The Numinous Podcast

Latest Episodes:

TNP221 Waking Up to the Dark with Clark Strand Dec 08, 2023

Show notes

Today, we welcome Clark Strand to the show to talk about his book, Waking up to the Dark: The Black Madonna's Gospel for an Age of Extinction and Collapse. Clark has written numerous books and articles, his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and he is co-author with previous podcast guest, Perdita Finn, of the book, The Way of the Rose.

In this episode, we go back to the beginning, in more ways than one. We explore the Deep Time of our neolithic ancestors, and even just how distant the world of our ancestors of less than 100 years ago seems, as we discuss the ways in which electric light has shaped our lives and our psyches. We discuss how electrification has led us to the climate crisis we’re in today. Waking up to the Dark is an urgent message from an apparition that Clark calls Our Lady of Climate Change about the challenges to come.

Get or gift a copy of Waking Up to the Dark

Learn more about the Way of the Rose Fellowship

Monthly Tricycle Haiku Challenge

Follow Clark on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clarkstrand/

Perdita Finn's episode of The Numinous Podcast

Sophie Strand's episode of The Numinous Podcast

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Learn more about The Spirit of Yuletide

Join The Numinous Network

Review this podcast!

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{NEW!} Leave a comment or question for me – I may respond in a future episode!

TNP220 Empower Your Perimenopause with Dr.Kristin Schnurr Nov 17, 2023

Show notes

I have been a student in the most life-changing class about perimenopause for the better part of this year. Actually, it’s a telehealth group – a group of patients meeting monthly for online sessions – under the care of Dr.Kristin Schnurr, a naturopathic doctor who specializes in complex endocrine concerns including perimenopause and postmenopause.

In this episode, we explore:

• how long perimenopause lasts
• how to know which stage of perimenopause you're in
• why vasomotor symptoms (hot flashes and night sweats) can be more serious than we think
• the connection between ACE scores and perimenopausal symptoms

and so much more!

Referenced in this episode:

Read Dr.Kristin's full bio here.

Follow her on Instagram.

Get on Dr.Kristin's newsletter by visiting her website here: www.drkristinschnurr.com

Dr.Kristin's Upcoming Therapeutic Small Group Programs:

Empowered - Navigating the Perimenopausal Transition - This group would be a good fit for those of you still menstruating or if it has been less than one year from your last menstrual period. Sign up for her newsletter to be the first to know when registration opens.
Emergence - An Exploration of Life After Menopause - For those of you for whom it has been 12 months since your last menstrual period. Sign up for her newsletter to be the first to know when registration opens.

Beginning in January 2024 these groups will meet virtually every month for 12 months. Over the course of the year, you'll cover comprehensive and up to date information in a safe and nurturing space. The emphasis will be on listening to your inner wisdom as you make informed decisions in support of your own unique health. Registration opens November 20th, 2023 via newsletter mail-out. If you miss that deadline, email the office to get on the waitlist: office@drkristinschnurr.com

Self-Paced Course: Empowered - Navigating the Perimenopausal Transition (Coming Soon! Visit her website and sign up for her newsletter for the announcement)

Resources

International Menopause Society

The Menopause Society

Daily Record of Severity of Problems tracking sheet

ACE Studies information and quiz

Perimenopause Playlist of relevant Numinous Podcast episodes

TNP165: Embracing Sovereignty at Midlife with Nikiah Seeds

TNP179: Navigating Creative Drought and Change with Nikiah Seeds

TNP164: The Astrology of Midlife with Danielle Blackwood

TNP182: Reimagining Elderhood with Sharon Blackie

TNP191: Entering Hekate's Cave with Dr.Cyndi Brannen

TNP216: Success and Spiritual Leadership with Colette Baron-Reid

TNP197: Portrait of a Marriage with Carmen and Ruben (Part Four)

TNP173: Creative Witchcraft with Natalie Rousseau (this one is maybe indirectly related - I can't remember specifics but it feels aligned!)

TNP217: Burnout and Recovery at Midlife with Annie Bray

Does this material resonate? Join us live!

Check out The Numinous Network and come to the Peri/Meno Jams and AMAs

Come hang out with us for The Spirit of Yuletide

Like what you heard? Give a little love to the podcast with a nice review!

TNP219 The Metaskills of Healing with Thérèse Cator Oct 26, 2023

Show notes

Wow, this is a juicy one. My dear friend, Thérèse Cator, is back on the show in this special replay of a session we co-led as a warm-up event for my Witches New Year Gathering happening on October 28, 2023.

