In this conversation/ transmission we were so honored to hear Dr. Jaiya John pour forth from the depths of his heart and soul in a way that can’t help but touch your own. We were blessed to hear from Jaiya about his background and how he went from being shy and voiceless to a fully-dilated voice for Love. We were blessed to hear him read passages from several of his extraordinary books including Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution; All These Rivers and You Chose Love; and Dear Artist: A Love Letter. Carl and I also each read a short excerpt from his forthcoming book(s) We Birth Freedom at Dawn.

We are so grateful for his generosity of spirit, his gorgeous writings, and his presence in our lives. His love and courage are contagious. Our wish is that all who listen become infected and go on to spread this love and courage in your own communities.

What an honor to share a conversation with the extraordinary soul, poet, teacher, writer, Dr. Jaiya John.

Please find more about him, his books, his poetry gatherings, his newsletter, his Instagram and more at www.jaiyajohn.com

Toward the end of our conversation, Jaiya mentions our dear heart-friend Alexandre Jodun of ahealingbridge.com

If you loved this podcast, please share it far and wide!

Greetings, listener friends.

We are so happy to share this episode with our dear friends and colleagues, Holly Truhlar and Alexandre Jodun. In our conversation we speak about what it means to live a soulful life, and why it matters. We weave through many topics connected to soul, including being embedded in relationship with an animate world, ancestors and future beings, imagination and the imaginal, the spell of individualism, ripening adulthood and becoming elders, our relationship with the wild, community building and more. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Holly Truhlar (she/they) is a grief therapist, group facilitator, and community organizer. She’s most known for her collaborations with politicized grief tending, collapse psychology, and soul activism. Her body of work is a remembering of what it means to be people of potency and culture. Over the last decade, she’s facilitated small and large groups (700+) using ritual, storytelling, creative processes, and Deep Democracy work. She earned a Doctorate in Law and Masters in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, though she learns the most from her relationships with the Wild, including the land she inhabits, Ancestors, Hekate, and donkeys. You can find out more about Holly.and her work at hollytruhlar.com

Alexandre Jodun (he/him) is a holistic psychotherapist, facilitator, ritualist, and ceremonialist with a creole-diasporic ancestral heritage. Through a decade of immersion and training within integrative and process-oriented, as well as earth-based and animist paradigms, he passionately walks his path of being a facilitator who can stand with feet in multiple worlds. His eclectic work with individuals, couples, and groups focuses on relational intimacy, grief and loss, altered and extraordinary states, intentional use of psychedelic & master-plant ritual technologies, and the psychospiritual processes of ripening into mature adulthood. You can find out more about Alexandre’s work at ahealingbridge.com

You can find out more about the Soulful Life online community, which is opening its doors to new members in March of 2024 at Soulfullife.mn.co

Embodying Maitri: The Essential Ingredient with Erin Geesaman Rabke

We’re delighted to share with you this podcast where Erin speaks about the practice of Maitri. Maitri is a Sanskrit word often translated as “lovingkindness” but several teachers in our lineage have gone further, naming it “courageous unconditional friendliness,” or “brave warmheartedness.” In this episode, Erin speaks about the importance of this practice in living a healing life. Traditional Buddhist teachings suggest beginning the practice with oneself, then extending our circles of care ever outward. Erin shares personal stories of working with this practice, and invites you in. She also shares about her upcoming online class Maitri: A Courtship with the Essential Ingredient. You can learn more about that offering here. https://embodimentmatters.com/maitri-courting-the-essential-ingredient/

Erin refers to a few sources of inspiration in this episode including:

To Love and Be Loved: The Difficult Yoga of Relationship with Stephen and Ondrea Levine

https://www.soundstrue.com/products/to-love-and-be-loved

bell hooks 

All About Love https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17607.All_About_Love

Her Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/interviews-with-thich-nhat-hanh/interview-with-bell-hooks-january-1-2000/

Open and Innocent by Scott Morrison

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3397459-open-and-innocent

There is Nothing Wrong with You by Cheri Huber

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27580.There_Is_Nothing_Wrong_with_You

And Mary Oliver’s poem, To Begin with the Sweet Grass

https://embodimentmatters.com/love-yourself/

In this conversation, Carl speaks with John Wolfstone.

John is third-generation settler, working on the Traditional and Unceded territory of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok Peoples. His blood and bones hold Hebraic, Norse and Celtic ancestry, and his spirit is from the Stars. As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, ritualist, community consultant, relationship coach, and transmedia story-teller, John is on a mission to reclamate adulthood initiation rites-of-passage.

Holding space for the great grief of our times, John designs and facilitates rituals of transformation, in service to regulating the personal and collective nervous systems back to belonging with the Earth. John apprenticed in numerous indigenous and ancestral ritual healing lineages during his decade long adulthood initiation quest, and bows in reverence to his many teachers, mentors, guides and elders.

John tends thresholds of all kinds, and can often be found praying by a fire, whistling bird song, invoking his ancestors, and training his craft as a sacred huntsman.

John is also one of the cofounders of the School of Mythopoetics.

In our conversation, we explore initiation, and why it has been so central to the human experience. We also talk about what is lost, in terms of the presence of adults and elders in the world, when practices of initiation are absent in a culture.

We talk about the markings of adulthood, exploring some of the indicators that someone has grown into an adult, or not.

And we look at how to grow a literacy with initiatory process, and for the many of us who have not grown up in cultures with intact rituals and rites of passage, how to bring these practices and principles into our lives and our communities.

John is facilitating a year-long adulthood initiation ritual apprenticeship through the School of Mythopoetics beginning November, 2022, and you can find more about that here. https://www.schoolofmythopoetics.com/ritual-apprenticeship

You can find more about John and his work here:

johnwolfstone.com

www.schoolofmythopoetics.com