Before the sacred and the profound, let me offer a little medicine that costs nothing and heals everyone: laughter.
An elder once asked, "Why did the corn refuse to talk to the bean? Because it thought the bean was full of hot air." Even in the oldest and most reverent traditions, there is room to laugh. Laughter is a universal remedy — one of the few languages every people on earth already speaks fluently.
Now, to the story.
In the quiet hills of Tecate, Mexico, just across the line from California, sits Rancho La Puerta — a place that has been a sanctuary for weary minds, bodies, and spirits since 1940. Each year the ranch hosts Wisdom Week, gathering healers, thinkers, and travelers from around the world to sit with the questions that matter most: How do we live well? How do we live long? And how do we leave something whole for those who come after us?
This year I had the honor of joining as chair of the board of Red Road Journey, an initiative devoted to carrying ancestral wisdom into the way we live and heal today. The theme could not have found me at a better moment: "Roots of Resilience: Healing Through Tradition and Connection."
Alongside four elders from communities that have kept their traditions alive against long odds, we shared stories, songs, dances, meditations, food knowledge, and sacred ceremony with more than 150 guests. What struck me all week was not how foreign these teachings felt to a modern crowd, but how familiar. Somewhere beneath the surface, every human being remembers this. The remembering is the healing.
The Power of Storytelling and Ceremony
Stories are the bloodstream of a people. They carry the lessons, the values, and the medicine forward when everything else has been taken. This is true not only for the peoples I come from — Diné, Lithuanian, Japanese — but for every family, every village, every nation that has ever tried to hand something good to its children. Each elder brought a different voice, and together they wove one cloth: resilience, gratitude, belonging.
One evening we gathered under the stars around a fire. The elders led the old songs and dances, their voices braiding into the crackle of the flames until you could not tell where one ended and the other began. The energy was a single heartbeat shared by 150 strangers who were no longer strangers. Then guests were invited to speak their own stories — and the vulnerability that opened in that firelight was its own kind of ceremony.
Healing, it turns out, so often begins the moment we feel seen, heard, and held by a circle that will not let us fall. You are not alone. The circle holds. It always has.
Food as Medicine
At Rancho La Puerta, food is not merely fuel — it is medicine. The ranch's farm-to-table philosophy sits comfortably beside a truth that peoples everywhere once knew in their bones: what we eat is a relationship, not a transaction.
The elders shared the old knowledge of traditional foods and their healing properties — the anti-inflammatory gifts of wild herbs, the quiet grounding power of ancestral grains. In a hands-on cooking class, guests learned to prepare traditional dishes from ingredients pulled that morning from the ranch's organic gardens. It was more than a lesson in cooking. It was a remembering of the sacred agreement between the human hand and the living earth — an agreement the modern world has spent a century forgetting, and can spend the next one recovering.
Healing Through Movement and Sound
Wisdom Week was not only spoken; it was practiced. The elders led guided meditations, breathwork, and trauma-healing rooted in traditions older than any nation on a map. These are not artifacts behind museum glass. They are living tools, and they work.
One session moved me beyond words. The elders taught us to use dance and vocal toning to release what the body has been holding — grief, fear, the weight we carry without naming it. I watched people who arrived that morning with heavy hearts leave the room lighter, radiant, unburdened. Between the formal sessions came the quieter medicine: a sunrise walk, a still moment in the gardens, a long conversation over a shared meal. These small human connections are, in the end, the whole of what we call wellness.
The Wisdom We Nearly Threw Away
Here is what a week like this makes plain. Across the world we have spent generations treating the oldest knowledge as something to be outgrown — a charming relic on the road to progress. But the peoples who held that knowledge were answering a question our modern systems still cannot: how do you build a way of life that makes the great-grandchildren whole, rather than hollowing them out?
That question is the thread running through everything I do, and through the books I have written — Stone Breath, By Lamplight, The Council Fire, The Far Messengers. It is the same question facing communities everywhere as the globe shifts under our feet: how do we move from extraction toward ownership, keep the wealth and the wisdom at home, and hand our children something living instead of something spent?
Rancho La Puerta's willingness to build a space for this exchange is a quiet act of vision. By weaving ancestral wisdom into its work, the ranch is not only enriching its guests — it is helping keep alive traditions the world will need far more than it yet knows.
A Legacy of Healing
As Wisdom Week 2025 drew to a close, gratitude filled me — for the elders who gave freely of their wisdom, for the guests who opened their hearts, and for a place devoted to the whole human being. The week reminded me that health and longevity were never only private achievements. They are woven from community, from connection, and from the wisdom of those who walked before us.
If you feel the pull toward your own healing, go and sit in a circle like this one. Honor the old knowledge that still quietly guides us toward a more harmonious way of living. Whatever your roots — and every one of us has them — they are still alive, still feeding you.
It is not too late. The fire is still lit. And the one who tends it next is you.
Red Road Journey is devoted to carrying ancestral wisdom into the way we live and heal today.