Friends! Here’s a D&M (Dharma & Meditation) conversation I recorded with mindfulness meditation teacher and founder of Australian Parents for Climate Action Suzie Brown while visiting Narara Eco Village last week. 

If you’ve ever felt anxious, unsure how to process difficult/obstinate emotions, or sad for no reason, this episode will provide ample tools for stilling the mind and relating to yourself – and the world – with kindness. 

On that note, I start the ep with an emo travel diary entry, and how a snaggy creek helped me see my internal struggles in a whole new light.

IN THIS CONVO

🕊️ When you feel sad for no reason despite the trappings of success

🕊️ Can we *really* choose happiness?

🕊️ The pleasant/unpleasant emotional pinball machine

🕊️ The magic of noticing

🕊️ Name it to tame it

🕊️ Kindfulness

🕊️ How to establish a non-militant meditation habit

🕊️ Rejigging negativity bias

🕊️ The R.A.I.N practice for difficult emotions

🕊️ Dharma + ecodharma explained

🕊️ How interbeing can solve the polycrisis

🕊️ Long Shower Syndrome

🕊️ Resource guilt

🕊️ Parents for Climate!

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Insight Meditation Australia

Sydney Insight Meditators

Suzie’s teaching profile

Banyan Together

Weekly online (by donation) Sky Sangha Meditation gathering

Australian Parents for Climate Action!

Give Suzie a hoy at [email protected]

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It's the RESKILLIENCE ROADTRIP where I'm intercepting all sorts of good sorts along Australia's east coast!

First up is Ceilidh Meo who teaches no less than 80 apocalypse skills (!!!) while also growing olives, shoring up the food system and being casually shamanic.

This is a ROMP of a convo that is INSPIRING ME TO USE CAPS. Such fun. Such depth. 

I also share about the caravan park we've just checked into.

🔥 WITHIN 

GEEK OUT ON MICRO NICHE OLIVE PRESSING

An antidote to the olive oil crisis

Cooperation is not the same as collaboration!

POMMUS

The gross truth about imported olive oil

THE FIVE C FRAMEWORK

When knowledge ain't power

Systems design thinking for avoiding monumental fuck ups

WHY 40s ARE THE BEST DECADE

Yay for confirmation bias!

Loyal soliders of the psyche

Birth story REWRITE

Learning types

Manifestation vs. MAGIC

Where does the need to know everything come from?

Do more of what you’re already good at, or challenge your comfort zone?

Not here to consume, but to create!

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Connect with Ceilidh ~ CIVILITAS

Ceilidh's olive oil ~ Apulia Grove

The Long Road Olive Coop

Art exhibition + workshops ~ Ancient Roots in the New World

Mel Robbins ~ The Let Them Theory

School of Shamanic Womancraft 

Happen Films ~ The New Peasants screening tour

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It's a Jordan + Catie double bill for the Season Four finale 🎊  

Join us for a fireside D&M as two humans just tryna digest the microplastic casserole of modernity… and make something better. 

You’ll hear about my secret storytelling anxiety, Jord’s new award nominated film, my other boyfriends, law breaking, roadkill harvesting, why we took the Good Death-i-vore Pledge, sacred hunting, how to really give a shit about your ecosystem AAAAAND turning baboozlement into useful skills. 

⚠️ A warning for sensitive ears, we swear a lot in this episode.

LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

Jord + Happen Films' newest doco ~ The New Peasants

The New Peasants Australian screening tour (come meet us!)

Film ~ In My Blood It Runs

Film ~ Honeyland

Best show ever ~ Bruce Parry’s TRIBE

Cal Newport 

Richard Telford’s DIY mini biochar kiln

Dylan Graves’ biochar podcast ~ Char Chit Chat

The Do with Su zine ~ Su Dennett + Catie Payne (inc. the Good Death-i-vore Pledge)

David Holmgren

Bill Mollison

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I share a recipe for de-zombifying your life before chatting with Imogen Ive, Director at Mittagundi – a remote 520 acre farm and off grid education centre built by and for young folks in the high country. This convo is a reminder that sometimes hard is good, together is better and a pack horse, tent and sense of adventure beats air conditioned comfort any day.

