Carmen Spagnola: Spells for the Apocalypse

Megan Hamilton (00:02.763)
I'm Megan Hamilton and this is the Embracing Enchantment Podcast. I first heard about the concept of collapse from today's guest. I had followed her for a few years, thoroughly enjoying her witchy and ancestral content, watching her build outdoor beds using furs and hides that she'd stretched and tanned herself, growing a giant pumpkin and being absolutely invested in its final weight.

and participating in her Witch's New Year workshops. As we are faced with the magnitude of change that has been happening, she has written a new book that just arrived in the mail for me today. Please welcome our guest, Carmen Spanula.

Carmen (00:48.718)
Thank you for having me. Thank you for good memories.

Megan Hamilton (00:52.362)
I have such fond memories of doing work with you. And I meant to ask you beforehand and I apologize. It is Spanula. Did I get it right? Okay. Like, I I also love lasagna. Okay, so Carmen, I'm going to pull a tarot card for us to center and perhaps provide a moment of reflection. In your introduction, you say, apocalypse is a somewhat dramatic word to describe

Carmen (01:01.228)
Yep, Spagnola like lasagna, is what I tell people.

Megan Hamilton (01:21.401)
collapse. It sounds almost mythical, but it's actually a rather mundane experience of ever eroding infrastructure, ideology, social fabric, and ecosystems. Things limp along for quite a while before they are suddenly and sometimes shockingly rendered non-functional. Collapse is like descending a staircase and missing the last few steps.

It happened slowly and then all of a sudden you find yourself in a heap, shaking and disoriented and likely in a lot of pain. You knew you were going down, but you didn't expect to land quite so hard. So I think many of us, for those who have maybe seen it coming for a while or for those who didn't expect this at all and are feeling this way right now, can you talk a little bit about how you came to understand that collapse was on the way?

and how you have been preparing for it.

Carmen (02:24.564)
Well, it became apparent to me, actually this comes up in my first book, The Spirited Kitchen, I went through a bankruptcy and this was propelled by the Great Recession in 2008. And I'm Canadian and had grown up with this idea of a social safety net. And

I found out, the long story short, is I found out that actually you can't get welfare unless you have less than $150 in your account. And so you can see that you're not going to be able to pay rent, but you actually can't even apply until you're like actually that desperate. And I just sort of realized that there was the cracks, you know, in society that I was like, I'm falling in one of those cracks and

I became a very...

thoughtful and devoted student of these cracks, you know, and came to understand what collapse is. And I follow a model that was explained in a book called The Long Descent by John Michael Greer, who used to be the archdruid, grand archdruid of North America or something like that, or America. And in the stair step of collapse, as I'm describing in Spells for the Apocalypse, it's that.

You're going down a step and it's like, whoa, something calamitous has happened to me. But then it kind of evens out for a while. And you think, OK, I'm going to recover. I'm, know, like, we had a whatever, a natural disaster. Or I personally, I had a bankruptcy. But you realize and collapse that it actually never is restored to your former functionality. It might even out for a while, but it never goes back to what it was. There's always something.

Carmen (04:18.604)
You know, and I more recently, just before I was writing spells for the apocalypse, I fell down some stairs and missed the last couple steps and broke my foot. And this was, I was going outside to connect with nature because I'd just come from a doctor's visit where I was advocating for my child who is, has, it's neurodivergent, has multiple diagnoses. And I was trying to advocate with our doctor and it, we actually got into.

Megan Hamilton (04:27.702)
ow.

Carmen (04:47.115)
an argument. I got into an argument with my doctor and it was so agitating for me. So I was at home and I was like, you know what, I need to go outside and I need to connect with nature. But I was still kind of having that conversation with like patriarchy in my mind. I was still fuming and I lost the last couple steps and I broke my foot and it never really goes back.

You know, was like, it's been a couple years now and you never really totally recover. You always remember that wound. It's always a little weekend there. And I think collapse can be a really overwhelming concept for people, but we actually have all gone through collapse and we actually all know how to adapt to collapse because we have these personal experiences. Mine was bankruptcy. It could be a illness. It could be...

Megan Hamilton (05:10.394)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (05:37.077)
a divorce, could be bereavement or death, but we go into a free state. We have a lot of survival energy that kind of gets locked up. And when we're coming out of the free state, the first thing that wants to happen is that survival energy wants to come out. And sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's challenging. But what I realized having studied collapse as a state and as a social experience over a long time is like actually

We are all going to experience it individually and collectively, and it's helpful to recognize the skills we've already developed and become very intentional about the places where maybe we have some gaps, maybe we need to become a little more skillful, because it's never going to go back to what it used to be. It just isn't. It never is.

Megan Hamilton (06:30.508)
Yeah, boy, you know what? And this is what I really like about you as well is it's so honest, but it's also so helpful because we're not glassing over what's happened or what's happening or that thinking that you're just waiting for things to go back to what they were. We're starting from here.

and we're going forward and even, you know, with something like a bankruptcy, presumably, I think it's supposed to be like off your records after seven years or something like that, right? And you're supposed to be back to normal and your credit's supposed to be fine, et cetera. But even just the sort of mental and psychic wound of that happening, I mean, I've had, definitely had sort of financial extreme distress before and it just...

