The Living Ancestor

In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, I explore the inextricable link between ancestry and destiny, grounding an ancient metaphysical idea in a very practical, embodied way.I begin by situating destiny within older cosmologies that understood reality as multidimensional, inhabited by forces with agency, and animated by a soul that incarnates with an orientation and a potential. From there, I trace how many traditional cultures understood destiny not as a fixed outcome, but as an unfolding process shaped by the ongoing relationship between soul, body, circumstance, and choice.From this foundation, I turn toward the ancestral layer. Drawing from Yoruba Ifa and Orisha traditions, as well as Daoist understandings of Jing, I explore how ancestral inheritance and destiny were understood as inseparable. The body itself becomes the meeting point between ancestral forces and the soul’s unfolding path.I speak to the soul as a being that incarnates with an orientation, a pull toward experience, expression, and becoming, while simultaneously entering into a web of ancestral inheritance that establishes real constraints, patterns, and potentials. These inherited conditions are not obstacles to destiny, but the very soil through which it must grow.To bring this into the everyday, I offer a deliberately mundane example: the human squat. As an ancestral movement pattern built into the structure of the human body, the squat reveals how fate, choice, inheritance, and outcome interact at even the most basic level of embodiment. The body we inherit sets real parameters. How we engage those parameters becomes a site of conscious participation. What we inherit shapes what is possible. How we engage it shapes what unfolds.Through this example, I invite you to extrapolate outward, toward family inheritance, cultural stories, bodily predispositions, and the broader ancestral field that shapes what is possible for us. Destiny, in this view, is not about escaping fate, but about making conscious, participatory choices within the circumstances we inherit. It is the art of bringing awareness, care, and choice to what we did not choose.This episode is an invitation to see ancestry and destiny not as abstract concepts, but as lived, embodied processes unfolding through everyday decisions, movements, and orientations.From here, the conversation expands outward to family lineage, cultural inheritance, bodily predispositions, and the broader ancestral field that precedes us. Destiny emerges not as escape from these forces, but as conscious participation within them. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Destiny is not a destination.It is a lived process.In this episode of The Living Ancestor Podcast, I explore destiny through two complementary metaphors that help orient us toward it in a more embodied and functional way.The first is the ship in sail: destiny as conscious participation in a journey, requiring navigation, stewardship of resources, and active engagement with fate as terrain rather than obstacle.The second is the tree and its fruit: destiny as an organic unfolding of what is already seeded within us, where growth, nourishment, resistance, and time allow something inherent to mature and bear fruit.These metaphors are medicine for different temperamentsFor those who over-surrender to fate, the ship calls forth responsibility and direction.For those who over-force outcomes, the tree restores patience, trust, and organic timing.Together, they point to destiny not as something we “arrive at,” but something that unfolds through how we orient, participate, and resource our lives.This episode is an invitation to re-encounter destiny as process, practice, and participation rather than outcome or achievement.🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore the ways in which we fetishize the ancestral in order to create a focal point of connection, and how that same touchstone can become limiting when it is mistaken for the whole of what the ancestral truly is.I begin by unpacking what a fetish actually means at its core: an orientation of consciousness, a container, a narrowing of vast forces into something we can relate to and work with. A fetish is a narrowing of devotion: the compression of something into an object, identity, behavior, or idea that can be grasped and engaged. While this process has ancient, indigenous roots and can be inherently valuable, it also has the potential to confine our perception when we mistake the container for the mystery itself.From there, I move into how modern cultures often reduce the ancestral into segmented forms: nutrition, movement, spirit work, or the dead, and how these narrowed interpretations flatten the true scope of ancestry. Diet trends, “primal” exercise, spiritualized nostalgia, and commodified versions of ancestral living are all explored as examples of this limitation.In the final phase, the ancestral is expanded beyond any single category. The body itself is revealed as an ancestral phenomenon. Bloodlines, landlines, soul lines, mythic lineages, and cosmic ancestry all emerge: extending back to Earth, Sun, Moon, stars, and Source. In this way, we begin to sense the ancestral not as an external force we approach, but as a vast field of being that holds us; one fire in a long, continuous lineage of fires.This episode invites you to move beyond a single fetishized layer of ancestry and instead build a broader altar of relationship: one that includes body, land, spirit, cosmos, memory, and mystery. Not to define the ancestral, but to begin listening to how it lives through you🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

