Kimberly and Mirabai Starr engage in a rich and intimate exploration of mysticism, personal loss, spirituality, and the intersection of sexuality and the sacred. They consider how they have each found spirituality in their everyday lives while being mindful of their journeys, cultures, ancestry, and the complexities involved. They discuss Mirabai's new book, "Ordinary Mysticism," which delves into the nature of mysticism and its accessibility to everyone every day. Mirabai emphasizes that mysticism doesn't require institutionalized religion and can be found in ordinary moments. They discuss the profound impact of loss and grief in Mirabai’s life. She describes how these experiences deepened her connection to the sacred and the beauty intertwined with suffering.

Bio

Mirabai Starr is an award winning author of creative nonfiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos for 20 years, and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialog. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. She has written over 15 books, and the latest is “Ordinary Mysticism.” But you'll hear her talk about “Caravan of No Despair,” “Wild Mercy,” and some of her translations from Spanish to English, “In The Mystics,” “The Great Mystics.” She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.

What you’ll hear:

• Mirabai's views on spiritual, literary and poetic writing.

• The origin story of her new book "Ordinary Mysticism" - including it’s connection to Anne Lamott

• The ease in finding the mystical if you are open to it.

• The challenges of having that openness in the everyday

• The intersections of grief and the sacred

• Cultivating mystical awareness in daily life

• Searching for spiritual grounding

• Uprootedness of being spiritual but not religious

• How to understand your relationship to different spiritual technologies

• How to tap into spiritual bounty without colonizing and appropriating

• Intention and attention are crucial for recognizing the sacred in the mundane.

• The integration of sexuality and spirituality

• The common split many women feel between the sexual and the sacred aspects of their lives. How healing from/through sexual abuse can lead to sacredness in intimacy

• What’s a responsible and mindful approach to drawing from various spiritual traditions?

• How does storytelling and reflecting on shared struggles lead to insights within the spiritual journey?

• And how ending an abusive sexual and spiritual relationship can lead to healing through new forms of intimacy.

• Healthy intimacy can be holy

Resources
https://mirabaistarr.com/

In this episode, podcast producer Jackson Kroopf interviews Kimberly Ann Johnson and Stephen Jenkinson about their upcoming live audio series Never Land / Sever Land - Dirt, Place, Ancestry, and The Making of Culture From The New World. They discuss the impact of their recent trip to Ireland on their ongoing collaboration around culture making in the wake of a global pandemic. They reveal details about Stephen's work-in-progress manuscript and how it relates to orphan wisdom. They consider the implications of the “New World” in contemporary circumstances, the sticky territory of ancestry, and how dirt fits into all of this. A glimpse into a very special offering to come, this conversation gives you a preview into what happens when these two come together to consider the topics and work they’ve devoted so much of their respective writings and teachings to: how to consider (your) place when history is never far past.

Bio

Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW is a worker, author, storyteller, musician and culture activist. In 2010, he founded Orphan Wisdom, a house for learning skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. It is a redemptive project that comes from where he comes from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time he won’t live to see. When not on the road, he makes books, succumbs to interviews, tends to labours on a small farm, mends broken handles and fences, and bends towards lifeways dictated by the seasons of the boreal borderlands.

What you’ll here wonderings about:

• What it means for North Americans to visit their ancestral homeland
• The consequences of being cultural orphans
• Native culture and its relationship to whiteness
• What ancestry means to your travel plans
• The difference between making culture from and making culture for...
• Peter Behrens' book "The Law of Dream"
• Stephen's musings on Tobe Hooper and Stephen Spielberg's film Poltergeist
• Back to the land / farming fantasies
• Dirt and its layered wisdom
• Shifts in Stephen's teachings from warnings to descriptors
• The Unauthorized history of North America
• What it means to always feel like you're running
• Why its different to listen to this series live...
• What wellness has to do with all this...

You can learn more and sign up for their upcoming class "Never Land / Sever Land: Dirt, Place, Ancestry, and The Makings of Culture From the New World" from October 20th-November 17th at:

https://kimberlyannjohnson.com/never-land/

photo by Mattias Olsson

In this episode, Kimberly and April discuss her most recent book of poetry titled Matter / Mother which shares about April’s experience of traveling through the underworld of grief, hardship, and heartbreak while mothering her young child. Together, they share their desires for a culture that makes space for the depth of mothering experiences and stories through all of the different seasons of life. They also discuss how to bear the pain and responsibility of both creating a world we want our children to live in while simultaneously inhabiting the one that currently exists. Overall, their vulnerability and honest reflections from their differing seasons of mothering offers language to those deep experiences and possibility for all mothers.

Bio

April Tierney is a poet, activist, craftswoman, mother, and lover of stories. Her work follows threads of ecopoetics, myth, culture, and lineage. She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and featured in Orion Magazine, Deep Times: A Journal of the Work that Reconnects, Clarion Poetry Magazine, and Real Ground Journal, among others.

