If climate reports and dystopian vibes are getting you down, this conversation with Meg Berryman might just lift you (gently) from the tiles.

Meg is the host of the Regenerative Life podcast, where she holds activating and catalysing conversations about social change, sustainable business, holistic wellbeing, personal development and regeneration, creating ripples of change from the inside out.

She’s not only a brilliant interviewer, meeting mighty minds like Tyson Yunkaporta and Claire Dunn for the kinds of intellectual-yet-accessible chats that leave listeners awestruck, but a formidable thinker herself. 

We’re stoked to welcome Meg for a wide-ranging convo that covers nervous system care, sitting in the magic dark, tending survival energy and watering the seeds of discontent. We discuss the perils of trying to make a positive impact out there if it’s having a negative impact on you and your people. And how to go about satisfying that deep primal yearning to reconnect with self, earth and other beings. 

Right now, in this time of grief, confusion + frustration, Meg Berryman is pure medicine. Listen in. 

SHOW NOTES

• The inspiration behind the Regenerative Life podcast
• An unlearning journey of dropping the postures and dropping into true self.
• Finding the balance between the unknown + the five year plan. 
• Challenging domesticity with wildness
• Regeneration is an embodied experience; but it’s not as easy as we’ve been sold. 
• The things we’ve sold as making us happy aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The agitation and restlessness we’re feeling as feedback is not anything wrong with us! The lie of capitalism is that it’s your problem, you need to buy something to fix you.
• The seeds of discontent are also the seeds of regeneration
• Homeostatic flux: ecosystems are constantly recalibrating according to feedback.
• How to reconsider + reevaluate what a good life is. 
• We have a deep primal yearning to reconnect with ourselves, the earth, other being. That urge is continually being overidden because on some level, we assume there’s something wrong with us. 
• "It’s not that I’m allergic to life, I’m allergic to the ways we’ve organised society and systems that are so removed from those basic primal instincts of being connected and belonging."
• Wisdom birthed from the bathroom floor. 
• Epic burnout led to total breakdown led to epic recalibration.
• Is sheer willpower the only way to get shit done?
• Reframing breakdown as a period of magic dark.
• We’ve had a health and wellness paradigm for 20 years that’s focussed on DOING things. But that keeps us in survival mode; it’s not sustainable or regenerative.
•  We need a whole lot of people to be regulated enough, for long enough, to make life giving decisions and make a dent in these systems.
• Being in conversation with questions. 
• How do we come back to ourselves, and is that enough?
• Getting out of hustle culture in business. 
• Everyone is saying, "we can’t slow down because x, y, z….” It’s the courageous soul chooses to interrogate that. 
• If you’re making impact out there, but that work is having a negative effect on your people in here, it’s a net zero. It’s not regenerative.
• The best gift you can give other beings is the gift of a settled system. 
• Avoiding the one-two punch of shame and guilt.

LINKS YOU'LL LOVE

• My Grandmother's Hands -- Resmaa Menakem

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Catie chats with Dr. Sapphire McMullan-Fisher, an ecologist with a special interest in biodiversity conservation, particularly macrofungi and mosses.

Sapphire is a renowned scientific researcher, speaker, teacher and author with a knack for communicating fungi’s vital ecological roles — and why we should all pay a lot more attention to these remarkable, all-connecting entities.

She's is also a pretty radical member of the community here in Naarm/Melbourne, who last year let Catie + George transform her suburban backyard into a market garden through the Growing Farmers program. 

Wise, lively and friend of the fungi, enjoy this cracking convo with Sapphire McMullan-Fisher.

