A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World

Stephen is a culture activist, teacher, author, and co-founder if the Orphan Wisdom School. His work centers around grief, elderhood, community, and is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, and working for a time we won’t see. Stephen and I speak about how a lack of generational connection and transmission has provoked deep rupture and brokenness. We discuss the difference between communities and collectives, the danger of individualism and personal “sovereignty,” and how grief is an inevitable outcome of true “awakening”. We also touch on guru/student relationships, societal misconceptions about power and privilege, how to cultivate belonging as a state of being, and the devastating effects of living in a culture that has traded grief for grievance.

Purchase a copy of Reckoning by Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson here.

Songs featured: “Invocation” by Nights of Grief and Mystery, “The Future” by Leonard Cohen

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A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a reader and listener supported project. If you find this content valuable, please consider becoming a paid supporter for only $5/month.

Mónica Guzmán is an author, journalist, and bridge builder. She is the Director of Digital Storytelling at Braver Angels, a nonprofit working to depolarize America, and author of the book “I Never Thought Of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times”. Móni and her parents immigrated to the US from Mexico when she was a teenager. Móni is a liberal, but her parents voted for Trump… twice. Our conversation focuses on the importance of curating connection to those we disagree with, and the practice of maintaining curiosity about ideas and opinions we don’t understand. We speak about how to prioritize trust above “truth,” the polarizing role of the media, and the danger of getting sucked into ideological silos. Móni explains how it is possible to remember that we are all smarter and more capable than what they want us to believe, but only when we make space for and reclaim vulnerable conversations, and a connection to one another.

Mónica’s book recommendation: The Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Find Mónica on Twitter, Instagram, and ReclaimCuriosity.com

Click here to learn more about Contact Beyond Contact.

Click here to sign up for the Sex at Dawn Retreat this September in Montana, hosted by Chris Ryan, Cameron & Melayne Shayne, and me! (Only two spots left).

Songs featured: “Moving” by Eskimotion, “Back to You” by Benjamin Gordon, and “Going Home” by Ásgeir

How to support the show:

* Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

* Become a paid subscriber on Substack.

* Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a reader and listener supported publication. If you find this content valuable, and have the means to donate financially, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $5/month.

Lenore Black, a fan favorite of the show, returns for a second episode. It’s an understatement to say that a lot has changed in the year and a half since Lenore and I first connected, both personally and collectively. We speak about Lenore’s move from New York City to Joshua Tree, which was as much an inner journey as an outer journey. Lenore shares why she decided to reevaluate her career, her connection to herself and to nature, and the identity she held onto for years as a bisexual, queer, kinky, non-monogamous woman. We speak about the importance of avoiding political and ideological silos, and why it’s vital that we approach ourselves and the world with curiosity, empathy and a willingness to have our minds changed in ways we might not expect.

Click here to listen to the first podcast episode Lenore and I recorded together.

Find Lenore on Instagram and on Substack

Songs featured: “Desert Solitaire” by Greta Morgan, “Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron, and “Meanwhile Back in the City” by The Presidents of the United States of America

How to support the show:

* Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

* Become a paid subscriber on Substack.

* Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a reader and listener supported publication. If you find this content valuable, and have the means to donate financially, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for only $5/month.

Chris and I had the pleasure of spending ten days with Elia on our trip to Tanzania last month, and sat down to record a podcast with him at Lake Eyasi. Elia is half Maasai, and spent much of his childhood being raised by his Maasai grandfather. He has a great deal of knowledge and insight about the complexities and conflicts between the Maasai and the “modern world,” because that complexity informs his life and identity. In this conversation we speak about his experience learning about wildlife, the land, astronomy and what it means to mature as a man within his Maasai community, and the shift into his adult life as a safari guide. We speak about Maasai culture and tradition, climate change, spirit animals, tourism, education, and population growth. Elia gives some unique and important context to the experience of coming from and living in two very different worlds.

Get in touch with Elia through Gladiola Adventure.

Songs featured: “Korobela” and “Asante Sana” by The Soil

How to support the show:

* Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

* Become a paid subscriber on Substack.

* Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a reader and listener supported publication. If you find this content valuable, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Sophie is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. We speak about personal and collective mythologies and how so many of our stories have been deracinated from their roots in ways that perpetuate harm. We discuss the importance of rerooting and rewilding these narratives by listening with our whole bodies, and becoming aware of how our individual story is a part of an overarching ecological matrix. We touch on how we’ve both worked to reframe our own sensitivity and illness, and the complexities of Psilocybin, masculinity, Jesus, spirituality and magic.

Find Sophie at and on Instagram, on Substack and check out her course with Advaya. Pre-order her book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.

Sophie’s Book Recommendations: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut and Inflamed by by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel

Songs featured: “Gold Star Mothers” by Hammock, “Meet The Moonlight” by Jack Johnson, and “Dust” by Ryan Montbleau

How to support the show:

* Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

* Become a paid subscriber on Substack.

* Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a listener-supported project. If you find this content valuable and have the means to donate, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Chloé is a writer and entrepreneur whose company, Theory of Enchantment, offers an alternative to conventional anti-racism training. Instead of focusing on dualistic thinking and division, Chloé’s company embraces and promotes love and compassion. We speak about the importance of accepting and embodying our own individual complexities and polarities as a means to accept others. We discuss the West’s (and our own individual) obsession with controlling and predicting, which inevitably leads to abuses of power. We also talk about meaningful relationship as an antidote to power grabbing, the importance of channeling anger as opposed to identifying with it, and how real change will require that we get back into our bodies and feel our feelings.

Find Chloé at TheoryofEnchantment.com, Instagram, and Twitter, and listen to her podcast The Heart Speaks

Chloé’s Book Recommendations: The Way of Woman by Helen Luke and The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

Songs featured: “Dreamer” by Arisha Badru and “You Make Loving Fun” by Fleetwood Mac

How to support the show:

* Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

* Become a paid subscriber on Substack.

* Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

Here is the 60 minutes segment I spoke about in our conversation:

A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a listener-supported project. If you find this content valuable and have the means to donate, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This episode has been a long time coming. If you’re a regular listener of MGSW, you know that I’m incredibly interested in exploring power dynamics, shadow, and spirituality, especially when all three become interwoven. I share my reflections about the podcast Cover Story, which uncovers abuses of power within the growing industry of psychedelic therapy. I also discuss Power in the Helping Professions by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, and reflect on how power is wielded within various forms of “therapy”. How might “healers” project the wounded pole of the wounded healer archetype onto their patients, thereby avoiding their own? What are the dangers of silencing genuine questions and concerns during campaigns to gain cultural acceptance of something that’s been historically demonized? Why are we more willing to discuss abuses of power when the abuses involve sex and drugs? How have nuanced conversations and opinions been replaced by false binaries and “you’re with me or against me” reactive assumptions? I discuss all of these questions and more.

Song featured: “Waterfalls” by Ten Fé

How to support the show:

* Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

* Become a paid subscriber on Substack.

* Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

A Millennial's Guide to Saving the World is a listener-supported project. If you find this content valuable, and have the means to donate, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Debra has lived an incredibly full and inspiring life with no plan of stopping anytime soon. From moving to Europe, dropping out of school, marrying an Italian prince and hitchhiking across Africa all by the time she was sixteen, Debra has always embraced the unknown and said “yes” to all of what life has thrown at her. We speak about her love of integrating art and architecture, and the beauty of bringing something of ourselves to new experiences as opposed to requiring an experience to give something to us. We touch on the importance of embracing our individual uniqueness, the beauty of being a citizen within a community, and why elderhood is underrated.

Songs featured: “Confidently Lost” by Sabrina Claudio and “Against the Wind” by Victory

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Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

Lindsey Lockett is a trauma educator, coach, podcast host and self-proclaimed “awareness junkie and nervous system ninja”. She joined me to continue our two-part conversation about spirituality. (To listen to part 1, head to Episode #79 of the Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast). Lindsey spent the first 30 years of her life as an evangelical Christian, but had a reckoning at age 33 and a traumatic dark night of the soul that provoked her to reinvent her life from the ground up. We speak about her journey of developing an individual approach to belief and meaning, and her commitment to understanding herself and the world in ways that challenge the status-quo. We speak about our mutual dedication to critical thinking, reinventing ourselves, and resisting fundamentalist/black & white thinking. We talk about belonging, ancestry, past life regressions, honoring the earth, and Lindsey tells a story about this one time she sacrificed a pig with her neighbors in order to pray for rain. Join me on Substack to share your thoughts about this episode in the comments section, and get access to bonus content and a community of like-minded humans.

Find Lindsey at LindseyLockett.com and on Instagram

Songs featured: “Be Like Water” by Lo Wolf and “All The Way Down” by Jonathan Wilson

How to support the show:

Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

In this episode I discuss three relatively controversial and divisive issues in an effort to expose our discomfort with cognitive dissonance. For example, are we really anti-vaccine mandate, or are we just anti-Covid vaccine mandate (because we don’t feel personally at risk)? Would we still be preaching about sovereignty if the virus was deadlier? What if it had been a white man who had slapped Chris Rock, or what if Chris Rock had been a woman? Is creating an identity around veganism more about seeking external validation than it is about veganism? This episode explores how resistant we can be to embracing the subjective nature of our beliefs and decisions, instead opting into “belief clubs” that provide us with externalized rationalizations for our own biases. I argue that by doing so, we lose countless opportunities to grow and gain greater self-awareness.

How to support the show:

Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

Visit my website - AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram