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

In this tender episode of Belonging, I'm sharing the story of the birth of my daughter, Atlas. To help me piece together all that happened (because parts are already beginning to fade and other parts exist for me outside of time and space), my dear friend and new doula who was with me through the whole process, Nisha Moodley, joined me to guide us through the conversation.Together, we weave the story of what happened over the course of my 48+ hour labor — sharing moments of celebration, moments of grief and fear, and moments that happened outside of my awareness. As I share with Nisha, it's helpful to be witnessed in my own processing of this birth experience. It's something I'll be processing forever and a story I will want to tell again and again.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/birth-story/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 Nisha on Instagram: http://instagram.com/nishamoodley/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

Amber Magnolia Hill is the woman behind Mythic Medicine and the Medicine Stories Podcast for people who year for knowledge about herbalism, deepening ancestral connections, and remembering what it is to be human upon the earth. She helps folks drop the cultural lies, disconnection, and disempowerment, and remember that the old ways are in our bones. I first met Amber at the Spirit Weavers Gathering where she was teaching an herbal body oiling class. Her Medicine Stories Podcast has featured so many conversations that have really shifted my perspectives and given me a deeper understanding of being an ancestral being and a being on this earth.I invited Amber on the Belonging podcast, knowing I would release this conversation while I am in the tender moments of post-partum with my new baby because she has had so much to say about mothering and how mothers are not supported in our society. We talk about the desire to re-village, slowing down in these times and finding our way to a parasympathetic state, ancestral connection in motherhood, expressing and interacting with folks who are grieving, and the Grandmother Hypothesis.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/amber-magnolia-hill/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 Amber on Instagram: http://instagram.com/mythicmedicineFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

I've got a much-anticipated conversation to share with you today with Toko-pa Turner, author of the bestselling book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home which explores the themes of exile and the search for belonging. I named this podcast Belonging before I came across Toko-pa's book, and then once I learned of it and as more and more folks shared her work with me, I felt more of a love and resonance for Toko-pa and I knew I would have her on the podcast someday.Toko-pa is a Canadian author, teacher, and dreamworker. Blending the mystical tradition of Sufism in which she was raised with a Jungian approach to dreamwork, she founded the Dream School in 2001 from which hundreds of students have since graduated. Sometimes called a midwife of the psyche, Toko-pa's work focuses on restoring the feminine, reconciling paradox, and facilitating sacred grief and ritual practice.Together we talk about initiations by exile — specifically as it relations to isolation during COVID-19, false belonging, the wound of isolation when you need community support and cannot get it, intergenerational displacement of belonging, learning to show up for others in a sustained way, the grief of living with a degenerative disease, receiving dreams at an early age and how they parented Toko-pa when she was in the foster system, dreams as living creatures, and using "belong" as an active verb.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/toko-pa-turner/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 Toko-pa on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tokopa/Follow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

I'm so happy to bring you this conversation with my friend and former mentor, Lola Pickett. Through her courses and programs, Lola empowers empaths and sensitive folk to rewire their brains, bodies, and behavior for internal and external resilience — shifting from self-repression to soul-expression. She is the published author of the Wild Messengers Alchemical Tarot and founder of EMPATH*ology™—an emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual resiliency training program. Her offerings blend cutting-edge neuroscience with trauma healing, herbalism, permaculture, ritual, and play to create powerful and lasting results.I invited Lola on the Belonging podcast to talk about resilience — you'll hear in this episode how I'm feeling tender and curious about motherhood and pregnancy. So Lola is sweet to share her perspectives as a mother of two. We also revisit the theme that you may have noticed in this podcast: the power of naming. Lola shares the story of renaming herself and also of her perspective on the responsibility of naming her own children. We talk about approaching resilience with integrity (not muscling through) and learning to trust yourself, how to respond when it all feels like too much, treating resilience like trauma work, the four Fs (flight, fight, fawn, freeze), and dealing with social media addiction.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/lola-pickett/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 Lola on Instagram: https://instagram.com/moonandmanifestFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

Joining me in this episode of the Belonging podcast is Mara Glatzel, an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host who helps perfectionists and people pleasers reclaim their sovereignty. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it, and she is here to help you believe in yourself as much as she believes in you.I invited Mara on the Belonging podcast to talk about a topic we really bond over, which is overcoming the patterns and behaviors of overworking, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and instead claiming our needs in a really deep and radical way. There's something about the way Mara talks about it that is just so refreshing. So together we talk about self-care as a function of privilege and how we see neediness and having needs as something that is "cringe-worthy" when really we all have needs and it's not neediness itself that is the problem, but your belief about your needs that is the problem. We also talk about expanding needs beyond physical needs, how needs and belonging intersect, the difference between needs and wants, lineages of needs that went unmet, asking ourselves "who am I doing this for?", navigating needs with a partner and children, seeking validation through striving, and the grief in our limits of our capacity to do.Find show notes for this episode here: https://beccapiastrelli.com/mara-glatzel/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 Mara on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maraglatzelFollow Becca on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beccapiastrelli/

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/