What Is the Right Amount of Feral?

I have been wondering lately: what is the right amount of feral? How much untamedness does a human being actually need?

I am asking this quite literally.

I recently arrived in a new place, in a country I don’t know, surrounded by unfamiliar mountains, plants, smells, animals and people. For the first few days, I wasn’t doing particularly well. I felt dysregulated and withdrawn, strangely unsafe although I couldn’t quite explain what I was unsafe from. I had difficulty connecting with people and wasn’t sleeping properly. There was irritability, numbness, restlessness and a peculiar sense of not being entirely inside my own body.

I was physically here, but some part of me had not arrived.

Then I went walking into the mountains, and something happened. Or it might be more accurate to say that I stopped making things happen.

I smelled the earth and lay down in the leaves. I rolled around in them, rubbing dead and living leaves against my skin and through my hair. I wanted the dew from the bushes on me, so I ran my hair through them. I wandered around looking for berries and edible plants, wanting somehow to taste the place, touch it, smell it, cover myself in it.

At some point, I howled in the forest.

None of this was planned. I wasn’t performing a grounding exercise or consciously regulating my nervous system. There was no protocol, no somatic technique, no spiritual practice. I simply stopped thinking quite so much, and my body seemed to know what to do.

Something in me wanted contact. Not an idea of connection with nature, but actual contact: skin against earth, leaves in my hair, plants entering my body, my voice moving through the landscape and the landscape entering through my senses. It felt as though my body was gathering information about where I was.

And slowly, I arrived.

What fascinated me even more was what happened afterward. I felt safer and much more inside myself, but I also found it unexpectedly easier to be with other people. Social connection, which had felt difficult only shortly before, suddenly felt natural again. Expression came more freely. I didn’t have to work so hard to participate.

Becoming more animal had not made me less social. Somehow, it had made me more available for relationship.

And that opened a much larger question for me:

What happens to a human being when too much spontaneous bodily expression is continuously subordinated to social performance?

We begin learning this remarkably early, and often through things so ordinary that nobody would think of them as particularly significant.

I remember coming back from spending time with cows as a child, smelling strongly of the farm. I loved being around them. There was nothing wrong with the experience until the human world reflected something else back to me: the smell was unpleasant and didn’t belong in the car.

There is also a photograph of me as a small child wearing ridiculously nice clothes and wildly messing around inside some kind of barrel. What I remember most clearly is my mother’s reaction to the beautiful clean clothes getting dirty.

Nothing dramatic happened in either of these moments. That is precisely what interests me.

Domestication doesn’t necessarily require some great act of repression. It can happen through thousands of tiny corrections: don’t get dirty, be quieter, don’t do that, behave, sit properly, put that down, people are looking.

Eventually nobody needs to tell us anymore because the observer has moved inside. We learn to interrupt ourselves.

Of course there are perfectly good reasons humans develop inhibition. We live among other beings, other people have boundaries, and our actions have consequences. Not every impulse needs to become an action, and something being natural does not automatically make it wise.

But somewhere along the way, self-regulation can become almost indistinguishable from self-suppression. How much of what we call civilized behaviour consists of continuously overriding signals coming from the living organism underneath it?

An animal responds to its environment with its whole body. It orients, listens, smells, approaches and retreats, rests, seeks contact, makes sounds, shakes, stretches, plays and protects itself. Its behaviour is continually shaped by information moving between body and environment.

Human beings possess immensely sophisticated reflective capacities, and I don’t think the answer is to abandon them. But something strange happens when those capacities appoint themselves as the authority over every other form of knowing. We become capable of watching ourselves watching ourselves. Before the body has even finished producing an impulse, another process has arrived to inspect it: Is this appropriate? Is this weird? What will people think? Do adults do this? Am I allowed?

At some point, the question is no longer whether we permit ourselves to follow the signal.

We stop perceiving the signal at all.

This is where I find myself returning to the idea of primal intelligence. I don’t mean primitive intelligence, irrationality, or surrendering responsibility to every passing impulse. I mean something older and quieter: the intelligence through which an organism knows how to be in relationship with its surroundings.

