Are we out of balance? Some thinkers pose that the scales have tipped toward industry, ego, and individuality, and we’re disconnected from the cycles of nature. We’re all Yang and no Yin. And this imbalance is causing climate change. So, what can we do to restore our sense of interconnectedness among all living things? How can tapping into our spirituality help us heal ourselves and the earth?
Dr. Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow is the author of Grounded: A Fierce, Feminine Guide to Connecting with the Soil and Healing from the Ground Up. She is also a founding member of Kiss the Ground, a nonprofit dedicated to awakening people to the possibilities of regeneration. On this bonus episode of Reversing Climate Change, Dr. McMorrow joins guest host and Nori cofounder Alexsandra Guerra to share her mother metaphor for the soil, describing how she sees the Yin as the feminine energy of regeneration and why western society struggles with birth and death—the primary portals of transformation.
Dr. McMorrow explores how our desire to DO disregards the spiritual aspect of climate change, discussing the individual and collective healing we must do to activate our soul voice and reconnect with each other and the earth. Listen in to understand the relationship between the empowerment of women and soil health and learn Dr. McMorrow’s simple practices for connecting with spirit and bringing our natural systems back into balance.
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Resources
Grounded: A Fierce, Feminine Guide to Connecting with the Soil and Healing from the Ground Up by Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow, PhD
Katharine Wilkinson’s 2018 TED Talk
How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal Your Past, and Create Your Self by Dr. Nicole LePera
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Hi everyone. My name is Alexsandra Guerra, from Nori. I’m one of the co-founders and director of corporate development, joining in for this guest hosting of this Reversing Climate Change podcast episode. [unclear] to be with you guys. Today we have Dr. Erin Yu-Juin, author of Grounded: A Fierce, Feminine Guide to Connecting with the Soil and Healing from the Ground Up. She’s also a founding member of Kiss the Ground. Welcome, Erin.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Thank you so much. I’m so pleased to be here.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, me too. So we’re going to talk about your book, as well as soil and climate and how to heal, but one of the first questions I have is, what inspired you to write this book? For anybody who’s listening, it’s quite a title, to talk about healing and from a feminine standpoint, as well as healing the soil.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah, thank you so much. It was quite an evolution. It came from graduating with my PhD in 2013 in urban planning and sustainable cities. So I was looking at climate change in cities and the built environment at the time, and then once I graduated, while I was doing my initial job search, because I thought I was going to work for cities and do some kind of municipal climate change related thing, I stumbled upon this group of volunteers that is now the organization Kiss the Ground. So at the time we were like 14 kind of ragtag volunteers, like on a couch, with this kind of wild mission that my friend Ryland Engelhart brought home from listening to Graeme Sait speak in Australia way back in 2013.
And so for me it was just a volunteer effort. But what happened was I learned about life in the soil and soil carbon sequestration for the first time, which is fascinating, that I made it through six years of a PhD in urban planning and focusing on sustainable cities and didn’t know about soil health or anything about soil carbon sequestration, because it wasn’t part of the mainstream conversation yet. That’s actually one of the great tasks, I think, of Kiss the Ground and the entire regenerative ag movement since then. But at the time it was a pretty wild idea.
And so I spent six months to a year with them, and I was their first kind of informal director, and becoming a nonprofit, deciding what we were doing, all of this stuff. And then I actually had what I now call kind of a classic spiritual breakdown, at the moment where I kind of, like, I got gentrified out of Venice, after being this graduate student, and I never did find that city job. And I was working with the Kiss the Ground group, and I just got exhausted and burnt out. And so decided at that moment to go to Bali for yoga teacher training, which was actually a huge leap at the time.
It was very much something I considered to be, like, air quotes, not serious, being this like academic woman that I thought of myself as. But some other things happened. My friend, a childhood friend, passed away of a sudden cancer at the time, and I just had this kind of, you know, come to God moment that was like, just do the thing that you would regret not doing. And so I went, and that was when, I mean, on the plane on the way to Bali I got this download that it was like a book, and like I had to write a book and I couldn’t stop until it was done. And that was seven years ago. So that was like this initial and clear call that never wavered for the entire seven years, no matter what it took.
And then, as I did my yoga teacher training, I started to become exposed to the concept of the yin and the energetics of the yin, and even got exposed to energetic healing and things like this, which I had no background in at all. And frankly, that was pretty like woo at the time. And so a lot of it has been, it formed into kind of a spiritual memoir. It’s what I call coming out of the woo closet. And this process of moving into yoga, teaching yoga, starting to do craniosacral therapy, shedding many, many layers of identity, at some point starting to encounter plant medicine.
And then it all sort of comes together with this notion of the divine feminine metaphor, which is the great mother metaphor, which brings us all the way back to plant medicine, and eventually brings us all the way back around to healing with Indigenous peoples and lands, which is really the original story. I just sort of came at it backwards in my mind. So it was quite a winding journey. But the book itself was, I can only explain it as a spiritual call and kind of a life’s purpose, like you have to do this no matter what it takes. And that’s how the whole thing was born.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s beautiful. So you mentioned this spiritual breakdown and the energy of the yin. What is the energy of the yin? What are you referring to?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: So I was doing, you know, I don’t know, just kind of like YogaWorks hatha yoga for stress relief, when I was finishing my doctorate, because sitting in front of a computer for that many hours was a lot. And somewhere in there I started to really connect with the breath, which is the primary part of yoga. And then when I went to Bali and I started to work with yin yoga, the yin is, it’s really the feminine, it’s the receptive. And so it’s also the slowing down, it’s also the listening. So we get all the way into this concept of the dark goddess and some of the unconscious.
