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Sex Birth Trauma with Kimberly Ann Johnson: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Kimberly Ann Johnson: Author, Vaginapractor, Trauma Educator
Cutting-edge, pioneering conversations on holistic women's health, including sex, birth, motherhood, womanhood, intimacy and trauma with doula, certified Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, and author of Call of the Wild and the Fourth Trimester, Kimberly Ann Johnson.
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- 1 weeks ago45 min
EP 249: Mothering the Mother – Granny Midwifery, the Lying-In, and Diasporic Memory with Shafia Monroe
In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Shafia Monroe, the renowned midwife, doula trainer, cultural historian, and author of Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing, with a foreword by Erykah Badu. Shafia begins with the inheritance she was raised on: a second-generation Boston Catholic mother who told her to burn the bra and not to stay anywhere she was unhappy, and a rural foot-washing Alabama father who turned an empty Boston lot into collard greens and turnips before anyone called it a community garden. From there the conversation follows the diasporic threads she has spent four decades tracing, from her father eating with his right hand to the Senegalese village where she watched women shape a newborn's head exactly as her mother had shaped her niece's. They talk about what enslavement broke in African-American postpartum culture and what was rebuilt after it: the lying-in, the warm soup, the darkened room, and a community that knew what to do without needing a book. Shafia lays out the history of the granny midwives, including the origin of the word granny itself. She and Kimberly work through the real difference between a doula and a midwife, why she trains in full circle rather than full spectrum, and why women are flock people whom Western birth deliberately separated. Shafia describes raising seven children inside the work rather than around it, and why the family that hired you has to come first. The conversation closes on money, policy, and fear: what makes birth work financially viable, what this country refuses to fund, and why she tells every woman and man she meets to stop fearing birth, to refuse the label of patient, and to trust a body that has been doing this since the beginning. Bio Shafia Monroe, MPH, is a renowned midwife, master doula trainer, cultural historian, author, and motivational speaker whose work has shaped birth and postpartum care for more than four decades. A leading subject matter expert on African American birth and postpartum traditions, she has researched the lives of twentieth century Black midwives and traveled to interview and observe them, learning traditional practices firsthand. In 1991 she founded the International Center for Traditional Childbearing, the first national nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of midwives and doulas of color and to promoting home birth in Black communities. In 2002 she created the SMC Full Circle Doula Birth Companion Training, a dual certification program built on the legacy of the twentieth century African American midwife, which has since trained thousands of birth workers worldwide. She is president of Shafia Monroe Consulting and Birthing CHANGE, which helps health care providers deliver culturally competent care. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including four lifetime achievement awards, and she was named by Scientific American in 2022 among those working to make health care more fair. Her book, Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing, with a foreword by Erykah Badu, was published by Hachette Go. She draws on her Southern roots in rural Alabama, where her grandmother taught her that food is medicine. She is a mother of seven, a grandmother of nine, and a great-grandmother of two, and she lives in Portland, Oregon. What She Shares - The two worlds she was raised between: a Boston Catholic mother and a rural foot-washing Alabama father - Her father turning an empty Boston lot into a garden in the 1970s, before there was a name for it - Her mother on burning the bra, on equality at home, and on never staying where you are unhappy - Why her mother told her that what people do not want you to know is kept in a book - Diasporic recognitions: eating with the right hand, banku and cornbread, rainwater, and infant massage - Watching women in a Senegalese village do exactly what she had watched her mother do fifty years earlier - Belly wrapping as something her community always practiced without a name for it - What enslavement broke in African American postpartum care, and what was rebuilt after emancipation - The lying-in, the warm soup, the quilts, and why the elders kept the room dark - African Americans as the country's dominant providers of postpartum care, and the credit never given - The granny midwives, where the word granny came from, and what it was meant to do - Why wisdom mattered more than whether a midwife had borne children of her own - The real difference between a doula and a midwife, and why she wants both - Full circle rather than full spectrum, and why the circle is the right shape
