Good Explanations

Good Explanations strives to be a podcast exploring the dance of being a good person and an intelligent professional.

"To be interesting is to be interested," and my curiosity is endless towards those who combine excellence with success and make it a priority to reflect upon themselves, their experiences, and their work.

My goal is to simplify and share true, good, and beautiful stories, ideas, and lessons. Whether these are expressed by guests or myself, I hope to deepen, expand, and clarify the relationship with ourselves, and in turn, the worlds unfolding all around us.

By exploring the complexity, beauty, simplicity, and challenges that arise as a result of being human, I hope to help guide you towards your own answers to these big questions. And as one of my Teachers once shared, “You’ll find that with all the great questions of life, the answers are all paradoxes. This is why, at some level, it’s sort of pointless to pursue them in order to find a trite answer. But the act of pursuing them is actually really useful because it gives you a certain intrinsic understanding within your life that brings a level of peace.”

"When it's time to get serious," therapy is there to help guide us back to ourselves. As Stephanie's mentor said, it's at this point an individual comes to therapy or therapy comes to them.

As you'll learn below, Stephanie is a legit-ass therapist and my legit-ass therapist for a few years now. She has influenced my way of thinking and as a healthy consequence, living, as much as anyone in my life. She has taught me how to ask better questions of myself, lean into feelings and emotions, remain curious throughout uncertainty, and the power of meeting myself where I'm at in order to build bridges towards the person I aspire to become.

In this conversation, Stephanie and I highlight what therapy is and might look like. We also talk about the importance of prioritizing bored time, fostering internal curiosity, intellectualizing feelings and emotions, creating space for ourselves and others, and much more.

I hope you enjoy the first podcast of Good Explanations with my first Spiritual Teacher (and current Therapist) Stephanie Larsen.

Stephanie Larsen LCPC, CST, E-RYT, is a licensed clinical counselor, certified sex therapist, and experienced yoga instructor. She has worked at inpatient and outpatient mental health programs for years, created and ran a wellness program for hospital staff at Cancer Treatment Centers of America, does contract work for businesses - making sure employee dynamics and wellness needs are addressed - and currently owns and runs a private practice with her husband who is also a licensed clinical counselor. She specializes in treating trauma, sexual and relationship issues.

Connect with Stephanie:

Website: https://restorebehavioral.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restore.behavioral.health/

If you listened to this podcast and are up for it, I'd truly appreciate a review & any feedback on Apple Podcasts. At a minimum, it is a chance for me to connect with you, at a medium, your feedback could convince just the right person to give Good Explanations a listen (or avoid it), and at a maximum, it can help influence the future, harder-to-get guests to join us for a discussion on Life.

Connect with Christian:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/goodexplanations

Website: https://christianscorner.org

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Chrisalfaro1017

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisalfaro17/

Newsletter: https://christianscorner.substack.com/p/growing-up

This is dedicated to those at Field Trip Health. Per their website, they use "psychedelic therapies that bring you to life [through] evidence-based, legal psychedelic therapies to help you heal depression and feel better."

Ronan Levy, the host of their podcast Field Tripping, asks a great question about what this pandemic has taught the guests. Since it's given us 'more time' and expressed differing branches of uncertainty, Ronan wonders how The Great Pause allowed us to grow, gather insights, realizations, or reflections, and in what respects. 

This is my much shorter answer to that question. It was born a few days after I tried to record another short response that ended up being half an hour - which is also out there. I hope you enjoy it!

In this, I discuss the importance of personal and self-development and how I was able to continue looking inwards for answers rather than outside myself. Catalysts along this internal journey were, and still are, Yoga, Reading, Writing, and Meditation, among others not expressed. The second big takeaway, for me, is how we all must learn to live alone at some point in our lives and why. 

On their podcast, Field Tripping: "Turn on and tune into Field Tripping, a podcast about psychedelics, the people that use them, and what our renewed love affair with both says about who we are and where we’re going. Explore how psychedelics awaken new views on sex, science, business, fitness, life, and death in the lives of our influential and inspiring guests. Join us on a journey into psychedelic experiences and how they change the world and our lives – one trip at a time.

The podcast sometimes deals with some challenging or sensitive topics, so we ask that you please be thoughtful and use good judgment when considering some of the subjects discussed."

If any of this has sparked some curiosity, start with episode #5 or episode #10 of the Field Tripping podcast.

Field Trip Health: https://www.fieldtriphealth.com/

Field Tripping: https://www.fieldtripping.fm/

Christian's Website: christianscorner.org