Death and Nondualism, with Rachael Rice
How do we die well inside of a culture that rewards us for dissociating from what’s actually happening? Is it possible to witness and transform death phobia into something more true? In this conversation with visionary artist, writer, and end of life caregiver, Rachael Rice, we explore non-dualism, death work, collapse, folk art and more.
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Megan: Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome. Thank you for being here and sharing your time and energy and attention with me. I'm coming to you from a very windy, blustery, very cold day in Portland, Oregon. And I'm noticing today, especially how the mid autumn is really different than the early autumn.
The colors have changed. It's much colder. The wind is starting to really pick up. More of our waking time is being spent in the darkness. And so things are changing as they always are. And I think this time as we kind of transition into November, it can be really easy to just kind of get sucked into the rest of the year.
It feels like the pace is about to get wild and unnatural and like I'm going to get, I'm going to be forced to miss all of the beauty and wisdom and help that is here in the cycle of seasons as we move through the rest of autumn. And I just want to say for myself and any of you listening who need to hear that, that I want to encourage you to really consider how you'd like to be for the rest of this year -who you want to be for the rest of this autumn season and early winter. What you would like to celebrate or not celebrate, how you want to celebrate these seasonal markers and with whom, and to just be really intentional if you would like to be with how you move through the rest of this year, 2023, because it can be really easy to just get totally sucked in to all of the things that we're maybe used to doing or that people expect of us or that dominant culture does.
You know, the winter solstice is very much overshadowed by the Christmas holiday. And if you celebrate Christmas, that's lovely. I do sometimes. I do in some ways, I guess, with my extended family, but there is always a part of me that feels like, damn, I didn't really drink in as much darkness or richness that I wanted to or needed to in the weeks sort of leading up to the winter solstice and on that special day. So if that's you, if you're feeling a little hungover from the Halloween season and just wanting to be mindful of how you spend the rest of this year, I'm right there with you. And I think today's episode will help you to stay sort of centered in some of the big questions and answers that this season has to offer you and give you some ideas for how to just be here in a really thoughtful way and how to keep Working with these themes of death and darkness that are so present and that, you know, have so much to teach us and offer us right now.
My guest today is Rachael Rice, who is an artist, writer, and end of life caregiver who crafts scroll stopping content for people who want to shape change. Her work supports movements that bring us closer to the kind of world we wish to inhabit. A neurodivergent queer person navigating chronic health issues and broadly coded as a white cis woman, Rachel is of primarily Swedish descent, with Scottish, Irish, French, German, and English ancestry, living and loving with her partner, whose income supports her work on the lands of the Chinook in Portland, Oregon. She works in a dozen kinds of media, plays four instruments, speaks three languages, parents two children, and hollers at one cat, usually not all at once.
I have followed Rachael's work for a number of years and I am so glad to have her on and to have been able to have this conversation with her. We talk about what it means to be an end of life caregiver, some of the hallmarks of death in Western culture and how it relates to collapse. Rachael always makes me look at things differently and I am going to bet that that's going to be your experience today as well.
So before I dive into our opening invocation, just a few things I want to share. One is that I am setting some intentions right now to be having more conversations with people about things like ecology, the seasons, vocation, capitalism, anti capitalism, collapse, cyclical themes in work and life and the natural world.
And one of my favorite ways to do that is by Being on other people's podcasts. It's really fun. I've done it, you know, many times before. I absolutely love it. And I just wanted to ask, you know, if you have a favorite podcast that you think I might be a good fit for, or if you know someone who has a podcast and you're open to introducing us, I would really, really love that.
It's one of my. joys and desires to sort of be having more conversations like these, not just in my show, but on other shows.
I also want to share that if you are staring down the end of this year and feeling like you have been really Strongly invited to reassess things in your working life, and you feel like you might be ready for a meaningful shift in how you relate to work, what you do for work, how you meet your needs, how you are of service in the world, and I just want to remind you that I do support people one on one through significant vocational shifts. And that is through about six months to a year process. We meet 12 times. It's an in depth look at how you came to where you are, what you need next from work, what you're being asked to give to the world, your unique strengths and outlook, and how to sort of give life to what wants to come through you next. You can learn all about that at AwildNewWork. com, and I'd love to chat with you if that feels resonant.
Finally, I just want to thank everyone who is supporting the show via financial contributions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You can contribute once or monthly. And all of that info is at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. Your contribution, whether it's monthly or once, even if it's just a few dollars makes a big difference. And I'm really grateful. Thank you.
All right, let's move through our opening invocation and we'll dive into this conversation with Rachael. So wherever you are, just noticing yourself in time and space.
Here you are flowing down the river that is your life right now. I don't know if you feel like you're stuck in a log jam or being swept away or floating almost still. However you are feeling about that river is so welcome here today. Taking a big deep breath, may each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet.
May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Hi, Rachael. Thank you so much for being here with us today.
Rachael: Thanks, Megan. It's great to be here.
Megan: I think I'd like to start by hearing a little bit more about how you got into death work - what Stephen Jenkinson calls the "death trade." What brought you here? And I know you do other things as well. And I am curious how you weave it all together and how, I don't know if it feels like a cohesive picture to you, but yeah, how does it fit into your other work in life?
Rachael: Well, thank you. I had a mom who was a hospice nurse and was actually the director of nursing at a visiting nurses association, a hospice, a VNA and hospice in Northern Vermont. She was an RN and she was a hospice nurse for my whole life and then became, you know, more of like a supervisor type nurse, but was always doing home visits.
Had like Steven Levine's Who Dies book on the bookshelf and was, you know, like one of those sort of prototypical kind of like angelic hospice nurse type personalities too. And then she got a really aggressive kind of bladder cancer in 1999 and she died when she was 49. And it was really pretty sudden.
Like she was diagnosed right around actually this time of year. It was around Halloween, like it was like end of October, beginning of November, and then she actually died in the first week of December. So it was a really short kind of timeline and the deterioration was fairly rapid. So I kind of saw my mom go from a fairly, you know, be a fairly vibrant person to, you know, having a death process that was fairly aggressive to the point where like, she kind of couldn't, she couldn't really do like chemo and radiation and all that stuff. She had like a few rounds of, I think, radiation, but, and lost her hair, you know, and it happened at a time in my life that was really formative where I was student teaching, I was a public school teacher at the time trying to be, you know, I was 21 years old, trying to graduate college and it was a wild experience for, for a lot of reasons, you know, in no small part because she was a hospice nurse.
