EarthXperiences

“Everybody has their truth. There are also universal truths that we all have to kind of live by.”

Chris James joins Earth Xperiences for a conversation about what happens when you begin questioning the beliefs you once considered fundamental truths.

Raised in Christianity as the son of a minister who later became a pastor and bishop, Chris shares some of the questions that followed him from childhood into adulthood. What happens to good people who do not believe in Jesus? Why are certain questions discouraged? And if something is true, should examining other beliefs threaten it?

The conversation moves through Christianity, spirituality, fasting, depression, relationships, self love, marriage, miracles and holistic wellness.

Chris shares how fasting changed when it became something he chose to explore rather than simply a religious practice. He reflects on how it affected his relationship with nature, his mental state and the way he understood his own spiritual journey.

They also explore the difference between self care and self love, why Chris describes romantic love as something that requires discipline, what heartbreak taught him about relationships, and why seeking truth has become an ongoing practice rather than arriving at one final answer.

♡ Questions to sit with

What beliefs have you inherited that you have never examined for yourself?

If something is true, should questioning it make it weaker or stronger?

Can fasting affect more than the physical body?

What is the difference between caring for yourself and actually loving yourself?

How much of what we call truth comes from experience, belief, interpretation or evidence?

ABOUT THE GUEST

Chris James is the founder and creator of A Healthy Alternative, a wellness brand focused on holistic health, fasting and helping people explore alternatives when traditional approaches do not resonate with them.

Find Chris James and A Healthy Alternative across social platforms as A Healthy Alternative.

Website: ahealthyalternative.org

Community: AHACommunities.com

Earth Xperiences is a space for conversations about belief, perspective, identity, critical thinking and the different ways people make sense of their experience on Earth.

“I just get a little defensive about my story because it's just like the most beautiful story to me.” — Anna Sheffield

What happens when the assumptions people make about your family don't reflect your actual experience?

Anna Sheffield grew up as a Black daughter in a white adoptive family. While transracial adoption often raises questions about racial identity, cultural belonging, adoption trauma, and biological family connections, Anna shares a perspective shaped by love, gratitude, personal challenges, and the freedom to define her own experience.

In this Earth Xperience, Anna and her adoptive mother, Kristen Sheffield, discuss what their family got right, what they learned along the way, and the misconceptions surrounding Black children raised by white parents.

Anna reflects on growing up in a predominantly white environment, discovering her biological roots, navigating racial stereotypes, and the criticism she receives for sharing a positive adoption story. Kristen offers her perspective on raising a Black daughter, recognizing unconscious bias, honoring cultural identity, and why adopted children should never feel obligated to be grateful for being adopted.

Their conversation also explores Christianity, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, historical racial policies in the Mormon church, and how faith and personal beliefs influence family relationships.

♡ Questions to Explore from This Conversation

1. Is it possible to get transracial adoption right, and who gets to decide what a successful adoption looks like?

2. Can love be enough in a family where racial and cultural experiences are different?

3. How much of our identity is shaped by the family that raises us compared to our biological and cultural roots?

4. Why do we sometimes struggle to accept positive experiences that challenge what we believe about a particular situation?

5. Should adopted children be expected to feel grateful for being adopted?

6. Can two children raised in the same household have completely different experiences of love, belonging, and identity?

7. When does concern for someone else's experience become an attempt to define their story for them?

♡ About the Guests

Anna Sheffield is a content creator who shares her experiences with transracial adoption, family, identity, faith, and the positive aspects of her upbringing alongside its challenges.

Kristen Sheffield is Anna's adoptive mother, an educator, entrepreneur, artist, and woman of faith. Together, they share two perspectives on the same family experience.

Connect with Anna Sheffield

Instagram: @heyannasheffield
TikTok: @heyannasheffield

♡ About Earth Xperiences

Every Earth Xperience carries a different perspective on what it means to be human.

Through personal stories and open conversations, Earth Xperiences explores beliefs, relationships, identity, faith, and the experiences that shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Listen with curiosity. Question what you think you know. Make room for another perspective.

“You should never fully trust anybody. You need to have discernment.” — Dr. Giovannie Jean-Louis

What happens when the systems we depend on for justice and healthcare become the very systems we begin to question?

In this Earth Xperience, Dani sits with Dr. Giovannie Jean-Louis, a neurodisability physiotherapist, healthcare advocate, and cofounder of Prober, to explore systemic racism, medical mistrust, accountability, and the responsibility we have to question the institutions that serve us.

Giovannie shares what inspired her to organize a 30 day advocacy challenge surrounding the Nolan Wells case, encouraging people to move beyond sharing news and take action. Their conversation connects the pursuit of justice with racial disparities in healthcare, including medical technology that may produce less accurate results for people with darker skin, breast cancer screening, clinical research, and the importance of advocating for yourself as a patient.

