Most of you won’t recognize my name. I’m Lauren, the Managing Director here at Ancestral Medicine. Hi. 👋🏽
I work closely with Daniel, our team, and our practitioners to keep the business end of this operation healthy: to keep our marketing quiet, our offerings potent, and our books balanced. I’m in your email today because I felt an urgent desire to give voice to the ancient power of female rage as fuel for world-building.
I brought this urge to Daniel, and he did what he often does, a thing he does better than most men I know: he passed me the mic to share his platform. Because yeah, this is a good moment to allow a woman to speak.
By the grace of a hard-earned, midlife commitment to my own wellbeing, I’ve mostly managed to stay steady despite the gruesome news cycle of the last few years. I’ve found ways to metabolize. To stay functioning. To keep loving.
Until the most recent revelations in the Epstein files, that is. You may now find me weeping daily, and in inappropriate circumstances, and it’s not because powerful men exploiting vulnerable people is surprising. It is distinctly unsurprising and structurally predictable. What concerns me most is not the story about one man, or even his network of cronies and enablers.
It’s the architecture that makes it possible.
We live among models of power organized around domination, entitlement, and extraction. Models historically built and enforced by men at the center of empire, corporation, and state. We see in the files the same extractive logic of colonialism.
We can find the male gaze at the center of most every social heartache for millennia.
Man see. Man want. Man take.
World burns.
From Ferdinand (the king) and his number one pirate (C. Columbus) to record Wall Street profits that decimate housing stability. From the transatlantic slave trade to Gilded Age industrialists relying on child labor and environmental devastation. From today’s military industrial complex to the incomprehensible quantity of pedophiles in global leadership. These systems make the Epsteins possible. And the Epsteins are the ones building worlds we wouldn’t have chosen, into which we’re conscripted for life.
We can dissolve into the sweaty, salacious gossip of these files. Choke on the slow drip of new revelations. We can gaze passively as it drifts into caricature and fringe theory, till every lie feels true and every truth feels like groundless conspiracy. Till we’re stuck in the paralysis of our rage and impotence.
Or.
We can remember that the real conspiracy is not a secret cabal in a dark room. It’s an open, legalized system of wealth concentration that privatizes profit, socializes harm, and protects itself at all costs.
It works its way into our lives, our homes, our worldview. It’s in our values, our food, our sex lives, in how we consume, how we love, and how we yearn to be chosen. The conspiracy lives in our bodies and guides our decisions. The conspiracy has my mother starving herself into her eighty-third year of life to be one pants size smaller.
The conspiracy shapes what we believe success looks like, what we consider impressive. It shapes the kinds of bodies we admire and what we’ll do to ourselves to get them. It causes us to rank human value and choose comfort over kindness. The conspiracy views land as a resource and time as currency. It measures worth by proximity to power, which is why we climb corporate ladders as anxiety eats us alive and so many women end up in marriages with men they knew all along to be unsafe.
We are infected with the logic of the conspiracy, and no matter how anti-supremacy we think we are, there is always more. Always more that we can scrub from the crevices of our perception. And some of us need the scrubbing more than others. To the precious few not-queer, cis white men on our email list, I’m looking at you. We need this from you perhaps most of all.
The good news is, for every perception we change, for every little fire we walk through, we emerge more free.
And so, yeah, worldbuilding. It cannot only mean electing different leaders or exposing different villains. Let’s do all that, for sure.
But our new worlds can’t come till we correct our vision first. It’s like being a practitioner of some kind and claiming inclusivity in shared space without first breaking open your own attachment to the supremacies you recreate. It simply doesn’t work if the foundational inquiry hasn’t been done. Your “inclusive” space won’t be safe, and someone will get hurt. Worldbuilding is behavioral. In worldbuilding, power, consent, desire, hierarchy, and belonging are actively negotiated rather than assumed. These inquiries interrupt the logic that underpins the systems of harm actively making our world feel like a living hellscape.
What does this look like in practical terms?
For starters, if systems are extractive, we focus even more being relational.
If systems isolate, our work is to connect.
Whoever we’re trained to view as a resource for utilization, we reconsider as kin.
If it’s our gaze that’s been weaponized in the perpetuation of these systems, or if we’ve adopted paradigms based on the overvaluation of the dominant gaze, our work is to become very effing aware of where our gaze may fall and how that might impact or shape culture.
It’s in the language we use. In whom we bless with the grace of our attention. It’s in what we tolerate and what we interrupt. It’s in what we praise or denounce. It’s in who we choose to believe, and how we hold space for harms we have unwittingly perpetuated.
