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 still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and it is axiomatic of this podcast that we need total systemic change quite urgently, that the old system is already breaking apart. There is no going back to how things were. Instead, we, those of us alive today, get to fashion a new way forward and everything that we do counts towards this. And with this in mind, a few brave souls are already working to hospice the old system as it crumbles, acting as death doulas to the Great Dying, as well as helping us to awaken the seeds of the new world that exists within us all. And one of these courageous individuals is our guest this week. Sara McFarland is a Soul Initiation and wild mind mentor and guide, an artist of consciousness, and a death doula for The Great Dying. As their website says, ‘I believe Earth is always moving towards transformation and renewal. To our eyes, it may look like rupture or being stuck, a dead end, or a tragedy. And like the earth, we are always whole, regardless of the part we are currently stuck in. Resiliency is part of our nature. I do not offer the solution to your problem. What are often labelled problems, I understand as symptoms of disconnection from the web of life and the trauma of civilisation. Both blessing and curse, they are the place where our gold is buried and shaped. I use all of the tools; physical, energetic and spiritual, that I have learned and received, to support you towards wholeness and the building of inner resources in order to reduce your stress level, to learn to love yourself and to stand in your power.’. 

Manda: I came to know Sara earlier this year, when I was invited on to the Starter Culture podcast. We talked then for an hour and it felt like about three minutes and forever and that we could have talked all day and not run out of avenues to explore and rabbit holes to excavate. Half a year on, and our conversation today took entirely different routes, but it felt just as generative to me. Sara lives right at the edge of the transformation of our world, helping to midwife the soul initiations of the people who are called to ask them for help, and stepping into the mystery at all its levels, to act as a guide, mentor and healer in this time of total transition. So knowing that the cracks are where the light gets in and things are crumbling apart pretty fast these days, people of the podcast, with much joy I invite you to welcome Sara McFarland.

Manda: Sara McFarland, a wonderful human being with an amazing drum. For those of you not watching the YouTube, Sara has the most beautiful drum I’ve ever seen and will tell us about it. But welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast.

Sara: Thank you Manda.

Manda: How are you and where are you on this beautiful summer’s day?

Sara: Yeah, well, first of all, I’m really glad to be here with you, meeting at this zoom portal. And my body is in Waren, Müritz, in Germany, which is halfway between Berlin and the Baltic Sea in the Lake District.

Manda: Wow there’s a Lake District in Germany! Why did I not realise that.

Sara: There is. Northeast of Germany.

Manda: We’re going to have to get the spelling for that for the transcripts, but we won’t worry about that now, because otherwise it’s hard for Anne. So, you are right at the leading edge of the emergent change of inter-becoming that we need, to lift us into whatever is coming next. What is most alive for you in the world as we speak? Bear in mind that we’re recording in the middle of July and by the time this goes out in September (because summer holidays for producers), the world will be in a different place. But here and now, what’s flowing for you?

Sara: The thing that really has my imagination, my attention, my intention right now is a question. Okay, let me back up. I’m a soul initiation guide for humans, which means I tend this threshold between the old life and the new life and support a kind of dying. Yes, a kind of dying to the old ways of being, so that we might each of us step into a greater conversation with the Holy and the wild, with the web of life. From a place of soul, from a place of ecological belonging and the particular and unique way of loving the world that each of us are born to be. So in that journey of being this kind of creature, I’m also a death doula for The Great Dying. There’s a particular ask from Earth and mystery to really tend to the dying of the old paradigm, the current modern power-over culture. And, you know, some of us are really engaged in dreaming the future. I’m one who… I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know, I have no idea.

Manda: Well, if we did it wouldn’t be a new system. That’s the point of emergence. If you can predict it from the old system, it’s not a new system, you just painted the wheels on the bus a different colour. But I think we can find our way to the emergent edge. We can sense our way to that.

Sara: Exactly. The way I’m framing it is from human centric to earth centric consciousness. So this capacity to shift, which humans have had through our imaginations since humans exist and even before. So this kind of co-dreaming that happens as Earth community that we’ve forgotten, but are actually wired to be a part of. So this remembering, right? Sort of the first step in waking up or deepening into this journey. And so the death doula for the Great dying, the Great Dying in this case is this sort of collective dying that’s happening of the old ways. And so the framing that’s been coming to me lately, which I’m still in this question. My question used to be what is earth up to? And my answer to that, which has birthed this next question is: okay, I know how to track patterns, and the patterns I see as a soul initiation guide and human, are really similar to the patterns I’m seeing in the collective. Which is to say crisis and call. Those are the two elements of the initiatory threshold crossing.

Manda: Which feels a lot like the whole Joseph Campbell hero’s journey. And it gets quite a bad rap; people are going we don’t need a heroic journey anymore. And I think, but everybody is the hero of their own story. And yes, it was horribly gendered, but if we take it ungendered and make it a heroic journey, that crisis and call. And the reluctance to step over the threshold and yet the astonishing opening that happens if we do. Tell us a little bit more about how you see the crisis in individuals. And that kind of fractal mirroring in the wider collective.

Sara: Right. So when I’m working with a human psyche, a human body being; I’m kind of allergic to the word individual, because this is such a cult of the individual that has this separation and schism of individuality; it’s such a harmful part of the modern paradigm. But when I’m working with a person which is, you know, all beings are people in my understanding, as an animist practitioner.

Manda: Right. So human person.

Sara: A human person, exactly. When I’m working with a human person there’s a particular preparedness that happens, usually without our knowing, in terms of a capacity for an authentic life, a coherent sense of self and a way of being in relationship with the human world and the more than human world and the other than human world. Which is to say, the wild others and the unseen ones, that is relational. That there’s an understanding of belonging first to earth community, second to human community, and knowing one’s place authentically within that human community.

Manda: And so do people come to you, do you feel they’ve got to knowing that they want this, but not knowing how to step over the threshold? Is that how you generally come to meet people, at that liminal space?

