Becoming The Practice

See Taylor’s photos, childhood to now, on Substack.

I met Taylor years ago at a sewing factory in Oakland. I was making bow ties. She already had stores. She spent a decade running up those same industrial stairs, pouring her heart into textiles, and navigating the unpredictable world of independent design.

She is a phenomenal Bay Area designer, a mom since 14, and a natural provider who has always known how to find a way, open doors, and trust her path. This conversation is about what happens when someone who has been holding it all together for decades finally lets herself stop, slow down, and breathe.

What we talked about:

* Clothes for the body you have now. She went from a size 2 to a size 12 almost overnight and couldn’t figure out how to get dressed. So she made a brand that moves with you.“I make clothing that makes you feel good when you don’t.”

* The mask year. In 2020, one sewer’s persistence turned Taylor’s idea into the mask everyone wanted—worn by everyone from Prince Harry to London Breed. It scaled her business overnight and employed a lot of people. Then came the deep fear that it was all anyone would remember.“I don’t make masks. I make clothes.”

* Closing three stores and feeling lighter. After closing three retail storefronts back-to-back, the permanent pressure she’d carried suddenly lifted. That’s when she discovered the language of her own nervous system.“Every time I stepped away from it, I felt lighter.”

* What success actually is. Not the press features. Not the internet buzz. Success is the consistent clientele of women who’ve carried 20 to 40 of her pieces in their closets for a decade.“Success is being able to do what you love in the most healthy, sustainable way.”

* Where she’s still becoming. Keeping a big heart without being an easy target. Learning to guard her energy in a way that feels safer and more grounded.“I wanna figure out how to still keep my heart big and beautiful, but also guard it.”

A question for you:What’s one thing you keep doing that stopped feeling good a while ago?

Find TaylorInstagram: @theretailtherapyresetshopSubstack

The links in her bios go to her waitlist, free guides on color and your nervous system, and one-on-one style consults

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At 30, Jaguar was hit by a car and died. Who came back is still integrating, 17 years later.

See Jaguar’s photos, childhood to now

Medicine woman. Womb steam practitioner. Writer, living in Oaxaca. This conversation is about ancestral medicine, brain injury, and becoming someone you don’t know yet.

She warned me she’d lose the plot at the start. She did. But we always found our way back.

What we talked about:

When the impossible happens to you. While she was still in a wheelchair, a shaman told her the accident released an old curse in her father’s Guyanese line and opened the way for jaguar medicine. She doesn’t ask you to believe it. She just didn’t get to stay a skeptic.“You don’t have the luxury of cynicism.”

The part that isn’t magic. Seizures. Physical, occupational, and speech therapy, and her mom happens to be a speech therapist. Wheelchair, walker, cane. Then an ashram, where chanting Sanskrit and cleaning toilets helped things click back.“What is a sandwich and how do I go to the bathroom?”

Womb steam as a lineage. She learned it at her first period. It’s not the trendy version: the herbs, the salt, the bowl, a practice you keep your whole life.“It’s the current that carries you.”

Saying it out loud. After the accident, she told doctors what she was seeing and was committed to a psych ward. Now she teaches it in women’s circles.“Saying the same thing that got me locked up.”

Still becoming. On the Day of the Dead, a medicine woman down the road helped her call back La Vonne, the woman she was before the accident. Her period stopped. The poetry came back. She’s laying down the sword.“I’m just planting the garden and I invite you in for tea.”

A question for youHas something ever happened to you that didn’t fit what you believed? What did you do with it? Tell me.

Find JaguarInstagram: @jaguarwombanWebsite:https://www.uteraoaxaca.com/Substack: The Book of Jaguar Work with her: one-on-one Zoom sessions with herbs she channels for you, immersions in Oaxaca, and first-moon initiations for mothers and daughters.

Content note: This episode mentions a serious car accident, brain injury and seizures, involuntary psychiatric hospitalization, and cannabis and psychedelic use. Nothing here is medical advice.

