Inner Source

Ep25 Dominique Debroux—Wise Women, the Evolutionary Story Menopause Deserves, and the Voice Inside That Already Knew

What if the story medicine told women about menopause, that we're simply outliving our fertility, was never the real story? Dr. Sandra Dreisbach and Dominique Debroux, documentary producer and nutritional chef behind Wise Women: Humanity's Untold Origins, trace that question through millions of years of human evolution. Through years of research with evolutionary scientists and anthropologists, Dominique and her filmmaker husband found that postmenopausal women predate Homo sapiens. They organized early human society. They are part of why our brains grew into what they are today. The menopausal transition is the point at which women grow into their wisdom and leadership. The science was there all along. This episode moves through the personal histories that gave that science texture. Dominique traces her path from the fashion industry, where a system she believed in turned out to profit from women's sense of inadequacy, through cervical cancer in her early twenties that pointed her toward food as medicine, to becoming a nutritional chef who designs comfort around nourishment rather than restriction. She talks about the dread that marked her own perimenopause, the sense of falling off a cliff of relevance, and how understanding the evolutionary story of what her body was doing changed that entirely. She talks about the hot flashes that came when she bit her tongue, and what shifted when she started saying what she'd been holding back. Sandra and Dominique also go into what it means for women to stop making themselves smaller, how the body communicates what it needs through symptoms we've been taught to silence, and why a woman's value was never stored in her fertile years. What does it feel like to have the receipts for what your inner voice has been saying? What changes when the dread of a transition turns into understanding of it? If this season of life is on your mind, or someone you love is in the middle of it, this episode is worth your full attention. Find all the show notes and links here: https://innersourcepodcast.com/25

Ep24 Anubhav Bhattacharyya—The Book Already Inside You, Storytelling as Healing, and Done Over Perfect

What if the story you've been meaning to write has been inside you all this time, waiting for the right kind of presence to draw it out? That question sits at the center of this conversation between Dr. Sandra Dreisbach and Anubhav Bhattacharyya, book architect and co-founder of Chevaun, where he helps people take a book from rough outline to a published reality in seven weeks or less. His process is entirely human-driven, built on genuine collaboration and a conviction that everyone carries at least one story worth sharing. In this episode, Dr. Sandra and Anubhav reflect on the making of her book Dancing at the Edge of Darkness, a journey that began when Anubhav spotted something he called "uniqueness" in Dr. Sandra's LinkedIn presence and reached out. What followed was months of creative partnership that challenged her academic conditioning, stretched the boundaries of what a book could be, and wove together fiction, philosophy, the hero's journey, and psychedelic integration into something neither could have made alone. They explore why storytelling has been humanity's most durable form of healing, from campfires to contemporary consciousness work, what it means to hold space for someone else's voice without overwriting it, and the piece of wisdom that frees every stuck writer to begin: done is better than perfect. If you've had a book living in the back of your mind for years, this episode may be what finally gets it out of there. Find all the show notes and links here: https://innersourcepodcast.com/24 [https://innersourcepodcast.com/24]

Ep23 Barbara Ann Michaels—Humor as Healing, the First Laugh, and Reclaiming Play as a Lifelong Practice

What if the moment you finally laugh at something that once broke you is actually proof that healing has already arrived? That's the quiet power at the center of this conversation between Dr. Sandra Dreisbach and Barbara Ann Michaels — performance artist, interfaith minister, and the self-described Jester of the Peace. Barbara has spent decades using humor not as a distraction from pain but as a precise instrument for releasing it. She founded Humorville, an immersive pop-up wellness experience where participants receive a passport to something they want more of in their lives, marry it, vote themselves president of it, and receive a letter from it weeks later in the mail. It sounds playful. It is playful. And it is, as Dr. Sandra discovers in real time during this episode, genuinely transformational. What does it mean that laughter and tears are actually the same cathartic energy? Why is vulnerability a more radical artistic choice than anger? What is "the first laugh" — and how do you know when it's safe for humor to enter a story that was once too painful to touch? How does humor create connection across divides that logic and reason alone cannot cross? And what would it look like if we stopped treating play as frivolous and started recognizing it as one of the fastest paths to authentic inner change? If you've been searching for healing in serious places and wondering why it keeps feeling incomplete, this episode is worth your full attention. Find all the show notes and links here:  https://www.innersourcepodcast.com/23 [https://www.innersourcepodcast.com/23]

