Sex Birth Trauma with Kimberly Ann Johnson

Kimberly and Mirabai Starr engage in a rich and intimate exploration of mysticism, personal loss, spirituality, and the intersection of sexuality and the sacred. They consider how they have each found spirituality in their everyday lives while being mindful of their journeys, cultures, ancestry, and the complexities involved. They discuss Mirabai's new book, "Ordinary Mysticism," which delves into the nature of mysticism and its accessibility to everyone every day. Mirabai emphasizes that mysticism doesn't require institutionalized religion and can be found in ordinary moments. They discuss the profound impact of loss and grief in Mirabai’s life. She describes how these experiences deepened her connection to the sacred and the beauty intertwined with suffering.   Bio Mirabai Starr is an award winning author of creative nonfiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught philosophy and world religions at the University of New Mexico, Taos for 20 years, and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialog. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss. She has written over 15 books, and the latest is “Ordinary Mysticism.” But you'll hear her talk about “Caravan of No Despair,” “Wild Mercy,” and some of her translations from Spanish to English, “In The Mystics,” “The Great Mystics.” She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.   What you’ll hear: Mirabai's views on spiritual, literary and poetic writing. The origin story of her new book "Ordinary Mysticism" - including it’s connection to Anne Lamott The ease in finding the mystical if you are open to it. The challenges of having that openness in the everyday The intersections of grief and the sacred Cultivating mystical awareness in daily life Searching for spiritual grounding Uprootedness of being spiritual but not religious How to understand your relationship to different spiritual technologies How to tap into spiritual bounty without colonizing and appropriating Intention and attention are crucial for recognizing the sacred in the mundane. The integration of sexuality and spirituality The common split many women feel between the sexual and the sacred aspects of their lives. How healing from/through sexual abuse can lead to sacredness in intimacy What’s a responsible and mindful approach to drawing from various spiritual traditions? How does storytelling and reflecting on shared struggles lead to insights within the spiritual journey? And how ending an abusive sexual and spiritual relationship can lead to healing through new forms of intimacy. Healthy intimacy can be holy Resources https://mirabaistarr.com/

Fellow Orphan Wisdom Scholar, and founder of Marketing for Hippies, Tad Hargrave dives deep with Kimberly into his ever-evolving relationship to whiteness and ancestry. They discuss Tad’s journey into exploring his ancestral roots, language and cultural identity, as well as Kimberly and Tad’s shared rites of passage experiences doing anti-racism work. Tad shares how he initially felt disconnected from indigenous cultures, but found deep resonance exploring his own heritage, particularly his Scottish Gaelic ancestry. The two discuss the polarities of self-loathing and self-glorification amidst contemporary white activists of both the left and right, and the broader implications of whiteness and cultural identity for white individuals. They touch on the importance of considering both privileges and poverties when it comes to whiteness, and also consider the challenges and complexities faced by white people in navigating issues of privilege, guilt when trying to meaningfully engage with marginalized histories and communities. Overall, the conversation delves into the nuanced and often difficult process of reclaiming one's cultural heritage and identity as a white person, and ends on a consideration of how to creatively and meaningfully approach speaking the colonizer tongue of English. Bio: Tad Hargrave is a hippy who developed a knack for marketing (and then learned to be a hippy again). He spent his late teens being schooled in a mixed bag of approaches to sales and marketing – some manipulative and some not. When that career ended, he spent a decade unlearning and unpacking what he’d been through. How had he been swept up in it? Why didn’t those approaches work as well as advertised? Were there ways of marketing that both worked better and felt better to all involved?  