And so the people that helped her die were also her co workers, right? And she died at home, which she's lucky to do because a lot of people don't. And she was surrounded by, you know, really good people that knew, knew her really well and knew how to do what she needed.
And there were parts of it that... You know, looking back, were really deeply unhelpful for me now as a death worker because there was a lot of, how do you say, sort of, "Business as usual" or like, you know, kind of, "we're going to stay positive." I've heard that phrase a lot. We're just going to stay positive because, you know, when the parents sit the kids down to tell them your mom's dying and my mom was my best friend.
She was, you know, the glue of our family and our family was kind of a mess. You know, I had a pretty violent, abusive dad and you know, she was kind of the, the buffer for all that. So the idea that she was going to not be around, and then my little sister and I were going to be have my, my, my crazy alcoholic dad be like, you know, the main caregiver was not a great thought.
And none of that was sort of addressed. You know, there was definitely like, you know, we know alcoholism, it's a family disease and all these things. So. And it was before, like, I hadn't really done therapy and, you know, I didn't have a lot of scaffolding or framework to kind of parse, like, what was occurring and then coming from the people who were supposed to be kind of educating me about what was happening in my life were sort of like, we're going to remain positive, which gave me no skills, you know, the business as usual thing gave me absolutely no skills to be able to then kind of go into that work later in a more honest way, you know.
But come to find out that's actually still par for the course in a lot of ways. There's a, there's a lot of kind of cultural conditioning around keeping the business as usual going so that the death doesn't sort of become quote more traumatic than it needs to be, or, you know, that doesn't disrupt people's lives too much. You know, people really think of their death as being an extremely private event and not something that actually serves to educate anyone about how to, how to die wise as it, as it were.
I really was drawn to it for some years after she died. And, you know, there would be people in my life who would, who would get sick and die and I would be, I do a little bedside work, you know, and then 2015, 2016, we kind of saw the sort of mask ripped off the really terrible underbelly of like racist America.
Which, you know, some of us were later to the party than others and understanding that that was what was really going on here. But as, like, Black Lives Matter kind of exploded, and as, you know, I saw that this sort of civil rights movement was kind of burning through America, I really was trying to understand, why did it take me so long to sort of see it?
And then, why is it taking everyone else so long to say anything about it as well, you know? And drilling down into that, I kind of came to a root of death phobia. Which has everything to do with, you know, whiteness and white supremacy and, you know, supremacist narratives of all kinds where we, you know, trade wisdom for some kind of winning, some kind of success and trade belonging, you know, for a seat closer to the fire of capitalism.
Right. And all these things. So I was like, all right, I can't actually like solve white supremacy myself.
But I nonetheless sort of wanted to find work that felt appropriate for the position that I occupy with the identities that I do hold and doing death work felt like, you know, it seems like an oblique way of coming to those issues, but to my understanding, it's actually kind of a, it's kind of a root work, you know, way of looking at, like, how did it get like this?
Like, we can't really actually figure out what to do about stuff until we understand why is it like this? What are the, like, conditions that gave rise to the situation that we're all in here? And sort of going through that process of becoming a hospice volunteer, not a death doula. I can talk a little bit more about that because they're very different things.
That felt like a piece that I had some ancestral kind of nourishment around. So the work that my mom did do and it came to me naturally, I think most people don't see a dead body, you know, in their lives, it's really sanitized and kind of buffered and it's outsourced, you know, through various caregivers and, you know, you can kind of purchase, you know, the, the care that you need if you're, if you're in that privileged bracket to be able to do so.
And that felt like a way that I could plug in and be, be of service and it didn't, it didn't freak me out the way that, you know, I think it might for a lot of people, I have a pretty high kind of gross out tolerance to, so, so I don't know, that's a very long winded answer to a sort of short question, and I feel like there might be a part two that I didn't quite get to...
Megan: Yeah. I guess anything you want to say about how it feeds or complements or relates to your work as an artist and the other things that you do?
Rachael: Yeah. Thank you. Ah, very good. So I think that there's such an overlap for me around the death work and the, the art making that I do, which is mostly kind of a folk art based, you know, I, I was a public school art teacher and so it was, you know, teaching lots and lots of different kinds of techniques and, and also working with materials that were affordable 'cause we don't fund, you know, we don't fund education, we don't fund the arts very much at all. So it was working a lot with like found objects, discarded objects, salvage, and having to get really creative around what I can use. And so there was sort of like powers of observation that get employed there, and that happens a lot in, for me, in the death work as well.
Like you really are having to kind of watch what's going on to understand what's going on. Like you have to, like how far apart is the breathing, you know, or the breaths. Because what stage are people at and it's it's you know, it's not like i've done 10 000 hours of death work. It's not my career. I I wouldn't even say i'm an expert in it.
I would still consider myself a relative beginner. I'm not like a veteran hospice nurse or something like that. You know, even if I did an hour a day, you know, for a few years, we're only talking about 500 hours. We're not talking about 10, 000 hours. And I certainly I'm not doing an hour a day, you know, so. I do still feel like I'm in this, like trying to figure out what is exactly going on with somebody, you know, when I, when I show up usually to their living room or sometimes their assisted living location or something, but usually it's in their home and really trying to listen. Like, the first thing I asked somebody is, so in your own words, tell me what's going on with you.
And I usually get like a catalog of symptoms. You know, like I usually get like, well, I fell last week and then I had to get some tests and we found a tumor, you know, or like, I'm struggling with keeping food down or I have pain, you know, these sort of like symptom chronology kind of stuff or event chronology stuff.
You know, interestingly, not once have I ever heard one person say, "well, I'm dying," you know, it's like super transgressive to say those words. And even as a death worker, that's not a super culturally sanctioned thing to do, you know, so it's, it's tricky to go into these situations and consider that I have one job, which is to not pretend that someone's not dying - like that just that's the job. And really almost everybody would prefer to pretend, you know, because that's the sort of that's polite. That's like you don't disrupt. You don't, you know, cause extra like, you know, difficulty for people sort of like, you know, it's "we're going to remain positive" kind of kind of vibes.
