True healing means breaking through isolation to know ourselves without the weight of our trauma — and it's rarely something we can do alone. In this deeply moving episode, Cynthia Marks welcomes Elya Braden, founder and president of HaGomel, a Los Angeles nonprofit providing expressive arts programming for women healing from sexual trauma. The name comes from Birkat HaGomel, an ancient Jewish prayer of gratitude spoken aloud after surviving a life-threatening danger — one that must be witnessed by community, so that others can answer back: we see you, we affirm you, and we are so glad you are alive.

Elya shares her own remarkable journey with grace and candor — from a childhood where writing became her secret refuge, through a career in law that quieted her creative voice, to the long road of confronting her past and finding her way home to herself through art and poetry. Together, she and Cynthia explore how creativity heals, why being witnessed by a supportive community is so transformative, and how each of us, once we've healed enough, can offer that healing to others. It's a conversation about self-love, courage, and the truth Elya returns to again and again: you are not alone, you are loved, and you absolutely deserve joy.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

To learn more, get involved, or support this work, visit the HaGomel community online and at Elya Braden's website, where you can also find her poetry collections Open the Fist and the forthcoming The Dragonfly Puzzle Box.

This episode includes candid discussion of childhood sexual abuse, shared in the spirit of healing. If you or someone you love needs support, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-656-4673.

Brenda's Books:

Money, Power, Respect: Pictures of My Neighborhood

Upstate Girls

For acclaimed documentary photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally, love has always been inseparable from truth. In this deeply moving episode, Cynthia Marks welcomes Brenda — a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and an award-winning photojournalist known for living among the families the world has left behind. Rather than observing poverty and hardship from a distance, Brenda moves into the margins and stays for years, decades even, becoming family to the people she photographs. Her images are raw, honest, and profoundly loving — doing much of the same work this show does: stripping away the armor, breaking down the stigma, and helping us see beyond our trauma.

Brenda shares her own remarkable journey with striking candor — a childhood without unconditional love, her role as the "family truth teller," early addiction and the long road through recovery, and how a camera became her way into love and connection. Together, she and Cynthia explore how trauma shapes our idea of love, why understanding "how things got that way" is the path to compassion, and why, for Brenda, all that chaos and disorder is love. It's a conversation about service, healing, and the families we create when we finally build the safe space we always needed.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

The Official And Now Love Website: www.andnowlove.com

Pets in Recovery: www.petsinrecovery.org

The Choice by Dr. Edith Eva Eger

What Happened to You? by Bruce Perry (Co-authored with Oprah Winfrey)

The Second Mountain by David Brooks

For many people struggling with addiction, one heartbreaking barrier stands between them and treatment: they have a beloved dog or cat, and nowhere for them to go. Faced with an impossible choice — get help and abandon their best friend, or stay in the dark to keep them safe — too many never walk through the door. Ken Moses decided no one should ever have to make that choice. In this deeply moving episode, Cynthia Marks welcomes Ken, founder of Pets in Recovery, a volunteer-driven, free fostering network that shelters and loves people's animals while their owners get the treatment they need.

Ken, who is in long-term recovery himself, shares his own story with remarkable honesty — from childhood trauma and decades of addiction to the hard, sacred work of healing, and the devastating personal loss that gave birth to his mission. Together, he and Cynthia explore what it means to carry your story without living in it, forgiveness as "giving up the hope that the past could have been any different," and the quiet grace of being told: we have your back, you matter, and your companion will be waiting for you on the other side of your healing.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

To learn more or get involved with Pets in Recovery, reach out through their community in the Coachella Valley and Southern California. If you or someone you love is struggling with addiction, help is available through the SAMHSA National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357.