SHOW NOTES

• Being a Gondwanan
• Growing up in a mining town in the Pilbara.
• From saving African animals to fungi fascination.
• A fire and fungi pHD in Tasmania.
• Overcoming dyslexia in academia. 
• Ecosystems need fungi!
• Decomposition + partners of plants. 
• Why to leave the tree debris be.
• Journey back to the Carboniferous period when all the coal and oil was formed.
• Fungi eats wood, invertebrates eat fungi, birds eat invertebrates... hey presto!
• Life goes on. (Even though we’re seriously messing with systems.) 
• How an understanding of matter recycling gives an appreciation of post-humous existence.
• Patterns + process + life = wow.
• Where do humans fit in the bigger picture? Should we just hurry up and extinct ourselves, or…?
• Making space + food in your garden for other organisms who deserve to be here in the landscape. 
• How mindfulness of observing nature increase your understanding of it.
• Find the things that make your curiosity pop. 
• Ask: what is it? How do I found out more about it?
• Re-activating our patterning brain.
• Curiosity as a practice.
• Being on the spectrum as a superpower. 
• Growing up thinking you’re not clever. 
• Absorbing information in tiny little bites.
• Expanding communicating styles so that everyone gets it.
• How expectations shape your view of self. 
• Looking to ecosystems to confirm our need for diversity. 
• Allowing ourselves to learn and love learning.
• Biology is not a soft science!
• How a car accident changed everything. 
• Having trust that humans won’t be assholes.
• They say you need a village to raise a child… I need a village just to survive!
• The impossibility of going life alone.
• How do you learn to ask people for help?
• Letting people self select in how they help.
• Ways to be be radical and resist the status quo.
• Being sustainable within your limits.
• What’s the #1 priority in taking action for the world?
• Letting your inner child guide us towards more fulfilling life and work.

LINKS YOU'LL LOVE

• Growing Farmers
• Fun Fungi Ecology
• Fungi4Land on Insta

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Do you know where your grain comes from... the farmers name... how they grow it? Woodstock flour are doing their level best to change the last frontier via the power of building relationships and connecting. Join Jade and Courtenay as they get gritty on grains and hear why we need to value its diversity and regionality just like  we do wine or cheese.

Links You'll Love!
Woodstock flour website
Food Connect in Brisbane
Open Food Network
Kirsten and Serenity Futuresteading Interview
Tivoli Road Bakery
Holistic Management
Riverina Organics Growers Group

Show us you love us!
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

Show Notes

• Why food production is the avenue to create the most significant environmental change
• Finding a way to fit into the family farm as the 2nd generation via a stone mill & farmers markets
• Getting people to think about their grain consumption as they do their veggies or fruit
• Venturing onto their own farm in Rutherglen
• Diversifying & de-risking as part of the succession plan
• Maintaining identity in the succession process
• Building a farm business that is totally collaborative & openly shares knowledge
• The importance of transparency in building a movement
• The power of open minded, interactive relationships
• Building a business via the lens of socio-political factors
• Land ownership & its connection to class & race - privilege
• Facing the confronting reality of land ownership on unceded land
• CSA model for grains
• Covid experiences of customer demands
• Open Road Project
• Education about true cost of food & reconciling the inaccessibility of this reality
• The journey of creating a path to market from scratch
• The value of putting yourself into things regardless of financial return in the short time
• Holistic management 
• Collaborating with community is often an opportunity to connect with land, find joy through connection to others & learn from all that’s around us
• Acknowledging the slow pace of us as humans
• How do we get the next generation interested in food production?
• The beauty of rural communities being accepting of each others ways & thinking 
• Finding solidarity in the wine growing community
• Rising early to paint - no excuses, no interruptions
• Defining business roles in a small family business 
• Being deliberate about the daily decisions to ensure balance
• How her painting complements her business
• Bookending the day at the dinner table

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Recorded just days after the Federal election, Gabrielle Chan doesn't mince words - even when bone tired. A celebrated journalist with the Guardian, outspoken advocate for rural Australia and encourager of individual agency. "Our system has been made up by people and it can be rewritten by people". Lets not wait for Government to bring change but get active and organised now during times of abundance.

Links You'll Love
Acres and Acres in Corryong
Wendell Berry
The Guardian

Show us you love us!
Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

Show Notes
Connecting the grass roots regen ag movements with top down politics
The need for change in our food, water, land management policies
“We export a lot of sausage sandwiches - beef and wheat”
Why it’s time to change the narrative around Australia's ag sector 
Why ‘level playing fields’ are a farce
The fragility of financial deregulations, long global supply chains increasing disease, increased drought - how do we as a sovereign nation reassure ourselves of continued prosperity
The potential for rural policy to create the framework that allows smaller scale and regen practices to thrive
The power of the colonial squatacracy
How do we bring policy reform to ag so it has relevance for smaller scale 7 regen practices to thrive
The potential of utilising the “voices for” movement as a model for local food to grow
Why we need to re-engage with politics 
The thing that only Govt does  is set the ground rules for how we conduct our business. 
People need to be involved in politics to influence its direction
The need for strategic water policy to better support us on the driest continent on earth
Talking about water, food and skills while we are in times of abundance
Where does the role of govt need to stop and allow room for community to pick up
The ongoing debate about why we do not yet have drought policy or food policy
Refine what you want to change  - get organised and get active in the arena from bottom up
The big secret - we are ALL MAKING IT UP
Her slow, gradual, accidental path to being a communicator.
Her writing approach - just keep writing, push through the creative barriers
The process of sitting down and ordering your thoughts results in a unique 
Connecting the systemic dots through political reporting
The history of farming and nature control
The Connectivity of farming to EVERYTHING ELSE
Ag and environment are different political portfolios - WTF
We cannot have an economy without an environment
The need for the economy the environment  + the desires of the humans involved in farming  to be interacting 
The need to account for ecological resources

