Lakota John Interview

Summary

The conversation explores indigenous spirituality, the relationship between human beings and nature, and the effects of cultural disruption and trauma. It also considers how reconnecting with inner identity, ancestral wisdom, and the natural world can support personal and collective healing.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can a person reconnect with their deeper identity after trauma and social conditioning?
• What can indigenous spiritual traditions teach modern society about living in balance with nature?
• How can people heal ancestral and personal wounds that continue to shape their lives?
• What role do ancestors and the unseen world play in spiritual growth?

Key takeaways

• Trauma can fragment the connection between spirit, soul, body, and mind.
• Healing begins by recognizing harmful patterns and returning to inner integrity.
• Indigenous traditions emphasize reciprocity, restraint, and respect for nature.
• The circle represents balance, connection, and living in harmony with natural rhythms.
• Personal healing can help transform inherited patterns across generations.
• Ancestors are viewed as continuing sources of guidance and connection.

Transcript

Rick: My name is Rick Archer. Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 400 of them by now. If this is new to you and you’d like to see others, please go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site. Much gratitude to those who have been supporting it.

My guest today is Lakota John. And how do you pronounce your name properly? Hoksila?

Lakota John: Hoksila Lakota.

Rick: Say it again?

Lakota John: Hoksila Lakota.

Rick: Good. It’s better that you pronounce these things than I. I’ll just call you John, for simplicity’s sake.

John is the first Native American person I’ve had on the show. A number of people have requested that we do a show about Native American spirituality, and so we’ll talk about that. But I think we’re going to broaden it out to talk about indigenous spirituality in general.

Indigenous Attunement to Nature’s Deeper Laws

There are some really interesting points that I think we can get into about the importance of the attunement of indigenous peoples to the deeper laws of nature, how important that is for general society, and how the reawakening of that attunement in indigenous cultures will have an impact on the larger society out of proportion to their numbers.

So let me just read a little bio of John. He is considered an Earth Man. What’s the Lakota for Earth Man, John?

Lakota John: [Ha, we, Joshua,]

Rick: Thank you. He is deeply connected to all things, understands their frequencies, and knows how to move with and through them. John gracefully walks the balance between the world of spirit and the material world, and brings to us a unique combination of gifts, along with a great store of accumulated wisdom and sacred universal knowledge.

I should add that he dedicates himself to helping people—to helping troubled youth, helping people who are considering suicide, and helping people who are mixed up in drugs. He also kind of walks his talk, I guess you might say.

John is down in New Zealand at the moment, and he spends a lot of time there, actually, and has been for a number of years. In the course of this interview, he’ll explain why that is.

Rick: So, for starters, John, let’s get to know you a little bit in terms of your childhood—anything that you find relevant. A lot of times I interview people who had certain experiences during their childhood that were perhaps signs that later in life they would be interested in spirituality. Then there’s almost a universal pattern where you get into your teenage years and kind of lose that innocence you had as a child. If I’m interviewing them, they have somehow regained that innocence and enthusiasm for deeper values of life. So how did that go for you? What was the pattern in your life?

Lakota John: Well, it’s amazing that you say that—the losing of innocence. To us, everything moves in sevens: conception to seven, seven to fourteen, fourteen to twenty-one, twenty-one to twenty-eight. And it moves.

Rick: When you say us, is that a Lakota tradition?

Lakota John: Well, yeah. I mean, everything kind of rolls within this diagram of the medicine wheel, the four corners, and the four directions.

What happens in life is that when we go through traumatic events—or sometimes we can even be born with different things and character defects, and so on and so forth—they take us off that course. That’s kind of like what we talk about in the betrayal of your inner self or your inner sense. Once you do that, you lose your identity.

Before you know it, you become dyslexic, because good becomes bad and bad becomes good in your world. Then later on, you find yourself moving with attention deficit because you can’t stay focused and single.

When traumatic events come into our lives and create this separation, there’s a wedge between the spirit and soul, the soul and body, and the body and mind. It completely fragments us—or fragments the Sacred Hoop, or, as [Ozawa], our energetic field, the EMF.

When events and things come at us, it’s like the cell, for instance. When you take the cell, you have your cell wall, and things get in and begin to distort and go after the nucleus. It’s no different from these things out there moving outside of us. They come into our worlds, going into the spirit and soul of who we are.

When you betray your inner self, you lose your identity.

That’s what creates, I truly believe, the separation that takes place through this thing that we go through—the betrayal of oneself.

Rick: I was thinking of how to explain meditation to a young friend who had expressed interest in it. The thought that came to mind was that, most deeply, we’re pure spirit. We’re the vast, innocent ocean of potentiality, bliss, intelligence, wisdom, or whatever you want to call it.

The sensory bombardment of life tends to overshadow that. The old analogy uses the way movies playing on a movie screen overshadow the screen, so you no longer see it. Then you begin to take the movie totally seriously and forget about the underlying screen.

Meditation might be a way of diminishing the intensity of the movie, at least momentarily, so that you can appreciate the underlying screen again—in this case, to appreciate your innermost nature, no longer impacted or overwhelmed by sensory input.

Meditation might be a way of diminishing the intensity of the movie, at least momentarily, so that you can appreciate the underlying screen again—in this case, to appreciate your innermost nature, no longer impacted or overwhelmed by sensory input.

If you do that regularly and frequently, it becomes a stable, standard feature of your experience, so that you can enjoy the outer world while maintaining one foot in the inner world, so to speak. Would you concur with that explanation?

Lakota John: Yeah. You look at the World Wide Web. It’s really easy to get stuck in that web. I deal with a lot of individuals who struggle with pornography and all sorts of different things that take them away from their original Self.

I truly believe that there’s an inner Self that’s connected to a spiritual DNA, which ties back into the First Estate. The second is the outer part, the micro of the macro, which ties us back into our genetic makeup, our thoughts, our bodies, and our appetites.

But that moves more on that linear line that we talk about, which consists of mom and dad, cell, and matter. They come together and create that biological side to us.

