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2021 was the year of my (mini) professional crisis.
There were big decisions to make, and I was feeling deeply confused about the direction I wanted to grow in professionally & with our school.
What kind of business (& life) did I want to have?
Did I want to blow up my creation?
It took me a long time to find a mentor to help me navigate what was right, for me.
I wanted someone who worked in deeply embodied ways. Someone who would support me if I decided to throw in the towel & make the decision to destroy my creation. And also someone who was a little bit magic.
Somehow (I think it was the power of Instagram) Rachael Maddox entered my life.
She’d just closed her own Coaching School down (to begin a conception journey) and was making some radical changes in her business model. She was EMBODIED AF. And supported CEOs. We started working together – and I’ve loved her since.
Navigating business (& life) in an embodied was is not for the faint of heart. The overarching (capitalist) messages we receive to get bigger, scale, and follow a “safe” and “conventional” path to “success” are OVERWHELMING. It takes a ton of courage to contemplate doing something different when the path is so overgrown and wild and unsure.
Recently I spoke with Rachael as part of our The Future Is Embodied Conference. Our conversation was a dive into the ethics of embodied business & how Rachael navigates her work as a witch & mentor.
It was such a rich conversation I wanted to bring it to you today, in the hopes you find some “unconventional” courage to follow your path (whatever that is) to the best version of your work in the world.
Of course, I didn’t close down our school, or decide to blow anything up in the end. Which is what I love so much about EMBODIMENT work. It’s an invitation to find YOUR body’s truth. Which won’t look the same as anyone else. What’s right for you won’t be right for them. But holding space for ALL the possibilities, even the wild & witchy ones remains something I hold as so valuable.
Resources from today’s podcast
- Rachaels’ website & find her here on Instagram
- Karpman drama/empowerment triangle
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
(This transcript is generated by AI so might not be perfect) ? Oh, and let’s take you off mute.
Hello and a warm welcome to this conversation on Embodied and Witchy business. Today. I’m so happy to be sharing with you Rachael Maddox, who is a self-described witch trauma specialist, master coach and guide. And I know Rachael intimately as I have worked with her before as my embodiment mentor in this conversation, which takes place almost in two parts. We are first describing how Rachael navigates her work and sometimes unconventional decisions in embodied ways. So we’re really speaking about making risky decisions that are sometimes a little bit countercultural, but that are rooted in deep coherence as a way to navigate your way forward as an entrepreneur. We then shifted into speaking about the reclamation of the witch stereotype and what this means in terms of Rachael’s current work and also her expression. This is a wonderful conversation for anyone who is in business, maybe identifies as an entrepreneur, coach, or creative, and who is wanting to bring more embodied and or more witchy magic to the way that they work. So a really warm welcome to this conversation with Rachael Maddox, a somatic trauma specialist, a two-time author, a full-time witch who works predominantly with seasoned coaches and CEOs to unleash their wildest work. Yet that’s what we’ll have a taste of today. Jenna Ward (01:38):
We first came together because in 2021, I was looking for a coach and a mentor. I was having a really hard time finding someone who was embodied, who could help me with some business decisions, where I didn’t necessarily want to follow a conventional model. I really wanted permission to maybe blow my business up, maybe do something very unconventional. And so the solution that I needed wasn’t like somebody’s how to scale to seven figures formula. The solution that I needed was like, what’s really right for me and my body and my leadership, knowing that it might look really countercultural? And at that same time, the magic of the internet, I think it was Instagram because you’re pretty prolific on Instagram and I love following you there, and I’ll include your link with this interview. Somehow the magic of Instagram suggested you to me. I didn’t really know you before then, and there was a similar time to you where, I’m going to use my own words here, blowing up your own business a little bit, or you were maybe on the tail end of that.
(02:45):
And I thought to myself, this woman’s super embodied and she’s making, I don’t know that I want to blow up my business, but she’s making decisions that’s like you are walking your talk. The full spectrum of possibilities is available and open. So we ended up working together. It was magical, highly recommended. It was delicious. It was everything I needed, and it was all about really figuring out what, for me as ACEO, what’s the right path in terms of how I navigate my creativity, my work, creativity, how I want my life to look as a result of that? What’s all the past stuff and the cultural stuff that’s impacting those decisions. You’re so masterful in this. So I wanted to start our conversation by saying Love you and what’s your ethos around working, choosing to do your work in ways that not only might be about teaching or facilitating aspects of embodiment and in your case, post-traumatic growth, but actually making the decisions as CEO as business owner in these creative and witchy and embodied ways that you do.