So there’s a realm of themes that are, like, in regeneration it’s sort of the compost phase of things, which is the death phase of the cycle, which is also rest and nighttime, and the winter phase of the seasonal cycle, the winter phase of the menstrual cycle. And there’s an endless amount of parallel metaphors that run through nature that reflect the yin. So actually, to me, the soil is the yin, it’s the void and the great creatrix, and essentially the womb metaphor.
And so it’s the place, it’s like chaos, the place where all possibility exists. Or we think of chaos as like random BS in Western culture, but there’s a more kind of mystical understanding of chaos as this place of all possibilities, and that is where the seed gestates under the surface of the soil. So all of those are the yin metaphor. I could kind of go on forever, but I think you get the idea.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. So let’s do the connection, because you very much in this book, Grounded, you very much focus on the connection between the feminine energy and our own healing, and how that connects to each other, and how we all play a part in maintaining the land and affecting the health and quality of our soil, and then how that affects climate. So can you explain a little bit more about how we’re all connected in that way, and how this yin energy, and how we take care of it, affects how we take care of our soil?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say at this point that Western culture, loosely, it’s kind of hard to call anything anything as vague as Western culture, but loosely, Western culture, I would say, doesn’t deal with the yin very well. We have basically created kind of an unconscious blind spot where we don’t deal with the death part of the cycle very well, which makes us sort of, lets me, in my perception, blind to life in the soil, health in the soil, also the compost part of the soil conversation.
So I feel like this particular audience is probably pretty well versed in the soil carbon sequestration, larger conversation, but to kind of loop it all together as far as the mother metaphor, it’s like, if you just, the direct mother metaphor, let’s say if you part the soil and you plant the seed, you insert the seed, and then you cover the soil, and then underground, in the darkness, the seed gestates, life gestates. And then at some point life is born, and then the rest of the cycle of course is that the plant grows, and then at some point dies, and then when it dies it comes back around as compost and goes back into the soil to renourish the soil. So it’s a complete cycle.
And what I found in those early years of yin yoga, and these things, the pieces started to come together, where I was like, oh, obviously humans are part of nature, which is sort of something I already knew intellectually, but I got to experience it energetically and physically and kind of at a soul level when I really started to work with it. And then when you see that seed metaphor and that mother womb metaphor, I came to realize that it’s also reflected in the moon. So the waxing and waning of the moon, there’s basically, it follows the cycles of the seasons as well. So you get like the four seasons, and then a winter, and a decomposition.
So the pieces that I put together were basically that if we don’t face this unconscious part of the cycle, it’s sort of like Scorpio archetypes as well, where it’s like, it’s regeneration, it’s death, it’s the unconscious, it’s secrets. We, I want to say, in Western culture, sort of way over focused on the sun and the spring and the summer parts of the cycle, and have really forgotten and relegated this darker part of the cycle, the necessary part of the cycle and the regenerating part of this cycle, into our unconscious somewhere.
And so the place where we’re healing is this unconscious part of our psyches, and this thing that we’re not paying attention to in our own energetic bodies, and then this thing that at the macro level we’re then not paying attention to collectively, which is why I would say that I didn’t learn anything about the soil in my PhD program, because it’s a blind spot in like our entire society. And I would say by now, seven years later, the wonderful work that your group does, and Kiss the Ground is doing, and so many groups are doing, is to help bring this piece, this unconscious piece, into the light, and to continue to tell the story and bring it to the forefront of consciousness, because it’s still not a mainstream conversation, which is fascinating.
So for me, I feel like when we have the courage to go into this sort of yin healing, which means essentially facing into our own darkness and looking into our own unconscious realm, then we can suddenly start to see the patterns of nature, and we start to see ourselves as part of nature. And when we do that, that’s when compost only makes complete sense, and often the soil and the forest floor and decomposition all sort of come into clarity, to the point where it’s obvious. But until we face that unconscious part of our psyches, we’re not going to be able to see it.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I mean, everything that you’re saying here, it’s almost like I was challenged, was like, I don’t know that we’re not paying attention to it, or just, or that we’re just totally unaware of it, right? So, totally being focused on the yang aspect, the energy, the doing, the sun, the go, go, go, [unclear] active energy, and that’s all we focus on, I think, in the Western world. And you mentioned this in your book and it really resonated with me, was, you know, constantly trying to achieve. And even when you referred to yoga, you said, yeah, it really started to lean into this yin yoga, and it was hard at first, because you kind of expect, oh, you go to yoga because you need to do like a workout, and you forget that there’s this other whole part which is the rest piece, the let things settle and turn over, the darker side.
And I have found through my own experience in the last year a deeper appreciation for that balance, and recognizing, like, the Dao De Jing, and really understanding the perspectives of Taoism and what yin and yang actually represent, and how, you know, you can’t have music without the silence between the notes. You can’t have the seed sprouting without the [unclear], the dirt decomposing from the thing that died before it. And yet we constantly focus on product, product, product, product. And I have to be honest, like, I was listening to that aspect of the book and it reminded me a lot of what I’ve been thinking about within Nori, and within the general, I don’t know if it’s a race, but it is definitely a global desire to do something about climate change. And I wonder how much of our desire to do too much is actually causing more of the problem.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah. I think, I think there’s something to that. And I remember in the early days of Kiss the Ground, we were fueled largely by this need to, this needing to do something urgently, which is accurate, given the data. And at the same time, I think over the seven years of evolution, just as humans and kind of growing up, I would say almost into adulthood for most of us, there has been a sort of slowing down, or taking of a breath, or taking time, because we do realize that actually, if we’re charging ahead kind of blindly and feeling like we’re saving something or doing something, we can actually miss the most important parts.
