Witch Sweat

"Facilitation is triage now" -NB What does it mean to lead group spaces in a world that feels increasingly raw, volatile, and grief-saturated? Melissa and Narinder sit down as artists, death workers and teachers to talk about how the role of the facilitator is changing, and why many space-holders are feeling exhausted and under impossible pressure. We talk: the collapse of the Spiritual Teacher ar...

When you find yourself more and more interested in non-ordinary states of consciousness and cultivating a deep relationship to Divine Intelligence, but have spent a dizzying amount of time apologizing, downplaying, or sanitizing your visions, gifts and ‘out-there’ theories on reality, my friend, you may be hauling around the Mystic’s Grief. Let’s sort through some of that, shall we?   Grief Thread...

Oh lordy this is a big one for my artists and creative folk.  I asked my audience on IG to name some of the grievances they carry having chosen the artist's life, or from not feeling allowed to chose the artist's life. Ugh, devastating. You're responses were gutting, and very universal. So here's my hot take on each of them. Spoiler, it's a lot of tough love. So go make your art. Some topics cover...

A rebroadcast of a workshop I led recently on the power of moving grief and worry and anxiety out of the body through the exit route of the hands. Grief does not love to be analyzed or hyper fixated on through the channel of the mind. It's a visceral project, it requires our feeling and sensing self. How better to get about it than through moving our hands creatively with others.  The meditation i...

Is it Anxiety or is it Life Grief? Solo episode dive into the difference between life grief and death grief. Thank GOD we are developing some maturity about the difference. I give much thanks that the cultural conversation is shifting and we are gaining some literacy around how much ~mental health stuff~ can be attributed to unprocessed and unmanaged life grief. Grief is the groundwater flowing un...

Buckle up, baby, we’re jumping into the fascinating world of psychic medium Caroline Brown. Cherished by many for her incredible mediumship abilities, Caroline shares her journey from being an accountant to becoming a conduit to the Spirit world and helping people connect to their Beloved Dead. We discuss how to talk to your Spirit team when you’re scared out of your gourd, and how to develop an o...

Ok my creative little gremlins, today we’re talking about BEING SEEN. Ahhh the terror! the allure! the yearn! the repulsion! We’re getting up underneath the complex layering of what it means to be successful by collective standards, and its requisite pressure to achieve widespread recognition, alongside genuine desires to be seen and acknowledged by many for your unique expression in the world. We...

Yikes ya’ll, sorry to say it but being out of control is just such a vital part of being more creative. It’s laying yourself at the feet of the MUSE, jugular exposed, giving up your Best Ideas to instead be ravaged by the strange unknowable force that is your true Creative Work. Buckle up and get cozy, we are getting freaking COMFORTABLE WITH UNCERTAINTY, and we’re doing it through the lens of cre...

A cross-posted conversation from Nico Wolf’s podcast Living Liminal , where Nico and Melissa chat about the intersection between ritual textile play, creative practice, and our Spirit work. They speak to the magic of hands, lost contexts of craft, and the necessity of the revival of recognizing the ways the Unseen world can inform the the gift of creative vision. They bring in threads from their u...

This week we’ve got LA-based dance artist/body wizard Stephanie Zaletel in the broadcast portal with us. GIVE THANKS! Church is served, honey! This episode is very much about the vital research of coming back home to yourself, your body and your essential creative voice, and the cost of not answering the call.  You KNOW we got up to some 12 step talk and wooooo baby the ancestral addiction to sham...

This week we are buh-lessed to have Nico Wolf up in our radio sphere. She is a wizard of the healing arts, oracular arts, group ceremony, Earth wisdom ways, and Dreamwork. She is also herself a dreamboat, like an actual captain-facilitator of the boat that takes you to Dream World, and just a totally fascinating human to talk Spirit shop with. We discuss working with dreams in a devotional way, ex...

This week we’re talking breast lumps, the doom forecasting that comes with health scares and awaiting *results*, talking to angels, and our very good but mysterious pal SURRENDER. And, like, how to fall dizzyingly in love with the lumpy mess of reality precisely as it is right now.  Spoiler alert - I gotta clean bill of health, this is about the upgrade in consciousness we get when we let the stun...

