Accidental Gods Podcast

Avoiding Burn Out, Fall Out, Drop Out (and Freak Out): a conversation with Manda Scott

I had the great pleasure of exploring inner work for outer change on the amazing Accidental Gods podcast with Manda Scott recently and it was published today.

We discussed the role wholing and healing have in our capacities as regenerative changemakers and importantly how to practically begin that process of remembering our place within the miraculous web of life as a daily, felt sense in the body.

What kinds of life-generating systems could we design together from a deep sense of embodied safety and openness with each other? What happens when we feel culturally able to shift from activism to connectivism as a vehicle for transformation?

We touched on Earthbound and Alef Trust's work with changemakers on the Embodied Permaculture Project and our new 9-week online course based on the success of the research project. We also explored Alef’s new wellbeing programme, Calmer Farmer offered to UK growers and farmers that we’ll be launching in January. We’ll share more about both these exciting developments in subsequent posts but for now here’s the podcast episode.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did!

Listen here:

or listen via her website here:

https://accidentalgods.life/avoiding-burn-out-fall-out-drop-out-and-freak-out-with-dan-mctiernan/

And here are Manda’s notes on the episode for a bit more detail:

”How do we become the change we need to see in the world? What are the actual, practical steps to grounding, connecting and resonating with the world?

As you’ll hear, Dan is working at the leading edge of the change we need to embody. He has straightforward practices that any of us can do to help us with grounding, attunement, opening and integration so that we can be the nodes in the web of life.

This is key: we need to stop trying to think our way out of this with our head-minds. It doesn’t work. It’s not going to work. We need to come into our physical bodies, find that truly calming place of peace – and then find connections we can trust with the wider web. This is what we’re here for. And Dan has routes to get there.

We’re on the brink of cataclysmic change. Knowing this, we have choices: we can either fold into despair, terror, rage…whatever rises up in us as we watch the whole biosphere hurtle towards irrevocable tipping points. Or we can become the change we need to see in the world: each of us. This is a cliché by now, but that doesn’t stop it being true. Here are others: we are the people we have been waiting for and if not us, now then who and when? We’ve been saying these for a long time and if you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re already on board, at least intellectually. You know there is no going back, that ideology cannot win out over biophysical reality and avoiding ecosystem collapse doesn’t just mean moving to regenerative farming or buying second hand clothes or even changing all the narratives of all the world’s media systems – good though each of these things would be.

But there’s been a gap between what we know and how we behave, between where our better selves might push us and the behaviours that are locked into the core of our being, our firmware, if you like. But now – this minute now – we’re hitting the buffers where the old paradigm is so obviously not fit for purpose that we need something new. The core questions are what? And how?

And this is where we’re going with the podcast just now – After Dr John Izzo of the Elders Action Network reminded us of our purpose on the earth, and Andrea Hiott of Waymaking helped us embrace paradox – now we’re talking to someone who can help guide us into the embodied reality of a different way of being.

Dan McTiernan is a certified Transpersonal Psychology Coach, embodied meditation teacher and breathwork instructor. With his wife Johanna, he’s the co-founder of embodied coaching organisation, Earthbound. He hosts the Being Earthbound podcast – which is absolutely on my must-listen list. He’s a facilitator on Alef Trust’s Nurturing the Fields of Change programme and is the project leader for the Embodied Permaculture Project – an international 2-year action research project exploring the impacts of holistic wellbeing on outer ecological change work. The first 9 weeks of this programme have just been released as a self-study course – and by the time this podcast ends, you will want to join up with that.

He is currently working with Alef Trust and the A Team Foundation to deliver an innovative project supporting farmers and growers in the UK with a programme of embodied wellbeing known as Calmer Farmer which will be launched in January 2025.”