What if strength training wasn’t simply about building muscle?
What if stepping beneath a barbell could become an act of devotion?
In this episode, I sit down with Awen of Primal Druidry, whose approach to physical training challenges many of our modern assumptions about both fitness and spirituality.
For her, the gym isn’t merely a place to improve health or appearance. It becomes sacred space—a place where discipline becomes ritual, physical hardship becomes offering, and strength training becomes a way of cultivating relationship with the divine.
Throughout our conversation, we explore questions like:
What is Primal Druidry, and what makes it a living tradition rather than an attempt to recreate the ancient past?
Why has strength training become such a central part of her spiritual practice?
What changes when exercise becomes ritual instead of self-improvement?
How does physical discipline shape character, devotion, and spiritual life?
What does she mean when she describes receiving guidance through training?
How do we think carefully about deeply personal spiritual experiences without dismissing them…or accepting them uncritically?
One aspect of our discussion that I found especially compelling is the challenge it poses to a very modern assumption: that the body is simply a vehicle for the mind. Throughout history, many religious and philosophical traditions have understood bodily practices (whether fasting, pilgrimage, martial arts, dance, or manual labor) as capable of shaping the soul.
This conversation asks whether lifting weights might belong in that lineage.
Even if you don’t share her theology or spiritual framework, I think the deeper questions are worth exploring.
Can repeated physical practice become a form of prayer?
Can discipline become devotion?
Can the body become a place where meaning is discovered rather than simply performed?
Those are the questions at the heart of this conversation.
As always, the goal isn’t to tell you what to believe. It’s to explore ideas with curiosity, ask better questions, and think more deeply about the relationship between body, mind, and the search for the sacred.
Thank you for taking the time to listen/watch, comment and share. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
How Suppression Shapes Our Bodies, Minds, and the World We Live In
Hey hey, Welcome back! Today’s episode connects beautifully to something many of you resonated with in my earlier show, Science or Stagnation? The Risk of Unquestioned Paradigms. In that episode, we talked about scientism… not science itself, but the dogma that forms around certain scientific ideas.
That’s why voices like Rupert Sheldrake have always fascinated me. Sheldrake, for those unfamiliar, isn’t a fringe crank. He’s a Cambridge-trained biologist who dared to question what he calls the “ten dogmas of modern science”: that nature is mechanical, that the mind is only the brain, that the laws of nature are fixed, that free will is an illusion, and so on.
When he presented these questions in a TED Talk, it struck such a nerve that the talk was quietly taken down. And that raised an obvious question: If the ideas are so wrong… why not let them stand and fall on their own? Why censor them unless they hit something tender? All of this sets the stage for today’s conversation.
Because the theory we’re exploring, Social Miasm Theory, fits right inside that tension between mainstream assumptions and the alternative frameworks we often dismiss too quickly.
My friend Stephinity Salazar just published a fascinating piece of research arguing that suppression (of toxins, trauma, emotion, and truth) is the root pattern underlying both chronic illness and our wider social dysfunction. It’s a theory that steps outside the materialist worldview and challenges the mechanistic lens we’ve all been taught to see through.
Dr. Stephinity Salazar
Hoop Camp Retreat
Yarmony Grass 2008
You don’t have to agree with everything…that’s not the goal here.
What I love is the chance to explore, to ask good questions, and to stay grounded while examining ideas that stretch our understanding.
This blog is your guide to the episode, so you can track the concepts, explore the references, and dive deeper while you listen.
So, with that, let’s dive into Social Miasm Theory: what it is, where it comes from, why it matters, and what it might reveal about the world we’re living in today.
What Are Miasms, Anyway?
To anchor our conversation, Stephinity starts by grounding the concept of “miasms” in its homeopathic roots. Historically, Samuel Hahnemann (founder of homeopathy) described three primary miasms:
Psora, linked to scabies or skin conditions
Syphilis, associated with destructive disease
Sycosis, with overgrowth and tissue proliferation
Since then, the theory has expanded. Many modern homeopaths now talk about five chronic miasms, adding:
Tubercular (linked to tuberculosis, respiratory issues) Homeopathy 360
Psychological suppression: denial, cognitive dissonance, fear-driven attachment to ideology
Truth suppression: propaganda, censorship, disinformation, scientific dogma
When these forms of suppression accumulate, she argues, they create a “social miasm”: a pathological field that shapes everything from public health to political polarization.
Even if you don’t buy every mechanism she proposes, the metaphor works. And the patterns are hard to ignore.
Evidence, Epistemology, and Skeptics: What Counts as “Real”?
This is the part my skeptical listeners will perk up for.
In the interview, I asked her the question I knew many of you were thinking: “How do you define evidence within this framework? What would you want skeptical listeners to understand before judging it?”
Stephinity argues that the modern scientific lens is too narrow. Not wrong—but incomplete. She sees value in:
case studies
pattern recognition
field effects
resonance models
historical cycles
experiential knowledge
Whether or not you agree, her challenge to mechanistic materialism echoes thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake, IONS researchers, and even physicists questioning entropic cosmology.
And she’s not claiming this replaces science. She’s asking what science misses when it refuses to look beyond the physical.
Suppression: What It Looks Like in Real Life
Stephinity’s paper covers how suppression shows up on multiple levels. Here are a few examples she explores:
Overuse of symptom-suppressive medications
Emotional avoidance that pushes trauma deeper
Social pressure to conform
Institutional censorship
Environmental toxins that overwhelm the microbiome
Radiation and electromagnetic exposures
She frames suppression as a terrain problem: when the body or society becomes too acidic, stressed, toxic, or disconnected, the miasm takes root.
