Living Ancestry, with Magda Permut and Molly Klekamp
What we’ve inherited from our ancestors is always alive within us, even when we feel disconnected from the wise ones who came before us and will come after us. In this episode with trauma therapists and deep thinkers Molly Klekamp and Magda Permut, we explore heritage, colonialism, somatics and more.
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Megan:
Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, coach, writer, and amateur ecologist living in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend, welcome. I hope that this finds you in good health and good care, taking good care. I'm recording this in sort of peak summer period. It's hot, and a lot of us, like I mentioned last time, I think just become a lot more conscious of the state of things on our planet when things are hot and dry.
And it can feel really hard to find resilience and the right I think in these times where we understand, we can see what's happening and meet it and not fall into despair, not ignore it. It's a complicated dance, I think. And it changes for me day by day. And one of the things that has really anchored me and that I'm really excited to bring to you all today is working with my ancestry and the resilience that is found in that lineage that we all have access to. And there's a lot that We've inherited from our ancestors, and you'll hear more about this in today's episode. Most of us, if not all, have inherited trauma through our family lines, and that can be big, big things, big traumas, but also little ones that happen to us every day, some sort of wounding - there's something that happens to us internally, and then it often makes us less flexible, more rigid, more feeling like we have to protect ourselves, and that's so normal in our culture today. I don't think it was as normal, you know, for our ancestors who lived way back when, when they've sort of lived in accordance to the rhythms of the land and nature and in more harmonious ways.
But a lot of us have inherited trauma, and That can really diminish our capacity to stay present with what is happening in our lives, but also in the world around us. But, we've also inherited a lot of capacity to evolve and change and understand. And my guests today, Magda and Molly, they know these themes very deeply. And they have seen in their role as trauma therapists, how trauma comes out in family lines and in our individual lives and how we can really start to heal some of that so that we have less maybe baggage around us, we feel less rigid, we can move and adapt more creatively. So I think you'll find this conversation a refreshing perspective on heritage, on how to work with healing ourselves, how that impacts past and future ancestors and what connecting with the land has to do with all of that.
Before I introduce Magda and Molly to you, I want to share two quick announcements. One is that starting August 22nd, I'm offering a free four week series called Unlearning Capitalism. There's different writings and guided meditations and reflection prompts for each week, and they're on the themes of reclaiming your sacred body, your sacred time, your sacred labor, and your sacred home, which of course is the earth.
And it's a really sweet, gentle look at how to clear away the sort of the next layer of gunk that you might have inherited from our capitalist system. It's all inspired and working with the themes of Virgo season. So if you feel like you could use a little boost in that area, you can find the link in the show notes and also on my homepage at awildnewwork. com.
You might have also noticed that this is episode 99, which means next week is episode 100. And I want to do something special to nurture this really sweet space, this podcast. I believe that anything we do or offer in the world, everything has some sort of... animation or life to it - that the podcast might not be sentient, but it has its own sort of identity and energy that's bigger than me.
You know, I sort of steward it and then it goes out in the world and what happens, the way it lands for you is beyond my control. And It's like one of my favorite things, it's so rich, I never take it for granted just hearing how the podcast Supports you. Gives you different perspectives, Helps you feel less alone helps you think about things in a new way. So I just want to do something to give it some extra love right now, and I want to do that through a little raffle. So, between now and August 20th, you can share the show with your community or write a review on Apple and I'll see, I'll look at who has done all of these things.
I'll make a list and I will choose randomly two winners and you will win either, it's your choice, a one hour, one on one session with me where we can talk about anything coming up on your journey with work and how to start shifting things in a different direction. Maybe how to see things that aren't easy for you to see right now, or you can choose a full higher calling tarot reading where we can get some more sort of mystical intel on what's at play for you right now. So there will be two winners. You can choose again, a one on one session with me or a higher calling tarot reading. Winners will be chosen randomly. And I don't offer either of these things publicly, so it's not something that you could get on your own right now, because it's sort of reserved... yeah, I just don't really offer them in one off ways.
So between now and August 20th, you can share and tag me on Instagram. You can share the podcast and tag me on LinkedIn. You can share it over email, wherever you want. If it's Not on Instagram or LinkedIn, just make sure you contact me via my website or one of those other ways to let me know that you shared it so I can add your name to the list and you can also leave a review on Apple and I will find your username and add you to the list that way.
