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00:00:30.000Hey for the wild community, Ayana here.
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00:01:38.420what happens when we allow our work to really fill us with this deep
00:01:48.940deep pleasure and deep joy and deep gratification and what happens when we get out of this
00:01:54.200white supremacist paradigm of capitalism and productivity and like what happens when our work
00:02:01.180can feel good to us. Welcome to part two of my conversation with Dr. Pavanagh Marais,
00:02:10.460where we'll be digging deeper into the topics of pleasure and embodiment,
00:02:14.760wild love, and relational belonging. Pavanagh Marais, pronoun P, is a somatic sex therapist
00:02:21.320and ancestral lineage healing practitioner in private practice in San Francisco.
00:02:26.620Pavanagh works with individuals and couples who wish to resolve the past,
00:02:29.900inhabit their bodies and their pleasure, and speak their desires.
00:02:34.900Pavani is also the founder of Wellseum, an online sexuality and intimacy school
00:02:39.300committed to personal and planetary liberation.
00:02:42.960Pavani hosts a podcast called Bespoken Bones,
00:02:46.040Ancestors at the Crossroads of Sex, Magic, and Science.
00:02:49.820The podcast is released every new and full moon
00:02:52.520and addresses topics of transgenerational trauma, erotic wellness, and ancestral support.0.99
00:02:59.040As a queer trans witch, Povni walks the glitter path of dancing bones, ridiculous delight, and old magic.1.00
00:03:09.300Well, thank you for coming back on the show.1.00
00:03:11.640Our conversation, it really moved me and being an activist for, you know, a good chunk of time at this point
00:03:22.200and fighting resource extraction projects and campaigning and all this stuff
00:03:26.500and feeling like, wow, we're not going to turn this boat around.
00:03:31.020We're not actually doing the things that five years ago I thought we were going to do.
00:03:35.720And then coming to this place of being like, wow, this is actually the healing is really
00:03:50.160And so having this conversation has felt really regenerative for me and clarifying, I guess.
00:03:55.860And also very comforting because it's just like, oh, okay, I can land here.
00:04:03.360I can land in this conversation with you and it feels real and it feels like we're actually talking about these huge pieces that are really stopping us from being able to show up as allies and Earth defenders in a way that I hope we can be one day.
00:04:19.340Even if it's only 3% of us, you know, I'm not hoping for all of us, I think, what, 3% to start a revolution or something.
00:04:25.600So I just wanted to start with that moment of gratitude for you.
00:04:31.040Yeah, I appreciated our conversation yesterday as well.
00:04:36.220I'm also thinking about what it means to investigate the inner spaces between the living and the dead within a culture that propagates death, while simultaneously ceding discomfort within the realms of death, darkness, the mystical, and the unseen.
00:04:52.180So I'm wondering, how does the process of journeying into the deep histories of our ancestors overlap with a reckoning around our mortality, a reclamation of death, or even a greater healing of the natural cycle of life?
00:05:08.520And it's my sense that there's a comfort when we connect with our ancestors, that there's a comfort in knowing that we will be welcomed when we die.
00:05:24.120And that, you know, I think a lot about this idea of that we're the ones right now, you know, and that I'm just thinking about like when we were in our 20s, I don't know if you ever felt like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do with my life?
