The concept of wisdom has long defied easy definition and measure, although many scholars agree that one essential feature is its paradoxical nature.
Fruitful paradoxes are those which offer an avenue of thought that leads to a better understanding of what is true.
Thank you for listening to the Wisdom Now Podcast
My name is Rose Lamont. I’m your host and the co-founder of Ritual.
In this podcast, I talk with spiritual teachers, philosophers and insightful people from many different walks of life to learn more about their stories of inner transformation and how we can learn to navigate life with skill and grace.
Now, let me share their wisdom with you.
Your Body Is Telling Your Life Story – Body Reading with Abbie Galvin
Your Body Is Telling Your Life Story – Body Reading with Abbie Galvin
In this episode, Abbie Galvin explores body reading as a way of seeing and being seen — a reflective process that reveals patterns in how we hold ourselves, move in the world, and relate to others.
Abbie shares her perspective on body reading and how the body reflects lived experience. She discusses the evolution of her practice, her approach to teaching, and running her school in New York. She speaks about the real meaning of community, how a studio space can function as a space for inquiry and support, and the values that shape how she works with students.
We explore how she approaches teaching beyond technique — meeting students where they are, encouraging curiosity rather than correction, and fostering genuine relationships instead of performance. Abbie also reflects on the role of home practice and daily awareness, and how personal experience continues to inform her understanding of her own personal nature and great nature itself.
In this episode:
• What body reading reveals about lived experience
• Abbie’s approach to teaching and working with students
• Running a studio in New York and cultivating genuine community
• Creating learning environments rooted in inquiry and support
• The role of home practice and daily awareness
• Teaching beyond mechanics toward deeper awareness
This conversation invites you to consider the body as a living record of experience — and how a reflective and thoughtful practising and teaching can support enhance our relationships and accelerate our personal evolution.
6 Nov 2025
When Lightning Strikes: Mitch Hunter Shares His Personal Story of a Transformative Kundalini Awakening
In this episode, Mitch Hunter opens up about his remarkable spiritual journey, from early childhood experiences with the supernatural to discovering meditation as a coping mechanism. He shares how his path led him deep into academia before an unexpected and profoundly transformative Kundalini awakening at Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in India.
Mitch describes the gradual unfolding of awareness that ultimately erupted into a violent yet liberating transformation - a moment that reshaped his understanding of consciousness life itself.
31 May 2024
Reclaiming our relationship with food using Ayurveda with Myra Lewin from Hale Pule
Myra Lewin is an Ayurveda practitioner and Master Yogini with more than 100,000 hours of Yoga teaching experience spanning 30+ years of practice. In 1999 Myra founded Hale Pule Ayurveda and Yoga, a center for education and healing.
Today Myra guides thousands of students blossoming into Ayurveda counselors and advisors and guides clients 1:1 through health consultations and energy healings. Myra oversees Agni Therapy, Hale Pule’s foundational program that instills balance and vitality into modern life with the principles of Ayurveda and Yoga.
In this episode we discuss our lost connection to our food sources and how we can heal our bodies, minds and lives by repairing this relationship, utilising the wisdom of Ayurveda.
Show Notes:
✨Myra spoke about her personal experience with finding Ayurveda and how it transformed her life.
✨How the Industrial Revolution transformed our eating habits and our relationship to food
✨How food is our primary relationship that sets the foundation for all other relationships
✨ How what we eat is in a very practical sense who we become
✨ How bringing consciousness into our relationship with food is a form of spiritual practice
✨How our modern relationship to food has resulted in a general loss of connection to who we are and how to look after ourselves.
✨ How being connected to our food sources brings us closer to nature herself.
✨ Food as a form of ritual or spiritual practice that offers us an opportunity to deepen our connection to our true Self.
23 Dec 2023
Meditation - Wisdom with Mitch Hunter
In this episode Ritual's founder, Rose Lamont, talks with Mitch Hunter, a physiotherapist, lecturer at Griffith University, and yoga and meditation teacher about his personal journey into meditation and its profound effect on his work and life.
