Human with Jess Mills

For our season 4 finale, we have a very, very special episode for you with the incredible Zoe Buckman.  Zoe is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and photography, exploring themes of feminism, mortality, and equality. Zoe was born and raised in Hackney, London, but has lived and worked and raised her beautiful daughter for many years now in Brooklyn, New York. After a series of triumphant shows Zoe is now being compared to, and exhibited alongside some of the greatest feminist artists of our time, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Kelly, Tracey Emin and Sophie Calle.  So it feels very special to have this time with Zoe to talk about her work, to learn more about how her own stories of tragedy and survival are held within it, and to hear what it means to her to have arrived at this point in her career when it feels things are heading to stratospheric heights… So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit. Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Tree Carr is an author and TEDx speaker who specialises in the realms of: Dreams, Death, Psychedelics, Altered States & Transpersonal Psychology. Tree is a Death Doula, she was ordained in 2021 at The Universal Life Church.  She is a a high priestess witch and master of Wicca. Tree's work as a Death Doula involves helping people spiritually, emotionally, existentially and practically at the end of their lives. Tree holds the space for healing, peace, support and compassion during the profound and sacred time of death and dying. As this episode will demonstrate, Tree has an extraordinary and rare ability to lean into the darkness that surrounds our relationship with death, to reveal how most of all, death can be the portal to our most profound experiences of love. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Michael Matania is the founder of Tough cookie, a mental health organisation created to help nurture human resilience.   Michael has said: I work in resilience because I’m interested in how we cope with the inevitable tragedy’s of life, how we tend to the part of us that remains when the rest of us have been decimated.  Michael came to this work following his recovery from psychosis in his late teens, and what follows is one of the most moving personal stories of transformation, and personal courage I have ever heard, so you are truly all in for a very special time with Michael today indeed.So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Lauren Mahon is a broadcaster, campaigner and co-founder of the groundbreaking and multi-award winning BBC5 Live Podcast ‘You Me and the Big C’. Lauren is founder of the charity GIRLvsCancer, she is a tireless campaigner for cancer awareness and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in medical science by the Institute of Cancer Research London as a prestigious recognition of the impact of her broadcasting, campaigning and activism to date.I met Lauren her when I was a guest on the podcast a couple of years ago… and the time I had with Lauren and her sensational co-host of You Me Big C, Deborah James, had such a huge effect on me- as many of you listening will know, they co founded the podcast, each of them, as people with very different, but life changing personal journey with cancer- and their mix of emotional intelligence, radical openness and vulnerability, combined with hilarious quick fire banter, and a very refreshing irreverence about this thing that they all refused would define them was just such a gift to be in the presence of…. Particularly as someone who was still very raw and coming to terms with the death of Mum who had recently died from brain cancer… and seeing them I just thought… you know it can be done differently…. And it was a MASSIVE source of inspiration to me and it certainly has been to millions and millions of people all over the country who listened to their podcast every week…So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Bexy Cameron is a writer, director, and activist. Her first best selling book, a memoir 'Cult Following' which was published last year to widespread awe and acclaim, is currently being transformed into a dramatized series with Dakota Jonson and Riley Ke-oh starring as the leads. It's not surprising that the world from Hollywood to London was set alight but this book, because it is a pure, tender, gripping ferociously brave story which provides a rare and intimate window into what it was like, to grow up inside of the Children of God, one of the most infamous religious sex cults of this century. Bexy has spent a lot of her adult life “retelling” the story of her childhood , but this conversation is not about Bexy gratuitously retelling her story, instead this is a  moment to look more deeply at what happened on the inside of her that enabled the internal journey from a childhood of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual incarcerations to lead to a life of truly self realized emancipation.  Amongst many extraordinary things, It is an intimate look at what her story reveals about “our basic human need for connection and purpose, about surviving our childhoods, about the gifts that trauma can bring, and maybe at some point, about forgiveness”.  So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

This final episode of this series with the extraordinary Bonny Tydeman. Bonny is a psychosynthesis coach and the creator of Soul Beam - A transformational coaching practice founded to enable people to connect to a life of true purpose and meaning. Bonny has said, “So many of us feel flattened by narratives of what we should be. But we can all be so much more than any predefined label or role, each one of us is a completely unique expression of life, full of creative potential and intuitive wisdom.”Bonny has come to this work through more than 15 years of deep personal enquiry and a profound journey of personal transformation, which she has translated into a practice which is having life changing effects working with people who feel in need of creating a deeper, more meaningful relationship to living. I know first hand, the extraordinary work that Bonny does, because I am one of the very lucky people that not only can call her a dear friend, but also a collaborator, Bonny is my incredible creative researcher and right hand partner in crime on all things Human podcast and who’s very unique brilliance is interwoven with every aspect of this podcast, so it is extra special that she is our final guest of this 3rd series! So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Solomon Smith is founder and Director of the legendary Brixton Soup Kitchen. The BSK was founded in 2013 to provide the sanctuary of community space, food, drink, warmth and a place of belonging, to some of the most vulnerable people in the community, including many local families who are homeless or living below the poverty line. The BSK is known not just as a place, but as a feeling- which is created by the heart, soul and humanity that Solomon and his dedicated team tirelessly generate for its service users every day. Just the year after it was founded Solomon was awarded the South London “Our Heroes” award for the transformational impact the Soup Kitchen was quickly established for having for its immediate service users and the wider community.  The story of the Brixton Soup Kitchen is one which embodies all that is the best of humanity…. Yet it is even more incredible when you know the story of the man, the legend who founded it. Solomon is a lifelong Brixtonian who was raised on the Moorlands Estate, which he describes as one of the most notorious estates in Brixton, coming from Moorlands, you have said, the world expects you to fail.  So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us, and let your heart be ignited by the fire of the human spirit.Created and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions

Josie Naughton is the CEO and co-Founder of Choose Love, a humanitarian organisation founded in August 2015 in response to the largest migration of people fleeing war, persecution and climate change that Europe had seen since WW2.  Within 3 months of being founded, Choose Love had raised over £1M and established itself across the front lines of the crisis as being the biggest grassroots provider of aid to the refugee crisis in Europe.  Six years later Choose Love is a globally recognised brand working in 15 countries, funding 150 grassroots organisations and has raised over £40M to date- it is a brand that not only represents the organisation, but a movement which holds the values/ ideology that so many people across the world feel is their own- one which ‘normalised helping human beings, no matter who they are or where they’re from.  This is an extraordinary thing in itself, but even more so when you understand the story of the person who has quietly, bravely, tirelessly led the organisation since she founded it.  Josie Naughton came to this role with no previous experience of the humanitarian sector at all, she had worked as a nanny, in bars and in music management till, like so many people at the time was at home one day seeing the horror of the crisis unfolding in Europe and felt compelled to take whatever action she could to help…. Having no idea how that action was going to change her own life and the life of so many other people. So if the world is feeling like a dark or difficult place, join us and let your heart be ignited by the human spiritCreated and hosted by Jess MillsCreative co-production by Bonny TydemanProduced by Joel Porter - Dot Dot Dot Productions