Ep22 Emile Hung—There Are No Perfect Conditions: How to Heal, Build, and Keep Going Anyway

What do you do when the conditions you're waiting for... never actually show up? In this episode, Dr. Sandra Dreisbach sits down with Emile Hung — a final-year medical student, premium ghost writer, and nutritionist who runs her entire online business from Havana, Cuba... through rolling blackouts, spotty Wi-Fi, and all the beautiful chaos that comes with it. Emile walks us through what burnout in medical school actually feels like from the inside — not the polished version we hear at conferences, but the real one. The kind where you stop being able to get yourself to class. Where patients start noticing before you do. Where you finally have to admit that the culture designed to teach you how to care for others... was quietly dismantling you. You'll hear how a single gym in Belize became the unexpected turning point in her recovery. And why a medical student had to walk into a fitness facility to learn what nutrition actually does to your hormones, your metabolism, and your mental state — things that never came up once in years of medical training. Dr. Dreisbach, who was navigating her own bankruptcy while they were co-creating the Shadow Work Facilitator free e-course together, reflects honestly on what it looks like to build something meaningful in the middle of imperfect circumstances. Their collaboration — forged across time zones, interrupted by blackouts, stretched across asynchronous messages and creative problem-solving — becomes its own quiet lesson in what trust and resilience actually require. By the end of this episode, you'll know how to recognize burnout before it strips your empathy entirely... how to use nutrition as a genuine mental health tool rather than an afterthought... how to find the right mentors even when they're not physically in your world... and how to stop waiting for the perfect moment and just take one small step anyway. Because if Emile can build something real from a Wi-Fi spot in Havana during a blackout... the question becomes less about conditions and more about what you're actually waiting for. Find all the show notes and links here:  https://www.innersourcepodcast.com/22 [https://www.innersourcepodcast.com/22]

Ep21 Bárbara Espina—The Crisis Nobody Plans For: Spiritual Emergency Response, Ethics, and Holding Space

What happens when a plant medicine ceremony goes sideways... and there's no one trained to help? That's the gap Bárbara Espina decided to fill. In this episode of Inner Source, Dr. Sandra Dreisbach sits down with Bárbara — a psychologist, plant medicine practitioner, and co-founder of CERT (Spiritual Emergency Response Team) — calling in from the Sacred Valley of Peru, where she's spent over a decade doing work most people don't even know exists. Bárbara shares how CERT came to life not from a polished plan, but from watching crisis after crisis unfold with no real infrastructure to catch the people falling. She walks through what spiritual emergency actually looks like in practice — how it differs from clinical crisis, why context changes absolutely everything, and what real-time response looks like when someone's documentation is missing, the language barrier is real, and the person in front of you is somewhere far from their ordinary mind. Dr. Sandra brings her own thread into the conversation — specifically around the invisible architecture of transformation, the power of conscious storytelling, and why making the unconscious visible isn't just philosophical. It's the foundation of ethical facilitation. She also shares how tools like the Thyrsus Oracle Deck grew directly from her own process of making those invisible inner threads something she could actually see, hold, and work with. Together, they pull back the curtain on something the plant medicine space rarely discusses openly: the facilitator's own experience. The harm they sometimes absorb. The things they don't say. The quiet isolation of holding space for everyone else while having nowhere safe to land themselves. By the time this episode is over, you'll know how to: → Recognize the difference between a genuine spiritual emergency and a clinical psychiatric crisis — and why getting that distinction wrong can cause serious harm → Prepare before traveling to a plant medicine hub like the Sacred Valley, including what to have in place before anything goes wrong → Identify the subtle ways infantilizing ceremony participants works directly against their transformation — and strips away the very agency that healing depends on → Hold the boundary of non-harm for yourself as a practitioner, not only for the people in your care → Find or build the kind of community support structure that's honest, sustainable, and free from the usual pressures of your regular professional circle Bárbara also opens up about her upcoming retreat, Wisdom of the Holders — a gathering built specifically for plant medicine facilitators who are ready to be seen, supported, and held... for once. If you hold space for others in any capacity — whether professionally or personally — this conversation will change how you think about what sustainable, ethical care actually requires. Find all the show notes and links here:  https://www.innersourcepodcast.com/21 [https://www.innersourcepodcast.com/21]