Sara: If what we’re up to is soul initiation guiding, yes.

Manda: Okay.

Sara: But again, I’ll say here, that was the preparedness, what I just named. But that’s not actually the crisis, right? The crisis is all of that beauty that I just named and then suddenly realising it’s no longer possible to live the old life in the way that I’ve been living it.

Manda: Right. Yeah. And before we go further, this is so fertile. And I’m pretty sure anyone listening to this podcast is at this threshold or will recognise this threshold. It’s no longer possible to live the old life, and in our culture, the trauma culture, the power-over culture, we don’t have a narrative for where to go and how to be different. So you were talking about being a death doula for the old. Let’s explore that a little bit more in terms of individual humans. I’m trying not to call them individuals; human people and the power-over trauma culture. I think we’re at that threshold. But some people are expressing it more clearly, and others in our more dominant culture are perhaps still in deflection and denial, but I think it’s all still there. I think part of what keeps people in deflection and denial is there is no hegemonic narrative that there might be an alternative. When you have people who’ve got to that and they feel that they’re up against the brick wall of the existing narrative, how are they generally able even to find that you exist? How do people access the fact that there is an alternative to the stories that we’ve been sold for 10,000 years, of scarcity, separation, powerless, powerlessness, power-over dominance, ownership? How do they come to find you?

Sara: Yeah, that’s like three questions in one, at least.

Manda: Go for it. Pick any one of the three and let’s see where we get to.

Sara: Okay. But it’s a great question. So I think the first thing I want to say is oftentimes people come to me first not because they’re in a place to actually let go of the old life, or because they’ve reached the threshold, but rather they’re longing for the first thing. They’re longing for authenticity. They’re longing for connection with earth community and the wider wild world. And they’re longing for understanding themselves as in coherence and resource. Because there’s so much, in the trauma culture, there’s so much that keeps us from actually softening into our vulnerability, our authenticity, our ways of being in the world that are in alignment with our values. It’s like the whole of modernity is actually built to keep us away from those things, to distract us from those things, and to keep feeding the wound or making more of the wound and keep us obsessed with the wound. And so the first step is like, oh, okay, wait, how can I actually rest into the unbrokenness? How can I rest into the wholeness of me? How can I  access, resource and understand myself and have a kind of coherence in spite of, maybe, the culture that I’m living in? So that’s usually the first step that I support people through.

Sara: But those who have done that through whatever ways they’ve been doing it, and are in that place where they have the resources to go on the journey; so this is a really important part. If people don’t have the resources of wholeness and the capacity to hold themselves and find anchor within themselves, with their people, with their other than human people, with their allies and wise ancestors and all the layers of context that we might understand ourselves to have, multidimensionally, it’s not possible to go on the journey. And I’m not convincing anybody, it’s mystery. It’s mystery that’s taking us on the journey.

Manda: Yes. We don’t make these rules.

Sara: No way.

Manda: They just happen. This is the way the world is. Like, we don’t make gravity, but if you drop your cup it will smash on the floor.  And I think, I find, and I’m curious to know if you find, that there is a kind of bridging space within this liminal threshold space where people are still expecting the old rules to apply in a new way. And they want it to be possible to just, I don’t know, get the app, do a certain amount of stuff that you can lay out, and the softening into the understanding that the world is not what you thought. One of my really quite big guides turned up in a completely different context. I was having an Emit treatment, I was happily spaced out and as if they were standing beside me, the grey mare said: the world is not what you think it is. And it was like, pardon? What? And I’ve been working with that ever since. And I think that understanding that the world is not what you think it is comes over and over and over. Because I thought I had a pretty broad understanding of what the world was, and even letting go of that and the letting go and the letting go, and then the allowing, and then the noticing of the way the world is (and it’s so much more magical than our power-over culture has ever allowed it to be) is what then opens the doors to possibility. Is this how it works with the people with you?

Sara: Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. And each in their own way, right? I mean, each of us needs to have that moment: the world is not what you think it is. Whoever comes and however the message is given to us, we each need to have that reckoning. Which is not about going from an old story to a new story. It’s not even about, for me, the hero’s journey. The beef I have with the hero’s journey is it’s always about conquering and killing like a beast or an obstacle, in the kind of classical sense. And if we’re talking about the initiation of the soul, actually we need to be defeated by greater things. Mystery needs to cut us, you know, dismember us from our old identity and our old way of understanding the world and our old story. Our attachment to the old way of being needs to be completely severed and we need to be dismembered. You know, it’s more like Inanna on the hook in the underworld, just like rotting meat. And this is why it takes resource. We need to have the capacity. And part of us needs to be willing, even though so much of us is like, no, don’t do it! A part of us has to be willing to step into a place that has no story. That is the liminal, the gestational, the rotting, the dying and the waiting before the new happens. And so collectively, the way I’m reading it is we’re in this sort of dying time. We’re not even in the nothing, we’re not even in the between story time.

Manda: Yeah. We haven’t got to the cocoon with the imaginal soup yet. We’re still the caterpillar spinning the cocoon. Yeah.

Sara: And so my kind of context is 500 years from now, maybe.

Manda: Oh, do you think?

Sara: If we’re lucky.

Manda: I was thinking five. That’s really interesting. Tell me why you think 500. How do you get to 500? Just genuinely curious.

Sara: Yeah, it’s kind of just picking a big number that’s way beyond anything I can expect to be part of my lifetime.

Manda: Okay. Because that’s like seven times seven generations. Yeah.

Sara: But my own journey took 15 years. So if I exponentially put that out. But it’s really a threshold of no hope. It’s a threshold of point of no return. If I’m really giving up the old story, then I have to step into a place of the liminal where there is no new story, and where my capacity to be tracking the mysteries and be falling in love with the mysteries. Then I think the 500 years is really sort of like a commitment question. I’m really willing to step into where where I won’t see, collectively, I won’t see the new.

