#617 Reclaiming Connection: Re-indigenisation for a Disconnected World with Marc-John Brown

Are you feeling disconnected from yourself, your purpose, or the world around you?

In this soul-stirring episode of Talking with the Experts, Rose Davidson sits down with Marc-John Brown—Co-Founder of Native Wisdom Hub—for a conversation that is equal parts grounding and galvanising. Together, they explore the powerful concept of re-indigenisation as the antidote to modern burnout, anxiety, and emotional disconnection.

Marc-John shares his journey from successful entrepreneur to complete burnout—and how that breakdown led him back to his deepest calling: reconnecting with indigenous wisdom traditions. As someone who once launched six companies and lost himself in the process, he now guides others in rediscovering purpose, healing trauma, and living in alignment.

You’ll learn how disconnection is at the heart of much of today’s physical, emotional, and spiritual malaise—and how the practices of our ancestors can guide us back to balance. Marc-John also breaks down how re-indigenisation can be practically integrated into modern life through ceremony, community, and performance coaching.

Whether you’re a high-performing professional on the edge of burnout or someone seeking a deeper sense of connection, this episode will shift your perspective—and perhaps, your path. You’ll walk away with a renewed understanding of what it means to be well, whole, and rooted.

✨ Topics covered:

• The hidden cost of hustle culture and overachievement
• How ancestral practices can transform mental, physical, and emotional health
• Coaching tools for reconnecting with purpose and community

Join us as we explore what it means to come home to yourself in a world that constantly pulls you away.

📩 CONNECT WITH MARC-JOHN

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marcjohn.brown

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-johnbrown/

Website: https://www.nativewisdomhub.com

📌 PROMOTION: https://nativewisdomhub.com/trauma-to-triumph

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Transcript

Intro | 00:01
Welcome to Talking With The Experts. Here we discuss all things business, by business owners, for business owners. Here is your host, Rose Davidson. 

 Rose | 00:11
Hello, welcome to Talking With The Experts. I'm your host, Rose Davidson from rosedavidson.com.au. Now, the modern world is suffering from multiple diseases and epidemics, and at the heart of it all is disconnection. Marc John Brown is going to share with us his secrets to... Building a better world with connection and action and belief and confidence and conviction. Now, Marc John is the co-founder and co-director of Native Wisdom Hub. This ethical for-profit organization seeks to help steward the world's fast-emerging psychedelic renaissance and industry in ways rooted in ethics, responsibility, and integrity. This wasn't always Marc John's position, however. Whilst a student of Indigenous wisdom traditions since his late teens, he qualified as a language interpreter and translator aged 22 and from age 24 onwards, He opened six companies, launching two of them fully before crashing and burning in 2018-2019. This burnout led him to his deepest calling, Indigenous Wisdom Traditions. Today as a co-founder and co-director, Marc John gets to exercise all of his greatest passions, combining said traditions with his love of high performance, community building and deep healing in a business environment that offers coaching, teaching, mentoring, ceremonial healing and retreats, striving to help people reach the very best version of themselves at every juncture. Marc John, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Brand, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to meet you. 

 Marc-John | 01:54
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Thank you for the introduction as well. 

 Rose | 01:59
You're very welcome. Tell me a little bit about your journey into, other than, you know, when having children, suffered burnout in 2018 and 2019. Tell me how you came to be into Indigenous medicine? 

 Marc-John | 02:15
Yeah, I kind of always knew that I was, I had the sentiment that I was going to explore the path of, you know, traditional healing systems and medicine systems. And I almost studied at the University of Middlesex, just in the north of London. I almost studied, Ayurvedic medicine. Ancient Indian Medicine, right? You But, yeah, you know, life took me... Into some of my own roots. And my ethnic roots are Scottish, British, Irish, but the roots of my upbringing and how I grew up is being surrounded by South Americans. And I lived in, well, for the past 16 years, I've lived on and off. In South America for extended periods of time. And the love for indigenous ways and indigenous wisdom, it came during a really life changing trip. My first trip to South America. Which is where I you know, met and married our co-founder, my wife, Erica. And it was during that time, you know, traveling through the landscapes of Bolivia and Peru, that's where the seed was really planted, because I was going through a real phase of transformation and awakening, if you will, in life. And that's where it was all seeded. I became deeply enamored by their ways of by being deeply connected with each other, with themselves and with the world that surrounded them. 

