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 outward. Erin shares personal stories of working with this practice, and invites you in. She also shares about her upcoming online class Maitri: A Courtship with the Essential Ingredient. You can learn more about that offering here. https://embodimentmatters.com/maitri-courting-the-essential-ingredient/

 

Erin refers to a few sources of inspiration in this episode including:

 

To Love and Be Loved: The Difficult Yoga of Relationship with Stephen and Ondrea Levine

https://www.soundstrue.com/products/to-love-and-be-loved

 

bell hooks 

All About Love https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17607.All_About_Love

Her Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/interviews-with-thich-nhat-hanh/interview-with-bell-hooks-january-1-2000/

 

Open and Innocent by Scott Morrison

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3397459-open-and-innocent

 

There is Nothing Wrong with You by Cheri Huber

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27580.There_Is_Nothing_Wrong_with_You

 

 

And Mary Oliver’s poem, To Begin with the Sweet Grass

 

https://embodimentmatters.com/love-yourself/

 

 

 

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 regulating the personal and collective nervous systems back to belonging with the Earth. John apprenticed in numerous indigenous and ancestral ritual healing lineages during his decade long adulthood initiation quest, and bows in reverence to his many teachers, mentors, guides and elders.

John tends thresholds of all kinds, and can often be found praying by a fire, whistling bird song, invoking his ancestors, and training his craft as a sacred huntsman.

John is also one of the cofounders of the School of Mythopoetics.

In our conversation, we explore initiation, and why it has been so central to the human experience. We also talk about what is lost, in terms of the presence of adults and elders in the world, when practices of initiation are absent in a culture.

We talk about the markings of adulthood, exploring some of the indicators that someone has grown into an adult, or not.

And we look at how to grow a literacy with initiatory process, and for the many of us who have not grown up in cultures with intact rituals and rites of passage, how to bring these practices and principles into our lives and our communities.

John is facilitating a year-long adulthood initiation ritual apprenticeship through the School of Mythopoetics beginning November, 2022, and you can find more about that here. https://www.schoolofmythopoetics.com/ritual-apprenticeship

You can find more about John and his work here:

johnwolfstone.com

www.schoolofmythopoetics.com

 

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 facilitator whose work focuses on the recovery of ancestral wisdom through body-based ways of knowing, and challenging the appropriation and erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the field of somatics. Marika resides on Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe territory (a.k.a. Guelph, Ontario). She is grateful for the nourishment and support of her peers, mentors, and more-than-human kin. 

 

Links:

website: wildbdoy.ca

IG: @wildbodysomatics

Courses: wildbody.ca/embodied-ethics

 

 

Here is a link to a beautiful and important piece written by Marika which I referred to in our conversation - On White People Building Belonging Together in our Movements for Liberation.

https://wildbody.ca/blog/on-building-belonging-as-white-people-within-our-movements

 

Some powerful quotes from Marika’s writings and teachings:

 

 

"I believe that building healing communities is just as important as having access to individualized healing supports such as therapy.

 

 

 

Divesting from appropriation is about both surrendering entitlement and feeling into the truth of our own peoples. I believe we are all capable of appropriation, and as a white bodied person I don't feel it's my work to tell Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour how to engage with their practices. I can share from what I know through my own journey into these questions, which includes feeling how intimately connected extraction, violence, and severance from the natural world are to the projects of white supremacy and Christian hegemony.

 

Lack of acknowledgment and consent, spiritual bypassing, claiming ownership and superiority, prohibitive costs, lack of access for the descendants of the very peoples from whom practices emerged, no sense of connection or accountability to our own peoples, normalizing cis, straight, thin, white, able bodies… the list goes on. 

 

I want to envision a methodology of somatics that is invested in liberation right down to the roots of the lineages and histories of our practices. If we are not tending to the ways that this field has been shaped by supremacy, we are missing a core component of embodied liberation. 

 

Practices emerge from culture, they are shaped by time, place, and cosmology. All of our peoples had practices and ways of working with the body towards healing. Even if we engage in the most consent-based, ethical, values-driven protocols with practices from outside our own cultures, we miss the crucial work of facing into the grief and joy of our own lineages and peoples. I believe that the unwillingness to do this is one way that the field of somatics can perpetuate white supremacy, and I envision new/old practices that reconnect us with our ancestors and carry us through mourning, accountability, and repair as white people. As practitioners, we hold power around shaping these conversations in our field, and in supporting these conditions with these we serve. 

