Woman Who Rubs the Mountain: Recent Episodes
Kendra Ward
a podcast and gathering place for stories of embodied ecology.
What happens when we rub on the body of the earth, how does it brush back against us?
There is a certain fidelity required when we return over and over again to be shaped, imagined even, by the beings, the weather, the land forms, and the elemental powers where we live.
Let us seek: intimacy across language, intimacy across culture, intimacy across species, intimacy across consciousness.
I’d call it Beth Stephens superpower: creating spaces that help women cherish the messy, mucky, imperfect wholeness of themselves. As an Ecopyschologist, Beth guides women through journeys of deep self-inquiry, working with nature while remembering themselves as a part of nature. Our conversation beautifully weaves through questions such as, why are we humans the only species who seem to have forgotten their essential completeness and what does it mean to get out of our own way so that mystery can dream through us?
These inquiries were quite slippery, but I felt like Beth did a beautiful job allowing them the complexity and respect they required. Here are a few more highlights from our conversation:
- Beth grounds us in place at her home in Suffolk, a land of flat marshes, vast skies, salt-licked trees and raw coastline. One of the reasons she loves this place so much is because “it is a land that does not give up her stories easily.” Mystery and melancholy palpably linger in the many layers of battle history and suppressed sacred sites that live deep in the ground of Suffolk.
- Ecotherapy is “a journey that invites people to reconnect with their wholeness, exploring all that it means to be human and reclaiming any parts we may have banished in order to fit into Western culture.” Ecotherapy may involve eco-somatic practices, creative expression, dream work, conversations with other-than-humans, or working with archetypes and deep imagery.
- Returning to the muck and the mess of our earthly entanglements is a relief; we can finally relax into our lives as they are. What a relief to stop all of the striving and instead allow ourselves grace in the disordered complexity. Here there is a deep honoring of the authenticity of nature and of ourselves being a part of nature.
- When we court Mystery, we see everything as an expression of Earth’s dreaming. Perhaps we can practice getting out of our own way and allow Mystery to dream through us, the same way it dreams through Oak, Snake, Thrush, and all of the rest of life.
More about Beth Stephens:
Nature in Mind: Beth's website
Ecotherapy: 1-1 ecotherapy for all humans
Rewilding for Women
IG nature_in_mind
Natural Academy: accredited training in Ecopsychology (and Beth's alma mater)
Resouces:
Kendra’s Book Recommendations
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin
Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche by Bill Plotkin
Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind edited by Theodore Roszak
It may be the longest journey we ever take- those 18 inches between our heads and our hearts. Here in the Fire elemental season, we can find new dimensions of healing through heart connection and widening our sense of relational intimacy with everything around us. But summer themes of full unfurling are mixed with emotionally-intelligent discernment so that our hearts are able to use their deepest sense of knowing, responding well to each individual moment. This prevents the over-extending, boundary-leaking, or over-consuming that can sometimes happen when we are swept away by the natural enthusiasm of summer spell-making.
In this exploration of the Fire Element / Summer Season / Heart Energy, we wonder:
- What do our animal bodies already know about summer? How does it live in us? How do we embody the archetype of Fire in all of its expressions of peak aliveness?
- How can our hearts open more fully in eco-adoration, waking us up through joy and relatedness?
- With a healthy Heart spirit, our authentic self moves us to honestly communicate the needs and knowing of ourselves to others.
There is even more heart-deliciousness in this episode as I tell a story about enormous ladles, starlight and our cosmic essence. Oh, and the kindled magic of fireflies is in there too. It is my hope that in these explorations you are reminded to love and love and love some more and in doing so, remember to let everything love you back.
Mentioned Books:
Kigo: Exploring the Spiritual Essence of Acupuncture Points Through the Changing Seasons by Lorie Dechar
The Secret Teachings of Plants: the Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Five Element Resources:
Rhythms of Change by Mary Saunders
Five Spirits by Lorie Eve Dechar
Heart Element Resources:
Deep Listening
Heart Coherence Meditation
Integral Anatomy with Gil Hedley: Look for the video called "Unwinding the Heart Center"
Fire Spirit Question: How are you expressing your truest self, and in turn, your truest joy?
Perhaps our human worry is the last thing the earth needs at these trickster crossroads. This is the core inquiry of Chara Armon, PhD., founder of The School for Humans and Earth: how can we actively move from eco-anxiety to eco-inspiration? Because how we view life on this planet and our place within it as human beings, directly determines how we choose to contribute or not. With a dash of neuroscience, a sprinkling of informed optimism, and a wallop of animist celebration, our conversation is an exploration into how humans might still be good medicine for this planet.
Here are a few of the highlights:
- We explore some of the mysteries of what it means to “feel at home,” and how it’s entirely possible for home to be small, local, and delicately close while at the same time varied, vast, and shared by many places, even the entire planet Earth.
- Our nervous systems are entrained to the earth and vice versa. In this way, our individual flourishing is intertwined with the Earth’s flourishing.
- Perhaps one of the most radical acts we can make is to use our love and creativity instead of fear and extinction-mongering to lead us forward. When we feel hopeful about our future we are more likely to take action or feel motivated to explore how we can hold a frequency of regeneration.
- It is from the seeds of animism that all world religions have grown. When we feel into our animist roots, it’s surprisingly pleasurable and intrinsically sane.
