Tomorrow is the Lion's Gate portal, which opens every year on August 8th when the sun is in Leo, Sirius rises on the horizon in alignment with the Earth and Orion's Belt, and the numerology of 8/8 creates a threshold that ancient civilizations including the Egyptians built their entire sacred architecture around. This episode is your preparation for that day, whether you are deeply embedded in spiritual practice or you are simply curious and open and willing to try something intentional for ten minutes before the world wakes up.

As a Leo rising who works with this portal every year through intention writing, candle lighting, mantra, and connecting with the particular quality of Leo energy that the Strength card in the Tarot captures so completely, I want to share what this practice actually looks like and why I believe that portal days are not about magical thinking but about the universal human technology of pausing at thresholds and asking yourself honestly what you are releasing and what you are calling in. The sun shines without apology. And even the sun sets. That is the whole teaching. Guided breath practice included.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me?

Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

Four weeks of naming what has gone unnamed for too long in Black and brown communities deserves a closing episode that actually answers the question everyone has been sitting with across this entire series, which is what do I do with all of this now. This episode is the practical one. We are going through depression, PTSD, Complex PTSD, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and ADHD, and for each one I am giving you the full picture, the clinical interventions that actually work, the somatic approaches that reach what talk therapy alone cannot touch, and the integrative layer of Reiki, ritual, ancestral healing, flower essences, sound healing, and nervous system support that I have watched transform my own healing and the healing of the people I work with.

We are also finally naming ADHD in this series, including why it is so dramatically underdiagnosed in Black women, what adult masking looks like, and why my own misdiagnosis story makes this the most personal episode of the four. I offer a complete map of what healing actually looks like when you stop choosing between the clinical and the spiritual and start letting them work together the way they were always meant to.

If anything across this mental health series has brought up feelings that feel bigger than you

can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me?

Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager. What I know now, as both a clinician and as the adult that teenager became, is that I was far too young for that diagnosis to be made with any real confidence, and that what I was actually experiencing was much better explained by something else entirely. The years I spent understanding myself through a framework that didn't fit are the most honest illustration I have of what happens when Black people receive a diagnosis from a system that has never been culturally neutral in how it sees us.

This episode is about bipolar disorder, what it actually is, how it presents differently in Black bodies, and why Black men are dramatically overdiagnosed with schizophrenia when what they are experiencing is mania, and why Black women's hypomanic episodes get read as aggression and instability rather than as symptoms of a condition that deserves treatment. We are also talking about what it means to question a diagnosis that doesn't fit, to advocate for yourself in a system that has historically made that very difficult for Black people to do, and what accurate diagnosis actually makes possible when you finally find it.

This is the fourth episode in a four part mental health series and it is the one about the right to be seen clearly.

If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

I was told to toughen my skin so many times as a child that I eventually stopped being able to feel the difference between the sensitivity I was born with and the armor I built over it. This episode is about what that costs and what it is actually possible to reclaim.

We are talking about anxiety today, what it actually is versus what our families and communities called it, and why the throat clearing and the pacing and the deep breaths with averted eyes that showed up in the people around me were never personality quirks, they were nervous systems doing the only thing they knew how to do with what they were carrying.

We are also talking about the highly sensitive person, a neurological trait that Elaine Aron has spent decades researching, that affects approximately fifteen to twenty percent of the population, and that in Black and brown children gets pathologized or hardened out rather than understood and honored. The sensitivity was never the flaw. The world that asked you to amputate it was asking for something it had no right to.

This is the third episode in a four part mental health series and it is the one for everyone who was ever told they were too much, too sensitive, too intense, when what they actually were was built for depth in a world that didn't know what to do with that.

If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

I attended fourteen schools from kindergarten through high school. That is not just a statistic about instability. That is a childhood spent perpetually learning how to be the new kid, reading rooms and decoding hierarchies and adapting to new environments with a speed and a thoroughness that the people around me called resilience and that I now understand as a nervous system doing whatever it had to do to survive constant uprootedness.

