The calls & pitfalls of the growth of shamanism - Nicholas Breeze Wood
Release Date: 08/06/2025
How to have a soulful Christmas - Lian Brook-Tyler
Be Mythical
All The Everything is Lian’s solo show where she dives deep into a topic, often woven around a myth or fairytale that she’s been journeying with. The LIVE making of All The Everything is recorded live on YouTube… to join Lian for the one: Make sure you’re and are a and we’ll let you know when the next one is happening. Lian explores what creates a soulful Christmas, beginning with the way the season stirs old memories and sudden tenderness, then circling through the frantic pace that pulls so many of us away from what we actually long for. She speaks about ancient midwinter...
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The urgent truth about why western culture needs traditional shamanism - Isaac Wortley & Eddy Elsey
Be Mythical
This week’s show is with Isaac Wortley and Eddy Elsey, both practicing apprentices of a traditional Mongolian lineage holder, who founded Mother Tree Shamanism. Isaac is an English shaman, who experienced a calling from a very young age. This led him to search out an authentic traditional teacher of Mongolian shamanism. Over ten years ago, he was initiated by his teacher, the founder of Mother Tree Shamanism, and has been an apprentice ever since. He has also studied traditional Mongolian/Tibetan medicine for last three years. He currently lives in the Midlands in England providing shamanic...
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How to transform your life with daily spiritual practice - Caitlín Matthews
Be Mythical
This week’s show is with Caitlín Matthews. Caitlín is an internationally renowned author, a teacher of shamanic training programme, a facilitator of Systemic Ritual® and the co-founder of the Foundation for Inspirational and Oracular Studies (FÍOS). Caitlín is the author of over 80 books, including Diary of a Soul Doctor, Singing the Soul Back Home, the Art of Celtic Seership, Celtic Devotional and The Celtic Book of the Dead. Her books have won a number of awards. She is known internationally for her work on the spiritual, mythic and ancestral traditions of Britain and Ireland. She...
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How to decode your dreams and change your life - Jane Teresa Anderson
Be Mythical
In this week’s show Lian is joined by Jane Teresa Anderson BSc Hons. Jane Teresa is a dream analyst, dream therapist, author, podcast host, and mentor, living in Hobart, Australia. Published by Hachette, Little Brown (Piatkus), Random House, and Harper Collins, Jane Teresa Anderson is the author of and dreaming, and her 2024 debut fiction novel, . She is a frequent guest in the media and an accomplished radio dream talk-back expert, interpreting callers’ dreams for more than 1,500 shows across commercial and ABC stations. Jane Teresa hosts a long-running podcast series, The Dream Show...
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How to be rooted in a world that’s forgotten - 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 hidden power in mythic stories of desire and love - 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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How to heal the wounded men: trauma, numbness & masculinity - Hugh Newton
Be Mythical
In this week’s show Lian is joined by Hugh Newton. Hugh’s life began in the midst of a war in Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia). Growing up in such harsh conditions meant that he had to work hard to overcome his complex childhood trauma. Hugh began his self-development journey 30 years ago, and has been passionate about both supporting men to step into the fullest versions of themselves, and strengthening and uplifting the African continent that he loves so much. Hugh works as the lead male facilitator at Celebration of Being, and was a certified leader at A Band of Brothers for 7 years....
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The ‘small print’ of working with powerful myths and archetypes - Caitlín Matthews
Be Mythical
This week’s show is with Caitlín Matthews. Caitlín is an internationally renowned author, a teacher of shamanic training programme, a facilitator of Systemic Ritual® and the co-founder of the Foundation for Inspirational and Oracular Studies (FÍOS). Caitlín is the author of over 80 books, including Diary of a Soul Doctor, Singing the Soul Back Home, the Art of Celtic Seership, Celtic Devotional and The Celtic Book of the Dead. Her books have won a number of awards. She is known internationally for her work on the spiritual, mythic and ancestral traditions of Britain and Ireland. She...
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How to honour the differences between men and women - Serdar Hararovich
Be Mythical
In this week’s show Lian is joined by Serdar Hararovich. Serdar is a Relationship & Secure Attachment Specialist offering integrative, attachment-based coaching and healing. He supports both men and women to heal early attachment wounds, establish inner security, reclaim their deepest self, and cultivate the emotional skills required for deep, soulful, and secure love. Serdar works with a wide variety of individuals - including, but not limited to, therapists, relationship coaches, and other practitioners. The common thread among his clients is a deep desire to go beyond the surface -...
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Plato’s allegory of the cave: how to journey from shadows to truth - Lian Brook-Tyler
Be Mythical
In this episode, Lian tells the ancient allegory of Plato’s Cave, a story of awakening and the painful beauty of learning to see. Each month, Lian’s shared a mythical tale as a 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. And this one feels especially poignant, because it will be the last story Lian tells in this way. Our community is evolving into its next form, UNIO: the Community for Wild Sovereign Souls. UNIO now becomes the living home...
info_outlineIn 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 - such as bronze shaman's mirrors, phurba daggers and many other Mongolian and Tibetan shamanic and Buddhist ritual objects - for which he holds traditional teachings and, where required, traditional initiations.
Despite being a ‘rather uneducated Buddhist,’ he is an ordained Tibetan Buddhist lama, a type called a ngakpa, whose role is similar to a shaman’s. Ngakpas are non-monastic, non-celebrate lamas who live in the community, specialising in ritual and magic for people within their community.
Nick is the editor of Sacred Hoop Magazine - a leading international magazine about shamanism - which has been published since 1993. He is also a musician and artist.
He is the author of several books including, 'Walking with the Tiger,' 'Sacred Drums of Siberia,' 'A Little Book of Revealing,' 'Voices From The Earth,' 'The Book of the Shaman,' 'The Shaman Box,' and 'The Resplendent Other'.
He runs the large Facebook group 3Worlds Shamanism, has done a podcast called the 3Worlds shamanism podcast on and off since 2006 and also has a somewhat neglected YouTube channel, also called 3Worlds Shamanism.
In this episode, Lian and Nicholas explore what it means to walk the path of shamanism in the modern West. Together, they trace the winding threads of Nicholas’ life… from the windswept fields of his Midlands childhood to the birth of Sacred Hoop magazine, through encounters with medicine wheel teachings, Mongolian and Himalayan shamans, and the long shadow of Castaneda. What unfolds is not a how-to or a prescription… but a living braid of animism, discipline, and devotion.
Nicholas reflects on the unexpected gift of dyslexia and how neurodivergence shaped his initiatory path, as a different kind of perception… one that enabled a direct, embodied relationship with the unseen. He and Lian explore the tension between psychotherapeutic frameworks and authentic shamanic practice, and the danger of mistaking surface form for deep structure. What makes a shaman, he says, is not sensitivity or interest, but being chosen by the spirits themselves.
Woven through the conversation is the question of lineage. What does it mean to carry teachings from other lands onto this one? How do we honour both the transmission and the soil we stand upon? From the cosmology of the medicine wheel to the pitfalls of cultural appropriation, from core shamanism to the necessity of cosmological bone… this episode offers a rare encounter with an elder who has walked the shamanic path for many decades.
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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Why the word “shaman” is often misused… and how understanding deep structure versus surface form can clarify what is truly sacred.
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How neurodivergence can shape perception in ways that become part of our gift, especially when navigating the unseen or the unknown.
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What it might mean to birth a Western lineage… one rooted not in imitation, but in integration, initiation, and real relationship with land and spirit.
Resources and stuff spoken about:
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Visit Nick’s websites:
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Join UNIO, the Academy of the Soul. 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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