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

In this episode of the Belonging Podcast, I am joined by Lindsay Mack — a queer intuitive Tarot teacher, writer, and the founder of the popular weekly podcast, Tarot for the Wild Soul. She is also the creator of Soul Tarot, a radical reinterpretation and intentional utilization of the Tarot as a healing tool, one that can assist us in differentiating the noise of our brain from the truth of our soul.I first met Lindsay at the Spirit Weavers Gathering where she was teaching Tarot and we've been tangentially weaving closer and closer together ever since. Lindsay asked to come on the Belonging Podcast to talk about her recent discoveries in her own ancestral healing process. She describes herself as a joyful survivor of childhood abuse, C-PTSD, and chronic pain/illness, and so I ask her to elaborate on that use of the word "joyful." We talk about the difference between being happy and experiencing joy and how unexpected moments of joy can come out of deep grief. We talk about being the caretaker for your child-self as an adult, the journey and intertwining of anti-racism work and ancestral work, how to work with ancestors if you don't know of any "well" ancestors and have patterns of abuse and addiction in your ancestry, and deepening into ancestry work through connecting with and learning about ancestral lands.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/lindsay-mack/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 Lindsay on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wildsoulhealing/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

I'm delighted a share a conversation with my dear friend Majo Molfino.  Majo helps women birth their dreams and share their gifts without quitting their day jobs. She is a self-described recovering “good girl” and daughter of immigrants, and as of this episode, she is the author of Break the Good Girl Myth, which empowers readers to break free from their good girl conditioning and design a more purposeful life. She is also the host of the HEROINE podcast, which is a very good listen.Together, we talk about adult friendships and our own friendship history and how cool it's been to witness her entire journey of bringing her book to life. Majo shares her own history being part of an immigrant family from Argentina and how the desire for belonging leads to assimilation as a "good girl." We talk about the primary myths of the good girl (mine is harmony) and getting used to feeling discomfort and we break, unravel, and unlearn these myths. Majo also shares the story of reclaiming her name, which gets us into a conversation about the power of naming (something that's been on my mind a lot as I prepare to name my baby).Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/majo-molfino/Follow Majo on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/majomolfinoFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

Asia Suler joins me in this episode of the Belonging Podcast. Asia is a writer, teacher, mystic, and herbalist who lives in the folds of the Blue ridge mountains. She is the creator and concoctress of One Willow Apothecaries, an Appalachian-grown company that offers lovingly handcrafted medicines and alchemical gateways of education. Her classes are a unique combination of western and energetic herbalism, stone medicine, earth-centered shamanism, and intuitive healing.I first found Asia on Instagram and as I've been doing pilgrimage over the last several years, so has she. I really love her perspective on the more-than-human world, how we can connect to the earth, and how it shows us our inherent goodness. In this episode, she shares how, like me, she grew up in suburbia, but then had a health crisis that took her to the wild. Asia gives us ideas on how to get started in building our relationship with the wild. We talk about reciprocity and animism, and what to do if you feel silly or judged in your communion with the earth.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/asia-suler/Follow Asia on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asiasuler/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

Rachael Rice is someone who I have held in high esteem for some time. She is first and foremost, an artist — depicting the world as she sees it and as what she sees coming. She's also a prolific writer, educator, and death doula. Her work lies at the crossroads of grief, radical togetherness, creative expression, death, learning, and magic. Rachael's art, writing, and speaking have really expanded my lens of the world as I work to decolonize my mind and awaken to a deeper, more real, more radical experience of this world. So I asked Rachael to come onto the Belonging podcast to talk about death, knowing that we would weave a conversation that goes so much deeper than just death — because death is a part of life, it's a part of all things.I really see this conversation as a continuation of the one I began with my death midwife teacher, Jerrigrace Lyons, on the Belonging podcast last year. Rachael and I recorded this conversation with the nearness of death that felt potent in the height of COVID-19. Together, We talk about how we live in a death-phobic society, a society that believes in unfettered growth — not really taking in that life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We talk about the consequences when we pretend that things don't end (because they do), being in an underworld journey, somatic grief embodiment practices, and a radical remembering of animism.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/rachael-rice/Follow Rachael on Instagram: https://instagram.com/rachaelriceFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

