Wild Sacred Journey Podcast

If we held up a laugh-meter (like the one from Monsters, Inc) what would our laugh levels be? and Why do we just feel drawn to certain places? and Do our ancestors matter? and Is it possible to befriend crows while being a nomad?

These are the types of questions (serious and silly) you’ll hear around today’s fire where I’m joined by the ever-optimistic, comedy-loving Kate Graham -  a shamanic oracle and creator of the Empath Energe...

Can we be human and not believe in sacredness? What does ‘sacred’ even mean? 

The energy of these times in this moment of full moon, Spring equinox, and lunar eclipse feels deeply challenging, beautiful, and initiatory. And I had a message come through as I meditated one night about what sacredness actually is:

“Sacredness is not what we do, or even what we feel - it’s a quality of presence and listening which allows for some magic...

The Spring Equinox (referred to in several European countries as some version of ‘Ostara’) is midway between Winter Solstice and Summer Solstice and a day of equal dark and light - the day and night are the same length. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, this is a time of blossoming, of unfurling, of tending the soil and placing new seeds. (The Southern Hemisphere celebrates the Fall Equinox and the equal light and dark on...

It’s been a while since I’ve had a guest around the fire for a host of reasons but today, for this new moon, I’m joined by Tad Hargrave of Marketing for Hippies (among other culture-making endeavors).

I got to meet Tad back in October in Edinburgh where we were both in town for the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and enjoyed our post-story session conversations around mutual interests of culture, myths, ancestral wisd...

I’m not going to pretend I think this is one of my best episodes. In fact, it feels like it’s one of my most rambling and least ‘helpful’. But it’s my birthday today and sometimes we get to just be human, not a’ helpful’ ‘resource’.

Sometimes good enough is just that.

So join me around the fire for a short and sweet episode and to hear my raw, unpolished wonderings about ritual; ceremony; thresholds; grieving and celebra...

What do you think of when you think of violence and peace? Antidote? Opposite sides of a coin? 

As you’re probably aware, the through-thread of my wonderings and conversations in this podcast is a question: in the face of the dehumanizing forces of the world, how do we devote ourselves to more humanity? 

And in these times, questions around peace, violence, and justice feel deeply relevant and urgent to questions of humanity. 

So o...

Imbolc is a Cross Quarter celebration - midway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox; widely celebrated on February 1st each year, although in 2024 the astrologically-derived date is Feb 4 or 5. But at its heart, it tells us we are at the beginning of the beginning of Spring and invites us to take note of the subtle shifts which herald a larger transition, the tension of opposites and contradictions which exist uncomfortably s...

Integration often takes longer than we think it will - the space between what’s here and what we now know to be possible is a place of healthy tension, heartbreak, creativity, imagination… hopefully leading to more wholeness and vibrant human-spirit expression.

As my post-pilgrimage integration journey continues, I share with you some John O’Donohue-inspired musings around Absence as creative force and soul-home. 

You’ll hear a bre...

Today around the fire I let you in a little more to some of my journey from deep disconnect and depression back to a lighter and more full-bodied experience of my life, prompted by the dark spiral I’ve found myself in over the past few weeks.

I talk about the tension we often feel in those places between needing others and needing to go inward. And I share about big emotions and why those of us who feel them often struggle to know ...

Welcome back around the fire where today I’m modeling showing up as I am, fresh from being sick and the rawness of landing back in the United States.

It’s a pretty common phenomenon to get sick after a really expansive time. And while there are plenty of physical, immune system reasons for this, there is also an energetic and spiritual component, going often unrecognized.

This component, when tended to, can help us integrate and me...

In my head and, at times out loud, I’ve been calling this trip I’ve been on in Ireland and Scotland an ancestral pilgrimage. While it has and is turning out to be so much more, the instigating spark first grew out of a journey of wanting to know who my people were, where were they from, and what they believed… before they became a colonizing presence in the United States, before they became ‘white’, before many of the broken system...

In the past when I’ve traveled, I’d have had a steady commentary running through my mind, as if I was evaluating myself and what I was experiencing from the outside, while planning what silly things I was going to write about it to friends back home. 

This trip is proving to be different. Which means, I find myself with less to say and more immersion into the stream of experiences.

But I still want to invite you along. So here is p...

When Erik and I recorded this episode, we intended it to be a bonus episode… and yet I’ve kept putting off listening to it. Honestly, I think I expected to find it super cringe (and it is a little, though not as much as I feared). But now here we are, approximately 1.5 months after recording it. Travel hasn’t allowed me to record many new episodes with guests and the moon moves through its phases… and I can’t keep hiding anymore.

<...

Today’s session around the fire was recorded about 10 days into my time in Scotland and watching it back for these notes, I’m aware of how ‘fizzy’ and ‘unsettled’ my system feels; how old meaning-making patterns were being stirred and and challenged and I was in the place of being unmade. Perhaps you’ll see something different in me, too. Or perhaps that’s how it always was and it looks and feels different now, later, after more sh...

We all need a certain level of containment - some boundaries and understandings to help guide us. However, things get sticky when we confuse certainty with containment. And when we (often unconsciously) try to avoid our fear of uncertainty.

Today, I’m joined at the fire by Erik Eging - a PR and Communications specialist, photographer, and no stranger to medicine spaces; as well as a human now supporting this podcast. 

He shares his...

What happens if you take two humans, both with some sort of calling to catalyze change, sit them down together during the Lion’s Gate Portal while spiders spin webs overhead, and then release that recording into the world on a Full Moon in Pisces??? 

A helluva magical, fiery, and loving conversation.

Pull up your chair, your log, your rock; get your tea, your hot cocoa, your popcorn - whatever you need to get comfortable because jo...

Freedom. Birth. God.

These are all words that have become quite loaded and contentious topics of conversation… and yet, in this episode, we dive in.

Joining me around the fire is Stella Udeozor - a first-generation Nigerian-American, mother of two, digital content Creator, storyteller, photographer, and birthkeeper backed out of Cincinnati, Ohio; who, through her business, Freedom Birth Story, aims to capture the true, and free, es...

I love starting each episode by asking the guest about the forces that shaped them because it drops us right into their unique tapestry of places, ancestors, languages, religions, beliefs, wounds, and victories - in short, the truest stuff of our individual and shared humanity. 

In a world where ‘trauma’ has become a buzzword and the pendulum seems to have swung from sweeping things under the rug to memeing about our tenderest hurt...

One aspect of being human is toggling back and forth between the stories and experiences of our personality self or our smaller, 3D, human self… and our Soul self, or the parts of us who can zoom way out and be open to (even if we can’t grasp completely) a vaster understanding of the larger Cosmos and web of life.

This conversation with Kari Hohne - a dream analyst, artist, and expert on the eastern and western archetypes that insp...