What I saw was a space. A space you could walk into, here, on this continent, and feel what it feels like to be inside the Amazon — the humidity, the sound, the green that isn’t one green but dozens. A space for the people who will never board that plane.

And underneath it, the reason: they have to fall in love. Because you cannot protect what you have not loved.

I carried that sentence for a year. Tienen que enamorarse. It worked every time I said it, which is exactly the problem — a sentence that always works is one you stop questioning.

The whole time I was building this space, it was quietly asking me something I wasn’t ready to hear: and then what. They fall in love, they feel something enormous, they put their coat back on and go home. And what. Love opens the door, but on its own it produces a feeling, not a relationship. What I’d designed was an encounter that asked nothing of anyone. Come in, be moved, leave unchanged. That’s not love. That’s tourism.

“Come in, be moved, leave unchanged.” That’s not love. That’s tourism.

Here’s what I kept coming back to. The Sapara govern more than 900,000 acres of standing forest, bigger than Rhode Island, held by fewer than 700 people. And three elders hold the language.

Three. Not a statistic. Three people, alive right now, carrying something the rest of us can’t open.

A language isn’t just words for things that already exist; that’s the mistake English makes easy, because English acts like a bag you can pour any content into. It doesn’t work that way. A language tells you whether the river is a relative or a resource, which beings you can speak to, and how. Some thoughts don’t survive without the grammar that holds them. Sin lengua, no hay cosmovisión. You can save every tree and still lose the forest, because what’s left without the language is scenery. Something beautiful nobody knows how to be in relationship with anymore.

So the space changed. Whispers of the Amazon isn’t a love letter anymore. It’s about a language standing at a threshold, and what it costs to cross it.

The photographs are printed on bark paper and linen, having the forest as both subject and surface. Then I embroider each one by hand, thread by thread, the way you’d sit with something you were trying to learn by heart. It’s slow in a way photography usually isn’t, and that’s the point: the language is disappearing in real time, and stitching for hours is closer to that speed than a shutter will ever be.

What I want now is bigger than an exhibition, and for spaces like museums + galleries to change, but that is a whole other newsletter.

I want the world to understand what actually happens when a language disappears.

Think about how we usually fight for the Amazon. We raise money for acres. We track carbon and canopy loss. We campaign against roads, pipelines, and oil concessions, and we are right to do all of it. But almost none of that connects to the people who are actually keeping the land intact: over 900,000 acres, held by fewer than 700 of them.

The Sapara have kept this forest standing for generations, and they have done it through knowledge that lives inside their language: which plants to use and how, which parts of the forest to leave alone, how to read what the land is telling you. That knowledge does not transfer without the words that carry it. So you can save every tree and still lose the thing that actually protects the forest long term, if the language goes with it.

That is the conversation I want to start: not just that the Sapara language is disappearing, but what disappears along with it.

A way of life is not heritage. It is not a thing you conserve behind climate control. It is as ordinary and as necessary as drinking water, and we do not preserve water. We drink it, and we protect the source, and we teach our children where it comes from.

And I am still building the space. The humidity, the sound, the forty different hues of green, all of it, exactly as it arrived two years ago. The space is just not the destination anymore. It is the door.

The threshold is now. I am no longer building a place for you to fall in love.

I am building a place where you have to decide what you do about it.

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🌿 Free guide: Slow Living as a Way Home → antupewma.kit.com/3f81139283

Peawkayal,

(until we meet again)

Antüpewma

Summer has been busy—full of changes and heartache, as some of you already know from my notes on Substack these last few weeks. If you don’t follow me on Substack, I lost a really great friend last week. She was the person you call the second anything happens the good, the bad, or the completely unhinged. I can’t tell you how many times these past few days I’ve reached for my phone to tell her all the crazy things going on, only to remember I can’t.

