A Fine Time for Healing

A Mysterious Traveler. A Sentient Canine. A Psychotic Patient...

Grieving psychiatrist Ben Banks can’t find a way to heal from loss. But when a mystifying, miraculous and mind-bending trio arrive at the psych ward, the Doctor is forced to confront his deepest fears and beliefs about the nature of consciousness and reality - even death. With his marriage, career and life hanging by a thread, he faces demons both real and imagined, all the while being transformed forever in this inspiring story of hope, healing and renewal.

Today's special guest, Donald Altman, MA, LPC, author of the book Travelers, is a psychotherapist, former monk, two-time Emmy-Award winner and award-winning author of over 20 books and CDs on mindfulness and spirituality.

Donald Altman is an international mindfulness expert, speaker and trainer, he has taught over 15,000 mental health clinicians, physicians, nurses, and others how to use mindfulness interventions for depression, anxiety, trauma, pain and stress-related conditions.

Donald served as Vice-President of international organization The Center for Mindful Eating. For many years, he was an adjunct professor in Portland State University’s Interpersonal Neurobiology Program, and taught graduate level classes for Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling. Donald was a Senior Mental Health Therapist at both a General Psychiatric Clinic and Eating Disorder Clinic for four years, before opening his own clinic outside of Portland, Oregon.

Donald writes the Practical Mindfulness Blog for Psychology Today, and his articles have over 600,000 views in the past year. His book The Mindfulness Toolbox was a two-time Gold Award Winner of the Ben Franklin Publishing Award for both the Psychology and Body-Mind-Spirit categories.

PRE-RECORDED

Well-designed boundaries are an essential component of living a happy, healthy, and balanced life. But while you may know that boundaries are important, it can often be confusing and intimidating to understand where, when, how, and with whom to build and maintain boundaries.

To help, today's special guest, Dr. Shainna Ali, mental health counselor, educator, and best-selling author of The Self-Love Workbook offers the book Designing Healthy Boundaries, a comprehensive guide to incorporating self-love into building your boundaries. How you perceive, value, and respect yourself all influence the effectiveness of your boundaries. This approach will help you set limits that are more deeply aligned with your personal values, yourself, and your relationships.

Through interactive activities, reflection prompts, and case examples, this workbook will help you explore what boundaries look like in your life and create more meaningful, rewarding connections through the art of boundaries.

Nightmares are really working on behalf of our healing, health, and wholeness says today's special guest, Dream Expert Kelly Sullivan Walden. " When we seek to understand their hidden meaning in our waking state, we discover that what we thought was only fear was actually a blessed lesson in disguise. Much like our nightmares, each of life’s unexpected mishaps and misfortunes is an opportunity for self-exploration. 

In her new vulnerable yet witty memoir, A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste, Kelly shares some of her darkest, muddiest moments (i.e., an expensive theft abroad, hot flashes in menopause, a producer’s proposition of sex in exchange for a career-making television role, and helping friends during life-threatening crises) and how she found the positive within them by using her 4-step “OGLE” method.

Kelly Sullivan Walden (a.k.a. Doctor Dream) is an award-winning, bestselling author of ten books. A dream expert, certified clinical hypnotherapist, inspirational speaker, and workshop facilitator, she holds a doctorate degree in interfaith studies. Her unique approach to dream-work led her to consultant with thousands of individuals from Fortune 500 executives to celebrities to stay-at-home moms. She hosts The Kelly Sullivan Walden Show podcast, and is the founder of DreamWork Practitioner Training, an online professional-development program empowering people to incorporate dream-work into their careers.

As a dream expert, Kelly is a regular guest on many national talk shows, including Doctor Oz, The Real, Coast to Coast, and Hallmark’s Home & Family. She’s decoded dreams for celebrities such as Topher Grace, Stassi Schroeder, Logan Paul, Ricki Lake, The Real Housewives of Orange County, and Dancing with the Stars’, Maksim Chmerkovskiy, to name a few.

