The Present Moment Project

Childhood cancer, grief, and what it actually looks like to build something meaningful after the worst possible loss. Camilla Goodwin lost her daughter Myla in 2020 to a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer called Wilms tumor. She was eight years old. In the years since, Camilla and her husband Mike have opened a restaurant, started a foundation, raised over three million dollars for families facing childhood cancer diagnoses, and somehow kept showing up for their other two kids, their community, and each other.

This conversation goes to a lot of honest places. Camilla talks about the adrenaline that carried her through the early months, nursing school, a psychology degree, a master's in education, all of it driven by that same force that Jill recognizes from her own experience of loss. They talk about the moment she realized she was reliving her trauma every time she sat with grieving parents, and how she had to step back from that part of the work to stay healthy enough to keep doing any of it.

There is a lot in here about faith, or the loss of it, and what slowly comes back. About the ways Myla shows up for her family still, through leaves in unexpected places, through the way her kids talk about her every single day. About what it meant to keep Myla's diagnosis framed in hope rather than statistics, and how that shaped the final years of her life.

Myla's Beleaf provides financial support to families navigating childhood cancer, from active treatment through end of life. They have helped 360 families in four years. The foundation is based in South Florida and operates across the state.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
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First responder mental health and the silence around it is where this conversation begins — with Tim Roberto, a Marine Corps veteran with 19 years of sobriety who turned his own history into something that helps people in uniform ask for help without losing anything in the process. He founded Stomping Out the Stigma, a nonprofit that connects first responders and veterans with licensed, culturally competent therapists. No insurance. No HR. No agency reporting. First name only, and someone calls you back within 24 hours.

Tim started using at 11, worked his way through everything available between then and 16, and got sober at 44. What finally moved him wasn't a program or a person — it was a quiet realization that his pain had grown bigger than his fear. For years, fear-based decisions had only produced more fear, the same drain cycling through the same dark. Recovery came through 12-step literature, morning routines, and what he calls a complete psychic change — not something he can fully explain, just something he stopped trying to figure out and started living instead.

He grew up one of five boys, raised by an authoritarian Italian father who had been sent back to Italy alone at eight years old for his education, and a deeply codependent English mother. Tim spent most of his childhood trying to be anything other than himself. The episode moves through his early years, his time in the Marine Corps, the moment in a Burger King parking lot at 16 when cocaine found him and he knew immediately it was different, and the first sober Christmas when he finally told his father he loved him — a scene that takes a long time to get through and is worth every second.

Jill brings her own thread in — her father, her husband's death, the boundary she set in her early 50s that she couldn't have set before, and what it finally felt like to be parented after spending most of her life without it. Both of them return again and again to the same ground: showing up for yourself in the morning before the day takes over, watching patterns instead of words, staying off the victim triangle, and choosing response over reaction. None of it is abstract. All of it is earned.

Palm Beach County has one of the highest death by suicide rates among first responders in any county in Florida. Nationally, more first responders die by suicide than in the line of duty. If you or someone you know is in uniform and struggling, Tim can be reached at [email protected] or sotsinc.org.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Adventure therapy, Navy SEALs, and what happens when the path you were certain about closes on you twice. David Cohen, a therapist and founder of Invictus Psychotherapy in Boca Raton, sits down to talk about how a DWI at 19 changed the entire direction of his life, and what it took to find purpose on the other side of that.

David walks through what adventure therapy actually looks like in practice, why talking about your problems in a chair only goes so far, and how taking someone rock climbing or kayaking can get to places that traditional talk therapy never reaches. The conversation moves into the body, the nervous system, and why so many people are walking around in a stress response they do not even recognize as one.

Jill and David talk honestly about sitting with emotions instead of outrunning them, the difference between insight and actual change, and why the belief "I can't do it" that shows up on a ropes course is the exact same belief that shows up everywhere else in a person's life. There is also a real conversation about men and emotional expression, and what it takes to access feelings when you were conditioned not to have them.

There is a lot of ground covered here, including OCD, hypnotherapy, exposure therapy, and what it means to be of genuine service versus just getting by. David is about to join the Army National Guard, has a two-month-old at home, and sees around thirty clients a week. He is doing the work, and it shows.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Friendship that holds through the worst moments is hard to put into words, but this conversation tries. Jill sits down with Andrew Reiss, a retired pediatrician and long-time family friend, to talk about what it actually looks like to rebuild a life after something shatters it. For Andrew, that was a massive stroke in November 2019 that left his left side paralyzed, though he had no awareness of it in the moment. For Jill, it was losing her husband Adam. Both of them have been figuring out, in real time, how to keep going.

Andrew talks honestly about the early days of recovery, going from full speed to complete stillness, and how he developed what he calls minimum daily fitness, a small, non-negotiable commitment to his body that had as much to do with quieting his inner critic as it did with getting stronger. He also reflects on a recent climb up Pico Duarte, the tallest mountain in the Caribbean, and what came into focus afterward about identity, letting go of the role he had held for decades, and what he is building now in its place.

The conversation moves into what Andrew watched work with his patients and his own kids over the years, specifically around emotional validation and resilience. His point is simple but easy to skip over: you have to validate the feeling before you try to change the behavior. And the modeling of resilience, he says, starts with parents actually taking care of themselves, not just their children.

