We’ve arrived at Lammas - that halfway point between summer solstice and autumn equinox.  The world feels like A LOT. So many of us are trying to process personal loss, trauma and grief in the face of global loss, trauma and grief. The LAST thing I want is for any of us to drag old wounds into the Autumn, letting bad stuff that happened stop us from making great stuff happen - we need to learn how to make our way through our pain, and find a way to transform that journey to feed our future. So I put together this panel of folx to help us discover systems for transmuting trauma.  Each of our guests today has managed to transmute trauma into something better in their own way. Everyone’s experience is different, so rather than giving you one answer, today we’ll get three different perspectives to help us understand that healing or moving on happens in a multitude of ways. After losing her aunt and mother in quick succession, Diandra found hope in cardinals.  Of her book Red Bird, Diandra Ford-Wing said, "I hope to offer solace to those navigating the challenging waters of loss and grief, providing a safe haven amidst their emotional storms." In finally being able to name her trauma of CSA and seek justice, Amy Miranda was able to bring her Spiritual practice and her creative practice together with What We’ve Forgotten. After surviving a mass shooting in 2021, Kristen Renaud found healing through painting and gardening which begat Lightning Struck Gardens. Each purchase of an item from LSG helps to fund her non-profit, and provide emotional support to survivors of gun violence. Together we can transmute trauma, turn the poison to medicine, become alchemists, and get comfortable in the spiral!

In this episode, Risa talks with Jack Chanek, a high priest of Gardnerian Wicca, doctor of Philosophy and the author of books on Goddess worship, Kabbalah, and Tarot. Jack shares his journey from an atheistic upbringing to becoming a Wiccan and a magical practitioner. They discuss Jack's books 'Kabbalah for Wiccans' and 'Tarot for the Magically Inclined,' focusing on how Kabbalah and Tarot can organize and enhance magical practices. He explains how to perform rituals like 'stacking the deck' for tarot magic and shares personal success stories, like the time he tied up the wind. Jack also offers advice on finding inclusive and safe Wiccan covens. He emphasizes experimenting with Tarot and scaling magic for local political activism.

We gathered together with Zoe Flowers and Amy Miranda to walk between worlds, do some divination, and celebrate the first birthday of the Missing Witches Deck of Oracles!!

In this conversation, Risa Dickens and guest, somatic practitioner Lise Lønsmann, discuss the significance of being in our bodies and how it is a revolutionary act against the patriarchy. We explore how patriarchy benefits from keeping individuals disconnected from their bodies, and how reconnecting through embodied rituals is a sacred process. Lise shares her personal journey of disconnection from her body and how a cancer scare catalyzed her somatic healing. She emphasizes the importance of non-judgmental somatic resourcing, building safety within oneself, and the need for small, consistent practices that can cultivate deeper self-awareness and aliveness. We also touch on the impact of childhood trauma on body awareness, the revolutionary nature of caring for oneself, and how small acts of embodiment can contribute to larger societal change. Additionally, Lise shares examples of her own embodied rituals and discusses the empowering aspects of witchcraft and magic in reclaiming our power and aliveness.

Let this be your Litha message: Gahd loves you as you are. We're celebrating the Summer Solstice 2025 with one of the brightest, sunniest, shiniest Witches we know: star of Canada's Drag Race Season 5, mother of the House of Gahd, and unofficial Auntie to us all, Uma Gahd! Together we discuss labels, emotionally preparing for the scrutiny of a rabid fandom, the importance of having and building community, and also building character. For Uma, activism means activation. There are points of intersection between Drag, Politics, Religion and Witchcraft, and we cover them all. Queer Spirituality, Dirt-worshipping Hippie Paganism, Hellenic Revivalism, Religious Reclamation, and Joy. "The Sun is coming, so soak it up, but even when it's not there, shine light." www.missingwitches.com/litha-2025

Witch poet Danielle Dulsky discusses the inspiration and urgency behind writing her book, highlighting the transformative power of fairy tales. In conversation with host Risa Dickens, they delve into how these stories, often dismissed as mere children's tales, have subversive, social-change elements and ancient roots that intertwine with dreams. Danielle speaks on the practice of raising paradoxes, blending rituals and story places, and the importance of initiating new narratives. She emphasizes the medicinal properties of archetypes and how they can be both empowering and problematic. They touch upon personal paradoxes, living through impactful global events, and how individual and collective stories co-create and reflect each other. The conversation finishes with an invitation to listeners to find, tell, and witness stories as a form of resistance and transformation, amplifying the potential for change through shared narratives.

ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT TO JOIN THE MISSING WITCHES REPARATIONS FUNDRAISER!! In this episode, Amy and Risa sit down to talk origin stories: their friendship, their Witchcraft, their collaborations, the MW project, their Reparations Fundraiser. It's an origin story and a Love Story. It's a story of taking What Ifs, combining them with friendship, imagination and faith to turn ideas into realities. www.missingwitches.com/ep-266-mwrf-part-4-origin-stories-with-amy-and-risa www.missingwitches.com/reparations-fundraiser-2025/

Join the Missing Witches Reparations Fundraiser by supporting The Sixties Scoop Network! For Part 3 of our MWRF series, Amy sits down with Sixties Scoop survivor and co-founder of The Sixties Scoop Network, Elaine Kicknosway, to talk about the continuing impact of the large-scale removal or “scooping” of Indigenous children from their homes, communities and families of birth, and their subsequent placement into predominantly non-Indigenous, middle-class families across the United States and Canada. Elaine says, "I want to believe we can all come home, even our missing and murdered sisters, I want to believe we can all come home." Stick around til the end of the episode to hear Elaine sing!!! Elaine Kicknosway (Qwe/she/her) is a Traditional helper - Swampy Cree through her biological mother from Amisk Lake and her biological father’s side is from Buffalo Narrows Sk. She is a Sixties Scoop Survivor and returned home in 1996. Elaine is Wolf Clan and is a member of Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation in Northern Saskatchewan. She has been long time community advocate in the areas of child welfare, MMIW2SG, healthy families, and Indigenous Wellness that include spaces for the LGBTQ2S+. She is a carrier of ceremonial teaching. Elaine is an Indigenous land based focusing therapist & trauma Counsellor, a Blanket exercise facilitator and trainer, Indigenous full spectrum birth to death Doula , Traditional dancer, singer, drummer and is the Cofounder of The Sixties Scoop Network. www.missingwitches.com/ep-265-mwrf-part-3-w-elaine-kicknosway-bi-giwen-coming-home https://sixtiesscoopnetwork.org/

Today we're joined by two Earth Angels, Christopher Marmolejo and Edgar Fabian Frias to talk about Art as Magic and as a healing practice, boundaries, divination, opening portals of possibility, bravery, and inner fortitude. This conversation is a nervous system reset - take a deep breath, slow down, rediscover your sense of self, commune with the Divine, and bear witness as unjust systems decay. REMINDER: This episode is part of our FIFTH annual REPARATIONS FUNDRAISER!! Go to missingwitches.com for all the details. www.missingwitches.com/ep-264-mwrf-part-2-w-christopher-marmolejo-and-edgar-fabian-frias-love-is-coming-to-us-all www.missingwitches.com/reparations-fundraiser-2025/

Today we're joined by Amanda Amour Lynx, Granddaughter Crow and Patty Krawec to talk about what we want to believe, the healing power of story-telling, trust, and together we imagine what a re-indiginized world might look like. It's Beltane! It's May Day!! It’s the halfway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice! It's the official kick off date for the annual Missing Witches Reparations fundraiser!! Every year we at Missing Witches, and our coven, and extended Witch community spend the month of May joyfully raising money for Indigenous support orgs (especially the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal!) and gathering together with magical friends to spotlight Indigenous voices through conversations about Indigenous Futures. Here's a quick rundown of how our fundraiser works: 1. Make a donation of $10 or more to your local Native Women’s Shelter or Indigenous Support Org or DONATE to the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. 2. Take a screen shot of your receipt and email it to missingwitches@gmail.com with the subject line: REPARATION 3. Be entered to win one of TWENTY fabulous prizes (full 2025 list link below) donated by luminaries of the Witch community. 4. Automatically receive coupon codes for a discount from TWO of our favourite Witchy Businesses: HAUS WITCH in Salem, and Michelle Pajak-Reynolds Jewelry!!! www.missingwitches.com/beltane-2025-w-amanda-amour-lynx-granddaughter-crow-and-patty-krawec-now-our-bird-has-flown www.missingwitches.com/reparations-fundraiser-2025

An anti-capitalist motivational meditation drawn from the science and mythology of the larch tree; a message filled with hope and resilience. This Kinship Episode calls for ending poverty and building a collaborative, supportive society drawing on the strength found in togetherness and nature’s wisdom, urging us to rise, grow, and flourish, even in cancerous times.

Chamomile is an icon of care, reaching out to tend to other plants in need. And humans too.  So if you’re feeling like a little trodden daisy, growing in the cracks, know that you are chamomile kin, that gentle does not mean weak, that true courage is staying calm in the face of fear and spreading out in response to pressure. For witches who refuse to be trampled or tamed, who dream while awake, who heal on their own terms at their own pace, and find themselves healing others in the process, let’s take chamomile as kin, as friend, as ally and as role model. www.missingwitches.com/ep-261-you-are-chamomile-kin-gentle-does-not-mean-weak

This episode is about wild beach grass. It's about being invaded and invader, holding the banks together and growing faster when the sandstorm hits.

