Holistic Life Navigation

This interview came after my scheduled guest had to cancel last minute. I put out a call asking for others to write me their stories of transforming trauma into wisdom. Nicole was the first to write, and her story is a continuation of last week's story: addiction born from unprocessed childhood trauma & the desperation to find safety. This time, it's from a woman's perspective....

Today's episode explores the somatic experience behind pornography addiction. Like most addictions, porn addiction is a desperation to find predictable safety. It stems from a childhood, particularly during puberty, of developing without consistent co-regulation. For men, it can be the secret password to be accepted into the club of men. I invite Benjamin Obler to this episode. Ben experience...

This is a beautiful episode, recorded on the day before Winter Solstice about the life-giving qualities of death. The inevitable transformation into the unknown that we all must experience. I spoke with Murphy Robinson & Jamie Waggoner who bring an insightful and unique conversation about death to the episode. We speak about how to die well, what death means to us, and the life force that is p...

Today's conversation is around the topic of healing through Astrology & the planets themselves. I was drawn to interview Britten because of her experience with finding safety with the Moon and then creating a workbook out of her experience for others to follow in her footsteps. We chat about the Moon, co-regulation, healing through Astrology, and the androgyny that is nature & the uni...

Today's guest is wise woman herbalist Lata Kennedy. Lata grew up in India and left home when she was just 16 to escape from a traumatic environment. Becoming very poor, she quickly turned to the Earth's wild foods & medicines to find a sense of belonging, security, and a skill that she could use to offer in exchange for food. Quickly, Lata began healing her body, healing her trauma,...

On this episode, I speak with Patric Mwalua who is the founder of the Mwalua Wildlife Trust. His organization was started with, as he says, "pennies in his pocket", when he began transporting water to endangered animals at the Tsavo Sanctuary in Kenya. His Water is Life Truck is an ongoing supply of water to water points in the wildlife areas. The delivery of water with this truck can be...

I, like many other children, was diagnosed in the 90s with ADHD, nervous ticks, & Tourette's Syndrome. The doctors wanted to put me on an anti-psychotic that would have had nearly catatonic effects. Lucky for me, my mother was a nurse and said "hell no!". So I began learning mindfulness, with the help of my mother, at the age of 9 and further managed and healed my diagnoses with...

This episode finds me in another group discussion with my 3 colleagues about co-regulation . Co-regulation is the event of attuning to another system that makes you feel safe. Essentially meaning: my body feels safe with your body. We talk about how co-regulation is the foundation for self-regulation, healthy relationships, and feeling safe with others in the world. For more information on my gues...

Today I interview Chelsea Goodwin & Rusty Moore. They are both little slices of history for the transgender movement. Both activists who founded Transy House   in 1995 to give housing to transgender people who needed safe space. Transy House eventually closed in 2008. I was happy to speak with them about their journeys in coming out, their recounts of trans and LGBTQI history, as well as a myr...

In this episode, I speak about the difference between empathy & being an Empath. Being empathic means the lifelong practice of understanding everyone. Being and Empath is the experience of feeling everyone. The untrained Empath, so to speak, is in a constant physical state of overwhelm. They may avoid people altogether. And this experience of physically feeling people's energies to the de...

Unique Hammond is my guest on today's episode. She suffered for many years from Crohn's, which literally stripped all the joy from her life. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't eat, and couldn't even be touched because her skin was so sensitive. Then, Karen Hurd's work found her and she implemented the Bean Protocol. Within weeks she began healing what had been many year...

Today I have Karen Hurd back on the show to talk all about adrenaline. This unavoidable, absolutely vital hormone that we need to live. Our modern world and industrialized food system has made it very easy for us to overtax our adrenals and create more adrenaline. And what does that mean for the body? Inflammation, digestive upset, anxiety, emotional imbalances & activating trauma responses ar...

Kounthea (Koon-tear) Richards is a coach, mother, and wise woman who was propelled into a major transformation in the midst of overwhelming illness & trauma. A lupus diagnosis changed her life when she was in her early thirties. She was slowly becoming crippled, was hospitalized on several occasions, and suffered a miscarriage. She was beginning to realize that, despite her holistic way of liv...

