Lifeworlds cover art

Lifeworlds

Lifeworlds

Written by: Alexa Firmenich
Listen for free

About this listen

A podcast series that explores how to orient your life around nature. We discover the mindsets, skills and actions that are required to partner wisely with other forms of life and engage in acts of brilliant restoration.

Join me on this intimate journey into the eyes and minds of other species; learn how our guests are living in deep relationship with ecologies; be electrified by expanding your field of reality, and let these stories spark your reconnection to nature’s multiverse.

By restoring our relationship with nature, and learning what it is to be nature, we begin to restore ourselves.

www.lifeworld.earth

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alexa Firmenich Biological Sciences Philosophy Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Poetry | Fruitful Darkness with Rilke

    Poetry | Fruitful Darkness with Rilke
    Oct 26 2025

    This Lifeworlds episode is a devotional journey into the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, the lyrical German poet of thresholds and embracing transformations.


    Through readings of his most luminous poems and writings, we explore how Rilke guides us deliciously in reconciling suffering and turmoil with tremendous beauty. It’s an offering for anyone standing in the in-between, for those moving through sublimation, and longing for those secret, dazzling encounters with primal life forces.


    Rilke’s words are an invitation in. To move towards. His poems are prayers…. “to go out into our hearts as onto a vast plain, so that life can feel us as it reaches for us.”

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    18 mins
  • 33. Empatheatre: Social Sculpture & Feeling Across Worlds

    33. Empatheatre: Social Sculpture & Feeling Across Worlds
    Oct 16 2025
    In this episode, we explore the role of theatre and empathy in transforming worldviews. Dr. Dylan McGarry is one of the founders of Empatheatre, a South African theatre-making company and methodology that turns research and storytelling into living social sculpture. Their plays create what they call amphitheatres for empathy - spaces where art, ritual, and dialogue help people listen across difference, from mining conflicts to ocean governance to human-wildlife coexistence.Empatheatre’s productions have brought together communities, policymakers, and activists that rarely meet, showing how imagination can transform civic life. The process of creating the plays generates profound potentials for restorative justice. As Dylan says, empathy is not about agreement, but about creating a vessel strong enough to hold our differences while keeping us in relation.We will cover:Empathy as a creative actTheatre and storytelling as Trojan horses that open conversations that traditional politics often can’tHow to design spaces that allow lifeworlds to touch and the practices that help us shift into another’s perspectiveHow empathy, when practiced collectively, becomes a form of governance: a new infrastructure for democracy and careEpisode websiteLinks:Share your input for the whale productionEmpatheatreDylan’s PHD5min Empatheatre docIndlela Yokuphila: The Soul's Journey (ZULU) film & the radio play used in the court caseLalela Ulwandle TrailerUmkhosi Wenala doc about Zulu musical on indigenous traditions & animist relationshipsSteiner’s 12 sensesMOTHProject CETIKaren BakkerUndrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine MammalsOne Ocean Hubdylanmcgarry.orgInstagram: @dylan_mcgarryPhoto Credit: Casey Pratt. It captures a significant moment in a collaborative theatre-making & storytelling project titled "Umkhosi Wenala" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 17 mins
  • 32. Depth Psychology and Soul Initiation – with Bill Plotkin from Animas Valley Institute

    32. Depth Psychology and Soul Initiation – with Bill Plotkin from Animas Valley Institute
    Jul 11 2025

    In this episode, I sit down with Bill Plotkin, founder of Animas Valley Institute. Over the past 40 years, Bill has developed intricate, nature-based models of human development and education that challenge dominant psychological frameworks and invite us into a maturation process rooted in wholeness, wildness, and the more-than-human world.

    We explore their three major maps of a person’s “soul-centric journey” and cover topics including:

    • Why most modern humans remain developmentally stuck in early adolescence
    • The 8-stage Soulcentric Developmental Wheel and how it mirrors nature’s rhythms
    • The four cardinal facets of the psyche, and the inner protectors that distort them
    • Whether other species undergo their own versions of soul initiation
    • Why the path to a mature culture will not come from the strategic mind, but from descent, mystery, and imagination
    • This is a deep-dive into a body of work that’s revolutionizing the lives of thousands of people, and how to think about adulthood, education, and healthy human cultures.

    Episode Website Link

    Links:

    • Animas Valley Institute
    • Animas Valley Offerings
    • Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche
    • Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
    • Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche
    • The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries
    • Parable of the Tribes

    Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

    Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock & Ellie Kidd

    Photo Credit: Midjourney

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 15 mins
No reviews yet