Rise Up: The Inner Work with Vicky Ross

Send us Fan Mail Pain does not disappear just because you’ve read the books, meditated, or done years of inner work. On a tender anniversary, Vicky Ross shares a raw, real-time realisation about grief, spiritual growth, and the moment she stopped treating her feelings as proof that something had gone wrong. We talk about the “myth of painless spirituality” and the frustration that follows: if I’m...

Send us Fan Mail He lands in Saudi Arabia the night the Gulf War begins, gets offered a bonus to stay, and says yes because unemployment back home is the other option. That single decision opens a career that moves from A&E nursing to pre-hospital emergency care, refugee camps, and later a very different fight inside healthcare leadership. I’m Vicky Ross, and I’ve wanted to share Andrew’s stor...

Send us Fan Mail A relationship ending can feel like freefall, but what if the real crisis is not losing them, it’s losing yourself? I’m joined by Shelly J. Whitehead, a relationship and couples coach and author of *Healing Your Heartbreak: 28 Days to Transformation*, to talk about the rise-up moment that changed how she loves, chooses and speaks up. We start with a story that still gives me chill...

Send us Fan Mail What if the parts of you that feel most “like you” are actually the parts you had to become to belong? We sit with a simple, unsettling question: what happened to the child you once were, the one who arrived curious, creative, emotionally open, and not yet trained to earn love through performance. I talk through how disconnection often starts quietly as nervous system survival. Wh...

Send us Fan Mail One night of rage can destroy everything, but it can also expose the exact moment you stop running and start waking up. I’m joined by Robert Jacks, a man who went from a pressured teenage marriage and a painful divorce to a violent breaking point that landed him in jail facing the possibility of decades behind bars. What follows is not a neat self-help story. It’s a candid account...

Send us Fan Mail The patterns that hurt you are rarely random. If you keep reacting the same way, choosing the same type of relationship, or freezing when you know what you “should” do, there’s usually something deeper at work than willpower. We go straight into the real question: why do we keep repeating pain, and what are we actually trying to avoid? I talk about how fear of rejection, humiliati...

Send us Fan Mail You know that feeling. Something's off. You can't name it. You've thought about it, talked about it — and it's still... there. This episode is for the intelligent, self-aware person who has done the work, and yet something underneath remains unmoved. In this episode, I share a method I developed called Quantum Alignment of Consciousness — a process that bypasse...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when the life you carefully built — the relationship, the identity, the sense of security — is ripped away all at once? My guest today is Will Thomas: coach, hypnotherapist, academic, author, and one of the most quietly extraordinary humans I know. And in this conversation, he does something brave — he tells the truth. Will's story begins in 1970s London, where g...

Send us Fan Mail “You’re fine” can be one of the most dangerous phrases a person hears when their body is clearly struggling. I’m joined by Charlotte Phelps, founder of The Alchemy of Being , to unpack her rise-up story from high-achieving banking life in London to a health crisis that culminates in a terrifying warning: her gut may rupture within weeks. What follows is not a neat wellness slogan,...

Send us Fan Mail You can do everything “right” and still feel like nothing shifts. That’s usually the moment to question the hidden assumption behind how you’re responding to life. I’m Vicky Ross, and today I’m sharing a perspective that can stop the frustration loop mid-spin: when you react to what you see, you’re often reacting to something that’s already finished. What looks like “current reali...

Send us Fan Mail Pressure can make even the smartest person sound unclear, act defensive, or rush a decision they would never make on a calm day. I’m Vicky Ross, and I’m digging into the real reason: when stress rises, your nervous system shifts into protection mode, and your world literally narrows. You don’t see more options, you see fewer and that’s when “I wasn’t thinking straight” becomes you...

Send us Fan Mail A life of comfort can hide a brutal truth: if you never have to stretch, you never learn what you are made of. I’m Vicky Ross, and I’m joined by my long-time friend Charles Taymor for a raw Rise Up story that starts with extreme privilege, runs through bereavement, betrayal, and financial collapse, and lands in a hard-won philosophy of responsibility, integrity, and rebuilding. Ch...

