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Welcome.
This is our first podcast episode and part of our Creative Contemplation series— a practice of deepening our connection to the rhythms and cycles of nature, using astrology as a framework to remember our wholeness. Each month, we reflect on a theme as we become present to the energy and subtle shift of seasons.
An opportunity for us to anchor in, slow down, and find harmony and belonging, together.
Our theme for October is Decide. You can learn more about our Creative Contemplation practice, read this month’s new moon letter, and download the free journal/workbook here.
Sitting down with
to discuss how we make decisions, taking risks, and the importance of bringing a sense of presence and care to ourselves and each other, was an immense honor.For those of you yet unfamiliar with her work, Dr.
is a contemplative scholar on pilgrimage, traveling wild reaches of North America to peer into solitude, silence, and the spiritual depths of human life, including what the Natural World has to teach us.Her featured Substack publication, Beyond the Comfort Zone, chronicles her journey with penetrating questions about the human condition.
A retired healthcare provider, Renée understands that the yearning to be well is a gateway to wholeness-making. She mentors individuals called to this threshold, whether to feel better day-to-day or because they have hit a wall with chronic health issues. Renée is former Chief Science and Wellness Officer of a women’s probio-phytotherapeutic supplements line and founding scientist of CURAlive, which small-batch produces a re-generative skincare formulation undergoing case studies at present.
Renée can be reached by email: reneeeliphd AT substack DOT com.
Renée brought her whole self to our conversation and shared the wisdom and grace of her experiences with abundant generosity. The rich unfolding of our time together is still nourishing my soul. I hope you gain as much from our exploration as I have.
The transcript below has been slightly edited for clarity.
Mariah- Hello, Renée. Thank you for joining me in this conversation. I just wanted to frame the context of our conversation and say that today we are talking about “How do we make decisions?” and exploring risk, intuition, and learning to trust our bodies as we navigate different decisions that might come up.
For those that are maybe not familiar with your work, I'd highly encourage them to check it out. You are the author of Beyond the Comfort Zone, a newsletter exploring questions about life, body and becoming fully human while on pilgrimage across North America.
So I wanted to get a little bit more about your background, maybe what led you to begin this pilgrimage and also kind of get an idea of where are you now on your journey?
Renée- Okay, well, first of all, Mariah, thank you for inviting me into this conversation with you. I'm delighted to be here. And I'll answer the second part of your question first because I'm at a campground and I may not have the best WiFi connection. So if I break up a little bit, you'll know why, but it should pick back up. So I am touring across North America and this is my converted sprinter, and I've been on the road now for eleven months. And I really wanted to venture into wild places.
“My writing comes through me better when I'm close to the natural world.”
The idea originally was that I was working on a book, which I'm still working on. And my writing comes through me better when I'm close to the natural world. So that was the original idea, and it's something that I've wanted to do for a long time, but then the journey took a lead of its own, and I've been a follower of the lead. And that really leads us into some of the questions, I think, that you're wanting to pose today about how we make decisions, because I had to change that as soon as I got on this journey.
The journey has taught me a lot of things. Things that were ideas before, but now they become a day-to-day reality.
Mariah- I love that exploration of allowing the path to unfold and knowing that you want to be on the path, but not always knowing where it's going to lead.
“If I'm really open and if I stay with this, a certain magic happens.”
Renée- Yeah. One of the things that I set in the beginning, an intention I set, was that I won't get too far ahead of myself. I won't get more than a day or so ahead of myself in my planning. I mean, there have been times that I've needed to be somewhere at a certain time, meeting with friends at different places along the way. I'm very fortunate to have friends across North America, and I've spent some time with them in different states along the way.
But as a general rule, my guideline for myself has been I won't know beyond a day or two. And I don't know how long I'll stay when I arrive in a place and if I'm really open and if I stay with this, a certain magic happens.
