Connection in Collapse, with Carmen Spagnola
We can sense how chaotic, disconnected, and troubled our world is, and many of us feel the need for sturdier skills that can help us be with these times.
In this conversation with Carmen Spagnola, we explore the poignancy of being alive right now as well as the frameworks and practices that can help us metabolize what’s happening and find the deliciousness that’s available.
About Carmen:
Carmen Spagnola is a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef turned trauma recovery practitioner, clinical hypnotherapist, and kitchen witch. She has hosted The Numinous Podcast since 2014. She's the author of The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes & Rituals for the Wheel of the Year, and founder of The Numinous Network, an online learning and support portal for people healing from trauma through a cross-pollination of somatics, attachment, and nature-based spirituality.
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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, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today. Hi friend and welcome. I'm so glad that you made it here and just honored to share this space with you. I'm coming to you from the late winter period. The sun is in the sign of Pisces. We're at the very end of this Zodiacal year we've gone through.
We're on the twelfth sign about to start a new cycle with the spring equinox and Aries and we're in this in between time and it can be hard to wait for the coming of spring for the full on, you know, beauty and scent and just joy that it can be, you know, but we see maybe some of the first blooms. The Daphne and Crocus and Daffodil are starting here, but there's still a lot of rain and gray.
You know, the days are still kind of short. And so I hope that you're just hanging in there with whatever is coming up and that You can sort of hold your heart if you're feeling any desire to sort of rush through this or get to the, get to the growing season already. Um, the message that I keep hearing seems to be that it's a really good time to keep things very small and humble right now.
Seeds are so small. The little sprouts we see growing are so small. These little buds at the end of the branches are so small and tender. And can we also just stay really close to the essence of our desires and longings and just take tiny little steps over and over again rather than sort of losing ourselves in the vastness of possibility, which can be really fun sometimes, but can also be really overwhelming.
So this thread of smallness and humility came through really beautifully in today's conversation with Carmen Spagnola, someone whose work I have followed for a number of years and have a lot of respect for. Carmen is a Le Cordon Bleu trained chef turned trauma recovery practitioner, clinical hypnotherapist, and kitchen witch.
She has hosted the Numinous podcast since 2014. She's the author of the Spirited Kitchen, Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year, and the founder of the Numinous Network, an online learning and support portal for people healing from trauma through a cross pollination of somatics, attachment, and nature based spirituality.
And I have accessed all of these resources with Carmen and have gotten so much out of them and in this conversation we talk about the state of the world right now, how to be what she calls the adult in the room, uh, tiny ways to give yourself little lifts and how not to stay frozen in fear or dissociation.
To also give yourself the space to take the next right step and be in the fullness of this life that you are living right now in all of its complexity and its beauty. So it's a lovely episode. I loved this conversation and I think it's an excellent way to conclude the journey that we've been on in this winter season of the podcast, um, with our theme of vast connection and I hope that you really love it.
Just a couple of quick announcements before we dive in. This is the last episode of the winter season of the show, and so I'll be sharing some encore episodes coming out in March to sort of tide you over, and then I'm working on the spring season, which I hope to bring to you starting in April. I want to say thank you to all of you who are supporting the show financially and chipping in either monthly or one at a time.
And if you would like to do that, if you're listening and have the space and like to contribute to the show, you can do that at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. And that just means a lot to feel like. This is a group effort and the, you know, the little contributions financially really help this keep going and bubbling along.
So thank you to all of you doing that. If you find yourself needing some more robust support in terms of your vocational life or how you are surviving inside of capitalism, I do just want to remind you that I work with people one on one in depth. I have in person. work happening here in the Portland area and I will just next week start offering live tarot readings again, which I have never done.
I've done tarot readings for a long time, but they've always been asynchronous and not live and in real time. So I'm really excited to start doing that more intently next week. And so all of that can be found on my website, awildnewwork. com and also in my weekly newsletters, which you can sign up for at the link in the show notes.
Even though the podcast will be taking a hiatus in March, my weekly newsletters will keep coming and sort of helping you really attune to these seasonal shifts that we're undergoing. So, all of that is there for you. Okay, I'm going to lead us into our opening invocation before shifting to this lovely conversation with Carmen.
So wherever you are, you might just notice your body and time and space right now. See if there's anything you could do to make this moment a little sweeter, or make your body a little more comfortable. 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 Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook, and Clackamas tribes, among many others who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. Alright, well, Carmen, thank you so much for being here.
Carmen: Totally my pleasure.
So excited to be, um, in this seat, you know, be the interviewee, right?
Megan: I knew I wanted to have you on this season because we're talking about connection. And I think the way that you think about and write about and talk about. connection to other humans and to the more than human world and to the spirit world.
It's really special because I think you are really conscious of the context that we're doing that in terms of trauma and collapse. And so I was thinking where we could start was just to hear a little bit from you about how you define collapse, what that means to you and, and where you see us in that maybe cycle or that place.
Carmen: Well, there's kind of the like, heady answer, and then there's the like, look around kind of answer. But, uh, but I do enjoy Thinking about collapse as sort of a, um, theoretical, even though it is very much not theoretical, it's very much happening now, but if I were to kind of like geek out on it, the way I conceive of collapse is it is a process of destabilization and eventual disillusion Like dissolving of societal structures and sites.
So like our institutions and our places. So that includes like landscapes, ecosystems, species, um, due to converging emergencies. Of large scale cooperation dilemmas, so it isn't just that one thing is happening. It's that there are several large scale things all occurring at once, and the crux of the issue is that none of them are problems that can be solved.