What She Shares:

–”Matter / Mother” poetry and mothering

–Mothering in the upper world while traversing the underworld

–Creative process while mothering

–Motherhood hardship and joys of different seasons

–Creating the world we want our children to inhabit

What You’ll Hear:

–Latest book “Matter Mother” of poetry

–Reading of “Birth Story” poem

–Birth as animalistic and mythic

–Decision behind black cover on book

–Longing for more mothering stories from underworld journey

–Writing a book during early mothering

–Listening to experiences not from our own

–Finding language for mothering experiences

–Finding the right voices on mothering experiences

–Birth culturally accepted as traumatic

–Mothering in the underworld while raising children in the upperworld

–Mothering as existential

–Heartbreak of mothering in these times

–Unable to talk about lived, ongoing way while holding children

–Fantasy of modern motherhood

–Modern living as kind of trauma we learn to cope with

–Four forest fires in three days

–Evacuating from home from forest fires

–Pausing from writing and trusting the quiet places

–Writing as torture until its tended to

–Bringing forth for the world what is asking to come through

–Books as living, breathing things

–Creative portion of mothering in tension with energy and needs

–Kimberly’s surprise of mothering young adulthood

–Grieving and loving during mothering in all phases

–Importance of sharing from different stages of mothering

–Physical versus psychological demands of mothering

–Noticing the glory spots of mothering

–Sending children out into the world

–Creating the world we want our children to live in

Resources

Website: https://www.apriltierney.com/

IG: @apriltierney11

In this episode, Kimberly and Marysia discuss how they’ve navigated the challenges and benefits of single motherhood. In many ways, their lives and stories run parallel: surprising pregnancies, marrying into another culture, becoming single mothers with babies, and living out single motherhood while being entrepreneurs. This honest, raw, and tender conversation offers vulnerable testimonies and nuggets of wisdom for other single mothers. They emphasize the difficulties but importance of building kinship and community, undoing internalized shame, and tending to community. Marysia’s School of the Sacred Wild is now open for enrollment with Kimberly as a guest teacher!

Bio

Marysia Miernowska is a teacher, author, Earth activist, green witch, folk herbalist and healer rooted in the Wise Woman Tradition of Healing. Born in Poland, she carries with her a lineage of European folk herbalism. Marysia honors plants as sentient beings, elders, healers and teachers. As a Plant Spirit Communicator, Marysia channels messages from the Earth spirits and guides students to connect with plant spirits through meditation and through their bodies, to receive guidance and learn about the constituents, energetics and properties of plants. Registration is now open for the School of the Sacred Wild and can be accessed through the link below.

What She Shares:

–Journeys into pregnancy

–Trauma and shame around single mothering

–Finding kinship and community

What You’ll Hear:

–Marysia’s surprising journey into motherhood

–Managing cultural differences as a couple

–Traumatic experience becoming a single mother with a baby

–Kimberly’s pregnancy and divorce

–Single motherhood sisterhood

–Navigating single motherhood challenges and joys

–Marysia entering single motherhood

–Receiving judgment for divorcing

–Physical manifestations of wounds and healing

–Functional freeze reactions for survival

–Finding the village as single mothers

–Fairy godmothers and aunties

–Bringing in chosen family for children

–Cultural differences in background and local living

–Anticipating the death of empty nest

–Reviewing mothering choices

–Grief and cultural isolation

–Predictability and calm in hiring anticipatory help

–Working through shame in asking for more help

–Nervous systems and being trapped

–How culture is physically organized disruptive to kinship

–Spontaneous social interactions

–Taking risks and extending our ways of gathering

–Doing it imperfectly and letting go of shame

–Tending to the ecosystem of families, parents, and single mothers

–School of the Sacred Wild herbalism program

–Creating kinship and a deep sense of belonging between human & non-human

–Holding vitality of the Mother archetype and cutting back, releasing, and discerning

–September 7th registration closes

–10% off code for listeners

–Kimberly to guest teach in School of Sacred Wild

Resources

Website: https://www.schoolofthesacredwild.com/

IG: @marysia_miernowska

Course Link for Listeners: here

In this episode, Natalie and Kimberly dive deep into the choose your own hormone phenomenon. They discuss an evolutionary biologist's perspective of individual vs. group think when it comes to women’s health, the connections between hormones and reproductive health issues like endometriosis and PCOS, as well as the evolutionary case for grandmothering.

Bio

Natalie Dinsdale, PhD is an evolutionary biologist, a researcher, an astrologer, a dancer, and a mother. She investigates how evolutionary dynamics shape features of sexuality, reproduction, and health & disease in humans.