What if the idea that we live in a simulation is less a ‘material reality’ and more a symptom of modern disconnection? It’s likely that those who feel the world is simulated have simply forgotten what it feels like to be ‘real.’ This episode examines the consequences of a loss of lived contact with reality: the fading of soul, body, and world into abstraction.Some live in the world as conscious, active participants inside animated bodies, while others drift as spectators of a simulation, like players in a video game. Many modern humans find themselves in a kind of limbo, yet the possibility of inhabiting the real world is still within reach. Tune into The Living Ancestor Podcast to discover how sensory awareness, presence, and breath can reconnect us back to reality.To paid members: It appears there was ‘glitch"‘ with this post’ and it only went out to paid subscribers. Apologies that you are receiving it twice as I correct the glitch, and get it to everyone. In fact, I had republish the whole thing from scratch because of technical issues. Seems I might be upsetting the techno gods. 🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: https://eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

“By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment — and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.” - James Hillman One of the places where clear perception of spiritual work breaks down, is the assumption that everyone is ‘doing the same thing in different ways’, meaning that every path is equivalent. This is functionally inaccurate. The mechanics, formulas and processes people engage with, along with the core intent they have, all shape the potential outcome of a path. Two of the most common themes we encounter among the core practices of the world are those of:The Path of Subtraction: emptiness/non-dualism/dissolving/release/peace The Path of Addition: desire/expression/manifest form/passion/sufferingThere are more of course, but these two present the most common distinct ways of working with ‘the soul’.If there is a principle that can allow the two to co-exist, it is silence. However, that’s not the point of this talk. Here, I offer a metaphor of a person engaging with a painting they have suddenly awoken to from deep sleep, as a way to understand the distinction between the paths of addition and subtraction. One seeks to return the canvas to a blank state, and the other is ‘an artist of the soul’. Both are challenging, but each in their own way. Knowing what path your on, is key. 🌩️ To stay connected and begin ‘Eating Ancient Virtue: Absorbing The Past to Nourish The Future + Join me at my Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Your soul has innate and inherent ‘animal powers’ that belong to it, and they shape your response to life’s ongoing demand for choice. The constellation of our choices is character. Character is destiny.In this Living Ancestor episode, I return to the terrain of soul medicine, that living current of power held by, worked with, and transmitted by the soul. Up until now I’ve spoken of soul medicine in its more ‘projective’ quality and how we can work with it in our craft/s. But the medicine also listens, and through this, it opens up a branching tree of responsive possibilities that shape our character.Animal powers are those inherent and innate perceptive and responsive abilities all creatures possess. Just as each animal embodies a unique power—the eagle’s far-seeing eye, the dolphin’s social song—our soul carries a particular style of perception that apprehends reality in its own way.Through its stylistic apprehension of life’s unfolding, it creates meaning and purpose moment to moment, but especially in those times that pull us towards the soul in order to make sense of what’s happening…the ruptures and challenges that demand the soul’s depth.Destiny then emerges through the soul’s ‘stylistic response,’ that is the result of its animal power to perceive and respond. This episode works within the mysterious paradoxes of destiny, free will, predeterminism, and fate, and seeks to offer a pragmatic clarity that ties some of their pieces together.🌩️ Join Eating Ancient Virtue @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, we explore one of the fundamental themes of becoming a ‘Living Ancestor’: orienting our lives toward ‘completion’. This expresses itself in small daily moments, all the way to the larger arc of completing the ritual of one's entire life. We touch on how resolving ‘open loops’ and familial karmic ties helps us prepare for death with a lighter heart. Unfinished business keeps us tethered to the past in unhealthy ways, and many of us carry a large amount of ‘drag’, that is anchored to family and ancestral karma. Embracing closure allows us to step into a spiritual legacy more ripe with the potential of flourishing, and it can happen in small movements of recognition and action. Through some personal stories and practical insights we’ll explore an engaged way of approaching this principle of completion. 🌩️ Join me @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