They don't have. response. They don't have answers. They only have responses. There's no, if there was an obvious thing we could do that would ameliorate that, we would have an answer. But there's always like a stick in the wheel. There's always like something mucking it up. And very often it's, it's human fallibility.
You know, we like, we know what we need to do to like use less, uh, Energy and, um, all of those kinds of things we know how to do. And I'm not, um, like a misanthrope who's like, ah, stupid humans. Like we deserve this coming to us. But the reality is we are human. And we don't function at these like large global planetary scales very well.
And so, if we could do something about it different as a species, we would, but we have cognitive limits, we have complexity limits, we have relationality that places limits, we have all of these limits. So, so what we're in. is large scale predicament all the time. Predicaments, paradoxes, they don't have answers.
As much as we want them, we want them. All they have are responses. So we keep responding and like hopefully we ameliorate some things, but of course what we find at these scales is no matter what you do to respond, It helps some aspects and it hinders others. So you're like constantly in this loop of predicament.
The scale is just way too big. So, so that's, you know, a bit of a bummer, but the other thing you could do is just like, look around and be like, Oh yeah, this is what happens with human societies. We have big expansions based on available energy and resources. So initially that was like slaves and then, you know, uh, it became oil.
And then what happens is. Those societies contract, all the resources move from distributed to the center of the empire, and then you're just concentrating the problems because there's eventually no more resources to extract and move to the center, and so then it crumbles. So, you know, currently, we can like look around and we see the destabilization.
Like everywhere, unstable governments, unstable institutions, um, things like, you know, healthcare, academia, the courts. We see human caused climate chaos. mismanaged response to pandemics, those kinds of things, uh, rising fascism, all these things converge. And so then what you have is you have collapse happening at many scales.
So we have, like you said, I, I, I'm always kind of looking at what's the context. So we have these personal impacts. You know, I'm Gen X. I just can't, I can't afford a home, not even to rent, in the shitty wrong side of the tracks place I grew up. Like that just, it's like so far beyond. Um, so that impacts me personally in my sense of like, I'm getting displaced, you know, I'm, all these things.
So the collapse starts impacting us personally. And We realize that there's no problem that we experience personally that doesn't somehow get exacerbated by the collective collapse, the large scale. So, or we can look at it the other way too. I am a person who works with, uh, trauma recovery and particularly with folks who have diagnoses of mental health disorder.
Um, I also happen to work with a lot of. Neurodivergent people. I also have to work having to work with a lot of chronically or episodically disabled people. All of these people, you can, when you look at the root cause of their issue. It's capitalist imperialist white supremacist patriarchy. It's the impacts of large scale collapse that are exacerbating what they're going through.
So, you know, so now we just kind of look at like, oh, okay, so there's no social safety net. There's no village. The impracticality of the nuclear family is like really sucky for all of us. So, so collapse is happening personally and for more and more people. And so we can't address things at the large scale.
So, um. So that's collapse. In a nutshell. Yay. I'm here all night. Yeah, no, yeah. It's, you know, I mean, I joke because it's a bummer. But actually, what I have found is that many, many, many people feel the relief that comes from not being gas lit anymore. So being able to name that You know, we are living in impossible times, uh, can actually be a real relief.
So for all folks who are like, like, this is my jam, you know, welcome.
Megan: Yeah. Oh, thank you. I've never heard it really framed that way. Um, or at least right now it feels. I really love how you brought in all the nuances of that, how it's happening on all of these different levels. So it sounds like one that obviously has an impact on us personally and then how the capacity we have to connect with others.
How is it impacting the way that we're attached or relating to others? Um, yeah, maybe we could start there.
Carmen: Well, boy, it's sure hard to connect when you are in constant, either low grade or acute. Perception of life threat, like really at every level. So, you know, the thing about collapse is it's unevenly distributed.
And so, so is the response and the adaptation. So we're all going to experience the dissolution of late stage racialized capitalism into something much smaller scale and much more localized. We're all going to experience that, but we're going to do it at different times and at different rates. And so some places, Are like really, really in it.
And there's already, you know, climate refugees and there's, you know, already water war and certainly we are still living in the age of extended protracted oil wars. So that that is like intense and very focusing for those folks. And for those of us who are experiencing You know, something different. It's still kind of abstract.
But if you, you know, if the question is like, how are, how do we see people adapting to collapse? You know, it depends on who you ask. Ask somebody who's lost their house in, you know, a wildfire. How are you doing three or four years on? Not great. You don't come back. It's a stairstep thing, right? It's like, we're all kind of on this one step, this plateau of like, Oh, things are kind of shitty.
And it's like little gray, you know, um, degradation and then Boom, you like fall down a step and it'll maybe even out, but it'll never go back up again. But it's amazing how quickly we get used to things evening out at this lower shittier level. Like I'm in Canada, what's colonially known as Canada. And like, I look around at our And I'm like, wow, this is not Tommy Douglas's Canada anymore.
We used to be so proud of universal health care, but like ask somebody, uh, who's been living with disability or chronic illness before COVID 19, they will tell you like, no, we are not adapting well. And I would say some folks like, like that population in particular, in some ways they are so much better prepared for collapse.
Because the illusion is gone. There's a, there's a, you know, well, like at least here in Canada, when I, for folks who don't know who Tommy Douglas is one of Canada's great icons, but he talked about, you know, Canadians have a compassionate responsibility towards our neighbor. And so that includes, you know, why we would have universal health care, but anybody who has been chronically 20 years knows that we do not have universal health care, we have a mythology of universal health care, and it is getting worse.
So, you know. If you ask people who live in Congo right now, how's, how are we adapting to class? Like we're fucking not, we are being overpowered by rich oligarchs and the West. So, you know. How are we adapting? Like, it depends on what you mean by adapt, right? Like, if, if what you mean is, like, hastening our demise, so that we can finally kind of, like, a very few, very resourceful, or very clever, or maybe just very rich people.
