In my most recent tome ‘In The Praise of The Wild Spirit: How to Rewild 21st Century Humans’, I drew upon my decade of living and working at Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, to weave together a direct a parallel between wolves and tribal humans (wildness), with dogs and modern humans (the domestic) .

A core theme of the text places the the story of civilization at the tenuous boarder of a perpetual consciousness war between:

The Domesticators: Abrahamic religions, governments, corporations, big tech, large institutions.

And…

The Wild Spirit: Untamed nature, indigenous people, animist traditions, animals, deep embodiment

In the same vein, I offer a metaphor: Domestication as infectious pathogen, and rewilding as an immune response by our innate wildness = a war.

Nearly everything we contend is an ‘injustice’ against nature, indigenous cultures and the loss of ancestral lifeways, can be laid at the foot of this tensional push and pull between domestication and wildness.

That is the primal condition, and the central star all other layers revolve around.

Translation: The root of ‘the problem’ is Domestication itself, and as a people, we are being actively domesticated right now.

Meet Colonialism: The Martyr

‘The martyrs have damaged the truth.’- Friedrich Nietzsche

What Nietzsche meant was that the ‘emotional response triggered by martyrs’, distorts truth, because the emotive intensity blurs reality.

This brings us to the feet of ‘colonialism’.

A term that has laid down strong roots within ‘the revolution’, which is attempting to sing The Ancestral Song back into modernity.

Colonialism: Colonialism is the systematic subjugation, and exploitation of a foreign territory and its occupants by some form of institutional power, with the aim of extracting wealth, enforcing cultural dominion, and expanding geopolitical control.

The horrors of colonialism are real, leaving behind a warzone in it’s wake, and by this stance, colonialism seems like THE enemy…

Legions have risen against it.

Squadrons of people policing cultural appropriation, instantly indignant of perceived slights that even hint of insensitivity; enthusiastically invoking generational trauma, in the hopes of eviscerating their discomfort in catharsis and cultural control.

In contemporary times colonialism has become a ‘brand’, and thus has been branded the primary target to place within our crosshairs.

Yet colonialism is but a martyr, sacrificed by The Domesticators, and elevated to the sainthood of ‘buzzword’, to draw our counter attack away from the real engine of The Domestic.

The colonial brand has been forged in the furnace of modern discontent, heated on the embers of outrage, and placed searing hot on the haunches of the ancestral healing, social justice and ‘progressive’ movements.

Why?

To manage the cattle of course = every rebellion needs a villain (or a scapegoat).

‘Know the enemy and know yourself’- The Art of War

Truth is the first causality of war.

And there is one truth you must know my friends:

The Domesticative effort is a shapeshifter, a creature composed of malleable materials, camouflaged, perpetually altering it’s presentation, so that it may remain unseen.

Another cold hard truth = colonialism, imperialism, totalitarianism, (whateverism) + these are not seperate operational branches, but coordinated campaign lines, tasked with carrying out The Grand Strategy.

To mold this…

Into this…

And that…

Into that…

The prime objective: to morph the inner and outer environment into a state of total systemic domestication.

We blame ‘the colonizers’…

Yet they are but fervent carriers, and transmitters of the domestic, living in a fever dream = their own wild indigenous humanity, plowed and tilled.

Their soul composted.

They were but an insignificant vanguard in The Grand Strategy. The obliteration of our collective indigenous nature, and the expanded land grab, but a single phase in a larger campaign. A long con…

The primary aggressor is, and has always been, the force of domestication.

The Domesticators want us in outrage, and focused on ‘trauma’. Modern power happily hands you the brand of colonialism to hate, yet it’s but a false flag operation that creates further division, discord and discontent.

Pouring fuel on emotional fires that fragment and divide, is a core weapon in the arsenal of espionage and spy-craft.

While we are focused on colonialism, the Domestic has already shapeshifted, in pursuit of the prime objective.

And turned ‘colonial branding’, into a way to domesticate us further = through distraction, through leaving us feeling wounded, through self policing, through racial discord, and most importantly…

Through drawing our attention away from the true generative power of The Ancestors, which lives in wells of deep time, beyond ism’s, where all humans were once truly, wild…

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I have been reflecting much on navigating ‘the dark’, the phases of life that are oft characterized by difficulty, feeling lost or uncertain, or intently, the periods of true ‘black phase work’, in which we are being cooked, desiccated, dissolved, dismembered, or drowned (baptized), in service of a greater alchemical unfolding of soul.

I have been in the dark phases of the work more than I care to admit throughout my life. Sigh.

In my younger days, I was all fire and intensity about it. My ‘alchemical laboratory’ radiated heat and acrid smoke on the steady.

Indeed, much about how we speak about the black phase of alchemy collectively is often all about fire and intensity. The black phase has become synonymous with cataclysmic all consuming change. Bathed in the fire.

Maybe you too are in a season where you feel like ‘the heat is on’.

Our culture and ‘modern spiritual culture’ often rewards this.

You know what I mean = the heroic effort, the glory of suffering, the bombastic display of stripes won and medals earned in the high effort of doing ‘shadow work’ or some such thing.

I have been there…I would push, overcook, apply more heat, more intent. This is the black phase when carried out through unforgiving fire, and scorched earth.

