Well Aware Podcast

Photo by Melodee Solomon

Do you remember that peculiar but serendipitous feeling when someone’s in your orbit, and you end up meeting simply by virtue of unplanned but repeated, consistent encounters? In 2019 it seems to happen virtually, too, and that’s the story of how Erin Telford and I met.

She and sound therapist Sara Auster—one of Well Aware’s very first guests who notably has a book coming out in the fall—have been long-time buddies. Two of my dearest friends Alex and Meesh completed their trainings with Erin and have since become breathwork facilitators. She leads breathwork events at Sky Ting, my yoga home base, a few times each year. When I reached out to Erin, she shared that she was excited because Well Aware had been on her radar for quite some time, and because of our many mutual friends. I suppose it was only a matter of time before universal forces brought us together.

We recorded our first conversation back in February 2019 and it was easily one of my favorite interviews. I was very sick and symptomatic at the time, which is one way to guarantee vulnerability… and by nature of her work and personhood, Erin shares from the heart. Not one minute after our sweet, much-anticipated exchange, my hard drive ran out of space and our conversation was deleted! Zilch. Nowhere to be found. I cried, I was embarrassed, and wanted to throw my laptop out the window. Erin, being the angel she is, responded in kind to my glitch. “Two open hearts can make magic twice.” A month later we had this talk, which was even better than the first.  

I’ve experienced this type of breathwork a handful of times, and each one has been more profound than the last. Erin works with the breath and the body as corrective medicine for childhood trauma. The breath is through the mouth, a two part inhale culminating in a full exhale. The first inhale inflates the belly, the second inflates the chest, and the exhale is a release. Breathing like this for any length of time will activate chemical reactions in the body that are said to help us release stored trauma. Some people yell, some laugh, some cry, my experiences have included all of the above… if you do it in a group setting, I guarantee it’ll be a wild ride. 

For the first 25 minutes or so, we talk about breathwork basics, and then we get into Erin’s journey and experience with the work. 

This episode is for anyone: 

• interested in breathwork as a practice and/or a career path
• yearning for a career change but is feeling weighed down by debt and/or years spent learning something else
• wanting to learn how to increase their self-confidence and self-respect
• learning to observe their inner critic(s)
• working on setting boundaries

We discuss: 

• How Erin went from being an acupuncturist to a breathwork teacher, despite having $250,000 in student debt
• Why she went all-in on breathwork, of all healing modalities
• How breathwork allows healing through self-resourcing, versus other modalities that outsource healing
• Active versus passive healing
• Her teacher David Elliott and his breathwork method
• What you can expect physically, emotionally, and mentally during one of her breathwork sessions
• What happened during the exact moment on October 22, 2016, when Erin realized she was enough
• Her clarity around boundaries and the inner process that yielded them 
• How she holds herself through difficult experiences 
• What happens when you drastically change the pace your life, inviting slowness and space
• Social media hygiene and how Erin holds energetic boundaries on Instagram to keep the experience fun 

If you’re turned on by breathwork and/or by Erin’s energy, she has a few offerings coming up this fall. The most exciting one is Sacred Terrain, a six-week healing journey into the landscape of your emotional body. With Erin as your guide, you’ll do breathwork and go inward to look closely at your patterns and behaviors, garnering the courage to shift where you need to. And if you’re lucky enough to be in New York or Los Angeles, you can attend one of her upcoming in-person groups. If not, she’s got you, you can attend her virtual online group in September.

SHOW NOTES 

• @erintelford__ on Instagram
• Gabor Mate, a Canadian physician who specializes in addiction and trauma
• David Elliott breathwork and trainings
• When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection by Gabor Mate

Articulate, headstrong, deft, hard working, self-aware, sensitive, nurturing, and collectively-oriented are all words that describe Owyn Ruck, the founder of Succurro. Succurro is a space that helps individuals as well as the collective regenerate humanity and reclaim a right to their own health. It’s located in East Meredith, New York — upstate, but away from all of the recent Brooklyn-transplant activity, claiming a space of its own.

Late last year I took an astrology class with Owyn through Succurro, and it changed my life. It was October, and I was in the beginnings of my healing crisis without even fully understanding what was going on. She opened up my eyes to a new way of thinking about astrology. Instead of rooting it in personality traits, she looks at a natal chart and sees potential and a clear healing journey, taking energetic cues rather than literal ones.  