Thérèse Cator is a trauma-informed embodiment practitioner who specializes in helping people develop a connection to their bodies that promotes wellness and healing. Cator’s work provides an intersectional and decolonial lens that is rare in an overwhelmingly white and ableist somatics field. Thérèse is also the founder of Embodied Black Girl, a global community that stands for the embodied liberation of Black women and femmes and women of color everywhere. Embodied Black Girl is devoted to creating a safe space for to heal from intergenerational trauma, racialized stress and colonial conditioning in service of our individual and collective liberation and healing. Thérèse has been featured in Forbes and MindBodyGreen, and she has delivered workshops to major tech companies while maintaining her focus on Black women's and femmes' health.

We've been friends since 2017 and over the years have been in trainings together as students, as well as co-facilitated and collaborated on projects. We often independently come up with new directions we want to take with our work, only to find the other was planning the exact same thing. And that's what happened here! We are each offering facilitator trainings in 2024 and we're here to give some insight into our shared philosophical approach.

Referenced in this episode

TNP85: Thérèse Cator on Shadow Alchemy and Life as Ceremony

Find out more about Thérèse's background here

Can academic reading be healing?, by Katherine Firth (the Routledge article based off Sedgewick's concept of "reparative reading")

Sedgewick's original essay on "paranoid reading" versus "reparative reading"

TNP161: Collapse in a Nutshell

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Learn more about the Metaskills of Collapse in my Collapse 101 course in The Numinous Network, or join us to experience our manner of approach for group facilitation.

Last call to get your ticket for Witches New Year! Recordings available to stream until Nov 7, 2023.

Like this episode? Give it a review! As you can tell, I read them and they matter to me!

TNP218 Take Down the Patriarchy and Take Back the Magic with Perdita Finn Oct 21, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is Perdita Finn, co-founder, with her husband Clark Strand, of the non-denominational international fellowship, The Way of the Rose, which inspired their book, The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. Her newest book is called Take Back the Magic:Conversations with the Unseen World. It's part spiritual memoir, part ancestral veneration how-to, part takedown of the patriarchy through correspondence with her deceased father who was a doctor.

I absolutely loved this conversation and could listen to Perdita for hours. I highly recommend you seek out her book, Take Back the Magic, and spend some time communing with your Beloved Dead.

Follow Perdita on Instagram

Join Perdita's Substack

Referenced in this episode

TNP73 Charlene Spretnak on Reclaiming PrePatriarchal Goddesses

Like this episode? I'd love your review! 🙏🏻💖

Check out Witches New Year 2023

Learn more about The Numinous Network

Check out my book, The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes & Rituals for the Wheel of the Year

Author photo by Juliet Lofrado.

TNP217 Burnout and Recovery at Midlife with Annie Bray Oct 19, 2023

Show notes

I saw a meme that said, "If I am googling symptoms and the treatment says "mindfulness", I know there's no treatment for my condition". I laughed but...for real, can't we do any better than this??

Let's have a real conversation about the pervasiveness of burnout and the gaslighting of the wellness industrial complex. If you're a regular listener, you know we have a clear line of sight on patriarchy and capitalism and we have long been well aware that they're the underlying cause, as with white supremacy, ableism, all of it. Clearly self-help and meditation isn't enough.

And yet, there is something to it, isn't there? It would be awfully ignorant of me to not recognize that a millenias-old practice probably has some merit. The benefits of meditation on our overall wellbeing and to support restoration of the nervous system are clear, (experientially if not always empirically).

Here to muddle through this with me today is my friend, Annie Bray, a longtime meditation teacher and bodywork practitioner. She's also a somatic coach and one of our Guides in The Numinous Network leading monthly Polyvagal Theory-informed meditation sessions. Annie also studied with Joanna Macy, root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, and we invoke her as a muse in this conversation, reflecting on her spiritual leadership as a woman in later life. It's nice to reflect on those who've inspired us as we navigate our entrepreneurship in the wellness space.

Annie has 20 years' experience as a manual therapist, plus deep study in trauma recovery, applied polyvagal theory, meditation, yoga and trauma-informed coaching. In her work, she aims to support folks to feel reliably well-met, relatively safe and free to engage with life meaningfully.