It doesn't go away. Even when you've done the work, every time there's a big financial decision coming up, the first place you go is right into there. And then you have to work through that again. Thanks for that, because what it also did was give us a, we've already done this. You've already done this. What's happening? It's already happened. And as you say, we built skills already. And so how can we sort of,

bring those to the table because we're not starting with zero tools. We're actually starting with a great deal of tools. And speaking of tools, this, you know, decided it wanted to come out as I was shuffling, which is the queen of pentacles, right? And so, you know, I've been thinking, and actually, funnily enough, this is this will come up again, but I've been really using pentacles as my sort of

Carmen (08:10.018)
Ooh. Yeah.

Megan Hamilton (08:26.977)
something I've been focusing on, especially for this year, because I'm trying to reframe my relationship with money and trying to see pentacles as more of resources instead of coins. And what does resource mean? And so I've been focusing on relationships and opportunities and the magic of aliveness. And I love that the Queen of Pentacles came up.

Carmen (08:39.534)
you

Carmen (08:50.19)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (08:54.336)
directly related to what we'll be talking about today because there's the money for renewal for fertility for you know reminding us of March and April there's all of the beautiful growth that's happening there's the calmness and the serenity and the focus on on the magic of aliveness on resources what actually matters not what doesn't matter

Carmen (09:21.154)
Mm-hmm.

and a robustness in the nervous system. If the pentacles are related to the body, there's a capaciousness, there's some regulatory flexibility, if we can use the language of polyvagal theory, but there's the capacity to be skillful with our responses so that we aren't hijacked with overwhelm and we're not thrown into that free state.

Megan Hamilton (09:27.022)
Mmm.

Megan Hamilton (09:51.48)
Yes. Yeah, I love that. Okay. So the first part, so here is Carmen's book. And if you are listening, it's a gorgeous, smaller hardcover book. It's a lighter purple with beautiful symbols on the front. It's really reminiscent of Carmen's first book that I also have. many of my beloved people have it because I got it as gifts. The Spirited Kitchen.

Carmen (10:17.486)
Hmm

Megan Hamilton (10:20.481)
So they make a beautiful, you know, on your bookshelf, you should get both because they look beautiful together. But in the first part of your book, it's called part magic, part self help. And where did my little.

You begin with trauma informed witchcraft, which is so great as a place to begin. Can you speak to this a bit because trauma informed gets bandied around a lot by folks who perhaps don't really understand what it means and why it's important. And I mean, you've already even when we're talking about the Queen, you're bringing up somatics. And so and you know, we know that you have quite an understanding of trauma and trauma informed, but

For folks who might be new to this concept or why we might use that in tandem with witchcraft and spell work, can you shed a bit of light on that?

Carmen (11:17.71)
Yeah, when I'm talking about trauma-informed witchcraft, I'm bringing the animist lens. I don't think you can be a witch without being an animist. You could be an animist without being a witch, but I don't think you can be a witch without being an animist. You either believe in the insolment of all the other beings that are not human or you don't. And so therefore, if you do, then you believe in the voice, choice, agency, and consent of all other beings as well. So...

we enter into relationship with the other than human realm from that place. I think one of the reasons why this is so important when we're going through collapse is because if we proceed as though the rocks, the trees, the ravens, the air are as aware of us as we are of them.

then we are forced to be in the question of how do I want to be in relationship with them? I think the trauma informed piece is that you shift from what can I get out of this spell? What is the benefit I can get? Can I get the surplus goodness that is in that crystal or in that energy and have it for myself? And instead you're in

this sort of sexy collaboration with the greater benevolent forces and everyone becomes your neighbor. And in collapse, that is going to be our strategy. That is how we're going to get through collapse is in community and in relationship and in togetherness. And we need to find ourselves mirrored through nature. We need to be able to see ourselves and

Megan Hamilton (12:48.131)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (13:13.9)
be willing to be seen. And in order to do that, we need to go into like the very deepest part of our sort of internal moral compass. What are my values and are these actions in alignment with my values? If I say that I value anti-capitalism, then I can't be hoarding the energy of this ally. You know, I can't be over-harvesting this.

botanical, I need to defend these spaces and I need to defend the defenders of the water and that sort of thing. So I wanted to bring that into Spells for the Apocalypse so that this didn't in any way seem like a trap door, like we can sidestep collapse because we can't, because we are in relationship and we want to proceed as though.

everyone's voice choice and agency matters. So in the book, I just sort of like, as you say, it's a small book because my publisher wanted like a spirited kitchen without recipes and they wanted something small and gift bookie. And that wasn't actually the book that I pitched them. I wanted to do something different and they said, no, but would you do like an extension of the spirited kitchen? And I was like, well, that's not really where my heart is. But they said, will you

Megan Hamilton (14:35.225)
Mmm.

Carmen (14:37.369)
pitches some ideas so I pitched them four or five and I very much live by the motto of sell them what they want but give them what they need so I was like I would like to do you want a gift book yeah exactly and so they wanted a gift book they wanted something like small and gifty that would go in like gift shops and things and I was like well but I want to write about collapse so this is

Megan Hamilton (14:45.131)
Yeah, I'm going to sneak in what I need. Yeah.

Megan Hamilton (15:02.755)
Just the perfect Christmas gift. Here you are.

