I don’t say that to establish credentials. I say it because it’s the ground everything else in this piece stands on, and because I think it’s time I made something plain that I may have only gestured at sideways in recent pieces.

I remember when I first learned the art of “Core Shamanism,” or, if you will, modern shamanic practices. I was learning that, in these practices, there’s a lot of focus put on the elements and the directions — Powers of the East, South, West, North, Above, Below, and Within. All the spirits and energies that represent each of those directions are summoned and invoked to contribute to the container we’re creating, or the blessings and prayers we’re emitting. As the years of my practice evolved, and I kept interacting more closely with representatives of living indigenous communities, my understanding of exactly why these practices are the way they are kept sinking in deeper.

And this why forms a very big part of the reason we hold the core mission of helping our communities stay rooted in Earth-based wisdom and sacred plant medicine traditions, whilst helping the world’s remaining indigenous populations keep those traditions alive as the modern world presses in from every direction. That’s not a project to me. It’s closer to duty. Dharma, if the word still means anything after how overused and commodified it’s become in the spaces I used to — and still do, to a certain degree — move in.

So let me be direct about how I actually see the world, because I’ve been circling paradox a lot lately — writing about how Earthly life doesn’t resolve into one tidy truth, how contradiction is simply the texture of being alive here — and I don’t want that to be mistaken for a shrug, or for “everything is equally true and nothing can be known.” That isn’t it.

My view of the world is animistic. And after enough years spent in relationship with plant medicine — Ayahuasca most of all, Wachuma alongside it — I’ve come to a position I hold with real confidence: existence, at its root, is quantum. Not metaphorically. That’s the closest word I have for what’s been shown to me, over and over, in ceremony and out of it. It confirms, too, what pretty much every teacher and community I’ve had the privilege of sitting with has pointed toward in their own way. If there’s one thing close to an ultimate truth, it may be that — and it means our beliefs, our culture, the lens through which we each choose to engage with the world, can, in so many ways, all be true at once. The truth is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

I also believe — again, from lived experience rather than borrowed theory — that there’s a vibrational hierarchy to the spirits and energies people meet in and through this work. Some of what’s encountered through shamanic practice sits lower on that scale than beings like Jesus, or the Buddha — those we might reasonably call enlightened. I’m not going to unpack that fully here; it deserves its own piece, and I’d rather build into it properly than rush it into a paragraph. But I wanted you to know where I actually stand, given how much I’ve been communicating recently about paradox, contradiction, and hypocrisy without saying plainly what I don’t think is up for grabs here.

With that said, recently I’ve been quite literally fascinated by the human condition. As I always am. I am an anthropologist at heart, first and foremost. The plants, the cosmos, the interwoven matrix of consciousness that is the supreme being of nature — they all fascinate me. But what fascinates me most is just how humans relate to it all. How humans relate to the world around them, and how, most importantly, they do so whilst being well and experiencing prosperity.

This is why I’ve been grappling recently, as I quite often do, with a few things I’ve experienced in recent life.

A few weeks ago I read a piece — the kind that lands somewhere I wasn’t expecting it to, and that gave a level of insight I recognised entirely from my own lived experience — about a woman who’s built an enormous following teaching people to heal their nervous systems and their relationship with their families of origin. The writer called out the levels of authenticity and accountability in what this teacher was sharing with the world, and the hyper-individualised approach to healing and returning to wholeness. It’s something I’ve watched social media influencer culture and celebrity status do time and time again — such vehicles, as far as I’ve seen, mould and shape us insidiously, silently, into states of hyper-focus on self, and in doing so contribute immensely to the development of narcissism in society. Fame can all too often help birth and shape it. If you want to read the article in question, you can do so here. I sat with its words for several days, not because I disagreed with the substance, but because it reminded me how thoroughly I once lived inside spaces exactly like the one she occupies.

I spent a good stretch of years deeply entrenched in the influencer world — not adjacent to it, inside it. Rooms with the people building the platforms, the funnels, the followings. I travelled from my then-home in Edinburgh down to London to open the book tour of one of the influencers who was parading me around in public as one of their “brothers” and “dear friends,” together with another — since-dispatched — friend, who, interestingly, walks a very similar path to myself and Erika with Native Wisdom Hub, and whom she was parading around calling her “bestie.” I was also quoted and named on the back cover and inside said book. I remember this person once saying, during a live broadcast, something to the effect that there are teachers out there who genuinely haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about when it comes to money. I knew in that moment, just as I knew on many other occasions, that there were covert, indirect attacks being shovelled in my direction through her various broadcasts and social media posts, and that she was talking about me. What I didn’t clock until much later was that she was, in the same breath, teaching her own version of a framework — Earth as one of the shareholders in how we do business — that had a real origin she wasn’t naming.

As the years passed, and she “dumped” me out of her world just as she did her so-called “bestie,” and as my sense of self-worth and value in the world very clearly increased, I realised she’d been indulging in all the same behaviours she was heavily criticising and attacking through her online following. One of the biggest things she called out — teaching, or “borrowing,” concepts without due attribution — was something she was exercising just as glaringly in her own world. As my experience in sacred, values-driven entrepreneurship deepened and expanded, I came to understand that she’d taken the concept of “Earth as the primary shareholder in how we do business” from Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia — with zero attribution to him in how she shared it. To me, that made her just as much a hypocrite as the people she was calling out online. I’m not interested in dragging this up as a gotcha moment. I’m interested in what it revealed to me about how easily an idea can travel through a room, get repeated with total conviction, and arrive somewhere far from where it started — with nobody along the way pausing to ask whose it was. This is, in fact, one of anthropology’s central concepts: cultural appropriation. But I guess that’s for another essay, another time. 😉

More recently, something smaller happened that’s stayed with me longer than it probably should have, if I’m being genuinely honest about the situation. My daughter missed out on joining a fitness- and wellbeing-focused hill-walking group because, having decided at the last minute upon hearing me leave to join it — jumping out of bed with excitement to come along — she arrived five minutes after the scheduled departure. What struck me wasn’t the five minutes. It was watching, in real time, how difficult it seemed for someone to simply say — we could have made an exception, or I could have kept a line of communication open with you, even by sharing my WhatsApp live location for one hour, totally hands-free, phone in my backpack, and I’m sorry that felt harsh to you and your daughter — and instead hold the line as though softening it would cost them something essential, even existential.

The biggest underlying fascination in this, as mentioned above, is the human condition — how we allow ourselves to be unconsciously dragged and moulded by our traumas, our troubles, our struggles, and the structures within which we exist, into behaving in such ways. Both of these examples show what happens when a person’s identity gets built too rigid to bend — one person unable to admit where an idea came from, another unable to admit that they could have been more kind, or have done better. Both were inherently scared of the softness and openness of their own vulnerability.

Why is it so hard for people to take a breath out, drop their shoulders, and drop their ego along with them — to simply admit their mistakes, maybe apologise, and commit to doing better next time?

I really believe the world will heal if we can build enough trust in one another, and in life’s inherent wisdom, to open up and be vulnerable — to show that we’re not immune to fucking up in life, that we are indeed just flawed human beings, and all we want is love, care, belonging, connection, and respect.

What about you? Do you agree with this belief? If so, how do we help people to have more trust in each other and in the world around them?

Marc-John Brown is a shamanic practitioner, writer, teacher, culture broker and language translator and interpreter living between Scotland and Peru with his wife, two children, and two cats. He writes Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life here on Substack — an ongoing, unfolding exploration of what it means to remember our belonging to each other, to the land, and to the natural world. 🌿

So, here’s what I’ve got for you.