Manda: Okay. We could go down that rabbit hole, but I think it’s probably a conversation for another day. Because I think for people listening, simply stepping into this place of letting go and being the doula for death, which is something I really would like to explore with you, in order to midwife something that we don’t know what it is, is really important. I would also like to talk about the heroic journey and how we might reframe it, but I think, again, conversation for another day. Let’s step into this process of soul initiation, which feels like a rebirth. And I’m aware you trained with Bill Plotkin or in his school. And this feels very much like the progression that he has, from infancy to adolescence to adulthood to elderhood. And that this happens many times in a life. It’s not a one off hit. I think birth is a stepping into that. As is death. Each of these takes us. And we don’t know exactly what comes next, but the idea that it’s as much a liminal space and a step in our journey as birth is, feels to me quite important for people to embrace. I’m trying to think how we go here; talk to me a bit about what it is to be a death doula for you, what it means and how people approach it.

Sara: Mhm. Yeah.

Manda: And if that’s not a useful question, tell me what would be.

Sara: No it’s a great question. It’s a great question. I’m just listening for the answer.

Manda: Okay. That’s fine.

Sara: So much of this being a death doula for the Great Dying, so much of it is not about my ego or about my really knowing; you know, I don’t really have a plan. It’s an emergent unfolding. I would say it’s about tracking cycles of life and death and rebirth. It’s about becoming sensitive to what are the ways that death is revealing itself? How do I know, for example, on the collective level or or in the psyche of a human, how do I know that this person is preparing to die? Metaphorically, psycho-spiritually. It’s not really the same as physical death. But there’s analogy of course. There is a particular way that the person steps back from the world, removes themselves from the busyness of the world, right? From engagement in business as usual. There’s a particular way that the psyche, that the psycho spiritual being turns toward the mystery. Which is what happens at the physical death of a human as well, right? I remember when my grandmother was dying, I was tending her the last six weeks of her life. And she’d fall asleep, sleeping more and more, and she’d fall asleep and she’d wake up and she’d be like, oh, I was just with my mother. So the dead came to her in dreams, and she’d start to have conversations with them, and she’d start to share memories of those who had already died. And so there was really this sense of like they were coming for her and she was turning away from this world.

Manda: Yeah. It’s like being on a seashore and the waves of the other world flow in, and then they recede, and then they flow in. And then at some point you’re on the sea and you’re out.

Sara: And there you go. So I’m tracking that rhythm in the psychospiritual being of another person, in the dream world of the person. What’s moving in their heart, what’s their centre of gravity around which their psyche is moving. So I’m listening for this and I’m listening for this in the collective as well. Like the way so many people are speaking to magic or to reconnection with Earth, there’s so much going on, so exquisite. Which for me, as you were saying, it’s not necessarily about the new that’s being born, but rather it’s a symptom or a symbol of like, oh, we’re turning towards the mysteries again. We’re turning towards something, we’re remembering something ancient about being human, that at some point requires us to be in conversation with the Holy and the wild in a particular way. That we can’t fully be human unless we’re in that kind of a conversation.

Manda: Yes. And so when a a human person comes to you and their psyche is in this state, you can support, you can validate for them. I’m imagining the fact that they’re not going crazy, that the old narrative can be let go and then you can support them in doing exactly what you just said. At a collective level I’m seeing, it seems to me, it feels to me as if more and more people are coming to this edge. And I don’t know whether this is confirmation bias on my part, that I’m wanting to see it and therefore I’m seeing it, or that I’m talking about it and so people feel safe to talk about it. And they were already there, they just didn’t feel safe. I don’t know the answer to that. But it does feel as if there is a wave and a lot of people are on it, and that the more people that join the wave, the more people can join the wave. There is a sense of a positive feedback that in my systems thinking, I think, might lead us to a tipping point where the story of our culture changes. First of all, are you seeing that? And second, how are you seeing that?

Sara: Before I go there, I want to name two things here which I feel are essential to the tracking that you’re talking about. When somebody comes to me, when a person comes to me, I’m listening and supporting two things. I’m listening and supporting resources, like parts work, nature based parts work, to tend the ones of us who really are suffering. Both are wounded by civilisation trauma as well as think it’s a terrible idea to step away from everything we’ve known and risk our way of belonging in the world.

Manda: You think that or you think there are parts that think that?

Sara: I think that there are parts of us, yes, there are always parts who think that it’s the worst idea in the entire world to risk your belonging and step away from your way of being. Like, are you crazy? You’re going to die. You know, protective parts of us. So one thing I’m doing with people is supporting them to heal and integrate and welcome home these parts of us, these immature ways of protection that have been happening since childhood, that are getting really rattled because there’s some huge shift happening in the psyche, some threat in the psyche.

Manda: Yes. Just before we go any further, let’s go down this rabbit hole, because this is really interesting. Because we talk about internal family systems therapy, which is parts work, quite a lot on the podcast. And partly because it has been so transformative in my own life. And you’re doing nature based parts work. Just tell us more about the principles and how this evolved into being and how the energy of it works with you.

Sara: Mhm. Yeah. So the map I use is the wild mind map of the psyche which was synthesised by Bill Plotkin and it’s based on the four directions. There are four archetypes in each of the directions and times of day and seasons. And the intention is to find a language that is set out like a map, so that we can be in relationship with different parts of ourselves, and understanding that the psyche is itself based on the models of nature. Because we are Earth, we humans are also Earth. And so what is true in the ‘natural world’ is also true of the human psyche, because this is also a natural world. So there’s the inner landscape and the outer landscape, and in the wild mind map of the psyche, the intention is to chart that inner landscape onto the cycles and movements of Earth. And I’ll just say here there are two kind of main circles within this structure or this map. One is the facets of wholeness. So each of the four directions has qualities that are inherent to being human:

Sara: Our wisdom and innocence in the East. Our belonging to the wild world in the South. Our creativity and romance with the world in the West and our nurturing, generative adult, the one of us that can manifest vision and care for ourselves and our people through generations. I’m giving you the short, down and dirty version, of course.

