Be Mythical

August 2025
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Wed, 27 August 2025

The White Snake Spirit: a reminder of the power of love and prayer - Lian Brook-Tyler

In this episode, Lian shares the ancient and evocative Chinese myth of the White Snake Spirit, a story of prayer, healing, and a love that endures across lifetimes.

Each month, Lian tells a mythical tale… as spell, as memory, as invitation... to be felt, stirred, remembered as a magical doorway into your own soul. These stories are one of the oldest ways ancestral wisdom has been carried down to us, a living inheritance that continues to speak when we meet them with reverence.

She first shared this live with our beloved community in UNIO, our Academy of the Soul, in which we continue to journey more deeply together with it in a month-long quest.

To join us for the next mythical quest, you can join UNIO here: bemythical.com/unio

The tale of the White Snake Spirit is one of the most beloved and enduring stories in Chinese folklore.

Here, a humble herbalist faces plague and despair, a wife reveals her hidden power, and devotion is tested through death, deception, and decades of prayer. Passed from tongue to tongue across generations, this myth carries not only a love story but the deep ancestral knowing that prayer itself is a living force able to heal, protect, and transform.

The question at its heart is profound: can love survive truth, time, and the weight of destiny? The answer, when it comes, shakes even the heavens.

Through this myth we are offered a mirror: of prayer that carries across lifetimes, of love that cannot be broken, and of stories as vessels of ancestral wisdom that still work their medicine within us today.

We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment wherever you are listening or in any of our other spaces to engage.

What you’ll receive from this episode:

The Power of Devotion: Xu Xian’s decades of prayer at the pagoda show how steady, daily offerings can move heaven and earth.
Prayer as Living Force: In this tale, prayer is not passive but a current of devotion that heals, restores, and even brings miracles into being.
The White Snake Spirit reminds us that myths are not relics but vessels of inherited wisdom, carrying truths about prayer, love, and transformation from the ancestors into our own lives.

Resources and stuff Lian spoke about:

Join UNIO, the Academy of the Soul: This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.

Be Mythical

Join our mailing list for soul stirring goodness: https://www.bemythical.com/moonly

Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth: https://www.bemythical.com/unio

Go Deeper: https://www.bemythical.com/godeeper

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Thank you for listening!

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Direct download: Podcast_515_mixdown.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 1:56pm EST

Wed, 6 August 2025

The calls & pitfalls of the growth of shamanism - Nicholas Breeze Wood

In this week’s show, Lian is joined by Nicholas Breeze Wood. Nicholas has practiced shamanism for over 40 years, combining it with the 'earthier' end of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as with 'medicine' teachings from Native North American peoples. He has worked with many gifted medicine people and shamans over the years, and is deeply apprenticed to his own spirit helpers, whose teachings never fail to awe and surprise him.

Nick’s shamanism is a fusion of traditional Himalayan and Mongolian forms, combined with teachings from his own spirits. He works especially deeply with ritual objects - such as bronze shaman's mirrors, phurba daggers and many other Mongolian and Tibetan shamanic and Buddhist ritual objects - for which he holds traditional teachings and, where required, traditional initiations.

Despite being a ‘rather uneducated Buddhist,’ he is an ordained Tibetan Buddhist lama, a type called a ngakpa, whose role is similar to a shaman’s. Ngakpas are non-monastic, non-celebrate lamas who live in the community, specialising in ritual and magic for people within their community.

Nick is the editor of Sacred Hoop Magazine - a leading international magazine about shamanism - which has been published since 1993. He is also a musician and artist.

He is the author of several books including, 'Walking with the Tiger,' 'Sacred Drums of Siberia,' 'A Little Book of Revealing,' 'Voices From The Earth,' 'The Book of the Shaman,' 'The Shaman Box,' and 'The Resplendent Other'.

He runs the large Facebook group 3Worlds Shamanism, has done a podcast called the 3Worlds shamanism podcast on and off since 2006 and also has a somewhat neglected YouTube channel, also called 3Worlds Shamanism.

In this episode, Lian and Nicholas explore what it means to walk the path of shamanism in the modern West. Together, they trace the winding threads of Nicholas’ life… from the windswept fields of his Midlands childhood to the birth of Sacred Hoop magazine, through encounters with medicine wheel teachings, Mongolian and Himalayan shamans, and the long shadow of Castaneda. What unfolds is not a how-to or a prescription… but a living braid of animism, discipline, and devotion.

Nicholas reflects on the unexpected gift of dyslexia and how neurodivergence shaped his initiatory path, as a different kind of perception… one that enabled a direct, embodied relationship with the unseen. He and Lian explore the tension between psychotherapeutic frameworks and authentic shamanic practice, and the danger of mistaking surface form for deep structure. What makes a shaman, he says, is not sensitivity or interest, but being chosen by the spirits themselves.

Woven through the conversation is the question of lineage. What does it mean to carry teachings from other lands onto this one? How do we honour both the transmission and the soil we stand upon? From the cosmology of the medicine wheel to the pitfalls of cultural appropriation, from core shamanism to the necessity of cosmological bone… this episode offers a rare encounter with an elder who has walked the shamanic path for many decades.