Evolutionary Wisdom + Neuroscience for Flourishing Children (and other Humans) with Dr. Darcia Narvaez

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

IWelcome to today's episode, where we're exploring the foundations of human flourishing with Dr. Darcia Narvaez, a groundbreaking researcher who bridges neuroscience, anthropology, and evolutionary wisdom. Dr. Narvaez isn't just an academic; she's an explorer of human potential, asking profound questions about how early experiences shape our moral development, well-being, and connection to the world around us.

Dr. Narvaez's research explores questions of species-typical and species-atypical development in terms of well-being, morality, and sustainable wisdom. She examines how early life experiences (the evolved nest) influence moral functioning and well-being in children and adults. She integrates evolutionary, anthropological, neurobiological, clinical, developmental, and educational sciences in her work. Questions that interest her include: How does early experience shape human nature? What can sustainable indigenous societies teach the modern world? What types of moral orientations do individuals develop in species-typical and atypical environments? What is indigenous ecological wisdom, and how do we cultivate it? How can educators and parents foster optimal development, well-being, and communal imagination? Her 2014 book won the 2015 William James Book Award from the APA and the 2017 Expanded Reason Award for research. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Educational Research Association. She hosts the website EvolvedNest.org and is president of KindredMedia.org.



In this Episode, we cover:

  • Early Memories, Exploring Moral Development and Trauma

  • The concept of Evolved Nest and its key Components

  • Modern Applications and Cultural Obstacles

  • Nesting Ambassador Program

  • Cultural Obstacles and Misconceptions

  • The Role of Nature and Play in Healing

  • Indigenous Wisdom and Evolutionary Insights

  • Personal connection to her Taino heritage and the Importance of listening to the land

  • The Future of the Evolve Nest Initiative


Helpful links:




Christine Marie Mason

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TRANSCRIPT

Darcia Narvaez  0:00  

I but these practices, most of them, have been around for 10s of millions of years other animals. So this means that evolution has done the experiments, so to speak, of what works to keep people alive, thriving, getting into adulthood, reproduce and keep things going.


Christine Mason  0:21  

Hello, everybody. This is Christine. Welcome to the Rose woman podcast. We do a little bit on love, on Liberation, on expanding consciousness, on healing the split between the material and the spiritual, so that all of life becomes more free, more imminent, more joyful, more related, more embodied all the good things. So welcome today to an episode that is a deep journey into the foundations of human flourishing. My guest, Dr Darshan Narvaez, psychologist, author and founder of the evolved nest initiative, has decades of research spanning neurobiology, anthropology, indigenous wisdom and moral development, she helps us remember what our bodies, hearts and communities have always known. We are born for connection, nurturance and belonging and together. Today, we're going to explore what it means to restore the original blueprint of human thriving, not as an abstraction, but through our everyday choices and communal practices, so that our nervous systems, our moral capacities and our planetary relationships are all improved. If you've ever sensed that something essential has been lost in our modern ways of raising children, relating to one another or living with the earth, and if you long to remember a better way, this episode is for you. We all love our children. We all have habits that are given to us by culture, and sometimes the ways that we have forgotten are more in line with what is best for our human biology. If you have my 2025 book, The Nine Lives of woman, there's a section in there around how we treat the fourth trimester, the early years of our children's lives, and how that relates to bonding and later health in the body, and some of that is echoed in Dr Narvaez research. She is really a remarkable person, and has devoted so much of life energy to these questions. We start by talking about how she found her path, and it's decidedly untraditional, like so many people these days, so please enjoy today's journey on the rose woman pod,