And then someone will say, “Oh, you should check this out.” Or I'll bump into this and I'll move in that direction and I'll stay over here for a little while. And then I realize, “Oh, well, look, there's something over there.”
You know, if I had a plan, this never would have happened. Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of magic. In fact, I ended up at the Arctic Ocean. I didn't set out to go to the Arctic Ocean. It just happened.
Mariah- Yeah, I really resonate with that. When I was in my mid-twenties, I took a solo backpacking trip, and I ended up being gone for 14 months. And when I started out, I had no idea all of the places I would go, or who I would meet. And there is really something that I miss now that I'm in a different season of life.
But when you're on the road like that and you're taking this journey, there is a sort of just natural presence that occurs because you're just thinking, like you said, one or two days ahead of time. I remember I'd be in a hostel and I'd have my computer out, and I'd be like, “Okay, who am I going to stay with next?” I was couch surfing and doing Workaway and like, “Okay, how am I going to get there?”
You're very focused on almost the survival details of the here and now. And that can be challenging long term. But I think there's also this gift in it that it just helps you to have more of that clarity of focus and trust that things will work out, that you will meet the right people at the right time. This will lead to this.
And I think that that's something that we don't often give ourselves the opportunity to experience. So when we do, I think it does feel kind of magical sometimes.
Renée- Yeah, magic is a good word for it. And you brought up a couple of pieces there. One is I admire your courage. That was quite an undertaking. I'm in this van. You were in a backpack, but you also brought up this piece around presence. It's so important.
Mariah- Yeah, I think that's another reason I'm excited to have this conversation with you. Being in a different season of life, being a new mom, having a lot more of stability and structure in my life, I'm looking for ways to live seasonally and live more in harmony with the different cycles of nature. Kind of bringing that presence to mind instead of always being caught up in this daily routine.
I think sometimes we get caught up in more of a linear way of thinking. So I developed this practice I call Creative Contemplation and it's a journal I made and a workbook that has themes for each month following the moon cycle and affirmations that go with each theme. And one of the reasons we landed on this topic is because the theme for October is Decide, being in Libra season. And the affirmation is, “I make decisions with confidence, taking a risk to put myself first.”
So I love that there's this theme coming through of courage and confidence, but also the risk piece. And that's something I wanted to explore with you a little bit more, this idea of making decisions with an element of risk and how you navigate that and if you have examples of how you've navigated that on this journey.
“When we experience ourselves as centered in the body, we're coming from within our home. And this can be the ground from which we move through the world.”
Renée- Absolutely. Yeah. Well, a thought comes to me before we get started, apropos how it is that I make decisions and how I work with people. Perhaps we bring the body in now we come into Presence so that when we're talking in the next little while we're coming from a place of presence with one another. Nothing more than just to allow our presence to reside in and abide from the body itself. So at this moment, we just bring some awareness to the body, where the body is in space and our feet where they are and our sit bones grounded in a chair.
And in that experience of coming into presence of the body, there is a place of presence within the body. It's our home. So when we experience ourselves as centered in the body, we're coming from within our home. And this can be the ground from which we move through the world. Every moment, every gesture is a movement from the center of our body. So if we hold that through this conversation, we'll see where it takes us.
Mariah- Thank you for sharing that. I love being able to return to the body and the breath. I was doing some yoga on the deck this morning, and one of the practices was belly breathing. And I forget how often I'm not belly breathing, and I'm just taking these shallow breaths from up here. And so connecting to our core and being able to drop in and anchor in is such a gift. Thank you for reminding us of that.
Renée- Yeah. Nice to be with present with you, Mariah, to do this.
Mariah- So does your body come into play when you're making decisions and evaluating risk? Is that something that you go to first as a foundation for moving forward?
“The organ of the heart is an incredibly profound organ of perceptivity. We don't think about it that way. We tend to think of the heart figuratively, but the activities of the heart can show us if we feel at ease with a decision that's before us.”
