Pagan ethics, liberalism, and the return of inherited order
There’s a reason so many of us are looking to the ancient world right now. Much of the West seems unable to explain what it stands for, what holds its people together, or what deserves to be passed down. We’re told we’re free to invent ourselves, yet so many of us are craving ancestry, belonging, and a place within a history that began long before us.
That hunger has drawn me toward Greek and Roman literature and the pre-Christian societies of Europe, where questions of honor, kinship, duty, and the preservation of order carried enormous weight. Those societies had their own failures, but they took seriously things our culture often struggles even to discuss: obligations we don’t choose, loyalty to the people we come from, and responsibility for what survives us.
It’s also what drew me to The Ark, whose creator joins me for this episode. I’ve been following his Substack, YouTube channel, and classical literature course, especially his exploration of what recovering a European pagan worldview would actually require. If we want to restore some order amid the chaos, what would that order rest on—and what would it demand of us?
One of his arguments that particularly caught my attention is that nature itself is amoral. Life includes predation, destruction, growth, and striving toward excellence. But recognizing those forces doesn’t tell us which ones should govern our behavior. If something occurs in nature, does that make it worthy of imitation? What gives us grounds to restrain one impulse and cultivate another?
Homer gives these questions human consequences. In The Ark’s reading, Achilles’ treatment of Hector and his eventual return to custom raise the question of what even the strongest warrior owes another person. Polyphemus’ rejection of Zeus’s laws of hospitality presents a related problem: what happens when someone recognizes no obligation beyond his own power?
This is where “might makes right” becomes an inadequate account of pagan morality. Strength matters, but so does what a person does with it. I wanted to press The Ark on what makes custom, hospitality, and reciprocal obligations binding, especially when someone is powerful enough to disregard them. His shift from a more Nietzschean outlook toward traditionalist paganism makes that question particularly interesting.
Ancestral continuity brings another dimension to this discussion. Understanding ourselves as part of a chain connecting ancestors and descendants challenges the idea that our lives belong entirely to us. It asks us to consider what we have inherited, what deserves preservation, and what our choices leave behind. That also opens up his critique of liberalism and the question of how much modern secular morality retains the Christian assumptions it claims to have outgrown.
There’s a (slight) disagreement I wanted to bring into the conversation, too. The Ark has expressed appreciation for paganized Christianity and the heroic Christ of medieval literature. Yet the Gospel teachings place discipleship above kinship (Luke 14:26), demand the renunciation of possessions (Luke 14:33), and instruct followers to turn the other cheek and love their enemies (Matthew 5:39–44). How does that fit with the ancestral obligations and heroic ethics we’re discussing?
If those heroic elements came from older pagan traditions, why use them to rehabilitate Christianity?
The Ark’s answer brought us back to the Arthurian literature that shaped his worldview in college. For him, those stories are a meaningful part of European history, and their Christian elements don’t erase their value or make them something we can simply discard. I can understand that attachment, even if I don’t share it. As I admitted during our conversation, there’s still plenty of “piss and vinegar” in my attitude toward Christianity after leaving the church, and finding appreciation for anything wrapped in it remains difficult for me. Our different experiences help explain why we approach that inheritance differently, even as we share an interest in recovering older traditions.
I close by asking The Ark which criticism of his worldview he finds hardest to answer, and whether wrestling with it has changed his thinking. I wanted to hear where he sees a serious challenge to his own interpretation of the pagan tradition.
Please listen to the FULL episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments.
On family memory, moral inheritance, and the cost of belonging
This is Part Three of a series that began with a question about participation: what have we lost by becoming spectators to experiences our ancestors once entered with their whole bodies? From there, the question became more personal. Part Two followed my own hunger for belonging through the communities, identities, and belief systems I had tried to make myself at home inside, and eventually toward something I have had to learn the hard way: belonging is not worth very much if I have to disappear in order to keep it.
I ended that essay writing about the ability to remain rooted when someone disagrees with me, to listen without disappearing, and to belong without surrendering conscience. At the time, those words felt like a conclusion drawn from everything I had already lived through.
I did not realize I was about to be tested on them in probably the most intense way possible.
All of this started in January of this year when I ordered an Ancestry DNA kit.
And, of course, after submitting my saliva, I had an absolute panic moment where I immediately regretted handing over my genetic data to who knows what private equity firm that is going to share it with whatever transhumanist agenda is out there.
Too late. The spit was already in the mail.
I also had absolutely no reason to expect the results would rearrange the story I had been told about myself.
My entire life, I understood my ancestry to be largely English, Scottish, and Irish. I grew up surrounded by the visual language that came with it too—green clovers, Irish imagery, fairies, Celtic-looking decorations, all the little symbols that become so ordinary in childhood that you stop noticing they are teaching you something about who you are.
That was simply where I came from. Or at least I thought it was.
So, when the results came back and said 50% Italian, I was absolutely shocked. Flabbergasted. Bewildered. Confused. Quite destabilized.
This meant something much more immediate: the man I had believed was my father could not be my biological father.
The matches made that difficult to deny. I recognized people on my mother’s side, and those relationships appeared exactly where they should.
But the paternal side was something else entirely.
That realization did more than change a percentage on an ancestry report. It made the story of my own origins suddenly unstable. The family line I had assumed was mine biologically wasn’t mine at all. The ancestry I had casually claimed my whole life, the family medical history I had repeated at doctors’ offices, the names and stories I understood as part of my inheritance—half of it had just fallen away in an afternoon.
There had always been a strange story around my conception. In 2016, while drunk, my mother admitted to me that she had felt guilty for all the times she had cheated on my dad while he was in prison. I had grown up hearing some convoluted explanation about being conceived when he was temporarily out because of good behavior, something involving a wedding, maybe a conjugal visit. Honestly, I don’t even know anymore. The timeline never completely made sense, but I never pushed very hard.
My family has always had something of a motto:
The past is the past. Let’s not talk about it.
Well…. DNA apparently did not get that memo.
Suddenly I had questions I had never expected to be asking at this point in my life. Who was my biological father? Who were these Italian people showing up in my matches? What was my actual paternal medical history? Had an entire family existed beside mine this whole time without me knowing it?
And there was another, stranger layer underneath all of that. If ancestry is one of the ways we orient ourselves in the world (through names, stories, land, family memory, inherited symbols) what happens when you discover that half of the map you were given was wrong?
And somewhere underneath the absurdity of that sentence was a much more unsettling question.
Who, then, were my people?
There was something intensely nauseating about reaching my forties and discovering that a foundational fact about my own identity had simply never been true.
My mother, predictably, denied everything at first and acted completely shocked. It took seven months of what I experienced as denial, contradictions, coping, and avoidance before she finally admitted that she had been in a relationship with an Italian man who ran a restaurant called the North Pole. The restaurant just happened to be on the route my mother traveled when she went to visit the man I had believed was my father while he was in prison.
He had gone to prison for dealing cocaine.
I would eventually learn that my newly discovered biological father’s world was also heavily entangled with cocaine.
My mother really knows how to choose them, huh?
The North Pole
Once I finally had his name, a family friend found an entire Facebook group dedicated to him and the North Pole. I started scrolling through years of photographs, stories, memories from old employees, people reminiscing about the restaurant and talking about how much they loved working for him. It sounded like he had built this iconic little world that people genuinely missed. He seemed charismatic and funny and generous. I learned that he died in a car accident in 2010, which meant that by the time I finally discovered who he was, I had already missed any possibility of ever meeting him.
And this is where my imagination started doing something I did not understand at the time.
I started building a family before I actually met one.
There were half-siblings, nieces and nephews, an entire network of people whose DNA overlapped with mine but whose lives had gone on for decades without me. I started thinking, Wow, what if this is it? What if this explains why I have always felt so disconnected from my own family? Maybe I had missed out on this warm, close Italian family I was actually supposed to have. Maybe these were the people who were finally going to understand me. Maybe I would have Christmases I actually looked forward to again. Maybe I would walk into a room full of relatives and experience some strange recognition that had always been missing.
Maybe everything was finally going to make sense.
Well…no. It did not.
Eugenio Zampighi, Happy Family (19th century).
The Family I Invented Before I Met Them
One particularly sad day, when I was feeling incredibly lonely and isolated, I took the gamble and reached out to the woman who managed the Facebook group. I had a suspicion that she was one of my half-sisters.
She responded within about ten minutes.
She told me that she had known about me my entire life. She said she had been waiting and praying to hear from me, and apparently there may even be another half-sister somewhere out there that neither of us knows. Immediately I was getting information that contradicted things my mother had told me, which by that point was hardly surprising.
What did surprise me was how positively she spoke about my mother. She told me how much she had adored her, how happy my mother had made her dad, how she had wanted them to get married. She would have been around fifteen at the time, so I tried to keep in mind that I was hearing the rose-tinted recollection of a teenage girl who had encountered a very specific version of my mother.
Still, it made me feel nauseated.
I have a lifetime of experiences with my mother that bear very little resemblance to the woman being described to me, and I have been estranged from her because of the dysfunction within my family. Sitting there listening to someone speak almost lovingly about her while I was already trying to absorb the fact that she had hidden my biological father from me for forty years felt surreal. But I tried not to immediately judge any of it. Two people can experience the same person very differently. I knew that. I wanted to be open.
Eventually Patrick and I went to meet my half-sister at a river house where she was staying.
When we first arrived, I was impressed. This was a gorgeous property, worth somewhere around two million dollars, and for a moment I was looking around thinking, Wait, is this our family money? Is this her money? What exactly did I just stumble into? I later realized that it belonged to her soon to be ex-husband, but at the time I knew almost nothing about any of these people.
Anyone who knows me also knows that I am hypervigilant as fuck. I walk into a room and notice approximately a thousand things immediately. Body language, tone, smells, identity markers, animals, exits, mess, tension, who seems uncomfortable, who seems too comfortable. I wish I could turn it off, but I cannot.
I had been very communicative about what time we would arrive, so she knew exactly when we were coming. When she opened the door, she looked like she had just gotten out of the pool, wrapped in a towel. Fine. Whatever. It was summer and people swim. But then we spent the next thirty minutes in the kitchen and she kept saying she was going to go change, only to become distracted by another story, then another, then five more.
The house was a disaster. I want to be fair about that because she was going through a divorce and moving out, and people going through a crisis are allowed to have messy houses. The mess by itself was not the issue. It was the totality of everything happening at once. Half-eaten food, trash and cups everywhere. Flies. She was smoking her cigarettes inside. Air conditioning blasting while the windows were open. She was buzzing around the kitchen, constantly adjusting her towel, starting one story and abandoning it halfway through to launch into another. I had brought her flowers and at some point, I found myself wandering around trying to locate something to put them in because she could not stay focused on one thing long enough to deal with them.
I remember being profoundly relieved that my husband had come with me, because I needed another person in the room who could later tell me that I had not imagined how uncomfortable the whole thing felt.
The property itself was one of the nicest places I had been to in a long time. Yet, the energy inside that house was some of the most destabilizing I had experienced in years.
I don’t know what was happening with her psychologically or medically. Patrick wondered afterward whether medication or something else had been involved, and I had my own questions, especially because she later spoke casually about cocaine use. But I cannot diagnose somebody based on spending one afternoon with her and I don’t need to. The observable experience was enough. My nervous system was screaming at me that something was off.
What troubled me even more was how little curiosity I felt coming toward me.
