SOLEFUL

What if care is an act of radical imagination?What part of me wants to care—and be cared for?What if care is not just a task… but a portal into presence and deep listening… into the art of living—and dying—well.Drop into your senses with Micheline to spark imagination and renewal in complex times. Credits:Written & Produced by Micheline BerrySoundscape & Sound Editing by Miguel RiveraOpening Music by Domonic Dean Breaux

Michelle Woo and Tony Patrick continue their heartfelt conversations with Sonya Dolan, the COO and a co-founder of Mettle Health.Caring for the caretakerArt as a means of opening up difficult conversationsThe role of the senses, deep listening, play and spontaneity in palliative careCreativity as a space of being About our guest: Sonya Dolan is the co-founder of Mettle Health, an online platform dedicated to offering personalized, holistic consultations to patients and caregivers navigating the complex emotional, practical, and existential challenges associated with serious illness, death, and grief.Sonya’s career in hospice and palliative care was shaped by the loss of her mother. This, combined with her role as a caregiver, profoundly shaped her professional path. After transitioning from event management to hospice administration, she worked closely with clinicians, patients, and families to deliver comprehensive programs, logistical support, and customer care. Her hospice work also introduced her to her co-founder BJ Miller, and palliative care, and the rest is history. Her extensive experience in caring for those navigating illness and death, coupled with her journey as a breast cancer survivor, has provided Sonya with a deep understanding of both the strengths and limitations of the healthcare system. She is particularly committed to working with empathy and compassion, learning from clinicians, and recognizing the essential role of heart-centered care in improving the patient and caregiver experience.For more information about today’s episode, visit: www.sole.housewww.mettlehealth.comIG: @schooloflivedexperienceTogether we explore the art of care and why it is important.Navigating serious, acute or chronic health issues for yourself or someone you’re caring for can be a challenge. Mettle Health can help address immediate needs or help you plan for, and navigate, the road ahead. Book a free 20-min consultation to learn more

A recap of our conversatio with BJ Miller with Miguel Rivera.Compilation, Editing and Sound Design: Miguel RiveraMusic: Domonic Dean Breaux

Welcome back to Season 2 of SOLEFUL: The Art of Care!In this opening episode, Michelle Woo and Tony Patrick sit down with BJ Miller, Co-Founder of Mettle Health. Together they explore:*How can art and imagination prepare us for life and death?*The role imagination plays in providing care and showing up in the world?*What is Death? If death is not the end, what remains after someone has died? About our Guest: Dr. BJ Miller is a longtime Hospice and Palliative Medicine physician and educator. He is a co-founder of Mettle Health, an online service created to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the practical, emotional and existential issues that come with serious illness and disability. Led by his own near-death experiences as a patient, BJ advocates for the roles of our senses, community and presence in designing a better ending. His interests are in working across disciplines to affect broad based culture change, cultivating a civic model for aging and dying, and furthering the message that suffering, illness and dying are fundamental and intrinsic aspects of life.For more information about today’s episode, visit: www.sole.housewww.mettlehealth.comIG: @schooloflivedexperienceIG: @mettle_healthNavigating serious, acute or chronic health issues for yourself or someone you’re caring for can be a challenge. Mettle Health can help address immediate needs or help you plan for, and navigate, the road ahead. Book a free 20-min consultation to learn more

Welcome back to SOLEFUL - an immersive podcast brought to you by the School of Lived Experience (SOLE). Join Tony Patrick and Michelle Woo on a journey and exploration of renewal through art, conversation, and practice inspired by lived experiences. We’re so excited to embark on our 2nd season with our friends from Mettle Health - a team of artists, designers, clinicians, and caregivers dedicated to holistic, imaginative care - to explore none other than the art of care. Through intimate interviews with some of today’s luminaries in art, technology and healthcare, we’ll talk about imagination, play, and how death can bring us closer to life. So please join us February 20th our launch of Season 2 SOLEFUL- "The Art of Care" where the SOLE will explore the spectrums of creativity, care, life, death, and everything in between. SOLEFUL was created by Tony Patrick, Michelle Woo, Micheline Berry and Miguel Rivera. It was sponsored and executive produced by For Freedoms - an artist-led organization dedicated to increasing civic engagement through art and collaboration. For more information, please visit www.forfreedoms.org.

