Mother of the Sword Podcast

Psychology Cannot Replace Lineage

Psychology Cannot Replace LineageHave a listen to our recent Mother of the Sword Podcast exploring these themes that feel fiery as I personally dive into a restructuring of my own body, heart, mind and body of work. Read on for an essay connected to the pod.TY to Jeff from Cosmic Cousins for editing this pod and yay they are going to be on the next one coming out this Saturday!Most people I know right now want support making money. Given the economy, and how capitalism wires our sense safety to what we can get and produce alone…that makes complete sense.We live inside a culture that tells us if we have enough money, we’ll finally feel safe, mentally, emotionally, and physiologically. There is truth in that. Financial stability matters. It’s one of the reasons I help people examine their relationship with money, create offerings that are sustainable, and move beyond constant hustle into a life that includes vision, planning, and meaningful action.But alongside that work, I can’t ignore the deeper hunger I see everywhere. A hunger that money cannot touch.A desire to relate to Truth within, to care that can touch the grief that does not go away. A path of admitting animism is just as real as accolades.I believe we are arriving at a moment where pathology and psychology—particularly the pathology that emerges from a Western psychological framework—cannot replace lineage.This isn’t a rejection of psychology. I’ve spent eleven years in Jungian analysis with the same therapist, and it has transformed my life. It gave language to experiences that otherwise would have remained unconscious. It taught me boundaries in relationship. It helped me survive. I’ve also witnessed medication and diagnosis save lives, helping people navigate unbearable suffering with greater choice and stability.And yet there are experiences that psychology cannot fully translate.There are moments of grief, ecstasy, devotion, trance, communion, and altered consciousness that become diminished the moment we reduce them solely to physiological or psychological events. Throughout most of human history, these experiences were never understood as isolated symptoms. They were held inside living traditions—supported by elders, songs, myths, initiation rites, cosmologies, and communities that knew how to accompany someone through mystery instead of immediately explaining it away.Today we breathe together, dance together, regulate together, and something ancient wakes up. People remember belonging. They remember God. They remember their bodies. Something profoundly real happens.But filtered through a culture obsessed with productivity, optimization, and individual achievement, these experiences are immediately translated into something else.Instead of asking, How does this change my relationship to my community? we ask, How can I monetize this? Instead of wondering, Who can help me integrate this over the coming years? we ask, How do I recreate this feeling next weekend?Ritual becomes another product. Transformation becomes another performance. The nervous system becomes another thing to perfect.Just as yoga was extracted from thousands of years of devotional, philosophical, and communal context to become another wellness commodity, I believe somatics is now walking the same line. The practices themselves remain powerful, but without roots they become vulnerable to misunderstanding.A healthy dissolution of the ego inside ritual can be mistaken for pathology. Pathology itself can become romanticized as spiritual awakening. Without mature cultural containers capable of distinguishing these experiences, we swing between over-pathologizing and over-spiritualizing, unable to hold the nuance that real transformation requires.Healing communities that cannot survive conflict, grief, ambiguity, disappointment, repair, and longing often recreate the very childhood dynamics they hope to heal. Tenderness is essential, but initiation also asks something of us. Safety isn’t the absence of rupture. Sometimes safety is what is rebuilt because we have the capacity to stay present through it.For centuries, women, queer people, mystics, and devotees who entered ecstatic states of prayer or grief were labeled irrational, hysterical, or possessed. Even now, there is discomfort around encounters with mystery that refuse rational explanation. We rush to interpret rather than participate. We diagnose instead of witnessing.I’m not suggesting we abandon psychology. I’m not romanticizing the past. I’m asking us to remember that psychology cannot replace lineage. It cannot replace ritual. It cannot replace community. It cannot replace a cosmology that understands human beings as more than isolated individuals seeking symptom reduction.Body Temple Dance™is a ritual pedagogy that understands the nervous system as inseparable from beauty, devotion, Goddess, relationship, creativity, ecology, and collective ritual. Ritual as the deliberate shaping of attention through embodied action in order to transform relationship. (We are leading an in person training in Spain September 1-8 and tonight the early rate ends - we have 3 more spaces.) Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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POSSESSED: Sex, Money, and Survival That Devours Us

2w ago01:03:42Tap to summarize

Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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The Truth is Erotic but Intimacy is Awkward

