In The Den with Mama Dragons

Hope, Activism, and The Power of Authentic Living

• Episode 110

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Content Warning: This episode contains brief mentions of rape and talks about addiction. 


Special Guest: Rikki West


Rikki West is a former spiritual seeker and UC Berkeley–trained scientist who spent decades trying to reconcile scientific explanations of existence with her ordinary, real-life awareness. One adventure at a time, she found her way to a peace and beauty that changed all the questions. Her book Rootlines, a memoir of family healing, was published by She Writes Press in 2020. Mother of Noli and Godmother of Morgan, Rikki loves being outside in the alpine desert of northern New Mexico, where she lives with her wife Jill and an old Yamaha. 


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SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LeWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Hello listeners. We want to share a content warning for this episode. There is a brief mention of sexual assault and a conversation around addiction. If these issues are difficult for you, we invite you to please take care of yourself and skip this episode. Thank you so much for listening.

As so many of us in this community know all too well, life has a way of throwing you unexpected curveballs. And as upending as those moments can be, they are also the ones that invite us deeper into our own self-discovery, asking some of life’s biggest questions about the nature of existence, identity, truth and spirituality. And this is especially true for our queer kids and beloveds as coming out often invites them to discover their most authentic selves.

Today’s guest knows this journey well and has written about it in her brand new book just released in January. Rikki West is the author of The Empty Bowl: Pursuing Truth in a Messy World. This is a deeply personal memoir that chronicles her lifelong quest for meaning, truth, faith, science, spirituality, queer identity and, most importantly, self-acceptance. Rikki was raised in a Catholic home and shaped by the turbulence of 1970s California, navigating a world that often denied the existence of people like her. Coming out as a lesbian at a time when visibility meant risk, she embraced her identity not only as a personal revelation but as an act of defiance and courage. She candidly shares her struggles with faith, addiction and societal pressure and the backlash that we’re seeing now on LGBTQ+ rights is much of her reflection. And the importance for queer folks continuing to stand in their full, untarnished, humanity. Rikki’s story is one of hope, and activism, and about the power of living authentically. And I’m so excited to have her with us today. Rikki, welcome to In the Den!"

RIKKI: Thank you so much for having me and thank you for that lovely introduction.

SARA: You’re welcome.

RIKKI: I’m happy to be here.

SARA: I’m really looking forward to this conversation. You have such an interesting life history that you go into great depth in this journey in your book. And so I just want to start with how this book came to be, why you decided to write it because I know that you came from a very successful career in Silicon Valley. So tell us about that.

RIKKI: Yes. When I retired I had time to access my creative side which I had always put aside because I was busy having a career and trying to make enough money to raise my daughter. So when I retired, I was in therapy, but I can’t remember quite why I was in therapy, probably struggling with some kind of power struggle in my marriage. And I think right at this time, Justice Kavanaugh had been accused of an assault in his youth. And the story of that assault, when I read it, just lit my brain up with the memory of me being raped in my 20s, which I had completely put out of my mind. And so in therapy I talked about it and I just became very emotional. It took a month or two for me to emotionally settle down from that realization and its impact on me. And as part of the therapy, I wrote about it. And that was the first chapter of the book because the beginning of my life and how it led to that event and the impact on my drinking and alcoholism, the impact on my coming out as a lesbian, it just influenced a lot of things. And part of my life has been the search for God, a search for deep meaning. And this kind of assault threw me into depths of self-hatred. It was really hard to get out. It lasted for decades. So I wrote the other parts of the book not really anymore thinking about the rape, but thinking about the deeper questions and the deeper context in which it had happened. That’s how I got started.

SARA: Wow. That must’ve been a very cathartic and therapeutic process for you just to engage in the writing.

RIKKI: Yeah.

SARA: Because your book really does share your journey from your childhood all the way through. And you’re very open about all of these struggles. I want to focus for a moment on the part of the book that is, I think, perhaps the most relevant to our community, and then we’ll expand out from there. But particularly the story of your coming out because you came out in the 1970’s which is a long time ago now. But a time when, while we’re in the midst of this cultural revolution, still being queer was a lot less accepted perhaps than it is today. And a lot of queer folks chose to stay in the closet because it would have just been too difficult in their lives and their careers and their families. Tell us about that time in your life?