More about Chara Armon, PhD.:
The School for Humans & Earth
Podcast
Courses & Programs
Resources:
Kendra’s Book Recommendations
Christian Kyriacou- the House Whisperer
Gaia Alchemy: the Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul by Stephan Harding
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia by Stephan Harding
Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence by Gregory Cajete
*I don't love supporting Amazon but at least these links offer all of the book's information so that you might find them elsewhere.
In celebration of the summer solstice, End of Life Doula, Ancestral Lineage Repair Practitioner, and Ritualist, Jen Hudziec is back on the podcast to talk about the unabashed sensuality of summer, the joy of loving and being loved back by the living world, and using pleasure as an essential earth-honoring skill. Jen also shares some of her insights and experiences as a Fire Walk instructor, working with fire as an ancestor who demands our full dedication and attention. At the end of our conversation, Jen guides us in a beautiful summer solstice meditation.
Here are the highlights:
- Skin of the earth, skin of our bodies, skin on skin, Jen’s body-felt sense of summer and its sensorial pleasure arises in liberation! Not just a freedom from all of the layers of winter clothes but also in deepening her relationship with the fluid, floating, levity of water.
- Co-opted by our hyper-sexualized culture, Jen describes her experience of freeing pleasure from only being equated with sexuality. Her personal shift came through a relationship with the Divine Feminine, when she began to experience true intimacy as beginning from within to then be shared outwards.
- Jen describes the pivotal moment in a Fire Walk ritual when an essential inquiry comes forward: Who is going to help you make it across? Are you going to try and go it alone or are you going to invoke the help of the people in your lineage who know fire intimately?
- Peering into their erotic inner worlds, flowers bring forward a certain kind of glorious witchery this time of year. Now we better understand that flowers aren’t just attracting bees by their colors and smell but also by their electromagnetic fields. So the really exciting part is when we start to tune into how our fields and those of the beings around us come into coherence with each other.
- Having descended from ancestors who were domesticated, who taught us to domesticate the land around us, domesticate our food growing methods, domesticate our bodies, even domesticate our hearts, Jen explores the question of what it means to have a wild, free, undomesticated heart.
More About Jen Hudziec:
Ancestral Pathways
Solstice Fire Walk
Dreaming into Death- 6 week series
Resources:
Kendra's Book Recommendation List
The Secret Teachings of Plants: the Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown
Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber
Eco-Somatic Educator, Rivka Honeybee Worth, intertwines her love of dance and nature in a body of work she aptly refers to as Eco-Soma. The embodied practices of Eco-Soma are devoted to rebuilding healthy, reciprocal relationships with the living world. In this rich conversation, we explore experiences of fresh interplay between our bodies and the body of the earth, we feel into the presence practice of Futuring, and we consider the fields of possibility that arise from cell to cell listening.
It was joyful to yarn with my Gaian sister from across the planet. Here are the highlights:
- Rivka has recently become the custodian of a protected wildlife area in Taungurung Country and she describes the welcomes she has been receiving from the more-than-human beings there, especially the wedge-tail eagle and other birds.
- The practice of Eco-Soma is about going skin to skin, locating physical presence in space. There are meeting places waiting for us everywhere when we combine consent, conscious touch, and deep listening.
- Futuring is a practice that involves feeling into the potential of what we could be and radiating that outwards. New and old worlds circle into each other as the past, present, and future move through a spiraling, non-linear path.
- Music, sound, and vibration are open pathways of communication with the more-than-humans. We may already have experience communicating with non-speaking beings, like an animal or infant, where we have practiced listening through skin tone or qualities of movement, or even practiced listening through our cells, skin, or organs.
- In the 5Rhythms system (Flowing / Staccato / Chaos / Lyrical / Stillness), Chaos comes before the joy and sweetness of Lyrical. Rivka speaks to the essential nature of “dancing Chaos,” letting intense emotions move through us, allowing for a breaking, a falling apart before moving on.
- Cell to cell meetings provide access to communicating on an even deeper level, finding the sensory bonding places between the cells in soil, in plants, in our human bodies, and beyond.
More About Rivka:
Rivka Honeybee Worth
Eco-Soma
In Your Arms
Tree Codes
Sound Journeys
Bird Song Prayer dance video
More Resources:
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Joanna Macy
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
Gabrielle Roth- 5Rhythms
Excerpt from Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember the Plants:”
“Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too.
Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.”
It was with utter delight that I recently shared a conversation with fellow intranaut and Ayurvedic medicine practitioner, Alana Layne Greenberg. I knew she would be game for turning off the lights so to speak, fumbling around with heightened senses, palpating the fissures, pressing up against some initiatory questions like: What does it mean to re-embody indigeneity? What’s up with our obsession about the end of the world? How does our human body reflect the land body and vice versa (and are there any ways that we might take this sense of “mirroring” too far?)
And more, so much more! Here are some highlights:
- Alana describes how she connects to Gaia, using wonderment as a vibration, “receiving a frequency medicine” that runs through all of her senses, ultimately creating a loop of reciprocity.
- Feeling into the personal nature and potential stickiness of the term “re-embodying indigeneity,” Alana explores it as “a more natural way of knowing… a way of being reverent.”
- It is speculated that every aspect of our bodies has olfactory receptors, including our heart, liver, lungs, sperm, and ova. What if our origin story is entirely based on smell? What if we have been entraining and detoxifying when we are in less-humanly impacted spaces with receptors we didn’t even know that we have?
