Ep 10: The Unexpected Path from Disordered Eating to Deep Nourishment with Clara Belize Wisner

What if true nourishment isn't about following the perfect diet—but about learning to listen to your body, reconnect with the Earth, and trust the wisdom you've carried all along?

In this heartfelt conversation, Lindsay and Scott sit down with holistic nutritionist and mineral balancing practitioner Clara Wisner to explore what it means to nourish the whole person. Clara shares her journey from childhood fascination with the human body, through years of disordered eating and body dysmorphia, to discovering a more embodied, intuitive approach to healing.

Together, they explore the profound connection between nourishment, motherhood, the natural world, ancestral wisdom, and the body's incredible ability to communicate what it needs. They also discuss why healing isn't about fixing ourselves; it's about remembering our place within nature and learning to trust the intelligence of our bodies.

If this conversation resonates with you, Clara's work extends far beyond this episode. Through her Deep Nourishment course, one-on-one mentorship, and writing, she guides women into a deeper relationship with nourishment, mineral balancing, feminine physiology, and the body's innate wisdom.

In this episode, we explore:

• Clara's journey from disordered eating to deep nourishment
• What embodiment really means—and why we're never truly disconnected from our bodies
• The connection between mineral balancing, nourishment, and long-term health
• Motherhood as a catalyst for healing and transformation
• Why our symptoms are often invitations to listen more deeply
• The role of nature, land, and ancestral connection in nervous system regulation
• Orienting to the Earth as "Mother" and reclaiming a deeper sense of belonging
• Raising children with a stronger connection to food, nature, and the rhythms of the Earth
• Why healing begins by learning to stay on your own side

Connect with Clara:

 Website: https://www.clarawisner.com

 Deep Nourishment: https://www.clarawisner.com/deep-nourishment

🌿 Substack (Remothering): https://clarabelize.substack.com

🌿 Instagram: @clarabelizewisner

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who is longing to reconnect with their body, the Earth, and a more nourishing way of living.

Connect with Lindsay & Scott: 

To learn more about our retreats: www.homesteadandheal.net

Connected with Lindsay: https://www.instagram.com/lindsaycourcelle/

Connect with Scott: https://www.instagram.com/alchemygardens/

If you loved this episode - it would mean so much to leave us a review!

Connect with Lindsay & Scott: 

To learn more about our retreats: www.homesteadandheal.net

Connected with Lindsay: https://www.instagram.com/lindsaycourcelle/

Connect with Scott: https://www.instagram.com/alchemygardens/

If you loved this episode - it would mean so much to leave us a review!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome to Homestead and Heal. I'm Scott.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont. Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth. And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world. Our bodies are part of it. Our healing comes through it. And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth. Okay, welcome back to Homestead and Heal. I'm so excited to have our friend Clara here today. And we met Clara, or I met Clara because she came for a deep alchemy immersion, which is my 15, or maybe we did 10 hours, 10 hours in a week of body work. I can't remember which one we did. I was quite pregnant.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

You were really pregnant, yeah. And I think that was the last one that you did, or last working week or something with Serena.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Yeah, I was very pregnant with Serena and Clara came for an immersion where we do a lot of bodies in one week. And I just absolutely loved meeting you and working with you. And then of course, I've just I've loved reading all of your beautiful writing, and I can just feel that you are such a deep, not just a deep thinker, but a deep feeler and have so much connection to your body and the earth that you are an obvious choice for us to work with. And then just in the last year, Scott and I have and our family have started working with you in mineral balancing. And I'm really excited to keep exploring that realm for us as well. Anything you want to say about? I I've brought Clara into our life and yeah, no, I think that's a good introduction.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Yeah, and I know Scott's listened to more of your podcast interviews with other people than maybe I have and has found them really enlightening too. So we would love for you to just introduce yourself, Clara, if you could tell everyone just a little bit about yourself and what you do.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah, thank you for having me. I love you guys. It's so fun to be here and an honor. Yeah, my name is Clara Belize Wisner, and that's my business name as well, Clara Belize Wisner. And I am a nutritionist in the simplest of terms. I'm a holistic nutritionist, and I've been working with women in particular through the field of nutrition for about almost 13, 14, 14 years. Yeah. And so it was a calling for sure. And I think we're gonna talk about my childhood a little bit, so I won't go too far into it, but I've always been like obsessed with the body, and from a very young age, from five years old, I was like asking all sorts of questions and reading anatomy books, just looking at them like picture books. So I have this deep connection to the body and curiosity around the body from a very young age, and that did turn into a lot of obsession in my teenage years, that kind of healthy, that healthy curiosity like interest, like really morphed into something like disordered eating, body dysmorphia, extreme exercise. But that also taught me a lot about the body and my body, and now I see it looking back in hindsight as such an education in empathy and understanding of like the limits of the body. And I always say I teach nourishment for embodiment, and one of the reasons I can do that is because of like how undernourished and disembodied I was at one point, and so my journey coming back into embodiment, and we're all embodied all the time, so it's not I feel like that word has a lot of context that I don't necessarily agree with, but yeah, my journey back to my body, my journey back to nourish nourishment as a whole word, like not just the physical body, but the mental, emotional, and spiritual body as well is a big piece of my work. So nowadays I work with women who feel called to do broader looks at their physical health, like looking at their physical health from the physical, but also from these different aspects, and this more there's a lot of space in my work for women's process with nourishment itself. And I also do mineral nutritional balancing, and that's part of the physical work that I do. Tons of functional testing. I have a pretty wide array of what I can use as far as tools, but I think the people, the women that work with me, and few men, and they're all the partners of the women, and Scott's one of them, and I love that, and I do work with the coolest men, but yeah, they all tend they all are partners of women that I've worked with. And yeah, I do mineral nutritional balancing and bioenergetic nutrition and bring that into this kind of whole body, whole system, whole person framework.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