Rachael Maddox (03:58):
Beautiful. Well, thank you. What a lovely intro. And it was just so awesome working with you. I loved it. I loved every minute. I think part of where we get caught up when it comes to running a business, honestly, money. We all need money to live in this world. And because of that, whenever we have any perceived sense of threat or fear or scarcity, we move from out of the body up into the head to try to figure things out. It’s like a speed response, a hypervigilance of sorts in terms of how we
run our businesses. And hypervigilance is an embodied response, of course, to a perceived sense of fear or danger, but it’s not actually grounded in wisdom, in truth, in coherence. And so I think a lot of us, because we’re trying to figure out how to make it, are making decisions from a hypervigilant fear place.
(05:00):
Well, if I don’t do this, then I won’t get any clients. Or if I do this, then nobody will hire me. Or if I blow up my business, then I’ll never work again or whatever it is. If I don’t come at things with a hypers from a hyper strategic place, I won’t have what I need. So I think I always like to start by just creating compassion. That is a very valid fear in the systems and the culture that we live in to think that you have to do things a certain way in order to be safe. But I’ve come to find that actually the safest and the most abundant thing that we can do is get really deeply centered in our truth because truth and coherence are magnetic. So for instance, I blew up my business. Yes, correct, absolutely. aptt still figuring out what I’m doing on the other side of that, but that was true for me.
(05:55):
And look, it magnetized you because you were like, well, I want to be able to, if I need to blow up my business. So when we make moves that are incoherence with our embodied truth, we become these magnetic forces for people that are resonating with coherence. So there’s a guy named ku, I think you’ve pronounced his last name, ize, and I worked with him a decade ago or something like that. But he taught me about coherence, and he described it as all of your parts lined up in the same direction. So you could think of it as your chakras, but it’s really just like every facet of the crystal that is your soul is vibrating with the same intention. And when that’s happening, you embody inevitable success, whatever success means to you. But when that’s not happening, when you are going in mixed directions inside of yourself, that’s what people perceive they perceive.
(06:55):
I think she’s a little confused or I think she’s a little whatever. So even for instance, right now I was running a 18 month certification training in post-traumatic growth called the Loo Coach training. I closed that training down, that kind of coincided with a pregnancy and then birth and postpartum. I’m emerging from my cave postpartum and I’m just doing a lot of experiments. But here’s the thing, the experiments I’m doing, I’m only doing experiments that feel coherent. And so even though they’re not necessarily inside of what you might perceive as one recognizable, easy to describe niched brand, not, I’m trying to find words for it, I’m like, I don’t know what the hell to call myself now, but people are buying whatever I’m putting out because the experiments are coherent. And so I think, again, we get stuck in our minds thinking, I have to have this brand, or I have to have this niche, or I have to be perfectly packaged. No, you have to be honest from the inside out. And that’s what I think magnetizes success.
Jenna Ward (08:06):
It makes delicious sense to me, and I see this play out at multiple levels of life and the entrepreneurial journey when there’s this narrative at the surface of I want or I should, but then we scratch the surface and a little bit deeper down. It’s like turbulences doubt, confusion, all very human responses that if we’re not, and I’ve had this experience, if we’re not figuring out those responses, it just never quite clicks and feels genuinely easy. One of the early examples and one that I still see with a lot of my clients is this, I’m ready to attract X number of clients. I’m ready to call in four clients, let’s say for if they’re doing coaching work, and then the clients don’t appear and we have a little scratch under the surface. And actually there’s this really guard closed no deep in the body, where as you’re describing that beautiful crystal light coherence, we are not seeing the clarity of that desire shine all the way through who they are.