This episode is about PTSD and Complex PTSD, what they actually are, how they develop, and why so many Black and brown people are walking around carrying them without ever having had a clinician look closely enough to name what they are seeing. We are going deep into Pete Walker's framework around the inner critic, the internalized voice that develops when children grow up in environments that couldn't fully hold them and that turns the pain of those environments inward, insisting for years, sometimes decades, that the person was always the problem.

I carry both of these diagnoses. I am bringing you the clinical understanding and the personal truth simultaneously because I think that is the only combination that actually reaches people who have spent their whole lives being told that what they were experiencing was their fault.

This is the second episode in a four part mental health series and it is one of the most important conversations I have had on this show.

If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

My grandmother called it the blues. My mother called it the devil. And I grew up in a household where neither of those words left room for what was actually happening inside me, which was that I was a child carrying a depression so complete and so silent that the people who loved me most looked at my stillness and called it strength.

This episode is about what gets missed when we don't have language for what we are living inside. It is about the Black children who perform capability so thoroughly that their suffering becomes invisible, about the cultural and spiritual frameworks that have historically stood in the place of clinical care in our communities, and about what it actually means to be depressed in a Black body, which does not always look like sadness and does not always ask for help and does not always get seen even by the people in the same room.

As both a psychotherapist and someone who has carried this diagnosis since my teenage years, I am bringing you the clinical understanding and the personal truth in the same breath. Because I think that is the only way this conversation is actually useful.

This is the first episode in a four part mental health series and it is the one I needed someone to make for me a long time ago.

If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

For over a decade my motto was the struggle is real. And I meant it literally. Crippling debt, bankruptcy in my early twenties, living in Southern California on community mental health wages while the spiritual community told me to raise my vibration. You cannot manifest from a nervous system in survival mode. And nobody was saying that out loud.

This episode is about money and what it actually means to be a Black healer, a Black therapist, a Black woman in a helping profession who was never taught that her worth had a dollar amount. We're going into why Black therapists don't accept insurance and why that is a systemic failure not a personal choice, what the wound around worth actually looks like in practice, and why I started doing Reiki for free long after I was ready to charge.

Forty percent of my practice is pro bono or sliding scale. I have been in private practice and have not yet raised my rates. I am telling you this not because I have it figured out but because I think the most radical thing a Black woman in a helping profession can do is tell the truth about what this actually costs.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

On June 19th 1865 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and told Black people what had already been true for two and a half years. That they were free. The delay was not accidental. Freedom had been the law of the land and the people it applied to were kept in bondage through deliberate deception.

This episode is sacred and it is political and it is personal. I'm sharing a story about a friendship that ended, about what happens when Black women educate white people about their own history and watch that knowledge get worn like a costume in white rooms with no attribution and no acknowledgment of where it came from. I'm giving you the full history of Juneteenth because it belongs to us and we deserve to know it completely. And I'm talking about what liberation actually feels like in the nervous system of a body that has been conditioned for generations to brace.

We close with an ancestral ritual to honor the ones who chose the water instead of bondage. The ones who did not survive to see June 19th but whose radical self determination made every freedom that came after possible.

This one is for us.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

I kept seeing clients while my body was shaking. While I was losing weight rapidly, not sleeping, not eating, running on empty in ways most of my clients never knew. This episode is for every healer, therapist, helper, and caregiver who has ever held space for someone else while privately coming undone.

We're talking about what it actually means to be a wounded healer, the cultural messaging that taught so many of us, especially in BIPOC households, that suffering in silence is strength, and why my clinical supervisor Dr. Lopez gave me permission that my upbringing never could. Self disclosure is not weakness. It is a clinical tool. And grace for the ugly parts of your own healing is not optional. It is the foundation.

This one is personal and it is necessary.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

Grief is not reserved for death. And nobody tells you that. In this episode I'm talking about what grief actually is, where it lives in the body, why the five stages were never meant to be a checklist, and why your loss counts regardless of what caused it.

We're going into anticipatory grief, the grief that arrives before the loss, how highly anxious nervous systems begin mourning months before an ending even happens, and what it actually looks like to move through grief rather than just push past it. I'm also recording this one from inside some fresh personal grief, which felt like exactly the right time to have this conversation. Guided ancestral breath practice included.

Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.

Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co