Never forget where you came from. Long before you had breath, a heartbeat, or solid bones, you belonged to the water. Your ancient mothers are oceanic. For billions of years the evolutionary dance of life unfolded in the sea: the first cells, the first symbiotic union of mitochondria and archaea, the first wavelike pulse found in all of life. The primordial respiratory wave moves through every cell and organ in your body. Though you may see yourself as a land being now, you are actually two-thirds water. You still carry the oceans within you as blood, lymph, tears and fascial lagoons. Your mer-creature inheritance lives within.

The Water Womb

You developed in a Water Womb, without light, breath or a sense of gravity, suspended in the warm, dark sea of your mother’s amnion. There you recapitulated the whole story of life on Earth—a 4.5-billion-year evolutionary journey replayed in 9 months of gestation. Your growing body moved through forms older than human: aquatic, amphibian, reptilian, mammalian, given shape by ancestral morphic fields proven by science to exist, but that cannot be fully explained.

We are each twice-born from the ocean—once at the dawn of life, and once in the amniotic sea of our mother’s womb. And we remain throughout our lives deeply attuned to the frequency of water. It is our first language and our oldest home.

Womb to World, Ocean to Land

And then, in a momentous evolutionary rite of passage that mirrored our own birth, life emerged from the waters and onto land, from womb to world.

It began with the plants, who prepared the Earth for all terrestrial life that would follow. But, they could not do it on their own.

The ancient plant beings that first migrated onto the land could only survive with the help of fungi. The earliest plants had no root systems. They could not anchor themselves, could not draw water and minerals from raw stone and thin soil. What made the leap possible was a partnership: fungal threads that wrapped around and into the cells of the plants, feeding them, anchoring them, carrying nourishment up from the Earth.

For some 50 million years, plants depended entirely on the fungi to act as their roots—for connection, communication, and sustenance. Eventually plants grew their own, but they never stopped needing the mycelial web. To this day, the vast majority of plants on Earth live in an intimate root partnership with mycorrhizal fungi. This relationship is the foundation of terrestrial life, providing food and habitat for all creatures, governing planetary water cycles, filling our atmosphere with oxygen.

Plants are your ancestors—not just as a metaphor, but as the pioneers that made life possible for every animal of the future, including humans. There is an unbroken chain of genetic and geometric patterns encoded within the web of life that connect the first plants to you as you read these words. Plants are Mother; Mycelia a Grandmother; both are Elders that came first. All life on this planet was midwifed by an older kingdom of being.

The Mycelial Web

Within the rich soil of the forest floor runs a primordial communication network. The roots of plants descend into the earth, and there they meet the flowing threads of mycelium—the fine fungal filaments that connect each plant to the next, weaving the plant beings of the forest into a single living fabric. This is the mycorrhizal web, the “neural network” of the forest.

The mycelial web behaves remarkably like a nervous system. Information moves through it. Nutrients are shared along it. A tree under attack can send chemical warnings to its neighbors through these threads; dying trees release their stored carbon into the network for others to use. The branching topology of underground fungal filaments echoes the architecture of neurons and synapses. The Earth, it turns out, has been “thinking” through its fungal webs for hundreds of millions of years.

An Underwater Forest Within

Let’s take a closer look at your own design. Consider your nervous system—that first developed in the aquatic world of the womb, designed to thrive underwater like a fish or dolphin. Your adult nervous system is still completely surrounded by water. Your brain and spinal cord are bathed by cerebrospinal fluid, your peripheral nerves are held in place by the fluid-filled scaffolding of fascia, with liquid crystalline layers of “fourth phase” water adhered to them in hexagonal geometrical formations.

The structure of your nervous system takes a tree-like form, reminiscent of sea plant thriving in an underwater forest, with a brain that parallels the canopy of a tree, a spinal cord that resembles the trunk, and nerve “roots” branching out from your spine. The name for the branching architecture of the dendrites of your neurons is derived from Greek dendron, meaning “tree”.

And beneath the nervous system runs a network older and more pervasive still: the fascia. This continuous web of connective tissue wraps every muscle, every organ, every cell, threading the whole body into one tensile, communicating, fluid fabric. It is built in a pattern similar to the mycelial web beneath the forest.

Plants and fungi were the first pioneers of web communication. Then millions of years later the fascia of animals followed a similar fractal, branching architecture of connection. Our fascia resembles an inner mycelial web, a fluid-lined network that, from an evolutionary perspective, long predates the development of the first nervous system on the planet. And in human embryology, our connective tissue begins forming by week 2 of gestational age, before the nervous system. We are, in our earliest tissues, woven together the way a forest is woven.

A Walking Sanctuary

Your body contains multitudes—you are a walking sanctuary. The mitochondria that power the cells of your body are of non-human origin, descendants of an ancient free-living archaeon that, some two billion years ago, was taken into the body of another single-celled organism, in an act of union so intimate it became the foundation for much of the complex life on the planet. Mitochondria carry their own DNA, passed on to you only through your mother, and her mother, and hers—an unbroken maternal lineage reaching back to the original mitochondrial mother in the primordial oceans. This is an ancestral mother line, with codes that were originally forged in the deep sea still humming inside you.

And the mitochondria are only the beginning. You are home to a teeming, magical ecosystem of beings—including bacteria, fungi and other members of the 50 trillion microorganisms of your microbiome. Without them you could not digest, synthesize important vitamins, have a functioning immune system or metabolism, or even fully think. Your body is a community space, a small ocean of relationship walking upright through the world.

The Tree of Life Is Your Body

Consider the shape of you. Your orientation is like a plant’s orientation. You have a crown and roots; your arms reach toward the heavens like branches and leaves, your legs and feet reach down toward the earth. This is the tree’s symmetry, and we share it. It is no accident that the Tree of Life sits at the center of spiritual traditions across the world, from the sefirot of the Kabbalah to the world-trees of countless cultures.

Most people think of the Tree of Life as something outside you—an archetypal energy or symbol that has nothing to do with the human body. But the Elder cultures understood that your body is the Tree of Life. Roots that draw nourishment from the fertile soil beneath you, a trunk where energies flow through you, and the crown that reaches toward heavens.

The Tree of Life is not just a symbol. It is embodied cosmology. The sacred symbols and mythic truths are woven into your body. They form a map of the subtle energetic and psychic currents within you, the basis of eco-somatic spiritual paths of somatic awakening.

Top: Egyptian tree goddess; Bottom Left: Asherah / Astarte Tree of Life; Bottom Right: Asherah as Tree of Life

Finding Our Roots Again

Unlike our plant ancestors who were fixed in the soil, we humans are mobile. The two major functions of plants’ roots—structure and digestion—are split into different locations in us so that we can walk. Our legs mirror the structural role of roots, but for digestion, we evolved a way to carry the “soil” inside our own intestines, in the form of a rich microbiome that allows us to receive nourishment everywhere we go.

The Shape of Us

All of this is who we are. It is our history, our birthright, where we come from. Layers upon layers of elemental and pre-human intelligence.

The truth is written in our body.

We are water-born—our mother is Water. We are inheritors of a worldwide tradition of mermaid myths that reflect the truth of our earliest gestational and evolutionary memories.

We share the subtle shapes of plants in the structures of our nervous system, and the symmetries of our body. These somatic pilgrimage pathways are mapped through the symbols of the collective unconscious common to all humans.

We are the mirrors of nature throughout the layers of our being.

To remember this is the beginning of a different way of living within your body, as a node in a vast evolutionary network hundreds of millions of years old—held, fed, and woven into the world the way the first plants were held by the fungi that carried them onto land.

These are our roots, our origins, our home.

Art Credits: opening image, collage adaptations of “Elemental Lovers” by Tessa Mythos and “Moon Cup” by Susan Seddon Boulet

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The old trauma healing era is over.

Yes, I know … but, hear me out.

That’s because a new perspective on trauma healing has arrived.

Like all living systems, trauma healing as a modality is evolving.

We all have wounds to heal. And, we will always need relational support and witnessing in that process (especially from all you gifted healers reading this). Because our wounding is relational, the balm is relational. That part isn’t going anywhere.

But, what I’m saying is that the entire framework and context of the conversation needs to change, and naturally many people are sensing that right now, and adjusting.

You can see here what I wrote about this back in 2022, as I predicted this movement.

The field of persistent, unresolved trauma—PTSD, complex-PTSD and similar—that all humans are currently experiencing is only possible in a world of disconnection.

Like animals, when we are connected to the organic Earth Matrix, we might experience acute shocks or traumas, but we can usually “shake them off”—they don’t tend to stick.

But in a world where we are so disconnected from the Earth, from the beauty and intelligence of our animal bodies, from our natural magic, and from the maps, cosmologies and structures that once wove us into the sacred Web of Life, persistent trauma states are the norm. They are a direct consequence of disconnection.

Our nervous systems weren’t designed to regulate in isolation. The more separated we are, the harder it is for our traumas to mend.

The greatest trauma of modern times is the separation of the human body-mind from the natural world. The cure is reconnection.

So, if disconnection is the problem, if that’s what makes traumas stick, is the solution to take more walks in the park? Not for most people. It will help some, but alone it won’t be enough. What’s needed is to learn a new way of relating to the living world. We need to court it, to learn its love languages, to reweave the threads of connection through small daily acts. To treat this as a sacred path that changes us as we walk it.

At Biomancy University we call this eco-somatic reconnection—merging our nervous system with the nervous system of Earth. We use the Biomantic Reconnection Mandala as a diagnostic and a map to guide the process.

After 30 years as a medical doctor, a former NIH researcher and healer, and after working with 40,000 people, here’s what I’ve seen:

Focus on eco-somatic connection first, and trauma symptoms begin to diminish right away, or they become so much easier to work with—rapid progress become the norm rather than a painfully slow process of titration and pendulation.

This is how every indigenous and alchemical system works. They do not psychologize the individual as a separate being, or do individual therapy in that sense. They focus on remembering you back to right relations with the greater forces of nature, life, tribe, cosmos and spirit. (Note: if you are NOT currently living in an intact indigenous cosmology, your cosmology needs re-wiring too.)

Leading-edge trauma science is quietly catching up. The current “standard of care” in modern trauma healing is trauma-focused therapy—coming into contact with the intense feelings and trauma memories, and then learning to manage them differently, which can be so difficult. Drop-out rates can be as high as 50%.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research shows that supportive, non-trauma-focused approaches (breathwork, yoga, meditation, animal- and nature-based therapies) profoundly reduce trauma symptoms. (Frost 2020; Cloitre 2002, 2010; Greer 2019). Several studies show even better results when the approaches are combined: support and resource people first, then do the trauma-focused therapy when people are ready. (Cloitre 2002, 2010).

This is the current state of the science. BUT, what is not said in the research is that no trauma therapy or “supportive therapy” is designed to actually heal the meta-level root of the issue—that our broken and disconnected cosmology needs repair. They are designed to stabilize you and keep you functioning in society as it is now: to patch you up and keep you serving the modern industrial Matrix.

On the other hand, mystery school work was designed to reshape those deep structural roots, and that’s why it has been so forbidden. Mystery schools led people through a process of “rebirth”. One reality begins to dissolve as another wider reality emerges in its place—as was encoded in the myths of Isis and Osiris, or Demeter and Persephone.

This level of transformation can only happen in an energetic cocoon, or chrysalis, to hold us in the process. That chrysalis is your connection with the nervous system of Earth and with the lineages that have walked this path before us—creating a bigger nervous system than your individual human one.

We weave all of this into our approach at Biomancy University. Rather than working with random, isolated practices, we weave breath, alchemical movement, guided journey, nature and spirit connection into an integrated cosmology and system, connected to the lineage traditions of our ancestors. We recognize the process as a sacred journey, not a problem to be fixed. We work with the truth that trauma didn’t begin in childhood. It came through inherited ancestral fields, imprinted on us in the womb. And, that the ultimate origin of trauma is our disconnection from the Earth.

We also reconnect people to their magic—their innate human ability to work with consciousness, devotion, prayer, subtle energies, psychic gifts and fields. The quantum layer of our biology.

We have been shamed and scared out of our magic through centuries of religious and cultural programming—functioning as a collective spell. We need to claim it back.

The old trauma healing era is ending because a new model is emerging. We are remembering the bigger picture. Our deepest healing comes from reconnecting with the Web of Life—physically, emotionally, energetically, spiritually. All the rest follows.

Reweaving connection. Rooting forward into the future.

In honor of Gaia, Dr Azra Bertrand

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Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

References:

Cloitre, M., Koenen, K. C., Cohen, L. R., & Han, H. (2002). Skills training in affective and interpersonal regulation followed by exposure: A phase-based treatment for PTSD related to childhood abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70(5), 1067–1074.

Cloitre, M., Stovall-McClough, K. C., Nooner, K., Zorbas, P., Cherry, S., Jackson, C. L., Gan, W., & Petkova, E. (2010). Treatment for PTSD related to childhood abuse: A randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(8), 915–924.

Cushing, R. E., & Braun, K. L. (2018). Mind-body therapy for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder: A systematic review. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 24(2), 106–114.

Frost ND, Laska KM, Wampold BE (2020). “Non-Trauma-Focused Psychotherapies for the Treatment of PTSD: a Descriptive Review.” Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry, 7(3):323–335

Greer, M., Vin-Raviv, N. (2019). Outdoor-based therapeutic recreation programs among military veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder: assessing the evidence. Military Behavioral Health, 7(3).

Niles, B. L., Mori, D. L., Polizzi, C., Pless Kaiser, A., Weinstein, E. S., Gershkovich, M., & Wang, C. (2018). A systematic review of randomized trials of mind-body interventions for PTSD. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 74(9), 1485–1508

Wynn, G. H. (2015). Complementary and alternative medicine approaches in the treatment of PTSD. Current Psychiatry Reports, 17(8), 62.

Gospel of the Mermaids: The Fluid Body, Part 1

The Foundation of Your Quantum Biology

Back in 1994, when I was living and studying in Bali, I would get up early every morning to walk to the beach with my teacher, a traditional Balinese high priest, to make prayers and offerings to the ocean at sunrise. I had taken a year out of my degree in biochemistry to deepen my spiritual studies in Balinese culture.

At the time, those moments in prayer at the water’s edge seemed like the polar opposite of my studies in science.

But now, as more and more research emerges on the role of water in our quantum biology, I see now what our ancestors always knew—that we are made of water magic, and that the legends of mermaids and mermen are more than make believe.

Our ancestors celebrated the waters of life, and intuitively understood that water held the secrets of our quantum biology and consciousness. In this essay we’ll take a tour through mythos, lineage, practical healing guidance and cutting edge new science of our sacred waterways, that will open you up to a much deeper understanding of your innate and very real bio-magic, and the embodied cosmologies that encoded them.

The Mermaid Lineages

“We play the tambourine for your Ka,

We dance for your majesty

We exalt you – to the height of heaven.”

~ Hymn to the Seven Hathors, Temple of Dendera, 1500 BCE

The water mysteries had a strong presence in the temples of Ancient Egypt. The hymn above was sung to charge the Ka—the energy body—of the 7 Hathors. The Hathors were symbolically linked with the 7 sisters of the Pleiades, a star cluster associated with the annual flooding of the Nile that brought fertility to the land. Myth told that the seven sisters were star mermaids, daughters of the ancient sea-nymph Pleione, meaning “abundance”, whose parents were Oceanus and Tethys, the Greek God and Goddess of the sacred waters. The fluid of heaven and earth is the “pleroma”—the embodiment of fullness, overflow, abundance, also found in the body.

During the annual Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, the goddess Hathor was carried in procession on a golden river barque, like a primordial mermaid, down the waters of the Nile at the time of the New Moon. During the ceremony, a bowl of water was placed on an altar, to act as a conduit for the nature gods—the neteru—and the mother of water, the Nile. They whispered over the water to charge it with intention. The waters carried her love and devotion, and carried her toward her destiny to create new Life. Water altars were created to receive the people’s prayers.

Hathor was the nourishing milk, the sensual feminine flow, Mother of the Body, Mother of the Gods, and a symbol of the shimmering Ka body, or energy body – our radiance, our aura, our embodied “glow” when our fluid body is in the flow, rather than stuck. Hathor’s priestesses charged her Ka through music, dance, essential oils, prayer, joy, sensuality and ecstasy—through devotionally raising the vibration of their own inner waters and fluid bodies, on a daily basis. (We’ll come back to that in a moment.)

Water. Mermaids. The energy body. Sensual movement. Singing. Music. Breath. Fragrance. Prayer. Devotion. The Beauty Way. Practices that calibrate the nervous system into balance and create low alpha flow states and theta states of coherence in our brainwaves. These are central spiritual focuses across time and culture. What they have in common is that they all help to regenerate our “fluid body” and our aura or energy body.

We see these practices mirrored in the tradition of Mary Magdalene and her alabaster jar of anointing fluids, her cleansing tears and even her name—Mary, or Maryam in Aramaic—associated with the word mar, meaning sea or salt water. Similarly with the goddess Isis, “Star of the Sea” with her processional “mermaid” sea festival, the Navigium Isidis, as well as with the goddess Asherah the “Sea-Walker”, the mermaid of the Sea of Galilee.

We also see these themes with Atargatis, the mermaid goddess of ancient Syria, who had subterranean temples with central altars in the middle of pools of water, requiring the priestesses to swim into the womblike pools to light candles and tend the altars. As well as Nammu, goddess of the fresh waters, the oldest known deity of the Ancient Near East, whose worship goes back more than 6,000 years, predating the Sumerian civilization. Other examples of the water-spirit traditions still exist now.

This water magic flowed through into the Catholic rites of the Blessing of Holy Water with the prayer: “O God, for the salvation of mankind, you built your greatest mysteries on this substance, water. In your kindness, hear our prayers and pour down the power of your blessing into this element... May this, your creature, become an agent of divine grace...” This rite is performed by a priest, sometimes involving the mixing of blessed salt, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In the Jewish tradition, on Sukkot, pilgrims watched the yearly water libations that were performed in the temple in a ritual known as “Simchat Beit Hashoevah” – the Rejoicing at the Place of the Water Drawing. To magically summon rain in the coming year, the priest poured out collected rain water from the previous season. The priest carried a golden flask with water from the rock-cut pool of Silwan that was fed from the Gihon Spring, and would eventually pass through the Water Gate that led to the temple.

The Mysteries of Water are eternal. Water is the origin of life, our developmental foundation in the waters of the womb, our mythos, our evolutionary home. In the Bible, the creation story features water as a primal substance: On day one of creation the Spirit of God hovers over the “face of the waters,” the primordial, formless state (the “deep”), and then on day two, God creates an expanse (firmament) to separate “the waters above from the waters below.” Life originates in water.

Water as a quantum, supra-sensory medium, is also the source of our quantum biology, and the real magic of the oracular perception system of our fascia network.

Let’s take a closer look at the anatomy of our fluid body, and learn why it is so important to our healing paths, energetic radiance and spiritual connection.

The Fluid Body - You are a Mermaid

First, like a mermaid - you have a “land” biology, and a “water” biology.

You are not primarily a solid structure. There is a duality, two layers of your biology.

At one level, you are mostly water, a kind of primordial mer-creature. Your skin and skeletal structure, amongst other things, serve as a vessel that carry the ancient oceans within you. We could only evolve out of the oceans by carrying them within us.

You are around 60% water by weight, but closer to 99% by molecule count.

That water is not inert. It is the medium through which your entire physiology operates—and it is the most energetically responsive layer of your biology.

I call this layer the fluid body.

Fluid Body vs Structural Body

Before we dive deeper into the workings of the fluid body, let’s look at the bigger context to understand the difference between the fluid body and structural body, and why this distinction is so important.

In my work in Biomancy, I distinguish between two interwoven aspects of our biology:

The structural body —includes your bones, organs, ligaments and other dense connective tissues. At the more subtle level, it involves your deep, inherited epigenetic and ancestral patterns — the somatic, psychological and neuro-endocrine paths that have a deep groove, and keep repeating over lifetimes, generations, to solidify. The structural layer moves in 3 to 7-year cycles. When you do work here, it is slower.

Structural body work is like re-doing the foundations. You are re-shaping bone and ligament, literally and metaphorically. You are trying to shift multi-generational psychological patterns and dense family morphic fields. This is critically important work, but it takes time and persistence and often a long-term energy input.

The fluid body—is more responsive, more tidal in nature; new waves of energy can flow in and create change more quickly. It is sensitive to energy and the immediate environment — the ecology of nature, home, culture, to your thoughts and feelings. Fluid body work is more like applying feng shui in your home to make it more beautiful and zing with energy, often with felt results that change the “atmosphere.”

From a bio-magical lens, the fluid body encompasses all of your sensitive and rapidly responsive “fluid” systems, including your fascia as a continuous body-wide fluid organ, as well as your blood, lymph and intra-cellular fluids. By fluid body, I do not just mean only what is liquid. Your nervous system, mitochondrial network and your “biofield” — the bioelectromagnetic field that surrounds and permeates you — are also rapidly responsive sensing and communicating systems. They are part of your fluid body, pulsing and flowing with circadian and seasonal rhythms. This is the part of you that can shift in an instant, responsive to the surrounding environment.

Your chronobiology, for instance, mother of your circadian biology, is designed to be perceiving patterns and textures of light, dark and time movements, in every moment.

The fluid body is extremely responsive. It can be quickly (but temporarily) reset with 20 minutes of breath or prayer, or be more permanently transformed in 40 days, as in the tradition of Jesus’s 40-day initiation in the wilderness. You can completely rebirth your frequency template at an epigenetic level in 6 months, over a cycle of equinox to equinox. It is exquisitely sensitive to frequency, sound, sunlight, darkness, temperature, emotion, prayer, rhythm, nature, touch, feelings and non-verbal cues.

The Ancestral Way: Fluid First, Then Structural

What’s so important to understand is that our ancestors never began with the structural work. They did not start with the heavy lifting of shifting the deep psychological patterns of relationship to family and cultural systems. They did not try to heal trauma by plunging headlong into painful patterns to feel the overwhelming feelings and hopefully alchemize them. They worked first to invoke the beneficial ecological and cosmic forces, to call forth ancestral gifts and powers and cultivate spirit energy.

They created a container of overflow, abundance, connection, and daily somatic practice — from dance, movement, bodywork, to walking and working in nature, working with healing food and herbs, and prayers of reverence and thanks, alongside creativity and expression.

Only after the fluid body was revitalized, radiant, coherent would they have the resources to restructure the foundations without burning out. This was daily practice, orientated around sun, moon, cycles, seasons, stars and rites of passage. Deep structural work often happens after or within initiation, which required preparation.

The Exiled Mer-Maid Lineage

In our modern world, we have devalued these practices as “feminine” or “wellness.” When we look at Mary Magdalene as the symbol of a lineage, what we often see portrayed are the structural rites — the grief mysteries, the death doula, descent into the underworld, crucifixion and resurrection, pathways of initiation, women’s mysteries and sacred sexuality. But her alabaster jar also marks her as a myrrhophore and mermaid—a sacred technician of the fluid body and the beauty way. As the mermaid lineages and priestesses of Hathor knew, we must charge the Ka body first. That happens through tending the fascia and fluid body—the sensitive, receptive, perceptual systems of our biology.

Because the “mer” feminine is exiled into spas and “wellness” spaces, the fluid body is forgotten. People forget that Magdalene was part of the “Mary” mer-maid lineage, here to remind us of the healing secrets of restoring our sense of inner beauty and coherence, in tandem with nature, ecology, time codes, body work and gentle movement that heals the fascia. Images of a female saint carrying a chalice with healing plant balms, fragrant oils and liquids of anointing represent a tradition that knew the medicine of the fluid body — how to sing to and shape the crystalline form of your fascia and release stuck energy. These mermaid practices renew your aura and cleanse your inner waters, giving you the foundations to do the more intense initiatory processes of death, rebirth and shadow work.

This is why I structure the Biomancy University programs to work with both the fluid body and the structural body—the fluid body as a personal initiation and apprenticeship and the structural body as a practitioner journey.

Beginning at Beltaine, we flow into 6 months of foundational fluid body work in the 6-month Apprenticeship, which includes taking journeys to bring organic light and vitality into your body organs and cells, connecting with your quantum water, communing with healing frequencies and the song of your cells, as well learning to hear the hidden languages of the ecosystem and elements, and a rebirth journey through the elemental templates held inside the Earth Womb.

Then, at Samhain, in Eco-Somatics, we move into 6 months of the more deep-rooted structural and ancestral work, as we remember deeper eco-evolutionary gifts, powers and identity, and the way our memory and experience form into solid character structures.

For the fluid body, we rebirth and regenerate with the elements, through the crystalline memory and original essence of the Womb of Earth. In the eco-somatic journey we rebirth through the birth mother, to discover our character structures.

In modern culture, the mermaid practices and rites of the ancient temples have lost their sacred context, forgetting that beauty rituals, bodywork, essential oils and healing waters, were once both sacred and a science, and were clearly understood to reset the aura and frequency and have real bio-magical effects.

Our Elder cultures knew these bio-secrets. The Essenes, as just one example, held daily water purification ceremonies, along with sunlight rituals, to open their “light body” (and fascia).

Fluid body and energy work is part of an ancient embodied cosmology and spiritual path. It can be done solely for joy, connection, healing, or to prepare for deeper work.

Your Fluid Body is the Biological Bridge

The secret that every ancient tradition has known is that your fluid body is the biological bridge to your energy body. It is the fastest and most direct path to transform it. It is forgotten because it takes us out of suffering and into joy.

The energy body has been known by different names across time and culture.

In Ancient Egypt it was the Ka body. In yogic traditions it is the Pranamaya kosha. In mystical Christianity, in its purified form it is the garment of light. Or, the aura in more modern times. It is the part of you that holds your living frequency and biological light. It is the part that activates when you “get your glow”.

And, although good health and wellbeing are connected to the fluid body, it is not about the “perfect body”. In fact, rigid health rules shut down this spiritual flow. It is our inner soul aliveness. Just like you can have heart disease and hold a big, felt heart presence, so you can also experience difficulty (most of us do) in the fluid body, and still carry the essence.

Your fluid body is the interface—including your blood, lymph, CSF, fascia and nervous system. It is the place where biology and energy stop being two separate things and reveal themselves as one continuous quantum phenomenon.

Your fluid body is where your biology becomes biomagic, and is it interconnected with the eco-magic of the natural world around us, and the flowing cosmic cycles we lives inside. It is the bridge between energy and matter. This is a biophysical reality, not a metaphor, and is the foundation of what I teach in Biomancy and Eco-Somatics.

Let’s explore what the new science actually says, and why every initiatic lineage on Earth started here, at the threshold of water, the fluidity that makes us feel alive.

What the Fluid Body Actually Is

Water is the source of life.

It’s easy to see that blood, lymph and lymph-related fluids (tears, saliva, CSF, amniotic fluid) are part of our fluid body; and they have been treated as sacred by Elder traditions across time. This wisdom is even reflected even in the monotheistic religions. In the book of Leviticus of the Hebrew Bible, we are told “the life is in the blood.” Our blood and our fluids hold our life-force energies—the inner waterways that mirror the sacred waterways of the Earth.

But, when I speak about our fluid body, I am talking about something greater than the more obvious fluids of blood and lymph, I’m referring to the water network that surrounds every cell and tissue in our body, and that governs our rapid response to subtle, quantum and electromagnetic energies.

Though we are not taught this in biology classes, our fascia is the key and “matrix” (womb, or containing structure) of our fluid body.

For most of modern medical history, the body’s loose fascia and “in-between spaces” were ignored and considered structurally inert. Thirty years ago, in my cadaver lab at Duke University medical school, they weren’t even discussed.

But in 2018, a team of NYU pathologists led by Dr. Neil Theise published a paper in Scientific Reports, “The Unrecognized Interstitium in Human Tissues,” that completely re-wrote the story and opened a portal back to the wisdom of our ancestors.

Dr. Thiese and colleagues realized that our loose fascia is actually a continuous body-wide network of fluid-filled compartments, supported by collagen lattices, woven through and around every organ, tissue and cell in the body, from the crown of the head to the tip of the toes. They named it the interstitium and proposed it as a candidate for the body’s largest organ.

What does this mean for you? It means your fascia is a continuous, body-wide ocean of fluid. Your fascia is a water organ; it is a chalice, a water bearer. And, the waters of your fascia are not “ordinary water” as you might think of them. They exist in a liquid crystalline, geometrically aligned, structured form that is vibrantly alive and responsive to frequency.

If a pin pricks your finger, the waters within you don’t pour out like tap water, because they exist as a fluid crystalline gel, in your lymph, blood and fascial layers. Even the mineral matric of your bones are made of 25% structured water.

This understanding fundamentally changes everything we know about how our biology actually works. As we will soon learn, your fascia is the structural scaffolding for a body-wide water-based primary communication network that predates and extends beyond your nervous system.

Your Liquid Crystalline Fluid Body

Last year I was invited to be a keynote speaker alongside Dr. Gerald Pollack, at a water festival in the US, alongside my wife, Seren Bertrand, who was presenting an embodied journey called “The Gospel of the Mermaids”. Sadly, the event was cancelled at the last minute, but the interplay of science and spiritual connection remains. We talk about the “mysteries” of life - and water is where the two collide.

Let’s dive into the work of biophysicist Gerald Pollack, PhD, at the University of Washington. Pollack's lab has shown that water touching any surface in your body—every membrane, protein, collagen fiber, microtubule or strand of DNA—does not behave like ordinary tap water. It organizes into a “fourth phase” as a liquid crystal that forms hexagonal honeycomb-like geometric patterns, with electromagnetic properties similar to a biological battery, with the capacity to absorb and release energy from light, and, as the late geneticist Mae-Wan Ho, PhD proposed, likely acts as a quantum resonator that coordinates instant body-wide communication.

This is the water of your fascia, this is the water that fills the spaces between cells, that coats your DNA and mitochondria and that hugs every protein in every cell in beautiful geometric patterns. This is the biological origins of your “mermaid magic”.

Your inner waters are structured. Structured water holds information and memory—in its geometry, in its electromagnetic properties and in its quantum resonance.

The structures of your water are not fixed like a solid quartz crystal. They are liquid, fluid, rapidly changing shape and geometry in response to the environment around us—to sunlight, to nature connection, to feelings and beliefs; to music, to what we eat, to how we move our body, to prayers, dreams and imagination, to the current narratives and theologies of the culture. So, the frequencies and energies that we cultivate have an immediate and powerful impact on the state of our fluid body.

Sunlight and Natural Electromagnetics Structure Our Waters

In 2009, Pollack’s group published a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry that showed that infra-red light, most abundantly available in the form of sunlight, dramatically increases the amount of structured, liquid crystalline water in your body.

So, sunlight structures your fluid body. Your liquid crystalline waterways are a circadian organ, pulsing with the cycles of light and dark. And, that is only the beginning.

They are also shaped by magnetic fields, the most important one being the natural geomagnetic field of the Earth. In 2024, Léa Bedja-Iacona PhD published a study in Bioelectromagnetics that showed pulsed electromagnetic fields stimulate the fibroblasts that make your fascial networks. Natural EM fields also propel blood through your capillaries and move lymphatic fluid through your lymph channels.

And, it’s not just EM fields, but everything in our environment, and in our inner worlds, that we are exposed to. Our ancestors may have used different words to describe this understanding, but they knew it in their bones, and lived in a devotional spiritual relationship with these “mother fields” of sun, Earth, ecosystem and cosmos that profoundly shape our fluid body, and that I have named “Biomancy” as a practice.

In our modern world, the greatest assault on our liquid crystalline fluid body come from the stresses of living a technical, industrialized, capitalist life, where we are bombarded by messages of fear, negativity, control and isolation through unceasing digital media on our phones and computers, and where we have lost contact with natural rhythms and fallen out of harmony with organic Gaian time. As demonstrated by the late water crystallographer, Masaru Emoto, “negative” frequencies have a degenerative and disorganizing effect on our liquid crystalline structures.

But, Emoto also showed that we also have the power to reshape our waters in powerfully positive ways. Positive experiences and emotions make the structures of our inner waters more harmonic and organized. As our ancestors knew, once we understand how to work with our fluid body, and commit to it as a daily practice, it represents our most powerful gateway to restore and regenerate our energy body.

One of my mentors, a physician whom I apprenticed with for years, was a friend and colleague of Masaru Emoto, but he taught resonance crystallography and consciousness of our blood. Together they presented on the ways that frequencies impact water, blood, lymph and fascia.

This was a core understanding and practice of the mermaid lineages.

How The Fascial Web of Life Communicates

Our Ka body—our energy body—emerges from the quantum and electromagnetic properties of our fascia and nervous system.

If I were to ask you what is the primary communication system of your body, you would probably say “my nervous system, of course”. We hear all about that on social media, right? But, it turns out that your fascia and connective tissue came first, from an evolutionary AND developmental perspective, so it is primary. Let me explain.

