79: The Alchemy of Change

While we often want to hold onto the things we love forever, endings are a sacred part of our natural cycles and they deserve to be honoured. In this final episode, Nic and Lala discuss their decision to end the podcast, reflect on their achievements and regrets, dream into their futures, and celebrate everything SEEN is and has been.

For the final episode of the season, Nic and Lala are joined by Marcellite Failla, a practitioner and scholar of African diasporic religions and spiritualities. Together, they explore the alchemy of change once more, interweaving the importance of ritual and routine, and discussing what it means to reclaim spiritual practices in a decolonized way. 

The challenges associated with growth, transformation or success are often under-discussed. Often, we imagine that getting  the thing you’ve been working so hard for means you’re set, that you have it under control — but what happens in reality? In this episode, Nic and Lala are joined by Mebrat Beyene to discuss the peaks and valleys of levelling up.

At some point along our journeys of personal growth or healing, we can find ourselves plateauing into a dreaded sense of stagnancy. In this episode, Nic and Lala explore the ways that stopping, stillness and taking stock are crucial elements to personal transformation, and how bringing more compassion and less comparison can support us in moving forward. 

In this episode, Nic and Lala continue to explore transformative justice on a personal level by tackling hope: its elusiveness, some of the uncomfortable pressures that it can place on us to be toxically positive, and how a ‘grounded’ hope can serve us well.

In this episode, Nic and Lala are joined by jaye simpson. Together, they talk about the ways that change can involve loss, how grief can be our teacher, and how grieving can illuminate what we care for and deserve. 

In this episode, Nic and Lala are joined by Nadine Tilma and explore the concept of radical self-love: how it supports the change process, what it makes possible in our lives, and how to hold the dialectic of acceptance and change.

In this episode, Nic and Lala explore safety as a condition and as something to cultivate within and around ourselves in order to foster the change we desire. They discuss what safety means to them and some of the tools we can use to create it.

In this episode, Nic and Lala are joined by activist, organizer and writer, Harsha Walia to talk about perfectionism, the fear (or necessity) of being seen, and how visibility is never more important than our shared humanity, relationships, and connections.

In this episode, Nic and Lala discuss longing, what drives change, and the magical ways that nature and a sense of wonder can both sustain and reframe how we accept the inevitabilities of transformation within ourselves.