BANDERA, Texas—Amongst the velvet-green hills and honey-hued grazing fields of Mollie Engelhart’s life, love, and passion—regenerative farming—freedom thrives at Sovereignty Ranch in West Texas.
It’s the freedom to raise livestock, work in moist brown soil growing healthy food, create the natural medicines she uses, and raise her children the way she sees fit.
It’s the freedom to live the way she chooses.
Far from being a radical utopian concept, Sovereignty Ranch is a practical community of people committed to human liberty and independence.
Its purpose is to bring like-minded people together in harmony with nature against an overreaching government hostile to their very existence.
“My thought is that we as individuals have to take responsibility so that we go back to living the way we used to,” said Ms. Engelhart, a vegan chef, entrepreneur, regenerative farmer, and co-host of Confluence 2024, alongside health podcaster Alec Zeck.
More than 400 people gathered for the April 5-8 event on this sprawling bucolic farm in Bandera, Texas, to see the sun’s total eclipse and learn about natural healing and living.
The goal was to teach people how to become more fluent in the skills to live in freedom and abundance in the face of increasing government control.
A host of guest speakers addressed this topic while offering helpful advice on how to trust more, love unconditionally, and live healthier lifestyles in a rapidly changing world dominated by pharmaceutical companies.
The event’s description stated, “But more than that, it is about building stronger families, lifelong friendships, and resilient communities.”
Before the pandemic, Ms. Engelhart ran a successful farm-to-market restaurant business with 350 employees in Los Angeles.
The business saw continued growth for 11 years until COVID-19 public health mandates by the government made commercial life increasingly difficult.
Ms. Engelhardt said the forced wearing of masks and social distancing—the “new normal,” as many called it—was just a government attempt at exercising control in a crisis.
Out of fear, she watched people hand their sovereignty over to government bureaucrats in exchange for the illusion of security, which came at a high price.
“It’s not about giving your power away to someone else; it’s about seeing that you are the power,” said Ms. Engelhart, who learned the value of regenerative farming growing up on a small farm in upstate New York.
She said regenerative farming is simply getting back what you invest in the soil.
“Regenerative agriculture and soil health are foundational to human health,” Ms. Engelhart told The Epoch Times. “We’ve stopped eating food that’s of the soil.”
On the first day of Confluence 2024, Katie Hess, an expert in flower alchemy, held a workshop on the healing nature of certain flowers.
“Everything is written into your body—energy,” Ms. Hess said. “Now, we can take the specific energies of flowers and apply them to points in our bodies.”
Ms. Hess said the world of medicine is “changing rapidly” in favor of the naturopathic model.
She said that’s because the old protocols of using vitamins, minerals, and supplements to prevent and treat disease are not working better than they used to.
“What is moving the dial for people more is energy medicine,” she said. “What is the physical body? The physical body is the screen. Our emotional patterns—our thought patterns—are what we project onto our physical body.”
Ms. Hess described the human body as “literally a walking crystal” resonating energy.
“So when you take in energy—the energy of plants—you can magnify” that energy, she said.
“So, it isn’t as if the flowers and plants are doing something to us. We have this relationship where we can project the energy to other people as well. Our bodies are made of energy.”
At one time, such thinking was considered “really woo-woo,” Ms. Hess said, but there exists an invisible realm of energy in and around us.
“There’s the one energy we can’t necessarily see but we know it’s true—love. But you can feel it. It’s the same with the flowers and plants. Anything that has to do with energy is what the human body really needs today,” she said.
Ryan Sprague, a “conscious cannabis coach” from Weymouth, Massachusetts, hosted a ceremonial event utilizing meditation, breath work, and cannabis therapy.
“This is exactly where I wanted to spend my eclipse—the exact kind of people I want to be around,” Mr. Sprague told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Sprague viewed the solar eclipse as not just an astronomical event but a spiritual signal and turning point in the battle between the negative and positive forces in the world.