And I would say that this spiritual part of the conversation, and part of the reason this is a spiritual memoir of sorts and sort of coming out of the woo closet, is because that part of the conversation is also really, I’m going to call it, heavily pooh-poohed a lot by, like, not just mainstream society, but certainly the academic world. In my journey, frankly, I got hit pretty hard throughout, because it’s frowned upon, because it’s hanging out there in our unconscious and our subconscious still. And I talk a lot about the history and the goddess history, which is a place that I never thought I would get into, and like mythology and archetypes, and how storytelling and these like archetypal energies are actually foundationally and fundamentally important to everything we’re doing. And if you look at marketing, for example, they’re using the power of the subconscious, the unconscious and archetypes all the time.
Alexsandra Guerra: Can you give us some examples of these archetypes and how it’s affecting us on a society level?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah. So I got into the sort of, the great mother archetype is the original, right? It’s the OG, like, that’s the soil, exactly what I said before. It’s like the cycles of all things, and the void, the great creatrix. And at some point, like around 5,000 years ago, and I kind of chased this around for a while, and there’s not an exact, there are lots of theories as to quite what happened, but nobody knows for sure. But at some point the mythologies around the great mother started to get taken apart and torn apart and [unclear] with the concept of private property, and the concept of essentially conquest, or like taking over, and the concept of owning land, which wasn’t thought of the same way before, and the concept of owning people. And so from that, I think the natural through line, unfortunately, we’ve ended up with genocide and slavery as extensions of those concepts.
But I can pinpoint a few things, which is like, for example, when Zeus got written into the Hera myth. And Hera apparently was a triple goddess who was the great mother in pre-Hellenic Greece, and she was just the great mother on her own, she didn’t have a partner. And then it was only in conquest that Zeus got written in, and he got written in as a shape-shifting rapist. And we still have that, like, origin myth at the base of Western civilization, and we don’t question it, which is fascinating, like, why we have a rapist hanging out there. I remember learning this in elementary school, you know, and like not blinking, and then wonder why we have a rape culture.
I mean, it’s fascinating that these things that are kind of buried in our psyche somewhere really do play out if they go unchecked, if they go uninterrogated, which is why we do personal and spiritual work, because what it does is send us into these unintegrated stories and archetypes and things that are basically playing out in real life without essentially, like, our consent, you know, until we go and bring the unconscious back into the conscious.
So there are many of these goddess archetypes that got rewritten. Lilith is another fascinating one, where she was apparently Adam’s first wife, made of the same earth, and then, it’s as I talk about in the book, but she gets basically exiled from the garden, you know, sent out, cast away. And she has this horrible choice, to either be subservient to Adam or to have a thousand babies a day and watch them all die, and she chooses that rather than be subservient. But then gets written into Christianity as a threat to the holy union, because Eve then gets written as coming from Adam’s rib. And so it’s just, like, we have these stories, like both of those myths are informing what we call, air quotes, holy union, you know, what we call marriage, and these things are still playing out in our culture.
So I think, really, as far away as that may seem from soil carbon sequestration, because it seemed like quite a journey for me, I think if we don’t go in and look at these unconscious things, they will continue to run our show. And it doesn’t matter how much compost we do, or what things we invent, if we’re not looking into what is hanging out in our collective unconscious, like, driving our show, we’re not going to be able to heal what we need to heal in order to bring these cycles back into balance.
And I think the larger sense of bringing cycles back into balance, rather than like, air quotes, fixing something, or air quotes saving something, or fighting climate change, you know, there’s so much language even in that. I mean, even the energy of fighting something creates an energy of fighting. And so I think this concept of working with the cycles, including our own darkness, and healing what is there, and leaning into the whole cycle, is the only thing that’s going to bring all of these larger cycles back into balance.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, absolutely. I’m trying to find a quote here that you wrote in the book about how, if we don’t heal our collective root chakra, or our collective unconsciousness, we won’t be able to heal the soil and therefore address our climate issue. How does this all connect, right? So you also mention the education, empowerment of women. So let’s start with where you were, which is, we need to heal our internal wounds, whether you’re female or male. It’s not specific to any one gender, we’re all affected by these different things that come through the patriarchy. So how do we do that? Do we empower women, educate girls, or do we do certain things? And then how does that affect, help us connect the dots, how does that affect climate change, and what does it have to do with the soil?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah, there’s, this goes in so many directions, thank you. The root chakra is another kind of energetic archetype, and it comes from the Hindu tantric traditions. And this is, again, one of the things that I sort of bumped into in Bali without meaning to. The idea of the root chakra is basically, it’s at the base, it’s sort of at the base, like below our tailbone, energetically, and it represents foundation, tribe, home, identity, family and safety. And if we’re in the United States, we’re basically looking at either, we’re looking at genocide, we’re looking at slavery, we’re looking at immigration. So basically every single human that’s here on this land where I happen to be sitting has some kind of major root trauma that is intergenerational, has been passed down over generations.
