Podcast appearances and mentions of sophie strand

Over the next month we'll be sharing four stories in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature. In this first one, author Sophie Strand uses her imagination to feel herself as part of the more-than-human world—as river, hummingbird, and mycelial network. Opening herself up to a “supracellular” state, she practices letting her mind leak beyond the bounds of individual consciousness and through the threads of relation that she shares with her ecosystem to experience being not a siloed self, but a web of interconnectivity. What empathy might take root and grow, she asks, when we practice thinking like this—when we imagine our consciousness to extend far beyond the confines of our own bodies? Read the essay. Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey For The Wild community, it's Ayana. It's been a minute. Life has been moving—fast, deep, and full. I've grown, and with that growth, a clearer sense of what I want to share with you has come into focus.After nearly a decade of digital episodes, I felt a longing—an ache to be in person, on the land, and heart to heart with our guests. That's why you may have noticed we've slowed down on weekly releases. Instead, we've been on the road, spending sacred, unhurried time with people we love—tending to conversations that are raw, intimate, funny, beautiful, edgy, and alive.We were hoping to keep it under wraps a little longer, but we're just too excited: the first season of our new walking series will be released soon, and it features the luminous Sophie Strand. This series is an in-person, land-based conversation that is intimate, weird, raw, beautiful exploration of land, grief, myth, pleasure, and more. These aren't studio-perfect interviews, they're alive.But there's more. We're also creating an anthology—a wild and tender book featuring Sophie and 20 other contributors like Tyson Yunkaporta, Sylvia Linsteadt, adrienne maree brown, Dori Midnight, and Stephen Jenkinson. It's an archive, an altar, a trail companion—a distillation of 10 years of For The Wild with essays, art, poetry, rituals, and deep questions. It asks us what it means to live in fragmentary times and still root deeply. We hope to print it later this year.To bring these projects to life, we need your support.We're looking for funding partners, sponsors, and publishers—and we're dreaming of a book tour from the West Coast to the East, and across the pond to Europe.If you're an individual, foundation, or aligned company that wants to support the Sophie Strand series, reach out.If you're a publisher or lit world comrade, I'd love to connect.If you'd like to host a live gathering for the book tour, let's talk—we'd love to share good food, real talk, and tender moments with your community.Email us at connect@forthewild.worldThank you for walking with us—whether you've been here since the beginning or just arrived. My heart is racing as I share this with you. It feels risky, but right. Vulnerable, but true. And I'm so grateful.In the meantime, you can spend some deep time with us through our Earthly Reads Series and Book Study or Bayo Akomolafe's We Will Dance with Mountains: Vunja! course—both on our website.And of course, we've got over 350 episodes waiting for you on your favorite platform.Here's to what comes next. With love,Ayana♫ The music featured in this update is “Das Nuvens (Live)” by Fabiano do Nascimento, courtesy of Leaving Records.Support the show

Today, we present a wild and flowering conversation between two poets, writers, philosophers, and theobiologians Bayo Akomalofe and Sophie Strand. This conversation is from a 2022 SAND Community Gathering. To hear the full conversation with Q&A from the live webinar you can view it here (with SAND Membership). In Greek Mythology, the Titan Kronos eats an indigestible stone and vomits up the new Olympic pantheon of gods. In our current time, people planted in stratigraphic layers of shared trauma find themselves uniquely ill – physically and mentally. We are unable to digest food and unable to digest violence. What if indigestion – practical and mythical – was a sign that a new world was threatening to be born? The very basis of our nucleated cells is an ancient botched bacterial cannibalism. What if our inability to digest certain injustices was an invitation to vomit up a new pantheon? And in an age when we are all threaded through with microplastics and blood pressure stabilizers, what does it mean to start to physically grow into new shapes around incursions we cannot properly assimilate or expel? 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 Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains'. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California's (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been appointed Senior Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. He is the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Yet it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she'll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. She is the author of The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and The Madonna Secret. She is also finishing a collection of essays about navigating an incurable genetic disease and early trauma through ecological storytelling. You can subscribe to her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com, and follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com. Topics 00:00 Introduction and Welcome 01:35 Introducing Dr. Bayo Akomolafe 04:11 Introducing Sophie Strand 06:35 Starting the Conversation: New Gods in Challenging Times 13:54 Exploring Mispronunciation and Evolution 27:27 Animist Perspectives on Trauma 28:17 Healing in Yoruba Culture 30:29 Bioelectric Signals and Embryogenesis 35:40 The Role of Trickster Gods 38:26 Invasive Species and Ecosystem Dynamics 47:25 Disability as an Invitation to Community 55:32 Concluding Thoughts on New Gods Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Catch Joshua Turek on comedy tour this summer! Tickets are up for shows in NYC, Chicago, San Diego, L.A., Seattle, Portland, Kansas City with more dates and cities coming soon at joshuaturek.com Author of "The Body is a Doorway", Sophie Strand talks with host Joshua Turek about her memoir, mycellial networks, books as guides to our psychic lives, and how both of them want to open bookstores. Check out Sophie's work here https://sophiestrand.com/Books talked about include:Plants in the imaginale realmUrsula Leguin The Language of the NightA Distant Mirror by Barbara TuchmanJoan of Arc by herself and her witnessesRed Rising Series by Pierce BrownLonesome Dove Larry McMurtryBooks by Larry Mcmurtrythe One Inside Sam ShepherdJoseph Campbell myth booksConfederacy of Dunces Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Kimberly and return guest Sophie Strand celebrate publishing week for Sophie's extraordinary new book The Body is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human. They discuss where Sophie currently finds herself in a post-diagnosis reality and what writing the book taught her about the mysteries of illness. She emphasizes the complex power of doctor relationships and medical information on body through the nocebo effect. Kimberly and Sophie talk through what it looks like to support someone dealing with illness day to day. Sophie shares her personal and social experiences with chronic illness, as well as the contemporary cultural pressures to intertwine identity with labels. She also highlights the role of community, creativity and bad story on diagnoses and treatments. This open-hearted conversation touches on the broader implications of health, identity, and the need for a more open and relational approach to healing and self-understanding.   Bio Sophie Strand is a poet and writer with a focus on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand and The Madonna Secret, and the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.” She lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.   What They Share The impact of a long-awaited diagnosis The No-Cebo Effect What we pay attention to we pray towards The Mystery of Illness Bad Story in Myth and Psychotherapeutic fields Self-Diagnosis How to tell a different stories about chronic illness Performing Sickness to have invisible illness be more visible How to check in with friends having a hard time/facing health challenges End of the addiction line Chronic Sickness as it relates to sobriety Eco-cidal culture wants to turn everything into product Somatic Protest Body can't work The miracle of GoFund Me alongside an unaffordable health care system History of oral culture Orality and Literature by anthropologist Walter Ong What is an individual? Monotheism of Psychology The impulse to classify is about control and fear Prayer is another energy that might have a better idea of what I need Vending Machine Prayer Finding book endings that aren't fantasies How to separate negative from worse How to operate with one spoon   Links IG @cosmogyny Substack https://sophiestrand.substack.com/ Sophie's New Book: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/sophie-strand/the-body-is-a-doorway-a-memoir/9780762487417/?lens=running-press The Body is A Doorway Amazon Review page: https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/?ie=UTF8&channel=glance-detail&asin=0762487410 Money and The Nervous System Sign-Up: https://kimberlyannjohnson.com/money-the-nervous-system/

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week's guest is my friend and inspiration, knowledge ecologist Christina Bowen. If I were to try and start a movement, I would call her first. Christina is CEO and co-founder of socialroots.io, an NSF- and Omidyar Network-funded software platform for cross-group collaboration that promotes aligned action and helps teams communicate legible impact metrics to stakeholders. Or, in the parlance of our times, she is a master of negotiating the complexities of human communication and community.She has deep, lived experience of what it takes to subvert the toxic status quo, cultivate the health of teams, and rethink our “social” spaces so they actually work for human beings. She also introduced me to the world of “mycopunk”, an earthier and more distributed alternative to solarpunk that places more priority on our relationships and narrative construction as an inherently collective project. This is a warm and grounded dialogue with someone I respect immensely as a force for betterment. Here is how her team describes their work and principles on their own website:Our greatest challenges as a global civilization will require an unprecedented amount of cooperation and may have been caused in large part by unmitigated competition. We have founded Socialroots on a few key principles, summarized below, to support this shift into a more healthy future.* Efficient coordination across groups enables more decentralized organizing and greater innovation.* Data is a commons and must be treated as such. Platform users need to be empowered when it comes to their data.* Power stays healthier when shared. We are dedicated to fair, transparent, and consent-driven work, enabling participatory communities to share values and approaches, and to approach teamwork informed by insights from healthy living systems.There you have it. I highly recommend you reach out to her and her team if you are trying to do better work in groups.Special Announcement: Join me for the first in a new series of live hangout calls for patrons on Saturday, January 18th at 2 pm Mountain Time! Let's foster real and lasting collaborations in a safe place for collective inquiry.Thank you and enjoy this episode!Project LinksLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse my reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:31 – Intro0:06:58 – Meet Christina Bowen0:08:54 – Scaling Social Networks Without Burning Out0:14:00 – Working Out Loud in Small & Large Groups0:19:25 – Social Protocols of Coordination0:22:44 – Healthy Boundaries Online0:30:10 – Supporting Invisible or Illegible Labor0:40:50 – Subverting The Status (More-Than-Human) Pyramid0:51:44 – Salience Landscapes & Safe/Brave/Inclusive Spaces0:53:35 – AI-Augmented Communication & Spacemaking1:01:34 – Edge-Based Coherent Sensemaking vs. Toxic Hierarchies1:09:11 – Mindful Tech Use & Recommended Guests1:12:38 – OutroMentioned MediaMycopunk PrinciplesBuild Capacity: Scaling your network without burning outby Socialroots, Christina Bowen, Naomi Joy SmithWhat is coordination and why is it so important to effective networks?by Ana Jamborcic, Christina Bowen, SocialrootsIntimacy Gradients: The Key to Fixing Our Broken Social Media Landscapeby Socialroots, Ana JamborcicLet's subvert the status pyramidby Socialroots, Ana JamborcicWorking and learning out loudby Harold JarcheAlyssa Allegretti on Sacred Domesticity and Hard Times in The Liminal WebFuture Fossils Podcast 225Descartes' Errorby Antonio DamasioSeeing Like A Stateby James C. ScottC. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as ArtFuture Fossils 175Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As GovernanceFuture Fossils 213Stephen Reid on Technological MetamodernismFuture Fossils 226Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold EquationsFuture Fossils 141The Dawn of Everythingby David Graeber & David WengrowGenerative Team Design: Innovation, Psychological Safety, and Empathyby Dara BlumenthalBeing Glueby Tanya ReillyIdentity Is Such A Dragby Luis Mojica and Sophie Strand on Holistic Life NavigationThe future is fungi: The rise and rhizomes of mushroom cultureby ASU Center for Science and The Imagination with Merlin Sheldrake, Kaitlin Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, and Corey PressmanOther Mentions• DWeb Camp• Responsive.org• Jeff Emmett• Plato• Bayo Akomolafe• Douglas Rushkoff• John Fullerton• Capitalinstitute.org• Cris Moore• Friedrich Hölderlin• Interspeciesinternet.io• Kumu.io• Joe Edelman• Pri Bertucci This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In this TIMELESS episode we hear from Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe. Together, we explore how the sacred is less about certainty and mastery and more about dwelling in the unknown, the disruptive, and the in-between. As we open ourselves to this journey, we consider how unlearning and openness might guide us toward a deeper, more grounded sense of the sacred—one that emerges in moments of humility, fragility, and genuine encounter.   “And  I  was  thinking  that,  at  least  in  my  own  situated  experience, my  approach  to  the  sacred  would  be  to  flip  the  paradigm  and  to  ask,  what  if  the  sacred  researches  you?” Sophie Strand   As a writer, Sophie focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially between beings, ideas, differences, and mythical gradients. Bayo is a poet, philosopher, psychologist, professor, and chief-curator of the Emergence Network. He curates this earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilisational crisis. We hope this TIMELESS episode invites you to pause and reflect on the sacred in new and unexpected ways.   Links from this episode and more at allthatweare.org  

