Feelings with Strangers

There are conversations that seem to happen at the very edge of what language can do. This is one of those.

Stephen Jenkinson has spent decades working in what he calls the death trade. Sitting with the dying, bearing witness to the end of life in ways that most of us spend our whole existence carefully avoiding. He wrote about it, spoke about it and then, just over two years ago, he walked into a neurologist's office expecting reassurance, and walked out with a Parkinson's diagnosis, and, as he puts it, never really walked out at all.

The man who entered that room didn't survive the encounter.

What you are about to hear is what came next. Stephen began writing on the day of his diagnosis, not intentionally, not as a craft, not as therapy, and not for anyone in particular. He wrote because he didn't know what else to do. He wrote the way a person writes when nothing has survived the news. And out of that wreckage came his new book, Trembling Still, a necklace of memory shards, improvised words, and ruptures so acute that even the editing team at his publisher were dumbfounded by what they read. He refused to rehabilitate it. He preserved the dumbfoundedness. Because to clean it up, he said, would have been to tell the wrong story.

We speak about what it means when the diagnosis is about your brain, not your liver or your kneecap, but the seat of you. How that forecloses any possibility of distance. How you can get used to anything, and why that realisation is both a mercy and a devastation. About isolation so acute it was almost devilish. About the version of himself that never left the neurologist's office. About hope, and why he remains persuaded that hopefulness and hopelessness have more in common than what separates them.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all of this, something extraordinary happens. A conversation about the end of a life becomes a conversation about the quality of attention we bring to whatever life remains. About what it means to abide, even trembling. About whether the skills we develop across a lifetime of doing the work still hold in the moments we cannot afford to waste them.

I found Stephen's book laugh-out-loud funny in places, and devastating in others. But the thing that stayed with me longest was something harder to name, a shimmering aliveness underneath the grief. The kind that only comes from someone who is genuinely grappling, in real time, on the page, with what it means to still be here.

This is not a conversation about getting better. There is no getting better. But it is, in the most unexpected way, a conversation about what it still means to show up.

Come with your full attention. 

About Stephen Jenkinson

Stephen Jenkinson is a teacher, author, activist, and farmer. He holds a Master's degree in Theology from Harvard University and a Master's degree in Social Work from the University of Toronto. He is the founder of the Orphan Wisdom School in Tramore, Canada, a teaching and learning house devoted to the skills of deep living and conscious dying. He is the author of several books, including the seminal Die Wise, as well as Homecoming, Come of Age, Becoming Animal, Matrimony, and his most recent work Trembling Still. He is also one half of the music and spoken word project Knights of Grief and Mystery, alongside musician Gregory Hoskins.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Stephen Jenkinson

Stephen Jenkinson — Orphan Wisdom

Trembling Still — New Book

Die Wise — Book

Knights of Grief and Mystery — Caldera (New Album)

What if the most radical act available to us right now is not a protest, a policy, or a purchase, but a question? A question about what we are actually participating in every single day at the table.

In this conversation, I sit down with Dr Will Tuttle, philosopher, musician, educator, former Zen Buddhist monk, and author of the worldwide bestseller The World Peace Diet, to explore one of the most confronting yet liberating truths: that the food on our plate is not just a personal choice. It is the foundation upon which our entire civilisation is built. And that foundation is far more troubled than most of us have been encouraged to look.

That our entire economic culture began with the enslavement, torture and killing of animals. We speak about the herding revolution of 10,000 years ago, and how the decision to own animals as property gave rise, for the first time in human history, to war, slavery, and a ruling class.

We speak about intelligence, and how Will's PhD research at UC Berkeley led him to understand that intelligence is simply the capacity to make connections, and how a culture built on not making connections erodes something essential in us. We speak about the inner work, the meditation, the silence, the daily practice of returning to who we actually are beneath the noise of what we have been told to be.

But this is not a heavy conversation. It is, in many ways, a deeply hopeful one. Will is 72 years old and has the biological age of a man in his twenties. He has not visited a doctor or taken a prescription in over 50 years. He and his wife Madeleine grow 80 fruit and nut trees on a quarter-acre of land in Northern California, and they have spent their lives travelling the world sharing a message that is, at its heart, extraordinarily simple: we do not have to keep doing this.

All beings can be free.

There is another way.

And it begins with us.

This is an invitation to something far more alive, more connected, and more free than the story we have been given.

