Memoir Body, Healing Story with Janelle Hardy

Elisha Halpin is of Scotch-Irish, African, and Cherokee descent. She was raised in Tennessee near the lands of her Cherokee and Appalachian ancestors.

As a bridge Elisha was born as one who crosses the thresholds and integrates the Wisdom. Elisha is interested in swimming in deep waters of self-discovery, starts conversations in the middle, and is a sacred rebel at heart. She is a lover of liminal lands such as where the the sea meets the forest. She is also a lover of kitchen dance parties, her cat Xavier, and a good pen with sparkly ink .

Elisha is a sacred life mentor and embodiment coach for visionaries, creatives, healers, and coaches. As the Priestess behind the Leader, Elisha facilitates sacred leaders into the embodiment of their Soul's Essence allowing them to trust their power, create their sacred service to have an impact, and authentically express their truth. As a channel of Divine Feminine wisdom, Elisha's mission is a revolution of leadership through reclaiming our sacred nature and expanding our nervous system capacity.

Through Sacred Soul Somatics Elisha weaves her 20+ year career as a tenured professor of somatics and dance with Breathwork, Neurosculpting, Energy work, and transpersonal psychology for a whole system approach to healing and transformation. As a professor, Elisha was an embedded faculty member in the Arts and Design Research Incubator with her research into somatic interventions for trauma and stress.

Elisha believes that our bodies are beautiful ruins, sites of pilgrimage, and carriers of the remembrances of time. This was deeply activated in her viscerally on her first trip to Ireland when she met the crumbling stones and began to move from within.

Elisha's work teaches that our lives are constantly in ruin, continually breaking down, turning over, and decomposing the past. It is in this breaking down that we become the sacred place of pilgrimage, of magic. This is what the sacred journey of Embodiment can teach us if we are willing.

Website: www.elishahalpin.com

Listen in to Janelle Hardy, creator of transformational memoir-writing course, The Art of Personal Mythmaking as she describes what this podcast is all about.

She'll be talking to published memoirists, people in the middle of writing their memoirs, storytellers and embodied healers.

She'll even toss in the occasional fairy tale and body-based writing prompt, to give your stories some unexpected sparks.

These are honest conversations of depth are good medicine – they're the antidote to feeling alone with creative and healing challenges.

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Sebene Selassie because I loved our conversation, and so did my listeners back then – our conversation is one of the most listened episodes on this podcast to date.

And, because what we talk about is so very timeless, and yet the ancient take Sebene chose is also so timely, I'm really excited to reintroduce you to Sebene Selassie, a Brooklyn-based teacher & writer who explores the themes of belonging and identity through meditation and spirituality.

Sebene helps modern, multicultural spiritual seekers create transformation in their lives by teaching them how to make space for self–care, new practices, and liberating change.

She's been studying Buddhism for over 28 years and for two decades she worked nationally and internationally for social change & social justice organizations.

Her work took her everywhere from the Tenderloin in San Francisco to refugee camps in Guinea, West Africa.

She mentors and coaches people from around the world (through the magic of the Interwebs), teaches classes and retreats regularly across the U.S., and is a meditation teacher on the Ten Percent Happier app. Her first book, Born to Belong, waas published by HarperOne in 2020.

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Roxanne Coble, a mixed media artist, illustrator, and maker of things in Los Angeles.

She's known for her detailed art journaling which fuses mixed media and painted illustration. Inspired by all things macabre, completed pages embrace a balance of humor and dark emotional themes – all while exploring topical events that occur within her personal life.

Her work has been featured on the cover of Art Journal Magazine and more recently as a guest artist on the PBS show Make It Artsy.

I wanted to chat with Roxanne because her art is so alive with imagery and symbolism. I had a feeling she'd be bubbling over with thoughts and ideas, and I was right. We discussed the creepiness of fairy tales, girl gangs, visual symbolism and hands. Especially hands.

