Liberating Beauty

What if creativity is the thread that leads us back to beauty - and to who we truly are?In this week's episode of the Liberating Beauty Podcast, we continue our mini-series on Creativity and its power to illuminate beauty even after years of its absence. Rebecca is joined by her dear friend Gail Jacob – a beloved pioneer in the field of developmental disabilities and a gifted textile artist – to trace the path creativity carves through the course of one woman's life. From a childhood marked by deprivation, through a career filled with reverence for different ways of being, to the arrival of a daughter who awakened her creative spark, Gail's story holds a question for all of us: what beauty lives within us before we know it's there?Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba CilomboProducers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboTo learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast.To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

We tend to associate creativity with the forms it takes like painting, music, or dance. But what if creativity - like beauty - is a frequency more than a form? What if creativity is the experience of being ourselves whenever we open to expressing who we truly are?  Today's episode opens a mini-series on the topic of creativity, one of beauty's kindred expressions. Rebecca shares examples of where she notices creativity in ordinary experiences - sometimes in ways she wouldn't have thought of as creative.  In the coming weeks, Rebecca will be joined by guests who will take us deeper into these questions. This series is an unfolding conversation, and you are part of it. Where is creativity expressing itself in your life? How can you nurture and invite your creative spirit in everyday moments?Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba CilomboProducers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboTo learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast.To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

For years, Rebecca moved between beauty, spirituality, and transformation, sensing an underlying coherence she couldn't put into words. Then something clicked: what if beauty is an expression of Love?In this episode, Rebecca explores the animating life force of Love, often in forms we don't immediately recognize. Many wisdom traditions have long recognized that Love is not only what arrives gently. Grief is also Love with nowhere to go. Beauty is Love made visible in a way the body can recognize. Pleasure is Love insisting on aliveness. Transformation is Love refusing to let us stay smaller than what we're becoming.What would it feel like to ask of your pain, your desire, your playfulness: could this, too, be Love?Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba CilomboProducers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboTo learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast.To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

There are passages in life that never make headlines. Some don’t even reach our conscious awareness. There’s no announcement. No ceremony. No room full of witnesses. Sometimes it's an ordinary Tuesday - a quiet threshold crossed, and then you just keep going.In this episode, Rebecca explores invisible thresholds - the quiet, interior passages that the outer culture doesn't often see or honor: The grief that doesn't qualify for bereavement leave. The gratitude for driving yourself safely to an appointment. The freedom from thoughts and fears that once would have sent you reeling.These passages are no less real. No less worthy of witness. Nothing is too small to honor with your attention, your breath and rest. What passage have you been carrying that is ready to be witnessed - if only by you?Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba CilomboProducers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboTo learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast.To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

When the rules we live by start to feel like walls, it's worth asking who built them. Today, Rebecca takes us into an ordinary moment of unraveling - a computer that wouldn't cooperate - and the cascade of self-imposed questioning and expectations that came with it. Join us this week as we explore legitimacy traps - the quiet, exhausting work of proving our worth through rules and structures of our design. What becomes possible when we remember that every rule has an author - and that in many instances - we still hold the pen?Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

When we connect with time as fixed and unyielding, it can feel like a bully, pushing us forward or leaving us behind. Yet, the arc of our lives often tells a more generous story. Today, Rebecca welcomes author, sociologist, and spiritual practitioner Rebecca S. Krantz (Becca) to explore the mysterious, creative and even benevolent nature of time. Becca discusses her novel in progress, "Rooting for Time," and together they invite a different possibility: what if we stopped trying to manage time and learned to be in relationship with it? What beauty emerges when the connection softens?ResourcesTo learn more about Becca, her work and to connect with her, visit her website at rebeccaskrantz.com. Some of the tools and practices that Becca shared include: Dr. Daniel Foor’s ancestral healing work: ancestralmedicine.org. Arawana Hayashi’s embodied movement practices through Social Presencing Theater: arawanahayashi.com. Tsoknyi Rinpoche’s teachings, writings and practices for embodied living: "Why We Meditate: The Science and Practice of Clarity and Compassion" (2022) by Daniel Goleman and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, https://a.co/07BWnWq9 and an online meditation course, fullybeing.org. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

