Healing is not a passive act in a world severed by conquest, extraction, imaginary borders, and systemic harm. It is a form of resistance. To heal through reconnection with land, with animals, with the spirit of place—it’s to challenge the fragmentation imposed by empire directly.
To return to the Earth is to remember our wholeness. To reclaim our sacred wildness. To rejoin the great relational web of life that colonization tries to erase. It’s more than therapy—it’s ceremony. It’s not just survival—it’s spiritual survival. And the Earth is not simply our background or setting. She is our first mother.
What is Animism? (And Why It Matters More Than Ever)
Animism is often misunderstood, diluted, or dismissed in dominant Western culture. But at its core, animism is a way of knowing that recognizes all beings as alive, aware, and interconnected—plants, animals, rivers, stones, stars. All carry consciousness. All are sacred kin.
To me, animism is not a religion, it’s a worldview. It’s a relationship. A deep-rooted knowing that we are part of, not separate from, the living intelligence of this planet. Animism isn’t about projecting spirit onto nature—it’s about perceiving what has always been there.
Today, we are increasingly alienated from soul and source, pulled into addictive shallow consumption and overstimulation by oppressive algorithms designed to keep you within it's matrix and away from nature. Animism calls us back into relation. Not just with the Earth, but with harmony, healing and ourselves.
Colonialism, Fragmentation, and the Soul Wound
Colonialism functions by severing what it cannot control, dominate, or exploit. It fragments: breaking people from land, language from meaning, spirit from body, humans from the more-than-human world. This fragmentation is not just political—it is deeply psychological and spiritual.
Fragmentation, as defined in Western psychology trauma theory, refers to a splitting or compartmentalization of the psyche in response to overwhelming stress or violence. Under colonization, this becomes collective: soul loss on a global scale.
Empire insists that the land is inert, that animals are lesser, that the body is sinful, and that spirit can only be mediated by institutions. In contrast, animism says: all of life is sacred, alive, and deserving of respect.
Animism is the antidote to fragmentation. It is the remembrance of wholeness. The medicine of mutual recognition.
Animism as Ungovernability: Intuition, Feral Instinct, and Wild Wisdom
To live animistically is to live ungoverned by empire. It means letting go of the need to control or explain everything through logic, and instead listening—to your body, your dreams, your land, your ancestors.
It means embracing intuition as intelligence. Feral instinct as guidance. It means choosing not to be tame, not to be domesticated by a system that views life as a commodity.
This kind of spiritual wildness is dangerous to empire—because it cannot be owned. It cannot be colonized. It refuses domination and lives in relationship instead.
Ungovernability is not chaos. It is sacred order. One aligned with life, not power.
Mirror Neurons, Coregulation, and How Nature Heals the Nervous System
Science has a name for one of the mechanisms through which we attune to others: mirror neurons. These are the cells in our brains that allow us to feel what others feel, to intuit their movement, emotion, and state. This is the biological basis of coregulation—the nervous system syncing between living beings.
What science rarely names—but animism affirms—is that this doesn’t just happen between humans. It happens between us and the natural world.
When we stand with an old tree, our breath slows. When we lay on the Earth, our heartbeat aligns with her frequency, the Schumann Resonance. When we meet the eyes of an animal, something ancient in our DNA is activated and remembers how to listen with the whole body.
It's impossible to heal from the wounds of our world while the body is in a constant state of fight or flight. We need to be able to access self-regulation, whether done solo or in coregulation, to heal.
We don’t heal by isolating. We heal by relating.
The Body of the Earth, The Body of the Self
The Earth and human bodies share uncanny, sacred similarities—symbiotic blueprints that remind us we are not separate. Here are more examples to inspire reflection and deepen the ritual guide:
🌬 Breath & Lungs
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Rainforests and coral reefs act like the lungs of the Earth, oxygenating the planet and filtering toxins—just as our lungs do for us.
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Stomata on leaves breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen like our own alveoli.
🧠 Brain & Nervous System
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The mycelial network in forests mirrors the human brain’s neural network—both are vast, communicative systems of memory, sensation, and transmission.
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Roots resemble nerve pathways, feeling their way through the dark with sensitivity and connection.
🩸 Blood & Water
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Rivers and streams are the Earth’s circulatory system, carrying nutrients across terrain like blood through veins.
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Oceans act as the planet’s lymphatic system, moving toxins and cleansing through tidal flows.
❤️ Heartbeat & Resonance
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The Schumann Resonance (the Earth’s electromagnetic pulse) matches closely with human brainwaves in meditative states, suggesting we synchronize best with Earth when in deep presence or prayer.
💀 Bones & Mountains
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Rock formations and mountain ranges resemble bones and spines, shaped by time, pressure, and elemental force.
