The Kinspirit Podcast

What does it mean to become ecological? This is the burning question behind today's podcast episode with Kelly Moody. These days especially, the word "ecology" has been cycling around internet, sparking many, many conversations about what it means to establish new relationships with each other and the land. In this episode, Kelly and I discuss why becoming ecological is not so much about what we "know" about nature, but about recognizing our inherent relationship with the Earth, each other, and all things else.

About Kelly

Kelly Moody is the main curator behind the Ground Shots Project and Podcast as well as is one of the CO-collaborators of the Colorado Trail Plant-a-go project.

She grew up in rural southern Virginia near the border of North Carolina in tobacco and muscadine country. Growing up here, she went to her grandma's house daily as a child, where fresh biscuits and iced tea were a regular necessity. Her other grandma was a determined plant lady who started a nursery business on the outskirts of their small rural town, which remained open for almost 50 years. Kelly grew up hiding with her sister in the tropical greenhouses, taking craft classes in the small nursery workshop, shelling green beans and canning tomatoes. These experiences of being on the family farm, working with plants and creating followed Kelly into her adulthood.

The past decade she has spent living simply in different landscapes studying plants, ecology and craft, writing about the land, growing food and herbs, or honoring her wanderlust by living on the road.

She received a B. A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies in 2009 from Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She has studied herbal medicine, land tending, ecology and botany with Rebecca Golden in southern Vermont, Paul Strauss and Chip Carrol at the Goldenseal Sanctuary in southeast Ohio, Luke Learningdeer and Marc Williams in western North Carolina. She apprenticed with Juliet Blankespoor and attended the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine in Asheville, NC in 2013. She helped manage the gardens at Dancing Springs Farm in Asheville, NC from 2014-2016. She studied book arts and paper-making at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. She taught hide tanning techniques for classes held by the medieval bookbinder Jim Croft at his rural Idaho homestead from 2017-2019. She has completed a handful of art + activism focused artist residencies and workshops including Signal Fire's month-long Wide Open Studios program during the summer of 2017 in the Pacific Northwest and in the fall of 2019 in the Southwest. These programs greatly influenced the trajectory of her work connecting creativity and human relationship with ecology. In Summer 2020, she hiked the Colorado Trail documenting plants on foot and made notes on wild food and medicine gardens found along the old Ute pathways. Her educational work over the years has included holding classes on hide tanning, plant ID, wild foods, medicine making, natural dyes, nutrition and gardening.

Kelly’s interest in storytelling and cross-cultural dialogue comes from both an upbringing in the small-town rural south and the inspiration of meeting people while living on the road.

Learn more about her work at the links below:

• Her Blog + Shop: Of Sedge and Salt
• Follow her on Instagram here and here

Other links:

• Our new workshop, Greeting the Polypoetic Self
• Follow the Regenerative Mystic Podcast on Instagram
• Follow the Kinspirit on Instagram

What does it look like to be current and liberated in your storytelling work? Can you taste the potency, joy, life, and potential of your medicine?

In this episode with Megan Febuary, we talk about the power of story as world-building work and how when we allow ourselves to honor our bodies in the creation process, we grant ourselves the opportunity to draft works that offer powerful medicine that is joyous to create and relevant to this time.

In this episode we explore:

• Growing our capacity to create new stories.
• How a trauma-sensitive approach to storytelling opens us to up to flow and the power of our voices.
• Stepping into the true power of being a storyteller in this day.
• How the work of transforming ideas into digestible forms, especially through the lens of a trauma-informed approach, is the work of wonder, power, and magic.
• Human Design as a language for style, rhythm, voice, and the true expression
• Practical ways to use Human Design to support discipline and self-expression in the creative process.

About Megan

Megan Febuary is an author, trauma-informed writing coach, and founder of the storytelling platform For Women Who Roar featured women’s voices from around the world. She has published thousands of works of women and helped hundreds write their books and heal their story. She is currently working on her second book. 

Links:

Follow Megan on Instagram
Follow For Women Who Roar on Instagram
Your Book Year - Writing Coaching
For Women Who Roar Podcast
For Women Who Roar - Online Publication
For Women Who Roar - Print Poetry Collection 

In this episode, Taria and I sit down to explore hunger, nourishment, sensitivity, and reciprocity with food. As a breast cancer and eating disorder survivor, a highly sensitive James Beard award-winning french-trained chef, nourishment guide, and gustatory synesthete, Taria moves through the world with a raw conviction and deep wisdom about how humanity's relationship with food is aching for a revolution. In this episode we explore...

