Wonderstruck

When her mother died, Hiroko Yoda was brought to her knees. What pulled her back was something that had been there all along, the ancient spiritual traditions of her home country, Japan. What followed was a decade-long journey through shrines and temples, sacred mountains, and waterfalls, culminating in her latest book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness.

The title comes from an ancient Japanese idea: that eight million spiritual beings inhabit everything around us. Not as a precise count, but as a way of saying the sacred is everywhere, in everything.

Recorded inside an ancient Shinto shrine deep within the sacred mountains of Kumano, located at the end of a pilgrimage route walked for over a thousand years, Wonderstruck's host Elizabeth Rovere sits down with Hiroko to explore:
✦ How "kami" spirit exists in everything
✦ How the concept of "half-belief, half-disbelief" makes room for mystery without demanding certainty
✦ Why gratitude, not belief, is the core of Japanese spirituality and the seed of happiness
✦ The flexibility of Japanese spirituality and what it offers a world grown rigid in its certainties
✦ The spirituality found in your favourite anime

Through Hiroko's journey, from grief to gratitude, from loss to a world where everything has a spirit, we begin to see that happiness isn't something to be chased or achieved. It's something to be noticed, in the smallest of things, in the spaces we walk past every day without looking.

Chapters:
00:00:00 Welcome to the Kumano Shrine
00:01:54 Kami: 8 Million Spiritual Beings
00:05:19 Rigid Society, Flexible Spirituality
00:16:32 Walking Through Grief
00:20:35 Gratitude, Not Belief
00:25:07 Half-belief, Half-disbelief
00:27:50 Mysteries of the Waterfall
00:35:52 Itadakimasu: Spirituality in Everyday Words
00:39:03 Meeting Itako, The Blind Shamaness
00:45:15 Masakado: Anger and Love
00:51:15 Anime, Yokai, and Healing

Follow Hiroko:
Website: https://www.hirokoyoda.com/
Substack: https://blog.hirokoyoda.com/
Book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/eight-million-ways-to-happiness-9781526672162/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hi_yoda_1

Follow Wonderstruck:
Website: https://wonderstruck.org
Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod
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TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If we understood the true complexity of the natural world, would we call it conscious? Would we begin to question the boundaries we put between ourselves and everything around us?

We explore these questions with biologist Merlin Sheldrake and science journalist Zoë Schlanger. Their bestselling books, "Entangled Life" and "The Light Eaters", required monk-like study and deep immersion in the natural world. What they discovered quietly dismantles some of our most basic assumptions about intelligence, memory, and what individuality really means.

Recorded during Harvard Divinity School's "Thinking with Plants and Fungi" conference, this special episode brings together Merlin, Zoë, host Elizabeth Rovere, and guest co-host Rachael Peterson, the "Thinking with Plants and Fungi" Initiative Program Lead at Harvard, to explore:

✦ Whether plants have personalities and why they might be kinder to kin
✦ How a brainless slime mold can navigate its way out of an IKEA faster than a human
✦ How flatworms put into question where memory actually lives
✦ Whether it's possible to ferment a book and drink it

When we stop centering the individual and truly reckon with the entangled nature of all living things, something shifts. The question stops being how do we include more-than-human perspectives… it starts being whether that separation even makes sense to begin with.

Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:10 How to Write About the Hidden World
00:04:45 The Myth of the Individual
00:09:53 We Are Polluting Our Own Home
00:15:14 The Problem Isn't Science. It's Language.
00:18:18 The Plant That Can Copy Anything
00:24:25 As Temperatures Rise, Fungi Are Evolving
00:28:31 Do Plants Have Personalities and Prefer Their Family?

Follow Merlin Sheldrake:
Website: https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/merlin.sheldrake
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/merlinsheldrake
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566795/entangled-life-by-merlin-sheldrake/

Follow Zoë Schlanger:
Website: https://www.zoeschlanger.com/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/zoeschlanger.bsky.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoeschlanger/
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-light-eaters-zoe-schlanger?variant=41096248295458

Follow Wonderstruck:
Website: https://wonderstruck.org
Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mystic poet Chelan Harkin doesn't write poems, she transmits them. At 21, after giving herself permission to write a "bad poem" every day, a creative channel cracked open and poems have flowed through her ever since.

Her work has drawn comparisons to Rumi, Hafiz and Khalil Gibran. Poets whose words slip beneath the thinking mind to reach something deeper, older and more alive within us.