And so we’re all, in some sense, disconnected from that sense of home, tribe, identity, family, and it makes sense that we feel unsafe in a kind of foundational, fundamental way. And I would argue that that is one of the major things driving capitalism, because we’re constantly looking outside of ourselves for our worthiness and our safety, and we keep, like, buying things and trying to do things beyond ourselves. So again, we get redirected back to our own healing.
And again, the root, it’s actually a masculine energy, and we’ll get to that, actually, that these, like, the masculine and the feminine are in fact not gendered at all. They’re just archetypes, and they run through everyone, no matter how we self-identify. The root actually has this masculine energy that helps us root into the mother, and it has a structure. So it’s a structural integrity, like a foundation. And then the next chakra up is the sacral chakra, and that has a feminine energy, a watery energy. And then we get into that conversation around creativity, money, sexuality. So again, there are energies around these, which is why I included them in the book, because it’s a really fascinating, essentially, archetypal map that can help us contextualize our own healing, I would say, on the individual level, and then on the collective level.
So what I discovered in the book is, everything is macro micro, micro macro, it all goes back and forth. There’s nothing that exists at the micro that doesn’t exist at the macro, and vice versa. So that’s the sort of foundational level of that root chakra healing. And then we’re talking about healing with women and girls. It actually gets back to that goddess mythology again. So if, for example, if we’re running like a rape culture story for the last 5,000 years, that’s also incredible intergenerational trauma that’s been passed down, energetically, conceptually, archetypally, and then also, like, literally, physically.
And so we have, again, thousands of years of, unfortunately, sexual violence, and again, slavery, and these sorts of awful institutions that have come out of these really imbalanced origin stories. And that’s a big piece of what we’re healing. And then, if you look at Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, she has a beautiful TED Talk about the data around the relationship between empowering women and girls and the relationship to climate change. The short answer is, like, whenever we empower women and girls, whenever we help them get education, reproductive rights, reproductive education, education in general, they help stabilize their communities, they help take care of the land.
They often choose not to have as many children, and do whatever they choose to do. They’re empowered in a way where they’re not subservient to whatever the over-culture is, that is often violence all over the world. And that has a huge relationship to how we care for and steward the land, on small plots, on small farms, in terms of forestry. I mean, there are all kinds of details as to how this plays out specifically all over the world, but there is this theme. And so to me it’s no accident that there’s such violence against what I would call the sacred, which is our land, the soil, the earth, and mother earth, and the mother earth archetype, and the feminine. In some literal sense, in this way it is gendered, where it is gendered violence.
And so all of those things do in fact tie together in my mind. And again, so much of that violence and that history is suppressed and not being collectively healed right now. So I think if we were to shift our focus into so much more individual, micro-level healing, it would have a ripple effect of macro-level healing across the world.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely, I completely agree with you. And you gave me a couple thoughts, which is like, every person, whether you’re a female or male, has some type of trauma that they need to heal. And it does seem like it has been passed down through, let’s say, whether it’s some of these archetypes you referred to that have been ingrained in our culture, like our religions, etc. We are, either as a man or a woman, repressing the more feminine aspects of ourselves. And then how does that manifest itself? Well, you then don’t have so much respect for the feminine, because you’re constantly used to repressing it or discounting it.
And therefore, how can you, if you were to take this analogy, this wonderful metaphor that you have of the soil and the ground being distinctly feminine energy, if you’re repressing your feminine energy in all aspects of your life, society, through your relationships, not feeling like it’s safe to cry or be vulnerable, things like that, how can you have respect for this beautiful, large feminine thing which is the soil? And so if we want to do that, to have respect for it, it’s to then respect all the feminine things about ourselves, give more respect and empowerment and love towards our female counterparts, or just, again, like, even within oneself.
I’m really trying to think about this from the perspective of a male. I’m always in the perspective of a female, you know, where it’s like, yeah, make me feel empowered. But I think that a lot of men are also suffering from this, like, we are collectively repressing that type of energy. And we’re just, I don’t even know that it’s a repression that’s known, that we’re aware of. It’s just a complete generational block that has been passed down. And if we open that up, then the respect to other women and this type of energy would translate into how we take care of and steward our land, and therefore impact climate change.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it’s important and helpful to differentiate, and to add to what you’re saying, or even to support what you’re saying, that sort of the non-gendered spectrum of the masculine, feminine, us healing both, and the whole spectrum within all of us. So I, for example, I’m doing a lot of masculine healing, what I would say. And there’s an interesting way to kind of clarify, because the patriarchy is kind of a sticky word, and so is the toxic masculine, and so is the toxic feminine. So a lot of people ask me about, how do I actually explain these? And it’s a tarot teacher, Lindsay Mack, who gives my favorite description of the masculine and the feminine as archetypes.
And the masculine is like the mountain. So it’s like the steady initiator, protector. It’s always there, it’s not going anywhere. And then the feminine is like oceanic power, and so it’s fluid, it’s receptive, it can be emotional, it’s changeable. Sometimes it’s a tide pool, sometimes it’s a hurricane. And when you have these two archetypes in this sort of nature metaphor, it’s not like one is stronger than the other. So I feel like the way I learned yin and yang in elementary school, inaccurately, was that like the yang was strong and the yin was like passive and weak, and like, that’s the balance of life. So, so men are strong and women are weak, great. And so we all have this kind of running through us somehow, even if we know that it’s totally inaccurate.
