Nature Evolutionaries

In this episode, Zigola talks about how co-creative partnerships are the foundation in the community where she lives, Damanhur, and how co-creation with nature plays a role in her work as a singer, teacher, and practitioner. Damanhur is a federation of Communities in Northern Italy with a focus on living in harmony with all that lives. Ecology, art, spirituality, and co-creation with nature are key elements of the community. Situated in the Valley of Valchiusella, around 400 Damanhurians live there and participate locally in the projects. 

Other thousands of Damanhurian citizens live around the world collaborating and initiating projects related to teaching, community building, ecology, and the creation of sacred spaces in harmony with nature. In her work, she is confronted on a daily basis with how nature’s intelligence is reaching out to help humans evolve and to develop together towards a sustainable future. As a practitioner she uses her connection with nature to help people raise their frequency, to live a happy and healthy life, and to be in connection with nature.

About  Zigola

Zigola Pioppo works as a singer, teacher, and practitioner, all in the field of the union between nature and humans. She has a Master of Science degree in Sustainable Energy and Human-Technology Interaction and has worked as a consultant in this field for corporate businesses. After several years of focus on a scientific approach to a sustainable future, the focus of her work changed more to the spiritual connection with nature and the work as a practitioner for individuals. She combines her passion for music (she studied Jazz singing in different institutes amongst which the Conservatory of Amsterdam) and healing (she is a Prano therapist of the Spiritual Healing School of Damanhur) with her work and connection with nature and developed a healing method in which technology, voice, and plants come together. She currently teaches courses for the Damanhur University, such as “Communication with the Plant World” and teaches her own courses on using the voice as a channel with nature. As a practitioner she helps people with their health issues and with getting clarity on how to live their lives without obstructions, standing in their full potential. In her sessions she collaborates with the intelligence of the plant world, integrating the technology of the Music of the Plants in her work. As a singer, she performs concerts in nature, with the music of the plants and the use of her voice.  To learn more about Zigola’s work please visit her website at https://www.voiceandplantmusichealing.com/media

Support the show

This episode features Jen Costa, Herbalist, Critical Care RN, BS, EM-CST and creator of ElderMoon School of Herbs & Earth Medicine. 

Our dialogue in this special teleseminar is  rooted in the ways that COVID has highlighted a need to develop our personal and collective connections for healing. We’re each faced with developing our ability to cooperate among ourselves and with Nature in order to meet our personal and community needs. Within this internal and external Quest, there’s this deep healing process we’re in with Nature that is demanding we be conscious, demanding we stay awake, and also demanding we choose to really see, feel, and act when called. The plants and trees, minerals and elements, the great Earth landscapes, and our hard-working Ancestors are here in support of this evolution which is truly driven by the unseen and ever-present microbial world.

From  Jen

Plants Heal. I learned this in the gardens and forests in a family that knew it was all about the soil, about learning to listen, and about connecting to small local community farms and businesses. These times are familiar with this wave back to carrying forward what works as we birth something new.

Jen Costa is a critical care RN of 13 years working frontline these days in the OR and ICU, and an Herbalist, Nature Activist, and Environmental Biologist of 30 years teaching herbal healing skills, apothecary tending through growing and making your own medicine, along with consulting on integrating healing plants into our collective healthcare system. 

To learn more about Jen and her work, visit her website at www.eldermoonschool.net

Support the show

When the outer world feels uncertain, we are called inward to find deeper meaning, connection, and faith.   What is the role of prayer in crisis? Does it actually make a difference?

We will explore answers to some of the oldest questions of the spiritual path;  What is your relationship to the Divine?  What is prayer? What is it for?  How do you pray when you are not religious? When god is not a person?

Fearn will share her understanding and practice of prayer as a Druid.  We will discuss some forms prayer can take.  We will explore prayer as an offering, as a divine dialogue, as a force for healing, as courtship, devotion, faith, and love for the world.

This will be an engaging talk that will give you tools and inspiration to build a personal, authentic prayer practice.

Find your way, your words, your unique relationship with the Divine, and change the world.

