S1 ep. 1: Who this is for (and who it’s not)

Season 1, EPISODE 1 TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Priestess Initiations: The Goddess Coven. I'm Casey and this is Episode 1.

I'm recording this as the leaves fall, in the mountains of Colorado, in what feels like the deepest integration phase of my life. Five months ago, I fell 75 feet while rappelling. We'll get to that story later in the season. For now, what matters is this: I'm teaching you from the threshold I'm walking. Between maiden and mother. Between what I've mastered and what's still initiating me. Between depth psychology and priestess wisdom.

If you're looking for someone who's arrived, who has it all figured out, who's going to give you five steps to transformation—this isn't that podcast. But if you're ready for real descent work, if you know that initiation is not a metaphor, if you're tired of spiritual bypassing and ready to reclaim what's been exiled, suppressed, or lost—then you're in the right place.

So who am I to start a podcast? That question holds a lot of vulnerable edges, and yet this is where I am being called. It’s the strongest calling I’ve felt since choosing a graduate program that changed my life. I have a Master's Degree in Body Psychotherapy and training in Jungian work—archetypal parts work, somatics, pain reprocessing. I understand how trauma lives in the body, how the psyche works, how to hold space for transformation.

But that's not what I'm doing here.

Here, I'm a priestess. I've been called into the goddess lineages—Persephone, Lilith, Medusa, Hecate, Isis, Kali. These goddesses have worked with me directly, initiating me through lived experience—through descents, disintegrations, deaths, reassemblies, and fierce reckonings. I work with ritual, embodiment, sacred reclamation, and the initiations that actually change you. I'm a published poet and author exploring embodiment, soul work, and relationships through writing.

My background in somatic and depth work informs how I understand the body and psyche—but what I offer through The Goddess Coven is spiritual teaching. Priestess training. Archetypal wisdom. Initiation.

I'm building The Goddess Coven for anyone of any gender, but especially women, who feel called to do real transformational work. We have a free community with a Ritual Grimoire and Embodiment Library where you can practice what we explore here.

Right now, this podcast is how I teach publicly. It's how I share what the goddesses have taught me, what my own initiations have revealed, and what I believe about how we actually transform.

And I'm entering what I call my mother era—I'm teaching graduate students now, learning how to hold space for the next generation of healers, stepping into this new role of guide and mentor. That's part of the maiden-to-mother journey I'm walking. We'll explore what that actually means throughout this season.

You won't find me on Instagram. Or TikTok. Or posting daily anywhere. And that's intentional.

I actually tried social media. Multiple times. And every time, I got clear signs from the universe that it wasn't for me. Things would break, posts wouldn't go through, I'd feel completely drained trying to keep up. The goddesses were speaking loud and clear: this is not your path.

Social media rewards surface over depth, performance over presence, and constant output over seasonal rhythms. It's designed to keep you consuming, comparing, scrolling—never actually practicing.

The work I teach—shadow integration, embodiment, goddess initiations, descent—can't be packaged into 60-second reels. It can't be done while you're scrolling. It requires your full attention, your body, your willingness to sit with discomfort and not immediately distract yourself.

And honestly? I don't want to build a personal brand. I'm not here to be an influencer. I'm building a coven—a relational web of people doing this work together, not a following of people consuming content about me.

So instead, I chose podcasting. Because podcasts let me go deep. They let me teach for 20, 30, 40 minutes without interruption. They let you listen while you're walking in nature, or sitting with your morning tea, or driving—times when you're actually present, not fragmented across five tabs.

If you want to read more about why I left social media and what that journey looked like, I wrote about it on our Priestess Initiations blog on the website—link in bio.

And if podcasting resonates with you, if you're someone who craves depth over quick hits, welcome. You're my people.

Before I tell you what this podcast IS, I want to be honest about my own edges in starting it.

Because here's the thing: I'm teaching about initiation, about descent, about walking into the unknown—and starting this podcast is its own initiation for me. I'm practicing what I preach, which means I'm also scared, uncertain, and pushing against my own resistance.

“My south node is in Taurus, and Isis, Lilith, Persephone, Hecate, and a lot of goddesses, honestly, live in my fourth house. The private temple, the hidden work. I've been comfortable, safe there, but my north node is asking me to step into the tenth house, public, visible teaching.

And this podcast is my attempt to start doing that, to step into my north node destiny. And that's fucking scary. It's a new level of the witch wound, which we'll talk about later this season, with a interview.

And this, I'm calling the priestess wound, the wound of not just being a witch, which I've claimed publicly for years. And that was its own journey. And some of you might be thinking, how do I even start there?

And we'll get there. But this priestess wound, there's a fear of being misunderstood, judged, called out. And yet, I was given an old school initiation.

There are so many kinds of initiations, and we will talk about that in the next few episodes, what initiation means, what that looks like.

But we all go through many different initiations throughout our lives. And I've experienced many. But the biggest one, the most obvious initiation, was this old school initiation, the fall.

And near-death experiences change you. And they ask you to really embody lessons that you've been learning or avoiding in a new light, in a new way. And so I'm teaching something that I'm still stepping into.

I'm still in that cauldron, that cauldron-spile of made-into-mother. I'm not teaching from the other side. And this podcast is an Eris act.

Eris, the goddess of discord, the disruptor, the truth-teller. For those of you who don't know her, she's the one who threw the golden apple that started the Trojan War. And she sits in my third house of communication in Aries.

But this podcast is meant to disrupt spiritual bypassing, the wellness culture, surface content. But there's an edge there, right? What if I'm too much?

What if I say the wrong thing? What if I piss people off? I will piss people off.

And then I remember that staying silent, softening my truth. That's not just betraying my astrology chart. It's betraying me.

