THE SOFT ANIMAL
OF YOUR BODY
The Soft Animal of Your Body is a podcast that explores insight from Somatic Wisdom Keepers—people who live counter to normative culture in ways that honor and reflect the inner truth of their body. Host McKay Gordon is a queer & non-binary artist, somatic pracitioner, and clinical group facilitator whose work engages body, mind, and spirit.
Woniya Thibeault: Earth, Ancestor, & Winning ‘Alone’
Woniya Thibeault is a world-renowned leader in ancestral and land-based skills. She is a teacher, author, and acclaimed All-Stars winner of The History Channel’s TV show, Alone.
Never quite at home in the modern world, Woniya was always drawn to wild places and the skills our ancestors used to thrive there. She has lived off-grid for most of her adult life, trading modernity for wilderness. She is driven by a desire to honor the natural world, to feel at home in and be a part of it. And she means it. Woniya's master's degree in earth science and decades spent honing land-based living, prepared her to live long-term in the wild, using only the natural resources it provides. (Think: hide tanning, fiber arts, hunting-and-gathering, basketry, buckskin clothing craft, and more.)
Woniya is feautred on Season 6 of Alone (The History Channel, Hulu, Netflix). There she survived 73 days alone in the arctic, an unthinkable feat, all chronicled in her book, Never Alone. Her anti-imperialist, liberatory approach rattled the Alone series, offering an entirely new way to ‘survive’ in the wild—by befriending the earth, instead of making it an enemy.
Two years later, Woniya was invited to compete in an even more rugged spin-off series, Alone Frozen. With this second Alone journey, Woniya made history in two ways: 1) across her two stints in the wild, she set a new record for cumulative days on an Alone solitary wilderness survival challenge; and 2) she became the first woman to win.
The response from viewers has been profound.
Woniya continues devoting her life to sharing ancestral skills. Join Woniya’s Buckskin Revolution, here.