This woman had supposedly known I existed my entire life and had been praying for me to appear. I had just discovered that half of my biological identity was not what I thought it was. I had spent months trying to learn who my father was, discovered he was already dead, and then walked into a house filled with photographs, stories and memories belonging to people whose blood I shared but whose lives I knew absolutely nothing about.
I had an entire fucking life too.
Yet I kept feeling like there was plenty of room for me to absorb her stories, her family history, her understanding of everyone involved, her healing journey, her perspective on my mother and our father, but much less room for me whenever my own interpretation differed from hers.
At one point I tried to offer a different perspective during a conversation and the interaction escalated badly enough that she started yelling and I nearly walked out. Afterward it was brushed away with something along the lines of, That’s just Italians. That’s how we fight.
But I wasn’t raised in this family. I do not have some reservoir of childhood affection that turns being screamed at into charming cultural familiarity. To me, it just felt like being screamed at.
There wasn’t much of an apology or an attempt to understand why the interaction bothered me. That feeling would become important later.
Bittersweet
The most disturbing thing I learned during this period involved our biological father.
I found out that when he was in his thirties, he had sexually exploited a teenage girl. She eventually wrote about the experience in a memoir, and a week or two after meeting my half-sister I got a copy of the book.
I will admit that I skimmed most of it because the author had become a born-again Protestant Christian and there is enough Abrahamic worldview running through the thing to make my eye twitch. But then I reached Chapter Eleven, titled “Bittersweet,” and stopped skimming.
She describes herself at fourteen as a child living with alcoholic parents, receiving very little nurturing or stability at home. My biological father was thirty-four years old, married, and already a father. He entered her world through horses. He helped her ride, bought her things, took her places, fed her, praised her and gave her attention at a time when the adults responsible for her were failing badly.
Then, according to her own account, that relationship became sexual.
Looking back as an adult, she describes recognizing a pattern she could not recognize when she was fourteen: an older man exploiting the vulnerability of a hurting girl. She writes about feeling trapped and confused. She describes being pressured sexually and unable to tell her parents what was happening because her own home was so unstable. At one point she summarizes what remained afterward as “virginity stolen, trust violated.”
That was enough for me.
I remember my half-sister telling me about this and saying, “You know Catholic men, always wanting those virginal women…” I was truly disgusted. I told her how horrific it was, and she said, “Well, we all have good and bad parts in us.” Then came Ram Dass and some New Age copium, as if that could soften what she had just shared with me.
I did not need to spiritualize it. I did not need to search for the hidden blessing. I did not need to tell myself that complicated people contain light and darkness and therefore no moral judgment is ever appropriate. I did not need to forgive a man I had never met simply because half of my DNA came from him.
A thirty-four-year-old man pursuing and sexually exploiting a fourteen-year-old child is abuse.
And that man was my biological father.
This realization was especially disorienting because I had already spent weeks immersed in the Facebook memorial group, where he existed almost entirely through warm collective memory: the funny restaurant owner, the beloved boss, the larger-than-life personality, the guy who made people laugh and created a place they still remembered decades later.
Those memories did not necessarily become lies because I read the memoir.
That is part of what made this harder.
People who do terrible things are rarely terrible every second of every day. A person can be generous to an employee and predatory toward somebody else. He could have made people laugh. He could have been adored by his daughter. He could have created an environment that people genuinely remember with enormous affection.
Human beings are inconvenient like that.
But once I read this woman’s account, another voice entered the family story.
And the prettier memories could no longer be allowed to swallow hers.
That is where I started thinking about memory differently.
A family is partly made out of the stories it agrees to repeat. Certain stories become funny. Certain names become beloved. Certain things are excused, certain things are hidden, and certain things become things “we don’t talk about.” Over time, those repetitions harden into an identity.
I know something about that because I came from a family whose motto was essentially the past is the past.
But the past does not disappear because people become uncomfortable when somebody names it.
Baccio Bandinelli, Laocoön (1520–25)
What My Body Already Knew
There was more information I struggled with during that visit. My half-sister spoke very casually about cocaine and told me that it had been “always snowing at the North Pole,” meaning cocaine was apparently everywhere around the restaurant. I was learning that my biological father had also dealt cocaine, which meant that both men occupying the category of father in my life (the man who raised me and the biological father I had just discovered) had been cocaine dealers.
Again, apparently, my mother had a type.
(Sometimes dark humor is the only way I know how to metabolize information that would otherwise make me want to scream.)
The day after meeting my half-sister, I felt sick. I kept replaying everything. Patrick and I talked about how uncomfortable the visit had been, and he agreed that we should have left much earlier. It seemed like almost every story I had heard contained another piece of information that I wished I had never learned.
Still, I did not want to make a harsh decision too quickly. She was going through a divorce. Finding a biological sibling in middle age was obviously going to be emotionally strange. Maybe I had simply become overloaded. Maybe my hypervigilance was getting ahead of me. Maybe I should give her another chance.
Very shortly after I read the chapter in the memoir, she invited me back to the river house one last time so that I could meet her daughter—my newly discovered niece.
Even though I did not really want to go, I agreed.
And then my body had other plans.
The day before the visit I developed a wicked migraine that continued through the entire day I was supposed to see her. I physically couldn’t endure the long drive and social stimulation.
And staying home gave me something I had not really had since this entire discovery began: enough distance to hear myself think.
As the adrenaline wore off, I had to admit that I did not want this relationship. I did not want to go back to the river house. I did not want birthday parties and photographs and nieces and nephews suddenly being folded into my life because DNA had revealed that technically these people belonged to categories called sister and family.
I did not feel closer. I wanted distance.
Coming to this conclusion hurt because I had wanted this discovery to mean something else entirely. I had let myself imagine that biological family might finally provide some missing form of belonging. Instead, I found myself confronting a question I had already been writing about.
In The Death of the Performed Self, I wrote about transformation as something deeper than simply adopting a new vocabulary or worldview. Real transformation shows up as discernment, self-command, courage, and to stand firmly without requiring everyone around you to reassure you that you are standing in exactly the right place.
Apparently life decided I needed an immediate practical examination.
Because suddenly the thing being offered wasn’t an abstract community or ideology.
It was blood.
Two biological sisters. Nieces and nephews. An Italian lineage. Photographs of a father whose face might contain some clue about mine. An entire family story I had briefly believed could explain why I had spent so much of my life feeling disconnected.
And maintaining access to that fantasy would have required me to begin overriding myself almost immediately.
I would have needed to ignore how uncomfortable I had been. Explain away the yelling. Explain away the instability. Keep reminding myself that she was going through a hard time. Swallow my moral reaction to what I had learned about our father. Keep accepting photos and birthday invitations. Meet the niece. Smile. Try harder. Be open-minded. Do not hurt anybody’s feelings.
Most importantly: do not risk losing belonging.
I know that woman. I know the version of myself who would have done exactly that and called it compassion.
She has existed inside churches, relationships, political communities, spiritual worlds, friendships and my own family. She is very good at learning the correct vocabulary. She can figure out what everyone around her needs her to believe. She can abandon her own perception and call it humility. She can disappear inside belonging and convince herself she has finally been loved.
I have spent years trying to let that performed self die.
Sandro Botticelli, Calumny of Apelles (c. 1495)
When Truth Costs Something
Eventually I sent my half-sister a boundary message.
It took me days to write because I was trying so hard not to be cruel. I told her the experience had been overwhelming and destabilizing. I explained that learning what I had learned about our biological father had deeply disturbed me and that I had struggled with what I perceived as attempts to soften or rationalize his behavior. I told her that I did not want to build a relationship and that I needed distance.
Her response illuminated almost everything my intuition had been trying to tell me since the river house. She sent me nine or ten messages in a flurry.
She told me that she had forgiven our father and framed that forgiveness as part of healing.
Then there was another Ram Dass quote….of fucking course there was a Ram Dass quote.
Her telling me that she had forgiven him would not have bothered me by itself. That is her relationship to her father. She knew him. She loved him. She can make whatever peace with his memory she needs to make. I am not the sovereign authority over her conscience.
But neither is she the sovereign authority over mine.
What bothered me was the way forgiveness became evidence of healing, because suddenly there was an implied hierarchy between us. She had reached the spiritually mature interpretation, while my anger, disgust and refusal to forgive were positioned as something I had yet to work through.
And there it was again: the exact same sensation I had felt in the river house.
I was not merely being offered another way of seeing the situation.
I felt like I was being told which interpretation was the evolved one.
This is why I have become so suspicious of spiritual bypassing. Forgiveness can be meaningful and healing for someone personally, but the word becomes dangerous when it is turned into a moral cudgel. Anger becomes pathology. Disgust becomes evidence that you have not “done the work.” Moral judgment becomes something unenlightened people cling to because they have not yet transcended their ego.
No.
A friend, Torna Braggison, recently wrote about hamingja as a kind of luck or power strengthened through honorable action. One idea from that piece has stayed with me: anger can be a signal that something has crossed a line and needs a response. I don’t think every surge of anger is a flawless instruction. Mine can distort things too. But I also don’t want to treat anger as automatic proof that I am sick, stuck, or failing to heal.
Sometimes something really has violated your moral order. Sometimes disgust is appropriate. Sometimes refusing to forgive someone you never knew is not a wound begging to be healed.
And I absolutely refuse the idea that moral clarity is an illness from which I need to recover.
The conversation escalated after that. I eventually said things harshly. I told her that I had experienced our time together as profoundly unstable, that I had not felt much curiosity from her about my life or what any of this had done to me, and that I felt as though she wanted to control what I was allowed to think, say and feel.
Those words did not arrive serenely after a breathwork session.
I was pissed. I was hurt. I was activated.
Could I have phrased some of it differently once the adrenaline left my body? Absolutely.
But one of the hardest lessons of my life has been learning that regretting the sharpness of a statement does not automatically mean the truth underneath it was wrong.
That distinction matters when you have spent years interpreting every conflict as evidence that you must have failed.
Sometimes a boundary comes out ugly because the gentler versions did not work.
Sometimes your hands shake while you type it.
Sometimes you cry afterward.
Sometimes the truth does not sound enlightened.
The Three Fates, 1558 by Giorgio Ghisi
Ond, Words in the Well, and Blood That Is Not an Oath
This is where Ond has started to become far more than an interesting Heathen concept to me.
Ond is the sacred breath, the vital breath of life. In the Heathen material I have been studying, speech is intimately connected to it because words quite literally ride upon breath. We take something that exists privately within us and breathe it outward into relationship, community and memory.
That idea has been sitting differently with me after this experience.
Truth is very easy when nobody has anything to lose.
Integrity becomes harder when speaking honestly threatens belonging.
It is one thing to sit alone at a desk writing about the importance of remaining rooted. It is another thing to have a newly discovered biological sister standing on the other side of the sentence.
At some point truth has to move from inside the body to outside it.
You have to breathe. Then you have to speak.
There is another Heathen idea I have been thinking about throughout all of this: words placed into the well. Not all words carry equal weight. What we say casually to a stranger is not the same as what we say to family, friends or community. Words spoken within relationships become part of shared memory. They influence reputation, identity, trust, inheritance.
When I think about this now, I cannot stop thinking about that Facebook group.
It was, in its own strange modern form, a well of memory.
Photograph after photograph, story after story, people placing memories of my biological father into a common space. The restaurant everyone loved. The funny boss. The friend. The father. The charismatic guy who made people feel good and created something people missed decades later.
And then I opened a memoir. Another voice entered the well.