Human trafficking is often described as the exploitation of unmet needs — the universal human longings for love, belonging, safety, and to be truly seen. In this powerful episode, Cynthia Marks sits down with Jasmine McDonald, Clinical Director, and Sara Elander, Director of Programs and Coordinator of Victim Services for the LA Regional Human Trafficking Task Force — both leading forces at Saving Innocence, a Los Angeles organization that has been restoring lives since 2010. Together they shed light on a difficult reality with remarkable warmth, and on the trauma-informed, survivor-centered work being done every day to bring hope and healing.

Sara and Jasmine explain what trafficking actually looks like, why survivors are far more like the rest of us than we assume, and how "voice and choice" guides everything they do — from their 24-hour crisis response to their survivor-led leadership programs. They also offer a candid, important warning for parents about how children are targeted online, and share simple, practical ways every one of us can help. Woven throughout is a theme close to this show's heart: that healing begins when we separate who a person truly is from what was done to them, and meet one another with compassion instead of judgment.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

To learn more, get involved, or support their work, visit savinginnocence.org. If you see something that doesn't feel right, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is available by phone at 1-888-373-7888 or by texting 233733.

If you live in Los Angeles, you see it every day — people living in RVs, vans, and cars on our streets — but you rarely hear the real story behind it. In this episode, Cynthia Marks sits down with Sam Lutzker, a PhD candidate in sociology at UCLA and co-author of the recent "Keep Moving" report, whose ground-level research on vehicle residency has been featured in The New York Times. Sam's work looks past the politics and the neighborhood complaints to actually talk with our unhoused neighbors, bringing rare empathy and nuance to a deeply complex issue.

Together, Cynthia and Sam explore the stereotypes that distort how we see people living in vehicles, what the official statistics really reveal about encampment sweeps, and why "service resistance" is often a mismatch between what's offered and what people actually need. They discuss the toll on caseworkers and outreach workers, the promise of street medicine and Housing First, and practical ideas like safe parking and stable parking that could genuinely help. Running through it all is a reminder close to this show's heart: that seeing one another as human — past the trauma, past the labels — is where real change begins.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

To learn more about Sam's work, you can find him through the UCLA Sociology department. Organizations mentioned include Safe Parking LA (safeparkingla.org).

What does love look like when it puts boots on the ground? In this episode, Cynthia Marks is joined by two remarkable women doing exactly that: Ashlee George, Co-Executive Director of the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project (CTAOP), and Leoni Wainwright, founder of the Vaul Institute in Cape Town, South Africa — one of CTAOP's program partners. Guided by the South African philosophy of ubuntu — "I am because we are" — they share how community-led development, mentorship, and spaces of deep psychological and physical safety are breaking systemic cycles for the next generation.

Leoni takes us inside the Cape Flats, where the Vaul Institute creates safe spaces for young people to feel valued, loved, and heard — many of them carrying burdens far beyond their years. The conversation moves through the silence surrounding gender-based violence, a hopeful new chapter in HIV prevention, why caring for the caregivers matters just as much as the work itself, and Leoni's own courageous journey from hidden trauma to healing. Together with Cynthia, they connect it all back to the imprint — the weight children carry that was never theirs — and the incredible resilience of young people when someone simply makes it safe to be themselves.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

To learn more or lend your support, visit www.ctaop.org and www.vaulinstitute.co.za.

This episode includes discussion of gender-based violence and sexual assault, shared in the spirit of healing. If you or someone you love needs support, please reach out to a trusted resource in your community.

Are you actually living your own life — or someone else's? In this episode, Cynthia Marks is joined once again by Dr. Loren Weiner, a Los Angeles psychotherapist whose practice is steeped in the methodology of the late Dr. Bernard Bail, for a fascinating look at how we unconsciously take in our parents' personalities, limitations, and unlived pain, and then live them out as if they were our own. Loren distinguishes ordinary identification — the natural way children absorb the people around them — from Dr. Bail's discovery of the imprint: the mother's unprocessed, unconscious feelings passed to the baby as early as the womb, quietly writing the rulebook for how much love, success, and happiness we believe we're allowed.

