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TribeAwaken

Stay steady on hard ground, and build what lasts.

Ancient tools for future-proofing generations: for healing what was handed down, and for building a home, a company or a community that holds together. I share them through the books, a free daily magazine, a three-minute breath by the water, and talks and work with leaders around the world.

Tony Skrelūnas
By Tony SkrelūnasAuthor of the Ancestral Watch novels·MBA, entrepreneur and executive·NAU College of Business Hall of Fame·PhD candidate, Prescott College
Read today's magazine → Work with Tony
The Ancestral Watch novelsStone Breath · The Far Messengers · The Council Fire
The garden and the waterfall I built, at first light.First light and mist, through the pines
Yá'át'ééhDiné Sveiki atvykęLietuvių ようこそ日本語
Masan seated in the hogan doorway, the boy and the sheepdog beside her
01

I learned everything by lamplight, and by helping Masan.

If you have read this far, you are carrying something: a family pattern you want to end with you, a community deciding what to keep, a mind that has not been quiet in years. I was raised for that carry.

My great-grandparents raised me at a sheep camp on Black Mesa, in a hogan without electricity, where Masan taught me to speak only what I want built. In college I met an identity crisis and an inferiority crisis, came through on one discovery, that I could be who I was, and graduated Standard Bearer.

After thirty years in councils and boardrooms, I write the Ancestral Watch novels, publish the free Abundance Mindset Magazine, and lead sessions and retreats on the far messenger principles. For my doctorate in human performance and intergenerational healing I study the far messengers of the desert, the ocean, the high passes and the songlines, runners and navigators who, continents apart, arrived at the same skills: settling the breath and the nervous system under threat, lasting the distance, and reading their bodies and the world. All of it is for the one carrying something a long way. There is room.

Tony Skrelūnas, arms crossed, at home
  • MBAand twenty years as an entrepreneur, including co-founding a renewable energy company
  • Executiveyears leading divisions, programs and teams
  • Hall of FameNorthern Arizona University, College of Business
  • PhD candidateSustainable Development, Prescott College
  • Teacherat 1440 Multiversity, and in gatherings on several continents
Keh Yazh places the stone in a child's hand. From the films for the books.
A historic photograph of the stick game
The stick game, in an old photograph.
Why I call the sheep camp a retreat →

Two kinds of resilience, one word.

The person, the family and the nervous system on one side. The place, its circle and the way it decides together on the other. Everything on this site stands in one of these two, and most of it stands in both.

Colored pebbles under the water of Oak Creek
02

Human Resilience

Intergenerational healing, long life, and the breath. A nervous system is learned before language and handed on, and it can be settled and handed on differently. My grandfather reached 103, and a long life was once common where I come from, so the second subject here is how to live that long and that well.

Human Resilience →Take the diagnostic
A home calm enough to teach inThe ancestral code for living to 100
A fire at night, the circle of faces lit around it
An illustration: a council seated around a fire
A circle of people seated on the ground in a courtyard
The Council Fire, book three
03

Community Resilience

A community that holds together, the way The Council Fire tells it: healing first, because there is no them; leaders recognized rather than campaigned for; the circle meeting, where the elders can stop a thing, the young hold a full vote, and nothing is decided the first time; and the One Question, asked for the great-grandchildren.

The circle, from The Council Fire →
Community ResilienceThe Local Governance ActThe Council Fire, the book

Take a Stone Breath · three minutes, free

Take a Stone Breath.

There is a stream at your feet, and in the stream there are pebbles.

In four, hold four, out six, hold four. One round here, with my own Oak Creek running under it, and the whole practice, the four steps and the count, is free as a printable page. The longer sittings I lead run from The Pocket, three minutes, to The Whole Crossing, most of an hour, and Four Movements for the drive.

The free printableThe full practice lives at Ancestral Peaks →Read free chapters

The people of the books

The people at the heart of every book come from three lineages: Lithuania, Japan and Turtle Island.

And the books travel far, with supporting characters from many lands:

the Swiss Alps · Kyoto and Tokyo · Molokaʻi · the Empty Quarter · Interlaken · the Ruhr · the Andes · the Armenian Highlands · Tibet · Aotearoa · Aboriginal Australia · Kenya · the Scottish Highlands · Thailand

The Lithuanian thread

The songs my Lithuanian family carried across an ocean.

“My grandfather carried himself across a continent to sit with a boy in a sheep camp on the other side of the world.”

Most of Stone Breath happens in the eastern highlands of Lithuania, “a land of deep pine woods, dozens of clear lakes, and villages so small that a stranger’s arrival is still news.” Tonas carries his grandfather’s small book of dainos, the old songs, to Antalieptė on the Šventoji River, where Austėja keeps the heritage center in the old stone mill and her grandmother Ona walks into the forest every morning, because “the trees need to know she’s still here.”