Key Conversation Points:
- How meditation techniques help with physiotherapy
- Developing an internal stability
- The mind-body connection
- Seeking out a genuine, ethical teacher
- Being present in the moment
Mitch is a university lecturer and yoga and meditation teacher. He has witnessed a profound self development over his 20 years of practice and is passionate about sharing the gifts of self enquiry with others. He focuses on somatosensory retraining in order to explore the cognitive and emotional links between the brain and the body, identify miscommunications, and restore a healthy relationship between the two.
23 Dec 2023
Embracing Change - Wisdom with Jonathan MacDonald
In this episode Ritual's founder, Rose Lamont, talks with Jonathan MacDonald, an award-winning, bestselling author and keynote speaker on the topics of change, digital transformation, and mindset.
Key Conversation Points:
- Jonathan’s books: Powered By Change and The Rise of Advanced Thought
- The paradox of constant change
- Finding a safe haven in public speaking
- Physics, shifting paradigms, neurology
- SELF: personal, ethical, AI
Jonathan MacDonald is one of the world's most in-demand and internationally renowned strategic change-makers, unlocking success for individuals and businesses who are shaping the future. He is an entrepreneur, investor, though-leader, author, and black belt martial artist.
16 Feb 2023
Health & Beauty Beyond Capitalism - Ayurvedic Wisdom with Chasca Summerville Part 2
In this episode Chasca and I spoke about the daily rituals of Ayurveda (Dinacharya) and how to get the most of your day and life using Ayurvedic rituals and routines.
Chasca shares some tips for transforming your daily life from her book Ayurvedic Rituals.
We also spoke about the different kinds of pressures women face with respect to beauty standards and how we can learn to approach beauty beyond the framework of capitalism and through the lens of Ayurveda.Chasca also touched on some of her own struggles with self-acceptance and how she uses Ayurveda to thrive in her body.
30 Nov 2022
Daily life through the lens of Ayurveda - Wisdom with Chasca Summerville
In this interview Rose Lamont chats with Chasca Summerville about her new book - Ayurvedic Daily Rituals and how she discovered Ayurveda. Chasca goes on to share how we can all begin to utilise some of the fundamental principles of Ayurveda to support and nourish our daily life through the transformation of some of our usual habits around our sleep, food and use of energy.
28 Nov 2022
Practice and all is NOT coming - Wisdom with Mark Whitwell. Part 2
In this episode Ritual's founder Rose Lamont talks with Mark Whitwell, a world renowned teacher, author and direct student of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), a man revered around the world as the ‘teacher of the teachers’ and ‘the father of modern Yoga.’
Mark shares his profound and embodied wisdom on how we can stop seeking for answers outside of ourselves and how we can all begin to participate more deeply in our own yoga and existence. And as Mark so eloquently and compassionately sates:
"life is not a dedication to working on oneself toward some future ideal" .. "you are the power the cosmos".
Key Conversation Points:
- Mark's journey to India in the 70's and his experience meeting his teachers.
- Yoga - 'a social dynamic of disempowerment' ?
- 'A teacher is no more or no less than a friend'
- Yoga - 'a struggle towards a future attainment' a creation of male orthodoxy
- The sickness of spiritual seeking and the cure to constant seeking.
- The origins, current state and trajectory of modern yoga in the west.
- What it means to have an authentic yoga practice.
- Marks connection with U.G Krishnamurti, T.K.V Desikachar and T. Krishnamacharya
- Mark's relationship with T.K.V Desikachar and the origins of his book - The Heart of Yoga
- The lineage and principles of T. Krishnamacharya
- How to stop seeking and start participating in your yoga and life.
- The seamless process of asana, pranayama and meditation
- Mark's illuminating conversation one of his teachers and subsequent student - the spiritual teacher Ram Dass
About Mark:
Mark Whitwell (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zNzI0YjdiMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw%3D%3D) has taught yoga for over four decades throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia, Fiji, and Aotearoa-New Zealand, and is the editor and contributor to TKV Desikachar's book The Heart of Yoga (https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Yoga-Developing-Personal-Practice/dp/089281764X).
