Soul + Practice: Raw Conversations & Real Practices with Kathy Escobar & Phyllis Mathis

Weaving webs of community, healing, mutual aid, earth wisdom, and other practices that help us make it in this harsh world are needed now more than ever. Angie Fadel joins us this week, sharing some of what she’s learning and practicing in this season of her story and how small contributions—what can feel like just a drop—matter. Angie’s based in Portland and is a spiritual director, meditative archer, and cultivator of healing spaces in nature. More at angiefadel.com

We love making new friends, and Amanda Udis-Kessler, author, former sociology professor, songwriter, and anti-oppression trainer, helped us gain some clarity and hope around living out ethics of flourishing despite the complete lack of ethics at the highest level of our land right now. With practical, honest, and clear ways to stay connected to our truest values and live them out despite the pull to go low, Amanda is a voice we need in the world right now! More at her website at amandaudiskessler.com.

There’s so much more going on in the sky than most of us are aware of! In this fun and eye-opening episode our friend Polly Baker, who’s a spiritual director who integrates astrology in an incredibly unique and grounding way, brings some incredible knowledge to the forces at work in the sky right now that we’re feeling collectively while also offering some clear and tangible practices to consider as we navigate this season of our nation’s and world’s history. Learn more about Polly’s cosmic direction work at polly-baker.com.

In this check-in episode, we process how we can stay grounded and clear when we’re constantly being gaslit with alternate facts and realities. While this is happening on a national level right now, many of us have experienced it in relationship with others, too; yeah, it’s exhausting.

When we were thinking about this season and what we needed, one of the first people that came to mind was our friend Nikki Kennedy. A trauma-therapist and community builder, she is a wise kindred and leader and we loved this conversation so much. So many gems for how we navigate these wild times, own the reality of this story, and grow in our capacity to care for ourselves and one another in simple accessible ways.

100 Episodes of Soul + Practice, what?!? What better way to honor it than with an amazing conversation with our friend Tara Taylor, who is a volunteer docent at Armstrong Woods in Northern California and incredible nature-based facilitator and guide. As we center this season on resourcing, there’s so much we can learn from the redwoods and we hope everyone listening grabs something we need right now. They are incredible teachers.

Whoa, can you say 2025 and what unhealthy unchecked destructive power looks like in action? What we are experiencing right now in the US is an age-old story but it is illuminated in new and horridly painful ways. In this episode, Kathy shares a little bit about her newest book “Turning Over Tables: A Lenten Call to Disrupting Power” that released a week before the Inauguration and we process some things about power together.

We need all the help we can get and some consistent, clear practices for our mental health really matter right now. In this episode, Phyllis fleshes out some of what she wrote in a recent substack, and it’s packed with all kinds of tangible and much-needed practices and reminders.

Well, we're back. A lot of horrid has happened since we were last together at the end of 2024 and we feel clear we need as much resourcing as we can. In this episode we process something Phyllis wrote on her Substack about the Existential Flu, a reality that can overtake us in these unprecedented, tumultuous, traumatic times. So many gems in there! Looking forward to being together more as we tend to our soul and practice our way forward, together.

Our last episode of 2024 is about 2024! Remembering, celebrating, grieving, laughing through 6 simple questions we both reflect on and hope that others maybe consider, too! It's good to pause and look back before moving forward.