In the conversational cauldron:

🍯 Setting up a working farm and outdoor ed centre in the middle of nowhere

🍯 Living without modern comforts, electric tools, phones or watches

🍯 Wilderness adventures for young folks from all walks of life

🍯 An oh-snap safety vs. risk reframe

🍯 The dilution of outdoor ed in schools

🍯 How to facilitate confidence and capacity in young people

🍯 Why we don’t try new things, and how to hack our fear of failure

🍯 Bringing off grid flavours to the urban palate

LINKY POOS 

Mittagundi Outdoor Education Centre

Mittagundi on Instagram

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✏️ Leave Reskillience a written review like a big old legend ✏️

Shrug off the cloak of secrecy and awkwardness around death with palliative care nurse Pippa White. I’ve been wanting to bring a death convo to the airwaves for ages, because there’s a huge imbalance between light/dark, above/below, waxing/waning, growth/decay, possessing/relinquishing energies in our culture (and I'm the first person to perpetuate it). Shout out to everyone who sent frank and thoughtful questions for Pippa to answer – you’ll hear them towards the end of the ep.

Pippa White is a palliative care nurse and death care advocate and educator in the Anthroposophical tradition. We discuss:

🖤 What is Anthroposophic philosophy?

🖤 Death care rituals, balms and vigils

🖤 Windows into the reality of spirit from people in transition

🖤 Why to “do the work” at the eleventh hour

🖤 Soothing suffering without drugs

🖤 How painful is death?

🖤 Different ways to relate to pain

🖤 Small, slow solutions to dying (tiny local end of life retreats)

🖤 Pet euthanasia, yay or nay?

🖤 How to deal with loved ones in denial?

🖤 Can you make a living in end of life care?

🖤 How do you document/cherish a life?

🖤 What folks find difficult when dying?

🖤 Grieving to breathe and to love

🖤 Birth and death thresholds

LINKY POOS 🧙‍♀️

Pippa White

Anthroposophical Society Australia

What is Advance Care Planning?

Wedgetail Retreat

Martín Prechtel

Stephen Jenkinson

[poem] Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas

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Do not listen to this unless you want to reawaken your dormant farming desires and throw yourself into a life on the land. I tell a story about being a grub, before having an animated chat with rural woman of the year Katie Finlay about staunching the loss of small farms in Australia and supporting emerging growers to step up – even and especially if they don’t own land. (What even is land ownership?) 

🍎 AND ALSO

Katie and Hugh Finlay are black belt orchardists whose online program Grow Great Fruit is just brilliant for anyone who wants to obtain a yield from fruit trees (with an organic and holistic tilt, of course). It gives me great joy to connect you with their work.

This is their Dream Orchard Masterclass starting REAL SOON on June 12.

🧙‍♀️LINKY POOS

Grow Great Fruit

Harcourt Organic Farming Coop

Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) 

Tess Sellar ~ Sellar Dairy 

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It’s colder than a penguin’s big toe here in Djaara Country, so we’re cosying up by the fire for a yarn with Gareth Devenish. I call Gareth the Snoop Dogg of permaculture, he calls himself a sovereign man walking in Country, subject to natural lore, seeking a connection with the cosmos. Call off your obligations for the next hour because Gareth’s crackling mix of irreverence and truth telling is something really special.

🔥 How to yarn

🔥 Why land ownership is a furphy

🔥 Native vs. exotic trees and colonial malaise

🔥 What is our responsibility to Country?

🔥 Nomadic agriculture

🔥 Quantum physics, free will and a post-truth era

🔥 Useful jobs in the time of AI

🔥 Why peacemaking with first nations people should be our #1 priority

🔥 Pay the rent!

🔥 Finding god in the compost heap

🔥 Does consciousness even exist?

🔥 Tips for planting and growing healthy trees

🔥 The best way to learn new skills

🔥 The scars which make us beautiful

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Gareth’s tree nursery ~ The Farm Tree Nursery (ships around Aus!)

