For our season 4 finale, we have a very, very special episode for you with the incredible Zoe Buckman.  Zoe is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and photography, exploring themes of feminism, mortality, and equality. Zoe was born and raised in Hackney, London, but has lived and worked and raised her beautiful daughter for many years now in Brooklyn, New York. 

After a series of triumphant shows Zoe is now being compared to, and exhibited alongside some of the greatest feminist artists of our time, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Kelly, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle.  So it feels very special to have this time with Zoe to talk about her work, to learn more about how her own stories of tragedy and survival are held within it, and to hear what it means to her to have arrived at this point in her career when it feels things are heading to stratospheric heights…

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tree Carr is an author and TEDx speaker who specialises in the realms of: Dreams, Death, Psychedelics, Altered States & Transpersonal Psychology. Tree is a Death Doula, she was ordained in 2021 at The Universal Life Church.  She is a a high priestess witch and master of Wicca. 

Tree's work as a Death Doula involves helping people spiritually, emotionally, existentially and practically at the end of their lives. Tree holds the space for healing, peace, support and compassion during the profound and sacred time of death and dying. As this episode will demonstrate, Tree has an extraordinary and rare ability to lean into the darkness that surrounds our relationship with death, to reveal how most of all, death can be the portal to our most profound experiences of love.

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michael Matania is the founder of Tough cookie, a mental health organisation created to help nurture human resilience.   Michael has said: I work in resilience because I’m interested in how we cope with the inevitable tragedy’s of life, how we tend to the part of us that remains when the rest of us have been decimated.  Michael came to this work following his recovery from psychosis in his late teens, and what follows is one of the most moving personal stories of transformation, and personal courage I have ever heard, so you are truly all in for a very special time with Michael today indeed.

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lauren Mahon is a broadcaster, campaigner and co-founder of the groundbreaking and multi-award winning BBC5 Live Podcast ‘You Me and the Big C’. Lauren is founder of the charity GIRLvsCancer, she is a tireless campaigner for cancer awareness and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in medical science by the Institute of Cancer Research London as a prestigious recognition of the impact of her broadcasting, campaigning and activism to date.

I met Lauren her when I was a guest on the podcast a couple of years ago… and the time I had with Lauren and her sensational co-host of You Me Big C, Deborah James, had such a huge effect on me- as many of you listening will know, they co founded the podcast, each of them, as people with very different, but life changing personal journey with cancer- and their mix of emotional intelligence, radical openness and vulnerability, combined with hilarious quick fire banter, and a very refreshing irreverence about this thing that they all refused would define them was just such a gift to be in the presence of…. Particularly as someone who was still very raw and coming to terms with the death of Mum who had recently died from brain cancer… and seeing them I just thought… you know it can be done differently…. And it was a MASSIVE source of inspiration to me and it certainly has been to millions and millions of people all over the country who listened to their podcast every week…

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steffy White is a yoga teacher, podcaster and the founder of the brilliant White Light Retreats. I have followed Steffy and all the brilliant things she does for some years now on social media but was so moved in the past year in the way Steffy took to her platform to talk about something quite different: the profound journey she has been on with her partner to conceive a baby.  

The journey to motherhood for many people is straight forward- but for so many others it is not- and, often without any preparation, means them embarking on a journey that for many feels it has turned their worlds inside out. 

However Steffy has also described how the events of this past year have provided the gateway to her greatest initiation into life. She has said “ I thought I was on this journey to have a baby- but what I actually found was an initiation into the alchemy of life.” What follows is a story which is as much about resilience and love as it is about the liberating power of ‘surrendering’ to those things which we cannot control. 

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bexy Cameron is a writer, director, and activist. Her first best selling book, a memoir 'Cult Following' which was published last year to widespread awe and acclaim, is currently being transformed into a dramatized series with Dakota Jonson and Riley Ke-oh starring as the leads. It's not surprising that the world from Hollywood to London was set alight but this book, because it is a pure, tender, gripping ferociously brave story which provides a rare and intimate window into what it was like, to grow up inside of the Children of God, one of the most infamous religious sex cults of this century. 

Bexy has spent a lot of her adult life “retelling” the story of her childhood , but this conversation is not about Bexy gratuitously retelling her story, instead this is a  moment to look more deeply at what happened on the inside of her that enabled the internal journey from a childhood of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual incarcerations to lead to a life of truly self realized emancipation.  Amongst many extraordinary things, It is an intimate look at what her story reveals about “our basic human need for connection and purpose, about surviving our childhoods, about the gifts that trauma can bring, and maybe at some point, about forgiveness”.  

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This final episode of this series with the extraordinary Bonny Tydeman. Bonny is a psychosynthesis coach and the creator of Soul Beam - A transformational coaching practice founded to enable people to connect to a life of true purpose and meaning. Bonny has said, “So many of us feel flattened by narratives of what we should be. But we can all be so much more than any predefined label or role, each one of us is a completely unique expression of life, full of creative potential and intuitive wisdom.”