And so it's not like people are really Honest around what's going on and often, you know, that's due to the fact that the family doesn't actually want to say goodbye, right? Understandably. I'm not saying like none of this is sort of an indictment or anything. It's super completely understandable in, you know, end stage capitalism in like, you know, nuclear families, which have no collectivism to them and hyper individualistic culture that, you know, your death then becomes this really individual experience that you get to decide in some kind of way how that looks and if no one else around you, you know, wants to say the words dying, dead, you know, death and everybody says, you know, other euphemisms or whatever, they have to listen really closely to understand kind of where, where are we at here actually, and to be able to communicate well with, you know, families and nurses and everyone who's kind of colluding to do patient centered care and That all sounds great.
Patient centered care, awesome, you know. Patient gets to drive the process, awesome. Well, what if the patient is super death phobic? The way most people are. You know, what if the patient wants to pretend that they're not dying? And certainly the families want to pretend that too because no one wants to like, you know, go there.
Then you have to be able to have these powers of observation and that, that comes into the rest of my work a lot because I, my work is seasonal, you know, it's mapped on nature and there's a lot of listening that kind of has to happen. Like what's, are the birds back yet? You know, has that plant bloomed yet?
You know, what's the soil like? Because that plant didn't bloom. So what's going on? Why, why did my lupins all turn beige the last two years? Well, it's because we got 98 degrees in April, you know, so that does kind of have an effect on like, how do you walk through the world and create work that actually is in harmony that's like actually reflecting the times because that's actually what art is supposed to do. Artists are supposed to reflect the times, you know, not the artist.
It's not all about personal expression and, and that's really the same for death work as well. But, you know, that's not what the dominant culture kind of prefers, which is to have like death be your sort of final personal expression or something. It's all about the individual and what they want, but we don't, we don't have, we don't have a lot of wisdom.
We don't have a lot of people modeling what a good death looks like. So how would we even know, you know, you have to be able to sort of listen deeply and kind of be okay with not knowing like what, what necessarily is going on and making choices anyways.
Megan: That's a good lead into my next question, which is, what have you noticed or seen to be effective when you are in service to death?
What does it take for someone to be able to be there when no one else wants to say what's happening and be with that as it is and support this personal and collective shift? What does it take, I guess, to be a helper to death rather than someone steeped in this pretending that it's not happening?
Rachael: Oh, thank you.
Well, there's something embedded in that question that demands a kind of looking at, like, what lens are we looking through? You know, what view are we having here? And, you know, I'm pretty deep into non dual studies, particularly Taoism at this point in the Longman lineage. I'm in a school called, it's an Orthodox Taoist school, Parting Clouds Taoism, shout out.
I don't claim to be an orthodox Taoist or anything like that, I just have a deep curiosity about what it means to be a whole human being, what it means to understand how, like, what reality is and what, and how to be intimate with it. One of the things that we are constantly looking at in these studies is the view is the sort of lens that we're looking through, which, you know, in our culture in the West, modern culture is, uh, is very dualistic.
And so then what is non dualism and you kind of see non dualism, you know, all over the place now and, you know, used to like sell all kinds of things, coaching, you know, stuff and all kinds of all kinds of stuff. And yeah, so there's a lot of like, you know, sort of capitalist non dualism stuff happening out there.
It's kind of gross, but in the world that I'm in, there's sort of, there's actually not really a distinction between life and death. Those boundaries are more blurred. And so I'm not really in service to death per se. Right. And I'm, I'm definitely not in service to the dying person per se either. And, you know, that's kind of where the word that's actually where the word doula comes from is to be a servant or a slave.
You know, that's the etymology of that word. And I understand there's modern constructions of that concept at this point that doesn't meet slavery. And, you know, there's an energetic signature to that word that comes through in its etymology. And so that begs the question, you're in service to what? And, you know, people are like, oh, well, to, you know, to the, to the dying people, obviously.
And again, you know, That often looks like, you know, showcasing a highlight reel, you know, of their life and definitely doing it in private, definitely not sharing anything with anyone other than maybe people like me who come and are literally, you know, wiping asses and doing transfers to wheelchairs, to toilets, you know. I see so much in the sort of death doula industrial complex where these services, these like skills that are normally have been just something that you learn by like having someone die around you in your home, so kids are there, you know, older people are there. The cousins are there. It's kind of the collective experience has now, you know, kind of been outsourced to the marketplace and over here and in the United States, the healthcare is a marketplace experience. You know, so it's a customer service model that we're looking at here and, you know, I do get asked like, which, you know, which death through a certification program should I do? And I'm just like, I don't have, I don't have any opinions on that because I haven't ever done one.
I'm not really interested in it because I'm not really interested in things that create more dualism where you are really trying to maintain your sense of a separate self.
This individualism and this like personal choice and this like showcasing a highlight reel of your life and having your death be really private so that no one can learn from it - it's not how I operate. I'm really much more interested in how do we prepare now for a good death and that is possible to do.
It's actually possible to practice, and one of the things that helps with that is an ability to relax when things are going really sideways, you know, an ability to sort of have your identity center dissolve a bit because that is what happens when you die. There's definitely a process where you leave your body, you know, and we can do that, like today, we can do that tonight. You can do that tonight. You know, everybody who's listening can actually do this tonight. You can go to sleep and you can dream. You can leave your body. We do it all the time. We never talk about it, you know, and you can ask for some dreams.
You can ask to remember your dreams. It can be tricky depending on, you know, where you're at with, uh, the stuff going on in your body. For me, I was a long time cannabis user. I'm sober now, but that really interfered with my dreams. So that's one of the things I just want to mention. If you really want to get into some of these practices, the cannabis can opaque your dreaming a lot. And if you quit, they'll come back in a, in a rush, trust me.
But you can write them down and you can in the morning, write them down. And over time, you kind of can notice your personal symbology that comes through, which also is reflective of a collective symbology that can also be coming through, you know, dream about dream about a house - that's often like your body, you know, the state of the house can kind of tell you things, you know, about your body, but kind of this like practice of relaxation into dissolving this identity center, you know, and cultivating, like a state of awareness that is more like, we don't have great translations for it, but kind of like empty mind, you know, and that isn't sort of, I'm not trying to say like, You know, dissociate because I think that's actually what it ends up looking like a lot, you know, here in this part of the world and, and people, you know, like me and you know, like identities matter and oppression matters.
That's not what I'm trying to say is like, you know, it's not like an escape hatch out of caring about things that have everything to do with identity and position hood and stuff like that, but more like the nature of reality is that there actually isn't a separate self. And so do you have practices where you are able to cultivate that kind of mind?