Apr 100:56:36Tap to summarize

“The Truth is Erotic.” - Ginny MuirAs much as we crave connection, I can assure you as a guide to the realms of intimacy it is awkward and full of tears and snots too.Are you also wondering how to relate to men (forever) but now more than ever in ways that feel nurturing and soul enriching? Yeah, us too.Across cultures, women’s and folks with vulvas bodies have been shaped by systems that regulate sexuality, emotional expression, and spiritual authority. But as devotees to the Shameless Goddess, we know we are here for something more.Join Ginny Muir and I in this episode of Mother of the Sword to explore the themes of intimacy, right relationship and how to get what we fucking want and deserve, when it comes to loving. Ginny has a program for all lovers if your wanting support in partnership get over here.Tomorrow Thursday April 2nd holds the full moon in the Indian mystical traditions called Hanuman Jayanti. Hanuman is the blessed lord of devotion, and my Dark Mother initiation is connected to his Mother and her temples on Anjaneri Hill in India. More on that some other time.Today’s episode and writing is a big dose of devotion today, after a much needed break for me. Have a read and then listen to our interview on a walk to move some energy relationally.Religious doctrine, colonial morality, and patriarchal medical frameworks have historically positioned female erotic intelligence as something to be controlled, silenced, or pathologized. One result of this long history is the pervasive presence of shame within the body, particularly within the pelvis, where sexuality, instinct, and creativity converge.Intimacy, for some of us, was never meant to be casual terrain. It was always going to be an underworld journey. Especially those of us on the Rose path, reclaiming a God that has a vagina and a more embodied sense of Spirituality and a life devoted to being of service to feeling more, not less.Ty to Audre Lorde for her immense contribution on the subject of the erotic and to Jeff from Cosmic Cousins for editing the pod go check out their astrology offerings!https://www.cosmiccousins.com/jeff-hinshaw Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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Jesus Sex Dreams, My First Threesome and The Mother's Waters

Mar 500:05:44Tap to summarize

For more Magdalene magic meet us over at www.bodytemple.church!When everything else fell away, when I left the father’s house, when the myth cracked and the spell broke and the bill came due — what remained was what had always been there:The Mother’s waters.Mouths watering.Home. Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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What's More Powerful Than a Daddy?

Jan 1900:18:14Tap to summarize

“Shiva without Shakti is a corpse.” -Laura AmmazonneAs a massively femme oriented being, I get that discipline can not only be a turn off, but enraging. I am all about the primal, pre-dogma and religious authorities type of spirituality and embodiment. But being in spaces where there is so much devotion oriented to the unseen and to being of service to humanity, I find a simultaneous kink around being told what to do and when to do it. the Difference is in the consent I have created within myself. And a new view on discpline.Discipline as being a disciple to Love.Authority, as we were taught it, was a clenched jaw, a spine held so tight it forgot how to listen, a voice that barked orders instead of tracking sensation. I am no longer interested in authority as control. I am interested in authority as collapse—the holy kind. The kind where you fall backward into the arms of the Divine and discover you were never meant to push your life forward at all. This is where my re-writing begins: not from effort, not from domination of self, but from listening so deeply the body becomes a tuning fork for truth.Most of us carry what I call boundary ruptures—moments where our no was ignored, where we learned to override our instincts to belong, survive, or be loved. Authority entered our nervous systems not as safety, but as threat. So we learned to submit, rebel, or dissociate. Rarely did we learn how to receive guidance without collapse, or how to lead without violence. Repairing boundary ruptures is not about harder edges or better performance. It is about restoring trust with the intelligence of the body. It is about letting the Divine speak through sensation instead of through shame, punishment, or spiritual striving.I am writing this from the sacred portal of Mother India—another dimension entirely—where reverence looks like a million different things and is felt not as obedience, but as shared joy. Here, devotion is not abstract. It is touchable. Audible. In the air. It lives in the excess of color, the chaos, the song, the tears, the laughter. It is an ecstatic devotion to Love itself, recognizable only to those who feel it in their bones. For the ones who get it, no explanation is needed.Devotion is felt.This is the authority I met years ago inside pre-religious mystical ritual with the Dark Goddess in India and again in Italy—before doctrine, before temples with rules, before God was turned into a father with conditions. There, authority was rhythm, drum, breath, voice cracking open. No hierarchy, only initiation by listening. The ritual did not command us; it waited for us to soften enough to hear it. The Goddess did not ask for obedience. She asked for attunement. And when we listened—truly listened—our lives reorganized themselves without force.To be a good leader, you must be a good servant—but I do not mean a servant to systems of oppression, productivity, or control, and I do not mean a servant to the dominant culture’s version of success. I mean a servant to something wider and more wild than yourself. A servant to eros, to truth, to the collective nervous system, to the living intelligence that moves through bodies, land, and time. Leadership, from this place, is not about directing others. It is about being so devoted to listening that others feel safe enough to hear themselves.This Capricorn New Moon, I am not interested in climbing another mountain or mastering another structure. I am interested in leasing my life up from beneath me—from the deep ground of devotion. From the place where discipline becomes reverence, responsibility becomes responsiveness, and authority is no longer a weapon but a sanctuary. True authority does not push. It receives the next instruction from the dark, fertile silence where God is not an idea, but a pulse moving through bone. This is where I begin again.We don’t just speak and write about the Divine Feminine over here in Body Temple, We embody Her.Come to France with us for a writing and womb healing embodied love and grief, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna retreat in April. Taurus season. Find info and apply here. Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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The Gospel According to...