If you're a creative curious person I know you'll enjoy this conversation.

I first encountered Alisha online and so appreciated her aesthetic, specific and gentle presence that I got on her newsletter list and started following her on Instagram. Since then, I've featured her in an interview series of creative s based on the Proust questionnaire – link in show notes – and I've taken her Liberated Lines writing course.

Alisha has a gift for holding sacred space, for deep listening, and for seeing the ordinary in extraordinary ways.

In the past, she founded and edited a print literary journal (Blackberry: a magazine), published personal essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry for a variety of online and print publications, ghostwritten, and taught at Squam Art Workshops.

Currently, you'll find her hosting creative gatherings in Sonoma, CA like the Fever Dreams Collective Retreat with Jennette Nielsen (on my wishlist), and facilitating the online writing workshop liberated lines with Robin Sandomirsky.

It was so fun to connect more deeply with Alisha, and I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy listening in.

For more like this, go to my website, janellehardy.com.

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Louise Hardy, a counsellor and art therapist. Also my mom!

I wanted to have her on the podcast to discuss creativity and the power of resourcing ourselves in difficult times with the creative, in ways that are totally free as well as ways that may cost some money (for art materials and/or art therapy services.)

Louise used the creative and a connection to beauty as a way of resourcing herself as a child growing up in poverty.

Louise's work as a therapist evolved over the past three decades through social work after which she earned a Masters Degree in Counselling and an advanced diploma in Art Therapy from the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute.

She's a Registered Canadian Art Therapist (RCAT) and a Certified Canadian Counsellor (CCC). These designations mean she is held to a high standard of professional and ethical conduct. Beyond the degrees she's explored body centred healing, Imago processes with couples, Diagnostic Drawing Series and Dissociation, Trauma and the Soul.

In this podcast we talked a lot about being struck by beauty, colour, making your art your own, giving yourself permission to make, create and learn, and mentors that show up in unlikely places like public laundromats.

We talked about learning technique, and being unfulfilled until you put your own vision into it, fiber arts, the time when new clothing was more fashionable than handmade, and making clothing out of curtains for her children (making do with what you have when what you have isn't money.)

We also talked about my dad's cancer, and dealing with the raging energy in her hands during that time by creating wet feltings, what it is to be a caregiver to someone with cancer and how the creative can help you care for yourself.

We also talked about the magic art show Louise created on an outdoor walking path, Swedish hardanger embroidery, knitting and reading bell hooks as a young mother in her 20s.

We talked even more about how cooking as a creative practice came from being so hungry as a child, and how learning to cook well was a way of being able to give; to feed herself and others. MFK Fisher's stories of food in the great depression came up, and memories of being a child, until the age of 9, watching her mother cook for 8 children on a wood stove, doing that herself as a young mother in a cabin in the woods, and learning to be in a relationship with heat – tending the fire in a wood stove.

We talked about studying social work, being elected as an MP (Member of Parliament) in her 30s, pursuing art therapy and counselling after losing the election, and enjoying the non-verbal aspects of art therapy – exploring symbol, metaphor psychotherapy, art and movement.

Plus, Louise shares her best tips for creative resourcing by playing with what you've got around you – without spending a cent – you probably won't guess what these techniques are ,but they're accessible to anyone, no matter their circumstances, and they're techniques that have really shaped me, as my mom did them my whole childhood – without me ever realizing what she was up to!

Listen to the episode to get the full delightful scoop!

Louise has continued to advance her experience through work with First Nations communities and working with Seniors and Elders. Much of her focus is on the multi-generational transmission of trauma, complex grief and transitional states of change.

We also talked about the shocks that stop us in our tracks – for Louise it was her son's diagnosis of kidney disease and wait for a kidney transplant – and then what brings us back to our creative selves.

Louise asks herself often "what is burning brightly for me right now?" and then follows the answer.