(09:14):
And that actually gives me a loving little nudge to let go and investigate one or two things I actually need to personally investigate my own doubts around right now. So it’s like it’s this ongoing, ongoing, ongoing process, which I feel is really exciting as a creative, because I don’t want things to be stagnant. I don’t think I was called to this type of work to do. There’s this conventional idea that we get an elevator pitch and we niche down, and it just gets more and more specific. For me personally, that feels a little bit stagnant, but everybody’s different. You’re certainly not in a stagnant phase in this creative evolution of your work. So I’d love to hear a little bit right now if you’re happy to share around, you shared some experiments that are feeling super cohesive and really crystalline for you. Can you share with us any other examples of what it looks like for you, whether it’s through rituals or practically about what it means to navigate this emergence from your postpartum cave in these coherent embodied ways? I just want to hear even more about it from you.
Rachael Maddox (10:22):
Yeah, the funny thing is right now I’m definitely in a season of needing to take my own medicine more than ever before. So right, we get it. And I think that’s important to hear. I’ve been in the coaching industry for 15 years. I’ve had at certain phase a half million dollar company, and I burned that down. And I don’t know if this is answering your question exactly, but I think what I’m feeling called to speak to is that when we are trying to are in the process of bringing our work forward and we get that static feeling right? Anything other than whoosh, this is a line and I’m rocking it. Maybe I have some nerves, or maybe
I’m like, is this going to work? Or whatever. But it’s a line that, and we’re going, when you have any of that other stuff, if there’s constriction, if there’s doubt, if there’s something that’s nagging in the back of your head, that’s your work to do.
(11:32):
So for instance, for me, in closing the coach training now coming back a year and a half later on the scene, again, I have unfinished business around closing my company. I mean, that’s just the straight up truth. And that’s now the work that I get to do because I want to be in a place where I can have a very abundant company again, and I’m like having abundant experiments, but this is not the same thing as like, whoosh, here I am, here’s my company, here’s what I’m doing, and I’m not going to be able to get to that place unless, until I contend with the reasons, the real reasons why I tore that company down. So I think that in terms of the rituals, I honestly think we want this to be laying out your crystal grid and attracting you. You want eight clients and you put little eight little crystals on your altar and you pray for no, what is your shadowy shit that is in the way?
(12:34):
Where are you having constriction in your body when you think about whatever what you’re charging or how you’re going to deal with leadership challenges or you don’t want to run a team or whatever it is, whatever your shit is, that gets you constricting, that’s where you have to do your embodied work. And if you can do that work, and if you can, like you were saying, work out, work finesse, massage those kinks, let them work themselves out, come to a more mature embodied place, then your eight clients are going to show up and you’re not going to need to put crystals on your altar for them.
Jenna Ward (13:16):
I’m a fan of putting champagne on your altar, but yes, crystals as well. So I’m really curious. I know my experience with a lot of people working in these realms, but also going through my own stuff in these realms is that when we describe this shadowy descent, it is shadows, it is descent, it is uncomfortable. It is looking at the vulnerable and cracking open to that, but it’s usually also laced with some delicious seed of new revelation and possibility.
(13:51):
So in a way, it’s this descent and in another way it’s almost like an upper limit or an upper ceiling of how good is it allowed to FB. And I find very often these two are coupled. So I love how you describe, and I experience it very often as this first descent into like, I don’t want to acknowledge that it’s just uncomfortable and it’s messy and it’s confusing. But then very often the seed at the heart of it, and this was the case a lot of the times when we were working together in 2021, but it remains true, just adjusting my boobs as we sit here remains true in the sense of compared to how women in my family have historically managed their money, how much money I have available compared to my ancestors, how easy and aligned it is for me to generate. These are just some of the examples of the discomfort is often wrapping around this seed of glorious possibility. I’m wondering if you can speak to that, if that, because I know one of your areas of specialty is around
post-traumatic growth as well, which is on the spectrum of where we’re speaking about. But I’m wondering if you can speak to this idea of the descent and the how good can it get?
Rachael Maddox (15:13):
Yeah. Well, one of the things that I’ve been really exploring in my shadow work, we’ll call it that, is the triangle of drama. Have you heard of this? Okay, so there’s, I think it’s called Karpman’s Triangle of Drama. Go in my little teacher mode for a moment. The triangle of drama includes three roles, right? It’s a triangle. One role is the victim, one role is the perpetrator, and one role is the savior. And these three roles need one another. And when you’re in a dynamic that feels like drama, that feels like trauma, drama, you are playing one or two of those roles and so is somebody else. So you’re either the victim and someone else is the perpetrator or you’re the victim and you’re being saved or you’re the savior, and then you decide you don’t want to be the savior anymore. And now whoever you were saving thinks you’re the perpetrator.