About Fearn

Fearn Lickfield is a web weaver, faery seer, earth diviner, temple tender, and magical activist. She is the director and headteacher of The Green Mountain Druid School and Ecstatic Dance Vermont. She serves life as a flower essence practitioner, geomancer, dowser, dancer, community organizer, gardener, and medicine maker. She co-creates community celebrations in honor of the earth and waters, the seasons, and for rites of passage. Fearn is the steward of Dreamland, a sanctuary and mystery school in Worcester VT. 

To learn more about Fearn and her work visit www.greenmountaindruidorder.org  or email Fearn directly at [email protected].

Support the show

As the planet continues to rapidly urbanize there is a growing sense that a new model of cities is needed: one that overcomes the physical (and mental) disconnect between humans and nature. Timothy Beatley believes that contact with nature is not something optional but it is absolutely essential for leading a happy, healthy, and meaningful life. Beatley will review the many ways in which cities are already profoundly natureful and biodiverse and he will describe the emerging vision and practice of Biophilic Cities. He will discuss the newly formed global Biophilic Cities Network and will provide examples of innovative design and planning in cities in the Network. 

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last thirty years. Beatley is the author or co-author of more than fifteen books, including Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Oceans and Cities (Island Press, 2014) and Blue Biophilic Cities: Nature and Resilience Along the Urban Coast (Palgrave, 2018).  Beatley directs the Biophilic Cities Project at UVA (http://biophiliccities.org/) and is also co-founder of UVA’s Center for Design and Health, within the School of Architecture.

Support the show

In this episode, Hilary Giovale, shares her experiences with ancestral apology, decolonization, and finding our indigenous heart-ways.

Apology is a catalyst for healing and forgiveness which helps to build our capacity for wholeness and restoration. When we ask for forgiveness, we engage in authentic relationship and open the possibility of healing for all peoples, the Earth, and all beings (seen and unseen). 

What does it mean to live as a settler on Indigenous lands? How can settlers honor our ancestors to rekindle memory of the rich, diverse, Earth-connected cultural lineages from which we are all descended? How can we build heart-centered relationships with Indigenous communities and Earth, to create pathways toward healing the harm inflicted by colonialism?

Hilary Giovale is a ninth-generation American settler of Scottish, Irish, and Scandinavian descent. She lives at the foot of a sacred mountain, a being of kinship, that stands within the traditional homelands of Diné, Hopi, Havasupai, Hualapai, Yavapai, and Paiute Peoples, as well as several Pueblos. Her relationships with this land and with Indigenous peoples inform her life as a mother, dancer, community organizer, writer, and philanthropist. In 2015, Hilary became aware of her ancestors’ longstanding presence as American settlers. Since then, she has been living a process of decolonization including ancestral repair, solidarity with Indigenous-led movements, reconnection with Earth, apology, forgiveness, and restoration. She is the author of a forthcoming book that shares about this healing process. To read more about her work, please visit www.goodrelative.com.

Support the show

Jerry Tello believes that essential to true health and healing is our scared interconnectedness to all our relations. In this seminar, he will share teachings from his indigenous culture that allow us to acknowledge and understand the significance of this medicine way and the ramifications of not respecting the teachings of dis-ease and imbalance. He will also share significant aspects for Recovering One's Sacredness and moving towards health and healing as a daily practice. 

About Jerry

Jerry Tello is a father, grandfather and over the last 40 years has dedicated himself to the healing of individuals, families, communities, and systems by speaking to over half a million people and training 1000’s of facilitators across the nation. Born from a family of Mexican, Texan and Coahuiltecan roots and raised in the south-central/Compton areas of Los Angeles. Mr. Tello is considered an international expert in the areas of trauma, healing, men and boys of color, fatherhood, family strengthening, racial justice, racial healing, community peace, and mobilization and culturally based violence prevention/intervention issues. He is co-founder of the National Compadres Network (established in 1988) and presently is Director of Training and Capacity Building. He has authored numerous articles, videos and curricula addressing the issues of generational trauma and culturally rooted, trauma-informed, healing centered practices. He served as a principal consultant for Scholastic Books on International Bilingual Literacy curriculum, is the author “ A Fathers Love”, a series of children’s books, co-editor of Family Violence and Men of Color, a series of motivational health and healing CD’s and co-author of the recently released award-winning book, “Recovering Your Sacredness”. 

