The Dandelion Effect

Kara Ware has been on a 17-year journey with her son Zachary, who was diagnosed with Autism just before his third birthday. With this news came the advice from the doctor: “There is no treatment for Autism. Medicate him to help with tantrums, sign him up for speech therapy, take him home and keep him safe.” Suggestions like these are what more and more parents are hearing as Autism diagnoses skyrocket.

But, why?

This question became a beacon for Kara as she sat with her toddler, who was hitting his development milestones for 14 months then one day began regressing into pain, confusion and chaos that nobody could explain. She traveled the country, seeking out specialists and alternative practitioners, learning about the root causes of inflammation and toxicity that can lead to a person presenting with Autism symptoms. She was not ready to accept the status quo, and the long path she has walked with her son has resulted in not only the remission of Zachary’s Autism symptoms, but a greater sense of health, joy and purpose in her own life as well.

Her family is living proof that there is another way to approach this diagnosis–and that there’s a bigger red flag in our lifestyles and environment that is begging to be noticed. Our changing planet is having drastic effects on human health and our species is facing unprecedented challenges. Autism is the canary in the coal mine. An invitation to look deeper into our history, our food, water, air, stress. When it’s in the home, it’s an invitation to explore the entire family ecosystem, rather than view the situation as an isolated issue for one person.

Using the functional medicine model that she adopted, Kara outlines the steps to slowly and deliberately remove toxins from the body and home, deepen into family values and spiritual practices to pour energy into thoughts, words and emotions that are creating the environment for healing; and take simple steps with nutrition, supplementation, genetic testing and necessary medical interventions.

Personally, Kara  is the healthiest and clearest she's ever been—and so is Zach. Professionally, she’s using what she’s learned to help doctors shift their conventional practices into functional medicine models and partner with patients for greater health education and lasting outcomes. She is also a board certified health coach, yoga teacher and host and producer of Good Medicine on the Go Podcast. And her new venture this year brings her full circle to helping families use their time, energy and resources wisely on the long journey of healing and living with autism.

The information in this episode is for informational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Please always direct questions about your health to your professional health care provider.

Kara Ware Website
Hope for Healing Family Pediatrics

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Lauren Lewis is a CO-based yoga teacher, plant-based chef and culinary educator. She headed west from Pennsylvania in 1999 to attend The University of Colorado, Boulder, and quickly fell in love with the mountains, the community and the lifestyle. After college, Lauren attended the School of Natural Cookery, where she discovered the inherent spirit of food, recipes and skills that she’s used in her own healing journey as well as in her service to others.

This conversation is setting the bar high for the third season of the podcast. Lauren and I get very personal, making space for her to tell her story about her 15-year battle with bulimia, an eating disorder characterized by periods of binging and purging. This is the first time she has shared publicly about bulimia and the role it’s played in her life, as well as the first time I share about my relationship to food, body image and a period of undiagnosed anorexia or food controlling.

We talk about honoring the journey towards loving the bodies we have, the challenges we face in today’s society with comparison to unattainable ideals, the long and winding path we take to cherish the forms we are in, to respect them, to love them, and above all, to recognize that each and every one of us is sacred.

While we are not professionals or experts in this field, we are in fact experts of our own bodies and the stories that these bodies live through. I believe that sharing our experiences helps to de-stigmatize and de-shame topics that are otherwise taboo, and that’s what we’re doing today. None of it is medical advice or recovery advice. We are simply two women swapping stories and imagining into a better world where children and teens are supported on their paths.

Lauren Lewis Website
Lauren Lewis 2023 Feathered Pipe Retreat

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The Feathered Pipe Ranch is a world-renowned retreat center that hosts weeklong yoga and wellness workshops from June through September, and as of this recording, we are smack in the middle of the season. Every retreat is full of amazing people traveling from all parts of the country and even the world—yesterday I met a woman who traveled all the way from Brazil.

This year feels like a true reunion of humanity. People are open, vulnerable, eager to learn and willing to lean into friendship and healing. At least that’s what I’ve experienced in speaking with guests. A real presence that leaves me optimistic for our collective futures.

To celebrate midseason, we’re airing the "Best of Season Two” episode, a taster to hear pieces of all 12 episodes from our second podcast season, and invite you to go back and visit the ones that you missed over the last six months. Based on the analytics, I’m seeing that many new people are still finding and listening to season two, which is really incredible since most of the conversations really are timeless and worth checking out even while the podcast team takes the summer hiatus. 

