Ricardo Leppe: Living Naturally – Learning Naturally

By WSF - Ricardo Leppe 18 June 2025

Ricardo Leppe: Living Naturally – Learning Naturally

Pollutant-free food, restful sleep and plenty of time outdoors

What does that have to do with learning? More than you might think. In the 18-minute impulse video “Natürlich leben – natürlich lernen” (Living naturally – learning naturally), learning visionary Ricardo Leppe shows how a life in harmony with nature reduces stress, opens the mind and so creates ideal conditions for self-determined learning.

Using concrete examples – from “only let edible things touch your skin”, through healthy sleep and a pollutant-free indoor climate with moon-phase timber, to playful exercise outdoors – Ricardo Leppe invites parents, educators and the curious to make their surroundings more natural step by step. The video is part of the freely accessible WSF course of the association “WissenSchafft Freiheit” linked here, and encourages us to let learning become as natural again as breathing.

To the WSF course (German)

Impulse video, 18 min Living naturally – learning naturally

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Who is Ricardo Leppe?

Ricardo Leppe was originally an Austrian magician and memory trainer. As a child he was taught by his parents during long journeys. Through his work as a memory trainer he visited many schools and went on to give talks on alternative learning techniques. In April 2020 Ricardo Leppe founded the association “WissenSchafft Freiheit” (Knowledge Creates Freedom) and has since been helping a growing number of like-minded parents and teachers to found free schools – on the basis of up-to-date knowledge, with heart and with the needs of the child firmly at the centre!

The video to read (transcript, translated and lightly edited for readability)

Living naturally, learning naturally – the field is so immensely large that, for once, I have written myself a little note. I brainstormed for a few minutes and only wrote down categories; we will never be able to go through them all here, so I will link them bit by bit below the video in the WSF course. If you are watching this on YouTube, click the first link below the video to get to the course page, where you will find the rest. For now we will just get an overview: what options are there, and what effects do they have? Because if I don’t feel well in my head, if certain outside factors keep acting on me, then of course I also have problems learning. I know that doesn’t apply to everyone – some people can learn with background noise, others need absolute silence; everyone is a bit different. I simply want to share experiences from all kinds of children and adults who have already dealt with these points, and you have to decide for yourself or for your children which ones suit you and which don’t.

One of the first things was all the skin-care products. I know it is a controversial topic and it is only my opinion – please accept it as that: I would not put anything on my skin that I could not also eat. We smear all sorts of things on our skin – something here, sunscreen there, some strange wound cream somewhere else – and it clogs everything up. Less oxygen diffuses through the skin, perhaps less sunlight is absorbed, the cells no longer work as well, and every bit of oxygen deficiency shows up above all in your brain. In other words, your skin has to be able to breathe. We know the feeling of wearing something tight, like leather: it doesn’t feel good. So my recommendation would be: apart from perhaps aloe vera, DMSO, magnesium spray and one or two other things, I would leave everything out if I were you. You save a lot of money, and there are natural remedies everywhere. If I have a small sting somewhere, I take some ribwort plantain, chew it a little and rub it on. If I have sunburn or something, I take a leaf of aloe vera – that stuff lasts forever – and rub it on. I have far fewer problems; the skin can breathe and doesn’t immediately have to detoxify this stuff again, which leaves you more capacity in your head for learning. A huge topic – I will link several things on it.

The next point was going barefoot. Here’s the thing: I’m sitting in front of a camera, there’s a laptop behind it, a phone lying there, a router somewhere. We are constantly charging ourselves up electrically with all kinds of things. Just go to a DIY store and buy a multimeter, and you will see the voltage in your body rise. Now think of a classroom: phones in it, a Wi-Fi router, the teacher’s computer and whatever else, in a concrete bunker with an antenna outside the door – I’m exaggerating a bit – and you can see the voltage in the children going up. They feel out of sorts. I know it myself when I’ve been at the computer and in the radiation for too long: I need to get out, I need a break, I need to go for a walk. But they often can’t. So the topic here is grounding (earthing), and I’ll link things on that below as well. Grounding is a huge topic, and part of it is going barefoot. It really helps if, during the break, your child or you stand on the earth somewhere for a minute – often a few seconds are enough for a first effect – so that the grounding can build up the electrons again and the excess voltage can flow out of your body. Going barefoot is also a huge physical topic: because of our shoes we always step the wrong way, landing heel first, which is totally unnatural and sends a shock through all the joints right up into the spine. So I would recommend switching to barefoot shoes, or shoes that compensate a little, and leaving children without shoes as much as possible. Children usually scream when you force shoes and similar things on them, because they don’t want them – they still listen to their bodies and go by instinct rather than by what they are told. Going barefoot is a huge topic for learning; maybe add an earthing mat. There is a long documentary on grounding, and I will definitely link my grounding video below too.

