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  • EU411: On the Journey with Sam

    EU411: On the Journey with Sam
    2026/06/18
    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! Pam, Anna, and Erika had a powerful conversation with Living Joyfully Network member and unschooling dad Sam. Sam shared deeply about his journey with his daughter through autistic burnout. We talked about Sam’s experiences in both PDA and unschooling parent communities, the depth of the inner work that this journey involves, and some of the major paradigm shifts that Sam has made along the way. It was a really meaningful conversation and we hope it resonates with you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello, everyone. I’m Anna Brown from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Erika Ellis and Pam Laricchia, as well as our special guest today, Sam. Hello to you all. I really appreciate Sam joining us today. He’s a member of the Living Joyfully Network and it’s been really nice getting to know his story and watch how things have unfolded. He brings that thoughtful, intentional energy that I love about the Network. That energy helps fuel my own personal growth and create a beautiful, supportive environment where we can dig deeper and question the prevailing narratives. So, Sam, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everybody’s interested in right now? SAM: Sure, yeah. Well, I live in Minneapolis with my wife Kate and my daughter. I recently retired from work early. I did the early retirement thing. I had been working part time for the year previous to that. And so, I guess I can start a little bit with what my daughter’s into. I mentioned to her that this was going to be one of the questions and she said interior design and interior decorating and games. And then I would add a few things to that, too. Right now, she’s super into making slime, large amounts of slime in many different permutations. There’s lots of experimentation happening with different ingredients and add-ins and colors and that kind of thing. So, that’s kind of fun and messy. She has a wide doll collection and she’s been really into making her own rooms. She calls them mini rooms and they’re essentially like dollhouse rooms, like a kitchen or a bedroom. She makes one room at a time and adds them on to each other and buys these little, tiny little Mini Brand versions of real life products that she stocks in the doll refrigerator really intricately. And I guess that ties into her interior design interest, as well. She’s super creative. She really likes to do drawing. She makes videos and she actually, I’m kind of amazed at some of the videos that she makes because she’s, I don’t even think I said she’s nine. And so she uses her iPad to make videos and she has her own YouTube channel. She has two YouTube channels, which are not updated too frequently. It’s something she’ll get really into and then completely abandon and then six months later be really into it again. And so, that’s fun. And then she likes building forts. She likes playing with our dog Lucy, and various other things. And she watches videos. She loves YouTube and learning. She’s really into watching videos about Minecraft and Toca Boca World, which is the other game that she’s really into at the moment. She watches videos about all kinds of things like science and history. It’s interesting. She’ll frequently tell me very random facts that she’s learned by watching videos and I, being skeptical, when I look at the videos she’s watching then I’ll Google it and be like is that really true? And it’s interesting because it almost always is accurate and so that’s been an interesting learning for me because I’m the kind of somebody who’s avoided YouTube and never wanted to have anything to do with it for many years. And now I watch quite a bit of it just to keep up with what she’s doing. So that’s kind of fun. And my wife Kate, she works in public policy. She’s an environmental climate scientist, and she works on making and contributing to the creation of policy to help us in the state of Minnesota adapt to climate change. And she is super engaged and super smart. And she also likes to compete in triathlons a couple of times a year. She and I are very ...