So I'll announce the two winners on next week's show on August 22nd and thanks for helping me just spread some love for this podcast, the space that we create together.
So now I want to introduce to you my lovely guests for today, Magda Permut and Molly Klekamp.
Molly and Magda are friends of mine. We've done a little bit of work together. We meet regularly and they're really, each of them is just... they've been tremendous sources of support and insights for me over the last year. I really respect and trust their work and their perspectives and I'm honored that they agreed to come on and have a conversation about Ancestry with me.
So let me just give you a little bit more background about each of them. Magda is a clinical and community psychologist, writer, facilitator, and founder of Rainbow Heart Farm. She spends her days nourishing relationships with human and more than human beings, land, and community. She's based in Portland, Oregon, on the unceded territory of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, and Molalla, and other tribes who have stewarded the land along the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.
Molly is a psychotherapist, advocate, and educator who helms a private practice in Boulder, Colorado, where she specializes in trauma and attachment wounds. Her teachings weave together story, somatic resourcing, mindfulness, and connection to land to awaken individuals to the sentience and connection of all living beings. She is a wolf dog mama and currently lives in the mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado.
I hope that you really love this episode. I'm going to read our opening invocation to kind of set the tone and then we'll dive into the conversation. So wherever you are, just noticing your body in time and space. Notice if you need to give your body anything right now. Maybe you take a deep breath and give it some extra oxygen.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Well, Molly and Magda, thank you so much for being here with us today. I want to start by just understanding what ancestry means to you, what the term ancestor even is in your world, who that includes, who it doesn't include, and why this matters at all. So wherever you want to start is perfect, but I think we'll begin there.
Molly:
Yeah, I can start off with just kind of just a really concrete idea around ancestry for me is really just our ancestors are those people who we have descended from. And they're the bodies that we've evolved from, and they're the people that we inherit our DNA, our stories, our genetics, experiences and cultural traits.
And also our social fabric, and that also includes trauma. We also inherit trauma from our ancestors too. So that's just on a really concrete level where, and what I view our ancestors as. Yeah. And I don't know if Magda, you have more to add to that.
Magda:
I agree with everything that Molly said. Those would include ancestors for me also.
I also tend to think of our ancestors as all of the sentient beings who came before us and who will come after us. It's easy to think about ancestors in sort of a one directional into the past way. But I tend to think also of future ancestors and as time as a lot more circular and spiral and in that way. We have future ancestors also and we are future ancestors.
When I think about All sentient beings, I think about the land as a piece of our ancestry, that stones are our ancestors, trees are our ancestors, the mountains are our ancestors, and not just humans. And when we're talking about trauma, I think the land holds the trauma of the more than human world also, and our bodies also hold the trauma of the more than human world.
It can get a little overwhelming when I try to think of it all in that way, and so I do tend to sort of piece it out, but in the broadest sense, contextually, I think it's important to hold that really wide frame across time and space and all beings.
Molly:
I'll add to that, just when we take that perspective, there's this real kinship that I think comes from viewing... when we can see all the natural world as having some ancestral lineage to us that actually really we've evolved from this world in that way that there's a real connection that can be cultivated from that and that can be really healing as we do ancestral work.
Megan:
Could You expand a little bit on how it's healing or, I mean, connection of course is just inevitably valuable, I think, but why, I mean, everyone's got full plates, full lives, we've got, you know, climate change, we've got enough trauma right in front of us. Why go backwards or forwards? Why learn about our ancestors? Why connect? What does that offer us?
Magda:
I can start by just saying we are already connected to our ancestors. I don't think it's a matter of initiating connection that is not there. I think that overculture and the tremendous forces of patriarchy and colonialism and our inheritance has been disconnecting and has promoted a lie about disconnection from those beings and from our ancestors, from our past, from our future.
And really the healing is in finding a place inside of ourselves to feel that connectedness and to step beneath that lie and see the truth that we are connected to everything and it's actually very simple. Just as simple as we are a part of nature. We are a part of the animal kingdom. It's more a reclamation of something that is already true and experiencing it in a full embodied way that is healing.
