In this episode, the brilliant Emily Ana Levy speaks to themes of ocean life, compost, healing from chronic illness, sovereignty, evolution and transformation, Ayahuasca, spiritual awakening and coming out of the spiritual closet, stepping into our gifts, and prioritizing play, pleasure, and connection to the Earth. She provides a beginner friendly introduction to topics such as plant dietas, Kambo and kambo self application, and shares about her experience with these healing modalities.

Links:

Personal Website: Emily Ana Levy | Entreprenuer, Speaker, Thought Leader

Shepherd Website: Shepherd ✳︎ | Collaborating with socially conscious leaders + entrepreneurs

Mighty Well Website: Mighty Well | Patient-Powered Products That Make Life Simpler

IG: @‌Emilyana_levy

In this special episode, Kufikiri Hiari Imara returns to the podcast, to guest host an amazing conversation with the brilliant individuals behind Entheogen Melanin Collective - Imani Turnbull-Brown and Julian Fontaine Fox.

Imani and Julian share the stories of how they each came to their advocacy and community work. They speak about the many intersectionalities of Blackness and Melanated Empowerment through storytelling. Entheogen Melanin Collective is fostering connection within the psychedelic space and offering healing in BIPOC spaces throughout and beyond the Boston area. Check them out and support their work at @‌EMCmass on IG

Bio: Imani Turnbull-Brown is a U.S. Navy veteran and holistic health & wellness consultant with a deep commitment to ancestral healing and community empowerment. She is the cofounder of the Entheogen Melanin Collective, an organization that uses entheogens as one of many tools to support education, integration, and accessibility to melanated joy, healing, and community. Rooted in her Afro-Caribbean heritage, Imani blends traditional wisdom with modern wellness practices to help others reclaim their wholeness.

Bio: Julian Fontaine Fox is a passionate and longtime psychedelic entheogen advocate, poet, and storyteller. He began his advocacy while in Santa Fe New Mexico where he founded a chapter of SSDP and worked with Synergetic Press as a volunteer consultant and advisor. He is the co-creator of Entheogen Melanin Collective and a resident of Boston in Roslindale. In his role with EMC he facilitates community building and outreach. He plans and holds events in the Boston area for community members to attend holding workshops centered on intergration, healing and education. He also reaches out through tabling at bus stops and train stations offering a place for locals to ask and get answers about these substances are.

Links: linktr.ee/entheogenmelanincollective

What happens when you combine respect, mutuality, self determination, potential for change, genuine human relationships, and healing environments? Welcome to The Wildflower Alliance! In the words of Earl Miller, “it’s so basic that people think it’s profound.”

The Wildflower Alliance supports healing and empowerment for the broader community and people who have been impacted by psychiatric diagnosis, trauma, extreme states, homelessness, problems with substances and other life-interrupting challenges. They do this through peer to peer support and genuine human relationships, alternative healing practices, learning opportunities, and advocacy.

In this episode, Earl Miller, Director of Community Support and Matty Hollander, Hampden coordinator, come on the podcast to discuss their journey with this project. They share about the Alternatives to Suicide support group, the Peer Support Line, the Bowen center, the importance of autonomy and agency, the poverty industrial complex, and “a return to community that is accountable to you, that holds value in your existence. If you believe in community - that includes everyone.”

Bio: Earl Miller’s life and work are deeply shaped by his lived experience navigating the psychiatric and foster care systems from the age of 12, and facing homelessness, hospitalization, and trauma—part of which was featured in The New York Times Magazine in December 2024. Since joining the Wildflower Alliance in 2011, he has channeled his resilience into advocacy, community building, and creative expression as a storyteller, musician, and poet with several albums to his name. A proud father of two, Earl has held roles at the Center for Human Development and the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, and served as the inaugural Director of Amherst’s Community Responders for Equity, Safety, and Service, where he helped establish a municipal alternative to traditional policing. He now serves as Director of Community Supports at the Wildflower Alliance, championing anti-racist, humane, holistic, and community-based responses to emotional distress.

Bio: Mathew Hollander serves as the Hampden Coordinator for the Wildflower Alliance, a grassroots peer support organization. He is a Northampton-based artist whose practice includes intricate ink drawings and mixed media sculptures. He is a longtime performer and member of the punk/hardcore music scene in the greater Boston area.