Manda: Yeah, and that last one is in the North, just for people who were tracking.

Sara: That’s in the north. Exactly. And then within that are held, and for me it’s really essential in terms of the imaging here, that held by our Resourced capacity are the protective parts. And so we have our escapists and our addicts and our bliss heads in the East. We have our wounded children and our outcasts in the South. We have our shadow in the West. And we have our loyal soldiers or managers or critics in the North. And they all work beautifully together. And the ways that these four interact with each other are pretty much what we see in our collective culture today. We see wounded children reacting to power over. It’s the drama triangle, right? We see the victims reacting to the controllers and the perpetrators and then people escaping and distracting and addicting. And everything going into the shadow as it does and then acting out shadow very badly, very immaturely and irresponsibly. It kind of breaking out and doing real damage. So this framing of the wild mind map of the psyche is so useful for everybody. I wish it would be taught in schools kind to understand ourselves. Could you imagine? Every teenager, everyone in high school learning the wild mind map of the psyche? That would be unbelievable.

Manda: Yes, because even just naming these parts gives us a sense of distance and the ability to see them as they act out. And the more that we can see, the less we have to blend with.

Sara: That’s right. And as you named earlier, this thing of well let’s invite them in rather than cut them out. So many people think that the way forward is to get rid of parts of themselves, and it’s exactly the opposite. It’s about welcoming home those who’ve been exiled or welcoming home those parts who are criticising us and treating us terribly. To welcome them home and say thank you so much for saving my life.

Manda: Yeah, because these parts think they’re doing what needs to be done to protect our system. I think this is something that was transformational for me in my therapy, was that if we can help those parts release the beliefs, because they’re so fast and so powerful and they’re in there and they’re doing what they need to do. And helping them to understand that perhaps they don’t need to do that anymore, all the time, frees up that speed and that energy and that creativity to be available to a self-led system. And I don’t know why I hadn’t understood that in previous therapy, but my goodness, it makes a difference.

Sara: It really does. And the only thing I would add to what you said, which was so beautiful, and is also my experience, is tracking the ways of these ones who have become expert at particular things. When we can heal them and welcome them home and grow them into mature ways of responding to the world through our facets of wholeness, the skills that that they have been tending and developing and practising for, you know, whatever: decades? Become the very potent ways that we bring our gifts into the world. So why would we not want to do this?

Manda: Quite. Yes. Well again, I think, imagine if this was taught in school. Imagine if every human being on the planet had access to healthy iterations of this. I’m sure there are unhealthy iterations and that would best be avoided, but my goodness, it would make a difference.

Sara: Mhm. So this is the first thing that I do with people. Let me support you to become familiar with the landscape of your inner world in relationship with the outer world. The way I work is always to send people out and be in conversation with the wild. Listening to dreams, tracking dreams. We go on deep imaginal journeys together. It’s always bringing in the imagination, emotion and the wild ones, to be in conversation with the world in as large a way as possible, right?  Okay, so that’s the first part. The second part is death. Supporting ego death. That’s kind of a big statement, but…

Manda: Yeah, and I’m really curious because we’ve just looked at a whole system and we’ve just looked at ways of making that system more fluid and making the creativity of the system more available to the whole system and everything that we just said. Which part of the system is ego? Because the system is the system.

Sara: Yeah. Beautiful. Thanks for that question. So I don’t consider the ego to be a bad word. Like in so many spiritual circles, the ego is like a negativity.

Manda: But you want it to die.

Sara: Well hold on. So in terms of the wild mind map, We talk about the 3D ego, the one who is rooted in wholeness, in the four facets of wholeness, and connected with soul and spirit. It’s the one of us that functions in the world and manifests our vision and also makes sure we eat. You know, really useful to have an ego. Essential, actually. So we could think about about it like the first half of life, which means until soul initiation, the first half of life the soul is in service to ego. We’re being guided and supported and fed by our souls. Soul initiation is the process of waking up to or becoming aware of our soul. And in the second half of life, our ego is in service to soul.

Manda: Okay, so could you define for people not familiar with this how you define soul?

Sara: Um, yeah. One way of defining soul is our psycho spiritual, ecological niche in the web of life. Another way of saying it is the particular way you love the world.

Manda: Okay. That’s nice.

Sara: Another way of saying it is the image at the centre of you. The poem at the centre of you. So it’s sort of like the finger pointing at the moon. I can’t really give you a definition that is…

Manda: But it’s the uniqueness.

Sara: It’s the uniqueness.

Manda: Of this self-conscious node in the web of life, of what makes this node this THIS.

Sara: Exactly.

Manda: And able to listen and able to respond and when somebody plucks one of the threads of the web, this is the tone that emerges. So yeah.

Sara: That’s it. You got it. Thank you.

Manda: So ego comes in service to that, rather than soul being in service to ego. So there’s an inversion.

Sara: Mhm. And THAT requires the death process. That inversion, that reckoning, that revelation, feels like death to the ego because of the way a human psyche, an ego has understood itself to be in the world. The old understanding must die in order to crack open and receive the image, the poem, the knowing of the deeper truth.

Manda: Right. So, in a way, if I’ve heard you, what dies is the belief system in order that the caterpillar becomes the butterfly, and it requires to dissolve in the chrysalis. And so what we’re seeing on a larger scale, in behaviour there’s a thing called an extinction burst, which is you used to put the money into the vending machine and it gave you, I don’t know, a can of coke. You put your money in and no can of coke arrives and what you do is you hit the machine and you rattle it, and you just give it a few kicks and hope that it’ll drop you a can of coke. And that’s the extinction burst. In any form of animal training it’s the, you know, I used to sit and you gave me a cookie, and now you’re not giving me a cookie. So I’m going to do a lot of very smart sits right in front of you until you see. And then eventually I’ll give up. And it feels like modernity is in its extinction burst at the moment. It’s doing over and over, harder and harder. We’re watching in the UK, a Labour government basically replicating what the Tory governments of previous decades have done, but much more, in the hope that it will somehow create the outcome that they want. And guys, we’re in a different world now. It’s not going to work. But watching that extinction burst happening in various systems and structures and the belief systems of the people who would just keep going, doing this. And it must work because we don’t know anything else. It feels like that ego death is happening, writ large. Would that accord with how you feel things?

