
55 episodes

KnotWork Storytelling Marisa Goudy
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- Society & Culture
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5.0 • 21 Ratings
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In each KnotWork Storytelling episode, we'll explore a different story from mythology, folklore, or history, particularly from Ireland and the Celtic World. Then, my guest and I dive deep into why these ideas and characters still resonate today.
Your host is Marisa Goudy, author of The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic. She is a Myth Worker, a Story Healer, a Writing Coach, and a has an MA in Irish literature from University College Dublin.
Join us as we wander through these ancient storylines as we set out on a quest to learn from the past, better understand the present, and craft a sustainable future.
Every episode reminds us that age-old stories are medicine for this modern moment.
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Divine Embodiment with Eleanora Amendolara | S4 Ep9
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Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Eleanora Amendolara shares an excerpt from her book Divine Embodiment: The Art & Practice of Chumpi Illumination. We discuss Eleanora’s many trips to Peru and the origins of her pioneering approach to healing and spiritual awakening.
Our Guest
Eleanora is a master healer and teacher with a thriving healing practice in Brooklyn and in Warwick, New York. As the founder of the Sacred Center Mystery School and a certified Health Kinesiology practitioner, she has been training healers and individuals on the path to spiritual awakening for more than three decades.
Her signature healing system, Chumpi Illumination, weaves together the indigenous wisdom of the Andes, principles of sacred geometry, the science of muscle testing, and wisdom of the ancient mystery traditions.
Get your copy of Divine Embodiment: The Art & Practice of Divine Embodiment.
Our Conversation
How Eleanora received her first set of Chumpi stones: An origin story, which includes a woman’s quest, a wise guide, the great Incan myth of Pachacuti (“the world turned upside down), all aligned with the turning of the seasons.When Eleanora would ask the paqos, the medicine women of Cusco who could teach her about the Chumpi stones, they always told her to look to the mountainsOur collaborative writing practice (I am a longtime student of the Sacred Center Mystery School, and have co-written two of Eleanora’s books).Connections across ancient cultures: Cusco as the sacred center of Peru, Uisneach as the sacred center of Ireland.Power of receiving and surrendering to a healing, rather expecting a healer to do something/produce something for you.Writing and creating from a place of “we don’t know what we don’t know.” When we can embrace uncertainty, the real mystical creation happens.What ritual with the indigenous Q’ero people really looks like (it’s not what the Western-programmed mind might expect)
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at writingcoachmarisa.comFind more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of her book, The Sovereignty Knot: www.marisagoudy.com
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The Last Sovereignty Goddess | S4 Ep 8
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Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
In Ireland’s Forgotten Goddess Queen-Queen-Witch (S4 Ep7), you met Mongfind. She’s best known from her role in the story of Niall of the Nine Hostages.
In “The Last Sovereignty Goddess” I imagine Mongfind’s divine origins and tell a story about power, sacred union, and the disruption of the balance between spirit, nature, and so-called civilization. We explore the intersection between the divine and the human and the frailties that are at the core of this story of goddesses and kings.
Our Guest
Laura Murphy, @everose on Instagram, is a poet, activist and healer from Ireland whose work centers around the ancient
Irish poetic practice of Imbas Forosnai. She has shared a trinity of stories here on KnotWork, reweaving the tales of the Irish goddesses Bóinn, Brigid, and Danu.
This time, I have asked Laura, a true soul sister, to sit with me as I weave a new story.
Our Conversation
A longtime theme in my work: how we tell goddess stories in order to tell our own human stories. While at University College Dublin, I published a paper in New Voices in Irish Criticism 4, “Dethroning the Goddess, Crowning the Woman: Eva Gore-Book and Lady Augusta Gregory’s Mythic Heroines”Channeling a story that is bigger than myself and also exactly the size of my own experienceThe power of choice and consent; the Irish tradition of the Sovereignty Goddess who chooses the king, and how that tradition was disruptedThis story explores sacred sexual union, but also the terrible first kiss What it is to be in relationship with our younger self and younger body, without buying into the toxicity of “anti-aging” Some background on the connections between the Irish and Palestinian people, including the British Israelites and attempts to excavate the sacred Hill of Tara in a quest to find the Ark of Covenant in 1900The ongoing struggle with the word and concept of “Sovereignty,” particularly with the far right’s use of the term. Considering relationship to ancestral land through the lens of America, a country built on the disrupted sovereignty of indigenous peoples.This Last Sovereignty Goddess story is the tale of an ending, and this feels like a “Tower moment,” the liminal space between what’s dying and being born.
