The Embodied Way Podcast

“Will my culture thank me if I disrupt its complacency?”

Zhenevere Sophia Dao asks some of the most piercing, identity-deconstructing and soul-generating questions of our time, while she also embodies the answers with deep, poetic presence and humility.

In this episode, we speak to this rare teacher, philosopher, embodiment artist, poetess, and transgender woman,  about the mysteries and the politics of gender, and about what she calls “the transgender necessity”. Zhenevere takes us on an up-close and personal journey into her own process of reclaiming her true gender, and, with spellbinding urgency, invites us to consider the social need to not only accept but to celebrate transgender people as messengers of what is possible in a life– and in a culture.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Zhenevere Sophia Dao is a poet, novelist, playwright, and director of the SACRA Theater Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A transgender woman, she is also the founder of the practice tradition of MogaDao and the MogaDao Institute. Zhenevere was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and has published fiction with Penguin Books.

Find more about her work:  www.mogadaoinstitute.com

THIS EPISODE’S WISDOM BITE

"Self-othering, or becoming trans inside of a culture or a self,  is what enables an absolute emancipation and a mythopoetic recreation of a new way of being in the world." 

"The transgender person is not just to be accepted but to be celebrated as deeply needed and necessary: The self-othering that is a necessary part of a transgender person’s emergence is actually a very important part of everyone psychological makeup. We often make great changes in our lives when we become ‘other’ to ourselves. It is a powerful tool of transparency  to one’s soul that everyone needs. And transgender people, we are masters at that, at self-othering– and of taking that self-othering into transformation and evolution."

What does it take for one to feel an utter and lasting sense of belonging––belonging to one's family, communities, and culture, belonging in one's body, belonging with a partner, and to one's own self? In this conversation with Canadian writer, teacher, and dreamworker Toko-pa Turner who authored the award-winning book Belonging, we contemplate the distinction between fitting-in and belonging, the reasons why non-belonging  is the silent pandemic of our times, the two lovers we must introduce within ourselves, and the competencies  we must learn and practice in order to experience belonging in a fragmented world. 

A brief and unprecedented episode, in which host Stefana Serafina discusses the coronavirus outbreak as a movement of archetypal  universal intelligence, a "raising of the voice of the the Wild Earth that is surging to make herself understood: Pressing pause now is only the start...."

"Sit down together–but a new kind of together", Corona seems to be saying,  "Pause and come still,  as a global organization that now gets a chance to meditate on its impact on the much vaster organization of life."

To share this episode from our webpage:

http://www.embodiedway.com/coronathecrone/

To share this episode in the form of a written essay:

https://www.intuitivedance.org/single-post/2020/03/17/Corona-the-Crone-We-Must-Be-Changed

Long before social injustice becomes obvious and explicit, our bodies  experience it, internalize it, and embody it as non-verbal patterns. In this conversation with Dr. Rae Johnson, a scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice, we expose the mostly unconscious behaviors that perpetuate oppression in an embodied way,  how oppression is experienced as a bodily felt sense,  and how we can learn to undo oppression through the body–– both as we experience it and as we inflict it on others.

Rae Johnson, PhD, RSMT is a queer-identified scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice. Key themes in their work include the embodied experience of oppression, somatic approaches to research, and the poetic body.  They are the chair of the Somatic Psychology Doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and the author of several books, including "Embodying Social Justice". 

https://raejohnsonsomatic.com/

On the importance of creating a culture of emotionally aware and expressed people, and the significance of allowing our bodies to express in a primal and liberated way, as an example of nature and its many states, storms, colors and changes. We speak with somatic healer, dancer, and embodiment facilitator, BERNADETTE PLEASANT, the founder of FEMME!, a modality for all genders. Tune in for this vibrant conversation about  how to harness the primal power and vulnerability of our emotions through the body, in a way that makes us freer, more alive, and more connected.

