Are we creating cracks in the fog of our collective consciousness—or adding to the noise?
In this conversation, I sit down with musician and spiritual artist East Forest to explore attention as sacred currency in a world that profits from our distraction. We speak about creating art that interrupts rather than performs, the tension of living within broken systems, and the practice of slowing down in times that demand urgency.
Together we touch on creative integrity, what it means to live counter culturally, Ram Dass, technology, and what it means to be guided by something wise amidst collapse.
East Forest: eastforest.org
Events: eastforest.org/tickets
Patreon Council: patreon.com/cw/eastforest
Music talked about in this episode
Learn more: Alchemy & Rachael
How do we navigate times of disorientation and change without losing ourselves? In this conversation, Dr. Patrick O’Neill brings his background in organizational psychology and years of guiding leaders through transformation to reflect on thresholds as spaces of both challenge and possibility.
We talk about attention as a radical act, vocation as an unfolding call, and the ways grief, eldership, and intergenerational stewardship shape the future that wants to emerge. Patrick’s insights invite us to meet the liminal not as something to rush through, but as a place where new life takes root.
Learn more about Patrick’s work:
Learn more: Alchemy & Rachael
Released for this Vigo New Moon
This episode of Deconstruction is an invitation into active imagination.
Rooted in my Celtic lineage and blessed by the Waters on the land where I live — the unceded and traditional territory of the Syilx First Nations — this meditation offers a safe container to meet our own Inner Terrain through sensation & image.
It teaches how regulation opens the ground for imagination, how orienting to the elements roots us more fully in belonging, and how to trust whatever arises as enough.
Before you begin, prepare a quiet space where you won’t be interrupted. Wear headphones if you can, and make yourself comfortable — cozy, supported, at ease.
In a time when attention is scattered outward, this practice is a ceremony of return — a way of coming home to the body with curiosity, safety, and compassion.
This episode is dedicated to Alice Anne & Zara Neukom,
my Anam Caras.
Find the Music here:
Learn more: Alchemy & Rachael
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” – Mary Oliver
I’m releasing this Bodyful encounter for the Aquarius Full Moon.
A gentle return to Self.
To the home of the Body.
A re-emergence into the goodness of Now.
This isn’t meditation in the traditional sense.
No rigid posture. No discipline to uphold. No efforting.
If you feel like moving, move.
If you need stillness, rest.
Simply watch yourself gently
and tend to the soft animal body of you.
In these times of intensity and activation, when our attention is mined and our nervous systems are hijacked by the chaos around us,
may this be a soft bed of moss to land in.
For the best experience, I recommend listening with headphones, in a quiet, comfortable space with soft or low lighting. Let this be a moment just for you.
In this episode, I speak with Marisa Radha Wepnner about conscious festivalling—not as escape, but as sacred emergence. Together we explore how festivals, when entered with intention, can become ceremonial spaces for nervous system repair, archetypal play, and collective re-enchantment.
This is not therapy in the clinical sense.
It’s beyond the clinic.
It’s art-based. Improvisational. Somatic. Alive.
A kind of adult playground where you can be fully expressed, fully felt, and fully witnessed.
We talk psychedelic integration, ritual, ecstatic dance, devotion, and the healing function of play. And we ask: What becomes possible when we treat joy, beauty, and adventure as legitimate sites of transformation?
If you’ve ever remembered yourself on a dance floor, in the forest, barefoot and free—this episode is for you.
I am not sure why my voice is echoey in the epsidoe.. Tickster was playing with me.
Ram Dass Legacy Retreat (Aug 14–18, Blue Ridge Mountains):
The Art of Living Retreat Center
Explore Radha’s work:
Learn more: Alchemy & Rachael
Here, on my Leo New Moon, the Jesse Roper saga completes!
After recording my episode with musician Jesse Roper, I offered to create a meditation for a big show he had coming up—one that was taking place in a cave. An audacious offer.
What came through was unexpected—joyful, easeful, and deeply alive.
I’ve been in conscious relationship with the Muse since January, and this meditation feels like part of that unfolding. Though it was originally crafted for one person, I’m releasing it here as a personal archive.
A small symbol of what can happen when I follow creative impulse without needing to understand it.
And yet, the energy it carries is for anyone feeling something rise before a performance, a ceremony, or a moment of being seen. A way to come back to the body. To steady. To begin from centre.
It will be particularly helpful if you play guitar haha!
Released with the Leo New Moon, in honour of creative reciprocity and the joy of sharing what moves through us.
To hear the full conversation with Jesse Roper, listen here:
In this week’s episode of Deconstruction, Rachael drops in with rockstar & artist Jesse Roper for a rich, irreverent, and wildly alive conversation on performance, presence, and joy as a revolutionary act. What begins as a playful exchange unfolds into something deeper, a study in what it means to follow aliveness through fear, and offer it back as medicine.