That's awesome. I like that you mentioned that we always are embodied. This is something that has come up a lot for us as we were approaching making this podcast and thinking about it, this idea of disconnection and really recognizing that we are never disconnected. We are our nourishment comes directly out of the earth and we are of the earth, we are the earth, and it's in our modern world and just lives that in our mind we can we can be less consciously connected. And that's like but how these words are thrown around. That's something that I think about a lot. So I like that you specified that. One thing that we like to do, since you're calling in from Montana, is that right? Uh we always like to connect to what's going on in people's in the natural world where you are. Here we're finally into our July summary, whether the Lindens are. I noticed the one out in front of your office is not quite blooming yet. Yeah. But a bunch of them, like the Linden trees, are in full bloom, mostly around here, which is just a very magical time for us. The Linden and the Elderberry at home, it's probably past flowering here in the valley, but up in our sort of mountainee home, the elderberry just in the last couple days is in full bloom and the linden. So those are things that we're excited about. Anything that pops out for you that's exciting and waves.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

Yeah, also just we had a lot of rain in June, which is great because our snowpack wasn't gonna be good. So our rivers are like cooking right now. I live on the Jefferson River, which is great, and it's really green, and it's yeah, I would say full bloom. It the vibe is full bloom, just all the green. And my daughter just found the first raspberries in our garden yesterday.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

And there's just mint is everywhere. We've been harvesting a lot of mint and making sun tea, and and we just made watermelon mint popsicles.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Oh, that's a good idea. I just got a watermelon, and our kids have been crazy for mint tea the last few days, so that's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Yeah, that's good. Very excited. Yeah, and peonies are going in our garden, and yeah, everything's just alive and feels great. And it's not like the crispy like end of summer yet. So everything's still like juicy.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

Yeah, that's cool. I've only been in Montana once in my life for the better part of a week when we're passing through a dropping my friend off who was going to school in Missoula.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

And yeah, that's where I went to undergrad.

SPEAKER_02 8:32

Okay. It was very, it was a big fire season. There was fires everywhere, and like all of Montana that I saw at least was just really cooked brown. This was in August, like middle of August. And it was just very crispy. Are you in a place where it's green part of the summer and then eventually it gets crispy brown?

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Or yep. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know you guys are in Vermont, and I remember when I was there, it was I was just like, there is just plants everywhere. This is so cool. Yeah, no, it's you get the gamut, but no, it's definitely a lot less lush than where you are.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

But you get the big skies, and I'm missing that from growing up in Kansas. Just when I landed down outside Denver on the flat part of Colorado, I was like, whoa, I have forgotten about these big skies. And like there's something so special about that. And I guess it just, yeah, depends what you connect with more. But yeah, so spacious.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Yes, really specious.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Thank you for that. And we do just want to kind of ask a little bit about your childhood. You mentioned looking at these anatomy books, but definitely just do you see these any more stories of how you ended up where you're at now on your path in life, specifically like maybe starting with your connection with the body and those anatomy books, and what else you remember about those early years and feeling into who you are today?

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Yes, yes. So just and also I'm thinking about orienting to land and earth. And I so my parents met in the Peace Corps. So they were in the Peace Corps when it was like just started in the 70s. Maybe they were like super early 80s. No, they would have been like late 70s. Yeah. So they came from different worlds. They my mom's from California, my dad's from Wisconsin. I think for both of them, going to Peace Corps was like quite a big thing. And there's definitely an environmental it's culture and it's what they like dip diplomacy in a way. I was in the Peace Corps as well.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

Where did your sorry to interrupt, where did your parents serve in the Peace Corps?