When we start looking at the vertical, we take it to a higher level of understanding, because I truly believe that when we connect the heart and go down this pattern here, this vertical, connecting the unseen [I] with the garden, I would say, getting back to heart space and innocence, then things ignite.

When you’re open to the universe, you will receive the knowledge that you need to give to another human being.

Rick: And how do we do that? I mean, it sounds good in principle, but in practice, how do you enable a person to do that?

Lakota John: Well, it’s actually getting out of the square—getting out of square thinking.

A lot of us today—for instance, you take the scroll, which is round, with ancient writing that comes off the skin of a tree. You take the scroll with the ancient writing and stick it in a book with four corners, and you get stuck in that book, no different from your television screen. It’s no different from any institution that’s teaching you to step away from the Sacred Feminine, the round Earth.

Everything God creates is round. When governments came into our world, they took us out of the teepee, which was round, and put us in square homes, and we became sick. That was a prophecy of one of our ancestors who was talking about the round versus the square.

When you look at your driver’s license, your birth certificate, and all these squares that we get stuck in, then we’re in the box. We’re not even original anymore. We have to get back to the circle again and get back to the reality of life—that we are spiritual beings out here, sharing all this different knowledge that we bring with us from the First Estate.

Rick: What’s the First Estate? What do you mean by that term?

Lakota John: We call it the spirit world.

When we’re spirit and we come down to Earth, we have to connect to Earth to experience the breath of life and become the living soul.

Each and every one of us had to come to Earth to experience that exchange between the tree and man. When you look at that exchange, it’s a universal exchange.

A lot of us say, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m going to hold on to these gifts, because I’m not going to give them away. You have to pay for them,” or, “This is mine, and that’s yours,” creating separatism within our worlds.

The tree doesn’t argue. The tree continues to bear fruit. A tree doesn’t even argue when the seed gets pushed into the ground. With us, it’s like somebody wrongs us, and the first thing we want to do is get upset and hold them hostage.

Kauri Dieback and the Tree’s Message

Rick: I heard that initially you were involved in this kauri restoration project, or you were at some point. That’s the kind of tree in New Zealand. You said, as if the tree were speaking, “I am dying from the inside out. And so are you. Listen.” There’s some really interesting stuff that you wrote about it. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit about how you got involved in that and what it was.

Lakota John: I came to New Zealand, and I’m fascinated with trees because we are basically a carbon copy of this thing called a tree. We have seed and soil, we come from mom and dad, and we grow and basically produce fruit.

I came out to New Zealand to take a look at some of the sacred trees. I went and spent some time underneath the kauri tree in fasting, prayer, and song.

I was looking at the tree and trying to understand this dieback disease that’s attacking it. It comes in unseen. They’re saying, “Well, is it coming through the root? Where’s this coming from?” Because the tree is dying.

Examining that, I went into prayer, and the tree said, “Yeah, look at me. I’m dying from the inside out. And so are the indigenous people all across the board.”

So what is this dieback disease? What is this unseen enemy that’s coming in? Well, it’s pride, ego, drugs, alcohol, and everything negative that’s coming in to destroy the human being.

Or you could even say the human cell. It’s the nucleus, the spiritual part of who we are, that’s under attack right now. That’s the way I see it.

They should get back to understanding the tree of life. You can say, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m going to put the brakes on here, and I’m going to start cutting and pruning the tree,” meaning thinning things out and getting things out of your life that don’t really serve you.

Eat right, get rid of bad habits, and before you know it, you’re at that place of living.

🕊️ Circle and square in traditional cultures

Rick: When you think about indigenous cultures around the world and read about them, there’s a certain sense that, at one point, maybe not that long ago, many of them were kind of idyllic and possessed a great deal of wisdom. The Māori, for instance, in its heyday, or the Native Americans, or the Bushmen of Southern Africa, certain cultures in the Himalayas, and so on.

And then Western culture came crashing into all these indigenous cultures and severely disrupted them. So what was it about the indigenous culture that enabled them to be that way? And what is it about Western culture that ruined them, essentially?

Lakota John: Well, it’s going back to the Circle and the Square. I was talking to an elder here in New Zealand. He was saying, “Well, when I was a boy, our houses were round.” But the Europeans came and started cutting down the ancient trees and milling them, and then created a square home for them, which they call the [mother eye].

The old guy was telling me that the energy didn’t flow the same. It’s taking the indigenous people out of the round and putting them into the square, and then dumping all that left-brain system on them, which is academia; changing the language, changing the vowels: Ah, Eh, Ee, Oh, Oo to A, E, I, O, U.

It breaks the frequency with prayer and connection to the star knowledge and the song, and our ancestors that walked the earth 200, 300, 400, 500 years or more ago. But there’s nothing wrong with education if you can retain your identity. There’s nothing wrong with religion if you can retain your identity.

And what is that identity? It’s the spirit and soul of who you truly are. I always say that when the heart feels something and the breath says contrary, the words come off your tongue with a split. Because when a person doesn’t really speak what’s in their heart, then the tongue splits and they become devilish. They become the serpent—they speak with a forked tongue.

Rick: Right. “White man speak with forked tongue?” That old meme from the movies.

Lakota John: That’s because they came in with one idea, but yet they betrayed the people with another: “Here, sign this treaty that we’re going to completely—”

Rick: Ignore.

Lakota John: Not even honor.

🎵 Water, stewardship, and the health of the Earth

There’s that whole thing from the Bible about God giving man dominion over the earth, and so on. It seems to me that was twisted to mean just exploit it to whatever extent you can. But really, if you think of dominion as stewardship, then you nurture it, you take care of it, like you would with your children. You try to protect, nourish, and help. But that’s not the way it went down, is it?

Rick: There’s that whole thing from the Bible about God giving man dominion over the earth, and so on. It seems to me that was twisted to mean just exploit it to whatever extent you can. But really, if you think of dominion as stewardship, then you nurture it, you take care of it, like you would with your children. You try to protect, nourish, and help. But that’s not the way it went down, is it?

