Unearthing Resiliency with Plant Kin ft. Lupita Tineo

Tender heart, let’s take a moment to honor the grief in the world right now. As many continue to witness and aim to end multiple genocides, how is your heart, and in what ways are you allowing your grief to arise? With the continued and unnecessary extinguishing of human and more-than-human life right now in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and more, you might find yourself going to bed and rising with the weight of this grief heavy in your heart. I know I do and that I’m not alone in this.

In today’s episode with my guest and dear friend, Lupita Tineo of Yolia Botanica, we’ll explore how we continue to navigate the grief and blessings of being alive and reflect on how forming emotional connections with our plant family can help expand our resiliency during intense grief. 

If you feel like you’re resiliency is waning, this is normal, rest, acknowledge, but please come back. It’s as important as ever that we remain steadfast in raising our voices, especially from places of privilege, to speak out against what’s happening and not turn away.

The weight of the world is too much for one body to hold or fix and you are not intended to do it alone. There are beings, seen and unseen, human and more than human available to help us root deeper into our resiliency. 

I trust you are doing your best to be with the grief and blessings of this moment while also rising to the continued calls to speak out against what’s happening. It takes all of us so. If you’re hungry for deeper resiliency, I hope you’ll stay and listen. 

Let’s get into this bounty of wisdom. Here’s more about my dear friend, Lupita Tineo, and her shop, Yolia Botanica.

Yolia Botanica is woman-owned and operated, blending Mexican curanderismo and paganism to provide respectful alternatives that help people take care of their spiritual bodies. Our products are created for modern brujas of all levels with the foundation of respecting sacred herbs, tribes, and practices. At Yolia Botanica, we don’t currently work with white sage or palo santo. Instead, we provide appropriate options that respect the life of the plant and the sanctity of spiritual traditions, specifically of Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Everything is made by Guadalupe aka Lulu, who was born and raised in Sonora, Mexico, and is on a reclaiming and reconnecting journey to her Indigenous ancestry. 

Here’s our chat. Click below to listen. Keep scrolling to read the transcript.

Cassie: Welcome, my dear friend, Lulu, to the show. I'm so happy to have you here. Finally. 

Lupita: Thank you. Thank you, Cassie. I appreciate it. We went around for months.

Cassie: I know, we did, but we made it happen. I always like to start off by just asking you a little bit about your lineage, and that could be your ancestry, your teaching lineage, or anything that you feel like you want to speak about what's shaped who you are today and your work.

Lupita: I was born in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, and this particular city in Sonora has the County name of Cajeme, which is really something that fills me with pride. I'm like, yes, it might not be the city's name, but it's the county's name. Cajemé was an Indigenous warrior who, in the 1900s, was part of, I guess you could say, the war that happened against the Yaqui people.

So this one has a lot of story. Cajemé County is vast, not just to Ciudad Obregón. It covers a bunch of other small towns around it. The primary tribe that resides in this area is the Mexican Yaquis. or the Yoeme. We do have the, I guess you could say, other side of the border. Yaqui, which are called the Pascua Yaqui.

Unfortunately, they are divided by a border now. And so they have different benefits, and they do have different conditions of life because of this. So Cajemé was an Indigenous warrior who, when the Spanish came. And they took over Mexico. Now we're talking about the early 1900s; the Mexican government was still fighting the indigenous people.

Okay. They still wanted to take their lands and deplete their resources. And so they were the very same Mexicans who primarily Spanish leaders led at this time, were on a hunt for the resources of the Yaqui, which is southern, central, west of Sonora, it covers a very large portion of Sonora because then we start entering the Arizona tribes and he had been contracted by one of them, a Spanish legislator to lead a Mexican army into the lands and pretty much kill them all and take their land.

Cajemé wasn't for anyone he had grown up in poverty. He did what he had to and for whom he had to do it, but he learned of this person's true goal, which was to eradicate the Yaqui tribe. They wanted to completely erase them so that there would be no trace so that there would be no one to give land back to ever.

Cajemé, being of this tribe, I guess, you know, people change, turned on this man who paid him a lot of money to lead their Mexican army, and he got together with the leaders of the Yaqui tribe and taught them what the plan was. And Cajemé had been In a lot of wars, a lot of fights, a lot of guerrilla groups.

So, he knew a lot about fighting and defending. What the Yaquis didn't have weapons, but Cajemé taught them how to make them with rocks, sticks, city, and arrowheads, all of the good stuff. To make it short, they succeeded in this battle. Unfortunately, it was not for long until a bigger army was sent that ended up slaughtering that whole village, which is where Sula Lobregón is now.

And so the County was named after Cajemé. Because of what he had done, of what he had stood for the Yaqui communities, his own community, so I, I like to think that I'm from Cajeme and not from Ciudad Obregón, because Ciudad Obregón is named after that very same legislator who slaughtered the entire region, of the Yaqui tribe, and There's a really amazing documentary on YouTube called Yaqui's, it's a Mexican man who goes on a very extensive history search for the landmarks, the stories and the evidence of a genocide against the Yaqui people, which lasted approximately 44 to 46 years.

This is one of the longest persecutions against an indigenous tribe. We're not talking about, oh, they slaughtered them for 10 years straight. And that was it. It went on for four decades, and it is very heartbreaking because we see in the documentary how the communities are now living because of this, the scraps of resources that they have to live with, how they unite and they stick together, and they're still teaching their children their native tongue, and Spanish is their second tongue.

And so it's this beautiful rendition of pain and persecution and the unity that follows into the very few. Yaqui people that remain today. So that's where a lot of my lineage comes from. Whether my mom's side, primarily Spanish, has any ties to that. I'm not sure, but my dad's side for sure has it.

I was able to find a picture from my dad's family, which is the oldest picture we were able to date, which is from around 1948. So, up until 1948, we have nothing prior. We have no records, we have no pictures, we have no idea of the names of people or where they were from. And there's a picture of this woman who would have been my father's side, my grandmother's great-grandmother.

And you look at this woman, and you say, This is an indigenous woman, but my dad's family didn't grow up that way. My dad's family grew up, I guess, not seeing themselves as indigenous. They saw themselves as

the rejection of society, the dark ones, the short ones, the ugly ones. And I know this because my dad's sister, whom I'm very, very close to, till this day, she'll call herself names, and she's this short little dark brown woman who got polio as a child.

And so she has a hump on her back, and she was she's the most amazing woman I know. And to hear her talk about herself in that sense, not acknowledging the beautiful culture and richness that she comes from rather. Forcing on herself the derogatory things that society has told her. My aunt praises white people. Okay? I'm not kidding. She adores white skin.

She adores blonde hair. And she's always dreamed of being like that. Because she says it is the most beautiful skin and hair on earth that she will never have. I was little, I could tell you like flashbacks of her just saying things, and she didn't say it in like a pity me. Way, she would just say it because she really believed it.

And so I grew up hearing about her brown skin, dark hair, and features. And so it does things to a child on my mom's side. My grandmother is very light-skinned. She has no hair anywhere. And so I remember my grandmother. Always pointing things out. Oh, look at your dark knees. Look at your dark elbows.

Look how hairy you are. Me and my sister and comparing our skin color to hers 

or her families again, not in a way of making us. I don't think she ever really meant to hurt us, right? It's usually how it happens, but that's what she did. And then here we have my aunt. Where do we lie? Where is there a positive for our existence, our identity, and our body?

There wasn't. There wasn't. There were negative sides coming from the light-skinned people side, negative things being said and pointed out for as long as we can remember because we were dark because our features were different because we had more hair, dark hair at that. And then my aunt, who looked like us, who looked more like us, saying what she had, what she looked like, was the worst of the worst.

So you build these foundations. Off of that, you internalize it, and then you live your life like that. Having internalized all of that colorist, racist, discriminatory. Language all of our lives. So that's more of who I am, where I come from, but also what it meant for me growing up, what that did not really have pride in an identity, not really having to belong to an identity because I wasn't Mexican enough.

I wasn't white enough. Wasn't indigenous enough. There was nothing that I could be enough of. But now, as I'm older, I've reclaimed a lot of things, and you know this: I've reclaimed a lot of things. I've reclaimed many things that brought me shame, starting with my name, which is Guadalupe, and Guadalupes in Mexico are called Lupitas.

And more often now, I try to introduce myself as Lupita because I know where Lulu came from, and it came from a lot of self-hatred. And embarrassment and shame because people couldn't pronounce my name and that brought me a lot of shame, having to assimilate into this country and have a name like that.

I was just the sorest thumb sticking out always and then being the fresh kid that didn't speak English and was brown and hairy. So when people say tell me about who you are, tell me about where you come from. I can't point out all the beautiful things 1st, although I'm grateful for them, although it's taken me a really long time to see and appreciate them.

Now, it didn't become pretty for a very long time, so always the harshest parts for me have to be acknowledged so that we can really understand where a lot of our neighbors come from as far as emotional and mentality. Goes we don't come from a place of acceptance and that can really hinder the way that we connect in the way that we live our lives.

And when I say I am from Sonora, I am Mexican-born and raised. That also comes with the territory of, I don't know who I am, and I'm having to define that, and I'm having to find it, having to yank it out, because it's right under me. It's right under me. 

Cassie: Thank you so much. 

Lupita: You're welcome.

Cassie: I know some of your story, but I don't know all of your story, and I did not know about the history of the Yaqui people. I'm really grateful to you for sharing that with me. I will find the YouTube video, and I'll share a link in the show notes for this episode, so if other people want to look at that, they can. (Click here to watch the Yaqui documentary Lulu references.)

Lupita: It's subtitled in English, too. He does have a book. It's called Yaqui. I don't know if that one's translated, but It's a great documentary. It really puts in perspective a lot of the communities here in Arizona.

We don't know a lot of this history, and so we don't understand. White people are the way they are. Yeah. Or why our communities are the way they are. We're sadder than ever, more disconnected than ever. There's a loss of identity that persists beyond measure. And it comes from things like that comes from persecutions of decades, of generational trauma.

And, it never needs a lot of attention. It just needs people willing to listen. You don't have to go shout it to the world, but what you do need to do is absorb it so that we can be that one little domino chip that bumped the next. And even if there is a lot of space between the next chip, we just want to inspire.

You might not touch people enough that you knock them down to keep doing the ripple effect, but you might inspire them. Because that pressure is big, that the pressure of making justice for everyone, it's big. 

Cassie: Thank you for rooting us into your truth as a starting place and bringing all of that in all of its grief and tenderness here. Because it is so important, and I'm just so honored to know you and to bear witness to your journey, and I always have been, so it's a real honor to be able to share it with others. 

Lupita: Thank you. I appreciate you.

Cassie: I appreciate you. I know; we're just having a little love-cry fest over here. Don't mind. Oh, we go back. 

Lupita: Yeah. I think that surfaces a lot when we talk. Yes. 

Cassie: I would love to hear a little bit about the land and your connection to the land. And this is a practice that, was inspired by Dra. Rocio Rosales Meza. That is to share a little bit about what the land is teaching you and speaking to you right now.

And I know that your connection to the land is deep. So, I would love to hear a little bit about it at this moment in time. 

