In this opening episode, Ethos shares their personal story as a trans-masculine, non-binary person raised in Mormonism, shaped by colonial cosmologies of separability, and transformed through education, somatic practice, relational inquiry, and lived experience inside the collapse of empire.

Tracing a journey from early gendered misrecognition, chronic depression, and survival through structure, to the liberatory impact of dialogical education and somatic healing, this episode introduces the foundational questions that guide Compost the Empire: How does modernity shape our nervous systems, our relationships, and our sense of self? What happens when rupture is no longer moralized as “good” or “bad,” but understood as a portal for repair, accountability, and post-traumatic growth?

Ethos introduces the conceptual map behind their work—drawing inspiration from decolonial thinkers such as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira—including the four core needs of being alive, the wounds produced by separability, neurocolonization as an operating system of empire, and the distinction between conflict cycles, collapse, repair, and trust-building.

This episode is not a manifesto or a prescription. It is an offering—a story shared as an invitation into deeper relational integrity, somatic accountability, and collective remembering. A doorway into the ongoing exploration known as The Alchemy of Rupture.

Listen if you’re curious about decolonization beyond ideology, healing beyond bypass, and what it might mean to live in right relation with yourself, others, and the living world.