Rooted Healing

Lindsay Branham is a revolutionary eco-doula, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and a social scientist, dedicated to leveraging media and technology to end human rights abuses and ecological disconnect.  She is the Founder of Novo film, which inspires imaginative solutions to seemingly insurmountable challenges, as well as a PhD student at Cambridge University exploring nature connectedness at the somatic, sensory level. She is a Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace and was named the inaugural Envision Social Good Fellow by the Independent Film Project and the United Nations.  Lindsay served as a media behaviour change specialist for UNICEF and Search for Common Ground, and was a freelance journalist for CNN and the BBC.

In this episode, we discuss a sensuous, erotic kind of deep ecology, the power of narrative in reshaping social repair, healing chronic illness through trees and interconnectivity, and Lindsay's new book on its way, 'Heartwood'. 

References

• They Came at Night - Novo Film
• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Links

• Learn more about Earth Medicine, our psilocybin retreat in the Netherlands.
• Grab the last spot on Forestlings
• Dribble worthy forestalling feasts on Chippy's insta
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Jill Purce is a renowned voice teacher, Family Constellations therapist and author, who pioneered the international sound healing movement through her rediscovery of ancient vocal techniques and the spiritual potential of the voice as a magical instrument for healing and meditation.  Her 1974 book ‘The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul’ was a seminal influence, helping inspire the birth of the modern labyrinth movement. The BBC made an hour-long documentary film about Jill and her work called More Ways Than One: The Mystic Spiral.  She produced over 30 books as General Editor of the Thames and Hudson Art and Imagination series, which pioneered a thematic approach to the spiritual and psychological meanings of the art of different cultures.  

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With thanks to Mike Howe and Chris Park for the music in this episode, as well as Jill Purce for the overtone chanting snippets.

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As a founding member of YES&: Conscious Living, Lawrence Joye co-curates and runs events and retreats as well as offering 1:1 and Group Developmental Coaching.  He is an initiate of the ManKind Project and offers Men's Coaching programmes and workshops as well as co-hosting Menspedition Retreats, which involve pilgrimage and rites of passage as a crusade into the depths and magnificence of our collective and individual masculinity. 

Lawrence has been facilitating The Work That Reconnects for a number of years and is excited to be weaving it into the spaces he creates for men. He finds deep fulfilment in his work supporting groups and individuals to deeply meet themselves and others, cultivating more trust, joy and reverence for life. 

Lawrence currently lives with his family at Cae Mabon in Gwynedd, where he hosts and co-facilitates Men's Retreats as well as managing other in-house projects.

This conversation spans men’s work, healing the masculine, rebuilding reverence for the hearth and exploring the often overlooked transition into fatherhood. 

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With thanks to Mike Howe and Chris Park for the music in this episode.

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Kirra Swenerton M.S. is an edge-walker, healing artist and scientist. Kirra teaches nature reverence, ritual and restoration ecology, bridging the worlds of science and the sacred, merging rigour and ethics with herbal wisdom and ancestral traditions, uplifting vulnerable creatures and revitalising wild places.  Kirra specialises in land and water tending, deposession and curse unravelling, plant medicine and psychedelics, dreamwork and ceremony and regularly speaks, teaches and writes about biocultural conservation of entheogenic plants and fungi, with a focus on Peyote and Sonoran Desert toad habitat protection. Kirra upholds the traditions of her British, Irish, Armenian and Italian ancestors and is an initiate in Vedic and Norse spiritual lineages. Kirra serves as the custodian of two salmon-bearing creeks in the mountains of Mendocino, California and frequently travels to the San Francisco Bay Area. You can connect with Kirra at rootwisdom.com or at the Atihana Nature Preserve.

References

Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund
Grow Medicine

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With thanks to Mike Howe, Chris Park and Dorrie Joy for the music in this episode.

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Elisa Fusi is an Italian molecular biologist, visionary herbalist and writer, with a research focus on human pathology, mycology, neuroscience and ecology.   With an ongoing investigation on folk medicine, ancestral rituals and indigenous cultures all over the world, Elisa has studied and lived with different indigenous groups in Madagascar and across Central and South America.  She later obtained a diploma in Mayan Medicine issued by the Mayan Medicine Institute of Guatemala.

After a near-death experience her quest for a more complete understanding of human consciousness became stronger.  She founded an environmental organization called You Are Home and later in 2012 she created Alquimia, an educational centre  promoting alternative teachings on herbalism, shamanism and alchemy in Costa Rica.

Elisa is also a PNEI (PsychoNeuroEndocrineImmunology) practitioner and Psycho-oncologist offering advice, resources, courses, and support to people with cancer and autoimmune disorders at her open clinic in Costa Rica.

In this episode, Elisa discusses the patterns of illness and the key insights from her extensive research and practice with chronic disease.  She discusses the ancestral approach to healing disease through altered states of consciousness and the initiations one can take to become an animistic healer.

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With thanks to Mike Howe, Ojhroy and Chris Park for the music in this episode.

