There is a kind of remembering that doesn’t live in the mind. It lives in the body. In the breath. In the quiet ache that tells you something ancient is stirring. This episode of The Practice of a Hoodoo Baptist is about that kind of remembering.
I’m joined by Charlotte Duerr James—educator, therapeutic coach, and initiated Medicine Woman—for a conversation that moves slowly, intentionally, and with reverence. Together, we explore what it means to return to ourselves without rushing, without bypassing, and without treating healing as another performance.
Charlotte’s work reminds us that transformation isn’t always about becoming something new. Sometimes, it’s about shedding what never belonged to us in the first place.
We talk about ancestral memory—not as metaphor, but as lived experience. About how the body holds stories that colonial systems worked hard to erase. About ceremony as a practice of listening rather than control. About the difference between medicine that liberates and spirituality that simply soothes.
This episode also invites a deeper reflection on collective healing. Charlotte challenges the idea that healing is private, isolated, or individualistic. Instead, she names remembrance as a communal act—one that reconnects us to lineage, land, and responsibility to one another.
Her work through New Old Ways and the Remembrance Program centers this truth: that healing without context can become extraction, and that liberation requires integrity, humility, and community. You can explore more of her work and offerings at newoldways.co, where remembrance is treated not as nostalgia, but as a living practice.
What I appreciate most about this conversation is its refusal to rush. There’s no promise of quick fixes. No shortcuts to wholeness. Just an honest invitation to sit with what the body knows, to honor the pace of healing, and to trust that the road home is walked step by step.
If you’ve been feeling disconnected—spiritually, ancestrally, or even from yourself—this episode meets you gently. It doesn’t demand answers. It simply asks you to listen.
Explore Charlotte’s work at newoldways.co