Darcia Narvaez  2:29  

my first memory ingrained in my soul at around age two and a half probably was in Puerto Rico on a balcony. I complained to my father, I was a daddy's girl that my brother took my toy, and instead of giving my getting my toy back, which I expected, he, in my recollection, flew into a rage and beat up my brother, which was counter to, you know, my sense of justice and haunted me. For always has haunted me. But I also spent half my childhood outside the US, and I would see often in third world countries so called, and I would see kids my age on the street corner selling gum in rags, barefoot, and I'm in a school uniform being driven to school, and I could not understand what was wrong with the world. We go away for a year, and then come back to the states for two years, and coming back, there's all this abundance and kind of wastefulness and and then we go go overseas. And, you know, there was this injustice that I saw over and over and over. And so I my my sense was there's something wrong with the world, something terribly wrong. And my journey in life has been in multiple careers, because I have a lot of interests, and I follow the spirit where it leads creative. I was, became a music major accidentally in college, and was a church organist. Pipe organ was my instrument, and it just took me a while to get to the the quest, to try to answer the question I went to seminary. That's one of my drifts, to try to find the answer. What's wrong with the world? And there it's that people with a lot of loudest voices get the attention and not you know, truth is the golden thread that runs through the world, but it's kind of overwhelmed by all sorts of other things. And then I eventually through after other career endeavors, found the field of moral development, which is an integration of philosophy and psychology. And I thought, Oh, this is it. This is it. And so I got my PhD in that area. And then I got rather disappointed over time, because the focus in the western world is on thinking and reasoning, and if you just reason like. You know, a good moral philosopher, and then force yourself to take the action you think is the best one, then you're a moral person. Doesn't matter what happens. And you know, as long as your intent was good. And that didn't make sense to me, because I grew up with a easily falling into a frozen brain state, where a professor would say. And this I discovered, particularly in seminary with the first week professor said, Oh, we loved your paper. Why don't you tell us about it? Frozen brain, can't speak, can't act, can't think. And so that experience of having one being put on the spot and just freezing in the like a deer in headlights made me realize, well, how can I be a moral person? Then I can't think, I can't act, I don't have free will. So I had to explore, and I read widely. I found effective neuroscience about animal studies and neuroscience and early experience, interpersonal neurobiology, the effects of early experience. And I found the anthropological work, ethnographies over generations, in a book called hunter gatherer childhoods, and realized, hmm, we're not doing that. And we, you know, we, for millions of years, followed, providing the, what I now call the evolved nest. And where the anthropologist said, Hmm, this is widespread all over the world, these practices, hmm, maybe it matters. You know, maybe we should be examining the effects, etc, etc. So that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years.


Christine Mason  6:38  

I'm very much enjoying this thread that is combining all of these insights, like the sense that we should be in a more harmonic relationship. That touched you from early childhood, the music that is about harmonic relationship, the spiritual development, which is about creating healing, wholeness, relationality, and then finding this thread, and I'm also just empathizing a bit with your moment, your trauma response, of like, Whoa, I can't speak, and how that led to this embodiment component that you then developed on embodied morality. You know, how do you if you've got a trauma response in your body? You can't be related.


Darcia Narvaez  7:17  

Yeah, you can't you can't relate to you're just stuck. You're in the the abyss of a sort, you know, you're cut off from life because you're just caught up in that feeling, in that sense, the actually, lack of senses, really,


Christine Mason  7:33  

yeah, I saw that. Gabor Mate wrote the intro to this book. And we can, we can circle back around to that. So, so you've, you've done a lot of very academic books, neurobiology and the development of human morality, that kind of but this one, the evolved nest nature's way of raising children really seems like it's accessible to a regular person who's trying to interrupt the way children have been raised for the last at least 50 years, if not longer.


Darcia Narvaez  7:59  

And the previous book, restoring the kinship worldview is also written for the public, for regular people. So both of these with North Atlantic books, are intending to try to get to regular people not just be stuck in the ivory tower with all the academics saying, Oh, that's a good idea. Oh, well, and not worrying about application or responsibility to the health of the planet.


Christine Mason  8:24  

I think you're onto something, and I like you were early and laying these things out for people, but that the instinct has been here for a long time. In the communities that I'm traveling in, I see a lot of people returning to many of the principles that you lay out here. So maybe you could give our listeners the basics on the concept of the evolved nest, and maybe we can talk about the those, those key components.


