By Alexa Firmenich
A podcast series that explores how to orient your life around nature. We discover the mindsets, skills and actions that are required to partner wisely with other forms of life and engage in acts of
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The podcast currently has 61 episodes available.
This is my take on ancient and intuitive sensory experience that taps into the innate intelligence of the human body, a blend of body compass, Zen Beginner's Mind, a shamanic medicine walk and Goethean science.
The practice asks you to find a place in the natural landscape where you could walk undisturbed for some time, and have an encounter with an element of nature. A true act of lifeworld-ing!
I guide you through a short introduction and the instructions. Attached on the website page is a link to the full instructions in PDF, and listed here in much briefer bullets below.
I recommend listening in full, then using either of the instructions when you choose to do the practice itself.
Abbreviated instructions
· Before entering into the natural landscape, you’ll walk to a threshold place, and stop.
· Here you will physically draw a threshold that you will walk across.
· Once you’ve done that, pause, connect with the land, speak your intention, ask for permission.
· Cross the threshold, and start walking towards where you feel a tug. Be conscious of the way your body can intuitively lead the way. Use the senses.
· At some point, you may come across a being in the land that catches your attention. It could be a spiders web, a stone, a patch of moss, a dead bough of a tree, a stream, a blade of grass, truly anything. Approach, introduce yourself.
· Spend a moment in presence with them, in beginners mind.
· Use Goethe’s Exact Sense Perception instructions –then imagine it transforming. Then release to receive. Let it communicate back to you.
· Stay here as long as feels right.
· When it comes to the time to go, thank this natural being and start walking back to your threshold place.
· When you cross the threshold, thank the land and when you’re ready, step across back into the other world.
· Gently wipe out the threshold door and take some time upon returning to digest anything that may have arisen for you.
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Calling all Lifeworlds listeners! We're finally doing our first-ever Q&A episode, and we want you to be part of it.
Over the past two years, we've been secretly hoarding all the brilliant questions and thoughts you've sent our way, and now it's time to get them out of the inbox and into the limelight.
Got something you’re wanting to ask our host, Alexa Firmenich? Now’s your chance to share whatever’s on your mind. Whether it's a burning question, a cheeky comment, or a heartfelt story, we want to hear it all.
You can email us at [email protected] or use our online form here.
And if you’re feeling extra brave (or just want to make Alexa’s day) send us an audio recording - nothing like hearing your lovely voices!
Don’t forget to let us know if you want a shout-out or prefer to stay mysterious. Looking forward to your contributions!
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Throughout history, many cultures have observed and interpreted animal behavior to predict events and read the landscapes around them. The multispecies lives of our planet weave an astonishing network of information across the face of the globe, a web of knowledge compromised of thousands of creatures communicating with each other, across species, and with their environments.
How we listen in on this collective intelligence? Today’s guest Martin Wikelski is director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space (ICARUS) - a project which has been dubbed as ‘the internet of animals’. Their team has created a global ecological monitoring system, attaching remote sensing chips to thousands of animals in the wild, in effect uncovering and translating, as Martin says, ‘the collective intelligence of life on earth’.
By tuning in to the communication and culture of animals, the project his project reveals the planet's hidden workings with enormous implications for conservation, global finance, and human infrastructure.
We explore many of these forward-thinking ideas in this episode, adding another layer to Lifeworlds’ ongoing question: How do we sense the planetary and see through the perspectives of other life?
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
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Could the destruction of nature become considered as serious a crime as that of genocide? How does the structure of law shape a civilisation’s norms, behaviors and overarching story?
Today we’ll be discussing international Ecocide law, a massively growing movement that wants to embed the notion of ‘ecocide’ crime at the highest levels of law - at the International Criminal Court in The Hague - and create a powerful deterrent for the further damage to ecosystems and people globally.
Our guest is Pella Thiel, a maverick ecologist, farmer, author and who has co-founded the Swedish hubs of international networks like Transition Sweden, End Ecocide Sweden and is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University. Pella was awarded the Swedish Martin Luther King Award in 2023 and the Environmental Hero of the year 2019.
We discuss:
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo credit: Law Statue
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to breathe yourself into your own body? To flow with the out-breath of trees into your own fractaling lungs, to dance ribbonlike into an ancient ceiba’s vasculature, to stitch an ecosystem together as a mycelium highways sparkling with energy? In this episode we explore the transformational potential of virtual reality through the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast, an artist collective that has emerged as a leading VR creators in the last decade.
They exhibited internationally from London to New York, Melbourne to Seoul, their work included in major exhibitions at institutions including the Barbican Centre, Saatchi Gallery, Sundance Film Festival, and SXSW. 'In The Eyes Of The Animal' was nominated for the Design of the Year by Design Museum Beazley Awards and won the Wired Innovation Award (2016). Most recently, the team at MLF won the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award for Innovation in Storytelling and Best VR Film at VR Arles Festival for ‘TreeHugger, Wawona’.
Ersin Han Ersin is the director of MLF and describes to us how they use dazzlingly aesthetic real-time VR experiences to explore the invisible perspectives of nature’s lifeworlds – and how they are constantly pushing the bounds of what technology makes possible in expanding our ecological sensitivities. I enquire into:
Episode Website Link.
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo credit: MLF exhibition at AMCI in Australia (photo from their website)
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Today’s episode brings us into the heart and philosophy of Zen Buddhism, as practiced by the Plum Village monastic community that was founded in 1982 by the Vietnamese peace activist, monk, poet, and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. Today it has grown into Europe’s largest Buddhist monastery, with over 200 resident monks and nuns, and known as one of the most actively engaged Buddhist communities offering insight on the modern world, and on the climate and ecological crises.