Send us Fan Mail Why do we feel sad… and what is sadness actually trying to tell us? In this episode of Rise Up , Vicky Ross explores the deeper mechanics behind sadness — one of the most misunderstood human emotions. Sadness often appears when something meaningful in our lives changes, ends, or fails to unfold the way we expected. But sadness is not simply something to “get over.” It is an emotio...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Rise Up and Live , Vicky is joined by holistic therapist Ben Barnett for a thoughtful and deeply human conversation about healing, personal transformation, and the wisdom of the body. Ben has spent more than 30 years working in holistic therapy, combining physical bodywork with energy work, coaching, and a deep understanding of how our emotional experiences shap...

Send us Fan Mail If You Could Choose a Life to Live… Would You Choose the One You’ve Got? Most people spend years trying to improve themselves. They analyse their thinking.  They try to regulate their emotions.  They push themselves to build better habits. But what if the real issue isn’t you? What if the real question is whether the life you're adapting to was ever consciously chosen in the...

Send us Fan Mail Many people wake up in their 40s and quietly think: This isn’t the life I imagined. Not because life is terrible.  But because something feels… misaligned. You’ve done what was expected.  You’ve built something responsible.  You’ve achieved things. And yet a quiet question appears: How did I get here? In this episode, Vicky explores why feeling lost is rarely about lacking directi...

Send us Fan Mail What if the thought isn’t the starting line? We dig into the deeper engine of change: the importance you assign to ideas, how meaning becomes identity, and why clarity and self-trust transform behaviour more reliably than forcing habits or chanting affirmations. This is a practical, compassionate guide to seeing the hidden choices shaping your life and shifting them without drama....

Send us Fan Mail Ever feel like your habits have a mind of their own? We dig into why repeated patterns persist even when you’re determined to change, and why willpower is the wrong place to start. Instead of flogging yourself for weak discipline or shaky motivation, we map the hidden chain that drives behaviour: the thought you mark as important, the internal dialogue it triggers, and the body st...

Send us Fan Mail What if the hardest parts of your past didn’t define you, but the meaning you gave them did? We dig into the quiet mechanics of interpretation—how the mind assigns stories to keep us safe, why those stories become identity, and how to step out of a prison built from protection. Without minimising loss or trauma, we show how to separate the fact of an event from the lens that forme...

Send us Fan Mail Why do conversations go wrong — even when you’re sure you’ve explained yourself clearly? Most communication breakdowns aren’t caused by poor wording.  They’re caused by stress, perception, and nervous system reactions. In this episode, Vicky explores why tone leaks state, how the brain distorts meaning under pressure, and why “better communication” is not a behaviour you can imple...

Send us Fan Mail So many people move through life appearing capable, calm, and in control — while underneath, something is quietly wearing them down. In this episode of Rise Up , I explore what happens when survival becomes a way of life. When “being strong” turns into holding everything together at the cost of your health, your peace, and your sense of self. We look at the difference between brea...

Send us Fan Mail What if the love we feel turns into a quiet form of control? We take a clear-eyed look at concern—when it’s a vital act of care and when it slips into psychological worry that spikes stress, breeds resentment, and unintentionally blocks the growth of the people we care about. With simple language and grounded stories, we draw the line between real-world support for genuine vulnera...

Send us Fan Mail Venting feels like relief in the moment — but what if it’s actually training your brain to stay stuck? In this episode, I unpack what’s really happening in the brain when we repeatedly vent about the same situation. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine. When it hears the same story over and over, it doesn’t interpret it as a problem to solve — it interprets it as something i...

Send us Fan Mail Complaining feels normal.  Harmless.  Sometimes even justified. But what if it’s quietly exhausting your nervous system, reinforcing stress, and keeping old patterns alive? In this episode of Rise Up , I explore complaining not as a bad habit to stop — but as an unconscious pattern driven by repetition, emotional chemistry, and familiarity. Using neuroscience, language awareness,...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Rise Up , I explore one of the most common — and most misunderstood — questions in personal development: How long do I have to do the work? I look at why so many people approach personal development as something to fix, finish, or complete, rather than an ongoing relationship with themselves. We’ve been taught to work on our bodies for a goal, to diet for a resu...