Mythic Christ Podcast

Rise Rooted: A Conversation With Rebecca Wildbear Rebecca Wildbear’s story begins in the wordless wonder of childhood, drawn to the mythic embrace of trees even as she grew up in a suburban landscape. Her yard was a small forest, home to many trees, including a giant ash so vast it took three children holding hands to circle its trunk. This early, silent kinship with trees became a guiding thread in Rebecca’s life, a calling she felt before she knew she chose it. As the years passed, her connection to the natural world—especially the forest—remained at the heart of who she was, shaping the paths she would walk and inspiring the work she would do, much like two trees reaching out across space to meet. Welcome to the Mythic Christ Podcast. In today’s episode, we journey into the rich tapestry of dreams, mythic imagination, and our profound connection with the natural world. Our host is joined by Rebecca Wildbear—a soul guide, psychotherapist, wilderness guide, and author—whose work alongside the Animas Valley Institute helps visionaries and empaths traverse thresholds of transformation. This episode includes a guided imaginal journey, inviting listeners to reconnect with their embodied imagination and to experience the wisdom of the forest from wherever they are. The conversation branches into themes of grief, transformation, ancestral memory, and the importance of rekindling childlike wonder. Together, we’ll contemplate the questions at the heart of our existence—and the possibility of rising up, rooted, like trees. Settle into this sacred space as we discover what it means to listen to the wild world, to dream, and to ask: What if life is larger and deeper than we ever imagined? ----more---- You are invited to experience “Rise Rooted: The Body, Dream and Mythic Imagination” an online and immersive program co-guided by Rebecca Wildbear author of Wild Yoga, and founder of Mythic Christ Mystery School, Matt Syrdal from August 17th to September 28th, over the course of six Mondays. Click here to learn more. This course is an invitation into the body as a doorway to the mythic imagination. Through movement, dreamwork, and deep imaginal practice, we explore how the world lives and dreams through us—through sensation, image, story, and relationship with the living Earth. ----more---- Rebecca Wildbear is a wilderness guide, depth-oriented psychotherapist, teacher, and author whose work explores the relationship between body, imagination, soul, and the living Earth. Through embodied practice, dreamwork, mythic imagination, and nature-based soul work, she guides transformative experiences that invite deeper belonging with self, community, and the wider animate world. Rebecca is the author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth and founder of Earth & Soul Academy. To learn more about Rebecca, visit: www.rebeccawildbear.com | Substack: https://rebeccawildbear.substack.com/ To receive updates about Earth & Soul Academy, courses, writings, retreats, and future offerings, visit: https://rebeccawildbear.kit.com/58b158ed89 ----more---- Special Musical Credit: “Calming Handpan” from Handpan by Greenred Productions “Love of Mauritius”, by Istvan Sky from Voice of Avatar “On the Nature of Daylight,” by Max Richter from The Blue Notebooks

Friends, It is my pleasure to introduce our next Awakening Mythic Imagination: Eco-Depth Yearlong program coming August 1st, 2025. This worldview shifting and life-changing certificate course is back with some new changes to content platform and practices rooted in my upcoming book. The introductory online intensive that begins the yearlong is August 1st thru 3rd, 2025. Registration will close in June of 2025, and there are limited spots available. This short episode is a brief introduction to the yearlong course. Enjoy! For more information visit: www.mythicchrist.com/yearlong There is a 15% off Earth Day promotion now thru April 22nd. If you are interested in payment options, scholarships, or have logistic questions schedule a 30 minute conversation with Matt. To register you simply fill out the yearlong application and pay a $350 deposit to reserve your spot.

In this episode I interview Ben Katt about his new book "The Way Home" tracing his own "hero's journey" to wholeness at midlife, including stories of change and personal transformation. I hope you enjoy! You can find him at: thewayhomebook.com benjaminkatt.com ----more---- Ben Katt is a meditation teacher, spiritual coach, and writer. He is the author of The Way Home: Discovering the Hero’s Journey to Wholeness at Midlife, a book that helps people wake up to their fullest lives. As the founder of MIND MKE, Ben teaches meditation and facilitates wellbeing experiences for teams, organizations, and companies. He is a certified advanced meditation teacher with 1 Giant Mind, holds a Master of Divinity degree, was an ordained minister for over a decade, and previously led The On Being Project’s work in supporting religious and spiritual leaders in the work of social healing. He lives in Milwaukee, WI with his wife, three children, and a bunny. ----more---- References in this episode include: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and A Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, by Bill Plotkin "I Contain Multitudes", song by Bob Dylan Christine Lore Weber's poem, "Mother Wisdom Speaks" Musical Credit: Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa, Johan Anders Baer, Esa Kotilainen & Seppo Paakkunainen, "Nils Juhan" from Dalveleaikkat - Wintergames Trevor Morris, The Vikings V (Music from the TV series) 2019