A fourteen-year-old girl’s. Her story does not erase everybody else’s.
But neither should their nostalgia erase hers.
That, to me, is where honor becomes different from reputation. Reputation can be built by repeating the most flattering stories. Honor requires making room for what is true even when the truth injures the story we would prefer to preserve.
Torna’s article gave me another way to think about the family part of this. He describes hamingja as something shaped by action and connected outward through family and community, like rings in a web.
“Acting with blatant dishonor is the worst thing you could do to your spiritual self. Not only would you have a lack of spiritual power and potency, it could also take your family generations to rectify your misdeeds causing your descendants to bear your shameful actions through no fault of their own.” —Torna Braggison
What one person does can become part of what the people around them have to carry, and the stories a family repeats help determine what gets passed along. That girl’s account belongs in the web too. So does my choice about whether I help cover it over.
That web also means I cannot simply declare myself separate and walk away untouched. The damage created by dishonorable action is called ohamingja—a negative inheritance that can move through a family and into its descendants. So, I can reject my biological father’s conduct and remain estranged from a mother whose actions I consider deeply dishonorable, but distance does not erase what their choices set in motion. I am still living with consequences I did not choose. The responsibility for what comes next belongs to me. I can live more honorably, tell the truth, keep my word and rebuild my own hamingja rather than passing the same secrecy, chaos and moral cowardice forward.
And this entire experience has made me think about blood differently too.
Blood is not an oath.
DNA can reveal biological relationship, but it cannot manufacture intimacy. It cannot command loyalty. It cannot obligate me to defend somebody I never knew. I share half of my DNA with my biological father, but I do not inherit his degeneracy or his excuses. I do not inherit anyone else’s nostalgia. I do not have to repeat my mother’s secrecy, and I do not inherit my half-sister’s forgiveness.
Biology can tell me where I came from. It cannot decide what I owe.
Kinship, at least in any meaningful sense, still has to be enacted through reciprocity, trust, words, deeds, character and time.
Relationship is something built. Not something detected in saliva.
This may be the greatest gift buried inside what has otherwise been one of the most disturbing years of my life.
For a brief period I really believed discovering my biological family might heal something ancient in me. I imagined the Italian family before I met them. I imagined Christmases with a full house, warmth, a family who had always wanted me, nieces and nephews, people who might somehow recognize me in a way my own family never had.
I am grieving that imagined family now too.
And maybe this is what standing rooted really means—not demanding that reality conform itself to the story I hoped would save me.
When I look backward at the hardest parts of my life now, I can see something I could not see while I was living through them. I know my vulnerabilities better. I know how badly I have wanted belonging. I know how susceptible I have been to charismatic people, authoritative belief systems, communities with one single permitted interpretation, people who speak with such certainty that I begin distrusting my own perception.
I know the seduction of being told, This is what healing looks like.
This is what being good looks like.
This is what being spiritually mature looks like.
This is what a good daughter looks like.
This is what a good Christian looks like.
This is what an enlightened person believes.
I have played that game before. Many times.
And this time, when the same dynamic appeared wearing an entirely different costume, I recognized it.
Not instantly. But sooner. And to me, that is a win.
Standing rooted does not mean I believe I am always right. Hypervigilance, trauma and anger can distort perception. I need people who challenge me, and I need the capacity to admit when evidence shows me that I am wrong. A tree that cannot move at all breaks in the wind. Roots are not rigidity. Roots make movement possible without losing the ground underneath you.
For a long time I thought honor had mostly to do with reputation—whether other people considered you good, whether you behaved properly, whether you were liked.
I understand it differently now.
Honor has something to do with whether your speech and your actions actually belong to the same person. Whether what leaves your mouth remains connected to what you know and believe inside yourself. Whether you can be trusted.
Especially by yourself.
That is why Ond has become such a powerful image for me. Breath originates inside the body and speech rides outward upon it. There should be some continuity between the two. Not perfection. Not impulsively saying every thought that passes through our minds. Not using “I’m just being honest” as permission for cruelty.
Continuity.
I do not want my mouth saying yes while every other part of me is screaming no.
I do not want to write publicly about integrity while living privately through appeasement.
I do not want to talk about truth and honor and then abandon both the moment they threaten to cost me something.
I’m beginning to believe that healing is much less glamorous than I used to think.
It is not pretending everything happens for a reason or turning every horrific thing into a lesson about love.
It is noticing the old pattern sooner. Leaving sooner.
Sending the difficult message.
Crying afterward because you genuinely wished the story had ended differently.
Grieving the family, you imagined without forcing yourself to belong to the family you actually found.
Maybe healing is being able to feel that ancient hunger for belonging rise inside you and still recognize when the price being asked is too high.
Biology can reveal my blood, but it cannot command my conscience.
And I can be more careful about what I place into the well.
These words are significant to me because they are carried on my own breath. They are part of the story I am choosing to leave behind me, and after a lifetime of learning how easily I could give my voice away in exchange for love, safety, certainty or belonging, I want the words I breathe into this world to actually belong to me.
Even when my voice shakes.
Even when telling the prettier story would have been so much easier.
Thank you so much for reading or listening! The audio always includes a few extra nuggets that aren’t in the written version, so give it a listen when you can. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Rethinking Pain, Movement, Fascia, and the Nervous System with Morgan Rojas
Most of us were taught to think about the body in fairly simple terms.
If a muscle feels tight, stretch it. If something feels weak, strengthen it. If it hurts, rest it. If your mobility is limited, work on flexibility.
Sometimes those things do indeed help. But for any of you out there who are like me, and have dealt with recurring tightness, old injuries, stubborn pain, or a movement that just never feels quite right knows that the body doesn’t always behave that neatly.
That is part of what drew me to the work of Morgan Rojas, a Licensed Massage Therapist with a master’s degree in Sport & Exercise Science and the founder of Find Aligned.
Morgan’s work asks us to look beyond isolated muscles and start thinking about the larger system: muscle, fascia, the nervous system, sensory information, previous injuries, movement patterns, and (perhaps most importantly) adaptation.
In her book, Align What Your Body Misunderstands, she writes:
“The body is not reacting randomly. It is adapting based on previous experiences, learned patterns, and the expectations it has developed over time.”
That idea immediately clicked for me because we talk about adaptation constantly when discussing metabolism.
If someone chronically diets, drastically restricts calories, or repeatedly exposes the body to the same stressor, the body responds. It adjusts to the environment it has been given.
Movement is no different.
Your body is continually learning from what you do repeatedly: how you sit, walk, lift, train, compensate after an injury, carry tension, favor one side, or avoid movements that once hurt.
Morgan continues:
“Something within the system—whether structural, neurological, or perceptual—is shaping how that moment is processed. While these responses may initially feel unpredictable, they begin to make sense when viewed through the lens of adaptation. What once seemed random becomes patterned, and what felt out of control becomes something that can be observed, understood, and eventually changed.”
That changes the question.
Instead of only asking, “What is wrong with this muscle?”, we can start asking:
“What has my body adapted to?”
Adaptation is not the same thing as optimal function
The body is remarkably good at finding ways to accomplish what we ask of it.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it has found the most efficient strategy.
Morgan puts it simply:
“The body will always adapt to the demands placed on it, but adaptation does not guarantee optimal function. It simply reflects what the system has been repeatedly exposed to. Without awareness, those adaptations may reinforce patterns that are inefficient or incomplete.”
That distinction matters.
An old ankle injury may change how you load one leg. A painful shoulder may teach you to move your shoulder blade differently. Years of sitting may influence how you organize movement through the hips and pelvis.
The original reason for an adaptation may even be long gone while the movement strategy remains.
That doesn’t mean the body has failed.
It means the body learned.
And something that can be learned can potentially be reorganized.
Pain and movement involve more than muscles
One of the most fascinating parts of Morgan’s work is her use of sensory input.
We rarely think about vision, smell, touch, pressure, balance, or body position when talking about knee pain or mobility. But the nervous system is constantly gathering information from the environment and the body and deciding how to respond.
Morgan sometimes changes a sensory input (such as visual information or smell) and then retests someone’s movement or symptoms.
The interesting question isn’t simply whether someone feels different.
It is: Why would changing seemingly unrelated information change the experience of pain or movement at all?
That opens a much larger conversation about how the nervous system interprets information, how movement is organized, and why pain is not always a simple measurement of tissue damage.
“I should be able to do this”
Most people have experienced a movement that technically should be possible but somehow feels wrong.
Maybe one side feels coordinated and the other feels clumsy.
Maybe your squat feels restricted until you warm up.
Maybe you have enough strength to perform an exercise, but the movement still feels unstable.
Morgan describes movement as something that is not defined solely by how it looks but by how it is organized.
That means strength and flexibility are only pieces of the puzzle.
How the nervous system is processing information, how force is being distributed, and whether the body is relying more heavily on certain tissues or strategies can all influence the experience.
Where fascia fits in
Fascia has become one of the trendiest words in the fitness and wellness world, sometimes to the point that it starts sounding mystical.
Morgan’s framework offers a more practical way to understand it.
Rather than treating fascia and muscle as completely separate systems, her work explores how different bodies may rely on them differently when creating movement, stability, and force.
That can help explain why two people performing the same exercise may experience it completely differently.
It also raises an interesting question many of us have probably never considered:
Are you trying to force your body to move according to a strategy that doesn’t actually match how your body tends to organize itself?
Becoming curious instead of immediately trying to “fix” yourself
The point of this conversation isn’t to teach everyone to diagnose their own pain.
It is almost the opposite.
It is an invitation to become more observant.
When something repeatedly feels tight, painful, unstable, or restricted, instead of immediately attacking that area with stretching, foam rolling, or strengthening, we might first get curious.
When does it happen?
Does it change after warming up?
Is one side different from the other?
Does the movement feel different depending on position, speed, load, or environment?
What previous injuries or habits might have shaped the way the body is approaching that task?
Patterns become much easier to understand when we stop treating every symptom as an isolated event.
In this episode of Taste0fTruth Tuesdays, Morgan and I explore sensory input, fascia and muscle, movement organization, chronic pain, old injuries, and the many ways our bodies adapt to what we repeatedly ask of them.
Because sometimes what feels like a body behaving unpredictably may actually be a body doing exactly what it has learned to do. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, feedback and questions!
Freedom, Moral Formation, and Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth
This is Part Two of The Ancient Hunger Beneath Modern Life, a series about participation, belonging, embodied wisdom, and what modern life has taught us to forget. Please note, this post will be truncated in some emails, please click “Read more” to access the entire essay.
When the Circle Closes
There is something unsettling about returning to a version of your life that once felt permanent.
Going back through these old photographs and blog posts, I could almost step inside that world again: the music, the movement, the friendships, the long drives, and the feeling of being recognized across a crowded field. For years, these people and places had helped me understand who I was. They were not simply hobbies or acquaintances orbiting an otherwise separate life. They were part of the world in which I had learned what freedom, community, individuality, and belonging were supposed to feel like.
That is what made revisiting it unexpectedly tender.
But memory changes when you know what came later.
Many of the same people I had associated with self-expression and the freedom to live differently would eventually turn on me when I expressed convictions they did not share. The upheavals of 2020 exposed something I had not wanted to see: there was tremendous room to be eccentric, spiritual, sexual, artistic, and unconventional, but considerably less room to question the moral and political assumptions holding the group together.
I first felt the circle closing while sitting on the couch in our military housing at Camp Zama in Japan, watching events unfold back home from the other side of the world.