Carmen (15:05.07)
Yeah, so here you go. And I do think, though, that the book just wanted to come out at this time and help us recognize, like, this is a traumatic, sensitizing event, even when you see it coming, even when you know, oh, yeah, he's going to win. Even, you know, it still is devastating when it happens. And if we treat this with the seriousness that I believe it.

deserves and needs, then we need to recognize, we are in a trauma response right now. And so even something as simple as discerning what my preference is, what my values are, who I am and what I care about is a form of trauma resilience. So this is a little gifty book that is, you know, as the kids say, I'm going to hold your hand while I tell you this. It's like, I'm going to hold your hand and this is a companion or a thing for you to hold on to.

and pressed to your breast that is gonna affirm, yeah, this is collapse. This is what's happening. And we actually, we know how to attend to trauma. And so, yeah, the book weaves in the principles of trauma recovery and neuroscience that have been really blossoming in the last 20 years. And thanks to things like TikTok and the internet, we are able to share with each other without needing to have mediated through a very slow moving medical system. it's like...

taking everything that I've learned in trauma-informed practice and putting it into something small and digestible that's really practical for this moment. So it was just a way to let people know this is a moment of great need and it is a traumatic event, but we know actually how to move through this to restore our response and restore our mobilization and restore our resilience.

Megan Hamilton (16:58.842)
I couldn't love all of that more because it's so again, it's and this is going to come up as a theme today, but it's so honest. And as you say, it's the it's the like, I'm going to hold your hand because what's more loving than telling someone the truth.

Carmen (17:18.093)
Yeah.

Megan Hamilton (17:20.461)
We're not glossing over, we're not bypassing. I think, you know, Carmen and I are recording this on January 22nd. So we've just had a rough couple of days that again, most of us knew were coming. And then even then you just you find yourself being surprised as one word could be used.

Carmen (17:41.368)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (17:46.242)
And so it is lovely to not only, you know, say, this is happening, right? Affirm it for people, but then, and here's what we do. And by the way, as I said before, and as you keep saying, we know what to do. I'm going to help help you through it. And so sort of relating to that with the idea of freeze as a speaking coach, one of the things that I like to teach is a system.

Carmen (17:56.878)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (18:01.71)
you

Megan Hamilton (18:14.617)
for when you go into freeze on stage. So you don't have to think of what to do. You know exactly what to do. And we start with the body, which is a somatic response as well. We know how to align ourselves. Then we move to breathing, then we move to speaking. So there's a system so you know what to do. And you can actually even recognize that you're in freeze because that might be a new concept to people as well, right? Why can't I move right now? Why am I?

Carmen (18:39.723)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (18:42.914)
What is happening? My brain isn't working. Here's what we do. So I love it. It's, it's, you know, naming, affirming, and here's the plan. my word for this year is magic because I'm taking a page from Rachel Pollock's views on the suit of pentacles and tarot, which is funny, not funny that the queen came up and focusing on the magic of aliveness, the curiosity and wonder that comes from an elevated human experience.

Carmen (19:02.379)
He he.

Megan Hamilton (19:11.095)
Not of course does not mean good vibes only, but instead the true understanding of who we are, where we're at and what is going on. In your book, you have a quote about the numinous. And for those who are learning about Carmen today, Carmen's group where she and multiple guests teach is called the numinous network. And I want to read because it, it, you know, really did give me a

beautiful feeling and you know, goosebumps as I was reading it. A signature of the numinous is a sense of poignance. Poignance is my favorite dilemma. Poignance is like beauty and pain swirling together. And the words of the artist formerly known as John Cougar, it hurts so good.

And a couple of weeks ago, I did a solo episode on rituals and spoke to how they got me through 2024, which was a long period of both releasing grief about my expectations of how things would be and coming to terms with how things were and how they seem to be playing out. And certainly this was sort of like collapse as a whole, but also collapse in my own little, little micro world.

I talked about some of the things I did cord cutting candle spells carving intentions into them shadow work. When we look at the rituals that you cover in your book, I want to read them.

Carmen (20:46.146)
Hmm.

Megan Hamilton (20:52.634)
Are you ready? Do you know where I'm going with this? Anxiety, confusion, disquiet, fear, loss, predicament, burnout, despair, dread, grief, overwhelm, rage, and stagnation.

Carmen (20:55.126)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (21:15.705)
And again, this ties back into what.

Megan Hamilton (21:21.901)
I've mentioned, you've mentioned, we're not fucking around here. Like, we're not gonna pretend like we're working towards like, let's move into the light. First of all, we need to address this stuff and we need to be honest about it and use words that are real and not glossing over. And so when we're faced with the reality with the different tools to help us.

Carmen (21:27.832)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (21:37.88)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (21:42.83)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (21:50.317)
keep our equilibrium strong.

Megan Hamilton (21:55.79)
Why was it important for you to name the rituals in this? I don't even want to say negative, but I will say honest and difficult in terms of the topics. then from there, what would you say is the most important ritual in the book?

Carmen (22:17.088)
Hmm so I

Proceed as though truth is stabilizing. So there's a somatic experience with something resonates or feels or sounds true in the body. I'm not talking about some kind of capital T truth that somebody has a monopoly on that. There can be multiple truths, but in the body when something sounds and feels true, it's very settling. Coherence is very grounding.

