HEAL.ENCHANT.REVOLT. is a podcast, newsletter, and blog where we think critically about health and healing in this age of social, political, and ecological upheaval. Rooted in the histories, paradigms, and practices of radical herbal and healing traditions around the world, we examine how modern conceptions of the body and “nature” have come to support oppressive political regimes and authoritarian ideologies. In our discussions, we articulate a collective resistance to exploitative health narratives, theorize about the (re)emergence of liberatory holistic health movements, and uplift the voices of healers and communities who are already doing the work of creating livable, ecocentric, regenerative societies.
Over the last several years, my work and research has focused on bringing enchanted political consciousness to wellness- and earth-concerned communities.
The format of this podcast will be two-fold: solo audio-essays containing my research (also published on this website as blog articles), and recorded conversations with other radical herbalists and healers. Topics may include: the spiritual-politics of health and healing, multi-species solidarity in global struggles for liberation, resisting systems of oppression, visioning (and making real) more livable worlds, and more.
These conversations are needed now more than ever as 21st century fascism is on the rise in the United States, Europe, its settlements, and post-colonial states. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, in no uncertain terms, how the wellness industry’s narratives about health, the body, beauty, and society can be easily misdirected to serve oppressive agendas. The rest of the former-counterculture (that motley social movement which has dispersed from the hippy counterculture of the 1960s and which now includes psychedelic communities, the wellness industry, certain holistic health practices, the New Age, Wiccans and some types of neopagans, yoga practitioners in the Global North, Occult practitioners, various other alternative spiritual movements, and so on) is also vulnerable to this manipulation.
If you circulate in or interact with the former-counterculture, as I do, then you’ve probably witnessed a strange shift in your friends over the last five years. Whereas the prevailing morality of the counterculture once centered peace, love, compassion, acceptance of difference, and revolutionary politics, more and more I am seeing my community members entertain extremist and oppressive ideas: homophobia and transphobia, violence, classism, hyper-individualism, victim-blaming, regressive gender norms, neo-puritanism, overt racism, xenophobia, and support of political causes and candidates that wish to curtail our freedoms.
As we will discuss in greater depth on this podcast, it is precisely because the former-counterculture tends to resist acquiring political knowledge that we’ve become uniquely vulnerable to exploitation by despotic elites. These tricksters utilize unbelievably sophisticated psychological weapons to manufacture our opinions and subtly shift our outlooks to favor fear-based narratives which support the removal of rights and resources from already-marginalized groups of people. These new technologies of persuasion are so advanced that none of us are totally immune to them. However, by developing critical consciousness, or what I would call political clairvoyance, we will be able to resist this deception and truly think for ourselves again.
In my research, I have found that it is specifically health-related narratives and misinformation that have been most effective in enabling our subculture’s slide into extremist and oppressive ideology. Therefore, it’s my belief that those communities who have retained their radical spiritual-politics—the anticapitalist and anti-colonial herbalists and healers, the Black, Indigenous, and traditional wisdom keepers, the integrative practitioners who blend modern medical knowledge with holistic health paradigms—are the ones to help guide our wellness-focused siblings back onto the path towards healthy, peaceful, free, just, and regenerative futures.
In this podcast and blog, I want to uplift the voices of these healers who are often geographically isolated from one another (the classic “witch in the woods” problem) and who too rarely have opportunities for gathering and discussing our related struggles, or to theorize a collective politics of liberatory healing at the end of the modern age.
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HEAL.ENCHANT.REVOLT. 