 Rose | 04:02
So what are the ancient secrets that you've learned that can help us to reconnect and to thrive? 

 Marc-John | 04:11
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, we in the business world, we're always looking for that thing that's going to give us the cutting edge that's going to give us that extra edge of performance, the next, you know, secret, the next, you know, golden elixir that's going to just push us that far above the, that little bit more above the competition. Really, what we have learned in everything that we do is... The highest performance can be found in the deepest level of simplicity. And what indigenous wisdom brings to us is to help us to remember what it is to be human, you know? To be human and so this is why you know i have the gift of working with you know high-performing athletes, people who are involved in politics, tech entrepreneurs and founders, and really high-performing people. What? I'm able to offer those people is a space where they're able to just truly connect with who they really are. 
 You know, at the core of their being. What were their dreams as a child? 
 You know, what truly drives you? What truly drives them, what truly gives them joy. And that is... 
 Yeah, those are some of the secrets, if you will. Not so secret, though. They're just simple... Bits of being human that we just become disconnected from. And so my job is to reconnect people with all of that. And if that means peeling back a whole bunch of layers of, noise and narratives and stories that we grow to tell ourselves through the you know fast-paced life that we live then that's exactly what we do we just silence everything and through a series of powerful questions if you will just peel back the layers and go deeper and deeper until we find, aha, okay. There it is. 

 Rose | 06:16
We don't often go deep within ourselves to find, you know, the true meaning of life, I guess. You know, we tend to live in a very superficial world. How do we, you know, find the key to our highest performance in life? 

 Marc-John | 06:35
- yeah. Yeah, to protect to reconnect with ourselves and to protect and nurture and stoke that fire of connection. Protect it as the most sacred thing that we have available to us. Truly, that is where One true prosperity lives, but with true prosperity is were able to perform it at the highest levels, really. It's, you know, one might take it back to developmental psychology, you know, and to rear a child in a good way is to allow them to feel fully supported on all fronts, whilst being autonomous and encouraging autonomy, whilst having to come up against things like fear management in the development of that autonomy right so And if we do that well, we truly create you know, adults in the world that are connected to themselves, deeply connected to themselves. They understand where they've come from, why they're here, where they're going, where their sense of purpose is, and who they're here to serve, right? And unfortunately, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, just the way the world has developed in such a fast paced way. We. It's got us... Yeah. Raising ourselves and raising each other in ways that are truly disconnected from that and maybe don't have that underlying sense of support and confidence, right? And so, yeah, this is absolutely the work that we do. And we do it In direct collaboration with the world's living indigenous populations. - Yeah. 

 Rose | 08:30
So how does Native Wisdom Hub, how does it work? 

 Marc-John | 08:36
Thanks for asking. We teach and train leaders of the field. 
 So we are currently training a cohort of cacao ceremonial leaders of cacao ceremonies, which in those spaces is exactly where this alchemy that I'm talking about happens. Reconnection happens. 
 So we're training leaders, we train facilitators. And we run an annual retreat in Peru every single year. Right at the end of the year, we collaborate with three different indigenous populations. And that's where we're able to... Give people an experience of that brings them face to face. With ancient civilizations who, you know, have you know, really not lost that connection with the natural world with themselves, and with the spirit of community and communal living, right? We get to bring people face to face with that. And run them through a whole bunch of exercises and expose them to that way of living and offer them the sacred indigenous plant medicines that these indigenous populations use in order to keep themselves connected to themselves. To each other, to the natural world. 

 Rose | 09:54
So what are the benefits of, you know... The night of... 
 You know, why should we... As individuals or as business leaders, you know, attend these retreats. 

 Marc-John | 10:08
Yeah, precisely for those reasons, to... Get to know what prosperity truly means. For you to get to grips with, you know, what does prosperity truly mean to you? And as a direct byproduct of this to reach all new levels of performance, to upgrade every single other area of your life, that you might have been blindsided to in your, you know, efforts to perform and your and you know being in all of the roles that we inhabit and embody and are involved with And to Yeah, to find... To find a sense of a deeper sense of purpose. In order to be able to tap into the magic that is legacy because legacy is Yeah, so many people that we work with. 
 You know, they think they're leaving a legacy through their corporate endeavors But actually, when they come and work with us, they find that they are able to tap into something that they didn't tap into before, which is a sense of legacy that goes way beyond any. Corporate venture or any you know, any business venture, actually, it goes deeper than that. And it is about the level of Impact. That they have left. On the world around them. Yeah. When they leave this earth, as we all will do inevitably at some point, right? 