I watched people tear down and destroy historical monuments in Richmond, Virginia, not far from where I grew up. By then I was living inside a military community, surrounded by a very different language of service, duty, order, and sacrifice. I was geographically removed from the social atmosphere many of my old friends still inhabited, and perhaps that distance allowed me to see what was happening differently.
I remember the reaction in my body before I had fully worked out the argument in my head. My stomach tightened. My palms began to sweat. I felt disgust and a strange embarrassment that this was happening so close to the place I still considered home.
My old communities began demanding allegiance to what increasingly felt like a single political script. I no longer recognized the friends and so called “tribe” which I had built so much of my identity around.
And by this point, social media was not incidental to my life.
Becoming a military spouse had physically separated me from many of the friends and communities I had accumulated over the years. Facebook and Instagram were how I stayed connected to people scattered across different cities and states. They were also where I worked. I had built my career as an online personal trainer and coach there, and my multilevel marketing business depended heavily on the same platforms. Friendship, professional identity, income, visibility, and reputation had all become strangely entangled inside the same digital space.
So what people thought of me online mattered more than I would like to admit now. These apps were not simply places I went to waste time scrolling. They had become the room where much of my social and professional life still existed.
You may think my initial reaction to being bullied online sounded absurd…and maybe it would be if you’re thinking of these as merely apps.
To me, they were not.
They were where years of photographs and memories lived, and where a public identity I had spent years constructing was suddenly being turned against me. A space that had once connected me to music, travel, friendship, and community had become somewhere I entered expecting humiliation.
The disagreement itself was not what hurt most. It was watching people who knew me join in so easily, as if my dignity stopped mattering the moment I landed on the wrong side of an issue.
The dogpile confirmed something I had felt for years: maybe I had never been held as securely inside these communities as I wanted to believe. Even during my years in Portland, I often hovered near the edges of friendship circles instead of living at their center. I remember lonely days off, knowing people were heading to the coast, the hot springs, or some other adventure I had not been invited to join.
The community gave me real friendship, joy, beauty, and belonging. I refuse to rewrite those years as though none of it mattered. I can also still admit how often I adjusted myself to remain acceptable.
Once I admitted that, I had a choice. I could stay quiet, repeat what I was expected to believe, and let other people decide the boundaries of acceptable thought. Or I could accept what might happen if I refused to perform agreement.
I chose the loneliness.
At first, it felt almost like social suicide. It also created tension in my closest relationships. The people who loved me wanted to protect me from what seemed to happen every time I spoke publicly about something controversial. From their perspective, the solution was simple: stay quiet. If no one knew what I believed, I would stop giving people reasons to turn against me.
But silence did not feel neutral to me. It felt like one more way to abandon myself.
I do not regret speaking. When I imagine looking back on my life as an old woman, I know I will be grateful that I said something when I believed it mattered.
Still, there was a cost.
These photographs remind me how many people were once in my life and how much smaller my social world has become. I know what a community can give us. I also know what happens when belonging depends upon hiding the parts of ourselves a group has decided not to tolerate.
I am no longer willing to purchase belonging that way.
If your sense of belonging depends on one-sided ideological conformity, with no room for nuance or freedom of thought, you are not part of a community. You are a cog in a crude machine—and that machine will discard you the moment you fall outside its range of tolerance. —Olympia Mahr
Festival culture was not the only place where I encountered this pattern. Around the same time, I began recognizing how much of my identity had been tied to Isagenix and the multilevel-marketing world. That community had given me encouragement, certainty, recognition, and the feeling that many people knew my name. When I spoke openly about the ways I believed the system had exploited me, plenty of people did not want to hear it. Some seemed unable to understand why I could not just admit that I knew better now and move on.
Leaving one system does not automatically heal the hunger that drew us into it.
The loss left an enormous hole, and Christianity entered through it.
At first, Christianity seemed to offer everything I had been craving: forgiveness, certainty, moral order, love, healing, and the promise that all the chaos of my life could finally be gathered into one coherent story. I wanted to do it correctly. I studied theology intensely and moved deeper into Reformed doctrine because I believed one of those competing systems had to be right. I just needed to find it and submit myself fully enough.
Then I encountered doctrinal triage, the sorting of beliefs into matters Christians could disagree about and matters that determined whether someone remained fully acceptable inside the community.
I had originally been baptized in the name of Jesus alone by a Oneness Pentecostal group. After joining a Reformed church, I was told that my baptism did not count because it had not been Trinitarian. I could no longer receive the Lord’s Supper, even though I had already taken it during my first weeks there.
The message felt familiar: belonging had conditions I had not understood when I entered.
When I lined up these chapters of my life—festival culture, Portland progressivism, multilevel marketing, diet culture, bodybuilding, and Christianity—I saw the same needs being met again and again: identity, certainty, recognition, moral language, and belonging. The worlds themselves were radically different. The risk of questioning their boundaries felt familiar.
I am not looking for a community without convictions. I do not believe every moral disagreement is trivial, and I have no interest in manufacturing intimacy with people whose vision of life is fundamentally incompatible with my own. I want like-minded people around me. I want enough shared moral ground that we can actually build something together.
I also need room for hard questions, intellectual honesty, and disagreement without humiliation. A community can have boundaries without coercing or degrading people who ask difficult questions. I want to be around people with convictions who do not immediately turn disagreement into dogpiling. And I will not betray myself just to remain welcome.
Ancient ideas have always fascinated me, of course, but curiosity was not the only reason I turned toward the old understanding of philosophy as a rite of rebirth. I was trying to figure out what parts of me remained after an entire social, spiritual, and moral identity collapsed. How was I supposed to rebuild without handing my conscience over to another system?
Freedom Without Formation
Hercules at the Crossroads Freedom is not merely the existence of choice, but the formation of character capable of choosing well.
After so many systems had promised to transform me, I began asking what transformation even meant.
I had changed my body, diet, politics, spiritual language, beliefs, and social circles. I kept entering new worlds hoping this one might finally make me whole. Each came with its own authorities, practices, taboos, vocabulary, and picture of who I could become if I followed the program correctly.
I eventually had to admit how easy it is to change identities without changing the pattern underneath. We can carry the same wounds, compulsions, and hunger for approval into a completely different community, learn all the right words, and mistake the intensity of conversion for wisdom because everything feels new.
That forced me to reconsider one of the most persistent moral slogans of modern life:
You do you.
For years, those words sounded compassionate and enlightened to me. I believed refusing judgment was the same thing as kindness. What someone did with their body, sexuality, money, health, or private life was presumed to be no one else’s concern as long as everyone involved consented and no immediate harm could be demonstrated.
Freedom meant removing constraints. The individual was sovereign, self-defining, and entitled to follow whatever desires arose from within.
I no longer believe any of us are that isolated.
Our desires do not appear in a vacuum. Families, wounds, friendships, industries, technologies, institutions, incentives, and the surrounding moral atmosphere all help shape them. We imitate what is modeled. We learn what is normal from what receives approval. Long before we have the judgment to examine any of it, we are absorbing ideas about liberation, beauty, sexuality, success, and fulfillment.
Even the self we call “authentic” has a history.
Culture does more than permit behavior. It helps form people. When an industry profits from a particular vision of empowerment, its financial incentives can disappear behind the language of individual choice. Once a behavior is publicly celebrated as liberation, questioning it begins to look like cruelty. Enough supposedly private decisions can change expectations, relationships, and the moral imagination of an entire society.
My own life makes it impossible for me to keep this argument abstract.
I once understood sex work almost entirely through the language of autonomy and empowerment. The people around me treated it as normal, even enviable. My mother told me she wished she had done it when she was younger. My sister was successful at it. My friends offered no meaningful resistance. Portland handed me an entire vocabulary through which commodifying sexuality could be framed as bold, liberated, and transgressive.
I made those choices. I own that.
I also know the person making them had been shaped by her family, her need for approval, her relationship with her body, the promise of money, and a culture that treated freedom as overcoming shame and refusing restraint. Owning my decisions does not require me to lie about the conditions surrounding them.
Years later, as a wife trying to build an enduring life with another person, I understood the consequences differently. Choices once praised as empowering had left marks on my ability to trust, attach, and understand intimacy. The language available to me at the time had plenty to say about my freedom to choose. It said very little about the person those choices might slowly form me into.
That question followed me through bodybuilding, multilevel marketing, New Age spirituality, and Christianity. Did the practices I submitted to actually make me freer? Bodybuilding fed my compulsions. The MLM world exploited my need to be seen. Other teachings encouraged me to treat struggle as evidence that I had not surrendered enough. Christianity gave me moral certainty for a while, but it also trained me to distrust my own questions.
Simply choosing something does not mean it increases our freedom.
The slogan assumes the self already knows what is good. Desire is treated as trustworthy because it feels personal. Yet desire can be trained by injury, appetite, commercial manipulation, social pressure, and the desperate need to belong. Sometimes the choice that feels most authentic is an old wound repeating itself in a new form.
This brought me back to the argument I explored in The Fragility of Freedom. A free society cannot survive through laws and procedures alone. It needs people capable of judgment, restraint, responsibility, courage, loyalty, and concern for something beyond immediate appetite. A republic can guarantee rights and limit government. It cannot legislate the character required to use freedom well.
So the political question cannot end with, What should people be legally permitted to do? We also have to ask what kind of person is capable of exercising that freedom without being ruled by appetite, compulsion, resentment, propaganda, commercial incentives, or the approval of the crowd.
Aristotle understood virtue as a capacity formed through repeated practice. Courage, temperance, generosity, responsibility, and sound judgment become part of us through habit. Anything that can be cultivated can also be neglected, distorted, or lost.
Political disagreements can therefore reach far beneath policy. People draw upon care, fairness, loyalty, authority, liberty, and the sacred, but we do not all weigh those concerns the same way. Sometimes we are not merely reaching different conclusions. We are measuring reality with different moral frameworks.
A culture organized almost entirely around liberation from constraint eventually loses the language to explain why restraint can be good. Discipline begins to look like repression. Every limit starts to resemble oppression, and we stop asking what the limit was meant to protect in the first place.
“The ancients held that there is nothing that cannot be cured by philosophy and theurgy.”
—Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth by Algis Uždavinys
The Older Purpose of Philosophy
Raphael’s School of Athens.
That question of formation sent me looking for an older understanding of philosophy.
After Christianity, the last thing I wanted was another belief system demanding my allegiance. What I found in the work of Algis Uždavinys was a completely different account of what philosophy had once been for.
Uždavinys argues that the modern world has largely lost the participatory understanding of reality found in ancient philosophy. In his account, the Protestant legacy and the emergence of modernity helped move truth into the isolated individual mind. Philosophy became preoccupied with the solitary thinker questioning, doubting, analyzing, and trying to establish with certainty that anything outside the mind existed at all.
For Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and the traditions that followed them, philosophy was concerned with what the pursuit of wisdom did to the soul. Reality was sacred, ordered, hierarchical, and meaningful. The soul was not sealed inside a private psychological world. It could participate in realities beyond its immediate appetites, opinions, fears, and social conditioning.
Philosophy involved contemplation, purification, discipline, initiation, sacred rites, and a change in one’s entire way of living. Knowing more was not enough. The philosopher was supposed to become capable of seeing and living differently.
My friend Brado approaches this through the concept of mediation: everything that stands between us and direct experience. Words, explanations, arguments, and even the thoughts inside our own heads can communicate something real, but they are still representations of an experience.