There are many complex multi-cellular creatures on this planet without a central nervous system, including trees for example, that are very sentient, and have nearly instantaneous body-wide communications. How can this be if they don’t have a nervous system? It’s because those signals are being transmitted along fascia and connective tissue pathways.

A great analogy is to compare our nervous system + fascia to a tree’s roots + the mycorrhizal fungi that extend out from the roots. The tree’s roots are like our nervous system, with fibrous roots that that drop down into the soil, but a tree’s root system alone isn’t enough to nourish it or to fully communicate with the surrounding ecology. Trees depend on the finer and more extensive mycorrhizal networks connected to their roots to bring in nourishment and to communicate with the greater web of life. The mycorrhizae are the “biological internet”. They touch everything in the soil: all the bacteria and microscopic organisms, food sources, minerals, other plant’s root. They work symbiotically with the tree roots, transmitting information and nourishment, back to them.

Our nervous system is like the roots, and our fascia like the mycorrhizal filaments.

Our fascial formed first in development, beginning by around 2-3 weeks, which is before nervous system development. It forms the extra-cellular “matrix” or womb-like web that anchors the nervous system in place. In fact, it holds everything in our body in place, because it literally surrounds every cell, tissue and organ in the body. And, our fascia is not inert, it actively regulates the function of our autonomic nervous system, our hormonal systems, and beyond. Fascial tension patterns even control gene expression in our cells, as James Wang, PhD et. al. first published in the journal Gene in 2007. (Wang, JH, et al. “Mechanoregulation of gene expression in fibroblasts”)

Not only does our fascia hold and regulate our nervous system (NS), the liquid crystalline waterways of our fascial tissues conduct electromagnetic signals and biophotonic light signals faster than our nervous system. Our NS is a specialized communication system that manages and integrates complex information from our whole body, but it receives much of its data from our deep fascial networks that acts as a multi-dimensional receiving array for vast amounts of information, including psychic.

Our fascia is densely innervated, and is our largest sensory organ. It touches every single cell in our body, whereas our nerves do not. People with psychic capabilities often have fascial structures that are so sensitive and receiving so much data and perception that it can be overwhelming, and can be due to trauma or hypermobile fascia disorders.

The remarkable, and now deceased geneticist, Mae-Wan Ho, PhD proposed that the liquid crystalline networks of our fascia are also communicating with instantaneous full body quantum resonance. This represents a complete paradigm change and new understanding of how our biology works.

We are quantum, energetic and bioelectromagnetic beings first, before we are biochemical or mechanical, and this emerges from our liquid crystalline fluid body.

Fascial Spider Webs: Thinking and Remembering Through Our Fascia

Human fascia is structured remarkably like spider webs. And as Japyassú and Laland argue in their 2017 paper “Extended Spider Cognition,” the web is integral to the spider’s cognitive system. In other words, spiders think through their webs. They have distributed cognition, extending beyond the brain, into the soma. Disturb their web, and they become confused. Spider webs also store memories woven into the architecture of their webs—analogous to somatic memories in human fascia.

How similar is our fascia to spider webs? Almost identical in structure and function. They are both fibrous networks built from liquid-crystalline water lining structural proteins (spidroin/fibroin in spider silk, collagen in fascia) that organize in web architectures. Both conduct information and electromagnetic signals. Both convert tension, sound and vibration into bioelectric signal (like phones). Both physically store history and memory in their networks. Spider webs act as “external ears”, bringing in information from sound vibrations in the environment, as does human fascia. Like fascia, spider webs are structured in a way that supports quantum communication.

The body is the brain—we think and feel through our connective tissue. Our cognition and emotional regulation is in part controlled by our fascia. Humans, and especially women, with hypermobile, disorganized fascia tend to be more sensitive / perceptive, and, like the spiders with broken webs, definitely have greater challenges with nervous system and cognitive dysregulation. Hypermobile fascia is associated with 5x more ADHD, as well as reduced memory, reduced executive function (planning and problem solving) and impaired general cognition (Tariq et al., Cureus, 2025; Sousa et al, Brain and Behavior, 2025). There are many reasons for these issues, but physical disorganization of the fascial sensory net is one.

Somatic practitioners witness extended somatic cognition and perception in their clients all the time—including memories, insights, feelings and emotions stored in fascia. When we bring awareness to fascia, new memories and feelings arise. When fascia shifts, so do our feelings and frequency. In sensitive, oracular people, the fascia definitely keeps the score of past traumas, not just personally but from the family and collective field.

Our minds, and our perceptual abilities, are not localized in our brains alone—they are distributed through the fluid network of our fascia.

We know our self and our identity through the moment to moment signals being fed back to us through the living web of our fascia.

Fascia as an Organ of Psychic Perception

Your fascia is an organ of multi-dimensional psychic perception.

Let’s review what we know so far: science shows fascia changes its shape (i.e. your body structure) in response to physical tension and pressure. Also, to biochemical and hormonal signals. It responds to and emits electromagnetic and light signals. And, it has the nanoscale tubular architecture to function via instantaneous, non-local, whole body quantum processes that break the normal laws of physics.

The quantum behavior of the liquid crystalline water networks of fascia includes being able tunnel through space via “wormholes”, to travel forward and backward in time, to exist simultaneously in up to six positions at once (hexalocation), and likely to act as a fractal antenna. A 2011 article by the editor of New Scientist magazine argues that “water’s quantum weirdness makes life possible.”

These kind of quantum properties are likely the source of our very real, scientifically proven psychic abilities as humans, as shown by the research of Dean Radin, PhD. I propose our fascial networks are the primary biological structure that anchor our oracular, psychic biology.

The Future of the Body

Fascia and structured water are going viral. So many people in the online healing space, and especially women, intuitively understand that our fascia and fluid body hold a powerful mystery. Fascia is the new “nervous system” with more and more health influencers focusing on it, yet somehow still not understanding the bigger picture, which is that fascia is the physical bridge to our energy, bioenergetics, perception and consciousness.

Your fluid body and fascia hold your shape, your posture, your structure and your sense of identity.

Your fluid body and fascia hold epigenetic memory, not just from your lifetime, but from your ancestors’.

Your fluid body and fascia are the source of your energy body, your aura, your frequency.

Your fluid body and fascia are inherently relational—they are networked. In your body, we know that everything is connected. It is your fascia that connects.

Your fluid body and fascia are the source of your embodied cognition and your psychic and oracular abilities.

The electromagnetic sensitivity inherent in your fluid body connect you to the natural EMF energies of the Earth, sun and the Schumann frequencies in the atmosphere.

The quantum properties of the fluid body connect you to consciousness and intuition.

Fascia is liquid crystalline memory. In embryologic development, the fascia shapes the growing fetus with memories older than this lifetime, transmitted by the morphic fields in the womb.

Healing and Transformation

You have both a “magical” fascia (energetically sensitive) and a mechanical one, but most people tend to be polarized one way or the other.

Many conversations in the healing and biomedical world are created by people with a mechanical, rigid fascia, for people with mechanical, rigid fascia. Strong medications, strong surgeries, heroic doses of psychedelic plant medicine, high intensity workouts, ice water plunges, deep tissue massage, heavy shadow work, and on and on.

This is not the “mer”-maid way. It is overwhelming for people with their magical physiology turned on, with an open and sensitive fluid body.

Fascial adhesions, or “stuck” places, form from injuries and stress that induce our fascia-creating cells to secrete sticky, viscous proteins in our tissues. The fascia becomes restricted, stuck, painful. What we know from the physical therapy literature is that gentle cross-tissue massage and touch, vibration and sound, emotional and other energetic work are much more effective in releasing the fascia and fluid body than the “brute force” structural work of heavy-handed physical manipulation, hard-core strength training, intense stretching and deep tissue work. For sensitive people, fluid body work comes first. Only after the fluid body is flowing and resourced again, are we ready for structural work.

Our fluid body is innately sensitive.

When you stand barefoot at sunrise and let the first red wavelengths of the day reach your eyes and skin, your liquid crystal fluid body quickly becomes more structured. When you sit in prayer, or feel devotion and awe, your fluid body restructures. When you spend a morning beside flowing water, when you let yourself weep, when you sing, when you dance, or drum, your interstitium reorganizes, your biophoton field shifts and the geometry of the water around your cells changes shape.

The structure of your inner waters are responsive to environment, intention, and field.

And you are mostly water. Ancient mermaids and merbeings.

So, sound is medicine. Light is medicine. Intuitive touch is medicine. Color, geometry, scent, rhythm, time spent beside a river or under a tree is medicine. Prayer, song, ritual, ceremony, beauty are medicine. The feeling of being loved, of being held in a circle of human voices, of being witnessed in grief —these are medicine.

Restoring Your Crystalline Connection with Earth

If your fascia and fluid body have lost their liquid crystalline honeycomb structure, through stress, trauma, disconnection from nature or overwhelm from any of the other disharmonic frequencies, you need to return to OI (not AI), the Original Intelligence of nature, to remember your coherent structure.

Whether that’s working with plants, structuring your water with sunlight, communing with the elements and spirit of the land, especially at sacred sites and places known to have strong electromagnetic energies and dragon lines, or working with time cycles like the circadian cycle, lunar cycle, the quarters of Equinox and Solstice and beyond, these are all part of the daily sacred practices and rituals that our ancestors passed down through cultural memory.

In many traditions, the journey culminates in the rite of passage of an elemental rebirth through the crystalline Womb of the Earth, the original memory of creation, to reset your crystalline matrix back into the original shape of the coherent Earth-connected human—the Anthropos. This is the journey that Jesus (Yeshua), took when he descended down into the Womb of the Earth during his three days in the tomb. It is the same journey taken by Inanna, Persephone, Demeter and many others.

This process is about templates, liquid crystalline structures and the organic matrix (womb) of Life. A rebirth through the elemental womb of the Earth is a restoration of the crystalline matrix of life as a structural reality inside the body and self.

Why Every Ancient Lineage Started Here

Modern psychology—for all its gifts—is roughly a hundred and fifty years old. The work of tending the fluid body is as old as our species.

When I was twenty, I travelled to Bali to live and apprentice with a priest whose entire life was choreographed around the daily care of his subtle waters. Morning offerings. Water blessings. Flower blessings. Sound. Prayer. Sunrise and sunset. This was not modern wellness and spa culture. He was practicing a precise “science” of tending the fluid body, handed down to him in a spiritual tradition thousands of years old.

In ancient Egypt, the priestesses of Hathor charged the Ka through chant, oils, sound, and ceremony. In the Mary Magdalene lineage, as my wife Seren and I wrote about in our Magdalene Mysteries book, the chalice and the anointing oils were the tools of the mer-tradition that knew the fluid body and tended it daily, because that daily tending was the foundation upon which any deeper death-and-rebirth initiation could rest.

The Asclepian dream temples worked similarly, as did the Eleusinian mysteries. Same with Taoist, ancient yogic traditions and every shamanic culture on Earth.

The fluid body is where positive change happens fast. Your structural body, your bone-deep ancestral patterning, will follow over years. But it follows the fluid. It always has.

What most psychologically-oriented people miss—and I see this in client after client—is the impulse to throw ourselves at our deepest structural patterns first. We try to chisel through bedrock. No ancestral culture ever did this. They worked the responsive layer daily, and let the dense layer move when it was ready. It can actually be more confronting to meet the daily parts of ourselves that resist opening and calibrating to the magic.

It can feel more powerful to diagnose, dissect, talk, and discover our meta-patterns. But change happens in the small daily moments, that your inner waters are watching.

The mermaid medicine was not “spa” or “self-care” in the Instagram sense. It was a serious, sacred, biological technology.

What Long-Term Transformation Actually Requires

The rebirth lineages did this work in a container. Daily practice. Cyclical rhythm. Ceremony. Community. A guiding map. A cosmology that placed the body inside something larger than itself. A system that placed the womb waters as origin.

This is my mission with Biomancy University: to create a structured container for modern people to completely rebirth their fluid body and energy body, weaving in the new science of quantum biology, water, fascia and nervous system, with embodiment practice, guided inner journey, ecological reconnection and devotional ceremony, to prepare for the deeper somatic rites of passage and structural re-templating of Eco-Somatics.

A very powerful modality we draw on is sophrology, or imaginal journey—the traditional art of using rhythmic speech (“incantation”), symbols and visual imagery that speak directly to the cerebellar consciousness. New science shows these journeys shift your genetic expression, immune function, mitochondrial function, inflammation, cortisol, wound healing and even preserve telomere length (slowing aging). (Dusek et al., PLoS One 2008; Bhasin et al., PLoS One 2013; Buric et al., Frontiers in Immunology 2017)

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the cutting edge science that backs fluid body and fascia work—the impact of circadian rhythm and nature connection alone could fill a book. Science is a core pillar of what I teach, because it strengthens our belief in these modalities and “dis-spells” the lies and devaluation perpetuated by the powers that be that energy, consciousness, feminine magic, and “the quantum” aren’t real.

There is a reason our ancestors worked in this way. I call it biomancy: the recognition of how deeply our biology responds to energy and “quantum” magic.

First tend your inner waters, and the rest will follow.

In honor of Gaia, Dr Azra Bertrand

Written and researched by Dr Azra Bertrand and Seren Bertrand

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Audio version available to listen to above

In the lead-up to the equinox our biology is actually being programmed for the entire winter (or summer in the southern hemisphere). This time is a special bio-alchemical gateway—what we do to attune to the cycles of nature, our bodies and the subtle energy fields as we near equinox will influence how we feel and embody for the next six months. Not just spiritually, but physically.

Are you ready for this Equinox Alchemy Portal?

As I sit on a rock in the fading summer sun, looking over the river and into the mountains, the landscape is starting to show the tell-tale signs of fall. The leaves are yellowing, the air is cooler and there is a mellower quality to the light, even in the midday sun. Equinox is almost here.

It’s been a busy summer, and I can feel my body responding to this change in temperament of the seasons, slowing down and sighing a release, even before my mind can register the shift.

Equinox has been known as a magical portal for thousands of years, as a time of deep alchemy.

The word equinox comes from the Latin “equal night”, or evennight, and marks the specific day in the spring and fall when the amount of daylight exactly equals the amount of darkness. In the northern hemisphere, this Equinox is a gateway to the approach of winter, and the growing darkness of the days, and the times of rest and retreat. In the southern hemisphere it’s the opposite, a threshold into the lengthening of the light, and the longer summer days of abundance. (Tropical latitudes have a different relationship to the sacred calendar of the seasons and the availability of light and food).

National Geographic describes this alchemical eco-mantic event this way, “Two times a year, Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt combine so that the sun sits right above Earth’s Equator, casting the dividing line between the light and dark parts of the planet—the twilight zone—through the North and South Poles. Earth isn’t the only planet that experiences equinoxes: every planet in our solar system has them.” Equinox is a cosmic event, with profound effects on our biology.

For many people this extraordinary moment goes by completely unnoticed. In busy cities and homes lit by artificial lights and the glow of computer screens, equinox has lost its meaning. Our bodies have been separated from the root of what brings life, healing and regeneration.

In some circles we’ve seen a revival of honoring the wheel of the year—the sacred seasonal calendar rooted in earth’s cycles—and a re-creation of the rituals and ceremonies our ancestors might have participated in, as they marked each cycle with community celebration and ritual.

But a crucial piece is still missing. Equinox is more than a seasonal celebration of the cycles; it is a time that has the potential to radically shift our deepest physiological and psychic functions. Even if our mind no longer remembers the magic of equinox, our biomantic body intelligence is still highly tuned in to this cosmic and earthly rhythm, and science now shows this is very real.

Many people are familiar with the idea of circadian rhythms (Latin, “around a day”), the biological clocks that guide us through the cycles of night and day, but few people understand that we also have circannual or seasonal rhythms that are profoundly sensitive to the shifting lengths of night and day. Seasonally changing “sunlight codes” govern our circannual bio-rhythms, and affect nearly every aspect of our physiology, including our brain waves, metabolism, hormonal systems, energy levels and mood. One of the keys to working with light-dark magic is that the times of transition—dusk, dawn, and the seasonal shifts at the time of equinox—powerfully influence our biological clocks or “oscillators”.

Exposure to light at these threshold moments has a much stronger impact than at other times.

The equinoxes are more than a gateway between the seasons, they are a gateway to a seasonal biological “rebirth” process in all living creatures. Our ancestors knew about this alchemy of light, and its relationship to the darkness that births it. The interplay of the light and dark, and its bio-spiritual consequences, has been the heart of many spiritual traditions, based not in faraway spiritual notions, but in the wisdom within our bodies. Our relationship to light—and darkness—is far deeper, and more embodied, than we could ever imagine. The study of these patterns is called chronobiology—a biology of time. Time magic is a vital key to embodiment.

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Equinox – The Gateway of our Alchemical Biology

Here is an incredible truth: Our exposure to light in the weeks leading up to equinox likely sets our biology for the entire winter. It is a crucial time of bio-magic. Based on studies of animals exposed to natural outdoor light, it appears much less important what light we receive after equinox, because by then our circannual biology clocks are already set for the winter.^1,2,3,4 Our wellbeing for the winter is being determined by the light we are receiving right now.

Children are even more sensitive to these shifts in subtle patterns of the light. Their future sleep rhythms are predicted by their circannual clocks, which are being set for winter (or summer) right now. It’s vitally important that parents understand these biomantic principles.

Equinox is a time of light magic; and the most potent time to absorb this alchemical light is at the liminal thresholds—dawn and dusk— the daily equivalent of equinox. Dawn sets our daytime biology, and is known as the hour of enlightenment. Dusk is the feminine witching hour, when we set our night biology. Fifteen minutes of exposure to outdoor light at dusk and dawn is all it takes to entrain our “master clock”, the suprachiasmatic nucleus in our brain, to synchronize with the daily light cycles of the sun, and harmonize our circadian rhythms to natural patterns.^5,6

Our stem cells—the cells of regeneration—are also regulated by these subtle changes in light exposure.⁷ Working with light to balance our biological clocks has potent effects on these cells that are responsible for our growth and renewal, igniting powerful healing potentials.

Our first biological clocks are inherited directly from the maternal egg cell, passed down from the mother’s ancestral line. And while in the womb, our earliest circadian rhythms appear to be influenced, or entrained, by the sunlight that our mother is exposed to while pregnant—faint rays pass through the walls of her womb and into the sensitive photoreceptors of our retinas and pineal glands.⁸ We carry an ancestral “light history”. We are living inside the remembered light-dark patterns of our forebears—and we will also pass these onto our future ancestors.

If we live disconnected from natural daily and seasonal light patterns and spend our days submerged in light pollution and computer glare, we leave a deficit of memory for those to come, who will inherit a more diminished and dysregulated biology than that of our ancestors.

Rather than just “light” or “dark” these states are a spectrum. We are sensitive to the most subtle shifts in the qualities of light. Our body perceives even the the slight shortening of daylight hours over the timespan of a single week, or millisecond exposures to dusk and dawn, with profound bio-magical effects. Our biochemistry shifts as does our openness to alchemical perception, which is why our ancestors courted these liminal times of light alchemy—like equinox, dawn and dusk—with such dedicated and reverent ceremonies, often at sacred sites. The elders understood the alchemies of light and the inner bio-magical workings of their own bodies.

Let Light Be Thy Medicine

In the past few decades, we’ve heard a lot about the impact of diet on our health, but not light.

The effects of light are as powerful as the effects of diet on our biology and physiology. Every single morning of our lives, the dim rays of sunlight that hit the backs of our eyes at dawn turn on at least 10% of our DNA—this is some 2,000 genes—along with the transcription of 20,000 different proteins not active during the night.⁹ But how many of us court these early morning rays of light, like ancient the yogis and druids did?

Our state of health and wellness, and our state of consciousness or mental health depend on optimum exposure to light (daily and seasonal) as much as the food we eat.

This is an astounding realization, one that no one tells us about in school or in the doctor’s office. When our reception of the natural light cycles is out of balance it can cause weight gain, poor digestion, an impaired microbiome, fatigue, low immune system function, diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep disorders, ADHD and other conditions. Chronic circadian misalignment due to a consistently poor “light diet” is linked with cardiovascular deaths, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.^10,11

Sunlight has powerful positive benefits beyond regulating our circadian and circannual rhythms. Healthy levels of vitamin D formed when sunlight shines on our skin is linked with an 80% risk reduction in breast cancer according to a recent study by Joan Lappe, Ph.D, published in the Journal of the Public Library of Science. Similar kinds of risk reductions are seen in many other cancers.¹² And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the health benefits of light.

Mental health issues, anxiety, depression are also intimately connected with the alchemy of light. Trauma healing through the biomantic lens shows us that this dysregulation from the patterns of light and nature is what makes trauma stick in the body, and then creates endless feedback loops.

Conditions such as SAD (seasonal affective disorder) are often caused by a lack of attunement to these gateways of the circannual and daily sunlight rhythms, rather than an innate problem with the months of darkness.^13,14 The dark months are designed to heal and regenerate us and provide a seasonal womb to rebirth our biology. Most mammals in temperate climates hibernate or reduce their activity in the winter, and likewise, when deeply attuned to the seasons, humans have a naturally slower “winter biology”, rich with high nighttime levels of the healing and dream-enhancing hormone melatonin. Winter is our mystic time, where we receive regeneration and new visions.

Light, or the patterns of light and darkness, are the master regulators of human physiology, and beyond that, of our states of spiritual connection and awareness. Like plants, we rise to the light, whilst rooted in the dark. We are alchemists of dark-light.

Ancestors at Equinox: Solar Circles, Cosmic Portals

Our ancestors held this wisdom both personally and as a community. They practiced light alchemy and revered the time maps of the cosmic cycles and the way they intersected with circannual body clocks. Compared to modern humans, they were high magicians of light.

Some 5,000 years ago in what is now County Meath, Ireland, our ancestors constructed the Cairn of the Cailleach (“Cairn T”), a sacred mound and stone passageway aligned exactly to the fall and spring equinox. At sunrise, only on these special days, a single ray of sunlight pierces the dark, womb-like passageway and lights up the “Equinox Stone” positioned at the end of the chamber and engraved with talismanic glyphs. This barrow was also called the Cairn of the Witch, the Cairn of the Hag, the Womb of Cailleach, and was modeled on the architecture of the female vulva-womb-pregnant belly, fertilized by the energy of the sun. It was rebirth technology.

What did our ancestors know that we moderns have forgotten? Why did they work for decades to build these megalithic mounds, marking the precise moment of the equinox, the turning point of the seasons? These ancient astronomers and architects were “time shamans” who held the mysteries of the seasons, and the mysteries of spiral consciousness. They knew that we must work our magic within the rhythms of earth, sun, moon, not separate from them. They visioned life in a circle or spiral. They created ritual space to allow those potent forces of planetary consciousness to entrain our own consciousness, to harmonize with the greater currents of the natural world that shape all that we are, to keep the thread of memory and magic alive and well.

As we now approach the 2021 equinox, we can reach back in time to our ancestors for inspiration. We can connect to these beautiful humans who once stood silently at the entryway of the mound of their “time temples” as the sun rose on the morning of the equinox. We can feel how their bare feet touched the ground, their arms opened to the mysteries, their bio-energies flowed freely through their earth-attuned bodies. They used breath and prayer to open their consciousness to receive the primal alchemy the earth and sun gives. What forces were they channeling, knowing, embodying? We can enter into this dimension with biomantic practice.

It is incredible to feel into a spiritual tradition rooted in our biology and ecology, not something transcendent or external to the body. These ancient magicians were scientists of the sacred.

Much like breathwork, yoga, and meditation, the practice of attuning to the shifting light patterns of the seasons, especially at dusk and dawn, shifts us into altered awareness. The scientific field of chronobiology, shows us that the rhythms of light and dark, both daily and seasonally, program the biological clocks found in every cell of our body. These biological clocks regulate all of our biological functions: hormone release, genetic expression, metabolism, weight gain or loss, immune system function, nervous system tone, blood pressure, heart rate variability, mood, attention, focus, sexual and reproductive functions, growth, repair and regeneration. Our natural bio-clocks and bio-rhythms hold the secrets of biological time magic, even the power to reset or reverse the ageing process. And, it is sunlight that holds the key to these time alchemy codes.

In a mystical sense, this moment of equinox is when we set our body magic to prepare to receive the regeneration and dreaming wisdom of winter (or the abundance of summer, for the southern hemisphere), and on a practical level, our light exposure levels right now dictate if we will gain or lose weight this winter, and if our body will switch into readiness for deep healing and repair.

By celebrating the equinox our ancestors were courting a magical and mystical biological alchemy—changing, shifting, realigning the very fabric of their embodiment, their biology. When we think of the ancient people of the Cairn of the Cailleach, we can think of them not just as ceremonialists or astronomers, but as pre-Celtic “yogis”, actually performing an embodiment practice, somatic magic - Biomancy, the magic of life.

This magic is also available to us, and it is calling to us right now.

Equinox Alchemy—Your Guide to Light Alchemy

• For 7 days before AND after Equinox, spend at least 15 minutes in the early morning sun absorbing its solar rays. Visualize your entire body and energy field receiving the light energy. If it’s cold or rainy, bundle up and head out anyway, but if you can’t get outside, stand by a window that faces the light.

• For 7 days before AND after Equinox, spend at least 15 minutes in the early evening fading sun greeting the night. Close your eyes and allow your body to sense the feeling of night.

• After sunset, dim down, or better yet, turn off artificial lights in your home. Candlelight is best in these 2 weeks if possible.

• For the best results wear red glasses after dark, especially the 2 hours before sleep. These are affordable, “red laser enhancement glasses” start between $10-$20, and block all blue and green light. They are much more effective than amber colored lenses. Your circadian rhythms are very sensitive. One moment of looking into a brightly lit fridge at night will disrupt the process. Red glasses prevent this.

• Turn on blue light blocking mode on iPhone and Android phones and/or use free blue light blocking apps for computers. Turn them off or place away from your beds when you sleep, because they emit microwave EMF.** (details below)

• You can switch to red light bulbs and red night lights before sleep and during the night

• Make sure you switch off all devices after 8pm if possible

• If you have bright outdoor lights shining in your bedroom window, black out shades are a great long-term investment in your circadian coherence.

**Complete blue light blocking glasses (red or orange lenses) are designed to be worn only after sunset—blocking blue light during the day, especially the morning, could cause circadian rhythm disruption. Clear or yellow-tinted ones can be used during the day to reduce eye-strain on computers. For night use: red glasses block 100% of blue and green light, and are most effective, but make it difficult to see colors. Orange glasses block 98% of blue light and are easier to see with than red ones. Yellow and clear glasses do not block enough blue light to protect circadian rhythms at night. Google "red laser enhancement glasses" for the most affordable glasses. They work just as well as the more expensive ones. Biohackerslab.com has a ton of free resources for blue light blocking, including links to higher price glasses (BluBlox, Swannies, etc), mobile phone blocking, free computer screen blocking software (Iristech, f.lux), and online tests for your glasses.

https://www.biohackerslab.com/resources/blue-light-filter-tests/

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Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses

.

Notes:

1. It is very difficult to do studies on the effects of natural light on the circannual rhythms in humans because so few modern humans experience undisturbed natural light across the seasons, whereas the animal kingdom still does.

2. “Circadian versus circannual rhythm in the photoperiodic programming of seasonal responses in Eurasian tree sparrow.” Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences. March 1, 2020, 3, pp 371-381. https://doi.org/10.1039/C9PP00404A

3. “Time of the sidereal year affects responsiveness to the phase-resetting effects of photoperiod in the ewe.” Journal of Reproductive Fertility. Issue 85, 1989. pp 221-227.

4. “Daily Increments of Light Hours Near Vernal Equinox Synchronize Circannual Testicular Cycle of Tropical Spotted Munia.” Chronobiology International. 22 May 2004, pp 553-569.

5. “Circadian Responses to Light-Flash Exposure: Conceptualization and New Data Guiding Future Directions.” Frontiers in Neurology. February 11, 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2021.627550

6. “Brief light exposure at dawn and dusk can encode day-length in the neuronal network of the mammalian circadian pacemaker.” Journal of the Federation of American Sciences for Experimental Biology. August 31, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.202001133RR

7. “Stem cells and the circadian clock.” Developmental Biology. Volume 431, Issue 2. November 15, 2017, pp 111-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ydbio.2017.09.012

8. “Circadian Rhythms in Cell Maturation.” Physiology. Jan 1, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00036.2013.

9. ibid.

10. “Circadian misalignment and health.” International Review of Psychiatry. April 2014,26(2), pp 139-54. https://doi.org/10.3109/09540261.2014.911149

11. “New Insights Into the Circadian Rhythm and Its Related Diseases.” Frontiers in Physiology. June 25, 2019. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2019.00682

12. “Breast cancer risk markedly lower with serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations ≥60 vs <20 ng/ml (150 vs 50 nmol/L): Pooled analysis of two randomized trials and a prospective cohort.” PLOS ONE. June 25, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199265

13. “Is prevention of cancer by sun exposure more than just the effect of vitamin D? A systematic review of epidemiological studies.” European Journal of Cancer. April 2013, pp 1422-36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejca.2012.11.001

14. “Circadian genes, rhythms and the biology of mood disorders.” Pharmacologic Therapies. May, 2007,114(2):222-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pharmthera.2007.02.003

The future of somatic healing is Eco-Somatics - a path of reconnecting to our original essence through the relational continuum of body wisdom and nature.

Eco-Somatics is a framework that includes profound eco-embodiment. It validates what you know to be true, what you sense with your instinctive, animate body. It gives you flexibility to “oracle” and “flow” with your intuition, but also science, a structure and an integrated pathway that merges the worlds of ecology, spirit and healing.

Eco-Somatics flies in the face of the orthodox medical systems of trauma healing that are disconnected from animal-body, soul and ecology. 80% of western psychiatric diagnoses could be replaced with a single diagnosis: multi-generational ancestral trauma, lodged in the body and psyche, a result of disconnection from the natural world, and the womb and earth-based cosmologies of our original mother cultures.

The Body as a Codex of Nature

Our bodies are fundamentally interwoven with the ecosystems around us, but most people no longer feel or remember this connection in an embodied way. We share 90% genetic homology with leopards, 60% with trees, and every atom in our body is a part of the greater body of our Mother Earth.

The defining question of this era is how can we, as modern humans, truly remember our ecological connections? How can we experience ourselves as leopards, as oak trees, as the Earth herself? And, what benefit would that have for us and the planet?

Eco-Somatics is a multi-disciplinary field of healing and awakening that approaches these questions as a sacred path of eco-spiritual reconnection with the living world.

All humans once embodied symbiotic consciousness. The greatest trauma of modern times is our separation from the natural world. As elder cultures have always known, our body functions like a cell in the greater body of the Earth; we depend on that connection for wholeness. Our psychology, physiology, fascia, microbiome, genetic expression, and emotional and spiritual health are shaped by interactions with the ecosystems and landscapes around us.

Ecology is mother. Our body and psyche were birthed through the deep-time evolutionary womb of nature, through the primordial dance of Earth and Sun.

All the energy in our bodies originally comes from sunlight, transformed into useable form by plants. Circadian rhythms of sunlight and darkness affect the expression of 80% of our genes and are central to the health of every cell, organ and system in the human body.

Eco-therapies, including nature bathing, now have dozens of high-quality clinical trials proving the profound healing power of nature immersion, with results that rival or outperform western medicine for common somatic and mental health conditions. For example, studies show that nature and other reconnective therapies help resolve trauma and PTSD, not by focusing on the trauma but by simply physically reconnecting to the natural world, and allowing a natural re-calibration to unfold.

Our Ecological Self

Eco-Somatics is also about how we connect to the wild nature within us—encoded in our DNA, in the architecture of our nervous system and shapes of our organs and cells. The human body is built on layers of evolutionary biology, stretching back 4 billion years to the origin of life on this planet. Nearly every human cell contains mitochondria, descendants of free-living archaeabacteria that lived 2 billion years ago; and nearly 50% of our genome is closely related to viruses.

Our biology is built on fractal organic patterns shared by all of the living world. Our lungs have a similar form to tree branches, our fascia mirrors the extended memory and perceptual networks of spider webs. Our nervous system, with its “nerve roots” and “dendrites” (from Greek dendron, or tree) takes the same shape as trees and long-tentacled jellyfish.

These observations are not new. They have been known by our ancestors for many thousands of years, and are the basis of mystical spiritual traditions. In Kabbalah, the Tree of Life mirrors the human body, and Taoist maps of inner energy currents mirror the flow of energy lines in the earth.

Eco-Somatics works with the reality that underneath our human identity lies our ancient animal and plant identity. We share 98% of our DNA with other primates and at least 60% with all complex life forms including trees and fungi. These beings are our eco-ancestors.

