In ancestral and indigenous cultures the world over, there exist bodies of restorative practice designed to help people return to a baseline of safety and connection when stress, threat, trauma, illness, or disaster moved people away from it. This book unites cutting-edge neurophysiology, primarily the application of Polyvagal Theory, with an array of ancestral awareness technologies. It integrates applied mindfulness, neurophysiology, somatic and emotional awareness, anti-racism, deep nature connection, cultural linguistics, and Indigenous Lifeways into a coherent framework in service of deepening connection with Self, One Another, and the Living World. It introduces hundreds of targeted neural exercises designed to restore connection: with the present moment, with ourselves, our bodies, our senses, our emotions, with one another, and with Nature. It is a guide to reclaiming the roots of our shared humanity: a doorway to the ancestral future.

For the past twenty-six years Natureza Gabriel has been assembling a map of untranslatable words. He started doing this because he needed them himself, and because each one he discovered reassured him, in some bone-deep way, that he wasn't the first or only person to have a specific feeling, experience, or intuition. This made him feel less alone. Keywords is a book filled with words missing from the English language, which particularly address aspects of our internal worlds, inter-personal worlds, and our relatedness with the more-than-human natural world that simply don't exist in English. Gabriel gathered them, over time, from 46 different languages.

Children like to ask why. They want to know how things got to be this way? What is the nature of this world we are thrust into, and how come it is set up like this?

In this collection of stories for the children in all of us, connection phenomenologist Natureza Gabriel explores the original language, the fireplace at the center of the village, how humans are like water, and other things it might be useful for children to understand if they want to grow up to be adults whose hearts are telling their minds what to do.