Through three remarkable patient dreams — a clay slab pressed into a bowl to make a perfect copy, a bullhorn announcement to "scrap the plan," and an old dusty house with peanut butter on white bread — Loren shows how the unconscious reveals the ways we've merged with our mothers, and how recognizing this begins to loosen its grip. Cynthia also shares her own discovery of carrying her mother's silence. The conversation widens to the world we build together: if we're all beset by unconscious limitations, our systems will reflect them — and the path to a freer world runs through each of us doing this inner work.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

Award-winning filmmaker and author Eisha Marjara joins Cynthia Marks for a moving conversation about how our earliest imprints shape the way we see ourselves — and how those patterns can be rewritten. Drawing on her acclaimed documentary work, including Am I the Skinniest Person You've Ever Seen? and Calorie, Eisha shares her journey through an eating disorder in her teens, the profound loss of her mother and younger sister, and the long road back to herself. With honesty and grace, she and Cynthia explore how an eating disorder can become a physical expression of an emotional imprint, tangled up with family expectations, grief, and the fear of stepping into womanhood.

Together they look at the ache of coming of age, the difference between care rooted in compassion versus control, and the quiet damage caused by the things families never talk about. Above all, Eisha's story is a testament to healing through creativity and tenderness — a reminder that we don't have to remain prisoners of our earliest conditioning, and that looking back at our youngest, most wounded selves with kindness is where the true rewriting of our story begins.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

This episode discusses eating disorders and loss, and is shared in the spirit of recovery and hope. If you or someone you love is struggling, support is available through the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline (1-866-662-1235).

We all build fantasies early in life — a web of denial and idealization meant to protect us from painful truths we couldn't yet face. But those same fantasies quietly shrink our world, steering us toward relationships and patterns that reenact the very things we're avoiding. In this episode, host Cynthia Marks welcomes back Dr. Lauren Dolinsky, a Los Angeles psychotherapist who works from the teachings of the late Dr. Bernard Bail, to explore how we can gently lift the veil, return to reality, and finally make room for real love, real connection, and a life that's actually our own.

Guided as always by the dream, Cynthia and Lauren walk through a series of remarkably clear dreams — a veiled ship lost at sea, a fantasy built around "the Rock," a refrigerator cleaned of moldy wine and rotten milk, and more — that show the unconscious doing its quiet work of clearing away what isn't true. Along the way, Cynthia shares her own deeply personal journey of dismantling a fantasy she once mistook for love. The message at the heart of it all: telling yourself the truth is one of the most loving things you can do, and it begins the moment you're willing to look inside.

This is And Now Love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Please follow, rate, and share the podcast, and pass this episode along to someone who might need it.

In this episode of And Now, Love, Cynthia Marks sits down with artist, father, community organizer, and Sidewalk Project leader Crushow Herring.

Crushow’s story is not simply about art. It is about becoming.

He speaks openly about growing up between Kansas City and Los Angeles, missing his father, finding expression through drawing, basketball, graffiti, and street culture, and eventually facing the painful reality that the world did not see him the way he had once believed it would.

After returning to Los Angeles, Crushow found himself in Skid Row. What began as survival slowly became connection. He started listening to people’s stories, learning why they were there, and seeing the humanity that so many others overlook.

Then fatherhood changed everything.

Crushow says his son saved his life. Becoming a father gave him a reason to stop surviving the old way and begin living with purpose. That purpose now moves through his art, his murals, The Sidewalk Project, and his work helping communities feel seen, heard, and valued.

This conversation explores fatherhood, faith, Skid Row, public art, healing, community, and the choice to live from one’s authentic purpose instead of becoming the statistic the world expected.

Listen to your dreams and live from your heart.

Topics include:

Fatherhood as transformation

Art as healing

Skid Row as community

The Sidewalk Project

Public murals and cultural memory

Living with purpose

Faith, service, and humanity

Seeing people others overlook

Breaking cycles through love