Ancient Prophecies, Living Children and the Healing of Remembrance
When I look back at how this all began, the image that comes to mind is very simple. Over 20 years ago while being adopted by the Yahua tribe I was in a circle of children sitting on the earth alongside a few elders. The smell of flowers and medicinal plants was in the air and at that moment I remembered my own innocence. Now holding a small children’s book in my hands carries a story woven together with the Yahua elders of the Amazon. Back then it felt like a small moment at the time, but the elders kept telling me that this is how worlds are replanted.
The initiative to unite the elders and children of the world started as a response to something painful that many of us feel but rarely name. Humanity’s innocence has been wounded. Children nowadays grow up surrounded by technology and artificial light, with little time in the forest or on the land, and their emotional world often becomes a silent battlefield. Elders, who once held the social role of guiding the community, find themselves isolated, placed on the margins of society. Veterans return from war carrying the concentrated trauma of our collective violence. Three generations, each holding a piece of the same broken story.
The elders I have worked with in the Amazon and Andes never spoke about “projects” or “programs.” They spoke about restoring right relationship instead. They reminded me that in healthy cultures, children, elders, and warriors are not separate categories. They are different phases of the same human heart. When one is forgotten, all three begin to suffer.
Our work with the Yahua tribe in the lower Amazon basin started with this understanding. The ancestral school we have built with the community is a living roundhouse where the children can learn to read the forest as fluently as they learn to read books, where elder stories, songs, and rituals are not archived in some museum of “tradition,” but passed breath to breath as part of daily life. The school was born from many hands and many prayers, including readers of Beyond Ayahuasca that helped fund the main maloka so Yahua children can grow up with both roots and wings.
Out of this relationship with the Yahua elders emerged the Seed of the Heart eco socio emotional workshop. Together we began asking a simple question: How can we help children understand their emotions as allies rather than enemies, while reconnecting them to the living intelligence of nature.
The workshop always begins in the same way with children gathering in a circle and being offered three plants with distinct qualities. For example, mint for clarity and freshness of mind, sage for protection and discernment and lavender for softness and soothing the nervous system. The children smell the plants, hold them, sometimes rub them on their faces or hands. The environment itself becomes the first teacher.
Then I read them the Seed of the Heart children’s story. It tells of the power of the heart within each of us that remembers how to feel the world without shutting down. In the story, emotions are represented as messengers of the elements that unite us with the ecosystem. Fear moves like water, sometimes stormy and overwhelming, yet capable of great cleansing when understood. Anger burns like fire, destructive when uncontrolled, yet full of courage and life force when guided by the heart. Sadness sinks like earth, heavy and dense, yet able to ground us in humility and empathy. Joy moves like the wind, light and playful, yet it can also become scattered when it loses connection to the body. All of this is held by the space of the heart that can welcome each element without being consumed.
After the story, we engage in the Amazonian based breathwork through the 7 elemental centers in the body, each symbolizing a stage of how the seed grows. The children then create their own “mythical emotion creatures.” They draw or act out beings that carry their fear, anger, grief, or joy. We dance with these creatures, ask them what they need, and learn how to befriend them instead of pushing them away. Elders are present in the circle, adding stories from their own childhood, sharing how they learned to face difficult feelings while staying connected to the forest, the river, and the spirits of the land.
This work started with the Yahua children, but it did not stay in one place. The Seed of the Heart workshop has now been shared with elders and children in the Amazon, the Andean highlands, communities in Mexico, and in different parts of the United States such as Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. Each land has its own character, yet the same pattern keeps appearing. Children relax when they are allowed to feel and elders come alive when their wisdom is welcomed. Parents and educators suddenly see that emotional intelligence is not something abstract. It grows naturally when hearts, bodies, and landscapes are brought back into dialogue.
A third strand has begun to weave into this circle. Veterans and others who carry deep trauma from conflict zones and systemic violence are joining our retreats and programs, both in the rainforest and in other locations. Many of them come with nervous systems that have been pushed beyond what any human being should have to endure. Nightmares, hypervigilance, a constant background of guilt or despair. Yet, beneath all that, there is a fierce tenderness, a wish to protect life rather than destroy it.
When veterans sit with elders from Indigenous lineages and witness children laughing and playing under the same sky, something powerful happens. The warrior role that has been distorted by modern warfare remembers its true purpose, which is to protect the vulnerable and safeguard the sacred. Veterans have told us that seeing Yahua children learning in the ancestral school, or participating in Seed of the Heart workshops, gives them a sense that their pain can be repurposed into service for future generations rather than remain frozen in the past. This is what I mean by healing the wounded innocence of humanity. Not erasing what has happened but transforming it into a deeper guardianship of life.
On a symbolic level, these threads of elders, children, and veterans echo into many ancient prophecies around the world that speak about a time of great crisis when humanity would be forced to choose between forgetting and remembering.
In the Andean and Amazonian traditions there is a prophecy known as the Eagle and the Condor. In one version, the Eagle represents the path of the mind, technology, and industrial power, while the Condor represents the path of the heart, intuition, and deep connection to the Earth. For five hundred years, these two paths have grown apart. The prophecy says that a new cycle begins when the Eagle and the Condor fly together in the same sky, and human beings remember how to bring mind and heart back into balance.
The way I see it, this does not belong to one geographic region anymore. Every time an engineer or therapist from the industrial world sits on the ground in the rainforest and listens to an Indigenous grandmother speaking about how to raise children in relationship with the forest, the Eagle and the Condor are quietly circling each other. Every time a veteran kneels in the Amazon soil to plant a tree alongside a Yahua child, the two wings of humanity are learning how to move in harmony.
