The Great Remembering

What if the most powerful solutions for the crises of modern life are ten thousand years old?

Modern life is full of advice about how to feel better, think better and live better – yet many of us still feel anxious, lonely and cut off from meaning. What if the problem is not that we have forgotten how to look after ourselves, but that we have forgotten how to do it together?

In The Great Remembering, June Cohen travels across cultures, continents and centuries to uncover the wisdom systems our ancestors built to help human beings endure upheaval and feel more fully alive. From epic physical ordeals and communal festivals to sauna and cold plunge, psychedelic ceremony and shared rituals of grief, these were not superstitions or quaint traditions, but sophisticated social technologies grounded in close observation of the body, the mind and the bonds between people.

Blending reportage, cultural history and new science with unusual range and clarity, Cohen shows how modern research is beginning to validate what older cultures already knew: that resilience is embodied, that healing is social, and that meaning cannot be reduced to personal optimisation. The Great Remembering is a bold, hopeful book about how we might live now – by recovering what modern life has left behind.