Here we are at the end of season two, and just rounding on the solstice. In celebration, I’m coming with a present for you: a yoga nidra to come back in and remember your spark. A moment of pause and reconnection with yourself, no matter what is going on around you.

Grab a blanket and get cosy. Together we’ll slide our way into deep rest, and hold a light in the dark.

That’s everything for this season, my friend. I hope you have a nourishing end to your year, no matter how you spend it. We’ll be back sometime next year. See you then!

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LINKS & CREDITS

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Find more of my work at anotherpractice.com

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This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

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Today, in the final conversation of this season, I'm speaking with Ava Riby-Williams.

We talked about living life as a creative act, going slow to go fast, liminal spaces and grey areas that allow us to express our wholeness, and the slow, messy work of liberating ourselves.

ABOUT AVA

Ava is a queer, British Ghanaian/Indian visionary, living in London. She acts out life purpose as a Creative Facilitator, Artist and Wellbeing guide who celebrates diversity and finds divinity in all of life. She uses arts and healing based practises to guide groups into deeper contemplation of issues concerning identity, oppression and liberation- on personal and collective levels.

Ava calls us into deeper self inquiry about our lives and participation in our society, planet and cosmos. She prompts us to get curious and ask...

Why are we here? In what way is our liberation all entangled?

Find more of her work

avazarah.com
@avazarah

MENTIONED THIS EPISODE

Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude

Emergent Strategy

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LINKS & CREDITS

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Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com

Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate

This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

Today I'm bringing you a conversation with Tamu Thomas.

Our conversation wandered through her own explorations of embodiment and her practice of Non-Linear Movement, the role of pleasure, sensuality and joy in women's wellbeing, reclaiming power and sovereignty, and channelling our energy in a generative way, even as we live in oppressive systems.

ABOUT TAMU

Tamu Thomas is an emotional well-being coach, writer, workshop facilitator, podcaster and Non-Linear Movement practitioner who helps over-functioning, overworking, high achieving women fall in love with themselves so they can make powerful choices about how they live, love and work.

Tamu’s work combines somatics, social work and spirituality with science and soulful systems. She is person-centred, evidence-based, trauma-informed, human-paced, nurturing, intuitive, loving and playful. Tamu’s holistic approach to supporting the bodies, minds and experience of her clients makes her work nurturing, deep and unique – just like her.

Tamu’s work is informed by her background of sixteen years in social work, somatic coach training, her love of behavioural neuroscience and polyvagal theory, positive psychology, spirituality and joy. Tamu combines these modalities to create a multifaceted body of work that helps her clients stop using anxiety as a productivity tool and stop normalising burnout. Tamu’s work helps her clients understand who they are so they may begin to tend to their needs, feel safe in their bodies, befriend themselves and begin to enjoy who they are.

Tamu supports her clients and workshop attendees understand themselves as valuable and worthy of caring for themselves. This enables them to prioritise their own well-being and life satisfaction alongside success and achievement.

Her mission is to help women enhance how they live, love and work by recovering from their addiction to toxic productivity.

Find more of her work:

Website
Instagram

WORK WITH ME

Be the first to hear about trial breathwork sessions

Download the Radical Rest Studio

One-to-One Embodiment Guidance

LINKS & CREDITS

Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com

Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com

Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate

This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

Today's episode is a conversation with the breathworker and herbalist Jennifer Patterson.

I’m a huge fan of Jennye’s work and it was a joy to get to chat with her. We covered all sorts of ground and you’ll hear us get into the wavy space between medicine and poison, how we can be in our bodies when they’re places of pain or challenge, being in relationship with the land even as city dwellers, and how she’s practicing turning towards aliveness in what she calls ‘dying times’.

ABOUT JENNIFER

Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, and words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing. A queer and trans affirming and centering, trauma-experienced herbalist and breathwork facilitator, Jennifer offers sliding scale care as a practitioner through her private practice Corpus Ritual and is a member of The Breathe Network.

She has facilitated workshops at healing centers, LGBTQ centers, a needle exchange and harm reduction clinic, online with the Transformative Language Arts Network, sexual violence resource centers, at colleges and universities, veterans hospitals, the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? and a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish healing center. She is also a teacher in training programs with The Breathe Network and Breath Liberation Society.

She is the author of The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing (Quarto) and editor of the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti- Violence Movement (2016). A graduate of Goddard College’s MA program, Jennifer is finishing a book project focused on translating embodied traumatic experience through somatic practices and critical and creative nonfiction.

Find more of her work:

corpusritual.com
@corpusritual

WORK WITH ME

Download the Radical Rest Studio

One-to-One Embodiment Guidance

In Practice, love letters and monthly live practices

LINKS & CREDITS

Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com

Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com

Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate

This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

I got to talk with my friend Lisa James about creativity, embodied truth, spiritual trust falls and what it’s really like to be a normal, everyday human living in deep connection to spirit.

