Welcome to "The Ode to Joy Podcast," a thought-provoking and uplifting show dedicated to exploring the transformative power of creativity, self-expression, and the pursuit of joy. Join us as we embark on a journey to discover the hidden depths of the human spirit and the boundless capacity for personal growth and fulfillment.
In each episode, we dive deep into the stories of remarkable individuals who have embraced their internal muse or genius. Through their trials and triumphs, we explore the obstacles they faced in nurturing their muse and the strategies they employed to share their personal genius with the world.
We believe that every person possesses a unique wellspring of creativity, waiting to be tapped into. Our guests share their firsthand experiences, guiding listeners through their own creative journeys, and providing invaluable insights and inspiration along the way.
From artists to entrepreneurs, writers to musicians, and thinkers to dreamers, our diverse range of guests offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives on embracing one's passions and cultivating a life of purpose. We delve into the pivotal moments that sparked their creative awakening, the challenges they encountered, and the profound transformations that occurred when they wholeheartedly embraced their authentic selves.
"The Ode to Joy Podcast" celebrates the joy of self-expression and the extraordinary beauty that unfolds when we dare to follow our creative impulses. Through engaging conversations, we explore the importance of cultivating resilience, overcoming self-doubt, and persisting in the face of adversity.
Whether you seek inspiration for your own creative endeavors, encouragement to embark on a new path, or simply a dose of positivity and upliftment, "The Ode to Joy Podcast" is your go-to destination. Join us as we embark on a voyage of self-discovery, where the pursuit of joy and the celebration of personal genius reign supreme.
Tune in, open your heart, and prepare to be inspired as we uncover the remarkable stories of those who have embraced their internal muse and illuminated the world with their personal genius.
"The Ode to Joy Podcast" is available on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe today and embark on a journey to unleash your creative potential and find your own Ode to Joy.
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A life can look perfect on paper and still feel hollow in your chest. My guest Shün tells the story of hitting every goal early, standing on the “top of the mountain,” and realizing he didn’t know who he was or what actually made him happy. When COVID stripped away the image, the parties, and the external validation, it forced a ruthless reset and gave him a single north star: absolute surrender to truth.
We talk about what it really means to let everything burn, including the identities, possessions, attachments, and relationships that once defined you. Shün shares the intensity of ego dissolution, the terror of having no ground to stand on, and why he chose three years of solitude in a mountain cabin as a period of renunciation and spiritual practice. From there, we explore meditation, the devotional path of bhakti yoga, and how his relationship with God became experiential rather than theoretical, with Eastern teachings and Shiva becoming an important part of his spiritual path.
But this conversation isn’t only about letting go. It’s also about what happens when you come back.
Shün shares how self-acceptance and self-love became the foundation that allowed him to open more fully to other people, to God, and ultimately to life itself. We talk about the difference between having profound spiritual experiences and actually embodying what you’ve learned while living in the world. For Shün, that meant eventually leaving his solitude and landing in the middle of Harlem, where New York City became a new kind of spiritual practice: enjoying beauty, pleasure, creativity, pizza, people, and all the wildness of being human without making any of it responsible for his happiness.
And perhaps that’s where the art of letting go ultimately brings us: not away from life, but more deeply into it.
We close with joy, play, creativity, and dance. After years of finding transcendence through stillness, Shün now finds that same presence through movement and Five Rhythms, where meditation and dance become two different doorways into the same experience of being completely here.
In this episode, we explore surrender, ego dissolution, solitude, self-love, devotion, spiritual awakening, embodiment, creativity, conscious dance, and what it means to loosen our grip on who we thought we were so that something more authentic can emerge.
Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who’s standing at the edge of a big change, and leave a review so more listeners can find The Ode to Joy Podcast.
Recording from Kauai during a hurricane watch set the tone for a conversation that keeps coming back to one truth: we’re never fully in control, and that can be a relief. I’m joined by my longtime friend Jai Chambers, an intuitive healer and musician who created The Undoing, a practice that weaves kundalini activation, sound, and deep mind-body awareness to help people regulate their nervous systems and release what they’ve been gripping for years. We start with the big question: what are we actually undoing when we say we want to heal, grow, or transform?
From there, we go straight into the messy, honest center of motherhood. Both of us are pregnant with baby girls, and we talk about identity shifts, grief in the first trimester, and the uncomfortable reality that your capacity changes before your life does. We name the constant stream of unsolicited advice, the boundary work of protecting your peace, and the pressure to keep producing and performing even while you’re literally creating life.