But as time has passed, alas, a shift in how I relate to these periods has shifted as well, conceptually and somatically.

from oven to cocoon…

from lighting struck tower to pregnancy…

from force to surrender…

We need not always raise the heat to the point of no return; fire is necessary, but in proper dosage.

‘The alchemists warned repeatedly against the ‘tyrannical fire.’ Violent heat destroys the vessel and burns up the divine water, whereas the moist heat of the dung-heap or the water-bath acts like the warmth of a brooding hen, nourishing the hidden seed without violence.’ - Edward F. Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy

Head the words of James Hillman here:

‘If alchemy is the art of fire, and alchemists, “artists of fire,” as many texts repeat, then the alchemist must be able to “know” all the kinds of fire, degrees of fire, sources of fire, fuels of fire.’

Water + Gentle Heat = Wu Wei (Effortless Effort)

May this be a gentle reminder, that going harder (hotter) is seldom the answer, and always carries the risk of spoiling the work.

Be like the brooding hen instead.

For to Enter The Black Phase is Go Subterranean = Resting In The Mother

> Undressed To The Bone

When The Bones|Essence are all that remain…

‘It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.’- Tyler Durden Fight Club

At home in the dark + listening = create time for quiet contemplation <> No ‘method’.

Buried + lying in wait = the darkness is my ally. Rest in the body + patience.

Rich, regal, resplendent darkness…

‘In the dark night of the soul, the alchemists found the ‘light of nature’ (lumen naturae). This is the light that does not come from above, from the sun of consciousness, but shines out of the very depths of the dark material body itself.’ - Carl Jung, Practice of Psychotherapy (Collected Works, Vol. 16, ¶ 454)

Swollen + heavy + gestating = pregnant with possibility…

‘In the darkness of the nigredo, the soul finds a womb - a matrix where the old form dissolves so that the essential mystery of the Self can take root and grow.' - Monika Wikman’s Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness

A creature of the tidal rhythms = allow yourself to wax and wane, ebb and flow, like waves lapping the shore. Practice acceptance.

Dissolution + metamorphous = remember a caterpillar must be fully dissolved to become a butterfly. Release your identity.

‘When we allow ourselves to rest in the mystery of the dark, we discover that what felt like annihilation was actually the gentle work of gestation.’ - Monika Wikman’s Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness

The mysteries of fermentation and fruiting = moist soil and gentle heat conjunct = black phase methods not centered on fire.

The solution = surrender to the deepest intelligence that unfolds the embryo…let go, trust.

Staying in the flow, tending to the seed, this eventually leads to new life.

On the "Blessed Greenness" (Benedicta Viriditas)

‘There is a power in the earth, a divine force of greenness (viriditas) that causes all things to flower and grow... Even in the darkest soil, the greenness remains, waiting for the spirit to water it’. - Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias (Trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, Paulist Press)

I Ching: Hexagram 28 - ‘A withered willow produces new shoots’.

‘In alchemical texts, the green color—the viriditas—often appears immediately following the deepest nigredo. It is the life of nature, the living spirit of the unconscious which was buried in the dark material and now begins to sprout like a plant out of the dark earth.’ — Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology (Inner City Books, 1980, p. 154)

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It has been a really fruitful time for me, that has had me both facing difficulty and receiving blessings in equal measure. Alas, I have gone through a period that has reinvigorated my spirit with the creative impulse to experiment, explore new horizons and alchemize different ways of transmitting something useful to the world.

Lately I have been feeling the pull to go deeper into ‘art’ of all kinds. Especially more physical art - painting, crafting, but also, yes, digital art. Check out this new oracle card I made recently for my upcoming deck ‘The Archetypal Ancestors’.

The ‘Art’ card from the ‘The Liberated One Suit’, of the ‘Lake’ element.

Art hums in our Ancestral bones. With AI running rampant and saturating the the digital sphere with formulaic imitations of art, and vacuous oceans of nothing soulful, I feel that ‘human art’ is one of the last few bastions of resistance to the soullessness of ‘the machine’.

However you can engage with art made by humans, I encourage you too. Watch it, observe it, listen to it, make it, craft it, dance it, eat it, move it…whatever. Make art, and as my teacher Fabeku Fatunmise would say: Make Marks.

With that said, I am feeling called to try something new. Which if you know me, is nothing new…kind of a paradox, I know.

I am going to be offering this list ‘photo essays’ for a time.

They may remain long term, or not, unsure. But as of late, the ‘power of images’ has been burning deep inside me, and it’s where the creative current is going.

Photo essays are a continuous stream, of you guessed it, photos, with minimal text, conveying a core idea (or ideas).

Enjoy!

| The War On Humanity: Your Cell Phone Is The Breach |

"Our Great War's a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives." - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

The battle against your humanity…

Against your senses & soft animal body…

Against your consciousness…

‘Breach’ - A term from siege warfare. An opening in the defense at the frontline or fortress wall. An entry point into the fray.

In todays’ world, your cellphone is a breach. You see it as access to infinite streams of information…the machine see’s it as access to your consciousness = the point of impact.

The Machine: big tech, big pharma, governments, ads, agendas, debates, trolls, political polarization, influencers, scammers, fake news, real news = dehumanizing and domesticating forces.