RIKKI: So as a young teenager, my dad took me down to Chicago and showed me queens and dykes and I was shocked. I did not know this was legal. I thought it was really creepy. He worked on Rush Street as a comedy writer and Rush Street is a place where a lot of burlesque kind of stuff was going on way back then in the 60’s I guess – 50’s even. And so we happened to be down there at his office. I was recording something for him. And we went past one of these studios. And so he showed me all the men dressed as women who were performing. And another time, we were at old-town Chicago at my uncle’s bar and there were a lot of lesbians out on the street. They were in – we used to call them wife-beater – tank tops or suits and I asked who those people were. And he explained it to me. So I thought gay was really weird. And I thought all the gay people hid out in urban communities. I had no idea that there were gay people everywhere hiding out in their own families. So I didn’t want to be a lesbian. I had feelings towards women. I had feelings toward men as a teenager into my twenties. Then it was a period of “free-love” in the 70’s in which everybody was supposed to sleep with everybody. And so I slept with some women and it was clear to me that that was where I lit up and where I felt connected. But I was deeply ashamed of that. I knew it was because I was a pervert, something was broken in me, and I couldn’t tell anybody. And so then I lived in a secret community of gay people who were kind of hiding out and pretending it wasn’t real.

SARA: How old were you during this time?

RIKKI: I’m in my 20s And then in 1978 when I’m about 27, Holly Near, the singer, asked us all to come out in order to support gay teachers against an initiative that was brought forward to prevent gays from teaching. So I came out. And everyone I told already knew, wasn’t surprised, didn’t care, already loved me, was glad I was accepting it, hoped I had friends. Everyone, my mother, my sister, coworkers, my boss…

SARA: Wow, your family?

RIKKI: Yeah. Yeah. My family was right there for me.

SARA: Because I know in your book you write about your Catholic upbringing and your childhood. Was that religious tension at play at all in your coming out and your family’s acceptance?

RIKKI: I think it was only still at play in myself. Everyone in my family had fallen away from the practice of religion. So nobody was going to Mass or had an active input that would say I was wrong. But I had absorbed that so deeply from society, from religion. As a little girl I tried to be so good and I said the rosary and I did all the rituals and I prayed all the time. And then I turned out queer. I just thought I was so bad. I just thought I was a bad, broken person. And then I came out and those straight people really reaffirmed me. It made a big difference. It made a big difference that they loved me. But it took decades for me to really love myself.

SARA: Thank you. I think that is a story that will resonate for some folks for sure. And I just want to acknowledge your story in particular in this moment. You really are a queer elder.

RIKKI: Yeah.

SARA: And these stories and lived experiences are so important for our younger queer kids to hear and to witness, especially these days with so many attacks. It’s really meaningful to be able to hear from queer folks who have lived long and meaningful lives, even lives of struggle, but have come out the other side and know what it means to cultivate community and resilience. So thank you for that.

RIKKI: Yeah.

SARA: In your book you talk about coming out as both a personal revelation, but also a political act. Can I hear more about that? What does that mean for you?

RIKKI: My therapist used to tell me – although she couldn’t have invented it – that the personal is the political. What I’m doing with my life says what it is that I think is a good thing to do with one’s life. It’s an act of asserting my presence and my values and asserting that I think they’re good for society. So by being out as a lesbian, I was saying it is all right. There is room. It is all right. And I am not only a member of, but I’m a creator of this society. And I bring certain values. I could list my values and we could agree they’re good or not. But anyway, pretend they're good.

SARA: I’m sure they are.

RIKKI: And so that’s a big statement and makes it safe for the next person to stand next to me. And I stood beside somebody and then we stood together and then we could begin the journey of inner acceptance. It was really after gay marriage was approved in California. I think that was around 2013. I was born in 1951, okay. It took half a century. I couldn’t say wife at first. I couldn’t do it. But it’s only in the last few years I’ve been able to call my wife, “My wife.” It just has been really slow changing that feeling of being a pervert to feeling of being a very healthy, human being, woman.

SARA: So even with the passage of marriage equality, you still had some of those deep questions, uncertainties about whether or not this was really acceptable?

RIKKI: Yes. I think it really, really helped that society and straight people around me accepted it because then I knew that my self-judgment was not true, so it should be challenged because it isn’t true. So they helped me very much that way.

SARA: That’s great. I want to reflect on your comment about holding on to those religious messages of sinfulness and brokenness and inadequacy. Even as your family had left the major teachings of the church behind, those still really lived in you and how long that struggle took for you. Reflect on that a little bit. Why do you think you held on so tightly to those messages even after the people around you were not as active? It wasn’t as critical a part of your life as it may have been in your childhood?

