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✨ True Wealth with Betty ✨
True Wealth is not our bank balance, the car we drive, the size of our home, or how many employees we have.
True Wealth is our ability to appreciate the phenomenal world.
To joyfully give and receive.
To feel connected and part of something bigger than just ourselves.
Many people are externally wealthy -- they have the money, the house, the car, the lifestyle; but internally they are they are poverty stricken, because they are disconnected, unhappy and their hearts are full of resentment and negative emotion.
Others are internally wealthy -- they have the ability to enjoy their lives, nurture healthy relationships, and exercise their creativity, but they have an unhealthy relationship with money, and what it means to meaningfully contribute to society, so they struggle & hide away, or get stuck simply making ends meet... and the world is poorer for it.
Join me, Betty Cottam Bertels, hypnotherapist, life coach, Tantric Buddhist yogini, mum of two, and cheerleader to the brave visionaries, whose courage and creative ways of thinking and being will change our world for the better... as I engage in conversations with the people whose passions and life journeys have in some way inspired me and touched my heart, to bring you thought-provoking, inspiring, and more often then not laughter-filled conversations to bring a little joy to your world, and a little fuel for your inner hearth fire.
May you discover your own unique brilliance, give and receive freely... and may your inner hearth fire brighten up the path to knowing your own true wealth, so that you might inspire the same in others -- even if in only your little corner of the world.
May all beings be happy and free! ✨☀️✨
✨ True Wealth with Betty ✨
Initiation culture, Indigenous Britons, and Dreaming a Future We’d be Proud to Leave Behind w/ Manda Scott
Dream deeply, rise up strong. A change is coming. These powerful words form the foundation of Manda Scott's revolutionary work, where ancient wisdom meets urgent contemporary need.
In this profound conversation, bestselling author and shamanic practitioner Manda Scott takes us on a journey from the world of pre-Roman Britain to our current precipice of ecological and social collapse – and most importantly, charts a believable path forward. The contrast she draws between "initiation culture" (the indigenous way of being that characterized most of human history) and "trauma culture" (our current disconnected paradigm) offers a framework for understanding not just how we lost our way, but how we might find it again.
Scott's journey from veterinary surgeon to acclaimed historical novelist to political visionary demonstrates the power of following one's calling, even when it seems impractical or impossible. Her Boudica series wasn't merely entertainment but a political statement – an attempt to show readers who we were before colonisation and who we could become again if we shed the trappings of what she calls "the predatory capitalist death cult."
Her latest novel, "Any Human Power," is her response to our current crisis – a "thrutopian" thriller that presents a path forward from our current reality to a future we'd be proud to leave behind. What makes her approach particularly powerful is that everything in her novel is based on solutions already being implemented somewhere in the world.
The conversation culminates in a powerful call to action, centred on healing ourselves, our communities, and our relationship with the living world. As Ursula Le Guin noted in the quote that inspired Scott's book title: "Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."
Manda's Website: https://mandascott.co.uk/
Manda's Shamanic Dreaming: https://dreamingawake.co.uk/
Manda's Accidental Gods Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/accidental-gods/id1492827360
From Betty: Being in business means being visible. Being ethical in business means not using dodgy tactics, of course, but also being authentic in how we present ourselves ~~
The trouble is… Many of us carry wounds around being seen, accepted, and celebrated as the individual we are.
Left untended, these wounds divide our will, i.e. we end up with conflicted desires:
Part of us wants to be visible to grow our businesses, but another part of us is absolutely dead set on staying well and truly within the shadows… Becuase that's where it's SAFE.
…whether that means literally hiding under the duvet (I've been there 🥸),
...mega procrastination & self sabotage
…or pretending to be someone we are not, so as not to stand out (I've also been there 🤫).
The push & pull can be utterly EXHAUSTING.
But the good news is, it's relatively quick & easy to fix, once you access the level of the subconscious mind, using a modality such as hypnosis.
Book your gift session & start getting unstuck today.
FB: Betty Cottam Bertels
IG: Betty_Cottam
www.truewealthw...
Because, if you talk to anyone who's lived amongst Indigenous people, who have not been totally traumatised by our culture. They laugh all the time, and they're not laughing inappropriately. They're laughing because their hearts are genuinely singing with joy, because they are an integral part of the web of life, which is raw compassion, and they know themselves to be that, to be that. So the hallmarks of an initiation culture are that the individuals within it undergo intermittent, episodic, contained encounters with death, and the containment is held by the elders and the shamans, by the tribe, but mostly by the web of life. And so the individual gets to the edges of themselves, where death is a genuine possibility and they ask for help. And if they ask for help and are able to receive and embody that help, then they survive.
Speaker 2:And if they can't?
Speaker 1:and they don't, then they don't.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the True Wealth Podcast, where we ask the question what does it mean to be truly wealthy in this digital age of distraction and disconnection? I'm your host, betty Cotton-Burtles. Blues singer, buddhist mum of two and former global shoestring adventurer, turned hypnotherapist and mindset coach. I believe that by healing our past and changing our beliefs, we may achieve not only the external successes the house, the relationship, the money, the impact but also internal success, the ability to actually enjoy our lives, because it's the joy and happiness that makes it all worthwhile. Join me as I invite friends, colleagues and esteemed teachers to discuss means of enhancing enjoyment in our lives. Teachers to discuss means of enhancing enjoyment in our lives, following our inspiration as individuals to create whatever it is that lights us up, so that we might radiate that energy out into the world via our businesses or our day-to-day lives, with the intention that all beings may benefit. I believe that this is where true wealth lies. Welcome to the show. Dream deeply, rise up strong. A change is coming Now. These are words that really speak to my heart and hopefully they speak to yours too, and they're also the tagline for Manda Scott's new novel Any Human Power, which is a through topian thriller, a political thriller actually, I mean very exciting book, um, that takes the reader on a journey from kind of present day to a future that would we would be proud to leave behind for future generations.
Speaker 2:And this is, as manda scott, my guest for today, as she will explain in the interview, and I really don't want to talk too much now because I do a lot of talking in a minute, um, but really what I adore about manda is that she is using her gift for writing. She is a wonderful writer and, as I'm about to, you'll hear me now, as I met her, I explained how I came across her books and how they were for me. The series of books that I first came across, as you'll hear in a moment, is her series of Boudicca books, all about the warrior queen from the pre-Roman times here in Britain, boudicca the Boudicca. Yeah, and honestly, these books were utterly gripping for me and I just could not put them down for about six weeks and I came out the other side and looked up and I felt completely changed and I just had to write to Amanda, the author, and find out more about her. I just thought who on earth has written these books? They are incredible, and that's when I went to manda's website, mandascottcouk, andi found out about what she does, all this other work she does in the world.
Speaker 2:You, she teaches shamanic dreaming. She has a master's from the Schumacher College in regenerative economics. I mean, she's fascinating. She's got all sorts of strings to her bow.
Speaker 2:She was a veterinary surgeon before she became an author and she is deeply connected to the non-human world and you'll feel that you, you know in her when you read her books, when you hear her speak, and, um, I really recommend not only that you check out her books, um, there are 16 of them in total, any human power being the the latest of them and also listen to her podcast, accidental Gods podcast, where she interviews people doing extraordinary things to, and the reason it's called Accidental Gods, I found out, was because that's what we are. You know, with the fate of our species and other species' survival in our own hands, we have become accidental gods. You know, we have to do something about this meta crisis, um, and she is using her voice and her skills to the best of her ability. You know how can she help to bring about the changes that are so needed, and she uses her podcast as a platform for interviewing people who are doing work at the cutting edge, you know, really changing, bringing about this overdue changes that are needed in all different parts of life. Um, so, yeah, without any further ado.
Speaker 2:Please, please, forgive my girlish enthusiasm. This is the first time that I had written to an author, somebody who I had no connection with at all and said would you come on? And I was just so excited to be speaking to her, as you're about to hear, so please do forgive my kind of very girlish enthusiasm, but I think we we both Manda and I enjoyed this connection and this conversation and, um, yeah, I found it deeply nourishing and I hope that you'll get something out of it too. I I really hope that you'll feel inspired to dig deeper into her work. Yeah, without further ado. This is Manda Scott. Oh, my goodness, I'm so excited for this. Welcome, manda, to the podcast. Thank you for this.
Speaker 1:Welcome, manda, to the podcast. Thank you. It's always a bit daunting when someone's excited, because I think I always don't quite live up to their expectations, but I'll do my best.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm not at all excited for this podcast. You know, it's just another day in my life and no really. The reason I'm so excited, amanda, is because and I just started to mention this story before we hit record and then I said look, let's record, let's go. So in December, a few months ago, a good friend of mine, a mother from our school community the kids go to a Steiner school here in West Wales, so we've got an idyllic, lovely community.
