Dancing Through the Minefield – Navigating Life’s Hidden Traps

If you've ever found yourself caught in survival mode—emotionally, financially, or even spiritually—this episode of Dear Grandchildren: A Tracker’s Tale, aired March 3, 2025, might just shift your trajectory.

In Dancing Through the Minefield – Navigating Life’s Hidden Traps, Michael Douglas discards the script and speaks straight from experience. He invites us to consider survival not as a badge of strength, but as a signal—an alert that something essential is missing: awareness. Not just the kind that keeps you from tripping on roots in the woods, but the deep, intuitive kind that lets you feel a change in the wind before the storm hits. That awareness, he says, is a receiving skill—one we’re born with, but often trained to ignore.

Michael pulls no punches in challenging how most of us live: reacting instead of choosing, numbing instead of engaging. He points to our ancestors, who didn’t learn by reading manuals—they learned by living. “Wisdom,” he says, “is an accumulation of mistakes and behavior changes.”

Through foundational survival skills—shelter, fire, water, and attitude—he illustrates how these aren't just wilderness skills, they’re life skills. Knowing how to build a debris hut or select dry kindling becomes a metaphor for how we create comfort, safety, and discernment in our lives. It's bushcraft as blueprint for thriving.

What makes this episode powerful is its blend of tough love and deep care. Michael doesn’t offer platitudes. He offers perspective—earned through cold nights, hard lessons, and joyful resilience. It's a reminder that living fully requires risk, rigor, and, most of all, presence.

Listen to the full episode and start replacing survival with something richer—engagement, awareness, and the tools to build your best life.