The Becoming Podcast

I'm really excited to bring you my conversation with Molly Millwood, Ph.D., today.

Molly's book, To Have and To Hold: Motherhood, Marriage and the Modern Dilemma, is, hands down, one of the best books on matrescence and maternal mental health that I've ever read....and I've definitely read them ALL. We share so many perspectives on this rite of passage in women's lives that I knew I had to have her on the show, and our time together definitely did not disappoint.

First, let me tell you a little bit about Molly. She is a licensed psychologist, author, speaker, singer-songwriter, mother, wife, and devoted advocate for women's mental health and wellbeing. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Montana and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University Medical Center. After balancing (or more accurately, never quite balancing) an academic career with a part-time psychotherapy practice for over 15 years, Molly now practices therapy full time. She works with adult individuals and couples, helping women rediscover themselves within the metamorphosis of motherhood and helping couples of all sorts improve their relational health.

If you are a mother – especially if you're a mother in the first few years of your mothering journey, this episode is for you. Here are some of the things that Molly and I talked about:

> The idea of losing yourself in motherhood, and Molly's personal experience of that....and also the opposite: of unearthing and reclaiming parts of herself after she became a mother that she didn't realize she had lost.

> Both Molly and I share our own stories of connecting with a deeply creative part of ourselves in motherhood.

> What the "modern dilemma" is and how Molly believes mothering is harder now than it has ever been.

> Postpartum mental health, the postpartum depression paradox and normalizing the challenging aspects of matrescence.

> The double-edged sword of social media for new mothers, the "mask of motherhood" and performative vulnerability.

> The challenges that our intimate partnerships face when a baby arrives, how parenting widens the gender gap and is often hardest for people who've strived for equality in their relationships.

I hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed speaking with Molly. We had an instant connection over so many shared ideas, which is obvious in this super-delightful conversation. Mamas, get ready to feel a lot less alone and a lot more normal.

It's my great pleasure to have Kimberly Ann Johnson join me for a rich and wide-ranging conversation on The Becoming Podcast this month.

I've been following Kimberly's work since her seminal book, The Fourth Trimester, rocked the worlds of mothers and birth workers alike when it was released five years ago. Since then, I've come to view Kimberly as someone who sees the connections between seemingly unrelated things and brings us insight and wisdom from intersections in the worlds of birth + postpartum wellness, somatics, sex and trauma.

Here's a little more about Kimberly: she is a Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, yoga teacher, postpartum advocate, and single mom. Working hands-on in integrative women's health and trauma recovery for more than a decade, she helps women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, and sexual boundary violations. Kimberly is the author of the Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use It for Good, as well as the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester, and the upcoming co-authored book with Stephen Jenkinson, Reckoning. She is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast.

The conversation I had with Kimberly was so generously informative and thoughtful – I can't wait to share it with you.

We talked about:

> Kimberly's new book, Reckoning, co-authored with Stephen Jenkinson, on navigating grief in the times we're living in.

> How Kimberly's first book, The Fourth Trimester, was truly a roadmap for the rite of passage into motherhood….and also what she feels are the necessary next steps in our culture's approach to postpartum wellness.

> How female nervous systems are unique, and how Kimberly's recent book The Call of The Wild invites women to understand their nervous systems and learn what they need. Hint: it's not more deep breaths and hot baths.

> How learning the particular language of your nervous system allows you to experience deeper authenticity and power – even in circumstances, like birth, that are often vulnerable.

> "Hold it" moments, and how we can metabolize important moments in our lives, no matter how tiny or tectonic their impact.

Oh my friends, this month's episode of the Becoming Podcast is so special, in so many ways.

First of all, I'm just going to come right out and say it: this is one of those fangirl episodes where I reach out to someone I adore and whose work I've been following for many, many years, and cross my fingers. It was such an honour to have Amber say an enthusiastic YES to my request, and to then have such a beautifully connecting, heartfelt conversation together.

If you're not familiar with Amber and her work, here's what you should know:

Amber is an herbalist, homesteader, and podcaster who is caretaking two daughters, four cats, and seven chickens on an herb farm in Northern California. She helps her online community remember what it is to be human upon the earth through earth and ancestor connection. Amber is the creator of the Mythic Medicinals line of herbal and mushroom medicines and the host of the Medicine Stories podcast.

The conversation I had with Amber was rich, meandering and deeply thought-provoking. We talked about:

> Amber's journey into motherhood and then into herbalism, and how that naturally led to a curiosity about ancestral lifeways

> Evolutionary mismatch theory, and how modern life is both burning us out and waking us up

> What it's like to parent in these times, where we often lack the traditional ways of knowing, community support and rites of passage (for us as mothers and for our children) that we need to guide us

> What it means to reclaim deep self- and inner-knowing as a way to navigate these challenging times with more ease, competence and integrity

This episode covers so very many of my favourite things, from herbalism and earth connection to mothering to rites of passage. I hope you enjoy the conversation I had with Amber as much as I did.