Empires on the march + A land grab of the psyche...

Siege weapons + spy craft…

Causalities. The utter devastation of war. Oh, the humanity…

Divide and conquer + when we go for the phone without even noticing…

Treasure = beauty that goes unnoticed in the fountain near by…

The shield wall: attention. The universe is your body…

Tactics: Put the phone down & blow on the embers of your soul = forge ahead….

Strategy = form a praxis: practice, move, breathe, sweat, laugh, feel, meditate, make art, have sex, be in nature, eye contact. The machines retreat when the soul burns bright. Stack one effort on top of the other.

The resistance is innate: ancient, deep, ancestral. Wake the fuck up it says…

‘How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight? I don't wanna die without any scars.’ - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Reinforcements are coming - send out the signal fire: Offerings, prayers, allies + the others who got your back.

The Ancestors know of the art of war…

A sword into the heart of the enemy…

To the victor go the spoils = flourishing…

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Hello my friends, I trust this message finds you well.

Important announcement: I have dissolved the EAV paid membership.

There are many reasons, but in short, the membership stopped being coherent, and I have no plans to paywall what flows through here again.

One-off courses on particular subjects will be a different story, but from now on the core transmissive current of EAV will be gifted.

Along that track, I will be gifting a few of the courses I created for the membership to the world for free.

And that is all I really want to say about it.

This was not an easy decision to make, and in the spirit of that choice, I share with you how I made it, with this free course.

Wayfinding

The ship in sail is one of the best metaphors I know of to describe the experience of navigating life. One must ready the ship, cohere the crew, stock the galley, read the weather, adjust to changing conditions, find directionality and choose a way.

This work is about steering the ship, and above all, choosing the way. It concerns that point in time and space where we make a choice that shifts the whole trajectory of our life, especially at a crossroads. How do we choose skillfully? Consider that the roadkill made its final choice, and it was one that left it for dead.

Ancient cultures codified this process of skillful and coherent decision-making in the fabric of the culture itself, and in the traditions they crafted.

Here we find:

• Communal Accountability

• Supportive Ancestors

• Auspicious Cultural Values

• Spiritual Traditions

• Divination

• Councils

• Rituals

Yet modern people have lost this framework, and make decisions with maybe one or two of these layers, but most often follow impulses that arise from no true center of choice.

Wayfinding as a skill is something we can cultivate, and the framework for better choices can be constructed.

This work is concerned with choices made under real conditions: limited visibility, shifting terrain, outcomes that carry real weight and uncertainty.

Wayfinding is a way of deciding that draws on far more than the thinking mind. You will learn how choice actually works, why some of ours go wrong, and how a life stops merely happening to you and becomes one you actively steer. Yet the destination is never guaranteed, and it is only a fool that does not fear the sea.

Enjoy.

0:00 - Wayfinding: The Skill of Making Consequential Decisions
Orienting decision-making as an art of navigation rather than an act of optimization, or direct control.

4:42 - Infinite Possibility & Limited Probability
Understanding the field of choice as vast in possibility but constrained by probability.

18:41 - The Primary Challenges: Who Gets to Choose?
Fragmentation, trauma, incoherent worldviews, reactionary north stars, blind spots, competing agendas, resistance to fate or destiny, and timing as limiting factors in choice-making.

46:36 - Wayfinding: Ancient Context
Embodied cultures, councils of elders, coherent worldviews, supportive ancestors, oracular wisdom, and ritual as containers for decision-making.

1:02:16 - Qualities of Skillful Decision Making
Coherence, centeredness, alignment, deep knowing, faith, and acceptance as qualities rather than techniques.

1:12:13 - Qualities of Unskillful Decision Making
Impulsivity, rushing, incoherence, unlivable outcomes, unwanted weight, fragmentation, and anxiety-driven certainty.

1:21:45 - Core: Coherence & Aim
Establishing a center and a north star, then cohering systems and choices around it.

1:29:15 - Hexagram 61: Centering and Connecting to the Spirits
Zhong as centering, equalization, heart coherence, ritual alignment, divination, and connection to ancestors and the inner world.

1:33:24 - Polymorphic Centers
Stable at the core, adaptive at the edges. Head, heart, and gut as shifting but integrated centers of orientation.

1:46:07 - Layered North Stars
Thriving, destiny, auspiciousness, and coherence as nested guiding forces, and principles, values and outcomes as modulators.

1:57:04 - Six Kinds of Choices
Start, crossroad, wait, continue, return, and end as distinct decision archetypes requiring different orientations.

2:03:21 - Special Considerations
Repeating patterns, perceived ruts, molting and itchiness, stalled progress, and unconscious forces shaping choice.

2:09:35 - Wayfinding: The Practices
Deep knowing through flow, body-as-oracle, prayer, ritual, magic, unification practices, listening, divination, counsel, and allowing.

2:24:21 - A Practice for Challenging Decisions
Flow, open the heart, divine. A simple sequence for engaging difficult or consequential choices.

Download The Slideshow Here

Audio Version

For those of you who like audio, the only truly CRUCIAL slide to see, is this one:

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There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

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I trust that this message finds you in good spirits, or at least supported enough if you’re in a challenging season of life.

