The world of neuroscience is a funny one… I laugh when I see popular science articles touting the “newest discovery in trauma healing,” or the radical new research that “unveils astounding insights about what it is to be human,” or Time magazine’s “Mindfulness: The New Science of Health and Happiness.”

Here’s the joke: these discoveries aren’t “new” exactly, instead they represent a shift in mainstream science and psychology to re-incorporate ancient and indigenous understandings of what is it to be human: inherently connected to all life, in a web of belonging.

This, combined with research technologies such as the fMRI, helps empirical science “prove” what we already know in our hearts: that humans thrive in collaboration and connection! Thus, it follows that healing trauma is a process of bringing integration where the psyche has become fragmented and has forgotten our inherent connectedness to all life.

These are the insights that intact indigenous cultures have known for millennia; what mystery schools and various wisdom lineages are pointing to, when they share tools for healing the fragmentation that occurs when humans become separated from our birthright of connectedness and interbeing.