Welcome to episode 4 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about the project, listen to earlier episodes and read articles about embodied permaculture, visit beingearthbound.substack.com/t/embodied-permaculture.

Episode 4: From Masking to Mutuality

What happens when we loosen our need to manage, fix and control, and allow ourselves to meet each other more openly?

In this episode, host Johanna McTiernan explores embodied relating as a pathway from masking and self-protection towards greater authenticity and mutual presence. Participants reflect on how early habits of fitting in, editing themselves, and seeking approval can become so automatic that they feel natural, even when they are rooted in tension and fear.

As the conversation unfolds, we hear how embodied presence can soften these patterns. Participants describe feeling safer in their own skin, communicating more openly, and relying less on external validation. There is a growing sense of permission to enjoy life, to value one’s own voice, and to care for others without disappearing in the process.

The episode then turns toward changemaking in polarised social fields. Rather than meeting opposition with more force, embodied relating offers a way to find common ground beneath positions. By resting in grounded presence, participants describe becoming more available to others and more able to hold difference without losing themselves.

A simple embodied practice returns from the early sessions of the project: “down and in” — bringing attention into the body, softening the face, and settling with the breath before engaging. From this place, listening deepens and connection becomes more possible.

One participant shares how this practice supported him to hold space for his wife and family when war broke out in his wife’s country of origin. Instead of rushing to solutions, he describes a growing capacity to stay present, grounded, and emotionally available.

In the second half of the episode, the focus shifts to control and agency. Through a guided inquiry led by Dan, participants explore what they are — and are not — in control of in their lived experience. Questions arise around fixing, improving, and outcome-attachment, and how much suffering is created when reality does not match imagined futures.

Participants reflect on fear, grief, resistance, and relief, as well as on the difference between power over and power with. The conversation gently opens into the possibility of participation without domination, choice without illusion, and action without guaranteed outcomes.

Throughout the episode, listeners are invited to notice their own relationship with control, agency, and trust, and to sense what becomes possible when effort softens into presence.

Coming up next

In the next episode, we explore what emerges when layers of resistance fall away, and experience is allowed to be as it is, touching into wholeness and deep belonging.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

Welcome to episode 3 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a six-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking, and the wider cultural shift towards alignment with life on Earth.

This series is based on an 18-month project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied, life-aligned embodiment practice. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities initiative and was designed and facilitated by Earthbound.

To find out more about the project, listen to earlier episodes and read articles about embodied permaculture, visit beingearthbound.substack.com/t/embodied-permaculture.

Episode 3: Tuning in to the Gut

What happens when we stop trying to hold life together from the head and allow ourselves to land more fully in the body?

In this episode, host Johanna McTiernan turns us towards the gut as a place of grounding, intuition, and deep trust. The conversation explores what it means to rest in not knowing, to loosen our grip on control, and to sense life from a deeper, quieter place within.

For many of us, a lack of grounding shows up as anxious energy, overthinking, or a sense of disconnection from meaning and belonging. How does that affect our work as changemakers, activists and permaculture practitioners? Project participants reflect on how tuning into the body, and particularly the belly and pelvic bowl, can bring a felt sense of safety and stability that allows experience to move through without overwhelming us. From this place, boundaries become clearer, and there is more space to meet what is happening without needing to manage or fix it.

The episode invites an exploration of intuition. Intuitive or inner knowing is described as something subtle, embodied, and relational. It often emerges through movement, time on the land, or moments of stillness, arriving not through effort, but through listening.

This way of knowing has implications beyond the individual. As the conversation unfolds, questions arise around collective work, decision-making, and changemaking. How do we stay true to inner guidance while working with others? What changes when we stop pushing upstream against life, and instead learn to move with its currents?

A recurring image in the episode is that of turning the boat downstream and allowing oneself to be carried, making small, responsive adjustments rather than forcing direction. This becomes an invitation to consider activism, leadership, and agency from a place of presence and relationality rather than oppositional struggle.

Throughout the episode, listeners are gently invited to reflect on their own relationship with control, trust, and grounded knowing, and to sense what might become possible if they allowed themselves to soften their inner grip and listen more deeply.

Coming up next

In the next episode, we explore embodied relating, moving from self-protection and masking towards mutual presence, authenticity, and holding safe space for others.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

We’d love to hear how this work lands for you, so please do leave a comment or share it with someone you feel would be interested.

