Stalking Wolf Meets Tom Brown Jr II

For the next 10 years, he taught Tom everything he knew about tracking, stalking, hunting and spiritual wisdom. Today the core of this knowledge is available to you from Tom by way of books (Brown, 1988, 1994, and more) and classes at Tracker School. I have taken two of Tom's weeklong classes, the beginning Standard Course and the beginning Philosophy Course (i.e., spirituality course). I highly recommend them for developing your relationships with nature and the spiritual worlds.

So, what did Stalking Wolf (Grandfather) teach? Of course, I cannot do his teachings justice in just a few paragraphs, but perhaps I can whet your appetite for reading more; your local library probably has copies of some of Tom Brown's books. The book that most fully explains Grandfather's spiritual ideas is Awakening Spirits (Brown, 1994).

Stalking Wolf's emphasis on quality spirituality I have highly appreciated. His 60 years' quest for spiritual answers was spent searching out quality and what could work for everyone. His perception was that rituals, ceremonies, dancing, meditation and prayers were most often used as crutches. As crutches, they often became the goal instead of a tool to help a person reach spiritual truths. While he did start his teachings of others with a few rituals and ceremonies, he quickly stopped using them so they did not become crutches.

By far, his favorite tool was a vision quest. He considered it invaluable for determining one's own truth and one's own unique path. Without vision quests, we usually become mired in human struggles and out of touch with our truths/paths. (For more about vision quests, see Chapter 6.)