Living Open | Modern Magick and Spirituality for Mystics and Seekers

Laura Mae Northrup (she/her), MFT is an author, educator, somatic psychotherapist, and podcaster. Her first book Radical Healership is a spiritually-informed, anticapitalist guide for healing practitioners who seek to build a values-driven healing practice. And it's out today! 

In this episode, Eryn and Laura talk about:

• Her journey writing her new book
• Emotions & book writing!
• Surrendering & letting emerge
• Overshaping our experiences
• Living in complexity
• Grappling with money (and charging money!) within capitalism
• The degradation of spirituality and healing
• The history of taking away people’s access to healing and spirituality as an intentional strategy of domination and disempowerment
• How psychedelics and entheogens help us heal sexual trauma
• Trauma as a spiritual wound
• The need to experience so much joy and beauty as people in care roles
• Right sized-ness
• How you sustain the path as a facilitator of healing work

ENTER THE BOOK GIVEAWAY ON INSTAGRAM.

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/laura-mae-northrup 

Register for Breathwork for Care on March 1st. Check out the Religious Trauma workbook. Connect with Eryn on Instagram.

You can learn more about her work here: www.lauramaenorthrup.com. Follow her on Instagram, check out her podcast, and buy the book wherever you buy books (especially from your local small bookstore!).

Eli is a gender doula - supporting folx as they question, explore, and transition their gender. In this episode, Eryn and Eli talk about:

• Eli’s journey with sexuality, gender, and spirituality
• “Is it my gender or sexuality, or is this just my trauma?”
• Queerness as a dream outside of the realm of our existence as kids
• His work as a gender doula
• Tarot’s role in his gender journey
• What Eli wants to tell people who are on a gender journey of some kind
• Why Eli thinks everyone should go on a gender journey
• Fluidity and changeability around identity and labels
• Labels & how they can constrain us
• Holding our own complications & other people’s complications, too
• Transness and queerness as vectors of spirituality and connection to nature, land, and community
• Different timelines for queer and trans people
• Tarot as support for gender exploration
• Grief as part of gender and sexuality journeys
• Ritual in gender journeys

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/eli-lawliet 

Register for Breathwork for Care on March 1st. Connect with Eryn on Instagram.

Connect with Eli on his website, Instagram, and TikTok. Sign up for his newsletter.

Anabel Khoo (she/they) is a psychotherapist, facilitator, interdisciplinary artist, and writer dedicated to cultivating holistic collective healing and social justice. They are also a queer, non-binary, diasporic Chinese person, and their lived experience has moved them to help other marginalized people to process intergenerational pain and to fully embody one’s power and worth.

In this episode, Anabel and Eryn talk about:

• Anabel’s journey with healing and somatics
• Coming to believe something through experiencing it in your body
• Creativity & the body
• How their interest in ceremony, ritual, and spirituality came about
• The importance of ceremony and ritual
• Doing ritual only when you feel moved to do ritual
• Somatics & collective liberation & collective healing
• Embodying body and mind at the same time
• The uncomfortable middle ground in healing
• Practicing being with what is totally intolerable
• Fear of stepping into painful places
• Working through the shame of being where we’re at

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/anabel-khoo

Check out the Religious Trauma workbook and the Religious Trauma meditation album. Read Eryn's poem, breakfast poem, in orangepeel mag.

Connect with Anabel on Instagram and their website.

Related: Ep. #242: Accessing States of Liberation, Imagination and Possibility Through the Body with Marika Heinrichs

Tara is a biracial non-binary Japanese Mystic who leans deeply into the wisdom of elemental magick and metaphor to connect. In this episode, Eryn and Tara talk about:

• The invitation of the Lovers for our collective Lovers year!
• Tara’s experience with their cards of the year of 2021
• “Cringe” tarot cards
• The different energies of death and tower cards
• The too much archetype
• Structure that creates ease and flexibility 
• Capricorn and Aquarius season energies
• Unpacking our why’s
• Haiku creative magic!
• Words and prayers as spells
• Creative expression, spirituality & dreams
• Healing with dreams

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/tara-burke 

Stay tuned for Eryn’s poetry collection, moon sign, out this spring! Check out the Religious Trauma workbook and the Religious Trauma meditation album.

Connect with Tara on Patreon, Instagram, TikTok, and their website.

Check out my first conversation with Tara: Ep. #214 Dreamscapes with Tara Burke and Sanyu Estelle.