Jesse is a natural storyteller, full of humour, integrity, and presence. His stories trace the path from fear to flow, from distraction to devotion. Together they explore music as emotional regulation, the magic of teaching kids to write songs, and the energetic exchange that makes live music feel like medicine.
This episode is a celebration of generosity, groove, and the relational magic that happens when we let joy be the message.
Bonus: Stay tuned for a special guided meditation Rachael created for Jesse before one of his concerts—released later this week as a companion piece to this conversation.
Music in episode:
Learn More: Alchemy & Rachael
Create a cocoon. Light a candle. Wear headphones.
Let the music move through you.
Let the part of you that is still becoming feel seen.
A Ritual for Uranus in Gemini
In honour of Gemini’s duplicity, I wanted to try this one again.
This audio was originally recorded for the Jupiter Cazimi (Breathing into Belonging), but it never quite anchored the body the way I knew it could.
So I returned. Recut, rethreaded, reimagined.
This time, I wove in the music that was actually playing when I recorded it—Liquid Bloom.
What emerged was something else.
A journey.
Evocative.. Alive.
This one won't be for everyone, but it was for me
I’m releasing it again, as Uranus enters Gemini—an auspicious moment for shapeshifting, redefinition, and multiplicity.
It feels right that there are now two versions.
This journey was originally recorded to use with Cannabis as a sacred Ally & may be especially resonant for those who work with this Plant in an intentional way.
If you choose to receive it, I invite you to do so with care.
Music:
Heart of the Shaman: Ceremonial Medicine Songs
Learn More: Alchemy & Rachael
This is a guided meditation to help you return to your body, your breath, and your being.
Gently. Honestly. With reverence.
There’s a place inside you that knows how to come home. Not through effort. Not through fixing. But through breath. Through sensation. Through presence.
This meditation is an invitation to meet yourself in that place. Together, we slow down. We root into the body. We track the subtle rhythm of aliveness moving through. And we listen.
Recorded on the New Moon and Jupiter Cazimi—a moment of cosmic clarity and inner expansion—this offering supports you in cultivating a felt sense of safety, groundedness, and belonging.
Let yourself be met. Let it feel good to be here. You are not alone.
For the best experience, I recommend listening with headphones, in a quiet, comfortable space with soft or low lighting. Let this be a moment just for you.
Music:
Dr. Ido Cohen is back! He joins Rachael for a deep and nuanced conversation about the emotional and relational work of digesting trauma. Together, they explore the space between personal experience and collective pain, and what it takes to create environments where truth, grief, and transformation can unfold.
This episode moves through themes of emotional digestion, embodied healing, and the liberating potential of intimacy. They discuss the impact of community, the fear of authenticity, and the importance of embracing vulnerability as a ritual act. What emerges is a powerful reflection on how we metabolize the wounds we carry—individually and as a culture—and the kind of presence required to do so.
At its core, this episode is about reclaiming the feminine principle in a world that often rewards disconnection. It’s an invitation into deeper connection, emotional honesty, and the sacred work of becoming fully human.
Connect with Dr. Ido Cohen:
Learn more: Alchemy & Rachael
In this episode, I sit down with Mackenzie Amara for a rich and reverent conversation about the mother wound—how it lives in our bodies, our culture, and our ancestral lines. We explore grief as a spiritual excavator, the path to existential secure attachment, and what it means to surrender to love even when loss is inevitable.
Mackenzie brings the rawness of new motherhood, the insight of depth psychology, and a deep relationship to archetypal energies. Together we speak of shape-shifting in service, calling in help, and the chaos within the mother complex. This conversation is a threshold—a remembering of the mother within, and a call to grieve, to feel, and to belong again.
Mackenzie Amara is a depth-oriented psychologist, writer, Jungian analyst-in-training, and doctoral student in Clinical Psychology. She’s also a 5Rhythms® teacher, a mystic, a new mother, and someone devoted to healing the psychic wounds that keep us from inhabiting our wholeness. Her work lives at the intersection of the mythic and the clinical, the sacred and the irreverent, the rational and the unknowable.
This episode is for those apprenticing to the long dark. For those learning to love without grasping. And for anyone who suspects the mother within may be the one who’s been here all along.
Connect with Mackenzie Amara:
Learn more: Alchemy & Rachael
In this conversation, Radha and Rachael explore the themes of transformation, self-awareness, and the importance of personal responsibility in navigating both individual and collective challenges. They discuss the role of relationships in self-discovery, the significance of open-mindedness, and the impact of the nervous system on our ability to feel safe and present.