The conversation also explores Giovannie's Haitian upbringing, her relationship with God outside organized religion, religious accountability, spirituality, and the assumptions people make about Haitian Vodou.

Through personal stories and the Earth Xperiences game, Giovannie considers empathy, the way our experiences shape our identities, and the small expressions of love that make us feel safe.

Questions to sit with:

How do we know when to trust the people and institutions we depend on?

When does questioning authority become a form of personal responsibility?

Can we recognize systemic racism without assuming we understand every individual situation?

What does accountability look like when our actions are measured against our beliefs?

How much of who we are comes from our experiences, and who would we be without our memories?

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Giovannie Jean-Louis is a neurodisability physiotherapist and cofounder of Prober, a research app designed to improve access to clinical research and increase representation of underrepresented populations in healthcare.

Her conversation explores the relationship between healthcare education, patient advocacy, community action, and the importance of making informed decisions.

Connect with Dr. Giovannie Jean-Louis

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onlygiovannie/

Prober: Search for Prober in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

ABOUT EARTH XPERIENCES

Earth Xperiences explores the beliefs, experiences, and perspectives that shape how people move through the world.

Through conversations, storytelling, and creative experiences, the podcast creates space to slow down, question what we believe, consider another perspective, and become more aware of how we choose to live.

“The behavior goes where the reinforcement flows.”

Dr. Jared Van is a behavior scientist, precision teacher, educator and abolitionist whose work explores how reinforcement, punishment, environment and systems influence human behavior.

In this Earth Xperiences conversation, Jared shares how an early concern with fairness eventually became connected to his work in education, behavior science, disability, racism and social systems.

We talk about what happens when people are repeatedly rewarded for certain behaviors, why struggling students may stop trying when failure becomes their normal experience, and what changes when we stop looking only at the individual and start examining the environment around them.

Jared also shares his perspective on research, skepticism and artificial intelligence. We explore whether AI can inherit human bias, how discriminatory assumptions can become embedded in technology, and what it might mean to use AI for good while still asking who benefits and who carries the cost.

The conversation moves into racism through a behavior science lens, including how associations are learned, how environments can reinforce harmful beliefs and why changing someone’s mind may require more than simply presenting better information.

We also talk about social media, outrage, algorithms and the ways attention itself can become reinforcement.

Then we play the Earth Xperiences game, where Jared is challenged to turn everyday human experiences into measurable behavior. He explores body image, arguments, laughter, screen time and what we might learn if we actually tracked the patterns of our lives.

Questions to sit with:

What behaviors are being reinforced around you every day?

How much of what we do comes from who we are, and how much comes from the environment around us?

Can racism and other harmful beliefs be understood as learned behavior?

What happens when social media rewards the content that makes us the most angry?

Can AI ever be neutral if it is created from human systems and human data?

What would change if schools measured learning differently?

What parts of your own life would you understand differently if you actually measured them?

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Jared Van holds a PhD in special education and is a board certified behavior analyst at the doctoral level. He describes himself as a behavior scientist, precision teacher and abolitionist.

His work brings behavior science into conversations about education, disability, racism, social systems, measurement and the environments that influence human behavior.

Connect with Dr. Jared Van:

Website: https://www.jaredvan.com/

TikTok: @jaredvaneducation
https://www.tiktok.com/@jaredvaneducation

Instagram: @jaredvaneducation

YouTube: @jaredvaneducation

Facebook: Jared Van Education

Jared also shares resources related to precision teaching, the Standard Celeration Chart and measuring inner behavior through his website.

Earth Xperiences explores the beliefs, experiences and perspectives that shape how people move through the world. These conversations create room to slow down, consider another perspective and think more intentionally about what shapes the way we live.

“One of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, Do you care if your beliefs are true?”

Melanie Trecek-King is the creator of Thinking Is Power and an educator focused on critical thinking, information literacy and science literacy.

In this Earth Xperiences conversation, Melanie shares how growing up in a Young Earth Creationist church, studying biology and eventually questioning beliefs she once considered part of her identity shaped the work she does today.

We talk about what happens when a belief becomes part of who we are, why simply giving someone more evidence may not change their mind, and how intellectual humility can help us recognize our own blind spots.

Melanie and I explore faith and critical thinking, science and the supernatural, sleep paralysis, the God of the Gaps, cognitive biases, misinformation, changing deeply held beliefs and whether science can actually prove or disprove God.

We also play the Earth Xperiences game, where Melanie is challenged to create believable misinformation, think through what makes critical thinking difficult and revisit one of her own videos to write down three new observations about her work.

