Power Reclamation

Today, we’re exploring the intersection of mystery and neuroscience, what Lara J. Day and I call Magic. We explore the 13 Sacred Nights ritual, an ancient winter solstice practice: what it is, how it works, and how its magic can shift the way your brain and nervous system perceive the world.

What does it mean to rewild, decolonize, and reclaim our experience of pleasure and intimacy? How do we embody erotic sovereignty? Victor Warring, an Erotic ReWilder and Somatic Sexuality Educator, helps us to understand the distinction between the erotic and the sexual, and to expand our capacity to experience pleasure—even amidst chaos, collapse, and collective overwhelm.

Shawna Reininger, with Conscious Enterprise, is one of the most skilled intuitive business and personal guides I know. In this episode we talk about why tapping into the power of intuition is more crucial than ever, and how we can start cultivating space for intuition in our everyday lives.

In this episode, I explore our deep human need for belonging and its counterparts of isolation and exile. I share insights on authentic belonging, from relationships with pets to embracing solitude, to help you develop a healthier sense of belonging both internally and in the world.

What does it look like when mega-celebrity spiritual teachers misuse their power and authority? And, when do these teachers' blindspots recapitulate the student's trauma - especially when the teacher doesn't understand the student's trauma response and instead blames the student for not doing the practices "right"? How can we stay alert to the charming and persuasive tactics of leaders who hold high positions of power and authority - while remaining realistic that they are still a human-being expressing themselves in unintegrated ways? This conversation with Nicola Amadora, spiritual teacher, Hakomi therapist and trauma-informed guide, brings light to the reality that students of spiritual teachers can slip into power-over and dominating power dynamics with a teacher that cause them to lose faith in their own inner authority and self-authoring trust. Key topics we covered: * The dangerous traps of spiritual bypassing and transcendence * How can women reclaim their voice when there have been centuries of cultural conditioning that dismisses a women's direct experience and personal needs? How can someone's direct experience ever be wrong as opposed to a gateway to greater self-awareness and understanding? * Scapegoating Projections - a common practice of banishing the innocent to justify separation and off-loading of personal responsibility through blame and exile * The downfall of savior projections that become a slippery slope of needing to hold a teacher as perfect and whole while ignoring red flags such as justifying their abuse and hypocritical behavior. * The impact of spiritual teachers who rigidly hold a right and wrong about how a person should live their life that makes no room for the unique needs of that person's process of integration and embodied healing. * Creating safe resources to process our confusion -- how to find people who can listen to our pain in a neutral and open-hearted way * We all have blindspots -- how to create a world where we help one another see them more clearly

It sounds easy to say, "welcome everything", but if you've tried, you'll know how many protectors and iron gates come down when circumstances that we don't like capture our attention or threaten our sense of power, safety and connection. It takes immense courage and consciousness to embark on this deep level of integration and healing. There is great power gained by learning to welcome our shadows and messiness. In this episode, Anne-Marie breaks down the arc of evolutionary leadership through the five developmental phases of leadership and consciousness. Episode Topics: 1. Being on my knees, dancing between despair & hope, led me to this recording 2. Why integral leadership? 3. "Please call me by my true name", a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh 4. What is integral leadership? 5. The movement from authentic leadership to integral leadership 6. Five phases of leadership development 7. The shift from reactive to creative leadership 8. The shift from creative to integral leadership 9. The key marker of an integral leader is a devotion to embracing one's shadows 10. Integral leadership immersions with Anne-Marie 11. Feeling safe enough to be messy -- an essential component for transformational growth

This conversation with Rixt Kuiper and Rob Sinclair is about integral leadership and shadow work. How do we as leaders, consultants, healers, therapists and change-makers lead and love through exploring our personal projections and exiled parts of self? Here is what we explore: 04.15: What is shadow and why does it matter? 09.50: Shadow work - the ability to consciously expose exiled parts of self 10.46: Is shadow always dark? What about the golden shadow? 12.40: How do you recognize shadow? 14.15: The importance of shadow work as it relates to integral leadership 19.10: What is a cultural shadow and how does it get reinforced by culture? 23.23: Why is shadow work important? 25.30: What shadow integration looks like for Anne-Marie 26.50: What shadow integration looks like for Rob 29.10: What shadow integration looks like for Rixt 33.17: The power of identifying missing experiences when working with leaders 34.53: Befriending our disowned parts 42.10: Why shadow work isn’t a destination – it’s a journey 43.50: The power of not doing shadow work alone – we need one another

