Nature's 4 Steps of Healing · Step One: Balance

Last week I asked you: What am I?

Not the body. Not the mind. Not the name on the card or the role in the story you tell about yourself. But the thing aware of all of it: the witness, the light, the boundless presence that is so vast it cannot be captured, so intimate it is closer than breath.

I asked you to sit with that question without answering it, to let it crack open the small rooms you have been living in.

And now I need to tell you the thing that comes after the opening.

Because sovereignty (real sovereignty, the kind that comes from knowing what you actually are) does not come to us alone. The whole of it fits in one line, and I'll spend the rest of this letter unfolding it:

My people hunted buffalo. It was the center of life, the thing that meant survival. And there was always the same problem: hunger scattered people. When one hunter saw meat on the horizon, he wanted to ride out ahead, to get there first, to secure abundance for his own family before anyone else could reach it.

When he did, everything fell apart.

He scattered the herd. The buffalo could run for days. What had been medicine for the whole nation became dust. Everyone went hungry because one person's fear got ahead of the circle's need.

So we had the Akichita. They were the hunt police, the riders whose job was to go out before the hunters and say: You cannot hunt yet. Not alone. Not ahead. They carried rawhide whips, and they were authorized to use them. And they were not the enemy. They were the thing that kept the whole nation fed.

And here is the part I want you to hold: the best hunter in the whole camp rode under the same order as the worst one. His skill bought him nothing. His hunger bought him nothing. His reputation bought him nothing.

Being told no was not a violation of freedom. It was the condition of freedom itself. Because the only way any of us could eat was if all of us waited.

There is a teaching in this that our time has almost forgotten.

We live in an age of individuals. I am encouraged to optimize my life, secure my advantage, build my brand, monetize my unique gift. Everywhere I am told that sovereignty means independence: that I should not answer to anything, that my desires are the compass, that anyone who slows me down is oppressing me.

But freedom that runs ahead leaves everyone else in the dust. It eats the commons. It scatters the medicine. It mistakes the ability to take what you want for the right to, and then wonders why the circle breaks apart and everyone goes hungry.

The Akichita understood something we keep having to relearn: there is no such thing as being well while your circle starves.

Not even in your own mind. Not even in your own heart. Because you are not separate from them. That red-tailed hawk I told you about, the one reading thermals and never asking permission to be hawk, is also a hawk in a world of hawks. She takes what she eats. Not more. She has no storehouse, no second freezer, no idea of getting ahead of next season. She works her own ground and leaves the next hawk's ground alone, and the arrangement holds without a single word spoken between them.

Nobody governs that hawk. Nobody has to.

That is what self-governance is for.

A person who can't be counted on has to be managed. Somebody has to watch them, remind them, work around them, cover for them, And being mmake a second plan in case they don't show. 

Which turns the whole thing upside down.

The freest person in the circle is not the one who answers to nobody. It's the one everybody can count on, because nobody has to spend a minute of their life managing them.

When Oren Lyons speaks of sovereignty (video was in last week's blog post entitled "Who Is the One Asking?"), he speaks of responsibility. He isn't softening the word. He's telling you where it lives.

You cannot be sovereign alone. It is not possible. Sovereignty is not a state you achieve by leaving. It is a state you discover by belonging more completely.

This is going to sting a little, so I am going to say it plainly.

If you have walked out of your family because you needed to be free, that is one thing. Sometimes it is necessary, and I do not judge it. But if you have walked out of every family, every tribe, every circle that makes demands on you, if you have decided that being sovereign means answering to nobody, then you have not found freedom. You have found isolation and called it sovereignty. And isolation will kill you as surely as a scattered herd kills the hunters.

I watch people do this. I have been close to it myself. You cut loose from every tie that asks anything of you, and for a while the lightness feels like freedom. It feels like flying.

Chris Stapleton has a song called "Parachute," and one line in it names what is really happening: falling feels like flying till you hit the ground.

Listen to what that song says we reach for on the way down: a roof when it's raining, a fire when it's cold, a drink when the whiskey is the only thing left to hold.

When you feel completely alone, those look like necessities. And they are real comforts, for a night. But a roof doesn't ask how you are. A fire doesn't sit up with you. And whiskey only holds you for as long as you keep holding it.

Every one of them is a quick fix that dead-ends, because none of them can give us what we are actually missing.

What we are missing is something to hold that holds us back. That is two things, and they need each other. 

The first is a living relationship with your own sovereignty: governing yourself well, tending your own wellness, keeping your word to yourself so the bottle doesn't pretend and appear to keep it for you. The second is trust in a circle that wants the good of the whole, because the good of the whole is the only place the good of each one of us can last.

That's why the song turns where it does: say the word, and I'll be there with you. I'll be your parachute.

That is the circle. It is not a cage around your freedom. It is what lets you land instead of hitting the ground: the roof in the storm, the fire in the cold, the hands that hold you warm until you can stand again.

And here is the part that brings us home: a parachute is woven, thread by thread, by hands that can be counted on. Every time you keep your word without being reminded, you become a thread in somebody else's parachute.

Real sovereignty doesn't mistake falling for flying. It knows when to run ahead and when to wait. It understands that its freedom is woven from ten thousand small surrenders to the circle it stands in.