RIKKI: Well, I was raised Catholic in a small Christian town in a large majority Christian country. And I absorbed the values of that set of teachings. And those values are great. Those are the respect for the individual, and the importance of love and forgiveness, and telling the truth, being honest, caring for others, giving a helping hand. Some other things snuck in along the way, like the difference between men and women. Women were really relegated to the sidelines and were supposed to be obedient at that time. So I also absorbed that being gay was a distortion, a perversion, a malformation. And that meant, when I had gay feelings as a young teenager and more and more as an older teenager, I had a broken thing inside me that was so shameful and bad, I shouldn’t tell anyone. And that is just as deep as my respect for the good values that I got from our culture. So it would be very hard for me to uproot the good values, that I say like honesty and truth. I just know those are right. So right alongside it, I was taught queer is bad. I know that’s right. It took a lot of resetting. I had to go very deep. I had to find my deepest part which has always been pure and never been wounded, my deepest, truest, cleanest, pure being which is full of love and forgiveness just naturally. I had to find that place to know that my person in the world was good enough.

SARA: How did you do that? How did you find that deepest, truest, purest form of your being? Was that connected to this unfolding of your spiritual journey and spiritual seeking?

RIKKI: Well, in a way, spiritual journey, spiritual seeking enabled me to eliminate things that weren’t working for me to find my place in the cosmos, who I am, and whether there is a God for me in my journey. So I did a lot of things. I did yoga. And I did Buddhism. And I borrowed Jesus for six months. I did a lot of different things: mediating, fasting, and chanting, and being very, very good. And I did EST and I cleaned up all of my garbage and everything. And still, I was not satisfied. And some years ago, I was speaking to a philosopher friend, spiritual guide and he said to me, “Drop the seeker.”

SARA: What does that mean?

RIKKI: It was suddenly completely clear to me that I had a very busy persona going on in my head, very busy searching for something, and talking and reading philosophy, and very busy. And that was all taking place inside my aware being, right here, always. A peaceful, contented, ever-present, unending, peaceful being is always here. It experiences the coffee and the sounds and the thoughts and the feelings, but it’s always here. That’s who I am. So as soon as he said, “Drop the seeker,” I suddenly saw that all the noise going on in my head was keeping me from noticing my ever-present being. And I turned my attention away and studied that being for a while, for years. Only to find, I told you this before, I’ll say it now, for me everything is God, everything. You and the stars, and me, and nothing is put here by anyone else. It’s all one. That’s what makes it God. It’s universal, includes everything, it blesses everything. It allows everything. It forgives everything. It’s open to everything. That’s the essence of me. God’s right here, experiencing Rikki life. And I just have to let that energy flow out and give up the busy Rikki life, drop the seeker.

SARA: I love that. I think that is a really beautiful description of what God might be. And I think that will really resonate for folks. But I want to take you back to Rikki the seeker for a minute because I know that in your book you talked a lot about the time in your life when you were deeply practicing some of those Eastern traditions and fasting and chanting and praying for many years. And I wonder if you could share with us what drew you to those traditions and practices in particular?

RIKKI: Yeah. I think I got carried by the 1960’s California’s Zeitgeist, which had a new-age component. But it also was a time when people had gone over to India and brought back new teachings. This was really fresh. Ramdas and others went over. Some people from Vietnam came over here. Some people went over there to study. So Americans were creating lots of opportunities to study Zen Meditation, or other kinds of [inaudible] meditation, or do yoga, or Hindu chanting. It was just present and was much more appealing and interesting to a young person like me wanting to break away and find new things. It turned out to be even older than Christianity. But I thought they were new things.

SARA: I’m sure you were not alone in that. And I kind of like that idea. It shows you just – especially at the time – how entrenched Western Christianity really was here and that breaking open and opportunities to explore Eastern philosophies and eastern traditions did feel new in the 1960’s.

RIKKI: Right.

SARA: I know that for a lot of our LGBTQ+ friends and family members, there’s a struggle with faith, some of which you have really clearly shared with us with the pain and rejection of religion. Have you found any spiritual spaces where you felt fully embraced as a queer person?

RIKKI: I don’t go to many places where I’m not fully embraced as a queer person right now. Maybe some of that is my comfort with myself. So I don’t even notice, maybe, if somebody is judging me because I’m not looking for it.

SARA: That’s good.

