The evening we arrived at KaingU Lodge in Zambia, we took a sunset boat tour of the Kafue River — and inadvertently steered directly into a pod of submerged hippos.
What followed was both genuinely terrifying and, in retrospect, one of the most perfect encounters I could have had with an animal whose medicine I’ve been sitting with for years.
Hippo knows something most of us resist: that limits are not the opposite of freedom. They are the container in which freedom becomes possible.
In this episode, I share the story of that river encounter, what hippo has taught me about the magic that lives inside constraints, and something quite personal — the years I spent fighting my own hard limits around food, and what happened when I finally stopped.
The first rule of magic is containment. — Julia Cameron
Read the original essay here
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The Wild Journey Home is a podcast of animal medicine essays — stories from the natural world that find us at exactly the right moment.