00:05:36.620and it seems like such a singular question it seems like oh it's about me in this body in
00:05:41.500in this life and in some ways it is but in some ways it's also a continuation of whatever is
00:05:49.980moving through the lineage right it's it's that the lineage is about something and so when we're
00:05:56.980the ones right now it's we're the ones doing the work right now for the sake of the lineage for
00:06:01.560the sake of whatever the purpose of this lineage is right and that our descendants will of blood
00:06:07.860and of hearts will will follow after us and we'll we'll take up those those threads of the work
00:06:14.200even if it looks really really different right even if their manifestation of it is really
00:06:18.340different and so like for me when I start to hold it in that way of I'm just the one right now I'm
00:06:24.120part of this greater thing, death is not finite. It's not an ending. Rather, it's an initiation
00:06:36.320into just a different state of being in which I get to participate in life in a different way,
00:06:43.980right? I think about how I say prayers for, I have kids, and so I say prayers for my kids all
00:06:50.260the time and I say prayers for their kids who aren't here yet and maybe they'll never have kids
00:06:54.800but like any ones who come after I'm saying those prayers for and I know because I'm doing this and
00:07:00.560because it it spontaneously just started right like we all we think about this like that the
00:07:05.860ones who came before me said those prayers for me even though they didn't know that I would ever
00:07:09.340exist and yeah so there's just this comfort in holding this kind of worldview on it I think of
00:07:15.540this cosmology of just being part of something that continues on and on and and so we we feel
00:07:22.580the ones kind of how we orient in western culture is that the past is that are back and the future
00:07:27.360is in front of us and so we feel the ones behind us and we feel the ones in front of us and
00:07:31.320it becomes less personal in certain ways you know of this question about like what's my purpose like
00:07:39.120you might not even like i i was let me just say i was i was in the shower this was maybe a year
00:07:43.480ago I was in the shower and I was asking my ancestors I was like really like folks am I am
00:07:47.720I doing the thing am I like what am I supposed to do is there anything else that you want me to do
00:07:51.800and they were like oh you already did it but I was like well do I get to know what it is and they
00:07:57.140were like nope you know and it was just kind of like oh okay so there is there's meaning to
00:08:04.120to our lives whether or not we you know figure it out and figuring it out being that like an
00:08:10.520intellectual concept. And so like, yeah, I mean, I think that death just becomes
00:08:14.300held in a different way and, you know, just anticipating kind of that, that welcoming of
00:08:20.920like, oh, I'm just in a different state now. Like I just moved to North Carolina. I'm in a different
00:08:25.000state now. And, oh, I just died. I'm in a different state now. And I had the privilege of interviewing
00:08:30.240my friend Colleen eight days before she died. She knew she was going to die. And she was like,
00:08:35.120yeah, I'm not scared. You know, I'm not scared of, of this dying thing. I'm scared of not having
00:08:40.140lived and kind of like the, the comings and the goings of being incarnate and being embodied and
00:08:46.440then being disembodied and, you know, not in the like trauma way, but in the like spirit way.
00:08:53.460Yeah. So I just kind of hold it as just in that, you know, in the, oh, I guess the other metaphor
00:08:57.320I want to talk about is forests. And this will probably resonate with you of like how necessary
00:09:02.720death is for forests right that the nutrients that when a tree or when a plant dies how they
00:09:09.920return those to the soil and how that becomes the nourishment for the next generation of life like
00:09:13.820it's just so cyclical and yeah i um i hold it that you know while death is a mystery it's it's
00:09:21.060natural and normal and we can learn to really honor that you know that while we're in these
00:09:28.500bodies we have these bodies and also trust that as we decompose and disintegrate and become
00:09:37.020one with the earth again like that the earth of our bodies like goes back to our final lover
00:09:42.860there's not this finite quality right it's only finite if we if we hold ourselves as separate and
00:09:48.120other than i was feeling into that so much and something that i've learned from stephen jenkinson
00:09:56.060who we've had a few times on the show who wrote a book called die wise is that in order to die
00:10:01.760well we have to live well and we have to be not necessarily preparing for death but in a way it
00:10:10.500is a type of preparation for when we transition into something else and how our relationships
00:10:16.660and the way that we live each day actually does affect the way that we transition into death
00:10:24.240And that was something that was really, I don't know if shocking is the right word, but goodness, just surprising to me because I'd never thought of it in that way.
00:10:33.360But I'd like to explore more of your thinking around pleasure, sexual wellness, and the erotic.
00:10:41.700And there's been a surge of conversation within our communities on these topics.
00:10:46.260And I think it might be useful if you shared a little bit more about how you defined and understand the, quote, erotic.