She was there through some of the hardest parts with my daughter and my son. She was there at 3 am when I couldn’t sleep, riddled with worry. And she was always the one telling me I was doing a great job, even on the days I didn’t believe it myself. She was a force of nature and the most resilient person I know.

Losing her cracked something open in me, a hard reminder of how fragile all of this is, and how much I’ve already been letting go of this year. I honestly can’t remember the last time I took a whole summer off…no writing, no producing. The last time was probably my early 20s before I graduated—ufff—when I stopped everything just to be. This summer, I paused it all: work, the podcast, creating, even reading emails. Can you imagine letting yourself just be?

Before this year, I’ll be honest, that thought alone would’ve brought me anxiety. But then came the illness that overproducing, overworking, and overgiving left behind, and it forced me to rethink the way I do things and let go of a lot that just wasn’t fitting anymore.

So now here I am, standing at the edge of fall, carrying all of this with me. And honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Fall has always felt like permission to me. Permission to slow down, to layer up, to let things fall away that don’t need to come with me into the next season. This year, that permission feels different. Heavier, in a good way. I’m not just shedding the “busy” of summer. I’m walking into fall with a friend-shaped space I didn’t have before, and I don’t want to fill it too fast, or pretend it isn’t there.

I keep thinking about how she’d probably tell me to just sit in it. Not to rush the grief. Not to “productivity” my way through missing her. Not to perform okay-ness for anyone reading this. She’d tell me to make the tea, light the candle, and let myself feel whatever I’m feeling — because that’s what she always did for me.

So what’s actually changing this fall?

The Slow-Living as a Way Home podcast isn’t going anywhere. My Sunday meditation circles stay too, because honestly, they've become as much of a lifeline for me as they are for whoever shows up. But everything else? I’m giving it to my art.

And I won’t pretend this shift is only about burnout anymore. I’m still mourning my friend, and the truth is, my studio is one of the only places that grief has somewhere to go. For years, art was the thing I squeezed in after everything else was “handled”, whatever hours were left over, if there were any left over. For the rest of my days, I’m doing it backwards. Art gets the hours first.

I don’t have it all figured out yet, week to week, what that actually looks like. But I know I’m not rebuilding a packed calendar just to say “I’m back.” Some of that is rest. Some of it is just needing space to miss her. I’m protecting the one thing that kept pulling at me all year, louder than everything else — my studio.

With so much love and care

Antupewma

It’s been a min since I last wrote anything because I’ve been in it, instead of taking the time to be out of it, if that makes sense. Something magical happened in Scotland; I had time away from the day-to-day to really reset my priorities and clarify what I want. So much of my life has been about pushing, pushing to prove, to prove that I was worthy, to prove that I am enough, and at the end of the day, what is it that I really want if none of that existed?

Would I let myself rest in the knowledge that, whatever I chose, it would be enough? In Scotland, I let myself dream, pulling away. And what I discovered was two things. One that a life doing art is possible, and two, a bit more morbid, but if I was dead, who would it really affect, and the truth was absolutely no one except my family. So why have I spent my entire adult life trying to make other people happy, helping without boundaries, pushing my passion work aside for what? For approval that never arrived. For a sense of worth I kept placing in other people’s hands.

Sitting with that in the Highlands, I felt something loosen. Not an answer, exactly. More like permission. Permission to stop proving. To let my art be the center of my life instead of the thing I get to after everything else. To help from fullness, with boundaries, instead of from fear.

I don’t know exactly what this looks like yet. I’m still inside it. But I wanted to write to you from the not-knowing, because that’s where the real remembering happens.

Maybe you’ve been pushing too. Proving too. If so, I’ll leave you with the question Scotland left me with: if you already knew you were enough, what would you choose?

Peawkayal,
(until we meet again)

— Antüpewma

This is the last episode before I go quiet for the summer.

And I couldn’t leave without sitting with you one more time, because what is alive in me right now is too full to hold alone.

In a few days I leave for Scotland. For the Highlands that sent me a message during the hardest part of my healing: slow down. And then the Highlands will teach you.

