Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / The Feminine Blueprint: Why Ancestral Cultures May Hold the Key to Modern Women’s Health with Mary Ruddick PT 1

Transcript

The Feminine Blueprint: Why Ancestral Cultures May Hold the Key to Modern Women’s Health with Mary Ruddick PT 1 · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  Welcome everyone, I am beyond excited about our next guest.
• 0:07
  She is one of two people that I knew I had to have them on this show.
• 0:13
  So I am beyond excited to be introducing you Mary Ruddick.
• 0:17
  Mary dedicates herself to the study of ancestral diets and traditional health practice.
• 0:23
  She travels extensively.
• 0:25
  She's like a modern day Indiana Jones without pillaging the cultures for their treasures,
• 0:31
  but she immerses herself into indigenous cultures to uncover ancient health practices,
• 0:37
  which she then integrates into her work to help others heal from challenging health conditions.
• 0:42
  Referred to as the Sherlock Holmes of health for her unique ability to assess and remediate
• 0:49
  health conditions, she specializes in metabolic microbiome, immune and nervous system disorders
• 0:56
  with a particular focus on neuromuscular conditions, infertility, and chronic diseases.
• 1:03
  Welcome to everyday ancestral and I am your host James Berry.
• 1:07
  Please enjoy our next guest, Mary Ruddick.
• 1:12
  How would you define a strong woman?
• 1:15
  Because I feel like you exude that and I say historically meaning the last 40 years
• 1:22
  or longer in the US.
• 1:24
  I feel like female strength was defined by male strength, but yet you exude a femininity,
• 1:34
  you exude a strength and an intelligence.
• 1:38
  I feel like in a sense maybe you're redefining what a strong woman is and can be.
• 1:45
  Thank you.
• 1:46
  I think to answer your question, I think a strong woman, it is different than a strong man.
• 1:52
  I think we get our strength from discernment rather than outward power.
• 1:57
  So by what we say no to and what we say yes to, we've really been the last few decades
• 2:03
  kind of conditioned and just culturally in this wave of do everything and accept everything
• 2:09
  and still keep your feminine forgiveness and flexibility.
• 2:14
  Flexibility is a very important part of health period and happiness as well.
• 2:19
  Enjoy.
• 2:20
  But I think it's really discernment because for females it's what we say no to.
• 2:24
  If we say yes to a bad partnership we have a terrible age, right?
• 2:28
  It's what we say no to.
• 2:29
  I love that.
• 2:30
  Isn't it fascinating because really we've been in such a patriarchal society for so long,
• 2:36
  particularly you're in the US, but as you're traveling I even think of other cultures
• 2:41
  as being very patriarchal as well.
• 2:44
  Is that your experience?
• 2:45
  What are the roles that you're finding women are playing in these other cultures and
• 2:50
  how are they defining female strength in these cultures?
• 2:54
  I love this question.
• 2:55
  I'm so glad you're asking this.
• 2:57
  It's so different because we would probably from the outside to find most of the places
• 3:02
  that I go to if not all patriarchal, but it doesn't come with the negative connotations
• 3:07
  that we have and it doesn't come with the negative results either.
• 3:11
  So it's very, very different.
• 3:14
  Females are very discerning.
• 3:16
  They know what they bring and what they want and they get it and they're very calm and
• 3:23
  joyful.
• 3:24
  And as a result, they're kind of like flowers, like even to me, when I come into most of
• 3:28
  the cultures, they immediately are holding my hand and taking me under their wing and
• 3:32
  snuggling and cooling me like I'm a child.
• 3:35
  It's wonderful.
• 3:36
  It feels so nice.
• 3:37
  You would never have that in Boston or in Miami.
• 3:40
  So, right, this just wouldn't have been female male roles, the power dynamic that we've
• 3:45
  defined them as as like this person is controlling or all the negative connotations like abusive
• 3:50
  no.
• 3:51
  And this one is submissive and this and this no.
• 3:55
  It's very different.
• 3:56
  It's almost hard for us to cognitize.
• 3:57
  I would say without seeing it, I luckily had examples of my own family because I'm from
• 4:03
  a family with really good marriages and relationships.
• 4:05
  But the male isn't controlling or in charge.
• 4:09
  He would never see it that way either.
• 4:11
  It's more that they are like yin and yang.
• 4:14
  They're two sides during necessary coin.
• 4:17
  And so, the male has different roles than the female.
• 4:20
  And as the roles are so divided, it's not limiting.
• 4:23
  It's actually, it gives you freedom.
