Mothership, wonder & crisis with Greg Wrenn. EP 31

In this episode I sit down with author and professor Greg Wrenn. We dive into an engaging conversation about healing, childhood trauma and ayahuasca. I came to the this conversation with skepticism, but also curiosity and lack of experience with this approach to healing. As we navigate the complexities of healing, Greg reflects on the roots of his journey, tracing it back to childhood. Tune in for an insightful discussion that blends humor, vulnerability, and profound insights into the healing path.

In this episode we talk about:

• Childhood trauma and healing

• Ayahuasca as last resort medicine

• Trust and psychedelics in ceremony

• Personal and planetary healing

• Reciprocity in healing practices

There was so much more we could have to and about. Let’s continue the conversation here.

As a discretion, there is a mention of un-detailed childhood abuse in this episode.

---

“What do you have to lose by putting out a message straight from the heart? What do you have to lose? Nothing. And what could be gained? A lot”

— Greg Wrenn

About Greg

GREG WRENN is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and author of Centaur, which National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes awarded the Brittingham Prize. Greg's work has appeared in The New Republic, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. As an associate English professor at James Madison University, he weaves climate change science into literary studies.

An Advanced PADI Nitrox diver, he has been exploring coral reefs around the world for over 25 years. He lives in the mountains of Virginia with his husband and their growing family of trees.

---

Greg’s Website

Instagram

Why the Body is Our Wisest Compass with Stefana Serafina. EP 30

My dear friend and mentor Stefana Serafina is our guest today. Her work has transformed my life. The way I live in my body and what I experience because of the intimate relationship with its language.

It became a very rich conversation about body, culture body, deep body and listening to the language of.

A conversation and reflection about how we can trust the information coming to us, what world we would have and live in, if body led was an option.  

I’m so excited to share her work with you! We would love to hear what you take away from this episode.

In this episode we talk about:

• The body and cultural perceptions.

• The body speaking the truth.

• Body movement and self-expression.

• The intelligence of the body.

• Deep body intelligence and movement.

“Will we transform the culture into something more restful, more sane, more just? I truly believe we would”

— Stefana Serafina

About Stefana

Stefana Serafina, M.A., is an embodiment educator, transformative movement facilitator and trainer, and the founder of the Deep Body Institute in California. Recognized for her unique body– and movement–based approach to personal and collective growth, Stefana has worked with hundreds of women and non-binary people in the U.S., Europe, and around the world since 2009, and has trained practitioners and facilitators in 12 different countries. 

Stefana developed the Deep Body Movement Method, which empower people in restoring embodied wholeness, interconnectedness, and personal–collective growth. Her work weaves together movement journeys and expressive arts approaches, nature- and soul-centric body practices, women’s sensuality & mystery traditions, embodied archetypal psychology, and dance, Her facilitation and teachings have been called "life-changing and life-giving",  "deeply penetrating and rekindling", a "masterful invitation to the timeless remembrance of who we are''.

Weekend Immersion in Copenhagen, Sept 13-15 2024

https://www.deepbody.org/sensual-root-denmark

Embodiment and Movement Facilitator/Educator Training - October 2024-2025 

https://www.deepbody.org/facilitator-training

(as a listener you get a discount on the training by mentioning carinalyall at sign up)

More about Stefana's work and all her offerings: 

www.deepbody.org

{Conversations with the Earth} A Letter to Mother Earth, by Angela Moon

Dear Mother,

You are the most enduring mother of all -- the bedrock of all. You are the soil, the water, the wind in the trees, the fire erupting from within.

Without you, where would I be? 

Earth, you hold me in embrace without reproach. My worries live in my head, I realize this when I press my cheek to your ground. Your energy is soft and pulsing. And I fear I will forget your embrace, calming and still, when I head back to the computer screen. I want to stay. I see my self centeredness waving again at its reflection in the mirror. I don't want to be trapped in my own reflection. 

I am just sitting, lying here right now, looking at the grass that covers your ground. The world is quiet here. For now. I might just drift off, into the land of dreams.

