Nurtured.

Full Moon Monday!!! Yowza!!!!!!

I’m so glad that when I decided to put this here podcast on the internets that I decided early on that Monday was the day to do it. I don’t know about you, but Mondays are generally tough days for me, so I’m really glad that no matter what, I will always have this tiny piece of joy and excitement no matter what happens, because it’s podcast day. 

And today is extra, extra rad because I got to sit with someone who I’ve admired from afar for quite some time and then the podcast was the vehicle for me to swallow my nerves, reach out, and be blown away by the conversation I got to have.

Our guest today, the AMAZING Shari Hampton, is a podcaster, on and off again blogger and, founder of Served Up Sober. Shari battled alcohol and drug addiction for over 35 years until one day five years ago, she landed in the arms of a retired psychiatrist and anthropologist turned holistic wellness enthusiast. She worked with this husband and wife team who merged their perspectives into a regime that combined various holistic modalities and focused on introspective examination and healing. It was through that experience she was able to build a life of recovery and gained awareness around how recovery exists at the crossroads of traditional methods and holistic ones. Shari soon felt a deep calling to create her own program that blended the two together.

She founded Served Up Sober because there is a stigma attached to healing that needs to be broken. Served stands firm in the power that we get to change and heal into our better selves and offers holistic support services in the form of weekly and monthly classes curated specifically for the sober and sober curious. As Shari says “It’s community over everything — always.”

You can find Shari online below. GO CHECK HER OUT NOW LOL!!!!

Facebook

Instagram

Website

Enjoy!

It’s March! It’s Monday! It’s a grand day that’s inching us closer and closer to that blessed Spring Equinox!

It’s also a fabulous day because I get to post the amazing conversation that I had with the incredible Niki Hale!

Born and raised at sea level in the SF Bay Area, she, her husband, and the four-leggeds packed it all up last September to move to Colorado, an hour away from the mile-high city of Denver. This transition has her considering new directions in her work as an artist and trauma-sensitive massage therapist. After closing down her massage studio in Oakland, and leaving her home for the last 33 years, she’s navigating the groundlessness of shifting identities and ’starting over.'

She is working on unhooking from our toxic Overculture, slowing down and doing less, and connecting with those in her direct reach. She also quit drinking back in 2016, allowing her to get to a much softer and gentler place in her work, her creative life, and her relationship to self and others. 

While she is no longer on social media, you can find her at www.starsalignbodywork.com.

Our conversation today weaves together stories about intuition, sobriety, friendships, and learning to hold our own. It’s truly magnificent and as always, I feel so honoured that I get to speak the words and then put them out there into the world for your hearts and ears. Enjoy my friends!

Hi all!!

We’re back this week with Amy Alaman in Part 2 of Intuitive Healing. We talk life post-Africa which means we’re talking intuition, intentionality and about figuring out how to take care of ourselves (among other things of course lol!).

If you missed it from last week…Amy is founder of Sacred Paintbrush Arts and is a Master Facilitator of intuitive painting, creative healer, and whimsy chaser. She has been clean and active in 12-step recovery since 2002, having gone to rehab at the age of 17. Amy has been practicing intuitive painting through Creative Juices Arts since 2013, and in 2019 began offering her own workshops. Amy is bridging the wellness gap by bringing the healing of the intuitive painting process to women of color and other underrepresented populations. She offers intuitive painting workshops designed to help people reconnect with their often traumatized and abandoned creative selves. She also sells hand-painted wearable art jewelry and other hand-crafted goods at her Sacred Adornment pop-up shops.

Weekly class: Wednesdays 6:30-9pm, Oakland, CA *visit website for details

Pop-up shops: *visit website for details

Connect with her at:

FB: The Sacred Paintbrush

IG: @thesacredpaintbrush

sacredpaintbrusharts.com

Hilo!!! It’s Monday and amazing things are happening this week!

Instead of trying to fit this baby all into one teeny, tiny imaginary box of one episode, I let it soar lol! The interview that I did with Amy Alaman was nothing short of magic so you get Part I this week and then Part II next week. It’s about intuition. It’s about healing. It’s about trust. It’s about so many beautiful things it was just too darn good to rush!

