Hāweatea Holly Bryson joined me eight and a half months pregnant, a Māori and Hawaiian psychotherapist, grief tender, and rites of passage guide who carries 57 named generations in her lineage.

We wandered into the difference between surface culture and deep culture. Between what we construct and what we are asked to remember. Between the five senses we were taught and the thirteen her tradition names.

She said something that stopped me:

"Everyone is grieving culture. Even those of us with a doorway to it."

And then near the end, she said something I'm still sitting with:

"The thing we're yearning for could exist internally rather than externally. But once we touch it, we actually grow externally, we become more of who we are. It's a decolonial flip."

No experts. No answers. Just two people falling back into wonder together.

You can find more of Hāweatea Holly Bryson at Nature Knows

Here is where my coaching and guiding lives at ⁠TheBridger.com⁠

As we move towards the fall, reflecting on the year and exploring what is to come, I will be offering my 7th cohort of The MIRROR Year in Review program. ⁠Check it out here.

DeepEnd today is cohosted by Ryan Conklin. Learn more at bridgercoaching.com

Steve Olson spent 30 years walking into Zapotec villages, earning trust, carrying sacred culture into the world, and asking himself every day whether he was getting it right.

We talked about appreciation versus appropriation. About what integrity looks like when the culture you're serving has no voice in the room. About a man named Aspiridion who took the first payment he ever received for his mezcal and put it all on the community table and said, "now we build a school."

And Steve said something that stopped me:

"We don't get to decide what they need. That's not our decision to make."

This is Culture 06 in the DeepEnd series.

No experts. Just honest conversation.

DeepEnd today is cohosted by Ryan Conklin. Learn more at bridgercoaching.com

Siobhan came to this conversation as a grief tender, an anthropologist, and a woman raised between two worlds, her mother's open-hearted artist home in New Mexico and her Persian father's household in Albuquerque, where unspoken rules landed hard when crossed.

We wandered into what culture actually is, not as a noun but as a verb. As cultivation and devotion. As singing flesh back onto bones.

She said something that stopped me:

"Everyone longs for culture. For elders. For the songs, the dances, the togetherness. And yet so often when I am weaving, I can just feel the grief of where we are."

We talked about the colonized mind and what it takes to rewild. We wandered towards the idea of conflict as the spirit of relationship asking itself to deepen. And then to a vert personal story I can not unheard about a man on a subway with his pants at his ankles who left us with a simple offering "it takes two people to pray."

No experts. No answers. Just two people tending the soil of culture together.

You can find more of Siobhan Asgharzadeh's work as Grief Pilgrim here

Here is where my coaching and guiding lives at TheBridger.com

As we move towards the fall, reflecting on the year and exploring what is to come, I will be offering my 7th cohort of The MIRROR Year in Review program. Check it out here.

DeepEnd today is cohosted by Ryan Conklin. Learn more at bridgercoaching.com