About

Dr. Will Tuttle is an award-winning speaker, educator, author, and musician whose work centres on compassion, intuition, meditation, and conscious living. He holds a PhD in education from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation on the role of intuition in education was nominated for the Best Dissertation Award. A former Zen Buddhist monk who trained in South Korea, he has delivered over 4,000 presentations across more than 50 countries. He is the author of the acclaimed The World Peace Diet, now translated into 18 languages, as well as Food for Freedom, The World Peace Way, and numerous other books and recordings. He travels and presents globally alongside his wife Madeleine, a visionary watercolour artist from Switzerland.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Dr. Will Tuttle

Site

https://www.willtuttle.com/

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/WorldPeaceDiet/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJdnSV5p-Yg

In this episode, I speak with Veda Austin - water researcher, speaker, and one of those rare guests who can move from the deeply personal to the deeply metaphysical without losing warmth or clarity. What begins with a near-fatal story from her youth opens into a wider conversation about forgiveness, self-trust, consciousness, healing, and the intelligence that lives within water.

Veda reflects on surviving trauma, forgiving the unforgivable, and the unexpected lessons that came not through certainty, but through relationship - with life, with grief, with herself, and with the element that has become her life’s work.

This is a conversation about mystery, pain, forgiveness and freedom. Probably more importantly. It's about learning to allow love to move what force can no longer.

If you’ve ever felt drawn to the edges of science, spirit, and human experience, then you'll love this conversation.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Veda Austin

Site

https://www.vedaaustin.com/

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/vedaaustin_water/?hl=en

The Frequency Movie

Site

https://thefrequencymovie.com/

Luc Montagnier

DNA Transduction

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26098521/

What if manifestation wasn't about magical thinking at all, but about learning how to work with your own mind?

In this conversation with Brian Withers, we unpack energy, alignment, desire, resistance, and the stories we've inherited about suffering. They move past the usual language around "raising your vibration" and get into something far more practical: how your thoughts shape your emotional state, how your emotional state shapes your choices, and how those choices quietly build a life.

They talk about heartbreak, melancholy, religion, self-worth, business, the law of attraction, and why so much of what we call struggle may actually be a misunderstanding of how life works. Brian makes the case that suffering isn't noble, desire isn't the problem, and the real work is learning to notice resistance and release it before it runs the show.

This is a conversation about responsibility, focus, and the possibility of living with more clarity and less fear. Not by denying pain, but by meeting it differently.

If you've ever felt sceptical of manifestation language, but still suspect there's something powerful in the way we think, feel, and move through the world, this one is for you.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers/videos

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Brian Withers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@brianwithers357

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/theknowledgeoflife/

Site

highervibrationsnow.com

What if the conflict in our relationships is not really between men and women, but between the parts of ourselves we have never learned how to bring together?

In this conversation, I sit down with Justin Patrick Pierce, relationship consultant, teacher, writer and long-time student of sacred sexuality, intimacy, polarity and non-duality.

Justin’s work moves beyond the usual conversations around masculine and feminine. He is not interested in dragging us back into old gender roles, or giving people another rigid script for how men and women should behave. Instead, he offers a more nuanced and practical language for understanding the forces that move through all of us: awareness and energy, stillness and feeling, desire and surrender, Alpha and Omega.

We speak about the crisis many couples are facing now, where two people can love each other deeply, build a life together, and still feel like they are missing each other in the places that matter most. Sex becomes strained. Desire becomes confusing. One person wants closeness while the other wants space. One person feels unseen while the other feels burdened. And slowly, the relationship becomes less a place of intimacy and more a place of quiet conflict. At the heart of Justin’s work is a simple but profound question: how do we stop making our partner the enemy, and begin to see relationship itself as the place where our deepest spiritual practice begins?

This is a conversation about love, desire, sacred sex, masculine and feminine polarity, the longing to be free, and the strange ways we sabotage the intimacy we most deeply want. It is also about why trying to escape relationship may be the very thing that keeps us trapped. And what becomes possible when we stop looking for freedom outside the moment, and instead learn how to meet the person in front of us with more presence, more truth, and more love.

