On the disconnection that is not geographical — and the long, unglamorous road back to being held

I used to believe that healing lived somewhere else.

Somewhere beyond the horizon.

Somewhere in another country, another retreat, another ceremony, another version of myself.

For years I chased the feeling that if I could just get far enough away from where I'd been, I might finally become someone new.

What I discovered was far less dramatic and far more useful.

The wound had already boarded the plane.

This reflection explores a lesson I learned slowly through fatherhood, ceremony, and years spent walking between Scotland and Peru: that some forms of disconnection are not geographical at all.

They live within us.

And until we recognise them, we carry them everywhere.

When I first went to the Amazon, I believed I was going there to be healed. I had read enough, sat in enough circles, heard enough stories to have built a quiet certainty that somewhere upriver — in the dark of the jungle nights, in the smoke of mapacho and the medicine songs of the Shipibo-Konibo — there was a cleaner version of me waiting. Freer. Lighter. Finally whole.

I packed that certainty alongside my mosquito net and trekking boots. It was the heaviest thing I carried, and the only thing I did not declare.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what my teachers there seemed to know before I had even unpacked my bag. The wound I had come to leave behind had bought its own ticket. It was sitting in the seat beside me on the plane. It walked with me into the Maloca and lay down where I lay down.

I had imagined I was travelling towards medicine. In truth I was carrying my whole severed history across an ocean and setting it down, intact, in front of people who could see it far more clearly than I could.

Here is the thing about the deepest layer of severance — the one beneath the sickness of the body, beneath the fracturing of community. You can change your postcode. You can cross an ocean. You can sit in the most sacred container on Earth with the most skilled keepers of it. And still the wound does not stay behind — because by then it is no longer a place you can leave.

It has stopped being your environment and become your interior.

It is no longer something that happened to you. It is something you have become.

That is what I have come to call the colonised soul.

I do not use those words lightly, and in the full chapter I take real care with them — because the histories are not interchangeable, and some of them are not mine to wear. But I have stopped pretending the story passes me by entirely. In the Irish and Scottish blood that makes up a good third of who I am, there is the memory of older clearances: people driven off their own land to make way for sheep, a mother tongue struck out of children in the very schools built to raise them. Land taken. A way of seeing the world declared backward. A language silenced in the mouths of the young.

I will not pretend to know exactly how such a thing travels down the generations. But I have stopped pretending it left no mark — until a boy several generations later is standing in a hallway thick with smoke, carrying a rage he cannot name and a grief that did not begin with him.

The colonised soul is Wetiko turned inwards and made personal. A worldview that says you are a resource, the Earth is a resource, and your worth is something you must earn by producing and consuming enough to be excused for existing — installed so early, so silently, that you mistake it for your own voice.

And then comes the part of this chapter I least wanted to write, because it turns the mirror on the very world I have given my life to.

For years, I performed my own healing at full volume across social media. I built the image of a man who had arrived — and I made sure the success read as evidence of how far I had evolved, as though the two were the same thing. More wealth equals more spiritual evolution. I preached it, fluently, to anyone who would follow.

That is not enlightenment. That is Wetiko in a linen shirt — the extractive logic of empire wearing the language of awakening.

I presented myself as healed. Finished. And it was a lie. Underneath the broadcasts I was still profoundly lost.

This is Wetiko's cleverest disguise. It learned it could not survive in a culture that was genuinely waking up — so it put on white linen, learned a few words of Sanskrit, Maya, and Quechua, and called itself awakening.

What finally brought it down to earth was not a teaching. It was fatherhood, and it was living alongside the world's living Indigenous peoples — among whom there is no audience for that kind of performance, and no reward for it either. You cannot perform your wholeness to a child who needs you at three in the morning. You cannot perform it to people who have kept the thread for a thousand years and can see straight through a costume.

You cannot think your way out of a colonised soul. The mind that would do the thinking is the very thing that has been colonised; it cannot be both the prisoner and the locksmith.

What I have seen instead — in myself, and in others further down the road than me — is that a soul is not repaired so much as re-membered. Put slowly back together. Called slowly back home. And this is never a solo achievement, never a personal-development project, never something you complete and then post about.

The first act of decolonising the soul, I have come to realise, is not a grand one. It is not an ayahuasca journey or a mountain or a vision. It is simply to stop performing your own healing for long enough to let yourself be held.

If this resonates, here is where to go next:

This is one chapter of Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, which I am writing and serialising live, chapter by chapter, on Substack — alongside weekly essays on fatherhood, ceremony, sacred entrepreneurship, and the recovery of connection in modern life. You can read this chapter in its full expression, and follow the book as it unfolds, over there.

The chapter goes on from here — into soul loss and soul retrieval, into a very ordinary night that taught me more than any ceremony, and into the beginning of the long road back. But that part belongs to the full read.

 

Read the full chapter

→ Read the full serialisation on Substack

Come and be held — Earth Wisdom Healing Retreat

Everything in this chapter points to the same quiet truth: that a soul is re-membered in relationship, on actual land, in actual weather — not performed alone on a screen. Our annual Earth Wisdom Healing Retreat is built for exactly that work: the unglamorous, profound labour of coming home to yourself in the company of others and the living Earth.

→ Learn about the Earth Wisdom Healing Retreat

Learn to hold the space — Cacao Ceremonial Leadership Training

There is a world of difference between performing wholeness and being able to sit at the foot of someone's mattress and hold them through their own return. If you feel called to carry ceremony with integrity — rooted, accountable, and free of the bypass this chapter names — our annual Cacao Ceremonial Leadership Training is where that craft is learned.

→ Explore the Cacao Ceremonial Leadership Training

With all my love,
Marc-John 🌿

Marc-John Brown is a writer, teacher, and co-founder of Native Wisdom Hub. Born in Scotland and shaped by decades of apprenticeship in Andean and Amazonian traditions, he writes at the intersection of re-indigenisation, sacred entrepreneurship, and the recovery of meaning and connection in modern life. He is currently writing his first book, Re-Indigenisation: Reclaiming Our Place in the Web of Life, published live on Substack. He currently lives near Loch Lomond, Scotland, with his children, and his wife and co-creator, Erika.