• How food is the first place we learn to stop trusting our inner knowing.
• How eating disorders and body dysmorphia are deeply connected to the larger food systems at play and how we've been disconnected from our relationship with nature and intuitive nourishment.
• Her story of growing up impoverished, hungry, and sensitive to her environment and food.
• How she found a voice through food, flavor, and spice and her journey into new realms of communication through taste.

Relevant Links:

• Follow Hunger as Lover on Instagram
• Follow Today We Eat Well on Instagram
• Bon Apetit: How CBD Chocolate Saved my Life by Taria Camerino
• Fearless Innovation by Taria Camerino

Marie Eve Laflamme is an Eco-Depth Art Therapist who is on a mission to provide beauty seekers with a safe and imaginative space to go deeper into their relationship with Self. In this episode, Marie Eve shares her own journey of making meaning through spiritual and psychological crises, using her experiences to artfully shape a life and path of radical belonging with the Earth. In this episode we explore:

• Deconstructing Evangelicalism and how this portal of spiritual disintegration opened Marie's heart to explore a more true-to-her relationship with Spirit.
• Spiritual and Cultural Loss and how her journey to Mexico supported her to appreciate the richness and truths of her own spiritual and cultural lineage.
• Making Meaning from Crisis and how Marie uses her art practice and her relationship with the seasons to weave a new story of who she is and why she's here.
• Anchoring into the Earth and the Seasons and how the Seasons provide us an accessible framework for reclaiming belonging and remembering who we are in essence.

Relevant Links:

• Follow Marie Eve on Instagram
• Marie's Website

Recorded in the Spring of 2022, so much has since happened in both my and Rachael's lives. So much has evolved. This episode is a testament to the beauty of trusting change. Change comes to bring us an opportunity to grow in wisdom and depth. Change comes to bring us an opportunity to parse, understand, see, and love ourselves a little more deeply. Change comes to bring the outer structural shifts that are needed in order to support our inner evolutionary cycles. Honor the change happening in your life. Honor the disintegration. Honor the parse and the parts that make themselves evident on the other side of change.  Trust your wholeness, your seasons, your body, and cyclical time enough to know that goodness is coming. Integration is coming. Joy is coming. Truth is here.

About Rachael

Rachael Maddox is a seasoned guide to healers & CEOs, as well as a 2-time author, podcaster, DJ, and full-blood witch.  Her work for the last 13 years has centered around facilitating personal and collective post-traumatic growth, and as such, Rachael has taught hundreds of coaches, therapists and guides the art and craft of safe and effective trauma resolution. Most recently, Rachael has devoted to supporting leading edge entrepreneurs in coming into their most radically aligned medicine – the kind that serves both them and the world, simultaneously.  To learn more from Rachael, dive into her books, Secret Bad Girl and ReBloom: Archetypal Trauma Resolution for Personal and Collective Healing at rebloomtogether.com, or tune in with her podcast and magical Dance Temples at rachaelmaddox.substack.com. She also writes and shares regularly on Instagram at instagram.com/rachaelmaddox.

Relevant Links

• Rebloom: Archetypal Trauma Resolution for Personal and Collective Healing
• Secret Bad Girl by Rachael Maddox
• Rebloom Our World Podcast with Rachael Maddox
• Free Embodied Trust Rebloom Meditation
• Free Rebloom Coherence Course Introduction
• Rebloom Coherence Course
• Follow Kinspirit on Instagram
• www.kinspirit.org

In this episode, I share a bit about Quantum Selfhood, our core theory of change, and a mythos for discovering our wholeness through relating. Quantum Selfhood is the understanding that all aspects of reality are extensions of the self. And that even at the smallest fragment of measurement, there is no corner of the cosmos that is not in some way related.

In this episode, we explore:

• What is quantum selfhood? Where does this term come from?
• Why quantum selfhood sits at the center of our core theory of change.
• The four pillars of Quantum Selfhood: Soul, Soil, Society, and Spirit.
• The three ways we desire to activate relationship to these four pillars through our work in Kinspirit: Soul Remembrance, World Building, Rites of Passage Work
• The seven symptoms of our lost rites of passage and why we need new stories, myths, and rites of passage in order to realize new futures for our world.
• The three rites of Quantum Selfhood that we'll explore in our work in Kinspirit: Essence Liberation, Sacred Ecology, Ritual Communion

Learn more about Kinspirit and our work at www.instagram.com/kinspirit

Update episode! Brave School is now Kinspirit. In this episode, I share quite a bit of behind-the-scenes of how I've been navigating change, spiritual death, and regeneration the last season. Inside of this episode, I explore themes of...