Sara: Maybe. I don’t know.

Manda: Okay!

Sara: It might also be a reaction of protective parts having a meltdown and a temper tantrum.

Manda: Okay. Right. Right.

Sara: So that’s why I think concurrently, the way that trauma healing has become so big in our culture is a part of this resource. You know, a part of this tending to the separation, tending to the wounding. However, parts of us, our protectors, want us to get really busy healing for the rest of eternity.

Manda: Yes!

Sara: Right. We get kind of stuck in the loop.

Manda: It’s a thing we can do to tell ourselves that this is the work. Yeah.  Okay, let’s unpack that a little, because I think this is really important. I don’t know exactly how we unpack it, but that this feels critical; the difference between doing the work because we’re growing, and doing the work as a distraction. And I’m seeing kind of the same, I’m kind of astrology adjacent, it’s quite interesting what’s happening in the astrological world at the moment. But I’m watching so much on my Facebook feed of all you have to do is, basically what it boils down to is think happy thoughts, light a candle, say a few pretty memes, because the cosmos is changing us and we are the ones who are going to change. You mustn’t think bad thoughts or even notice that bad stuff is happening in the world, because then you will evolve. And I totally get that this is my projection, my judgement; but I’m not seeing an awful lot of ego death and actual evolution happening there. I’m seeing a lot of really quite focussed denial.

Sara: Yeah. Yep. Okay, so here we are again at what are the conditions necessary to cross the threshold? What are the conditions necessary to prepare for the dismemberment? Which again is up to mystery.

Manda: Yes.

Sara: So anything that any human is saying about it is probably wrong.

Manda: Right. Because you can’t just press the button and go, okay, ready now, make it happen. Because that’s by definition not.

Sara: Protective strategy probably, right? So the two things that are required is the crisis and the call. And that within the context of resource and coherence. So if we get kind of lost in healing, obsessed with I’m never going to be done, I have to continue healing for the rest of my life. Healing is not the goal, but some folks get really kind of into the loop, the trauma loop, the vortex of trauma. And so that we could get busy healing, or we can get busy meditating and thinking the star beings will come and save us. Whatever the story is, we’re not really tending to the truth of what’s happening. So I don’t think we need a new story, I think we need to start telling ourselves the truth about what’s actually happening right now.

Manda: Go on then. Yes.

Sara: And that’s how we turn towards the crisis. We turn towards the crisis by saying This is the situation. There’s the sixth mass extinction happening. The planet is warming. Politics; I’m not even going to talk about what’s happening in the United States, you know.

Manda: Because by the time this goes out, it’ll be worse. Pretty much the only thing you can say is they’ll have thought of some other new crazy to layer onto the old crazy. Yeah.

Sara: But that’s kind of the state of the world in so many ways, right? There’s just layers and layers of crazy, which is the acting out of threatened, wounded children and crazy protective strategies to control, bouncing back and forth.

Manda: Yeah.

Sara: So that’s the one piece; oh, what if we just tell ourselves the truth about what’s actually happening? Here’s where it hurts. Here’s how it hurts. Here’s why it hurts. Here’s the situation. Now I’m going to do the work, my inner work so I have the resources to be present, right? So that I’m healed and whole enough. There’s no end, I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life, but I’m healed and whole enough to actually hold myself and be present with what’s happening. Then we’re ready to actually let ourselves go on the journey. Cross that threshold, right? And what happens then is the thing that brings us over that threshold is the call, the longing, the desire, the beauty. Partly it’s in collectively the longing for the new life, the longing for what’s possible, the longing for earth, for our people, for the ancestral. You know, all the things that we’re seeing moving in the world, that’s the longing, the call of the future ones. That’s the call of Earth saying, ‘come!’. These two have to have to come together. There has to be enough of a crisis. We have to be whole enough and healed enough to face the crisis and let it penetrate us, penetrate our defences without protecting ourselves against it. We need to grieve. We need to feel.

Manda: Yeah, we need to grieve. I think we need to emphasise that the grief, we can’t escape the grieving. But I think also it’s possible to be wildly in love with the messiness of life and grieve. I think people get locked into it’s one or the other. And for me, they’re two halves of the same rolling wonder of I can grieve and be in love. They’re not mutually exclusive.

Sara: No, they’re mutually feeding, actually. The more we love, the more we grieve. The more we grieve, the more we can love. Totally. Yeah.

Manda: Thank you.

Sara: And this already begins to soften. When we can do that, when we can love like that, and we can grieve like that, and we can tell ourselves the truth, it already begins to soften the shell. It begins to soften our attachment to the old way. And we can feel the longing, the desire, the call that is bringing us forward over the threshold to say, O humans, how can we take our ecological place once again? There are people who are living in their ecological place. There are indigenous people who have continued.

Manda: Yes, who have never entered the trauma culture, however much we might try and pour it all over them. They are still there. Just. Yes.

Sara: And there’s indigenous people who’ve already been through the apocalypse because they have been visited upon by the colonising trauma culture, and they are remembering. They’re remembering who they are and practising their language, learning their language again.

Manda: And sharing it very generously with the trauma culture, because they can see that healing needs to happen in a wider scale.

Sara: Yeah. So, you know, again, who are the guides? Who are the soul initiation guides on the collective level? Is the question that comes up, when we’re naming people like this, who are still embedded and woven in and have been through an apocalypse and are living.