Across cultures through time, the Tree is the mythic image of the cosmos, one of the oldest and most deeply rooted of the archetypes. The Tree is a mythic map of whole imaginal realms of visionary and psychic experience holding the mysteries of creation, renewal, life and death, secret knowledge, and initiatory memory. The Great Tree. Our ancestors have hung the bodies of their dead in trees, like a cradle in boughs awaiting rebirth, curled up like embryo ornaments hung in the hollowed-out trunks, for the tree was believed to be a vehicle to the gods, a vessel of regeneration, that could pierce the eternal realms of the heavens and the underworld. Mircea Eliade, in his seminal work Shamanism, explores the Tree as an archetypal image of shamanic states of consciousness, found across indigenous peoples from Siberia to Sapmi in Northern Scandinavia, to North American indigenous peoples. And that this archetypal image of the tree, is not only one of the oldest archetypes across the world, but is a map of the trance-states, of those masters of techniques of ecstasy, we refer to as shamans. Jesus of Nazareth, a personage enshrouded in mystery, one of the few great figures who continues to stir controversy, fascinate deep discourse, and allure spiritual seekers and mystics, even from different faiths, perhaps even more today than ever before. Scholarship has opened new doorways and possibilities into understanding the life of this mysterious holy man. A whole new paradigm of exploration is departing dramatically from modern scholarship, rewilding the ground of Christianity and returning religion to its most ancient numinous grounds of animate experience. This episode introduces the underlying issues of modern historiography undergirding the Jesus of history and faith, tracking the origins of the shamanic archetype emerging into our collective consciousness, and reimagining an Earth-based spirituality that might rediscover the journey of descent to soul for the greater healing of the Earth community. ----more---- Mythic Christ Podcast operates because of the generosity of its growing Patreon community. As a Patreon supporter of the Apprentice Tier or higher you will receive access to the full "Shaman Christ" series and other bonus episodes, downloadable practices to support your own journey, special offerings and program discounts. To become a patron supporter of this podcast, in service to this emerging vision and the possibility of cultural transformation, please visit patreon.com/mythicchrist To join our online community visit: www.mythicchrist.com To learn more about our Awakening Mythic Imagination: Eco-Depth Yearlong Program visit: www.mythicchrist.com/programs

Over countless millennia, humans have longed for freedom from bondage to the limits of the physical realm of suffering and death… Longed for a portal to the stars, cold, distant, keepers of ancestral wisdom and ancient secrets into the mysteries of the cosmos itself. Behind the primal Mother Goddess stood a void that could not be breached, a holy darkness that was the origin and source of all. Light ineffable, a radiance pure, virginal. A quest for a cosmic innocence, a primeval dawn, that held light and darkness in balance, that both included and transcended masculine and feminine yet birthed both energies into the world of form and time. Most origin myths are stories of the cosmos. In the first century these stories were shaped by a belief in an intelligence, a wisdom behind and within the universe. A soul within the world itself, that gave rise to our human capacities for knowledge and culture and devotion. This episode "Unitive Christ: The Dissolver" Is part one of a series that explores the paradox of Wisdom Christ, and the ancient counterpart Sophia, the union of opposites, as well as the Sacred Fool and Trickster archetypes. ----more---- Mythic Christ offers online community for exploring mythic structures of story, archetype, dream, and the deep imaginal realm awakening within individuals who are sensing a collective longing a desire to rewild the divine image and re-root our religious institutions in the sacred Spirit-breathed ground of the natural world. Mythic Christ Podcast operates because of the generosity of its growing Patreon community. To become a patron supporter of this podcast, in service to this emerging vision and the possibility of cultural transformation, please visit patreon.com/mythicchrist To join our online community or learn more about our Awakening Mythic Imagination: Eco-Depth Yearlong Program visit: www.mythicchrist.com

