Odyssey & Alchemy: Conversations on Spirituality, Psychology & Inner Transformation

What if the thing sabotaging your next big move isn't fear — it's a security guard who's been on duty since childhood? Dr. Julie Gowthorpe is a registered social worker and founder of Gowthorpe Therapists in Ontario, where she and her team provide trauma-informed care for individuals, couples, and families — including specialized work with police, military members, and First Nations communities na...

What if connecting to the divine wasn't a mystery — just a signal you'd never learned to turn on? Taras Machula is a certified hypnotherapist who works in the subconscious, treating addiction, trauma, and grief through a method he built himself: the Temple of Divinity. He calls hypnosis a "super highway" to the higher self — and midway through this conversation, he takes Martin through a live, fiv...

What if your inner critic isn't a villain — just a toddler holding a bullhorn? Peter Kenney calls himself a spiritual handyman — twenty years helping people move from stuck to unstoppable, after a spontaneous out-of-body experience during a kundalini yoga class rerouted his entire life. His book, The Inner Remodel , treats the self like a house, complete with rooms for fear, the inner critic, and...

The measure of a man isn't what he says he'll do under fire. It's what he actually does when the bullets start flying. Benjamin Lee spent his career as an EOD technician, defusing bombs on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. He came home with PTSD, an opioid addiction that started with a legitimate prescription after surgery, and no idea who he was without the uniform. He rebuilt himself more...

What if the compulsive behavior you're ashamed of has nothing to do with being a bad man — and everything to do with a nervous system that was never allowed to regulate? Bentzy Goldman calls himself living proof it can be rebuilt. He went from addiction and suicidal depression — including an affair that nearly got him killed by a Marine sniper's fiancé's gun — to building and selling businesses. H...

What if the "terms and conditions" you've been living under were never real to begin with? Steve Barton took over his father's flower shop at 22 after a stroke sidelined him, built it into the largest in the state, and sold it right before the 2008 crash — then had an out-of-body, near-death experience in the middle of a routine therapy session that cracked his identity wide open. He's now a coach...

What's left of a man when the job, the marriage, or the mask he's worn for decades finally cracks? Dr. Richard Oelberger earned the nickname "Dr. Zero" doing suicide prevention work on Skid Row alongside the LAPD — going out in the middle of the night to talk people down from the edge. A somatic psychologist and author of The Zero Method , he now runs men's groups and a twice-yearly men's retreat...

A little boy told his therapist what happens to his tears when he's not allowed to cry: "They go down into my tummy, they turn into rocks, and then they come right back out and I throw them around the room." Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst is a licensed psychologist who has spent 30 years in the room with boys — and with the grown men those boys become. Her argument is simple: you can't give your son permi...

Willpower has a ceiling. You can out-hustle almost anything — except a nervous system that's still bracing for a threat. Dr. Alena Candova spent years being the person who had it together — capable, resilient, checking every box — without realizing she was running on survival instincts, not actual alignment. A chiropractor turned nervous system expert, she's the author of Grace Over Grit, and she...

On March 24th, 2024, Neal Tricarico's autistic son Anthony attempted suicide. Nine weeks later, on May 25th, Anthony passed. Neal had spent 20 years in rooms with Tony Robbins and Steve Leshansky helping other people transform their lives. He thought that was the career. It turned out to be the training. He didn't perform his way through the grief. He didn't wait for closure. He built the Endurant...

Most men who struggle with compulsive sexual behavior are told the same story: you're an addict, count the days, wear the chip, fail, repeat. Fran Frye doesn't buy that script — and she's built an entire practice proving why it fails. Fran is a certified sex counsellor based in Charleston who works exclusively with men on compulsive sexual behavior. She's also a sexual assault survivor, a 13-year...

What if grief isn't something you get over, but something you carry to term? Katie Rizzo is a scientist, longtime high school biology teacher, and mother of three who lost her oldest son Nicholas to an opioid overdose in 2024. Instead of looking away, she studied it — turning her research and her grief into her book, The Trimesters of Grief . In this conversation we explore emotional healing after...