People typically say ‘I must regretfully inform you that’, but honestly, my sense is not one of regret, but sobriety.

But ultimately, I am writing you to let you know I will be dissolving the paid membership of EAV.

…

Read more

Listen to The Audio Version of The Podcast Here:

Disease as Prima Materia

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we continue the alchemical thread from the previous transmission and turn to a single idea: that nearly every illness carries within it a seed of alchemical gold, if we can learn to relate to it in the ‘right way’.

Prima materia means the ‘first matter’, the raw and often despised starting point of any alchemical work.

The old alchemists wrote of it as something cheap, freely available, held in contempt, easily discarded, and gone unnoticed. And that, it turns out, is exactly how most of us relate to our own dis-ease: the aches & pains, the shutdowns, the loss of desire and the places where we stop wanting to engage with life. These states are ubiquitous and continuous for many of us in the modern world.

We will explore why chemistry and alchemy are not the same.

Chemistry divorces the one doing the work from the material, while alchemy always includes the person. When you heat the matter, you heat yourself. When you dissolve it, you dissolve yourself. Because of that sympathetic link, working with illness becomes a way of working with the whole being, and ‘the war on disease’ gives way to a relationship with it.

The Alchemical Phases of Illness

I also move through the ‘classical phases’ as they show up in the lived experience of illness.

The nigredo, ‘the blackening’…is when a diagnosis lands like the Tower card and everything you knew is turned to ash.

The albedo, the long washing, which becomes the actual regimen of practice, diet, movement, meditation and inner work applied over and over on a consistent basis.

And the rubedo, the reddening, where the work coagulates into a new form, a gold that may be health, or may be an entirely different way of inhabiting your body and your life.

My Story & Working The Alchemy

Along the way I share my own story directly, the heart trouble that arrived in my late twenties out of a stressful stretch living at a wolf sanctuary in New Mexico, and how relating to the heart not as a mechanical pump but as ‘the emperor of the organs’, the orchestrator of the body, became one of the great catalysts of my life.

I also offer a way of working across the three levels of xing, qi, and shen: body, energy, and spirit, so that whatever you are facing can be met at every layer of the self.

There is no guarantee that every illness becomes gold, and to be really, really clear…it is not a claim that sickness is your fault. It is an invitation to set fault aside and take up response-ability, the ability to respond, and to let disease become a starting point rather than a sentence.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

Prima materia means the ‘first matter’, the raw and often despised starting point of any alchemical work.

The old alchemists wrote of it as something cheap, freely available, held in contempt, easily discarded, and gone unnoticed. And that, it turns out, is exactly how most of us relate to our own dis-ease: the aches & pains, the shutdowns, the loss of desire and the places where we stop wanting to engage with life.

We explore why chemistry and alchemy are not the same.

Chemistry divorces the one doing the work from the material, while alchemy always includes the person. When you heat the matter, you heat yourself. When you dissolve it, you dissolve yourself. Because of that sympathetic link, working with illness becomes a way of working with the whole being, and ‘the war on disease’ gives way to a relationship with it.

I also move through the classical phases as they show up in the lived experience of illness.

The nigredo, ‘the blackening’…is when a diagnosis lands like the Tower card and everything you knew is turned to ash.

The albedo, the long washing, which becomes the actual regimen of practice, diet, movement, and inner work applied over and over on a consistent basis.

And the rubedo, the reddening, where the work coagulates into a new form, a gold that may be health, or may be an entirely different way of inhabiting your body and your life.

Along the way I share my own story directly, the heart trouble that arrived in my late twenties out of a stressful stretch living at a wolf sanctuary in New Mexico, and how relating to the heart not as a mechanical pump but as the emperor of the organs, the orchestrator of the body, became one of the great catalysts of my life.

I also offer a way of working across the three levels of xing, qi, and shen: body, energy, and spirit, so that whatever you are facing can be met at every layer of the self.

There is no guarantee that every illness becomes gold, and to be really, really clear…it is not a claim that sickness is your fault. It is an invitation to set fault aside and take up response-ability, the ability to respond, and to let disease become a starting point rather than a sentence.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

Listen to The Audio Version Here:

Hello my friends!

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we step back and take a big-picture look at the healing process, mapping it through the lens of alchemy.

While I do present a ‘model’, this transmission is not a theoretical exercise, for the specifics have emerged from my own life and from years of counseling others. This includes my long experience inhabiting a body that has never quite functioned the way most peoples bodies function.

At the heart of this conversation is what James Hillman called the redemption of matter. Western culture has inherited a deep habit of splitting spirit from matter, of demeaning the physical while pointing us always toward ascension…away from the body, the material.

This habit has flowed into Western medicine, which has come to treat the body as a machine, a set of levers and functions to optimize while the being on the inside is continuously divorced from the whole.

Alchemy, lovingly and longingly moves in the other direction: for the old alchemists, working with matter was already a soulful act.

To heat, purify, dissolve, and coagulate a material was to work on the soul at the same time. Spirit and matter molded at the same time and in the same way. Auspicious.

We will explore how the language of nature is itself alchemical.

Sun meets soil…which meets seed and water…and plant life follows.

Water evaporates, gathers, condenses, and returns.

