In this profound conversation, Bruce Lyon explores why the collective crisis we’re living through may not be collapse—but initiation.

We talk about psychological death and rebirth, the cost of avoiding transformation, and why humanity may be facing a threshold it can no longer postpone.

This episode explores:

• Why crisis may be initiation knocking at the door
• The difference between trauma and true initiation
• Why comfort doesn’t mature us
• How avoidance of death shows up as mental health collapse, ecological breakdown, and loss of meaning
• Why money is not neutral—it carries relational energy
• The shift from survival-based living to love-based reciprocity
• Why your body is matter’s response to your soul—a gift, not an asset
• Sacred emotions like longing, rage, and grief as evolutionary forces
• The soul’s intelligence, love, and will—and what must surrender before purpose reveals itself

We also explore a radical idea: that matter is not dead substance, but living divinity—and that the way we relate to matter shapes our inner and outer worlds.

If you’ve felt that something in you—and in our collective—is being asked to die so something truer can be born, this conversation is for you.

About Bruce Lyon:

Bruce Lyon is an author, teacher, and poet. He is the founder of Highden Temple & Shamballa School and co-creator of ISTA. His work focuses on initiation—personal and planetary—as well as the reemergence of the modern mystery schools. Bruce has guided thousands through transformative processes that awaken the soul, body, and collective consciousness.

Connect with Bruce:

• Bruce Lyon's books and videos: www.brucelyon.com
• Highden Temple: www.highdentemple.org
• Bruce’s YouTube videos: www.youtube.com/@monadicmedia3733
• 
  

Content Note: This episode explores death, collective crisis, grief, rage, and the psychological process of ego dissolution. While deeply educational and transformative, some listeners may find these topics challenging. Please practice self-care as you listen.

Connect with the Garden of Becoming:

Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast

Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with someone who needs to hear this message. Follow for new episodes weekly!

Chemistry gets you in. But it doesn't teach you how to stay.

Most people believe if they find the one, happily ever after is automatic. Then reality hits: you're repeating family patterns, don't know how to communicate when triggered, and feel too ashamed to ask for help.

Laurie Handlers, founder of the Extraordinary Lovers program, breaks down what actually makes love last—beyond the initial spark.

In this episode:

• The three challenges keeping couples stuck (naive expectations, zero skills, shame)
• How to stop outsourcing your pleasure and learn what you actually want
• Why your "picker" chooses familiar trauma instead of aligned values—and how to refine it
• Communication rituals for truth-telling and confrontation
• The gender dynamics no one talks about honestly (and the cosmic joke of biological differences)
• What it takes to keep relationships juicy for a lifetime

This is the relationship education you didn't get—covering self-love practices, love of partner, and partnership that manifests something beyond yourselves.

WANT TO TRY IT?

Start here:

1. Ask yourself: What do I want my partner to do for me that I'm unwilling to do for myself? (Witness you? Hear you? Celebrate you?) Now do that for yourself first.
2. Notice your automatic reactions this week. When you react strongly, pause and ask: "Am I responding to them, or to my mother/father/sibling?"
3. Ask the hard questions: What do I want in my life? What am I willing to do to have it? How honest am I willing to be?

ABOUT LAURIE HANDLERS:

Laurie Handlers is the author of the international bestseller Sex & Happiness: The Tantric Laws of Intimacy and creator of the Extraordinary Lovers Program. She has been teaching transformational workshops on sexuality, intimacy, and relationships since 1978, impacting tens of thousands of lives.

To Laurie, sexuality is the portal to healing and connects us to our creative life force. As a speaker and facilitator, she has taught on topics ranging from releasing past emotional trauma to Tantra (expansion through awareness). Together with her partner, she offers relationship coaching and workshops on how to be in extraordinary love.

Connect with Laurie:

Website: www.lauriehandlers.com

Instagram: @laurie.handlers

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast
• Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with a couple who needs to hear this or someone navigating relationship challenges.

New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe and follow for conversations that go beneath the surface.

In this nuanced and grounding conversation, Buddhist teacher and depth hypnosis practitioner Juliana Sloane explores why not every wound responds to stillness—and why not every wound needs more intensity. Some experiences require co-regulation, discernment, and tools that work beyond the conscious mind.

Juliana shares how depth hypnosis and shamanic journey work help people access inner guidance, repair attachment wounds, and bring protection and resources to moments in the past that didn’t have them. Together, we explore how to tell when meditation is supportive versus when it’s no longer enough, and how to recognize when catharsis is genuinely healing—or simply recreating overwhelm.