Stone Breath
Austėja; her grandmother Ona, “Singer of dainos”; her daughter Ugnė; Rytis; and Tonas’s Lithuanian grandfather, Vytautas, who “Wrote letters back to Lithuania for fifty years.”
The Council Fire
Ugnė, now the keeper of “The songs; joy as survival,” and her brother Keyah, who “taught the dances the way other men coached football.”
The Far Messengers
Rasa Vaitkutė, “A song keeper from a forest country in the Baltic.”
“In Lithuania, we say the land remembers.”Stone Breath, “The Talka”
Read the Lithuanian thread →Skaityti lietuviškai →Knygnešiai ir dainų saugotojai →
Akmens
kvėpavimasŠirdis žino kelią

Kas išeina, tas niekada neišeina iki galo one who leaves never fully leaves

Photographs, all taken in Lithuania, via Wikimedia Commons: the Šventoji at Mikieriai by Aidas U., and the river and a lake at Antalieptė by VietovesLt (CC BY 3.0); the lakes from Ladakalnis hill by Wojsyl (CC BY-SA 3.0); an old house at Palūšė by Scotch Mist and the sutartinės singers by Bcecilija (CC BY-SA 4.0); Antalieptė by Tired time (public domain); the Stelmužė oak by Anaiptol (CC0). The book’s Antalieptė borrows its name, its slow river and its old watermill from the real village; the village in the story, and everyone in it, is imagined.

The books. The Ancestral Watch.

Three novels so far, and a practice inside each one. Stone Breath is the breath counted above. The Far Messengers is the training. The Council Fire is the circle, and how a people rebuilds.

Stone Breath, book one

Stone Breath

A story of remembering, and the breath counted on a river pebble.

Book one →
 The Far Messengers, book four

The Far Messengers

Seven days at a world congress, and the disciplines the carriers trained.

Book two →
 The Council Fire, book three

The Council Fire

The original instructions for the world we rebuild, with a family on its cover.

Book three →
Cover of Living as a Far Messenger, the Ancestral Watch Executive Reader
The Executive Reader

Living as a Far Messenger

The Oldest Discipline of Mind, Body, and Soul. Seventy illustrated pages: the teaching in one sitting, then eleven write-in worksheets to return to at solstices and birthdays.

Read it in a sitting. Write in it for a year.

About the reader →
The Council FireA film · 76 seconds
All the books →

The Turtle Island thread

Big Mountain, Oak Creek, and the old councils of a whole continent.

“I was raised in a hogan on Big Mountain, learning by lamplight after the chores were done.”

Tonas Yazzie grows up on Big Mountain in the care of his great-grandmother Masan, and makes his home in Sedona, “on a dirt road close to Oak Creek.” In The Council Fire, Nizhoní of the Navajo Nation carries the land and the sun to a council of twelve peoples, and the elders remind the keepers that the councils of this continent were never small exceptions.

Stone Breath
Tonas Yazzie and the family of Big Mountain: Masan, who “Raised Tonas. Ran four hundred sheep. Famous weaver.”; Keh Yazh, “Champion runner.”; Ada; Hastiin, who “herded every day from the time he could walk into his nineties”; Mano Yazzie; and Uncle Kee Bahé.
The Council Fire
Nizhoní, of the “Diné · Navajo Nation,” and her grandmother Shimá Sání, who “was a weaver.” Around the fire, the elders speak of the Haudenosaunee and the Great Law of Peace, and of the gathering the Shoshone hosted in the Great Basin.
The Far Messengers
It opens on the line that carried it: “Keh Yazh → Masan → Ada → Tony → You.”
“What we are remembering was once everywhere.”The Council Fire, “The Ones Who Did Not Ask”
Read the Turtle Island thread →The Council Fire →
HózhóAhéhee’

Hózhó beauty, balance, harmony. A way of walking through the world.

Photographs: the flock going out, the sheep and the dog, three sheep grazing, and the stones of Oak Creek are Tony’s own; Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon via Unsplash (free license). The family in the books, and everyone in it, is imagined.

Go deeper, every week

Ancestral Peaks: the practice, one calm session at a time.

Guided sessions in a calm voice, from two minutes to forty-three. The Eight Weeks path. The Reading Room, with the science of the far messengers. A live Council every month, and something new every Monday and Thursday.

Visit Ancestral Peaks →Hear a free session

Two sessions are free when you leave your name and email. Membership is $12 a month or $79 a year.

The horse, drawn in one line, two eagle feathers in its mane

The magazine · free · a new issue every morning

Abundance Mindset Magazine

Good news chosen as medicine. Something built, healed, opened or won, gathered each morning from Turtle Island, Latin America, Japan, Lithuania, India and Tibet, and set beside my own writing.