Evolutionary Inheritance

Our nervous system is not just “human”—in fact, it is predominantly pre-human, consisting of layers of anatomy and capacities first pioneered by other species. We are biophilic beings, with neurohormonal pathways wired to form emotional bonds with other animals and plants. Research suggests we have magnetoreceptors in our brains, similar to those used by birds to navigate magnetic field lines.

Our intra-uterine biology is adapted to underwater life; we have slits resembling gills and a tail at certain points in embryological development. At birth, we transition from an aquatic womb environment to life on land, mirroring the evolutionary leap that brought amphibians to land.

Each of these evolutionary capacities is encoded into our genetic and ecological memory—a potent storehouse of vital energies forgotten by modern cultures, but central to traditional healing practices dating back to paleolithic times. The earliest human art, cave paintings more than 50,000 years old, depicts merged human-animal chimeras in magical ritual.

Our “animal powers” are a universal human inheritance, encoded in our biology, accessible to all who wish to remember. The biology and neurology of our ecological ancestors are layered within us—validated by leading edge science, as well as traditional spiritual frameworks that view animals and plants as our elders.

There are many traditional Eco-Somatic modalities, including animal forms of qi gong, sun salutations of yogic tradition—originally a devotional practice to greet the sun—and forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku of Japan, focusing on sensory awareness of the natural world. Ecstatic ritual dance and music is used by many indigenous cultures to shapeshift into animal identity and receive oracular medicine for personal and tribal healing. Tree- and stone-wyrding—listening to and receiving messages from the natural world—are ancient Anglo-Saxon practices.

Earth Reconnection

The field of modern Eco-Somatics is rapidly evolving as practitioners map out new somatic approaches to remember ourselves as expressions of Earth, to awaken our true wild nature and ecological sensorium, to activate dormant powers within our evolutionary nervous system, and to feel our kinship to the greater-than-human world.

Contemporary Eco-Somatics incorporates diverse practices including primordial, instinctive, and ecological movement; expressive dance; ecologically relational breathing; sound; and immersive sensory experiences in nature. Circadian, circannual and circalunar attunement play a role, as well as ecologically-directed bodywork. Eco-Somatic therapies reflect the animistic, sacred nature of life, and can incorporate prayer, ceremony and active imaginal journey as a broader eco-spiritual path.

At its heart, Eco-Somatics re-wilds and empowers us—returning us to the felt, embodied experience that we are not separate from the living world, but expressions of it. Through pathways of ancestral and modern practice, it offers a sacred homecoming in this time of ecological crisis and disconnection.

Eco-Somatics as a Practice

In my unique framework of Evolutionary Eco-Somatics I merge womb cosmology, embryology, rebirth techniques, developmental somatic sequences and somatic rites of passage, alongside ecological reconnection, both within our current ecosystem, and deep-time ecologies. The body remembers its place in the greater ecosystem of life, healing the separation, the disconnection, the forgetting. I write more on this here.

I share from my personal experience as a medical doctor of nearly 30 years, trained in the neuroendocrinology of mother-baby bonding, alongside studies of the perinatal matrix, and somatic rebirth practices. Plus my own studies of Mystery traditions focused on the somatic, oracular intelligence of the body, deemed as “feminine”, and the bioenergetic reunion with the Womb of Earth—for rebirth, regeneration, and in some religions, full-blown spiritual resurrection.

Here are some unique perspectives I’m adding into the rich weave of Eco-Somatics…

Sacred Balance: The Missing Thread

What many approaches are not addressing is the feminine, spiritual and biological blueprint that has always been the foundation of somatic healing. It’s a balance of a coherent framework and map (structure), with our spontaneous body wisdom (flow).

What has now been codified as “somatics”, often based on a linear, biomedical model, once originated in feminine shamanic practice—women who were deeply connected to the rites of passage of life, the elements, the earth, nature, the stars and body gnosis, present in ancient cultures across the world from China, Africa to Europe.

Eco-Somatics is a remembering of the original primordial religion, transcribed into fresh language and form for modern times.

The priestess lineages knew this. In the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, it was the women who held plant medicine ceremonies, who guided initiates through death and rebirth experiences in their bodies. The priestesses of Eleusis weren’t facilitating therapy sessions—they were midwifing souls through profound somatic transformations that connected participants to the cosmic rhythms of Earth herself.

The folk medicine traditions knew this. When the strega witches of Southern Italy danced the tarantella to heal from trauma (literally called “tarantism”), they weren’t doing it in a therapist’s office with treatment protocols. They were dancing ecstatically in community, to live music, until their bodies found their way back to life force. The healing happened through rhythm, through earth connection, through the feminine understanding that the body knows how to heal given the right conditions.

The midwives and herbalists knew this. For millennia, women were the keepers of birth wisdom, of plant medicine, of the understanding that healing happens in cycles—like the moon, like the seasons, like the processes of conception, gestation, birth, and renewal that women’s bodies know intimately.

But, as I have described in several books co-written with my wife, Seren Bertrand, the sacred somatic feminine knowledge was systematically attacked over a period of at least 3,000 years. The texts, practices, memory and societal respect for these traditions were almost lost in modern cultures, and often preserved secretly in hidden lineages.

In the 20^th century, men across the world, including well-known figures such as Carl Jung, M.D., started to gather and bring back this wisdom, often inspired by women who weren’t fully acknowledged, and who served as modern oracular wisdom keepers.

The Somatic Renaissance

After World War II, there was a flowering of body-based healing modalities: Rolfing, Continuum Movement, osteopathy, the Feldenkrais Method, Alexander Technique. These became the therapeutic backbone of what people started calling “somatic healing”—a way for people to understand and heal themselves through the body directly, without having to rely on orthodox medical frameworks.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich, known as the “Father of Somatics”, deserves a special mention here because he was the one figure who dared to include the full spectrum of our nature in his understanding of the body-psyche continuum. As expressed by his famous quote: “I know that what you call ‘God’ really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.”

Reich understood that psychological defenses become structural, somatic defenses. That we armor against feeling our life force when it becomes too much to experience. His work with structural characterology and body reading became the foundation for virtually every body-based therapy that followed—from Gestalt to Bioenergetics to Rolfing to modern somatic therapies. In my work I advance and re-interpret some of his ideas on character structures, and place them back at their time of origin, inside the womb.

Scientific research is only now catching up with somatic therapies. We now know that practices like Seiki, Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement, and traditional acupuncture are all working with the fascia—the sensory-rich connective tissue matrix that stores memory, emotion, and trauma in the body, inside a watery web that holds the secrets of our quantum biology. We have scientific validation for what indigenous healers knew: the body is a unified field of consciousness, working via quantum resonance, sound and light, not a machine made up of separate parts.

The Future is Eco-Somatic

The future of healing is clear: we need to remember our intuitive, feminine roots and place our healing systems inside a spiritual and ecological context.

Eco-Somatics is re-wilding the field of healing. Not as a rigid, isolated modality to master, but as a living framework that includes:

Ecological embodiment. Recognizing that we are not separate bodies trying to heal in isolation, but expressions of Earth’s body. Our nervous systems evolved in constant relationship with natural rhythms, elements, and cycles. True somatic healing happens when we remember our place in the web of life, and the familial and cultural contexts of each individual.

Feminine spiritual lineages. Honoring that women have been the keepers of somatic wisdom for millennia—through birth traditions, plant medicine ceremonies, seasonal rituals, dance, song, and the understanding that the body is a sacred expression of the Earth Mother herself.

Fluid, quantum intelligence. Working with the understanding that healing doesn’t follow linear protocols but emerges through the same organic intelligence that grows forests and births babies. Sometimes you need breathwork; sometimes you need to scream; sometimes you need to be held, to dance under the full moon, or to call on ancestors (human or creature!)

Trauma as interruption of flow. Understanding that trauma isn’t something to be fixed but a disconnection from life force that can be rewoven through reconnection practices that restore our natural capacity for regulation, resilience, and aliveness. Science is already showing that a focus on reconnection is as effective as focusing on the trauma itself.

The symbiotic self. Recognizing that we’re not isolated individuals trying to optimize our personal nervous systems, but interconnected beings whose healing is intimately connected to the healing of our communities, our ancestors, and the living Earth. We were designed to heal in synchrony with the Earth, to merge and co-regulate our nervous systems with hers.

Eco-Somatics gives you permission to trust the wisdom that’s already alive in your cells. It gives you a framework sophisticated enough for the modern mind, while flexible enough to follow the organic unfolding of your body’s own healing intelligence. Because that’s what your body has been waiting for all along—not another expert to tell you what’s wrong with it, but recognition of the profound wisdom it already carries, and the sacred context in which your magic can bloom.

In Honor of Gaia, Dr Azra Bertrand

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

Subscribe now

The ancient land of Sumer, in what is now modern-day Iraq, holds a powerful memory of the Neanderthal legacy and their connection to feminine consciousness and embodied magic – a legacy that went on to inform the priestess traditions and Goddess temples of the area, and was passed directly down through this lineage into the Alchemists working in the middle-ages.

Shanidar cave (pictured above) located on Bradost mountain in the Kurdish region of Iraq, was once home to our Neanderthal ancestors, and the remains of eight adults and two infant Neanderthals dating from 35,000 – 65,000 years ago, was found in this ancient cave.

Evidence suggests that one of the Neanderthal adults was given a ritual burial, laid out on his left-hand side in the fetal position, returning to the womb of Mother Earth and garlanded with flowers, which throughout cultures across the world symbolize the Goddess.

Biomantic wisdom brings the knowing that our ancestors were deeply embodied in cerebellar shamanic consciousness, living in at-one-ness with the mother spirit of the earth.

This essay is an extended extract from the Magdalene Mysteries, including material not published before, and shares a vision of the spiritual legacy of these primordial magicians.

There was a time on earth when women and men were whole. When an ancient Motherline firmly anchored a braided umbilical cord of ancestral memory stretching back to the dawn of time; where humanity drank deeply in a Eucharistic of communion with this ancient line, merging with it, baptizing in it – and remembering, always remembering the old ways of the Mother Dragons of Creation.

Our story of lineage of Primordial Alchemy takes us back 300,000 years ago, to gaze into the Neanderthal womb caves of Shanidar, in the Zagros mountain range that forms the northeastern boundary of modern day Iraq, directly adjacent to the land that would one day be known as Shu-mer-u, Sumeria, Su-Mer. The magical Land of the Mer.

World of the Ancestors

On a crisp spring morning a small group of humans slowly and ceremoniously walked past the briskly flowing Greater Zab River, and up a mountainous path to the sacred cave of Shanidar. The band would have looked somewhat unusual to modern eyes, a stronger, sturdier, more muscular stock, with more body hair, along with striking green eyes, bronze skin, and red hair. Their manner would seem gentle, their movements simple, coordinated, mesmerizing, more like panthers or bears than humans.

Between them they carried the body of a beloved family member, who had died the night before. As they walked, they called in Spirit, gently singing the songs of the ancestors, who were so close they might have reached out and touched them.

For the Neanderthals, a people of the ancient primordial religion, Shanidar was a birthing cave on many levels: a place of emergence, where life first came forth from the dark, primordial depths of the earth womb, and the sacred site where human women would come to give birth, like the First Mothers of their stories. It was also a womb-tomb sanctuary where they would bring the ‘resting ones’, their blessed and honored dead, to lay back into the earth. The memory of these caves would be carried forth across time, hidden in roots of ancient languages, as well as myth, story, and symbol. This legacy would infuse down to Biblical times, as the Hebrew word for cave, MARH (מְעָרָה),) contains the feminine root MAR, of Mary – reminding us of the magical cave of resurrection where Mary gave the sacred death/rebirth rites.

When their funeral procession reached the cave, the group dug a hole in the earthen floor and tenderly laid the body into the ground, left side down, in a fetal position befitting his return journey back to the mother-womb of Gaia. The tribe lovingly anointed the body with red ochre pigments, a time-honored Neanderthal tradition that symbolized the menstrual and birth blood of the earth. By the mystery of the mother’s blood - cosmic, shamanic, holographic - he would find safe passage home.

Over 300,000 years ago, The Neanderthal womb shamans depicted honorific religious symbols of V’s and M’s to celebrate the generative feminine womb portal, carving them artistically into bones, and painting them on cave walls, and etching them into stone figurines and clay pottery.

There is evidence of shamanic, goddess worshipping humans across the globe, including the remarkable 73,000-year-old ochre art in the Blombos caves in South Africa, the striking crimson red hand prints in El Castillo cave in Spain, over 40,000 years old, and the red ‘Jacob’s’ ladder found in another Spanish cave, over 65,000 years old. At Cueva de los Aviones, a cave in southeastern Spain, researchers also found perforated seashell beads and pigments that are at least 115,000 years old. South African artists were already working with red ochre, which archeologists believe symbolized fertility, death and menstruation, over 160,000 years ago.

They were artistic, intuitive, feeling beings, connected to the sacred web of life.

Theirs was a cerebellar intelligence rather than a cerebral thinking one. They were spiritually and emotionally awakened, through the amygdala and the neural network of the cerebellum – the feminine brain and portal of cosmic mother consciousness, which philosopher Swedenborg described as the gateway to the Angelic realm. The prehistoric womb shamans had a far greater cerebellar capacity than modern humans, and their capacity for magical feminine wisdom and psychic visions was emulated by the Egyptian initiates who often emphasized the large cerebellar skull and directed the mystery of the Ankh to the mouth of the goddess, at the base of the skull, transmitting into the amygdala. The cerebellum also releases intoxicating nectars of consciousness and creates hormonal ecstasies in mystic states of heightened awareness, and female womb shamans could initiate this state, and were considered the original shamans.

The Neanderthal Legacy

The primordial magicians weaved with the old root magic of the instinctual world. They merged with bird, serpent, scorpion, wild bull, lion, fish and dragons in the magical process of a spirit-journey communion undertaken by the shaman-priestesses. To become animal, to call in the spiritual power, they would ritually dress themselves in animal costumes. They would move like the animal, dancing in darkened womb chambers or under the moonlight. They would fast, pray, make animal sounds, swirl and spin to the rhythm of the animal-skin moon drums, until they became serpent-women, scorpion-women, dragon-women. The primordial powers channeled by the priestess heightened their powers to interpret dreams, to read the omens, to receive spirit messages, and to magically minister between the gods and peoples of earth.

This ‘time before time’ still exists, it still weaves dreams of primordial union, it still holds the labyrinth map to return to the center; the holy womb cave. In 2006 it was announced that Neanderthals are not actually extinct. Rather, they live on inside us. Neanderthal DNA, or the DNA of similar archaic humans of Africa and South Asia, comprises 1 – 4% of the genetic material of modern humans. Many modern humans have the equivalent Neanderthal genetic material of one pure-blooded Neanderthal as a great, great, great grandparent. These primordial shamans and alchemical biomancers are our dear Ancestors.

They are calling to us from within our own blood memory to remember their pristine consciousness of love and wisdom, and their beautiful communion with earth’s spirit, and the Garden of Eden they once created here through their eco-magic.

In essence, the Neanderthal legacy is the legacy of the Alchemists – it is the embodied power of shamanic feminine spirituality and cosmology, rooted in our deepest hearts and memory. It is the path of the moon, the path of love, the wild feminine. It is a bloodline legacy that was passed down from the Stone Age to the priestesses.

There is no coincidence that the Neanderthals are often depicted as having red hair, and that over time red hair has been associated with witchcraft and unbridled sexuality. This folk memory is passed to Magdalene, who is depicted with red hair, as were the Fairy Folk.

This is their lost her-story. This is the secret knowledge of Biomancy – wisdom within the body - passed down to Mary Magdalene. This is what it is that the Magdalene knew – and what she wishes you to know, to treasure, to embody, and to pass on in an unbroken continuation of the line. This was the legacy passed down to the European alchemists to restore the paradise of Sophia’s Garden.

The ancient priestesses of the Near East claim descent from the primordial forces of nature, as well as the moon, the stars and the ancient dragons. They knew that to honor and remember these connections was to open the doorway to the deepest magic.

The primacy of the psyche, the potency of the mythic imagination, the magic of sign and sigil, of totemic animal communion around the midnight fire, of memories stored in stone, land and water—these were the domains of the ancient primordial shamans and magicians. They tapped into the vast field of creative potential and cosmological memory to give birth to structures of spirit, building majestic mythological landscapes the way modern architects build cities of concrete and steel. The Neanderthal ancestors and shaman priestesses of old knew what forces propel, fructify and animate life, and the cycles that rise and fall over time. They reached for these powers, brought them down into form and whispered them forward across time.

Primordial Magic Prayer

There is no beginning of time, and no end, only cycles of birth, dissolution, and rebirth, eternal spirals of becoming that inevitably return us to the fecund womb of darkness, where we quietly gestate the next phase of our journey. We wax, we wane, we wax again. Ours is a lunar womb world.

Mother Night, the Great Shepherdess of the dark birthing sea, presides over her queendom, along with her numinous, luminous divine children – the moon, the imperishable stars, and the fertilizing sun.

The song of creation is sounds forth, rising up from her nethermouth, the Great Hor of the Cosmos.

Let there be moonlight over the primordial oceans.

Let the earth and her creatures be born.

The she-dragon Nammu, Kur, Tiamat – creatrix of many names - stirs in the deep.

We know her by her birth bellows -- her volcanic eruption and earthshake. New land pours out with her lava. Valleys rise into mountains, hills sink back into the seas.

There are forces older than human that shape us, that we must learn to live with, that we must summon and evoke, that we must have faith in.

Our spirits fly with the soul birds, our thighs are strong like the bounding gazelle. We spit and kick with the vigor of wild asses. We mate like lions. We roar.

The power in the wildness is ours to remember.

The serpents coil around each other to sexually conjoin, pulsating, mesmerizing, magical. As do the two strands of our human DNA. New life arises.

Woman’s blood comes monthly, with the moon. It is the gift of the goddess, the gift of life, and the measure of time. From the mother’s blood our bodies are formed, from the milk of her breasts we are nourished. From her womb we are born. All culture arises from this foundation. May we never forget.

Male and female, masculine and feminine, god and goddess come together. Infinite form is birthed. One becomes two, two becomes one. One becomes interwoven everywhere.

The microcosmic reflects in the macrocosmic. The mundane in the celestial. As in the heavens, as in the earth, as in the wild creatures, so it is in us.

The fruit of the date palm nourishes us; her fronds shade us. The reeds of the marshes become shelter. The dry land is watered, the field plowed, the furrow seeded. Green shoots of wheat and barley rise each spring. We celebrate their return with the esh-esh all-temple festivals, and the rites of sacred marriage. In turn we celebrate each new moon, her golden crescent crown like the horns of the wild cow, reminding us of all that nourishes us, our many mothers.

The garden must be cultivated with song, with prayer, with craft, with ritual, with the waters of life. We weave the world into being. Every movement, every word, every item of beauty we adorn ourselves with, is its own magic.

Let the Gate of Horn be thrown open, let us step across time into another world, let what is ancient be remembered and be born again into fresh forms.

Love is becoming itself.

A.B.

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Audio version available to listen to above

We have been conditioned to be afraid of darkness, but for our ancestors darkness was both medicine and alchemical magic—it brought regeneration and vision, connected to the bio-magic of the pineal gland and the hormone melatonin.

Here in the northern hemisphere, in these darkest days that precede the rebirth of the light on Winter Solstice, we enter into a sacred time, a geomantic womb where the Earth Mother gives birth to another solar cycle. This descent into darkness is a magic portal.

This time of year was traditionally one of gathering together in the dark nights, around gentle and warming fires, to share medicine stories and call on the visions of Otherworld to guide and shape a new cycle, receiving messages from the quantum womb at the center of Mother Earth.

As we enter this solstice portal of oracular magic, let’s ask ourselves: What magic does this terrestrial darkness bring? How can we commune with this alchemical darkness that was the spirit medicine of the ancestors? And, from a biomantic perspective, what bio-magic does winter solstice encode?

Our world needs this earth wisdom now, so that our knowledge can birth a new vision.

If it feels that we are more divided than ever, it must be our shared earthly inheritance that unites us. We all walk on the same holy ground, surrounded and infused by the same bio-magic.

Solstice—When the Portal Opens

Asa new circannual cycle approaches, and the wheel of the year turns towards Solstice, I find myself casting my mind back to 2012, almost a decade ago now, when I immersed in the alchemical darkness in a deeper way than ever before.

On the winter solstice of 2012, my wife, Seren, and I found ourselves sitting silently in the darkened womb of an earth and thatch Celtic roundhouse, built according to pre-Iron Age standards. The roundhouse was situated on the archeologic site of Saveock in Cornwall, home to a healing spring and a once thriving Swan-cult tracing back thousands of years, a tradition kept secretly alive over the ages by unknown witches, up until modern times, when ceremonial-ritual pits filled with talismanic objects such as swan wings and special crystals were discovered.

Crouching down to enter through the small doorway, we were greeted by a profound womblike darkness, lit only by a small fire. We sat directly on the earth, as our ancestors would have done 3,000 years ago, the embers of a fire glowing softly red-orange in front of us. Otherwise, we were surrounded by a rich and perfect darkness, absent all electricity or artificial lighting.

It was an experience of entering layers of darkness, first the outer darkness of the evening skies scattered with glittering starlight, as we had walked across the land, until entering the pure darkness of the roundhouse, where the mud walls seemed to hold the darkness like liquid.

“Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.” Lao Tzu, Chinese sage

Visionary Darkness

Solstice comes from a Latin origin, meaning the stilling of the sun; on this darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere the sun appears to pause in its journey for three days, before gaining the light again with each passing day as the sun is “reborn”. This three-day descent into darkness has been celebrated for many thousands of years as a powerful feminine earth mystery, and was made famous in the story of Christ who descended into a tomb for three days before his resurrection. The megalithic Elder cultures built celestially aligned earth temples to receive rays of sunlight on sacred dolmens and barrow passageways, including at Newgrange of Ireland, Stonehenge and others across the globe, marking the resurrection of the light from the portal of the dazzling, sentient darkness that has always been, dark matter, dark mater, Dark Mother.

In our fast-paced modern lives we generally orient to the light, the brightness, the known. We talk about ‘enlightenment’ and ‘illumination’. The darkness feels, in contrast, unknown, frightening at times, and if you believe the narrative about this ancient feminine presence of darkness by modern institutions, you might even worry that darkness is malevolent. But indeed all of life, all of matter is birthed from darkness. Our universe is a dark womb. Light is rare, and when the switch goes off, creation returns to its resting state—the primordial blackness.

This alchemical darkness is the zero point of existence, a birthing womb, from which creation emerges —a scintillating network of dark filaments connects every birth and resurrection in the universe, from our own dark beginnings in the womb, to the womb of night that rebirths and cleanses our psyche every day, to the greater cycles of winter darkness that turn us toward rest as the vegetative world (and the food supply) dies back in temperate latitudes. These threads extend to the dark womb at the center of the earth, whose gravitational and magnetic fields make possible all life on the planet, emerging from the dark soil and dark oceanic depths. Our galaxy itself is birthed from darkness—a supermassive black hole the size of four million suns, whose gravitational waves organize the spiraling arms that birth new planets and stars. And, it is the invisible filaments of dark matter that hold together the superstructure of the universe itself.

“There is in God - some say - A deep, but dazzling darkness.” Henry Vaughan

Biomagicians—Shamans of Body Wisdom

Our innate intuitive magic, it seems, may also be birthed from darkness. According to a study published by the former University of Virginia psychologist, Robert Van de Castle, PhD, up to two-thirds of verified extra-sensory experiences (ESP) happen during the dark hours of sleep.¹ And, in a landmark review of suprasensory communication authored by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem, PhD, our capacity to communicate telepathically is markedly improved in dark or dimly-lit environments.² Darkness creates psychic states.

This explains the many traditions where initiates or mystics spent time alone in the darkness, often in a cave or a temple built like a womb/tomb. Darkness then, as our ancestors knew and as science also supports, is a potent doorway into magic, including time magic, as we will explore shortly. Every indigenous and magico-spiritual culture has recognized this fact. Night is the time for shamanic flight into altered states of consciousness, where we can access the living library of our bodies, the natural world and the cosmos, extending our perception far beyond the five ordinary senses to bring back beautiful gnosis for the tribe, as well as very practical information critical for our survival. It is a time for prophesy and oracles, for psychic vision.

In seasonal terms, Winter Solstice is the ‘midnight hour’ of darkness in the annual solar cycle. It is a time our psychic abilities are heightened and we are more open to oracular visions. I remember vividly the solstice night in December of 2012, as Seren and I felt the energies building, I took out a lyre and began to slowly play, invoking the magical spirit of the night. We breathed deeply and intentionally, toned, prayed and opened our bodies and consciousness to the secrets of the darkness. Instantly we were transported across time to speak with our ancestors present at this sacred spring several thousand years ago, and soon after that to our Neanderthal kin, peoples who pilgrimaged to the site tens of thousands of years ago.

“The Ancestors were reaching across the veil to remind us of their wisdom, and a profound message for modern humans, sharing that we were all in this together, and they were helping.”

Winter Solstice is traditionally a time when we merge with the deepest earth frequency, an electromagnetic energy that pulses deep within the dark core of earth, and that summons the ancestors to share their wisdom and memory, and to move through the membrane of timelines. This solstice alchemy is not something imaginary; it is biomantic, rooted in our biology and ecology, a sacred science. When our ancestors performed ceremonies and built monuments to mark winter solstice, it was not just for spiritual purpose, but for bio-magical purpose. They used this powerful time node to consciously shift and rebirth their biology.

The people who gathered at the Solstice time temples such as Newgrange in Ireland, or Stonehenge were bio-magicians and shamans of our most mystical hormone, melatonin.

The mysteries of the alchemical darkness, and earth magic, are entangled with the biomantic, alchemical secrets of our body, and particularly the power of the pineal gland and melatonin.

Melatonin is the bio-mystical hormone of darkness, prophesy, regeneration and rebirth.

Melatonin: “Mistress” Hormone of the Body

The alchemies of darkness are intimately entwined with the magic of our pineal gland, and the endocrine alchemy of our hormonal system, that interacts with the external ecology of earth.

The pineal gland is a small pine cone-shaped gland—about 0.8 centimeters in adults—located inside the center of the brain in the epithalamus, a tissue that connects our limbic brain, the emotional brain, to our other brain structures. The pineal gland’s main role is to secrete the hormone melatonin, that regulates the circadian rhythm and sleep-wake cycles of nearly every cell and tissue in the body—in response to the light-dark signals of the outer environment.

We hear a lot about serotonin as the “happy” hormone, but melatonin is the “mistress” hormone of our body, produced and released by the pineal gland only during the darkness of night. The pineal gland resides, like the Lady of the Lake, nestled against an inner ocean of cerebral fluid, and from this throne coordinates and governs nearly every aspect of our physiology.

For most people, the awareness of our how our biology works is almost exclusively focused to the daytime. As if when our eyes are closed and we are asleep, nothing important could be happening, right? But it is in the times of darkness, in the deep of the night, that melatonin cues our body to repair our DNA, to renew and rejuvenate our cells, to activate our stem cells, to restore our mitochondria, to grow and evolve our neural circuitry so we can learn from the day’s experiences, and to powerfully impact nearly every organ and system in the body.

Melatonin grows new brain cells via a process called neurogenesis, and it powerfully protects the brain from inflammation and degenerative diseases. It regulates and calms our autonomic nervous system; it improves our heart functioning; regulates blood pressure and protects against heart attacks and strokes. It boosts our immune system against viruses and bacteria; it suppresses cancer; and it reduces auto-immune conditions.³ It is one of the most potent anti-oxidants in the body, and with its unique chemical structure it can pass into every cell and compartment and fluid in the body, concentrating in particular in mitochondria, but also passing through breast milk to children, and through other feminine fluids. It helps us sleep and enter dream states.⁴ It deepens our brainwaves toward flow and trance states (alpha/theta).⁵ It regulates the functioning of every other hormone. The list goes on and on. Beyond that, its impact extends out forward and backward across time, as we’ll soon see.

Melatonin: Hormone of Quantum Time Magic

As the mistress of darkness, melatonin is not just the hormone of the night, it is the hormone of winter solstice. The melatonin production in our bodies reaches its maximum output on the night of winter solstice, when the seasonal wheel is passing through it darkest time, and opening up the doorway to a very powerful bio-magic, the inner alchemies of darkness.⁵

If we lived in full alignment with circadian and circannual rhythms and the complex pattern of light that shapes our consciousness, biology and endocrine system, then Solstice would be a moment when the gates of wisdom opened, deep within Mother Earth, to speak to us.

The name melatonin derives from the Greek melanos meaning dark, or black, plus tonic—melatonin is literally the tonic or elixir of darkness. It is the dreaming elixir of the witches and deep feminine consciousness. The ancients intuited the presence of this hormone long before modern science could isolate it and determine its chemical structure, with myth and legend from ancient times describing its mystical properties to create altered states of consciousness.

In spiritual circles the pineal gland is associated with the “third eye”, and from an evolutionary perspective this is literally true. It is the remains of a vestigial eye, once located on the top of the head of a common ancestor some 300 million years ago.⁶ Though a working third eye still remains on the top of the skull in a few reptile species, in most vertebrates, including humans, it migrated deep inside the brain where it translates the codes of sunlight through the retina into the hormonal pulses that shape our relationship to light and darkness, and to time itself. I like to think of it as our “dragon eye”, a primordial wisdom keeper within our deep brain.

“From a biological perspective, the role of melatonin is extraordinary, far and away more impactful than any other compound in the body. Its principal role is to translate the changing patterns of sunlight and darkness into biological codes, governing how our biology works with cycles of time—past, present and future. Melatonin is the dark mistress of biological time magic.”

When you look at the scientific literature on melatonin, the language sounds almost mystical. Thomas Erren, PhD, chronobiologist at the University of Cologne describes melatonin as a “universal time messenger”.⁷ Another cellular biologist calls it a “biological time–domain molecule acting on the circadian, seasonal, and transgenerational timescales”.⁸ In other words, in addition to its immediate biological actions, melatonin also programs enormously complex actions that will take place in the future. For example, melatonin released at night determines the tide of sex hormones and cortisol released the following day, which is why it is sometimes prescribed to support waning hormones in peri-menopause.⁹ Beyond that, the melatonin released in the deep winter programs our biology for the following spring and summer.¹⁰ How well were you sleeping, digesting, managing viruses and regulating your hormones this summer? Look back onto what was happening with your melatonin last winter.

In the same way, how we are curating our hormonal template right now has an impact for the coming spring and summer. Just as our ancestors gathered food, they gathered light and dark, they understood the seasonal, circannual and circadian time magic of our endocrine system.

In simple terms the amount of light you consume in summer, completing at Fall Equinox determines how your body heals and regenerates over winter, and the amount of darkness you allow yourself to experience in winter, peaking at Winter Solstice, determines your health and wellbeing for the summer—from your metabolism and how quickly your burn calories, to your immune system and how well you can heal. Our health is programmed by both light and dark, so the “wheel of the year”, the traditional ceremonial calendar of the year in earth-centric traditions, is not just a celebration of seasons and archetypal energies, it is a profound bio-magic that we need to know about and align with, if we wish to embody health and radiance.

Our relationship with the interplay of light and darkness is primal. On an even greater timescale we are programmed by the light and dark we receive in the womb. Gestational melatonin, which surges four times higher in the third trimester of pregnancy, programs the baby for light and dark cycles for the following year, and also affects puberty a decade later.¹¹ When we are older, melatonin determines our journey of ageing. Melatonin is what blooms us and withers us, it predicts when our life ignites and when it dies back down. The time-programming comes not just from the light record during the baby’s gestation, but from the historical record of light cycles over many years stored in the time-keeping centers of the mother’s brain.¹²

Our ancestral heritage is not just psychological or genetic; it is biomantic— somatic magic.

According to a groundbreaking 2018 study in Nature, 80% of our genes operate according to specific cycles and rhythms tied to the patterns of light.¹³ In other words, time, as determined by the shifting light and darkness, is the most foundational code-generator of our DNA expression, and thus our biology. Every cell, every tissue, every organ has its own “clock”. Melatonin affects all of these, making it the queen of epigenetic regulation of our DNA expression. And it is this melatonin that is at its peak power during the winter solstice. It is this magical hormone of alchemical darkness that is the secret to our longevity, our vitality, and our deep knowing—a “Sophia” code that lives within us, weaving us into the intricate pattern of time and life.

Grail Castle of the Brain—The Pineal Gland

I cannot finish this essay without re-emphasizing the symbiotic relationship of melatonin, the hormonal fluid mermaid who travels into every aspect of our cellular being, and the Grail Castle she hails from, the pineal gland. Together they have been known as the “seat of our soul” and the throne of our psychic, magical and intuitive powers, most potent over Winter Solstice.

