On Mycelium, Compost, and Animate Sensibilities: A Conversation With Sophie Strand
Release Date: 04/21/2022
Summoned by the Earth: A Conversation with Cynthia Jurs
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 , 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....
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Beauty as Ballast, Grief as Guide, Body as Sacred Land: A Conversation with Leilani Navar and Erin Geesaman Rabke
Embodiment Matters Podcast
Beauty as Ballast, Grief as Guide, Body as Sacred Land In this conversation between dear friends Erin of Embodiment Matters & Leilani Navar of Turning Season we dive into rich topics which we’ll be exploring in some upcoming online offerings. Beauty as Ballast, Grief as Guide, and Body as Sacred Land. We also delve into the 5 Vows of the Great turning as articulated by Joanna Macy (see below.) To find out more about our 3-Sunday series, click here. Soon the January course Take Heart: Embodying the Great Turning, with...
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Soul Water Rising: A Conversation with Dr. Jaiya John
Embodiment Matters Podcast
In this conversation/ transmission we were so honored to hear 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 ; ; and . 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...
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Musical By Nature: A Conversation With Zuza Gonçalves
Embodiment Matters Podcast
Dear friends, It is such a pleasure to share this conversation with Zuza Gonçalves. I met Zuza at the Bobby McFerrin Circlesongs School, and was so moved by his presence, his kindness, the way he moved around the room, and how he led us in movement, song and body-percussion. It felt to me like original human music. Zuza has been exploring alternative ways to collective music making for more than 20 years, integrating vocal improvisation, body percussion, movement, dialogue, cooperative practices and collaborative methodologies to promote experiences where music and...
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Living a Soulful Life: A Conversation with Holly Truhlar and Alexandre Jodun
Embodiment Matters Podcast
Greetings, listener friends. We are so happy to share this episode with our dear friends and colleagues, Holly Truhlar and Alexandre Jodun. In our conversation we speak about what it means to live a soulful life, and why it matters. We weave through many topics connected to soul, including being embedded in relationship with an animate world, ancestors and future beings, imagination and the imaginal, the spell of individualism, ripening adulthood and becoming elders, our relationship with the wild, community building and more. We hope you enjoy the conversation. (she/they) is a...
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Watering the Seeds of Soul: A Conversation with Holly Truhlar and Erin Geesaman Rabke
Embodiment Matters Podcast
Watering the Seeds of Soul A conversation with Holly Truhlar and Erin Geesaman Rabke Find out more about Watering the Seeds of Soul at In this conversation we explore how we came into grief work both personally and professionally. We share a bit about what is unique about our approach to grief, including Soul, somatics, the mythopoetic, anti-oppression, biocultural restoration and more. We talk about the Six Gates of Grief as articulated by our dear friend Francis Weller: Everything we love we will lose. The parts of us that have not known love. The...
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Embodying Maitri: The Essential Ingredient With Erin Geesaman Rabke
Embodiment Matters Podcast
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...
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Initiation and the Markings of Adulthood: A Conversation with John Wolfstone
Embodiment Matters Podcast
In this conversation, Carl speaks with John Wolfstone. John is third-generation settler, working on the Traditional and Unceded territory of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok Peoples. His blood and bones hold Hebraic, Norse and Celtic ancestry, and his spirit is from the Stars. As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, ritualist, community consultant, relationship coach, and transmedia story-teller, John is on a mission to reclamate adulthood initiation rites-of-passage. Holding space for the great grief of our times, John designs and facilitates rituals of transformation, in service to...
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Embodying Reverent Relationship with Marika Heinrichs
Embodiment Matters Podcast
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...
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On Mycelium, Compost, and Animate Sensibilities: A Conversation With Sophie Strand
Embodiment Matters Podcast
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. In a favorite audio program called How to be an Elder, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says: “”What makes an elder, a heartfelt spirit, a clear mind, a talented heart, one who is young...
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In a favorite audio program called How to be an Elder, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says: “”What makes an elder, a heartfelt spirit, a clear mind, a talented heart, one who is young while old and old while young, an activist for the Soul? Is it formulae, schemas, lexicons? It could be. But also, and often more so, I think it is very like the flowering of the trees in the forest, as we gather more years: we straggle and stride onward in our better learned ways to give out even more seeds for new life, and to blossom wildly in so doing for self and others … “
During our conversation Carl honors Sophie’s way of showing up as an elder and oh, does she scatter seeds (and underground microrhizal fungi) for new life.
She’s a prolific writer who shares via her newsletter on sophiestrand.substack.com and on Instagram and Facebook as cosmogyny. Two lovely essays on her website that we discuss in this conversation are https://creatrixmag.com/melt-divine-feminine-into-divine-animacy/ and a great story on relationship with a woodchuck called https://braidedway.org/mentorship-with-the-more-than-human-world/ You can find those and more at sophiestrand.com
Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order from all online booksellers. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023.
In this conversation we explore embodiment, pleasure and discomfort, love stories as ecosystems, complicating the idea of individualism, about queerness and explorations of masculine and feminine outside of a binary, looking for stowaways of other stories in monotheistic religions, myths as the voice of the landscape and considerations of how stories travel and cross pollinate, the porosity of identity, about Sophie’s experience with illness and the problems with mainstream ideas of wellness, how Sophie came to her animist sensitivities, and so much more.
We know you’ll enjoy this rich conversation with a truly brilliant and beautiful being.