Ancestors In The Making
"If you're not initiatied into the mythology, into the bone memory, of your own life, you'll likely be living an existence that is not entirely your own. And the life you belong to, standing several paces in front of you, looking back over its shoulder with eyes wide waiting for you to remember… to walk towards it
Where are you?
I am here!
Who are you?
I am this moment!
Do not live your life in such a way that others give you a name you have no belonging to."
- Kedar S. Brown, Ancestors in the Making Interview
Ancestors In The Making
Ancestors In The Making, produced by A Healing Bridge, is a series of interviews and conversational pilgrimages into the territories of adulthood & elderhood, ritual & ceremony, initiation & rites of passage, and community & village. Throughout this intimate video series, we spend time with visionaries and healers, as we journey to pick up the lost threads of earth-based wisdom and ancestral ways of living, to remember who we are at our core and how we may fully embody the soul gifts that we came into this world with.
We invite you to wander with us into landscapes that are not often explored, and to wonder about what it truly means to be human at this time. This is a call to those who yearn to live more fully and to connect with more heart and meaning to All that is.
About A Healing Bridge
We are Alyona Kobevka and Alexandre Jodun, a married couple and the voices behind A Healing Bridge. We’re holistic psychotherapists and facilitators, who offer experiential therapies for seekers and sensitive individuals on their path of psychospiritual healing and development. We are lovers of the earth and the natural world, and are devoted to contributing to the evolution of consciousness, and reviving the nature-honoring and animist ways of living, that can support us as a people to remember who we are and what we’re here for.
We hope that this series will bring you into a direct experience with your own soul and inspire you to keep on walking the path that is authentic to you.
Overview
In this rich conversation, Kedar gracefully walks us through the lost sacred art of "following your name" as we take a look through an ancient and integrative lens, imagining what it might be like to live into the unique medicine that we came into this world with.
Themes: Initiation Into Our Unique Gifts ● Grief As Healer ● Ancestral Healing & Connection As Etiquette ● Ritual & Ceremony
Transcript
Alyona Kobevka 0:01
Ancestors in the Making is a series of interviews and conversational pilgrimages into the territories of adulthood and elderhood ritual and ceremony, initiation and rites of passage, and community and village. Throughout this intimate video series, we spend time with visionaries and healers, as we journey to pick up the lost threads of Earth based wisdom and ancestral ways of living, to remember who we are at our core, and how we may fully embody the soul gifts that we came into this world with. I am Alyona Kobevka.
Alexandre Jodun 0:41
And I'm Alexandre Jodun. We're a married couple and the voices behind a Healing Bridge. We are holistic psychotherapists and facilitators who offer experiential therapies for seekers and sensitive individuals on their path of psycho-spiritual healing and development. We are lovers of the earth and the natural world and are devoted to contributing to the evolution of consciousness and reviving the nature honoring and animist ways of living that can support us as a people to remember who we are and what we're here for. We hope that this series will bring you into a direct experience with your own soul and inspire you to keep on walking the path that is authentic to you.
Alyona Kobevka 1:27
In today's conversation, we're speaking with Kedar S. Brown, the founder and director of Rites of Passage Counsel. Kedar is an internationally known ceremonialist, healer, intuitive and teacher of psychological and spiritual awareness with over 35 years of professional experience. Over this time, Kedar has developed an effective and unique approach to emotional and spiritual healing by braiding together his depth of clinical knowledge of experiential psychotherapies with more nature-based indigenous wisdom teachings and healing methods from around the world. Kedar has apprenticed with Stephen Foster, and Meredith Little from the School of Lost Borders, Malidome Some, Shaman, an elder of the Dogora tribe of Burkina Faso, and he has also had the privilege and honor to learn many valuable insights into healing from his apprenticeship with Cherokee elder and medicine person Will Rocking Bear.
Alexandre Jodun 2:31
Today we speak with Kedar about following your calling and discovering your unique medicine. Hello, Kedar, welcome to Ancestors in the Making. It's so lovely to be here with you.
Kedar Brown 2:45
Thank you very much. It's great to be here as well.
Alexandre Jodun 2:48
Yes! We're really excited to have this discussion with you. And we're super grateful for this time. What we'd like to do to start off our conversation today is just do a short acknowledgement of country. We'd like to send out our respect to the traditional owners of the lands from which we're recording, which is the Wurundjeri people's of the Kulin nation. And we'd like to just acknowledge their their ancestors, their elders, past, present, and emerging and just really acknowledge the connection to country and their sacred relationship, their sovereignty, which is still yet to be seated. And just extend that to Asheville, North Carolina, where you are, Kedar, to the Cherokee peoples who I believe are the custodians there and take a moment to just welcome all of our ancestors, my ancestors, Alyona's and ancestors and your ancestors, Kedar, and all those that walk amongst us. And we'd really like to extend gratitude for those invisible forces and beings that brought us into connection with you. Not long ago. And I'd like to pass it over to you to open up the space with an invocation.
Kedar Brown 4:23
Okay, thank you very much. It's a honor and a privilege to sit with you this evening here and this morning down there. I offer this invocation as an extension to those that you have acknowledged so far. And to call in the greater circle. I invite all of our listeners to call up an image or send your spirit as you're sitting in your chair to a place in nature, a place that knows your name, some place that you have seen, some place you visited, some place that you know and knows you. As we begin this invocation I invite you to close your eyes, and imagine yourself standing in that place at sunrise, and we will begin.
With much gratitude. Creator, Great Spirit, we come to you this day with open hearts with clear hearts with humble hearts. We call upon the medicine ancestors, those of the land there and those of the land here and those medicine ancestors that were in service to their people, to call in those sacred energies and allies and elements. We welcome those medicine ancestors to assist us in this calling in ceremony. Now turning toward the rising sun, feeling the warmth on our face. We greet this new morning. We call on the energies of springtime and new beginnings and fresh starts, call on the energy of Eagle and Condor and Hawk and all those high fliers that teach us how to see the big picture in our lives. That know how to focus on the tiny details. We call upon that good medicine from the East, that teaches us how to see each other for the first time every time, to drop those old stories that we have about ourselves and each other, that will allow us once again to see the mystery in the beauty that is present before us all the time. We call upon that good medicine of the East in the form of song and that the song be carried out on the wind as a blessing to all our people all our relations. With much gratitude for those beautiful ones of the East, we welcome you here to this circle to this virtual gathering. We ask that you awaken within each one of us that bone memory where you live as well. Ashay.
