In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is time to create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your guide and fellow traveller on this journey into possibility. And this week we’re heading back into the inner work that feels to me so essential to our creating a way through to that future that we would be proud of. We already explored it in the last few months with Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy, and then with Angharad, and then with Simon Raphael, and now we’re back with Dr Maggie Ostara, who’s an old friend of the podcast. She was with us back in episode 116 when we talked about finding our purpose in the world; what’s mine to do, what’s yours to do, what’s ours to do together. And I have put a link in the show notes to that in case you want to go back and listen. Since then, though, Maggie has written a book. It’s called Feminine Sovereignty; Eight Pillars for Regenerating Ourselves and Our World. It was published towards the end of last year in November 2023, and I have been wanting to talk to Maggie ever since. And now we have the time, because this book is absolutely of our time and for our time, and completely aligned with the thrutopian ideals of Accidental Gods and everything else that we’re doing.

Manda: It’s courageous, and it’s definitely hard hitting in terms of its dissection of where we are, but it is absolutely full of compassion and wisdom, and Maggie’s experience of holding space for people and working with people and helping everybody to find their own path in a way that has coherence and integrity. There are intellectual exercises and emotional exercises and embodied exercises and things where you just read it and think, hmm, okay, I’ll just put it down and go out for a walk and think about this for a while and then come back. And when I’ve processed it, I’ll dive in again. So it’s well worth reading. It’s not something that you start at the beginning, go on till the end and then stop, I think. So you might want to do that and then go back. But anyway, it’s there and you can order it now. And as you’ll hear in the podcast, Maggie is also running a year long course, which is starting early in February and which does still have room on it. And there will be a link in the show notes by the time you get to this. So here we go. People of the podcast, please welcome Maggie Ostara, author of Feminine Sovereignty, Eight Pillars for Regenerating Ourselves and Our World.

Manda: Maggie, welcome back to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you? I never remember. Are you in California still?

Maggie: I am in Northern California and I am well. We have had quite a bit of rain, but not so much of atmospheric rivers like we had last year. So we celebrate a lot here when we have rain that we can actually receive, the earth can receive and it doesn’t create flooding and it nourishes everything. And so, you know, we’re in the dark of winter still, but I have to say, the days are getting a little bit longer, which always perks me up when I can see the days getting longer. So I’m well, I’m happy to be starting a new year and delighted to be talking to you.

Manda: Thank you. Yeah. When someone’s in America, we schedule the recording at 6:00 UK time and I scheduled it months and months ago. And I forget that around this time of year, that’s not far after the point where the chickens are kind of thinking they might go to sleep. I spend quite a lot of time hen herding before we come onto the podcast! That was fine, and we’ve just had frosts and they haven’t got frostbite in their feet yet, so this is all good. So it’s January and when we first moved here, we were told that we’d have to fill the freezer for two weeks in January, February because there would be a point where we couldn’t get out because of the snow. And we have never seen that much snow. It’s like the weather is not what it used to be.

Maggie: It’s all changing, isn’t it?

Manda: Everything is changing faster than we thought, but that means there is opportunity for change, and you have written a book designed to help people to do that: Feminine Sovereignty; Eight Pillars for Regenerating Ourselves and the World. Congratulations! How is it doing? Is it doing as well as you would like?

Maggie: Thank you, thank you. Well, it just came out. So it’s been out two months now and we had a really great book birth process. I think we have sold about 1000 copies. So for a first time self-published author, that’s a good start.

Manda: That’s really good. Yes.

Maggie: Yeah. So I’m happy with that. I’m also working with readers and offering, I’m actually starting ten Days of Sovereignty today, which is a gift for my readers and my community, introducing them to some of the key themes in a very accessible way. So some of them are readers, some of them are checking it out and it’s just a great way for me to build community and be with people. I learned so much also from how people are working with material, so that’s why I really like to be very highly interactive and be in community with people, because it grows me a lot as well. 

Manda: Yes, and then it makes a book not a static thing.

Maggie: Well, exactly.

Manda: Then it becomes an evolving process, and presumably a new book arises at some point. But in the meantime, you can bring in the people, you can explore things more deeply, and the book becomes something much more alive than we could ever do in the old days, when we just went round and talked to people at festivals or book readings or whatever else. It’s so different these days, so I’d like to get into that later on. But before we get there, feminine sovereignty, that’s your title, and it seems to me that both of those are words that have multiple meanings and many depths and many layers. And so let’s look into those if we can. Let’s just look into what feminine means first for you, partly because I’m aware that we spoke to Nina Simons not very long ago, and we spoke a lot about the masculine and the feminine being within both of us, but we never really took the time to unpick that. We were talking about other things. So I’d like to take that time with you now. So what does feminine mean for you in the context of the current world?

Maggie: Well, let me just be very transparent. I’m not one of those people who’s been out teaching about the divine feminine or anything. Not that I have anything against it, but it just hasn’t been my thing. And really, I’ve always been kind of gender non-binary in my own way, gender divergent in my own way. So I love now how we have so much  gender diversity compared to certainly when I was growing up. And my kid identifies as non-binary, so I think that we’re starting to have a lot more breathing space around gender and what gender can mean. So I chose the word feminine very specifically for this book and I’m happy to go back into a larger conversation if you want to Manda. But let me just say, the reason I picked it for my book was as a juxtaposition to the sovereignty of individualism, which mask does not call out the fact that it is a masculine form. I mean, just historically. So I’m a historicist by training so you’ll have to bear with me in this. But, in the United States, where we had the first sovereign state and we had the first sovereign citizen in this country, it was definitely gendered as male. And then it became racialized as white. So the sovereign citizen has these attributes that are elided in the way that we talk about history. We don’t bring up the gender, we don’t bring up the racial stuff.