Can just like start again, everything else just kind of collapses and like a few start again, then, um, you know, like we're, we're doing all right at, uh, getting started from scratch on something else, but I think we're doing a pretty shitty job right now of adapting in the sense that we're, we're not doing a good job of reining in the rich and powerful and, um, intimidating them.
Um, you know, like we aren't, we're doing a pretty bad job of our, you know, storming of the Bastille and pulling out the guillotines, but you know, the glimmer of possibility that I see in terms of connection is that more and more people are not gaslighting themselves or others anymore. And more and more people are becoming class conscious and recognizing that, you know, the capitalist imperialist white supremacist patriarchal mandate.
Is, um, gaslighting and traumatizing us constantly and we're getting pretty sick of it. And so I think that's a positive adaptation. Really, you know, the revolutionary spirit class conscious spirit, but that feels important. Yeah.
Megan: Thank you. Yeah, it does make sense that it would completely depend on who you're asking and what I mean by adaptation And I am gonna have to think about what I meant by that.
I guess I meant like Are we making this better somehow or are we getting through it somehow and it sounds like In your view, it's so big and already in motion that no, but that at least there's some unveiling happening. Is that sort of accurate?
Carmen: Yeah, like, well, and I guess what I would say is like, the other thing, it's Not so much that it's so big.
It's like, what, what lever are you trying to pull? Like, at what, what scale are you asking? Because everybody has different influence at different levels. And so I presume that, you know, most of us are not world leaders, so. Like I said, I think we're doing a shitty job of intimidating. Well, except the French, the French are still doing a pretty good job of intimidating their aristocracy.
And I think we should all learn from that. Um, but I would say, you know, I, I do think that the rise of things like, uh, more trauma awareness and, uh, uh, even being able to overlay neuroscience and somatics and attachment theory, polyvagal theory, all of these interesting things that are. I, I think you could fairly well argue were responses to.
a market for self healing and self help in the West, you know, like I think that those are areas of study that have proliferated due to Western capitalist interest in feeling good all the time. So I think that, that kind of stuff, if we then overlay it into our lives, into more of a like collective care model, a more intersectional model, like I said, a more, more Class conscious and also less human supremacist model.
When we, when we start to apply those things at whatever our scale is, then we can do some like pretty important and powerful things, I think, in terms of adapting to collapse. And So I, where, where it's at for me is like that, you know, 150 people and less kind of thing of like, you know, where's your circle of influence?
And, um, within that sphere of influence, can you create like a little cell of, uh, folks who are, um, tracking each other and tracking the larger patterns and not necessarily working to ensure their own futurity, but some conservation of like the, the best of human. The human spirit and the human endeavor.
Right. So, um, again, it's like kind of goes back to just classic black socialist feminist work of margins to center. And it's like, so I may, of course, I have a child of a young, you know, like a emergent adult 20 year old queer anxious kid. And I would like for them to make it, but the fact that They don't want children and probably won't have them.
I'm like not attached to in the same way that like somebody else might be because it's like, okay, so that's great. We've got like one more generation of me and we're going to be thinking about how do we ensure like, for instance, you know, okay, we're going to Relocate to this particular piece of land that's been ancestral in my partner's family for a while, but we're not actually really working to ensure our futurity, but perhaps indigenous futurity in that area.
So we need to, you know, create more authentic relationships. We have to, you know, create land that's regenerative. We have to steward it for someone else who may not necessarily be us. So, you know, I think there are positive adaptations for sure, it just depends on the scale. If you're asking me generally, it's like, wow, you know, we're fucked, but that's not so bad because we're, you know, we're just humans.
It's fine. It's fine. There's a lot of other cool stuff happening on this planet that will carry on, you know? Mm hmm. Thank you.
Megan: Yeah, maybe we could bring it down to like the nitty gritty for a second and then talk about some of those. Um, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, um, how you're seeing some of those positive, smaller scale adaptations that you're seeing.
So maybe could you just take a little bit of time to help us see how. Collapse is impacting our like one on one or small interpersonal relationships. And then maybe that's where we could focus on some of the. You know, skills or adaptations that you were seeing be helpful.
Carmen: For sure. I mean. Well, the thing that's, like, top of mind right now, if I'm thinking about interpersonal stuff, is, like, pandemic response.
So, that is an incredibly touchy subject that, for me, shouldn't be. But like really is. And even I as, oh, I heard this term the other day, COVID hawk. I'm like, am I a COVID hawk? I like hawks, right? So it's like, oh yeah, spiritual vision, they're tracking, they're focused, but apparently it's like not a compliment.
Anyway, it's like, so that creates a challenge for me when I'm trying to engage with people in a safe kind of way. And I don't even, like, I, I'm not immune compromised, I, I'm not, I'm a little worried about my kiddo, but I'm not, that's not why, this is just how I feel in a collapse oriented world, we, we need to become used to epidemics, just like swooping through, lightning quick, and um, so there's just like basic standards of care, that as it turns out, it's, We cannot agree on as a society.
So of course that creates a sense of alienation for some, it creates frustration for others. It's, you know, creates disability, literal disability. So we have to grapple with things like the moral injury of. What we're putting kids through what, how we treat people who actually maybe do have vaccine injury.
I'm vaccinated, but I believe people get injuries. How do we deal with this? It's very personal. It's very personal. So how then does one deal with something like that? Well, it's really helpful to over time. I've discovered it's like, well, there's certain kind of basic skills of being human that have to become more precise, More, um, attuned.