He has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Latina, and Lowrider magazines and has received many major awards including in 2016 Maria Shriver’s Annual Advocate for Change award; the 2015 White House Champions of Change award; in 2012 the Presidential Crime Victims Service Award, presented by President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno; two California Governor’s Awards and the Ambassador of Peace Award presented by Rotary international. Finally, in collaboration with the American G.I. Forum, Mr. Tello was part of an effort of providing Domestic Violence awareness, healing and support services to Iraq, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf veterans and their spouses. Presently, He also directs the Sacred Circles Center in Whittier, California and is a member of the Sacred Circles performance group, a group dedicated to community peace and healing. He is the proud father of three children; Marcos, Renee, Emilio and grandfather of Amara, Naiya, Greyson, and Harrison. To learn more about Jerry visit his website at  jerrytello.com

Support the show

Explore the possibilities of living and leading from the embodied worldview of interbeing with Claire Vanderplank. Claire is a shamanic practitioner and nature guide who works with individuals and teams to become forces of creation through cultivating a direct connection with the fundamental creative power and principles of life.

We are in a time when many of us have had individual waking up experiences, however, we now need to integrate that into our communities and systems that have been built from a worldview of separation. True Oneness involves both a realization and an embodiment of what it is to be fully human, a union between the 'human' and the 'being', very much a part of this earth and eternity at the same time.

Practically, this involves a commitment to personal cultivation and of listening to nature and spirit for guidance and understanding of purpose and path. It also requires the skills to navigate a world in transition, to lead courageously through holding a new worldview and inhabiting the future we want to see in our everyday actions and choices in the building of the next phase of humanity.

The vision is of a world where humans model ourselves as Nature itself. Where we realize our unique gifts as individuals and as humans collectively. Where we know that we belong here on Earth as an essential part of life itself, here to give our gifts to each other and the rest of life in a creative expression of love, joy, and beauty. This becomes our sacred anchor, always guiding us back to truth and giving us the courage to face our individual and collective shadows.

About Claire

Claire is based in Fremantle, Western Australia, also known as Noongar Boodjar. Her works centers around deepening connection with inner, outer, and true nature and how we can integrate the worldview of interbeing into our collective systems and communities as an imperative for this transitionary period in human history. She is a facilitator, shamanic practitioner, and guides people in nature-based spiritual cultivation practices through the Way of Nature lineage, including multi-day wilderness quests.  To learn more about Claire and her work, visit her website, http://womc.com.au/

Support the show

Is your kitchen ‘herb-ready’? Kami McBride can help! With the widespread increase in chronic and infectious diseases, having the antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant power of your herbs working for you at maximum capacity is what’s needed now. Setting up an effective herbal kitchen is the foundation for making sure you get the daily dose of herbs you need if you really want a pro-active herbal health care plan in place for your family.

Stocking your pantry with herb-filled condiments is the easiest way to have an ‘herb-ready’ kitchen so you can fill your food with the healing power of herbs at every meal. Kitchen herbs not only add flavor to our food, but they also support our overall health on a daily basis with their anti-oxidant and anti-viral supporting activity. You don’t have to be an herbalist and you don’t have to be a good cook to benefit from the top disease-fighting spice rack herbs. With 30 years of inspiring families to feel confident in using herbs, Kami has developed some fast track tips that to help you sort through the herbal information overwhelm and enjoy using more herbs in your daily meals.

Kami McBride’s 30 years of teaching herbal medicine is steeped in her calling to activate culture that embraces deep connection with the earth and inspire the next generation to love and care for the plants. Kami has taught herbal medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing and in the Masters’ program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She has helped thousands of families learn to use herbs for self-care. She is the author of The Herbal Kitchen and her online workshops fuel the home herbalism movement to revitalize our relationship with the plant world and use herbal medicine for home wellness care. For more information about Kami and her work visit www.KamiMcBride.com

Support the show

As we navigate through our changing times, many of us are experiencing grief. Some of what we grieve we can name and recognize, perhaps we grieve the loss of connection, the absence of touch, the loss of work, the destruction of Nature, the passing of our Loved ones, or the life paths we’ve taken. There may be other times when we feel grief or perhaps sadness or anger and are unable to identify their roots. At these times, we may be tapping into the collective grief. 