We also get real about body image, disordered eating history, and the way “snapback culture” trains women to treat pregnancy and postpartum like a competition. We talk about trusting the body’s wisdom, choosing the slow path, and letting go of the fantasy that you can “get back” to who you were. And we don’t skip the hard social pieces either: friendships falling away, the loneliness that can hit even in a partnership, and why postpartum support needs to look like food, presence, and specific help, not vague offers or another onesie.
If you’re navigating pregnancy, postpartum, healing, or any season of big change, come listen for language, tools, and permission to surrender without giving up. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find these conversations.
RESOURCES
Jai Chambers | The Undoing
Jai Chambers is an intuitive healer, musician, and facilitator of transformational experiences. She is the creator of The Undoing, a body of work weaving Kundalini energy, sound, movement, and the mind-body connection to create spaces for surrender, nervous system regulation, emotional release, and reconnection with the authentic self.
Chaya Hannah Cohen: Integration After The Breakthrough
A powerful retreat can crack you open, but what happens when you go back to laundry, traffic, deadlines, and people who do not speak the language of your experience? I sit down with Chaya Hannah Cohen, a shamanic breathwork, bodywork, and sound healing guide and death doula, to get honest about the part of transformation nobody posts about: integration.
We talk about what it means to let go after the breakthrough and why “more ceremony” is not the same as growth. Chaya shares a core principle that has guided her work with thousands of people through ceremony and somatic practice: we can only move at the speed of safety. We unpack common post retreat mistakes, how to ground big visions without taking them too literally, and why the ultimate ceremony is often the most ordinary moment, where you practice patience, boundaries, and kindness in real relationships.
From there, we drop into the body. We explore why you cannot think your way into healing, how breathwork and sound can support nervous system regulation, and why being witnessed in community helps trauma, grief, and joy move without overwhelming you. Chaya also reflects on her Peru dieta, sacred reciprocity, and how plant medicine integration can invite deeper humility and discipline, not just peak experiences.
We close with death awareness and lineage healing, including the conversations we hope you have with parents and grandparents while you still can, from care wishes to music, rituals, and the kind of environment that feels most nourishing. If you want practical integration tools grounded in breath, community, and embodied wisdom, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who is in a big transition, and leave a review so more people can find this support.
Chaya Hannah works at the intersection of somatic healing, shamanic practice, and Jewish mysticism, offering trauma-informed support for those navigating the tender terrain after deep ceremonial or psychedelic experience. Her 1:1 sessions weave breathwork, intuitive bodywork, craniosacral therapy, and sound healing into a personalized container for nervous system regulation, emotional processing, and integration. She also offers group ceremonies, workshops, and retreats — including immersive gatherings in NYC and the Sacred Valley of Peru.
AI can produce words in seconds. But what happens to our voices, attention, and creative courage when we hand over the messy, human process of making something true?
In this episode of The Ode to Joy Podcast, Elena Box sits down with longtime friend, creative mentor, non-AI conversion copywriter, book muse, and screenwriter Elyssa Jakim for a conversation about artistry, surrender, motherhood, grief, and creating in the age of “robot writing.”
Elyssa shares why convenience is not the same as creativity, what it has been like to navigate a “void” season in her business, and how hyperachievement can become a survival response. She also reflects on birth trauma, financial insecurity, receiving support, and the death of her father, renowned translator Boris Jakim, whose devotion to language and literature shaped her own creative path.
Together, Elena and Elyssa explore what AI cannot replicate: lived experience, shared history, human witnessing, and the unexpected insight that can spark something entirely new.
Elyssa also shares what she is building now, including the Temple of Venus and her Own Your Artistry Salon for writers and soulful entrepreneurs ready to reclaim their voices and creative process.
This conversation is an invitation to stop outsourcing your expression and return to the beauty, difficulty, and aliveness of making something real.
As Elyssa says, “If we can’t be bad and get better, then we don’t get transcendent human creativity.”
There is nothing like the real thing.
Connect with Elyssa
Learn more about Elyssa’s work: https://www.elyssajakim.com/
Explore the Own Your Artistry Salon: https://www.elyssajakim.com/own-your-artistry-salon
Follow Elyssa on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elyssajakim
Read on Substack:
Shaina Garfield: From Chronic Lyme To Death Education Through Ritual
Death can be one of the clearest teachers we have—but only if we stop treating it like a distant problem.