This past week, I kept being ambushed and utterly engulfed by gratitude. Not the performed kind, by any stretch of the imagination. The kind that arrives entirely uninvited and sits you down to take some deep breaths of reflection and attention.

The first was in a courtroom.

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It has, however, caused me some deep levels of uncomfortable reflection. It was said to me gently, almost in passing, in the run-up to the six-acre property in Bathgate last year — the one that, in the end, we didn’t acquire. Here it is:

Your word carries further when you own a property like that.

I remember nodding. I remember something in me agreeing before I’d had the chance to think about it. It took a long drive home, and then several more weeks, before the sentence started to properly make me itch and irk.

Because what it was really saying, once I turned it over, was this: the more wealth you can display, the more authority your word will carry. Which means, if you keep following the thread to its essential depth — the more wealth you have, the more spiritually developed you can be seen to be.

I don’t think the person who said it to me believed that. I don’t think most people who say things like it believe it either. That’s what makes it worth writing about. It isn’t cynicism. It’s something quieter and more insidious than that — an old pattern, dressed in new cloth, moving through rooms that pride themselves on having left old patterns behind.

As I write these words, I don’t want to come across as someone looking down at a human, or more-than-human, world I’ve somehow transcended. Please don’t mistake this writing for that. This writing comes from a place that sits, genuinely, on the inside of that world — as someone who has quite literally built a life and a small livelihood within it. Someone who has sat in circles with genuinely searching people, and who has, on more than one occasion, felt the pull of these same currents in myself. I too have fantasised, more than once over the years, about increased wealth, status, and the subsequent power, authority, and weight it may be perceived to give my words. This truly isn’t an essay about them. It’s an essay about us, and the patterns that move through communities that would insist, quite sincerely, that they’ve stepped outside the patterns altogether.

Here’s the thread I keep pulling on: a strong connection to the spirit world, the divine, and a capacity to manifest things in the physical world, do not tell us how spiritually developed we are. They tell us we’re gifted, or practised, or lucky, or some combination of the three. Vertical connection — upward, inward, into the unseen — is real, and I do not for a moment dismiss it. But I’ve come to believe the highest expression of spiritual maturity isn’t vertical at all. It’s horizontal. A regulated nervous system. Peace in the mind. Joy in the heart. And then — this is the part that’s easy to skip — all of that carried outward, into acts of kindness that do the harder thing: that give space to the person the room habitually doesn’t listen to. The unheard. The overlooked. The ones without the loudest voice or the biggest platform.

By that measure, spiritual development has almost nothing to do with what a person can channel, predict, or manifest, and everything to do with who they make room for.

I’ve watched this get inverted in smaller ways too — ways that are easy to miss because they don’t announce themselves as power at all. I’ve stood in circles where a kind of “lads being lads” energy takes hold without anyone naming it: a grouping together, a subtle closing of ranks, right at the moment when the feminine in the room most needs including rather than out-talked. It’s an easy wave of energy to get caught up in, and I’ve been there plenty of times myself — that masculine, dominant, gregarious, loud, boisterous vehicle of affection, connection, and validation. Nobody in such circumstances says whoever has the biggest presence should be listened to first. Nobody would ever say that sentence aloud. But I’ve felt it operating in the room all the same, quiet and unclaimed.

And then there’s the age one, which is perhaps the sentence I’ve sat with longest. Someone I hold real affection for — a well-respected figure in Scotland’s holistic and wellbeing world — told me, in the middle of a disagreement, that they had several more years of life experience than me, and so, in effect, knew more than me or carried more wisdom than me. I understood immediately what was happening, even as I struggled to name it in the moment. Because if you follow that logic to its root, years alone become the measure of wisdom, rather than what those years were spent doing. A person who has lived their whole life inside one language and one country is, by that measure, automatically wiser than someone younger who has spent years building a mind in multiple languages, unlearning the safety net of home comforts, sitting with realities a long way from Western familiarity. That’s not how wisdom works, and some quiet part of me thinks we both already know that. But the sentence still landed as a power move, because scratch almost any of these patterns and you find the same root: a very old, very human obsession with who gets to be more powerful than whom, and how that power can be used to steer people, communities, and outcomes.

The pattern that troubles me most, though, might be the strangest of all — because it hides inside the very language that claims to have solved it. I move through spiritual and wellbeing spaces that preach, quite proudly, no gurus. We all have our own inner authority, we say. And yet, in the same breath, so much of what gets offered as guidance traces back to one almighty source, treated as though it were the whole of the truth rather than one true thing among many.

I see this most clearly in the world of nutrition and dietary guidance, where I have enormous respect for the sheer number of people the Medical Medium’s work has genuinely helped. But I’ve also watched practitioners take that body of teaching and flatten it into something like the body is a car — it just needs the right oil, water, and fuel — as if every human body needed the same base inputs in the same measure. Ayurveda has known otherwise for thousands of years: Vata, Pitta, Kapha, each constitution needing something different. Chinese medicine has known it too. The moment we reduce a body — any body — to one universal formula, we’ve quietly discarded millennia of medicine that understood individuality as the starting point, not the exception. And underneath that reduction, again, is the same familiar shape: certainty is easier to sell than nuance, and one authoritative source is easier to build a following around than many overlapping, sometimes-contradicting truths.

Wealth as proof of spiritual rank. Age as proof of wisdom. One teaching as the whole of the truth. A closing of ranks that quietly, silently outvotes the feminine in the room. Different costumes, same structure underneath — a structure I don’t think it’s unfair to call patriarchal, and colonial in its logic, even when it’s worn by people who would be genuinely appalled to hear it named that way. It is, after all, the native operating system of the world we were all raised inside — predatory capitalism dressed, in these rooms, in white linen, harem pants, and cacao rather than a suit (with a caveat to say that I, too, sometimes find myself wearing white linen and harem pants, and sacramentally sipping cacao, within ceremonial contexts).

So here is the line of inquiry I keep returning to: isn’t the truest spiritual work, then, our capacity to sit with the discomfort of being shown our own internalised power plays — the patterns quietly planted in us by structures that have always rewarded dominance over listening, certainty over curiosity, and the appearance of having arrived over the humility of still becoming?

I write all of this with love, not judgement. As I write it, I’m sitting inside the same discomfort I’m describing — only recently, I found myself in disagreement with a neighbour in my local vicinity over something. I noticed myself wanting to reach for the leveraging of my qualifications and ‘credentials’, if you will, to gain more power and posture in the disagreement. This, instead of simply expressing my disagreement from a place of my own truth and authentic sentiments and perceptions. Thankfully, I caught myself in that scenario and didn’t act upon impulse. However, there have been numerous occasions (too many to count!) over the years of my adult life where I wouldn’t have had a second thought about reaching for such a power grab.

With all this said, when the people who inspired the production of this piece have the emotional room for it, I’d far rather have this conversation with them directly — in person, around a fire, on land held as kin rather than as an asset — than say any more about it here on this Substack.

All my blessings,
Marc-John 🌿

Marc-John Brown is a writer, teacher, culture broker and language translator living between Scotland and Peru with his wife, two children, and two cats. He writes Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life here on Substack — an ongoing, unfolding exploration of what it means to remember our belonging to each other, to the land, and to the natural world.

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Here’s the fuller shape of it.

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Here’s the question I’ve been sitting with: if you spend years building something — really building it, the way you’d raise a child or tend a fire that can’t be left unattended — what does it mean to deliberately let it get smaller? Not because it failed. And most certainly not because you’re walking away from it. But because some quieter instinct in you has said enough, for now, and you’re choosing to listen.