Today on the show, I welcome Sophie Strand, a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she'll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she's ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. She is the author of The Flowering Wand,The Madonna Secret, and the forthcoming memoir The Body Is a Doorway as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.”  You can follow her work on Instagram @cosmogyny. We get to hear Sophie talk about The Flowering Wand, why she wrote it and how she relates to the masculine - how is it different from the patriarchy and why that is important. Is the harm patriarchal or more broadly dominant culture? How does she feel about disturbing the dominant culture system? The inspiration for The Flowering Wand was born of her interrogation of the Jesus story which she retells in The Madonna Secret with an honoring of the roots of Rabbi Yeshua and the rightful placement of Mary Magdalene as a peer by his side. Why have women's stories been left out - are we getting better at telling them? Hmmm, consider our current election as a reflection point. How does Sophie relate and respond to the cultural limitations or expectation placed on women? How does she tend to her self? How can we tend to the earth...egregore?Sophie has an upcoming workshop, Myths as Maps: Ecological Storytelling, happening on November 16th and 17th. We have limited time to dive into the vast subject of myth and how we can perhaps more appropriately work with myth through the creation of our own vs. an adoption of others from a much different time and place. Her daily practice is an effort to create her own myth and is a profound inspiration in how we can be better collaborators with all the beings we dance with on earth.Thanks Sophie, I look forward to reading The Body is a Doorway when it comes out in March 2025!Following our conversation, I turn to Kim Krans' Archtype cards for some inspiration in how to navigate the potential challenges that may arise this week following the election. The Bridge is the response. It's a perfect gift of contemplation for these times.For those needing some inspiration in how to tend to oneself, one's child or perhaps one's inner child, here is the article I shared from Susan Weber on how to see the world as good.Today's show was engineered by Ian Seda from Radiokingston.org.Our show music is from Shana Falana!Feel free to email me, say hello: she@iwantwhatshehas.org** Please: SUBSCRIBE to the pod and leave a REVIEW wherever you are listening, it helps other users FIND IThttp://iwantwhatshehas.org/podcastITUNES | SPOTIFYITUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i-want-what-she-has/id1451648361?mt=2SPOTIFY:https://open.spotify.com/show/77pmJwS2q9vTywz7Uhiyff?si=G2eYCjLjT3KltgdfA6XXCAFollow:INSTAGRAM * https://www.instagram.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast/FACEBOOK * https://www.facebook.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ About This EpisodeHow can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation?How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly dominated by anxiety and technological determinism?This week on Future Fossils (as a teaser for the kind of conversations I am having for my upcoming spin-off Humans On The Loop), I meet with Stockholm-based transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator, complexity researcher, founder of The Psychedelic Society, and once upon a time the youngest-ever board member of Greenpeace UK, Stephen Reid to discuss the importance of taking a more values-driven approach to technology development. Stephen and I agree that it's crucial to consider the potential consequences of technological advancements and to promote a more thoughtful approach to innovation…but for the sake of playing with tension, he places more of an emphasis on our capacity for axiological design whereas I feel more of a need to point out that the rapid evolution of technology can outpace our ability to predict its consequences, troubling efforts to design an enduringly sustainable future. One thing we agree on, and model in this episode, is the value of deeper conversations about the role of technology in society…and how to integrate their transformative potentials.PS — I'm guest lecturing for Stephen's upcoming four-week course on Technological Metamodernism soon, along with Alexander Beiner and Hanzi Freinacht and Ellie Hain and Rufus Pollock. We'll engage critically with ideas like Daniel Schmachtenberger's axiological design and Vitalik Buterin's d/acc. As usual I'm probably the odd duck in this lineup, going hard on epistemic humility and the injunction of digital media to effect a transformation of the modern self-authoring ego into networked, permeable, transjective sub-agencies arising spontaneously and fluidly from fundamentally noncomputable interactions of rapid information flows... Anyway, the point is we'd love to have you join us and sink your teeth into these discussions! I absolutely promise to bring up voting cyborg ecotopes. Big thanks to Stephen for inviting me to play!PPS — Here is another really good, very different conversation between me and Stephen and Alistair Langer on Alistair's show Catalyzing Radical Systems Change.(Editorial Correction: It was Mike Tyson, not Muhammad Ali, who said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.")✨ Support This Work• Hire me as a consultant or advisor• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backers for Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show's music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Chapters(0:00:00-0:10:29) Stephen's Background and Interests in Technology and Metamodernism (0:10:29-0:18:03) Navigating the Complex Relationship Between Technology and Human Values (0:18:03-0:25:18) The Limits of Axiological Design and the Importance of Community Oversight (0:25:18-0:34:29) Defining and Defending Axiological Design (0:34:29-0:45:03) Exploring Alternative Governance Structures: Guilds and Rites of Passage (0:45:03-0:56:36) Vitalik Buterin's "Defensive Decentralized Accelerationism" (0:56:36-1:06:04) Integrating Humor and Recognizing Irony in the Technosphere(1:06:04-1:12:17) Recovering Awe, Curiosity, and Playfulness in a Tech-Saturated World (1:12:17- 1:12:56) Finding Lightness in the Face of Existential Questions (1:12:56-1:13:28) Exploring The Future and A Call to Action✨ MentionsIain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Hanzi Freinacht, Josh Schrei, Ken Wilber, Vitalik Buterin, Bayo Akomolafe, Cory Doctorow, Nora Bateson, Dave Snowden, W. Brian Arthur, J. F. Martel, Stafford Beer, Rene Descartes, Bill Plotkin, Joe Edelman, Ellie Hain, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Kegan, Aldous Huxley, Andrés Gomez Emilsson✨ Select Related Episodes (also available as a Spotify playlist)223 - Timothy Morton, 220 - Austin Wade-Smith219 - Joshua Schrei217 - Gregory Landua and Speaker John Ash214 - Megan Phipps, JF Martel, Phil Ford213 - Amber Case, Michael Zargham212 - Geoffrey West, Manfred Laubichler187 - Kevin Welch, David Hensley178 - Chris Ryan176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, Sam Gandy174 - Evan Snyder172 - Tyson Yunkaporta166 - Anna Riedl165 - Kevin Kelly163 - Toby Kiers, Brandon Quittem141 - Nora Bateson122 - Magenta Ceiba109 - Bruce Damer094 - Mark Nelson086 - Onyx Ashanti080 - George Dvorsky076 - Technology as Psychedelic Parenting066 - John Danaher060 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens056 - Sophia Rokhlin051 - Daniel Schmachtenberger050 - Ayana Young042 - William Irwin Thompson017 - Tibet Sprague This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Have you ever felt a profound sense of grief for "the environment" and wondered how this heart-sense may ties into our kinship and ancient stories? Join our online community to discuss these ideas! In this episode, Sophie Strand and I explore this complex interplay, highlighting how symbiosis and mutual aid have played pivotal roles in evolutionary advancements and how consuming food, metabolism, is an act of metamorphosis. From the intimate dance between plants and fungi that reshaped our world, to personal reflections on seasonal changes, Sophie and I share our collective journey through climate grief and adaptation. We emphasize the essential nature of being grounded in our surroundings and fostering a kinship with the land.We also discuss the idea of uncertainty. What if embracing uncertainty could open up new ways of understanding our environment? New and old ways made new in their re-rooting. We tackle the topic of binary thinking, drawing on cognitive science and Andy Clark's work on predictive processing, revealing how rigid certainty can alienate us from nature. Sophie also carries the fascinating language of fungi (mycorrhizae and hyphae) to illustrate the broader ecological implications of communication, communion, and community. Through these connections, we underscore our often misguided efforts to control nature and the false sense of predictability it brings.Lastly, Sophie weaves together ancient myths and modern reinterpretations to uncover their ecological wisdom. Whether it's the symbolic cave art of Lascaux or the misunderstood roles of plants like autumn olive and Johnson grass, myths serve as durable vessels of environmental and social knowledge. We invite you to rethink these narratives as not just cultural artifacts, but as repositories of scientific data and ecological insights. Join us in this rich tapestry of stories, science, and spirituality, and rediscover the interconnectedness of life, death, and rebirth within our ecosystems.Read Sophie's Books HERE. Follow Sophie on Substack HERE.Buy Daniel's latest book HERE.Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.

Inspired by Sophie Strand's The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, I meander through my own thoughts on the patriarchy, matriarchy, the feminine and the masculine. We receive two cards, The Castle and Gnosis, from Kim Kran's Archetypes Guidebook and then talk about the moon and her magic.Here's your New Moon Report from Tanaaz at Forever Conscious.And here's the associated playlist.Today's show was engineered by Ian Seda from Radiokingston.org.Our show music is from Shana Falana!Feel free to email me, say hello: she@iwantwhatshehas.org** Please: SUBSCRIBE to the pod and leave a REVIEW wherever you are listening, it helps other users FIND IThttp://iwantwhatshehas.org/podcastITUNES | SPOTIFYITUNES: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/i-want-what-she-has/id1451648361?mt=2SPOTIFY:https://open.spotify.com/show/77pmJwS2q9vTywz7Uhiyff?si=G2eYCjLjT3KltgdfA6XXCAFollow:INSTAGRAM * https://www.instagram.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast/FACEBOOK * https://www.facebook.com/iwantwhatshehaspodcast

“The first half of my career was spent putting people to sleep, and after my midlife crisis, I realized I had to start waking people up, including myself.”My guest today is Dr. Stephen Faulkner, a former medical doctor, pilot, and one of my key mentors on the path of mythopoetic masculinity.In this episode, Stephen reflects on his nearly 70 years of life and shares his profound emotional and spiritual contentment despite facing chronic health issues. He emphasizes the critical importance of engaging in inner spiritual work to avoid the bitterness and regret that often accompany aging.The Mythic Masculine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Stephen recounts his spiritual awakening at age 35, guided by the mythic maps found in "Iron John," and highlights the healing significance of connecting with nature and ritual. We speak on the transformative power of men's circles and the profound influence of Robert Bly on his journey, who also kindled a love of the great poet and artist William Blake.He shares the tale of Gilgamesh & Endiku which was part of how we first met.And finally, Stephen speaks of his recent near-death experience that brought him an unexpected sense of peace. He concludes with a heartfelt call for older men to mentor and support younger men, ensuring the continuity of wisdom and tending the fire across generations.LINKS* The enduring presence and power of William Blake (featuring Stephen Faulkner)UPCOMING OFFERINGSNext month, Deus and I are holding our next AWE (Awakening the Wild Erotic) Men's Weekend July 26-28 in Black Creek, about 3 hours north of Victoria on Vancouver Island. It's a ritual immersion in the archetype of the Lover, and if this calls to you, come join us. We're 60% full already.In September we're also launching our next cohort of The Deep Masculine, a 12-week online expedition into the alluring, seductive force that animates all of life - Eros and beyond. It's the most comprehensive container I've co-crafted to condenses almost a decade worth of men's work, myth, and somatics into a powerful journey. Book a Discovery Call now and see if it's right for you.And finally, for all genders, you're invited to take my online course Iron John: A Mythic Story About Men, which is a fantastic introduction to the book & a great way to integrate the chapters alongside my special guests like Stephen Jenkinson, Michael Gay, Sophie Strand and more.What do you think of this episode? I'd love to hear your comments below. Get full access to The Mythic Masculine at themythicmasculine.substack.com/subscribe

In this special episode, we had the rare opportunity to be in the same place at the same time! And so we sat on Mariana's couch, and answered questions submitted by our dear listeners. Tune into our thirty-eighth show, where we explore topics both personal and magical, chatting about the story of our friendship, building spiritual businesses, contending with family reactions to interest in witchy topics, favorite and least favorite astrology placements, and more. We love making this podcast, and are so grateful for the wonderful questions from the audience :) Special thanks to this episode's ad partner, Sophia Kaur, find her on Instagram @___sophiakaur.Doors are now open for Cristina's signature class, The Art of Chart Interpretation: An Immersion in Astrology and Its Mythic Symbols, which you can learn all about here!Get your free Archetypal Tarot book from Mariana here, and keep an eye out for the announcement for open enrollment for the Archetypal Tarot School! Join our book club! We meet on June 29th to discuss Sophie Strand's amazing book of essays The Flowering Wand. Be sure to leave us a review and rating, it helps our work find other like-minded souls :) 

Access The Iron John course here.A few years ago, I was invited to steward an online offering for the Rowe Center, based in Massachusetts.With the passing of Robert Bly, esteemed poet, activist, and father of the mythopoetic men's movement, I opted to weave a 7 week journey revisiting his seminal book Iron John, inviting an array of special guests to join me. The roster includes Stephen Jenksinon, Sophie Strand, Ramon Parish, Michael Gay, Philip Folsom, Shay Au Lait & Stefanos Sifandos.The course was a big success, and since then, I've always wanted to re-release it for more folk of all genders to access the insights & experience.I'm pleased to announce the course is now available.A few more words about Robert Bly & the story:As named, he is perhaps most well known for his retelling of the classic German fairy tale, which illuminated the inner world of men in such a way that seemed long absent from modern Western culture. This longing to be gathered into the mysteries of men and manhood, of a mythic masculinity, drew much contention upon its release in the early 90's, and has reverberated to this day.It wasn't until I watched the documentary '1000 Years of Joy' that I grasped the larger portrait of a man who had already amassed a respectful body of work before he turned to culture and gender. My love for Mr. Bly grew tremendously, as a blazing example of what could lie ahead in the later half of life, a glimpse of elderhood to a troubled time.Note: I also interviewed the films director Hayden Reiss which I've included at the bottom. Whether or not you've seen the documentary, it's delightful to hear his stories of meeting & collaborating with Bly.In 2022, the spiral has come around as a new generation discovers Iron John alongside an urgent crisis of masculinity. What might Iron John offer in the wake of #metoo, Artificial Intelligence, post-truth, multi-generational trauma, and biospheric breakdown?Despite some contemporary references that are dated, the book holds up as a vital to the conversation of manhood as it did in its day.At the time, Bly was criticized by some feminists for "blaming women" for men's troubles - and yet, that has never been accurate. He writes "This doesn't mean that the women are doing something wrong: I think the problem is more that the older men are not really doing their job."That's not to say there aren't blindspots (there are), and thankfully a number of additional perspectives have added to the polyphony of emerging masculinities.Here's my interview with Hadyn Reiss, the director of the Bly documentary 1000 Years of Joy. I highly recommend viewing the full film. Get full access to The Mythic Masculine at themythicmasculine.substack.com/subscribe

This week I riff with Austin Wade Smith (they/them) — an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York and the Executive Director of Regen Foundation, a US-based non-profit working with distributed ledgers and AI to design sovereign regenerative economics. Austin's work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster greater interdependence between individuals and our living world. They teach design and engineering courses related to their research at universities in New York.In this conversation we explore what Austin calls “a simple framework designed to expand the legibility of the ‘more than human world' (such as ‘Nature', Non-Humans, ‘More-than-Human Ecologies', etc.) to various anthropogenic infrastructures and technologies, with the aim of increasing the ‘surface area' through which non-humans directly exert influence on human-made systems.”How can we make ecosystems more legible to the economic and political contexts in which they now exist?Get ready for a conversation that up-ends conventional categories to hack open a new possibility space for human-machine symbiosis and technologically-assisted biospheric stewardship!PS — I'm trying to launch a NEW podcast, Humans On The Loop, about how to use our new AI superpowers wisely. Here's more info in case you'd like to help support this project or know someone who might!✨ Relevant Links:AustinWadeSmith.comTwitterLinkedInEssaysRegen Foundation“Legibility for Our Living World with Austin Wade Smith” on Ma Earth“Corporate Metabolism” by Xander Paco Nathan“The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.✨ Select Related Episodes:• 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet• 215 - Social Science & Collective Intelligence with Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs• 213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance• 212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere• 180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend• 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions• 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit• 76 - "Technology as Psychedelic Parenting at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

My guest today is Andrea Villa, a scholar, a mentor of men, a restorer of old practices and languages of the sacred.He has spent several years studying male initiation with indigenous peoples from India to West Africa to Native America, developing a unique understanding of gender as intelligence. His passion is to support men in regaining their erotic agency in love & relationships.In today's episode, we delve into the profound realms of Eros as a multifaceted force that transcends mere physical attraction, touching upon the realms of the spiritual, the creative, and the deeply personal aspects of human experience. Andrea shares his journey of being undone by Eros, highlighting its crucial role in our connection to the world. He describes the important differences between masculine and feminine energies, and advocates for the significance of adoration and devotion in the dance of partnership.Andrea also introduces the concept of erotic discipline, a practice of staying present with beauty to transcend the visible and touch the essence of our being. And he references Dante's Divine Comedy, the monumental epic from the Middle Ages, and the poet's adoration of Beatrice as a model for a love that can elevate our spirits to the divine.I'd love to hear what you think of this episode! Leave your comments below.Heads up: I'm inviting Andrew to offer an upcoming webinar in the next month. Stay tuned for details.LINKS* Official Website - Andrea VillaALSO, BEGINNING THIS THURSDAY: There's only a few days left to join the very first online cohort of The Deep Masculine, a 3 month journey for men. I wanted to offer further insight behind the inspiration for this offering, with its roots in the soil of a fairy tale:First published in 1990, Robert Bly's "Iron John: A Book About Men" is a key work in the mythopoetic men's movement.The book rides the story of Iron John, a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, as a framework to explore masculinity and men's issues. Throughout the book, Bly discusses the concept of "the deep masculine," a term he uses to describe an essential, positive aspect of mature masculinity that has largely been lost in modern society - due to cultural poverty, lack of rites of passage, and the absence of positive male mentorship.I've spoken on this thread in multiple conversations, including one with poet & author Sophie Strand in "Revisiting The Wild Man."​Mythopoetic men's work grew as a response to these challenges - and many men & organizations have picked up the torch from the first generation and the task they bequeathed to us.Now, it's also true the Wild Man archetype has become overly fetishized in many men's work spaces, with an emphasis on pushing back against the "domesticated life." (Think Tyler Durden in Fight Club, or Lester Burham in American Beauty).And yet, the Wild Man remains a mysterious and alluring presence for a deeper invitation into a lovership with life.After almost 5 years of inquiry, alongside mentors, elders & many conversations under The Mythic Masculine podcast, as well as numerous months in the creative cauldron, The Deep Masculine journey brings together the most effective elements we could muster for igniting the hearts & souls of men.We begin April 11. Get full access to The Mythic Masculine at themythicmasculine.substack.com/subscribe