When I read Lisa Marchiano's new book, Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself, I knew I had to have her on the podcast.

Though I usually work with mothers who are traversing the initial few years of their mothering journey, I found Lisa's book deeply insightful and comforting for the mothering experiences that I'm currently having.

Let me tell you a little bit about Lisa:

Lisa Marchiano, LCSW is a writer and Jungian analyst in private practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the cohost and creator of the popular podcast This Jungian Life. She teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of Philadelphia, and lectures widely on Jungian topics. In addition to being the author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself, Lisa's writings have appeared in Quillette, The Journal of Analytical Psychology, and Psychological Perspectives, among other publications.

The conversation I had with Lisa spans so many topics, including:

> How a deeper sense of inner knowing is a gift that motherhood offers us, if we'll accept it

> How motherhood invites us to move into deeper self-authority

> How our relationships with our own mothers shift when we become mothers ourselves

> A new version of the well-known Selkie story that reframes it as a failed initiation, and shows us what a "successful" initiation into motherhood requires

> How losing yourself in motherhood is necessary, and not a bad thing at all

This is a powerful episode that I found so resonant to my own motherhood journey, and those of the mamas I support. I hope you are inspired and heartened by Lisa's wisdom.

Welcome back for another episode of The Becoming Podcast, friends!

I'm thrilled to bring you this deep and thought-provoking conversation with Shauna Janz.

Shauna is an educator, facilitator and ritualist at the crossroads of grief, trauma, embodiment and ancestral healing work. For the past 15 years she has worked in both private practice offering 1:1 support, and with national and international organizations offering trauma-informed facilitation training, grief literacy and curriculum development, and ancestral healing rituals to diverse audiences.

I wanted to have Shauna on the show because grief work continues to play a huge role in the work that I do: it's an inextricable part of what it means to traverse change in our lives.

Our conversation begins with Shauna's intimate insight into the grief journey that she's traversing right now. Relatedly, we talk about what we have "permission" to grieve. Shauna offers profound wisdom around the conditions and capacities that support us in our grieving process, as well as how grief can be an elder that ushers us into who we're becoming. We talk about the cultural influences on grief and who "gets" to grieve, and how to have agency with what can be an all-consuming experience. We continue on in a conversation around somatics and embodiment, the loss of community witnesses for our grief, and how we pathologize grief.

A big welcome to this month's Becoming Podcast guest, Mara Glatzel!

Mara and I have known each other for years, and I was really excited for our conversation. It did not disappoint.

As many of you know, self-tending is one of the Seven Core Competencies of Radical Transformation – those skills and capacities that we need to grow in order to traverse times of change in our lives with more ease. Given that Mara is the QUEEN of all things tending to your needs, I just had to have her on the show.

Let me tell you a little bit about Mara. Mara is an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host. She is a needy human who helps other needy humans stop abandoning themselves and start reclaiming their humanity through embracing their needs and honouring their natural energy cycles. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it and she is here to help you believe in yourself as much as she believes in you.

Our conversation was rich and lively. Mara shared the way that she thinks about self-care and tending, and how we need to shift from a prescriptive model of what "good self-care" looks like and into learning how to recognize what we requireto honour our humanity and keep being the humans we want to be.

We talked about "thin times" – when we're going through transformation or challenge – and how to grow our capacity through meaningful tending.

We also talk about honouring our humanity by asking for what you need in work and caregiving contexts. As I listened back to our conversation in the editing process, I realized that both Mara and I have the privilege of being able to (even if we don't always) structure our work in a way that allows us to take time off when we need to, and that's reflected in our conversation. Even if this isn't the case for you, I hope maybe you can feel inspired to be audacious in the supports you feel you can ask for (and maybe some of the ones you feel you can't, just for good measure).

Finally, we muse on the idea that maybe seeking a more human way of living and meeting our needs actually might be the rite of passage that underlies them all, and that the ability to centre your needs will never be more important than it is now, as the world becomes an increasingly challenging place to live.

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!

On this month's podcast, I had the great pleasure of connecting with Carmen Spagnola. I first learned of Carmen's work quite a few years ago now, and since then have taken a number of her programs. I value her as a teacher and guide also exploring what it means to traverse rites of passage and other initiatory experiences, as well as a fellow multipotentialite who sees the throughlines and patterns between seemingly unrelated things and, in so doing, brings us ideas and concepts that are inspiring and new. Here's a little more about Carmen: she works at the intersection of attachment, somatic attunement, and personal/collective trauma. People find her because something is collapsing within or around them – their relationship, self-identity, ecosystem, or something else. Carmen is a trauma recovery practitioner, clinical hypnotherapist, attachment support worker and teacher, podcast host since 2014, Wilderness Quest guide, Le Cordon Bleu (Paris)-trained chef, rose and vegetable gardener, witch of no particular affiliation, and animist, among other things. She has taught intuition development workshops since 2011, including her popular year-long program, The Numinous School, which ran for 7 years online. Her courses, workshops, and live classes are now found all in one place in The Numinous Network. Her book, The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year,will be released on October 18, 2022, by Countryman Press | W.W.Norton. In this episode, Carmen shares with us the catalyzing moment that brought her to her knees – and to the way she lives and shows up in the world, as well as in her work, today. She talks about how she followed her childhood spiritual curiosity into learning about and supporting people from a rites of passage lens through ritual and initations. Carmen shares with us the Four Shields of Human Development model of transformation that she uses as a framework for this work. Then she dives into a Quest story that beautifully illustrates how this framework shows up in people's lived experiences. We finish our conversation with Carmen sharing a bit about her upcoming cookbook, which I literally •cannot wait• to have on my shelf! I loved this thoughtful, rich and meandering conversation with Carmen and I hope you do too!