At its heart, this episode is an invitation to rethink intimacy. Not as something we perform. Not as something we control. But as a living practice, one that asks us to see more clearly, feel more honestly, and come closer to the parts of ourselves and each other we have spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

About

Justin Patrick Pierce has spent sixteen years in an intimate laboratory: his own marriage to Londin Angel Winters. Developing, testing, and refining a body of work on sacred sexuality and spiritual intimacy.

He is not a therapist. He is not a theorist. He is a practitioner who teaches what he lives, and who lives what he teaches.

His approach is nondual at its root: beneath the dance of Alpha and Omega, there is one consciousness knowing itself through the polarity of two. Understanding this changes everything about how you meet your partner, your desire, and yourself.

Teaching alongside him is Londin Angel Winters, sacred intimacy teacher, devoted practitioner, and the other half of this work. Londin leads the Women's Circle and co-leads the Couples Practice. She is co-author of both books. Her teaching lives in the body, breath, sensation, desire, the places women have learned to shut down. She doesn't teach concepts. She teaches women how to feel again.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers/videos

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Justin Patrick Peirce 

Site

www.JustinPatrickPierce.com

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/JustinPatrickPierce

Books Playing With Fire: The Spiritual Path of Intimate Relationship & 

The Awakened Woman’s Guide to Everlasting Love,

Losing Weight & Building Muscle

Mind Mind-set matters | Exercise and the placebo effect

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/

What if you could become younger, lose weight, and build muscle without treatments, calorie counting, or working out?

In this conversation, I sit down with MikeyBreathes - a teacher, traveller, unintentional provocateur, and one of the more unique voices in the modern health and embodiment space. Mikey’s work sits far outside the usual language of wellness. He is not speaking about another supplement, protocol, diet, or biohack. His central idea sits far outside the usual textbooks on human health and biology: that the power we are searching for is already within us, and that the body is not a machine to be fixed but an expression of consciousness, belief, attention, and energy.

We speak about health, ageing, fasting, identity, illness, belief, embodiment, and what happens when we stop outsourcing our power to authority figures, systems, experts, and inherited ideas about what is possible. Mikey shares his own story, growing up in poverty, experiencing deep childhood difficulty, developing gynecomastia as a young boy, and beginning a lifelong inquiry into the body, the mind, and the hidden architecture of belief.

His claims are challenging, sometimes might appear outrageous, and will undoubtedly stretch the limits of what many people are willing to consider. But beneath this is a deeper invitation: to question how much of what we call biology is also shaped by perception, identity, fear, and the stories we unconsciously live inside.

This is a conversation about the body as a divine instrument. About the difference between living and simply not dying. About why so much of modern health is built on fear, control, and disconnection. And about what might become possible when we stop trying to escape the body and instead come all the way back into it.

At its heart, this episode is an invitation to stay curious. To ask better questions.

Mentioned Studies

Dwarf to Giant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Rainer

Losing Weight & Building Muscle

Mind Mind-set matters

Exercise and the placebo effect

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers/videos

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Mickey Breathes

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/mikeybreathes/

The Life Guide

https://theguide.life/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio

In this conversation, I sit down with Brian Withers, author, life coach, and creator of Higher Vibrations Now, to explore manifestation from a different lens.

Manifestation, not as wishful thinking. Not as forcing the universe to give us what we want. But as a deeper education in thought, emotion, vibration, and the power we have to choose the meaning we give to life.

Brian’s work centres on personal empowerment, that our emotions are not random but offer guidance. That the way we think about ourselves, our experiences, our struggles, and our desires shapes the energy we live from. And that when we begin to change the way we see, speak, and respond to life, the world we experience begins to change with us.

We speak about contrast, grief, childhood programming, the stories we inherit, and why so many of us unconsciously create from old beliefs rather than from who we truly are. Brian explains what he calls the “creative process,” the role of the Law of Attraction, and why negative emotion may not be something to fear, but a signal pointing us back towards a truer perspective.

This is also a conversation about responsibility in the most liberating sense. The responsibility to notice our thoughts. To choose our focus. To stop letting the outside world dictate our inner state. And to remember that the energy we carry into the world is not just personal; it contributes to the collective.

At its heart, this episode is about reclaiming authorship of your life.

About learning to tell a new story.

And perhaps, about realising that nothing has gone wrong, we have simply forgotten how powerful we are.

Brian Withers, HCT, CECP, is a life coach, author, personal empowerment teacher, and the creator of Higher Vibrations Now. His work focuses on helping people understand and shift their personal energy vibration through present-moment thought choices, emotional awareness, and what he describes as personal vibration training.