- 1 weeks ago51 min
EP 248: Rewrite the Mother Code – Losing Yourself, Self-Mothering, and the Courage to Rock the Boat with Dr. Gertrude Lyons
In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Dr. Gertrude Lyons, a master coach, podcast host, and the author of Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust, about what it takes to notice you have gone missing from your own life. Dr. Gertrude describes the moment on a pilgrimage in Nepal, with her children in high school and college, when she burst into tears in front of a shaman and understood that despite years of coaching, study, and conscious parenting, she had lost herself somewhere inside motherhood. That recognition sent her back to school for a doctorate in education and eventually produced the framework the book is built on. Kimberly and Dr. Gertrude trace how the messages get in: the primal, unconscious conviction that rocking the boat will make everything fall apart, the ordering of children and spouse and career ahead of self, and the false pretense that there is a right way to do any of it. The conversation turns to the hero myth and what it has done to mother culture, the pressure to be exceptional rather than to be on a journey, and whether twenty years of increased awareness has actually shifted anything underneath. She then tells the story of her 2025 TEDx talk, which TED would not post until she removed the birth data: the maternal mortality figures, the history of midwives being pushed out by active marketing campaigns, and the observation that not all hospital birth practice is evidence based. Kimberly picks this up and runs with it, on how the people the system appears to serve are the least likely to see it clearly, on birth as an irreducibly bodily experience that has been siloed off from the rest of a woman's life, and on what it costs to be defanged from your own animal instinct. Bio Dr. Gertrude Lyons is a master coach, podcast host, and thought leader helping women rewrite outdated narratives around motherhood, identity, and self-worth. She is the author of Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust, A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood (Rise Books, 2025), which grew out of her doctoral research into the transformational opportunity inside motherhood and has since become the foundation of a broader body of work with women at every stage of that question. She holds an Ed.D. and an M.A. in Transformational Leadership and Coaching from Wright Graduate University, an M.A. in Psychology from Antioch University McGregor, and a BBA in Finance and Accounting from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. She is a Whole Brain Living certified coach and holds a Level 3 breathwork certification through the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance. She hosts the Rewrite the Mother Code podcast, delivered a 2025 TEDx talk titled Redefining Self-Mothering: The Courage to Mother Ourselves First, and has spoken at the Glastonbury Goddess Conference. Over more than twenty years she has worked with individuals, couples, parents, and families, and she now leads retreats in Mexico and Ireland, with a first retreat in Malta planned. Her home base is Chicago. She has two daughters. What Dr. Gertrude Shares The pilgrimage in Nepal, the shaman, and the moment she understood she had lost herself inside motherhood Why two master's degrees were not enough, and what sent her back for a doctorate The difference between her first daughter and her second, and the fear she could only see in retrospect What rocking the boat looked like, and how couples coaching quietly became parenting coaching Leaving the dogma of a Roman Catholic upbringing while keeping the mystery, and finding the divine feminine The letter she wrote in 1989 asking her fiancé for premarital counseling, and why she could not say it out loud The hero myth as exceptionalism, and the journey as the whole point rather than the prize at the end What has and has not changed for mothers in thirty years, and why more information has meant more overwhelm Her home birth, being called selfish by her family, and the boss whose two suggestions changed her life The 2025 TEDx talk, the birth data she was asked to remove, and the reason she was never given Why she believes all women mother, and the
- 3 weeks ago1h 10m
EP 247: The Opposite of Hypervigilance – Boundaries, Healthy Aggression, and Reclaiming Fight with Jaye Marolla
