ep. #25 
Mallika welcomes her husband into a conversation about the trajectory of their 17 year relationship, particularly the elements that have supported authentic connection and getting through the dark times of disconnection. He speaks with humor and vulnerability about the reality of conscious parenting while working really hard to meet Mallika in a deep and loving marriage.  

The flow of the conversation going something like this: 

• The dance of "fighting" that we did for many years - Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson
• Mallika's love language not being met well by Steve - Love Languages
• Our Enneagram Episode on being in relationships 
• Do we think we are good parents? 
• Ancestral wounds and patterns showing up in our kids
• Priorities in parenting - Raising emotionally healthy kids
• When and why to transition out of RIE parenting
• When we thought our marriage might be over
• Main nuggets that Steve took away from couples therapy
• The impact of jealousy early on in our relationship
• Maintaining attraction to each other as we age
• Are we desensitized to what is attractive to us by porn and media?
• The deeper relational work we both had to do to heal
• Getting through the belly of the beast and emerging into a totally new relationship
• The surprising impact of how much their therapist liked Steve
• How distraction can help find connection
• "Don't go to bed angry" isn't good advice
• Hidden Brain episode on marriage

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Mallika's Website 

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Ashley's Website 

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ep. #24 
In this season episode we talk about how we can align ourselves with the energy of spring and ideas for creating a spring altar at home! 



References: 
Bronwyn's Instagram
The Circle Round Book

Mallika's Website https://www.thewildandwise.com

Ashley’s Instagram

Ashley's Website 

Wild and Wise Instagram

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ep. #23 

Mallika has a conversation with Rui Liu ("Rae"), CEO and Founder of Grass People Tree, a tea company bringing the story of living tea and the wild, indigenous and ancient tea from her homeland in Southwest China. This deep conversation touches on holistic wellness, personal integrity and the joy of laughing and being together in a simple life.

Topics we touch on:

• Relationship between tea and holistic wellness
• How tea is picked "alive" and "whole", like a human body
• How Rui's sense of home changed when she started Grass People Tree
• Learning to translate and teach something you innately know
• How tea is connecting us to the ancestors with every sip, every leaf
• Bringing tea to London, a place that colonized China, and healing relationship to tea
• The ancestral wisdom that lives in all of us
• The need to balance the intellect with the primal feeling of being a human
• Simplify to come back to our inner wisdom and connection to everything
• Tea being a process to facilitate "getting rid of" the excessing doing in our lives
• The root of helping others is our self-work
• The impact of being fixed on one perception

Grass People Tree website
IG for Grass People Tree
IG for Rui

Wild and Wise Instagram

Mallika's Website

Ashley’s Instagram

Ashley's Website 

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ep. #22 
In this episode, Ashley speaks with Aaron Schiller!

Aaron is the founder of Launch Medicine and the host of the launch medicine podcast. He is focused on helping people find the sweet nectar in their life and business and get their vision out into the world in a healing way.  Prior to starting Launch Medicine, Aaron coached founders and executives from small businesses to organizations such as Apple, Yale University, and Norcal Cannabis. 

Topics we dive into:

• Water as medicine, movement, and central to the cycles of life  
• The connection between the way we treat water and grief 
• Water and spirit as a ever-present help available to us 
• Water supporting our own growth and blossoming 
• Bring ceremony and prayer into family life 
• The complexities of relating to our businesses, money, and capitalism 
• Bringing our deep gifts into the world through business
• The process of launching a new business or rebranding
• Collaboration as the key to business success
• Reframing business as a relationship 
• Going all-in on your passions and missions 
• Aaron’s history with reconnecting with spirit through AA
• Repatterining ancestry through prayer and practice 
• The inquiry of how to treating your family as sacred 
• Integrating the spiritual into your daily life
• Transforming beyond the nuclear family

Aaron’s information: 

Launch Medicine Website

Launch Medicine Instagram 

Launch Medicine Facebook 

Launch Medicine Spotify

Launch Medicine Apple Podcast  

Website https://www.thewildandwise.com/donate

Ashley’s Instagram

Ashley's Website 

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ep. #21 
In todays episode, Ashley interviews Tania Laisuna, David Coral, and Lorena Rodriguez. 
Tania and David call in from the Putumayo region of Columbia where they live, and work on a community project that fosters the continuation of ancestral knowledge and the transition to a more sustainable way of living.

They weave an exploration of "buen vivir", an indigenous concept from South America that expands colonized perspective of wellness. 

This episode of full of beauty and life! We hope you enjoy :)

This episode includes full translation in Spanish and English!
¡Este episodio incluye traducción completa en español e inglés! 

