Modern life pulls us out of our bodies, into stress, anxiety, and constant stimulation. In this conversation, Natalie and Mark of Forge and Flow explore ancient, embodied solutions for restoring harmony in a chaotic world.
We talk about how the body functions like a musical instrument, when we are in alignment, everything resonates in tune. When stress, exhaustion, and disconnection set in, that inner symphony falls out of coherence.
This video explores:
✨ Why grounding into the body is essential in modern life
✨ Ancient movement and breath practices like Qigong, Tai Chi, yoga, and meditation ✨ How harmony returns when we regulate our own nervous systems
✨ Nourishment, food quality, and the body as the original temple
✨ Sound, vibration, and the difference between acoustic and digital resonance
✨ Why voice, chanting, and simple sound practices were central to ancient cultures
✨ Re-anchoring through nature, earth connection, and seasonal awareness
These practices are simple, accessible, and timeless, rooted in primordial wisdom that predates modern civilization. They are not about escaping the body or chasing transcendence, but about returning to balance within it.
When we restore harmony inside ourselves, that coherence ripples outward, into our relationships, communities, and the world around us.
WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW
OR READ THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW
We're Natalie and Mark from Forge and Flow, and we are creating a sanctum, both in person and online. And technically what this is all about is harmonic restoration. So you can think of your body like a musical instrument; it's a powerful instrument, and also it's an entire symphony in and of itself.
When you're healthy and happy and joyful, feeling good, you're in alignment. All of the things that are within you, your strings are working in tune and sound beautiful. But when there's exhaustion, fatigue, stress, illness, that means the strings are out of tune. So we help you restore your entire bodily symphony.
We're going to talk about ancient solutions for modern life, for the now time... We can dissect what “ancient” really means, but we're talking many, many thousands upon thousands of years ago. Even a thousand years ago was not ancient. 2000 years ago is not ancient in a lot of ways. So we're talking primordial stuff, when the world was just more harmonious with itself, not just humans, but all things in harmony with each other. These primordial practices are still intact today, but we also know that many are not, or that they have been changed somehow.
There's a lot of things that we can do today to help us through this craziness of the modern world that is rooted and steeped in these ancient practices. The answer to the chaos is we just become coherent in our own bodies and that ripples out to everything else. We cannot control what's happening outside of us. We can only control that ripple effect that we create in our own body and then in our own environment, and then in our own community, and then it just keeps going.
Imagine somebody in your life, you're like, I really wish they would change. You cannot change them, but you could change how you interact and how you respond to them. Which could in turn send that ripple into them and change some of their behaviors over time too. Or maybe not. But the potential is there and it starts from within. It starts from us.
This is the only way forward, realizing harmonic life. Harmony returns when we return harmony to our own nervous systems. So the higher vibrational conversation is really about earth re-anchoring herself. It's a feminine quality that is revising, restructuring, restoring, regenerating the entire nervous system of the earth, nurturing and stabilizing and grounding. So we have to match that.
Anchoring into the Body
The first thing I'll bring up that was top of mind when we threw this into the pool of things we really want to talk about is anchoring into the body. This world does a really fantastic job, like the best job ever, of pulling us out of our bodies. Untethering.
It's also what we do to ourselves. I think one of the most unbalanced things that I've come across during my path is a kind of spirituality that almost has you looking towards ascension out of earth, because the harmony is out there, up there, and we just need to do astral traveling. Transcend. Get out of the body. Get out of the body. There's a lot of chasing of things to reach a high, reach a higher consciousness. Reaching constantly. Seeking constantly. That which already lies within is where the balance is.
I think what this video is really about is this truth: we have a tightrope to walk in this life. Each way you go, you can fall off the edges to extremes. So it's always thinking about, oh, I'm chasing this too much, I've got to get back over here. Oh, got to get back. So we're constantly realigning ourselves on the tightrope.
This would go for this concept of the out-of-body thing too. There's moments where having a really beautiful meditative experience is amazing, but not "I've got to go do that again. How can I do it longer?" Becoming addicted to it.
And we do, because this world is, for most of us, the modern world doesn't make sense. The modern way of living, the modern stress and anxiety pulls us into addictive models.
