Hi there,

Howie Jacobson here - it's been a while!

Things have been moving fast here in HowieLand - we sold our home/farm in North Carolina and are now living in Barcelona, Spain. It's been a hectic move, selling cars, putting stuff in storage, selling the house, and moving to a city where we don't speak either language (Spanish -- and Catalan, I discovered).

And in the midst of all that, I've published three podcast episodes with really amazing guests.

Practical Ethics for Our Time: Peter Singer on PYP 555

Peter Singer pretty much launched the animal rights and animal welfare movements in 1975 with the publication of Animal Liberation. Forty-eight years later, he's got a revised edition coming out: Animal Liberation Now, featuring an introduction by historian and Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari.

We talked about:

• How philosophy can be a force for good in the world.
  
• The difference between decency and ethics.
  
• How to balance reason, emotion, and religion.
  
• The possibility of disagreeing while remaining respectful (and even friendly).
  
• How Singer began his journey of philosophical inquiry into humanity's (mis)treatment of billions of animals every year.
  

Building a Shame-Free Zone in a Sexually Messed Up World: Veronica Monet on PYP 556

This is the first of what I hope will be a 3-part series of interview with Veronica Monet. Originally, our plan was to talk about her use of Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a coach.

But then I looked her up online and was like, “whoa, there's a lot of other things we need to talk about.”

• Her upbringing in a repressive and abusive religious cult.
• Her drug addiction and recovery.
• Her work as a high end escort, and her decades-long activism on behalf of sex workers.
• Her healing practice for couples, dedicated to healing trauma and removing shame associated with sexuality and its varied expressions.

In this conversation, we covered a lot of Veronica's biography, which I hope will challenge your thinking as much as it did mine.

Venerating the Earth Through Wild Yoga: Rebecca Wildbear on PYP 557

Rebecca Wildbear is an outdoor guide, yoga teacher, and author of Wild Yoga: A Practice of Initiation, Veneration & Advocacy for the Earth.

In her work, she weaves together two strands that have diverged in our current social and political culture: personal growth and environmental / social justice.

In our conversation, we cover what Wildbear sees as a shrinking of yoga in the West, into asanas (postures) and exercise rather than a deep spiritual practice that can connect us with ourselves and the world around us.

I had never really thought about the significance of so many postured named for elements of the natural world: tree pose, pigeon, dolphin, eagle (now that's a hard one!), and many more. But Wildbear makes it clear that yoga was originally a practice that sought to unite humans with the more-than-human world, through respect and modeling.

And so yoga becomes a portal for the body to remember its own wildness.

In the book, each chapter shares a different pose or posture or movement, and invites us to explore what we can learn from it, and from the aspect of nature it honors.

And in so doing, Wildbear explains, we can regain the knowing that the entire world is sentient, and alive, and full of meaning and purpose. So that we can reconnect with our own spirit and purpose, in the service of all life.

Stay tuned for more wonderful guests over the next few weeks, including the author of a new book about of the "underground grandmas of ayahuasca" and a friend who treated long COVID with water fasting at True North Health Center, among other lifestyle strategies.

Warmly
Howie