Maggie: We’re starting to do that now. But for many, many decades that was never a thing. And so it was just the rugged individual who was autonomous and independent and could do what he wanted to do as long as he didn’t hurt somebody else. Right? This was the sovereignty of the the citizen right here in the US. I’m sure there’s versions of that elsewhere, but this is what I know best, both because I grew up here and also because that’s where my academic work was in the United States. And so one of the things I’ve seen as more and more people have been claiming the terms sovereignty for themselves, which has been interesting for me to watch because I’ve been using the terms for 25 years, and now it’s like all over the place and people are using it for all kinds of different things, and we can go into that more if you want. But one of the things I see is women and non-binaries and people who have felt, let’s just say, more generally excluded from that notion of individualism, claiming sovereignty out of a desire to be included in individualism, which of course leaves the whole system intact. It just says, we want to have a part of that pie, please. You know, can’t we just have the American dream? 

Manda: The paradigm stays the same. You just increase the franchise a bit. Right.

Maggie: We just increase the franchise. And of course the movements for social justice have been about this. Not at all to denigrate them, but I think now when I came of age in a feminist household in the 70s, and I grew up during civil rights, feminism, and that was all about how can we expand the population that has the ability to participate fully as a citizen. And the thing is, that leaves the system intact.  And I think that the idea was that when people of different identities go into the system, the system will change. And I think there’s some truth to that. But I also think we’re running into that wall, of the system really has to be fundamentally transformed. So all of that to say, the reason I chose feminine sovereignty was to juxtapose it to that current trend that I see, where in its most crude terms, it’s that I claim sovereignty so I can have full access to be the biggest consumer I want to be. I want to be able to make as much money as possible. I want to have a big house. I want to be able to travel anywhere I want at any time, right? 

Maggie: So people have claimed sovereignty for that. And I’m like, oh no, what I’m talking about, it’s not that. So then what is it? So I use the term feminine to bring up qualities such as compassion, interconnectedness, caring, feeling like we’re all in this together, recognising that we’re one big human tribe. And we have to get beyond our tribal affiliations, as I’ve heard you talk about many times, that certain kinds of tribalism are really a problem, right? So we want to find these qualities where we’re like, hey, we’re all in this together, we’ve got to come together. And to me, that’s a feminine quality.

Manda: How do you get to that being a feminine quality? I’m not suggesting it’s not, but I think it’s interesting that we have gendered inclusivity versus exclusivity.

Maggie: Well, let me just say that I don’t think any of this is natural. I don’t think any of this is innate. This is not something that’s innate in somebody who has a female body or anything like that. For me, this is all socially constructed; that we create this binary of masculine and feminine and then we attribute different qualities to those different categories. So let me just say that I am not an essentialist in that way. You know, women are like this and men are like that, and women are feminine and men are masculine. Like, no, not at all. But it was a way, in my view, of trying to signal to people a distinction that I was making around sovereignty, that I thought would be visible for people who tended to, in that social construction of the feminine, relate to that. It was a choice that had to do with how do I best communicate with people, rather than me trying to express some kind of essence of what I think is feminine, if that makes sense.

Manda: Wonderful. So that makes a lot of sense of feminine being an internal process. And sovereignty, in many ways it sounds to me as if it’s you’re trying to expand sovereignty beyond a particular cultural moment in time with the US, where sovereignty gained a particular set of concepts. And sometimes when I talk to American groups and I’ll ask them what’s important, half the group will say liberty. And I have genuinely no idea what they’re talking about. What do you mean by liberty? Do you want the liberty to murder kittens? No they don’t. Do you want the liberty to lie in the middle of the road and have cars drive around you? No they don’t. Liberty has very specific cultural meaning. And so it seems to me is that sovereignty presumably also has quite rigid, from what I heard, cultural definitions and that you’re trying to expand this. So the obvious question, now that you’re working with your readers, is are there many people who identify as men coming to this, to find their feminine sovereignty? Or is it still largely people who identify as women?

Maggie: Well, I mostly work with women. I’ve always mostly worked with women. Mostly women are the people who are attracted to working with me. I also in the book and also in my work, I do specifically address ways that women have been marginalised and persecuted and so on. So my feeling about men is they are totally welcome to come and participate, and sometimes they do, as long as they’re willing to understand that they’re not going to be the centre. I de-center men, I de-center that. And for some men, that’s totally fine. They’re like, yeah, I don’t really need to be the centre anymore. I get it. And others are like, wait, what about me? Wait, wait, what about me? So if they’re happy to come into an environment where women are the centre and their voices are really, really encouraged and they may hear things that are hard for them to hear, then I’m fine with them being there. But my environment is very specifically kind of focussed that way. Although, I’ve had men who’ve looked at my book say this isn’t just for women. And I’m like, absolutely, it’s not just for women. Although there is material in the chapter about vitality and embodiment and our relationship to the living world, I talk a lot about the way that women’s bodies have, you know, all the different things that have happened with women’s bodies over the years. And I don’t talk about that with men’s about men’s bodies. So in that way, there is a kind of women focus to what I’m doing.

Maggie: But what I would say about sovereignty is, you’ll like this I think Manda, I first was introduced to it, working with a shamanic practitioner who was talking about energetic sovereignty. This was 25 years ago in 1998, and we were doing work, and she was talking about, from a shamanic point of view, the significance of having energetic sovereignty so that you don’t have other energies in your field, basically. And there’s a quality to the word that I really loved. And I think that there is an appeal that many of us have to the kind of regal quality that can go with sovereignty, when we think of royalty, for example, the regal part. And what I’ve wanted to do is say there are qualities of this energy, of this word, that are appealing to us. And the best sovereigns historically were always benevolent. They were always concerned about the well-being of their people. They were always concerned about the well-being of the land. And we have historical antecedents of the few who were like that. And so I want to reclaim this possibility. And and I don’t quite know what you think about this, but I’ve read about the sovereignty goddess, who is an ancient pre-Roman, old Europe figure, who was the one who chose and joined with the king, representing the land. She was the one who said, okay, I think we can trust him, we’re going to select him and joined with him. And then she could remove him if he was not acting appropriately and protecting the people and all of that. And this is my ancestry and this is something that I find really interesting and appealing, because then we have more of a balance of masculine and feminine during that time.

Maggie: And so, not to try to return to that past or something, but to be like, where is there juice for us in that idea? And one of the things with the modern sovereignty and individualism is that it’s this idea that you’re an autonomous being that has this independence. But actually, if you look at sovereignty, you can’t be a sovereign on your own. You’re a sovereign because you have a people or you have a domain, you have a terrain, you have something that you are responsible for. We’ve seen a lot of dictators, a lot of authoritarianism, you know, royalty is is rife with with that. And yet in its highest expression, it’s about how do we step into really taking responsibility for that which is within our purview and helping it to heal, to thrive and to be in its highest expression. 

