In this beautifully imaginative conversation, I’m joined again by Zoë from The Runa School to explore how ritual and play can come together to help us navigate grief, transformation, and everyday life. You can listen to our first conversation on the Kind Business podcast over here.

Zoë shares how her work designing ritual games grew from her studies in rites of passage and her deep interest in how we can bring the sacred and the playful into conversation. We talk about the ritual game she created for me, The Grandmother’s Quilt, and how this experience opened a space for healing, intimacy with the land, and a sense of being witnessed in grief.

Together we explore:

• How ritual games bridge devotion, creativity, and play

• What it means to be seen and held in moments of transformation

• The healing power of simple, repeated acts of presence

• What it looks like to root into community, ancestry, and the land

• How we might bring ritual and reflection into workplaces and everyday life

Zoë also shares her vision for the future of The Runa School: bringing ritual games into collective spaces and reimagining our relationship with technology, storytelling, and community care.

Zoë Ackerman is a co-founder of Mycelios, a game design studio, and Runa, a school dedicated to teaching and learning animist ritual. Zoë draws on over a decade of experience in participatory design, rites of passage, and embodied storytelling. Originally from Charlottesville, Virginia, Zoë now lives in Curitiba, Brazil, on the ancestral lands of the Guarani, Kaingang, and Xetá peoples.

You can find Zoë’s work and sign up for her newsletter at runa.school.

You can join our weekly glimmer sessions here: https://griefmagic.com/blessings/

and this is the link to my business group program Rooted: https://pinkwellstudio.com/rooted/

Thank you for listening!

Love,

Yarrow

Enrollment for Rooted 2026 closes this Sunday, January 25th, and I would love for you to join us. In this short episode, I’m sharing what to expect inside the program and a few new updates that make it an even more beautiful experience.

You’ll hear about:
🌿 The six themes we’ll explore together in Rooted
✨ The new series of short pep talks you can download and listen to anytime
🕯️ Two new Sunday co-working sessions for peaceful focus and accountability
💛 The new six-month payment plan and sliding-scale options (starting at £50/month)

If you’ve been thinking about joining but haven’t said yes yet, this is your moment. Rooted begins on Saturday, February 1st, and I can’t wait to get started.

👉 Learn more and enroll here: https://pinkwellstudio.com/rooted

Today I want to talk to you about something really simple but surprisingly life-changing: the emotional support bag.

I started this practice in 2021, after my friend Francis died. I was deep in grief, and at the time I was mostly homebound due to an accident and lockdown. My days blurred together and it was just hard to keep track of things. I noticed that the things that could give me comfort, like a soft blanket, a lip balm, my stimmy toy or a good smell were always scattered around the house. So I began gathering them into a small zip pouch that I could keep near me at all times.

Over time this became what I call my emotional support bag. It’s small enough to fit in my backpack, but full of things that make moving through the day easier. I know this is super simple, but its also great magic.

Here are the two links I mentioned:

Weekly Glimmer sessions https://griefmagic.com/blessings/

Rooted group program https://pinkwellstudio.com/rooted/

Thanks for listening!

Love,

Yarrow

I'm delighted to greet the new year by sharing a beautiful conversation I had with Eileen March of My Luminous Life. Eileen brings such a rich background and really touching insights to the table. Here is some of what we talked about:

• Simple ways to live a more magical life
• Slowing down enough to notice what we actually want
• Embracing what we can learn from loss and good grief
• Listening to our bodies even if we don't always get the message we want to hear

Eileen March is a spiritual coach, energy healer, podcast host, author, and slow-living witch devoted to helping women reclaim their power, reconnect with their bodies, and re-enchant their everyday lives. With a background in both midwifery and religious studies, Eileen bridges the sacred and the practical—weaving together science, spirit, and soul.

Eileen is the founder of My Luminous Life and the creator of Unleash Your Inner Witch, a powerful program designed to help spiritually curious women remember their magic and live with more meaning, fulfillment, rest, and peace. She’s passionate about dismantling hustle culture, listening to the body’s rhythms, and creating brave, nurturing spaces where women can feel held, seen, and safe enough to transform. When she’s not coaching or holding ceremony, you’ll find her reading stories of hope and healing, tending her garden, or snuggling her sweet kitty.