RIKKI: It’s helpful. It’s really helpful to not notice some things. I would say that I was in an organization that was founded by Yoganonda in which we studied Hindu practices and [inaudible] in that context. And I was totally and completely accepted there. I was on the board. I was a student and there were several other gay people involved but not the main leadership. So it wasn’t a gay place. And in Buddhism, nobody has ever cared. And in AA, nobody cared about that at all and I did a lot of work with God and a higher power in AA. So I just have not gone to those places.

SARA: That’s great. And I appreciate the wisdom that you also bring into those spaces that you are just who you are and you don’t pay attention as much anymore. You just are fully in being yourself, which is really wonderful.

RIKKI: But this is much harder for children or young teens. They don’t have the confidence that comes from living and knowing how others live and making mistakes and recovering. So I think it’s much, much harder to go into a room where there’s even a little more judgement. Just the second cousin, or the aunt across the room that’s sneering or whispering something. And it just goes right to your heart. I don’t know what to do about that. People need to have somewhere to go and someone to say, “Look inside yourself. You are great. You are strong. This is going to make you strong. This is a grain of sand in your oyster.” Really need that.

SARA: Definitely. And I think you’ve shared the value of that, of having those spaces where we can go where either it’s not a factor. It doesn’t matter. Or further than that, people care about you so deeply that they’re supporting you, affirming you, that there’s communal spaces. You are also a scientist by trade, trained at UC Berkeley. I’m curious how your scientific education influenced your views on faith and spirituality.

RIKKI: Well, this is the subject of the whole book. I was in such turmoil for so long. Science explains we’re made of atoms, and particles, and energy. And there’s no soul in there. There’s no being in there. There’s just the randomness, and some preset things that after the Big Bang there was some numbers like the charge on a proton. There are a few things that were preset and then the whole thing, bang, bang, bang just flows from there. And I believe it’s possible. But it’s an incomplete description of the universe because, hello. We’re aware. We’re conscious. We have feelings. We be. WE BE. And what we be is awareness experiencing whatever’s coming up. The color red and that hardness of teeth and the sound of my voice. We’re that being.

SARA: I’m struck in hearing this reflection in that what I hear you saying is that our awareness is what makes us spiritual beings.

RIKKI: Yes. If you want to just for a moment, if you just want to close your eyes for a moment and be aware of as many things that you’re aware of. Your feet on the floor, your fingers in front of you touching each other, and the scent of your lips, and the sound of my voice, and your glasses on your ears, whatever. Okay. All those things, . . . something is experiencing that. Something knows the taste of coffee. It’s different from being hit with a stick. Something knows that. That something is eternal, endless, -- let me say endless because I don’t know about eternal – but in my own experience, I see that it’s endless. It’s always present. It’s content. That’s my deepest spiritual self. It happens to be identical with yours, I think, one great spiritual self.

SARA: Do you still feel that seeker-self or that sense of yearning for something greater in this evolution of your spirituality?

RIKKI: No. It’s so strange. Since I really saw deeply into my own self, being truth, goodness, beauty, I am one with everything, I’m not even a person, my deep self, I just am not wondering about things. I see that understanding more is out of my mind's capacity. I’m limited. I know that science is not going to explain the truth, yet, until it broadens what it studies. So I’m not so anxious about trying to learn. I don’t know. I'm just at peace. There’s no more seeking. There’s no more self-hate. There’s no more self-judgement. Things do arise. I get my feelings hurt. I get angry. I just watch it bubble up like a lava lamp. And then it will disappear. Everything comes and goes. It passes.

SARA: That’s a beautiful aspiration. I don’t hear too many people in my line of work – and I get to have these conversations a lot – who can say, “I’m at peace.” And who’ve lived a life of deep struggle.

RIKKI: Yeah. I had my hard times. So I think that’s somewhat the main point of my book, maybe, is that you have right here within yourself. We were just pointing to it and are looking, right here in your own self, you have the source of deep contentment and peace. It does not have to be upset about what happens to you or society. Of course, there will be upset, but it doesn’t take your whole being. It doesn’t overwhelm you. It doesn’t become, “Oh, I’m really angry about what I read in the paper today.” Not “I’m going crazy. I can hardly stand it.” It’s really different.

SARA: That is really different. And that’s a difficult practice for lots of people, I think. Particularly right now when the current state of things is flooding us with concern, attacks… I’m hearing a lot of people express a lot of struggle in trying to find even some equanimity.

RIKKI: Yes. Of course that’s inevitable. Did I say [I have] a trans god son and we’re concerned we may have to leave the country so he can get his meds. I mean, we’ll see what happens. Yes, of course, we’re all deeply, very concerned and our deep being connected to everything, connected to God, connected to Jupiter, to lifespans, our deep being is whole and complete and ready to face all these things.