00:10:53.680and how we can understand pleasure both within and beyond the realm of sex?
00:10:59.000Oh, such good questions. Yeah. I mean, really, when I try to put a word definition on the erotic,
00:11:05.720because it's a felt sense thing, it's a communion thing, right? It's hard to put words on it. But
00:11:11.380really, I think the best word for it is aliveness, right? The current of life and when we're
00:11:17.300really exquisitely aware of, you know, all of the life that's happening in us at every single
00:11:24.060moment, right? That we're made up of, I don't know, I can't remember how many billion cells,
00:11:28.580some enormous number of cells, and each one of them is alive and has its own job, has its own
00:11:34.700purpose, has its own life cycle. And there's all these like processes of life happening on the
00:11:39.740cellular level, right? As a cell is born, a cell goes through its whole spiel, respires, reproduces,
00:11:47.300ultimately dies and is reabsorbed or you know passed through and so i think about the erotic
00:11:53.400i'm like oh how can i start to pay attention to feeling that to feeling into the life that's
00:12:03.940actually happening in this body this like all the the collection of beings that is this body
00:12:08.160and that it's a it's a force eros is a force that is a current maybe it's a better word because i
00:12:16.120don't like the work force but like a current that's it requires our attention it's i mean
00:12:21.660it's happening right like a river is flowing whether or not we're looking at it and it's the
00:12:25.420same with eros of it's there whether or not we're paying attention to it but the way to know it
00:12:29.820the way to really know the erotic is is through the attention and through the felt sense and
00:12:34.400i discern it from the sexual and that they're they're interwoven and they're connected but
00:12:40.280they're not the same thing right there's so many ways to weave the erotic into your daily life
00:12:49.080you might not just be able to have sex all day right but you can be erotic all day long and
00:12:54.260you can be feeling and feeling your aliveness and feeling deeply all day long and when your
00:12:58.940attention wanders you can bring it back to to your feeling and and so that the uniqueness of that
00:13:05.720sensation of, of really acknowledging the erotic, the field of the erotic, it's really profound.
00:13:11.940And it's like sourced both in those processes of life, but it's also sourced in all of the
00:13:18.320processes of life, right? This is the thing where we can get really turned on looking at the full
00:13:22.520moon or watching the winds blow through the top of the trees and the leaves. Or I just, I love
00:13:27.520that dance actually of like, I think about, I was dancing in the mission in San Francisco a while
00:13:33.320ago and it's like you know it's gritty it's urban and there's not a lot of nature and and I was
00:13:39.560looking out the window and there were these there's these palm trees that go all the way down
00:13:42.460mission street and they're really really tall so it's just like this long thin trunk and at the top
00:13:50.140there's this kind of burst of foliage and I was watching the winds move through those through
00:13:55.880those leaves those palm leaves those fronds I guess they're called I was like oh like that's
00:14:00.600sexy, like it's not just sexy to me because I'm watching them like, oh, that whole thing that's
00:14:03.860happening between them. It was like watching two lovers, right? I'm like, oh, the wind is
00:14:08.440tickling those fronds and the fronds are combing the winds. And it's like this reciprocal relationship
00:14:13.340and I'm just, I'm getting to watch porn right here. And, you know, so I would say that that's
00:14:18.880kind of, that's how I hold the erotic. It's just a current of life that we can tune our attention
00:14:23.500towards. And pleasure is just this boon that we get to enjoy, right? It is about enjoyment. It's
00:14:32.620about savoring. It's about delight. It's about feeling good. And one of the things that can
00:14:38.960happen with trauma is that feeling good cannot feel good anymore. It can feel bad or it can feel
00:14:45.180unsafe. And so I also want to just be really clear that pleasure is very personally defined
00:14:53.300experience. I can't tell you what your pleasure is. You know, it's yours and you can't tell me
00:14:58.980what mine is. It's really, you know, what feels good, what feels safe enough. It can be a kind
00:15:07.100of quiet, savoring, enjoying, and it can also be like more exciting just depending on the chemical
00:15:12.580experience that our nervous system's having at that moment, the kind of the unique combination
00:15:16.860of excitement and enjoyment or arousal and calming or, you know, sympathetic and parasympathic
00:15:22.960nervous system. But, but I think that I also think about pleasure as something that is really
