Episodes

  • This is Healing — How Do You Cope?

    This is Healing — How Do You Cope?
    Apr 8 2026
    How do you cope with a timeline you want no part of? It's the question everyone asks and nobody answers with any honesty. In this episode of This Is Healing, I go deep into what grief actually is — not a problem to be solved, not a stage to move through, but an ocean you learn to live beside. I talk about the difference between coping and building capacity, why the five stages of grief fail the moments that matter most, what the nervous system is still reaching for when the person is gone, and what it means to continue moving through life when the person you loved is not. This is not a recovery story. There is no resolution here. There is only the truth of where I am — in time and space — and an invitation to anyone carrying something to recognize themselves in it. If this episode finds you at the right moment, send it to one person who needs to hear it.
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • This is Healing — Liminal Timeline

    This is Healing — Liminal Timeline
    Apr 1 2026
    I went to turn on music before hitting record and it logged into Patrick's account. Not mine. His. And I just sat there — because that is exactly how grief works. Not in the dramatic moments. In the quiet ones that slip in without warning and take everything for a second.
    This episode is called Liminal Timeline because that is where I am. The in-between. Not who I was and not yet whoever comes next.

    This week I flew to Cincinnati for the second hearing of the Reagan Tokes Patrick Heringer Act — the legislation that carries Patrick's name — and then drove twelve and a half hours to Omaha with no space in between. By Friday I had nothing left. My nervous system was done. I couldn't show up for Rae the way I wanted to. I couldn't fake being okay. And I stopped trying.

    In this episode I talk about what it actually costs to be functional in rooms that require it. I talk about walking back into Cincinnati — a city that holds the version of my life that no longer exists — and not being able to cry there. I talk about the jaguar mask I got tattooed on my body in Omaha, what the shaman heals first, and why that mask has been living in my mind since Patrick and I went to Costa Rica together. I talk about how grief has changed my sacral authority in Human Design, why hotels will never feel the same, what MDMA opened on a Wednesday when I was looking for relief, and what came through when it did: love yourself the way that Patrick loved you.

    And I talk about spring arriving early in the Colorado mountains — the most beautiful spring I can remember — and how beauty doesn't soften grief. It sharpens it. Every beautiful thing is a reminder of what exists. And who isn't here to see it.

    "Still being here isn't the same as being okay. It's just still being here. And sometimes that's enough."

    This Is Healing is my real-time account of navigating grief and loss. I am not the gold standard. I am not doing this right. I am learning the shape of it by impact. If you have been putting words to something you've been carrying for a long time — I think that thing might be grief. This episode is for you.

    Subscribe. Leave a comment. Send questions — I'm answering them in the descriptions.

    #grief #healing #thisishealing #liminalspace #grieving #widowsfire #humandesign #mentalhealthpodcast #loss #podcast
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • This is Healing — How Not to Disappear

    This is Healing — How Not to Disappear
    Mar 23 2026
    What grief does to the body and how we build the capacity to stay alive inside a life we never chose.


    Have you ever wondered what grief actually does to the body?Nine months ago my husband was murdered in our home. This morning I finished the CrossFit Open ranked in the top ninety four percent in the world.

    Which raises a strange question.How do you keep living after everything changes?

    In this episode I talk about trauma, grief, nervous system capacity, rage, recovery, and rebuilding a life after catastrophic loss. It is about learning how not to disappear.
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • This is Healing — Grief Lives in the Minutes

    This is Healing — Grief Lives in the Minutes
    Mar 23 2026
    Most of our culture talks about grief as if it lives on a calendar. People say things like “it’s been a year” or “time heals.” But when I heard a line in the film Hamnet, something in me recognized a deeper truth. Grief does not live in years. It lives in seconds. It lives in minutes. It lives in heartbeats. In this episode I talk about what it means to survive grief, and why surviving can sometimes feel more disorienting than the loss itself.

    I also explore the parts of grief people rarely admit out loud. The moments when you laugh and feel guilty. The moments when envy rises because you are witnessing the life you thought you would still be living. The anger when people say “you and Patrick had something most people never get.” And the quiet realization that sometimes what sounds like a compliment is actually someone else’s grief showing up sideways.

    Finally, I step into something larger. The ancient idea of samsara, the wheel of human experience, where love and loss are not mistakes but part of the same turning. Because grief eventually forces a question most of us spend our lives avoiding: Is the goal to avoid suffering, or is the point to love fully even though it will burn?
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    58 mins
  • This is Healing — Sex MDMA and Sovereignty

    This is Healing — Sex MDMA and Sovereignty
    Mar 23 2026
    This episode might sound like it’s about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. In some ways, it is. But not in the way people expect.