Speaker 2:Fantastic school here in west wales, so we've got an idyllic, lovely community and a fellow mother is a fellow dreamer and a wonderful human being and she said to me she just mentioned the buddhica. She said I'm reading this book about buddhica and I kind of went hmm, and I'm not a person who reads historical novels I, I read. And I'm not even a person or I haven't been for until quite recently who really has spent much time reading novels as an adult, as a child and a young adult. I devoured them, I spent my whole life in novels. And then I think, since I've been building my business and kind of being a mother and I've I immersed myself in the kind of self-help and just non-fiction world of reading a lot you didn't know, you needed to know, until you suddenly need to know them.
Speaker 2:Personal development? Yeah, absolutely. And so I for the last. I don't know, probably my eldest is nine now, um, so, yeah, probably at least that long, and probably longer before that, I was reading books on Buddhism. So you know, it's been 15-20 years I've been reading non-fiction. And then suddenly, well, not, yours wasn't the first uh that I came to, but in the last year I've been, I had the experience of we went on holiday. I think this is what happened. We had a lovely week in Mallorca and my partner spent a lot of the time reading.
Speaker 2:And I thought to myself when you're on holiday, you need to read novels, you know that's what you know. That's like what you do on holiday. You need to read novels, you know that's what you know.
Speaker 1:That's like what you do on holiday bookshops. I don't. I don't want to read personal development on holiday.
Speaker 2:So, um, anyway, I and, but I didn't. I realized that I had a book with me. I never read it. So then I got home and I said to myself I'm not going to work tomorrow. I was so pissed off that I hadn't read a novel on holiday. We'd been away and I'd just been with the kids and busy, busy, busy. And so I thought I'm just. I went to Waterstones it would be nice if I said it was a lovely, independent, local bookshop. But I went to Waterstones and I just looked around and it was the first time in my adult life that I'd spent, you know, gone, with no time pressure, no, like money pressure, because I think I'd always read secondhand books or what people gave me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so it was the first time I went in and I went God, what would I read if I could read any?
Speaker 1:of this and it was just such a what's going to call to you. That's always really interesting. Yeah, what did call to you? What called to me?
Speaker 2:then that was like at the beginning of maybe a year ago or 18 months ago, and I went into oh gosh, what are those? I can see one of them on the bookshelf. I'm just going to lean away from the mic a moment. Bettyty actually my name is a bit ridiculous, but it's an amazing book by tiffany daniels, I think. So that was one, and then the other ones that really spoke to me and I I don't have the author's name, but it might come um, are about yeah, like the ancient greek. You know the this, this new retelling yes, there's a lot of that.
Speaker 1:Oh Circe, I think, is one of them. Oh Circe, right, madeleine Miller. Yes, yes, brilliant.
Speaker 2:So a couple of those.
Speaker 1:yeah, Okay, you were landing on good feet, that was really good.
Speaker 2:I was and I just discovered this like lust for novels that I just had not experienced since being a young person, and it was so exciting, anyway, I just have not experienced since being a young person, and it was so exciting, anyway. So fast forward a little bit and my friend on the school run just meant, no, we were in a soft play, we're in a soft play in Pembrokeshire. And she said, oh yeah, I've been reading this book, boudicca, and I just went, huh, and I went and I bought the first one and I just barely looked up, you know, when you're in, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this.
Speaker 1:And, as a writer, it's the best thing anyone can say. Your book just dragged me in and I couldn't step away.
Speaker 2:It's great, thank you. I found all sorts of time I didn't know I had.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or someone else who was prepared to pick up the slack which is always a good thing to know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so anyway, uh, that's me and this, so all of that, to say that, um buddhica, this series that you've written, uh, three books, although there's a prequel.
Speaker 1:There's a prequel, isn't there? No, no, there's four books. It was originally conceived of as a trilogy, no, and then we added a fourth book. Yeah, so I had a good editor who was prepared to say actually, this needs to be four and made it happen.
Speaker 2:I have read all four.
Speaker 1:That was, yeah, I just miss. And then I did write a short story, prequel and sequels, and then the whole of the Rome series. There's four books which my slightly less wonderful publisher decided I needed to have a gender neutral name. In the days before that was a thing.
Speaker 1:Because, these were after the end of the Boudicca series. Britain was not a good place to be. The islands of Britain were not a happy place to be, but I had discovered that the Great Fire of Rome took place not long after the end of the Boudiccan revolt. Not long after the end of the Boudiccan revolt, and I'd left characters in Gaul explicitly for that reason, because I also discovered the historical basis for Christ, which is three different people whose stories have been pushed together. I thought if I can't write a thriller based on that, I should give up and go back to the day job. So the Rome books carry on some of the surviving characters of the Boudicca books, but they were written as MC Scott instead of Manda Scott, so nobody knows which is very annoying.
Speaker 2:This is terrible news now because I've got stuff I need to do.
Speaker 1:They've been out for 20 years now, Sunshine. They're still going to be around. They're not going anywhere.
Speaker 2:A bit of that hunger. You know so, wow, that's exciting, gosh, and some of the characters continue. And you know no, so um, wow, that's exciting, gosh, and some of the characters continue. And the the idea that this is the story of christ. Wow, I mean, that got quite well hidden.
Speaker 1:There was quite a lot of. We can't really say this it. You have to look quite hard for that. But I did put it in the author's note at the end, because nobody reads the author's note at the end, so it was okay to put it there at the end of the final pages of the book when you're in Of the first book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I read the author's name. I read it all.
Speaker 1:I'm Boudicca. You're one of the three. Yes, Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Please tell me. I mean, I know this was so the first book, I think. I just got it off the shelf to see when, which year it was, and it seems to be copyright 2003. Is that?
Speaker 1:2003 is that right? I started writing at in 2000. It took a while to get the first one to a point where we both agreed me and my editor agreed that it was what it needed to be, and then after that there were roughly one a year, so yeah, so 25 years ago.
Speaker 2:Yes, as of today, yeah, wow so what I'd love to hear from you, amanda, is how and why you got drawn to. So what I'd love to do, just to give a frame for the whole conversation, I'd love to talk about Boudicca a little bit. I really want to hear about your process, of how that came into being and what it was like for you writing that, and then I have since dug into your other work and been to your website and found out about all the other things you've been doing and listening to your podcast, so then we can go there.
Speaker 1:OK, brilliant, and we could get to the new book, because it's oddly in this it's in the same mindset but it's contemporary. So yeah, that'd be quite interesting. I think I've got it here. It's in the same mindset but it's contemporary.
Speaker 2:So yeah, that would be quite interesting.
Speaker 1:I think I've got it here and it's definitely coming into the conversation, Fantastic yeah brilliant, beautiful.
Speaker 2:Okay, so Boudicca.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's 25 years since I've thought about this in any great depth. I was a veterinary surgeon is the first thing to say. So I grew up in Scotland and I grew up in Scotland on a dual existence, parallel existences, because part of me was in vet school, being good at learning stuff which is very left brain, and the rest of me was going over to Edinburgh. I was in a Glasgow vet school. I was going to Edinburgh every weekend to work with a group of druids in caves near Roslyn and I was studying Buddhism. I joined the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. I did everything that I could to expand what we would now think of. I would think it was heart, mind, mind and what in the go Chris would call right brain stuff. And and the two didn't overlap very much Nobody in the vet school knew what I was doing at weekends. People at weekends didn't know I was studying to be a vet, but I was doing it largely.
Speaker 1:If we take a little step back, when I was a kid I read Rosemary Sutcliffe's Eagle of the Ninth, which whichad it ahead, of writing Eagle of the Twelfth, which is one of the Rome books, and realized how colonial and how misogynist it was, but when I was a kid I didn't notice that. I noticed that the Roman young man, roman has to go north to rescue the eagle of his father's legion because his father has been disgraced because the legion has lost their eagle. He goes north of the wall, into Scotland, so where I lived. So he comes into my place and he with his, his native slave Eske. It's so colonial and it's so projected, anyway, let's leave that alone. They come north to the and they meet the, the seal people and the priests of the horned moon. God have definitely got Marcus's father's eagle and they keep it in what's effectively a long barrow with a goat skin as a kind of door and they go in and you never see what's in past the goat skin curtain. And I was desperate. I was eight or nine. I have to know. I have to know Because I was living in this little Presbyterian village in Scotland and that was the first time I had any idea that there were other gods and that these are my people, because what I was being taught was definitely not mine and there was no one could tell me.
Speaker 1:And then dad took me and my brother to the Brochs, which, again on Scotland, we went to the one that's at Glenelg, just opposite Skye, to the Brochs, which, again on Scotland. We went to the one that's at Glenelg, just opposite sky, and it's this huge paleolithic dwelling it's it's 80 feet across or so and the walls at the bottom it's so it's it's dry stone and they're set far enough apart that in the winter the cattle were between the walls and then it curves up in this kind of beehive shape and there were seven stories, and so the cattle, and then the hay, and then grain, and then other stuff on the way up, and then the people lived in the middle and and we went there and I just sat and I could hear these whispers on the edge of my hearing. And again, these are my people, I need to know what you can teach me. And then I read less than the mohicans, and then I was completely lost. It's like there are people who are alive much more recently than the people in the Bronx, for whom the gods of the land are alive, and so part of me was trying to be that and the rest of me was desperately trying to find the answer to that question of what happens behind the goat's skin curtain. How do I connect to the gods of the land, and that didn't change at all.