(16:09):
It’s a whole thing. And the triangle of drama can move to the triangle of empowerment where the victim turns into a creator, the perpetrator turns into a challenger and the savior turns into a coach. Part of what I have been working in my shadow land is the triangle of drama that I was in in my previous company, unbeknownst to me and unintentionally as the savior, and I want to bring this up because the through line I’ve been doing this, maybe we can play this game. I’ve been experimenting with how do we move somatically from the triangle of drama to the triangle of empowerment? So for me, what was being the savior serving? How was that serving me? It wasn’t really about boosting my ego or infantalizing other people or anything like that. Actually what it was about, and this is what made me think of what you were saying or think of this, what you were saying, I’m a fucking genius straight up. And I am not saying that to be like, eh, I’m saying, and there’s a real loneliness in knowing how to make more money than everyone else in being a fast healer around your shit and being able to alchemize trauma quickly in being able to be deeply resilient in the face of the shit that’s happening in our world. There’s a real loneliness being at the top, and I didn’t want to face that. And so I said, I won’t.
(18:04):
I’ll just share everything. My 400 page book, creative comments, no copyright, do whatever you want with it. My program that I created, I’ll let everyone else teach too. I didn’t want to own the seat of my power because it felt lonely and it felt isolating. So each of these positions has a breakthrough, and the eye of the needle for the savior, for me is actually to stand alone and then to say, from this place of standing alone, I can share and I can overflow, but only when I’ve gone through the eye of the needle that says, I will stand alone in my ability to be potent, I’ll stand alone victim almost always doesn’t want to take responsibility. I was talking to my husband about this, right? We’re not talking about were you victimized or not. I’m talking about when you’re in the triangle of drama and you’re in the position where you’re just like, they want this or they want that, or no, there’s often a fear of saying, can I do this?
(19:18):
Can I take a stand for myself? I stand, can I be radically? And I’ve found that the perpetrator doesn’t want to look at the harm they’ve caused. Can I own my mistakes? So I think that when we can move past these three trauma or triangle of drama things and move into empowerment, that’s where we get into that joy of you can have the hardest leadership challenges.
You can have deep losses, just shit you don’t want to have happen to you in business or in life, but you’re like, I’m going to stay over here. I’m going to find a way to stay in my power. And if you can do that, I think that that’s where you end up feeling joy in your upper limits versus being afraid of them. I don’t know if that exactly answers what you were asking, but that’s what that inspired in me.
Jenna Ward (20:19):
It’s great medicine because as you’re sharing and particularly around your personal insights as you shift into that, how is the savior boosting me and what did it reveal in terms of the lesson and discomfort that you had to become really comfortable with? You said, I’m a fucking genius and it’s lonely at the top. And it was just so interesting. I Jenna and put my hands up, pop the champagne. I’m a hundred percent there for celebrating that. And I notice in my body, just even as you say it, like this unconscious and closing up contraction of like, oh, and this is my own stuff.
Rachael Maddox (21:03):
You’re a genius and you don’t want to stand alone. Jenna Ward (21:06):
This is my own stuff. I’m like, oh, that’s uncomfortable. And to me, it just illustrated the point perfectly of the how good can it get? And I feel like this is illuminating. What you spoke about was exquisite. I’ve written it all down and it’s going to all go into the transcript for this conversation, but it also just so beautifully speaks to this. What I really hear in the ethos is on the other side, there is this discovery of usually of this brilliance of yourself that we have to expand to also hold, can I hold? And you held it so effortlessly when you just said it just then, I’m a fucking genius. Each of us has that different flavor and quality and facet of genius. And I think this so beautifully couples with that idea of magnetism that you were speaking about before. If all of us can be incohesive with that deep truth, then yes, what we do express out into the world becomes magnetic. But can we allow ourselves to hold ourselves not just as enough, not just as competent, not just as proficient, not just as good, but in our own unique way, whatever that looks like, it would be different for everyone as a fucking genius.