Bonny has come to this work through more than 15 years of deep personal enquiry and a profound journey of personal transformation, which she has translated into a practice which is having life changing effects working with people who feel in need of creating a deeper, more meaningful relationship to living. I know first hand, the extraordinary work that Bonny does, because I am one of the very lucky people that not only can call her a dear friend, but also a collaborator, Bonny is my incredible creative researcher and right hand partner in crime on all things Human podcast and who’s very unique brilliance is interwoven with every aspect of this podcast, so it is extra special that she is our final guest of this 3rd series! 

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Solomon Smith is founder and Director of the legendary Brixton Soup Kitchen. The BSK was founded in 2013 to provide the sanctuary of community space, food, drink, warmth and a place of belonging, to some of the most vulnerable people in the community, including many local families who are homeless or living below the poverty line. The BSK is known not just as a place, but as a feeling- which is created by the heart, soul and humanity that Solomon and his dedicated team tirelessly generate for its service users every day. 

Just the year after it was founded Solomon was awarded the South London “Our Heroes” award for the transformational impact the Soup Kitchen was quickly established for having for its immediate service users and the wider community.  

The story of the Brixton Soup Kitchen is one which embodies all that is the best of humanity…. Yet it is even more incredible when you know the story of the man, the legend who founded it. Solomon is a lifelong Brixtonian who was raised on the Moorlands Estate, which he describes as one of the most notorious estates in Brixton, coming from Moorlands, you have said, the world expects you to fail.  

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Josie Naughton is the CEO and co-Founder of Choose Love, a humanitarian organisation founded in August 2015 in response to the largest migration of people fleeing war, persecution and climate change that Europe had seen since WW2.  

Within 3 months of being founded, Choose Love had raised over £1M and established itself across the front lines of the crisis as being the biggest grassroots provider of aid to the refugee crisis in Europe.  Six years later Choose Love is a globally recognised brand working in 15 countries, funding 150 grassroots organisations and has raised over £40M to date- it is a brand that not only represents the organisation, but a movement which holds the values/ ideology that so many people across the world feel is their own- one which ‘normalised helping human beings, no matter who they are or where they’re from.  This is an extraordinary thing in itself, but even more so when you understand the story of the person who has quietly, bravely, tirelessly led the organisation since she founded it.  Josie Naughton came to this role with no previous experience of the humanitarian sector at all, she had worked as a nanny, in bars and in music management till, like so many people at the time was at home one day seeing the horror of the crisis unfolding in Europe and felt compelled to take whatever action she could to help…. Having no idea how that action was going to change her own life and the life of so many other people. 

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the human spirit

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nina Gualinga, an activist, a mother, of dual Swedish and Ecuadorian heritage, she part of the collective struggle of the Kichwa community of Sarayaku, deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, which is where she was raised.  

When Nina was 8 years old, her community that was previously untouched by roads or electricity was violently confronted by extractive oil companies… Consequently, since these VERY early years of her childhood, she has been leading the relentless work of protecting her communities and their indigenous lands from this existential attack, they are currently under unprecedented threat from destruction and exploitation.

In Nina’s words, “My inspiration comes from the earth itself, all the beauty of life expressed in so many ways. My motivation comes from the people around me who are fighting every day to protect their families and their home, the Amazonian rainforest.

Motherhood. Amazonia. Women. Indigenous People. Extractivism. Violence. Climate change and love- it’s all connected.”

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nici Harrison is a transformational coach, and founder of “The Griefspace” which has been founded to provide grief circles, retreats and individual sessions to enable grieving people to reframe their grief to become a sacred transformational gateway to a deeper and more profound relationship with living.  

Nici has has come to what she describes as, her ‘apprenticeship with grief’ as the result the expereince of her own earth shattering loss of her beloved mother, who she she describes as her soul mate her ‘twin flame’ whom after many years of acute illness with depression, died by suicide just 5 years ago, when Nici was in her early 20’s. Her experience of grief was an initiation into a world which so many grieving people discover, which is one that seemingly has no language or wisdom to support grieving people. Nici you have said, “we are told to get up and get on, to deny our feelings and distract ourselves senseless. When in reality, as you say Nici, “our grief needs to be seen, acknowledged, heard and loved.”  Nici’s wisdom and precise articulation on loss is a balm for the soul for any grieving heart, yet it is also a conversation which is an invitation for any person who doesn’t know loss but wants to come to understand more about how grief truly transforms us. 

Grief requires an expansiveness of self that stretches our hearts to a fourth dimension. The extraordinary thing is that we can contain it, live with it, and that somehow the human heart can hold it all. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trigger Warning - Suicidal Intention

Laura Dockrill is an award-winning author and illustrator of books for children and young people. What Have I Done? Is her first book for adults which courageously narrates her experience of postpartum psychosis which she experienced after the birth of her baby boy. 