Lakota John: Well, we’ve basically stepped away from the blessing, because everything—even the air that goes in and out of our body—is a blessing. The water, the water is sacred, and there’s a lot going on with the water.

You take big corporations and individuals that are completely—even the farming industry. Out here in New Zealand, it’s the nitrates and everything else they’re dumping on the land. It’s contaminating the water source. Later on, two more generations, where are we going to get clean water?

And you look at other countries that really struggle with having clean water. But to me, I really believe that the stuff going on in South Dakota with the pipeline and everything that’s happening is showing us what we really need to focus on: the water within, our blood, and how things move from our heart.

You know how the heart pumps blood throughout the whole body to sustain it. Now, is that blood pure? Is your intent pure? Is your heart pure, so that you can take action with that pure water flowing through you? Or have you been contaminated generations back, and you have this hate going on within you, or something going on to basically make the blood puddle—they call it here in New Zealand—dirty?

We have to clean up within our lives before things change outside of our lives.

So these are things that we have to clean up within our lives before they go on outside of our lives.

Rick: Do you think it’s really true that if you go back four or five hundred years—let’s take Native Americans, for example—they really were attuned to nature? Because you hear stories of warfare among tribes and all sorts of hideous tortures. Even without Western intervention, do you think there might have been a degeneration of the attunement to natural law among indigenous cultures that made them vulnerable to Western invasion?

Lakota John: People in all cultures will slack from time to time and not go out, harvest, and do what they needed to do. Now, this is how in tune our people were on the plains, on my dad’s side.

When you go out to the plains, you can see for miles. So it’s like, “Where are the buffalo? Winter’s coming. How are we going to sustain ourselves?” Well, the society—the buffalo society—would go out and prepare to actually call the buffalo in.

So they would load the pipes, they would do the ceremony, they would do the buffalo dance, they would acknowledge the ancestors, and they would begin to send the smoke up. Our ancestors would pick up on that and take it and push the buffalo to us.

Buffalo Hunting as Sacred Stewardship

Then the buffalo scouts would go out in the four directions until they spotted the buffalo. They would pray with the horses, remove the sacred garment, and go out and only take what the buffalo gave them. They didn’t take more than they needed.

Then the buffalo scouts would go out in the four directions until they spotted the buffalo. They would pray with the horses, remove the sacred garment, and go out and only take what the buffalo gave them. They didn’t take more than they needed.

Even if the buffalo gave them, say, 30 buffalo for that season, the community would come together and say, “We need to divvy this up and do this the right way, so we don’t eat it all in one day.” Everyone worked together to make it easier for the elders and the children.

Back in those days, everything moved in a matriarchal system. The matriarch held the lodge. The Earth was in a matriotic system.

But when they came in with, “Let’s turn the Earth Mother and put it into the patriarchal system,” they knew that, following Henry the Eighth, that system would only sustain itself for maybe up to four generations. Because if you don’t have any men, then comes seizure of properties and lands.

So when you look at New Zealand, when the land was in the matriotic system, it would go on forever. But when they took the land from the matriarch into the patriarch, then it would only last up to four generations, and then they could confiscate it. And that’s how the lands were taken.

And not only that, we changed the frequency of Earth Mother to male. So what’s happening to our children today?

Rick: To reiterate, you’re saying that the more traditional native cultures had a matriarchal foundation, and the European or Western cultures which came in were patriarchal and disrupted that balance.

Lakota John: Exactly. And it came with church, government, belief systems. They figured, if we can convince the indigenous people to do the same, then things will happen where we can go in, in a few generations, and basically confiscate lands.

Rick: People were forced into Christianity. They were forced—even beaten if they spoke their native tongue. They were forced to speak English, and so on. So this was basically a complete disruption and destruction of the cultures.

Lakota John: They were even forced into incest. There’s a lot of stuff that’s taken place in indigenous country that, man, it’s been a rough journey for our people—for all the indigenous.

🩺 Healing ancestral trauma

I work with the Aboriginals as well in Australia, and they have the same story. But what we’re doing now is going back into the cell memory and going back generations, because in my practice, we heal from back to front.

We don’t just deal with the immediate. We look at—we chase these disorders back and corner them, and then actually take them completely out of the individual’s life.

Rick: Let’s explore that. You’re not dwelling on the atrocities that were committed since the time of Christopher Columbus. You’re offering something which can heal that.

Lakota John: When you hold on to traumatic events, you become acidic, and you become very ill, degenerating. You’re holding on to the past, and you’re stuck there.

We all have a past, and our ancestors live with us because they’re part of our genetic makeup, on that linear level as well as vertical, because they’re connected to—we believe that they’re in the wind, and they’re in everything.

When we take a breath, and we walk for the many, and we walk as a person that’s principally driven and spiritually grounded, and we’re the pure love that we are, we stand here as a proxy for our ancestors that have taken the journey.

When we begin to look at our truth and our integrity, it comes from within. And our ancestors are saying, “Hey, well done. Keep it up.”

Rick: Let’s talk about ancestors for a minute. In Hinduism, they’re called the Pitris in the Vedic culture. There are rituals that are done to help the Pitris, to uplift them, to liberate them, and so on. It’s considered to be reciprocal: you help them, they help you. Elaborate on that in terms of your understanding of Native American culture.

Lakota John: There is no separation between us and our ancestors. To us, by saying a name, we invoke them, and they come into our place and time.

Society teaches you that the Earth and this life is it, so do all that you can to feed the animal, and then later on worry about it when you get to the other side. But in my life, I used to like to drink and carry on. That was feeding the animal, these lower realms, but I was stuck there.

Once I started spiraling in and getting to the inspiring part of me, then I started to aspire and spiral up, connecting more and more with my ancestors in the unseen world. Because to us, we put more focus on the unseen rather than the seen.

That’s just like the tree. When you look at the tree, you see the tree, but you don’t see the root system. The plants are all interconnected; they have a network, no different from you and me here now.

Rick: Is there a sense of reincarnation, where people come back again? How does it work?

