Becoming The Practice

Click here to see guests photos from childhood till today on our Substack

Paola is a singer, a former labor and delivery nurse, and a guide who leads spiritual retreats to Egypt. Before this conversation I knew her as a guide. I’d heard her sing in ceremony.

I didn’t know how much her voice had carried her.

A note: this episode of Becoming the Practice includes an account of an attempted sexual assault and a serious injury. Take care of yourself as you listen.

Paola grew up in Switzerland. Her father came from a family of Swiss cow farmers, a traveler when hardly anyone traveled. Her mother is Haitian, with Taíno and Arawak roots. In school, Paola and her brother were the only Brown kids. Being loud, being on stage, being an entertainer weren’t taken seriously there.

Then New York, at 23, on an artist visa. “All of me fits in here.”

She tells me about the night in Brooklyn that almost ended all of it, and about the conversation with her spirit guides that sent her back. I’ll let you hear that one from her.

We talk about motherhood. We talk about twenty years of nursing, and the 2020 vision of the pyramids that came to her while she was sick. Now she leads Healing for the Healer retreats in the Sequoias, and journeys to Egypt that include a night ceremony inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. She doesn’t call herself a lightworker anymore. “I’m a full spectrum worker.”

And we talk about where she is now: letting every past version of herself back in. The girl who didn’t fit in at school. The singer. The nurse. The mother. “I’ve lived many lives.”

Find Paola: Everyone Needs Healing

Egypt Shop

Listen or watch her videos! Here & Here

The album “Right on time” will be released by the end of this month.

In the meantime, HERE is a song that is downloadable right now that she did with Lizzy Jeff a few years ago

Episode music by my brother, Elam Blackman

Hit reply & let me know what landed!

See photos of Maya from childhood till today

What it costs to grow up without a landing placeMaya learned to get along everywhere because she had to. She learned to figure out who she was in every new room. And then she had a son, and was completely clear “That was kinda fucked up. I wouldn’t choose to do that.” She gave her child what she didn’t have, stability.

The leap at forty-fiveOver twenty-three years at the same salon, then on her own with no business experience, no guarantee, just a lease on a small space and a lot of hope. She thought she was going to become a life coach. Instead she fell in love with hair all over again, but differently. “I’ve created this beautiful sanctuary for people to come and release and create themselves to be something new.”

Adornment as prayer and protectionWe talk about how clothing, jewelry & tattoos are prayer. “It feels like armor. It feels like this bubble of magic.”

Perimenopause as portalMaya has been talking about perimenopause online since before it was common. Years of research before asking her doctor for hormone therapy. Hip pain she’d assumed was arthritis. Brain fog she’d feared might be early Alzheimer’s. Both improved. She’s not evangelizing she’s just done the reading and wants other women to have access to it. “It’s this magical time of getting to be more fully whoever I’m becoming. Feels like permission.” Every year, she says, she sheds a few more of the f***s she’s been giving.

Connect with her on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/mayalowe_hair/

Listen to Elam’s Song HERE

A question for you:

Is there somewhere in your life right now where you’re between versions of yourself? What does it feel like to be there, and are you letting yourself actually be there?

Hit reply. I read everything.

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See Taylor’s photos, childhood to now, on Substack.

I met Taylor years ago at a sewing factory in Oakland. I was making bow ties. She already had stores. She spent a decade running up those same industrial stairs, pouring her heart into textiles, and navigating the unpredictable world of independent design.

She is a phenomenal Bay Area designer, a mom since 14, and a natural provider who has always known how to find a way, open doors, and trust her path. This conversation is about what happens when someone who has been holding it all together for decades finally lets herself stop, slow down, and breathe.

What we talked about:

* Clothes for the body you have now. She went from a size 2 to a size 12 almost overnight and couldn’t figure out how to get dressed. So she made a brand that moves with you.“I make clothing that makes you feel good when you don’t.”

* The mask year. In 2020, one sewer’s persistence turned Taylor’s idea into the mask everyone wanted—worn by everyone from Prince Harry to London Breed. It scaled her business overnight and employed a lot of people. Then came the deep fear that it was all anyone would remember.“I don’t make masks. I make clothes.”

* Closing three stores and feeling lighter. After closing three retail storefronts back-to-back, the permanent pressure she’d carried suddenly lifted. That’s when she discovered the language of her own nervous system.“Every time I stepped away from it, I felt lighter.”

* What success actually is. Not the press features. Not the internet buzz. Success is the consistent clientele of women who’ve carried 20 to 40 of her pieces in their closets for a decade.“Success is being able to do what you love in the most healthy, sustainable way.”