• 4:26
  It gives you the kind of freedom, at least from what I hear from women, they're most are
• 4:31
  searching for, quietly, secretly, while they cry themselves to bed at night over their
• 4:35
  glass of wine.
• 4:36
  Right?
• 4:37
  So, it is, it's really incredible.
• 4:39
  They get to spend time with their family, their children, their sisters, their laughing
• 4:44
  all the time.
• 4:45
  They're dancing all the time.
• 4:46
  They're not restricted.
• 4:47
  Now, where I think things have turned into our culture and where it's going and in other
• 4:53
  places.
• 4:54
  And what we think that we see, when we see, say, a borderline tribal culture, which is
• 4:59
  a hybrid of modernization in the past or, you know, the traditional ways, is that mental
• 5:05
  illness comes in.
• 5:07
  And microbiome imbalance comes in.
• 5:10
  And when those things come in, that's when people get coercive, abusive, manipulative,
• 5:15
  the traditional negative of the male was power and control, the negative of the female
• 5:21
  is manipulation.
• 5:23
  We're seeing both and both aren't good.
• 5:25
  So we get more and more of that as I see more mental illness set in and more overall
• 5:30
  imbalance.
• 5:32
  And I think that could happen even without a big change in diet, like we've seen in
• 5:36
  diet and lifestyle, simply because of female, our hormones, we require very different things
• 5:43
  in the male hormones too.
• 5:44
  We get rewarded by different things.
• 5:45
  We get punished hormonally by different actions.
• 5:49
  And one of the things that makes a female kind of spin out, if we talk about it in a slang
• 5:54
  way instead of a hormonal, but from a hormonal level, what makes a female spin out is not
• 6:00
  having safety.
• 6:01
  And safety is not to be found today.
• 6:04
  It's not found in your own career if you get sick, you have no safety.
• 6:08
  Traditionally, the safety was provided by the whole community to the females and to the
• 6:13
  children.
• 6:14
  And it wasn't just to their marriage, if something happened to the husband, then his family
• 6:19
  took her in.
• 6:20
  She was never abandoned.
• 6:22
  And so this kind of, we can all do it ourselves, has caused a great rift in what we think each
• 6:29
  gender is there for and what they can provide and what they're good at and what they're bad
• 6:33
  at.
• 6:34
  And it's all honestly so skewed from what it's meant to be.
• 6:40
  I was in a press this year.
• 6:41
  I talked about this a bit and I had to bring it into tropical birds because I thought knowing
• 6:46
  the humans I know, who's going to hear me from the level that's not theoretical instead
• 6:51
  of just hormonal.
• 6:52
  And so I was like, well, let's use tropical birds because when we watch nature documentaries,
• 6:57
  we're not judging them for being like that.
• 6:59
  We're not judging the male bird for spending five years building a nest to attract a female
• 7:03
  for 10 seconds.
• 7:04
  You know, like, we're not judging them for that.
• 7:07
  We're not saying it from a theoretical standpoint.
• 7:09
  It's very, very hormonal as to what's going on and it actually is with us too.
• 7:13
  Wow.
• 7:14
  That's a fascinating concept though.
• 7:16
  Like I think about when you, like when I've been in men's groups, for example, one of
• 7:20
  the first things we do is we create a safe container.
• 7:23
  And what I hear you saying in this sense is that one of the dysfunctions that's happening
• 7:27
  societally is that we're not creating a safe container for the society.
• 7:32
  That in many ways, it's like we're focusing so much on maybe personalities, individualities
• 7:37
  and just that we're actually not at first just creating a cultural safe container or a societal
• 7:46
  safe container.
• 7:47
  And I think about this thing when I first met my wife, who's Canadian and I don't think
• 7:52
  she actually feels this way anymore.
• 7:53
  But when I first met her, she said, in Canada, I feel like the country's got my back.
• 7:59
  And I think she was thinking about, you know, from the medical standpoint and just like
• 8:03
  that there's so there's services for them, right?
• 8:06
  And she was like, but in the US, I feel like it's the Wild West.
• 8:09
  Like, I don't feel safe.
• 8:11
  Yes.
• 8:12
  Yeah.
• 8:13
  I would agree having lived in many other countries, it feels very unsafe in America.
• 8:18
  And it's unsafe in funny ways, right?
• 8:21
  We often think of unsafe as like robber or, you know, violence, this kind of thing.
• 8:26
  But actually the human body, what it registers as feeling safe, what it hormonally responds
• 8:31
  to say first threat is so different than what we think, like being inside is a threat
• 8:37
  to the body.
• 8:38
  It pumps out more stress for that than most things we could think of.