SPEAKER_01 10:47

They were in Belize. Oh my god, that was my Belize as a church. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

Cool.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

Yeah. So my middle name is Belize. So while they were there, my dad was a beekeeper, and he's always been his he grew up on a dairy farm and he's always been really interested in farming and the land. And so I think the Peace Corps for him really got him more able to do things like beekeeping, and he was organizing cooperatives and things like that. And so yeah, he just always wanted to be a farmer. And my mom grew up in California going on backpack trips. She was like part of the Sierra Club, and her family. I was just with her brother and her sister's husband, and they're all in their 70s, and they're all still, they just went on this four-day camping trip and like wow riding bikes and going hiking. They're more active than me, I'm pretty sure. And yeah, I did I definitely have this on both sides, this kind of deep connection to nature and earth. And so I grew up camping a ton. And because they were in the Peace Corps, they had this book called Where There Is No Doctor. And that was the book that I was like obsessed with because it was literally like a handout of or like a reference book of how to deal with things if you were in the jungle and you didn't have a doctor close. So it was like, how do you set a broken leg? And like, how do you deal with parasites? I just loved it. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. So grew up, I was born in Florida. I moved to the East Coast for a while, but most spent most of my childhood in Montana, right around where I am now. And so yeah, there's also just a huge culture of land stewardship and outdoor activities and recreation. And we grew up, we camped a lot, we backpacked a lot as a kid, and there was a lot of my dad is didn't become a farmer, although he does have a greenhouse and he has done various business things to try to be a farmer. But ultimately he became an agricultural economist and he spent his life's work really working on promoting organic farming and showing through study that studies and meta-analysis that organic farming is better for the earth. That's a big thing that he was trying to show scientifically, economically.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

Yeah. So yeah, I have, I remember hearing a lot about GMOs as a kid and how bad they were, because that was like when they were really starting to take off. And so I definitely have, I'll say programming around leave no trace, organic food systems, small scale, small scale farming. A lot of, and my sister took in my dad, she's here right now, took over in my dad's footsteps and is continuing a lot of the work, similar work that he did, and also wants to be a farmer ultimately. So yeah, so tons of connection to the land and earth and nature as a baseline for my life. That's awesome. And the body. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yeah. And with the body too, I'm curious on your paths. It sounds like when you were younger, you were really exploring, trying to learn more about the body or just fascinated by it. And then would you tell us a little bit more about getting into maybe your teenage years and whether you feel like you were keeping that? If did you feel still connected to your body as you were starting to move into that dysmorphia and disordered eating and things like that, or and to the earth, or were you what how do you how would you describe your path through that?

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah, I would say, oh man, there's so many directions and threads you could pull there. But I yeah, around 13 or something, I started to become really aware of your bot of my body as you are, how it looks relative to other people's bodies, things like that. And you grew up at the same time, I'm sure it was, you know, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, and I don't know. I wasn't like super my parents, we didn't have TV, but once you're when you're a teenager, you get exposed to stuff. It wasn't like we had social media, but I guess cosmopolitan, I don't know. Yeah. And yeah, I just that just really, for whatever reason, hit me. And I think because I am, I was and am so interested in the body that there was a certain way that it hooked me that maybe it wouldn't another kid because I don't have it. It wasn't like my mom was super critical. I'm sure my mom has her own stuff with her body, but it wasn't there wasn't a super toxic, like at home relationship with food or body or anything like that. So it is interesting. Like, why did it grab me and why did I have struggle with it so much? But yeah, I started to get really obsessed with exercising and be like, can I like give myself a six-pack? And it was really like this self-experimenting, like, I want to impact my body, like I want to see if I can change how it looks. And so there, I do have a kind of obsessive, like learning mind, like still, and I've learned to work with it more, like where I'll just get interested in a subject, and I just I have to get to the bottom of it, like I have to understand all of it. And if you're know about human design, I'm like a one-three, so the one is the investigator, it's just drill all the way down to the bottom until you're like, so I have this innate like drive, and I think that did drive a lot of the disordered stuff because it was like a game for me. It was like a it was all a learning experience. There was, I think in some ways I was still connected to my body more than you might think because I knew it was wrong, actually. And I was on a different podcast a while ago where there was two of us getting interviewed, and we had both kind of had this journey of disordered eating to healing, and the other person said, Oh no, I thought I was right. Like I always thought I was like the I this diet is the right way. This, and I always, if I'm honest with myself, I always kind of knew I'm like, this isn't right, this isn't good for me. But I was like, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it because of this like obsession with experimenting. And so I think there was like a connection to the to the core of me always watching what I was doing. There's the observer and then there's the one doing it, and I was always observing myself. I remember a few moments in high school, especially being like, This is too far. You've taken it too far, and backing off, and then going back in and backing off. And that's how disordered eating is. We you don't just you would die if you just kept you're gonna you have to eat at some point, right? So there's this binge restrict cycle, of course. And then for me, it was this kind of yeah, I don't know, experimentation for sure. And like I said, looking back on it, I feel so much compassion for that teenager and early 20s, and also all the stuff that comes with controlling nourishment and how that makes you feel like you have more control over your life, and and there's a spirituality to it. The emptiness feels really like you do get to access states that you don't get to access when you're super grounded, which I think is really attractive for a lot of the women that I work with and myself who tend towards that kind of anorexic not eating enough or did. So, yeah, there's a lot of exploration, there was a lot of life lived through those experiences for sure.