And I' m actually almost finished with this book called China Root. Super interesting. It's about Zen Buddhism and how it came out of China, out of Chan Buddhism. But there was just this part I was reading right before this talk and I was like, wow, this actually sounds like something Megan and your awesome questions where they talk about Sky mind.
It's like empty mind. And they're they unpack it with the characters, the Chinese characters, but it comes from some characters that actually mean like a turbulent mind like a turbulent sky and There's also a tiger and there's like mountains in it. And so this Concept this like state is actually more, the etymology is "mountain tiger sky mind."
And so it's like, okay, what does it take? I think it takes a mountain tiger sky mind to be able to cultivate the kind of intimacy with the way things really are, which, you know, your personal expression and, and your highlight reel. And these things all aren't, aren't actually going to, they're, they're a colossal waste of chi. Like, to keep your identity center and your point of view, like so, so strong, it will not serve you in your final moments, you know?
So what does a good death look like? Well, we can say, we can certainly know what it doesn't look like, which is most of what we see. You know? I mean, my gosh, we've seen how, how many times has there been like a celebrity that everybody loves and then they're, they suddenly, you know, died of cancer and they were so private and they never told anybody, or we have people in our lives that have done that right and everyone is just like, you know, they really did it. We really did it their own way and it's like well, how did that help anyone? You know, that there's just no obligation whatsoever to have the way that we die serve the culture in any way. And so when we talk about being a doula, I'm not in service to the dying person. The dying person isn't automatically wise just because they're dying, Right?
I'm actually in service to the, to the culture and to the, to the non dualism of the reality of what we are actually kind of finding ourselves inside of here. And those are really different things. And it's much, much harder actually to be in service to the culture. Cause then it's like, who might even know what does the culture need?
I often, I don't know. What am I going to do in my, in my three hours with somebody that is mostly about swabbing slime out of their mouths with those little, you know, sponge sticks and literally changing diapers, making sure they don't have bed sores, trying to decide, are they in organ failure? Cause like if they are, it's actually not a good idea to be giving them water and food, you know. And, and that kind of high level discernment stuff, it's not sexy, it doesn't go on a tote bag, I think some of these like super death positive things, like the pendulum swinging that way is like understandable and good, you know, to have like death positive stuff happening in the world, but I also have kind of some mixed feelings about some of the sort of commercialism, you know. The accoutrement, the, uh, The hyper identity stuff around it, you know, the "future corpse" t shirt... like once upon a time, I had a pediatric patient, 14 year old, you know, two spirit, indigenous, queer child was dying and I was hanging out with her mom. It was like the same day that I was going over there that I saw some of the like new merch drop from some of the, you know, Like bigger known kind of death doula practitioner people. And I think you got to really question, like, if I couldn't show up and do and hang out with that mom wearing that shirt, like, who is it for then?
Like, what are we even doing here with, with, with this way of, which is like, again, the pendulum swinging is good. It's used to just like, we're kind of still coming out of like Victorian era, like, you know, either just like pretend everything is fine or it's like spooky seance, you know, ancestors and, you know, like ghosty, you know, entities and stuff like that.
And I, I, you know, I don't really, I don't think find that stuff really helpful either. And we see some vestiges of it in like, you know, modern pagan practices and like Instagram witchcraft. And this kind of thing, but I'm in this other, I'm in this other mountain tiger sky mind cultivation world, you know, I'm trying to be like intimate with a place of these things actually not being separate and so then how do we practice relaxing into that now?
There's actually one other resource I wanted to mention. It's fantastic, It's a talk by Pema Chodron who I used to love a lot more than I love now - Don't love how she handled this Shambhala like sex scandal stuff - But she did a really good series of talks about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And I think you can only listen to it on Audible, which I don't have an account, but I signed up for like a two week free account just so I could listen to Pema Chodron talking about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which, you know, I have here and I think it's a really good resource because it actually talks about You know what you can do for someone while they're dying and then in the many weeks after as well and some of those practices, um, and it's a very non dualistic take on stuff because it's like, well, when is someone actually dying?
There's no demarcation line, right? And even after they're dead, there's all kinds of studies and stuff around how people are still - how the how the brain is still working and sort of like, we don't know what consciousness is. We don't actually know what any of these things are. The shit is unknowable, you know, but I think some of those things are really helpful and they kind of cultivate the practices now that we can do.
We don't all have to be death workers right now, although it is a kind of a helpful skill like it. I think it used to not be so specialized. You know, it was just like, Something that you saw. I think it's important for kids to to be involved in people dying. That's a wildly unpopular opinion. It's supposed to be a collective experience.
It's not something where you just indulge your rank entitlement for your individual personal expression, like you're some kind of, you know, final rock star or whatever, and you get to have this big moment. Death work's mostly really boring, you know, it's a lot of sitting around. Learn to meditate, you know.
Megan: I wanted to hear a little bit more about something you kind of touched on earlier about how, you know, a lot of our approach here in this part of the world is about like being polite and we don't want to say like, This person is dying and like, make it a collective messy experience.
And you said something about how, like, we do that to try to like limit the trauma, but actually it's creating trauma, I think, by not letting it be messy and disruptive. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Like how actually it might be, and maybe this is like a dualistic the way I'm thinking about it, but how actually it can be, I don't know, healing healthy, The way things really are, to let it be disruptive and messy.
Rachael: Well, I think that there's a really challenging kind of Deprogramming that we have to go through where we really want things to work out. We really want to win, you know, even we want to even like win at like the, the letting go game or like win at the like death game, you know, where things are sort of like there's closure and there's healing and, you know, I really feel like We just don't live in a time where that's super accessible for most people.
I have seen it, and I also just think that in the, the field that I'm in, which is, you know, a bit more biomedical, like when you do hospice through a hospital, you get some biomedical training, which is, I think, actually really helpful, you know. I find it much more useful because there's a, I think that there's a, A wish that people have to have the death be a more sort of profound, sacred, spiritual learning, you know, transcendent, useful experience, right. And that's a lot of what, you know, some of the programs and services. And I'm really not trying to disparage any of them. I would encourage anybody to just do if you're called to like doing death doula work, like do the stuff. These people have a lot of skills. There's absolutely merit to it. I'm looking at the view.
