Woman Who Rubs the Mountain

Welcome to the world of Microanimism with microbiologist, independent scholar, and ritualist, Siv Watkins, PhD. Siv introduces us to the enigmatic yet ordinary realm of microorganisms, with whom humans have been entangled with since our very beginnings. She says that “the microbial world dares us to identify our human selves within the rest of the living and dying world.” Listening to Siv, I could...

The migrating birds know. The slowing, dying bumble bees know. The gnarled, wild pear tree knows, its fruit thumping to the earth. Something has been released, a heaviness is settling into our limbs, the tree’s limbs, the earth’s limbs. The cosmic axis has shifted, moving us into what is potentially one of the most challenging transitions of the seasonal wheel.  In this episode we explore all...

I’d call it Beth Stephens superpower: creating spaces that help women cherish the messy, mucky, imperfect wholeness of themselves. As an Ecopyschologist, Beth guides women through journeys of deep self-inquiry, working with nature while remembering themselves as a part of nature. Our conversation beautifully weaves through questions such as, why are we humans the only species who seem to have forg...

It may be the longest journey we ever take- those 18 inches between our heads and our hearts. Here in the Fire elemental season, we can find new dimensions of healing through heart connection and widening our sense of relational intimacy with everything around us. But summer themes of full unfurling are mixed with emotionally-intelligent discernment so that our hearts are able to use their deepest...

Perhaps our human worry is the last thing the earth needs at these trickster crossroads. This is the core inquiry of Chara Armon, PhD., founder of The School for Humans and Earth: how can we actively move from eco-anxiety to eco-inspiration? Because how we view life on this planet and our place within it as human beings, directly determines how we choose to contribute or not. With a dash of neuros...

In celebration of the summer solstice, End of Life Doula, Ancestral Lineage Repair Practitioner, and Ritualist, Jen Hudziec is back on the podcast to talk about the unabashed sensuality of summer, the joy of loving and being loved back by the living world, and using pleasure as an essential earth-honoring skill. Jen also shares some of her insights and experiences as a Fire Walk instructor, workin...

In the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, Nature communication consultant, teacher, and facilitator, Dr. Saskia von Diest, shares her story of shifting from her PhD in plant pathology to postdoctoral research investigations of intuitive farming. With the guidance of the living world around her, she created a term to describe a deeper way of knowing - Ecofluency. Perhaps it is the m...

It was a joy to lean in with the host of the Becoming Nature podcast, Carina Lyall. Our conversation easily flowed between squirrel games (spoiler alert, they want all the walnuts), how certain stories come straight from the Earth, and the relief of physically/mentally de-centering ourselves when we are outside. My favorite part of our conversation was when Carina described storytelling as the “wi...

Paths lead us forward in acts of collective mark-making, while also leading us backwards into memory, as well as inwards, deeper into ourselves. In this one-year anniversary episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, I reflect on this sense of pressing into the place where we live, all the while exposing overlapping intimacies between personal story and land story. This episode brings a d...

It’s been an entire turn of the seasonal wheel since the podcast began and I am excited to spiral back to the Embodied Elements Series with you. By embodied elements I am wondering, how is the season and its corresponding change in landscape arising within your inner landscape? What energies are rousing in the land where you live and how are they emerging through your...

From a young age, author and herbalist Vanessa Chakour was struck by the archetype of Artemis as the original land protector and environmental activist. In her book, Awakening Artemis , Vanessa skillfully tells her personal story through a healing mandala of herbalism, plant lore, and eco-warriorship. In this latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, Vanessa further explains her draw to A...

Whether it’s a seashell collection that sits on your toilet, silky feathers tucked into your car’s dashboard, or rocks lining your kitchen windowsill, it is our human tendency to collect and extract everything around us. In this latest episode of Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, author and plant spirit medicine teacher, Rachel Corby, and I wonder about the ways and reasons we pile up nature all around...

Some of us might feel pretty darn intimate with the place where we live, but Fearn Lickfield, Director of the Green Mountain Druid School, is literally, ceremoniously, married to the land she calls home. In the latest episode of Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, Fearn shares with us the precious story of how she courted and married Dreamland (+Ivan!), what it means to be a practicing, modern Druid, and...