Maggie: So that’s the kind of energy of sovereignty that I want to invoke. Because the problem with individualism is it really focuses on rights. These are my rights. And I’m like, where is the responsibility that goes with those rights? And this is a big problem that we historically have in this country; we have to balance rights with responsibility. The shift from adolescence into adulthood is to take on responsibility, personal responsibility first, for our own actions and our behaviour and our words and all of that. But then responsibility as a member of the tribe or a member of the community. And this is the missing piece that I certainly want to invoke, in terms of what sovereignty can give us. And so that was also the place where I had been working with sovereignty, to look at how do I take responsibility? You know, in the early years, how do I take responsibility for my own energy field? Which is what that practitioner had said to me. Oh my gosh, I’d never even thought number one, that that was there. And number two, that I needed to do it. And I didn’t know how to do it.

Maggie: It was like a new thing for me at the time. How do I take responsibility for my emotional state, for my physical vitality, for how I show up in the world, for the things that are in my ability to care for. And so that started as a kind of personal exploration. But it grew a lot really during the pandemic when we saw this uprising of people around the world after George Floyd was murdered. And so many white people were like, wow, I got to wake up to my privilege. I have to wake up to systemic racism and how this is really damaging to huge portions of our population. And take on some responsibility for unravelling that white supremacy, that systemic racism. So for me, sovereignty is about that, too. How do we become more sovereign and more caring and more compassionate and more inclusive of all the world’s people? And then, of course, through Thrutopia and Accidental Gods, I’ve been exposed to so many different opportunities for how do we do that for our living world. And so many examples that you highlight that show how people are doing that in so many different places. So for me, sovereignty is about all of that. And that’s why also I call it out explicitly by the end of the book, which is about becoming sovereign stewards.

Manda: Let’s go inwards before we go outwards, though, because I think there’s a lot still to unpick in that. And I’m reminded of something that I saw the other day which said ‘the single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, called Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of ‘I have rights’ and an indigenous mindset of ‘I have obligations’. Instead of thinking that I’m born with rights, I choose to think that I’m born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations and the planet herself’. And this was in a particular fertile flow of various things on social media, because not long after that, somebody keyed me into someone who’d said, returning to tradition doesn’t mean returning to the past. It means reconnecting to the wisdom of our ancestors and bringing it forward with us. Which is exactly what you’re saying, and what your book really is about is  let’s acknowledge our birthright and step forward. Because exactly as you’re saying, the history of power over in humanity, as far as we know, is relatively short. 300,000 years of evolution, where presumably we were fairly balanced, and then 10,000 years of what Francis Weller calls the trauma culture, where we have allowed the psychopaths to rise to the top. I had a very interesting conversation not so long ago with Rachel Donald, where she said that in Papua New Guinea they identify the psychopaths, send them out alone into the forest. Kind of just totally exclude them from the tribe, unless they need to fight a war, when these people, guys generally, are invited back to fight the war. If they’re still alive at the end of it, they’re sent back out into the forest again. And they go! Which  can you imagine doing that with some of the psychopaths at the top of your and my political structure? Sorry, guys, you’re just going to the wilderness forever. And actually, if we get it right, there will be no wars, so you will not be coming back. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Maggie: Amazing. Yeah.

Manda: Anyway, back to your book.

Maggie: And I just want to say, Manda exactly what you read, that quotation you just read. Exactly right. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. One of the things I did in doing research for the book is I went and checked out the conversation about human rights. And I went and I looked at the the UN, I forget exactly what the title is, but it’s like the UN Charter of Human Rights or something like that. And there’s 150 or something of them. Only one of them says what we should do. All of them are about things that cannot be done to us, right? Our rights. And that was so interesting to me, because that means those are all developed in response to authoritarianism in some form. Whether that was royalty to begin with, but it’s all about pushing back against forces that are trying to confine us and make us do certain things. And I think your point when you were saying about liberty, you know, people from the US are all about liberty. I think that’s an example of how that shows up, is that it’s all about liberty. You can’t do this to me. 

Maggie: Yet there’s only one little thing in there about what our responsibilities are. Whereas if you read the great law of peace, of what most people know as the Iroquois, the great law of peace is all about responsibility. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about rights, it’s about who we are as a people and who we need to be in order to be good leaders. There’s all kinds of requirements for the chiefs, and all the women decide if the men are going to be chiefs or not. And they remove them if they’re not. It’s the same as you were just saying, right, send them off into the forest. And when our so-called founding fathers took that great law of peace and used it as a basis for the Constitution, they left out all the part about all those responsibilities, and also about the women being the ones who are choosing the chiefs, like they conveniently just left all that out because it didn’t fit with their… it’s indigenous life meets patriarchy, right?

Manda: Right. And it becomes quite interesting. I would like to unpack this a little bit. I want to go back to your book again, but we come up against this quite a lot in the podcast. Because we grew up in the trauma culture and the idea even then, when you and I were young, which, you know, was an aeon away in modern technology and the advance of civilisation and the changes that have happened. But I wanted to be free of the culture and the strictures of the culture within which I grew, as a little Presbyterian village and there was stuff that the kind of person I knew I was being was not going to get on well there. And yet, when I read accounts of indigenous peoples that are not filtered through missionaries or other people who impose their own belief systems on it, the freedom to be who you want is integral to the requirement to be part of the community. That seems to be something that’s really missing from the West or from our Western educated, industrial, rich, democratic, weird culture. Is that if we imposed on people obligations to be part of a community, the community isn’t there; the support, the network, the sense of being held by people by whom you are both respected and for whom you have respect; it’s just not there. And so I was talking to Josh Davila the other day about Coordi-nations and about creating new nation states that are digital, from people who do have that sense of respect flowing between and among. Our communities of place have broken down because we don’t have the kinship, we don’t have the connection, we don’t have whatever it took to make the glue, to help people to feel safe where they live. And I wonder if in your work with the book, you had any sense that our communities of place, purpose and passion were beginning to become disparate and that communities of place may no longer be the basket within which a sovereign person can function?