This is where we start to cross into the biological, psychological, and social layers—which brings us to one of my favorite parts of her theory.
Neuroparasitology: When Parasites Change Behavior
The concept of a new branch of science of neuroparasitology. Study of the influence of parasites on the activity of the brain.
This is the section I teased in the podcast because it’s both wild and backed by real research.
Stephinity references studies showing that parasites can alter host behavior not just in insects or rodents, but potentially in humans too. Her paper cites examples like helminths, nematodes, mycotoxins, and other microorganisms (McAuliffe, 2016; Colaiacovo, 2021). These organisms are everywhere, not just in “developing countries” (Yu, 2010).
Researchers have documented parasites that:
influence mood
shift risk-taking
modify sexual attraction
impair impulse control
change social patterns
This is what Dawkins called the extended phenotype (1982): the parasite’s genes expressing themselves through the host’s behavior. Neuroparasitologists Hughes & Libersat (2019) and Johnson (2020) have shown how certain infections can shift personality traits in specific, predictable ways.
Stephinity ties this into terrain: parasites tend to thrive in acidic, low-oxygen, stressed, radiative environments (Clark, 1995; Tennant, 2013; Cerecedes, 2015). In her view, chronic suppression creates exactly that kind of internal ecosystem.
But there’s another layer here. One that isn’t biological at all.
This is where philosopher Daniel Dennett enters the chat.
In Breaking the Spell, Dennett describes “parasites of the mind”: ideas that spread not because they’re true, but because they’re incredibly good at hijacking human psychology. These mental parasites latch onto our cognitive wiring the same way biological one’s latch onto the nervous system. They survive by exploiting:
fear
moral impulses
tribal loyalty
the desire for certainty
social pressure
existential insecurity
According to Dennett, religious dogmas, conspiracy theories, and ideological extremes act like memetic parasites: they replicate by using us, encouraging us to host them and then pass them on.
In other words: not all parasites live in the gut. Some live in the mind.
And…..we even discussed how billionaire Les Wexner once publicly described having a “dybbuk spirit” a kind of parasitic entity in Jewish folklore known for influencing personality. Whether symbolic or literal, the analogy fits. 🫨😮
Her point is simple: When the terrain is weak, something else will fill the space.
Whether that “something” is trauma, ideology, toxicity, or a literal parasite… the mechanism rhymes.
Collective Delusion and Mass Psychosis
Drawing on Jung and Dostoevsky, Stephinity explores the idea that societies can enter “psychic epidemics.”
You’ve seen this. We all have…
The last decade has been a masterclass in how fear, propaganda, and emotional suppression create predictable patterns:
polarization
tribal thinking
moral panics
ideological possession
scapegoating
censorship
intolerance of nuance
She argues these are symptoms of a cultural miasm—not failures of individual character.
Whether you lean left, right, or somewhere out in the wilderness, you’ve likely felt this rising tension. And it’s hard not to see how unresolved collective trauma feeds it.
COVID as a Catalyst: What the Pandemic Revealed
Another part of her paper dives into how the pandemic brought hidden patterns to the surface.
Some of her claims are controversial, especially around EMFs and environmental co-factors. In the episode, we unpack these with curiosity, not blind acceptance.
Her larger point is that COVID exposed:
institutional fragility
scientific gatekeeping
public distrust
trauma-based responses
authoritarian overreach
the psychological toll of suppression
Whether you agree with the specific mechanisms or not, the last decade made one thing undeniable: something in our social terrain is deeply dysregulated.
8. Healing Forward: What Do We Do With All This?
If suppression drives miasms, then healing means unsuppressing. Gently, not chaotically.
Stephinity suggests practices like:
emotional honesty
reconnecting with nature
releasing stored trauma
nutritional and detoxification support
reducing exposure to chronic stressors
restoring community and meaning
opening space for spiritual or intuitive insight
She’s not prescribing a protocol. She’s offering a map.
The destination is what the Greeks called sophrosyne: a state of balance between wisdom and sanity. Not blissful ignorance, not paranoid awakening. Just grounded clarity.
And I think we could all use a bit more of that.
Key Evidence and Arguments
Stephinity critiques materialist science, calling out what she terms “entropic cosmology.” She argues that by assuming nature is strictly mechanistic, mainstream science misses field-based phenomena, non-local consciousness, and deeper systemic patterns.
She draws on historical and homeopathic sources (Hahnemann, Kent) to build her theoretical foundation but also argues for newer forms of evidence: resonance, case studies, and pattern detection in social systems.
On the environmental front, she explores links between toxins, EMF / 5G, biotech, and chronic disease, not just as correlation, but as evidence of suppression dynamics.
Psychologically, she invokes mass delusion or collective repression (drawing from Jung, Dostoevsky) seeing societal crises as expressions of buried collective shadow.
Ultimately, her call to action isn’t just for individual healing, but for systemic awakening: more transparency, alternative medical paradigms, and restored connection with nature.
Why This Matters for You
Even if homeopathy isn’t your jam, Social Miasm Theory offers a metaphor (and potentially a map) for understanding how inner repression becomes external crisis. If this episode does anything, I hope it gives you permission to look a little closer and question the stuff we’re told not to touch.
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