Now, make a quarter turn to the right, towards the South. We call upon the good medicine of the South and beautiful ones of the South, the place of the warming sun. The place of action, place of integrity and impeccability, the place where our thoughts and our feelings and our words and our actions are exactly the same. Of courage and innocence and playfulness and passion. Coyote and Rattlesnake, that beautiful good medicine in the South. With much gratitude we welcome you to the circle. I ask that you awaken within each one of us that bone memory where you live as well. Ashay.
We call out to the beautiful ones of the West. The place of the setting sun cooler nights of Autumn, bright colored leaves overhead and on the ground. The healing nourishing elements of water, healing, and reconciliation and forgiveness. The ease and flow . We call upon the medicine of initiation and turning inwards. We thank you guardians of the West for teaching us how to see in the dark when that darkness is within ourselves and when the darkness is around us. Stay focused on that light, walk towards that light and call upon those medicine allies at the West to join us in this circle to awaken within each one of us. That bone memory where you live as well. Ashay.
We call on the good medicine of the North, the place of sacred mountain, the place of the stories keepers in the elders. Buffalo prayerfulness in abundance and gratitude, in the place of surrender and letting go, self acceptance and self love. Letting go so deeply that spring simply shows up by itself, for no other reason than we let go enough. Thank you sacred mountain we welcome you to the circle to awaken with an each one of us that good medicine that bone memory where you live as well. Aho!
Reach up high, the sky nation. Grandmother Moon and Grandfather Sun. Grandmother Moon, we thank you for teaching us how to own those shadowy places in ourselves, how to talk about those things that are often difficult to talk about. To bring those things that we hold in shadow and bring them into the light over and over and over again, the way that you show us how to do your grandfather, son, we thank you for showing up every day, teaching us about the discipline and the integrity of falling down seven times and getting up eight, always eight. For showing up every day when it's challenging and difficult. On those days. We also reach out to our star sisters and brothers and others. And thank you for shining down your light upon us. And reminding us to that we can shine as a beacon of light as you do by the way we live our lives so that you could see us from out there, expansiveness and mystery, and endless possibility of the great above. We welcome you to the circle and we ask that you awaken with an each one of us that bone memory that stardust that we each carry. Ashay.
Now we reached down to the earth to get our hands into the soil as if putting down roots. We thank you Mother Earth for all the good medicine that you offer for teaching us of balance, nourishment, and restoration. For reminding us that scarcity is an illusion only perpetuated when we live out of balance with you. We thank you for nudging us back into balance the way that you do. We thank you for reminding us of home and community and belonging and connection. For all the good medicine from the great below we acknowledge you this day, we call upon you to awaken within each one of us that bone memory where you live as well. A place of soil and soul that we each carry within our being. much gratitude we welcome you.
We reach out to the seven generations and beyond that stand behind us, our ancestral lineage. Those footprints and heartbeats, tears and laughter left in the ground left on the wind. We thank you for dreaming us into this place. To those ancestors that stand in front of us for seven generations and beyond that stand in front of us. We thank you for watching to see how we live our lives so that you will know what to do when you get here. We thank you for that level of accountability and trust - may we be worthy of it by the way we live our lives. To those bright and shiny ones. Those ancestors that lived well and died well and that are well in spirit, we invite you to the circle to awaken within each one of us those ancient agreements that we made with you before coming here, about who we are coming here to be, what medicine we were coming here to offer. Help us to remember those agreements. And this conversation today, much gratitude, we welcome you. Ashay.
Now we call out to the spirits of the land around us, wherever you are on the planet right now. Offer your gratitude in the form of awareness. To those standing tall ones that may be just outside your window, to that mountain spirit that may be just down the road, spirit of that river that may flow nearby. To the plant medicine people, the four legged people, the two legged people, the winged ones, the strong people, and all the beautiful beings of this land around us. We acknowledge you this day. May we vow to listen more deeply to the dreaming of the land. So we may once again hear that dreaming in our own dreams. And be able to read dream, a new land, one of honor and respect between us. With much gratitud,e we acknowledge you and we welcome you. Ashay.
And to the great council that sits on the other side of the fire, tending those coals and keeping them hot. We thank you for the way that you stand by us. We thank you for believing in us even when we stumble and fall and have a hard time believing in ourselves and each other. We thank you for keeping that fire burning over there. And by the way we tend to fire on this side, be a blessing to all our relations all our peoples, human and non human peoples living and nonliving peoples. By the way that we live our lives with much gratitude, we welcome you and acknowledge you. Ashay.
As you're ready, I welcome you to open your eyes and reground yourself. This puts you in a different space to come back from invocation. Maybe we don't come back. Maybe we'll just keep the door open and see what trouble we can get into.
Alyona Kobevka 17:46
Thank you so much for that beautiful invocation. I have tears in my eyes. I know that's a good sign.
Kedar Brown 17:56
Tears. They're not enough tears of acknowledgment in this world. There's too many tears of regret. But not enough of deep acknowledgement and gratitude and a lot of unresolved grief floating around that gets petrified and turns into turmoil. So yeah! Tears, tears are really good medicine, something we could all use more of.
Alyona Kobevka 18:26
Agreed. Thank you. Thank you. So we would like to begin today by sharing a couple quotes from you. And one of the things that you've said that's really struck us is that, "the life that we're in, may not be the one that we're headed to." The life that we're currently in may not be the one that we're headed to. And another thing that you said is, "you don't want to be living a life that's not your own". And I'm wondering, would you be able to explain or expand on those statements and also how they might relate to the topic of awakening to and following one's calling.
Kedar Brown 19:11
Yeah, I think those lines come from a poem called "Follow Your Name" that I wrote a while back. And if I can remember the verse, I'm terrible about remembering my own stuff. "If you are not initiated into the mythology, into the bone memory of your own life, you will likely be living an existence that is not entirely your own. And the life that you came here to live is standing several paces in front of you, looking back over its shoulder with eyes wide, waiting for you to remember... to walk towards it. Where are you, it says. I am here. Who are you? I am this moment. Do not live your life in such a way that others give you a name that you have no belonging to. Do not live your life in such a way that others give you a name you have no belonging to."