And chaos is incoherence and it puts us into a global high activation state. And so what we want to do is like contain things and words are a really good container. We feel it in the body when somebody says, I just feel so stagnant. It's it's different even than the word stuck. It's different even than the word overwhelmed. All of these things have their own magic, their own

resonance, their own morphogenetic field. And in collapse, there are some very predictable responses that we can, you know, thank our ancestors for having survived them. And in our body, our ancestors go, this is what you're experiencing. know, kind of all the bells sound in your body, because somebody has said the word that is like a magic spell that kind of breaks the spell as soon as you say it.

So once you can identify, I think I feel anxious because that's what you're drawn to. Now I know what to do about that because there are protocols. And when we think, you know, the word protocol comes from proto-cola. First, proto-cola, glue. Protocol is the glue that keeps like a person or a community together. This is why we have certain protocols you talk about when you're speaking.

Megan Hamilton (23:52.93)
Right?

Carmen (24:18.05)
This is the system. It's a protocol. This is what we do and it's going to glue us together in this chaotic moment. so hearing the word like, I am burnt out. I am exhausted from trying to hold back the wave of attacks on my bodily autonomy or, know, I am exhausted by the narcissists in power, you know, that's where I'm at. That already is a spell.

And so I think that there's something really powerful too about recognizing that when we are in collapse, we just can't function executively. It is extremely difficult to read. It's extremely difficult to comprehend. It's extremely difficult to do more than two or three steps. And I don't know if you noticed this, Megan, in the early days of the pandemic.

I noticed immediately that if I sent out a newsletter with people wanting to say sign up for an event, you know, you used to be able to send out a instructions of like, here's the three steps and people just like could not understand the cognitive functioning really dramatically decreased. And what I started to realize was like, wow, it has to be a one step. We have to remove the barriers cause people don't have the brain glucose. There's not the cognitive capacity.

Megan Hamilton (25:27.575)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Carmen (25:44.227)
This is just a very common thing in collapse. We know this in trauma work. I think many people saw and experienced it. If you were trying to get people to like follow basic instructions during the early days of the pandemic, you can see people can't do much more. So it was a little gift book, but to me I was like, no, this is a handbook for people in collapse so that they're like, I don't know what I'm feeling, it feels apocalyptic. It feels bad. And I do want the magic words and

Megan Hamilton (26:03.672)
Hmm.

Megan Hamilton (26:09.655)
Yeah.

Carmen (26:12.706)
to open the book and just go, this is what I feel. I can do that much, you know, but I don't want to have to go through a whole bunch of theory and understand what's going on. I just know what I'm experiencing right now. So I think the most important spell in the book is like opening it up and being able to trust whatever the magic word is for you. it's, and maybe it's not.

you know, what we're describing now are the rituals in part two, but there's also the rituals, which I call remedies in part three. And these are the resilience routines. I'm sure we'll talk about that later. You might not be feeling, you know, stuck or stagnant, despair, disquiet. You might be feeling something else. You might be feeling a yearning for something different and you might find those in the remedies. But I think that's kind of the first spell is like, what is your abracadabra? What is your...

What is the resonant word so that you can locate yourself? And for me, when I'm working with people in collapse, and this is what I do myself too, when I'm recognizing like, I'm in a freeze response. The very first thing I do and try to tell people to do is stand up. Literally just stand up, just mobilize that much and bring on your arms and legs.

Megan Hamilton (27:26.009)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carmen (27:33.409)
So if you can stand up and scan the room and see your spells for the apocalypse on the shelf and like reach for it and open the page and that is the first spell you got mobilized. And you know, so many of us I think are grasping and capitalist imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchy interrupts our reach towards each other, towards resources. And this is hopefully something that

Megan Hamilton (27:39.382)
You

Carmen (28:01.634)
will not be easily interrupted. It's like literally right there, like a talisman for you. I think that's, you know, the tacit or innate ritual is just mobilize yourself enough to reach towards a resource.

Megan Hamilton (28:20.755)
Yes. Yes. And, and, you know, let's, we'll for sure have lots of compassion for sometimes how hard it is to stand up when you're in that state, right? You're just like,

Carmen (28:34.709)
my god. my god. I spent hours, days when I couldn't believe I was going on welfare. Like I literally, I went to the welfare office. I would drop my kid off. I was a single mom of a kindergartener. Drop my kid off at kindergarten and for four days I then drove to the welfare office thinking like, well I'll try to get there when nobody's there. I had so much shame.

And I was so in disbelief. I was so numb. And of course, there's always people at the welfare office. They're always waiting outside. There's never a time when no one's in the welfare office. And so I would stay there from like 9.05 to right before I had to pick up my kid. And I would like cry and sleep and cry and sleep and cry and sleep. That was all I would do. And finally on, you know, in the last

Megan Hamilton (29:12.76)
Right.

Carmen (29:29.356)
hour before I had to pick up my kid on Friday, I like walked in in just utter shame and disbelief. I totally get the, you know, not only the numbness that overtakes you, but also the shame of like, I shouldn't

be feeling so weak right now, or I should know what to do, or I shouldn't be feeling so non-functional, what's the matter with me? Of course, now looking at that, it's like, again, capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal, you know, like, right, I've internalized it, right? Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I fully, I fully get the numbness and the utter disbelief.

Megan Hamilton (30:03.843)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's sort of always the answer. Right.

