Know Ya Flow
Women in flow, share what they know. Hear women's stories of how they've grown, what they know, and how they are living in flow.
Know Ya Flow
Wild Sacred Journey with Kate Powell
We trace Kate Powell’s path from early sensitivity and lost spark to a grounded practice that blends yoga, energetic medicine, storytelling, and animist ceremony. We explore boundaries vs walls, grief literacy, colonization’s impact on belonging, and how to rebuild culture with the land.
• early sensitivity, overwhelm, and numbing
• yoga and farming as doorways back to body
• clairs and energetic hygiene in daily life
• boundaries as membranes, not walls
• nervous system patterns formed in overwhelm
• presence and witnessing as core healing skills
• colonization, empire, and cultural severance
• animism and seeing everything as relationship
• ancestral breadcrumbs in song and story
• the age of the third thing and culture-making
• upcoming ceremonies and how to connect
Find Kate: www.wildsacredjourney.com • Instagram: @WildSacredJourney_KP • Ceremonies: Nov 8 at Stephanie McKinley’s; Winter Solstice Dec 21 at Daydream Studios
Welcome to Know Your Flow Podcast, where women in Flow share what they know. I'm your host, Laura Martin. Join me as we talk to women and hear their stories on what they know, how they've grown, and living in flow.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Today we're here with Kate Powell. Hi, Kate. Hi. Good. Thanks for being here today. Thank you. Yeah. So today we're here to chat about all the things. So tell us a little bit. So the way that we've connected is because of like the Shine community. You rolled out before I rolled in, kind of because you left. Yeah, you left Winchester when? 2019? Before COVID?
SPEAKER_00:I started backing off a little bit in my teaching at Shine and some of the other places like 2018, 2019. And then yeah. Cool. I kind of left, I think, by fall of 2019. Right before everything shut down in wow, March of 2020. Cool. Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So then yeah, I popped in from like 2020 and now it's 2025 and we've connected. So amazing. I'd love to see it. Yeah. So the webs keep growing. I know. They really do. So tell us a little bit about like how you found yoga in general and why you started teaching and what that all like meant and looked like to you. And maybe like a little bit about your personality and how that was like attractive, maybe to you, how you were as a kid, kind of a thing. And then yeah, we'll start there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, I think I remember I was probably like not more than five or six years old. And my parents had this friend who was like really into tarot and kind of like wore the long sweepy skirts, like very hippie. Or she was like a friend of a friend kind of thing. And I remember as like a little kid, like five or six, we were like over at their house. It was some party. And she like walked past me and she patted me on the head and she was like, You are just such a young, bright soul. And I remember as this, I don't know, yeah, like I said, five, six-year-old, like looking at her and being like, This woman must not be very good at what she does because I am an old soul. I'm like, who has that thought? But like I remember it so clearly. Yeah. And it was just such a, it's such a funny moment. So I mean, I think in some ways, that whole kid thing, like, yes, you are, I've always in some way been building to this, I guess. But the things that we're really good at are the things that we can't see because they just happen for us like breathing, you know. So I think we, I don't know. I wonder if that's part of why it seems like we're designed to lose the things that we're really good at for a while and then have to like find our way back to them. Cause I feel like that's a lot of the human journey in some way. So yeah, I mean, I've always been very sensitive, very intuitive, probably always had somewhat of a spiritual kind of lens on life, although I don't think I would have like called it that. And I yeah, have always loved like moving and being outdoors and dancer. I was a dancer for many years. You know, when I was a little kid too, people would ask what you wanted to be when you grow up. And I had a different thing for every day of the week that I wanted to be. And there were like teachers and dance teachers, and at one point I had a vet, I think just because I liked animals and I didn't know what else you did with animals. Um, yeah, I can't even remember what they all were now, but there was definitely dance and teaching. And yeah. But then I, you know, grew up and I think around, you know, probably nine or eleven, like if you look back at pictures, you can really see at that age, like nine, but somewhere between nine and eleven, you can see this like spark that was in me just kind of like go out of my eyes. Like if you look back at pictures, like I really notice it in the last, you know, five, eight years. I've been looking back at pictures periodically and I'm like, ooh, like wow, what prompted that? And I think it seems like like when I look at young girls in particular, I see that happen around that age. So I think I I don't know how much of that's like a society thing and how much of that again is maybe just like a developmental thing. But it seems like there's some spark that just kind of shuts down or gets hidden really deep inside. And so yeah, I mean, I don't think I was any different from anybody in that sense. And yeah, and so I think I just like really started trying to play the game, you know, and be good at school and you know, be the little machine and and not be too sensitive and tamp down all the ways that I could sort of sense all the meaning, like see through the masks people often wear and kind of end up in these sort of almost gaslighty situations where you're like reading the room and the interaction like entirely differently from how it seems like it's going to other people, and you're like, Am I the crazy one? So, you know, you just kind of like I shut that down. I think again, I don't think I'm alone in this. And then I um yeah, and then from there I re yeah, I really struggled when I got to like my teenage years and then college years, like I was just feeling really like numb and disconnected, and I got just like kind of increasingly disconnected from my body.
SPEAKER_02:Were you trying to be like a mainstream person, or were you drinking and caring about trends and caring about friends and that kind of thing, or were you always on the outskirts being a little bit explorative of other stuff?