Topics we touch on:

• Broadening our understanding of wellness to include cycles of the earth and ethical codes of community and relationship to ecosystem. 
• This concept of wellness, or buen vivre, as intrinsically related to our contact with all living beings 
• Morning practice of greeting yourself 
• The interrelationship between how inner waters and outer waters 
• History as a living thing
• True wellness integrates history of place and of people
• Giving back to the people are were mistreated and harmed is part of wellness
• Building relationships to native plants as a pathway to reconnection
• Building relationships with the indigenous people and stories where plants medicines originate.
• Sacred medicines like tobacco, chicha, cocoa, alcohol 
• Circling as a process for inquiry and as a way to build relationships with medicine  
• The continued effort it takes to heal and create wellness. 

Their home, life and project:

https://www.larealidad.org/

Instagram:  @eslabon_la_realidad/

Nuh Jay Music:

https://nuhjay.bandcamp.com/

Kun Music:

https://soundcloud.com/kun-hilando-el-sonido

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Ashley's website
Ashley's Instagram
Ashley's Water Mama Circle

Mallika's website
Mallika's Instagram

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ep. #20
In today's episode, Mallika shares a conversation she had back in early December with Amber Magnolia Hill. Amber shares a lot about her personal experience loosing her mother in a car accident 5 years ago. She graces us with her vulnerability and authentic emotional experience as we dive into what It means to loose someone so vital, how she continues to tend her relationship with her mother and the entwined relationship with life/death-tending and motherhood.


Amber's Instagram
Amber's website Mythic Medicine
Amber's Podcast Medicine Stories 

Things we dive into in this episode:

• Amber's experience of the grief of loosing her mother
• Little "g" and big "G" grief
• Grief is sacred space that continues to hold your relationship to something that existed. 
• The darkness that thrives on the feeling of being alone 
• The Inevitability of loss and death
• How our culture is set up to deny death
• Spontaneous, simple rituals to remember
• Angelica, Osha and Violet - plants for allowing and supporting grief
• The grief the come with motherhood
• Impact of raising children outside of village/community
• Motherhood and tending life and death
• Creating containers for children that minimize cultural trauma
• Healing and emotional self-regulation for ourselves as parents
• The collective grief we are feeling during Covid
• The complexity that can be held inside a conversation

The Denial of Death by Earnest Becker
The Belonging Podcast
Atlantic Article The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
Rachelle Garcia Seliga   Innate Traditions
Inuit Morality Play book about parenting
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
Brené Brown podcast with David Kessler




Ashley's website
Ashley's Instagram
Ashley's Parent Prayer Circle

Mallika's website
Mallika's Instagram
Mallika's Embodied Therapeutic Art Process

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ep. #19 

In this episode Ashley talks with Cass Phelps about the process and potential for creating internal containers for healing and growth. 

Cass offers workshops throughout the world and conducts a private practice in Kauai, HI. His gift of insight allows him to assist his students in their Self Awakening and healing process; realizing their inspirations and full potential. 

Cass is a Somatic Movement therapist, certified Reiki Master, Sound Healing therapist and lifelong musician. He also creates movement performance works and is known to call on different forms of Art Therapy, dance and the innovative intelligence of play. His unique approach to sound, breath, movement and resting-stillness unifies the creative and healing arts together as one. A strong sense of humor and laid-back style help Cass to deliver the awakening transmission:  “All Is Within.” 

In this episode you will here us talk about:  

• Creating containers for healing and growth 
• The relationship between nourishment and expansion 
• Tuning into the biological intelligence of life 
• The importance of listening to our bodies' needs 
• Resolving trauma through presence  
• The gift process 
• Phase 1: Receive your own gift 
• Phase 2: Nourish yourself with your gift 
• Phase 3: Share your gifts to the world 
• Receiving the nourishment of your own gift 
• The magnetism of connecting with essence 
• The gift of sensitivity 
• Bringing this work to children 

Resources Mentioned:
Cass's Website:  https://awake-one.com/
The Gift Process: https://awake-one.com/gift-process
Video of Cass teaching Biological Breath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35Ppb-mnO30
Video of Cass teaching a spinal spiral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj1pdWmSwOc 

Ashley's website
Ashley's Instagram
Ashley's Parent Prayer Circle

Mallika's website
Mallika's Instagram
Mallika's Embodied Therapeutic Art Process 

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ep. #18 
Ashely and Mallika explore various pillars of wellness and how to bring them in during the winter months. Winter is not just a time of year where energy disappears, but actually there is a different kind of energy present and available to us. 
It's an energy of darkness - not like evil, but like the quiet, underbelly of life, the waters we were born from, the soft, warmth that we all need. 