 Rose | 11:47
- absolutely, and you know- Are there sacred plants that are part of this psychedelic renaissance or? 

 Marc-John | 12:01
Yeah, the psychedelic renaissance. Maybe seem to be a surge in interest and research. Into psychedelic compounds being ingested by the human being for the purpose of uprooting childhood traumas, getting to know oneself better, feeling more connected, all of the above. And our job. Is to keep all of that or at least our corner of it rooted in the native traditions. And so there are you know, plant medicines that are rooted in millenary traditions, that span back thousands of years, that are absolutely part of that psychedelic renaissance. And when people come on to retreats with us, they get to experience that directly in the original context with the original bearers of these medicines, in a way that is not disconnected from their root, which again, arguably, the malaise and disease that we're experiencing in this modern world stems from that disconnection. That we you know, have kind of cultivated for ourselves. 
 So yeah. 

 Rose | 13:13
It's a human condition, isn't it, to be disconnected from society? And, you know, sometimes we can find it a little bit challenging to reconnect ourselves and find ourselves thriving in an environment where, you know, We are away from, you know, stress and Stripe. 

 Marc-John | 13:31
Right. Yep. Exactly. 

 Rose | 13:34
- So, Marc, John, you know, you've got some offering today. It's the nativewisdomhub.com trauma to triumph. Explain what that's about. Yes. 

 Marc-John | 13:49
Yeah, I would love to just offer it to any business owner out there who is... Either feels like they're reaching a state of burnout or is already beyond the state of burnout. It's just a little guide. That I put together for literally putting yourself back together. Once you're reaching burnout or have gone beyond the point of burnout, it's from a wisdom that I gleaned, I guess, from Yeah, just... 
 You know, really kind of furiously. Rushing my way through six different companies, having successfully built or to a certain degree of success, built two of them. And then crashing and burning because life was just moving too fast, the demand, the responsibilities growing on me. It just became too much and I couldn't hold it anymore at that time and I crashed and I burned. And so in this guide, it's I just share the wisdom of how to reconnect with what is most important with us. In order to rise again and find our place of triumph where we are doing work that feels aligned with our truest calling and where we are feeling satiated and purposeful in the work that we do. And to rebuild our energy reserves, to rebuild our energy reserves and... And build a solid foundation for ourselves once more so that we can Move forward. Again in life so that we aren't defeated by the burner so it's a free guide My gift from... 
 You know, from me to your audience as a thank you for tuning in. 

 Rose | 15:35
Wonderful. Thank you for that. Now, burnout is a really or can be, Now it is. No, it is. It's a horrible thing to have to go through. I get that about once or twice a year. I overdo it with... With several activities that I do and I find myself that I've crashed and burned, not to the point of being bedridden or any of those things, but to the point where my brain just doesn't want to function anymore. How can what you do, what you offer, how can that help? 

 Marc-John | 16:08
Yeah, for sure. So we glean energy. We glean energy. We're able to fill up our energy reserves from the things that truly give us joy and truly Help us to feel like what we are doing matters. Help us to feel like we are You know, we have some sense of a purpose. And what we do is, you know, important. That gives us a sense of joy. That sense of joy gives us energy reserves in soul. That is... A big part of what we do at native wisdom hub is to plug people back into that What? Where is your purpose? Where is your joy? Right. And how can you Build your life. More with those energies so that you can as they say, fill your cup once more and re- gain energy reserves. And if that means taking a little bit of a rest, you know, It's perfectly valid. There's no shame in resting as part of the human journey, taking rest and plugging ourselves into what gives us joy. This is where energy is replenished. And that is a sure way to recuperate from burnout, right? 

 Rose | 17:20
Absolutely don't. I can attest to that. Mac John can be found on LinkedIn at Marc-John Brown And he's on Facebook at Marcjohn.brown. And his website is nativewisdomhub.com. Marc John, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on Talking With The Experts. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today. 

 Marc-John | 17:44
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much. 

 Rose | 17:47
Bye-bye. 

 Outro | 17:48
You've been listening to Talking With The Experts, hosted by Rose Davidson. Make sure you have a look at our back catalogue over at talkingwiththeexperts.com. And be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don't miss out on any episode. We look forward to your company next time.