Speaker 1:I came down to Cambridge. I was a house surgeon at Cambridge and then worked in Newmarket and I was still spending every weekend going away to anything that I could find that would help me to learn that. And there came a point where the shaman so I was learning. Then there was a short window between mid 80s, early 90s, mid 80s and late 80s really. So a lot of Native American teachers would come across because their guides and gods were telling them they needed to teach white people or we were going to destroy the world and see what happened. And they were very free with their teaching of. We will teach you how to talk to the gods of your land using the tools that we have inherited that are living lineage, because you lost your lineage 2000 years ago. The romans did destroy it. This you know. Seventh daughter of a seventh daughter stuff is bollocks.
Speaker 1:Basically, there is very sorry what's bollocks the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter? The idea that my granny has some kind of lineage that goes back to druidic times and can teach me how to connect to the gods of the islands of Britain yeah is a fantasy.
Speaker 1:yeah, totally yeah. But the, the indigenous peoples of the Sami from northern Finland, or the Native Americans, north and south, or Australians or Africans, are people who still have a living lineage. They know how to talk to the gods of the land. They know how to be an integral part of the web of life and ask it, what do you want to be? And respond that's the nature of their being. There's a wonderful woman called Vanessa Andriotti who wrote Hospicing Modernity, and she's Brazilian, she's part indigenous, part German, and her indigenous grandfather said that the core wounding of colonialism is not the slaughter of the people and the taking of the land. Those are terrible and they are very traumatic, but the core wound is the belief in separability that our culture carries and that indigenous cultures don't.
Speaker 1:And so I was working and then, within three or four years, of course, predatory capitalism being what it is, somebody who'd been taught by some of these people not in the UK, I have to say, but decided you know, pay me a thousand dollars and I'll teach you to be a shaman in a weekend. And they were setting up courses like that and the doors closed quite firmly and quite fast Not completely, but the freedom with which we were being taught was was because the people who in the native cultures, who did not think it was sensible to teach us, had been saying they're not adult, they're teaching children. They don't know how to handle this. And when they give me a thousand dollars and I'll teach you to be a shaman in a weekend, stuff started. They went see, and everyone else, oh whoa, we didn't think you were going to do that, but I had been incredibly privileged to be part of that kind of brief flowering and then to have continual teaching thereafter.
Speaker 1:And so I was being a vet and I was learning that, and there came a point where, asking what do you want to me? The answer was beginning less to be we want you to be a vet and more to be wanting to do other stuff. And what came out of we want you to do other stuff was writing. And in the beginning I wrote crime thrillers because I was working full time, I did not have time to do research, and I could write crime thrillers without doing any research because, basically, I had access to the pathology department. It's not hard, um, but then there came a point where what was I? I had a particular shamanic event which I can tell you if you want. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I mean, if you want to, yes, no, no, I don't mind it.
Speaker 1:I'll try and edit the highlights because, um so I had. I had lurchers at that point. We know what a lurcher is. It's a kind of dog. Yes, ok, that's good. The Americans don't know what a lurcher is.
Speaker 2:The.
Speaker 1:Americans think a lurcher is a kind of homeless man, which is hilarious, because for a while the bio on the back of my book said Amanda lives in Suffolk with two lurchers and too many cats, and I realized what they thought and had guys. That's hilarious, don't do blokes anyway. So my senior lecture, um, I was walking along newmarket he's thinking about the next book, which was going to be a crime novel and she caught a hair and brought it back to me and first of all, she wasn't very good at catching hairs, but this one was a doe who had recently given birth. Wow, and I just completely broke, because hair is a sacred to everything that I do. And if I couldn't find the kits in a thousand acres of New York, at Heath, with the grass up to my knees, they weren't going to survive. And I didn't find them. I spent all day looking. So I part of what I?
Speaker 1:I was very young I wasn't teaching at that point, obviously and yet I had internalized that the gods will whisper and then they will speak, and then they will shout. And if you get to the point where they are shouting at you, you're going to wish you'd learned to listen a bit earlier. And this was. As far as I was concerned, this was pretty much of a shout.
Speaker 1:So I went and sat under a tree in Thetford Forest which was near to where I lived, and this was a hazel tree that literally it would have taken six or seven people to get their arms around. It was huge and it was my sit spot at the time and I took the dogs because I lived on my own. I wanted to look after them and sat under the tree asking what do you want to be? And? And the answer came very quickly and I argued a lot which is very stupid and I teach all my students not to do that because I didn't think I could do it. Yeah, um, and in the end I I kind of said, okay, I'm going to go home and I'm going to see.
Speaker 1:I had enough money to last till the end of the month and then I was going to have to go back to the day job, full time and okay, till the end of the month. At that point I a few weeks were yes, yes, wow.
Speaker 1:And um, I went home and I called the only person I knew who wrote historical fiction. She said, well, you can't do this at all because, um, your publishers won't let you. You're on, you are now a crime novelist and the, the crime novel I just written had been shortlisted for an edgar. So I was doing okay. And he said that's your branding, they won't let you change. And anyway, if there was enough to write about booty cat, I would already have done it and done it. And there isn't and I haven't, so you can't. But I'd made a promise under the tree and I wasn't stupid enough to decide I couldn't keep the promise. So, and I lived near Cambridge, I worked at Cambridge and I had access to the library, the anthropology library, the history library, the archaeology library, everything. There were more shells of books on Roman military history around the Boudiccan era than there were in the entire vet school library on anaesthesia.
Speaker 2:So, I just immersed myself in all this stuff and by the end of not very long.
Speaker 1:I had a 23 page synopsis and mostly a synopsis is 300 words. If you're lucky by the end of the month, a lot easier like by the end of the week.
Speaker 2:And then before the end of the month.
Speaker 1:I went to Crime Scene 2000. So we know it was 2000 in London, crime string, and I was on a panel with three or four other people and some gorgeous person in the audience said so what are you writing next? Which is every writer's favourite question if you ever want to know what to ask, because publishing cycles being what they are, the book that you are selling to people is the one that you wrote 18 months ago and you don't.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's nice, but the one you're working on now is what really matters. So this person asked what are you writing next? And my editor was in the audience and we had had a big fallout and really just to piss her off, I said I'm I'm writing a series about Boudicca. Because she'd said no, no, we don't want Boudicca. History doesn't sell. We want you to write a sequel to the one that just got shortlisted for an Oscar Edgar. Sorry, in writing terms, edgar is an.
Speaker 2:Oscar.
Speaker 1:So so I just kind of said that to piss her off. And I got a little bit more money. We sold the rights to Germany, so the money was eking out. And that September I was at Dead on Deansgate, another big crime festival, and came down off my panel and someone came up to me and said I was in the audience when you said that at Dead on Deansgate, have you got anything? Well, I've got three chapters and a synopsis why? And she said well, I've just started at Transworld and they want me to take on a big series. Would you? Would you send it to me?
Speaker 1:yeah, wow so by the time my money ran out like I had about five days before I was really gonna have to go and start begging people for a proper job. Yeah, they bought it for more money than I'd ever seen before um, which doesn't say much that the previous people were not paying very much for for the books, but still it was enough to give up the day job.
Speaker 2:That is amazing, isn't it all before the end?
Speaker 1:yeah, totally no, no, the I'd got more money more money get, just kept dribbling in, just enough to keep me. So it was um it work. It was pretty much March till September in the end it was six months total, but it worked.
Speaker 1:And then, amazing stuff. We were working, my editor was great and she said there are two kinds of people in the world there are Romans and there are Celts, Britons, and most of the publishing industry is Romans. So we're only going to fight the battles. We know how to win. Ok, I hear you, and one of is Romans. So we're only going to fight the battles. We know how to win. Okay, I hear you, and one of the ones.
Speaker 1:So I had this idea of a cover I wanted. I, Garth Nix, had just had the Sabriel cover, which was gorgeous, and then they just done new covers for Lord of the Rings, which are really, really classy covers. So just basically a sigil, a colored sigil in a black background. And I said I want that and here's the image that I want. And she went I don't think this is a battle we can win, but let's see. And she went into the. They had big meetings about covers. And she went into the cover meeting and said I'm not sure about this. And a guy at the end of the table put his hand up and said oh well, I designed those covers when I was with the other publisher that I've just left to join you. I would really enjoy designing covers for Boudicca. And she just came out and went. We won that battle.
Speaker 1:So we got the covers that we wanted it was good.
Speaker 2:So Boudicca is I mean. So you said there that there wasn't much about her available.
Speaker 1:I said that my friend told me there wasn't much because my friend had only ever bothered sorry, lovely though she is to read Tacitus, and there's a paragraph or two. There's a little bit more if you bother to dig, but there's a paragraph. That is the Boudiccan speech.