Maggie: Well, I wouldn’t say that they couldn’t function. However, part of our legacy as women, we lost our sovereignty under patriarchy and as indigenous people all over the world, we lost our sovereignty under the age of empire. 

Manda: Which was also patriarchy.

Maggie: Which often goes with patriarchy, but they’re not exactly the same. And so I think that one of the legacies of that is displacement. You know, that people don’t live in the ancestral lands of their people. I mean, even just like in the UK, if you just think about what happened with the enclosure movement, where people were getting along…

Manda: Forcibly displaced.

Maggie: And then they had to move and they had to go into cities that had no infrastructure. And no wonder everybody got sick. I mean, it got crazy, right? Because people were displaced off of their ancestral lands. And of course, this is what empire does, is it displaces people and the lucky ones maybe get out. So many Europeans came here to the United States because they’re like, we got to get out. Where are we going to go? We got to go somewhere. And then of course, the indigenous population here got displaced because those people came. And what’s happened with the legacy that we have of that, is one of displacement, of un rootedness. We are unrooted people, many of us. And I think that’s why a lot of indigenous people I’ve talked to here in this community are kind of like, when are you guys going to get it together and root yourself somewhere and be a part of your land? 

Maggie: In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer says this. She’s like, when are you guys going to start becoming more indigenous? You know, relate to the land, learn about the plants, take care of your environment. That’s that’s an option for us. And yet I think about the number of places I’ve lived in my life, like many, many, many, many. And that’s not uncommon for somebody of my background. So when it comes to communities of place, a lot of times people they’re not in the same place. And if they’re in the place, they don’t necessarily have a relationship to the land that would really feed them, about being in a place. I mean, you’re such a great example of your relationship with the Hill that you go to, right? And you commune with the web of life there. I mean, that’s being related to the land. And I’ll say for myself, I try, but I notice how hard it is for me to do that. 

Manda: Is there a place in the world where it’s easy for you? Have you ever found anywhere where that was easy? Connecting to the land specifically?

Maggie: Well, it’s not that I can’t have experiences, but I don’t feel like a rooted person, if that makes sense. Even now I have a restlessness in myself, which I think is a pattern from my legacy of moving around. So given that in our world, I have an online community and I call it a community of purpose. And it’s a global community, there’s almost a thousand people in it, and it’s growing and there’s people from all over the world in it. And that’s exciting to me because there are a lot of people who come and who participate, who don’t have access to a lot of the things that I’m offering, where they are. And they don’t necessarily find their community of purpose where they live. And so we’re looking for that online. And I think that that can be very positive. And it’s interesting what you just said about this idea of what is it, Digital Nation states. Is that what you said?

Manda: Coordi-nations they call them. Yes, absolutely that.

Maggie: The woman who created the platform that I use for my online community, it’s called Mighty Network, she said that she really envisioned that these are all communities of choice, of purpose, that people come to. And that as time goes on, people will pick a few that they feel really connected to, where they can find the people that they can share with, can support, can be a part of projects together. And she created this platform to facilitate that. And I love that vision, because there are so many people who are unrooted and people who are waking up all over the place, but where they live, they may not be finding that camaraderie.

Manda: Yes, absolutely. It’s one of the great developments of our time that we can do this. And I think part of the vision of the coordi-nation is that your first step is you build your community of purpose, and then you network out and find other communities of purpose that share your values, and a community of communities arises. Then we can begin really to reach the tipping points where things begin to change. So thank you. Let’s take a slightly different tack, because this is really interesting but I think we could keep going on down that rabbit hole, but we probably don’t need to. Instead I’d like to talk about genre, because you and I met on the Thrutopian masterclass and we still are endeavouring to create a new genre of work, because dystopias are really not useful. Utopias don’t help us because we can’t see how to get there, and we need the Thrutopias to take us from where we are to where we need to be. And that these are both fiction and non-fiction. And you have created, I would say, a non-fiction Thrutopian book. You tell stories in it, you tell bits of memoir in it, you tell other people’s stories as well as having the real, deep embodiment of what we can do. I want to talk about that later, too, but talk to me a little bit about what genre means to you as a writer. Getting out in the world, even just getting on to Amazon and having to allocate your books somewhere, when Thrutopian, even climate, is not actually a category on Amazon. How did you navigate that?

Maggie: Although I do have to say I picked a category on Amazon that was Earth guardianship.

Manda: Oh, is that a category at Amazon?

Maggie: It is a category. It’s a subcategory. Like you have to go down in it, but we found it.

Manda: Well done that woman!

Maggie: So it’s in Earth guardianship, which I was happy to be a part of. So genre. So I grew up in a literary family and I had literature in my life from the earliest, earliest times. My father was an English professor, and he taught many, many different genres. He really loved literature and language and narrative . And I was thinking about this this morning that I was really raised on Lord of the Rings from early early age. So my mother read The Hobbit to me when I was seven, and my dad read the Lord of the rings to me when I was eight.

Manda: Goodness. And you didn’t have nightmares? 

Maggie: No, not from that. I had nightmares from other things. But, no. And so I was really raised on story, myth, this kind of deep sense of ancientness, magic, but mysterious, unreliable, inconsistent magic powering the world. So that was really a big part of me. So when I came to write this book, I knew I needed to write it in a not straightforward way. Because I have an academic background, my  default to some degree is if I start talking about bigger issues, is to get kind of intellectual and academic and very linear. And I was like, no, that’s not the book I want to write. So I charged myself with the challenge of presenting multiple genres of writing in the book to reflect and represent the diversity of our actual lives. Like our lives are not one kind of narrative. They’re not one kind of song. They’re not one kind of tone. We’re constantly moving between different lenses, for example, through which we see the world, where we step in and out of different stories that we’re living inside of, whether we’re in the public sphere or in the private sphere. And so from my view, how we live is that we’re constantly moving through what you might call different genres or different aspects of consciousness.