Manda: Yes. Who are the genuine elders, I think, who exactly that; have got the perspective. There’s something about getting to be an elder, which is not an age thing, we could get to 108 and still be an adolescent; or we could be 40 and be an elder. It seems to me it’s a perspective and a yeah, it’s a felt sense. And when one is in the presence of an elder, it’s a really clear, there’s a level of trust that arises for me and a sense of relief that parts of me can let go of the having to hold. And again, that softening that you were talking about. Say more about the softening and how you see it with the people that you work with and also in the culture.

Sara: Yeah. So I’m thinking right now about my work with with starter culture, and that our vision is about building relational culture. And one of the kind of core practices that we invite people into is what we’re calling primal attunement with one’s self. Attunement with oneself, attunement with other humans, attunement with the other than human, the wild ones, and attunement with the more than human, unseen. That this is the framework for relational culture, and that requires both a capacity to tend to what is real right now, to feel what is real right now and to be vulnerable. And the softening is somehow a combination of these three things.

Manda: Yeah. Yes. And so for me, vulnerability is an act of courage. And I used to think that it needed a safe space and now I’m beginning to realise that maybe it is that when one feels safe enough in the web, it’s possible to be vulnerable in unsafe spaces. Or spaces that feel less safe, perhaps. So again, I’m interested in your perspective on… There’s trusting, there’s vulnerability, there’s compassion for self and other, and an unattachment to outcomes that allows the boundaries of ourselves to be less defended, I guess. Does that land?

Sara: Yeah, definitely. And again, I would say that’s this kind of capacity to access our wholeness and our resource, our self in IFS or wholeness in the wild mind map, makes us safe for ourselves. Knowing that we can tell ourselves the truth about what’s hurting, about our desires, about our longing, about how we’re feeling. Our aliveness. About what’s dying in us. We can tell ourselves the truth about that, because we have the resources to hold ourselves, we become safe for ourselves. And that makes us a trustworthy person for others.

Manda: Exactly. Then we can help other people to find resource.

Sara: Right. Just being present with people, you know. And when you said, that was beautiful when you said ‘I used to think I needed to have a safe space to be vulnerable’. And what happened in my head was ‘now we understand that being vulnerable creates a safe space’.

Manda: Exactly. Yeah.

Sara: That when we have that resource within us, that wholeness, that capacity, which is a muscle and a practice, you know. Everybody has access to this, this wholeness. Our being vulnerable creates a safe space. Now, of course, I want to put a caveat in here about there are actual places where it’s actually not safe.

Manda: Yeah. If we were in a gulag in El Salvador, it would be different.

Sara: Right? Like there’s a certain level of privilege and a certain level of capacity that we’re talking from and as and you know, with. And still, if we look at orders of magnitude, somewhere it’s always possible. It Might be on a smaller scale or a smaller circle, but we can find wholeness within ourselves and be vulnerable. Every single one of us can choose that in some way, in some place.

Manda: Yeah. And what’s arising for me is there’s something about authenticity as well, because I’ve seen performative vulnerability, which is actually quite a sticky place to be. And I always endeavour to feel huge compassion because it feels I have a part of me that always wants to get things right, that, you know, I need to pass the test, and the whole of life is a test. And in every moment I have to be checking what the rules of the test are, and then I have to pass them. And that there are parts where performative vulnerability is ‘this is what I do now is I become vulnerable and I emote’. And so I think that crucial to this is actually being with what is in a way that is authentic; finding the genuine place inside us can be really hard. Again, this is a lifelong task and a knife edge off which we wobble continuously. And all that happens, I think, is we notice the wobbling a bit sooner and maybe try and come back into balance a little bit better. Is that landing?

Sara: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Which is why that is so much of what I’m up to with people. That relationship between wholeness, between resource and risking being authentic. Because we can risk being vulnerable and one of the other risks is authenticity. There is an aspect of safety; I need to feel safe enough in myself and with others to risk being authentic. And then see what happens. Otherwise, I’m simply practising immature ways of belonging. Like you just named with your beautiful, tell me the rules of the test so I can pass it. You know, that’s a way you’ve survived, right? But it keeps you small in a particular way. It keeps you belonging in a particular way that is not rooted in your bigness.

Manda: Yeah. It works in the trauma culture because we get a lot of ticks for that. But it’s not authentic. And I think, again, when I’m in the presence of genuine authenticity, then my energy system, my soul, I guess, understands what authenticity feels like. And it seems to me I remember decades ago reading Gurdjieff, who said it only took 80 fully realised human beings and the world would be transformed. He didn’t define fully realised, which was a really easy copout, because also the population was slightly less then. And I’m feeling there’s some kind of exponential thing happening, but there will be the more authentic people we can get, the easier it is for people to be authentic. And then the more authentic people we have…. I have this dream of everyone finding their authenticity, because it is such an extraordinary place to be connected to the web of life, to be that conscious node able to vibrate with the rest of the web. And for me, there’s something about all the parts of my head mind, all the parts that feel they need to get the test right, all the parts that are reacting instead of responding, being able to stand down and not feel that they have to find the answer; is the letting go of responsibility, the setting down that burden, is such a relief.

Sara: Mhm.

Manda: And can we speak to that?  We’ve spoken a lot about the crisis and the call and the finding that place of authenticity and vulnerability. In your wild mind path, where does the journey lead? Or how does the journey evolve? I suppose that’s the problem with the hero’s journey, is it is a linear thing and it’s old story, but nonetheless, I still quite like it as a metaphor. I think there’s something about, as long as we’re not projecting all the monsters out and accepting that they’re worthy adversaries, and most of them are inside, and it’s a continual process, it’s not a one hit wonder. There’s still a sense that authenticity is, I was going to say, is its own reward. And I think the language of that’s probably not great. But it’s an extraordinary feeling, even if it’s only fleeting, to feel that it’s okay to be me. And that I can do me quite well because it’s me.

Sara: Yeah, in fact, you can’t do anything other. Me is the best thing you can do. It’s the only thing you can do. Yeah, yeah. Can you ask that question in a different way?