• 8:42
  So it can be very subtle things like not eating at the same time every day, not having
• 8:47
  loved ones around constantly to hear and to smell, sleeping alone.
• 8:52
  These kind of things create a great deal of destabilization.
• 8:55
  And when you couple that with our modern health conditions without a safety net of any kind
• 9:02
  of shelter when you're sick or care when you're sick, that means you're very reliant
• 9:07
  on the very few people that you were raised with and that they're mentally stable and healthy
• 9:13
  enough to take care of you as well.
• 9:15
  So it's a very shaky system.
• 9:17
  It really is.
• 9:18
  And for, for females, when they provide for themselves, and I mean shelter, food, care
• 9:23
  for the children.
• 9:24
  Okay.
• 9:25
  And we're talking from a scientific hormonal standpoint, we're not talking from a theoretical.
• 9:30
  The cortisol is very, very high.
• 9:32
  The reward is not there.
• 9:33
  It's a bit of a punishment.
• 9:35
  It can be done.
• 9:36
  We obviously can do it, but it does take a toll.
• 9:39
  And we're seeing that, especially around perimenopausal years, the cortisol has become too
• 9:44
  much of an issue for phase two and three of deliver and we have a lot of penalties for
• 9:49
  that.
• 9:50
  Now, in contrast, when men struggle, of course, there's a cap as well, but when you go and
• 9:56
  you work towards something, someone born a male goes and works towards something, you
• 10:01
  get a huge hormonal reward.
• 10:03
  So it's a very big difference.
• 10:05
  We get rewarded with nurture, you get rewarded with output.
• 10:08
  And so the fact that we're all kind of pretending that we're all the same, it's causing huge
• 10:13
  issues to both genders and both genders are paying the price with dealing with each other
• 10:18
  and with ourselves.
• 10:20
  No one feels too good or too happy.
• 10:22
  I want to back up a little bit, though, because I just, I want to make sure people understand
• 10:26
  a little bit more about your past.
• 10:29
  I learned that you went through your own health challenges.
• 10:32
  I did.
• 10:33
  Can you share a little bit about that?
• 10:34
  Because I find it fascinating that at least what you've articulated in some of the interviews
• 10:40
  I've watched is that the three things that help pull you out initially, because if you
• 10:45
  look at it as stages, but the first stage was gratitude, affirmations and mindfulness.
• 10:51
  And it's like, well, that's not what we usually think about as healing.
• 10:56
  I mean, it's healing qualities, but it's not usually like, well, this is what's going
• 11:00
  to start the process.
• 11:02
  We just need to see it as part of the process.
• 11:05
  Yeah, definitely.
• 11:06
  It was a huge part.
• 11:07
  I was a very healthy kid growing up.
• 11:09
  So I didn't have any of these issues that other people do.
• 11:12
  I was very lucky as far as that goes.
• 11:14
  And I was studying biology in the Bahamas.
• 11:17
  I was at a field station.
• 11:18
  And I got a my co-bacterium infection, which is really hard to kill.
• 11:23
  And we run an island without hospitals or doctors or roads.
• 11:26
  Well, there was one road.
• 11:28
  But my fever of 106 lasted for six days.
• 11:31
  And at the time seemed to permanently damage my nervous system.
• 11:35
  I was disabled and bedbound for the better part of 12 years with horrific neuropathy,
• 11:42
  kidney disease, liver disease.
• 11:43
  I needed a machine for my lungs, basically name it double thyroid disease.
• 11:48
  So the list would be long, but it wasn't curable at the time.
• 11:53
  There hadn't been anyone who had gotten into remission.
• 11:56
  And the kidney aspect was quite significant.
• 12:00
  I lost enormous, enormous weight couldn't lift him a mug for many of those years.
• 12:05
  Like I am now.
• 12:06
  We really got to a point where we kind of gave up on Western medicine, not entirely.
• 12:12
  I still would do my reviews and my lab work, but we realized it wasn't going to get me to where we needed to go.
• 12:18
  And I was also running out of time to be frank.
• 12:20
  And so we started looking at other things.
• 12:22
  And it took five years from that point to get into remission, which was lucky at all to get anywhere.
• 12:28
  But the things that I brought in first were things that I could control.
• 12:32
  And one of the natures of what I had was just exquisite pain.
• 12:36
  Like I could have never anticipated or imagined before this happened.
• 12:41
  That really was not touched by any medication.
• 12:43
  So I didn't have any escape from the pain.
• 12:46
  It was 24-7.
