This is the first of many posts on our Neighborhood Prepper SHTF Philosophy:
“Protect Your Peace, and Prepare.”
This isn’t something we pulled from a book of old military tactics. It’s a philosophy we’ve developed over the last 7+ years in our work as spiritual educators.
We’re coming at this topic from an unusual vantage point, and it’s this unique perspective that gives us something to add to the (already massive) body of survival and prepping material on the Internet.
There are a lot of good sites out there on preparedness, but we want you to walk away from Neighborhood Prepper with more than a few new gadgets.
Yes, we want to help you to find awesome gear, be more informed, and deepen useful skillsets—of course.
But even more importantly, we want to help you forge a rock-steady psychological and emotional foundation to get you through even the worst of times.
Think of it like this:
When “Shit Hits the Fan,” it doesn’t matter how many supplies you have ready if your stress gets the best of you.
It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you have prepared—if you’re in a manic frenzy from the stress of reality, you’re not going to make good decisions.
Our SHTF Philosophy
1. Protect Your Peace.
This is where most of our philosophy is centered, and where our expertise lies.
We’ve seen, countless times over, the profound impact our emotional impulses have on decision making.
It’s not just hopelessness, either. Positivity can be just as distorting as pessimism.
Ultimately, peace is the only emotional state that doesn’t drastically impact our choices.
If you can learn to access that peace, even when life gets intense, you’re going to be far more capable of navigating the reality in front of you.
2. Actually Getting Prepared.
Then, of course, there are the supplies worth having and skillsets worth developing.
Food, water, firearms, and other gear; self-defense training, firestarting tools and know-how, hunting and trapping skills—the list goes on.
If civilization as we know it begins to dissolve, there’s no replacement for basic supplies and skills.
But if you noticed, “Prepare” comes after “Protect Your Peace,” and there’s a good reason for that.
At some point, no matter how prepared we get, our supplies are going to run low or we’re going to find ourselves in a situation that our supplies can’t fix.
Creating a a stable access to our peace is far more important than the supplies we’re able to stockpile.
We can pretend to know what the future holds, and exactly how a SHTF situation is going to play out, but if we’re really honest with ourselves, we have no idea.
There’s no such thing as perfect certainty and “expertise” in something that none of us have ever experienced before.
The moment civilization starts to dissolve, we’re all in uncharted territory.
Will our supplies even be helpful? Will we even have access to them? We can hope, but there’s no real way to know.
More than anything, we have to be adaptable, and that means protecting our peace.
“Protect Your Peace, and Prepare.”