I’ve spent late 2019 to 2026 fully immersed in building Native Wisdom Hub with Erika. It really came to life at the height of COVID, when I went in my depressed states to a river on the Scottish Borders and could hear my then Shipibo Maestro’s voice in my head, whispering his messages of wisdom and support to me. Over the years, we’ve taken people on expedition from the city of Cusco deep into the Amazon Jungle of Madre De Dios, and we’ve gone equally deep into the jungles of Lower Ucayali, taking people to move into deep master plant dieta and interrelationship with their higher selves through the deeply magical portal that is the natural world. And since 2022, we’ve been running the Earth Wisdom Healing Retreat on an annual basis. This feels like the pinnacle of our offerings. The true flagship, if you will. A beautiful balance of everything we’ve done and everything we offer, all in one single offering and catering to the needs of as many people within our community as possible, allowing people from all walks of life to experience of the magic of Peruvian Plant Medicine in its Motherland. Native Wisdom Hub, truly, has been the shape of my days for the best part of a decade.

And for the past year, I’ve been winding it down—at least somewhat. Watching it traverse a phase of relative quietness, on a directly parallel basis to me deactivating my Instagram and Facebook accounts. It has felt right, as we move through what is clearly a recalibration and somewhat of a rebirthing into a new phase of life together, as husband and wife, parents of our children, and co-founders and co-directors of the organisation that was birthed from our shared passions and what is undoubtedly our shared Dharma as soulmates united through generations and, most likely, light years.

Native Wisdom Hub is absolutely not being closed or shut down. And it absolutely has not failed, though I notice how ready my mind is sometimes to reach for that word anyway, as if shrinking and failing were the same motion. Erika still leads all of her very powerful cacao work. Our Leadership Training continues, the retreats in the Sacred Valley — all that work continues. What’s changing is the pace I hold underneath it all, and how much of myself I’m pouring into growth for growth’s own sake. No more of that, please.

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Here’s the honest seam in this one: I coach people through exactly this kind of transition. Helping someone step out of a life that no longer fits, into something more location-independent, more their own — that’s work I know from the inside, because I’ve done it myself more than once. And for months I’ve been giving that advice to others without fully taking it myself. At least not in as full a way as I’d guide my clients to. And you know what? There’s a particular kind of exposure in noticing that. You can hold space for someone else’s threshold for years before you’re honest enough to stand on your own. We coach others so well, but when it comes to coaching ourselves? That’s another matter altogether!

So this is me: taking my own medicine. 🦅

As mentioned already, part of this has meant stepping back from social media almost entirely. Digital places and spaces I’d spent years building audiences, and where I no longer wanted to exist. As mentioned in a previous article, I’ve come to think of that particular hum — the low-grade pressure to always be seen leading, posting, holding space, generating interest — as its own kind of colonisation. A digitised Wetiko, quietly eating the thing it feeds on. Coming off it hasn’t been simple. There’s been a real cost, in visibility and in the momentum I’d built. But there’s also been a kind of quiet I didn’t know I was missing.

In the space that’s opened up, I’ve gone back to language interpreting and translation — work I did for years before NWH, work that asks something different of me than facilitation does. And I’ve enjoyed it more than I expected to. The quiet time, dancing to the beat of nobody’s drum except my own, silently enjoying the mental stimulation of technical language analysis. Work that I do for clients, but work that I’m currently doing for nobody more than myself.

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Here’s where once-upon-a-time I may reach for a lesson to impart—to tie the ribbon and tell you what this all means. I don’t think I’ve earned that yet. What I have instead is a genuine question, one I don’t think is only mine: is winding something down ever legible as growth? We have so much language for scaling, for building, for the next chapter. Almost none for the deliberate shrinking of something you love, done not in defeat but in devotion to what it might become if you stopped forcing it for a while. As one of my first coach-trainers called it, “slowing down to speed up”. With a caveat to say that there is zero attachment whatsoever to the act of “speeding up”. From this position, we listen to the voice of nature; receive what wants to emerge, and act accordingly. Devotional. Intentional. Reciprocal; far from extractivist or forceful.

There is no clearly-defined answer here. What I do know is that Erika and I are having real conversations about what the next five to seven years of our family’s life looks like, and that some of those conversations only became possible once I stopped needing NWH to be bigger every quarter.

If any of this is stirring something in you — if there’s a version of your own life or work you’ve been quietly shrinking, or wanting to — I’d love to hear about it. And if you want the fuller version of this thread, including what’s actually happened these past months and what taking my own medicine has looked like in practice, that’s where I’m headed next, for paid subscribers.

Tupananchiskama,
Marc-John 🌿

Marc-John Brown is a writer, teacher, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub. Born in Scotland and steeped in Andean and Amazonian traditions through years of deep apprenticeship and life in South America, he writes at the intersection of re-indigenisation, sacred entrepreneurship, and the recovery of meaning in modern life. He is currently serialising his first book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, published live on this Substack. He lives between Scotland and Peru with his two children, two cats, and his wife and co-creator, Erika.

I sit down at the desk with some Yerba Mate, and there are between three and four tabs open before I’ve properly settled in front of the laptop. One is a large legal document I’m translating for an old agency client I started servicing assignments for way back in March 2012. The same client that formed part of the working ecosystem that allowed me to travel as a digital nomad through South Korea, China, and Malaysia, together with Erika, between 2012 and 2013. The next tab is AI evaluation and transcription work. And the third is Native Wisdom Hub, some thread with Erika about this year’s Cacao Ceremonial Leadership cohort or her cacao shipment. Some days within a week, there’s a fourth tab open that’s this Substack, working on the next essay or hanging out a little bit within the wider Substack community.

A younger version of me may have looked at that screen and felt ashamed of it. Fragmented. Scattered. Proof that I hadn’t yet arrived at whatever it is a “thought leader” or “teacher” is supposed to look like — someone whose whole life is ceremony and ritual, unbothered by invoices and the mundane.

I absolutely don’t feel that shame, however. I’m still figuring out a definition for what I feel instead, but it’s definitely a lot more solid, grounded, and balanced than shame.

In this personal year five, the freedom I’m experiencing is of a strange flavour. Not freedom from the ordinary work, but freedom that seems to require doing more of it, not less.

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We spent most of that day in the garden, sun properly out over Scotland in what has been our hottest summer for a very long time, the kids bouncing on their airtracks whilst Erika and I danced to salsa and old Cuban folklore — the music that's quietly been the backbone of our family life for years now, before ceremony or plant medicine entered it. An ordinary Wednesday, in the best possible way.

Experiencing and reading life the way I do, through the eyes of multiple spiritual modalities, not least numerology, I have begun to experience a particular flavour of freedom post-birthday. From a numerological perspective, I pay attention and calculate life in personal years — not January to December, but birthday to birthday. By that reckoning I’ve just crossed into a personal year 5, and if you know anything about numerology’s rough grammar, you’ll know that a 5 year speaks of freedom, movement, and horizons you haven’t seen yet. As usual, I don’t offer that as proof of anything, nor as fact. I offer it as the chosen lens I happened to be looking through when something else, something more ordinary and more interesting, caught my eye.

Post-birthday, I’ve returned to my freelance profession in language services.

Fourteen years ago, before any of this — before Native Wisdom Hub, before the book, before cacao and ceremony became the architecture of my working life — I qualified as a language interpreter and translator. Sheriff Courts. Immigration tribunals. Rooms where somebody’s whole future turns on whether the right word lands in the right place at the right moment. It was my first proper ‘trade’, if you will. Learned the long way, on my feet, in rooms with very high stakes and very little room for error.

I stepped away from it, on and off, for years, as other paths pulled harder. And now, at the start of this new personal cycle, I’ve stepped back in — at the same time as a small handful of new coaching enquiries have started arriving. Two worlds I’d always kept in separate rooms in my head, suddenly sharing a doorway.