 EPISODE'S WISDOM BITES: 

Our bodies are created in the likeness of nature. Sunsets don’t hold back. Rainstorms and the ocean get to be so many things; there is no one right way for them to be. And so we also get to be that expressive: We get to be water, we get to be gentle as a fine mist, we get to be still and inviting, we get to be ferocious, we get to be frozen, or warm. We get to be everything that is given to us by example of nature. And the invitation is that nature in no iteration   stays the same or operates in a thin or narrow margin. There is change, there is growth, there is color, there is beauty, there is barren, there is every-thing in nature! And our bodies too, our way of being, of moving, of emoting, are all of that– all the ways in which we can live our bodies as an example of nature.”

“When my body is freeas it wishes, as opposed to traditional forms of dance, and I am feeling, say, rage,I am  not focusing on a pointed toe and an angle, but I get to bring whatever needs to move through me, in such a complete way that I feel wider after I move: I have given that which I am feeling the movement and the sound that it needs to express through my body. So I  often tell people to bring me their “too-much”. If they have ever been told that they were too much, I say to them, “Bring it to me! I want your too-muchness.” Those are the kind of people I want to run tribe with, to create a community with. If we get to be fully expressed through our bodies, imagine the lives we get to live.”

More about Bernadette's work at https://livefemme.com

Bernadette Pleasant is the Creator of Femme! a mind and body wellness modality, rooted in dance, sensuality, emotional and creative expression, inclusivity and empowerment for all. A  gifted somatic healer, dancer, and entrepreneur, Bernadette creates immersive experiences that empower and celebrate people of all genders, ages, sizes, and fitness levels. She travels the world to offer transformative embodiment and regularly leads discussions on emotional healing, inclusive movement, and embodied empowerment. 

She is also a woman of color who comes from a long line of natural healers, and an experienced practitioner and teacher  of Pole Dancing, Nia, and African Dance. Her classrooms welcome participants without judgment and support them on their paths to finding comfort in their own skin. 

How does one know that they are standing at a threshold whose crossing is a promise that life will never be the same?  What gives us the power to move through the toughest, the biggest, or the most influential turning points of our lives? And why are the body and the heart, dance and community our best allies in both personal and collective rites of passage? Listen to Dr. Melissa Michaels weigh in on these powerful questions, and speak to the importance of finding one’s soul path vs. getting on the “success path”.  

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Melissa Michaels, is a doctor of education, a movement– and rites-of-passage guide and facilitator, a youth mentor, a community leader and activist, based in Boulder, CO. She creates movement based cross-cultural educational opportunities focusing on the potential that is available at major life thresholds. Her work uses the expressive and social arts to establish body and heart as resources for authentic expression, and for mapping the journey from trauma to dynamic well-being.

Recognizing the essential need for the body in our cultural conversations about how to serve the next generation, she has developed comprehensive programs, assisting youth and the adults who serve them in accessing their kinesthetic intelligence and their capacity to move with grace, focus, and freedom. Melissa creates safe and provocative learning environments that support individuals and communities in the embodied exploration of how creativity serves awakening and connection. 

Melissa is the Founder and Director of  a couple of international somatic education and Rites-Of-Passage programs. She also founded Golden Bridge, the nonprofit organization that serves as the umbrella for her work and the work of the hundreds of emerging leaders who have come of age in her programs.

Melissa is the author of the book, Youth On Fire: Igniting a Generation of Embodied Global Leaders. She is the mother of three daughters and a mentor for youth across the globe.

Find more about Melissa's work at 

http://www.goldenbridge.org/

This conversation with Zhen Dao, creator of the Mogadao Institute tradition, is a mythopoetic, down-to-earth, and sensuous contemplation on rediscovering the true erotic nature of being as a return to our vulnerability and our need for each other. We speak about Eros beyond the impoverished cultural perceptions and modern exploits, and bring the erotic back  into the context of making full-body contact with one another and the living world, taking the great risk of  becoming spiritually naked in our mutual need for “other”, and letting ourselves be found and touched in our deepest longing.  