In this episode, Kimberly is rejoined by Jaye Marolla, somatic educator, martial artist, and bodyworker, founder of The Body Innate, YINDOJO, and YinWarriorship in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Nine months and several co-taught weekends after their first conversation, and ahead of Jaye joining Jaguar Fight Club in September, they dive deep into their work with the word fight. Jaye explains why she has never used the frame of self-defense, reflecting on how it seats a woman inside a preconceived victim's stance and quietly assigns the whole burden of a culture's violence to the people most likely to be harmed by it. From there they make the distinction between readiness and hypervigilance, between the body that knows where the exits are and the body running a fear script it has mistaken for awareness. They look at what happens when a boundary comes from contraction rather than wholeness, at Kimberly's work restoring reflexive gestures in bodies that were anesthetized or held still, and at the longing for real physical contact that both of them keep meeting in rooms, and that many somatic training treats as inappropriate. The second half turns to the trauma frame itself, and what it costs in agency, artistry, and appetite when a culture organizes everything it knows about the body around what went wrong. They talk about animist inquiry and bone knowing, about somatic transmission versus the somatic exercise, about the long arc from trying out a practice to living one, and about the blueprint each person carries and what it takes to fight for it in a culture built to bury it. The conversation closes on the great work that may look like nothing you could post and on the power of a deeply quiet life. Bio Jaye Marolla is a somatic educator, martial artist, and bodyworker based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the founder of The Body Innate, YINDOJO, and YinWarriorship. A former Division I basketball player at American University, she has spent decades training across martial and healing traditions, shaped by years of living and studying in Ghana, China, Thailand, Central Asia, and England, where she became fascinated by lineage-based practice and the knowledge that travels tacitly, through transmission and embodied nuance. In China and Thailand she studied martial arts and healing practices alongside one another, and came to understand the two branches as growing from a single root. In Santa Fe she spent three years studying with her former teacher Zhenevere Sophia Dao in the practices of Post-Daoism and Mythopoetic Qigong. She weaves applied Daoism and conscious Eros through vitality-based teaching within a framework of experiential collaborative leadership and somatic activism, offering classes and intensives in Santa Fe, across the United States, and internationally, and working privately with individuals, groups, and organizations. She is a member of Soma Collective in Santa Fe, and has collaborated with practitioners including Stephen Jenkinson on retreats exploring death, embodiment, and communal practice. She joins Kimberly for Jaguar Fight Club in September. What Jaye Shares Why she has never gone near self-defense training, and why she considers the frame harmful rather than merely imprecise The difference between self-defense and self-awareness, and what changes when every body is trained rather than only the ones expected to be harmed Hypervigilance as a fear script running outside present time, and readiness as its opposite How a martial artist uses the imaginal capacity: not forecasting harm, but rehearsing the move she is going to make Boundary from the knitted sense of self versus boundary from contraction, and why the second one invites more antagonism The longing for real contact, why bodies are still recovering from the distance of the COVID years, and what animals know about grappling Ma-ai, the spatial and temporal distance between two bodies, and how we track it constantly without naming it The animist frame and bone knowing as a starting point rather than an advanced technique Why the trauma orientation functions as a distraction from self-agency, social activism, and collective inquiry Her objec
- 4 weeks ago1h 16m
EP 246: Whose Desire Is This? – Rematriation, Erotic Self Sourcing, and the Art of Touching Women with Casia Sobolewski
In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Casia Sobolewski, somatic sex educator, sexological bodyworker, and co-founder of the Himeros Project. Casia opens with the grief of a recent realization: that patriarchal structures had shaped even her most tender and private erotic world, and that some of the desires moving through her may never have been hers to begin with. From there she traces twenty years of exploring dominance and submission, the pull of the daddy dom dynamic in her twenties, and the question she is only asking now about why she had to imagine herself young to feel turned on. They talk about the "taking quadrant" of the wheel of consent and why so many exhausted women reach for passivity when what their systems actually want is mobilization. She describes the men's retreats she runs with her husband Cosmo Meens: what men bring to a room where their erotic lives are finally speakable, why starting with sexuality is both the hardest and the most important entry point in men's work, and what happens in a man's system when a woman says no. She unpacks matriarchy as mothers at the beginning rather than rule by women, drawing