Resident crone, Joan Advent invites women of all ages to return to the wisdom of the body as an antidote to what former guest Marion Rose PhD., calls “Disconnected Domination Culture.”
From her chaise lounge beside her dog, Molly, Joan reflects on the body as a wise elder, the foundation of our humanity, and a sanctuary that reconnects us to our sacred nature. Drawing on Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, she reframes healing as allowing “the soft animal” of the body to love what it loves—not through numbing out, but through becoming more alive, connected, and oriented to a deeper truth.
Joan invites the listener to unplug from stimulation and come home to breath, heartbeat, and simple sensations, sharing practices like stillness, slow stretching, micro-movements, and observing animals as teachers of comfort and ease.
She also highlights the body’s innate wisdom, the heart’s steady miracle, and a few mysteries of human biology—offering the body as a compass for navigating collective chaos and the unknown.
00:00 Welcome to The Crone Codes + Today’s Theme: Coming Back to the Body
01:27 The Body as Wise Elder (and the Cost of Disconnection)
03:12 Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”: Let the Soft Animal Love What It Loves
05:53 Disconnected Domination Culture: How We Lose Our Yes/No and Our Power
08:00 Return to Sanity: Unplug, Breathe, and Rejoin Life’s Natural Rhythms
09:58 A Sacred Heartbeat: Remembering the Miracle of Being Alive
13:31 Simple Practices: Stillness, Stretching, and Micro-Movements
16:44 Go Out of Your Mind, Return to Your Senses (Daily Body Reverence)
18:25 Body Mysteries: Heart-Brain Cells & Fetal Microchimerism
20:55 Learn from Animals + Closing Blessing
From Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Love & Will with Marion Rose PhD. Episode 6
Transcript
Joan: Hello, welcome back to The Crone Codes. I’m your host, the creator and resident crone Joan Advent. I’m sitting here on my chaise lounge today and my sweet little dog, Molly, is lying next to me. Just breathing in the beauty of the day. I’m looking out the window at the sunlight on the barren trees in the woods beside our house.
And what I want to talk with you about today, as Molly takes a deep breath is returning to our body. Molly’s taking a deep breath. My stomach is gurgling and what I’m aware of is just how important it is for us to have a relationship with our body.
To recognize that our body in so many ways is like a wise elder. It has been with us from the beginning. It’s been with us from when we went from two cells to four cells to 16 cells, and on and on and on.
It is the foundation of our humanity, this body that we’re walking around in.
And as my friend and former guest, Marion Rose speaks about the “Disconnected Domination Culture” that we are all living in.
The whole purpose of the disconnection is to cut us off. To cut us off from our true, sacred nature and our organic nature, all of which is found in our body.
I’ve heard it said that the definition of Christ is the sacred or the essence of God in form and so to that extent, we are all Christed beings.
And I want to go back to my favorite Mary Oliver quote from the poem, the Wild Geese. I’m doing it from memory, so I may not get it a hundred percent correct, but essentially the poem opens with you do not have to. Repent, crawling on your knees a hundred miles. I’m getting it totally wrong. You do not have to crawl upon your knees a hundred miles repenting through the desert.
You only need to let yourself love. You. You only need to let, you only need to allow the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
I’ll put in the show notes, the exact quote, but you get the gist. And with that, Molly is sitting up and readjusting.
Those few lines of that poem, Wild Geese, I would say has been my North star, my Soul’s North Star in the lifetime. To remember that it’s not about repenting, it’s not about earning.
It’s not about questing, but being here in human form, being on the planet is all about allowing the soft animal of our body to love what it loves.
And when we do that, it’s not about numbing out or getting high.
In the deepest sense when we allow the soft animal of our body to love what it loves, it brings us alive. It connects us with who we are at our deepest core. It connects us with the whole of life. It brings us back to that Christed state, to that sacred within human form.
So why is this so important? It’s so important because facets of what, as Marion describes it, the “Disconnected Domination Culture”. The key facets of that are all about keeping us disconnected from our body. Our body, which registers our innate Yes or No. Our body, which houses our capacity to tune in and to sense and to know and to read what’s occurring.
What’s occurring within us, what’s occurring around us. Our body, just like an animal’s body that is capable of sensing safety, danger. Desire, all of these very important innate, instinctual facets of our human body, that when we’re disconnected from that we are in part, disconnected from our power.
We’re more susceptible to our nervous system getting flooded and overwhelmed by sensory input that keeps us looping either in a, like a, a loop of adrenaline, a loop of, um, cortisol. Stress hormones. And when you look at the way our lives are set up these days, certainly in Western culture and here in the United States,
like it is not set up in a way that honors our body and our being. It’s not set up in a way that honors our connection to each other or to all things. And so I’m here today to remind you that coming back to your own body is a way.
It’s a way to counteract that. It’s a way to return to sanity.
When I think about all the things that are being, revealed at this time, uncovered at this time, just the, the chaos, the mayhem, the crazy that is in the collective.
Our systems are not designed to metabolize all of that all at once. However, if we are able to just come back and be with ourselves to be with our bodies and unplug from all the stimulation and just tune in to the rhythm of your breath, the beating of your heart. It’s like to the rhythm of your bones, the rhythm of your breath, the rhythm of your blood, it’s like the natural pulsation of life. It brings us back to something that is organic and true and wise. And we need that right now. We need our connection to our human body. We need our connection to its wisdom.
We need our connection to the memories that our body holds. We need our connection to the emotions that are filtered, or are a we’ll say, a standard feature of our body.
