Know More, Carry Less: What Bushcraft has taught me about living and psychotherapy.

In bushcraft circles, there’s a saying: Know more, carry less. It is practical to learn enough skills, with the intention that you won’t need to haul every gadget, backup tool, or survival accessory into the woods. You can go into the woods, dressed as yourself, rather than as an astronaut going into space. It always makes me laugh the way we gear up to travel into our first home. The idea of this saying is that wisdom can replace excess material items. A reminder that within the landscape is all we need to survive, if we are prepared with enough knowledge and skill to partner with what is there already.

This truth reaches far beyond the forest for me, as I've been contemplating it over the years. The deeper I go into the world(s) of therapy, healing, and human change, the more I return to the realization: we may be carrying too much. There is excess in the field: frameworks, certifications, interventions, expectations, understandings of what therapy is, and all the "therapy speak" and psychobabble.

Carrying less creates simplicity in survival and allows for excess life force energy to flow into thriving in an unexpected way. It takes skill to simplify and live with efficiency.

Simple and efficient doesn't mean easy. This saying means simplicity, as in what are the essential principles and components of survival, and how do we cultivate the essential quintessence of being present with the gifts of life we might otherwise overlook through excess and complexity?

Underneath the psychological theories and modalities, healing tends to happen through a handful of pretty necessary, fundamental, and developmental human experiences: being witnessed, feeling safe enough to tell the truth, having emotions survive contact with another person, experiencing mutuality instead of abandonment, reconnecting to body, instinct, and meaning. Through relationships, we discover that we are not too broken or alone. Most therapeutic modalities (whether psychodynamic, somatic, attachment-based, CBT, ACT, IFS, narrative therapy, or ecotherapy, to name a few) eventually circle the same bits of knowledge and skill sets basic to a relationally efficient, and growth fostering human experience.

The language changes, the maps and interventions change; however, the human nervous system still asks the same questions at all stages of life and development: Am I safe? Can I provide someone else's safety while I am not safe? Am I alone? Can I be real here? Will I disappear if I tell the truth? Can I ever fully exist without telling my truth? Who can hear it without abandoning me? Is this relationship transactional or mutual? Can I remain connected while being fully myself?

The relationship is often what heals these disconnections because the reality is not all relationships foster our growth.

I'm not saying techniques are useless. Theory and training matters, and cultivating our skills certainly matters. A good map can prevent harm and deepen care, but I discovered through the invitation to "carry less" that modalities are less like magic spells and more like containers for profoundly human qualities: presence, attunement, curiosity, repair, compassion, and trust.

The relational-cultural therapists understood this deeply, as they uncovered the simple and efficient "5-good things." So did many indigenous healing traditions long before psychotherapy existed. Healing, and wholeness, does not happen in isolation. We change our relationship; the relationship is the forest between two people.

That’s the “know more, carry less” invitation for therapists.

We learn deeply and study widely. In graduate school, we learn to respect complexity.

But moving into practices means to carry lightly enough that we can still meet another human being without hiding behind jargon or expertise.

People are not starving for the perfect intervention; they are starving for contact that feels real and, in turn, makes them real. Just like learning to carry less in the woods, and to rely on what is there, brings a sense of confidence to a bush-

crafter, trusting that everything we therapists need is already in the room, will bring us a sense of confidence.

People are looking for a flexible nervous system, a trustworthy witness, a place where they do not have to perform their wellness. People are looking for a relationship sturdy enough to hold grief, contradiction, fear, tenderness, and becoming. People aren't paying therapists for their therapeutic relationship; they are paying to have an experience that will translate into stronger relationships with others in their lives as they learn what is essential to human relating.

I have a sense that the irony is that the more deeply rooted a clinician becomes, the simpler their work can appear from the outside; like a skilled survivalist carrying only a knife, cordage, and firestarter because they trust their relationship with the land.

The therapist does not need to carry every tool imaginable if they know how to remain present, responsive, ethical, embodied, and connected to the living reality in front of them. Modalities give a container, an orientation with which to learn these skills; however, the modality is not essential to therapy the way a sense of calm, acceptance, resonance, and energy is. (To measure this sense of C.A.R.E. in your relationships, try Amy Bank's Care Assessment.)

Many of us are overloaded with strategies for becoming acceptable humans or brilliant therapists: productivity, self-improvement, explanations for our pain, coping skills that require material items, and numerous ways to earn belonging. We require perfection of our friends and family and ourselves, when the basics of breath,

body, brain, and belonging are already ours.

If we learn to notice, be present with what is, and cultivate the awareness of the gifts that are everywhere in all moments, we will trust that we know and carry less.

The cure grows by the poison. The earth provides, just as our systems provide immense substance and wisdom, without gear and modalities. So, as you pass through the gates of complexity in bushcraft or in therapy or in life I hope you remember, "Know more, carry less." I hope you remember to set excess down, and trust in your growing wisdom and relationship.

Would you like to come outside and play with me?

Rewild your time and steward your soul,

Nomi