Lupita: It's quite an amazing journey to think, oh, there's nothing in the desert. And then you go looking, and you find how much power and life and energy are actually here. The Sonoran Desert is one of the harshest environments, but it's also a very diverse environment.

We have high sierras, mountains, which absorb a lot of the rain and that feed with beautiful green luscious hills, the wildlife encourages our to bloom. If you go south into Mexico, you'll find the, which are a type of cactus that is spiny rather than the saguaros, which are one big and thick with arms. Each part of the Sonoran Desert has something really beautiful and unique about it. And depending on how high or how low the elevation is, The elevation will give you a gem. You'll find the pitayas in higher elevations, but you'll find creosote in lower elevations. And you know my obsession with creosote.

I don't know that anybody has more fascination with it more than I do. I know many people love its medicinal properties and the intoxicating smell. Of creosote when it rains and it comes into contact with water, but I don't think people, a lot of people, understand the energetic and magical representation creosote has for me. And this is where we talk about why creosote is so amazing.

I'll give you some fun facts which you already know. But creosote can go without water for up to two years. There is a creosote bush found right on the verge of the Sonoran Desert and the Mojave Desert, which crosses into a little bit of California. And this bush is named King Clone, and it's approximately 12,000 years old.

The scientists who studied this bush believed it to be one of the oldest organisms on Earth that's still standing. And you wonder, wow, how does it do that? So can survive some of the harshest environments and harshest droughts because it stores water in the root system. The root system of a creosote bush is a fighter it up roots, other smaller bushes and preserves its strength because it wants more water. And so it'll eliminate smaller bushes by pushing them up and out from the roots. It tries to take over the bigger the roots, the more water it can store. So I love to think of creosote as a symbol of perseverance.

And a symbol of strength, prosperity, because of that root system, and I always say this, what an amazing thing it would be for us to be so well established and so rooted that everything we have and need to continue through the harshest of environments is right in our roots that sustain us, that hold us.

That feeds us, and that guides us. And so the creosote bush really brings that element for me. I think if I could embody a little bit of what creosote is in my human form, I could touch a lot of people. And I try to, I'm trying to expand this root system and to strengthen my root system so that when harsh environments come again, because they will, I will know that I can continue because my roots uphold me and because my roots will make me go through this, And I just can't think of a better way to experience the desert, if not for creosote bush.

Besides its medicinal properties, creosote has taught me not to judge a book by its cover. It still has so much to offer, even in its dormant form. Indigenous people, as much as Arizona, as much as Sonora, burn the creosote branches as an insect repellent when it's in dormant stages. It's, You know, you look at it when it's cold, and you're like, that is 1 ugly plant because it goes brown, and it it almost looks like it got burned, but it isn't.

It's just dry. It's, it's sleeping. And then the 1st little sign of spring approaches, and it starts to scrap these little tiny green leaves off of those ugly. Brown, dry branches like you would think these branches are dead, but they're not and I see it every spring when it starts to sprout those little green babies, and it new leaves coming in new blooms, new arms, it regenerates itself so amazingly, and it needs nothing, and it needs no one, but it also thrives.

In a community space, because some of the creosotes will connect roots and will help each other in storing water and feeding on themselves through the drought. So I can't find a better example of life than a creosote bush.

Cassie: I love hearing you talk about creosote, and I just want to sing your praises for a moment because they're. I have creosote all over my house. You introduced me to creosote, and I developed a real love of it. I love the smell of it. I love it in the shower. I have your creosote oil. To that, I love to use. So thank you for introducing me to this plant and to all of the listeners because it's so prevalent in the Southwest, too. 

Lupita: It's an emotional attachment to, for a lot of people. If you're not from here, then Korea started. It's like this funky, musky smell.

But for people who have been here for a long time, I've lived here for 20 years, and there's a lot more creosote here than where I live. And where I was born and raised, because I'm really close to the coast, to the Gulf of California. So it's a lot more beachy, a lot more humid and Curioso doesn't like that, so we would have to drive.

Two or three hours out of where I live to find creosote. And we did this because it was medicinal. My grandmother would mash it up and with mix it with other herbs. Another herb, I'm not sure what it's called in English, but in Spanish it's called golondrina and it's literally a weed. It's this little weed that if you plant some plants in your pots and use some of the soil that is here.

You're going to get one of these little plants, and it's tiny, grows out of the dirt, spreads out, and has tiny little circular leaves. So my grandma would grab Golondrina creosote and mash it until it got nice and juicy and sticky, because creosote exudes like a wax from the leaves.

And when we were little, again, I was born and raised in Mexico. There was no chickenpox vaccine for us. So we got chickenpox. And I remember my back being covered in little blisters, and the itchiness was insane. And I just remember my grandmother couldn't handle the whining. And she just rubbed that piece all over our backs.

I think my sister got chicken pox first, and then about a week ish, I got it. And so we have to take two trips to find the creosote. And when we found it, my dad was with us, and my dad told my grandmother. Who is my maternal grandmother? Her name is Sylvia. And my dad said, Sylvia, you can't take from the bushes that are dormant.

You have to take from the green trees. And my grandma said, why? My dad said I don't know. That's just what I've been told. And I carried that with me for a really long time, and I didn't realize I had. That question lingered until a few years ago when I started to work with my career. So this was around 2018.

You don't take from a dormant tree just like you wouldn't take from an ill person. You take from the bush, the branch that's healthier because that means it's strong enough to regenerate and it's strong enough to recuperate from whatever you're taking. And my dad said, do you have a coin because we have to leave something?

And she was like, no, I don't have anything. My grandpa drove us. My grandpa was a smoker. Is a smoker, and my dad's, oh, let's go ask Ernesto if he can give us a cigarette, and my grandma said for what he said, you have to give something, and the conversation seemed like you should know this already.

But my dad grew up in a very small town, four hours, four and a half hours north of where I was. And so we found a lot more creosote there. Because it's closer to the lower elevation, more dry desert, he had a lot more interactions and experience with creosote than my grandmother did.

And that's what he had been told. That's what his mother told him. And so he was just doing it, but my grandmother didn't know. And through time, I learned, about respecting the bush, respecting the shrub. And when I talked to my dad about it, I asked him, Papi, do you remember when we got chicken pox?

And he was like, how could I forget? And I said, do you remember that you were looking for something to give to the bush? And he's, yeah, I remember. So your grandpa ended up putting up a fight for the cigarette, but he's he gave it to me. And I was like, yeah, I was like, do you know why you did that?

He said, it's I didn't want to argue with your grandmother, but You're supposed to give something to the bush. And I was like, okay, do you know why you're supposed to give something? He was like, I don't know. It's it's like a thank you, I think. And I realized my dad has always been really intuitive about those things but also really doubtful.

Like he knew, but didn't know. And I think a lot of us have that, just, but we don't trust it enough. And I shared with him, I said, I've been reading a lot about Creosote, Sonoran Desert, and, I, I'm working with a lot of energy and things like that, so it's an exchange, Dad, it's an exchange.

You're giving something because you're taking something. He's, oh, he's okay. Going to the store, and I was like, sure, he's you give them money, and you get something. And I was like, yeah, sure. That's fine. That's as far as we're going to get.

It's one of those cute little moments of enlightenment of how early the medicine started, how early the practice has started. And we Mexicans do things without knowing why. Or knowing where because that's been lost. The oral sharing, the oral tradition, and then if we do have a little bit of it, it was taboo, don't talk about it, because people are going to think you're a witch.

And we can't call it that. We can't call it brujería. We call it holistic or natural. We can't call it anything. And if you say curandera, you're right there with the witches. 

Cassie: the plight of the witches. It's so prevalent across so many cultures. 

Lupita: So it's a conundrum. Yeah. How do we praise what has always been persecuted and shamed? And we live in that constantly. I find Creosote to be non-binary. I grew up with it being called a feminine name, and when we moved here, it was called a masculine name. And I found that very interesting, and I thought, huh, in Spanish, Spanish has male and female.

So in Spanish, creosote was named the governess or the little stinker 'cause it's very potent. Both of went, which end in a, which is female, RA. So when we moved here and I found people called it. Or creosote or greasewood. I said, those are all male. And then it was just that, that it didn't have to be either or, that it could be both, that it can be a healer and also a conduit of strength.

Cassie: I love that and just, I'm looking at a bundle that I have from you now, and I feel that same energy of it is both. 

Lupita: Yeah. It is. It really is. The way it comes to. Share the healing benefits. It wants to embrace and connect through its healing benefits, but also in the way that it stands up to show its strength and its dominance and its masculine energy of protection and perseverance.

It just pushes through. So, I love the duality. I love the coexistence of the energies because it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can coexist. It can be both. And I think that acknowledges its existence very well. Mhm. For how we see it in different cultures. Because, like how I just mentioned, I grew up with it being feminine, and I've learned to see it as that when I need to, when I'm in my Spanish self, it's feminine.

And when I'm in my English self, it's masculine. Yeah, it meets you where you're at. It really does. Yeah. 

Cassie: I love the story about your, dad coaching your grandma into like how to work with the plants and leave an offering that is such a. Beautiful story 

Lupita: and with a cigarette.

Cassie: Yeah. And I love that you could circle back and connect with him about that, like how healing. I imagine that might have been for both of you. 

Lupita: He said things made a lot of sense. he doesn't remember who taught or told him. He said it was just what everyone did, that you must leave something.

And he was like, when I was a little boy, I had to get some. And all I had on me was a piece of gum, and I left a piece of gum. And I was like, we go back to intention is everything. It really is. Now, having good intentions doesn't excuse ignorance, right? But it helps us get there. It helps us get to a better place of understanding and education for sure because having good intentions is like a foundation of embarking on the right path towards this kind of learning and this kind of living.

But my dad's intentions were right. The education just wasn't. Knowledge wasn't. They never really learned those things. I'm sure somewhere down the line, there was an older woman telling people why, but she was probably labeled as a witch, and then people saw that, and so they stopped sharing that information because they didn't want to be labeled like that woman, so we stopped sharing.

Cassie: Yeah, but the practices persevered.

Lupita: Yes, they do.

Cassie: We have a little bit of time left, and it's funny, I wanted to talk to you about grief and working with plants, and though we haven't named that, it's woven throughout the entire conversation, which I'm not surprised about, but I would love if there is anything that's coming to mind about how you've worked with plants.

Your personal grief, or how you know, because, as I mentioned in the intro, you have a store where you're able to tend to your community and offer your plant medicine, like, how does grief arise? How is grief tended? And how does working? Alongside these different plants, you work with, help support and facilitate that.

Lupita: There is an emotional attachment that guides a lot of what I use. And I've honed in on this emotional attachment to things because I have to understand what it means to me first. And this is something that I talk to people a lot about. Why am I going to use something? That has no connection to me.

Why will I implement something into my life that invokes no feeling? No memory. No sensation whatsoever. There are a lot of beautiful native plants. In Sonora, one of them is creosote, which we grew up with, but most are from all over the world. Chamomile is German or Egyptian, cinnamon, Indonesia, and these herbs have an emotional connection to me because this is what I remember my Abuelita making in the kitchen as a child.

This is what I remember. My aunt's making for me when I had a tummy ache. And so I know there is a lot of herbs that have energetic and physical tending to the heart.

