How much of our past do we need to understand before we can move forward? And what if we’re already happy with where we are?

Ben Oofana has followed an unconventional path since leaving home at seventeen. His early experiences among the Kiowa people in Oklahoma led to an apprenticeship with traditional healer Horace Daukei and, eventually, decades of exploring different approaches to personal development.

Agnes and Ben discuss his experiences, his beliefs about emotional healing, and the questions that arise when two people approach the past from different perspectives.

In this episode

• Leaving home as a teenager to follow an unusual calling.

• Gaining acceptance among Kiowa elders.

• Learning from Horace Daukei.

• Discovering different approaches through Sufi and Buddhist traditions.

• Training in Chinese internal martial arts and qigong.

• How Ben developed his own meditation practices.

• The idea of spiritual bypassing and lessons learned from teachers.

• The importance of loving, supportive people in our lives.

• Agnes’s questions about happiness, resilience and leaving the past behind.

• Continuing to grow, learn and remain curious as we age.

Ben shares his personal understanding of healing and development, while Agnes offers a different perspective: that our later years can also be about enjoying what we’ve already built and embracing what lies ahead.

Content note: This conversation includes references to childhood abuse, sexual assault and emotional trauma. Ben also discusses spiritual and healing practices from his personal perspective. These experiences and approaches are not presented as substitutes for qualified medical or mental health care.

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At seventeen, Ben left home and found his way into a predominantly Kiowa community in southwestern Oklahoma. He later apprenticed with Horace Daukei, one of the last surviving traditional doctors of the Kiowa Tribe, and began going through the vision quest, fasting alone for four days and nights in the Wichita Mountains without food or water.

After a succession of destructive relationships in his mid-twenties, Ben came to recognize that he was reenacting many of the traumas and emotional wounds of his childhood and adolescence. That realization led him into decades of intensive meditation while also exploring a wide range of therapeutic interventions and returning to and going deeper into the ancient practices he had learned while training with Horace. He later began seventeen years of training with Sifu Li Tai Liang in the Chinese internal arts of Xin Yi Quan, Baguazhang, Tai Chi, Chi Gong and related practices.

Through years of intensive practice, exploration and direct experience, Ben developed an approach to healing that works with the places where the impressions of trauma, attachment wounds and other lived experiences become deeply embedded in the body and mind.

Having trained with a traditional Native American doctor, Ben also serves as a conduit, allowing a powerful presence to work through him to facilitate healing within the bodies and minds of those he works with. He helps people heal from heartbreak, attachment wounds, dysfunctional relational patterns and other deep emotional wounds, reconnect with their authentic selves, and develop the internal resources that enable them to create healthier and more deeply fulfilling relationships and lives.