And sitting in both rooms again, I noticed something I’d never quite named before.

There’s a particular skill interpreting demands of you that has nothing to do with vocabulary or grammar, and everything to do with something called verbal working memory — active short-term memory, if you want the plainer term for it. It’s the capacity to hold someone’s spoken words in your mind whilst you’re simultaneously unpacking their meaning, tracking the grammar, and building the equivalent sentence in a second language — all before the speaker has finished their next thought. You’re never just translating word for word. You’re holding a moving target in your mind long enough to do something precise with it.

I’m still learning what that skill is most useful for outside a courtroom, in the wider context of being of service to our shared world. But here’s what I’m noticing so far.

In a coaching conversation, that same capacity turns into something else entirely. It becomes the ability to hold a client’s words across a timeline — not just what they said thirty seconds ago, but what they said fifteen minutes ago, and sometimes what they said in a session three weeks back — and to move between those points when it might serve them. A client will say something in passing, almost throwaway, and twenty minutes later say something that rhymes or resonates with it in a way they haven’t noticed. I go back. I ask about the first thing, then the second, and I ask what they make of the two sitting next to each other.

More often than I expected, that’s the moment something shifts. Not because I’ve told them anything. I haven’t. I’ve just handed back two things they already said, side by side, and let them do the noticing.

I don’t think this makes me a particularly gifted coach. The actual coaching — asking the right question, staying quiet at the right moment, knowing when to lean in and when to leave a silence alone — is its own craft, and one I’m still apprenticed to after the best part of a decade. But I’ve come to believe the working memory piece is what lets that craft land with more precision than it otherwise would. It’s not the engine. It’s the thing that lets the engine idle quietly enough to hear what’s actually being said underneath the words.

There’s usually a narrative running beneath a person’s decisions and patterns, and it’s rarely the one they’d tell you first if you asked directly. Watching someone find the edges of that narrative — watching the moment their own words, reflected back, start to rearrange something in them — is one of the more honouring pieces of work I get to do. Not because I’m healing something for them. Because I’m helping them hear themselves clearly enough to start healing it on their own terms.

And underneath all of it, if I’m honest about where this is going, is a question I keep circling back to. If not for freedom, then what, in the end, are we actually building any of this for?

Freedom, as I’m coming to understand it this year, isn’t the absence of structure — courtrooms have plenty of that, and I’m walking back into them by choice. It’s what structure is for. It’s the thing that lets a person step properly into whichever life they came here for — building something that matters in their field, doing better work pushing the frontiers of whatever they’ve been called to, or simply being more fully present in the ordinary, unglamorous work of loving the people in front of them and nurturing the relationships that are most important to them.

I don’t know yet what this particular personal year is going to ask of me. I rarely do, at the start of one. But I’m grateful, this month, for a skill I built in rooms that had nothing to do with spirit or ceremony, and for the strange, quiet way it’s turned out to serve exactly that work after all.

With all my love,
Marc-John

Marc-John Brown is a writer, teacher, coach, mentor, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub, working alongside his wife Erika at the intersection of re-indigenisation, ceremonial leadership, and conscious fatherhood. He is currently serialising his book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, here on Substack. If you’d like to explore coaching with him, you can find out more on the Native Wisdom Hub coaching page.

Not a calling. A diagnosis.

In his village, he said, when someone starts going through that, people are glad. We’re going to have another healer. A circle of those who’ve already been through it gathers round, works out the specific shape of what’s calling, does the rituals the calling asks for, and then the whole village comes together to celebrate the person’s return — the homecoming of a healer after a long journey through turmoil. In the country he first travelled to for graduate study, he found the same ringing being met with sedation, straightjackets, and a locked ward.

I’m not a Dagara initiate. That’s not my lineage, and as always, I want to be honest that I’m reporting a teaching I encountered, not one I was raised inside. But something in it landed on me so precisely I had to sit with it for a full day before I could write a word. Because for months now, I have been trying, quite deliberately, to put the phone down.

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It’s been several months — since last September, when Erika and I delivered our final deep Amazonian plant medicine immersion — that I made the decision to step back from the rigours of deep ceremonial space-holding. I haven’t sat a master plant dieta since August 2025, and I’ve been genuinely at peace with that. It was a choice, not a collapse. Then the six-acre property in Bathgate, which we’d built real hope around, didn’t materialise, and something in me that was already leaning towards rest took that as confirmation rather than defeat.

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Three thresholds, one ordinary Wednesday. I have to sit with the number seventeen for a moment even now. I have been with this woman longer than I have lived in any other chapter of my own life — longer than the house I grew up in, longer than any job, any city, any single version of myself. Whatever else I have failed to finish, I have not failed to stay.

We didn’t mark it with much ceremony. We spent a large chunk of the day in the scorching Scottish sun, out in the garden — the kids bouncing on their inflatable airtracks, Erika and I dancing to salsa and Cuban folklore, the genre that has quietly formed the backbone of our family life every bit as much as our plant medicine and ceremonial work has. No grand toast. No framed reflection written in advance. Just a Wednesday carrying three milestones at once, which felt, in hindsight, exactly right — because the thing I’ve been circling for weeks isn’t really about birthdays or anniversaries or nursery graduations. It’s about what they interrupted.

For most of this year I’ve been writing my way down into the deepest part of my book — the chapter I called The Colonised Soul. It’s the part of the journey with not much comfort in it yet, only the honest naming of the deepest wound. And one thread kept surfacing in ways I didn’t expect: how easily we come to believe that arrival will complete us. That the person we’re looking for is waiting somewhere just past the horizon — in a country not yet visited, a level not yet reached, a version of our life not yet lived. Move there, get that, become this, and only then will the searching stop.

I’ve built entire chapters of my actual life around that belief. Scotland to Peru and back again. Businesses started and quietly let go. Land I hoped to steward that never became mine. A shifting sense, every few years, that the real thing — the settled, arrived, finally-whole version of Marc-John — was one more decision away.

None of that searching was wasted. I don’t believe that. But sitting with the number seventeen this week, I noticed something I’d been too busy arriving to notice before.

The things I kept looking for had been right under my nose all along.

Not in a neat, aphorism-shaped way. In the actual, unglamorous way. Two adult human beings, building and rebuilding a family across continents. Two people whose souls are entirely restless unless living in truth and authenticity, hearts fully on their sleeves — which is a beautiful thing to say and a genuinely difficult thing to practise.

I’m thinking of a moment a few years ago, when we were struggling badly with money. We were both crying, properly, and in the middle of it our eyes met — one of those moments when you are as emotionally exposed as it’s possible to be in front of another human being. And I froze. My heart closed, completely, in real time, while I was looking straight at her. It took days afterwards to unpack what had actually happened in that instant: a fear so visceral, so entirely in the body rather than the head, that it had nothing to do with logic. The fear of being seen and held that deeply. We talked it through, slowly, until it turned into mutual understanding, and the understanding turned into something neither of us had before — a new level of openness, and with it, a deeper connectedness of being.

Erika didn’t arrive into my life once. She arrives, in some sense, every single week — sometimes every single day — and so, I have to assume, do I into hers. That’s not a failure of the fairytale version of love. It might be the more accurate one. Messy. Regenerative. Featuring significant periodic fracturing before it returns to heal, expand, and grow into something stronger than what came before.