00:15:28.280healing and that deliberately allowing pleasure, whatever that is for you, whatever your definition
00:15:36.160is, deliberately allowing pleasure to infiltrate, you know, to be this like agent provocateur inside
00:15:43.120your body of, of like really allowing the pleasure to come in is it's the antithesis of this
00:15:48.900unworthiness syndrome that plagues us, right? In the West of disconnect and feeling like we're too
00:15:55.000much or we're not enough or we're unworthy of goodness and love and blessing. And so like,
00:15:59.540yeah. And I just want to note that the ancestral practices can really help with this. I think about,
00:16:05.740I talk with my ancestors a lot in the shower and what a miracle is like hot water comes out of the
00:16:10.380wall in my house. That's a miracle, you know? And so I'm like, I get in the shower and I'm like,
00:16:15.820oh you guys feel this this is so good it feels so good and you know that kind of pleasure of
00:16:22.720finding finding what what calls you to spirit you know what opens your heart what fills you
00:16:32.180with delight what makes you feel free and spontaneous those are kind of the the ways
00:16:37.400that I hold pleasure and just that if our movements I think our movements are often
00:16:41.680really serious. We're committed to the good work. I made a film a few years ago called Holy Milf,
00:16:48.340which was a queer, ecosexual, erotic ritual invocation to the elements film. And I was
00:16:56.240showing it to a bunch of activists. And one of the folks there was like, yeah, that's great,
00:17:01.140but forest defending, that's what we have to do. It's really important. I was like, yeah,
00:17:04.720but this is the same thing, right? It's just through a different lens. It's what happens when
00:17:09.320we allow our work to really fill us with this deep pleasure and deep joy and deep gratification
00:17:16.720and what happens when we get out of this white supremacist paradigm of capitalism and productivity
00:17:23.940and like what happens when our work can feel good to us.
00:17:39.320In my mouth the leaves were all swaying together
00:21:54.060Our ecological kin awaits our inquiries of consent, our listening, our engagement on this earth with them, end quote.
00:22:03.240So with these words in mind, I'm excited to think about how the erotic might expand our capacity for connection with place, or perhaps how we might re-engage with earth as a loved one, a sacred relationship that is tended, savored, and pleasurable.
00:22:20.480And you kind of started to speak to that, I think, with watching the branches, but I'd love to go into this deeper.
00:22:27.440Yeah, I want to start just by sharing a helpful tip to combat sexual socialization of like, how do we be with the erotic in consensual ways, but also not allow consent to become dogmatic, right?
00:22:46.380And so we're, like you said, you named it, you said we're socialized to project our erotic at, right?
00:22:53.860Like the object of my attraction, the object of my adoration.
00:22:57.440And so I propose that we can be erotic with, we don't have to be erotic at, right? So, and it's how I experience it thematically is directional. So that there's, when we're projecting at, when we're taking our arrows and we're projecting it at someone and landing it on them or on something, right? Whether we have consent or not, that there's a, there's a kind of a linear directionality about that.
00:23:21.500And for folks who have penises, that's often forward, right? And it can be very genital-centric, and it can be very intrusive sometimes, right? So what is it to be erotic with? And this is for both human and other than human, and I think is helpful when thinking about how do I be consensual with my eros everywhere I go in the world?0.97
00:23:49.480you know if like how do I be erotic with is like oh I can somatically if I put my attention on it
00:23:56.120I can take that erotic energy that might be really genitally focused and I can spread it out
00:24:00.520I can spread it out to my whole body and I can spread it out behind me I can spread it out above
00:24:06.660me I can spread it out below me I can root it into the earth you know that there's like that I can
00:24:11.640just become like this beautiful energy ball of arrows, you know, that's, that's not trying to
00:24:20.760land it on, you know, not trying to convince or persuade or negotiate. It's just like, Hey,
00:24:28.260here I am in my beautiful arrows who I'm just, I'm feeling the pleasure that's available even
00:24:33.860without any kind of stimulation, right? I can turn my attention to that. I can, I can get nuanced
00:24:37.820enough to learn to do that. And then it's kind of a non-issue, like the consent thing, because I'm
00:24:42.820not trying to do anything with it. There's no agenda, right? I'm not trying to get to a goal.