Questions the fundamental systems
Finding optimism in the work done by others
Having faith in humanity
Connecting people to spark change

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Sign out of 2024 with this lively mastermind who suggests we take country into our body ! How?
Build routine around food,
Go barefoot to boost immunity, 
Stop seeing food as an inconvenience
Cook & eat with family often
Connect to the seasons of your life & the landscape
Create & share ceremony
Use food as a reconciliation tool

Belonging to a matriarchal community has unlocked knowledge handed down by oral stories, dance & art where kinship is more than human to human. Knowing your spirit belongs here is a gift we can all tap but with belonging comes responsibility - one to mother earth, but also to sisterhood, eldership and to being part of the greater whole.

Links You'll Love
Karkala book by Mindy Woods
Karkala instagram

Loved this? Try these:
Tyson Yunkaporta
Billa from the Wild School

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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:

Living by 6 local seasons
"Being part of the greater whole - we are one of the parts of many, it’s not us & them but all of us as one contributing to our country in some way we can maintain balance"
Caring for her totems goanna, echidna & wollomi pine via broader care of her environment
Societal lack of connection & belonging
Imperfect allyship - ok to make mistakes but important to maintain connection
Mob love a yarn - connect, be quiet, shut your mouth, open your listening & be there in respectful observation. Get curious about native food landscapes, 
Knowledge is the sacred part, the fundamental core of culture & treated with great reverence despite it not being written down, its taken seriously when its shared on
It’s not transactional, it’s about relationships & allows us all to slow down to a pace that humans should actually move at.
Childhood memories on country with family - eating oysters out of jam jars
Being a proud cook - not a chef
Having friends apply for masterchef on her behalf
Debunking the myth of Australian food being meat pies & sausage rolls
Asking what is Australia's cuisine & exploring culture through food
Eating foods from our landscape, they belong here, are highly nutritious & are abundant
Moving into eldership as wisdom holders - not an age but a readiness
When you’re taking care of country you're taking care of mob & community too
The privilege of taking on responsibility for cultural teachings
When women are in charge it creates a great balance - women's wishes are always community based & they are thinking about country community & culture".
You can’t be what you can’t see - be the one to lead the way
Standing loud & proud in sisterhood - uniting.
"The privilege to eat food that you’ve grown & understand the value of: local, seasonal, country gives you what you need at the right times in abundance - feeding the old people & the young people before feeding the well ones"

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What started as a throw away title while supporting her husband James Rebanks on his book tours, Helen Rebanks now proudly refers to herself as the farmers wife - a title that has very much become her identity & set in her a burning desire to write her own book about invisible women who’s stories are not told. As a mother of four & the backbone for their farming ventures in the Lakes District in the UK, Helen declares that the only people who work harder than farmers are farmers wives. I reckon she's right! She is a small in stature, large in capability kind of woman who truly loves her daily reason to get out of bed & nurture her family. hold the many threads of keeping a family going, setting the pace and rhythm.  She speaks of honouring our capability to be in service with love, empathy  compassion & a regular roast on the dinner table not just on Sundays. Through this lens she is bringing her own kind of approach to combatting corporate greed, multi national farmland ownership & returning us to localised food systems.

Food that’s made with love & care says “I’m nourished & looked after” - imagine being the person in the house that provides this service” 
This story is about speaking up for those who hold families together, hold communities together. We need small farm futures with local food systems. Knowing where our food comes from & being able to ask the questions.

Join us at her at her kitchen table.