Speaker 1:There's a little bit longer, but there's a very little bit and it's all about the revolt and I knew that I had to write who we were before the Romans came, because the whole point was if we can see who we've been, we can see who we could be if we let go of all the predatory capital, death, cult stuff that Rome imposed on us.
Speaker 2:So I had to go back. So this is so interesting because I've been listening to podcasts of you speaking about lots of things and, in particular, your latest book, which we will come to. But, as somebody asked you on a podcast, so this was very much a strategic move and we'll go there and you can tell us about that.
Speaker 1:All my books have been political.
Speaker 2:yes, yes, they are. There's a strategic already.
Speaker 1:But even the crime novels. I was writing lesbian crime novels at a point where the only other person doing that was Al McTermid and we had a very different approach to that. Somebody wrote after the latest one came out wrote me a really cross email saying your book is too political. Sunshine, every single book I've ever written has been political. You just haven't noticed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Good has been political. You just haven't noticed yeah good.
Speaker 1:So yeah, no, it was very, but it was strategic, because what I got under the tree was this will change the world, these books will change the world. And I genuinely thought I told my editor I it's extremely likely that I will go under a bus after we finish this, because this is what I'm here to do, and and then it's I am trusting you to get these sold. And and obviously I didn't, and there are other things still to do, but I genuinely believe that would be the case. And what actually happened was that, after the first book came out, I ended up teaching, because I said to everyone it's you know, this is who we are, this is who we can be told in the book and then people were not quite understanding how to do it from the book, which confused me a bit, but anyway.
Speaker 2:So I started. You're referring to the dreaming, yeah, which please everyone listening go and read the books, so you know exactly what's. If you haven't read them, you need to read them, you absolutely need to read them. And the the dreaming is the dreaming a huge part. I mean it's the, it's the whole thing, because it arose out.
Speaker 1:So for me I call shamanic practice dreaming, partly because it it makes it more clear, I think, and it gets it away. Everybody thinks shamanic practice is about smoking drugs or drinking drugs or whatever, and for me it's not. It's about finding ways to access all of the other realities which are far, far, far bigger than our reality. And you can do that while you're asleep and you can dream while you're awake. So I teach now shamanic dreaming, dreaming awake as a direct result of having gone around the country telling people that they just needed to read the books and then realizing it wasn't working.
Speaker 1:So it's just, it's over 20 years since we started teaching and I thought I would teach a couple, and now it's a 20 years since we started teaching and I thought I would teach a couple and and now it's amazing industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds incredible. I mean I've I've listened to you talking about you know the cycle of teachings and sounds like you've had, yeah, a 16 year cycle or something. Is that right? A full?
Speaker 1:cycle. Technically it should take 11 years, but nobody's done it in less than 16, so yeah partly because lockdown gets in the way yeah you know there's always something. You can't necessarily come to something once a year, every year, for 11 years so yeah, so what was it like?
Speaker 2:I mean you've I'm very aware that you wrote these books a quarter of a century ago, but for me they're so fresh and also so poignant, because I didn't know. I was hungry for that. I didn't know, thank you, I did not know how hungry I was. I mean, personally speaking, manda, I am a complete mongrel and in fact my. So I say that because I didn't really ever feel much connection to the British Isles, despite having grown up here all my life. You know, we all move around, don't we, like you've moved all over. I didn't. I wasn't from the place I grew up. Not many people I knew were, um, I didn't feel any connection to the landscape there in the seven veil above, uh, above bristol. I mean, I just didn't, I just didn't feel it.
Speaker 2:Somehow I enjoyed nature and being out in nature. As a child I did. I spent a lot of time out in nature. But yeah, I just, I think I just because I knew one of my, my grandfather was actually native Innu from Labrador, wow, and so that was interesting, which was hidden from us. I never knew that until you know later, because it was not a thing that he wanted to talk about, right? So I never talked to him about it, sadly Gosh talked to him about it, sadly gosh.
Speaker 2:So anyway, um, this whole thing about culture and um, yeah, what I said was I'm I didn't know how hungry I was for these books and the reason that they struck me so hard was because you're talking about our native, I mean shamanic, pre-colonial culture, pre-colonial culture. And you know another funny thing, I think, another thing, that just I love them even more. I've always said, as kind of a joke between me and my partner that I'm allergic to straight lines. I hate them, I honestly hate them, just like we've got this very square house with a very square garden and everything. The previous woman who lived here, bless her. She made everything very square and it was, you know, just so, with a square greenhouse and everything is square and I actually find it very stressful. So I say all this and you know you're already nodding and knowing where this is going.
Speaker 2:Yes, Interesting Because we were designed to live in circles. Tell us about that.
Speaker 1:Because that's what I think your experience tells us about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think I remember a long time ago listening to a podcast like at least a decade ago when podcasts weren't really a thing of someone Chinese talking to someone American and saying, because the American was getting very afraid of the, moved out and conquered the rest of the world, and it's not because we couldn't. And. And what they said was, we who live in round spaces think differently and you will never understand because you live in square spaces and I think that's I. I think china is a very interesting space and let's not get too lost in there, because the indigenous culture and trauma culture doesn't map onto that space nearly as well.
Speaker 1:But I think for us, 300,000 years of human evolution you know, if we want to go further, back till we were hydrogen boiling in the sun, there are not things in the natural world. There are very few actual straight lines, right? Yeah, there's something about when we whatever it is that cut us off from our knowing of being an integral part of the web of life. Yeah, we wanted to control, and the way you control things is you box them in and we box in ourselves. Else. There's a really interesting guy whose name I always forget, but he did his PhD on the fact that humans in cities exhibit exactly the same psychosis as animals in zoos, and we've done this. There's a book by Christopher Ryan called Civilized to Death, to death, and we have, we are in the process of destroying our souls by our desperate need to control the living world and, in fact, we're destroying the living world because we've decided we can control it so completely that it doesn't even need to be there.
Speaker 1:There's a significant proportion of Silicon Valley that thinks, quotes nature, and I hate that. The othering of that is an aesthetic option, and if it's an aesthetic option, you can do without it, and it's yeah, it's functionally insane. But these are also people who think they're going to live forever. You know they've sold for death.
Speaker 1:They live in a. They read way too many science fiction novels as kids and they have not grown out of it, and that's a whole other conversation. But you're designed to live in round spaces. And if you go and spend time in a yurt or a roundhouse or a teepee or any of those things, your soul, just mind, certainly just relaxes out into the space. Oh yes, this is home, this is where I belong, and Rome brought the trauma culture to the islands of britain?
Speaker 1:I don't think they invented it. They just happened to be really good at exporting it, and later britain became really good at exporting it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and that's absolutely what happens in the buddhca series. I mean, the contrast between the time in the novel spent with the Romans and then the time spent with the Britons. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, okay, I feel like I could talk about this the whole time. Ok, I feel like I could talk about this the whole time, but I'm very aware that I want to move on and hear about your later work, and you mentioned there about the trauma culture, and I've heard you speak about this a number of times and, as a result, I heard you, um, yeah, as a comparison to the initiation culture.
Speaker 1:Um, can you say a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, try not to get too lost in it. So this, the idea, comes from francis weller and I think it's really important to acknowledge that and he learned from maladoma somi. He wrote Of Water and the Spirit, so we need to acknowledge honour the lineage of this.
Speaker 1:And Frances Weller is a trauma therapist. I don't really like the nomenclature. To be honest, I think trauma culture already triggers people who are in the trauma culture, and it would be good to find other words. However, leaving that aside, so, initiation culture, 300,000 years of evolution as humans and however long we want to go 64 million to the last mass extinction we, as soon as we became self-conscious, we know ourselves to be an integral part of the web of life and I think that's part of the point of being human is to be the self-conscious nodes and in the wide, wide, wide mesh of life. When I was beginning, before I began to set up Accidental Gods, the visions that set that up.
Speaker 2:We sit with the fire. That's Manda's podcast Accidental Gods. It's also a membership program and the membership, yeah, and the membership came first.
Speaker 1:Okay, faith and I sit with the fire every winter solstice, and I sat with the fire and the visions that came with that particular winter solstice were of the. That vision of the earth has seen from space, that blue pearl floating in the blackness of space, and all around it was this intricate, vast, uncountable number of strands, mesh web all around the indra's net, all around it, and what I was told was that each crossing point of these very, very fine light fibers of light was a point of consciousness, and some of these are human and most of them are not. Um, and then I was given a couple of other images. It took me a while to work out what that one meant. Yeah, the thing about writing buddhica was really clear text and clear text has happened very rarely in life, um, and?
Speaker 1:and the start of accidental gods was not clear text at all. Anyway, that that mesh. I think part of what we are here for is to be self conscious, nodes in the web of life, to be aware that this is what we are. And and again, I think Tyson Young-Caporta in his latest book, right Story, wrong Story, says something. He tells a story of the adults are making a dugout canoe and the kids are playing on a bend on the north bank of the river jumping in.
