What if the most powerful solutions for the crises of modern life are actually found… in our past?
We see it in headlines, in trendlines, in our own lives: We've never been more anxious, more divided, or more lost. The problem isn't that we lack solutions. It's that we abandoned the ones that actually worked. For thousands of years, across every culture on earth, humans built sophisticated “wisdom systems” to meet our deepest needs — rooted in physical challenge, sensory immersion, communal ritual, and belonging. But in our pursuit of progress, we dismantled them.
In The Great Remembering, June Cohen — co-creator of TED Talks and Masters of Scale — time-travels across cultures, continents, and centuries to investigate what we left behind. Wisdom systems for communal awe and communal grief. Practices like the sauna, the festival, the epic physical challenge. What cutting-edge neuroscience, cell biology, and physiology are now confirming is as surprising as it is obvious: These practices weren't primitive. They were sophisticated solutions to the oldest human problems. And the science is finally proving why they worked.
The mental health crisis. The climate crisis. The crisis of social division. The rise of AI challenging our way of life. At every rupture like this, humans have looked to the past to find their way forward.
The answers are already there.
We just need to remember.
Advance Praise for The Great Remembering
“
June doesn't preach or pretend to have all the answers. She reminds us that many of the things we're searching for today — connection, resilience, purpose, healing — may not be new discoveries at all. We simply need to remember. And that's what makes this book so powerful.
— Gabby Reece, Host of The Gabby Reece Show; Former elite volleyball player
“
With compassionate curiosity about what makes us human, June takes us on an archeological tour of the ancient yearning pulsating beneath all of our evolving technologies and changing moral fashions – to make sense of our mortality and rejoice in our aliveness, to salve our suffering and give shape to our joy. What a revelation, what an invitation, to discover that people who had no notion of gravity, genetics, or democracy answered the questions we live with more wisely than we do – a beckoning to rethink how we make of our fragile embodiment a cathedral of meaning.
— Maria Popova, Brainpicker, The Marginalian
“
I've never seen the science explained better for a lay audience.
— Charles Raison, Professor of Psychiatry and Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“
When something captures June Cohen’s imagination, pay attention. June is best known as a futurist—which makes this book counter-intuitive, even paradoxical. She time-travels different cultures, on different continents, across many centuries to unearth “a striking truth”: the answer to our most pressing challenges lies not in the future but in the past. She brilliantly argues that to advance forward, we must look back — to the practices, or what she calls “wisdom systems,” of the ancients. The bottom line: June Cohen has much to teach us about how to live today. Pay attention.
— Steven Petrow, Columnist, The Washington Post
“
We were right all along. A joyous baedeker of six ancient traditions that can recharge, inspire and perhaps change us for the better..
— Seth Godin, 21-time best-selling author (Tribes, The Practice, The Knot)
“
June Cohen has spelunked to the core of our emotional existence and found a soothing surprise. What if everything we need is already within, forgotten and slumbering, waiting on us to just remember? You will ping constantly as you read this book, as June magically uses curiosity and discovery to resurface a soul truth: We’re all here to walk each other home and that which you need the most already knows your face.
— Tamala Edwards, News and Public Affairs Anchor, ABC News - Philadelphia
“
Hooks you from the very first sentence and rouses you with determination to implement the wisdom she animates with effortless grace… an urgent and important book.
— Bruce Feiler, seven-time best-selling author of Walking The Bible, Life is in the Transitions and A Time to Gather
“
June Cohen is such a friendly, open-hearted, deeply informed guide to recovering the wisdom that can make us whole and alive once more.
— Chip Conley, Founder, Modern Elder Academy and Joie de Vivre Hospitality Group
“
“An electrifying, dizzying, wondrous celebration of humanity, then and now. I finished it feeling connected, inspired, hopeful.
— Keith Ferrazzi, Best-selling author of Never Eat Alone
“
An epic and intimate journey into what makes us human, what heals us, and what binds us together. June Cohen is an unparalleled guide to the ancient wisdom and modern science that remind us why we’re here and how we find joy and meaning in our lives each and every day. What a gift she has rescued from our ancestors.
— Doug Abrams, Co-Author of The New York Times-bestselling The Book of Joy and The Book of Hope
“
June Cohen makes giant topics easy to understand … a fast-paced book, delivered with a deft sense of humor.
— Lance McDaniel, President, Rotary Club of Oklahoma City