Our guest this time on The Elder Well is Manda Scott. Based in the UK, Manda has been, variously, a veterinary surgeon, columnist, acupuncturist, regenerative smallholder, homoeopath, coach, renegade economist - and author of 16 novels, several screenplays and one non-fiction book. She holds a Master’s degree in Regenerative Economics from Schumacher College, is a contemporary shamanic teacher, and co-hosts the Accidental Gods podcast with her wife, Faith Tilleray. In this episode of The Elder Well, we sit down with Manda for a courageous and compassionate conversation which explores elderhood, personal and collective trauma, wonderment, chaos, the web of life, the future of the planet, and more… Know someone who’d love this conversation with Manda Scott? Please share below. Manda speculates that culturally we may be at peak trauma now and cannot as a collective go much further without either crashing and burning, or emerging into a new system which does not have trauma as a baseline. She describes the differences between “trauma cultures” and “initiation cultures”, and suggests the marked absence of meaningful initiation rites and rituals keeps much of society stuck in a kind of arrested early adolescence. Manda offers fascinating insights about initiation cultures being more serotonin-based in contrast to the prevailing culture in the west which is largely based on dopamine requiring continual and ever-larger amounts of stimulation to sustain itself; Throughout our conversation, Manda points to paths which would lead us away from the brink of cultural and planetary collapse. “If we don’t bring a critical mass of people to the edge of what’s possible and leave behind all the old structures of predatory capitalism and trauma culture then I don’t think we make it through.” Manda speaks movingly of an inspiring vision she had in mid-winter 2018 in which she was shown the earth floating in space, criss-crossed by millions of fibres of light, creating a web, and how at every crossing point was a node of consciousness, of which some were human….and most were not. Manda shares how, for her, a true elder is someone who has the capacity to not become hijacked by their own trauma, who has learned how to connect with the web of life, and has offered themselves fully in service of youngers and the planet. Manda invites each of us to cultivate joyful curiosity, and to fall in love with the magic of being alive in spite of the obvious chaos around us. Towards the end of our time together, she shares an inspiring vision she is holding of a possible future where each person wakes up feeling safe, confident and excited, awed and alive with the possibility of the day, connected with themselves, other people and the rest of the web of life, knowing what’s theirs to do, confident in their capacity to do it, and doing this in the company of other people who they trust in good faith are doing the same. Offering a few links to explore this conversation further: * The Accidental Gods Podcast * The website of Manda Scott * Releasing Our Burdens: A Guide to Healing Individual, Ancestral, and Collective Trauma by Richard Schwartz PhD and Thomas Hübl PhD * The website of teacher and author Thomas Hübl * Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman by Malidoma Patrice Somé We were enlivened and inspired by our time with Manda; we very much hope you are too. Please enjoy. “I think in general terms, the point of an elder in any healed and whole culture is to be helping to hold the space for the younger people coming through. I think one of the points of being human is to create the compost the land, create the soil of which to grow other humans who will be wiser than us.” We are so happy to share that The Elder Well podcast opens and closes with the song River Run Free composed and performed by MaMuse with Walter Strauss on guitar. This song is shared here with the generous permission of the artists. To find out more about MaMuse, their music and their mission please visit: http://www.mamuse.org/ Get full access to The Elder Well at theelderwell.substack.com/subscribe