The pineal gland is famous throughout history as the “gland of the alchemist”, often depicted in ancient manuscripts and texts as a pine cone that sits atop and crowns the spinal cord. It’s featured in the art of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece, India, the Dionysian mystery schools and the Aztec culture of Mexico; and it crowns an enormous bronze fountain in the pope’s own Vatican City. The ancient Egyptian “Eye of Horus” symbol, some 5,000 years old, bears a close anatomical resemblance to the brain structures that surround the central pineal gland. Given their advanced anatomical knowledge, along with suggestive temple inscriptions, this is unlikely to be a coincidence. Author and scholar Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki describes an ancient journey taken by priests and priestesses of Isis into the “Star Chamber of Isis”, associated with a temple of Isis at Sais, Egypt, that she believes describes imaginal journeys into the brain to activate the pituitary and pineal glands, and the production of melatonin, the mystical feminine molecule.¹⁴

“The pineal gland is the portal of earth alchemy, tuning us into the web of life and time magic”

The more subtle mysteries of pineal biology and neurophysiology are only now beginning to be unraveled by modern science. Calcite micro-crystals that deposit in the pineal gland take on complex and beautiful geometrical patterns, fractals of sacred geometries that are found in the natural world.¹⁵ These crystals are “piezoelectric” and are sensitive to electromagnetic fields.¹⁶ The pineal gland’s nighttime secretion of melatonin is altered by electromagnetic fields, including magnetic fields in the same range as the earth’s own geomagnetic field.¹⁷ These electromagnetic affects are stronger in the winter nights than the summer.¹⁸ This may well be connected to the scientific studies of psychic phenomena, which show that ESP (which happen more often at night) are also affected by geomagnetic activity, the electro-magic of sacred earth sites.¹⁹

The pineal gland is a psychic antenna that tunes into earth energy. From a neuroanatomy perspective, the pineal gland is situated perfectly between the worlds of the conscious, thinking mind and the artistic, intuitive, somatic, mystical, ancient mind. It sits like a magical portal at the center of a cruciform mandala, placed at nearly the exact mid-point of the brain - between the left and right hemispheres, between the front brain and back brain, and at the boundary of the brain and body, the only part of the brain not encased by the blood brain barrier, to allow it access to a tremendous circulation of blood, ounce per ounce more than any other organ in the body. The alchemists and ancestors understood how our body is the gateway of magic, and that true wisdom lay inside.

Our Bodies are Complex Quantum Time-Computers

Stepping back, you can begin to sense a picture emerging that is astounding. Our bodies operate as an enormously complex and environmentally sensitive quantum time-computer, with trillions of overlapping biological cycles, in every cell and tissue, that meet each other in specific nodes and conjunctions, allowing for predictive programming years and generations into the future. Our biology operates in a similar way to celestial-spiritual astrological calendars, such as the Mayan calendar, with the interplay of the orbital cycles of celestial bodies—the sun, the moon, planets, constellations—predicting critical nodes and junctures thousands of years into the past and future. Our body is a galaxy unto itself, surfing the codes of time magic, entangled across vast timelines.

With this knowledge at hand, we can revisit the sacred temples of our ancestors with a new perspective, a new and deeper understanding, of what they were calling forth in their ceremonies; and we can ask ourselves why have these earth temples been abandoned? Why do we modern humans not even understand the basics of our bodies, let alone our potential for bio-magic? Why has our education not included this?

We have forgotten how to live in and be magicians of our own bodies.

Newgrange - Return of the Light

In Newgrange in Ireland, a majestic earth temple was built thousands of years ago, in 3,200 BCE, older than the pyramids. It is designed to align with the first ray of light on winter solstice, which travels up the 19-meter passageway to illuminate the dark chamber with golden light.

The rocks around the entrance of the earth mound and inside are designed with talismanic symbols such as circles, spirals and chevrons that represent portals or gateways of rebirth and regeneration. In Irish myth it is called Sidhe in Brugha, described as a portal to otherworld and a temple and dwelling place of the divine ancestors. Old Irish tales tell of the solstice light of the god impregnating the womb of the goddess, conceiving or rebirthing the sun/son. John Carey, an expert on Irish mythology, says that the tales of Brú na Bóinne are the only Irish legends where a sacred site is linked with the control of time. Newgrange is also linked to legends of shapeshifting swans, often connected to lost prophetic traditions of druids and bards.

Because we have forgotten the secrets of bio-magic and eco-magic, these stories and the purpose of these epic sacred sites can often appear confusing or mystical in a way that is disconnected from the reality of our biology and its intricate interweaving with our ecology.

From the perspective of Biomancy and Ecomancy, the interconnected magic of life, knowing that the people who sat in the dark chambers of Newgrange were likely practicing a way of bio-mysticsm and courting the magic of their melatonin for a vision, we can reclaim our wisdom.

For me, this is what earth remembrance or earth activism must include. A true alchemical understanding of the magical reality of our bodies and earth, and a vision that emerges from this reconnection, as if the voice of mother earth is speaking through each cell of our body.

Dr Azra Bertrand

Sacred lore from Newgrange: ‘This was my palace. In days past many a one plucked here the purple flower of magic and the fruit of the tree of life…” And even as he spoke, a light began to glow and to pervade the cave, and to obliterate the stone walls and the antique hieroglyphics engraven thereon, and to melt the earthen floor into itself like a fiery sun suddenly uprisen within the world, and there was everywhere a wandering ecstasy of sound; light and sound were one; light had a voice… “I am Aengus, men call me young. I am the sunlight in the heart, moonlight in the mind; I am the light at the end of every dream… I will make you immortal; for my palace opens into the Gardens of the Sun.’ A Dream of Angus Og, AE (George Russell) 1897

Your Guide to Winter Solstice Alchemy

Alchemical Darkness
* For 3 days before Solstice, spend at least 30 minutes sat in total darkness (you might need to wear a light blocker). Visualize your entire body and energy field immersed in the darkness. If possible, go out into the darkness of night and connect to the land.
* The night before Solstice, spend at least 15 minutes in the early evening fading sun greeting the night. Close your eyes and allow your body to sense the feeling of night.
* You can listen to this Ancestral Swan Meditation on Winter Solstice, a guided biomantic journey: Find a quiet place to journey with the meditation, and ideally you would be in complete darkness – you can wear a blindfold if you need to block the light completely. The meditation takes you on a magical swan journey to Newgrange in Ireland for Solstice.

Rebirth of the Light
* If possible try to get up at dawn on the morning of Winter Solstice and see the first light
* Allow your body to become sensitive and aware to different spectrums of light
* Create a Winter Solstice ritual and light a special candle to symbolize the light’s return. * Experiment with meditating in total darkness with just a candle lit, and then extinguishing the candlelight. Tune in and feel how your entire body senses the dark

Join us to spend a year activating your body’s innate quantum magic through our Biomancy Diploma Apprenticeship. Doors Open May 1st.

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Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

Notes:

1. Van de Castle, Robert. “Sleep and Dreams”. In B. Wolman (Ed.), Handbook of Parapsychology, 1977.

2. Bem, D. J., & Honorton, C. (1994). “Does psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer.” Psychological Bulletin, 115(1), 4–18. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.115.1.4

3. José Cipolla-Neto, Fernanda Gaspar do Amaral, “Melatonin as a Hormone: New Physiological and Clinical Insights.” Endocrine Reviews, Volume 39, Issue 6, December 2018, Pages 990–1028, https://doi.org/10.1210/er.2018-00084.

4. Kunz D, Mahlberg R, Müller C, Tilmann A, Bes F. “Melatonin in patients with reduced REM sleep duration: two randomized controlled trials.” J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2004 Jan;89(1):128-34. doi: 10.1210/jc.2002-021057. PMID: 14715839.

5. Cajochen C, Kräuchi K, von Arx MA, Möri D, Graw P, Wirz-Justice A. Daytime melatonin administration enhances sleepiness and theta/alpha activity in the waking EEG. Neurosci Lett. 1996 Apr 5;207(3):209-13. doi: 10.1016/0304-3940(96)12517-9. PMID: 8728487.

6. More references coming soon!

Photo Attribution:
“Winter Solstice Sunrise” – Newgrange. Ron Cogswell. CC 2.0 via Flickr.

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This is the first in a series of essays about a powerful new paradigm in the world of somatics and trauma healing—the emergence of eco-somatics—and the return of our world to an ecologically-integrated womb cosmology.

Transformation and healing starts within the place of origin, spiraling out from the ecosystems we inhabit, including our mother’s body and the body of the planetary mother, into the greater containers of time, culture, memory and perception.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the new eco-somatics movement will uproot and transform the entire ecosystem of modern healing. The medicine of the future is here now. It’s backed by science. And, it’s calling for your attention.

Whatever it is you do in the world, it will touch you.

Whether you are a bodyworker, psychotherapist, doctor, movement teacher, trauma therapist, parent, educator, artist or business leader, this movement will change your world, because as a humanity we are being forced to look at our relationship to nature—within us and without.

We must become fluent in the hidden languages of the natural world, and open our hearts again to the reality of Spirit and consciousness that permeates all of life.

The State of Somatics and Trauma Healing

Before we get to eco-somatics, let’s first take a look at the modern field of somatics and trauma healing.

If you time-travelled back to our parents’ generation and said the word “somatics”, they would probably have no idea what you were talking about.

Modern somatics, especially in the social media era, is something that has moved from the edges of society, to take a place at the center of culture—especially for millennials and Gen Z who are more fluent in trauma talk than most MD’s.

This is a big leap forward in many ways, but it also has its drawbacks, and asks us to pause to contemplate the future of somatics—especially in this historic moment of divergence of the AI, technological “no-body”-based realities vs. the organic, animal, evolutionary worlds that humans have inhabited for millions of years.

What does the future bring? And more importantly, what do we need to do and become to direct it into a future of healing and collaborative embodiment of our natural blueprint?

Somatics, and especially eco-somatics, plays a critically important role as we enter this new era of civilization.

It’s a time for us to take a discerning look at our cultural institutions and structures, and take stock of what is working, and what’s in need of evolution.

For the purposes of this essay, I am reviewing the origin of modern western somatics, starting with the godfather of body-based psychotherapies, Wilhelm Reich, and all of the somatic healing “tributaries” his work directly or indirectly inspired, including:

• Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine)

• Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Perls)

• Rolfing (Ida Rolf)

• Pilates (Joseph Pilates)

• Holotropic Breathwork (Stanislav Grof)

• Bioenergetics (Alexander Lowen)

• Core Energetics (John Pierrakos)

• Alexander Technique (Matthias Alexander)

• Primal Therapy (Arthur Janov)

• Feldenkrais (Moshe Feldenkrais)

• Rebirth Breathwork (Leonard Orr)

• Continuum Movement (Emilie Conrad)

• Bowen Method (Thomas Bowen)

• Hakomi (Ron Kurtz)

• TRE (David Berceli)

• Rosen Method Bodywork (Marion Rosen)

• Biosynthesis (David Boadella)

• Postural / Energetic Integration (Jack Painter)

We’ll also explore the contribution of Dr. Stephen Porges, and his polyvagal theory, as well as Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment theory, that, along with Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, incepted the culture of nervous system therapies, awareness of chronic childhood trauma, and the concept of “safe”, trauma-informed spaces and therapies.

My place in this world of modern somatics began with a two-year stint at the NIH from 1999 - 2001, working in the foundational research lineages that contributed to modern attachment theory, and three years of intensive study and training with one of Wilhelm Reich’s heirs, Dr. John Pierrakos, the founder of Core Energetics, alongside many other body-based modalities to heal soma and psyche in union.

Of course, somatics is not “new”, and, in fact, eco-somatics was the realm of the body shamans, priestesses and mystery adepts across the cultures and ages, a conversation that we’ll dive into in part two of this essay.

But first, I want to begin at the place it all started for me, as an anxious medical student, idealistically hoping to learn how to cure and heal humanity…

School of Medicine

I was age 24, in my second year of medical school at Duke, and in absolute crisis.

The brutal schedule, lack of sleep and unrelenting pressure of med school collided headlong with unhealed family trauma patterns, and I suddenly found myself clinically depressed and anxious.

What to do? I turned first to my psychiatry professors and mentors—the medical orthodoxy. They recommended antidepressants and seemed surprised when, several months later, I told them they had not helped a bit, but had caused heart arrhythmias, and a near complete dissociation of my mind from my body, a kind of “severance”.

“What next?”, I asked. They replied “a different medication, of course.” I very reluctantly agreed, against my intuition, because they were the experts, right?

Of course, some people and some circumstances absolutely benefit from medications, but the next set of pills made my anxiety even worse, so I made a life-changing decision in that moment that effectively took me beyond the current scientific model I was training in—and into the unknown. My body and soul were asking for something different, but I had no idea what.

I reached toward traditional talk psychotherapy next. I was told I’d need a visit each week for 6 – 12 months, as a starter. I tried for a month, without any noticeable benefit, and realized, “no, this is not going to work either”—I couldn’t afford to wait that long. (I did return to somatic awareness-based talk therapies in the future; and they were very helpful.)

By that time, I was living in Bethesda, Maryland, doing research at the NIH in the field of maternal-child attachment. One day I was sitting in a café after work, wondering if I would ever feel better, when I saw a small ad in a holistic magazine: “Do you want to feel radically alive? Join a Core Energetics somatic process group.” Instant soul recognition: “Yes!”

And, the rest was history. I was taught a breathwork practice handed down in a direct line from the Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Reich, that bio-mimicked a natural, tension-breaking breath pattern in children. I did it religiously, every morning for 20 minutes.

By the end of week 1, I felt 50% better. By the end of week 4, that level of depression never returned, but my inherited trauma patterns would need more attention in time, and eventually responded to a more womb-based, ecological and “magical” approach.

The Reichian breathing didn’t solve all my problems, of course, but it taught me the enormous power of bioenergetics and somatic therapies. Safer, more natural, sourced from the deep well of my own body magic, and profoundly more effective for me and many others.

I went on to take a professional training in Core Energetics and Bioenergetics, that still informs what I teach in Eco-Somatics, as I will share more about later in this series of essays.

What is Somatics Anyway?

Here’s the thing: few people really know.

Somatics can seem like hodgepodge collection of breathwork, bodywork, somatic processing, craniosacral, postural awareness, expressive dance, shamanic movement, voicework, sexual therapies and beyond. If you've been scrolling through Instagram reels of people doing neck releases while talking about nervous system regulation, or watching TikTok videos of wellness influencers shaking to discharge anxiety and trauma from their fascia, or watching from the sidelines as the “breathwork wars” rage on between gentle nose breathers and ecstatic mouth breathers, you've encountered the wild west of modern somatics.

But what are the origin of these therapies? How effective are they? What kind of training do practitioners have? How do they work?

As a field, somatics is all over the place. There’s no cohesive framework that holds it together. It’s dismissed by the medical orthodoxy, overlooked by research grants and is still ambivalent about growing up and setting itself free from the western biomedical model.

A somatics practitioner can mean anything from a multi-decade experienced psychologist certified in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing therapy, to a highly empathic young Gen Z’er without formal training who’s been breathing into her psoas for 10 years already and can feel your tense AF psoas from across the room with her very real somatic clairsentience, to a yoga-based trauma therapist focusing on complex-PTSD and vagal tone, to a wellness coach’s 3-month fascia program, to rebirth breathwork descended from Leonard Orr and his teacher Babaji, and on and on.

Ordinary people sharing their experiences on social media has accelerated discoveries in the field, but has also skewed the conversation and opinions to accounts with the best optics, not necessarily the most experienced practitioners.

As the research studies slowly trickle in, it turns out that many somatic modalities are as effective, if not more, as western medical treatments, but it is a field that suffers from amnesia—it has forgotten its origins and its place in the greater ecosystem.

So, what is modern somatics? Let’s take a tour of the field as it stands now, including a look at the science, and then in part 2 of this essay series we’ll explore its roots.

The Orthodox Medical Approach: "It's All in Your Head"

Harvard Health defines somatics in this way: somatic therapy “focuses on the body and how emotions appear within the body" and “posits that our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions … traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can become trapped inside." A letter from Harvard Women’s Health lists the pillars of Peter Levine’s practices—pendulation, titration, somatic awareness—as what you might expect from a somatic therapist.1

Wow, has Harvard accepted somatic therapies?

It sounds promising until you realize they're positioning it as a harmless add-on to what they consider real medicine: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and pharmaceuticals, describing how CBT "engages only the mind, not the body, encouraging people to become aware of disturbing thoughts and behavior patterns and work to change them."

When someone presents with PTSD or complex trauma, the orthodox route looks something like this: a psychiatrist's office, a DSM-V diagnosis, maybe some CBT sessions focused on challenging negative thought patterns, and likely a prescription pad.

The body? It’s irrelevant. The brain is the organ with a problem; it is suffering from a chemical imbalance that responds to anti-depressants.

Really? Yes, we do have brain chemistry; and anti-depressants like Prozac can alter that chemistry. For some people, especially older generations, or for people less attuned to their bodies and feelings, that treatment feels like the best solution. But, for the younger generations and sensitive folks, and especially sensitive women (who represent about 80% of those practicing and receiving somatic therapies), these mechanistic, linear, mental or biochemical models do not work well.

The “Alternative Orthodoxy”: The Body Keeps the Score

Then there's what I call the alternative orthodoxy—the bridge between mainstream medicine and the wellness world. This is where figures like Drs. Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine and others, have helped create a wave of powerful, science-backed somatic approaches to trauma healing.

In 2014, renegade Harvard psychiatrist and researcher, Van der Kolk, exploded the field of somatics with his landmark book, The Body Keeps the Score. 2018 marked the beginning of its 7-year run on the New York Times bestsellers list, where it still remains at the time of writing, with an estimated 4+ million copies sold.

The Body Keeps the Score, is the book that “legitimized” somatic therapies in the eyes of the world. Van der Kolk compiled the growing list of peer-reviewed scientific articles validating somatic therapies, and provided some context and theory to make sense of it.

He was inspired in part by Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, who credits Wilhelm Reich’s work as an important influence. This is a key detail that we’ll circle back to in the second essay, as we trace the origins of somatic therapy back to its spiritual and ecological roots.

Show Me the Science

The medical orthodoxy still dismisses somatic modalities, even though the science that proves their effectiveness is stunning:

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is now scientifically validated to treat trauma by directing attention to our “felt sense”—internal sensations (interoception, proprioception, and kinesthesia) rather than to cognitive or emotional experiences.

A 2017 study showed that SE eliminated the diagnosis of PTSD in nearly 50% of patients, after 15 weekly sessions. That is as good as, or better than, any orthodox medical treatment.2

But that is only the beginning—dozens of other studies show similarly striking results. Here are a few:

A 2014 article published by Van der Kolk proved that 10 sessions of yoga-based trauma therapy reduced PTSD symptoms significantly, and was equivalent to or better than standard medical treatments. 3

In 2014, Kaiser health system published a study of EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) that showed better and faster results than conventional CBT in treating PTSD.4

There are now more than a dozen studies showing the effectiveness of sensori­motor therapy (SMT), a body-awareness method to treat PTSD. A key principle of SMT is that people who have unresolved traumatic experiences often store them within their bodies, causing somatic symptoms like strained patterns of tension, movement, posture, and breath to develop.5

Stanford University Professor of Medicine, Dr. Peter Bayley, published a paper in 2022 that showed specific breathwork techniques were equally effective as standard CPT (cognitive processing therapy) in treating PTSD. 6

A 2023 article, published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, found that specific movement and dance therapies significantly reduce PTSD and depression.7

The alternative orthodoxy has also given us breakthrough concepts like polyvagal theory, attachment styles and trauma-informed care, which we will hear more about in a moment.

The new frameworks and scientific results of modern somatic therapies are revolutionary—they are challenging the worldview of the medical-industrial complex, and daring to bring the healing process out of the head and into the body, where it’s empowering everyday folks, especially women, to take control of their own health and spiritual journeys.

BUT, this is only the beginning of the story— a quantum leap in paradigms is underway.

Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory and the Culture of Nervous System

Somatics is a diverse field, with many kinds of therapies, but let’s explore a particularly important track that we’re hearing about all the time: the nervous system.

If you have any interest in healing, your social media feeds will run thick with nervous system healing content. Business coaches teaching you to increase your nervous system bandwidth to open to abundance, trauma therapists telling you the 10 best ways to increase your vagal tone, classes on co-regulation, gentle breathwork designed to regulate your nervous system, jousts of who is and who isn’t trauma-informed, what healing containers are “safe spaces” and which aren’t, nervous system reset protocols, diagrams of fight / flight / freeze / fawn / appease, and on and on. Everything is nervous system.

And with good reason—it is a critical system not just for our mental health, but for our body as a whole. Our nervous system governs how good we feel in our body, our immune system, hormonal system, relational capacities and beyond. It is a relational intelligence.

And, it is sensitive to disruption from stress and trauma. Collectively, women have been more acutely attuned to nervous system regulation, and have been the key voices in bringing this issue to public consciousness.

What most people don’t realize is that the prominence of all of these conversations was profoundly influenced by the ideas of one man—psychology professor Stephen Porges, PhD, and his groundbreaking polyvagal theory (PVT), first proposed in 1994, and which has become a central pillar of the somatics community.

Many tens of thousands of practitioners and clients love PVT, but there are a few difficulties with the theory.

One is that, after 30 years of research, the biology of polyvagal theory cannot be proven and is not accepted by the general scientific community. Several prominent neuroscientists argue that the unique functions of the ventral vagal and dorsal vagal complexes proposed by Porges don’t exist. Whether or not they are real, it appears they don’t work in the way he thought. This does not mean that the polyvagal therapies aren’t effective, it’s just hard to explain the biological mechanism of how they work.

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The Evolutionary Nervous System

Porges’s genius was to look at the nervous system from an evolutionary, phylogenetic perspective. He began with the observation that the social behaviors of mammals are markedly different than reptiles, which led to his hypothesis that mammals must have a different nervous system anatomy and function than reptiles. PVT is mammal-focused, and views the older reptilian layer as “primitive” and only responsible for “defensive” responses (such as fear, safety, aggression, hiding).

In Eco-Somatics, we approach our evolutionary nervous system from a broader perspective: that we have multiple distinct evolutionary layers within our nervous system, each with important gifts and functions that work in collaboration. Working with all of these layers is a key to our healing, not just the mammalian layer. I have refined these layers into five distinct categories, for the sake of mapping the territory, but the somatic reality is an interconnected continuum.

In the course of a day our nervous system will shift from prey, to predator, to rest and regenerate, to innovate and activate, to decision making, responding to complex cues from ecological markers, or following hierarchies of existing social structures.

Let’s remember that the nervous system is not static or fixed system across time. It is the result of a living evolutionary process that is still ongoing. It’s a responsive intelligence, that draws from and informs our eco-epigenetics. Even in our own lifetimes our nervous system changes form and function: from newborn, to infant, to a seven-year-old, to an adolescent to adult—each stage of life demands developmental shifts and new capacities. These are physiological rites of passage for our nervous system.

Rites of Passage of the Nervous System

When we are born, and make the leap from being a water creature, floating in the amniotic fluids of the womb, to a land creature, our entire physiology shifts radically, including our nervous system. The newborn period marks the time of the most rapid changes in our brains, with more than 1 million new synaptic connections forming per second, according the Harvard Center for the Developing Child 8 . And the changes don’t stop there.

There are periodic leaps throughout the younger years, including an important change in resting brain wave states from a predominant theta state (imaginal thinking) to alpha state (focused thinking) around age 8.9 Which is why, for example, Waldorf schools discourage teaching linear-thinking academics before age 7.

Adolescence is a time of even greater change than childhood, with explosive transformation in our neural circuitry, second only to the newborn period, with as much as 50% of our synapses changing in the pre-frontal cortex and other key areas of our brains. 10 Childbirth causes significant remodeling of the nervous system to enhance empathy and attunement, not just for the birthing mother, but for fathers as well.11 The point is that across our development, our nervous system shifts profoundly during physiological rites of passage.

The changes of the nervous system in our human development (ontogeny) mirror changes in the nervous system over evolutionary time (phylogeny) on our planet.

Mermaids and The Nervous System: Our Watery Beginnings

In a womb cosmology of creation, we always start with the origins of the system. The first nervous systems on this planet originated in the oceans, in ancient jellyfish and similar creatures, and served a very different purpose than the nervous systems of modern land-dwelling social mammals, let alone the nervous systems of humans, some of whom now live in mega cities of millions.

But, like the jellyfish, our human nervous system also first formed in the amniotic “oceans” of our mother’s womb. We are deeply attuned to this frequency of water, and to aquatic and amniotic physiology and experience. We carry the evolutionary history of life on this planet inside us; and it is recapitulated during gestation, as our body rapidly moves between somatic templates that are pre-human in origin. In the womb we take a magical, cerebellar, dreamlike, somatic journey through the many stages of evolution—aquatic, reptilian, mammalian—as our body is given shape by ancestral, eco-, bio-morphogenetic fields that guide our development, with templates of creation that science recognizes, but does not fully understand.

The journey from ocean, to amphibian (“live two lives”), to reptile, to mammalian four legged, or two legged humans is not a straight line of “advancement”, but an expansion that includes the benefits and wisdom of the forms that we have inhabited in our evolutionary past. They remain stored in our deep genetic and eco-epigenetic memory. This is not a metaphor—we have 90% genetic homology (shared gene function) with leopards, for example.12

An article from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science reports, “Jellyfish, with their decentralized regenerative nervous systems, are more advanced than once thought. A new study from the University of Copenhagen has demonstrated that Caribbean box jellyfish can learn at a much more complex level than ever imagined – despite only having one thousand nerve cells and no centralized brain. The finding changes our fundamental understanding of the brain and could enlighten us about our own mysterious brains.” 13

Any nervous system theory that predominantly values human traits and devalues more ancient intelligence, such as reptilian, fails to understand that we are only around 1% uniquely human at a genetic level. 99% of our DNA and our physiology is prehuman.

Eco-somatic nervous system theory brings us back into connection, consciousness and embodiment of our evolutionary layers of somatic intelligence, that are designed to work together in a symphony, or, like a car with many gears, that can be shifted quickly and instinctively, so we are equipped to move across rapidly changing terrains with power and wisdom.

But the full story of our human blueprint is often reduced into quick sound bites on social media, and linear one-tier theories. Our nervous system is often portrayed as a machine that can break down or stop working, and just needs a quick reset or fix.

What is happening in reality is that we are collectively waking up and remembering the incredible quantum magic that is our body, and getting back in touch with the sensitive tuning and purpose of every interconnected system within us. This cannot be reduced to simple bio hacks.

Polyvagal Theory: Bonding & Attachment in the Mammalian Baby

Let’s circle back and apply what we’ve learned about the evolutionary nervous system to polyvagal theory. Polyvagal’s success comes directly from Stephen Porges’s bold insight into a forgotten truth of our evolutionary design—that distinct new neural pathways evolved to support mammalian babies.

Porges proposed that the vagus nerve is the key—that the vagus nerve of reptiles is evolutionarily older and simpler, but the vagus nerve of mammals evolved into multiple pathways (“polyvagal”) that make complex social interactions possible.

Polyvagal theory is also all about autonomic nervous system regulation, and how trauma interferes with regulation. Trauma amps up our sympathetic nervous system and puts us into “fight or flight” mode. Or, if we can’t fight or flee, the fear activates our older “reptilian” dorsal vagal complex, which puts us into the “shutdown” modes of collapse, freeze, fawn or appease—different strategies to minimize threat.

Porges believes that mammals (including humans) evolved a new vagal nerve center, the ventral vagal complex, that allows mammalian babies to calm their nervous systems through positive social contact and co-regulation with their mothers—through safe spaces, friendly faces, emotional attunement, hearing a sing-song “prosodic” voice (like a mother uses with a young baby), and other signals caregivers naturally provide to young children—that diminish stress and promotes a more regulated nervous system.

"The elements of the social engagement system [ventral vagal complex] ... enable infant and mother to co-regulate autonomic states via reciprocal cues of safety." ~ Stephen Porges

When we work with polyvagal therapies, and with attachment repair, we are working at the level of the mammalian child, an important layer, but only one of the layers of our eco-somatic nervous system.

Polyvagal and Attachment Therapies: Creating Safety for the Inner Child

Healthy vagal tone can be blocked by stress—by relationships or environments that feel unsafe or mis-attuned, or that trigger old trauma memories. This happens at an instinctive, preconscious level—what Porges calls neuroception—which has become a neurobiological basis for the focus on safe spaces and trauma-informed containers in the wellness community.

Polyvagal theory weaves directly into attachment and trauma healing theory, because if the attachment bonds with our primary caregivers were disrupted at an early age due to trauma, we avoid or feel anxious around emotionally intimate relationship. If relationships are a problem, it’s more difficult to regulate our nervous system in our adult life.

A solution is that we can try to repair early relational wounds with therapists who model healthy attachment and attunement. At an energetic level, the client is revisiting the unresolved feelings and conflicts of their inner child. The therapist is functioning as a model “healthy” parent.

There are now tens of thousands of attachment repair and polyvagal-informed practitioners, helping restore our mammalian and inner child layers, and that is so important, but who is teaching us how to become healthy, initiated, resourced adults?

When We Hyper-Focus on the Wounded Child

In an Eco-Somatic whole ecology, whole cosmology system, we do not just focus on healing our inner child wounds. Equal emphasis is placed on healing our individuation wounds—the feelings, traumas and blocks around our adulting, initiation, rites of passage of the nervous system and connection to the greater ecosystems.

Inner child work helps us heal our heart, but initiation / individuation work helps us heal our relationship to power. We must have both to become whole.

What an infant needs is different to what an 8 year old needs, to what a 13 year old needs, to what an adult needs. Our nervous system is designed to function differently in different eras in our life.

What we discover is that if we hyper-focus on only one layer of the nervous system, based on the mother-baby dyad, it fine tunes our capacity for attachment and bonding, and to receive healing around early childhood traumas, but fails to guide us on how to move from survival or dependency into thriving, innovative, resourceful, adults—to individuate.

We risk becoming stuck in child mode, and might find ourselves demanding safe spaces and trauma-informed containers everywhere, rather than in dedicated trauma and attachment therapy settings. Or, if we over-focus on our childhood traumas, without a balanced focus on developing our powerfully-resourced adult selves, our apex predator self, we may find ourselves defaulting to victim mode and prey mode.

Polyvagal and other trauma theory describes core defensive states, including freeze, collapse, fawn, appease modes. These are not just functions of our nervous system, they are all qualities of a mammal in a prey response.

Other symptoms of this imbalance can include finding it difficult to operate in the adult world, to make money, run businesses, to be matriarchs or patriarchs, which can create a different kind of wounding in family systems. Children need more than just sensitive attunement, they need parents with a fully integrated eco-somatic nervous systems that can nourish themselves and bring resources to the family.

This is why people initially have big gains within the mammalian / inner child healing framework, because it's so important to hold the inner child and understand how a lack of presence, care and attachment affected us when we were children. But we then we may flounder if we are not given the language, bridge, and guidance to bring that child self into individuation, into the adult and elder, or to hold “dangerous” energies.

Eco-Somatics: The Bigger Picture

I’m in a unique position to comment on this, as I was one of a relatively small group of researchers (and very few MD’s) who participated in the research lineage that founded modern attachment theory. I spent two years in the NIH research labs, sitting with the monkeys whose attachment trauma was the source of the theory, watching and observing their behavior, looking directly into their eyes, day in and day out. I witnessed their behavioral patterns, often with the monkeys interacting with me, and then saw the results of how their behavior and neuroendocrinology shifted depending on connection and relationship with a caregiver.

What I saw was that the attachment repair and nervous system regulation work was one piece, but alone it was not enough; the bigger gains came from integrating into a holistic ecological structure. And, that looking to other wounded, unstable monkeys as attachment figures to try to regulate their emotions, resulted in some of the worst outcomes of all, creating cultures of dysregulation and emotional looping.

What was missing during those experiments was the rhythm and sequence of life, the stages of development, Eldership, structure, place, memory, ecosystem. Once created, the mother-attachment wound could not be repaired by social connection with peers or adoptive mothers in the way that had been hoped. Instead, the monkeys—and by extension us—needed to connect to a bigger container and context to hold them.

Our nervous systems are looking to feel belonging and place in all of the eco-systems we inhabit. In spiritual traditions around the world, it was not the role of the biological parents to exclusively fulfill this need, or the role of a replacement caregiver or therapist.

When we learn how to source our energy directly from the Earth and Sun, when we turn on the cunning and wisdom layers of our nervous system, when we connect to our animal powers as a genetic memory woven into our DNA, when we Elder our nervous system, when we become Mother Trees and Father Trees and merge our nervous system with the Earth—we create our own safety wherever we go.

