In This Episode:

[0:00] Intro: How much time are you spending in the present moment?

[1:05] The story of my daughter's stillbirth and family vacation

[3:22] Why grief lives in the present moment

[4:13] The two exit strategies our culture teaches us

[4:40] The vision board story (4 months after loss)

[6:27] Why we haven't been taught to feel our feelings

[10:26] My five-year fertility journey and the Bali decision

[14:28] What I learned about sitting with emotions

[16:12] Why I became a somatic life coach

[17:33] What somatic coaching actually is

[19:00] The I Think, I Feel, I Sense practice

[20:12] Introduction to the 10-Day Reset

Key Takeaway: The present moment is where your pain lives—and it's also the only place where anything can shift for you.

Topics covered:

Relief vs. real change: the crucial difference

The survival mode cycle and escape containers

Why vacations and wellness retreats feel good but don't create lasting transformation

What integration actually means

Small intentional actions vs. big dramatic life changes

Real-life story: Bali, forgiveness, and aligned action

Real-life story: Intentional changes and the unexpected layoff

Building a life you don't have to escape from

Somatic coaching and body wisdom

Grief, loss, and finding your truth

How to recognize when you're in pressure-valve mode vs. making real change

Resources mentioned:

10-day reset audio series

Free consultation call

Key takeaway: The missing piece between relief and real change is integration—taking what you discover and weaving it into your daily life through small, sustainable, aligned actions.

Topics Covered:

The cultural myth of resilience (and why it's actually suppression)

How our workplace and social systems are designed to keep us in toxic resilience

The real cost of pushing emotions down (it lives in your body)

The difference between toxic resilience and genuine resilience

How grief reveals what actually matters to you

The 3-step framework: Feel it → Understand it → Act on it

Kendra's personal story: vision board to life coach to starting her business

Why you don't have to be okay (and why that matters)

Key Takeaways:

Resilience isn't recovery—it's discovery

Your emotions contain information only available if you feel them

Small, intentional actions aligned with your grief create real change

Listening to your inner wisdom is a practice, not a destination

Resources Mentioned:

Free Awaken Your Inner Joy Guided Journal

Centered and Alive Group Program (starts September)

Discovery Call

The cultural messages we received about emotions (and why they're wrong).

Emotions as information: what your brain is actually doing when you feel something.

The difference between a feeling being valid and being true.

Why suppressed emotions become stored energy in your body.

The chronic fatigue connection: unprocessed emotions and exhaustion.

Therapy vs. feeling: Why talking about emotions isn't the same as feeling them.

The practice of witnessing: how to actually feel your emotions.

Sitting with grief at your desk: a real-moment story of embodied witnessing.

Why your body knows answers your mind can't access

Creating safe spaces to feel in your coaching and in your life

The True You Reset: a tool for reconnecting with your inner wisdom

Key Takeaway:
You can't think your way through emotions. You have to feel your way through them. And the moment you give yourself permission to sit with what's present, without needing to fix it, everything shifts.

Resources:
Free 10-Day True You Reset: truthafterloss.com/reset10

Centered and Alive Coaching: truthafterloss.com/workwithkendra

Episode 1: 12 Years After Losing My Daughter, My Body Was Still Holding Grief

In the first episode of Truth After Loss, Kendra Merrill sets the stage for the podcast and shares three cultural messages about grief that she's learned aren't true.

What we cover:

Why "getting over" grief isn't the goal, and what to aim for instead

How grief stays with you for life, even as its intensity changes

Why unprocessed grief gets stored in the body (with a nod to Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score)

The Yosemite hike that left Kendra in pain for days, and the moment on her floor that showed her why

Why feeling your feelings, even years later, is the way forward

What Kendra's daughter Adeline taught her about worth, value, and building a life around truth

About Kendra: Kendra Merrill is the host of Truth After Loss. Her story includes the stillbirth of her daughter Adeline, losing her father six weeks later, and a decade of loss that followed. This podcast is where she shares what grief has revealed to her, and invites you to find your own truth in what you've carried.

Notable line: "What if the point was never how do we get through it, but more how do we learn to carry it?"

Connect: Subscribe on YouTube or follow on your podcast app so you never miss an episode. Share your story in the comments — Kendra reads every one.

Trailer for Truth After Loss Podcast.

In this episode:

Why "just shift your mindset" stopped being enough for so many women

What science actually says about somatic intelligence and where it falls short

How school, religion, corporate culture, and even the self-help industry trained us to override our inner knowing

Why the rise of AI makes reclaiming this capacity more urgent than ever

Three practices to start expanding your capacity to listen inward and rebuild self-trust

Resources:

Free 10-Day TrueYou Reset: https://kendrathriving.com/reset10

TrueYou Coaching: https://kendrathriving.com/work-with-kendra

This episode includes discussion of the stillbirth of Kendra's daughter.

In this episode, Kendra gets personal about something most of us haven't connected yet — how a nervous system running in chronic survival mode quietly shapes every relationship in your life. She shares her own story, the patterns she's recognized in herself and the women she works with, and what becomes possible when you start to heal. Not perfect relationships. Real ones.

What if the story you've been telling yourself about who you are… was never really yours?

In this episode, we're getting into something I believe is the most foundational work a woman can do — understanding her core beliefs. Not in a therapy-speak, clinical kind of way. In a real, this-is-running-your-whole-life kind of way.

We cover:

What core beliefs actually are (and why they're not facts)

How the belief → behavior chain works (and why it's automatic)

Where your beliefs came from — and why most were formed before you had a say

The wild Kelly McGonigal stress study that changed how I think about beliefs and the body

My personal story — what I had to reconcile alone in Bali before everything changed

A simple 3-step process to identify and start challenging your own limiting beliefs

Links mentioned: Free 10 Day True You Reset → https://kendrathriving.com/reset10 

In this episode we cover:

[00:00] Introduction — Why this conversation matters right now

[01:00] What are we actually chasing?

[03:00] The pursuit of happiness — traced back to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence

[05:00] How cultural norms shape what we believe will make us happy

[07:00] Why we exhaust ourselves chasing everyone else's version of happiness

[08:00] Kendra's personal story — the rocking chair moment

[12:00] Why our nervous systems are wired to prioritize belonging over truth

[15:00] The graveyard story — learning to advocate for your own truth

[22:00] What happens when you continuously abandon yourself (mentally, physically, spiritually, relationally)

[27:00] How to start cultivating real happiness — 5 ways

[28:00] Embrace wants vs. needs (from The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan)

[29:00] Measure yourself backwards, not against the future

[31:00] Create meaning from your past

[33:00] Soul-led living — making yourself the reference point

[34:00] The 10-Day True You Audio Reset

[34:00] Do your part and surrender — co-creating your life

Resources mentioned:

• The Gap and the Gain — Dan Sullivan

• The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk

• FREE 10-Day True You Audio Reset https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aknaC2rEZGY