This week we are rebroadcasting our episode with Sophie Strand which originally aired in November 2022. In this winding and lucid conversation, guest Sophie Strand invites us to investigate our relationality, to embrace rot and decay, to welcome our demons to the dinner table, and to prepare for uncertain futures with tenderness. Sophie brings to light the wisdom of the compost heap. What myths do we need for modernity, what wisdom is sedimented within our bodies? Sophie and Ayana tap into deep lines of thought and myth, weaving together conversations and concepts from thousands of years of human history. As the interview asks, “What is it to be human on our most basic level?” To be a human is to be in complicated and compromising relationships – relationships that implicate us within the other, that show us that love is a process of altering and of deep work. Purity is not an option. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions on November 22, 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.Music by Tan Cologne and Mitski. Cover image by Alexandra Levasseur. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.Support the show

I'm honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity. ✨ Mentioned & Related Links:Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin's Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Woodstock Bookfest will be live and in person this weekend in Woodstock, New York. The festival features an amazing line-up including: Masha Gessen, Mark Whitaker, Sophie Strand, Sari Botton, Gail Straub, Elissa Altman, Nick Flynn - just to name a few.Of course, they'll have a Story Slam and ending with their signature panel, Memoir-A-Go-Go! Yes, there will be Little Bites and Big Libations. Festival Founder, Martha Frankel, is here with details.

If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review.  The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom. Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we're doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it's well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!✨ Mentioned & Related Links:The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki's Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow✨ Support The Show:• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work✨ Related FF Episodes:213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In this new and returning episode after an unexpected year-long sabbatical, Erica talks about inspiring books that have woven their way into her life and encouraged the practice of listening in the still darkness to the dead who support us. Listen, subscribe, and leave a review on iTunes.   Resources Mentioned The Way of the Rose by Perdita Finn and Clark Strand https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/532917/the-way-of-the-rose-by-clark-strand-and-perdita-finn/ Take Back the Magic by Perdita Finn https://takebackthemagic.com Waking Up to the Dark by Clark Strand https://www.monkfishpublishing.com/products-page-2/environmentalism/waking-up-to-the-dark/ The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Madonna-Secret/Sophie-Strand/9781591434672 The Reluctant Psychic by Susan Saxman https://suzanfionasaxman.com   Stay Connected Erica Thibodeaux, MS, LPC Website: ericathibodeaux.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancientsoul_modernmind_podcast/   Insight Timer: https://insig.ht/R9RzqgnwBGb   Music Credits: Intro and Outro music: Liberty Kohn, https://instagram.com/libertykohn/ and Erica Thibodeaux   Ancient Soul, Modern Mind Podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and all other podcast listening platforms. May these ancient stories return you to your ancestors, to the land, to the sacred fire, water, and minerals that we are all from.  And may this conversation help you to awaken to your true spirit. 

Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why?  Perhaps it is because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emphasis on forward progress, its commitment to the removal of mystery from daily life, and its encouragement of numbness over feeling, is fundamentally at odds with the seer's sensitivities and alignment to larger forces beyond human control. So modernity pushes the seer to the fringe — and once cast aside, seeing can veer into charlatanry and delusion. The rise of free market spirituality and New Age conspiracy is a result of the unmooring of the seer from traditional context. Yet what this points to isn't something 'wrong' with seeing or spirituality. It points to the need for context in a larger culture of disconnect and fragmentation, for slow learning and earned wisdom within a culture that always rushes things outwards. Dichotomized narratives that pit scientific rationalism against the spiritual, shamanic, or oracular ignore the central importance that spiritual movements play in culture. Visionary movements drive all aspects of culture, including scientific innovation. And ultimately — as science itself tells us — having a 'fringe' that sees things differently than the mainstream is absolutely essential to the growth of culture. So perhaps the modern-day seer must re-learn what it means to find anchor and context and earned wisdom, just as society must remember that the seer is vitally important. In a world of fragmentation and numbness, the seer comes to wake the culture up, to restore its sensitivities, and ultimately to drive culture forward.  Featuring conversations with Sophie Strand and Healingfromhealing's Adam Aronovich and music by Peia, Marya Stark, Char Rothschild, and more. Listen on a good sound system!Support the show

✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!This week I speak with two of the most thoughtful people I know in tech, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and systems engineer Michael Zargham (Founder & CEO of BlockScience) — who work together on tools for building trust between tech users and tech companies at the Superset DAO and each contribute diverse value to society through myriad creative projects in their own right (like Amber's totally fabulous music group Glo Torch!). Thanks to the generous invitation of Regen Foundation CEO Gregory Landua, I met Amber and Michael for an in-person recording at the Regen Summit — easily one of the most inspiring Web3 events I've ever attended — in between jam sessions with a few dozen others working at the intersections of regenerative finance, ecosystem stewardship, distributed ledgers, and civtech. This episode only catches a tiny sliver of the awesome conversations that we had while gathered face-to-face, but it's a potent morsel nonetheless. We talked about the market's perverse fascination with talking appliances as a failed attempt to reboot animism, how good design empowers and bad design deprives by making choices possible or not, and why it's time for a new kind of terms-of-service agreement that allows users to migrate en masse from platforms that have violated people's trust…along with much else. A very lucid and articulate, yet very playful, trialogue on matters that deserve sincerity but also benefit from childlike curiosity and warmth!Enjoy…✨ Support My Work As A Public Good:• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.✨ Related Links For The Intellectually Voracious:Amber's Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium.Michael's Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Google Scholar.Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Reviewby Sidney RednerHow Design is Governanceby Amber CaseWe Need More Control Over Our Own User Databy Amber CaseThe Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputeesby Michael Garfield (on technology as an other-controlled prosthesis and the vulnerability of cyborgs)“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”by Harlan Ellison✨ SOME Upcoming Episodes:• Jingmai O'Connor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Chicago, on her singular life and work.• J.F. Martel & Phil Ford of Weird Studies Podcast and Megan Phipps of The University of Amsterdam on Weird Cybernetics.• David Jay Brown and Sara Phinn on their field guide to the entities of DMT hyperspace, published next year by Inner Traditions.• Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs on social science and collective intelligence tools for a memetic immune system.• Michael Skye of VisionForce on his work to help confront the crises faced by contemporary boys and men.• Neil Theise, professor of pathology at NYU, on complex systems science and his new book, Notes on Complexity.✨ Related Archive Episodes:211 - Adam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet207 - Tech & Community LIVE at Junkyard Social Club with Evan Snyder, Ryan Madson, Roger Toennis, Aaron Gabriel, & Juicy Life204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together197 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Lost Civilizations, and The Singularity (Part 1)180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations106 - Stowe Boyd on The Future(s) of Work and How to Thrive Amidst Accelerating Change80 - George Dvorsky on Strange Days Ahead: Ethics for Autonomous Machines29 - Sara Huntley (Raising Robots Right)✨ Thanks to Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premonitions that come to pass, to have dream experiences that translate into day-to-day life, and to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, and with a larger world of animate forces. For most of human history, the people that received such visions lived right at the center of culture. But what happens when the seer is ripped from the ecology in which they traditionally lived? The intuitive is cast out, othered, vilified, and pathologized. Cast aside, relegated to the margins of society, without the context that once held it, oracular seeing can veer into charlatanry and delusion. So these days visions — like everything else in the modern world — are immediately monetized, translated into marketable pop-spirituality and much of the mastery and depth of visionary tradition is lost. But what this points to isn't something “wrong” with intuition or the practice of oracular vision — it points to something wrong with modernity's relationship with it. The proclivity towards vilifying and pathologizing intuition on the one hand and claiming it as an exotic and monetizable gift useful for attracting internet followers on the other — all of this is a function of the othering of intuition in the modern world. Societally, we would do well to rediscover the central role of the seer.  For if we lose our ability to learn from the visions of seers, we lose the feeling body of culture —  the very thing that drives culture forward. Featuring music by Marya Stark, Char Rothschild, and Peia, and featuring discussions with author Frederick Smith, psychoanalyst Bernardo Malamut, and Sophie Strand, this multi-part episode series seeks to place the seer back in their rightful place at the center of culture. It is simultaneously a celebration of the gifts of the intuitive and a reminder that dreams and visions need an ecology of accountability in which to live and grow. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention. Support the show

Sophie Strand “The Madonna Secret” A Novel And Courageous Journey Into The Magdalene.

Sophie Strand “The Madonna Secret” A Novel And Courageous Journey Into The Magdalene.

Today on Mushroom Hour we join in communion with the overflowing font of mythos, play and animated everything Sophie Strand. Sophie is a poet and writer with a focus on the history of religion and the intersection of spirituality, storytelling and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including the Dark Mountain Project, poetry.org and the magazines Unearthed, Braided Way, Art PAPERS and Entropy. Their newest book “The Flowering Wand – Rewilding the Sacred Masculine” is a potent retelling of classical European myths and masculine characters like Dionysus, Merlin, Jesus that encourages men to put down the iron sword and pick up a myceliated, vegetal thyrsus.    TOPICS COVERED:   Staying Alive by Exploring Ecology   Mediterranean Religions & Arthurian Myths    Myths as Vessels of Environmental Information   Replanting Myths - Reroot, Rewild, Retell    Polyphonic Iconography   Partnership Cultures and Dominator Cultures   Medusa & Mothers Turned into Monsters    Symbiosis & Synchronism    The Rebellion of Dionysus   Gender as a Morphic Field & a Mycelial Web    The King Becomes the Kingdom   Expanding Masculinity   Jesus the Magical, Nature-Loving Rabbi   Returning to the Compost Heap    EPISODE RESOURCES:    "The Flowering Wand": https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Flowering-Wand/Sophie-Strand/9781644115961   "The Madonna Secret": https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Madonna-Secret/Sophie-Strand/9781591434672   Sophie Strand Substack: https://sophiestrand.substack.com/   Sophie Strand IG: https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny/   "Bitch": https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lucy-cooke/bitch/9781541674905/?lens=basic-books   Microanimism: https://www.microanimism.com/   Chlorophyllum molybdites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyllum_molybdites   "Enlivenment": https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536660/   "An Immense World": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/

In this episode, we delve deep into the realms of history, spirituality, and resilience with our guest, Sophie Strand. Sophie, a renowned poet and writer, has dedicated her work to exploring the intricate connections between religion, storytelling, and ecology, and her profound insights have graced numerous projects and publications. Our conversation takes us on a captivating journey through various intriguing topics. We'll explore the profound tale of sensory resilience amidst the looming threats and violence that shape our world. We'll unravel the complexities of trauma's enduring legacy and the unique gift of sensitivity it bestows upon some. Together, we'll ponder the notion that not everyone survives life's initiation rituals and how, in many ways, we're all interconnected, much like cells in the grand body of existence. Join us as we embark on this thought-provoking journey of nourishing life and resisting capitalism, delving into these themes, and much more. Stay tuned for a conversation that promises to enlighten, inspire, and challenge our perspectives.   Introduction by guest Sophie Strand. 2:50 The legacy of trauma and the gift of sensitivity. 5:20 The idea that not everyone survives an initiation. 8:10 We are a cell in the body. 10:30 The story of the man that murdered Jesus and his wife. 13:05 Empire is the first grand empire that does this on a giant scale. 17:50 How the knowledge of birth control has changed the world. 19:35 How do we live with the mystery of uncertainty? 21:40 How to live with the mystery and how to navigate it. 24:10 Life is invested in surviving, even if it's at the expense of a toast. 26:45 The power of slowing down and letting go. 30:00 Nourishing Life and Resisting Capitalism. 32:05 Healing beyond hope. 34:30 There is an aspect of money and health that is virtue-based. 36:20 The problem with the assumption of a special diet. 38:35 The disadvantage of being white and male. 41:00 People this summer were surprised by the flooding, fires and smog. 43:20 What's good for us has been very bad for the planet. 46:00 A party doesn't have to be hard work. Storytelling is a way of staying alive. 48:20 Write a story about an emergency. 50:35   Website: https://sophiestrand.com/   IG: @cosmogyny ______________________________________________ Host Jennifer Moore is an author, energy healer, intuitive mentor, master trainer for EFT International, podcast host and founder of The Empathic Mastery Academy.  https://www.empathicmasteryacademy.com https://www.empathicmastery.com   Get Jen's book  Https://empathicmasterybook.com   @EmpathicMastery (IG)   https://www.instagram.com/EmpathicMastery   Join Jen's free FB group for monthly full moon masterclasses and her Empathic Safety Guide at https://www.empathicmastery.com/masterclass

MADONNA SECRET: Sophie Strand Mary Magdalene's confessions reveal a sensual world of love and betrayal, magic and mystery, hidden within the Gospels ----Beginning with Miriam's childhood as a member of a wealthy Jewish family living outside of Bethany, we see her struggles as a young woman with spiritual curiosity and intellectual aspirations that drive her to combat the violence of Empire and the sexism of her own culture. Propelled by mystic visions, Miriam is finally drawn into the wilds of Galilee, where her destiny collides with a mischievous rabbi who will change her and the world forever. Trapped in a mythic story unfolding in events around them, the lovers strive not to repeat a tragedy older than the pyramids. --- In The Madonna Secret, Sophie Strand resurrects a richly textured world where complex characters reveal the lived reality of scripture and open familiar sayings to radical new meanings and possibilities. Sophie Strand is a poet and writer with a focus on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way, and Art PAPERS. The author of The Flowering Wand, she lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. www.sophiestrand.com Learn more about Simran here: www.iamsimran.com www.1111mag.com/