Maggie: And so that’s why when I was writing this, I was like, okay, how can I use different genre to help people have a little bit of that experience and also to keep them engaged? Because story is the primary way through which we make sense of our world. I mean, this is why we always were telling stories around the fire forever, because this is how we know who we are. This is how we we pass on our values. This is how we share our mistakes and how we atone. We do all of that through story. And it’s also what we remember. Like if you think about talks that you go to, and there’s this person speaking, what do you remember? You don’t remember the five points that they needed to make, you remember the story that they told. So I knew that a lot of the material I was going to offer was going to be challenging. And this is part of the thrutopian challenge, right? Is what we’re presenting to people are often things that people want to turn away from, or they’re in denial about, or they’d like to engage but it scares them and they don’t quite know what to do with that. So I was thinking of this as how do I titrate my reader’s experience so that they can stay engaged? And so I build in pauses, for example. I’ll have my reader as the main character of the book and then the writer is also a character in the book and we have conversations. So if I present something that’s kind of intense, I’ll be like, okay, that was a lot; let’s just pause for a moment. Let’s take a few breaths. How are you feeling in your body? You might want to stop and make some notes about how you’re feeling right now, so that we can titrate our experience. 

Maggie: Because if we think of ourselves as being in a trauma culture, one of the principles of trauma work is that we don’t go any faster than the slowest part of us can go.

Manda: Yeah, thank you.

Maggie: Because if we try to push forward, then we retraumatize. Or it’s possible, not always. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s possible. So being able to slow down and digest and integrate is absolutely key to healing trauma. And so that’s a kind of underlying principle throughout the book, which in my view, different genres enable us to do. Because if you have a kind of intense piece about dealing with systemic racism, let’s just say, since we’ve already talked about that today. To be able to pause, digest, write about it, think about it, and then go into a story, makes it easier to actually take it in and integrate it and then work with it. So that’s why there’s so many different kinds of information, different ways of presenting information and so on. And I think this is thrutopian, because form transmits meaning in a very fundamental way. This is something that, when I was a professor and academic, I was really aware as a literature PhD, is form. What can be expressed or not expressed by using different types of form? And so what’s the genre but a form?

Maggie: And so with thrutopia I think a big part of our challenge and opportunity is how do we use form to help us digest the hard bits? You know, face and digest the hard bits and breathe and then be able to stay in or come back. You might need a break, come back in, stay in or come back. Circle back. So genre enables us to do that. So for me as a non-fiction writer, there’s plenty of narrative. I mean, to me, the whole book is a narrative. It’s all a story of development and of possibility. So it was not an easy book to write, I will tell you, it was hard, because of trying to make those pieces work. So you don’t have a reader all of a sudden go, wait a minute, we were just talking about this, and now all of a sudden we’re talking about that, right? But I had fun doing it too.

Manda: Yeah. And it addresses absolutely what you said at the beginning, about way back in 1998, being told about the concept of energetic sovereignty. Because sovereignty wasn’t a buzzword back in the 90s, was it? I mean, it’s really maybe the last five years it really took off, certainly in my listening, with the kind of rebel wisdom crowd, before the pandemic, sovereignty became a thing. And it’s kind of floated into different areas now. But this book invites you on a many layered journey to develop your own personal sovereignty and to grow yourself into a compassionate, sovereign steward of our planet in your own unique way. And then what I love about it is that you ease people, exactly as you said, into asking their own questions. What’s my role in regenerating myself in our world? How can I make peace with my past experiences of my ancestors so I can be fully present in the here and now? Really quite deep and challenging questions. And then you say, exactly, let’s pause and breathe for a few moments. Maybe close your eyes so it’s easier to turn your attention inward. You talk people through the actual process that they need to go through to, exactly as you said, to embody this, to root it, to ground it, to make it part of their own energetic reality. And I’m wondering now that you have a thousand people in your community and you’re talking to them, one assumes the community is self-selecting, the people who got it and the people who were able to engage. Are you moving beyond the book, or are you taking them through exercises that are in the book and helping them to process them, basically in real time?

Maggie: Well, we’re right at the beginning, because the book just came out and honestly, Manda, people are still getting the book. I had to really actually have a little reality check with myself, because when I did the first stuff with people who had bought the book, I was like, let’s go, let’s dive in. And then I was like, oh, wait a minute, they’re just getting this book. They don’t really know what this book is about yet. They don’t really know how it’s going to challenge them. And so I needed to dial back a little bit and be like, okay, how do I create the foundation? So that’s where I’m at right now, is really creating this foundation. And in asking them to share what sovereignty means for them, because I also want to hear, because it helps me understand. And a lot of it’s pretty what I expected, which is about, like one person said, ‘I’m the boss of my life’. And I was like, yeah, you be the boss of your life. So I think that this is kind of in the individualism category, which has to do with personal empowerment.

Maggie: The way that I talk about feminine sovereignty is personal sovereignty, personal empowerment is necessary. We need to learn how to really connect with spirit, work with our emotional energy, know how to work with our auric field, how to have a healthy body, all that stuff that’s necessary. And it’s insufficient. It’s just the first step. Because when you become really sovereign on the inner landscape, in the sense of building your vitality, becoming a well-resourced person, knowing what’s yours and what’s somebody else’s and not getting too trapped in that. Being able to step out of that confining conditioning to be consumers, all of that. When you’ve done that, there is an upwelling in most people to be like, okay, now how can I be in the world? What can I contribute? What’s my purpose? And as a human design expert, many, many people come to me to look to human design to help them understand what their purpose is. I have lots of conversations with people about that.

Manda: Tell us a little bit more about what human design is. Just for people who don’t know.

Maggie: Human design is an elegant and sophisticated system that draws on four ancient wisdom traditions, the yoga traditions, the tree of life from the Kabbalah, astrology and the I-Ching. And it’s uncannily accurate. I mean, I’m not really a systems person that way, but when I really got into this, it hooked me. I think a lot of people are kind of astonished, honestly, at how accurate it is when I give them a reading. So a lot of times people do come for this idea of purpose, and just to say a thing about purpose – I think that there is this huge interest now in purpose. What’s my purpose? This is a question people ask a lot, and I think it’s actually a hallmark of the breakdown of the story of progress, that in this country would be the American dream. But other countries have their own version of it, which is get an education, get a good job, you know, have some kids, get married maybe first and then get a big house.

