A group of us including my two brothers and some friends from a small town in Pennsylvania had a long established tradition where we would hike into the wilderness together on a weekend, set up camp in a nice meadow, drum circle, dance naked around a fire and trance. We found ourselves in states of enequalled bliss. We were just camping out. Why would we be so happy? Why the ecstacy? At the time I did not think about it but in retrospect the answer is simple. Frankly, it was serotinin floods. As you will see, we were doing exactly what humans were designed to do, what we were designed to enjoy, to be with people, to sing and dance. We were doing what felt good. We were connecting to our natural repressed need to act tribal after a long childhood of being forced to sit at a desk under artificial lights. We were just having a get-together in the woods but it was a liberating experience. In essence, not to offend anyone, this was a holy communion. It was a sacrament to millions of years of divine mutations that had created us. Essentially it was the combination of the therapeutic value of eating good foods, the anaerobic exercise of hiking in clean air, the psychological therapeutic value of music, the love, it was all of this and the fact that it was combined that made it such a powerful euphoric experience. Simply put, we were having a party, like the kind children have everyday with just food and friendship. This is the good news: having a party, if done properly, can be very healthy, for the spirit, the mind and therefore the body. Lastly, the experience was free. It didn't cost anything.
For most of our history we were tribal. We were camping, gathering nuts or fruit from trees, making music, dancing and trancing. Metaphorically, its true, we were all living in the Garden of Eden as hunter/gatherers, just as the Amazonian Indians continue to do today.
This tribal part of history lasted for a very long time. The anthropologist Richard Nelson, living among Canadian Native Americans, explains that, in comparison to our species ancient and long history of tribal culture, “agriculture has existed for only a moment and urban societies scarcely more than a blink.” The NASA Astronomer Carl Sagan once wrote that the tribal "hunter/gatherer lifestyles have served mankind well for most of our history, and I think there is unmistakable evidence that we are in a way designed by evolution for such a culture; when we abandon the hunter/gatherer lifestyle we abandon the childhood of our species...We are now irreversibly set on the latter path (of civilized life) but it will take some getting used to."
In the context of our species long history, many of us living in civilization have very recently lost some of our most basic human cultural traditions. Generally, most people in civilization are now in less contact with nature, we have a breakdown of community and family, we eat less natural food, make less music, art, and we have less belief in anything spiritual. Yet we now know, through experiment and research, that all of these elements of tribal society had adaptive value and are proven to promote health. The reason is because these traditions are what we were designed to do after millions of years of biological evolution and thousands and thousands of years of cultural evolution. Going for a hike in the woods is healthy. Making music is healthy. Dancing and Trancing is healthy. Being social animals is healthy. Being connected to the clan is healthy. These traditions were culturally universal all around the world because they were adaptive. Cultural traditions that may not have been adaptive died out along with maladaptive culture. This constant refinement of healthy tradition created a refined cultural evolution of tribal behavior.
My major point here is this: All of these natural conditions of tribal peoples and ancient traditions of our ancestors have now become proven holistic therapies used by mainstream dieticians, exercise therapists, and psychologists. These are therapies that improve well-being. There's now Ecotherapy, Wilderness Therapy and Horticulture Therapy proving that our healthiest habitat is one of plants and nature. We have exercise therapy proving that we are designed to be nomadic hiker/gatherers. There is also art therapy, music therapy, dance therapy, proving that our traditions were healthy for our minds and therefore adaptive. We have group therapy and talk therapy proving that being social animals is healthy. We have instinct therapy and natural food diets that prove that we are designed to eat fresh food found in nature. They all just happen to be part of the culture of tribal hunter/gatherers and they all have proven track records that reveal there healing nature. This is not a coincidence.
Now before I go any further let me say that civilization was a brilliant idea. Our inventiveness is what makes us human in the first place. But, what the above information suggests is that we add natural and tribal elements into our modern lives as a way of adapting properly to our modern lives. In contrast to being in our natural human habitat and living out our oldest cultural traditions, let me tell you a story about adapting improperly to the modern world. My grandfather, Max, was an airplane pilot during the beginning of the history of aviation, when he got his brain sliced open by a spinning propeller.
It happened when he was 26 years old. He had just landed his airplane in a grassy field after a short flight and was dropping off passengers. His biographer writes that, one of the passengers, a young girl, was standing on the wing of his airplane as the wind coming from the propeller "washed her long blond hair back". To get off the airplane, the girl "jumped off the front of the wing to the grass, directly in front of the spinning propeller."
"No!" Max shouted at the girl, but the girl couldn't hear him with the loud airplane engine. Max "hurtled out of the cockpit...reaching for her as she stepped into the propeller, and the two went down into tangled legs and arms." The girl's life could not be saved and the propeller sliced my grandfather's brain open. The blade cut into his skull, down into the folds of his brain's cerebral cortex and he was lying out in the grassy field bleeding from the brain injury. He almost died, but fortunately my grandfather survived, although he was stuck in a hospital with severe memory loss, and an inability to talk.
