A quick bonus episode with some thoughts around burnout and the holiday season and what we might consider in order to honor a more ancestral rhythm.

First conceived in late November, then recorded a week or so ago, the rhythm of bringing this episode to you demonstrates my own honoring of this rhythm. No rush. Everything in its time.

If you do want to join us in the virtual roundhouse for an experiential exploration and re-imagining of how our longer ago ancestors would have gathered for ceremony and story; as a way to keep themselves human, whole, connected, and alive at this time of longest night and the return of the sun… we’ll be gathering on Dec 20th (tomorrow from when this episode actually goes live). You can find more info or save your spot: https://www.wildsacredjourney.com/winter-solstice-in-the-roundhouse

Here’s to rest, the fruitful darkness, and the blessed return of the light.

With love,

Kate

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You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” - Wendell Berry

Tad Hargrave, one of our guests in today’s episode, likes to reference this quote. And seeing a need to call people back into their humanity, finding ways to help them go about their days with more goodness and beauty, is something at the heart of both of our work. We also both love stories and myths. In fact, we talked about those very things in episode 38.

Recently, he’s been teaming up with Kakisimow Iskwew (aka Natalie Pepin) - a Metis Cultural Educator who helps guide Indigenous people reclaiming their culture to connect with their living teachings around art, food, language and connection to spirit. And together, they’re offering deep spirals into the story ‘Briar Rose’ as a way of beginning to access indigenous cultural memory of Mother Europe.

I jumped at the chance to have them both gather with me here to spiral around some of the big, important questions many of us who want to live as creatures and want to do something about the ugliness which seems to be everywhere in the world today seem to be grappling with and wondering about.

Questions like:

• • What is culture? And if we’re ‘white’ or of European descent (particularly if we live in so-called ‘North America’), do we have ‘culture’?
  • How are we defining indigenous - as an identity or something else?
  • What does it mean that stories hold memory?
  • How do we navigate the hunger, the thirst, the grief and shame which seem to be in so many of us these days as we reach for something meaningful and nourishing? And if we find some deeper roots, and they feel like their ‘ours’, how do we go about honoring them in a good way?

• 
  

  Since we recorded the conversation, I attended a three-hour online version of their spiral into Briar Rose and the story is still resonating within me and moving me in ways that aren’t ready to be articulated yet; but are inviting me into deeper relationship, into protocol, with the story itself and the living culture it’s carrying.

  May this conversation be a way of growing more culture - may it offer you some soil, or perhaps the glimpse of some roots, an idea of where to dig to find something which invites you back into deeper humanity.

  And if you’re feeling the call, I highly recommend their work with Briar Rose. You can find more about it here: https://meetingmyancestors.com/briar-rose/

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  As always - if this conversation moves you in some way, please help share and pass it on to others you think might also be moved. This type of sharing helps feed these conversations and the work we’re up to in the world.

  Find Tad: https://tadhargrave.substack.com/

  Find Natalie/ Kakisimow Iskwew: https://meetingmyancestors.com/

  Find Kate: www.wildsacredjourney.com

  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kate-powell-wsjp/support

Back in late August, I sat down to have a flowing, juicy conversation with the wise, down-to-Earth Tamy Roloff (herbal tea seller, coach, midwife, mother and grandmother) around aliveness and aging; and more specifically the question: is it inevitable that we settle in to die with little excitement or joy for the future beyond retirement prospects?

Along the way, we also explore:

• spirituality;
• plants as friends;
• ancestral ways and animism;
• women’s life cycles and seasons;
• how being a woman is often framed as a negative thing and other ways we might be able see it;
• pain avoidance, mindset, and how that affects our ability to find pleasure and our own rhythms;
• community and living counter-culturally;
• travel and how it opens us to other ways of seeing ourselves and the world;
• possible benefits to loneliness;
• self-trust;

…and more.

Join us around the fire? You’re most welcome here.

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And if you've come for Tamy, I hope you'll stick around for more conversations exploring the question: in dehumanizing times, what might help us stay human and be more fully alive?

You can find Tamy:

Website: wholisticwomantea.com

Instagram: WholisticW

Facebook: Wholistic Woman

YouTube: WholisticWomanTea

You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp

What if your fear of being seen as lazy is wasting your fire and contributing to your burnout?

And what if what we’ve been taught to consider as laziness is our body and brain trying to recalibrate back to more sustainable cycles of efforting and rest?

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Your desire to contribute and make a difference is a genuine and beautiful thing… and when it gets entangled with (often unconscious and unexamined) societal conditioning around the evils of laziness and the glories of productivity… we end up primed for burnout.

But we need our fire. In these times, perhaps, more than ever.

We need to be able to face challenges in less exhausting, more pleasurable ways. We need to work rest into our cycles of efforting so we can keep going.

