Where We Once Belonged: Hunter-Gatherer Wisdom for a Modern World

Maybe we need to step back for a moment and learn from the dysfunction we see in the modern world—from the growing sense that something essential has slipped beyond our grasp, and that finding our way forward requires remembering something ancient.

Even as technology accelerates and our comforts multiply, many of us feel increasingly disconnected: from one another, from our own bodies, and from the natural world that sustains us. As we move through our days insulated by screens, schedules, and artificial sunlight, we lose awareness of the subtle rhythms that guided human life for tens of thousands of years.

Still, beneath the noise of daily life, moments of gratitude or flashes of intuition can ground us in a sense of connection. Such moments awaken something old in us—an embodied lineage of wisdom carried across generations. They remind us that humans once lived in continuous relationship with the land, the seasons, the unseen world, and with one another.

We are part of a growing movement rooted in ancestral wisdom and spiritual ecology, seeking to reorient humanity’s relationship with the Earth. From a paradigm of separation and exploitation, we are called to reclaim a sense of kinship, reciprocity, and the sacred.

Long before modern civilization—before temples, doctrines, and written texts—spirituality was not something to merely believe. It was lived. Altered states of consciousness were woven into the everyday fabric of life. Trance, rhythm, breath, dance, sound, and ritual offered regular pathways into expanded states of awareness, where our ancestors dialogued with the cosmos, received guidance, and reaffirmed their place in the great web of life.

This way of being—embodied, attentive, and in unity with the living world—is medicine for our times. Fifty years ago, our founder, the anthropologist Dr. Felicitas Goodman, revived a ritual practice found among ancient cultures worldwide. She dusted it off, restored it, and offered us a well-worn pathway home.

Reflecting on these earliest chapters of humanity’s story, she reminds us:

“In a very real way, the hunters and gatherers open the first chapter of our human history. And fittingly, this dawning was as close to paradise as humans have ever been able to achieve… They live a life of total balance because they do not aspire to control their habitat; they are part of it.”   –  Dr. Felicitas Goodman

We need not idealize the past to retrieve the wisdom embedded within it. But we must ask: What made their experience of a challenging world feel like paradise—and what have we lost in a modern world that has solved so many of those same challenges? What inner capacities can we reclaim to help us work with Nature rather than against Her?

Science now affirms what ancient people knew: ecological harmony is our best path forward. Yet what we often overlook is that such harmony is not merely a strategy—it is a way of consciousness. A way of perceiving the world rooted in attunement, embodied presence, and regular access to expanded awareness. These capacities were once foundational to human existence. What our modern society has left behind, we can still pick up again. It remains within us, calling to us.

The embodied technologies of consciousness that sustained our ancestors—trance, rhythm, ritual, and direct encounter with the sacred—still hold immense power and relevance today. They help us remember who we are, where we belong, and how we might once again live in balance with the living world.