Wayward Bodies

Elle Bower Johnston
Wayward Bodies

Wayward Bodies is a show exploring our bodies and the messy places they meet the world. Join your host Elle Bower Johnston as she discuss embodiment, body liberation, creativity, healing, and how we show up as our whole selves. You can expect a mix of solo musings and conversations with excellent humans, with a lens of queerness, anti-oppression, body liberation and lots of space for the nuance of being a human.

  1. Reclaiming Pleasure and Power with Tamu Thomas

    02/11/2022

    Reclaiming Pleasure and Power with Tamu Thomas

    Today I'm bringing you a conversation with Tamu Thomas. Our conversation wandered through her own explorations of embodiment and her practice of Non-Linear Movement, the role of pleasure, sensuality and joy in women's wellbeing, reclaiming power and sovereignty, and channelling our energy in a generative way, even as we live in oppressive systems. ABOUT TAMU Tamu Thomas is an emotional well-being coach, writer, workshop facilitator, podcaster and Non-Linear Movement practitioner who helps over-functioning, overworking, high achieving women fall in love with themselves so they can make powerful choices about how they live, love and work. Tamu’s work combines somatics, social work and spirituality with science and soulful systems. She is person-centred, evidence-based, trauma-informed, human-paced, nurturing, intuitive, loving and playful. Tamu’s holistic approach to supporting the bodies, minds and experience of her clients makes her work nurturing, deep and unique – just like her. Tamu’s work is informed by her background of sixteen years in social work, somatic coach training, her love of behavioural neuroscience and polyvagal theory, positive psychology, spirituality and joy. Tamu combines these modalities to create a multifaceted body of work that helps her clients stop using anxiety as a productivity tool and stop normalising burnout. Tamu’s work helps her clients understand who they are so they may begin to tend to their needs, feel safe in their bodies, befriend themselves and begin to enjoy who they are. Tamu supports her clients and workshop attendees understand themselves as valuable and worthy of caring for themselves. This enables them to prioritise their own well-being and life satisfaction alongside success and achievement. Her mission is to help women enhance how they live, love and work by recovering from their addiction to toxic productivity. Find more of her work: Website Instagram WORK WITH ME Be the first to hear about trial breathwork sessions Download the Radical Rest Studio One-to-One Embodiment Guidance LINKS & CREDITS Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

  2. Aliveness in Dying Times with Jennifer Patterson

    19/10/2022

    Aliveness in Dying Times with Jennifer Patterson

    Today's episode is a conversation with the breathworker and herbalist Jennifer Patterson. I’m a huge fan of Jennye’s work and it was a joy to get to chat with her. We covered all sorts of ground and you’ll hear us get into the wavy space between medicine and poison, how we can be in our bodies when they’re places of pain or challenge, being in relationship with the land even as city dwellers, and how she’s practicing turning towards aliveness in what she calls ‘dying times’. ABOUT JENNIFER Jennifer Patterson is a grief worker who uses plants, breath, and words to explore survivorhood, body(ies) and healing. A queer and trans affirming and centering, trauma-experienced herbalist and breathwork facilitator, Jennifer offers sliding scale care as a practitioner through her private practice Corpus Ritual and is a member of The Breathe Network. She has facilitated workshops at healing centers, LGBTQ centers, a needle exchange and harm reduction clinic, online with the Transformative Language Arts Network, sexual violence resource centers, at colleges and universities, veterans hospitals, the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do? and a Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish healing center. She is also a teacher in training programs with The Breathe Network and Breath Liberation Society. She is the author of The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing (Quarto) and editor of the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti- Violence Movement (2016). A graduate of Goddard College’s MA program, Jennifer is finishing a book project focused on translating embodied traumatic experience through somatic practices and critical and creative nonfiction. Find more of her work: corpusritual.com @corpusritual WORK WITH ME Download the Radical Rest Studio One-to-One Embodiment Guidance In Practice, love letters and monthly live practices LINKS & CREDITS Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