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    59 分
  • EU410: On the Journey with Ari Lambie

    EU410: On the Journey with Ari Lambie
    2026/06/04
    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! We had a fascinating conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Ari Lambie. Ari is a mom of three young children and she spoke with us about her journey. We talked about the philosophy of learning, the fallibilism of humans, creativity, children’s social development as well as their capability, and a lot more. It was a really rich conversation and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello everyone, I’m Anna Brown with Living Joyfully, and today I’m joined by my co-host Erika Ellis and Pam Larcchia, as well as our special guest today, Ari Lambie. Hello to you all. Before we get started, I just want to mention the Living Joyfully Network. It’s a lovely place where you can find support at any stage of your journey, and I feel so lucky to get to hang out with so many amazing people from all over the world. If you’d like to join us, we’ll put the link in show notes, and you can also go to our website livingjoyfully.ca, and there’s a link right on the home page. I am so excited that Ari is here with us today. She is one of those amazing members of the Network I was just mentioning, and it’s been so fun getting to know her and her family. She loves to dive into all the nuances, and that is my favorite, so I’m very excited. Ari, just to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everyone’s interested in right now? ARI: Sure. Well, thanks so much for having me. I’m really grateful to be here. I am Ari, and I’m part of a family of five. We live in Portland, Oregon. My husband, Joaquin, is a critical care doctor, so he spends a lot of time taking care of people and solving challenging problems, but he’s also really fun. He brings a lot of light energy to the house. He likes to cook, which I love. I mean, I don’t love cooking, so I love that he cooks. He also likes to garden and play sports and come up with challenging ideas and concepts that are away from the norm, which is our favorite thing to talk about. We’ve been together for 20 years, and we just love talking about the ideas he comes up with, which makes me think hard and come back with either a new way of thinking or challenging him with a new idea. So, that’s what we spend a lot of time doing when we have time to ourselves. My nine-year-old daughter likes to come in on those conversations sometimes. She really likes figuring out the world, talking about it. She likes to read. One of her interests is unusual animals, particularly marine animals. She’s taught me a ton about all these animals I’ve never heard of. She also likes to bake and do some crafty things. She likes to watch Minecraft videos and hang with friends. She spends a lot of time with her friends. My seven-year-old is just this fantastic person of expression. She loves to draw. She loves to listen to music. She’s teaching herself how to play some music. She loves stories and is really good at telling stories. And she expresses herself with her body, too. She’s really athletic, and she gives the biggest, best hugs that you’ll ever feel. My five-year-old, she’s really into pretend play. We play a lot of games together. She loves to be a pet in a pet store, and I come and have to buy her because she’s the most special pet in the store. Or we’ll play that we’re both shape-shifting dragons, and we have to defend against the other dragons. So that’s kind of her jam. She also likes to cook, and she’s really into numbers right now. She’s always figuring out how they go together, how they count up. So that’s been fun to play with her, too. We all like to move. We’re all pretty physical. One of our favorite games is tag. When we go to the park, we will almost inevitably end up playing some form of freeze tag. We’ve invented lots of different games of freeze tag. Me, I like to move outdoors. Hiking is probably one of my favorite hobbies right now. I also like to journal, and craft, and do art here and there. I spend most of my time hanging out with my kids and figuring out life. I’m loving it. It’s so nice. PAM: It’s so great to hear about everybody. I feel ...
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    50 分
  • EU409: Foundations: Baby Steps

    EU409: Foundations: Baby Steps
    2026/05/21
    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Baby Steps. So often, when we’re faced with a challenge or making a choice, we don’t need to have the full picture or the final answer in order to move forward. By taking a baby step in the direction that makes sense to us or to our loved ones, we can learn more about the situation and see how it feels. One baby step can lead naturally to the next. As we keep communicating and checking in, we can find a path forward that works for everyone. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS Does it feel like many of the day to day choices you’re making are urgent? Are they really? If you haven’t listened to episode 8 yet about Anna’s mantra, “there’s plenty of time,” I highly recommend it. Thinking back, can you remember a time when you felt pressured (often by ourselves!) to make a decision quickly yet the better choice wasn’t immediately clear? Can you think of a series of baby steps that might have helped? Feel free to get creative! Is there a choice or a goal you’re considering right now that feels big? You don’t need to know exactly how you’d get there, but can you see a baby step in that direction? Can you do that and see what happens? Are you more of a leap-first person or a firm-footing person? What about your partner? Your children? How can understanding that help you communicate with them about future decisions? TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas in these first dozen episodes and have really enjoyed how they are building on one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, please share it with the people in your life that you think would benefit from contemplating these ideas. It’s super easy to share. Just send them to