Links You'll Love
The Farmers Wife Helen Rebanks book
The Sheppard's wife Insta handle

Loved this? Try these:
Ep 54 Mara from Orto farm
Ep 121 Nat Wilmott

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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:
Speaking up for the women who sit behind the regenerative family farmers life.
Thinking holistically about life on the land - It's WHOLE!
The farmers table as a gathering place
Reasons for transitioning into regenerative practices.
Sharing her farming stories to help others transition their on earth practices
"If I’ve ever felt minimised in the work I do its not been by me or my family"
Living small & living local rather than chasing a celebrity culture is what she strives for. 
Our deep disconnection to our food.
The power of a meal around the table
Tomatoes on toast or scrambled eggs IS DINNER
The role of motherhood taught her to become a voice for the process of becoming a mother. We can suffer in silence or talk to each other & learn.
Sharing very vulnerable things in the hope it helps others.

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Summary
As a super quiet, observing kid, Carolyn often had her head in a book or went adventuring on her own. As an adult this lead to naturally hermitty behaviour before she actively decided to show others that shy characters can do bold & hard things too - especially if they take tea wherever they go. Now, woven into a well connected community she is more or less living her daydream of tea caravans, herbal gardens, her very own herbal medicine book & a throng of good folks around her.
She reveals that growing herbs was her gateway to herbalism & that we can all know their potency by incorporating them into every day life & not just turning to them when we're sick. But to do this we must get to know them. The best way to become intimate is to grow them, dry them, taste them, smell them, feel how they moves through your body.
Join us on a magical herbal love-affair!

Links You'll Love
The Medicine Garden - Carolyn Parker
The Cottage Herbalist

Loved this ep? Try these:
Anthea Koullouros 
Perma Pixie

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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:
Her seasonal daily rhythm
“It was a daydream of mine not to wake up to an alarm but to wake up with the sunshine”
Being a poly-jobist: business woman, gardener, herbalist
"I’m an evolved that-way sort of person - I straddle between being a list maker & a meanderer".
Being the kid who wasn’t ultra conversational & actively moving through the discomfort of it & learning to have conversations & a little false bravado
I want to show other reserved/shy people that you can o scary things
“I think we are hard wired for comfort but this doesn't allow us to reach our potential”
Taking herself off to a boxing gym to learn how to be assertive & confident
Drawing daydream gardens
Discovering you can be a herbalist later in life
Being a naturopath is so much more than a job - enabling the patient to undertake holistic change is really where the opportunity to change is.
Viewing it more as a lifestyle is part of the solution
Teaching her patients skills rather than selling them potions
Leading patients to veggie gardens, kimchi pots, community & settled adrenals
Wearing fun clothes & sporting dirty fingernails at the same time
Picking outfits like her dinner, according to colour
Award winning tea blends - making tea since big enough to be trusted with a kettle
Starting her tea caravan
Not being nostalgic
The importance of being connected to people
Stop moving the goal posts without appreciating what you've achieved

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Summary
If we are going to lay the foundations of a world we are proud to leave as a legacy we need to be comfortable to move into elderhood - for Manda Scott this is about getting comfortable with emergence and asking the living web “what is mine to do”.
 We’ve created a world where separation, anxiety & powerlessness have become the underlying defaults instead of a world of security, belonging & agency. We are addicted to dopamine &exist in a world of trauma rather than initiation so how are we to rewrite these patterns?
By listening to the heart-mind - its very shy & quiet but the head mind will whisper if it needs you to really listen.

Links You'll Love
Any Human Power - Manda Scott
Accidental Gods - Manda Scott program &  podcast
Right story, Wrong story - Tyson Yunkaporta
Sand talk - Tyson Yunkaporta
Mans search for meaning - Victor Frankel
Francis Weller - The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Loved this? Try these:
Tyson Yunkaporta
Damon Gameau

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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:
Learning to live as functioning members of the earth community
Why she writes fiction not non fiction
Receiving shamanic instruction
How to be in connection with the web of life in all its complexity
Being born into a trauma culture rather than an initiation culture
Why seeing truth without self projection is hard.
Her decades of shamanic teaching - still learning to discern the difference between what her ego is saying and what the energy is saying
Returning to a sit spot to receive instructions to write a book
“Skin Listening” - an ability to be felt with all your senses without pre conceived ideas
Sit spots - what can I see, what can I feel, what does my heart say 
Why some languages say “I am other” and some say “I am intrinsically part of what is happening.
Initiation culture is capable of holding contained encounters with death
We live in a dopamine culture - addicted to turning oil into adrenaline
Yearning for a serotonin mesh of connection of meaning & purpose
The four stages of Adulthood
Undoing our head mind dominance
Offering yourself in service and waiting for your path.
 The chaos of our culture is that we think we can plan ahead
We live in an insane world & ourselves its sane
One of the key measures of adulthood is being prepared to walk against the tide