Darcia Narvaez  8:47  

Sure, these are from the lists of common characteristics that the anthropologists have noted around the world and all the hunter gatherer and other even traditional societies, and a couple I've added to them because they were they're mostly men, so they didn't look at birth and breastfeeding so much. But I'll just go through the list. We've identified nine, and there's many more probably that could be added, but these are the ones we've looked at in my lab. My laboratory first is a welcoming social climate to for example, then the mother, when she's pregnant, she feels like the baby is welcome. She is welcomed by the community, so all the vibratory energies and the biochemistry of everything is welcoming the baby in her body as the baby is growing into their fullness. Second is a soothing perinatal experience, so part of that is this gestational period, but then birth soothing birth where there's no distress imposed, no painful procedures, no rushing, because babies vary by about 55 days. How long they want to stay in the womb. Due Dates are just guesses. And you know, you babies grow at different rates, or fetuses grow at different rates. And then post need, post birth, no separation between mother and baby, because they need to calm each other down after a regular kind of birth, a naturalistic birth, and their hormones and bonding and the breastfeeding success are really important. The third one now we talk about is multiple bonded nurturers. Evolved nest is I kind of emphasize early babyhood, experience of nestedness, because people forget about babies. They lump them in with children, and don't realize, you know, the way they treat them that, yeah, this is a really sensitive time where you have to have an external womb experience, you know, because babies are not well, they resemble fetuses of other animals till about 18 months of age. You know, their brain plates don't fuse until around that age, and so they need to have all their needs met very quickly. So the biochemistry is a growth in a growth state, not a distressed state. So you need multiple nurturers around, not just mom, not just mom and dad, because everyone gets all the adults get tired, and they need to, you know, hand the baby over to a familiar person. So this is not necessarily kin, but also non kin. So it's a village care. The fourth one is responsive relationships in babyhood. This means keeping baby optimally aroused for that growth state. Now all of the components of the nest, barring soothing birth experiences and Perinatal experiences and breastfeeding, those are for just the young, but all the rest of them. We all need. We need that welcoming environment. We need multiple mentors. We need responsive relationships, to be listened to, to feel like we matter, we belong, and then there's affectionate touch. That's number five. We have off to be social creatures that you know, lots of affectionate touch all the time, if you look at the the accounts of anthropologists and all, and no negative touch, negative touch, spanking, slapping, pinching, hitting, shifts the trajectory of development shifts it away from following that inner compass that each child is born with to unfold their beauty, their uniqueness, and grow towards well being. You punish them, and you've now instituted self doubt, you've distrust and then they're not going to follow the inner compass. They're going to ask, you know, want you to tell them if this is safe or not, and that you've destroyed, you know, distorted their whole being. It's really hard to fix. That takes a lot of therapy later. And then number six, then would be a breastfeeding. And breastfeeding for our species, breast milk is very thin, so it has to be ingested frequently. It's full of the hormones that build a healthy brain and body and prepare yourself to have your mind exploded. Our average age of weaning is age four, and that's because the immune system is developing and doesn't reach adult levels till about age five, even. So we know that some children need to be breastfed longer. Boys need more of the nests than girls. They develop more slowly. Have less built in resilience. They're about two years behind until about age 30. So they need a lot more nurturing, a lot more affection. And then the next one is play, self directed play, and that is, you know, running around, climbing trees, wrestling and freedom with others to do what your instinct wants you to do. Because you're developing your brain, your ability to stop and start action, your executive functions, that's part of that, and you control your aggression, or else your playmates not going to play with you. So and then the two more, number eight, is nature, immersion and connection. You know, we co evolve with the natural world. We are nature, and we have ideally developed receptive intelligence to the communications of the natural the rest of the natural world, the wind, the animals, to know what they're communicating. This is part of our heritage, and we kind of you grew up in four walls. You forget all that. And then finally, restorative healing practices to restore our relationships with others, to restore our mental physical balance, to maintain our sense of connection to the cosmos. So those are the nine. So it's welcoming, climate, soothing, perinatal experience, multiple bonded nurturers, responsive relationships, a. Protectionate touch and no negative touch. Breastfeeding for several years on requests at the baby's direction, free play, self directed, social free play, nature, immersion and connection and restorative healing practices. And that's


