Accidental Gods

How do we create healthy people, intimately enmeshed in a healthy biosphere so that, together, we can co-create routes to a healthy future?
Health is such an astonishingly polarised and polarising field: everyone has their triggers and there's not a whole lot of self-regulation when they've been activated. But there are some truly astonishing people out there who are fully on board with the concept that late stage capitalism is at the heart of our ills and that regeneration of our connections is the key to building health in all its senses. 
Amanda d'Almeida is one of these - a truly remarkable woman.  She's a family medicine doctor by training, and for most of us, going through a medical degree takes all that we've got.  For Amanda, not so much. While studying medicine, she also read for a Masters in Public Health - and wrote her thesis on the role of Regenerative Agriculture in community health. At the same time, she and her partner set up Medicine Explained on Instagram and TikTok, with the intent of sharing accessible information as widely as possible - their social media accounts have 1.6 million followers, so by any measure, we could say that's succeeding.  She co-founded and hosts The Nuance: a community health podcast exploring the nuance lost in today's discourse and centering narratives often not represented in media. The focus is on social and community medicine topics, specifically highlighting the intersection of human and planetary health including environmental and climate justice. 
She also co-founded the climate health co-op because she and her partner had been asked during multiple conferences to consult with folks on how to create engaging media, and instead created a community of healthcare professionals, artists, storytellers, professors, organizers, community members, activists, humans on this earth who are dedicated to advance climate justice, environmental justice, and health equity through multimedia content production to shift narratives and create real-world impact from social media and beyond. 

All the way through, she has partnered with and followed the leadership of community-based organizations, supporting research and advocacy to work towards a more beautiful, healthy, and just world.

And now, at the age of thirty one, Amanda has completed her Fellowship in Community Medicine. She's about to take a very well deserved 2 months off, but just ahead of going away, we sat down for this conversation. If you want reasons to hope, Amanda d'Almeida offers them in spades. 

Please note that all these views are Amanda's own and not the view of her employer. This is not medical advice.

Links
Medicine Explained on TikTok
Medicine Explained on Instagram
Amanda on LinkedIn
The Climate Health Co-op on Instagram
The Nuance: A Healthy Podcast
Creators to Watch
Book: Celebrate your Period
Lyla June's Paper 'Architects of Abundance: Indigenous Regenerative Food and Land Management Systems'
NYC OffTech
The Nap Ministry: Rest is Resistance
Interrupting Criminalization

—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

How do we think about systemic change? Specifically, how do four podcasters who spend their entire lives thinking about this think about systemic change - what it is and how we get there?
Tim Logan of Future Learning Design podcast convened a conversation with Nathalie Nahai of her eponymous In Conversation podcast, Amit Paul of the World of Wisdom podcast.
So you can know them better,
Amit Paul is a former popstar and CEO of green chemicals company Paxymer AB turned systems dancer. No, he's co-founder of Innrwrks and host of World of Wisdom podcast, exploring how business can create a future we want for our kids. Amit hosts explorative conversations, facilitates group work and advices and supports companies navigating the current ecological, social and technological paradigm shifts. 

Nathalie Nahai is an author, keynote speaker and host of the Nathalie Nahai in Conversation podcast enquires into our relationship with one another, with technology and with the living world. She’s author of the international best-sellers Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion and, more recently, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience which has been described as “One of the defining business books of our times”. She’s a consultant, artist and the founder of Flourishing Futures Salon, a project that offers curated gastronomical gatherings that explore how we can thrive in times of turbulence and change.
Tim Logan is an education leader, connector and facilitator. Bringing his extensive learning from a global career in youth work, teaching, school leadership and consultancy, Tim has worked with prominent clients around the world to develop new and innovative approaches to learning, well-being and youth engagement. Most recently, on behalf of International Baccalaureate, Tim co-created Festival of Hope with Jennifer Bahrami, which is growing as part of a broader portfolio of IB youth initiatives. Tim is also host/producer of the Future Learning Design podcast. 

And together, we are Podcasters United, at least for this episode - exploring systems change, what it means and how we can bring it about at scale and in time. Enjoy!
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

How do we encourage human flourishing? How, in fact, do we make the thriving of all 8 billion humans and the More than Human World central to all that we are and do?  It's a core tenet of this podcast, that if each of us were able to discover what's ours to do - and, more importantly, to be - and were supported in the inter-becoming that would arise from bringing the best of ourselves to the table…we'd be well on the way to the transformation we need to get us through the pinch points of the climate, cultural and technological apocalypses that are heading our way.
So in today's episode, we're talking with someone who crosses many disciplines in search of eudaimonia - the concept of human flourishing, of 'finding our best self' proposed by Plato and expanded by Aristotle.  Dr Jenna Mikus is an engineer and architect by training, and is now a consultant and strategic advisor who specialises in balancing architectural science with wellbeing science to promote flourishing health and wellbeing by design across a wide range of environments. 
As you'll hear, she did her PhD during lockdown in the ways it might be possible to help elderly people find meaning and purpose - in scientific terms, to attain self determination - in their lives.  And now she is an academic and consultant who acts as an ideas "alchemist," helping companies curate environments & experiences for eudaimonia to support optimal health and wellbeing, precipitate ineffable emotions like delight & awe, promote meaning, inspire creativity, & catalyse belonging, and innovate. She's founder of the Eauda-Group and helped found the 'Flourishing by Design' (FxD) community of practice affiliated with Harvard's Human Flourishing Network.
In a world where those who accumulate wealth are increasingly leaning towards mass extinction as if it were somehow going to be useful, it's so refreshing to explore the ways we can be differently human.  Enjoy!

