Finding Gold: Honest Alchemical Conversations with Mia Perry Bowick

Perimenopause doesn't always start with hot flashes. For many women it starts in the brain: new anxiety, brain fog, waking at 3am, walking into a room and forgetting why. Sometimes the only sign is "I just don't feel like myself."

October is Menopause Awareness Month, and this conversation is for every woman in her mid 30s, 40s and beyond who has been told her symptoms are "just stress." Mia Perry Bowick sits down with her friend (and tennis partner) Jess Asherin, PA-C, MSCP, founder of OlaVida Health, to talk honestly about perimenopause, hormones, grief and the choices women deserve to know they have.

In this episode:
• Why perimenopause starts in the brain, often before hot flashes
• The 79+ symptoms of perimenopause and why doctors treat them one at a time
• Estrogen's role in heart health, bone health and brain health
• How the Women's Health Initiative took a generation of women off HRT
• Why HRT is a personal, nuanced choice, not a requirement
• Grieving the body you had, and your 40s as a "second puberty"
• How perimenopause affects marriages, partners and intimacy
• Why every woman should know about vaginal estrogen

"Health is not a privilege. It is who you want to be."

If you've been feeling off and no one has asked about your hormones, this episode is your permission to start that conversation with your provider.

Connect with Jess Asherin and OlaVida Health: https://olavidahealth.com/
Connect with Mia: https://miaperrybowick.com

This episode is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Talk with your healthcare provider about your own health.

What happens when a therapist becomes a mom and realizes she knows too much? In this episode of Holding The Sea, grief practitioner Mia Perry Bowick sits down with Anna Aslanian, a fellow psychotherapist and former colleague from their days at an intensive outpatient treatment center in Santa Monica. Now both raising young kids, they get honest about the transition into motherhood from a therapist's point of view.

They talk about the guilt and shame that comes from knowing every attachment study, mom guilt vs dad guilt, the overstimulation of the newborn and toddler years, getting diagnosed with ADHD after having a second child, and the grief of losing the version of yourself that existed before kids. Anna shares what it was like to become a mother while caring for her own mom through cancer, and Mia opens up about parenting through her sister's time in hospice. Together they explore the sandwich generation, how to explain grief to a four, five or six year old, the idea of the "good enough" parent, cycle breaking, co-regulation, and why nothing hard in our lives has to go to waste.

If you are a therapist mom, a parent carrying grief, or anyone who has felt alone in how hard parenting can be, this conversation is for you.

Topics covered: motherhood transition, mom guilt, therapist mom, adult ADHD diagnosis, postpartum anxiety, grief and motherhood, sandwich generation, explaining death to children, reparenting, cycle breaking, good enough parenting, nervous system regulation.

Subscribe for more conversations on grief, motherhood and healing.

0:00 The Unexpected Beauty Within Grief
1:10 Reflecting on Our Shared Professional Past
2:27 The Double-Edged Sword of Therapist-Parents
5:40 The Invisible Weight of Parental Guilt
14:11 The Profound Grief of Life Transitions
24:00 Alchemizing Pain Into Deeper Empathy
36:50 Guiding Children Through Complex Emotions

Follow Anna: https://www.instagram.com/mytherapycorner/
Subscribe for new episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MiaPerryBowick
Newsletter and full archive: miaperrybowick.com
Follow Mia: https://www.instagram.com/miaperrybowick/

Most of us were taught to shut it down — the crying, the curiosity, the noise. And then we spent the rest of our lives performing a version of ourselves we thought was safer.

In this episode of Finding Gold, Mia sits down on the blue couch with her dear friend Kerstin Caldwell, who teaches improvisation as a tool for self-awareness. Kerstin grew up in a small-town Colorado mortuary, where she was told at four or five years old that she represented the family business. Being funny became her way in — until it became the only door she knew how to walk through.

Together they talk about the difference between humor that heals and humor that hides, why play isn't the same thing as being entertaining, and what it means to be present with grief instead of performing your way around it. Kirsten shares the story of her family saying goodbye to their dog during the pandemic, how she uses improv side-coaching to stay in her own body, and why her favorite place to teach is inside prisons — where she describes her work as handing people back their five-year-olds.

This one is about grief, but it's also about play as the thing that lets you sit beside grief without being terrified of it.

In this conversation:
— Improvisation as self-awareness, not performance
— "I found out I don't like bacon" — what presence actually reveals
— Growing up in a funeral home and learning to be quiet
— Being funny as survival, and what happens when you lay it down
— Humor that heals vs. humor that defends
— Play as permission: why it lowers the stakes enough to get real
— Grief that includes joy
— Rehearsal for the revolution (Augusto Boal) and remembering who you were

Connect with Mia
Grief Alchemy Sessions: https://www.miaperrybowick.com/grief-alchemy-sessions
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miaperrybowick/

If this episode met you somewhere, share it with someone who's carrying something.

Blake Kasemeier lost his mom to lung cancer in the span of three weeks. Four days after saying goodbye, his plane landed and he found out he'd been laid off. What he did next wasn't a plan. He started frantically documenting a world that only he and his mother had ever lived in.