The Dandelion Effect Podcast is a gentle reminder that inspiring and extraordinary people are out there doing good in the world. These conversations explore a range of topics including generational healing, veteran’s mental health, the law of attraction, food as a love language, sustainable building, ethical technology and mindfulness, energy medicine, adventure travel, and much more.

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Donna Eden is a pioneer in the field of Energy Medicine, and she was born with the gift of literally being able to see the body's energies, in the forms of colors and geometrical shapes. After five specialists told her she had 9 months to 2 years to live, she healed herself from multiple sclerosis, allergies, asthma and the effects of a heart attack at age 27. She then honed her skills and learned how to accurately determine the causes of physical and psychological problems based on the state of a person’s energies, and devise highly effective treatments for her clients and students.

She’s co-authored several books with her husband Dr. David Feinstein, including Energy Medicine, Energy Medicine for Women, and The Promise of Energy Psychology. Donna has taught tens of thousands of people all over the world how to engage with the healing and restorative power of their own energies, and her time teaching at the Feathered Pipe Ranch played an instrumental role in catapulting her career.

Her personal story is fascinating and inspiring, and yet, she believes that each one of us is born being able to see energy and that it’s a tool that lies dormant if it’s not used. Throughout her career, she’s seen over and over again that we all have the capacity to tune into energy—what she calls “The Language of the World”—and use it for experiencing mental clarity, physical vitality and joy.

In this conversation, I ask Donna to read my aura—I just couldn’t help myself!—and she shares her opinion on why so many people suffer from modern dis-ease. She also graciously walks us through four incredibly simple tools for alleviating stress and calming the nervous system. 

Donna admits that year 79, her age as of this interview, has been her best year yet, and you will hear it in her voice, her laugh, her tone—she is full of energy. You can practically see her smile through your ears.

Donna Eden Website

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Tim Sloffer happened upon the Ranch last year while he was applying for a Lilly Teacher Creativity Grant from the Lilly Endowment, a program that began in 1987 as a way to help Indiana elementary and secondary educators renew their commitment to teaching. To give you an idea of the scope of this program, the foundation awarded 103 grants, each totaling $12,000 for 2022. And, what’s amazing about this grant is that teachers can apply to be covered for all kinds of experiences that will enhance the their understanding of themselves and the world at large: studying foreign language, natural resources, photography, chess, quilting, zoology—the list is endless. If you can write it up to show that it will expand and improve you as a person and as a teacher, it’s considered.

With zero background in yoga, but a desire to learn how to take better care of himself, Tim Googled “wellness retreats” and found the Feathered Pipe Ranch. After looking through the summer schedule, he realized that he could spend five weeks participating in five totally different workshops covering wellness from many angles—and so the grant was written and awarded.

In this conversation, we explore Tim’s upbringing in the small town of Huntertown, Indiana, the road that led him to following in his mom’s footsteps as a teacher, his journey through college as a teen parent, and the challenges and joys of raising three kids.

He reflects on his time at the Ranch, what he learned from each retreat, the growth moments that invited him out of his comfort zone and the ways that he settled into the rhythm of life as a long-termer. On Tim’s last night, we presented him with a cake and celebrated the time he spent with us on Bear Creek Road, and today we get a window into how the lessons of last summer have trickled into his everyday life.

Lilly Endowment Fund

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Dave Morin is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, born and raised in Helena, MT. Currently, he is Co-Founder of Offline Ventures, an investing and inventing company focused on the creation of humanist technology and serving founder potential, and is Chairman of Esalen Institute, a leading center for exploring and realizing human potential through experience, education, and research.

Early in his career, Dave was the 29th employee at Facebook and his first job upon moving to San Francisco was at Apple. Needless to say, he’s been on the forefront of tech innovation since the start of the internet in the 90s, and over the last couple decades has co-founded and managed a handful of ventures in this realm: Path, a company dedicated to being a source of happiness, meaning, and connection through simplicity and privacy in social networking technology; Slow Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture fund that champions long term thinking and serves a community of over 300 of the most innovative startups in the world; and Sunrise, a nonprofit focused on bringing together science, spirituality, technology, and design to revolutionize how humans experience depression.