But I think also being at peace with what you're consuming and using because of the emotional peace it brings does a lot of things, too. And if that's cinnamon, then so be it. If that's basil for you, basil your way through, girl. They're natural. They're going to either unbloat you, or help with the nervousness, or help relax the shit out of you, or help you go poop.

There are some amazing benefits. But what does it do to you emotionally? What feelings does it invoke when you smell it, when you touch it, when you drink it, when you cook it, when you burn it? Our emotions can really derail us, but our emotions can also ground us, and our emotions can guide us. I think for the last few years, I really embraced more of What herbs emotionally do for me, whether they are attributed to that or not.

I think chamomile is a staple for a lot of Mexican families, and chamomile has just been that homie for me that whether I'm sad, stressed, or tired, I'm going to have a cup of chamomile. I don't know if there is any specific herb that I would recommend, per se, that is, oh, that one is very connected to the heart, that one is all about emotional healing; I think that emotional healing starts with the feelings provoked by what you're using. In the 1st place, and so when we get that, we can create different connections with what we're using. And that's another really important aspect of using tools and medicine in the 1st place is laying the foundations, the correct foundations.

In the first place, connecting with the things that invoke positive and serene feelings, emotional feelings, so that you can find a sense of self and a sense of peace, knowing that you're using something that connects you back to yourself, to your inner child, to your culture, to your family. And we are reinforcing those routes, and we are working on establishing those routes from the ground up rather than working from here down. Reinforcing from the ground up is super important.

I think we need to go back to the very simple basics of, let me use something that invokes emotional connection.

Cassie: You are such a deep well of wisdom, my friend. Also just want to say that I think you should make a shirt that says “Basil your way through girl”,  because I just think it needs to exist. 

Lupita: Yeah, I use basil for a lot of things. And my personal limpias. Or the one-on-one sessions that I do, I have a bunch of basil outside, and two or three of the plants that I have are a different kind of variation of basil.

I think it's, I think it's Thai basil. I'm going to collect Thai basil. Basil is like a weed in Mexico, especially in the Sonoran parts. Basil likes the sun, but it also likes a little bit of humidity. And so Sonora, further down, is a little humid, and so this shit grows everywhere. All the little houses have basil in a pot somewhere, and it drops the seeds.

Flowers when it dries. And so then they have more basil growing on the ground and you'll find random patches of basil just going everywhere. So I took some of the seeds from my aunt's house, and I put them in the ground, and some of them took off. And they're there, and then I have another popular common cuisine, basil with the big fat leaves.

And then I have another one that's all green with white flowers. And then I have a purple basil, which is beautiful. It's gorgeous. It's I think they call it ruby red. really beautiful basil. The caterpillar worms devoured it. So we're waiting for it to come back and regenerate.

But yeah, basil your way through because basil is anti-inflammatory. And it smells amazing. Cut it and rub the leaves. And just Immerse yourself in the beautiful healing smell like that. It's amazing. Have you ever smelled basil in an essential oil form? 

Cassie: I don't know if I have. 

Lupita: It's interesting. Yeah. Very interesting.

Cassie: It's just incredible to me the different varieties of basil and how they're all so different. And this goes for so many plants. I have holy basil or Tulsi basil in my garden. I have Tulsi, too. I love it. And I, it's just exactly what you described. I make tea with it sometimes. I've made tinctures with it before, but my favorite thing is in the summer to just rub my hands on it.

And it's just the most amazing smell. 

Lupita: And it's sweet. Tulsi is sweet. 

Cassie: Oh, it's like perfume. 

Lupita: Yes, it has this perfumey floral smell with the tanginess, of a basil. 

Cassie: I love what you said, too, because I think, Especially when thinking about grief, it's so important to remember that grief shows up in people's bodies in so many different ways. And so when you honor the plants that you feel called to work with, the ones that you have that emotional connection with, you're honoring how grief is showing up in your body.

Which is different for every grief, for every person; it's just that there's so much variety, and that's the beauty of working with plants is that the plants want to support us. And it's all about what you said, like feeling that emotional connection to them.

Lupita: Yes, if we think of plants as spirits. Then, it facilitates how we want to connect with them.

You don't want to connect with the spirit without having that foundation laid. You I mean, I wouldn't, I would want for there to be a deep connection that honors both of us, even if it is out of a memory, even if it is out of a childhood event, that really induces that. It's like this, threading, inner weaving, where everything just starts to make sense, the feeling, the smell, the memory, and the act of consumption, whether it's energetic or drinking it or eating it, or smelling it, it stimulates your senses.

And now you're in your physical self, as much as you are in your emotional body and your spiritual being. And so there's all of this interconnectedness that's weaved through, allowing for that emotional connection, with a plant. I really don't think you can go wrong with basil. We go back to basil just being amazing.

Rosemary. 

Cassie: Oh, I love rosemary. 

Lupita: For us, it's also Rue's amazing. And, I grew up with Rue being used to cure my ear infections. We never really used antibiotics. We would look through in some olive oil or whatever oil we have and then we put it in our ears and then we'd cover it with cotton balls, until this day, my kids haven't had an ear infection and whenever they join, whenever join us started to.

Show any signs of infection. I have this concoction of oils with ruin and extracts and things, and he'll ask me for it and say, my ear hurts. Can you give me some of that stuff? And I'm like, sure, and this is what I'm doing with him and with both of them is establishing those emotional connections so that when he's older, he can look back.

And remember and have that one or those few staple memories that smelled like something, looked like something, felt like something. I want him to remember that so that he always has something to go back to that makes him feel connected.

Cassie: What a gift. What a legacy. What can you think about? Yeah, to leave that for your children. I think about that a lot with my kids, too, and the potency and the power of showing them how important those relationships can be with our plant family.

Lupita: And respect. I think there's no need for children to be malicious with our environment.

It's one thing to be curious and to learn, which every child has to go through. But I taught both of my boys very early on to respect plants and respect nature. 

Cassie: Can you imagine how lush and abundant and beautiful the earth would be if children were raised, with this reciprocity in mind? 

Lupita: We're not taught that though.

It's taught to take and take abusively and aggressively.

And, I've been speaking on issues with white sage for years, and that's what's happened, and it's happening to follow Santo to where we are taking. Abusively and aggressively, and there's no reciprocity. There's no respect. There's no foundation, and there's no emotional connection. Yeah. So we're taking it because our mind wants to have it, and so there's that disconnect, and the intention is already wrong. The foundation is already wrong. And this is why I said earlier that having the right intention doesn't excuse ignorance. Because maybe you didn't know, like a lot of us, but if you know better, you do better.

 People still choose to look the other way. Yeah, for a lot of things. Yeah. I still choose to look away from the massacre on White Sage, but White Sage is also representative of a lot of other things.

Yeah, a lot of groups of people, a lot of issues in this world. White Sage represents a lot of oppressed communities and we are watching it unfold. In many ways across the globe, that has brought forward its own set of grief, its own set of collective grief, where we don't know how to channel and we don't know where to put it. Personally, I don't know where to put it. I don't know what to do with it, but I allow myself to acknowledge that because not acknowledging it is my privilege. And so if I know something is going on with White Sage, and I find out there's communities being harmed because they're taking their White Sage away because they're killing their White Sage, then they're going to speak up, because if my voice is all I have, then so be it. Yeah. I refuse to be silent. I refuse to be the person who, when this is established as history, refuses to be that part of that percentage that was not part of the collective healing.

Cassie: I think a lot of people, myself included, are learning the value of our voice and the importance of our voice.

Lupita: it represents a lot of things. A lot of wars, a lot of genocides. There is a lot of injustice and a lot of abuse. White sage represents our Indigenous people. It represents our Palestinian people. It represents our people in Congo. It represents people in South Korea and North Korea.

It represents our Mexican people. It represents our Latin Americans. It represents all of it. Yeah. It's more like a symbol, right? But we've seen the efforts of people sharing about White Sage. And the progress that has made. But it didn't happen quick. And that is the thing with time. I think time for me brings a lot of grief sometimes.

Cassie: Yeah. as a collective, too, we're learning so much about how to grieve together. And I think time is a part of that. how do we process and grieve the bigness of the pain of the horrors that are happening in our world? And I think that we're walking. Through it right now. At least the people who are willing to bear witness are learning in real-time. How do we walk through this? How do we assimilate and process what is happening so that we can remain in it? 

Lupita: And I'm smiling because creosote. 

Cassie: Bringing it back to the creosote. 

Lupita: Creosote can be. Both things. Yeah. because it fucking can, it's that simple. It can be grieving and can be in its emotional self, and its feminine self, and it can coexist and push through and persevere. And it's masculine energy, and so I think we are asking, how do we navigate the grief and the blessing of being alive,

Nature is perfect. And will always be perfect examples to life. We find our life in nature, we find meaning, we find reasons, we find purpose, and, that's the most beautiful story to tell. 

Cassie: It is. And I'm looking forward to spending some time. Some of the creosote that I have from you And I will certainly put all the links for your wonderful creations in the show notes. So if anybody listening wants to connect with Creosote. That they can't or connect with Lulu that you can, but I'm just so glad that we found time to do this.

You just brought so much. So I'm just so happy to share your wisdom. Thank you. This was so wonderful. Thank you so much, Lulu, for your time, for your energy, for your wisdom. 

Lupita: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It was amazing.

Magical Allies for Grief with Ashley Leavy

Welcome beloveds. Today, I’m bringing you a conversation with my dear friend, Ashley Leavy, that feels like a needed love offering at this tender time. In this episode, we talk about magical allies for grief, primarily crystals and stones, but plants and trees also weave into the conversation. We discuss a few crystals that can be wonderful allies in working with grief, navigating ethics while working with crystals, and leaning on your intuition when deciding how to connect with different energies for support while grieving. 

I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it and perhaps find some invitations to tend to your grief at this time. Ashley and I have been friends for several years now. I have so much love and respect for her as a person, healer, and teacher, and I am honored to share some of her wisdom with you. 

Ashley Leavy is one of the world’s top crystal healing experts and educators, and author of Crystals for Energy Healing and Cosmic Crystals. Ashley’s passion for crystal healing drives her role as Founder & Educational Director of the Love & Light School of Crystal Therapy. Ashley has created dozens of award-winning, online courses that are fun, educational, and life-transforming, the Love & Light School has quickly grown into a thriving international community.

Here’s our chat. Click below to listen. Keep scrolling to read the transcript.

The following is an unedited transcript. Grammar and spelling errors may be present.

Cassie: Welcome, Ashley.

I'm so glad you're here. Longtime friend of mine, so what a treat to have you on here.

Ashley: It's so nice to get to talk like this. 

Cassie: Yes, it is. We've been talking behind the scenes for many years, and so it does feel special to, be talking here in a more public space together, 

Ashley: yeah.

Cassie: I would love for you to share, a little bit about your lineage, and that can be either your ancestral lineage, or your teaching lineage, or both, but just a little bit about, what's shaped your work and brought you here to this space in your journey. 

Ashley: I think it's a little bit of a combination of things. In terms of my ancestral lineage, what I do is crystal healing. That's mainly the thing that I'm focused on in my work. And that stems back to a lot of summer afternoons spent at my grandma and grandpa's house. My grandfather was a scientist. He was a chemical engineer by trade.