(22:27):
I’ve got a lot of work to do on that still, honestly. Jenna Ward (26:35):
Yeah, well bring that on that in. So for post-production editing, we’re going again from now. Thank you. (26:47):
So when we were preparing for this chat today, I read your professional bio. The first thing in it was, which I just loved. You had a poll on your Instagram a little while ago of how would you describe the work that I do? And one of the options was, which I voted for that option because you’re just full of witchy goodness. I’m really curious to you what this facet of witch means in your work and how it infuses what you do, why you do it, how you do it. Can you speak to us a little bit about your professional witch?
Rachael Maddox (27:19):
Yeah, I was said a picnic for all the people who’d worked with my midwife recently, and Sean, my husband, was talking to someone and saying, oh yeah, she’s so witchy, and this woman turns to me and goes, are you a professional witch? And I was like, yes. So I kept getting all these reflections about it. It was around the same time. So it was really funny, but
Jenna Ward (27:39):
It’s just life goals, I think, to be a professional witch. Rachael Maddox (27:43):
So there are a lot of different ways that I think people can think about and talk about what it means to be a witch. But for me, I like to just, if you think about the archetype of a witch, what are some of the things you imagine, you imagine cackling, you imagine maybe a big nose and a mole or a wart on their face. I
Jenna Ward (28:08):
Imagine a little cauldron somewhere where you put posty shit into, Rachael Maddox (28:13):
Yes,
Jenna Ward (28:14):
I was gifted for my birthday. Rachael Maddox (28:16):
Yes, and you make potions or you cast spells, which is to me, but I like just even thinking of the visual, this old hag in a Hutt in the forest who’s stirring something over the stove top and has birds flying around in her house. This is the extreme version. And she’s feared. She’s feared, and she’s also gone to when you really need something. This is, I like just working with the stereotype because the stereotype, I mean, dude, all you have to do to get annoyed is go read the Wikipedia article on witches and it’s just so patriarchal. It’s super like, oh, their effectiveness is questionable, and they make evil hexes and they’re feared worldwide and right eye roll, big eye roll. But if we take this archetypal image and we strip it of its patriarchal filter, what we’re talking about is a wise woman, a woman who is fearless enough to say what she thinks, a woman who knows how to work with the plants and the earth and the animals.
(29:41):
A woman who you go to when you need counsel, a woman who is fucking liberated in her body and in her laughter and in her mischief, a woman that you should fear because if you cross her, she’s not going to put up with it. If you pull some shit on a witch, you’re in trouble. So a woman who has boundaries, a woman who knows her worth, and that image leaves out the coven, a woman who is in sisterhood with other powerful women who are in celebration of one another’s powers, who are bringing their powers together to do good things in the world, to heal, to bring medicine forward and look, think of all the witches there could be. There could be a sex witch, there can be a money witch, there can be a word witch, there can be a kitchen witch. There’s different varieties of witch, but at the heart, witches know their power. They’re wise women with shameless, joyful power. That’s what witches and that’s what I’m,
Jenna Ward (30:54):
I love it. And if I rewound maybe five or six years, I probably would as you described to which I’m like, yes, I want to be that. But I wouldn’t perhaps have resonated so strongly with the word. I feel like there were a few things that really shifted my personal, I’ve always liked the movie The Craft, for example, which is a little bit witchy. That’s like your Teenhood introduction to Witch. There were two things that really shifted my adoration of the concept of witch. The first was, I’m obviously white. I have European roots, and somehow my husband’s Dutch. When we are in Europe, there is something that is in the land there that speaks to my witchy self. My hobby when I’m in Europe is making spells and hand painting candles. So painting the spells. I don’t do that in Australia. I don’t feel that on the land here, but I feel it there. The other thing that really shifts, so there’s this reconnection with, for me, there is witchy ancestry in my roots.
(32:00):
The other thing was reading Caliban and The Witch by Sylvia Fari, which was a good history on the power and the persecution of witches, which I was just, that’s just the best book ever. And it felt like a real homecoming to the power of what it means for this facet of womanhood, which for my ancestors was probably pretty common in the village life. I don’t know, but I can assume. So I just love how you’ve described witch, and I feel that it just is so complimentary to the concept of embodiment because it’s like the full spectrum of these feminine gifts and feminine wilds and all the ways that they might come out in harmony with the earth and in harmony with other people. So yes, I love it. So how does this infuse what you do, how you show up your work? Tell us more about this.
