Kerri Mangis: Why the Mud Is the Point

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Kerri Mangis is a TEDx speaker, author, and spiritual guide who has spent more than 20 years as a seeker. She came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about her book Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness, her forthcoming book The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis (August 25, 2026), and a philosophy of transformation rooted in alchemy, Jungian psychology, and hard-earned personal experience. Self-Help Got It Wrong Kerri opened by taking aim at the self-help industry’s most persistent failures — toxic positivity and the “fake it till you make it” approach to emotional life. She didn’t just critique it from a distance. She admitted she bought into it herself. The alternative she offers is not another system of positive thinking. It’s embodiment — the idea that all of it, the anger, the shame, the fear, belongs to you and deserves acknowledgment. “I am my soul, I am my ego, I am my anger, I am my shame and my fear, and all of that — if we acknowledge it and we learn to live with it — it doesn’t have power over us. It allows us to be in power.” She extended that point to emotions specifically: “Our emotions aren’t out to sabotage us. They’re there to get our attention.” Even anger, which she named as her most difficult emotion, she treats as a messenger. She gives anger a pronoun — he — and said he “has a lot to teach me and is usually trying to get my attention to something that I’m not paying attention to.” The Three Stages Kerri’s next book, The Essential Ingredient, organizes her philosophy into a three-stage model of transformation: breakdown, reflection, and rebirth. Breakdown is the stage where you question everything — the social contracts, the childhood conditioning, the beliefs handed down from parents and grandparents. Reflection is where you sit with those beliefs and ask whether they’ve helped you or hurt you, whether they once protected your heart but are now sheltering it. And rebirth is returning to the world transformed, carrying fewer of the old ways of thinking. “Your greatest rebirths always came at the end of something that was hard.” The model didn’t come from a textbook. It came from alchemy. Alchemy in the Kitchen During the pandemic, Kerri went to her local New Age bookstore and cleaned out their alchemy section. Then she went hands-on, practicing a related discipline called spagyrics — working with herbs to make tinctures using the same philosophical principles as alchemy. She was up at 4 a.m. mixing herbs, and she found in that physical process the same breakdown-pause-transformation arc she’d been observing in her own life. From there she discovered that Carl Jung had drawn heavily from alchemical principles in his own work. Jung posed a question Kerri found essential: what happens if we allow people to break down, instead of constantly picking them back up right away? She also shared three mantras she encountered across her yoga and spiritual studies — what’s here is elsewhere, what is not here is nowhere; as above, so below; and as within, so without — and traced them all back to alchemy’s central principle: all is one. “It’s one river,” she said, “lots of tributaries, lots of different directions, but it’s all the same truth.” The Soul Has a Name In 2014, Kerri attended a women’s retreat. One of the closing exercises was to write vows to your soul and read them aloud to the group. The retreat leader also suggested giving the soul a name. Kerri chose Serene Voyager. “I liked the word serene because I like the idea of being serene on the inside,” she said. “And yet Voyager — my soul wants to travel, my soul wants to explore, doesn’t want to sit still.” She shortened it to Seri, which rhymed with Kerri, and kept the piece of paper with her vows on it. She still uses that relationship as a counterweight to ego. When the metrics of publishing and podcasting start to wear on her — the subscriber counts, the views — it’s Seri that pushes back: “Yeah, but did you have fun?” Heroes vs. Elders Kerri’s TEDx talk, delivered last August, made the case that menopause is a rite of passage, not a medical inconvenience to be minimized. In the West, women are conditioned to hide it. Her argument was that this transition from the adult years — defined by work, family, and obligation — into a wiser stage of life should be honored, not suppressed. That argument connects to a broader framework she writes about: the difference between heroes and elders. A hero is someone we look to out there, to save us. An elder is a community guide that everyone seeks counsel from, but who still holds people responsible for themselves. “In the hero model, we outsource our power. In the elder model, we embody it.” Grief Became Steadfastness Kerri lost both of her parents in the fall and early winter of last year, one after another. She described them as soulmates — one not willing to be here without the other. As the oldest of three, she became the one others leaned on. “Because of the practice and the work that I’ve done over the years, I was able to come into a position of… steadfastness, and presence, and clarity. I was able to be the bridge between my brothers when they were over-emotional. I was able to help ground them. I was able to be this presence for other people — because I’ve done my work.” She was quick to add that she didn’t do it alone. She still works with a spiritual guide herself. “Nobody should do this alone.” She spoke at both funerals, and said she was proud of the words she found. No Mud, No Lotus Kerri addressed the manifestation industry directly, and without much softness. Dream boards, vision boards, affirmations — she tried all of it and walked away. Not because positivity is wrong, but because it’s incomplete. “Nothing was as powerful as sitting with my own stuff. Not pretending it’s not there. Not pretending to be somebody different. Just living in the truth, in the mud.” She borrowed the Buddhist expression — no mud, no lotus — and applied it to the manifestation world: “That manifestation work, it’s beautiful and it sounds good. But it’s all lotus, it’s no mud. You gotta have the mud.” Where to Find Kerri Website: kerrymangis.com — includes a transformation-stage quiz and a self-love quiz Book (out now): Embodying Soul: A Return to Wholeness — available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited Book (August 25, 2026): The Essential Ingredient: Remaking Ourselves in Times of Crisis Podcast: Awaken Your Power on Apple Podcasts (currently on hiatus through book launch) Also on: Substack, Medium, and Instagram Kerri Mangis was a guest on Lens of Hopefulness with John Passadino, available on YouTube, Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Audible Article and Podcast copyright Passadino Publishing LLC [https://johnpwrites.com/] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lensofhopefulness.substack.com [https://lensofhopefulness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