After the retreat, my mami and my daughter join me. She turns 17 on the Isle of Skye. Three generations of women on land that called us.

A few months ago I learned we carry the B2 haplogroup, a maternal lineage passed only from mother to daughter, unbroken for thousands of years. Which means our very first abuelita is coming with us. Watching three of her daughters finally learn to be still.

This episode holds an ancestral teaching on lineage and a gentle practice for calling in the women who carried you, even the ones whose names were lost.

I’ll be back in the fall, slower and fuller.

The ancestors are always with you. 🌿

Con todo mi amor,
Antüpewma

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 60-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🌀 Sabiduria — A weekly newsletter I write alongside Juliet and Georgina, where we explore embodied ancestral wisdom — the kind that moves through the body, not just the mind. If that calls to you, come find us on Substack. —> Subscribe to Sabiduría

🌿 Free guide: Slow Living as a Way Home → antupewma.kit.com/3f81139283

A cup of tea. Dried flowers on the counter. Her scent on my pillow. Day after day.

That’s how Manzanilla(chamomile) held me when I finally stopped running.

I thought I knew her, the gentle tea you reach for when you can’t sleep, the plant in the corner of the cupboard that almost everyone overlooks.

But I didn’t know her as a relationship. As a teacher. As someone who shows up every single day, without announcement, asking nothing but presence.

This week’s episode is about what plants teach us when we finally slow down enough to listen. About what it means to receive without bracing. About reclaiming your lineage, even when the people around you don’t understand yet.

And it’s about this: if your survival-tired body has forgotten what being held feels like, there’s a plant waiting to teach you.

Not in one moment. In the daily return.

With warmth,
Antüpewma

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🏔️ Slow-Living Retreats — Intimate, application-only gatherings where slow living becomes embodied. Multi-day immersions in beautiful landscapes — ceremony, photography, community, and the kind of rest that changes everything. Next Adventure: Slow Living in the Highlands of Scotland. —> Learn More

🌀 Sabiduria — A weekly newsletter I write alongside Juliet and Georgina, where we explore embodied ancestral wisdom — the kind that moves through the body, not just the mind. If that calls to you, come find us on Substack. —> Subscribe to Sabiduría

🌿 Free guide: Slow Living as a Way Home → antupewma.kit.com/3f81139283

Last week I felt like tiny cuts all over my soul.

I won’t get into too much detail because I don’t want to put any more energy into this. And this is the second time my lineage has been questioned — and this time by someone whose blood runs alongside mine.

In this day and age of appropriation, I understand questioning everything. And yet — who are we if w…

Read more

This week’s episode came from a conversation someone this week, preparing hard for something that mattered, studying it over and over, trying to get it right.

And listening to them, I recognized something. Not the situation, the posture. The bracing. The belief that if we just hold ourselves tightly enough, we can keep ourselves from failing.

I know that posture from the inside. For years, I treated my work as make-or-break, and I would brace so hard that by the time the moment arrived, I could barely remember my own name. The knowing was there. I just couldn’t reach it.

In the ancestral way of understanding, the body does not forget; it becomes crowded. When we live too long in survival, the inner wind shortens, and fear narrows what we’re able to hear. Slowness is what settles the water again.

Until Next Week, move gently.

Peawkayal,

Antüpewma

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🏔️ Slow-Living Retreats — Intimate, application-only gatherings where slow living becomes embodied. Multi-day immersions in beautiful landscapes — ceremony, photography, community, and the kind of rest that changes everything. Next Adventure: Slow Living in the Highlands of Scotland. —> Learn More

🌀 Sabiduria — A weekly newsletter I write alongside Juliet and Georgina, where we explore embodied ancestral wisdom — the kind that moves through the body, not just the mind. If that calls to you, come find us on Substack. —> Subscribe to Sabiduría

🌿 Free guide: Slow Living as a Way Home → antupewma.kit.com/3f81139283

I have been on a healing journey with chronic exhaustion and inflammation for over a year. This is the quiet ground underneath everything I share with you here. The slowness. The teachings. The remembering. None of it is something I learned somewhere ahead of you. It is the medicine I am living on, in real time, in my own body.