We’ve spoken on the show about fragmented consciousness, a mind that sees parts and not the whole. Meditation and other Buddhist practices are one of the core ways of how we can heal minds and views. And so we will hear from two Plum Village monks: Sister True Dedication and Brother Spirit. Before entering the monastery, Sister True Dedication studied History & Political Thought at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist for BBC News. In the early years of her monastic training, she assisted Thich Nhat Hanh in their engaged Buddhist actions for human rights, religious freedom, applied ethics, and ecology. Brother Spirit began his monastic training in Plum Village in 2008, and before ordaining he studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer, and as such has since composed many of the community’s beloved chants. They both helped to found the international Wake Up Movement, a community of young meditators finding new ways to combine mindfulness and engaged Buddhism.
We talk about:
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Photo credit: Plum Village website
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Woven together loosely by my narrative, this special episode traces through a selection of five dazzling poems from the Pulitzer-prize winning poet Mary Oliver; bringing us into giddy relationship with the natural world -- with geese and grasshoppers and miracles and scars and existential queries on what makes life worth living. Mary's sharp and gentle perception of nature, her ability to communicate its messages with such simple and profound language, is at once both balm and flame for the soul.
“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” – Mary Oliver
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Are plants conscious? Do they experience forms of cognition and intelligence that go beyond patterned and hard-wired evolutionary behaviors? Do intelligence and consciousness really require a brain and central nervous system? Or should we consider intelligence on Earth to be less brain-bound, perhaps not even residing in the individual self, but rather in an enmeshment within an ecosystem? A swarm intelligence, a networked mind, distributed, adaptive, like a murmuration of starlings in the setting sun. And how would we even begin to start answering these questions empirically?
Today it is my explicit intention to change the way that you think about the kingdom of plants and the intelligence that resides within it. This is a controversial topic with scientists on all sides of the spectrum vehemently advocating for or against concepts.
It was Darwin who first introduced to the Western world the concept of the "root brain" hypothesis, where the tips of plant roots act in some ways like a brain, a distributed intelligence network. They challenge our very notions of an individual. Plants exhibit qualities that are adaptive, flexible, and goal directed – all hallmarks of an intelligence that goes beyond hard wired impulsive responses. They make decisions, perform predictive modeling, share nutrients and recognize kin. Electrical and chemical signalling systems have been identified in plants very similar to those found in the nervous systems of animals, including neurotransmitters like dopamine and melatonin.
Our guest today is Paco Calvo, a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. He combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving, challenging conventional perspectives of his field. Paco has said that ‘to ‘know thyself’, one has to think well beyond oneself, or even one’s species. We are only one small part of a kaleidoscopic variety of ways of being alive.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Soulfire Sessions have come to Lifeworlds! These occasional special episodes will be our take on the good old concept of a fireside chat. Intimate, philosophical, challenging, sometimes zany, always insightful, these are discussions with visionaries who don’t often get the airtime to speak about their deeper ways of being and feeling – and what lights their souls on fire.
In this first session I speak with my dear friend Daniel Schmachtenberger, a social philosopher and founding director of the Civilisation Research Institute. Daniel has a particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, artificial intelligence, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
With the fire roaring, we delve into the psychological and metaphysical underpinnings of the metacrisis, traversing topics such as fragmented consciousness, Daoism, wholeness, feeling in service to thinking, dharma enquiries, conflict theory, and what it might mean to live a meaningful life.
Links:
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seeds. Memory keepers. Speckled time travellers. Capsules of deep, earth wisdom. To control seeds is to control life. To be a seed is to hold the genetic code of turning starlight into matter, of morphing your body into soft green tips that tremble in the wind and drink fire. There is a deep co-evolutionary relationship that exists in your bones, between humans, land, ecology, and seeds.
And we are losing them. An absence of flourishing seed systems directly correlates with a loss of cultural identity for thousands of communities around the world. Life for rural communities fractures. We’re losing our seed keepers. The freedom of seeds therefore becomes a political act of justice, on food sovereignty, indigenous rights, and restoring power back into the hands of farmers. So how does this rich history weave into the story of today’s guest?
Milka Chepkorir Kuto is an anthropologist and climate and human rights activist. She is a member of the Sengwer indigenous community of Kenya’s Rift Valley, and she has become a representative for her people in defending their land rights after violent evictions from their traditional lands. Milka is also a Coordinator of Defending Territories of Life at ICCA Consortium, and has worked the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her community is now working to revitalize people-land relationships through indigenous knowledge, and Milka works with the women to save and protect their ancestral ways and seed systems. As Milka speaks, you can feel in her spirit this visceral connection to place, story, food, culture, a weaving of seed, hand, heart, human, forest. Milka herself is a seed, a story keeper, a culture holder, an inspirational tie between ancestral knowing and the modern world.
Episode Website Link
Show Links:
Milka’s Crowdfunding Site for Lifeworlds listeners: “Help the Indigenous Sengwer Peoples of Kenya”
Revitalizing Sengwer People-Land Relationships
Seed savers network Kenya
Global Alliance for Future of Food
Open Seed Sharing
Earthed course: Saving Seeds for a Better Future
Will Bonsall, Scatterseed Project
Movie: SEED, The Untold Story
Gaia Foundation Seed Sovereignty
Seeds of Freedom Trilogy
Navdanya from Vandana Shiva
Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd
Cover Photo by AI
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The podcast currently has 61 episodes available.
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