As he writes:
“This type of knowledge then, as it cannot be verbalized, it similarly cannot be rationalized either. As existence is surely affected by this type of knowledge rather than the other type we discussed—the knowledge mediated by discursive intellect—it can be jarring to consider that the knowing we attain from reading a word on a page or thinking a thought in our head is not the same as the knowing [we] receive from experience.”
This does not make reason useless. Discursive thought allows us to analyze, compare, question, build, and communicate. It simply cannot deliver every kind of knowing by itself.
Brado distinguishes between wisdom acquired as information and wisdom that must be received through encounter. We may prepare through study, discipline, and reflection. At some point, however, the idea has to become lived reality.
That was the philosophical form of something my body had already taught me through music, injury, repetition, and movement. Certain things cannot be transferred intact from one mind to another. They have to be entered.
Philo-sophia (the love of wisdom) was an art of seeing, loving, understanding, and living. Its purpose was not merely to construct arguments, master technical language, or accumulate information about what earlier philosophers had believed. It was a discipline of transformation that shaped perception, character, conduct, and one’s relationship with death. Wisdom had to be practiced until it became embodied. The measure of philosophy was the kind of life it produced.
Uždavinys describes its telos as a radical transformation of thought and existence in pursuit of wisdom.
The Platonic and Aristotelian traditions did not assume every desire represented the authentic self. They asked whether our desires were ordered toward what was genuinely good, beautiful, and life-giving. Freedom included liberation from confusion, compulsion, false appearances, and domination by the lower parts of ourselves.
That is far more demanding than telling me to express myself. It asks what kind of self I am becoming. Are my desires making me more lucid, courageous, capable of love, and responsible to the living world around me? A choice can be legal and sincerely felt and still lead me away from wisdom.
Adopting one more ideology could never answer that question for me. I did not need a new identity to perform or a collection of ancient ideas decorating the same unexamined life. I needed practices capable of changing how I perceived, desired, judged, and lived.
“Therefore, a philosophical journey is the mimetic and ritual-like journey of the hero, like Heracles and Orpheus, to the Netherworld, the Egyptian Duat, where all the opposites meet. This is the process of ‘dying before death’ and resurrection.”
—Algis Uždavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth
What Must Die
Psyche Carried to Olympus Follower of Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael
When I think about rebirth in my own life, I do not imagine becoming an entirely different person. I think about the gradual death of the person I constructed in order to survive.
Growing up inside an authoritarian household, I learned early that parental love could be conditional, discipline could mean pain, and trust could leave me exposed. I became self-reliant because I had to. That kind of self-reliance has a cost.
“I believe, toxic shame is a type of emotional flashback in which we view ourselves with the same disgust we saw reflected in our parents’ faces whenever they acted as if they were repulsed by us. Toxic shame freezes us in the fear, mortification, and hopelessness of our most traumatic times in childhood. To the degree, that our parents acted as if they couldn’t stand the side of us, to that same degree are we prone to toxic shame, attacks of feeling bad, worthless, and ugly. Parents routinely use toxic shame to dismiss children’s needs and to extinguish their ability to assert themselves and protest (or even notice) abuse and neglect.” —Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling—Harvesting forgiveness out of blame
The need for control, the drive for perfection, the desperate desire to become good enough to earn love—these were not random personality traits. They were ways of navigating a world in which I never felt securely seen, safe, or understood.
They followed me into adulthood. I tried to control my body through eating disorders and bodybuilding. I tried to control how other people perceived me through achievement, performance, and reinvention. Certainty felt like safety, so I entered communities that promised it. Again and again, I hoped that if I became the right kind of person, the old feeling of not being securely loved might finally disappear.
And so what I have learned… is my intensity does not have to die. Neither does my capacity to feel deeply or my desire for beauty, discipline, belonging, and meaning. I need to let go of the fantasy that I can fill that old absence by becoming impressive enough, obedient enough, beautiful enough, spiritually correct enough, politically acceptable enough, or perfectly understood.
There is a useful name for another illusion wrapped up in this: the end-of-history illusion. We can look backward and recognize how profoundly we have changed while imagining that the person we are now is somehow the finished version.
I can see it all through my own life. Each new world felt like an arrival. This is it. The right body. The right community. The right politics. The right spiritual vocabulary. The explanation that would finally gather every scattered piece of my life together.
I knew I had changed dramatically before arriving there. Somehow I still believed this newest self was the one I had been moving toward all along.
Of course she was not finished. I am not finished now either.
That does not mean every change is positive growth or that our values should be endlessly disposable. It means the direction of our formation matters because we are never standing still.
I can now see a difference between conversion and transformation. Conversion can change our vocabulary very quickly. Transformation is slower, less glamorous, and much harder to perform for an audience.
It shows up in steadier values, discernment, self-command, courage, and the ability to remain rooted when someone disagrees. It allows me to listen without disappearing and stand firmly without needing everyone around me to confirm that I am standing in exactly the right place.
I no longer imagine the performed self dying in one grand initiatory moment. It dies in small decisions: when I refuse to punish myself, trust what I have actually observed, remain honest despite the possibility of rejection, or stay in relationship without abandoning myself inside it.
In the Platonic language that has helped me understand this, rebirth changes perception. The frightened, grasping, passion-bound self loses its absolute claim over us, making room for something more lucid to participate in a greater order of reality.
For me, philosophy is the work of becoming able to see.
I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and live within.
– C.G. Jung, The Red Book
Divine Madness
“Divine Madness”: Roman cameo of a dancing maenad, 1st century CE.
In Part One, I wrote about learning through the body—about the moment a hula hoop stops being something you are consciously controlling and becomes something your body simply knows how to move with.
For years, ecstatic dance gave me access to another kind of knowing. The ritual container could create the conditions for something to happen, but it could not guarantee that it would. Music, ceremony, movement, and community could prepare the ground. Some Sundays remained simply joyful afternoons of dancing. Others opened into something I still struggle to describe.
Participation is not a vending machine for transcendence. Ritual can orient us toward an experience without forcing the experience to occur.
I could go week after week and have a beautiful time dancing, sweating, moving, seeing friends, and being carried by good music. Then there were certain Sundays when something else happened.
I still cannot fully explain what made the difference.
Sometimes it seemed to be the DJ or the particular arc of the music. Sometimes it was the combination of people who gathered that day. Anyone who has spent enough time in spaces like this knows the people in the room change the room. The energy could build on itself until I could no longer separate my individual experience from whatever was happening collectively.
Sociology gives us the term collective effervescence for the heightened energy that can emerge when people gather in shared ritual, movement, rhythm, and attention.
From a Heathen perspective, I also think about megin: power or vitality that does not belong only to an isolated individual, but can gather and move through relationship and communal participation.
Whatever language I use, I know the difference between having a wonderful time and entering a genuinely ecstatic state.
In those moments, ordinary self-consciousness fell away. I stopped experiencing music as something coming toward me from outside. My body was no longer selecting a sequence of movements. At a certain point, I was not listening to the music anymore. I was inside it.
My body knew what to do before I could think about it.
Those experiences come closest to what Plato described as divinely inspired madness.
Roman stucco relief of a maenad with a tympanum.
By madness, I am not talking about chaos for its own sake or the idea that anything erupting spontaneously from within us must be authentic and sacred. Plato was describing a state in which the ordinary calculating mind loosens its grip and another way of knowing becomes possible.
The ritual container mattered.
We opened together.
We danced together.
We closed together.
The room, the music, the people, the repetition of returning Sunday after Sunday, and the shared expectation that we had gathered to move instead of watch gave form to something I could not have produced alone.
Sometimes afterward I took the microphone and tried to describe what had happened. I can see now that part of that impulse came from my lifelong desire to be seen and understood. I have always had big feelings and a powerful need to give those feelings somewhere to go.
But that was not all of it.
I was trying to bring something back.
Something had happened through participation, and I wanted words for it. The words always came second.
What the Word Can Carry
Georg von Rosen, Odin as Wanderer (1886).
Writing has become one of the primary ways I make sense of my life. It takes something living as memory, sensation, grief, confusion, or half-formed insight and gives it enough shape for me to encounter it from another angle. It creates distance without necessarily cutting me off from what happened.
The writing is still not the experience.
Recently, a friend reminded me that writing does not have to be merely confessional or testimonial. It can function as external memory, a way of placing meaning outside ourselves so we can meet it again later and discover that we have changed.
The story of Odin and the runes captures something similar. Odin is not simply handed information. He hangs for nine nights upon the tree, wounded by a spear, “myself to myself,” without food or drink. Only through the ordeal does he perceive and take up the runes.
“Then I began to quicken and be wise, and to grow and to prosper; one word from another word found a word for me, one deed from another deed found a deed for me.”
—Hávamál, stanza 141, in The Poetic Edda, translated by Carolyne Larrington (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 32.
The marks themselves can be inscribed. They can exist outside the person, carried across distance and time. But the story does not confuse possession of the symbol with possession of wisdom. Odin has to become capable of knowing what the symbol contains.
At this point of the essay, I must say it is a little ridiculous to be writing an essay on forms of knowledge that cannot be contained inside of it.
I can tell you about ecstatic dance. I can describe the DJ, the sweat, the ceremony, the people moving beside me, and those strange days when something emerged from the group that no single person brought into the room.
I cannot put that experience inside your body.
Anyone I have ever taught to hoop eventually reaches the limit of my instructions. I can demonstrate, adjust their stance, point to their feet, and explain how to shift their weight. Eventually their body has to find it.
And then, suddenly, the hoop stays up.
They know.
That is the wisdom of participation I was reaching toward in Part One. Some things become knowable only from inside the act itself.
This is also why I continue to write. I can preserve memory, notice patterns between experiences that happened decades apart, and leave markers for myself. I can return later and understand the same words differently because I am different.
Good writing may even point another person toward an experience they have to enter for themselves.
Maybe it’s that the best words can do, is to show us where to look.
“If we cannot give a true account of ourselves and our doings it will mean that our actions have been ‘as you like it’, reckless and informal rather than to the point and in good form.” *
Becoming More Alive
Odysseus returning to Penelope, Greek terracotta plaque, ca. 460–450 BCE — after ordeal and wandering, the final movement is not escape but return.
If becoming more alive is the goal, then I still have to ask what kind of life is worth building.
If I no longer believe you do you is an adequate moral philosophy, but I also refuse to surrender my conscience to another authority simply because it promises certainty, how do I decide what is good?
An older understanding of wisdom makes that question more demanding. In much of classical philosophy, to know was to be. Wisdom was not something one simply possessed because one had encountered the correct argument, read the correct book, or even undergone an extraordinary experience. The knower had to be changed.
That shifts the question. It is not only, What do I know? It is, What kind of person am I becoming through what I claim to know?
I keep returning to this particular distinction: a life shaped merely by preference versus a life given form.
Freedom cannot mean that I never have to account for what I choose. If anything, freedom places a greater responsibility on me to ask whether my actions have direction, coherence, and some relationship to what is actually good.
So now I ask what a belief, practice, or way of living does to a person over time. Does it agree with biological and material reality, or does it ask me to deny what is plainly there? What happens when it is repeated for years instead of experienced for an afternoon? What kind of relationships does it produce? Who bears the consequences? Does it cultivate courage, responsibility, reciprocity, restraint, loyalty, honesty, and care for something beyond immediate appetite?