That's what he did, but he was really interested in all things having to do with the natural world. So he was very interested in crystals and minerals. He was also interested in rainfall. And to the point where This man, he was so cute. He would go walk down by the pond near his house every single day and count the number of geese while they were migrating so he could track the goose migration year over year, make little charts and data plots of how many geese, and I just love that kind of thing about him.

So he always approached things from a very sort of scientific mindset. I tend to approach things more from a spirituality mindset. But it was him who I think really instilled that love of nature and the land with me from a really young age. And so we would sit in his office for hours sometimes and he'd show me the different mineral specimens he had in his collection and tell me where they came from and what they were used for and what they were made of and how they got their color and all these things that just seemed so fascinating to me as a kid and really got me started on this path.

So it became a personal practice for many years to work with my crystals. And the first book that I came across that was really about the energy of crystals was by the author Melody. It was the Love is in the Earth book. A kaleidoscope of crystals, and I found out that someone that Melody had trained, was going to be teaching her methodology of crystal healing, where I lived here in Madison, Wisconsin, and I was so excited.

I had to go. I didn't think I wanted to do crystal healing for my work. It was totally just personal practice at that point. This was back in like 2007 and taking that workshop totally. Changed my whole life. I saw firsthand from the experiences that I had from the experiences of other people in that class setting, just how powerful crystals could be when we worked in relationship with them.

And that kind of got me started on a journey to learn. More and more so, although that was where I started in terms of my lineage, I ended up going on to study with Melody quite a few times. I found so many supportive teachers along the way, like Dale Walker and Judy Hall and lots of others that I feel Really lucky to have been able to take classes with some in person, some online.

but all of that has really shaped my personal work because I think a lot of times our teachers can give us. A great starting point for, how to work with our tools. And it's up to us to hone that practice and find something that works for us. 

Cassie: Beautiful. I love hearing all those different pieces of your story and how they weave together and how it started with your grandfather's love of connecting with the land.

That's so beautiful. And just Hearing the richness of your lineage of how you got to where you are, I think it's so important to honor these places where we've come from, so I appreciate hearing a little bit more about your path and your journey. 

Ashley: Yeah, it's so interesting because although Crystal Healing has this really deep, rich history, It really had like a modern day resurgence in the 1980s, 90s, and so a lot of how we think about practicing with crystals today is really informed by that and was shaped by that, but I think with that also created this.

Unspoken set of rigid rules and structure about how something should be. And so I'm sort of unlearning all of that and reclaiming a little bit of the experimentation and play and connection with my stones. 

Cassie: Hmm. Also so needed. Yes, that experimentation in play. And I already know you know this, but just to say it out loud for this episode that I definitely resonate with all of the unlearning that goes along with, really creating a magical practice of your own or a spiritual practice of your own.

And it's. Really empowering too. And it's it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be our lineage and our ancestry along with, our own personal discoveries and our practices. Okay, we could go on talking about that forever, but 

So before we jump into talking about grief and crystals, I would love to hear a little bit just about the land that you're currently residing on, whose land it is, and maybe any wisdom that the season's sharing with you.

And this is a practice that I learned from Dr. Rocio Rosales Mesa. So I just want to credit her, and bringing this question here to us. 

Ashley: I love this question so much. I live in present day Madison, Wisconsin, known as Dayjope, which is forcefully ceded Ho Chunk land. and I think in terms of something that I'm learning from the season right now, It's a lot of letting go, a lot of recognizing the deep wisdom and the cycles that the land has to offer us, recognizing that, as well as the abundant times, the plentiful times, the very joyous times, there's Always still space within that joy for grief and vice versa when we're deep in our grief when we're deep in the leaner times when we're deep in the stillness, we can also find moments of joy.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing, the land and the season sort of hold space for us to be full and complete and just feel the way that we're feeling. 

Cassie: Thank you for sharing those lessons. 

Here, where I am on Miami land, in so called Indiana, it is very humid and hot today and the land is continuing to give me these beautiful lessons of how much the earth loves us because the earth continues to provide for us even amidst all of the change, the rapid change that we're experiencing in our climate and in the land.

Ashley: Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you.

Cassie: Before we start discussing, getting into different crystals that one might want to work with when they're walking a grief journey. I'd love to just hear a little bit from you, your personal practice of ways to work with crystals ethically and ways that are rooted in reciprocity and relationship.

Cause I just feel like that's a really. Great foundation to start any conversation when we're talking about crystals and stones because it can be really hard to work with crystals and stones ethically. And I also want to say that this is a huge topic, not something that we can fully Piece apart and expand upon in this episode, but, I have a feeling that you might have other resources, and that I can link those in the show notes because this is such a broad topic.

Ashley: yeah, I'm really glad that you asked this question. It comes up a lot when we're looking at working with crystals, right? With anything that we work with in our lives, there is a cost. There is a trade off and crystals are no different from that. They come from the land. They are the land themselves.

so when we are sourcing our crystals when we're purchasing our crystals, it's helpful to know whether or not those crystals have been sourced as ethically as possible. And this is a phrase that I've started using after lots of conversations with my dear friend, Nicholas Pearson, who's an amazing crystal author.

because there, there may not actually really be any truly ethically sourced crystals. And so we need to look at several different factors when we're choosing them. First and foremost, were the people who were mining those crystals in safe working conditions. That's something we want to consider.

Were the people who were mining those crystals paid fairly for their labor? That's a really big consideration. because we don't want physical extraction of the minerals and also extraction of someone's labor and safety. Third, was any child labor used in the mining of those crystals? Because this happens way more than it should.

So much more than most people know, especially from certain locations, we see this. Predominantly, in specific countries in Africa, but not it doesn't mean every crystal that comes from there. It uses child labor. It just means it's more common there. And then fourth, what's the environmental impact of those stones being mined?

A lot of people think, how can we do healing work with crystals when we've taken them from the earth? We ripped them from the earth. This isn't sustainable. This isn't, an ethical practice, environmentally detrimental, but. Yeah. The truth is most crystals that are on the market, so to speak, are secondary to whatever the intended purpose of that mine was, which is usually some sort of ore or something that we need for, electronics industry, things like that.

For the most part. This isn't always true, but for the most part, the crystals are not the primary thing that is being sought out. So I think it's really important to recognize that, and a lot of people will say things like, I don't want to work with crystals because they're not ethical. you and I are sitting here chatting, on the internet, on our computers right now.

We all have cell phones or iPads or whatever we have. The minerals and the mining practices that go into creating those things are so much more detrimental than The crystals that we work with for healing for again, for the most part speaking pretty broadly. So I think when we are choosing our crystals, we need to be really, mindful and ask good questions.

Those four questions. Are they, are the workers safe? Are the workers paid fairly? No child labor used. And what's the environmental impact? I also think that because in this industry, people know that. Ethical sourcing is important to a lot of consumers. People are throwing around terms like ethically sourced or consciously sourced without really.

Answering those four questions. consciously sourced, especially it's like a red flag term for me, because what does that really mean? and some places are better than others. Some sources will really discuss their practices for sourcing, how they vet their suppliers, all that stuff. That's great.

But as a consumer asks those questions, don't just ask, is this an ethically sourced crystal? Because a lot of times the answer you'll get is just yes. in what ways is it ethically sourced? so this is really important to ask. And in a conversation that Nicholas Pearson and I had on my podcast in the past, he said, probably the most ethically sourced crystal you could get is the one that you walk out into your backyard and pick up off the ground.

You're not, in the process, destroying any of the plant life or animals. You're not. Contributing to soil erosion, anything like that, you know where it came from, you know how it was sourced, you know everything about it. when we're sourcing crystals, as ethically as possible. this is really important.

And that goes for the mining practice as well as the manufacturing practice. If it was cut, polished, wherever, what's happening with those workers? What's happening with the labor there, the safety conditions, the pay, the environmental impact of that, thinking about where they come from and how far they're shipped, right?

So there's a huge benefit to working with crystals from our local landscape, just as there is from eating locally. 

Cassie: Absolutely. I love what you said about sourcing crystals that are as ethical as possible. I feel like that's a really important distinction. And it's honestly one of the reasons why I stopped selling crystals because I grappled with it so much. Because it is so hard and even asking sometimes it's hard to get straight answers from people. And 

I found that My crystal collection is smaller, but the crystals that I do have or find, because I am a big proponent of letting them find me out in nature, that the relationships that I have with them are so much deeper and more meaningful, even though my collection is a little bit smaller. So there can really be, even though we might not have the biggest, sparkliest collection of crystals, it can still be really, healing and powerful and meaningful. 

Ashley: Absolutely. Some of my favorite stones are ones that I found when I was on, like a road trip with my mom or something like that, where the stone just comes to you.

And it's just like working with plants in that regard, asking permission before you take a stone, both of the stone itself of the land of the landscape. And of course. for legal reasons of the land owners, unfortunately, but that's something that we also need to consider. You can't just go to a state park and pick up a rock.

Cassie: Absolutely. thank you for putting all of that. I know that was a lot of research that you compiled into a really short snippet, because like I said, working with crystals as ethically as possible is such a huge topic. So thank you for bringing all that in into such bite sized pieces for us.

Those are very actionable things that I think a lot of people will appreciate being able to take away. 

Ashley: You're welcome. And I think the most important thing I want to leave people with on that is do your research, ask the questions when you're purchasing those crystals, and just have some awareness, think things through where things are coming from, and don't just take that ethical, ethically sourced label at face value.

Cassie: Absolutely. I agree. 

 Let's talk a little bit about, stones and crystals that Are supportive for grief work. and of course, grief work can run the gamut. grief shows up in our lives in all different ways, not in just the loss of a loved one. but I think, I know for me, I've definitely worked with crystals throughout my various grief journeys. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience and any that you suggest or recommend folks work with. 

Ashley: Yeah, so there are definitely always a few that come to mind for me. One of the ones that I love is Spirit Quartz. Spirit Quartz is a beautiful variety of amethyst, often with some golden iron staining.

And it typically forms in small points or clusters where The main crystals are entirely covered on all their sides by little baby crystals. And then the large crystal termination of the main crystal pokes out of the top. and it's, I think one of the best all around stones for grief. if you've been experiencing grief of any type truly, and.

You can't quite put your finger on how it's affecting you, you just, are feeling it, maybe you can't even identify where it's coming from. Sometimes this is a really supportive stone for helping you work through that, explore some of those feelings, understand, More about the sources opening up your awareness that way, but it's also really good for helping you overcome some of the obstacles that present themselves when we're grieving, right?

Because, I think for all of us, we encounter different obstacles and that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's just Sometimes part of the process. And with this spirit courts, they have this really soft, gentle energy that just helps you feel really supported. and it meets you where you're at, no matter where that is.

And that's something that I really love about this stone. another stone that I love is pink opal. Pink opal has a really nurturing, supportive energy as well. And if I think of a crystal that's You know, when I work with it, it feels like it just giving me a hug and really calming down my body, helping me feel more at ease, more present.