This ambient soundscape is composed of original elemental recordings, music and sound design derived from Somatic Journey Episode 5 - Ether. Sound Design by Miguel Rivera & Micheline Berry with original music by Jordan Hansell / Geometrae.

SOLEFUL hosts Michelle Woo & Tony Patrick are joined by Season 1 collaborators Micheline Berry and Miguel Rivera to end the year in a moving reflection and conversation. Join us as we dive deep into: -Birth and Death as a ‘cycle of life’ continuum -Presencing death for the first time -Ether as an alive, sensitive space -The need to celebrate death as a ritual process of transformation -The challenge we all face stepping off the hamster wheel of over-working  -Working with the voice of the “inner critic” vs. the voice of the “inner benefactor” -Mitigation of suffering through ritual markers of belonging and inter-relationship And the wishes and aspirational futures for 2024 from all four of us. Happy New Year!!!

Michelle Woo & Tony Patrick welcome back Miguel Rivera and Micheline Berry for our final episode of the Somatic Journey series.  Today in Part 1 we explore the ephemeral element, Ether, as the potent space and silence that radically includes the cosmos and our creativity alike.  Our meditation is an invitation to slow down and become the silence that is listening, creating space around the density of our own thoughts, feelings and emotions.  Produced by Micheline Berry Edited and Sound Design by Miguel Rivera & Micheline Berry Mix and Mastering by Rick Santizo Original music on this episode by Jordan Hansell / Geometrae Studio Original Theme Music by David Ralicke

I love you, Lillian (November 21, 1933-October 19, 2023) Words by Michelle Woo Sound design by Micheline Berry Music by Domonic Dean Breaux

Ambient soundscapes composed of original elemental recordings, music, and sound design derived from Somatic Journey Episode 4. Sound Design by Miguel Rivera.

Sometimes the only thing we can do to heal the human tangle of suffering is to just breathe.  That is the lesson of AIR.  Through the indigenous spirit story ‘The Hummingbird Pin’ and breathing meditation, Micheline Berry and Miguel Rivera guide you through an immersive journey into the intelligence of AIR and how air nurtures the interdependent template of exchange between our own bodies and every green thing around us.  In the RIFF following the journey, we explore notions of our reciprocal relationship to our non-human kin and breathing as a powerful practice of self-regulation with SOLEFUL hosts Michelle Woo and Tony Patrick. Produced by Micheline Berry. Edited and Sound Design by Miguel Rivera. Mix and Mastering by Rick Santizo. Original Theme Music by David Ralicke.  Special Thanks to Earthstar Studio for their sponsorship of this episode.  For more information on For Freedoms Media, please visit www.ForFreedoms.com For more info, resources, and upcoming events for SOLEFUL POD and SOLE (The School of Lived Experience) please visit www.sole.house

Humberto Ak’abal is a poet that combines in his work the indigenous consciousness (its languages, its spirituality, and music) and the consciousness of new countries that for 500 years have been known in some parts as Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and in others as Guatemala or Mexico. Writers like Ak’abal that originate from that ancient world deeply guarded in the mountains, forests, and shorelines of our immense continent, demand that we go into that other reality we do not know, that we understand that the culture, that indigenous soul lives and breathes right beside us, in the same time as ours, with the same life as ours, loving and understanding the same continent that we love but do not understand and do not see. - Carlos Montemayor Read & Sound Design by Miguel Rivera

A poetic invitation into the Macroverse -- for now. Written and Read by Tony Patrick.

Your 3 billion year-old elemental intelligence can be a source of refuge. With each breath, know you can metabolize and transform the effects of trauma, exhaustion and stress. A nugget Written and Read By Micheline Pierrette Berry. Music: "Movement 1 Ether" from the album Sound Tools for Sacred Movement by DJ Drez

Ambient soundscapes composed of original elemental recordings, music and sound design derived from Somatic Journey Episode 3. Sound Design by Miguel Rivera

