Returning to Ancient Wisdom for Modern Evolution
Modern wellness has lost its soul–but ancient wisdom can help us retrieve it.
A beautiful Passionflower I found growing on a restaurant fence in San Diego. Passionvine and flower can help with relaxation of the mind and body and as an aphrodisiac, also helps connect us with flow. Medicine is everywhere, if you know where to look.
The Subscription Spell
The other day, I saw a post a friend reshared about how, in this age of endless subscriptions, we no longer own the things we buy. It named something I’ve felt for a while: I don’t want to pay $20 a month to use a program that I used to buy once for $60 and keep for years.
Yes, eventually the software became outdated — planned obsolescence has always been part of the game — but something about this model feels more than inconvenient. It feels ensnaring. Exploitative. Like we’ve been caught in a web of “auto-pay” agreements that quietly siphon not just money, but agency.
And it’s not just products anymore. Even creativity and care are being sold back to us through monthly memberships, paid communities, and “exclusive” content. We’re standing at a strange threshold: between monetizing everything and trying to make a living in a world where very little remains uncommodified.
The Myth of Ownership
This tension pulls me back to the ideas in Sacred Economics. There isn’t much left that capitalism hasn’t found a way to package, market, and sell. As Trevor Noah said,
The village disappears and what you have to do is you have to buy the village back.
As a small business owner, I feel it daily. Every bit of “advice” I see centers on funnels, conversions, and keeping people buying. And honestly, it feels icky. Because what I do — what so many of us do — isn’t about selling. It’s about service.
Sacred Healership
From the lineages I’ve trained in, traditional healers did not charge for their gifts. Everyone had a right to care, regardless of economic status. The healer’s role was sacred, and their wellbeing was ensured by the community itself — with food, shelter, trade — because everyone knew they would eventually need the healer’s care.
Because healership is meant to be a dán, a soul calling, not a commercial enterprise like it has become here in the United States.
Healing or Profit?
Whether it’s healthcare, big pharma, or the online wellness industry, profit too often depends on people staying unwell. The system thrives on imbalance.
But a healer knows that life is both abundant and harsh, an eternal dance of contractions and expansions, and that as long as there is life, there will be those in need of healing. Babies born, wounds needing tending, imbalances in need of rebalancing, traumas in need of alchemizing. A healer knows that food and plants are medicine, as are rest and walking barefoot and belly laughing. A healer knows that she is not the one doing the healing, but instead holding safe and sacred space and guidance for the mind and body to heal themselves and remember balance.
The Failing System
Most people I meet are disillusioned with our healthcare system, yet hesitant to trust anything outside of it. That’s not their fault; centuries of witch hunts and 19th-century (and onward) propaganda deliberately erased traditional and indigenous healing practices to make room for profit. Yes, modern medicine has saved countless lives — and it has limits. It treats disease once it arrives. It rarely prevents it.
We find ourselves on a precipice. The healthcare system in this country — like many systems right now — is collapsing under the weight of policies that prioritize profits over people. We are about to witness massive cuts to coverage, while our government is currently shut down over debates on whether healthcare is a right or a privilege.
As one of my teachers said, asking the government to protect our health is like asking an abusive partner to stop hurting us. At some point, we have to reclaim our agency.
We are at that point.
A Different Way Forward
Unlike modern medicine, I do not promise quick fixes. You are not broken. You do not need to be fixed.
What I offer is presence — grounded, connected, listening. Listening to you, and to the quiet messages your mind, body, and soul are already speaking. This is not about “fixing”; it’s about listening, nourishing, and balancing.
Healing — or better yet, evolution — happens when we transmute pain into wisdom, when we compost what’s dying and allow something new to grow. We aren’t returning to the old; we’re becoming something more whole.
The Remembering
Perhaps part of you already knows this. Maybe it lives in your personal or ancestral memory — the old ways that once kept the village alive. Or maybe you just know the current system isn’t working.
Science is beginning to echo what Indigenous wisdom has always known: mind, body, and soul are inseparable. As a trauma therapist, I see it every day; people come for trauma therapy and I educate them on how their headaches/migraines, digestive issues, and chronic pain aren’t “unrelated” after all. Gabor Maté has written several books sharing how the repression of emotion, especially healthy anger, is a risk factor for a multitude of diseases–from metabolic syndromes to autoimmune disorders and even cancer.
We cannot evolve by suppressing what is human.
We evolve by learning to listen again.
An Invitation
If you feel the pull toward a different way of living, healing, or remembering — follow it.
These are the pathways back to wholeness.
This is not self-improvement.
This is soul and societal evolution — a return to the rhythms of nature, reciprocity, and right relationship.
We are returning to ancient wisdom for modern evolution.
Katie Blackthorn, LCSW, is a trauma therapist, folk herbalist, and Wise Woman dedicated to soul and societal evolution. Her work bridges modern psychotherapy and ancestral healing through Revivify Life.