Christine Mason  15:15  

that's very much in contradiction. Tim, but the way most of us live on the soothing perinatal stuff. There's a French obstetrician, Michel odont And we've interviewed a couple of people on orgasmic birth. And I was really struck to find that, you know, for the mother, that's a DMT release at the moment of birth, and the experience of the child coming into that quiet is like, really sets their whole nervous system for life. Yeah, right. But if you miss that, if you miss that, like you've you've grown up in a world where you haven't given your children a soothing perinatal experience, who didn't on demand, breastfeed. It sounds like all of these other things, positive, touch, allowing for freedom of movement, having a good, strong community, being in nature, all of that these, these things can be remediating for those early stages. So if you were to weight these things, what do you think has the most impact for an adult, if you're a parent who has school aged children or teenagers, or if you're talking about reparenting or re cultivating these things as an adult, what do you think drives the most impact? Well, the


Darcia Narvaez  16:24  

two, I recommend always, because you can do them. Some of the others are a little harder to manage, like affectionate touch. It's like people are all get all worried about that one. So I say find a child under age seven to play with and play with them, you know, because you have to be there in the moment with them and respond, or else they'll stop playing with you. And when you're playing, you're growing your right hemisphere. So part of what happens when we under care for the young we don't provide the evolved nest, is the right hemisphere is underdeveloped, and the right hemisphere because it grows more rapidly in the first years Alan Shore's work, initially the seat of self regulation, of empathy, of integrating the body in the senses and the external world. The right hemisphere is kind of the governor of our whole selves. And when you undermine it, you forget how to relate. I mean, it's social emotional intelligence there. And you, you when you're left. I'm going to go off on a tangent here. When you're left in distress as a baby, you're going to use your primitive Survival Systems to to keep you alive, really, your fear system, your anger system, your panic system, and and they that's what you have only because you're not growing all this social emotional intelligence of the right hemisphere, because you're left alone in the crib, you're left alone on the playpen, you're given a screen, you're left to sleep, sleep train. All this stuff is undermining then right hemisphere development and play is the cure, but the adults have to learn how to let go and be silly and run around. And what I did in my classes, because with my undergraduates, college students, is I use folks on games. I was a music teacher, right? So, and that then they have permission, because there's a structure in the game, and they could be, you know, laughing and they're touching and they're singing and they're moving. It's a safe way to start to release the desire to play, which we all have. So play is one, and the second one I always recommend is nature. Nature immersion. Go find a sit spot. This is John Young and his work and his colleagues. Find a sit spot in the natural place, and go there regularly. At first the animals will hide, and over time, they'll start to show themselves. And you will you can open your senses to and your you'll hear more, you'll see more, you'll feel more. And that's a very healing experience. Earthing, lying on Earth is also a healing experience. So I think we get in touch with, uh, unmanifest as well, cosmic um spirits, the you know, all the wonderful things that are flowing around us when we take time to sit and be I


Christine Mason  19:17  

love all of these things. I want to live that life with you so you one of the things I love is that you bring examples in from non human species like elephants and whales and wolves, saying that evolved nest is not just a human concept, but that we've, we've, we've, it's a it's an animal concept, it's a natural concept. And maybe you could tell a couple stories from there,


Darcia Narvaez  19:39  

right? So we've been around for about 2 million years as a genus, human genus, 300,000 years as a species. So, but these practices, most of them, have been around for 10s of millions of years other animals. So this means that evolution has done the experience. Experiments, so to speak, of what works to keep people alive, thriving, getting into adulthood, reproduce and keep things going. The purpose of evolution is to perpetuate diversity and increase diversity, right? So all these things are there to help individual species and the ecological communities to thrive. In the book, we have 10 chapters, and we address this is with my colleague, gay Bradshaw, who's an animal rights activist and runs the Coronavirus Institute in Oregon, and each chapter is a different animal and a different aspect of the nest. So for the welcoming environment that we have, our chapter called mutual accompaniment, and we focus on African elephants because they are matriarchal set group that when the child, the offspring, arrives, they all gather around the mother, and then they, they keep, always the the baby, the young one, in the middle of the group as they walk across the land. And they, when the baby comes, they're all touch the baby and welcome so there's just a wonderful accompaniment. I call this companionship, care in our little movie, breaking the cycle we by contrast, it's only six minutes.


