Hello hello!
Welcome to Living the Spiral. For those of you who are new here, this is a podcast about learning to read the language the world is always speaking, through astrology, human design, and the deep ancestral wisdom of the earth’s changing seasons.
Today I’m thrilled to have my dear friend Rachel Simon Stark on the show as a special guest for my new series Living the Spiral: Magicians. In my mind, magic is what happens when you remember that you are not separate from the forces that made you, and you start acting accordingly. It’s the practice of making the invisible visible through attention, intention, and the words you’re willing to say out loud.
After walking the wheel of the year and attuning to the spirals of time for several years on the podcast, I’m excited to start bringing in conversations with people who are doing this particular type of magical work in the world. Rachel is definitely one of those people, and I’m so excited to welcome you to this thought-provoking episode: Ancestral Magic.
Rachel Simon Stark is a Santa Fe-based writer and founder of Widening Circles Collaborative. Her work explores belonging, identity, ancestral inheritance, and social change, moving between the intimate and the universal to engage questions of meaning-making in times of disorientation and rapid change.
Rachel spent sixteen years directing large-scale social impact initiatives across nonprofit, academic, public, and technology sectors, and currently serves as a Program Director for New Mexico’s statewide launch of Universal Child Care. She holds degrees from Northwestern and UC Berkeley, her academic research has been published by Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute and Duke’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
She is also a farmer and compost enthusiast. All of that grounds her work in something real and rooted, and it truly shows. I first met Rachel at a Día de los Muertos gathering outside of Santa Fe, a perfect space to naturally fall into deep conversation about ancestral healing, reclamation, and curiosity. Through Widening Circles, Rachel teaches a course called Cultivating Culture, a nine-week container focusing on ancestral reclamation and attention to long cycles of healing. She’s now offered the course six times, moving participants through present, past, and future as a way of opening into genuine relationship with their lineage.
In this conversation we get into how ancestry came to Rachel through a grandmother who showed up in dreams while she was at rock bottom in grad school, the difference between shame and humiliation and why that distinction matters, the idea that identity is a river and why fixing it in place is a kind of loss, what it means to consider yourself a future ancestor, and why every one of us has indigenous marrow in our bones.
Rachel plans on offering another cohort of her Cultivating Culture course this fall, a perfect season for working with your ancestral web of relations.
To learn more about working Rachel and the Widening Circles Collaborative, visit her website at wideningcirclescollaborative.com.
Follow Rachel on Instagram and here on Substack at Rachel Simon Stark, where she writes the deep and thoughtful publication hi•ne•ni : here i am.
🎧 Listen to the episode in the Substack player above, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
About Alison & Living the Spiral
Alison Dale is an artist, writer, astrologer & Human Design guide based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work lives at the intersection of ancestral systems that track the seasons and the planets, embodiment practices, and earth-based spirituality. She offers astrology and human design readings as well as 1-on-1 astro-somatic coaching packages at hearthandspiral.com.
Join her here on Substack by clicking the button below, and follow along on Instagram at @hearthandspiral.
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