pod.link/livingjoyfully. From there, they can pick their favorite podcast player and it will take them right to the show in that app. Thanks so much for helping us spread the word. And so, this week, we are going to talk about the idea of baby steps. When we’re trying to make a choice, so often, we don’t need to make the big, ultimate decision right now. This builds on the idea that there’s plenty of time, which we talked about a few weeks ago. These are the threads that are moving through them all. So, maybe we’re not yet sure whether we want to pursue the end goal that we’re considering. When we find ourselves here, what’s often missing is more information or experience. So, taking the next baby step in that direction can give us more information to help us make that bigger picture decision. Sometimes we need to take quite a few baby steps before we get a keen sense of what we ultimately want to do. Or, maybe our partner or child wants to do something that stretches our comfort zone. Chances are, we don’t need to make a yes/no choice immediately. Staying open and curious, which we talked about last week, can help us take the next baby step in that direction and just learn more about what it entails and how it feels. It can also give us a better understanding of why they’re wanting to go in that direction and some experience that can help us better explain our perspective. We’re learning more about them and we’re learning more about ourselves. That deeper level of self-awareness and having a better grasp of the language around their goal, now we can have more meaningful and connected conversations with them. There’s just so much we can learn when we try just that next baby step, isn’t there? ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. And it really is the natural extension of last week’s discussion on being open and curious. When our partner or child brings us something they want to do, sometimes if we don’t see the whole path clearly, we’ll just shut it down. At the first thought of resistance, we’re...
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    18 分
  • EU408: A Field Guide: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning

    EU408: A Field Guide: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning
    2026/05/07
    We’re back with the second episode in our new series on the podcast, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. Today, we’re beginning our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage six: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning. Deschooling has several aspects, and this is one of the big ones. We may carry many beliefs about the way that school is connected to learning and the way we expect children to learn. In order to challenge those beliefs, we dug into five truths about learning: teaching is not a prerequisite for learning, curriculum is unnecessary for learning, children are always learning, learning is fun, and learning is not hard. Once we start to question our existing beliefs, many of these new truths come to the surface. And they really build on each other until we’re living in a whole new paradigm! We loved diving into learning and we hope you find this episode helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Pam’s Substack article, “But if they don’t go to school, how will they learn?” Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Larrichia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello! PAM: So we are back with another episode in our Field Guide series. We’re working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey, A Field Guide, which is framed around the hero’s journey and it’s a weaving together of myths, contemporary stories, and just tales from my own journey. In our first episode, if you haven’t listened to that yet, you can go back, we dove into the first phase of the unschooling journey, which was Choosing Unschooling, in which we answered the call to unschooling. We found our guides, which in a fun twist are so often our children. We navigated past various threshold guardians as we crossed the threshold from the ordinary world into the world of unschooling and moved through our time in the belly of the whale where we came to embrace the curiosity of a beginner’s mind. Now we are firmly in the deschooling phase of our journey, which encompasses seven stages and really does represent the bulk of our transformational work. Joseph Campbell calls this next stage the Road of Trials, which through the lens of unschooling, I have broken into two stages because I experienced them as quite distinct from each other. The first focuses on challenging our existing beliefs about learning and then the second one on those related to parenting. In this episode, we’re going to talk about five truths about learning. And if you’re new to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely to be dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean and some of their further reaching implications because it’s just mind-blowing enough to hear these the first time and go what, that doesn’t match with what I’ve known so far. Anyway, if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and context around them. You’ll be strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, because you’ve been doing this for a while, so building your wisdom. And you are moving towards really believing and feeling these truths in your own bones, owning them for yourself. All right, after all that preamble, the first truth we are going to explore is that teaching is not a prerequisite for learning. And right off, oh my gosh, there are just so many aspects to this one truth, isn’t there? ANNA: It’s true. And I think it’s so interesting, because all of us can think of so many things we’ve learned without being specifically taught in that one way. And, oh my goodness, just look at babies learning to walk and talk without expert classroom instruction. And yet somehow schools have really sold us on this concept that to learn you need to be instructed by someone. And not only that, but learning happens while sitting at a desk. And let’s throw in some power dynamic, loss ...