It's an excerpt from a poem called Follow Your Name, maybe we can send that out to people, after this is over. The poem came to me when I was working with a young man who was 17. I was working in a wilderness recovery center, where we work with the kids, the teenagers out in the wilderness. And they usually spend about eight weeks with us- this was many years ago. This young man had for time lived in South Africa, in a village. His family moved to Washington, DC, here in the States when he was eight years old. Already you can begin to see moving from village life to Washington DC in the United States is a huge shift of reality. And as a consequence, he did seek out initiations as would have been the way of his people, but it was through gangs and violence and drinking and dangerous behaviors. Knowing something about where he was from. I asked, "Do you have another name?" He looked at me, tilted his head and said, "Yeah". I said, "Would you be willing to tell me what it is?" And he wrote down this really long name across the entire page. When he read it to me, it was in his native language. What he read was elements and animals and features in the landscape that were in this name. And then he paused and got tearful. He paused. And he said, You know, when I was leaving the village before I moved over here, my, Goji, my grandmother said, "Follow your name". And I said, "Have you been doing that?" And he said, "No".
And then I had another experience working with a young lady from the Seminole tribe down in another one of our states, Florida. And she come in, in a similar way, told me a very similar story. She to at a very young age, by her tribal grandmother elder had been given a name. And what I notice is that these names there is a tradition in many cultures, often First Nation peoples or indigenous peoples, where there's this understanding that you're born into this world, from the realm of the ancestors, you come here with medicine to offer you come into a certain ancestral lineage, one to further the healing arc of those lines, but also to be activated in a certain way to offer what medicine you came here to offer, that you would have made agreements with your ancestors before coming here about what that was going to be, and you would have formed relationships with certain ancestral allies or helping spirits we could say, in your lineage that also carry the same medicine. This is all before we arrive. And then when you arrive here, the often the job of an elder is to study this child and discern what is their name. They come in with this.
The word education actually comes from the Latin root word educari. And it doesn't mean to fill you up with information that the society you live in then will want from you. It means to draw forth from within. So that the role of a teacher was not to teach you things or give you information but was actually to pull stuff out of you, your genius. And so this idea that the elder would see in you the qualities of, or frequency of name that that would come in the form of imagery that they would assign, you know, images of landscape and animals and elementals, because this was the name, not of who they were in that moment, but who they had to live into. Follow your name. This way of being, these names, certainly these names with this type of conscious intent, are meant as roadmaps as opposed to simply descriptions of some quality, or a naming of an ancestor without a full appreciation of what we're giving this child. It's this roadmap, if you will, to follow your name. And, of course, in many traditions, you may go through initiations, where your name changes, you're taking on different medicine, or you're activating different qualities of medicine that you carry. And now, it requires a different frequency. So that when somebody speaks your name, it calls out that frequency of medicine. I have heard people often say, you know, I never felt like I belonged to my name, like it. They have this other name. So what happens when you hear this name spoken, it causes something to be called out in them that they want to rise up to meet. There's this connection between ancestors and relationship with ancestors and transition into this physical realm. The fact that we want to deliver the medicine that we came here to deliver, when we go back there, we don't want to go back there and say, whoops, I forgot, or I got involved in all these dramas, and all this stuff that I was going down there to deliver, it's still here, I didn't drop it off. So you want to leave all that stuff in the ground before you go. And somebody else can come along and dig it up and find it and will be of use to future generations.
This relationship with ancestors, as a realm of support, a realm of relationship and reminder of who we are and what we carry. And also, to live in such a way that we can, like the title of this conversation you and I are having become ancestors to live well and die well, to be able to transition into becoming one of those bright and shiny ones means that we would have discharged the capacity of all that we had to offer. While we were here, we left nothing, nothing back, held nothing back. That's a longer response. But those lines from the poem that you mentioned, that's where it takes me when I think about were that poem originated, where the lines came into that. This idea that if we're not initiated into our own mythology or our own bone memory, then there's a tendency to simply adapt those values that are offered and elevated in the society that we live in. I think it was Joseph Campbell who said that if you ever want to know the values of the culture, you just look around and see what the tallest buildings are, or the tallest structures. Many 1000s of years ago, those were the sacred places. Now, they're the economic structures, business structures, these are the the new gods. So if we're not initiated into that which we carry, we tend to adopt what's around us - all of the isms. They're all the shadows that are rising up around marginalized peoples and racism and consumerism and capitalism. All these isms , it has so many labels. And that's what's left to adopt.
The other thing about what it is speaking to is that these initiatory experiences are to connect one deeply to not only the medicine they carry into their ancestors and to the delivery of that, and into their community, where pseudo-initiations, or those that have come to replace the ancient ones, tend to want to bind the individual consciousness and behavior to some other group agenda. That is mostly in service to self where to be initiated into one's own medicine, it is to bind one to those agreements, as we would say, the sacred agreements we made about what we're coming here to offer, in service to our people, human and non-human peoples. And so it's a huge difference between the pseudo-initiations and then what we're called to. In the poem, that line, if we're not initiated into that mythology of bone memory of who we are, then you'll likely be living in existence that's not entirely your own. You might not ever know it, until you feel really disheartened at some point in your life. Or you find yourself living a life that you don't belong in. And not sure what to do about it. That happens so much. It leads to so much turmoil. We have so many uninitiated people that are endorsing the false mythologies. And asking others to follow. Or the other side would be people become depressed and suicidal and anxious. I worked with a lot of people over many years that when people are feeling suicidal, and I'll ask them, or they'll tell me. I'll say, "You're right, something needs to die, but it is not you". That's the confusion that there's a way in which you've been living that is not congruent with who you are. That's what's trying to die. And if you're not careful, you misinterpret that and think it's yourself. These old ceremonies or rituals, assisted people in crossing these thresholds, these great divides of challenge where we were asked to reach out to something greater than ourselves, in that threshold phase of an initiatory passage where there's no certainty to hold on to. And yet we reach out maybe only with grief or prayer or something. But it's that kind of deep surrender that is really called for. If we approach that which is sacred, with an open heart with a humble heart, that which is sacred will approach us and we may experience some grace. But it requires that kind of approach. For it to approach us back.
Alexandre Jodun 34:47
So much of what you've shared just then, thank you, by the way, has touched us deeply. In our journey, and a lot of the people that we work with in our friends and community, around the world, specifically around being disconnected from ancestry, and being disconnected from an intact cosmology. I'm curious as to your perspective, of the value of grief, and not necessarily finding solutions to fix our life, but to simply, as you said, surrender with an open heart to something that's happening in our process that isn't very flashy or popular or looks good externally, but may actually deepen our connection to our own mythology, as you're mentioning. If you could say something about grief, and something about not having intact cosmology, and inheritance of maybe someone even saying this is your name, here's your original name.
