Write Your Path

It’s time to stop trying to think your way through everything and start listening to your body. Inga Driksne is a Latvian creative who has built a life around movement, photography, curated experiences, and the art of slowing down. After years of moving between London, Berlin, and a nomadic life, she eventually landed in Mexico City, where she found herself exploring a deeper relationship with her body, spirituality, grief, and creativity.In this conversation, we explore somatic movement, what it actually means to listen to the “language of the body,” why awareness is only the first half of changing a pattern, and how to create a life that gives you enough space to actually hear yourself. We talk about anger, grief, trauma, creativity, play, and the idea that healing doesn't necessarily happen when we're sitting in the pain, but can happen when we make our way back to joy, movement, rest, and presence.Resources & sites mentioned in this episode:Welcoming Grief, the grief community Inga createdDeath Café, an agenda-free gathering for talking openly about deathDance the Medicine, the facilitation training Inga is undertaking, which combines dance, somatic practices, embodiment, facilitation, and communityThe IFS, or Internal Family Systems, InstituteGITA Studio, a yoga, breathwork, and movement studio in CDMX where Inga leads eventsMilena May, an experienced Somatic Therapist and Functional Practitioner and Inga’s teacherThe podcast episode about my Vipassana experienceConnect with Inga on InstagramCheck out Inga's photography work here

In this episode, I’m talking with my longtime friend Amelia Chiarenza about the many lives we get to live. Amelia went from Division I rowing coach to a corporate aerospace defense career with Boeing. But after losing her mother, best friend, and father within 16 months—followed by being laid off from her job—Amelia made a hard pivot: She moved back to her childhood home, committed to finishing the book she’d been writing, and began building an entirely new creative and entrepreneurial life around her story.We talk about her work as a death doula and energy kinesiologist, including themes of grief, reinvention, and learning to recognize when a chapter is coming to an end—even when everything looks successful on the outside. Amelia takes us deep into the process of writing and publishing her memoir, Recovered, Alive, including the vulnerability of putting your story into the world and the freedom of creative exploration. If you’re carrying a story you know you’re meant to share, this conversation is an invitation to listen for what’s asking to emerge next.Resources & sites mentioned in this episode:Rebecca Auman and her podcast, Voices in the RiverFind Amelia on her website, Instagram and LinkedInCheck out her book, Recovered, Alive and her podcast Cultivate Being

What if the biggest thing standing between you and the life you want isn’t a lack of time, money, knowledge, or opportunity—but you? In this episode, I make a commitment to myself: I am no longer my biggest blocker. I talk about the limiting beliefs, fear, self-doubt, procrastination, and resistance that keeps us from doing the things we already know we need to do, and why becoming the person who can actually hold what we say we want requires us to start changing our daily habits now.I also share my work with a business coach and a soul mentor, simplifying my business around my Book Doula + Writing Coach work, and getting brutally honest about where I’ve been getting in my own way. I outline the simple daily habits I’m committing to and why I’m giving myself more grace. But the real shift comes from thinking about these habits not as things we have to do, but as acts of devotion to ourselves; what if taking a walk, journaling, singing, meditating, or doing the thing you’ve been avoiding could become a living, breathing act of self-devotion?Resources & sites mentioned in this episode:Check out my coach Claire Seller’s work hereReady to Write Your Book? Grab your *Finish the Effing Book* call hereStart building your freelance writing business inside The 6-Fig Freelance Writer self-paced digital courseCheck out Ailish’s Instagram here, and listen to my episode where I break down our first call hereThe episode where I talk extensively about my experience sitting VipassanaListen to some of my early mantras here!

Today’s episode features my longtime friend & serial entrepreneur Neil Goldsmith. Back in 2016, Neil quit his 9-to-5, moved to Thailand, and built a successful e-commerce business selling Viking-inspired products. Since then, he’s traveled the world and turned a single horn mug into a 35-product business. We talk about the wild, messy, and often unexpected path of watching a business grow, decline, and evolve over its first 10 years, and then figuring out what comes next.Neil opens up about the emotional attachment entrepreneurs can develop to their businesses, the challenge of becoming a slave to it, the missed opportunity to sell his company, and his efforts to build systems, teams, and AI-powered tools that give him his freedom back. He also shares the story behind his new SaaS company, Replenly, a failed venture into the kava industry, and why some of his biggest “failures” became some of his best adventures.Resources & sites mentioned in this episode:The episode where I talk about the concept of freedom can be found here, and where I talk about productivity can be found here.Check out Norse Tradesman’s website, Instagram, and Etsy shop Learn more about Neil’s new SaaS product, ReplenlyFind Neil on Instagram and LinkedIn

In this conversation with the impossible-to-categorize Lola Villa, we dive into everything from finding your voice to following your curiosity, and trusting that the more deeply you become yourself, the more aligned opportunities begin to find you. Lola—a creative strategist, musician, curator, and storyteller—shares her journey from working in traditional media and visual storytelling to creating music, working with nature, and eventually being invited to help shape a new version of NASA’s legendary Golden Record, a project designed to tell the story of humanity and the Earth to other intelligent life in the universe.Lola believes authenticity can actually be a trap, as we’re all inevitably shaped by the people, books, music, languages, and cultures that influence us (which is why copying can actually be a powerful part of developing your own creative voice). We explore the creative process, the importance of becoming obsessed with a subject, and what it means to see ourselves as porous beings constantly shaped by the world around us. Essentially, this conversation is an invitation to stop striving for some perfect version of authenticity and simply start creating from your own unique way of seeing the world.Resources & sites mentioned in this episode:Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.Book recommendations: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown, and The Overstory by Richard PowersThe Gap, a short video by Ira Glass. The audio is taken from a talk on storytelling he gave; watch parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 here (the excerpt is from part 3).Future Sound of Nature, Lola’s record label that blends the soul of electronic music with the rhythms of the Earth.Atmos, the nonprofit media organization focused on the cross-pollination of climate and culture where Lola worked.NASA's Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, first launched in 1977 to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. Here’s the Radio Lab episode that talks about it.Echosystem School of Sound, Lola’s online electronic music production school & communityLola’s website, Instagram & LinkedInCorrections to this episode:It was Neil deGrasse Tyson our friend Glo sat down with, not Carl Sagan LOL (I tend to confuse my famous astrophysicists). Watch their chat here and listen to Gloria’s episode on the podcast here.Apparently the Vozinha LinkedIn recruitment story is false?! Ugh so heartbreaking (it was such a good one!).