Somatics is a big field, with many beautiful therapies, some of which work on the aquatic layer of the nervous system, including cranio-sacral for example, and others that work on different layers of our biology and nervous system. I will map it out in future essays, along with a look at some of the other challenges of modern western somatics due to its default framework of the biomedical model, and speak to a more quantum biology-aware approach.

An eco-somatic womb-based cosmology starts with our origin in the womb, traces our path through the rites of passage of the nervous system, in our development and across evolutionary time. It activates our eco-epigenetics and gives us a bigger container and context to hold our body, our psyche, our nervous system, and profoundly resources us to restore equilibrium and thrive again.

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We are shaped by maternal genetics encoded into us in the womb, that go on to define our ability to thrive in life – on a physical, emotional and spiritual level. But we can shapeshift our genes…

In the late spring of 2012, my wife and I lived for three months in a small village in northern India, snugged into the steep foothills of the Himalayan mountains. At the time she was suffering from a form of chronic fatigue brought on by a period of intensive stress. Her immune system and mitochondria had temporarily stopped functioning properly —as if her body was in a kind of energetic hibernation, patiently waiting for the right moment to spring to life again. Our intuition guided us to the high-altitude forests, strong sunlight and pristine mountain air of the Himachal, where we knew some healing magic was waiting for her, surrounded by remote, wild nature.

Our little house lay along a simple goat path, overlooking the valley, with no heat or amenities.

Slowly, the rhythms of nature worked their medicine. Rising with the sun, communing with the beautiful forests, and retiring at sunset to our rustic candlelit home, away from electricity and cell towers, our life was simple and natural. Then one day, as she was improving, we decided to take a “short” walk along a mountain trail to a waterfall. Himalayan weather is wild and unpredictable, and what started as a sunny day quickly turned into an intense rain and hail storm. The “short” walk was more like an hour and a half, and, soaked to the bone by the cold rain, we both became mildly hypothermic. Before the storm she had felt low-energy, and struggled to walk the path, but as soon as the ice-cold rain drenched through her summer dress, she raced along the path, laughing wildly, followed by a friendly stray dog who yapped along in delight.

Luckily, we made it home safely and re-warmed. What we noticed next was astounding.

Almost immediately, the months of intense fatigue that Seren had been experiencing suddenly ended. It was as if the elemental energy of the cold rain “rebirthed” her. The cold shock activated core epigenetic and mitochondrial reprogramming, and reset her bioenergetic system to a much higher functioning. The biochemical pathways of these kind of metabolic shifts have now been well studied in the “cold thermogenesis” medical literature, and popularized by advocates like Wim Hof.

But I knew that this rebirth was more than just cold water—it was a biomantic, or bio-magical, process made possible by months of prayer, vision journeys, and deep communion with all the elements of wild nature.

Let’s take a deeper look at the science and traditions behind this.

Rebirth Technologies:
Restoring the Original Template

I first heard about the idea of psychological “rebirth” from Dr. Stanislav Grof more than two decades ago, while in medical school. He pioneered the idea of perinatal matrices, the different stages in our birthing process that can hold imprints or traumas from our time in the womb, and their lasting effects on our psychology. He offered guided journeys to help patients “time travel” back to their birth and gestational experiences, to understand and clear the traumas.

These technologies involve a form of breathing called holotropic breathwork that alters our brain physiology and opens our “doors of perception”, so we can experience a visionary biomantic journey—a “bio-magical” state of consciousness where we can retrieve, access, and process memories, emotions and somatic imprints from our childhood and time in the womb.

Seren and I experienced another type of rebirth work, pioneered by psychoanalyst Leonard Orr, at our little home in the Himalayas, where a therapist came to our house and took us both through a profound journey. Afterwards the practitioner gave us a sentence that encapsulated the energies we were reclaiming from our birth template, mine was honoring the underlying depression that ran through my ancestral line (my grandfather begged on the streets as a 10-year-old boy during the "Great Depression"), and Seren’s phrase was to “trust in the flow of joy”.

I was immensely fascinated by the arena of “rebirth technology”, especially the idea that our formative experiences were not fixed, as science had previously thought, but were plastic, and responded to our environment, our intentions and our daily pratices.

This means we can experience daily quantum rebirths that reshape our very genetic expression.

As I researched the field, I became aware that practitioners seemed to be split into two camps: those on one side focused on emotional, psychological, and ancestral rebirth, often involving “shadow work”, and then the biohackers on the other side, who were experts in revitalizing, energizing and regenerating the bioenergy and physical systems, but without a sacred context.

It became clear that what was needed was a biomantic rebirth, that included the whole picture.

Shapeshifting DNA: The Science of Epigenetics

Over the last twenty years, the science of epigenetics has revolutionized our understanding of human health. Epigenetics is the study of how factors “above” our actual DNA determine which genes are expressed. The remarkable finding is that 90 - 95% of our genetic expression, and our health, is determined by signals from our environment, not by the DNA codes we inherit from our parents.^1,2 Our exposure to stress, chemicals, electromagnetics, healthy nutrients, love and affection and many other factors imprint our DNA, turning some genes on, some off, and shifting the fundamental architecture of our biology and physiology.³ Many of these changes can last years, even generations, and some of the deepest imprinting happens during our time in the womb.

Recent research has underscored how powerfully our womb experiences influence who we are at every level—biologically, emotionally, spiritually. Hundreds of studies now show how intra-uterine toxic exposures, including emotional and psychological toxins such as stress, depression, anxiety and mental illness in our parents (fathers too), can cause every kind of illness and disease lasting into adulthood. The same is true for herbicides, pesticides, toxic and processed foods, pharmaceuticals, smoke, industrial chemicals, and more—the list goes on and on.

On the positive side, cutting-edge epigenetic studies also show how much power we have to transform and shapeshift these early imprints with biomantic practices that change our genetic expression. Healthy natural diets, movement and practices like yoga cause positive epigenetic reprogramming.^4,5 Importantly, the studies also included energetic-spiritual practices. Specifically, meditation, chi gong, tai chi, visualization and imaginal journeys changed genetic expression.⁶ In 2014, Scientific American published an article titled, “Changing Our DNA through Mind Control? A study finds meditating cancer patients are able to affect the makeup of their DNA.” In other words, the science is real, and it supports the idea that deep spiritual-energetic processes, in addition to physical ones, can re-shape the functioning of our DNA.

These kinds of practices, as well as others, can also reverse our “epigenetic clocks”, a measure of our physiologic age and predicted “healthspan” that is much more accurate than our birth age.

A recent study showed that two natural hormones (DHEA and growth hormone) as well as a medicine that mimics some of the effects of intermittent fasting and exercise (metformin) could generate a reversal in biological age at the rate of 6.5 years per year of treatment by the end of the study period.⁷ Other people report similar results just using natural sunlight, gentle exercise, and intermittent fasting—no medications required. We have the capacity to renew ourselves.

When we experience biomantic rebirth we can turn back the clock of the aging process, and re-conceive our primal templates of inherited DNA, transforming past trauma into regeneration.

When I speak about biomantic health I am talking about an electro-magnetic model of health and biology, alongside the more traditional biochemical model we are all more familiar with. Our electro-magnetism is rooted in energy not matter, and is relational, environmental and quantum.

Genetic Grail - Our Magical Motherline DNA

When I practiced as a physician, many of the patients who came to see me were women experiencing fatigue, inflammation and immune system problems, including obesity, that had nothing to do with a poor diet or lack of exercise, but was caused by a systemic collapse in their body energetics. We would later learn that the problem was in their mitochondria.

A few years later, my colleague in the practice, whom I often discussed this phenomenon with, released a groundbreaking paper on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, showing that CFS, rather than being ordinary “tiredness” or a psychosomatic malaise, was caused by a change in mitochondrial function similar to a kind of hibernation.⁸ The special energy-harnessing genes would literally become so overwhelmed they would “go to sleep”—until something woke them back up.

Maternal mitochondria are the key to our (super)natural bio-magic; they govern our stem cells, aging, inflammation and system wide epigenetics. They are the biggest determinant of whether we are healthy or sick, and on a bioenergetic level, whether we feel full of anima, vitality, radiance and life force. Mitochondrial failure is at the root of nearly every modern chronic disease, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune issues, and many more.

This special DNA has an affinity with feminine energy, and is sensitive to harsh environments.

Mitochondria have their own separate DNA, mitochondrial DNA, that is inherited only through the maternal line, passed directly from the mother’s fertilized egg cell to all future cells in the body.

It originated from an archaic bacteria, a tiny single-cell organism, that was absorbed into larger single-cell creature, in a powerful symbiotic union, that formed the basis for human life. Mitochondria actually govern much of the epigenetics of our entire genetic code, and are a critical player in our womb-time imprinting. This magical DNA is the ancient mother code within our bodies, our primordial mother wisdom, forged 2 billion years ago in the oceans.

This ancient maternal "deep sea" DNA is often at odds with our fast, polluted, online modern world. The ways it can be “wooed” out of hiding are by returning back to a more natural way of life, connecting with the plants, the earth, and the wild forces of life.

If our cultural environment modifies our DNA in negative ways, then it is the elemental forces of life—fire, air, water, earth—that heal, regenerate and awaken our genetic magic. There are many elemental relationships that weave our body into being, physically and bioenergetically, but the foundational connections are with the light of the sun, and the magnetism of earth.

Seeking light, our mitochondria act like antennae that sense the changing patterns of sunlight, and transmit that information via a signature of “reactive oxygen species” and other metabolites, to every cell in our body. All energy on the planet comes from the sun, so all of life orients to it. We are in a continuous and ongoing dance with the radiance and nourishment of sunlight.

We are also in an ongoing communication with the electromagnetic fields of earth: the geomagnetic field that rises up from the molten core of the earth, and the Schumann resonances, the healthy EMF’s that life has co-evolved with for billions of years. These energy fields penetrate deep into the womb and shape the developing baby in positive ways, unless it is disrupted by artificial, non-natural EMF’s. Our “EMF diet” effects the quantum biological processes of mitochondria, which then control the epigenetics of the body and our energy.

Luckily, this magical mother DNA is highly receptive to transformation and is the “genetic grail” that all yogis, shamans, alchemists and medicine people, have summoned and courted for healing rebirths.

Elemental Awakening: Rebirth Through the Earth

Our ancestors knew all this, of course, which is why alchemical-spiritual rebirth processes were an integral part of nearly every indigenous culture. But, as we will see, our elders held the process in a much greater context: rebirth did not happen through the womb of our biological mother, but through the Womb of Mother Earth. It was an elemental awakening of Gaian consciousness—an embodiment of the truth that we are a part of nature, not separate.

We are bio-magical beings. We are not just products of our modern time and culture, and certainly not just our emotions or our traumas; we are so much vaster, so much more elemental. Yes, our experience in the womb is vital, but we are always held within greater wombs, greater mothers, our elemental mothers, and of course Mother Earth, who nourish us with energy.

Our ancestors intuitively understood this and practiced spiritual and biomantic rebirth. In fact, the idea of rebirth or returning to a womblike enclosure, and then rebirthing out into the light is present in most sacred traditions across the world. Pre-Celtic “yogis” in Ireland use circannual portals, like Equinox, to perform biomantic rituals that shifted their genetic code, with alchemies of light. Likewise, in Mayan tradition and in other indigenous Native American traditions, sacred rituals are held inside the darkened womb of a lodge or kiva to summon biomantic energies of rebirth. Of course, even Christianity has rebirth technology at its heart, where Jesus is entombed in a dark cave for three days and then is resurrected and “born again” into his spiritual body of light.

These sages were not seeking to return to their birth mother’s womb – they were seeking to be rebirthed through the earth, to fully inhabit the inheritance of their body and earth magic.

Sacred Mandala:
The Codes of Earth, Air, Fire and Water

What we know is that on a biological level we are now inhabiting a body crafted from our man-made cultural womb, with all of its beliefs, contractions and ways of living that are against nature. Most humans on earth are now born from the colonized womb (and are fundamentally able to be colonized and/or be an agent of that colonization). Biomancy is a return to our primordial biomantic templates to regenerate and rebirth through the wisdom of nature. By nature, I don’t mean that nice place you walk through on vacation or your weekend off. I mean a massively complex, holographic, wild cosmic intelligence that birthed the earth, that we live within and that we are completely dependent on, because it is our creator and our mother, despite our "advances" in the modern world.

This elemental rebirth of biomancy (as the old mystery schools spoke of) eventually sheds or melts all the false aspects of us that are man-made or are inherited from a culture that is separated from the wisdom of earth. And, as this “new you” emerges, reflected through the prism of the elements, it is nearly unrecognizable. It is astounding and beautiful to live within that pristine stream of elemental life force energy expressing in human form. Earth is calling humans back to our true nature.

The question is not whether nature or earth or humans will survive, but if we will learn to thrive within her blueprint – can we rebirth through the wisdom of mother earth?

Our very nature as regenerative, cyclical beings, is that we are constantly being birthed through energetic wombs of experience, environment, sensation and spiritual connection. Birth is a process. We transform, evolve, shapeshift and it is our responsibility to claim this birthright.

Our biology is a biology of belonging, not just to our human families, but also to the earth, to the sun, to the elements. We all have a powerful yearning to belong. Most of the time we think about this with respect to humans: belonging to human community, family, friends. But we also have a primordial, biological desire to belong to the earth, to belong to the cycles of the sun. Every cell in our body has evolved over almost four billion years to orient to fire: the light of the sun; to earth: her minerals and magnetic fields; to air: the oxygen that we depend upon; and to the life-giving water of our planet. Our biology was created in this way to belong to the sun, to the earth; to receive this yang light, this yin magnetism of the earth. Our bodies operate not in isolation from the natural world around us, but because of it—we are born with a biology of belonging.

In ancient myths, when a soul arrives on earth it lands on a branch of the Tree of Life—a shamanic realm in the center of earth—before being allocated to a human womb to be born.

As the Sufi poet Kahlil Gibrain so eloquently writes, we are born from a cosmic belonging:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

We belong to earth, even if we feel un-belonged from our family or cultural systems.

When we restore this connection, our whole being can bloom into its brilliance.

Rebirthing Mitochondrial DNA

Each of these practices or subjects has a wealth of science and spiritual context, but this is the topline list of methods to supercharge your bioenergy levels and shapeshift DNA:

1. Exposure to cold water (such as the Wim Hof method)

2. Getting a good “sunlight diet” (especially at dawn and dusk)

3. Intermittent fasting (allows mitochondria to repair and heal)

4. Living in natural electromagnetic fields (artificial fields disrupt mitochondria)

5. Earthing / grounding (charges up mitochondria with electrons)

6. Movement (generates new mitochondria)

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

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I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

Notes:

1. “Cancer is a Preventable Disease that Requires Major Lifestyle Changes." Pharm Res. 2008 Sep; 25(9): 2097–2116. 2008 Jul 15. doi: 10.1007/s11095-008-9661-9

2. "Cancer and the Environment." National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health. Accessed Sep 29,2021. https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/materials/cancer_and_the_environment_508.pdf

3. “Modern human lifestyle prejudices epigenetic changes to cuddle diseases.” Ann. Trans. Medicine. 2019;7(5):82. https://atm.amegroups.com/article/view/23298/html

4. "Preliminary indications of the effect of a brief yoga intervention on markers of inflammation and DNA methylation in chronically stressed women."Transl Psychiatry 6, e965 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2016.234

5. "Rapid changes in histone deacetylases and inflammatory gene expression in expert meditators." Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2014 Feb;40:96-107. doi: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2013.11.004

6. “Changes Induced by Mind-Body Intervention Including Epigenetic Marks and Its Effects on Diabetes.” Int. Journal Molecular Science. 2021 Jan 28;22(3):1317. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms22031317

7. "Reversal of epigenetic aging and immunosenescent trends in humans." Aging Cell. 2019 Dec;18(6):e13028. doi: 10.1111/acel.13028.

8. "Metabolic features of chronic fatigue syndrome." Proc. Natl. Academy Science. 2016 Sep 13;113(37):E5472-80. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1607571113

Elemental Rebirth artwork exclusively created for Biomancy University by Natvienna Hannel @holywomanholygrail

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The other day I glanced at the Amazon bestseller list and was surprised to see Bessel van der Kolk’s book on trauma healing, The Body Keeps the Score, as the number one best-selling book in the U.S. It’s a powerful, comprehensive and well-written pop text by a former Harvard professor of psychiatry, validating complementary therapies in healing trauma – movement therapy, body-centered and somatic awareness, art therapy, neurofeedback, interpersonal therapies – treatments that are fundamentally important, safer and generally more effective than medications, and proven so by science. It seems a revolution is underway.

So, no big news that it was selling well for its genre. My surprise was how the field of trauma healing had quietly surged into public awareness since the book’s publication in 2014, when it was barely a blip on the radar. Likewise, Dr. Gabor Mate’s new documentary “The Wisdom of Trauma” received almost 4 million views in its first week of airing. The world is waking up to our current crisis. Trauma healing deserves this spotlight. Personal, ancestral and collective trauma is the cause of most of the world’s ills, and is the dissonance at the heart of our culture.

At its root trauma is a state of disconnection. This disconnection wreaks havoc on our bodies, on our relationships, on our families, and on our greater societies – because we are fundamentally relational, interconnected beings, at every level. That is how we are designed. When we become traumatized, all of our internal and external systems that rely on these connections begin to fail.

When this failure to thrive shows up in our lives – depression, anxiety, health issues, addictions, failed relationships - we often turn to the experts for help. The mainstream approach to trauma healing focuses almost exclusively on pharmaceutical solutions, or cognitive and psychological therapies. In the last few decades, the conversation has moved forward, with leading-edge somatic awareness and complementary approaches proven effective by clinical studies.^1-4

But something is still missing. After all the talk therapy, shadow stalking and processing, the trauma often remains stuck.

Biomancy brings a new perspective. Our healing does not happen by working on our own, as an isolated or separated individual — our healing is in tandem with earth. Yes, the emotional and psychological aspects of trauma healing are important, but until we reconnect with the sacred and magical dimension of nature and the quantum alchemy of our body in a deeper way — in a biomantic and ecomantic way — we will be missing out on the most powerful healing resource available: our own regenerative blueprint in harmony with the quantum energy templates of creation.

Biomancy acknowledges that our body, as well as the body of Mother Earth, are living beings with their own vast, interconnected intelligence networks — documented by science — that are far wiser than our thinking minds. Trauma disrupts our ability to access these subtle fields of primordial intelligence that surround us. And until we reconnect, this separation from our own somatic intelligence and the greater web of life keeps us stuck in endless trauma loops.

The art of biomancy is consciously reweaving these magical connections, which naturally heal and regulate our nervous systems, and move us forward into new timelines — rather than replaying the same painful physiological and psychological responses from the past.

We are not aware of the degree to which trauma is a biological process, and how opening into a regenerative, reconnected, body-rooted biomantic consciousness can bring graceful healing.

Take our connection and interdependence with the earth as an example. Not as an abstract idea, but in a very literal, feet-on-the-ground kind of way. Every time we touch our body to the earth, a surge of electrons rushes up into us, quenching free radicals, allowing regeneration, stimulating mitochondrial function, enlivening us. When we step away from artificial electromagnetic fields, we quickly come into resonance with the Earth’s ambient electromagnetic fields, one of which is called the Schumann resonance, that at 7.83 Hz, entrains our brain into a high theta wave pattern associated with superflow states. Our bodies are engaged in an ongoing electromagnetic conversation with the earth, a love relationship with the subtle energy fields of our planet.

When trauma disrupts this felt sense of a loving and safe relationship with the earth, that holds and supports us, restoring this connection reignites our bio-magic, and our sense of wellbeing.

Quantum Magic: The Wellness Cure Within

After the collective trauma vortex of the last few years, people are waking up to the idea that nature—including the body—has a field of intelligence that can heal us at the deepest level.

When I practiced medicine, often seeing patients with chronic conditions that traditional and alternative therapies had failed to treat, I understood that I needed to take a panoramic view of the situation, and move beyond the current paradigm of health that viewed the body as separate from its environment. The body does not exist in isolation; it is ensouled and entangled in nature.

Early research in the field of nature therapy was conducted by the Italian Oncology Group of Clinical Research (GOIRC), coordinated by Prof. Francesco Di Costanzo, director of the Oncology Department of Careggi Hospital in Florence, Italy. They showed that simply placing nature art on the walls of hospitals improved the healing and wellbeing of the patients, begging the question, “Imagine what real nature can do?”

There are now dozens of clinical studies proving that nature therapy, referred to as ecotherapy or green therapy, heals trauma, anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder and addictions. Being in nature even for brief periods has been shown to improve mental and physical health in veterans, at-risk inner city youth and patients from all walks of life. Ecotherapy raises serotonin levels, stabilizes mood and improves a number of physical health outcomes.^5-12

But, when I speak about healing trauma through connection with nature, I am not talking about simply taking a nice walk through the forest or a visit to the beach (though these are scientifically proven to heal us, too), but establishing a deeper connection to the nature that we all belong to. Not nature as separate from us, or outside of us, but nature that lives inside our own body, nature that unites us through a field of energy and intelligence with all the ecosystems of the world, whose fabric of interwoven beingness we are all an intricate part of.

Our wellbeing is dependent on the wellbeing of this entire system, just as the health of the entire system is dependent on our own, as an individual “cell” within her greater body. The vast reservoir of biomantic intelligence within our bodies and the natural world is asking for our attention, waiting for the invitation to surge into our awareness, and help us come into true “well”-ness. Here, I mean wellness is the ancient sense, as in the well waters, the fluid essences and elixirs of mother earth that emerge from deep within her body, without which we cannot live. This is why our ancestors worshipped wells and springs. They knew these sources carried healing powers beyond the physical; they held subtle energies that connected us to the greater whole. The sacred waters, the holy waters, provided resilience and protection against traumas of all kinds.

Nature’s Medicine: Healing Through Reconnection

Our biology is magical, not mechanical—it operates according to quantum processes, not the Newtonian biochemistry we were taught in school. And our body is a great teacher.

The traditional approach to trauma healing focuses on the psychological and emotional dimensions of the problem. My own teacher, Dr. John Pierrakos, and his mentor, Dr. Wilhelm Reich (who was a peer of Dr. Carl Jung), revolutionized the field of psychotherapy with the idea that our body and psyche exist on a continuum—there is no clear separation. What affects one affects the other. By consciously moving our body, changing our breathing patterns, shifting muscular blocks and postural defenses, and opening our vocal expression, we begin to free up our bioenergetic flow, release old traumas and reconnect. In doing that our psyches change and begin to heal. The ancient knowledge that these men remembered, and that was once taught in the mystery schools, birthed the field of body-centered psychotherapies popular today.

Most people now understand that until it is healed, trauma keeps us frozen, dissociated from a full-spectrum and balanced emotional life. Leading researchers also recognize trauma as a chronic physiological state —of persistent biological dysregulation that affects our immune system, intestinal health, cardiovascular systems, birth outcomes, and literally every aspect of our physical functioning and measures of wellness. The fields of transgenerational trauma and epigenetic trauma teach us that until it is healed, this trauma is passed on and on to future generations. We not only heal ourselves; we are healing entire lineages of our ancestors.

Some of the deepest traumas remain invisible, because they are actually inflicted by our own cultural institutions and modern belief systems, patterns of living and perceiving the world that we have come to accept as normal, but that are profoundly abnormal to the natural order of life.

We modern humans are, in effect, all traumatized. We are all disconnected from our innate primal self, living far below our biological and spiritual potentials. Most people, for example, no longer view the Earth as a living sentient being. Every indigenous culture in the history of world has done so, as did Plato and Pythagoras, whose teachings laid the foundations of western philosophy and natural sciences. Most people have no idea that plants are scientifically proven to possess distributed cellular intelligence, memories, problem-solving skills, relationships, mothering behavior and imagination, and that they communicate to other plants and animals “bio-acoustically” through song. When we consciously consume plants, their wisdom then grows inside us. Our relationship is eucharistic—we become “at one” with their unique vibration.

What’s missing from the discussion of trauma healing is this biomantic perspective: trauma is also a state of disconnection from nature, from ecology, from a holistic vision of our place in the world, from magic, from the sacred and quantum dimensions of life. If trauma healing is about reconnection, then we must reconnect at the ecological, the magical, the bioenergetic, the quantum, the sacred, and the spiritual levels every bit as much as the psychological.

Our greatest gift is the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of nature, and our incredible regenerative healing capacity. We must understand that the body and psyche are one—if something is harmful to the body it harms the psyche, and if something is harmful to the psyche it harms the body. Healing our body, our physiology, and nervous system can heal the psyche. Sometimes we need talk therapy, to be able to speak the story out loud. It helps to acknowledge it, speak it and find our voice. But equally, being in nature, having reconnecting experiences with the energy fields of our body, the cosmos and the natural world, can restore, regenerate and create healing which is then passed on to the psyche.

Relationship regulates our nervous system, relationship not just with other people, but with the greater whole. This is how our bodies and psyches are designed, to be reassured, at a physiological level, when in connection with others. Think of a newborn baby with her mother; it is much the same even as adults with our greater mothers of ecosystem, earth, and cosmic mothers.

Solar/Lunar Alchemy: Holy Grail of Healing

At its heart, trauma healing is a reconciliation with our trust in life, and openness to love.

The holy grail of trauma healing is regulation of the central nervous system—the calming of the sympathetic nervous system responsible for our “fight or flight” response, and the boosting of our parasympathetic nervous system which helps us relax and regenerate. In his polyvagal theory, Dr. Stephen Porges discovered a new, third type of nervous system response, mediated by the vagus nerve, that brings us into a state of balanced enjoyment, play and harmony. This powerful third way is strengthened through connection. Porges studied it in relation to social engagement. When we extend that connection to earth and body, how much more will be able to regulate? How much more belonged will we feel? How much more healing is possible?

We need to start seeing ourselves as bio-magical beings who depend on very subtle and complex relationships with the energies of our own body, and the ecosystems of earth and cosmos. These energies are not make-believe, they are very real, complex systems of energy that regulate our physiology and bio-fields—such as the photons of light we receive from the sun—that have a vast impact on our physical and mental wellbeing. The body experiences modern life, with its technological dominance and relentless busy-ness as a primal trauma. Our feminine self suffers most from this; our body doesn’t just keep the score or say "no"—it talks to us, and is our oracle.

We must ask ourselves, what is this deep intelligence inside our bodies and nature asking of us?

It can be as simple as stepping into a daily biomantic awareness practice and participating in earth’s rhythms again, so we can find the balance between living in the man-made world and returning to the natural world we belong to, and from which all our food, water, and energetic sustenance comes.

The importance of our connection to the sun and circadian rhythms often goes unrecognized. From a biological perspective, sunrise is nothing less than a physiological explosion. Every morning, as the first rays of the sun hit our retina, a cascade of biomagic is triggered that turns on some twenty percent of our genes. This genetic awakening is responsible for the generation of tens of thousands of proteins, as well as a flood of hormones, peptides and other molecules of communication. Light shifts our immune system, our mood, our cardiovascular health and the functioning of every other organ system in our body. We are very literally built around an architecture of light. A deeper connection to the sun, and its radiance, builds new realities inside us. As the sun rises, and if we choose to greet it, our body and psyche become solarized.

At sunset the opposite is true; the dimming rays of light turn on the production of melatonin, shifting our consciousness and neurological functioning profoundly. The darkness awakens not just dreamstates, as our consciousness becomes lunarized, but activates a full-body cellular regeneration program that repair and rebuild tissues, and heal trauma imprints, as we rest into night. It is our connection to the natural, cyclical rhythms of light that makes this possible.

When we lose this solar-lunar connection, due to artificial lighting and too much time spent indoors, the body perceives it as a biological trauma, a separation from the holistic cycles embedded deep within our body-nature, and that we depend upon for all our optimal functioning, physical and spiritual. Our ability to regenerate and recover from trauma is also impacted. Of course, our ancestors also experienced trauma—death, loss, change—but because of their bio-magical practices and rituals, in sacred trust with the natural world, they recovered more easily. Their deeper connections made them more resilient and able to flow with the cycles of life.

The sacred path of the elders offered not only spiritual wholeness, but biomantic healing and regeneration. Deep interconnection with earth and cosmos is a form of endocrine alchemy; it is medicine and it is magic.

Our ancestors were not only accomplished biomancers, they were also astromancers – they understood that the relationship between the cycles of the celestial bodies had a profound effect on the human body. They worshipped not just the sun, but the quality of light and transmissions of codes of subtle information and essences the sun brought into the human body. At an intuitive level, they perceived the biomagical photons and waves of light that we absorb from the celestial bodies, and that shift our consciousness, mirroring how plants respond to light, and facilitating a tremendous growth and inner flowering. They presaged the existence of bio-photons, particles of light generated within the cells of every living creature on the planet.

In every alchemical and indigenous tradition, people have built “churches” to amplify this biomagical relationship with nature. In Ireland, ancient megalithic sites such as Carrowmore (built more than 6,000 years ago, older than the pyramids of Egypt) were created in a cruciform shape, representing the primordial alchemical mysteries. At Newgrange in the Boyne valley, a beam of light penetrates the dark inner chamber on Winter Solstice; and in prehistoric times, initiates would have spent 3 days into the womb-tomb (like Jesus) before they were resurrected by the dazzling ray of light that penetrated the darkness. The sun and its relationship to the earth as the dark, fecund mother womb, was not an abstract concept, but an act of biomantic alchemy.

Switching on Our Regenerative Magic

But as modern, traumatized humans, we have forgotten even the simplest routines and rituals to amplify our biomagical potentials, such as greeting the sun and bidding it farewell each day; gestures that help our biology and psychology integrate the cycles of the day, and the greater cosmic cycles.

By restoring connection, and consciously forging resonance with the natural magical fields that surround us, we can begin to emerge out of trauma loops that may have been held in our ancestral line for centuries.

The ultimate trauma is our disconnection from the web of life.

Often, healing breakthroughs come from activating our primal biomantic essence, not just working with our emotions. When we commune with the deep unmet needs of our biology, new levels of healing become possible, and we begin to experience that as an awakening. The rising sun is symbolic of this process, as is the returning moon who cycles through darkness every month. These celestial cycles teach us how to find renewal and rebirth.

In case we thought our ancestral traditions were merely "spiritual" rituals, neuroscience now shows that they were founded on sturdy scientific roots. Exposure to sunlight, especially at dawn and dusk, radically alters our brain chemistry. Likewise, disconnection from circadian rhythms causes chronic inflammation of the brain, which contributes to weight gain and body-wide immune system dysregulation, and predisposes us to cancer.

It is not just light itself that balances our neurophysiology; it is the natural rhythms and cycling patterns of darkness and light. Try this experiment: rather than looking at a computer or phone as the very first thing you do in the morning, instead go outside and look at the sun (whether you live in a crowded city or countryside, you will always have the sun). Make this commitment to look at the outdoor light as the first thing you do on waking, taking 10 minutes to let your retina absorb that radiance and light. It will trigger a cascade of information that shifts your nervous system, your physiology, your biology.

And beyond that, connect to the magnetic field of earth, and the negative ion reservoir of earth, through placing your bare feet on the ground, and feel what that does to your physiology. This starts to regulate your nervous system and slows your brain waves, and helps bring you out of trauma loops, addictive impulses and worry patterns. You can do this on a daily basis. At night go out and see the fading sun, the descending sun, the sunset. The quality of light coming from a setting sun is different from the quality of light coming from a sunrise. Or look out upon a dark starlit night, or a the light of the full moon. Each of these different qualities of light communicates different biomantic intelligence and information to our bodies—which changes our biology and physiology, can turn on or turn off thousands of genes, and can shift our consciousness into integrated states.

Biomancy is all about reconnection: to body, to bioenergetic templates, to nature, to psyche, to our fundamental ground of connection. And, as anyone knows who goes on a healing journey, the healing journey becomes an awakening journey. Another way of saying this is that it moves from repair to integration to expansion to flowering into an evolutionary transformation. If trauma is the breaking of connection to your own body, to your own sense of self, to your own sense of the sacred, to your connection with earth, to other people, to your connection to a trust in life, then Biomancy is the restoring of that connection—to body, self, soul, purpose; to the sense of the sacred; to the felt sense of nature and the cycles; and to restoring connection with your own heart.

What emerges through this process is an innate trust and faith, that brings a regenerative energy of embodiment, experienced as a rebirth of optimism, creativity, connection, love.

If trauma is the disconnection, then once you’re reconnected, the story of trauma can be laid to rest, it can just dissolve. You are now integrated and ready to move on to the next chapter in your beautiful story. The story of trauma exists with that urgency only because it’s still asking you to reconnect to something. Once that reconnection is made, that sense of urgency or importance dissolves, it simply becomes a wisdom that can be passed on.