The main point here is that my grandfather later ended up learning from his mistake of not being careful with what was, at that time, new technology. His biographer writes, " The message he received was that in the future he'd have to be more careful." Later, he began flying again with a new awareness of the danger of machinery and a new respect for new technology.
He was more careful. His "life is a chronicle of...the will to continue trying." He later held the Guinness Book of Worlds Records, for the most time spent in the air, "logging more than 50,000 hours-the equivalent of six years, twenty four hours a day." (So not only did he live but also he became one of the biggest workaholics in history)
But again, the major point here is that he changed his attitude towards technology.
In order to adapt to the new technology of airplanes, he needed to be aware of the fragile nature of his human body.
Like my grandfather, in times of exponential change we all "have to be more careful." We sometimes need to step back and look at the big picture of how we are living in an increasingly changing environment. We need to be cautious with our newly created industrial society in order to maintain our health.
Yet our civilization is amazing. Our scientific progress is magical and we now have space travel, faster computers, and better medicine. To realize our full potential we need to continue our technological progress without ignoring our natural biology and our evolutionary legacy. This is not easy because it creates a bit of a dilemma.
As the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary explains that we were born "divine mutants...designed by millions of years of evolution to live in a small band, into this Garden of Eden each human being is born perfect. But...in the social system... individuals, quickly get trapped into non-adaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot." Humans have a natural way of acting and that if we act unnatural enough we can get sick not only physically but mentally too. We need to know how to be natural to be healthy. We're sophisticated, which is wonderful, and it is what makes our species great, but in the process of creating technology and advancing human civilization we sometimes lose basic mental and physical health. Big city alienation and general depression have become the common colds of psychiatric disturbances. Suicide rates have been increasing. Just in America, over 100 million prescriptions for psychotherapeutic drugs are written each year. The ethnographic writer, Conrad Phillip Kottak, says, "Preventative health care improved during the twentieth century...But industrialization has spawned its own health problems. Modern stressors include noise, air and water pollution; poor nutrition, dangerous machinery, impersonal work; isolation, poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse."
Industrialization has "spawned its own health problems" and diseases such as cancer are statistically increasing instead of declining. Clearly this must be a result of a changing factor in our environment. In fact, research is beginning to point in this direction. Contrary to popular assumption Anthropologists have observed that many tribal hunter/gatherer cultures live to be just as old as we do in the west. For example, Richard Lee's famous ethnography of Africa's I Kung found that these hunter-gatherers have a living expectancy into their 70's, but they were not dying of our diseases. Hunters and gatherers usually die of infection and trauma, illness that western medicine can cure. Katherine Milton a physical anthropology professor at the University of California Berkeley writes that "information on the diets and health of recent and contemporary traditional peoples, both hunter-gatherers and small scale agriculturalists who eat wild foods, show that all such societies are largely free of such diseases of affluence (Heart disease, Cancer etc) Medical Doctor S. Boyd Eaton repeats "diseases which cause most of our deaths in our society are infrequent even among hunters and gatherers" He asks, "What have we abandoned and how have we changed?" If we added some of their tribal hunter/gatherer diet, exercise, environment, and lifestyle to our advanced medicine we would absolutely improve our daily health.
This is where part of my personal story begins. Like my grandfather I have received a sudden setback from industrialization. As I write this, I am 29 years old and I was recently diagnosed with a type of throat cancer that is most common in the more polluted parts of China, especially in and near Hong Kong. In the U.S. the highest rates of my type of cancer is found around Houston Texas where they have lots of petroleum processing plants. Researchers are confused. They suggest possible causal factors include the process of smoking fish, alcohol, diet, etc. Personally I believe that my cancer was at least partly caused by a toxin in my environment especially because at the time I was taking long 20 mile walks through Paris everyday where they have the highest rate of lung cancer in europe. Like my grandfather, I need to learn from my mistake and develop a new relationship with the changing technological world if I am going to be healthy. Mainly, I will have to be as careful as I can about the environment I choose to be in. I need to be careful about Babylon poisons.
When I was experiencing chemo and radiation I put these methods of living as naturally as possible, according to the lifestyle of tribal people, into practice. My family gathered around me. I took hikes into the forest as much as possible. I ate as natural as possible. I surrounded myself with art and music. I crafted this book as my own form of art therapy. And I prayed everyday. All of this is. of course, therapeutic and it increased the general quality of my life. Post treatment I continue to use it and it continues to boost my levels of energy. In fact 6 months after my radiation treatment as I use tribal cultural elements in my life, I feel healthier now than almost any other time in my life.
Tribal therapy is the simultaneous combination of all of our healing traditions, of spending time with nature and living naturally. Tribal Therapy, worked to keep our species healthy for thousands of years. Now as our industrial age progresses and we have higher standards of living, we can use all of these traditions to supplement our space age lifestyle - to fortify our progress and live longer, happier and healthier lives.
Part of my own realization of the potential of Tribal Therapy took place one day when traveling in India. While walking in the forest, I came into contact with a mentally ill monkey. He was a male, blond-haired macaque. The idea of a mentally ill monkey may seem strange, but one must realize that a monkey's brain is relatively complex, and the more complex a brain the more that can go wrong with it. There are more brain parts compared to your average animal brain and therefore more can break.