But the patriarchy is this other thing that in the book I think, that it’s the ego externalized. So it’s the collective ego that’s externalized into a collective thing, and we call it patriarchy, because it has manifested in something that we would kind of vaguely call toxic masculinity. And it has nothing to do with the actual sacred masculinity or the healthy masculinity in this beautiful natural spectrum of balance. And so it gets a little sticky in there, but I think differentiating the patriarchy really more as the ego, less as anything gender-based, but just, yes, also to recognize that in the cycle imbalance that we have, it is tipped towards what looks like it would be sort of the yang or the masculine, but actually it’s taken this very toxic way of it, which really isn’t the sacred masculine at all.
So if that makes sense, we’re coming all the way back to heal both in ourselves constantly. And I find if I over-tip in one direction in terms of my healing, the other side will sort of suffer, and then so I get to kind of notice again and watch if I’ve gone out of balance in one direction or another. It’s a constant healing cycle, which then is of course reflected in the macro as well. So hopefully that makes sense.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, it totally makes sense to me, and I appreciate that distinction, because it almost feels like these conversations can be very, you said the word sticky, and very fragile, because some people might identify, you know, male or female, and, or, are you attacking me? Like, there’s nothing wrong with me being a male or a white male. And of course there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a matter of, like, being balanced and recognizing when things have gone out of balance. And unfortunately, some physical types of people historically have had more power than others. And so it’s just, these are tricky conversations to have, and I appreciate your distinction of, hey, look, there’s the patriarchy, and it’s not necessarily that we’re talking about the patriarchy as, like, all men and anything masculine, because there is something greater than that, which is like divine masculine energy and divine feminine energy.
And they’re so very, very different and far from this patriarchy thing that we have, which is just like this, I don’t know, monstrous ego-based demon of a kind. I don’t even know if it’s a demon, but, like, but like a construct, because I don’t want to create an enemy out of it, right? Like, embrace your shadow, but recognize your ego for what it is, and like, give it a hug when you see your ego tripping, right? And notice that it’s not really you, it’s just an ego trip.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah, I’ve just been reflecting on this in the last few days, particularly about this awareness of the ego. So I think for those of us who have done, now at this point, like, lots of deep personal work and spiritual work and psychological work, we become quite practiced at interacting with the ego. But for those who are new to it and don’t have that experience, the ego is basically running the show. So the ego can basically take over, and if you’re not aware of the ego and its existence, and the conversation between the ego and the soul, the ego’s just running the show, which is basically what’s happening still at the collective level, because we still, I think, have so few people doing this personal work.
So I think the next chapter of my work is actually helping to open that door. And there have been some huge waves recently. The book, I think, How to Do the Work, or something like that, just hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed, because people are starting to lean into personal work in a way that, seven years ago, like I said, was quite pooh-poohed, like it was very sort of sidelined and really not mainstream, and now it’s not quite mainstream yet, but there’s a larger conversation. And I think when we can have kind of the collective, like the real mainstream consciousness, enter into an actual awareness of a conversation between the ego and the soul, then we don’t have to make the ego such an enemy, like right now it feels like a crazy demon, because it’s running amok, you know?
Like, that’s why we are in the climate situation we’re in, I would say, is because our collective ego is so strong right now and that collective soul voice is still so sidelined. It’s sort of like a wheel turning, like the more that we could get this soul conversation in there, and to heal the piece that, I don’t know why I keep saying pooh-pooh, like, to heal a piece where there’s sort of still this voice, it’s like, oh, that it’s irrational, it’s, you know, it’s voodoo, it’s witchcraft, it’s [unclear], you name it. You know, it’s sidelined in every way, still to this moment, to this day. Like, to be a woman walking around saying what I’m saying is still, like, pretty quite outside of the norm.
And so I think as that shifts, and as we can introduce these concepts as more palatable, like, I think still the masculine and the feminine conversation is kind of brand new, the conversation with the ego is pretty still, pretty far out there, but I feel like it’s turning quickly, and kind of has to, on our timeline. As the collective then becomes aware of the ego, then we can have a much, much different conversation as a collective. And we could be like, oh, hey, this big unhealthy thing that’s going on, like, we don’t have to make war with it, we don’t have to make war with ourselves, we don’t have to use war metaphors and continue to put energy into that sort of thing. We can actually learn how to align with ourselves and then with nature.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yes. So many things that you said that I want to expand on, definitely, like the idea of not having to make war with something, and recognizing that where we put our energy, more of it will come back. And I’m a big believer in the law of attraction. It’s just, I mean, it’s kind of physics, right? They tell you, like, if you exert force on an object, it will exert equal and opposite force.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah, exactly. Everything, I mean, and this again, I still feel like a woo person saying everything is energy. I mean, I was raised on the East Coast, like, my family doesn’t speak this way. It’s still, it’s still a little bit weird. But we need to get there pretty quickly, you know. It’s like, okay, this conversation, I feel like actually, and this is kind of the way all personal and spiritual growth works, is that we hit a point of too much pain. We deny, we deny, the ego can clamp down for long enough, until there’s some kind of breakdown, which is what occurred in my life in 2013, right? Where it’s like, right now we’re hitting this collective breakdown, and we saw 2020 and what it did to accelerate some cracks and some openings.
And now we’re talking about mental health in a way we weren’t before. Now we’re talking about intergenerational trauma in a way that we were not before, and we’re dealing with history that we weren’t willing to face before, and that’s all in one year. And so I think that work is not just trickling through, it’s like firing through. And then pretty quickly we’re in a conversation around the ego and the soul, and we start to get to a conversation around soul. Then we can actually talk about nature, because another thing I’ve run into most recently is that birth and death, like, Western culture is just phenomenally bad at birth and death, these like magical portals, like the primary portals of transformation in nature that we all answer to, that Western culture really wants to ignore the fact that, you know, we come in and we go out of 3D realms.