It took him time but he began to find a better way to market. By 2006, he had become one of the first, full-time ‘conscious business’ marketing coaches (for hippies) and created a business where he could share the understanding he had come to: Marketing could feel good. You didn’t have to choose between marketing that worked (but felt awful) or marketing that felt good (but got you no clients). Since 2001, he has been touring his marketing workshops around Canada, the United States, Europe, and online, bringing refreshing and unorthodox ideas to conscious entrepreneurs and green businesses that help them grow their organizations and businesses (without selling their souls). Instead of charging outrageous amounts, he started doing most of his events on a pay what you can basis. He is the author of sixteen books and workbooks on marketing. Tad currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta (traditionally known, in the local indigenous language of the Cree, as Amiskwaciy (Beaver Hill) and later Amiskwaciwaskihegan (Beaver Hill House) and his ancestors come primarily from Scotland with some from the Ukraine as well. He is now dedicated to spending the rest of his days preserving and fostering a more deeply respectful, beautiful and human culture.   What you’ll hear: Tad’s intro to anti-racism and youth organizing work in the Bay Area Tad found himself pushing up against something in anti-racist/white supremacy trainings What  is the role of self-loathing in anti-racism trainings? Tad  found admiration toward indigenous rituals, but unlike some white peers, didn’t feel drawn to doing more work with indigenous cultures Something changed when Tad began learning his indigenous language Tad came to understand whiteness as a cover for something Whiteness is a kind of forgetting Can a white person participate in a indigenous ritual? Yes, but always as a guest and with consideration for the impact their presence might be having on that community Recognizing that whiteness was trouble, that it was a kind of poverty  Tad found he no longer was so anxiously seeking approval from indigenous people and people of color, which he recognized as another form of taking The importance of finding rootedness in ancestral story Kim discusses her experience in urban education in Chicago and studying under Michael Eric Dyson Kim found she was often comparing her ancestor grief to Black peers  Kim has found Canada’s links to the older world to be more apparent than the United States Unpacking whiteness is an empty box - there’s nothing there. Where do white people go for culture? Often Black culture in North America You can’t start with shame - you have to remind people who they came from Peter Levine’s idea that you don’t, in locating feelings in the body, rest in what’s good and stay comfortable; but you also don’t stay in the bad and turn to ash. For white people there is no “good” place to go connected to the term white- it’s discomfort all the time. A polarizing time - one end of  the spectrum is MAGA which reinforces white supremacy/entitlement the other end is leftist positive reinforcement for self-loathing, guilt, and shame. White privilege gets conflated with cultural appropriation The belief that deep down you are bad is a non-indigenous worldview - it’s a Christian one. A rite of passage in a certain way to be so different than the rest of a room of people. There is privilege in white innocence, wide-eyed and curious about other worldviews, but it is not one that you come out the other side of without recognizing cultural poverty. There are double binds of contemporary identity politics discourse - despite the intention to advocate for another group of people, there is also anticipated criticism for participating in culture or movement that is not your own. After an event, there are lines of young people paralyzed by guilt about being white, male, or part of the settler-colonial class.  There’s a lot of learning that can happen if you look back to why people left, further than just North American history. Self-loathing is a collapse onto oneself and self-glorification if a puffing up/posture on a very dark history of  genocide, slavery, and racism - they aren’t opposites - they are two sides of the same coin. Dominant society has a tendency to co-opt, and possess everything that is holy. There is no movement that isn’t co-opted by a dominant society -  BLM, Feminism, Indigeneity Corporations co-opt every movement without changing their practices - the enemy is that machine. Wendell Berry - live as a machine or live as a creature? Whiteness is a construct of empire. How do you make a living when you want to opt out of empire, late-stage capitalism and try and work on a more human scale? How to find or make the village? Leaving more than you had for the next generation. The origins of a conception of whiteness is privilege - but as you go further there are also poverties. At Orphan Wisdom School Tad saw something not just preserved, but practiced How do we not only preserve ancestral culture but also practice it? What does it mean to make culture in the times and places we are living? Resources Tad’s Substack: https://tadhargrave.substack.com/ Tad’s Marketing Business: https://marketingforhippies.com/ Tad on Whiteness: https://healingfromwhiteness.blogspot.com/  Tad’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/marketingforhippies/ Martin Prechtel’s book: Rescuing the Light  Stephanie Mackay’s website: stephaniemackay.ca  