There’s a moment from the garden here at home I keep returning to. It was truly a gift from spirit, and it came, of all people, through my daughter — grounded, blossoming feminine energy that she is. She spotted a chrysalis in the grass, blown clean off the washing line by a strong wind. The fact she even noticed it, and knew straightaway what it was, felt like a small miracle in itself. She rescued it — tied it with a piece of dental floss and a small lump of Blu Tack to a hole-punched plastic lid, which she balanced over an empty jam jar with a bit of paper inside — and every day for five days she sprayed it gently with water to help it along. Until, finally, it birthed. We watched its very first spreading of wings: stuck together at first, vibrating at extraordinary speed as they filled with hemolymph, the fluid that is, quite literally, a butterfly’s life force, before they opened properly and began to flap.

When we set it free in the garden, tears came to my eyes. I could feel the symbolism vibrating in every fibre of my body. A new era, birthed. A period of significant contraction transforming into a period of massive expansion. Time to fly with a freedom we haven’t felt in a long while. And the freedom was never out there in the wider world. It was always on the inside — subject to a fearless dissolution of an old version of ourselves, so that an entirely new version may be born.

My daughter’s first backpacking trip, not long before that, comes back to me in the same breath — watching her step, cautiously and then not so cautiously, into a version of the world I once discovered on my own terms, hitch-hiking through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and into Peru as a teenager, entirely fluent by then in the Spanish that carried me through it. I wanted, more than anything, to hand her the world. What I hadn’t expected was to learn something from watching her hold it.

Our son gave me a version of the same lesson only a few days ago, at a Pagan festival not far from home. I watched him move between adult after adult with total fearlessness — inviting himself to sit beside complete strangers, asking, without a flicker of self-consciousness, whether he could try some of their food. A natural friend-maker. Asking strangers for their food isn’t exactly a core teaching in our house, but the spirit underneath it is: the boldness, the confidence, the conviction to meet the world exactly as you are. That’s something to behold in a five-year-old, and something I recognise, gratefully, as a seed of what Erika and I have spent years trying to cultivate in ourselves.

I think this is the quieter sibling to everything I’ve been excavating in the book. The colonised soul — the subject of Chapter Five, serialised here on this Substack — believes home is a place not yet reached.

Seventeen years in, standing in an ordinary Scottish week with a wife who has outlasted every plan I ever made, with and without her, I’m no longer sure that’s true.

Perhaps re-indigenisation isn’t only the long road back to ancestral land, forgotten language, older ways of knowing — the journey the book keeps tracing at its largest scale. Perhaps it also begins somewhere much smaller and much closer to home.

With the person who has been walking beside you for seventeen years. With the children asking, again, for your attention. With the garden outside your door, doing its slow, unhurried work regardless of whether or not you’re watching.

I kept searching for the sacred as though it were somewhere I hadn’t yet been. It’s possible it has simply been waiting, patiently, for me to notice I was already home.

Freedom isn’t only the pumping of hemolymph into new wings, the spreading of them, and a departure to far-away lands. It’s also found right here, right now, in the rich presence of each ordinary moment. Each breath.

A truth that’s all too often—in the modern contexts we’re forced to exist in—more difficult to live than to write or say.

All my love,
Marc-John 🌿

Marc-John Brown is a writer, teacher, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub, working alongside his wife Erika at the intersection of re-indigenisation, ceremonial leadership, and conscious fatherhood. He is currently serialising his book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, here on Substack.

A gentle nod toward paid subscription — Chapter 5, The Colonised Soul, and this week’s Hermit’s Journal (my personal reflections on the journey of writing the book, chapter by chapter) both dig into this same territory of arrival and belonging from the inside, for anyone who wants to go further with it.

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Here it is. How do you give a child both roots and the open road?

📸: My daughter and I, boarding the outbound plane on our recent trip to Poznań ✈️🇵🇱

I’ve noticed I come most alive at the edges of things. Put me at a border, in a language I’m still fumbling, at a table of people I’ve only just met, and something wakes up in me that a settled week at home never quite reaches. The wanderer in me — the part that hitchhiked across a continent before his twenties and ended up, of all places, married in Cusco — has never fully gone quiet. For years I half-believed it was a restlessness to be grown out of. I’m less sure of that now. I’ve started to think it might be closer to the truth of me than the version that stays put.

And yet I’m a father. That changes the maths.

My daughter learns through an online curriculum I’m genuinely glad of — rigorous, wide, far better than what I’d have wanted to hand her by default. But it means her days are quieter than mine were at her age, with fewer friends a short walk from the door. The research on this is fairly settled, and I feel it as a father long before I read it as a fact: a young person grows steadier — socially, psychologically — with a core group of their own to test themselves against and belong to. People they can bounce off as they work out who they are. I want that for her with an ache I find hard to put down. And finding people who are awake, kind, and roughly aligned in their values has become quietly rare. We’ve all felt how thin community has worn.

So I’m holding two things that seem to pull in opposite directions. The open road that made me. The rootedness I’m told — and believe — my children need.

Modern life tends to hand us this as a straight choice. Roots or wings. Stability or adventure. Stay and give them a settled childhood, or roam and give them the world. Most of the parenting wisdom I come across lands firmly on one side or the other, and both sides sound reasonable, which is usually a sign the question’s been set up wrong.

Because the more I sit with it, the more I suspect the binary is itself something we’ve forgotten our way into.

Through Erika’s family, and through the little I’ve been allowed to witness in the Andes, I’ve caught a glimpse of communities for whom moving and belonging were never opposites. Whole worlds organised around seasons and altitudes — people who travelled between them, who followed what the land and the year asked of them, and who were no less rooted for any of it. Their belonging didn’t sit in a single fixed address. It lived in relationship. In reciprocity. In knowing exactly who and what you were answerable to, wherever your feet happened to be that month.

As always, I want to be careful with what I write here. I’m an apprentice to that way of seeing, not an authority on it, and I won’t flatten other people’s lives into a tidy lesson for mine. But the glimpse has genuinely changed the question for me. It’s made me wonder whether belonging was ever really the same thing as staying.

Somewhere along the way, I think we confused rootedness with stillness. We started measuring a child’s stability by how few times they’d moved house, how long they’d had the same view from the same window. And there’s something real in that — children do need ground under them. But I’m not sure the ground was ever meant to be a postcode. I wonder if it was always meant to be people. A web of relationship strong enough that you carry it with you, so that you can stand in an unfamiliar place and still know who you belong to.

A friend said something to me once, in Buenos Aires, back in 2008, that I didn’t have the ears for at the time. Los padres son la patria de los hijos. The parents are the homeland of the children. I think she offered it lightly, the way you do across a late table among friends — but it lodged in me, and it has stayed there for the better part of twenty years, waiting, I suspect, for me to become enough of a father to understand it. The patria, the motherland, the ground a child stands on — not a country, not a house. Us. The people who raise them. We are the place they are from. Everything I’m fumbling toward in this essay, she handed me in a single sentence, and it has taken me this long to begin to live into it.

We’re at one of those thresholds as a family just now. Without spending the whole of it here, I’ll say this much: a move is taking shape, somewhere out in the wider world, and for reasons close to my heart this won’t be the year we spend in Peru as we have before. I won’t pretend I know where the road goes, because I don’t. But there’s something that feels like it’s time. Time to uproot again and experience life somewhere else — not least because our 5-year-old son just graduated nursery (kindergarten) and the pull to allow him to transition into something more beautiful than the local, government-owned primary school is real. As is the intrigue and excitement around the possibility of taking full advantage of our daughter’s location-independent schooling. On top of that, we only recently had the roof on our family home replaced, putting it in prime position for providing another young family out there with a lovely, rain-protected home to rent for the foreseeable future.

And here’s where the question turns over in my hands again. What I want for my children, when I’m honest, isn’t a single place on a map. It’s the capacity to be at home in the world — and people to be at home with. Those two things felt like opposites when I started writing this. They’re starting to feel like the same thing said twice. My friend in Buenos Aires got there twenty years ahead of me: the homeland I keep wanting to give them may be the one they’re already standing in.