Burnout is increasingly rampant in our world and we need new approaches—adapted from traditional wisdom—that reverse this trend. Unfortunately, turning to many current spiritual practices and perspectives can lead to bypassing underlying issues. An attitude of deep transformation from the inside-out leads to changes that are authentic, sustainable, and integrated.

Making 42 valuable, but obscure, mystical texts accessible with commentary, reflections, practices, and more, today's special guest, Rabbi Matthew Ponak presents through his book,  Embodied Kabbalah, teachings from Jewish mysticism alongside insightful inspirations from current thinkers and the world's great philosophers.

Rabbi Matthew Ponak is a teacher of Jewish mysticism, a spiritual counselor, and the cofounder of the Mekorah Institute—an online spiritual center for embodied practice. Ordained with honors as a rabbi at the neo-Hasidic Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, he also holds a Master’s degree in Contemplative Religions from Naropa University. Matthew lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is certified as a Focusing Professional to guide others to deeper self-knowledge and healing.

According to the BBC, over 40% of Britons gained weight during the pandemic, with an average gain of over half a stone. Since lockdowns have ended, many people may feel trapped by their new unhealthy habits, addicted to sugary or salty snacks, and too exhausted to even think of hitting the gym. Traditional dieting logic would tell those people to “eat less and move more.” But what if that logic was fundamentally flawed?

That question is the eye-opening premise behind ‘The Inflowfit Method’, a comprehensively researched and lauded new book by tooday's special guest Mounira Assoul.

Mounira Assoul, Mimi for short is the founder of the Inflowfit method. A certified Eating psychology coach since 2020 as well as a qualified health & fitness coach for over ten years. She specialises in habit changing, fat loss, progressive compound, and resistance training to gain healthy muscle mass and bone density. She is a certified Pilates Instructor. Prior to that, she worked in public relations, management and communication field both for international companies and as a freelance consultant. She holds an MA in Diplomatic Studies and Communication as well as Translation and Interpreting Eng/Fren/Arabic. She believes that mutual respect and understanding should govern all relations and that only through education and guidance we can really transform peoples' lives. This eBook is the culmination of her own ongoing transformation journey as well as relevant issues faced by the clients she has been working with for the past few years. It is also the collection of all the wisdom beads extricated from the many books, YouTube channels, scientific podcasts she delved into over the past fifteen years.

One question Randi often get asked from partners or ex-partners of narcissistic spouses who have children with is:

Do narcissistic parents truly love their children?

Randi Fine has a definitive answer for this question which she supports in her discussion on this show. If you’re curious as to what that answer is, watch the show on The Randi Fine YouTube Channel or listen to the podcast.

Topics Randi covers include:

What is love and what kind of love do children thrive on?What does it mean when a narcissist says they love their children?What do children who have narcissistic parents experience and how do they respond?and more

Randi Fine is a World Renowned Narcissistic Abuse Expert and Coach in private practice with 15 years of experience coaching victims and survivors of narcissistic personality disorder abuse worldwide. An adept coach with proven success, she has directly guided 1200+ clients toward rapid emotional healing and thousands more through articles, interviews, videos, and podcasts.

Randi is the author of two books, Close Encounters of the Worst Kind Second Edition, The Narcissistic Abuse Survivor’s Guide to Healing and Recovery, and her compelling, page turning memoir, Cliffedge Road.

PRE-RECORDED

Each of us has more to do with creating coincidences than we think.

Today's special guest Dr. Bernard Beitman explores the crucial role of personal agency in his book Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen.  individual thought and action. He shows that there's much more behind these occurrences than "fate" or "randomness", and says that "they can be clues to the functioning of the psychosphere, our mental atmosphere through which many of them happen, and that by sharing our personal coincidence stories we help each other grow through our connections with other people."

