Jeanna Kadlec (she/her) is a writer, astrologer, former lingerie boutique owner, and recovering academic. Her writing has appeared in ELLE, NYLON, O the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Catapult, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, and she's the creator of the New York Times-featured newsletter Astrology for Writers. A born and bred Midwesterner, she now lives in Brooklyn. HERETIC is her first book.

In this episode, Eryn and Jeanna talk about:

• Jeanna’s journey with Christianity & deconstruction
• Grieving the loss of religion
• Not just replacing christianity with cut/copy/paste spirituality but actually figuring out what we believe
• Navigating having conservative, evangelical families
• Believing in people’s capacity to change
• Having hard conversations with family
• The particular loneliness of strained and estranged relationships with parents
• Reparenting ourselves

Check out the blog for this episode at erynjohnson.com/blog/jeanna-kadlec  

Check out my recent essay in Insider. Subscribe to Joy Notes and check out the Religious Trauma workbook.

Connect with Jeanna on her website, social media. Read her book, Heretic, and check out her substack Astrology for Writers.

Victoria Albina (she/her/ella) a Functional Medicine Nurse Practitioner, an herbalist, and a nervous system expert. 

In this episode, Eryn and Victoria discuss:

• Her journey with health and healing
• How the stories we tell about ourselves and the world impact our somatic experience of life
• Vagus nerve and polyvagal theory!
• Different nervous system states
• Perceiving threat
• Finding safety in the nervous system slowly and steadily
• Allowing your body to complete the energy of what it wanted to do in a challenging moment 
• Hypervigilance after trauma
• Self-love
• The fawn response, codependence, and people pleasing
• Attachment theory
• All of this existing in context of oppressive systems

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/maria-victoria-albina 

Connect with Eryn on their substack, Joy Notes. Explore the Religious Trauma Support workbook.

Download Victoria's free suite of meditations and nervous system orienting exercises. 

Tune into Victoria's Feminist Wellness podcast and connect with her on Instagram @victoriaalbinawellness.

Laura (she/they) is a writer, editor, and book coach who works with intuitive and magical writers who want to unearth their own writing stories and create a sustainable writing practice.

In this episode, Eryn and Laura talk about:

• Laura’s journey with creativity, writing, magic, and spirituality
• Using frameworks and support for our writing (and not)
• Pinning down key emotional moments and using them as a basis for fiction writing
• Unearthing and softly excavating our deepest stories
• Collaborating with the parts of you the story is coming from
• Figuring out the story you’re trying to tell
• Being open to the nonlinear creative writing process
• Rituals Laura uses in their writing process
• Different stages of the creative process where feedback may be more or less helpful
• Experiential learning through the writing process
• The inner work that goes along with writing
• Identifying learned myths in creativity
• Writing the true book that you’re meant to write
• Creating a sustainable writing practice

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/laura-ellen-joyce 

Connect with Eryn on their substack, Joy Notes. Explore the Religious Trauma Support workbook.

Connect with Laura on their website and their new Substack!

Chelsey Pippin Mizzi (she/her) is a writer, tarot reader, and the founder of Pip Cards Tarot, a tarot consultancy helping creatives unblock, generate new ideas, and connect to their inner artist through tarot. In this episode, Eryn and Chelsey talk about:

• Chelsey’s journey with creativity, writing, and tarot
• Images in the process of writing
• Using your tarot deck to have conversations with your creativity
• Using tarot to write better stories and better-developed characters
• Doing tarot spreads for your characters
• Holding the cards loosely!
• Lessons from Chelsey’s book-writing process

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/chelsey-pippin-mizzi

Connect with Eryn on their substack, Joy Notes. Some of their writings on creativity and creative process over there:

• devotion to creative transformation
• telling the story that wants to be told
• play and nourishing the creative self
• a mini creative reset 
• the next thing leads to the next thing
• scent-sual creative aliveness with Mary Adelle

Connect with Chelsey on Instagram, her website, or her Substack, The French Dispatch.