I don’t have it resolved. I share that as, as always, I’d rather be a fellow traveller working something out in the open than a man pretending he’s arrived. There are real costs in every direction. A child needs continuity and a child needs horizon, and I haven’t found the clean formula that gives both at full strength. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the work is just to keep holding the tension honestly, and to keep choosing — this season, then the next — what serves the people in my care.

So perhaps the question worth carrying into the week isn’t where do we put down roots. Perhaps it’s the quieter one underneath: what do we carry that lets us belong wherever we stand? What would it take for our children — and for us — to be the kind of people who can arrive somewhere new and not be lost? That’s a question you can ask whether you’re moving across the world or staying exactly where you are. I suspect most of us are more nomadic in our hearts than our front doors let on.

I’ll keep writing toward it. The closer turns of this particular threshold — the actual decisions, the leaving and the arriving, and the book I’m serialising chapter by chapter — I share with those who walk alongside me as paid subscribers. But this question belongs to all of us, and I wanted to put it down here, unfinished, where it could be shared.

Thank you for reading it before it was tidy.

All my love,
Marc-John 🌿

Marc-John Brown is a writer and father walking between two worlds: the hills near Loch Lomond in Scotland, where he grew up, and the Andes and Amazon where he has spent years as an apprentice to Q’ero and Shipibo-Konibo wisdom keepers. With his wife Erika, whose lineage is Chanka-Quechua, he co-founded Native Wisdom Hub, a family organisation working in reciprocity with Indigenous communities in Peru.

This Substack is where he thinks out loud about re-indigenisation, fatherhood, and the search for meaning in a disconnected age — and where he is serialising his first book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life*, chapter by chapter. Free essays like this one arrive most Sundays. Paid subscribers receive the book as it is written, along with the *Hermit’s Journal audio reflections that follow each chapter.

*If something here resonated, he’d be glad to have you walk alongside.

When I first went to the Amazon, I believed I was going there to be healed. I had read enough, sat in enough circles with different elders, heard enough stories to have built a quiet certainty that somewhere upriver, in the dark of the jungle nights, in the smoke of mapacho and the medicine songs of the Shipibo-Konibo, there was a cleaner version of me waiting — freer, lighter, finally whole. I packed that certainty alongside my mosquito net and trekking boots. It was the heaviest thing I carried, and the only thing I did not declare.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what my teachers there seemed to know before I had even unpacked my bag. The wound I had come to leave behind had bought its own ticket. It was sitting in the seat beside me on the plane. It walked with me into the Maloca and lay down where I lay down. The world I had grown up in — the one I wrote about in the last chapter, the smoke and the violence and the rage I had learned to wear like a second skin — none of it had stayed in Scotland. I had imagined I was travelling towards medicine. In truth I was carrying my whole severed history across an ocean and setting it down, intact, in front of people who could see it far more clearly than I could.

The body keeps the score. Over a run of ceremonies under the care of the Shipibo-Konibo, I would find myself writhing on the mattress, wriggling with a frustration and an unsettledness I could not place, trying to shake off the darkness the medicine was patiently handing me. I wanted to pull the pillow over my head and pretend I could not hear or smell or see what was being put in front of me. The maestro sat at the foot of my mattress, singing his icaros over my body, and I could not bring myself to face him. I could not bring myself to face the moment at all. I had arrived believing that the act of turning up — of getting myself into the ceremony in the first place — was itself the work, the proof of my seriousness. Those nights showed me something humbler and harder. Sitting in the ceremony is not the same as facing yourself. One is a posture. The other is standing in front of the mirror and letting the truth of your own existence come unbound. Unravelled in its entirety before your eyes.

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The healthy pride is real. The trip was real. The ceremony of it — a father walking beside his daughter into the world for the first time — was as genuine and sacred as anything I’ve experienced in an Amazonian Maloca.

But you, as a paid subscriber, get the underneath of it. You get the parts of the man that don’t make it into the public piece — not because they’re shameful, but because they’re tender. Because they require context and trust to land properly. Because this is what you’re here for. You’ve trusted me; and this is where I get to extend my own gestures of trust to you.

So let me take you somewhere a little deeper.

The Amazon, 2022

In 2022, I was in deep apprenticeship with the Shipibo-Konibo in the Peruvian Amazon. An apprenticeship that began in October 2019.

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Life — the unscheduled, beautifully feral kind — arrived at my door in the form of one of my dearest friends, accompanied by his three utterly magnificent children, who live on acres of countryside and roam it with the kind of liberty that would make most city-dwelling families shriek. Time simply dissolved. And then, before I could reorient myself, Monday arrived and I was on a plane.

I wasn’t running away from anything or anyone. I was running towards a new level of connection with someone.

My darling daughter.

📷: Freshly boarded the plane ✈️ to Poznań. 🇵🇱

She turns thirteen in September.

Twelve years old, and already navigating a world that is vastly more complex, faster, and in many ways more treacherous than the one I grew up in. She is sharp, intellectual, curious, incredibly creative, and emotionally intelligent in ways that continually disarm me. She’s at the threshold — as all children approaching adolescence are — of becoming someone she’s not yet fully met.

I wanted her first real initiatory travel experience — not a family holiday nor one of the trips into the Amazon jungle she’d experienced in her earlier childhood, but a genuine budget adventure, hostels and all — to happen beside me. Her father. The person, more than any other in her life, who was in large part made by exactly this kind of travel.

So we went. Poznań and Berlin. Budget flights. Backpacker hostels. Local food and cobbled streets, and the disorientation of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and having to find your feet and find your way.

There is something I want you to understand about what this trip means to me personally, and why it carries the weight that it does.

When I was in my late teens and twenties, I backpacked my way through the world. Not comfortably. Not with much money. But with a hunger to understand the human experience and condition in all its textures — a hunger that, I believe now, was the earliest expression of what would eventually become my life’s work. That restlessness was the seed of re-indigenisation, long before I had language for it.

The road taught me things no classroom ever could. How to navigate uncertainty with a calm body. How to receive the hospitality of complete strangers. How to be utterly alone and not be destroyed by it, but rather inspired by it. How to move through cultures and communities different from your own without imposing yourself on them, but without losing yourself either.

That road eventually led me to a backpackers’ hostel in Cusco, Peru, in March of 2009 — where I met Erika, the woman who is my wife, my co-creator, and the mother of my children. That hitch-hiking journey from Argentina through Chile and Bolivia into Peru, which I had intended to continue north through Ecuador and Colombia, ended there. Because you don’t keep moving when you’ve arrived at the thing you were actually heading towards.

My daughter would not exist without backpacking.

And now, here she was, with a rucksack on her back and her father beside her, walking into her first taste of the world as it actually is — not curated nor pre-meditated, not comfortable. Not designed to protect her from friction.

I cannot tell you the pride I feel when I look back on my moments watching her navigate that. Watching her handle the unfamiliar with grace and curiosity. Watching her be, even briefly, a citizen of the world rather than a passenger in it.

She will, I suspect, be backpacking independently within the next three to five years. The thought is equal parts thrilling and sobering. And it was precisely because of that knowing — because I can see the horizon of her independence approaching — that I wanted her first experience to be beside me. Not as protection, nor as an act of control. But as a transmission. From me to her. From father to daughter.

Because there are things a father can pass to a child that cannot be written down, delivered in a classroom, or communicated in a phone call. They have to be walked. They have to be lived, side by side, in the friction and wonder of real encounters with the world.

This trip was absolutely not a holiday. It was a silently ceremonial initiation.