It’s in how courageously we’re willing to love.
Here’s a wonderful thing: I still believe another world is possible. Not every day. But I see enough beauty in the actions of my loved ones, in the things they’re doing, and the things you’re doing and building, to know that there’s something to believe in. So thank you for being my beacon.
Now comes the part where Daniel usually tells us about all the things open for registration, and I’ll do that, too. But first I’d really like you to know that our programming decisions, the topics we cover, the guests we invite and platform, they’re all envisioned and cooked up in the name of paradigm-shifts, the expansion of perception, and personal and cultural repair. If you’re not sure what your practice looks like, or how to shift perspective, or if you simply feel too afraid or angry or too broken to get up off the floor, chances are decent we’ve got something for you. If cost is a barrier, shoot us a note. We’re running a business, but we do our best to open our doors to all who have interest.
Foundations of Ritual begins on Monday. This is the first class I ever took with Ancestral Medicine, before I worked here, and look at me now. 💅 Daniel is teaching all the live calls, and you’ll get his pre-recorded lessons, too. I know listening to men speak right now is…a tad challenging. However, the course is a cross-cultural education in rekindling and deepening ritual practice in a safe and sensitive space with, in my opinion, one of the best we’ve got.
On March 19th, we’ve invited Nkem Ndefo and Kai Cheng Thom for a one-time talk called Steady in the Storm: Leading with Courage and Building Community Resilience. We’ll talk about all the stuff in this letter, but through the lens of our two guests. Nkem brings decades of experience in healthcare, healing justice, and systems change, and her work centers solidarity with communities impacted by violence and marginalization. Kai Cheng is a writer, poet, performer, and community healer based in Toronto. She’s known for her work on queer/trans rights, mental health, and transformative justice. It’ll be dope, and it’s free. Come hang with us for an hour and half. There’ll be time for Q&A at the end.
Because we’re committed to keeping it weird, and special for the science folks in our audience, this very cool offering is also open: Relational Living with the Smalls: Adventures with the Microbial World. The course invites you to squint a bit, to look past the obvious. The labor of the smalls is constant, intimate, and largely unseen. Sound familiar? We begin March 24, and all calls will be anchored by friend of the network, Siobhán (Siv) Watkins, microbiologist and founder of Microanimism. She’ll be joined by David Zilber, a professional chef, fermenter, and food scientist.
Possibly my favorite offering at Ancestral Medicine, we’ve expanded and updated our Animist Psychology curriculum from 8 to 12 lessons, and Daniel is hard at work recording all new lessons. There will also be 12 live calls with Daniel and visiting guests of diverse ancestries. The course begins in late April and speaks to a central gap in modern psychology: the tendency to reduce the psyche to the individual. It guides participants in how to invite and include ancestry, culture, ecology, spirit, and unseen forces. It’s an amazing course for therapists and other holders of space wanting to blow open their Euro-centric training with some new ideas and skills. It’s also for we mouthy broads who participate in healing and enjoy helping our practitioners…ahem…expand their worldview.
Every thinking person is at least a little heartbroken right now. Some cultures are better than others at metabolizing and utilizing the honorable power of grief. If you could use a bit of support, community, and skill-building, our two stellar teachers, Chi Young Kim and Langston Kahn will draw on Taoist Elemental Theory and animist principles in this five-part series, Grieving Ourselves Whole. Early registration is open while spaces last.
And finally, we’ll be in person in Tbilisi, Georgia this July! It’s an unexpected addition to our annual lineup. Three days of ancestral lineage healing with Daniel and trained practitioners at a very accessible rate. I personally plan to be there if you’d like to chat worldbuilding over khachapuri.
Don’t forget our Practitioner Directory for one-on-one Ancestral Healing, and our library of self-paced courses.
– IN PRAISE OF GOOD WORKS –
Demand the Full Unredacted Release of the Epstein Files
California representative Ro Khanna is pushing for the full, unredacted release of the Epstein files and greater transparency from the U.S. DOJ. Accountability begins with truth. Call your rep and insist they follow suit. This is a party-neutral cause, and public pressure is the best resource we’ve got to counter private influence.
Survivors are putting themselves at extraordinary personal risk to speak out. To go up against this kind of power requires a type of courage most of us will never be asked to summon. Their characters have been attacked, histories dissected, safety threatened. Support survivor-led advocacy through World Without Exploitation.
If you’re living with the impact of childhood sexual abuse, RAINN offers confidential support and resources.