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Querant by Alexander Chee
• Character development tarot spread
• Chelsey's Tarot for Novelists ebook
• Chelsey's book, The Tarot Spreads Yearbook

Gina Badger (they/she) is a clinical energetic herbalist. They offer care through their private practice, Long Spell, and collaborative projects such as Wet Coast mutual aid kits. Gina is a queer nonbinary femme of mixed Western European ancestry born in Treaty 6 territory and currently living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations (Vancouver, Canada).

In this episode, Eryn and Gina talk about:

• Gina’s journey with plants!
• Building an embodied relationship with plants
• Personal healing-oriented plant communication
• Looking to the plants as teachers
• Orienting toward plant relationship
• Ways to give plants attention
• What relationship with plants looks like for them in the winter

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/gina-badger 

Subscribe to the Joy Notes substack here and get a copy of the Religious Trauma support workbook here.

Connect with Gina on their website, Instagram, or over email at [email protected].

Footnotes from Gina:

• Episodes from KPFA radio show the Herbal Highway: “Herbal Energetics” (15/Feb/2023, originally aired 1/May/1999) and “Honoring our Elders: Karyn Sanders,” (2/Nov/2022)
• Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects
• Chani Nicholas’s Week Ahead Podcast for the week of 30/Jan/2023

Sherry Shone (she/her) honors her Black, White, and First Native heritages using hoodoo work. She has two books on the subject and working on her first divination deck. 

In this episode, Sherry and Eryn talk about:

• Sherry’s journey with spirituality and hoodoo
• Doing hoodoo before even understanding what she was doing
• Intention, faith, and direction
• The roots of hoodoo
• What sherry means when she says hoodoo is for everyone
• Healing lineage wounds and not arriving to other practices with no connection to your own
• Hoodoo for liberation
• Simple and effective magic
• How it can scare people around us when we’re changing and becoming more of ourselves
• Connecting with ancestors and shared ancestors
• Her relationship with the bible now
• Simple hoodoo spells

CW: brief mention of physical violence

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/that-hoodoo-lady 

Check out the Religious Trauma workbook, a 110-page digital workbook full of prompts, reflections, meditations, rituals, and somatic exercises to support folks on a journey of deprogramming and healing from dogmatic religious backgrounds.

Subscribe to the Joy Notes substack for upcoming writings like: TELLING THE STORY THAT WANTS TO BE TOLD, I’LL NEVER WRITE SOMETHING AS GOOD AS MELISSA FEBOS AND THAT’S OKAY, BOOKS I LOVE, GETTING INTO YOUR BODY WHEN YOUR BODY CAN FEEL LIKE A STRANGE OR UNKIND PLACE.

Connect with Sherry on her website and Instagram. Get a copy of Hoodoo for Everyone.

Tarot for Top Surgery.

Grace (they/them) is an artist, a quilt maker, and a writer. Their work falls under the broad canopy of “women’s work” and they are intentionally digging into what it means to look at that work through a queer, non-binary lens. They’re self taught and often work in unconventional methods and reclaimed materials to achieve pieces that represent their experiences and interests as a German-American midwestern lesbian. But sometimes, too, they just make socks because they have cold feet.

In this episode, Eryn and Grace talk about:

• Grace’s journey with creativity, quilting, writing!
• Getting into quilting
• Family histories of quilting
• Making wonky weird quilts!
• Working with reclaimed and recycled fabrics
• Queerness & quilting
• What it means to do women’s work through a queer, non-binary lens
• Home-making without heteronormative gender roles
• Grace’s connection to their German ancestry
• Queer culture and how we create it by living it!
• Grace’s writing practice
• Telling stories with words and textiles

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/grace-rother 

Check out the latest joy notes and share your creative intentions for the year here. Subscribe to access an archive of writings on creativity, healing, aliveness, beauty, and grief.

Connect with Grace on their Substack, Instagram, and website.

