I get asked the question, 'Do I need a shamanic practitioner or a therapist?' often enough that I want to answer it directly, without steering you toward me as a shamanic practitioner by default. These two kinds of support do different work, and knowing which one fits what you're dealing with right now will save you time.

Ordinary waking consciousness has a habit of presenting itself as the default, the sober baseline against which every other state of mind is measured and usually found lacking. Dreaming is dismissed as noise. Meditative states are dismissed as suggestion. Psychedelic and near-death experiences are dismissed as chemical or neurological malfunctions. The assumption underneath all of these dismissals is rarely argued for directly.

Some grief moves the way it's supposed to. It comes in waves, gets talked through, gets understood, and, over time, loosens its grip enough that life has room in it again. And some grief doesn't. You can talk about it for years, understand exactly what happened and why it hurts, be able to narrate the whole thing clearly to a therapist or a friend, and still find it sitting in you exactly where it was on day one, untouched by all that understanding.

Michael Polanyi opened a durable line of inquiry in 1966 with a single, deceptively simple observation: we know more than we can tell. A face is recognisable among a thousand others, instantly, though the person recognising it could not write down the precise combination of features that made it identifiable. A skilled cyclist keeps their balance through a continuous set of micro-adjustments they could not consciously describe, let alone teach through verbal instruction alone

There's a particular kind of sorrow people bring to me that doesn't quite fit their own story. They can't point to the loss that caused it. It doesn't track with anything that's happened in their own life, at least not obviously. It just sits there, familiar and old, as though it's been there longer than they have.

A useful way to sharpen the free will question is to stop asking whether it exists at all and start asking a more specific one: how much of what feels like your own choosing was actually installed in you before you were in a position to choose anything?

I get some version of this sentence often, usually from someone who has already tried the things that are supposed to work. Therapy, maybe. Meditation apps. A good psychiatrist and a prescription that helps some of it, but not all of it. They are not looking for a belief system. They are looking for the anxiety to stop running the show, and they've heard I might be able to help, and they are deeply unconvinced that I can.

Descartes is usually blamed for a split he did not fully commit to. In the Sixth Meditation, he writes that he is "not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit." He even gives the reasoning: if the relationship were merely a pilot observing a vessel, he would perceive bodily damage the way a sailor spots a leak, by inference, rather than actually feeling p

In a world buzzing with technology and rapid change, it might seem surprising to think about ancient practices like shamanism finding a place in our digital lives. Yet, here we are, standing at a fascinating crossroads where old wisdom meets new tools. If you’ve ever felt drawn to the idea of spiritual healing, connection with nature, or exploring the unseen realms, you might wonder - how do I find a modern shaman in today’s online world? Let’s explore this together.

Here is a question that makes a great many scientists uncomfortable: if consciousness is simply what the brain does, what happens to it when the brain stops? Not in a vague, hopeful sense. In a specific, documented, published-in-The-Lancet sense.

Over the past five weeks, this series has handed over a fairly demanding toolkit. Question the source. Notice the body's signal before the mind talks over it. Treat AI as a tutor rather than an oracle. Separate a sacred text from those who guard it. Ask whose interests a political claim, a news story, or a history book actually serves. Taken together, these are a genuine discipline, and, if practiced without care, they have a way of curdling into something that no longer serv

Of all the categories of information we're asked to evaluate, none is harder than the ones written or spoken by people who have something to gain from our believing them. Politicians want our votes. News organisations, whatever their intentions, operate within business models that reward attention over nuance. And history, the longest running record we have, was for most of its existence written by whoever held the pen, which very often meant whoever had won.

Many people who grew up inside a strict religious tradition carry a particular kind of flinch, one that appears the moment a question about scripture forms in the mind, before the question has even been fully thought. It is not doubt itself that produces the flinch. It is the memory of being taught, sometimes explicitly and sometimes simply through the weight of atmosphere in a room, that the question itself was the transgression.

There is a temptation, among people who care about careful thinking, to treat artificial intelligence as either a saviour or a threat, and to reach for one of these two postures rather than doing the harder work of figuring out where the tool genuinely helps and where it genuinely harms. I want to resist both postures here. AI is neither the end of independent thought nor its salvation.

If the first task is knowing how to evaluate what we're told, the second task is harder and more personal: building the internal capacities that make evaluation possible in the first place. Three of these matter more than any technique or checklist.

We are living through a strange inversion. For most of human history, the problem was scarcity: too little information, too few books, too few witnesses to any given event. Now the problem has flipped entirely. We drown in claims. A question that once required a trip to a library now returns ten million answers in half a second, several of them contradicting one another, all delivered with the same calm, authoritative tone, whether generated by a Nobel laureate or an anonymou

People ask me this more than almost anything else. Not 'does shamanic work actually work' and not 'what do you believe'. They want to know what happens in a shamanic session. What they're walking into. Whether they'll have to say a chant, hold a rattle, wear something, or believe something before we even begin. So let me answer plainly, the way I wish someone had answered for me the first time.

Start with the domino. Push the first one and the rest fall in an order you could, in principle, predict if you knew the exact position, weight, and spacing of every tile. This is the picture that determinism offers us for the universe itself. Pierre Simon Laplace put it plainly two centuries ago: an intelligence that knew the precise state of every particle in existence, along with the laws governing them, could calculate the entire future and the entire past in a single equ

I watch people reach for their phones before they have even finished forming the question. What should I eat. What should I write. What should I feel about this. AI answers before the thought has settled into shape. I am not against the tools themselves. I am against what happens to a person who stops trusting their own instrument.

Watch enough Disney films and a pattern surfaces that most viewers feel before they name it. Bambi's mother dies in the first act. Nemo's mother is gone before the opening credits finish. Elsa and Anna lose their mothers at sea. The Lion King buries a father instead but strips the mother from the story entirely, as though her absence were simply background.