What You'll Learn:

When Stillness Isn't Enough:

• The signs that meditation alone won't heal what you're carrying
• Why relational wounds need co-regulation, not solo sitting
• How to recognize dysregulation vs. witnessing

Hypnosis vs. Meditation—What's the Difference:

• Why they feel identical but work differently (the field vs. the scalpel)
• Dispelling myths: therapeutic hypnosis isn't stage hypnosis
• The neuroplastic shifts that happen in lighter altered states

The Intensity Question:

• How to tell if catharsis is healing or recreating trauma patterns
• Why cultural intensity addiction keeps you stuck
• When gentle approaches work vs. when depth is needed

Working With Your Unconscious Mind:

• Decoding the symbolic language of trance (similar to dreams)
• Why guides and inner resources matter for attachment healing
• The color-shifting exercise for working with stuck emotions in real time

Plant Medicine & Grief Work:

• Preparation: building relationship with plant spirits through dialogue
• Integration tools: journaling, collage, movement, play
• How these modalities support death, loss, and existential crisis

About Juliana Sloane:

Juliana Sloane is a hypnotherapist, transformational coach, and Buddhist teacher whose work weaves together wisdom traditions and cutting-edge psychology. Trained in Depth Hypnosis, Applied Shamanic Counseling, Positive Psychology Coaching, and Coaching for the Unconscious Mind, she helps clients move beyond the limits of talk therapy into the deeper terrain of the unconscious mind.

A longtime Buddhist practitioner, she brings extensive silent retreat experience and training in Buddhist chaplaincy into her teaching and client work. She teaches meditation retreats and classes throughout the Southwest and works online with clients worldwide. Her writing on meditation, healing, and altered states has been featured in Tricycle Magazine and Spirituality & Health.

Juliana is known for creating spaces where clients can access an embodied sense of safety and wisdom as they shift long-held patterns with compassion and clarity. She has supported hundreds of people navigating spiritual emergence, trauma, anxiety, chronic illness, relationship challenges, and major life transitions. Based in Santa Fe, NM, she works with clients across the globe.

Connect with Juliana: www.julianasloane.com

Connect with the Garden of Becoming:

Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast

Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with someone who needs to hear this message.

Follow for new episodes weekly!

What if the pleasure you're seeking isn't about better techniques—but about teaching your body it's finally safe to surrender?

In this deeply personal conversation, Sex and Relationship Coach Usha Rose reveals why your nervous system—not your arousal level—determines your capacity for pleasure. You'll discover why you might plateau during sex, why big emotions and big orgasms are connected, and how to reclaim the parts of your sexuality that got shut down in childhood.

This episode includes a live coaching moment where Usha works with me through my own anxious attachment patterns—showing exactly how unconscious blocks keep us from having what we say we want.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:

Why Your Nervous System Blocks Pleasure:

• Why safety, not arousal, is the foundation of orgasm
• How your body scans for threat even during intimacy
• The connection between emotional range and orgasmic capacity
• Simple practices: deep breathing, orienting, humming, vagal nerve stimulation

Self-Pleasure & Healing Practices:

• The erotic innocence practice: exploring your body with childlike curiosity
• How to use self-pleasure to access grief, memories, and stuck emotions
• The difference between rushed orgasm-focused masturbation and intentional practice

Sex Magic & Rewiring:

• How to use heightened pleasure states to rewire unconscious blocks
• Why you unconsciously sabotage what you consciously want
• Teaching your nervous system it's safe to have what you desire

Intimacy & Attachment:

• The Wheel of Consent and proximity/distance practices for couples
• Why your inner child gets activated in relationships
• Moving from anxious/avoidant attachment toward secure attachment
• How to navigate mismatched needs without losing yourself

ABOUT USHA ROSE:

Usha Rose is a VITA™ certified Sex and Relationship Coach and facilitator for the International School of Temple Arts and Liberation Workshops. With over 20 years of professional experience in trauma-informed holistic healing work, she specializes in helping individuals and couples create the nervous system safety needed for deep intimacy and embodied pleasure.

By integrating ancient Tantric practices with modern neuroscience, she guides clients from disconnect and numbness into embodied confidence, satisfying sex, and nourishing relationships. Her work addresses the root cause: teaching your nervous system that it's finally safe to surrender, feel, and receive.