Renée- For me, when I have a decision before me, there's always this calling into presence. What's happening in my body. I'm thinking right now of something that I wrote about a handful of months ago when I was deciding on going to the Arctic, and there were some risks there, and it was a moment of great uncertainty. Did I want to make this trek? And some of these were practical matters. Was the van up for the journey? What were the supplies that I would need? And how would I handle things if something broke down, including, for instance, the water pump? If the water pump shook and rattled too much and broke, well, how was I going to get water to drink, even though I might have a full tank?
So there were some practical considerations. And then was I up to the task of being in that quality of silence and wildness where there was no escape? I couldn't just come out of that silence in a moment. Once I got a couple of hundred miles in, I was there. So was I up for that task? Here's my way, in general, of approaching a scenario like that to your question, and that is that we get information that we can discern through the faculties of thought. Right?
So I needed an extra spare tire. I needed an extra water pump that I might have to install. I needed extra water. Right? So those are practical matters. That's information that we can discern through the faculty of thought. But does that always answer the question when we're taking a risk, does that help us lean into yes, only to a certain extent.
And then we have to rely on another intelligence, another way of knowing. And that comes with presence, deep presence to the body itself and presence to the perceptivity of the actual heart muscle. The organ of the heart is an incredibly profound organ of perceptivity. We don't think about it that way. We tend to think of the heart figuratively, but the activities of the heart can show us if we feel at ease with a decision that's before us. Right?
Mariah- Yeah.
Renée- What's happening in the body? If we are feeling a sense of ease in the body, or if we're feeling a sense of relief about if I'm moving toward this decision and it gives me a sense of relief, my body is at ease. That's something I can trust. That's another way of knowing. The body will never tell us lies. Yeah. Our faculties of thought will come up with all kinds of stories, but the body will always tell us the truth. And the question becomes, okay, well, then how is it that we come into relationship with the body? We learn how to listen to the body, and then when we learn to trust what the body is saying, because we've been told for millennia that the body can't be trusted and this isn't true.
“We can’t make decisions from the chaos of anxiety.”
Mariah- Yeah. I really like how you kind of brought the mind into it as an important piece, having that kind of practical preparation that you did, knowing that there was a risk. You still were able to use logic to prepare to the best of your ability, even though there was still uncertainty. I think sometimes when we talk about the body and our intuition and our heart, sometimes the mind gets villainized, and it's like you just kind of throw it out with the bathwater, and we forget that really, it can all be integrated.
But I think in our culture, in our society, we definitely rely more heavily on the mind and logic, and we haven't fully integrated those other pieces which can work in this really beautiful harmony. Something that I'm wrestling with in my own life as someone who experiences a lot of anxiety and this nervous system activation, sometimes it's hard for me to trust my body because my heart will be racing or my hands will get clammy and I'm in fight or flight mode but there's not an actual danger. My mind has perceived a risk or a threat that may or may not be real.
And so I'm curious, in those instances when we might be activated in that fight or flight or freeze experience in our body, how do we then know, okay, maybe this is not the best place to make a decision?
Or, if we're in true danger, or we need those survival instincts activated, how do we know? Okay, yes, I do need to listen to what my body is telling me.
“Sometimes sitting still in the storm of anxiety is the last thing that we can possibly do. It's just too much. We need to do something else for a little while to quiet the storm.”
Renée- Indeed. Well, I'm glad you brought this up. And anxiety can be a beast, and we can't make decisions from the chaos of anxiety. We cannot make decisions from that place. It's important to distinguish, I think, anxiety from true fear. Anxiety is based on the experience of fear. But fear is an intelligence that's lived in the present moment through the body itself. Okay? And if we can see that it's an intelligence that has a purpose to keep us safe and alive, then we don't villainize fear either.
Yeah, we don't want to do that, but how do we work with it? And when we're caught up in this storm of anxiety about something that could be out there in the future, how do we work with that? And you were talking about, it's activated. And sometimes sitting still in the storm of anxiety is the last thing that we can possibly do. It's just too much. We need to do something else for a little while to quiet the storm. And then we can come into calm with the body itself, but not while we're so activated. Then the question becomes, well, how do we soothe ourselves in activation?