• 12:47
  And so as you can imagine, your mindset is even if you go in with the best of mindset,
• 12:54
  you're not exactly thinking about the flowers, you know, when you're dealing with that much pain.
• 12:59
  So I started working on that because that was something I could shift.
• 13:03
  And really focusing on right now, I started to realize that if I could just take the pain in 10 seconds, I could handle it.
• 13:10
  It was the idea of handling it for 10 minutes or an hour or a day or a week that was so overwhelming.
• 13:17
  And so if I brought it down to just these 10 seconds, and then that led to practicing a great deal of gratitude and shifting the focus,
• 13:24
  never lying to myself or gaslighting myself,
• 13:27
  but shifting the focus from what was truly terrible to what was also true.
• 13:33
  That was something neutral or beautiful at the same time.
• 13:37
  And that really helped my nervous system calm and relax.
• 13:40
  And it also honestly was a great gift to myself because it was like taking a vacation from the illness.
• 13:47
  And so I started to cultivate that more and more and more and more,
• 13:51
  which led to really the space in which I think is so required to heal.
• 13:56
  Because as Carolyn Mees says, it's so well, you could be doing nothing,
• 14:00
  but green juice or nothing but carnivore.
• 14:02
  But if you're eating that with stress and anger and frustration and in gratitude,
• 14:08
  the cells aren't going to regenerate in the right way.
• 14:10
  There's too much cortisol pumping.
• 14:12
  We don't regenerate that cell with all that cortisol pumping.
• 14:15
  And cortisol is our friend.
• 14:16
  We need it. It's just not all the time.
• 14:20
  So this part of your journey was before you started going into the other countries
• 14:25
  and exploring other cultures, correct?
• 14:28
  It was. Yeah, I was always a traveler.
• 14:29
  And I'm from a family that slipped internationally quite a bit.
• 14:32
  So my dad grew up mostly in Egypt.
• 14:34
  But yeah, I was only 18 when it happened.
• 14:37
  So I hadn't done it a lot on my own.
• 14:39
  I have to wonder that process that journey is really painted your experience
• 14:47
  as you enter these other cultures, you know, the humbleness, the mindfulness,
• 14:51
  the kind of separation of ego that probably came through that process.
• 14:56
  Because one of the kind of, I feel like one of the white elephants in the room,
• 15:01
  at least from how people might perceive you from outside without knowing you,
• 15:06
  is that here you are this beautiful tall, I don't know your full nationality,
• 15:10
  but let's just say white woman, right?
• 15:12
  That is going into these cultures.
• 15:14
  So here comes, and once again, the white savior to, you know,
• 15:18
  research and explore these cultures.
• 15:21
  Do you ever get that kind of energy from people?
• 15:23
  Very rarely, but usually it'll happen from someone online that hasn't,
• 15:27
  it doesn't know anything about my work, just sees a photo or something.
• 15:31
  Yeah.
• 15:32
  What's your experience though, particularly initially, when you first started this,
• 15:37
  this journey in terms of how you were received?
• 15:42
  Well, received with the tribes or received back home.
• 15:46
  Initially with the tribes, but if it's different from back home, I'd love to hear that too.
• 15:50
  Just incredible love anywhere I go.
• 15:53
  I travel differently, so I was well aware of the injustice done to most of the tribal cultures
• 16:00
  from the medical community and many of the religious communities as well.
• 16:05
  And so I never went in with an idea of me getting something out of it.
• 16:10
  I really went out of curiosity and still do.
• 16:13
  So I didn't go to learn and I didn't go to teach.
• 16:17
  I just went to befriend. That was it.
• 16:20
  And I think that was maybe one of the reasons why I've been able to go into so many communities
• 16:26
  and especially so many that are untrusting.
• 16:29
  The other reason is that, at least from what I've seen, now, you know, for many years now,
• 16:34
  gosh, about eight years now, people have been asking me to take them or film crews,
• 16:37
  these kind of things. And it's interesting when I lead these groups.
• 16:41
  I'm really picky about them and when we go and how long.
• 16:45
  But we have so many time constraints in our culture.
• 16:48
  And the way that we view time and calendars is quite bipolar to the way that the tribes do.
• 16:54
  And so it doesn't fit.
• 16:56
  So many people will come in if they go, they want to stay for like two days, not very long.
• 17:01
  And they want to dip in, dip out and make kind of wide reaching assumptions.
• 17:07
  I see this a lot.
• 17:08
  And that's not how anything works in these cultures.
• 17:11
  These cultures are very much more like when we're sick, actually.
• 17:15
  It's more meditative.
• 17:17
  You go more based on serendipity and on intuition.
