Finding Harmony Podcast

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)

  Ancient Breathing 2.0 Master Class OUTRO - 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

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 coach and licensed acupuncturist who has coached founders, executives, and high performers since 2008 — the kind of people who look, from the outside, like they've figured it out. Most of his life, he was one of them, which turned out to be the part the work was about. He spent years training in Ashtanga yoga and was authorized to teach by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in 2003 [VERIFY]. 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.

 

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube · or wherever you listen.

  Ancient Breathing 2.0 Master Class OUTRO - 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

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. 

Free 90-Minute Pranayama Masterclass: https://harmonyslater.com/free-90-minute-pranayama-masterclass

 

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.

  Ancient Breathing 2.0 Master Class OUTRO - 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

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 OUTRO - 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

What happens when four days alone in the desert — no food, no phone, just water and a sleeping bag — bring you face to face with your own unconscious? Filmmaker Jan Becker joins Harmony and Russell to talk about Vision Quest, his documentary chronicling one of humanity's oldest rites of passage, and how a project that began with his friend Christian Oliver became something far more personal after Christian's sudden death.

Guest Bio

Jan Becker is a German-born filmmaker based in Los Angeles. After years working as a cinematographer, he turned to directing documentaries shaped by his long-standing interest in meditation, Jungian psychology, and trauma and recovery work. Vision Quest, his latest film, follows a small group — including his close friend, actor and filmmaker Christian Oliver [VERIFY] — through a traditional four-day, four-night fasting ritual in the high desert. What began as a passion project between friends became, after Christian's sudden death, a tribute to his memory and an exploration of grief, healing, and the questions that outlast us.

Connect with Jan

Website: visionquestfilm.com

Instagram: @vision_quest_movie

Watch: Vision Quest — pay-per-view on Amazon Prime & Google Play

Key Takeaways

A vision quest is four days and nights alone in nature with only water — an ancient rite of passage most modern people never experience.

Jan describes nature as communicating in images rather than words — a Jungian lens on the unconscious.

Grief can reshape a creative project's purpose without erasing its original intention.

Confidence and clarity often come after the discomfort, not before it.

Fear in isolation is usually the mind, not the environment, doing the talking.

Leave a Review & Subscribe

If this episode resonated, a 5-star review helps other seekers find these conversations. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

  Ancient Breathing 2.0 Master Class OUTRO - 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