So I’m remembering, it’s probably been six years ago or so, my daughter. Needed to have a, huh, what’s the right word? A sonogram of her heart.
I believe it was a sonogram. And I was there in the room with her when she had it done. And I just want to share with you that it was such a sacred experience to witness my daughter’s heart beating, like to see it up on the screen, beating rhythmically over and over and over again. It was such a sacred moment and it, it gave her pause as well as a young teenager to witness that. And as I sit here now, just the remembrance or the knowing that our hearts are beating in this moment. They’ve been beating from the time we were in our mother’s womb and they will continue to beat. And just for a moment, if you can close your eyes, if you’re able to just allow yourself to tune in, whether you can feel the rhythm of your heartbeat or not. But to just know that there is this steady pulsation within your chest.
Your heart is pumping and delivering oxygen and all the good stuff to each of your cells. As well as taking out what’s not needed and releasing it back to be, to be dumped out. Like that, that every moment of every day your heart is beating. And that is like a miracle. I mean, I, I know we take it all for granted, but it’s nothing short of a miracle. Human life is nothing short of a miracle, and being on this planet, being on this planet is nothing short of a miracle.
And when we connect with our bodies, we remember that. We remember the miraculous. And while it seems like life in these days can feel like a, a dumpster fire with everything being exposed revealed and on and on in the way people are treating each other. When we can come back to the simplicity of letting our body love what it loves, just pausing and taking in the breath
and recognizing the sacred in this moment, it really starts to cut through all the crazy.
So I want to invite you to just let yourself enjoy moments of stillness.
Where you pause and just register your breath.
And I also want to encourage you to experiment with a practice. One of the practices I enjoy, which is my body, The soft animal of my body loves to stretch. And to, um, just like you might watch a cat move or even a dog move, or any animal, they’re so good at stretching and uh, just kind of stretching into the body. Just almost like slipping it on like silk stockings, just the way that they move in this very fluid and intentional nature. And I want to invite you to experiment with long languid movements in the body or micro movements.
Just seeing how small you can move. It might even be one finger or just moving in the most subtle ways as a way to begin to come back to your body, to your beautiful body.
There’s so many things , so many avenues and threads that I could go down in this episode, which I’m, I’m going to save some of those for another day, but, but I just want to invite you to return to the wonder and the simple sensations that we can experience within the body.
So again. Just inviting you to experiment with whether it’s slow, subtle, micro movements, or if you could imagine the way an infant might be playing with dust moats that are floating through the air, just allowing yourself, whether it’s through your hands. Or opening up and expanding through your arms or, or just exploring spiral movements through your wrists, your hands, your legs, your whole body to just let yourself explore. And I like to say, sometimes we need to go out of our mind. These days many are going out of their minds, but I want to invite you to intentionally go out of your mind and to come back to your body, return to your senses. I want to invite you to go out of your mind. And return to your senses. Return to the sacred yearnings of your body, loving what it loves.
And as you move through your day I want to just plant the seeds of remembrance to hold your body with the sacredness it deserves. So whether it’s moving with intention, listening to your cues, your hunger cues, your fatigue cues, need for rest, need for water. Or, or whether it’s, as you’re putting on your clothes or looking in the mirror, just celebrating the miracle and the sacred nature of this incredible body, like this sanctuary for your spirit That is such a miraculous biological computer, Extraordinaire.
Before we close, I’ll just offer the reminder. Not a reminder, but just offer that I learned that, you know, that our heart actually has brain cells. And that our heart is able to tune in seconds, microseconds before the mind. And I just offer this as one of the small pieces of the miraculous that is our human body.
And another that comes to mind is the way that when we as women are pregnant, whether a baby is delivered to full term or not. Anytime we are pregnant, there are residual fetal cells that live within a woman’s body forever. As long as she’s still alive, there are cells from the fetus that she carried whether there is a miscarriage, whether there is a live birth, uh, still birth, no, no matter how long the term is. That, that these are some of the sacred mysteries and there are so many more. I just want to remind you that this body, this vehicle you’re moving through time with, through life with is so worthy of your honor. And of coming home to, and remembering, and to listening in.
Listening in to what it loves. Listening into its visceral yes and visceral no. If we just do that in this year. Or in this lifetime or in this phase that we’re all in, we’re, we’re just going to be better off. It, it’s going to short circuit any misery, any, and it’s just going to make things better. And it’s going to give us a true north, or a compass. It’s going to give us a compass that we can orient to. And don’t we all need this as we’re navigating the great unknown that we’re walking through in these days.
And for some next level mentoring or tips on how to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. If you have a pet, I recommend that you take some time to just observe the way they move, whether it’s. The request for belly rubs, the laying on their back and waiting for a belly rub, or it’s the cat that comes and slinks up next to you, sidles up next to you.
Or they just come and curl up in your lap or put, put their head under your hand. Just become a student. Become a student of the animals, and consider how can I bring that comfort level, that comfortability with just letting my body love what it loves? How can I bring that home? Into my day-to-day life.
How can I, in any given moment, whether you’re driving, whether you’re cooking, whether you are sitting and working at your desk, how can I invite in even more of what I want? What my body, what would make my body feel good in this moment? What would help it just relax or feel more of a sense of ease in this moment?
So I want to invite you. To practice with that.
So that’s it for today. Sending you all my love, honoring your beautiful body as I sit here with Molly looking out the window at the trees.
And I do as always want to remind you that whether you are making ripples, perhaps the most subtle of ripples in your life, or you are making seismic big ass waves, you, you, my dear, our love. And you are loved.