And I don't suppose have all the answers here. I can only say what works for me and if I'm particularly activated. And there have been times that I've had such anxiety in my life that it was very hard to come down from that activation. But what works for me is to move. I need to walk.
There's a great book entitled In Praise of Walking and it was a game changer for me, not because I hadn't been a walker, but because I had been a walker. I've been a walker all of my life and it helped me see what's happening neurologically when we walk, that it does calm the nervous system tremendously. It activates the creative centers.
So when we walk and we're walking through a process, for instance, of decision making that we may have some anxiety about and we just hold the question loosely. We don't peer in too deeply to the question. We just let the question live in us and we take a walk. If our body is able for a walk. And that movement itself can begin to quiet the activation and avail us to other centers of the body.
“Better decisions will be made when we wait for clarity to come. And it will come.”
Mariah- Yeah, biologically when we're in that kind of fight or flight or freeze, there are certain chemical responses that are happening. There's a certain pathway that's activated and being able to shake that off or activate more of the rest and digest side of our bodies, it can be very powerful. And it is using our body to help us get into a more calm state. And knowing some tools and techniques, like going on a walk.
I know for me, it’s being outside or doing some yoga or I love running. That running actually physically helps me kind of get rid of that flee response where I'm like, okay, then I feel more empowered and I feel more in my body. And you're sweating, and so you're releasing toxins and there's so many benefits. So, yeah, I love that we can use our body as an ally even when we're kind of in that nervous system response of like oh, I'm just feeling so much tension and so much anxiety. We can still work with that, and we don't have to escape it or make decisions from that sense of urgency.
Renée- Exactly. Yeah. Which is another piece I want to circle back just for a moment about movement in the body. And there are many techniques out there. There's even shaking technique, rocking, all kinds of ways that we can shake free of the activation and also soothe ourselves. But in the same way that we can't make decisions from a place of good decisions, from a place of chaos, we need to learn to slow down what's urgent, what's really urgent. Can we see through this moment as not being as urgent as we like to think it is?
And better decisions will be made when we wait for clarity to come. And it will come. We will know.
Mariah- Yeah.
Renée- We will know.
Mariah- I love that piece of, I think, being patient and trusting the timing of things, trusting the flow of energy through us and around us. And I think that's something that has been really helping me kind of anchor into that natural ebb and flow of life itself. It is a natural cycle. We're not meant to be turned on all the time. We're not meant to live in this eternal spring.
We're moving into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, and it is this time of slowing down and kind of going within and having kind of a guide for how to do that, looking to nature for help in, okay, what season are we in now? And how can we maybe harmonize with it instead of push against it or even push against ourselves and our own natural rhythms and seasons and cycles? I think that's something that isn't the main narrative of our culture and society, but I think there's a slow shift happening where we're kind of longing for that presence, we're longing for that harmony instead of this more linear mentality of go, go all the time. Everything is urgent.
“We're not meant to be turned on all the time. We're not meant to live in this eternal spring.”
Renée- I love that you bring nature and seasons, Mariah. We're being called into this. We're being called into our natural rhythms as species on a planet that's circling around the sun. Right. And I think we're starting to realize that we can't, as you say, go, go, and that the body is going to respond to these seasons.
And we are of the nature that we seek and the body quiets in nature. We walk outside, we get a breath of fresh air. We hear these sounds that are of the natural world. And it's calming to the nervous system. Yeah, very much is.
Mariah- Absolutely. I think another question we had for this conversation was thinking about nature, thinking about self and other, we are so interconnected, and yet there's also this sense of separation, of boundary, of I'm still my own individual person. So holding the tension of that both/and, exploring that a little bit.