Join Melinda Laus's Seasons for Healing Community
My dear friend Melinda Laus holds space for a grief support community that blends the healing power of nature with wise and inspired grief education. Her wisdom and compassion are soul medicine, and I highly recommend her work to anyone experiencing collective grief or personal loss. Learn more at thenatureofgrief.com
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative... -
Ireland’s Forgotten Goddess-Queen-Witch (Re-Release) | S4 Ep7
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Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Meet Mongfind, the Sovereignty Goddess who appears in the Book of Lecan, a medieval Irish manuscript compiled at the turn of the fourteenth century. Her story is part of the better known tale of Niall of the Nine Hostages, the founding father of the O'Neill clan.
This story was written by Marisa Goudy. It is an adaptation from the translation of the original manuscript, inspired by the interpretation of the tale by Gearóid Ó Crualaoich in The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer.
This story originally aired in February 2022. We’re sharing it again this week because Mongfind is closely associated with the festival of Samhain (often called the Irish holiday that inspired Halloween). Listen to this episode so you’re ready for another tale of Mongfind, The Last Sovereignty Goddess, coming next week!
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at writingcoachmarisa.comFind more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of her book, The Sovereignty Knot: www.marisagoudy.com
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Fite Fuaite: Interwoven, A Story by Jen Murphy | S4 Ep6
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Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Fite Fuaite, the Irish for “interwoven.” Jen Murphy weaves a vast cloak of wisdom and culture. Less a story perhaps and more of an incantation and an invocation of the many faces of the divine feminine.
The lore of the Cailleach, the sacred hag known by many names including Old Woman of Beare, gives shape to Jen’s narrative. Over a dozen goddess beings, all representing facets of the Great Mother, in this story: Brigid, Sionann, Morríghan, Anahita, Bóinn, Kali, Badb, Inanna, Mis, Sophia, Baubo, and Sheela-Na-Gig.
Our Guest
Jen Murphy is the award-winning founder of the Celtic School of Embodiment. An anthropologist and mythologist by background, Jen is a cultural dreamer whose work is dedicated to evolving the Irish mythic feminine through scholarship, the body, and the arts, in service to these times.
I highly recommend Jen’s Celtic Woman's Voyage, now offered as a self-study program: www.celticembodiment.com/self-study/voyage
Our Conversation
The best way to experience this story is to release the hold of the intellectual mind and let the heart be in the flow. Jen recommends you let the story move through the body and then respond through image, either by drawing or by actively seeking the images of the story throughout your life. This story is inspired by words from Sinéad O’Connor and Marion Woodman and inspired by work Jen did through the Anima Mundi School.A profound question to ask: What if I was created in the image of the Great Mother? Who would that give me permission to be?James Hillman: “Our dreams are prior to our thinking.”To thrive, we need an image of the feminine and the dance of metaphor, not just masculine, fact, and doctrine.The need to balance scholarship and research with the emotional response and the realities of cultural dreamtime. Now, scholarship and magic are completely separate, but that wasn’t so for the ancestors.
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at writingcoachmarisa.comFind more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of her book, The Sovereignty Knot: www.marisagoudy.com
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A Sacred Detour to Iona, A Story by Royce Fitts | S4 Ep5
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Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, and hear the supporter-only podcast between episodes on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Iona. This island in the Scottish Hebrides is only three miles long, but it's home to millennia of spiritual, cultural, and natural magic.
This story is an excerpt from the new spiritual memoir by Royce Fitts’s, The Geography of the Soul. Royce invites us to meet the wild divine feminine energies that are embodied on this sacred land.
Our Guest
Royce Fitts, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified dream worker, with a doctorate in ministry. His book The Geography of the Soul: Dreams, Reality and the Journey of a Lifetime blends memoir, political and social consciousness, and spiritual wisdom and takes you to a hidden gem in the midst of the English countryside: the Ridgeway National Trail.
This book explores relationships between physical and spiritual landscapes, personal and collective histories, and night-time dreams and how they weave together to reveal and heal the wounds of our lifetime.
Royce is a long-time writing coaching client. I have had the immense pleasure and privilege of walking alongside him throughout the writing process, all the way to now as he launches Geography of the Soul with Flint Hills Publishing.
Join us for the online launch event for Geography of the Soul on October 25, 2023. I’m excited to join Royce to talk about his author journey and how we collaborated through the drafting and editing process. Register here.
