The World Needs Creatives with Rachael Sardelich

We've arrived at the finale of the third season of The World Needs Creatives and I cannot think of a more fitting person to close this journey with than with my dear friend Jane McCann, known to many as The Middle Aged Goddess.

What Jane reveals to us in this episode — what she lives and breathes and shows us through her own unraveling — is that our deepest authenticity and originality is hidden in the very place we try to avoid, halt, and resist: the process of aging itself.

In a culture that teaches us to fight time, preserve youth, and stay forever fixed in one season, Jane has made a different choice.  She's let herself be seen in all her changing, aging, becoming. And in doing so, she's discovered that what we thought was an ending is actually a return — to the most original version of ourselves that was waiting beneath all the performance and perfection we've been taught to present to the world.

In our conversation, we explore:

• The great unraveling that comes with perimenopause and midlife — and what wisdom emerges from it
• How we become clearer about who we are while simultaneously releasing what we thought we knew
• The unlived parts of ourselves that finally get permission to come forward
• What Jane has learned about invisibility, authenticity, and the freedom of caring less about others' opinions
• How daily practice becomes the ground for transformation and creative expression
• The beautiful paradox of time: having so much ahead of us, even as we become more awake to its preciousness

Join us as we close this season with a conversation about finding our way home to ourselves by letting go of who we've been told to be.

EPISODE LINKS:

Jane's website

Travel with Jane

Follow Jane on Instagram

Subscribe to Jane's Substack Goddess Gram

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

As the year begins to softens into rest, Rachael invites you into her personal year-end ritual — a process of reflection, visioning, and tending to what wants to emerge. She shares how to honor the thresholds you've crossed, illuminate the patterns holding you back, and architect a year that feels nourishing, spacious, and alive. This is about building your creative life around seasons, listening to the intelligence of your desires, and trusting what wants to move through you.

Join our Begin Again virtual new moon gathering on Thursday 20 November at 6pm AEST via THIS LINK.

Explore Rachael's 1:1 Creative Partnership via THIS LINK.

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

There's no space left. Not in your calendar. Not in your mind. Not in those quiet moments between tasks — because there are no quiet moments anymore.

And somewhere beneath the endless scroll and packed schedule, there's a part of you that remembers what it felt like to create from ease. To let ideas arrive instead of forcing them. To feel spacious instead of squeezed.

Burnout has been a running theme throughout this season. Today, we sit with the question underneath it all: In a world designed to keep us constantly available, what does our brain actually need to be both creative and productive?

Join us as we enter the intentional world of Jodi Wilson — bestselling author, health journalist, and founder of Practicing Simplicity. Her new book, A Brain That Breathes, explores the neuroscience behind our collective overwhelm and offers a radical solution: breathing space.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why your nervous system is stuck in survival mode and how it blocks creative flow
• The concept of "soft fascination" — how gazing at trees and clouds isn't wasted time but how your brain actually declutters
• "Enoughness" — an Indigenous economic principle that teaches us about sufficiency in a culture of more
• Why self-care has become another productivity metric and what genuine rest actually looks like
• How our scarcity mindset keeps us gorging on information we don't need
• Practical ways to create breathing space through small, intentional choices that cost nothing
• What our ancestors knew 10,000 years ago that we've forgotten about living well

This conversation is permission to stop filling every moment. To trust that your brain doesn't need more input — it needs space to breathe.

Links mentioned:

Explore Rachael's 1:1 Creative Partnership (Enrolments close November 21)

Pre-order A Brain That Breathes by Jodi Wilson: 

Follow Jodi Wilson:

• Practicing Simplicity on Substack: 
• Instagram: @practicingsimplicity

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

What happens when the work you love is built on systems that break the world? What if you stood face-to-face with the devastation your industry creates and walking away wasn't an option?

Today's guest, Celeste Tesoriero, chose to stay. She decided to rebuild her industry from the inside out.

Celeste spent over seventeen years building a formidable fashion career, working for iconic Australian brands and luxury houses like Roland Mouret. She launched her own label that garnered seven international design award nominations and collaborated with sustainability leaders at Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney through the British Fashion Council.

A transformative moment in Bali changed everything, when she was confronted with the harm hidden within the fashion production industry.

Instead of walking away, Celeste got curious. She studied sustainability, permaculture, and Indigenous knowledge systems. Then she did something that takes tremendous courage: she went back to transform the industry she loves.

For the past eight years, through Sonzai Studios, she's been bridging worlds — the commercial and the sacred, the extractive and the regenerative. She helps businesses integrate Indigenous wisdom and genuinely sustainable practices, fundamentally challenging how we think about growth, profit, and our responsibility to the natural world.