It really wants to tell us that it’s all linear, you know. We, like, going in and to live like a linear life that is not connected to the cycles of nature, frankly, is terrifying. And so it’s another reason why we have a collective root chakra, just fear. We have people living in fear, and people living in fear are going to make all kinds of irrational decisions, collectively and individually, which is exactly what we’re living out right now. Also 2020, with the theme of death, you know, as we come to really start to work with grief, and it starts to stop being so triggering and sidelined.
Like, I literally, I recently just lost a pet, and my experience of the way that just grief, just being in grief and sharing about it, triggered so many people around me on such a profound level, I got a really good look at, like, how much work we still have to do there. And grief lives right there in the death space, with the compost space, with the dark goddess, right? And also, you want to talk about taboo subjects, we’ve got sexuality and we’ve got plant medicine. And plant medicine, of course, is criminalized by the federal government, which to me is like such a symptom of a sick society, you know, like a society that criminalizes nature’s ability to remind us, nature’s innate ability to help guide us back to this conversation around soul and spirit and, you know, where we come from when we’re born, where we might go when we die.
But humans have been answering to this for all of time. But Western civilization seems to think that it can just deny it all, you know, and so we find ourselves in a pickle, because that’s not how nature works. So at some point pretty soon here, I think we’ll be answering to all of this.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. I think the theme that’s coming out of this conversation for me is a theme of balance. It’s of appreciating, we started this conversation with yin and yang, right? So for me, I personally see the Western culture completely out of balance. I mean, we’re so disconnected from the source of our food, the source of the things that we buy, and how it impacted the communities that created it, or extracted that material from the ground, or produced it, or put it together. We’re just so far into the need for convenience and comfort. And I don’t think that convenience and comfort is a bad thing, but everything in balance.
Like, sometimes, right now I’m living in Cusco, Peru, and I have been for several months. It’s been pandemic, and it’s very interesting, because sometimes it’s different to live in a developing country from when you’re living in a developed country. I’m realizing what I’m taking more and more for granted, or what I have taken for granted in my more Western lifestyle, and recognizing, like, it’s okay to be cold. Yeah. You know, like, I kind of just need to breathe into it. Like, it’s weird, like, if I just stop the tension in my shoulders and, like, let them drop and take a deep breath, the cold isn’t so cold. But it’s this fear of being cold all the time. I’d like to remind myself there’s a balance, like, hey, soon I will be indoors again and it won’t be so cold.
Like, there’s this beautiful impermanence of the state of things, and it’s beautiful because it’s impermanent, right? It’s beautiful because you’re happy in this moment, then you’re sad in a moment. You know, that movie Soul, did you see it, that came out from Disney?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Oh yes, yeah. Oh, I just watched it recently.
Alexsandra Guerra: The first time I watched it, I had to re-watch the scene towards the end where he’s playing the piano and recalling all the memories, and he’s like, this is living. And I’m like, yeah, that’s it. And I think, unfortunately, when I think of, like, what has driven a lot of the problems that we see today, which I think are fixable, and I think they’re fixable, the problem, let me start with the problems. Extracting way too much from land in an unsustainable, unregenerative manner, right? Suppressing communities from where we extract those things, to empower and give lush lives to those who use them. That does not mean that any population is better or worse as a human being. We’re all just part of this cycle. So let’s bring it back to balance. And that’s kind of like what’s in my mind now, is how do we bring more balance?
And I think part of that is what you said, which is getting rid of the fear of the discomfort of healing all the other parts of us, because it is okay. Like, and we can’t escape nature. Like, we will be born, we will get older, we will age, we will wrinkle, we will die. Like, you know, like there’s just this constant fight even against aging, and it just, it seems like a disconnect from those natural cycles in the Western world for me, and the complete lack of appreciation, because we weren’t educated in how beautiful it is to get old, to die, to let these things happen.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Absolutely. And I think it’s, that speaks to the interconnectedness of all things, right, which is inherent, and it’s something that we seem to have forgotten in our intense individuality. But what has happened then is that we’ve lost the ceremonies and the rituals that thread communities together, which I think is one of the many reasons why healing with Indigenous peoples and lands is so important, because there are ways and teachings and ceremonies that have stood the test of time. And have even maybe withstood, I’ve been listening to some people speaking about it recently, and it’s like, maybe some of those cultures have had much harder times way further back, thousands of years back, and learned from them, and then put in place ceremonies and rituals after that.
You know, it’s not like anybody’s perfect or better or whatever, but that we have learned along the way that if we keep in mind this harmony and this balance and this interconnectedness of all things, we put in place fabric into our cultures to remind ourselves and to remember. And in this, that makes me think of this grief process that I realized, I was like, we are, like, bereft. Like, I can’t find grief rituals anywhere. I looked online. I mean, there’s like a few, found a few little Celtic ones with some herbs and things, and, like, down in, and I have a Celtic line, a few like Asian ones, a few people told me about things.
But I actually found myself just sort of intuiting, following my own intuition, and following a few things that I had heard, and being like, okay, I’m going to reweave this, you know, I’m going to just listen to spirit and let spirit guide me in terms of how to proceed with ritual and ceremony around this massive transformation in my life, and then share that and pass that forward. And I think there’s something about reweaving that we’re doing there, when we don’t have those things in place.