Listen to full song by Elam Blackman

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Natalie Rose Silva is a ceremonialist and perfumer based in Santa Rosa, California, and a single mother raising her son, Sonny. She is the founder of Godseye Oils, a handcrafted ceremonial botanical perfume and body care brand that is evolving into a deeper practice of prayer — one-on-one scent healing sessions and full customization for each person who comes to her. She co-founded Made of Stars with her sister Erika, and together they are launching Sister School this November, a training devoted to healing the sister wound and building a new world. Natalie has facilitated ceremony since 2017, is the lead singer of a heavy metal cover band in Northern California, and carries Portuguese island and Welsh/Celtic ancestry as a third-generation Oakland native.

Natalie lost her mother, and that grief eventually blossomed into her perfume brand. In this conversation we talk about beauty made from loss, the rooms of women that changed her life, navigating ADHD, and how it feels to stop masking and let yourself be fully seen.

We also get into the pipeline nobody expected, from pole dancing classes to medicine ceremonies, and how sacred sisterhood became the center of everything. Plus channeled small-batch scents, the great gift of perimenopause burning away the mask, and the prayer for deep love.

A small heads-up: this episode briefly mentions suicide and sexual assault.

Find Natalie:

* https://www.godseyeoils.com/

* @godseyeoils

* http://www.madeofstars.co

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Living While Dying: Conversations with Darlene Cordero

Darlene Cordero was seven months into her own business when she was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. Three and a half years later, she calls it the thing that clarified her, not the thing that broke her.

In this conversation, Darlene shares what it means to arrive home to yourself after a lifetime of looking everywhere else. We talk about the difference between self love as a practice and self love as a hashtag, what it actually takes to meet yourself with compassion when you’ve spent years performing for everyone around you. She opens up about learning to ask for help after a lifetime of being the capable one, the single mother, the woman who never wanted anyone to feel sorry for her.

We also get into the work she’s building now: death doula trainings, a gentle guide to end of life planning, and her living memorial, a celebration of her life held while she’s still in it. Darlene is heading to Cambridge for a master’s in social innovation, studying how communities can better care for people living with long term illness. She’s writing about all of it on her Substack, The Art of Living and Dying.

This is a conversation about mortality, but more than that, it’s about what becomes possible when you stop running from it.

Find Darlene at @meetdarlene and at The Art of Living and Dying.

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What if money isn't what they told you it is? This week, I'm joined by Isha Vela, a psychologist, financial strategist, and founder of the Wealth Ecology Institute, to talk about what it means to have a relationship with money.

Not a spreadsheet relationship, but a real one. Isha describes her relationship with the spirit of money as polyamorous, it wants to move, to touch lots of people, to be in circulation. We get into her journey from burnout and divorce to building a trauma-informed financial brokerage, the ancestral technology of rotating savings circles, why a satisfied woman is ungovernable, and the six patriarchal stories (the LIVIDS) that keep us small. We also talk about her ancestors, who told her: We had to bury the knowledge so you could speak it. This one will change how you think about money, community, and what you're worth.

Find Isha Vela:

* Instagram

* YouTube

Her podcast:

* Waking Up Wealthy — available on all major platforms

Resources mentioned:

* Wealth Ecology Institute — ecological wealth redistribution and matriarchal money practices

* Mycelium — Global Matriarchal Network — doors open Oct 1st

* Flow Mini Course: Moving Money Matriarchally — free course; sign up to join the email list and qualify as a Mycelium founder

Concepts referenced:

* The LIVIDS — Isha’s framework: Lack · Individualism · Victimhood · Imposter · Doubt · Shame

* Rotating Savings Circles (susus / tandas / committees) — ancestral collective wealth technology

* Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott — book on shadow work around money

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In this episode I talk with Flora Bowley, a painter, teacher, and author who has been teaching her intuitive painting process for over 16 years. She’s written multiple books including Brave Intuitive Painting, The Art of Aliveness, and Fresh Paint, and co-owns a 20-acre retreat center an hour outside of Portland, Oregon. As we’re recording this, she’s about to get in her Toyota and drive cross-country on what she’s calling the Creative Revolution Tour: one-day workshops in cities across the country, because she believes we need to be in rooms together right now more than ever.