- Learning to work with Void medicine - the dark, inherently feminine energy from which all life springs- makes space for a radical not-knowingness and the embracing of uncertainty.
- Alana wonders how we might “untame presence in a way that fosters a revolution of love?”
- How is our obsession with extinction becoming like a trendy “sexy, burning man event?” How might we be careful about seeding our own prophecy?
- Using the Ayurvedic principle of agni, let us transmute our grief for the world, laying it down in digestive fires, metabolizing it in a way that stops centering humans and reveres Gaia instead.
- Alana recently watched a lily opening in real time, the inside of the lily's petals so very white, and she felt acutely aware of all that our senses can’t perceive and how we struggle to see the more-than-humans in their full wholeness.
Alana Layne Greenberg
More Resources:
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Young
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia by Stephan Harding
Becoming Gaia by Sean Kelly
Restoring the Kinship Worldview by Wahinkpe Topa
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Gaston Bachelard: An Elemental Reverie on the World's Stuff by Joanne Stroud
Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber
In this episode, two time TEDx speaker and eco-spiritualist, Chris Omni, MPH, shines her bright light on us in a celebration of Black joy in green spaces. This is her poetic theorization of Black joy:
“Black Joy is a Statement, Black Joy is a Stride, Black Joy is Permission, Black Joy is Pride, Black Joy is a form of Resistance, Black Joy is a form of Rest, Black Joy is ANYTHING you need it to be because Black Joy is truly the best!”
Chris’s enthusiasm for life is entirely contagious and you will not want to miss our entire conversation. Here are some of the highlights:
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Grounded in a sense of place with a little storytelling, Chris tells us about the newest addition to her healing garden: a resilient elephant ear plant that is flourishing despite being found near death in a trash pile.
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There was a pivotal moment when Chris realized she needed Black joy to be her focus; she had a remembering that Mother Earth has always loved her and was just waiting for her to show up.
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Black joy is a form of resistance, providing an entirely different story to the deficit narrative transferred through our culture, particularly through Black women’s health research.
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There is a frequency to Black joy, the way it moves through the body, it is a statement that is both verbal and non-verbal, it is a stride.
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Chris offers a powerful example of witnessing Black joy as a statement, watching a mother and father move through green spaces in their stride, all the while providing a generational message of Black joy as pride to their children.
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Black joy is also based in rest, removing the “metaphorical cape of the strong black woman” which Chris describes as “a tired narrative, a narrative that will strangle the life out of us.”
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Calling in Black joy as rest makes space for loving self, others, community, and nature. Using a “praxis of pause, we can build rest, pause, and reflection into our daily lives.”
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Chris describes how she purposely pushes back on capitalism by not being on the clock and instead taking the first two hours of everyday to press pause on the demands of the day until she first meets the demands of herself.
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Chris lights up talking about her love affair with trees: “I love their presence, their height, their symbolism, their crowns… the branches of trees, like ancestors reaching out to each other.”
More about Chris Omni:
Mother Earth Academy: a nature inspired space of teaching and learning
Kujima Health and Art: the Kujima Report shines a light on the disparities that many Black womxn face
Self-love Sunday (SLS): inviting members into a divinely designed space of eco-mindfulness, peace, love, and slowFULLness. The SLS experience includes a jar of shea butter bearing the same name - Self Love. SLS is open to every soul of Love and Light!
Black Joy as a Stride: a visual inquiry and official submission for the 2022 SoundWalk September Global Festival hosted by Walk Listen Create!
TJ Collections: the True Joy Collections, filmed in honor of Chris’s father, Thomas James.
Other Resources:
"Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors" by Rue Mapp
"We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy" by Natalie Baszile
"Black Faces, Whites Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors" by Carolyn Finney
"Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry" by Camille T. Dungy
"Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape" by Lauret Savoy
"The Color of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World" by Lauret Savoy & Alison Hawthorne Deming
And for all you fellow birders out there:
"Birding for Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers" by John C. Robinson
Each day the earth seems to be dipping her body downwards, inviting us to purposely step into the dark. Let us not resist, but willingly enter this long tunnel, this inner passageway with its smell of metals, its fertile stone blood. There is no reneging, no reversing the seasons, the elements, the death process. Every step brings us closer to the world’s silent chambers and its caves of glittering minerals, ever closer to the womb of winter, that immovable germinal place of brooding.
Here in the autumn season, we remember that Metal was one of the first materials humans pounded and shaped for use, and in this sense, Metal has always been emblematic of alchemy and transformation. The discerning medicine of Metal is like a sharp blade to cut, refine, or pare down to what is truly meaningful to us.
In this exploration of the Metal element / Lung energy / Autumn season, we wonder:
-What does the inherent wisdom of our lungs, skin, pores, nose, and immune system know already about themes of boundaries, barriers, and protective shields as we enter this season more deeply?
-How might our bodies feel heavier with the weight of our metals, the calcium in our bones and teeth, the copper of our red blood cells, the zinc that helps with wound healing? How does feeling into these metals connect us with the same mineral matrices in the stones, boulders, elder mountains around us, even the planets, asteroids, cosmos above us?
-What do our animal or plant kin tell us about migrating, gathering, fattening, bedding down, falling back to the earth?
-How might we come to work with grief as praise for life, grief as awakeness, grief as aliveness, or even grief as a creature that moves beyond human time?