Postpartum psychosis occurs in 1 -2% of births. The onset is usually very sudden, most often within the first 2 weeks postpartum and often for women who have never had any previous history of mental health issues and is considered a mental health emergency. 

For too long there have been cool winds of silence and shame around the vast spectrum of the darker and more chaotic experiences of postnatal mental health. Laura is breaking the seal on that silence creating honesty, compassion and permission for this conversation, that so many new mothers need, to feel safe in having. 

So if there world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everybody and welcome to the third series of the Human Podcast, a place to hear extraordinary human stories that celebrate the limitless potential of human beings.  

Sonia Gisa is a model, actress and author of the extraordinary memoir, Slaughter Baby. Sonia was born in Rusenga in Rwanda, when she was three years old in 1994, she and her family lived through the 100 day Rwandan Genocide that from the 7th April to the 15th July that year, saw the murder over 1.1million Rwandan people, including the assasiation of her beloved father and the death of her baby brother. 

Sonia is now an international model and actress  living in London. Her experience tells the story of our human capacity for terror, courage, resilience, love and forgiveness in a way I have never personally had the privilege to encounter before.

Sonia’s story is one of profound grief and loss… and of survival, both in the most literal sense and also in the survival of the soul…of a person who sees the world in all its beauty and wonder even after having lived through and beyond one the most unspeakable human atrocities in modern history. 

So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everybody and welcome to the third series of the Human Podcast, a place to hear extraordinary human stories that celebrate the limitless potential of human beings. 

This podcast is dedicated to honouring our experiences of transformation, our ability to live through, live with and beyond the inevitable devastations and renewals of living. So often, our personal stories of tragedy and survival are left untold, hidden behind the facade of ordinary life: Human has been created to make them more seen, more heard and more celebrated. Because I believe, within them, we can all feel more connected to our shared humanity.   

So we couldn’t be luckier to be launching this season with the sensational Deborah James. Four years ago, at the age of 35, Deborah was blindsided with a diagnosis of incurable Bowel Cancer. She was given less than an 8% of surviving 5 years. So every day since then, Deborah has been required to live ‘with’ one of the greatest existential challenges human beings face- that of our ultimate mortality. Deborah has said “my only option is to live in the now and to value one day at a time.” But my god, living, truly living is what Deborah does everyday with passion, courage, joy and most importantly always always with….Glamour. However, in recent weeks Deborah reached a ‘rock bottom’ when she discovered the treatment that has been keeping her alive is now no longer working and consequently, the rollercoaster she has been living on took her to “the gates of hell”. So Deborah and I met to record this episode when she was truly in the eye of a terrifying storm, yet the conversation that emerged was about hope, motherhood, courage...and shopping.  

So if the world feels like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the season finale of this second season of Human, I am in a rare and intimate conversation with a very special guest; the artist, author and poet, the extraordinary Frieda Hughes. Grief and loss is something that has run throughout the landscape of Friedas’ life since the earliest years of her childhood with the loss of her mother, the writer Syliva Plath, her father the poet Ted Hughes and her brother Nicolas Hughes.  Of her childhood she has said, “there were happy times, but happiness is not what chiselled a shape out of me, and often it flowered in a garden of broken glass from more painful experiences.”

Throughout her life she has used her painting and writing to document and articulate the emotion of these seminal experiences. Frieda’s life truly tells us of the redemptive power of creativity to transform the obliterative experience of grief into a life with prolific creative purpose. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today’s episode is a family affair with our guest, my brother, Matthew Mills. Apart from being my brother, Matthew is a trailblazing CEO of the Deliciously Ella business empire, the most loving devoted Dad to his two girls… my heavenly gorgeous nieces Sky and May and husband to our Ella.  

But today we are here to talk about the love, the loss and our life beyond the death of our exquisite Mum. On the 24th May 2017, Mum and I hung up the phone from our daily Facetime. My baby was 10 weeks old. If I wasn't’ with Mum, we’d speak on Facetime everyday, because whilst navigating the wonder and strangeness of new motherhood I had returned to the unsanitized, boundaryless intimacy of her love. As a new Mum, I needed her in a way I hadn't since my childhood.  As the sun was setting on this perfect early Summers day I got a phone call- it was a police officer, who was with her , in an ambulance being rushed to hospital. She’d suffered two huge seizures and was unconscious. Two days later we were handed her death sentence. An MRI scan revealed an aggressive brain tumour in the left side of her brain. We were told she may have 13 months, she died 11.5 months later on the 12th May 2018, at home in our arms. Her diagnosis, dying and death for us, has been obliterative, but from it, new life grows, our new life, as a family, without her.  Learning to live without her has been a moment by moment process of restitching our own edges and understanding how we could be whole again.  