Energy Balancing Practices
So we're talking about the ancient solutions for this problem. One of the best ways to address this situation is doing energy balancing practices, things like Tai Chi, Qigong, yoga, meditation, even some forms of martial arts that aren't overly intense. Some of those are great too, but they can pull us into too much stress as well. But when you're talking about a fully rounded, holistic version of a martial art, like kung fu, it's very internal too. Very meditative.
Let's talk about Qigong, for example, which is the ancient Chinese... oh, we'll get to the sound in a minute. My ring is very excited. This is a crystal singing bowl here we'll talk about in a moment. She's getting excited.
Qigong is a wonderful mind-body movement breath work practice. It involves meditative qualities. It involves even touching ourselves to get in touch with our skin and our organs through massage and tapping and vibration and shaking. Simple things, but movements and breath work and really working with the body, physically, energetically, emotionally, spiritually, all parts can be tapped into doing these practices. These ancient practices are thousands upon thousands of years old, that even predate the notion of the word Qigong, that predate the nation of China. All of that stuff. This is pre-shamanic and nomadic in lifestyle where people were just with the earth.
Seeing how nature acted, being part of nature, being part of the seasons and the cycles and all of that, and really being in tune with themselves first. And then with each other. And then that ripples out, like we said in the beginning, into the larger groups of the tribes and the communities and the groups and into countries, nations, and all that.
So these practices are simple and profound. Anybody can do them. Any age, any fitness level, any mobility limitation. Anywhere. Anytime. Because there's no equipment needed, there's no real deep knowledge needed. You can dive deep into it and it's wonderful, but you can pick up really simplistic motions and breathing practices that aim at regulating the nervous system, reducing the stress to help us get through these very stressful times.
That is what those practices actually are, the practices that align you with your tightrope to see where imbalances are occurring. So it's a truth-revealing path as well. It can become a mirror in a lot of ways because it brings stuff to the surface. It moves things throughout. It moves the energy, it moves the emotions. We can have emotions that get stuck in us and stagnant and physical things like fluids and things like that. Detoxification pathways that get stuck and aren't functioning properly.
So it opens the gate. You've got to get the key. The key is the tool, and then you've got to use the tool to open the gate, and then things can flow more and you can see where those issues are and how to navigate them more properly.
Yoga is the same way, at least in the ancient forms of yoga. Yoga's taken on a modern lens of being a little bit more fitness-oriented. And you've got to go to your yoga class, you've got to check it off the box. You've got to make sure you tell your friends you did yoga. That's going more into the stress route of things versus the real ancient qualities of it, which is more than just doing poses and a little bit of breath work. It's really internal and quality, there's ethics involved in it. There's concentration involved in it, and there's deep spiritual aspects involved in it too, and meditation and stillness.
I did a video on another channel that I have called Awakening Magic, talking about the root order of the Breath Keeper lineage. When you walk this world, when you traverse the world and you look through all time and space to see how we started walking across this world to drop and keep as much of this wisdom alive as possible, that's where we're getting it. These practices were the practices that the first human civilization ever did, because it was that vital. That important. It's just part of the way of being, the harmonic way of life.
Nourishment and the Body as Temple
Another huge solution has to be taking nourishment into our body. What goes into your body is important.
The first temple was our body. It wasn't about this physical structure that was built out there. There's that externalization again. All any human ever needed was the temple within themselves, where communion happens.
Those structure temples are great for gathering, gathering lots of like-minded people together, gathering into a space and connecting in the ways that they can connect. In fact, did you know that's what church means? Gathering space. That's it. How about that?
So we have this externalization issue happening. When we look back and we're like, oh wait, I'm the temple. How do I clean my temple? How do I nourish my temple? Purify, detox. Get it to function properly again.
Look, it would be great to say this is so simple, but it's not that simple today. I know that people really love to say, well just eat more vegetables. Just eat more salads. And while these things are inherently, of course we need to eat the rainbow, if you will, let's not even get into diet. It's about: what is the food?
Clean eating. Clean food. Pure food. Untainted nourishment.
Because you can eat as many vegetables as you want, but if they're laced with all sorts of pesticides and stuff like that, I don't care how much salad you eat. You're putting toxins in your body.