I want to be honest with you about something, because this Substack has always been a place of honest reflection, beyond anything I share that may be considered to be ‘teaching’, ‘wisdom’, or ‘knowledge sharing’.

My path — the path that sits alongside fatherhood, that is in many ways its twin — is the path of indigenous plant medicine, sacred ceremony, the deep apprenticeship that comes with working in service to the more-than-human world and, most especially, the living indigenous populations who are the way-showers of this path. This is my Dharma. It’s not separate from who I am as a father; it shapes who I am as a father. The patience I’ve cultivated in ceremony. The capacity to hold space. The willingness to be dismembered and rebuilt. All of it flows into the man my children experience when they look up at me.

But fatherhood has always been first. Always. Even if at times, during my plant medicine apprenticeship, this has come into clear examination and challenge.

Choosing fatherhood as first has not always been without cost.

In 2022, I was deep in apprenticeship with the Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazon jungle. Far from tourism, this was a genuine commitment to a path that demands everything — the dieta, the isolation, the long months in community with a tradition that has held this medicine for generations. My maestros. My teachers. A lineage I had been working with and towards for years.

My daughter could not settle during that period. Our family had originally landed back in Peru in July 2021 — we made it our home once more, I obtained my residence card, we were committed to building a life there. For the long term. But my daughter was struggling. Unsettled in ways that mattered just a little too much. And I had to make a decision.

I chose her.

I chose fatherhood over the jungle. Over the deepest, most sacred work of my spiritual development. Over the continuation of an apprenticeship that had taken years to build and would take a lifetime more to continue.

I don’t write this seeking sympathy. Absolutely not. I write it because I believe it was the right choice, and I believe it was one of the most important decisions I have ever made. Not because the plant medicine path was wrong — it was and remains deeply right for me — but because a child who cannot settle is asking her father a question, and the question is not rhetorical.

She was asking: are you here? Am I important to you?

And the answer, from the deepest part of who I am, was yes. Unequivocally, without reservation, yes.

I want to introduce you to a distinction that I carry in my work and in my life, and that I think is worth exploring — because it speaks to the tension and the integration I’m describing.

There is what I call vertical spirituality and horizontal spirituality.

Vertical spirituality, in my own life and practice, is the deepening relationship with plant spirits, elementals, and the more-than-human world. It is the pursuit of expanded states of consciousness, of merging with the intelligence of nature, of developing the spiritual faculties that allow a person to be of genuine service in ceremony and healing. For someone walking a Buddhist or Hindu path, it might be the pursuit of inner peace, of enlightenment, of liberation. It is the upward and inward reach.

Horizontal spirituality is something different. It is the practice of sacred relationship in the everyday — fatherhood, conscious partnership, community, humanity, social justice, the reconciliation and repair of fractures in the human web. It is less ethereal than the vertical. It does not necessarily produce visions or prophecy. And it absolutely does not announce itself. But I believe it is equally — perhaps more — important, because it is where the fruits of the vertical journey either root themselves in real relationships, or melt and meld into performance.

My work, as I understand it, is to be a bridge between both. Not to abandon the vertical for the horizontal, nor to use the vertical as an escape from the horizontal. But to let each deepen and inform the other.

The trip to Poznań and Berlin was horizontal spirituality in its most immediate form. A father walking beside his daughter into the wide, complicated, beautiful world. Teaching her not with words, but with actions and presence.

I’m immensely proud of her.

And I am immensely proud, if I’m honest, of the most important decisions I’ve made in my journey of fatherhood. Not as performance, but as a quiet nod of recognition. Because it is not easy to choose fatherhood as your highest Dharma when the call of the jungle is singing in your blood, when your maestros are waiting, when the work of spiritual development feels urgent and irreversible. When you know that the medicine that they hold is the medicine that the world, at large, so sorely needs.

It is not easy. And I did it anyway.

Because I know that it doesn’t matter how much the world needs that forest medicine, that nature medicine, that indigenous medicine. My very biggest and most immediate contribution to the future of our world are the adults that I help shape my children into.

Growing my children into healthy adults who can help to make this world better, kinder, more whole (and of course, re-indigenised)— this is my greatest and very best legacy. More than any book I write. More than any ceremony I hold. More than any retreat I lead, company I build, or training I deliver.

She walked (and electric-scootered!) her way through the streets of Poznań with her rucksack on her back and her eyes wide open.

That is more than enough.

📷: Riding electric scooters around in the city where the Polish nation was founded 🇵🇱

There is more to this story — more about what it costs a man to hold both paths simultaneously, more about the spiritual discipline (and the places it slips) when the priorities of fatherhood press up against the rigorous demands of plant medicine practice, and more about how I understand the relationship between my work as a bridge-walker and the roots that fatherhood has given me.

That piece arrives tomorrow morning and is for my paid subscribers — the inner circle of this digital campfire.

If you’ve been reading here for a while and feel the pull to go deeper, to be inside the more personal and unfiltered layers of this journey, the door is open.

Subscribe here.

With all my love,
Marc-John 🌿

Marc-John Brown is a writer, teacher, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub. Born in Scotland and shaped by decades of apprenticeship in Andean and Amazonian traditions, he writes at the intersection of re-indigenisation, sacred entrepreneurship, and the recovery of meaning and connection in modern life. He is currently writing his first book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, published live on this Substack. He lives near Loch Lomond, Scotland, with his children, and his wife and co-creator, Erika.

My childhood football team, Hearts FC, was playing the final match of the season at the mighty Celtic Park, and I was there — or at least, my attention was there. More on that shortly, because it turns out the weekend gave me more material than I bargained for. Not comfortable material. The kind that lodges itself beneath the ribs and refuses to dissolve until you write it out.

This is that writing.

The Temple of Plenty

At some point over the weekend, I found myself inside Costco’s Glasgow branch.

If you have never been to a Costco, let me paint the picture. It is a warehouse the size of a small aircraft hangar, lit with industrial fluorescence, stacked floor to ceiling with goods in quantities designed for small armies or very large and very optimistic families. You do not go to Costco for one item. Costco does not do one item. Costco does forty-eight of the same item, shrink-wrapped together and placed on a pallet beside a thousand other pallets of forty-eight of a different item.

I walked through it slowly. I always do this in spaces like that — slow down, let the sensory information arrive before the judgement does.

What arrived first was something close to awe.

Not admiration. Awe. The kind that contains a tremor of something unnameable. Because there is something genuinely staggering about the human capacity to manufacture, transport, warehouse, price, and sell at this scale. The logistics alone are a civilisational achievement. I stood in front of a display — a fully erected family-sized camping tent, propped above the aisle — and felt something resembling vertigo. I am not exaggerating. Then I looked across at rows of tinned tomatoes.

And then, inevitably, came the question beneath the question.

At what cost?

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I’m not going to tell you what it means. I’m not sure it means anything. But I’m beginning to remember that’s the wrong question anyway.

It started — or at least, I started noticing — sometime in the middle of a week that had its full weight behind it. The kind of week that arrives with a list. Outstanding figures. Conversations that need to happen. The quiet arithmetic of a family man trying to hold things together with enough grace that the children don’t feel the tension humming beneath the dinner table.

I was sitting with a spreadsheet I couldn’t quite balance when I first clocked it. 108. Not on the spreadsheet — on the clock, the timestamp on an email, the price of something I was looking at. I noted it with the mild interest one gives a passing cloud and returned to the numbers that actually mattered at that moment in time.

Then it happened again. And again.

By the fourth time that week, I was no longer dismissing it.

And here is where it gets interesting — not because of what the number means, but because of what my response to noticing it revealed about me.

I live in two worlds. I always have.

