Customer Reviews

The Wild Within: Adventures in Nature and Animal Teachings

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This is a book which requires that one actually read the dust jacket description. From the cover and the title, a reader might think this is a book about tracking skills. It is. However, the animal that Rezendes teaches his students to track is ultimately themselves.

The other reviews here already outline Rezendes' personal history, which he often uses as example in his teachings. His approach to self discovery is one I'd not encountered before, however. Yes, I know many seek quiet in the woods to get in touch with their own spirit, but this notion of tracking and stalking another animal to achieve this end is fascinating to me. Fascinating also are the connections he makes from seemingly unrelated incidents such as a bobcat's journey and that of spiritual seekers. He gives us simple exercises we can try in our own "wilderness" to help us experience the ideas he suggests.

His ability to read the signs left by the animals amazed me, and I have been one to look at such things carefully in my own forays into the wild. This book shows that there is so much I haven't seen, both in tracking wild creatures and my own journey through life.

Whether you agree with his approach or not, this is a highly readable and thought-provoking book, a refreshing change from most of the "self help" genre.

By sharing his incredible life experiences, Paul opens himself and the lessons he has learned as a way of understanding the natural world of which we are part. Paul's book has shed light on previously undiscovered and unobserved occurences in the environment that surrounds my house and inhabits my thoughts. As Paul guides the reader through the discoveries of the relationships between animals, plants and the web of life, he also sheds insight into our actions and our relationship to everything we observe, from watching your pets behaviors to reasoning the need to claim our personal space.

I have also attended two of Paul's week-long animal tracking courses. Like the book, his classes have provided a means for any interested person to observe the wilderness, and the wild within. One of my copies of this book has a lot of notes written where the lessons presented offer insight to my experiences, and lack thereof.

If you are interested in an easy-to-read, verifiable page-turner, read The Wild Within, and explore the same.

Everything Paul Rezendes shows his students is right in front of them and requires no explanation. This is an irony the wilderness student is familiar with, and so is the spiritual practitioner.

THE WILD WITHIN is a book about tracking, and a delightful record of an enthusiastic and engaging teacher. It is also a very open yet unassuming autobiography, including the author's experiences as leader of a motorcycle gang, yoga student, and now ardent outdoorsman. His spiritual insights are without denomination or zeal, and do not intrude in the slightest upon his tribute to the natural world and the wonders it holds for anyone who will walk softly and listen.

The first meeting of a stalking seminar begins when students arrive at the location to find Rezendes's jeep baring a sign that reads, "Your program has begun. You must find your instructor. He is watching you." Students poke around for quite a while, but they cannot find a man who is sitting no more than ten feet away, watching from a thicket. Even when they nearly step on him. Even when he shouts "Turkeys!" at them. Rezendes writes, "Everything we ever need to learn, if we want to know deeply who we are, if we want to know what keeps us from connecting with nature, is all here in front of us all the time. All we have to do is pay attention..." and observe how, as his students learned in this instance, how certain thought habits keep us out of our sensory awareness and separate us from our own life.

Most of us lead hurried, demanding lives, cut off from the natural world that surrounds us. The Wild Within walks us back into this natural world, into the sights, sounds, and smells of the wild. Paul Rezendes guides us gently by sharing his own personal trials, revelations and experiences. But, this is more than a book about the outdoors! From his intimidate encounters with wild animals, Paul Rezendes turns to himself and to all of us and examines who we are in the greater scheme of life. Some people may not be ready to let go of their ideas of self, preconceived notions, the control of thought, of ego and fear in order to step into the wild and the wild within, but for those who are ready, the "wild within" is waiting.

As a student of tracking I found the book to be both insightful and awakening. Mr. Rezendes is able to put into words, vision, listening, conflict and issues of self which can only make the reader able to appreciate what is actually being said in the out of doors. I truly recommend this book to all those who want to know what they are missing and the steps to get there when they step off of the pavement and want to follow the signs. Mr. Rezendes Thank You!

As a tracking instructor, I "recommemd" that each student read this book either before or after attending my class. Mr. Rezendes's tracking courses are also recommemded.

Mr. Rezendes guides the reader into a better understanding of the out-of-doors, teaches them how to see, listen and read what is usually missed. In his Chapers on "Stalking Slience", The Territory of Self", and "Speaking Without Words" he teaches that silence and seeing are but several of the requirements of 'becoming' one with the woods and with tracks.

Anyone interested in the out-of-doors or tracking should read this book and place it on their tracking book shelf for future reference,if for nothing else, to allow themselves other venues of thought.

I'm teaching an environmental psychology class and this is the best book I've found to integrate the concepts of the self, thought, and human behavior. Rezendes has a way of explaining complex concepts in a truly engaging and understandable way. My students love this book.

There are many ways to connect with spirit. Paul Rezendes tells how tracking animals can be a spiritual meditation. In the still of nature, the tracker must pay attention to every sign, every cue of the animal's tracks to succeed in knowing the animal in its fullness. As you stalk, you see, hear and feel what is normally hidden by the mind's chatter or the distractions of time. You are in the Now.

The reward for such concentration is to know the unique beauty of the animal you follow. And in this knowing, you bring into yourself the wildness of nature that is always part of you.

Through stalking meditation, Paul Rezendes shows that the wildness of the loon is love. The wildness of the moose is sharing. Bears teach appropriate fear. All nature teaches connection. Rezendes inspires you to seek wildness. Go for it! It comes to you.

Paul Rezendes's book "The Wild Within" is a wonderful book, easy to read and sometimes as casual as a hot summer's day and at others intense and deep with illuminating experiences of the searcher for truth, no matter how contradictory this sounds. His life, that of a man trying to find a way to reality if you like when it was always there all the time just waiting to be noticed once the chattering mind has been silenced, is fascinating. His years as leader of a motorcycle gang and then his route to the opposite extreme that of a yoga and ashram founder show how much suffering someone must sometimes go through to reach that impossible peak where you are already standing. Rezendes's book takes turns wandering in different directions, often through a factual journey of animal tracks and behaviour patterns and then to his own experiences with them as he is tracking them and finally to his own very deeply personal experiences in trying to live life as a human being, in the end, must. It is remarkable how the intensity of the book varies throughout, the animal connections are really amazing, such as his direct communication with the Moose and the almost scary reply of the fox to his own infringements on its territory. If you're looking for a strictly tracking book, don't read this, if its more you want, maybe. Delightful and sometimes questing.

Hard to say how much I enjoyed the book. You can see this influence in Mark Elbrochs new book and is a nice look into a tracking pioneers life. I believe he is retired form teaching tracking and like most of these older trackers, tracking has been more than prints on dirt or sign. I enjoyed it very much and I will read the copy I have more than once. Hopefully one day he will start the seminars again.