Dec 2900:15:19Tap to summarize

A whore and a virgin meet at a witchy nonalcoholic herbal bar called Hekate in the East Village in NYC. They begin speaking and the timeless swirl consumes them. They enter into a devotion so total it risks everything. The holy darkness. A whore for God, a virgin forevermore.Our 11 day ritual theater and writing Embodied Venus begins January 1st with a live workshop join us!All living things, sentient. Everything. All-consuming darkness. Emptiness. The sky captures my heart-mind a hundred times a day. And still, I don’t know.I have been slowly, imperfectly learning to offer my own body again as sacred, as you have. Not as something to be forgiven, but as something to be trusted.Myself, perhaps.They say Mary Magdalene was a whore, and then, to counter the insult, they insist she wasn’t. I have always been annoyed by both responses, as if womanhood must be defended by erasure, as if eros needs to be purified in order to be holy. The Gnostic gospels give voice to a whole other devotion between Magdalene and her beloved—one that does not split love from desire, spirit from flesh.Last podcast episode for 2025 we cant praise end thank Jeff from Cosmic Cousins enough for being a pillar of support inner hearts and lives and for our pod...Go follow and book them for readings they're incredible! https://www.cosmiccousins.com/fools-journey-2026PS. Join us in Embodied Venus - a ritual theater expressive alchemy writing course beginning January 1st with a fire ceremony and potent ritual in Body Temple with our ecstatic emotional community! Come laugh, cry and write your own damn gospel babe.Over the course of these days we'll write, move, laugh, cry, breathe, perform, and channel: using somatic practices and embodied theatre to invite grief and ancestral longing into the body, then transforming those depths into raw, fierce, luminous writing.Start your new year in soul with us, not just scrolling! All practices, poems/prose and prompts in one course you can access anytime. All live classes recorded. Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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An Illusion of Time

Nov 1200:39:11Tap to summarize

“The creative sexual energy in each of us is a reflection of the Creator.” Deborah SundahlThe creative power of the soul and our felt sense of eros in the body – something ancient and also alive now, are interconnected.There are ways that we all habitually separate our spiritual practices from the power of our sexuality. We pray for wholeness, for awakening, for Divine love—yet we exile the very current that animates all life: the eros of birth, death and sex. This is what we guide you in embodying in our course Shameless Goddess and our womb healer teacher training level 2 for folks that are already doulas, midwives, certified sex, love and relationship coaches and therapists.Today’s episode we are conversing with the inspiring mama, enthusiastic storyteller and devotional heart Sabrina Amina, who is one of our Body Temple Somatic Facilitator’s and Womb Healer’s. Sabrina is first and foremost of a lover of Allah. In this life she works as an educator. Creates as an artist, and pays bills like an exhausted proletariat. She keeps the pulse of her creativity and exhuberance alive by exploring the mysteries of this life and pondering what’s beyond what we can see. What’s does that mean? It doesn’t matter.She just wants to live without having to explain herself and wants to be seen without feeling examined. She longs to be understood but resents being analyzed. These days she finds comfort in being seen by the great unseen.Eros, as we know, is not just sex. It’s a state – similar to what people enter in birth and death - when in deep pain and pleasure, when in touch with the in-between, the paradox, the Truth. The tension in the thresholds.Thank you to my friend Jeff from Cosmic Cousins for editing our Mother of hte Sword podcast! https://www.cosmiccousins.com Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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Art Over Approval