The Ancestors are either the wind at your back or a lead weight at your feet.In this podcast we explore how our Ancestors shape our fate, and thus by extension...our destinies. A big part of the message we inherit in modern culture is that of ‘individual choice’, which has wonderful gifts… and large gaps, for it misses how our lives occur in a continuum. In today's world devoid of practices that tend to the dead, we're often left ‘grappling’ with the legacies we've inherited, instead of being supported by them. In indigenous cultures, with healthy ancestral lines, the blessings of the dead, flow like a fertile river. Most of us are asleep to the gifts, and curses carried in the energetic signature of familial stories, hungry ghosts, or the loving dead (sometimes they are all the same thing). The fate bestowed upon us by our Ancestors can be expressed in many ways, but in this podcast, I cover how they do so through:* Genetic gifts and debilitations* Emotionally charged narratives & the energetic signature they carry* The ‘unlived destinies’ of our line, seeking to live through usFate, destiny and Ancestors are all interrelated in crucial ways. In this podcast, I invite you to consider the possibility that a part of your destiny is to ‘awaken’ to these ancestral influences and actively engage with them.Understanding that your personal story is intertwined with the stories of your ancestors—which is further woven into the broader story of life and death itself—can empower you to actualize your own individual destiny, which paradoxically always ties into a greater whole.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever heard of Kintsugi? It is the art of purposefully breaking pottery and repairing the cracks with gold. I can envision no metaphor better suited for describing the creative process.Creativity is not replicability. Creation is (in part) the filling of cracks with gold…our gold. In today’s podcast, we explore how critical it is to liberate ourselves from the relentless pursuit of perfection in our creativity.What I have come to learn is that flaws and imperfections are not just inevitable; they are essential. They are a feature and not a bug, and they are present in all works, traditions, and methods. For years, I found myself ensnared in a pattern: I would discover someone's work, become enamored, dive deep into it, only to eventually become disillusioned by its flaws and imperfections. Yet, it is the cracks and flaws that make work unique.In this podcast, we’ll explore how to appreciate the imperfections in our work and the work of others. We’ll dive into the foundational elements of creativity, discussing how flaws shape and enrich the message, much like the art of kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with gold, creating something uniquely beautiful.🌩️ Join me @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

The concept of finding and following one's "North Star" is central to navigating fate and destiny. The North Star serves as an internal guiding light, representing a clear unifying direction in life. Metaphorically, it represents an inner sense of guidance analogous to the stable north star already in the sky: Polaris. As there is an outer sky, there is an inner sky. Just as the North Star aids navigation by bringing a ships crew into alignment with a singular direction, identifying one's personal North Star helps unify and synchronize life's disparate aspects toward a chosen path.Everyone already has an innate North Star, that is usually overshadowed by fate and conditioning. To transmute fate into destiny involves consciously aligning with this innate guiding light. Practically, the North Star translates into day-to-day actions and routines, guiding all aspects of life—health, vocation, relationships, and spirituality. When each aspect aligns with this guiding light, life becomes cohesive and purposeful. Traditional teachings emphasize this coherence, offering cosmologies, disciplines, and moral frameworks that align individuals with a cohering direction.In modern contexts lacking such traditions, many experience desynchronization, with different aspects of life moving disjointedly. Ultimately, walking in alignment with one's North Star is akin to walking the path of destiny daily, embodying the journey and destination simultaneously.