The Wild and Wise

Grief and Motherhood Entwined with Amber Magnolia Hill

Season 2

ep. #20
In today's episode, Mallika shares a conversation she had back in early December with Amber Magnolia Hill. Amber shares a lot about her personal experience loosing her mother in a car accident 5 years ago. She graces us with her vulnerability and authentic emotional experience as we dive into what It means to loose someone so vital, how she continues to tend her relationship with her mother and the entwined relationship with life/death-tending and motherhood.


Amber's Instagram
Amber's website Mythic Medicine
Amber's Podcast Medicine Stories 

Things we dive into in this episode:

  • Amber's experience of the grief of loosing her mother
  • Little "g" and big "G" grief
  • Grief is sacred space that continues to hold your relationship to something that existed. 
  • The darkness that thrives on the feeling of being alone 
  • The Inevitability of loss and death
  • How our culture is set up to deny death
  • Spontaneous, simple rituals to remember
  • Angelica, Osha and Violet - plants for allowing and supporting grief
  • The grief the come with motherhood
  • Impact of raising children outside of village/community
  • Motherhood and tending life and death
  • Creating containers for children that minimize cultural trauma
  • Healing and emotional self-regulation for ourselves as parents
  • The collective grief we are feeling during Covid
  • The complexity that can be held inside a conversation



The Denial of Death by Earnest Becker
The Belonging Podcast
Atlantic Article The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
Rachelle Garcia Seliga   Innate Traditions
Inuit Morality Play book about parenting
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
Brené Brown podcast with David Kessler




Ashley's website
Ashley's Instagram
Ashley's Parent Prayer Circle

Mallika's website
Mallika's Instagram
Mallika's Embodied Therapeutic Art Process

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