This week on The Dancing Willow podcast, Elliott Brinkley is joined by herbalist, poet, and teacher Seán Pádraig O’Donoghue for a conversation that moves far beyond information and into felt experience. Through the conversation, a single question kept surfacing, sometimes directly, sometimes like an underground stream:
What are we allowing to shape us?
This blog post is a musing on some of the major themes we discussed, but we highly recommend listening to the full episode here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nBGPWtw9S2EgRSFoCM1Q0?si=qlxIbdfIQfyOiQF4RmIiiw
Being Shaped By…
We are always being shaped.
By the land beneath our feet. By the cultures we move within. By the stories we tell ourselves, the media we absorb, the medicines we take, the rhythms we entrain our nervous systems to, often without conscious consent.
This conversation unfolded as a slow inquiry into that shaping. Not from an abstract or ideological place, but from lived experience, the body as teacher, and the quiet intelligence of the Earth.
Heart, Bone, and the Body as Question
Seán shared about his recent heart surgery, an experience that was both deeply physical and profoundly initiatory. The procedure required opening the chest, reshaping heart muscle, and then allowing the sternum, the bone that protects the heart, to grow back.
Bone is ancestral tissue. It carries lineage, inheritance, and memory. And yet bone is not static. It is constantly remodeling itself in response to pressure, movement, and environment.
Healing opened a question that moved far beyond the medical:
What happens when we allow ourselves to be shaped by the world, rather than trying to shape the world to suit us?
In the long process of recovery, Seán found himself in deeper relationship with land with more tangible vitality, walking, listening, asking to be shaped by the Earth.
Culture, Ancestry, and the Forces That Dream Us
If the Earth shapes slowly, patiently, relationally- culture shapes quickly.
We live inside systems designed to pull attention, condition desire, and normalize disembodiment. Much of this shaping happens beneath awareness, through repetition and saturation rather than choice.
Seán spoke to this as a form of cultural hypnosis, a state in which we are being “dreamed” by forces we did not consciously choose.
Ancestry enters the conversation not as something to reenact or romanticize, but as an orientation: a remembering of how to listen, how to relate, how to live in reciprocity with land and mystery. Ancestors were not following tradition for tradition’s sake, they were responding to place.
Psychedelics, Microdosing, and Shaping Consciousness
This inquiry naturally extended into psychedelics- not as trends or tools, but as forces that dramatically increase neural plasticity. Making us more shapeable.
Seán offered a perspective that runs counter to much of the current enthusiasm around microdosing. While larger, ceremonial doses often require intentional setting, preparation, and pause, microdosing can quietly amplify whatever environment we are already immersed in.
If the surrounding context is culture-as-usual- screens, productivity, overstimulation- then increased neuroplasticity may simply reinforce the very patterns we are hoping to outgrow.
This reframes the question entirely. It’s not just what medicine are you taking? but:
What is shaping you while you are open?
Choosing the Shaping
This conversation was less about answers and more about orientation.
About slowing down enough to notice what is quietly sculpting our nervous systems, our bodies, our bones. Getting outside, feeling our hearts and connecting to the beauty of nature.
The invitation is simple, and not easy:
To choose with care what we allow to shape us. To listen with the body. To let the Earth be a teacher again.
Sometimes healing is not about adding more, but about changing what we consent to be formed by.
Listen to the full episode here and share your thoughts with us!