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s world, there is an idea that you can just eat ‘content articles’ for breakfast, get certified, and then go on to have a fulfilling practice regurgitating the same tired information.In this world, genuine articles are few and far between. It’s no surprise that imposter syndrome is so common as to be a household term.While most sources out there will try and sell you some kind of ‘workaround’ so that you don’t feel like an imposter, (or not let the feeling stop you from acting), I suggest that this feeling is ‘actually’ a signal giving you valuable insight.Instead of running from or ignoring the feeling, I suggest doing this instead…🌩️ Join me @ My Substack:And get access to:+Free Courses+Long Form Writing +Weaving Gold Podcast +Teachings On The Art of Practice+Poetry & Musings +Offers & Updates This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore offerings and sacrifice as ancient human technologies of relationship, exchange, and transformation.Across indigenous and traditional cultures, the giving of offerings is woven into how humans relate to land, spirits, gods, seasons, and one another. Offerings create balance, ease tension, express gratitude, and anchor us in time and place. At a deeper level, they speak directly to the other-than-conscious mind, the symbolic and energetic layer of reality that understands exchange, nourishment, and reciprocity.I look at sacrifice not as punishment or moral debt, but as a fundamental alchemy. Sacrifice is a form of death. It removes something from our immediate threshold of experience and creates space. Every expansion requires contraction. Every gain requires release. This is a truth the body, the unconscious, and the ancestral memory all understand.Drawing on primal human experience, I explore how this rhythm is still alive in us today. Life itself calls us toward greater capacity, toward the fuller expression of our gifts and the life we sense we came here to live. Yet many people remain stuck at the threshold because they cannot surrender who they currently are.I speak about the altar not as an object, but as a place of change. To alter is to transform. To live in alignment with becoming requires the willingness to sacrifice the present self for the one that is emerging. This process is often uncomfortable, because nothing wants to die, and the parts of us that are familiar resist release.This episode is an invitation to understand sacrifice not as loss, but as compost. The relinquishing of what is feeds what is becoming. When we are willing to offer who we are now to the altar of change, we nourish not only our own evolution, but the life that is calling us to contribute something greater to the world.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore fate, destiny, and free will through a deeply personal story that has shaped my life from infancy.I share how I was born into an African-rooted shamanic and divinatory tradition carried through my Cuban family, and how a long-form divination performed when I was a child became a reference point for who my life was “supposed” to be. From a young age, I was told I would become a spiritual teacher, even a prophetic figure, and this story quietly shaped my sense of identity long before I had the language to question it.I reflect on growing up inside that narrative, rebelling against it as a teenager, and later confronting it again as an adult when I could no longer tell whether my work as a teacher was truly my choice or the mechanical continuation of a story I had inherited.From there, I describe a radical break: stepping away from teaching, shutting down my business, and devoting several years to stock market trading as an experiment in free will. That period brought discipline, loss, emotional intensity, and ultimately grief, revealing that the archetypes of teacher and artist were not roles I could abandon without cost.I explore how sustained practice eventually burned away what was not aligned and led me back to this work, not as obligation, but as conscious engagement. From that process, a simple formula for destiny emerges: fate provides the soil, but destiny requires soul forces to bring it into fruition.This episode looks at destiny not as a fixed outcome, but as a living process, shaped by archetypal capacities, choice, and the willingness to engage one’s inheritance consciously. It closes with a reflection on the mystery at the heart of free will itself, and the possibility that the deepest act of choice may be the decision to realize what we were always meant to become.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Myths all around the world tell us that fate and free will dance together in the ongoing genesis of life and death, and yet, fate, which is the circumstances, universal laws, and divine order already in place when we arrive, determines the context that one can even choose within. Different cultures have held either fate or free will as more important. Some cultures fully embrace fate, whereas others (like Western culture) herald free will. In the end, we ask what is choice?What are the greater and lesser parameters of that choice?Do we choose to play the game, embracing what has already been woven, or choose to resist the will of fate?And if we do, where does that lead?To gladly embrace fate is to accept that your life is not just about you, and it might just unlock your destiny.