After returning from the UN, my body asked me to rest. Not at the edge of burnout. Not after collapse. Just because she asked.

And for the first time in a long time, I listened, without apology, without rushing back, without measuring my worth against what I had produced.

This episode is about what embodiment actually looks like. Not the teaching of it. The living of it.

It is about the pendulum swing of unlearning self-abandonment and why, sometimes, you have to go all the way to the other extreme to break a pattern that has been running for decades.

It is about the ancestral understanding of the body as a living bridge between you and your ancestors, the land, and the unseen.

And it is about the trust I am learning to have in you. The trust that you are walking this with me, not waiting for me to perform.

That is reciprocity with the community.

This week's practice is called Listening to the Bridge. A simple, body-centered ritual for letting your body speak without interrupting it.

If you have ever pushed through when your body asked you to rest, if over-giving has been how you feel loved, this episode was written for you.

Peawkayal.

Antüpewma

She was in residential treatment. Not for the reasons people assume when they hear those words. She was there because she wanted to leave this world, and we were trying, with everything we had, to keep her in it.

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There are conversations you plan, and then there are the ones that pour through you because they were already waiting.

This one was the second kind.

This month on Ancestor Hour Podcast, Georgina and I welcomed our comadre Juliet Diaz, author of The Altar Within, community bruja, neurodivergent Indigenous Taino and first-generation Cuban-American, and one of the most influential literary voices of our generation. Her books have been translated into more than 14 languages. Love Juliet sits at the top of Substack’s leaderboard. She is, simply, a force.

But what came through wasn’t a résumé.

It was three women around a fire — comadres, hermanas, three matriarchs — talking about what this moment is actually asking of us. About why joy is resistance, not bypass. About the wound being revealed, and our capacity to heal it. About what slowing down really means when you’ve spent 40+ years over-extending, over-giving, over-doing.

A few of the threads we pulled on:

→ Why we are the machine — and what it means to stop fueling it

→ The difference between bypassing into joy and rooting into joy as resistance → A message for everyone in their 40s who’s been running on empty

→ Why the elders are calling us back to our hands — to maíz, to embroidery, to the slow remembering

→ The 10-year journey Juliet, Georgina and I are stepping into together — bringing Indigenous voices and ancestral medicine into the world in deep reciprocity, and Sabiduría, our collaborative newsletter

→ What it looks like when faith leads, and the path arranges itself behind it

This is not a love-and-light space. We say that often. The duality is the medicine. The crying and the hummingbirds. The rage and the love that’s underneath it.

If this episode meets you somewhere tender, I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email. Tell me what landed. Tell me where you are in your own slowing down.

We’re walking each other home.

Con amor,

Antüpewma(Daniela)

I missed last week, I was in rooms at the UN Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues, sitting with siblings from territories I have never visited, speaking languages I will never speak. And my body kept recognizing them. The same pulse. The same medicine. The same fire.

I came home changed.

If you read The Abuelos Are Here last week, you already know some of what arrived in me there. This episode is the continuation of what the Abuelos have been asking me ever since, and what they may be asking you too.

We work with two plants today. Ruda for fierce discernment. Manzanilla for soft receiving. And one question that has been moving through me for weeks now:

Whose voice is this? And is it mine?

Because much of what we carry was never ours.

The voice that says your fire makes you unwantable. The voice that says you must overgive to be loved. The voice that tells you to make yourself smaller so the room stays comfortable.

Almost none of those voices came from you.

This episode is for the woman who is finally done carrying what was never hers.

May the Abuelitos find you close. May whatever is rising have somewhere soft to land. May your tenderness toward yourself be the radical thing this season.