00:24:47.660I'm just hanging out with my erotic, being with my sexy. And I do this when I'm out in the world
00:24:54.360all the time, out with people, out with nature. It's a different paradigm, I think, of really
00:25:02.740stepping into like you know everywhere I go I'm erotic and it's never trying to do a thing right
00:25:09.400does that make sense all right so then you asked me the question I totally riffed off of that so
00:25:14.260you asked me about eco-sexuality yeah well first I mean I want to acknowledge Annie Sprinkle and
00:25:20.600Beth Stevens for their vast contribution to the paradigm around eco-sexuality I think it goes
00:25:28.280back again to what we were we were talking about when we were talking about sacred sites and how
00:25:32.580to approach the, and this, this consensual piece is around that, around, it's a different way of
00:25:39.700inhabiting our soma when we decide that our sensuality or sexuality isn't just limited to
00:25:49.380other humans, right? When we're like, oh, I am going to have an erotic experience with
00:25:55.180this body of water, this river, I'm going to have an erotic experience with this tree, right? It's,
00:26:00.400it's again it's that deep listening and one of the cool things that i have found is that it's
00:26:06.320pretty responsive like you can actually ask and be like hey okay to give you a hug tree and things
00:26:12.500will happen like the wind will blow or the needle will fall or you know this stuff happens and and
00:26:17.760i think it's just polite also like it's a good protocol of just kind of getting out of extraction
00:26:23.880mindset and into collaborative mindset right of just like asking like oh hey i had it was like
00:26:30.180on a walk in my neighborhood yesterday. Hey, tomato. My neighbors had tomatoes in the yard.
00:26:33.600Can I eat you? Like, is that okay? Yeah. It's like, yeah, cool. Great. And then being okay to,
00:26:39.540you know, it's a muscle. You have to build that trust of like listening, but then
00:26:42.720hearing no is also okay. Right. Like, oh, cool. You're not into it today. And also like
00:26:48.540reciprocity, you know, sacred reciprocity about the give back. When I was a baby, which somebody
00:26:54.180trained me of, oh, if you, if you take something, make sure you leave something,
00:26:58.080offer some pee, offer some of your hair. Just make sure that that reciprocity is being tended,
00:27:04.020that those offerings are being made. Even if it's just whatever you have is fine. You don't have to
00:27:10.560be all fancy about it. If you have a little bit of saliva in your mouth, that's fine, whatever it
00:27:16.680is, but just to really track for the give back. Yeah. That's what I want to say about that.
00:27:21.300Mm-hmm. That piece of reciprocity and offering is so important. And I think when I learned about it, I didn't really understand how to ground that action of offering. And I think I thought it was more, yeah, I guess I didn't fully believe that it was real or something.
00:27:43.880And it took years of practicing and just going, okay, I'm going to do this and maybe I'll feel silly and maybe I'll feel like this isn't really connecting with this place.
00:27:53.920But time after time and year after year of sitting with it in the discomfort of breaking down my colonial white supremacist dominant culture conditioning and opening myself up and listening and doing those offerings time and time again, it's like, no, no, this is very real.
00:28:10.800This is extremely connecting. And so I love hearing you talk about it because it just floods me with all of my feelings. And I'm wondering within this circle of reciprocity, how are we fundamentally changed by our relationship with wild places? And how are we open to the erotic and deepened in our capacity for unconditional love?