The witches are back! On the latest episode I'm joined again by Risa Dickens and Amy Torok, who first appeared on the show in 2021. They're back this time to discuss their latest book, "New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment."  Risa and Amy are also the co-authors of “Missing Witches: Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic”, both from North Atlantic Books, and the co-hosts of the podcast Missing Witches.On the latest episode we explore:The nature of sacred activism and the constantly flowing journey between personal evolution and its outward expression in the worldThe importance of holding multiplicities and paradox, and how this work is essential to witchcraftWhy differences shouldn't divide us but rather invite us to expandRisa and Amy's process for collaborating and writing their books together - and in doing so, how they've joined a lineage of powerful women who write togetherOur shared loved of dirt, and why it's much more than a metaphor for both the medicine we need AND what's ailing usShow Notes If you'd like to know whose ancestral tribal lands you currently reside on, you can look up your address here: https://native-land.ca/You can also visit the Coalition of Natives and Allies for more helpful educational resources about Indigenous rights and history.Please check out Home to Her Academy, a school dedicated to seekers of Sacred Feminine wisdom!  www.hometoheracademy.com. And while you're there, don't forget to sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date with upcoming classes.My book, “Home to Her: Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine,” is available from Womancraft Publishing! To learn more, read endorsements and purchase, please visit  https://womancraftpublishing.com/product/home-to-her/. It is also available for sale via Amazon, Bookshop.org, and you can order it from your favorite local bookstore, too.Please – if you love this podcast and/or have read my book, please consider leaving me a review! For the podcast, reviews on iTunes are extremely helpful, and for the book, reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are equally helpful. Thank you for supporting my work!You can watch this and other podcast episodes at the Home to Her YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@hometoherGot feedback about this episode or others you've heard? Please reach out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/hometoher/ ), Facebook  (https://www.facebook.com/hometoher)You can learn more about Amy and Risa's work at www.missingwitches.com. You can find them on Instagram @missingwitches and on Facebook at  facebook.com/missingwitches.During this episode, we discussed Z Budapest. This article quotes Amy and provides a good overview of her life and work, including her stance on transgender individuals participating in ceremony. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-18/this-feminist-witch-introduced-california-to-goddess-worshipAmy and Risa also mentioned the following resources:  Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, as well as New Age and Armageddon by Monica Sjoo; Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood; Witches, Midwives and Nurses by Barbara  Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.I mentioned the book Witches and Pagans by Max Dashu Risa mentioned the song Water Witch, by Secret Sisters. You can listen to it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXb1lxv9caQI discussed the controversy around the book The Mists of Avalon in a prior episode. This article provides an overview (content warning: child sexual abuse is discussed): Content warning - these article refer to child sexual abuse. More context here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/27/sff-community-marion-zimmer-bradley-daughter-accuses-abuseRisa and Amy also mentioned several other thinkers during this episode. These include: Professor Donna Haroway; philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour ; writer and activist Sylvia Federici ; and artist and scholar WhiteFeather HunterRelated Episodes The Portal of the Divine Feminine with Sophie Strand: https://hometoher.simplecast.com/episodes/the-portal-of-the-divine-feminine-with-sophie-strandFinding Missing Witches with Risa Dickens and Amy Torok: https://hometoher.simplecast.com/episodes/witch-finding-with-risa-dickens-and-amy-torok

On today's episode, Luis speaks with Sophie Strand, self-described writer, compost heap, and neo-troubadour animist.Together they explore identity as a strategy: sometimes useful, sometimes not, but never the truth. Often when there is low capacity for ambiguity, the identity is the strategy born from that, fueled by desire for stability.Luis and Sophie discuss:· not getting trapped in the idea of self, and leaving openness for fluidity and change· the mythical and animistic experience of nature and trauma· the restricting idea of “normativity”· the atomized self vs the communal experience of life· shifting focus from destructive to constructive behaviors, from isolation to relationYou can learn more about Sophie's work here:https://sophiestrand.com/You can learn more about the six week course, and sign up for the waitlist, here:https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/courseFor more information about Holistic Life Navigation, visit: https://www.holisticlifenavigation.com/

Sophie is a writer and poet who blends spirituality, storytelling, and ecology to reimagine ancient myths for the modern world. She is the author of two books: The Flowering Wand, a collection of essays aimed at rewinding the sacred masculine, and her new book, The Madonna Secret, a historical novel about Mary Magdalene, which offers a retelling of the story of Christianity, that is perhaps more accurate than many other versions which have been distorted by various religious and political agendas.Sophie is one of my favorite writers and one of the smartest people I know. And I hope you enjoy this episode. Sophie's booksSophie's InstagramFollow James McCrae on InstagramCheck out my booksJoin my newsletter

We wanted to create this episode highlighting some shimmering jewels from the first 50 episodes of the podcast. We know that getting into a podcast can be daunting when there are dozens of episodes to choose from. So we wanted to distill some of the varied guests from our previous episodes with some clips from the show. Consider becoming a member of SAND to support the production costs of this podcast. Thank you for listening and sharing the show. Guest Clips 3:18 – Peter Russell from #8 Evolving with Consciousness 7:04 – Monica Gagliano from #23 The Songs of Gaia 12:18 – Donald Hoffman and Rupert Spira from #38 Weaving the Eternal Golden Braid 21:00 – Gabor Maté and Resma Menaken from #24 Somatic Abolitionism 26:42 – Eriel Tchekwie Deranger from #14 Healing Relationships in Community and Ourselves 29:00 – Neil Theise from #34 Conversations on Complexity 33:40 – Joan Tollifson from #30 Here. Now. Being. 37:10 – Bayo Akomolafe and Sophie Strand from #6 New Gods at the End of the World 41:54 – Parvathy Baul from #47 What Shines

Sophie Strand is a poet and writer with a focus on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. If you love Mary Magdalene and fondly remember Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, you are in for a real treat! Sophie's new book, The Madonna Secret, is a passionate retelling of the story of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, rewilding the Gospels with the forgotten voices of defiant and oppressed women, the nature-based storytelling of oral communities, and the embodied eroticism of a lovable rabbi with appetites and desires, doubts and shame, and a playful sense of humor. Plus, his awesome mom – aka The Virgin Mary – is a raucous and wonderful surprise, giving big time Baubo of Greek myth vibes, (who in my mind could be played wonderfully by Shohreh Aghdashloo of The Expanse fame). In this conversation, we talk about what it's like to write about miracles while living with an incurable disease, (Sophie lives with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder - something that many members of the Numinous Network are all too familiar). We also discuss animism, magic, patriarchy, and the realness she brings to the landscape and the characters of her novel. Sophie's poems and essays have appeared in numerous projects and publications, including Spirituality & Health, Atmos, Braided Way and Art PAPERS. The author of The Flowering Wand, she lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.   Purchase The Madonna Secret anywhere (and please do leave a review!)   Follow Sophie: SophieStrand.com Her Substack Instagram Facebook   References in this episode: older Dev Patel Louis Garrel  Golshifteh Farhani (Oh now that I see who she is, I LOVED her in that dystopian show, Invasion) young Javier Bardem article about Bruce Chilton Bruce Chilton wikipedia Honi the Circle Drawer Hanina ben Dosa Contemporaries of Jesus who were miracle workers   Learn more about the Numinous Network Sign up for my newsletter and join us for Free Week, Sept 17-23, 2023  

Mary Magdalene's confessions reveal a sensual world of love and betrayal, magic and mystery, hidden within the Gospels --------------------- Beginning with Miriam's childhood as a member of a wealthy Jewish family living outside of Bethany, we see her struggles as a young woman with spiritual curiosity and intellectual aspirations that drive her to combat the violence of Empire and the sexism of her own culture. Propelled by mystic visions, Miriam is finally drawn into the wilds of Galilee, where her destiny collides with a mischievous rabbi who will change her and the world forever. Trapped in a mythic story unfolding in events around them, the lovers strive not to repeat a tragedy older than the pyramids. --- In The Madonna Secret, Sophie Strand resurrects a richly textured world where complex characters reveal the lived reality of scripture and open familiar sayings to radical new meanings and possibilities.

Mary Magdalene's confessions reveal a sensual world of love and betrayal, magic and mystery, hidden within the Gospels --------------------- Beginning with Miriam's childhood as a member of a wealthy Jewish family living outside of Bethany, we see her struggles as a young woman with spiritual curiosity and intellectual aspirations that drive her to combat the violence of Empire and the sexism of her own culture. Propelled by mystic visions, Miriam is finally drawn into the wilds of Galilee, where her destiny collides with a mischievous rabbi who will change her and the world forever. Trapped in a mythic story unfolding in events around them, the lovers strive not to repeat a tragedy older than the pyramids. --- In The Madonna Secret, Sophie Strand resurrects a richly textured world where complex characters reveal the lived reality of scripture and open familiar sayings to radical new meanings and possibilities.

Healing is communal. Settle in softly for this wide-ranging conversation with my most requested guest. Sophie and I talk chronic illness and trauma, diagnosis as blessing and as hex, the theater of medicine, the aquatic nature of memory, and the entanglements of time. RESOURCES: Sophie on Instagram Sophie's newsletter Make Me Good Soil Sophie's books and more The Lady's Handbook for her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey ACE- Adverse Childhood Experiences quiz The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van den Kolk (giant trigger warning; read the book below instead) Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupam Maria and Raj Patel Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious by Erik Wargo The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich The Emerald (a podcast beloved by both me & Sophie) Read The Ones That Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics & the Entanglement of Matter & Meaning by Karen Barad Time, As a Symptom by Joanna Newsom (lyrics here) My blog post Ancestral Voices, women's Weariness, and the Illusion of Linear Time Episode 82 What I'd Be Without You: My Mother's Life, Death, and Legacy of Love   Come relax at my Costa Rica Forest Bathing Retreat- last day to book is August 4th ‘23 Medicine Stories Patreon (podcast bonuses!) Take our fun Which Healing Herb is Your Spirit Medicine? quiz My website MythicMedicine.love  Mythic Medicine on Instagram Medicine Stories Facebook group Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)

Two recent appearances of Sophie Strand at SAND. One was her Community Conversation with Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo the second a story she read called “Healing: A Ghost Story” with Bayo Akomolafe. Sophie's course The Body is a Doorway at SAND Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she'll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she's ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is available now from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, The Madonna Secret, that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels. She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny. sophiestrand.com Topics: 0:00 – Introduction 4:30 – We Must Risk New Shapes 14:24 – Disability and Sickness 26:50 – Collective Story Telling and Trance 39:16 – A Rescue Promise 44:20 – Healing: A Ghost Story

In this episode, Kimberly and Sophie explore the nuances of being public entrepreneurs and authors. They wonder aloud together about the various roles of knowledge, expertise, and experience and discuss issues such as psychedelics for women, the complexities of social media, the need for eldership, disability and sickness as an altered state, as well as healing practices outside of a hyper-fixated and individualistic framework. The common threads connecting their questions center around identities as facilitators and writers, the need for connection to community and lineages, and managing the challenges of social media and identity politics in a hyper-individualistic culture. Ultimately, they land on the beauty that comes from maturation, wisdom, and growth over time that cannot be done by a quick-fix nor in isolation.   Bio Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays “The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine” was published last year in 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her books of poetry include “Love Song to a Blue God,” “Those Other Flowers to Come” and “The Approach.” Her poems and essays have been published by Art PAPERS, The Dark Mountain Project, Poetry.org, Unearthed, Braided Way, Creatrix, Your Impossible Voice, The Doris, Persephone's Daughters, and Entropy. She has recently finished a work of historical fiction, “The Madonna Secret,” that offers an eco-feminist revision of the gospels, and will be released this summer.  She is currently researching her next epic, a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde. What She Shares: –Cultural band-aids for deeper wounds –Public and private identities –Demonizing and idolizing figures –Impact of social media and identity politics –Elderhood, wisdom, and changing perspectives   What You'll Hear: –Problematizing psychedelics  –Gendered experiences with psychedelics –Harder for women to recover after psychedelics –Cultural band-aids on wounds –Sophie addresses disabled writer label –Publishing editorial choices and confinement –Public identities and social media –Collective energy demonizing or idolizing figures –Navigating social media pressures and intuition as entrepreneurs –Is the medicine of these times insignificance? –Story of Joan of Arc –No saviors, no heroes –Creating money and wanting to be insignificant –Tensions between community, authority, and parasocial diffusion –Bodily impact of social media –Problematizing gatekeeping of knowledge and lived experiences –Risk-averseness and obsession with safety  –Safety as limited capacity to survive –Hyperfixation and hyper-individualism of healing –Impact of identity politics on youth –Maturity, wisdom, and changing perspectives –Discerning between privacy, secrecy, and transparency –Using discretion when writing memoir –Difference between rot and fermentation   Resources Website: https://sophiestrand.com/ IG: @cosmogyny  

How can we affirm and deepen the experience of our queerness through the lens of The Margin? How might practicing and studying mysticism expand our abilities to witness our own queerness?Join me for a conversation I recorded with my dear friend and queer sibling Nick Kepley. Throughout the month of June 2023, Nick is hosting a queer conference called Meet Me At The Margin. I invited Nick to discuss the reflections that have bubbled forth since they birthed and announced this conference. The resulting conversation felt alive and deeply thought-provoking for me. Join me and other incredible queer practitioners, artists, and thinkers for Meet Me At The Margin, a month-long virtual conference for queer people who want to reclaim and re-story their innate capacity for ambiguity, paradox, and liminality throughout June 2023. Registration is open until Monday, June 12, 2023 so reserve your spot now if you feel the call.  Here's Nick's bio: Nick Kepley is a white, queer, non-binary Tarot anarchist who believes in the power of words and their complete inability to describe reality. Since 2011, Nick has been working as a Tarot facilitator, utilizing the cards as a reflective tool, and witnessing the conversations that take place between clients and their deeper knowing. In addition to this work, Nick is also the co-creator of the In Search of Tarot guided journal collection, the founder of The Searcher's Symposium for Tarot Education, and the host of the In Search of Tarot podcast. They are currently writing a book that imagines a new kind of mythopoetics for healing and reclaiming marginal identity. You can learn more connect with Nick by visiting manofthecards.com or by following them on Instagram @insearchoftarot. You can also listen to Nick's podcast, In Search of Tarot, and support the podcast's Patreon account. We also mentioned a few of our colleagues throughout the conversation: Elias Lawliet, Leah Garza, Britten LaRue, and Sophie Strand. This podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Jonathan Koe. Theme music is also composed by me! Connect with me through my newsletter, my Instagram @nate_qi, and my music. For podcast-related inquiries, email me at healingthespiritpodcast@gmail.com.

