Reindigenizing the Self, Our Life, and Our Mission on Earth

Our ancestors were all indigenous once. Every single one.

I don’t care if you’re French-Corsican-Italian like me, or Danish, or Scottish, or some mixture of migrations you can’t fully trace. Before the empires came, before the Roman roads cut through the forests, before the Inquisition burned the herbalists, before the church swallowed the holy wells and renamed them after saints and hoped everyone would forget what was there before, every line in our blood goes back to people who lived inside the living world, deeply woven to a wild and ancient dark green and mystical thread.

People who knew the names of the plants and the moods of the rivers and the particular way the light falls in a valley in late October, and what that means. People who had ceremonies for grief and songs for praise and an understanding, as natural as breathing, that the Earth is not a stage for human performance but a community of beings we belong to.

And “something” happened.

Something enormous and slow and brutal, stretched across centuries, and by the time it was finished (it’s not really finished), we had forgotten that we ever knew. We had forgotten so completely that the forgetting itself became invisible. And now many walk around with this ache, this spiritual homelessness, this sense that something foundational is missing, no matter how much inner work we do, and we can’t name it because the thing that was taken is also the thing that would give us the language to name what was taken.

Martín Prechtel says every individual in the world, regardless of cultural background or race, has an indigenous soul struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment created by that individual’s mind. I have been sitting with that sentence for years. It is the truest thing I know about why so many of us feel like this “world” is so difficult to be in. Why most certifications don’t reach the real, deeper ache. Why the mission we built still feels a little bit like it’s wearing “someone else’s clothes.”

This essay is a map for finding that indigenous soul inside you.

I wrote a few months ago about belonging out there, in “The Polycrisis Is Testing Our Hearts,” about community, land, and the ethics of returning. I found that this here is the harder essay. The one about belonging in here with something so ancient and so wild it can be terrifying. About what Empire colonized inside us, in our relationship to purpose, to time, to grief, to beauty, to the sacred itself. And about the seven territories of inner reindigenizing I’ve come to recognize through years of sitting with people who arrive carrying the same beautiful, exhausted question.

It comes with a companion guide at the end of this essay, “The Seven Territories: A Map for Reindigenizing the Self,” with journal prompts and small rituals and practices for each territory. Something you can print and keep and work with.

And for those who want to walk this daily, a 21-day embodied practice I'm building slowly, called Becoming the Medicine.

But first, the excavation.