Hello beautiful ones! The Becoming Podcast is returning after a somewhat unplanned hiatus, brought to you by Getting Pneumonia A Week After Launching My Book! But here we are again, and I couldn't be more delighted to be welcoming Carmen Spagnola as my first guest of 2025. Carmen has been a friend, colleague and teacher of mine for many years now, and she has just released her latest book, Spells for the Apocalypse: Practical Magic for Turbulent Times, and, given the events of the past few weeks in our world, the timing of this important work couldn't be more auspicious. Before I dive in, let me tell you a little bit about Carmen: Carmen teaches about animism, folk magic, witchcraft, ritual and ancestral knowledge related to land and seasons. She cross-pollinates somatics, attachment, collapse awareness, intersectional feminism, and kinship with the More Than Human in her work as a trauma resolution practitioner. Carmen is the author of The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year, which teaches folklore and spellcraft for the solstices, equinoxes, and half-way points between, based on her training in culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu Paris. Carmen's professional study includes extensive training in hypnotherapy, interpersonal neurobiology, somatic psychology, mood and personality disorder support, and client-centred assistance for neurodivergent adults, youth, and their caregivers. She is constantly researching current promising practices to provide psychoemotional care and nervous system reconditioning support for people with chronic or episodic disability, with special attention to autoimmunity, dysautonomia, and long COVID. She holds provider certifications for Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning, The Safe and Sound Protocol, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercise, The Resilience Toolkit, and Clinical Hypnotherapy. Her spiritual healing repertoire includes numerous certificates spanning a twenty-five year exploration of trance work, regression therapy, energy work, shamanistic practices, systemic constellations, divination, herbalism, kitchen witchery, cultural conservation and ancestral veneration practices, and wilderness quest. Here's some of what we talk about in this episode: What is collapse – both personal and collective. Carmen beautifully names the thing that we all know, now, in our bones, to be true. The power of ritual to soothe, mobilize and transform us when there's nothing else you can *do* in the face of predicament and chaos How Carmen's new book, Spells for the Apocalypse, supports us to feel more skillful, resourced and resilient in times of personal and collective collapse The "gift and the task" of Carmen's personal Quest experience – aka, the promise it would kill her to break How Carmen is coping with grief and rage these days. This is the question Carmen asks everyone on her podcast, the Numinous Podcast, and I was really keen to turn her own question back to her. As she always does, even in the deeply challenging times she's experiencing right now, Carmen models how we might work with grief and rage in meaningful and supportive ways. Carmen and I talk about so, so much more, including our shared experiences of going on Quest, the rituals I did during my own personal time of collapse, what happens when an animist moves to a different ecosystem, and more. I hope you love listening to this episode with Carmen as much as I loved recording it with her!
