How I Healed Podcast

Sena Maria at one point trusted doctors more than herself. It was a major upgrade for her to come to the realization that she did not need to outsource authority over her body. She knew she could heal herself, starting at the level of story and belief, instead of looking for cures through pharmaceuticals. This lead her into the medicine path, and she began to sit in ceremony with master teachers s...

Siobhan Azgharzadeh joins us on this week’s podcast for a walk with grief. When she was in her early 30s, Siobhan’s best friend died suddenly. Siobhan followed her beloved friend into the underworld, fully consumed by grief. A month into her grief, she woke up one day unable to see. Doctors looked at her double vision and headaches, her loss of motor function in her legs, and brain scans showing l...

On today’s episode, we talk to Laura Delano, mother, writer, and peer-to-peer psychiatric support advocate. Laura was like many teenage girls, crushed under the pressure of perfectionism. She was diagnosed at fourteen with depression and prescribed psych meds, even though she knew in her heart that her rage, pain, and grief were logical, natural reactions to the society in which she was contorting...

Mikiala Spadaro was skeptical of the medical system — a crunchy, granola type of girlie who did yoga and meditated and didn’t immediately reach for meds whenever she felt ill. She thought she was awakened to life, but she would soon be humbled after finding a huge lump in her breast that seemed to grow overnight, and which was diagnosed as an aggressive, potentially deadly breast cancer. She had t...

Today on How I Healed we speak with beloved friend Kate Ater, a licensed doctor of Chinese medicine in New Mexico since 2001. She practices classical Chinese medicine and Chinese herbology. You may have heard us mention her name many times before on the podcast, she is our favorite source of knowledge on TCM and she is finally with us. A scientist and critical inquirer, she originally wanted to be...

Alicen Grey’s vocal talent attracted attention from a very young age. The church in which she grew up put her on stages raising money for the church, not a dime of which she ever saw. Told that she would be punished by God if she refused, she burnt out her voice and associated singing with being entrapped. The process of freeing and reclaiming her voice involved freeing her mind, body, and soul. N...

As an elite highschool and college athlete, Shannon Connolly was driven to win, to be the best, to master her body and what it was capable of. She carried a belief that her success was tied up in her fitness excellence, so when she pushed herself to the limit, it impacted far more than her wins in field hockey or track. Her relationships with friends and family, but most importantly, with herself,...

Romy inherited a love of dance from her matrilineal line. She has been studying ballet since childhood and became a dance teacher specializing in ballet and traditional African dance. Her business was successful, and yet she knew that there was a block preventing her from fully embodying all the power available to her in her body, in her relationships, and in her business. She attributed this bloc...

Content notice: This episode of How I Healed includes brief, but graphic, descriptions of rape, sexual exploitation, suicidality and suicidal ideation. Olivia Ballard grew up homeschooled in the Church of Latter Day Saints. While this gave her a strong foundation of family and faith, it chafed at her self-expression, especially of her sexuality. When encountering identity politics for the first ti...

When Tanya lost her father to a heart attack, she blamed herself. For years, she medicated her guilt and regret with meth and alcohol. While she tried many times to get clean, merely stopping these habits was not enough. Depression and anxiety set in whenever she got sober. Addiction was the surface level issue, and there was a deeper root to her sickness that would require a spiritual initiation...

Podcast co-creator Mary Lou Singleton tells the story of healing her chronic asthma in our third episode. Born needing resuscitation, Mary Lou was born out of breath. She also didn't have the chance to bond with her mother in the first three days of life. Expressing her own and the grief of her lineage began early, through her weak lungs, asthma, and painful eczema. When wheezing for breath and co...

On the second episode of How I Healed, podcast co-creator Jocelyn Macdonald tells her story of healing from decades of chronic health conditions including bipolar disorder, anxiety, rheumatoid arthritis, sjogren’s syndrome, psoriasis and endometriosis. Engagement with the medical system created and proliferated disease identities that then could only be treated with more and more engagement with t...

Welcome to How I Healed . In our first episode, Jocelyn and Mary Lou discuss why we created the How I Healed podcast. We share our critiques of mainstream medicine and discuss how the healthcare industry in the US would be better labeled the disease maintenance industry.  But we don’t just complain about the status quo! We discuss what true healing means to each of us and offer insight on liberati...