SPEAKER_00:I think I've always been a little bit more comfortable on the outskirts. Like I've always kind of had this as much as I feel like I can be really influenced by other people if I'm not being really careful. I also feel like I've had this really clear inner knowing and this voice that although I've lost a lot of pieces of myself that I've had to refind, there's been this clear voice that's just been like, that's not my thing, that's not my thing, that's not my thing. You know, and and I think some of it too was like a rebellion where I felt like I wasn't cute little beebopy kind of like girl, like whatever that sort of conventional idea of beauty is. Like I never felt like that was me or that I was ever gonna fit into that. So I also think some of it was like a rebellion of like just uh shutting that down. I think too, I do feel I've definitely also always been someone who people just start to like I'll be at the farmer's market and someone will just start to like pour out their whole life story to me. And you're just like, oh, okay. Yeah. I was like at a farmer's market in Ireland last year, and this like old lady would like happen to be standing next to me looking at things, and all of a sudden she was just like, you know, I've never told anybody this, but my whole life I've kind of been abused and like all this stuff. It's like, oh my god, we're at a farmer's market. Like, what is actually happening right now? Yeah. And now at least I know okay. Because like I that is the kind of work that I do, and I'm like, right, okay. And people pick up on their presence and that in your presence, and they're either like triggered by it or they're drawn to it, or you know, yeah, and it's not always personal, it's like often more about them, but there's you know, there's something going on there. But so I think too, I didn't know what to do with a lot of attention that I felt like was often sort of sent my way, whether it was male gaze attention or whether it was like whatever. And so I think just tried to be like ugly and invisible kind of for a long time. So I think that was some of it too, is I really wasn't aiming to be popular or aiming. I think my rebellion was kind of to like, you can't get rejected if you aren't even trying to play that game. But like playing the game more in the sense of like, you know, I was good at school, and so I was like, okay, fine. And I was like kind of bored by it in some ways, and I enjoyed it in other ways. Like, I like learning, but I never really liked school, I think. And so, you know, yeah, I think I was just like, well, I'm gonna like really check out if I don't set myself some crazy goal. So it's like fine, I'm gonna take all advanced classes and get all straight A's and just like really yeah, like push myself for that. Yeah. So I think I was probably if you had to like be in like a high school click, I was probably more like the nerdy, you know, definitely didn't go to parties, definitely didn't, yeah. I was not really that that kid, the like over responsible, like kind of semi, probably maybe a little too adultified.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, totally kid in some ways. And then what about like relationships with other people? How was that in high school? And even like how is that now?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, you know, I think I've always kind of had fewer quality relationships over quantity. Like again, I think as like a high-sensitive kind of introverted person that just feels more manageable to me. Yeah. But I still, it's interesting, even just in the last week or so, there's been some stuff coming up that I've been working with in the dream space and in meditations and with my beyond human guides and things like that that's been around like how much I was even like lying to myself in a lot of ways about what I actually wanted. So that I was protecting myself from wanting things that I didn't think I was allowed to have. So I think I, you know, it's hard to to get close to people who are like not actually emotionally available because they're lying to themselves. Yeah, like it's very easy to see that when someone else is doing it to us. It's like not always so easy to see it when it's us doing it to ourselves. So even though I would say like I had some good friends, I feel like, yeah, I probably wasn't as close to people as I I would say there's definitely been a a theme of me having a lot of the closest, what I would call the closest people in my life, be people who aren't very heart forward. What do you mean? They're more what? Protecting their hearts. Oh so either they're really in their heads or they just like have a lot of walls up, and so it keeps things kind of at the surface level. And so I think that was like more aw, and so I tried to kind of fit in with that, I think, because innately that's not at all how I am. Like I'm a very heart forward person, and I often have images when I'm doing kind of healing work with myself. I often have images of like this little kid with just like, you know, care bear heart beams, like beaming out and like standing there going like all alone, like going, like, does nobody want any of this? Like it's just shining out of me for you. Yeah, like does nobody, you know, and so then you attract the people who do want it but don't know how to reciprocate, or you retract, you know, random ladies in farmers markets who just suddenly start pouring out their life stories, or you attract like sometimes predatory, you know. I think for me, a lot of my thing has been unlearning some of the okay, so in the lack, in the absence of actual healthy boundaries, I think is when I started becoming more emotionally unavailable because I didn't know how else to protect it. And so I think for me it's been about rediscovering the vulnerability and then learning how to have actual appropriate boundaries.
SPEAKER_02:Because what do you do instead? Unhealthy boundaries, like what does that look like?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, I think when I work with clients and stuff like that, and I I can relate to this myself, like a lot of the boundaries. I think before we start really getting into understanding what boundaries are, we think they're walls.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:You know? And so a lot of people go, right, put up the boundaries. And what they mean is put up the walls, right? And then nothing gets in or out, right? Good or bad. And so it's more about learning how to like have a membrane instead of a wall where some things can get in and some things can get out, and some things can't get in, and some things are protected from going out until it's the right time and place, you know, that kind of thing. So it's it's like for me, the journey to boundaries has been about learning, you know, yeah, that they change and that they grow and that they're contextual. And I love, you know, I well, I think I've read this somewhere too, but I, you know, one of those spontaneous idea things. I guess it, I think it came to me, but then I've also read it other places that yeah, boundaries of a distance at which we love people, you know. And so sometimes, like to love somebody, we actually have to really not have them in our lives, you know. Exactly. And sometimes to love somebody, we actually need to challenge ourselves to be more vulnerable and to get closer to them, right? Yeah. So it's yeah, it's learning to like kind of dance with that instead of just this kind of wall up. Yeah, nothing gets in or out.
SPEAKER_02:Are you saying that like basically before, are we just talking about with clients or with everybody in your life? Like, do you feel like you didn't have boundaries with people before? And so then things would get weird and now you do.
SPEAKER_00:It's funny. I actually feel like part of why I loved first being a yoga teacher and then doing more of the shamanic, you know, work that I do and the other kinds of stuff is that that was actually when I could connect best with people. Because there was the boundary of I'm teaching this, yeah. And and also that I then had permission to be myself. To go there in a way that like people don't expect in social circumstances, like when you roll up to a party and you're like, hey guys, you know, like yeah, like that can be sometimes people don't want that, you know. And so I like I've I've had to get better at social stuff, like more of the social small talk kind of nicety things because that's not that's also not my innate nature, I think. Yeah, it's not instinctive to me, but I can see where that plays a an important role sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it also, I think that was part of why I actually really liked work, was that I felt like I could be me. And people, the people who were around me in those moments were people who were opting into me being me. That makes sense, yeah. And then also along the way, I've come to realize too how much being highly sensitive to energy and all that stuff, like I am picking up a lot on other things, people's stuff, even if they don't say it, the nonverbal stuff. And so walking through crowded areas, even if people don't just start pouring out their stories to me verbally, sometimes their energy is doing that. And so, like if I'm out in a crowded public space, I'll often just be picking up on stuff. And again, that's something I've gotten better at kind of closing down. But as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult, I had no idea, right? Like we're not taught how to, there's no conversation around that in our society. I think that's changing a little bit now, but at the time there wasn't. And so you're just like, right, let's just numb this out because I don't know what to do. Like I am so overwhelmed and uncomfortable in my own body. Because part of it too, so when we're talking about intuitive information and the nonverbal information, right, we often call them the clairs. So the five clairs. So you have clairsence, clairvoyance, claircognizance, right? There's the the different channels basically that you receive information on. My primary one is kinesthetic, so the clairsence. So I feel what other people are feeling, like in my own body. Yeah. So I, oh, clear audience and clear anyway. Yes, okay. Sorry, my brain's still trying to remember all the clears. Um, so yeah, so if I'm walking through crowded spaces and other people have traumas that haven't been resolved that are in their bodies that are like just wanting so badly to be heard and seen and witnessed and cared for. And so they're like, you know, those things are just like leaching out of their fields. Whoops, sorry. And so I'll feel that stuff like in my body. So it's often physically uncomfortable for me to be in spaces with people like that, yeah, where that's happening, where there's a lot of intended stuff going on. And so again, I've gotten better at just shielding myself and just, you know, kind of practicing good energetic hygiene myself and being able to recognize when that's what's happening.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But that was only through going through the trainings I went through that I learned those skills prior to that. And and and I would say even my shamanic training, not even so much the yoga training. The yoga training started me kind of getting back in touch with my body, with my breath, with spirituality, you know, getting out of my head, which was like not a healthy place to be for a while. But it wasn't really until I started learning how to actually be sensitive in the world through learning more of these intuitive and shamanic tools, these energetic tools, that it like started to make sense. And then I actually could become more sensitive and have it not feel like such a liability. Cause I think a lot of us when we're really sensitive, it feels like such a liability because no lunes taught us how to be sensitive. And so it's physically uncomfortable and it's overwhelming and it's like all the things. And so, yeah, whether it's drugs or alcohol or just giant walls up or avoiding all social situations or like whatever the things are that food, sex, you know, whatever the things are that we use to numb, for me, it was like wearing baggy clothing too. It was like I didn't want anything extra like touching my skin. Yeah. It was like too much. Yeah. I felt too much. Yeah, whatever the different things are that we try to do to like numb and process the overwhelm. We like start to feel like being sensitive is a liability.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And in reality, if we actually have the tools, it's it's significant, or I don't know, for me anyway, my life got significantly better when I started to be like, okay, now I can be sensitive and I don't have to feel all the things all the time. I know how to shut that down a little bit. Or if I can be exhausting, I know what to do.