Let me tell you this, I love you. I want you to know love can feel like abundance. But love can also feel like a clear absence, a clearing of immense space. It's not always about filling up to the top. Love can be like an empty shelf, cleared just for you. Love can be a pocket of silence. This space, it looks empty and it holds so much. 

I dream of being in peace with you more often. I dream of being like this even when I am not lying here with you. When I'm frantic and hurrying, I dream of settling back into contemplative presence with you. I want to greet your blue oceans and your mountain terrains, your children - the animals, plants, all.

But I either fall behind, stay stuck in my head, or send all my senses into the vortex of my screen. Removed from you, I seek comfort and relief from you -- perhaps it is a heavy burden for you to bear, along with other things you carry.

You don't engage me in my rabbit hole of abstractions, my spiraling staircase of 'what-ifs'. You neither validate, nor affirm, nor criticize. You just hold me and then they somehow fade away, to be replaced by birds chirping and a sense of peaceful awe.

It feels like an external force, and yet I felt the shift happen from within. Have you absorbed my deepest fears and self criticisms? Have they seeped into your ground? Or did they disappear when you didn't help me feed them? I have now slipped out of the room of thoughts. I'm now in this moment with all of your children, all of your creation, with the tangible feeling of you holding me. 

I feel a wave of guilt when I reflect on how we are poisoning you. Humans. I'm one of them. How do I listen for you more deeply, Mother Earth? How do I do that without relying on the speech of humans, the speech we have carved out only for our kind, our kind that now seeks to destroy the balance you set?

A language of feeling and earth based tending. I am learning and growing. You are always there, present. You are with us all, and I hope you are listening. I won't forget you. I'll remember to spend time with you. Stay well, until we converse again, in love.

By Angela Moon

Bio:

Angela Moon strives to practice mindful living and express her deepest imaginative self. She appreciates time to observe nature, meditate, learn from others, read, and write. She enjoys connecting to our inner wildness, nurturing trust with clear communication, tapping into creativity, and getting in touch with nature and spirit. Sharing authentic experiences, thoughts, and connections is one of her aspirations and joys.

Follow Angela on her Medium page: https://medium.com/@angelamoon

An ode to blubber; this body is not your battleground

I wrote this post for a site back in 2014. Yet we’re still talking about this. Still asking for the right to be body. To feel safe. To have body, not give you the right to traumatize. There is a long way to go. I have conversations with my three daughters about this a lot. I am sharing this again, as the blog I wrote it for no longer exists. My feelings and experience with being a body still does.

Denmark, 2014

Do you strive for perfection or feel shitty when you look in the mirror?Are you pretty sure that Self-Love is a short drive from Minsk? These are my thoughts on why being called fat in public once again pushed me to change how I related to myself - for the better.  

My weight… just writing that sparked so many thoughts that I have a hard time keeping up. Feeling forced to relate to how I look, what I weigh and most importantly what am doing about it has swung into my life again and again. 

Some have said I am easy on the eye, others say that there is so much of me I am hard to miss. This is a recent story about a personal-space invasion by opinions and the ripple effect of them. 

The foundation of my work is that you belong here exactly as you are. I believe that there is no perfect ideal to strive for. Body image, intellect, beauty, coolness. It has been the work I needed to do with myself to feel free in my life, and it is how I support women to feel content, happy and strong as they are. 

I know that for me not owning that statement has been exhausting. In motherhood I read books, looked at women who wizzed through the challenging parts smiling and looking great, and I felt like a constant failure. Going to meeting with oatmeal in my hair, or saying that i JUST gave birth to excuse the blubber on my belly. 

The art of comparison once again left me feeling less worthy. The foundation of being wrong or less than, isn’t a nice place to be and very very seldom leads to a life with happiness and ease. The self-compassion practice and showing up just as I am changed my life. 

Does this mean that that foundation is never shaken? No. But it takes a bit more to get the earth quaking, and it happened a few weeks ago. 

A little story I want to share.

I was out for drinks with my two sisters. We had a great time and we decided to end the good times with a burger. Now it is no secret that I have put on weight after the 2 pregnancies and what not, but burger it was – YOLO or something.