-Do we ever attempt to think our way through grief (as worry or anxiety), always spinning and looping in our minds instead of engaging with the healing power of authentic, embodied sadness with its power to move us more deeply into all of life?
-How does Wind, as a living being, an elemental force, or an enigmatic deity, reign over the autumn season? What is the pattern of the Wind’s movements where you live, how do they run their fingers through the cracks in the stones and over the heads of the long grasses? Perhaps you might invite the Winds into your lungs more intentionally, letting their life force meld and move into your own.
Five Element Resources:
In Our Element by Lindsay Fauntleroy
Rhythms of Change by Mary Saunders
Five Spirits by Lorie Dechar
Metal Element Resources:
Essentials by David Whyte
Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson
The Smell of Rain on Dust by Martin Prechtel
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
Advice for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them) by Sallie Tisdale
The Emerald Podcast: No One Gets Out of Here Alive (The Death Episode) with Josh Schrei
The Metal Element Spirit Questions: How might the naturalness of our grief wash through us as an expression of spiritual health? Can we let our tears fall to the earth and then physically touch the earth as a gesture of love and tenderness, letting this sorrow move us, not with personal shame but with a true, open heart?
"You were never more lost than you are now, if you cannot reach out, touch the wild earth and weep..." Nettle-eater by Tom Hirons
A skilled weaver of the sacred through both the ancient and the modern, acupuncturist Lindsay Fauntleroy possesses the rare ability to make the principles of subtle energetic healing accessible within our daily lives. She does this with much wisdom and playfulness in her recently released book, “In Our Element: Using the Five Elements as Soul Medicine to Unleash Your Personal Power.” My favorite moment in our conversation was when she shared her invocation for the current Earth element “to walk like a mountain,” to allow her body to get heavy, to spread out, to take up spaaaaaace.
Here are some other highlights:
-Lindsay rubs on the land where she lives by rising with the sun and making her morning walk a prayer, a love affair with the breeze.
-Lindsay clears up one of the most common confusions she encounters: the difference between flower essences and essential oils.
-Flower essences are the ephemeral, thought-body of plants. They use the intelligence and consciousness of plants as affirmations of our higher truths.
-We can disrupt any training we might have in approaching plants with a “what can you do for ME” attitude by practicing a sense of reciprocity instead of self-centered transaction.
-Exploring ways of connecting with the land and the living world while living in heavily human-impacted spaces. Lindsay describes using the flower essence Green Nicotiana to help her remember that nature is everywhere, even in places that feel impossibly armored or urbanized.
-Lindsay describes her deep commitment to community wellness, advocating for urban youth, and normalizing that nature is us.
-Music is medicine and each season is a different song. We can work more deeply with the Five Elements by exploring them through their vibration, pulse, and rhythm within our bodies.
-Perhaps more than any other element, the current Earth element / late summer season highlights the voice of our bodies, asking us to better know what our bodies want, crave, long for.
Resources:
The Spirit Seed: Professional and personal development flower essence classes
Elementals Flower Essences: Archetypal flower essence formulas closely aligned with the soul lessons explored in Lindsay's book "In Our Element."
"In Our Element: Using the Five Elements as Soul Medicine to Unleash Your Personal Power" by Lindsay Fauntleroy
IG/Twitter handle @LindsayFaunt
Other Five Element Resources:
Five Spirits by Lorie Dechar
Nourishing Destiny by Lonny Jarrett
Further Learning:
A New Possibility: Alchemy, Astrology, and Chinese medicine courses and community
MINKA School of the Healing Arts & Sciences: Wellness, social justice, and community
*Practicing music as medicine, these show notes where created while listening to Allison Russell's Nightflyer on repeat. The song's hearty, repetitive guitar/drum beat is serious Earth element medicine for me.
It could be argued that it is one of the most challenging transitions of the entire seasonal wheel: the ending of summer and the beginning of everything falling back to the earth. A magical opposition appears as the energies of the earth grow abundant and generous all the while mysteriously moving into decline and decrease. The Earth element conjures themes related to the harvest, nourishment, and digestion, all the while bringing us deeper into our flesh, our embodiment, our black soil centers. This is an element of substance, and it supports our ability to move wishful ideas into reality, taking abstract thoughts and manifesting them within the material world.
In this exploration of the Earth element / Digestive center / Late summer season, we wonder:
-What do our animal bodies know about this time of year? How does it live in us? How can we take our cues on how to live from the more-than-human beings around us?
-How are we digesting our world? How might we be more discerning about what is truly nourishing?
-How does looping, excessive thinking, or worry act as a psychological knottiness, not only in our minds but also within our bodies?
-How does the Earth element help us better know how to love, nourish, and mother ourselves?
Five Element Resources:
Rhythms of Change by Mary Saunders
Five Spirits by Lorie Dechar
Earth Element Resources:
Mindful Eating by Jan Chozen Bays
The Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor
Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and the World with the Practice of RAIN by Tara Brach
The spirit question of the Earth element asks:
What does it mean to nourish ourselves well?
What intention do you wish for the Earth with your whole heart and how might you use this intent to inform your presence in the world?
Through land alchemy and working with flower essences, Camilla Blossom forms bridges of healing and reconciliation between humans and the spirited places where they live. Being in Camilla’s presence, you can feel a deep quiet, echoes from the deep void from which all life emerges.
