The Becoming Podcast | Season 4; Episode 2 | Carmen Spagnola on rites of passage, questing and becoming an initiated adult

The Becoming Podcast

On this month's podcast, I had the great pleasure of connecting with Carmen Spagnola. I first learned of Carmen's work quite a few years ago now, and since then have taken a number of her programs. I value her as a teacher and guide also exploring what it means to traverse rites of passage and other initiatory experiences, as well as a fellow multipotentialite who sees the throughlines and patterns between seemingly unrelated things and, in so doing, brings us ideas and concepts that are inspiring and new. Here's a little more about Carmen: she works at the intersection of attachment, somatic attunement, and personal/collective trauma. People find her because something is collapsing within or around them – their relationship, self-identity, ecosystem, or something else. Carmen is a trauma recovery practitioner, clinical hypnotherapist, attachment support worker and teacher, podcast host since 2014, Wilderness Quest guide, Le Cordon Bleu (Paris)-trained chef, rose and vegetable gardener, witch of no particular affiliation, and animist, among other things. She has taught intuition development workshops since 2011, including her popular year-long program, The Numinous School, which ran for 7 years online. Her courses, workshops, and live classes are now found all in one place in The Numinous Network. Her book, The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year,will be released on October 18, 2022, by Countryman Press | W.W.Norton. In this episode, Carmen shares with us the catalyzing moment that brought her to her knees – and to the way she lives and shows up in the world, as well as in her work, today. She talks about how she followed her childhood spiritual curiosity into learning about and supporting people from a rites of passage lens through ritual and initations. Carmen shares with us the Four Shields of Human Development model of transformation that she uses as a framework for this work. Then she dives into a Quest story that beautifully illustrates how this framework shows up in people's lived experiences. We finish our conversation with Carmen sharing a bit about her upcoming cookbook, which I literally •cannot wait• to have on my shelf! I loved this thoughtful, rich and meandering conversation with Carmen and I hope you do too!