Grief is the somatic experience of overwhelming love & overwhelming loss hitting the body at once. This episode explores Loren Michelle's story of grief. A story that is radical, unusual, yet deeply moving & inspiring. Her story is about the death of her son & acclaimed professional skateboarder Pablo Ramirez on April 23rd 2019. Loren was a client of mine at the time. Our work, wh...

Gail Morrison, aka Gaiamore, is an artist, eco-therapist and teacher of earth-based spiritual practices. I had her on to share her personal journey with us, how her journey to listen to her body when it was full of cancer led her to the Earth-based practices. In this episode we discuss paganism, co-regulating in nature, and she leads me in a short but powerful divination session with a tree in NYC...

Dr. Amber McZeal is a gift to the world. A writer, vocalist, sacred scholar, and activist she utilizes sound therapy and guided somatic imagery to engage the knowledge of the body. She is a pioneer, and inventor, of the process that she calls "Decolonizing The Psyche". In this episode, we speak about how our psyches became colonized and how we can begin to decolonize them, returning to a...

Today's episode features Dr. Carolyn Elliott, creator & author of the transformative work that she calls "Existential Kink". It is a radical practice of shifting your energy of disgust into pure turn on. Turn on, in this case, being quite expansive: genital turn on, happiness, full body light-up - essentially transforming a negative charge into a positive one. Transforming how t...

Today's episode is a discussion with Natalie Ross. She is the co-founder of the collective Earth Speak, which offers a beautiful virtual community that includes monthly meetings, videos, and podcasts that all serve as resources for connecting to yourself more holistically and with the Earth in mind. I interviewed her after a quote I read of hers that said "Judgement is the death of intui...

We hear about how important it is to "have boundaries", but what does that even mean? We have to be able to feel our boundaries before we can ever express them. Can we have too many boundaries? What do boundaries have to do with racism? We explore it all in this episode where I am joined by 4 of my colleagues for a round table discussion about boundaries through the holistic lens of soma...

In this episode, I discuss the somatic exercise of finding safety in the body. Safety is the opposite of threat, and threat is the root cause of all trauma. Our bodies speak in sensations. Trauma & stress express themselves through constriction of the body. Where peace & safety express themselves through openness and relief in the body. This episode walks explains how we can find the safet...

In this episode, I interview Dave Berger. He is one of my teachers and his work is deeply rooted in the physiology of trauma: how trauma shows up in the body. We speak about chronic pain, the need to relax around the constriction for healing, and how to become embodied so we can listen to our bodies before reacting to things and people. For more information on Dave's work, visit https://www.d...

Beans are the word! Karen Hurd is a strict whole food nutritionist that discovered the life-saving benefits of beans over 30 years ago when she used soluble fiber to save her 18 month old daughter's life. Her philosophies, education, and protocol have helped thousands and thousands of individuals heal from serious chronic disease, as well as boost the health of people living an already balanc...

Addiction is the result of not knowing how to find safety in yourself. So we go out into the world and find people, substances, and situations that make us feel safe. Then we become dependent on them. This is not a character flaw or a behavioral issue, it's a vulnerable experience as a result of childhood trauma. In this episode I am joined by David McNamara. David is a recovery coach, substa...

Trauma is an internal event in response to a threat. It is vital for our survival. It's part of us and our lives and, as long we understand how to listen to it and use it, it doesn't have to run our lives. In this episode I explain what trauma is, how to tell when you're in a trauma response, & how we can release trauma from the body to restore vitality to our system and our liv...

This episode was recorded in my back garden. You can hear the birds and occasional car as the Sun was setting over the mountains. I had the pleasure of interviewing my wife, Aemen Bell, about her own healing journey, her herbal philosophies, and the many healing benefits of Yarrow. Yarrow is a common herb that is most likely growing right by your yard around in early Summer. It is a powerful herb...