Episodes

What does rock climbing have to do with helping underserved, traumatized kids find their motivation and healing? Dr. Clifton Hicks learned early, through his own experiences, that the physical challenges of the outdoors, especially rock climbing, offered opportunities to learn how to face other challenges and find your way up whatever adversity hill might befall you. He developed a therapeutic program based on rock climbing, taking therapy out of the office and into the environment. While doing ...

What helps us to find our way back to optimism and gratitude after a terrible experience? For Anne Kubitsky, it was inviting strangers to share what they were grateful for. First, she sent out some postcards addressed to herself with “What are you grateful for?” printed on the back. Evolving into a project which installs art projects encouraging gratitude, she’ll share with us what finding gratitude has created in her life.

If you were diagnosed with breast cancer, could you keep your sense of amusement? For Joules Evans, it was a must. As a writer and an acitvist, she couples a fierce fighting spirit with a wry sense of humor. Thinking globally and acting locally, Joules will inspire and amuse you as she talks about her own cancer experience and the writing and work it led to. As she puts it, “I’ve had a lot of opportunities to be an advocate for breast health awareness and for others fighting the bitch that is br...

When Kelly Carlisle left the military, life became more difficult. She was suddenly unsure where she belonged and what would give her new life meaning. She was not always appreciated for the service she had given. Starting out with a corporate job, she found herself drawn to grow food, delighted by the flourishing tomatos and a little lemon tree. How did this passion, which helped her connect with her new life and heal from what she’d been exposed to both in the military and after, turn into a n...

Join me as we talk about how the worst time in Amikaeyla’s life led to Music As Medicine, programming she developed which successfully helps people in the United States and around the world (including recently in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Sierra Leone) unlock their deepest inner voice. What links her work on national and international t.v., on recordings with many award winning artists, singing for His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India and working with...

Recovering from a divorce and dealing with his father’s terminal diagnosis, Robert Pruitt faced the lowest point in his life. But hearing his father was ill, he knew he would regret missing any of it. In the next three months until his dad’s death, Robert wrote in his journal and embarked on a crash course in living and dying. How did these losses and the work he did to respond to them lead to a life of purpose and meaning, teaching others to share the gifts they are with the world? Robert will ...

When breast cancer interrupted her successful life, Terri Wingham found herself depressed and isolated, with no bridge back from illness to purpose. Taking a chance by going on a volunteer trip to Africa, she found a passion that she now shares with other survivors at volunteer locations across the globe. Listen in to find out how A Fresh Chapter, the non-profit she founded, facilitates trips around the world. Be moved by the stories of people who, by giving, have received a new outlook.

Lorrain Taylor's worst nightmare began on a typical February day in 2000. Her sons, twins, were murdered together in a parking lot while trying to start a car, victims of a random shooting. How did Lorrain heal and begin her work to support families after the loss of their children to violence? Lorrain's story of redemption and activism will break your heart and lift you up

How would it change you to lose most of your family in a few short years? Lily Myers Kaplan has written an intimate and compelling memoir, Two Rare Birds: A Legacy of Love about the painful, exhausting, challenging and ultimately transformative experiences Lily and her family had as they faced old age, two cancer diagnoses, and their family history. Her honesty will move and inspire you

As a child, Marianna Cacciatore lost her best friend, who was murdered on her way home. Isolated with her grief, Marianna learned young the value of developing skills to support ourselves through loss. Deeply believing in the important and value of grieving, a primary focus of her career has been working with grieving families and creating tools to promote resilience in grieving people. Her message of hope and resilience, as well as willingness to truly embrace her own grief, inspires and moves ...

Do you like to play cards? And sit around the kitchen table talking with family, with friends? But are there those conversations you find it hard to have? How do you want to die? For that matter, how do you want to live? The Action Mill, a graphic arts company that has worked with companies that are focused on addressing grief, has developed a card game, My Gift of Grace, to help all of us talk about dying and living. Jethro Heiko and Nick Jehlen, two of the founders and game developers, are mot...

What if you had changed your life to make it everything you dreamed of and then were diagnosed with breast cancer? And your usual way of coping was to apply a strong wit to every experience? And you’d done stand-up comedy, honing your comedic skills? And you hated pink ribbons and fundraisers? You might find yourself writing a book about finding a way to give as little to cancer as you could get away with. You might become even more determined to live your best life! Find out more about Dena Tay...

From 1985 to 1995, Benjamin Allen lost his wife Lydia and their two children to AIDS, contracted through a blood transfusion during childbirth. Grieving these unimaginable losses, Benjamin felt his way to a deeper life. He says, “My experience with grief has been that a part of me is forever gone and a part of the one I love and lost is forever with me.” His journey of reintegration led him to write a book, Out of the Ashes: Healing in the Afterloss, to share what he’s learned about navigating g...

How can music deepen our experience of life,especially when life is difficult? As a result of the challenges

How can we create an open conversation about the damages and continued disconnects which resultfrom racism?

Have you had a conversation with the closest people to you about how they want to die? The Conversation Project believes we all need to have those conversations and offers invaluable insights into how to bring them about. Join me with Harriet Warshaw, the Executive Director, as we talk about the Project’s principles and how she was moved to work with the organization after the death of her mother.

Aimee DuFresne lost her father and young husband within a year of each other. Devastated by the loss, she had to choose how to continue living her life. Ultimately, she found the courage not just to live but to create a life beyond what she had imagined. Her choice, to live life to the fullest, led to a career that has included a radio show, several books, and a coaching practice to help other women live their best life, encouraging her clients to live the healthy life she has found for herself....

How would you find your way through the pain and betrayal you would feel if you lost someone you loved to suicide? Robert Lesoine found his way through the agony of losing his closest friend; first by writing his pain into a journal and then, ultimately, by creating a book with Marilynne Chöphel, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who specializes in trauma. The result is Unfinished Conversation: Healing from Suicide and Loss - A Guided Journey, which weaves entries from Robert's journal wi...

Melanie DeMore, an outstanding and internationally recognized vocalartist, embodies her own principle that music can be a force for socialand political change.

Join me when guest Ash Beckham talks about having the hard conversations. How did she learnabout that? By coming out as a lesbian

Frank Ostaseski, a widely respected authority on compassionate end of life care, urgesus to turn toward suffering.

Julie Genovese struggled for the first several decades of her life with deep shame and self criticism as a result of the cruel bullying and medical torture she experienced as a child. Originally believing that her dwarfism and arthritis condemned her to a limited and lonely life, she found a way to love herself, with all her unique difference. Following every twist and turn of her own struggle, she learned to accept herself fully and create the life of her dreams. Join us for a story of triumph ...

Already fascinated by the mysteries of death, sociologist Michelle Peticolas deepened her own understanding of death, and of grief, when she was faced with the deaths of both her parents within the same year. Join us as we explore the ways those losses opened her heart and led to her life’s work as a filmmaker exploring death and as a coach facilitating grief. Together, we’ll talk about how making her film series, Secrets of Life and Death, intensified her understanding of what was, and is, poss...

Claire Bidwell Smith found out at 14 that both her parents had cancer. She spent the next ten years interweaving a halting journey to maturity with their declines and deaths (her mother when she was 14 and her father when she was 24). The many aspects of her grief led to a memoir, The Rules of Inheritance, which will soon be made into a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. She is also a grief counselor and former hospice counselor, using her own experiences to inform her work. As she says, she does...