Today we explore our kinship with a creature of colour and heat, who inspired ancient myth-makers, 19th century authors, and cult film directors alike - the pink flamingo. But beyond its appearances in our human stories throughout time and place, more inspirational than the mythology is the complex and persistent life of the flamingo bird itself. In her poem “How the Mountains drip with Sunset” Emily Dicksinson asked: Have I the lip of the Flamingo That I dare to tell? So let’s gather here in this flamingo flock today, and I’ll use my flamingo lips, and dare to tell you that we are kin. Let’s conquer a cruel landscape together, by bringing colour, heat, dance and joy to inhospitable places. Because Flamingos exist and thrive in some of the harshest environments that our Earth has to offer. And if they can do it, so can we. www.missingwitches.com/ep-259-you-are-flamingo-kin-pink-feathers-and-thick-skin

This Kinship episode of the Missing Witches Podcast was written and produced by Risa Dickens. The song Beech was composed and produced by Cosmo Sheldrake with lyrics from a poem by Robert Macfarlane, and was included here with kind permission. The Missing Witches podcast is listener-supported, if you'd like to support the project share this episode! Help us find our kin. Check out Missing Witches.com to find out more.

This episode is a spell. To celebrate the Spring Equinox of 2025 we invited the Missing Witches Coven to write and read spell poems, and we gathered together to conjure the magics of poetry, of protection, abundance and ease, to empower the powerless and bring conscience to the conscious-less. We hope that these rhymes will become mantras we can sing in our heads at night to replace the intrusive thoughts, the fear. This is our spell, to be transmitted across the waves and webs, to reach your ears and soothe you, to reach your heart and rile you, to experience the magic of becoming. This is our spell. https://www.missingwitches.com/ep-257-ostara-2025-this-episode-is-a-spell/

Risa interviews professor of neuroscience and tarot reader, Dr Siddharth Ramakrishnan, about what happens in our brains when we divine, the evidence for collective conscience and neuroforecasting, how different animals move through the world, and what plastic is doing to our experience of time.

In the second half of our exciting conversation with the electric and wise Patty Krawec we talk about language, theoretical physics, pyro-epistemology, stones, stories and white supremacy.

Patty Krawec is an Anishinaabe/Ukrainian writer and speaker belonging to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and residing in Niagara Falls. She has served on the board of the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and co-hosted the Medicine for the Resistance podcast. Patty is a founding director of the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation which challenges settlers to pay their rent for living on Indigenous land and then disburses those funds to Indigenous people, meeting immediate survival needs as well as supporting the organizing and community building needed to address the structural issues that create those needs. Patty has a background in social work, supporting victims of sexual and gendered violence as well as child abuse. A strong believer in the power of collective organizing, Patty was an active union member throughout her career as a social worker. Her current work and writing focuses on how Anishinaabe belonging and thought can inform faith and social justice practices and has been published in Sojourners, Rampant Magazine, Midnight Sun, Yellowhead Institute, Indiginews, Religion News Service, and Broadview. Her first book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future was published in 2022 by Broadleaf Books. Her second book, Bad Indians Book Club: Reading At The Edge of a Thousand Worlds, is about the ways that marginalized writing and storytelling can help us reimagine that future will be published in the fall of 2025. She lives on the bluesky @daanis.ca and you can find her online at daanis.ca

The halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox (also known as Imbolc) is the perfect time to look backwards and forwards - what did we learn and what can we do differently as we start planning the planting of new seeds - literal and metaphorical. February first also kicks off black history month and these two dates combined provide the perfect opportunity to celebrate where we’re going and learn from where we’ve been. For the past few years Missing Witches has hosted a Zoom circle of inspiring Black Witches for a "Future Histories of Black Magic" special to mark Black History Month.  We believe that all of our guests are creating what will be the future of black history with their incredible work. Last year we lost a beloved poet, Nikki Giovanni, so we’re taking this year’s prompt from the title of one of her poems, “Revolutionary Dreams”. Over the past couple years there’s been a lot of rhetoric around the word revolution - both political and personal. So I’ve gathered this panel of brilliant witches together today, Lilith Dorsey, Loli Moon, Christena Cleveland, Zoe Flowers, Thea Anderson, and Dr Beverly to ask: What is YOUR revolutionary dream? What does YOUR revolution look like?  www.missingwitches.com/imbolc-2025-future-histories-of-black-magic-revolutionary-dreams-w-lilith-dorsey-loli-moon-christena-cleveland-zoe-flowers-thea-anderson-and-dr-beverly