The Present Moment Project

Codependency, people pleasing, and setting healthy boundaries can shape how we see ourselves and the relationships we create. Jill Bershad sits down with therapist Michael Berger for an honest, sometimes funny conversation about recovery, personal responsibility, and learning to recognize our own worth. Michael shares his personal journey through Codependents Anonymous, his struggles with people p...

Addiction doesn’t happen to one person. It changes marriages, families, relationships, and the way everyone around it learns to survive. Jill Bershad sits down with interventionist Marc Kantor and his wife Julie for an open conversation about addiction, recovery, generational trauma, and what it really takes for a family to heal. Marc and Julie share the story of a marriage that nearly ended as Ma...

Trauma can shape the way we see ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us without us even realizing it. Jill Bershad sits down with her close friend and EMDR therapist Luna Medina for a deeply personal conversation about how experiences from our past can continue to influence our beliefs, reactions, and choices years later. Luna explains EMDR through the idea of seeing life through dif...

Grief, trauma, and healing can look completely different from one person to the next. Jill Bershad sits down with therapist Linda Tepper for an honest conversation about losing their husbands within months of each other and the very different ways their minds and bodies responded to loss. While Jill found herself constantly moving, traveling, going to concerts, and surrounding herself with friends...

Childhood experiences, addiction recovery, and leadership come together in a conversation about how our past continues to shape the way we show up. Jill Bershad sits down with Blake Cohen to talk about his recovery, his work in leadership psychology, and why our unresolved experiences can affect far more than just ourselves. Blake shares his own path into recovery, beginning with the intervention...

Supporting a transgender child, healing from childhood wounds, and learning to love yourself are at the center of this heartfelt conversation. Jill Bershad sits down with her friend Shayna Bloom to reflect on resilience, parenting, grief, spirituality, and the courage to live authentically through life's biggest transitions. Shayna shares her family's journey as her child, Eli, transitio...

Personal growth, healing old patterns, and learning to trust yourself shape this honest conversation as Jill Bershad welcomes therapists and Real Course instructors Jon Waller and Stephanie Savo-Smellie. Together they reflect on the life-changing work that helped them move beyond people-pleasing, self-doubt, and childhood beliefs that continued to influence their adult relationships. Jon and Steph...

Grief, resilience, and learning how to keep living after loss are at the heart of this deeply personal conversation. Jill Bershad sits down with Amy to talk about the death of Amy’s son Yossi from brain cancer and the experiences that led her to write The Wholeness of a Broken Heart. Amy shares the nine months between Yossi’s diagnosis and his death, the community that surrounded her family, and t...

Starting over at 45, building a startup, and learning to trust yourself are at the heart of this conversation. Jill Bershad sits down with her longtime friend Nathalya to reflect on decades of friendship, raising families, navigating financial uncertainty, and finding the courage to begin again. Nathalya shares how a personal family tragedy led her to leave a successful event planning career, retu...

Bryan Martin lost his partner Clayton in 2018 after a bizarre accident during yard work which led to a fungal infection, a missed diagnosis, and liver failure within months. He also lost his father that same year. What followed was grief compounded by invisibility — a doctor in the ER dismissed him because he and Clayton weren't married, and people around him minimized the loss for the same r...

Childhood cancer, grief, and what it actually looks like to build something meaningful after the worst possible loss. Camilla Goodwin lost her daughter Myla in 2020 to a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer called Wilms tumor. She was eight years old. In the years since, Camilla and her husband Mike have opened a restaurant, started a foundation, raised over three million dollars for families...

First responder mental health and the silence around it is where this conversation begins — with Tim Roberto, a Marine Corps veteran with 19 years of sobriety who turned his own history into something that helps people in uniform ask for help without losing anything in the process. He founded Stomping Out the Stigma, a nonprofit that connects first responders and veterans with licensed, culturally...

Adventure therapy, Navy SEALs, and what happens when the path you were certain about closes on you twice. David Cohen, a therapist and founder of Invictus Psychotherapy in Boca Raton, sits down to talk about how a DWI at 19 changed the entire direction of his life, and what it took to find purpose on the other side of that. David walks through what adventure therapy actually looks like in practice...