00:28:35.620and just to make a note on this unconditional love word I honestly really didn't know what that was
00:28:43.720in an embodied way I didn't understand it I didn't grow up in a family that unconditional
00:28:50.040love was something that was given and it wasn't until I was with the temperate rainforest and I
00:28:56.800fell so madly in love with this ecosystem this place and I remember the lust and the first you
00:29:05.400know honeymoon stage and i was just totally enraptured and then the more that i spent time
00:29:09.780with the temperate rainforest as the drought came and i would walk around these forest weather was
00:29:15.520you know and they weren't all old growth actually most was not old growth there's only two percent
00:29:19.840old growth left globally so the old growth was very scarce and i'd go into these second growth
00:29:24.080and these plantation forests i'd be like you're not old growth like you're not what i fantasize
00:29:29.340about or my honeymoon phase is or and now it's and you're in drought and you're crunchy and i
00:29:34.400remember having all of these feelings of rejection and it took me time to be like no no I love you
00:29:40.680whether you are crunchy in your drought I love you if you are plantation forested I love you
00:29:47.120regardless of what we have done to you because I love you for you regardless of what you are
00:29:53.600to quote me and when I shifted that and I could just feel so madly in love with the forest with
00:30:00.420where they're at exactly at this moment within climate change and the anthropocene and so much
00:30:05.720raping and pillaging of them and their ancestors and to be able to to feel that type of depth of
00:30:12.340love that i'm not going anywhere regardless of what happens to you i'm going to be by your side
00:30:18.820until the very end the expansiveness of my chest even saying that is like nothing i've ever
00:30:24.840experienced in the human world and and so this topic of unconditional love for wild places but
00:30:31.220also places that were once wild and have been in so many ways abused so badly has been a huge
00:30:37.760teaching in my life so that's my own personal story around it but yeah I'd love to just hear
00:30:43.240you speak about the depth of capacity for unconditional love with wild places or just
00:30:49.580the earth in general i feel blessed by to hear your description of falling in love
00:30:56.080it's my sense that if we want wild love what we need to learn is to receive wild love
00:31:08.560and wild love isn't perfect and the places aren't perfect right they're not like when we fall in
00:31:22.660love with a human we're not actually for like the first six to 18 months we're not actually in love
00:31:28.000with the person we think we are we're in love with our love we're in love with the set of sensations
00:31:32.720that we're having in our bodies we're in love with the fact that we can feel this way we're not
00:31:37.800actually in love with the person and so when we actually fall in love with a person when we fall
00:31:46.080deeply deeply in sustainable long-term love it's knowing that they are a hot mess and that they're
00:31:53.240going to be a hot mess until they die that's what my partner said to me once when I was telling him
00:31:57.860that I was such a hot mess he said yeah I love you and you're going to be a hot mess till you die0.76
00:32:01.580That's unconditional love, right? And what can happen with the erotic when we go out into wild places that are not perfect, that have been harmed, that have been abused, is it can feel like if you open yourself, if you open yourself to that really deep feeling, you're going to feel what has happened in that place, right?
00:32:30.000and that's hard it's hard to feel that it's hard to bear witness to it it's and it's hard to um
00:32:40.260acknowledge it and so you know i mean i think lots of folks can go and they can get turned on
00:32:46.520by the mating of the birds and the clouds in the sky but like the kind of love that you're
00:32:53.220talking about the unconditional love it has to be inclusive of the whole situation like what is
00:33:01.720yeah it's like there has to be no fear about opening to what is because you trust your own
00:33:07.740resilience you trust that I can erotically open to the aliveness of this place no matter how harmed
00:33:15.160it is or to this person no matter how messed up they are I can open fully I can be with
00:33:21.380whatever is true there, whatever has happened, whatever they're feeling, I can be with that.