“What will it look like for autistic adults and their allies to advocate for their needs when traditional supports are under attack and may no longer be available?” Invited to speak to this question at a recent conference, Rebecca brings her reflections to this personal episode, sharing her experience as a late-diagnosed autistic woman - one that has inspired her to reimagine advocacy through a framework of beauty. In the midst of rising oppression and uncertainty, Rebecca builds on Sue Davidoff and Allan Kaplan's powerful work, "A Delicate Activism: A Radical Approach to Change", to ask: what would it feel like to practice a beautiful activism? What would it mean to claim our identities, autistic or otherwise, as beautiful?Resources: To read "A Delicate Activism: A Radical Approach to Change" (2014) by Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff of the Proteus Initiative, visit: https://tinyurl.com/rh3dd3w. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

Within each soul there is a quiet pulse of mystery thatdoesn't need permission. Yet many of us have spent years learning to quiet it, translate it, and to make it palatable. We might not even be able to feel it yet. In this episode, Rebecca invites you to linger in the parts of yourself that the world has never quite known what to do with, trusting the benevolence of our nature - our beautiful wildness. Resources: To learn more about Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes,Ph.D, visit her website at mavenproductions.com/about-dr-clarissa-estes. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

What if beauty feels unrelatable - even painful? For many people, beauty has never felt free from conditioning, and yet the longing for it lingers. In this episode, Rebecca brings listener questions to the center, learning from the places where beauty hasn't landed yet. What emerges is something unexpected: a definition of beauty that's still becoming, still moving toward the feeling of being unmistakably, quietly yourself.Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

In this episode, we delve into the etymology of encouragement: en- ("make, put in") and courage ("heart, spirit"). But this isn’t a grammar lesson! Rebecca reflects on why these times are encouraging us to inhabit all that we are and shares a poem that came to her as a call from her ancestors about the healing power of truth and bravery across time. To read the poem, “Why I Sing for Us,” visit  togetherinbeauty.com/post/why-i-sing-for-us. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

When we hear the word cancer, many of us experience fear, grief, or a quiet dread. And that makes sense. Millions of people around the world are diagnosed with cancer each year. For individuals who receive a cancer diagnosis, and for all the people who love them, the news of cancer can stop us in our tracks. However, as Rebecca explores today with her beautiful and brilliant friend and guest, Dr. Sandrine Pell, sometimes confronting the things that scare us the most take us to a new edge of presence, clarity, and deeper resonance with who we truly are. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

Throughout our lives, there are questions that yearn for our attention. In answering them, we touch the heart of why we’re here. In this episode, Rebecca tells the story of finding her question and the ordinary miracle that unfolded as she walked toward its answer. What are the questions that are waiting for you?Resources:For more information about Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)*, visit the Cleveland Clinic: my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/22641-emdr-therapy. *EMDR or other bilateral stimulation practices such as tapping can surface intense emotions. Please consider reaching out to a trusted mental health professional if you would like additional support. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

In this episode, we explore what it feels like to come into contact with the spirit of beauty in every day moments. Rebecca shares examples of where she's noticing beauty in her life - often in unexpected places - and invites you to take a beauty inventory of your own. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.

Welcome to the first episode of the Liberating Beauty Podcast! In this episode, we introduce you to our host, Rebecca and share what inspired the podcast to come into being and. We're so glad you're here. Host: Rebecca Paradiso de SayuOriginal Music: Mapumba Cilombo Producers: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba CilomboCreative Directors: Rebecca Paradiso de Sayu & Mapumba Cilombo To learn more about Rebecca and her work, visit Together in Beauty - togetherinbeauty.com - home to the Liberating Beauty Podcast. To learn more about Mapumba and his work as a producer, sound engineer and musician, visit his website at mapumbamusic.com. ⁠⁠⁠If you find this podcast meaningful, please consider making a donation at togetherinbeauty.com/podcast. Your gift helps ensure that the work can continue with integrity and grace and reach as many listeners as possible. As always, thank you for your support.