The Mind and Emotions Are Naturally Wild and Resist Taming
Don’t just try to control or subdue your mind and emotions. Honor their wildness.
Posted May 30, 2026 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley
In The African Queen , Katharine Hepburn upbraids Humphrey Bogart by telling him that “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
Not surprisingly, Hepburn’s character is a missionary, and as such holds dear a belief congenital to Western religion that spiritual life should take us up and out from nature, that it’s the antidote to our instincts and emotions, our animal wants and sensual passions.
But the term “human nature” admits that the two are inextricably entwined. We’re a subset of the larger category called Nature, which isn’t out there somewhere, or left behind in the past, or, as Hepburn’s character would have it, beneath us. It’s in us, body and mind. “Our instincts, our motives, our biology, our basic needs, our struggles over status, resources, attachments—pure animal,” says Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses .
That pure animal's brain spent 99 percent of its developmental time in the wild kingdom—and wild things are, by definition, those we don’t control—but we never seem to tire of trying to control it, which often makes us feel like little more than a baby on the back of an elephant.
For example, one of our favorite spiritual techniques for trying to tame our wild minds is meditation , but even meditation itself has a wild origin. It arose among hunting cultures in the Himalayan foothills as a direct descendant of the stilling and centering tactics essential to all hunters, animal and human, and it aims not for control but acceptance of the force of nature that the mind truly is. It actually aims to remove controls—all our attempts to tame, suppress, and transcend the mind—and simply allow and observe it as one would an animal in the wild.
Meditators often describe the mind as a monkey or a wild horse, chattering mindlessly or running wild. And though it’s good to have some reins in hand, meditation (and mindfulness more generally) is really about embracing the untamed, galloping nature of our minds and emotions rather than forcing them into artificial stillness. It's about opening to and observing whatever we're feeling or thinking, not trying to change it, fix it, rise above it, or make it go away.
Camping out alone in the Allegheny mountains, Gerald May, author of The Wisdom of Wilderness , once lay wide-eyed in his tent while a bear prowled his campsite. He describes a fear more intense than anything he experienced even in Vietnam, and that he was completely present to it, beyond all coping, because there was nothing to do.
“I have never before experienced such clean, unadulterated purity of emotion ,” he says of the encounter. “This fear is naked. It consists of my heart pounding so loudly I’m certain the bear must hear it, my breath rushing yet fully silent, my body ready for anything, my mind absolutely empty, open, waiting. I have never felt so alive.”
Like any strong emotion, he says, fear can make you exquisitely conscious of living, perfectly aware of being in the moment. But it can only do that on those rare occasions when you don’t try to fight it, run away from it, cope with it, suppress it, or try to domesticate it. “Wild, untamed emotions are full of life-spirit,” May says, “vibrant with the energy of being. They don’t have to be acted out, but neither do they need to be tamed. They’re part of our inner wilderness.”
Humans, however, are big on control. And wildness—inner or outer—frightens us, and has for a very long time, as evidenced by our headlong rush to civilize ourselves, to remove and protect ourselves from wild nature and raise the drawbridge before those red in tooth and claw had a chance to follow us into the compound.
The creation stories of every culture on Earth, for instance, have told the tale of a lost paradise like the Garden of Eden. But a garden is an expression of the will of the gardener, not the garden. In other words, our most cherished fantasy of paradise is one in which things are tame, not wild (a word that means “self-willed”).
Paradise comes from the Persian pairi-daeza, meaning a walled orchard. That is, a tamed wilderness, one that’s tilled, terraced, mulched, pruned, sprayed, seeded, weeded, fertilized, composted, landscaped, and harvested. Not one that’s left to its own devices and designs, but one that’s controlled.
And naturally, we bring this fantasy of control to our spiritual and psychological aspirations, our hunger to reenter the garden and recapture the sense of peace and oneness we presumably felt there, or just get a grip on ourselves and our willful emotions. But even meditation doesn’t necessarily take us there. In its darkness, silence, and solitude, we encounter the entire elemental life of the human psyche: passions, angers, joys, lusts, worries, inspirations, agendas, doubts, and fears.
Some practitioners even suggest that the inward equivalent of the wilderness is the unconscious , with all its fractious and unkempt energies, its suppressed desires and dreams . “The depths of mind,” says poet Gary Snyder, “are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now .”
But if you can welcome the sudden appearance of a bobcat in your inner sanctum—if you can bear with and bear witness to whatever emotional, physical, and sensory hoopla presents itself to your awareness while immersed in a practice like meditation, without trying to muzzle it—it can bring you to the other aspect of wilderness: its serenity.
Humans have always sought out wild places—deserts, for example—for inner calm and spiritual clarity because among the endowments of wilderness is vast stillness and silence, and it’s no coincidence that humanity’s formalized journeys to Source—vision quests, walkabouts, pilgrimages—continue taking us back to the wilderness for the rendezvous. There’s also a reason sages are characterized as living in remote mountain reaches or caves. Buddha gained enlightenment while sitting under a tree. Muhammed received his first revelation of God in a cave in the mountains. Jonah was carried to redemption in the belly of a whale.
In Hebrew, the word for wilderness is midbar, referring to a place without speech, “beyond words.” But it’s also a place where, by falling silent and listening—as you might do in meditation—you can hear a deeper speech, that of the divine. Which means there’s no such thing as a godforsaken wilderness. It’s in wilderness that you’re most likely to hear God.
Maybe the same goes for the bobcats you’re likely to encounter in your deep emotional life. If you‘re able to remain watchful and attentive to them, and not try to swipe-left just to be rid of your uneasiness, you may discover what the world’s holy books have been telling us all along about chaos , outer or inner. In the central creation story in the Western world (Genesis), Chaos with a capital C is described as the condition of the Earth before it was formed. Meaning that chaos precedes creation , and if you deny yourself the one, you’re going to deny yourself the other.
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Gregg Levoy is the author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion (Penguin) and Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (Random House).
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.