We, for example, like grandparents, one of the things I heard in a grief group was that someone, her grandmother, excuse me, started teaching her about death when she was little, so that when it was time for grandmother to pass, the child had the information that had been passed down as to how to be with that death. And then as that person, that little one, grows, they learn, and then they then have the wisdom, they become the grandmother at some point, and they pass that down as well. So there’s this cyclical, you know, humans interacting together at all ages.
So we’re not, like, sending our small children to buildings that look like prisons, you know, feeding them prison food, and then sending our old people to buildings that look like prisons and feeding them prison food. And again, it’s just, that’s the ego’s like blindness and denial, being like, no, no, none of that happens, like, everybody’s in spring and summer, like it’s all just, you know, forward moving. But it’s funny because even there, it’s like we’re run by fear.
So, back to what you’re saying about fear, is that without these kind of foundational things and this fabric and this community and these teachings and these rituals, of course we’re terrified. It’s terrifying. Like, we’re without bearing, you know, we don’t have any, like, when it’s really hard and scary, I leaned hard on my spiritual practices, thank goodness. I was like, wow, I have really deep roots, thank goodness. Imagine going through this without, in a society that doesn’t have any of these things. Like, and I think death is just traumatizing people over and over and over again in Western society, continuing to exacerbate it, pass it down to the next generation even more, because each time it happens we’re that much less prepared, and we’re that much more afraid.
And we are less equipped to be with our grief, and we don’t have community, and it triggers everybody around us, so then we get exiled. I mean, it’s just, it’s a terrible wave. It’s like it’s backwards. And so we see this in nature, that we’ve got these awful, like, climate change exponential curves, you know, and these things that compound. But it also works in the other way, where nature heals very, very quickly. The second we tip something back into balance, those connections naturally sort of link up, like in a sort of mycorrhizal way, right?
So, one thing for all of this difficulty and all of this fear and all of this sort of lack of things that we need, I feel like we can actually heal it very quickly as well, as soon as we become aware of it, start to do the work, turn our attention to it, start listening to spirit, and frankly start reweaving. If we need to, like, download new ceremonies straight from spirit, which I think we need to, you know, I think that’s the work of our time. I think we’re going to have to do that, to rethread community and society back together in balance.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And what’s so great is that there are still, I think there’s another half of the world that still has those ceremonies. And it’s a matter, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this story or legend of the eagle and the condor. I’m going to do a poor job of it, but essentially the eagle’s from the north, and the eagle represents industry, like strength and progression. And the condor is from the south, and it represents more heart-centered being, soul-centered, warmth, fire, you know, and it represents our [unclear]. And so the lands of the north and the lands of the south. And, you know, I was with a shaman friend of mine in Mexico, and he was telling me about this legend.
He goes, now is the time. And this was foretold, you know, hundreds of years ago by, [unclear], in his people, I can’t remember where, I won’t misremember, but that at some point, and this is the time that we’re in now, it will be time for the eagle and the condor to start working together, where the eagle comes and starts teaching industry to the condor, and the condor teaches, you know, more heart-centered being to the eagle. I don’t know why these two birds were part of the legend, but that’s what it is. And I feel that that’s very much what we’re in right now.
And I hope to see that, because I do see, you know, the north, like, let’s say Europe or China or the US, extracting a lot of resources from really naturally rich places like Africa and South America, without any real concern about what’s happening in those places and how it’s affecting those communities. And yet those communities have a lot of practices they can share with regard to ceremony. So the eagle’s really good at [unclear], like, it’s a beautiful gift, and it’s time to share that and educate the condor. And the condor needs to share and educate the eagle on how to be more okay with these more natural cycles, providing ceremonies.
And it’s just like, we’re these two halves of this one whole on this planet, and yet we’re completely distinct and not sharing those wisdoms with each other. And if we could, I mean, that’s my dream, and I think it’s a dream of many people’s, to see balance more across the world in that way. Because it’s, again, no characteristic is inherently bad, it’s just a matter of, is it in balance?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Yeah. It’s beautiful. And what I feel when you say that is that nature naturally finds balance, no matter what. That’s her way, she just does, you know. So it’s possible that where we are is like, while it takes consciousness and practice and intention to kind of steer the wheel on some level, it will happen without us, but it will happen. Which is, if that makes any sense, that there is this like divine intelligence to nature to inevitably bring things back into balance.
I’ve actually been listening a lot to Zach Bush, MD, recently, particularly around food cycle, but also he speaks a lot about this, the birth and death, again, this sort of like blind spot in Western medicine. So there’s another conversation, a huge conversation right now around public health and medicine, and then we get into sort of Western science, and what it is great at and what it might be less great at, and same with Western culture. So I think there’s something intuitively, it feels like there’s something in there. And he was talking also about how, after these great extinction events, inevitably there’s always a huge burst in biodiversity, because that’s just how nature works.