ABOUT ZHEN DAO 

Zhen Dao is the founder of the Daoist–based practice tradition of MogaDao, and the MogaDao Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a transgender embodiment master, poet, novelist, and writer on a variety of philosophical, and cultural subjects, and her teachings come in one of the most unique, spellbinding, and truth-telling voices of our times. Zhen is  also the director of the theater company SACRA: Immanence Theater in Santa Fe. 

More about Zhen and the Mogadao Institute:

https://www.mogadaoinstitute.com

THIS EPISODE's QUOTES

“Eros is the enfleshing, the making flesh, of the longing for an extraordinary life. And what that means is the spiritual nudity to come out of your protective place and to expose the mutuality of need and long and desire that characterize the truth of existence.”

“We no longer have faith that touching other people, either literally or emotionally or intellectually,  is an end in and of itself. When we lose that faith in contact as a reason to live, not as way to get some place else, but as an essential purpose of life– to be in contact, to bleed back and forth on each other emotionally, spiritually , sexually, sensually, intellectually, and to color our worlds and each other through our need– when we lose that faith we get relegated to performing, to being objects of entertainment, and relationships become about what they can produce.”

“The soul colors itself in eros, and it cannot reveal itself without eros. The soul is frigid without eros.”  

MAKING SOUL FOR A TROUBLED WORLD, with Michael Meade  

How to make more soul for a world that seems to be falling apart?  “What you love is the cure”, reminds us mythologist Michael Meade.  In this conversation with the renowned storyteller, author, and scholar, we speak about why it’s of the essence to get closer to what you  love and do more of it, so you can be in conversation with your own soul, harvesting its timeless resources for living a meaningful life and making more soul for the world. Join us for this rich conversation on the significance of lunar knowledge, embodied soul wisdom, mythological acupuncture, and living with purpose in times like ours.

“We all hope our lives have meaning. The way to make sure of that is to love what we love and make more soul for the world. When we make more soul through our personal genius,  life is more present, things are more connected, and the world secretly more united.”

ABOUT MICHAEL MEADE

Michael Meade, D.H.L., is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic storytelling, street-savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep knowledge of cross-cultural rituals. He has an unusual ability to distill and synthesize these disciplines, tapping into ancestral sources of wisdom and connecting them to the stories we are living today.

He is the author of The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of The Soul, Why the World Doesn't End, and The Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul. Meade is the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit network of artist, activists, and community builders that encourages greater understanding between diverse peoples.

For more information about Michael's work, books, and podcast: 

www.mosaicvoices.org

www.livingmyth.org

THIS EPISODE’s QUOTES

“It can feel at first that we are falling, but really what we do is fall to the ground of the soul,  where we have each inherited deep resources for life. And in the soul there resides the genius of a person’ life–– the spirit that is already there. There is a deep spirit in the soul of each person, and when things are falling apart, it is soul that we need to bring everything  back together.”

“So we are experiencing in culture a loss of soul. And we are here to make more soul. It begins with the individual, with everyone’s personal genius,  and once enough soul has been made by individuals, then we can reconnect to the collective and begin to change life. And our issues right now are so profound and widespread that we need many people’s genius, and many people’s soulful connections in order to build our way back to a meaningful culture, and a meaningful connection of culture to nature.”

Deya Dova is a ground breaking vocalist, electronic music producer and an international touring artist from Australia, who records her music live at sacred sites. We speak about the experience of merging body and earth and blending into the landscape as a way of giving voice to the land, and singing  the ancient human myths that can unite modern humans in new ways. Tune in for some live singing, newly released tunes, and this in-depth conversation with Deya Dova and co-producer Hamilton Barnett.  

DEYA DOVA

Synthesizing ancient songlines, tribal voices and inspired story telling with cinematic soundscapes, future bass and totemic beats, Deya Dova invokes temple mysticism and brings euphoric tribalism to the dance floor. Hailing from the expansive Nullarbor desert in Australia and now based in the Byron Bay Area, Deya writes, records and produces all of her intricate vocal work and also designs her costuming and album artwork.  Deya and her co-producer and husband Hamilton Barnett fuse into their music and performances the earthy humanness and sensual power of Deya’s voice with the cutting edge futurism of Global Bass music.