I know that you've just had this beautiful front-seat view of the wild places in nature and have probably felt both a part of it and also separate from it. And so, moving forward as humans, navigating that tension of being interconnected and also still feeling this sense of boundary between us and others and nature.
Renée- Yeah. Where to begin with this one? Well, this is where the philosopher/physiologist comes out in me. The idea that we're separate is both true and not true. You know, there's a semipermeable boundary that defines the body, Renée, and there's a semipermeable boundary that defines the body, Mariah, the being that is you and the being that is me. But this body being is in intimate relationship. It's intimately intertwined with the world around me. It's an open system. I'm breathing the air.
Mariah- Yeah.
Renée- I'm intimate with the world by the fact of my breath. And I'm giving my cells and my genetics back to the world on my out breath. We just dial it into that immediately. We see that we're not as separate as we think we are.
“We belong to the world and with the world, and we belong to the world and with each other.”
Renée- And it doesn't have to be philosophical. If we bring a quality of presence to the fact that in my breath, I'm receiving the world, and in the release of my breath, I'm giving back to the world. And the same thing with food. I take something in, it becomes a part of me. Right.
And I'm in a conversation with you. And this experience with you has impressions on my being. It lives in the cells of me. When I look at your eyes and you look at my eyes, we're making impressions on one another. When we begin to live inside this understanding, we have presence to this understanding that, yes, I am Renée and you are Mariah, and everyone here is each person's own self. But we belong to the world and with the world, and we belong to the world and with each other.
And so how is it that we can dance this dance of self and other self and world? And I often think about it in the context of the Yin Yang symbol in the circle. Right. That one cannot be without the other. The circle isn't whole. And that tension is that line, that membrane.
And the tension is a tautness that keeps them together more so than a strain.
Mariah- Yeah.
Renée- Right. If we start seeing tension as a kind of taut line that keeps something together if you look at water, the surface of water is holding itself together by the tension between the molecules. Science helps us think about our life because this is what's happening in the natural world. Water is probably one of the strongest elements in the world of how the molecules stay together. And so there's a tensile strength, there's a cohesion there. And if we look at the Yin Yang inside the circle and we see that this tension between us is really there to keep us together and make that circle whole. I can't be me if you're not you. Right?
“I have some needs and you have some needs, and they may be seemingly in conflict, but we can start to ask the question in a different way.”
Renée- So we exist inside this circle and then we have a responsibility to it, have a responsibility to the whole, have a responsibility to the natural world. We have a responsibility to one another. And part of that responsibility is that I become myself inside the circle. Right. I have a responsibility to do that on behalf of you, on behalf of the world. Not only on behalf of me. It takes this sort of narcissism out of it.
And it brings us into relationship with the whole.
Then when we come into a situation where there's what we would perceive to be a conflicting needs– I have some needs and you have some needs, and they may be seemingly in conflict, but we can start to ask the question in a different way. How are your needs feeding you? And how can I be in care of if I'm in relationship with you, inviting you in to care for your needs, and you inviting me in to care for my needs? So the element of tension changes from conflict to care, and then we have to let go of our agendas.
This is where we come into presence with life itself as an unfolding and that we don't know from moment to moment. We're living in this world together and we don't know what's going to happen moment to moment. So how to walk through it together.
“When you tune the violin, you tighten the strings and you tighten them to a certain point of tension so that they're in tune, so that you can play in harmony.”
Mariah- I really appreciate your reframing of tension as almost a necessity and a tool to keep us together. And it's so funny that you bring that up because I had written a poem a few years ago about the tension in a violin. And I played violin when I was a child, not very well. But when you tune the violin, you tighten the strings and you tighten them to a certain point of tension so that they're in tune, so that you can play in harmony. And so just reimagining this tension as something that can help us sing, something that can help us play in tune with our own voice. In harmony with others, I think, is a beautiful metaphor.
Renée- I love that.
