WOMAN WHO RUBS THE MOUNTAIN 

RECENT EPISODES

#31 Microanimism:

Being in Relationship with the Smalls

Welcome to the world of Microanimism with microbiologist, independent scholar, and ritualist, Siv Watkins, PhD. Siv introduces us to the enigmatic yet ordinary realm of microorganisms, with whom humans have been entangled with since our very beginnings. She says that “the microbial world dares us to identify our human selves within the rest of the living and dying world.”

🎧 54 min listen

#30 The Embodied Elements:

The Earth Element & Nourishing Our Dark Centers

The migrating birds know. The slowing, dying bumble bees know. The gnarled, wild pear tree knows, its fruit thumping to the earth. Something has been released, a heaviness is settling into our limbs, the tree’s limbs, the earth’s limbs. The cosmic axis has shifted, moving us into what is potentially one of the most challenging transitions of the seasonal wheel. In this episode we explore all things Earth Element: in our bodies, in our minds, how have we been digesting our world? 

🎧 35 min listen

#29 Ecotherapy & Reclaiming Our Wholeness:

A Conversation with Beth Stephens about Holding Ourselves in All That it Means to Be Human

I’d call it Beth Stephens superpower: creating spaces that help women cherish the messy, mucky, imperfect wholeness of themselves. As an Ecopyschologist, Beth guides women through journeys of deep self-inquiry, working with nature while remembering themselves as a part of nature. Our conversation beautifully weaves through questions such as, why are we humans the only species who seem to have forgotten their essential completeness and what does it mean to get out of our own way so that mystery can dream through us?

🎧 65 min listen

#28 The Embodied Elements:

The Fire Element & Deepening Our Intimacy with All of Life

It may be the longest journey we ever take- those 18 inches between our heads and our hearts. Here in the Fire elemental season, we can find new dimensions of healing through heart connection and widening our sense of relational intimacy with everything around us. But summer themes of full unfurling are mixed with emotionally-intelligent discernment so that our hearts are able to use their deepest sense of knowing, responding well to each individual moment. This prevents the over-extending, boundary-leaking, or over-consuming that can sometimes happen when we are swept away by the natural enthusiasm of summer spell-making.

🎧 34 min listen

#27 Regenerative Partnering with Nature:

A Conversation with Chara Armon about Moving Beyond Eco-Anxiety

Perhaps our human worry is the last thing the earth needs at these trickster crossroads. This is the core inquiry of Chara Armon, PhD., founder of The School for Humans and Earth: how can we actively move from eco-anxiety to eco-inspiration? Because how we view life on this planet and our place within it as human beings, directly determines how we choose to contribute or not. With a dash of neuroscience, a sprinkling of informed optimism, and a wallop of animist celebration, our conversation is an exploration into how humans might still be good medicine for this planet.

🎧 62 min listen

#26 A Wild, Undomesticated Heart:

A conversation with Jen Hudziec about the Intimacies of Summer

In celebration of the summer solstice, End of Life Doula, Ancestral Lineage Repair Practitioner, and Ritualist, Jen Hudziec is back on the podcast to talk about the unabashed sensuality of summer, the joy of loving and being loved back by the living world, and using pleasure as an essential earth-honoring skill. Jen also shares some of her insights and experiences as a Fire Walk instructor, working with fire as an ancestor who demands our full dedication and attention. Listen all the way to hear Jen guiding us in a beautiful summer solstice meditation.

🎧 67 min listen

#25 Ecofluency:

A Conversation with Saskia von Diest about Co-creation & Communication with Nature

In the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, Nature communication consultant, teacher, and facilitator, Dr. Saskia von Diest, shares her story of shifting from her PhD in plant pathology to postdoctoral research investigations of intuitive farming. With the guidance of the living world around her, she created a term to describe a deeper way of knowing - Ecofluency. Perhaps it is the most critical skill we can develop as humans, the ability to sit in dialogue and ask the Earth directly: what is needed at this moment on the planet? Because it's only when we ask and listen with more of ourselves, that we really begin to understand what nature truly needs.

🎧 65 min listen

#24 The Stories of Everything:

A Conversation with Carina Lyall about Hearing the Many Truths

It was a joy to lean in with the host of the Becoming Nature podcast, Carina Lyall. Our conversation easily flowed between squirrel games (spoiler alert, they want all the walnuts), how certain stories come straight from the Earth, and the relief of physically/mentally de-centering ourselves when we are outside. My favorite part of our conversation was when Carina described storytelling as the “wildest sense of truth-telling.” Even when we don’t know the old stories of the land where we live, we can know the many smaller truths of the beings around us. Sparrow has his truth, Violet her truth, Hawthorn has their truth of what it is like to be in the world. We can practice letting ourselves be opened wide by more truths than answers.

🎧 57 min listen

#23 The Land Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself

Paths lead us forward in acts of collective mark-making, while also leading us backwards into memory, as well as inwards, deeper into ourselves. In this one-year anniversary episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, I reflect on this sense of pressing into the place where we live, all the while exposing overlapping intimacies between personal story and land story. This episode brings a deep curiosity to why we live where we do (out of all the places on the planet, why here?) And in what ways does this land already know who we are, what we could be, what we are moving towards?

🎧 57 min listen

#22 The Embodied Elements:

Indulging Our Chlorophyll Reveries

It’s been an entire turn of the seasonal wheel since the podcast began and I am excited to spiral back to the Embodied Elements Series with you. By embodied elements I am wondering, how is the season and its corresponding change in landscape arising within your inner landscape? What energies are rousing in the land where you live and how are they emerging through your heart and psyche?

🎧 35 min listen

#1 My Love Story:

Rubbing the Land Where I Live + an Introduction of Intent

In this initial episode, Kendra introduces her overarching intent for the podcast and explains why love is an interspecies bridge and at the very foundation of these explorations in ecological embodiment. How will we ever take action, invested at the level of marrow and glacial skull and tooth-root, if we do not know love first?

In this spirit, Kendra introduces us to the land where she lives and to the Deep Dreamers, the very ancient rocks that she regularly engages in heart connection with. She describes how something old and strange pulls her forward in these relationships, deep familiarities stir in her body. 

🎧 24 min listen

Gently gather some soil into your hand. Bring it to your face. Inhale. Feel it change you. All of life is contained in this single breath.

Let us begin with offerings of praise and respect to the ground beneath our feet, the land spirits where we live, taking time to acknowledge all that they have seen, all that they know.

In particular, giving thanks to the Elders- past, present, emerging- of the land where I live, the unceded territory of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation.

Actively disrupting Indigenous erasure, you can celebrate the living Indigenous people where you live through native.land.ca 

Kendra Ward, LAc., MAOM, is a traditional East Asian medicine practitioner and land alchemist. Ever curious about the fluid interfaces between the human body and land body, Kendra brings twenty years of experience practicing the nature-based system of acupuncture to her land alchemy work. She offers home and land clearings, blessing ceremonies, land altar installments, and mentorship in nature communication.

In addition to her Land Alchemy practice, Kendra offers an online course of study in practical Earth-honoring skills and her first book, Throwing Thunder: Awakening the Forces of Nature Within Every Woman was released in 2021.