Finding Harmony Podcast

What if your symptoms aren't the problem? What if they're a message?

Harmony Slater and Russell Case welcome Allison Lorne, a certified nurse midwife with 25 years in women's health who guides women through perimenopause and menopause as a sacred passage rather than a set of symptoms to silence. Allison is also a spinal energetics practitioner, so the conversation moves between the clinical and the energetic: what hormones are doing, what the body is asking for, and how to come home to it.

Allison explains why she calls perimenopause "adolescence in reverse," how the history of hormone therapy shaped what women were told for two decades, and why emotional symptoms like anxiety, irritability, and sleeplessness often arrive first. She shares her own first symptom, why it took her years to recognize perimenopause, and how a lifetime of intuitive healing work led her from hospital nursing to private practice. Along the way: the grandmother hypothesis, a coven on California's Central Coast, dandelions, and a simple practice for tuning in to your inner wise woman.

In this episode

Why perimenopause can feel like adolescence in reverse, and what the big feelings are asking you to look at

How hormone therapy went from widely prescribed to widely feared, and what Allison says the reanalysis of the Women's Health Initiative data showed

Why Allison describes hormone therapy as comparable to insulin or thyroid medication, and why she says the decision is case by case

The emotional symptoms that often come first: anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, a sense of doom, rising feminine rage

Allison's own first symptom, and why she did not recognize perimenopause for about ten years

How relationships change when children leave home, and why communication and intimacy matter in midlife

The grandmother hypothesis, orcas, and why menopause may be about purpose rather than decline

How spinal energetics keeps a client alert and engaged, and why that matters for lasting change

Why empaths need to learn "what's mine and what's not mine"

A simple daily practice for meeting your inner wise woman, using the elements of water, fire, earth, air, and ether

Key takeaways

Perimenopause is a whole-systems transition, not only a hormonal one. Emotional symptoms are information.

Allison's view: hormone therapy decisions are individual, and the greatest benefit is seen when it starts before 60 or within ten years of the last period. Talk with your own provider.

Midlife is an opportunity to take inventory of what has been pushed down and to choose embodiment, self-awareness, and nervous system regulation.

Women's health research has lagged behind, and community is part of the remedy.

Time in nature, even gazing at the sky, helps the brain settle into the states where insight arrives.

Guest bio
Allison Lorne, CNM, is a certified nurse midwife with 25 years in women's health. After two decades in hospital and clinical practice, she opened a private practice three years ago, where she guides women through perimenopause and menopause with a blend of clinical education, somatic work, and spinal energetics. She leads a three-month coaching program for women in midlife and lives on five acres on California's Central Coast.

Connect with Allison

Website: https://www.healwithallison.com/

https://www.instagram.com/spiritualsomatics/

Sensitivity Quiz

 

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Description
Everyone is talking about nervous system regulation. But what if the goal isn't to be calm all the time? In Episode 337, Harmony Slater and Russell Case talk with Laurie James, author of Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go, host of the Confessions of a Free Bird podcast, and a certified somatic practitioner and coach who works in the Somatic Experiencing approach developed by Peter Levine.

Laurie shares how caring for aging parents while raising four daughters, and the end of a 26-year marriage, led to a season of overwhelm and then to somatic healing. She explains what Somatic Experiencing is, why a healthy nervous system moves between activation and rest many times a day, how to build capacity instead of chasing calm, and why you can heal without retelling your whole story.

In this episode

Why the goal of nervous system work is flexibility and resilience, not constant calm

What Somatic Experiencing is, and how listening to the body differs from directing it from the top down

How the vagus nerve and neuroception shape your response to safety and threat

What it means to complete a threat response that never finished

How yoga, nature and slow movement support regulation

Why you don't have to revisit your story to release it

How a memoir, a podcast and one-on-one work grew out of a second-half-of-life reinvention

About the guest
Laurie James is an author, certified somatic practitioner and coach, and the host of the Confessions of a Free Bird podcast. Her memoir, Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go (2021), chronicles a season of raising four daughters, caring for her parents, and the unraveling of a long marriage. She lives in Southern California.