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    1 時間
  • EU407: On the Journey with Lucia Silva

    EU407: On the Journey with Lucia Silva
    2026/04/23
    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! We had a rich conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Lucia Silva. Lucia was previously on the podcast in episode 251, Unschooling as a Lifestyle. She is an unschooling mom of two and she came back to share some updates about her unschooling journey. We talked about trusting our children’s learning journeys, Lucia’s inner growth and mindset shifts, as well as her experience in the Living Joyfully Network and how the community has supported her over the years. It was a really beautiful discussion and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE EU251: Unschooling as a Lifestyle with Lucia Silva We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ERIKA: Hello, everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our guest today, Lucia Silva. Hello to you all! PAM, ANNA, AND LUCIA: Hello! ERIKA: Before we begin our conversation with Lucia, I wanted to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, which has really been life changing for me in so many ways. On the Network, we have such great discussions about so many topics. Our community has such a wide variety of experiences, and everyone’s really interested in learning and growing and being intentional with their families. It’s really unlike any other online community I’ve found. Being part of the Network offers powerful support, especially during those moments when fears pop up or if you’re new to unschooling and just need a place where people understand what you’re going through. If you’d like to learn more about the Network and check it out for yourself, you can visit livingjoyfully.ca and click on Network at the top of the page. And we’ll also leave a link for that in the show notes. We would love to meet you. So I’m very excited that we get to talk to Lucia today. I met Lucia on the Living Joyfully Network and have just loved getting to know her over the years. And she was also on the podcast back in episode 251 and shared her journey to unschooling in that episode. I encourage everyone to check that out as well. And we’re excited to dive in for an update five and a half years later, which is wild. So Lucia, we would love to hear what everyone is interested in right now. LUCIA: Five and a half years later sounds like, in the scope of kid time, it’s so long. It’s so long. And then thinking, how long have you been unschooling? Five and a half years still seems really new. So, it’s interesting to think about those elastic times. And it was fun to see how some things are just so similar. I’m sure you guys see that with your kids. But, wow, I can connect where they’re into the exact same thing. So there’s four of us. It’s me and my husband, Micah, and my two kids. They’re older now. To respect their privacy, I’m not going to be using their names. And I’ll just refer to them with neutral pronouns. They said I could talk about them in general. My oldest child is still really into ballet. And that’s their primary passion. And that has remained strong, grown, changed a little bit. It’s not what they want to do professionally, but it is just a primary part of their lives. They’re also still really into reading and drawing and making. They have a great friend group. And they do lots of fun stuff. I just dropped them off at the botanical gardens to hang out with friends this morning. And let’s see, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. I lost my train of thought. My younger child, back when I originally did the podcast, they were really into building and constructing items out of stuff. And I had not really forgotten, even though we still have a lot of that preserved in the garage. But they’re really into building tabletop games, mostly card games. They’re constantly inventing new games. We’ve brought a lot of them to the table, done a lot of design. We’ve taken them to little fairs and sold lots of them. And we have game tournaments. They’re kind of based around the Wings of Fire lore, because that’s what their friends were into when they started it. It’s turned into this thing where they have this whole group of friends that are ...