on Heide Göttner-Abendroth and the Mosuo, and names how the nuclear family loads one man with labor that once belonged to grandmothers, aunties, uncles and brothers. The conversation moves through early motherhood and the erotic tether Casia kept through it, the axial age and the cost of men teaching women how to care, aging and the erasure of the grandmother, and closes on the work she and Cosmo are renaming the art and responsibility of touching women. Bio Casia Sobolewski is a somatic sex educator, sexological bodyworker, and erotic practitioner who has been teaching sexuality since 2009. She is a certified Somatic Sex Educator and Sexological Bodyworker, a certified Holistic Sex Educator, and a trained intern surrogate partner with the International Professional Surrogates Association. She completed Dr. Betty Martin's Like A Pro Wheel of Consent training and has served on the boards of the Association of Certified Sexological Bodyworkers and the Somatic Sex Educators Association. In Toronto she founded Spit.Exposed, a queer and feminist porn project she ran from 2014 to 2019. From 2018 to 2025 she was a practitioner and teacher with Back to the Body: Sensual Retreats for Women. She is co-founder and ongoing practitioner of the Himeros Project, immersive retreats for men, which she leads alongside her husband Cosmo Meens, and together they teach The Art and Responsibility of Touching Women. She works in immersion experiences only, supporting people who are out of touch with their pleasure, who have experienced sexual trauma, or who want a space to meet the erotic aspect of themselves with integrity. She identifies as queer, non-disabled, introverted, non-monogamous, kink positive, married, cis, femme, a mother to one, a stepmother to three, and a devoted sister, daughter, friend and partner. She lives in British Columbia and her personal site is Honey and Water. What Casia Shares The grief opening three or four months ago when she realized patriarchal structures had reached into her most private erotic world Twenty years of exploring dominance and submission, and the question she is only now asking about why she had to imagine herself young to feel turned on Why so many women arrive wanting to be dominated, and why exhaustion and choice fatigue are part of the picture The taking quadrant of the wheel of consent, and the night she first took, tired, at 11pm What her men's retreats actually look like, including the numbers: nine to twelve men, three male staff, four female practitioners, ages twenty-eight to seventy-five Why she and Cosmo added mutual touch to the container, and how negotiation of desire is taught in micro steps What happens in a man's system when she says no, and why receiving a no is the skill that transfers to the rest of his life Matriarchy as mothers at the beginning, drawn from Heide Göttner-Abendroth, and the Mosuo clan structure where there are no words for husband or father How the nuclear family hands one stepfather the labor of grandmothers, aunties, uncles and brothers, and why he feels like he is failing </
- Aug 16, 20261h 9m
EP 245: The Contrast Is the Gold - Death Nesting, the Vortex, and Why Deathcare Belongs to the Village with Anne-Marie Keppel
In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Anne-Marie Keppel, death doula educator, founder of the nonprofit Village Deathcare, and author of Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula, about what has and has not shifted in the culture since she wrote the book. Anne-Marie traces the origin of Death Nesting back to her years as a licensed nurse assistant in residential care, a hospice volunteer, a Meals on Wheels director, and to the elderly homeless man she looked after through Vermont winters; work she did because she wanted to. They look at the 1920s as the demarcation point when care left the home, when antibiotics became a god and the hospital became the authority realm, and at what has been lost in the handoff from family to funeral home. Anne-Marie makes the case that death curiosity is healthy, that it is okay to want to see and touch a dead body, and that fewer than half of the 500 students she has taught ever have. She describes the vortex that opens when someone is leaving their body, why timing matters more than ceremony, and why she considers the celebration of life a travesty when it replaces mourning rather than following it. The conversation goes into difficult territory: what care workers have reported feeling after a medically assisted death, the sense of severing and whiplash, and Kimberly's parallel that you can die and death does not happen. They talk honestly about suicide, about normalizing the thought rather than exiling it, about the scammers now working the death doula platforms, and about why people who long for death often do not know what dead actually is. The episode closes on professionalization: why she calls the business plan death doula training a lost opportunity, why she teaches citizens rather than experts, why the hairdresser who talks about dying with people in her chair