Questions to sit with:

Do you care if your beliefs are true?

If one of your beliefs were wrong, would you actually want to know?

Can faith and critical thinking exist together?

How much of what we believe comes from the culture, family and community we were born into?

Why do facts sometimes fail to change a person’s mind?

Can we experience something as real and still misunderstand what happened?

What beliefs have become so connected to our identity that questioning them feels like questioning ourselves?

ABOUT THE GUEST

Melanie Trecek-King is the creator of Thinking Is Power. Her background is in biology and ecology, and her work now focuses on helping people understand critical thinking, science literacy, information literacy, cognitive biases and the ways we can become more thoughtful about what we believe and why.

She is an associate professor at Massasoit Community College, a Fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer.

Connect with Melanie Trecek-King:

Website: https://thinkingispower.com/start-here/

Instagram: @thinkingpowers
https://www.instagram.com/thinkingpowers/

TikTok: @thinkingpowers
https://www.tiktok.com/@thinkingpowers

Earth Xperiences explores the beliefs, experiences and perspectives that shape how people move through the world. The goal is not simply to decide who is right, but to slow down long enough to understand how we arrived at what we believe.

“No more blind faith.”

Hope with Holly joins Dani on Earth Xperiences for a conversation about Christian deconstruction, questioning faith, religious identity, Christian nationalism, patriarchy, relationships, motherhood, and what happens when the beliefs that once shaped your entire life begin to change.

Holly shares her experience inside evangelical Christianity and the questions that eventually led her to reconsider what she had been taught about God, the Bible, women, men, marriage, leadership, and spiritual authority.

The conversation moves through faith deconstruction and the uncertainty that can come with no longer having the same answers. Holly reflects on losing her daughter, seeking answers through religion, reaching a point where blind faith was no longer enough, and learning to ask questions she once felt she could not ask.

Dani and Holly also explore self control, self respect, dating after divorce, motherhood, gender roles, patriarchy, hearing the voice of God, and how we decide whether a belief comes from God, culture, another person, or ourselves.

Questions explored in this Earth Xperience:

What happens when Christianity has been part of your entire identity and you begin questioning it?

How do you know when you are hearing God versus your own thoughts?

Can you question the Bible without immediately replacing your old beliefs with new certainty?

How do religious teachings about women and men shape relationships?

What does self respect look like after divorce?

How do you learn what you actually want after years of following expectations?

What happens when grief changes the way you understand faith?

And once you stop having blind faith, how do you decide what you believe now?

This conversation is for anyone interested in Christian deconstruction, religious deconstruction, questioning Christianity, evangelical Christianity, Christian nationalism, faith and doubt, women in Christianity, patriarchy and religion, spiritual identity, and life after a major change in belief.

About this Earth Xperience

Earth Xperiences is a conversation project with Dani centered on how people make sense of being human. Guests bring their stories, beliefs, questions, contradictions, and experiences to the table. The goal is to create room for curiosity, critical thinking, and perspectives we may not encounter in our own lives.

“The entire concept of you as a sinner, an unworthy sinner, is the most energy draining thing you’ll ever experience.”

Cyndi Savage spent more than 30 years inside Christianity, including years as a minister and missionary. Then she began questioning the Bible, the ideas she had been taught and the framework she had once used to understand God, morality and herself.

In this Earth Xperience, Cyndi and Dani explore what happens when someone begins rebuilding their worldview outside of Christianity.

The conversation moves through faith deconstruction, biblical interpretation, answered prayer, miracles, good and evil, sin, accountability, love and marriage. Cyndi reflects on anger, questioning long held beliefs and how she decides what information to trust after leaving a belief system she once trusted deeply.

Then we put some of those ideas to the test through the Earth Xperience game, where Cyndi responds in real time to questions about Jesus, the Bible, sin, belief and ideas from her own content.

Consider:

What makes a belief trustworthy?

If you remove the concept of sin, what creates accountability?

Can something feel spiritually real and still be questioned?

What happens to your definition of love when your religious framework changes?

When you leave one belief system, how do you know the next one is any closer to the truth?

“You have to set a new standard of familiarity for yourself.”

What happens when the beliefs, communities and expectations that once gave your life structure no longer feel honest?

In this Earth Xperiences conversation, Dani sits with artist, creative, speaker and musician Saiuri Diogé for a discussion about faith, identity, work, love and learning how to trust yourself outside of the roles other people assign to you.

Saiuri shares what led her to step away from the Seventh day Adventist environment she grew up in while still maintaining a belief in God. She reflects on the difference between sincere faith and performing righteousness, why she no longer believes questioning religion requires abandoning God, and how deconstruction changed the way she understands herself.