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    1 時間 3 分
  • EU406: Foundations: Open and Curious

    EU406: Foundations: Open and Curious
    2026/04/09
    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Open and Curious. Open and curious is a helpful mindset shift for navigating relationships and challenges. In this week’s episode, we dive into Pam’s mantra and some of the many ways that it has proven to be so valuable in our lives. Being open and curious takes us back to beginner’s mind and allows us to see possibilities and question limiting beliefs that no longer serve us. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS How does it feel to think about being open and curious about the people in your life? What do you discover through that lens? Try being open and curious while navigating a conflict this week, rather than jumping right to the solution you have in mind. What felt different? Think about something in your life that you’re feeling stuck around. What bubbles up when you approach it with openness and curiosity? What other possibilities exist? Next time you’re judging something your partner or child is choosing to do as “bad,” play with the question “Who would I be without this perspective? What would I do instead? How would that feel?” TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us as we explore relationships, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and have really enjoyed how they’ve been building upon one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, we’d love it if you could leave a rating and a review. That definitely helps new people find us. In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about being open and curious. This is something you will hear us say a lot. I first heard about it from Pam and I find myself saying it daily at this point. When you think about the opposite, it’s being closed and disinterested, so it’s pretty easy to see why we both love it. I don’t want to move through the world feeling closed and disinterested, and it definitely doesn’t help us solve problems or to connect with the people around us. Being open and curious serves us in our relationships on a lot of different levels. When we’re open and curious about our partner, we want to understand them, what’s important to them, why they see things the way they do. We want to set aside any judgment and really lean into connecting with the person in front of us. When I find myself not understanding something they did or said, I can remind myself to be open and curious about it, to not jump to conclusions, to not write a story, like we were talking about last week. That gives us the best chance to avoid a misunderstanding. And part of being curious is asking questions and listening. PAM: Yeah. I love this so much. I have found open and curious to be such a helpful lens to bring to my relationships. For me, it’s a quick way to get to beginner’s mind, which is a place where I don’t feel like I have to know the answers, and I’m just curious to learn more. I often feel a sense of wonder and a childlike energy when I can get there. And it’s not childish. Childlike. There’s a big distinction. So, when I’m open and curious, I’m attentive and I’m interested in hearing new ideas and new perspectives. I want to learn how the other person is seeing things. I want to learn what they’re interested in and why it lights them up. And, of course, that doesn’t mean forgetting about who I am. To me, beginner’s mind is about understanding that the world is richer than just my story. My story, the one I tell about myself, is definitely a vibrant thread, but it also weaves alongside the stories of the other important people in my life. And it reminds me that their story is theirs to tell and I want to listen. I want to know them, not my version of them. And to take that metaphor just one step deeper, being open and curious reminds me to explore the tapestry of my life, which includes the people I love and care about, not ...
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    16 分
  • EU405: A Field Guide: Choosing Unschooling

    EU405: A Field Guide: Choosing Unschooling
    2026/03/26
    Welcome to a new series on the podcast that we’re calling A Field Guide, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We’re using the chapters of the book as monthly themes in the Living Joyfully Network, which is bringing everything top of mind for us, and got us excited to share our thoughts here on the podcast as well. The book, framed around the hero’s journey, is a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from Pam’s unschooling journey. The monomyth of the hero describes an individual who somehow stumbles upon clues to a truth that lies outside of conventional belief, and begins a quest—physical, spiritual, or both—to understand and eventually embody that truth as their new way of life. Sound familiar? Unschooling unquestionably lies beyond today’s conventional wisdom around learning, parenting, and childhood. And through our journey to understand unschooling, we will learn and grow and change as we come to embrace this new lifestyle. It’s an inner, or spiritual, journey and, by the end, we will see our ordinary world in a new and extraordinary way. And while no two journeys are the same, there are similar stages and characters that you are likely to encounter in some form on your unschooling journey. This is where a field guide shines. In this first episode, we’re talking about the initial phase of the journey: Choosing Unschooling. We talk about the initial call to unschooling, which looks different for different families. We also explore what it looked like to find our guides along this path, describe the threshold guardians we may meet as we cross the threshold into the world of unschooling, and share what it was like to find ourselves in the metaphorical “belly of the whale.” It was a fun conversation and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and I am joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both. And today we are starting a new series on the podcast called A Field Guide. So that means we