Carmen (30:22.262)
and the shock, even when it's coming at you like a slow moving train, it's still so shocking. What I love about that in retrospect though, is that speaks to something so deep about our moral fiber, that there's something about this that is so egregious to how I feel the world should operate in terms of compassionate responsibility for our neighbor, in terms of, you know, being able to

Megan Hamilton (30:41.273)
Hmm.

Carmen (30:51.253)
see and accept people without shame or blame. That it's not our fault that we are in this fucking dystopia right now. So I sort of love the spirit of the piece that is like so shocked because it speaks to your moral compass about just how egregious, how utterly horrifyingly wrong all of this is.

Megan Hamilton (31:01.113)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (31:19.747)
Yes, yes, and those things, those little anchors as well, right? I still have feelings about this or, you know, the little points that we learn, they're so important to the shifts that need to happen as you start to untangle from everything that we grew up with, everything we were told the way what we, you know, were might have been promised to things would look like.

et cetera, et cetera, even wanting that, like, and then realizing actually, fuck, I fucking don't care about this. And also I don't have to, if I want to spend three hours searching for four leaf clovers in my backyard or, you know, finding the bunny droppings just to make sure that the bunny keeps coming like that to me, there's no, you know, there's no like getting ahead or reaching the

Carmen (31:50.466)
You

Carmen (31:56.724)
Yeah, totally.

Carmen (32:14.552)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (32:15.031)
financial goals, I mean, you we do live in a system where we probably need a certain amount of money in order to be functional, especially when we're parents. But all this stupid stuff that we were sold that we needed or that we needed to participate in or that people should care about the

Carmen (32:24.172)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm?

Megan Hamilton (32:40.43)
The green light to start to untangle from it is so powerful and those small moments where we just realize, wait a minute, wait a minute, I don't need to care about this or how do I release this from my body?

paramount to the shifts that can start to happen for you and the and the true joy that you can start to feel regardless because it is still possible to have joy in these times and in fact denying that to yourself is is problematic because it stops you from being a functional human who can Help others and not that that's our only function right but and

Carmen (33:13.666)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (33:18.638)
I'll talk.

Carmen (33:29.966)
Totally. No, totally. Well, and that piece too about, you know, yes, we want to release this from our body. And yet I'm kind of like, do we, I, what I would like is for this to shape our nervous systems. And that is what collapse is doing anyway. What we want though is for it to shape our nervous system so that we recognize it when it's happening or we recognize something that is like a moral injury and

we allow it to shape our character. And if we allow it to shape our character, then we will feel compelled to intervene on others' behalf or speak up or, you know, if we see a Roman salute, we give a Schoenigen handshake. I don't know if Americans know what that is, but in Schoenigen years ago, yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, the Schoenigen handshake is, this is years ago, but the Canadian Prime Minister, there was a protester really in his face. I'm not endorsing this, but.

Megan Hamilton (34:16.659)
not a Roman salute.

Carmen (34:29.342)
It's called the Schwennegan handshake because there was a protest in Schwennegan and the protester got so close to him that the Prime Minister of Canada grabbed the protester by the throat, front and back and threw him to the ground. So, you know, there is an impulse to protect. Yeah, exactly. But I think that that we should allow collapse to shape our character, we mobilize very quickly like that in the face, that we say, no, that flag's coming down, that hate speech is coming down. Like that's what

Megan Hamilton (34:37.901)
I remember, I remember. Gentle Canada.

Carmen (34:57.645)
we want to mobilize into. it's not, as you say, we're not trying to like move to the light or just like always be a shining emblem of equanimity that sometimes we want to mobilize in rage and in, you know, just like a full body no. And I think that's also really great. And when we have access,

to a greater range of responses, then we have access to more of that joy and awe and connection and movement and other things that I get into in part three. But if we close down to the ones that are challenging, we are also closing down and reducing our sort of window of tolerance, even for the good stuff. So what we want to do is expand and become more spacious, more capacious, more skillful with a greater range of

both the difficulty but also the plus side is that we get a greater access to the greater range of joy and beauty and connective qualities as well. So they go hand in hand. This is kind of the blessing and the curse of collapse and in trauma work too, I say this all the time is ultimately we just have this one body. And so that's sort of like the blessing and the curse is we just have this one body. It kind of doesn't matter if your response comes from

Megan Hamilton (36:14.265)
Hmm.

Carmen (36:20.438)
a thing that happened to you, your neurobiological makeup, your neuro type, all those things, like they matter to the extent that it's good for that coherence and maybe certain things are gonna work better if for worse, but ultimately you just have this one nervous system, you have this one autonomic response, you have this one brain, and that's where we have to work. And so if we close down and contain and restrict,

what we can grapple with, then it closes down, restricts and contains what we can respond with. So if we can expand the idea that we can grapple with collapse, we get to expand the idea that we can tolerate more love as well.

Megan Hamilton (36:57.261)
Yeah.

Megan Hamilton (37:04.921)
Mmm, yes, yes, which is the principles of shadow work too, right? Yes. And so, you know, you've been hinting at this too. And the final part of the book is called Remedies, right? And so in comparison to what the rituals were, here are the remedies. Acknowledgement, awe, celebration.