The conversation also delves into the complexities of dissociation, trauma healing, and the necessity of metabolizing past experiences to reclaim one's life force energy. Ultimately, they emphasize the importance of self-inquiry and compassion in the journey of personal growth. In this conversation, Rachael Spyker and Radha explore the themes of sensuality, pleasure, and conscious living.
They discuss the importance of community and eldership in personal and collective transformation, as well as the relationship with Mother Earth and the necessity of feeling pain to facilitate healing. The dialogue emphasizes the balance between enjoyment and awareness, the role of pleasure as activism, and the alchemical process of destruction leading to new creation.
Questions for Self Inquiry:
Talked about in the episode:
Ram Dass Legacy Retreat: The Art of Living, Blue Ridge Mountains
Joanna Macy’s work on Earth grief and collective transformation
Embodied Practice for nervous system regulation
Find more about their work here:
Season 5
opens with one of the most compelling minds in the field of psychedelic integration: Dr. Ido Cohen—clinical psychologist, founder of The Integration Circle, and someone who brings rare clarity, warmth, and rigour to the transformational path.
In this conversation, Rachael and Ido trace the arc from personal rupture to collective insight—beginning with the story of his house burning down, and unfolding into an exploration of integration as individuation, play as soul retrieval, and consciousness as something deeply relational.
Ido draws from Jungian depth psychology, relational psychoanalysis, and years immersed in ceremonial practice to offer a vision of healing that’s honest, alive, and anchored in the complexity of being human.
This episode is textured, surprising, and quietly revolutionary. A call to meet ourselves—and each other—more fully.
A guided somatic journey into your body and into the body of the Earth.
In this bonus episode from the Treehouse Project, Rachael shares a short, potent commentary on the origins of this guided meditation—created during a time of deep personal and political upheaval. Originally made to regulate her own nervous system while navigating a wave of collective reactivity, the meditation was recorded in real time from a jungle treehouse.
This episode almost didn’t get released. It emerged from a charged moment inside the psychedelic therapy world, entangled with systems Rachael cares deeply about. And after returning home, a painful moment of creative misattunement nearly kept it buried.
But this piece is being shared now—not because it needs to be heard, but because it no longer needs to be understood.
The guided meditation begins at 10:45.
Offered in devotion to the Earth, to the trees, and to the body as belonging.
May it hold you as you return.
On this Earth Day, may your body remember it belongs to something vast, rooted, and alive.
For the best experience, I recommend listening with headphones, in a quiet, comfortable space with soft or low lighting. Let this be a moment just for you.
Find the Complete Treehouse Project here
What happens when spiritual awakening meets a collapsing world?
In this pivotal episode, Rachael sits down with psychedelic therapist and spiritual activist Marisa Radha Weppner for a soul-deep conversation on truth, discernment, and sacred responsibility. Together, they name what many are afraid to: the commodification of psychedelics, the seductive trap of spiritual bypass, and the crisis of conscience in wellness spaces gone silent.
This is a conversation about what it really means to integrate—not just your journey, but your place in the world. Radha speaks from the frontlines of embodied activism, weaving decades of experience with grief for the Earth, anger at injustice, and love for what’s still possible.
They explore:
How to return to the sacred in a time of collapse
This episode is a mirror for those ready to reckon with complexity and reclaim clarity. It’s for the ones who can’t look away—and won’t.
Find more about their work here:
Episode Commentary: Architecture of Programming
In this episode of Deconstruction, I’m joined by Simon Yugler—depth psychotherapist, psychedelic guide, and author of Psychedelics and the Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair.
Together, we spiral into the terrain of mythopoetics as a lens for meaning-making in times of upheaval and unknowing.
We explore how story becomes a map—for navigating life, altered states, for integration, for grief. We speak of animism, the de-souled world, and what it means to come back into right relationship with the Earth—and with soul. Simon offers reflections on ontological addiction, facilitator integrity, and the cost of chasing peak experiences without myth or community.
This conversation is a living invitation:
to heal through story,
to reweave our world with meaning,
to remember that transformation—like myth—moves in spirals.
Find more about Simon Here:
This final meditation in the Treehouse Project is a tender homecoming!
Created as a sanctuary for the moments when big emotions rise—when you recognize the feeling isn’t just about now, but something from long ago. This is a guided journey into the safe forest within you, where your inner child awaits your presence. Here, you’re invited to tend gently to whatever is present with care, curiosity, and love.