A dancer, nature-lover, and contributing author to Handbook for Human Potential, Usha creates spaces where science meets sacred sexuality—and where your body finally feels safe enough to say yes to pleasure.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• The Wheel of Consent by Betty Martin
• Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott
• Dr. Stacey Ellis - Liberation Workshops (inner child healing)
• Free guided self-breast massage practice (available on Usha's website)

SPECIAL OFFER FOR LISTENERS: Usha's Self-Pleasure Rituals Mini-Course (9 guided practices including sex magic, sensuality, and moon time rituals)

• Normally $50, free for podcast listeners with code: PODCAST
• Access at: www.usharose.com/self-pleasure-rituals

CONNECT WITH USHA:

Website: www.usharose.com
Instagram: @usharose

This episode contains mature discussions about sexuality, pleasure, intimacy, attachment, and emotional processing. While educational in nature, listener discretion is advised.

Connect with the Garden of Becoming:

• Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast
• Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with someone who needs to hear this message.

Follow for new episodes weekly!

Have you ever caught yourself reaching for your phone at 2 AM, needing to know if they still care? Or rehearsing the same conversation over and over in your head, convinced if you just say the right thing, they'll finally understand?

In this conversation, Elizabeth Willis breaks down what anxious attachment actually is—your nervous system in fight-or-flight, shooting your energy out to grab hold of what you think will make you safe. She introduces us to the Self-Pleasure Modality, a practice for learning how to feel rather than think our way through our patterns.

Elizabeth explains how building our capacity to hold sensations, especially uncomfortable ones, expands our capacity for joy and aliveness. We explore the shame that comes with anxious attachment and why giving yourself permission to need what you need might be the only way through. And we look at trusting that attraction has intelligence—that even when it pulls you toward the "wrong" people, it might be leading you exactly where you need to heal.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:

• Anxious attachment is fight-or-flight energy shooting outward to grab what your wound perceives as security
• The "I have to" energy is your nervous system's signal—I have to text them, I have to know right now
• Why anxious attachment lives in your mind, not your body (because the sensations are too intense to feel)
• The Self-Pleasure Modality teaches you to strengthen your capacity to stay in your body and feel sensations
• How to practice bringing awareness back to your body—even if you can only hold it for 2-3 seconds
• Pain and pleasure are fully linked—your capacity to feel discomfort expands your capacity for joy
• Why shame is so damaging around anxious patterns and how permission changes everything
• Attraction has intelligence—the pull toward what scares you might hold exactly what needs healing
• When you access the gold nuggets in your wound, that's where healing happens

WANT TO TRY IT?

Practice the 2-3 second hold: Next time you feel the "I have to text them" urgency, pause. Bring your awareness back to your body. Feel the sensations—however uncomfortable—for just 2-3 seconds before your mind takes over. Then do it again. And again. This is how you build capacity.

ABOUT ELIZABETH WILLIS:

Elizabeth Willis, PhD, is the founder and Director of the Institute of New Paradigm Intimacy, the only sexuality school that unites deep, somatic transformation with an award-winning, highly comprehensive curriculum in human sexual development.
Her mission through INPI is to integrate Eros back into society, into the places where it has been exiled: education, healthcare, leadership, therapy, coaching, law, entrepreneurship, and the arts. The certification is open to all professions, and INPI has trained teachers, clinicians, mental-health professionals, bodyworkers, midwives, lawyers, executives, artists, and community leaders around the world.
Elizabeth is also the author of the forthcoming book The Initiated Teacher, a speaker, adjunct professor, and mother, whose work invites us to reclaim our bodies, restore our power, and bring soulful, sex-positive leadership into every profession and every corner of society.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Institute New Paradigm Intimacy: newparadigmintimacy.com
• YouTube: Institute New Paradigm Intimacy (for deeper explanation of Self-Pleasure Modality)
• Main offering: 9-Month Somatic Sex Coaching Certification Program (next cohort begins January 12, 2026)

Courses available:

• Love Addict guide
• Hell and Heartbreak: journeying heartbreak and the medicine of heartbreak
• The Dweller on the Threshold

Connect with Elizabeth:

Website: newparadigmintimacy.com

Instagram: @theunpolishedjourney

Connect with the Garden of Becoming:

• Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast
• Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with someone navigating anxious attachment or learning to come home to their body.

What if stress isn't the problem—but how you've been taught to respond to it is?

In this conversation, Mike Zoun breaks down why chasing calm keeps you stuck. Through heart rate variability (HRV) measurement and somatic practices, Mike reveals what your body has been trying to tell you all along: that symptoms aren't problems to fix, they're messages to listen to.