38 Books, One Teenager, and a Trilogy About Clones

I get a lot of guests on Lens of Hopefulness who found self-improvement later in life — as adults, sometimes as retired adults, like me. So, when I got to sit down with Shanti Hershenson, I was genuinely excited, because here’s someone who found her purpose before she could even legally drive. Shanti has written 38 books. She’s published 22 of them, with number 23 on the way by the time this episode is out. And she’s about to head off to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. I wanted to know how someone gets that much work done, that young, in a world absolutely stuffed with distractions — and what she’s learned along the way that the rest of us could use. Finding Purpose Early Shanti told me she’s never really doubted that writing would be her life. This is what she wanted to do as a kid, and it’s what she wants to do now. “This is what I wanted to do when I was a kid, it’s what I want to do now, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.” She’s in good company. She pointed out that S.E. Hinton was sixteen when she published The Outsiders, and Christopher Paolini was fifteen when he wrote the first Eragon book. So, a young author with a clear sense of direction isn’t unheard of — but doing it in this generation, with this much noise competing for her attention, is its own kind of feat. The Discipline Behind the Words I asked how she manages to write so much with a phone full of apps sitting right next to her — because I have that same phone, and I know how it goes. Her answer was refreshingly honest. She’s not immune to it. “One thing I do is that I have a goal, and I have to write a thousand words every single day. I have been doing this since I was in seventh grade. Not writing a thousand words is not an option.” She admitted she still catches herself two hundred words in, ready to scroll. Her fix is noticing the pattern and talking herself back: finish the writing first, then the scrolling will feel good, because it’s not standing between her and something she still owes herself. This connected for me to something I read years ago in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled — his idea that so much of what troubles us as a society comes down to wanting immediate gratification instead of delayed gratification. Shanti described her writing sessions almost like a meditation — noise-cancelling headphones on, everything else locked out, fully present with the work and the characters she’s built. That’s not so different from what I feel when I’m on-stage improvising or lost in a scene. You disappear into it. Family, Environment, and Finding Your Footing I asked where the discipline came from — school, family, something else. Shanti said part of it was simply natural, an obsession with writing and creating for as long as she can remember. But she also said her family has been supportive without that support directly explaining her output. What shapes her work more, she said, is the environment she lives in — real events, things she’s seen and felt, opinions she holds, all filtering into even her more fantastical stories. We talked a bit about how tough the teenage years can be for anyone trying to find their own independence. I shared that I didn’t really find mine until later, and that I drifted for a while into a crowd that experimented with drinking — something that, thankfully, never took hold in me. What did help, looking back at raising my own two sons, was giving kids as many outlets as they can handle. One of my boys found music and never stopped; the other found a camera in his hand young and became a professional videographer. Shanti’s experience, and the response she gets from other young people telling her they’re inspired to write too, felt like a good example of what happens when a kid finds that outlet early and it actually sticks. On Being a “Pantser” and the New Book Her twenty-third book, Wolfgang One, is the start of a planned trilogy. It imagines a society where everyone is cloned from an important historical figure and raised from birth to live up to that person’s legacy. The main character is a clone of Wolfgang Mozart, on the edge of adulthood, when a DNA test turns up something that sends him spiraling. As a fellow author, I wanted to know her process — plotter or pantser (A person who writes by the seat of their pants!), in the language we use in the Long Island Authors Group I sit on the board of. She’s mostly a pantser. “I do actually have a whiteboard in my room, but I haven’t touched it in like two years. I’m definitely — I’ve always been a little bit more of a pantser.” She’s not a pure one, though. She keeps bullet points and loose paragraphs of what needs to happen next, and by the halfway point of most books, she knows exactly where the rest of the story is going. It’s a process a lot of working authors will recognize — start loose, tighten as you go. AI, Authenticity, and What a Computer Can’t Do This was the part of the conversation I most wanted to have with her, since she’s coming up in a generation where AI in college and in writing is simply there, all the time, whether anyone likes it or not. I told her about a short story class I taught, where I asked an AI tool to outline a three-act structure just to demonstrate what it could do — and it offered, unprompted, to just write the whole thing for me. I asked why she doesn’t take that shortcut, given how much time it would save her. “So much of what I enjoy about writing is the process itself. I love sitting down every day, I love having my little cold drinks, my coffees, and just writing... So much of writing is relaying my own personal experience, and how deep down I have felt about certain things, and I just don’t feel like a computer can properly convey that.” That tracked with something I feel as an actor. When I’ve had to play a scene rooted in real loss, I’ve pulled from what I felt like when my own father passed away, and I had to play a scene about grief, and so I put that experience into the character. No tool replicates lived experience — it can only approximate it. Shanti and I agreed AI is a legitimate research tool and it isn’t going anywhere, but we agreed the writing it produces tends to come out oddly careful, almost afraid to commit to anything sharp or specific. There’s a place for it. It’s just not the place where the actual voice lives. Lessons Worth Sitting With ● Purpose found early doesn’t need to be rare — it needs room to grow. Give kids outlets, plural, and let them find the one that sticks. ● Discipline beats inspiration. A thousand words a day, kept since seventh grade, will outproduce waiting to feel like writing. ● Getting lost in the work — writing, acting, whatever your version is — is its own reward, and it’s the thing that no shortcut can replace. ● Structure and freedom aren’t opposites. You can start as a “pantser” and still end up with a story that holds together. ● AI can save you time on research and logistics. It can’t hand you your own voice, and it shouldn’t be asked to. Where to Find Shanti Shanti’s books span several series — including the Bio Gnome series, the Eris and Rest duology, Little Green Man, and the new Wolfgang One trilogy — and are available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and some hardcover editions, with several titles on Kindle Unlimited. You can find all of them, along with her newsletter and event schedule, at shantihershenson.com, and she’s active on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms if you want to follow her work as she heads off to college this fall. Listen to the Full Conversation There’s a lot more in the full episode — including how Shanti approaches cover design, her thoughts on adapting novels into film versus screenplays, and where she sees herself five years from now. Lens of Hopefulness podcast...

