Offline, With Alison Rice

Dearest you. 

The first time I sat down with doctor, rocket scientist, author and zero waste life advocate, Dr. Anita Vandyke, she was looking ahead to a bright and exciting future with her husband James and daughter Vivian. She was close to graduating from medical school and had just written her second book, The Zero Waste Family. 

But just two years on, things look quite different. Today, Anita’s list of titles includes widow. Devastatingly, she lost her husband James to cancer in late 2022. He was just 40 years old. 

If you’re a regular listener of this sweet and stable podcast, you’ll know that some of my most connected episodes are the ones birthed during or after a significant life experience. At the time of recording and releasing this episode, that life experience is the passing of my beautiful mum and the grief that has followed. 

This honest conversation is dedicated to James and to my mum. It’s also dedicated to every person who can no longer smell, touch and hear someone they love. It’s for anyone who wants to learn how to be someone to the person left behind. What to say. What to do. How to be there and catch them in the oceanic swell that is loss.

Thank you Anita for allowing the deep well of grief you hold for James to spill over so we can hear it and feel it and hopefully, help you carry it. 

P.S. I am sorry about the interference… we recorded in person at Anita’s home and I think our pesky mobile phones tried to get involved.

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you. 

This episode is a bit of a full circle moment for me. Caitlin and Anna interviewed me back in 2018 for what was then a soon-to-launch podcast but is now the very well established Lady Brains. I was still working in publishing and I had begun recording for Offline but it was still my little secret so to be sitting here five years later having an honest conversation about the texture and terrain we’ve all moved through as podcasters and founders is a real honour. 

Like, we did it! We're still here!

We had what I think is a really uncommon and kind of complex conversation about being a founder while also helping other founders. While we serve very differently, we share many of the same challenges and experiences.

I am proud of this conversation because it feels like the antidote to polish and shine of typical founder interviews. We don’t talk in grabs and we take time to think about what we want to say. There’s lot of purposeful pauses. 

Maybe it is just me, but this feels very compelling and encouraging as we come out of the era that hurt more of us than it helped — Girl Boss and the grind culture that came with it. 

We hope you love out very honest conversation and that it allows you a moment to lean out and make contact with something real and unscripted. 

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you. 

A gentle warning upfront. This episode covers difficult topics like pregnancy loss, infertility and navigating the death of a parent while becoming a parent. 

I never expect the stories and experiences my guests hold closest to their hearts but I am always grateful when they gift them to us. This episode is no exception — Leigh and I really go there on some pieces and while an emotional listen at times, I know we both believe so necessary to bring the context and complexity to lives that otherwise look perfect and pain-free from the outside. 

We hope you love our chat and know you’ll hold us in our shares. Some are sweet, some are silly, some are brave, some act as an example of our privilege and some are so raw they make us want to take it back. 

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you.

If you follow Nadine Jane Astrology on Instagram, you’ll know that she went away for a little while. Her absence was very felt on my feed and I thought about her often. I wondered if she was ok, and I hoped she’d be back creating her signature style of intuitive, soft and highly emotive astrology content. 

So you can imagine the smile on my face when I was presented with the opportunity to sit down with Nadine once again — three years after our first honest conversation. She’s such a joy to interview but I was also just so curious to ask her about the last couple of years. Where has she been? Why did she take a break? What did she do and how did it all feel?

As you’ll soon learn, our favourite New York City astrologer (currently residing in country Maine) experienced the very thing she’s guided many of us through — her Saturn Return. For Nadine, this significant astrological event brought with it something unexpected. It turned the lights out on her love affair with astrology and as someone who channels, what that meant was she lost her signal. 

Nadine and I explore what that was like, the other areas of growth her Saturn Return brought on, how it impacted the book she’d signed on to write and has since been published (Magic Days, her 800-page masterpiece), her evolved relationship with astrology and her body, and her cosmic weather report for this year. 

If you’ve been thinking about making a brave decision, you’re going to like what she has to say.

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you. 

Eleanor Pendleton, Sara Crampton and Beck Wadworth are three of Australia’s most successful women’s lifestyle influencers but they’re also three women I am grateful to call my friends. 

It’s been years between honest conversations and like so many of you, the four of us have moved through a lot — sustaining businesses during a global pandemic, pregnancy and sadly, pregnancy loss, birth, the first months and years of motherhood, terminally ill parents, the death of someone we love and the grief that follows — all while doing our best to show up for our teams, our communities and business’ missions. 

The girls and I put it all on the table and we hope in doing that, we provide you with a rich entry point into feeling more seen and heard within your own life experiences. 