Mariah- Yeah. I love that you brought that up. I was like, oh my gosh, I was actually just planning to share that poem this week. So it's funny, it's a little synchronicity that happened.
Renée- Wow.
Mariah- Yeah. But tension being a tool and not something that we try to avoid or escape or just not experience. I think going back to the body, too, there's this idea of trying to achieve balance as this sort of static equation where it's like, okay, we've achieved the balance and here it is. But in our body, homeostasis is a very active state. There are so many feedback loops that are happening all the time and adjustments that are being made. And speaking of instruments, our body is this really beautiful instrument that has all of these ways of maintaining that dance of homeostasis. And yeah, I think seeing it more like a dance, seeing it as this tension that we hold with care, I think just provides a little bit of relief.
It provides a little bit of a pathway through and it allows us to accept our full humanity. We don't have to try to get rid of something in order to have this embodied experience. We can learn how to look at it differently, how to invite in presence and embody that tension in a way that serves ourselves and serves others.
“Sometimes I need to attend to something within myself as care so that I come back in relationship with you more fully available to the relationship, more fully who I am.”
Renée- Yeah. What's coming to me to serve as a premise for all is presence and care. Really being present to what's happening in our life, present with another person, what's happening in their life. And also recognizing if we're looking at the tension of what may be my needs and what may be your needs in the context of a relationship or relating with one another. Sometimes I need to attend to something within myself as care so that I come back in relationship with you more fully available to the relationship, more fully who I am.
For me, I need a lot of solitude and that could be hard for someone in relationship who isn't comfortable with that kind of solitude. And so to your point, there's this violin string of tension playing where we find a harmony between the fundamental needs that I may have for solitude and the fundamental needs that another person may have for connection. Now, how do we how do we dance with those? And my sense is that if we reframe some of our perspectives around these things not as conflicting means as an example but as caring for the whole.
Mariah– Yeah, I love that we're speaking on different topics but they have this theme throughout of our wholeness. Coming into our wholeness, coming into our wholeness with ourselves, but also with our environment in relationship with others and that's very Libra. We're in the season of Libra which is very focused on relationship with others and connection and balancing that self and other. So I love that that's just coming up in our conversation naturally.
We are as humans, we're built for connection, we're built for those relationships with other humans but also with wild places, with nature and I think so often we take ourselves out of nature and that we create that false separation.
Like you were saying earlier, we are semipermeable and I love that phrase because I think that just sums it up really well. Just this image of being flowing in air, exhaling air. And it really is as simple as coming back to our breath in order to remember that interconnection with all that is.
Renée- Yeah. There's a piece here about intimacy with our surroundings, intimacy with the world itself, intimacy with our life, intimacy with ourselves, intimacy with one another.
Mariah- Which can be very uncomfortable sometimes.
Renée- It can be very uncomfortable.
“We don't want to think about the oil field. We just want to think about the convenience we get from what's happening over there, but we don't want to actually look at it.”
Mariah- Yeah, I think that was another piece I wanted to kind of explore with you, as we wrap up our conversation. I love your letters because I really do feel like you're on the front lines of some of these really magnificent landscapes, and you're reporting back to the rest of us. And I love what comes through and the images that you share.
They're so captivating, and you ask a lot of really probing questions that sometimes are uncomfortable. And when you were talking about going through the oil fields, it brought me to tears. Just the honest expression of the devastation and how could we have done this as humans? How did we get here? But I think what else you bring to the table, which I really appreciate, is this kind of inquiry for “How do we move forward?”
Like, yes, there's this, but also there's this over here, there's beauty, there's hope. It's an ability to confront, kind of in an intimate way, the things that make us so uncomfortable that most of us would probably like to pretend don't exist. We don't want to think about the oil field. We just want to think about the convenience we get from what's happening over there, but we don't want to actually look at it.