I'm looking at like, What do we actually think is real here and which systems have we kind of bought into that if I do these check marks that then somehow I will win, you know, and winning can look like getting what I want, you know, which might look like closure or learning or like, you know, The kid's able to say goodbye to the dad and forgive him in that moment And then the dad forgives the kid and it's just like, maybe. Maybe not.
In the hospice world Where I am in portland, oregon on the lands of the chinook The people that access these services tend to not have collective cultures that are, that they're part of, because we're even told in our trainings, like, you're going to get, you're going to get mostly white people, you're going to get a lot of veterans, you're going to get people that don't have family, you know, that can be for all kinds of reasons, but what we don't get is a lot of people of color.
We don't get a lot of like Russians, Ukrainians, people from Asia, people of Asian descent because those cultures actually tend to be more collectivist. They tend to be multi generational and it's sort of handled, you know, by the collective because there's a much more recent ancestral skill set, you know, that white people and especially white people who have had, uh, like relational, low relational skills or drug abuse, trauma, or, you know, you've alienated your family, then it gets outsourced you know, to, to hospice workers and to people like me.
And so then it's really, you're just like, you got to let go of a lot of the wishes around what, what the good death might, might be. It's just going to be good enough. It's going to be like, okay, you're not alone. And I get, it's not like, I mean, I've had people that are straight up like a- holes, you know, like I show up and all they want to do is talk about how the LGBTs are taking over their church and stuff for real, you know, and, and that doesn't stop with white people. Like there's, there's all kinds of like nonsense that comes out of people's faces.
And like, so then what, what are we, what are we talking about with the good death here? Because if that person were at Thanksgiving dinner and you're, you know, getting your, you know, social justice chops, looking at Instagram memes, like you're going to tell that person off, right? And so it's, it's really like an interesting kind of conundrum to be going into these people's homes where they don't really have anyone. And there's probably a reason for that. And they're not super nice to you either. And it's like, all right, well, you still got to change your diaper, bud. You know, it's, it's no, it's no joke.
I mean, I had a, I had a veteran who had had multiple strokes. He couldn't speak. Somehow we were able to communicate. I was able to like, listen enough and kind of like, he would hold up objects and stuff for me that he needed done. I would basically clean his toilet and like wash his socks.
And then I would buy him two sprites because he wanted two sprites. And, you know, just like give him whatever, you know, sugar, like garbage that he wanted to eat. And I got a note after that, he died, that he was going to have a veteran funeral and that he was going to have nobody at it. And it was, he was, it was called an unclaimed soldier funeral to give you an idea, you know, of like how it actually is when we look at the effects of empire, you know, and we look at like the propaganda around how we support the troops and stuff like that until, you know, they actually go to war and they're so traumatized and they, you know, kind of can't function.
So we don't really take care of them and then they die and nobody's there, nobody's there. And it was like, you know, hey, hospice workers, do you want to come and attend, you know, attend to this unclaimed soldiers funeral kind of thing? So, like, the poverty of relationality is so deep, it's so threadbare, you know, so it's really hard to know, like, how do you have a good death?
And I really feel like... For the people that are listening to this and care about this kind of thing now, you know, don't wait, you know, don't don't put it off and like the very reasons that we sort of think that we're going to have some kind of death that's going to like be tied up in a nice bow and that everybody's going to learn something - it's kind of the same Buy in that we think that if I just like check all the right boxes and I do my, get my language and my behaviors Correct, you know, and I'm you know Eat all the clean foods and I you know do all the qigong and that somehow I'm going to win, You know. Like it's really hard to unhook from all that Because we're just in a time that that's not a thing anymore, you know, like you can, you can, you can do all those things and, and check all the boxes that the culture checks and tells you to check and feel profound emptiness.
The microplastics and the viruses and the degradation of the biosphere and stuff are, are, are causing so much more early death, you know, so much more long term illness and long term disease. So I think a big part of like learning how to die well is really listening to disabled people, people with disabilities, people with long term illness, people that have survived also on the margins, you know, for longer than the rest of us.
A lot of this is like. It's our first rodeo, you know, it's not everybody's first rodeo. So, you know, really kind of prioritizing the voices and the experiences of people who have had to survive harder shit has a lot to teach us. And it's not always what to do. Sometimes it's what not to do, you know, like wisdom is not a huge commodity in any, in any sector at this point.
So like, how do we work on that now? How can you let things die that aren't necessarily your body now, you know, and I think that and I'm talking like material not just sort of abstract Like oh, I have the right opinions and I have these cool ideas and you know I'm able to journey and do this meditation or whatever but like maybe don't buy a second house. You know, maybe like actually divest from in a material way from winning, you know, whatever, whatever that might really look like, and that's a, that's a whole other, you know, conversation, like what it looks like to not win at life, but being kind of being able to relax into that a bit more is a skill set that I think we could all like be working on and it will help us all have a, have a better death.
Megan: You sort of started to take us there already, but I wanted to kind of back up a little bit and talk about cultural death or collapse. And that's something that we talk about on the show frequently, but a lot of the things you've mentioned now, like relationality, divesting from winning, expanding into non dualist ways of thinking and seeing ourselves as not just this body or this home.
All of those seem like ways that we can also just be in the presence of whatever is happening collectively right now. Is that how you think about it or do you feel like being present with collapse requires different skills? Same. Like, I just wanted to hear more about how you confront what's happening largely in addition to being with, you know, this veteran that has died or these people that are dying individually. Does that make sense?
Rachael: Yeah, no, thank you. And thanks for being somebody that, you know, has this in the view, you know, it's very hard to have conversations of any substance for me with people who actually don't have the view that we're, that we're in some kind of collapse. It's really been wild to kind of see the, the sort of bifurcation and the kind of intense rabbit holing that, all the like red pilling and, you know, pandemic inspired sort of psychosis, you know, cultural and other, you know, just wild conspiracy stuff and like, just people really kind of like, you know, people like Charles Eisenstein and people like smart people that are just like, no, this is actually a coronation and we're all going through a portal and we're going to come out the other side and we're going to win, you know, or that things are like, oh, this is the sort of part where it all degrades before it, like before the new earth and we get better.