Lakota John: Our connection with our people never ended. It was never severed, basically. That’s why, with us, we have no limits to what we believe. That’s how we can connect with the eagle and actually see things from up there looking down. There was no limitation to our belief and connection to the stars and everything else.

Our people stayed in senses. They didn’t really go into science because they didn’t have anything to prove. They didn’t have to say, “Look at how smart I am. Look at the knowledge I carry and the degrees that I have hanging on my walls.” That’s just knowledge. What about your life? What’s in your heart? What’s coming out of your mouth?

To us, everything comes in energetically before it manifests in the physical. When it starts to manifest in the physical, then you know that somewhere down the line, it has crept in at a root level and taken you completely off track.

Rick: Trying to solve problems, or trying to change life, just by remaining on the horizontal level at which you already reside isn’t going to get you very far. You need to access the vertical and get down to the deeper values of the spirit, which underlie the apparent superficial values of life. Is that what you’re saying?

Lakota John: They say the longest journey is from here to here. When you can get out of your head and get into your heart, you’re into your innocence, or inner sense. When you can get to the inner sense, you’re back in this place called the Garden of Eden.

But once you get to the garden, remember, there are trees in the garden, including the Tree of Good and Evil: duality. When you play with this thing called duality, you’re dying spiritually, because you’re playing with dark and light constantly.

If you can take the journey back from heart space to here, which is where the Tree of Life resides to us, in the pineal and pituitary, and you can get underneath that Tree of Life, then things really make sense. Then you know that life goes on, because we are immortal. We’re infinite—the spirit inside of us, the soul inside of us.

What we don’t want to do is take the journey where there’s spirit-and-soul division, where the spirit goes one way and the soul goes another. When you tell a lie, you split yourself.

Rick: By spirit, do you mean the Universal Spirit, and by soul do you mean individual soul?

Lakota John: There are four parts of us. There’s the spirit, the soul, the body, and the mind.

The soul, to us, lives within the breath of life. That’s the essence of who we are. But the spirit has its true identity. We come from the spirit world with attributes and talents and identity.

What happens is the square system tells you, “Your identity lives here, and this is what you should be.” But this is surrogate power. The mind begins to try to govern the heart, when it should be the other way around, where the spirit ends up governing the mind.

In the Medicine Wheel, when we go clockwise, we go mental, spiritual, emotional, physical, and back up into the mental. When we go counterclockwise, it goes mental, physical, emotional, or in the soul level, back to spiritual. So we’re going backwards.

The spirit and soul will never betray you. Your innocence will never betray you, but your mind will get you into trouble. Every time I get a thought, I take it to the spiritual side of me and say, “Is this really good? Is it going to edify me and help me get to higher places of aspiration?”

Immediately, if it’s not, the spirit will reject it and say, “Don’t even go there.”

Openness, grounding, and discernment

Even in meditation, you can go into meditation, but there are weight-bearing walls that shouldn’t be torn down, because the roof will come down on you. There are things that we have to be careful with when we step into that realm.

We don’t want to just become open to whatever is out there, because sexual energy can come in, and before you know it, all you’re thinking about is sex.

Rick: A young man needs help. He is so cracked open that he’s hearing everybody’s thoughts, and he’s getting all this information that he doesn’t know how to deal with. He doesn’t have any grounding. This kind of thing is happening to a lot of people these days: openness without any shield or filter. They’re overwhelmed and become incapacitated.

Lakota John: That’s because of the generation, the seventh generation that’s here today that’s going to reboot this new spirituality. Well, actually, it’s an old spirituality, but they’re going to separate the common sense from the nonsense, because there’s a lot of nonsense out there.

I’m working always in damage control. People that I meet are like, “This happened.” I’m like, “I’m just glad you’re here today, so we’ll get sorted through it and put you back together again.” Here at the Four Winds and Valor, we do that type of work with people constantly.

Rick: There are a lot of special souls being born whose role it will be to help bring in a more enlightened world, and a lot of these people have difficulties to go through before they’re ready to play that role.

Lakota John: Or connecting with those that can actually lead them and guide them in that way.

In our tribal societies, when you took a kid acting out like a horse, immediately you would say, “The horse is connected to that child, and that child will grow up and probably become part of the Horse Society.” Then you take them and develop that talent, and place them in that stewardship.

Today, you take a kid born with these talents, and immediately they say, “You need to be a lawyer,” or “You should be an electrician,” or, “Dancers don’t make good money.” They want to deprive you of this passion that you have inside because they want to put you in a square system.

I think it’s important that when our children are born, we look closely at the attributes they carry and what they aspire to, so that you can build on that, rather than focusing on their F. With education, they focus on the F and forget about what you’re good at.

The four colors and a shared future

Rick: A lot of times I’ve heard you say, “We believe,” or “Such and such,” and you’re referring to your Native culture’s wisdom. Are you referring to Lakota culture?

Lakota John: On the Medicine Wheel, there are four colors: red, yellow, black, and white. The red man represents the Indigenous people, the Earth people. The yellow man represents the Asians, which is the one that balances the yin and yang. Black people are athletic; they’re dancers, the Africans. The white people are the analytical thinkers.

In that Medicine Wheel, it’s balancing the spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental—the attributes of the four colors—to bring it to your corner, your center.

Rick: That must be a relatively new understanding, because a few hundred years ago Native American people would not even have seen yellow, white, or black people.

Lakota John: This was a prophecy that came through our ancestors and elders. No different from the four colors coming together under the sacred tree.

It’s coming together as a people, as a collaboration, which is happening now. More of our Indigenous people are becoming more open to sharing spirituality, because life won’t go on with this separatism: “You go that way, and I go this way.”

We have to come together to share that knowledge and bring it all together for this generation, to groom them to be great thinkers and great leaders.

To go back to the vertical line and really connect with sky and Earth, which is the spirituality in the soul—the Spirit and the soul of who we truly are. We had to touch ground before we became the living soul. We had to come to Earth to understand that exchange and the law of correlation.

Rick: So what do you do on a daily basis to enrich and deepen your own connection with Spirit?