I have also started to value tradition. That does not make everything inherited good. It means I no longer assume one isolated mind can reconstruct a wise way of life from scratch. Traditions can carry generations of observation about human nature, family, obligation, reciprocity, sex, death, community, and meaning. We should understand what they are protecting before we casually discard them.
Tradition is not an infallible oracle either. I look toward biology, history, anthropology, sociology, lived consequences, virtue, and human flourishing. None can relieve me of judgment. Together, they demand far more than asking whether something feels authentic in the moment.
Lately, becoming more alive has looked almost embarrassingly ordinary. It means doing the dishes while actually inhabiting the moment instead of treating the task as an obstacle between me and whatever comes next. Walking slowly enough to notice what is around me. Preparing food with gratitude. Tending living things. Keeping a promise. Paying attention to the season. Putting my hands into the earth. Moving my body. Writing something true.
It also means learning what my body needs when I am overwhelmed. Sometimes I do not need another explanation. It’s somatic engagement like pressure, warmth, touch, or breathwork. I am learning how to remain honorable in relationship when it would be easier to punish, manipulate, withdraw, or perform.
There was a time when I searched for transformation through intensity. A new body. A new community. A new spiritual identity. A new doctrine. A new explanation that could make everything that hurt finally make sense.
I also found aliveness somewhere else too. As I wrote in Part One:
“We planned entire summers around gathering beneath stages and temporary tents. We drove for days to arrive somewhere that would exist for only a weekend, then disappear almost as quickly as it had formed.”
Those temporary worlds gave me music, movement, friendship, collective energy, and a kind of belonging I often struggled to find elsewhere. All of that was real. I would never diminish it.
There was an escapist edge to it too.
If the place where I felt most at home existed only for a weekend, what did that make the rest of my life?
Normal life could become the grind between festivals. Work, chores, obligations, and ordinary days were things to get through so I could afford the next tour, the next gathering, the next temporary return to myself.
What startled me while rereading my old blogs was finding a younger version of myself already wrestling with this exact problem. In 2010, after writing about staying sober at festivals, struggling with hip pain, and realizing how much I loved my work and routine, I blurted out:
“I realized that I am happier after having a great workout than I am at a music festival. whoa-wait-WHAT? I am happier living my normal routine of working as a personal trainer and teaching Hoop Classes?? How blessed am I? My real life is so incredible, i don’t need to run away for 4-5 days, indulge in drug consumption to feel happy?! wow.”
Reading that now almost made me laugh. I was already saying this back then! A younger me could feel this in her body before I had the philosophical language to explain it.
Knowing something once does not mean we know how to build an entire life around it. I lost and rediscovered that lesson through bodybuilding, multilevel marketing, Christianity, illness, political rupture, and every other identity I tried to make into a permanent home.
Now I think rebirth may be much less dramatic than another conversion. It may be the slow formation of a life I can actually inhabit.
I do not want to organize my life around the next escape. I want to bring participation, beauty, ritual, and aliveness into the days I once thought I had to get through. I want to return to my body and ordinary life, perceive what is already sacred here, and participate in relationship without abandoning myself.
That brings me back to the hunger underneath this entire series.
I thought I was writing about hooping. Then it was writing about festivals, ritual, community, religion, philosophy, and the strange succession of selves I have inhabited.
Underneath all of it was the same question:
How do we become fully present participants in our own lives?
I am no longer looking for a system that will tell me exactly who I must become. I am trying to become capable of meeting life, in all of its beauty, obligations, grief, mystery, pleasure, limits, and loss, with enough discernment and courage to participate in it fully.
Maybe rebirth has nothing to do with leaving this world for another one. Maybe it means returning to this one more alive.
Thank you so much for reading or listening! The audio always includes a few extra nuggets that aren’t in the written version, so give it a listen when you can. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Taste of Truth is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Atmayajna: Self-Sacrifice: Selected Papers. Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, p.137
Articles mentioned or that influenced this series:
“Truth can be both our shield and sword in the battle of life.”
There are people who influence us not only through what they teach, but through the manner in which they live what they teach.
Over the last several months, my friend Torna Braggison has offered me a remarkable degree of openness, patience, friendship, and spiritual guidance. He has answered my many questions, challenged me to think more deeply, and helped me better understand a Heathen worldview that cannot be reduced to symbolism, abstract belief, or solitary spiritual consumption.
Torna is the author of Power Through Truth, an exploration of the relationship between sacred breath, truthful speech, oath-keeping, honor, and spiritual power within the Heathen tradition.
His guidance has continually returned me to something more demanding: conduct.
How do we speak?
What do we promise?
Do our actions uphold our words?
Can the people closest to us trust what comes out of our mouths?
What happens to us (personally, socially, and spiritually) when they cannot?
What if truth is not merely something we believe, but something we breathe, speak, promise, remember, and live?
Ask and Embla, Robert Engels, 1919. Odin’s gift of Ond—the sacred breath that gives life and carries the spoken word.
Truth Is Not Merely an Idea
Modern people are accustomed to treating truth primarily as a matter of intellectual agreement.
We ask whether a proposition is correct, whether a doctrine is factual, or whether someone possesses the proper beliefs. Religion often becomes a matter of assenting to particular claims. Politics becomes a competition between competing narratives. Online identity becomes a collection of publicly declared values.
But declaring a value is not the same as embodying it.
A person can speak endlessly about compassion while behaving cruelly. Someone can build an identity around authenticity while lying to the people closest to them. A spiritual leader can speak of love, healing, transcendence, and divine truth while refusing accountability for the damage caused by their conduct.
Words alone do not prove character.
Within the framework Torna presents, however, words are not inconsequential. They are not merely sounds, opinions, or disposable expressions. They are carried upon the sacred breath and given force through the character and intention of the speaker.
Torna describes Ond as the sacred breath of life, the divine spark gifted by Odin. Our words ride upon that breath, and when we speak, we give those words a kind of life. Their quality is connected to the truth, intention, and honor of the person speaking them.
Speech therefore becomes more than communication.
It becomes participation.
We breathe something of ourselves into the world.
The Breath Behind the Word
In Völuspá, Odin’s gift to Ask and Embla includes Ond—the animating breath without which they do not yet fully possess life. Torna connects this sacred breath to speech, creativity, ecstatic power, ritual, galdr, and the ability to shape reality through will and expression.
This does not mean that every passing sentence is a magical incantation in the theatrical or New Age sense.
It means that speech carries consequences.
Words can establish trust or destroy it. They can bind people together, orient a community, transmit memory, establish obligation, inspire courage, or leave another person spiritually and emotionally disoriented. A truthful word spoken at the right moment can restore someone’s sense of reality. A deliberate lie can make another person doubt their own perception.
Our words affect the world because other people must live inside the reality those words help create.
This is one reason truth matters so deeply to me.
I do not want truth to remain an attractive principle I discuss in essays or podcasts. I want the people in my life to know that my word means something. I want to follow through when I make a commitment. I want to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable. I want to recognize when my conduct contradicts what I have claimed and accept the responsibility of repairing what I can.
That is not always easy.
Truth as lived accountability demands more than being “right.” It demands self-examination, restraint, memory, courage, and humility. It may require us to admit that we have behaved dishonorably. It may force us to stop protecting the version of ourselves we would prefer others to believe.
Truth can defend us, but it can also cut through our own self-deception.
It is both shield and sword.
Words in the Well
One of the most compelling ideas in Torna’s article is that some words carry more weight than others.
He distinguishes between common or everyday speech, words placed “in the well” through intimate or sacred relationships, and the giving of formal oaths. Each carries a different degree of personal, communal, and spiritual consequence.
We all understand this intuitively.
Telling a cashier that we are “fine” when we are having a terrible day does not carry the same moral weight as lying to a spouse, deceiving a close friend, betraying a confidant, or breaking a solemn vow.
The closer the relationship, the more of ourselves we place behind the word.
Words spoken to those who trust us become part of a shared memory. They shape how another person understands us, themselves, and the relationship between us. Words spoken during ritual enter the memory of the group. Stories told by the skald or bard help shape a people’s understanding of their ancestors, heroes, virtues, and obligations.
These are words placed into the well.
The well can be understood as Mímir’s well, ancestral memory, cultural memory, or the accumulated memory of the community. What is spoken does not simply disappear after the vibration leaves the air. It continues through consequence, reputation, story, recollection, and relationship.
A truthful word can strengthen the speaker and those who hear it.
A dishonest word can poison the well.
“The Spiritual Weight of an Oath”: John Bauer, Tyr and Fenrir
The Spiritual Weight of an Oath
An oath carries the greatest weight because an oath is not merely a prediction about what we hope to do.
It is an act of binding.
Torna describes an oath as something given life through sacred breath and powered by the will. The oath involves not only the person who gives it, but the recipient, the witnesses, the place, and the spiritual powers invoked or present. Until it is fulfilled or broken, the oath continues to possess force.
This is almost incomprehensible within a culture of casual promises.
We say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” “I’ll always be there,” “You can trust me,” or “I swear I’ll change,” often with little awareness of the weight those statements carry for the person receiving them.
Our society encourages constant speech while teaching very little discipline of speech.
We post immediate reactions. We make dramatic declarations. We promise more than we can deliver. We publicly perform virtues we have not yet cultivated privately. We use language to manage how others perceive us, then become resentful when we are held accountable to the identity we presented.
A Heathen understanding of oath asks us to become more careful.
Do not promise lightly.
Do not offer your word merely to relieve the discomfort of the present moment.
Do not invoke trust when you are unwilling to behave in a trustworthy manner.
The answer is not to become silent, emotionally unavailable, or terrified of commitment. It is to understand that a promise contains part of the self. When we repeatedly keep our word, we become someone whose speech possesses weight. When we continually break it, our words become thin and useless.
Eventually, no one believes us… and that isn’t because they are cruel, but because we have taught them not to.
Honor Is Accumulated
Torna connects the keeping of oaths with Hamingja, a concept often translated as luck but also associated with honor, power, fortune, and the accumulated strength of the self.
This is not luck imagined as random cosmic favor.
It is closer to luck that has been cultivated.
A person who consistently acts with integrity develops trusted relationships, a dependable reputation, communal support, and an internal sense of coherence. Their words and actions reinforce each other. They become spiritually and socially substantial.
Keeping one’s word strengthens the whole self, while dishonorable conduct weakens it.
We might recognize this even without using explicitly spiritual language.
A trustworthy person is often surrounded by people willing to help them because they have proven that help will not be wasted. Their reputation opens doors. Their community remembers their conduct. When hardship comes, they are not entirely alone.
This is not always fair or perfectly reciprocal. Honorable people can still be betrayed, harmed, or abandoned. But the larger principle remains: character accumulates.
So does dishonor.
Every promise kept or broken becomes part of the person we are becoming.
Truth as Communal Participation
Truth is often framed as an individual possession: my truth, my beliefs, my authenticity.
But Torna’s article presents truth as profoundly relational.
As a bard and skald, he writes that believing in the moral truth of a story allows the teller to connect with those listening. Honest words can create a communal experience in which teller, listener, folk, hero, deity, moral teaching, place, and ancestral memory are brought into relationship.
Truth does not merely sit inside the mind.
It passes between people.
It is sung, remembered, witnessed, and enacted.
This is where the concept becomes essential to The Wisdom of Participation. Traditional cultures did not generally understand humans as isolated consumers of spiritual information. People gathered. They sang. They told stories. They made vows before witnesses. They remembered their dead. They carried inherited obligations. They participated in the maintenance of a shared moral world.