🌲 Preparation
To receive this meditation fully, we recommend:
• Finding a quiet, private space where you won’t be interrupted
• Using headphones for an immersive experience
• Bringing a blanket, pillow, or comfort item
• Lighting a candle or dimming the lights to create a soft atmosphere
• Placing a few meaningful objects nearby—stones, totems, photos, or anything that feels comforting or grounding
• Giving yourself time afterwards to journal, rest, or simply be
This is a space to slow down and listen. A moment to return to yourself.
This offering is a love letter to the child within, and to the living Earth who reminds us how to root, how to be, how to belong.
Thank you for being part of the Treehouse Project—a living, breathing exhibit devoted to presence and protection.
To support forest conservation efforts, visit: Jaguar Rescue Centre
The Fourth episode of the Treehouse Project, this guided meditation invites you into the depths of your own body, where sensations hold stories and fear is simply courage waiting to unfold.
Born from a deeply attuned therapeutic relationship, this meditation was originally created for someone who had spent years building resilience, learning to meet their panic with compassion. Through accompaniment and somatic presence, they discovered the power of moving toward rather than away from the energy locked in their nervous system. With time and care, they found their own ability to hold what once felt unbearable.
Now, this meditation exists as a bridge, for them and for you. A resource to accompany you as you turn toward the sensations within, knowing you are not alone.
With gentle guidance, we will:
• Locate the places inside holding tension or emotion
• Meet them with presence instead of avoidance
• Offer them care, breath, and attunement
• Move with what arises, trusting your body’s wisdom
This is a space of deep listening—to your body, to your inner child, and to the wisdom that unfolds when we allow ourselves to stay.
Integration and Self-Care
After this meditation, you will find guidance on how to care for yourself after deep inner work, along with practical integration support. Drink water, journal, move, rest, or seek connection. However you choose to tend to yourself, know that you are worthy of it.
*Trying to capture a deeply attuned dyadic intervention in a meditation was something I had never done before. There are things I would tweak next time, but this is the original offering for the Treehouse Project exhibition. It was meaningful to create, and I look forward to developing this skill further*
In celebration of this release, donations have been made to the Irish Wildlife Trust, an offering back to the land that holds us. And in honour of the one and only Hozier, whose artistry reminds us that music, activism, and reverence for nature are deeply intertwined.
Take your time. You are held.
This meditation was the first one I recorded for the Treehouse Project! Though I almost did not release it. I avoided listening to it. But when I finally sat down to listen, I saw something I had not expected.
I saw nervousness.
I saw nervousness, but I also saw courage. I was stepping into something unknown, offering something deeply personal. And that kind of expression does not come without weight.
Relating to it as art softened that.
This meditation is an invitation into process. Into the state we so often enter before we begin. A state of hesitation, contraction, and the choice to move through.
This episode includes:
• Commentary on my initial resistance, perfectionism, and the unexpected layers of nervousness I encountered in the recording process. I share how this meditation became a mirror for my own growth and how I learned to soften control and surrender to the process of art.
• Body Scan Meditation (begins at 9:06), raw, untouched. A practice of slowing down, meeting yourself where you are, and arriving fully in and through the noise of life.
The Treehouse Project is not about perfection. It is about presence.
| A Living Exhibition of Consciousness, The Treehouse project is a series of six guided meditations designed to root people into their bodies, to restore the relationship between Self and Body, Us and Land. I recorded these meditations in a treehouse surrounded by the living, breathing Jungle. This is about activating relationship through an immersive experience of the living world moving through human consciousness. They are meant as medicine.
To bring you back into your own House of Belonging.
This meditation was the first one I recorded and the third to be released. It carries something essential. As always, this offering is in service to the Trees. With this release, I donated to the Jane Goodall Canada Institute.
This is the second episode of the Treehouse Project, a series of six guided meditations designed to root people into their bodies, to restore the relationship between Self and Body, Us and Land.
This project unfolds as an interactive multimedia art exhibit. It moves between meditation, storytelling, and direct action,
This guided meditation was designed to help you transition out of the day and into deep rest*. Through breath, body awareness, and gentle surrender, you will be guided into a state of relaxation, allowing your nervous system to settle and your mind to quiet. As you soften into sleep, a nighttime story told by the great Myth teller, Alice, will accompany you into the dream world, inviting your imagination to drift into restful wonder. *
Each meditation in this series is part of a fundraiser for the forests. With this episode, I am donating to the Ancient Forest Alliance, an organization working to protect British Columbia’s endangered old-growth forests and ensure sustainable forestry practices for future generations.
Listen now and join me in protecting the forests.
* Artist Commentary:
I love the content and intention of this meditation. But the sound quality is Horrendous. The cicadas are like metallic jolts in my eardrums. There was also a real Trickster moment with the music at the end that, for artist integrity, I could not change.
As a piece of art, come bear witness. But as an actual mental health resource... I’ll record a new one soon!