Together, we explore the themes of:

• What it means to be humbled by nature and learn to work with rather than against ecological systems
• The courage it takes to close what's successful but misaligned, and how that grief becomes a gateway to something more real
• How to bridge the sacred and the commercial without compromising either
• Why personal sustainability — your own capacity to endure — must come before any business strategy
• The art of holding a mirror to broken systems with empathy rather than condemnation
• What happens when we stop asking "how do I grow?" and start asking "what do I value?"
• And how indigenous wisdom offers us a 60,000-year blueprint for working in right relationship with the natural world

Join us for a conversation about rewilding industries, bridging worlds, and what happens when you refuse to accept that the way things are is the way they have to be.

KEY SHOW LINKS:

Explore Rachael's 1:1 Creative Partnership

Follow Celeste on Instagram

Follow Sonzai Studio's on Instagram

Get in touch with Celeste

Protocols for Non-Indigenous People working with Indigenous Knowledge

5 Steps to a Sustainable Wardrobe & More Resources

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

Your energy is the most important resource you have. It's the most influential, the most impactful thing you can share with the world, and learning how to understand and read and be intentional with your own energy is a game changer.

In this solo episode, we're entering into the realm of energetics. What influences our energy? How do we manage it? And how it shapes everything from the work we create to the opportunities that flow toward us.

This is about discovering who you really are underneath all the noise. Because our energy is how we perceive the world, and how the world perceives us.

I'll guide you through a two-part energetic audit to purify and fortify your energetic presence. We'll look at your environment, your relationships, how you nourish yourself, the state of your nervous system, and even the words you speak. 

This episode is packed with practical exercises you'll want to return to, so come with your journal and pen ready. 

This is the tending that makes everything else possible.

Enrol for Rachael's 1:1 Creative Partnership HERE.

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

Do you hear the pulse of creation speaking to you? Have you ever wondered how to cultivate a deeper relationship with this vast, omnipresent force?

Today we venture into the sacred and animate world of Josh Schrei — a teacher, writer, mythologist, and founder of The Emerald Podcast.

If you're yearning to deepen your relationship with source, with the great mystery itself, this conversation is for you. Joshua invites us to remember what our ancestors knew across time and tradition: that we live not in a world of inert objects, but in a living, sentient, singing cosmos. That creation pulses through all things — through water and stone, through breath and blood, through the spaces between heartbeats. And that we are not separate from this pulse. We are woven into it. 

In this mystical conversation, we explore what it means to move from the mindset of extraction to one of cultivation. We talk about why the ache for originality many of us feel is actually a cellular memory — a longing to return to our role as vessels for something ancient and ever-present. We discover how the seasons of stillness in our creative lives are not failures, but sacred incubations. And we learn why the most radical act of creativity in our fractured world is choosing reciprocity over consumption, reverence over extraction.

Joshua speaks to the mysteries of how creation reaches us — through the voice of waters, through the wisdom held in stones, through felt dialogue with the land itself. He reveals why the constant pressure to produce is a wound we carry, and what becomes possible when we finally align with the actual rhythms of the cosmos.

In this episode we explore:

• The difference between summoning inspiration and cultivating a real, living relationship with the creative forces of the cosmos
• Why creativity as service, rather than extraction — transforms not just your art, but your entire relationship to being alive
• The burden of believing creativity must come from you alone, and the liberation that comes when you release that weight
• Why stillness and incubation are not failures, but sacred architecture woven into the fabric of existence
• The cost of constant production, and what it means to align with the natural rhythms of creation
• How to anchor yourself to place and develop a felt dialogue with the living world
• The essential role of dreamers, artists, and visionaries in guiding culture toward healing and wholeness
• Why we need communal circles of dreaming in a world that has forgotten how to listen

SHOW LINKS:

Explore Rachael's 1:1 Creative Partnership

The Emerald Podcast

Josh's Mythic Body Course

Follow The Emerald on Instagram

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

What  does it take to be real? To create something pure in a world addicted to replication? To stay true when the cost of that truth is everything you've built?

Today we enter the alchemical world of Holly Ryan,  — a bespoke jeweller, environmental pioneer, and founder of iconic Australian brand Holly Ryan Jewellery, and together we explore what it means to let go of a vision you've spent your entire adult life creating. 

Holly shares her thirteen-year journey building a cult brand to global heights —from Vogue to Bella Hadid, from fashion weeks to prestigious retailers worldwide — only to face the complete dissolution of burnout that demanded she dismantle everything at the peak of her career.

This is a story of personal alchemy and metamorphosis. We witness the bone-deep unraveling that cracks you open and strips you bare, the exhaustion of creating something pure in a world addicted to replication, and what happens when your truth becomes everyone's tagline. Holly reveals the pivotal moments that shifted her trajectory — from fighting greenwashing, to reconnection with source and stepping back into her power as an educator and voice for radical transparency.

You'll hear about how to befriend the liminal space between worlds, to trust what intuition whispers beyond the noise, and to embrace the process of personal alchemy with radical honesty and courage.

This episode is an invitation to every creative navigating dissolution and resurrection. It's for those standing at the threshold, feeling called to evolve, and seeking permission to let their freak flag fly.

