The Rewilding of the Brain: Epigenetics and Memory

by Cordula Frei

The Rewilding of the Brain: Epigenetics and Memory

The Magic We Remember: Rewilding the Brain, Reclaiming the Feminine

There was a fire crackling softly in the middle of the night, casting long shadows across the ground. The forest, silent but full of whispers, breathed around us. My granddaughter, her eyes wide and full of wonder, sat beside me as the flames flickered, and in her voice, a question was born: “Grandma, do you believe in magic?”

Her innocent inquiry, like a spark in the dark, sparked a deep reflection within me. Magic. I smiled and leaned closer, the firelight catching the gleam in her hair.

“Magic?” I repeated, letting the word sit in the space between us. “Magic is real, but it’s not something you make. It’s something you remember.”

She tilted her head, the fire casting flickering patterns on her face. “Remember? How do you remember?” For a moment i was tempted to tell her, that we continue this talk once she is grown up. But then the deep yearn in her eyes made me realize, these type of questions are not for adults. They are for souls.

I thought for a moment before answering, choosing my words carefully. “You know the unicorn you see in your dreams? The one with the shining coat and the wild eyes? That’s magic. She’s part of you, and part of me. Every time you dream of her, every time you close your eyes and let her run through the forest of your mind, the magic wakes up. But if you forget her, she sleeps. The more you remember, the more she comes alive.”

She stared at me, wide-eyed, seeking the truth in my words. “Is she real?”

I nodded. “She’s as real as the trees in the forest. As real as the moon that rises every night. As real as the wind that dances through the branches. But magic... magic isn’t a thing. It’s a way of being. A way of remembering that we’re more than what we think we are.”

She didn’t speak for a long time, her gaze lost in the embers of the fire. “Where do I find her?”

I looked into the night sky, the stars scattered like glitter, and then looked back at her. “You find her by remembering that she’s already inside of you. She’s in the way you feel the wind on your skin. She’s in the way you laugh, the way you wonder, the way you dream. She’s in your bones. Just like Baba Yaga, who hides in the forest, waiting for those who truly seek her. She’s not lost, little one, we’ve just forgotten how to find her.”

Her face softened with understanding, and I could see in her eyes the stirring of something ancient, something that called to her, deep within.

But as the fire died down, the magic began to feel more distant again. A part of me—perhaps the part that had forgotten—couldn’t help but wonder: How do we remember? How do we find the magic again, when the world around us seems to have lost touch with it? And how would i find the right words answering her pressing questions?

In those quiet hours, I realized something crucial. The magic the little girl longed for wasn’t lost. It was buried, perhaps. And it had been forgotten by many, especially in the world we now live in—a world where the feminine, the nocturnal principle, is often silenced or ignored. It’s as though we’ve lost touch with something elemental, something primal, that once guided us, protected us, and kept us rooted in the earth.

Jean Gebser, in his work on the evolution of consciousness, spoke of the "nocturnal" as a vital aspect of human experience. The nocturnal isn’t just the night, or the darkness. It’s the space of the feminine, the place where intuition, imagination, and deep knowing reside. It’s the domain of mystery and depth—qualities that have long been neglected, forgotten, or misunderstood in the wake of modernity’s rational, mental dominance.

The problem is that, in forgetting the nocturnal, we forget how to feel our connection to the earth, to the cycles of nature, to the stories that are encoded in our bones. We forget that the feminine is not just a role, but an essential force. Gebser predicted that for the world to move forward, we would need to reclaim the integral consciousness—one that integrates not only the rational but the emotional, the mythic, the archaic. The feminine, in this regard, isn’t just a gender, but a principle that must be acknowledged if we are to reconnect to all that we have lost.

As I pondered this, something else occurred to me. The little girl’s question about magic wasn’t just a question about the unicorn or the forest or the fairytales we tell ourselves at night. It was about how we remember. How do we bring back what has been buried? How do we reawaken the parts of our brain and body that store the ancient wisdom? And more importantly, what happens to us when we forget?

We are not merely creatures of logic, of reason. We are beings of memory—deep memory. In fact, epigenetics teaches us that our genes carry the stories of our ancestors, the wisdom they passed down, and even their fears. The state of our brain, our mental well-being, and our spiritual connections are deeply influenced by our ancestors’ experiences. In some ways, we are all still living out the legacies of the past—whether we know it or not.

Just like the magic the little girl seeks, the path to rewilding the brain is one of remembering. It's about reconnecting to the spaces where we have forgotten our connection to the earth, to the stars, to our own primal instincts. This is not just a psychological task; it’s a physical one. Our brains, shaped by generations of human experience, have adapted and evolved. But much of the deep, archaic memory has been silenced by the constant noise of modern life.

Rewilding the brain—returning it to its ancestral knowledge—requires us to break free from the shackles of rationality and rediscover the mythic, the somatic, the intuitive. Just as the little girl’s magical unicorn sleeps within her, so too do the memories of our ancestors—stored in the deep recesses of our neural pathways—await our attention.

As the night stretched on and the stars burned bright above us, I could feel that something inside the little girl had shifted. She wasn’t asking about magic anymore. She was beginning to see it.

“Grandma,” she said, her voice filled with certainty. “I found the magic.”

I looked at her, my heart swelling with a knowing smile. “Where did you find it?”

She pointed to the forest beyond the firelight, the dark expanse where the trees whispered to each other. “In the trees,” she said simply. “It’s always been here.”