Reconnecting to beauty, harmony, resonance, pleasure puts us back on the track to a beautiful timeline that promotes and sustains life and growth and creativity. It takes us into the evolutionary gold, which throughout time has been known as the “golden eras”. We all have golden eras, the time when our lives, our emotions, our biology, our belonging, our connection has anchored and expanded, and we feel the goldenness of the nourishment of life.

Our biology, and our biomagic is created from a regenerative template that lives within every cell of our body—and no matter how traumatic our personal experiences may have been, miracles of renewal are waiting to happen. Biomancy is the medicine of the future – it is future magic, future healing, a future golden age which our biology is designed for.

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

References:

1. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Penguin, 2015.

2. A Yoga Intervention for Posttraumatic Stress: A Preliminary Randomized Control Trial https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4558444/

3. Mindfulness and yoga for psychological trauma: systematic review and meta-analysis https://doi.org/10.1080/15299732.2020.1760167

4. Treating Complex Trauma Survivors: A Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TSY)-Informed Psychotherapeutic Approach https://doi.org/10.1080/15401383.2020.1761498

5. ‘Everything just seems much more right in nature’: How veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder experience nature-based activities in a forest therapy garden https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5193293/

6. Awe in nature heals: Evidence from military veterans, at-risk youth, and college students. Anderson, Craig L.,Monroy, Maria,Keltner, Dacher. Emotion, Vol 18(8), Dec 2018, 1195-1202

7. Emotion in the wilds of nature: The coherence and contagion of fear during threatening group-based outdoors experiences. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000378

8. “Recovering With Nature”: A Review of Ecotherapy and Implications for the COVID-19 Pandemic https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.604440/full

9. Ecotherapy – A Forgotten Ecosystem Service: A Review https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6085576/

10. Alvarsson, J. J., Wiens, S., & Nilsson, M. (2010). Stress recovery during exposure to nature sound and environmental noise. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(3), 1036-1046.

11. Chalquist, C. (2009). A look at the ecotherapy research evidence. Ecopsychology, 1(2), 64-74.

12. Clay, R. A. (2001). Green is good for you. Monitor on Psychology, 32(4). http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/greengood.aspx accessed 13 July, 2021

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"Our body is made of a psychedelic magic designed to awaken, reconnect, regenerate and evolve us into flow states, that science is discovering can heal us"

There is a revolution underway, one that will fundamentally change all of our modern notions about healing and the transformational power within our biology. It is literally turning a $400 billion global mental health industry on its head.

Plant medicines that were previously restricted or forbidden have now become the superstars of the scientific world.

Folks are calling this a "psychedelic revolution", but we need to reframe this conversation and put it into a bigger context

It will impact all realms of healing. No matter where you are in the healing continuum, this will ripple out to your world eventually. Not necessarily because you will want to take plant medicines, but because the entire context of healing will shift.

I call it the "biodelic revolution", because our bodies are innately psychedelic. The molecules and neural pathways of “non-ordinary consciousness” are hardwired into our neural circuitry. Every traditional and magical culture has practiced these inner technologies to access altered states of consciousness for healing and growth.

Biodelics is our ancient and future magic.

We don’t take psychedelics, we are psychedelic. Our inner psychedelic biosystems are ancient. Take our endocannabinoid system (inner cannabis-like molecules and receptors), for example. It evolved almost 600 million years ago, which is more than 350 million years before the first mammalian brain, and more than 550 million years before the first cannabis plant appeared! In other words, our innate biodelics are encoded in our ancestral biosystems that formed before us and the flowering plants we know today.

What the new research is revealing is mind-blowing. Psychedelic medicines, such as DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, ketamine and MDMA, and by extension biodelics, are magic. Respected scientists, publishing in the most prestigious academic journals, are so awed by the results of psychedelics that they are calling them profound “quantum change experiences”.

But what they’re not saying (because they can’t patent it in a pill) speaks loudest. Reading the small print of the journal articles, which I am trained to do with my background as a biomedical researcher and physician, an astounding picture emerges.

I can almost sense the mushrooms tricksters snickering in the background. Because the new science is proving to be dangerously spiritual—and undermines the scientific dogma of “materialism”, and the idea that we have no soul or spirit.

The neurobiology of psychedelic medicine proves that our biology is wired for the mystical, the numinous, the magical. In biodelic experience, on real-time fMRI scans, we can see the metabolism of our prefrontal cortex, temporal cortex and thalamus slow down, as the psychedelic medicines “open our doors of perception”, reducing rigidity of thinking and perception, freeing us to have visionary insights.¹

The results extend to self-generated altered states of biodelic consciousness as well, such as breathwork and ceremony; on live EEG recordings, we can see that breathwork and ceremony induces changes similar to psychedelics, slowing our brainwaves down into delta, theta and alpha “superflow” creative trance states.²

We will return to this incredible biodelic science later, but first, let me share my own personal story of healing through biodelic consciousness, and introduce the mischievous mycelial mystics who are leading us down this magic rabbit hole…

Biodelia in Bali – The Mushroom Teachers

My first introduction to the world of biodelics was at age 20, in apprenticeship and daily living in the home of Ida Pedanda Ketut Sideman, one of the last traditional Balinese poet-priests. By "biodelic", I mean entering into expanded, but very natural states of altered perception and consciousness, often in connection to nature, or deep somatic and sensory experience. In these "non-ordinary" states, our perception of time can feel different, and we can more easily enter into creativity, openness, flow and "quantum change experiences", which open us to a kind of “time tunnelling”.

The religious anthropologist Mircea Eliade described these experiences as an ecstatic participation in the magical dimensions of reality.

Every morning we would wake with the first light and walk to the ocean, making flower offerings to the sea and surya ceremonies to the sun. We walked barefoot on the warm sand, and hand-cast fishing nets into the water to gather tiny fish for the household's food. Every day the priest made ritual food and flower offerings to the many nature and elemental beings, and we burned fragrant incense to shift our consciousness before chanting and reading classical poems aloud. Even the food he ate was infused with his wife’s prayers and song, so he had the energy to carry the spiritual responsibility for his entire region.

The result of my spiritual apprenticeship with the Balinese high priest was that I found myself in a profoundly "biodelic" state of deep interconnection with the natural world, and with my own body. My sensory perceptions were heightened, and my creativity was at an all-time high. I was in the flow, every day experiencing mysterious and meaningful coincidences that Carl Jung referred to as synchronicities. Through daily bio-magical practice, I had entered into a deeper biodelic reality.

“These magical practices activated the same cell surface receptors and neural circuitry as psychoactive medicines—acting through our endocannabinoid system, endorphins, serotonin and dopamine pathways, oxytocin and vasopressin systems, and more—achieving many of the same benefits of psychedelic medicines, but in a gentler way, at the level of a 'microdose'."

As my own inner psychedelic pharmacopeia was coming online, it was as if I was being prepared for significant meeting or experience. What I did not anticipate was that this biodelic microdose would soon open the doors of perception to a full-blown macro-dose mystical experience at the hands of the famous golden-capped psilocybin mushrooms.

Mushroom Mysticism – Psychedelic Initiation

One day, after leaving the home of Ida Pedanda, I journeyed to the nearby water temple of Uluwatu with some good friends to commune with the energies of the land.

The temple site is physically stunning, situated right on the edge of a limestone cliff, some 230 feet above the ocean, on the southernmost peninsula of Bali. It is one of the nine directional temples of the island, that, from a cosmological perspective, helps to anchor Bali in mandalic and ritual space.

Walking through the meadows down to the beach, a friend noticed a large group of golden-capped, blue-streaked mushrooms that he identified as psilocybes. He gathered them to make a tea and offered it to the group. I had never explored psychedelic medicine before, but he assured me that it would be a beautiful and sacred experience on the temple lands, and in nature with trusted friends. My heart was saying yes. So, I prepared myself for my first communion with the mushroom beings.

There are some 200 species of psilocybe mushrooms found around the world. Each mushroom that you see above ground is just the fruiting body of an extensive underground “mother” network of mycelia—analogous to a small apple on the mother apple tree. Magic mushrooms are rich in the compound psilocybin, that, after ingestion, is transformed in the body into its active form psilocin, aka 4-hydroxy-DMT. Along with the other “classic” psychedelics such as LSD, ayahuasca, and DMT, psilocybin is structurally related to our neurotransmitter serotonin (5-hydroxy-tryptamine), and strongly activates the serotonin 2A receptors of the brain, opening the biodelic doors and giving rise to mystical shifts in consciousness.

With the warm, earth-scented mushroom tea in hand, I sipped gently, relaxing into the spirit and atmosphere of the land. I noticed the sun softening. I tuned into my body. Other than some initial nausea (no one had mentioned that), not much seemed to be happening at first, so I headed back down to the beach to take a swim. But by the time I had arrived, I was in a different dimension. Standing with my feet in the golden sand at water's edge, I watched-felt-heard the waves rush past my legs, and then ebb back out to sea. The patterns of sunlight reflected like networks of diamonds in the wet sand, and all of the dazzling sensorium took on a fresh, extraordinary beauty. It was like I was seeing the world through new, wondrous, eyes.

As the colors amplified into a vivid palette, sunlight bathed my skin, and I looked at the coconut palms and beautiful plants around, I felt a surge of love for the natural and sensual world like I had never felt before. I began to weep. I cried and laughed for who knows how long, in fairy time. I felt like I was turning into Bali - the sun, the water, the land, the plants. My energetic edges became porous, and extended into the all the animate and inanimate beings that surrounded me. All the world felt preternaturally alive and sentient. My greatest pleasure in those moments came from merging and coalescing.

Feelings of love, openness and curiosity overflowed and extended out to my friends, who were in similar hyperconnected states. We lay on the grass, breathing with the trees and spoke about all that was on our hearts, past, present and future, some of which we had never dared to admit to ourselves, much less another person. After a while the mood shifted, as the mushroom’s effects deepened, and difficult emotions started to bubble up—predictably, as I would later learn. Psychedelic means “soul opening”, and these fungal allies have a propensity to reveal what lies heavy on our heart, or submerged traumas.

I gravitated to conversation with a young woman. She was an experienced mushroom journeyer, with a shaved head and serious eyes. Her boyfriend had committed suicide by driving off a cliff, and she understood loss and pain. She could see I needed to take some space, and encouraged me to go on a solo walkabout. Heading out deeper into nature, I reflected on my life back in America. I contrasted the natural beauty of the world of Bali, with my life as a budding research biochemist, working long hours every day on the 7^th floor of a research institute, under glaring artificial lights, with my nose in petri dishes, looking at blood proteins all day. It was like a prison dimension in comparison with the beauty of my life in Bali.

“I felt like the mushroom beings were imprinting me with a vision of an alternative enchanted reality – not something faraway, or in another dimension, but something here right now, that was only a choice away. I knew I was at a crossroads in my life. They told me to be a guardian for earth's magic.”

Afterwards, this experience lived inside me like a navigational map. New scientific studies reveal that from a neurobiological perspective, under the right circumstances, even after just one single mystical experience on psilocybin, or other similar psychedelics, we have a long-term increase in openness, creativity and capacity for divergent thinking.³ Our brain is permanently shapeshifted by these experiences with persistent positive personality trait changes, and the matching neurobiological changes of global increased synchronization and functional connection between diverse brain networks.⁴

But here is the secret part that no one says out loud. The astounding results science is revealing, are tremendously enhanced the more deeply spiritual and interconnected the container of healing is, exemplified by the spiritual world of my Balinese mentor. And this takes us into the realm of the mystery schools and the indigenous shamans, and their practice of magic.

It is an irony that the power of psychedelic experience for healing is now being adopted by men in white coats who have spent the last few hundred years telling everyone that magic doesn’t exist and persecuting anyone who says otherwise.

Psychedelics and Trauma healing

What was once the domain of alternative spiritual seekers, mystics and hedonists, is now being sought out by a diverse range of people seeking to heal from traumatic experiences, difficult childhoods, addiction and chronic diseases.

Amongst the pioneers of psychedelic-assisted healing for PTSD were military veterans and other trauma survivors who were not getting results from conventional psychiatric treatments, and began heading to the indigenous cultures of the Amazonian rainforest to work with Ayahuasca.

Reports of “miracle healings” started to filter back to support groups and online forums, with more and more people reporting positive results from a number of different classical psychedelic medicines, as well as MDMA and ketamine. Therapists, doctors, researchers, and eventually the pharmaceutical industry, started paying closer attention. Over the last decade there have now been dozens of small, well-designed clinical trials for PTSD, depression, anxiety and other conditions, with overwhelmingly positive results, echoing the encouraging results of “first wave” psychedelic research in the 1950’s and 60’s.

In 2021 Dr. Rick Doblin et. al. published a landmark paper in the journal Nature Medicine showing that MDMA assisted therapy was remarkably effective for severe PTSD. 80% of the patients had a noticeable benefit, and a full 60% no longer had the diagnosis of PTSD. Compare this to conventional SSRI and therapy that has proven to have little long-term success.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are now research-validated “mystical experience scales” (e.g. the MEQ-30) to quantify the depth of experience on psychedelic medicine. The traits of “openness” and “connectedness”, and the intensity of “self-transcendent experiences” are regularly reported as quantifiable results in mainstream journals.

Psychedelic medicines could not have come at a better time. A stunning article published in April, 2022 by Dr. Omar Almohammed in the journal PLoS One, and based on a review of a massive U.S. database, reported that SSRI antidepressants (like Prozac and Paxil), the mainstay of pharmaceutical treatment of depression, do not improve quality of life.

With ground-breaking new research on MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin and others being published every month, it is easy to enter into a therapeutic “gold rush” attitude and lose track of the bigger picture—that what we are talking about here is much bigger than just psychedelic medicines. The amazing results are coming from many unrelated medicines, each working on very different sets of neural pathways and receptors. So, why do they all work? What do they have in common?

This is why I am pioneering the modality of Biodelics, that includes the category of psychedelics and plant medicine, but is far more comprehensive than that, and also includes the study and practice of the arts and science of self-generated mystic states. It is not psychedelic medicines themselves that are the secret to our healing, it is our biodelic capacity that is intrinsic within us. Psychedelic medicines activate our innate ancient psychedelic pathways, but so do many other time-honored practices and processes that generate altered states of consciousness, and that our biology and physiology is wired to experience.

Women in particular have been recognized by Elder cultures as having this innate biodelic capacity, especially in moments of rites of passage, such as menstruation, childbirth and breastfeeding and menopause, which are deeply interconnected to the activation of our psychedelic and biodelic pathways. The feminine body, in its lunar cycles, holds powerful biodelic magic.

Mainstream media is framing the conversation solely in terms of psychedelic medicines, because it is easy. It is easy to see (and study) how psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, DMT, LSD and others cause such profound effects in our consciousness, and outperform conventional medical treatments. But why do they? Because they plug directly into, and activate the innate psychedelic systems within us. There is much less money and attention directed to our natural biodelia or the innate feminine psychedelic experiences, and subtle and nuanced spiritual states that can’t be easily replicated and put into a pill or therapy.

Billions of research dollars have already been invested in the search for patentable psychedelic medicines. Every big-name academic research institution now has a center for psychedelic medicine: the Harvard-Mass General Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics, the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research, Imperial College of London's Centre for Psychedelic Research, Duke University Center for Integrated Psychedelic Science, and on and on.

In a 2021 paper published in the journal Neuron, Yale University researcher Alex Kwan, Ph.D. showed that psilocybin mushrooms rewire the brains of depressed patients, profoundly increasing the size and number of neuronal connections.⁵ This is a rare and astonishing finding. These levels of neural re-wiring are normally only possible in young children. As a result of this degree of neural plasticity, an adult can, for example, easily acquire perfect musical pitch.⁶

“From a mental health perspective, what neuroscientists are discovering is that when we enter into non-ordinary states, we gain access to unprecedented levels of neuroplasticity—the ability to rewrite old trauma programs.”

What they are not talking about is that this is a form of time-magic, where we can open up and re-encode memory loops from childhood, or memory traces that have been epigenetically inherited from our family systems and ancestors. And, beyond that, what they are not saying is that this path will re-ignite the ancient gnosis that spirit and magic are imbued into all of life, the living reality of bio-animism.

The implications are vast, from emotional and mental healing, to expanded creativity, to shifting your "vibe or frequency", to improved health and vitality, to your ability to access the magic of your own biology, to interspecies communication with the natural world, and to navigating the deeper, synchronistic, "quantum" layers of reality.

Mastering these inner psychedelic technologies will be 100% necessary for humanity to go forward as a species in this era of unprecedented cultural and ecological change. It will be a part of all inspired healing, business, arts, agriculture, and more—extending into every domain of life. The solutions for the world issues we are facing will be non-ordinary and “magical”.

Sacred Science - Embracing a Revolution in Healing

Beyond the narrative that psychedelics are the emerging gold standard in trauma healing (for those with the right certificates), we must step back and allow a larger vision to emerge and speak to us, from the soul of the earth itself. We can’t afford to stand on the sidelines on this issue, because there is an incredible opportunity to expand into a new future of how we hold the human experience. Not as linear and limited—but as biodelic—revealing that we have a quantum biology entangled in a quantum ecology. In reality we are all magicians; our biology is hardwired for mystical “quantum change experiences”.

The oncoming revolution is not something new for indigenous and spiritual traditions, but what is utterly new—and incredible to see—is that science is about to accidentally prove magic is real. And in doing so, let the genie out of bottle.

What we are really talking about is a revolution in understanding the healing power of expanded, "non-ordinary" states of consciousness. Yes, this can come from psychedelic medicines, but we can access it just as easily through many other means, with a long and established history in every indigenous, magical and alchemical culture. This is what the druids taught, the wise women (witches) taught, the alchemists, the Mystery Schools, the gnostics, the ancient Taoists, the San peoples of South Africa. These are the technologies that inspired the shamanistic paleolithic cave paintings across the world. This is what living indigenous traditions still teach across the Americas, Aboriginal Australia and beyond. The reality is, that shamans are also “scientists” of sorts. There is an underpinning of incredible biological and ecological gnosis in their magic.

For example, the Ayahuasca brew consists of a combination of two different plants, each with a unique but critical active ingredient, amongst thousands of different plant species in the Amazon. It only works when both plants are present and prepared in specific ways. How did indigenous shamans discover this? Coming to this knowledge would involve a scientific understanding of the human digestive and nervous system, and biochemical interactions, usually only associated with medical doctors in the modern world, but which the Ayahuasca shamans say was taught to them “by the plants”.

Psychedelic experiences are “gateway moments” that introduces us to our own Biodelic capacities. In my own journey, I was forever touched and changed by my meeting with the mushroom teachers, but it was the Biodelic arts of breathwork, movement, circadian alchemy and psychic journeying that eventually called me deeper into the path of transformation.

My “psyche-delic” breakthrough came after an intensive 6-month period of daily breathwork, in the lineage of Wilhelm Reich MD, which mimics the breathing sequences babies make in order to regulate their nervous system. This inspired me to develop Biodelic Breathwork, which is unique because it also activates our circadian, elemental and somatic capacities.

“This is why I call it the 'biodelic revolution', as we begin to understand the innate psychedelic nature of our own biology, the molecules and neural pathways of non-ordinary consciousness hardwired into our neural circuitry. Our body is biodelic.”

When we look at the format of the mystery schools, one macro-dose psychedelic ceremony such as rebirth rites in Egypt or Eleusis was prepared for by a strict regimen of daily biodelic practice over the year, so that the magical biology of the participant was fully initiated and grounded before the ceremony. Biodelics is a continuum of interconnection and courtship.

The new science is proving that quantum bio-magic exists and that it operates through these innate psychedelic pathways within us. This bio-intelligence is ancient and innately wired into even the smallest detail of our biology and the greater ecology we belong to. We are a web with many weavers. These abilities are what the rishis called “siddhis” and what the druids, shamans and witches were courting with their magic. It is our responsibility to acknowledge this gift and use it wisely.

It is no coincidence that our psychedelic pathways are opening again at this time, bringing us into a renaissance of healing.

Biodelics is an exciting new pathway, at the intersection of science, soma, ceremony and magic (psychobiology), which includes the healing potential of plant psychedelia, but expands out into a greater vision of our own natural neuro-biological capacity to regenerate, through practices and experiences that have been called “magical” by our Elder cultures, but which are very real.

Writing this, I remember the wisdom, grief and hope of my original “biodelic” mentor, Ida Pedanda. He was one of the last great poet-priests of Bali, handwriting all his teachings in elaborate calligraphy on natural parchments. After the influx of tourism to Bali beginning in the 70’s, he knew that his way of life and the old world was dying, as the young people turned to new gods.

He revered an old way of beauty, of living inside a sacred mandala, weaving yourself into the natural order of life, inhabiting time spirals, patterns and cycles through a ritual calendar of offering to the landscape. Some of this landscape you could see with your eyes, and some was a landscape that could not be seen with ordinary eyes. His deepest wish was that this world of beauty would reflower, and that this magic would be remembered again by younger generations, and the world would heal.

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We are time beings. Our biology is time-coded. This is what we need to know to heal.

Time shapes everything about our experience on earth. It brings us into this world, and it takes us out of this world. Time was a primordial deity of our ancestors. It is time that we reawaken their prayers, and call upon Lady Saturn, Lady Chronos—the lost feminine Titans of Time. And, their daughter of Memory, Mnemosyne. And, their granddaughters Nine. So, we can be guided into the spiral flow of time, where future and past meet again.

It’s a couple of days before spring equinox and we are already in the time portal. I am guiding nearly 1000 people on a biomantic journey into a time-entangled equinox 5,000 years ago in Ireland. As the first rays of the morning sun arc over the horizon and alight on my pineal gland, my DNA bursts into transcriptive flower. My epigenetics are alive, buzzing, humming like bees, reshaping themselves to this song of the ancient sunlight. My whole body pulses and tingles. I sense the same happening with the others on this shared journey. We are chrononauts, surfing and navigating the sea of time.

Meanwhile another memory flashes into my awareness, a scene from the film Arrival, when the heptapods teach Louise their symbolic language, allowing her to communicate with the future. Because at that moment what the ancient Irish sun is telling me is that the equinox magic is about more than sunlight. This magic is also about time. Not as an abstraction of science, but as a living intelligence that structures and holds all of life.

Time is not a theory. Or an equation. It is certainly not an illusion. It is a womb. Ancient mystics, such as the Sufis and druids, once knew this.

I can feel our Ancestors now, in spirals around us, humming gently, a sound that is travelling across timewaves branched out like neural dendrites.

Looking through our cultural eyes, the sun dominates the sky and our “daylight reality”. The sun’s energy powers all life on this planet. You can understand why the ancient Aztecs, Egyptians and many others equated this heavenly ball of fire with the supreme deity. But what the older, feminine cosmologies teach us is that the vast, dark, yin womb, called Time, was the mother of the stars, including the sun, and is the midwife of life, death and transformation. She was known by many names, including Kal, Kali, Saturn, Chronos.¹ Chronos is the name of the ancient Greek titan (god) of time. “His” roman name is Saturn. But, as we have written in other works, there is good reason to believe that before the era of the patriarchal religions, “he” was once a “she”—Lady Saturn.

Time was once a Goddess. But how often do we think of time as sacred now?

On an everyday level we always talk about “having the time and energy” for things, pointing to a hidden truth that we measure and shape our lives by both energy and time. Energy gets a lot of airspace. Everyone is working on ways to boost their energy, work with their energy. We have “energy healers” who are growing in numbers by the year. But, no one really mentions time. We don’t go to “time healers”—yet. Although, you might say that’s what the magicians and shamans of old did to heal people, they went into dimensions of Time to work an old, old magic.

Indeed, even trauma healing, at its root, is a form of time-healing, time-traveling, working with the mysteries of memory and locations in time.

One of the visions I have committed myself to is bringing together the worlds of magic and the mechanics of science. Because I believe the overlap is stunning. Magic is just a different language for the same knowledge that science brings, a different way of describing or working with our core reality. Magical cultures “ensoul” deep science in a kind of metaphysical myth and theatre that speaks to the non-linear dreaming mind. This aspect of our consciousness is the Mother Mind, and grasps a reality our thinking mind is too small to see, let alone comprehend.

Chronobiology: Our Biology is Time-Coded

Time Magic is the missing piece in our healing journey. No one is talking about the critical role of time in health, wellbeing and awakening. It seems that the only people really sharing about the mysteries of time in a meaningful way are a handful of science fiction writers, and the quantum and high gravity physicists who inspire them. So, our movies are full of time magic, but we relegate it to the realms of “fantasy”.

But time’s secrets are very real. Astoundingly close. Right inside us. They are written within the body—our body is a manuscript of time.

Chronobiology exists inside the realm of Time Magic. Our ancestors worshipped time, they followed cycles, seasons, greeted dawns, prayed at dusk. There is a reason for this. The defining feature of our biology that is rarely mentioned is chronobiology. We have a time-coded biology. Every process in our body is guided by time – from our digestion, to our hormones, to growth and ageing, to the blood pulsing around our body to a beat.

“Time Magic is the missing piece in our healing journey. Our body is made of time. Every one of our 50 trillion cells has its own biological clock, along with each of our organs, as well as our body as a whole. A full 80% of our genes respond to the circadian cycles of sunlight and darkness.”

The day-night cycle is like a puppet master to our body. And, this reality extends far beyond the human world—nearly every living cell on the planet is fundamentally oriented around the rhythms of light and dark. Our ecology and cosmology are also time-coded. Everything in nature also moves to the measures of bio-clocks, in complex cycles.

We are living inside time spirals. Guiding and in-forming every aspect of our being are the cycles of light and dark, winter-summer cycles, lunar cycles, planetary cycles, zodiac cycles and life cycles. As a scientific discipline, chronobiology has exploded in prominence in recent years, with peer-reviewed research articles now numbering in the tens of thousands, and with half of those papers having been written in the last seven years.

Your chronobiology is guiding every moment of your life. When you open your eyes in the morning, the sunlight hits your retina and is relayed to the master time-keeping center of your deep brain, your suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which translates the codes of light into the language of your body: hormones, neurotransmitters and electrical signals. This transformed light turns on your digestive system and metabolism. It shifts your hormones and immune system into gear. It upregulates your muscles and increases your exercise capacity. It sets into motion the full epigenetic revolution of your circadian biology, where the expression of some 16,000 of your genes changes powerfully over the course of the day.²

And, we are not just talking about daily time cycles. If you are a woman, you may be experiencing your body differently depending on where you are in your menstrual cycle, a “circalunar” rhythm—moving in lunar patterns. Your metabolism, immune system, mood, neurotransmitters, brain waves, and nearly every other organ-system profoundly ebb and flow in rhythm with the moon for approximately four decades of your life.

Just as there is a “wheel of the year” in folk tradition, we have a “wheel of bio-magic” inside our bodies. We experience profound seasonal or circannual changes, with 90% of our genes expressing according to the rhythms of the seasons, along with 60% of our hormones behaving differently in winter and summer.³ We have striking changes in the “cytoarchitecture of our brain”—the cellular structure of our brain—as well as a strong seasonal pulse in leptin expression, which regulates core metabolism, “food-seeking behavior” and weight gain versus loss.⁴

A landmark study from the Salk Institute, published in 2018 in the leading journal Science, explains how our chronobiology system “constitutes by far the largest” and most important regulatory mechanism in the body.⁵ “Timing is everything, to our genes,” reads the headline.⁶ Being “in sync” with time, with the light-dark cycles, the lunar cycles and the seasonal cycles, is the single most important factor in our health. Our wellbeing, our health, how we age, how embodied we are, are all governed by the patterns of time in the body.

Biomedical scientists now realize that every diagnostic modality, every pharmacologic or herbal treatment, and even our entire framework for how our body communicates and functions must consider cycles of time. From a nutritional and metabolic perspective, when we eat or exercise may be just as important as what we eat and how we move our bodies (“chrononutrition”, “chronoexercise”). “Chronotherapy”, or attention to when we take a strong medication, including cancer chemotherapies, is now considered the state of the art for some types of cancers, according to the British journal, The Lancet.⁷

Eco-Magic: The Healing Medicine of Plants is Time-Coded

Sit with that for a moment. Every healing modality you engage with happens within the container of time, which may have the biggest impact on whether it succeeds for you or not. But no one mentions it. It’s like we’re all in a “time-avoidant” reality together, pretending this majestic aspect of creation and consciousness doesn’t exist or isn’t important. Folk medicine knew about Time Magic. The herb has to be planted and harvested at the right time. And, beyond that, the qualities of that unique time-coded moment live on in the plant, giving it a frequency that shares a specific healing gift.

Practices such as astrological herbalism were not a side-street of old-style medicine, it was the centerpiece. Our old text books are filled with instructions on when to pick plants, either on a certain moon—full, new, waxing or waning—or as the sun is rising, along with its time-coded sap, which begins to ascend at dawn and descend at dusk.

Myth and lore around plants is often time-coded—either to the cycles of the day and night or the cycles of the seasonal mandala. St John’s wort was collected at midsummer and associated with the healing medicine of peak solar transmissions, whilst vervaine was often collected at Equinox and carried the verdant greening energy of the Earth in her wild abundance. Culpeper (ca. 1650), who ascribed astrological signs to medicinal herbs, says that Hypericum “is under the celestial sign Leo, and the dominion of the Sun.” And another old English poem says: “St. John’s wort doth charm evil away. If gathered at midnight on the saint’s holy day.” Magical instructions are rooted in specific time-locations. it is not just what you use but when, and what time-magic influenced it.

We’ve let a whole body of wisdom fall to the wayside, and we urgently need to reclaim it. It could well be that this missing factor of Time Magic is at the root of many of our societal problems. Biomancy and its centering of time as a healing and transformational agent, and as a conscious living intelligence, changes us at a root level. It is a new movement. Ancient wisdom for these modern times. We are time beings, and we must find our way back to organic, Gaian time if we are to heal as individuals and a collective.

All the words we use to express coming back into resonance with life—"the now”, “presence”, “awakening”—or feelings of a soothed and regulated nervous system, are ways of describing a return to innate organic time. Trauma lives in the body when we’ve become stuck inside a time loop.

“Time does not simply flow linearly, but moves in spirals that connect past, present and future timelines. Emotionally charged experiences repeat and re-enact themselves across timelines in different disguises. Time repeats storylines.”

Time heals everything. But not in the ways we think.

We do not need to exit time, but to regain a true sense of time, to re-enter primordial time again. To pulse. To Spiral. To Time Weave.

This is healing at a biomantic level. This is a remembrance of what our Ancestors courted. This returns us to the magic of the cycles of life, as embodied beings.

We’ve Fallen Out of Organic Time

Modern, industrialized life with its busy work and social schedules, machine-like production quotas and addictions to technology have pushed us into a 24/7 artificial time. We can also call it manmade or non-natural time. It has been such a slow and gradual creep that most of us have simply accepted it and remember no other way. As a consequence, we have fallen out of organic time.

This has accelerated since 2020 when our innate “clocks” and routines were disrupted by the quarantines, closures and isolation of the covid era, ushering us into even deeper technological time, and setting us adrift from meaningful rhythms of life. We are all suffering from rhythm disruption, but it is hitting the younger generations the hardest. A United Healthcare white paper from February of this year reports that behavioral and mental health utilization is up 35% for millennials and their children compared to pre-pandemic levels.⁸ We have lived through a collective trauma, and we are now suffering from “time sickness”. Ancestral cultures understood this and “took the time” to craft ritual and ceremonial spaces to reset the tribe’s bio-magical clocks for healing.

“Time is not just a schedule, it is a dimension of consciousness that guides and structures everything in our life—our entire biological system, as well as our worldview or cosmology, our thought process, our emotions, our psyche, our energy body and how we relate to the natural world.”

The problem is that, as biological beings, operating outside of natural time undermines our physical, mental and spiritual health through a process scientists call “circadian disruption”. Loss of organic circadian rhythmicity is especially damaging for women, as we will see below. Beyond that, the ecological results of continually imposing manmade time onto our living planet are disastrous. In nature, seasons of productivity are followed by seasons of regeneration, bringing balance and sustainability to our ecosystems. When we take and take from the planet without rest and regeneration, we deplete it; when we force plants to grow according to our time schedules with herbicides and synthetic fertilizers, we destroy the soil; when we shine lights 24/7 in our cities, we disrupt the breeding of birds and aquatic life; when we frack for oil and mine silicon and rare earth metals to keep up with an exponentially increasing pace of consumer-technological demand, we decimate the biomes that support life on the planet. And on, and on. This “time sickness” is a root cause of our collective disturbance.

“Falling out of organic time represents a physiologic, emotional, psychic and magical trauma, especially for women.”