Manda: I guess I’m exploring where for you Wild Mind evolves. I’m trying not to ask it in a linear way, but I’m thinking beyond crisis and call is something. And what is the something beyond crisis and call?

Sara: Thank you. Yeah that’s helpful. So I wouldn’t name the journey as the wild mind journey. Wild Mind is a mapping and a way of continually, until we die and maybe beyond, understanding and being in relationship with our inner landscape, our inner world. That has as its intention, self-healing, resourcing, becoming more whole, more integrated, more coherent. And having more access to our gifts, powers, strengths as we welcome home and grow up those parts of ourselves.

Manda: Right. I think that’s actually the answer to the question, is there’s a sense of a flower continually unfolding, the thousand petaled lotus. Whatever it is, there’s a continual arising of being.

Sara: It’s the continual allowing of choosing authenticity or being able to be more and more authentic. It’s like, oh, I’m going to risk being authentic or make this choice, which is really vulnerable. And then in response, parts of me have a meltdown or freak out or have a really hard time. So then we turn towards the healing work again. And then we have the resources and we’re like, okay, got this, you know, I’m going to be authentic. Oh, that’s risky to be that vulnerable. And then we have this continual flowering and cycling of tending.

Sara: The journey of soul initiation is a human developmental period of time within the psyche of a human. And Wild Mind is a way of being in relationship. So there are different aspects of aliveness going on here. So crisis and call is from this journey of soul initiation, is this thresholding of the journey of soul initiation. And after that comes dismemberment, comes the dying of the old life, the attachment to the old life.

Manda: Okay. And the inversion of ego and soul.

Sara: Exactly. The. The dying, the letting go of the dying. The releasing of  my worldview, of how I’ve understood the world to be, of who I’ve understood myself to be in the world, as authentic and beautiful as it was. And there’ll be another authentic, beautiful, and now I’m between stories, now I’m between lives. I’m in the underworld, I’ve passed beyond the veil on a certain way and I’m in the mystery. And I’m in the dark and I’m in the wilderness within and without. And the world the way I’ve understood it doesn’t make any sense anymore. So this is where the metaphor is a bit difficult when we’re talking about the personal and the collective level, because I think in terms of the personal level, it’s a bit clearer to track than on the collective level, where we many people in different places personally.

Sara: So it’s kind of like, how big do we have to look at it in order to see the long arc of the species? You know, where do we need to zoom out to with the deep time eyes, to see the long arc of the species? And at a certain point, if we get too granular, the metaphor breaks down because there’s too many personal humans in different phases in the journey. Or not at all on that journey yet, because they’re, whatever, seven years old.

Manda: Let’s stay with the individual at the moment, because this is really interesting, because we’ve got to the meltdown, the dismemberment, the the dark night of the soul (ish). And there’s a part of me that thinks that in itself is an incredibly fertile place, and one could rest in there for a very long time watching dissolution happening. Do you see an emergence or do you see that as where the soul and the ego have inverted and the person is now connected to the web of life?

Sara: Well, the person’s always connected to the web of life, of course. They just don’t know.

Manda: Okay. Aware of their connection.

Sara: Yeah. So first this kind of devastating revelation. Just thinking of my own experience and coming face to face with the holy and understanding, seeing the reflection, we might say, of my true face in the eyes of the Holy, is a thing that is life altering to say it in a very small way.

Manda: Yeah. And not a one hit event.

Sara: Not a one hit event. It takes as long as it takes, you know. It takes as long as it takes again. This time is mystery time. We’re not in Chronos, we’re in kairos. We’re outside of time in a particular way, in an essential way. We become time walkers because we’re in this kind of other world at the same time as we’re in this world, functioning. You know, we still have to function. In traditional cultures, people would be taken away usually for this. But in our WEIRD modern situation, we have to have a job and function and have friends and family and do whatever we’re doing, simultaneously. But that kind of thing…

Manda: The kind of chrysalis phase where we got into the imaginal soup and everything is actually spread.

Sara: Yeah. The revelation moment. It’s kind of in a way the ignition or the quickening; it’s both the devastation and the spark, the ignition.

Manda: Right. It’s the death and rebirth moment.

Sara: It’s the death moment. Yeah. Which also has the seeds within for the rebirth. Then there’s this whole time after. And I think often in our culture we think, okay, one and done. We have a revelation. We have a peak experience. I go and have an ayahuasca journey or whatever and now I’ve had this vision and now all I have to do is just go do that vision. But the problem is we try and jump back out into the old life,  and think we can still be in the world that was before. But if we’re really in the journey, there is no world the way it was before. And so I’m listening for the collective levels of that right now, as I’m saying that. But to stay with the personal, after this ignition moment, there’s this whole time of the shaping; this is the time that ego is being shaped. The actual transformation is happening. The becoming who we truly are is happening.

Sara: And again it’s a cyclical process. It’s not a linear process but there is a particular rhythm and a particular forward motion, even though it’s sometimes also backwards. But there’s a particular rhythm and migration. It’s like a migration. There’s a particular journey that is happening that we are not responsible for the speed of, you know, we’re carried, in a way.

Manda: Yeah, but you can support people and you can experience them going through a relatively predictable cycle, even if we can’t predict the duration of it.

Sara: That’s it. Yeah. And this is such a delicate, vulnerable time. Just like I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. I remember feeling it physically in my cells. I could feel it happening. I could feel myself being changed. No ground under my feet anymore. Sometimes I would have these images of me being stuck upside down in the earth with my legs, you know, up in the air. Like everything was just wrong ways around and I couldn’t make sense of anything. And slowly there is a constellating. There’s a gelling, there’s a distilling, there’s a process of reorganising. And the coherence that we had, the wholeness we had, the self that we understood is the thing that keeps us sane, really on the journey. Because this kind of journey can be literally crazy making if we don’t have the resources to go through it. And so there’s this  cohering, this constellating, this gelling and reshaping into form again, that happens. And then the emergence out.