You have to, like, use them more surgically and, and study them more surgically. So attachment, attachment dynamics, trauma awareness. Somatic regulation, you know, there's like these very sort of basic skills that capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy are, is so invested in numbing us from. So, you know, like that is a huge challenge to kind of find the time, the capacity, like willing.
Householders or friends or family who are willing to go on that journey with you where you're like, okay, so, you know, so if we live in a world that is governed by predicament and paradox. And is morally injurious. Like it's very high stakes and there are errors of omission and commission constantly, and like opposing values.
How then do we integrate that in our family, in our marriage? If you have one of you is really collapsed where in your marriage and the other one isn't, it's really fucking hard. You, you really have to have some skills around. So much more than just communication attachment semantics interpersonal neurobiology co regulation.
These are technologies of surviving collapse. So, I mean, I find these things very promising there's nothing that's going to save us from collapse. Don't get me wrong, but we can have a quality of experience, a quality of humanness that still includes pleasure, joy, connection, satisfiability, enoughness, the little lifts, the good stuff, you know, that's all still there too.
And in fact, probably even more critical. And we do that with each other. So yeah, those, those interpersonal technologies, and then of course your collective technologies, so maybe I'll just pause there because there's definitely like ways to think about it, but maybe we'll get into but that's, those are, that's like where I was.
Headed many years ago, you know, like I got really interested in collapse. It was like quite fascinating to me because I was, I had gone through it personally with a bankruptcy and realized that there was no social safety net. And also I didn't really have a personal safety net, no family safety net. I realized what class I was in, that's for sure.
And so after like 15 years of experimentation and study, I definitely have frameworks now, but I didn't start with them as robust as I have. And I don't think people need to really, though it might be a bit of a fast track.
Megan: Yeah, that's one of the things I really appreciate about you and sort of, I find a lot of boldness or courage, I guess, because I see you as someone who can be thinking and seeing the world in this way.
But also, I mean, your book, The Spirited Kitchen is just beautiful. It feels like, it almost feels like, not that collapse isn't happening, but it's like so luscious and fun and, you know, your work in the Numinous Network, it seems like, and this may be just. Projection, but it seems like you really enjoy your life, actually.
Carmen: Yeah, I do.
Megan: And so I, I just really appreciate watching people who can hold all of that. And maybe it's not, not a paradox, like, because you see that the world is happening, like you said, it's even more important to bring in color and softness and these practices that you employ. So I just wanted to say that that I really appreciate how you hold all of that.
Um, yeah, maybe you could walk us through some of the things that help you stay sturdy in this if we were focused on, you know, maybe the 150 people around us and this is our sphere of influence. What are some of the things you would recommend looking into or practicing more of to be in this together.
For
Carmen: sure. Yeah. So, you know, today I probably have like eight or nine or ten things that I think are like important in this constellation, but like I said, I didn't start out with that like fully fleshed out theory of like, how are we going to have a really wonderful quality of life and collapse? I started with the one thing and the one thing was a vision of a small and delicious life and everything that that means.
And the smallness speaks to not just like enoughness, like really feeling like something is enough, but also the preciousness of things that are fleeting, you know, things that are really important to us, you know, my friend. Uh, Quaker friend, Michael, he passed away a few years ago, but I have him on my podcast talking about this, about the little lifts, that like happiness is about little lifts.
It's not this great big thing that you can grasp and pull to your breast. It's like this invisible substance that exists between people and you can't really see it, but you can feel it with the human heart. And so those little, well, not just the human heart, I mean, you know, when you see those memes that are like, Bears enjoy beautiful vistas.
It's like, I think bears have little lifts too. I think lots of other, other than human beings experience the little lifts. Uh, so when, when you are small and at that scale, it's just, there's so much awe and wonder in like, what are the chances? I'm so little and the cosmos is so big. And. You know, awe has this kind of pro social quality to it that transcends our personal problems, right?
Sometimes, like, when I'm really feeling, I don't know, In need when I'm feeling like in pain, because this is a moment of great need and a moment of great pain, I will have this like regressive thing that happens. And it didn't used to happen as like a recovering avoidant person. I just used to do this. I was like always pretty strong and stoic.
But now, you know, Decade into like really focusing on secure attachment starting with kind of abandonment one stuff and flipping to like thinking of it as attachment. Earning some secure attachment I will regress to this like little I'm just a little mammal. I'm just a little mammal living my little life out here.
And like, what are the chances and sometimes I'm not a mammal sometimes I'm a little bean. And my husband will be like, how's it going today? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm so overwhelmed. I'm just a little bean. I don't even have arms and legs. I can't carry all this. Like, this is just too much. I'm just a little bean.
And so, you know, it's like, I just want this small life that like, is at the scale of the little bean that I actually am. I'm just a human being and I don't even have arms and legs. So I just need something little. I feel like I can really root in to what, you know, is important when I do that, when I let myself be small and every bit thing be so big.
And like, I find a little cocoon of safeness and nurturance in my life. And the delicious part of it is. I have found that the more I can embed myself in natural systems, which, you know, like I've also, I lead wilderness quests. And so like, that's a big part of it. I think if you can make yourself safe in the wilderness and the natural world, you are, you have a strong somatic felt sense of being able to make yourself safe.
So I think that ability to sense and feel safeness and feel into your own self efficacy is one of the ways that. We, I think it's a precursor to true healing, being able to sense safeness and make yourself safe and scan for safeness. You have to have that skill before you can actually move into healing.
And so the deliciousness speaks to self provender of like growing my own food, eating my own food, feeding people with my own food. Like, you know, like if I make capers from. Nasturtium seeds, you know, they're not really capers, but I make pickled nasturtium seeds and that's something so small and precious because I had to like Grow the nasturtiums, keep the seeds, pickle the things, make the salad that I put them on, you know The Sultan of Brunei doesn't even have that.