And I'm just like, y'all... I don't know if that's, like, I just can't have conviction around that. I don't claim to know actually, you know, exactly what's going on here, but modern industrial humans are not doing great. We're not well, you know, and I can see that play out really, you know, hyper locally where you just have people just absolutely apoplectic at how much they, how, how visible the houseless neighbors are here, you know, "my kids shouldn't have to walk past and see that." Oh, okay. They shouldn't have to Not like this shouldn't have to happen. You know, what the hell - why do we like let people die in the street? richest country on earth, you know. But this like just rank entitlement to the individual experience and so I find I struggle with this with this thing that you're talking about, you know, and I kind of have to like in the same way that I have to sort of like pulse some of my Anti inflammatory medications for my some auto inflammatory disorders that I have, and I have to like kind of pulse my involvement in, in death work.
Like I kind of have to take breaks, you know, from it and pulse how much I'm thinking about the news, you know, I really struggle with how much that can then lead to my own collapse. Right. You know, and I think we see, I think we're seeing that a lot. I think we're, you know, one of the symptoms of collapse is that people collapse inside of it.
Health collapses inside of it. And this sort of memification of the solutions where it's like, Oh, we're all going to get land and share land and grow crops. I'm just like, I don't, not if we're doing land back, like, really? Like, no, you know, I'm not actually out here trying to, to, to buy land and do a homestead kind of thing.
Like, I'm probably going to go down with the ship, I guess. How do I relax? How do I relax inside that like, what's the mountain tiger sky mind that can that can hold what we're living through? I do think it's not something that people have experienced before, you know, I think that collapses happened before.
I mean, there's like, there's been collapses that, you know, bottlenecks and things that have happened before. You know, industrialization, there's like quaternary extinctions and, you know, hunter gatherers that like destroyed whole biospheres. Like, it's totally like, humans are really corruptible. All of them are very, very corruptible.
And it really seems to me we're here to learn. And so it's like, where are you learning from? Well, I moved towards, you know, non dual studies and in particular Daoism, which is syncretic. It has A ton of Buddhism in it, has a ton of Confucianism in it, but I don't think we can kind of ignore the, the nondual wisdom of like a whole entire hemisphere, you know, and expect to like figure out, you know, how to be like, I think we're going to have to actually actually pay attention to these, these wisdom traditions and, you know, not then parlay them into like the marketplace of a personal brand or whatever, but like actually do these practices so that we can, you know, mountain tiger sky mind our way, you know, into whatever into whatever is next. And a lot of it is like being like, "I don't actually know", like, I don't actually have any idea how this is all going to go.
And if I stay present and like, Like the kind of presence that actually has absence inside of it and I don't mean absence like dissociative absence, but like the nature of things have being this sort of type of emptiness and it's hard to sort of bend words around it, you know, but really getting into these into these practices where you can kind of like map yourself more on to how the Dao behaves, you know. At least that's the, that's the sort of path that I'm on anyways, and everybody's got to figure out that stuff for themselves and I'm, I'm in the camp of like, just pick one, you know, find a non dual path that's like ancestrally nourishing, is the real deal, which is hard to find because there's crooks and cheats all over the place everywhere and then you know really go as far as you can go without like and really being attentive to the dissociation part because that's the whole name of the game of modernity and westernism, is a dissociation game. Like you are deeply rewarded to not be present.
But it's a lot of observation. It's like, okay, well, how does the Dao behave? You know, I mean, it helps that like the people that sort of noticed the Dao, like wrote shit down, um, for thousands of years, you know, before the rest of the world sort of figured out writing, you know. And it came out of divination.
It came out of really paying attention and noticing things and making Oracle bone scripts and like asking questions and watching the stars and watching the crops and like watching, watching, watching, watching, watching, and mapping onto nature in that way. So really kind of like noticing, like befriending plants, I think is a huge piece.
I don't know how people, I don't know how people live without knowing plants as, as friends. You know, having allies that are in the more than human world, because like, I don't know if any modern industrial human is safe at this point, you know, it includes myself, you know, it's really hard out there. It's hard to be a human being.
And so it's like, what does that even mean to be a whole human being? You know, I want to be like the Dao . What's the Dao like? Water. You know, like that's one of the observations that has come out of like the thousands of books of the canon of, you know, Orthodox Taoism is like be like water, you know. I know Bruce Lee said it too, but like it's actually useful advice, you know.
Can we also notice who's collapsing in your world?
And how do we then materially shift resources towards them, you know, maybe you can give away one of your cars, you know Maybe, maybe you can like, I don't know, don't, don't be a landlord, like, you know, get a real job or something. I'm just kidding, like, nobody needs to actually get a real job, but, like, how do you, you know, actually divest from some of the stuff that the culture, like, pushes you towards that, that encourages more, more collapse, you know, how can we, like, actually materially move resources towards The most vulnerable people? And I know we can't do it all the time, 24 7, but, you know, I can really pay attention, you know. I can really pay attention to what's happening in the landscape around me.
I can pay attention to what's happening for the disabled people in my world. You know, I can still mask and crowded places, you know, and really like kind of make things a bit more uncomfortable for myself sometimes in order to benefit the collective. And that might look like standing, you know, standing meditation and like, You know, twin dragons hold the column for 45 minutes or something, you know, which I did at a recent retreat and thought I was going to die.
I was like, I'm gonna die, but something happened while I'm standing there and my arms like turned to fire, which then turned to dragons, which then like the dragons like dropped on my arms and they started like circulating around my body. And I was like, Oh, if I had only stood here for five minutes, that never would have happened.
And like, The healing is in that part. It's in the like, that crazy sort of like my mind is in this cage and it's just like a dog that's just like, you know, ready to gnaw off its own leg, you know, because it's bored, like, so like, more this, you know, and then when I come into a place where I'm like, this is an untenable situation, I don't know what to do and I can't stand it.
It's like I've got some of these skills. And like people that are listening to this have no idea what I mean. I love doing like visual stuff on podcasts.
But like holding a stance for a long time, being able to sit with your own mind and like, just watch like how it careens around. Tell you what, for me, it never gets easier. It can get funnier, just like, wow, like, I'm a piece of work, you know, like, this is amazing, I thought I would be better by now, I thought I'd be a better person or whatever, you know, like, nope, nope, still crazy after all these years, but that actually does translate for me into the collapse stuff, you know, this sort of radical presencing.
Megan: Thank you. That's really rich. I think before I sort of, as we head into the end of this episode, I think, I hope this doesn't feel like too... I don't think it's a shift, but one of the things, you know, of course, Instagram is a really weird place, but one of the things that I really enjoy about what you post is the way that you are cultivating or bringing in or remaking your own ancestral practices, which I see is totally related to doing some of the death phobia that you alluded to earlier in white supremacy.