In this episode, I’m joined by ritualist and death educator Shaina Garfield, founder of Leaves With You and one of the co-facilitators of the Beyond the Veil Retreat, to talk about green burial, grief, and the surprisingly life-giving practice of planning a sacred return to Earth.
We begin with Shaina’s nonlinear path into this work: being diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease in college, discovering holistic healing, and following a design question that led her to create her first macrame coffin. Shaina shares why handweaving a biodegradable coffin can become so much more than an environmentally conscious funeral option—it can be a communal ritual in which every knot holds prayers, beauty, love, and memory.
From there, we explore Shaina’s deeply personal essay, The Return to My Earth, and the moment she realized that healing was not about transcending or escaping her body. It was about coming home to it.
We talk about letting go of the lives we thought we would have, learning to hold gratitude and longing at the same time, and recognizing when the search for healing becomes another way of searching for something wrong with us.
Shaina shares how plant medicine ceremony has served as a form of threshold training, why the real ceremony begins after the ceremony, and why integration and physical action matter more than continually chasing the next cure, treatment, or spiritual breakthrough. She also offers guidance for anyone curious about connecting with guides, ritual, and the unseen—even if plant medicine is not part of their path.
And because this is the Ode to Joy podcast, we make space for the joy woven through it all: dance breaks, trees, water, gardens, laughter, daily acts of offering, and the practices that help us stay openhearted while living with pain and uncertainty.
Beth Clayton: When Your Inner Good Girl Tries To Run The Show
You can feel it when your old life still “works” but your body has already started to leave. Beth Clayton joins us to talk about threshold moments, the ones that don’t respond to hustle or optimization because they’re asking for an identity death. We trace Beth’s path from acting to coaching, somatic mentorship, and ceremonialist work, including the tender grief of putting down a beloved dream and the unexpected freedom that can follow a chosen crossing.
We also unpack a pattern so many women live inside without naming it: the good girl as a nervous system protector. Beth shares how “good girl syndrome” isn’t just people pleasing, it can look like overachieving, cool detachment, avoidance, or doing it all alone. We explore how protectors form through conditioning, attachment pain, and patriarchy, and why your mind may feel liberated while your body still braces against truth, power, intimacy, and pleasure.
From somatic work to ritual and end-of-life awareness, we talk about what helps you cross without getting dragged: being witnessed, making space for grief, and learning to relate to protectors with curiosity instead of war. We close with the inner elder, the part of you that can take life seriously while holding it lightly, and how connecting to that wisdom can change what the past even means in your body.
Three Truths from this Episode
1. Every transformation requires a death.
Real transformation isn’t about optimizing yourself—it’s about crossing a threshold. Every new version of you asks you to grieve a version you once loved. Sometimes we choose that crossing. Sometimes the crossing chooses us. Either way, becoming requires letting go.
2. Your protectors aren’t your enemy.
The parts of you that procrastinate, overachieve, people-please, avoid conflict, or try to stay in control aren’t broken—they’re protecting something. The invitation isn’t to fight them, but to get curious, listen, and allow them to become guides instead of guards.
3. We aren’t meant to cross thresholds alone.
Whether you’re grieving, becoming a mother, changing careers, ending a relationship, receiving a diagnosis, or simply becoming more yourself, witnessing matters. Many of life’s biggest initiations go unnamed. Healing begins when we allow ourselves to be accompanied through them.
Journaling PromptsPractices to Explore This WeekResources
Why Becoming More Yourself Requires Grieving What No Longer Fits
Something wild happens when your life hits a season you can’t “power through.” I’m sharing a personal update I’ve been living inside of lately: pregnancy, the humbling first trimester, and what it forces me to release when my usual productivity stories stop working. If you’re a mom, a caregiver, a go-getter, or anyone moving through change, this is for the days when success looks like making it to bedtime and calling that sacred.
We talk about tiny rituals as spiritual practice and realistic self-care. Not the fantasy of two uninterrupted hours, but the two-minute practices that bring you home: lighting a candle, making tea, watering a plant, stepping outside barefoot, taking five deep belly breaths, or putting your legs up the wall. I share how these micro-rituals build steadiness, protect your peace, and help you reorient when your nervous system is loud and your mind is spinning.
Then we go deeper into community as medicine. I reflect on the kind of relationships that don’t just validate you, but actually help you remember who you are. That also means grieving false belonging, noticing where familiarity isn’t alignment, and trusting your nervous system before your thoughts catch up. We unpack expansion vs contraction, boundaries around gossip, and why nature is such a powerful teacher when you’re tempted to hurry.