Christine Mason  21:32  

It was very sweet. You have a very nice narrator voice. Thank you.


Darcia Narvaez  21:35  

My first job was as a voice of a puppet when I was eight and nine on public television for a Spanish language show.


Christine Mason  21:45  

I love that way, just like boys pop it towards morality, Professor or eco morality. That's great.


Darcia Narvaez  21:51  

I love it. Maria, well,


Christine Mason  21:54  

yeah, so this way of companioning,


Darcia Narvaez  21:57  

actually, all the nest aspects are about companionship. It's all instead of this detachment that we encourage in the dominant culture, detach from your baby, you know, push them over there and leave them alone to cry and whatever they have to be independent, all these great, crazy ideas that create the opposite. They create dependency and inability to actually think outside the box. So


Christine Mason  22:21  

when I might show I wish I had known this when I my children were little, because that I can remember, like, really trying very hard to live in the modern world, you know, with them and and, and then they're just crying and not sleeping, and, oh my gosh, and going to a doctor who wrote a book on healthy sleep habits happy child, and basically like you had to sleep training and the torture of trying to let your child cry themselves to sleep. As a mother, it was impossible. Well, I could not do it right. And now I feel very validated that you're basically saying that that is the right instinct,


Darcia Narvaez  22:58  

you know, yeah, even these nannies on TV that guide parents to do things they're one of them was asked, Well, do you sleep your children? Oh, no. Oh, wow.


Christine Mason  23:11  

Well, so this whole highlighting of evolution versus modern disconnection is about the nest and it's also about much larger story of our economies, the way we're in, you know, sort of the violence of our culture, the way traumas are occurring in our culture. And I feel like there's, it's one thing to name it, and it's another to solve it, you know, and that there's some way of you that you're like, really naming the evolution versus modern disconnection thing you do a really deep dive into like, the neurobiological foundations of how we shape our brains are shaped, and how our moral reasoning and our pro social behavior and our nervous systems, how that's all shaped by our by our neurobiology. And I'm wondering now, as you're getting into more public facing material, how you're envisioning a transition to some new blend, or a way back where I don't imagine that a lot of people are going to be able to go completely Luddite or back to the land. So what are the applications for the evolved nest principles in a modern family's life or in modern structures, yeah@evolvenest.org,


Darcia Narvaez  24:24  

we have a bunch of suggestions. We have checklists for if you're if you have a baby or young child, or another checklist for childhood, another checklist for adults, of things to do. You know, every day, get out there and play, let them outside and push, you know, play with them and learn how to do that. Or, you know, ideally, it's not the parents playing with a child. That's not how we evolve. We evolved with they play with other kids, different age kids. So it's some multi age, multi gender kind of way of living. Would get back to more of that. And then the, you know, to. Trust the natural world as much as you can. You know where you are. Everything is, you know, dependent on where you live. And affectionate touch, I mean, cuddle on the sofa. Always start the day with hugs, you know, that kind of thing, and making sure that they feel, you know, respected as you're doing all those things, and try to bring in the neighbors or trusted adults to be part of their mentoring so they feel like they're in a community of carers, not just the parents. So there's a lot of different things we're starting. We're actually starting a nesting ambassador program this week where Saturday,


Christine Mason  25:44  

what's that? Tell me, what is that? What's a nesting ambassador? Yes,


Darcia Narvaez  25:48  

we have a beta group who's going to go through the materials this summer, and then we'll open it up to the public in the fall. But a nesting ambassador is someone who learns the principles and practices of the Evolve nest and then applies them, and we help them build tools to do this, applies it wherever they are in their walk of life. So as a therapist, a parent, a community organizer, a business person, on and on, anybody can apply the Evolve nest principles to wherever they are, and that's what the aim is. And we have people from all over the world interested.