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Violeta Abitia is an artist, energy healer and reiki master who leads reiki courses and children’s art and mindfulness programmes in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico.  Violeta seeks to deconstruct the patterns that take us away from what she calls the most sacred experience granted to every human being on this planet: "Awakening".

Woven into this episode is music from Miguel Angel Sui Sanz, who is an indigenous musician who busks in San Cristobal de las Casas.  This episode is a nostalgic taste of a chapter in Mexico, finally reaching ears after a year and a half in the archive. We hope it brings you a joyful and nourishing taste of Violeta's wisdom and Miguel's heartfelt melodies.

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With thanks to Mike Howe and Miguel Angel Sui Sanz for their music contributions.

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Nathalie Nahai is an expert in psychology, persuasive tech & human behaviour, drawing upon a rich background in psychology, web design and the arts, to offer a unique vantage point from which to examine the complex challenges we face today. Her best-selling book: Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion has been adopted as the go-to manual by business leaders and universities alike, and her new book, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”.  Whether speaking to audiences of thousands, or leading executive roundtables for private clients, Nathalie’s ability to ignite conversation and offer tools and strategies with which to ethically harness human potential, has helped countless organisations transform how they approach business.

Nathalie is the host of The Hive Podcast, enquiring into our relationship with technology, one another and the natural world.  You can find Nathalie’s interview with me, which was episode 106. CEREMONY, SONG & BELONGING: REKINDLING RELATIONSHIP IN A FRANTIC WORLD.  Nathalie is also a spectacular multidisciplinary artist and the second half of this conversation offers a rare glimpse into Nathalie’s creative world, where we’ve woven in one of her original songs, which goes straight to the core of existence itself.  Explore her creative works. This is such a powerful conversation spanning what it really means to be human and how the technological world poses such nuanced, thought provoking questions for us to explore, especially with the rise of AI in the arts. 

Learn more about The Digital Age: Understanding & Reclaiming Systems of Power

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Thank you to Mike Howe, Ojhro and Chris Park for the music in this episode.

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A Spring Equinox episode to inspire new beginnings and plant seeds of change... Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Network and Transition Town Totnes, and author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently ‘From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want’.  He is an Ashoka Fellow, has spoken at TED Global and at several TEDx events, and appeared in the French film phenomenon ‘Demain‘.  He is a keen gardener, a founder of the New Lion Brewery in Totnes (an example of 'REconomy'), and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project.  Rob hosts the podcast ‘From What If to What Next‘, inviting imaginative thinkers to travel in a time machine to 2030 and create a visceral, tangible, innovative sense of a greener, more integrated future, where he champions collective imagination.  

Rob shows us that rapid, radical and resilient change can happen. It is possible and here are some ideas, solutions and ways to create a greener future joyfully.

Recommended reading:
The Entangled Activist by Anthea Lawson

Join us at ANCESTRAL and explore our other gatherings, episodes and website.

Gift forward by becoming a patron. Bonus content comes out with every episode alongside giveaways and discounts.

Thank you to Mike Howe and Chris Park for the music in this episode.

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Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology.  It would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.  Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine invites masculine mythic and religious archetypes into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge, rerooting them back into their original ecology.

Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Sophie leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths.  Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be out this year.  Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God and Those Other Flowers to Come and The Approach.  We talk about the renaissance of animism, rewilding our cycles and selves into the landscape, and redefining health or healing through the lens of chronic illness and ecology.  We also touch on queer ecology and the context behind her wonderful books.

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The Rooted Healing podcast is hosted by Veronica Stanwell, with thanks to  Chris Park and Mike Howe for their ongoing music contributions.

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One of the world's leading environmental campaigners, Alastair McIntosh is an Isle of Lewis-raised writer, broadcaster and campaigning academic best known for his work on land reform on Eigg, in helping to stop the Harris superquarry; also for developing human ecology as an applied academic discipline in Scotland. He holds a PhD on liberation theology and contemporary Scottish land reform from the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster and is a Fellow of Scotland's Centre for Human Ecology, as well as a regular presenter for Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Scotland.

His book, Soil and Soul, has been described as “world-changing” by George Monbiot. Other books include Riders on the Storm: the Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being, Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition,  Poacher's Pilgrimage: an Island Journey, Spiritual Activism: Leadership as Service, Radical Human Ecology: Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches and Rekindling Community: Connecting People, Environment and Spirituality amongst many other published works.

Alastair’s work seeks to connect people, place and spirituality into a more full understanding of community. He sees global crises as crises of the human condition requiring evolution that is more cultural than political, economic or technical. Spirituality for him is “that which gives life” and specifically, “life as love made visible.” As a Quaker, he approaches this from both Christian and interfaith perspectives. He is also a founding director of the GalGael Trust working with local people in hard-pressed circumstances.

Explore our gatherings.

Join us at Earth Medicine.

Sign up for our free day-long Summer Solstice ceremony.

Get in touch with music contributions.

Join our Patreon community from £1 a month.

Explore Rooted Healing.

The Rooted Healing podcast is hosted by Veronica Stanwell, with thanks to Dorrie Joy, Chris Park and Mike Howe for their ongoing music contributions.

Support the show