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Embodied Permaculture Project, a 6‑episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking and the culture shift from our current paradigm to alignment with life on Earth. This series is based on a project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied life‑aligned embodiment practice for 18 months. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities Initiative, and it was designed and facilitated by Earthbound. To find out more about our work, please visit earthbound.fi.

Episode 2

In this second episode of the Embodied Permaculture Project podcast, we ask: What is embodiment, really? And how does it support those seeking to live in alignment with the Earth?

Johanna is joined by Dan, lead facilitator of the project, to explore how disconnection from the body mirrors disconnection from the wider living systems we’re part of. They trace how much of modern life draws us up into the head, away from the subtle signals of the heart and gut, and how this internal misalignment is mirrored in our external culture — from infinite growth models to ecological breakdown.

Drawing on reflections from project participants, this episode explores how returning to the body supports resilience, trust, and connection. We hear stories of burnout, illness, and inherited conditioning, and what began to shift when people slowed down, grounded themselves, and tuned in to their felt experience.

Together, we introduce the four principles that shaped the project:

Grounding – creating a felt sense of safety

Attunement – tuning into self, others, and Earth

Opening – softening into connection and flow

Integration – weaving inner work into outer work

These movements support a different kind of change: one that doesn’t push from urgency, but emerges from presence. One that reconnects us not just with ourselves, but with the land, with one another, and with life itself.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. You can find it here.

We’d love to hear how this work lands for you, so please do leave a comment or share it with someone you feel would be interested.

Welcome to the Embodied Permaculture Project, a 6-episode podcast series exploring what embodied presence and life-centric inner practice can offer permaculture, changemaking and the culture shift from our current paradigm to alignment with life on Earth. This series is based on a project in which 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe were immersed in applied life-aligned embodiment practice for 18 months. The project was funded as part of the Alef Trust’s Conscious Communities Initiative, and it was designed and facilitated by Earthbound. To find out more about our work please visit earthbound.fi.

Episode 1

In this opening episode of the Embodied Permaculture Project podcast, we introduce the journey that brought this series to life - an 18‑month exploration with 20 permaculture practitioners from across Europe, diving deeply into life-aligned embodiment practice. Designed and facilitated by us at Earthbound and funded through Alef Trust’s Conscious Community initiative, the project asked: What might become possible in permaculture, changemaking, and cultural regeneration when we root ourselves more fully in embodied presence?

We share why we believe embodiment is essential for the cultural shift we long for - a move from disconnection and burnout toward grounded, relational ways of being that are aligned with life. Through powerful reflections from project participants, this episode surfaces the tensions between inner and outer change, between head and body, and between working with nature and working as nature.

Together, we explore the invisible conditioning we carry from industrial cultures, how burnout shows up even in nature-aligned spaces, and what begins to shift when we slow down, reconnect to the body, and rediscover our belonging in the wider web of life. We also speak to the importance of trust, community, and the deeper qualities that enable transformation, not just in our systems, but in ourselves.

We created this podcast to share what we learned as fellow travellers and to invite you into this conversation about how real change happens.

If this conversation resonates with you, we invite you to go deeper. The Embodied Permaculture online course is a nine-week, self-paced journey rooted in the practices and insights from this project. Hosted by the Permaculture Association Britain, it’s open to anyone — no prior experience needed, just a willingness to reconnect with your body, your land, and the wider field of life. Join us in exploring what it truly means to live as nature.

In Episode 2, we ask: What is embodiment?

We’d love to have you with us for the journey.

This post is public so please share it with those you feel would be interested.

Earthbound is excited and proud to be facilitating the embodiment work in this important new Alef Trust project and I wanted to take a few minutes to explain why we are offering it to farmers, growers and agricultural students at this time of uncertainty and challenge for the agricultural sector.