Carmen (37:10.86)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (37:33.85)
conservation, nurturance, protection, appreciation, balance, connection, movement. And I'm saying this all because these words are uplifting, right? There's hopefulness in here as well, which is one of the values of the podcast. Pranking, which I can't wait to talk to you about, renewal and wholeness. And it is like the gift. I always think of when I'm thinking of shadow work,

your capacity for joy after diving into what your body is constricting against, but saying, no, I'm going to be brave and I'm going to get into this, right? And also realizing it's, you know, it's not that it's not hard, but you know, you can actually do it. And then on the other side of it, as you've mentioned, our capacity for joy, our capacity for hopefulness, our renewal of energy,

moving forward with a full spectrum of humanity and not just focusing on the few things that we like because ultimately that's just not good for anybody. They're very different from the rituals in terms of focus. Can you speak to how important it is to work? And I think that the order of the book is really important too, right? Like the way that everything is

is lined out and the, you not, not not on purpose. think everything's on purpose, but it very specifically goes through this. So to work through the grieving process and acclimate to what's happening before we dive into the work that keeps us hopeful. And then I'm also hoping that you will talk to us a little bit about pronging. I love it.

Carmen (39:26.382)
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, so yeah, the way that the book is organized does have the remedies last to anchor us, because of course we want to anchor in something that's resourcing. It's just like in a one to one session with a therapist or somatic trauma practitioner, whoever you're with, you know, you don't want to end when somebody is just like, OK, I finally made contact with like my deepest, darkest pain and like, time's up.

Megan Hamilton (39:54.571)
Yeah. See you later.

Carmen (39:56.529)
Yeah, right. It's like we want to always do the amount of work that we can handle in the time that we have and and the resources that we have so we want to like scale that work so that we have enough time to I love your word acclimate acclimate to whatever is true for us in this moment have a little bit of Discharge of the stress or emotion or the feeling or whatever it is, you know engage with that difficulty and then

What happens after that is we get the settling of like, okay, that feels true. That's like resonating in my body. And now some people, when I say settling, does feel like you kind of relax a bit, but for a lot of people it's more like, now I'm, actually have more space now. I'm not, I'm not tied up in a bunch of energy of either trying to ignore or fight with this part of me that doesn't like what's happening to me. I don't like what's going on. Right. So we loosen.

Megan Hamilton (40:40.44)
Hmm.

Megan Hamilton (40:49.685)
so important to recognize. Yes!

Carmen (40:54.433)
our energy from the fight against the thing and we just be with it. We do our ritual or we do whatever our therapeutic thing is. And then we want to have enough time because what happens after that discharge of the stress is there's that settling and then it gets a little disorienting for a minute because we're like, wait, am I gonna, I think maybe I'm gonna be okay. Like it's like a little bit weird because we have to reorient to something. So it can take.

a minute to just go like, well, so what does that mean for me? What becomes possible now? What meaning do I make of this, of my life, of my next steps if I'm not all tied up in the angst and the tension of battling this thing that I don't like what's happening and I don't like how I feel? So after that, if we wait long enough in that kind of disoriented feeling, we just settle a little bit.

Usually what happens is there's enough space for a liveness to come in. Something's going to want to come in in the kind of space that you've made where you don't, you're not hanging on to that freeze response anymore. And what comes in is more vitality, more energy. And this process, if we wait for it long enough, we call it pronging. When it comes in, it's like pronging is what happens when

You have escaped something that almost took you out. And suddenly you realize, holy shit, I'm actually okay. And the vitality comes rushing back into your body. And this actually comes, it comes from biology, like biologists watching animals. So this is what happens if you see like a spring buck gets attacked by a leopard and it plays dead and you know, the big cat doesn't want to eat.

Megan Hamilton (42:24.857)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (42:29.369)
Yep.

Carmen (42:50.467)
dead material so it takes off. After that sort possum freeze response, when the spring block or the gazelle gets up, it shakes it off and then it bounds away. And pronging is that side to side kind of shimmy of like, whoa, what just happened there? We come back to life and then we kind of are like,

We're feeling ourself. We're kind of bopping along. And I always hear like Saturday night fever. You know, I hear the Bee Gees in my mind. It's like that, like, yeah. And sometimes it's like a big thing. Like we escaped. I don't know. Like you win a legal judgment or something. It's like, my God, you first, you sigh. It's like, my gosh, sigh of relief. And then celebration. And it can also be little things like you almost got

Megan Hamilton (43:16.921)
Hahaha!

Carmen (43:40.269)
Sideswipe by a bus or something and you didn't it's like whoa did you did you see that and then you're like holy crow you start laughing maybe a little because that's the the prank wants to come out it's like this percussive bouncy kind of somatic response now what happens under capitalism is we tend to want to leverage that energy to be more productive or we go shopping or whatever I used to do this like with clients

you know, you have like a good session with a client and at the end they're kind of like, you can see they're feeling themselves. They maybe smile a bit and maybe they're shaking their head a little. And so, you know, I would mirror that. would do that too. Just a sort of mirror like, yeah, yeah, you look what you just did. And then they would leave and I would get all bouncy and I would.

I would instantly like, I'd want to go to the grocery store and just like look at all of the produce. Cause it's like, I just love looking at beautifully arranged vegetables and stuff or, you know, or sometimes I would want to go to like a home store and just like look at all the pillows and stuff. I'm not like a big consumer type, but it's like, just, you find that you want beauty. You want, you're inspired. You know, you want to go and engage with things. And so instead of getting spendy instead of, you know,

trying to be like, I've got energy. should like redo my website or something like that. What we want for procking is try to extend the prank, you know, try to extend the prank in the book, in the, in the author's notes. I remember that scene in Jerry Maguire where Jerry, I think he like quit the job. It's Tom Cruise is like, he's quit and he's in his car and he's like elated cause he's left this soul sucking thing and he's trying to

Megan Hamilton (45:06.317)
Right.

