My ancestors called it a mitote.

My ancestors called it a mitote. The chaos of a thousand voices clouding your mind. The chatter of false beliefs, judgements, and fears. We experience it now as an endless onslaught of information and misinformation. I don’t believe the world has been noisier than it is now. So how do we find our center?

I’ve been reflecting on the indigenous aspects of my upbringing.

My mother is native to Mexico and raised me with the teachings of our ancestors, (largely Toltec) passed down through word of mouth and handwritten teachings and practices from abuela to abuela. I grew up praying, practicing ritual, meditating, and connecting to the divine in whatever way I could. I didn’t have an oppressive God as so many who inherit religion do. I had freedom to believe. Freedom to create. Freedom to be.

I’m eternally grateful that I was raised with my spiritual eyes open.

That I wasn’t raised praying to a Creator that punishes.

(No. My God would never. My God teaches, it doesn’t punish.)

I had these ancestral principles as guideposts throughout my life, and I come back to them more and more as I get older.

I feel that as a collective, we’re seriously lacking when it comes to initiations, rites of passage, and preparation to face the wild unknown as it presents itself. Most people have had their roots entirely erased, we have no origin story to turn to, to reflect upon, no wisdom to guide us through these deeply uncertain and confusing times. So today I’d like to impart some of my own generational wisdom upon you. I hope that these teachings serve as little reminders, little nudges to remember your essence and your soul, no matter what.

The Three Keys to Mastery

In my lineage it is believed that there are three keys to mastery:

Intuition, Intention, and Imagination.

Intuition because it is your connection to the Divine. It is how you receive synchronicities and sense where life is trying to lead you.

Intention because your intention reflects the purity of your heart. They say that clean intentions is the most important quality of a warrior.

Imagination, because through imagination we create; our personal reality, our manifestations, our dreams, our visions.

These three keys have been my compass. That, and listening to my own heart as a practice to stay connected to my own essence.

The Cognitive Cost of Convenience

The thing about this new age of misinformation that we’re in (with AI and LLMs) is that when we over-rely on them, we end up stifling our own intuitive hits and imaginative downloads by outsourcing them to an algorithm.

A recent MIT study showed that people who used ChatGPT to write essays had significantly lower neural engagement in the frontal regions of the brain (areas associated with critical thinking, memory, and learning).

The researchers from this study even coined a term called “cognitive debt,” explaining how habitual AI reliance fosters a pattern where users experience weakened independent thinking skills.

The participants who relied on AI in this study reportedly struggled to recall what they’d even written because they outsource their thinking & imagination.

The Real Cost

The real cost, when we hand our intuition over to an algorithm that thinks for us, is that we lose our connection to the Divine.

When AI generates your creative vision for you, you lose your imagination, the very tool with which you create your reality.

The crazy thing is that we’re doing it entirely voluntarily, without realizing the cost. We’re trading our ability to think, intuit, and imagine, for convenience.

I often wonder, what m>y ancestors would think. How they would respond to what’s happening in the world

I find myself coming back again and again to indigenous wisdom. To wanting to be closer to our mother planet. To honoring and learning from the greatest technologies of them all; nature & storytelling.

Last month I found myself in Costa Rica, sitting in circle with an Amazonian Tubú indigenous elder. We were doing mambe (a sacred practice of coca leaf and ash) and as I sat there, I couldn't help but notice that the ancestral way of learning, of educating, of initiating, was in large part through storytelling, ceremony, and initiation.

Not through information overload. Through creative, imaginative storytelling.

So let me remind you that story is how we activate intuition.

Story is how imagination lives and breathes.

Stories are how we remember who we are and where we come from.

Your intuition is not something you can outsource.

Your imagination is not something that an algorithm can generate for you.

Your pure-hearted intentions can only come from within you.

These qualities are your birthright. They are essential aspects of who you are.

And in a world of endless mitote, they are how you find your way back home.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

Let me know if you’d like me to share more lineage wisdom in a future post.

LOVE YA!

- B