Turtle Island · México · Kyōto · Vilnius · India · TibetThis morning's issue
A sun crossing a gold sky over green mountains, an eagle above, and the far messenger running the ridgeThe far messenger runs the ridge · open this morning's issue →
Human Resilience · October 19, 2026A Home Calm Enough to Teach In Human Resilience · October 19, 2026Why I Call the Sheep Camp a Retreat Human Resilience · October 19, 2026Little Piles of Rock Health & Longevity · April 1, 2026The Ancestral Code for Living to 100
Open the whole magazine →

Recent work

Where the work has been lately.

Invited by the Hopi Department of Health and Human Services, 1440 Multiversity, Rancho La Puerta and Prescott College.

People standing at the shore at sunset, a canoe on the water
Hopi · a full day

Building long-term resilience with an ancient culture

Hopi opened its door to this work: the far messengers, the science of the nervous system, and the tools a nation that has kept its covenant took home.

 A garden path under papel picado at Rancho La Puerta
Rancho La Puerta · Abundance Week

One in a trillion

Invited to Abundance Week at Rancho La Puerta to meet Tom Blue Wolf and Pat Mitchell, and the hour under the papel picado that came of it.

 A talk around the fire circle on the lawn at 1440 Multiversity
1440 Multiversity

The course, and a fire in the redwoods

A course built from three traditions and forty years of research, and the first Far Messenger Retreat, around the fire in the redwoods.

 Tony at the podium in his sash, giving the commencement address
Prescott College

Twenty-five years to that podium

The PhD commencement address at Prescott College, and the doctorate underneath it: the science of the far messenger.

 Dusk over the hills of a city
Planning and capital development

From the first plan to the build

For most of this year I have led high-level development work for a community health organization: facility planning, design teams, bids and budgets, carried from the first plan toward the build.

Talks, workshops, and work with communities and companies.

Every program leaves each person with a practice they can run in ten minutes a day and a written 30/60/90 plan for the work they go back to, measured before and again thirty days after.

The same ground, brought into a room: a keynote, a day in the canyon, a season with a team, or a longer piece of work with a community learning to meet, decide and heal together.

1

TalksKeynotes

For your conference, your council or your company.

 2

WorkshopsThe Canyon Within

A day, or several, on the land and in the breath.

 3

For teamsThe Far Messenger Program

A season with a leadership team or a board.

 4

TeachingCourses and the curriculum

Where the far messenger work is taught, and what it holds.

 5

PressInterviews and appearances

Podcasts, talks and print.
Start a conversation →
A council seated in a circle on the lawn

The Journal.

Long reads on healing, long life, honorable trade and the far messengers, with one of my own line drawings on every piece. The rows drift; rest a hand on them and they wait.

The books · the doctorate

What a Far Messenger Is

The ones who carried the medicine, the message and the trade across hard ground, and what it takes to be one now.
Health & longevityThe Ancestral Code for Living to 100
Community ResilienceThe Council Fire Arrives With a Family on Its Cover
Global · one operating systemTibet, and the Unbroken Thread
The storyShizhé'é: A Father's Day Letter to the Man Who Chose Me
Everything in the journal, in one list
The whole journal →The feed

Culture in motion, from many nations.

Dancers, runners, navigators, farmers, councils and markets, and cities and coastlines in the morning fog. The tiles change while you watch. Some are my own photographs, some are the films made for the books, and some are photographs from other hands and other nations.

World photographs from Unsplash, used under its license. The films are the ones made for the books; they are illustrations, not footage.

Listen

Some of it was never meant to be read.

A song, a word before you begin, and a meditation playlist for the mornings you need the frequency changed before the day starts.

Original song · written and performed by Tony

The Warrior's Code

Written for the ones who keep going after the reason to keep going has stopped being obvious. Play it loud, early, before anybody else is awake.

Spoken · about nine minutes

A Word Before You Begin

The short version of everything on this page, said out loud. Useful in a car park before a hard meeting, which is exactly where it was meant to be used.

Go deeper

Ancestral Peaks

The guided sessions, the Eight Weeks, readings from the books and the monthly Council, for members. Two sessions are free when you leave your name and email.

Visit Ancestral Peaks →
The playlist

Meditations for the morning.

A running playlist of guided sits, drum, and long-form quiet, added to as new sessions are recorded.

Open the full playlist →

Free

Take the Stone Breath with you.

The three-minute practice opens on the very next page, the four steps and the count. No list, no waiting.

Your address stays with our team and is never shared or sold. Or write to me directly.

Get in touch

Write to me.

Speaking, consulting, a retreat for your people, or a question about the work. It comes to our team, and we read every one.

Write to me →Press