is doing death doula work, and why the point is to give all the knowledge and wisdom, everything you've got, away. If any of this landed close to home, you don't have to sit with it alone. In the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, day or night. BIO Anne-Marie Keppel is an international speaker, award-winning author of Death Nesting: The Heart-Centered Practices of a Death Doula, and founder of Village Deathcare 501c3, whose inspiration and purpose is incorporating deathcare into community. Of Irish Celtic and Finnish Sámi (indigenous Finno-Ugric) roots, she draws from her work as a death doula, nurse assistant, life-long meditator, Reiki Master Teacher and mother of three. She leads retreats and talks in Vermont, across the US, in Ireland, England, Costa Rica and Mexico on death, dying, healing and intuition. She lives in Vermont where she practices meditation, magic, community deathcare, trains her Siberian Husky (nonstop) and delights in her family's love. WHAT ANNE-MARIE SHARES Why she wrote Death Nesting from a place of genuine care and not a business plan, and how she only later realized she had accidentally built a business model The basic physical skills nobody is taught anymore: how to transfer someone from bed to chair, how to protect your own back, how to hold a body that cannot hold itself Her years as a licensed nurse assistant in residential care, a hospice volunteer, and director of Meals on Wheels in Montpelier, Vermont Caring for an 89 year old homeless veteran through Vermont winters, and what it taught her about doing the work when nobody is filming The 1920s as the demarcation point: hospitalization, antibiotics as the new god, and the hospital as a god realm where we send our loved ones away Why death curiosity is healthy, and why it is okay to want to see, touch, and smell a dead body That fewer than half of the 500 plus students she has taught have ever seen a dead body, at every age including into their sixties The vortex that opens when a person is leaving their body, why others feel it whether or not they know it, and why it stays open afterward Why the celebration of life is a travesty when it replaces the funeral, and why timing is the thing that matters What people have told her after being present a
- Aug 10, 202659 min
EP 244: Consistency, Not Perfection - Nutrition for Menopause and Beyond with Karen Newby
Kimberly wanted to speak with someone who was neither hormones-or-nothing nor going to offer complicated longevity protocol. Karen Newby is a UK nutritionist with a BSc in Nutritional Medicine and fifteen years of clinical practice, and she speaks with clear-eyed candor about how to support women's nutrition through midlife and beyond. What follows is a genuinely practical conversation. Karen explains why menopause is now classified as an inflammatory transitional event, what that has to do with joint pain, foggy head, eczema, and autoimmune flares, and how the shift in estrogen changes insulin sensitivity and where the body stores weight. Underneath the nutrition is a broader argument about what got lost for women in the hormone gold rush. There is useful myth-busting on creatine, on electrolytes as a marketing category newly aimed at midlife women, on the protein wars, and on why the ultra-processed conversation should be about refined carbohydrates and breakfast cereal rather than about whether protein powder counts. Karen's bottom line: the body wants to be well, consistency beats perfection, and confusion is the thing most likely to stop a woman from starting at all. Bio Karen Newby / Nutritionist BSc Nutritional Med, mBANT, CNHC Karen is a nutritionist, speaker, food activist, author and regular media contributor. She holds a BSc in Nutritional Medicine and has over 15 years of clinical experience. She works extensively with women navigating menopause and post-menopause, translating complex nutritional science into practical, sustainable strategies that support long-term vitality. She is author of three books focused on the menopause and post menopause: The Natural Menopause Method — a nutritional guide to perimenopause and beyond, The Natural Menopause Method Cookbook, and The Post Menopause Method — a nutritional guide to ageing well (out October 2026). Through her writing, she combines clinical expertise with practical recipes, lifestyle guidance and an emphasis on preventative health. Having lived for many years in China and Vietnam, she has witnessed first-hand how traditional food cultures place nourishment front and centre of everyday life versus the UK's ultra processed food culture. Karen is on a mission to help women reclaim agency over their health at menopause, through what they eat and how they live, and how we can learn from ancient food wisdom from wise women across the world. Living without a fear of ageing so our post menopausal lives can be vibrant, purposeful and fulfilling. What Karen Shares Why she isn't interested in telling anyone what to do and why the real obstacle is that women carry so much they can't get themselves onto their own