Jenna on LinkedIn
Jenna on Google Scholar

—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'BECOMING A GOOD ANCESTOR' which will run on Sunday 13th September 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along, but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

"We are a collective of artists making art to bring forth the second renaissance.
We are alchemists. We create a new world through our work.
We are the bridge between the dying past and the future unborn.
Art is an expression of our consciousness and humanity, this is our path of transformation. 
Life as an art.
…
Our work is to create a space to be with all of it. To be with the joy, the darkness, the hope, the sadness, the unknown.
Our work is to inquire about what would a world that works for everyone look like?"

Thus begins the Manifesto on Art in the Second Renaissance, and this week we speak with its author, Sylvie Barbier, a French-Taiwanese performance artist whose work is some of the most powerfully raw, wild and beautiful I have ever seen. As well as being an artist and mother, she's an entrepreneur and educator and one of the two co-founders of Life Itself, which is designed to build a wiser future through culture, space and community.
The Life Itself website says, 'We are pragmatic utopians, committed to practical action for a radically wiser, weller world. We create conscious coliving hubs, start businesses, do research and engage in activism to pioneer a wiser culture and plant the seeds of a second renaissance.' 
The Second Renaissance is an initiative of Life Itself which acknowledges that we live in a moment of potential crisis and collective rebirth and offers a home to the growing community of people who are working to make this rebirth happen.
Sylvie is an artist of extraordinary scope and depth and so the role of art in that rebirth is the focus of this episode, but we ranged far and deep into the nature of healing our shadows so that we can heal the ancestral and descendant lines, so that we can become the ancestors our descendants are proud of; we explored the nature of ritual in building new beginnings and helping endings; as we did with the Brother from nearby Plum Village, we explored the nature of life and death and how we can meet our own deaths with grace and joy and hope.  Above all, we explored how we can fall in love with living - with life itself - so that we might lay strong foundations for real transformation.

And before we leap into our conversation, I want to remind you that there's an Accidental Gods online Gathering 'Walking the Path of the Inner Warrior' on Sunday 28th June - which is this coming Sunday if you're listening on or near launch day - 4pm - 8pm, on Zoom - we'll be exploring many of the ideas that we talk about in this episode, but anchoring them in your own life's experience.  This follows on from our Gathering on Falling in Love with life, which, as Sylvie says in the podcast, is the key to working with our shadows.  You don't have to have done that - if you're new to our work, we'll make sure you have secure grounding, but if you have been to other Gatherings, we'll build on the work we've already done this year.  So - hope to see you there and then, and now, enjoy....

Links
Sylvie's website
Life Itself
Second Renaissance
Second Renaissance Manifesto

—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'WALKING THE PATH OF THE INNER WARRIOR' which will run on Sunday 28th June 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along - but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is writing a book just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.

"I have come to believe something that sounds simple and is anything but: if Mothering were the axis around which we revolved, we would liberate the world. By Mothering I do not mean the biological act of giving birth, or the domestic role that has been used to confine us. I mean the practice – available to all people, in all bodies – of tending to life with full presence: protecting it, nourishing it, teaching it to know itself, trusting it."
These are the words of our guest this week, mother, writer, scholar and activist: Zineb Mouhyi in her forthcoming book series, on 'Mothering Liberation'. She defines mothering as the everyday politics - available to all people in all bodies - of tending to life and making every child ours. The book series will be made of three books. The first on mothering ourselves, the second on mothering our children, and the third on mothering the world.
Zineb has been an advocate for social change through education, notably through the charitable organizations she co-founded — YouthxYouth & the Weaving Lab — and through her PhD research on the role of education in the Palestinian liberation struggle.  I've been privileged to read the early chapters of her books as she is writing them (a courageous act in its own right) and can safely say that this is one of those life-changing works that could move us all to the collective tipping point we need.  At a time when the world feels increasingly unstable, making a commitment to the flourishing of all life is central to the way forward.  Enjoy!
Links
Zineb's website
Zineb on LinkedIn
Episode #141 of Accidental Gods
—About Accidental Gods—

We offer three strands all rooted in the same soil, drawing from the same river: Accidental Gods, Dreaming Awake and the Thrutopia Writing Masterclass
Our next Open Gathering offered as part of our Accidental Gods Programme is 'WALKING THE PATH OF THE INNER WARRIOR' which will run on Sunday 28th June 2026 from 16:00 - 20:00 GMT - details are here. You don't have to be a member of Accidental Gods to come along - but if you are, all Gatherings are half price.

If you'd like to join us at Accidental Gods, this is the membership where we endeavour to help you to connect fully with the living web of life.
If you'd like to train more deeply in the contemporary shamanic work at Dreaming Awake, you'll find us here.
If you'd like to explore the recordings from our last Thrutopia Writing Masterclass, the details are here
Manda and Louise both offer one-to-one Mentoring Calls.  Manda is fully booked just now, but if you'd like to contact Louise, details are here.