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Hungry?  How bout a salad…trust me, after todays convo, you’re going to want to eat salad for breakfast, lunch & dinner. Not just the limp lettuce & store bought dressing kind of salad but one that tickles all your gastronomic senses. Once you've been satiated the convo settle into really chewing on the realities of this high energy lass' day to day existence: her rituals,  her challenge to find the gaps to do the quiet things, learning to really be in the moment & finding her path to enoughness.

Alice Zaslavski has chatted with us on the pod before but since then her OTT love for food, food education & food appreciation has exploded into the stratosphere with another 3 cookbooks, her own radio segment on Saturday mornings & now her own cooking show on the ABC, you’ll still find her exuberance filling the pages of papers & magazines nationwide & for today you’ll her convincing you to serve salad for your every meal.

 The pace of this human is dizzy-ing so its a strap in & hang tight kind of episode.

Links You'll Love
A bite to eat with Alice - ABC
Salad Days - Alice Zaslavski
Phenomenom - Free Lessons via the lense of food 

Loved this? Try these:
Alice on Futuresteading previously

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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:
Being a talker on paper 
Her latest adventures in gastronomic pleasures 
Listening to your body to understand what you need at the time.
Food as medicine deserves to be understood by all
Her ‘vegetable-forward’ food, centric Georgian heritage 
Sharing a common vision but not always sharing the same timing ambitions
Movement has power - just start & collectively the energies come together
Breaking our daily fast with vegetables
Be ready & willing to adapt the recipes to suit yourself
The real life day to day juggle of such a busy busy life 
Having a ‘wife’ in her ‘husband’
Learning to say a hard NO
Prioritising her health as the most important part of her job
Being lit up by all that you do so it doesn't feel like working a day of your life
Time to update the vision board
The soma response to birthing a new project
Building an enabling network to get into flow
Enabling others to be their most magic version of themselves
Being an extroverted extrovert - learning how to absorb human energy via a screen
Learning to speak English with Big Ted on Playschool
Wishing for more time with community
Making time for reading
Saying yes to the opportunities that ground you.

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This is a pour-a-cuppa kinda convo - Matilda Brown is a rare kind-of open book where nothing is off limits and despite not actually being her friend you get the distinct feeling that you must be. 

Flipping a childhood acting career for a regnerative food business wasn’t part of her plan - actually nothing really is, this breath of fresh air claims to be “bumbling around with life, filling in time until she dies.” But her bumble is joyful & hopeful in the best way possible.

She & her husband Scott Gooding are the brains & brawn behind the Good Farm pre prepared meals range & they’ve just released a cook book with the same name - its as delightful as she is - This is her story!

Links You'll Love
The Good Farm Shop
the Good Farm Cookbook
Provinir

Loved this? Try these eps:

Alex from Cornersmith
Laura from Feather & bone

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Casual Support - Buy Me A Coffee
Regular Support - Patreon
Buy the Book - Futuresteading - Live Like tomorrow matters

We talked about:

Being an oversharer & wanting to know the details without any shame
Going through the world giving more than taking
Boobs peaking at 14
Fad diets of her teenage years without an understanding of nutrition
From actor to foodie
Life epiphanies via parenthood
Believing that the universe has your back & the lessons you are being served are necessary
Stumbling into a regenerative path
Creating Cow shares until they realised there was a hole in their bucket
The challenge of building a business around the true cost of a whole animal outside of the industrial food system
Creating a regenerative food business nuancing as they went.
Combining a regen story with convenience
Sharing more than just the business news in this nosey world…navigating sharing of personal stories
Avoiding a thick skin so you keep ‘feeling’
I have so much to learn as a spiritual being in a humans body, on a ride in a world that can’t be controlled or predicted.
Magic sits in the bumbling, rats & mice & problem children
Appreciating the things that money can’t buy 
The value of being relational - shunning the online solution
The need to squeeze your closest folk
How many ‘no’s’ do you need before you get to the YES
Even when things are hard they can still be heart filling and they can make you FEEL so alive! This is living, side stepping numbness is when you feel your most alive.

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