Embodiment Matters Podcast

In this conversation, we speak with our friend and teacher, Cynthia Jurs, along with our dear friend and cohost, Leilani Navar, of The Turning Season Podcast. Cynthia recently published Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing our World, which is a wisdom book for our times. As both of us have shared, this book is an extraordinary weaving of spiritual biography, riveting travel adventures, essential Dharma instructions, sacred activism, deep ecology, indigenous wisdom, and an overall beautiful story of a human being dedicating her life to liberation, and caring for this living Earth in these mythic times in which we live. Our conversation moves through many terrains including working with difficult times, the balance of prayer and activism, dismantling systems of domination, keeping our fingernails dirty with the work and practices of liberation, and so much more. In the beginning of the conversaiton, Erin mentions the gathering of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, and you can find information on that here. We hope you enjoy, and we highly recommend reading Cynthia's book (or listening, as she reads it in her own voice.) To find our more about the class, Take Heart: Embodying the Great Turning, that Erin and Leilani are teaching in January, 2025 with guest teachers, Cynthia Jurs, Francis Weller, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Lydia Violet Harutoonian you can click here. You can find out more about Cynthia's Gaia Mandala practice here and her Earth Treasure Vase project here. And you can find out more about Leilani Navar and the Turning Season Podcast here

In this conversation/ transmission we were so honored to hear Dr. Jaiya John pour forth from the depths of his heart and soul in a way that can't help but touch your own. We were blessed to hear from Jaiya about his background and how he went from being shy and voiceless to a fully-dilated voice for Love. We were blessed to hear him read passages from several of his extraordinary books including Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution; All These Rivers and You Chose Love; and Dear Artist: A Love Letter. Carl and I also each read a short excerpt from his forthcoming book(s) We Birth Freedom at Dawn. We are so grateful for his generosity of spirit, his gorgeous writings, and his presence in our lives. His love and courage are contagious. Our wish is that all who listen become infected and go on to spread this love and courage in your own communities. What an honor to share a conversation with the extraordinary soul, poet, teacher, writer, Dr. Jaiya John. Please find more about him, his books, his poetry gatherings, his newsletter, his Instagram and more at www.jaiyajohn.com Toward the end of our conversation, Jaiya mentions our dear heart-friend Alexandre Jodun of ahealingbridge.com If you loved this podcast, please share it far and wide!

Embodying Maitri: The Essential Ingredient with Erin Geesaman Rabke We're delighted to share with you this podcast where Erin speaks about the practice of Maitri. Maitri is a Sanskrit word often translated as "lovingkindness" but several teachers in our lineage have gone further, naming it "courageous unconditional friendliness," or "brave warmheartedness." In this episode, Erin speaks about the importance of this practice in living a healing life. Traditional Buddhist teachings suggest beginning the practice with oneself, then extending our circles of care ever outward. Erin shares personal stories of working with this practice, and invites you in. She also shares about her upcoming online class Maitri: A Courtship with the Essential Ingredient. You can learn more about that offering here. https://embodimentmatters.com/maitri-courting-the-essential-ingredient/ Erin refers to a few sources of inspiration in this episode including: To Love and Be Loved: The Difficult Yoga of Relationship with Stephen and Ondrea Levine https://www.soundstrue.com/products/to-love-and-be-loved bell hooks All About Love https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17607.All_About_Love Her Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/interviews-with-thich-nhat-hanh/interview-with-bell-hooks-january-1-2000/ Open and Innocent by Scott Morrison https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3397459-open-and-innocent There is Nothing Wrong with You by Cheri Huber https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27580.There_Is_Nothing_Wrong_with_You And Mary Oliver's poem, To Begin with the Sweet Grass https://embodimentmatters.com/love-yourself/

