In this this episode, Demi Lee and Annamaria sit down with Alana Ward for a conversation about death - and, perhaps more importantly, about what death asks of the living.

No one is getting out of here alive. Everything we love will change. Every season will end. Every body will eventually return to the earth. And rather than making life meaningless, what if remembering this is precisely what makes it sacred?

Together, we explore what happens when we stop keeping death at arm’s length and begin building a relationship with our own mortality - how the awareness of impermanence can bring us into deeper humility, courage, presence and reverence for the ordinary moments of our lives.

Demi Lee shares the story of being falsely diagnosed with cancer, and the threshold that diagnosis took her across. Faced suddenly with the possibility of her own death, she was forced to confront an uncomfortable question: if my life ended sooner than I imagined, have I actually lived it the way I wanted to?

What followed was a reckoning with the places she was still withholding herself from life. The offerings not yet birthed. The words not yet spoken. The risks not yet taken. The strange liberation of realising that, when your time comes, you are the one who will die your own death - and therefore you hold the sacred responsibility to live a life that is actually yours.

We speak about legacy, creative courage, using your voice, and the ways remembering death can strip away some of the performance and trivialities that consume us.

We also enter the more difficult territory of suicide and suicidal ideation, bringing a conversation often relegated to the shadows into the light. Not romanticising death, nor reducing the complexity of suicide, but asking what it might mean to help someone find a life they can remain in relationship with.

This is a conversation about death. But really, it is a conversation about life.

About remembering that the breath moving through you right now is temporary. That the people you love are temporary. That this particular incarnation of your life will never happen again.

And perhaps there is no greater invitation to live than remembering that one day, we will die.

• Join us in Body As Altar in Northern NSW from October 1st - October 4th, 2026. Book Now using the Discount Code RETURN for $150 discount.
• Today's Episode is sponsored by Dreamy Moons Tarot, offering Tarot Card Decks for those seeking deeper connection, guidance and clarity. Offering Guided Journals - keepers of your deepest dreams and musings. Purchase now using the Discount Code: ECLECTICA

Death has become something to manage, sanitise and hide. But what if dying was never meant to be reduced to a medical event?

In this profound conversation, death walker Alana Woodward joins fellow death and grief doula Demi Lee and Annamaria to explore what has been lost through the medicalisation, domestication and colonisation of death - and what becomes possible when we reclaim it as a sacred rite of passage.

Together, they question a culture that has become deeply death-phobic; one that often rushes bodies away, strips death of ceremony and leaves families disconnected from one of life's most transformative thresholds. Instead, they invite us into another way: one where death is not simply an ending, but a process. A liminal crossing. A sacred postpartum of the soul.

This episode explores the forgotten wisdom of spending time with the body, creating ritual, tending altars, lighting candles, witnessing the dying process and re-villaging death. We speak about the profound role these practices can play in helping us metabolise grief, integrate loss and remain in relationship with those we love as they cross the threshold between worlds.

Woven throughout are conversations about ancestral death traditions, the importance of community, the thin veil between life and death, dying at home, and what it truly means to participate in dying rather than avoid it. Because when we restore intimacy with death, we often discover a deeper intimacy with life itself.

This is not simply a conversation about death. It is an invitation to remember how to die well, so that we may learn to live more fully.

- You can find Alana via here

- Join us in our 4-day Ceremonial Intensive held in Byron Bay 'The Body As Altar' - a Collaboration between Eclectica Hub and InBluem

- Today's episode is sponsored by Dreamy Moons Tarot.

• Offering Tarot Card Decks for those seeking deeper connection, guidance, and clarity
• and Guided Journals - keepers of your deepest dreams and musings. 
• Purchase now using the Discount Code: ECLECTICA

- Support for Dying at Home:

• In Victoria, local community palliative care teams, like Eastern Palliative Care and Banksia Palliative Care Service, provide free home-based medical, nursing, and volunteer support.

• Victorian Palliative Care Advice Service: A free, confidential non-emergency advice line (1800 360 000) that helps patients and families understand symptom management and navigate the palliative care system.
• Benetas End-of-Life Support Service: A private, in-home care program designed to complement community palliative care by providing additional hands-on support.

In this episode, we unpack the Peter Pan Archetype - the modern non-committal man who orbits intimacy, craves connection, but disappears the moment depth, responsibility, or true devotion is required.

Joined by men’s mentor Joshua Payne, we explore the cultural, psychological and spiritual forces shaping modern masculinity - particularly within spiritual and conscious communities, where emotional language can sometimes mask deep avoidance.

We speak about the sexual revolution and the removal of consequence from intimacy. Contraception, abortion, dating apps and endless digital stimulation have radically changed relational dynamics - creating a world where men can endlessly seek novelty, validation and erotic freedom without necessarily being called into maturity, devotion or responsibility.

We explore the modern distortion of “freedom,” and how many men have been sold the idea that freedom means remaining unattached, endlessly exploring, travelling, and avoiding commitment - while true freedom may actually deepen through sacred responsibility, purpose, intimacy and family.