That's how rare and precious this is. So, so that kind of started Like, okay, here's how I think I will be more safe in collapse times if I just make the scope and scale, like, just enough for a little being to feel safe in this little place and being able to, like, grow my own food, cook my own food, exchange that kind of thing with other people.
That was, like, really core to this whole thing. Uh, kind of getting upright again, getting mobilized after a huge personal collapse. Then after that, I kind of started to realize, like, kind of, I touched into my Wilderness Quest training again. And in that work, when we go out and Wilderness Quest, we're working with the four seasons of the human journey, they kind of map the maturation of a human, you know, from like just being a little bean or a little mammal.
Our summer's child here on the earth. And then we become like, you know, an adolescent and an adult and then an elder. And I realized like, Oh shit. There aren't that many adults in the room. Like when I was coming out of my, when I was going into my own collapse being like, Oh my God, I'm about to like be a homeless, single parent, single mother with a huge amount of debt or a bankruptcy, like.
What the hell? There actually weren't that many adults. There weren't many people guiding me. There weren't people who actually knew what to do. There weren't, there just like, weren't many adults. And then my own healing as well. It was like, oh wow, there's just like not a lot of, um, people who are tracking what I'm tracking.
So then it was like, what would I have to do to become the adult in the room? And I found that the quest teachings were really helpful. There's certain rites and rituals that you do to help you mature from like a child feeling belonging on the earth to become like the adolescent who can differentiate and like Speak truth to power and rebel against the norm, all of that, to becoming the adults who know about the importance of like ceremony and ritual and death literacy and being able to walk with grief and gratitude.
And then the elders who are able to kind of go back. To a release state of surrender and maybe even kind of excitement about death and and transforming into whatever comes next. So those kinds of rites of passage helped me because those kinds of rituals are a confrontation with reality, for sure, but also with the self, the self that can stay upright, the self that can survive, the self that can, um, you know, locate safeness and, and who has done some things, you know, and know some things.
So you want to become the person you want to rely on. I, this is the reliable person I want to have in an emergency. I'm going to become that person. So those technologies were in that framework of like, there's certain things that need to go first in order for me to like, truly be the adult. You can't just like fake that.
Um, So that was helpful. And then I started to go like, okay. You can look at any kind of form of healing. They'll usually have like good old fashioned PEMS, right? P E M S there's stuff you do on the physical level. E for emotional level, M for mental or psychological level and S for spiritual. So once you're like upright and you're like, okay, yeah, it collapses the thing.
We're like, yeah, I've experienced a personal collapse in my own life that I'm healing from, and I got to keep moving forward, but I have a bit more capacity now. And in order to ensure this doesn't happen to not only me again, but like the people that I love, I need some skills and I need to like, think about these different levels of preparedness for that.
So like, for instance, with collapse, if you're thinking about like, what are some of the things I could do? The physical level for myself to be more prepared. So that literally could be like, I should get a first aid kit or like, I should, whatever. It's like, I should have some water in my apartment or whatever.
There's like physical things and then still staying with physical, but you could look at, okay, what about to include an other? Like, is there any, could I have a little extra? Could I, could I, um, you know, could I incorporate conversations, you know, with others and maybe share with some mutual aid? Like, who are my neighbors?
Meet those people. And then at the collective, like, maybe there's something at the collective level I should be doing that could be community, you know, organizing with people that could be like, hey, let's all pool our resources. For earthquake kit or, um, you know, we saw it in the pandemic, right? Like my husband went to everybody on the block was like, Hey, here's a form.
Do you want to fill it out? I actually don't know the names of the people at the end of the street. Would you like to fill out like who your emergency contact is? If you have householders, if you get sick, like, can we, do you need us to bring you anything? And so finally, everybody on our block, okay. knew who everybody was and who was vulnerable on the street.
So that's like a physical thing. And then you would do emotional. What are some of the skills? So like, you know, do you have any emotional support? Do you, do you have a sense of? You know, your own overwhelmed, you have some grief literacy. So you would like maybe start by educating yourself about those things and then you'd be like, yeah, can I have these conversations with my householders?
What kind of emotional support do we need? And then the collective, like, where's my whole family at? How do I parent and collapse? How do I, how do I talk to my parents about, um, kind of thinking smarter? Like maybe fucking move away from the ocean. What the hell? Don't, you know, like that kind of stuff. Can we have, do we have the emotional capacity and competence and like mentally there's like stuff you can do, not just to educate yourself about like what are the patterns, and like how to talk to other people, but there's also, you know, collectively like technologies of working through collapse with others like transformative justice, you know, organizing.
How do we get those guillotines lined up? Like, what, what has to happen here? You know? And then spiritually. Like, how do I personally face my own mortality, like, live in a way that, um, I'd be okay if I got sick or died tomorrow, that kind of thing, and, like, I'm current in all my relationships and, and then, like, even collectively, like, how do we deal with the moral injuries of this world?
How do we integrate? How do we, um, heal from, you know, the woundedness of this and, and, you know, for those of us who are white settlers, how do we let go of settler futurity? Like, this is kind of like a way of thinking about that. My eight or nine things kind of comes out of that. When I think about like, what are the technologies or the frameworks I'm using, like, so number one is like, yeah, collapse awareness and preparedness, particularly to your site and where you live.
Trauma sensitivity, because not only is the world constantly traumatizing, but we will have large scale disabling or emergency events. And so I did some training on like, critical incident group debriefing. You know, it's like, I need to learn about how do we deal with those kinds of traumas at that kind of level.