So let me name it plainly: what do you owe the circle?

You owe it restraint. Not always. Not in everything. But in the things that matter: the hunts, the medicines, the moments when the whole nation's survival depends on whether you can wait.

You owe it honesty. If you are about to scatter the herd, the circle needs to know. That means no shame, no hiding, no pretending, just the plain, hard truth: "I am afraid. I am hungry. I want to run ahead." The riders were never sent out against hunger or fear. Every hunter on that ridge was hungry, and most of them were afraid. The riders went out against the one who would charge ahead of the others. Hunger spoken out loud can be held by the circle. Hunger hidden scatters the herd.

You owe it your presence. Not your gift. Not your special talent. Not the thing you think makes you valuable. Just you, in the place where you actually are, in the body you actually have, in the year it is, with the people who are there. Not the you that you might become in some future where the conditions are better. The you that is here now, ready to wait.

And you owe it your grief. This is the one that surprises people. But if the circle starves, you suffer too. And if you act as though you don't, as though you can prosper alone while others go hungry, then you have separated yourself from them in the deepest way. You have made yourself a stranger to the very thing that made you. That is not freedom. That is a death that walks around.

That's the whole obligation. It's smaller than people fear and heavier than people expect.

Here is what I know from living this. Abundance shows up the moment you stop running ahead and stand with the circle. It shows up the moment you say, I will wait, I will be honest, I will show up as I am, I will grieve what happens to you because you are me. That is when the abundance you were running toward arrives.

It doesn't come because you earned it by your suffering, and it isn't a reward for your obedience. It comes because the thing you were trying to steal was never yours alone to take. It was always the herd's, moving together, held in common, offered to whoever could wait long enough to receive it that way.

The Akichita did not ride out to punish you. They rode out to tell you when it was safe to hunt: when the herd was ready, when the circle was prepared. And the hunters who waited, who let the fear and hunger move through them without acting on it, ate. Their children ate.

And because that order held, there was meat. Because there was meat, there was a giveaway. Because there was a giveaway, the widow ate and the orphan ate and the man who was too sick to ride that season ate, and nobody had to beg for it or prove they deserved it. The discipline out on the ridge is the reason there was generosity back in the camp.

The order didn't compete with the abundance. The order is what produced it.

This is not a theory. It is not a nice idea for spiritual people. It is the way the world actually works. Sovereignty without circle is starvation. Circle without sovereignty is slavery. They need each other.

Our camp doesn't look like a camp anymore. It's spread across a lot of countries and a lot of time zones, and most of us will never stand in the same field. A fair number of us are aiming to, though, out here under Mato Tipila at Summer Solstice 2028.

But it works the same way it always did. What this circle needs from you is not your money. It isn't your agreement with everything I think, either. That would be a dull circle, and I'd have nothing to learn in it. What it needs is that you can be counted on.

So I will leave you with this before you go out into your day and try this on.

Notice where you are about to run ahead. Don't judge it. Just notice. Is it your career? Your healing? Your vision? Your need to be right? Your hunger for someone to finally understand you?

And ask yourself (don't answer, just ask): what would it look like to wait here? To stay in step with the circle I am actually in, instead of the circle I am trying to get to?

Because the circle you are in right now is not a mistake. It is not a place you have gotten trapped by accident. It is exactly where the herd needs you to be so that everyone eats, even if the circle is painful, and even if it is asking you to do something your individual sovereign self does not want to do.

Then one small practice for this week. It takes almost no time at all. Last week I asked you for twelve minutes of stillness. This week it's the other kind.

Find one small promise you've made: the kind nobody would hold you to, the kind that would cost you nothing to let slide. The call you said you'd make. The thing you said you'd bring.

Keep it. Exactly. On time. Without being reminded.

Then notice who that frees. It won't be you, not directly. It'll be whoever no longer has to wonder.

That's Balance. It isn't a feeling. It's a thing somebody else can lean their weight on.

The red-tailed hawk reads the thermals and waits. The sage holds the soil and does not run. The circle gets fed because the riders went out and said,

 "Not yet. Not alone. Not ahead."

And when the time comes (and it will come), you will hunt with a power no individual runner ever had.

You are always welcome here. There's nothing to join and nothing to buy. Just come and be well.

Companions for this teaching are being prepared for the Open Circle Library: Oren Lyons on sovereignty, from Children of the Setting Sun, filmed in the Council Chambers of the Lummi Nation, and David Swallow Jr. on the Oceti Sakowin and the warrior societies. They're coming by December, free and ready for you. Watch here at IndigenousHealing.io and in the weekly Circle Letter for when they arrive. If you missed last week's post, start there: "Who Is the One Asking?" [LINK: paste last week's post URL into this link]

Come walk with us in wellness, with and for all our relations.
Mitakuye Oyasin 🌿

a Dream Song Carrier, Stone Medicine practitioner, and Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, relative of Chief John Grass. She lives nine miles from Mato Tipila (Devils Tower) in Hulett, Wyoming, and is the founder of IndigenousHealing.io, a free global healing community walking Nature's 4 Steps together toward the Circle the Walk of Peace Path, Summer Solstice 2028. All are welcome. The circle path is always open.