🌩️ Join me @ My Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Although it may not appear so at first glance, much of what drives people toward spirituality, personal development, and inner cultivation is a search for power. Not power as money or status, but the ability to actually affect reality: to heal, to release, to address what feels immovable, and to participate in shaping one’s life rather than being carried by it.In this episode, I explore power as a relational phenomenon rather than an individual possession. Modern Western culture often frames power as something to acquire or generate alone, yet many indigenous, animist, and shamanic traditions understand power as something we access through connection. The deepest forms of power emerge when we become instruments for forces larger than ourselves.I examine this through examples drawn from shamanism, Qigong, and ancestral worldviews, where power flows through relationship with land, ancestors, natural forces, symbols, and living currents of meaning. In these traditions, power is everywhere, embedded in stones, rivers, gods, emotions, ideas, and lineages, and human beings participate in power by entering into right relationship with these forces.From there, I introduce the idea of a personal power grid: the network of relationships, beliefs, practices, places, and forces that consistently energize and shape a life. Whatever you are regularly connected to becomes a source of power that also shapes what you transmit into the world.I speak in particular about the ancestral as a profound and often overlooked source of power. The ancestral is not abstract. It is the living continuity of life itself, deeply invested in your thriving. Through ancestral relationship, veneration, and lived practices, this vast lineage can become a stabilizing and generative power source in the present.This episode ultimately asks a simple but far-reaching question: what powers your life right now? What forces are you plugged into, consciously or unconsciously, and what kind of power signature are they shaping? Because destiny does not resonate with every current equally. It unfolds through alignment with the power that can actually carry it.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

One of the core themes running through this podcast is that the stories we attune to are actively shaping us. They shape posture, physiology, perception, and the possibilities we experience in daily life. No teaching is neutral. Every instruction, lesson, or piece of advice is anchored in a deeper story or cosmology, whether it is explicit or not.In this episode, I explore how teaching always transmits values, and how those values are often carried through subtle language. I focus in particular on the overuse of the words need, must, and should, and how these terms frequently function as carriers of urgency, shame, authority, and survival pressure.I look at how these words show up in self-talk, in modern teaching culture, and especially in online education spaces. When a teacher relies heavily on must, need, and should, they are often transmitting an inherited value structure rather than inviting genuine discovery. In many cases, this is not intentional manipulation, but an unexamined cosmology absorbed from tradition, authority, or ideology.Values shape lives. And values themselves are stories. Some arise organically from the soul through love, inspiration, enthusiasm, and gratitude. Others are imposed externally and maintained through pressure, comparison, and fear. These two story streams speak very differently.I explore when the language of need and must is actually appropriate, primarily in matters of true survival or clearly defined conditions, and how misuse of this language often keeps people locked in adrenalized, reactive states rather than sovereign choice.This episode invites a reconsideration of how we teach, how we motivate ourselves, and how we listen to others. Not through coercion or conversion, but through invitation, inspiration, and alignment with what is genuinely alive within.I close with a paradoxical reframing: what we need to do is stop using the word need outside of real necessity, what we must do is listen to what the soul is already calling us toward, and what we should do is stop telling others what they should do.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

What do fate, family ties, and Christmas trees have to do with each other?In this episode, I explore fate as the inherited circumstances we do not choose: family, culture, place, time, body, and tradition. Fate is not a mistake. It is the set of conditions we are born into and must contend with, and it is the raw material from which destiny is formed through conscious engagement.I look at family ties as a primary layer of fate, carrying stories, beliefs, gifts, wounds, and traditions that shape us long before we can reflect on them. Seasonal celebrations, especially those tied to the solstice, act as powerful markers in time, connecting human beings to cycles of nature, memory, and meaning.From there, I share a personal story about Christmas, my grandmother, and the deep emotional imprint this tradition left on me. I reflect on moving away from Christmas as I became more critical of its origins and commercialization, and then returning to it years later with a new relationship, one rooted in acceptance rather than rejection.Christmas is not pristine. Its symbols are layered, contradictory, and historically complex. Santa Claus is part saint, part nature spirit, part corporate myth. The holiday carries both beauty and distortion, generosity and excess. Yet it also