There is also a quieter thread running through all of it, about connection, vulnerability, and what happens when people stop waiting to feel better before they take the next step. Andrew describes it as acting your way into better feeling, and Jill recognizes it immediately from her own work with clients walking through grief and depression.

This one covers a lot of ground, stroke recovery, grief, parenting, identity after retirement, service work abroad, and two people who have stayed close through all of it.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
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Liver transplant survivor and ICU nurse Melissa met host Jill Bershad at a spa just six days before this conversation. The connection was immediate, and the conversation that followed feels just as natural.

Melissa’s life has asked a lot of her from a young age. After losing her father at eight, she stepped into a caregiving role for her mother and younger brother by nine. Since then, her path has been shaped by responsibility, resilience, and a series of life-altering health challenges that would stop most people in their tracks.

What runs underneath all of it is not performance or positivity. It is something quieter. Melissa talks about her Christian faith the way she talks about everything else, plainly and without pressure. She references the book of Job not as a metaphor but as a framework she actually lives by. She also talks about what she has never done well, grieving, slowing down, letting people see the fragile parts, and she says it without apology.

Jill does not turn this into a session. She just listens, asks the questions most people would be afraid to ask, and lets Melissa be exactly who she is. The result is a conversation about survival that does not feel like a survival story. It feels like two people talking honestly about what it costs to keep going, and why most of us do anyway.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Jill sits down with longtime friend and psychotherapist Rachel Blogg for a conversation that moves between real life, real loss, and the quiet ways people keep going.

They talk about what it looks like to live through hard things without stopping long enough to process them, and what happens when you finally do. There’s a thread of high performance running through it all. The pressure to hold it together. The habit of putting one foot in front of the other. And the shift that comes when that’s no longer enough.

Rachel shares pieces of her story that she hasn’t spoken about publicly before, including her history with disordered eating, how perfectionism shows up, and the ongoing work of staying aware without letting the past define her. They also talk about fear, safety, relationships, and the difference between living as a victim and making intentional choices that feel more empowering.

There’s no neat takeaway here. Just two people sitting in it, making sense of what they’ve lived through, and what it means to keep moving forward with more honesty and intention.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Jill Bershad sits with Oteil Burbridge for a wide-ranging conversation about grief, music, death, family, faith, and the strange ways light keeps finding its way in. What starts with memories of Oteil’s brother Kofi opens into something bigger: how loss changes your priorities, how music carries people through what words cannot, and why staying close to your own mortality can make life feel more honest and more alive.

They talk about what it means to lose someone who shaped you, the healing force inside song and community, raising children without crushing their light, and the difference between identity and essence. Oteil also shares the story behind Kofi Day of Service, the grief woven into his music, and the deeper reason some songs hit so hard when life breaks open.

It is thoughtful, emotional, funny in unexpected places, and deeply human. A conversation about sorrow, magic, service, and what remains when everything extra falls away.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Some people make you feel calmer just by the way they talk. Dido Balla is one of those people and the conversation goes straight to what actually helps when life is loud, fast, and constantly activating your nervous system.

Dido shares his story growing up in Cameroon, how curiosity shaped him, and why asking “why” can be the kindest starting point when you don’t love how you reacted. Jill and Dido talk about emotional regulation as a real life skill, what it means to feel “okay,” and why feeling safe in your body matters more than controlling the outside world.

They also get practical with a simple framework Dido uses, awareness, regulation, and fitness, along with tools that are free and accessible like breath, sound, touch, and reframing. There’s honesty about trauma, boundaries, and the difference between being nice and being truly kind.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Jill Bershad sits down with Danica Bajaj, a 23-year-old Duke graduate and Robertson Scholar whose life changed after losing her brother to terminal brain cancer. That loss sent her searching for meaning, and gratitude became the thread she followed through science, spirituality, and the land itself.

Danica shares what it was like to spend days in silence at a Buddhist temple in Japan, to live and work in a tiny town in New Zealand where community and sustainability are inseparable, and to keep asking strangers around the world one simple question: what are you grateful for?

Together, Jill and Danica talk about the kind of gratitude that does not bypass pain, the difference between forcing positivity and building a real practice, and the quiet shift from why was he only given 30 years to he was given 30 years and that was the gift. They also reflect on grief, time, connection, and why slowing down with others around a table can make people feel safe enough to tell the truth.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad

Jill sits with Mary Eckstein, a Holocaust survivor who has lived through war, displacement, the loss of nearly her entire family, the death of her husband after 63 years of marriage, and the loss of her son. Mary speaks plainly about fear, hunger, survival, grief, and what it has meant to keep going without turning away from life.

This is not a conversation about inspiration or silver linings. It is a quiet, honest reflection on resilience as something practical and lived. Mary shares what it was like to be eight years old during the Holocaust, how she rebuilt a life from nothing, why she chose to keep working after loss, and how focusing on the good moments helped her move forward without denying the pain.

They talk about memory, responsibility, grief, aging, and the choice to stay present even when days are hard. A steady, thoughtful conversation about what it means to live fully, one day at a time, after experiencing unimaginable loss.

Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP

• Email: [email protected] 
• Website: jillbershad.com
• Instagram: @jillkbershad.lmhc
• Facebook: jillkbershad