 

 

 

All those years practicing yoga are part of what shaped me and helped me to grow the capacity to release it for a practice that feels more aligned, more liberatory. It’s not for me to decide who should or shouldn’t practice yoga, or whether or not something is appropriation. Those questions can serve as distractions, virtue signalling that keeps us from the work of divesting from the roots of whiteness that lead to appropriation in the first place. I do know that the space that was left when I quit yoga made room for a new kind of connection to emerge that feels much more rooted in my values, and my lineage. I am not sure how we can approach practices such as yoga as white people without having something to share in return. A practice entails a relationship, if we don’t know who we are or where we come from, how can we really engage in mutual connection?"

 

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 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. 

Animal Body, Deep Time and The Thing We All Long For: A Conversation with Josh Schrei

Friends, we are delighted to share this recent conversation with Josh Schrei.

Joshua Michael Schrei is the founder and host of The Emerald podcast. The Emerald combines evocative narrative, soul-stirring music, and interviews with award-winning authors and luminaries to explore the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald draws from a deep well of poetry, lore, and mythos to challenge conventional narratives on politics and public discourse, meditation and mindfulness, art, science, literature, and more.  A writer, teacher, and a lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — in particular the Indian subcontinent — Josh has sought to navigate the living, animate space of the imagination and advocate for a world that prioritizes imaginative vision. Josh has taught intensive courses in mythology and somatic disciplines for nearly 20 years.

 

In our conversation, we cover some good terrain. We explore some pithy some essential Zen teachings, we look into what is the experience of our animal body, what does it mean to living an animate universe? Throughout the conversation, we weave in the image of deep time, of the long arc of human evolution, and the profound inheritance that each of us carries. We speak of elements of the teacher-student relationship, and what supports learning, unfolding, and embodying what we all long for. 

May you enjoy the conversation, and we always love to hear your reflections.

You can find out more information on the Emerald Podcasr, and Josh’s teachings wherever you listen to podcasts.

Tipping The Scales Toward Love & Goodness

In this beautiful conversation with poet, writer, and teacher Mark Nepo, we begin exploring Mark’s beautiful take on what it means to be embodied. Throughout the conversation, we were blessed with Mark’s soulful readings of several of our favorites of his poems. We discuss how care can erase the walls we keep building between us, and how using our imagination in service of a more beautiful world is so needed in a time of polarized divisiveness. It’s our generation’s turn - are we going to make a world rooted in love or rooted in fear and violence? Mark talks about the spiritual journey through the metaphor of a flower - not getting anywhere, but unfolding from the inside out. Mark speaks to a quote from William Blake: “Straight is the road to improvement. Crooked is the road to genius,” as well as looking at the original definition of genius, and affirming that we each carry genius. Mark shares many stories from his book More Together than Alone, about the power of building community. Mark also shares a potent story about literacy in the Dark Ages in Europe - only 10% of the population was literate. 10% of the people kept literacy alive! What if we commit to being and nourishing the 10% who keep literacy of the heart and soul alive during these challenging times? We hope you find deep nourishment in this beautiful conversation.

Mark Nepo is a poet and spiritual teacher who has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for over 40 years. With over a million copies sold, Mark has moved and inspired readers and seekers all over the world with his #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. A beloved poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.” His work is widely accessible and used by many and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A bestselling author, Mark has published twenty-two books and recorded fifteen audio projects. Recent work includes The Book of Soul (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2020), Drinking from the River of Light (Sounds True, 2019); More Together Than Alone (Atria, 2018) cited by Spirituality & Practice as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2018; and Things That Join the Sea and the Sky (Sounds True, 2017), a Nautilus Book Award Winner. Mark was given a Life- Achievement Award by AgeNation in 2015; in 2016 he was named by Watkins: Mind Body Spirit as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, and was also chosen as one of OWN’s SuperSoul 100, a group of inspired leaders using their gifts and voices to elevate humanity. In 2014 Mark was part of Oprah Winfrey’s The Life You Want Tour, and has appeared several times on her Super Soul Sunday program on OWN TV. He has also been interviewed by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. Mark is a regular columnist for Spirituality & Health Magazine.