Speaker 1:And story of the adults are making a dugout canoe and the kids are playing on a bend on the north bank of the river, jumping in and out of the water. And he says because today it is safe and tomorrow it won't be, the crocodiles will be here. And he goes on to say we, we the indigenous peoples of australia, don't have that paleolithic fight and flight response that you all talk about, because we know where the predators are always, and so much of our concept of who we were before modernity took over is utter bollocks, because it's projections of what we think. The peasants are not us, but you know the straight white Oxbridge men who make these decisions. Look at the peasants of their time and assume that everybody was a peasant and therefore it was bad and it wasn't.
Speaker 1:Indigenous peoples are a bit like. Douglas Adams talks about dolphins in his wonderful Hitchhiker's Guide series and he says humans think they're more intelligent than dolphins because they invented New York and nuclear bombs and wars and cities and so forth. And dolphins think they're much more intelligent than humans for exactly the same reason. And it's the same with indigenous people. Again, vanessa Andreati wanted to marry a man of Spanish descent and her indigenous side said no, you can't, because he won't.
Speaker 1:He'll get bitten by a snake, as in he won't know where the predators are and he won't know how to laugh, because if you talk to anyone who's lived amongst indigenous people who have not been totally traumatized by our culture.
Speaker 1:They laugh all the time, and they're not laughing inappropriately. They're laughing because their hearts are genuinely singing with joy, because they are an integral part of the web of life, which is is raw compassion, and they know themselves to be that. So the hallmarks of an initiation culture are that the individuals within it undergo intermittent, episodic, contained encounters with death, and the containment is held by the elders and the shamans, by the tribe, but mostly by the web of life. And so the individual gets to the edges of themselves, where death is a genuine possibility, and they ask for help. And if they ask for help and are able to receive and embody that help, then they survive.
Speaker 2:And if they can't and they don't, then they don't.
Speaker 1:And this is not considered a terrible thing Because everybody Caesar said of the Celts that fighting them was really hard. The Britons even, because they see death as taking off a shirt, as in you just can't come back again. It doesn't matter. And it's really hard to fight people who don't care about dying, Wow. So if you can embody that help you grow and you come back to the people. Whatever the contained encounter with death has been. So life, birth, the act of giving birth, is a contained encounter with death for the mother and the child.
Speaker 1:I don't think infant mortality was anything like we have been told that it was and we can discuss that if you want, but but even so, it's in a contained account with death and then throughout life there are more and more of these. I'm going to stop for me because it's glitching quite a lot. Are you getting glitches or is?
Speaker 2:it, you just flash, but I think it's okay. Okay, all right, yeah um.
Speaker 1:So what we come back to is a knowing of who I am and that I can ask for help at any moment, and it's a reciprocal thing. It's not. I'm not like a child going gimme, gimme, gimme.
Speaker 1:I am knowing that help will be asked of me as well as offered to me, and I come back into a community of people, knowing who I am, knowing what it is that I am good at, knowing what's mine to do, and I'm surrounded by people who know what's theirs to do, and I can take pride, genuine good pride, not hubris pride. But I am good at this because it's what's mine to do and because it's mine to do, I am good at it and I can ask for help to do it, and I am surrounded by people that I respect and who respect me. So I live in this reciprocal flow of pride and respect going from between the human and the more than human world. I feel respected by the gods of the land and the spirits of the trees and the rocks and the rain. Yeah, and so I live in this sense of knowing my place in the world and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1:And that's the serotonin mesh. If we look at the cognitive neuroscience of networks of enhancement, serotonin is a big reward mesh in our brain and serotonin reward meshes are. They're typified by their long duration and their additive. Yeah, our culture. Something happened 10 to 12,000 years ago and a portion of humanity lost that knowing of being an integral part of the web of life. Because we can.
Speaker 1:It's impossible to conduct the Western style of agriculture, which is enslavement of the web of life, both the plants and the animals, if you know yourself to be an integral part. We know that all of the other continents, the Americas, australia, africa, the Amazon, they're all managed landscapes, managed by people, but the people are managing them in harmony with the web of life. They're not saying this is my field and I will kill anybody who tries to take my turnips from it. Or this is my cow and I am going to make it pull a plough for the rest of its life, whatever else it wants to. I'm going to take its children away from it the day they're born. I'm going to treat it as if it were a mechanical thing, because I don't care, because it's other and I, in the trauma culture, live in this concept of scarcity and separation and powerlessness, which is entirely other than we evolved to do, and so we don't have the contained encounters with death, we just have trauma that stacks and stacks and stacks and overflows.
Speaker 1:We don't have the serotonin mesh of pride and respect with the community of people and the more than human world we are. This desperate need for dopamine hits, and dopamine is characterized by being very short term, it's not additive and it's subject to the laws of diminishing returns. So there is no way that the boxes from Amazon, or the porn, or the cocaine, or the alcohol or the sugar, or sending rockets to Mars or buying up yet another democracy or whatever it is that one does to try and fill the void inside. It's not going to work.
Speaker 2:What it's not going to work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly those Amazon boxes no exactly A yet another box from Amazon. Please stop buying from Amazon. People just never buy from Amazon, ever again, oh.
Speaker 2:God.
Speaker 1:It's never going to fill the void inside, and you know this. That's what the whole of your podcast is about. Yeah, but people, people don't, and I think we are now seeing the extinction behaviors of the end of the predatory capital death cult. And it will destroy us, yes, or we step out of it, and so then this all got to.
Speaker 1:The latest book was a very explicit instruction from the web of life sitting on the hill to write a way forward for now, because with the buddhica books I was trying to show a pre-colonial way of being connected to the weatherland and I really thought that if everybody read this they'd all just do it and we'd drop our romanization and we'd be fine. And it didn't quite work out like that. So this one is much more explicit in okay, guys, you can see how we could do this, because this is set in a recognisable version of the world. It is explicit and you can see what you need to do.
Speaker 2:I love it. When I wrote to you, amanda, and asked if you wanted, if you would, come on the podcast, you said yeah, have you read any human power? And I said no, I've ordered it. It's on its way. Not from amazon, of course, um and and I have since read it and it and it is. It is quite something I mean yeah wow.
Speaker 2:I mean I don't know where to start. What I think I found amazing. So the book is Any Human Power. I've got it here. I'll just hold it up in case people are watching the video version. And it's got a lovely crow on the cover.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, I love that cover. So grateful Such a nice crow yeah.
Speaker 2:And nice colours Viridian, I think that colour is viridian, that's my daughter's middle name. Yeah, oh cool. Yeah, it's like in between blue and green on the colour wheel. Anyway, random aside. So, yeah, what is extraordinary about this book? I mean there's a lot that's extraordinary about it. There's a lot in it. I mean I've never really. It's so that the amount of research and I think this is what you're. Am I correct in thinking that your podcast was the research?
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't know that it was, but I knew once I started that if I hadn't been doing the podcast I would have had no interest. The spirits on the hill said you need to do this and I think the had no interest. You know. The spirits on the hill said you need to do this and I think the podcast.
Speaker 1:No well, the podcast first, but then the book was a whole other set of instructions and and I genuinely would not have had a clue I hadn't been doing the podcast, which is why we also set up something we called the Thrutopia Masterclass.
Speaker 1:Yeah because part of the instruction was also it needs not to be just you writing this, yes, as many writers as we can, or creatives of any sort, to be mapping ways forward that will actually work, instead of the dystopias that are, you know, being lived out around us just now so the point?
Speaker 2:um, so it's a through topian novel which starts in a recognizable present day scenario and then a series of remarkable things happen and uh, and the end result is yeah the idea is that it athrotopia from my definition of athrotopia.
Speaker 1:Again, we need to honour rupert reid, who coined the term in a 2017 post on Huffington Post, and his concept of Threetopia in mind is somewhat different, but he did give me permission to use it for the Threetopia Masterclass, and then the book is clearly in the same vein.
Speaker 1:So my definition of a Threetopia is that exactly that starts in a recognisable present and creates crafts, lays out roadmaps through to a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us, and that's got to be the key. I want the grandchildren's grandchildren of this generation to look back at us and go yes, they did it, they did it. They left it way too late, way, way too late, and it took a long time before they realized what they needed to do, but once they did, they got together, they coalesced around a suite of common values with common aims, and they made them happen. And so there we need to know how we can do that. We need to see step by step by step, because utah dystopias, as we've said to dystopias, please, anyone listening, don't write dystopias, oh my gosh anyone ever known who writes a dystopia.
Speaker 1:They think if just they can describe how bad it's going to be, everybody will change their mind. And that's not how cognitive neuroscience works. Frightening people into behavioral change has never worked unless you let them see and feel what the other behaviors might be. You've got to give people agency. I have four things, and it spells made motivation, agency, direction and empowerment.
