We Can Do Hard Things
Ways to Be More Present: Indigenous Wisdom from Kaitlin Curtice (Best Of)
30 Mar 2025
1. How to listen to the signals our bodies give us, and other concrete strategies to hold on to being human. 2. The healing power of honoring and reconnecting with our little girl selves and with our Mother Earth. 3. How, if all else fails, we can practice presence and embodiment by talking to a house plant. 4. The traumatizing effect of purity culture, colonization, and assimilation, and how to come home to the wholeness of our core nature, desire, and wisdom. 5. Concrete, everyday acts of rebellion that help us regain what we lost, and restore us to who we really are. About Kaitlin: Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity. She is a wise and vital voice on decolonizing our bodies, faith, and families, and the freedom and peace of embodiment - finding wholeness in ourselves, our stories, and our lineage. Her new book, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, examines the journey of resisting the status quo by caring for ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth – and is available now. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @kaitlincurtice. If you want to hear more about Embodiment, please listen to the We Can Do Hard Things episode 168 Sonya Renee Taylor: What If You Loved Your Body? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is, as our friend Allison says, a real TR. which means a real treat. Her mom used to say, this is a real TR, which was supposed to be short for treat, but actually it's longer than treat. It's a little confusing. Anyway, today we have a real TR. Our dear friend, Caitlin Curtis.
Caitlin Curtis is an award-winning author, poet, storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Pottawatomie Nation, Caitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity. She is a wise and vital voice on decolonizing our bodies, faith, and families, and the freedom and peace of embodiment, finding wholeness in ourselves, our story, and our lineage.
Her new book, Living Resistance, An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, examines the journey of resisting the status quo by caring for ourselves, one another, and and Mother Earth, and is beautiful and is available now. Welcome, Caitlin.
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here with you. We are delighted.
I learned so much from your story about assimilation as a violence that disconnects us from ourselves and that compels us to erase who we are. And then... The process of deconstruction that you walk us through, that seems to me to be kind of the digging through the rubble to unearth and remember who we are. And you offer so many concrete tools because all of that seems so...
aspirational and wonderful, but it's really hard to find an inroad there. If the whole world is a relentless effort to separate us from our humanity, then it's almost like our whole life needs to be a relentless fight for the wholeness. Yes. So can we start at the very beginning, before we need to remember, before we got dismembered, can you talk to us about your life before you were nine?
Yeah. And yes to what you were just saying. It's so hard. And I just want us to learn to be human together. That's what I want more than anything. And that really involves every aspect of who we are. When I was young, I learned how to balance a checkbook, but I never learned how to listen to my own body. I never learned how to engage with Mother Earth. And those are the things we learn.
We come to a certain age and we're told, okay, here's how to be an adult. Here's how to enter the capitalist system that we have set up here for you to be successful. And right at that moment, that is a disembodiment because we're taught to sort of enter into that harshness of the world and lose the softness of who we are, even as kids. And So I was a sensitive little kid.
I was the baby of my family. My sister's nine years older than me. My brother's seven years older than me. My family moved a lot. My father worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So he was an indigenous police officer. And so I was born in Oklahoma. And we moved back and forth from Oklahoma to New Mexico multiple times.
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