Kedar Brown 36:15
This loss of connection, this loss of belonging is reflected in our abuse of the planet for one, the place of belonging, so that it shows up not just in relationship to ourselves with ourselves and each other, but also in how we treat the planet. If you can imagine a braided sweet grass, have you ever seen sweet grass that comes in a braided strip, where three strands are braided together? If you can imagine that braided sweet grass, and one of those strands is you. Another strand is your lineage, your ancestors, and another strand is the very land from which they come. And there was a time for all of us, when these three strands were not separated, when who we were as individuals could not be named separately from our ancestors and that could not be talked about separately, from our relationship to land around us. They were just woven tightly together. And yet, over time, these things have become unraveled. And there's grief and loss in that disconnection. And whatever way, it's happened for everybody. I always say that grief is not an individual dilemma, it is a collective responsibility. And so we think of grief ritual, or a communal expression, communal gathering of offering of grief around an ancestor shrine or a grief ritual. That this outpouring is food for the spirits. In my lineage is an old Irish proverb says that the troubles in the other world can only be healed from this world. And the troubles in this world can only be healed from the other world. This quote implies there's this reciprocal responsibility of tending and carrying between the ancestors and us. Grief is the conduit. Grief is the connector. Shared grief eliminates all beliefs of divisions when you're in it. And so it connects. Grief as our offering of water brings connection. deep connection to those places within ourselves that we carry, maybe from our own biographical story, or maybe the parts of us that we carry ancestrally and those wounds and traumas that come down through the line. Grief is a connecting element if you will, that brings healing and reconciliation. That is why I say grief is a collective responsibility. When people talk about loss and grief, and its been so long, I still feel sad, you know, will that ever stop? And I'll say, I hope not. I hope not. When I think about my dad who died in 1992, when I feel the tears, the doorway of connection is open. Or my mom who died just a couple years ago, when I can drop into that heart and feel the grief, I feel the presence and the connection to the love. If we think of grief as that which connects in a world where there's so much brokenness, and so much separation, and so much homelessness of spirit cloaked with individualism.
Yet the gatekeepers that interrupt one from being able to touch or open that, they have to be honored too, they have to be acknowledged, - we just don't do that because you say, that's a good thing. In one person's story, maybe this line of strong women who became very stoic, was necessary to get through that famine, or that Holocaust. And thank God that they were able to do that. And it's okay now. So grief is a way to connect and heal our lineage. When we talk about doing ancestral line clearing healing work, we're talking about an invocation to the ancestors in our line that live well and die well, those that are well in spirit to assist us in healing that which is broken and disconnected. Those traumas that live in the line between where they are and where I am. Often those are done with water, not only our water, but in water, or with rivers and close to rivers, especially where two rivers come together rituals of healing, ancestral grief. Grief is a necessity of healing, connection and belonging. Without it, the belonging gets disconnected and we lose our sense of connection. Maybe we maintain that for other reasons that happened hundreds of years ago. But being aware of that, so that the healing work we do isn't just for ourselves. It's, it's for the ones before us, and the ones that come in after us as well. And they're both assisting us in doing it. Grief is such a component of, a conduit of connection, and belonging. When we can drop into it.
And then there's different kinds of grief. There's your personal grief, something that you're wrestling with from your own story. You finally say I let go, I surrender or whatever it is, that allows the grief of surrender to begin to show up. There's the grief of others that because we're energetic beings, we absorb and feel. One of the greatest teachings I received from my teacher Rocking Bear was when I was telling him a story about something I was feeling deeply. And he looked at me and he said, "Is that yours?" And I immediately knew what he was asking - I had to reorganize my Western mind for a minute. And I thought and said, "you know, I don't think so. I thought it was and it was causing me great pain but I realized it's coming from here". We also carry each other's grief. And those that were connected to, any healing work we do assist those were connected to; any troubles they feel, it'll be felt in the field, and we will feel it in the field. Then there's the grief that is ancestral and tends to travel through lines like a hungry ghost.
And then there is the grief that we have denied and buried in the land. And I have a different perspective on that when people say, "the trees are grieving, or the mountain is grieving" . I say, "No, the mountain is holding the grief that we have not acknowledged. Because that's what the earth does, it is our mother, it will hold us and if we don't acknowledge it is going to still hold us, is going to feel it. And until we acknowledge it, it's going to be holding that for us." There's grief that's embedded in the landscape in places that have been resting there and somebody sensitive comes along and touches that stone or tree and all of a sudden becomes a hollow bone to move it. The unacknowledged grief becomes petrified. Petrified grief that looks like anger. I think I heard this somewhere in Africa- an angry man is a man on the road to grief. And the sooner he gets there the better for him and for us. Let's not shy away just because he's all angry - let's go in and let's hold him because he's on the way to grief. And so often that's what happens with grief, it becomes petrified anger. And then we forget that that's what's happened here - this is alot of sadness here. And we tend to pull away from it or counter it with more anger and that creates more grief. There are people called tear listeners. These are people that have consciously, though maybe not intentionally, but they have a conscious awareness of their life experiences have conditioned them by apprenticing them to grief. They have apprenticed themselves to grief simply by the fire of living their own life. And this isn't punishment, this is preparation - as these people begin to heal those places in themselves, their acute awarenesses - these tear listener sense and feel into an acknowledged grief in others becomes quite adept and being able to voice, to name it, to draw it out so that it can live and come out. So it's another form of people that carry this tear listening as a component of medicine. In my ancestral tradition, there were called the keening women who seem to be more intuitively aware. But the keening women would come into situations where there had been loss and they begin to keen, to sound and eventually their keenning would would activate grief in the room and all of a sudden everybody would be pouring it out, So, people can carry this relationship with grief that they've apprenticed themselves to as medicine that they carry to help others bring grief out. It is quite an under acknowledged and misunderstood emotion.
Alyona Kobevka 49:42
Thank you so much Kedar. I can feel my whole being relax as you've offered a reframe for not only us, but so many of us from grief, in a pathological lens to really see that there's a lot of meaning in grief. I know in my own life and also with the people that I've had the privilege of working with that, when there's that period of darkness in these initiatory portals that we move through, that's usually when we can get really stuck. I'm wondering, from your perspective, what do you see as some of the resources that are important to harness, whether that's communally or individually with nature, that will help us to be able to move through the darkness, as you've called it as the seeding ground.
