The Future Is Ancestral — Heal the Healers in Times of Crisis: Venezuela

The Invitation

The future is ancestral

In Paraty, where the sea reaches into the cobblestones and the old town seems to remember more than it says, Ubiraci Pataxó and I shared a stage. The theme we were given sounds, at first, like a paradox: the future is ancestral. By the end of the conversation it no longer felt like a phrase to be understood, but a direction to be walked.

The provocation belongs to the great lineage of Indigenous thought carried into our time by Ailton Krenak — the idea that if there is a future worth considering, it is ancestral, because it was already here. The future is not a territory ahead of us to be conquered. It is a memory in the blood to be recovered. Time is not a straight line racing away from its origin. It curves. It spirals. It returns.

I have spent years describing Fundamental Peace in the language of neuroscience and consciousness. Ubiraci has spent his life inside a knowledge that never left the body — the wisdom of the Pataxó, held between the earth and the ocean on the coast of Bahia. In Paraty we discovered that we had arrived at the same clearing by different paths. Now we come together again, as transpersonal leaders, to open that clearing to others.

The Frame

A peace that is a relationship, not a summit

Fundamental Peace, as I have come to understand it, is not the silencing of conflict. It rests on three pillars — freedom, consciousness, and happiness — and it obeys the oldest of laws: as within, so without. A single regulated nervous system, multiplied across a people, becomes a mature humanity. Peace, in this sense, is simply the capacity to respond instead of react.

If that is what peace is, then it cannot be decreed. It has to be practiced — and it has to be practiced between people. This is why the World Happiness Foundation gathers what we call Dialogues for Fundamental Peace. Not a summit, but a movement. Not a resolution, but a relationship. A dialogue is the smallest unit of peace: two nervous systems choosing coherence over fear, presence over performance. Every time we sit in a circle and truly listen, we rehearse the world we say we want.

“Fundamental Peace is not the absence of pain… it is the transmutation of its energy into love and compassion.”

— Luis Miguel Gallardo

The Wound

Because no one should have to care alone

There is a particular loneliness at the center of care. The therapist who holds a hundred stories and tells none of her own. The nurse, the chaplain, the coach, the community leader, the mother — those who become the still point others lean on, and who quietly wonder who is holding them. Ubiraci names it plainly, in the language of his people's practice: «Quem cuida de tanta gente precisa de cuidados» — whoever cares for so many needs care, too.

This is the wound the Heal the Healers network exists to tend. In times of crisis, those who care for others also need a place to stop, to reconnect, and to feel accompanied. Not another training. Not another set of tools. A space to be received. Because Fundamental Peace is also born the moment no one has to care in solitude — «cuando nadie tiene que cuidar en soledad».

Care that only flows outward eventually runs dry; this is not a failure of character but a fact of physics. What restores the healer is not more effort but reciprocity — the turning of care back toward the one who gives it. A network rather than a hierarchy. A web, in which each of us is, at once, holding and held.

The Meeting

We are all relatives

Ubiraci comes from Coroa Vermelha, the community his father, Pajé Itambé, helped to found — today the largest urban Indigenous village in Latin America. He is a practitioner of Integrative Community Therapy and a researcher in a project whose name says almost everything on its own: the Web of the Five Healings — We Are All Relatives — which tends the healing of thoughts, feelings, relationships, ecological cycles, and economic exchanges. Ancestral wisdom and present wisdom, spoken in the same breath.

Co-creation is the opposite of extraction. It would be easy — and it would be a betrayal — to treat Indigenous knowledge as a resource to be mined for a Western wellness market. We refuse that. What we are building is a relationship between equals: two traditions of healing meeting as relatives, each keeping its own root, each learning the other's language.

This is the ancestral future made concrete. Not a nostalgia for the past, but a spiral back toward what we always knew: that healing is relational, that the earth is kin, and that peace is something we weave, together, thread by thread.

The Circle

Sit with us — Wednesday, 15 July, online

We invite you to a conversation on presence, compassion, and the importance of accompanying those who sustain people, families, and communities in their most challenging moments.

📅 Wednesday, 15 July — online via Zoom · 🕑 14:00 Brazil & Argentina · 15:00 USA (ET) · 11:00 México · 19:00 España.

🔗 Register: https://happinessagora.zoom.us/meeting/register/g75R34mIRGqMEj8x1G6whw

The future is ancestral. Peace is a relationship. And the circle is open.