Contact Nutrition and the Five Pathways to Secure Attachment with Carmen Spagnola

Send Mara a quick text love note here!I am thrilled that today Carmen Spagnola is BACK on the podcast. (If you have not listened to it yet, last time we were talking about how to cultivate a small and delicious life in the face of collapse, how to sit with needs that cannot be met, and how to find hope and feel despair at the same time. It is a good one. Find it here!)This time we went deeper into the actual mechanics of connection, and specifically into Carmen's new book How to Connect and the framework at the heart of it: Contact nutrition.Contact nutrition is the how of secure attachment. The five physical, mammalian things we do that make another person feel seen and safe: kind eyes, vocal prosody (real emotional warmth in your voice), safe touch, shared rhythm, and ingestion behaviors like eating and drinking together. These are the micro-moments that either connect us or create distance.During this episode, Carmen and I talk about why these connective behaviors can be difficult to access in a culture shaped by oppression and chronic stress. We talk about how to figure out which of the five your own nervous system is most hungry for. We get into casting a wider net for getting your needs met, including why I love my Zumba crew for weekly contact nutrition!This powerful thing about the framework of contact nutrition in my experience is that it gave me language for something I had been quietly judging myself for needing.But, you, like me, are not too needy. You are under-nourished. There is a difference, and this episode is going to help you feel into it.About Carmen SpagnolaCarmen Spagnola is a somatic practitioner, attachment educator, clinical hypnotherapist, and an outspoken feminist witch. She teaches about attachment, contact nutrition, power dynamics, animism, folk magic, ritual, and ancestral knowledge related to land and seasons. Carmen's new book How to Connect: Build Strong Bonds and Deep Connections Through Contact Nutrition comes out November 4th, 2026 from 9th House Press. Pre-order it now at carmenspagnola.com. Pre-orders matter enormously for small independent publishers and this book is worth it!My BEST tools, matched to exactly what you need. Take the [free] needs quiz: needsquiz.com