Alissa (she/her) of Akasha Apothecary is a folk herbalist and facilitator. In this episode, Alissa and Eryn discuss:

• Alissa's journey with plants, healing & spirituality
• What the land is like by her right now
• Death, complete upheaval and ripping away all that is untrue
• Resisting death & gripping to untrue stories
• Life/death/rebirth cycles
• Opening to ancestral layers of loss
• Embodiment practices for staying with yourself
• Cultivating self trust
• How to know if you’re abandoning yourself
• The willow tree, compassion, and rage
• Cultivating safety in yourself to feel rage
• Integrating spiritual experiences
• Letting contradiction live within people
• Staying curious and open
• Polarized thinking as a fight or flight response

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/alissa-akasha-apothecary 

Connect with Eryn on Instagram. Learn more about + apply for HOLY, a 7-week reclamation circle and support group for ex-religious folks to create community and heal from the impacts of dogmatic religion together.

Connect with Alissa on Instagram and her website.

Danica Boyce (she/her) is a pagan educator and coach, guiding folks to shed limitation and imperialism by reconnecting with pagan abundance, animism & folklore. She specializes in religious history, folk song, and the energetics of holding epic, love-filled visions for humankind and the earth.

In this episode, Eryn and Danica explore:

• Danica’s journey with paganism and folklore
• Shame around the life-sustaining magic of imagination and play
• What it was like spiritually in Europe before Christian colonization
• Expanding our thinking beyond purity of European nation-states when it comes to our ancestry
• Connecting with European folk culture
• Abundance and scarcity in cultural practices
• Innovating within cultural practices
• Europeans displaces from their lands carrying the model of theft and control to America
• Long lineages of loss of culture
• Grief & belonging
• Holding other people in gentleness
• The flattening of death in Christian culture
• Capitalism, exchange, and trade
• Cultivating an abundance mindset in a not weird & toxic way!

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/danica-boyce 

Connect with Eryn on Instagram. Learn more about + apply for HOLY, a 7-week reclamation circle and support group for ex-religious folks to create community and heal from the impacts of dogmatic religion together.

Connect with Danica on her Instagram & podcast. Email her at [email protected].

Mentioned in this episode: Ep. #217: European Folk Ways & Ancestor Work with Megan McGuire.

In this episode, your host Eryn shares some of their learnings from 2021 around healing & spirituality. Enjoy!

Email Eryn to be added to the waitlist for the winter round of HOLY: [email protected] 

Check out the Religious Trauma workbook and Religious Trauma meditation album.

Roshni (they/them) is a self-worth coach and tarot reader for South-Asian women, LGBTQ+ folks, and people who identify as the black sheep of their family. 

In this episode, Eryn and Roshni talk about:

• Roshni’s journey with healing, self-worth, and religious trauma 
• How struggling with self-worth is connected to religious trauma
• Connecting back to their family’s spiritual & folk practices and rituals before Christianity
• Learning how to engage with spiritual and religious practices in different ways than we did in dogmatic religion
• Witchcraft as something that connects us to personal power
• Playing the role of “black sheep” in your family in the context of queerness & religion specifically
• Complicated family relationships & setting boundaries
• Letting go of the inner critic
• Not waiting to feel free
• Healing around self-worth & shame
• Making patterns in our healing work

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/roshni-patel 

Connect with Eryn on Instagram. Check out the Religious Trauma workbook and Religious Trauma meditation album. Email Eryn [email protected] to be added to the waitlist for winter HOLY.

Connect with Roshni on their website and Instagram.

My interview with Samara Kasai on tarot to break oppressive systems + bridging justice and tarot.

Mona Eshaiker, LMFT (she, her) is a licensed therapist and mental health consultant. She specializes in burnout recovery and prevention on the individual and systemic levels. She is passionate about work-life balance and psychological safety for historically underrepresented folks.

In this episode, Eryn and Mona talk about:

• Mona’s journey with burnout and mental health
• How rest makes space to figure out what you actually want
• The power of pause
• What’s happening with burnout emotionally, physically, and spiritually
• What to do when you know you need to rest but you’re required to keep producing!
• Rewriting stories around rest, “laziness,” and productivity
• Centering community care without burning out
• Becoming a stranger to yourself when you repress your feelings
• Losing touch with your yeses and no’s when you burn out
• Honoring and feeling your feelings

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/mona-eshaiker 

Connect with Eryn on Instagram. Check out the Religious Trauma workbook and Religious Trauma meditation album.

You can connect with Mona on her website and Instagram.

This episode is a soft collective tarot reading to sink into for the winter solstice + winter season ahead, plus some reflections on grief and wintertime. In the reading we talk surrender, expanding into the full spectrum of our wholeness, being with pain + more.

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/winter-solstice-medicine 

Connect with Eryn on Instagram.

Join us for the Virtual Solstice Breathwork for Grief gathering on Wednesday, Dec 22nd (recording included for all who register). 

Get the Religious Trauma Meditation Album, on special launch price until December 23rd.