Here we explore what it means to be in conversation with trees. Davidson hikes into an ancient redwood forest on a regular basis and practices “forest bathing”. She reminds us that when we are not bombarded with the noise, bright lights, and electromagnetic fields of a city our nervous system calms down and our capacity opens up to a wider field of perception. Ellen Dee Davidson is an advocate for the health of forests. Besides her memoir, she's the author of a number of children's books, also worked as an elementary, piano, and creative writing teacher and raised two daughters. She lives with her husband in the redwoods of northern California where she regularly sits with trees in a form of “forest bathing”. She is the author of Stolen Voices: In a City Ruled by Silence Can One Girl's Voice Make a Difference? (Turtleback Books Library Binding 2005), Princess Justina Albertina (Charlesbridge 2007), Zoe the Misfit (Boulden Publishing 2008), Wind (Luminare Press 2022) and Wild Path to the Sacred Heart (A Forest Bathing Memoir) (Star Tree Press 2019)Interview Date: 3/27/2023 Tags: Ellen Dee Davidson, forest bathing, Shinrin Yoku, hypnagogic state, authentic core, Suzanne Simard, Sophie Strand, dung beetle, Peter Wohllenben, trees, elementals, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Personal Transformation, Dreams

Nick's going solo today to explore the themes and concepts that will inspire Meet Me at The Margin - a month-long virtual conference for queer people who want to reclaim and re-story their innate capacity for ambiguity, paradox, and liminality, which will take place June 4-28, 2023. Through a series of eight workshops facilitated by some of today's most Marginal thinkers, participants explore queerness through the lenses of tarot, astrology, narrative therapy, eco-mythology, archetype, art, and more. Facilitators include Charlie Claire Burgess, Amy DiGennaro, Edgar Fabian Frías, Nick Kepley, Jonathan Koe, Elias Lawliet, Sophie Strand, Jaison Perez, Chanti Tacoronte-Perez. Workshops will be held every Sunday (from 6-8pm ET) and Wednesday (from 7-9pm ET) in June, for a total of 16 hours of instruction. Captions will be enabled for all sessions, and recordings will be available through 7/31. REGISTER FOR MEET ME AT THE MARGIN Save on registration by joining the In Search of Tarot Patreon Music by AJ Ackleson. Thanks AJ!

How can our stories be useful to our communities and become live saving myths and ecologies? In this episode Amisha talks to Sophie Strand. Sophie is a writer and thinker that takes us to new heights and deep crevices on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays ‘The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine' was published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels ‘The Madonna Secret' comes out in Summer 2023. Amisha and Sophie speak about the magic of myth-making and the possibilities of adjacent live-saving realities they open up; places where we may envision humankind as part of an ecological niche. Sophie shares about her life with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a rare genetic connective tissue disease that affects her entire body. By recognising the porousness of her body, she reveals the messiness of decay, ego death and life's anxieties. As a result she brings alive life-affirming myths and new ideas around communities rooted in the deep wisdoms of the compost heap. They delve into healthism and its exiling consequences. They reveal that its prevalence in Western medical paradigms and New Age spirituality, holds us personally responsible for coming into normativity distracting from the nourishing essence that exists within our diverse survival strategies. Sophie speaks about Eco grief, a natural outcome of Earth that is surviving outside its window of tolerance.  We learn that sharing our profoundly messy and psychedelic stories along with the small fixes we have learnt through survival is an important form of activism that boosts our communities; whilst gathering in dance and joining hands to distribute feelings of grief and anxiety might be our lighthouse of survival. Links from this episode and more at allthatweare.org