SPEAKER_02:Like very exhausting. It is.
SPEAKER_00:And especially, and it feels sad too, because it's like, you know, so many people could really use some help. And I don't mean that in like some savior complex kind of way, but just like from a compassionate like heart, like the world can be so much better than most people realize it can be, and like life can be so much better, and we can feel so much better than most people are walking around thinking they have any right to feel. Yeah. Most people think if they're getting up and they're surviving, that's good enough, you know, and it's not nothing. That's a big fucking deal sometimes, you know. But it's I want a world where we all feel like we're thriving. Yeah. And I feel like we're when we make decisions, assuming survival is the best we can do, we're making really short-term decisions that really don't actually take into account our wider web of kinships. Too they tend to be fear-based, they tend to be very self-centered. You know, I think if we kind of look at the modern world, the geopolitical situation in the modern world right now, we're seeing a lot of things that are the result of people thinking surviving is the best we can do. And I think we would see a very different world if people were actually like, what does it take? Not just for me and mine to thrive, because nobody thrives in a vacuum. We can survive maybe for a bit in a vacuum, but we actually can't thrive in a vacuum. So, like, if we're actually making decisions based on what will it take to thrive, I don't know. I have this suspicion the world would look really different. Totally.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I think that there would have to be a lot of support, though, for each person. Like you can't do it alone and like to dismantle beliefs or to feel your emotions. A lot of being sensitive when I think about it or vulnerable or whatever really requires somebody else to like look at you or hear you or see you in that sensitivity or vulnerability and tell you that that's okay. Because I'm guessing that probably when you were little or whenever you were told that wasn't okay, like that's what you think, and that's why you have those walls, and that's why you don't want to be that way. And so people having another person to like validate them and look at them, there are people that don't have that opportunity and don't have anybody in their life to do that. And so I feel like that's a huge reason too why people stay stuck is they don't even know that that's what they need. Right. Or that that's what's holding them back from being from thriving because they're just trying to survive because they're so hardened and so overstimulated and overwhelmed.
SPEAKER_00:Well, you know, and on a nervous system level, we put a coping mechanism in place, right? Like something happens, we get overwhelmed, right? There's big T traumas and little T traumas, right? So anytime we're overwhelmed and don't know how to process something, that actually lands in the nervous system as a trauma. It may be a little T trauma, not a big T trauma, but it's a trauma. And so from a nervous system perspective, like what happens in that moment is whatever we put in place to help us navigate the situation so that maybe we can just deal with it later when we have the time or we have the whatever, right? We'd like to push it down. And if if we survive the situation, then in that moment, the nervous system's like, great, that worked, check. You know, so suddenly then whatever pattern we put in place in that moment is actually seen as a good thing on a nervous system level. So we'll just keep defaulting to it until we actually have the safe space and the proper witnessing and whatever other support we need to actually go, wait a minute, first off, is that really getting me the results I want long term or just in that exact moment? And then to actually witness the original thing that happened, which sometimes is so long ago that we've forgotten or might even have been pre-verbal or might even have been ancestral, in which case, and that's where I think like talk therapies, for example, traditional talk therapies kind of start to reach the end of their scope of practice.
SPEAKER_02:Totally, you know, yeah, because it's like more than you can't even verbalize what it is.
SPEAKER_00:It could be generational, it could be, you know, there's so many things it could be. And so that's where like a somatic practice, you know, and that's why like sometimes people show up on their yoga mat and they start to move their body and some huge emotion starts to like come up and they're like, What just happened? You know, but it's like the body, that whole the body keeps score thing, right? The body remembers, the body stores the things, the nervous system stores the things until proper witnessing. And so sometimes I think what can happen too, it actually reinforces the walls because people will start to have some kind of experience that will crack start to tap into that old overwhelming emotion or pattern, or what had been overwhelming as a kid. Maybe it's not overwhelming now if they consciously think about it as an adult, but it was overwhelming as a kid, so it's still can like in the overwhelming category in the nervous system, you know. And so they'll start to tap into it accidentally, like through yoga or meditation or breath work or an energy healing session, you know, that were whatever something, a massage, even acupuncture, you know, whatever. And so, you know, people because more and more I feel like people are starting to branch out into these more holistic, what we would consider in our modern world, holistic supplemental kind of things, even though many of them have the basis in a significantly older spiritual and wellness tradition, you know, than our like Western allopathic medicine or talk therapy or whatever. But people will kind of start to like dip their toe in, something will crack open, the overwhelming thing will happen, and then either the practitioner facilitator isn't trained or it's in a group practice or you know, something. And so then it's like the walls come back up, and then the modality that actually started to crack them open gets listed as unsafe in their mind, right? In that nervous system, almost like subconscious nervous system response. And so then they never go back. Or if they do go back, they go back with guarded hearts, you know, and so then they're kind of like half in, half out, and and they're they're again mostly subconscious, their nervous system's kind of constantly trying to protect them from having that thing crack open again. Not because the cracking open is actually dangerous, the cracking open is actually what they need, but because the cracking open without the proper support is dangerous.