Pink Opal is really good at doing that. I... Struggle with anxiety personally, and this is a stone that I've also found to be supportive in that journey for me, just holding it in my hands, breathing through things, allowing me to calm my mind, calm my nervous system a little bit, and I think A lot of times when we're grieving and having that sort of physical response, just a tactile, physical reminder to be present with whatever we're feeling emotionally, whatever we're feeling in our body, let it sort of roll through us, is really helpful, and for me, Pink Opal has been a great support that way.

I also really like lithium quartz, particularly when our grief is pushing us into states of anger. Which comes up. I think, it's not uncommon for us when we are grieving. Sometimes we let our emotions take over, right? And if you are just in one of those places of rage and you are feeling ready to erupt, I'm not in any way saying don't do that because sometimes that is so healing.

 Like that can be so healing. But, to help you just, Take that breath and calm back down after that sort of comes out how it needs to come out. Lithium quartz is really beautiful, and I think the last crystal that I would love to share is one that I had a big personal journey with when I lost my grandmother and that was rose quartz.

My whole years and years journey of working with crystals, I was never drawn to rose quartz. I thought it was kind of boring. I didn't understand why people liked it. It was run of the mill, like, okay, it's there, I get it, but I just didn't really feel it. But after I lost my grandma in 2018, she passed away, from complications with dementia.

I was really struggling, and I was struggling in so many ways, there's that initial sadness of losing a loved one. but more than that, I think the thing that I... Really felt in the weeks and months after her passing was this deep sense of loneliness. she and I spoke on the phone almost every single day and she was a huge part of my life.

Our relationship was so meaningful to me and suddenly there was just this whole, I never quite realized how listening to her tell me about what she. Made for her and my grandpa for lunch that day, and what prescriptions she went to fill, and, what was blooming in her backyard. I never realized that would leave quite such a big hole in my life when I couldn't just hear her tell me about her day.

Oh my gosh, sorry, I'm getting emotional. 

Cassie: Your emotions are welcome here. 

Ashley: Thank you. She was such a special part of my life and suddenly having that void was really challenging and I missed her so much more even than I thought I would. And all of a sudden, I was really drawn in by Rose Quartz. Anything that was Rose Quartz was just calling to me.

So I had a few pieces in my little crystal tool kit, and they just... Were speaking to me like, we are here for you. So I slept with those in my pillowcase and on my bedside table. I carried them around in my pocket or tucked into my bra. I just had them around me all the time. And I felt comforted.

I felt A tiny bit less lonely, of course, I still miss my grandma. I still do. I miss those conversations. I miss that time. But Rose Quartz was there for me in a way that I didn't really expect and I still can't even quite put my finger on what it was about that stone that was so powerful during that time and so healing, but I just felt held.

I just felt so held and so seen in my grief. And, it's a stone that after, maybe six months, eight months, I noticed I was less and less drawn to, and that was also okay. At first, I was a little nervous. I didn't understand why there was a change. I thought maybe I just, I, there was something with me.

I wasn't able to connect with it in the same way, and I started to realize, no, it was there for me when I really needed it, when I was in that really rough, raw place, and it got me through. And when I started healing and Figuring out how to be a little less lonely, it just wasn't needed in the same way.

And so I learned to let go of the stone and it was like a lesson in grieving all over again that, sometimes we transcend things in our lives too. But I knew that it would always sort of be there for me if I needed it. And unfortunately, last week, we lost one of our chickens, my dear Fanny.

And I turned to my rose quartz again for support because I was feeling, that loneliness of not seeing her out in the backyard with the other hens and just feeling very sad. And so even though it's been You know, five years now since I've last worked with my rose quartz really deeply, I knew that it would be there for me and it was.

Cassie: Thank you for sharing that tender story about your grandma. And I think it so beautifully illustrates how, when working with stones and crystals, this relational aspect of it, and how, if we're open and listening to, the tools that we connect with most, I don't even like to use, there's a better word than tools, but the beings that we connect with the most, that, We open ourselves up to ways of being supported and being held and for you that was that rose quartz and I think for a lot of other people it could be too but what I love about your story is it illustrates how one might find a crystal that maybe isn't listed in a book as a stone that's intended for grief and grief support but how to open yourself up to What beings, what energies are around you that want to support you through any specific grief journey that you're going through?

Because I think it does vary so much for each of us, and I love those suggestions that you offer too, especially Pink Opal. I've worked with Pink Opal before, and as you were describing it, I was just thinking, I need to... I need to get out my pink opal and just spend some time with it because it, I could sense that warm hug feeling.

 I really appreciate all of those offerings and your tender story about rose quartz. 

Ashley: Yeah, I think that exactly what you're saying is so important, Cassie, like feeling empowered to seek out those relationships for yourself is hugely important in this work. Like it doesn't have to come from a list on the internet.

It doesn't have to come from a book. It doesn't have to come from one of the suggestions I just made, but just really opening yourself up to. Yeah. Being aware of what sort of calling to you. One way I really like to do this when I'm feeling some kind of way, and I just need a little support, no matter what it is.

Maybe it's to work with a plant or flower and herb. Maybe it's to work with a crystal. I just find myself still in the present moment and see what sort of Comes to mind, right? I'll usually close my eyes, take a few deep breaths. I'm a fairly visual person. So for me, often something will come in my mind's eye.

Maybe it's a color. Maybe it's a shape. And I'll relate that with something that's around me. And so I'll seek out that plant or that stone or whatever it is. And then I'll pick a few options that sort of remind me of that energy as well, because sometimes if My intuition is not telling me this exact thing that I thought it was, but it's something that's like that.

So I'll put a few different options out, and then I'll usually place those on my altar. I'll make myself really comfortable. Again, close my eyes to get present in the moment. And when I open my eyes, I just see what captures my attention the most. What seems like it has that. Little bit of extra twinkle that little bit extra something that's really speaking to me.

And that's usually the thing that I'll go to. Sometimes it's two things, right? But that'll be the thing that I go to and I work with and, maybe that'll be keeping that on my altar in my ancestor corner. Maybe that will be carrying it with me. Maybe that'll be, wearing that as a piece of jewelry or something, but just having that energy.

Around me to support me when I need it is what's most important. And, finding the method of connecting with those things that works for you. In addition to Seeking out the specific energy like all of that is part of that process of working with these energies. 

Cassie: Absolutely. And I love you answered my next question already. I'm just going to add a little bit to it because I was going to ask you, how are some of the ways that we can work with crystals, when we're working through different phases and specifically grief. and you really spoke to that and I love how you spoke to it in a way that is again, I'm opening myself up to these different energies and allowing So them to guide me, which is something I've been doing a lot in my practice and we work, I know that you and I work in very similar ways.

 So what you described is very similar to how I work and something I've been doing lately specifically with plants, but it would work just as well with crystals is just letting them come to me. So I just, when I'm out for walks, I'm just very aware of what plants get my attention. and just open myself up to what, how would you like me to work with you instead of the reverse of, you know, so much of my spiritual practice has been me going to quartz and saying quartz. I need you for this. And I've done this role reversal of no, I've spent a lot of years asking and taking and now I want to open myself up and listen to what you have to say. And I think there's a lot of opportunity in that with crystals too, and especially with grief because I think As a society, we have such an aversion to talking about death and dying and grief as a part of that.

A lot of us don't really know how to tend to our grief. We're not taught how to tend to our grief. And I think crystals and plants, too, have a unique ability to hold us in our grief because they are more enmeshed in the natural cycles of the earth in ways that we've really, a lot of us have extracted ourselves from, which sort of leads me into my next question, which is something that I've noticed when I've worked with crystals and stones is I'm often reminded Of time and the perception of time and how trees and plants and especially crystals and stones have a very different perception of time and that translates into their perception of grief and loss too. And it's been very comforting for me to feel this energy from crystals of being like. Yes, there is grief here, but there are long periods of grief and we are still here. We are present. and I found a lot of peace in that. So I would love if you could speak to that at all. just this idea of perception of time and how it's so different for crystals and, how much we have to learn 

Ashley: yeah. that is one of the beautiful things about crystals and one of the really fascinating things about crystals. Geologic time is so much different than human time. A lot of the crystals that we work with and build relationship with, they can be millions of years old. Some are thousands of years old, some are millions of years old.

that is... Mind blowing to me and so think of all that they have seen and experienced and bared witness to, from their time of formation until present day, like they've been through so much. And I was actually thinking a little bit about this concept with. Everything that is happening with our environment right now, right?

We are seeing drastic unprecedented effects of climate change currently, and I've really been struggling, as I'm sure so many have with the heaviness of that and grieving for our planet. And it made me think what some of these stones. Must feel right now, like I feel like in a way that maybe they haven't experienced grief before they are probably grieving, holding space for the earth, holding space for the creatures of the earth, the plants, the animals and humanity, and I think that it's, I think that it's something that is so different that they are going through, probably at the same time that we are experiencing that.

That our grief is in a way collective and that we can find even deeper community in our grief with the land around us because of that, because I think maybe for one of the first times, probably the very minerals from the earth itself are feeling that same weight of grief, even in their perspective of geologic time, because things are so different, but it also gives me hope that like what you said, Cassie, Thank They have seen so much and they have been here for so long, that the perspective is a bit different.

And I think finding those points of commonality with the mineral kingdom, with the plant kingdom can be really supportive of us. One of the things that when my grandma passed away, one of the ways that I chose to work with that rose quartz is I just took it outside in the yard. no shoes, no socks, just put my feet on the earth and closed my eyes and held that stone over my heart and just felt the sun shining down on me and thought, where can I go to Again, be held.

And it was that asking of what do you want me to do? How do you want me to work with you that you were saying? I definitely was not conscious of that, but it was very much being open to being led. And I made my way over to this very old willow tree in my yard. It's got to be 150 years old, at least.

It's absolutely massive. And I sat under the willow tree holding this rose quartz over my heart. And it wasn't until later that I learned of the connection of willow trees with mourning. And I thought, well, how appropriate is that? but like you were saying, you know, there is this difference in perspective with minerals, which are so old or these very ancient beans and trees.

Which are a little younger than that, but still very much older than many of us. And then our own human timeline, but we can still find these points of connection. I think between those varying perspectives, of what it means to exist and what it means to be and of what it means to experience loss.

Cassie: Thank you, Ashley. That was beautiful and it's just got me thinking about just, relationships that we have with these, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, and how, just how beautiful it is that, we're able to be held and hold, even though, as humans, we're learning how to hold, but we are, and I think that's the love that exists. From the plants, the trees and the crystals to continue to teach us how to be in right relationship with them is a real testament of love. and a real, just such a beautiful part of grief. That's something that, that really arises from being able to grieve deeply. 

Ashley: So beautiful. Yeah. It's just feeling very nourishing.

I'm grateful to be here with you and having this conversation. 

Cassie: Me too. Is there anything else that you would like to share that's on your heart about grief or crystals, before I ask you a closing question? 

Ashley: I think just leaving everyone with the idea that it really is about finding your own way and forging your own relationships and being respectful.

I think that's one of the most important things that we can do with any energies that we're working with, but, not being. confined, not being afraid that you're going to make a mistake. We'll all make mistakes and it, if you're working with the intention to be in right relationship, if you're keeping that in your awareness, I think for the most part you won't go wrong.