Welcome to episode two hundred of Future Fossils! On this episode, I'm joined by Ehren Cruz (LinkedIn, Instagram, Website) and Daphne Krantz (LinkedIn, Instagram, Website) to discuss transcendence, trauma, and transformation. We talk about the festival world, our individual journeys, the rise of psychedelics in therapeutic applications, the potential of these substances, and their cultural roots. We also discuss addiction, trauma, and the consequences of collective consciousness, freedom, and how to provide access to these therapies in a way that respects Indigenous knowledge.✨ Chapters:(0:00:01) - Exploring Transcendence, Trauma, and Transformation(0:08:27) - Psychedelic Use With Intention(0:17:11) - Psychedelics and Substance Abuse(0:26:13) - Exploring Relationships to Psychoactive Substances(0:41:59) - Embodiment in Psychedelic Therapy(0:54:30) - Addiction, Trauma, and The Transhuman Conditions(1:03:20) - Healing Through Connection and Community(1:09:04) - The Freedom of Exploration(1:12:15) - Authentic Expression & Vulnerability(1:15:26) - Psychedelics for Exploration(1:27:55) - The Consequences of Collective Consciousness Freedom(1:43:02) - Supporting Independent Work✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “Ephemeropolis” from the EP of the same name & “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP.)Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord server. Join us!✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• These show notes were supplemented with Podium.Page, a very cool new AI service I'm happy to endorse. Sign up at https://hello.podium.page/?via=michael and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• I transcribe this show with help from Podscribe.ai — which I highly recommend to other podcasters. (If you'd like to help edit transcripts for the Future Fossils book project, please email or DM me: Email | Twitter | Instagram)• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians: let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.✨ Mentioned & Related Episodes:7 - Shane Mauss (Psychedelic Comedy)10 - Anthony Thogmartin & David Krantz (Future Music)27 - Rak Razam & Niles Heckman (5-MeO DMT & Consciousness)58 - Shane Mauss (Psychonautic Adventures at the Edge of Genius & Madness)59 - Charles Shaw (Trauma, Addiction, and Healing)62 - David Krantz (Cannabis Nutrigenomics)68 - Charles Shaw (Soul in the Heart of Darkness)96 - Malena Grosz on Community-Led Party Culture vs. Corporate "Nightlife"100 - The Teafaerie on DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention103 - Tricia Eastman on Facilitating Psychedelic Journeys to Recover from An Age of Epidemic Trauma112 - Mitsuaki Chi on Serving the Mushroom117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson on Psychedelic Science & Too Much Novelty136 - Alyssa Gursky on Psychedelic Art Therapy & The Future of Communication156 - Stuart Davis on Zen, Aliens, and Psychedelics168 - Mikey Lion & Malena Grosz on Festival Time, Life-Changing Trips, and Community in COVID171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit✨ Keywords:Transcendence, Trauma, Transformation, Festival World, Psychedelics, Therapeutic Applications, Cultural Roots, Addiction, Collective Consciousness, Freedom, Access, Indigenous Knowledge, Intentionality, Context, Consumer Culture, Spiritual Ego, Health Coaching, Mental Health Counseling, Gender Identity, Substance Abuse, Private Practice, Ancient Cultural Roots, Modern Therapeutic Applications, Transformational Festival Culture, Memory, Embodiment, Rat Park Experiment, Brain Inference, Harlan Ellison, Opioid Crisis, Connection, Community, Oppression, Systems of Power, Self-Harm, Interconnectedness, Consumerism, Mindset, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Courageous Expression, Authentic Self, Right Wing Psychedelia, Commodification, Marginalized Groups, Nurturing Attachment, Reality, Independent Work, Apple Podcasts, Patreon✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript:Michael (1s):Greetings, future fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 200 of the podcast that explores our place in time. My God, we made it here. What a view from this summit. It's incredible. And for this episode, I have two very special guests, two very old friends. I mean they're, they're not very old, they're just friends I've had for a very long time. Aaron Cruz and Daphne Krantz. Aaron is a psychedelic experience facilitator. Daphne is an addiction counselor, but I met them both in the festival world when Aaron and I were working on the Visionary Art Web Magazine Sole Purpose back in like a decade ago.Michael (55s):And Daphne was producing electronic music under the Alias FU Texture. Dabney was a self-identified man at the time. David Krantz appeared on the show, episode 63 talking about cannabis and Nutrigenomics. So I mean, all of us have been through just extraordinary transformations. Aaron Cruz was the guy whose ceremonially blessed my Google Glass before I performed with it in a world first self streaming performance Gratify Festival in 2013.Michael (1m 35s):So yeah, there's a lot of archival material to unpack here, but we don't spend a lot of time ruminating on history. Instead, we discuss the present moment of the landscape of our society and people's trauma and drive for transcendence and the way that this collides with consumer culture and transformational festival scene where we all met one another. And it's an extraordinary episode and I know a lot of people out there are having a really hard time right now.Michael (2m 23s):And I am with you. I have huge news to share soon. I want you to know that you are not alone in your efforts to work things out. And if you need support, there is support for you. I really hope that you get something out of this conversation. I myself found just simply re-listening to the recording to be truly healing. And I'm really grateful that I get to share it with you. But before I do that, I want to pay tribute to everyone who is supporting this show on Patreon and on CK everyone who is subscribing to my music on Band camp, the latest Patreon supporters include Darius Strel and Samantha Lotz.Michael (3m 17s):Thank you both so much. Thank you also to the, the hundreds of other people who are helping me pay my mortgage and feed my kids with this subscription service one form or another. I have plenty of awesome new things for you, including speaking of psychedelics, a live taping of the two sets I just played opening for comedian Shane Moss here in Santa Fe. John Cocteau Cinema sold out shows. Excellent evening. I just posted the little teaser clip of the song Transparent, which was the song from that 2013 Google Blast performance.Michael (4m 2s):Actually that was, its its inaugural debut and I've refined it over the last decade and I submitted it to NPRs Tiny Desk concert. And you can find that up on my YouTube. If you want to taste of the electro-acoustic inventions that I will be treating subscribers to here in short order patreon.com/michael garfield, michael garfield.ck.com, which is where this podcast is currently hosted RSS feed. And thanks to everybody who's been reading and reviewing the show on Apple Podcast and Spotify and wherever you're wonderful, you've got this, whatever you're going through, you can do it.Michael (4m 46s):I believe in you and do not hesitate to reach out to me or to my fabulous guests or to other members of our community if you need the support. Thank you. Enjoy this episode. Be well and much more coming soon. I have two extraordinary conversations in the Can one with Kevin wo, my dear friend here in Santa Fe and Kmo, the notorious, legendary confederate podcaster who just published a trial log, the first part of the trial log between the three of us on his own show.Michael (5m 27s):Highly recommend you go check that out. And then also an episode with Caveat Magister, the resident philosopher of Burning Man who published an extraordinary book last year, turned your Life into Art, which resulted in a very long, vulnerable, profound and hilarious conversation between the two of us about our own adventures and misadventures and the relationship between Psycho Magic and Burning Man and Meow Wolf and Disney and Jurassic Park. Oh, and speaking of which, another piece of bait to throw on the hook for you subscribers.Michael (6m 12s):I am about to start a Jurassic Park book club this spring. I will be leading the group in the Discord server and in the Facebook group and on live calls chapter by chapter through the book that changed the world. I've an intense and intimate relationship with this book. I was there at the world premier in 1993. I grew up doing Dinosaur Diggs with the book's Primary Paleontological consultant, Robert Bocker. I have a dress for tattoo, et cetera. I've sold the painting to Ian, not to Ian Malcolm, the Jeff Goldblum, but I did name my son after that mathematician.Michael (6m 59s):Anyway, yes, much, much, much to discuss, especially because you know, one of the craziest things about this year is that the proverbial velociraptors have escaped the island, you know, and open ai. What, what's in a name? You know, everything is just transforming so fast now. And so I am the dispossessed Cassandra that will lead you through some kibbitz in Doug rush cuffs language. Please join us, everybody subscribing Tock or anybody on Patreon at five bucks or more will be privy to those live calls and I really hope to see you in there.Michael (7m 47s):And with all of that shilling behind me now, please give it up for the marvelous Aaron Cruz and Daphne Krantz. Two people with whom I can confidently entrust your minds. Enjoy. Okay, let's just dive in. Sure. Aaron Daphne. Hi, future fossils. You're here.Michael (8m 26s):Awesome. This took us like what, nine months to schedule this.Daphne (8m 30s):A slow burn, but we, here we go. It's great to hear me here,Ehren (8m 33s):Brother. It is, yeah. And once again, anything that gets rescheduled always ends up turning out better. Like I, I was just thinking, I'm really glad we actually didn't do this interview nine months ago, just in terms of life experience between now and then. I don't know what that's gonna translate to in a conversation, but personally I feel a lot more prepared to talk to you rightDaphne (8m 51s):Now. A hundred percent agree.Michael (8m 53s):Cool. Okay, so let's just dive in then. Both of you are doing really interesting work in the explosive emerging sector of, in one way or another, dealing with people's trauma, dealing with people's various like life crisis issues. And having met both of you through the festival world, which was a scene of pretty rampant abuse and escapism. And I met you both as what my friend in town here, Mitch Minno would call like psychedelic conservatives, where I felt like there were a bunch of like elder millennials who were kind of trying to help that had been in the scene for a little long and they were really working to steer people into a more grounded and integrated approach to extasis in the festival world.Michael (9m 52s):And all of us have seen our fair share of, and perhaps also lived through our fair share of right and wrong relationship to the tools and technologies of transcendence. So that's kinda where I wanna take this. And I think maybe the way to start is just by having both of you introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your path and the various roles that you've kept over the years in this, in adjacent spheres and what led you into the work that you're doing now. And then, yeah, from there we can take it wherever the conversation chooses to lead us. Daphne, we've had you on the show before, so why don't we have Aaron go first? Let's do that.Michael (10m 32s):Okay,Daphne (10m 32s):Awesome. Thank you Mike. Yo, we appreciate you're really eloquent way of creating an environment to kind of settle into here. So Aaron Cruz, I've been really deeply immersed in psychedelics for 15 years. My first foray into the world, or in curiosity, was actually going to school in Ohio State University for fellowship in anthropology. And coming it from the perspective of looking at 16th, 15th century around the time of the, the conquest in indigenous cultures utilizing plant medicine ceremony ritual as a community harmonizer agent, as a tool for collective wisdom, also for ceremonial divine communion, but very much from an ivory tower perspective.Daphne (11m 15s):I was not very much engaged with psychedelics at that particular lens outside of a foray into a couple of opportunities at all. Good music festival or different things like that. But I beg the question about is using these plant medicines with intentionality, will it create a more symbiotic way of life? A way of understanding the interdependence between the natural landscape, humanity, culture, community building and personal evolution. So it wasn't until major psychedelic experience in 2008 where I had probably inadvisable amount of L s D in the middle of a, an event and went into a full system to dissolve to the, the good degree. I actually didn't even know my name for several hours, but, but what I did feel that came to recognize was just this deep sense of connection to the soul of, of others.Daphne (12m 4s):A sense that e, each one of us sped our best efforts with cultural conditioning, social conditioning, how we're races, peers, we had a desire to appreciated, embraced. There's this deep sense of tribal kinship that I think I felt from everybody wanted to explore whether they were wearing a grateful dead shirt, a ballerina tutu or flat cap or whatever it was. And we wear these different types of masks of her own safety and security and and sense of self. But beneath that facade, I just felt this deep, rich desire to be a sense of belonging and connection and desire to be a p a child of the universe for lack of a better term. So that kind of really set me off from that tone as you shared, is that this rapidly accelerated from place of recreation to a deep of place of deep spiritual potency.Daphne (12m 46s):And, and from that place on the alchemical frontier, as I call that kind of festival type of realm where many, whether they're using compounds for escapism or they're trying to embody or embrace a particular lifestyle that they can then translate and seed into their own default realities or wherever that is almost train Jedi training grounds or whatever you could consider that to be. However, your orientation around it, that is, I just felt a deep devotion to trying to support those particular realms. First through workshop ceremony and cultivation of experiences that had some integrity and bones to using these things mindfully, actually to producing events. I was producing a co-producing original back in the day where I believe I met you, Mike, with root wire with the popio about 2010 through 2013 or nine through 12, maybe one of those epox learned a lot.Daphne (13m 35s):It was a lot of bootstrapping and blood, sweat and everything else trying to get the, those events going and, but they're really creating these containers for radical creativity and self-expression and where music and visionary arts could be upheld in a new model of, of honoring them and mutual out something that never took, took root as much as I would love it to. And then kind of translated into producing Lee Festival out here in Asheville, North Carolina for six years. And the ethos behind that was trying to create a dynamic cultural atmosphere, 10 to 15 different nations, people of all walks of life and traditions expressing their music arts culture ceremony and using that as a catalyst to kind of break down isms to reveal that the true depth and value that the rich, creative and cultural expression has beyond politic, beyond social conditioning.Daphne (14m 21s):It's a, you hear one thing about Iranians on on tv, but if you see them doing their Sufi circle dance and chanting and when they're cooking their food at the end of the day, it just really, it's amazing how humanity and expression in those places would really quickly help people bypass certain prejudices without saying a word. We're often dialogue, even intentional and conscious dialogue tend to fail. The expression goes beyond that. So, and of course there is still a rich culture of psychedelics and but these places are, it's kind of underground. It's not necessarily, there's no curated container specifically to facilitate initiation of rights of passage. It's a little bit more rogue, rogue experiencing.Daphne (15m 2s):So after that kind of materialized up to Covid where I was really actually even at that point seeking an exit strategy from that realm, the intensity of producing events is extremely vigorous. I remember in 2019 I had 7,800 emails and countless calls just coordinating three festivals and I'd have children, my three girls just hanging on every limb. And that one more call, one more, one more thing. So it was becoming quite burned out and Covid kind of did me at the time. I didn't think so a bit of a favor and giving me, kind of forcing me into an exit strategy to re-identify myself, not as just a producer and an event organizer, but someone that is deeply passionate about initiatory culture. My catalyst was festivals for initiation or creative initiation.Daphne (15m 43s):And then I went back to where it all began, really sat with the medicine once again, brought myself back into sacramental ceremony. And then I started really gazing at the broad sweeping frontier, the vanguard of the psychedelic emergence now, and saying, this may be a time I could be transparent and real and open about my deep care and use of these plants and medicines for almost 15 years. And so I went ahead and I got a professional coaching certification from I C F, I got a third wave psychedelic certification. It was the first a psychedelic coaching program in the nation back in 2020, in six months of learning the panoramic of psychedelics, preparation, integration, the neuroplasticity, the ethics considerations, dosaging compound understanding.Daphne (16m 24s):So getting that whole holistic review and then the cultivating a practice, a facilitation coaching practice based upon using that psychedelic as a catalyst but in a continuum of deeply intentional self-work and self-care and, and moving into that space with an openness to receive insights. But then really about embodiment. What do you do after you have those lightning bolts of revelation and how do you make that have an impact in your life? So that's been my last few years is serving as a, a ceremonial facilitator and coach in at the psychedelic realm and also a harm reductionist. People are looking for a high integrity experience but have a compound, don't really know how to go about it in a way that's intentional and safe. Really kind of stepping into that space and holding that container for them and being an ally.Ehren (17m 6s):Awesome. Daphne. Hi. Lovely to be back here with you Michael. So I'll start from the beginning and kind of give my whole story inspired by Aaron and the way he just articulated that trajectory. And I started out like we met each other. I think we might have met each other also at Root Wire back in that era. And I found myself in this world as a music producer. I was really heavily investing time and energy into building a music career, DJing, producing under the name few Texture for a long time, starting in around 2009. And that was my main gig for about six years and had some early psychedelic experiences when I was pretty young.Ehren (17m 52s):14, 15, 16 kind of set me off on a path to where I really had a strong inclination that there was something there and was always very interested in them and came into the festival world, into the music world with a very idealistic lens of what these substances could do for us individually as humanity and had my ideal ideals broken completely in a lot of ways. And what I experienced personally through relationships with collaborators, through my own inability to show up in the way that I wanted to in terms of my own ideals, thinking that because I took psychedelics, I was gonna somehow magically be this person who could live up to these ideals of relational integrity and honesty and like really being a beacon of what I perceived as like light, right?Ehren (18m 50s):And really had some issues with spiritual ego when I was younger and kind of had the sense of I've seen these other realms, I, I know more than other people, I'm special. I had all that story and really ended up harming me and other people around me. And it took some pretty significant relational abuse actually that I was experiencing and participating in through a creative relationship to kind of break me outta that illusion, right? That because I am creating interesting forward thinking music with a psychedelic bent in this kind of wild and free community festival community, that somehow I was immune from all of the shadow that exists in our culture in the psyche, in all of these places that I was just very blind to.Ehren (19m 44s):And I think it's a pretty normal developmental thing in your early twenties, and I mean at any age ongoing of course to be, to have places that are less conscious and those are blind spots, right? And so I really was forced through my musical career, through my participation in psychedelic culture to either have the choice to look at those blind spots or continue to ignore them. And I'd look back and I'm really grateful that I, I really did at a certain point be like, damn, I need to go to therapy. You can't do this on my own. I'm really hurting. And in about 2015 I kind of stepped away from music pretty hardcore and really shifted my focus because I was in too much pain.Ehren (20m 28s):I had experienced a lot of relational trauma around that time and started to just do other things peripherally related to music. I worked for MOG for a little bit building synthesizers and found myself doing a lot of personal healing work, kind of getting really real about my own inability to show up as what at the time I was perceiving as like a good person. In retrospect there it was so much more complex than that. And over time, being able to drop the layers of shame and the layers of self-judgment around a lot of those relational patterns I was living out that of course are familial and cultural and all these other things. But I ended up starting doing health coaching work around that time.Ehren (21m 11s):And Michael, that's something that we've connected on on the past episodes around some of the epigenetic coaching work. I do a lot of genetic testing, I do a lot of personalized nutrition, peak performance type work and was doing that pretty steadily from about 2015 to 2019 and I'm still doing it, but over the last three and a half years or so, went and got a master's in mental health counseling, started to really find that a lot of the people I was working with and drawing from my own experiences in therapy and healing, I was like, okay, nutrition and all of these physiological things are very important.Ehren (21m 53s):And what I'm seeing is most of these people need emotional healing. Most of these people need more psycho emotional awareness and healing from trauma and relational patterns. And I just felt really unprepared to do that work as a coach at the time. And also had just tremendous openings into understanding myself better into being able to, yeah, be with discomfort and be with pain in a way that when I was younger was totally off the table. It was like I'm just gonna distract myself fully from all of that through, through jugs, through sensory experiences through the festival world.Ehren (22m 37s):And that's where I got drawn and no regret, like I love that it was what shaped me and I still engage in all of that just with this slightly different way of being with it, not as an escape, but as a way of celebration in contrast with really being able to also be with the more difficult, darker shadow aspects of life and seeing that as a pathway to wholeness rather than avoiding those things. And so that's the work I'm doing now as a therapist, as someone who does psychedelic integration work. I've also done publications on psychedelics.Ehren (23m 18s):I have an article that was in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling a couple years ago. I have another one that's pending right now on psilocybin assisted group therapy that I hope gets through in the international journal group psychotherapy right now. And I'm planning some research also on gender and psychedelics in terms of the way psychedelic experiences impact gender nonconforming and gender expansive people's perception of gender. And I know for me that was one of the early indications that I was transgender was a mushroom experience when I was in my early twenties when I was like, wait, I think I'm a lesbian, I have no idea what this means. And I had no idea how to process it.Ehren (23m 58s):And I kind of stuffed it back down for years and two years until it was just too obvious. But I have, yeah, that's in the works working on IRB approval for that this year. So yeah, kind of have a research bent, do general therapy work with people, do psychedelic assisted work, also still do genetic testing, epigenetic coaching, working on more of the physiological side with people and coming from a holistic health perspective. But yeah, just also to add the other piece in here, I did my internship and worked for a little over a year substance abuse rehab as well, doing therapy there. And so as someone who's been a long time proponent of psychedelics and the potential healing capacity of them, still fully believe that despite my own, and I've had many important experiences to counter what I was saying earlier around them also creating sometimes an idealized version of self without doing the work to get there.Ehren (24m 57s):I worked in a rehab working with people who've had maladaptive relationships with substances and it was a very important counter to my own, again, idealized image and idealized perception of the human relationship with substances. And so I, coming out of that, I actually left in December starting in opening up my private practice with I think a much more balanced understanding of all the different ways humans can be in relationship to substances from full on avoidance to transcendence and self-awareness. And I really love to be able to hold both of those perspectives and work with people on all sides of that spectrum because there's not just necessarily a clean one thing one way or the other for people.Ehren (25m 45s):I find myself and Michael, you and I have talked about this weaving in and out of those relationships of where we end up relating to different substances in good or more harmful ways. And I think there's an importance to be able to be honest with ourselves and with people that we're working with around, yeah, what is this really? What is this really doing for me? And what am I getting out of this? And sometimes it's okay to lean on a substance for pain relief or for disassociation intentionally, right? But like at a certain point, like how do we learn how to take what, and I think this is true regardless of how we're using any substance, how do we learn from it and take what this substance is helping us with and kind of learn how to do it on our own in certain ways.Ehren (26m 36s):And so that's, I think maybe where this roundabout description of my life right now is leading to is that point of I'm very interested in regardless of the substance, regardless of what it is, whether it's heroin, whether you're using heroin to avoid painful emotion, how do you learn how to be without yourself, without the substance, right? Or whether you're using ayahuasca or L s D to access the transcendent and become more aware of the deep capacity for inner love and compassion that's already inside of you. Like how do you learn how to do that in a stable, grounded way on your own right? And I, I think there's a, a parallel, right that I think is lost in the discourse about drugs in general that I'd love to bring in.Michael (27m 22s):So that's actually right where I want to be for this cuz I think should not come as a surprise to anyone that there is this rather obvious isomorphism, I guess in people's relationship to ecstatic events generally to the festival as some, as a phenomenon that has its origins in the acknowledgement and re you know, the recognition and enactment of a relationship to sort of vertical access or a horizontal, like a transcendent experience of time rather than just a one damn thing after another duration Kronos clock time that there's, it's an observance of a kind of a holy dimension to our lives.Michael (28m 17s):And at one point these were all woven together much more intimately than they are today in our lives. The, the holiday has become something that is, and the festivals generally have become something that is more about a pressure valve or kind of escape from the oppression of our lives rather than something that's woven into the fabric of, or our everyday expect the observances of sacred hours in a monastic sense. And so likewise, I think if you were to believe the anthropological take on substance use, the various substances were held more like, more formally, like I think that all of us have participated in a number of discussions, are well aware of ayahuasca in particular being something that is still very much implicated within this fabric of specific cultural utility under understand and practice.Michael (29m 24s):But a lot of these things exist. For instance, ketamine is something that is either in, it's used as a medical anesthetic primarily until just a few years ago, or it's used as a club drug. And so there's a, it doesn't have that same sort of unity of purpose and the same clarity as far as the way that it's being applied and it lacks a, a lineage or a continuity where it's not like John Lilly had a, a tribe of people that he coached on how to do this. He was like people experimenting on their own. And I mean the same goes also for other, more, more recently discovered synthetic substances like L S D and also for substances that had a more focused and time-honored indigenous tradition around them like psilocybin, but either through just the proliferation of GarageBand type experimentation taking over as the primary cultural mode or whatever like we have.Michael (30m 30s):So there's this whole spectrum of the ways that different substances either have managed to maintain or never or have gotten away from, or never actually even had a system of protocols within which their use could be more or less responsibly engaged. And of course, I'm not saying that there's a ton of examples in which ayahuasca is not even within, even within settings that claim to be responsible. And anyway, this is just a nimbus of considerations around the question, which is where is the line between escapism healthier approaches or like sometimes escapism, like you just said, Daphne is actually healthy if it's encountered in a way or if we people are en engaging this in a way that is not just con ongoing peak ex seeking of peak experiences.Michael (31m 28s):I mean, I think one more thing I'll say to this is that I've seen people, and it should, I'm sure anyone listening to this has also seen people who engage traditions that are about in more, you might think like endogenous substances like running or meditation that have strong cultural containers, but there are always leaks in these containers or these containers themselves are not typically are, are not healthy. Like I've seen ayahuasca ceremonies that were the, the, that particular community depended on the patronage in order to do its work of people who had managed to kind of trick themselves into thinking that they were doing important spiritual work, but were just kind of had become gluttons or for punishment or like masochists that were just in there to purge, heal DNA traumas or whatever for their retroactive lineal healing week after week after week.Michael (32m 31s):And nothing was actually changing. They had gotten themselves into a loop. And so I'm, yeah, I'm curious how does one ever, how does one actually even begin to recognize when something has crossed over from healthy into unhealthy? Like what is, where is the line? It seems rather contextual and I mean there were, it's funny because, I mean just to bring it back to festivals and then I'll stop, it wasn't ever really clear to me. I mean, it was clear when lip service was being paid to transformation and that was a load of shit because I think that was used as a lure by and still is by event organizers and promoters to bait people into buying a ticket but wasn't really held in the right way in those events.Michael (33m 19s):And then there are times when every effort is made to do this stuff sincerely, but is not really handled in a way that makes it success, you know. And the same can be said for anything, I mean for like educational television is an example of something that people have been fighting over for almost a century. Whether the medium, whether the format of this makes these tools effective, potentially effective, problematic in their actual implementation, et cetera. So this is a much bigger conversation than a conversation about drugs really. It's a conversation about how mu how far we can engage in a particular type of relation to a, a practice of self transformation or transcendence or illumination or education or whatever before it becomes more trouble than it's worth or before.Michael (34m 11s):We need to call in some sort of balancing factor. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts at length and I'd love to hear you kind of back and forth about this.Daphne (34m 19s):Yeah, there's so much there man. That is a panoramic for sure. One of the things to kind of look at here is that the idea of the recreational use of, of a psychoactive or a psychedelic compound is 50, 60 years old. The lineage of using Sacramento entheogenic compounds is at least 40,000 years old for the time of megalithic cave paintings, size of football fields made with depth pigmentation that is with techniques that have somehow have the endurance to be still on those walls this year later is with sac ceremonial initiations and MAs and sabertooth and many mushrooms along the bottom.Daphne (34m 59s):So perhaps even people have said such as stems and McKenna, the origin of cultural or creativity of artistic creativity might have been spawned or germinated through the use of psychedelic compounds, the self-awareness and the potential for di interdimensional realization. But you look at Theon that was used with eloc mysteries, the type of reverence people have taken for one time in their entire life to, to walk to the Elian temple from Athens, the distance of a marathon fasting, moving into that experience with great care, great reverence, having an initiation with an ergo wine, a compound that's now been synthesizing the LSDs in 47. But originally was the, the rye, the barley grain, the ergot there infused into a beverage and seeing the immortality of the soul dramatized in front of you by our initiatory rights of passage theater in Egypt.Daphne (35m 50s):And you know, the temples of Ocirus, which had little mandrakes wrapped around its feet, or isis, which had little mushrooms at the feed. And those particular lineages of priesthoods and priestesses would utilize compounds to commune and learn the subtle language of that particular medicine in collaboration with ritual and practice to help to uphold virtues of different aspects of the civilization. And you go all around from the flesh of the god's, Aztec, MasTec, olmec, TOK cultures, ayahuasca, there's probably 10 different brews in that region, thousands of years old Abor, pati bush, west Africa, psilocybins everywhere, Druids Nordic culture.Daphne (36m 31s):I mean, but you look at the way upon which peyote cactus, you used it in a way that was like, here is an ally, here is a teacher, here is a compatriot a an essence of something that I work in cohesion with in order for me to learn how to navigate my own life evolutionary process in greater symbiotic relationship with the world around me, how I commune with the divine and with more, I guess visceral potency to allow that philosophical faith that aspiring Christians across the world hold this philosophical arm length faith that when things go sour where send in love and light when things are fine, I forget I'm even affiliated or associated with any kind of denomination.Daphne (37m 15s):And it's really an interesting thing when you have a different mindset of we are in a continuum of connectivity to an interdimensional web of life and that there's an interdependence between us and these different realms of being to try to embody and embrace a life that is a virtue or an integrity or create community based around these deeper ethics and values that are being kind of almost divinely inspired. And now you're coming into a timer where that has been systematically eradicated beyond all else, whether it's the early Catholic church with the Council of naia, that plant medicine, the original Nixon move was in 3 89 ad pretty much when plant medicine was absolutely persecuted feminine that he, the hosts or the feminine energy that often was the catalyst of working together in communion with the plants and offering it the original catacombs, the nasta catacombs where they find ergot wines and such that probably the original Eucharist was a psychedelic medicine.Daphne (38m 13s):All of that was completely ousted and nothing has been persecuted harder than plant medicine. And so then coming into contemporary society, the reintroduction, whether was through the scientific land, rogue experimentation, GaN coming up with massive amounts of compounds, Albert Hoffman. But when it started to infuse into academia, it again started moving people into this awareness that is, this compound is not just therapeutic, it is creating something within it that is inspiring Nas, a deeper wisdom, a deeper sense of internal communion with life force that is beyond something that can be charted on a bar graph or triangulated with an abacus.Daphne (38m 56s):And so that, and then they, the considerations of set and setting and if you're gonna host an experiment, how do you, how do you hold a psychedelic space without being on a psychedelic? And there is a lot of challenges there because it just, it is a type of experience that almost necessitates an A, a visceral embodied awareness to even understand how to support in any kind of way because of the potency and the gravity and the expansion of what that is is something you can't read on chapter seven and have a good grasp on how to facilitate or how to curate. But that whole experience, what it ended up happening is that the disruptive nature of people thinking, perceiving, expanding in a way that is unformed or nonconform to the status quos growing industrial complex and commercial material culture created a real schism reality.Daphne (39m 47s):And so people that felt like they wanted to embrace and imbibe had to flee, had to go to the woods and had to lock themselves. And Stella Stellar or like Chris Beige who just came out with L S D in the mining universe of absolutely prolific book for 20 years, had to hide his L S D ceremonial work and testing and deep psychospiritual results until he was 10 years past 10 retired to, to finally come out with the fruits of his labor. It just created his isolatory world and framework. And so now we're saying, escapees, please come back. Like you all had to run away to do your compound and try to find yourself and your consciousness, but you, we want you back in community and the old deadheads and those that are kind of in that lineage is like, it's just not safe over there.Daphne (40m 30s):We're gonna keep it in the parks, we're gonna keep it in the fields and if we come back over there, we're gonna be always outcasted as the hippies that are just avantgarde and fringe. And so it's a real interesting dynamic in culture where we want to infuse the intelligence and the beauty of the transformation that these things can uphold. But then we don't actually have a paradigm that allows people to be expansive and allows people to be avantgarde and ecstatic in these different things without feeling that they're actually a real challenge to our core sets of cultural beliefs. So part of this kind of third wave that we're seeing right now is the reintroduction of that outcasted, psychedelic culture.Daphne (41m 10s):And it's now in a, into a space of deeper therapeutic respect where they're seeing through the results of John Hopkins in Imperial College of London and all these other studies that the power in P T S D complex, P T S D and a addiction and trauma for, with intentionality with a progressive path that includes a holistic wellbeing, body, mind, spirit care, deep intentionality, using it as a catalyst, catalyst and integration process that this can be something that can allow somebody to at least get a sense where is that inner compass, where is that inner sense of who I am? And it's an immersive culture, so you kind of drip dry, you dunk 'em in that space, they get, oh, that's what home is. I, okay, I remember, oh wait, it's going away from me.Daphne (41m 51s):It's go, I'm starting to forget. And that's where devotional practice and self-care and all those things are the real way to really supporting and sustaining that. But I think where psychedelics help is it imprints or imbues a remembrance of where that space is and to your port Michael, like once you get that deep message, then it's time to do the work. What decisions in my life, what relationships, habits, patterns, distractions, what is in my life that is taking me away from that center, make those earnest actions, make those earnest choices, and then have a sense of where that foundation is. Then if you name for growing, maybe you do revisit with the medicine in an alliance in a way that is understanding that it isn't, it's an aid, it's not a, it's not a panacea, it's never meant to be, but it helps you at times to say, okay, here's a reminder, here's your truth, here's where you can be if you let go of the drama, the guilt, shame and baggage and, but really you still got a lot of work to do on those faces before you can say that you're, we're all we're a whole.Daphne (42m 48s):So there's a nice, there's a nice kind of panoramic or a dance going on here with this third waves trying to rebrace indigenous culture and the long lineage of ceremony, trying to respect the research, trying to bring people back from the fridge of alchemy and then trying to bring about awareness to those that have been tabooed for 50 years in the Nixon war. That there's actually some vitality and merit to re reengaging with this consciousness expansion. Beautiful.Ehren (43m 12s):I wanna pick up on a couple pieces there, Erin, especially around the embodiment piece and where I see that as being a really critical component of the way that psychedelics are being reintroduced into the therapeutic community, into the way we're looking at this. And I kind of want to frame it in the context of the way Western psychotherapy has developed over the last 100 years because Michael, as you brought up, we don't have a lineage necessarily that we're drawing from. As these things are starting to become back, back into research, back into culture. John Lilly didn't have a tribe to draw from, right? He didn't. He was out there outlaw on his own doing it.Ehren (43m 55s):And in so many ways, what we're seeing right now is the people that have been experimenting, coming back together, having the capacity to get federal grant fund private funding and having these inroads into saying, all right, now that we've had these experiences, how do we codify them and provi present them in a way that's palatable to the skeptics, to the people that have assumed that this is just for hippies and people that you know off their rocker, right? And what I wanna look at is like the sense of when psychedelics were being explored in the fifties and sixties, the dominant modalities and theories that were being used therapeutically were still very Freudian and psychodynamic, psychoanalytic really meaning that predominantly they were mental, there was not necessarily the component of the body being brought in gestalt therapy, definitely the early kind of version of a lot of somatic therapies that are more popular now.Ehren (44m 57s):But that wasn't popular therapy at that time. It was being developed in the fifties and sixties, but it didn't make its way into a larger mainstream understanding of the importance of an embodied relationship to the mind and to the emotions until much later on, and especially in the nineties, early two thousands and up to now, there's been a pretty strong somatic revolution in psychotherapy saying, we need to incorporate the body, we need to incorporate the way that most people have heard at this point, the idea that trauma is stored in the body, in the nervous system. And there's absolutely a truth to that and it's kind of an oversimplification of it, but it's true that order to access the, the way we can reprocess memories, the way we can re-pattern our nervous systems, like we do have to include the body for the most part.Ehren (45m 49s):Sometimes inside is enough, but rarely, right? And so that's the trap that psychotherapy and talk therapy found itself in for a long time was not including that. And so that was also the frame that psychedelic work was being looked at when it was being researched in the fifties when it was being explored also through the kind of the outliers as well. I don't think there was as much of a com a understanding of that embodied nature of the experience as we're talking about now. And when you look at some of the models that are being put forth, I'm specifically thinking of Rosalyn Watts at Imperial College in London has this really beautiful model called the ACE model or accept connect and body model that they're using in psilocybin research that really includes the body, right?Ehren (46m 40s):Includes the what is happening in your body in this moment as you're experiencing this, and is it possible to move towards this and treat whatever is happening, whether it's painful, disturbing, difficult to be with compassion and with acceptance. And that parallels most, if not all of the current understandings of some of the best ways to do therapy with people looking at things like internal family systems or EMDR or many of the therapeutic modalities that essentially ask people to revisit traumatic memories or traumatic experiences, traumatic emotions with a deeper sense of love and compassion.Ehren (47m 20s):And when you look at the core of a lot of what the psychedelic research is showing, I think around why these things work for trauma healing, why these, these things work for PTs D, why these things work for longstanding depression or addiction, it's because they do give people access, like you said, Aaron, to that remembrance, right? To that remembrance of I'm more than this limited ego self that experiences pain and suffering. I actually have access, I can remember this access to some source of love that I feel in my body, I feel in my heart. And I can use that as a way to soften and be with the parts of me that I generally don't want to be with.Ehren (48m 2s):Like it opens up that capacity to do that. And it's the same thing that I do with clients through internal family systems and other ways of psychotherapy. It just magnifies that capacity for people to find that within themselves really fast and really quickly. You know what I mean? If you've ever done M D M A, like you just wanna love everyone, you feel it. It's an embodied experience, right? And so the levels of that which people can access that in those states gives people this greater capacity than like you said, to almost bookmark that or have a way of coming back to it, remembering ongoing.Ehren (48m 43s):And so that's the integration work. And I wanna bring this back, Michael, also to what you were saying about the institutions of festival culture, taking these experiences and marketing them as transformational and actually somehow pulling that label away from that embodied experience of what it's like to have that remembrance that into the right conditions and circumstances creates the conditions for internal transformation through that remembering, right? Like that's the individual experience that sometimes happens in a place where you have autonomy to do whatever drugs you want and beyond whatever wavelength you want to get on with a bunch of people who are also doing the same thing, right?Ehren (49m 32s):That approximates in some ways what we're seeing in the therapeutic research, just not in a contained setting, right? And then seeing festival culture kind of take that and label the festival as that rather than the experience that some people have as that. And I think that it brings up this larger conversation right now around the psychedelic industry and what we can learn maybe from the failures of transformational festival culture and the successes when we're talking about how psychedelics might be marketed to people as a therapeutic tool. Because I see the exact same pitfalls, I see the exact same appeal to any company that wants to present the psychedelic experience as inherently healing no matter what.Ehren (50m 22s):In the same way that a transformational festival wants to present the idea that coming to this festival is gonna gonna create transformation for you no matter what, and leaves out all of the specific conditions and containers and importance of all the pieces that come together to create the safety, create the container, create the, the ripening of that internal remembering and what do you do with it, right? What do you actually do with it? What, how are you being prompted to know what to do with it? And I too, Michael, remember the notion of the transformational festival and going, what does this actually mean?Ehren (51m 2s):What are we trying to transform into? What is this? What is this thing? What is this buzzword? And it's funny because the most of the transformation I, I've experienced in my own life has come from outside of that. And then those experiences now actually are like these celebratory experiences that I'm not running away from at the time they were more these escapist type things. And again, I'm gonna steer it back to that question of like, where's that line? Because I, I think it's in context with all this, all the things I was, I've just mentioned around, it's so contextual, it's so individual around where that line is for people. It's so individual where that line is between going and wanting to have an experience versus actually having it.Ehren (51m 50s):And there's no way for me or you or Erin to be an arbiter of that for someone it has someone deciding, but doing it in an honest way, right? Of like, how much am I actually moving towards parts of myself that I haven't been able to be with or haven't been able to understand or haven't been able to find love and compassion for or treat in a way that's more humane or more in relationship to a higher set of ideals or perhaps a more maybe something like an indigenously informed I set of ideals around interconnectedness and how much am I continuing to engage with substances as a way to trick myself into thinking that I might be doing that or that just I'm straight up just having a great time so I don't have to deal with that shit.Ehren (52m 45s):And I think that there's the potential for either of that in the festival world, in the commercialized, institutionalized medicalized model, in the coaching model in any of these places. And I think I'm gonna just speak from my own experience as a therapist, like working in a rehab, right? Like I've seen people, you know, substances aside come in and pretend like they're doing the work and just totally diluting themselves and, and we see what that looks like. But sometimes it's easier for people just to kind of pretend like they're going through the steps and the motions and that's what people are ready for and that's okay too. That has to be part of, of the process.Ehren (53m 26s):I've experienced that. I've experienced that self illusion of thinking I'm going somewhere when I'm really just treading water. And there's that, I think it's an important and a natural step actually in any part, right? It's kind of the pre-contemplation part in the stages of change where you have to want to change before you want to change before you change. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing that the idea of transformation might be prompted by something like a transformational festival or by the idea of doing therapy or by the idea of whatever modality you're seeking to change with. But yeah, I just get the sense that there's no clear answer to that question around where that line is it's individual and that I'm curious to explore more around like how we've experienced that festival realm and how that might translates into the work we're doing now and what we're seeing in the larger context of, of kind of the rollout of a more mainstream version of psychedelics.Michael (54m 24s):Can I focus this a little bit before I bounce it back to you, Aaron? Because I think, and thank you both for that. One of the, the things that strikes me about all of this is that I think about that classic rat park experiment that, you know, where it showed that laboratory rats don't just by default prefer the cocaine button over food, that there are these un unhealthy addictive patterns are actually, and I talked about this, another expert in unhealthy addictive patterns. Charles Shaw, right? Old friend and complicated figure.Ehren (55m 4s):I love that episode by the way, way back.Michael (55m 6s):She's not way back. Charles is somebody who has been a real pain in the ass to a lot of people over the years, but I think really walks this line now and his, he's, he's gonna mature as a wounded healer into the role of addiction counselor and helping people through these same kind of trials that he himself has been through in his life. And Charles made the point in that I think it was episode 58 or thereabouts, that the addiction is actually the brain doing what it should be doing. Now it's, and I'll be talking about this with some neuroscientists at some point this year also, that the brain, if you think about it as like an uncertainty reduction or free energy minimization, these terms that are floating around now, that the brain is a tool for inference.Michael (55m 50s):And so it likes to be able to make parsimonious predictions about its own future states and about the future of its environment. And in a weird way, addiction facilitates in that. Like when I had Eric Wargo on the show, he was talking about how many people he thinks are precognitive individuals like Harlan Ellison famous science fiction writer who wrote a lot of time travel fiction and has a, you know, that a lot of these people have problems with alcoholism or, or drug use. Philip Kate, Dick, there's a way in which I'm drunk today and I'm gonna be drunk tomorrow, is actually doing, is the brain doing what it's been tasked to do? So there's that on one piece. And then the other piece is that the rat park thing, when at that experiment, when you put rats together with one another in an environment that allows a much more so like a greater surface area for social encounters and more exercise and so on, that they actually prefer the company of other rats and quote unquote healthy behaviors over these repetitive self stimulating addictive behaviors.Michael (56m 57s):And I look at the last few years and how covid in particular seems it the lockdowns people getting stuck in their home for months at a time, the uncertainty of a, a really turbulent environment, the specter of these an ever tightening cinch or vice of government interventions or just the fear of people being as hats and not doing socially responsible behaviors as a res, as a reaction to this crisis. I mean there's just like all of these ways that that mental health has come to the foreground through all of us going through this collective trauma together.Michael (57m 42s):And like we were, Aaron and I were talking about before the call started, the living in Santa Fe in New Mexico, in a place that is so much of its character is about it being a concentration of indigenous people living on reservation, trying to make their way in, in community with wave after wave of European colonists that matters of we're like this relationship between oppression, trauma, substance abuse, or addictive behavior. It's all really interesting. And like the last piece I'll stack on this is when I had Tyson Yoko on the show and Tyson talked about how that this kind of pattern is not unique to peoples that have a very centuries long history of abuse and oppression.Michael (58m 31s):There is, you see opioid crisis coming up very prominently in Pennsylvania, coal mining communities whose way of life has been disrupted by changes in the energy sector by, by massive motions in the world market. And so suddenly you have lots of alcoholism and Oxycontin and fentanyl abuse and so on in, in these places as well. I mean, I guess Daphne especially curious in your sense, you know, in, in this relationship with you're thinking on transgender matters issues, this thing about this relationship between, like you said earlier about getting yourself out of the cage of a particular maladaptive model of self and the way that's related to getting oneself out of the cage of one's condition, like the actual material conditions of one's life.Michael (59m 25s):Because again, just a last callback to another episode, it, the episode I had with Chris Ryan who his book Civilized to Death, he talks about how far we've gone in the modern era from kind of environment that is actually good for the human body and the human mind and how, you know, the covid being a kind of apotheosis of that, of everyone living almost entirely in, in these digital spaces or being forced through economic concerns to work in very dangerous environments without adequate protection. So I mean, I just, yeah, a yarn ball of stuff, but really curious about this, and I feel like you've both addressed some of this already, but just to refocus on this particular corner of it, the way that, you know, addictive behaviors and abusive patterns seem to be the result of structural issues and that the self is also something that emerges out of a dynamic and relational set of feedbacks with that environment.Michael (1h 0m 43s):And so who you are is a kind of reflection of or ever-evolving trace fossil of the world in which you find yourself. And so like when people talk about getting over trauma, like one of the, one of the big, the three main things that people talk about are again and again and all of them find some sort of foothold in or expression in various psychedelic practices. But one is service, one is creative work writing or inquiry, right? Autobiographical writing especially. And then one is travel or pilgrimage and there's a way in which the psychedelic ceremonial container can facilitate anyone or all three of those.Michael (1h 1m 27s):But yeah, I mean it just strikes me that like more, as more and more people come out as neurodivergent or come out as trans in some way or another, or are trying to maintain their sanity in a set of socioeconomic circumstances over which they have no control, that there's something that comes into light here about the way that we're no long like in a, I don't know, I put it like self-discovery of our parents' generation of the second wave of psychedelics in the west was in its own way more about breaking free of the strictures of squared dom, but had an emphasis on much like it was part and parcel with this other thing that was going on, which was this proliferation of lifestyle consumerism.Michael (1h 2m 20s):And Charles Shaw and I talked about that too, about the way that these drives for transcendence were co-opted by finding yourself, meaning settling into kind of understanding rather than a phase change into a more plural or multidimensional or metamorphic understanding of the self. And especially in a regime of extremely granular and pervasive and pernicious behavioral engineering empowered by digital surveillance technologies. It strikes me that there's something that Richard Doyle has talked about this, that like psychedelics are kind of a training wheels for the Transhuman condition and for what it means to live in a network society where you may not actually want to settle on an identity at all.Michael (1h 3m 9s):You know that the identity itself is the trap. So I don't know, I don't know. I thought I was focusing things, but I just blew it up into, anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that particular matter.Ehren (1h 3m 20s):I'll speak briefly to just that notion around connection and social in the Rat Park piece. I mean there's a reason why any type of addiction therapy is like the gold standard is group therapy and why AA groups and all these things, despite their problems still are so popular is because getting connected with community and people that actually understand you is probably the most healing thing out of anything more mu, I mean, working through trauma is important, but having a network of people that you can call and be in relationship to is what I've seen to be the most healing thing for people. And it actually brings up this revision of what I was saying before in a way around the transformational festivals where in retrospect, the most transformational thing for me about those spaces I was inhabiting for so long are these sustained continued connections that we have now with each other, right?Ehren (1h 4m 15s):And like that's where the real magic was actually gaining these deeper relationships with people who understand us. And I think when we look at oppression and look at the systems that prevent people from feeling like it's okay to be who they are, or that there's an inherent shame in the case of trans people or inherent fear of being seen or in the case of economic disparity that like you are stuck in this place and you're going to be stripped and taken advantage of and there's no way out, right? It's a very disconnecting, isolating thing. And even though there can be these pockets of connection between people that are continuously stuck in poverty or contin, continuously stuck in a sense of, as a trans person, I'm constantly being repressed and targeted and there is community in that very often the most healing thing that's needed is to actually integrate back into culture and to change the systems that are creating that disconnection and oppression in the first place, right?Ehren (1h 5m 26s):And it's this open question right now for me in terms of when we're talking about substance abuse, like those communities are breeding grounds for it because that's the way people deal. That's they're, they work, right? Substances work. That's why people use them. And I always look at it like there's nothing wrong with you for going with a strategy that works, but when it comes to psychedelics, what you're saying I think is really important around how do we actually integrate this into an understanding of how we are interconnected with other people and that our own personal work needs to include a justice component or a component of social change or influencing other people's healing to other people's place in the world.Ehren (1

Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine was published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023 and is available for pre-order.  Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com.  On this Episode: Sophie Strand | @cosmogyny Adam Jackson | @adam___jackson  SACRED SONS TRAININGS & EVENTS: SACRED SONS IMMERSION | 2-Day Community Event FRANKFURT (GERMANY) : MARCH 4 - 5 ROTTERDAM (NETHERLANDS) : MARCH 11 - 12 BOULDER (COLORADO) : MARCH 11 - 12 SAN DIEGO (CALIFORNIA) : APRIL 1 - 2  DUBLIN (IRELAND) : APRIL 29 - 30  CHICAGO (ILLINOIS) | APRIL 29 - 30 BRISTOL (ENGLAND) | MAY 20 - 21 SACRED SONS EMX | 4-Day Embodied Masculine Experience SAN DIEGO (CA) : MARCH 16 - 19  COCHISE (AZ) : MARCH 23 - 26  TEPOZTLAN (MEX) : MARCH 30 - APRIL 2   MAUI MANA | A return to the place of origin, the home within, born of the land MAUI (HAWAI'I) : MARCH 29 - APRIL 2, 2023 THE 33 MASTER-HEART| 12-Months of Collaboration, Council, Community and Contribution  CONNECT: Shop | Sacred Sons Apparel & Cacao Website | sacredsons.com   YouTube | Sacred Sons   Instagram | @sacredsons   Events Calendar | All upcoming Sacred Sons Trainings and Experiences!  Music | Ancient Future  