Lakota John: I sleep until about three in the afternoon. No, what I usually do is, in the mornings at four o’clock—I’m always up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning—because that’s quiet time for me, reflection.

I go into meditation or prayer, or drum songs out, and really converse with the universe: “What would you have me do today? Because I’m a servant. Give me an experience today to share my love, my experience, faith, and hope with another human being to help them get to a better place.”

Tracing Trauma from Conception to Age Seven

To me, it’s like we’re not healers. We just come in with the toolbox and say, “Here, this tool does this; this tool does that.” When I work with people, it’s, “Let’s look at conception to seven. Let’s dissect that seven years of your life. What took place? What were Mom and Dad thinking at the time of your conception? Was it scarcity? Was it fear?”

Lakota John: I was born two months premature. My sister was extremely ill. She was a firstborn. My parents were filled with grief because they didn’t know whether she was going to make it or not.

Then I came on the scene. My mother had that same fear as I was in the womb, so that fear was so unbearable, I had to come out. I came two months early, but I was put in an incubator, and I never connected with my mother’s breast.

Every time my mother tried to put me down, I would scream in a panic. Through all my adult life, I was out searching for my mother’s breast in one failed relationship after another, until I went back. I went into a sweat lodge and prayer and found out, “This thing happened way before you even took the breath of life.”

I had to go back before I could move forward.

Going back to my mother and making the wrong right, before you know it, the healing took place within me. I said, “Forgive me for being born at that time.” Then my appetites for the breast fell by the wayside. I didn’t have to go looking for relationships.

It took me having to go back before I could move forward, to really look at these character defects that I was born with. It enlightened my world in recovery and teaching people how to take traumatic events and deal with them, so that they do not live in the cell memory. And it isn’t just in your brain; it’s throughout your whole body.

Rick: Sweat lodge, prayer, drumming, chanting, things like that?

Lakota John: Fasting, praying.

Rick: And when you work with others, do you give them the same tools?

Lakota John: We start by looking into an individual’s eyes and looking at what’s there. The eyes are the windows to the soul. You can look into the eyes and do a little bit of iridology, look at traces, their hands and hair, and the features on their face. Before you know it, you’re pulling things out of them that they wouldn’t really share with another human being. Then you can give them the tools to fix it.

When I meet people, it’s like, do I have permission to speak to your inner self, which is your spirit? Our spirits will communicate, and they will not lie. But if I sit back and I’m moving on ego or pride, and I’m using somebody else’s work, I’m going to misdiagnose.

Rick: So if they give you that permission, then you tune into them and offer them something to reconnect themselves with Spirit.

Lakota John: Right. And then we started looking at the physical end of it.

Rick: Like health, diet, and things like that?

Lakota John: Testing the blood—what’s living in the blood? Why is the nucleus under attack? Why are the cell walls weak? We have to look at all that.

👁️ The sweat lodge and different ways of seeing

Rick: It sounds like you’re taking a blend of ancient and modern. You’re referring to the pineal and pituitary glands, DNA, and cell walls. This is all stuff that the Native American cultures didn’t even know about. It sounds like you’re taking the best of both worlds and coming up with therapies.

Lakota John: We did know about it, because this is our culture right here: the sweat lodge.

Rick: Okay, but—

Lakota John: You see, the sweat lodge is a cell. Going into the lodge is actually going into the cell memory and extracting.

People today who are diagnosed as schizophrenic—in our culture, it was a blessing. Those people worked between the two worlds. They were given their own teepee, their own lodge, because when you wanted to connect with an ancestor who had passed, you would go directly to them. They would channel, and they would give you the answers from the unseen world to the visible, seen world. So that was held in high regard.

If a man was born feminine and had feminine traits, he didn’t go out and say, “Well, I’m gay, I’m going to sleep with all the warriors.” What he did was remain celibate. He could sit in a female circle as well as a male circle and balance those two energies. They were held in high regard, because a man who could sit in a female circle and have the virtue to bring in the principle without it being distorted was a gift.

Rick: Are you suggesting that gay people are misguided if they have relationships with the same sex?

Lakota John: No. What I’m suggesting is that we have to look at whether it’s love or stimulation. My whole life doesn’t revolve around sex. That’s just an energy in motion, just stimulation. My love comes from here, not my sex gland.

To me, I love myself; I’m married to myself. So this way, I could even be married to you. But that doesn’t mean that we’re attracted to each other and we’re going to go sleep together and stimulate one another.

If we can get past the animal, which is the sex part, then I really believe that if we examine ourselves, we can get it right. I’m not saying it’s right, or I’m saying it’s wrong, because I have a lot of gay friends and I love them to death.

Rick: To speak in tantric terms, the energy can be sublimated and raised up, so that it’s not down in the second chakra, but risen up to the heart chakra.

Lakota John: Exactly. We take a thought and we’ll either move it into the body, or we’ll take it to the Spirit. That’s where the battle exists. When I fall into the body, I’m in the animal. I’m pleasure-seeking. But if I take it to the Spirit, the Spirit might say, “Don’t eat for three days.” Let’s put this body in check.

In Christianity, the Master—before he became the Master—went on a hilltop for 40 days. The first thing he overcomes is his appetites: “Turn the stones into bread.” The second thing he overcomes is his ego. Then he overcomes his pride.

If we can overcome the world, then we can have angelic beings, celestial beings, minister unto us. We have to get out of the animal, get out of our ego, and get out of our pride. Then we have the reception.

What does it take to have a connection with another individual? It takes a proposal, an engagement, a wedding, and a reception. What am I proposing today? To quit what I’m doing. How would I engage with it? How will I marry it and fuse it so that my reception can be turned on, so I can be switched on at all times?

The marriage comes from marrying the heart, the breath, and the tongue. That’s when you speak your truth. Then nothing but pure thoughts and images move into you, because the mind goes through a renewal process.

But you have to get to the innocence. You have to go through the integration—the marriage—before you can have that renewal of the mind.