The body is a microcosm of that same living world, an ongoing process of transformation, and the ancient elemental medicines of the Taoist, Ayurvedic, and Tibetan traditions understood it this way.

In Chinese medicine each organ carries its own spirit, its own consciousness bequeathed upon us by our ancestors, and you cannot separate the consciousness of the organ from who you are as a being.

From there we come to the core of the talk: disease as fragmentation.

Drawing on a principle from osteopathic medicine, we explore the idea that a disease is a gift that keeps the system together, an intelligent process that forms where some part of us has split off from the whole.

We trace those splits across every layer of a person, the ancestral, the environmental, the cultural, the karmic and past-life, the inner parts at odds with one another, and finally the personality itself with its idiosyncratic patterns.

Health, then, is a movement toward wholeness, and ‘a healing regimen’ becomes something like an alchemical formula, brought in to reintegrate what has fractured and to transmute the system toward greater integrity.

And so the disease becomes a catalyst for cultivation.

It asks us to change, to sacrifice the versions of ourselves we have grown accustomed to at the altar of wholeness, and to become someone more vital, more integrated, and more authentically ourselves in the process.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

Subscribe now

While I do present a ‘model’, this transmission is it is not a theoretical exercise, for specifics have emerged from my own life and from years of counseling others. This includes my long experience inhabiting a body that has never quite functioned the way most peoples bodies function.

At the heart of this conversation is what James Hillman called the redemption of matter. Western culture has inherited a deep habit of splitting spirit from matter, of demeaning the physical while pointing us always toward ascension…away from the body, the material.

This habit has flowed into Western medicine, which has come to treat the body as a machine, a set of levers and functions to optimize while the being on the inside is quietly divorced from the whole.

Alchemy, lovingly and longingly moves in the other direction: for the old alchemists, working with matter was already a soulful act.

To heat, purify, dissolve, and coagulate a material was to work on the soul at the same time. Spirit and matter molded at the same time and in the same way. Auspicious.

We explore how the language of nature is itself alchemical.

Sun meets soil…which meets seed and water…and plant life follows.

Water evaporates, gathers, condenses, and returns.

The body is a microcosm of that same living world, an ongoing process of transformation, and the ancient elemental medicines of the Taoist, Ayurvedic, and Tibetan traditions understood it this way.

In Chinese medicine each organ carries its own spirit, its own consciousness bequeathed upon us by our ancestors, and you cannot separate the consciousness of the organ from who you are as a being.

From there we come to the core of the talk: disease as fragmentation.

Drawing on a principle from osteopathic medicine, we explore the idea that a disease is a gift that keeps the system together, an intelligent process that forms where some part of us has split off from the whole.

We trace those splits across every layer of a person, the ancestral, the environmental, the cultural, the karmic and past-life, the inner parts at odds with one another, and finally the personality itself with its idiosyncratic patterns.

Health, then, is a movement toward wholeness, and ‘a healing regimen’ becomes something like an alchemical formula, brought in to reintegrate what has fractured and to transmute the system toward greater integrity.

And so the disease becomes a catalyst for cultivation.

It asks us to change, to sacrifice the versions of ourselves we have grown accustomed to at the altar of wholeness, and to become someone more vital, more integrated, and more authentically ourselves in the process.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

Listen to The Audio Podcast Here:

Hello my friends...

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we are going to take a deep dive into the intersection between ancestral patterns & health, a stem that branches out from what could be called ‘Ancestral Medicine’.

Ancestral medicine is a term I originally encountered through the work of Daniel Foor and his teachings on ancestral healing; however in this podcast, I refocus the medicinal layers, from the direct tending of ancestral spirits, to the ways in which the ancestral flows into, alters and shapes the living body.

Throughout the conversation I move fluidly between the animistic and shamanic layers and the more contemporary ‘scientific language’, recontextualizing the clinical into the ‘animate’, for genetics are a modernized and mechanistic way to speak about ancestral patterns. The body is an ancestral phenomenon, which came out of a parent who came out of ancestors.

Ancestral impacts on health are braided and multi layered, for there is the...

+The great ocean of deep time hunter-gatherer ancestors who shaped the human creature over hundreds of thousands of years, and the evolutionary mismatch that arises when modern life pulls us out of the life way we designed for. This results in the diseases of civilization: early heart disease, diabetes, the cancers, arthritis, arriving as the signature of that dislocation.

+Then the narrower scales: race and its genetic gifts and weaknesses.

+Then finally our own familial lines with their strange, idiosyncratic genetic preloading.

All this is occurring inside the backdrop of direct relationships to ancestral spirits, and the state of our whole lineage.

I also share the story of my wife Crystal, whose body seems need very large doses of vitamin B5 in order to function normally, because somewhere upstream an ancestral pattern molded her physiology with this quark...however this a phenomenon that highlights a core principle of this talk: the modern intermixes lines, diasporas, beliefs, and bodies at a scale our ancestors never faced, and it hands each of us a genetic inheritance that can be very hard to track.

Finally I anchor all this back into into the lines themselves, the long time currents behind our eight great-grandparent braided behind us like a rope. In a healthy ancestral field that rope carries the blessings and the genetic gifts though it like a vibrating string.