What happens when the mask you wear for a living starts wearing you? Bill Marchant has spent nearly four decades inside the craft of acting — on screen in Chappie and Stargate SG1, behind the camera on his own feature Everyone, and for 35 years training actors at Vancouver Film School before recently retiring from the role that shaped his life. In this conversation we explore men's inner work and...

Happily married on Friday, divorcing on Sunday, back to normal by Tuesday. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. Dr. Talina Hermann is a doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, clinical herbalist, and functional medicine practitioner. When conventional medicine failed to explain her own health struggles, she went looking for answers — and built a career giving them to others as fou...

What if the pattern you've been managing for decades could actually heal at the root? Dr. Melinda Fouts is back on the show — psychotherapist, executive coach, and psychedelic-assisted therapy guide, trained at the California Institute of Integral Studies and practicing legally in Colorado, where she guides both micro-dosing protocols and full psilocybin journeys. In this conversation we explore p...

Girls get a rite of passage. Boys get silence — and spend thirty years paying for it. Raymond E. Foster served in the US Coast Guard, rose to lieutenant in the LAPD — earning the police medal for heroism and over 200 commendations — advised Caribbean governments on national security, and is a past master of his Masonic lodge. He's also the author of The Temple Within and Chasing the Surge, a book...

Why does willpower keep failing — and what actually breaks an addiction? Hypnotherapist Brian Davies helps people quit smoking in a single session, and in this conversation with Martin Prihoda he explains why real change happens in the subconscious mind, not through white-knuckle discipline. Brian came to this work the hard way: a father who was only present when drinking, an ADHD diagnosis that d...

What if the ceiling you keep hitting was installed before you were old enough to question it? Dr. Tara Perry is a hypnotherapist, Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, and one of the most effective subconscious reprogrammers working today. For 25 years she's worked with Olympians, celebrities, and first responders — going directly into the subconscious mind to find the root cause of what's b...

Frank Mesa spent 30 years at MTA Metro-North — starting as an assistant conductor and working his way to Chief Operations Training Officer, responsible for developing 7,000 employees in one of America's most demanding and high-stakes environments. Then he walked away and started over. In this episode, Frank breaks down his ERD framework — Evolve, Revolve, or Devolve — a decision-making system he d...

What happens when you stop choosing between the sacred and the worldly? You get David Nichtern. Grammy-nominated songwriter. Four-time Emmy winner. Buddhist teacher for over 50 years. David wrote "Midnight at the Oasis," played with Jerry Garcia and Paul Simon, and spent two decades studying under the legendary Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Today he runs Dharma Moon — a global platform training the ne...

Julie Brams has spent over 30 years helping people get out of their own way — in the therapy room and in the forest. She's a licensed marriage and family therapist, eco-psychologist, and certified Forest Therapy guide whose work sits at the crossroads of inner healing and the natural world. In this conversation we go deep. We talk about nervous system dysregulation as a cultural disease, not a per...

What if your voice was broadcasting the state of your nervous system — and you didn't even know it? In this episode I sit down with Alexander Fredericks, founder of ToneWell and a man who has spent over two decades bringing other people's ideas to life across music, cleantech, neuroscience, and wellness technology. What started as a mission to save his wife's health became a decades-long journey i...

What happens when a nurse trained in evidence-based medicine becomes a target of black magic — and survives to heal others? Shaman Sondra Bailey spent years bed-bound, stripped of her home, her career, and custody of her child. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong. The tests came back clean. What they missed — and what Western medicine has no language for — was a deliberate, sustained dark ene...

What does it actually take to flourish? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Scott Glassman — psychologist, professor at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and author of A Happier You — to explore the science and soul of living a genuinely happy life. Scott opens up about his own battle with depression as a teenager, how being bullied reshaped his relationship with himself, and why...

Most of us treat sleep like an afterthought — something we'll get to when everything else is done. Alison Anandi Francis spent 15 years paying the price for that mistake, battling chronic insomnia while running a successful business and holding it together on the outside while quietly falling apart within. What she found in a yoga ashram in India — specifically through the breath — became the foun...