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you. 

A very warm welcome to season eight of this beautiful and ever-evolving podcast. 

This episode is part of a brand-new series called Checking In With, where I touch base with some of Offline’s earliest guests to hear how they’re doing today, what they’ve moved through since we last spoke and of course, how their definition of success has evolved in and around the rich texture of their life experiences. 

This very first checking-in episode is with one of my best friends, Zoe Marshall. She was Offline’s fourth guest way back in season one. Zoe is my emotionally safe friend and while I didn’t realise it when I asked her to record with me, that’s really what this episode is about – friendship – and how important it is as aware and ambitious people that we have those emotionally safe relationships that we can fall backwards into when we’re being stretched to a new edge. 

I hope you adore this season’s honesty. I hope you feel the joy and the pleasure and the play I’m actively seeking following what has been a really hard couple of years. I also hope you adore the explorations into the darker spaces life leads my guests and I into as we seek to land more deeply into our True Self.

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you.

Off— is a conscious professional development space that exists to help you live out a professional reality that feels nourishing, sustainable, purposeful and true. 

You deserve this. We all do.

Our work isn’t supposed to leave us feeling burnt out, disappointed or hopeless. What we do for a living should be a productive outlet for our fulfillment, not the source of our fulfillment itself. 

This is one of the biggest lessons I teach inside this expanding professional development container — how to create space between who you are and what you do, and how serving from that place will evolve and elevate your definition of success. 

You set the pace. Everything is recorded. 

Off— is professional development like you’ve never experienced it before. No more hustling. No more grinding. Just simply arriving at your highest professional expression. 

Alison xo

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Dearest you.

One hundred episodes Offline, The Podcast. One hundred times I’ve had the privilege of holding someone’s story or extracting their wisdom. One hundred times it’s been my honour to serve beautiful you and your growth. 

To celebrate Offline’s 100th episode, we’re going to honour this growing body of work. We’re going to honour the volume. We’re going to honour you and I, showing up for every episode and doing our work.

I hope you enjoy this little trip down memory lane to hear from the teachers and the healers whose knowledge and wisdom has created real and meaningful shifts in our lives.

Jeannie Bourke, Natalia Benson, Jerico Mandybur, Matt Ringrose, Nadine Jane Astrology, Manoj Dias, Jaclyn Michelle, Lara Briden, Dylan Smith, Penny Locaso, Carson Tueller, Dalia Gencher, Rachel Ricketts, Dr. Nicole LePera, Laura Poole, Sah D’Simone, Shaman Durek and Tori Washington — thank you.

And thank you for being here. Thank you for gifting me your precious time and your awareness. Thank you for letting me in so fully, so I can help you on your way.

Alison xo

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Dearest you. 

Welcome back to part two of my honest conversation with a teacher of mine, Matt Ringrose. Matt initiated me as a Vedic Meditator in late 2018, and he’s been a steady counsel in my life ever since. 

If you’d like to start with part one, here it is. 

Having a conversation with Matt is never linear, and that’s what I’ve loved most about our chats over the years. In this most recent sit down, we discuss the powerful technique of letting go — something we are inviting you to learn how to do — and more specifically, what becomes possible when we let go of our professional attachments and the definitions of success that don’t serve our highest possible growth and evolution. 

This episode begins when we were discussing how our expectations of life, work, business and self evolve as our state of consciousness evolves and increases. Which is perfect and relevant, but for me personally has sometimes had a bit of a melancholy flavour to it. 

He also explains why acquiring things like cars, houses or even a private island aren’t the throughway to lasting fulfillment. 

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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Dearest you. 

If you’ve been listening to Offline since the beginning or at least since season two, you’ll know about Bondi Meditation Centre founder and Vedic Meditation teacher, Matt Ringrose. He taught me this effortless meditation technique a few months after I launched the podcast in 2018, and it quite simply changed the direction and intention of my life, my work and how I define success.

Matt was just the type of teacher I needed at a time in my life when things felt really hard, sad, anxious and serious. Fast forward three and a half years and Matt remains a steady counsel in my life and also a friend.

We both received such a warm reception for our first episode, so it’s really an honour to bring you another honest conversation with Matt.

We spoke for two hours (!) so I’m publishing it over two episodes. This is part one. We covered a lot of really valuable ground but the thread that weaves its way throughout is letting go. How to let go of all that is holding us back and what becomes possible when we do.

Ok, here’s to letting go of our professional attachments and the definitions of success that don’t serve our evolution. I’m calling it professional peace.

Thank you for being here.

Alison xo

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