Jenny Rivers | Speaking With Our Bodies, Wombcraft, Nature's Rhythms & Living In The Paradox
Jenny Rivers is a multi-modality therapist, energy worker, and wisdom keeper of the female body and it's cycles. She joins me for a multifaceted flow state where we chat on diet and the many "isms" around food, recovering from the winter-season funk, and her offerings as a healer and teacher, such as bodywork practices and knowledge of human biological rhythms.
In the Plus+ Extension we talk about tracking heavenly cycles, deconstructing mythological archetypes, what Imbolc means in nature, Michael Wann the synchronicity-generator, fusing various movement medicine traditions, and much more.
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In this episode
Core themes
Diet as an ongoing experiment
Jenny describes nine months of mostly steak, eggs and bacon, a slide back into summer fruit, sugar and holiday cookies, and a return to strict carnivore on December 26th that she says no longer works the way it first did. Chance recounts five years as a vegan that, he says, left him plateaued in climbing and lifting until he added eggs and chicken. Jenny sorts people into moderators and abstainers and finds freedom in restriction, and Chance agrees, citing his own long choice to skip dairy. Both treat the body as dynamic: listen, adjust, and never lock into dogma.
The ethics of eating anything at all
Jenny asks whether any being can live without killing another, arguing that plants have consciousness too and relaying the carnivore community's view that plants defend themselves with chemicals while fruit is offered to spread seed. She describes hunting in older cultures as a sacred agreement between hunter and animal, and argues that tilling and fertilizing fields treats the earth like a body forced to grow what we choose. Chance points to permaculture food forests as a gentler model, wonders whether eating farmed animals mirrors humans being farmed on a larger scale, and later says gratitude for the whole supply chain is what his earlier diets lacked.
Belief as the limit of human potential
Chance describes listening to the Ringing Cedars of Russia series, whose central character lives lightly clothed in the Siberian woods while squirrels bring her nuts and mushrooms, and ties it to his own barefoot walks in the snow. He argues that our bodily capacities are bounded mostly by belief and by generations spent in survival mode, and that as survival pressure eases we may find a new harmony with nature. Jenny adds a fasting book she just finished, including an account she recalls of someone going 382 days without eating, and wonders aloud what becomes possible when we choose what to believe.
Integrity, attention and acting as if
Jenny tells how she left a wellness center she had worked at for four years when a mask rule returned, calling integrity the alignment of inner values with outer action, and started her own women's circle. She spent December away from the news, wrestled with whether that was spiritual bypassing, and then felt, like Theoden hearing Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, that open war was upon her anyway. Chance answers with a chameleon card about acting as if, balanced by naming what we do not consent to, and argues the most persuasive thing anyone can do is live their healthiest, strongest life.
Wombcraft and the wisdom of cycles
Jenny's wombcraft mentoring walks women through the four phases of the menstrual cycle, which she pairs with the maiden, mother, wild woman and crone archetypes, and which she says the medical system surrounds with myths. She frames the wild woman phase before bleeding not as a stigma about hormonal women but as a rightful need to rage and speak out against what we no longer stand for, a Kali kind of energy. Her larger point is that everyone moves through cycles, and that the more we honor them, the more we can transcend them toward the calm, unchanging part of us.
Quotes
“You can't go down that road. That road has already been traveled, and you have to find a new way.”
“Our bodies are dynamic and changing and in flux, and most important is that we find a way to be in honest communication between our mind and body.”
“The more we abstain or the more we restrict what we eat, it gives us a sense of freedom, because we don't have to think about it.”
“If you're not able to get stronger physically, what other capacities may be diminished in your life that are less apparent and less easy to measure?”
“The whole idea of integrity is your inner values, your inner belief systems are in alignment with your outer world.”
“The limiting of what's possible is what puts us in the state of lack and fear.”
“It doesn't matter what side of the equation that you're on. What matters is us all being together and being like, we're here and we belong together because we're here.”
“The best way is to live your highest potential, be the healthiest life that you can be, kick as much ass as you can in your own life.”
“The wild woman represents our inherent right and need to rage, to rage against the machine, to speak out against those things that we are no longer standing for.”
“The thing that was missing in both of those previous incarnations of my dietary choices was the gratitude.”
Jenny Rivers is a multi-modality therapist, energy worker, and "wisdom keeper" of the female body and its cycles, discussing wombcraft, bodywork, and natural rhythms on InnerVerse.
See all Jenny episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