Amy, founder of Sacred Paintbrush Arts, is a Master Facilitator of intuitive painting, creative healer, and whimsy chaser. She has been clean and active in 12-step recovery since 2002, having gone to rehab at the age of 17. Amy has been practicing intuitive painting through Creative Juices Arts since 2013, and in 2019 began offering her own workshops. Amy is bridging the wellness gap by bringing the healing of the intuitive painting process to women of color and other underrepresented populations. She offers intuitive painting workshops designed to help people reconnect with their often traumatized and abandoned creative selves. She also sells hand-painted wearable art jewelry and other hand-crafted goods at her Sacred Adornment pop-up shops.

Weekly class: Wednesdays 6:30-9pm, Oakland, CA *visit website for details

Pop-up shops: *visit website for details

Connect with her at:

FB: The Sacred Paintbrush

IG: @thesacredpaintbrush

sacredpaintbrusharts.com

Same time, same place next week for Part II. Have an amazing week!

We’re keepin’ it Radical this week folks!

And yes…you read that correctly. I got to sit down with one of the most incredible teachers of all time, Sonya Renee Taylor!!!! 

Sonya is an Artist, Author, Activist and transformational leader who is a National and International award-winning writer and performer and published author. She is the founder and Radical Executive Officer of The Body is Not An Apology, an international digital media and education company committed to radical self-love and body empowerment as the foundational tool of social justice, whose content reaches over 1 million people monthly. Sonya shares her work and activism across the US, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands. Sonya has been seen, heard, and read on HBO, BET, MTV, TV One, NPR, PBS, CNN, Oxygen Network, The New York Times, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Today.com, Huffington Post, Vogue Australia, Shape.com, Ms. Magazine and many more. She has shared stages with such luminaries as the late Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Sonia Sanchez and others. In 2016, Sonya was a guest of the Obama White House, where she spoke about TBINAA’s work at the intersection of LGBTQIAA+ issues and disability justice. Sonya currently resides between California and New Zealand where she is an inaugural fellow in the Edmund Hilary Fellowship for global impact change makers. You can learn more about her radical self-love work at www.sonyareneetaylor.com and  www.thebodyisnotanapology.com.

Today we get real and talk about what radical self-love is (what it might not be) and how to do the work.

It’s a beautiful conversation that I’m ecstatic to share with you, so snuggle in and enjoy!

First week in February and we’re killin’ it (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself lol!).

This week, we’re continuing the impromptu “series” on all things body care with the incredible Luca Page. Luca has been a personal trainer living and loving in Oakland for over five years. After falling in love with working out, they wanted to share that passion with anyone who wanted to find it. As a queer person of color, they wanted to be able to open and run a gym for the LGTBQ/POC/Body Positive community. With the help and support of their community in Oakland, this dream became a possibility and Radically Fit was born. They are so grateful to be able to serve the community by doing something they truly love to do while reshaping people’s view of what “being fit” looks like. 

It’s all about empowerment and Luca helps us reconnect with that in this week’s episode.

 Enjoy!

We’re starting out today with a little blast from the past. I cannot get this song out of my head and while it could be worse….it could be a lot better lol! So as I type I’m listening to NOFX way too loud and being transported back to my teenage years and liking the view from here waaaaaayyyyyy better. 

I digress….

It’s Monday, so that means another amazing guest that’s helping us (me) human and show up to conversations that often feel really complicated. This week we are joined by the incredible Tiana Dodson who is a body liberation coach and founder of One Beautiful Yes. She’s here to destroy the belief that you have to be thin to be happy and healthy and is starting a new conversation around health -- one that acknowledges that health is holistic, personal, and that being fat and being healthy do not have to be mutually exclusive. I’ve been coming back to her words a lot over the last couple of weeks and I’m honoured to get share them with all of you. 

Thanks for being here on this last Monday in January – We made it!!!!

Tiana’s Links!

