Todd Elliott — Kentucky farmer, Reiki master, Druid, and author of The Cunning Farmer — joins us to talk about what happens when you stop separating farm work from spirit work.

We cover how he consults the land spirits and ancestors on his own farm, how he uses Reiki to send healing into land that's been traumatized by violence and destruction, what he learned from a pilgrimage to the astronomically-aligned earthworks of the Adena and Hopewell cultures in southern Ohio, and how he actually times planting (and magic) to the moon's movement through the zodiac signs. We also dig into harder questions: reconciling ancestral Christianity with pagan and animist practice, telling authentic tradition apart from "fakelore," working ethically with entheogenic and baneful plants, and whether every forest deserves to be treated as a sacred grove.

If you believe the land is alive and listening, this conversation is for you.

📖 Get the book: The Cunning Farmer (Inner Traditions) — https://www.innertraditions.com/the-cunning-farmer
🌐 More from Todd: thecunningfarmer.com | thecunningfarmer.substack.com
📷 Instagram/Facebook: @TheCunningFarmer

Pan Society

In this episode, we explore discernment — the ancient art of self-governing when there's no outside authority to tell you what's right. We look at how animist councils made decisions together, and how you can build that same council inside yourself: your body, your inner voices, and time itself. Learn to tell fear apart from wisdom, desire apart from calling, and pressure apart from a true pull. Includes a three-stage discernment practice you can use on a real decision today.

🌿 Part of our Sovereignty series. Be sure to listen to the others in this series.

Ever feel like you used to sense something alive in nature, but modern life numbed it? This episode breaks down 16 everyday habits that block a lived, reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world — and what animism actually asks of us in return.

We're not just talking about "believing trees have spirits." Animism is a two-way relationship: giving as well as taking, noticing as well as being noticed, owing as well as receiving. This episode maps exactly where modern Western life severs that exchange — from clock time to grocery store meat to consumer-rights thinking — and opens the door back into relationship.

🌲 Topics covered:

• What animism actually means (it's not what you learned in school)
• Why reciprocity is the missing piece most nature-spirituality content skips
• 16 specific modern habits that block lived animist experience
• Practical entry points back into relationship with land, plants, animals, and place

If you're into earth-based spirituality, animism, land-based practice, reciprocity with nature, or just want to understand why modern life feels so disenchanted — this one's for you.

Learn more here:

https://pansociety.net

What if self-sufficiency isn't about needing no one — but about having something real to offer the land? In Episode 5, we explore animist self-sufficiency as reciprocal competence: the skills, craft, and material fluency that let you enter right relationship with the world around you.We dig into the difference between subsistence (dependence on systems) and sovereignty (fluency with materials), why crafting with your hands is a form of spiritual practice, and how Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk reframes hands-on, pattern-based thinking as a way to solve problems holistically — not just abstractly.Topics covered: embodied knowledge, the gift economy, ancestral skills (fermentation, foraging, fire-making, fiber work, building), and why craft is inheritance, not nostalgia.🌱 Field Practice: Learn one hands-on skill this week that turns raw material into something tangible.

Join us https://pansociety.net

Photos, music, videos by Pixabay

Ever feel like there's more than one voice inside you? In this episode, we explore how animist traditions around the world — from Hawaiian Huna to Mongolian shamanism to Lakota soul teachings to West African concepts of the double — understood the self as a council, not a single "I." Learn the difference between being ruled by your inner voices and learning to govern them, how dreams and symptoms are council members trying to speak, and how this ancient idea shows up today in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and the trauma model of structural dissociation. Plus, a simple journaling practice to help you hear your own inner parliament clearly. If you've ever wondered whether your intuition, your wounds, and your ancestors are all talking to you at once — this one's for you.

Join us at Pansociety.net

Musician Mark shares his "think like a proton" philosophy — a way of channeling energy, ritual, and presence into songwriting and performance. We explore how science, poetry, and family shaped his sound, and how staying energetically attuned lets him connect deeply with every audience.

Mark Winters

Pan Society

Where are you, right now — really? In your body, or a step outside it? Living in this moment, or replaying the past and rehearsing the future? This episode maps three layers of "where am I": embodiment, time, and relational position — above, below, behind, in front, beside, with — then zooms out to ask the same questions of our place among rivers, trees, and animals. Includes a three-part field practice for finding your way back to here, now.

Want to go deeper? Join me here:

Pan Society

What happens when you ask permission from a mountain — and then ignore the answer?

In 1996, eight people died on Everest in a single storm. The movie captures the chaos, the courage, and the heartbreak. But it misses the deeper story: the mountain herself.

In this episode, we sit with Chomolungma — the Goddess Mother of the World — and ask what she saw that day. We talk about the Puja ceremony the Sherpas held before the climb, what it actually meant, and what happened when the Western climbers nodded politely and then went right back to their spreadsheets.

We talk about the trash. The bodies left behind. The Sherpas who were treated like pack animals by people who would later write bestselling books. And the quiet, devastating truth at the heart of all of it: the mountain doesn't care about your reasons.

She was here before us. She'll be here after.

This one's for the animists. The ones who knock before they enter. The ones who know the land is listening.

🌿 Topics covered:

• The Puja ceremony and what "asking permission" actually means in practice
• Sherpa cosmology and the goddess Miyolangsangma
• 50+ tons of trash on Everest and what that says about us
• The human motivations that sent people past their limits
• Beck Weathers, Yasuko Namba, and the ethics of leaving someone behind
• Why Nature is the only story that was never going to end with us
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https://pansociety.net

What if the antidote to evil has been living in the rivers, roots, and rituals of Earth-based spirituality all along?

We explore Evan Longin's theory of what makes widespread harm possible — binary thinking, controlled information, oversimplified answers, and unchecked power — and ask whether animism, one of humanity's oldest worldviews, naturally resists all four.

For anyone who talks to trees, grieves the animals they eat, or feels the river has something to say.

See us at https://pansociety.net

What does it mean to truly govern yourself in a world designed to fragment your attention and outsource your choices? In Episode 1 of this series, we explore sovereignty not as power or isolation — but as coherent self-governance in relationship. Through an animist lens, we look at why you can only genuinely connect with the living world (trees, rivers, ancestors, dreams) when you show up as genuinely yourself — and how consumer culture, social media, and algorithmic life quietly erode that self. We introduce the six-part arc of the series (Root → Perceive → Discern → Choose → Defend → Regenerate) and leave you with a simple but powerful field practice to try this week.

Want to go deeper? Join me here:https://www.pansociety.net