Molly:
I think the other piece of this is like, Megan, you asked like, "why would we do this when we have these busy lives," and to Magda's point, we're already connected and we're already connected to our ancestors and specifically, you know, from the descendants that we're connected to. We actually carry their experiences in our genes.
So the research in epigenetics shows that our gene expression can be altered based on the experiences of our ancestors up to 10 generations ago. So that is just wild. And it's not only in genetic expression that they're finding. They're also finding that memories and experiences can be passed along. So what happens is that there's all sorts of things actually that can happen. So in our bodies, we are actually like have those artifacts from our ancestors in our bodies and our genes and our, in our memories.
And so if our ancestors, if the people we're connected to have experienced trauma, that's also going to live in our bodies. And if we're not cognizant of that, we're going to reenact it. We can project it onto other bodies, onto other people, onto the land. And so those things that we inherit, it's so important because it's already there and we're already reenacting it. We're already reenacting it by being busy all the time, right? Then it's part of our inheritance, being busy, being stressed. And the idea is not to just eliminate stress or to get rid of these things, but it's to build our capacity for connection to ourselves and to our bodies so that we can, that we can manage it in a bigger way so that then we have an access to a part of ourselves, to our deep knowing. So that's what I think it would be important.
Magda:
Yeah. I mean, I think in the simplest way that our own healing and the healing of the world and really our survival as a species depends on it. Not in a like, Oh, panic - another thing to like run around and get busy about, but actually, you know, Bayo Akomolafe says "times are urgent, we must slow down." I actually think that that's the, that's the place we're stopping and returning to a place of regulation and to a place of knowing. You know, it's funny, Molly, when you say, you know, it's wild that it's 10 generations back and that we carry these memories.
And in some ways it's wild because we've been sold this myth with a story of disconnection. In truth, it's sort of the most obvious thing in the world, right? If we look at the genetics of plants or we look at the genetics and the evolution of species and animals, everything gets handed down. That's how we live.
That's how we survive. And at some point we developed this lie about disconnection. That was a survival strategy, too. We're just now at this place in the evolution of sort of the cosmic consciousness where that lie no longer serves us. And it's time. It's time. But the only way to do it is to continually start like peeking under the veil by being really present with ourselves.
Molly:
Yeah, I think even just as therapists, you know, something that's so obvious in working with clients is the things that get passed on through family and the narratives that get passed along, behaviors that are modeled. Forms of interaction. And so to your point, Magda, when we think about like 10 generations back, of course those things are getting passed.
I mean, that's how humans also learn like beyond the genetic piece, just the learning piece that's there. And so it's so clear, I think, that that would be there. And it's so interesting that there has been this myth around the disconnection. I think to your point, it's like, yeah, that somehow that actually was beneficial at one point.
That was actually an adaptive response, but it no longer is.
Magda:
I could even add that it's not just trauma that has been passed down. It has been the capacity for adapting to changing environments, to coping with trauma, which is probably what the disconnection response was adapting to as it is. That's a, that is a dissociative response that we see this in individuals when something is overwhelming, a part of us leaves.
And that's sort of the place that we are with our ancestors or with the land a lot of the time - is we're sort of like, "Oh, you're not really there. I'm in my own world." There's a lot of resource that we are not connected to when we are not connected to ancestry. As well as trauma. And so those things come hand in hand and when they flow back in there's like this feeling of when you've been sitting on your foot and it fell asleep for too long and like a first tingles and hurts and then you're like, "Oh, there's my foot."
I mean, that's like what the process of reconnection can be like. And then you can do all sorts of new things that you couldn't do while your foot was asleep or just completely numb.
Megan:
Have you found certain modalities or practices especially helpful for healing some of this? I get that you're saying that sort of anything we do to take care of ourselves is having reverberations and addressing some of this, and - in my experience - there have been particular threads that are kind of obviously inherited and sort of the way that I work with those are a little different than like if I'm just having a busy day and slowing down. So are there things that you found particularly helpful for the ancestral inheritance piece?
Molly:
I would just offer that I think the body is the first access point to working with this. So one of the first things I think is really to be able to settle the body, become aware of the body and know when your nervous system is and isn't regulated and that that is the biggest portal and pathway or the first starting place to not only be able to settle the body, but also to be able to safeguard the body, and that means that we take a tender, compassionate approach to our bodies and noticing it and starting to build the capacity to really be in our bodies.