Speaker 1:If you don't have each of those four things, you will not get behavior change, and so dystopias are never going to work, because, by definition, a dystopia does not give you the direction, the agency, the motivation and the empowerment. Utopias also might give you a light at the end of the tunnel, but they don't show you the tunnel, and so they're not any more useful. So if we're going to get there, we need to see the steps, and and of course there are as many ways to get there as there are people on the planet, but I I just wrote one that that could work yeah, and and you know, if, if anybody who's got this is why I'm absolutely amazed by you, amanda, and why I'm so inspired, really, because I think I've got this.
Speaker 2:Uh, I've always had, uh, well, not always, but for the last, I don't know, six years or so. Um, as I've been building my business, I've had this tendency to just really want to empower people. You know, I've had this message that seems to come from somewhere don't know where change the world. We need to change our inner beliefs. And that's what I do. I help people to rewire their internal narrative and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:It's good, don't do it down.
Speaker 2:No, I don't want to do it down, I'm just so aware of it. It's seriously important.
Speaker 1:Are you going to have to cut off?
Speaker 2:No, I don't have to cut off. No, no.
Speaker 1:Okay, you're all right. Are you Good oh?
Speaker 2:good I oh, good I get.
Speaker 1:so I get nervous about time because I'm uh, I'm not a person, like I said lines and straight, you know, don't tend to abide by exactly. No, no me either.
Speaker 2:So it's fine, okay, good um, where was I going with that?
Speaker 1:your business is about empowering people.
Speaker 2:Yes, and changing their inner story. Um, and you know this sense of often, you know this lack of, but like lack you meant, I think you mentioned lack, did you mention?
Speaker 1:scarcity, separation and powerlessness. Yes, that sense of there not being enough stuff yes, always, not never enough.
Speaker 2:And that's like you know people come to me with I think they resonate with because I've got this. My natural tendency is to say it's so positive, it's almost, and then I feel I can go into a bit of a shame thing about that. Like you know, it's too big, it's too much. I want to change the whole world. Like I can never do that on my own, but by empowering all these people who've got their own visions of what's possible and by just helping them to believe. Never do that on my own, but by empowering all these people who've got their own visions of what's possible and by just helping them to believe in their own thing, yeah, then we've got a chance. So, um, so where was I going with this? Um, well, while I'm thinking about that, did you ever feel self-doubt when you were?
Speaker 1:when you go yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you work with that?
Speaker 1:family system, so it's given me more language for that. But I always did this anyway. It's just I didn't know this is what I was doing. I honor that part. Yes, you are right, I might be writing the biggest heap of shit anyone's ever seen and nobody might want to read it. That's, that's always possible, but but it helps that I have. I had a really clear instruction from the gods and the gods that I work with that I needed to do this so I don't get to say no, actually so that part is, you know, I don't get to say no, so let's just do the best we can.
Speaker 1:And the thing about writing is it's always a process of pouring stuff onto the page and coming back tomorrow and going well, that is actual rubbish, yeah, but we can, you know, and and by 10 days from now it might not be and sometimes it just has to go.
Speaker 1:But but that the thing about writing is it's a constant iterative process, so the bit that's like that is absolute rubbish is actually really useful for honing, because if it gets the point he goes no, that might not be total rubbish then then, we keep it for a little while and see if it fits and keeps going. So it's giving that part, letting that part be strong at what it's good at, and having the absolute conviction that this is what I need to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Beautiful yeah.
Speaker 2:And the part. I mean I love the whole concept of the internal family systems and the parts. And yeah, use that Really empowering.
Speaker 1:It's so shamanic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, okay, interesting.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that it feels it to me possibly the way that I do it, and I have a therapist who's also trained with some of the same shamanic teachers as me, so that's very useful. We only discovered that along the way, but I suppose oh yeah, because parts you can relate to parts. I relate to parts in a very similar way to which I relate to guides and gods.
Speaker 2:You want to say any more about that? Well, I don't know if I can really because it becomes.
Speaker 1:I have a very strong internal modality. So if I'm going into a vision, what I would call a dreaming space, to talk to a part and giving it agency and allowing it to express what it needs to express, it's not significantly different to going up the hill and and talking to the hill, yeah, and giving it agency and letting it express. Or, you know, in that space between waking and sleeping, going out into a semi dream landscape that has some anchors in reality and inviting in what wants to come and giving them agency and and it's a very similar process beautiful and so I mean so juicy and rich and so much that I could ask about it.
Speaker 2:But I'm I, I. I'd like to come back to any human power, because what I found the most, I mean. It's hard to I. When you're a novelist, you must talk about your books all the time. How much do you give away from the plot?
Speaker 1:I wouldn't give away the central, the kind of arc of the thriller. A tweet was sent and it triggered a certain number of things and we wouldn't necessarily give away what it triggers, but the rest, you know, the fact that the main character dies at the end of the second chapter I talk about all the time Because that was given me on the hill yeah, okay, when I was doing the, the visioning that.
Speaker 1:I didn't realize that's what I was doing, but it turned into that yeah I was given that first scene and the void walks which I can talk about those yeah um, and the fact that it combines.
Speaker 1:I'm calling it a mytho political thriller. I'm trying to create a new mythology, because all of our mythology arises out of the trauma culture. What happens? What does it look like? One of my big questions for now is what does 21st century initiation culture look and feel like? Because we're not going back to being forager hunters. That's not a thing. But if we're going to go forward, I think we have to go forward in a way that that heals the trauma.
Speaker 2:We have to do the work individually and collectively and reconnect with the web of life manda, as you're talking, I'm just going to tell you this because I feel like it's so beautiful. I've just caught out the corner of my eye, up on the hill.
Speaker 1:Um, there's a blue sky, it's very sunny and there is a red kite which is circling, I thought it might be did you yeah, because, uh, I I feed the kites here periodically, so I fed them just before I came up, so there were actually quite a lot out there. And, yeah, red kites are amazing and they, yeah, go talk to the kites really I do actually they're an amazing source of wisdom and connection and clarity. They clear things out, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, fascinating. I'd love to hear more about that, but I feel like I'm desperately trying to bring it back to any human power, because we're giving little snippets of what happens. So perhaps we can come back to kites, or not? Yeah, so the main character dies at the end of chapter happens. So perhaps we can come back to kites or not, but yeah, so the main character dies at the end of chapter two. And do you want to give a brief? Okay, so this is your synopsis.
Speaker 1:Yes, Vision on the Hill, and what I was given was the scene where a 60-something-year-old woman is lying on a bed and her 15 year old grandson is at her side and he says when you come home, can we go up the hill and watch the crows go to bed, which is exactly what I was doing.
Speaker 1:So I had been told while teaching that I had to do a number of things which are too long to talk about, and sit in a particular place in a particular frame of mind for at least an hour as the sun goes down every night. That was the instruction. So I did, and this was during lockdown um summer solstice 2021, and so part of the instruction was to to get a particular object in a particular place, and it took a while to get that. So by the end of july, I was sitting every night as the sun goes down for an hour, and it was beautiful and I was watching the crows go to bed and then a series of visions that gave me this book and the really clear instruction that needed to write it, because I thought I had given up writing.
Speaker 2:I thought it was too.
Speaker 1:it took too long to get a book from the idea to the whole process of writing and editing and getting it out into the world as years and I was doing the podcast why would I need to do that? And then, no, no, you need to. Nobody else is writing the way through and you need to do that.
Speaker 1:I didn't have the word through topi at that point. And so the scene is Lan is lying there. Finn says can we go home and watch the crows go to bed? And she says no, I'm not coming home. We've had this conversation. I'm dying. There is no coming home from here and he is completely broken. Um, he lives with her and her wife, who died recently, so it was only him and her. And he says you're the only one who gets me. I don't want to live in a world with you, not in it. And she realizes he's serious and she says I don't know what's coming next, but if you really need me and you call.
Speaker 1:I will do whatever I can to come to you. I'm not leaving you, I promise. And he and she and we all feel the gods pause in their labours and look down and go OK, that was a promise, you are held to that. And then she dies and then the rest of the book is told from her perspective of having to keep that promise and she's caught in the the kind of interstitial, liminal space between the lands of life and the lands of death which is quite a well-known in shamanic practice. One of the functions of a tribal shaman is psychopumping, which is to lead the souls of those newly dead to where they need to go. And and this is the interstitial space that you traverse- so is a space?
Speaker 1:yes, exactly, no quite well, so, um, so lan is locked there and then she has to discover how to have agency. So the other thing that I saw on the hill was she goes three times into the void, and the void is a, again, a shamanic space that you do not visit without extreme need and in the company of someone who knows exactly what they're doing. Because Lan is dead and she's terrified of this place and she is aware, or is told by the crow that is her teacher, that if she screws up here, death is not the. She's already dead. Death is not what happens. What happens is total annihilation. You simply cease to exist, and this would not be a good thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, so, with due trepidation, she, she goes three times into the void, and the first time is to the aim of the void. The point of the void as it is in the book, which is one specific instance, is if you can hone your intent cleanly and clearly and powerfully enough, you can split time and see as many as necessary of the options, of what might be going to arise from your standpoint, of your splitting of time. What you can't see is something that hasn't arisen yet. So the other implication is if you can do that. If you can then enter the lands of the living, you may be able to create a timeline that does not exist yet.