SPEAKER_02:That makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, people don't know where to find that. So you got into yoga, how so I had just finished college and yeah, I'd really struggled my last couple years of college. Like I was just feeling really lost. I felt like I looked at the city. What did you go to college for? I ended up majoring in French and minor in in art history. Okay. Um, but that mostly just because I don't know, like I liked learning and I just kind of like those were actually the easiest things for me to like I started speaking French when I was in seventh grade because I lived over in France for a year with my family when I was like 12, 13. So then I just kind of kept up with my French all through. So it was actually like one of the easiest things for me to major in by the time I got to college that would allow me to take like a whole bunch of other classes that I was interested in. Yeah, so I, you know, but I mean I never really planned on like doing anything with linguistics. It was just like an interest of mine. I liked traveling, I liked speaking languages, mostly for the stories. I liked stories and I've always liked storytelling, I think, and in its different forms. Yeah, and so it was like I was looking out at the world, I felt like I had no idea where to go next. I had no idea, I just felt overwhelmed, like deeply overwhelmed. And I had just kind of like shut down and I'd already kind of been struggling with depression and feeling really disconnected from my body, and my head would just like spin out. I remember I'd be laying in bed sometimes at night, like unable to sleep. And and I knew that my thoughts were like poisonous at that time. Like I knew they were telling me things. Everybody hates you, you're terrible, really negative, dark stuff. And I knew that it was probably not true, but I thought I was my brain. And so I didn't know. I remember laying there being like, how do you outsmart your own brain? Like, how do you? And I just like didn't know what to do. And so there was a yoga studio. I'd ended up back at my parents' house for a little bit right after college, and then there was a yoga studio there, right near their house, closed now, but at the time it was called Dancing Mind Yoga. And because I'd been a dancer most of my life, I was kind of like, I don't know. So I just kind of like stumbled my way in there and it was a Baptiste practice. And I left and I was like, Well, I don't know what the fuck just happened, but I think I feel better. And I bought one of those like unlimited first week things. So I just like went back a whole bunch, and by the end of the week, I was like, something's changing. The beginning of my practice, I would cry anytime my head was blowing my heart. I would sometimes cry for the entire 90-minute practice because they were like the 90-minute Baptiste. This was like the OG Baptiste practice. And uh yeah, and I remember like I would just have these moments where like this, this that wiser voice that I think had always been with me, but I just had kind of lost sight of would was just really like guiding me. And so, yeah, and then I found farming too, and so I was actually farming at the time, and so I was working outside and I was more like in touch with the seasons and eating foods that were actually what was growing at the time and were ones I'd grown and were grown really well, and so there was something, and I was like moving my body a lot more, like making things tangible with you know, with my hands, and so like those two things combined like really helped completely shift things for me. And so then I kind of got as far as I could in the farming before like the next step was really like starting your own farm, and that didn't really feel like the right move, but yoga teacher training did, and so then I got certified to teach yoga, and then yeah, and then at that point was when I moved to Winchester and started trying to so then when you were teaching yoga, did you feel like you were picking up on everybody's energy, like their sensitivities, and how you were just saying, like, you know, people will go to a class, but then like the facilitator or the you know, practitioner, the teacher, whatever, they're they're not really in the right space to support.
SPEAKER_02:So it feels kind of like unsafe. Like, did you feel like you naturally were attracted to that and to the energies? And like, it wasn't just like teaching the physical, but did you feel like you what made it special for you and what made you so good at it? Because also you have like a reputation of being an OG teacher in this community and being really special to a lot of people. So, do you think that that was why?
SPEAKER_00:So I think the first couple years I was teaching, you know, I think it's funny, you graduate from yogurt teacher training and you have these like clear ideas of like how you're gonna teach and how you want to teach. And I would say the first 300 hours of actual teaching, you're just trying to figure out how to take this idea of how you want to be as a teacher and actually have it consistently happen. And I think it takes a solid like 300 hours of actual teaching. So I jumped into teaching quite a lot. So I think I got through those 300 hours fairly quickly. Some people who are only teaching one class a week for however many years, like that's those 300 hours are gonna take them a lot longer. But I would say at that time it was more of a mindset and physical thing still for me. Then while I was teaching was actually when I started going through my three-year integrative energetic medicine and coaching training, the more the shamanic kind of practices and protocols. And so I while I was going through the three years of that, I was both teaching and I mean I was still maintaining like I tried for at least five, sometimes six days a week of my own practice too, in studio if I could, just because that worked for me. It's a little easier when you don't have kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, and so I I was like exploring what I was learning there in my own body on my mat in my practice. And then I would start to take that into my cueing or into like how I was holding space as a teacher. And I started just kind of playing with it. So I think I I it was more I think that I developed into that as I was teaching, but in a large part because of this training. That makes sense that I was going through kind of at the same time that I was teaching. Because I I had a couple years, I had a a year, I guess. So I got certified to teach 2013. I think I really started teaching regularly in 2014, and then I joined my training, my next training in fall of 2015. So I think I had like, yeah, kind of like a year of teaching because I knew I needed to integrate the yoga teacher training. Because I think that's another thing that happens is often we jump into the next thing. And the next thing and the next thing. And we don't actually give our time, ourselves time to like chew on. Yeah, like just actually actually like really bring the teaching down into our bodies and then actually be able to embody it. Yeah. So I just kind of instinctively knew. And so I gave myself some time to just play and integrate that piece of things. And then I yeah, had this opportunity come up to do this other training. And something in me was just like a gut yes. And it was actually kind of perfect because at that time, even though the yoga had started making a really big difference in like my mindset and in my connection with my body, I still found a lot of like interpersonal dynamics of like kind of codependency and like some of the lying to myself that I was doing about what I actually wanted and what I was willing to settle for, and like wanting to fit in, and the yeah, a lot of like not really reciprocal relationships or relationships that weren't inherently bad, but just like didn't nourish me in the ways I actually needed. And I kept trying to tell myself it was fine, you know, and that I didn't need what I didn't need and kind of settling in that way. So I was still like caught in a lot of those. So even though like a lot had changed, there were also some fundamental things that really hadn't changed. And it wasn't until I would say the energy stuff and really starting to then learn boundaries and how to be sensitive and actually recognize, like really come back to like what if you actually trusted that you're reading this situation accurately, you know, rather than trying to talk yourself out of like when people say, Oh yeah, no, you're like my best friend, and yet they're not acting like it, but I'm believing their words because what else do I have? Because I've disconnected from my intuition and my like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So there's like so much of like giving our own power away that happens when we don't trust our intuition, our inner knowing, our our ability to read a situation, and or not just read and interpret the situation based on our lens, but to just say, look, I don't know if my lens is right or wrong, but this doesn't work for me. Yeah. Either way, yeah, which is like a thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And like necessary for sure. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. So then I felt like, and it was also that was some of where too, I think I actually finally started unblocking my heart. And because so much of the training, and this is a piece that I think is missed in most trainings, right? We worked in my training that I went through, they had us work for ourselves on a full year before they even started us teaching us protocols to work with other people. Yeah. Yeah. And most of what it was at heart was learning how to actually be present because it's the presence and the specific frequency of presence that we can drop into that actually allows for healing to happen. And that's the piece that most trainings are too quick to actually really get people grounded into in my experience. And and just kind of from what I see and hear from other practitioners and facilitators of different different kinds of modalities. And so I think that was when I really started to understand the difference between because you can be a very caring person and not be in heart frequency. Yeah. You know, and it doesn't negate the caring that we're doing when we're not in heart frequency and the good that that can do, but it does mean that there are other energies coming into that caring that are influencing it. Totally. You know? Yeah. And so, you know, I've had people who've cared about me deeply, but just they're not in their hearts. And I can feel that. And there's something about that that feels then, yeah, like there is, there's a lack of vulnerability when we're not in our hearts because we can care without being vulnerable. Right. You know, and in fact, oftentimes we care about other people so that we don't have to be vulnerable.