I adore her for sharing her mind and heart through her substack writing by challenging the dominant narrative in our culture around money, capitalism, and business as usual.
Basically, she’s not buying it when it comes to consumer culture and the insidious ways that it undermines the fabric of our society. Join us as we take a deep dive into the disguised gift of a personal apocalypse and how it disrupts the trance as well as the mind virus that infects our culture with the toxic myths of scarcity. This episode will either piss you off or have you cheering, but either way - your response is welcome. Sometimes we have to get messy and real in order to reveal and heal what’s been ailing us.

• In this episode you’ll hear Gina’s exploration of Capitalism and how it’s intimately tied to other systems of oppression.
• Gina’s future vision and her invitation to co-create a better world.
• What is animism and how to distinguish it from spirituality + her endeavor to build a community where people can co-create a future, grieve the current reality, and honor what they most value.
• The story of her own personal apocalypse and what it taught her.
• Why she decided to call her substack “A Girl Has No Brand”
• Learn what “collapse-aware” rites of passage mean and how it applies to where we are now.
• Hear about what Gina describes as life’s invitations to radicalize. Why humor, collaboration, and community are the keys to the future.

Gina is an animist witch and rites of passage guide who centers her work around anticapitalism and ecological re-enchantment. She offers radical presence and compassion to those who want to move into the seasonal reality of their lives in full awareness that the world as we’ve known it is disintegrating, bringing a collapse-aware approach to moving into maturity and relational leadership. She believes we break the spell of modernity by doing this work together. Gina is also a plant medicine integration guide who loves to help people bring animist enchantment into their lives. In the secular world, Gina holds an undergraduate degree in Critical Theory from NYU, as well as an MFA from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in Writing for Film and Television, and is a professional writer.

She currently lives in a 150-year-old Victorian Church in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she and her partner are creating a sanctuary called “Our Lady of the Apocalypse”, creating a community space for grief, skill-sharing, ritual, beauty, and unlearning, finding our way through the darkness together, awake in the burning forest of the world.

The ways in which the intertwining of capitalism and spirituality is actually at the very heart of the climate crisis and ecocide – the ecological crisis is a deeply “spiritual” crisis arising from the intentional erasure and destruction of ancestral traditions and animist relationships to land and earth– erasure and destruction that was very explicitly in the service of colonial capitalism. So what is needed in the face of these crises is a spiritual response/atonement/reconciliation, but perversely, almost all of what passes for spirituality right now occurs in a deeply capitalist, neoliberal framework that neuters and sublimates all spiritual impulse back into the patterns of hyperindividualism, commodification, consumption, and the society of the spectacle, perpetuating the root causes of the crisis instead of offering a potentially vital response to it.

Links:

• Website: enchantment.church
• Substack : a girl has no brand
• The Problem with B Corp ‘Conscious Capitalism’ | Dame Magazine
• TRP: Bergen Hyde - From Wounded Maiden to Cherishing Mother: An Archetypal Rite of Passage for Women
• Book: Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World: Levy, Paul, Dossey M.D., Larry: 9781644114100: Books - Amazon
• anthropocene.church

How beautiful is that?

Meet Carole Marie Downing, a coach, song leader, and facilitator passionate about creating resilience through challenging times. Her initial career was in nursing, working in areas of hospice and integrative medicine. She then shifted to coaching after receiving a master's degree in psychology, emphasizing consciousness, health, and healing.

She utilizes both her professional background and personal experience to gently support clients to tune in to their capacity to thrive. After a loss and significant life transitions, her most recent work as a song leader and music guide encourages people to sing and learn music in a way that creates connection and cultivates the transformational act of bringing our voices fully into the world. Carole Marie lives in Portland, Oregon, and loves hot cups of tea. She enjoys making music out of everything life offers up and going barefoot in the sand.

** Carole believes we can use music as a way to create more connection and bring our voices to the world.**

• Attunement - If we were to look at an instrument that was out of tune, we wouldn't say that it was broken or hopeless; instead, we would tune it, and I feel this is the same with people.
• If life isn't going exactly as we would like, and we are out of sync with the world, it’s simply a request for re-attunement and noticing where we need to come back into alignment.
• We can look at our relationships with ourselves and others as being out of tune or in harmony.
• Initially, Carole experienced music as a way to heal from the grief of loss.
• Sometimes, life experiences can’t be captured in words, and only music can help us express and move through our pain. When we allow ourselves to feel that deeply, we become wise to the fact that there can even be other emotions felt while we are in pain, such as beauty and gratitude.
• Our culture influences whether we feel safe enough or confident enough to bring our voices into the world. Many people have this idea that they have to sound a certain way to sing, which is not true.
• It’s so important that more of us access our voices in this way and that we look at a chorus as a metaphor for our humanity. Sometimes there is disharmony, and this is always true; before we have harmony together, it’s a necessary part of the process.

Links:

• Instagram: Carole Marie Downing (@carole.downing)
• Tune to Joy - Carole Marie Downing
• (20+) Carole Marie Downing | Facebook
• Teachings From Grief - Gangaji.org
• Carole Marie Downing Writes About Her First Year As A Widow — Grief Gratitude & Greatness
• Writer, coach, & widowed mom Carole Marie Downing — Jenny Lisk
• LinkedIn: Carole Downing