I’ve known about Succurro for a year or so, and I truly cannot remember how I came across it, but I’m glad I did. I was sucked into the mystery — the presentation on the website was so beautiful, their offerings were esoteric, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Which lead me to reach out to Owyn, and I’m so glad I did! In our conversation we discuss: 

• What exactly Succurro is, who it serves, and why she created it
• Owyn’s sensitive nature and how it manifests
• How she navigated a relationship to Spirit in an atheist household growing up
• Her best advice to someone looking at Succurro and wanting to create something similar 
• How to listen to your body, and Owyn’s story of a life-long struggle with hers
• Her inquiry technique for clarity
• How she came around to calling herself an artist 
• Whether she believes in ghosts (!)
• The interplay of climate change and self-awareness

This episode will especially serve sensitive or highly sensitive people, anybody looking to open up their own healing center, and people interested in astrology and/or self-inquiry. Forward it to your friends, share widely, tag us on Instagram and let us know how this episode affected you. 

SHOW NOTES

• Saipua, where Owyn apprenticed (listen to Sarah, Saipua's founder, Well Aware episode from 2015!)
• Marlee Grace (listen to her Well Aware episode, too)
• Textile Arts Center in New York City’s Brooklyn and West Village 
• The Astrology Podcast: Fate, Free Will, and Astrology 
• Mark Jones, Owyn’s astrology teacher 
• SourcePoint therapy, via Succurro and the SourcePoint official website

“When you get these jobs that you so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” —Toni Morrison

To know Ryan is a privilege. He’s a good listener, a strategic thinker, is generous with his energy, and spends most of his spare time in service of others or dreaming of ways we can all be, at scale. His ability to do exquisite boots-on-the-ground work while holding a higher vision not only for himself, but for the collective, is as rare as it is impressive.

Ryan is a freelance designer, brand strategist, yoga teacher, reiki master, artist, creative director—a true multi-hyphenate, like many Well Aware guests—who has done work for Wanderlust, Daybreaker, adidas, The Numinous, Lululemon, and more. He’s also the founder of Aligned, a media company disrupting the way we think of well-being that’s focused on the collective.

Our conversation took place about year ago (if you want to know what happened between now and then, listen to The Big Update). It was fun to listen again and see how much had evolved and what still resonates. I met Ryan in the spring of 2018, right after he’d completed his first self-directed zine, Her Ferocities, which is perhaps the most beautiful and thoughtful zine I’ve had the pleasure of reading. He sent a cold email to my mindbodygreen address (yes, editors do read cold emails!) and after following the link to his work I knew we had to meet. It was a time when politics were grim, in the wake of #metoo, #timesup and #blacklivesmatter, that this beautiful booklet emerged.

In this episode, Ryan and I cover a lot of ground:

• Privilege, empowerment, and responsibility in wellness and media
• The capital W why behind self-care
• Wellness outside of its own industry
• What the future of media could look like
• Representation in wellness and media
• How he created a cohesive body of work, from seemingly disparate pieces
• What it’s like to teach yoga in a jail
• How he comes back to his personal practice after falling off the wagon
• And of course, his personal approach to well-being

I hope you enjoy the episode! As always, let me know what you think. If you're here reading the blog, leave a note in the comments, shoot me an email (I share my email address on each episode), leave a review on iTunes, or send me a DM on Insta. Find Ryan on Instagram at @ryan_lemere or through his personal website, ryanlemere.com

SHOW NOTES

• ALIGNED
• Ryan's instagram @ryan_lemere
• Aligned's instagram @alignedmag
• Third Eye Society cap
• Her Ferocities zine
• Ryan Lemere
• Anti Social Social Club
• Folk Rebellion - the dispatch - all about finding freedom IRL, living freely without the shackles of technology
• Moment app
• Open Up Resources - a not for profit that provides teachers with free curricula ideas or entire curricula
• Wanderlust
• Tushy
• Daybreaker
• Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life by Radha Agrawal, illustrated by Ryan Lemere
• Liberated Prison Yoga - trauma-sensitive yoga teacher training for those who wish to teach in jails
• Summer Rayne Oaks - proud chicken mama

Human design is a new(ish) way to learn about yourself. Like astrology, you need the date, place, and time of your birth to generate an accurate chart, which looks something like this:

The diagram above is apparently Beyonce's human design chart :). You're welcome. Believe it or not, everyone's chart looks this crazy and confusing! Shapes, lines, numbers, colors, astrological conventions, and other terms (not pictured here) like "type" and "strategy" create a blueprint, another way for us to glean information about ourselves. After generating my chart, I was full-on stumped. I listened to a few human design podcasts and learned about the five main archetypes, but I couldn't find a crash course in chart reading that didn't exist behind a paywall.