What you will hear:

• Carl Jung as inspiration for ideas on individual experience vs. groupthink - mass psychology
• The true person vs. The statistical person
• While individuals matter, her research is on patterns of populations changing over time
• Pregnancy screening for women in late 30s
• Trusting intuition around medical choices
• Endometriosis - is menstrual fluid the cause of legions?
• Bi-polar disorder’s connections to oxytocin
• Do people with PCOS have a uterine that contracts less?
• How does Natalie’s research relate to connective tissue, collagen, and parasympathetic responses?
• Oxytocin doesn’t only mean good
• Trade-offs in evolutionary biology - activities and functions that have to happen for evolution to occur.
• What is the effect of high testosterone in women and PCOS?
• How do females of a species obtain the resources they need to reproduce?
• Choose your own hormone phenomenon in menopause treatment
• There is good evidence that grandmothering has benefits to mothers and daughters

Resources

website: https://www.nataliedinsdale.com/

substack: https://natalield.substack.com/

In this episode, Kimberly and Chris dive deep into the impact of travel on their lives and the consequences of tourism in places they call home. As two world travelers, who have each spent a decade living abroad, Kimberly and Chris consider what they have learned about home, hospitality, and culture from places far from the lands they were raised. They discuss how the pandemic impacted travel to where Chris resides in Mexico, one of two countries that kept its borders open? How Air BnB’s, second homes, and passive income have changed the real estate landscape for future generations? They wonder what it would look like to re-imagine the set of relationships and responsibilities one has if they “belong” to their neighborhood? They ask what if we imagined both our “leisure” and our “work” as connected to the place we live? And how does the question of confinement to home, so relevant to new mothers, show up in the “post-pandemic” summer of 2024?

Bio

Chris Christou is a writer, educational curator, and activist. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, he moved to Oaxaca, Mexico in 2015 after a decade of delirious wanderlust. In 2016, Chris began concurrently working in and writing about the tourism industry, founding Oaxaca Profundo, a deep learning organization focused on food culture and radical hospitality. In 2021, alongside friends and strangers, he organized and launched the End of Tourism Podcast. He is the author of a book of poetry entitled the Black Braid of Memory, as well as forthcoming books on the psychedelic culture, the unauthorized history of tourism, and radical hospitality. Finally, he is a student of all things chocolate and cacao-related.

What You’ll Hear

• Being at home in other places
• Are places “back to normal”?
• Are we “post-pandemic”?
• Mexico as an escape route for coping with Covid culture
• How is a sense of home impacted by tourism?
• What does it mean to be forced to stay at home and the response is to get as far away as fast as possible?
• Wanderlust - wanting to be everywhere and by virtue of that not wanting to be anywhere
• How much of tourism an unwillingness to be where one is?
• What does it mean to consider what the place you call home needs? And what you can offer that place?
• I don’t think you can be responsible to a place if you’re elsewhere
• The history of mobility in north American Culture
• How to re-neighbor
• Seeing places as temporary makes them disposable
• How the pandemic led to lots of profit-driven real estate aquisitions
• The impact of Air Bnbs in tourist destinations
• Do we make our homes for ourselves or for our parents and others we want to welcome people
• How do locals become second class servants or mascot for Instagram world views?
• Dehumanization is a two way street in the tourist industry
• Leaving one expensive city for a less expensive city you bring the landlords with you.
• The un-sustainability of second homes
• Hospitality is complex - learning a culture to invoke hospitality with the stranger
• How difficult staying at home is for a new mother?
• Feeling confined when trying to make home with a baby
• Having family in and of two cultures
• Travel vegans vs. living it up

Resources

https://www.chrischristou.net/

chrischristou.substack.com

IG - @zajorino / @theendoftourism / @oaxacaprofundo

In this episode, Kimberly and Lauren discuss her teaching journey, which led to the restorative exercise techniques Lauren offers in the women’s health field. As a lifelong mover, Lauren went through several different yoga trainings and anatomical frameworks to arrive at a simple truth: there isn’t a right or wrong, good or bad when it comes to understanding your body’s needs. They discuss re-writing injury stories, and consider what leads women to medically intervene at different phases of life. In addition, Kimberly and Lauren talk about raising teenage girls. In this open hearted conversation, two somatic experiencing practitioners talk through their way of practicing what they teach.

Bio

Lauren Ohayon isan internationally recognized yoga + Pilates teacher specializing in core and pelvic floor issues. She has been teaching for the past two decades. Lauren creates online exercise programs that are challenging, unique, safe, sustainable and life-changing.

In addition to yoga and Pilates, she is certified as a Restorative Exercise Specialist™, in Neurokinetic Therapy® and in Anatomy in Motion. The web site Holy Shift yoga was her first online baby and has since become this web site under her own name. Nothing has changed but the name. Learn more at www.laurenohayon.com

What You’ll Hear

• Supporting women in training their bodies
• The intersection of Anatomy and the Nervous system
• The pelvic floor world
• Movement as soothing
• Injuries as a yoga teacher
• Needing to dig less healing wells, instead dig one deep well
• Set one on a path of a more mindful way of moving
• Re-writing the stories of our injuries
• Distinguishing anatomy and biomechanics
• Somatic nervous system approach to exercise
• Feldenkrais technique was a big influence
• Letting your body teach you
• What leads us to try and intervene in our bodies as women at different life phases
• Good filters for not entertaining the cult/“you should” mindset
• Diet and protein
• Being sensory following nature and desire for warmth
• Parenting teens
• A mother who was a very experimental/exploratory teen
• Consent communication and safety
• Restoring your core- a central support system that receives and transmits
• To be restorative is to not approach the body through good/bad right/wrong anatomical frameworks
• Accepting the body’s changes with aging

Resources

IG: @thelaurenohayon

Website: www.laurenohayon.com