Embodying Reverent Relationship with Marika Heinrichs What a pleasure to speak with Marika Heinrichs of Wildbody.ca about somatics, lineages, respect and repair - and what a delight to have such a rich and tender conversation in Rumi's field that sits outside of any rigid and fixed ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing. I hope you enjoy this important conversation. Marika Heinrichs is the granddaughter of German Mennonite, British, and Irish settlers to the part of Turtle Island colonially know as Canada. She is a queer, femme, somatics practitioner and facilitator whose work focuses on the recovery of ancestral wisdom through body-based ways of knowing, and challenging the appropriation and erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the field of somatics. Marika resides on Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe territory (a.k.a. Guelph, Ontario). She is grateful for the nourishment and support of her peers, mentors, and more-than-human kin. Links: website: wildbdoy.ca IG: @wildbodysomatics Courses: wildbody.ca/embodied-ethics Here is a link to a beautiful and important piece written by Marika which I referred to in our conversation - On White People Building Belonging Together in our Movements for Liberation. https://wildbody.ca/blog/on-building-belonging-as-white-people-within-our-movements Some powerful quotes from Marika's writings and teachings: "I believe that building healing communities is just as important as having access to individualized healing supports such as therapy. Divesting from appropriation is about both surrendering entitlement and feeling into the truth of our own peoples. I believe we are all capable of appropriation, and as a white bodied person I don't feel it's my work to tell Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour how to engage with their practices. I can share from what I know through my own journey into these questions, which includes feeling how intimately connected extraction, violence, and severance from the natural world are to the projects of white supremacy and Christian hegemony. Lack of acknowledgment and consent, spiritual bypassing, claiming ownership and superiority, prohibitive costs, lack of access for the descendants of the very peoples from whom practices emerged, no sense of connection or accountability to our own peoples, normalizing cis, straight, thin, white, able bodies… the list goes on. I want to envision a methodology of somatics that is invested in liberation right down to the roots of the lineages and histories of our practices. If we are not tending to the ways that this field has been shaped by supremacy, we are missing a core component of embodied liberation. Practices emerge from culture, they are shaped by time, place, and cosmology. All of our peoples had practices and ways of working with the body towards healing. Even if we engage in the most consent-based, ethical, values-driven protocols with practices from outside our own cultures, we miss the crucial work of facing into the grief and joy of our own lineages and peoples. I believe that the unwillingness to do this is one way that the field of somatics can perpetuate white supremacy, and I envision new/old practices that reconnect us with our ancestors and carry us through mourning, accountability, and repair as white people. As practitioners, we hold power around shaping these conversations in our field, and in supporting these conditions with these we serve. All those years practicing yoga are part of what shaped me and helped me to grow the capacity to release it for a practice that feels more aligned, more liberatory. It's not for me to decide who should or shouldn't practice yoga, or whether or not something is appropriation. Those questions can serve as distractions, virtue signalling that keeps us from the work of divesting from the roots of whiteness that lead to appropriation in the first place. I do know that the space that was left when I quit yoga made room for a new kind of connection to emerge that feels much more rooted in my values, and my lineage. I am not sure how we can approach practices such as yoga as white people without having something to share in return. A practice entails a relationship, if we don't know who we are or where we come from, how can we really engage in mutual connection?"

Animal Body, Deep Time and The Thing We All Long For: A Conversation with Josh Schrei Friends, we are delighted to share this recent conversation with Josh Schrei. Joshua Michael Schrei is the founder and host of The Emerald podcast. The Emerald combines evocative narrative, soul-stirring music, and interviews with award-winning authors and luminaries to explore the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald draws from a deep well of poetry, lore, and mythos to challenge conventional narratives on politics and public discourse, meditation and mindfulness, art, science, literature, and more. A writer, teacher, and a lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — in particular the Indian subcontinent — Josh has sought to navigate the living, animate space of the imagination and advocate for a world that prioritizes imaginative vision. Josh has taught intensive courses in mythology and somatic disciplines for nearly 20 years. In our conversation, we cover some good terrain. We explore some pithy some essential Zen teachings, we look into what is the experience of our animal body, what does it mean to living an animate universe? Throughout the conversation, we weave in the image of deep time, of the long arc of human evolution, and the profound inheritance that each of us carries. We speak of elements of the teacher-student relationship, and what supports learning, unfolding, and embodying what we all long for. May you enjoy the conversation, and we always love to hear your reflections. You can find out more information on the Emerald Podcasr, and Josh's teachings wherever you listen to podcasts.