It is the intelligence that tells us to move when something in us needs movement and become still when stillness is needed. To seek company or solitude. To make sound, cry, play, touch, investigate. To orient toward what feels nourishing and away from what feels dangerous. It requires inhabiting the body closely enough to hear what it is saying in the first place.

And I keep wondering: how much of this intelligence have we domesticated out of ourselves? What happens when it has nowhere to go?

Someone recently shared an experience of reaching such an extreme dissonance between their inner reality and their outer performance that something eventually broke through. Their expression became almost completely animal: curling into a corner, screeching, writhing, hissing and falling into a rhythmic breath that felt almost like giving birth to something that could no longer remain contained.

I don’t want to romanticize an extreme state of distress. But something in their description felt very familiar to me: the dissonance between the inside and the performance outside had become unbearable.

That feels deeply connected to the question I am asking here.

Not simply whether humans should become more feral, but how much spontaneous aliveness a human organism can suppress before the suppression itself begins to have consequences.

At the same time, I don’t think the answer is to turn wildness into another performance. There is something almost comical about imagining ourselves doing that: rewilding correctly, scheduling our morning shaking practice, booking our forest screaming session, tracking our barefoot hours and congratulating ourselves on becoming adequately primal.

That would simply be domestication wearing antlers.

What interests me happens before performance, when nobody is watching, including the internalized watcher. The body moves because movement arises. A sound comes because it wants to come. Hands touch bark, the nose moves toward the earth, the feet leave the path. For a moment, the person who has spent decades asking whether they are behaving correctly forgets to ask.

And something very old becomes perceptible again.

There is a boundary, of course. Wildness does not exempt us from relationship. If an impulse harms another person, ourselves, another creature or the environment, discernment matters. Context and consent matter. A forest and a crowded train are not the same environment.

But once actual harm, danger and other people’s boundaries have been accounted for, a vast territory remains. I suspect many of its fences aren’t really fences at all. They are inherited instructions about what people do, what adults don’t do, what is weird, inappropriate or embarrassing. What acts will make you unaccepted to the community? The tribal acceptance runs deep as before it was so crucial to fit in, for survival.

What exactly would happen if an adult sang while walking through a city, or started dancing while waiting for something? What is so threatening about lying in the grass, climbing a tree, making strange sounds, walking barefoot, getting covered in mud, or allowing grief to move through the body in ways that are not aesthetically pleasing?

Why is the acceptable physical vocabulary of adulthood so narrow?

The opposite of domestication may not be chaos. It may be responsiveness.

A wild animal is not free because it ignores its environment. Quite the opposite. Its life depends upon an extraordinary sensitivity to what surrounds it. It notices and responds. Its wildness exists in relationship.

That is much closer to what I experienced on the mountain.

When I arrived here, I had been trying to become familiar with this place through the human mind. I wanted to understand where I was, who lived here, how things worked and what I was supposed to do. Meanwhile my body seemed to be asking an entirely different set of questions.

What does this land smell like? What grows here? What can I eat? Where can I rest? How does the ground feel against my skin? What sounds come out of me here? Can I let this place touch me?

There is a kind of belonging that begins much further down than thought. My body needed to meet the place, not merely know where it was.

And this has made me question some of the language we use around regulation itself. We speak endlessly about regulating the body, calming the nervous system, managing stress, emotions, ourselves. There is always another intervention, technique, thing being done to the organism.

But what if the body does not always need to be regulated?

What if sometimes it simply needs to be allowed?

Allowed to complete a movement, make a sound, get dirty, explore, be strange. Allowed to be an animal without turning animality into pathology, identity, ideology or another form of performance.

There is something almost unbearably tender to me about realizing how little permission this might actually require.

I keep thinking about the child in the barrel, wearing her beautiful clothes and behaving completely inappropriately.

Completely alive.

Maybe she wasn’t lacking something that needed to be taught. Maybe she was carrying information that would take me decades to learn how to hear again.

So I return to my original question.

What is the right amount of feral?

I still don’t know. But somewhere along the way, the question has turned itself inside out.

Instead of asking how much wildness a civilized human being should permit herself, I find myself asking:

How much aliveness did we have to suppress in order to become this civilized?

And what might return if we stopped interrupting it?

Primal intelligence may not be another capacity we need to acquire. It may be what has been waiting underneath all along.