Dr. Desiree has been sharing pieces of this story on her personal Instagram for years. We finally sat down and told the whole thing. What it felt like when her skin started reacting. Why it took years before mold even crossed her mind. And what it actually took to come out the other side.

This episode flips the usual format. Brandi takes the host chair and interviews Dr. Desiree about one of the most personal health challenges of her life: mold toxicity. Starting with the first strange symptoms in 2021 and ending with nasal sprays, binders, a Candida protocol, and a trip to Dallas that gave her the first real window of relief she'd felt in years, Dr. Desiree walks through everything she experienced, everything she tried, and what finally worked. She also gets honest about the hardest part: being a trained naturopathic doctor who still couldn't connect the dots when it was her own body sending the signals.

If you've had unexplained skin reactions, relentless fatigue, histamine responses to foods you used to tolerate, chronic congestion, or brain fog that just won't lift, this episode is worth sitting with.

What You'll Learn:

• Why mold toxicity mimics so many other conditions and why even practitioners consistently miss it

• The full constellation of symptoms Dr. Desiree experienced: skin rashes, eyebrow hair loss, histamine reactions, tongue numbness, chronic congestion, shortness of breath, brain fog, fatigue, and sudden constipation

• The antifungal tincture that triggered Dr. Desiree's first major flare — and why that flare was actually the beginning of the answer

• What a slow washing machine leak has to do with years of unresolved symptoms (and why you often can't see the mold causing it)

• How the fungi kingdom actually breaks down: mushrooms, yeasts, and molds are related but not the same — not even close

• The layered recovery protocol in sequence: detox pathway support first, antifungals and antimicrobials second, binders and sauna third

• What Herxheimer (die-off) reactions feel like — and how to know when you're doing too much, too fast

• The nasal spray protocol that helped Dr. Desiree stop mouth breathing at night and start rebuilding her nasal microbiome

• What CIRS (chronic inflammatory response syndrome) and MARCONS mean, and why they matter for long-term mold recovery

• Whether mold testing is worth the cost — and what Desiree actually did and didn't test herself

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take the free wellness quiz to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

You've read the books. You've done the workshops. You've got the strategy. So why does everything still feel like too much?

Tess Rouse has a different answer than what you've been sold: you don't need more strategy. You need more capacity.

In this episode, we sit down with Tess Rouse, breathwork facilitator and somatic practitioner, who spent 18 years managing rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease while building a 16-year executive leadership career on sheer drive. She's worked with individuals and organizations on one disruptive idea: burnout isn't fixed by doing more, it's fixed by building the body's ability to hold more. If you've ever wondered why you can have all the tools and still feel like you're running on empty, this episode is the conversation you need.

What You'll Learn

• What "capacity" actually means and how low capacity shows up in your relationships, your rest, and your reactions

• The honest difference between someone who is genuinely regulated under pressure and someone who has gotten very good at masking dysregulation

• Why the high-achieving, overperforming coping mechanism is one of the hardest to recognize because everyone is applauding you for it

• The two specific steps to actually build nervous system capacity (and why everyone wants to skip the first one)

• What Hebbian law has to do with the automatic patterns running your daily life right now

• Why the nervous system doesn't update just because your circumstances do, and what it takes to actually rewire old patterns

• Why the body cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a real one, and how breathwork uses this to help repattern the nervous system

• What Tess is actually watching for in a session when she sees someone's nervous system shift in real time

• Why avoiding emotion doesn't dissolve it, it embeds it, and what that embedding looks like in the body over years

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take our wellness quiz to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

Summer is over, and your body already knew it before your calendar did. If you've spent every September trying to white-knuckle yourself back into discipline and ended up feeling worse than when you started, we made this one for you. It's not another checklist. It's something better.

In this episode, Brandi and Dr. Des introduce the Return to Rhythm Mushroom Moment Reset Box: a collaboration with functional diagnostic nutritionist and cyclical living expert Jenn Pike. This box, and this whole episode, are built around one idea — the problem isn't your willpower. It's that most of us have been trying to run on a 24-hour clock while our hormones are running on a 28-day one.

We walk through why September feels so hard every year, what cyclical living actually looks like broken down by the four phases of your cycle, and exactly what's in the box, what each piece does, and why the sequence matters. Jenn is not on this episode, but she's all over the box: her free masterclass comes inside it via QR code, and her cycle-matched fitness membership Synced is included as 30 days free. This episode is for anyone standing in September thinking they don't even know where step one is.