Embodying Prayer and Soul Activism In this beautiful conversation, I speak to poet, facilitator and soul activist Nan Seymour, who also happens to be one of my dearest friends. We take as a springboard for our conversation Nan's recently published book of poems called prayers not meant for heaven. Nan weaves several of her poems throughout the conversation and they're beautiful. We talk about bio-cultural restoration, about the importance of writing and reading during these times, about the importance of praise and noticing the ways in which we're awestruck. We also share a very candid discussion about Nan's love of Jesus as her first radical social justice teacher. There's so much goodness and inspiration here and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did! You can order Nan's book here https://www.toadhalleditions.ink/prayers-not-meant You can read and/or participate in Nan's poetic project in support of Great Salt Lake here https://nanseymour.com/blog/item/141-irreplaceable-a-1700-line-praise-poem-in-the-making You can learn more and sign up for a session of River Writing here https://riverwriting.com/ And you'll find much more inspiration at Nan's website here https://nanseymour.com/ Nan mentions our shared mentor Deena Metzger http://deenametzger.net/ And our recent podcast with her https://embodimentmatters.com/i-wish-you-heartbreak-an-exploration-of-the-19-ways-with-deena-metzger/ You can take a virtual tour of the church we talked about here - watch the video showing you all the radical dancing saints! https://www.saintgregorys.org/the-dancing-saints.html A little more about Nan in her own words: "I provide narrative encouragement. In 2015 I created River Writing to foster voice and authentic connection. I delight in how this practice challenges the tyranny of perfectionism and breaks through walls of isolation. I've led scores of oral storytelling workshops for people from all walks of life. Everyone has stories no one else can tell. I'm devoted to helping folks find, shine, and share them. We never know who our stories are for. I believe in saying the truest things we can say. My debut poetry collection, prayers not meant for heaven has recently been published by Toad Hall Editions. The poems, written primarily during the pandemic, are prayers meant for the earth and for each other. I hope they will vine around us here on the ground, leaving us more knowingly and gladly intertwined. Count me deeply smitten with life in all forms including scrub oak forests, vultures, and wild violets. I'm currently writing about the imperiled ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake, my near neighbor. I'm deeply concerned about the future life of stromatolites, brine shrimp, brine flies, and the entire feathered citizenry of the Pacific Coast flyway. I'm praying with my pen, writing about the lake with the hope that we will cease diverting her waters in time. The chambers of my heart are occupied by my daughter Beatrice, my love Mustafa, River Writers, and Sophie, my border collie/lab companion. I'm devoted to community and dare to hope that our collective participation in human evolution is tipping the balance of the cosmos towards kindness and even love."

Ariella is a beekeeper, writer, teacher, musician and mother living in Northern California. Her work with honey bees came through a lifelong interest in human connection with the non-human world. She is a graduate of the Lyceum, a European shamanic pathway with the bee and the serpent as its central motifs. Within this tradition, she is trained in the healing and seership modality known as the Pollen Method. Her work is a fusion of her love for the natural world and embodied, womb-centric practices. Ariella seeks to foster a deeper relationship between humans and the natural world through honey bees, seeing the bee as a bridge species between our domestic lives and the wild, both within and around us. She is a lover of wild places, liminal spaces and the song of the land. She teaches shamanic dreamwork, natural beekeeping, and women's retreats all guided by the honeyed wisdom of the serpent and the bee. You can find more about her work at www.honeybeewild.com and on instagram at beekeepinginskirts. Below is the text of a beautiful post of hers I read from a recent Instagram post. You'll see why I and many others are so enamored with her writings. "It's not really about beekeeping. This love affair. This devotion to doing it better. To listening. To finding another route that gives and heals, instead of takes. We can call it beekeeping, because, surely, there are some tricks of the trade, some caring for the bees in their boxes that we can learn. But really, it's about your roots comingling with the mycelia. Really it's about your tears dripping into the river. Really it's about the moon dipping into your dreams and curling around a whispered tune you think you remember from long ago. It's not even about saving, unless the saving is you and you are the forest, and the forest is the sea, and the sea is the stars.⠀ ⠀ What it's about, is Weaving. ⠀ Reweaving. Rewilding. Restoring. Revivifying. ⠀ It's about Listening. ⠀ Ear to the hive. Womb to the earth. ⠀ It's about Grief and Exaltation. ⠀ Sting in your heart, honey on your lips.⠀ It's about Remembering." References: In our conversation we spoke about the work of mythologist Martin Shaw and specifically this trailer for his book Scatterlings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0T7UP1U1Ts https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57195435-scatterlings And Ari also referred to the writings of Joanna Macy. I recommend any of her work (or my classes where we dive into it!) including Active Hope, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13235686-active-hope World as Lover World as Self, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/536524.World_as_Lover_World_as_Self A Wild Love for the World. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51551987-a-wild-love-for-the-world I also love this video with Joanna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmjF1jE2K0 I also referred to the book, Native Science, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1049116.Native_Science You can find more about the Lyceum in which Ariella studied for a decade here: https://sacredtrust.org/workshops/pollen/