    This is a ten-day window into what grief actually looks like inside a body. The watching. The wanting. The ego. The collapse. The seventy dollars of DoorDash. The prison sentence feeling. The nervous system spiral. The choice to interrupt it.

    I talk about being watched by men again and what that wakes up in me. I talk about widow sexuality without sanitizing it. I talk about oxytocin and PTSD and the reality that sometimes being touched is not indulgence — it’s regulation.

    walk you through the day I chose MDMA — not as escapism, not as performance, but as medicine. I talk about why Patrick and I used it in our marriage, how secure attachment is built and not won, and what happened in the shower when the grief reorganized instead of disappeared.

    I talk about the queen image that has followed me since my twenties. I talk about sovereignty. I talk about the moment the sentence shifted from “this is a prison” to “this is a conduit.”

    I talk about Shabbat at another widow’s table. About Jewish grief rituals and how communal mourning holds people differently than American resilience culture.

    And I talk about this:

    I am not done loving.There will be another king.
    There will be another love.
    And that does not erase the first.This is not a neat lesson episode.

    This is process.
    This is oscillation.
    This is what it looks like to stay.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • This is Healing — How I'm Carrying It

    This is Healing — How I'm Carrying It
    Mar 23 2026
    It’s been eight months since my husband, Patrick, died.

    In this episode, I talk about what grief actually asks of me. Not emotionally. Socially. Physically. Relationally.

    Grief doesn’t just live in my heart.

    It lives in my body.

    It lives in my relationships.

    And it lives in how I move through the world with other people.

    I share what has helped, what hasn’t, how masking my grief shows up in my nervous system, and what I’m learning about telling the truth without managing other people’s comfort.

    This episode is about learning that grief isn’t something I get over.
    It’s something I learn how to carry.

    A poem by Mary Oliver became the interruption I didn’t know I needed and helped me see this week’s lesson more clearly.
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    46 mins
  • This is Healing — Glimmers

    This is Healing — Glimmers
    Mar 23 2026
    I’m back for the first time since January 9th. This episode comes from my new home in Colorado and tells the full story of what these past weeks have actually been like. I talk about settling into a new house, building safety, finding unexpected joy, and what grief looks like when it no longer consumes every second but never fully leaves.

    I share what it was like to be pulled back into early grief by a song from The National, how endurance is not the same thing as purpose, and what it means to keep staying when the reason for living hasn’t fully revealed itself yet. This episode moves through glimmers, anger, sovereignty, capacity, disappointment, and the reality of starting over without the person I made decisions with.
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    48 mins
  • This is Healing — Operation Hummingbird

    This is Healing — Operation Hummingbird
    Mar 23 2026
    This episode was recorded from my new family room in Colorado, sitting in front of an enormous stone fireplace, looking out at snow I can’t even quantify. Eight inches. Ten. Maybe three feet. Who’s to say. What matters is that it’s here. And that I am here.

    This is a fireside reflection on why I left Cincinnati when I did, and why it was never just about the cold. It was the gray. Grief already compromises the nervous system. Seasonal depression was already part of my pattern even when Patrick was alive. I was not going to stack suffering on top of suffering this year.

    I talk about the stress of moving inside grief, what it meant to pack one box at a time, and the quiet moment when I realized my memory was starting to come back. Not all at once. Just enough to notice. Enough to feel like progress.

    From there, the episode moves into a complete redefinition of strength. Not endurance. Not white knuckling. Not grit. Strength as slowing down. Listening before the body screams. Paying attention to insomnia, hunger, money, and the ways the nervous system tells the truth long before the mind catches up.

    I share the moment I had to write a thirty-one-thousand-dollar check to the biohazard company, and how money hits the body as safety when everything else has already fallen apart. Grief is not just emotional. It is cellular. It disorients time, memory, purpose, and identity.

    The story of Operation Hummingbird unfolds through the drive west with Matt and Rachel, a ridiculous game of Would You Rather, and the moment lunch turned into tears when my body finally had enough fuel to let the sadness arrive. “Well, I’ve eaten. So now I’m sad.”

    This episode weaves through coping, sobriety, nervous system capacity, and why grief cannot be met with toughness. I talk about softness, pliability, and why you can’t harden around loss without calcifying around what’s missing.

    There is space here for psilocybin, not as escape, but as widening the riverbanks so feeling can move again. For trust without clarity. For the hummingbird as symbol, flying without a map and believing the nectar will appear.

    I talk about hope as location, not optimism. Where it lives for me right now. Where it doesn’t. About not wanting to be with anyone and not wanting to be alone. About changing in order to survive, and the fear of not knowing who I am becoming.

    The episode closes with beauty that isn’t pretty, and the question grief keeps asking underneath everything. Can you love without an object. Can you stay open when there is no repair.

    This episode does not offer resolution.
    It offers honesty.
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    1 hr and 2 mins