So allow yourself that opportunity to explore, to build relationships, to get to know your stones or your plants or the land that you walk on. and just. find joy in that process and find joy, even in your grief. I think sometimes it feels so heavy, that we question those moments of joy or we feel guilt over them.

And, just allow yourself to be held, allow yourself to feel loved and supported and nurtured by those energies around you. and allow yourself. Just a little rest, a little deep breath. 

Cassie: Thank you. and the last question I want to ask you just goes back to the name of the podcast, Rooting Into Wholeness.

And I would just love to hear a little bit about what brings you, what reminds you of that sense of your innate wholeness these days. ? 

Ashley: It's making art. It doesn't matter what the medium is, what the format is.

If I can be completely in that flow of creation, I feel so connected and aligned and so much like myself. Like people always talk about, being your authentic self and whatever that means. I really, truly feel most like myself when I'm deep in that process of creation. and I think part of it is because there is such a range of experience that can be present, right?

You can find joy, you can find grief, you can find frustration, you can find pleasure, you can find all of these things when you're in that act of creating something. And for me, I think that's the thing that is Nourishing my soul absolutely more than anything else and helping me feel completely whole.

Cassie: Oh, I needed to hear that. So thank you for sharing that. That is. Medicine that I need to get back in touch with, so I appreciate the reminder. and before we close, I'd love for you to share with folks just where they can find you, where they can connect with you. 

Ashley: Sure, I would love for everyone to head over to my website.

Love and light school. com. Feel free to check out tons of free resources there. There's blog posts, articles. You can find links to my podcast there, as well as learn more about classes and guided meditations over on insight timer, all that good stuff. You can also find me on Instagram at love and light school.

If you enjoy listening to the conversation, Cassie and I are having, I'd love to talk with you more. So send me a DM. Thank you. 

Cassie: All right. Thank you so much, Ashley, for coming on. What rich and nourishing conversations. I appreciate you. 

Ashley: Thank you so much for having me.

Sacred Links Between Grief & Pleasure with Kalah Hill

Hello, dear ones. I’m coming to you with the first guest podcast in a new series all about grief and grief tending and what it can look and feel like when we apply a spiritual lens.

This four-part series will explore grief tending through pleasure, astrology, plant magic, and working with crystals. One of the many gifts I’ve received from my work with grief and death is learning how much wisdom and healing can be found in walking with my grief more intentionally. I’ve learned that grief is not an isolated emotion to be relegated to the loss of a beloved. Grief is ever present and has so much to teach us. As my work shifts deeper into rites of passage around death and reclaiming magical practices I’ve been severed from, I continue to learn more and more from my ability to be with and tend to my grief and how connected grief is to so many other topics, like pleasure, ancestral work, and reclaiming a personal magical practice. 

This first episode with Kalah Hill is so, so rich. I embarked on the Maiden to Mother Teacher Training hosted by Sarah Durham Wilson and many others over the last year, and Kalah was one of the facilitators during the training. When I say this training rocked my world, it’s truly an understatement. It’s also the inspiration for my upcoming retreat I mention in this episode. But for today, I want to focus on the work I experienced with Kalah and how it opened my eyes to the deep connections between grief and pleasure. 

Freedom Doula and Pleasure activist Kalah Hill is the founder of In Pleasure We Trust. Through her many years as a student of trust, Kalah regenerates space with her clients with care and sweet rootedness. Kalah evokes permission for sovereignty within the landscape of our social interdependency. In her work, Kalah unravels the illusions of systemic oppression that create communities of conformity and insatiability. Kalah’s loving practice reveals the human capacity to be in equanimity, trust, and deep satisfaction. Her healing balm of pleasure is how she creates a bridge of solidarity in crossing the threshold into liberation. Kalah’s experience and facilitation is multidisciplinary, ranging from biological and ecosystem-based sciences, somatic coaching, social justice, maiden to mother lineage, and doula work. 

Here’s our chat. Click below to listen, or scroll to read.

The text below is a transcript of our recorded conversation. Grammatical and spelling errors may be present.

Cassie: hello, welcome, Kayla. I’m so happy to have you here and to chat about Pleasure and grief and all the juiciness that comes with those topics. So welcome. 

Kalah: Thank you. Cassie. It’s so nice to be here. I’m really excited. 

Cassie: Me too. before we dive into those juicy topics, I would love to hear a little bit about. The land that you’re on and maybe what that land is sharing with you today or how it’s showing up, which is a practice that I learned from Dr. Rocio Rosales Mesa that I just really love and think it’s such a beautiful way to start a space. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that from you. 

Kalah: Gorgeous.

Yeah, I’m on, the, occupied stolen territory of Guamares, the Guamares people, and I guess today known as San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. and this land has been teaching me a lot, actually. That’s such a good question. I’ve been based in Costa Rica for the last six years, in, Chorotega territory.

And I recently came out of the jungles and into the desert, mountainous, regions and it’s a completely different landscape than what I’ve been accustomed to and what I’ve been working with and I really work closely in partnership with the land. I do a lot of different ritual,and just honoring and grounding and nourishment and giving back.

And so giving back to. This land has been so clear to me that it’s time for me to transition fully out of the jungle, and I’ve been shown a lot of beauty in that transition thus far, and I’m just listening right now. I’m very new to this land. I’ve only been here for three months, so I’m, paying my dues, so to say.

and still cultivating a bond and a connection. 

Cassie: Beautiful, thank you. I didn’t realize that you had just moved, so recently. I didn’t realize I had, I’ve changed, I’ve recently came from the desert to the Midwest, so I have a reversal of lands that I’m getting to know, so I know that, that place well.

Kalah: Yeah, it’s quite potent. There’s A lot of good workings here for me, and I’m very grateful that I’m so attuned to my orientation, my, my earthly orientation. I’m very clairsentient. So wherever my body is. really matters. The environment matters. And I’m just grateful that I have such clarity around movement and where I need to be at any given moment.

So yeah, it’s beautiful. 

Cassie: I’ll pay, honor to the place that I’m on to, which I’m on, occupied Miami or Miami land, which is in so called Indiana in the States. And. I am really loving the way the land is showing up and appearing today because we’re deep in the waning moon might be in the dark moon and I’m on my moon cycle and it is overcast and cloudy and rainy outside, which feels so nourishing and like what the earth needs and what I need.

So it’s feeling, very well aligned within my body and out in the land. as far as your work, I would love to hear a little bit about what brought you to your work and maybe a little bit about your lineage and that could be ancestral lineage to what brought you to your work or just teacher lineage, whatever speaks to you and resonates and wants to come out.

but just a little bit of your journey and process to coming to the work that you do now.

Kalah: Well, I guess it always begins with the mother, right?

Um, yeah, well, I was born to Deborah, a beautiful woman. I call her a white witch. My white witch mother, descendant from, English and German blood and a wild woman, a mystic and single mom. And, I just learned, I learned a lot from my mother in terms of the capacities that I have with magic and mystery and Otherworldly ventures There was a lot of access to exploration and curiosity. I was given full permission for those things really raised, to enjoy life really raised to, be in pleasure, whether it was in my body or whether it was with food or with imagination or fantasy, those things were very much fostered. The pieces that I’ve had to pick up along the way involve my mother’s inability to be fully actualized in the 3D practical world.

And that was really challenging for her and for us. Growing up from me growing up, it was,very unstable kind of material financial situations. And so I now am in this place of creating context and bringing the dream into reality and really creating heaven on earth because I know heaven to be so true.

because of these like early on gifts of access to pleasure and enjoyment. And I remember, and I’m going to get just real honest. I remember, I started self pleasuring when I was four years old and my mother had caught me. I was in the back of the car. I was in the car exploring, It was, open.

And my mother said, asked me what I was doing. And I told her, oh, I found this thing. Oh, it’s so pleasurable. And she was incredibly supportive. She said, oh, that’s called masturbation. It’s really great for you. And. But you do it in the privacy of your bedroom, right? Because I was about to go public. And I think because of that fostering, and that, literal, no shame, no judgment around me accessing this pleasure in my body from the age of four to literally today, age 38, I just have decades of practice when it comes to, Harnessing and accessing my pleasure and enjoying myself and there’s that bleeds out into everything, right?

Like it’s not just a masturbation practice any longer. It’s like a life form of its own that really has sprung from that initial, that initial, finding inside of myself. so I’ve had a lot of amazing cultivation, as well as, my father’s side, my father’s lineage, my father is African American, black man in the United States from Harlem, and I just love to seep in black feminist literature, I love the lineage of pleasure that is the thread line of so much of.

That work, when we talk about Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Maya, Angelo, Nikki Giovanni, all of these brilliant black feminist writers who really saw pleasure as a critical piece of the liberation movement and the movement towards. Justice and activism work, and it’s, adrian maree brown, who just published Pleasure Activism a few years ago, really brought that collection of work together in one great piece of work, and I love that book.

It’s It’s like my Bible and because I didn’t grow up with my father and I now have a relationship with him going on about 14 plus years now. I’ve known my father and it’s been really great to actualize those components of my lineage as well. And so I definitely spring from that. And in terms of teachers, I think you and I are familiar.

We have the same teacher, Sarah. Sarah of Magdalene and she’s really supported me in the mother wound work and working with my white witch and my white witch mother, who is brilliant but also very much, indoctrinated by the patriarchy and really exiled in many ways. and it’s been so reparative to work with Sarah.

I also have a really great embodiment, embodiment dance teacher, Amber Ryan. She comes from the Five Rhythms lineage. She studied with Gabrielle Raw and, my somatics, coaching teacher. So my best friend. Who I grew up with, actually. Her name is Dana Regan, and she’s the founder of the Somatic Soul Coaching School, which I am now on faculty for as well, and also certified as a Somatic Soul Coach.

So we’ve done a lot of embodiment work with various teachers and really beloved women in my life. It’s been a great healing journey.

Cassie: I really enjoyed hearing more about your story because yes, as Kayla mentions, the way that I found, I got to know her was through, Sarah Durham Wilson, mother to maiden teacher training.

The third cohort of it that has almost come to an end. but it has just been a beautiful transformative supportive, training. One that I am just internally grateful to have been a part of and to meet so many amazing women like Kayla. and so many things are coming up. For me, just about what you shared about your lineage and your ancestry, one thing, you know, I love that you shared so honestly about self pleasuring at a young age, because I think it ties in so beautifully to pleasure and grief.

And I also have a similar story, and it’s one that’s Burned into my memory and not in a bad way, but you talking about it is just bringing up a lot of curiosity around this memory that I have. I was, I had a similar experience where I was self pleasuring. I was probably four, maybe five. And I was, it was just in the living room, like in front of the TV, just laying on the floor.

And I remember my mom just being like, what’s she doing over there? And she wasn’t. It wasn’t there wasn’t any judgment or shaming associated with it, which I’m very grateful for. But then when I think about that same kind of. Self pleasuring as a adolescent, I can sense all the shame attached to it. And I’m like, when did that happen?

How did that happen? and I feel like a big part of the teacher training, the mother to maiden teacher training has been me really rediscovering and reclaiming that pleasure in a very personal, liberatory way. 

but yeah, I would love to just hear you share more about, any musings or insights you’ve noticed in that relation between grief and pleasure and specifically self pleasure and those shifts that happen from that young age of just innately knowing that we have this ability to bring such pleasure to ourselves.