1 de jul de 202653 min

The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

I was not sure what to expect from my recent Lens of Hopefulness interview with Lolo—psychotherapist, paranormal explorer, and host of the REALMS Podcast but was happy to cover ground that I had honestly been wanting to explore for a long time: the space where clinical psychology and the unexplained overlap, where grief and ghost voices coexist, and where a practicing therapist can sit with questions that have no clean answers. REALMS is Lolo’s YouTube channel. It stands for Real Experiences, Answers, Lore, Myth and Sanctuary. I had watched his YouTube channel and liked what I saw. As I told him on air, it was the kind of show where you cannot bring yourself to turn it off. The approach is open, unhurried, and—something I rarely see in the paranormal space—genuinely humble. From Existential Anxiety to Podcast Host Lolo did not arrive at the paranormal through fascination alone. He describes a history of existential anxiety that pushed him to ask the hard questions about life, death, and meaning. Several close brushes with death sharpened the urgency. His background in therapy—he is a licensed psychotherapist who works with trauma, anxiety, and grief, currently through Teladoc—gave him a clinical lens. But clinical tools, he found, have limits. “Things have to be proven, it has to be very black and white,” he said, describing the constraints of evidence-based practice, “but that’s also not real life. There’s so much that we can’t explain and we don’t fully understand.” That recognition—that the clinical model has a ceiling—drove him to create a community rather than a stage. REALMS is less a ghost-hunting show and more a conversation space where people with unusual experiences can share without being laughed out of the room. No slick host, no click-bait production values. Just people telling their stories, his co-host included, in a space where grief, wonder, and uncertainty are all allowed in at once. The Big Conclusion: The Answer Is Too Big for Us I asked Lolo what his most profound discovery has been after years of investigating, interviewing, and questioning. His answer was not what I expected. After all of it, he has arrived at a kind of acceptance of not-knowing. “Whatever the answer is, it’s too big for us to understand,” he said. “It’s just so out of our perception that we just can’t even try to understand.” He followed that with something even more practical: truth, he observed, is a little bit relative. And if a belief system makes a person feel better and helps them function, you have to ask yourself how much it matters whether it is objectively provable—as long as the person is not losing themselves in it. Balance, he said, is everything. He understands why people go all-in on certain systems; the exhaustion of seeking direction makes it tempting. But he holds back from that himself, always taking baby steps and staying skeptical enough to keep perspective. Personal Experiences That Are Hard to Dismiss This is where the conversation got personal—on both sides of the microphone. Lolo described being present at a Catholic exorcism ritual—a full church closed down for a three-to-four-hour event, presided over by a priest, for a single individual. He witnessed the person behaving in ways he still cannot fully account for, while also noting, with his therapist’s eye, how much the cultural and media landscape (particularly the enormous impact of The Exorcist) could influence a person’s presentation. He does not dismiss what he saw. He does not fully explain it either. That tension is exactly where he lives. I brought my own experience to the table as well. I shared that when my father passed away, during a period of deep grief, I had what felt like a channeling experience. I asked him to give me a piece of information I could not have known—my grandmother’s maiden name—and I received the name Ingrassia. When I checked with my mother, she confirmed it. I also shared that