Belonging: Conversations about rites of passage, meaningful community, and seasonal living

Carmen Spagnola is a wilderness guide, podcast host, Le Cordon Bleu-trained Chef, rose and vegetable gardener, collapse-aware coach, and witch of no particular affiliation. In this episode, we discuss the ongoing saga of her 300+ lb. TikTok-famous pumpkin and explore the term “collapse” as it relates to being collapse aware as an individual and as a collective. We wind through her journey from bei...

In today’s episode, I invite us fireside to connect with our ancestors — the humans, plants, animals, and stardust we come from. Tune to hear me reflect on how wild and perfect it is that we’re all here. And how profoundly we’re connected by our shared planet. I also explore our chosen and affinity ancestors. And I share my journey of connecting with my lineage and a few specific ways that you can...

Erin Claire Jones uses Human Design to help thousands of individuals and companies step into their work and their lives as their truest selves and to their highest potential. In this episode, we have conversation about how Human Design can give us permission to be ourselves and help us live with greater ease and authenticity every day. We discuss Human Design basics including types (generator, man...

Clare Foale is a Mum, a creator, a space holder, a brink walker and an ocean lover, living on Garigal Country in Australia. Together, Clare and I have an open and vulnerable conversation about our experiences with delayed postpartum depression. We share the moments beloved practitioners finally helped us see we weren’t okay. The strength it took to acknowledge our pain when so many people dismisse...

So much has changed since I last had my husband Tim on the podcast. We became parents. We decided to leave California. We bought a house in upstate New York. It feels like almost everything is different since that last episode three years ago. So this week I’ve invited Tim to come back to the show for an open conversation about our family and how we navigate change. Together we discuss why having...

Marysia Miernowska is a teacher, author, Earth activist, green witch, folk herbalist and healer rooted in the Wise Woman Tradition of Healing. She has spent her life traveling, learning and sharing different regenerative ways of tending to the Earth, healing land, and healing people. She is the Director of the School of the Sacred Wild and author of The Witch’s Herbal Apothecary. Together, we have...

While I often talk about mothering on the podcast, it’s been a few seasons since I shared a personal reflection on being a mother. So this episode of Belonging is a solo episode where I open up about my journey with delayed postpartum depression. In this episode, I talk about struggling with anxiety and rage, realizing that I was taking out my anger on my partner, being diagnosed with PPD, trying...

Anoushka Florence is a teacher, an author, a circle-tender, and a mother. She is the Keeper of the Mama’s Village, the Mama of The Goddess Space, and the author of The Women’s Circle. Her work is based on ancient spiritual feminine practices that are grounded in the belief that the power to heal comes from within. Together, we begin with the question what is circle? and spiral out to the importanc...

Tracy Benjamin is a food photographer, stylist & blogger based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this episode, we have a tender conversation about grief, and all the ways she’s experienced it since her mom’s sudden death in 2017. Together we explore how loss can encompass our full range of emotions and impact every area of our life. Tracy shares what it feels like to be the only woman left in...

Nicole Antoinette is a writer, podcast host, and community-builder who is super into long-distance hiking. In this conversation, she tells us the story of how long solo hikes have become her spiritual & devotional practice. Together we explore the power of facing fear and discomfort, the lessons gained from embracing loneliness, and the self-trust that comes when there’s no one else to ask for...

Asha Frost is an Anishinaabe (Ojibway) Medicine Woman (member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation), Healer, and Spiritual Mentor. Last time she was on the podcast we discussed her viral article “Dear White Woman who wants to be like me,” and today she returns to share her new book You Are the Medicine with us. Together we explore the medicine of publishing a book. We discuss why we felt called...

Dacy Gillespie is a personal stylist who intuitively guides us to discover the clothes we feel best in — uncovering and releasing what society says we “should” wear in the process. Together we explore the question “what do you want to wear?” and we talk about how pausing before purchasing can help us make more ethical decisions and find clothes we love. Dacy also shares why “flattering” is a fatph...