to-do list Menopause as an inflammatory transitional event, and the through-line to aches, foggy head, eczema, psoriasis, and autoimmune conditions How changing estrogen affects insulin sensitivity, why weight moves to the middle, and the difference between metabolic change and cortisol-driven "worry waist" The protein-rich, fiber-rich breakfast as the single highest-leverage change and why caffeine belongs with breakfast rather than before it Her 1% / 2% / 3% framework: fifteen minutes for breakfast, half an hour for lunch, forty-five minutes for the evening meal A 14-hour overnight fast as the realistic version of intermittent fasting during perimenopause, and why long fasts during hormonal flux tend to backfire What she actually means by ultra-processed: refined carbohydrates, white bread, breakfast cereal versus the protein powders and jarred goods most people worry about Creatine: well researched, safe, cheap as monohydrate, not on her essential list, and the brain-health claims not yet supported by robust studies Why she's skeptical of electrolyte supplements for midlife women, and the Vietnamese soda chanh she drank through monsoon season instead The protein wars: why Blue Zones populations eat less protein than the West, and why she still thinks it matters at menopause Fat phobia inherited from a generation of calorie-counting mothers, a
- Jun 8, 202656 min
EP 243: Eating the Shadow – Mythopoetic Men's Work, the Lover Archetype, and Repair in a Villageless World with Ian MacKenzie
In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Ian MacKenzie, filmmaker, writer, mythosomatic guide, and host of The Mythic Masculine, about what men's work looks like in 2026. A fellow Orphan Wisdom scholar, Ian traces the mythopoetic lineage back through Robert Bly's Iron John, Carl Jung, and Marie-Louise von Franz, and describes how discovering Bly's book in his late grandfather's study set him on this path alongside his film work on feminine archetypes (Amplify Her). They talk candidly about the cultural moment — the "Rape Academy," the Pelicot case, the question of where the men are, and why the issues that feel omnipresent in some circles remain invisible in others curated by algorithm. Ian unpacks the medicine of mythopoetic men's spaces: how men can "put down the masculine pole" when others hold the container, why porn functions as a "toxic mimic" of intimacy, and how the shadow we exile grows hostile and acts out. They explore the lover archetype and erotic rites of passage rooted in his time at the Tamera community in Portugal, the "road of ashes" and why real men's spaces are composed of "failed heroes," and how to tend rites of passage for our own children by building real relationships with other men long before adolescence. The conversation closes on accountability and repair in a "villageless" culture, erotic leadership, and the inaugural Cascadia Men's Conference. Bio Ian MacKenzie is a filmmaker, mythosomatic guide, and the founder of The Mythic Masculine - a platform devoted to stewarding the soul work of men. For two decades, Ian has tracked the emergence of imaginal culture - from the fires of Burning Man to the streets of Occupy Wall St - amplifying the voices of visionaries, artists, and wisdom keepers working toward a more regenerative world. A 15-year scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School, and a four-time pilgrim to the Tamera peace research community in Portugal, he has dedicated himself to expanding the terrain of what men's inner work can be: weaving ritual, ancestral story, and somatic reclamation into a living path toward sovereign purpose. He is the co-founder of The Deep Masculine Journey, a 12-week initiatory program for men, and the host of The Mythic Masculine podcast. His films include Sacred Economics, Occupy Love, Amplify Her, and The Village of Lovers. He lives on Vancouver Island with his partner and son. What He Shares The mythopoetic lineage of Bly's Iron John, Jung, von Franz and finding the book in his grandfather's study in his mid-30s How exploring feminine archetypes through Amplify Her opened the question of masculinity for him Why the "where are the men" moment is so confusing for men who want to speak but fear getting it wrong The "hungry ghost" pattern: what happens when men locate all their Eros and vitality in women Porn as a "toxic mimic" (Caroline Casey's phrase) of real intimacy and reciprocity "Putting down the masculine pole" how men can finally fall apart when others hold the container "Eating the shadow" creating space for men to reveal trespass and explore real repair Erotic rites of passage and the lover archetype, drawn from his time at Tamera The "road of ashes," failed heroes, and the difference between olders and elders Tending rites of passage for our kids and why a parent is "disqualified" from leading their own child's Accountability and repair in a villageless culture, and the vision behind the Cascadia Men's Conference What You'll Hear What "the mythic masculine" means and where the mythopoetic tradition comes from Whether the erotic is "feminine" anima, animus, and locating aliveness inside vs. outside How algorithmic bubbles make the same cultural crisis omnipresent for some and invisible for others <p dir="lt