• Connect with Eileen on IG
• Download Awaken to the Magic Within (free eBook)
• Follow Eileen on Insight Timer
• Send Eileen an Email eileen@myluminouslife.ca

You are still welcome to join in the winter season of weekly glimmer sessions over here and here is the link to Rooted, my business group program over at Pink Well Studio.

Thanks for listening,

Yarrow

Happy New Year! I wanted to share a few small and gentle rituals for the beginning of 2026, little ways to mark this moment without rushing toward big resolutions or putting pressure on ourselves to reinvent everything overnight.

I am still hibernating over here, so all I am trying to do is to prepare the soil for what will grow later in the year.

I’ll walk you through a few of my favourite winter rituals: clearing and tending to your home, creating more space in your calendar, and checking in with friends who might need extra care this season. I’ll also share a reflection practice around defining your own sense of enoughness so you can move into the year with a little more peace and clarity.

Finally, I’ll guide you through a simple ritual of writing a prayer for the year or the season ahead. It can be something short and personal that you keep close to remind yourself of what you most want to feel.

This is also an invitation to join the winter season of our weekly glimmer sessions. These are beautiful drop ins on a Monday where you can be creative or do little rituals with other like minded people who want to begin the week (and the year) as they mean to go on: https://griefmagic.com/blessings/

Thanks for listening,

Yarrow

In this solo episode of Grief Magic, I share some gentle reflections on protecting your time and energy in the year ahead, so there’s room for meaningful connection with your grief, your body, and your creativity.

I talk about how we can be intentional with the spaces we inhabit, both physical and digital, and create an environment that supports healing and rest.

You’ll hear about:

• Making physical space in your home by decluttering gently and reconnecting with what you already have

• Reviewing spending and prioritising experiences and community over buying new things

• Curating your digital world by choosing what you engage with and using blockers or breaks to make space for stillness

• Spending social time more intentionally and finding joy in making things together

• Asking what your grief actually needs from you right now, and creating rituals that allow it to move through you with tenderness

This episode is also an invitation to join the winter season of glimmer sessions, which start next week: https://griefmagic.com/blessings/ This is a beautiful space for creativity and renewal and there are sliding scale options available. We would love to have you!

Thanks for listening,

Yarrow

I wanted to close out the year with one more solo episode, talking about how I am celebrating and keeping things soft and simple. I am also sharing ideas for including loved ones we lost into our rituals, setting boundaries with family and making travelling more comfortable. Finally, there are some rituals for the winter solstice and a Rauhnaechste practice I am doing in here.

Whatever you are up to, I hope you are ending the year with lots of rest and permission to dream.

✨ The Winter Glimmer Sessions begin in early January: weekly creative and ritual circles where we can rest, create, and tend to our inner worlds together. You can find all the details at https://glimmerportal.com/blessings/

Love,

Yarrow

Misha of Hafez Death Care, my guest for today's episode, has a really beautiful podcast I hope you will check out too - it's called Halva for the Heart and I was honoured to be on episode 14. In this conversation for Grief Magic, we went both deep and wide into some really meaningful topics that I hope you'll enjoy too:

• Dying and grieving in diaspora
• Small and big rituals that help us navigate losses
• Listening to our bodies in the face of death
• Continuing connections with people we have lost

Misha (she/he/they) is an Iranian-American death doula and grief tender whose work honors the sacredness of death and the political power of mourning. Their path into this calling began at the tender age of twenty, when they were blessed with the gift of witnessing their mother’s death. Today, through Hafez Death Care, Misha offers culturally-rooted, anti-imperialist support for dying people and their loved ones before, during, and after the dying process.

They also provide grief tending for personal, collective, and ancestral grief, teaching that grief is both an emotional process and an act of resistance. They facilitate community grief events, offer one-on-one death midwifery and grief support, and host Halva for the Heart, a podcast exploring death and grief through a diasporic lens. Misha’s work is grounded in the belief that by caring for our Dying and tending to our grief in community, we strengthen our movements for justice and deepen our capacity for collective care.

https://hafezdeathcare.com/

You are invited to join the Winter Magic retreat here: https://glimmerportal.com/tarot-for-grief-winter-solstice-retreat/

Thanks for listening!

Love,

Yarrow