🩺 Mental health and the unseen world

Rick: A young man was basically diagnosed as schizophrenic, but was an incredibly deep, intuitive person and was misunderstood. He foresaw his own death and drew pictures of it. He was struck by lightning. His mother began communicating with him once he was on the other side, and he came through with profound, uplifting, evolutionary information.

It was interesting that you mentioned that in the Native culture, schizophrenics were considered to be people who had a foot in both sides, who were tuned into Spirit.

Lakota John: I worked with a woman out here who had been diagnosed schizophrenic and was on every medication under the sun for 15 years. Genealogy out here is huge in New Zealand and in our indigenous world. We have to understand where we come from before we understand where we’re going.

This woman held the genealogy for both sides of her family. I worked with her for a year and a half—sweat lodging, prayer, fasting—and we finally found that the voices she was hearing were the people who were connected to her through genealogy. There was work that she had to do for them. Once she started connecting on those levels, the voices started fading out. Today, she’s a productive individual moving in society and off medication.

Rick: So they were just trying to get through to her, and she wasn’t listening?

Lakota John: She didn’t know where this was coming from. She would see a doctor, they would diagnose her, and give her medication. She was still hearing the voices. They weren’t going to stop.

We started unveiling that and going back and taking a look at it. It was a beautiful thing to see this woman come back. When she first came into my presence, I wouldn’t even touch her. She was so vexed and so contaminated—laughing, crying, just completely out there. She was tormented.

There is hope. If you can dig deep—and it’s really hard for that system, the mental health system, to coin this, model it, and package it. Each individual clinician and therapist really has to know themselves before they can work with another human being.

Four Winds Wellness

Rick: You have this sign behind you, Valor and Tonic, which I guess is the name of the organization you’re working with in New Zealand. Is that an actual physical building, like a center or clinic?

Lakota John: We do. We have a clinic here. We do acupuncture, raindrop therapy, and a lot of different things. We have [an Anon] as well as an outdoor facility where we do the sweat lodging and the questing and Native American crafts.

We have a Four Winds Wellness in America, Australia, and New Zealand. We work in different areas to facilitate and give to the people what they need.

Rick: Where’s the one in America?

Lakota John: In the St. George area.

Rick: St. George, Utah?

Lakota John: Yeah.

I’ve worked on a lot of different wellness centers and trained people how to use the programs that we do to take people through the rites of passage, taking them into a place of connecting.

The Sacred Hoop ceremony and seminars that we teach include drum workshops, rhythm, frequency, and color therapy, because there are systems in the body that connect to the colors. When we take people through color therapy, a specific color takes us back into the system, whether it’s the root, the sex gland, the adrenals, the spleen, solar plexus, liver, heart, lungs, throat, pineal, pituitary, crown, or energetic field.

There are colors connected to it. They reveal where the trauma is and where it’s residing.

Rick: It sounds like you have a whole potpourri of different therapies and tactics, some traditional and ancient and originating from your culture, and others from modern sources. You’re taking whatever works.

Lakota John: You’ve got to intermarry everything. The more tools you have in your toolbox, as long as you’re connected to Spirit, you’re not going to misdiagnose.

If we can build that relationship and get past the fear and separation—“You’re white, non-Native, or black”—then we can get to that place of wellness, taking you to higher levels of understanding and where it really came from.

Rick: How many people are you working with at any given time?

Lakota John: I’m working with 15 or 20 at a time, sometimes 150 at a time. I do one-on-ones and group work. When they go into the sweat lodge, they know what they’re getting. They know what each direction means. They know the song and whatever’s going on in that lodge. It’s not a mystery.

Rick: I suspect that you do the sweat lodge in a safe and responsible way, because there was some guy who didn’t know what he was doing who killed a couple of people in Arizona.

Lakota John: You’ve got to look at your right to do it. Did he have the right to do that? Did he just learn it somewhere and want to capitalize on it for money?

A lot of times, when we look at what we do as medicine people, and there’s that exchange with money, sometimes it’ll defile what we’re doing. If we start putting our intention more on the money rather than the healing, then you start losing your talent and your gift.

Rick: How do you deal with that?

Lakota John: Residual income—creating things that create residual income. This way, if you have a single mother who needs some help, you’re not saying, “If you don’t pay me 150 bucks an hour, I can’t see you.” Let’s work out a barter system where you come in and do something for the organization, and we’ll give you the treatment.

Rick: Those that have money pay, and that way you’re able to pay the rent.

Lakota John: Nothing is free. And if people get something free, there’s no value to it.

Rick: You want to empower people and not have them dependent on you.

Lakota John: That’s what the welfare system creates. We take it to another level, and that’s mending the nets. This way, they have the tools to fix what’s broken. When things come into their lives, they can sit back and say, “Wait a minute, this is my stuff.” We can open it up, see where it’s going, and find a solution to the problem.

Prophecy, reservations, and the future

Rick: I heard you say in some interview that we better hold on because God’s going to shake the world to wake it up. Do you have a sense, either personally or through your tradition, about where the world might be going in the next decade or two?

Lakota John: There are things happening all over the world today, and there’s an attack on the water.

Rick: Not only the water—the trees, the water, the air.

Lakota John: The frequency is still living in the water. Here in New Zealand, there are places where the water is extremely pure, and I’m grateful to be here to have that experience.

We need to look at what’s happening here—in that heart space—and start looking at the square systems that we’re stuck in. Then learn to nurture the female. I believe that’s a huge thing that needs to happen today: to show unconditional love to the female, instead of looking at the female as an object and using and abusing.

We have to get back to that place, as males, to honor the life-givers. It starts with the water. That’s sacred. It gives life. If we don’t have water, where are we heading as a human species?

Rick: That’s what Standing Rock was about, wasn’t it? The fear that the Dakota Access Pipeline was going to pollute the sacred water.

Lakota John: I look at things in America that are being pre-staged right now. It was shown to me: that pipeline is pre-staged so that when it breaks, it’s all about relocating the Indigenous people. Once they relocate Indigenous people, then they go for the resources underground.

Rick: Are you saying that it will be intentional if that pipeline breaks, so as to give them an excuse to move people?