Speaker 1:So she goes to the Voids. The timeline is split for her by the Crow, and she sees all the ways that Finn does kill himself, or she sees a number of ways Finn does kill himself, and then she's kicked back into the land of the living with the option of well, you don't want that to happen, see what you can do. And she has to find out how she can take agency. And then, later in the book, twice more she goes into the void, and once is for the movement that is growing around her family, a global movement aiming towards creating a whole new system, on the grounds that the existing system is not fit for purpose. And then the third time is for the whole of humanity, where she sees the ways that the humanity could just drive the bus off the edge of the cliff, and yet there is still time to turn it. And I still believe that to be true.
Speaker 1:The system is not fit for purpose and we do need a global movement, and how do we bring it together is is still a big question yeah, beautiful, it is a big question and I, um, I love that.
Speaker 2:I love the whole concept of the through utopian. When I heard, when I went to your website after reading buddhism and kind of stumbled across all of this, I was like my mouth was just hanging open. I was like I want us. I was just gonna I'm just gonna swear fuck this.
Speaker 1:Is it like? Yes, are you allowed to?
Speaker 2:swear in your podcast? Yeah, of course I'm allowed to swear. I just have to tick the I just tick the explicit. I think it's all adults anyway. I can do what I want, so yeah, so so, creating a world we're proud to leave behind for future generations, that was what came through for you.
Speaker 1:That that we need to do that that we need to do that and that is possible we have all the answers.
Speaker 1:I think that's the big thing nothing in the book does. It isn't already happening or isn't about to happen. I had one of the best emails that I had. There's a person that I venerate as god. Basically is audrey tang, who used to be the digital minister of taiwan and is now ambassador at large for cybersecurity, and she and Glenn Vile have written a book together called Plurality, and Glenn and Audrey wrote to me and said we don't know how you managed to write your book unless you hacked our brains. Oh, thank you?
Speaker 2:No, I didn't.
Speaker 1:Did you hack her brain? No, I didn't, but I did look at exactly what she'd done in Taiwan and then, map it forward. It's not hard the principles are there and all I did was bring it into the UK and say OK, and so what's the obvious? Next few steps, and everything in the book is being done somewhere in the world. They just haven't all been brought together in one unified political whole, and that's it. It takes.
Speaker 2:It takes the artists, the creatives, the visionaries to pave the way somehow to it does, to put that forward and for somebody to have that, um, breadth of vision, um, and just to piece it together in that way.
Speaker 1:I mean your mind has been told how's that animal you're stroking? It's, it's really he just needs to come and talk when I'm on the zoom it's easier to just let him, because otherwise he just makes a lot of noise a lovely gray fluffy cat?
Speaker 1:yeah, he's, by the look of it, um yeah yeah, this is um, yes, and I think this is the. This is the thing that we have to get across. We have a political system that is in its death throes and we're watching, you know and it might spark the third world war, but there's a wonderful thing that amitav gosh said, which I only discovered after I'd written the book, which was future generations looking back may well hold politicians and bureaucrats culpable for their failure to act in the great derangement which is now as they should, but more they will hold artists and creatives and writers culpable because it's not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures, and I would say this is not.
Speaker 1:If they were capable of imagining different futures, they would not have their jobs. Yeah, the system is designed to perpetuate the system and it does it really well, and the system is not fit for purpose, which is so boring is the continuation of complex life on earth. Yeah, it's. We have to stop believing that we'll just elect the right people and they'll sort it, because they don't know how they genuinely don't have?
Speaker 1:no, they don't, they don't know, but we have the tools yes, we can do the whole buckminster fuller thing of creating a different system that renders the existing system obsolete which is basically what I'm doing in the book is how do we create that parallel system?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, it's remarkable. I just think your mind is phenomenal, man, like how I just was again like mouth hanging open reading this, but I was not expecting it to go where it went and just like well thank you, that's good, that's always wow. How have you? Yeah, I mean, I always get a bit intimidated by people with minds like it's not hard.
Speaker 1:No, no, honestly, all I am is a magpie. I just I've had the privilege of five years of every week talking to someone who is doing the stuff that we need to do. That's the point of the podcast. Who is doing this? And then I just have to bring it all together. It's not complicated, I mean, it was quite hard it is.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, it's a lot harder than writing historical novels, but it wasn't impossible. And we're facing extinction, and I don't think people have got their heads around that yet. Well, no, it's it. We are heading to extinction. The idea that plucky bands of humans will survive while 93 percent of everything else dies is not a thing. Yeah, and, and so it's, if I can imagine a way forward. I have to do do that, and everybody else can imagine ways forward too.
Speaker 1:We just need to agree on the values yeah and then we need to agree on the ask and since writing the book, I've I wrote a podcast not a podcast, sorry a sub stack on Monday which I will send you because I think it's. It's where I am at the moment but basically the fundamental ask. So the values I think think are compassion, courage, integrity, generosity of spirit. We need to be the best of ourselves, we need to stop being tribal. And then the ask is clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean, clear, courageous, compassionate connections within all parts of ourselves.
Speaker 1:So we need to do the inner work of healing between ourselves and each other, so we need to do the work of working. How do we actually create communities of place, purpose and passion that actually work, and then between ourselves and the web of life?
Speaker 2:we need to heal that rift and it's not impossible?
Speaker 1:no, it really isn't. I'm teaching shamanic students oh, I'm not anymore, because my senior apprentices, but I'm teaching accidental gods, gods members and the senior students I'm teaching.
Speaker 1:Still, none of this is impossible and the inner work of healing we could do now. We just our triggers are what? Let us know where we get healed, and I'm assuming that most of us are feeling triggers quite a lot just now. Every time we get triggered, we go I see you, how do I heal that part? Yeah, how do I help that part to thaw out? Thomas hubel says that our I love thomas hubel traumas exactly our moment frozen in time. So how do I? How do I thaw?
Speaker 2:those bits.
Speaker 1:How do I hold them in compassion? Because, we have to because it's not optional.
Speaker 2:Not to anymore it's not optional, is it? We have to grow the fuck up. I've already sworn once, so I'm swearing again yes yes, yes, grow the fuck up.
Speaker 1:I I absolutely. I'm not a great fan of wilbur smith and all of it. Not wilbur smith, of the ken wilbur and the spiral dynamics, but is it? What is it? Wake up, show up, clean up, grow up that's not a bad.
Speaker 2:I used to love ken wilber. I haven't.
Speaker 1:I haven't delved into him for a while, but but even so, wake up, show up, clean up, grow up. Yes, right. Yeah, it's not optional, not to no, it's all a bit um I'm pretending that the predatory capital death cult is going to somehow get us through this by monetizing. The apocalypse is not a thing.
Speaker 2:No so what can I? Can't, what can people do? Just to finish um manda, I mean, I I adore this whole conversation and it's so where I'm at, you know. Uh, I mean a couple of recommendations of books that I've read recent, that I've got from you and your podcast. I've just finished maladoma's book.
Speaker 1:Oh, right, right Of Water and the Spirit Of Water and the Spirit, wow, right, yes, I mean and just been.
Speaker 2:I don't know, I can't tell where I've got all this inspiration, whether it's come from you or whether it's come from different sources, but just it seems so alive in me right now because the work I do is about growing people up, but they don't see it as that.
Speaker 1:But that's what happens, and um they'll see it as that now, yes, they see it. They see it retrospectively.
Speaker 2:They see it as that, but that's not what people don't tend to come to me saying I really want to grow up. No, because that's not a thing like what you were saying it's not. What was that what you were saying? Or is that someone else? God um about people don't want to hear. I can't remember. You said people don't want to hear something um about where they are.
Speaker 1:It's not like, it's not comfortable people want to hear where we are as a species yes it's really hard and there's a tendency to shoot the messenger the whole of the right is basing its offer on. The current system is broken and if we all go back to the 1950s it'll be fine. And you cannot deny your way out of biophysical reality. You know Bannon is not going to get his 10,000 year Reich, because we are. We've got three to four degrees of warming baked in.
Speaker 1:If we don't actually stamp on the brakes now, and stamping on the brakes does not mean building carbon capture and storage plants so you can carry on emitting the carbon that we're emitting now. First of all, it's not all about the carbon and second, you stop the emissions.
Speaker 1:You actually just stop the extraction yeah, I listened to a podcast a while back with some woman in can in Canada saying she went to one of the big fossil fuel meetings and they're all talking about carbon capture and storage and reducing, you know, petrol vehicles on the roads. And she's going. Why don't we just stop taking this stuff out of the ground and all these? Men in suits, looked at her and went you can't say that that's not polite. Yeah, we're facing extinction, fuck polite frankly, we now got the F word, so often yeah, it's coming, it's not about being polite.