Our greatest ability and gift as a species is the imagination. We imagine new possibilities. We imagine ourselves into new futures. Human imagination is uniquely forward reaching, and world creating. The imagination is an inner mirror upon the world itself, reflecting back to us who we really are what the world really is. We are homo poeta, human meaning makers. We bear the burden and gift of this capacity for mythic imagination. Myth is not a ‘persistent lie’ or a fantasy, it is the “wildest way of telling the truth”, in the words of mythologist Martin Shaw. Myth is not just old stories that held the morals, beliefs, and identity of peoples past. But it is a living speech, an infinitely creative and deep pattern, a root system of the imagination of the world of which we are intimately a part. Today, mythic imagination has been all but lost to us. Our collective imagination today has become unmoored from these ancient mythic root systems, it has become paralyzed and pathological. Religion has abstracted and disembodied what was once intimate knowledge and rapport with the animate forces of a mysterious world. Our exile today is a loss of consciousness with catastrophic results on our ecosystems and biosphere, alienation from a living and dreaming Earth. Only mythic imagination can help us navigate this dangerous and initiatory moment. To awaken mythic imagination is to return to the headwaters of meaning and purpose latent in Earth for us as a species. The mythic wellspring of religion and culture. In this episode “Awakening Mythic Imagination” we will explore the nature of myth as a conversation between the Earth, humanity and the divine. Myth is the only language large enough to contain the initiatory energies that alone can reforge human consciousness. Mythic imagination is what gives life meaning and depth, it is the heart of community, offers a path of individuation and growth. And truly represents what Jung called the “religious function” re-connecting the mundane with the sacred. ----more---- If you are new to this space and it resonates with you, and you want to support the podcast, the works that goes into it and promoting the vision. Please consider becoming a Patron, it only costs as little as 6$ a month. If you appreciate the vision and want to support find out more at, patreon.com/mythicchrist. All patrons get access to early release of episodes and a complementary downloadable guided meditation practice, at other levels patrons get new content and bonus episodes, advanced downloadable practices, complementary mentoring session with me in dreamwork, deep imagery, coaching, and discounts on upcoming online immersions and our Awakening Mythic Imagination Eco-Depth Yearlong program. The program is currently full but there is a waiting list for next September 2023. If you would like more information email me at matt.syrdal@mythicchrist.com.

We have lost something as a culture difficult to describe or even to feel. We have lost the language and the ritual container we need to even become conscious these ambiguous losses and the untended grief buried in the body, both individually and collectively. We might sense that Reality itself is on the line. Guy Debord in landmark work, The Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967, tracks the shift from the early stage industrial revolution when we exchanged a depth of “being” for an obsession with “having.” Exiling ourselves further as a collective from the real world. Now in the Anthropocene, marked by late stage capitalism, we are plunging further into existential exile, exchanging “having” for “appearing.” Catastrophic loss of meaning, hope, and connection. Debord explains, “the spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life.” This episode is a teaser for the official launch of the Mythic Christ podcast in September 2022—featuring exploration of the Christ myth that has become domesticated, which is to say deanimated, disembodied, abstracted and universalized from local enfleshment in sacred place and the stories of place. Up until this modern industrial age, for many Earth-based peoples, place has always had a face. The original Hebrew creation myths express this idea that the Earth herself has a face and the divine-human face is itself the icon of creation. We will explore the poetic image of the face of the ground, as ultimately an invitation to return to an animacy that involves reawakening a mythic consciousness we need to forge a new path ahead in this age of ecocide. The “flesh” of bodies are living interfaces, apertures to “knowing and being known” open gateways of erotic touch, ecstatic feeling, emotive expression, imaginal depth, sentience, memory, and interiority that modern culture has been exiled from. The face represents the animacy of the cosmos and our own animate, emergent rootedness in this vast, sentient web of creation. Mythic Christ Podcast operates because of the generosity of its growing Patreon community. To become a patron supporter of this podcast, in service to this emerging vision and in support of greater cultural transformation, please visit ​patreon.com/mythicchrist To join an online community of exploration and practice offering multi-day immersions or to explore soul-oriented mentoring including guided dreamwork, deep imagery, self-designed ceremony, myth-work, storytelling, ritual embodiment, coaching and more, check out our website to learn more: www.mythicchrist.com