Manda: Go up the career ladder, retire, enjoy your golf course. Yeah. And in the meantime, buy a lot of stuff.

Maggie: Exactly. Yeah. So it’s being able to step out of that, recognising wait a minute, that’s not really… And I talk to people who did that whole thing and then they’re like, oh no, I’m not happy. And guess what? It looks like it’s a problem. What we’re doing is a problem in the world. Oh no! And then what’s my purpose? And I think that the purpose is arising because the purposes that we had in our communities and that we were taught, it’s just not working for people all that much. Right. But my view on purpose is that it’s not like you have A Purpose, you know, like you have one thing you’re supposed to do. It’s more about looking for what makes you feel on purpose. It’s more of a felt sense. It’s more of an energy that you get and it’s enthusiasm. And the old meaning of enthusiasm is what makes the God within you dance? I love that.

Manda: That’s fantastic. That has to be the title.

Maggie: Makes the God within you dance. Because that means your aliveness is growing. And I’m somebody who’s done many, many different things over the course of my life. When I was in graduate school and when I was a professor, I felt very on purpose for a long time until I didn’t. And then I hit a place and I was like, okay, I guess I did what I was supposed to do, or what I was going to get out of this, and then I needed to go somewhere else and do something else. And then that trend has continued. I’ve done lots of different things throughout my adult life. But what I look for is what’s calling me, what’s starting to awaken that aliveness inside of me, so that I feel this fuel for engaging with life. And there are people who do have a purpose. Like my dad knew he was going to be an English professor. His dad was an English professor. He knew that he was born to do that, and he did the whole thing. He did the same thing his whole life.

Manda: For 60 years I remember he was an English professor. Yeah, huge amount of time.

Maggie: I think he’s not typical. I don’t think that many people have that kind of experience.

Manda: And not now. I think in his generation it was more, you took a job and that was your job for life, and there was a hierarchy and you slowly climbed the ladder if you were lucky, and then you got a pension and then you died.

Maggie: Well, and of course, if we go farther back, you became a blacksmith or you were a farmer, you grew up in a farm and you became a farmer or a farmer’s wife and that’s what you did. But it wasn’t necessarily coming from a sense of purpose, you know what I mean? It was just like, this is what you did. Yes. Right. So this idea around purpose is really a pretty modern idea. 

Manda: I think it is. But I think you could go back far enough, if you go back before the trauma culture which locked us into farming and get to the initiation culture again, which we need to bring forward. Then the whole point, I think, of the rites of passage was to discover what is it you’re really, really good at? What is it that makes you dance with the God within? Are you a hunter or a craftsperson or a healer or a shaman? Your purpose was was there, and I’m sure it evolved as you connected to the web of life. There was fluidity, but the chance to find what you were supremely good at, what brought the best out of you in conjunction with the rest, I’m sure was a really big part of the rites of passage at the teenage level.

Maggie: I hear you, and I think I’m just talking about people now are talking about purpose. I totally hear what you’re saying. But even then, you know, when I think about the trajectory in the Boudicca books, they’re still unfolding a purpose for our main characters, even though they got one level of what they were here for, but then they continued to discover more and more over time.

Manda: Yes, you have to listen.

Maggie: Right. So I think that it’s kind of both/and, maybe. But I do think this interest in purpose has a lot to do with the breakdown of culture, that would help us know that we had some kind of purpose. And we’re kind of like, what do we do now? The sense that I get from a lot of people I talk to is like, okay, I did that thing. I talked to a woman recently who was 29, she was young, but she had been a nurse for eight years. And she was like, okay, I did that thing and I was good at it, and I’ve been rewarded for it and I can make money doing it, and it’s killing me. And I don’t know what to do. And when I did her human design, one of the things I saw is this woman has intuition off the charts. Like so much intuition. And I said to her, do you realise how much intuition you have? Are you aware of that at all? She kind of went well…

Manda: But we don’t talk about it in public.

Maggie: But it kind of wasn’t okay. And I said, I hear you. Because intuition was not okay while I was growing up. I really suppressed it, you know, highly intellectual family. And she goes, yeah, I didn’t. And I said, well, what do you most love to do? And she was like, well, I love to coach people, I love to help people. And I’m like, of course you do, because that’s what you’re designed to do. You have so much intuition, you are probably an incredible support person for people, because you can just tune right into what’s going on with them. And she was like, wow, really? You think? I’m like, yes. And she was like, okay, I’m going to go explore! And I love that process. To me, that’s a liberatory process. It’s an example of what we’re talking about, how people get acculturated into something and she didn’t even know, or she wouldn’t own her intuition. And I’m so happy when I get to talk to somebody who’s that age, because now she can really grow herself through her 30s, based in her intuition, rather than coming to me in her 50s, having spent another 20 years being a nurse. 

Manda: Yes, doing something that was destroying her. And so much of our modern culture is that, isn’t it? And yet what I’m hearing from you is even when we found a spark of what makes the God within dance, we have to be prepared to put that one down and change and be flexible in the moment. Because what we were called to do yesterday may not be what we were called to do tomorrow. And that, again, our culture is not framed for that, because we still have to pay bills and paying bills requires some kind of income and the income we feel needs to be stable. I completely get that in your group everything is nascent. But are you in yourself seeing a pathway forward to a way of being that doesn’t require the strictures of our culture or superorganism or whatever we call it?

Maggie: Absolutely. I mean, my intention as of right now is I have a an offering that will start in February, and it is to walk through the eight pillars with me in our community of purpose. And it’s not a book club, meaning we’re not going to sit down there and just read passages from the book. It’s awesome if people want to do that. I’ve had some people who’ve already told me, yeah, a book group, I’ve got the book, we’re going to do it together. And you could take this book and have your own path to sovereignty in it, but my experience is that we evolve best in community. There’s only so much we can do on our own. And that it’s in a community of purpose that we can share, we can be witnessed. And for many people, just the process of sharing and being witnessed is deeply, deeply healing. Because most of us feel like we didn’t get seen and heard for who we really are while we were growing up. So just being able to share and be witnessed is very, very healing. But then we also can support each other.