unknown 18:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say also, I feel like the earth and my connection to nature saved me in a lot of ways because when I was deepest in my disordered eating, I would still I would go out and I would talk. Now I think of it as talking to the trees. And at the time that wasn't exactly how I thought about it, but yeah, I would go out in nature and it would be like the one place I could feel myself. And I always had that connection to being outside and feeling really comfortable. I know some people find nature scary or something, and I always found it very soothing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Yeah, that's what I was wondering because it seems like maybe the combination of your earth connection and connection to the land, and probably I'm guessing probably just some of the programming of your parents who were in the Peace Corps. You just had this knowing that our kind of American over culture and Cosmo magazine or YM or like all those lose five pounds in whatever, however many days. That was that you, I'm sure you had a sense from all of that was like not right when you say you knew it was not right. That's what I was thinking about. But also just how, yeah, it's interesting to think about nowadays, and there's a lot of conversation around social media being so toxic for young women, young girls. But even back then, just the way those magazines they just created this gap from like where the average person is and all of the super skinny models in those magazines. And I was thinking about this at the beach the other day because we just got back from Maine and looking around and just I'm always so amazed at how different each body is. You don't go to the beach and see two bodies that look the same, but then in a magazine, it's like everybody is practically the same. So it's a very, yeah, it creates such a distorted sense of reality. I would I I feel that way, and I would imagine it's like that for many women and girls as they're growing up and getting more curious about like how their body's changing, for example.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah. Yeah. Mirroring is so important growing up. It's always important, but we this is a big part of my work. I say I'm in service to the mother, like this mature feminine aspect that lives in the earth that is mother earth in a lot of ways. And like she, when we have that in our lives, we will be reflected, right? That's part of what the mother does. She reflects to the child, oh, honey, you're feeling upset. Oh, you're feeling sad. Oh, it looks like you're hurt. Just those little things, those are mirroring when we're saying that. And oh, that's how we know. Oh, I'm feeling upset. Oh, I'm feeling hurt. And when we don't have the mature feminine aspect, I think the teenage years get so chaotic because we're looking for that mirroring, and then we get it from our peers, or we get it from magazines, or we get it from celebrities, or we get it from TV shows. And yeah, then that mirroring is just terrible. It's not, oh yeah, like this is what happens. Like your body is gonna, you're gonna feel things that you didn't feel before, and you're gonna your body's gonna change. And it's gonna look different. And and I don't, I know I didn't get that as a teenager. Like it was very I don't know, it all felt rushed and it all felt shameful and it all felt confusing and like no one was guiding me. So I think in a lot of ways it's a reaching for just a need that we have, especially as teenagers, and that we just don't have a big presence in the world. And actually, that's a huge part of my healing in my older years has been orienting to earth as mother.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Will you speak a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Yeah, I think we need to have like a cosmology that includes us as women. And I think even if we didn't grow up, I didn't grow up in like a Christian household per se or a religious household, but the West were just generally indoctrinated with the Judeo-Christian mythos and stories. And those don't a lot of times include women, or they include women as like Mary Magdalene as the prostitute, and there's not like this mother figure. There's Mother Mary a little bit, but she's really taken from a lot of like more pagan indigenous traditions that just needed a because they were like, you can't take away the mother. So yeah, I think that all women these days, in the West at least, are really starving for a cosmology that includes them. And that we can trace a lot of our suffering, women and men, back to this missing archetype, back to this missing aspect of our cosmology. And so, yeah, it was just really important for me to find this archetypal mother somewhere that I could relate to, that I could connect to, that I could be in communion with. And it's not because like my mother isn't a good mother, it's just like she's a human and we're all like humans. Like, I'm I can't be the perfect mother for my kids either. And so as you get older and you become an adult, it's like you have to find. I feel that I had to find like the father and the mother. And that's it's a spiritual way of talking about it, I guess. But I needed to orient to something that I could always go and that could always hold me, that was always there, that held those qualities of the good mother for me. And yeah, Earth has always done that. I realized it wasn't really, oh, I'm gonna now orient Earth as mother. It was like, oh, that's what I've been doing, and I can do that more consciously now.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

Yeah, that's really beautiful and puts words to things that I've thought but or felt, but not really verbalized. And I do wonder in that, I know you said it's not any particular moment, but do you have any clearly you are really healthy in a lot of ways, and you've oriented your life to health now. And so are there some moments where you can feel like you started to move more in that direction and where maybe these ideas came and started to solidify, or anytime you had real epiphanies around your body or the earth?