* Where she’s still becoming. Keeping a big heart without being an easy target. Learning to guard her energy in a way that feels safer and more grounded.“I wanna figure out how to still keep my heart big and beautiful, but also guard it.”

A question for you:What’s one thing you keep doing that stopped feeling good a while ago?

Find TaylorInstagram: @theretailtherapyresetshopSubstack

The links in her bios go to her waitlist, free guides on color and your nervous system, and one-on-one style consults

See Jaguar’s photos, childhood to now

At 30, Jaguar was hit by a car and died. Who came back is still integrating, 17 years later.

Medicine woman. Womb steam practitioner. Writer, living in Oaxaca. This conversation is about ancestral medicine, brain injury, and becoming someone you don’t know yet.

She warned me she’d lose the plot at the start. She did. But we always found our way back.

What we talked about:

When the impossible happens to you. While she was still in a wheelchair, a shaman told her the accident released an old curse in her father’s Guyanese line and opened the way for jaguar medicine. She doesn’t ask you to believe it. She just didn’t get to stay a skeptic.“You don’t have the luxury of cynicism.”

The part that isn’t magic. Seizures. Physical, occupational, and speech therapy, and her mom happens to be a speech therapist. Wheelchair, walker, cane. Then an ashram, where chanting Sanskrit and cleaning toilets helped things click back.“What is a sandwich and how do I go to the bathroom?”

Womb steam as a lineage. She learned it at her first period. It’s not the trendy version: the herbs, the salt, the bowl, a practice you keep your whole life.“It’s the current that carries you.”

Saying it out loud. After the accident, she told doctors what she was seeing and was committed to a psych ward. Now she teaches it in women’s circles.“Saying the same thing that got me locked up.”

Still becoming. On the Day of the Dead, a medicine woman down the road helped her call back La Vonne, the woman she was before the accident. Her period stopped. The poetry came back. She’s laying down the sword.“I’m just planting the garden and I invite you in for tea.”

A question for youHas something ever happened to you that didn’t fit what you believed? What did you do with it? Tell me.

Find JaguarInstagram: @jaguarwombanWebsite: Uteraoaxaca.comSubstack: The Book of Jaguar Work with her: one-on-one Zoom sessions with herbs she channels for you, immersions in Oaxaca, and first-moon initiations for mothers and daughters.

Content note: This episode mentions a serious car accident, brain injury and seizures, involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and cannabis and psychedelic use. Nothing here is medical advice.

Listen to full song by Elam Blackman

See photos of our guest from childhood to today on our Substack

Natalie Rose Silva is a ceremonialist and perfumer based in Santa Rosa, California, and a single mother raising her son, Sonny. She is the founder of Godseye Oils, a handcrafted ceremonial botanical perfume and body care brand that is evolving into a deeper practice of prayer — one-on-one scent healing sessions and full customization for each person who comes to her. She co-founded Made of Stars with her sister Erika, and together they are launching Sister School this November, a training devoted to healing the sister wound and building a new world. Natalie has facilitated ceremony since 2017, is the lead singer of a heavy metal cover band in Northern California, and carries Portuguese island and Welsh/Celtic ancestry as a third-generation Oakland native.

Natalie lost her mother, and that grief eventually blossomed into her perfume brand. In this conversation we talk about beauty made from loss, the rooms of women that changed her life, navigating ADHD, and how it feels to stop masking and let yourself be fully seen.

We also get into the pipeline nobody expected, from pole dancing classes to medicine ceremonies, and how sacred sisterhood became the center of everything. Plus channeled small-batch scents, the great gift of perimenopause burning away the mask, and the prayer for deep love.

A small heads-up: this episode briefly mentions suicide and sexual assault.

Find Natalie:

* godseyeoils.com

* @godseyeoils

* madeofstars.co

See photos of our guest from childhood to today on our Substack

Darlene Cordero was seven months into her own business when she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Three and a half years later, she calls it the thing that clarified her, not the thing that broke her.

In this conversation, Darlene shares what it means to arrive home to yourself after a lifetime of looking everywhere else. We talk about the difference between self love as a practice and self love as a hashtag, what it actually takes to meet yourself with compassion when you’ve spent years performing for everyone around you. She opens up about learning to ask for help after a lifetime of being the capable one, the single mother, the woman who never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her.

We also get into the work she’s building now: death doula trainings, a gentle guide to end of life planning, and her living memorial, a celebration of her life held while she’s still in it. Darlene is heading to Cambridge for a master’s in social innovation, studying how communities can better care for people living with long term illness. She’s writing about all of it on her Substack, The Art of Living and Dying.

This is a conversation about mortality, but more than that, it’s about what becomes possible when you stop running from it.

Find Darlene at @meetdarlene and at The Art of Living and Dying.