Kedar Brown 50:42
This passage, you describe, this threshold, moving through the threshold. We have to be careful with the word stuck, because it implies- is one of the unfortunate things about the English language is it's filled with way too many of the wrong kinds of words, it is not a living language. It has too many nouns and not enough verbs. So when we name something "stuck", it means that we have an agenda that we should be somewhere else, and that where we are is not okay. And by definition is not even a place. When I was a therapist, early in my career, I would hear the people talk about client resistance. I figured out that client resistance means therapist agenda. Because it's a place. When we come into a threshold, it means we are no longer where we were. And we're not yet where we hope to be. We're in this undefined realm of where there are no names, there is no ground of certainty. And so "stuck" is the result of looking for certainty, or the boredom of lack of stimulation that is a gatekeeper that prevents us from dropping into the present moment. What really drops us into the present moment is when we have reached the end of our own limited resourcefulness in the journey. And we let go, maybe with the belief that, I don't know if I I am going to make it. I don't know if this is going to happen. I don't know what to do. Saying, " I don't know what to do", is actually the beginning of dismantling stuckness as an agenda to be somewhere else. I don't know what to do is an invitation, I don't know what to do is a prayer of grief. It's an invitation to the sacred of an open heart of humbleness. When we reached that place where we can drop all pretenses that we really knew what the hell we were doing anyway. We open and say,"Hell, I don't know what to do. I don't even know if anything's out there." It's a cry for help. What I've learned in Lakota tradition, there is a word called "hembleceya" to describe the ceremony of a rite of passage or vision quest. Actually, the word vision quest is not a native word-they don't have that word. But they have this word "hembleceya". And forgive me if I'm not saying this correctly, but the beauty of the word is that it is it implies an action, meaning to cry for a vision. One has to cry for a vision. It doesn't come through some cleverly orchestrated ritual of using these right beautiful words. It comes when we're broken, when we're down in the depths.
Michael Meade talks about these initiatory experience that can have two primary trajectories. One of fire, which is called an initiation by ascent. You are impassioned. You have something moving through you that's unstoppable. You got to do it. You are on fire. We also might call it a genie possession. And the thing about that is if you don't have the right kind of guides to help you navigate that energy, it will kill you. It's the story behind the mythology of the genie coming out of the bottle. First thing he wants to do is kill you, not grant your wishes. The other is a trajectory that goes down into water. In stories where we go down into water it is about ancestry about soul work, about healing and reconciliation and, dealing with those things that are hurtful and painful and coming to reconcile and heal and facing that grief and facing that rage and facing that fear. This downward arc into water is into grief, into healing. I'm down in the water - I even forgot the question. Whatever it was you asked took us down to the water and there's a sense that people love the ascent. Everybody wants to be spiritual. But there's an old saying that those that want to go to the fire end up in the water, and those that go to the water, well, they'll end up in the fire. So the pathway to the fire is actually down through the water first. If we prematurely want to ascend, we will still find ourselves eventually back down in the water.
These pathways of threshold, that's what you're asking about when we get to these places, they require a surrender. In order to start around the wheel again, we have to let go. And letting go is equivalent to self acceptance. Accepting self and one story is proportional to my ability to surrender and let go. It's the invitation to something greater than ourselves. We could call it grace, Great Spirit, Creator, the mountain, whatever it is, but it's an invitation for grace, and it doesn't guarantee it. That's the nature of grace. It doesn't guarantee something will enter. If you think about your own life story, you can proably recall moments where you may have felt so broken, so shattered by life's experiences and you did that, you surrendered -not a surrender of resignation and giving up and depression, but really a surrender of reaching out to something greater. And something happened. It may have been a sound. I've had experiences where something in the room got really loud. One time I was down at a pond and had this experience in which this huge invisible boulder - that's about as big as the splash was, it clearly was not a beaver slapping its tail, I know what that looks like, BOOM into the water and you're met by something, something that says you're not alone. And then we begin to walk hand in hand with that. I won't even call it a belief because it's beyond that. Belief in first that there's some kind of construct of understanding. The thing is when we go beyond that, when we've gone out beyond the ground of our own beliefs that we are really in the essence of surrendering to grace. And it's such a fine thing. To have a full passage through the threshold, one must have that kind of experience. You can go through the threshold and not have that happen. I guide a lot of people through a vision quest ceremony and say going through this doesn't guarantee that you're going to have some kind of soul encounter. Maybe you won't, actually most people don't. Something will happen. But if you go to that place things will happen.
I have spent alot of time working with people in nature and wilderness. What I've come to notice is these phenomenal experiences where a creature from nature comes in, in some kind of really not typical behavior way. What I've come to believe about that to understand about that is whether in ritual or with the individual when they enter a state of, openness and vulnerability, the other beings then recognize us as one of their own. And they come in close. Easiest thing to notice, if we have pets, they do that all the time. We feel sad, and our dog walks over, or in a room of people and there's an animal in the room, and they'll go snuggle up next to the person who's struggling. I've noticed that happens in the wild, that when we enter that state, somehow, the creatures of the natural world can now see us where before we weren't visible, or certainly weren't trustworthy, because what they were seeing didn't quite match what they saw, what they sensed. The thing on the outside didn't match what they saw on the inside and so they didn't trust it. There is this way of surrender that invites the sacred in its many different forms to recognize and come in closer, and when you when you approach that which is sacred, with a humble heart, that which is sacred will approach you. It's that language beyond words. Grief is a language beyond words. Not something you can choreograph all by yourself, generally.
Alexandre Jodun 1:02:09
That whole mythic underpinning, or understanding of the ascent by fire, and then the descent into the underworld by water, I can really resonate from both of our stories, in a sense, because of culture, and not being initiated into our own mythologies, our so called first life was very much that ascent. And the last five, six years, has really been this decent, and really been this long, slow process of grief, which, when we look outwards, doesn't really seem to be valued so much. Sometimes it can feel very much like an individual, isolated process. Then when we're putting our tendrils out to try and find some community where we can express that within, as you said, you know, connect to grief in its original sense, there's this challenge and this tension, of feeling the need and that natural kind of urge to express this grief, but then also so many opposing forces that are both inside and outside. Different values, different ways of seeing life and the psychospiritual journey. And I guess, an old mythic idea that we've become aware of is something around in order for change to truly happen, the tension of opposites needs to be held for long enough, so that something magical something third, a third thing can then appear, which might not be a very popular thing to do. It's like- let's just get quick answers. Let's just go to do a ceremony or some plant medicine or something that's just going to fix my life. Right? There's this living into that you've mentioned, which hasn't had a lot of airtime and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more to that.
Kedar Brown 1:04:27
There is this tendency as you described for things on the planet seemed to have speeded up at least in my 61 years and have gotten really fast. And even text messages have a shorthand. We've got emojis now that communicate complete forms of thought with little faces. This speeding up, we tend to see our relationship to the sacred along those same lines. That that's how you do it, you know, we'll go to the plant medicine weekend down in Peru or to the plant medicine circle that's happening in town every other Saturday night you can go to it. And people can certainly have a profound experience. But these things were not meant to be regular. See if you can grow some corn with that. If you've done all these things with these plant plant medicine spirits, is your life growing any more corn than it was before? Are you just enjoying the journey? Every time you go? There's an old saying is that when you arrive somewhere you need to have a story. In the old days, the one of the oldest healing art forms that exists is stories. And when travelers would come after they are cleaned up and fed, they would gather around the fires and share the story. Where have you come from? What's happened? That's to say that the story can be years. So how do you develop relationship with spirit? Here's a few things - do this for 20 years, and then we'll have another chat and see where that has taken you. This idea that things are rapid or faster, that we need. There's not the discipline often or the stillness that is required to let those two points of opposites settle together. Before they get here we have words like stuck and resistance, and many other pathological words that say something's wrong. We tend to pathologize the journey. And therefore it needs fixing with medication or therapy or something. Even this tendency to pathologize these initiatory descents or ascents as it were, and see them as something that is somehow deficient, somehow that needs fixing. As opposed to how can we align ourselves with this person and help them navigate this? Because there's gold down at the bottom of that river or there's shiny coins. There's something down there? We know that. And when we forget, hopefully we'll find somebody else that can remind us that Oh, yeah, remember last time you were down there. This way of mythologizing our experience so that it's not seen as something that requires fixing or it's described as no place at all. Often when I guide people into some kind of experience in the present moment. I say, So what happened? Well, nothing happened. Well, that's impossible. So let's examine nothing. Oh, well, there was that blue feather that you saw just for a second then there was darkness. So that's not nothing. That's everything. Or they say "All I saw was darkness. Nothing happened." This is the whole realm of possibility. Let's go back and let's sit in the darkness and not look for something. But just look. And that's one of those shifts of awareness where we learn not to look for something, but we do learn to pay attention.
My teacher Rocking Bear used to say, "I have learned not to believe in much of anything. That way I can pay attention to everything." Our beliefs often can constrict our perception and that we can see what's within it. What's outside of it, we won't see or we'll call it nothing or we'll have to make it fit. Another one of my teachers Malidoma Some would laugh and say, "I notice people in this country are very interested in looking for Spirit. But on the rare occasion when I have seen spirits show up physically they go running". You don't want to find it, you just want to look for it. I think there is this ability to hold the tension of opposites as you describe because that is a place, it is not stuck, it is not in need of anything else. There are qualities to the experience of holding the tension of opposites. What is the quality of it? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What does it feel like in your bones? What color does it have? What shape does it have? And begin to immerse ones into the present moment, sensory felt awareness of this thing we may call nothing, all of a sudden becomes everything. Everything is connected to everything, therefore everything is a portal to everything else. How you access it is with stillness and presence and awareness. And when you bring that to any moment, it opens and connects to everything else. It's what's meant by that old, I don't remember who originated this one, the old saying God is in the details. It's like, you bring your attention to the present moment of whatever's happened and all of a sudden, it breaks into something else. But you have to pass the gatekeepers. And those gatekeepers are all the names we call it like stuck or resistant or, or uncomfortable, or bored. That's a really good one boredom, if they will think of boredom as a door and it's only going to open when you lean into it long enough. And eventually, if you keep leaning into it, it will crack open. But don't distract yourself from it. It's all these beautiful ways of holding that that still point of tension of opposites, as you say.
Alexandre Jodun 1:12:33
To start wrapping up, we've probably got about 15 to 20 minutes. In terms of bringing it back full circle, we're talking about ancestors in the making. I think about both of our journeys, a lot of the people that we've been in community spaces with something that is very challenging at the moment, thinking about the state of the world, racial injustice, climate injustice, lots of injustice, and severance. Thinking about ancestors and thinking about ancestral lineage. There's a tendency for all of us, that we've experienced this, of trying to search for ancestral connection in other cultures, and not really knowing the etiquette of how to be in relationship to other lineages or the practices, possibly due to not having a connection with one's own ancestry and blood lineage, which, again, coming back to this tension, and maybe very difficult part of the journey of really looking at those traumas, and those really ugly places that might live within our ancestry. But potentially might have some value in deepening us or rooting us into something or into the people that are walking beside us that we're not aware of. I'm wondering if you can say a little something around the value of really doing the ancestral work?
Kedar Brown 1:14:27
In a time where, in my perceptual judgments, spirituality is, where people are connecting with this deity or that deity or this ancestral native spirit or that indigenous native spirit and teacher. I think in a way it creates more grief with our own ancestors, because they're saying, "Hey, you know" and I think the starting place for that kind of support, is your own lineage. If we go back to the braided sweet grass, it may take a while if you could turn and walk back down your four major lines, if you chose one, and you started walking on your mother's mother's line or your father's father's line, you get going back and back and back and back, you will come to a time where the sweet grass is woven tight, where the the individual and the ancestors in the land were woven together. And when they moved, they carried that connection, if they were nomadic, they carried that connection in relationship. It lives and exists in all of us. That's the longing, that's the the disconnection. Yet healing the brokenness, the divide between however far back those ones are, and where we are. What we would call ancestral line clearing would be a way of attending to each of your ancestral lines to connect with an ancestral helping spirit.