Grief is a powerful, transformative experience that is essential to experiencing a full life. As Martín Prechtel writes in The Smell of Rain on Dust: “If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love. We are not praising the life we have been given in order to love. If we do not praise whom we miss, we are ourselves in some way dead. So grief and praise make us alive.” And yet in our dominant culture, grief is often considered a weakness and something to pass through quickly, resulting in numbing and other coping mechanisms to help us deny our true feelings. If we want to live full, vibrant lives and particularly if we want to be co-creative partners with Nature, we are compelled to identify and heal our grief. Fortunately, the plants are willing to guide and support us through this process.

Join O.N.E. Visioning Council members, Pam Montgomery and Jen Frey, as they delve into the depths of grief, sharing its beautiful and powerful role in our lives as well as Plant Allies who help us navigate through grief.

Pam Montgomery is an author, teacher, and practitioner who has passionately embraced her role as a spokesperson for the green beings and has been investigating plants/trees and their intelligent spiritual nature for more than three decades. She is the author of two books one of which is the highly acclaimed Plant Spirit Healing; A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness and Partner Earth; A Spiritual Ecology. She operates the Partner Earth Education Center at Sweetwater Sanctuary in Danby, Vermont where classes, plant research, and ceremonies take place. Pam also teaches internationally on plant spirit healing, spiritual ecology, and people as Nature Evolutionaries. She is a founding member of United Plant Savers and more recently the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries or O.N.E. Her latest passion is to engage ceremonially in full symbiosis within the plant/human matrix where the elder common plants and trees initiate and guide us into being truly human. www.wakeuptonature.com

Jen Frey is a Healer, Mentor, Earth Advocate, and Voice of the Plants. She is the Founder of Heart Springs Sanctuary, where she helps people deepen their connection with nature through plant communication. With over 20 years of experience with plant essences, energy work, and herbal practices her private consultations and plant-based protocols are known for helping clients through emotional life transitions, physical health crises, and chronic conditions. Jen has dedicated her life to the spiritual path of plant work. Her apprenticeship certification programs, ceremonies, retreats, and workshop offerings are designed for people wanting to open their hearts, fall in love with plants and deepen their relationship to the planet. www.brigidsway.com

Support the show

 Jolie Elan shares her experience of tapping into the wisdom of the oaks for guidance in hard times.

Many Indigenous people say that plants reveal their medicine via dreams and visions. What if these types of relationships are within everyone’s reach? How do we go about building mutually beneficial relationships? On a decade long adventure to eat acorn food, ethnobotanist Jolie Elan became so intertwined within the oak web of life that the oaks began to reveal myths and medicines in dreams and visions. Join Ethnobotanist and oak lover Jolie Elan as she tells her ethnobotanical love story that discusses the ecology, botany, medicine, myth, spirit, and food of the mighty oak.

Jolie Elan, M.S. is the Founding Director of Go Wild Institute. She is a deep ecologist, ethnobotanist, consulting botanist, and educator. She has inspired thousands of people to deepen their relationship with nature. Jolie has worked with ethnobotanical projects on four continents including restoring sacred forest groves in India and developing the herbal medicine sector in war-torn Kosovo. Jolie is also a certified permaculture designer and a seasoned environmental advocate with twenty years of experience building diverse networks, especially with Indigenous groups focused on protecting sacred sites. Combining her love for the earth and spirit, Jolie completed her training as a Spiritual Director and acts as a spiritual companion for those who wish to increase their intimacy with the divine, especially through the natural world. 

Jolie is adjunct faculty at the College of Marin and regularly teaches at Point Reyes Field Institute, the San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, as well as a large variety of herbal medicine schools, and environmental and spiritual organizations throughout the west. She works with Jewish organizations, like Hazon, Wilderness Torah, Temple Emek Shalom and the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco to offer eco- Jewish classes that ground Jewish practices and teachings in the Earth. Jolie received her B.A. from the Evergreen State College in Environmental Studies, her Master’s degree in Natural Resources from Humboldt State University, and her certification in Spiritual Direction from the Chaplaincy Institute. She has served as the President of the Marin Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. Jolie can often be found foraging wild foods and medicines and hanging out with oak trees.  To learn more about Jolie’s work visit the Go Wild Institute website.

Support the show