It was easy to diagnose the monkeys' disorder. He was stressed for very obvious reasons, in a situation that is quite common to anyone who has watched monkeys in the wild. He had been territorially forced out of the larger "troop" of monkeys. He was kicked out by the dominant Alpha male in a battle over females. Many species of primates are polygamous, where dominant males mate with all the females. In this case, the dominant Alpha male was physically superior to the mentally sick male. The stronger Alpha male had turned the weaker, now-mentally-ill monkey into an alienated outcast. The mentally ill monkey would sit at a distance and fume. As the troop of monkey sat together, the mentally ill monkey would ruffle the branches and shriek out of anger and stress. Every once in a while the alpha male would make love to one of the females.
The unhappy facial expression on the mentally ill monkeys' face was an obvious symptom of his stress. He had a huge, jealous, unhappy frown that seemed to be permanent. Now, the monkey was stressed out for two, simple, obvious reasons. One, he had become an outcast and therefore he has no social interaction, and two, he had no sexual interaction. Every adult monkey needs a social and sexual outlet. These are basic psychological instincts, and therefore, needs. And now because of the new development the monkey had what seemed to be an unhealthy state of stress. Later after some reflection the X-Manager of 7/11, Jen Bothell, diagnosed the macaque as a schizophrenic with elements of psychotic deviance. She suggested that we administer 50mg a day of a strong sedative, She was joking but I am sure Sigmund would take her serious.
Sigmund Freud once pointed out that we the white hairless primates would also experience mental illness if we are not able to express our most basic sexual instincts. Lately, it has also been proven that social isolation can have negative biological effects, displaying the amount of psychological pain felt from isolation.
We were designed by evolution to be social. We once lived together in tribal, nomadic groups and were permanently connected to people. We also had the many cultural traditions that are now proven to be healthy and even, as we will see, instinctive. But we have no modern day outlet for them because of our demanding schedules. We often don't have an outlet to be in nature, we don't make music anymore, we make very little art, we eat less natural food, and many of us lost faith in our belief systems giving up on meaning in life or even hope in the future. We have less access to these instinctive cultural forms that once were a part of our everyday lives and now when we get involved in these things, because we see that they heal us, we call them therapy. But, in actuality it's just being natural. It's just being balanced.
English hippies have been practicing tribal therapy for decades now in what they call free festivals. They have gatherings all over the country including places like the Stonehenge Monument and at Windsor Castle. In the book Fierce Dancing, CJ Stone interviews a woman who first saw the Windsor Festival when she was a child. Stone tells the story of how this young child first experienced the festival: "One year, she was caught in a traffic jam. It was the end of the Windsor Festival and people were pouring out of the park in hordes, all of these people with unkempt hair, painted faces, and bright patchwork clothes." The young girls conservative parents were saying, 'Look at them. What do they think they look like? They are like animals. It's disgusting. It shouldn't be allowed.'" "But the young girl, "who was about eight at the time was transfixed by the scene. She was looking out the back window entranced. They all seemed so happy. They were smiling and laughing. It was riot of color, like a carnival. It seemed to put a whole new perspective on life. Life for these people was not just a routine as dreary as the relentless tick of a clock, and burdened with the inevitable pressures of duty. It was joyous. It was a cavalcade, a spectacle. It was fun. Shed never before seen adults who were looking like they were having fun."
The English hippies were only part of the beginning of Tribal Therapy. There are also the International Rainbow Gatherings, love-ins, drum circles, New Age workshops and sweat lodges. There has been an important shift in consciousness in these forms of Tribal Therapy. Many in the counter culture have learned lessons and the emphasis has changed in the decades from drug abuse to the realization that drugs are sacred and that they should not be abused but used wisely. So now the focus is less on drug abuse and more on holistic health. Yet, it does not mean that the power of brain chemistry is denied. The ancients have something to teach us with their peace pipes, their communal wine, their holy soma, and their magic mushrooms. Yet, these psychoactive chemicals must be respected and treated as sacred.
I first came across a real, traditional, tribal, nomadic, hunting and gathering lifestyle in Thailand. It was when I came into contact with a group of sea-gypsies, sometimes called sea-nomads. These people call themselves Moken. I was in the Indian Ocean. For much of the year the Indian Ocean, near Thailand, is a crystal-clear, glass-like, sea. This allows for very easy sailing between the islands. The sea gypsies live here while fishing and gathering. They have done this for millennium.
They made much of there own possessions such as their homes, boats, but also their more artistic possessions such as totem poles and floor mats. They made music as many other hunter-gatherers have done for millennia with drums and their own human voices. They lived in intimate social groups. All of these cultural traditions of art and music making and natural elements of being socially connected and eating natural foods, were intertwined into one single system and often practiced together. For example, when I visited them on a small island there was a point of climax when drums were being pounded, women were dancing, a man was working on the design on his boat while discussing his religion, and men and women were gathered together laughing and screaming in the middle of intimate personal relationships. People were also eating freshly caught fish and fruit. It was all one system of just being natural.
Every human on planet earth had relatively recent ancestors that lived in these conditions.

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