Category Archives: Indigenous science

Honouring our Rage

August 10, 2025decolonising, healing, Indigenous science, Relationships, Spiritual Skills, valuesanger, death, decay, emotion, flow, hate, hatred, healing, identity, indigenous, love, mental-health, passion, power, rage, rebirth, relationships, responsibility, spirit, spiritualityValerie Ringland

Blog by Valerie

Rage matters. It’s a passionate, spirited emotion. Spirit keeps our inner fires burning and helps us feel alive. We need healthy spirits! I remember spiritual teacher Tom Lake, an Anglo-Celtic medicine man sharing that to try to get rid of one’s anger is to dis-spirit oneself. What we do with that energy makes a difference to our fulfilment, our personal power, and to the people and world around us.

Unfortunately social and political power are often not encouraging of us being our best selves. But we still have to live with who we are being and what we do.

I have noticed a pattern to the hateful messages I receive from other politically Indigenous folks. The person states their cultural affiliation (usually Aboriginal Australian, sometimes Native American), then attacks mine. The comments are about one of my online offerings, but are directed to an unknown reader using othering language. They open with language like “I’m really interested how she can claim…” while expressing no interest in dialogue. Most comments occur on weekend evenings from males. It’s clear the person didn’t read more than a paragraph or two about me and my life’s work.

I feel the person’s rage and see it as a cry for help. I send compassion, care, and a boundary of not engaging directly so as to avoid fueling flames of further divisiveness and violence.

We all get overwhelmed and are unsure how to direct our rage at times. I get that. For all of us who care about Lore and Law, who feel connected with Mother Earth and the ecosystems where we live, there is a lot to be angry about right now. Much about the way we are collectively living feels wrong, yet as individuals we can feel limited power what we can do differently.

Here are some ways that I find constructive to honour rage in the short term:

Primal screams (you might like to add chest beating) and foot stomping;
Big sobbing, raging grief (where you really let go and have a big physical cry);
Physical movement (running or wild dancing are good options); and/or
Musical, artistic or other creative expression (banging drums often helps).

In the medium and long term, I find these helpful:

Practicing unconditional love and acceptance (especially with oneself and with people who have very different values and worldviews);
Reflecting how to more fully live your core values and ways to practice compassion when you can’t (maybe you do some activism or make a small lifestyle change);
Spending time connecting with landforms, animals and plants and attuning to indigenous science messages; and/or
Setting and honouring boundaries to uphold important Lore and Law (like treating yourself and others with respect and dignity).

When I think about people behaving in ways that I fundamentally disagree with and find inherently destructive, it helps me to remember the cycles of the Earth: birth, life, death, and rebirth. Destructive energy leads to death and decay, and following that is an opportunity for rebirth. Death and decay is uncomfortable to be with, but it’s s purposeful part of our life cycle. Deaths of collective dreams and ways of being can feel very big at times, yet reach unexpected tipping points. I find solace in the quotes below, and maybe you will resonate with them also.

Let’s express our deepest passions and rage wisely to keep that energy flowing! Let’s allow toxic divisiveness and existential supremacy to die and decay, making more space for interconnectivity and beautiful rebirths to emerge.

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Darkness

May 18, 2025decolonising, healing, Indigenous science, relationships, spiritual skills, valuesancestral healing, compassion, cosmology, darkness, denial, exercise, friendship, identity, jealousy, judgment, life, love, mental-health, metaphor, pure, relationships, trick, unconditional loveValerie Ringland

Blog by Valerie

“Darkness is the purest form of light” is a teaching I deeply honour from Tiwa Elder Joseph Rael – Beautiful Painted Arrow. He says this because out of darkness all colours and possibilities emerge, whereas white light reflects and pushes all colours away. Darkness is a metaphor of the sacred womb where we all begin our lives in our mother’s bodies. And darkness envelops us each night (if we allow it). Within the womb of darkness is the potentiality for anything to be (re)born.

I heard an interview with Gina Chick recently in which she said that she spends most of her time in uncomfortable spaces. That is also my experience of living in a way where I honour darkness, and it aligns with the explanation of the Red Road discussed in a previous post, where we focus the majority of our energy on honouring ancestors, living our core values, and grounding respectfully where we are. (Image: metaphor of a plant that spends most of its energy building strong roots and connecting with other plants underground, and less energy flowering or fruiting above the ground)

I’ve found that when we are committed to a holistic spiritual path of allowing all feelings and thoughts to flow without existential judgment, when others we are in relationship with do not do this too, seeds of destructive energy grow bigger between us, along with pain, judgment, insecurity, and crazy-making cognitive dissonances. If both are willing to confront the resulting mess, come together to listen to each other and take responsibility for choices, behaviours, and resulting impacts (whether intended or not), then the relationship and trust between them can repair and deepen. Unconditional love means no existential judgment.

If one or both do not do this, then the relationship transforms into one with less trust, safety and intimacy, and it can even fracture beyond repair. And broken trust, as most of us have experienced, tends to be harder to rebuild than it is to grow trust and intimacy in the first place.

In a recent blog I shared that I have witnessed numerous people work for years towards something, then turn their backs at a pivotal moment in abandonment and destruction. Some stories and beliefs seem so deep they trick us into crazy-making cognitive dissonances that become hard to contain. Cognitive dissonance is when we feel split by words and stories not aligning with behaviours and actions. For example, if we believe we are a good friend and that means we don’t feel jealous of friends’ successes, yet we do feel jealous when a friend gets a new job and we feel stuck in job rut, then we might push those feelings aside and pretend they’re not there. (Image: let’s feel it all so the negative feelings ground and we grow from them rather than growing into piles of sh*t in our lives!)