We talk about creativity as a birthright, what happens when the dream arrives and you realize you’re lonely, how teaching forced her to understand her own process, and the delicate balance between creative practice and creative business. We also get into finding your own voice when you’ve been inspired by someone else’s, buying a 20-acre retreat center during a pandemic (cabins, glamping tents, and all the county permits that come with it), and how she keeps showing up to rooms of 50 to 100 people even though part of her just wants to sit at the back.

If you want to catch Flora on the Creative Revolution Tour, she’s stopping in Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, the Omega Institute in New York, Hot Springs, Santa Fe, and Santa Barbara -late September through mid-November. No art experience needed. Just art making, writing, and connecting soul to soul.

If you already know Flora, this will deepen your love. If you’re just meeting her, you’re in for a treat.

* Flora Bowley’s website: https://florabowley.com/

* Flora on Instagram: @florabowley

* Flora on Facebook: https://facebook.com/florabowley

* Music by Elam Blackman

If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with a friend or leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. This is a new podcast and your feedback means so much, reach out and tell me what's landing for you.

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Tamu is a holistic wellness facilitator, teacher, and mama of three based in Oakland, California. In this conversation, she traces her origin story, from her grandmothers in Texarkana who taught her the art of tending, to her parents’ interracial marriage and migration from the South, to her own path as a kitchen alchemist, home herbalist, and practitioner of Cha Dao (the Way of Tea).

We talk about the menopause portal and how Tamu built a support circle that became a self-guided journal called Dancing the In Between; her experience sitting with plant medicine and how it cracked her open to compassion as a mother; and how a single hour of tea at Spirit Weavers Gathering brought her the same depth of release she’d found in night-long ceremonies. We also get into living spring water, daily tea practice as a moving meditation, and what it means to live by “everyday practical magic.”

Tamu's booklet Dancing the In Between is now available on her website. Link below.

Find Tamu:

* Website: wholisticshine join her newsletter for offerings & updates

* Instagram: @wholistic_shine upcoming offerings, living spring resources & more

* Uchu Botanical flower essences & botanical medicines made with living spring water

* Elam’s Song Here

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This week I’m sitting down with Tizzle. An astrologer, perfumer, channel, and grant writer who shares her journey from an awkward misfit to finally feeling fully aligned.

We get into how art saved her life and teaching healed her, the shift from discipline to devotion that changed everything, and her work with the Sawalmem in Northern California. She’s 43, she’s thriving, and she’ll tell you the 40s are the decade.

I almost didn’t start this podcast, and it was Tizzle’s reading that pushed me to finally do it, so this one feels extra special.

You can find Tizzle on Instagram @aromakaura

Music for this episode is by my brother, Elam Blackman. You can find his work here.

Get full access to Becoming The Practice at https://becomingthepractice.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode I talk with Justice McNeil-Sumser, a fiber artist, creative facilitator, and yoga teacher based in San Francisco. She's a self-identified highly sensitive person who makes soft armor, wearable spells, and sewing patterns. She makes a living from her art without losing herself to it, which is harder than it sounds! We talk about color as medicine, what it costs to stay true to your creative vision, and the moment she shipped off a five-dress order feeling completely resentful and thought: I'm done.

Justice has built something entirely her own and uses her platform to lift others while she's at it. If you already know her, this will just add to the reasons why you love her. If you're just being introduced, you're in for a treat!

Links:

Thread and Sprout: https://www.threadandsprout.com/Instagram: @threadandsproutMovement for Makers: @movementformakersBecoming the Practice on SubstackBecoming the Practice on Instagram

Music: Elam Blackman

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I talk with Zoë Swara Tollefsen, one of my oldest, dearest friends. Zoë is a bodyworker and Ayurvedic practitioner in the Bay Area who’s been studying in an unbroken 3,500-year-old lineage for nearly 20 years.

Zoë traces her story from a wild, expressive childhood in the forests of the Olympic Peninsula; where she spoke to plants and sold tickets to her own one-kid shows -through the loss of her father, the meeting of her teacher, and the long road of learning to trust her own knowing over the fears of others.