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We don't mean for it to become a manipulation. That's not our intention at all, but it can become a manipulation because it's a way of trying to receive care and love and acceptance from other people without actually putting our hearts on the line, without actually giving like actually giving it without a bunch of expectations or like trying to protect ourselves from the risk of being vulnerable is a risk. It's scary as shit.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:It takes so much courage to be vulnerable, you know. Yeah. But it's also like fundamental to being human. And we do a lot of weird stuff if we're like trying to avoid actually being vulnerable. I know. So we have to like part of it is like, yeah, boundaries, part of it, I think, is also like building up the nervous system skills so that we can kind of tend ourselves, we can expand our capacity for risk, you know, and to be able to like take that risk and then recover when we hit flattened a little bit because that happened. Yeah, absolutely. It happened to me not that long ago. I ended up with a huge broken heart. Yeah, you know, and it took me a while to recover from that. Yeah. And like also, I had to really work to like make sure that my recovery didn't look like shutting myself down again. Yeah. You know, that I could tend the brokenheartedness while still, you know, and I think that's such important it's such an important skill right now in the world because so many people are grieving and feeling just like brokenhearted about so many things. And like, yeah, we need we need to tend that grief. We need to tend that brokenheartedness, not squish it down or push it away or hide it in a corner because it will only come back later in a really weird, ugly looking, scary looking shape. Usually, you know, very it could be explosive, it could be self-destructive, it could be, you know, whatever, but it'll come back somehow. But yeah, but just that that yeah, we need to grieve and tend the heartbrokenness and learn how to do that without shutting our hearts down.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly. And I think it kind of sounds like it comes back to being present with it too, and not trying to be like, I feel really bad about this. So instead I'm going to maybe yell around about something that's like adjacent to what I'm upset about, yeah, and actually just be like upset about what it is, and like then feel through that and stay in the heart and stay present. And then eventually with time and space and attention, it will soften a little bit and things like that, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and we can only be present with other people's big feels, like to the extent that we can be present with our own big feels, like we're only and so that goes not just for like that goes for people in their day-to-day life and also for practitioners. I know, right? Instead of trying to fix and say talk and yeah. Yeah. And so, and we can so like, and you know, so if we don't know how to be that present with those big feels in ourselves, like because they are when we start, they feel like a tidal wave that is gonna drown us. Yeah. And so part of the role of a practitioner at that point is to like be the lifeboat or be the like just the container that's like, let it be big, let it be whatever. Like, you're not gonna spin out and get lost. I've got the grounding cord here, I've got the anchor, I've got the, you know, whatever it is, like I'm holding something. So you can go through the process and come back again. Like I'll help you find your way back. Yeah. You know, but but that's part of where I think we have to be really discerning about which practitioners we work with too in those moments, because not everybody has the same level of capacity.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:For you know, we can have the best intentions, but what we come up against is our capacity.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about like how, you know, sometimes you just need somebody to like see you in that and know that it's okay. And, you know, like, and I love what you said about yeah, like holding it down so that they, you know, you're not gonna go right away.
SPEAKER_00:It makes you get swift away and tied away, but like you're tied to the cord. So if you need to get swift away by the wave, go with the wave. Yeah, ride the wave. Yeah, I've got the cord, I'll tug you back to land when it's done.
SPEAKER_02:Because people have a really hard time just in you know, day-to-day life or whatever, sitting with other people's stuff. We don't really know how to do that in the the best way. I know we have like the best intentions, but as simple as so many times you'll see if if you're like watching TV or somebody will start crying, and then the person will be like, No, no, don't cry, don't cry. So much of what we think of as kindness is actually trying to fix other people to make ourselves more comfortable, exactly, and becomes like harmful, and like, yeah, like, no, no, don't cry, or even like even if somebody sometimes like you'll see somebody is crying and you want to put your hand on them and like touch them.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And that you think is like being helpful. Like you think you're like, oh, they're crying. I want to help and touch them. And but really you feel uncomfortable and you're taking them out of their experience by touching them, and they're like jolted, kind of whether they realize it or not.
SPEAKER_00:Not actually about them. And they now have to worry about oh god, managing themselves on behalf of let me calm down because apparently, like I need to calm down, they're touching me.
SPEAKER_02:This seems like a lot, I guess. And it becomes a whole thing.
SPEAKER_00:And it's even sometimes people reaching for hugs, even if they ask for it, sometimes that's a way of trying to pass it on to somebody else rather than we have so many little like we're amazing and terrible. Like how adaptive we are. Like it is one of the biggest miracles of humans, I feel like is how adaptive we are. And it's just one of our sneakiest things that I feel like can really backfire on us because we come up with all these what end up becoming maladaptive behaviors, like along the way towards just yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So you went through that whole training and then what happened? So you went through that training and then, yeah, and then what?
SPEAKER_00:And that training was to become what and to do what? Technically, so yeah, the the term, you know, the title that they gave us was integrative energetic medicine practitioner and coach, or that was the title of the training. You know, because I I think it's tricky in these modern times because we have so few pure intact lineages anymore. You know, partly through just humans moving, which humans have always done since the beginning of time from place to place and taken, you know, kind of picked things from different cultures, you know, along the way to influence, right? I mean, there's always been cultural exchange and humans moving and trading and all of that stuff since you know, prehistory. But then obviously like colonization and you know, things like that have like played a huge role in that too. So, you know, there's very few and and one of the things that happens in colonization, and I think it's like yeah, just important to name this kind of thing. Also, can you also can you define colonization? Yeah, so that's what yeah, yeah. So in colonization, so colonization is like the idea that some country, power, government, people want to live, have the land or resources or whatever uh that where there are already another people and culture. And often, sometimes they go there themselves, but often what they do is they'll take people from other places who maybe they've already started colonizing and they'll move them to that place. Because one of the ways that you disconnect a people from the land and kind of take them over, one of the ways you weaken a people is you disconnect them from the land, from their language, from their stories, from their culture. Right. And once you've done that, they don't know who they are anymore. And so then that you can shape them into whoever you want them to be, which is probably you, right? Or whatever you want them to be for you. So and again, you know, violence and territory stuff and some form of colonization have also, I think, probably been around since the beginning of time, along with humans moving and interacting with each other, you know. Yeah, and even pre-time as we would think of it, pre-history anyway. But I would say like the idea of empire then has really elevated it to a whole other level. So empire being one country that wants to have lots of colonies in lots of places. Okay, right. So Roman Empire, we have the British Empire, we have, you know, right, there's been different countries through different parts of history. But one of the things they do then when they move to places is you're trying to basically create satellite countries of you, but you go somewhere and they have if if the people have a strong sense of identity, they're not going to want to become your satellite. So you have to