The conversation also moves beyond religion. Saiuri explores why people can repeatedly choose relationships and environments that hurt them simply because they feel familiar, and why changing those patterns may require creating an entirely new standard for what feels normal.

She also challenges ideas about work, productivity and worth. If someone becomes highly skilled at what they do, should finishing faster make their labor less valuable? And when work can be completed without sitting at a desk all day, how much of traditional work culture is actually about productivity and how much is about appearing productive?

Later, Saiuri steps into an Earth Xperiences game where she has two minutes to consider what human abilities may become more important as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable.

This Xperience asks us to consider:

What parts of our identity are actually ours, and what parts were handed to us?

Can someone leave a religious system without leaving God?

How do we distinguish healthy love from something that simply feels familiar?

Are we sometimes calling fear “waiting on God”?

Should greater skill give us more freedom rather than more work?

And as technology becomes more capable, what parts of being human become even more valuable?

Find Saiuri Diogé on Instagram by searching Saiuri Diogé and on YouTube at SIGH_YURI.

Earth Xperiences is a space for conversations about the beliefs, experiences and perspectives shaping how we understand ourselves and one another.

“If I didn’t know who Jesus was for myself, I would want nothing to do with Christianity.”

Can you question Christianity, challenge church culture and still choose faith?

In this episode of Earth Xperiences, Dani sits down with Vene for a conversation about Christianity, church hurt, Seventh Day Adventism, religious legalism, spiritual experiences, critical thinking and what happens when the faith you inherited begins to raise new questions.

Vene shares how growing up in the Adventist church shaped her discipline, identity and relationship with God. She also opens up about becoming pregnant outside of marriage, how that experience changed the way she viewed her church community and why she began examining beliefs she had accepted for most of her life.

The conversation explores the difference Vene sees between Jesus and Christianity as an institution, why she still has love for the church while questioning parts of it and how she makes room for faith alongside critical thinking.

Vene also shares personal experiences that strengthened her belief in God, including moments when she felt God with her during some of the lowest points of her life.

Later, Dani and Vene examine what faith actually means. If faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen, is belief something we know or something we choose?

They also explore what happens when religious beliefs become harmful, how conviction can turn into condemnation and why disagreement about religion does not always have to become an argument.

Consider:

Can you question your religious upbringing without abandoning your faith?

Can faith and critical thinking exist together?

When does a belief become harmful?

What would a healthier church look like?

Can you love a religious community while challenging the systems within it?

And if faith is something we choose, what responsibility do we have toward people who choose differently?

Vene is a creative, believer and critical thinker whose work explores faith, identity and the ideas that shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

She is also the curator of wholesome experiences through Vene Presents.

✨ A Creative, A Believer, A Critical Thinker ✨
Curator of wholesome experiences 🤍

TikTok: @norveneee

Instagram: @vene_presents

Follow Earth Xperiences for more conversations examining the beliefs, experiences and questions that shape who we become.

About Vene

“Death is nothing to fear.”

Josh, known online as Everyone’s Brother, says his understanding of life, God and identity changed after surviving multiple medical crises and near death experiences.

In this Earth Xperiences conversation, Josh shares what he remembers from being outside of his body, what he describes as an encounter with God, and how those experiences challenged the Christianity he grew up with.

We talk about what happened when he returned to life without many of his memories, his struggle with alcohol, rebuilding his identity, spirituality, intuition, fasting, love, good and evil, forgiveness, surrender and the beliefs we inherit from other people.

Josh also shares why he believes losing the person he used to be eventually gave him permission to create someone new.

This conversation does not ask you to accept Josh’s interpretation of what happened to him. It creates space to hear his experience and examine what it brings up in your own understanding of life, death, faith and being human.

As you listen, consider:

What would happen to your beliefs if you experienced something you could not explain?

How much of your understanding of God came from personal experience and how much was inherited?

If you lost the identity you spent your life building, who would you become next?

What is a belief about yourself that you eventually realized came from somebody else?

Can compassion have more power than judgment?

And if death were no longer something you feared, would it change the way you lived?

Josh shares more of his work as Everyone’s Brother through Instagram, YouTube, Substack and his Bringing Death to Life community.

BOUT THE GUEST

Josh is a guitar tech, dog trainer and rehabilitator who shares his work online as Everyone’s Brother. After surviving multiple medical emergencies and near death experiences, he began speaking publicly about death, identity, spirituality, healing and his understanding of God.

He also created Bringing Death to Life, a community focused on letting go of old identities and exploring personal transformation.

Connect with Josh:

Instagram: @everyonez.brother

YouTube: Everyone’s Brother

Substack: Everyone’s Brother

Community: Bringing Death to Life

Earth Xperiences is a collection of conversations exploring beliefs, experiences, perspectives and the complicated process of being human.