In our fractured world some strands run strong while others sit frozen or estranged, and a person raised inside a single troubled line is anchored to something akin to a floating root, drawing up the troubles of that one current while the rest of their inheritance stays sealed off.

Ancestral lineage repair is the work of reconnecting those strands, reaching back past the great ancestral disconnection and letting the flow return.

Topics include:

• Ancestral medicine and the health dimension of ancestor work

• The multi-layered scales of ancestral patterns, from deep time to the familial line

• Evolutionary mismatch and the diseases of civilization

• Genetics as the physical expression of an ancestral pattern

• Genetic expression, epigenetics, and the second genome

• Behavioral and perceptual patterns mistaken for genetics

• SNPs and idiosyncratic nutrient needs in the modern body

• The eight ancestral lines and the braided rope of inheritance

• Ancestral lineage repair and restoring the flow

• Fate, destiny, and wholeness-making across the generations

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we are going to take a deep dive into the intersection between ancestral patterns & health, a stem that branches from what could be called ‘Ancestral Medicine’.

Ancestral medicine is a term I originally encountered through the work of Daniel Foor’s and his teachings on ancestral healing; however in this podcast, I refocus the medicinal layers, from the direct tending of ancestral spirits, to the ways in which the ancestral flows into, alters and shapes the living body.

Throughout the conversation I move fluidly between the animistic and shamanic layers and the more contemporary ‘scientific language’, recontextualizing the clinical into the ‘animate’, for genetics are a modernized and mechanistic way to speak about ancestral patterns. The body is an ancestral phenomenon, which came out of a parent who came out of ancestors.

Ancestral impacts on health are braided and multi layered, for there is the...

The great ocean of deep time hunter-gatherer ancestors who shaped the human creature over hundreds of thousands of years, and the evolutionary mismatch that arises when modern life pulls us out of the life way we designed for. This results in the diseases of civilization: early heart disease, diabetes, the cancers, arthritis, arriving as the signature of that dislocation.

Then the narrower scales: race and its genetic gifts and weaknesses.

Then finally our own familial lines with their strange, idiosyncratic genetic preloading.

All this is occurring inside the backdrop of direct relationships to ancestral spirits, and the state of our whole lineage.

I also share the story of my wife Crystal, whose body seems need very large doses of vitamin B5 in order to function normally, because somewhere upstream an ancestral pattern molded her physiology with this quark...however this a phenomenon that highlights a core principle of this talk: the modern intermixes lines, diasporas, beliefs, and bodies at a scale our ancestors never faced, and it hands each of us a genetic inheritance that can be very hard to track.

Finally I anchor all this back into into the lines themselves, the long time currents behind our eight great-grandparent braided behind us like a rope. In a healthy ancestral field that rope carries the blessings and the genetic gifts though it like a vibrating string.

In our fractured world some strands run strong while others sit frozen or estranged, and a person raised inside a single troubled line becomes is anchored to something akin to a floating root, drawing up the troubles of that one current while the rest of their inheritance stays sealed off.

Ancestral lineage repair is the work of reconnecting those strands, reaching back past the great ancestral disconnection and letting the flow return.

Topics include:

• Ancestral medicine and the health dimension of ancestor work

• The multi-layered scales of ancestral patterns, from deep time to the familial line

• Evolutionary mismatch and the diseases of civilization

• Genetics as the physical expression of an ancestral pattern

• Genetic expression, epigenetics, and the second genome

• Behavioral and perceptual patterns mistaken for genetics

• SNPs and idiosyncratic nutrient needs in the modern body

• The eight ancestral lines and the braided rope of inheritance

• Ancestral lineage repair and restoring the flow

• Fate, destiny, and wholeness-making across the generations

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

Remember, in the midst of what the Chinese called “interesting times,” that is what is most important: do what you can do and ignore the rest.

Anyway...

I wanted to update you on a couple of reorganizations.

From a Monthly Anchor to…

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Listen to The Audio Version of The Podcast Here

Hello my friends…

In this episode of the The Living Ancestor podcast, we explore a dimension of ancestor work that often receives far less attention than healing, clearing, repair or the resolution of inherited burdens: the retrieval of blessings.

Drawing from both traditional understandings of the ancestral and my own experiences in practice, I explore the idea that the ancestors are not only a source of unfinished stories, and/or inherited wounds as is often portrayed on social media.

But also a source of blessings that may be waiting to enter our lives, if we just opened the channels and allowed them to flow in.

We discuss…

• Why modern people tend to focus on ancestral problems more readily than ancestral gifts

• How the ancestral field has become obscured through centuries of disconnection

• Why many of us encounter the harder dimensions of ancestor work before learning how to receive its fruits

• The ways in which the ancestors may ask us to resolve the past, but also, how they can help us enrich the future

I also share a simple but powerful approach to consciously inviting ancestral blessings into our lives by simply creating space for what is already seeking to arrive.

Along the way, we touch on ancestral veneration, offerings, lineage repair, synchronicity, and the surprising ways blessing can emerge when we stop trying to control its form.

At its heart, this conversation is an invitation to remember that the ancestors are not just asking us to carry ancestral burdens, but they may also be trying to give us something.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

EAV is a living body of work built around one idea: that the old ways still have something essential to offer. If that resonates, the deeper study lives inside the membership. Come join us.

