Human with Jess Mills Jess Mills

For our season 4 finale, we have a very, very special episode for you with the incredible Zoe Buckman.  Zoe is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and photography, exploring themes of feminism, mortality, and equality. Zoe was born and raised in Hackney, London, but has lived and worked and raised her beautiful daughter for many years now in Brooklyn, New York. 
After a series of triumphant shows Zoe is now being compared to, and exhibited alongside some of the greatest feminist artists of our time, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Kelly, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle.  So it feels very special to have this time with Zoe to talk about her work, to learn more about how her own stories of tragedy and survival are held within it, and to hear what it means to her to have arrived at this point in her career when it feels things are heading to stratospheric heights…
So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.
Created and hosted by Jess Mills
Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman
Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tree Carr is an author and TEDx speaker who specialises in the realms of: Dreams, Death, Psychedelics, Altered States & Transpersonal Psychology. Tree is a Death Doula, she was ordained in 2021 at The Universal Life Church.  She is a a high priestess witch and master of Wicca. 
Tree's work as a Death Doula involves helping people spiritually, emotionally, existentially and practically at the end of their lives. Tree holds the space for healing, peace, support and compassion during the profound and sacred time of death and dying. As this episode will demonstrate, Tree has an extraordinary and rare ability to lean into the darkness that surrounds our relationship with death, to reveal how most of all, death can be the portal to our most profound experiences of love.
So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.
Created and hosted by Jess Mills
Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman
Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Matania is the founder of Tough cookie, a mental health organisation created to help nurture human resilience.   Michael has said: I work in resilience because I’m interested in how we cope with the inevitable tragedy’s of life, how we tend to the part of us that remains when the rest of us have been decimated.  Michael came to this work following his recovery from psychosis in his late teens, and what follows is one of the most moving personal stories of transformation, and personal courage I have ever heard, so you are truly all in for a very special time with Michael today indeed.
So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.
Created and hosted by Jess Mills
Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman
Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Mahon is a broadcaster, campaigner and co-founder of the groundbreaking and multi-award winning BBC5 Live Podcast ‘You Me and the Big C’. Lauren is founder of the charity GIRLvsCancer, she is a tireless campaigner for cancer awareness and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in medical science by the Institute of Cancer Research London as a prestigious recognition of the impact of her broadcasting, campaigning and activism to date.
I met Lauren her when I was a guest on the podcast a couple of years ago… and the time I had with Lauren and her sensational co-host of You Me Big C, Deborah James, had such a huge effect on me- as many of you listening will know, they co founded the podcast, each of them, as people with very different, but life changing personal journey with cancer- and their mix of emotional intelligence, radical openness and vulnerability, combined with hilarious quick fire banter, and a very refreshing irreverence about this thing that they all refused would define them was just such a gift to be in the presence of…. Particularly as someone who was still very raw and coming to terms with the death of Mum who had recently died from brain cancer… and seeing them I just thought… you know it can be done differently…. And it was a MASSIVE source of inspiration to me and it certainly has been to millions and millions of people all over the country who listened to their podcast every week…
So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.
Created and hosted by Jess Mills
Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman
Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steffy White is a yoga teacher, podcaster and the founder of the brilliant White Light Retreats. I have followed Steffy and all the brilliant things she does for some years now on social media but was so moved in the past year in the way Steffy took to her platform to talk about something quite different: the profound journey she has been on with her partner to conceive a baby.  
The journey to motherhood for many people is straight forward- but for so many others it is not- and, often without any preparation, means them embarking on a journey that for many feels it has turned their worlds inside out. 
However Steffy has also described how the events of this past year have provided the gateway to her greatest initiation into life. She has said “ I thought I was on this journey to have a baby- but what I actually found was an initiation into the alchemy of life.” What follows is a story which is as much about resilience and love as it is about the liberating power of ‘surrendering’ to those things which we cannot control. 
So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 

Created and hosted by Jess Mills
Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman
Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bexy Cameron is a writer, director, and activist. Her first best selling book, a memoir 'Cult Following' which was published last year to widespread awe and acclaim, is currently being transformed into a dramatized series with Dakota Jonson and Riley Ke-oh starring as the leads. It's not surprising that the world from Hollywood to London was set alight but this book, because it is a pure, tender, gripping ferociously brave story which provides a rare and intimate window into what it was like, to grow up inside of the Children of God, one of the most infamous religious sex cults of this century. 
Bexy has spent a lot of her adult life “retelling” the story of her childhood , but this conversation is not about Bexy gratuitously retelling her story, instead this is a  moment to look more deeply at what happened on the inside of her that enabled the internal journey from a childhood of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual incarcerations to lead to a life of truly self realized emancipation.  Amongst many extraordinary things, It is an intimate look at what her story reveals about “our basic human need for connection and purpose, about surviving our childhoods, about the gifts that trauma can bring, and maybe at some point, about forgiveness”.  
So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.
Created and hosted by Jess Mills
Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman
Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.