The skald did not simply deliver “content.”
The community did not merely observe.
Everyone present became part of the remembering.
This is radically different from a spirituality centered on private revelation, personal vibration, or self-created metaphysical truth. The well does not belong to the isolated ego. It contains the memory of relationships—between the living, the dead, the Gods, the land, and those yet to come.
What we place into that well matters.
Bragi, Carl Emil Doepler, 1882. Bragi, the Norse god of poetry and eloquence, represents speech as sacred craft: words shaped through memory, rhythm, truth, and responsibility. The skald does not merely entertain, but gives voice to the stories and values through which a people remembers itself. Public domain.
No One Can Embody Truth on Our Behalf
Christianity famously places the words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” into the mouth of Jesus.
In that worldview, truth is ultimately embodied in and accessed through a singular salvific figure. The believer is asked to place faith in that figure and the theological claims made about him.
The Heathen framework explored here places the emphasis elsewhere.
Truth is not merely a person to profess belief in. It is a standard we must demonstrate through conduct.
No savior can keep our promises for us.
No doctrine can repair the trust we have broken.
No spiritual identity can substitute for honest speech.
No declaration of belief can transform dishonorable behavior into honorable behavior.
Truth must be renewed each time we speak carefully, fulfill a commitment, admit a wrong, make recompense, resist convenient deception, or allow our actions to bear the weight of what we have claimed.
It must be breathed and lived.
The Question Before Us
My upcoming conversation with Torna Braggison will explore the relationship between Ond, speech, oath, honor, memory, galdr, storytelling, and spiritual power.
But beneath the terminology lies a deeply human question.
What kind of person does my speech reveal me to be?
Do my words give life, orientation, and trust to the people around me?
Do I make promises carelessly?
Have I confused saying the right things with becoming an honorable person?
Have I demanded truth from others while excusing dishonesty in myself?
And when I fail, am I willing to make recompense rather than simply inventing a more flattering story about what happened?
Truth is not merely the absence of false information.
It is the alignment of breath, speech, memory, promise, and deed.
It is the weight accumulated when we repeatedly prove that our words can be trusted.
It is what we place into the well.
It is what others will remember.
And it is what remains when every attractive spiritual claim has been stripped away and only our conduct is left to speak for us.
The Lessons of Asgard– WorldTree Publications, 36pgs. Completely revised, with original kennings to the Gods by Torna Braggison. An introductory study of the principle Gods & Goddesses in the lore.
Flow Arts, Festival Ritual, and the Lost Wisdom of Participation
Hey hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth, this essay is much different than what I normally write, I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane with me.
For years, strangers would see me walking through an airport, across a college campus, or into a music venue carrying an enormous circle of plastic and ask the same question:
“Is that a hula hoop? What do you do with that thing?”
I usually smiled.
There was no quick way to explain what the hoop had already done with me.
By then, it had bruised my hips, taken over my living room, earned me the nickname “hula-hoop girl” around my college campus, and sent me driving and flying across the country in search of music, teachers, festivals, and other people who understood why it was impossible to put the thing down.
It had carried me onto stages I was terrified to enter. It had introduced me to women I first knew only by their YouTube names and later came to know as teachers, collaborators, friends, and soul sisters. It had given me a language for my body at a time when I was still deeply self-conscious inside it.
At the time, I thought I was learning tricks.
I was learning how to float the hoop from my waist above my head. How to reverse its current. How to move in both directions. How to toss, pause, break, roll, and recover. How to follow a drum solo until movement and music stopped feeling like separate things.
All of that was true.
But something much deeper was happening
This is the first part of a series I have been circling around for a long time, though I didn’t fully realize it at first.
I thought I was writing about hoop dance, festival culture and the importance of ritual.
Then philosophy.
Then paganism.
Then neuroscience.
The deeper I followed the thread, the more I realized they were all pointing toward the same question:
What happens to human beings when participation is replaced by spectatorship?
I keep returning to the difference between knowing about life and actually participating in life.
Modern people are drowning in information about health, spirituality, community, nervous system regulation, trauma, meaning, embodiment, and connection. We have the podcasts, the books, the frameworks, and an ever-expanding vocabulary. We can analyze our attachment styles, map our trauma responses, name our nervous system states, and explain exactly why we feel disconnected.
And yet, so many of us are still lonely….
Still disembodied.
Still watching life through glass.
Still trying to think our way into something the body may only truly recover through embodiment, through rhythm, movement, expression, shared presence, and practice.
This piece is about that hunger.
The ancient hunger beneath modern life.
Not merely the hunger to believe something, but the hunger to belong to a living world again.
For a long time, I thought my years in flow arts were simply a chapter of my life—a beautiful one, but ultimately behind me. Looking back now, I see something different.
Long before I studied philosophy, mythology, neuroscience, religion, or ancestral traditions, my body was already being introduced to a way of knowing that none of those books could have given me.
It had to be practiced. Repeated. Failed. Felt. Shared.
It had to be participated in.
Before philosophy gave me language for participation, my body had already spent years practicing it.
Long before I studied mythology, ritual, paganism, or the neuroscience of embodiment, I had already encountered something those traditions were trying to describe.
I knew it through music. Through movement. Through repetition. And most importantly through community.
By the simple act of showing up, again and again, until something inside me changed.
I no longer interpret every part of those years the way I did in my twenties.
But I trust the experience more than I trust all the language I once wrapped around it.
And that is where this story really begins.
Long before I studied heathenry/paganism,
I danced it.
The First Forms of Participation
Before there was a circle of plastic spinning around my waist, there were trees to climb, horses to ride, ponds to swim in, and twenty-six acres that gave my body somewhere to go. Some of my earliest memories are not of sitting still and thinking about the world, but of moving through it—crossing the dam, wandering the property, climbing high enough to see everything differently.
There was one enormous oak tree that had fallen and become something like a fort. I would retreat there after arguments with my mother, disappearing into its branches and hollows until I felt like myself again. I would not have called that nervous-system regulation. I would not have called it ritual, grounding, or communion with place. I only knew that the tree could hold something I did not yet know how to carry.
Movement was also part of my life in more formal ways. I took ballet, tap, and jazz, although jazz was the form I loved most. Ballet often made me painfully aware of my body—how tall I was, how much space I occupied, how unlike the smaller girls I sometimes felt. Jazz gave me more room. There was something about the music, the costumes, and the freedom of the movement that allowed me to step outside that self-consciousness for a while.
Music offered another kind of participation. I played piano and violin, but orchestra was where something larger began to reveal itself. Practicing alone mattered, but it was never the whole point. The real experience happened when everyone entered together: dozens of separate parts becoming one piece of music that none of us could have made alone.
I did not have words for why that felt so powerful. I only knew the difference between playing a part by myself and feeling it take its place inside a living whole.
The tree was not merely scenery.
The orchestra was not merely a collection of individuals.
Movement was not merely exercise.
Each required me to enter into a relationship—with a place, a rhythm, a group of people, or the limits of my own body. I could not understand any of them from the outside. I had to climb the branches, learn the music, miss the step, lose my place, and begin again.
Looking back, I can see that I was learning the same lesson in different forms: the world became more alive when I participated in it.
I did not yet know that this was a kind of knowledge. I only knew that I felt most like myself when I was moving, making, playing, or contributing one small part to something larger.
The hoop would eventually gather all of this into a single practice—movement, rhythm, repetition, music, play, place, and community.
It did not create the longing.
It gave the longing a shape.
The Circle Opens
One of my roommates and I, playing around with those rinky-dink store-bought hula hoops.
That shape arrived rather unceremoniously in the winter of 2005: a cheap, store-bought hula hoop that I could barely keep spinning around my waist.
At first, it was mostly frustrating. The hoop fell almost as quickly as I could lift it, clattering against the floor while I tried again. Eventually, though, my body found the rhythm. I carried it back to college, where I practiced in the living room while my roommates laughed, none of us realizing what had begun.
That first hoop was a toy. The real initiation came the following summer at Smilefest, a music festival held at Deerfields in North Carolina.
There, I picked up what hoopers called a “real” hoop—large, heavy, handmade, and nothing like the lightweight plastic circle I had been struggling with. I could feel the difference immediately. Its weight slowed the movement enough for my body to follow. For the first time, the hoop did not seem like an object I was trying to control. It felt like something I could enter into conversation with.
I practiced until dark bruises spread across both hips.
Then I strapped the enormous hoop to the roof of the car and brought it home.
Something had taken hold of me.
I began carrying the hoop everywhere. I practiced alone in backyards and parking lots, using my car stereo for music. I watched early YouTube videos of hoopers like Hoopalicious, Spiral, Christabel Zamor, and the Hoopnotica dancers, calling my roommates into the room whenever someone performed a movement I could not imagine being possible.
“Look at this. How does she do that?”
There were tutorials, but no explanation could place the movement inside my body. I could watch someone perform a trick dozens of times. I could study the position of her hands, the angle of the hoop, and the direction of its current. None of that meant I could do it. The knowledge had to travel another route.
I had to pick up the hoop.
I had to drop it.
I had to feel where the movement broke down, make some tiny adjustment I could barely name, and try again.
One of the clearest memories I have from that period is standing in the front yard during my junior year of college, listening to the same music over and over while trying to raise the hoop from my knees back toward my waist. I had watched other people do it. I understood, in theory, what was supposed to happen.
But my body did not know yet.
Then, after what felt like endless repetition, something shifted. The hoop caught. My knees and hips found the pulse. The circle began to rise.
I could not have explained what I had done differently.
My body simply understood.
That moment opened a door. Once I felt the movement happen, I knew the other tricks were possible too because I had experienced the difference between knowing what a movement looked like and then knowing it from within.
The Circle Widens
That question did not remain private for long.
In March 2007, only about a year after I first began seriously hooping, I found myself waiting beside a stage in Boulder, Colorado, preparing to perform with EOTO for the first time.
For weeks, I had told everyone how excited I was. I was going to hoop onstage with Jason Hann and Micheal Travis—two musicians from String Cheese Incident (the jam band I had spent the previous summer following across the country.) Until that moment, the whole thing had felt thrilling and almost unreal.
Then it was time to walk onto the stage.
The excitement dropped straight into the pit of my stomach.
Holy shit. I’m really getting up there.
At that very moment, Jamie Janover, one of the other musicians came over, he had noticed how nervous I was and gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten:
“Just go up there when you’re feeling the groove and get off when you’re done. It’s simple.”
He was right, although it did not feel simple while I was standing there.
There was no choreography to memorize and no fixed sequence waiting for me. EOTO was an improv jam band. The musicians were listening and responding to one another in real time. The audience was responding to the music. To join them, I had to stop thinking about how I looked, listen with my entire body, and enter the moment already unfolding.
I could not calculate my way into it.
I had to feel when to step forward.
For the first time, I was no longer simply hooping to music.
I was moving inside it.
Inside the Music
Once I crossed that threshold, the road opened quickly.
Music was not something playing quietly in the background while life happened elsewhere. It organized our movements, our travel, our friendships, and our sense of time. We planned entire summers around gathering beneath stages and temporary tents. We drove for days to arrive somewhere that would exist for only a weekend, then disappear almost as quickly as it had formed.
For those few days, however, we were not merely an audience.
People danced, cooked, camped, taught, performed, built installations, traded food, shared supplies, carried one another’s equipment, and stayed awake until sunrise. Musicians improvised with one another onstage while dancers responded from the crowd. The boundary between performer and participant was more porous than it appeared.