Celebrating World Poetry Day this month, this episode features Chelan speaking with Wonderstruck's Elizabeth Rovere about:
✦ How a Hafiz poem she heard at 17 unlocked her heart and set her entire path in motion
✦ The "bad poem experiment" and how permission to fail became the key to creative flow
✦ How praying to her favourite dead poets led to a synchronicity that changed everything
✦ How our deepest fears, when met with consciousness, can transform into our strongest allies
✦ The extraordinary story behind her book The Prophetess which stands in conversation with Gibran’s The Prophet

This is a conversation for anyone who has suspected that the sacred isn’t elsewhere, but closer, more available and more alive than we ever dared to believe.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:07:06 The Poem That Changed Everything
00:13:47 The "Bad Poem Experiment"
00:19:22 Say Wow: The Poem That Went Viral
00:23:44 Praying To Her Favourite Dead Poets
00:30:50 The Meaning Of Authentic Service
00:35:55 Suffering and Our Great Cocoon
00:39:21 Writing The Prophetess
00:43:33 Meeting Hajjar Gibran
00:51:53 Fear as a Life Force
00:58:32 Closing Reflections

Follow Chelan Harkin:
Website: https://chelanharkinpoetry.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chelanharkin/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chani.harkin
Find all Chelan's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B08PL55XMD

Follow Wonderstruck:
Website: https://wonderstruck.org
Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Can a mountain teach us how to live in peace? In his early twenties, George Thompson was living with intense anxiety and a deep sense of meaninglessness. His body carried constant tension, and the voice in his head told him that he was not good enough. That crisis became the catalyst for a decision that would change the direction of his life.

George travelled alone to China’s sacred Wudang Mountains, the birthplace of Tai Chi and a centre of Daoist (Taoist) practice for centuries. There, immersed in mountains, monasteries, and daily practice, he encountered Tai Chi.

In this conversation, George and Wonderstruck’s Elizabeth Rovere explore:
✦ Tai Chi as a martial art and moving meditation: powerful, peaceful, and beautiful
✦ Balance as something dynamic that allows you to hold your centre in the midst of change
✦ The inner critic (“the Underminer”) and learning not to identify with the story it tells
✦ Why peace can’t be learned, but arises through presence and awareness
✦ The universal language of wonder and awe

This episode reminds us to look at what lies beneath the thinking mind, and to discover, as George puts it, that balance is possible.

Chapters
00:00:00 Introduction
00:05:49 Journey to the Wudang Mountains
00:10:22 Finding Balance Through Tai Chi
00:18:14 Spirituality as a Form of Activism
00:24:45 Hope & The Vinegar Metaphor
00:29:58 Love, Connection & Fierce Compassion
00:35:29 Is Eminem Daoist?
00:42:04 Awe and Wonder Predates Language
00:46:27 Nature, AI, and the Technology Continuum
00:49:42 Why Are We Here?

Follow George:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@George-Thompson
The Subtle Art of Losing Yourself: https://youtu.be/9KArWcMldPM?si=fHt4OPWFb8-zSuAx
Balance is Possible: https://www.balanceispossible.com/
Taoist Wellness Community: https://www.taoistwellness.online/community
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/george.thompson._/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@george.thompson_
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/georgethompson.uk

Follow Wonderstruck:
Website: https://wonderstruck.org
Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From a coffee farm in rural Colombia to the psychoanalytic couch, Macario Giraldo has spent his life listening for the quiet forces that shape a human life: language, loss, desire, and love.

At the age of ten, Macario left his family to join the La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order that would become his home for the next twenty-five years. Beneath the structure of faith and vocation, an early sense of separation endured. Over time, it found expression as a desire for something he had long deferred: a family of his own.

A Fulbright scholarship brought Macario to Washington, D.C. It was here that he received a rare dispensation from the Church to leave the brotherhood and encountered psychology and the work of Jacques Lacan, which would shape the rest of his analytic life.

In dialogue with Colette Soler, an analysand of Lacan, as well as clinicians Marianne Goldberger and Hugh Mullan, Macario developed a distinctive approach to group therapy informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. In his work, he listens not only to what is said, but to what stirs between people: the unconscious processes that emerge in groups, including conflict, desire, identification, and shared symbolic history.

In this episode, we explore:
✦ Cause and triggers
✦ Group therapy as a modern ritual
✦ Lacanian thinking beyond the individual
✦ The fantasy of complete satisfaction
✦ Listening as a psychological practice
✦ The journey to become your own friend

Macario invites us to wonder about the desires that take shape in relation to others, the limits of certainty, and how, over a lifetime, we might learn to live more truthfully with ourselves and with one another

Chapters
0:00:00 Introduction
0:03:21 Picasso and the Desire of Others
0:08:27 Presence, Absence, and the Fort-Da Game
0:15:18 From Coffee Farm to the Christian Brothers
0:18:53 Discovering Jacques Lacan
0:24:49 Jouissance: The Pursuit and Crisis of Desire
0:30:34 The Unexplored Gold Mine of Group Therapy
0:38:34 The Power of Listening
0:41:35 Anxiety is an Index of the Real
0:48:27 Faith after Dogma
0:55:35 The Journey to Become Your Own Friend
0:58:13 Gardens, Love, and Wonder: The Closing Note

Follow Wonderstruck:
Website: https://wonderstruck.org
Substack: https://newsletter.wonderstruck.org
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@wonderstruckpod
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wonderstruckpod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wonderstruckpod
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wonderstruckpod
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wonderstruck/id1671879661
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6fS5boWGwYTShddG7SKlVw
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.