🎙️ The Love That Couldn't Stay

🎙️ The Love That Couldn't Stay

Some loves are not meant to last. They are meant to change you. This episode is the one I have been sitting with the longest. A love that was real and complicated and full of beauty and full of wreckage, all at once. A pandemic love that became a family, a crossroads that had no good direction, and the quiet act of handing someone you love the map to the place they needed to go, even when that place was not beside you. We steep with rose, lemon balm, hawthorn and mugwort tonight. You already know them from the Weekly Steep. Tonight they hold something different. This is for anyone who has ever loved someone they could not keep. Who has stood at the crossroads and found no direction without cost. Who is still somewhere in the middle of it and has not yet given themselves permission to grieve the whole of what was lost. Pull up a chair. The kettle is already on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe [https://thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

🎙️ Season 2: Tea Table Confessional ☕️

Some of us are not holding on to pain because we want to suffer. We are holding on because somewhere deep inside, letting go feels like losing it all over again. This Sunday at the Tea Table, we sit with one of the most honest questions I know: what if you are not grieving what happened — what if you are grieving who you were before it did? This episode is about the marriage we never meant to make. The one with our pain, our misery, our loyalty to suffering. I talk about what it really means to heal — not forgetting, not pretending it didn’t hurt, not leaving anyone behind — but learning to carry the love without carrying the wound in the same way. This week’s companion herb is Violet — Viola Odorata — a plant the grieving have been given for centuries. Not as symbol. As medicine. We explore its lymphatic action, its cooling nature, its heart-shaped leaves, and why it was the herb I chose over every mainstream heart herb in the apothecary. Come with your cup. Come with whatever you are still carrying. The table is set. The door is open. Dropping Sunday at 4:44 PM EST This Sunday. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe [https://thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

🎙️Season 2: The Living Tree Series

There is a sphere on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t sit at the crown, luminous and unreachable. It doesn’t root at the base in the dark earth of Malkuth. It lives in between — just above the ground, just below the heart — gathering everything that has moved down from the heights and holding it, distilling it, preparing it to finally touch the world. Its name is Yesod. The Foundation. The tradition numbers the tree from the crown down. We are beginning at the roots. So while Yesod carries the number nine, she is the second place we are learning to stand. Yesod is the moon’s territory. The subconscious. The sacral center. The etheric body that runs just beneath the surface of everything we think we know about ourselves — carrying our oldest emotional patterns, our most ancient blueprints about love and belonging and whether we are worthy of either. In this episode, mugwort walks in to tend the threshold. Silver-backed, lunar, oneirogenic — she is the herb that helps what is cycling underneath finally complete its cycle. That helps the dream say what the day will not. We talk about the long looking outward. About the moment you finally turn around. About divine love as something you recognize within yourself before it has anywhere to land from outside. About the gentle hand of angel numbers on the shoulder — 1:11, 2:22, 3:33 — the quiet reassurance that something larger is always paying attention. About the kind of love that doesn’t stop at the threshold. The kind that holds us through every form of crossing. This is Episode 2 of the Living Tree Series — eleven episodes, eleven sephirot, the Tree of Life mapped onto the body and the plant kingdom and the quiet interior life we are all navigating, whether we have a name for it or not. Brew a cup of mugwort if you have her. Set it beside you. Let her work while we work. The kettle is always on. 🌿 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe [https://thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Season 2: 🫖 Tea Table Confessional

Some medicine is not sweet. Tonight we are sitting with dandelion root — the plant most of us were taught to call a weed, the one that pushes up through the pavement anyway, unbothered and faithful to its own nature. In this episode, I asks what it means that so many of us learned to do the same: to smooth over our heat, to rename our anger, to fold ourselves smaller so the room would stay comfortable. This is a conversation about the difference between anger and grief — and the way one so often wears the other’s coat. I share my own story of growing up without language for the shape of my spirit, of being mislabeled in rooms that only made space for straight lines, and of nights under the northern lights in Alaska where something ancient finally broke open and began, at last, to move. Through the lens of TCM and traditional herbalism, dandelion root has a long relationship with the liver — the organ that, in many healing traditions, holds the weight of what we could not let go. It is a bitter herb, an awakener. It does not shame the body for holding too much. It simply, with quiet insistence, helps what has been held too long find its way downstream. Bring your cup. Bring whatever you’ve been carrying. The kettle is on, & tea table is here ready to catch you, and so is the conversation you may have been waiting a long time to have. Steeped in intention — offered with care. The Gilded Leaf 🌿 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe [https://thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Season Two: The Living Tree – 11 Insights from the Tree of Life

There is an ancient map. It predates the wellness aisle, the apothecary, the printing press. In the Kabbalistic tradition, it is called the Tree of Life — ten luminous centers of awareness arranged like a body standing between earth and heaven. Root to crown. Receiving to giving. Contraction to expansion. It was drawn as a tree. That was not an accident. In this first episode of Season Two series, we begin at the bottom of the Tree — in Malkuth, the kingdom, the ground. The sephirah of the physical world, the body, the actual conditions of your life. Not the life you’re narrating. The one you’re living. Malkuth asks the most unglamorous and most necessary question of all: Are you here? Are you in a body? Is that body safe enough to feel? We explore how Malkuth maps directly onto the root chakra — Muladhara — and what it means when the lowest point of our energy has been cut off from its source. We look at the herbs that live in this territory: dandelion root, burdock, oatstraw, nettle — common, humble, and quietly extraordinary plants that don’t bypass the body to reach the spirit. They go straight into the soil of you. This episode also includes a simple root check-in practice you can do with your next cup — three quiet questions that will help you locate yourself in your own life, without shame and without spin. In this episode: * What the Tree of Life is, and why it was drawn as a tree * The ten sephirot and how they map onto the human body * Malkuth: the kingdom, the earth, the place where spirit becomes matter * The connection between Malkuth and the root chakra (Muladhara) * The Malkuth herbs: roots and minerals that insist on contact with reality * A root check-in practice to carry into your week Subscribe to The Gilded Leaf newsletter for the Wednesday Weekly Steep — one herb, one feeling, one honest cup at a time. 🌿 thegildedleaf.substack.com [https://open.substack.com/pub/thegildedleaf] Steeped in intention — offered with care. The Gilded Leaf 🌿 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe [https://thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]