I was also pretty skeptical. Human design purports to be a combination of the chakra system, astrology, the i-ching, Kabbalah, and hexagram that was channeled in 1987 by one man. While I'm still not quite sure how all of these work together, or even what "hexagram" is, I was curious enough to learn more. Enter: Erin Claire Jones. After my struggling with my health earlier this year and looking everywhere for answers, and learning to trust the voice within.

Erin joined me for an episode that will equip you with some human design essentials that are difficult to find elsewhere. The first half of our conversation is human design 101. She reviews each of the five human design types in detail (generator, manifesting generator, projector, manifestor, and reflector), the strategy, the incarnation cross, the meaning of the shapes, colors, and pathways in between, and what happens when you don't resonate with certain elements of your chart.

Then, we discuss how she came to human design, from her childhood and upbringing, to what she studied in college, to how she was introduced to it. She shares resources if you're interested in learning about human design, whether you want a more formal training or you want to self-study. Erin has generously offered Well Aware listeners 10% off of a blueprint — a customized human design reading in PDF format, rather than a call or in person. Enter WELLAWARE when you checkout. The promo ends 8/21. Keep me posted on what you learn about yourselves!

Our main topics of discussion include:

• Human design 101: a pretty comprehensive crash course!
• How Erin came to human design
• The best resources if you want to learn more about human design
• What happens when you don't resonate with your type or another element of your design
• What Erin does she feels stuck or blocked
• How understanding her human design changed her work and relationships
• The practices she does to "honor her design"
• How she upholds boundaries as a healer who works closely with others, often
• Human design, parenting, and its effects on the next generation

SHOW NOTES 

Jovian Archive

erinclairejones.com

Erin's blueprint offering

Erin's instagram: @erinclairejones

International School of Human Design

BG5 Business Institute

Erika Bloom is one of the most literate bodyworkers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I trekked to her Upper East Side studio—which was kind of a big deal, because I don't particularly enjoy venturing above 14th street—prior to our interview to see what the buzz was about. This was once upon a time in 2017.

I had my (completely unfounded) doubts. The best somatic experiences I've had have come from scrappy yoga teachers or humble bodyworkers, not celebrity teachers who look like supermodels themselves. Expecting a challenging session on some combination of the cadillac and the reformer, I was floored by Erika's process and intuition. She read my body head to toe, front to back, and silently decided on a gentle plan of action. We did some small, targeted movements for which the breath was central, but our hour together was focused on bodywork and release. Bodywork! I thought I came for pilates and there she was, giving me one of the best myofascial releases I've ever had.

Since that session, we've enjoyed several meals and yoga classes together. Our discussions meander from super nerdy-healing topics like how ancestral trauma affects our health and romantic relationships to practical ones like how to really listen to the body, what it's like to live with autoimmune issues, and more. This conversation is one of those fly-on-the-wall scenarios, an accurate representation of what an hour with Erika is like.

Another reason I wanted her on the show? Erika Bloom's 600-hour certification program is arguably the most comprehensive pilates training in the world. Aside from the traditional mat and apparatus techniques, Bloom has modernized the training by including material from modern sources she's studied, experienced, and trusts: Alexander technique, Body-Mind Centering by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Zero Balancing by Fritz, the tenets of rolfing by Ida Rolf, and more. This makes our conversation—and any conversation with Bloom relating to the body, mind, and spirit—so rich.

In our conversation, Erika and I discuss:

• her body reading technique and "building a library of possibilities"
• the new somatic material that's interesting to her right now (hint: it has to do with fascia,which happens to be an obsession of mine too)
• why you don't need to "feel the burn" to increase muscular strength
• her personal movement, meditation, and home organization practices
• how over-doing cardio can lead to health issues
• where she misunderstood self-love
• her preferred bodywork modalities like zero balancing by Fritz
• her best advice for new teachers, especially if you have anxiety

Thank you for listening and as always, let me know what you think.

I first stumbled Jason Logan's work through the social media channels of Horses Atelier, a clothing line run by Canadian writers Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka, who happens to be Jason's partner. His ink tests occasionally appeared on Horses' Instagram and I liked them so much I started following his handle, @toronotoinkcompany, which started a slow burn obsession. This was probably 2012-ish timing.