• 17:23
  So for instance, if I'm in the Arctic and I'm in a far away hunting village,
• 17:29
  let's say like eight dogs led days away.
• 17:32
  One of my friends or guides may say,
• 17:34
  yeah, I'll take you by dog said tomorrow to get back to the original town.
• 17:38
  We'll head back so that you can catch your plane.
• 17:41
  The plane only comes every two weeks if the weather is cooperating, right?
• 17:45
  During the season and more often than not,
• 17:48
  they'll say yes.
• 17:48
  And then the next day, there's no way you're going because they just won't feel like it.
• 17:53
  And that may mean that they're intuiting that the weather is about to change or this or that.
• 17:58
  But they go far more on what they feel than what they said.
• 18:03
  And that is being authentic in their culture and admirable and honorable.
• 18:08
  So it's a very different system that requires enormous amounts of time to get to know someone
• 18:14
  or people and most people from our cultures do not have the time that I've had
• 18:19
  to go and spend and build those relationships because
• 18:24
  especially with the truly ancestral communities that I've been to,
• 18:27
  they simply don't need anything.
• 18:29
  There's nothing you can trade with them that they're going to care about.
• 18:33
  So you can't buy your way in.
• 18:35
  You get to know them by the generosity of friendship.
• 18:41
  That's how you get to know them.
• 18:42
  And that takes a lot of time.
• 18:44
  So yeah, so that's very different.
• 18:46
  As far as being received back home, usually people are really curious about it.
• 18:50
  I think everyone's wanted me to cut off the footage for ages, but you know, time.
• 18:55
  Yeah, and by and large, really good.
• 18:57
  Every once in a while, a photo will go around of me and someone will make an off comments
• 19:02
  about like, here's that, you know, white woman posing and a photo or something.
• 19:07
  But honestly, it's pretty understandable because I would say that most of the
• 19:11
  trips to those to many of these regions have been for personal gain and that kind of thing.
• 19:16
  You know, I've really went and still do go not to go study subjects, but to see what's different.
• 19:24
  I think this world is pretty magical.
• 19:26
  I think there's so much more to it than we can see with our eye.
• 19:30
  I've really seen with these cultures that they cultivate another sense, like an intuitive sense,
• 19:37
  that I think we all have access to, only they honor it a bit more, right?
• 19:41
  We're always kind of stifling ours down.
• 19:44
  And it's something that can be cultivated and it's really exquisitely beautiful.
• 19:49
  I love to go and spend time because it reminds me of those beautiful last years of illness,
• 19:54
  where you just hear the birds and you see the light in the dust and it's lovely.
• 20:01
  How do you decide where to go?
• 20:04
  Kind of coupled with that question.
• 20:06
  It's like, how do you even initiate it?
• 20:09
  You're deciding, okay, I want to go here, but then how do you then outreach and actually connect
• 20:15
  with people to make it happen?
• 20:17
  A lot of it is serendipity, honestly.
• 20:20
  So there have been times where I've had plans where I want to go to this culture or that culture,
• 20:24
  and I'll make plans and I'll go.
• 20:26
  But with those where I like outwardly decide, very pointedly,
• 20:31
  I'll usually go to a neighboring town about as close as you can get with a moderate,
• 20:36
  like a mix of civilization, a mix of modernity.
• 20:40
  And I'll just wait and I'll meet people and eventually, usually,
• 20:44
  someone grew up in that region where I want to go and they'll bring me back as a friend.
• 20:48
  And so that's usually how I go in.
• 20:50
  That also gives me a bit of time to learn the language as well, which is pretty important.
• 20:54
  So that's usually how I go about it.
• 20:56
  Sometimes I get invited, like I was invited by the CME.
• 20:59
  Sometimes, honestly, more often than not, is serendipity.
• 21:04
  So while it started with going with some of the,
• 21:06
  going to some of the carnivore tribes that I had read about
• 21:09
  in medical and anthropological journals when I was sick,
• 21:13
  then you catch wind with all these other groups.
• 21:15
  And while many times we talk about, at least in the podcast and book sphere,
• 21:21
  we kind of hear of the same cultures over and over,
• 21:23
  but there's so many that are really not heard about because they're tiny.
• 21:29
  So I'll catch wind of of those and usually not always,
• 21:34
  but I'll try to find ones that aren't written or spoken of much
• 21:38
  because that usually indicates not always I have been let down,
• 21:41
  but that usually indicates more ancestral living and less, less modernity.
• 21:48
  Is ancestral living the curiosity, you know, the around ancestral living?
• 21:53
  Is that the driver or?
