Here’s a thing about spiritual bypassing that nobody wants to say….
People are drawn to traditions that aren’t theirs because the culture they were handed is built on Walmart, Miller Lite, and the strong suggestion that the meaning of your life is your net worth. There’s nothing of substance to draw from. So they reach sideways, into someone else’s lineage, and the people whose lineage it is (understandably) don’t love that.
I get why. I really do.
But the conversation usually stops there, at appropriation, without asking the next question.
Which is: what are those of us who’ve lost the thread supposed to do instead? Just keep living on the surface? Keep accepting that our spiritual inheritance is Botox, a $1200 tube of face cream, and a Peloton?
I’ve been sitting with this for a while.
The Chain That Broke
My great-grandmother came to the US from Slovakia. She’s the last link. By the time knowledge had to travel through my grandparents, through my parents, down to me, the chain was broken.
Great-grandma’s children were busy becoming American and being American meant leaving the old world behind. And so it got dropped and nobody talked about it. So here I am, three generations later, trying to listen for something that wasn’t passed on.
That’s certainly not unique to my family. That’s the story for a lot of people who have been raised with the ideals of the US founders, far from the old country. The transmission broke and what filled the gap left generations of wisdom behind in favor of status symbols and productivity. And seeking more depth than that makes you an outlier; eccentric, weird.
Last year I bought a stack of Eastern European folklore books. I wanted the stories of my people. Not the sanitized fairy tales. The older ones, the ones that carry the actual cosmology, the understanding of the world my ancestors operated from before they got on a boat and became American and deliberately left most of it behind.
I wanted to root myself somewhere ancestral. Somewhere with more substance than the culture that kept suggesting I wasn’t hustling enough.
How Cultural Depth Feels
I practice Chinese medicine. That tradition has texture and depth. The stories, the language, the way the medicine is spoken conveys a whole understanding of the universe. The heavens. The earth. Seasons. Cycles and patterns. The body is more like a field to be tended, not a machine to break down into pieces.
I’ve been learning to live inside those frameworks since I was twenty and I landed in an Asian philosophy class. It has changed how I see everything. But it’s not mine by blood. It’s mine by study and practice and devotion, and I hold that appropriately.
So what is mine by blood? That’s the question I’ve been following.
The Word Itself
And that’s how I found the word vedma.
The root of the word is knowing. It comes from the Slovak ‘vedieť, which means ‘to know.’ That in turn goes back to an older Proto-Slavic meaning of seeing and perceiving and understanding. All three.
When applied to a person, someone called vedma was a woman who knew things. The one people came to when ordinary explanations weren’t enough. She worked with the earth, the body, the pattern, the unseen. She held knowledge for the community and she probably got called a witch the moment that knowing made someone uncomfortable.
(That pattern shows up in every tradition, by the way, not just mine.)
I’m not interested in claiming a title. But I do recognize a lineage pattern that has been waiting for someone in my family to discover it. The woman who holds a kind of knowing that doesn’t fit inside the approved cultural containers. The one who works in liminal medicine. The one whose presence can unsettle people who are organized around surface desires and borrowed authority.
When I look at the work I’ve been doing my whole career practicing East Asian medicine, that description is not wrong.
Why This Is Part of The Permission Project
The Permission Project isn’t just the public-facing ideas I share. It’s also a process of personal discovery. In this season of life, I am giving myself permission and a space to follow threads like this one. I am allowing myself to be someone who’s actively reclaiming what was lost rather than pretending the loss doesn’t matter.
And I hope to gather like-minded people around that. Those who have felt the hollowness. Those who have watched communities with deeper roots reclaiming their lineages (Black Americans, Latino communities, indigenous people who never fully lost the thread), and recognized something they desire for themselves. Those who may have stood in a mall while someone asked which lines on their face they wanted erased and thought: This is not what I’m here for.
Every culture contains good and bad. I won’t pretend the whole history of my ancestors is perfect and I refuse to make excuses for any atrocities that have been propagated.
But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the entirety of the culture. The ancestral wisdom traditions of this earth have been here for thousands of years because they work. They work with how humans actually are and how they evolve.
For me, finding vedma is a small part of finding my way back to that.
Your ancestors had their own words. Their own stories. Their own understanding of what it meant to be someone who knows things.
Are you ready to find out what those are?