Carmen (45:30.863)
hunch the radio to find good songs. He's trying to sing and finally Tom Petty free falling comes on and he's just like belting it out. That's pronking. And I do believe that in order for us to get to pronking, we have to have the fight. We have to have the spring. We have to have the part of us that's like, no, this matters to me and I'm going to defend myself. I'm going to defend the institution I love. I'm going to defend the person.

Megan Hamilton (45:32.707)
Right.

Megan Hamilton (45:40.078)
Yeah.

Carmen (45:58.349)
beside me on the bus, the stranger, whoever it is. And then that opportunity gives us the chance to, if we succeed, we don't always, but if we succeed, to go into that sense of like, wow, we made it, we did it, I did that. That is who I truly am. When push comes to shove, that is my character. This is me, this is who I am. And so that...

We want to try to extend it. want to anytime we notice it when we're like kind of proud of ourselves and feeling ourselves, we should try to rest in that and share it with other people. I just think that that's one of the signals of being in alignment with our character, with our values, with creating the world that we want to have as that kind of one of celebratory resilience.

Megan Hamilton (46:52.218)
Yes, yes. And you know, you can think of lots of examples where that, you know, I think of alternative business courses that I've taken where they're, you know, celebrate your wins because the more you lean into your achievements and the things that you're proud of, even if your win is, you know, I said no to that client because I knew that it wasn't going to be a good fit. That is

Carmen (47:18.818)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (47:19.437)
you know, there's a pronging to that, a relief to that or whatever, you know, whatever. And so the more we use that as a focusing point and we build these memories of pronging, of like high fives to ourselves or building, you know, I like to talk about self-efficacy a lot, the more that becomes available to us, it builds our.

Carmen (47:24.322)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (47:41.314)
Yes.

Megan Hamilton (47:45.37)
It builds our capacity for seeing ourselves differently as you know, the hero that we would like to be flaws and all obviously and then you know our capacity for what we can do increases what we see ourselves doing opens up in really wonderful ways. love it. Okay, so when everything feels so

Carmen (47:54.454)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (48:08.674)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (48:15.395)
heavy and discombobulating, right? And so I'm going from elation back to feeling heavy. Knowing that hopefulness keeps us working towards change and gives us the courage to keep going. What would you say is something we can do right now to begin the path forward for ourselves? Aside from obviously getting Carmen's book, which I will for sure.

linked to in all the places.

Carmen (48:47.727)
Well, in this one, I'm going to speak to the American experience because it is just ahead of what's going to happen in the Canadian experience. We have an election this year and our own Timu Trump, Pierre Poirier, is like, yeah. So.

Carmen (49:11.03)
The very first thing I'm going to quote from Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny, do not comply in advance. So knowing in your own body what your no is and that you can say yes to what you want to say yes to and no to what you want to say no to and that there are many different ways of saying no. So decide already. can see the writing is on the wall. So

Do not comply in advance on what does your no look like. Now sometimes for some folks that's going to be literally just kind of unsettling the settler within, the one who overrides consent and the one who has learned entitlement or the one who has learned that it's not okay to say no because you're just going to get overpowered anyway. There is something so important to your own character and more a fiber in saying no.

and defending your own no. So that could be as simple as like, yeah, just practicing saying no out loud to things before you go, you know, I'm just not sure it's right for me. You could literally just practice saying, no, I don't think that's right for me. For some people, they might have to do quite a lot of work, right, around just that piece. And then there's kind of the other end of the spectrum where if you're a person who's like, yeah, no, everybody knows what I know is, I'm like, that's like my default is no.

Megan Hamilton (50:19.501)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (50:25.367)
Right. Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (50:35.067)
I know.

Carmen (50:38.058)
Maybe you might want to take that more out into the public sphere. So, you know, maybe you take a training to be a legal observer. Maybe you start to see who's doing ice watches in neighborhoods that are very diverse populations and just go on ice watch, you know, like there's a whole spectrum of things, but I think everybody attuning to what their know is, is going to be a really important.

of being able to have potent magic going forward. And then my personal thing that I'm doing right now, again, from Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny is defend institutions. And we think of institutions as like, yeah, education, the law, et cetera. But actually there are multiple organizations that we can think of as the social infrastructure that creates the compassionate civil society we wish. So it could be anything from like,

the farmers market, Wikipedia, your school board, your local newspaper, your library. I got a library. I just moved to a new town and I went down and got a library card yesterday. Like this is spell craft. This is us forming and shaping the world that we want. So I really think that

Megan Hamilton (51:53.966)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (52:06.318)
say no to what you want to say no to and also what are you saying yes to and actively mobilize to defend whatever that is in your community. It could be as simple as like your neighborhood buy nothing group. That's a form of mutual aid. know, decide you're only gonna free cycle or know, thrift or secondhand your clothes this year if you haven't already. You know, like

Megan Hamilton (52:24.313)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Carmen (52:34.038)
Those kinds of things say no to what you want to say no to, but say yes also to what you want to say yes to. And then you will have both a ritual and you will have a remedy that you are already doing. That's what I think everybody should be doing right now. What's your no's? What's your yes's? And take action on both.