What You'll Learn:

• Why your body feels September coming before your brain has even caught up — and what that signal actually means

• The real difference between a routine (which can still burn you out) and a rhythm (which works with your body's actual pattern)

• Who Jenn Pike is, what she built, and why her cyclical living framework applies even if you're postmenopausal or not currently cycling

• What the four phases of the menstrual cycle mean for your energy, strength, and stress tolerance — and why ignoring this makes consistency feel impossible

• Why you cannot build a sustainable rhythm on top of a nervous system that is already maxed out

• What the five-mushroom blend in the box contains and what role it plays in your morning

• Why Reishi is included separately in capsule form and what it has to do with sleep

• What Synced is and why the 30-day trial means no two people using this box will be doing the same thing

• What Jenn's masterclass actually teaches inside the box - and why it's the operating manual for everything

• What "nourish, sync, prime" looks like as a daily arc from morning to night

  
  

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take our wellness quiz to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

We have both stayed somewhere that was quietly hurting us. For Brandi, it was a classroom and a pharmaceutical protocol that had stopped feeling like healing. For Desiree, it was an apartment with mold and a body that would not stop signaling that something was wrong. We stayed because leaving felt like the bigger risk. This episode is about what it actually took to move.

Abundance is not a vision board word. It is not about your bank account. It is a nervous system state a felt sense that there is enough and your body either lives in it or it does not. In this episode, Brandi and Dr. Desiree get into the physiology of what scarcity does inside your body, walk through their own stories of staying stuck longer than they should have, and share what it really looks like to shift out of survival mode and into something that actually feels like a life. This one gets personal. We cover the science, the stories, the receiving problem most high-achievers have, and where Reishi and Lion's Mane fit into all of it.

📃What You'll Learn

• The body-level difference between scarcity and abundance and why it is not just a mindset issue

• Why your nervous system cannot tell the difference between "there is a bear in front of me" and "I might not make rent"

• The fourth stress response most people forget (and why so many women spend most of their lives there)

• Brandi's full origin story: two decades of teaching, an autoimmune diagnosis, a medication stack with mounting side effects, and the moment staying finally felt scarier than changing

• How Dr. Desiree "called in the one" while managing mold illness, living on arugula, and showing up to work every day without complaint

• Why receiving is so much harder than giving for most high-achievers, and what a real practice for it looks like

• The difference between a season of quiet building and a season of failure (they are not the same thing)

• How to tell in your body whether your effort is coming from devotion or from fear

• How Reishi supports the body's stress response and sleep, and why Lion's Mane was Brandi's first experience with cognitive clarity

• A simple sentence-completion exercise that surfaces the story keeping you stuck right now

📃 Your Next Steps

• Take our wellness quiz to find out where your body needs support right now: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Follow us on Instagram at @eversiowellness: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

Three minutes. That's how long it took Brandi to go from completely dysregulated to completely herself this morning. Three minutes of intentional breathwork, and the tears came, and the only words that followed were: "That's not who I am. What was I thinking?" We walked into this recording session with Dr. Laura Foster shaken, and we're walking out of it with something we had to share with you immediately.

Dr. Laura Foster is a chiropractor with over 25 years of experience working with the nervous system. She is also a certified breathwork facilitator, retreat leader, and founder of the Breathe Into Being membership. She discovered breathwork during the pandemic, trained as a facilitator in Costa Rica, and now runs women's retreats in Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, and Portugal. She has spent the better part of a decade watching people come home to themselves through the breath, and she joined us to explain why this particular tool is the one she keeps coming back to: it's free, it's always available, and it lives inside of you.

This episode covers the science of what breathwork does to the nervous system, why healing doesn't require reliving what you're carrying, and how Brandi proved the whole thing works through a screen in under three minutes before we hit record.

What You'll Learn:

• Why your body's natural default is healing, and what actually gets in the way of that

• How breathwork produces altered states of consciousness similar to what Stanislav Grof researched when he pioneered holotropic breathwork after psychedelics were banned from clinical use

• What the body does with stored experience that the mind can't process, and why the breath bypasses the need to think your way through it

• Why talk therapy can sometimes keep us wired to the same nervous system loops, and what breathwork does instead

• How Dr. Laura went from a reluctant first-timer (her words: "my soul wanted to take a decade nap") to certified facilitator to retreat leader

• Why Brandi was fully skeptical of online breathwork and had a profound release anyway

• What the cumulative shift looks like over time vs. the single big release most people expect

• The story behind Dr. Laura's Heart Spark retreats and why she believes women heal more completely in circle with other women

• How to find community and continued practice through the Breathe Into Being membership

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take our wellness quiz to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

Three minutes. That's how long it took Brandi to go from completely dysregulated to completely herself this morning. Three minutes of intentional breathwork, and the tears came, and the only words that followed were: "That's not who I am. What was I thinking?" We walked into this recording session with Dr. Laura Foster shaken, and we're walking out of it with something we had to share with you immediately.