Topics we cover:

• Chinese Medicine's calendar of the seasons
• Lack of relationship between capitalist economy and the need for rest
• Ways to incorporate deepening rest even when we have to keep working full-time
• Myelination of our nerves and our bodies
• Why electronics are worse for us in the winter
• Energy available for slow evening learning of craft activities
• Great time of year to practice meditating, especially if you have a hard time with it normally
• Using the landscape to prompt our psychological processes
• Dream journaling
• Movement practice in the dark
• Foods that nourish and foods that deplete

Ashely's Chinese Medicine teacher Bronwyn Ayla
Jessica Prentice's cookbook Full Moon Feast

Ashley's website
Ashley's Instagram
Ashley's Parent Prayer Circle

Mallika's website
Mallika's Instagram
Mallika's Embodied Therapeutic Art Process

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ep. #17 
Stasha Ginsberg is a lover of depth and discovery. She is a published author and poet. She is also a storyteller, teacher, mother, dancer, musician, performer, tarot reader and facilitator of soulful writes of passage programs for youth and adults.

Stasha is a midwife of story journeys. She perceives each human to be a wild matryoshka, or nesting doll, full of stories. She loves the creative process and its capacity to crack open a story and lead one on a rite of passage, mythic journey through the landscape of body, soul, place, longing, memory & imagination.
Mallika and Stasha sat down to talk about the role the story can play in healing and creating wellness. Stasha shares about her personal initiation into healing work using story and we also dive deep into the layers of medicine that are available within the story of Vasilisa and Baba Yaga. 
Topics we touch one:
- Story is the fabric of our humaness
- "Spiritual enlightenment" ca actually be a bypass for doing the dark and deep work
- The story that came knocking for Stasha
- Connecting the personal and the mythic
- Story activates parts of ourselves and a wholeness of self can emerge
- The stories in our heads
- Five Rhythms dance
- Disney versions of old fairytales
- Longterm work with one story
- Vasilisa the Brave (meeting Baba Yaga)
- Working for the elixir of life
- This is a time to journey into the dark with Vasilisa and others
- The time to do the work and the time to set that work down
- The Individual call Into the forest
- How grounding simple work is in times of great fear

"How do we go to sleep and trust?"

"Ultimately story just wants us to make sense out of what it means to be human."

"Those stories speak louder from the heart than from how we see them or pick them apart"

Fierce Feminine Divinities of Eurasia and Latin America

Stasha wanted to make sure to add a piece about how to embody the work you do with a story. After letting a story live in you, finding a way to be witnessed in the embodiment of that story is a culmination or crescendo of that process.

Listen to me reading Vasilisa's story (as written by Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
In Episode 2
 And I dive into it again in Ep. 12

Here is a link to Stasha's performance/monologue, the end piece of her work with Kirsten Wilson in Boulder, Co. ( Letting the Body Speak )
Kirsten's website

Stasha's website: stockingstories.wordpress.com
Stasha on Facebook: The Wild Matryoshka
Stasha on Instagram: The Wild Matryoshka

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ep. #16
John and Ashley recorded an emergent conversation for today's podcast episode. The conversation is packed with so much wisdom while still retaining a flow and easeful aliveness. There are SO many amazing quotable nuggets in this one.
John Wolfstone is a storyteller, filmmaker, community organizer and a mentor for Rites of Passage work. John is a curious explorer and question asker.
Here are some of the questions I (Mallika) hear being held in this conversation and the work that John is doing In the world:
How do we do the work, the healing and rebuilding, that is here for us to do in this lifetime, and not get swept away into the anxiety of wanting to also see the results of the work right now?
How can we move to the next stage of development from the adolescent type of maturity associated with the hyper-Individualism and our current definition of freedom?
How can we actually find more freedom in "staying put" than in the flight of travel, or new relationships or careers?

Topics we cover:
The missing relationship with death
What is Eros and how to connect with it
What does it mean to rest
Reclamation of our aliveness
Rite of passage/ quest for Initiation
Hyper-Individualism
Relationship with place
Polyamory and staying with one partner
Loyalty and integrity
Tamera Peace Research Center In Portugal
When healed people start a community
Healing self In relation to birth family
Ancestor relationships bring down anxiety
Recommendations for building relationship with ancestors
Childhood trauma living in the lineage
Wounds are the sacred cut Into the gift


John's website: www.johnwolfstone.com

Ashley's website
Ashley's Instagram
Ashley's Parent Prayer Circle

Mallika's website
Mallika's Instagram
Mallika's Embodied Therapeutic Art Process

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