Is there another way to relate to time? Modern (masculine-paradigm) spiritual systems promise us a way out of the trap of artificial time, by leaving time altogether and entering into a transcendent “timelessness”, “no time” or “the eternal now”. Or, they may teach that “time is an illusion”. The issue, of course, is that if we wish to be living, embodied beings, we cannot permanently transcend time. Our cells, our bodies, our families, our planet are all located in time. This is where life is. Embodiment actually means locating ourselves in time and space. We are here in this body, in this time, in the center-point.

There is a third way, the way all of our ancestors lived prior to the industrial revolution, and the way every other species on the planet lives—in natural time. Or, what I call organic spiral time. The spiral is the innate pattern of our universe, from galaxies to the way our spinal fluid flows.

Every living organism in the natural world has a timing and rhythm for its life and development, as do the moon, sun, planets and stars. And nothing in the natural world resonates with artificial time, which vibrates at the level of “artificial intelligence” or “machine consciousness”. Imagine dancing a beautiful waltz, and then the music speeds up. It’s now a foxtrot. It speeds up again and it’s a tap dance, and then a mambo, and again and again until eventually we collapse in a heap. Manmade, artificial time is not compatible with life. In fact, it degenerates organic beings.

Our ancestors knew that time is one of the greatest mysteries. It is alive, sentient, multi-dimensional, deific. We can have a conversation with it, and it will talk back to us. Past, present and future co-exist in different overlapping dimensions that can communicate back and forth with each other as different “timelines”, or time-entangled reality fields. We ride the back of time like a great dragon that carries us on our life’s journey. It is no coincidence that many of the Elder peoples viewed the primordial deity of time as a serpent or dragon, as did the Orphic and pre-Hellenic people of ancient Greece, who revered Chronos (Khronos) as an ouroboros-like serpent, whose eternity circled the universe.

Organic time is not only sustainable, it is regenerative. All healing is a direct consequence of entering into organic time. What do meditation, yoga, qi gong, bodywork, forest bathing, breathwork, healing dance, biomantic reconnection with the sun and earth, family constellations, and nearly every kind of “self-care” have in common? For a moment, they drop us out of manmade time. Healing and magic naturally follow. We think it is the modality that created the shift, but it was primarily the re-attunement with organic time that opened the doorway in our bioenergetics and consciousness. If you go deep in nature and bring your computer and your deadlines and your time-pressure stress, guess what—you won’t heal.

Time isn’t just a flow or a spiral, it also has a beat, a rhythm. Time is percussive. It communicates information, as if we are “dancers in time”, letting us know how, when and where to put our feet, how to move, how to love, how to rest, how to play. Time is showing us how to be human.

In spiritual circles, as well as in wave physics, we often hear about “frequency” and “vibration”—but these are just measurements of pulsations or cycles in time. When slowed down to near the speed of a human heart, we call this a tempo, a rhythm, a beat. Like a shaman’s drum, our heartbeat pulses us into a rhythm of life, as does the pulse of sunrise and sunset. Our body and soul are reading and searching for these bio-cues all the time.

Living within an organic rhythm is what we call belonging. In a biomantic sense, we must live inside a bio-magical routine that makes sense to our bodies, that synchronizes and attunes us to the patterns and tempos of nature. This is the underlying reality of the trauma healing concept of “nervous system regulation”. Regulate means “to make regular”, to find the right tempo and pace. Because when our nervous system falls out of time, out of pattern, out of rhythm, we feel anxious, keyed up, and our core biology breaks down. The answer to our healing lies beyond any rational plans laid out by our thinking mind—it requires entering the pulsing organic time that we are designed for.

What is your daily routine? Your daily rhythm? What is the beat and tempo of your life? This is where your deepest healings secrets will live.

Sometimes in our race to grow or evolve, we reach for peak experiences that “blow us apart”—forgetting that we need routine to ground us.

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Women as Time Shamans: Keepers of the Lunar Wands

Time Magic has a special place in its heart for women, and for the more feminine ways of being. Our earliest Ancestors saw time as a Mother.

All the old cultures knew that women, with the unique magic of their wombs and cycles of death and birth were the Time Keepers of the society.

Women’s deep connection to the mysteries of time, experienced through the profoundly cyclical nature of their biology, positioned women as the earliest “shamans” and sacred Time Keepers. By “shaman” I mean the practitioners of tribal magic, healing and communication with the spirit worlds, known by many different names across time and culture. The earliest known shaman or magician in the archeological record is a woman who lived approximately 27,000 years ago, buried in her ceremonial dress and with talismanic objects, in what is now the Czech Republic.

The traditional female rites of passage are biologically time-coded and based around the fertility cycles: menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, motherhood and menopause. The earliest time-keeping instruments were paleolithic lunar-menstrual wands and carvings, adorned with menstrual blood and moon symbology. A woman’s body was a mystical clock, and was revered as a portal for the Time Mysteries.

One of the most celebrated lunar-menstrual time-keeping carvings is the “Venus of Laussel” found cut into the wall of a rock shelter in Dordogne, France, dating from 25,000 years ago. The figure’s left hand is over her womb / belly, and right hand holds aloft a magical object—a crescent shaped bison horn with 13 time-markings, representing the 13 full or new moons of the year, or the 13 menstrual cycles of a year. The horn itself is an ancient symbol of the crescent moon, associated with menstrual magic, and the fact that the carving was covered in red ochre pigment, symbolic of menstrual blood across the ancient worlds, confirms the function as a time-keeper and “measurer” of the lunar cycles. Even the words “measure” and “metric” derive from ancient Greek word roots for “womb” and “mother” (mētra and mētēr).

“Women have suffered the most with this loss of time-awareness, because women’s bodies respond to the cycles of time and the dark/light patterns of our world with 200% more sensitivity than men.”

Women have been shoehorned into a world that does not respect their innate cyclical time and their resonance with organic time magic. As the man-made time machine speeds up with ever more vigor, women’s bodies and psyches are starting to break down—creating anxiety and mood disorders, infertility, and auto-immune disorders, rooted in “time”. Women have had to turn to mystical practice to understand their predicament.

Coming out of the flow of organic spiral time takes a heavy toll on women, because women’s bodies need to be in synchrony with the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset, patterns of light and dark, cycles of the moon, the daily “breath” of earth’s magnetic field, and of intuitively self-guided periods of activity followed by regenerative rest. To put this all into context, being in circadian and circannual rhythm is likely the single most important factor in our health, our vitality and our magic for ALL humans. But for women, a disruption is even more catastrophic.

Women’s bodies still resonate with memories of 'moon time' and communal village mother rites. As women have sought their empowerment (rightly so!) they have often entered business and online worlds that do not reflect the cyclical timescapes that they need to thrive and succeed. The biomantic goal of returning to organic time is something that we need to infuse into all levels of business and society, not just for brief moments of “self-care”. Being in natural time is personally and ecologically regenerative—allowing women to share their creative gifts while still feeling vital and alive in their bodies.

When women force themselves into unnatural rhythms their bodies often speak back to them. In this way they are the “canary in the mine". Science shows that our collective time crisis disproportionately affects women’s bodies and psyches. According to a February, 2023 article in the journal Science, women have twice as many genes expressing rhythmically in their body tissues as men, moving in synchrony with cycles of sunlight and darkness.⁹ This heightened sensitivity to time is also shared by children.

What this means is that at a cellular level, women are more sensitive to being in organic time. When a woman falls out of organic time, the consequences are devastating to her biology and psyche. Fortunately, the converse is also true—women in states of “circadian chaos” have greater healing benefits when they come back into organic time and rhythm. Meaning that “time-healing” and coming back into biomantic resonance is the crucial healing modality for women. Let’s take a brief tour through the science so we can understand what this means at a practical level.

Women & Circadian Biology

It is hard to overstate how important the circadian timing system is for our health. It affects our temperature, hormone release, digestion, sleep, and mood.¹⁰ It regulates our blood pressure and heart rate, as well as our blood flow that delivers oxygen and nutrients to our cells. It determines our “endothelial function”, or how prone we are to heart attacks and strokes.¹¹ It determines our susceptibility to cancer, viruses and bacterial infections. Circadian harmony is critical to our mental health, autonomic nervous system regulation and subjective feelings of well-being and goodness. It is the key factor in our metabolic set-point—whether we burn fat as fuel, or store it and gain weight. It has a powerful impact on fertility, as well as menstrual health. When a woman is in time chaos she will be prone to have painful periods, gain weight, feel anxious, have poor digestion and lowered fertility.

For women ALL of the above effects are more pronounced than for men. Professor Ivana Skrlec, Ph.D. of Strossmayer University writes in a 2021 paper, that it has been shown that women are more sensitive to “circadian rhythm disorders and have an increased risk of chronic diseases affecting the reproductive and immune systems, central nervous system, endocrine functions, and cardiovascular health.”¹² Which may explain the explosion of “mysterious” health issues and immune disorders that are much more prevalent in women—including chronic fatigue, lyme, fibromyalgia, hypothyroidism, auto-immunity, migraines, IBS and others—that have been poorly understood, under-researched, and at times dismissed as “psycho-somatic” or “it’s all in your mind” by the mainstream medical system.

In response to circadian stress, women gain weight and store fat more easily than men, even when eating similarly.¹³ We are taught by modern health science that our weight is primarily determined by what we eat, but that is not true—it is primarily determined by our internal metabolic “thermostat” settings that are heavily influenced by circadian rhythms and the light (and darkness) we receive. The implications of this reality and how women relate to food are far-reaching. Eating disorders are seen primarily as a psychological issue, but they may also be a response to this phenomenon.

Circadian wellness is not just about “the light”—in fact, our relationship with darkness is the greater issue. We are “dark-deprived”. Our time rhythms are not just governed by the light we receive in the day, but the darkness we should be receiving at night. The global epidemic of weight gain is strongly linked to the loss of pure darkness at night after the introduction of artificial lighting across the world. A 2016 paper from the Salk Genetics Institute, authored by Tracy Bedrosian, Ph.D. explains, “Increases in electric light at night parallel increases in obesity and metabolic syndrome worldwide. A direct association between exposure to aberrant light cycles and weight gain has been established … Moreover, exposure to light at night in an uncontrolled home setting is associated with a higher odds ratio for obesity in humans. Several large-scale epidemiological studies demonstrate that social jet lag and shift work may contribute to metabolic dysfunction and increases in BMI.”¹⁴

One of the most surprising findings is that time disruption is the most important cause of female infertility.¹⁵ In her 2020 paper, “Disruption of Circadian Rhythms: A Crucial Factor in the Etiology of Infertility”, Professor Francesca Sciarra, Ph.D. of Sapienza University of Rome describes how circadian disruption “affects infertility, producing low levels of sex hormones, causing embryo implantation failure and reducing newborn size” in both animal models and in human women. The damage happens through the interruption of progesterone release. We are experiencing an epidemic of low progesterone in modern women, causing severe “PMS”, menstrual irregularity and peri-menopausal symptoms. And, at a magical symbolic level progesterone is strongly connected to being able to create feminine structures in the world. Progesterone is the “structural feminine”—which builds energy and new life.

The list goes on and on: women are much more sensitive to the emotional and mental health effects of falling out of organic time: "Circadian disruption has been associated with several mood disorders, including major depression, manic-depressive disorder, and SAD.”¹⁶ All of these circadian issues affect women disproportionately.

Outer and Inner Time

Our state of mood and consciousness also affects our inner body clocks, which is why practices such as meditation, plant magic, and breathwork can get us back into the healing zone. In Biomancy we call these healing states of consciousness “biodelic”—as our biology is innately wired to experience expanded states of consciousness, where our body switches into flow states.

Because even if we are connecting to the outer cycles and rhythms of nature with the sun, moon, stars, we can still be thrown “out of time” through inner stress. Inside our bodies we have a complex system of communication, via melatonin, cortisol and other signals that relay the messages of sunlight and darkness to every cell in the body. Stress disrupts all of these pathways, and throws our cells into time chaos. It’s like our body can’t tell the time anymore! When we get on a computer or mobile phone, most people tense-up and stop breathing fully. When we do this, we begin resonating with artificial time, not organic time—and our body perceives this as stressful. If we do this long enough, our circadian systems fall apart. Rhythmic breathing is one of the easiest ways to synch ourselves back with organic time—breathing with awareness of the pattern, the pulse.

We think that trauma is always emotional—it’s not, it can be somatic, in the sense that our bodies and psyche actually perceive disconnection from organic time as a fundamental trauma. Trauma physiology is a global dysregulation of our biology as a result of being stuck in a moment from the past, outside the natural flow of time. One of the deepest supports for healing trauma comes from re-entering into organic time, which opens our magical capacities for healing and re-wiring our neurophysiology. This is one reason why psychedelic- and biodelic-assisted therapies are so effective in treating trauma—they open “critical learning” windows in our brains that allow us to effectively “time-travel” and re-pattern memories from the past.

Healing Your Relationship With Time

Our magical relationship to time exists in our cerebellar consciousness, where time softens, opens and is non-linear. At times it is mythic. One of the core motifs of fairy tales is that when we step into the world of faerie, time shifts and dilates. We walk into a magical forest, or down a fairy road, or ride a boat across a lake to a magical island, and enter into a different dimension of time. We think we’ve been gone for a minute or an hour, but we may be gone for years. Women often have a special role in these stories, tied to our ancestors’ knowledge of women’s deep relationship with time magic.

Remembering our ancestral wisdom can help us find new ways to relate to time and to live our lives differently.

What our ancestors knew is that our relationship with time extends beyond our physiology, deep into our metaphysiology. We are Time Magic beings. This is what the Elder cultures studied, worshipped, and built earth and stone temples to. It was the centerpiece of their spiritual, ceremonial and daily life. The way we interface with cycles and chronobiology is at our physical and metaphysical core. It is a sacred knowing.

Myths are alive in time - living beings who exist across time, speaking their stories into different epochs, molding the nature of reality with their mythic persona. Myth is the DNA of time, archetypal patterns that repeat over time, drawing on veiled, coded instructions and blueprints. Myths are stories that emerge from the womb of time to pattern life and evolution with mythic templates and signatures. Like our DNA, they create a consistency (patterned matrices, motifs) in evolution. Myths pattern time, and are created from the womb of time, they are “as old as time”, or as they say “once upon a time”. This helps time flow inside a template or pattern. Myth is a language through which time is communicating to us, which is why in many old stories, the guest star of the story is time itself. Ancestral stories are usually concerned with time, either creation myths (when time began) or re-creation myths (a point in time when a new timeline is chosen), or stories of transformation through time-coded journeys.

Time brings us into this world, and Time takes us out of it. Time grows us, and time ages us. Time is the midwife of our life and the midwife of our death. No wonder in our death-avoidant culture we are so afraid of time, and want to control it and make it linear or an illusion. Time expresses itself through repeating myths over vast time periods. And, a shift in epochs is a shift in myth. Time is pregnant with a new myth now. We have an opportunity to reclaim our relationship to time, and to build economies and structures and worlds that heal us and connect us into the regenerative spiral of life.

Healing “Time Sickness”

Healing with Time Magic is a biomantic approach where we work with daily, practical body magic ritual and awareness of the cycles of time, and how they connect our biology to the greater ecology and cosmology, along with a meta-awareness of the magic of time.

• Body rituals to connect to the sun, moon and stars

• Rhythmic breathing or patterned breathwork practice

• Rhythmic movement or movement that creates patterns

• Rhythmic sound or sound immersions that shift time

• Sophrology journeys where we are guided into deep time

• Meditation, nature connection, silence, where we “re-synch”

• Opening into Biodelic healing states of consciousness

• Communing with elemental energy and plant magic

• Working with myth, story, archetype and motif to locate in time

• Ancestral alchemy and weaving timelines and releasing trauma 'time loops'

• Personal and community routine, rituals and ceremonies

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Notes:

1. Kali was known as the "womb of time"

2. Mure LS, et al. "Diurnal transcriptome atlas of a primate across major neural and peripheral tissues." Science. 2018 Mar 16; 359(6381) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924732/

3. Wucher V, et al. "Day-night and seasonal variation of human gene expression across tissues." PLoS Biol. 2023 Feb 6;21(2):e3001986. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9934459/

4. ibid.

5. Mure, op. cit.

6. "Timing is everything, to our genes." Salk News. Feb 8, 2018. https://www.salk.edu/news-release/timing-everything-genes/

7. Petković M, et al. "Chronotherapy in Glioblastoma: state of the art and future perspectives." EBioMedicine. 2023 Mar;89:104470.

8. "Millennials and their children: Significant health findings." United Healthcare and Health Action Council White Paper. February, 2023. https://eims.uhc.com/content/dam/eni/health-action-council-microsite/images/UHC_HAC_WP-Millennials.pdf

9. Talamanca L, et al. "Sex-dimorphic and age-dependent organization of 24-hour gene expression rhythms in humans." Science. 2023 Feb 3;379(6631):478-483. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36730411/

10. Škrlec I, et al. "Sex Differences in Circadian Clock Genes and Myocardial Infarction Susceptibility." Journal of Cardiovascular Development and Disease. 2021; 8(5):53.
    https://doi.org/10.3390/jcdd8050053

11. ibid.

12. Škrlec, op. cit.

13. Link JC, et al. "Genetic Basis for Sex Differences in Obesity and Lipid Metabolism." Annual Review of Nutrition. 2017 Aug 21;37:225-245. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-nutr-071816-064827

14. Bedrosian TA, et al. "Endocrine Effects of Circadian Disruption." Annual Review of Physiology. 2016;78:109-31. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-physiol-021115-105102

15. Sciarra F, et al. "Disruption of Circadian Rhythms: A Crucial Factor in the Etiology of Infertility." International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2020; 21(11):3943. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21113943

16. Bedrosian, op. cit.

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THE SUMMER of my nineteenth year, I set out for the wilds of Alaska with only my backpack and an unquenchable thirst for life. Not the safe, packaged, manicured life I grew up with in suburbia, but the real thing—raw, primal life. Though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I was compelled by a deep longing for wildness. As a teenage boy, my soul had been insistently whispering that some vitally important and alluring element was missing from the secure life my parents and society expected of me; and I knew I needed to leave “normal” society to find it.

I wanted freedom, wildness, adventure, aliveness—not security and a pension plan.

Hiking up onto a glacier a few thousand feet above the forest floor—where literally no humans had set foot for many years—I set up camp directly on the glacial ice. As a storm blew in that night, gale force winds threatened, reminding me of just how fragile we are in the greater scheme of the ecosystems of Gaia. Out in the wild, thousands of miles from civilization, on that long first night I was initiated by nature in all her rawness and wild power, as the storms raged around me.

Over that summer, at times I would sleep on raw mountain peaks under the full moon, without a tent or sleeping bag, nestled into a snug of granite rock, looking up into the infinite night sky above me and communing with the vast beauty of this wildness—a magnificent beauty that etched itself into the depths of my soul.

Alaska is untamed nature for thousands of miles; 99.9 percent of it does not even have roads or fences. It is unbounded. In these immense stretches of undisturbed land, the humming energetic field of the Earth can be felt in a way that is impossible in the civilized world. It is like the difference between stargazing from within a brightly lit city compared to looking into the dark skies of a remote mountain top. When the background glow of civilization vanishes, perception becomes clear. Our primal senses switch on. An invitation is extended to join nature’s resonance.

During my adventure into the wild, living deep in the boreal forest, I carried only toothpaste, a wool hat, a rain suit, and two changes of clothes. It was a several-day hike into the woods from the nearest gravel road, which was itself miles from civilization. I was a world away from conveniences we have come to rely on—such as grocery stores, tap water, bathrooms or medical care. Anything I ate was what I caught or had boated in.

The first journey to Alaska is disorienting, if not downright shocking; it is the primal shock of feeling the true wilds for the first time, and the realization that something wild within us has been living in captivity—tamed, domesticated, neutered. Long dormant genetic memories begin to stir. You begin to sense for the first time, not at a cognitive level but at a primal feeling level, that you yourself are a part of this wildness, not separate.

For more than two months I slept on the belly of the earth in remote forests every night, allowing Mother Gaia to infuse me with her energies, to take me into her rhythms, to take me into her womb. I bathed in the cold of her northern oceans. I ate her offerings of fish and game. I accepted her many gifts and allowed her to teach me. My perceptions altered, my sense of time warped, and the subtle, but consuming background compulsion that I had to “do” anything other than just be a human creature vanished. My own primal nature had synchronized and merged with Gaia. What an incredible homecoming. I could no longer feel where my own boundaries ended and nature’s began.

I became wild—unselfconscious and free. I was born again, alive for the first time. And in this my life was forever changed.

Walking down to Resurrection Bay every morning, seeing the glory of the snow-capped peaks that run to the water’s edge, and then jumping into that ocean water—so cold that it takes your breath away—I was immersed in primal aliveness. It is only in retrospect that I began to understand what had happened to me in the woods of Alaska, and what drew me there to begin with. And it was only after years of unsuccessfully attempting to integrate those experiences into my “civilized” life that I eventually learned that it was impossible. You cannot fit the wildness into a box of ownership, separated off by fences, roads, boundaries and concrete. Civilization itself must bend, not nature.

Just as the wildness of our soul cannot fit into society’s vision of what it should be, likewise, the civilized parts of myself needed to give way to my innate wildness. My soul needed to take the lead.

And this was only the beginning. In Alaska, I was a solo journeyman, a lone wolf, independent. Like many men, I thought that freedom was to be found in solitude, meditation, and contemplation. Due to my youth at the time, I could not see that my longing for union with Gaia and her natural wildness was also a longing for the untamed, wild, feeling nature of my own self — my feminine or yin aspects — and the forgotten path of feminine wisdom. Gaia or Earth has always been envisioned as a mother or feminine spirit. I desired to truly meet the feminine in all her wild and beautiful elements, and to remember how the masculine was an integral part of this vast, dynamic beauty.

This return to balance and harmony is the essence of Biomancy, an ancient way of bio-magic that integrates and unites all the elements of creation. A deep rebirth comes from this alchemical union and embodiment in devotion to Sophia, the Living Spirit of Earth, who expresses in the magnificence of our ecosystems. For it is from this communion with the feminine birth templates that our deep elemental wildness emerges.

Later on, in my summers away from medical school, I balanced the intellectual learning experiences of the medical system by becoming a wilderness guide in the ancient mountains of Appalachia. Once again it was the feminine spirit of nature, the wild voices of rushing rivers, the greening power of the plants, the magical essence of the wild creatures, and the quiet sanctity of mountain vistas filled with silence and awe that initiated me. Nature is our true teacher.

Sleeping in the arms of the forest, under a tapestry of midnight starlight, Mother Nature invited me home again, a return to her Great Love. A love that includes the wildness, that includes our creature bodies, that includes the Earth. Love is our birthright, and within love lives the greatest freedom.

In discovering the western alchemical path of Sophia, I found a wisdom stream that integrated the magic potentials of our biology with the deep mystery of psyche and soul, and the planetary womb consciousness of Mother Earth. I felt welcomed by a lineage of thinkers, practitioners and mystics who were devoted to a holistic vision of what it meant to be an embodied human held in Gaia’s web.

At the age of nineteen, I was searching for what I now know to be the greatest human desire—the longing to merge, the longing for union, for reconnection. I wanted to be one with the wildness of the earth, and as it turns out, I wanted to be one with the Mother.

I instinctively knew that I was being called by the Divine Mother at the deepest soul level. This call of the Divine Feminine became the guiding light of my life.

Join us on the Sophianic Path -The Biomancy 12 month Diploma Starts May 1st

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I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

because the seed is alive
more real than time
and the forms of this age

diamond
eternal
circle

this, for me, is enough
to stand, here,
again and again

as a man
to sip from the poison chalice
they say only woman can survive

when they say 'be gone,
you don't belong'
I say, believe me I already am

gone
gone
gone

to the other side
to another time
to a new land

where tomorrow walks
with bare feet and toes
twinkling in cool grass

singing in ways you can only imagine
warm skin
sunlight
dancing

where the soil is black
the sky blue and deep
as the waters

flowers up
roots down
the ends meet again

my heart
my home
my belonging

Subscribe now

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

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Welcome to the lineage of Biomancy, rooted in the feminine mysteries of Sophia, and the earth-centric traditions that reveal the ensouled magic of a living planet within a living cosmos, emanating from a deep mystery. Within the Alchemical traditions of Sophia, there is a pathway of ideas that have been strung across time like a brightly colored prayer flag, ushering us on a pilgrimage to gnosis.

Various colleges of initiates have stewarded this lineage across time, including the temple priestesses, the womb shamans, Ophites and gnostics, the oracles of sacred sites, the witches and folk magicians, the chantresses, keening women, medicine keepers of different traditions, the mystery school adepts, the Cathars, Templars, the medieval alchemists and scientists, and the artists, poets and bards who encoded the forbidden wisdom in music, art, myth, and poetry.

“Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Often there is no linear structure to the way these teachings have been kept and passed along. It is more of a pollination or a spontaneous blooming in which ideas keep regrowing. So even though many different groups of people may be held within the garlanded archway of Alchemica Sophia, it does not mean their beliefs are always strictly synchronous. Biomancy as a gnostic tradition is a path of inner revelation, rather than external rules, teachings or set beliefs. It is an adventure into the mystery of existence that each person travels in their own unique way.

Sophianic Magic

For our Ancestors science and magic were not separate – they existed on a continuum, and it was understood that a magical and practical reality was entangled and interwoven together. These two realities, described as Middle World and Otherworld, quantum physics and Newtonian physics, were complements to each other and were part of the Sacred Balance of all existence, like two sides of a co-joining coin. One reality gave us stability and certainty, and was denser and slower to respond to magic, with a more fixed set of laws. The other reality was more fluid, residing in possibility and potential, where magical effects could happen instantaneously. This balance of possibility and movement with stability and certainty is the force that unites all life.

Alchemica Sophia lineage-weavers respected all aspects of reality in the weave, and had deep knowledge about working with both the denser principles of matter and the possibilities of magic, especially the creative feminine chaos magic that underlies all life, known as Shakti or Anima. It is at these magical intersections of chaos and order, where reality shapeshifts, that miracles occur.

The magical lineage that Biomancy draws inspiration from is based on the lineage of the feminine Mystery Schools, that taught about an ensouled world and body (rather than the disembodied philosophies of dualism). Biomancy is dedicated to this living lineage of wisdom, devoted to Sophia, which evolves and re-emerges to meet the needs of its time and to find new words for ancient ideas. Biomancy includes ecomancy and astromancy. As the entangled systems of body, ecology and cosmos cannot be divided. We are part of a resonant whole.

Bio magic and Eco magic is a reemergent pathway that will come to define our future. Biomancy sits within this lineage of wisdom and philosophy, bringing its own unique weave and perspective to these traditions. In alchemical traditions it is believed that each generation needs to reweave and reimagine the old stories and teachings, so they can evolve with a living spirit. Biomancy is the co-creation of Azra Bertrand and Seren Bertrand, and is led by Dr Bertrand with his unique blend of spiritual, healing and scientific training, and initiation in the mysteries.

Embodied Spirituality

Biomancy is dedicated to courting this living wisdom of Sophia, entangled in a participatory co-weaving of earth, including all her creatures and beings and the cosmos. This conscious great weave of creation is the source of the greatest gift - our embodied magic, our Bio-Magic. Biomancy places a feminine philosophy, ecology and cosmology as the centerpiece of the work of Biomancy, a feminine essence which includes all genders and expressions within its weave.

Biomancy is particularly interested in merging the magic of soma and psyche, so we can access the brilliance and potential of the invisible imaginal realms with the psychic somatic power of the body, in a new cosmic mythos. By uniting body and soul, the body becomes an imaginarium for the dreams of God. Our quantum biology is infinite.

"The difference between the psyche and body is artificial...in reality, there is nothing but a living body. That is the fact; and psyche is as much a living body, as body is living psyche. It is just the same."

Carl Jung

Embodied Spirituality

This European lineage has particular significance for Dr Bertrand, as one of his great maternal ancestors was Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762 – 1836), a German physician, writer and philosopher who was a friend to, and personal physician of, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Christoph Hufeland studied medicine and was educated at Weimar, where his father held the office of court physician to the grand duchess. He was interested in many esoteric subjects, including Chinese Alchemy and the spiritual science of longevity. He was also an early supporter of naturopathy and homeopathy, and proposed the vital life force that Reich also believed in.

His most widely translated book was Macrobiotics: The Art of Prolonging Life, which later influenced George Ohsawa, founder of modern macrobiotics (whose legacy, by happy coincidence, Dr Bertrand studied at the Institute of Macrobiotics, creating an accidental lineage ‘loop’.)

This fascination with the possibility of biomagic seems to run through his ancestral bloodline, and has been a lifelong fascination and dedication. Including the healing power of nature, as eco-magic.

Dr Bertrand also undertook a four-year apprenticeship with a physician who practiced darkfield microscopy, a modern form of blood divination – where a person’s wellbeing is divined in their blood. Blood magic was a core principle of our ancestors who knew that ‘the blood is the life’. Our blood is literally singing with secrets that science is only just uncovering. Our blood is a memory bank.

Along with his co-creatrix, Seren Bertrand, he believes this lineage is ready to rebirth, like a beautiful green snake shedding its skin, evolving to channel the beauty and joy of the feminine mystery. At its heart, Biomancy is not a subject to just study in libraries, but a way of being to live and embody a powerful, regenerative shining energy.

Our future depends on us reclaiming our magic. Our natural magic, our organic magic, our bio-magic. Life is rooted in magic. The incredible potential for love, life, wild creativity that lives within all of us. Biomancy is alchemy rooted into the future – birthed directly through the magic of embodiment and the shimmering possibility of creating a new way on earth that speaks to the modern world.

Biomancy is a living stream of practice, connection and wisdom, to reenchant our disconnection and separation from the flow of life, so we can come home. All our current issues are a symptom of disconnection. So restoring connection is the healing of our times.

The Holy Longing

Tell a wise person or else keep silent
for those who do not understand will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm waters of the love nights
where you were begotten, where you have begotten
a strange feeling creeps over you
as you watch the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness
and a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upwards.

Distance does not make you falter,
now, arriving in magic, flying
and finally insane for the light
you are the butterfly, and you are gone.
And so long as you have not experienced this: to die and so to grow
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

Johann von Wolfgang Goethe,
Translated by Robert Bly and David Whyte

Join us on the Sophianic Path -The Biomancy 12 month Diploma Starts May 1st

Registration Details Here

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

Audio Version Available For Listening Above

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As we enter the cusp of a new world story, a new way of magic is emerging with it …

Our body is made of magic, as is the natural world we live in. Magic is our essence, it is our birthright, it is our very nature. Yet, we have been trained to believe that it is not real.

Biomancy is the art and science of understanding real living magic. The practical application and embodiment of our own biological potential, in harmonious connection with the living earth and cosmos. It is a continuation of the stream of ancestral knowledge, now perilously forgotten, that once stood at the front and center of every culture on this planet, where physics and metaphysics, science and magic, the practical and mystical were known to be equally real.

By magic, I do not mean something fantastical, something outside the normal order of nature. I mean something that is extraordinarily natural and real. Something that has already been conclusively proven by science, and has been known for thousands of years by indigenous and traditional cultures, but that our mainstream consensus-generating institutions stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. Our understanding of nature needs to shift now to embrace this magical reality.

Like many people, I did not start out fully believing in the magical nature of reality. It was as if I had two different states of awareness living inside my brain, a magician who loved the world of metaphysics and a critic who would roll his eyes in disbelief. In my deepest essence I knew this magic was real, but my medically-trained mind, my scientifically-trained mind – my “inner skeptic” – did it’s best to deny it. I needed concrete proof, to see it with my own eyes, not just read about it in second-hand accounts. And that opportunity would come soon enough.

Our body is made of magic, with incredible powers of regenerative healing and intuitive wisdom.

One of my first direct encounters with our astounding bio-magical potential was working with three women with severe metastatic cancer as a medical resident. Two were considered “terminal” cases. They had failed surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy – everything conventional medicine had to offer. The cancer had already spread to their brain, bones and spinal cord. Multiple CT scans, MRI scans, bloodwork, and thick medical case records attested to the dire reality of their situation, predicting a life expectancy in months, not years. Yet, over a few months they became 100% cancer free in a way that could not be directly attributed to any conventional or alternative therapies. What had happened? What was this magic? Interestingly, I presented their cases to the entire residency program, but it was as if most of the young doctors could not even see how remarkable this was! They had been carefully trained that this was not possible, so they couldn’t even see it. Or, they didn’t want to see it.

The third situation was even more stunning, because I actually witnessed a cancer “melting away” in front of my eyes. This woman had metastatic breast cancer, and I was supervising her use of hyperbaric oxygen. After stepping out of the oxygen chamber, she said “Doc, I feel hot!” Her skin had turned beet-red all over, like the worst hot flash you could imagine. I couldn’t explain what was happening, so I monitored her over the rest of the afternoon, but aside from feeling hot and a bit flustered she was fine.