Jasper Joy (they/he) is a white genderqueer witch, tarot scholar, community chemist, Venusian writer, and elder-babe residing among the rightful homelands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee people, both past and present. In this episode, Eryn and Jasper talk about:

• Jasper’s journey with healing & tarot
• Queer conjuring
• Coming into their own spirituality from a Wiccan background
• Spiritual integration!
• Manifesting “bad things”
• Queer witch as an embodied archetype
• Honoring Medusa as a queer witch!
• Tarot for top surgery
• The queens of the tarot and water

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/jasper-joy

Read the latest joy notes: THE NEXT THING LEADS TO THE NEXT THING. Subscribe for a free 7-day trial to read paid essays!

Join Virtual Solstice Breathwork for Grief, a gathering on Tuesday, 12/20 at 7 pm EST to be with and tend to grief.

Connect with Jasper on Instagram, and their website. Find Tarot for Top Surgery here!

Mina Hiebert (she/her) is an art therapist who believes in the power of making art with intention, connection, and the spirit of play. She currently works as a counsellor in elementary schools and with adults online through the therapeutic art group “Oracle Lab”. Mina’s main method of creative practice is garment sewing, through which she explores expression, colour, and her body. She lives on the unceded, traditional and ancestral territories of the Lekwungen/Songhees and Esquimalt peoples, also known as Victoria, BC.

In this episode, Eryn and Mina talk about:

• Mina’s journey with art, creativity, and healing
• Making art but not feeling like an artist / feeling like an artist!
• Untangling the idea of only being an artist if you’re producing something not just if you’re experiencing
• The identity of artist
• Queerness & art making
• Giving our own meaning to our art
• Permission to play, make mistakes, make a mess, use your nice supplies!
• Mina’s journey with textile arts!
• The transformation her sewing practice has gone through
• Making garments as a political statement
• Slow creative magic!
• Being open to being touched by what’s happening around us

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/mina-hiebert 

Read the latest joy notes: THE NEXT THING LEADS TO THE NEXT THING. Subscribe for a free 7-day trial to read paid essays!

Join Virtual Solstice Breathwork for Grief, a gathering on Tuesday, 12/20 at 7 pm EST to be with and tend to grief.

Connect with Mina on her website and Instagram.

Rebecca Scolnick (she/her) is an emotional witch, forever seeker, and queer human lady, who uses magic and storytelling to support unlearning work and inspire new meaning-making.

In this episode, Rebecca and Eryn talk about:

• Rebecca’s journey with healing & spirituality
• Evolving our spiritual practices & why neither of us read tarot for ourselves very much anymore
• Spirituality as part of capitalism world
• The responsibility of both facilitator and participant to do Hierophant work
• Abandoning ourselves and calling it spirituality!
• How we embody & interact with surrender
• Numerology magic!
• Angel numbers exist & don’t exist!
• Working with these systems and tools (like tarot and numerology) intuitively
• Lineages of numerology
• Life path numbers and what you can learn from them
• Entry points to learning about your own numerology

Blog for this episode: www.living-open.com/blog/rebecca-scolnick

Get the Religious Trauma workbook, a 110-page digital workbook full of prompts, reflections, meditations, rituals, and somatic exercises to help you deprogram, heal, and reclaim who you are after religion.

Read the latest edition of joy notes: DEVOTION TO CREATIVE TRANSFORMATION

Read Abandoning Myself and Calling It Surrender.

Connect with Rebecca on her website and Instagram. Get a copy of her book, The Witch’s Book of Numbers!

Today I’m reading you the October Joy Notes essay for paid subscribers as a little freebie, called THE LINEAGES WE CARRY IN OUR BODIES: thousands of ghosts, emergent ancestor ritual, and remembering who we are in our grief.

Joy Notes is my twice-monthly publication featuring writings on being stretched wide by beauty, grief, and the full spectrum of aliveness.

I want to invite you to subscribe to joy notes for $5/month - there is also a free tier - but paying helps support a working writer & makes writing sustainable! Click here to subscribe and get access to other pieces including:

• SCENT-SUAL CREATIVE ALIVENESS WITH MARY ADELLE
• ABANDONING MYSELF AND CALLING IT SURRENDER
• INSTRUCTIONS FOR BEING ALIVE
• LETTING OURSELVES CHANGE & TRANSFORM