Christine Mason  26:23  

So I think it's perfect timing over the last five years between COVID and the move to remote working for many information workers. And you know that we had a lot of shake up internally in the way that we related to our work, to our economies, to what we consider to be safe. And I feel a lot of people have returned to family. Do you notice that


Darcia Narvaez  26:45  

it was an opportunity? Yeah, it was an opportunity for that. If you were privileged, right, and had your children with you at home, there's a lot of things that were positive about that. I mean, there are other things that didn't go well, and for young children in masks, not helpful for babies and young.


Christine Mason  27:03  

Yeah, just just more along the questions of like, if we're no longer tied to or trusting the existing larger structures, that there seems to be a window of opportunity to restore a trust in our intuitive knowing great about connection and family and community, like the larger concept of family, like chosen family, right? I love that you use this Aloe mothers, which was a word I'd never heard before. You know, we know stepmothers, aunties, and particularly here in Hawaii, you know every woman over 30s and auntie and that this, this idea that is such a potent one that it's not all on you, mom or dad, that you really can lean into other adults. That requires trust and knowing who these other adults are. And that's that's kind of exciting.


Darcia Narvaez  27:51  

So Alan mothers is a anthropological term, so it means just someone other than mother who's there to be supportive of the child at any age. Yeah.


Christine Mason  28:01  

So let's talk a little bit about the cultural obstacles and misconceptions. We talked about a few of them, like sleep training, the medicalized birth stuff, cry it out. Not fun. What are some other things that you'd like to see sunsetted in the culture?


Darcia Narvaez  28:17  

Well, this is, in a way, related to the previous book restoring the kinship worldview, we have my colleague, four arrows, who is the first author on that has developed a list of 51 precepts that contrast with the dominant worldview. So 51 indigenous or kinship worldview manifestations and how they are different from the dominant culture that we live in, that we think is just the way it is, you know. So I could go through a few of them that are related to parenting, and one of them is the first one on our list is the rigid hierarchy. So there's this idea that parents know better, that you have to force the child to be good. This is a western idea. You have to make them obey the rules that you have as an adult in order for them later to be able to choose to follow the rules, which is like you break their spirit, and then you expect them to be able to, you know, be a whole person later. So the indigenous perspective, of course, is you don't interfere with the unfolding of the child, the uniqueness, that inner compass that they're following you instead support it, and they will grow into cooperation. They'll grow into wisdom. So that's one thing, I think we, the Western derived culture, has been very caught up in a hierarchy, because all of us, you know, we're forced into this, and we live in hierarchical workplaces and all this. So we think it's all normal. It isn't normal. Our heritage is egalitarianism, and we expect it. Babies expect it. They expect respect. They expect to be listened to. They expect conversation from the beginning, what Colin trevarthan calls communicative musicality. Their body is ready to be in dance with the carers, the nurturers around them, and this is 24/7 they want that kind of conversation and being listened to. So babies are not bundles of genes that you know you have to just get through babyhood because you can't do anything about their personality. That's another obstacle that is incorrect. You are shaping their personality, how easily they move into stress response, what how cooperative they are with the relational experiences they're having.


Christine Mason  30:41  

So, yeah, well, if there's 51 let's not go through them. But if you are out there and you're listening to this, you shouldn't be reading this, these books. Can, can we? Can we touch a little bit on how your work relates to indigeneity, and how you've sort of included that in your research, and who you're in dialog with on indigenous wisdom relative to the evolved