“At the end of the day, the negative polarity only feeds on fear. So when you’re in a place like this where everyone is coming from love, we don’t feed that beast,” he said.
“This eclipse is going to be a big turning point where people realize that they come from love and that nothing from fear can harm them.”
Tyler Smith of Indiana said the most critical aspects of the four-day event were the spiritual lessons and the call to personal freedom.
“It’s taking sovereignty over your body, mind, and soul. It’s taking back what’s yours—given to you by God—and not outsourcing to other control structures. It’s taking back your freedom,” Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times.
Guest speaker Dr. Andy Kaufman is a forensic psychologist and COVID-19 “whistleblower” who is skeptical of allopathic medicine’s fixation on germ theory.
On April 5, Dr. Kaufman gave a talk on the role of the individual in law and commerce during COVID-19.
“Your freedom to choose what to do with your body was suddenly being put on hold. You were being prevented from operating in the world unless you did X, Y, or Z, and you had no choice in the matter,” Dr. Kaufman said.
“Everyone knew at some level that was not the spirit of freedom; that was not the values of America and the United States. How did that come about?”
Dr. Kaufman said that in the history of totalitarian states, there has been a distinct and recurring pattern where the government used an emergency in order to justify significant changes in society.
“The United States has the principle of individualism: that it’s up to everyone what risk we want to take. The government can try to protect us, they can tell us there’s a danger. But if we want to face that danger for survival, for example, it’s up to us to take that risk.”
But during the pandemic, “it’s the fact that [for] everyone, their individual choice was taken away. These things were all radical departures from the public health policy,” Dr. Kaufman told The Epoch Times.
He said the two main lessons of Confluence 2024 were that it is a mistake for people to give away all their power to a government or corporation.
“You have to take it back, think for yourself, and do it for yourself. Because the central power is always corruptible, and they’re going to act in self-interest at some point,” Dr. Kaufman said.
“In the health realm, we have a similar lesson that the medical establishment is much more driven by profit than it is by health. They use strategies, including perpetuating completely imaginary causes of disease upon us.
“Nature provides ways to heal. Once I got outside the medical paradigm, I’ve seen people with life-threatening illnesses, chronic, incurable illnesses, over and over again cure themselves,” he said.
Holistic medicine coach Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan spoke of the need to build new communities in a failing society and not to go it alone.
“A lot of us have gotten really good at being the lone wolf because we had to. Look around. We’re not alone at all, it turns out. They lied to us,” Dr. Chan said.
Amidst a “world of zombies,” she said, the future demands resilient communities to find solutions “together.”
“We can’t lone-wolf this one. You can’t lone-wolf your way into building a whole new [solution],” she said.
Mollie Engelhart’s mother, Jeanne Engelhart, flew in from Maui, Hawaii, to attend Confluence 2024 and view the eclipse.
“I am so excited to be here and see what it’s about. I was supposed to come to the last one [in 2023]—this whole idea of let’s move forward without the government,” Ms. Engelhart said.
“We don’t need everyone to wake up; there are enough of us who are awake. We need to come together, and that is what’s happening here. There for sure is a movement here. United, we survive.”
Mollie Engelhart said the purpose of Confluence 2024 was to reach out to the broadest possible audience of like-minded people.
Before, people felt alone during the pandemic, she said. But when the first gathering took place in 2023, “people were weeping to find other people that felt the way they did.
“Now, people have found their tribe of freedom-loving, choose whether you want to be vaccinated or not” individuals, she said. “Health freedom, health conscious.”
She estimates that 97 percent of the people at Confluence 2024 have not taken an mRNA shot against COVID-19.
The visitors were as diverse in their bohemian appearance as they tasted different foods and holistic items made from organic ingredients during the event.
“I would say that we’re not left or right, but we’re more right than left,” Ms. Engelhart said. “We want freedom, guns, and food.”
And when the proverbial stuff hits the fan, she said, “Do you really want to be alone?”
“The government only has power to the degree that we rely on it. We’ve got to get back to radical trust. My goal is a resilient community.”
