In this episode, we sit down once again with Michael Northro, known to many as the Shaman, for a deeper conversation on ancestors—who they are, how they are understood across shamanic traditions, and what it means to honor them in a modern world.

We explore how ancestors are viewed not simply as figures of the past, but as living influences—guides, protectors, and carriers of memory that shape identity, culture, and spiritual practice. From blood lineage to spiritual lineage, we discuss the different ways ancestors are recognized within shamanism and how those relationships can be approached with respect, intention, and humility.

This conversation also touches on practical and philosophical questions:

What does it mean to honor ancestors today?

How do you engage ancestral work without appropriation or fantasy?

And how do remembrance, ritual, and responsibility intersect in shamanic worldviews?

A grounded discussion at the crossroads of spirituality, ancestry, and the strange—inviting reflection rather than dogma.

In this episode of Monday Mornings with Peace, we explore 3 Stoic mantras for humility through the wisdom of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

Stoicism is often misunderstood as coldness or emotional detachment, but at its core, it is a philosophy of self-mastery, character, discipline, and clear vision. And one of the most important parts of that vision is humility.

Not weakness.

Not self-hatred.

Not making yourself small.

But the ability to stay teachable, let truth correct your ego, and remember what truly matters before life passes by.

In this episode, we reflect on three Stoic mantras:

I cannot grow where I refuse to be taught.

Truth is greater than my ego.

Remember death, and return to what matters.

Through Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and the Stoic practice of memento mori, this episode is about humility as strength — the kind of humility that helps us become wiser, calmer, and less enslaved to pride.

Because the goal is not to appear wise.

The goal is to become wise.

#Stoicism #Humility #MarcusAurelius #Epictetus #MementoMori #AncientWisdom #PersonalGrowth

Christianity did not begin as a finished world religion. It began as a Jewish movement around Jesus of Nazareth in the world of first-century Palestine — shaped by Roman occupation, apocalyptic hope, resurrection belief, Paul’s mission to the Gentiles, early Christian diversity, and eventually the rise of bishops, doctrine, and councils.

In this Thursday Journal, we continue dissecting the snowball: looking at how one of history’s most influential traditions gathered layers over time. From Jesus and the Kingdom of God, to James and Paul, to rival Christian sects, proto-orthodoxy, Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea, this episode explores how Christianity became the religion the world would come to know.

This is not an attack on Christianity. It is an attempt to understand it historically — to ask what the tradition is made of before we decide how to carry it, question it, love it, or leave it.

In this episode of Monday Mornings with Peace, we focus on one mantra:

Fall seven times. Rise eight.

Through Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of self-overcoming, we reflect on what it means to get back up after failure, shame, weakness, or the feeling that you have fallen back into an older version of yourself.

The fall does not have to become your identity. Sometimes it reveals the next part of you that must be strengthened, disciplined, and overcome.

This is an episode about rising again — not perfectly, not loudly, but honestly.

In this episode of Traversing the Strange World, we examine faith as a snowball handed to us by history.

Where did our ideas of heaven, hell, Satan, resurrection, judgment, and the end of the world come from? Were these beliefs always understood the way many of us inherited them, or did they develop through exile, empire, scripture, culture, and religious imagination?

This episode explores the ancient influence of Zoroastrianism, the Persian religion that carried powerful ideas about cosmic good and evil, judgment after death, resurrection, and the final restoration of the world. We look at how these ideas may have shaped later Jewish and Christian thought, especially after the Babylonian exile and during the development of apocalyptic belief.

This is not an episode about tearing faith down. It is about examining what history has handed us.

Just as Socrates taught the importance of the examined life, maybe we should also examine the ideas we carry — especially the ones we did not consciously choose.

There is a kind of tiredness that sleep does not fix.

In this episode of Monday Mornings with Peace, we reflect on burnout, exhaustion, and the strange heaviness that comes when life begins to feel scorched from the inside out.

Through Marcus Aurelius, Jesus, Albert Camus, the Sabbath tradition, and Nietzsche, we move through five mantras for the weary soul: how to rise gently, lay the burden down, find the hidden summer within, remember we are not machines, and refuse to mistake exhaustion for the end.

This episode is not about pretending you are not tired.

It is about rest, rhythm, recovery, and resolve.

Because you may be burned out. But you are not finished.

What happens when the God you inherited stops fitting inside the explanations you were handed?

In this Thursday Journal episode, I explore God as Mystery through deconstruction, biblical scholarship, and the long human attempt to understand the divine.

Coming out of the Messianic Hebrew Roots movement, I was taught to question everything — mainstream Christianity, tradition, Rome, holidays, and the version of Jesus most people inherit. But eventually, those questions kept going, and they led me beyond the movement that first taught me to ask them.

This episode looks at the development of Yahweh in the Old Testament, the evolution of Jesus from Jewish rabbi to cosmic savior, and how voices like Bart Ehrman and Rabbi Tovia Singer changed the way I saw the Bible.

But this is not about mocking faith.

It is about what remains after certainty falls apart.

Maybe belief is like a snowball rolling through history, gathering layers of tribe, exile, empire, philosophy, fear, hope, ritual, interpretation, and sincere religious experience.

And maybe God is not destroyed by those layers.

Maybe God is the Mystery behind the whole process.