The sovereign child: Remembering how to parent in ancestral ways - Arthur Haines
Release Date: 05/06/2025
Ancient technology & modern science: the power of the shamanic drum - Sophie Messager
Be Mythical
In this week’s show, Lian is joined by Sophie Messager. Sophie bridges worlds that rarely meet. A former reproductive physiologist with a PhD, she traded her microscope for holistic practices after experiencing the transformative power of an empowered birth. Her decade-long journey as a doula, birth educator, and author of deepened her exploration of the rhythms surrounding women’s transitions. Now a holistic life transition mentor, Sophie guides women through significant life thresholds – from birth to perimenopause and beyond. Her unique combination of scientific expertise and...
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The healing home: how to design your house as a sanctuary - Paula Robinson
Be Mythical
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This is why your soul-led business isn't successful - Tad Hargrave
Be Mythical
This week’s show is with Tad Hargrave. Tad is a hippy who developed a knack for marketing (and then learned how to be a hippy again). Since 2001, he’s been weaving together strands of ethical marketing, Waldorf School education, a history in the performing arts, local culture work, anti-globalization activism, an interest in his ancestral, traditional cultures, community building and supporting local economies into this work of helping people create profitable businesses that are ethically grown while restoring the beauty of the marketplace. Tad did improv comedy semi-professionally...
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The White Snake Spirit: a reminder of the power of love and prayer - Lian Brook-Tyler
Be Mythical
In this episode, Lian shares the ancient and evocative Chinese myth of the White Snake Spirit, a story of prayer, healing, and a love that endures across lifetimes. Each month, Lian tells a mythical tale… as spell, as memory, as invitation... to be felt, stirred, remembered as a magical doorway into your own soul. These stories are one of the oldest ways ancestral wisdom has been carried down to us, a living inheritance that continues to speak when we meet them with reverence. She first shared this live with our beloved community in UNIO, our Academy of the Soul, in which we continue to...
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The calls & pitfalls of the growth of shamanism - Nicholas Breeze Wood
Be Mythical
In this week’s show, Lian is joined by Nicholas Breeze Wood. Nicholas has practiced shamanism for over 40 years, combining it with the 'earthier' end of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as with 'medicine' teachings from Native North American peoples. He has worked with many gifted medicine people and shamans over the years, and is deeply apprenticed to his own spirit helpers, whose teachings never fail to awe and surprise him. Nick’s shamanism is a fusion of traditional Himalayan and Mongolian forms, combined with teachings from his own spirits. He works especially deeply with ritual objects -...
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The land, the story, the soul: How to reclaim what was lost - Stephanie MacKay
Be Mythical
In this week’s show Lian is joined by Stephanie MacKay. Stephanie is a mythologist, wilderness guide, and cultural craftswoman devoted to the long, slow work of remembering how to belong—to land, to lineage, to story, and to each other. As founder and director of Fianna Wilderness School, she has spent the past 15+ years guiding rites of passage, seasonal myth circles, and nature-based mentorship rooted in the wilds. Stephanie’s work braids together her Celtic ancestry, years of deep study with Martín Prechtel and the Animas Valley Institute, and a fierce love of story as medicine. She...
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The myth of Pygmalion: How to bring beauty to life - Lian Brook-Tyler
Be Mythical
In this episode, Lian shares the ancient and evocative myth of Pygmalion, a story of longing, creation, and the mystery of what brings something… or someone… to life. Each month, Lian tells a mythical tale… as spell, as memory, as invitation... not to be analysed or consumed, but to be felt, stirred, remembered as a magical doorway into your own soul. She first shared this live with our beloved community in UNIO, our Academy of the Soul, in which we continue to journey more deeply together with it in a month-long quest. To join us for the next mythical quest, you can join UNIO here: In...
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Be Mythical
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Be Mythical
This week’s show is with Coco Oya Cienna-Rey. Coco is the author of Digging for Mother’s Bones from Womancraft Publishing, is a UK based mother, grandmother, creative, mystic, soul guide and writer. Her creativity is informed by her journey as a devotee of the Tantric path (an embodied path of self-liberation) and her personal journey with trauma. Coco has always felt a call to channel the Voice of the Divine Feminine and is published in several bestselling anthologies. Often thought provoking, yet always heartfelt her work speaks of the sacred wisdom stored in the body, the...
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How to heal a man: Superheroes, shadows & sacred circles - Karl Brooks
Be Mythical
In this week’s show, Lian is joined by Karl Brooks, a long-term Be Mythical student and a much-loved member of our community within , whose journey from crisis to reclamation has been one of the most beautiful we’ve had the honour to witness. Karl has a deep connection with his inner child, who unbeknownst to him had been running most of his life behind the scenes, in his subconscious! When he began to make the unconscious, conscious, and start asking what his inner child wanted - to feel safe, see, held, respected, loved, all from an unconditional place, he found he held the key...
info_outlineThis week’s show is with Arthur Haines. Arthur is a Maine hunting, fishing, and recreation guide, forager, ancestral skills mentor, author, public speaker, and botanical researcher. He grew up in the western mountains of Maine, a rural area that was home to swift streams known for their trout fishing. He spent most of his childhood in the Sandy River Valley hiking, tracking, and foraging.
Arthur now runs the Delta Institute of Natural History in Canton, Maine, where he teaches human ecology, focusing on the values of foraging, wildcrafting medicine, and primitive living skills. He continues to spend a great deal of his free time practicing his skills as a modern hunter-gatherer.
In 2017, he authored “A New Path”, a comprehensive work on nature connection and rewilding, detailing how to incorporate ancestral practices into modern living.
As a research botanist for the Native Plant Trust, he completed an inclusive flora of the New England region titled “Flora Novae Angliae” and has authored over twenty publications in peer-reviewed journals and books, including naming species of plants new to science. His series of YouTube videos has inspired thousands of people interested in foraging wild edible and medicinal plants.
In this show, Lian and Arthur explore if our attempts to control and shape our children are not only unnecessary, but a wound to their sovereignty? In this evocative and deeply human conversation, Lian is joined once again by Arthur Haines to explore what it means to parent in a way that honours the innate wholeness of the child.
Together, they journey through the emotional and practical landscape of ancestral child rearing… touching on everything from physical punishment and coercive control, to co-sleeping, mixed age play, and the essential power of physical touch. Arthur offers stories from his own family alongside insights drawn from hunter gatherer societies, where sovereignty is not earned… it is assumed.
Throughout the conversation, they reflect on how so many of our cultural norms – even well intentioned ones – can fracture the nervous systems of both child and parent. This episode is a remembrance, an invitation, and a reclamation… calling us back to a more natural, compassionate, and connected way of raising the next generation.
We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment wherever you are listening or in any of our other spaces to engage.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
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The illusion of control in modern parenting can fracture trust and deplete both parent and child… offering sovereignty instead creates a foundation of mutual respect and deep connection.
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Physical punishment, even when socially normalised, models domination, damages cognitive development, and teaches children that love and harm can coexist.
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Returning to ancestral patterns, including co-sleeping, mixed age community, touch-based communication, and high indulgence of infants, supports emotional resilience and deepens parent child bonds.
Resources and stuff spoken about:
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Find out more about Arthur’s Apprenticeship Program - for people excited to pursue a rewilding lifestyle
- Join UNIO, the Academy of Sacred Union. This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.
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