SPEAKER_01 25:23

Yeah, I becoming a mother was like really when that started to consciously come online, which as when as I'm sure people listening know, becoming a mother is such an intense, for me at least, shattering of who you think you are and and a rebirth of you as someone, as mother, or as mother of two or as mother of three, or whatever it is. And yeah, I had boss babed super hard and I was still working in the field of nutrition, so it's not like I was like did some crazy career shift or something, but I was working in the field of nutrition and felt good and was good at it and doing good work, but I always felt like is this it? There's so many women that it's like I'm just gonna give them a diet plan and some supplements, and then that's it. Really, that just doesn't feel like it. And then I became a mother and I was yeah, I can't actually I can't do this anymore. I can't do the same thing every day. And then I had two babies super close together, and so I had another baby within a year, and that second postpartum was just so intense. I was not sleeping, I was super anxious, I was I gained 80, 200 pounds, give or take, depending on where you start it. But with the pregnancies and stuff, but yeah, my body changed. The first pregnancy, my body changed and it was disorienting, and I had to face a lot of the continued disordered stuff that was still in the waiting in the wings. And then the second pregnancy was just like like I was just dissolving completely, and and so yeah, orienting to my body as not broken was a huge arc of experience, and that was really important for me to be like, yes, my body looks like it's not perfect or it's it's not the ideal, but I have to trust this process, and I'm still in that, honestly. But yeah, that that second pregnancy, basically going through burnout and reorienting a lot of my work, reorienting a lot of my identity, reorienting and just having the experience of being mother and what that does to your heart and breaks like how it breaks you open and softens you and requires you to receive in ways that you haven't before. That all was like a huge reorientation to I would say the feminine and what it means, what the feminine means. And I found a lot of relief and holding through the earth during that time when I was so desperate. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

And that's really what she's here for is to hold us. And I find that the older I get, the more I can also feel into that. How really it's been throughout my life that I've felt so held by the earth, but especially becoming a mother, and I'm sure in different ways becoming a father, just yeah, that like you're speaking of, it's like such a dissolution of who you are. Just yeah, that idea of dissolving, I think, makes a lot of sense because it's just such a big change. And for you to have gone through it two times in a short span, I think for me, like my children are fairly I'm three or so years with my first two kids and then five years. And so there's been this point in the maybe three years after where or two years after, maybe where things are like really shifting, and I'm having a little bit of change in who I am, and then I'm pregnant again, and then I can like change again, but like you kind of got it's like you're getting hit by a bus or something.

SPEAKER_01 29:25

In in scuba diving, I think they call it the rapid descent. It's like when you just drop. Yeah, that's what it was. It was like rapid descent into motherhood. That's kind of how I do things. That's part of like the disordered eating too. I am a person of extremes. I just I can't help it, but I'm sure I'll gentle out as I and I am gentling out as I get older, but I have just lived a lot of lives and a lot of extreme things. And I guess it's just the way I learn.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

It's for me, it's really cool hearing your story again because I find over and over my particular interest has been in herbalism over recent years, but oftentimes the best practitioners are folks that have really lived the things that they're really good at helping other people to face and heal from. And yeah, so it just seems like your experience in life, while I'm sure, were really difficult at times and so challenging, but also so informative to the work that you bring forward. So that's I don't know. There's some sort of gift in that.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Yeah, I have a teacher that says your medicine is your experience, the skills that you've your experience, your life experience, the pain, the suffering, the holes you've crawled out of.

SPEAKER_02 30:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

And then your skills, your schooling, your kind of professional experience, if you will. What skills have you built, and then your gifts. What were you born with? What did you just come in with the world knowing? And it's like those three things working together are someone's medicine for the world.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

I love that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

So yeah, that those holes you crawled out of is part of it for sure. Makes sense, it makes sense of all of the suffering or the struggle. Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