SARA: I love that.

RIKKI: They’re allowed to happen in this universe and we’re allowed to know them and feel them and sense them. But we also are allowed to make a choice, lots of choices. And over and over again choose our values and choose to create the kind of love that we feel is important in the world. That’s always available. So when we’re panicking, maybe a little key would be to try to find the witness element and try to be more of the witness than the element. And from the peaceful witness place to look out and say, “OK. Am I going to have to house my friend’s grandfather illegally?" Maybe I have to do that. But you have to look from this peace to make choices like that. You can’t make them out of “Oh, my God, what am I going to do? Everything’s breaking.”

SARA: It’s a powerful reminder to hear you talk about wholeness and completeness living within all of us all the time, and helps me come back into that grounded place of no matter what – and we’re in this storm of so many people telling our beloveds they are not whole and not complete and not worthy – and one small piece, that wisdom that we can glean from you in this moment, is to hold onto and come back to that innate sense of wholeness and completeness that lives in within us.

RIKKI: Yes. I want to say that people have different ways of accessing that. And we should make use of all of them. Some people, it’s music. Some people, it’s hiking. Some people, it’s praying, drawing, painting, cooking, gardening. But doing it with that clarity that you’re going to a deep place of peace now to prepare yourself to face the world.

SARA: Yes. That’s fabulous. And I know that this particular wisdom around wholeness and completeness and finding those different things that bring us into that place of peace, there’s a lot of that that plays out and is part of the path to recovery from addiction, which is a path I know you’re very familiar with. And you talk a lot about addiction in your book. And I’m curious if we can talk about that a little bit together because your book opens with a story from your childhood and living with an alcoholic father. And so will you share a little bit with us about how that addiction took root in your life and how you found your way through to recovery? And I think of this particularly because this is a very familiar story in our LGBTQ+ community, that addiction is pretty ripe as a coping mechanism for folks when they’re really struggling with identity and family and religion. So what was that like for you?

RIKKI: Yeah. My parents drank a lot. It was party time. They came of age in the 40’s. They always had a cocktail and a cigarette. And everyone they admired on television and everything always had a cocktail and a cigarette. And so they drank a lot. And then my father came from an alcoholic family and my mother did too. And so it was frequently out of control. And the thing that I want to say is that, first of all, I learned to drink for fun and to be cool. And then I learned to drink whenever there was a problem so you didn’t have to face it. And that’s really dangerous. And I think particularly young queer people, or potentially queer or want to be queer, I mean who knows, we are very vulnerable if you’re not heteronormative. You’re very vulnerable to trying to take something to ease the pain of just being yourself the way you are, and just being ashamed of it, bitter, or angry and wanting to hurt other people because they made you feel so bad. God, I know that feeling so well. But I learned to drink from my parents. And when I saw I was drinking myself into the toilet like my dad, I just said, “I am not going to do it. I am not going to live like that. I am not going to be like that. I’m going to find a different way. Something about me deserves to be happy and I am going to find the way.” And it took me another decade after knowing that, it took me another decade to get into AA which worked for me. I know it doesn’t work for a lot of people. But they have some very powerful principles and one of them is to rely on spiritual help. And I think this would be so great for youth if there was a way that’s sort of non-denominational that – AA kind of offered that – to find the higher power that you, personally, can trust. Personally, I used Jesus for six months. Then I sort of made up a divine mother. And it was a constantly evolving picture of what I thought the divine power might be. And that’s all you need because it will speak to you. It will help you. It will carry you. If we could just somehow have a rules-free way for kids to explore their own access to the deep truth.

SARA: Yeah. That would be an incredible gift.

RIKKI: Spirituality is a very important part of my recovery in AA because I did not know how to self-regulate. If something came up, I was out of control. Little bit of anxiety, I’m in a panic. Somebody doesn’t like me, I’m depressed for three days. I didn’t know how to self-regulate, especially after I got sober. So that was very important. I could turn to a higher power and say, “Please help me. Give me guidance. Show me what to do. I’m going to not drink. I’m going to deal with hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. And I’m going to wait for a solution.” To learn how to do that, so powerful. But you have to have something you can turn it over to, with some confidence you’ll be supported. And I did find that in AA and by experimenting.