Attachment dynamics. So again, like to self, to other, to the collective, because We need to be able to communicate and connect across differences and styles, you know, be the secure person, be the adult in the room, somatics, because we have to stay centered, we have to stay upright, we can't succumb to overwhelm and freeze and dissociation, um, and we have to help others, we have to lend our nervous system to other people so we have fewer casualties.
of collapse. Um, I mean that like psychologically, spiritually, emotionally as well. Uh, animism, so that idea of like divestment from human supremacy. And, you know, if you proceed as though, even if you aren't an animist exactly at this point, what if you were to proceed as though we live in a participatory universe and everything else is as aware of us as we are of it.
You will not feel alone in collapse and you will also be less invested in your own preservation because it's like, well, I'm just part of this ecosystem and my footprint is pretty bigger. I'm taking more than my fair share. So it's a lot easier to. Yeah, divest when you feel a sense of belonging, belonging where you care about the other beings, um, as much as you do for yourself.
I think also grief and death literacy. So like being able to be with grief without succumbing to depression. That is like chef's kiss, n'est plus ultra, that is like the best, you know, skill a person can develop in this time, because it has intergenerational impacts, particularly if you are a person who is a womb carrier, and you bleed.
I mean, this is what epigenetics is, and transgenerational trauma, particularly from the grandmother to the grandchild, because, The grandmother is carrying the egg, imprinting and shaping the nervous system of the one who will bear that egg. This is the transmission of the strengths and the gifts. of your lineage.
So it's not just about trauma. It's about capacities and affinities and, and strengths and gifts and, you know, particular kinds of genius. So not succumbing to fear of your own mortality, which is just fucking fear of reality and not succumbing to the gloom. Is the, the, the gift you give to future generations, they don't have to get so fucking hung up on the personal stuff because you were able to kind of have a more, you're able to tap into your transcendent function.
You know, that's, that's what real death work is about. And then, um, ritual literacy, because you can't just process this stuff mentally, or even through talking, you need to get it out of your body. You need to get it out of your body. And so having a way to mark in time and space, what is going on in your life and have these like time, these passages, these landmarks, um, so that you don't get caught in the past and you're not afraid of the future because you're living in a cyclical time.
Um, that's what ritual does for us. And then like, Satisfiability and enoughness, like a. A feeling of enoughness so that you aren't grasping for more, and so that you know what it feels like to, to, um, feel settled, you know, and satisfied. I think that's like a core collapse skill so you can still feel the joy.
Transformative justice, for sure, you know, the, the, how, it's like the bless this mess part, like how do we integrate monstrosity. Because it just is. And then finally, I think technologies for collective care. So that, you know, is like mutual aid setups, but also like, that's one of the reasons I use therapeutic tremoring for trauma recovery.
Cause you don't have to talk and a whole bunch of people can do it at once. Same with why I'm like currently my current training track I'm on is. Constellations because there's, there's a way to tap in to something transcendent for a group quickly and effectively. Again, that's kind of like in the same family as ritual, but you need to have technologies for like quick coherence in the collective.
Because it's so discordant and incoherent in collapse times. You have to like get everybody onto the same page in the same moment held in the same container very quickly. So, so those are like the 10 things that I do now.
Megan: Wow. Yeah. I wish I lived on your block. I can see the adults in the room. Yes. I love, I love all of those and, and definitely not.
Incorporating all of them, but it feels, I think that's why you need the, I'm just a little bean as a counterweight because like you can go back to that, you know, and stretch a little bit into some of these areas, but also come back to your tininess. And I can see how both of those work really beautifully together and really balance each other.
So thanks. There's so that's so rich. Um, Yeah, I'm going to chew on all 10 of those. Is that sort of where you're headed with your new book, or is that different? Can you say
Carmen: anything about that? Yes, I, I, okay. So I'm just going to say it. I love my new book, especially because it feels so subversive. So it's called Spells for the Apocalypse, Rituals and Remedies for Turbulent Times.
And it's part magic, part self help. And, you know, it's with my same publisher, who's a great publisher. Uh, it's an imprint of W. W. Norton. Um, known for, you know, they have like a professional track, right? Where they do a lot of textbooks and a lot of like professional manuals. And they also do stuff like the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Just that kind of stuff. But they have these other imprints. And one of them, Countryman, is like, supposed to be, you know, Recipes and like backcountry bike trail maps like this kind of stuff and they were like oh we kind of want to get into like spirituality and so I sort of slid in there like kind of under the radar with the spirited kitchen and was able to like Really convince them that there's just no point in doing a spirituality book or a witchcraft book that doesn't include, uh, acknowledgement of capitalist imperialist white supremacist patriarchy.
And, uh, that, that doesn't place us kind of in this moment in time and respond to this moment of time with some real truth about what, what makes a witch and how political it is as an identity. They, like, went along with it, and it worked out. So that was great. So then when they were like, We would like an extension of The Spirited Kitchen, that's just, like, more about spells.
But, like, I really wanted to write about collapse. And so I was like, They were like, pitch us a few things that could be, like, a good extension. They just, well, okay, I want to write about collapse, but I really wanted to write about contact nutrition. I really just feel like, okay, this is so important from a, like, attachment, trauma, somatics, collective care, like, contact nutrition, it's so important, it's so, like, central to my work.
But they were like, that just feels like a little too far away from the Spirit Kitchen. We want, like, a bridge. And I was like, okay, what do you think of this? And so basically, though, they were like, spells for the apocalypse. I was like, it's catchy, right? And they were kind of like, yeah, but like, what is it?
So I needed to like pitch this book that's about collapse without really saying the word collapse in my proposal. And they, they liked it. They were like, awesome. I, they asked for like a one page. So I was like, here's what it is. It's going to be really great for people who, um, want to do some self help.
Maybe they like can't afford therapy. It's also going to be really great for therapists who want to include something about like the more than human. Um, it's going to be based in like neuroscience and it's going to be great. And attachment theory, polyvagal theory, it's going to be awesome. And they were like, great.
So then I submit the manuscript. They want to book for like the gift market. They're like, we want something that's going to be really pretty that you could find in like an anthropology or something and like kind of catchy. And I was like, spelled for the apocalypse. I'm telling you it's catchy. Lots of people get it.
And so I submitted the manuscript. They just wanted like this short little thing and you know what it is. It's like every tool I use for folks in my collapse one on one courses in my, you know, my trauma training that I'm starting to do. All of that, they've been like condensed into exercises. Everything we do in the numinous network basically has been condensed into like a little.
handbook for like, and it's organized by here's like calamities, like 12 calamities, like dread, anxiety, confusion, redicament. And then there's like a ritual for each one. And then all the remedies. Are those like life giving life affirming trauma healing tools that we use, um, like, you know, celebration, attunement, acknowledgement, connection, or, um, you know, I don't know if your listeners know what pronking is, but anyway, all these things that we use in trauma work to help people get mobilized and like feel joy in spite of pain, that's the second part.
So there's 13 calamities and 13 that are like the rituals and then 13 remedies and all taken together. It's basically like everything I do in the Numinous Network, everything I do to help prepare people for personal and collective collapse, it's all in there. And it's like. The very first line is like, apocalypse is this, and it's about collapse, and collapse is converging emergencies, and it's, you know, happens at all these levels, and it's marked by the nervous system state of freeze.
And so all of these exercises are to help you get out of freeze and into whatever the next, you know, natural step is. So it's all about coming out of freeze and being able to get mobilized and then land safeness and find joy even as all this is happening. So, um, yeah, I'm super stoked about it as every, as I'm reading it every time like edits and stuff come or like book design cover design is happening right now.
I'm like, Oh, I love this book. This is definitely the book that I want to read. So, yeah, Spells for the Apocalypse is coming out in January 2025.
Megan: Okay. It sounds amazing. Thank you. I'm excited for that. That's really cool. Yeah. I had never thought of the state of collapse being freeze, but that really lands for sure.
Carmen: Yeah. A hundred percent. There's many kinds of freeze. Right. So I think a lot of us, when we think of freeze, we think of like quite a catatonic collapse. It's like, you're not moving, you're like, Flat affect, that kind of thing. But some people have more of an attentive immobility. They're, they're kind of more like deer in headlights.
Like they might be very still, but they are tracking, you know, they are really watching. Other people are in a functional freeze where they're not really getting into stuff emotionally. They are tasking. They're like, well, I'm going to take care of me, or I'm going to, you know, like, that's like what preppers do, right?
Bunkers and beans people. They're in functional freeze. They cannot handle emotionally necessarily what's, what's happening, and so they're trying to like fortify against it. And like, lots of us. Do that in smaller ways that are not prepping, but, but we're workaholics or, you know, that kind of thing. So there's many different kinds of freeze.
And, um, you know, I talk a little bit about each one, but it's like reasoned association are totally normal, natural, appropriate responses to this. It's just that they're not helpful. At a certain point, because we get so immobilized and we like fall behind and the calamities tend to. Multiply. The longer we stop facing it.
So it's like the grief piles up, the physical ill health piles up, the, you know, detritus of arguments and disconnection pile up, you know, all of that. So it's better if we can stay slightly mobilized. Just enough to attend, um, to what is in front of us and remain like sort of curious, you know, in that social engagement ventral vagal part of our nervous system where we can attend to the world with some interest and curiosity and collaboration, um, because it's like, it would just be.
It'll just be a lot more fun to be together in this if we can, you know, have genuine delight in each other, even as we are disgusted by things happening in the world if we can, you know, that saying, go soft on each other and hard on systems, you know.
Megan: Yeah. Well, I want to make sure we have a minute for you to let people know where they can find you.
But maybe before we do, what are your, do you have any hopes, I guess, for people's connections to one another or to the more than human world right now?
Carmen: Hmm. Hopes. So I'm like, I'm not much of a hope person, not because I don't. Like it. I just don't really need it. So like the Dutch in World War Two had this saying hope is not necessary to proceed And I know some people do need hope and that's cool.
I'm not like slamming that no no shade to that Some people do need hope some people don't need hope they don't like it because they feel like it They take their eye off the prize, you know, some people need it some of the time and not all the time, you know, it's fine wherever you're at. That's fine. I'm not shitting on hope.
I just I don't just not that oriented to it. I maybe it's because I'm so oriented to like the little lifts of, you know, joy and like I really do feel I love my life. I love I love how I live. I love the I love my values. I like my moral compass a lot. I like how I integrate the, um, stuff that just is like, Oh, you know, values opposition, like it's not going to always be clean with people.
It's not, I, you know, I don't have like, I don't have, I don't, I just don't orient towards like, I need something to feel motivated or like help me, you know, it's like, I look around and I see the beauty and the agony of the human race all the time. And, and that's just poignance poignance is like one of my most favorite states.
And it is the state of predicament where you have so much beauty and so much pain. And then they're just, they're like, French kissing poignance is like so intense and like has this like rising sympathetic energy to it that's like, ha. But um, you know, it's like it hurts so good in the words of the great John Cougar Mellencamp, it just hurts so good and I just love it.
And so I just like look around at the world and I see it all the time and it like, makes me cry and it makes me like so happy. I think it's so beautiful that we're all here in this moment. Somebody invented the internet. What? Good for you. I hope your parents were proud. You know, like, good for you. It's actually accelerating a lot of the worst parts of humanity, but like, A for effort.