So you're helping us to look at it and confront it with honesty and a little bit of uncomfortableness. But then I think there's also this invitation to not let ourselves stay in despair but to find a way forward. I think in one of your letters, you talked about it as, like, an unfolding. And, yeah, I would just kind of like to get more of your perspective on that. How do you hold both of those experiences, both the despair and the devastation and the possibility for an unfolding that maybe includes hope?
“My sense is that the inclination toward despair could be a kind of sidestepping from allowing ourselves to come into that feeling, the inner feeling, and to be able to bear witness to something with heart.”
Renée- Very good question. Um, these are urgent times. These are uncertain times and so I want to pause for a moment and handle this question with great care, because despair would be a natural response, right? And I'm aware that many people feel despair in these times, and why wouldn't we? It's an extraordinary time of witnessing the suffering of the world and one another, the rape and pillage of the planet and one another, and trauma, exquisite trauma.
So despair is a natural response, or would be a natural response, a quality of hopelessness about humanity in general with the question, can we turn it around? Can we become a loving force on the planet and one another?
But here's my feeling on holding this tension, this tautness between the impulse toward despair and the hope for hope itself. And that is that what's being asked of us at this time is to become present to inner feeling, to become present to the feeling that we think we cannot bear. It's a time of great sorrow because of the uncertainty, because of what we bear witness to. There's sorrow here and there's also lamentation. As human beings, we lament what we've done and what we haven't done.
And my sense is that the inclination toward despair could be a kind of sidestepping from allowing ourselves to come into that feeling, the inner feeling, and to be able to bear witness to something with heart. That takes courage. That's what courage is, is to live with heart, right?
And here's what happens when we do that. It's through the experience of inner feeling that hope slips through. It slips through in a moment. And particularly if we're holding these times together, if we bear sorrow together, if we bear witness to suffering with heart, with one another. Hope slips through that care and that presence.
That's how we come to true hope, not a false sense of hope, everything's going to be okay. Everything's not going to be the way that we might want it to be. We have no control here. This is uncertainty writ large, right? And so we're being called into new ways of being that rely not only on this faculty of thought, which is its own intelligence but there are other intelligences of our being as well. And these are lived in and through the body and the heart as an organ of perceptivity.
We come into presence through the body, with the body and in the heart. And there's some practices to do that, but we can come to hope. There's every reason for hope as much as there's reason for hopelessness, there is every reason for hope. You can't have one without the other.
“Being able to feel the grief, the lamentation, those are sacred emotions. Those are sacred experiences. There's something in us that needs and longs for a true experience of the magnitude of those emotions and to let it come through our bodies and to experience that in community.”
Mariah- What's coming to mind right now is I think so many times we can become overwhelmed with that feeling of despair or sorrow. And it's almost like we're in this sense of paralysis, like it feels too big to tackle. And we’re not able to make decisions from that place of overwhelm. Being able to move out of that, being able to feel the grief, the lamentation, those are sacred emotions. Those are sacred experiences. I really believe there's something in us that needs and longs for a true experience of the magnitude of those emotions and to let it come through our bodies and to experience that in community.
So giving ourselves the opportunity to really, truly, properly grieve and feel that sorrow together, to share that burden, I think then we can come out of a sense of paralysis, of like, what do we do next, the world is on fire? And we can make decisions from a different perspective with hope and taking risks? Taking risks that the future is uncertain and there are no guarantees, but can we still do things that we risk being intimate with each other, we risk being intimate with the natural world? And how does that inform the decisions we make as a human race for how we're going to care for each other and the natural world around us?
Renée- Yeah. So we keep coming back to presence and care. Right. Being presenced, being with. And we can learn to trust ourselves through our experiences. We can learn to trust that we can feel grief, we can feel sorrow. I like that you said that grief is a sacred experience. So we could cast aside the notion that often gets tossed out, that grief leads to depression. I would say that the failure to grieve leads to depression.
Mariah- Yes, yes. I've lived that in my own life.
“We can learn to trust that we can feel grief, we can feel sorrow.”