Ebony LePenn is a mother, abolitionist, licensed massage therapist, reiki master, energetic mentor, author and advocate for unconditional love and peace for all. She is the founder of High Frequency Academy Ltd. Anthony P. Clay Healing Project (Social Justice Enterprise & Public Benefit Corp.) that serves as a school and healing oasis for B.I.P.O.C. communities and our allies. HFA offers revolutionary healing services and energy awareness curriculum to address the complex emotional affects of surviving colonization in marginalized communities. We facilitate workshops for individuals, families, and organizations.

www.HFAcademyLTD.com

IG@APCHealing

A deep dive into the depths of activism, Shipibo Ayahuasca Curanderismo, and being a professional listener, with the spectacular Joshua Kahn Russell! In this episode, Joshua shares about his experience channeling a sense of knowing about the world into activism and politics, and how that brought him to plant medicine, and to his current work in the world: supporting activists to heal their trauma and gain resilience with the help of Sacred Nature. He begins with a story of understanding change as about shifting the balances and forces of power. This thread is inherent throughout the conversation on both the micro and macro level, as Joshua shares about how he got into and spent decades doing front line, indigenous sovereignty, social and climate justice movement work, until long undiagnosed Lyme disease and burnout brought him to a complete halt. He shares about how his life was saved by practices from an indigenous ayahuasca tradition, and what he understands now about that cosmology and technology. Then, we turn the dialogue to the topic of supporting other activists, and to listening and connecting with consciousness beyond the human realm. This is a conversation about identity, trauma, wisdom, and re-orienting what it means to be an agent of social change.

Bio: Joshua Kahn Russell has spent 25 years as a social movement facilitator and has trained thousands of activists across the globe in over 15 countries. He is the former Executive Director of The Wildfire Project, where he supported progressive grassroots frontline organizations across a range of sectors including Environmental and Climate Justice, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Racial and Economic Justice movements. He has helped campaigns win — defending land, water, and workers rights, defeating multi-billion dollar oil pipelines, winning wage increases and tenant protections — against banks, oil companies, logging corporations, and coal barons; worked with groups in a breadth of arenas, from local resiliency projects, to national coalitions, to the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations internationally. He has been an apprentice of Shipibo Ayahuascero Ricardo Amaringo in the Peruvian Amazon for over 12 years, and brings cohorts of leaders to the rainforest for trauma healing in Indigenous-held ayahuasca ceremonies and plant dietas. He also works with plant medicines as a guide, and is currently a somatic leadership coach. Joshua threads together his experience of decades of frontline activist work as a campaigner, strategist, organizer, and non-violent direct action coordinator, learning from grassroots movements around the world, with his practice of supporting healing and transformation with plant medicine.  He has written and co-edited numerous books, including A Line In The Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice, Beautiful Trouble, and Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis.

From the episode - quote 1 came from Anthony Machado:
”There is no path. The path is made by walking.” quote 2 came from George Harrison: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”

Jessica Malka is a mother, guide, and steward of embodied remembrance. She is the co-founder of LEIAMOON, where she offers tools and spaces for women to reconnect with their bodies through vaginal steaming and womb-centered coherence. Through her work, she offers original pathways of healing and sovereignty, walking beside women as they return to the living source of their creative power.

Jessica has been a dear friend of mine for a long time. I am so delighted that we finally made it happen to record a conversation. We talk about the web of connection between us and other beings, including our ancestors; the stratospheric layers of our planet; grounding and inhabiting our own containers first, so we can tap into the web of life in a safe and manageable way; vaginal steaming, womb consciousness and creativity; healing the relationship between masculine and feminine consciousness; steaming as a practice for all people and all genitals; historic and cross-cultural uses of steaming for spiritual and holistic health; “symptoms” as signals or communications; and collective prayer spaces.

Please note, the terms “women” and “men” are used throughout this episode, with a lot of fluidity for who and how this may apply to each listener and their unique experience of identity and their body. We hope this episode feels accessible and inclusive to our friends beyond the gender binary as well. <3

Links: LEIAMOON.com

IG: leiamoonwomen

If you’re already familiar with IFS, or you want to skip the intro, fast forward to 18:20!

Mel Galbraith is a psychotherapist with over a decade of experience supporting individuals through a trauma-informed lens. She holds a Master of Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier University, a Bachelor of Arts in Social Development Studies from the University of Waterloo, and an Advanced Diploma in Child and Youth Work from Fanshawe College.