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🏔️ Slow-Living Retreats — Intimate, application-only gatherings where slow living becomes embodied. Multi-day immersions in beautiful landscapes — ceremony, photography, community, and the kind of rest that changes everything. Next Adventure: Slow Living in the Highlands of Scotland. —> Learn More

🌀 Sabiduria — A weekly newsletter I write alongside Juliet and Georgina, where we explore embodied ancestral wisdom — the kind that moves through the body, not just the mind. If that calls to you, come find us on Substack. —> Subscribe to Sabiduría

Peawkayal, Antüpewma

The same grief. The same medicine. The same songs in different tongues. Across territories, across oceans, across borders that were never ours to begin with, the same pulse.

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And what the camera showed me — consistently, across every room, every face, every story — is that each decade carries its own distinct worldview about worth. About fire. About who gets to take up space.

The maiden years. The threshold years. And then the years where the body stops cooperating with the performance and calls forward the woman who is done asking permission.

That is where we are going. That is what the grandmothers are trying to bring us to.

This week’s episode is a ceremony. Three flames. For the women who came before you, for the belief they passed down, and for the fire that is yours to carry now.

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🏔️ Slow-Living Retreats — Intimate, application-only gatherings where slow living becomes embodied. Multi-day immersions in beautiful landscapes — ceremony, photography, community, and the kind of rest that changes everything. Next Adventure: Slow Living in the Highlands of Scotland. —> Learn More

🌀 Sabiduria — A weekly newsletter I write alongside Juliet and Georgina, where we explore embodied ancestral wisdom — the kind that moves through the body, not just the mind. If that calls to you, come find us on Substack. —> Subscribe to Sabiduría

Con fuego y con amor, Antüpewma

I sat beside it. I didn’t try to understand it. And slowly it became this episode.

I don’t want to say too much here. But if you have been feeling like something is ending and you don’t know what is beginning — if you are tired of trying to find your way through and ready to be held instead — this one was made for you.

Come with water nearby. A bowl, a glass, a cup of something warm. Let it be present with you.

This is not an episode about water. It is a ceremony with water.

Listen when you have twenty quiet minutes. 🌿

If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Other ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🏔️ Slow-Living Retreats — Intimate, application-only gatherings where slow living becomes embodied. Multi-day immersions in beautiful landscapes — ceremony, photography, community, and the kind of rest that changes everything. Next Adventure: Slow Living in the Highlands of Scotland. —> Learn More

🌀 Sabiduria — A weekly newsletter I write alongside Juliet and Georgina, where we explore embodied ancestral wisdom — the kind that moves through the body, not just the mind. If that calls to you, come find us on Substack. —> Subscribe to Sabiduría

Con amor y lentitud, Antüpewma

Believe me, I understand the pull. The images come fast and relentless. Forests falling. Languages going quiet. Policies that erase what took centuries to build. Burn after burn after burn. And if you are a person who loves this earth, who carries the memory of a people in your blood, who has sat with elders while the…

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She had been really sick. And now she was getting better, that particular tenderness that fills a space when someone you love has frightened you and then comes back. We were just sitting together, the relief of it still warm between us, and somewhere in that …

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Slowly. And I say slowly porque my immediate family was never taught to hold plants the way our ancestors did. It wasn’t spoken, it was passed down in the quiet ways. My abuela reaching for manzanilla when your belly hurt, when you were on your moon, when something needed healing that a doctor’s visit couldn’t touch. Subconscious. Embedded. A knowing that lived in the hands before it lived in the mind.

But the deeper I’ve gone into reclamation, the more relationships have opened. Now I’m connecting with the plantitas in the dream world. Asking them for guidance. And they are answering.

This week some of them came to me in a dream, arriving like guests who had been waiting for the right moment to knock. Basil. Rosemary. Chamomile. Bobinsana. Mint. They were asking to be in relationship with me this spring.

I sat with that. Why these five? Why now?