Maggie: So you can ask for advice, if you want advice. You can ask for a reflection and and receiving a powerful reflection from somebody else is also deeply healing, because a lot of times we didn’t get that in our early years. We mostly got told what not to do or what to do, but it wasn’t about reflecting your brilliance or your magnificence back to you. Or even just empathising with, wow, I totally get why that’s heartbreaking for you. I hear you. Yes. Just having that kind of presence with each other. So a lot of what we’re going to be doing is working with the themes, the materials that come, but to do it inside of a community of purpose, because that is the piece that’s going to help us digest, the way we were just talking about before regarding the genres of the book. There’s a phrase that I love from Susan Harper, who is one of my mentors in the continuum movement, and she talks about how gravity is a force of belonging, and that this is a really healing experience for many of us because we are unrooted. We are often unrooted people. So if we can actually embrace and work with gravity as a force of belonging, we can become aware of our primary relationship with the planet.

Maggie: And then I see community as a force of belonging. That is on a human scale. Gravity is a planetary scale and community is human scale. How we create a force of belonging. Because feeling isolated, feeling rejected is so depressing and it drains us. So actually, just feeling like, wow, some other people are grappling with some of the things that I’m grappling with. And also the synergy that can happen when people start to work together and new things arise as a result of that, like the creativity really goes up. So that’s what I’m really looking for in this community and what we’re going to be doing in this year long, it’s called The Explorers Club. Because it is about exploring. It’s about exploring the unknown inside of us. It’s exploring the places that we’ve turned away from. It’s about exploring what’s possible, both in our own selves and how we can grow ourselves, but then also what’s possible when we are comrades and in community with each other.

Manda: Brilliant. So this is a year long and it’s starting in February. When is it starting? And we’ll see if we can get this episode out before.

Maggie: It is starting February 14th, I think.

Manda: Can you send me a link specifically to that? So we’ll put it in the show notes. You may have already sent it because you’re very organised and you sent me lots of links.

Maggie: I did not send that one. But yeah, okay.

Manda: Please do, because I think people listening may well want to take part in that. It sounds like an extraordinary thing to do. It would be great. Read the book and then really come and explore. 

Maggie: The thing about it is that the themes and the opportunity, the invitations in this book are very disruptive in a lot of ways. They’re very challenging. And one of the things I learned about myself and I finally embraced about myself, it’s one of the things human design helped me understand about myself, is that I am a disruptor. I just see things differently than a lot of people do. It’s called individual circuitry, in human design. I just see things differently. I’ve always been that way, and it’s why I’m attracted to Thrutopia, you know? I just see things different and so being able to disrupt the norms that are harming us is vital. And yet it’s deeply terrifying for many people. I mean, I have people who’ve been working with me and who are wanting this and they’re like, it’s so scary. I’m like, I know it is.

Manda: Oh, really? Right. And on a planetary scale, that’s where we’re at. So many people standing on the edge of the cliff, realising that the bus’s on its way over and it’s scary because we don’t have another roadmap. So are those people, the ones who are afraid, are you able to help them have a sense that there is a roadmap, even if they can’t see exactly what it is?

Maggie: Yeah. Well, that is the project. That’s the project. And that’s why it’s an exploration. Because I don’t have the answers. You know what I mean? I don’t have the answers. 

Manda: No, none of us does.

Maggie: But I’m good at asking questions, and then I’m good at supporting and holding space for us to respond to the questions and see what arises and see what’s valuable. And then also look to see, wow, where’s the resistance that’s coming up? Like I just completed another program, on Embody Your Human Design. And one of the things we talked a lot about was the process of meeting myself. Because as you grow, as you expand, when you want to move out of your norm, you move out of your comfort zone. You meet yourself in your own resistance. You meet the parts of you that are like, oh no, no, no, no. Beyond there are dragons, dragons are out there, right?  And then you get to meet that part of yourself. And then how do you work with that? So this is a big part of becoming sovereign is looking at that part of you that wants to keep you safe and going, okay, what of this is useful and what is not? What do I want to keep? What do I want to evolve? And that’s what the project of the book is about all the way through, let’s bring up some things and see how we respond and be able to process that. Because, one of the things I know you and I have talked about before, and I think this is something Accidental Gods really taught me, is we have so many possible solutions, right? We don’t have maybe ultimate solutions. 

Manda: It’s an evolving process.

Maggie: But there are so many people doing so many cool things out in the world, right? There really are. There’s like all kinds of stuff. And yet don’t have the will in large enough numbers to be able to turn our attention and our resources in the direction of those things.

Manda: Yet

Maggie: Yet. So the project then from my view is how do we build the will to do that? And so that’s what feminine sovereignty is really. It’s like, how do we grow ourselves into the people who can create the culture we’d be proud to leave to future generations. That’s the short version of what this is about, right? How do we grow ourselves into those people who have that kind of will to actually do things differently? Maybe look at my comfort and my conveniences. Do I actually need all of that?

Manda: Yeah, sure. And it’s going anyway. I think part of the conversations that we’re having, certainly this year is even if you think you can’t do without them, you’re not going to have them much longer. The system is breaking down. And so what can we craft while there is time that will bring us forward in a way that is healing and whole and generative and gives us a space to breathe and enables us. To create a space for the future generations to step into. So yeah.

Maggie: I want to just speak to this tension point that you just mentioned. Because I’ve heard you speak about before and we’ve talked about in thrutopia, is if you present the facts to people, a lot of times they can’t digest it. They’re like, yeah, yeah I know. So for me it’s like, how do I get in there. 

Manda: How do you get the ears open and listening. Able to absorb. Yes.

Maggie: Get in the psyche. How do you get in there? So that people are willing to actually have the challenging conversations with themselves to start out with, but then with other people.

Manda: And are you finding that the people coming to you, you’re still at that? Because I’m imagining the people who come to you have had those challenging conversations and are now wanting to step into, okay, so what’s possible? But are you finding that actually you’re still at the process of…

Maggie:  Oh yeah.

Manda: Oh really. Okay.

Maggie: Yeah. And that may change over time because in terms of my whole kind of development of my body of work, the book and feminine sovereignty in its form is new for the population that I’ve had. And so my intention is, now that the book is here, and I’m getting to talk to you and to talk to other people, that I will be attracting more people who are like you’re saying, at the stage that you’re talking about. 