wage a certain type of warfare on those people in order to make them amenable in some kind of way to becoming a satellite of you. Yeah. That's your intention. You know, and the other thing too, uh like I've I've heard it said, you know, empire evolves narrower and narrower. If you look at it from an evolution, it wants more and more sameness because it's easier to control sameness. Whereas if you look at the natural world, the natural world evolves more and more diverse. Yeah, because it's actually actually like ecologically dangerous to have too much sameness. Yeah. Right. So it's very anti-nature empire in a lot of ways. Right. So that's also part of the reason, too. You want to disconnect people from the land, you want to disconnect, right? Because that's part of how you're creating more and more sameness is you're taking people out of their ecology, out of their sense of I live here and I belong to this space, and that means I live in this way and I honor these rhythms, and I right, like when we lived with more of that sense of belonging to a specific space, you know, stories are stored in the land. And Kakisimosqueu, um, Natalie Pepin, an indigenous Amiti woman and and sort of culture worker up in um culture educator up in Canada, I've heard her say that when from an indigenous perspective, we don't actually create culture. Culture is actually on loan to us by the land. So the land, it's a set of instructions that the land gives us on how to live in that particular place in a good way. So the stories are about helping us navigate that, the songs are about helping us navigate that. All of what we think of as culture, you know, all of what humans kind of quote unquote create, you know, art, government systems, craft, you know, whatever it is, are all actually like listened for, like the inspiration is considered like listened for from the land. So that we're learning how to be humans in a good way and a good to the place that we live. So if someone wants to come in and wants the resources or whatever from the land, then they're gonna have a lot more trouble if you have people who feel like they really belong somewhere. So in the example of currently called North America, right? Other sometimes called Turtle Island, you know, where we where we're having this conversation where we live, right? Our white European ancestors, right? Many of them, particularly here in like the Shenandoah Valley, right? The Appalachians, right? Many of them came from Ireland, Scotland. They were brought over here by England because England wanted the land in Ireland and Scotland. So they were picked up, they were disconnected from their language, their languages were made. Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic have been illegal for a long time. They're having a resurgence, but they've almost died out. They're considered endangered languages. Songs, the bagpipes were considered a weapon of war and were illegal for a while. Drums were illegal for a while. So a lot of these gathering to sing songs and tell stories were illegal for a while. You know, you had this artificially created famine where there was actually plenty of food, but the food was all meant to be taken elsewhere, and none of it was allowed to come back into the country. So when the potatoes failed, which was all people had to eat, they were dying andor having to leave. So you have this happening there, which is colonization, that is empire disconnecting a people from their place. And then what you do is you take them and you send them to another place that you want to colonize to be your little soldiers. And, you know, so when we're thinking about this on like a soul and a nervous system level, to be disconnected from where you live and a deeper sense of rootedness and identity is actually massive trauma. And so, as we know, hurt people hurt people. So once you have these people dehumanized, you send them out into the world to do really fucked up dehumanizing things to other people. And now they can because you've dehumanized them and you've disconnected them. And so then they come forth and through disease and all kinds of other things, they colonize this land and both wipe out and sometimes appropriate like wisdom traditions that you know they were they're missing, right? Like we need spiritual practices. We actually need there is a nourishment that we need that goes beyond food. And again, I think this gets into it's not just about survival, it's about thriving. And if we're gonna thrive, there's multiple forms of nourishment we need. It's not just do we have a roof over our head and clothes for our body and food and water, those are crucial, but it, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is actually like I I don't I don't think that little like spiritual fun, you know, like pleasure and and creativity and spirituality, that's not the tiniest part of the pyramid, actually. Not if you want to actually thrive. And so yeah, like dressing all these pieces.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so love that. I think that was all important to talk about and mention.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the title.
SPEAKER_02:And basically where I think, yeah, I know where you're going with that, is that basically in those societies there was like a specific name for the person that was doing what you learned to do. Right. Yes, yeah. But it wasn't in that like way of a training. Right.
SPEAKER_00:So there aren't these pure, there aren't mostly pure intact lineages anymore. So that's why my training is kind of more of an integrative. There are places in the world where there still are intact cultures and lineages, but they are few and far between. Most of them have been just, it's incredible that they've survived the colonization that happened to the countries where they were, because there are very few places in the world that haven't experienced some form of colonization within the 20th, the 19th and 20th centuries. Yeah. The whole explorers from Europe wandering out in the world and being like, oh, look. Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah. What do we even call these practices when we don't even have words and our language? You know, and so shaman, we use the word shaman as kind of a catch-all because Western anthropologists started using it. To my understanding, the only people who call themselves that in their own language are in Siberia. And then Western anthropologists start just started applying it to any indigenous wisdom carrier, medicine person, regardless of what they called themselves. Yeah. So it's kind of an awkward term because it's both kind of appropriative and erasive at the same time. Yeah. But it's kind of what we've got, and it's imperfect, but you know, it it does kind of invoke a certain something that I think people kind of start to get, like, okay, we're talking about multiple planes of existence here and bridging them, and that health and wellness and harmony are like, yeah, about well, health and wellness are about harmony within a person, within a society or a community, and then between individuals and the community and the land where they live, and then this energetic world, this which we could call the spiritual world, we could call it the other world, we could call it right, it could have many different names. But it's kind of this it's the world that like rubs along right next to ours, you know. And some people, we all have a certain capacity to kind of sense that it's there. Um, some people are just more attuned to it than others for different reasons, or find that more instinctive. But that yeah, that there that beyond the physical stuff we sense with our physical senses, there's then this other world that is energetic, spiritual, and we sense that with our beyond physical senses, our extras sensory, whatever the word is, the clear the clears. Yeah. But and then within that world, there are consciousnesses as well as then so this idea of animism. Indigenous people the world over seem to have, while everybody has specific, unique things based on where they live and you know their language and their culture and you know, all of that stuff, like a cosm, a unique cosmology. They're also like through threads that seem to be common wherever you find people in the world who yeah, and so one of those is animism, which is the idea that the world, everything in the world has a certain level of consciousness and is sentient. So the trees outside are sentient, you know, they have a consciousness, they have an energy, and different trees will have different energies and different, we could think of them as like personalities, you know, kind of, you know, all the plants, all the rocks, and then within that, even the man-made things have a certain level of that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So you got your certification, and then after that, you probably did you like keep teaching for a little bit? Did and then did you realize what your bigger mission and passion is, which sounds to me like maybe stuff connecting people back to the land and to their lineages and to I imagine that there was probably a curiosity of like, wait a minute, we are really disconnected. And you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is it sounds like there was a curiosity of like, wait a minute, we all got colonized, we are very disconnected. We don't know really even. I mean, we've all had to do like 23andMe to even find out where we're from. We're all just as hodgepodged here and we're disconnected from actual traditions, lineages, song, any of that stuff. We don't even know what that looks like. We have no idea. And so it sounds to me like you got curious of like, well, where do I find that? And what does that look like? And is there a way that we can get connected back to the land, back to our ancestry? And um, so that then we can truly like thrive in the world based on something so simple as connecting back to nature and connecting back. But I feel like that sounds really good. And even when people will say stuff about like, it's ancestral or like, you know, connecting with your ancestors or just using that word in general, I think a lot of times it's like, okay, but what do you talk like how? What do you mean? Like, what are you talking about? That sounds really lovely, and I'd love to connect to the practices and to story and to sit around a fire with people and have these things that feel very, oh, I want that. I love to be out in nature with family and singing songs and making our own meals and you know, doing those things, but nobody knows how, yeah, I feel like. And so are you kind of coming at a place of like that your studies and and immersive that you've been immersing in and figuring out what that looks like?