Our Conversation
This book grew out of Royce’s 2016 journey: a “conscious hike” on the Ridgeway National Trail, the oldest road in England and Europe, which he took in response to a series of great life changes that needed him to change even more.The role of dreams in our lives and the strange, evolutionary instinct to dream. The divine feminine is at the heart of every story in this season of KnotWork Storytelling. Royce describes his relationship to the Crone of Iona and what he learned about his own masculinity while held by the sacred feminine. What is it like to embody masculine “god” energy in a healthy way? Royce invites us to have an intimate conversation with the feminine and masculine divinity within us.Royce’s lived paradox: Royce is a mystic, wizard, shaman in this world, but his work takes him to the heart of the US military where he is a military and family life counselorAn invocation of vitality and why it is so important to dream and to value our dreams.
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness professional or a creative entrepreneur who wants to use stories to build your business, book a free consultation with Marisa. Learn more at writingcoachmarisa.comFind more of Marisa's writing and get a copy of -
Birth, Death, and Rebirth: A Story of the Goddess Lilith | S4 Ep4
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Love KnotWork Storytelling? Support the show, find the in-depth show notes, get special supporter-only podcast episodes, and stay connected between seasons on our Substack, Myth Is Medicine.
Our Story
Lilith was a goddess or a demon, depending on whose holy books or sacred folk tradition you follow. Pearl Gregor channels Lilith’s divine voice, decrying all the ways she has been misunderstood and offering us a renewed story of Lilith as the rising power of the long repressed feminine.
Our Guest
Pearl Gregor is an explorer and a seeker. She is a writer, dream coach, story teller, author of the three books in the series Dreams Along the Way, and an international public speaker. Pearl is a farmer, grandmother, a blogger and a Crone of wisdom.
Pearl experienced years of personal turmoil beginning about age nine. Nothing. But nothing, worked. Then at age 43, she discovered meditation and in December 1988 learned that she could ask for a dream. That first dream unleashed an avalanche of change. Like the Myth of the Goddess Inanna, Pearl lived the descent into the underworld. Like the Myth of the Goddess Lilith, Pearl has lived this process of life, death, and rebirth.
Join Pearl to explore the deep mysteries of dreams, psyche and soul. You can read her books, or join her in her latest passion, a Dream Readers’ Myth Circle. Find her at https://dreamsalongtheway.com/
Our Conversation
Pearl’s visionary experience of the goddesses Lilith and Sophia during a reiki treatment The contrast of a profound spiritual opening of the divine feminine while at conference of educators whose systems had little respect for a feminine perspectiveContinuing the journey with a dream of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the ancient rites of Demeter and Persephone, which enabled Pearl to feel for the first time “I am pleased to be a woman” The 325 AD Council of Nicaea and Empire Constantine’s declarations establish one true church that declared the birth-death-rebirth story to be hereticalMarisa’s journey with the Church and the decision to reject it, which seems a generational difference from Pearl who stayed connected to the church through the Roman Catholic WomenPriest movement. The initial rejection and slow acceptance of Marija Gimbutas’s work by some (See more at Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA)The work of Liliana Kleiner, a Argentinian-Canadian-Israeli artist who focuses on the work of Lilith and Inanna Books we discussed: Perdita Finn’s Take Back the Magic, Marion Woodman’s The Pregnant Virgin, Nancy Qualls-Corbett’s The Sacred Prostitute (foreword by Woodman).
Our Music
Music at the start of the show is by Beth Sweeney and Billy Hardy: billyandbeth.com
Work With Marisa
1:1 Writing Coaching: If you are working on a spiritual memoir or wellness
Customer Reviews
Beautiful stories. Myth becomes relevant! Wonderfully produced
You don’t have to live Irish literature and myth to get something out of this podcast. It’s such a welcome mental escape and shift. Marisa and her guests’ stories are just beautiful and they do a fabulous job of connecting myth to modern day.
Amazing storytelling!
Marisa is such a gifted storyteller! She takes old and ancient myths and brings them to life in a way that shows how timeless these tales really are and what we might still learn from them about ourselves and our world. If you’re interested in in the magic that a good story can bring to your life and want to be transported through time and space and back again… you’ll want to listen to Knotwork Storytelling! Highly recommended.
I love the stories!
When I walk, I love being carried away with these stories. These stories take me away from every day life in a way that’s real and necessary. The Celtic world is a wonderful place to visit!