Essentially she's integrated life as a mother, caregiver to her mother and the death of her husband to cancer at 53 into a deeper understanding of the complexity, joy and struggles of all our lives.

Louise is also an artist, and creates wild large-scale wet feltings (among many other mostly fiber arts related art.)

She delights in the exploration of fiber arts and gender, and despite being criticized by male MPs for knitting in parliament, she never stopped, and holds a torch for all fiber arts, it's mixture of the practical and the feminine, and loves how fiber arts brings warmth and beauty and an engagement of the sense of touch to people.

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Gitanjali Hemp, a master energy healer from Santa Cruz County, California.

Gitanjali works with clients and students to help them cultivate awareness of their subtle body and most sacred selves, increasing their capacity for meaningful contribution and fulfilling expression in their lives and work through a system she founded called Syntara System, a deeply integrative, evolutionary energy healing modality that awakens consciousness, inspiring sustainable change.

She brings 20 years of study and training with healers and masters from some of the world's richest traditions and most cutting edge healing modalities. She has spent 18 years in active practice, both as a practitioner and teacher: leading retreats, workshops, 18 month professional trainings, virtual courses and facilitating ceremonies and women's groups.

There is nothing Gitanjali loves more than helping people learn how to access and embody their unique brilliance and create their life and world from that place.

I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with Gitanjali and hearing her perspectives, and I know you'll enjoy our ramble through the Indian tale Churning The Cosmic Sea

the story of Shiva and Shakti: Churning the Cosmic Sea

• On being raised in the US as a Catholic, growing up on western style bible based stories, having ancestors and family from India
• stories about Shiva and Shakti and those energies as external and internal aspects of our selves
• separating darkness and light, churning to create and separate, poison created from this churning, representing the suffering of the world
• Shiva taking the poison and swallowing it to save the world, Shakti holding Shiva around his throat, strangling her beloved in order to save him (Shiva becomes knows as the 'blue-throated one' because of this)
• how this story is shared in different ways – some parts of the story are only told by holders of lineage traditions, other versions of the story are more mundane version
• how the heroic act needs the tenderness, the support
• how Shakti is the saviour as well by stopping the poisoning and transmuting the poison
• how this story speaks to those of us who are healers, and how transmuting the poison depends on our connection to nourishment and nurturance and pleasure
• that remembering to weave nurturance and pleasure into our work in the world is so important – it's from there that we can reorganise our trauma and wounding and make a difference in the world
• how powerful the things are that we don't consider powerful
• how being nourishing/caretaking comes easier than being nourished
• how taking the time to ask for and receive nourishment is important and empowering
• nourishing for Gitanjali looks like taking baths, nature, taking walks, good food, the oceans, meditation, movement, yoga, dance, time with children, friends, family, playing and creating art
• how there are so many different faces of our aspects of our psyches, the feminine, and how the feminine embodies the dark goddess energies of knowing in a fierce way that sometimes intense direct action is needed and that it comes from the same level of compassion and presence as the nourishment, and knowing how to take that type of action
• how the forcefulness of birthing and labour reflects that ferocity

relationship with creativity

• on believing we are all creative beings
• on developing an energy modality and how working with clients and teaching this is Gitanjali's creative endeavour in the world
• how her business flows and runs is a creative expression
• how giving birth and raising children taught her a lot about creativity
• the childbirth and mothering experience and how it shapes consciousness
• dancing, freeform movement and expression is creative
• visual arts and singing are some outlets for creative expression as well
• the creative work of teaching Syntara Systems – created through a long process of learning through dance, working with clients, seeking and learning from people in ashrams in India, and from Hopi, Navajo and Australian Aboriginal peoples, and learning to teach as a teacher of massage students, as an assistant at a Montessori school, by receiving transmissions from dreams, and developing her process of working with people and teaching what she knows through that process
• how direct experience and connection to things is as important as learning skills and techniques intellectually
• on having a doubting questioning mind, but also being able to follow the currents of energy
• the importance of hanging out in the ugly messy phase of the creative process