In his 30s Mark was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, a struggle which helped to form his philosophy of experiencing life fully while staying in relationship to an unknowable future. Mark devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship. He continues to offer readings, lectures, and retreats. Please visit him at:

www.MarkNepo.com, http://threeintentions.com and http://wmespeakers.com/speaker/mark-nepo

In February 2022, Mark will be teaching in Salt Lake City, Utah through the Jung Society of Utah

Friday, Feb 25th, 7pm: Heartwork: Being a Spirit in the World

Saturday, Feb 26th, 9am-1pm: Reclaiming Our Humanity: Being Fierce and Tender in Our Call to Love 

You can find out more about these events, and register at jungutah.com

 

Embodying Prayer and Soul Activism

In this beautiful conversation, I speak to poet, facilitator and soul activist Nan Seymour, who also happens to be one of my dearest friends.

We take as a springboard for our conversation Nan’s recently published book of poems called prayers not meant for heaven.

Nan weaves several of her poems throughout the conversation and they’re beautiful.

We talk about bio-cultural restoration, about the importance of writing and reading during these times, about the importance of praise and noticing the ways in which we’re awestruck.

We also share a very candid discussion about Nan’s love of Jesus as her first radical social justice teacher. There’s so much goodness and inspiration here and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did!

You can order Nan’s book here https://www.toadhalleditions.ink/prayers-not-meant

You can read and/or participate in Nan’s poetic project in support of Great Salt Lake here  https://nanseymour.com/blog/item/141-irreplaceable-a-1700-line-praise-poem-in-the-making

You can learn more and sign up for a session of River Writing here

https://riverwriting.com/

And you’ll find much more inspiration at Nan’s website here https://nanseymour.com/

Nan mentions our shared mentor Deena Metzger http://deenametzger.net/

And our recent podcast with her https://embodimentmatters.com/i-wish-you-heartbreak-an-exploration-of-the-19-ways-with-deena-metzger/

You can take a virtual tour of the church we talked about here - watch the video showing you all the radical dancing saints! https://www.saintgregorys.org/the-dancing-saints.html

A little more about Nan in her own words:

“I provide narrative encouragement. In 2015 I created River Writing to foster voice and authentic connection. I delight in how this practice challenges the tyranny of perfectionism and breaks through walls of isolation.

I've led scores of oral storytelling workshops for people from all walks of life. Everyone has stories no one else can tell. I'm devoted to helping folks find, shine, and share them. We never know who our stories are for. I believe in saying the truest things we can say.

My debut poetry collection, prayers not meant for heaven has recently been published by Toad Hall Editions. The poems, written primarily during the pandemic, are prayers meant for the earth and for each other. I hope they will vine around us here on the ground, leaving us more knowingly and gladly intertwined.

Count me deeply smitten with life in all forms including scrub oak forests, vultures, and wild violets. I'm currently writing about the imperiled ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake, my near neighbor. I'm deeply concerned about the future life of stromatolites, brine shrimp, brine flies, and the entire feathered citizenry of the Pacific Coast flyway. I'm praying with my pen, writing about the lake with the hope that we will cease diverting her waters in time.

The chambers of my heart are occupied by my daughter Beatrice, my love Mustafa, River Writers, and Sophie, my border collie/lab companion. I'm devoted to community and dare to hope that our collective participation in human evolution is tipping the balance of the cosmos towards kindness and even love.”

Liam Bowler is a teacher, writer, father, bodyworker and hosts the Body Awake Podcast. 

 

He is the author of A Creator’s Companion, a beautiful book that explores the many elements of the process of creativity. 

 

In our conversation, we speak about embodiment, and embodiment as relationship, and how each of our understandings of embodiment has evolved over the years. 

 

We reflect together about creativity, and the necessity of courtship with the creative process. We speak about how creativity is not limited to those who are identified as artists, but how becoming truly becoming yourself, finding your voice is an act of creation. 

 

We speak of intimacy and not knowing, and what feels most important in the times in which we live. 