Jason's style was a welcome departure from the too-curated, desaturated, shades-of-white, minimal Instagram feeds I followed back then. It seemed like every photo had to be styled and edited and professionally shot, and Jason's ink tests were a breath of fresh air, respite from the contrived identities we all (yep, myself included) were projecting onto social media.

I was also drawn to his experimental approach and focus on the process. He refers to his artwork at Toronto Ink Company as “ink tests,” which is a wonderful way to think about artwork (and everything?). Everything is a test because he is constantly brewing new inks in new ways, and in his process he releases expectations about how they'll exist in artwork. If it sounds like a spiritual practice, it's because for Jason, it is.

The Toronto Ink Company is Jason’s side project-turned-business, and his value prop is that he can make ink from anything. Literally anything. He started by boiling the husks of black walnuts to make a rich brown pigment, and then began to experiment with other materials. Now he makes inks from ash, hibiscus flowers, gypsum stone, turmeric, buckthorn sap, a rusty nail, and much more.

To me, the most enriching layer is that he pairs these abstract ink tests—stunning in their own right—with pithy, sometimes dark, sometimes delightfully nonsensical, catchy words and phrases like “know better” and “I mean what I say” and “working it out,” transforming each piece into a feeling. The inks, the handwriting, and the phrases all have a rawness that I find to be mysterious, authentic, and enchanting.

Jason shipped some inks for me to try around the time of our interview (September 2017), and I loved them so much that when I went to Toronto in the fall of last year, I bought one in every color and have been experimenting with them since.

One important detail to note is that this conversation happened … drumroll please … in September 2017. Almost two years ago! He’d just started working on his book, Make Ink, which is now out in the world.

While Toronto Ink Company is the focus of this interview, Jason is also the creative director of Horses Atelier, involved in the creative direction of seven (!) newspapers in Toronto, is working on a documentary, wrote a book, and is a partner and father to three kids. And he brings it all to the table in our conversation.

Here's a preview of what we talked about:

• a look at his ink making and sketchbook practice
• the limitless possibility in being a multi-passionate individual
• the advantage of having both a career and a side hustle
• finding freedom within self-imposed creative boundaries
• how his sketchbook practice saved his life
• his creative process when making art with ink
• his perspective on creating a company versus being an artist
• the concept of “ink tests”
• his thoughts on the age-old question: what is art?
• how to deal with judgment and comparison in art making
• how running has informed his creative practice
• rituals for artists just starting out on a practice
• advice to artists trying to find their voice

Let me know what you think about our conversation and thank you so much for listening!

This is the episode many of you have been asking for, the episode that I've been wanting to post but haven't yet. This is also the episode where I deliver a 40 minute soliloquy, so if you prefer the interview format, I don't blame you. Hang tight till the next one, my conversation with Jason Logan of Toronto Ink company and feel free to skip today. No hard feelings. Promise.

I didn't update Well Aware for the better part of two years. Why? What happened? In this episode, I explain everything. The yoga teacher training, the book deal, the demanding job, and, yes, the diagnoses.

As it turns out, the Internet is a strange and beautiful place and I'm grateful for the deep, bountiful, genuine connections it has bequeathed. But in considering what to share and when, a monologue about my own health journey felt iffy. Is it TMI, does it sound like a sob story, or is it simply unprofessional? I hesitated and mulled for quite some time.

In the thick of my health issues, the time became now—fast. Since starting Well Aware, transparency has been embedded in my approach, which has essentially rendered this audio project a record of my journey. So I had to share this 40 minute ditty, it's too big a part of me to ignore, and it's important context for show. In doing so, I hope to participate in dismantling shame around chronic illness, to help redefine the relationship between work and vulnerability, and to fill you in on all the things going on behind the Instagram frame, behind the podcast, behind the book, behind the byline.

My intention in sharing the story of my unintentional hiatus is to reconnect with you listeners and to offer support. Self healing, self study, and self practice are often glamorized on social media, but the darkest days are the ones where I really saw myself—no adornments or projections. Self-discovery can be lighthearted and easy, and also lonely and challenging. Sometimes it's both. It's been a wild almost-two-years, and while I'm still struggling with the unknown, being back feels pretty damn good.

Image by Louis Camnitzer, 1937