Lenore Black, a fan favorite of the show, returns for a second episode. It’s an understatement to say that a lot has changed in the year and a half since Lenore and I first connected, both personally and collectively. We speak about Lenore’s move from New York City to Joshua Tree, which was as much an inner journey as an outer journey. Lenore shares why she decided to reevaluate her career, her connection to herself and to nature, and the identity she held onto for years as a bisexual, queer, kinky, non-monogamous woman. We speak about the importance of avoiding political and ideological silos, and why it’s vital that we approach ourselves and the world with curiosity, empathy and a willingness to have our minds changed in ways we might not expect.

Click here to listen to the first podcast episode Lenore and I recorded together.

Find Lenore on Instagram and on Substack

Songs featured: “Desert Solitaire” by Greta Morgan, “Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron, and “Meanwhile Back in the City” by The Presidents of the United States of America

How to support the show:

• Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
• Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

Listen to this episode on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Chris and I had the pleasure of spending ten days with Elia on our trip to Tanzania last month, and sat down to record a podcast with him at Lake Eyasi. Elia is half Maasai, and spent much of his childhood being raised by his Maasai grandfather. He has a great deal of knowledge and insight about the complexities and conflicts between the Maasai and the “modern world,” because that complexity informs his life and identity. In this conversation we speak about his experience learning about wildlife, the land, astronomy and what it means to mature as a man within his Maasai community, and the shift into his adult life as a safari guide. We speak about Maasai culture and tradition, climate change, spirit animals, tourism, education, and population growth. Elia gives some unique and important context to the experience of coming from and living in two very different worlds.

Get in touch with Elia through Gladiola Adventure.

Songs featured: “Korobela” and “Asante Sana” by The Soil

How to support the show:

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Listen to this episode on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sophie is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. We speak about personal and collective mythologies and how so many of our stories have been deracinated from their roots in ways that perpetuate harm. We discuss the importance of rerooting and rewilding these narratives by listening with our whole bodies, and becoming aware of how our individual story is a part of an overarching ecological matrix. We touch on how we’ve both worked to reframe our own sensitivity and illness, and the complexities of Psilocybin, masculinity, Jesus, spirituality and magic.

Find Sophie at and on Instagram, on Substack and check out her course with Advaya. Pre-order her book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine.

Sophie’s Book Recommendations: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut and Inflamed by by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel

Songs featured: “Gold Star Mothers” by Hammock, “Meet The Moonlight” by Jack Johnson, and “Dust” by Ryan Montbleau

How to support the show:

• Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
• Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

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Chloé is a writer and entrepreneur whose company, Theory of Enchantment, offers an alternative to conventional anti-racism training. Instead of focusing on dualistic thinking and division, Chloé’s company embraces and promotes love and compassion. We speak about the importance of accepting and embodying our own individual complexities and polarities as a means to accept others. We discuss the West’s (and our own individual) obsession with controlling and predicting, which inevitably leads to abuses of power. We also talk about meaningful relationship as an antidote to power grabbing, the importance of channeling anger as opposed to identifying with it, and how real change will require that we get back into our bodies and feel our feelings.

Find Chloé at TheoryofEnchantment.com, Instagram, and Twitter, and listen to her podcast The Heart Speaks

Chloé’s Book Recommendations: The Way of Woman by Helen Luke and The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

Songs featured: “Dreamer” by Arisha Badru and “You Make Loving Fun” by Fleetwood Mac

How to support the show:

• Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!
• Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

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This episode has been a long time coming. If you’re a regular listener of MGSW, you know that I’m incredibly interested in exploring power dynamics, shadow, and spirituality, especially when all three become interwoven. I share my reflections about the podcast Cover Story, which uncovers abuses of power within the growing industry of psychedelic therapy. I also discuss Power in the Helping Professions by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig, and reflect on how power is wielded within various forms of “therapy”. How might “healers” project the wounded pole of the wounded healer archetype onto their patients, thereby avoiding their own? What are the dangers of silencing genuine questions and concerns during campaigns to gain cultural acceptance of something that’s been historically demonized? Why are we more willing to discuss abuses of power when the abuses involve sex and drugs? How have nuanced conversations and opinions been replaced by false binaries and “you’re with me or against me” reactive assumptions? I discuss all of these questions and more.

Song featured: “Waterfalls” by Ten Fé

How to support the show:

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Debra has lived an incredibly full and inspiring life with no plan of stopping anytime soon. From moving to Europe, dropping out of school, marrying an Italian prince and hitchhiking across Africa all by the time she was sixteen, Debra has always embraced the unknown and said “yes” to all of what life has thrown at her. We speak about her love of integrating art and architecture, and the beauty of bringing something of ourselves to new experiences as opposed to requiring an experience to give something to us. We touch on the importance of embracing our individual uniqueness, the beauty of being a citizen within a community, and why elderhood is underrated.