I was just wondering, we did talk about body connection, earth connection, but besides your parents, we didn't get in into any deeper ancestors. I'm wondering if there's anything you want to share about your ancestors and or just how you're mothering your daughters, because I know you're a very intentional mother, and just I'm thinking about those. Yeah, just the ripple effects both in both directions.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Yeah, I yeah, I don't my ancestors are pretty European. On my dad's side, it's pretty Norwegian, Scandinavian kind of. And then on my mom's side, it's Dutch and English, German, Europe. But yeah, and I actually like my husband for Christmas this year got me that this book of the ancestry on both sides. It's really cool. Oh cool. So I haven't done a ton of that kind of stuff, and I yeah, it's like you can, it's all of these family trees on both sides. So yeah, but I don't have a grandparent that came from a intact culture and made food. There was a little bit of that on my dad's side, talking about being Norwegian or Polish, which they were too, but yeah, no intact traditions that I was exposed to for the most part, which I think is something I'm like currently interested in. Connection to land and from the nourishment perspective, right? I've been doing a fair amount of stuff with indigenous cultures. Here, the Blackfoot Indians that live here in Montana, I've been doing some learning with them on herbs and local plants and stuff. And then I've attended Moondance, which is an indigenous kind of feminine ceremony in Mexico. And yeah, I've just really been acutely aware of I feel so connected to the land that we own here that I live on. It is generational land. My husband's grandparents are buried here. So as far as Europeans go and Americans go, we have a connection to this place, and I feel it in my body. The land speaks to me. We're in relationship. I built a yurt on our land here because the land told me to, and not crazy, oh, it told me to, but it was like very clear. This is the land wants to work, is how I look at it. It wants to work, it wants to heal itself and others and be like a grounding point here in this on this land. So there's a deep connection, but what I feel when I'm with these indigenous people is it's nothing. I have nothing compared to what this guy that's been teaching me about the herbs. He's like, This is my family's land forever. Like forever. From the beginning of time. My ancestors have lived here. Yeah, and it's just like there is such a uh a nutrient that we are missing, even if we are connected to the land that we live in. There's just something that we will never hopefully maybe some we have to create something new because we can't go backwards. And things have really been severed for a lot of people with European roots. And obviously, there's trauma and issues with the like the blacks, but Indians hear insane amounts of horrible things that have happened to them in the more recent future, so that they remember still. And we don't even remember our severing, which is in some ways, even it's so sad, right? It's just like we we can't even remember the fact that we were that connected to the land. And I've just been thinking about, and one's not worse than the other, anything. It's just the point is that we are all traumatized by this disconnection from the land and the relationships that we that would have just been so innate for most of our evolution as human beings. And that like the way that grounds our nervous system to like have relationships with the plants that our ancestors had and have that be passed down, for example. I mean, yeah, I don't know how we get that nourishment in this day and age. I don't know like where you can access that kind of deep safety that comes from knowing that the land has you and you like that you are part of the land and that the land is part of you. And someone I was just talking to in a like an event that I was just part of was like the tagline was like land is kin. It's that it's like knowing that land is kin, that we are the land and the land is us, like land is kin is a redundancy because it's all just us. And we like can conceptualize that and maybe even feel it, but that is not part of like our everyday life as much as I would like it to be. So I'm trying to, I think you asked me about raising my kids, and I'm like, I'm trying to raise my kids with just as much connection to the land and to their nourishment that comes from the land as as humanly possible. Yeah, but I do think that is something that we don't, it's like an elephant in the room when I think about nourishment and the way that we think about nourishment and like how we just don't even like land isn't even part of the picture a lot of times. I mean, it is for you guys, but but it's like the sixth vital sign or something. Yeah, I can and women's bodies are are especially connected to the land. We have so many health issues and fertility issues, and saying it's we are land is kin. We are that land.

SPEAKER_02 37:13

I like that phrase, and I can relate to all of that. And it reminds me of we interviewed Pam Montgomery, who's this sort of herbal world elder who teaches a lot about plant spirit medicine, and she's just really amazing. She actually lives in our local community here, but cool. We were having this conversation with her about like how long will it take for us to reclaim what you're describing? And we got to this point in that conversation of it depends on how we live. We were talking about our kids, our seventh generation here in Vermont. And when you were just talking about that, I was thinking of I was thinking, I I knew my great-grandparents pretty well, and I was really close with my mom's grandparents. And my great-grandfather came from Italy, and he traveled when they came to this country. They first actually went to Kansas, where Lindsay grew up, which is just an odd, funny thing. And then they moved to Vermont, and he talked a lot about how he felt really at home here because it just reminded him of home. And we traveled to where he's from, which is like just getting into the Alps. So our mountains aren't like that. But there's like a lot of other feeling of the place that I guess felt like home for him. And I feel like part of that puzzle is just the relationship with if you're like starting to raise your own food, if you have a hand in nourishing yourself from being in partnership with the earth, then I feel like we start to get back towards that pattern. It's of course different from knowing your people's creation story was like in that mountain over there. My people like came, like their mother is that mountain, and it's been that way for eternity. That's something I can't relate to. But I do think that the earth is like a single living entity. And if we can tap into that feeling. And I think really I was talking with someone the other day, and I always I've had this feeling for a long time. If Lindsay and I could do anything, or if I could, really, Lindsay's focus is more on people finding home in their bodies or finding the patterns in their bodies and all this sort of thing. And mine is more helping people find that connection with the earth. But I had this feeling for a long time. We wanted to promote this program called, what do I want to call it? Everyone grows. There was a program called Everyone Eats, and it was like helping connect people with local food. And I really wanted to push this initiative that was like Everyone Grows. The idea being even if your family had one meal a year that was stuff that you had a direct hand in nourishing and coaxing out of the earth, I think that could have the power to change your relationship in such a big way. And so our conversation with Pam got to the spot like, how long will it take us before we feel indigenous or are indigenous? And we just got to it depends on what our lives look like, how close we're living to the land. But I love thinking about topic.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