Subscribe now

Drawing from both traditional understandings of the ancestral and my own experiences in practice, I explore the idea that the ancestors are not only a source of unfinished stories, and/or inherited wounds as is often portrayed on social media.

But also a source of blessings that may be waiting to enter our lives, if we just opened the channels and allowed them to flow in.

We discuss…

• Why modern people tend to focus on ancestral problems more readily than ancestral gifts

• How the ancestral field has become obscured through centuries of disconnection

• Why many of us encounter the harder dimensions of ancestor work before learning how to receive its fruits

• The ways in which the ancestors may ask us to resolve the past, but also, how they can help us enrich the future

I also share a simple but powerful approach to consciously inviting ancestral blessings into our lives by simply creating space for what is already seeking to arrive.

Along the way, we touch on ancestral veneration, offerings, lineage repair, synchronicity, and the surprising ways blessing can emerge when we stop trying to control its form.

At its heart, this conversation is an invitation to remember that the ancestors are not just asking us to carry ancestral burdens, but they may also be trying to give us something.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

Listen to The Audio Version of The Podcast Here

A few weeks ago, I learned that Gordon White of Runesoup had died.

To my surprise, the news hit me harder than I expected. Generally speaking, I don’t tend to be deeply affected by the deaths of people I never personally knew. Yet when I heard that Gordon had passed, I found myself sitting with a real sense of loss.

The reason, I eventually realized, is that he had become a kind of spiritual ancestor in my own life.

I first encountered Gordon’s work about a decade ago through his book Chaos Protocols. At the time, it radically expanded my understanding of what magic could be. More importantly, it introduced me to a way of thinking that would go on to shape much of my own work over the years. His influence can be found throughout Eating Ancient Virtue, and even within both of the books I have written.

So this episode is partly a remembrance of Gordon White and the impact he had on me.

But it is also a reflection on something larger: what is genius?

Not necessarily genius in the modern sense of IQ scores, academic achievement, but genius as a force. Genius as a calling. Genius as the unique medicine that only a particular person can bring into the world.

One of the ideas I explore in this conversation is that we know someone is living in their genius when their presence can be felt, and when they are gone, their absence can be felt too.

Gordon was one of those people.

His work was so uniquely his own that the world feels different without him in it.

His death has also prompted me to examine my own life more honestly. Where am I holding back? Where have I chosen safety over authenticity? Where am I still resisting the deeper expression of the work I came here to do?

In that sense, this episode became less about death and more about life.

It became a meditation on ancestry, destiny, vocation, courage, and what it means to fully inhabit the medicine that belongs to us.

And perhaps most importantly, it became an invitation.

Because one day all of us will be gone: the question is whether we will leave behind an absence that can be felt.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

EAV is a living body of work built around one idea: that the old ways still have something essential to offer. If that resonates, the deeper study lives inside the membership. Come join us.

Subscribe now

To my surprise, the news hit me harder than I expected. Generally speaking, I don’t tend to be deeply affected by the deaths of people I never personally knew. Yet when I heard that Gordon had passed, I found myself sitting with a real sense of loss.

The reason, I eventually realized, is that he had become a kind of spiritual ancestor in my own life.

I first encountered Gordon’s work about a decade ago through his book Chaos Protocols. At the time, it radically expanded my understanding of what magic could be. More importantly, it introduced me to a way of thinking that would go on to shape much of my own work over the years. His influence can be found throughout Eating Ancient Virtue, and even within both of the books I have written.

So this episode is partly a remembrance of Gordon White and the impact he had on me.

But it is also a reflection on something larger: what is genius?

Not genius in the modern sense of IQ scores, academic achievement, or exceptional talent, but genius as a force. Genius as a calling. Genius as the unique medicine that only a particular person can bring into the world.

One of the ideas I explore in this conversation is that we know someone is living in their genius when their presence can be felt, and when they are gone, their absence can be felt too.

Gordon was one of those people.

His work was so uniquely his own that the world feels different without him in it.

His death has also prompted me to examine my own life more honestly. Where am I holding back? Where have I chosen safety over authenticity? Where am I still resisting the deeper expression of the work I came here to do?

In that sense, this episode became less about death and more about life.

It became a meditation on ancestry, destiny, vocation, courage, and what it means to fully inhabit the medicine that belongs to us.

And perhaps most importantly, it became an invitation.

Because one day all of us will be gone: the question is whether we will leave behind an absence that can be felt.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com

There you’ll find additional podcasts, essays, courses, and explorations into ancestry, animism, spirituality, mythology, and the restoration of older ways of being in a modern world.

Listen to The Audio Version of The Podcast Here

Hello my friends…

In this episode of The Living Ancestor podcast, we explore the quiet but powerful ways the Deep Ancestors continue to shape our lives beneath the threshold of conscious thought. Through personal stories of instinct, reflex, movement, and animal behavior, this conversation traces the living continuity between the ancient world and the modern human nervous system.

What if the ancestors are not only spiritual presences encountered in ritual, but active intelligences woven into the structure of our bodies themselves? What if reflexes, orienting patterns, instinctive reactions, and even the way we seek warmth, safety, and connection are blessings carried forward through deep time?

