Season 3

For those of us who have never quite fit in the environments where we found ourselves, the search for home can extend beyond geography. Stephanie Sheng knows this intimately. Born in the US to a father from China and mother from Hong Kong, she belonged fully to neither culture. At age 10, when her father was diagnosed with stage four cancer, big questions arrived and never really left. 

What is the body actually holding, and how does it release it? While every Wounded Healer episode has touched on this inquiry, this final conversation brings it firmly into focus. Solea Anani, who opened this series with myth, prayer and an invocation to the wound’s own intelligence, returns to close the circle. She’s joined by Dr Aimie Apigian, a double board certified physician whose Biology of Trauma framework maps what happens at the cellular level when the body stores survival.

The therapist’s wound is rarely just one thing. Our guests today shared that for them, it’s been a mix of childhood, educational, religious, ancestral, racial, colonial, cultural and systemic wounds, seeded through a lifetime. What turned these wounded humans into wounded healers is how they related to their wounds.

The therapist’s wound is rarely just one thing. Our guests today shared that for them, it’s been a mix of childhood, educational, religious, ancestral, racial, colonial, cultural and systemic wounds, seeded through a lifetime. What turned these wounded humans into wounded healers is how they related to their wounds.

What becomes possible when a wounded healer acknowledges their wound? To address this question, we brought together three diverse medical professionals whose practices and traditions span indigenous, osteopathic and allopathic realms. As they move from consulting room to ceremony, from the body’s symptoms to the soul’s message, from protocol to empathic presence, each reflects on the wounding that brought them into medicine, and the inner work that transformed how they practice it.

Chiron, the greatest healer in the mythological world, could not heal himself, and so became known as, ‘the wounded healer.’ Solea opens this series with a myth, a prayer and an invocation to the wisdom of the wound. She presences Chiron as a living intelligence that’s alive in each of us, shaping both our wounds, and the shadows we can’t quite see. 

In addition to the personal weight of masculinity that all men carry, brown and black skinned men are burdened by additional collective weights that must be carried while navigating a world not built for them, in bodies that are policed, feared, criminalized and often murdered. In this episode, co-hosts Kevin and J’aime are joined by two remarkable men: HawaH Kasat and Reggie Hubbard. Together they explore the experiences of BIPOC men, and address:

In this episode, Kevin is joined by two friends and Compassionate Inquiry® colleagues for a full spectrum conversation that moves from desolation and helplessness, to grief, hope and laughter. They begin in grim terrain shaped by intergenerational trauma, measured by dismal statistics and broadcast through news stories and images of violence that shock us precisely because the perpetrators are so young. Then somehow, their focus shifts to tenderness.  

Researchers have studied it, governments have funded it, and schools have intervened. But 30 years later, boys are still falling behind in education. Why is this problem so ‘stubborn?’ Why has so little changed? In this episode, Susan talks about her work in the Taking Boys Seriously research project, Appreciative Inquiry, what actually works for boys, why it matters for the men they’ll become, and to society overall. 

What happens when grief isn’t personal, when it belongs to the land, the climate, and the fractured relationship between humans and the living world? Join us as climate psychologist, systems thinker and trauma therapist, Steffi Bednarek moves this conversation from the personal to the planetary, and from the clinical to the deeply, wildly human. She suggests that our epidemic of depression, anxiety, and disconnection may not be a malfunction, but an unanswered call to an unnamed grief so large, Western psychology barely has the language for it.