Tending the Roots: Composting Conversations

About Heidi J Cardoza:   From a young age Heidi has been empathic and expressive, with a love of nature and a desire to understand reality by honoring multiple perspectives. She studied physics, dance and performance art in college and produced several multimedia shows asking questions and inspiring integration and celebration.    She joined La Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz (the Rainbow Caravan for Peace) for many years in South America. This was an international group of rebels who traveled, worked and made art together. They learned to live simple, everyday lives together in connection with the mythic and the sacred land. Upon returning from Latin America, she started a multimedia performance art collective in Missoula, MT called the Open Field Artists, who played with cultural and spiritual change. She was also a certified yoga facilitator, massage therapist and arts mentor.    In time, Heidi’s body began to release personal unconscious material (trauma) into the conscious mind and body to be integrated (which was scary). She then produced another multimedia art show called First Breath, which used theater to examine patterns we inherit from our parents. After this show her body-psyche initiated a deeper transformational process integrating ancestral trauma, and she moved into a land-based farm and garden community for a few years. Although this was a difficult time due to isolation and lack of support, it was also precious and brought her very close to herself, the land and the benevolent ancestors.   Since then, Heidi has been using her experience in sound, movement, theater, improvisation, performance art, comedy, clowning, drag and music - to continue collaborating, playing and experimenting! She initiated a collaborative multimedia art project called Free System-Sistema Libre. She also joined the Rooted Global Village and feels immensely grateful for all the ways she has grown within Rooted over the past few years. And she has been active in the disability community for years as an artist, educator and organizer, which has been empowering and enriching. She also works as a hospice caregiver, and is currently focusing on loving connections and mutual empowerment as humanity and nature continue to go through what she (and many others) experience as a mysterious cultural paradigm shift.   Heidi has failed a lot. SHE is sometimes a HE, and HE is quite sexy. They love a swim, especially under moonlight, with friends. She/he/they are howling and dreaming with all you friends out there…   Facebook: heidi junkersfeld Instagram: @heidij.free Website: www.freesystemsisteamlibre.com For more information about Rooted Global Village visit our website: www.rootedglobalvillage.com

On our own, the desire born from the challenges we’ve faced can be a powerfully transformative force in our lives.   Our personal embrace of the Soulful Chainbreaker becomes a cultural force when we gather together, commune, share stories, and support each other to commit to and sustain the journey.  We do not disrupt and re/orient within a vacuum, other beings dedicated to this process become our co-conspirators and co-creators of new experiences and new future(s).   Rooted in the experience of our non-separation we might find greater access to our creative life energy and imagination to become newly oriented in the world, to create new maps and pathways of belonging. 

Many experiences of trauma/oppression reveal where we’ve failed to belong authentically. The ways in which, as we navigate our social worlds, we come up against blocks and barriers to birthright dignity, authenticity, acceptance and belonging. That is, where we disappoint and fail to conform to the expectations of dominant cultural narratives. This rejection dampens our inner spark, disorients our desire, and erects borders and checkpoints in our interior world that prevents the wild rambling and roving that is our birthright and is necessary for wellbeing. This non-belonging is also a portal to a re/imagination of how else we might live.  Often unconscious to us, our experiences within culture shape the ways we’re oriented in the world; influencing the neurophysiology of our bodies, our emotions, perceptions, and beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world.  On this shared journey the Chainbreaker illuminates the borders and checkpoints - the chains - that limit the free expression of our own unique hearts. The Chainbreaker archetype offers a way to embody fire-based courage so that we may see clearly the impacts of dominant familial and cultural narratives and a path to liberate ourselves and the generations that will come after us. What appears to us as evident in a field of infinite possibility is influenced by our early experiences embedded within family systems and culture.   This explores the spirit and science behind change-making and chain-breaking. And it asks the question: What can we learn from our bodies that the broader culture tries to bury?  We’ll also offer guided reflection practice on what trauma has made way for in your life.

The Chainbreaker as archetype invites critical questioning and reclaiming. We are invited to consider disappointing our families of origin, and the cultural influences at large by rejecting narratives and dictates that reproduce harms.It’s risky, even, for those most marginalized in these narratives. Yet in this risk we open to a vital rebirth: the opportunity to access desire long hidden or dampened by chains and obstacles.  If we imagine our inner and outer worlds as a map; not one shaped by imposed borders but rather a map that authentically reveals the contours we trace in our daily living and loving. What would we see? What is shaped by inheritance? How does desire move in this geography? Where are you located in this story of change that is both personal and collective?  Desire as creative impulse roots in the energy and action of fire: warming, illuminating, consuming, and transforming. There is a font of desire - distinguished from forms of desire shaped by culture - rooted in a deeper order of life, residing within each of us, that is the fire that propels deeper-level transformation. 