And, you know, I believe like we all have ancestors who knew how to work with death and knew that it was a normal thing that was both profane and sacred at the same time. And so maybe, you know, in this sort of autumn period, can you share a little bit about how you have Re, I don't know if it's reconnected, but how you're like making kind of new culture yourself, like connecting to old practices in, you know, the lineage that you have in this lifetime.
Yeah. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that if you're open to sharing.
Rachael: Oh, thanks. Like that. Sure. Well, let me, let me, I'm just curious. What is, do you know your ancestry and what your people are or were?
Megan: Yeah, it's mostly Irish and German with some Nordic folks from way back. That's what I've got.
Rachael: Yeah. That sounds like me. Yeah, I have, uh, very recent Swedish immigrants, like on my dad's side, both sets of his grandparents immigrated from Sweden, which is why I have this naturally blonde hair. Just kidding. It's like a total dye job from a few days ago. But yeah, really recent, mostly Swedish. Like it's, it's a privilege to know your ancestry.
I understand that, you know, I've been pretty lucky to be able to like, you know, put my DNA on the internet, which is, you know, a questionable practice for sure, but yeah, I'll take the risk, cause I'm curious like that. When I really started looking into, uh, like ancestral reclaiming and kind of looking at those practices and really looking at the bulk of my ancestry, which is very much largely Norse, you know, it's super disturbing stuff.
It's like really nothing that I want to do, you know, aesthetically, it's not super interesting to me. You know, I really like the folk art kind of aspects of some of the Scandinavian stuff. But like, you know, if you really read the history of, um, the Norse people and, you know, especially sort of like Iron Age, Bronze Age, you know, Viking culture.
Neil Price is an amazing author, scholar around Norse practices, including the overlap with true shamanistic, circumpolar shamanistic cultures and the influence of the Sami on the Norse spirituality. There's a textbook called like, uh, what's it called? Like the Viking mind, I want to say, and it's very dense and academic and it's amazing around Norse spirituality.
And he also wrote Children of Ash and Elm, which is a fantastic book around like the day to day lives. Dude, it was brutal. Like the whole culture was predicated on war. Literal colonization. A lot of like the way the economics were structured required like an ongoing expansion of Land to get more, you know, resources and just the plundering and some of the spiritual practices were so violent and disturbing and like like nothing nothing that I'd want to be like, oh, yeah, let's like bring that back I think you know nordic animism is a really good resource, you know I think he's doing that kind of work in a really good way And Rune, um, his name's Gray, is his name, and he's, he's great, and he like, kind of, um, reimagines some things, I think, that are, that have the ancestral nourishment, but are very committed to sort of, like, You know, a decolonial kind of animistic praxis, which I think is really necessary.
Like, I think you actually have to bring, and shout out to Dare Sohei for this phrase, like a non dual decolonial animistic praxis to whatever tradition you're going to be, you know, kind of engaging in. Right. Then we could have like a whole other, you know, podcast about what the hell does that mean?
Ask Dare. They would be great for it. And Dare's so much better explaining that stuff than, than I am. But I think some of the stuff that's more universal where you're really just like noticing, you know, what time of year it is definitely like noticing what phase of the moon it is. That was those were the origins of culture of all culture was, you know, like hunter gatherer women and in parts of Africa, you know, hundreds of thousands of years have gathered, you know, during certain moon phases in order to sing together because that's when the tiger like predators would come out and they would gather and they would like sings polyphonic singing in order to sound like a larger animal to protect the children, protect the village and like that had everything to do with it being a new moon and being dark, you know, had everything to do with a full moon and then being able to go and like, and hunt and do the different ritual that comes from that, you know, and so we can, like, I don't actually like spend a lot of time with my recent ancestors, you know. I come from like a pretty intense Lineage of trauma and Lutheranism. Like Lutheranism was a state religion well into the 1800s, which is Bananas, you know, and, you know, for better or worse, like the Catholic church kind of preserved a lot of the folk art stuff.
It got like repackaged and renamed and it's, oh, now we're going to call it this or whatever. But there was a lot of stuff that kind of struggled to, to, to persist in, in Scandinavian culture and like Lutheranism and stuff. And my grandparents are Swedish Lutherans, go to Lutheran church and yeah, like to work with those more immediate ancestors actually looks like really Doing work on my own like rage, you know, my own ability to resist addictions of all kinds.
There's so much addiction, trauma and violence in my lineage.
So, you know, around Samhain, I definitely will, I'll put their, I'll put their pictures up and I'll like, you know, do the like, like, thank you. But I don't like invite them into my world. You know, there's other, um, ancestors that you can, like, work with in ancestral practices that are so universal, they don't risk appropriation.
All of that art self destructs, like, I don't, I'm moving away from using, like, acrylic paints and, you know, things that, that are painted. Making the earth eat it like whatever I make, I want the earth to be able to eat it and have it be okay, you know, and that's hard doesn't always, doesn't always happen, but that's why, you know, I'm, I'm out here like stringing rose hips and birch bark and carving avocado seeds and stuff like it's not going to, you know, and there's privilege in that I have, I have a white man in tech as a husband who pays for most of my bills.
Like to keep it a hundred, you know, like I became a step parent and I kind of traded a career for being able to be supported and I do a tremendous amount of work. It's not like I don't work, but I have some, you know, support that I think a lot of people don't have that let me, lets me then, you know, have all this time to be looking at, you know, when, when are the geese like flying and, um, you know, how long did that, how well did that calendula do in that part of the garden this year?
But that stuff is still, everybody can, you know, look outside. See what's going on. Yeah. It's worth if you have the time, if you have the privilege to comb out a bit, what came before you, if you can look into it, if you can really see what, what were the embroideries, what were the plants, you know, what were the herbs that people worked with and you, lots of those are still available now, you know, can you kind of like dig into, you know, some of those folkways What did people do on, you know, when, when was their new year?
You know, I mean, it can be all kinds of different times, right? Yeah. What were the patterns? What's the food? Did they, did they put straw on the, on the floor at a certain time of year? Did they like make things out of, out of plants and burn them for good luck? Like what, what did they do? And like, and if you don't know, you can ask for a dream, you know, um, and there's ways to get that, that information that.