Lisa Olivera is a writer, therapist, and creative who shares work centered around radical acceptance, cultivating compassion, and integrating our stories and full humanity. She is also a new mother, just five months postpartum at the time we recorded this episode. Together we talk about the pressures and expectations of motherhood, the deep joy and grief of becoming a parent, and how having two ti...

Belonging is back! After my winter hibernation, I find myself craving a little vernal worship. So this episode is all about ancestral rituals and practices for spring. First, I share lessons I learned while wintering, including my stepping away from social media, making my life small, and my seasonal self-care wheel. Then we dive into the pleasure of seeds, greens, flowers, eggs, honey, and milk....

I've gotten several audience questions about seasonal rituals, so in this episode of Belonging, I thought I would address seasonal rituals for the time that I'm currently in: rituals around winter. First, I invite you to notice what winter looks and feels like where you live (not everywhere looks like a Bavarian ski village in December). Then, I invite you to notice what winter is energe...

Then Belonging Podcast episode is about adult friendships — how to cultivate them and why they're so dang hard to create and maintain. I dedicate a whole chapter to community in my book, Root & Ritual, particularly as it relates to friendships, but it's one of the topics I get asked about most, so I thought I'd bring it here to the podcast as well. I share about the importance o...

I've gotten some questions from Belonging podcast listeners about rites of passage, especially if you've left a religion that previously offered a sense of rites of passage and ritual, or how to cultivate rites of passage when we don't have that religious or cultural foundation. This is something I've touched on before on the Belonging podcast, and I'm sharing my thoughts...

In this episode of Belonging, I'm sharing what my life looks like now on the other side of birth for any of you who are wondering what life looks like as a new parent or who are struggling to find the elusive balance. I share how I (attempt to) balance business, mothering, self-care, and partnership, what motherhood looks like now one year in, how my greatest lesson in this time is patience,...

So many of us are desiring tools and methods to connect with the land we live on. In this episode of the Belonging podcast, I share ways that I'm building a relationship with the living world after feeling like I've lost it since entering motherhood. I share about the colonial construct of "nature," the history of enclosure and the separation of humans from the natural world, h...

In this episode of Belonging, I'm sharing the complicated thoughts and feelings I'm experiencing being a mother — choosing to bring a child into this world — and living in a time of climate collapse. I share somatic tools for how I'm dealing with the anxiety and grief of these times, questioning if it's ethical to bring a child into this world, building community care and knowi...

I've had many questions and curiosities about my book, the book writing process, and how I got my book published, so this episode of the Belonging podcast is the full story of what went into the creation and publication of Root & Ritual. I share when I first felt the calling to write a book, being in integrity with the why of writing a book (and not just because I wanted to feel successfu...

I have slowly emerged from my cocoon here in this outward facing internet space after taking a much-needed and restorative three-month mama sabbatical. My time was spent making my life as small and as energetically boundaried as possible so I could catch my breath, be with my baby as she turned one year old, and orient myself back to center enough to feel in my body again. I am now seeing how movi...

This episode of Belonging is a swapcast with Kathryn Fink of The Heart is a Cauldron. Kathryn believes in a world where each of us lives in deep connection — with our wild soul, our purpose, and our place in the wondrous web of being. To magic this world into reality, they sew an untamed array of seeds into the soil of their work as a mentor, podcaster, and queer mystic — weaving together animist...

Lara Veleda Vesta is back on the Belonging podcast, continuing the threads of our conversation from a couple years ago and introduce her new book, Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine. Lara is an artist, author, storyteller, and educator transforming chronic illness into a path of healing and reclaiming. Her research interests include ancestral connection and disability as initiatio...

We are living in a time of collective trauma and that is exactly what I'm talking about with my guest, Rachael Maddox, in this episode of Belonging. Rachael Maddox is a trauma resolution educator, coach, and guide who’s helped hundreds of humans move from sexual, complex or developmental trauma into pleasure, power, and trust-filled relationships. Rachael teaches and mentors other coaches, he...