On episode 90 of the Magick & Alchemy Podcast, hosts Kate Belew and Kristin Lisenby interview Sophie Strand. Sophie is a writer based in New York's Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. In this conversation, Sophie discusses her new book, “The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.” She also talks about her relationship to tarot and fungi, and shares her perspective on the evolution of stories - including the mythology of Artemis and Dionysus. Learn more about Sophie and her offerings via her website, social media, or Substack newsletter: https://sophiestrand.com/ https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny/ https://sophiestrand.substack.com/ Created by Tamed Wild. Production by Julio Montero Music by Follow the Wind, Taizo Audio.

This week and next, we talk to returning guest Tadaaki Hozumi about the crossroads between the esoteric history of Japan and its Indigenous peoples and royal family; the mysterious convergence of ancient records from around the world on stories of lost civilizations and extraterrestrial encounters; and how animism and magic seem ripe for retrieval as we barrel down the chute of the Technological Singularity.This is one of those edge-case conversations that I'll look back on in twenty years and either consider totally insane or uncanny in its prophetic insights. I don't confidently recommend every mention in the show notes as an authoritative final source, but I refuse to censor our citations out of my commitment to humility about What's Really Going On. This is a truly off-road dialogue on ideas so far outside of the dominant world-space of early 21st-Century Western thinking as to constitute a reputational risk, but what else is this show for than to showcase maverick thinkers and strange, potentially transformative speculations anchored in careful independent study?Strap in for a crash course on hidden temple texts, occult perspectives on the analog-digital divide, and alternative narratives so bizarre and interesting I consider them worth review on aesthetic grounds alone!  Tada is one of those “too weird to live, too rare to die” wizards and wonders I'm honored to call a friend and colleague, and I'm delighted to have them back on Future Fossils to explore the Real with you.In Tada's own blog post about this episode, they say:“It was an incredible opportunity to get to speak so freely about ancient-future matters on a prolific podcast with a name that basically captures the essence of the discussion. I've always appreciated Michael's kindness and bravery as a host, not just of a podcast but of whole online communities, who is committed to giving his listenership and community the permission to explore the strangest possibilities of human existence.”✨ Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts!This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server so I can release it into the wilds as a fan-operated platform. Want to claim stake?✨ Support The Show:Subscribe to the podcast, essays, music, and news on Substack or PatreonBuy my original paintings or commission new workBuy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Mentioned & Related Media:Future Fossils 149 - Cultural Somatics & Ritual as Justice with Tada Hozumi, Dare Sohei, and Naomi MostGraham Hancock's hotly-debated Netflix series Ancient ApocalypseFuture Fossils 14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)Future Fossils 65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)The Evolution of Surveillance by Michael GarfieldImprovising out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael GarfieldFuture Fossils 179 - Scout-Lieder Wiley on Transrational Oracles & Magical Thinking in The 21st CenturyFuture Fossils 195 - A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesVagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf PottsT.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim BeyWilliam Irwin Thompson – Exodus as Revolution (Prophecy and Revolution: Five Lectures on the Old Testament, #3)Future Fossils 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch InstitutionsRemember Who You Are Remember 'Where' You Are and Where You 'Come' from by David IckeThe Arcturus Probe: Tales and Reports of an Ongoing Investigation by Jose ArguellesEVIDENCE OF A MASSIVE THERMONUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS ON MARS IN THE PAST: The Cydonian Hypothesis and Fermi's Paradox by J. E. BrandenburgTakenouchi DocumentsFuture Fossils 117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the UnconsciousSun-Moon Revelations / Hitsuki Shinji (1, 2)Future Fossils 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin SummitComing Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness by William Irwin ThompsonFuture Fossils 181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameBUCLA social scientist Paul Smaldino on covert signaling, identity, and social learningTen Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron LanierMore info on the Hozumi clanRein Lo (1, 2)Japanese-Jewish Common Ancestry TheoryNigihayahiFuxi Nuwa (compass and square)Episode Music: “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP by Michael Garfield This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

On episode 88 of the Magick & Alchemy Podcast, hosts Kate Belew and Kristin Lisenby interview Chaweon Koo. Chaweon Koo is a writer of the intersection of pop culture, the occult, and futurism. Her Tik Tok @chaweonkoo is one of the most popular occult accounts on the platform, and she also interviews some of the most distinguished occultists and witches in the English-speaking world on her YouTube, “Witches & Wine.” In this conversation, Chaweon discusses digital witchcraft, casting spells on the Ethereum blockchain, and tells us about her book “Spellbound: A New Witch's Guide to Crafting the Future.” She also talks about the body as a portable altar, working with demons, and why she wants to be Hecate. Connect with Chaweon via: Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@chaweonkoo Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chaweonkoo/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WitchesWine/featured Buy her book here! https://bookshop.org/p/books/spell-bound-a-new-witch-s-guide-to-crafting-the-future-chaweon-koo/17381967?ean=9781922417640 Created by Tamed Wild. Production by Julio Montero Music by Follow the Wind, Taizo Audio. Shoutouts: Scarlet Imprint “Moon Signs,” Anabelle Gat “The Flowering Wand,” Sophie Strand

In spirit of the Winter Solstice and holiday season, For The Wild is taking a break this week. We hope you are taking great care of yourself as we near the end of this calendar year. We also want to share some updates about what you can expect from the Podcast and our Patreon in 2023.Since we released our first episode in September of 2014, we've been so blessed to create and curate our weekly episodes as offerings to the times in which we live. We remain in deep gratitude to our guests who have simultaneously comforted and stretched us, as well as to you, our listeners, for accompanying us on this journey. In an effort to continue this work and support our small but mighty team of four, we are enhancing our 2023 offerings...Beginning in Jan all episodes released to the public via our website, digital streaming services, and radio syndicates will be standard episodes under an hour. Episode that exceeds an hour in length will be available on Patreon. We will be organizing a series of live hangouts between guests, friends of the Podcast, and Ayana. These live hangouts will be available to our Patreon supporters. We're excited to announce that our first hangout will be with Sophie Stand in late Jan. We're also creating a series of digital zines that will be released via Patreon.We're adding new Patreon tiers:– Support us at $1/mo to access episodes that exceed one hour + transcripts – Join at a $5/mo for digital zines and live hangouts, + transcripts & extended episodes– Give $25/mo or more to help sustain the podcast and receive the benefits aboveSign up by the end of the year at the $5 or more level to receive the free zine, "Embodying the Revolution with brontë velez Study Guide + Resource Zine" and access to our live hangout w/ Sophie Strand. Patreon.com/forthewild.

In this winding and lucid conversation, guest Sophie Strand invites us to investigate our relationality, to embrace rot and decay, to welcome our demons to the dinner table, and to prepare for uncertain futures with tenderness. Sophie brings to light the wisdom of the compost heap. What myths do we need for modernity, what wisdom is sedimented within our bodies? Sophie and Ayana tap into deep lines of thought and myth, weaving together conversations and concepts from thousands of years of human history. As the interview asks, “What is it to be human on our most basic level?” To be a human is to be in complicated and compromising relationships – relationships that implicate us within the other, that show us that love is a process of altering and of deep work. Purity is not an option. Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions on November 22, 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.Music by Tan Cologne and Mitski. Cover image by Alexandra Levasseur. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.