I nodded. And in that moment, I knew that she had remembered. The magic wasn’t something she had to search for, it was something she had reawakened within herself. The connection had never been severed—it was just waiting to be noticed, waiting to be called back into the light.

In her eyes, the magic was alive again. And so was I.

The world needs this. We need it. The magic, the wisdom, the deep remembering of who we are—it’s not just for us. It’s for the future. If we continue to neglect the feminine, the nocturnal, the mythic, we risk losing the very thing that connects us to the earth, to each other, and to ourselves.

The little girl, in her simple question about magic, showed me something profound. We don’t need to make magic happen. We need to remember it. We need to return to the ancient, wild places within ourselves, to those parts of the brain and body that have been asleep for too long. We need to reawaken the wisdom of our ancestors, the magic of our bones, the stories of the stars.

As we remember, we heal. And in healing, we not only save ourselves, but we save the world.

Recent studies in epigenetics have shown that experiences—traumas, joys, fears—can leave marks on our genes, influencing not just our lives but those of our descendants. It's as if our bodies carry the memories of our ancestors, whispering their stories through our cells.

Jean Gebser spoke of the evolution of consciousness, emphasizing the importance of integrating various structures of awareness. He believed that to truly evolve, we must embrace the "nocturnal" aspects of our psyche—the intuitive, the emotional, the mystical.

In that moment with my granddaughter, I realized that her quest for magic was a call to remember—to reconnect with the parts of ourselves that modern life often suppresses. It's in the stories we tell, the dreams we chase, and the fears we confront.

As the moon continued its journey across the sky, I felt a shift within. The profound anxiety of the previous night gave way to a profound sense of connection—to the earth, to my ancestors, to the future generations who will carry our stories forward.

Later I walked the soft curve of the hillside, the late sun dusting the fields with amber as Basel shimmered below and the Rhine coiled like a remembering serpent through the valley. My friend, barefoot in wild grass was resting as I said quietly:

“Trauma cannot be solved by the mental brain.”

I felt those words land in her like an echo. Not from abstraction but from her body, her lineage, from a place where language trembles before instinct. We were not simply women walking—we were daughters of a forgotten priestesshood, unwinding the tight spiral of a culture that has forgotten how to kneel before mystery.

She told me of the TED talk she’d seen, where a neurologist recounted her stroke, the shutting down of one hemisphere and the explosive expansion of the other—the right brain swelling into a cathedral of vision, connection, and timelessness. She said it wasn’t terrifying, but liberating.

And then the hard part began: returning to the narrow hallway of the rational mind.

We paused, watching clouds build over the Alps like ancient gods.

We agreed: modern woman lives in exile.

Exiled from the cave, the circle, the rite, the howl and from the Baba Yaga's hut.

“The memories that hold trauma,” I said, “don’t live in the neat stories of the neocortex. They are coiled deep, scaled and silent, in the reptilian brain. That old brain doesn’t speak English. It speaks dream. Smell. Flash. Drumbeat.”

We spoke of how healing can never come solely from language, from talk therapy or theories, though those help. True healing moves through rhythm, breath, ritual, myth. It’s the Baba Yaga fire. It’s the sweat lodge or the reconnection to the archaic lineage. It’s rolling on the earth, burying the fear in soil and letting the worms teach us how to digest death.It s a integration in our brain.

And so, we imagined what a post-postmodern (or metamodern if you like) rite of passage might look like.

A place where trauma is not a label, but a threshold.

Where the goal is not to ‘fix’, but to remember—to descend, like Persephone, and return bearing seeds.

Gebser wrote that the integral structure of consciousness is not the accumulation of all previous stages, but their transparency through us. He didn’t ask us to become magical again, or mythical, or archaic—but to let those ways of knowing shine through the mental.

He called it diaphany.

A luminous structure where day and night, thought and myth, the unicorn and the brainstem—live together.

On the hill, we watched a hawk circle, then vanish.

My friend peacefully rested and i said, “Maybe this is the mutation Gebser spoke of. Not one of genes, but of remembering who we were before forgetting.”

And so, I carried all that—my night of moonlit unravelling, the solemn walk along the Rhine, my granddaughter’s question about magic—back to the hearth where she waited.

When I told her the story of Baba Yaga again that evening, her eyes were wide but calm.

“Did you live in her hut, Grandma?”

“Yes,” I said. “And so did you.”

She nodded, as if this was obvious. Why did you let us in, she asked? I had no answer. No answer from the mental brain. But with her tiny hand, she tapped her heart.

“That’s where I keep the magic stick.” And then i knew, this is why, This is why me, the Baba Yaga Grandmother who i never am and never was but the women i am who had choosen to live in nature and hear and worship her heartbeat gave shelter to what today you call a grandchild. A child that carries the future behind and before your self.

I stood in the kitchen of my daugther later in the day and she told me; Mum, i will have children, thats for sure.

I smiled inwardly and asked her, why, darling - do you want to have children? She said; to make this world a better place. There is so much loss and out of order. There has to be children who know. And who remember.

I looked at her gently, my wonderful, adult daugther. And internally i thought, just like you sweetheart. Just like you. And she fetched the fresh eggs from her chicken and said even though we dismissed mothers day yesterday, lets to it today, and have a feast. And we did. With her eggs from her chicken at the farm and with the love and beauty that shine from her presence.

The full moon rose again behind her, still fierce, still full, but now a companion—not a threat.

She had remembered.

And so had I.

Even if sun and moon stand opposing and the nights creatures are feasting on persephones downhill journey, there was always one answer: walk through the forest and don t mind the wild beasts.