An episode for the artists, creatives and solo entrepreneurs out there who get bogged down by the idea of having to *do it all* all by your lonesome.  You've got other unseen forces up in your corner, who have your back, who are gassing you up and have secret lil intel to support your vision and work. Call them your guides, the angels, God, call them the indwelling consciousness of your projects a...

Oh lookie here, we are BACK baby. The AI bot that helped me audio engineer this episode thought it would be a good idea to title it "Savoring the Petite Droplets of Life Experiences" and they would be not wrong.   Listen to me try to make the parallel between the experience of fomo and an inflammatory yet very magical take on DEATH. Whoops another accidental episode on death stuff.  Sorry I'm cong...

Jimmy and Melissa air some things OUT. We’re talking about the cost of an unexpressed life. We’re talking about the cost of wrangling our true voices to be more palatable to institutions - for clout, visibility, legibility, resource access - and how the curated version of ourselves is like an addiction that must be recovered from, boy howdy! We’re looking at the micro and macro impact of power dif...

In this episode, we look at what’s happening in G@za, specifically through the lens of social media, and the forces that want to keep us skewing towards nervous system collapse and disassociation. Spoiler alert: it’s whiteness! It’s the ‘soothing’ lull of consumerism and capitalism! It’s the unconscious practice of abdicating personal power! It's compulsive information guzzling as a proxy for part...

An episode for people who wanna get into the loving mystery and magic of death, dying and grief work. In this solo show, Melissa shares a story from a recent encounter with a dying person, and some powerful / hard-won lil gemstones of truth that have emerged since. Don’t be scared! Let’s normalize these convos and make it feel less bewildering and weird.  Ilysm thank you for being here ⚡️   **Joi...

We are in search of more imaginative expressions of masculinity - in ourselves and in the world, who tf is with us?? Let’s get into the energy of the nourishing and life-affirming badassery that is the sacred and dare-we-say intergalactic masculine principle. We talk Sedona vortexes, performative masculinity as a survival strategy, entity work, erotic power, desire, exhaustion, and MORE! This epis...

This week Mel shares an excerpt from a recent mini-workshop on the cost of prioritizing likeability in the eyes of others. We unravel the tangled knots of codependency, living as if to placate others, and orienting to life as if you’re always on the edge of being in trouble or needing to explain yourself. She shares a few somatic tools for loosening the grip of some of these learned habits and tra...

This week we are joined by the dazzling Dajé Alōh aka The Story Doula, and DANG do we get blessed by her presence. She takes us all the way to church and to the underworld beneath the church, and has us swinging from the rafters by the end of it. We talk recovery from fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and mining the jewels from the faith for a more creative, more gritty OF THE EARTH AND DIRT ki...

Mel takes us on a journey through the imagination and the realm of the ancestors, sharing a visualization tool for connecting to the big, fun resource that is your kindreds on the other side of the veil. Beginners and skeptics welcome! This is not about talking to dead people in a mediumship kind of way, but more like tippy-tapping on the back screen door of the ~beyond~ and recognizing that we re...

This week we are graced by fitness-pole star-movement legend Marlo Fisken, who is one of the most delightful, goofy, generous humans I know. We talk about the ways she empowers people to have more creative and unconventional relationships to their body and movement, and her tools for bringing as much play as possible into her world as an aid for doing hard things and disrupting the status quo. Thi...

What a death midwife-performance artist has to say about the habit of palatability. It miiiiight be killing you. The cultural program of *making other people more comfortable over authenticity* gets parsed out as Melissa and Narinder yuck it up and talk about the role of the sacred clown in society, the shadow side of performing your very likable personality, and what it takes to get thyself free...

This is the beginning of something. Let's gooooooo   Music by Ben Coleman - find more of his music at Ben Coleman Sounds on bandcamp Vocals by Gavin Bernard - he does not want to be found anywhere, enjoy this rare encounter with his baritone dulcetness