- May 25, 20261h 7m
EP 242: Arbitrary Intelligence - Tools, Limits, and the Willies of What's Coming with Stephen Jenkinson
In this episode, Kimberly is re-joined by Stephen Jenkinson, author of Trembling Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse, about the moment we find ourselves in with artificial intelligence and what it asks of us. They unpack the claim that AI is merely a tool; a real tool elaborates the capacities of the human hand just enough to reveal its God-given limits. Jenkinson suggests renaming AI "arbitrary intelligence," and traces how the rollout was designed to anticipate and absorb resistance before it could even form. Kimberly shares her own encounters with AI's creep into branding, self-driving cars, dream interpretation, therapy, dating, and her daughter's experience competing against Adderall and AI-assisted classmates. Together they explore whether willful underachievement might be the truest form of resistance and why the loss of kinship with the world is the precondition for welcoming a machine as your therapist. Jenkinson describes an MIT technologist's pitch to make him immortal through AI, and his fully human reply. The conversation closes with Jenkinson's own physical limitation, that unlike any Zoom AI companion, he can't sit any longer; a poetic, human ending to the kind of overflowing conversations that we've come to expect from these two. Bio Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, is a teacher, author, culture worker, farmer, and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School. He is the author of Die Wise, Come of Age, A Generations Worth, Reckoning (with Kimberly Ann Johnson) and most recently Trembling Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse. His work explores grief, elderhood, dying, and the deep obligations of being alive in a time of unprecedented consequence. He has a master's degree in theology from Harvard and a master's in social work from the University of Toronto, and spent years as a program director in a major Canadian hospital, where his work focused on the care of the dying. He lives on a farm in the Ottawa Valley with his wife Nathalie Roy. What He Shares: – Why AI should be called "arbitrary intelligence" and why the words artificial and intelligence don't belong together – The MIT technologist's pitch to make him immortal through AI and why he said no – The shift from Lascaux to Turkey: how humans went from small stick figures to the biggest thing that ever happened – Willful underachievement as the truest form of resistance – Why he's glad he won't see the future and the two-generation rule for language loss – The rollout: how AI anticipated resistance and folded it into the code before anyone could articulate their concern – His own physical limitation as the conversation's closing teaching What You'll Hear: – Kimberly's encounters with AI creep: branding, self-driving cars, Zoom companions, Microsoft Word prompts – Is AI a tool? Why a tool elaborates the hand and complies with God-given limits – Arbitrary intelligence: renaming the thing for what it is – The rollout: how resistance was anticipated, folded into the code, and served back as good soup – The allegation that this has happened before and why he doesn't buy it – The microwave precedent: how fast something goes from luxury to you're-a-buffoon-without-it – Slow food, fast food, and what you can't recover from losing – Kimberly's daughter competing unassisted against Adderall and AI and reinforcing the slower pace – Willful underachievement and failing to qualify as resistance – Leonard Cohen: none of us deserving the cruelty or the grace – The MIT pitch: wouldn't your grandchildren want access to you after you die? – Love must obey the limits of time and the human frame – The want machine: why wanting something for someone doesn't make it good for them – Lascaux to Turkey: from humans as tiny stick figures to humans as the biggest thing – The loss of kinship with the made world as the precondition for AI – AI as therapy, dream interpreter, dating coach, prescription writer and the abject loneliness underneath – Being hurt aloud about what we're willing to submit to – AI as you riffing on you being true to yourself as the thing that's being sold – Kimberly on the inescapable attack in nervous system language and whether talking about it helps or feeds it – SJ's body calling time: people learning from the part of you that you wish wasn't happening Resources Website
About Sex Birth Trauma with Kimberly Ann Johnson
Cutting-edge, pioneering conversations on holistic women's health, including sex, birth, motherhood, womanhood, intimacy and trauma with doula, certified Sexological Bodyworker, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, and author of Call of the Wild and the Fourth Trimester, Kimberly Ann Johnson.
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