Co-Evolutionary Culturing

The personal embedded within the collective

Holding the responsibility of healing through the personal and the collective
Charla and I explore the layers of the personal and the collective and how we move through the "pearl necklace" of karma, which is the way we respond habitually through the lenses of trauma, ancestral gift, cultural worldview. We explore together what it means to belong, how we feel and deal with anger and where its expression belongs, performative belonging versus authenticity and the question of why is it important to have a voice? This is a quantum and personal conversation with a dear dear friend of 20 years.
 
Charla is concerned about the ways in which humans, both the collectivity and individual humans, are embedded in community and in larger systems, including the somatic, psychological and spiritual implications of that. As well, Charla tracks the sociopolitical consequences of: being embedded, being engulfed, being dissociated, or being conscious of one’s own role to play in this lifetime; the contingencies that led to the position one finds oneself in; and the ways in which their role and trajectory impacts the larger systems. They are concerned with the relationship between our responsibility to show up fully within larger systems and the knowing that there is a larger, vast, expanse in which these larger systems and our roles within them are playing out. Their work is an exploration of what it means to be able to hold both perspectives of personal and collective, and to show up in both ways for oneself, for other humans, and for the innumerable beings that live on our planet.
Charla is  a psychoanalytic therapist living and working on Abenaki land, or New Hampshire USA, though strongly identified as a Californian. Though they work with all, they have a special interest and lived experience in trans-affirmative care, specifically focusing on work with queer and trans youth. They have practiced and facilitated rites of passage work, somatic healing sessions, sacred wilderness practices, are a longstanding practitioner of American Zen Buddhism. They anticipate entering into training for psychedelic-assisted rites of passage and psychotherapy at some point in the near future.
https://www.charlamalamed.com
 
Music: Carry this All by Ahlay Blakely
Alexandra “ahlay” Blakely is a descendent of Ashkenazi, Scandinavian, and British folk. She is an artist, singer-songwriter, communal grief tender, community organizer, facilitator, and ceramicist walking the path of ancestral healing and the reclaiming of lost cultural memory. Her community singing album Spells from the Unknown offers songs for collective transformation, inquiry, and living in service to the future ones. Her second album, WAILS: Songs for Grief, was recorded with a 200-person choir and is entirely dedicated to grief, inspired by the Whales of the Sea, the wails of our times, and Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow, especially “the five gates of grief.” Her forthcoming third album, Anthems for an Apocalypse, arrives September 2025 and explores themes of collapse, courage, and abolitionist love. Through her music and gatherings, ahlay invites people into deep feeling, collective remembering, and the restoration of belonging across time.
 
To stay informed about her ongoing offerings, sign up for her monthly newsletter. 
support/socials:
Patreon
Bandcamp
Website
Instagram
Youtube
Spotify 
 

Summoning the Guardians of these Times

Alicia and I speak about the intuitive, consciousness shifting jump of evolution in corn and these times. We speak about protection that is wise and the protective strategies that underpin modernity's violence. We listen in to who might guide us as we find our way through the "jump" that we now find ourselves in, between the old paradigm and the not-yet-born, the transformational space between what was and what comes- the present moment in which everything is possible and the guardians who are midwifing this dangerous and transformative time. 
 
Alicia Enciso Litschi
Pronouns:  she/her/ella
Website:  www.conalmatherapy.com
Social: https://offeringsforcornmother.substack.com/
 
Alicia is a hybrid healer in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona.  She is part curandera, part psychologist.  She finds great meaning in helping her clients restore their connections to ancestral wisdom and belonging to the land.  Alicia is devoted to Corn Mother--one of the ancient Mothers of this world.  Alicia loves to spread the practice of making offerings to the land.  Guided by Corn Mother, she travels together with friends, making small offerings in service of connecting to the greater intelligences of Earth's Being.
Eamon Willow is the shamanic practitioner that Alicia mentions, their website is https://calonyddraig.com/

Episode 6: Decolonizing at Depth

My guest is Shaleah Dawnyel, founder of the School of Unlearning Berlin. We speak together in a brave space about what it is to be a portal person, the necessity of speaking about things that our very presence embodies which are often confrontative for folks. We talk about leaning in to the discomfort of this way of being that opens up both the heart and mind for what is possible beyond binaries and hierarchies. And how that in and of itself is the invitation for transformation, together.
 
About Shaleah Dawnyel: Jane of all trades and master of some, Shaleah Dawnyel escaped her origins in Los Angeles in 2009 and found their home in Berlin. After working for over 15 years as a strategy & marketing consultant for creatives, she recently co-founded the School of Unlearning in Berlin, dedicated to (un)learning the myth of separation that is destroying our world. When they aren't gesturing toward alternative futures, she enjoys wandering walks with their fur partner Harmony and exploring the best cheeses the EU has to offer.  
https://shaleahdawnyel.com School of Unlearning Berlin 

Episode 5: What we understand of Power

Greetings! In this episode, we speak of what we mean when we use the word power, and what we mean when we say power-over culture. We speak of composting power-over culture and how one might do that through inner-led change. It is a vulnerable and tender conversation that reveals our own experience and grappling, healing and transformation as we ourselves compost the shadows and wounds of power-over culture within our own psyches and within the relational culture that is Starter Culture.
Music by Tamsin Elliot, Uma's Song from the Album Fey

Episode 4 - Tending the relational culture of Starter Culture

Join us, Claire Milne and Sara McFarland, as we tend the heart of Starter Culture and share what has brought us here and why each of us are passionate about what brings us to this work, the inner-led transformation of power-over culture into relational culture. 
 
With music by Laura Brady
Strong Ones from the album Stitch and Ocean
Website: http://www.wren-music.com

Episode 3 - Eco- Belonging Awakening to our place in Earth Community Part 2

Description
 
The second part of our Eco-Awakening conversation of belonging to Earth Community, with Bell Selkie Lovelock and Sara McFarland. In this episode, you’ll find an experiential invitation to deepen into your senses and encounter the wild others within and without. We speak about how to Eco-Awaken, how to experience ourselves as Earth and how to continue the practice of it in our daily lives. With poetry by William Stafford and Joy Harjo. Music by Tamsin Elliot 
http://www.tamsinelliott.co.uk/

Eco-Belonging - awakening to our place in Earth Community

Bell Selkie Lovelock and myself, Sara McFarland, speak about Eco-Awakening, which is the psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual remembering of the fact that we each are a part of Earth and that all beings are our Kith, in reciprocal relatedness. Come along with us for an imaginal journey through poetry, song and stories into the heart of belonging to Earth Community.

Introducing Starter Culture

Welcome to our first podcast, in which we dive into the heart of Starter Culture and all the ways in which we expand consciousness beyond the power-over culture into human wholeness and the other-than-human. We talk about the necessary death of the modern paradigm and the grief and fear that brings with it, the ways we might decolonize at depth and at scale, and the necessity of inner work for outer change for a possible future cultural renewal. www.starterculture.net