But whilst what has happened to our family has been life defining for us, it is far from extraordinary…quite the opposite, it is entirely ordinary. Our experience of loss is a thread that tugs at the universal fabric of them all because whilst the stories of our grief are unique, I believe, the language of them, is universal. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alice Aedy is a documentary photographer, film-maker and activist. Jack Harries is a documentary film-maker and environmental activist who has built an online platform of over 5 million people raising awareness of the climate emergency. 

Together, Alice and Jack, are co-founders of Earthrise, a platform dedicated to empowering and galvanising the next generation of climate activists into long term, sustained action- they have both played a central role in putting the climate emergency on the news and political agenda for the first time in the UK. 

The challenges that humankind face as a result of the climate crisis are unprecedented. All the science states that unless we act urgently and radically to change the way we are living on Earth we will speed towards the mass extinction of life on this planet as we know it. Coming into true acceptance of the enormity of this is as existentially overwhelming as anything could possibly be and the consequence for many who do, involves the onset of a relatively newly recognised, yet very commonly experienced form of ‘grief,’ called Climate Grief: a grief for all that has already been lost on earth and the dread for the certain loss of all life on earth as we know it, if action is not taken. It is now broadly recognised that human beings are going to have to learn, both collectively and individually to manage, and tend to, this grief as a part of driving one of the most important movements for change in the history of humankind. As we hear so boldly in this episode, tending to the darkness of our feelings is an integral part of activism, it is what enables us to keep the fire of relentless hope burning bright. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben Brooks Dutton is the Sunday Times Best selling author of Its Not Raining Daddy It's Happy, award winning blogger of Life As A Widower and chair of the Life Matters Task force for bereaved families in the UK. 

Ben’s story is one which ignited the hearts of this nation back November 2012, when his exquisite wife Desreen, mother to their 2 year old son, was killed by a speeding car whilst they were walking home together from a perfect, blissfully happy Saturday afternoon with best friends. It was an event of such inexplicable tragedy, that it could feel hard to come to terms with a world in which something so randomly obliterative could happen.   

Ben’s story is one which pushes the vessel of our human capacity to hold and endure the shock, agony, acceptance and recovery from loss to its limits- consequently, what his story reveals, is one of the most courageous stories of grief I have been privileged to hear. His story is not only one of his own courage to “live fiercely” alongside his grief, but his story, also leads us to that of his gorgeous, brilliant son Jackson, who lost the person he loved most before had the language to express it. 

Within a couple of months of Desreens passing, Ben got to work, putting his story to the service of others through his hugely popular blog which was followed and read by millions of people all over the world. As we are in conversation, it is almost 8 years to the day that Desreen was killed. In Ben's words, in these more recent times, he has had to ‘start turning away from death, and back towards life’. So, if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Leyla Hussein is a Bafta nominated presented, a Psychotherapist, and an internationally Celebrated Activist campaigning to end Female Genital Mutilation. Leyla is an FGM survivor- who in her own words “is trying to live her bravest life”.

In this series we are exploring the vast and different ways in which human beings experience, and live “with” their experiences of grief and loss, which of course are not just limited to death and bereavement.  

Leyla is a leading global voice, breaking centuries of silence on the unique type of grief that millions of women and girls all over the world live with every day, as survivors of FGM. Today, more than 200 Million girls and women worldwide have experienced FGM

Every 11 seconds a girl undergoes FGM. 3 Million girls are at risk of it every year.

Leyla's extraordinary and courageous activism is a torchlight to millions of women and girls all over the world, so if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.



Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the 14th November 2020, at the age of 30, Lotte became a widow, after her soul mate, Ben Khouizter, died of Covid 19 in a Mexican hospital, where they had courageously travelled against all odds - to receive cancer treatment for a diagnosis they were told was terminal in August. Lotte and Ben’s love, bravery and earth shattering pursuit to save his life, knew no bounds. Ben was 36, he was one of the most universally loved people on this Earth. Their story was one that captured the hearts and support of thousands of people all over the world who were willing him back to health. The profundity of his death has been felt on every corner of the planet. Lotte’s story is one which tells of the unique and quantum loss of her Ben, but it also speaks to the ‘distinctly’ cruel and isolated process of loss and grief that millions of people around the world are experiencing, as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic.   

Since Ben’s passing…Lotte has committed herself to laying the raw and visceral narration of her grief open, and in doing so it has provided a witness statement to these very early, wild and raw stages of grief, that are normally experienced behind the veil of people's most hidden lives. So, this conversation is a rare and privileged window into the very early days and weeks after loss. Lotte’s story truly tells us of the limitless love and courage that grieving hearts can hold. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. 

Created and hosted by Jess Mills

Creative co-production by Bonny Tydeman

Produced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.