See photos of our guest from childhood to today on our Substack

What if money isn't what they told you it is? This week, I'm joined by Isha Vela, a psychologist, financial strategist, and founder of the Wealth Ecology Institute, to talk about what it means to have a relationship with money.

Not a spreadsheet relationship, but a real one. Isha describes her relationship with the spirit of money as polyamorous, it wants to move, to touch lots of people, to be in circulation. We get into her journey from burnout and divorce to building a trauma-informed financial brokerage, the ancestral technology of rotating savings circles, why a satisfied woman is ungovernable, and the six patriarchal stories (the LIVIDS) that keep us small. We also talk about her ancestors, who told her: We had to bury the knowledge so you could speak it. This one will change how you think about money, community, and what you're worth.

Find Isha Vela:

* Instagram

* YouTube

Her podcast:

* Waking Up Wealthy — available on all major platforms

Resources mentioned:

* Wealth Ecology Institute — ecological wealth redistribution and matriarchal money practices

* Mycelium — Global Matriarchal Network — doors open Oct 1st

* Flow Mini Course: Moving Money Matriarchally — free course; sign up to join the email list and qualify as a Mycelium founder

Concepts referenced:

* The LIVIDS — Isha’s framework: Lack · Individualism · Victimhood · Imposter · Doubt · Shame

* Rotating Savings Circles (susus / tandas / committees) — ancestral collective wealth technology

* Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott — book on shadow work around money

See photos of our guest from childhood to today on our Substack

In this episode I talk with Flora Bowley, a painter, teacher, and author who has been teaching her intuitive painting process for over 16 years. She’s written multiple books including Brave Intuitive Painting, The Art of Aliveness, and Fresh Paint, and co-owns a 20-acre retreat center an hour outside of Portland, Oregon. As we’re recording this, she’s about to get in her Toyota and drive cross-country on what she’s calling the Creative Revolution Tour: one-day workshops in cities across the country, because she believes we need to be in rooms together right now more than ever.

We talk about creativity as a birthright, what happens when the dream arrives and you realize you’re lonely, how teaching forced her to understand her own process, and the delicate balance between creative practice and creative business. We also get into finding your own voice when you’ve been inspired by someone else’s, buying a 20-acre retreat center during a pandemic (cabins, glamping tents, and all the county permits that come with it), and how she keeps showing up to rooms of 50 to 100 people even though part of her just wants to sit at the back.

If you want to catch Flora on the Creative Revolution Tour, she’s stopping in Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, the Omega Institute in New York, Hot Springs, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara -late September through mid-November. No art experience needed. Just art making, writing, and connecting soul to soul.

If you already know Flora, this will deepen your love. If you’re just meeting her, you’re in for a treat.

* Flora Bowley’s website: florabowley.com

* Flora on Instagram: @florabowley

* Flora on Facebook: facebook.com/florabowley

* Music by Elam Blackman

If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with a friend or leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. This is a new podcast and your feedback means so much, reach out and tell me what's landing for you.

See photos of our guest from childhood to today on our Substack

Tamu is a holistic wellness facilitator, teacher, and mama of three based in Oakland, California. In this conversation, she traces her origin story, from her grandmothers in Texarkana who taught her the art of tending, to her parents’ interracial marriage and migration from the South, to her own path as a kitchen alchemist, home herbalist, and practitioner of Cha Dao (the Way of Tea).

We talk about the menopause portal and how Tamu built a support circle that became a self-guided journal called Dancing the In Between; her experience sitting with plant medicine and how it cracked her open to compassion as a mother; and how a single hour of tea at Spirit Weavers Gathering brought her the same depth of release she’d found in night-long ceremonies. We also get into living spring water, daily tea practice as a moving meditation, and what it means to live by “everyday practical magic.”

Tamu's booklet Dancing the In Between is now available on her website. Link below.

Find Tamu:

* Website: wholisticshine join her newsletter for offerings & updates

* Instagram: @wholistic_shine upcoming offerings, living spring resources & more

* Uchu Botanical flower essences & botanical medicines made with living spring water

* Elam’s Song Here

See photos of our guest from childhood to today on our Substack

This week I’m sitting down with Tizzle. An astrologer, perfumer, channel, and grant writer who shares her journey from an awkward misfit to finally feeling fully aligned.

We get into how art saved her life and teaching healed her, the shift from discipline to devotion that changed everything, and her work with the Sawalmem in Northern California. She’s 43, she’s thriving, and she’ll tell you the 40s are the decade.

I almost didn’t start this podcast, and it was Tizzle’s reading that pushed me to finally do it, so this one feels extra special.

You can find Tizzle on Instagram @aromakaura

Music for this episode is by my brother, Elam Blackman. You can find his work here.