In this solo episodes Nicoleta explores the relationship between bereavement and happiness.

Sharing her own experience of a very close family member sudden death, Nicoleta takes you through a number of very important questions:

How do you  move through the shock of a dear person's death?

What it means to lose someone fairly young?

How it feels to find someone you just met died unexpectedly?

What kills us young these post-modern times?

How is bereavement experienced these days and what is its impact on our lives?

Why does grief close us to happiness?  And how do we open up to joy and aliveness again?

Nicoleta asks also a number of existential questions:

Why did that person live?

What was that scope and purpose of that life?

Was it to create something at a physical level and leave behind in the world?

Was it to allow another person to come to life?

Was it to save another person from a hard life?

Was it to take care of others?

Was it to experience something and learn some lessons themselves?

Or perhaps to help others experience something and learn some lessons from them?

In this episode Nicoleta talks about the relationship between sanity and happiness with Wajid Hassan, actor, author and spiritual teacher based in North Carolina, USA.

How is your perspective changed in life when you are born into a Muslim country, then you are raised in a Christian school in England, and then follow a yogi master and live your adult life in Los Angeles?

Are we spiritual beings in a physical body?

Will the spiritual life ever come first for humans in front of the material life?

Have our inactions or bad actions brought the world in such a mess?

Was the humanity for some reason brainwashed to believe in the concept of “only one life to live”? 

Is the division and conflict on Earth the result of people in authority positions operating on low levels of consciousness?

Are we manipulated by forces that want to control the world and create poverty, war and division in their hunger for power?

How do we preserve our sanity and purify ourselves from the mental pollution of hatred, jealousy, envy and greed?

Can the belief in reincarnation be the solution for the social inequality we witness today?

Why is the topic of reincarnation little spoke about whilst the word “karma” is widely accepted in the western world? Do we really understand and respect the law of karma?

Is our current life a reflection of our wrong-doings from our previous lives and at the same time an opportunity to learn the lessons we need to learn in order to evolve?

Are we here on this planet to raise our consciousness?

Are we all connected?

In this episodes Nicoleta chats about ageing and happiness with Clarissa Kristjansson, mindfulness and menopause coach, podcaster and speaker from Sweden.

What does it feel to go through a burnout in your mid-50s when you are pre-menopausal, have extreme anxiety and you lose motivation in life?

Can you escape stuckness and loneliness with the aid of mindful living?

Why are women still caught up in traditional roles, over-giving and over-caring and why do they struggle to demand responsibility from men?

How to open uncomfortable conversations with partners, how to express your needs and set healthy boundaries.

Are we far from equal roles? Are women’s roles changing? Education of younger generations. 

Ageing well and with grace in a society placing way too much focus on youth.

The critical role of communication in relationships and how it can keep together or break lifelong marriages.

What we want in life as we are ageing.

Sensuality as the sexual experience as we get older.

In this episode Nicoleta explores the relationship between music and happiness with Hope Sheree, a spiritual soul artist, author, blogger and host of “A Dose Of Hope Radio” from Virginia USA.

Selected out of thousands of applicants, Hope is one of the 50 artists to be part of the world’s greatest gospel choir established by the multi-Grammy and Oscar winner Pharrel Williams that has toured the world and had been documented in the Netflix six-part docu-series called Voices of Fire.

Why would a blues and R&B recording artist reaching Top 50 Billboard charts switch to Gospel music?

How HOPE became the “Helping Other People Endure” acronym. 

Where to go if you go through personal or social challenges, including illness, the pandemic and the police brutality as an African-American population.

Is Black Lives Matter movement real and what are the most intimate worries of a mother watching her young son leaving to high school and praying that he comes back home safe.

What is the impact of social injustice on people’s mental health? Can kindness and serving others heal us?

How to get a master’s degree whilst recording albums and raising 3 children.

What is multiple sclerosis doing to our health? Can we retain our confidence? Can we still preserve faith and continue to live on purpose?

Is happiness a choice? Can we cultivate an environment where we can be happy? Are distractions making us “really” happy?