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Caves, volcanoes, and caverns feel like the womb of the Earth—holding, gestating, listening.
🌡 Fever & Fire
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Wildfires and volcanic eruptions mirror immune responses—purging infection, creating fertile ground, even if it appears destructive.
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Climate change can be understood as the Earth’s fever—a cry for healing and balance.
🤲 Skin & Soil
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Soil is Earth’s skin, filled with microbiomes, pores, and sensitivity. Like us, the planet absorbs, protects, and exhales through this living layer.
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Topsoil erosion mirrors how trauma strips us of protective layers when we’re overexposed and undernourished.
🧬 DNA & Seeds
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Seeds and spores carry ancestral memory like genetic code, shaping entire ecosystems from a single imprint, just like us.
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Stone strata hold memory like the DNA in our bones hold trauma.
When we recognize these commonalities, we begin to understand that what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. And just as we need rest, nourishment, and regulation, so does the land.
Our ancestors didn’t need peer-reviewed empirical science studies to know this. They could feel it in their bodies. And we still can—if we remember how to listen.
What the Land is Telling Us (If We’re Willing to Listen)
Nature always reveals what is needed. Plant medicine grows where wounds exist. Certain mushrooms appear in the aftermath of ecological devastation to remediate toxins. Predators return to cull diseased prey and restore balance. Burn scars from wildfires become fertile beds for regrowth.
The land is constantly in communication. Fire is not just destruction—it is a messenger. Floods, droughts, and blooms all speak in the language of ecology, energy, and spirit.
When we are willing to get quiet, humble, and relational, the Earth teaches us what healing looks like. Not in theory—but in practice. With dirt under our nails, breath in our lungs, and tears in our eyes.
Living the Prayer: My Journey to Black Moon Wolfdog Sanctuary
In 2021, when my faith in humanity was shattered—again—and my chronically ill body mirrored more and more of the wounds of the world, I didn’t give in to the dystopian numbness that colonial trauma can produce. And trust me, it was tempting as a now elder crusty, eco-punk, nihilism is a familiar seductive release of responsibility disguised as rebellion. To be punk and in community with others in that way has always echoed the primal instincts within me.
Instead, I listened. To my unending grief. To the rage of my ancestors, boiling the blood in my veins, releasing fire in my breath. To the animals, the wolves simultaneously exotified and hunted like pests on their ancestral lands, and gunned down to near extinction- like that of my peoples. To the land, where I was born and raised in California, now constantly raging in wildfire at the people who wouldn't listen to and continue to exploit her. And I followed them.
That path led me to Northeastern Washington, to begin a new life living as close to the land as I could. There, I founded Black Moon Wolfdog Sanctuary, where I now live and work in daily, reciprocal relationship with rescued wolfdogs, wild plants, forest spirits, and the "unseen".
It’s not glamorous. It’s not easy. But it is real. It is healing. And it is my answer to despair so deep it threatens to end me: live as though a different world is possible, even if I never live to see it. Create sanctuary, and be in kinship with our sacred relatives.
Because devotion is its own revolution.
Animism as the Path Forward (Even If We Never Arrive)
Even as a seer, I cannot say for certain that we will overturn the evils and perils of the modern world, and I won't pretend I can. Maybe as a survivor in CPTSD recovery, I prefer radical acceptance of the worst and to fight and hope for the best. The probable truth is: we may never see global liberation, decolonization, or ecological restoration in our lifetimes. But that doesn’t mean we stop working for them. We act in service of the future—seven generations forward—because love demands it.
Animism is not just a personal spiritual path. It is a collective survival strategy. It is how we help the Earth heal—not by dominating her but by humbling ourselves to her wisdom.
It is how we unlearn colonial logics and remember we are not separate, not superior, not sovereign. We are kin. And kin care for each other. It's in the nature of our design.
Closing Invocation: Listen to Your Mother
When the world feels too loud,
when the grief feels too deep,
when the path forward seems unclear—
Listen to your mother.
Put your hands in the dirt.
Walk barefoot through the wild.
Look into the eyes of an animal and remember your own soul.
You are not lost.
You are not alone.
You are part of everything.
And everything is calling you home.
About the Author - Mētztli Wolf
I'm the witch behind Revolutionary Mystic—an Evolutionary Astrologer, Evidential Medium, trauma-informed psychic, and founder of Black Moon Wolfdog Sanctuary. I live close to the land in the remote mountains of NE Washington, where I care for a pack of rescued wolfdogs red-tagged for euthanasia. My life’s work is rooted in animism, ancestral remembrance, feral reciprocity, and collective liberation.
This blog is more than words—it’s a prayer, a spell, and an invitation to return to right-relationship with land, spirit, and instinct. I believe healing is possible when we stop asking empire for permission to feel, to listen, to be wild.
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