My elder once told me that the medicine we need grows all around us. I think about this every time I remember the mugwort. When I was living in my old house, it started appearing everywhere and I hadn’t planted it, didn’t even know what it was. The more I researched, the more I understood. My inflammation was through the roof that year. The plant had shown up before I knew I needed it. This is what happens when you let things grow wild in their natural habitat. When you stop calling medicine a weed.

So, how do you begin to form a real relationship with plants? Not just drinking them, not just cooking with them, but actually being in relationship with them?

For me it started one at a time. I’m someone who loves to go deep, to research every layer of a thing out of pure curiosity. So I’d pick one plant and fall into it completely. By that point I already had years with Cacao and all of her magic, so I knew what a real plant relationship felt like. I knew the difference between consuming something and communing with it.

Here’s what I’d invite you to ask yourself when a plant calls to you: Why this one? What is it carrying medicinally that some part of you is gravitating toward? And if a plant shows up in your dream, don’t brush it off. Ask why it came.

Full disclosure: it took me years of being in right relationship before the plants started visiting my dreams. This is ancient technology. Before laboratories, before clinical studies, the ancestors would enter the dream state and ask the plants directly what they were for. The plant would teach. That’s not metaphor. That’s how the medicine was learned.

So. Why are Basil, Rosemary, Chamomile, Bobinsana, and Mint showing up this spring?

Before we get into each plant, I need to tell you what my body is carrying. Because this isn’t a wellness post.

I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Sjögren’s disease, and I am moving through perimenopause. Three conditions, one thread: my immune system has been turning inward, attacking what it was meant to protect. The inflammation, the blood sugar spikes, the fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix. It’s all connected.

I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because the plants that came to me in that dream were not random. They were precise. They knew what my body was carrying before I thought to ask.

That’s what the ancestors understood. The medicine grows all around you. Sometimes through the soil. Sometimes through the dream.

Let’s get into it.

Basil

Not the basil you sprinkle on pasta, but the one they call Tulsi, Holy Basil, the Incomparable One. The one that knows something about survival.

This plant came to me in a dream and I didn’t question it because I already knew she had something to say.

Tulsi is an adaptogen, which means she helps your body find its way back to equilibrium when stress has pulled it too far in any direction. For those of us carrying autoimmune conditions, our cortisol is rarely where it should be. We wake tired, we crash in the afternoon, we lie awake at 3am with a mind that won’t stop. Tulsi speaks directly to that. She regulates the stress response, brings cortisol back into rhythm, and in doing so she also helps stabilize blood sugar, which for me has been spiking in ways that feel connected to everything else happening hormonally.

But here is what I find most beautiful about her. Studies have shown Tulsi has immunomodulatory properties, meaning she doesn’t just suppress the immune system or stimulate it. She helps it learn how to respond appropriately again. For those of us whose immune systems have turned inward, that is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

She also carries something for the grief that lives in the body. The kind that doesn’t have a clear story attached to it anymore, just a weight. She is warming, clarifying, and she opens the chest.

Start with a cup of tulsi tea in the morning. Hold it with both hands. Ask her what she knows.

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A few nights ago, I had a dream that I can still feel as I am writing this. You know that type of dream that keeps coming up even days after you dreamt it. And I’ve been sitting with it all week, in the mornings, in circle, in the quiet before the day gets loud. And slowly it became this episode.

I don’t want to say too much here. But if you’ve been feeling the pull of spring and something in you is still asking to go slow — this one was made for you.