If you’re craving depth and ceremony, I also share details on the Beyond the Veil retreat (July 25 to 26 at Woodmont Day Camp in upstate New York) and what we’re creating together with shamanic journeying, grief wisdom, and sacred space. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.
✨ Three Elena Truths
Your nervous system often recognizes what belongs long before your mind catches up.
Tiny daily rituals have the power to keep you connected to yourself when life won’t make space for long spiritual practices.
Every meaningful life requires grieving the relationships, expectations, and identities that no longer align with who you’re becoming.
Death Awareness As A Path To Joy with Korona of Omnia Mirari
Death is the one certainty we all share, yet most of us are trained to avoid it until it forces a reckoning. We want a different relationship with mortality, one that doesn’t glamorize darkness but uses death awareness to sharpen what’s real, tender, and worth living for.
We’re joined by Korona, founder of Omnia Mirari and an end-of-life doula, to talk about “remembering home,” the fear beneath the fear, and why impermanence can feel so threatening in modern culture. We dig into what happens when a society removes death from everyday life, how fear makes us easier to control, and why reclaiming autonomy often starts with facing the unknown. Along the way, we connect death awareness to joy and embodiment, including the practice of staying aligned with love even when life gets messy.
We also preview Beyond the Veil (July 25 to 26 in New City, New York), an immersive gathering rooted in ritual, grief literacy, and spiritual inquiry. We explore why ceremony does what conversation can’t, how communal grieving creates real medicine, and what “dying awake” means through near-death experiences, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the idea that we carry frequency, not possessions. Korona shares a simple 30-day journaling practice to track what feels expansive and contractive so you can live with more clarity right now.
If this resonates, subscribe, share this with a friend who avoids the hard topics, and leave a review so more people can find these conversations. What’s one belief about death you’re ready to question today?
Grief can feel like you’ve been dropped into an alien landscape where the smallest routines no longer make sense and the future stops looking familiar. I sit down with applied philosopher and grief studies pioneer Thomas Attig to talk about why that disorientation is not a malfunction. It’s what love does to a life, and it’s why grieving is less about “getting over it” and more about relearning the world after loss.
We dig into the difference between reactions and responses in bereavement. Yes, sorrow hits hard, but Thomas argues that grief also includes agency: how we meet the changed facts of family, work, identity, and daily life. Along the way, he shares the teaching stories that shaped his work in death education and grief counseling, including what people actually need from us when they’re mourning and why platitudes can land like harm.
We also explore continuing bonds and the heart of grief: moving from loving someone who is physically present to continuing to love them after they die. We talk spirituality in a grounded way, including remembrance practices, speaking a loved one’s name, and the soul and spirit language Thomas developed over decades of writing. He closes with a powerful “fragile humanity, handle with care” reflection that asks whether it’s okay to be small, impermanent, mortal, uncertain, and sometimes suffering.
If you want to go deeper, Thomas’ new collection, Seeking Wisdom in Death’s Shadows, is available through Oxford University Press, and listeners can use a discount code shared in our conversation. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s carrying loss, and leave a review so more people can find honest grief support.
Thomas Truths / Key Wisdom from the End
Life is centrally a grieving process: letting go of what you cannot hold onto, and carrying forward what you can.
Grief is not only pain. It can also bring wisdom, gratitude, growth, love, and a deeper sense of being alive.
We are fragile humans, and that fragility has to be handled with care.
It is a privilege to be alive, even with suffering, uncertainty, impermanence, and loss.
You can feel “fine” on the outside and still be white-knuckling your way through life. That’s the quiet tension Elena Box is unpacking as Ode to Joy shifts into a new season on the art of letting go, a practice she also calls “practicing death while fully alive.”
We talk about why resilience isn’t only about staying strong. Sometimes strength is releasing what was never yours to control in the first place. From Elena’s work as a shamanic practitioner and death doula, a pattern keeps repeating: the things we struggle to let go of at the end of life are often the same things we cling to every day in relationships, motherhood, identity, and the stories we tell about who we’re supposed to be. That’s where the real work begins, not with willpower, but with honesty.