Links and resources

Laurie's website: https://www.laurieejames.com/

Laurie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurie.james/

Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go on Amazon and wherever books are sold

Confessions of a Free Bird podcast, where Harmony was a guest

Mentioned in this episode
Peter Levine (Somatic Experiencing), Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory), Gabor Maté, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris (The Deepest Well and the ACE study)

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What happens when the thing that saved your life becomes the thing you have to heal from?

Chad Herst has been practicing Ashtanga yoga since his twenties — authorized to teach by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois himself in 2003 — and coaching high-performing founders and executives since 2008. From the outside, he'd figured it out. From the inside, he was running the exact pattern he now helps his clients name: the drive that builds something real, and then keeps running long after it stops feeling like enough.

 

Harmony and Russell sit down with their old friend from the Mysore years to talk about what actually broke that pattern open — a body that finally refused to cooperate, a decade of sitting with ayahuasca, and a grief from his brother's death in 1991 that he didn't let himself fully feel until he turned 50. It's a conversation about achievement, identity, family patterns, and what it costs to keep proving you're enough — and what's on the other side of finally stopping.

Chad's new book, The Performance Trap: The Ache No Success Will Ever Fix, launches October 1, 2026 Get the first chapter, read in his voice, at herstwellness.com/chapter-one.

 

Guest bio:

Chad Herst is a mind/body and executive coach and the author of The Performance Trap: The Ache No Success Will Ever Fix. He has been coaching since 2008. His work helps people notice the patterns that take over under pressure, listen for what matters to them, and try different ways of responding in daily life.

Find out more: https://herstwellness.com

His new book, The Performance Trap: The Ache No Success Will Ever Fix, names the pattern he kept finding underneath the success in his clients, and in himself: the drive that builds something real, then keeps running long after it stops feeling like enough. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Melissa.

 

Connect with Chad:

Website: herstwellness.com

Free first chapter (read in his voice): herstwellness.com/chapter-one 

 

Key takeaways:

Achievement can be a coping mechanism as much as a calling — and the two can look identical from the outside

A pattern that starts as protection (being "the good kid," never a problem) can quietly become an identity you can't set down

Practices like Ashtanga, meditation, and ceremony don't create your patterns — they reveal and can magnify them

Sometimes the body has to break down before old grief finally has somewhere to go

Integration — bringing an insight into ordinary daily life — is harder, and more important, than the peak moment that produced it

Telling the truth about your own story, even imperfectly and even when family disagrees with how you tell it, can itself be a form of healing

 

Content Advisory: This episode includes a personal conversation about grief after a suicide loss, a family member's mental illness, and the complicated emotions that can follow. Please take care while listening, and feel free to skip this one if it isn't the right time.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available:

United States: Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or chat at 988lifeline.org. Available 24/7.

Canada: Call or text 9-8-8 (Suicide Crisis Helpline). Available 24/7, in English and French.

Outside the US and Canada: Find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.

If you're in immediate danger, please call your local emergency number (911 in the US and Canada).

 

Leave a review: If this episode resonated, a 5-star review and a note on your biggest takeaway helps other seekers find these conversations.

 

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Marie Manuchehri was a thirty-seven-year-old oncology nurse when, mid-task at a patient's bedside, her clairvoyance switched on — and never switched off. Thirty years later, she has spent more time than most of us at the edge between living and dying.

In this conversation with Harmony Slater and Russell Case, Marie explains why joy is the condition that opens intuition rather than the reward for it, how to tell a genuine knowing from ordinary fear, and what she has noticed in the rooms of people who were about to cross over. She also shares the moment she told her nursing supervisor what was happening to her — certain it would end her career.