Here are the highlights from our conversation:
(3:00) Our understanding about our work for Gaia may continuously evolve. Camilla describes herself as a Landwalker, because she feels as though she has been instructed to move to different places on the Earth. Recently she has been working with a magical arboretum near her home, going deeper into her embodied ecology through meditation, sitting/talking with the trees, and creating flower essences.
(5:15) Camilla describes the four principles foundational to land alchemy: Invitation, Presence, Co-creation, and Transformation.
(10:05) The practice of land alchemy came to Camilla organically over time as she would receive teachings from different elementals and nature spirits while making flower essences. Sometimes the practice of land alchemy involves clearing historical imprints, moving discarnate energies, tending to sick water spirits, or making offerings, but it is always ultimately based in relationship building.
(15:15) Camilla tells the story of a sick creek deva who was healed by the correct placement of a rainbow crystal. When we help the land feel better we feel better too.
(19:00) We can directly ask the land what it needs and we can tend to it the same way we would a human body (who has experienced trauma, depletion, injury, etc).
(19:38) Freeing up energetic attachments in the land directly impacts the humans who live there, sometimes even moving them into roles of guardianship.
(23:22) What does it feel like when the land isn’t breathing and how can we call on the wind spirits, air dragons, (or other local beings, like dragonflies) to help move breath through a place?
(26:00) In the process of reclaiming the sacred feminine within her, Camilla learned to engage with the thirteen Spirit Grandmothers. Nurturing spaces of creation heals our lineages and frees up lines of persecution.
(31:35) Camilla describes how working with Grandmother Owl helped her confront her shadows of power. When we are at one with our truest self and Gaia, we have access to the most direct, authentic inner trust.
(40:07) Deep in our hearts, we have a tremendous longing and need for Grandmother wisdom and elders on this planet.
(48:36) Our culture does not place much value on playfulness, but learning to more actively, ongoingly engage our creativity and imagination helps us dream up the kind of world we want to live in.
Resources:
Camilla Blossom's website
Patreon Community - Camilla Blossom New Earth Visionaries
Calendar of Events - online & onsite
Grandmother Lodges
Visions of Wisdom: Messages of the Thirteen Grandmothers
by Judith Moore & Sean Sands
It may be the longest journey we ever take, those eighteen inches between our heads and our hearts. Here in the Fire Element season, we can find new dimensions of healing through heart connection and widening our sense of relational intimacy with everything around us. But summer themes of full unfurling are mixed with emotionally-intelligent discernment so that our hearts are able to use their deepest sense of knowing, responding well to each individual moment. This prevents the over-extending, boundary-leaking, or over-consuming that can sometimes happen when we are swept away by the natural enthusiasm of summer spell-making.
In this exploration of the Fire Element / Summer Season / Heart Energy, we wonder:
-What do our animal bodies already know about summer? How does it live in us?
-How can our hearts open more fully in eco-adoration, waking us up through joy and relatedness?
-On the flip side, how can we learn temperance, knowing how to radiate without burning out?
-Perhaps our hearts are more dynamic and resilient than we realize, inherently knowing how to fill, burst, break, and fill once more.
-With a healthy Heart spirit, our authentic self moves us to honestly communicate the needs and knowing of ourselves to others.
There is even more heart-deliciousness in this episode as I tell a story about enormous ladles, starlight, and our cosmic essence. Oh, and the flinty magic of fireflies is in there too. The episode ends with an offering, a practice for widening your heart presence or what is also known as deep listening.
It is my hope that in these explorations you are reminded to love and love and love some more and to in turn, let everything love you back.
Mentioned Book:
Kigo: Exploring the Spiritual Essence of Acupuncture Points Through the Changing Seasons by Lorie Dechar
Five Element Resources:
Rhythms of Change by Mary Saunders
Five Spirits by Lorie Dechar
Heart Element Resources:
More on Deep Listening
Heart Coherence Meditation
Fire Spirit Question:
The spirit question of the Fire element asks: How are you expressing your truest self, and in turn, your truest joy?
Generation after generation, we have been taught to stuff down and ignore the depth of suffering within our colonialist history. For writer and community organizer, Hilary Giovale, a series of unexpected ancestral interventions woke her from this fog of amnesia and denial, shifting her life’s work towards collective grieving, truth-telling, apology, and forgiveness. Hilary begins our conversation with a magical story about how the sacred mountain where she lives orchestrates unbelievable acts of healing and reconciliation. We also explore the importance of sitting with our feelings and letting them change us for good, the power of sound and movement as critical tools of embodied decolonization, and the tremendous healing potential of having a personal reparations plan.
Here are the highlights:
(4:12) Hilary describes her beloved relationship with the sacred mountain of kinship that she lives with. Learning directly from the Indigenous stewards of this place has deepened her relationship with this mountain in ways she never could have dreamed on her own.
(7:03) Hilary tells a story about one of the mountain peaks close to where she lives- colonially known as "Agassiz Peak"- and how this sacred mountain has woven a connection (and physical meeting) between the family of the white settler and namesake of this place, a descendent of those harmed by Agassiz, and the Indigenous youth fighting to have the name of this sacred mountain (their Grandmother), changed at the federal level.
(14:00) When everything within our mainstream culture seems to be conspiring to keep us asleep, staying awake, whether through our senses, minds, or hearts, can be a sacred commitment. All of us carry these legacies of pain, whether we realize it or not, because our colonialist history hasn’t truly been spoken about or acknowledged in any lasting, fundamental way.