Yeah. Go ahead if you want. You go. I was just gonna say, I was thinking as you were talking about your connection with the land earlier. I was just having this wondering around, I don't know, I'm not gonna be able to articulate this very well, but just around our souls. And obviously, there are so many different beliefs around this sort of thing. But like Scott was describing his ancestors feeling at home here in Vermont because it was similar to where he where they were from in Italy. I just have this wondering of, I don't know, there are just certain types of music I hear sometimes, like music from like different parts of Africa, where I'm just like, what is my connection to this, to this music? Like there's gotta be some soul connection here. And I just wonder about that too. And I don't know, I have nothing more to say on that. It's just a wondering of mine of what are all the different it, it's like we can think about ourselves as being a body, as being a mind, a heart, a soul. And it's like we are so complex beyond whatever we can learn in a book. It's just we're way beyond that. And so just thinking of all those different ways that the aspects of who we are might connect with the land or yeah, or the earth. I don't know. I'm just wondering about that.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

Yeah, no, I love all of these things, and I think I yeah, I can get a little bit like, oh my god, like Scott's saying, having that creation story, that cosmology of that mountain is my mother. I yearn for that on some level. And like I said, like we can't go backwards. We can't go back to that. And that was the time of a lot of separate, right? There was indigenous people and they stayed in there one. And we're that's just not the world we live in. We live in this international global world where we can fly to the other side of the world in a few days if we wanted to. Yeah, there's something about there's something new. I think that yes, I want people to connect to the land, and yes, I think that the more connected you are to the land that you live on, the better. And there is something that we have to create, something new. We have to, there's something about like coming together as humanity and the earth and recognizing that there are these unbroken lineages that deserve so much honor and respect and and sacred holding. And there's gonna be new practices, new ceremonies, a new earth, if you will. And that's part of the evolution as well. And I don't know what that's gonna look like at all, but I do know that it's yeah, that it comes from like staying in our bodies, being connected to our bodies, being connected to the earth where we are. And I do I've worked with ancestors like shamanically a fair amount, and like I have some ancestors like in like that kind of Norwegian that feel the most connected. And I live in Montana where there's a ton of snow, and like I could never like I am I love the ocean, but like I would never live by the ocean. I would always want to live in like the mountains in with the winter. I can feel that in my body, in my soul, in my and it's like, why is that? Is that because of my blood ancestry or is like my soul? I don't know. And then there's like astrocartography with like your soul. I have a soul line that goes right through Montana. So no wonder I feel so at home and connected here. And yeah, I also know that I do have some Native American in my ancestry on my mom's side, and so maybe I don't like who knows, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:56

That is cool, and you've led into the next question, which Which is what are you excited about moving forward in your life, in your work?

SPEAKER_01 44:05

Yeah, in my work, I'm really feeling moving even more into working with a smaller amount of women and maybe some men in a more kind of longer term way. I really feel it's great to offer accessible things and to work with a lot of people. And I've learned so much, but I'm really excited about longer-term, bigger containers, deeper work where we can really work with nourishment from a more almost symbolic place and really work with dreams, symbol, HTMA, blood labs, the body, food. And yeah, I wanna, I really feel excited and alive when I think about working with women in that way. And I do that, but it's like a smaller part of my work. I would like it to be the bulk of the work that I do with women. And I have deep nourishment course. I just, it's ready. It's I recorded it live, but now it's like anyone can take it. I'm really excited about it. I'm very proud of it. It feels like my body of work. I just these last 12 years, I've just created this body of work that now is packaged. And I know courses are dead because of all the AI stuff, but I'm like, well, this is- I don't think that's true.