And I think that's just the first practice that I find before even kind of going towards the ancestral work, because inevitably what will happen is if there is trauma, there is grief and a lot of loss. The nervous system in the body gets dysregulated when we access those things. And so if we don't have the capacity to regulate our nervous systems and we're not aware of when we freeze, when we flee, when we shut down, when we dissociate, when we go into fight, then if we're not cognizant of those things in the first place, then again, we're gonna, we're gonna reenact those things.
But we're also not going to be able to access the place in us that can really care for ourselves and build that connection to ancestor in a healthy and meaningful way. In a healing way.
Magda:
Yeah, I would say 100% the body is the first place to start. And there are lots and lots of practices for supporting the body and the nervous system.
Meditation is wonderful. Being in nature is wonderful. Finding places that are soothing. Before we started today, I was a little nervous, and so I spent five minutes just sitting here looking out the window at the leaves on the tree and the way that the wind moved them. And really being present was sort of the sensation of that in my eyes, having a process of letting it in.
And I think that's like that cultivating that receptivity is a place in the body, like letting goodness in, is a tremendous practice for us. It's a window of tolerance issue as Molly's talking about being able to safeguard the body is sort of about finding the window within which we can tolerate experience. So knowing when we're over our limit and being able to say, "Oh, I, I need a moment. What do I need?" And then learning what things are good when we're sort of at that edge where we're about to dissociate or we're about to become dysregulated or we're about to do whatever we do when we leave ourselves and then coming back.
I do think that there are ways to connect in a resourced way with ancestry practices that do not necessarily invoke trauma and can be resourcing. Things like connecting with the seasons. All of our ancestors were more connected and are more connected to the seasons than we are. That has been a clear trajectory over time, is that we have gotten more and more protected from the elements, from the experience of the ebbs and flows of life. So that's, that's an easy entry. I think also learning about practices and foods from your cultural tradition, those are sort of small ways that can be resourcing in a deep way that we don't totally understand with our brains and even noticing sort of how we react to those foods and that's a way then we're back to the body.
Again, so those are sort of ways that you can do a little bit of both and I would recommend doing some of both before moving towards ancestral work that might - probably will - be traumatized, will have trauma in it. Most of the people in our history have experienced some sort of trauma.
Molly:
I would just add to what Magda had to say with some of the practices, you know, there are lots of spiritual teachers and lots of people from specific cultural communities that really hold those lineages that are great resources for people to connect to, to really do that work.
And outside of that, just in our own daily practices, you know, some things that we can do that maybe feel a little more on the resourcing side and by resource, I mean, anything, any practice, any person that promotes healing and growth in us. And I really, I got that definition from Resmaa Menakem, and I think it's just a really helpful way to think about it, but creating an ancestor altar can be super helpful and a practice of connection. Or if you have an ancestor already that you know, like, even just a grandparent, you know. I have a grandma that I often think about and call on in certain instances. And so thinking about that person, or if there's someone that really felt like a safe person, or if there's someone in your family lineage that resembles or, or represents something that feels empowering or resourcing to you, you can call on them in moments of need.
Megan:
Thank you. I'm also thinking about something you're both familiar with and weave into your work a lot, which is myth and how that can also be a connection to past, present, future ancestry. Do you want to talk a little bit about how myth is also a way that our ancestors might teach us?
Magda:
Yeah, I'll expand this a little bit to be story and myth because I've been thinking a lot about individual stories as a place of healing of what we would call cultural complexes.
So the cultural complex, I'm actually going to read a quote from Samuel Kimball's: "intergenerational processes are expressed as phantoms that provide representation and continuity for unresolved or unworked through grief and violence that occurred in a prior historical context." So really what he's saying is that there's a set of experiences in the past that collected Emotion that has not been processed, that's sort of sitting out there in the past and is part of what we inherit either through familial lines or through cultural lines, that both both are happening and both are possible and there's, you know, each family interprets things slightly different and hands down a different constellation of strengths and struggles.
This story is the story of that unprocessed grief. And so when we hear stories from the people who came before us, from people from other cultures, from places that story has not been expressed yet, we have access to healing through that avenue- through what has not been said being said in the world.