Check out Annie's website here

Learn more about Annie's 1:1 Somatic Coaching

REORIENT: a 12-week meditation program for midlife caregivers, based deeply in both WTR and in attachment and polyvagal theory, set to run again in January, with increased focus on midlife caregivers dealing with burnout.

Follow her on Instagram

Referenced in this episode

Joanna Macy

Work That Reconnects

Recent studies on burnout

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

Donald Winnicott's Good Enough Mother studies

Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at a Time, by Laura Khadouri

Check out The Numinous Network to try Annie's class and more!

Review The Spirited Kitchen on Amazon

Like this episode? I'd love your review!

(Thanks in advance for taking the time 💖)

TNP216 Colette Baron-Reid on Success + Spiritual Leadership Oct 13, 2023

Show notes

🚨Alert! 🚨 Alert! 🚨This is a very special episode where my life comes full circle! I am unspeakably thrilled to welcome Colette Baron-Reid to the show.

Colette Baron-Reid is a bestselling author of 15 best-selling Oracle card decks, with over a million sold worldwide and 7 books published in 27 languages. In fact, her iconic deck, The Enchanted Map, is the #1 oracle deck I've recommended for the past decade for people to develop their intuition and card reading skills.

This interview is candid, it's intimate, and it's a very frank reflection on the lessons learned over a 30+ year career in spiritual leadership. We talk workaholism, we talk intergenerational trauma, we talk menopause... We talk about diversity, equity and inclusion in the spiritual self-help genre, and humility in the face of public scrutiny. We talk about diving deeper into shadow work and real, authentic repair. Join us for a fascinating portrait of a wise woman just getting started at 65...

Colette is an internationally acclaimed Oracle expert, spiritual intuitive, personal transformation thought leader, business strategist, artist, and educator. She's the founder of The Oracle School Experience®, OraclePalooza®, and host of INSIDE THE WOONIVERSE, a weekly podcast series. She's a former EMI recording artist has been living clean and sober for the last 37 years. Colette provided numerous in-depth resources in this episode:

References

Visit Colette's website

Oracle School

Colette's membership site

Inside the Woo-niverse podcast

Know Justice, Know Peace by Dr. Deborah Egerton, Enneagram + Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility specialist

Mindful of Race and Healing Rage by Ruth King

Like this episode? Review the podcast! 🙏🏻

TNP215 Before Capitalism (from a European Perspective) with Sophie Macklin Oct 09, 2023

Show notes

This is a conversation about capitalism, and therefore about whiteness and supremacy culture. There is a bit of a record scratch moment when I say something that sounds pretty obliviously white, then correct myself. I like to leave the mistakes in because it's good reconditioning from perfectionism/whiteness. Enjoy!

Sophie Macklin is an anarchist mystic who lived in California for fifteen years but recently returned home to England. She practises brythonic polytheism, antifascism, and devotion to an animate world, and specializes in topics related to radical history, anti-capitalism, antifascism, reclaiming the commons, anti-ableism, and exploring different ways of knowing. She’s an educator whose work has deeply impacted my own.

I've invited Sophie back to the show to talk about capitalism and its accompanying attitudes around productivity, disability, and land use. In this episode, we’re talking about a period of history in England when we saw the end of access to common lands to the system of private property and land ownership which we now think of as normal. If you want to jam on Caliban and the Witch and the work of Silvia Federici, this one's for you!

References

Sophie is a presenter at my annual Witches New Year event – hope you'll join us!

Silvia Federici

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, by Silvia Federici

Horse Power and Magic, George Ewart Evans

Follow Sophie on Instagram @sophiemacklin

Join us at Witches New Year 2023

Review the podcast!

TNP214 Pop Culture, Toxic Positivity, and Stuff We Hate with Emily Rose Oct 06, 2023

Show notes

Emily Rose is a content creator from Montreal who hosts a pop culture and reality TV recap podcast called It's Become a Whole Thing. She's also an herbalist and an astrologer. After the death of her mother in the start of the pandemic, Emily needed an outlet to disconnect from the heaviness of life and she found it in pop culture and a whole new world on TikTok where creativity and smarts meet niche communities and a swell of support on social media.

Emily can usually be found glued to her couch, on a quest for a new brunch spot, or on a troll stroll (the antithesis to the hot girl walk: no minimum distances, just taking your bad attitude and bad outfit to get some air and Vitamin D).