It was such a treat to get to sit down and chat with Lisa, I’m sure you’ll feel her steadying grounded energy coming through as we discuss being in relationship with life and the divine.

Our conversation wandered through the feeling of an ‘in your bones’ kind of truth in comparison to cognitive knowledge, the friction we can feel where the mystical unknowns of spiritual practice bump up against our logic-obsessed society, and becoming a clear channel for creativity. And the messy realities of spiritual work in a human life (ie: sometimes it’s just really annoying and we don’t want to!)

ABOUT LISA

Lisa is a heart-led human and lover of the sea. She creates spaces within which people might remember their way home.

Find more of her work:

Website

Instagram

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Download the Radical Rest Studio

One-to-One Embodiment Guidance

In Practice, love letters on embodiment magic in the real world

LINKS & CREDITS

Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com

Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com

Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate

This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

Today's episode is a conversation with the magical Leila Sadeghee. We spoke about the divine feminine, her journey from the art world to mysticism and how we can make our lives the temple in which we connect with the divine.

I loved the places we wandered in this conversation. Wandering seems like a fitting word, since we talked about the nonlinear nature of spiritual awakening, and the deep devotion we need to be able to trust that spiralling path. stopping along the way to look at pilgrimage and ritual practices, going inwards to find the medicine that will save you, and dismantling oppression as a spiritual endeavour.

ABOUT LEILA

Skilled at creating powerful healing spaces wherever her voice is heard, Leila is a practical mystic and a channel for beautiful healing energies. Known for her talent in bringing the depth of the esoteric spiritual traditions into salient and accessible focus, she is a master ritualist and caller of community centered in collective care and spiritual awakening.

Leila is dedicated to dissolving systemic oppression as a spiritual practice, and she is a devotee of the Divine Mother in all Their forms; she is also pilgrimage enthusiast for whom walking on sacred ground brings ecstatic satisfaction.

Based in the UK, Leila leads ritual healing events, sacred pilgrimages, immersions in spiritual practices, yoga teacher training, and utterly magical retreats online and around the globe.

Find more of her work:

Revel in Worth retreat

www.leilasadeghee.com

www.vesselofworth.com

Today I'm bringing you a conversation that I got to have with Marika Heinrichs all about embodiment and whiteness, rediscovering ancestors and doing what we don’t know how to do.

I’m so pleased that I can finally share this conversation with you. Marika and I wandered through our birthright to being in connection with the world and the cultural disconnection we have to clear to return to that. We spoke about having consent and finding lineages that are ours (especially as two white practitioners), learning to listen through more than just our cognitive capacities, and the inherent queerness of embodiment.

ABOUT MARIKA

Marika Heinrichs (she/her) is a cis queer femme of (Soviet) German, British, and Irish ancestry who believes that reconnecting with the wisdom of our bodies is vital to ending systems of domination and supremacy.

She has practiced as a somatic therapist and educator within social movement spaces for over a decade. Marika has trained in the lineages of generative somatics, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), Focusing, and NeuroAffective Touch and is currently a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Marika holds a commitment to pushing back against the appropriation of BIPOC cultural wisdom that happens so often in mainstream somatics, as well as to cultivate spaces for people of European ancestry to connect with something in ourselves older than whiteness, through embodied practice.

She lives in Guelph, Canada on the lands of the Attawandaron/Chonnonton/Neutral Peoples, also the treaty land of the Mississaugas of the New Credit and part of the Dish with One Spoon Covenant.

Find more of her work:

wildbody.ca

@wildbodysomatics

WORK WITH ME

Download the Radical Rest Studio

One-to-One Embodiment Guidance

In Practice, letters on embodiment magic in the real world

LINKS & CREDITS

Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com

Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com

Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate

This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

In this first conversation of Season 2, I had the pleasure of talking with Theo Wildcroft.

We spoke about about being in relationship with wildness, neurodiversity, disability justice, the way story creates space for us to exist in wholeness, and the power of embracing your brokenness.

ABOUT THEO

Theo Wildcroft, PhD is a teacher, writer and scholar working for a more sustainable relationship between our many selves, the communities that hold us, and the world that nourishes us. Her research considers the democratization of yoga post-lineage, and the many different ways yoga communities are responding to concerns about safety in practice. She is at the forefront of the movement for trauma sensitivity, diversity and inclusion.

She blogs and writes articles on yoga, on social justice, on hope, and on untold stories. She’s a lover of vulnerable people, of wild things and wild places, and of the simple miracle of life itself. An accomplished writer with two decades of experience in group facilitation, she not only delivers compelling lectures and inspiring writing, but holds careful and thoughtful spaces for groups and individuals to deepen their knowledge, share experiences and acquire new skills.

Find more of her work:

wildyoga.co.uk

Nourish Yoga Trainings

Barefoot Body Training

WORK WITH ME

Download the Radical Rest Studio

One-to-One Embodiment Guidance

In Practice, letters on embodiment magic in the real world

LINKS & CREDITS

Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com

Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com

Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate

This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.