And then those shifts that happen that so many of us come into feeling shame around pleasure, which then turns to grief at a lot of times. Yeah. 

Kalah: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to say, yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like, welcome to planet Earth, where you will be, under threat of shame, guilt. It’s a consequence of our, of our current state of affairs and of a long history of, repression and oppression and systems that, that really are no longer sustaining, sustaining us.

And it’s so curious to me because I find this to be true for every single human is that there’s this original innocence. Where think of it’s as a young girl, just like self pleasuring in public or just in broad daylight, not even thinking twice about it. Oh, yeah, this feels good.

I’m going to do it. And. That’s what I’m trying to get back to, and not that I’m trying to masturbate in public. That I’m trying to get back to that sense of full permission and choice over my own body. Which, as most of us know, if any of us are not living inside a cave, that, women’s bodies… have been under threat for millennia for thousands and thousands of years.

Our bodies have been under threat and access to agency over our own bodies is at threat and alive and well today, especially with the Supreme Court ruling overturning of Roe versus Wade, right? All of these things have come now. There’s so much shadow work, I think, available to us, and this is where I find that when someone really accesses or remembers their pleasure for the first time in maybe, let’s say, 25 years.

There are calcifications that have formed inside of our nervous systems, inside of our bodies, that as we chisel away at those calcifications and break them open by liberating our pleasure, we’re reminded of the great grievance. That is also there in the way of we’ve kept ourselves from ourselves for far too long, and there’s something to mourn about that.

And so the way that I practice and the way that I work with clients is that I work really slowly at like piece by piece, chisel by chisel. Removing these calcifications to open to the softening of what is truly and inherently, our birthright, essentially, to be a soft human, to be safe enough, to be upheld to be, actualized, in the truth of our pleasure.

that is a process in and of itself of unraveling usually decades of shame and fear and guilt and oppression and violence and abuse and, the list goes on of what we’re unraveling. But in that unraveling, there’s a deep cathartic release that tends to happen. And typically it’s in the form of a grievance in the form of tears.

maybe there’s anger, right? we start to go through all of these stages of grief when we open to our pleasure and that’s what I see time and time again. 

Cassie: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what inspired me to reach out to you for this was, during the teacher training, I had the pleasure of getting to be led by Kayla to, to embark on some pleasure work and what stood out to me and these were in groups.

So it was a non sexual pleasure, that we were cultivating and building and. I think that’s also such a, it’s just such a big part that, I was lacking for my personal practice. And I think something else that came up was, either in the reading, but I think it’s come up in some of the training too.

It’s just the. Pleasure that can be inherent and just in, in female relationships and friendships, that’s non sexual. And that is something that I did not even realize how much grief I had. Around that topic of all of the years of, Oh, there can be pleasure. There can be sensuality in these relationships that are not relationships with, an sexual partner, but there can still be that sensuality and pleasure there and reclaiming that.

And the grief. Oh my gosh. That is where I felt a lot of grief is around those untapped relationships where it was like a veil was lifted. Oh, I can have pleasure and sensuality in these relationships to sign me up. how do I return to that? I would love to hear you share just about, I don’t know how that’s shown up in your work or ways to cultivate that because I have found it to be a little bit.

Trickier, I would love to hear anything that’s coming up for you around that. 

Kalah: Yeah, there’s a deep need, I think, and a deep calling inside of the culture and inside of our individual bodies for touch.

And for somatic residency with one another, and there’s a couple things that came to mind. one is that we’re essentially like primates, right? We’re essentially primates, and I think that in our biology, we are wired to basically like, groom and cuddle each other. there’s something like, if you see chimpanzees or bonobos,they really, they’re always in the herd.

They’re always like grooming each other, sifting through their hair, and there’s this, real biological, mechanism that is hardwired for touch. So there’s that piece. And then I also sense another thing going on, maybe a little bit deeper around, not deeper, but just different context of we don’t need to be speaking as much it’s not so much about what we’re saying.

It’s more about how we are co regulating things. With each other by actualizing contact with each other. And, I remember reading a book by Parker J. Palmer called Let Your Life Speak. And he went through a series of really deep depressions, clinical grade depressions, and he was pretty much bedridden for months.

And, He said that the least helpful people during that time were the people who would come over and say, Oh, Parker, why don’t you get up and take a walk? Or let’s go out in the sunshine and get some fresh air. Or how about what have you eaten today? Let’s eat something together. It was like a lot of let’s get up and out of this.

And he said the most helpful person was this man, a fellow platonic male friend who would come over and he wouldn’t say anything. He would come over, he would walk in, and he would just rub his feet and he would do, give him a foot massage, Three times a week or something. And he said that was the most impactful experience during his deep depression because he felt finally that he could just be and he felt deep connection to the person that he was with.

Whereas these other people who were trying to like fix the problem and find a solution. Really, he felt completely disconnected from them. And so I do feel that touches radical and radically healing, and it’s part of, now post coven really becoming a part of my. private practice with individuals and laying of hands on what it is to even just braid each other’s hair or,take a bath together.

I do a lot of ritual bath work. And yeah, we hyper sexualize all of this. And I think it’s been hyper sexualized as like a colonial tactic to divide and conquer us from each other. Because, I can’t, have sexual relations with all of these people. I don’t want to, so I guess I can’t actually touch them.

I guess I can’t actually get into a bath with them and, play with each other’s hair, there’s all of these things that have been removed from our innate, biological needs. as a species and now it’s, it’s like we’re well enough, I think, and safe enough, at least I am. And so I take that privilege and I use it wisely to, to reestablish these connections and to practice touch as often as I can.

Obviously in consensual ways, right? It’s all in agreement. and it’s all a choice. And that’s the piece that is so liberating and wildly free. It just, it’s so nourishing to the soul. And even, even self touch right the work that we did. And in the maiden to mother journey with that one pleasure call, it’s like rose brushing.

it’s looking, it’s mirror work. it’s, how are you touching your own body is also like a really great indicator of, where you’re at in terms of opening to and responding to these inherent pleasure, wirings and codes that lie inside our nervous systems that are really wired for success.

Like they will bring a lot of, let’s say satisfaction to one’s experience. and whether that satisfaction feels good or feels bad is also not a thing, right? Because sometimes what I’ve noticed with touch is that it unlocks. Tapestries inside of my own body that actually don’t feel great. I feel really sad when they are unlocked and I’m able to go into that morning and I’m able to go into that pain a lot easier when I have appropriate touch in my life.

Cassie: I love how you phrase that. It really helped me make a little switch in my head because I’ve, like I said, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this with you is because I see this inherent connection between pleasure and grief. And I was thinking of it, in one way, touching into the pleasure brings up the grief, but it’s also what can bring healing to the grief.

It’s what enables us to be with it. So it’s like a both and, all encompassing sort of situation and yeah, I’ve, it’s Become a more regular part of my practice. I would say since the maiden to mother journey movement, pleasure embodiment, like all of those things have just become like daily parts of my practice and ways that it wasn’t because I’m like, Oh, I like, I need this.

I have to have this in order to continue, the direction that I would like to go in. if I want to be in the grief, I have to have the pleasure to. 

Kalah: Yes. And see how that’s like a reclamation of agency right there, which is like a critical pillar for freedom. Yeah. Yeah. It’s there’s so many layers and it’s so multidimensional, but it really, it’s almost like there’s this inherent genius that lives inside of our bodies.

And if we just shut up for two seconds. We just stopped talking, then this genius is allowed to arise and what happens then is, really what I think most freedom fighters have been fighting for a very long time and screaming Hey, listen, if you follow this thread line, I promise.

I promise that you will make it through. so it’s time, I think, to also just start listening to these people. I think, it’s time to start listening to Indigenous people, Black queer folks,it’s just time.

Fast. Listening to that and also listening to the genius of your body. Yeah. 

Cassie: Yeah, definitely. I would love to hear, just any offerings that you might have for titrating into this, because I know one thing that I noticed as somebody who did not have a really prominent pleasure practice. That it does require some titration, like there needs to be,because like you said, there are so many layers, it’s so connected to grief.

So what are some ways to slowly move into that and bring it to the forefront and one’s practice. 

Kalah: Yeah, yes, this is so important. So I am like, trauma informed. I’m not a trauma specialist, but I’m a trauma informed coach. And what that means to me is that I understand, the workings of trauma and how it exists in the body.

And When we are healing trauma, the word titration is thrown around a lot and it’s so critical and it basically means that there’s this slow drip over time of discharging that trauma out of the body. So releasing the trauma, actually, it doesn’t happen in one moment, one big cataclysmic moment, because if it did, it would retraumatize the nervous system and put us back to where we started.

And so we titrate. The same goes for intake. So when we are, let’s say, intaking,we need hydration and we’re hooked up to an IV. That hydration, that water and those, all those you know, nutrients are coming out, but they’re dripping and they’re going very slowly. That’s why it takes an hour up to an hour to rehydrate the body, right?

Because it takes, that slow titrated, experience for the body to actually uptake the hydration. So it’s the same with the pleasure. You can’t just, bombard yourself with, let’s say, I don’t know, you don’t have a pleasure practice at all, and then you just, go to some sort of, huge orgy or something, off the bat, you know, like, this is what I’m going to do, it could be not safe.

so I recommend, really enjoying the slowness. It’s like I see honey, like I get a visual of honey dripping from the comb and like how slowly and how delicious that is. Like my mouth is watering just thinking about that image. And so there’s so many different practices. I’ll name a few.

One is really working with the element of water. And so to me, water is pleasure central. I don’t know. There’s just so much about water. it holds and stores memory. we’re like 70% water. there’s a lot of it. With water and frequency and working with that element that I just love.

I also love how versatile water is. It can be a solid, a liquid and a gas. it’s incredible element. So bathing is like a big practice of mine. I know not everyone has access to a bathtub, so it’s not necessarily that you need to have access to a bathtub. But if you do, I highly recommend bathing.

But it’s more about the ritual around water. So whether it’s bathing, showering, walking to a body of water, whether that body of water is a lake, a stream, an ocean, a fountain in the middle of a city, right? Really finding water. access. It could also even just be a glass of water and you’re going to intentionally be with the water.

So in whatever way that means to you, whether that’s getting into the water, whether that’s getting around water, whether that’s ingesting water, you’re going to intentionally be with the water and you’re going to be with the water for as long as you want. So this is also what’s great about pleasure practice is that this is about what you want.

This is about what you need. So if you need five minutes, great. If you need five hours, great. And I recommend really aiming for what it is that you need. Now, it might take several months to get to a five hour intentional practice with water, right? what does that even entail? But what if we got curious with our own selves?

And this is where the original innocence comes in, because if we think about children, they’re not questioning Oh my God, do I have enough time? Or what am I going to do? Am I going to get bored? Oh, this might not work for me. They literally just go straight in to the practice of play. boom, no, no thoughts, no questions or nothing.

They are just ready. So we all have that. Become from that. We were all Children at one point in our lives and regardless of our upbringing and our household circumstances, because I definitely lived in one that was quite chaotic and tumultuous as well. So I understand that as well. I do know that the more work I do and remembering him.