Megan Hamilton (52:53.707)
Yep. Yep. Love it. Yep. Know yourself deeply. Ask yourself those questions. We don't always take the time to do that. Use the moons if you need to. Right. What do you what are you ready to release? What are you ready to bring in? They exist in nature. Just decide when you know what's happening with the moon that that's when you're going to take a bit of intentionality and essentially just

Carmen (53:06.625)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (53:20.13)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (53:22.637)
You know, knowing yourself, being intentional, making intentional choices, and knowing what they mean. I mean, I had a conversation with a client once about all this junk in her garage. And I said, well, is it junk or is it excessive resources? Is that actually wealth? And then can you redistribute it by taking it to the place that, you know, gives out the coats, the place that

Carmen (53:27.82)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (53:51.866)
uses old lumber. Like how can we reframe things so that it's not just bring in constantly, you know, buy, buy, buy. Like what is a resource and what does that mean and how do we be intentional about it? And as you say, what are your values? What do you care about? What do you want to protect? And what are you going to say no to? And how are you going to do it? And deciding in advance again, because we know about

Carmen (54:03.052)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (54:10.67)
Mm-hmm.

Megan Hamilton (54:19.449)
functional freeze, we know about what happens to our brains, we know it. We've known it for a long time. Don't try to come up with something new in a really challenging situation. Decide ahead of time how you're going to handle it so that you can go into it and you know what to do. Not that it's going to be easy when you're there, just that you know what it is or as you say, stand up. That's step one, right? Find the book.

Carmen (54:25.099)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (54:35.054)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (54:40.032)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen (54:46.476)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Megan Hamilton (54:49.417)
go get the book. Name, name your feeling, which we teach to kids. Right when they're freaking out. It's like, name your feeling, name it. I'm angry and you're like, great. What are you angry about? And then it just, what a huge communication lesson that we as adults can teach ourselves.

Carmen (54:56.847)
Totally.

Carmen (55:01.047)
Yeah.

Carmen (55:05.592)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Carmen (55:14.688)
Absolutely. And the idea too that like collapse is cyclical. Our ancestors have survived collapse. We, you know, it is cyclical and the book is designed to work with the moon. So you could do a ritual on a full moon and a remedy on a new moon. And what I like about that is if you were to decide I am going to do something to grapple with collapse this year and

That means that twice a month I'm going to do something and one is going to be sitting with the tough stuff and moving it through, acclimating my nervous system, getting my body stronger. And the other one is going to be developing more tolerance and capacity to hold the good stuff. I mean, that, that in itself is a framework that helps us move through collapse. have to attune to those cycles because

Megan Hamilton (56:03.843)
hard.

Carmen (56:10.488)
Collapse is here and has already been here. It's just been unevenly distributed. like indigenous folks have gone through collapse and they are in a resurgence of reclamation and restoration. We can look to that as a model of like, okay, so these things happen in cycles and I want to support that upcycle, that flourishing, the renaissance, right? And so if we can have that renaissance every month through our own year, we develop capacity to lead that.

Megan Hamilton (56:36.045)
Yeah, a little mini renaissance.

Carmen (56:40.183)
in our communities.

Megan Hamilton (56:41.623)
I love it. I love it. Carmen, I have so enjoyed talking to you today. I'm always so grateful for what I've learned from you and what you bring into the world. I really want to encourage everybody to go and get Carmen's book, because it's just, it's beautiful and it's honest and it's loving and...

If you're looking for something to help you through what feels like a challenging time, then it's going to be a reference for you, a tool to use. we're grateful for that. And so Carmen, thank you so much for being here today.

Carmen (57:30.955)
Thank you, Megan, and thank you for your work. Your work is really equipping people to be leaders in their own lives and therefore have strong impact in their communities. And we need people like that. We need people with voice and people with conviction and who also are okay with, you know, it's not always gonna go great, but that's self-efficacy, you know, that we have the confidence to know that generally we can...

perform as needed and if we can't, we're gonna recover in motion somehow, right? And get back on track. So thank you for your leadership in that and for cultivating that in others and for having me on your show and sharing me with your people. I really appreciate it.

Megan Hamilton (57:59.512)
Right. Yep.

Megan Hamilton (58:09.625)
my goodness. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. and well, Carmen and I could thank each other for the next hour. I'm going to, I'm going to do the closing out reading of all the stuff. You can find all of the information and takeaways from today's episode in the show notes or at embracing enchantment.com subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts. And we'd love, love for you to leave a review. I love reading.

how people are finding the podcast. You can also leave a voice note at embracingenchantment.com and we might feature it in a future episode. Find out more about Carmen and where to follow her in the show notes. Make sure to get her book and get on her email list to learn more about the Numinous Network because let me tell you, they do beautiful and cool things. I've got two witches ladders.

hanging in the back in the lilac tree to speak to that. You're going to want to make sure you're subscribed because we have some exciting episodes coming up about fun ways to deal with mundane chores and further deep dives into tarot and manifesting. And you can catch up on previous episodes where we talk about tarot, human design, the question of whether magic is real and so much more. Until then, here's to building an enchanted life.

Bye.