Into the Woods Short Reads: Books 1-5: Into the Woods Short Reads

By Holly Worton

Feeling unfulfilled? Wonder if your life could be better?

 

The Into the Woods Short Reads books are a series of 30-minute ebooks based on episodes from my Into the Woods Podcast. They're all about going into the woods of you: who you are, where you are in life, and where you want to be headed...so you can consciously create the life that you want to live.

 

In this box set of Books 1-5, you will learn:

• How to add more adventure to your life
• How to practice self love
• How to practice self care
• How to develop your inner compass
• How to let go of toxic people in your life and mind

These books are not meant to be a complete guide to each of the topics they cover. They're meant to give you quick tips on how to improve your life as quickly as easily as possible in just 30 minutes of reading, so you can spend your valuable time actually implementing the suggestions.

 

They consist of five main sections:

 

1. What you'll learn: quick bullet points so you know what to expect.
2. The main content: one short chapter that you can get through in about 30 minutes. This main chapter has the same title as the book itself.
3. Take action today: simple things you can do to take the first steps to transform your life.
4. Links: to things I mention, so you can check out the related websites.
5. Related podcast episodes: since you're reading this book, I assume that you prefer to read rather than listen to podcasts. But just in case you enjoy both ways of learning, I'm including links to related podcast episodes.

 

If you're ready to turn your dreams into a reality, click the BUY NOW button and get started on your path to happiness!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tribal Publishing
• Release date: Aug 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781911161554

Book preview

Book I

How You Can Add More Adventure to Your Life

1

What You’ll Learn

Why adventure is an important part of our lives

What is adventure

How you can add more adventure to your life—even on a budget

Lots of examples of little ways to spice up your life

How you can get started today planning more adventures

2

How You Can Add More Adventure to Your Life

Adventure adds spice to our lives. It breaks up the monotony of our routines. Adventure can add a spark of fun and increased happiness to our responsibility-filled days and weeks. Participating in adventurous activities can serve as a personal challenge that leaves us feeling a new sense of accomplishment, freedom, and confidence when we engage in them. Adventure is great for growth. It can help us to become more agile and flexible in our thinking and planning, which can improve both our personal and our professional lives. Finally, living a more adventurous life and participating in more adventures is not just good for ourselves. It can be inspiring to others, such as friends, family members, and colleagues. 

Stop and think for a moment: 

When was the last time you felt a sense of adventure in your life? 

When was the last time you did something for the first time? 

When was the last time you tried something new? 

When did you last go somewhere new? 

What is adventure?

Adventure has been described as an unusual, exciting, or daring experience. It’s doing something new that’s challenging, and that probably takes you outside your comfort zone. It’s about opening up to new experiences—or doing something familiar in a new or different way—that will leave you feeling invigorated and refreshed. 

To me, an adventure is any kind of deviation from our regular routine, our normal life, our usual way of doing things. It is something exciting, fun, joyful, and different. It could be: taking a new route on the way to work, walking down a new trail in the forest, or traveling to a new country where you have never been before. There are all kinds of adventures and all kinds of budgets for adventures. Let me repeat that: adventure can be had on all sizes of budgets. This is not about going out and spending a lot of money—unless you have it and want to. Adventure can include even the tiniest things. Exploring a new trail in the woods can bring such a sense of excitement and joy and adventure. 

How I add adventure to my life

I honestly believe that adding more adventure to our lives is essential for our personal growth and also for our personal satisfaction in life. I love my weekly and daily routines, but it’s also crucial for me to break them up because this is what gives my life that spice of adventure. 

I find it really useful to see how other people do things, so I want to share some examples of how I add adventure to my life. You can use some of these ideas for yourself, or you can use them to inspire other ideas for things that are more suited to your tastes and interests. Adventure is important to me: it gives me a sense of expansive joy that I really crave. 

Every year, I do an extensive year-end review, where I go back through my calendar and my journals for the year, and I evaluate what I loved and what I didn’t. I use this information to plan what I want to experience in the new year. Many of the things that I plan for my own life typically satisfy my need for adventure. 

Drum making. Last year, I completed a plant spirit healing apprenticeship. One of the first things that we did to prepare for that apprenticeship was a drum-birthing workshop. Now, I am not a musical person. I had certainly never made a musical instrument before, and I don’t even consider myself to be a crafty sort of person. It was a lovely experience, and I now have such a strong relationship with my drum that I don’t think I would have if I had just bought it in the store. 

This is not something I would ever have signed up for if it hadn’t been a pre-requisite to my apprenticeship. It was a huge adventure for me, because again: I’m not crafty, I’m not musical, and yet I made a drum. I’d like to suggest that you be open to experiences and adventures that you might not think you’re naturally suited for. If someone invites you to a workshop that’s totally unrelated to anything you’ve ever done, don’t say no right away—think about it and consider saying yes. New experiences and new workshops are adventures!

Shamanic journeying. In my plant spirit healing apprenticeship, one of the things we learned was how to make Shamanic journeys for healing purposes. This is an example of a kind of inner adventure because, during a shamanic journey, I am not actually going somewhere physically. And yes, things happen in my shamanic journeys that I never thought I would be doing. My suggestion to you: consider not only adventures that involve physically going somewhere and doing something new and different, but also adventures in consciousness—exciting new places you can go to in your mind. 

Navigation. Last year I traveled up to North Yorkshire to do my second NNAS Gold training (the National Navigation Award Scheme) with Mark Reid of Team Walking. Both times that I did this training, it was a massive adventure: Yorkshire is so much wilder than what I’m used to down in southeast England. Because the Gold training is an advanced navigation course, Mark specifically seeks out poor weather conditions to make it even more challenging. 

This was an adventure for a variety of reasons: I had never been to that part of Yorkshire before. I was walking in places I had never seen before, with landscapes that are very different from what I’m used to in my local area. This was also a big stretch out of my comfort zone because I’m not used to navigating in poor weather (think pouring rain and chilling wind). I’m also not used to coming down off huge, steep hills in the dark, with dangerous mine shafts and sinkholes just off our path. Taking a wrong step could have been very dangerous. 

You may or may not be up for risky things like learning how to read a map and get from one place to another in the dark with horrible weather conditions—without falling into a hole in the ground. But maybe you would like an element of risk to your adventures. What types of risks are you willing to take? What kinds of risky adventures sound like fun?   

Plant identification. Last year, I did a course on plant identification for wild food and medicine. This five-day course was absolutely fantastic. We camped in the woods for five nights. During the day we identified plants, we foraged and made dinner out of our findings, and we learned how to use these plants for healing. It was such an adventure because it was the first time I had ever taken a course where I was so immersed in the study matter. After dinner, we would go for an evening walk with one of the instructors to review all the plants we had learned each day. I loved the fact that the whole group was camping together out in the woods. It was so immersive, and it was so much fun that I’ve signed up for two more courses with that school for this year. 

This course was perfect because it combined so many of the things I love: camping, hiking, outdoors, plants, and learning new things. Think about all the things that you enjoy doing, and explore ways that you can put several of these together into one adventure.  

Television. When my ninth book—If Trees Could Talk: Life Lessons from the Wisdom of the Woods—was released last year, I hired a fantastic publicist who got me an appearance on national television in the UK. This was a massive adventure that was really outside my comfort zone: it was the first time I appeared on live TV, and it was the first time that I had talked about my book to such a