At a time when much of the planet is on fire, literally, Miguel Rivera and Micheline Pierrette Berry continue their immersive journey into the elemental intelligence of FIRE, while also touching on the dire necessity for humans to learn how to tend to this metabolizing elemental force of nature. Through the origin story “The Gift of Fire” and following somatic fire meditation & breath work, you will be invited to connect deeply to Fire as an inherent transformational device to be tended with care. Following the journey, we meet up at the RIFF (Resonance, Imagination, Forgiveness and Fun) with SOLEFUL hosts Michelle Woo and Tony Patrick who share personal stories of fire building as we contemplate: -Fire as community builder -Fire as a space -Fire as narrative technology -The human obligation to caretake the elements of the planet -Fire as relative -And a final spontaneous dharma nugget from Michelle’s 5 year old daughter Lil. <3 Produced by Micheline Berry. Editing and Sound Design by Miguel Rivera. Mixing and Mastering Rick Santizo. Original Theme Music by David Ralicke.  Special Thanks to Earthstar Studio for their sponsorship of this episode. 

Through an intimate account of a near death experience, Mingyur Rinpoche teaches us that flow is a way of life. Part 2 of an excerpt read by Michelle Woo Edited and sound design by Miguel Rivera Excerpt from In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk can Teach you About Living from Nearly Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov, 2019, page 43.

The poems of Deborah Miranda bypass the filters imposed by colonization and certain patterns in contemporary culture, open up paths for the reader to directly connect with primordial elemental energies of the world we live in. Allowing us to feel and express the sense of beauty and renewal when we are in direct relation to the land and its beings around us. “Raised by Humans” Tia Chucha Press. Read by Miguel Rivera

Ambient soundscapes composed of original elemental recordings, music and sound design derived from Somatic Journey Episode 2. Sound Design by Miguel Rivera

Your guides Miguel Rivera and Micheline Pierrette Berry return to continue your immersive journey into regeneration and renewal. Through an earth-based origin story “In the Beginning” and bone meditation, instigate a deep sense of belonging and connection to the wild within and around you. Following the journey, hosts Michelle Woo and Tony Patrick lead a heart centered conversation known as the RIFF (resonance, imagination, forgiveness and fun) to explore emergent themes of:-re-framing our connection to nature-the crisis of imagination and belonging -ways to make the shift into relationship with the planet-close encounters with an animate earth Episode 2 was produced by Micheline BerryEditing and sound design by Miguel RiveraMixing and mastering Rick SantizoOriginal theme music by David Ralicke

We are excited to introduce SOLESCAPES: ambient soundscapes composed of music and sound effects derived from each podcast episode for contemplation, deep listening and imagination. Edited by Miguel Rivera Sound Design by Miguel Rivera and Micheline Pierrette Berry Mixed and Mastered by John X Volaitis

A poem and call to remembrance. Written and spoken by Micheline Pierrette Berry Edited by Miguel Rivera Sound Design by Miguel Rivera and Micheline Pierrette Berry

Through an intimate account of a near death experience, Mingyur Rinpoche teaches us that flow is a way of life. Excerpt read by Michelle Woo Edited and sound design by Miguel Rivera Excerpt from In Love with the World: What a Buddhist Monk can Teach you About Living from Nearly Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov, 2019, page 43.

Born from dreams, from stones that speak, from ordinary words, from the wrinkles of a grandmother’s face, from the laughter of the rain, the poems of Humberto Ak’abal bring us to a different way of listening, feeling and understanding our world. Read by Miguel Rivera Edited and sound design by Miguel Rivera

Why work with difficult emotions?  Why work with difficult feelings? So that we can create space for fun, love, beauty, and real connection. Conceived and recorded at the end of 2022 as the Covid 19 pandemic was “winding down”, our inaugural SOLE Somatic Journey is dedicated to all who may be grappling with the dilemma of difficult emotions, grief or loss whether from the effect of the pandemic or just being human during complex times.  Join Miguel Rivera and Micheline Pierrette Berry on an immersive inquiry into the power of indigenous storytelling and somatic water meditation to meet and transform our own pain and difficult emotions into compassion for ourselves and others. Original Theme music composed and performed by David Ralicke. Episode 1 music by Benjy Werthheimer.

Get the latest internal weather conditions and forecasts including the SOLE storm tracker, and guide to understanding the impact of our emotional, physical and psychic highs and lows.

Welcome to SOLEFUL, an immersive podcast experience brought to you by the School of Lived Experience featuring hosts, Tony Patrick and Michelle Woo. Through storytelling, practice and conversation, we strive for greater compassion and connection to ourselves, the world and the everyday. Join us!