Bernard Beitman, M.D., the founder ot The Coincidence Project, is the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School, he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University. The former chair of psychiatry of the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school for 17 years, he writes a blog for Psychology Today on coinicidence and is the coauthor of the award-winning book Learning Psychotherapy.

Founder of Mastering Change, today's special guest Steven Twohig has committed himself to mastering the art of transformation.

While seeking to heal from trauma inflicted while just a toddler, Steven was introduced to the practice of shadow work in April of 2000, leading to a lifelong study and what he believes is a path to enlightenment. Steven spent a decade working for and studying under the world's leading business and life strategist, Tony Robbins. He wanted to blend shadow work with business strategy, integration, and implementation. Tony commissioned him to interview over 10,000 business leaders worldwide to determine what made them successful and help thousands transform their businesses to be more productive and strategic.

Currently, he is studying the impact of shadow work on psychedelic integration. He focuses on bridging the gap between traditional plant medicine and the western mind, intending to bring the insights and innovation that plant medicine provides to everyone who wants more out of their lives. He believes that we are finally on the cusp of proper mental healthcare, which will spur global innovation.

He is an international speaker and has traveled worldwide, teaching a blend of strategy, shadow work, and spirituality. He has extensive study in mindfulness, mindset, business optimization, shadow work and facilitation, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), hypnotherapy, group dynamics, peak performance, leadership dynamics, and unconscious communication. Through this work, he has formulated a specific framework for understanding the human experience and is currently training other guides to spread the practice.

1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys in the United States experience sexual abuse. 91% of child sexual abuse is by someone who is known and trusted by the child or their family. That means every 9 minutes a child is a victim of sexual abuse. 

With these numbers, it is apparent that sexual abuse is a silent epidemic. While discussion and intervention for prevention have increased over the years, there remains a stigma and silence around the topic of sexual abuse. 

Today’s special guest, Cindy Benezra, is one of those statistics. She was sexually abused for years as a very young child by her father. Through a remarkable journey that she has shared in her memoir, Under the Orange Blossoms, Cindy has found healing and hope. Her mission is to be a voice to normalize speaking up and speaking out about sexual abuse and give hope to others that their story matters and healing is possible. 

Cindy is the founder of CindyTalks™, a platform where she discusses healing tools and stories of hope for other trauma survivors and the general public. She is also the co-founder of a luxury event company, where she spends much of her time creating beautiful spaces for some of the most important events in people’s lives. Currently, Cindy and her husband reside in Seattle, Washington, and are parents of four adult children.

We all knew that mental health was greatly affected due to the pandemic, but a study published last week in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science has revealed that the stress due to the pandemic prematurely aged teen brains by at least three years, and in ways similar to children who have faced chronic stress and adversity.

One of the study’s findings showed that when comparing the MRI scans of a group of 128 children, half before the pandemic and half at the end of the first year, there was growth in the hippocampus and amygdala, parts of the brain that control memory access and help regulate fear, stress and other emotions.

To quote today's special guest, NYC psychotherapist Dr. Kathryn Smerling,  “What we’re seeing is that when we are isolated and fear-based, we don’t grow as well when we are not fear-based.”

A collaborative and dynamic psychotherapist, Dr. Kathryn Smerling specializes in creating healthy and meaningful relationships. She works with individuals and families in all phases of life, crises-related or otherwise. Her extensive professional and educational experience has developed her working knowledge of a broad range of techniques, allowing her to creatively tailor sessions to meet the specific needs of her clients.

Dr. Smerling provides individual adult therapy, as well as comprehensive couples and family therapy. She also specializes in family systems, with an approach that is both inclusive and supportive of children and their needs within the greater picture of the family. Having begun her career as a nursery school teacher, Dr. Smerling has always been an advocate for children and their education. She is an authority in aiding families going through divorce, both as a parent coordinator and a child advocate, and she is a known expert with families who have children in the autistic spectrum, especially working with their siblings.