You'll learn about the three types of stress your nervous system experiences (and why each needs a different response), and how to build capacity to hold whatever arises—not just feel better temporarily.

This is about listening to your body as your most committed ally—speaking to you with unconditional love, showing you where you're out of alignment, where you're overextending yourself, and what needs your attention.

KEY TOPICS:

• Why what you think might be “good for you” isn't the same as what's actually good for your body
• The three types of stress: mental, emotional, and physical (and how to respond to each) Heart rate variability (HRV) and what it reveals about hidden stress
• Building nervous system capacity vs. chasing calm
• Authentic expression as nervous system regulation
• Why emotions only last 90 seconds (and what keeps you stuck)
• Movement as medicine: when your body needs activation, not stillness

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Your body's stress response is information, not malfunction
• Meditation isn't always the answer—sometimes your body needs movement
• True healing means building capacity to feel more, not numbing symptoms
• Authentic expression regulates your nervous system
• Your body speaks with unconditional love—until your last breath

ABOUT MIKE ZOUN:

Mike Zoun is the founder of The Present Edge, where he helps clients understand their nervous systems through HRV measurement and embodied practices. His work focuses on building capacity to feel and process emotions rather than managing or suppressing them.

Connect with Mike at www.thepresentedge.nl

Connect with the Garden of Becoming:

• Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast
• Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with someone who needs to hear this message.

Follow for new episodes weekly!

In this deeply embodied conversation, sacred sexuality facilitator Briana Cribeyer reveals why our relationships trigger our youngest, most wounded parts—and how to practice showing up as adults in love. Whether you're monogamous, non-monogamous, or single, this episode offers revolutionary insights about nervous system regulation, desire, and the daily practice of truly meeting another person.

What You'll Learn:

Understanding Your Nervous System in Relationship:

• The "back heart" practice for coming back to your full body
• How to move at the pace of the nervous system that needs the most regulation
• The practice of merge and unmerge—being with yourself while in connection

Working With Desires:

• Why naming what you want feels so dangerous (and how to do it anyway)
• What to do when your desires don't match your partner's
• The core childhood wound that stops us from speaking our truth

Lessons From Non-Monogamy for Everyone:

• How to remeet your partner with fresh eyes after years together
• The practice of conscious beginnings and endings within long-term relationships
• Why we're actually in relationship with multiple people even in monogamy

Jealousy, Grief & The Big Feelings:

• How to honor jealousy as information rather than something to fix
• Why we need to grieve losses we never processed as children
• The relationship between feeling rage and accessing joy

Inner Child & Teenager Work:

• The practice of giving yourself what your younger parts needed
• How attachment styles predict your adult relationship patterns
• Moving from intellectual understanding to embodied awareness

About Briana Cribeyer:

Briana Cribeyer is a facilitator, trainer, and founder of Sacred Sexuality Rising. With a rich background in social services, non-profit management, and education, Briana blends her expertise in sociology and sustainability with deep spiritual practices rooted in movement, prayer, and shamanic healing. Her journey has taken her from the Midwest to the mountains and forests of Colorado, New Hampshire, and Washington, as well as abroad to Japan and South America, where she cultivated a profound connection to earth wisdom and womb medicine.
As a lead trainer for Intuitive Tantra and a facilitator for the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA), Briana guides individuals and communities toward transformation, healing, and self-empowerment. Her work emphasizes radical love, self-responsibility, and the belief that through these practices, we can shift the collective trajectory of humanity.
Her workshops and sessions are an expression of her deep commitment to cultivating connection, community, and alchemical transformation.

Resources Mentioned:

• Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott
• Dr. Stacey Ellis - Liberation Workshops (inner child and inner adolescent work)
• Attachment theory literature
• Somatic Experiencing (body-based trauma healing)
• Rumi's teachings on lover and beloved

Connect with Briana:

• Website: https://www.brianacribeyer.com/
• Instagram: @she_boldly_goes_
• The Sacred Portal - Briana's membership program with monthly coaching and master classes

This episode contains mature discussions about relationships, sexuality, intimacy, and emotional processing. While educational in nature, listener discretion is advised.

Garden of Becoming explores the messy, beautiful work of becoming whole. Subscribe and follow for conversations that go beneath the surface.

Connect with us:

• Instagram: @gardenofbecomingpodcast
• Email: hello@gardenofbecoming.com

Review and Share: If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review to help others find this show, and share it with someone who needs to hear this message.