Episode 82 - Natasha Lythgoe - Crisis as Necessity, Trusting the Mythic and Incorporating Change
In this episode I’m in conversation with Natasha Lythgoe, Vision Quest guide, retreat leader and mentor, who’s work and approach has been profoundly shaped by her life as an artist and through her buddhist practice.
Natasha works with mind, body, psyche/soul and mystery, sharing the skills that have been shared with her over the last twenty five years of practice.
I’ve been following Natasha’s work since we trained together as nature guides on Chris Salisbury’s inaugural Call of the Wild program 11 years ago and was excited to invite her onto the podcast this year.
This episode follows the thread from Episode 81 with David Wendl-Berry and also connects back to EP 79 with Dr Ros Watts.
This is a conversation which explores the messy work of integration or incorporation as Natasha prefers.
It’s about the work we must all do if we’re serious about paradigm shifts, letting go of destructive behaviours, and becoming the change we seek, especially following rites of passage, threshold work or peak experience.
This is a conversation which invites us to explore different intelligences within us and around us.
Especially our own body intelligence, learning its language and clock which defies the very paradigms of extractivism and capitalism.
We explore
Natasha’s journey as an artist, her buddhist practice and her connection back to the land and its wider intelligence.
How do we begin to trust the messy, wild , aliveness inside us and around us in contrast to the stuck, limited, linear, rational ways of ‘making sense’ in modernity.
How to learn to trust different ways of knowing the world and ourselves to help us navigate these times. Ways which are not always comfortable and clear.
Somatics and the body - this episode is a bit different, in that it features a very spontaneous co-created somatic practice which Natasha offered me as we were in mid conversation.
So I invite you to follow along when Natasha guides the body intelligence practice - see it as a playful sensory exploration.
Christina Figures said recently:
“Systemic transformation is deeply personal. “
I think this episode is touching on that.
It invites us into the uncomfortable, messy and I’d suggest most beautiful work, which doesn’t fit slickly into the commercialisation of peak experience, spiritual transformation and purpose/leadership work.
Learning to lean into your authentic purpose, with a process and journey which is often being guided by wilder, unpredictable, more feral, more than human life forces.
Which I think is really the invitation of becoming crew.
As Bayo Akomolafe once said to me
“May your road be rough “
I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Please share your thoughts in the comments and the episode with your friends if it speaks to you.