SARA: Yeah. It’s interesting to hear you talk about self-regulation. We just had an episode at the start of the year about self-care with a Zen Buddist priest. And what was really interesting to me and making this big connection is how these spiritual tools – or tools we often think of as spiritual, spiritual practices – are excellent tools for self-regulation. Things like breathing, and meditating, and even things like tapping. There’s a spiritual element there that I think it’s really fascinating to me to think about that connection, that the spiritual is what can self-regulate us.

RIKKI: Yes. Yes.

SARA: And you’ve shared how that’s been true for you in your whole journey, really, is finding those practices and tools that have been part of self-regulation which perhaps is really just also a part of that self-discovery.

RIKKI: Yes.

SARA: Given where you are in your life and the long life you’ve lived and the stories that you’ve shared with us, what gives you hope for the future of the LGBTQ+ community?

RIKKI: Oh, it’s hard to have hope for us right now. It’s a lot of right-wing, social-ideology that doesn’t have a place for us. And it’s happening all over Europe and it’s happening here. So I think it’s very difficult. We may not be able to be so public and so out and enjoy the privilege of being treated like a decent human being. And what are we going to do if that’s the case for a while? We have to keep doing things like you’re doing with this podcast and people finding ways to share their experience, strength, and hope. We have to protect each other. And I think it’s probably true broader than the gay community. We have to protect each other and try and keep alive the things that we believe in even as they are denigrated in the public sphere. So as far as I can see, gay people have shown tremendous courage, like so many other social and racial groups in the history of our world. People who rise up with some real courage to say, “I exist. I’m here. I’m queer.” Or, “I’m this or I’m that. But I’m real and I deserve to be here like everybody else.” And people just do that and do that. I was not very brave. It took calling me in and asking me to come out, to come out. But I did at a time when it wasn’t acceptable, although I was accepted. So I just think the only thing I can think of is that we have to keep talking to each other and sharing and being. If we can’t be public, then let’s be available in other ways, through groups and podcasts, and churches.

SARA: Yes. Thank you. That’s a beautiful, hopeful sentiment for how we can keep supporting each other and turning to each other in difficult times. I really appreciate this conversation, Rikki. Thank you. You’ve shared some really beautiful wisdom with us and your life experience and all that you have learned along the way. Thanks for taking the time to share that with all of us. I want to close our time together with a couple of questions that I like to ask all of my guests at the end of our interviews. And the first question has to do with the Mama Dragons name, which comes out of this sense of fierceness and fierce protection for our queer kids. So I want to ask my guests, what is it that you are fierce about?

RIKKI: I mean, I can’t say I’m fierce about love. I work on it. I try to bring it forth. It’s very important to me. I think it’s the most important healing factor that we need is love. But what I’m really fierce about is protecting my daughter. I would stand in front of a truck just to stop her from being insulted by somebody.

SARA: Well, that makes you a Mama Dragon for sure.

RIKKI: I just love her and she’s a full-grown adult now and her life has so many things I want to fix and change and correct that I don’t like and I don’t approve of. And it’s so none of my business. And I just love her so much and want to support her in any endeavor she’s in. So really, it’s protecting my daughter just like all the rest of you guys.

SARA: That’s great. Thank you. Thank you for those parenting reminders too. So helpful. I think we all feel that as parents in some way, shape, or form. All of it, the fierce protection and the “Oh, but I would really like to fix this for you.” Affirming ourselves as parents in that spectrum of what is normal for a parent. The last question that I have for you, Rikki, is what is bringing you joy right now, especially in these times when we need as much joy as we can find?

RIKKI: Yes. The experience of simply being. So I might enjoy music. I love going for a hike, cooking delicious food, or even better going out for delicious food, being with friends and family. Yes. But where I really feel the loosening of the tension in my mind and body and the releasing of fear about the world, about aging, death, I really find that when I take a moment to allow my mind to settle, quiet down, and turn my attention to the aware present being that’s underneath all the activity. And when I can rest there for a few minutes, I find I’m restored to what I might call, “Quiet Joy” or contentment. That feeling that you have when, for a few minutes, everything is right in the world. All your chores are done and your kids are okay and everybody’s fed and the laundry’s folded and the bills are paid and you have that moment before the next thing happens. That’s my secret place.

SARA: Beautiful. What a beautiful gift. Thank you for sharing yourself and your life and your wisdom with us today. It’s been a great conversation.

RIKKI: I’ve enjoyed it so much. Thank you for having me on, Sara. I hope it’s helpful to your listeners.

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us here In The Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to tell your friends and leave us a positive rating and review wherever it is you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from being part of this community. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ+ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website mamadragons.org.

 

 



People on this episode

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Sara LaWall

Host
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Jen Blair

Producer