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So I did keep teaching kind of as I transitioned into having like a one-to-one practice for a little while here in Winchester. Then I felt called to be nomadic. I actually had this beautiful trip to India. And when I came back from that, I was like clear that I felt this nudge to be nomadic. So I started trying to find hold our old RV and started kind of trying to transition. And then COVID happened, and so everything went online anyway. But you know, I find that through this stuff, it's interesting because another sort of frequently held indigenous understanding is that life is maintenance, actually, right? Because if everything, so just quickly circling back to the animism thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If everything is conscious, that that means everything is a relationship, actually, rather than our modern world would have us, and like capitalism and empire would have us think of everything basically as a resource, because it looks at everything as a resource to fuel this machine, right? And whether it's a war machine or a capitalism machine or an industry machine, whatever the machine is, right? And so even humans actually are resources within that. And so part of why we burn out so much is that we're being treated like resources and we're actually being extracted from and exploited, like by just kind of how our society is set up. And I think sometimes like that we're doing that to each other, kind of. And I think often we've forgotten that just because society is set up that way now doesn't mean it always has been or that it has to continue to be. Like we actually have a lot of say in how society is set up. Right. And like it takes more than one of us, you know, it takes a, you know, a certain amount of like a sea change, right? But animism for me is one of the ways we start to kind of reconnect because we start to unlearn it's a it's a fundamental worldview that we can pretty much guarantee anybody's ancestors have ascribed to at one point in time. So it's a way of starting to get back into the ancestral connection without having to have specifics. Because some people have specifics and some people don't. But if we can start to try and kind of view the world through an animist lens, we're gonna start to tap back into ancestral wisdom in some kind of way. And along the way, we're gonna start to see the world that we're living in very differently. And we're gonna start to see, whoa, is that why I'm burned out all the time? Because this whole resource thing, and like, whoa, wow, like the fact that I haven't learned how to steward relationships is not maybe not my fault, but also now my responsibility, right? And like, and actually, if I start thinking of the world as like an animist thing and everything as being a relationship, suddenly that changes how much stuff I have, how I manage the stuff I have, right? How I understand. I started sort of saying, yes, this thing about maintenance, right? So if everything's a relationship, then we are always having to tend relationships, right? Relationships require tending. So I think it's the same with like our spiritual practices. I was reflecting on that this morning on my yoga mat, right? And our healing work, whatever we want to call it. In our society, we tend to have a little bit of one and done, right? We want to get the house and we want to have it built nice, and then we can just forget about it for a while. And eventually it'll start to fall down and we'll have to maintain it. But we keep trying to aim for like getting to a point where we can just forget about it for a while. And I think a lot of that's because we're overwhelmed. We have too much stuff on our plate. We were meant to be doing most of what we try to do, like in community, you know, have some collective child care, have some collective task doing, right? Like we were not meant to be doing as much stuff alone as we're currently doing alone. So, anyway, so so I would say, like, even though I didn't name it this way, I wouldn't have known how to name it this way at the time. Yes, my work just keeps evolving because I keep evolving, because as I keep deepening my relationship with these beyond human guides that I'm honored to have work with me and through me. And as I keep deepening my understanding of animism, as I keep kind of unlearning some of like the modern fuckery that kind of seems to be getting in the way of like my sensitivity and my ability to be human and to thrive and all of that kind of stuff and not burn out all the time and to like have a just a juicy, meaningful, feeling life, you know, which I think is what most people want, right? Like on some deep level. As I kind of like keep going along that journey, it keeps taking me kind of these different places. Gotcha. So at one point, you know, so yes, and initially I was just kind of doing the protocols my teachers had taught me, and you know, we were having like beautiful people were having beautiful, you know, shifts, you know, in their sessions with me and that kind of thing. And yeah, and that would, you know, also kind of show up in how I was teaching yoga and how I was cueing and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. And then I started reaching a point where I was kind of like, okay, what's next for me, you know, and like my growth. And I was sitting in a lot of these conversations around cultural appropriation. And I was kind of noticing that I had a little bit of like, even though I understand what colonialism is and the harm that it's done, I was still noticing that I was feeling this like little bit of like, but I have a right to this kind of entitlement voice that was like kind of coming up. And so I was, okay, well, let's follow that little feeling back to its roots and like see what's actually behind it. And so I followed it like down deeper into my body. And then what I came in contact with was just all of a sudden this immense ocean of grief that I could tell was not just mine, but went back through the generations and not just my generations, like my direct ancestry generations, but really what we would call in a racialized world white people, right? And this sense that, and there was a, you know, yes, there's like the entitlement and the grabbiness and the desperation and the hunger, which can lead us to be out of integrity. But underneath that, there is a kernel of integrity, which is like that we need like having access to this level of connection with the land, to this understanding of the world, to a like a meaningful, connected cosmology, right? Where we have a sense of belonging to the world and having a role within it, that that's actually a birthright, that's actually like a fundamentally necessary thing. And that the phrase that came to me at that time is like along with this wave of grief. Grief was like before my people were white, they were something else. And if you go back far enough in that lineage, I don't know how far you have to go, but if you go back far enough, they were once indigenous to a place and had because I think part of why people are drawn to yoga is it's ancient and it feels very different than just kind of modern, new agey kind of trying to cobble it together. The same with shamanic stuff. You know, so the reason we're drawn to practices that may not be quote unquote ours is that there's something in them that we can feel that is fundamentally different than the new stuff we're making up. That makes a lot of sense. So I wonder if there's any breadcrumbs of those like anywhere in these places. And so I started, and so for me, part of I'm lucky enough that I have enough oral history in my family to kind of be able to trace where my lineage is. You know, there might be some surprises in there. I haven't ever done a 23 or me or like anything like that. Those are, you know, they're they're useful but imperfect. Yeah. And I don't love the idea of private companies having my DNA, but that's another conversation for another time. Um, so I haven't done any of those, but I'm lucky enough in my family that we kind of know more or less in the world where we're where we were originally from. And around about that time, actually, the lands of Scotland and Ireland started coming to me in dreams. I could like feel them and they'd start kind of tugging on me, and I was like, okay. So I started kind of studying. Well, I started learning Irish Gaelic, although I haven't been practicing enough to really make much progress with it. But, you know, and and so there's something, and I started learning like some different ancestral skill craft and trying to like cook some foods, and I, you know, took some courses with like traditional songs and listening to some stories and things like that. So there's and just figuring if I did these things that my long enough ago ancestors had done, that energetically then a connection starts to awaken. And so again, even if we don't have the specifics, something somatically, something from the body actually starts to reactivate or kind of spark back to life again. And so I mean, at first one of the Irish songs I learned was like the song that they made during the potato famine. And so it was a song they sang, a keen, a keening, which is like a the Irish practice of like of like a wailing, a grief, it's a practice of grief, a somatic release of grief through through sound, often accompanying funerals, but they made one for the potatoes. And I also