Tune in to hear me share these thoughts and some exercises I’ve found to be helpful. Try them with me and let me know how it goes?

I’d love to hear.

Here’s to climbing our mountains,

Kate

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You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp

Last weekend I made a hat. I took a pile of wool fibers and turned them into something functional and beautiful for my head.

And since then, how wool fulls and felts has been popping to mind as a metaphor for relationship and community building. In the wake of the US elections, I felt drawn to share some of these musings with you and go a little deeper into why I believe these ancestral skills practices, alongside more animist and ancestral wisdom and healing traditions, make for a potent store house for our individual and collective humanity.

So which relationships make up the threads in the fabric of you?

Which do you not feel so full without?

Which frictions and differences are actually serving to make you stronger and more resilient? Which are too much and risk tearing or damaging the cloth of you? Which are not enough to encourage the bonding needed for us all to become?

Where can you turn to be reminded of your humanity? How are you passing humanity down to the ones who will come after?

I’d love to hear.

Here’s to being stronger together. Here’s to staying human and staying alive.

With love,

Kate

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You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp

What distinguishes a pilgrimage from everyday life?

Did our long-ago ancestors suffer from burnout or purpose anxiety? And, if not, why?

These are two main questions I’m exploring at the one month mark of being back in Scotland after my epic ancestral pilgrimage here (and in Ireland) last year.

You’ll hear me muse about:

• what being on pilgrimage means and whether we can practice it even if we can’t leave home;
• connecting with our ancestral tapestries through food, language, song, and story;
• what might be possible if we brought more wonder, magic, and vulnerability back to the small moments of life;
• why I suspect our ancestors didn’t struggle with purpose anxiety;
• if worrying about purpose is actually a way of seeking validation;
• a basic definition of ‘integration’;

… and more.

Do you have ways of practicing pilgrimage (whether through travel or at home)? What is your way of being curious about the universe?

I’d love to hear.

Here’s to wonder and questions and the magic of aliveness,

Kate

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You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp

Have you heard the expression: “the veil is thin”?

And do you have an experience of what that means?

This bonus episode is in honor of what the celtic culture would call Samhain (though plenty of cultures around the world have other celebrations at this time of year honoring the ancestors and marking this moment of the thinning veil).

In this episode, you’ll hear me muse on

what I think a “thin veil” means;

where this particular season fits into the larger seasonal cycles and rhythms of aliveness;

how working with the season might support us in burnout recovery or keep us from entering into burnout…

and more.

I also offer some self-inquiry prompts to perhaps hold lightly as you attend to the seasonal themes of clearing space and harvest.

Although most of the episode is geared towards the Northern Hemisphere, I offer some brief thoughts for those in the Southern Hemisphere at this point of your Imbolc, too.

Many blessings for our journey into the cave,

Kate

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You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp

Have you experienced the grief of wondering whether your life, whether YOU, have any purpose? Only to try thing after thing while seeking your purpose; ultimately ending up more uncertain and confused? And burned out now on top of it?

You’re not alone.

This episode is in response to a listener who wrote to me after listening to my Episode 49 on Wellness World Pitfalls if we’re not including shadow work. She was drawing some connection between what she heard in my episode and an interview she heard with Elizabeth Gilbert which touched on purpose anxiety. She found herself curious about this connection and the practice and process of integration. She wondered if I had any thoughts.

Turns out, I do. Enough that there will be more than one episode on this subject.

This first one focuses on my perspective on Purpose Anxiety - what it is; why we seem to struggle with it; and a redefinition of ‘purpose’ which might be helpful (and undermine the idea that you need more trainings, more approaches).

Now, it's the first time I’ve tried to articulate some of these thoughts out loud, so they may not be their most coherent and easily digestible yet. They’re still fairly web-y.

But I have tears come twice in this episode, so there’s something juicy here.

Tune if you’re curious:

• What, even, is our ‘purpose’… and why do we seem to find ourselves anxious about it?
• What do late-stage capitalism and empire have to do with why we find it hard to feel like we have purpose?
• What’s the role of ‘individuality’ in a “we’re all one” world?
• Why can’t I seem to find my purpose by myself?

(and more)

What do you think about ‘purpose’ as being relational? Or what stood out to you most in this episode?

I’d love to hear. Your wonderings and impressions just might spawn a whole ‘nother series of episodes!

We can also engage in beautiful back and forth, oral and collective wisdom-making, together through conversations at a Wisdom Wednesday call. First Wednesdays of the month. You can find more info or register for the next one here: https://www.wildsacredjourney.com/wisdom-wednesdays

With so much passion for your truest expression,

Kate

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You can find Kate:

Website: www.wildsacredjourney.com

Email – kate@wildsacredjourney.com

Instagram: @wildsacredjourney_kp