00:33:27.720I'm not going to lose myself. I'm not going to be swept away by that suffering or I'm not going
00:33:34.560to be devastated and thrown into endless grief. I might feel grief. We need to feel grief. We need
00:33:42.720to be. I think that that's such an important connection actually between the erotic and grief
00:33:48.600of the willingness to feel grief and the willingness to feel grief about place, about
00:33:52.860relationship, about patriarchy, about oppression. The willingness to feel that deep grief is actually
00:33:59.000the thing that makes it relational. I'm not afraid of your pain. I'm not afraid of your suffering.
00:34:03.780I'm not afraid of your trauma getting on me somehow and tainting me. I don't need this
00:34:08.560like this pure thing i need the real thing yeah and when we have that practice in place of like
00:34:17.820i'm practicing my resilience for the sake of wild love for the sake of connection with you
00:34:22.920person place universe right i'm practicing my resilience i'm practicing being okay i'm
00:34:29.120practicing receiving and practicing receiving pleasure right i'm not letting myself stay in
00:34:35.580this brittleness, this fragility that comes from pain, really, right? Like I can be, I can be in
00:34:44.120pain and I can be flexible. I can be generous and generative with my body and with my heart and with
00:34:50.500my arrows. Like that's, I feel like where, that's that transcendent moment where you've really
00:34:56.640belong and you're really not alone because like you are of, you are with, right? You've become
00:35:03.120the river you've become the sky you've become the the forest and there's not this I mean I think
00:35:10.420this is what death is actually gonna this is what I'm praying for you know that my death is gonna
00:35:14.660be like of like I'm just with now there's no separation you know and that's I mean there's
00:35:22.560no separation and there doesn't need to be for this for any boundaries or safety like it's just
00:35:28.120okay to just surrender into this embrace.
00:35:58.120Afternoon wrote the ice, I smoked overhead
00:37:25.140this feeling of comfort and belonging that you have just expressed is so deeply nourishing and
00:37:45.880I feel like so many of us if not all of us are praying and striving and sometimes clinging for
00:37:53.780that type of connection with another. And yeah, I just, I'm thinking about our conversation today
00:38:04.460within the framework of belonging and belonging within the body in an erotic sense, belonging
00:38:10.020as an earth connection and belonging alongside ancestral or cultural kin. And I'm wondering how
00:38:17.720you're living within this inquiry of belonging as an ongoing practice or process.
00:38:24.480Yeah. This has been my primary practice recently. And what feels really exciting
00:38:31.320is that other people have figured some of this stuff out. There's technologies and things that
00:38:39.060are written about it and cultural practices. And I feel like there's a lot in the cultural
00:38:44.640conversation right now about belonging. I'm reading Bell Hook's book, Belonging, which is
00:38:50.300so amazing. And yeah. And so my practice is like, and again, I talk about sexual liberation as a
00:39:00.920set of practices, right? It's not this like state that you get to like, woohoo, no, I'm sexually
00:39:04.480liberated. It's like, oh no, I'm a commitment to these practices. And I think that belonging is
00:39:09.280like that. If I feel like I'm not belonging, if I feel that sense of disbelonging, it's on me
00:39:16.680to practice something different, right? To be like, oh, okay, so this is what's happening right
00:39:23.660now. Okay, I'm going to do one of my belonging practices. I'm going to reach out to someone. I
00:39:29.360am going to go spend some time with my land. There are things that we can actually do to
00:39:37.000increase that sense of belonging and that there's there's personal things and there's also cultural
00:39:40.760things there's group things right we can create communities of welcome uh we can create like oh
00:39:46.640gosh i'm just thinking about when i um i took an improv class and one of the things that they
00:39:53.120taught us was like so you okay they'd be like break up into groups of three and so then you
00:39:59.200have to do it in like 10 seconds like really fast and if anybody is not in a group you're like come
00:40:04.620come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, come, right? Like this like over here,
00:40:08.120come with us, you know, and we can all practice that. Right. And so like, if I'm feeling that
00:40:12.840sense of disbelonging that I can actually, I can become more inclusive. I can become more welcoming
00:40:17.740rather than, you know, kind of feeling bereft or feeling left out. I can, I can actually do