relationship with body

• On loving her body and having a complex relationship with it
• on having a body that was very thin, then became really strong in 20s, then after having children it softened, then experiencing 2 children really close together, building a business, dealing with Lyme's Disease, experiencing a lot of stress, becoming depleted and now having a body that is heavier
• coming back to yoga and wrestling with an egoic notion of what she can and can't do,
• the experience of having admired women with soft bellies when she was younger, and now having the soft belly and learning to live it
• on knowing she wouldn't have the capacity to know and carry all that she is if she were still as thin as she was – the weightedness in her body and presence feels much more sustaining of all that she's doing

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Sylvia V. Linsteadt, a writer whose work—both fiction and non-fiction—is rooted in myth, ecology, feminism & bioregionalism, and is devoted to broadening our human stories to include the voices of the living land.

She lives in the bishop pine forest on a peninsula called Point Reyes, which has at various times been an island in the Pacific, but which is currently attached to North America along a volatile fault line called the San Andreas, and on the Greek island of Crete, another land prone to earthquake and mystery.

The story of how I came across Sylvia is one I share in our conversation, but it involved a series of synchronicities via facebook, delightful ones, that ended up with me signing up for a course she was teaching.

We had an incredibly wide-ranging and lovely conversation, talking about living inside the questions, feeling stretched, the mind/body split, cerebral anxiety, the importance of grounding, the indigenous foodways, music ways and stories of Cretan people, metaphoric dismemberment, labyrinths, going into the underworld, descent and return, and being in the middle of writing a novel.

Sylvia is the author of the middle grade ecological fantasy duology, The Stargold Chronicles (The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising), published by Usborne in June 2018 and May 2019, the novel Tatterdemalion (Unbound, Spring 2017) with artist Rima Staines, and the short-story collection Our Lady of the Dark Country.

She is also a certified animal tracker.

Her work currently finds itself knee-deep in the mythologies of a pre-Hellenic Mediterranean world, in the form of a historical novel set in Minoan Crete, currently in progress. For more about the creation of this novel you can follow along on her Patreon page.

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Salma Darling, a conscious dance facilitator, dance movement psychotherapist, dharma and mindfulness teacher who lives flexibly between the UK and Marin County California.

Salma's been facilitating conscious dance and meditation in a variety of contexts since 1998, using methods that are theoretically and practically informed by Insight (vipassana) buddhist meditation, western psychotherapeutic models and ecopsychology.

While she was doing an MA in art and ecology she developed Wild Divine Dance as a mindful embodied awakening practice incorporating stillness and movement, indoors and in the wild.

Much of her process was developed on beaches in Devon, Dorset and Cornwall, and on Dartmoor, UK.

Her offerings are led by a number of substantial dance movement awareness trainings since 1997, my work with clients and students over 20 years, embodied engagement with the landscape and directing performance in nature.

Her skills are offerings are also informed by around 2 years cumulative formal silent Theravadan buddhist retreats, dharma study, and her personal and ongoing journey in healing trauma and living fully and heartfully.

Her current workshop programmes combine silent meditation and free dance movement expression inside and in the wild, a weekly dharma group in Brighton UK, and online one to one meditation, somatic enquiry and mentoring.

the Buddhist story of Angulimala

• finds it interesting how many Buddhist meditation teachings are shared through stories
• the story speak to the capacity we have to transform
• the capacity we have to find peace and ease and to awaken no matter what our history
• how we can inspire and support each other and teach each other through our own transformation
• how the Buddha, his presence, was an inspiration for the terrifying Angulimala to change
• how the Buddha encourages Angulimala to bear with the changes, and how much of an impact it can have to give someone the encouragement to keep going – that despite being attacked by other people, Angulimala kept going, he bore the fruits of his actions