And when we are regulated in our nervous system, we can hold and digest and transmute that. And it has collective ripples throughout everything, throughout everybody's story. And then the story that we tell and the story that we hand down becomes a different story because that has been processed.
Myth is sort of the grandma or sort of the big umbrella of all of our stories, because myths are sort of these acute, boiled down potent versions of stories that are changed and adapted over time and that we can then see our story and see our ancestor stories reflected in it and then Bring that information and bring the emotion that it evokes back in to current day.
Molly:
When I think about myth and story and fairy tale as access points to ancestors, I think about this way in which humans are actually wired for story. So we are neurobiologically wired for story and to hear story and it lands in our system in a very specific way. And so, I think about how just connecting to that wiring in and of itself is a connection to our ancestors, how they learned through myths, through story, through oral tradition.
And then I also think that there's this way and there's a book called Hospicing Modernity, and in this book she talks about how stories resurface and myths resurface at certain times and the medicine is different because the context is different. But we can also look at the stories and at myth and at fairy tales to what... there's still some teaching from our ancestors in those. So for example, in some traditions, there's stories that talk about when you go into the forest, you know, asking for certain permissions to go in, and if you don't, what happens?
And so there's this guidance or this nudging that we can take from that and say, Oh, this is about having relationship and connection to the natural world and that there's a medicine from those before us in those teachings. And so we can really connect to ancestors through those things because we can see the medicine that's in story and just to Magda's point about myth being kind of like... myth speaks to the universal, these archetypes that are a lot of times said to be the reason they're universal is because many people can relate to the themes and these things and these stories and these myths. And so that's another way we can connect, right? If our ancestors connected in an archetypal way to these stories, that's there's also medicine for us in that too.
And I think the cool thing about story and myth is that it really actually speaks to us in a way that can really circumvent our defenses. And it helps get us into a state of mind into - just like dreams - like into this kind of other place in our psyche where there are openings, and being in that place that can also be another portal to hearing and listening to ancestors.
Magda:
I love that Molly, and you reminded me, and I just want to pull the thread through to what we were talking about earlier, when you were talking about how being grounded in the nervous system, we can connect with our deep knowing and that that is an access point. When you're talking about stories coming and going and the way that stories emerge and then sort of ebb and flow through the collective consciousness, you can see this in Hollywood, right?
That there'll be like a wave of movies with this type of theme and a wave of another type of theme. And then for 10 years, there's nobody's talking about this type of story. And then it's back again, right? That's the collective unconscious following its deep knowing, its collective deep knowing about what is the medicine of this time.
Similarly, on the individual level, That's what we can do when we start tapping into these places. Sometimes one story will just speak to you when it had never opened itself to you before. You'd looked at it and it was just words on a page or you'd heard it and it was almost like it was in a different language that you don't understand.
And then one day it's like your ear just opened to it and it can release this deep knowing. It has connected to that part of you that is guiding yourself and that is bringing you back into connection with the unconscious, with the ancestors, with the, the deep places in the psyche and the world.
Megan:
Lovely. Thank you both for responding to that in that way. Maybe we could spend some time talking about land and connection and healing and Molly, this is something you spoke to specifically in a different context, about how connecting to other sentient beings can be deeply healing, and I'm curious what you could tell us about ways to do that. I'm assuming it's also through the body, like some of the things that you've mentioned, but ways to do that. And also ways to do that, that doesn't repeat sort of the colonial context that a lot of us in white bodies sort of unknowingly or unconsciously repeat. We just go for a hike and then we just claim this forest and this forest is here to heal me. And I'm going to, you know, do all this stuff. What could you say about any of what I just said?
Molly:
You know, I think the first thing I'll just speak to is cultivating an awareness and a compassionate presence to the sentience of all living beings.
And that I think comes back to what we were talking about before in viewing the land and the natural world as kin. And when we take the approach of... when I'm outside and interacting with the land around me or the natural world, a lot of times I just talk to, like, the Aspen trees here in the mountains of Colorado, for whatever reason, to me, I just have this relationship with them. And to me, they're real beings, they're alive. And so I might just greet them and say, hello. Or if I see the little remnants of the ground squirrels around our property, pulling things apart, I think, oh, well, someone was here. There was a being here. And just really internally using language even that honors the aliveness and the beingness of those creatures and the world.