You know, I like, so that's kind of how I see the world. It's like, it's all, um, Kind of just like squelching in me all the time is poignance. And I, I really love poignance. It just feels like a, I don't know that it's uniquely human, but it feels like a very special part of being human. And you know, I got to be here for this time and it, and it's so beautiful and so horrendous.
I, I just, I just love it. It's such a, such a predicament. I'm just glad to be here with everyone. Oh yeah, you asked how do we, how do people, okay, so it's like, and now it's like segue into the ad. Yeah, so, so, um. Everything's just at Carmen Spagnola dot com. That's all people should sign up for my newsletter because I think social media is dead, even though I have a great time on Tick Tock and Instagram.
It's not much like therapy. I don't think stuff like social media and one on one therapy are even going to exist in. a couple generations, um, much less be affordable for like plebeians like me. So I would just say hopefully we have email for a good long time. And so, uh, people should get on my newsletter list, which you find at carmenspagnola.
com. I'll put
Megan: that in the show notes. Oh yeah. Thank you. Thank you for bringing poignance in and yeah, I feel just being in your presence, like the, I feel the relief and grounding of my nervous system and just the way that I think you just emboldened us to, to hold it all and to appreciate the complexity and the mess of it.
And I just really appreciate the work you do in the world and the way you are in the world. And I feel. Yeah, I feel like we can connect better with all of these things that you shared with us today. So thank you so much. I'm really so glad you came.
Carmen: Can I say one tiny thing? I know you're trying to, this is the hand on the door moment and you're trying to like wrap it up as a podcaster.
I totally know this moment. People are like, Oh, I just have one more thing to say after you just said to all your summary. Um, sorry, I appreciate that. But I just want to say, because there are people who've been listening to this series that you're doing and it's on connection. And so I just want to like offer this little bit of reassurance.
There's actually not that much to be done. That's like the blessing and the curse of like trauma recovery of any kind of healing. Um, you will discover this is like the dirty secret. There's actually not that much that can be done. There's like contact nutrition. There's attunement to self and to other and like truth.
There's like truth and beauty. You know in Ode on a Grecian Urn, beauty is truth, truth is beauty, that's all you know on earth and all you need to know. It really fucking is that. It's like, you gotta live, and you gotta die. And you're gonna try to make the quality of that be enriching for the people around you.
That's it. So like, there's not that much we can do about collapse. There, there just kind of isn't. And so great. You can like relax about a whole bunch of it and just really focus on what is the quality of your humanness. And what's wonderful about that is that actually that will amplify that actually scales really well.
You try to like control and like. Control and tame this unwieldy monster, you will forever fail. But if you're like, I got to live and I got to die. And the quality of that matters to me and the people around me and any children or grandchildren and people that I'm influencing. And like, that's kind of it.
That's all I have to do that really scales very well. And so, um, Yeah. It's, it's like, yes, it's a lot. It's overwhelming. You know, head, hand on the forehead, back on the fainting couch. We go, I get it. But actually just like we discover with any trauma resolution, what you can do is like self and co regulation.
That's essentially it. Sometimes there's medicines, sometimes there's surgery, but lots of times there isn't. And you will go to any doctor and you will discover whatever your like mystery illnesses, whatever your ailment is. We're talking about collapse, but this could be cancer. This could be cardiac disease.
You'll go to doctors, you go to people who know a lot of things and you will discover, Oh, they don't actually do a lot of things. Like we actually haven't like cured cancer or heart disease. We, we don't actually have great treatments for that. And the treatments that we have, there's like five, you know, it's like we can do surgery, we can do medicine.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. So when you kind of like, again, just like. Divest from the idea that there's some solution that if you just learned more, you understood more, you would get, and then you would know how you can make a choice about how to go forward. There just, there isn't. There's people who know a lot, but there isn't a lot we can do about most things.
And so the, the most effective thing we have discovered for anything, for health or longevity or, um, happiness or resilience, any of those things. It's the ability to co regulate with other people, like fucking hold your hot potato together. You know, like, it's like, yeah, we're going to live, we're going to die.
We're going to lose people. We're going to love people. We're going to lose them. It's going to be poignant. And our ability to have some regulatory flexibility in our nervous system is going to make it easier for us and everyone we know. That's like all we can really do. And so great. We've got like one thing to do.
You know, it takes a lot of the pressure off, you put it that way. So it's kind of like whatever people are doing to connect, that's the thing they should be doing. And as they keep getting good and skillful at it, it'll start to ripple out and they'll have more capacity to do more things. They'll get their own grid.
What do I want to do on the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level for myself, others, and the collective? Boom. It's just, it's bingo. You start with wherever you are. Anyway, it was great being here, Megan. Thank you so much for asking. And, uh, that's all I have to say about that. Thank you.
Megan: Thank you for bringing the simplicity in at the end.
Yes. Thank you so much.
Carmen: Yeah. Thank you.
Megan: Okay, my friend, I hope that you loved that conversation. I encourage you to follow along with Carmen. I've learned so much from her and her work in the world, and you might too. And I encourage you to reach out in some way and see what she's up to. Thank you to all of you supporting the show financially, but also through your, um, Listening and sharing with others and ratings and reviews, all of that really makes this possible.
And I don't know if I would do it without knowing that this was landing for you, uh, in some way. So thank you for your encouragement in those ways. I will be back with you in two weeks with an encore episode to sort of keep us simmering in this transition from the winter to spring. From Pisces to Aries, and then I'm aiming to be back with you for a full new season starting in April.
So, take such good care, and I'll see you on the other side.