• 21:55
  Yeah, I'll tell you.
• 21:56
  And I know this isn't a good answer, but it is the honest one.
• 21:59
  Really, since going through the illness,
• 22:01
  I don't really have these outward goals or output driven desires.
• 22:06
  And I don't know why that snapped off of my body and hasn't come back,
• 22:10
  but I really don't go for any individual purpose.
• 22:14
  I kind of just follow these open doors and they keep happening and they've been really beautiful.
• 22:19
  So I enjoy the experience.
• 22:21
  It's like living out my wildest fantasies as a kid,
• 22:24
  watching things like Indiana Jones and seeing these temples and these jungles
• 22:29
  with exotic animals.
• 22:30
  It's amazing.
• 22:31
  So I love that, but I also, I really love seeing the different diets and lifestyles
• 22:38
  and how it's not rigid.
• 22:40
  I think a lot in the health sphere,
• 22:42
  people are kind of hammer and nail like everyone should do what I did
• 22:45
  because this healed me.
• 22:46
  And there's a place for that and that's very understandable,
• 22:48
  but humans across time are kind of a unique animal
• 22:52
  and that we have eaten different diets from each other.
• 22:55
  I don't really see that with many other animals,
• 22:58
  but we do that and we can do that and be in perfect health.
• 23:02
  So one of the things I was curious about was if people were still healthy enough
• 23:07
  in these regions to still display that and to show that.
• 23:10
  And that was just a very quick yes that is on the first year of traveling.
• 23:14
  But yeah, I would say more than anything else, it's affirming.
• 23:18
  It's very life affirming to see how humans can live in such harsh conditions.
• 23:22
  What we would consider harsh, right?
• 23:24
  If I dropped you in the Arctic or in the Amazon,
• 23:26
  we'd be very lucky to survive.
• 23:28
  It would be unrealistic too.
• 23:30
  And yet they're thriving and they're healthier than we are.
• 23:32
  They're more joyful than we are.
• 23:33
  They sleep better.
• 23:34
  They live longer like they kind of have our utopia.
• 23:37
  And I think that speaks so much for the human spirit.
• 23:40
  And it opens doors rather than shuts them in terms of possibility.
• 23:45
  I love how you said they open doors in your innocence,
• 23:48
  following your own intuition and kind of spirit to where to go.
• 23:53
  But I guess the inevitable question that you probably get asked all the time,
• 23:57
  and it would be idiotic for me not to ask this,
• 23:59
  which is through all these travels, is there any theme?
• 24:04
  Is there any kind of like, oh, these are very specific human traits
• 24:10
  or very specific nutritional practices that I believe I should pull from each one of these?
• 24:15
  And have you compiled like that top three list of like, okay,
• 24:19
  here's the top three things that I think we really,
• 24:22
  we're missing here in the U.S.
• 24:23
  Like because when we experience things out in life,
• 24:27
  I think a lot of times inadvertently the motivation is,
• 24:31
  well, how do I connect with that?
• 24:32
  We go outside ourselves and then we bring it inward.
• 24:35
  And sometimes it's inward to outward, right?
• 24:37
  But there's a constant ebb and flow of that.
• 24:40
  So I have to wonder how are all these experiences getting boiled down inwardly for you
• 24:47
  and then how you now practice life?
• 24:50
  I would say that I had incorporated most of the things that I found before going to these cultures
• 24:55
  and that it was in that incorporation and that was just lucky that that matched up.
• 25:00
  But it was in that incorporation that I got into remission.
• 25:03
  Things that I think we're missing the most, there's really four of them.
• 25:06
  So like if you imagine sitting in a chair, you need four legs.
• 25:09
  And if you're missing one, you fall.
• 25:11
  It doesn't matter which one.
• 25:12
  I think they're all equally important.
• 25:14
  And there may be more.
• 25:16
  One is of course diet and we can go into the nuances of that.
• 25:19
  So even though there's differences, there's a lot in common.
• 25:22
  Another is lifestyle being in the sun a lot, even if it's a cloudy place.
• 25:27
  Being outside, touching dirt, snuggling constantly with humans, never being alone,
• 25:33
  eating with your hands, there's a number of things.
• 25:36
  Mindset is another and all the cultures I've been to and especially the ones in the harshest
• 25:41
  climates, you start cultivating character and the characters of virtue from infancy with your
• 25:48
  children. And so that's that's a really big piece of I think we're lacking.
• 25:53
  We don't cultivate resilience unless we figure out how to do it on our own.
• 25:56
  Our culture doesn't help us with that.
• 26:00
  And then the most important I think that we're lacking is community, honestly.