Manda: Right. So the small islands of coherence, the imaginal cells become imaginal organs, become the butterfly. But my experience is there isn’t just one butterfly, there’s cycles. That it’s a sine wave and the only thing that’s predictable is that it is going to happen again. And I feel slightly more comfortable navigating the not knowing phase because I know it’s a phase and Just because the ground has fallen out from under my feet, doesn’t mean there won’t come a point where it feels like the ground is back again. Is that fair?

Sara: Right. Yeah. 

Manda: And so it feels to me on a collective level that quite a lot of people are experiencing the the ground is just not there anymore. And watching the ground falling out from other people makes our own ground, even if relatively speaking, people are still holding down a job, they’ve still got a salary. They’re watching the cracks appearing in the world and I’m wondering, I’m aware we’re very nearly out of time, but I’m feeling on a collective level what you’re doing holding individual people; I know you don’t like individual but you know what I mean; is the work and it’s amazing. Do you have any sense that there would be a collective holding possible at a wider scale energetically or in any way, so that the people who are feeling the ground crumbling under their feet at least know that this is a thing that happens? I’m sensing that there’s an energetic space where that might be possible. And I wonder what you feel.

Sara: Mhm. I do. I don’t yet know what that looks like, but I would say that’s my growing edge of exploration, or one of my growing edges of exploration. I’ve called together this gathering of the Holy Death Doulas to explore exactly this question. How could we do this together?As a collective for the collective. Because it does feel that there’s a a call on a collective level. And it’s not just about working with a single person. That we have to find a way to actually scale that to the collective and be tending it in a different way. And it does feel first of all, anyway, more energetic. More… I don’t know what words we want to use there.

Manda: Energetic. I think the podcast is quite familiar with the concept of there being an energetic space, and it seems to me that this is an energetic space. And that it has its own integrity and its own dynamics. And once we’re familiar in there, if there is something else needed, we will find out what that is, but that it matters quite a lot to step into that space and be able to, or willing, to be in service to whatever life needs in that space.

Sara: That’s right. Yeah.

Manda: And it feels like quite a fertile edge. And I’m very heartened that it feels like a fertile edge for you, too. We’re very near the end. But you said this is one of the things that’s emerging for you and I’m thinking I should have asked an hour ago what else is emerging? Because this has been fantastic and I love it, and I would really like to come back. But what else is at the emergent edge for you that you could highlight for us in a couple of minutes?

Sara: Um, It’s, of course, deeply related to everything we’ve been saying. It’s just more about the form. So there’s the collective question and tending and curiosity and how do we hold this together in terms of the holy death doula gatherings? And then there’s how can I, as a single person connected into the web in the way that I am, be bridging that gap between personal and collective, or how can I access and enter in a more collective level. So it has to do with being an artist of consciousness.

Manda: Oh, I love that.

Sara: Consciousness as an artistic medium, through ritual, through practices and techniques of shifting consciousness, like drumming or singing or sounding or storytelling. I’m working on a podcast very slowly in the background. That would be a ritual invitation into that kind of shifted consciousness. So maybe an old word might be a seer, right? You know, somebody who catches things from the web and offers them to their people. That kind of role, because I catch things and I’m a weaver and I’m a time walker and I’m a listener in a particular way. And so how can I say yes to receiving that, but then also offer that to my people? And the thing that feels most alive for me, or one of the things that feels most alive for me, apart from or in addition to guiding programs or mentoring people on these journeys, is a consciousness artist, right?

Manda: Yeah, of course. That feels exciting. Can we line that up for our next podcast conversation together? What is it to be a consciousness artist? An artist of consciousness, I love that.

Sara: Yeah.

Manda: But meanwhile, we are so out of time. Thank you so much, Sarah McFarland, for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I really look forward to another conversation sometime soon.

Sara: Me too. Thank you so much.

Speaker4: Thank you.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Sarah for everything that they do. Being a death doula for The Great Turning is quite a huge thing, and a concept that I hadn’t really come across until we spoke. And now that I’ve thought about it quite a lot more, I’m beginning to understand more of what it takes to stand, to rest, to be at that liminal space, at the edge of where life moves into death, where everything is let go and there’s a birth canal into whatever comes next. Because we record these quite a while before they go out, so that the producers can have some time off, we recorded this in the week where we lost Andrea Gibson and Joanna macy to whatever comes next, stepping into the mystery of whatever it is that is beyond life. And I have been reflecting a lot this week of the eastern philosophical concept of the bardos as being the place where we go, and there are often challenges as we move through towards the next world. And it occurs to me as a thought experiment to wonder, what if this that we call life is the bardo? And I’m sure I’m not the first to have taken this philosophical and conceptual step. Please don’t send me 10,000 emails telling me who else has done it. It felt fresh to me and I offer it as a thought experiment to you. How would you live differently if this was a place where you could reflect on the things that didn’t work in some previous existence, some other mode of existence, and you are working through them as you step forward towards a new mode of existence. Perhaps it wouldn’t change anything. For me it is changing the texture of the days. And I am definitely exploring this concept of what it might be to be a death doula for the old system as we move into something new.

Manda: And of course, what Sarah offers isn’t only this. Soul initiation is a huge thing. And again, if we are entering into a period of species level soul initiation, what does it feel like for each of us to play our part in this? I came away from this conversation with a lot of open questions, and I’m offering them to you in our spirit of general and shared enquiry. So I invite you to go out and ask yourself these questions too, and see where it takes you. There are no obvious or right answers. There are just questions and reflections and then perhaps slight shifts in how we are in the world and how we see the evolution of our own souls. So there we go. That’s it for another week.

Manda: Enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcript, Faith Tillery for managing all of the tech while being away on a course. Thank you. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you have the time to give us five stars in a review on the podcast app of your choice, we would be enormously grateful. It does make a huge difference to the algorithms. And if you know of anybody else that wants to explore what it is to stand at the liminal edges of our world and of our being, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

You may also like these recent podcasts