First ‘dropping out’ of New Zealand society and travelling to India in his teens, this was the beginning of a lifelong love affair that took him into the orbits of many of the great masters of our time, known and unknown, including falling in love with Swami Muktananda in the early seventies and accompanying him around Australia. But it wasn’t until Mark met Krishnamacharya and Desikachar in Chennai (then Madras) in 1973 that he discovered a practice that could make his inspirational experiences stable and comprehensible: Yoga. Desikachar and his father were living as ordinary humble people, sharing their meals on the floor of their home, not posturing as superior beings or powertripping. Mark fell in love with this and with the Yoga he received.
28 Nov 2022
Ordinariness: The highest spiritual attainment - Wisdom with Mark Whitwell. Part 1
In this episode Rituals founder Rose Lamont talks with Mark Whitwell, a world renowned teacher, author and direct student of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), a man revered around the world as the ‘teacher of the teachers’ and ‘the father of modern Yoga.’
Mark shares his profound and embodied wisdom on how we can stop seeking for answers outside of ourselves and how we can all begin to participate more deeply in our own lives and existence. And as Mark so eloquently and compassionately sates:
"life is not a dedication to working on oneself toward some future ideal" .. "you are the power the cosmos".
Key Conversation Points:
- Mark's journey to India in the 70's and his experience meeting his teachers.
- Yoga - 'a social dynamic of disempowerment' ?
- 'A teacher is no more or no less than a friend'
- Yoga - 'a struggle towards a future attainment' a creation of male orthodoxy
- The sickness of spiritual seeking and the cure to constant seeking.
- The origins, current state and trajectory of modern yoga in the west.
- What it means to have an authentic yoga practice.
- Marks connection with U.G Krishnamurti, T.K.V Desikachar and T. Krishnamacharya
- Mark's relationship with T.K.V Desikachar and the origins of his book - The Heart of Yoga
- The lineage and principles of T. Krishnamacharya
- How to stop seeking and start participating in your yoga and life.
- The seamless process of asana, pranayama and meditation
- Mark's illuminating conversation one of his teachers and subsequent student - the spiritual teacher Ram Dass
About Mark:
Mark Whitwell (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8zNzI0YjdiMC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw%3D%3D) has taught yoga for over four decades throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia, Fiji, and Aotearoa-New Zealand, and is the editor and contributor to TKV Desikachar's book The Heart of Yoga (https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Yoga-Developing-Personal-Practice/dp/089281764X).
First ‘dropping out’ of New Zealand society and travelling to India in his teens, this was the beginning of a lifelong love affair that took him into the orbits of many of the great masters of our time, known and unknown, including falling in love with Swami Muktananda in the early seventies and accompanying him around Australia. But it wasn’t until Mark met Krishnamacharya and Desikachar in Chennai (then Madras) in 1973 that he discovered a practice that could make his inspirational experiences stable and comprehensible: Yoga. Desikachar and his father were living as ordinary humble people, sharing their meals on the floor of their home, not posturing as superior beings or powertripping. Mark fell in love with this and with the Yoga he received.
25 Nov 2022
Physiology alters psychology - Wisdom with Abbie Galvin
In this episode Rose chats with Abbie Galvin an author, teacher and passionate student of life about her personal story with yoga and how she has used Katonah yoga to transform her body, mind, relationships and entire way of interacting with the world.
"so much of it is fighting our first nature which his habit"
"From the subtle patterns like our sleep cycles and digestive cycles, to more obvious patterns like the seasons or aging, we are part of the natural world. Our job in yoga is to manipulate the patterns that don't serve us, and to cultivate and develop new ones that help us function better. And because the narrative of our lives is reflected in the body, changing physiology alters psychology. The third principle underlies the discipline of esoteric training: repetition of techniques. By virtue of repetition , one potentially develops insight"
Topics Covered:
- Abbie's personal story with developing her yoga and finding Katonah Yoga and Nevine Michaan.
- What hold's us back from developing an effective yoga practice
- First nature, habit and why we find it so hard to change.
- Breaking our linear patterns of learning that we develop from childhood.
- Can we change our bodies in old age ?
- How she uses the patterns and maps of Great Nature to navigate her body, mind and life.
- Self-inquiry and exploration to navigate conflict with ourselves and others.
- How our physicality effects and transforms our psychology.
- Abbie talks about how her 60's are her best years yet.
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