#36 - Is This a Free therapy Session?!
EPISODE #36
What does it mean to die before we actually die?
This week’s anonymous caller, a psychotherapist from Santa Barbara, had her first brush with mortality at just six years old, when her father was struck in the head by a baseball. He survived, but as someone entirely different. That moment became the quiet beginning of a lifelong fascination with grief, transformation, and what it means to live fully in the face of impermanence.
Through her work as a therapist and her own healing, she’s explored how death awareness can be a form of awakening. We talk about Buddhism, the bardos, and how somatic therapy and psychedelics can help us move grief from the mind into the body — shifting it from something to fix into something to live alongside.
She also shares her view on the so-called “midlife crisis,” reframing it as a midlife awakening: a chance to stop waiting for later and start living now (something I’m a huge proponent of). It’s a conversation that moves fluidly between psychology and spirituality. Between what we can understand and what we can only feel and leaves you asking how you might live if you truly remembered that time is finite.
Book Recommendation: How We Live Is How We Die by Pema Chödrön
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
Listen to the full episode here or wherever you get your podcasts.