SPEAKER_00 45:27

That's not true. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

I keep hearing that, but I'm like, but I'm really proud of this course and I'm really proud of the way it covers the basics of my work and then what that's gonna allow me to expand into with deeper one-on-one longer term containers. So I'm really excited about that. And personally, we are moving to Mexico for nine months in August. So we're not gonna be on this land, which felt so weird. I was like, I thought this land, and but I really think we need to break some stuff. You just get on autopilot and things just get busy, and I don't know. I feel like we need a break and sabbatical. And and my husband wants the girls to learn Spanish, and so they'll be going to Spanish-speaking Waldorf jungle school.

SPEAKER_02 46:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 46:21

And we'll be working just remotely, and and I'm really excited about that adventure for our family. It feels like a huge closing of a chapter and pause, and then like when we get back here, like I said, the land wants to work. We just built this year, we have intentions to buy another 150 acres. So there's a lot of potentially stuff like you guys are doing on your land, or my my sister wants to be a farmer. I don't know. There's a lot of really exciting potential after that. So that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 46:55

That's so exciting. And yeah, and I also just wanted to speak to your desire for more depth with your clients. And I just think that that does sound like deep nourishment, not only for your clients, but for you. You need to do work that feels deeply nourishing instead of being like a fast food restaurant that people are getting their quick fix.

SPEAKER_01 47:17

Yeah, yeah, that's really my big thing is like even with social media, like I'm like, I don't want to create these like little things that people like I want the people that want to read my like writing and my longer listen to my podcasts. And anyway, I'm in a big reorganization with that right now.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

It'll be exciting to hear. We'll have to do another interview sometime when you're either when you're in Mexico or after, just to hear how being on different land and with different I'm so curious about it because here in Vermont, I don't hate the winters, but I also am not one of those people that's I love winter. I'm just there are different periods of time where I'm like, oh, this winter is feeling oppressive right now. And I'd much rather be in like a rainy ocean. For me, it's more like thinking of England or something like that. And so I'm curious, I'm curious how that will feel for you to be in a place with a lot of life growing during the winter as opposed to like the space that you usually have in not space, but like that cold bounce of winter.

SPEAKER_01 48:22

It's hibernate, it's a hibernation here for sure. Yeah, I am a little, I'm a little apprehensive about that, to be honest. And like I need the cool down. I get quite hot, I get fiery, and it's like I need that put to bed sometimes and rest for a month or two. But we'll see. It all feels aligned. Yeah, yeah. I feel very connected to Mexico too. I've spent a lot of time there, and I moondance is a big was a big deal for me, and that's in Mexico. And so there is definitely a connection to Mexico as well.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

Amazing. I think just our kind of last question or last couple questions. One is just what is advice that you wish you would have gotten early on for thinking about people listening to this podcast who might be just feeling into their path in this world.

SPEAKER_01 49:11

I feel like it's something around like there's no rush, there's no urgency. I wish someone would have told me like take a deep breath. This is the process, you are on the path. Like we talked about, like all of these negative things in a lot of ways that happen in my life, like really do inform who I am and how I work with people and how I feel, and like how relatable I am, and not that it's all about how I relate to other people either, but yeah, like you are becoming and you can trust that. And as long as you are, as long as you can stay with yourself, I think this is really key. It's like as long as you are on your own side, because I define healing as being on your own side. So if you can be on your own side, if you can stay with yourself, you can't make a mistake, you can't go wrong. And you may go, you may go through a lot of pain, you may go through a lot of difficult situations, but if you can stay with yourself, there's nothing to fear. Stay with your heart, stay with your broken heart.

SPEAKER_02 50:31

That's amazing advice. I love framing it that way. That's really nice.

SPEAKER_00 50:37

Okay, could you just share? And I love that too. Sorry, I didn't respond to that. I would love it if you could share just where people can find you and learn more about your work.

SPEAKER_01 50:47

Yes.com is a great place to find out about my work. I am taking an Instagram break, and like I was saying, I'm in this whole thing with social media, but at Clara BelizeWisner on Instagram, I have tons of content that you can go check out and get a feel for me. And I also write on Substack a publication called Remothering, and that is to what we spoke about orienting to Earth as Mother. It's really documenting very personal process that I've had through becoming a mother and what it's like to live a life oriented to and in service to the mother and this mature feminine aspect, and like how do we what's it like to live a life devoted to that? So I that's available too. And that is also available on Spotify as a podcast. I read my own writing called Rebecca. I didn't realize that.

SPEAKER_00 51:44

Well, okay. Thank you so much, Clara. I've loved this conversation so much, and you're just so wise. And I would highly recommend people checking out either your writing or this podcast of your writing because it's just so beautiful and such an inspiration to me. And I look forward to when my kids get a little bit bigger and I have a little more space for some of my own writing again as well. But thank you for being here and we really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 52:13

Yeah, thanks.

SPEAKER_00 52:14

Thank you guys. Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal. If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review. For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.

SPEAKER_02 52:29

We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.