will have these episodes being released alongside our ongoing foundation series and our journey conversations with other unschooling parents and any other ideas that bubble up for us along the way. We definitely like to go with the flow that way. For this series we’re going to be working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We’re also working through it in the network, our online community, which is bringing everything top-of-mind for us and got us excited to share our thoughts here on the podcast as well. So the book, it’s framed around the hero’s journey. It’s a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from my unschooling journey. The monomyth of the hero describes an individual who somehow stumbles upon clues to a truth that lies outside of conventional belief and begins a quest, physical, spiritual, or both, to understand and eventually embody that truth as their new way of life. So, I think that probably sounds familiar to most of our listeners. Unschooling unquestionably lies beyond today’s conventional wisdom around learning and parenting and childhood. And through our journey to understand unschooling, we will learn and grow and change as we come to embrace this new lifestyle. It’s an inner or spiritual journey and by the end we will see our ordinary world in a new and extraordinary way. My body is full of goosebumps right now. Anyway, as I explain in the book, we’re calling this series a field guide. That’s in the title because while no two journeys are the same, there are similar stages and characters that you are likely to encounter in some form on your unschooling journey. In this episode, we’re talking about the initial phase of the journey, which I call choosing unschooling, and the first stage is the call to unschooling. So our journey begins in the ordinary world. I think most of us grew up absorbing the conventional messages around learning that kids have to go to school because that’s where the trained teachers are and to learn something...
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    48 分
  • EU404: Foundations: Stories

    EU404: Foundations: Stories
    2026/03/12
    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Stories. Humans are storytellers. We choose the stories we tell about our lives. In every situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it, and they’re all a version of the truth. But we get to choose which version resonates the most with us, which one feels better to us, and then that informs our actions moving forward. Getting curious about the stories we tell can be an amazing form of self-care! We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS What stories are you holding on to about yourself, your partner, and your family? Where are the stories coming from? From your parents during your childhood? The outside voices of society? Somewhere else? Do you see the story in your self-talk? How else might you tell that story? How does it feel to realize that you get to craft your own stories? TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are very happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about stories, both the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we assign to other people, meaning what we think they’re thinking. And yes, it can get very messy. Now, this episode is a bit longer than usual, but we think it’s worth it. Stories are intricately woven into our relationships with the people that we love, and that’s because humans are storytelling animals. It’s how we make sense of our world. In the book The Storytelling Animal, How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall, he wrote, “Story is for a human as water is for a fish – all encompassing and not quite palpable.” I love that so much, because story truly is everywhere. And the language we choose makes a profound difference, because the stories we tell ourselves become our self-talk. That is why we want to be intentional about the language that we’re using. And what’s really fascinating is that for pretty much any situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it and they can all make sense and all could truthfully tell the story of that situation. And the thing to realize is, we get to choose which one resonates most and feels better to us, which then informs our actions moving forward, which calls back to our conversation in episode seven about how every moment is a choice. Stories and choice are woven together so well, aren’t they? ANNA: Oh my gosh. So much. For me, truly understanding the role of story has been so pivotal. That awareness allowed me to step back and observe, so, where’s this story coming from? Does it feel real to me and who I am in this moment? Is it serving me? And if I’ve held onto it for a long time, why? Why have I held onto that story? And who would I be without it? That’s one I love to think about. Who would I be? What would it feel like? Because there’s an energetic feeling to that. What do I feel without this story that I’m telling about myself or these people in my life? And those questions really can only come about once you take off the veil and realize that everything is a story. Then I get to dive in and have these questions. And through the questioning, I can hone in on what is really working for me. And then I can start to change my story to be more reflective of me as the person I am now, the person I want to be moving forward. And I could see the role of story more clearly and use it as a tool instead of being held hostage by it, which is kind of how it felt before. And for me, like you said, language is such a big piece of that. I try to be so intentional about my language that I use, whether I’m defining some kind of big event or a very simple task in front of me, because in that language is choice. I’m developing the story that informs my day and tells others who I am. And so, that piece is so critical to me, just seeing it for what it is. And then, how do I want to create my narrative? What language do I want to use to describe it? I like thinking about it....
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    30 分