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Wonderstruck

Wonderstruck

Written by: Striking Wonder Productions
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Wonderstruck® is a podcast about awe and wonder that includes the profoundly moving, the humbling, and the uncanny. Hosted by psychologist, yoga teacher, and seeker Elizabeth Rovere, it explores experiences that bring us to the very edges of what we can explain, and beyond.


Join us every month for conversations with scientists and shamans, philosophers and poets, mystics and experiencers. We ask what we can learn from those moments that often lack explanations. We ask deeper questions about consciousness, being, and reality. We look at mystery not as something to solve, but as a place where transformation can occur. And along the way, we glimpse a world wilder, stranger, and more Real than we ever imagined.


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Presented by Creative Visions and Striking Wonder Productions™

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Striking Wonder Productions Hygiene & Healthy Living Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Sciences Spirituality
Episodes
  • 33: Hiroko Yoda on What Japanese Spirituality Can Teach Us About Happiness

    33: Hiroko Yoda on What Japanese Spirituality Can Teach Us About Happiness
    May 12 2026

    When her mother died, Hiroko Yoda was brought to her knees. What pulled her back was something that had been there all along, the ancient spiritual traditions of her home country, Japan. What followed was a decade-long journey through shrines and temples, sacred mountains, and waterfalls, culminating in her latest book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness.


    The title comes from an ancient Japanese idea: that eight million spiritual beings inhabit everything around us. Not as a precise count, but as a way of saying the sacred is everywhere, in everything.


    Recorded inside an ancient Shinto shrine deep within the sacred mountains of Kumano, located at the end of a pilgrimage route walked for over a thousand years, Wonderstruck's host Elizabeth Rovere sits down with Hiroko to explore:

    ✦ How "kami" spirit exists in everything

    ✦ How the concept of "half-belief, half-disbelief" makes room for mystery without demanding certainty

    ✦ Why gratitude, not belief, is the core of Japanese spirituality and the seed of happiness

    ✦ The flexibility of Japanese spirituality and what it offers a world grown rigid in its certainties

    ✦ The spirituality found in your favourite anime


    Through Hiroko's journey, from grief to gratitude, from loss to a world where everything has a spirit, we begin to see that happiness isn't something to be chased or achieved. It's something to be noticed, in the smallest of things, in the spaces we walk past every day without looking.


    Chapters:

    00:00:00 Welcome to the Kumano Shrine

    00:01:54 Kami: 8 Million Spiritual Beings

    00:05:19 Rigid Society, Flexible Spirituality

    00:16:32 Walking Through Grief

    00:20:35 Gratitude, Not Belief

    00:25:07 Half-belief, Half-disbelief

    00:27:50 Mysteries of the Waterfall

    00:35:52 Itadakimasu: Spirituality in Everyday Words

    00:39:03 Meeting Itako, The Blind Shamaness

    00:45:15 Masakado: Anger and Love

    00:51:15 Anime, Yokai, and Healing


    Follow Hiroko:

    Website: https://www.hirokoyoda.com/

    Substack: https://blog.hirokoyoda.com/

    Book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/eight-million-ways-to-happiness-9781526672162/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hi_yoda_1


    Follow Wonderstruck:

    Website: https://wonderstruck.org

    Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/

    TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod

    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661

    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    59 mins
  • 32: The Secret Lives of Plants and Fungi with Merlin Sheldrake and Zoë Schlanger

    32: The Secret Lives of Plants and Fungi with Merlin Sheldrake and Zoë Schlanger
    Apr 7 2026
    If we understood the true complexity of the natural world, would we call it conscious? Would we begin to question the boundaries we put between ourselves and everything around us?We explore these questions with biologist Merlin Sheldrake and science journalist Zoë Schlanger. Their bestselling books, "Entangled Life" and "The Light Eaters", required monk-like study and deep immersion in the natural world. What they discovered quietly dismantles some of our most basic assumptions about intelligence, memory, and what individuality really means. Recorded during Harvard Divinity School's "Thinking with Plants and Fungi" conference, this special episode brings together Merlin, Zoë, host Elizabeth Rovere, and guest co-host Rachael Peterson, the "Thinking with Plants and Fungi" Initiative Program Lead at Harvard, to explore:✦ Whether plants have personalities and why they might be kinder to kin ✦ How a brainless slime mold can navigate its way out of an IKEA faster than a human✦ How flatworms put into question where memory actually lives✦ Whether it's possible to ferment a book and drink itWhen we stop centering the individual and truly reckon with the entangled nature of all living things, something shifts. The question stops being how do we include more-than-human perspectives… it starts being whether that separation even makes sense to begin with. Chapters:00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:10 How to Write About the Hidden World 00:04:45 The Myth of the Individual 00:09:53 We Are Polluting Our Own Home 00:15:14 The Problem Isn't Science. It's Language. 00:18:18 The Plant That Can Copy Anything 00:24:25 As Temperatures Rise, Fungi Are Evolving 00:28:31 Do Plants Have Personalities and Prefer Their Family?Follow Merlin Sheldrake:Website: https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/merlin.sheldrakeYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/merlinsheldrake Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566795/entangled-life-by-merlin-sheldrake/ Follow Zoë Schlanger: Website: https://www.zoeschlanger.com/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/zoeschlanger.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoeschlanger/ The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-light-eaters-zoe-schlanger?variant=41096248295458 Follow Wonderstruck:Website: https://wonderstruck.orgSubstack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpodFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpodApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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    42 mins
  • 31: Mystic Poet Chelan Harkin on Poetry, Prayer and Unlocking Creative Flow

    31: Mystic Poet Chelan Harkin on Poetry, Prayer and Unlocking Creative Flow
    Mar 3 2026

    Mystic poet Chelan Harkin doesn't write poems, she transmits them. At 21, after giving herself permission to write a "bad poem" every day, a creative channel cracked open and poems have flowed through her ever since.


    Her work has drawn comparisons to Rumi, Hafiz and Khalil Gibran. Poets whose words slip beneath the thinking mind to reach something deeper, older and more alive within us.


    Celebrating World Poetry Day this month, this episode features Chelan speaking with Wonderstruck's Elizabeth Rovere about:

    ✦ How a Hafiz poem she heard at 17 unlocked her heart and set her entire path in motion

    ✦ The "bad poem experiment" and how permission to fail became the key to creative flow

    ✦ How praying to her favourite dead poets led to a synchronicity that changed everything

    ✦ How our deepest fears, when met with consciousness, can transform into our strongest allies

    ✦ The extraordinary story behind her book The Prophetess which stands in conversation with Gibran’s The Prophet


    This is a conversation for anyone who has suspected that the sacred isn’t elsewhere, but closer, more available and more alive than we ever dared to believe.


    00:00:00 Introduction

    00:07:06 The Poem That Changed Everything

    00:13:47 The "Bad Poem Experiment"

    00:19:22 Say Wow: The Poem That Went Viral

    00:23:44 Praying To Her Favourite Dead Poets

    00:30:50 The Meaning Of Authentic Service

    00:35:55 Suffering and Our Great Cocoon

    00:39:21 Writing The Prophetess

    00:43:33 Meeting Hajjar Gibran

    00:51:53 Fear as a Life Force

    00:58:32 Closing Reflections


    Follow Chelan Harkin:

    Website: https://chelanharkinpoetry.com/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chelanharkin/

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chani.harkin

    Find all Chelan's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B08PL55XMD


    Follow Wonderstruck:

    Website: https://wonderstruck.org

    Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org

    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/

    TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod

    Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661

    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    59 mins
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