Embrace The Animal regrets to announce that its founder and lead visionary, Joshua Valentine, has passed away. Over the years, Joshua has built an extraordinary legacy in the form of wilderness survival courses, adventure film and photography, autobiographical writing, and motivational podcasting. He has left large shoes to fill and will be greatly missed among the outdoor community and various other demographics.

In the wake of Joshua’s passing, his clients and colleagues have been working to ensure that the incredible organization he created will continue to prosper. Embrace The Animal is excited to reveal the company’s next steps and provide all who are interested with the opportunity to experience the freedom of the outdoors. In the meantime, stay tuned and, as Joshua Valentine would say, “Live Wild!”

Our Mission:

To embody the attitude of breaking barriers by seeking adversity, and empowering others to do so by connecting our primitive capabilities to our modern minds.

What is Embrace the Animal?

We find our best selves not through comfort, but rather adversity. In connecting to our wild, more primitive selves and surroundings, we can tap into stronger, happier, and healthier ways of living, reaching levels of toughness and achievement that we only dreamed might be possible.

What does Embrace the Animal mean?

The human mind and body are capable of vastly more than we lead ourselves to believe. Each of us has an animal within us that when tapped, can help us push beyond the limits we set for ourselves. Our ancestors had almost the exact same bodies we do now, yet it was their daily adversity faced simply in the name of surviving to pass on their genes that allowed them to thrive from the perils of ice ages into the modern society we live in today. While our modern world has much to appreciate, we are increasingly cut off from our natural setting and the requisite adversity required to navigate them. In constantly seeking adversity, we can tap into our abilities to reach our highest selves, both mentally and physically, and constantly break the barriers of possibility. We Embrace the Animal by connecting our primitive instincts and abilities to our modern selves, to thrive as human animals in a way that only our era and history has allowed.

What is the ETA Mindset/Philosophy?

There is no superhuman. There is only human, and we were not designed to simply survive in nature. We were designed to thrive there. Only in seeking adversity, and sharpening our primitive instincts alongside our modern understandings do the human and the animal become one.