Rachael Maddox (32:56):
Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is you’re saying in terms of the history, European witches were murdered in mass. The most powerful women in Europe were murdered by Christian patriarchy. And then of course in the US too, the Salem witch burnings and which trials. And so it’s no wonder why we as white women have forgotten. We’re afraid to embody these parts of ourselves. We’re afraid to be, or we’ve lost the muscle of being in the coven. We are afraid of our fearless voice, our power to cast spells. And when I say that, I mean to bring our intentions to reality. We’re afraid. We call it, we write ourselves off. I’ve been making potions lately. I actually have been teaching classes on how to make potions, and it feels like folk magic. That’s actually important. My friend Anne, who’s a coach, she was here when I did the potion part, and she was like, I’m so surprised at how effective this was.
(34:02):
And I’m like, yeah, that’s what I mean. It’s like, could we actually be powerful? Could the potion thing? And it’s like, yeah, dude, plant medicine plants. I’m into herbalism. I would call myself like a folk herbalist. I have an herb garden with a variety of herbs, and I just learn what does it mean? And I make my own little tinctures and stuff, Ortiz from my folk garden or my
medicine garden. It’s so powerful, mother war Skullcap. These things are here to be in service to us, but we’ve forgotten. And it’s not just that we’ve forgotten. We’ve been disconnected from that, severed from that institutionally and historically and violently. So I think it’s actually really important, this reemergence of the witch and this reintegration with the witch. In terms of post-traumatic growth, what would it look like if white women were reconnected to the power of the earth? We’re not afraid to use their voices. Were empowered to have boundaries where they were needed. Were actually in solidarity, in sisterhood with one another. What would that do for our culture?
(35:17):
A lot. What would that do for your business? If you let your witch sit at the helm of your ship and steer your business, how would your business be different? And if you’re listening and you’re just like, right, that’s sort of that constriction that I was talking about earlier. Where inside of yourself are you constricting? Where are you holding yourself back? I’m about to run a program called business, and it’s going to really focus on specifically unleashing your voice, the voice of your witch. And I know people are going to come in there and they’re just going to be like, right. Yeah.
Jenna Ward (36:01):
I love all that you’re sharing as you’re sharing. It reminds me, when I use the word CEO, I’m often actually referring to myself as chief embodiment officer. So I’m not really looking at the executive function of what’s going on. I’m sitting there being like, what’s the feel? What do we want to create? The vibe of what’s here? And there’s a somatic piece and medicine piece to that, but there’s also very much a, what’s the spell that we’re wanting to cast and the desire that we’re wanting to work towards and bring in. So I really feel you in terms of the relevance for that in business. Now, my friend are a very expressive, you’re a, I think two time author, but you’re also just an expressive powerhouse. Have you always been that way? Very prolific and very expressive. Is that natural and normal to you? I know that’s something that a lot of individuals, women have glitches around. I’m curious for you in terms of your witch, your embodiedness, your expression and how these pieces fit together.
Rachael Maddox (37:09):
Yeah, I won’t say that that’s a hard thing for me. It’s definitely just part of my design. When I had a blog when people didn’t have blogs, and I’ve also always been someone who’s spoken in ways that could disrupt because I’m a witch. That’s it.
That’s part of it too. But that doesn’t mean it’s always been easy for me, and that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes tremble when I write what I need to say. And I think that sometimes we expect that saying hard things or expressing big truths should always be easy, or if other people are doing it must be easy for them, and that’s not true. Yeah, but that said, part of what gives me the capacity, and this is again, I think a muscle of the witch I is, I’m not expressing, but in isolation. I’m not like an isolated person that’s putting, again, I think the way that patriarchy paints the witch is isolated.
(38:18):
She’s just this cast out woman in the Hutt, in the woods by herself. No real witches have cousins. And so if you are somebody who’s trying to recover your voice and recover your truth and recover your edge, then part of what I think we have to do is reclaim that. What we see is wise and the truth in our heart. It’s medicine. It’s meant to be set. And that’s one piece of the puzzle. And the other piece of the puzzle is, so if we have trauma around speaking our truth, or if we have fear around speaking or even just knowing or locating what feels like our wisdom, we can bring that to a group and we can say, this is the edge that I want to share about. This is the thing that I’m afraid to say.