In today’s conversation, we talk about his path from a ski racer in small town Montana to an angel investor and serial entrepreneur smack in the middle of the tech capital of the country, Silicon Valley, California. Recognizing early on that his brain was different than most other kids, Dave describes his childhood as one of looking for belonging, and he found solace and stimulation at his grandfather’s house while playing on one of the earliest computer models ever made. He was also serendipitously introduced to Aikido, a Japanese martial art, through his best friend’s uncle, and that began his lifelong foray into eastern philosophy, self awareness and contemplative practices.

We tackle a big topic today—mental health in the age of technology—and while this interview just scratches the surface of the immensity of this conversation, I hope you walk away with an understanding of the nuance of our current predicament, the good and bad of modern technology, the intent with which it was originally created, and the knowing that there are people like Dave out there, pouring themselves into ideas like Web3, and how to make our interactions with these tools safer, healthier and more human.

Offline Ventures
Sunrise
Esalen Institute

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In the days of digital nomads, geo-tagging and endless sources of technological communication, it’s sometimes hard to believe how people traveled without knowing anything about the places they were visiting. With no blog posts or reviews to read, and no way to get in touch with friends in real-time (unless you were right there next to one another), people hitched rides, slept in bus terminals and leaned on poor translation and big hearted-strangers for their next moves.

These are details that make up the stories of today’s guest VJ Supera, a wild woman of adventure, laughter and endless curiosity. VJ is the sister of Feathered Pipe Foundation founder, India Supera, and she has been traveling to the most remote corners of the world for nearly 55 years. She rarely—if ever—has taken the comfortable route. Now, at 77 years old, she’s still making her rounds, though trips have taken a different meaning than they did in the days of twenty-something wanderlust.

I got to sit down with VJ in her house in Helena, Montana, where we shared a pot of chai tea in her living room lined with art and travel books. We yuck it up, as she would say, about her upbringing with bohemian parents, the role of creativity and spirituality in her life, experimentation with LSD and other drugs in the hippie era, and stories of her travels to far-off lands, dressing like a man and hitchhiking through Tibet on cargo jeeps, stumbling into a yak drive on a caravan mission to Tajikistan, and living under a tree outside of Guru Sai Baba’s ashram in India.

If you’ve been to the Ranch, you may have had the pleasure of meeting her at one of VJ’s Bizarre Bazaars, where she spreads out on the lawn and sells ancient beads, rugs, fabrics, and other one-of-a-kind items from the Middle East and Central Asia. She’s a summer staple at the Feathered Pipe Ranch, and has become a very important person in my life over the years, always reminding me to take chances, find adventure and have fun. If I have half as much adventure as she has had, I’d consider this a life well-lived.

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Physicist Amory Lovins is Cofounder and Chairman Emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit organization working to transform the global energy system to secure a clean, prosperous, zero-carbon future.

He has written more than 800 papers and 31 books, including Natural Capitalism, Reinventing Fire, and Winning the Oil Endgame. For the past 45 years, he’s advised major firms and governments in over 70 countries on clean energy—including the US Departments of Energy and Defense and a 7-year stint on the National Petroleum Council—as well as leading integrative design for superefficient buildings, factories, and vehicles. Time has named him one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 Top Global Thinkers.

A Harvard and Oxford dropout, he’s taught at 10 universities, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Scholar of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. He teaches only topics he’s never formally studied, so as to retain Beginner’s Mind—a concept we’ll get into in today’s conversation. 

This is a much different side of Amory Lovins than you'll find in other public interviews.

In this conversation, we talk about early childhood influences and illnesses, the 15 summers he spent guiding trips in the White Mountains of New Hampshire—a place that sparked his life-long interest in landscape photography and utter devotion to the natural world. I ask him what it’s been like to be a pioneer in the clean energy space, facing the almost mythical powers of the fossil fuel industries, the impending threats of climate change, and decades of scrutiny from critics and those with vested interest in the status quo.

We discuss biomimicry, natural capital, and integrative design, and the laws of nature that can help us build and live much more efficiently and harmoniously—concepts he discusses using the example of his own home office in Old Snowmass, Colorado, complete with a 900-square-foot tropical passive-solar banana farm inside. Amory quotes environmentalists, writers, spiritual leaders, sacred texts, and the Taoist outlook that keeps him centered and focused in order to carry out his work in the world.

RMI.org

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Historical trauma is a new model in public health that suggests that populations historically subjected to long-term, mass trauma—such as slavery, the Holocaust, forced migration, and the violent colonization of Native Americans—exhibit a higher prevalence of disease even several generations after the original trauma occurred. This model is backed by research in the field of epigenetics, which studies how trauma changes our DNA and is thus passed on to future generations, making them more susceptible to certain mental and physical conditions.