Oct 2100:34:31Tap to summarize

Blessed dark moon friends. The season of slowing down and taking more articulate care of ourselves, one another and the lands we tend. Times are tough — and as many activists, Black radical feminists, and queer and Trans kin have generously taught us, we the people hold the power to rest, to regroup, and to reimagine new ways of relating.To instigate change with our creative life force is the sacred responsibility at the root, in the Earth, of our body.Today’s episode of Mother of the Sword explores all things sacred sexuality, right relationship and creating with mama Kat. Kat Mills Martin is a critically acclaimed film director and writer from Hawai’i. She is also a writer, actor, secret yogini and has studied tons of experimental theater which y’all know we love. Let us know what you hear below in the comments!Extra love to Jeff from Cosmic Cousins for editing Mother of the Sword! Go follow them on IG for astrology magic.When we take the risk to create, we’re learning how to relate beyond empire — how to bring soul back into a culture that would rather us feel nothing. Because when we can’t feel, we can be more easily controlled.The power of our no is holy. It’s the boundary that cleans the altar, the sacred pause that makes space for what is real. Saying no and learning to hear it is not just painful rejection—it’s devotion to what matters most. It’s the cauldron that creates the courage you need to put your money where your mouth is, and keep creating against all odds. It is an act of protection when we are authentic and listening. ‘Tis the season to cleanse away the demons that say…you are unworthy to create a life that reflects your soul.The act of aligning our energy with what our body, soul, and creative spirit actually consent to take community and care beyond what we’ve been taught. When we honor the no, we re-enter right relationship with life itself—no longer leaking power into patterns of people-pleasing, overextending, or performing for love.In this way, no becomes an ecstatic union ritual—a meeting point between self and Source where integrity births creativity. It is a rite of passage from survival to sovereignty, from obligation to authentic offering. Our no makes room for a truer yes, one that emerges from the body’s wisdom, the erotic pulse of creation, and the courage to be fully alive.PS. We have one space left for our India Pilgrimage January 2026. Find us at BodyTemple.Church Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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The Songs Beneath the Skin:

Oct 500:13:59Tap to summarize

All the liberation work we do in relationship reveals our innate courage and mostly, let's be real, our ignorance. To be able to really dive into shadow work, we need to be resourced and have spaces to release what lives within us. This podcast practice will support you in doing this today.In today’s episode of Mother of the Sword you’ll experience an important shamanic writing tool for going in and more importantly for many of you reading this, out of the underworld, aka subconscious aka your body. As an invitation out of overwhelm and into expression, enjoy this ritual for your inner child and inner mystic full moon practice. Thanks to Alexandra “Ahlay” Blakely for the song.My roots in shamanism reach deep into the mystical lineages of Kundalini Shakti from India and the earth-based traditions of Southern Italy. These streams of mysticism have shown me how the sacred doesn’t need religion to be real — only presence, devotion, and a willingness to feel.From Mary to Kali - the Mother in me has been awakened and will never die. Each of us carries our own ancestral threads — both of blood and soul — and I’d love to hear in the comments what yours are.Grateful to Jeff from Cosmic Cousins for editing this episode! Please comment and share The Mother of the Sword. Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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Rapture, Eros and NYC

Sep 2400:46:17Tap to summarize

Healing the root is not just an idea, it’s a practice that we can attune to and need to do in relationship. We were wounded in relationship, and it is there we will heal too.In my experience, rapture is when two or more bodies really worship yours, and it sends you into this ecstatic union with God. Just throwing that out there, but my lineage traditionally has orgiastic rituals in devotion to the Black Madonna aka Mother Earth so…In this episode of Mother of the Sword we chat with Syd - you can find their Substack here! It is always mysterious what goes on in our embodiment retreats so int his episode we bring love to the deep healing of all things root - se quality, money, belonging - while also getting into the power community holds to heal us!Ty to Jeff form Cosmic Cousins for editing this pod! We love you.PS. There are only 6 days left to register for our 9 month training and mentorship y’all…if you know you want it but can’t pay today just respond to this email so I know and can hold the spot for you! 💃🏻If you know you are a YES get in here!When you are a deeply feminine being, meaning you care about the ways we are all interconnected and choose to live from a space of relatedness…you need strong containers and boundaries to hold all the Shakti and what wants to be birthed through you. Get full access to Mother of the Sword at bodytemple.substack.com/subscribe

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All episodes

Psychology Cannot Replace Lineage

POSSESSED: Sex, Money, and Survival That Devours Us

The Truth is Erotic but Intimacy is Awkward

Jesus Sex Dreams, My First Threesome and The Mother's Waters

What's More Powerful Than a Daddy?

The Gospel According to...

An Illusion of Time

Art Over Approval

The Songs Beneath the Skin:

Rapture, Eros and NYC