Then radiation: if children have their phone at their ear a lot, or especially at night. If the switched-on phone is right next to your head at night, and perhaps you also have a spring mattress and some metal in the construction of your bed that conducts – that’s how you build an electromagnet. You can’t sleep well like that; it can’t work. So please get radiation out of the bedroom as far as you possibly can, and perhaps add an earthing mat. I’ll link a video on that too, and under my grounding video I have also linked a channel – I can’t remember its name offhand, something like “grounding channel” – by Wladi, who sadly died very young, where he shows how you can make these things yourself for a few euros. So there are great ways to change things in your bedroom.

Another big aspect, since we’re already in the bedroom, is getting up in the morning. For most people the rhythm is an absolute disaster, perhaps because they had their phone with its blue light in their face all evening, find it hard to fall asleep and then, of course, hard to get up. I’ll either make a separate video on sleep rhythm and so on or link something, because it is a gigantic topic. As for getting up: we have known for ages that teenagers in particular are useless in the morning. In my day, getting up early during puberty was the very, very last thing I wanted in my life. Now, I could change my rhythm, I could change my whole life to make it easier – but something that also helps quickly is getting rid of that stupid alarm clock, you know the one I mean. Buy yourself a wake-up light. It sits in the bedroom, a round thing, and it simulates a natural sunrise with its light, and you wake up naturally – unless you have the duvet pulled over your head and can’t see it. I’ve tried it countless times: you simply wake up by yourself and not through the shock of the alarm. We are the only living beings that don’t let our children and ourselves get up according to a natural rhythm. I have never seen pigeons, foxes or deer waking their young in the morning. We are the only ones, and it often tears us out of phases we might just need, because our body knows when we should wake up. So: a big recommendation for wake-up lights. You can also set them so that, say, after a few minutes of light they start playing music, so you don’t oversleep. And if you are still unsure, set your phone a few minutes later as an emergency backup. But I can tell you: unless I had the duvet over my head or the window open in winter, the wake-up light really woke me up naturally, because it nudges all your hormones and says “hey, the sun is rising”, and you simply wake up. Wake-up lights – a really great recommendation.

Then all the furniture and floors and everything around you. Most of the paints we slap on the walls – you notice it when you have a new flat, it smells so chemical – all of that goes into your body. The same goes for furniture: cheap furniture held together with some glue, chipboard full of chemicals – it gives off fumes, which is easy to measure, permanently, often for decades. Here I recommend Erwin Thoma. He started for exactly these reasons, because his children reacted allergically to this stuff and nothing worked any more – which of course always affects school and learning too. He began working with moon-phase timber and building solid-wood houses that need no glue at all, only wooden plug-in joints, and so got an incredibly great project off the ground. I can strongly recommend Erwin Thoma, including his talks, which I’ll also link below, so you can take a closer look at this topic – he is much further into it. I would like to mention that we make an effort here: Dad in particular builds almost everything himself in this area, or we make sure it is solid wood with as few chemicals as possible.

Then the dear television – the box, the brain-destroying machine, the income-destroying machine. Best throw the thing out, or sell it, or give it to someone who will be happy with it. I haven’t had one for, I think, a good decade now. Nothing but nonsense comes out of it. If you really need something, you normally have a laptop where you can watch everything online. Get rid of it. Especially with children you can see that the waves coming out of the television are hypnotising. You enter a brainwave state in which you soak up everything subconsciously, and often that is a lot of information you hear – war, death, love, who’s with whom again, somebody died somewhere again, terrible things happening somewhere again. Normally the vast majority is negative stuff that you take in and don’t actually need for your life. And with children we know this state in the brain where they sit there as if hypnotised and often don’t even react any more. It is a kind of hypnosis. I know about stage hypnosis from magic: it’s about opening the brain through certain frequencies and certain suggestions, and that is exactly what television does. Of course they want to sell their advertising and their films – you can say they are companies and have the right to do so. You have the right to throw the thing out. Please, please – a strong recommendation, also for children: don’t get them used to this hypnotic state; you can see them really slipping away in their brains in front of screens. I know it’s been quite difficult lately; it’s simply a recommendation, but for learning behaviour it’s immensely important.