Key Topics Explored:

• Cultivating her craft — how nature shaped Holly's earliest understanding of creation and transformation
• Building a cult brand — from fashion week to global recognition, and the price of pioneering sustainability before it was cool
• Being ahead of your time 
• Greenwashing and heartbreak 
• The anatomy of burnout
• Letting everything burn
• The liminal space — inhabiting the sacred threshold between dissolution and resurrection
• Reconnecting to source
• Personal alchemy — how melting down precious metals became the map for melting down and remaking yourself
• From visibility to intimacy
• What it takes to be real
• Redefining success
• The other side of people pleasing

SHOW LINKS:

- Explore Rachael's 1:1 Creative Partnership

- Explore Holly Ryan Studio & Holly Ryan Jewellery & Holly's website

- Link to Holly's short film - El Agua Mágica

- Chris Hood - Jeweller from Tasmania

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

In this solo episode, I'm opening up about what it really takes to leap and land when your creative work is calling you toward something new.

Last week we explored the invisible lines that limit our potential in the subconscious. Today is about breaking through those glass ceilings we find ourselves pressed against, knowing exactly where we want to go but unable to move toward it.

We unpack the patterns that keep us circling in place: comparison, imposter syndrome, scarcity, the comfort of what we already know, and the essential inner work that makes leaping possible: cultivating a deep sense of safety in our bodies, building unshakeable self-worth, and learning to move from a grounded, authentic place.

I also dive into expanding your work through collaboration and how to land ideal partners, how to ground down and back yourself when fear arrives, and trusting that when you leap, you will be met.

This is for anyone feeling the pull toward expansion but frozen at the edge. For the creatives who can see their next chapter but don't know how to step into it.

Because on the other side of that leap, when you finally trust yourself enough to take it, everything changes.

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

This week we're turning the tables. Beloved guest Dee Kawai Tang from episode #16 takes over the mic and interviews me about my own creation story – from growing up in a caravan, to an international career working alongside creative visionaries, and the winding journey that has led me to build a life and business fueled by meaning and creative advocacy.

What emerges in our conversation cuts right to the heart of transformation – how do we move beyond the lines of limitation we've grown accustomed to believe? What if "just doing our thing" is actually a disguise for playing small? What might change for us if we actively choose to become a leader of our own destiny?

Together, we dive deep into the dance between masculine and feminine energies, unravelling ancestral patterns, the courage it takes to go for gold, how to walk your path without a map, and what it means to reclaim your unapologetic creative voice.

For every creative ready to take up more space - this one's for you.

In this episode, we explore:

• Ancestral patterns that shape our creative voice and what we think is possible
• How the environments we enter shape our expression
• De-conditioning from corporate culture
• The warrior spirit that lives within every creative
• What it means to give yourself permission to win
• Stepping into creative leadership and self motivated power
• Why community and collaboration elevate individual creativity

EPISODE LINKS:

Listen to Dee's first episode HERE on Conversations Across Realms, Embodying Grief and Clearing Karmic Knots.

My Substack article around my childhood.

Dee's 3 Part Guide to Self Publishing.

Read Dee's infamous Substack WOO-Tang HERE.

Learn more about working with Rach HERE.

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.

Today, we walk the Dreaming Path with Dr. Paul Callaghan — a Worimi man, storyteller, dancer, consultant and author whose life journey and cultural wisdom teach us how to live out our best story.

We travel through his early years of spirituality and cultural roots, into the western system that pulled him away from them, and toward a breakdown that became the portal back home.

In this conversation, Paul invites us to reflect on what it means to find The Dreaming Path, to reclaim our power with gentleness, and to nurture a creative life in harmony with Country. He shares practices to help us pay attention and reconnect to the living world, to find belonging in the land beneath our feet, and to remember that community is the true source of originality.

This episode is an invitation to step out of the rush of our modern world, to trust the wisdom of Country, and to begin walking your own Dreaming Path back to wonder, authenticity, and peace.

This episode is full of rare and precious Indigenous wisdom, truth telling,  transformative insights, practical tips, and rich inspiration for the creative heart.

In this episode, we explore:

• The power of owning and sharing our story
• Paul’s journey from corporate success to a pivotal breakdown that led him back to reconnecting with his cultural roots
• The wisdom of Aboriginal spirituality
• Practices for listening to Country and finding true belonging
• Creativity as medicine for healing and transformation
• How to reclaim our power with gentleness rather than force
• The ache of loneliness and the pathways back to connection
• The wisdom of slowing down in a world that rushes ahead
• Why originality is born in community, not in isolation
• The sacred responsibility of sharing knowledge with integrity

You can purchase Dr Paul's book - The Dreaming Path HERE

And his new children's book - Adventures on the Dreaming Path HERE.

You can follow The World Needs Creatives on Instagram HERE.

Explore working or collaborating with Rachael at [email protected] and learn more about her work HERE.

You can join the wider conversation and our community over on Substack via THIS LINK.

The original painted work in the show design was hand painted by artist Sarah Darling.

The creation of our original musical score was created by Camilla Rose Sullivan.