Calmer Farmer – Supporting Food Producers’ Inner Wellbeing in Service to Food Systems Transformation 🌱

Feeling stressed or overwhelmed by the demands of farming in the UK?Looking for a different approach to your wellbeing?Discover how you can:Cultivate greater calm and presence, even in challenging timesFeel more connected to your body, relationships, and the landRediscover deeper joy and flow in your work📅 Join Calmer Farmer – a FREE 10-week online embodied wellbeing course for farmers and growers across the UK!This new UK-wide pilot research project explores how inner embodiment practices can support the wellbeing of farmers and their farm work.By participating, you’ll:Connect with farmers across the countryRecognize that caring for yourself is just as vital as caring for the land.Receive FREE, evidence-based embodiment practices (just 10-20 minutes a day!)📅 Enrolment open now!📅 Course starts February 23rd 2025!🔗 For more information visit www.calmerfarmer.org

Please share this post with anyone you feel would benefit!

Manda Scott is a force of nature. She’s the creator of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast and an award-winning writer of approaching 20 books. She is perhaps most known for her excellent Boudicca series which brought to life a rich and vivid portrayal of the Earth-connected cultures that existed in Britain before the invasion of Rome.

I devoured those novels back in the early 2000s being drawn to them initially because I discovered Manda had “dreamed” these novels into being. This creative upwelling had been gifted her through her decades of shamanic practice and her connection with what she refers to as the “Gods of the Land”.

As well as a very gifted author, she is also a teacher of 21st Century shamanic practice and works with people around the world to hone these capacities for deep connection and deep listening through her Dreaming Awake school.

All of these threads of her life are coalescing currently into what she describes as “thrutopias”, the living stories that will support us to move from our current trauma-based culture to an initiatory culture that prioritises relationship over control and mutual flourishing over profit. Her latest novel, Any Human Power is just that; a necessary story for our times that acts as a guide, a support and a beacon of hope for a species and a planet that is crying out for a better story to live by.In the podcast, we discuss the calling that beckoned her on this life path, the thrutopia movement, the limbic hijacking we are currently experiencing, cutting-edge socio-political technologies for systems transformation and above all, the power of a good story well told.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And just before you listen, I just wanted to mention that at the very end of the interview, I ask Manda if there is anything else that needs to be shared. She closes her eyes, turns inwards and asks the Gods of the land. There are long pauses as she listens and shares what comes. I have left them in because it feels important to share this process and practice to illustrate how it works in the world and to normalise this form of active receptivity as something we can all learn to do. In fact, I believe this human capacity of deeply grounded attunement could be one of the most important to rediscover and live from.

To find out more about Manda and her work and to read Any Human Power, please visit MandaScott.co.uk. To learn more about 21st century shamanistic practice visit dreamingawake.co.uk and to listen to Manda’s excellent podcast visit AccidentalGods.life.

Thank you for reading Being Earthbound. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Jessica Bockler is an applied theatre practitioner and transpersonal psychologist. She’s one of the founding directors of the Alef Trust which is a global leader in transformative education and training in consciousness, transpersonal and spiritual psychology and offers Masters, PhD and professional certificate programmes.

As well as academic excellence, Alef is also taking an active role in supporting transformational changemakers around the world. Through their Nurturing the Fields of Change community programme they are facilitating more embodied, more connective and more deeply transformative approaches to change work and activism across a range of fields including agriculture, social justice, climate and conflict resolution to name a few. Jessica has the great gift of bringing people together in spaces of mutual support and creative emergence that have the potential to support a new regenerative paradigm and a way of being in the world that fosters peace, growth and healing.In this conversation, we explore the huge potential this community of transformational changemakers offers its membership and the wider world. I hope you enjoy it.

If you are looking for a community like Nurturing the Fields of Change, we’d love to welcome you. You can find out more and register at:

https://fieldsofchange2024.sutra.co

If you know others who may be interested in this episode and the NFC community please share it with them!

Russell Scott is someone who has had his feet in the inner and outer worlds of transformational change for many decades. He’s a highly experienced retreat leader and clearing therapist and is the author of an excellent book on the value of independent seeking on the spiritual path as a means to fully own and inhabit our experience.

He also spent many years running an ecological retreat centre that ran courses on permaculture, ecological building and the like. So I was drawn to him as someone who values this synthesis of inner and outer work as a means to real cultural change. He’s a wise and kind soul and I hope you enjoy this podcast conversation as much as I did.Russell offers one-to-one clearing sessions and mentorship as well as group Coming Home (aka enlightenment intensive) retreats. He also offers facilitation training in these processes and I really recommend his book, Awaken the Guru In You. You can access all of his resources and offerings at his website www.awakentheguruinyou.com