relationship with body

• having had a traumatic violent childhood, of having felt unwanted
• growing up in the 70s in Britain – experiencing a lot of racism
• therefore, took a vow of silence at the age of 10, her only way of control, body also froze, had extreme tension in the body, developed anorexia, had extreme anxiety and depression
• in early 20s had two overdoses, was hospitalized twice -was a calling to come back to her body
• started getting really into meditation and dance as a tool to come back to her body and return home
• started getting more clear in her mind as a result
• how her art teacher first taught her to meditate – a very strong impulse told her it was really important
• meditation has become a place to cultivate care, kindness and acceptance towards herself
• dance has helped her express and explore different aspects in herself, and how to be in relationship
• meditation and free dance as a pairing – they inform each other – bringing the practices that the Buddha taught to the dance – being present to movement and relationship – both are about connecting with the divine, all of life, consciousness
• being with a physical felt sense of her body is a really big part of her life
• having had chronic fatigue – really got into lying meditation – really surrendering to gravity and doing a scanning meditation
• cultivating joy, delighting in the uplifting qualities the body can bring – dance has taught her the exuberance of playing

relationship with creativity

• the state of creativity is exuberance, joy, playfulness
• the wondering – what is the meaning of creativity?
• having trained as a fashion designer – creativity was a big part of her life in the conventional sense
• but then creativity got jammed, started to understand it as life moving and unfolding itself, that life itself is inherently creative
• has begun to experience herself as a participant in the creative and creativity
• how one thing leads to another and creativity is the process of tracking the following
• how recovering from chronic fatigue was a deep listening – of tracking the creative flow and being present in wild nature
• having a primordial impulse to participate with the land – to come back to the human animal and move with wild abandon through all kinds of different weathers
• the intimacy of being with the breath and the wind, hearing the ruffle of leaves
• and through this 'rewilding' she feels more spontaneous, more creative, more free to let life through her

In this encore episode I'm sharing a conversation with Grace Quantock, a counsellor, a registered member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, writer, coach, wellness provocateur, and healing trailblazer.

Grace is currently living – and thriving – with often debilitating illness and knows, firsthand, the emotional and physical rollercoaster that accompanies diagnosis and life struggles. Because of that, she's founded the Phoenix Fire Academy, Trailblazing Wellness and Healing Boxes, to help people live and thrive with debilitating illnesses.

She lives in the valleys of Wales and loves reading, gardening and early mornings. She firmly believes that life is meant to be celebrated, and has made it her mission to help others do just that … joyfully and on their own terms.

It is such a treat to share my conversation with her today – her storytelling and gentle, thoughtful nature shine through in our conversation.

Enjoy our ramble through the Welsh fairy tale The Lady of the Lake and the Physicians of Myddfai.

the Welsh fairytale The Lady of the Lake and the Physicians of Myddfai

• the Brecon Beacons mountain range
• The Welsh words for Gramma and Grampa
• the Welsh tradition of Bards
• on navigating the bounds of safety as a woman in relationships
• on being grounded and present in a landscape with ancient history
• on believing in ritual and daily magic
• on exploring the land and history of where you live
• on being a steward and guardian of the land you're living on
• on how people are hurt/judged for having what are called 'wrong' reactions

relationship with creativity

• on having a creative practice and then going into the head and getting sick, letting go of creative work
• on doing The Artist's Way and the reading deprivation week
• how not reading led to space for writing
• doing intuitive painting, reclaiming creativity
• on not reading stuff on the internet
• on doing a digital detox (how reading about doing things is deceptive)
• following a 'create before consume' philosophy

relationship with body

• it's a beautiful work in progress
• on how to come home to the body when it's a place of chronic pain
• learning how to read a finely tuned instrument/body
• how to be with body when the habit is to check out and dissociate
• how to make the body safe enough to stay in it
• how to go deeper into the body and have joy in it
• how Marion Woodman's writing inspires Grace to stay with the body and the process
• how medicalizing bodies makes the person feel like a diagnosis instead of a person