On this month's podcast, I had the great pleasure of connecting with Carmen Spagnola.  I first learned of Carmen's work quite a few years ago now, and since then have taken a number of her programs.  I value her as a teacher and guide also exploring what it means to traverse rites of passage and other initiatory experiences, as well as a fellow multipotentialite who sees the throughlines and patterns between seemingly unrelated things and, in so doing, brings us ideas and concepts that are inspiring and new. Here's a little more about Carmen: she works at the intersection of attachment, somatic attunement, and personal/collective trauma. People find her because something is collapsing within or around them – their relationship, self-identity, ecosystem, or something else. Carmen is a trauma recovery practitioner, clinical hypnotherapist, attachment support worker and teacher, podcast host since 2014, Wilderness Quest guide, Le Cordon Bleu (Paris)-trained chef, rose and vegetable gardener, witch of no particular affiliation, and animist, among other things. She has taught intuition development workshops since 2011, including her popular year-long program, The Numinous School, which ran for 7 years online. Her courses, workshops, and live classes are now found all in one place in The Numinous Network. Her book, The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year, will be released on October 18, 2022, by Countryman Press | W.W.Norton. In this episode, Carmen shares with us the catalyzing moment that brought her to her knees – and to the way she lives and shows up in the world, as well as in her work, today.  She talks about how she followed her childhood spiritual curiosity into learning about and supporting people from a rites of passage lens through ritual and initations.  Carmen shares with us the Four Shields of Human Development model of transformation that she uses as a framework for this work.  Then she dives into a Quest story that beautifully illustrates how this framework shows up in people's lived experiences.  We finish our conversation with Carmen sharing a bit about her upcoming cookbook, which I literally •cannot wait• to have on my shelf! I loved this thoughtful, rich and meandering conversation with Carmen and I hope you do too!

Rachael Maddox is a trauma resolution educator, coach and guide who's helped hundreds of humans move from sexual, complex or developmental trauma into pleasure, power and trust-filled relationships.

I really wanted to have Rachael on the show today to talk about the possibility of trauma resolution as a rite of passage. Rachael is a gifted map-maker for the terrain of embodied healing and of what it means to alchemize traumatic experiences and wounds into power and potential.

Our conversation starts with Rachael's own story of taking up the initiatory call to heal. We talk about how taking up that call, for so many of us, asks us to move from a place of "rebellion and blame" to "responsibility and creativity." Rachael shares with us, in detail, a map of embodied healing based in nervous system regulation and orienting to pleasure, joy, and "our natural blueprint of health." She also gives us a brief glimpse into the archetype-based model of trauma resolution she has developed. (It is brilliant, and I totally want to know more!). Finally, we talk about what it means to rest + digest after a time of major change – that it is natural for us to contract after a period of expansion, and that this can be challenging in a culture that doesn't make it easy to rest and recalibrate.

Rachael generously shares ideas and resources throughout our interview that I know you will be able to use in your own life. Make sure you grab a pen and journal for this one! I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

The final episode of Season 3 of The Becoming Podcast is a conversation with Jen Berlingo, midlife midwife extraordinaire.

Jen is a coach, licensed professional counselor, a nationally registered art therapist, a master-level Reiki practitioner, an author, an artist and a witch. She speaks, writes and teaches about midlife emergence, including her own world-rocking experience of upending her entire life as she entered her forties.

It's obvious why I had to have her on the show, right?

Our conversation kicks off with The Ani Difranco Songs That Changed Our Lives, and it just gets better from there, people. Jen shares so much wisdom, including the astrological significance of our 42nd year of life, and the common themes she has found woven throughout so many women's experience of midlife. We talk about how to manage the fear of Doing The Thing, and how women's transformations happen relationally and in relationship, not usually as a result of the traditionally-valued experience of "leaving the village" on a quest and returning changed. Jen talks specifically about how she traversed the midlife decision that changed everything for her through showing up for deep and deeply uncomfortable conversations. We talked about how answering the call to midlife emergence is a form of lineage healing, and she shared how intuition and embodiment supported her through this massive change.

This conversation is so rich and so full of courage: it's a must-listen for anyone, especially anyone who is approaching or navigating through midlife right now.