Manda: But your existing community needs to be led to the edge, so to speak? 

Maggie: Well, I think it’s a mix. It’s a mix. There was a woman who responded this morning to something, who was saying, ‘yeah, I’m not really sure what I think about sovereignty. I grew up in a communist country. And the way that we were, the environment I grew up in, so because sovereignty sounds a little bit like authoritarianism. And so I need to digest that’. And I was like thank you for bringing that up. Because these are some of the pieces. But she’s also somebody who was saying, yeah, sovereignty for me is being able to be in command of my life, be in charge of my life. Which for somebody who grew up in a communist country where she didn’t get to do that, it totally makes sense. So that’s where she’s at. So there’s a whole spectrum, right? There’s a whole spectrum. And you know, as you’ve said many times, we need all of us, right? So wherever you’re at, come on in. Let me meet you where you’re at. We got something for you no matter where you are. And we’ll keep moving it along.

Manda: Excellent. Yeah. And you have the skills to do that. That’s the amazing thing is you have built this.

Maggie: But the other thing Manda, just related to what you’re saying is that I’m also a little later in the year, is I’m going to create the Feminine Sovereignty Leadership Incubator, which is for a more intimate group of people who really want to do stuff. It’s about what are the projects, what’s the inner landscape project you want to work on? What’s the out in the world project you want to work on? And so that’s for people who are like, okay, got it. Got the idea of feminine sovereignty, now I want to do some stuff and I’d like to do that with support of me and of other community members. Because I want that kind of an offering for those people and it’s an incubator, because I think some people are going to read this book and they’re going to be like, wow, I could go and work with my city right now! They don’t need my incubator. They’re activated. They’re going to do whatever they’re going to do. But there’s people who are like, that would be such a good idea, but I don’t know how to do it or I don’t know what the steps are.

Manda: They want a community and the support and everything you’ve spoken about. To just help them ease into it, because it’s going against the flow still.

Maggie: And I think that we need incubators, to create environments where people can grow their capacity, so that they can really step out as greater change agents in the world. But my view is it’s really important that it comes from the inside and that they do it not with the old paradigm of ‘I have to go out and fight for everything!’. But how do we transform in a different way? Because we got to step out of that power over power under paradigm.

 Manda: Yes. And the whole of your spiralling inwards, the first four of the eight pillars spiralling in and then the second four spiralling out andcommunication that connects and mutually beneficial collaborations. They’re all about building networks, not forcing people about engaging beautifully. So I’m guessing you don’t yet have dates for the incubator, but when you do, send them and I will put them in the show notes. And if you’re listening to this later in the year, check out the show notes, because it might well be there. 

Maggie: Yeah, probably by March.

Manda: Oh, cool. Not even that late. There we go. By March.

Maggie: Yeah, I’m just going to get the Explorers Club going first and then we’ll see. And I would just say, if any of you are listening and you’re interested in that, just contact me and we’ll connect. Yeah.

Manda: Put your name on a list. We are we’re over time. I go over time all the time. So in wrapping up, is there anything else that you wanted to say or that you would like to say as closing to people?

Maggie: You matter. You matter. And what I hear from people a lot is what could I do that would matter? And it’s a very disempowering mindset. And I think that so much of culture has taught us that we don’t matter. I actually just saw a post on Instagram from Rockefeller saying, ‘I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers’. And I thought, you know, this is how we’ve been enculturated, right? We don’t matter. What we feel, doesn’t matter. What we think doesn’t matter. Our creativity doesn’t matter unless we’re being good workers. And then we’re creating profit for others. And so it’s a big step and a big process to own your own value, to own your worthiness, to own your magnificence, to activate your intuition and your creativity, which are absolutely vital for us to make our way through to that world we want to leave to future generations. We’re not going to do it just with our left brains. We have to activate all these other aspects of ourselves. And so you and your development and your feelings matter. We have to get in touch with our emotional state. We have to learn how to honour our emotions but not be controlled by them. This all matters. And whoever taught you or whatever system taught you that you don’t, just know that it’s not accurate and you have magnificence inside of you to offer. And that we have so much to offer each other. And I would love to meet you and find out the specific ways in which you matter.

Manda: All right, people, there we go. I will put links in the show notes through which you can connect with Maggie and get to know each other. Maggie Ostara, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. That was a delight and I look forward to hearing how it all goes.

Maggie: Thank you Manda. Always a joy.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for another week. With enormous thanks to Maggie for the amount of time and thought and wisdom that she has put into this book, and then that she’s bringing to the world with her courses. Everything that she does is aligned towards creating a world that we would be proud to leave behind. Which is a phrase that I hope by now trips off your tongue very readily and is a space that you want to come into. If we don’t leave a world that we’d be proud to leave behind, the one we would not be proud to leave behind is being modelled for us daily. You only have to look at the newspapers, watch any kind of media to see what the old paradigm thinks is what it needs to do, what it can do, what it must do. I don’t know quite what is pushing it, but it isn’t good. And this is not, I feel, a world that any of us would be proud to leave behind. So then what is ours to do? What can we do and how do we do it individually and together? How do we build our communities of place, of passion and of purpose, and then network those communities in big coordinations of shared value so that we can change the way the world behaves? 2024, I really believe, is the year when this is becoming absolutely, obviously essential for anybody who has any measure of empathy or even a basic desire for a world that thrives.

Manda: So that’s us. If you’ve got that far, it’s definitely you. I thoroughly recommend Maggie’s book, and if you have the time and space to go on one of her courses, then I imagine that would be a pretty remarkable experience. Pretty much guaranteed to help you find a tribe that you can connect with. So there we are. That’s it for this week. Enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot and for the sound production. Thanks to Anne Thomas for the transcript and to Faith Tilleray for the website. For wrestling with all of the tech, and most importantly, for the underlying conversations that keep us moving forward. And then an enormous thanks to you for listening, for caring, for grappling with the really hard and wicked problems of our time. But if not us, who? And if not now, when? So let’s go for it. And if you know of anybody else who wants to dig more deeply into the ways that we can regenerate ourselves and the living planet, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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