So that's one piece of opening in that way. And the other piece, I think when we start to do that, I'll just actually speak to a personal experience and want to speak to the, the thing you're talking about, Megan, around like the colonial mindset and the settler mindset around land and I've noticed as I have a practice of communicating with land, these different stories will open to me.
So for example, I went backpacking someplace that was called Sand Creek in Colorado. And I just started when I was there, just having a little bit of a relationship with the land and trying to communicate and there was some barrier some block or some like pain that I felt in that. So I just started doing research and learned about the Sand Creek Massacre that happened here, which was a massacre from the settlers, the white settlers who were coming out to the west to mine, and they killed a large amount of the northern Arapaho and the Ute tribe here. And that was whose land this was originally.
And that just got me thinking and doing all sorts of other research about the land here and the indigenous people whose lands this is, which is really the, again, the Northern Arapaho, the Cheyenne and the Ute, and I'm just outside of Boulder, Colorado. And so I think one way that we can start that practice is when we're in conversation with the land and really taking a deep respect for it, that some of those stories open to us, the, it will speak to us.
Magda:
Beautiful, Molly. In agreement with Molly that receptivity, a stance of receptivity is sort of the first place. It's okay to want to go to nature, to be connected to nature and to be in reciprocal relationship and to get something out of that. Like we need that and She needs us to need that and to go get it too, but how we do that I think is important and the stance matters, and so starting with receptivity, starting with asking permission, starting with gratitude.
Those are things that before I step on new land, I try to make sure are just deep in my heart and I will say things out loud and I will take a little piece of my hair and offer it to the land and just say, here's a little piece of me. Thank you for sharing a piece of you. And when I'm leaving, sometimes I'll say thank you. And sometimes I'll see if I can get it to echo off the canyon and like, feel it coming back. I've sometimes really felt that like wave of the land answering in sort of a physiological sense.
I think the other thing I want to mention is Really, it's about finding a personal authentic connection to land. That appropriation occurs when we're taking something from another culture or some other way that doesn't suit us specifically, that is not authentic and we're sort of enacting it in this performative way. And that comes from a place of a hungry ghost - of a deep longing and, you know, bless us all in our deep longing to reconnect, and you have it in you. You have it in you. All of our ancestors were indigenous at some point.
There's a lot in between us and that experience, but you absolutely still have access to it. And so finding even if it's a moment and then just seeing that moment and cherishing it and growing it. That's where I, what I think is important. The other thing I would just add to Molly's Sand Creek story is I try to get very curious about where things come from.
Everything that we have, I mean, I'm sitting here looking at this microphone that is in my frame now for this podcast, but this microphone came from somewhere and so finding out what metal is this from, like what metal is this, where is this metal found, where were the pieces assembled, where was it taken, how did this come to be, is a way to reconnect in a really deep way with the time And space components of land and our connection to it in ways that we just completely take for granted. And we can't do it for everything in our world all the time that would be beyond a full time job for one human.
But when something - again to this deep knowing - when something sort of strikes your attention, what is that thing? What is that thing made of? And where does that come from? And then using the incredible informational resources that we have access to the technology. And tracing it back and finding out what you can and then seeing how you can find an authentic connection to that original place too.
And so I'd be able to give gratitude to some piece of land for this microphone and also see if there are ways that I can be more gentle on the earth in my decisions about, you know, purchasing microphones and right, like make consumer decisions also with that information in mind.
Molly:
There's a thread Magda that you spoke to the hungry ghost piece that I really just want to pull through and highlight because as a white person, woman of European descent, I have kind of wrestled with that.
There's some sort of hole or some sort of something missing internally because of the disconnection, disconnection from ancestral lineage, and kind of having this gaze that didn't feel good to me about like looking to other cultures. And I think to Magda's point, like that is the hungry ghost, that is some of the trauma, right? Of those disconnections.
And that, When we can settle ourselves, when we can work with those things, and I'll just bring it back to the body. And I think Resmaa Menakem talks about this in a beautiful way that when we find that settledness and that compassionate care towards self internally, then it really does open up the knowing and we develop our own practices or reconnection and that reclamation piece comes through, we become a channel for that when we're able to find that space internally.