offers joy, celebration, giving, and connection, not only through material gifts, but through presence, memory, and shared ritual.This episode is an exploration of how we can consciously relate to what we inherit. Not everything we are given is perfect, yet it still shapes us. When we acknowledge fate without resentment and engage tradition without denial, we begin to transmute inheritance into something living.The Christmas tree becomes a symbol of this process: a pagan remnant that survived centuries of transformation, still capable of holding meaning. In the same way, our family and cultural inheritances can be accepted, loved, and reshaped into expressions that are authentic to who we are now.This episode invites reflection on how destiny emerges not by escaping fate, but by meeting it with awareness, choice, and care.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

For those called to the path of the golden thread, understanding and embodying authentic authority is essential. Authentic authority is the specific power each of us carries to act in the world in alignment with soul, calling, and destiny.In this episode, I explore how every human being arrives with innate gifts, talents, and capacities meant to contribute to the greater whole. Like cells in a living body, each of us has a particular function. Authenticity is what is already present, spontaneous, and unforced. Authority is the domain of reality where that authenticity can act with real effect.I examine how authentic authority expresses itself differently across domains. A warrior aligned with destiny carries power within the field of battle. A healer aligned with destiny carries power within the work of mending, unifying, and restoring coherence. In each case, authority emerges when innate gifts are cultivated through study, training, and lived experience.Magic, in this context, is not theatrical spellwork. It is the capacity to create real change in accordance with will and function within a given domain. When someone acts within their authentic authority, their actions carry weight, momentum, and consequence. Outside of that authority, effort becomes inefficient and often damaging.I explore the path of the golden thread as a conscious relationship with the harmonic order of the world. Acting in alignment with authentic authority contributes beauty, coherence, and meaning. Acting outside of it feeds disorder unconsciously and extracts a cost from the individual.This episode invites a deeper inquiry into what you are designed to do, what you love without coercion, and where your actions can genuinely serve the greater whole. When authentic authority is embodied, life becomes not only more effective, but more meaningful.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Modern Western civilization places enormous value on freedom, and in America in particular, freedom has become a kind of brand. This love of freedom has spread widely, and in many ways, that is a beautiful thing. Freedom is one of my own core virtues. Yet not all expressions of freedom are purely beneficial.In this episode, I explore how certain modern ideas about freedom can actually obscure vocation, calling, and destiny. I examine the common belief that hard work beats talent every time, and how this idea, while often true, misses something more essential. Nothing surpasses the fusion of innate talent and devoted, focused work carried out over time.Destiny contains vocation. It is what we came here to do. The signposts that point toward this calling are what we naturally love and where our talents already live. Talents are not accidents. They are pathways carved into the fabric of who we are, built in as capacities for expressing power and shaping reality.I explore how modern freedom narratives imply that we are blank slates who can become anything through effort alone, rather than discovering and refining what we are already meant to become. This misunderstanding leads many people to ignore their gifts or mistake passion alone for vocation.Using the example of artistic craft, I look at how talent must be cultivated through study, discipline, experimentation, and long-term devotion. True vocation emerges when talent is brought into relationship with skill, practice, limitation, and learning. At a certain point, craft itself becomes a path, and the work begins to transform the individual as much as the individual shapes the work.This episode explores the movement from freedom as limitless choice toward freedom as alignment, where devotion to a path becomes a north star, and creativity becomes a means of bringing something genuinely new into the world through soul, discipline, and lived practice.