 

You can find out more about Liam, and his work and teaching at thebodyawake.com

Ariella is a beekeeper, writer, teacher, musician and mother living in Northern California. Her work with honey bees came through a lifelong interest in human connection with the non-human world.  She is a graduate of the Lyceum, a European shamanic pathway with the bee and the serpent as its central motifs.  Within this tradition, she is trained in the healing and seership modality known as the Pollen Method.  Her work is a fusion of her love for the natural world and embodied, womb-centric practices.  

 

Ariella seeks to foster a deeper relationship between humans and the natural world through honey bees, seeing the bee as a bridge species between our domestic lives and the wild, both within and around us. She is a lover of wild places, liminal spaces and the song of the land.  She teaches shamanic dreamwork, natural beekeeping, and women's retreats all guided by the honeyed wisdom of the serpent and the bee.

 

You can find more about her work at www.honeybeewild.com and on instagram at beekeepinginskirts. 

 

Below is the text of a beautiful post of hers I read from a recent Instagram post. You’ll see why I and many others are so enamored with her writings. 

 

“It's not really about beekeeping. This love affair. This devotion to doing it better. To listening. To finding another route that gives and heals, instead of takes. We can call it beekeeping, because, surely, there are some tricks of the trade, some caring for the bees in their boxes that we can learn. But really, it's about your roots comingling with the mycelia. Really it's about your tears dripping into the river. Really it's about the moon dipping into your dreams and curling around a whispered tune you think you remember from long ago. It's not even about saving, unless the saving is you and you are the forest, and the forest is the sea, and the sea is the stars.⠀

⠀

What it's about, is Weaving. ⠀

Reweaving. Rewilding. Restoring. Revivifying. ⠀

It's about Listening. ⠀

Ear to the hive. Womb to the earth. ⠀

It's about Grief and Exaltation. ⠀

Sting in your heart, honey on your lips.⠀

It's about Remembering.”

 

References: 

 

In our conversation we spoke about the work of mythologist Martin Shaw and specifically this trailer for his book Scatterlings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0T7UP1U1Ts

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57195435-scatterlings

 

And Ari also referred to the writings of Joanna Macy. I recommend any of her work (or my classes where we dive into it!) including Active Hope, 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13235686-active-hope

World as Lover World as Self, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/536524.World_as_Lover_World_as_Self

A Wild Love for the World. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51551987-a-wild-love-for-the-world

 

I also love this video with Joanna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmjF1jE2K0 

 

I also referred to the book, Native Science, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1049116.Native_Science

 

You can find more about the Lyceum in which Ariella studied for a decade here: https://sacredtrust.org/workshops/pollen/

We Were Made For These Times: A conversation with Kaira Jewel Lingo

 

In this conversation with Kaira, we explore many rich topics including:

 

• embodiment and mindfulness as not separate
• her new book We Were Made For These Times
• the practice of coming home to ourselves
• applying these teachings in the mess of real life rather than just a monastic situation
• social justice and mindfulness and how each of these need each other
• the mantras of True Love from Thich Nhat Hanh
• powerful teachings from 2 monks from Plum Village who attended COP26
• the powerful practice of kissing the earth with your feet
• layered mindfulness
• and so much more

 

Kaira Jewel Lingo began practicing mindfulness in 1997 and teaches Buddhist meditation, secular mindfulness, and compassion internationally. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel teaches in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on activists, Black/Indigenous/People of Color, artists, educators, families, and youth. Now based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to individuals and groups. She is author of the just released We Were Made for These Times: Skilfully Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption from Parallax Press. Visit kairajewel.com to learn more. 

 

Kaira is offering a retreat Dec 4 and 5, 2021, through Spirit Rock, on the same title as my new book: https://spirit-rock.secure.retreat.guru/program/we-were-made-for-these-times-kj1m21/?_ga=2.185343337.1993561752.1633760566-881770598.1633760566&lang=en

 

Along with her partner who is an Episcopal priest, she is offering a new Buddhist Christian community of study, practice and action that meets monthly. People can sign up here if they'd like more info. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSftoybrmY3MixFXo2qrFxGajc2p3bn82WPeqbuRoRWKhwkNcg/viewform