(19:08) Working with an ancestor altar can provide a container of support when the depth of our grief or other feelings arise. When we honestly sit with our feelings (instead of numbing out, ignoring, or trying to fix our way through), we can let it change us for good. If we do not do this inner work first, there is the potential for the same cycles of harm to stay alive within us.
(25:38) We can use the power of sound, drumming, or dancing as embodied practices of moving intense feelings through our bodies. Thrashing, flailing, rolling on the ground- it might be ugly but that is one of the reasons it works so well.
(30:09) We must transform the mythology of who we were raised to be. In her personal journey, Hilary has had to create a new sense of self based on learning about her ancestors and understanding the longer arc of history.
(32:00) Patterns of intergenerational harm were created over thousands of years in Europe where practices of colonization originated. All of those years acted as a template for a condensed program of genocide that was then enacted on this continent.
(39:13) After much learning and contemplation, Hilary feels that one of the most important acts we can take to become a good relative is to set up a personal reparations plan. She describes how she has used her ancestral story as a blueprint to creating her plan. She calls this “repaying the unpayable debt,” acknowledging that these harms can never be truly resolved but that there is healing in the effort, the action, the trying.
Resources:
Hilary Giovale: www.goodrelative.com
Statements of Support to Change the Name of Agassiz Peak, email hilary@goodrelative.com
Hilary’s Guide to Making a Personal Reparations Plan
Hilary’s website, Good Relative, is a wealth of knowledge, study, and opportunities for inner work and healing. If you need more, here are a few books that are sitting by my bedside table right now :
Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell
Staying with the Troubles: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
“We are remembering the remembering.” Robin Kimmerer
In this episode, word-diviner Jen Violi talks about getting beyond the intellectual exercise of writing, instead sourcing our creativity from the rich dirt of our bodies. Perhaps our bodies know something about letting go of the certainty or pressure of written language. Some stories are so alive that they just don’t want to be held down by pen and paper (or computer).
Here are some the the highlights:
(4:00) What might open up when we have conversations with everything? We can practice introducing ourselves to the river, the tree, or the land where we are.
(5:20) “My embodied connection is just getting dirty.” Jen shares a childhood memory of getting her doll marked up with dirt, simultaneously feeling like she messed something up while also feeling like the dirt made her doll much more real.
(11:30) Jen combines her love of writing, ritual, and sensory exploration while teaching her class, Elemental Writing. She recently completed a deep dive into the Water element and will be beginning the Earth element on June 27th. What happens when we include our bodies in the writing? What do the elements know or want to share as living beings that we can engage with during the writing process?
(19:30) Stories are alive. We can explore moving beyond metaphors as just abstract ideas. Getting ready for her Water element class, Jen soaked in the bathtub and actively asked Water for help. “I’m not kidding when I say that I am talking to Water.”
(23:00) Perhaps stories aren’t always meant to be written down. We can let go of the certainty of written language; sometimes it is more alive when it is not glued down to a page. In many ways, we are all starving in language. Social media has this way of never satiating us because we don’t allow for the expansiveness of what language could be.
(33:50) Eco-grief, eco-anxiety, eco-anguish: we are constantly trying to slap a label on everything. Sometimes talking about the problem is the problem (Sophie Strand).
(36:20) We have stopped giving our grief space to grow. Some beautiful words from Jen: “Let your grief grow tall. My grief--mother gone, father gone, "healthy" body I once knew gone and gone, more I cannot say right here and now--has grown tall, I think. Grown with me. Grown into something beautiful and unexpected. When allowed into the fullness of herself, when allowed space, grief can grow into something tall and strong.”
(43: 50) How can we be better members of the alive family of the world? How can we soften ourselves around the harms humans create? Jen tells a story about offering a mint sprig in water to a stranger as a simple gesture of connection and remembrance of the generosity of the earth.
RESOURCES:
Elemental Writing (the next class in the series, Earth Element, begins June 27th)
Initiation Station (Jen Violi’s Patreon)
Jen Violi's Website
MENTIONS:
Sophie Strand
David Abram
Bayo Akomolafe
No One Is Talking About This: A Novel, by Patricia Lockwood
The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, by Martin Prechtel
Enchanted April (movie)
WATER RESOURCES (some of my favorites):
Sing the Water Song
Speaking to the Water by Pat McCabe
Our Watersheds, Ourselves by James McGowan as part of the Dark Mountain Project
“Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away. Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from under the ground.” -David Abram, "Becoming Animal"
Goddess renegade. Midwife mastermind. Holy woman edge walker. But also Lover of All Beings. These were some of the descriptions that came to mind after my conversation with Lorie Dechar. What a gift it was for me to be in soul exchange with Lorie. We talked about everything from the exact timing of the bees and sea lavender on the coast where she lives all the way to honoring the domains of the dark goddess. At the pulsing, vibrant heart of Lorie’s mission is to be a part of this “global web of lovers,” cultivating intimate communities both locally and globally.
These were some of the highlights:
(4:06) Lorie tells the story of where she lives, just south of where the sun first hits the Eastern coast of the US every morning. The “People of the First Light”, also known as the Wabanaki Confederacy, really understand/understood the sacredness of this timing. Lorie describes “how real the spirits of this place” are to her and how her books, Five Spirits and Kigo, were informed and inspired by this land.