Gareth’s email ~ [email protected]

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I tell a story about making bugger all money but feeling filthy rich, before being joined by the incredible Linda Cockburn (pronounced “Co’burn” cos it’s Scottish) who explains why Capitalism is a death cult, and ways to crowd it out with reciprocity. Ample brain fodder and fiery inspiration here, folks! 

We cover:

🪶 Being unmade by successive tragedies.

🪶 Quitting employment to work in the home economy.

🪶 Going six months without spending a dollar.

🪶 How to grow your own toilet paper!

🪶 Will politicians ever “solve” climate change?

🪶 Why you can’t question capitalism

🪶 How the growth imperative works

🪶 Changing the narrative through language

🪶 The debt treadmill for “developing” nations

🪶 The closest thing we’ve had to utopia in human history!

🪶 Old and new indigeneity through storytelling

🪶 Hitting bodily limits

🪶 How to get owwwfff the hamster wheel

🪶 Riches without an income

🪶 The Eudaimonia Index & Reciprocity

🪶 Black Soldier Fly Revolution!

🪶 How to share even when you’re a scoundrel only child like me

🪶 Why it feels great to give your best stuff away

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Linda’s books

The Quiet Revolution (basically why & how to decouple from the death cult of capitalism & start giving back to all life)

Eat My Shadow (hopeful and instructive collapse fiction!)

Living the Good Life

Linda’s articles in Organic Gardener magazine

A kickass essay by Linda ~ My Planet Saving Superpowers

Linda on Instagram

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann

Seed Freaks ~ open pollinated seeds Tasmania

David Holmgren’s RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future

Sound credit: Bruny Island Ambience by guyburns License: Attribution 4.0

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Hello! I have been away in the bush for three days and three nights with just a tarp, sleeping bag and water to my name. No tent, no pillow, no torch, NO BREAKFAST. Off the back of this deeply moving ritual (which I'll tell you about soon), I wanted to release this equally as moving and foresty interview with Tessa Campisi.

Tessa is a writer, poet, audio visual artist, activist and radio host who speaks with the timbre of an old growth tree and tells stories that will rustle your leaves. 

In this chat:

🌳 What it's like to live through a catastrophic flood

🌳 How anarchic networks can rise to meet a crisis, fast

🌳 What happens when forest conservationists are at loggerheads with traditional owners?

🌳 Strawman vs. steelman arguments

🌳 A new approach to deep listening to those you disagree with 

🌳 What traditional activism gets wrong and how to be a more effective change agent 

🌳 How and why to love the scraps of our beautiful, broken world

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS 

Tessa's home on the web

Tessa's (online) exhibition ~ Framings of Wombat Forest

Article of interest ~ Reflections on forest gardening by Cam Walker https://www.melbournefoe.org.au/galk_galk_dhelkunya

Paper of interest ~ History of Environmentalist-Indigenous alliances and conflicts

Essay of interest ~ The Trouble with Wilderness by William Cronon

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Me ranting about Couple Power and the Urban Nanna being brilliant. May all the single, neurospicy permies find ample inspiration in today’s interview with Anna Matilda! Teacher of traditional skills, crafts and non-judgey sustainability. Anna is a breath of fresh air in the stale bedchamber of the status quo, sharing openly about how she does permaculture solo, in the city, in a rental property, with limited energy and Captain Anxiety occasionally taking the wheel.

Mistakes as teachers

Out ya come, Captain Anxiety

Feeling out of step with the whole world

The stress and physical fallout of masking

Personal energy that can be budgeted

The Fuck It Wave

FYI: You don’t need a compost toilet or a goat

Guide Beside learning (Nanna education)

Is permaculture uniquely attractive to people on the spectrum?

For the single women renters!

Spoon Theory

Building community with a capital C

Giving and receiving

Banking energy and goodwill in people, in community

Community as forest

Skills as security

Mudhuts Theory

Revelling in knowing nothing

Can we change?

Swedish wisdom ~ lagom & mysig

Japanese wisdom ~ kintsugi & shishiko embroidery

🧙‍♀️ LINKY POOS

Anna’s new book is out now! Everyday Permaculture ~ Anna Matilda

The Urban Nanna’s on the interwebs

The Urban Nanna on Instagram

⭐ Reskillience on Patreon ⭐