Earth Yourself: A Manifesto
What happens when everything falls away, and you have to find new ground?
I wrote this from the other side of something.
Cancer. Stage 3. The kind of shocking life moment where the ground you thought was solid turns out to be nothing of the sort.
When an oncologist tells you what this could mean, and how much time you may have had left if you weren’t here now, a lot of questions arrive very quickly. Not the medical ones. The other ones. The ones you’ve been too busy (or afraid) to ask.
What about my kids future? Am I living the way I want to live? Do the people around me really know me? Have I been present for any of it?
I expected the cancer journey to be a fight. That’s the language everyone uses. Battle. Beat it. Warrior.
What I experienced was something different. Surrender. Gratitude. Trust in something far bigger than I could ever explain. The day after my diagnosis for stage 3 melanoma in the lymph nodes on both sides of my neck, I began learning Vedic meditation. Not because I’d read about it in a wellness magazine. Because I was terrified, and I needed something real to hold on to.
It brought me more peace than anything I’ve tried in five decades of living. A year on, I’m still working on it. Staying disciplined to meditate twice a day is the tough part. But I’m getting there.
And my body. My body was extraordinary. Through all of it, through the treatment and the fear and the sleepless nights, it kept showing up. It kept doing its job. I ramped up my nutrition to reduce inflammation. I was in the gym three times a week and continued playing A-grade basketball. I plunged into cold water often, loved sitting in saunas, and made sure I walked and moved every day, not because a longevity podcast told me to, but because my body earned my respect.
Almost a year into remission, cancer has taught me something I should have known all along. Your body is not a machine to be optimised. It’s a companion. You trust it. You listen to it. You take care of it, and it takes care of you.
The room empties
But here’s the part nobody warns you about.
People disappear.
Not everyone. But enough. Friends you’ve known for years suddenly don’t know what to say. They default to the script. “How’s your health?” And when you say “good,” the relief is visible. “Great to hear!” And then they change the subject to something safe. Something small.
It’s a terrible feeling. Being in the deepest moment of your life and realising that most people can’t sit with you in it.
I think a lot of people know that feeling, even without cancer. Anyone who’s been through grief, or divorce, or burnout, or a crisis of identity. The room empties when the conversation gets real.
Earth Yourself started, in part, as a response to that emptiness. Not a solution. A companion.
Because I think what most of us are missing isn’t information. It’s not another ten-step plan, morning routine, or breathwork course. It’s someone who says: I’m in it too. Stay. Let’s talk about what actually matters.
We are surrounded
A good friend of mine, Dianne Whelan, a proud Canadian, spent six years hiking, paddling, skiing and snowshoeing 24,000 kilometres across the Trans Canada Trail. She made an extraordinary documentary about it called 500 Days in the Wild and it’s screening in Australia right now.
She told me something I haven’t stopped thinking about. Humans make up 0.01 per cent of all life on Earth.
Zero point zero one.
How can we ever be alone? We are always surrounded. By trees, by ocean, by soil teeming with more life in a handful than there are people on this planet. We just forgot how to notice.
That forgetting is the problem.
Earthing the wire
The world right now feels like a live power line.
Everything buzzing. Everything urgent. War and news cycles that never close. Notifications that never stop. A low hum of anxiety that we’ve somehow agreed to call normal.
We’re connected to everything and grounded to nothing.
Earth yourself.
That’s the idea. Not a brand. Not a movement. Just two words that kept coming back to me during the hardest year of my life.
Earth yourself. Like earthing a wire. Take the charge out. Find the ground.
Dial down the red. Let more green in.
The question underneath
I’ve spent thirteen years telling stories about travel. Running Karryon, writing about the industry, talking to the people who shape it around the world. I consider myself extremely privileged. I love the work. I still do.
But this is something different.
Earth Yourself isn’t about the travel trade. It’s about the question underneath all of it. The one that sits behind every trip you take, every ocean you swim in, every conversation with a stranger that cracks something open.
How do you live well on a planet that needs you to live better?
Not perfectly. Not performatively. Just with a bit more awareness, a bit more care, and a lot less of the noise that pulls us away from what matters.
Where my feet are
I don’t have a twelve-step plan for that. I’m suspicious of anyone who does.
What I have is curiosity. A notebook full of questions. A body that walked through fire and came out more alive on the other side. And a deep, stubborn belief that the answers are already out there if we’re willing to look in the right places.
I write this from Byron Bay, on Bundjalung Country. Land that the Arakwal people have cared for since long before any of us arrived with our wellness retreats and our surf brands and our ideas about what this place should be.
Living here teaches you something if you let it. The land was here first. It will be here last. And the people who understood how to live in relationship with it, not just on top of it, knew things we are only now scrambling to relearn.
I sit on the Destination Byron board. It’s a volunteer role. I wanted to give back to the place that held me through the worst year of my life. And already it’s teaching me more than I expected about what it means to care for somewhere, not just live in it.
That’s the spirit of Earth Yourself. Rooted in a real place. Looking out at the world from here.
The answers are out there if we’re willing to look in the right places.
In entering cold water at dawn.
In a forest that’s been standing for a thousand years.
In the wisdom of cultures that never forgot what we’re only now rediscovering.
In the science of what actually makes a human being well.
In travel that changes the traveller, not just the Instagram grid.
The same conversation
For too long, the wellness conversation has been split from the travel conversation, which has been split from the environmental conversation, which has been split from the “how do I just be a decent human?” conversation.
They’re the same conversation.
Your health is not separate from the health of the planet. The way you travel is not separate from the way you live. The things that ground you, breath, movement, nature, purpose, and community, are the same things that ground the world around you.
Earth Yourself explores that overlap. The space where personal wellbeing meets planetary responsibility. Where a cold plunge meets conservation. Where a soul journey meets a regeneration project. Where slowing down is the most radical thing you can do.
This is for you
The people I want to talk to are the ones who’ve been through something.
Not the influencers or the optimisers. The seekers. The ones who’ve hit a wall, or lost something, or woken up one morning and thought: there has to be more than this.
You’ve done enough living to know that the answers you were sold don’t quite fit anymore. You’re not cynical. You’re not checked out. You’re looking. Quietly, honestly looking.
This is for you.
No gurus
I’m not big on gurus. I believe in good questions, honest stories, and people who are willing to share what they’ve learned without pretending they’ve figured it all out.
That’s what this will be. Stories. Conversations. Interviews with people doing extraordinary things at the intersection of wellness, travel, nature, culture and purpose. Books, eventually. Maybe retreats. Definitely a podcast. The kind of content that makes you put your phone down and go outside.
Or pick it up less in the first place.
Giving more back
The most interesting people I’ve met in travel, in business, in life, are the ones who’ve stopped asking “how do I take less?” and started asking “how do I give more back?”
We can do more than slow the damage. We can heal things. Ecosystems. Communities. Ourselves.
That shift is everything.
Come find your ground
Earth Yourself won’t be for everyone. I know that.
It won’t necessarily be slick enough for the hardcore bio-hackers or woo enough for the crystal crowd. It won’t have listicles or life hacks. It probably won’t go viral.
But if you’ve ever stood in the ocean and felt something you couldn’t name. If you’ve ever walked through a forest and felt your shoulders drop for the first time in weeks. If you’ve ever sat across from someone in a country you didn’t know and understood, without a word, that you’re the same.
Then you already know what this is about.
You are not alone. You are surrounded.
Come find your ground.
Matt Leedham, Founder, Earth Yourself, Byron Bay, Bundjalung Country
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