Symbiosis Music Festival 2007
When there was room, I stepped onto the stage with my hoop. Other times, I danced in the field among everyone else. Both experiences were deeply impactful in my dance practice. Whether hundreds of people were watching me or no one was, I was learning to respond to rhythm rather than impose myself upon it.
The music moved, so I moved.
The hoop changed direction, so I followed.
The crowd surged, softened, shouted, or fell quiet, and the whole atmosphere changed with it.
At its best, it felt less like a performance than a conversation occurring through bodies.
Over time, the women I had once watched with awe became people I practiced beside. Some became teachers, troupe members, collaborators, and friends. I moved to Portland at the end of 2007 and joined Kaivalya Hoop Dancers, entering a community that took the practice seriously while still preserving its sense of play.
I spent Portland’s rainy season obsessively practicing reverse currents. I wanted to move comfortably in both directions, even though one side initially felt completely unnatural. I repeated barrel rolls, breaks, pauses, and reversals until the awkward side slowly became less foreign.
Then severe back pain forced the practice to change again.
At twenty-three, there were days when preparing food or standing for longer than twenty minutes felt nearly impossible. I worried that I would lose the thing that had given my life so much momentum. I could no longer rely on constant waist hooping or the larger, more physically demanding movements that had once filled my practice.
But limitation created another kind of education.
I began exploring pauses, tosses, reversals, off-body movement, and smaller gestures that did not aggravate my back as severely. What initially felt like an interruption became a new creative vocabulary. The hoop was still teaching me, but now the lesson was adaptation.
Participation did not mean forcing myself through pain. It meant listening closely enough to remain in relationship with the practice as my body changed.
Hoop Dance Workshops from all over the country
Eventually, I began teaching more.
At festivals and community gatherings, I watched people pick up hoops with the same awkward uncertainty I had once felt. Some were convinced they could not do it. Others laughed the moment the hoop dropped. I learned that teaching movement required more than explaining where to place the feet or how to push the hips.
Sometimes I demonstrated.
Sometimes I offered a small correction.
Sometimes the most useful thing I could do was give someone enough room to fail without feeling embarrassed.
The moment when a movement finally entered another person’s body was unmistakable. Their face changed. The effort briefly disappeared. What had seemed impossible became available to them from the inside.
At EmergNsee Music Gathering (2008) in Oregon, I taught a HoopYoga and hoop-dance workshop attended by Meghan the Kat, one of the performers who had inspired me during my earliest years following String Cheese Incident. There was something beautifully disorienting about teaching a person I had once watched from a distance.
The hierarchy I had imagined between teacher and student dissolved.
She had given something to me through her movement. I had taken it into my own body, practiced it, altered it, combined it with what I had learned elsewhere, and now I was returning something to her.
Knowledge moved in a circle.
As I wrote at the time:
“It’s so beautiful how we all learn from each other, one hooper heart to the next.”
That sentence is covered in the earnestness of my early twenties, but I still believe what I was trying to say.
The practice did not belong to any one teacher, performer, or school. It passed between us. We learned through watching, imitating, experimenting, teaching, and being corrected. Every person carried the movement differently because every body was different. What one person offered was never reproduced perfectly; it was received, transformed, and passed onward.
By the time I attended Hoop Camp in California in 2008, that circulating exchange had become a culture of its own.
Hoop Camp Retreat 2008
For years, I had known many hoopers primarily through grainy online videos, usernames, festival sightings, and brief encounters on tour. (I can’t help but to hear “This one time…at Band Camp”, if you grew up in the early 2000s, you’ll get this. )
The people I had admired from across the country were suddenly gathered in one place. We practiced together during the day, exchanged ideas in workshops, ate together, laughed together, and filled the darkness with glowing hoops at night.
I was surrounded by women who had shaped my imagination before they ever knew my name, alongside childhood friends, college friends, troupe members, and the people who had become my chosen family on the road.
I described myself afterward as channeling “true Unicorn energy”—nonstop hooping, smiling, laughing, and learning. The language makes me laugh now, but the joy was real.
So was the sense that something larger than individual skill was taking place.
During the opening ceremony, we gathered around a prayer hoop and placed our intentions inside it. One by one, people spoke about what the hoop had done in their lives: the confidence it had restored, the friendships it had created, the grief it had carried, the joy it had unlocked, and the selves it had allowed them to discover.
In my blog afterward, I wrote:
“All of us have been changed by the hoop. It’s impacted our lives, brought us together, shown us ourselves, given us bliss, given us confidence…”
I would describe some of those experiences differently today. I no longer interpret every ecstatic weekend, meaningful coincidence, or intense connection through the same spiritual vocabulary I used then.
But I do not dismiss what happened simply because my language has changed.
We gathered around a shared practice.
We moved together.
We taught one another.
We placed hopes and prayers inside a circle.
And through repetition, rhythm, attention, and communal presence, many of us experienced real transformation.
What had begun as a cheap plastic toy had become a language through which we recognized one another.
A movement became a practice.
A practice became a community.
And somewhere along the way, community began to resemble ritual.
The Hunger We Keep Trying to Name
A movement became a practice.
A practice became a community.
And somewhere along the way, community began to resemble ritual.
I did not yet know the language of moral psychology or sociology. I had never heard Émile Durkheim’s phrase collective effervescence: the strange charge that can arise when people gather, move, sing, mourn, celebrate, and direct their attention toward something together.
I did not know Jonathan Haidt’s idea of the “hive switch”—the human capacity to loosen, temporarily, the boundaries of the individual self and become part of an emergent whole. Haidt has suggested that people sometimes need precisely these experiences of self-transcendence, and that music, dancing, communal worship, and local festivals can offer places where isolated individuals become participants in something larger.
I only knew what it felt like.
I knew the sensation of entering a field where hundreds of people were responding to the same rhythm. I knew what happened when musicians improvised, dancers answered, and the distance between performer and audience became briefly porous. I knew the feeling of looking across a dark campground and seeing circles of light moving through the trees.
I knew what it was to become less preoccupied with myself without disappearing entirely.
The experience was not one of erasing the individual. It was the experience of becoming an individual in relationship—one moving body inside a larger pattern.
Research on communal music and movement suggests that this feeling is not merely sentimental. Singing together can accelerate feelings of closeness among people who begin as strangers, while synchronized and physically demanding dance can deepen social bonding.
None of that proves that every festival is sacred, every crowd is healthy, or every ecstatic experience is transformative. Collective energy can be commercialized, manipulated, and turned toward destructive ends just as easily as generous ones. The same human capacity that allows people to lose themselves in music can also make groups tribal, conformist, or cruel.
But the possibility of misuse does not erase the underlying need.
We are creatures shaped for more than private thought.
We learn through imitation. We regulate one another through voice, expression, touch, and presence. We create attachment through repeated encounters. We remember through songs, meals, places, stories, gestures, and practices carried from one body into another.
And yet modern life increasingly offers us the image of these things without requiring our participation in them.
We can stream concerts without entering a crowd.
Watch other people dance without moving.
Order food without cooking or eating with anyone.
Read about ritual without belonging to a ritual community.
Listen to conversations about friendship while sitting alone.
Learn the vocabulary of embodiment while barely inhabiting our bodies.
We are connected to more people than previous generations could have imagined, yet much of that connection asks almost nothing of us beyond attention.
And attention is not the same as belonging.
Recognition is not reciprocity.
Watching is not participating.
A feed is not a feast.
The distinction matters because loneliness is not simply the absence of people. It can also be the absence of roles, obligations, shared places, repeated practices, and the experience of being meaningfully woven into other lives.
We have become very skilled at diagnosing the resulting ache.
We speak of trauma responses, dopamine, attachment styles, nervous-system dysregulation, depression, social anxiety, and burnout. These frameworks can be genuinely helpful. Naming an experience can make it less frightening and give us a place to begin.
But sometimes I wonder whether we are still trying to think our way out of conditions that cannot be changed through thought alone.
A widely shared passage attributed to Jay LeSoleil puts the mismatch much more sharply:
“You feel depressed and crazy because in every historical human culture known to anthropology, people sang together, danced together, and ate food together—and you don’t sing, you don’t dance, and you eat alone in the dark.
You are a singing ape, and you are meant to know fifty dances by heart, which hilltops are sacred, and the names of every plant it is possible to eat.”
The passage is deliberately sweeping. Depression cannot be reduced to a lack of communal dancing, and no single poetic statement can represent every historical culture.
But it lands because it names something our clinical language often misses.
The problem may not be only what is happening inside the isolated individual.
The problem may also be the world in which the individual is being asked to live.
A world where community has become optional, ritual has become content, food has become fuel, music has become background noise, and places are valued primarily for what can be extracted or built upon them.
A world in which we are encouraged to construct an identity but given fewer durable ways to belong.
Perhaps that is why our hunger attaches itself so easily to substitutes.
We mistake stimulation for aliveness.
Visibility for intimacy.
Agreement for community.
Intermittent attention for belonging.
We search for the feeling of being carried beyond ourselves through fandoms, online movements, romantic fixation, political tribes, spiritual consumerism, and endless streams of other people’s lives. Some of these can produce real relationships and genuine meaning. But they can also leave the body sitting in the same room, staring through the same glass, still longing to be somewhere it is needed.
When I look back now, I do not think I miss only the performances, the festivals, or the person I was at twenty-three.
I miss having a practice that placed me inside a living network of people, music, places, responsibilities, and shared memory.
I knew which songs could shift the energy of an entire field.
I knew who would help me carry my hoops.
I knew where people gathered after the music ended.
I had teachers, students, collaborators, and friends.
I had something to offer the gathering, and the gathering had something to ask of me.
That is different from being observed.
It is different from being liked.
It is different from being included in a group chat.
It is participation.
In 2014, I tried to describe this in a short poem:
Grateful for Dance
Portal to divine connection A form of sacred expression Of outward shining expansion Here I am, calling to attention
It’s time to move It’s time to be free It’s time to prove Your non-complacency
So please follow me Down this path of dance divinity It’s time we realize It’s not you and me, it’s we.
Some of the language makes me smile now. But that final line contains an intuition I still trust. It was never only about what happened to me inside the hoop.
It was about what became possible between us.
This does not mean we need to recreate the past, abandon technology, or spend our lives at music festivals. Nor does it mean every older community was nurturing. Communities can constrain, exclude, punish, and demand conformity. Nostalgia can make us forget that belonging has often come at a cost.
The question is not how to return to an imaginary golden age.
The question is what forms of participation human beings still need—and how we might create them honestly now.
Where can we sing without needing to be singers?
Dance without needing to perform?
Prepare food that will be eaten by more than one person?
Learn the names of the plants and animals around us?
Create rituals that give grief, gratitude, transition, and memory somewhere to live outside our private minds?
Practice something regularly enough that it changes us?
Modern people are drowning in information about how to become healthier, happier, more regulated, more spiritual, and more connected. But information cannot substitute for the meal, the chorus, the dance, the garden, the ceremony, the friendship, or the repeated practice.
Some wisdom can only be received through participation.
And perhaps some forms of loneliness cannot be solved by understanding ourselves more perfectly. Perhaps they require becoming part of something that does not begin and end with the self.
That is the ancient hunger beneath modern life.
Not merely the hunger to believe something.
The hunger to belong to a living world again.
And we may not be able to think our way back into that world.