We talk about growing up with Scandinavian ritual, finding a Vedic lineage through family, and how Ayurveda and Esalen massage became two halves of a single practice: creating spaces where people can land in their bodies and let expression move through them. Zoë opens up about why she tells every person who gets on her table: if something wants to come through, let it.

Links

* Find Zoë at https://www.moongardensanctuary.com/

* Instagram @moongardensanctuary

* Subscribe to Becoming the Practice on all major platforms

* Photos from each guest’s journey on Instagram and Substack

* Music by Elam Blackman

Get full access to Becoming The Practice at https://becomingthepractice.substack.com/subscribe

I sit down with my friend Arwyn, a farm kid turned yoga teacher -turned tattoo artist honoring art as prayer. We trace her path from rural Maine to her tattoo studio in Northern California, and her recent move from San Francisco to rebuild an abandoned property on the Eel River in Mendocino.

* Find Arwyn Moonrise on Instagram: @township31

* Her new place: https://elfinglen.com/ (coming soon)

* Listen to the rest of Elam’s song: The Murder Rides Again

If this resonated with you, share it or leave a review.

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I sat down with Teyler, a mother, doula, and founder of Doula for the People and the Foodie Doula. Her nonprofit that provides free postpartum care and nourishing meals to BIPOC and queer mothers in the Bay Area.

We trace her path from a childhood rooted in food and big family, to her own isolating postpartum experience -unable to afford the support she now provides; which became the catalyst for her nonprofit. We dig into building something meaningful inside systems you’re trying to resist, and the line between sacrifice and martyrdom.

We close on intuition, self-care as protection, and parenting through presence over performance.

In this episode:

* Teyler’s roots -Jamaican and Mexican-American family

* How not having postpartum support shaped her mission

* Building Doula for the People without becoming a martyr to the cause

* Staying rooted in community values while working within institutional systems

* Protecting your energy and parenting through presence, not perfection

https://thefoodiedoula.com/ @thefoodiedoula

https://doulaforthepeople.org/ @doula_for_the_people

Music by Elam Blackman The Murder Rides Again

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The Myth of Arrival

This week I’m talking with Erika Wright, a codependency counselor, a ceremonial leader, a channel, a musician, and mother.

We get into how she defines codependency, the medicine ceremony that cracked open her own healing, and why she built her whole career around just telling the truth about herself instead of pretending to have it figured out.

We also talk about raising daughters to honor their own truths, the exhausting, hilarious reality of motherhood and the illusive trickster we call satisfaction.

In this episode:

* Her definition of co-dependency and why it’s not a personal failing

* How ceremony that changed everything for her

* Teaching boundaries without apologizing

* Why comfort can be as dangerous as suffering

* How she is becoming the practice instead of chasing arrival

Find her at:

www.ericawright.org | @erikawrighthcd

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Alissa Anderson has run Foggy Notion, a beloved indie shop in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond, for fifteen years. What started as a studio space accidentally became a neighborhood institution. Before that, she was touring the world playing cello with musicians you’ve definitely heard of, until she realized that life wasn’t hers to keep.

This conversation is about what it actually looks like to build something on your own terms. We talk about curation as a values practice, the difference between scaling and deepening, what luxury really means when you’ve designed your own life, and why she’s never wanted a second location.

I’ve known Alissa for years. She carries my line at the shop. This was the longer conversation I always wanted to have.

-Mira

foggy-notion.com | @foggynotionsf | Alissa Anderson

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Becoming the Practice is a show about what it takes to live, not just believe in, the values that call to us. Host Mira Blackman sits down with artists, healers, organizers, and visionaries who are doing the work in real time: following their intuition, reclaiming what’s theirs & shedding what’s not. These are women building community, lives & businesses that center care over extraction.

These are intimate, wide-ranging conversations about what it actually looks like to let life become the practice, the courage, the doubt, the ancestors, and the messy, beautiful becoming along the way. New episodes drop weekly.

Listen to the trailer above, and hit subscribe! You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify

I am so glad you’re here. Let the practice begin.

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