Then we get practical. Control isn’t the problem, it’s the strategy. So what are you protecting yourself from feeling? Elena names the emotional roots beneath avoidance grief, uncertainty, powerlessness, rejection, shame, loneliness and not being chosen and shares a vulnerable story about returning to acting through a community theater audition. The twist is the takeaway: the goal isn’t to be chosen, it’s to choose joy. You’ll also learn a simple 30-second nervous system friendly practice to help you pause, name what you feel, and stay with it long enough for your life to open back up.
If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who’s been holding it all together, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What feeling are you most resistant to experiencing right now?
✨ THREE ELENA TRUTHS
You are not avoiding your life—you are avoiding a feeling within it
Control is not your problem—it is your protection
The way you practice feeling now is the way you will meet life later
📝 JOURNALING PROMPTS
What feeling am I most resistant to experiencing right now?
When that feeling starts to arise, what do I do instead?
Jai offers 1:1 sessions and group experiences, both virtually and in person, including opportunities to experience The Undoing on Kauaʻi.
Throughout our conversation, Jai shares how The Undoing grew out of her own realization that so much of her life, and even her spiritual practice, had been centered around doing: achieving, striving, transforming, and trying to become something.
The Undoing invites the opposite: surrender.
Through Kundalini energy, sound, movement, and embodied practice, Jai creates a space to release stored energy, feel what wants to be felt, and loosen our grip on the identities, patterns, and conditioning we carry.
Learn more + explore Jai’s offerings: https://jaichambers.com
Listen Next: My First Conversation with Jai
Jai and I first sat down together on The Ode to Joy Podcast a few years ago. If this conversation leaves you wanting more Jai, you can go back and listen to our original episode together.
During the episode, I share a teaching that stayed with me from Sister MorningStar, an elder midwife and teacher I had the opportunity to study with before giving birth.
Her work explores instinctual birth, feminine wisdom, motherhood, and traditional birth knowledge. One of the teachings I carried into my own birth was the understanding that we may reach an edge where we believe we cannot continue, and yet there is something on the other side of that threshold.
If you're feeling activated, tender, or simply needing to be held as your experience continues to unfold, her work is a gentle and grounding place to land.
Possibility Portal: Women’s Retreat in Peru Join Chaya Hannah and Sunshine for an intimate seven-day women’s retreat in Pisac and Peru’s Sacred Valley, November 16–23, 2026. The experience includes yoga and intuitive movement, shamanic and holotropic breathwork, sound healing, integration circles, nervous system regulation, ritual and ceremony, sacred-site visits, elder wisdom, and plenty of space for rest and integration. https://www.feelingsfelt.com/peru-women-s-retreat
International End of Life Doula Association (INELDA) Chaya trained with INELDA in end-of-life doula care. INELDA offers education and training for people interested in supporting individuals and families through dying, death, and end-of-life care. https://inelda.org/
Death Café Chaya mentions Death Cafés as a way to gather in community and have open, honest conversations about death and mortality. Find a Death Café near you or learn how to host one. https://deathcafe.com/
Reforesters Laboratory A community space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where Chaya offers gatherings including her Possibility Portal work, bringing together practices such as meditation, music, plant wisdom, art, and community. https://reforesters.io/
If this conversation resonates, subscribe to The Ode to Joy Podcast, leave a review, and share the episode with a friend who is tired of the AI haze and ready to return to their own creative process.
If you are curious about death-positive living, end-of-life planning, ritual, chronic illness, green burial, or what it means to return fully to your body and the Earth, this conversation offers both grounding and permission.
Subscribe to the podcast, share this episode with someone who may need it, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.
Three Shaina Truths
1. The equation of becoming requires both giving away and receiving.
Whenever we cross a threshold and become a new version of ourselves, something must be released. Letting go creates the space into which the next chapter can arrive.
2. Medicine is not necessarily a cure—it can be a key.
No teacher, ceremony, treatment, or spiritual practice can walk the path for us. The key may open something, but we are still responsible for building the door, walking through it, and integrating what we have learned into our everyday lives.
3. Our death can become our final offering to the Earth.
Preparing for our sacred return is not only about deciding what happens after we die. It asks us to consider what we are cultivating within our bodies, our relationships, and our lives right now.
Standout Quotes from Shaina
“It’s important to witness what is witnessing you, because what we’re seeking is also seeking us.”
“The equation of becoming means having to give away in order to receive.”
“The ceremony is great, but it’s really the integration and the action that make it real.”
“Plant medicine is not a cure—it’s a key. I’m the one who has to build the door and walk through it.”
“Death is a key to experiencing more joy.”
“We’re looking at our death only to inform our life here today.”