There is the world of spreadsheets, standing orders, school runs, business strategy, organisational structure, and the very tangible weight of providing for the people I love most. And there is another world — the one I have been apprenticed into over many years on my travels—in the Amazon, in the Andes, in ceremony and in silence — where the world is understood to be alive and communicative. Where patterns are not coincidences but invitations. Where a number appearing three times in a week is not evidence of a glitch in your perception, but a nudge from something that moves beneath the surface of things.

Modernity — and I mean this clinically, not rhetorically — has produced a civilisation that is functionally symbolically illiterate. We have outsourced meaning to algorithms and productivity to calendars, and the net result is a population that is drowning in information and starving for significance and connection. When a man begins to notice patterns — numbers, recurring themes, the uncanny timing of certain conversations — he is offered precisely two socially acceptable responses: dismiss it as coincidence, or monetise it as a “sign from the universe” and package it into a manifestation course.

Neither of these is honest or sincere—at least not to me. Neither of them is what indigenous wisdom actually teaches.

Every tradition I have sat with — Andean, Amazonian, North American, Celtic, and others — shares one foundational assumption that modernity has largely abandoned: the world is not inert. It is not a backdrop against which human drama is played out. It is participating. It has what the Quechua tradition might call Kawsay — aliveness, vitality, consciousness woven into the fabric of things.

This is not mysticism for its own sake. It is a profoundly different epistemology — a different way of knowing — one that asks not “is this sign real?” but rather “what is my relationship to it?”

That shift — from verification to relationship — is at the heart of what I mean by re-indigenisation. Not returning to a romanticised past. Not performing ceremony as costume. But recovering a mode of attention that our ancestors held as naturally as breath: the understanding that meaning is not manufactured inside the human mind. It arises in the encounter between an attentive being and a living world.

Erika — who was raised inside a living Chanka-Quechua cosmology that never entirely severed this thread — does not find it remarkable when the world speaks through pattern. She has simply never been systematically taught to distrust it. I have had to unlearn that distrust. Slowly, imperfectly, and in the middle of weeks that also contain spreadsheets.

Here is what nobody tells you about trying to stay symbolically awake inside modern life: it is expensive. Not financially — though it can be that too, if you follow it down certain paths. I mean energetically, relationally, psychologically.

To remain genuinely curious about pattern — without tipping into magical thinking on one side or anxious rationalisation on the other — requires a particular kind of discipline. The discipline, in fact, of holding two things simultaneously without collapsing them into each other.

In the same week that 108 kept appearing, I was navigating real pressure. The kind that arrives without symbolism — just weight. And there is a version of spiritual life being marketed out there that would ask you to treat the number as the answer to that pressure. A cosmic reassurance. Proof that things are moving in your favour. I’ve seen that move. I’ve watched people make it. And I understand its appeal completely — because when the practical world is pressing in, the idea that the universe is winking at you is enormously comforting.

But I do not trust it. Or rather — I trust something more demanding than that.

Staying awake, to me, does not mean interpreting every symbol as personal endorsement. It means remaining in relationship with the mystery, whilst simultaneously doing the actual work. Filing the return. Making the call. Having the difficult conversation. The sacred and the practical are not in opposition. They are — when you get the posture right — the same motion.

The Andean concept of Yanantín speaks to complementary opposites held in dynamic balance. Not one defeating the other. Not synthesis into a grey middle. But both fully alive, in creative tension.

I have come to understand my own life through this lens. The man who knows how to read a balance sheet and the man who sits with the mystery of a recurring number — these are not contradictions I need to resolve. They are Yanantín. They need each other. The groundedness of one prevents the other from floating off into fantasy. The openness of the other prevents the first from calcifying into mere function.

The question I keep returning to is not whether the numbers mean something. It is this: what energies and vibration are being reflected to me by life right now? And, most importantly, does the quality of my attention — my willingness to notice, to remain curious, to stay in relationship with the world’s aliveness — make me a better man, a better father, a better partner, a better builder?

My honest answer, this week at least, is yes.

I do not know what 108 was trying to tell me. In fact, I’m certain that “trying to tell me” is not even the right frame. As alluded to above, it is less about a message and more about a mirror — a surface in which I can see the quality of my own presence, vibration, and current reality. Am I awake enough to notice the world? Am I grounded enough not to be swept away or swallowed up by what I notice?

These feel like the right questions. Not because they lead anywhere conclusive, but because they keep me honest. Curious without being credulous. Open without being unmoored.

There is a civilisation-wide hunger for exactly this kind of inquiry — not the manufactured certainty of “manifestation” movements and culture; not the closed door of materialist rationalism, but something that genuinely and sincerely sits between those two. A return to symbolic literacy. A return to the ancient and deeply inherent, instinctual and ontological science of patterning. A re-indigenisation of the human mind and its way of interacting with life.

We used to know how to live here. In the question. In the encounter. In the exchange. In the aliveness of a world that — whatever else you believe about it — is clearly not finished speaking.

It’s been quite a number of years that I’ve been learning this all over again. Week by week, number by number, spreadsheets and all.

Thank you for reading me.

Marc-John

FYI: The Re-Indigenisation book is being written live on this Substack. If you’d like to read the chapters as they emerge — and go deeper into everything touched on here — consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Marc-John Brown is a coach, writer, teacher, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub. Born in Scotland and steeped in Andean and Amazonian traditions through decades of apprenticeship and life in South America, he writes at the intersection of re-indigenisation, sacred entrepreneurship, and the recovery of meaning in modern life. He is currently writing his first book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, published live on this Substack. He lives between Scotland and Peru with his wife and co-creator, Erika.

The question is this: what does a human being become when the structures meant to hold and shape them are not simply imperfect — but entirely absent?

I grew up in Edinburgh. On a council estate. In a flat thick with cigarette smoke, where dysfunction was not the exception but the architecture of daily life. Violence was not something that happened occasionally, on the edges of my world. It was the primary language of conflict resolution — at home, in the stairwells of the block, in the school corridors, on the streets. My mother — a woman I love, and whose pain I have spent years learning to hold with compassion rather than resentment — punched me in the face. She flew out of our apartment door and down the stairs to throw fists at the mothers of other children. She raised my cousin, a child society might today label a “problem” child, passed from his biological mother’s abandonment into my mother’s arms — from one deeply wounded woman to another, two people attempting to give what had never been given to them.

On sunny summer days, I would walk home from school and enter the hallway of our flat. Thin ribbons of smoke drifted slowly through the air. I would traverse that fog on the way to my bedroom. At school, children would tell me I smelled funny. That smell was tobacco. It was the smell of a home where comfort was found in addiction, where the nervous system sought relief from its own overwhelm through whatever chemical could be relied upon to deliver it.

I learned taekwondo. I learned boxing. Not as sport — as survival. The world around me demanded that I develop a hard shell, and I did. But a hard shell is not strength. It is adaptation to an environment that should never have been. And beneath it, something tender was being slowly starved of what it needed.

I am not sharing this to elicit sympathy. I am sharing it because what I lived is not an anomaly. It is a pattern — a predictable, measurable, well-documented pattern — of what happens when a community has been stripped of the structures that once gave it coherence, meaning, and the capacity to transmit wisdom from one generation to the next.

It is what a village looks like when the village has been broken.

The Loneliness at the Centre

In June 2025, the World Health Organisation released the findings of its Commission on Social Connection — the most comprehensive global assessment of loneliness ever undertaken. The numbers stopped me in my tracks. One in six people worldwide is now affected by loneliness. It kills, by the WHO’s own estimate, approximately one hundred people every hour — more than 871,000 deaths every year. To put that in perspective: loneliness now claims more lives annually than many diseases we run global health campaigns to eradicate.

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