Why Pharrell Williams is truly “Happy” and how is he as a human behind the screens?

Is fame a problem for artists? 

Finally, listen to Hope singing live for the podcast convinced that music soothes the human spirit.

In this episode Nicoleta explores the relationship between self-love and happiness with therapist and coach Nicola Farnhill from Costa Blanca, Spain.

Nicola shares how her traumatic childhood experience and her therapist mother informed her decision to become a therapist herself.

They talk about the common experience of being therapists, about losing their mothers 10 years ago and what they learned throughout the decades doing their inner work.

Discover why we struggle to show our vulnerable side and express our real self and what is conditioning doing to us in life

Find out why trauma is one of the most disabling experience one can have and how trauma disconnects us from our authentic self.

Learn about what it means to live from the untruth, about emotional co-dependency and the impact of growing up with disable siblings.

Explore the role of spirituality in healing and why we spend most of our time in the mind, in anxiety and the victim mentality. 

Take their invitation to expand your mind and be in presence, the portal towards peace and happiness.

What is self-love, how do you care about yourself physically, mentally and spirituality and why you should celebrating yourself every day instead of looking outside for validation and love. 

Self-love is the ability to explore who you are. Self-love is the fuel for confidence, self-esteem and self-worth.

Nicola and Nicoleta share how they used humour and acceptance to overcome adversities and heal their wounds and give tips to start your inner journey and escape your tunnel mind. 

In this second part of the interview with Desa Markovic, Prof. in Systemic Psychotherapy at Regents University London, Nicoleta continues to explore the relationship between sexuality, family dynamics and happiness.

They look at the parenting styles and the importance of healthy boundaries and privacy in educating children. Sometimes we fail to notice how, as parents, we send messages about sex to our children that end up shaping their sexuality.

Learn why it is essential to know who you are and what you want in order to develop a healthy satisfying sexuality. 

Find how we develop sexual confidence and how the counselling and psychotherapy practice can help us all in this sense.

Explore what it means to have good sex, why do we lose our sexual desire and how the stresses of life influence our libido. 

Also, let’s ask some very other important questions: 

-       What is the difference between sex and sensuality? 

-       What is normal in sexuality,  and what we share and what we hide in our bedrooms? 

-       Who sets the norms and what standards define our sexual expectations and desires. 

-       Why there is still a lot of judgement around sex in the culture and psychotherapy as well?

-       What is asexuality and is it a sexual orientation in itself?

-       What are the most common sexual issues that clients bring into the therapy room? Between vanilla and kinky sex.

What sexual compulsions, porn and sex addiction bring into our lives.

And lastly, is sexuality related with our meaning and purpose in life? 

In this episode Nicoleta chats about the relationship between work in marketing and happiness with Ray Stanvius business developer for mental health professionals based in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Ray shares the cultural shock he had when he moved from America to Catalonia in his 30’s despite his multicultural background having being born American from Argentinian mother and Lithuanian father parents. 

A marketer with a degree in psychology, Ray shares the benefits of freelance work as opposed to the 9 to 5 jobs he had in the past. Ray is now helping mental health professionals develop their businesses and reach as many people as possible, from generating leads for them to teaching them do their own marketing.

They talk about the misconceptions surrounding the field of modern marketing, about influence and manipulation, and how fast the trade is changing in the digital world.

Can we do without marketing in our consumerist world focused on spending more? What is the relationship between marketing and happiness? These are some of the questions they ask and answer.

They also look at ways of staying healthy in our modern days. From a morning routine, movement, Mediterranean diet, mindful living and meditation they are all helpful in living a healthy life. Ray shares the benefit of living by the sea and taking walks in the nature (very much attuned with the Connect With Nature campaign initiated as part of the this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week running these days).

Lastly they link happiness with the pandemic and remind us about the personal choice we can all make to be well despite the drama and the hardship we face in life. Showing gratitude and appreciation for the little things we have in life can help us stay open to happiness and create fulfilling lives.