  3. Your Life is the Temple with Leila Sadeghee

    24/08/2022

    Your Life is the Temple with Leila Sadeghee

    Today's episode is a conversation with the magical Leila Sadeghee. We spoke about the divine feminine, her journey from the art world to mysticism and how we can make our lives the temple in which we connect with the divine. I loved the places we wandered in this conversation. Wandering seems like a fitting word, since we talked about the nonlinear nature of spiritual awakening, and the deep devotion we need to be able to trust that spiralling path. stopping along the way to look at pilgrimage and ritual practices, going inwards to find the medicine that will save you, and dismantling oppression as a spiritual endeavour. ABOUT LEILA Skilled at creating powerful healing spaces wherever her voice is heard, Leila is a practical mystic and a channel for beautiful healing energies. Known for her talent in bringing the depth of the esoteric spiritual traditions into salient and accessible focus, she is a master ritualist and caller of community centered in collective care and spiritual awakening. Leila is dedicated to dissolving systemic oppression as a spiritual practice, and she is a devotee of the Divine Mother in all Their forms; she is also pilgrimage enthusiast for whom walking on sacred ground brings ecstatic satisfaction. Based in the UK, Leila leads ritual healing events, sacred pilgrimages, immersions in spiritual practices, yoga teacher training, and utterly magical retreats online and around the globe. Find more of her work: Revel in Worth retreat www.leilasadeghee.com www.vesselofworth.com

  4. Remembering our Roots with Marika Heinrichs

    10/08/2022

    Remembering our Roots with Marika Heinrichs

    Today I'm bringing you a conversation that I got to have with Marika Heinrichs all about embodiment and whiteness, rediscovering ancestors and doing what we don’t know how to do. I’m so pleased that I can finally share this conversation with you. Marika and I wandered through our birthright to being in connection with the world and the cultural disconnection we have to clear to return to that. We spoke about having consent and finding lineages that are ours (especially as two white practitioners), learning to listen through more than just our cognitive capacities, and the inherent queerness of embodiment. ABOUT MARIKA Marika Heinrichs (she/her) is a cis queer femme of (Soviet) German, British, and Irish ancestry who believes that reconnecting with the wisdom of our bodies is vital to ending systems of domination and supremacy. She has practiced as a somatic therapist and educator within social movement spaces for over a decade. Marika has trained in the lineages of generative somatics, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), Focusing, and NeuroAffective Touch and is currently a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Marika holds a commitment to pushing back against the appropriation of BIPOC cultural wisdom that happens so often in mainstream somatics, as well as to cultivate spaces for people of European ancestry to connect with something in ourselves older than whiteness, through embodied practice. She lives in Guelph, Canada on the lands of the Attawandaron/Chonnonton/Neutral Peoples, also the treaty land of the Mississaugas of the New Credit and part of the Dish with One Spoon Covenant. Find more of her work: wildbody.ca @wildbodysomatics WORK WITH ME Download the Radical Rest Studio One-to-One Embodiment Guidance In Practice, letters on embodiment magic in the real world LINKS & CREDITS Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

  5. Embrace Your Brokenness With Theo Wildcroft

    27/07/2022

    Embrace Your Brokenness With Theo Wildcroft

    In this first conversation of Season 2, I had the pleasure of talking with Theo Wildcroft. We spoke about about being in relationship with wildness, neurodiversity, disability justice, the way story creates space for us to exist in wholeness, and the power of embracing your brokenness. ABOUT THEO Theo Wildcroft, PhD is a teacher, writer and scholar working for a more sustainable relationship between our many selves, the communities that hold us, and the world that nourishes us. Her research considers the democratization of yoga post-lineage, and the many different ways yoga communities are responding to concerns about safety in practice. She is at the forefront of the movement for trauma sensitivity, diversity and inclusion. She blogs and writes articles on yoga, on social justice, on hope, and on untold stories. She’s a lover of vulnerable people, of wild things and wild places, and of the simple miracle of life itself. An accomplished writer with two decades of experience in group facilitation, she not only delivers compelling lectures and inspiring writing, but holds careful and thoughtful spaces for groups and individuals to deepen their knowledge, share experiences and acquire new skills. Find more of her work: wildyoga.co.uk Nourish Yoga Trainings Barefoot Body Training WORK WITH ME Download the Radical Rest Studio One-to-One Embodiment Guidance In Practice, letters on embodiment magic in the real world LINKS & CREDITS Drop me an email - waywardbodies@protonmail.com Find more of my work at ellebowerjohnston.com Join the mailing list, my other favourite way to communicate This episode is edited by the radiant Joeli Kelly, with eternal thanks and praises.

About

Wayward Bodies is a show exploring our bodies and the messy places they meet the world. Join your host Elle Bower Johnston as she discuss embodiment, body liberation, creativity, healing, and how we show up as our whole selves. You can expect a mix of solo musings and conversations with excellent humans, with a lens of queerness, anti-oppression, body liberation and lots of space for the nuance of being a human.

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