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.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.comThere 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

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 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.comThere 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

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 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.comThere 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

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 futureI 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. In some ways…it’s easy. Funny enough, that is why it often trips people up. 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

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 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 humansIf 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

The Living Ancestor PodcastIn 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 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, I explore the inextricable link between ancestry and destiny, grounding an ancient metaphysical idea in a very practical, embodied way.I begin by situating destiny within older cosmologies that understood reality as multidimensional, inhabited by forces with agency, and animated by a soul that incarnates with an orientation and a potential. From there, I trace how many traditional cultures understood destiny not as a fixed outcome, but as an unfolding process shaped by the ongoing relationship between soul, body, circumstance, and choice.From this foundation, I turn toward the ancestral layer. Drawing from Yoruba Ifa and Orisha traditions, as well as Daoist understandings of Jing, I explore how ancestral inheritance and destiny were understood as inseparable. The body itself becomes the meeting point between ancestral forces and the soul’s unfolding path.I speak to the soul as a being that incarnates with an orientation, a pull toward experience, expression, and becoming, while simultaneously entering into a web of ancestral inheritance that establishes real constraints, patterns, and potentials. These inherited conditions are not obstacles to destiny, but the very soil through which it must grow.To bring this into the everyday, I offer a deliberately mundane example: the human squat. As an ancestral movement pattern built into the structure of the human body, the squat reveals how fate, choice, inheritance, and outcome interact at even the most basic level of embodiment. The body we inherit sets real parameters. How we engage those parameters becomes a site of conscious participation. What we inherit shapes what is possible. How we engage it shapes what unfolds.Through this example, I invite you to extrapolate outward, toward family inheritance, cultural stories, bodily predispositions, and the broader ancestral field that shapes what is possible for us. Destiny, in this view, is not about escaping fate, but about making conscious, participatory choices within the circumstances we inherit. It is the art of bringing awareness, care, and choice to what we did not choose.This episode is an invitation to see ancestry and destiny not as abstract concepts, but as lived, embodied processes unfolding through everyday decisions, movements, and orientations.From here, the conversation expands outward to family lineage, cultural inheritance, bodily predispositions, and the broader ancestral field that precedes us. Destiny emerges not as escape from these forces, but as conscious participation within them. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Destiny is not a destination.It is a lived process.In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, I explore destiny through two complementary metaphors that help orient us toward it in a more embodied and functional way.The first is the ship in sail: destiny as conscious participation in a journey, requiring navigation, stewardship of resources, and active engagement with fate as terrain rather than obstacle.The second is the tree and its fruit: destiny as an organic unfolding of what is already seeded within us, where growth, nourishment, resistance, and time allow something inherent to mature and bear fruit.These metaphors are medicine for different temperamentsFor those who over-surrender to fate, the ship calls forth responsibility and direction.For those who over-force outcomes, the tree restores patience, trust, and organic timing.Together, they point to destiny not as something we “arrive at,” but something that unfolds through how we orient, participate, and resource our lives.This episode is an invitation to re-encounter destiny as process, practice, and participation rather than outcome or achievement.🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore the ways in which we fetishize the ancestral in order to create a focal point of connection, and how that same touchstone can become limiting when it is mistaken for the whole of what the ancestral truly is.I begin by unpacking what a fetish actually means at its core: an orientation of consciousness, a container, a narrowing of vast forces into something we can relate to and work with. A fetish is a narrowing of devotion: the compression of something into an object, identity, behavior, or idea that can be grasped and engaged. While this process has ancient, indigenous roots and can be inherently valuable, it also has the potential to confine our perception when we mistake the container for the mystery itself.From there, I move into how modern cultures often reduce the ancestral into segmented forms: nutrition, movement, spirit work, or the dead, and how these narrowed interpretations flatten the true scope of ancestry. Diet trends, “primal” exercise, spiritualized nostalgia, and commodified versions of ancestral living are all explored as examples of this limitation.In the final phase, the ancestral is expanded beyond any single category. The body itself is revealed as an ancestral phenomenon. Bloodlines, landlines, soul lines, mythic lineages, and cosmic ancestry all emerge: extending back to Earth, Sun, Moon, stars, and Source. In this way, we begin to sense the ancestral not as an external force we approach, but as a vast field of being that holds us; one fire in a long, continuous lineage of fires.This episode invites you to move beyond a single fetishized layer of ancestry and instead build a broader altar of relationship: one that includes body, land, spirit, cosmos, memory, and mystery. Not to define the ancestral, but to begin listening to how it lives through you🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

What if the idea that we live in a simulation is less a ‘material reality’ and more a symptom of modern disconnection? It’s likely that those who feel the world is simulated have simply forgotten what it feels like to be ‘real.’ This episode examines the consequences of a loss of lived contact with reality: the fading of soul, body, and world into abstraction.Some live in the world as conscious, active participants inside animated bodies, while others drift as spectators of a simulation, like players in a video game. Many modern humans find themselves in a kind of limbo, yet the possibility of inhabiting the real world is still within reach. Tune into The Living Ancestor Podcast to discover how sensory awareness, presence, and breath can reconnect us back to reality.To paid members: It appears there was ‘glitch"‘ with this post’ and it only went out to paid subscribers. Apologies that you are receiving it twice as I correct the glitch, and get it to everyone. In fact, I had republish the whole thing from scratch because of technical issues. Seems I might be upsetting the techno gods. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: https://eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe