Podcast
Embodiment Matters Podcast
Hosted by Carl Rabke and Erin Geesaman Rabke · EN
Embodiment Matters is an ongoing, rich conversation about what it really means to be embodied, and why and how embodiment matters so much in our daily lives and in our world. Our guests include wise and insightful teachers from the realms of somatics, Buddhism, meditation, social justice, psychotherapy, movement arts, bodywork, martial arts, neuroscience, environmentalists, indigenous teachers, and more.
In our conversations, we explore a wide range of topics around waking up and being embodied, and offer guided practices to help return to your embodiment as a source of wisdom, guidance and intimacy with life.
Your hosts, Carl Rabke and Erin Geesaman Rabke, have been devoted to waking up and being embodied for the last 25 years. They have extensive training and practice in The Feldenkrais Method, Yoga & Yoga Therapy, Structural Integration, Embodied Life, Buddhist Meditation, Tai Chi, Focusing, Ayurveda, and more. They share a passion for sharing potent practices that support people in becoming more embodied, more mindful and aware, more rooted in liberating kindness, and more free in all ways; as well as more able to bring their unique gifts forth to benefit the world.
They live in Salt Lake City, and can be found at bodyhappy.com
66episodes
Episodes
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Experiential Deep Ecology: A Conversation with John Seed And Skye Cielita Flor
Jan 10, 202501:17:47Tap to summarizeFriends, we are delighted to share this conversation with two beautiful Earth-loving humans, John Seed and Skye Cielita Flor. John is a long-time Earth activist, writer, teacher, musician, who, along side Joanna Macy, helped to grow the body of work called Experiential Deep Ecology or The Work that Reconnects. Skye is a teacher, folk herbalist, plant medicine ritualist, mama, and friend with whom we have connected for several years in online spaces with Francis Weller, Bayo Akomolafe and Josh Schrei. You can learn more about John and Skye, and their unique stories and bodies of work at johnseed.net and deepearthdreaming.world In our conversation, we talk about the origins of deep ecology ecology work, we speak of ways to de-center the human, and the practices that help to reconnect us with the living intelligence of the Earth. We speak of the challenges of parenting in these times, along with the difficulties of doing this kind of soul work in what John calls "the religion of economics." It is a rich and deep conversation with wisdom holders from different generations who hold such beautiful respect for each other's wisdom and insight, and such deep love for the Earth and life. We hope you enjoy the conversation! You can find more information about the classes that Erin mentions in the introduction here: embodimentmatters.com/live-with-erin-and-carl/
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Summoned by the Earth: A Conversation with Cynthia Jurs
Nov 20, 202401:06:01Tap to summarizeIn this conversation, we speak with our friend and teacher, Cynthia Jurs, along with our dear friend and cohost, Leilani Navar, of The Turning Season Podcast. Cynthia recently published Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing our World, which is a wisdom book for our times. As both of us have shared, this book is an extraordinary weaving of spiritual biography, riveting travel adventures, essential Dharma instructions, sacred activism, deep ecology, indigenous wisdom, and an overall beautiful story of a human being dedicating her life to liberation, and caring for this living Earth in these mythic times in which we live. Our conversation moves through many terrains including working with difficult times, the balance of prayer and activism, dismantling systems of domination, keeping our fingernails dirty with the work and practices of liberation, and so much more. In the beginning of the conversaiton, Erin mentions the gathering of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, and you can find information on that here. We hope you enjoy, and we highly recommend reading Cynthia's book (or listening, as she reads it in her own voice.) To find our more about the class, Take Heart: Embodying the Great Turning, that Erin and Leilani are teaching in January, 2025 with guest teachers, Cynthia Jurs, Francis Weller, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Lydia Violet Harutoonian you can click here. You can find out more about Cynthia's Gaia Mandala practice here and her Earth Treasure Vase project here. And you can find out more about Leilani Navar and the Turning Season Podcast here
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Beauty as Ballast, Grief as Guide, Body as Sacred Land: A Conversation with Leilani Navar and Erin Geesaman Rabke
Nov 1, 202401:03:22Tap to summarizeBeauty as Ballast, Grief as Guide, Body as Sacred Land In this conversation between dear friends Erin of Embodiment Matters & Leilani Navar of Turning Season https://turningseason.com/ we dive into rich topics which we’ll be exploring in some upcoming online offerings. Beauty as Ballast, Grief as Guide, and Body as Sacred Land. We also delve into the 5 Vows of the Great turning as articulated by Joanna Macy (see below.) To find out more about our 3-Sunday series, click here. https://embodimentmatters.com/take-heart-3-sundays-of-encouragement-for-weary-earth-lovers/ Soon the January course Take Heart: Embodying the Great Turning, with special guest teachers Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer https://ahundredfallingveils.com/, Cynthia Jurs, https://earthtreasurevase.org/about-us/founder/ Francis Weller https://www.francisweller.net/, and Lydia Violet Hartoonian https://schoolforthegreatturning.com/, will be listed on our events page. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay tuned to this and future offerings. https://embodimentmatters.com/live-with-erin-and-carl/ Five Vows of the Great Turning I vow to myself and to each of you to commit myself daily to the healing of our world and the welfare of all beings. I vow to myself and to each of you to live on Earth more lightly and less violently in the food, products, and energy I consume. I vow to myself and to each of you to draw strength and guidance from the living Earth, the ancestors, the future beings, and our siblings of all species. I vow to myself and to each of you to support you in your work for the world, and to ask for help when I need it. I vow to myself and to each of you to pursue a daily practice that clarifies my mind, strengthens my heart, and supports me in observing these vows.
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Soul Water Rising: A Conversation with Dr. Jaiya John
Aug 29, 202401:14:04Tap to summarizeIn this conversation/ transmission we were so honored to hear Dr. Jaiya John pour forth from the depths of his heart and soul in a way that can’t help but touch your own. We were blessed to hear from Jaiya about his background and how he went from being shy and voiceless to a fully-dilated voice for Love. We were blessed to hear him read passages from several of his extraordinary books including Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution; All These Rivers and You Chose Love; and Dear Artist: A Love Letter. Carl and I also each read a short excerpt from his forthcoming book(s) We Birth Freedom at Dawn. We are so grateful for his generosity of spirit, his gorgeous writings, and his presence in our lives. His love and courage are contagious. Our wish is that all who listen become infected and go on to spread this love and courage in your own communities. What an honor to share a conversation with the extraordinary soul, poet, teacher, writer, Dr. Jaiya John. Please find more about him, his books, his poetry gatherings, his newsletter, his Instagram and more at www.jaiyajohn.com Toward the end of our conversation, Jaiya mentions our dear heart-friend Alexandre Jodun of ahealingbridge.com If you loved this podcast, please share it far and wide!
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Musical By Nature: A Conversation With Zuza Gonçalves
May 15, 202401:21:04Tap to summarizeDear friends, It is such a pleasure to share this conversation with Zuza Gonçalves. I met Zuza at the Bobby McFerrin Circlesongs School, and was so moved by his presence, his kindness, the way he moved around the room, and how he led us in movement, song and body-percussion. It felt to me like original human music. Zuza has been exploring alternative ways to collective music making for more than 20 years, integrating vocal improvisation, body percussion, movement, dialogue, cooperative practices and collaborative methodologies to promote experiences where music and human connection are interconnected and feed off each other. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Zuza has a bachelor’s degree in Music (composing and conducting) and a graduate degree in the Pedagogy of Cooperation. He is the co-creator of Música do Círculo, part of the faculty at Bobby McFerrin's Circlesongs School, at IBMF (Ghana edition) and travels internationally for festivals and workshops on Música do Circulo. In our conversation, we speak about vocal improvisation as ancestral practice, and how we are all musical by nature. We speak about the challenges that arise when we outsource our musicality to a small number of perfomers, and don't experience ourselves as being a part of music being made in daily life. We also explore the value of play and improvisation, an how essential these qualities are for learning, and meeting challenging times, and how rarely modern adults get to experience play and improvisation. Zuza also guides us all in a wonderful improv practice to sing and play along with. To find our more about Música do Círculo and the upcoming retreats and trainings you can visit https://www.musicadocirculo.com To find out more about the Circlesongs School you can visit https://circlesongs.com Also Zuza mentions The Well, a global vocal improvisation network https://thewellvocal.com And here are links to other circlesongs/ vocal improv resources: http://www.judivinar.com https://www.rhiannonmusic.com https://gaelaubrit.com http://www.joeyblake.com https://www.destaniwolf.com https://www.christianekaram.com http://www.rizumik.com/ https://www.jaospina.com https://www.varijashree.com https://www.goussycelestin.com/works https://vocaltoning.net
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Embodying Maitri: The Essential Ingredient With Erin Geesaman Rabke
Feb 12, 202300:49:42Tap to summarizeEmbodying Maitri: The Essential Ingredient with Erin Geesaman Rabke We’re delighted to share with you this podcast where Erin speaks about the practice of Maitri. Maitri is a Sanskrit word often translated as “lovingkindness” but several teachers in our lineage have gone further, naming it “courageous unconditional friendliness,” or “brave warmheartedness.” In this episode, Erin speaks about the importance of this practice in living a healing life. Traditional Buddhist teachings suggest beginning the practice with oneself, then extending our circles of care ever outward. Erin shares personal stories of working with this practice, and invites you in. She also shares about her upcoming online class Maitri: A Courtship with the Essential Ingredient. You can learn more about that offering here. https://embodimentmatters.com/maitri-courting-the-essential-ingredient/ Erin refers to a few sources of inspiration in this episode including: To Love and Be Loved: The Difficult Yoga of Relationship with Stephen and Ondrea Levine https://www.soundstrue.com/products/to-love-and-be-loved bell hooks All About Love https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17607.All_About_Love Her Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/interviews-with-thich-nhat-hanh/interview-with-bell-hooks-january-1-2000/ Open and Innocent by Scott Morrison https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3397459-open-and-innocent There is Nothing Wrong with You by Cheri Huber https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27580.There_Is_Nothing_Wrong_with_You And Mary Oliver’s poem, To Begin with the Sweet Grass https://embodimentmatters.com/love-yourself/
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Initiation and the Markings of Adulthood: A Conversation with John Wolfstone
Nov 9, 202201:00:21Tap to summarizeIn this conversation, Carl speaks with John Wolfstone. John is third-generation settler, working on the Traditional and Unceded territory of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok Peoples. His blood and bones hold Hebraic, Norse and Celtic ancestry, and his spirit is from the Stars. As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, ritualist, community consultant, relationship coach, and transmedia story-teller, John is on a mission to reclamate adulthood initiation rites-of-passage. Holding space for the great grief of our times, John designs and facilitates rituals of transformation, in service to regulating the personal and collective nervous systems back to belonging with the Earth. John apprenticed in numerous indigenous and ancestral ritual healing lineages during his decade long adulthood initiation quest, and bows in reverence to his many teachers, mentors, guides and elders. John tends thresholds of all kinds, and can often be found praying by a fire, whistling bird song, invoking his ancestors, and training his craft as a sacred huntsman. John is also one of the cofounders of the School of Mythopoetics. In our conversation, we explore initiation, and why it has been so central to the human experience. We also talk about what is lost, in terms of the presence of adults and elders in the world, when practices of initiation are absent in a culture. We talk about the markings of adulthood, exploring some of the indicators that someone has grown into an adult, or not. And we look at how to grow a literacy with initiatory process, and for the many of us who have not grown up in cultures with intact rituals and rites of passage, how to bring these practices and principles into our lives and our communities. John is facilitating a year-long adulthood initiation ritual apprenticeship through the School of Mythopoetics beginning November, 2022, and you can find more about that here. https://www.schoolofmythopoetics.com/ritual-apprenticeship You can find more about John and his work here: johnwolfstone.com www.schoolofmythopoetics.com
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Embodying Reverent Relationship with Marika Heinrichs
Sep 13, 202201:08:04Tap to summarizeEmbodying Reverent Relationship with Marika Heinrichs What a pleasure to speak with Marika Heinrichs of Wildbody.ca about somatics, lineages, respect and repair - and what a delight to have such a rich and tender conversation in Rumi’s field that sits outside of any rigid and fixed ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing. I hope you enjoy this important conversation. Marika Heinrichs is the granddaughter of German Mennonite, British, and Irish settlers to the part of Turtle Island colonially know as Canada. She is a queer, femme, somatics practitioner and facilitator whose work focuses on the recovery of ancestral wisdom through body-based ways of knowing, and challenging the appropriation and erasure of Indigenous knowledge in the field of somatics. Marika resides on Attawandaron, Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe territory (a.k.a. Guelph, Ontario). She is grateful for the nourishment and support of her peers, mentors, and more-than-human kin. Links: website: wildbdoy.ca IG: @wildbodysomatics Courses: wildbody.ca/embodied-ethics Here is a link to a beautiful and important piece written by Marika which I referred to in our conversation - On White People Building Belonging Together in our Movements for Liberation. https://wildbody.ca/blog/on-building-belonging-as-white-people-within-our-movements Some powerful quotes from Marika’s writings and teachings: "I believe that building healing communities is just as important as having access to individualized healing supports such as therapy. Divesting from appropriation is about both surrendering entitlement and feeling into the truth of our own peoples. I believe we are all capable of appropriation, and as a white bodied person I don't feel it's my work to tell Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour how to engage with their practices. I can share from what I know through my own journey into these questions, which includes feeling how intimately connected extraction, violence, and severance from the natural world are to the projects of white supremacy and Christian hegemony. Lack of acknowledgment and consent, spiritual bypassing, claiming ownership and superiority, prohibitive costs, lack of access for the descendants of the very peoples from whom practices emerged, no sense of connection or accountability to our own peoples, normalizing cis, straight, thin, white, able bodies… the list goes on. I want to envision a methodology of somatics that is invested in liberation right down to the roots of the lineages and histories of our practices. If we are not tending to the ways that this field has been shaped by supremacy, we are missing a core component of embodied liberation. Practices emerge from culture, they are shaped by time, place, and cosmology. All of our peoples had practices and ways of working with the body towards healing. Even if we engage in the most consent-based, ethical, values-driven