• My Move to Santa Fe – Sickness + Facing off with Burnout
• Radical Rest and Radical Death
• Calling my energy back from Burnout and Donning Sovereignty
• Breaking Rapport and Deep Grief in Letting Brave School Go
• Dialing in and Finetuning the Vision
• Unplugging from a Mechanistic Relationship with Work
• Developing a Reciprocal Relationship with Current, with Soil

Learn more about Kinspirit at www.instagram.com/kinspirit

Reclaim Creative was founded in 2020 by Allie Chamberlain - an architect, slow fashion advocate, and self-taught sewist who comes from a long lineage of Appalachian and Western Kentucky quilters. Offering a fresh take on clothing, their garments are crafted from repurposed and vintage textiles - most often vintage quilts that are decades, if not one hundred years old. They are made with love, often made by hand, and hold heritage within their threads. This process of restoring forgotten textiles is just one facet of the way that Allie sees beauty in the forgotten world. Tune into this episode to learn more as we chat social media, entrepreneurship, textiles, restoration, community-centered design thinking, and seeking community restoration.

About Allie Chamberlain

Allie Chamberlain is an architect, slow fashion advocate, and self-taught sewist - comes from a lineage of Appalachian and Western
Kentucky quilters. Growing up, she was always taught how to quilt, sew, and make her own garments, but it wasn't until architecture school that she really began to value the power of repurposed textiles. She has worked for a sustainable fashion company, co-owned a second-hand clothing shop, practiced architecture at three firms, and is currently running her own repurposed textile business - reclaim creative.

Resources Mentioned:

• Reclaim Creative - Instagram
• Reclaim Creative - Website

About Brave School:

Brave School is an institute of dreaming for wild-hearted creatives and entrepreneurs who are looking for an alternative, embodied, and regenerative approach to business and brand strategy. Through this approach, we host gatherings, workshops, and a membership that supports creatives in shaping and sharing their work with the world. We exist to support creatives in creating their true soul work, building evolutionary companies, and earning a viable revenue in the process.

• Building Brave Membership
• Upcoming Events and Retreats
• Own Your Voice Mini-Course

"Your skin does not separate you from the natural world. It's a bridge through which the external world flows into you. And you flow into it." - Alan Watts

Many of us go through our lives seeing our skin as a gentle boundary between our inward selves and the outside world. But what if the skin is actually a mirror – a porous portal between our souls and the soul of the world?  In this episode of the Regenerative Mystic Podcast, we chat with Kalpana Arias, founder of Nowadays on Earth to chat about how to grow ecosomatic consciousness: the capacity to commune with and be attuned by the natural world through the body. In this episode, we explore how to communicate with nature and the collective benefits of forming a relationship with the natural world that not only affects our individual and local systems but has the potential to impact the world at large.

Keynotes of this Episode:

06:26 - Kalpana's take on direct observation

09:51 - What is the language of nature?

12:17 - Conversation is in our movement

15:11 - The skin as an interface and we are a collective of mirrors

17:01 - What is the myth of individualism?

19:00 - Living Systems Theory

26:00 - Growing your language and getting in tune with your body

19:15 - Dropping in and being present with our bodies

33:00 - Expanding time through the body

About Kalpana Arias

Kalpana is a tech-anthropologist, climate activist, and ecosomatics educator currently working at the intersection between technology, nature, and urban design. In 2020 they founded Nowadays On Earth; a platform advocating for contact with nature in the digital age as a response to our global deprivation of green spaces and our need for human-nature relationships for individual and planetary wellbeing.

Resources Mentioned:

• Living Systems Thinking
• Alan Watts - Your Skin is Not a Boundary

About Brave School

Brave School is an institute of dreaming for wild-hearted creatives and entrepreneurs who are looking for an alternative, embodied, and regenerative approach to business and brand strategy. Through this approach, we host gatherings, workshops, and a membership that supports creatives in shaping and sharing their work with the world. We exist to support creatives in creating their true soul work, building evolutionary companies, and earning a viable revenue in the process.

• Building Brave Membership
• Upcoming Events and Retreats
• Own Your Voice Mini-Course

In this episode of the Regenerative Mystic podcast, I'm talking about what essence liberation is and what I mean by that term. I talk about how I relate to my identity as a black queer futurist regenerative mystic in the conversations about regenerative paradigm, the creative process, and mysticism.

Learn more about the Regenerative Mystic podcast at www.braveschool.co/podcast. Follow us on social media at @theregenerativemystic / @braveschool.co / @thestorydoula