Darcia Narvaez  31:02  

nest. My insights that I mentioned came from reading widely and finding the different disciplines, the anthropology, the neuroscience and so on. I got invited to write the book neurobiology and the development of human morality, and I had to add a because the book had a mind of its own. I had to add a subtitle, evolution, culture and wisdom, because I realized I couldn't just talk about neurobiology and morality. It's like, well, what are you going to do now? Things have gone wrong. How do we find the you know, the baselines, what for what's normal? And that's the book. Led me to indigenous wisdom. I called it primal wisdom, and that was, you know, a set of many of the primal wisdom characteristics overlap with Western wisdom traditions of the Christian version, which I talk about in there. But there is a couple that are different, and one of them is that you are fearful of, in Christian tradition, your animal nature, and in Primal wisdom, you are fearful of being alienated from your animal nature. Your animal nature is where all these intuitions are, your instincts, and you shape those as you grow in a indigenous community to be really connected to all the Earthlings around you, non human and human and the Westerners. Oh no, that nature, that animal nature, is that screaming, selfish baby. Well, this is how I view it. That's where they got this idea. It's because you, when you under care for a baby, you're going to have a screaming baby, and they're going to look very selfish, because that's what happens when you you only let them use their primate systems rather than grow what's human, which takes empathy and a biology of lovingness that fosters then and brings out that cooperative nature. Otherwise, you put them in a biology of fear, and when they're in a biology of fear, you don't think very well the blood flow for adults. So when the stress response kicks in, the blood flow shifts away from your higher order thinking to mobilize your muscles for fight or flight, right? And you're not going to be open hearted or open minded, but this is what the Western culture thinks is normal, not all of it, but on average. Anyway. So I discovered four arrows when I was writing the book. And so he was very influential. He has a lot of different books that he has written, and then I've put together one of my symposiums at Notre Dame. First three were all about evolution, early experience and human development. The fourth one was on indigenous wisdom and global flourishing. So we brought in a number of Native Americans to give talks, and then we have a book, another book with hair chapters. So it's been a growing learning experience for me. But when I joined ancestry.com I discovered that I have supposedly 10% indigenous heritage because of my Puerto Rican background, and that means Taino, Taino people, Taino nation, and they merged with European blood. And otherwise, there aren't activists too much going on in terms of the culture. But anyway,


Christine Mason  34:39  

when you, when you, when you learned that, did you dive into the Taino heritage? Did you did that drive you to look it up? Yeah, yeah,


Darcia Narvaez  34:46  

there isn't a lot out there. And there's some things here and there. And then, you know, I have, I wear silver bracelets and and I have the image for the four directions, different spirit animal for me. Um. And for the South, I have the atabey, the Goddess from the Taino culture. And she has frog legs because she's a, you know, like She's the goddess of birth and such. And, anyway, yeah, so I try to maintain what I can.


Christine Mason  35:19  

I've never heard of her. I mean, there's a lot of Goddess traditions, but here's one that's left out. I'm imagining her sort of in that deep plie like in the there's a goddess position in yoga where you are sort of wide legged, almost like in horse stance, feet turned out, and your arms are up like, ah, kind of like that. That's


Darcia Narvaez  35:38  

right. That's right. I'm looking at the image. I have her on my wall, and I have her on my bracelet. Yeah, beautiful.


Christine Mason  35:43  

There's a there's a sense, particularly in America, where we have a lot of months, you know, there's very few clear bloodlines, and a lot of Western Europeans and a lot of people who came to the US without a clear migratory strategy, like they came to flee famine, to flee war, some came for better opportunity. A lot of came through indentured servitude, enslavement. You know, there are a lot of people who arrived here and lost complete touch to their own lineages. And I wonder, I wonder about becoming indigenous again, no matter if, even if you don't know your lineage, how to get reconnected to your local land, your local place,


Darcia Narvaez  36:27  

yeah, I think it's important to also talk about what the word indigenous means, because people use it in different ways, and then some people get worried about it. So I just had a blog post last week about this, and this short one I the way I look at it is, we're all indigenous to Earth, right? So we're all earthlings, and how, well, however, well we live with Earth. We are indigenous. But then there's the indigenous wisdom of the native communities around the world, traditional ecological knowledge. This is knowledge that comes from living in a particular place, because the land gives you the language. The language comes from the land. And so we have what I don't know, how many 1000s, 10s of 1000s of languages in the past, anyway, coming out of the landscape, and then the understanding about how to live well in that particular landscape, so that everything flourishes, so that we need to support that wisdom and that knowledge by, you know, supporting our native cousins all over the world. But then there's a third way, and that has to do with this indigenous or kinship worldview. We can all shift to a kinship worldview. And looking at we have charts@worldview.org you can download the charts comparing the two kinds of worldviews, dominant and indigenous or kinship, and we can all work on that. And then where we are, we're, I guess it's really fourth way. Listen to the land where you are, you know, go out and sit on the on the grass or among the trees and listen and see what you learn.


