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

In this episode of Belonging, I'm sharing what my life looks like now on the other side of birth for any of you who are wondering what life looks like as a new parent or who are struggling to find the elusive balance. I share how I (attempt to) balance business, mothering, self-care, and partnership, what motherhood looks like now one year in, how my greatest lesson in this time is patience, my feelings of panic from aging and time passing, and how I deal with feeling incompetent and like I can't keep up.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/balance-daily-life/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

So many of us are desiring tools and methods to connect with the land we live on. In this episode of the Belonging podcast, I share ways that I'm building a relationship with the living world after feeling like I've lost it since entering motherhood. I share about the colonial construct of "nature," the history of enclosure and the separation of humans from the natural world, holding an animist view of the world, tuning into the land you're on throughout time, being in relationship with the land by grieving the loss, and practices for connecting with the land.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/relationship-living-world/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

In this episode of Belonging, I'm sharing the complicated thoughts and feelings I'm experiencing being a mother — choosing to bring a child into this world — and living in a time of climate collapse. I share somatic tools for how I'm dealing with the anxiety and grief of these times, questioning if it's ethical to bring a child into this world, building community care and knowing your neighbors, and conjuring curiosity to find out what you need to know rather than catastrophizing.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/mothering-eco-grief/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

I've had many questions and curiosities about my book, the book writing process, and how I got my book published, so this episode of the Belonging podcast is the full story of what went into the creation and publication of Root & Ritual.I share when I first felt the calling to write a book, being in integrity with the why of writing a book (and not just because I wanted to feel successful and important), the lineage healing story that went into writing a book, finding a book agent, writing (and re-writing) a book proposal, pitching the book and getting rejected, writing a book while pregnant, what no one talks about: getting help to write a book, my actual writing process, and the tools I used to write.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/how-i-wrote-a-book/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

I have slowly emerged from my cocoon here in this outward facing internet space after taking a much-needed and restorative three-month mama sabbatical. My time was spent making my life as small and as energetically boundaried as possible so I could catch my breath, be with my baby as she turned one year old, and orient myself back to center enough to feel in my body again. I am now seeing how moving through this rite of passage of having a child has woven me even more deeply into alignment with the seasons and cycles of my wild body and spirit.So this episode of Belonging is a solo episode where I share how this time has been for me. I talk about the importance of admitting when you're over-capacity, recognizing when you're putting yourself last (especially as a parent), re-negotiating identity (why am I doing this?), being willing to question everything, my need to be seen as transforming, and coping with my grief by learning to make my world small.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/mama-sabbatical/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

This episode of Belonging is a swapcast with Kathryn Fink of The Heart is a Cauldron. Kathryn believes in a world where each of us lives in deep connection — with our wild soul, our purpose, and our place in the wondrous web of being. To magic this world into reality, they sew an untamed array of seeds into the soil of their work as a mentor, podcaster, and queer mystic — weaving together animist ethics and enchantment, trauma-informed Buddhist psychology, transformational coaching, reverence for the mythic spirit and ancestral folkways, a devotion to justice, and a lifetime of living in the liminal.Together in this episode, we talk about the tender and vulnerable ways we have learned about belonging, belonging as a radical antidote to Empire, the perversion of belonging in toxic religious spaces, finding belonging and sacred connection in the places churches have been built (atop ancient sacred sites), what we've learned about belonging through podcasting, approaching belonging when someone disagrees with you, how to find belonging in a time such as this, and creating personal rituals and living practices around grief.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/kathryn-fink/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Kathryn on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kathryn.a.fink/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