In understanding how to move forward and break the cycle of historical trauma, we have to ask the question: What does historical healing look like?

That’s the topic of today’s conversation with Linda Kinsey, a member of the A'aninin Nation or the “White Clay People”. She is the Native Connections Director for Helena Indian Alliance, helping secure grants for suicide prevention services for Native youth ages 12-24, and she also serves with RISE: Reaching Indian Students Everywhere, to educate people on Native American history and encourage folks to learn who they are by learning where they came from.

When it comes to reconciling the history of genocide of Native Americans in this country, the idea of generational trauma is just starting to creep into the vernacular and shed light on the compounding issues they face in modern society—a world in which they’re expected to bounce back from a century of intentional erasure. And Linda believes that many people don’t understand the current statistics of high suicide rates, alcoholism and substance abuse and chronic disease among native communities is because we don’t often learn about the true history of this country.

In her former  long-standing role as the director of a Tribal Treatment Center in her hometown of Fort Belknap, Montana—and as a Native woman growing up on a reservation in the 1970s—Linda experienced and witnessed the consequences of historical and generational trauma, and she’s dedicated her life to healing herself and integrating her own family’s history and helping others do the same.

This conversation is very special for us because Linda’s tribal family caretakes a Feathered Pipe, a relic that has been with their community for thousands of years and is a symbol of resilience, faith and connection. It’s actually because of this relic that she wanted to come visit the Feathered Pipe Ranch in 2021 for the concert with Navajo flutist R. Carlos Nakai. We talk about her feeling when visiting the Ranch and the belief that a place can preserve and protect particular energies just as pipes can hold centuries of prayers and energies, too.

Linda teaches us about the importance of balance, growing up in a household of natives and non-natives, democrats and republicans, catholics and protestants. Her whole life, she’s been in the middle, which has proven to be the superpower behind her capacity to hold many experiences and emotions at once. This ability is a necessity in today’s world and perhaps a necessity that has always existed, considering the ancient wisdom teachings of the Eastern traditions and indigenous peoples everywhere.

Helena Indian Alliance

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Bob Quinn is a scientist, farmer, out-of-the-box thinker and savvy businessman who has dedicated his entire career to regenerating food systems and educating the public on the connection between land and soil preservation, nutritious food, robust rural communities and human health.

With a PhD in Plant Biochemistry from University of California Davis, Bob returned to his hometown of Big Sandy, Montana—a population of 600 people—where he took over the family farm and was among the first farmers in Montana to go organic. He served on the National Board of U.S. Department of Ag to create a USDA organic standard, started a grain cleaning plant, flour mill and Montana’s first wind farm.

His book, Grain by Grain with Liz Carlisle, lays out the recent history of farming in the United States, how the rise of  “Big Ag” has pushed small farms out of business and turned rural communities across the country into ghost towns. In a rush to produce higher yields to keep up with the small margins of the global commodity market, farmers have drowned their soil and crops in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that have lasting consequences for the land and the people who eat the end products.

What Bob has done to organize organic systems and revive ancient grains is incredible. In 1988, he converted his entire 2,400 acre farm to organic and hasn’t looked back. Over five decades, he started several projects and businesses: Kamut International, a company specializing in organic Kamut khorasan wheat; Montana Flour and Grain, which processes his grains into flour for bakeries, pasta makers and distributors; Big Sandy Organics; and The Oil Barn, an operation that presses organically-grown safflower into cooking oil then returns the used oil to his farm to replace diesel fuel.

In this conversation, he makes the case for eating ancient wheat varieties versus modern wheat, which has been continuously bred for high yields, at the detriment of nutrition, diversity and flavor. We discuss the research that his team has carried out in Italy among patients with diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome and heart disease, and how switching to a diet of Kamut in place of conventionally-grown modern wheat lowered inflammation, cholesterol, cytokines and other markers that lead to chronic illness. Ancient wheat could be part of the answer for the 12-20% of people who experience symptoms of gluten sensitivity or intolerance.

This talk scratches the surface of the high cost of cheap food, but my hope is that it will help you rethink our industrial agriculture system, choose organically-grown foods, experiment with ancient wheat varieties like Einkorn, farro and Kamut, and begin to understand why we can’t talk about farming without talking about human health and planetary healthy. The three are inextricably linked, and if we don’t start to make different choices, we’re just continuing the race to the bottom.

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