You know, can ask then you to be kind of this more creative, thoughtful person because we don't all necessarily have the ability to have that information and, and, and so then what do we do instead? Right? And you can be hopefully creative and, and somebody that then can generate some of that for the people that come after.
I know that like my kids probably think I'm just a crazy witch or whatever, but like they're, they're, it's a long game, right? You know, 20 years from now, they're going to be like, wow, like every October we did all this Apple stuff, you know, you know, and like they're gonna like it's still it's you can still map yourself onto onto the seasons, you know, no matter who you are.
Megan: Yeah, thank you. That's helpful to hear from you about that. And yeah, thank you for that. And thank you for being with people who are dying. I know that that's not that's like collective work. Absolutely. So thank you. Yeah, just thank you for how you show up in the world and all the questions you're asking.
How can people follow along? I'll put all of the resources you've noted in the show notes. I'll put, you know, your links, but could you take a second to just tell people like how they might learning with you?
Rachael: Oh, thanks. So, yeah, I mean, I'm on Instagram at Rachel Rice and it's, my name is spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L.
It's easy to, easy to misspell for some reason. And um, I have a website at rachaelrice.com and then I have a new site that I just finished that's more for like copywriting and storytelling and strategy. I'm really happy to work with people who are. You know, having like in this kind of realm, like the stuff that you're doing, Megan and, and, and the people that, that, you know, you magnetized towards, which is just such a unusual and beautiful gift to the world, you know, to, to be doing the kind of work that has these conversations, which is like, we're not fun at parties. Yeah. People are like, what do you do? I'm a death worker. Like, I can kind of choose. I'm gonna be like, Oh, I'm a writer. Like, Oh, Oh, I'm a death worker. And it's like, that's a good way to sort of like exit out of the combo or whatever.
But I do really like supporting people that are having, you know, that work in this sort of most tender, you know, edgy places and like the real, the real edge of things, not the sort of, you know, I don't know, like there's a sort of Edge play that, that is more Disney fied out there, I think where, you know, you go to like Burning Man and take a bunch of ayahuasca, you know what I mean, like, I'm not, I'm talking about like people who are really, really present with what's going on and aren't necessarily partying at the end of the world and also need copy and need websites and need to put their work out and those offerings at rachelrice. work. That's probably, those are probably the best places to find me. I find Tik Tok really overwhelming, like it just like jams my, my circuits and stuff, but yeah.
And I also feel like I haven't been able to really hear, like, I've talked all through this and I'm, I'm curious just about, you know, in your life for you, like, What's going on with you in, in what's most alive for you this time of year and what are you working on?
Megan: Oh, thank you. It's so nice. Gosh, right now in this moment, I just took a workshop with Perdita Finn, who does communication with the dead. Yeah, I've been having a lot of, I don't know what you call it, but like, I guess spiritual activity, lots of dreams, synchronicities, visions, like things are really up right now.
And I'm thinking about communicating with the land as sort of, you know, like you've mentioned the original oracle, right? If I had a question before writing or before the tarot, I would have gone out and asked it and then maybe the wind picks up or like a bird lands or, and I, Just feel really drawn to that and want to cultivate more of that in my own life and also to sort of embrace what's already here.
So often I think we have certain proclivities or interests or gifts that like we don't really see as such, you know, so I'm trying to accept that those are things that have been up for me since I was young and sort of trying to embrace those and yeah, just navigate whatever this is right now and pay my bills and like just Yeah keep having conversations like this.
So yeah, I've been noticing how much smaller my social circle is getting, which I guess might be a good. I don't know. It's not good or bad, but it's just really validating to hear that, like, yeah, it's hard to be popular or like make sense to a lot of people. And I think I'm just trying to like shed more of that just, just to keep going toward what is alive for me.
And so, yeah, there's a lot happening this autumn, I think, personally and collectively.
Rachael: I love that. Yeah. Thank you for that. I do think we're going to see more, you know, gravitation towards the kind of stuff that you're talking about and the kind of work you do, because I think people are sort of like exhausting the, the typical options of stuff, you know, we're sort of like running out of, you know, steam around some of the conventional avenues of how to be okay, how to win, how to succeed.
And, and so then it's like, okay, well then what do you listen to when like that all fell apart? You know, and, you know, these kinds of resources are going to be really helpful for people just in a very like pragmatic, practical kind of way, you know, and, and, and you're a visionary person. And so you're going to be seeing stuff before the collective sees it, but it will be shifted, I think, you know, towards that kind of reality that that'll be like actually much more helpful than the kind of. Override your body. Don't listen to your body. Become a machine, you know, or like listen to your body to the point where, you know, the whole world is here to meet your preferences, you know, kind of kind of stuff.
So thank you for keeping it going even when, you know, it's not necessarily like there's not an immediate reward for it.
Megan: Thanks. Thanks for saying that. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here today. This has been really wonderful.
Rachael: Likewise.
Megan: Okay, my friend, I hope you really enjoyed that conversation. I encourage you to check out Rachael's work and to listen to what she has to say about where we are in the arc of our collective journey right now and to just sort of ponder what she shared with us today.
A reminder that if you know of a great podcast or if you have a podcast or know someone who does and you think I might be able to be of service or offer any insights to that show and that audience, I'd love to know about them or to be introduced to them. If you are in the midst of a major transition in your working life, I would love to walk alongside you through that if it feels like a good fit and you can learn about my one on one process at a wild new work. com.
And finally, thank you to all of you who have supported the show financially, and if that is something that you're open to doing either once or monthly. I'd be so grateful. And you can find that page at the link in the show notes at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. I hope you take such good care. I will be back with you next week with a wonderful interview, another one in this autumn season. I'm so enjoying these topics and these conversations and I hope you are too. And I will see you on the other side.
Show Notes:
To connect with Rachael, visit:
*Rachaelrice.com
*Rachaelrice.work
*Instagram.com/rachaelrice
*TikTok = @rachaelericksonrice
Resources mentioned:
Embracing the Unknown by Pema Chödrön
Neil Price, author of The Viking Way and Children of Ash and Elm
China Root by David Hinton
Dare Sohei: www.animistarts.art/who-we-are
Nordic Animism: nordicanimism.com/
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For more information about working with me 1:1 through a vocational transition, visit: awildnewwork.com/one-on-one-coaching
To support the show financially, visit: www.buymeacoffee.com/meganleatherman