minute, and my heart would be hammering in my chest at more than 200 beats per minute.

Every day was dicey. Every day was kinetic. Every day we were tested psychologically as well as physically. In the broiling, hellish heat, with temperatures sometimes exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, we conducted 18-hour patrols, some of which were down the notorious, high-walled Pharmacy Road in Sangin, Helmand Province, where there was no way of escaping the enemy. We were on high alert for snipers, tripwires, booby traps and murder holes.

Know your enemy

The enemy ranged from locals who had been given a fistful of dollars to toss a grenade or fire a few rounds at us, to hardened, foreign fighters. Some of them were clearly well-versed small arms tacticians who got us into some tricky situations. Finding yourself cut off or surrounded was commonplace. Discussions about saving the last round for yourself were also common, which gives you an idea of what we had to think about before stepping out the door each day.

In the movies, someone gets shot once and they go down but that wasnt our experience. Our super-light 5.56mm rounds would often go straight through the enemy; they werent designed for killing outright, but for mortally wounding and incapacitating in conventional warfare. It would then take two soldiers to remove the injured man from the battlefield. Yet, this was far from conventional warfare. If we needed to kill the enemy outright, we had to shoot them in the head, which was made all the harder by them zigzagging as they ran towards us (which was also how we moved when running towards them).

From our encounters in the bazaar, it was clear that our enemy werent scared of us; fighting-age males would give us death-stares from their motorbikes and I just knew that we would see them again. They were fearless, perhaps emboldened by the drugs they were taking, which included heroin; they would pull the needles out of their arms, then run straight at us through the corn with their Kalashnikovs, more than happy to meet their maker. If you were captured, having your head cut off would have been a kindness the preferred practice was for a medieval-style torture in which you were skinned alive and had salt rubbed into your body.

This was up-close, visceral fighting. I survived ambushes, temporarily lost my hearing from massive explosions, watched some of my colleagues get shot right in front of me, and, on many occasions, narrowly avoided losing my own life. Returning to base, you sometimes only had a couple of hours of sleep before getting ready to go out on the next patrol, so your brain hardly had a chance to begin processing what you had just experienced.

Victims of war

Seven times in the space of six months, I carried a friends coffin. And in the same six months, the bloodiest time of the conflict for British troops, I attended or had duties at a further seven funerals. At every one, my brain was saying to me, It should be me in that box. One of our chaps was buried in the same church that he had been married in just seven weeks earlier. I watched families fall apart as the realisation hit hard that it was their husband, uncle, brother or son inside that box. I know that lessons have since been learned but, at the time, it was lads from the same unit, who had just been fighting on the same tour, who were carrying the coffins. I cant hear Mariah Careys Hero without imagining coffins going up in flames at a cremation; if that track ever comes on the radio when Im driving, I turn it off straight away.