In North America, the Anishinaabe speak of the Seven Fires prophecy, which describes stages in the life of the people on Turtle Island. In the time of the Seventh Fire, people face a choice between a path of the mind that continues to destroy the Earth and a path of spirit that leads back to balance. If they choose wisely, a new fire called the Eighth Fire is lit, a fire of brotherhood and sisterhood where different colors and traditions come together in respect. This resonates deeply with the global tribe that is forming around our work. We have Indigenous elders from the Amazon and Andes, children from cities and villages, veterans from different wars, and supporters from many countries who feel that this is no longer about one culture saving another. It is about humanity finding its way back to the fire together.
There is also a vision attributed to the Lakota leader Crazy Horse, who spoke of a time in the future when the Red Nation would rise again as a blessing for a sick world, a world full of broken promises and separation that longs for light. That vision is not about domination. It is about Indigenous wisdom returning to its rightful place as a guide for a humanity that has lost its bearings. I see the Yahua ancestral school and similar initiatives across the planet as quiet expressions of that blessing. They are small on the map, yet immense in meaning.
From the Himalayan side of the world, there is a Tibetan prophecy often paraphrased as, “When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Dharma will go to the West.” Many lamas and practitioners understand this as a prediction that Tibetan Buddhism and its teachings on the nature of mind would spread far beyond the mountain valleys where they were preserved in relative isolation. When I sit with Tibetan teachers and Amazonian elders, I feel that this scattering of wisdom traditions across the globe is part of the same pattern. The world is in crisis, yet it is also in a great cross pollination of lineages. Children can now grow up with access to Indigenous Amazonian teaching stories, Andean rituals of reciprocity, Tibetan meditations on the nature of mind, and modern psychology, all in one lifetime.
The Q’ero nation of the Andes speak of the Chaka Runa – The Bridge People prophecy. Modern (new age) retellings speak about “Rainbow Warriors,” people of all colors and backgrounds who come together to protect the Earth in times of great ecological and social harm. The origins of some of these rainbow stories are mixed and not always rooted clearly in a specific Indigenous nation, and Native scholars have rightfully pointed out the danger of turning them into vague New Age slogans. What matters to me is not claiming to fulfill any one prophecy but listening to the shared essence behind them. Again and again, the message is that when we remember our kinship with the Earth and with one another, we have a chance to heal.
In that sense, the global tribe that is forming around the Seed of the Heart initiative is not a brand. It is a field of relationship. We see elders from rainforest and mountain cultures who still carry intact blueprints of how to live in reciprocity with the web of life. We see children whose sensitivity has not yet been entirely numbed by noise and speed, children who can still feel the language of plants and animals if given a little encouragement. We see veterans and other trauma carriers who know the cost of disconnection in a very direct way, and who are longing to dedicate their strength to something that genuinely serves life.
When elders, children, and veterans come together, new patterns of healing emerge. A veteran who has seen villages destroyed may help build an ancestral school classroom. A child who has been bullied at school may sit with an elder who tells them that their sensitivity is not a weakness, but a gift needed for the future. An elder who has felt ignored by modern society may realize that their stories are medicine for a whole generation learning to feel again.
In practical terms, our work continues on several fronts at once. In the Amazon, we are finishing the first phase of the Yahua ancestral school, with the main round maloka already built and the curriculum being shaped in collaboration with the elders, focusing on language, traditional arts, forest knowledge, and emotional literacy. In the Andes and Mexico, we are adapting the Seed of the Heart workshop to local traditions while keeping its core intact: emotional awareness, connection with nature, and intergenerational dialogue. In the United States and other countries, we are holding retreats and workshops that invite people to step out of the speed of daily life, sit on the earth, and remember how to listen to their inner and outer worlds at the same time.
The mini documentary that accompanies this article is a small window into this larger tapestry. You will see Yahua children and elders laughing. You may also catch glimpses of veterans and other participants whose faces carry both grief and relief, as if finally they are sitting in a circle that makes sense to their hearts.
I do not pretend that one book, one workshop, or one school can solve the planetary crisis we are in. What I know is that every time a child learns to befriend their fear instead of shutting it down, every time an elder’s wisdom is honored instead of dismissed, every time a veteran’s pain is received as a doorway to deeper compassion rather than something to medicate away, the field of wounded innocence in humanity becomes a little less frozen.
The ancient prophecies remind us that we are not the first generation to face a crossroads. They also remind us that we carry within us the capacity to choose again. Whether we call it the time of the Eagle and the Condor, the lighting of the Eighth Fire, the rising of the Red Nation as a blessing, or the iron bird era, the essential invitation is the same. Remember who you are in relation to the Earth. Remember who you are in relation to each other. Let the elders, the children, and the trauma carriers all take their rightful place in the circle.
If you feel a resonance with this vision, I invite you to watch the video, share it with those who may be moved by it, and to support the initiatives that keep this work alive. Our Zeffy fundraiser helps sustain the Yahua ancestral school, the Seed of the Heart workshops, and the gatherings that bring elders, children, and veterans together as one global tribe of healing. Most of all, I invite you to notice the elders, children, and wounded warriors in your own life, and to treat each encounter as part of the same prophecy unfolding.
In the end, the Seed of the Heart is not an abstract concept. It is that quiet place in every human being that still remembers how to care. When that seed is nurtured, in a forest in the Amazon or in an apartment in a city, the world begins to grow in a different direction.
Thank you for walking this winding path of planetary healing and transformation alongside me.