I could offer a ritual prescription. I can give a couple of options for those that aren't able to go outside or maybe live in apartment buildings. The first is to what we call journey - what the Cherokee call dreaming. When I say imagination, think of imagination, as the language of the sacred, that's how sacred communicates with us through images and the imaginal. It doesn't mean false, or not real. Think of the imagination, meaning language, the language of spirit. To journey to close your eyes. And if you're familiar with journeying with the drum, you can do that. Simply close your eyes and intend a journey to the realm of the ancestral, helping spirits. You can even imagine this, this is like going up, we would call it an upperworld journey. You might imagine climbing a tree or riding smoke from a fire - traveling up and arriving in a place that we're going to call the realm of the ancestral, helping spirits. How do you know when you're there? Well, you just kind of know. You just have a felt sense or a visual sense. Again, I use the word imagination as the language of spirit, let your imagination guide you to this place. And once you're there, if your journeying to connect with a specific ancient ancestral grandmother, you would d say, "I am..." and you speak your name. "I am the daughter of or the son of..." and you speak your mother's name. "I am the granddaughter of or grandson of..." and you speak your grandmother's name on your mother's side. What you're doing is you're identifying the lineage and calling upon relationship with an ancestral helping spirit. One that lived well and died well one that is well in spirit at this time. Offering an Ancient One, to come forward to meet me. when you have a sense of one coming forward, this grandmother in this case, and you identify yourself again, your name and your lineage. "Are you my grandmother?" You will get a yes. And just to be sure, "Are you well in spirit? are you connected to the the bright and shiny ones, those who lived well and die? Those that are well in spirit or the greater pool of ancestral love and wisdom in our family line?" You'll get a yes. At that point "Grandmother, I'm your granddaughter, I'm your grandson. I wish to learn about our line. Can you teach me about the blessings of this line? What are the blessings of our line grandmother?" And then something will come across something will be communication in some form. "What are the teachings of this line?" And there may be something conveyed at that point. We could say, "What is the medicine of this line that I carry within me?" You have that interaction, you may do that same journey to that same ancestral helping grandmother two or three times, maybe you just asked one question. And after a while, say the third time you go and you come back and journal, write these things down. And then in a later journey, you say, "Grandmother, will you assist me in healing those places in our line that have been broken, the places of disconnection and trauma and grief and loss and all the places that have unacknowledged turmoil and trauma?" You make the request. There may be something conveyed to you at that point. Usually there is. Each time coming back from a journey. So you do three of these journeys, each time coming back and journaling.
Now you've developed a relationship with this one ancestral helping grandmother's maternal grandmother. Ideally, if you're working with your ancestors, you want to do this with all four lines. The way I'm talking about it may be different than others. I'm not talking about a linear step-by-step of mom to grandmothers, great grandmothers, great, great grandmother. You're going to go to the realm of the ancestral helping spirits. You're not to engage in any of the turmoil that may live in the line. If you suspect that you somehow have stumbled into the wrong room and they're not well in spirit, they're not connected to the deeper pool love and wisdom and your family line, say "Thank you, I'm moving on." You journey until find one that is well. I usually take people to the realm of the ancestral helping allies, go there directly. You have this relationship. Ideally, you do with all four lines. You've established relationship with your ancestral helping spirits. I always like to remind people that the one that shows up for you is not simply the one that happened to be available, not doing anything that morning, and said, "Oh, let's go see what they want. I don't have anything going on. Do you have anything going on? Why don't you go to your you're not doing anything" No, it's the one that carries the medicine that you carry. That's why they show up. So there is not only that this is the one showing up. But this is the one that carries the medicine you carry. So relationship with them is vitally important in moving this into the world as you journey and deepen that relationship through journey and over and over. So you could do this with all four, over time, or you could do one at a time.
There is another component that I would like to call the ritual re-enactment where you do ritual in the physical, that reenacts the relationship and the healing requests that happen in the non -physical. With that healing request, in the way I prescribe, it is to get an unpolished piece of Rose Quartz stone that represents the connection to that ancestral helping ally. This mineral, Rose Quartz. Get a piece of yarn and if you are able to work with a water source like a stream, say 13 feet. If you're in your apartment, and you can get a pan of water, or even in your tub, maybe 13 inches. On one end you tie the yarn to the stone, the Rose Quartz. If you're working with running water, let the red yarn go downstream. Tie the other end of the red yarn to a ring. It could be a simple ring, we call it your ancestor ring. Rings are about relationship, so your ancestor ring is relationship to your helping ancestors. Tie it to the ring. If you're using a running water source like a small stream, you do your invocation in which you call upon the ancestor that you've been working with. Then pour milk and honey over the rose quartz so that the milk and honey runs down stream across the bloodline - the red yarn with saying the healing request , "Ancestors, please help me heal and clear the line of the brokenness of the dislocation of the things that have been forgotten." Whatever you can specifically identify in that line that is needs healing. Then you pour it over that. If you're doing this in an apartment in a closed building space, and you can get a pan of water and use the 13 inches of red yarn, and just pour it across the entire line and down to the ring. The invocation is important because the invocation at the beginning, you want to call upon the ancestral helping ally that you had developed relationship with through journey. Also have a candle present - fire is the important opening of a doorway as you do the invocation. It is good to do this on the new moon night. Unless you're all prepared, now you have to wait to the next one. The new moon is about beginnings, so you do it on a new moon night and you leave it in the water for those three dark nights. The first of the dark nights, you do the ritual, you leave it in the water for the three dark nights, at the end of the three dark nights on the fourth day in the morning at sunrise, you go and retrieve the ring and the quartz. The yarn can be deposited in fire to be burned up. Then, put the ring on. The stone can sit on an ancestral altar, or if you don't have an altar, sit it beside your bed for now. The ring goes on your finger and then wear the ring until the full moon and when the moon is full, have a celebratory meal of gratitude and thank you or the healing and thank you for the connection and relationship and all the good medicine that's flowing to me. It is one of gratitude. It's good to cook something your ancestors would have eaten or liked. Do a little research and to see what kind of foods that might have been.
That is an ancestral ritual, both forming relationship through the journey and then doing the ritual enactment in the physical to bring it into the physical realm - the relationship and the healing request. Sometimes people have done all four clearings at once. And so it takes a while do all the journeys. I'm more of an advocate of of slower is better. On one new moon do one and you will have done the journeys prior to it. Spend time with this particular ancestor and then move to the next, do another one another line. If you're adopted, they'll work it all out on their end you don't have to worry about that. You call on the grandmother or ancient grandmother or grandfather of your lineage, of your line. You don't need four rings. You will have eventually four rose quartz, each one connected to that figure, ancestral ally -one ring same ring could be used each time so it reconnects the relationship to that line again. I like tell people that the ancestors' main focus is you. Your ancestors main concern is you. They're not concerned about world peace or how your neighbor is doing or the state of things down at the Capitol building in this country. They're saying how is my granddaughter? How's my grandson? What do you need? I encourage people that if you're working with helping spirits, that ancestors be the first ones that are deepened into, before you start working in other directionsl. To call upon those to make those connections, those relationships first and begin with those first. They are the ancestors that did have a physical body, so they're really good at the things that you encounter and struggle with. Where other deities that may not know anything about that, you know, they never had a mortgage on a house. But your ancestors - they worked, they raised kids, they did all these things. And so these are the ones we call them for the things of living life and the challenges and struggles and you need help with this. "Grandmother, I need some help with this" As you learn what is the blessing, the teaching, or the medicine of that line, you begin to discern the different things that are moving through the lines to that ring, to you. And of course, if you're in the healing professions, anytime you're going out into the world to work in that way, and you're calling on the ancestors, you want to put the ring on and wear it or you can wear it all the time. If you take it off, leave it with the Rose Quartz stones. Of course, from New Moon to the first full moon, wear it that entire time and keep a journal nearby so that you can write stuff down. So, that is a ritual prescription for both forming relationships with ancestral helping spirits, discerning clearly that you're working with the helping ones, not the ones that have trouble. And then a ritual enactment to bring that relationship into the physical and making a healing request as far as clearing the line.
