Many people go into the woods to become weak on purpose.
They pay the price of a season's meat to sleep in soft huts and eat the food of rabbits: leaves, seeds, water that tastes of grass. No hunt. No kill. They call this a gift they give themselves.
At dawn they roll out flat skins on the ground and fold their bodies into the shapes of hunted things. Here is the sleeping dog. Here is the wounded bird. Here is the child who has not yet learned to walk. A leader stands before them and speaks in the soft voice you use on a frightened animal, and they obey. They reach for the sky. They hold. Their legs shake. No enemy has touched them. They are fighting nothing, and they are losing.
Then the strangest thing. The leader tells them to lie down and stop. To empty the head. To make the mind go quiet and dark and think of nothing at all.
I do not understand. The quiet mind is the dead mind. When my head goes empty, it is because the cold has come, or the blood has left me, and soon I will feed the crows. These people chase it. They travel far and give away good meat to sit in a circle and practice being prey.
Their tribe has grown too safe. When nothing hunts you, you must learn to hunt yourself.