during a particularly intense period of spiritual engagement, I found I could touch someone in pain and the pain would stop—and that the experience frightened me enough that I stepped back from it entirely. And there was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Long Island that a family had opened for viewings by appointment, once a year, after seeing the image of their late son in the painting. My family went. I saw my father’s face in that picture. These are not things I trot out in casual conversation. But with Lolo, there was no performance required, in either direction. He listened as a therapist does—with interest and without the need to nail it down. Science, Scripture, and the Surprising Overlap One moment in this conversation that surprised me was when Lolo pointed out that the Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic astrophysicist—and that its core concept, a sudden explosive emergence of light from nothing, aligns rather neatly with the opening of Genesis: “In the beginning, God said, let there be light.” I thought that was worth sitting with for a moment. He also referenced something that resonated with me personally: the statistical near impossibility of any individual human being here at all. The probability of the specific sperm and egg that created any given person has been estimated at one in 400 trillion. Add to that the extraordinary series of cosmic accidents that make Earth habitable—Jupiter shielding us from asteroids, a sun at just the right distance—and the odds of existing become almost theoretical. “We are a like theoretic impossibility of existing,” Lolo said, “and here we are. So it’s like if I am and I’m only here for a blink of an eye, it has to mean something, has to be worth something.” Prayer, Meditation, and the Anxiety Connection Lolo made an observation that felt important in its simplicity: praying is a form of grounding. Psychologically, he said, it does the same thing that mindfulness and meditation do. The act of saying a prayer is functionally a mantra. Why do we work so hard to keep these two things separate? I told him about my own attempt at morning prayer that very day. My mind kept jumping ahead—I have ADD, which I was fairly upfront about—and I finally said, God, help me pray. And the response that came to me was simply: breathe slowly. I did. My mind quieted. Whatever you want to call that, it worked. Lolo was not surprised. He said that in his clinical work, he has noticed that purpose and direction and motivation are deeply intertwined, and that a lot of what religion offers—community, ritual, a sense of being held—overlaps substantially with what good therapy offers. His take on the confessional was particularly candid: a priest hearing confession, he noted, is essentially an untrained therapist. You go in, you unburden yourself, you walk out lighter. Trauma, Anxiety, and the Bear at the Door Toward the end of our conversation, Lolo got into the mechanics of anxiety in a way I found useful—and personally recognizable. He described the way the anxious brain cannot reliably distinguish between a perceived threat and a real one. His analogy: if you are doing your taxes and a bear shows up at the door, the bear wins your attention. That is the right response. The problem is that anxiety treats the taxes themselves as the bear. “Your brain is like analyzing the world and perceiving a threat,” he said. I told him that described a good portion of my own life. For much of it, everything was urgent and dramatic and felt like a crisis. As I have gotten older—I am in my sixties now—I have settled into something different. The sands in the hourglass are visible. And I find I am less interested in spending them in a state of alarm. Lolo’s approach to coping with his own anxiety, when I asked him directly, came down to two things: grounding—feet on the floor, present in...

3 de jun de 20261 h 6 min

Kerri Mangis: Why the Mud Is the Point

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