An Excerpt from Restore Wellbeing

Ancestral Healing Practices for Daily Living

Take my hand. I’d like to take you someplace. It is someplace new, someplace that you have probably never been. Everything will be slightly unfamiliar. Not alien. Not foreign. Just touched with an unknown quality.

You’ll try to put your finger on it at first. Is it the language? The culture? The food? The architecture? The landscape?

But no, the longer that you are here, the more you will begin to understand that the shift is internal. I’m taking you to a new place inside yourself.

Everything tastes a little bit different here. Time itself moves a little bit differently here. The crackle of the fire itself sounds a little bit different here, the woodsmoke smells a little bit different here, the flames themselves dance with a color that is a little bit– how do you say it– more awake? The touch of your sweater on your own skin feels a bit scratchier. The water you dip your fingers into runs colder and cleaner. Your very own laughter sounds heartier.

Somehow it is as if we have stepped behind the world. As if we have moved through a portal, stepped across a threshold, moved back into a texture of experience that is original. For you are not lost here, you are not disoriented, simply different. There is some quality to your experience– some fundamental quality– that has changed. Almost as if something inside of you has condensed. Changed from vapor back to water. Become more fluid. Or fluid again. Or perhaps something in you has thawed. Something that was frozen has come back to life. Now that you are here, strangely, the things that seemed so important before you arrived have receded a bit. The siren song of the velocity of the modern world– the meetings, the dinners, transactions, insurance policies, the arbitrage– the endless unsettling churn of it all– seems almost a distraction.

You find yourself drawn to different things now. Your hands, which have always been here, attached to the end of your arms– they want to make things. They want to arrange flowers, tend the garden, they want to plane wood. You are amazed by simple things, like standing barefoot on a wooden floor: the dynamic phenomenon of balance. The feel of the weight transfer from your heels, the balls of your feet, up the leg, into the knee, into the hip, the pelvic floor. The way breath subtly radiates through all the diaphragms in the body.

You find a deliberate satisfaction in the everyday act of making tea. Boiling water, steeping tealeaves, pouring. Inhaling with fingers knit round the rim of the cup. These things absorb your attention like a sponge.

When the sun drops below the horizon, the overhead lights feel overbright to you. You prefer candles. Some rhythm inside of you has re-homed, back to the calendar of nature.

You begin to suspect the rocks you finger are sentient. That the birds communicate with one another in a language that you could understand if you could listen just beyond the edge of your attention. You learn to grow very still and yet from this stillness you begin to perceive, inwardly, a continuous and vital hum. As if your body itself is a beehive, dormant in winter, coming back to life.

Of its own accord your body hungers for bone broth, fresh vegetables, spring water, healthy fats, trace minerals. You stop setting an alarm. One day you take out your journal, and you make a list of the things you like to do now that you have found your way home...