Shauna Janz joins me in this episode of Belonging. Shauna is a sacred grief counselor who holds space for all the areas and intersections of grief — embodiment, rituals, ancestral connection, and the individual and group process. She is dedicated to tending belonging in our world — within ourselves, with each other, with our other-than-human relations and with the sacred. She creates space for reaching into the rough and beautiful places that are a catalyst for transformation and healing, personally and collectively. Her offerings are trauma-aware, somatic-informed, and culturally-inclusive and anchored in the resiliency of the human spirit, decolonizing, and animist values.Shauna and I recorded this episode before the current uprisings, so our conversation about grief was mostly focused on COVID-19 (which is still a present reality), but working with our grief is absolutely relevant to our calls to dismantle white supremacy and police brutality and create a paradigm shift. Together we talk about questioning our relationship with grief, grief as an offering, the need to be witnessed in grief, disenfranchised grief, and inherited resilience vs. inherited trauma.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/shauna-janz/Follow Shauna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sacredgriefshaunajanz/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

Julie Parker, Founder of The Beautiful You Coaching Academy, Co-Founder of Priestess Temple School, host of the Priestess Podcast, published author (her book Priestess is available for pre-order as of TODAY!), and speaker joins me in this episode of the Belonging Podcast.Together, we talk about the meaning of the word "priestess" and what it looks like to embody it in this world, ancestral pilgrimage and being descended from European lands while living in colonized Australia (where Julie lives), our collective longing for sisterhood and how to heal trust with other women, and leaning into discomfort in order to build new paradigms — Julie shares her story of choosing to turn down a major book deal that was out of integrity.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/julie-parker/Order Priestess here: https://juliesuzanneparker.com/priestessbook/Follow Julie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julesyparker/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

June Marisa Kaewsith, also known as "Jumakae," joins me on the Belonging Podcast today. Jumakae is a professional artist, wellness consultant, and storytelling coach who first roped me in with her TEDx talk and her powerful storytelling voice. I knew I wanted to talk with her on Belonging about her ancestral connection, but we dove so much more into the power of stepping into your ancestral identity in these times of the pandemic and ways to navigate these times of uncertainty — including envisioning the future in a different way.Together, we talk about how to stay rooted in times of change, how June changed her name as an act of empowerment and deepening into her Asian-American identity, ancestral connection practices (and how we tend to over-complicate them), breaking the model minority myth, releasing the need to take on the world's suffering as our own, creation as self-regulation, and using this time to envision a new future.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/jumakae/Follow Jumakae on Instagram: http://instagram.com/jumakae/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

Much of the curiosity around my work has to do with ancestral connection and ancestral practices, which is why I am so excited to share my conversation with Gogo Thule Ngane on this episode of Belonging.Gogo is a Sangoma priestess and healer guided by the elevated ancestors of her lineages from the Mossi of West Africa and Zulu of South Africa. She works as a diviner using ancestral shamanic practices and ceremonial traditions. Her healing practice offers workshops, ceremonies, and retreats from the perspective of ancient African cosmologies. She walks the path of a wisdom keeper devoted to preserving and honoring the ancestral way of healing.It is such a privilege to talk to someone who is so connected to their ancestral ways as Gogo is. Gogo shares her journey to becoming a Sangoma priestess, how she's learned and remembered the ways of her ancestors, her current ancestral practices, ancestral elevation, and calling upon ancestors and elders during scary and uncertain times.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/gogo-thule-ngane/Follow Gogo Thule Ngane on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thuleheals/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

In this episode of the Belonging podcast, I am joined by Asha Frost, an Anishinaabe (Ojibway) Medicine Woman (member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation), Healer, and Spiritual Mentor. Asha wrote an article titled "Dear White Woman who wants to be like me," which went viral for many of the same reasons why it caught my attention: it's a powerful calling in around cultural appropriation.Together, we talk about Asha's experience as a First Nations woman of Turtle Island, having grandparents who grew up on the reservation and were sent to residential school, the ways carrying generational trauma shows up in Asha's life plus how she works through it, navigating the response of her viral article, and cultural appropriation.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/asha-frost/Follow Asha Frost on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asha.frostFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/

I'm thrilled to bring you a conversation with Ayana Young, a fierce warrior for the earth and fellow podcaster. I have learned so much from Ayana over the years about what it means to be alive in the Anthropocene (the Age of Man) and how to find hope in action. Ayana specializes in intersectional environmental and social justice, deep ecology and land-based restoration, and was a co-founder of the Environmental Working Group.Together Ayana and I talk about how she lives her life today in the woods of northern California and her commitment to a new way of being in the Anthropocene. We dig into the psychological dimensions — the fear and grief and discomfort — of living in these times, not just with the world-wide pandemic, but in the midst of climate collapse and whatever else might be coming our way. It's a heavy but important conversation, including about finding hope and action in this moment and in the future.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/ayana-young/Follow Ayana Young on Instagram: http://instagram.com/for.the.wild/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/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/