What else did I have? Since we’re on household things that give off harmful substances: pots and pans. We try to have most of ours made of cast iron, enamel or ceramic, some of glass, because Teflon and all that coated stuff – I’ll link a few things on it – simply releases harmful substances. Most of these substances are deposited in the brain or in the gut, and the gut in turn mainly influences the brain. That slows everything down again: the body has to be busier with detoxifying than with what it actually wants to do, and once again the learning process suffers. A huge topic; I’ll link things on it.

Then clothing and dyes. Now you’ll say: hang on a moment, Ricardo, everything you say is bad, everything we use! Well, we’ve got used to it. Look: many of the diseases we know today we didn’t have a few decades ago. Back then we didn’t have the food we have today; most of what is on the shelves in our shopping centres didn’t exist. We mostly still had cotton and linen clothing; pots were often made of stainless steel or old cast iron; all these coatings didn’t exist; clothes weren’t treated or dyed so much; we didn’t perfume ourselves all day. None of what I have listed existed back then. For example, I lived with Native Americans for a while, and they don’t have these problems either – but they don’t really have the things I’m listing here. We have all sorts of things we created that are artificially negative for the body – whether consciously or unconsciously by certain people and companies is another matter. If you want to improve this, it’s your job to take care of it yourself. So with clothing, make an effort to go for cotton or linen, or at least wash it out well, and pay attention to good quality. I always had things washed out anyway, because my mum had a second-hand shop and I got my clothes from there – except underpants and socks, I don’t necessarily want to show those – so I largely didn’t have the problem. But I notice it now when I have dyed material: if I wear a red or a green T-shirt and do sport, my sweat smells quite different, much more unpleasant, because somehow, no idea, the chemicals under the arm combine with it differently. If I wear a white linen T-shirt or a white cotton T-shirt with much less dye in it, it’s definitely different – I can clearly notice the difference. So here too I’ll link something; just look into it and then decide whether you want to go along with it. I’m only giving you options; you don’t have to adopt any of it.

Then we come to food, where of course there is endless trickery. Dad once worked in the food industry – incredible things, where they say: this substance is below a certain percentage, so we don’t have to declare it; or it was in there before processing and we no longer have to declare it because it’s after the fact; or things like “natural flavourings”. Look up what “natural flavourings” means – it’ll make you sick. They are often waste products from the chemical industry or from moulds, but they arose naturally, meaning nobody specifically made sure they would arise. So if some waste product from the chemical industry that isn’t good happens to taste a bit like strawberry, it’s a natural flavouring because it tastes like strawberry. There’s trickery without end. My recommendation: look at the health sections, which I also have in the WSF course. Regional, seasonal – and if you can’t even recognise or chemically understand what’s written on your food, hands off.

Yes, the list could go on for a long time, but these are the main factors in our lifestyle where we take in a little bit of harmful substances everywhere. Of course your T-shirt won’t kill you tomorrow, and your pan won’t kill you tomorrow either – but a bit here, a bit here, a bit here, a bit here, and we don’t know how they interact, we don’t know the long-term effects, we don’t know how it affects a very young organism. And we often lack a point of comparison: “I’m fine, my child’s fine” – but compared with what? Very many people who have already changed their lives say afterwards: “I didn’t even know it could be different.” Just try it out. I’ll link lots of things below. Get started where it feels good to you. Of course there are endless other things to list, but otherwise this gets too long. I’ll link things bit by bit, and you’ll notice that once you get into three or four areas, you’ll find the others anyway through the YouTube algorithm, or it will become logical to you: if it’s like this here and like this there, it must be like this here too – like a puzzle where it all fits together. Don’t let it get you down – this isn’t meant to be negative, as in “everything is bad”; just engage with it consciously and make your own decisions. Maybe it will change your life for the better. Try it out, have fun – see you in the next video.