Lakota John: I’m not saying anything. I pray that it doesn’t happen. With technology today, we don’t even need oil.

Why not get back to the basics and look at technology and alternative powers? We can create a better place on this planet for the next generations. But another generation is going to be so stuck in the box. Are they going to be original thinkers?

Rick: I think there’s a new generation coming in—at least a lot of them—who are a lot more enlightened than their parents and grandparents were. This higher consciousness is being born.

Lakota John: Youth today are so switched on. But in some situations, they’re completely struggling because they’re connected to drugs and different things that are dumbing them down. They don’t have that enthusiasm for going out and making it happen.

It was once said in prophecy, as well as in the four colors of the Medicine Wheel, that working in reverse order, the red in the east governed the land of America. Then the white man came and governed the land, and the black man came and governed the land—Obama. Now the yellow man will come in and govern the land.

Rick: Or orange.

Lakota John: After that cycle, it’ll fall back into the hands of the red man—the Indigenous.

I really believe that we were put on reservations because reservations will become the last stronghold of America. If people will go back to the reservation to learn the ancient ways and how to live in harmony, international banking will not own America because of the reservation systems that have been put in place throughout America.

Rick: There is a sacred connection in traditional cultures to what we might call the laws of nature. Perhaps, in a way, the reservations are the last stand of that connection. Most of them are very troubled, but do you have hope for a resurrection of the spirituality, perhaps starting on the reservations and spreading from there?

Lakota John: It’s moving there. It’s just reigniting that memory. It’s going back to the youth.

People out there have that medicine and that knowledge covered with these heart walls. You just have to get to the heart walls, get to the center, and take people to that place of awakening.

It’s going to come forth not just through tribal lands, but through those who are awakening, with the knowledge to help their people. I don’t believe that we should be separate. I have no boundaries regarding who I work with.

I’ve gotten past the, “I hate the white man for what they did to my people.” I cannot teach what I teach if I’m caught up on something that took place that I can’t even elaborate on because I wasn’t there.

I cannot teach what I teach if I’m caught up on something that took place that I wasn’t there to witness.

✨ Technology, addiction, and spiritual awakening

Rick: There’s that idea of seven generations in Native American wisdom, and so many policies don’t even look ahead one generation. They’re so shortsighted. Companies are thinking of the next quarter’s profits, and we’re not considering what the world might be like 50, 100, or 200 years from now.

Lakota John: Maybe we need to get rid of Trump and bring in Gump.

Rick: Forrest Gump?

Lakota John: It’s going to be pretty interesting to see where it all goes in the next five to ten years.

Rick: There’s that Chinese curse: “May you be born in interesting times.”

Lakota John: I believe that we’ll be able to communicate with people all over the world.

Rick: We are now. You’re in New Zealand, and I’m in Iowa.

Lakota John: We can exchange that and feel good about it, and then it can go to others and keep on going. There are communities out here that are doing the work, growing food, and moving toward that oneness within societies.

Each and every one of us has a stewardship to maintain a community. What are we good at, and what do we like to do? There are some who like to garden, some who like to milk cows, some who like to build homes—

Rick: And some who like to write software.

Lakota John: Right. It’s just putting people in the right place. Right now we’re looking at bringing roundhouses into New Zealand and Australia. You’re seeing the return to the Indigenous.

Rick: In the Vedic culture, they have a term called Dharma. It means the course of action which, for a particular individual, is most appropriate, evolutionary, and suitable for their makeup. The reestablishment of Dharma, of right livelihood, is considered extremely important.

Lakota John: It’s creating that perfect balance. That’s knowing male and female, sky and earth, Mom and Dad, and bringing those four circles together, so you sit right in the middle of it.

When you have that perfect balance, you’re in perfect harmony. You are the love that you are, the truth is coming from your mouth, and your thoughts are pure because you go through the renewal process.

Addiction and trapped emotion

Rick: There’s a terrible opioid epidemic in the United States. People are dying from overdoses every day, and it’s spreading. It says something about what’s going on in the collective consciousness, what people are dealing with, and how they’re trying to numb themselves rather than wake up.

I had this realization when I was 18 that there’s only one way out, and that’s up—up in terms of higher consciousness. If you try to blot it out, you’re just going to have to deal with it again later. I think you say in your book, “Feelings buried alive never die.”

I had this realization when I was 18 that there’s only one way out, and that’s up—up in terms of higher consciousness. If you try to blot it out, you’re just going to have to deal with it again later. I think you say in your book, “Feelings buried alive never die.”

Lakota John: “Sedate” is “see you at another date”—sedate. We tend not to want to deal with the emotion today, so we’ll put it off until tomorrow.

Opiates are huge in America at this time. Young people are getting into pharmaceuticals.

Rick: Then they go from there to heroin, because heroin is cheaper.

Lakota John: They venture off into street drugs and street opiates. I believe it’s traumatic events. You don’t just wake up saying, “I think I need to sedate.” Something has to happen in life to trigger that sedation: trapped emotion.

Let’s look at trapped emotion. Let’s look at traumatic events that create trapped emotion, that create an acidic environment. Let’s look at a toxic environment. Worry, blame, and anger live in the second chamber, and most people who are dealing with anger take a drink and try to sedate it, and it lives in the liver.

We have to go back to peeling the onion and taking a look at what created this energy that’s living within this individual’s world. What event created it? It’s about evaluation. It’s taking it all the way back to really look at it.

Rick: Since this is an epidemic involving millions of people, how do we peel the onion on a mass scale?

Lakota John: You need them to contact the Four Winds Wellness Center.

Rick: I think you’d be a bit overwhelmed.

Lakota John: The sad part about it is it’s an industry. Even when it’s non-pharmaceutical, it’s still an industry. People are making money on it. The more arrests and crime and everything else, the more it fuels the machine.

Why bring in something that works? The systems say, “Why bring something in that works?” This is working really well, because we need more counselors, more prison guards, and more prisons. All it does is fuel shame.