This becomes even more crazy-making when we layer denial on top. If the friend who got the new job is like me, she can feel this jealousy rising and wants to avoid it destroying the relationship. Maybe she practices giving compassion and grace while hoping that her friend processes the hard feelings, and hopefully she processes some of her own hard feelings such as disappointment that her friend couldn’t celebrate her new opportunity with her. If time passes and the hard feelings persist, she might ask her friend to talk so as to clear the air between them. If the jealous friend is too scared, ashamed, unaware or in denial about her hard feelings to be able to take responsibility and process them and instead tells the friend with the new job that she’s crazy, she is happy for her and doesn’t have any jealousy, that becomes crazy-making for both of them.

Crazy-making takes a lot of energy to carry. It spirals us out of our hearts and bodies, creating separation from our truth. We lose integrity and the ability to experience wholeness when we are trying to be two people at once. In the previous example, the jealous friend trying to be ‘a good friend’ isn’t allowing herself to be authentic and a messy human who can both feel happy for her friend and a bit jealous as well. That’s actually making her less of a good friend and growing the seed of jealousy even bigger, creating more destruction in the relationship. To me, the best thing that could happen is that the jealous friend lets go of her judgmental story about identifying and behaving as a ‘good friend’ so as to create an opening for the two of them to have a real and sustainable friendship capable of withstanding pain and hard emotions. (Image)

Exercise: What stories do you tell yourself that limit your openness to darkness? You may wish to close your eyes and meditate on the question: ‘What do I believe about the nature of darkness?‘

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Futuresteading podcast

March 4, 2025Decolonising, healing, Indigenous scienceancestral healing, book, cosmology, Earth Ethos, identity, indigenous, media, newspaper, philosophy, podcast, relationshipsValerie Ringland

If you would like to listen to an interview with Valerie about the inspiration behind the Healing through Indigenous Wisdom book, here is the link. =)

There’s also a short article about both Lukas & Valerie on p. 26 of our local paper The Triangle, with three corrections: Lukas was born in Sydney, Valerie was born in Ohio, and William Ringland is buried in Bermagui.

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Spiritual Secret Sauce

March 3, 2025healing, Indigenous science, spiritual skills, valuesaddiction, altar work, ayahusasca, core values, daily practice, faith, healing, humour, intensity, meditation, mental-health, nervous system, patience, persistence, practice, spirituality, time, trust, values, vipassanaValerie Ringland

Blog by Valerie

Over the years I have observed a number of spiritual seekers looking for a ‘secret sauce’ solution to their lives – some kind of trick or program that, if they followed it, would lessen their pain and make their lives look more like what they have in mind. I have numerous times had the experience of being ‘tried on’, sometimes for a few months, sometimes even for years. But when one is looking for a secret sauce, spiritual practices from any tradition will inevitably disappoint. Yes, some ceremonies or practices may resonate so deeply, even profoundly altering our life direction with deep healing in a moment or over a short period of time. But if we continue to seek ‘pow’ experiences, we will end up chasing the dragon on a hopeless, addictive journey.

An important spiritual ‘pow’ I experienced when I was trying to move through suppressed childhood trauma that had come up in my late 20s. I did four ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon, followed by a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat in Chile (without warm enough clothing!); I felt for weeks afterwards as if my brain had been shaken like a snow globe. I had done that on purpose to move the trauma through my life over years instead of decades. I remember sitting in a hotel room in Peru and painting pictures, then ripping them up and reassembling the pieces to reflect myself. Life was very intense for more than seven years as a result of the pace at which I chose to ride that wave of energy, and miraculously Lukas rode through it with me, often saying he felt like he was barely holding on. I am glad to have moved through much of that trauma. My most recent spiritual ‘pow’ experience was the birth of my daughter. She turns three this year, and I feel like my nervous system is calming down from what the birth brought up.

Last year someone who tried me on started working through my book, and after three weeks said to me they were done doing spiritual work because they weren’t seeing enough changes in their life. I was pretty stunned that this person was expecting such a short ‘pow’ turnaround in their life with so little effort. When I was very unwell in my 20s and finally found a naturopath who diagnosed the pathogenic bacteria in my gut, I remember her saying that with three years of drastic diet limitations and careful, targeted supplements I could expect to feel better. That sounded good to me as I considered how many years had led to my system becoming so sick. And it turned out to be true. (Image from an art installation in Sydney in 2020; sorry I don’t remember the artist!)

These days I like to think about how long it takes a plant to establish its roots underground, all the nourishment required to even make it to the surface, and then the years of growth and renewal and moving through disease. I told that person that some seeds I had planted in my life over a decade ago were only starting to bear fruit for me now, and that I had been doing some of the same daily spiritual practices such as altar work and seasonal ceremonies for longer than that. Unfortunately, that person has become very dis-spirited, and I hope they find a way out of the dark hole they’re in. (Another photo I took at Angkor Wat years ago of an amazingly resilient tree)

It seems to me that a real spiritual ‘secret sauce’ is made up of persistence, patience, a daily practice, trust and faith in something(s) bigger than ourselves who care to help, commitment to core values that are worth living and dying for, grit and determination to stay the course, and a sense of humour.