Transmuting Intergenerational Trauma Through The Creative Principles of Fire This is a story about what it means to be the one who steps out of line. The one willing to be the weak link in the chain.  The one willing to disrupt and disobey; to embrace disruption as a portal and disappoint some of the expectations held for us (and the people associated with them) in the service of another future. And how a shift in imagination turns our deviance into a dedication to life, love, and liberation. This requires courage, fierce love and a fire (in the belly) that sustains our commitment. In this podcast there are reflections on becoming the soulful chainbreaker, and what it might mean to and for you.

Cliff Berrien has 40-years of experience as a student and teacher of Afro-Diasporic drumming and music traditions. He has combined his music studies, degree in psychology and years of experience as a professional DJ to develop practices that promote collective joy, cultural dexterity and global healing. Cliff has had the honor of using these practices for the past 5 years co-facilitating workshops with his mentor, Dr. Barbara Holmes, author of Race and the Cosmos and Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. Dr. Holmes’ work has deepened Cliff’s appreciation of womanist thought as a visionary landscape influenced by African indigenous spirituality and woman-centered perspectives which place humans in a sacred web of life that includes plants, animals, elemental forces, the earth, the cosmos, and the living and the dead. For more information visit our website: www.rootedglobalvillage.com

I've learned over a lifetime of experience with people who either steered me away from, or closer to, the intelligence and wisdom my body held, that the teachers I trusted most were those that taught me to trust myself. There is a profound relationship between trust, bodily intelligence, and building authentic connection. From the vast complexity of bodily intelligence to the oft neglected guidance through dreams and connections with elemental kin, there is so much we might un/learn and re/inhabit. Breaking cycles of trauma through trust and what it takes to develop your compass for nurturing relationship is deeply vital work. Our paths are all filled with alchemy, wounds, and boundless capacity for love — hopefully this short reflection offers you something to aid the journey. Visit our website: www.rootedglobalvillage.com Our instagram: tending.the.roots

In this episode we discuss grief as a metabolizer of experience and its role in our lives and the world to come. An End of Life (EOL) Doula, Oceana specializes in the liminal spaces of active dying and grief. She is currently researching the intersection of embodied grief and somatic abolitionism as well as developing and holding space for healing through a sensual (all the senses) lens. Here work with the Rooted Global Village is focused in the area of somatic grieving as a liberatory praxis as well as holding space for people of the African diaspora. A certified home funeral celebrant, living funeral ceremony facilitator, and Conscious Dying Educator, Oceana also holds graduate degrees in counseling psychology and organizational development. You can learn more about her on her substack, and on instagram. Oceana’s Links: Substack:  https://oceana.substack.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oceanasportal/

This podcast was recorded in early September, 2023, in the midst of a wave of grief that felt too big for my body; too big to hold alone. In Rooted, we are dedicated to shifting away from cultural forms that perpetuate separation and isolation. Sometimes my heart breaks so deeply at the news of the world that I can hardly keep my head up. At times the grief becomes so big that it feels like my body isn’t big enough to hold it, almost as if I could crack and out of the crevasse that opens up, this primal scream would come tearing out to shake the foundations of the earth. And it always reminds me of this idea that challenges a lot of the Eurocentric ideas about grief, that it’s a private affair, or something to limit to one or two people, or perhaps a good therapist.  But sometimes the grief is not mine alone; let alone mine to hold alone. This short reflection is devoted to that.

I’m excited to have Weena on the podcast today. She happens to be a dear friend of mine and also one of our rooted team members. In rooted, Weena is probably the person who more than anyone else, brings us back to the body, to the impulse of bodily knowing, and how we can engage with the themes we’re working with in a space like rooted. Her work is focused on truly experiencing this world through our bodies. It’s a critical component of what we do. This conversation was both enjoyable, given our friendship, and felt somewhat incomplete to both of us, hinting at a possible part two in the future. It’s a casual, kitchen table talk that went wherever it wanted to. We begin by discussing perimenopause and its impact on cognitive functioning, verbal fluency, and the challenge of showing up authentically in spaces. This is tied to the unlearning process we’re undergoing and our critique of cultures linked to supremacist systems. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Weena. If you want to learn more about her, you can find links to her Instagram and website below. Weena’s been working and playing in the worlds of dance, movement training, and somatic therapies in New York City for the last 25 years. Her guiding light is to value the interconnected reality of bodily aliveness (and its absence in the tangible sense). She finds that aliveness through making dances, facilitating SE+AM group work, working somatically with folks individually, partnering and mothering, and in her amazing neighborhood of Jackson Heights. Weena is passionate about getting to the heart of what shifts our human-made systems toward that which protects, cares for, and supports our human needs for mobility, stability, clarity and love. SE+AM has been her response to that need. SE+AM is a practice Weena developed that is about making direct contact with the internal, bodily-felt aliveness within and around us. You can learn more about SE+AM and experience it for yourself at: Weena's website: weenapauly.com Weena's instagram: weenapaulytarr Weena's Podcast: Reverence For Impulse