Songs featured: “Confidently Lost” by Sabrina Claudio and “Against the Wind” by Victory

How to support the show:

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Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

Visit my website – AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

Listen to this episode on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Lindsey Lockett is a trauma educator, coach, podcast host and self-proclaimed “awareness junkie and nervous system ninja”. She joined me to continue our two-part conversation about spirituality. (To listen to part 1, head to Episode #79 of the Holistic Trauma Healing Podcast). Lindsey spent the first 30 years of her life as an evangelical Christian, but had a reckoning at age 33 and a traumatic dark night of the soul that provoked her to reinvent her life from the ground up. We speak about her journey of developing an individual approach to belief and meaning, and her commitment to understanding herself and the world in ways that challenge the status-quo. We speak about our mutual dedication to critical thinking, reinventing ourselves, and resisting fundamentalist/black & white thinking. We talk about belonging, ancestry, past life regressions, honoring the earth, and Lindsey tells a story about this one time she sacrificed a pig with her neighbors in order to pray for rain. Join me on Substack to share your thoughts about this episode in the comments section, and get access to bonus content and a community of like-minded humans.

Find Lindsey at LindseyLockett.com and on Instagram

Songs featured: “Be Like Water” by Lo Wolf and “All The Way Down” by Jonathan Wilson

How to support the show:

Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

Visit my website – AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

Listen to this episode on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this episode I discuss three relatively controversial and divisive issues in an effort to expose our discomfort with cognitive dissonance. For example, are we really anti-vaccine mandate, or are we just anti-Covid vaccine mandate (because we don’t feel personally at risk)? Would we still be preaching about sovereignty if the virus was deadlier? What if it had been a white man who had slapped Chris Rock, or what if Chris Rock had been a woman? Is creating an identity around veganism more about seeking external validation than it is about veganism? This episode explores how resistant we can be to embracing the subjective nature of our beliefs and decisions, instead opting into “belief clubs” that provide us with externalized rationalizations for our own biases. I argue that by doing so, we lose countless opportunities to grow and gain greater self-awareness.

How to support the show:

Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Join me on Substack and get access to newsletters, exclusive writing, community book clubs & access and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show: anyakaats.substack.com

Visit my website – AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

Listen to this episode on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Christopher Ryan (co-author of Sex at Dawn, author of Civilized to Death, and host of Tangentially Speaking) returns to the podcast to discuss spirituality, and the ways we’ve engaged in this realm in different, yet parallel ways. We speak about psychedelics, astrology, synchronicity, and magic, and how these tools and practices have informed our approach to life. We touch on integration, ego, and humility, plus discuss the conflict between scientific worldviews/mechanistic thinking and the exploration of subjective meaning and belief. Plus, I talk about my inspiration for The Lunar Circle and why I approach and teach astrology in such a nuanced and experiential way.

Find Chris at chrisryanphd.com, on Twitter and on Instagram

Songs featured: “Bathroom Dance” by Hildur Guðnadóttir from the movie Joker and “Inside I’ll Sing” by Shards & Isolation Choir

How to support the show:

Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Join the Substack community and get access to newsletters, exclusive articles, and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show, which you can join by clicking this link – https://discord.gg/sQHPPVC9 (This Discord link expires in 7 days from the episode date. If it no longer works, send me an email – anyakaats@gmail.com)

Join the April Lunar Circle, enrollment closes 3/28 – AnyaKaats.com/LunarCircle

Visit my website – AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram

Listen to this episode wherever you listen to podcasts.

Lisa is a writer, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and a certified Jungian Analyst. She is a co-host of the podcast This Jungian Life and the author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself. She joins me on the podcast to talk about motherhood (both literally and figuratively), and how it offers us a meaningful path toward our own individuation. We speak about projection, the process of creativity, the dangers of victimhood, the fallacy of control, and distinguishing the difference between intuition vs. anxiety. We also discuss the power of mythology as a warehouse of psychic patterns and their capacity to give us language for things that are notoriously hard to language.

Find Lisa at LisaMarchiano.com and at ThisJungianLife.com

Lisa’s Book Recommendation: The Cormoran Strike Series by Robert Galbraith (Aka J.K. Rowling)

Songs featured: “Sun, Arise! (An Invocation, An Introduction)” by Phospherescent and “One More Cup of Coffee” by Frazey Ford

How to support the show:

Rate, review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

Join the Substack community and get access to newsletters, exclusive articles, and a private Discord server just for listeners of the show, which you can join by clicking this link – https://discord.gg/Vwp4nr2P (This Discord link expires in 7 days from the episode date. If it no longer works, send me an email – anyakaats@gmail.com)

Join the April Lunar Circle – AnyaKaats.com/LunarCircle

Visit my website – AnyaKaats.com & Find me on Instagram