That child like piece, I can find her and she is very alive and she is very well and she is very much ready to play and very much ready to explore. And so this is where I invite you to get crafty and creative and. Enjoy your time. You can put different things like in the water. Like I do a lot of ritual with just like putting stuff in the water, like flowers or crystals or oils or really anything.

Or if I’m walking along a stream and I find different rocks or I’m on the beach and I find different shells, I’ll go to the water and return those to the water. a lot of my practices are sparked by spontaneity and in intuition. And so like in the moment, it’s what am I intuitively craving? What am I intuitively wanting or desiring?

And can I actualize that for myself? It might be like, oh, I’m like. Walking down the beach and I like intuitively want to go and just immerse myself in the water. Okay, I’m gonna go do that. Or maybe I don’t want to go in the water that day and I want to sit on the edge and I want to just listen to the water.

Okay, I’m gonna do that. What do I hear from the water? All of this is ritual, and all of it is true, especially when it’s integrous to you. So that’s what I invite people to, is like their own innate knowing. I know, I like to give a little bit of structure and give people examples, but at the same time, it’s like we get to co create this.

I’m not, I don’t have the magic key. I’m human here with you. Exploring and figuring things out as I go, and I just invite all of us to have that courage to really trust ourselves again.

Cassie: Yes, I love that. You brought it back to the, honoring our inherent wisdom around pleasure. And that’s certainly what I’ve noticed. and especially with the slowness, what I’ve been finding for me is that The pleasure lives in the slowness and that when I can be in when I can pace myself on that way, the pleasure, the intuitions around experiencing sensory pleasure come in almost automatically, I’ll catch myself just walking outside and, just.

Bask in the sunlight and feel the sun on my skin and hear the sounds of the birds and just melt into the pleasure of it. And it’s like without the slowness, I can’t find that. So it’s been, for me, it’s been really pleasurable and just exciting and playful to have those moments just come in without forcing.

It’s just because my pace has slowed down. and you’re speaking my language with the elements. I love working with the elements. And water is, It’s such a fun one to work with. Yeah. 

Kalah: And fire can be great, like sunbathing, tending to a fire, lighting a candle, getting into a sauna, getting a hot water bottle, putting it at your feet, and like on a cold day.

There’s so many aspects of, Engagement, and it’s really it’s very sensorial. So it’s coming back to the body. And so really anything that’s going to activate the senses and be a pleasure practice. It’s that’s the thread line is that we’re awakening to sensation. and in that, I think we are awakening to our lives and that’s where we get to.

Kind of die and be reborn again, not to be sound like. Super like culty or something, but like to, to really shed those layers of, numbness, I’d say, and disassociation that are great, intelligent coping mechanisms for the environments in which we’ve been born into. So I’m not denying the intelligence of, numbing because that in and of itself has safeguarded a lot of our.

a lot of our psychology for a long time, but as we release into new ways of being with each other, and as we collectively start to heal, we’re going to have to shift out of, states of disassociation and start to stay in the body. And then over time, there’s actually really great practice around conscious numbing, which Adrian Marie Brown talks about a lot, too.

Which basically gives us those moments of reprieve, Hey, you know what, I’m going to Netflix and chill and just zone out for two hours, and that’s totally, I think also very healthy too. So it’s not to say that

one is better than the other, or we’re in some sort of place. That’s not okay. It’s to say all of it is welcome. And when we welcome all of it, then we get. To be free. there’s no, we don’t have to compartmentalize so much. We don’t have

to, like, how has the tapestry of our bodies been colonized? Like, how has the tapestry of our sensation? been, compartmentalized, like divided and conquered and almost there’s like a dictator inside of at least there was inside of me, this dictator said,this is only permissible under certain circumstances and certain ways.

And if it’s not that, then that doesn’t come out. And there was a lot of regulation and rules going on in terms of like, when I was allowed to feel something and when I wasn’t. And to basically say, no, I have full permission to feel my experiences in any given moment. to have sensation run through my body.

It is my birthright. To have access to my bodily autonomy and to make choice from a space of feeling and sensation as opposed to a space of logic, really reframes and reshapes the entire experience of your life. So to me,it’s, it’s a power move. It’s a big power move to reincorporate pleasure.

Cassie: Absolutely. Yeah, I really resonate with what you said about that, the inner dictator, because I’ve certainly, I’m sure it’ll be a lifetime of unraveling that, but the inner dialogue is sometimes I don’t have time, I think you mentioned that I don’t have time for this, I need to be productive, all of those things that capitalism, patriarchy, tell us that we, I can’t do this because I need to be doing this.

and I’m at the part of it where there’s a lot of, okay, let’s pause, let’s, is this truth or is this? the inner dictator. I like that I have a name for it now. I’m going to borrow that if that’s okay. My inner dictator that’s trying to keep me from pleasure because I’m not about it anymore.

I’m ready to cut ties with them. 

Kalah: yes. so many aspects that have tried to keep us safe and that’s why it’s like there I have compassion because these are all coping strategies under pretty severe conditions, you know, we’re talking about. Stomach oppression and you know how our bodies have adapted to those environments.

And so I have a lot of compassion for the inner dictator. And at the same time, my pleasure is not their domain. That’s not the domain dictator. That’s not where they rest in my body anymore. 

Cassie: Absolutely. I don’t want to keep you for too long, so I’m just going to ask you a couple more questions before we wrap up.

but when those, because I, you know, I think about, I know for me, that inner dictator, and like we’ve already mentioned, grief comes up in so many ways, but I know for me, I have had a lot of grief as well around that inner dictator, and Remembering that I do, get to experience pleasure and I get to decide when and how I experience pleasure.

And then I will, sometimes I can go into that spiral of, Oh, I, of either feeling bad about it or feeling bad about how much I’ve missed out because I listened to the inner dictator for so long. So handling when those, griefs arise of. ways to be with them, address them, move with them, as they arise.

Kalah: Yeah. I’ve said this before on another podcast and I’ll just say it again, when I hit these moments of resistance and, or let’s say challenge when there’s shame or guilt that comes up and I start to grieve and I start to get angry and I start to get just really upset about the years that were lost.

I ask myself this question, what is the most loving thing I could do next? And so bell hooks talks about so brilliantly talks about, what it takes to step into a culture of love, what it takes to walk into a love ethic and embody that in our relations. with ourselves and with our communities.

And I think it, it takes asking questions like that in moments of despair. It takes asking the question, what is the most loving thing I can do next to take care of this grief, to take care of this grieving body. Sometimes that’s lying down. Sometimes that’s making a cup of tea. Sometimes that’s taking a walk.

Sometimes that’s brushing your teeth. Sometimes that’s, not brushing your teeth. like it really can be a very simple. exchange of realism, there’s this, sobriety, that comes online, like you sober up when you’re in the middle of this grief and you’re Whoa, like my capacity right now is not of the expectation of what patriarchy or capitalism or these oppressive societies would even deem as like.

normal, whatever you want to call these like really distorted views of how we’re supposed to be showing up as humans. And if we lovingly can slow down and ask these questions and take the next best step towards love, regardless of what that is. I think that we are starting to build cultures of care.

Beyond what we know now when we’re starting to step into unconditional loving space with ourselves and then have more capacity to do that with others. yeah, there’s so much that I think people really need to learn about how to hold space for both pleasure and grief. They’re very similar in the ways in which we hold space for both of those beautiful human attributes.

And it is one that is incredibly loving, incredibly slow and incredibly like non judgmental. It’s just okay, I got to release the control and I got to let go. Otherwise, this is going to consume me. And then I will have lost myself again. And I want to make sure that I stay with myself as much as I can.

in the sensation of all of my life experiences. 

Cassie: Beautiful. I love that invitation. Thank you. as I shared with you, interviews are new to my podcast, so I’m playing around with some sort of a closing question. And though you might’ve already answered this, I would just love to hear, what right now is, bringing you back to your innate wholeness.

Kalah: Gosh, so much. I’m like, Oh God, there’s like a million things that are bringing me back to my wholeness. This is my Gemini rising here. Ooh, I got like 20 million things going on at once. But I think, the first thing that came to me and what’s really been apparent is, the skill of letting go and the skill of saying no.

And how that actually brings me into such deep states of satisfaction and satiation and wholeness. So I am like a genius at the yes, right? that’s what I teach people. I teach people the yes. Like, how do I have you screaming? yes. Like I can probably get you there pretty well. And what I’ve learned though, is that yes, doesn’t just come out of nowhere.

That our no’s are really deep, nourishing, loving. No thank you’s are shaping our yeses. They’re giving definition to our yeses. So it creates this really dynamic partnership. And what I’m experiencing in my life is that as I really honor my own capacity and my own limitations. Which is like a really hard concept for a pleasure, a pleasury stuff.

I’m like, wait, there’s limits.

This is boundless. but to really say listen, this is my capacity. This is where I’m at. And I’m going to have to bow out of this, opportunity or social event or whatever it may be. And really. Safeguard that capacity. I’ve learned that these deep wells of satiation and satisfaction, are experienced.

I’m like, wow. Okay. So the world didn’t implode by me saying no. And what actually became much clearer was like, My definitive yes, and the things that I actually do have capacity for not only capacity but also like deep longing for. and I think that’s just a maturation process, I’m 38, which I feel like is very young.

I feel like talk to me when I’m 60. This podcast is going to be, this interview is going to be great. but I do, I feel very young and I feel that I’m still in deep maturation processes that will. Start to come to light even more and more as I grow into my maturity, and I’m really looking forward to that.

And there’s this real beauty to the boundary work that comes with pleasure. And so that’s been really tantalizing. 

Cassie: I love that and I love your description of your no’s sort of chiseling and carving out what your yeses are like bringing them. Even more fully to life. That’s a really beautiful visual.

Oh, Kayla, I’m so grateful to know you and to have worked with you and for all of the beauty and wisdom you shared with us here. Thank you so much for, for showing up and sharing. And I would just love for you to share, where people can find you, where people can work with you, the ways that they can work with you.

Kalah: Of course. Yeah. So I have my website, which is in pleasure. We trust dot com as well as my instagram at Kayla dot hill. And yeah, there’s lots of fun musings going on there. I’m getting braver shining my light. And so I’ll have more things coming, and always feel free to reach out to me. I love connection.

I’m happy for you to slip into my DMs, honestly, slip into my DMs and ask me out. I’ll probably say yes. I’m such a flirt. I love flirting. I love getting to know people. I’m very curious. And so yeah, I’m always available for a chat, and to connect and yeah, there’s many ways I work with individual clients, privately online and also in person and I do combo packs with that too.

So we’ll have some things online, some things in person. And then I also host group experiences and events of the erotic nature. I’m very ceremonial, very conscious, and intentional. space for going a little deeper into exploring, sensual touch and erotic exploration. So really excited about all those things.

Cassie: Yeah. Yes. Some of those are piquing my interest. I didn’t know about the group. Work that you did. That’s exciting. and I will, of course, I will have all of your links and everything and the show notes so people can find you easily and connect. Wonderful. Thank you again so much, Kayla. 

Kalah: Thank you, Cassie.

My pleasure.