THIS EPISODE WISDOM QUOTES:

“It’s an incredible emotional thing for me to sing directly from the landscapes of sacred sites . As soon as I go to a sacred site,  I start to recall it, memories of it begin coming in, and the experience I have is of being imprinted with the landscape. All of these sites for me are relations. Each of them is a relationship and a deep love. They come up as a bunch of friends walking through the field and say “Speak about me, speak about me!” I listen without an agenda. It is an experience of symbiotic connection, when me and the earth become one; there is no separation. This ancient memory is surging up through the earth and the cosmos and it’s the same memory that is surging through my own body. It’s this DNA matching, we enter this dance and because I am a singer, it becomes expressed as sound.”

“Paramount for me is the belief and the understanding that within each and every human being we have all the colors existing within us, the black, the red, the yellow,  and the white, and the mixture of all of those- which is so many of us are now, a mixture of all the colors, the five fingers on the hand, the five brothers and sisters who live inside each of us. My journey has been so much about connecting to each of those colors. I don't deny my black voice, I don't deny my white voice. I acknowledge and respect my red voice, I love and  appreciate my yellow voice, and I sing them all together as my brown voice. It is in this embodiment of the colors, the memories and the nations that are all inside of us, that we can really find reunification on the planet.”

~Deya Dova

“There is a lot of hope in the indigenous voices  we hear that bring people together. We notice that there are voices that persist to keep separation and there are other voices that come from true leaders that look to unify the people going forward.” ~Hamilton Barnett  

On following the body's internal and evolutionary wisdom to generate new life. We speak to Tina Stromsted, PhD about the body as an intelligent orchestra always organizing for  healing and growth, movement as the language of the soul, and bringing light into the dark places of the psyche by using the body's guidance.

A guided practice is offered at the end of the conversation. 

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Tina Stromsted, Ph.D. is a Jungian psychoanalyst, dance therapist, and somatics educator.  She was a founding faculty member of the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a co-founder and faculty member of the Authentic Movement Institute in Berkeley (1993-2004). Currently she teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, the Depth Psychology/Somatics Doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and as a core faculty member for the Marion Woodman Foundation.  With 40 years of clinical experience, and a background in dance and theater, she teaches at universities and healing centers internationally, and has a special interest in the creative process, neuroscience, attachment theory, eco-psychology, and embodied spirituality. Developer of Dreamdancing, Embodied Alchemy, and Soul’s Body Center, Dr. Stromsted’s numerous articles and book chapters explore the integration of body, brain, psyche and soul in healing and transformation.  

For more information visit  www.AuthenticMovement-BodySoul.com 

More episodes @ www.embodiedway.com

THIS EPISODES WISDOM QUOTES 

 “We tend to split the body and spirit, we think of the body as matter as something to carry our head around, to perfect, to diet, to repress, to represent us in a particular way, rather than a deep living organismic collection of rivers and island and soft places and deep places and organs. The body is like an orchestra that, with all its tempos and rhythms and wisdoms, is always trying to let us know more about our experience: The nervous system works quickly like the high violins and the flutes,  and the organs, the viscera, are slower,  more like the cello and the base, the bones are more like the drums. If we bring our attention and curiosity to the life, the sensations, and imagery that arise from the body, when enough care and safety and cherishing are there,  the soul begins to light up the body. There is more consciousness, more electricity, more warm, the light within the dark body is beginning to grow: The body becomes an alchemist.”   

“One way that we can discover what our bodies are trying to tell us through the less conscious, spontaneous movements that our bodies make as we speak is to slow down and get interested in our bodies’ sensations, the signals that are trying to bubble up from the deep body, from the cellular wisdom, that level of intelligence, before it gets to the cranium, way before it gets to the reflective centers of the brain– when it’s still liquid or hot or pulsatory, pre-verbal, before they move from the brainstem to the right (limbic, emotional) brain and across into the left brain, the language centers, way before that, there is a reservoir of intelligence that we often don’t pay attention to.”