And then we kind of stop having to fill it with false refuges. I think that's a word from Tara Brach, like these false kind of things to fill. And you also know it when you're in your deepest knowing. You feel all the alignment and congruity and you can also feel it when you're in relationship with people too.
Megan:
Thank you both, such rich observations, and I'm really appreciating how just simple it is - that it's all already here in this moment in our bodies, and we just, there are all of these sweet, small ways to do this work. You don't have to go to a workshop or get a degree or, you know, do advance anything. It's just all right here, which is really beautiful. Maybe one more question before we let people know how they can connect with you.
You know, Magda, you mentioned circular time and that we have, ancestry goes many ways backward and forward and probably all around. What are some of your hopes about? Where this work could lead if, if enough of us got on board with some of this re -regulation, reconnection, sort of sacred ancestor work, what do you hope sort of comes from that or blooms from that?
And maybe you're already seeing it, but would love to end sort of with a vision for where this could take us.
Magda:
That question kind of brings tears to my eyes, I'll tell you, Megan. When I dream in and feel into this, my wish would be that we can feel each other's pain and that we can feel the pain of the earth, and the pain of our ancestors and the pain of the future, and be able to act in a moment to moment way from that pain because that pain is integrally connected to our love. And that we could just respond in a way that is so easy and instinctual and it doesn't require, it doesn't require any cognitive capacity at all.
It's like the way that you, you know, reach out to someone so generously when it's in your heart and you feel connected to them, that that could be the norm.
Molly:
My hope and future visioning is for us to be able... in doing this work, if we look forward to really be able to deconstruct some of the systems that have been put in place because of these lineages, and not because not to demonize the past or to say it was all bad because there's such resource in it too, right? The connection piece. But that some of the systems that came out of necessity, perhaps, or came out of reenactment of past traumas, that we can begin to deconstruct those things and that We can find healing and collective healing and individual healing, and not to say in this like that will form this utopic society in any sort of way, but that we can really live from an embodied, grounded place where we're taking ownership for our own actions and how those things impact others. And we're really just living in attunement with one another and with the natural world and seeing that we are part of it all. We are in the whole matrix and we are part of the threads of all of the things that connect. So that would be my hope.
Megan:
Lovely visions. Thank you. I know you have some things coming up that you're doing together. I know you also each have your own practices, and if you could speak to how people can connect, what you have coming up, where they can follow along.
Magda:
So we have a retreat coming up just outside of Portland, Oregon, and it's going to be a day and a half, and it is on the 22nd and 23rd of September, and information about that is available on our websites which will be in the show notes. Then we also have an upcoming course that Molly, maybe you want to speak to?
Molly:
Sure, yeah. So this is part two, a course that we started last year. It's called Wild Within. And we will be using a training that we did with Clarissa Pinkola Estes to go through the second half of her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.
So that is starting in October, but I'll need to verify the date on that. And you can also find information on both our websites that'll be in the show notes. And also Magda and I have a website for the work we're doing together called tendrilscommunity. com, but that'll also be in the show notes. And then of course, both of us are therapists and I'm in Boulder and Magda's in Portland.
Megan:
Thank you both so much. This was really rich and I know we could talk really for hours on this topic specifically, but thank you just for your very eloquent and pointed responses. I know that these are things that you both think about and embody very deeply. So really appreciate you sharing your insights with us today.
Molly:
Thank you, Megan.
Magda:
Yeah, thank you for holding space and asking good questions. Really appreciate you.
Megan:
Okay, my friend, I hope that you loved this conversation and I encourage you to connect with Magda and Molly if you'd like to keep learning. All of the links you need are in the show notes. I want to just give you a quick reminder of our little raffle to celebrate episode 100.
Between now and August 20th, you can share and tag me or contact me on my website. Let me know that you shared the podcast and two winners will receive their choice of a one hour, one on one session with me or a higher calling tarot reading. And it will also, I think, just feel really sweet to the podcast to get a little further out into the world.
So thank you for being on this ride with me. I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.
Resources/Practitioners Mentioned:
*Resmaa Menakem
*Samuel Kimbles
*Bayo Akomolafe
*Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
*Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
To sign up for Unlearning Capitalism, visit: https://mailchi.mp/9a38972ba76a/unlearning-capitalism or awildnewwork.com
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