Friendship that holds through the worst moments is hard to put into words, but this conversation tries. Jill sits down with Andrew Reiss, a retired pediatrician and long-time family friend, to talk about what it actually looks like to rebuild a life after something shatters it. For Andrew, that was a massive stroke in November 2019 that left his left side paralyzed, though he had no awareness of i...

Liver transplant survivor and ICU nurse Melissa met host Jill Bershad at a spa just six days before this conversation. The connection was immediate, and the conversation that followed feels just as natural. Melissa’s life has asked a lot of her from a young age. After losing her father at eight, she stepped into a caregiving role for her mother and younger brother by nine. Since then, her path has...

Jill sits down with longtime friend and psychotherapist Rachel Blogg for a conversation that moves between real life, real loss, and the quiet ways people keep going. They talk about what it looks like to live through hard things without stopping long enough to process them, and what happens when you finally do. There’s a thread of high performance running through it all. The pressure to hold it t...

Jill Bershad sits with Oteil Burbridge for a wide-ranging conversation about grief, music, death, family, faith, and the strange ways light keeps finding its way in. What starts with memories of Oteil’s brother Kofi opens into something bigger: how loss changes your priorities, how music carries people through what words cannot, and why staying close to your own mortality can make life feel more h...

Some people make you feel calmer just by the way they talk. Dido Balla is one of those people and the conversation goes straight to what actually helps when life is loud, fast, and constantly activating your nervous system. Dido shares his story growing up in Cameroon, how curiosity shaped him, and why asking “why” can be the kindest starting point when you don’t love how you reacted. Jill and Did...

Jill Bershad sits down with Danica Bajaj, a 23-year-old Duke graduate and Robertson Scholar whose life changed after losing her brother to terminal brain cancer. That loss sent her searching for meaning, and gratitude became the thread she followed through science, spirituality, and the land itself. Danica shares what it was like to spend days in silence at a Buddhist temple in Japan, to live and...

Jill sits with Mary Eckstein, a Holocaust survivor who has lived through war, displacement, the loss of nearly her entire family, the death of her husband after 63 years of marriage, and the loss of her son. Mary speaks plainly about fear, hunger, survival, grief, and what it has meant to keep going without turning away from life. This is not a conversation about inspiration or silver linings. It...

Jill sits down with longtime friend Laura Reiss to talk about what it looks like to stay human in a world that feels intense and noisy. They share the real story of Kindness Matters Foundation, from an after-school club to something that’s growing into a wider movement, and why people are reaching for kindness and community right now. They keep coming back to the present moment and the nervous sys...

Jill Bershad sits down with John Puls, a longtime clinician in the mental health and substance use field who also carries his own lived experience of addiction and long-term sobriety. John shares what it looked like when things were spiraling early on, what finally helped him stay sober, and why he believes community and purpose matter as much as any program. They also get real about the tricky li...

In this powerful and deeply grounding conversation, host Jill Bershad sits down with divorce coach, speaker, and author Jennifer Warren Medwin to explore how resilience is built one intentional choice at a time. Jennifer shares the philosophy behind her work and her lived experience of navigating divorce, grief, and major life transitions by learning to stay rooted in the present moment. Together,...

In this powerful episode of The Present Moment Project, Jill Bershad sits down with her friend Brianna Greenspan, an author, speaker, and wellness pioneer who has transformed a lifetime of complex chronic illness into a mission of healing and hope. Brianna shares what it was like growing up with confusing and painful symptoms, bullying, learning challenges, and feeling like everything was wrong wi...

In this powerful episode of The Present Moment Project, host Jill Bershad sits down with her dear friend and psychotherapist Tricia Youngs to explore her book Rescued Hope for the Shattered Heart and Soul. Tricia shares her journey from childhood sexual abuse, spiritual wounding, and growing up in an alcoholic home to becoming a therapist, author, and healer of hearts. Jill and Tricia talk honestl...