Welcome to the Rooted global village. This podcast episode is an introduction of sorts, to what The Rooted Global Village exists because of, and for. Rooted is an organism made up of the many souls who are a part of it. And like any organism, it has a birth story. And like other birth stories, the birth is not the beginning… As you listen, we invite you to hold this question near: What sparks a fire in your belly for change? Let’s see where your own story intersects with ours. visit our website at: www.rootedglobalvillage.com  

Akilah is a mother, partner, and liberation worker who helps people unlearn the barriers to being our real selves together, in our homes and all the other ways we connect, work, and serve. In July of 2016, Richards published the first episode of Fare of the Free Child podcast, now known among the short list of must-listen-to podcasts for anyone considering parenting and leadership from a liberation lens. The podcast focuses on Black people, Native|Indigenous people, and People of Color (BIPOC) families who practice unschooling and other forms of self-directed, decolonization-minded living and learning. In May of 2019, Richards joined the celebrated TEDx Speaker village with her poignant speech, Raising Free People, where she shared the now widely-celebrated philosophy, “We can’t keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people.” In November of 2020, she released her book, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (PM Press)  which has been heralded as “the blueprint” for the type of self-inquiry and collective liberation that will help us free our children and ourselves. As founder of Raising Free People Network, Richards and co-conspirators produce work to challenge and encourage social justice minded people to explore privilege and power in their relationships with leadership. Akilah is a founding board member of The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) and the mother of two teenage daughters. You can find her views on Self-Directed Education, Black joy, deschooling and decoloniality for leadership and community all over the Internet. Additionally her advocacy and organizing work has received national press including Forbes Magazine, Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), NBC TV, CBC Radio, and several print publications, including The New York Times. Akilah's Instagram: fareofthefreechild Akilah's Website: https://raisingfreepeople.com

Kai Cheng Thom is an author, community worker, somatic healer, lasagna lover, and wicked witch based in Toronto. She has spoken and published widely on the topics of trauma, transformative justice, and mental health. A former clinical social worker, Kai Cheng has also spent over a decade working in public sector mental health with LGBT youth and their families, an experience that continues to inform her work today. She is also the author of four award-winning books, including the Stonewall Award-winning essay collection I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE. Her newest book, Falling Back in Love with Being Human, from Penguin Random House will be released on August 1st 2023. Kai Cheng’s links: website: https://kaichengthom.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kaichengthom/

Yvette Murrell is a coach, healer, consultant, co-founder, and Connector of the former Playback Milwaukee Theatre Company, has multifaceted, cross-sector national career accomplishments in expressive arts, business, and education. A powerfully-gifted facilitator and shaman with over 30 years of practice, Yvette weaves a deeply embodied approach to social, racial, and restorative justice into the lives of individuals, organizations, and institutions seeking transformative change. By her presence alone, Yvette grounds love into action by awakening body wisdom, ancestral guides, and creative play through compassionate inquiry and somatic listening. She can deftly hear the soul’s calling toward collective liberation, alchemizing conflict, and challenge to compassion, strategy, and vision. You’ll find Yvette, where innovation, cultural arts, and transformative justice meets beloved community. Yvette’s links: website: https://yvettemurrell.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/divineguidanceoracle/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvette-murrell-375a32b1/

I grew up looking into the night sky and the heavens above me.  Without concepts that defined the movement of planets and stars, or the mathematics to describe them, I would orient my head and neck upwards, captivated by the beauty of this cosmic mystery stretched out above my head. So expansive that it would take my breath away.   For those of us who have been sold a narrative that there is only one way we can be in relationship with the heavens, only one way to make sense of it through Western scientific knowledge, we may have a disconnected sense of this vital connection. Much like a muscle that’s atrophied; it’s been neglected and underused for important reasons. Many of us have been force fed what scholar Arturo Escobar calls the “One World Story”; a story that has also attempted to eradicate other stories about who we are and our place in the web of life.   This episode reflects one point in a journey that we’ve been on for a while now in Rooted, tracing an arc of exploration as it relates to how we might begin to reimagine relationship and belonging.  Here we consider how we might begin to enliven the seen and unseen strands that connect us to a broader web of relationships.   This summer in Rooted, we're embarking on a project centered on rekindling a relationship that for many of us has been flattened; reduced to a specific thing that can only be known by experts with advanced degrees. We will reclaim the fullness of an experience of kinship. Let’s infuse this muscle of kinship again through shared practice, storytelling, and art-making. We are bringing our full bodies to play with Venus this summer. Our friend, Bear Ryver, has referred to these celestial bodies as our cosmic ancestors. I am giddy with excitement for the journey and hope you might join us!  Friends, this is the first episode for a new podcast called Tending the Roots, which reflects the conversations and explorations of the Rooted Global Village. We attempt to bridge the personal and collective in our reach towards healing (wholeness) and personal and collective liberation. We also have an exciting summer project we'd like to invite you to join! www.rootedglobalvillage.com