That was me for basically my whole life. Before the word organic was around, I used to shop at Trader Joe's in my twenties because it was literally next door to our place. But that was lucky because that had a little better... Trader Joe's was established in 1975 and their goal is to bring healthier food. Cleaner food. Now the problem is that is not the case anymore. These grocery stores, when industrialization really blew up, it was about keeping as much food as possible in the place. No care nor concern what is in the food, where the food comes from.
Enter preservatives and ultra-processed stuff. The things in the middle aisles at the grocery stores, typically.
But we have to put an emphasis on this organic thing. That's a word that's been overused in a lot of ways, and it's gone into the lexicon of the marketing world. But it really has a true core essence, that it is pure. Organic. It is of the pure world and has not been adulterated by corporations and other things out there that taint the food and make it actually difficult for our bodies to process, in some ways impossible for our bodies to process, so that stuff stays in the body. Our body doesn't know what to do with it. So it just tucks it away into that closet of the things that I don't know what to do with. Just put it in the closet. But it affects so many systems within our body. Detoxification, metabolism, blood flow, all the enzymatic processes get thrown off because there's no minerals. Minerals get stripped out. That's a whole other video too.
But one thing, if we were to say a solution in this mixture, is seeking out regenerative or biodynamic farming practices wherever you may be. Now, wherever you may be, it's hard to find. Regenerative close by, we have some in our region. Biodynamic is even harder. So if we were to put this on a level, it would be organic, and then regenerative, and then biodynamic.
Regenerative is really working with the soil again, regenerating the soil that the crops grow in. Because when you grow the crops, it pulls, it's supposed to pull the minerals from the soil. If the soil has nothing to offer beneficially, then the plant is not going to get those nutrients. And then when you eat them, you don't get it. So even organic, if it's not pulling up the good stuff, you're not getting the good stuff.
So regenerating the soil is actually creating that biome in the soil again, that has all of those nutrients that grow into the plant that we can then consume.
And biodynamic is a whole other thing. It's regenerative in nature, but then it's taken to the next level of working with cosmic alignments to grow things essentially. So it's literally connecting sky and soil. Imagine how much power, meaning beauty and star wisdom, is held within anything grown in that kind of environment. Because that environment is carrying, just like regenerative farming, human consciousness that is a very high vibrational, beautiful human consciousness to even care in that way, that much. Because that's the other thing, when we eat food, is there care and is there love put into said food? That's a vibration.
So these are the things that can feed the body, can retune the body. And we have to think about it in this way: food you take in equates to the signal or vibration that your body puts out. The vibration that your body puts out is that which comes back to you.
Sound and Vibration
So speaking of vibration, we also have sound. We were just talking about food and the ancient solution, because we're talking about how food used to be grown in the ancient days, not in the modern days. But it's a vibration. And one of the most amazing healing tools through literal vibration is sound.
And we have this amazing crystal singing bowl here that will ring for you, but we're going to explain something about it too.
Oh, interjecting over here. So Mark writes. He makes music. He has an album out on Spotify called An Early Return, and it's really beautiful. Just in case you want to check it out.
It's instrumental electronic music, but it's soothing to the soul in a lot of ways. We've talked about this in another video, but that's electronic music. So what it kind of leads into what we're talking about here is acoustic versus digital.
Now, everything today, unless you see something live in person from acoustic instruments like an orchestra or somebody playing an acoustic guitar or somebody just singing, pretty much everything else is digitized, meaning made to be digital. A lot of arguments out there about, is digital as good of a quality as acoustic? I would say no. Some people would say yes. It's just like photos, is digital photography as good as using actual celluloid film? A lot of people say no. Some people say yes, but we're here to say there's no contest between acoustic sound, which means live and in person. Organic. There's that word again. Organic sound versus something that's been converted into a digital format.
It's a change of a wave form is what it is. How light and sound is carried. Essentially, it goes from a pure wave, pure sine wave to more of an erratic signature.
So if I ring this bowl here... [sound of crystal singing bowl]
If I keep ringing it a bit...
[continued ringing]
You definitely heard that. You definitely can feel that. But there's no way it has the same impact vibrationally speaking in your body through the camera digitized and into YouTube and out your speaker or earbuds or whatever as it did us being here in front of this bowl right now.
