106. Ceremony, Song & Belonging: On Rekindling Relationship In A Frantic World / Veronica Stanwell

In today’s conversation, I speak with Veronica Stanwell - a multidisciplinary healing and creative arts practitioner who weaves soma, psyche, ceremony and song into intimate gatherings for connection, healing and growth. Driven by a longing for a collective shift towards nature-awe, eco-imagination and rekindled interconnectedness, Veronica is the founder of Rooted Healing, an organization that helps heal and connect inner and outer landscapes through transformational gatherings in nature, cross-cultural wisdom exchange, and somatic and transpersonal workshops. Offering legal and unique ceremonial Psilocybin retreats in the Netherlands, ancestral immersions in her homeland of Wales and many other gatherings that re-indigenise and re-root people back into the land, Veronica’s mission is to cultivate the kind of profound belonging that ends habits and systems of harm and instils an embodied remembrance of what it means to be creative, human and alive. As part of a growing collection of resources and projects, Veronica also hosts the wonderful Rooted Healing podcast, which explores how we can heal, re-imagine and co-create a thriving world. With an MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology with the Alef Trust, Veronica’s animist embrace of life permeates her explorations into expanded states of consciousness, both within indigenous traditions of the Americas, and her own personal enquiries into Europe’s native ways. Drawing upon a background in professional theatre that continues to guide her work, Veronica’s approach is one that carries deep reverence for the power of story, music, expression, catharsis and playfulness. As a movement teacher with roots in dance, yoga and somatics, she is currently developing a modality based on animistic ideas, that invokes playful enquiry into the inspirited interdependent body-mind. Recorded on 22nd February 2023.