We speak about:

• ghosting and orbiting behaviours
• the fear of hurting women or becoming “the perpetrator”
• war, fatherlessness and the mother wound
• men extracting worth through sexual conquest
• the hormonal and evolutionary drive to reproduce
• the disappearance of male initiation
• why many men fear emotional depth and feminine intimacy
• how women often become initiators into masculine maturation
• and the growing crisis of adolescence within modern masculinity.

This is a nuanced conversation about commitment, consequence, devotion, eros, maturation and the deep hunger many people feel for relationships that are rooted in integrity rather than endless avoidance.

Todays Episode Sponsor is Iama Ayurveda Wellness - offering personalised guidance rooted in the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda, known as the “science of life". Restore your health naturally with Ayurvedic Consultations and treatments with Reiki - by Kristyana - offering holistic wellness support and personalised healing. She is open to collaborations, wellness events, and retreat partnerships. Connect & find more info at www.iamaayurveda.com.

Sign up for Motherline today - held on Saturday July 5th and Sunday July 6th, 2026., in Arthurs Creek VIC Australia.

In this episode, we sit with one of our most treasured mentors and medicine woman, Sarah Singing Raven, in a conversation that doesn’t try to make awakening palatable.

We speak to what it actually means to ripen the soul - not as a concept, but as a lived initiation. The type of initiation that asks something of you and brings you to the edge of what you thought you could hold. This is a conversation about saying yes to the thresholds that shape you.

We explore the terrain of awakening and healing, and how often it feels like collapse rather than expansion. A dismantling of identity. A loosening of ego. A descent into the unknown where nothing is certain and nothing is comfortable.

We speak about the ways modern life - technology, phones, constant stimulation - are pulling us further from the natural world, from our intuition, and from each other. And what it takes to return.

Through practices like vision quests, meditation, and intentional encounters with silence and solitude, we explore how the soul comes back online - which is far from comfortable, but expands your capacity through depth, presence, and devotion.

- Join us in MOTHERLINE, April 11th and 12th in Victoria

(Use the Code 'ROOTED' for $20 discount)

- Explore Sarah Singing Raven's Medicine at Gracias Madre Here

In this unfiltered conversation with men’s facilitator Joshua Payne (Demi Lee's husband), we step straight into the tension around masculinity, feminism, and the collapse of polarity in modern culture.

We question the ways modern day feminism has mistaken equality with sameness - and what that has meant for women operating in chronic output, disconnected from cyclical intelligence and embodied power. We explore why so many men feel disoriented, uninitiated, and estranged from grounded masculine leadership.

Joshua draws from his work with organisations such as The Man Cave, the Rites of Passage Institute, and Movember, supporting thousands of men across Australia.

Joshua is clear: from his perspective, toxic masculinity doesn’t exist - immaturity does. A man without initiation, without ego-death, without having met the edges of himself, is dangerous. A man cut off from disciplined access to his aggression is fragmented.

We speak about the shadow side of labelling aggression and violence as inherently “toxic,” and how casting these forces out can produce men who are frozen - disconnected from their capacity to protect, to hold ground, to access clean, contained power.

The conversation turns toward channeling strength in service of protection rather than domination. Toward rites of passage, ego-death practices like jiu-jitsu, and the necessity of masculine elders in shaping boys into integrated, embodied men.

We also speak about polarity inside the home. What happens - psychologically, physiologically, hormonally, erotically - when women become primary providers and men stay home? What shifts in chemistry, identity, desire?

What would it take to raise mature men and embodied women at the same time? A nuanced, confronting, and deeply necessary conversation.

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In this episode, Demi and Anna-Maria descend into the soil of grief as an initiatory force - not as something to be solved or survived, but something that strips masks, demands radical honesty, and reshapes how we live.

They speak to grief as a teacher, an elder, a living frequency that trains us through every loss we face - from the quiet, easily dismissed endings to the shattering ones that undo us completely. These smaller losses become the training ground, preparing the nervous system, heart, and soul for deeper surrender when life asks more of us.

This conversation explores how grief and death sharpen presence, simplify what matters, and measure how fully we are willing to live. It is the knowing that we will lose, that teaches us how to treasure.

Demi and Annie reflect on acclimatising to pain and building a relationship with intensity - understanding that grief does not disappear, but that our capacity to meet it can expand.

They name the devastation of solitary grieving within a hyper-individualised culture, while also honouring that no one can walk the inner passage of grief for you. Grief is a rite of passage that requires aloneness as well as accompaniment. Re-villaging grief does not mean being rescued from it – it means being witnessed through it.

This episode is an offering for those who know grief not as pathology, but as a sacred altar we are changed upon - again and again.

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In this second part of our conversation on Womb Grief, we descend even deeper into the unspoken landscapes that live within women’s bodies and explore the often-invisible grief held in the womb.

We speak to the profound impacts of abortion, miscarriage, early birth, and stillbirth, and how a woman may not feel grief intellectually, yet her womb carries its own story that needs tending. We explore why every woman who moves through pregnancy loss - including chosen abortion - deserves to be met as a mother in postpartum, held with reverence, nourishment, and grief literacy.