protocols with practices from outside our own cultures, we miss the crucial work of facing into the grief and joy of our own lineages and peoples. I believe that the unwillingness to do this is one way that the field of somatics can perpetuate white supremacy, and I envision new/old practices that reconnect us with our ancestors and carry us through mourning, accountability, and repair as white people. As practitioners, we hold power around shaping these conversations in our field, and in supporting these conditions with these we serve. All those years practicing yoga are part of what shaped me and helped me to grow the capacity to release it for a practice that feels more aligned, more liberatory. It’s not for me to decide who should or shouldn’t practice yoga, or whether or not something is appropriation. Those questions can serve as distractions, virtue signalling that keeps us from the work of divesting from the roots of whiteness that lead to appropriation in the first place. I do know that the space that was left when I quit yoga made room for a new kind of connection to emerge that feels much more rooted in my values, and my lineage. I am not sure how we can approach practices such as yoga as white people without having something to share in return. A practice entails a relationship, if we don’t know who we are or where we come from, how can we really engage in mutual connection?"
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On Mycelium, Compost, and Animate Sensibilities: A Conversation With Sophie Strand
Apr 21, 202201:11:42Tap to summarizeSophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients. In a favorite audio program called How to be an Elder, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes says: “”What makes an elder, a heartfelt spirit, a clear mind, a talented heart, one who is young while old and old while young, an activist for the Soul? Is it formulae, schemas, lexicons? It could be. But also, and often more so, I think it is very like the flowering of the trees in the forest, as we gather more years: we straggle and stride onward in our better learned ways to give out even more seeds for new life, and to blossom wildly in so doing for self and others … “ During our conversation Carl honors Sophie’s way of showing up as an elder and oh, does she scatter seeds (and underground microrhizal fungi) for new life. She’s a prolific writer who shares via her newsletter on sophiestrand.substack.com and on Instagram and Facebook as cosmogyny. Two lovely essays on her website that we discuss in this conversation are https://creatrixmag.com/melt-divine-feminine-into-divine-animacy/ and a great story on relationship with a woodchuck called https://braidedway.org/mentorship-with-the-more-than-human-world/ You can find those and more at sophiestrand.com Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order from all online booksellers. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. In this conversation we explore embodiment, pleasure and discomfort, love stories as ecosystems, complicating the idea of individualism, about queerness and explorations of masculine and feminine outside of a binary, looking for stowaways of other stories in monotheistic religions, myths as the voice of the landscape and considerations of how stories travel and cross pollinate, the porosity of identity, about Sophie’s experience with illness and the problems with mainstream ideas of wellness, how Sophie came to her animist sensitivities, and so much more. We know you’ll enjoy this rich conversation with a truly brilliant and beautiful being.
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Animal Body, Deep Time and the Thing We All Long For: A Conversation With Josh Schrei
Mar 23, 202201:05:06Tap to summarizeAnimal Body, Deep Time and The Thing We All Long For: A Conversation with Josh Schrei Friends, we are delighted to share this recent conversation with Josh Schrei. Joshua Michael Schrei is the founder and host of The Emerald podcast. The Emerald combines evocative narrative, soul-stirring music, and interviews with award-winning authors and luminaries to explore the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald draws from a deep well of poetry, lore, and mythos to challenge conventional narratives on politics and public discourse, meditation and mindfulness, art, science, literature, and more. A writer, teacher, and a lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — in particular the Indian subcontinent — Josh has sought to navigate the living, animate space of the imagination and advocate for a world that prioritizes imaginative vision. Josh has taught intensive courses in mythology and somatic disciplines for nearly 20 years. In our conversation, we cover some good terrain. We explore some pithy some essential Zen teachings, we look into what is the experience of our animal body, what does it mean to living an animate universe? Throughout the conversation, we weave in the image of deep time, of the long arc of human evolution, and the profound inheritance that each of us carries. We speak of elements of the teacher-student relationship, and what supports learning, unfolding, and embodying what we all long for. May you enjoy the conversation, and we always love to hear your reflections. You can find out more information on the Emerald Podcasr, and Josh’s teachings wherever you listen to podcasts.
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