What happens when stoicism and the learned behavior of compartmentalizing one's emotions and vulnerability stifle the individual who embodies them? What type of violence does this create within and externally? This phenomenon is called toxic masculinity — an exalted archetype of what it means “to be a man”, which is reinforced through socialization and conditioning. What happens when we're shown that to belong we must ascribe to certain standards and norms -- how does this conditioning result in the reinforcement of our own personal cages? You know, those rigid limiting beliefs and behaviors that contort us into a smaller version of who we are. Which effectively separate us from our multidimensional, emotional, physical, and spiritual self?

Are dark thoughts, painful emotional patterns always our psychology or hormonal imbalances? No! Sometimes they are foreign energy. Listen to qigong master, Damaris Jarboux, as she describes the framework for foreign energy and how it impacts our mental body (thoughts), emotional body, physical body and eventually our spiritual connection. "Foreign energy is a spiritual virus" -- it's an energy that interferes with our ability to sense and embody our true self. Some of they key topics we cover are: * Naming Foreign Energies * Clearing Yourself from Foreign Energies * The Unity of Soul and Spirit Depicted in Stories * The Expansion of Polarity * Healing the collective and personal divide through centering in our heart * Finding and Understanding the Foreign Energy Piece

Many of us are taught we have to find the one core purpose for our expression in the world and if we can’t do that then somehow it means we’ve failed. That is NOT true. You’ll hear guest, Sajit Greene, debunk this outdated paradigm today through topics such as: * How has one’s soul purpose become distorted by patriarchal views? * The patriarchy paradigm is not gender-based * What are patriarchal views and how does it inflame anxiety, greed, and fear? * How is this viewed through an astrology lens? * How the framework of yin (feminine energy) and yang (masculine energy) helps to remove judgment and genderism from the conversations about the destruction created by power-over and non-consensual dominance. * Rescripting soul purpose: What does soul purpose express when it’s harmonized by divine feminine (yin) and masculine (yang) energies rather than the polarization of the patriarchy paradigm? * White privilege and the power of examining our inherited language and cultural norms

Jen shares about her journey of being lured into deep introspection through an inner fire in her heart and belly. Jen candidly shares with us about the vulnerability and liberation of living a life through radical self-honesty. She defines Midlife Emergence as "the process of coming into view or being exposed after previously being concealed." We covered these topics -- and more: * what is Midlife Emergence? How she helps other women to listen to their inner fire and explore their own inner fire. * opening her heterosexual marriage with a man while simultaneously exploring a romantic connection with a woman. * how she and her now ex-husband consciously uncoupled from their roles of husband and wife into a new form of love and friendship as they co-parent with their teenage daughter. * rewriting negative connotations and perceptions of divorce - how she and her ex-husband uncoupled with generous love, honesty, and care, which has brought them closer than ever before. As a result of this journey, she has written a book (still in the publication process) and is currently taking enrollment for her new program called, Midlife Emergence -- an invitation for other women to investigate their own inner fire and cultivate the courage to leap into new expressions of self and sovereignty.

Holadia shares about her journey of inheriting the cultural norms of who she "should be" from her small town, good-girl, midwestern upbringing. She speaks about how her life was built out of tiny boxes of limited perceptions of reality. Telling stories about the special allies and life experiences that ignited a new vision for her life --- which allowed her to courageous buck convention and reclaim her empowered inner authority. She is an artist of connecting the heart, soul, and mind into one's most authentic and embodied expression of power. Holadia speaks about the art of pausing. Of taking time to turn inward and listen, clarify and ask for guidance -- an alternative to the frantic anxiety-driven approach of moving faster and doing more in an effort to control and force change. She holds others while they flail -- and eventually, learn how to sit in the fertile ground of uncertainty. I know this first hand from my initial meeting with her 18 years ago. She is a master of yielding, waiting, listening -- like few people I know. Holadia holds people's hands as they navigate painful confusion, disorientation, and burn-out. She offers personal retreats in her Colorado mountain home as a means to support others to buck the internal confining boxes of fear that have become tight, dark, and claustrophobic. She guides others to reveal their personal power, wisdom, and an expanding vision of what's possible in their lives.