He is the author of Higher Vibrations for Health, Happiness and Harmony, Higher Vibrations for a Healthy, Happy and Harmonious Relationship, and The Book of Life. His first book includes a 20-week programme designed to help people shift into a more positively focused mind, while The Book of Life explores what Brian calls the Creative Process Cycle, a framework for understanding why we are here, who we are, and how life works.

Brian holds a certification in Health and Wellness Coaching and is also a Certified Emotion Code Practitioner. Through his books, coaching, online teachings, and YouTube channel, he shares practical tools for changing thought patterns, understanding emotional guidance, and returning to what he describes as our natural high-vibration state.

His work is rooted in the belief that health, happiness, harmony, and personal transformation are available to everyone when we learn how to work with our own thoughts, emotions, and energy.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers/videos

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Brian Withers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@brianwithers357

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/theknowledgeoflife/

Site

highervibrationsnow.com

What if time isn’t just something we move through, but something that lives inside us? In this conversation, I sit down with Bryan Hubbard, philosopher, journalist, author, and the creator of Time-Light Therapy, to explore the idea that trauma may not simply be stored in the body but expressed through our relationship with time.

Bryan’s work turns much of the conventional language around healing on its head. Rather than seeing ourselves as fixed individuals carrying depression, anxiety, anger, self-sabotage, or old wounds, he suggests that what we call the self is a creation of the past shaped by unresolved energies, inherited stories, and the moments we were never fully able to meet. We speak about childhood trauma, the emotional patterns that quietly repeat through our lives, why the past keeps seeking vindication in the present, and how so many of the behaviours we judge ourselves for may not be “who we are” at all, but expressions of something deeper asking to be seen.

This is also a conversation about hope. Not the shallow kind. But the kind that comes from recognising that no matter how heavy the past has become, there may still be a way through. That healing is not about becoming someone new, but remembering the part of us that was never truly damaged.

Bryan also shares the deeply personal origins of Time-Light, how his own experience of childhood abuse, chronic depression, and eventual revelation led him to develop a therapeutic model centred around time, trauma, consciousness, and the possibility of becoming fully alive in the present.

At its heart, this episode is about the courage to look within. To see the patterns. To stop mistaking the mask for the self. And perhaps to remember that the revolution we keep waiting for out there has always had to begin in the heart.

About

Bryan Hubbard Bryan Hubbard is a philosopher, journalist, author, publisher, and the creator of Time-Light Therapy, a spiritual therapeutic method that explores trauma through our relationship with time. He is the author of Time-Light and The Untrue Story of You, and is co-editor of the international magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You. His work brings together philosophy, trauma healing, spirituality, journalism, and personal inquiry to offer a new way of understanding the self, the past, and the possibility of freedom.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers/videos

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Bryan Hubbard

Site

https://www.timelighttherapy.com/

In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, a researcher of human potential, and someone who, quite literally, had her world turned inside out through a single, profound experience during meditation.

What followed wasn’t a neat spiritual awakening. It was years of questioning… of trying to reconcile what she had felt. A state of complete love, peace, and contentment with the density of everyday human life.

From that moment on, her work has been about one thing: how we return to what we already are.

We explore what it means to be human, not just biologically, but energetically. The idea that much of what we experience as limitation may simply be unpractised capacity. That intuition isn’t something mystical, but something we’ve forgotten how to use. This is where our true human capacities may go beyond anything we can currently imagine, such as learning to literally see without sight. 

But underneath all of it is something far simpler.

A return to self-awareness.

Because maybe the most radical idea in all of this,

We’ve just forgotten how to look.

Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan  

Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan is a holistic Chinese medicine doctor, consciousness and human potential coach, author, speaker, and educator. Her work focuses on meditation, human potential, intuition, wellness, “blindfold vision,” conscious parenting, and what she describes as “new human possibilities.” She combines traditional Chinese medicine, spirituality, meditation practices, and human potential coaching.

Feelings with Strangers

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/@FeelingswithStrangers/videos

Socials

https://www.instagram.com/feelings.with.strangers/

Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan  

https://www.instagram.com/dredithubuntu/

Dr Edith Ubuntu Chan YouTube

Blindfold Trainings (Kids, Adults & Facilitator training)

http://Blindfold.Vision