Website: One Beautiful Yes
Instagram: @IAmTianaDodson
Facebook: @TianaTheCoach
Twitter: @OneBeautifulYes

Omgosh YESSSS!!!! Nurtured. is BACK!!

It took me a bit longer to get back here than anticipated and honestly, I feel a bit like one of those beautifully scraggly bears after they come out of hibernation. I feel awkward at the mic, am experiencing being really outside of myself during interviews, and am having just all-around thoughts of “wtf am I even doing”???!!! Thankfully we get to kick off season two with this sweet little episode that I recorded back in November with a soul who means a lot to me so it feels like the kindest way to get back into the swing of things.

I feel truly honoured to share with all of you, the conversation I had with the incredible Max Backer on all things enneagram. Perhaps this work is second nature to you, or perhaps you’ve stopped reading this and are googling what on earth enneagram is…either way…this episode is a must for anyone wanting to dive a little deeper into the personality and to add a new tool to their ever expanding tool kit.

Max Backer is a former professor and performance poet from Ithaca NY and above all, a type 4 to the bitter end. They were a 2012 Lambda Fellow in Poetry under Jewelle Gomez and Dorothy Allison and most recently delivered a Ted Talk entitled: no one has imagined us: the gender non-binary experience. 

As the Experience Manager for Tempest, an online recovery platform, they use non-traditional sobriety frameworks such as the enneagram and birth charts to help folks find their way home.

So welcome back! Sooooo excited we’re starting another season and most of all, I’m thankful that you’re back here with me <3

It’s here! The last episode of the first season and I could not have been more honoured to have had the opportunity to share this space with the incredible Pixie Lighthorse.

I have admired Pixie’s work since the moment a copy of Prayers of Honoring was gifted to me and her words are a constant in both my personal and professional practice. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so seen, held and known in the pages of a book before, but they have a transformative essence about them and I encourage you all to take some time to get to know her incredible work.

Cherie Dawn Carr writes as Pixie Lighthorse to honor the unheard voices of her Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw ancestors.

She’s the author of the Prayers of Honoring series, written to restore the bonds between people and nature while healing spiritual trauma. She recently wrote Goldmining the Shadows: Honoring the Medicine of Wounds, the companion to her 2017 book, Boundaries & Protection: Honoring Self, Honoring Others.

She has created over forty-five online educational courses applying integrative transformative practice, animal and plant studies, and the Medicine Circle. Visual Quest, a painting course developed for online and live audiences to bring deeper meaning to creative processes.

She found that teaching and talking to people about spirituality is challenging while we are possessed by our wounds, shadow, binary perceptions, boundaries violations, religious trauma and collective colonial violations. Her books aim to help individuals sort through the influences that block their connection to greater sources of peace and wisdom.

As I mention on this episode, I’m taking a bit of a break but will be back with some AMAZING episodes for season two in early 2020. Thank you all, have a safe ride into the end of 2019. 

Hello and Happy December!!! I don’t know about you all, but I’m crawling across the finish line of this decade and having to be really REALLY intent on how I’m going to take care of myself in the last few weeks of this year. I always start out with good intentions in January, but by month 12 when the days are short and the nights are soooooooo long, I’m done. 

I was so glad to sit and chat with the absolutely f$%king incredible Marlee Grace last week and I couldn’t wait to post this episode so as I mentioned to her, the turnaround on this was a personal best, because I just wanted you all to hear it so much! 

Marlee Grace is a dancer, writer, artist, and shape maker. She wrote a book called How to Not Always Be Working : a toolkit for creativity and radical self care as well as zines about sobriety and phone addiction. She teaches improvisation as a dance form in real life, online classes on art making and rituals, and sees one one clients who want to unblock their creativity and small business practices. 

She facilitates a project called CENTER that is an experiment unfolding in space and time that has a residency and an online shop. She also writes a weekly newsletter and registration for her four week online course Everything Is A Sunset is currently open (so get in there!!!!).

Check her out on Instagram at marleeegrace and personalpractice

Come snuggle in and listen to this fabulous human talk about tending to our beautiful selves and how to lean into some of the places that might feel hard. 

Enjoy!