In this episode, podcast producer Jackson Kroopf interviews Kimberly Ann Johnson and Stephen Jenkinson about their upcoming live audio series Never Land / Sever Land - Dirt, Place, Ancestry, and The Making of Culture From The New World.  They discuss the impact of their recent trip to Ireland on their ongoing collaboration around culture making in the wake of a global pandemic. They reveal details about Stephen's work-in-progress manuscript and how it relates to orphan wisdom. They consider the implications of the “New World” in contemporary circumstances, the sticky territory of ancestry, and how dirt fits into all of this. A glimpse into a very special offering to come, this conversation gives you a preview into what happens when these two come together to consider the topics and work they’ve devoted so much of their respective writings and teachings to: how to consider (your) place when history is never far past. Bio Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW is a worker, author, storyteller, musician and culture activist. In 2010, he founded Orphan Wisdom, a house for learning skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. It is a redemptive project that comes from where he comes from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time he won’t live to see. When not on the road, he makes books, succumbs to interviews, tends to labours on a small farm, mends broken handles and fences, and bends towards lifeways dictated by the seasons of the boreal borderlands. What you’ll here wonderings about: What it means for North Americans to visit their ancestral homeland The consequences of being cultural orphans Native culture and its relationship to whiteness What ancestry means to your travel plans The difference between making culture from and making culture for... Peter Behrens' book "The Law of Dream" Stephen's musings on Tobe Hooper and Stephen Spielberg's film Poltergeist Back to the land / farming fantasies Dirt and its layered wisdom Shifts in Stephen's teachings from warnings to descriptors The Unauthorized history of North America What it means to always feel like you're running Why its different to listen to this series live... What wellness has to do with all this... You can learn  more and sign up for their upcoming class "Never Land / Sever Land: Dirt, Place, Ancestry, and The Makings of Culture From the New World" from October 20th-November 17th at: https://kimberlyannjohnson.com/never-land/ photo by Mattias Olsson  

In this episode, Kimberly and April discuss her most recent book of poetry titled Matter / Mother which shares about April’s experience of traveling through the underworld of grief, hardship, and heartbreak while mothering her young child. Together, they share their desires for a culture that makes space for the depth of mothering experiences and stories through all of the different seasons of life. They also discuss how to bear the pain and responsibility of both creating a world we want our children to live in while simultaneously inhabiting the one that currently exists. Overall, their vulnerability and honest reflections from their differing seasons of mothering offers language to those deep experiences and possibility for all mothers.   Bio April Tierney is a poet, activist, craftswoman, mother, and lover of stories. Her work follows threads of ecopoetics, myth, culture, and lineage. She has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and featured in Orion Magazine, Deep Times: A Journal of the Work that Reconnects, Clarion Poetry Magazine, and Real Ground Journal, among others.   What She Shares: –”Matter / Mother” poetry and mothering –Mothering in the upper world while traversing the underworld –Creative process while mothering –Motherhood hardship and joys of different seasons –Creating the world we want our children to inhabit   What You’ll Hear: –Latest book “Matter Mother” of poetry –Reading of “Birth Story” poem –Birth as animalistic and mythic –Decision behind black cover on book –Longing for more mothering stories from underworld journey –Writing a book during early mothering –Listening to experiences not from our own –Finding language for mothering experiences –Finding the right voices on mothering experiences –Birth culturally accepted as traumatic –Mothering in the underworld while raising children in the upperworld –Mothering as existential –Heartbreak of mothering in these times –Unable to talk about lived, ongoing way while holding children –Fantasy of modern motherhood –Modern living as kind of trauma we learn to cope with –Four forest fires in three days –Evacuating from home from forest fires –Pausing from writing and trusting the quiet places –Writing as torture until its tended to –Bringing forth for the world what is asking to come through –Books as living, breathing things –Creative portion of mothering in tension with energy and needs –Kimberly’s surprise of mothering young adulthood –Grieving and loving during mothering in all phases –Importance of sharing from different stages of mothering –Physical versus psychological demands of mothering –Noticing the glory spots of mothering –Sending children out into the world –Creating the world we want our children to live in   Resources Website: https://www.apriltierney.com/ IG: @apriltierney11