Dr. Laura Foster is a chiropractor with over 25 years of experience working with the nervous system. She is also a certified breathwork facilitator, retreat leader, and founder of the Breathe Into Being membership. She discovered breathwork during the pandemic, trained as a facilitator in Costa Rica, and now runs women's retreats in Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, and Portugal. She has spent the better part of a decade watching people come home to themselves through the breath, and she joined us to explain why this particular tool is the one she keeps coming back to: it's free, it's always available, and it lives inside of you.

This episode covers the science of what breathwork does to the nervous system, why healing doesn't require reliving what you're carrying, and how Brandi proved the whole thing works through a screen in under three minutes before we hit record.

What You'll Learn:

• Why your body's natural default is healing, and what actually gets in the way of that

• How breathwork produces altered states of consciousness similar to what Stanislav Grof researched when he pioneered holotropic breathwork after psychedelics were banned from clinical use

• What the body does with stored experience that the mind can't process, and why the breath bypasses the need to think your way through it

• Why talk therapy can sometimes keep us wired to the same nervous system loops, and what breathwork does instead

• How Dr. Laura went from a reluctant first-timer (her words: "my soul wanted to take a decade nap") to certified facilitator to retreat leader

• Why Brandi was fully skeptical of online breathwork and had a profound release anyway

• What the cumulative shift looks like over time vs. the single big release most people expect

• The story behind Dr. Laura's Heart Spark retreats and why she believes women heal more completely in circle with other women

• How to find community and continued practice through the Breathe Into Being membership

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take our wellness quiz to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

She had a packed chiropractic practice, 150 to 200 patient visits a week, four kids, a husband who was a pilot, and was training for Iron Man races on the weekends. From the outside, the life was finished. Complete. And then something went quiet on the inside.

Dr. Laura Foster spent 25 years as a chiropractor before the gap between who she was and who she was being in her life became impossible to ignore. She'd been setting goals, hitting them, and moving straight to the next one without pausing for even 10 seconds. She'd been outrunning her life in every literal and figurative sense of the word. And when she finally stopped, what she found was not what she expected.

In this episode, Laura walks us through the breakdown that became her breakthrough: the year she sat in the discomfort, asked herself the questions she'd never thought to ask, and started making 2% shifts that changed the entire trajectory of her life. She now leads breathwork, homeopathy, and retreats for women going through their own version of that same reckoning. If you've ever hit a goal and felt nothing, or built a life that looks right but doesn't feel right, this conversation is for you.

What You'll Learn:

• Why achieving your biggest goals can make you feel worse, and what that feeling is actually pointing to

• The difference between achievement and fulfillment, and why most of us have been chasing the wrong one

• What Dr. Laura means by "the gap" between who you are and who you're being, and why closing it doesn't mean burning everything down

• The 2% shift: the golf ball foot analogy that reframes what big life change actually requires

• Why Laura stopped setting goals for a year, and what she discovered when she did

• How to identify your top values and actually live them, not just list them

• The homeopathy story that started with two small pellets, a whale-sized pregnant woman, and a very unexpected afternoon

• What three years in Costa Rica taught her about freedom, health, and choosing your own experience

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take our wellness QUIZ to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

Acne doesn't care how old you are. It shows up at 15, then again at 37, on the same side of the jawline, around the same time of the month, no matter what you change in your skincare routine. If you've been treating the surface while something else is running the show underneath, this episode is going to reframe the whole conversation.

This is the third and final episode in our Skin Series, and we're closing it out with acne. Not just the teenage kind. The adult hormonal kind that shows up like clockwork, concentrates along the jaw, and connects to a single enzyme most people have never heard of. Dr. Desiree breaks down the four types of acne, what makes hormonal acne structurally different, why your blood work can look completely normal and still not tell the full story, and how the research on Ganoderma lucidum triterpenoids connects directly to the enzyme driving sebum production. We also cover the gut connection, which maps more precisely to acne than most people expect, the psychological weight this condition carries at a level the research documents clearly, and where chaga fits in as a secondary supporting player.