(10:03) While our local sense of place is essential, there is also a great “rhizomatic network” being built, like “tendrils under the earth” that are creating this “global web of lovers.” In the midst of the breakdown, we must cultivate intimate communities both locally AND globally.
(12:29) Lorie speaks to how the mesh that is being created is not just in the earth but also in her/our nervous systems and that platforms like Zoom are serving as our training ground for virtual connection.
(13:18) With gorgeous storytelling, Lorie describes how her understanding of “Yi” (the spirit of the Earth according to the Five Spirit cosmology) was downloaded to her in a clear transmission while kayaking off Darling Island. Observing the very specific blooming time of the sea lavender (which only grows between high and low tide), covered in honey bees, Lorie describes how she finally, viscerally, got the true meaning of “Yi.”
(18:45) Lorie offers a definition of what “alchemy” means to her, especially as it relates to a pre-dualistic thinking when we were not automatically separating spirit from matter.
(24:24) The mission of Alchemical Healing is to offer an invitation to transform what feels really hard (the “lead,” the discarded, the shadow parts) and to turn it into “gold,” or deeper healing.
(26:32) Let us continue to find ways of living with uncertainty and navigating within turbulence. If we can’t bear the dissolution, we keep running back to the old systems that are killing us and the planet.
(33:26) Lorie quotes her teacher, Bayo Akomolafe: “What if we shift our whole way of being to: death is not the enemy?” She describes how powerful this statement was to her and how it relates to her understanding of calling in and honoring the domain of the dark goddess. In creating reverence for Her, it allows a certain breathing room to remember that we are part of a much larger process and cycle than we can even know.
(37:44) Lorie speaks to the word “fugitivity”* and her sense that it is about midwifing a new consciousness that is atemporal, nondual, and multidimensional. One of her biggest passions is being part of this emergent consciousness that is bubbling up all over and cultivating community where we can have change-making conversations. “None of us can do this alone.”
Resources:
Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing, by Lorie Dechar
Kigo: Exploring the Spiritual Essence of Acupuncture Points Through the Changing Seasons, by Lorie Dechar
The Alchemy of Inner Work: A Guide for Turning Illness & Suffering into True Health & Well-Being, by Lorie Dechar and Benjamin Fox
A New Possibility Community
*Side note: The term “fugitivity” shows up currently with a variety of interpretations but it originally emerged as a signature idiom of black diasporic culture related to slavery’s legacies and an escape from the colonial and racial hegemony of Western liberty. It feels important to acknowledge the word’s true source.
Bayo Akomolafe describes fugitivity as “the theology of incalculability and hopelessness. The fugitive rejects the promise of repair and refuses the hope of the established order. By clinging to outlawed desires, barely perceptible imaginations, alien gestures, the fugitive inhabits the moving wilds.”
bronte velez says, “we move into fugitivity when we wonder: how does it feel to choose to not participate in the systems as they are?”
Learning from traditional animist, ritualist, and ancestral guide, Erica Nunnally, is an opportunity to feel deeply grounded and immersed in practical, earthy wisdom. You can almost hear the trees singing, you can almost smell the dirt rich under your feet as she speaks.
In this conversation we explore:
(7:00) “Rootlessness” and Erica’s experience of having lived in many places around the world at an early age. Each place she resided spoke to her differently. As a “tumbleweed,” she found ways of grounding through her family unit and through creating a heart relationship with the living world around her.
(13:00) Erica describes how she came to understand and use the Four Medicine’s Approach (Mind-Body-Spirit-Nature) in her life and practice. So much focus is placed within our culture on just the first three (Mind-Body-Spirit) and “still we are not well.” Nature acts as the fourth leg of the stool (so to speak), creating health and and seating us more fully on this planet.
(24:50) Health is our natural state of being. What we are eating, how we are living, who we are surrounded by is all impacting our sense of being in/out of balance. In Erica’s experience, re-education is key to reclaiming a sense of agency and responsibility.
(42:30) Yoga practice reminds us that all of life is a practice; we are literally constantly learning and unlearning. Let us feel into how we are all doing our best. Let us take this time in these bodies as practice. Let us not linger too long with the “second dart” (listen in to find out what this means!)
(47:00) Erica describes connecting with Dandelion as an ally to remembering our personal and collective resilience. “Life is truly a gift and worth opening up to.”
Resources:
Erica Nunnally’s website and offerings
The Seven Practices of Wildly Successful Wellnesspreneurs
Ancestral Lineage Healing
Initiations: A Life of Ritual (a year long journey through Ancestral Medicine)
The Journey Through 13 Moons
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Welcome to the cycle’s beginning in a seasonal series I’m calling the Embodied Elements. The Five Elements do not live in dusty books or in the minds of scholars, existing somewhere entirely outside of us. No, they are made potent and animate through us living them into being. In some ways the Five Elements are a vital, sacred vocabulary for our internal ecosystem, reminding us that the cycles of birth, death, and renewal live in our bodies as well as in the entirety of creation.
Wood creates Fire, whose ashes become Earth, which forges and shapes Metal, whose mineral matrices dissolve into Water, which nourishes Wood as the creation cycle begins anew. They are enmeshed within us, in our dreams, in our memories, in our cells, and in our psyches. They are an emergent phenomenon, acting to shape and imagine us fresh.