She called the office the next morning and said a number of small skin tags, warts and the like had simply “fallen off” overnight, that something very unusual was happening. I asked her to have another ultrasound of her breast, and the radiologist could not find the 8 cm tumor that had been there the month before. The radiologist was so stunned on hearing the initial report, that he pushed the tech aside and did the scan himself before agreeing. Her immune system had somehow “turned on” in front of my eyes, and recognized the cancerous cells in her body. Twenty-four hours later she was cancer free, and stayed that way for as long as I knew her.

Of course, it’s easy to assume that it was the oxygen treatment that had “done” this magical healing, but that was not the case. A certain number of people experience spontaneous healings “as if by magic” whether they are receiving conventional therapies or alternative ones. Equally, many people do not heal no matter what they try, even with supposed cures that have worked for other people.

I knew that I had seen not just miracles, but real magic, natural magic, a magic that lived inside our bodies, inside the earth, and inside the complex and brilliant energy structure of our cosmos. Magic was real, as healing was real – but it did not come from the outside as a cure or a fix. It came from inside us, from the magical quantum energy, the dark matter field that weaves together our universe, based on laws of resonance, frequency, harmonic structures and feelings.

Witnessing these bio-magical healings catalyzed my deeper journey into the practice of alchemy, to seek to understand these mysterious realms.

I began to ask the fundamental questions:

What is this magic? What does it ask of us?

All living systems are entangled. Magic is rooted in relationship, connection and communication.

Biomantic (biological and ecological) magic is based on our fundamental interconnection with all of life, and at its root, a shared connection with the unified field or quantum field or akashic field. Quantum physics proves that at the nano level, reality is an Alice-in-Wonderland world: particles can communicate instantly across space and time, faster than the speed of light; particles can “jump timelines”, communicating into the future and the past; they can pass through walls (quantum tunneling); they can “telepathically” share information over distances (quantum teleportation); and they can affect events that have already taken place in the past. The list goes on and on. Leading edge science is even unravelling the mystery of aging.

The quantum world is magical, and we are made of this. The truth is that our human biology, and the biology of our living planet, is based in quantum processes. In other words, we have a quantum biology. The science that underpins this new understanding is rapidly emerging: human vision depends on quantum phenomena; biological energy generation in our cells (in mitochondria), as well as photosynthesis in plants, rely on quantum mechanisms; the shape, structure and function of every protein in the human body is determined by quantum physics. It is also likely that the very conception of human life – from fertilization of the egg, to implantation onto the womb lining, to the morphogenetic fields that guide the formation of the new being – relies on these “magical” quantum processes.

Our bodies work not just by biochemistry, but by magic. Or, more accurately, biomagic.

Biomancy is a worldview and practicum that embraces this knowledge, and sees through quantum eyes. This new (and at the same time ancient) way of looking at the world, at ourselves and our place on the earth is more important now than ever. We must understand the true power of our own biology, so that we can open into a deeper communion with the planet we live upon, and reconnect in a deeply felt and lived way. When we “become biomantic” we enter a reality where we feel in our blood and bones that our future together is entangled, and that the intelligence of earth is leading the way. If we are willing to listen to this deep wisdom and guidance that is being transmitted from the vast intelligences we live within – body, earth, cosmos – then we become oracles for the future.

I invite you to take a moment now, to pause, breathe into your body and feel that vibrating hum of energy that is calling to you, from deep inside of you.

It is time to trust that voice.

The Biomancy Diploma

A 12 Month Biromantic Apprenticeship Starts May 1st

Registration Details Here

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

Audio Version Available For Listening Above

Subscribe now

Standing by the cold, tumbling waters of our local Appalachian river, offering my morning prayers and praise to her life-giving flow, my memory drifts back to a time in Bali nearly three decades ago now, when I lived and studied with a traditional Balinese high priest, known as the last great poet-priest of Bali, one of the last of his kind. That experience was my first embodied glimpse into the world of biomancy, a magical co-relating with Mother Earth and her elements.

The scene is still etched in my mind: the seventy-year-old priest, in his ornamented white sarong, praying softly over the water and gently laying flower offerings into the bay next to me, watching them slowly drift away with the tide. In that moment it was as if time had dilated and softened, the vivid reds, pinks, yellows seemed to float on the surface of the water, reminding me of the way scientists describe stars floating on the currents and eddies of interstellar space.

A warm, humid breeze played on my face, and I felt a sudden quickening of radical aliveness course through my body. The soles of my bare feet were praying into the moist sand at water’s edge, and the Earth was responding to my invitation, charging me with ancient energy from her depths. The elderly poet-priest next to me possessed rich brown eyes that spoke of kindness and mystery. His soft hands scattered the last bit of the flower offering to the water, the breeze taking the final words of his prayers and diffusing them across the world. He knew that I, a curious young man eager to know the secrets of the universe, would have liked him to give me a full explanation of what just happened. Instead, his eyes twinkled with a joyful smile, and he offered me a few riddling words that made no sense to my logical mind. He knew better than I did, that there are some moments of magic in life that shouldn’t be put into words.

I was twenty years old at the time, taking a semester away from a rigorous biochemistry research degree. Against the advice of my career guidance mentors, I had decided to spend time in Bali on independent study, living and learning with the priest Ida Pedanda Ketut Sideman and his family. As part of my studies, I wrote an eighty-page thesis on the spiritual transmission I received from him, titled "Jubilant and Free from Doubt". The irony of that was not lost on me a few years later, when, after deciding to pursue a career in medicine, I experienced profound clinical depression that drained all the magic out of life, as I experienced the depths of doubt and despair, but which led me to my healing and awakening journey.

Looking back, I can see that the Balinese priest and the beautiful, biomantic traditional culture that he was a part of, along with the warmth and connection I experienced in his temple and family home, was my archetypal experience of the magical mentor. He was a real-life Yoda, who gave me a glimpse behind the curtain of magic that sustained me on the long and difficult road that would follow. Often, we are gifted with glimpses of awakening to inspire us.

Growing up, my church was the forest. I would spend hours lost in the green magic of nature. I also read many books on the superpowers of yogis, and if I wasn't sitting in the woods writing poetry, you might have found me trying to bend a spoon with just the power of my mind. I also devotedly practiced meditation for hours.

"Like many of you reading this, as I look back I realize that it was not I who had chosen the magical path, but the magical path that had chosen me."

Where other people around me seemed to dream of material success, big houses, expensive cars, security in their old age, I dreamed of awakening the magical potential in my own body and living out the mythic states of being and alchemical journeys of the magicians, wizards, yogis, saints, monks, and all the people across history who lived on the fringes of society in order to experience a deeper beauty and mystery, and to awaken their deep soul potential.

And maybe this is why, at age twenty-three, the night before medical school began, a profound sense of doom washed over me as I lay in bed in the middle of the night. By society's standards I was doing the right thing and choosing the right path, but the magical part of my soul was flashing warning lights. In the end, I embraced the decision because I knew part of my destiny was to learn about the path of healing, and, more importantly, to heal myself along the way.

The first day of med school was difficult. I instantly felt the lack of resonance with those around me. At the time I had long blond hair colorfully dyed with streaks of bright green, wearing wild and brightly colored clothes, marking me out as a rebel. A bit later, a chief resident in OB-GYN had the pleasure of telling me that for my own good he would offer me the choice of cutting my hair short, or he would give me a failing mark for the rotation and I wouldn’t graduate.

From the get-go I was more interested in alternative therapies. In particular I wanted to explore how consciousness, what I now call bio-magic, could heal people at a deeper level and in a more graceful way. I understood that pharmaceuticals could be a powerful healing tool, especially in emergencies, but certainly not the only option and not without serious potential risks. The gap between my reality and the reality of the medical culture was highlighted one Sunday afternoon when a friend and fellow medical student told me how he had successfully helped a woman with psychosis fall asleep without medications. She was huddled on her bed one night, clutching her knees to her chest, terrified of all the snakes that appeared to be on the floor around the bed. My friend was told to give her a tranquilizer. Instead, he suggested that perhaps they were friendly snakes, here to help and protect her. That made intuitive sense to her, and relieved of the terror, she had a wonderful night’s sleep.

“Incredible,” I thought. I saw how the snakes were a primal archetypal symbol that had emerged from her subconscious at this time of crisis in her life, and that re-storying her relationship to them was a far more powerful method of regulating her nervous system than anti-psychotic meds. But my friend was failed as a punishment, and forced to repeat a semester of medical school for the sin of using symbolic magic rather than the sanctioned pharmacologic drugs.

This world of medicine stood against the idea of magic, and by my third year of med school, I had dropped into a profound clinical depression. The memories of the Balinese priest’s prayers on the wind and the effervescent magic that infused all of life were gone. Instead, I was being crushed under the weight of a huge mechanical system that denied my own magical soul.

One night a few weeks later I simply could not fall asleep. My sense of despair and anxiety had heightened to the point that I knew I needed help—I couldn't heal this alone. So, naturally, I turned to the medical system I was studying to see what they had to offer me. First, I saw a family doctor who gave me an anti-depressant called venlafaxine (Effexor), but it made me even more anxious. I then went to a psychiatrist who gave me a different anti-depressant called paroxetine (Paxil). After six months, not only had it not helped the depression, it made me feel profoundly dissociated, it crushed any sense of libido or vitality and it caused irregular heart rhythms. Next, I saw a psychiatrist who specialized in psychoanalysis, but he could in no way create the kind of container I needed to heal. Our conversations went nowhere.

It was a wake-up call. I realized that the profession I was studying had none of the tools I needed to heal, and actively discouraged and shamed me for seeking alternative therapies outside their system. I made the monumental decision that I could not carry on in medical school and I needed to drop out. The true healing medicine that I needed lay elsewhere.

That night, I went home to my housemates full of fear and anxiety about my decision. They were integrated, streetwise young men, studying business, and I confessed to them I was quitting. They sat on the couch with me and listened with a warmth and presence that my psychiatrist had not been able to muster. After we had spoken about it in depth, one of the guys looked me directly in the eyes and asked, "Are you sure you want to do this?" I hesitated for a moment, but then a deep knowing rushed up into my body. It was as if those prayers on the wind spoken by the Balinese priest had only just reached me. "Yes," I replied, "I need to do this."

A moment later he stood up, popped quickly into his room and brought back a copy of a spiritual book he treasured. I opened it, and the first words I saw were "go forth spiritual warrior, trust your instincts that guide you on this spiritual path." As I read, tears started to stream down my face; it was the confirmation I needed. The other young man put a hand on my shoulder and handed me a DVD of a movie I had not yet watched—The Matrix. I spent the afternoon watching the movie, which blew my mind, with its story of unplugging from a mechanical and false reality to reclaim our primordial biological inheritance. I was ready.

I then called the dean of the med school, and later my parents, to break the difficult news.

A few weeks later I was sitting in a cafe in suburban Washington, DC, a young man adrift from the world, with no place of belonging, three years of study and an enormous financial investment down the drain, my parents out of their heads upset with my decision. I was still feeling depressed, and had no useful job skills to support myself. Sipping on a tea, I reached over to a free New Age healing magazine, the kind of thing considered forbidden contraband in medical school. I casually flicked through it, until my hand rested on a page, and my attention dialed in. It was a moment of destiny. There was a small ad for a healing modality called Core Energetics, created by Dr. John Pierrakos, a psychiatrist and protégé of the pioneering body-psychotherapist Dr. Wilhelm Reich, friend and colleague of the well-known psychiatrist Carl Jung. The ad read “Do you want to feel radically alive?” “Yes!”, I actually said out loud.

That night I called the number in the ad, and entered the world of somatic, body-centered healing. Within a few weeks of starting a powerful daily breathwork practice, I experienced more healing than in a year with mainstream doctors. The depression lifted, never to return, and a whole new world opened up to me, that I would now call body magic. I began a multi-year professional training course in alchemical bioenergetics, supporting myself with an organic home-cleaning business. A year later my Core Energetics mentor persuaded me to return to med school, saying he had a gut feeling it would be important to my journey.

And, I did return, but this time on my own terms—knowing through first-hand experience that there existed powerfully effective bio-magical healing modalities outside the scope of conventional medicine. And, that I no longer needed my professors or the other students to approve of me. I just needed to graduate, get my degree, and follow my healing dreams.

It turned out that with this renewed vision and perspective, I could also appreciate how valuable it was to learn the anatomy and physiology, to master the state-of-the-art diagnostics, to hone my skills at research (I spent two years doing research at the National Institutes of Health in mother-child attachment), and to have the invaluable experience of working hands-on with many thousands of patients. It was just that the modern institution of medicine, the “system”, was difficult, not the age-old profession of healing. I went on to complete a family medicine residency. Amongst other highlights were assisting-attending 150 live births, and working as the sole doctor covering emergency rooms, intensive care units (ICU’s) and internal medicine wards in rural California hospitals. My training was firmly grounded in the best of conventional medicine. Meanwhile I was building a successful private practice in leading-edge integrative and “soul medicine” that would become my full-time career for a number of years.

And, in those years my healing practice flourished. People flew in by helicopter and plane from distant states to see me. I was booked out for several months in advance. I traveled the world learning the latest regenerative technologies in combination with bioenergetics and emotional-symbolic healing. All was on track, or so I thought. But then in the midst of my hyper-busy schedule, flying home from a conference one day I heard a clear voice, as if announced through the PA system of the plane, that I needed to leave that practice and seek a new dimension of magic, or else I would die. I turned to the person beside me to ask if the captain had made an announcement. No, it was my inner voice, speaking loud enough to finally get my attention.

What life wanted of me was my next level of magical initiation and awakening, to discover a new (and ancient) vision of healing and connection that my soul was longing for, which would heal and awaken me at a deeper level than anything I had yet experienced.

In the years that followed, I began a deep apprenticeship in the earth-centric, “feminine” mysteries, researching and co-writing, with my wife Seren, two books on the global traditions of earth and feminine-based healing and awakening once practiced by every Elder culture around the world. I came to realize that my trauma, and our collective trauma (because we are all traumatized at some level), did not originate from where our culture teaches us to look.

Yes, many of us have had difficult childhood experiences, and some people have had it extremely so. And we must tend to that. Others have experienced the trauma of systematic ethnic and racial biases, which begin to get closer to the roots of the issue, and we must tend to that as well. But, all modern humans are suffering from a profound bio-magical and eco-magical disconnection. Our modern cosmologies, our worldviews and systems of healing and awakening have lost contact with our deep interconnection with natural world, and with the magic of our bodies and cosmos that was once so obvious to our ancestors. This absence is so much a part of the fabric of modern life that we must take a step back to even perceive how adrift we are.

We are cosmological beings, children of the stars, the sun, moon, the mysteries of the galactic center that birthed our world. We are children of the Earth Mother who gave us our body and who guides us, and we are younger siblings of the Plant Ancestors who feed and nourish us with so much more than calories and nutrients. The Story we live inside grows us at a foundational level, shaping us into the people, families, communities, collective we become.

I knew deep down that the medicine we needed most was a re-genesis of our Story, to inhabit an alchemical cosmovision that could guide us into our truest potential, and also educate us on the magical realities of our bodies, and the multi-dimensional ecologies we live within.

Out of this knowing emerged Biomancy, as the culmination of thirty years of study and healing, along with my own personal awakening journey and communion with the more-than-human world.

I would like to open the door for you, into a new world that is waiting for you to step inside.

The Biomancy Diploma

A 12 Month Biomantic Apprenticeship Starts May 1st

Registration Details Here

Biomantic Healing: A New Lens on Trauma

Acknowledging my own trauma was my entry point into the alchemical journey of awakening. And, that is how many of us arrived here—at some time in our life the pain was great enough that we started looking for answers. Or, it was the spontaneous upwelling of our magical gifts or spiritual awareness, labeled as “crazy” by our family and culture. Or, a bit of both.

As children or young adults, we have a bone-deep knowing that something in the “grown-up world” is not quite right. Some vital essence has been lost, something as important to us as the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. It can be hard to see, but we know it by the symptoms. Under the surface we carry a deep grief and sadness. Or, we might not have full and easy access to our feelings. Or, intimate relationships are difficult. Or, it might be hard to feel fully grounded, relaxed, open and connected to our body, our joy, our self-worth and value. Or, our nervous system is stressed and overwhelmed, and our health suffering. Or, we may be well aware of our magical gifts, but fear being judged and ostracized for them.

From a biomantic perspective, as well as a medical one, these are all symptoms of an underlying trauma, but when we seek help in the modern western system, we only receive partial answers to a deeply complex situation. It is because the entire framework is deficient. To get the healing we are looking for, we need to open up a new bio-magical story of how the world really works. This is the deepest medicine, the deepest magic. When we are able to perceive this, our path of healing also becomes a journey of biomantic awakening

A Biomantic Approach to Healing Trauma

When people speak of “trauma” these days, they are often referring to what is called PTSD—post traumatic stress disorder— in the professional community, or complex-PTSD. What that means is that an event or set of events that happened in the past caused dysregulation of physiology and biology that is still ongoing in the present day. The trauma state lives on in our bodies, long after the event is over. Naturally, we all experience loss or shock at times, and our bodies and psyches usually return back to a state of equilibrium afterwards. But, sometimes we get stuck, and the bad feelings continue to loop.

This issue is not confined to the nervous system, the same can happen throughout our body. A parallel process happens in chronic fatigue, as shown in a 2016 paper published in the Proceeedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a former colleague of mine.¹ In chronic fatigue our mitochondria, which are normally resilient to stress, go into a state of hibernation or dormancy due to an overwhelming stress that they cannot cope with and cannot bounce back from on their own. In other words, it is like a PTSD of the mitochondria. Our mitochondria get stuck—there is a failure to regulate and create coherence.

Both of these conditions are increasingly common in our modern world that is more and more traumatizing as we become more disconnected from the sources of inspiration and regeneration that our ancestors relied upon.

In the world of trauma healing, it is now recognized that what heals the dysregulation of our brains and autonomic nervous systems is, of course, neural “regulation”. Therapies and treatments that improve autonomic nervous system regulation are now the holy grail of PTSD therapy. This happens through strengthening the vagus nerve and parasympathetic nervous tone, which is easily measured, and that puts us into relaxed states where we can regenerate and heal. And our body is designed to enter these natural regenerative healing states.

We can also regulate ourselves with the Earth itself, and the plants, trees, elements, and on a deeper level we can regulate by entering dreaming states of magical coherence, which are facilitated by body magic, plant magic and eco magic, to name a few.

The Vision of Biomancy

Biomancy offers a new vision for this healing and re-weaving process, which places us in the context of our entwined body magic and ecological magic and the astro-magic of the cosmos. We are a continuum of interconnections rather than isolated separate beings. And the nature of this entangled reality of being is magical not modernist mechanical.

But let’s first take a brief tour of the evolution of trauma healing in modern times.

Chemical imbalance – The first stage for many people in their healing journey is when a doctor tells you that your ongoing trauma state is caused a chemical imbalance in your brain, and offers you pharmaceuticals to shift your neurotransmitters. For some people experiencing acute symptoms, this can be helpful in the short term, but it rarely works in the long run, and can causes adverse withdrawal and medication effects.

Psychology / talk therapy – The next stage for many people is “talk therapy”, mentally exploring and speaking about the challenging dynamics and behaviors around the trauma. This is an important key. Making conscious and speaking about the issues is a powerful step in the healing. The target of this method is the cortical “front brain”, the thinking and problem-solving mind. When you “hit the right piece” it moves energy and triggers emotional release, but despite understanding more about the trauma, symptoms often persist in the body and nervous system, and we can get stuck talking about the same events for years if we are not aware of the bigger picture.

Emotional feeling/releasing – This is the idea of “when you feel it, you heal it”. Feeling and allowing your emotions is helpful, especially if they have been repressed or “stuffed down”. When an emotion releases, often with tears or deep feelings, it can diminish the intensity of the charge around the trauma, and we can at times experience a huge shift. This works directly with the “limbic” brain centers, including the amygdala. But the trauma feelings often come back even after an emotional release. We can get stuck looping in the same feelings for years—if we keep focusing on the nature of the pain itself, it is difficult to heal.

Somatic healing – Now we are moving deeper. Pioneers like Wilhelm Reich began to understand that trauma is stored in the body, and is visible in our postures and body language. Working with the body can allow powerful energy movements, integration, release and insight, often beyond words or the logical mind. This opens the door to somatic magic, where the body is allowed to heal itself, with its own innate wisdom. But this is only one piece of a greater tapestry of reconnection to explore, as the layers of the body and psyche are a complex ecosystem.

Bioenergetic / Movement – An extension of the somatic work developed by Reich, and also seen in traditional healing systems, working with breath and movement can facilitate body energy shifts beyond talking or exploring rational cause-effect, and can enter quantum realms.

"Entheogens also function at this level, revealing non-local, multidimensional perspectives. This, like the somatic therapies, works at the level of the ancient brain centers, including the cerebellum and back brain."

Birth and prenatal trauma & relational templates – Trauma patterns are powerfully imprinted into our psyche during our time in the womb and birth. In Biomancy, we work directly with rebirth and re-templating our time in the womb, in the tradition of the Mystery Schools of old, where this was a center-piece of the healing and awakening journey, to re-install primordial energy blueprints that should have been activated and embodied in our time in the womb.

Ancestral layers (epigenetics) – At some point we realize that “our” trauma is not our own. We have inherited patterns from our parents, and their parents before them. Transgenerational trauma is real, and addressing this issue is a powerful complement. In Biomancy, we work with ancestral and lineage journeys, to remember and re-imprint the gifts of our past and future lineages. But once we realize how immense our ancestral trauma baggage is, surely we can’t be expected to feel and move it all through this one human body. So, where do we go next?

What’s New in Biomancy

In Biomancy the focus is on awakening, repairing and regenerating our original templates of creation, pre-existent in the universal birth story, that live on inside our cells and quantum biofield. Everything in existence is formed by a pattern. We are biologically coded for patterns of coherence, wired for multidimensional connection, fully equipped for stem cell, epigenetic and mitochondrial awakening, and embodied psychic repair.

We instinctively talk about "trauma patterns" reflecting this deeper knowing that our suffering is happening at a primordial root level, as if our intuition is pointing it out to us.

Eventually, this path opens us like a flower into awakening and reclaiming our evolutionary templates. Like the universe itself, we are time-coded for evolutionary surges. Trauma healing can expand out into the power of a magical cosmology, where we remember how our innate body alchemy can help us achieve precognition, oracular consciousness, body superpowers of healing and vitality, non-ordinary states of consciousness and powers of manifestation. These psychic and healing gifts are all scientifically validated, and the coherent states of consciousness marked by unique brainwave patterns measurable on EEG, or in functional MRI scans.

We also reconnect with the magical dimension of Earth, remembering that she is more than just food or shelter for us, more than just a mother, she is also a magician. With a massive amount of flowing liquid crystal at her center in an electrically-charged, quantumly-activated state, the Earth is functioning as an extraordinary quantum supercomputer. All computer technology operates through the crystalline magic of silicon mined from the earth, so imagine what kind of visionary power the whole of the Earth is generating and transmitting if we plug into it?

As modern people, we currently exist in a trauma-inducing worldview. The dominant cosmology is one of disconnection: scientific materialism, that tells us that the world is only mechanical and material, there is no spirit or magic. No love or mystery. There is no meaning, or greater unfolding purpose to our lives. There is no deep and magical field of connection that unites us all. Even our consciousness is an illusion, an “epiphenomenon” of the machine-like functioning of our brain. To think otherwise is labeled as childlike at best, and “dangerous New Age anti-science thinking” at worst. But the veil of materialism is flimsy. No one really believes it. It is knocked down in one moment of deep dreaming, in one powerful imaginal journey, or with a few psilocybin mushrooms—the curtain is pulled back to see a greater and more magical reality. Psychedelics are now scientifically proven to heal trauma as powerfully as some officially sanctioned treatments. Only the remembrance of our true magic can really heal us.

Now, more than ever, we see the magnitude of our personal, ancestral and collective trauma biology, and how it has been replicated in our relationships with others, including our bodies and the body of earth.

"And paradoxically, as we feel into this overwhelming truth, we are also sensing somewhere deep inside us a new dream awakening from within our primal core."

Traditional models of trauma healing are helpful and important. At certain times we have to talk, to feel, to cry, to move all the energy and emotion that has been stuck inside us. But we need more. This cumulative memory of holographic trauma is lodged in our foundational templates, in patterns and structures that define who we are at a quantum energy level. Biomantic healing and awakening works on this structural template level from many angles, to bring us back into resonance with life itself, and to reweave and restore our original templates, so we can expand into that felt sense of wellbeing, creative magic, and evolutionary potential that is our destiny.

We are all living inside an incredible story, and a story is also a pattern – a template.

We can re-narrate and re-template how we live and rebirth our magic here on earth.

Notes:

1. Naviaux RK, et al. "Metabolic features of chronic fatigue syndrome." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2016 Sep 13;113(37):E5472-80. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1607571113

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Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

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I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.

Biomancy Vision - My Year Out of Time

Biomancy came through in what I call my “Year Out of Time” in 2019 - when I left man-made time for an organic immersion, as a crystallization of my 30 years working in the fields of healing, medicine, eco-spirituality and leadership.

There is nothing to connect you to earth like bringing a child into the world….

For an entire year I did not have a website, I was not on social media, I did not travel anywhere by airplane. I localized, I ancestralized, I rooted. Earth reclaimed me.

Time slowed down, and I entered the “organic time” of Gaian magic.

For years I had been slowly working to regenerate the soil in our garden, and in this year of magic I spent every day barefoot, with the elements, under the sunlight, my hands in the soil, surrounded by plants, growing my own food, and taking pilgrimages to cold plunge in the river.

It was life-changing. I dropped out of man-made time and into the field of Green Magic, an immersive ecological consciousness. I felt myself transforming into the “Green Man” and the archetypal energy of the Gardener that collaborates with the magic of the earth to grow new nourishment and new realities. This shift was brought on by the spirit of our gestating daughter, who we conceived in February of 2019.

I was humbled and touched by the miracle of pregnancy. I planted a flower garden for Seren that bloomed in the height of her second trimester. An old peach tree flowered and fruited for the first time in seven years as if in sympathetic magic.

I was in awe of how Seren received dreams from her body that told her what she needed to eat. In the dreamtime, matriarchs from her childhood came offering a cup of hot chocolate, or stood smiling in front of shops with butchered meat, guiding her to the nutrition her body and our daughter needed in different moments.

I spent my days listening and talking to the plants and trees on the land. Dandelion, nettle, oak, reishi, mugwort and many other “wild ones” taught me the beauty of the biomantic art of “plant eucharists”, where we open to quantumly entangle with the living spirit of the plant as we ingest it into our body. Mother Amanita also called, as our daughter, still nestled in the womb, reminded us that beyond fairytales there existed a living lineage and tradition waiting and wanting to be re-discovered. A path of Plant Mediumship, courtship and relational magic were emerging.

The essence of our daughter’s (and Earth’s) message for me was to begin distilling my 30 years study and practice of healing, science, alchemy, nature wilding, magic and mystery teachings into an integrated and unified world of eco-magical education and initiatory experiences for future generations to participate in—in essence, she wanted us to build her a real-life “Green” Hogwarts, to help birth a new paradigm of wisdom.

Around that same time, I had a “big dream”, a prophetic dream that moved me to my core, the kind that you can feel in your body is 100% true. In it I witnessed children of the future practicing a collaborative magic together in pairs, facing each other with synchronized hand movements, smiling and laughing the whole time. They were light-heartedly playing games with what we might call “yogic siddhis”, bending space and time with ease. Meanwhile, the forest, trees and grasses were overgrowing the old concrete buildings of New York, dissolving the city back to green.

This dream became a visionary bridge into the strange world of 2020, where once more, I was wedded to the land, to the seasons, to the slow turning of day and night, guided by birdsong and calendars of flowers, “locked down” from the modern world, this time holding my beautiful baby daughter, meeting the world with her wide eyes. And then, as if someone pushed “go” man-made time started again, faster than ever.

From this alchemy emerged a new word, it came to us from the Dreaming of Gaia….BIOMANCY – the oracular magic of life, the voice of of earth, of creation.

“Bio means "life" or "the living organic world" in old Greek, and mantic means "inspired, oracular, magical, divination" - it refers to wisdom that is received from a deity or divine source. Biomancy is the wisdom received from the Voice of Earth.

Many cultures hold Earth and the intelligence of life as sacred. So in aspects it resonates with ideas from ancient wisdom such as animism, paganism, witchcraft, shamanism, mysticism, yoga, but it is also fundamentally different. It liberates us from the past, whilst weaving the essential thread into the future, with new energy, and new vision.

We called this essence of Biomancy “Rooting into the Future” and “Restoring Connection”. It is the path of Eco-Somatics -remembering we are a continuum.

It is beyond religion or spirituality, it is located in biology, ecology, cosmology, and the very real and very magic pathways of our physical body and earth mother, as a bio-magical ecosystem. It weaves ancient wisdom with modern science.

I knew that we needed to remember our Ancestral Alchemy again, not just healing the pain points, but redeeming the treasures, the legacy, the gifts we inherit that live inside us, waiting for us to say YES to their magic. This ancient wisdom wanted to be reborn for modern times, to be taught in modern magic schools, where we could celebrate and honor the past, without identifying with all the labels that disguise how unified we are.

It was time for a visionary merging of the feminine worlds of intuition, instinct, deep body gnosis with the masculine perspective of science, practice and technique.

Our somatic healing cannot be separated from our ecological healing, or coming into balance with the whole. We are eco-somatic being s to our core, fully co-joined.

Our bodies and our lives are not operating in isolation – we are relational beings who are entwined into a magical, interdependent world.

This is the spirit of Biomancy University. It is seeded to us by the children of the future, and it’s our sacred task to prepare the way for them. What they achieve with their magic will boggle our minds, but we must create the container that holds them.

Biomancy is for those of you who feel this new vision in your bones, in your dreams, in your heart. Who feel estranged from the modern healing modality of mainstream medicine, and even alternative spirituality and modern trauma healing at times. It’s as if the future is whispering us back onto the green paths of life. You feel it, and it can be hard to explain and articulate your intuition and knowing. Biomancy is here to give you words, structure, support, tools, trust.

The most consistent feedback we have received is that Biomancy University and the work is a total “homecoming” for people. It’s such a relief.

In all my many studies and travels, with an education that has cost over half a million dollars and has taken me to the highest echelons of medicine and healing, the magic of earth has always called me back down, back home, back into the body, back into connection and relationship. There is a kinship of reconnection calling us. In magic it is called vinculum – the agent that binds or ties us together. We can also simply call it love. But this love is vast, diverse, complex as it embodies into form, and it is time we discover the magic inside our bodies and our ecology.

One of the defining arts that we work with in Biomancy University is the alchemy of Templates – primordial, coherent, harmonic structures that have form, sound, frequency, signature personality, and transmit a blueprint that the quantum realm converts into the living realities that form our world.

A new Template is emerging right now – can you feel it?

For those of you who are called, it is time to align with this new template, this new story, this new magic.

We need to learn the non-human languages, and how to speak in sunlight codes, and to give relationship counselling to our organs, to be in reverence to our Mitochondria, as an ancient mother, to meet our DNA not as a junk stream, but as a living library with a vital message for now.

During my magical time of emergence, connecting into this new template that is inviting us to embody and inhabit it, Seren and I discovered a modern magic book we loved, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and listened to the audio books together on quiet nights, as the baby slept.

Sometimes the most real and transformational magic is hidden in story books, fairytales and myths, waiting to be reborn at the right time:

“But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”

“There is nothing else in magic but the wild thought of the bird as it casts itself into the void. There is no creature upon the earth with such potential for magic. Even the least of them may fly straight out of this world and come by chance to the Other Lands. Where does the wind come from that blows upon your face, that fans the pages of your book? Where the harum-scarum magic of small wild creatures meets the magic of Man, where the language of the wind and the rain and the trees can be understood, there we will find the Raven King.”

― Susanna Clarke, quotes from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Visit me at my website www.azrabertrand.com for videos, essays and course details.

Biomancy University - Work With Me:

• Future of Somatics - Instant Access Eco-Somatics Course

• Eco-Somatics 6-Month Practitioner Training starts on Nov. 1st - Enrolling Now

• Eco-Somatic 7-Day Retreat, September 10-17th September, nr Asheville

• Biomancy 6-Month Eco-Spiritual Apprenticeship & 1 Year Diploma, May 1st

• Professional Coaching (contact for info) - for experienced MD’s, ND’s, therapists, energy workers and other healing professionals.

• Join our newsletter HERE (and receive a biomantic meditation as a gift)

• Follow me on Instagram

I also share free Equinox and Solstice gatherings, and periodically offer new, live online courses.