In this episode of Holding The Sea, Mia Perry Bowick reconnects with a friend she's known since seventh grade for a conversation about grief, craft, and what it actually takes to survive the worst-case scenario and keep going.

Blake is a writer and content creator known online as Blake of Today, where he writes about fatherhood, music, masculinity and the ordinary things that turn out to be sacred. He's also a jujitsu black belt, a dad to two boys, and one of the rare people with fourteen friends he can text about anything.

What we get into:
- The ball in the room, and why grief never gets smaller
- High gravity days and the one small thing that breaks the inertia
- Why writing is blue collar work, and why the process matters more than the product
- Good grief days versus bad grief days
- The world that exists between two people, and who becomes responsible for it
- Toxic masculinity as a public health crisis, and raising boys inside of it
- Painting the sunset, magical thinking, and what holds when belief doesn't
- How physical practice becomes a place to put pain

Finding Gold is a show about alchemy. About taking grief, trauma and pain and turning them into something that other people can hold.

Follow Blake: https://www.instagram.com/blakeoftoday/
Subscribe for new episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MiaPerryBowick
Newsletter and full archive: miaperrybowick.com
Follow Mia: https://www.instagram.com/miaperrybowick/

After years in survival mode including homelessness and a period where she wasn't sure she'd make it Erina Wells didn't wait for someone to save her. She became her own guide. Teaching herself yoga from YouTube videos, then training in breathwork, meditation, Reiki, quantum touch energy healing, sound therapy with tuning forks, aromatherapy, and lymphatic work, she built an entire self healing practice out of necessity.

In this episode of Holding The Sea, host Mia Perry Bowick sits down with Erina for an unflinching conversation about grief healing as a transformative force, the mirror work that pulled her out of shame spirals, integrating the divine feminine and divine masculine within yourself, and why she calls herself a guide rather than a healer. They talk about the loss of her father and the moment a stranger named Garuda shifted how she understood divinity showing up in everyday life.

They talk about the loss of her father, the mirror work that pulled her out of shame spirals, and the moment a stranger named Garuda changed how she understood divinity showing up in everyday life.
Erina also shares what's next: her new digital platform built around domain mastery of the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual self — and her mission to make these ancestral healing practices accessible to the communities they came from.

This is a raw, funny, deeply human conversation about trauma healing, personal growth, and coming home to yourself — the kind of spiritual journey that reminds you you're the main character of your own show.

⏱️ In this episode:
• Becoming your own guide after years in survival mode
• Building a holistic healing practice from scratch, out of necessity
• Quantum touch, tuning forks, aromatherapy & the lymphatic system
• Grief as a "waiting room," not a cloud to pass through
• The mirror as a collaborative energy
• Integrating your divine masculine & feminine
• Healing in motion vs. sitting still
• Making ancestral healing accessible for BIPOC communities
• Why you are the main character of your own show

🌊 Connect with Erina Wells:
Website: quantumwave.space
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/quantumwavetherapeutics/

✨ Finding Gold with Mia Perry Bowick
https://www.miaperrybowick.com/

If this conversation moved you, leave a comment, like the video, and subscribe for more.

If you're struggling, please reach out to a licensed professional or a crisis line in your area — you don't have to do it alone.

What if burnout isn't a character flaw, but your nervous system running out of resources?

In this episode of Finding Gold, host Mia Perry Bowick sits down with Dr. Alexis Kennedy — a former academic who spent decades researching sexual abuse, assault, and human trafficking before turning her attention to the neuroscience of burnout. After her own catastrophic collapse (a migraine in a first-responder resilience course that forced her to confront her own PTSD), Alexis left academia to teach what she'd learned about keeping the nervous system safe.

Together, Mia and Alexis explore:

- The difference between burnout, vicarious trauma, secondary victimization, and moral distress
- Why the amygdala behaves differently in burnout than in depression
- How chronic fight-or-flight impacts digestion, sleep, inflammation, and the ability to think clearly
- Why "the body keeps the score" — and how shaking, movement, and breath help release stored stress
- The lie of peak performance, and why rest is the real path to being your best self
- Grief as an inherent part of change, identity, and career transition
- Simple, science-backed tools: a glass of water, a walk, a "brag book," and better sleep routines

A grounding, honest conversation for anyone in a helping profession: therapists, first responders, caregivers, entrepreneurs who've been telling themselves they're "fine."

Self-care isn't woo-woo. It's healthcare.

🎧 Subscribe to Finding Gold: Honest Alchemical Conversations for more conversations on healing, resilience, and being human.

In this first episode of Holding The Sea, Mia sits down with her sister-in-law Zoe for an honest conversation about what it means to approach the end of life while still loving being alive.

They talk about grief and the difference between grieving and depression, the surprising place of joy inside loss, motherhood and what we leave behind for our children, the parallels between birth and death, ritual and surrender, and the choice to see the world as full of miracles rather than meaningless.

This is a conversation about dying that is really about how to live. Thank you for holding this space with us.