Key takeaways:

Joy isn't a reward for doing the work — in Marie's model it's the condition that makes intuition possible

Intuition is a high-frequency state, which is why it goes quiet in fight-or-flight, where most people live

Fear is not intuition. If a message arrives with a story attached, it's coming from the mind

Her technique: deliberately move your energy down out of the brain and into the pelvis, so the third eye has room

Her abilities opened at 37, on a day shift she hadn't chosen, in a hospital she loved

She doesn't remember her sessions afterward, which she considers a mercy

"You can only love your neighbour as much as you love yourself"

For empaths: stay in your own lane, stay in your own joy, stop carrying the world

Marie Manuchehri is an intuitive, healer, and medium who began her healing career while working as an oncology nurse in a Seattle-area hospital. Her perceptions and her ability to move energy have assisted many people in healing their bodies.

Marie loves to educate those who are also on the healer's path, and teaches many courses focused on intuition and the awareness of energy — tools for recognising and understanding your own intuition, and for offering new perceptions to those seeking healing. She's devoted to teaching people about the real, positive impact their own psychic abilities can have on transforming their lives and their psychology, as well as the lives of others.

In her private practice, Marie cares for clients around the world, providing insight into their health concerns as well as mediumship to help them connect with loved ones on the Other Side. She hosts the bi-monthly Joyful Intuitive Podcast and is the author of Intuitive Self-Healing and How to Communicate with Your Spirit Guides.

Connect with Marie
Website: energyintuitive.com

Instagram: @MarieManuchehri

Facebook: @MarieManuchehri

YouTube: @MarieManuchehri — youtube.com/user/mariemanuchehri

Podcast: The Joyful Intuitive Podcast

Books: Intuitive Self-Healing · How to Communicate with Your Spirit Guides

 

Free masterclass — Sunday 27 September. Three pranayama techniques, taught live. If this conversation made you want to slow down enough to actually hear yourself, this is the practice. 

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DISCLAIMER: This conversation is shared for educational and inspirational purposes and is not medical advice. Nothing discussed here is a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a qualified healthcare provider. Please don't change a treatment plan without talking to your doctor.

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Harmony Slater and co-host Russell Case sit down with executive coach, theater artist, and University of Virginia lecturer Denise Stewart for a conversation about story, voice, and confidence.

With more than three decades of experience as an actor, playwright, and director, Denise now coaches CEOs, physicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, and university students on how to access their own stories — not a polished script, but the real, specific, unglamorous truth that actually connects.

Topics covered:

Why code-switching and accent shame shape how we show up to speak

The difference between a "vulnerable moment" and a "weak performance"

Why vague stories ("it was a hard time") lose an audience, and how to dig for the moment underneath

Aristotle's six elements of story — plot, character, spectacle, diction, music, and theme — as an entry point into your own history

"Story pulling" instead of storytelling: how to help someone else open up without interrogating them

Why some audiences need vulnerability and others need authority, and how to tell the difference

Protecting the stories you haven't "earned" the right to tell yet

How Denise coaches Tibetan entrepreneurs, neurosurgeons, and early-stage founders to pitch from story instead of platitude

About Denise Stewart: Denise Stewart is an executive coach and lecturer at the University of Virginia's Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, where she teaches public speaking, improv, and storytelling. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from UVA and has spent over 15,000 hours in public speaking and theatrical performance, including touring her one-woman show Dirty Barbie and Other Girlhood Tales to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her clients include entrepreneurs, physicians, scientists, and Fortune 500 teams.

Connect with Denise: denisestewartstudio.com | Instagram @swamphatchedbutterfly | Substack: The Last Nerve

Connect with Finding Harmony: Instagram @findingharmonypodcast | Host @harmonyslaterofficial | community-harmonyslater.com

If this episode moved you, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to trust their voice a little more today.

  Ancient Breathing 2.0 Master Class - https://harmonyslater.com/free-90-minute-pranayama-masterclass

FIND Harmony online: https://harmonyslater.com/
Harmony on IG: https://www.instagram.com/harmonyslaterofficial/
Finding Harmony Podcast on IG: https://www.instagram.com/findingharmonypodcast/

FREE Manifestation Activation: https://harmonyslater.kit.com/manifestation-activation