What You'll Learn:

• Why acne is actually several distinct conditions, and why getting the category right changes everything about how you address it

• What malassezia folliculitis (fungal acne) is, why nearly 1 in 3 people diagnosed with acne may actually have it, and the one symptom that gives it away

• Why hormonal acne concentrates specifically along the jawline, and what androgen receptor density has to do with it

• The four-factor cascade behind every breakout and how one upstream hormone driver sets all of them in motion

• Why completely normal blood work does not rule out hormonal acne, and what actually matters more than your lab numbers

• What the research actually documents about acne's psychological impact, and why clinical severity doesn't predict how much it affects someone

• The specific compounds in reishi's fruiting body that inhibit 5-alpha reductase, the exact enzyme converting testosterone to DHT in androgen-sensitive skin tissue

• How a low glycemic diet connects to sebum production through a well-mapped biological line from food to insulin to IGF-1 to your sebaceous glands

• The gut microbiome research connecting a specific lactobacillus strain to IGF-1 expression and oxidative stress in acne

• Why dual extraction matters specifically for the reishi compounds most relevant to hormonal acne, and what to look for on the label

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Take our wellness quiz to find the right mushroom for you: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

➡️ Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15 ⬅️ https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

Picture someone waking up at two in the morning because the itching finally won the fight against their sleep. Not a mild itch. The kind that makes you consider, for one irrational second, whether scratching until it bleeds might bring relief. Or a parent standing in the pharmacy aisle at midnight, Googling one more cream, because nothing has worked yet and the pediatrician is six months out. That is eczema in real life. And it deserves more than another tube of cortisone.

In Part 2 of our Skin Series, we get into eczema, the one that gets dismissed as "just sensitive skin" more often than it should be. Dr. Desiree breaks down the Th2 immune pathway driving atopic dermatitis, the specific cytokines behind that relentless itch cycle, and why eczema in early childhood can be the first signal in a broader immune pattern that sometimes includes food allergies and asthma. She also shares her own experience developing adult-onset eczema from mold exposure, the invisible kind that took four years to identify. We cover how reishi's triterpenes connect to the mast cell and histamine side of the story, where the gut-skin research lands, and three concrete things you can do right now regardless of where you are in managing your skin.

What You'll Learn:

• Why eczema is a mapped Th2 immune condition driven by specific cytokines, not just dry or reactive skin

• The role of IL-31 in creating the itch signal, and why scratching sends the whole cycle into a physiological feedback loop

• What researchers call the "atopic march" and what the data says about eczema predicting asthma and food allergies in children

• Why mold exposure in the home is backed by a 2024 meta-analysis as a measurable eczema and asthma risk factor

• The five distinct types of eczema and why getting the right diagnosis determines which approaches are actually relevant to your situation

• Dr. Desiree's personal experience developing eczema as an adult after four years of unknowing mold exposure, and what finally changed

• How reishi's triterpenes (specifically ganoderic acids unique to this mushroom) target mast cell histamine release at the source of the itch response

• What makes reishi an immune modulator rather than a straight suppressant, and why that distinction matters for eczema

• Why infant gut microbiome diversity appears as an early predictive marker for eczema risk, and how reishi's beta-glucans connect to that story

• The three things to verify before buying any reishi product, and what to walk away from entirely

Your Next Steps:

• Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/

• Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products

• Find the right mushroom for you with our wellness quiz: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz

➡️ Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15 ⬅️ https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-productsThis is Part 1 of our brand-new Skin Series. We're starting with psoriasis because it's personal for both of us. Brandi shares her history with psoriasis starting at age 15, over a decade on a pharmaceutical biologic, and how she eventually found her way to remission through a combination of lifestyle shifts and functional mushrooms. Dr. Desiree breaks down the exact immune mechanism driving psoriasis, including the IL-23/IL-17 pathway, the TH17 cell overactivation loop, and the documented role of oxidative stress as a contributing factor in the disease process. Then we walk through why chaga is the functional mushroom most aligned with this picture, what the research actually shows, and how the gut-skin axis connects it all.📃What You'll Learn▸ Why psoriasis is an immune condition that shows up on the skin, not a skin problem, and why that reframe changes your entire support strategy▸ The IL-23/IL-17 axis explained simply: the self-sustaining inflammatory loop that drives psoriasis flares▸ What actually happens to skin cells during a flare (a 28 to 30 day cycle gets compressed into 3 to 7 days)▸ Why oxidative stress is a contributing factor in the psoriasis disease process, not just a side effect▸ The five types of psoriasis and why many people don't even recognize their own condition▸ The real mental health cost of psoriasis: the numbers are significant, and this episode names them▸ Why chaga has one of the highest measured antioxidant capacities of any natural substance researchers have tested▸ How chaga polysaccharides affect TH17 and T regulatory cell balance, the same immune players driving psoriasis▸ What the gut-skin axis has to do with psoriasis severity, and how chaga fits into that layer▸ Exactly what to look for on a chaga label, and why most products on store shelves wouldn't make the cut📃Your Next Steps▸ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eversiowellness/▸ Shop Eversio Wellness and save 15% with code PODCAST15: https://www.eversiowellness.com/discount/PODCAST15?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-products▸ Not sure which mushroom is right for you? Take our quiz: https://www.eversiowellness.com/pages/take-our-quiz