Renée- Yeah. We need this sacred capacity. And to know that we can hold that with each other, with care and great affection, will help us begin to trust one another in the process and let what is in front of us reveal itself. We can begin to trust that something is out there in front of us, that will reveal itself. We can be receptive to it rather than trying to figure it out.
We avail ourselves to what's opening toward us. What's coming toward us. That's surrender. That's a receptivity. And that's not directing our thought and our tendency to try to figure something out into the future. It's a completely flopped way of being present to what's coming toward us.
Mariah- Yeah, exactly. And being active participants in our life, but understanding that it is this sort of co-creation. And I think one thing that we didn't touch on, but I think it goes without saying, when we're present in the moment, that's when we can hear our intuition. That's when we have that open receptivity to a presence or other things beyond us that I think can speak to us and help guide us along the way.
Renée- Yeah. Intuition happens in a gap of thought.
It bubbles up in the quiet moments of night or first thing in the morning. Right. And it's when our thought is quiet. It's calm. Intuition is calm. Right. We slow down and we come into intuition. We slow down and we allow ourselves to receive what's coming toward us, what wants our attention, what's being revealed. And so we learn new ways of knowing, new ways of being through this receptivity.
Mariah- Yeah. New ways of becoming and relating.
Renée- Exactly.
Mariah- I love that. Well, this has been such a lovely conversation. I so appreciate your time and your wisdom and the grace with which you offer your insights and your experiences.
“Intuition happens in a gap of thought. It bubbles up in the quiet moments of night or first thing in the morning.”
Renée- Well, it's been wonderful talking with you, Mariah. Thank you so much.
Mariah- I wanted to give you the opportunity to share anything coming up that you would like listeners to know about. I know you have a new project that you just launched. And maybe give us a little kind of forecast of how your journey is wrapping up. Or is it wrapping up? Are you on the road for a few more months? Do you know the answer? Maybe that's part of the uncertainty.
Renée- Do I know the answer? I am in Central Canada at this moment. I'm in Manitoba, heading toward Ontario. I don't know what's in the next month because I'm noticing that the roads are emptying of travelers like me, and campgrounds are closing. So will I stay in Canada as I head east? That's my hope, but I don't know. So that's forthcoming. Where's Renée? Where go I?
But in general, I'm heading home. It'll be a couple of months before I will return home, but my family, my adult children will be as delighted, I think, for me to be home for a little while as I will be delighted to spend some time with them. Yeah.
So I did launch a new project, Cura. I just announced that last week. And it's an unfolding, and I would say this journey has taught me about making the announcement about that. And that is that we're really exploring ideas of health and age and practices of health and age in ways that we will reimagine together. And so I posed some questions on the introduction to Cura page about perceiving health and age in new ways, and what if we begin to live into these questions in this way?
And I'm very excited about it something that I've wanted to do for a while, and I don't know where it's going, and that's okay.
Mariah- Yeah. Well, congratulations on taking the first step. Sometimes that's the hardest one to take.
Renée- Yeah. Thank you.
Mariah- Well, I think
is probably the best way to keep up with your journey on Substack. Are there any other places that we can find your work? Is that the main one?Renée- That's it. I've moved my website over to Substack. It's on
.My Instagram has pretty much fallen silent. I'm spending all of my time on Beyond the Comfort Zone. And Cura is within Beyond the Comfort Zone. So if someone goes to my page, Beyond the Comfort Zone, you scroll down, and you will see Cura.
Mariah- Yeah, well, I love Substack as a community, and I think there's so many beautiful connections that are being made. And so I'm kind of the same as you. I'm like, let's just focus more of my attention there because it gives you more value, I think, than some of the other platforms. So I think that's great.
Renée- Yeah, well and we get to meet fantastic people like you.
Mariah- Yeah, same. I appreciate it. Well, thanks again, and I look forward to keeping up with your journey.
Renée- Thank you. Thank you. I look forward to being in touch.
How do we decide?