• 26:04
  Community is everything in these cultures.
• 26:07
  And to be honest, we need a lot of community for very biological things.
• 26:13
  Some of the things that are perhaps we could easily be judged for as really bad are also very
• 26:19
  necessary. Humans, we don't produce some of our reward chemicals like oxytocin without
• 26:26
  another, without our tribe and their tribe.
• 26:29
  And so we often talk about oxytocin as the love chemical between couples and parents and
• 26:35
  children, but it's also actually a communal hormone very much so.
• 26:39
  And so the more tribes see themselves as different or communities see themselves as different,
• 26:43
  the more oxytocin is actually produced and the more reward.
• 26:47
  And as we've kind of all become one gender, one culture, one everything,
• 26:53
  we're losing a lot of that which leads to a lot of depression and just panic, right?
• 26:59
  Yeah, we don't have to define it. It could just be social upset.
• 27:02
  But also the community is where we forget about ourselves and I think that we're really missing
• 27:10
  that. If I get someone in my office who's depressed, if they're physically able to,
• 27:15
  one of the first things I'm going to assign, aside from diet and some of the lifestyle things,
• 27:20
  is to start taking care of someone else. Because when we take care of someone else,
• 27:24
  we forget about our own troubles and that's incredibly important for sanity,
• 27:28
  incredibly. And so as we become more of an isolationist, more of everyone lives in their own
• 27:33
  house, everyone's separate, no one's problems or your problems, we're falling apart as an animal
• 27:40
  and as a culture. Two of those pillars that you talked about, I would love to dive in a little
• 27:47
  deeper with them because they're kind of hot topics and particularly as a father, one of them
• 27:52
  particularly is like when you mentioned, I'm like, oh, well, what's the secret?
• 27:56
  You know, and it's a rude sound. So how do you teach kids to be resilient?
• 28:02
  Because you mentioned that they are getting this from the minute they're born. So what is it
• 28:06
  they're getting? Because as a parent, I would love to make sure that I'm instilling those characteristics
• 28:13
  into my child. They're getting challenges with a lot of love and age-appropriate challenges.
• 28:19
  So what the child comes out with, they're very hard challenges, they're not easy,
• 28:23
  but what the child comes out with is a true sense of confidence. Confidence doesn't come from
• 28:28
  us believing that we're capable. It comes from evidence of us being capable. And so what I see a
• 28:34
  lot is a lot of coddling in our cultures and then also the opposite, sending them out to the wolves
• 28:41
  without being prepared. Where I was raised, unless you had good parents, you were not taught how to
• 28:48
  budget. You weren't taught about the wolves of the world. It was very sheltered, honestly.
• 28:54
  And so you don't have your basic life skills. What these folks do, and it's different in each
• 28:58
  culture that I go to, they do things that we would get put in jail for. But the kids don't get harmed.
• 29:05
  So for instance, in some of the cold, wintery, snowy Asian cultures I've been to, you put
• 29:12
  children out in the cold to see if they're going to freeze. Because they're only allowed to come if
• 29:16
  they don't to be a part of the culture. And in some of the Latin American and South American
• 29:22
  cultures, you take children into the extreme sonnest that will break an adult, right? And the
• 29:29
  children are there. Now the adults are there to intervene if something happens, but I've never
• 29:33
  seen them have to intervene. What happens instead is the child becomes so proud of themselves
• 29:39
  for facing something so incredibly difficult. And although they may feel like they're doing it
• 29:45
  on their own, I can't say what they're feeling, but their whole community is outside cheering for
• 29:51
  them silently. And then they cheer non silently very loudly when the child succeeds. The child is
• 29:59
  constantly tested and then taught that it can do the thing it thought it absolutely could not on
• 30:05
  its deepest core. And then the entire community recognizes that accomplishment. And what you get
• 30:11
  from that is a true sense of confidence to go in the world and around the world with because
• 30:17
  you never know what's going to cross your path. You never know the travesties that are going to
• 30:22
  bestow you. But if you know that you can get through hard things and that you've gotten through
• 30:27
  impossible things that you couldn't before, you don't lose your mind in that process. You stay
• 30:32
  solid. Oh my gosh, you're giving me chills. I love this. I'm really understanding what you're
• 30:38
  talking about when you say like how important community is and how we're not valuing that as
• 30:44
  much in American society. I would say it all. I don't think we value it at all. And I think it's
• 30:50
  because we haven't felt the full effects of it yet of losing it. I'm sure many of your listeners
• 30:54
  will remember I grew up on like a leave it to be for street. And so you know, all of the neighbors,
• 31:00
  we knew all of each other we would run in and out of all the children's houses and it was like
• 31:04
  all the moms were ours. You know, and there's a different level of community when you've got something
• 31:09
  like that to where you don't even know here in labor is unless there's a power outage. It's
• 31:13
  totally totally different. And I think I'm really seeing a real mix of kids getting utterly thrown
• 31:20
  to the wolves and adults too. I hear when I'm walking about, I walk a lot. So when I'm walking
• 31:26
  about in cities or if I'm in a restaurant, I hear people talking about some of the things they're
• 31:30
  going through and how their family or friends respond very often, a common response that I hear
• 31:35
  in the States. If someone is going through something very hard and they share it with someone else,
• 31:40
  the other person will say, that's not my responsibility to deal with. It's not empathy. It's not,
• 31:47
  oh my gosh, that must be so hard. How can I help? It's, well, that's not my responsibility.
