The Numinous Podcast

I'm thrilled to welcome esteemed dreamwork practitioner, Toko-pa Turner to the podcast today! Although we live relatively close to each other and have several friends in common, this is our first ever conversation. I'm excited to have more of them because we just barely touched on the interests we share. I love how Toko-pa articulates her approach to investigating the personal unconscious and the work of being part of the collective. Her new book, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, is the jumping off point of our conversation. It leads us into an exploration of her Sufi upbringing, her perilous journey through the foster care system, acknowledging white privilege, elder wisdom, turning to face the Dark Dream, and how dreams can help lead us back to ourselves and each other. Learn all about her dreamwork offerings on her website, toko-pa.com.

Buckle up for a wild conversation that explores the highs and lows of spiritual self-help, addiction, parenting, trauma, relationships, bereavement and motherhood. Emelia Symington Fedy is an artist and storyteller. Her new audio memoir is called Trying To Be Good: The Healing Powers Of Lying, Cheating, Stealing And Doing Drugs. Emilia is a new friend of mine, a friend of a friend, and a kindred spirit in many ways. So it felt good and safe for us to "go there" in this interview. Content warning: we go into topics like teenage sexuality, sexual assault and rape, death and dying, all of it. It's intense at times. It's also funny and tender. It's very real. Do you ever feel alone in your trauma, or your shame, or your dark thoughts? We're right here with you. We had this conversation with you in mind. Here's where you can purchase the audio memoir, read Emelia's articles, and hire her creative genius.

Are you ready for a deep dive into mystery schools, Druidry, the Kabbala, the Tree of Life, the Gnostics, and geomancy? What?? All in one conversation? YES! This conversation is an incredible treat. Returning to The Numinous Podcast for the third time is my guest, John Michael Greer. He's a world-renowned authority on a million things, and today we're focusing on his excellent handbook, The Celtic Golden Dawn: An Original & Complete Curriculum of Druidic Study. It is well worth your time to peruse John's Amazon author page, and try to grasp just how much research has gone into his life's work to this point. I own several volumes and I can tell you, there are not light reads. The are not superficial forays. These are reference libraries you can hold in your hand – the bibliographies alone, people. The bibliographies! Magical keys to unlock the knowledge of the ages, I tell you. Read John's essays at ecosophia.net.

Classically speaking, a psychopomp is a deity or supernatural being who would guide the souls of the dead to their resting place in the afterlife. In modern parlance, a psychopomp acts as "an energetic Soul Midwife to the dead or dying". Cat Webb is a psychopomp, oracle, creatrix, mystic and teacher. So naturally, this was a fabulous conversation! We talk about patriarchy, good spiritual hygiene, dealing with a death-phobic society – specifically how to care for the dying when there are family members resisting – and so, so, so much more. Follow her on Facebook or join her group PsychopompLifeChat.

I'm so pleased to be speaking with Monique today about her new book, Speaking Our Truth: A Journey Of Reconciliation. You can purchase all of Monique's books for children online at Orca Books. Learn more about the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here. Read their 94 Calls to Action here. Explore more youth titles by Indigenous Canadian authors.

"Not everyone can be saved, but everyone is worth loving." Jenn Richardson Jenn was a Mentoring client, who came to a couple of my retreats, and then Quest and is now a dear, dear friend and soul sister. More importantly, she is now coming out as a professional intuitive - hooray! Jenn is a queer feminist poet and yoga instructor and banshee-at-large, a fascinating person to know and observe as she moves through the world and comments on it. Today we're talking about growing up with an alcoholic and homeless father and how his death has impacted her life. She shares what I think many of us have experienced around the mystery of death and how covered-up it can be in western culture. And she talks about grieving as a physical process. It's an intense, close-up, very real conversation. Learn about Jenn and her intuitive readings on her website, jennthepoet.com Check out her art and poetry on Instagram. Listen to her in conversation about Quest with her fellow participants. Jenn references Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women Who Run With The Wolves, and  we talk about the keeners and the banshees.

Thérèse Cator is a Spiritual Leadership Coach + Teacher, Shadow Alchemist, and Soul Artist and comes from a lineage of healers, spiritual teachers, intuitives, artists and activists. She was born in a country ruled by a dictator, her first language is French, and she's as comfortable working with Fortune 500 companies as she is teaching students in South Central LA or acting in Hollywood. In other words: she's got some stories! Today, we're talking about ancestry, grieving, life as ceremony, and she tells a harrowing story about being racially profiled and how that led to the liberation of her own Light. Learn more about Agape International.   Learn more about Vipassana Meditation.   Thérèse is leading a Shadow Alchemy Retreat in Tulum, Mexico. Explore her world at theresecator.com

Rachael Rice is an artist, teacher, musician, truth-teller, and whistle-blower amongst many, many other things. In this intimate conversation, we talk about the death of her mother and how it affected her creativity, her spiritual growth and her journey of recovery. Rachael was 22 when her mother died, and her mom was 49. Learn more about Rachael here. Purchase her original art here, and in her Etsy shop and more cool items on Society6. Listen to our conversation (including Marybeth Bonfiglio!) on Confronting Whiteness here. Find out more about the 12 Step approach here. Learn more about the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy approach here. Rachael mentioned Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, too. Check out Stephen Jenkinson's book Die Wise and Rachael's mom's favourite book on death, Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living And Conscious Dying by Stephen and Ondrea Levine.

My guest today is a literature professor who writes a blog called Dating Tips For The Feminist Man, under the pen name "Nora Samaran". Last year, she wrote an article that went viral, changed my life, and transformed my marriage. It's called "The Opposite Of Rape Culture Is Nurturance Culture". Just so we have a basic agreement of what is meant by “rape culture”, a quick Google brings up this definition: a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse. Wikipedia goes a little bit further: Rape culture is a sociological concept used to describe a setting in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality.  Behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, slut shaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape, refusing to acknowledge the harm caused by some forms of sexual violence, or some combination of these.  Nora's article does a beautiful job of summarizing attachment theory as it applies to adult relationships and then stepping back to look a the larger implications within a patriarchal culture. We talk about how western culture shames men for feeling and nurturing, how it invisibilizes white supremacy and anti-black racism for white people. In this episode, I give a brief summary of attachment theory and the four main attachment styles. You can read more here in the article where I dish about my own marriage. Off the top, Nora mentions The Icarus Project, along with bell hooks and Kimberlé Crenshaw. We also mention Tada Hozumi and cite his work over at SelfishActivist.com. Adrienne Maree Brown is quoted and she is definitely someone to learn from. The book The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin, is described as well.

This is a gentle little episode. It's just a recording of me and my husband, Ruben, musing about appropriate rituals for the upcoming solar eclipse. The conversation meanders to ecological costs, the workers and the strangers, capitalism, extinction, co-parenting, the meaning of "shadow work", fine art in Paris, and how gleaning points to a way of living together that we each really value. In the end, we do sort of come up with some ritual observances to mark the eclipse. Things we mention: John O'Donohue's Grace Before Meals Daniel Quinn's essay, "The New Renaissance" Kelly Diels' essay, There Is No Flawless Position (newsletter, August 20, 2017) Agnès Vargas' film, "The Gleaners and I" Jean-Francois Millet's painting of The Gleaners and also The Angelus (originally titled, Prayer For The Potato Crop)