Mel has worked in a variety of settings, including community agencies, specialized treatment facilities, and school boards. She is passionate about helping people reconnect with their inner resources and cultivate a sense of calm, clarity, and compassion within themselves.

Her approach is rooted in the belief that healing comes from within — and with the right support, everyone can access the tools they need to move toward their preferred identity and narrative. Mel creates a warm, non-judgmental space for clients to explore and transform the beliefs and experiences that shape their lives.

Show Notes: It was an honor to have Mel, my IFS (Internal Family Systems) teacher, on the podcast finally! Mel is currently leading IFSCA (the IFS Counseling Association) where she teaches, offers consultation and helps people on their IFS journey.

In this episode, we talk about a way to understand IFS and parts; cultural burdens, legacy burdens and intergenerational trauma, and how travel can shake up and shine light on the cultural burdens we may carry; connecting to our own lineage and ancestry; Mel stepping into purpose and service as she brings IFS out of North America and into other parts of the world; Derek Scott, the founder of IFSCA, now an ancestor, whom you can learn from through hundreds of videos on his youtube (or by studying at IFSCA!); consciousness as a form of inner attunement and awareness; seeing ourselves as a work in progress (especially us therapists) and that being OKAY; self energy and self leadership, and sitting with Self.

Links:

IFSCA.ca

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-get-to-know-and-love-all-the-parts-of-your-self

A poetically epic journey, from the porosity we’re born with, to walking a nonlinear path and growing toward honoring our callings while staying grounded and present. We discuss and invite an incorporation of science with spiritual and earth-based wisdom. We reflect on what we’ve been learning and receiving from our feminine friendship, reflecting on the concept of "sistering" as a verb.

Jasmine Virdi (she/her) is a writer, educator, poet, and activist based between Cyprus and Mexico. Her writing centers on psychedelics, spirituality, and deep ecology and has been featured in DoubleBlind Magazine, Open Democracy, Science and Non-Duality, and Psychedelics Today. Jasmine has an MSc in Transpersonal Psychology and offers private coaching and mentorship to clients. She is an advocate for decolonising healing practices, and integrates earth-based wisdom, trauma-informed approaches and somatics into her work.

Follow Jasmine’s Substack - Foraged Wisdom - a monthly newsletter that gathers and collects insights on world-building amidst systems collapse, weaving together animism, earth-based spirituality, grief work, decolonisation, magic, and the richness of the human spirit.

A rich stroll through a wide realm of topics relating to grief with the brilliant Camille Sapara Barton. Topics include the dynamic balance of connection to spirit and to the material aspects of life; parents and their grown children, learning to enjoy one another; cultivating an intentional grief practice (ideally in community) and Cami’s new book - Tending Grief.

Picking up a thread for the conversation with Ayize Jama-Everett earlier this year, we talk about evil, and how this might relate to grief. Cami shares some of the cosmology and cultural elements of the Dagara tribe that inspired them as they wrote the book. They also share about the grief of uncertainty, and the mass loss of the Covid pandemic, and grieving things that have not yet come to an end, such as ongoing systemic oppression.

We discuss joy and cultivating space for play, as part of grief tending. Cami imparts their experience with this work - that feeling one emotion opens them up to a greater depth of engagement with life and its full spectrum of feelings and experiences. We also hear sound guidance around finding spaces that can safely hold us in our grief.

Links: https://camillesaparabarton.com/

https://camillesaparabarton.com/tending-grief-book/

In this episode, Alex Carelli of ThetaSoma comes back on the podcast to talk about her recent experience through the portal of transformation through death, grief and ceremony. How can we support ourselves and one another when dealing with loss and profound change? What does it mean to become the anchor?

Bio: Alexandra is an artist, writer, speaker & teacher. She is a current doctoral student of Transpersonal Psychology at Sofia University with a research concentration in dream studies, shamanism and eco-psychology.

Along her journey, she has studied with masters of the metaphysical healing arts in yoga, Ayurveda, tarot, astrology, divination, and sacred ritual practice woven with an MA in Marriage and Family Therapy. Alexandra's work and words act as a transpersonal bridge between the cosmos, nature and the human world to spark inspiration, introspection, and collective healing.

@‌alexandra.carelli @‌thetasoma

alexandracarelli.substack.com

www.thetasoma.com