Drawing from personal experiences on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, I reflect on narrowly avoiding a car accident through split-second reflexes, observing ancestral survival patterns in tide pool fish along volcanic coastlines, and understanding crawling, locomotion, and primal movement as expressions of ancient intelligence embedded directly into the human organism.

This episode explores the ancestral beyond something distant or abstract, but as an ongoing field of relationality that continuously informs perception, survival, behavior, and meaning-making. The Deep Ancestor are alive in the nervous system, and our body’s capacity to respond before the rational mind can think.

Topics include:

• Deep Ancestors and deep time consciousness

• Reflexes as ancestral blessings

• Instinct, and embodied intelligence

• Primal movement and ancestral patterning

• Animism and living relationality

• The ancestral nervous system

• Tide pools, animal behavior, and evolutionary memory

• Ancestor work beyond ritual practice

• The continuity between ancient and modern humans

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to stay connected, you can join me at eatingancientvirtue.substack.com for more podcasts, writings, courses, and offerings exploring the ancestral, the mythic imagination, and the restoration of older ways of being.

EAV is a living body of work built around one idea: that the old ways still have something essential to offer. If that resonates, the deeper study lives inside the membership. Come join us.

Subscribe now

What if the ancestors are not only spiritual presences encountered in ritual, but active intelligences woven into the structure of our bodies themselves? What if reflexes, orienting patterns, instinctive reactions, and even the way we seek warmth, safety, and connection are blessings carried forward through deep time?

Drawing from personal experiences on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, I reflect on narrowly avoiding a car accident through split-second reflexes, observing ancestral survival patterns in tide pool fish along volcanic coastlines, and understanding crawling, locomotion, and primal movement as expressions of ancient intelligence embedded directly into the human organism.

This episode explores the ancestral beyond something distant or abstract, but as an ongoing field of relationality that continuously informs perception, survival, behavior, and meaning-making. The Deep Ancestors are not gone. They are alive in the nervous system, alive in instinct, alive in the body’s capacity to respond before the rational mind can think.

Topics include:

• Deep Ancestors and deep time consciousness

• Reflexes as ancestral blessings

• Instinct, and embodied intelligence

• Primal movement and ancestral patterning

• Animism and living relationality

• The ancestral nervous system

• Tide pools, animal behavior, and evolutionary memory

• Ancestor work beyond ritual practice

• The continuity between ancient and modern humans

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to stay connected, you can join me at eatingancientvirtue.substack.com for more podcasts, writings, courses, and offerings exploring the ancestral, the mythic imagination, and the restoration of older ways of being.

Listen To The Audio Version of The Podcast Here:

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we explore the increasingly strange intersection between synchronicity, omens, divination, and the algorithmic architecture of the modern world. As AI-driven advertising grows more sophisticated, the ancient human instinct to read signs and meaning from the world around us is colliding with systems specifically designed to capture our attention, shape our behavior, and ultimately, direct our choices so they align with the agenda of commodifying forces.

This podcast examines the deep ancestral roots of omen reading and synchronicity through the lens of animism, tracking, hunter-gatherer awareness, and traditional forms of divination. We discuss how human beings have always interpreted patterns in the environment as meaningful, and how this capacity is woven into the structure of consciousness itself.

But in a world saturated by algorithms & targeted ads, an important question emerges: how do we distinguish a genuine sign from a ‘manufactured’ enchantment?

Together, we explore the difference between authentic synchronicity and what I call ‘adware synchronicity,’ the subtle ways institutions and technologies attempt to redirect attention and shape destiny through modern forms of magic. We also discuss dreams, symbols, collective patterns, media, spiritual ecology, animism, ancestral consciousness, and the importance of discernment in an age increasingly populated by artificial signals.

This episode is ultimately an invitation to reclaim a deeper relationship with meaning itself, and to sharpen our ability to recognize when the ‘world soul’ is truly speaking.

EAV is a living body of work built around one idea: that the old ways still have something essential to offer. If that resonates, the deeper study lives inside the membership. Come join us.

Subscribe now

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, we explore the increasingly strange intersection between synchronicity, omens, divination, and the algorithmic architecture of the modern world. As AI-driven advertising grows more sophisticated, the ancient human instinct to read signs and meaning from the world around us is colliding with systems specifically designed to capture our attention, shape our behavior, and ultimately, direct our choices so they align with the agenda of commodifying forces.

This podcast examines the deep ancestral roots of omen reading and synchronicity through the lens of animism, tracking, hunter-gatherer awareness, and traditional forms of divination. We discuss how human beings have always interpreted patterns in the environment as meaningful, and how this capacity is woven into the structure of consciousness itself.

But in a world saturated by algorithms & targeted ads, an important question emerges: how do we distinguish a genuine sign from a ‘manufactured’ enchantment?

Together, we explore the difference between authentic synchronicity and what I call ‘adware synchronicity,’ the subtle ways institutions and technologies attempt to redirect attention and shape destiny through modern forms of magic. We also discuss dreams, symbols, collective patterns, media, spiritual ecology, animism, ancestral consciousness, and the importance of discernment in an age increasingly populated by artificial signals.

This episode is ultimately an invitation to reclaim a deeper relationship with meaning itself, and to sharpen our ability to recognize when the ‘world soul’ is truly speaking.

🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com