00:40:23.080things. So that's like really exciting to me about belonging, you know, that it's, it's something
00:40:28.020that we can tend to within ourselves and within our communities. And I think it's pretty exciting
00:40:36.800to think about belonging to a place, you know, trees belong to a place like that tree. It just
00:40:42.780picks where it's going to live. And then that's just its place, you know, and what is that like
00:40:47.340to make that commitment to a place and whether or not you are living in that place all the time,
00:40:52.120like you said, like I am with you, you're never going to leave those forests, right? Like even
00:40:56.540if you're on the other side of the world you're with those forests you belong to that place you
00:41:00.280know where you belong yeah and we can do that we can cultivate those those practices of of belonging
00:41:06.600to particular places where we feel the home the home feelings yeah and uh yeah it's on us to do
00:41:14.280up yeah my goodness there's so much and I feel the same way almost after every time you pause
00:41:27.400because I feel like entire galaxies are expanding in my heart and in my mind of feeling so much
00:41:35.860complexity in myself and this longing to belong this longing for unconditional love
00:41:42.560this longing for a connection and a reciprocity that has been so stripped and in some ways
00:41:50.840stolen from our human experience. Maybe not in some ways, in multiple ways. And as our time
00:41:59.820together comes to a close, I'd love to hear more about how we might thread some of these practices
00:42:07.020of embodiment, deep listening, and ancestral exploration into our lives. How can we tend
00:42:13.840to these sacred relationships with the self and kin? What portals, whether that's plants,
00:42:21.100myths, storytelling, alters, animals, exist for creative animation in the everyday?
00:42:28.740Yeah. I mean, well, I think you just named a bunch of the practices and they're going to be
00:42:32.700so different. They're going to be so unique for each person, right?
00:42:36.040And like we talked about earlier, they're definitely things that your ancestors practiced.
00:42:40.100Like eat the foods your ancestors ate, do the things that they did.
00:42:43.960If they were like, if they spun wool, spin wool and see what happens.
00:42:47.740You know, I think that those are interesting kinds of things.
00:42:51.100I also just want to address practice itself.
00:42:54.780Practice gets a bad rap, you know, from folks who have been through public school or been
00:43:00.700through music lessons or been through organized sports or organized religion that they hated,
00:43:06.780you know, then like you have to practice and practice half an hour a day. And, and so when
00:43:11.400we talk about practices, when I talk about practices, I want to be just really careful
00:43:19.240to not further that you're not good as you are right now. You must do work to be good,
00:43:28.100You know, and one of my mentors, Richard Strozzi says, you're always practicing something when you get to choose what you practice, right? And so practices really don't have to be these monolithic things that you do or don't do or get resistant about doing.
00:43:48.420a practice can appear in a moment right a practice can be just like one real breath or or one true
00:43:57.180thing that you say or you some people do really well with structured practice but other people
00:44:02.520just get you know especially the anarchist crew just get super resistant to it right and so
00:44:08.020I think holding a different paradigm of practice in which like really small amounts of conscious
00:44:13.080practice will yield you excellent results. And you don't like to quote Mary Oliver,
00:44:18.860crawl on broken glass, right? You can just have a practice, make it conscious and listen for that
00:44:25.420thing that's right inside you at that moment. I really don't want this conversation to end.
00:44:30.220Being with you in this conversation is, in a way, it feels like I've been starving for this type of
00:44:40.440of soulful food and talking to you is like the best buffet. I don't know why I see it in terms
00:44:48.600of food. I'm not, I just had lunch, so I shouldn't be that hungry, but there's this, yeah, just this
00:44:53.860longing to be able to connect around these topics so deeply. And you have such a gentle, but potent
00:45:03.140way of describing these themes that are just so human and they're so us. And I really appreciate
00:45:13.260all the work that you must have done to be able to sit with these themes in the ways that you do
00:45:19.200and be able to then share them with the world and with all of the things that you do through
00:45:24.880your podcast and through your teachings. And thank you so much for being the person you are.