Speaker 1:We are facing extinction, actual extinction of the human race, and the fact that our neurophysiology is not really wired to accept that does not make it less real. And unless we have motivation, agency, direction and empowerment, we cannot embrace it. But once we have that sense direction and empowerment we cannot embrace it. But once we have that sense, so that so any human power, the work that you and I are both doing is to give people a sense of direction towards a different way of being. Yeah, the motivation that getting there is worthwhile, the agency of I can see what's mine to do and the empowerment of.
Speaker 1:I have the capacity to do it, yeah, and we need to bring people together in a critical mass and get doing that, because otherwise our kids are not going to have a livable planet, and I don't know how many people need to hear that in a way that actually sinks in what I love about how you're approaching this, manda and I've heard you talk about this in other conversations is why you're doing it in a fiction book.
Speaker 2:you know, to make it accessible, to make it like an easy pill to swallow. It's almost like you don't know you're swallowing a pill, Right. It's kind of sugarcoating A bit.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Or people think they're getting a nice novel and they are and they get a thriller and and there's a level at which you can just read it as a thriller. Yeah, yeah, but I don't know, do you think?
Speaker 1:I don't know, and probably not actually, because it ends on the night after a general election. So it's quite hard. This is why I got the angry email from the lady who said it's too political, and everything else I've ever written has been political, but it's been slightly less obvious.
Speaker 2:The word politics was not necessarily in there when I was trying to let you understand that Joan of Arc was not who you thought she was, or that yeah yeah, pre-colonial Britain functioned in a way that you hadn't quite got your head around, so yes, yeah, so I love that you're doing it in a way that's accessible, and the question that I'm sitting with is, yeah, how to scale it up, I suppose. How do we scale it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we have to scale the healing, and that means getting people to know that they have to heal and they can heal. Yes, because I think and this is something Thomas Hubel talks about I'm going to be talking to Bob Faulconer in a while, who's done a lot of this work with IFS how?
Speaker 2:do we heal?
Speaker 1:at scale. So your listeners, everybody accepting that healing needs to happen, looking at our own fears and our own triggers and accepting those are parts that are traumatised. They are having trauma responses.
Speaker 2:Healing is possible Totally possible healing is necessary and it doesn't even need to take long.
Speaker 1:I'm finding you know once you commit to it it can be extraordinarily quick and it's an accelerating thing. I think it's harder to heal the early bits, and once your system understands that healing is possible, then then the door is open and know that there is another way of being right. I think this is really important. If everybody on the planet woke up tomorrow and their ask was clean water, clean air, clean soil clean clear connections within all parts of ourselves, between ourselves each other ourselves in the web of life, predatory capitalism would be over by tomorrow night.
Speaker 1:It's not inevitable, we've been told. There is I think it's project drones who said it's easier to imagine the total extinction of life on earth than it is to imagine an end to capitalism. But that doesn't mean it can't end Now. The quote from which the book is that the book title is taken was Ursula Le Guin saying we live in capitalism. Its power seems unassailable, but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings, and very often the focus of that resistance begins in art, often in our art, the art of words. She said that 10 years ago. Beautiful's true. Yeah, any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. We just have to stop pretending that the existing system is in any way capable of moving us to where we need to go.
Speaker 1:And yet we are capable. Capable of moving to where we need to go, together, all of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we need to heal ourselves so that we can appreciate ourselves actually and and the space, the, the me shaped space that I take up in the world and what I've got to give to the world, and then to be able to start to vision, visualize, use, to tap into our own creativity and our creative well, and all that comes from the connection, yeah, and then visualize something new, and everybody has the power to visualize and talk to the people or listen to the people who are already doing it yeah I think this is there's.
Speaker 1:A lot of the answers are already out there. Joe brewer's got his whole bi-regional thing going. Dark Matter Labs is doing amazing stuff, opus in Sheffield. Even in Bristol Civic Square yes, civic Square in Bristol doing amazing stuff. There's so much happening already on the ground that never makes it into the public eye because we have a media system designed to perpetuate the old system. So we have to. There's so many layers. We have to heal ourselves, yes, our connections with each other. We have to start talking to each other while we still can. Yeah, because musk owns starlink, it is possible that this might you know, without getting paranoid, they could shut down the internet tomorrow if they chose to. So, while we still can we need to talk to the people that we care about.
Speaker 1:We need to build the communities as a place of purpose and of passion that are predicated in a whole different set of values on agency and sufficiency and empowerment and connection and being the best of ourselves and bringing the best of ourselves to every single moment. And if you connect to the web of life with gratitude and compassion and joyful curiosity, three pillars of the heart, mind and send that out.
Speaker 1:It reverberates, it reverberates and it magnifies and you become a source and a beacon of that in the world and the world needs that of that in the world, and the world needs that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that feels like a beautiful natural culmination. I mean I, yeah, I've, I've adored talking to you, manda, it's been so much fun.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm so grateful for your honor thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, it's so, yeah, beautiful, and yeah, the red kites moved on now no they appear from time to time, but I don't usually see them from this room. I normally have to go up there to see them, but they sometimes make a little appearance at like the right moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly yeah, and listen to the web because in all of these little things it's talking to us and certainly what we're finding with the shamanic work is it's, it's, it's coming in closer and more urgently and more keen to engage. All we have to do is is open and say yes and learn how to sift out our own headwind projections from the authentic connection that's coming.
Speaker 2:That's. That's big work, it's not impossible, and so if people have been listening to this and they are loving what you're talking about and they want to know more about how to do that, um, you are not teaching yourself, but you have somebody. I teach the old.
Speaker 1:I teach the more advanced classes, so so there's a accidental gods is a membership and, and a lot of the three pillars of the heart mind is the latest module in there. There's a accidental gods is a membership and and a lot of the three pillars of the heart mind is the latest module in there. There's a lot of stuff you can do on your own. It's designed for everyone to do their own work connecting to water and air and earth and and fire not in that order and and then setting intent and then learning to let go into connection and then the three pillars of the heart mind, and you have to be in accidental gods if you want to do the dreaming awake work at any length. You can come into our first foundation course on dreaming awake.
Speaker 1:So dreamingawakecouk is the shamanic work. Accidental gods, dot life, accidental gods on all one word, dot life is the accidental gods, membership, and, and they are, they work together. I dreamy awake's been going since I wrote the buddhica books. Accidental gods has been going since just before lockdown, so but they all come on the same source, they're all heading in the same direction. So you can come into accidental gods and and experience it and see if it's what you would like to do, and then the dreaming awake is is one is more small group teaching, either in person or online yeah, so yeah, that beautiful.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much thank you, thank, it's really been a delight.
Speaker 2:Thank you, yeah, and listen to Amanda's podcast, of course.
Speaker 1:Did you mention that you may have?
Speaker 2:mentioned it, but accidental gods podcast, that would be lovely after you've listened to this one, you can listen to that. Yeah, all right, thanks, amanda Super. Thank you, thanks, manda super. Thank you. Well, thanks for listening to my conversation with manda scott. I really hope that you found it interesting, um, and that you'll go and check out her work, all her books and her podcast and her membership and again, that's mandascottcouk. You can find all all those um, all that information.
Speaker 2:And if you're, um, a visionary, somebody with a vision for how things could be different, if you're a cycle breaker and a change maker and you really you know you can see a vision for the future and it requires substantial change, and you also know that you're going to need to show up as the very best version of yourself if you're going to bring about that change, then I believe I might be able to help you, because you know it's all very easy to get inspired, isn't it? And we come away from motivational talks and things that inspire us and we feel so excited about bringing about this change, and then you know the hard truth of it can hit us like and the imposter syndrome syndrome comes in the who am I to feel like I can make any kind of difference, and it can be hard to even get out of bed in the face of that kind of resistance. Well, yeah, this is really my area of expertise and I would love to have a conversation with you. If this is something you're experiencing, like procrastination, you know, an inability to follow through on the, the tasks that will help you to make the change that you know you're really capable of and you know what to do. It's just you're finding it hard to to actually do it. Yeah, so this is this is really what my work is. It's about um, rtt rapid transformational therapy, which is a kind of hypnosis. I help people to rewire the unhelpful and, quite frankly, limiting beliefs that we get conditioned to believe, and I help people to believe in the limitless version of themselves, and this is inspired by my own practice in Tibetan Buddhism.
Speaker 2:But anyway, if you want to find out more about me, please go to truewealthwithbettycom and you can downloada free workshop there all about why we need to heal our past, to grow our businesses, or you know our vision and actually make that difference in the world that we know, that we can make. Um, and, yeah, I'd love to hear from you. So, trueworldswithbettycom, if you want to find out about me, mandascottcouk. If you want to find out about manda and um, I'll catch you next time. Please do share this episode, if it you found it inspiring, with somebody who you think might enjoy it, and do subscribe to the podcast. Um, that really helps me to get the word out there. All right, that's all for today. I'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening. Bye, thank you.