So I just liked that message about just how mother nature always heals, and she does handle it. And we’re part of this grand design, and all we can do is intend towards this healing, this bringing things into balance. And then also, at a certain point, this is also the yin, is just sort of releasing and surrendering to her, to her divine intelligence, and trusting that that’s the way it’s going to go.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yes, absolutely. We talked about, I think we started off gingerly and now, like, fully dived into the more spiritual aspect, which is totally fine. I don’t think that it’s necessary for us to make it super palatable. I think the fact that if talking about these things causes some type of physical or emotional or, like, psychological, like, eye roll, I think it’s a signal that there’s something off. Like, why would it bother you? Because if you were so chill, like, it wouldn’t bother you. So those are useful signals. What do we do about it? You gave some really good practices in your book. Are there a couple that you would like to share with the audience and leave them with, to try out?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Sure, yeah, thank you. I stick to the really, really, really basic, I think, to the point where people are like, that’s obvious. But you have to actually do them, this is a trick. So, and also to this point of, for people who maybe are just entering into personal work or spiritual work at all, and this is a lot to bite off and chew, there are some really, really simple entry points. One is literally just taking three breaths at any point, which again, maybe sounds totally trite. But actually, if you, for example, put an alarm on your phone or something, stop yourself at certain points of the day and just stop and take three breaths.
You don’t even have to like go outside to do this exercise. It’s actually a really powerful exercise in connecting to spirit, even if you’re not consciously doing that, or if that’s not your purpose. If nothing else, it will help slow down your nervous system and just sort of help very slightly, like, decrease your stress for a moment. And it’s just, if you just do the three breaths, it’ll help you sort of gently remind. And then when that helps a little bit, you might be more inspired to do some deep breathing for longer or something like that, if that feels good.
And I think the next one is equally as simple and kind of goes with the first. One is literally just taking off your shoes and going and putting your feet on the earth at least once a day, and it can literally be for one minute or like 20 seconds if you can’t. But I find that if I, even if I feel overstressed or something, which I have found, the last two months have been really intense with the book launch obviously and the pet loss and things, I really had to take my own medicine, and I really had to pause and, like, stop and take three breaths and go outside and take my shoes off.
And even for one minute, again, it would calm my nervous system, and then I would become so much calmer in 20 seconds that I would stay out there for ten minutes, you know, or I would pull up a chair and just leave my feet on the ground and just breathe for a little while, even if it was, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Those are a couple of really basic ones. And then those are kind of, I would call them, inner work. On the outer work side, compost, obviously. So, I think it’s a pretty friendly audience for compost, but for many people that’s brand new, it’s new information, even that the soil is alive.
Even if this is not new information for you, you can pass this one on. That for compost, for example, my agent actually, when she read my book in the very beginning, she Googled composting and realized, and she’s in Manhattan, that she could save her little compost scraps, her food scraps, in the freezer, and then take them to her farmers market where she was getting her food once a week anyway, or twice a week, and so it didn’t take an extra step. And then she also learned that the food scraps, when they’re not in the trash, would no longer smell, which is a big deal in Manhattan. And then there was less trash, which is a big deal in Manhattan. So it’s a tiny little thing, but actually a huge thing.
And I think if you want to get a lot further into that, you could actually move into helping others compost, help set up a community compost, help set up a system or a city-level compost. Even if you’re, you know, let’s say that you’re a community leader, you know it, but you’re not composting. That could be a big step for you. So those are a few, like, really simple entry points.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you. And I wanted to say, there was one thing that you mentioned and I just, it’s worth bringing up, in that second tactic you gave, which is taking your shoes off and touching the ground, was that we’re always disconnected because we’re wearing shoes, and we’re in these buildings, and the earth has an actual current, obviously it has a magnetic charge, and we get out of balance when we don’t do that. So it’s not just a spiritual good practice, but it affects the physical as well, in ways that we don’t quite know.
And all of this is in ways we don’t quite know. I remember once I was speaking with a colleague about this, about spirituality, and he said, you know what, everything can be explained by science. And I said, sure. But who’s to say spirituality isn’t science we don’t yet understand? Some of the things that we have now, like the fact that you and I are on a podcast, and I’m here in Peru and you’re in San Diego, like, it’s magic. Go back 200 years, it’s magic, right? So some of the things that we’re talking about now might make people roll their eyes or feel uncomfortable and be like, that’s just some woo-woo stuff. It’s just science we don’t understand yet. And science being this beautiful thing that connects us all, who’s to say science isn’t magic?
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Oh, absolutely. And it’s an observation, just like science, like, air quotes, proving, you know, that meditation works, that’s been going on for tens of thousands of years, and acupuncture, and, you know, gut health, all of these things. So frankly, Western science is pretty slow on it. The HeartMath is really fascinating, and one kind of funny factoid is, apparently the horse’s heart has like a six-mile electromagnetic field. So if you ever wanted a horse healing. I don’t know why I felt like that was important to say, I like weird things that you wouldn’t know. But it’s like, who knows, like, the horses are healing us in ways that we have no idea, and then science eventually figures it out, you know.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s wonderful. I woke up with two horses across from my apartment this morning. So this is great. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Erin, for joining. Thank you for the seven-year trek of writing your book, and all the things that you’ve done to help spread the word on the importance of soil, and for sharing, like, vulnerably, your story. So, I, and everybody, read your book. It’s quite good, and exactly the type of conversation we’re supposed to be having, and it’s very much a pandemic, you know, like a pandemic-triggered thing that I think came out at the right time.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for your beautiful questions and the beautiful conversation, and being open and willing to engage it. That’s really lovely.
Alexsandra Guerra: Always. Well, take care.
Erin Yu-Juin McMorrow: You too, take care. Thank you so much.
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com, where there is a newsletter. That’s nori.com. Subscribe. There’s podcasts, there’s a whole bunch else. Or you can send us an email at podcast@nori.com. We are also now on Patreon, at patreon.com/noripodcasts, if you’d like more content and community. And thank you so much for your support.