“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Journaling Prompts
What am I being invited to give away so that I can receive what is trying to enter my life?
Where has my desire to heal, grow, or improve quietly become a search for something wrong with me?
What would it mean for me to return to my Earth—to my body, my needs, my limits, and the physical reality of my life?
If I knew I were going to die tomorrow, what would feel complete—and what would I wish I had tended to more lovingly?
How might I treat one ordinary act today—washing the dishes, preparing food, walking outside, or caring for my body—as an offering?
What expectations about my life, my body, or the person I thought I would become am I ready to grieve and release?
What would my own sacred return to Earth look and feel like? What does imagining it teach me about how I want to live now?
Where is life already inviting me into the dance—and what keeps me from joining it?
Explore green burial and environmentally conscious end-of-life options in your local area
In This Episode
Chronic illness as an initiation into healing, death work, and the Earth
Shaina’s journey from industrial designer to ritualist and death educator
Creating biodegradable macrame coffins
Weaving prayers, memories, and love into a burial vessel
Returning to the body after years of spiritual exploration
When the healing journey becomes another form of self-rejection
Holding gratitude for the present while maintaining a vision for the future
The equation of becoming
Life as a series of thresholds
Plant medicine, responsibility, lineage, and discernment
Why integration matters more than chasing spiritual experiences
Connecting with guides and the unseen
Learning to live with death rather than treating it as a distant problem
Dance as prayer, embodiment, and connection to creation
Green burial as a physical and spiritual offering
Using death to inform how we live today
Shaina’s offering at Beyond the Veil
Connect with Shaina
Shaina Garfield is a ritualist, death educator, designer, and founder of Leaves With You. Her work helps people reconnect with death, grief, ceremony, and the natural world through ritual containers, death education, green burial exploration, and biodegradable macrame coffins.
At the Beyond the Veil Retreat, Shaina will facilitate The Sacred Return to Earth, an exploration of green burial, the spiritual dimensions of decomposition, and how envisioning our return to the Earth can transform the way we live today.
What version of myself am I still trying to keep alive, even though I know she’s ready to be released?
Where in my life am I standing with one foot in my old world and one foot in my new one?
Which of my “protectors” tends to show up most often—my people pleaser, my overachiever, my perfectionist, my avoider, my lone wolf? What is she trying to protect?
Where am I waiting to be dragged across a threshold instead of choosing to cross it?
What grief in my life has never truly been witnessed?
What part of me is asking to come home?
Name your threshold.
Instead of waiting until life forces change upon you, ask yourself:
What threshold am I standing at right now?
Simply naming it often changes how you move through it.
Have a conversation with your protector.
Instead of trying to silence the part of yourself that’s scared, perfectionistic, controlling, or avoiding…
Ask:
What are you protecting me from?
What do you need me to know?
What would help you feel safe enough to soften?
As Beth reminds us, you don’t fight your protectors—you invite them in.
Create a ritual of release.
Thresholds deserve ceremony.
Write a letter to the version of yourself you’re releasing. Thank her. Name what she protected. Read it aloud. Burn it, bury it, or place it somewhere meaningful as a physical marker that you’re crossing into a new season.
Beth Clayton’s Good Girl Protector Quiz, a free assessment to discover your primary protector archetype and learn how it shapes your relationships, purpose, money, and self-expression.
Beth’s work can be found through her website, Instagram, and Substack, where she teaches on the Good Girl, Sacred Rebel, embodiment, and threshold work.
Beyond the Veil Retreat (New City, New York): Beth will be leading Crossing Thresholds: Living What Death Teaches, a transformative workshop on using the wisdom of death to navigate life’s many initiations. Through somatic practices, guided reflection, and journaling, participants will explore what they’re ready to release, what is waiting to emerge, and how to move through life’s thresholds with greater courage, clarity, and embodiment.
Join Elena and a collective of experienced death doulas, spiritual practitioners, and ceremonial guides for a weekend exploring death, grief, ritual, and living more fully.
July 25–26 (Day Passes Available)
You’ll experience:
Shamanic journeying
Workshops on death, grief, and end-of-life care
Sunrise yoga
Ceremony
Community around the fire
Practical tools for supporting yourself and others through loss
For 30 days, reflect on these three prompts each day:
What felt expansive today?
What felt contractive today?
What insight did I receive today?
At the end of the 30 days, review your entries and notice the patterns: What raises your frequency? What lowers it? What makes you feel more alive, connected, open, and fully yourself?
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