Margaret De Wys is a professor at Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts as well as a composer and sound installation artist.
A dramatic shift in her life set her on a pilgrimage to Ecuador and to becoming a world traveler and explorer dedicated to the preservation and transmission of traditional wisdom in the modern world. She has recently been published, her book came out in January 2009: Black Smoke: A Woman’s Journey of Healing, Wild Love and Transformation in the Amazon which chronicles her encounter with a Shuar master of medicina milenaria who guided her into a world of potent visionary plants, harrowing initiations and ritual purification.

 

 Interview with Margaret De Wys [37:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. She is the author of many books, including most recently, From Grief into Vision: A Council; Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; Tree: Essays and Pieces, A Sabbath Among the Ruins, Looking for the Faces of God and Writing For Your Life.

 

 Interview with Deena Metzger [48:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ann Weiser Cornell is recognized as one of the leading teachers of Focusing in the world. Since 1989, she has taught Focusing as a full time profession, in northern California and in fourteen states and seventeen countries on five continents, with a special emphasis on the language of process and inner relationship. Focusing is a special way of paying attention to yourself, so that you sense the whole way you are feeling about situations or issues in your life. It involves having a different kind of relationship with emotions and feelings. The result is greater calm, wiser choices, and a deeper sense of connection to your own life and being. See Focusing Resources.

 

 Interview with Ann Weiser Cornell [42:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Bill Plotkin, PhD, has been a psychotherapist, research psychologist, rock musician, river runner, professor of psychology, and mountain-bike racer. As a research psychologist, he studied dreams and nonordinary states of consciousness achieved through meditation, biofeedback, and hypnosis. The founder and president of Animas Valley Institute, he has guided thousands of people through initiatory passages in nature since 1980. Currently an ecotherapist, depth psychologist, and wilderness guide, he leads a variety of experiential, nature-based individuation programs. He is the author of Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche and Nature and the Human Mind.

 

 Interview with Bill Plotkin [48:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Miriam Sagan is the author of over twenty books, including a memoir, Searching for a Mustard Seed : A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story (Winner best Memoir from Independent Publishers, 2004). Her poetry includes Rag Trade, The Widow’s Coat), and The Art of Love.

Sagan directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College, and has taught at the College of Santa Fe, University of New Mexico, Taos Institute of the Arts, Aspen Writer’s Conference, around the country, and on line for writers.com and UCLA Extension. She has held residency grants at Yaddo and MacDowell, and is the recipient of a grant from The Barbara Deming Foundation/Money for Women and a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency.

 

 Interview with Miriam Sagan [43:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download