If you don’t have a spiritual awakening, then it doesn’t start anywhere else. The spiritual awakening comes with the sun that rises in the East, and the West is about putting yesterday behind you.

We can create a world of joy, happiness, success, and abundance. It’s just clearing that mindset. You’ve got to jackhammer that concrete out of your head and repour, bringing in this other knowledge and this way of thinking—right thinking—because most of us are really self-destructing just through thought.

Food, genetics, and the modern world

Rick: Is there anything important to you that we haven’t touched upon?

Lakota John: Food! What about food? What’s happening with our food today?

It’s so expensive to buy organic food. The people out here live on bread and flour and fillers, and that’s what’s creating this toxicity within our bodies.

Rick: And diabetes and so on.

Lakota John: Food is a big issue. I believe if we’d all go back to a little square patch of land, create our own gardens, and have the awakening to attend that garden and weed it, that’s a whole other level of discussion.

A lot of us like the quick fix. McDonald’s is really easy: do a drive-through and boom, boom, boom, you’re off—with a stomachache for a couple of days.

Rick: The genetic engineering issue has spiritual implications, because it implies the same tendency to dominate nature that we were talking about earlier—thinking that we can understand better than nature can how the DNA works and how a plant is supposed to develop.

We’re playing God and potentially creating disastrous outcomes, since we don’t fully understand what we’re doing. Monsanto has a seed which, once the plant has grown, can’t be used to plant a new crop. You have to buy more seeds from Monsanto.

Lakota John: With cross-pollination, there could be a plant growing over here with something that kills off another plant. The genetics from this plant can kill off another plant.

They want to get rid of heirloom seeds so they can control the food industry. Once they control the food industry, they control the people. They can put any astronomical number on it and say, “Either you pay for it or die.”

There are people working to counteract that. They’re going out and creating seed banks and doing beautiful work to hold on to what’s right.

When you go through events and different things happen in one’s life, it alters your genetics as well—your way of thinking, the connection to the deities, and to our ancestry. It does the same thing to us.

There’s a physical aspect to this as well as a spiritual aspect. We have to look at both. The body is going to die and go into the earth, into matter, but what happens to the spirit and soul?

Recovering the original blueprint

Rick: Technology has had damaging effects when it isn’t supported by Spirit. But I have a feeling that Pandora’s box has been opened, and we’re not going to get back to a non-technological age. If we survive, it will be something new, in which advanced technologies coexist with a resurgence or renaissance of the Spirit.

Lakota John: I believe that. We’ll be able to communicate with people all over the world, and networking can help communities grow food and move toward oneness.

Rick: You look at your television, it snatches your attention. You look at your phone, it takes your attention.

Lakota John: On the back of the Apple phone there’s an apple with a bite out of it. That goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. We’re all biting into the tree of duality, and we’re all stuck in this World Wide Web.

It keeps us from examining that original blueprint and going back to yourself as a child of God, close to creation. I know that I’m connected to Wakan Tanka, the Creator, and so there is no division and no separation.

Don’t bite into the system that teaches you that you are separate.

Societies will teach you that you’re separate. But don’t believe in that. Don’t bite into that system.

Rick: Sometimes people think that if we really get back to an ideal society, it will be very simple, agrarian, and non-technological. But if we look forward 50 years, we could have a very advanced technological state and also be very advanced spiritually.

Lakota John: It’s putting people in the right place. Some like to garden, some like to milk cows, some like to build homes, and some like to write software.

We have to get through the past before we can get into the future. The past is going back and taking a look at character defects that we were born with—gluttony and all these other things that we have to overcome. Before you know it, we start unveiling it, and this person is actually doing the healing for the one who was depressed five, six, or seven generations back.

When I work with young Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, I say, “You’ve stepped into a realm now where you have been chosen to clear the lines for your ancestors. That’s a big responsibility. Are you ready to do it?”

We teach you how to become grounded and overcome the issues that keep you from your true identity, which might have come through the genetic lines. Cleaning and clearing the genetic lines is huge.

Closing thoughts

Rick: Many traditional cultures have this understanding that you have to go back and help the ancestors and clear the genetic lines. It works in both directions. In the Vedic culture, they have the idea that if an individual becomes enlightened, it enlightens seven generations. They have rituals to try to clear things for the ancestors because it’s important for us now, as well as for them.

Lakota John: We live three 28-year cycles, basically. In our lodge, when we bring seven stones in for each section of our lodge, there are 28 stones in total. The first seven are working through conception to seven, then seven to fourteen, then fourteen to twenty-one. It keeps moving.

It’s important that we go back and do the Jubilee, where we can leave the first seven years behind us rather than rolling that into the next seven-year cycle. Before you know it, that’s what creates the heart walls.

If we can peel those layers and go back, we have to go back to do the clearing. This way, you can stand as a pure vessel—as we call it, the hollow bone—to actually move that energy.

Rick: You’re doing good work. I think we’ve given people a nice sampling of your thoughts and an introduction to some of the things you do. I’ll link to your website. Do you do any kind of distance work? If somebody’s in Germany, do you talk to people on Skype?

Lakota John: All the time. I go into America twice a year, and into Australia and New Zealand a lot. I live here full time, and I spend probably four months in America. I’m going to America in two weeks for Sundance and a few other traditional things that we’re doing back home.

Fourwindswellness.org. We have a nonprofit organization in three different countries, and we’re doing some phenomenal work with the people.

Rick: That’s great. Keep up the good work. It’s been good speaking with you. This interview is part of an ongoing series. I’ve been doing them for about seven years now, and I intend to continue doing them.

If you find this interesting, go to batgap.com. If you like, you can sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted. There’s an audio podcast of this if you like to listen to podcasts while you commute, and quite a few other things on the site. Just check out the menus.

Thanks, John. It’s been good spending time with you.

Lakota John: Yeah, we’ll have to do it again.

Rick: Thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching, and we’ll see you next week. Next week is a fellow named Tony Samara. I’ve just started investigating and learning about him. He sounds like an interesting guy, and next week you’ll learn a lot more about him. So see you then.