• 31:55
  It's very cold. And so a lot of people are getting sent into this world, like we'll figure it out,
• 32:00
  and that is not a way to get confidence. That is a way to disintegrate, honestly, as an individual
• 32:07
  and as a culture. Do you think, in a sense, and really when we're talking about when we're looking at
• 32:13
  some of these cultures, I think we can then jump to maybe this is an ancestral concept, right?
• 32:19
  Which is, do you think there is an or was a more sense of ownership of, and I don't mean like,
• 32:25
  oh, slavery ownership, obviously. I'm talking about ownership of terms of like, hey, we,
• 32:30
  we are a humanity here. We are all human and we need to take care of each other.
• 32:36
  Yeah, a thousand percent. To such an extreme level, like if you take Mongolia,
• 32:41
  nomadic culture, when you come across a girl or a yurt or a tent home, whenever the family leaves,
• 32:49
  they may be coming back in four months, when they leave, they leave the house fully stocked as if
• 32:54
  their best friend is coming, so that if someone comes along the way and doesn't have food or shelter,
• 32:59
  they can use their home. Total stranger, they'll never even meet that person or that family.
• 33:05
  It's bringing tears in my eyes. That's so beautiful. Yes, it's explicitly beautiful.
• 33:11
  But I feel like it's bringing tears in my eyes precisely because of what you're saying,
• 33:15
  which is I don't typically feel that way. On a certain level, I'm like, this feels like the human
• 33:22
  experience, like this is what we're missing. It is. And so I'm feeling both like, oh my god,
• 33:26
  what a beautiful gesture, what a beautiful way to exist, coexist, and I'm also feeling the space
• 33:34
  that, oh my gosh, yeah, I don't feel, I never feel that way. I think that's actually more of our
• 33:39
  birthright to feel that way. It's a it's a normal feeling day in and day out when I'm with these
• 33:45
  communities. It's a normal feeling, I would say, for most to have to go through herculean effort
• 33:50
  to heal, not in the first years, but having seen so many people's journey. I think that happens a
• 33:56
  lot. I think it's what we have access to, but we don't really know how to get to it because we're
• 34:03
  not really raised with that. So, you know, in so many traditions, there's this mythology of
• 34:09
  the homeless person sitting on a box. Have you heard about this one? And they're begging every day,
• 34:15
  and one day someone asks the homeless person, you know, what's in your box? They're like, oh,
• 34:21
  nothing. I've been sitting on it for 30 years, you know, and they open it up and it's full of gold.
• 34:26
  And I think it's such a good a good metaphor for the reality of our life because at any given
• 34:35
  moment, we can truly be in a very real, very horrific, present day hell, a true one. And we also
• 34:45
  have the key within us to transform that. And I think the ticket is learning how to use that key
• 34:51
  and where that lock goes. And these cultures are very good at teaching that. And we have failed.
• 34:57
  We have failed ourselves, our children, everyone. Yes.
• 35:01
  Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode of Mary Reddick. Part two, we cover some really cool stuff,
• 35:08
  y'all. So we explore how early life shapes are microbiome and mental health. And the big one,
• 35:15
  why community is medicine. Oh, I can't wait to hear what she has to say about this.
• 35:20
  And what we can all do to reclaim ancestral wisdom in daily life.
• 35:25
  Hey, if this episode sparked something for you, be sure to subscribe and share it with someone
• 35:30
  who needs to hear it. Let us know your thoughts in a review. It really helps. Catch you in part two.
• 35:40
  Thank you so much for joining me on everyday ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode,
• 35:46
  hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You could find the show notes, links,
• 35:50
  and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's EATPLUCK.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd
• 36:02
  get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.