Right now we are smack dab in Liver energy/Wood element/Spring season and our clever body knowing doesn’t need to be an expert in theoretical ideas about the Five Elements because it already knows spring. We know its smell of hope, its innovative shades of green, the optimistic potential it brings in every blooming flower. And we feel this in our flesh: a desire to move, to shake off the accumulated heaviness of winter, and to let a vulnerable hope penetrate the spaces between our ribs.
Tuning into the spirit questions of the Wood element, we explore themes of:
-being in the flow,
-taking a stand,
-speaking our truth,
-the therapeutic nature of anger,
-vision, purpose, and agency (growing upwards even with gravity working against us!)
None of these explorations are done in a vacuum by us as single individuals but instead we are enmeshed within a wider community of support. So instead of trying to go it alone, we reach out for help, initiating conversation with the wisest teachers of the Wood element: the Tree families where we live.
After many years of intentionally engaging with these old, primordial energies of the Five Elements, I feel more and more woven into the verdant fabric of the living world. My hope is that you will too.
Mentioned Books:
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Conversations with Trees by Stephanie Kaza
Five Element Resources:
Rhythms of Change by Mary Saunders
Five Spirits by Lorie Eve Dechar
Qi and Meridians:
The Spark in the Machine: How the Science of Acupuncture Explains the Mysteries of Western Medicine by Daniel Keown
Liver Element Resources:
Shaking Qi gong
Ho’oponopono (for release and forgiveness)
All kinds of breathing exercises
Wood Spirit Question:
- How do we grow through our lives and into our soul’s full expression? [What wants to be born or renewed in your life? How are you willing to assert yourself to make it a reality?]
Speaking with us from Apsaalooke (Crow) territory, in what is currently known as Livingston, MT, astrologer and Ayurvedic practitioner, Kristine Backes, gifts us with her knowledge and living experience of what it means to align with the natural rhythms all around us.
Here are the highlights:
(5:59) Everything is medicine.
(10:24) Kristine’s dream of a star-shaped cell phone with a broken interface the night before her first official astrological reading and its message that she already contained the language of the stars within her; she was just in a process of remembering.
(12:05) The planets and their energy patterns live in us and we can find them in our bodies.
(15:35) Touching in on the fields of Astroherbalism, the School of Evolutionary Herbalism, and
*Spagyrics (an alchemical preparation of herbs meant to be in a more potent form, made in sync with the astrological cycles.)
(24:08) “All models are wrong but some are useful.” When we remember that we are using imperfect models it brings us back to our lived experience and inner-knowing.
(33:00) It's a holographic universe; all of life exists within each of us.
(37:38) Digestion is the way we turn earth consciousness into human consciousness.
(39:28) Ritual as everyday opportunities for intentional action.
(43:38) Relearning how to put our thanks at the beginning instead of the end, especially in any acts of taking, consuming, or gathering.
(50:48) When asked how she finds joy and love in the place where she lives, Kristine responds: “The Mountains feel like me, and vice versa. The Mountains are the medicine I carry.”
(52:29) A story about Mountain Lions on the Leo New Moon.
(56:10) Kristine’s offerings to the world.
Relevant Resources:
Kristine Backes
The Natural Wisdom Podcast
The School of Evolutionary Herbalism
In this initial episode, Kendra introduces her overarching intent for the podcast and explains why love is an interspecies bridge and at the very foundation of these explorations in ecological embodiment. How will we ever take action, invested at the level of marrow and glacial skull and tooth-root, if we do not know love first?
In this spirit, Kendra introduces us to the land where she lives and to the Deep Dreamers, the very ancient rocks that she regularly engages in heart connection with. She describes how something old and strange pulls her forward in these relationships, deep familiarities stir in her body.
She then turns to the listeners with this essential inquiry:
What happens when we rub on the body of the earth, how does it brush back against us?
What happens when we return over and over again to be shaped, imagined even, by the beings, the weather, the land forms, and the elemental powers where we live. When we really pay attention we may find that living world yearns for our noticing eye, our guttural hum-song, our invested embrace.
How are you rubbing on, loving on the place where you live?
In addition to having disruptive, love-centered conversations about an emergent animist worldview, this podcast is a gathering place for stories of ecological embodiment. So here is your invitation to join and collaborate:
in spoken or written word (anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes) share anything you can think of smacks of earth-honoring revelry. This could be :
- a ritual you do every morning
- a thunderous insight you got after falling asleep in the crook of a tree.
It could be
- a chat you had with the skunk cabbage emerging from their early spring bog,
- or prayers you offered to the dead baby fox as you moved him from the side of the road.
It could be
- lessons you’ve learned from rain, from rivers, from your shower.
- or conversations you’ve had with the dead-living wood of your house.
It could be:
- the telling of old knowings in your body, where tree roots live in your feet, where rose quartz has settled in your heart, where dandelions grow from your eye sockets.
It could be a sacred hymn, a fire-side chat, a description of something completely mundane that reveals itself to you in a fresh way. It could be a telling of where you go to reflect, to commune, to remember what is holy in you, what is holy around you.
Kendra's deepest hope is that in sharing these experiences of embodied ecology, our reality shifts, our core truths sharpen, and space is made for a new/old earth-honoring culture to re-emerge.
Share your emergent experiences of becoming with your ecosystem at the STORY CAULDRON!