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Back in 1980 my friends and I built a shack in the deep coast range mountains out of Coos Bay Oregon… We noticed that it took a full week for our minds, our bodies, our beings to settle into life in the forest. We were hunting and gathering food, there was constant danger of injury, being charged by elk, drowning, and a brush with Bigfoot.

We became like the animals. We smelled like the animals. We felt the heat in the summer and the driving rain in the winter. We didn’t see a television for six months at a time.

Every now-and-then we’d take the truck to the University of Oregon in Eugene where we visited the girls and restocked our pot supplies. As we entered the city we’d literally feel the electrical energy. Power lines, noise, Yuppie assholes.

Before, our minds had been quiet and open to absorb every bit of information you need to live and hunt in the woods. What we felt is that as we entered the city we had to put up a mental wall, to shield us from the overload of stimulation. Most people go through their entire life in that condition and know nothing different. Later, when we returned to our shack in the woods it took another few days to decompress.

…

Short of living like Thoreau at Walden Pond, we can quiet our minds with introspective, internal martial arts. We can live in the moment, setting aside concerns of past and future… training the mind [is the] way to free it:
Yi (mind intent) leads Chi (energy), resulting in Jing (action).

— Dojo Rat