It's betraying my soul and my purpose. And it's betraying you. Because sometimes hard truths are necessary for us to grow, for us to grow and become something bigger.

And so I know that I meant to speak uncomfortable truths. And I practice this with clients. But this is my way of practicing it publicly.

And so claiming this podcast is claiming my public voice, being visible, being unapologetic. And I mentioned a few goddesses, but the other one that's really relevant is Kali, Kali Ma. She ROARS.

I don't know how much you know about Kali or if you've worked with her at all. But she is the ultimate fierce feminine destroyer liberator. She does not whisper.

And she sits right on my north node. She's where I'm going, not where I am yet. I'm still practicing Kali.

Every time I speak truth that makes people uncomfortable, I'm embodying her. I'm doing my work. And so this podcast is a journey that we're going on together.

And if you're listening and you're scared to be seen, to speak, to claim your power, I get it. I'm doing it too. This podcast is my initiation into public teaching, and I don't have to be perfect.

I just have to be honest. And I trust the spiral.

So if I stumble, if I'm still figuring this out as I go—good. That means I'm in it with you. That means this is real, right? And you deserve something real. We all do.

Alright, let's talk about what this podcast actually IS.

So what IS this podcast?

This is where I teach the goddesses who've initiated me, the ones I'm still working with, and the ones yet to call. Not as cute archetypes to study intellectually, though you're welcome to relate to them archetypally. But here I'm teaching them as living forces that demand something from you.These goddesses teach through lived experience—through descents, disintegrations, deaths, reassemblies, and fierce reckonings.

This is where I explore the maiden-to-mother journey. Not as a linear path you complete, but as a spiral you walk over and over. The maiden descends through that cauldron into the unknown and the mother emerges from the starlight within it. And then she descends again differently.

You'll return to these places, shadow, grief, rage, sexuality, power, in deeper and more integrated ways each time. And so really this podcast teaches:

• Shadow work that actually reclaims your power (not just "faces your darkness")

• Embodiment practices that bring this into your body (not just your head)

• Goddess initiations that are real, not metaphorical

• The messy truth about transformation (it's not aesthetic, it's not comfortable, and it will ask everything of you)

Each episode will offer teaching AND practice. I'm not just giving you concepts to think about. I'm inviting you to do the actual work—in your body, in your life, in your relationships.

And later this season, I'll share interviews with other practitioners and witches, and maybe priestesses, as well as my own story of the fall—the initiation that took me to the edge of death and required every piece of medicine I'd ever learned.

Let me be equally clear about what this is NOT.

This is not self-help. I'm not here to make you feel better or fix your life in ten easy steps. Transformation is not a project you complete. It's a process you live.

This is not 'love and light' spirituality. If you're looking for positive affirmations and good vibes only, you're in the wrong place. I work with shadow, rage, grief, death, and the parts of the feminine that patriarchy has tried to suppress.

That does not mean that we won't talk about play. Play is sacred. But the goddesses I teach are fierce. They destroy what needs destroying. They're not here to make you comfortable.

This is not wellness content. I'm not selling you supplements or morning routines or productivity hacks. The work I teach is about descending into the places you've been avoiding, reclaiming the parts of yourself you've exiled, and becoming sovereign.

Let's just sit with that word for a moment.

Sovereign, sovereign.

Sovereignty sometimes means burning your life down and starting over. Sometimes it's the tower card, which no one wants to pull. But I'll tell you, as you enter transformation, sometimes you pull that card, and instead of dread, excitement sparks.

This is not entertainment. You can't passively consume this podcast. If you're not willing to practice, to sit with discomfort, to do your own descent work—just listening won't change anything.

And to be clear, this is not mental health treatment. This is spiritual and archetypal work. This is for those of you who feel called to the word witch, shaman, or priestess.

This is priestess initiations.

So who IS this for?

This is for anyone ready for real transformation. Not the kind that looks good on Instagram. The kind that breaks you open and puts you back together differently.

This is for people walking the threshold between maiden and mother. Whether that's literal (becoming a parent, shifting from independence to interdependence) or archetypal (claiming your power to hold space for others, building something bigger than yourself).

This is for the sensitive ones, the HSPs, for the ones who feel too much, who've been called 'too intense,' who know there's something more beneath the surface of things. If you're highly attuned to energy, emotion, and the invisible world—you're probably meant to be a priestess or healer. This podcast is for you.

This is for people who've been through initiations—trauma, loss, rupture, death, disintegration—and know that there's medicine in the wound. You're not broken. You're being forged.

This is for those ready to reclaim: your body, your sexuality, your rage, your power, your voice, your magic. The things that got you shamed, exiled, or called 'too much.'

And this is for people who understand that we don't do this work alone. Initiation happens in relationship—with the goddesses, with your coven, in partnership, with the living world. If you're here, you're part of the coven.

This season, we'll walk through 16 episodes together. We'll start with foundations—what initiation means, why the body matters, what shadow actually is. Then we'll journey through the goddesses who've taught me the most. I'll share my own initiations, including the fall that nearly killed me. And we'll end with the fierce edges. Kali, the witch wound, blood mysteries and cycles of initiation. Spoiler alert, that is about the menstrual cycle. And the spiral that never ends.

If you're still here, if this is resonating, welcome. 

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode, and visit the link in by all for our free website resources.

You'll find our ritual grimoire, embodiment library, and workshops diving deeper.

Trust the spiral.

This podcast is spiritual teaching, not therapy or medical advice."

This material is protected by copyright, Casey Dunne.

From Priestess Initiations: The Goddess Coven: S1 Ep.1 Who This Is For (And Who It's Not), Nov 19, 2025