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore how having an opinion about everything actually diminishes our power in the world.I look at the modern pressure to constantly react, comment, and take a stance on every political event, war, or social issue, and how this demand to be perpetually opinionated often drains energy without creating real impact. Having an opinion does not automatically mean having insight, expertise, or power. In many cases, it simply disperses attention away from where it could be used effectively.Each of us arrives with a specific set of gifts, capacities, and inclinations. These gifts can be amplified or diminished by what we practice, study, and cultivate over time. True power emerges where innate gifts meet lived experience and real expertise. Outside of those arenas, our opinions often carry little weight, no matter how charged they feel.I examine how power has become an uncomfortable word in modern culture, often tangled with fear, trauma, or avoidance. Yet power is inseparable from destiny. Fate constrains us through circumstances we did not choose. Destiny emerges through conscious engagement with those constraints, and that process requires learning where and how to exert power responsibly.Limiting circumstances, rather than being obstacles alone, often reveal where our real power lives. Challenges shape skill. Skill becomes capacity. Capacity becomes contribution.This episode is an invitation to withdraw energy from reactive opinion-making and return it to the domains where you are actually equipped to act. When power is focused rather than scattered, it becomes effective, meaningful, and aligned with what you are here to do.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

Discussions of free will are ancient, persistent, and unresolved. Human beings have been wrestling with the nature of choice, conditioning, and sovereignty for as long as we have records of thought itself.In this episode, I explore free will as the capacity to choose a direction that falls outside mechanical conditioning. I look at the layers of influence that shape us long before we are conscious participants: ancestral inheritance, biology, family systems, culture, religion, and civilization itself. Much of what we call “choice” operates inside these inherited patterns, whether we acknowledge them or not.From there, I turn toward modern biological narratives that deny the existence of free will altogether, framing human beings as programmed flesh machines driven by selfish genetics, chemistry, and evolutionary randomness. I examine this perspective not as neutral truth, but as a contemporary cosmology, one story among many about the nature of life.I offer a different framing drawn from indigenous, tribal, and traditional worldviews, where free will is understood as a function of the soul. Within this lens, the body does not possess free will; the soul animating the body does. Free will is therefore neither universal nor evenly distributed. It can be cultivated, diminished, transmitted, or lost, depending on circumstance, culture, and practice.Soul is not a metaphor here. It is an animating force that some individuals and cultures embody more fully than others, and its presence directly affects the degree of freedom available to a person. In a largely soulless consumer civilization, this distinction becomes uncomfortable, difficult to quantify, and often denied.This episode invites a reconsideration of free will not as an abstract philosophical right, but as a lived capacity tied to soul, cosmology, and conscious cultivation. Free will does not operate in a vacuum, and most daily choices are not expressions of it. Yet the more soul is cultivated, the more space opens for genuine choice to emerge.eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I explore the difference between fate and destiny through the lens of lived experience.I share how being initiated into an African-rooted magical tradition in infancy, and receiving a long-form divination meant to guide life choices, shaped a deep wound around predetermination, freedom, and choice. What was intended as protection and orientation became, through mishandling and immaturity, a felt sense of being trapped inside a story that could not be escaped.From there, I unpack the distinction between fate and destiny. Fate is mechanical, predictable, and unconscious. Destiny is not a destination or fixed outcome, but an ongoing process of cultivation that requires conscious participation. Destiny emerges through how we engage with the circumstances of our lives and how we weave meaning from what has been given.I explore life as story, memory as malleable, and how inherited worldviews, family narratives, and cultural conditioning often shape our identity without our consent, locking us into a life we did not choose. This unconscious weaving is the pathway of fate.Destiny, by contrast, asks us to become conscious weavers of our own story. It requires choosing a cosmology that is life-affirming, understanding our role within a larger tapestry, and recognizing meaning and purpose as functional contributions rather than abstract ideals.Your life, your wounds, your gifts, and your desires are not accidents. They are the threads you are meant to work with. Destiny becomes a living frequency, an attractor, a north star that organizes the circumstances of your life when you learn how to align with it consciously.This episode is an invitation to move from mechanical inheritance into conscious participation, and to begin cultivating a destiny that is lived, not predicted.🌩️ Continue the thread in writing at Eating Ancient Virtue on Substack: eatingancientvirtue.substack.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eatingancientvirtue.substack.com/subscribe