Christine Mason  38:17  

So beautiful. I want to thank you for these decades of work that have led to this very integrated philosophy on the evolved nest and everything else that's embedded in there, because that's sort of the culmination of all of these other things, in a way, I'm very much looking forward to where it goes next, and to making it not counter cultural, where we started, but to Bringing it back into true culture. Thank you very much. Where can people find you?


Darcia Narvaez  38:45  

Thanks for having me. It's been a delight. Well, evolvnest.org, is a place with lots of tools, and our little films are there. You can scroll down and see them, six, eight and 12 minutes. The last 12 minute one is reimagining humanity, which is actually going back to our ancestral wisdom. And then my, I have my university website, if people want that kind of more academic stuff, Darshan or vice at Notre Dame nd.edu and then, oh, there's also darshanarvis.com darshanarvis.com


Christine Mason  39:22  

thank you so much for being with me today on the rosewoman podcast on love and liberation. I'm Christine. I have some takeaways to recap. We covered a lot in the episode, and the first one is that the Evolve nest is our biological and cultural birthright. The evolved nest, as a book, outlines nine components that are common across wise ancestral societies, including a welcoming prenatal environment, multiple nurturers, on demand, breastfeeding and abundant play and nature immersion, these practices support healthy brain and moral development and set a foundation for lifelong well being. The second thing was modern childbearing norms. Child. Rearing norms contradict this evolutionary wisdom. So we talked about this a little bit, sleep training, cognitive discipline, isolating infants. These directly oppose what evolution has prepared us for, and they interfere with the right hemisphere development, which is essential for empathy, for regulation and relational intelligence. The third thing that we talked about that really hit me was how embodiment and play will heal our developmental wounds if you didn't receive an evolved nest growing up, it's not too late. Dr darsha recommends two powerful entry points for adults, nature immersion and self directed play, especially with children under age seven. These practices rewire the nervous system for connection and joy at any age number four, kinship is a remedy. The whole worldview of kinship is a remedy to disconnection. If you re indigenize yourself, not just through your own heritage, but by living in right relationship with the land, language, community, if you can kind of drop into this kinship worldview and shift from hierarchy and control to relationality and respect, things get better. I think I have a ancient post called Becoming indigenous that speaks to this as well. And finally, you are not alone. I am not alone. We need each other. The myth of the isolated nuclear family is ahistorical and harmful. True resilience and flourishing arise from alo mothers or extended caregivers, chosen aunties, mentors, village style, interdependence. So the evolved nest is not just about babies. It's a lifelong ecosystem of mutual care. So all of that sounds great to me. It's a large part of what we do at Sundari. It's a large part of the movement toward chosen family. This is why we have Sangha. This is why we lean into each other. This is why I do my good community stuff online. Host curtains and song circles at the house, host retreats at my land, so that people can be together in non transactional spaces. If you want to learn more about any of those outcomes and activities, then you can come and visit me@christinemariemason.com check out our events, check out our retreats. And of course, as always, rosewoman.com the main supporter of this podcast, along with radiantfarms.us, gummies for greater wellbeing. And if you would like to be a sponsor of the show. The show is growing in its reach, and if we're aligned, it would be wonderful to have your support and to get your message out to our people. Thank you so much, and please remember that you always have that essential soul spark that you were born with, that light that you came into the world with, is always there with you, no matter what coatings or adaptations have been laid on top of it. It's protected, it's there. It's a matter of releasing it slowly, slowly back into the world and letting your fullness shine all love all the time you


Transcribed by https://otter.ai




Geneva Tolentino
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