learned they would often sing it to people who left on the boats. So as the boats with all the people who were leaving to fight try and find food and work elsewhere because there was none to be had in Ireland, people would gather at the dock and sing this keen for them because you know, at that time when people were poor and it was like you probably weren't coming back again, you know. So you basically, and you know, it's not like we could just WhatsApp, you know, like it was staying in touch was significantly harder and more costly than most of those people at that point could probably afford, many of them. So there was this sense that you almost had to just grieve the person as if they were dying because you were that was it. Yeah, right. Which I mean, when you think about what that does in terms of like cultural connection and being able to keep this spiritual nourishment coming across and alive, you know, the spiritual nourishment, the sense of self, you know, like it's gonna sever that yeah really quickly. Yeah, it's interesting in the old stories, they often talk about the third thing. So there's like two seemingly opposite forces that come together often have a child, right? Represented by characters that and then the child results and it's the third thing. And so I feel like many of us now, and not just what again in a racialized world we would call white people or people of European descent, right? But I think a lot of people around the world, right? There's so much multicultural, there's been so much mixing, there's been so much like I think we're in the age of the third thing where we have to recognize like our responsibility as being the third things. So it's not that we're looking for some pure, you know, I like even if I learn Irish, Gaelic, and even if, right, like I I'm not Irish, I can't claim that. I've you know, the US Americans are very culturally different than Irish people, totally, even though we have a lot of shared ancestry, right? So for me, it's it's become this journey of like looking back, not because there's something perfect back there, or because I can even make a claim to any sort of purity, authenticity, whatever, but that if we can start to find these little breadcrumbs through the cultural remnants that are there, through starting to practice animism, through trying to like put ourselves in our ancestors' shoes and wonder, okay, what babies got thrown out with the bathwater? Right. And then how does that apply to the land where I live now? How does that help me become a good person in whatever repair needs to happen in the wake of colonialism, right? And that I'm living on stolen lands, you know, and like right. But then we're coming to it not from this place of poverty and hunger and desperation ourselves. We're coming to it from this sense of I might be a little bit lost or in between things, but I came from beauty once too, if you go back far enough. And I can now honor and respect the beauty of your cultures and traditions in a different way or show up to that conversation in a different way because I'm not an orphan. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So it's, yeah. So it's this, I think we're kind of in the age of the third thing. This is like something that I've been playing around with this idea. This is, I think, where my work is building to. So I think this is even kind of, I'm getting slightly ahead of myself, but it's the vision, I think. Yeah. Is like, yeah, this sense that what is the future that we're gonna create based on being the bridges between worlds? And a lot of that has to do with learning to navigate this tension within us of being a really multiplicitous being. Totally, you know, yeah. And that same as like what we started the conversation, you know, that we often lose ourselves to have to come back to ourselves. Like, what if that's actually the spiritual journey humanity's been on right now, too? You know, and and so when we find our way back to ourselves, we find our way back to ourselves more conscious, more aware, more evolved than we were when we lost ourselves. Like as little kids, we're innately us. And then we get all these other voices telling us who else to be, and we try to do that game. And then we're like have this moment where we're like, oh my God, I can't sustain that. I'm like burned out, disconnected, depressed, whatever. And who am I? And we start to find our way back to what that little kid knew all along, but now we're doing it as an adult, right? So there's some other layer of richness and depth that's there. So I kind of feel like what if human that's actually what humanity is kind of doing right now. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Humanity. Because I feel like we come and go in waves as humans, like we forget how to be human.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And then we have to build a culture that reminds us how to be human because humans are very good at forgetting how to be human.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Actually. And so then we come up with this culture and we the culture helps us remember how to be human, and then we start to take the culture for granted, or something happens and we get disconnected from it and we get lost again. And then we have to, and so I feel like we're just kind of in this next wave. That makes a lot of sense of having to create a new culture. Yeah. You know, but again, from the sense of like, we're not creating it, we're co-creating it with the land, with the universe, with ancestors, and sort of whatever ancestral memory we can try and kind of awaken. And I think you're right, like people get overwhelmed by that because either our ancestry feels too trauma-filled. I mean, I was so resistant to the idea of ancestral connection for a long time because I was kind of like, fuck my grandparents, my great-grandparents, you know, ugh, all their bad ideas and all their, you know, they're the reason my parents were hurting in this way, which is the reason like they did this to me, you know, like right. Like it's so easy to get that in that story. Yeah, we don't have to either know the specifics. Yes, we have to do some tending of the traumas, but with this idea of let's look for like the overarching things that we can be pretty confident everyone shared. And then maybe we drill into the specifics if we know where they were from. We can start to get the songs and we can start to, but even then it's like gonna we're it's still kind of in the liminal space. There are elders and culture and tradition carriers who are still alive and are still doing their work. So some of it might be finding those people and learning from them and paying them and supporting them, you know, and like maybe even apprenticing with them, depending on if that feels like the right call. But sometimes too, I think it it's like it's gonna have to be a little bit more like liminal and creative, you know, where we're kind of looking for enough rootedness that it feels like it's like that gong boom of rightness kind of and like integrity, but it's gonna have to be a little bit made up because a lot of it's been lost.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Totally. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing. I really appreciate it. For letting me ramble at your no, I love it. I appreciate it. And you're back in Winchester doing some things, right? So yeah, tell us a little bit about what you're gonna be offering in the next coming months.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I've got a deeper three-hour like fire and land ceremony that will be at Stephanie McKinley's place coming up on November 8th. Um, and then we've got a winter solstice one that'll also be at Daydream Studios, yeah, on December 21st. So yeah, a couple different things, but the deeper ceremonies, the three hour ones, you know, those again, you don't need to have experience to come, but it'll just be a more uh primal a little bit and just like more spacious. Yeah. So like we will probably drop in deeper in like sort of in the 90 minute, because the workshop we've got here is like a 90-minute. So it's a little, like I said, a little bit more of an intro taster kind of thing. And the other one will just be like even more cool, kind of dropping into it. Wow, I love. And there will be stories, I'll tell stories that's part of it for me. I love storytelling. So the finding old European fairy tales and myths that actually carry these cultural memories, not just archetypal, like psychological, like, oh, this force in my inner world, and it's not about navel gazing, it's about realizing that these old stories actually hold some memory of when our ancestors were more culturally indigenous. Cool. And so, yeah, that's one of my favorite ways to kind of find the beauty and the ancestral connection. So yeah. Awesome. So then where can people find you? Yeah. So www.wildsacred journey.com is my website, and I'm slowly shifting things over on my website. So I haven't read through all of it like recently. So some pages might feel tonally different from other pages because they just haven't been updated yet. But yes, that's there. I do one-to-one work. I have a sub stack that I started that I took a little bit of a break from. I'm hoping to get back going again. Same with the podcast. Um, but you know, you can find links to all of that on my on my website. And um also, yeah, I'm on Instagram, Wild Sacred Journey underscore the letter K and the letter P E Kate Powell. Cool. My initials. Uh, and I am also on Facebook too, although a little bit less. So I would say Instagram and the website are kind of the better ways. Right now, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I there's only again, there's only so many relationships that I can tend. Yeah, it's so true. With social platforms.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing and for being here. And we'll have, yeah, we'll have the website in the show notes as well if you guys are interested. And yeah, hopefully we'll see you in person soon. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you, Laura.