Alyona Kobevka 1:32:00
Beautiful. Yes. Thank you so much for your generosity and sharing that. I know we can attend to that. Beautiful. I was wanting to ask. Lastly, before we ask you to speak a little bit about the free gift, would you be able to share where that ritual comes from?
Kedar Brown 1:32:19
It comes from my ancestors they told me. I don't remember when it came. Some years ago. I was used to working with an ancestor ring, not in that kind of ritual. But an ancestor ring, on a divination spread and somewhere, simply extrapolated. In my understanding of when we journey to the to the non-physical world to do work into that I learned that it's important to realize that a ritual is a physical expression of what's been agreed upon or happening in the other world. When people say, I'm not sure what to do in ritual, I will say, look over there and see what's happening. Because whatever is happening there is what we're going to do here. It happens there first. And so it's a physical expression of the ritual enactment of the request and the prayers in the relationship and agreement made there in a non-physical to bring it here. So somewhere in the weaving together of all that information, this ritual came to me and I dont even know when, some some many years ago in a divination, it just came up. I realized that first we need relationship with these ancestors through connection and journey, and then some ritual, to bring it into the physical realm as we can begin to work with them and make requests. And then of course, that could extend to create an ancestor shrine and there's lots of things to say about that. The main point I want to make with ancestors is when it comes to working with the spirit realm, especially anyone other than Creator or all the different names we have for Creator, your ancestors are the place, the perfect place, the place I recommend starting because it's very personal. Where as with the others, like working with the elementals. When you are working with the elementals, the Fire and Water or Mineral or Earth, these energies are not personal. They just are what they are and they do what they do. It's important to know how to work with them. They're not going to be all personal and lovey dovey , they're just this. Now ancestors, on the other hand, they'll do all that. I think it's a perfect starting place to begin at home, making those connections before you start reaching out beyond, into other places. Once you make those connections, you won't have to go searching, this stuff will start coming to you, because it's in the lineage. You will be called to do a fire ritual where you don't know why but it's coming through. As you start working with it, working with your ancestors becomes the the holographic blueprint that begins to then take you in other directions. It's the foundation that begins to direct you in other places. And then in time, you find that most of your guidance and information is not coming from the physical world, it's coming from that from there. Because you've deepened into it, you've learned how to read it, to understand it, to trust it. Beginning there, it will lead other places. You may find yourself being drawn to dieties you didn't even think about, but all sudden, you discover, they were in this line, way back here in this place. It's just a respectful place to start, you don't want to bypass your own ancestors and start venturing out in the spiritual Cosmos without them.
Alyona Kobevka 1:36:43
Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you.
Kedar Brown 1:36:48
It has been fun to spend this time with you.
Alyona Kobevka 1:36:53
So this might be an opportunity to just say a few words, share a little bit about the free gift that you'll be offering.
Kedar Brown 1:37:03
So there's a couple of free gifts, you'll get a link to the website. If you click on the link, you'll have the invitation to join and receive a audio story of singing stone, it's a story of the initiatory journey. It's called Singing Stone. I perform it using a drum. It was recorded live some years back. It's an audio drumming story of singing stone, and it's about the initiatory journey. Then your name will be entered into a drawing for a free divination. Out of the people that register and receive the story, if you put in the notes, the name of this particular summit interview, that will cue me to know that this is where you saw it. I will gather those names, I usually start gathering, the day the marketing starts happening. And then usually about a week after it has been aired. Give it a good week following the airing of the recording, to gather all the names. From those names, I actually journey to my ancestors and ask them for a number and they give me a number. Then I just go down the list to come to that number and count and when it comes that number, then I'll email you and offer you a free divination and there will be a link that you can go to the read about, you know, what it means to receive the divination, what that looksw like and that kind of thing. And itwill be it will be a recorded session. You get the recording following the divination that's the gift.
Alexandre Jodun 1:39:21
Fantastic.
Alyona Kobevka 1:39:22
Wonderful.
Alexandre Jodun 1:39:23
Thank you for your generosity. And speaking of names. We were thinking maybe we could close with you speaking the FollowYour Name poem that you wrote.
Kedar Brown 1:39:37
I'm on the spot now.
Alyona Kobevka 1:39:39
We might have it too. I don't know.
Alexandre Jodun 1:39:41
Yeah, Yeah, we do.
Kedar Brown 1:39:43
Let me put my glasses on. As they like to say, talk amongst yourselves for just a moment. A couple of shifts here on my computer.
I'll tell you what if you put either the title of the talk or follow your name when you do the invitation, I'll send you the poem too.
Alexandre Jodun 1:40:18
Yeah, beautiful.
Kedar Brown 1:40:19
Okay, so, again, it's called follow your name. Pay attention. Pay attention. Be careful not to distract yourself from yourself, by focusing on the obstacles in your life. Focus on the delivery of your medicine, not on the stories in your head where you recount your limitations and losses. Do not indulge in such self importance as a way to avoid taking responsibility for your medicine, and the gifts of healing that you came into this world to offer. You are the heroes and the heroines of your own story. And if you are not initiated into the bone memory into the mythology of your own life, you will likely be living an existence that is not entirely your own. In the life you know, you must live is the one standing just a few paces in front of you, looking back over its shoulder with eyes wide waiting for you to remember. Apprentice yourself to yourself. Walk through the horizon of your own dreams, the place where you live in the absence of story, the place where the sharp edges of this unfolding moment demands your full attention. Where are you? I am here you say? Who are you? I am this moment, you reply. Pay attention. Pay attention. Do not walk in the world in such a way that another gives you a name that you have no belonging to. Pay attention. Pay attention. Do not walk in the world in such a way that others give you a name you have no belonging to.
A small task.
Alyona Kobevka 1:42:26
Wow. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Yes. So much gratitude for you Kedar for this beautiful connection and for your service and love. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
Kedar Brown 1:42:40
Oh, thank you for the invitation. It's been a joy and look forward to hearing from all the folks and maybe I'll get down there sometime. We'll do one of these grief rituals.
Alyona Kobevka 1:42:50
Yes, yes. Sounds great.
Kedar Brown 1:42:53
Okay. All right. Go Well, everybody!