In the cue some guys felt that we had cut in line, and looked at me and said that I probably shouldn’t be in there anyway considering my weight. Well tears galore and I felt shitty. Reduced to an unworthy lump of Blubber (did you every read Judy Blume’s book? It’s awesome… anyway).

The sense that everyone in there were looking at me deciding whether they agreed or not felt humiliating. I had to get out of there. Shaken by how someone could effect how I felt about myself stayed with me for days. 

Fast forward 2 weeks and my man and I are away for the weekend at a music festival. As I am coming out of the toilet area a woman stops me. She is a scout for a model agency and thinks I would be an awesome model for the normal size/curve department… huh…

All of the sudden someone’s opinion of me steered me in another direction. 

So which “truth” do I go with? A third – my own? How I see myself? How I feel about myself? Or do I let either of their perspectives rule and dictate wether I feel worthy just as I am? Do I wait till I have xx weight to go out again or do I pout my lips and work it like a supermodel? The “you belong here, exactly as you are” reminds me that none of the above is my truth. It is their eyes looking at me. What matters is how I look at me. And this has been such an awesome reminder.

BMI and weight has nothing to do with it. I feel it is relevant for most women. I believe it begins with how you feel. Does the need to shift come from “I am a problem that needs to be solved” or does it come from a deep knowing of worth and compassion and from there asking “So what do I want”. 

This is what we can work on – how you see you. And knowing that you belong here, because hey you already are. <3

Discovering the cracks in the mirror with Bayo Akomolafe

Most often we talk about the cracks being where the light comes in. In this conversation with Bayo Akomolafe, he says “Sometimes mirrors rupture and cracks start to emerge. And then our images start to get distorted. And in those would could despair and seek to polish the mirror back to it’s shininess again. Or we could use in a different ethical move, use the cracks to seek out the darknesses, the shadows the cracks occlude”

This conversation has invited me to look at those in my mirror. Where I try to polish and where I accept the invitation. In the broader scale where we in West are so busy polishing that our arms are falling off. It takes some breathing deeply and a commitment to not turn away.

I had so much emotion running through my veins as he spoke, words fell short and felt that as well. He is an important voice of our day. In his words, poetry and in the way those ask me as the receiver to reflect!

Please let us know what you take away from this conversation.

Listen here:

About Bayo:

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books,

These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.

Where to find him:

www.bayoakomolafe.net

www.emergencenetwork.org

Resources mentioned:

Feminist Scholar Karen Barad

Bayo on Facebook

---

The Body and Envisioning a New World with Stefana Serafina ☾ 14

Oh my has this episode been a long time coming. But it is landing here at just the right time.

My dear friend and mentor Stefana Serafina is our guest today. Her work has transformed my life. The way I live in my body and what I experience because of the intimate relationship with its language.

It became a very rich conversation about body, my body, your body, the body as the extension of Earth. .

A conversation and reflection about the risk of not including our bodies (again!) in the visioning for the new world that might be shaping with this crisis. 

About the body having to be the guide and the way in this hopeful emergence of a renewed human race. 

I’m so excited to share her work with you! We would love to hear what you take away from this episode.

ABOUT STEFANA:

Stefana Serafina, M.A., is an embodiment educator, writer, and embodied empowerment facilitator based in the San Francisco Bay. She is recognized for her unique and multi-faceted approach to body–based self–discovery and transformation.

She is the founder of Intuitive Body and Dance ©, which has grown into an international platform providing resources, experiences, and education for returning to our bodies’ inherent intelligence

For over a decade, Stefana has been teaching and facilitating transformative, movement-based embodiment in California, Europe, Central America, and online, and developing the Deep–Body model that is at the foundation of the work.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

My Grandmother's Hands : Racialized Trauma and the Pathways to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies - Resmaa Menakem

The Body Keeps the Score : Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma - Bessel van der Kolk

My bodies, My earth - Ruby Gibson

Waking the Tiger - Peter Levine

FIND STEFANAS WORK HERE:
https://www.intuitivedance.org