(39:15):
This is the part of me I’m afraid to bring out witches. We talk about the broom in the closet and the witch in the closet. Well, the witches out of the closet. What parts of you are in the closet? There are three muscles. One, I can revere my own heart as sacred, the medicine in my heart, the truth in my heart, the wisdom in my heart. Two, I can get support from my coven. I can say embolden me, build me up. Celebrate me. Tell me I’m not crazy. Tell me I am crazy. Tell me when I’m off. Check me.
(39:51):
And from those two things, when we can really have self-respect and self honor, and when we can have celebration and mirroring from the ones that we really love and trust, then we can overflow and emanate to the world. So yeah, I overflow, I share, I’m prolific, but I have those two things. I have my coven and I have my sense of no matter what anyone says about me, I know where I stand with myself about what I’m saying, and I respect myself and I trust myself. Those aren’t easy things to have if you have trauma around your voice.
Jenna Ward (40:27):
I just thought a big like, yes, delicious as you speak about this, it’s this path of tending to the emerging vulnerability to acknowledge it here, to acknowledge it close in a safer circle, and then to let it go wide. And I think that for a lot of us, we expect that it’s going to go from here to out here in this one instant step without finding security in it before we express it more loudly to the world. So I love how you describe this process of titrating it to get bigger and louder and gently, and you
settle in it with each phase of expansion until it is much more effortless to say the big things. I like how you describe it as a muscle as well.
Rachael Maddox (41:14):
Totally.
Jenna Ward (41:16):
It inspires me to say something vulnerable. I need to go. I love the juice of that. The love. Yeah. That inspires me. And Rachael Maddox (41:24):
So you share it with your people first. You say, guys, I’m going to say this vulnerable thing. What do you think? Is this hitting the mark? Is there anything I’m missing? Should I turn the volume up anywhere? Should I turn the volume down anywhere you know me and you also know my vulnerabilities, the kind of pushback I don’t want to get where I should watch my ass or the kind of trouble I want to cause? Am I holding myself back? That’s why it’s so important to have the coven. It’s critical if you really want to be a pronounced witch.
Jenna Ward (42:03):
And I can attest to that throughout my entire entrepreneurial journey, since I was a baby entrepreneur, like doing expressive things many, many moons ago, I have had the privilege of one of my peers and friends, and she was a mentor, and now she’s a close friend. She had always understood the value and the importance of a group of women together, a cove as you describe it. And so she was always dragging me along and inviting me in. So I was always like the baby entrepreneur in the room being like, look at these amazing people. And there’s been such rocket fuel in being in those spaces over the course of my professional career. And just for me as a woman, mostly, actually for me as a woman, secondary is the professional piece. So if you could leave us with a final message around a more embodied future, if you were to whisper us a remembering or a practice or a little morsel of delicious goodness as a spell for all of us to share, everyone listening to this and joining us for this conversation, but all bodies to hold a more embodied future, which to me is a much more optimistic, caring, witching delicious future.
(43:23):
What might you share with us as your final little morsel of goodness? Rachael Maddox (43:29):
You can’t fake your cackle. So if you’re trying to, and I think a cackle is a really good barometer, if you’re coherent or not, does it make you laugh with joy? Cackle is not evil, right? Cackle is like, oh, this is so hilarious. This is so funny. This is a little bit, I reverent. This is authentic. This is outside of the bounds of what people tell me I should do and aligned with what I know I want to do. I mean, it’s a funny legacy to offer up, but I do think that you shouldn’t do it unless it makes you cackle Jenna Ward (44:15):
To hold that as a barometer. Everyone who’s joining us for this conversation will be having some kind of little reaction or big reaction in their body right now. I feel like a pulling, drawing forward, let more of that part of me emerge. That’s what I notice in my body, and I encourage everyone to just take a little notice of what it is. No right or wrong. Just notice what that wish invokes inside you. That’s very interesting. Thank you. It’s been super freaking delicious. For people who want to see your cackling expression dive deeper into your world of embodied magic post-traumatic growth witchy, where should they go to find more?
Rachael Maddox (45:03):
Yeah, I’m on Instagram at Rachael Maddox and re bloom together.com is currently still my website. Jenna Ward (45:09):
We’ll put the links with this interview. Thank you so much for your time today. Beautiful human. It’s been rich. Thank you, Jenna. Feel called to cackle at the end here just a little bit. And that’s a wrap.