We discuss how the spirits of these babies belong in our constellation - and how, when they are unseen, unacknowledged, or spiritually misplaced, they continue to seek resolution through symptom expressions in the lineage.

We explore the effects of hormonal contraception on the womb and travel into the realm of first sexual experiences - losing our virginity, early partners, sexual assault, and dissociated sex.

We explore how sex is an energetic exchange that leaves imprints, ancestral residue, and relational debris in the womb-space, and why these experiences often require clearing.

This episode is an invitation to walk slowly, gently, and courageously into the places we were never taught to honour. If you’ve lived through pregnancy loss, abortion, boundary-less sexual experiences, contraception-related disruption, or ancestral womb ache - may this conversation offer recognition, resonance, and a path toward reclamation.

• Join us in The Way of The Rose 4-Day Ceremonial Dance Container with Mayra Stark
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In this deeply moving and unflinchingly honest conversation, Anna-Maria and Demi Lee enter the uncharted territory of womb grief - the sorrow, wisdom, and fierce intelligence held within the sacred consciousness of the womb.We explore the womb as an ancient temple and how, in the modern world, she is so often misunderstood, medicalised, and disregarded. We speak to the collective womb and to the ways women’s bodies and wombs across the world are disrespected through war, violence, and systemic control.This conversation moves tenderly through themes of abortion, miscarriage, hysterectomy, sexual abuse, genital mutilation, obstetric violence, and birth trauma - naming what has long been left unspoken. We reflect on the medicalised birth industry and the absence of trauma-awareness in maternity care, where cervical checks and routine procedures can unconsciously echo earlier experiences of boundary violation or sexual assault.

We speak about the yearning to conceive, the ache of unrealised motherhood, and the grief of time - when your heart is ready to be a mother but life’s timing hasn’t yet aligned.We also question how modern feminism, in its pursuit of equality, has often led women to work and perform as if we have male bodies, leaving many disconnected from their cyclical nature. We explore how this disconnection contributes to burnout, hormonal imbalance, infertility, and strain within relationships. At its heart, this episode is an invocation: to listen to the womb’s voice, to honour her as both a personal and collective consciousness, and to recognise womb grief not as pathology, but as sacred guidance - calling us back to balance, reverence, and embodied truth.

• Join us in our 4-Day Visionary Dance and Ceremonial Intensive 'Way of the Rose' with Marya Stark
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• Extend the Circle - Standing with the Wombs Not Yet Free

This episode cuts through the illusions we all get trapped in. The distorted mirrors of projection and judgement. Demi Lee and Anna-Maria lay it bare - the way people see you says far more about them, than it does about you. Their wounds, their belief systems, their unresolved conflict, their life story and unique lens of the world - they smear the glass they see the world through, and then call it a reflection of you.

We break down the holographic nature of these projections and the layers of data held inside every barb of criticism or whispered judgment. The truth? You only ever see people through fragments or surface level observations, and then you tend to fill in the gaps with assumption. Hey - we all do it. But it’s also where the distortion creeps in.

The medicine here is LET THEM. Let them project. Let them judge. If it slides off you, it was never yours. If it stings, that sting is information. It’s data that points to your wounding or your own belief systems you hold around the self. And that is a rich invitation to get deeply curious and even grateful for the mirror this person is holding up.

This is not about spiritual bypass, nor about playing the victim. This is about radical self-responsibility. About knowing yourself so deeply that no one else’s perception impact your sense of self. And about being ruthless enough to ask: Why does this person trigger me? What is it showing me about myself?

If you’re ready to stop outsourcing your power to other people’s projections or judgements or accusations, this episode will hand you the sword.

- Sign up for Way of the WombKeeper Byron Bay Here

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In this episode, Demi Lee and Anna-Maria journey into the shadow side of the feminine - the hidden patterns that keep women small, silent, and disconnected from their deepest truth.

We explore the subtle and not-so-subtle ways women betray themselves. Mothers who remain in strained or disempowering partnerships for the sake of family, women who appease partners at the cost of their own desires, those who shrink their needs in birth rooms or bend to medical authority, and the devastating toll of rejecting our bodies through bounce-back culture and cosmetic surgery.

We also name the shadow dynamics that arise in love and intimacy. Too often, women deny their deepest desires for fear of losing love, saying “yes” to open relationships they don’t truly want, or avoiding difficult truths to protect their partner’s feelings. To advocate for your needs in relationship is an act of courage - to be willing to risk rupture, to stand on your own two feet, and to truly see the mirror your partner holds up for you rather than victimising yourself in the process.

These shadows reveal themselves in the choices we make, the stories we tell our children, and the way we silently absorb the message that women’s bodies, voices, and desires are secondary. When we deny our truth, our children inherit that denial. When we reject or change our bodies, our children learn to question the beauty of their own.

This conversation is not an indictment but an illumination - an invitation to recognise the cost of appeasement, to reclaim agency over body and voice, and to reimagine a feminine that is discerning, heart-led, self-responsible, and rooted in embodied agency.

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Song: Elders by VeroCoya