Lara Veleda Vesta is back on the Belonging podcast, continuing the threads of our conversation from a couple years ago and introduce her new book, Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine.Lara is an artist, author, storyteller, and educator transforming chronic illness into a path of healing and reclaiming. Her research interests include ancestral connection and disability as initiation. She shares her journey with mythtelling, folk magic, ancestor lore, and ritual practice with her Patreon community and through classes at the Wild Soul School.Together in this episode, we talk about Lara's process with writing and illustrating her new book and getting the book deal, what are the runes and where did they come from, being in relationship with ancestral tools, how to work with Lara's book Wild Soul Runes,the journey to spiritual sovereignty, and finding spirituality amidst chronic illness and disability.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/wild-soul-runes/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Lara on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veledavesta/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

We are living in a time of collective trauma and that is exactly what I'm talking about with my guest, Rachael Maddox, in this episode of Belonging.Rachael Maddox is a trauma resolution educator, coach, and guide who’s helped hundreds of humans move from sexual, complex or developmental trauma into pleasure, power, and trust-filled relationships. Rachael teaches and mentors other coaches, healers, and therapists who are devoted to trauma-informed, radically inclusive, pleasure-positive approaches to changing lives and culture.Together in this episode, we talk about how we are living inside prolonged panic of collective trauma right now, how to define secure attachment through a somatic/nervous system lens, how to tune into our range of resilience and regulation, how we begin to build stories and identities around our physiological responses and the collective trauma bonding we're having with folks who have similar trauma responses, post-traumatic growth, feeling the collective need for collective grieving, finding the smallest way to mobilize, the desire for revillaging and what makes it so difficult in practice, and finding our center of sovereignty in order to truly be in regenerative community and building it at the right scale.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/rachael-maddox/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Rachael on Instagram: http://instagram.com/rachaelmaddox/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

MaryBeth Bonfiglio joins me on this episode of the Belonging podcast to talk about the many commonalities we have in our ancestral connection work and lives. MaryBeth is a writer and a practitioner of ancestral folk magic of her ancestors (from Sicily and mainland Italy). She is deeply devoted to knowing and understanding her roots and learning their ancient and not-so-ancient ways of being together, and with the land. She also gathers people on her ancestral land of Sicily to anchor in the earth, village practices, food stories, ancestral arts, dance, music, and celebration—all within community.Together we talk about feeling (un)belonging where you live and finding a sense of home, how to live in apology and do the repair work when it's hard to stay on colonized land, connecting to ancestral lands as a relational experience, and coming back to the "why" of ancestral connection.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/marybeth-bonfiglio/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow MaryBeth on Instagram: http://instagram.com/marybethbonfiglioFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

This episode really feels like I'm inviting you into my home and into a relationship that has been really vital and nourishing to me and that is with Bethany Gurrola of Alma Rising.Bethany is my post-partum doula, but as we talk about in this episode, the relationship and support system we're building is really so much more than that. It's built on a real sense of reciprocity. So in this ongoing exploration of what it means to be in deep community, grieving the loss of the village, and navigating a way back to re-villaging, Bethany and I realized that something about what's happening between us feels like we're on the right track.So together we talk about the nature of this relationship and the importance of doula support for everyone in a variety of important life moments. We talk about boundaries and self-care in doula work, reciprocity of energy within Capitalism, how doula care ripples outward into your community, the difference between nannies and doulas, dreaming forward better medical support — for queer, nonbinary, trans, Black, and Indigenous folks and families, and teen moms, and working with the youth to set change in motion and foster emotional intelligence from a formative age.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/bethany-gurrola/My book Root & Ritual: Timeless Ways to Connect to Land, Lineage, Community, and the Self is now available wherever books are sold! My intention with this book is for it to be your guide to reconnecting with the earth, your ancestors, and your communities as you come home to your whole self. Despite our best efforts, our modern world leaves so many of us feeling isolated, unworthy, and alone. We’re unrooted from the land, untethered from our lineages, disconnected from our communities, and separated from our deepest sense of self. Root & Ritual is meant to be a pathway back to connection and wholeness through rituals, recipes, and ancestral wisdom. Find more information at: http://rootandritualbook.com/Follow Bethany on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alma_rising_doulacare/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/