Living Open | Modern Magick and Spirituality for Mystics and Seekers

Jeanna Kadlec (she/her) is a writer, astrologer, former lingerie boutique owner, and recovering academic. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, NYLON, O the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Catapult, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and she's the creator of the New York Times-featured newsletter Astrology for Writers. A born and bred Midwesterner, she now lives in Brooklyn. HERETIC is her first book.

In this episode, Eryn and Jeanna talk about:

• Jeanna’s journey with Christianity & deconstruction
• Grieving the loss of religion
• Not just replacing christianity with cut/copy/paste spirituality but actually figuring out what we believe
• Navigating having conservative, evangelical families
• Believing in people’s capacity to change
• Having hard conversations with family
• The particular loneliness of strained and estranged relationships with parents
• Reparenting ourselves

Check out the blog for this episode at erynjohnson.com/blog/jeanna-kadlec  

Check out my recent essay in Insider. Subscribe to Joy Notes and check out the Religious Trauma workbook.

Connect with Jeanna on her website, social media. Read her book, Heretic, and check out her substack Astrology for Writers.

Victoria Albina (she/her/ella) a Functional Medicine Nurse Practitioner, an herbalist, and a nervous system expert. 

In this episode, Eryn and Victoria discuss:

• Her journey with health and healing
• How the stories we tell about ourselves and the world impact our somatic experience of life
• Vagus nerve and polyvagal theory!
• Different nervous system states
• Perceiving threat
• Finding safety in the nervous system slowly and steadily
• Allowing your body to complete the energy of what it wanted to do in a challenging moment 
• Hypervigilance after trauma
• Self-love
• The fawn response, codependence, and people pleasing
• Attachment theory
• All of this existing in context of oppressive systems

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/maria-victoria-albina 

Connect with Eryn on their substack, Joy Notes. Explore the Religious Trauma Support workbook.

Download Victoria's free suite of meditations and nervous system orienting exercises. 

Tune into Victoria's Feminist Wellness podcast and connect with her on Instagram @victoriaalbinawellness.

Laura (she/they) is a writer, editor, and book coach who works with intuitive and magical writers who want to unearth their own writing stories and create a sustainable writing practice.

In this episode, Eryn and Laura talk about:

• Laura’s journey with creativity, writing, magic, and spirituality
• Using frameworks and support for our writing (and not)
• Pinning down key emotional moments and using them as a basis for fiction writing
• Unearthing and softly excavating our deepest stories
• Collaborating with the parts of you the story is coming from
• Figuring out the story you’re trying to tell
• Being open to the nonlinear creative writing process
• Rituals Laura uses in their writing process
• Different stages of the creative process where feedback may be more or less helpful
• Experiential learning through the writing process
• The inner work that goes along with writing
• Identifying learned myths in creativity
• Writing the true book that you’re meant to write
• Creating a sustainable writing practice

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/laura-ellen-joyce 

Connect with Eryn on their substack, Joy Notes. Explore the Religious Trauma Support workbook.

Connect with Laura on their website and their new Substack!

Chelsey Pippin Mizzi (she/her) is a writer, tarot reader, and the founder of Pip Cards Tarot, a tarot consultancy helping creatives unblock, generate new ideas, and connect to their inner artist through tarot. In this episode, Eryn and Chelsey talk about:

• Chelsey’s journey with creativity, writing, and tarot
• Images in the process of writing
• Using your tarot deck to have conversations with your creativity
• Using tarot to write better stories and better-developed characters
• Doing tarot spreads for your characters
• Holding the cards loosely!
• Lessons from Chelsey’s book-writing process

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/chelsey-pippin-mizzi

Connect with Eryn on their substack, Joy Notes. Some of their writings on creativity and creative process over there:

• devotion to creative transformation
• telling the story that wants to be told
• play and nourishing the creative self
• a mini creative reset 
• the next thing leads to the next thing
• scent-sual creative aliveness with Mary Adelle

Connect with Chelsey on Instagram, her website, or her Substack, The French Dispatch.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Querant by Alexander Chee
• Character development tarot spread
• Chelsey's Tarot for Novelists ebook
• Chelsey's book, The Tarot Spreads Yearbook

Gina Badger (they/she) is a clinical energetic herbalist. They offer care through their private practice, Long Spell, and collaborative projects such as Wet Coast mutual aid kits. Gina is a queer nonbinary femme of mixed Western European ancestry born in Treaty 6 territory and currently living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations (Vancouver, Canada).

In this episode, Eryn and Gina talk about:

• Gina’s journey with plants!
• Building an embodied relationship with plants
• Personal healing-oriented plant communication
• Looking to the plants as teachers
• Orienting toward plant relationship
• Ways to give plants attention
• What relationship with plants looks like for them in the winter

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/gina-badger 

Subscribe to the Joy Notes substack here and get a copy of the Religious Trauma support workbook here.

Connect with Gina on their website, Instagram, or over email at gina@longspellherbs.com.

Footnotes from Gina:

• Episodes from KPFA radio show the Herbal Highway: “Herbal Energetics” (15/Feb/2023, originally aired 1/May/1999) and “Honoring our Elders: Karyn Sanders,” (2/Nov/2022)
• Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects
• Chani Nicholas’s Week Ahead Podcast for the week of 30/Jan/2023