In this episode, Kimberly and Chris dive deep into the impact of travel on their lives and the consequences of tourism in places they call home. As two world travelers, who have each spent a decade living abroad, Kimberly and Chris consider what they have learned about home, hospitality, and culture from places far from the lands they were raised. They discuss how the pandemic impacted travel to where Chris resides in Mexico, one of two countries that kept its borders open? How Air BnB’s, second homes, and passive income have changed the real estate landscape for future generations? They wonder what it would look like to re-imagine the set of relationships and responsibilities one has if they “belong” to their neighborhood? They ask what if we imagined both our “leisure” and our “work” as connected to the place we live? And how does the question of confinement to home, so relevant to new mothers, show up in the “post-pandemic” summer of 2024?

Bio

Chris Christou is a writer, educational curator, and activist. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada, he moved to Oaxaca, Mexico in 2015 after a decade of delirious wanderlust. In 2016, Chris began concurrently working in and writing about the tourism industry, founding Oaxaca Profundo, a deep learning organization focused on food culture and radical hospitality. In 2021, alongside friends and strangers, he organized and launched the End of Tourism Podcast. He is the author of a book of poetry entitled the Black Braid of Memory, as well as forthcoming books on the psychedelic culture, the unauthorized history of tourism, and radical hospitality. Finally, he is a student of all things chocolate and cacao-related.

What You’ll Here

• Being at home in other places
• Are places “back to normal”?
• Are we “post-pandemic”?
• Mexico as an escape route for coping with Covid culture
• How is a sense of home impacted by tourism?
• What does it mean to be forced to stay at home and the response is to get as far away as fast as possible?
• Wanderlust - wanting to be everywhere and by virtue of that not wanting to be anywhere
• How much of tourism an unwillingness to be where one is?
• What does it mean to consider what the place you call home needs? And what you can offer that place?
• I don’t think you can be responsible to a place if you’re elsewhere
• The history of mobility in north American Culture
• How to re-neighbor
• Seeing places as temporary makes them disposable
• How the pandemic led to lots of profit-driven real estate aquisitions
• The impact of Air Bnbs in tourist destinations
• Do we make our homes for ourselves or for our parents and others we want to welcome people
• How do locals become second class servants or mascot for Instagram world views?
• Dehumanization is a two way street in the tourist industry
• Leaving one expensive city for a less expensive city you bring the landlords with you.
• The un-sustainability of second homes
• Hospitality is complex - learning a culture to invoke hospitality with the stranger
• How difficult staying at home is for a new mother?
• Feeling confined when trying to make home with a baby
• Having family in and of two cultures
• Travel vegans vs. living it up

Resources

https://www.chrischristou.net/

chrischristou.substack.com

IG - @zajorino / @theendoftourism / @oaxacaprofundo

In this episode, Kimberly and Lauren discuss her teaching journey, which led to the restorative exercise techniques Lauren offers in the women’s health field. As a lifelong mover, Lauren went through several different yoga trainings and anatomical frameworks to arrive at a simple truth: there isn’t a right or wrong, good or bad when it comes to understanding your body’s needs. They discuss re-writing injury stories, and consider what leads women to medically intervene at different phases of life. In addition, Kimberly and Lauren talk about raising teenage girls. In this open hearted conversation, two somatic experiencing practitioners talk through their way of practicing what they teach.

Bio

Lauren Ohayon isan internationally recognized yoga + Pilates teacher specializing in core and pelvic floor issues. She has been teaching for the past two decades. Lauren creates online exercise programs that are challenging, unique, safe, sustainable and life-changing.

In addition to yoga and Pilates, she is certified as a Restorative Exercise Specialist™, in Neurokinetic Therapy® and in Anatomy in Motion. The web site Holy Shift yoga was her first online baby and has since become this web site under her own name. Nothing has changed but the name. Learn more at www.laurenohayon.com

What You’ll Hear

• Supporting women in training their bodies
• The intersection of Anatomy and the Nervous system
• The pelvic floor world
• Movement as soothing
• Injuries as a yoga teacher
• Needing to dig less healing wells, instead dig one deep well
• Set one on a path of a more mindful way of moving
• Re-writing the stories of our injuries
• Distinguishing anatomy and biomechanics
• Somatic nervous system approach to exercise
• Feldenkrais technique was a big influence
• Letting your body teach you
• What leads us to try and intervene in our bodies as women at different life phases
• Good filters for not entertaining the cult/“you should” mindset
• Diet and protein
• Being sensory following nature and desire for warmth
• Parenting teens
• A mother who was a very experimental/exploratory teen
• Consent communication and safety
• Restoring your core- a central support system that receives and transmits
• To be restorative is to not approach the body through good/bad right/wrong anatomical frameworks
• Accepting the body’s changes with aging

Resources

IG: @thelaurenohayon

Website: www.laurenohayon.com

With fellow educator and Orphan Wisdom Scholar Johannah Reimer, Kimberly discusses Johannah’s long cultivated journey with Girl Groups that work on collective rites of passage. They explore the difference between weekend and longer form rites of passage processes for girls crossing the threshold to adolescence and womanhood, as well as ways to de-emphasize soul work that doesn't center "the self." Johannah emphasizes the impact she has seen guiding Girls Groups and their families into relationships that reflect boundaries, values, and connection. Johannah talks through her passionate approach to the Matricarchical archetype, as well as their shared thoughts on being a single parent. Johanna describes her upcoming 9-month Girl Group facilitator training “Pathways to Womanhood” where she shares her elemental curriculum, which has been honed over 10 years of work with girls of all ages. Links to a free workshop and the facilitator training below.

Bio

Johannah Reimer is a soulcentric educator, ceremonialist, teen mentor, and an artist of many trades. Trained as a Waldorf teacher, Johannah has been working with children of all ages for over 20 years and holds a particular passion for tweens/teens striving to meet their developmental needs for mentorship and initiation in a culture that has forgotten how to do so. An apprentice of visionaries: Sage Hamilton and Melissa Michaels of SOMA Source, Johannah has worked for many years as a Waldorf teacher under the guidance of her elder Sage, and as an embodied leader for international youth in movement based Rites of Passage with Golden Bridge & Golden Girls Global.

What She Shares

• Initiatory rites for girls crossing the threshold into adolescence

• Village mindedness in a Culture without village norms

• Severance - a death happening in rites of passage

• Stepping into a threshold, into a new phase of being

• What does it mean when girls go on a quest to leave childhood behind and then return back to their parents and community?

• Parents also cross a threshold when their children go on such a quest.

• A year long process that she does with 5th graders

• The conflation of big experiences with rites of passage

• Distinguishing between a rite of passage vs. a threshold

• How short-term retreats are often not living up to the term rites of passage

• Girls Groups are designed for a longer-term structure within a collective

• The power of collective work vs. over-emphasis on the self

• Working with teens you sometimes need an iron fist and a velvet glove

• The power of improvisation when working with teens

• The power of parents letting go of control

• Parents fear of their own children: important to assert boundaries/values and stay connected

• Parents: “Stay true. Stay the course.”

• As a child of divorce, the challenge of being a single parent

• Gathering the men around the son of a single mother

• She describes her upcoming free class for anyone who feels the call to be a village auntie, as well as her intimate 9-month Girl Group facilitator training.

• The power of the Matricarchical archetype and Village Aunties.

Resources

Pathways to Womanhood - Girls Group Facilitator Training

Becoming a Village Auntie (Free Training)

www.wakefulnature.com