Come listen when you have fifteen minutes and something warm to drink. 🌿

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If something here touches you, feel free to share it with someone you love or post a part that resonates. Thank you for reading, hearting, commenting, and simply being here. Your presence truly matters. And if this work has nourished you and you feel moved to reciprocate, you can support it here with a cup of tea—> tesito. ☕

Other ways we can walk this path together:

🌿 Sunday Gathering — Every Sunday, I hold a 30-minute meditation circle on Zoom. A small sanctuary for your nervous system. No experience needed — just your willingness to pause. Todos son bienvenidos. ——> Register Here

🎙️ Slow Living as a Way Home — My bilingual podcast where we explore ancestral wisdom, cultural remembering, and what it actually means to come home to yourself. Available wherever you listen. ——> Listen Here

🏔️ Slow-Living Retreats — Intimate, application-only gatherings where slow living becomes embodied. Multi-day immersions in beautiful landscapes — ceremony, photography, community, and the kind of rest that changes everything. Next Adventure: Slow Living in the Highlands of Scotland. —> Learn More

With love and slowness, Antüpewma

In this reintroduction episode, Daniela and Georgina sit down for a real platica about where they've been, what life has handed them, and why now feels like exactly the right moment to return. There are updates about daughters, about grief, about becoming an abuelita, about giving a talk at Pratt, and watching students' mouths drop open. There is laughter. There is honesty. There are boobs pointing south.

And yes. We talk about perimenopause. All of it. The Meno belly that didn't buy a ticket but showed up anyway. The hair. The hormones. The afternoon crashes. The moment you look at yourself naked and think, wait, who is this? We talk about what Western medicine offers, what the women in the Amazon taught Daniela about plant medicine and hormonal regulation, and what ancestral wisdom has always known that we are only now beginning to reclaim.

This season of Ancestor Hour is a commitment. One episode a month. Praticas just between the two of us, and conversations with elders, artists, and voices that carry real medicine. No scripts. No sugarcoating. Just truth, community, and a lot of love.

Because if there is one thing we know now that we didn't know before, it is this: you don't have to do any of it alone.

This episode covers:

• Where we've been and what shifted

• Perimenopause, body changes, and what the ancestors knew

• What's coming this season on Ancestor Hour

• How to find and stay connected to our community

Connect with us:

• Ancestor Hour on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean

• Substack newsletter Sabiduria (https://sabiduriaretreats.substack.com/)

• Daniela's Sunday Meditation Circle, every Sunday at 11am EST (Register for Free Meditation Every Sunday)

• Georgina's monthly circle at @MujerMagic on Instagram

• DM or email us at ancestorhourpodcast@gmail.com your guest wishes. We have a list and we're making it big.

In this reintroduction episode, Daniela and Georgina sit down for a real platica about where they've been, what life has handed them, and why now feels like exactly the right moment to return. There are updates about daughters, about grief, about becoming an abuelita, about giving a talk at Pratt, and watching students' mouths drop open. There is laughter. There is honesty. There are boobs pointing south.

And yes. We talk about perimenopause. All of it. The Meno belly that didn't buy a ticket but showed up anyway. The hair. The hormones. The afternoon crashes. The moment you look at yourself naked and think, wait, who is this? We talk about what Western medicine offers, what the women in the Amazon taught Daniela about plant medicine and hormonal regulation, and what ancestral wisdom has always known that we are only now beginning to reclaim.

This season of Ancestor Hour is a commitment. One episode a month. Praticas just between the two of us, and conversations with elders, artists, and voices that carry real medicine. No scripts. No sugarcoating. Just truth, community, and a lot of love.

Because if there is one thing we know now that we didn't know before, it is this: you don't have to do any of it alone.

This episode covers:

• Where we've been and what shifted

• Perimenopause, body changes, and what the ancestors knew

• What's coming this season on Ancestor Hour

• How to find and stay connected to our community

Connect with us:

• Ancestor Hour on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Podbean

• Substack newsletter Sabiduria (https://sabiduriaretreats.substack.com/)

• Daniela's Sunday Meditation Circle, every Sunday at 11am EST (Register for Free Meditation Every Sunday)

• Georgina's monthly circle at @MujerMagic on Instagram

• DM or email us at ancestorhourpodcast@gmail.com your guest wishes. We have a list and we're making it big.