ElderWare: Story Work and Aging in the mid-21st Century

Episode 22 - Ron Pevny

Ron Pevny is the founder of the Center for Conscious Eldering [https://www.centerforconsciouseldering.com/] and the author of "Conscious Living, Conscious Aging: Claiming the Gifts of Elderhood [https://www.centerforconsciouseldering.com/conscious-living-anniversary-edition/]". He has spent fifty years helping people move through life's major transitions — from his early training with the pioneers of the modern vision quest movement to his work leading week-long retreats at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

Episode 21 - Xanthe Golenko on Intergenerational Care in Australia

My guest is Xanthe Golenko, an Australian researcher, practitioner, and now storytelling facilitator based in France. Xanthe came to this work through an unlikely path — nine years as a professional dancer, a detour into business and healthcare research, a PhD in organizational culture in public hospitals, and then a fateful introduction to intergenerational practice that, as she puts it, just hooked her. What she witnessed — the bonds, the joy, the transformation in people who had been reduced to a diagnosis or a room number — changed the direction of her professional life.

Episode 20 - Pia Kontos

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Episode 20 - Pia Kontos

Dr. Pia Kontos is a senior scientist at the KITE Research Institute at the University of Toronto, and her life's work is challenging the idea that dementia means the self is gone. Drawing on embodiment theory, she argues that agency, humor, creativity, and relationship persist through the body even in severe cognitive impairment — and she builds the evidence for that argument through documentary film, research-based theater, and dance programs that put people living with dementia at the center of their own stories.

Episode 19 - Kinde Nebeker

Kinde Nebeker is a rites of passage guide based in Castle Valley, Utah — out near Moab, which is about as magic a piece of geography as this earth has to offer. She trained in transpersonal psychology at Naropa University, and has spent decades guiding people through vision fasts rooted in indigenous ceremony, stripped of cultural appropriation, but full of the original medicine: solitude, fasting, land, story, and deep listening. This conversation went places I didn't expect. It usually does when someone knows what they're talking about.