Sink your taproot deep into the Earth and let's celebrate all that our plant kin have to share with us. Plant Spirit Wisdom teacher, Sara Artemisia, helps us relax into our birthright of kinship with the plants around us. In this episode, Sara and I explore entraining our nervous systems to giant tree meditators, radiating ourselves from the inside out like flowers, and honoring the many plantcest...

Gather by the warmth of the wood stove for this special winter solstice episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, where we explore radical introspection, loosening of uncertainty, and hibernating in the caves of soul questions with Death Doula, Ancestral Lineage Repair Practitioner, and Ritualist, Jen Hudziec. Jen belongs to an ancient group of healers who hold space for other humans in...

Eco-Somatic Educator, Rivka Honeybee Worth, intertwines her love of dance and nature in a body of work she aptly refers to as Eco-Soma. The embodied practices of Eco-Soma are devoted to rebuilding healthy, reciprocal relationships with the living world. In this rich conversation, we explore experiences of fresh interplay between our bodies and the body of the earth, we feel into the presence pract...

It was with utter delight that I recently shared a conversation with fellow intranaut and Ayurvedic medicine practitioner, Alana Layne Greenberg. I knew she would be game for turning off the lights so to speak, fumbling around with heightened senses, palpating the fissures, pressing up against some initiatory questions like: What does it mean to re-embody indigeneity? What’s up with our obsession...

In this episode, two time TEDx speaker and eco-spiritualist, Chris Omni, MPH, shines her bright light on us in a celebration of Black joy in green spaces. This is her poetic theorization of Black joy: “Black Joy is a Statement , Black Joy is a Stride , Black Joy is Permission , Black Joy is Pride , Black Joy is a form of Resistance , Black Joy is a form of Rest, Black Joy is ANYTHING you need it t...

A skilled weaver of the sacred through both the ancient and the modern, acupuncturist Lindsay Fauntleroy possesses the rare ability to make the principles of subtle energetic healing accessible within our daily lives. She does this with much wisdom and playfulness in her recently released book, “In Our Element: Using the Five Elements as Soul Medicine to Unleash Your Personal Power.” My favorite m...

Through land alchemy and working with flower essences, Camilla Blossom forms bridges of healing and reconciliation between humans and the spirited places where they live. Being in Camilla’s presence, you can feel a deep quiet, echoes from the deep void from which all life emerges.  Here are the highlights from our conversation: (3:00) Our understanding about our work for Gaia may continuously...

Generation after generation, we have been taught to stuff down and ignore the depth of suffering within our colonialist history. For writer and community organizer, Hilary Giovale, a series of unexpected ancestral interventions woke her from this fog of amnesia and denial, shifting her life’s work towards collective grieving, truth-telling, apology, and forgiveness. Hilary begins our conversation...

In this episode, word-diviner Jen Violi talks about getting beyond the intellectual exercise of writing, instead sourcing our creativity from the rich dirt of our bodies. Perhaps our bodies know something about letting go of the certainty or pressure of written language. Some stories are so alive that they just don’t want to be held down by pen and paper (or computer). Here are some the the highli...

Goddess renegade. Midwife mastermind. Holy woman edge walker. But also Lover of All Beings. These were some of the descriptions that came to mind after my conversation with Lorie Dechar. What a gift it was for me to be in soul exchange with Lorie. We talked about everything from the exact timing of the bees and sea lavender on the coast where she lives all the way to honoring the domains of the da...

Learning from traditional animist, ritualist, and ancestral guide, Erica Nunnally, is an opportunity to feel deeply grounded and immersed in practical, earthy wisdom. You can almost hear the trees singing, you can almost smell the dirt rich under your feet as she speaks. In this conversation we explore: (7:00) “Rootlessness” and Erica’s experience of having lived in many places around the world at...

Speaking with us from Apsaalooke (Crow) territory, in what is currently known as Livingston, MT, astrologer and Ayurvedic practitioner, Kristine Backes, gifts us with her knowledge and living experience of what it means to align with the natural rhythms all around us.    Here are the highlights: (5:59) Everything is medicine. (10:24) Kristine’s dream of a star-shaped cell phone with a br...