References

The Stuff I Hate Journal: Trends I Hate. Foods I Loathe. People Who Annoy Me. And Everything Else That's the Absolute Worst, by Emily Rose

It's Become A Whole Thing Podcast

Emily's TikTok: @itsbecomeawholething

Meredith Lynch, writer and pop culture deep dives

Molly McPherson, public relations and crisis communications

The Zen Blonde, pop culture deep dives

Friday Things, Stacy Lee Kong

Colleen Emery, Emery Herbals

Letterkenny, Canada's second best ever situational comedy IMHO

Bridget Casey, financial coach

KikiMay, feminist analysis, smashing the patriarchy one ding dong at a time

Review this podcast now!

TNP213 Parenting Beyond Power with Jen Lumanlan Sep 29, 2023

Show notes

My guest today is Jen Lumanlan host of the popular podcast, Your Parenting Mojo, and author of the book Parenting Beyond Power: How to Use Connection and Collaboration to Transform Your Family - and the World.

After attending Berkeley and Yale and following a traditional career path in sustainability consulting, Jen found that parenting was her toughest challenge yet. She went back to school for a master’s degree in psychology focused on child development and another in education, and trained as a Co-Active coach to share what she learned with other parents.

In the book, she shares about her own struggles as a child and a content warning here for bereavement and discussion of disordered eating.

For my listeners who are people of the global majority, the book is written from the perspective of a white parent grappling with unlearning the use of dominance and other more subtle aspects of white supremacy culture. In this conversation, it does take a minute to get around to stating explicitly that white parents do not have the same parents as parents who are Black, or Indigenous or Asian or other oppressed identities. I want to assure you we do get around to that and also that it is front and centre throughout the book, and it’s handled with nuance. It’s an excellent book for folks who are actively seeking or maybe just starting to be curious about how to dismantle systems of oppression and unhook from supremacy culture and the use of dominance and coercion at the family and relational level.

Here's how you can get Jen's book through a gift economy approach: https://yourparentingmojo.com/book/

References

Decolonizing Non-Violent Communication, Meenadchi

Needy: How to Advocate for your Needs and Claim your Sovereignty, Mara Glatzel

My Collapse 101 course is included with membership in The Numinous Network

Stacy Lee Kong of Friday Things explains the coercive control at work in the Jonah Hill/Sarah Brady text exchange

My social media post/explainer on coercive control

Why Giving Choices Doesn't Work And What To Do Instead, Your Parenting Mojo Podcast

Dismantling White Supremacy Culture in our Families, Amanda Gross

White Supremacy Culture, Tema Okun

Zawn Villines on Facebook and their substack, Liberating Motherhood: For mothers who are pissed off about sexism, household chore inequality, and endless misogynistic bullshit, and for the allies who want a better world for all of us

How to Get Away with Parenting with Malaika Dowler

Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, Tomlin Wilding

No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism, Chris Niebauer

Like this episode? Review the podcast!

TNP212 Shauna Janz on Ancestral Veneration in Child-Free and Queer Lineages Sep 22, 2023

Show notes

Shauna Janz is a facilitator at the crossroads of grief, trauma, ritual and ancestral healing. She is a queer cis-woman of northern European ancestry who has been facilitating trauma-informed workshops since 2008 to a wide range of audiences including within education, non-profit, hospice, business, government, and Indigenous settings, locally and internationally.

The intersection of being childfree and ancestral veneration is fascinating to me because when we talk about lineage there’s an implication of continuance. I personally did have a biological child, but I doubt my child will have a child. So it’s interesting to cast my net a little wider when I ponder the question, Who am I becoming an ancestor for? And when I think about my spiritual practice of ancestral veneration, it’s interesting to think about whether I’m giving enough attention to ancestors I’m not directly descended from - the aunties, the uncles, the chosen family that my wayback people were connected to, the ones who supported my direct ancestors so I could be here now.

Shauna is exactly who you want as a conversation partner to ponder these questions!

Notes

ShaunaJanz.com

@sacredgriefshaunajanz

• Belonging to the World - Relationship and Ritual for the Heart of Grief starts Oct 4, 2023
• Elder Wisdom - Connecting with our Ancestral Ecosystems to Embody Love and Liberation starts Oct 9, 2023 with Tamira Cousett • Trauma-Informed Grief Support - A Professional Development Workshop on Nov 9-10, 2023

Learning Through Loss, based in Victoria, BC

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Review The Spirited Kitchen on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Goodreads or Indigo