“We are rainforest people living on a rainforest island… and the greatest challenge is truly remembering that.”

In this episode, we sit down with Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, a rainforest guardian, author, conservationist and founder of the Thousand Year Trust - exploring the healing potential of restoring Britain’s ancient temperate rainforests.

From his home at Cabilla, a sanctuary on Bodmin Moor where native thousand year old Celtic oaks still grow, Merlin is leading a soulful mission: to reweave ecological resilience with cultural memory, and to bring people back into relationship with our Atlantic rainforests.

We also explore Merlin’s powerful debut book, Our Oaken Bones - an emotive reflection on place, belonging, healing and the intergenerational task of tending what remains.

This episode includes a book giveaway for our Patreon community - one listener will receive a hardback copy of Our Oaken Bones. Visit patreon.com/rootedhealing to enter and support the podcast.

Learn more about our offerings and join our free Embodied Deep Ecology workshop at rootedhealing.org.

The music stitched into this episode is from The Children’s Forest and Bonnie Medicine.

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In this episode, we welcome Maile Kalokura, a Somatic Educator, Shamanic & Evolutionary Astrologer and founder of Kalokura Astrology & the Golden Rose Temple. With a passion for deepening self-awareness and activating a sense of aliveness in the body, Maile guides us through the art of softening - into presence, authenticity and embodied truth.

She shares her personal journey of confronting power dynamics and radical initiations that led her to rediscover the strength in vulnerability, the power of boundaries and the beauty of slowing down, sensuously.

Through her studies in somatic healing, mystical traditions and sacred arts, she has cultivated a path of attunement to life’s deeper rhythms, where sensuous presence becomes a gateway to freedom.

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Mairead, the creatrix behind Bonnie Medicine, is a singer, song weaver, and medicine musician from the ‘Bonnie’ isles of Scotland. Rooted deeply in her Celtic heritage and a profound connection to story and place, her music is a prayer—an offering of freedom, unity and truth, inviting us into remembrance and harmony with all beings.

Over a year ago, Mairead’s music became a core thread of the Rooted Healing Podcast, weaving its way through many episodes and into the audio chapters of our year-long course, Deepen Your Roots. It was a joy to finally meet her in person at our Ancestral Gathering last year, where she brought her fiery, vibrant Scottish spirit. Her passion for ancestral life-ways is utterly contagious, and her devotion to the songful, ancestral path is something we deeply respect.

This episode is woven with songs from Mairead’s newly released EP, Belonging, alongside a piece from her previous album, Wide Open.

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