Show Notes
Weaving a New Story of Courage, Power, and Purpose on the Earth
Lately on the podcast, we've been transiting the realms of sacred rites of passage, thresholdcrossing and initiation. We've been exploring what it looks like to embracing our natural cycles of life / death / change / initiation and recognize the medicine that each of these stages offer us. In this episode, I sit down with my sister, Ashley River, Ceremonial Tattooist, Facilitator, Co-Founder of School of the Sacred Arts: A Mystery School for Ceremonial Tattoo and Co-Visionary of the Thresholdkeeper Retreat, happening on July 27 - 30 in the coastal redwoods of Mendocino, CA.
We both met in Santa Fe, NM in a time when we were both transiting through powerful initiations that matured us and woke us up to deeper layers of the medicine, work, and vision we're both individually called to birth. Part of what has forged our friendship is the recognition of how terrifying it can be to step out into your work and medicine with past life (a present life) karmic memories of being burned, hung, tried, and exiled while putting your everything into birthing vision into the world.
In this episode, we explore what it looks like to deeply surrender to the potent medicine our initiations invite us into. We talk about how the purpose of initiatory medicine is to lift us up into a higher beauty and an expanded capacity to step into our unique potential.
I'm so excited to co-host Thresholdkeeper with my sister Ashley. You can find out more about her medicine, her School of the Sacred Art and our work together below:
About Ashley River
Ashley River is a multidimensional artist, ceremonialist, author, teacher, mystic, and threshold guide. She is the creator and teacher of a healing modality of ceremonial tattoo alchemy called Soul Tattoo®, the Author of Tending to the Sacred, and Messages from the Heart of the Divine oracle deck, Host of Weaving your Web podcast. co-founder of Feminine Voices retreats and School of the Sacred Arts school for Sacred Tattooing. Her work is a devotion to desire, feminine liberation, soul expression, and creative empowerment through the deep and wild evolutionary path.
www.ashleyriver.co
About Thresholdkeeper Retreat
Thresholdkeeper is a midsummer, threshold-crossing respite for healers and medicine keepers in the redwood forests of Mendocino, CA taking place on July 27 - 30.
This is a retreat for the ones who hear the unmistakable call to surrender to the wisdom of the Pysche's Song. It is for those who know that their life's work is to traverse the deep world – the liminal spaces of mystery, death, change, birth, and initiation – in order to gather the ingredients of the medicines they know will serve their people in these times of immense cultural change.
Thresholdkeeper is for those who honor that the path of becoming is not rainbows and fairies, but the daily work of firmly walking upon rich, dark soil of a changing Earth. Learn more about Thresholdkeeper at the link below.
More from The Kinspirit Podcast
Recorded at the end of Summer, Narinder and I discuss our shared experiences growing up in religious fundamentalist communities and how it shaped our perspectives on life. We explore the beauty and romance in everyday living and the importance of calling forth the beauty in this world. Narinder also shares her journey as a death midwife and the role of death midwifery in society. We discuss the concept of forgiving this realm, embracing death as home, and the importance of wonder and unconditional love.
Pain is mycelial. This episode is dedicated to sharing in prayers for Palestine and recognizing how we can each own our role in the global revolution our world needs.
How do you know if you have spiritual gifts? What are the signs that your spiritual gifts are coming online? In this week's episode of the Kinspirit podcast, I continue our mini-series on Spiritual Gifts by sharing some of the key signs that your spiritual gifts are coming online and how to work with them. I also share some key things to watch out for that will help you to stay grounded, discerning, watchful, and in your body without shutting your heart down from the experience that you are having
Carly Mountain, author of Descent & Rising: Women's Stories and Embodying the Inanna Myth, joins the podcast to discuss the psychospiritual descent to soul and the wildly misunderstood sacred rites of passage that many women secretly experience. She emphasizes the importance of calling this wisdom back into the lives of women and normalizing the nature of both descent and rising as part of the feminine path. Carly explores the concept of sacrifice and the need to let go of certain aspects of ourselves in order to rise and embody our true selves. She also highlights the role of desire and pleasure in the journey of descent and rising, and the importance of compassion for ourselves and others as we navigate these transformative processes.
There's something that happens when we walk through a soul-level initiation: we discover that we may have extrasensory gifts. These gifts don't often feel like "gifts" at first. Sometimes they feel intense, like the veil is a bit thinner than we thought before. If you're like many people, you take to google to try and figure out what's happening to you. Perhaps you have dreams or premonitions about things that haven't happened yet. Perhaps you feel more sensitive to other people and environments. These experience may sound cool and exciting, but they are not always pleasant. They come with a tax to the body. It doesn't always feel pleasant to perceive the mixing of many people's energetic cocktails through your one little body. It's not always fun to wake up from dreams that feel prophetic, but a have a tinge of fear or darkness that we may not feel comfortable holding or working with.