Like the way it vibrates in your temple, you can feel that. I really feel it in my heart space. This is the 528 hertz, which is in alignment with the heartbeat. It carries a completely different signature.
We all listen to music in our earbuds or on our computer speakers. Even if you have a great sound system, it is a converted signal. In your car, wherever you are, you can have a high-end speaker system, but it still is a converted signal from acoustic to digital. Unless you have a band in your backseat playing in your ear, that might be really cool. That could be cool actually. Maybe we should start that business. Just hopping people's cars. There's a trombone coming through.
But we don't have that. We have speakers and that's the convenience factor and that's the modern world using convenience. Oh, I can listen to music anywhere. That's amazing. And that is amazing. But you're not going to get the same quality of sound, of vibration as you would in person.
If you were to look up on your computer a symphony orchestra and listen to it, you might be like, wow, that sounds really great. But if you see that same performance in person in a concert hall with the acoustics built properly through the domed roofs and everything like that, built for a reason, no contest. It does not have the same quality of emotion that you feel. Way more powerful, more profound.
When we lived in New York City, we would go to Carnegie Hall and we would see these symphonies in person. But you don't have to be in New York and go to Carnegie Hall. There's lots of colleges around and community theaters. But I'm saying from the experience of knowing what that felt like versus if I just throw it on Spotify on great speakers, there just isn't a contest.
We're not saying that you can't get any benefit or value out of listening to music. It's just another way that the modern world has watered down something pure and organic. Music used to be more in person given we didn't have this more "global" world, so there's pros and cons in these things of course.
And then also it's both sides. Because nothing is more profound than having music available to places that wouldn't even... it's the way that we've learned about each other and the gifts that each of our nations, of all of our people have. That's beautiful. Because when you're isolated in just in-person groups, we can't hear, like here in the United States, we wouldn't be able to hear the beautiful music in Africa. So there's a benefit to this, but we're just saying another solution to bring to the table is seek out finding some local groups that you can get some live sound bath. But do some research. Who's doing the sound bath? What kind of bowl? Things like that. Just getting more anchored in, re-anchored into the body in these in-person things can really be beautiful.
And I would like to also, just on the sound note really quickly, through the lineage and through remembering, what I've also remembered is this truth: when our bodies are the temple, when we make sound, when we do sound baths with our own voice, that's very harmonically aligned with what used to happen. See, we have thought of the voice as a performance mechanism. When I open and I sing, I perform for people. And that of course is beautiful.
But even if you can't sing, using your voice to reverberate inside of your temple walls in your body is profoundly healing. The ancient, that's where mantras and healing sounds come in, chants, chanting and ancient vowel sounds. Just going "Ahhhhh." Very simple. You can feel that in varying locations in your body.
And when you do it every day, when you do it a lot, even if it's not every day, but often, you begin to feel that vibration, literally in your fascia. You can feel it in your tissues. So even if you think that you can't sing, it's not about singing. It's about using your voice to create that temple vibration, that resonance in your body.
Absolutely.
Connecting with Nature
What's amazing is that all of these things we mentioned are just simple. Everything has been over-complicated. We're trying to simplify life in this overly complicated world.
So even just simple things like we have a stream on our property. We go out and sit by the stream. It's that simple of a re-anchoring.
Nature is always a great way to reset and to anchor in because we are nature, but we have removed ourselves from nature in many ways. Putting ourselves in these boxes. Just walking through nature, touching the ground. Even if you're in a city, you can find a park. You can find ways to be with grass and be with trees and be with the open air.
If you're lucky, like we are, to live near mountains and in really forested areas. Great. Or even on a coastline where you're connecting with the ocean energy and the sand and just digging your feet into earth and connecting with that more deeply is anchoring almost immediately.
Now another thing I want to share is that everything that we are mentioning today, 100% applies to your animals, your dogs, and your cats. They need all of these things too. All of it. Maybe, I mean, they can't do yoga per se...
They do downward facing dog very well.
They have to go outside. They have to anchor in the earth. Even your cats, if you can get them out there and just let them touch that soil, let them touch that grass, even if you're holding them with you. It is that imperative that we remember that all of life needs sunshine, all of life needs grounding, the rooting of the soil of the earth, which is the cellular structure of Earth.