A TENDER SPACE

Season 1, Episode 6 – Healing & Creativity, with Chris Zydel

On this episode, we’re talking about the intersection between creativity and healing. How can we tap into our own intuition and creativity in order to become more whole, healed, joyful and alive? And how does tenderness help us address the part of us that gets blocked by perfectionism?

Our guest today is Chris Zydel, who calls herself the Wild Heart Queen. Chris is the founder of Creative Juices Arts and the author of Conversations with the Brush: Wisdom Tales from the Intuitive Painting Heart. She’s a creativity coach and an Evolutionary Astrologer, and runs women’s groups, teaches weekly intuitive painting classes, facilitates expressive arts retreats and has created an expressive arts teacher training program.

Listen on Spotify or Apple, or join our Substack community.

Season 1, Episode 5 – Healing & Deconstruction, with Ronna Detrick

In this episode, we are exploring the ins and outs of deconstructing from religion. Many folks are raised with religious ideologies that begin to become problematic for them as they grow and learn and change. Taking apart and deconstructing those belief systems can be hard, not just as a personal crisis of faith, but because of the impact on our relationships with our families of origin – not to mention the broader communities we may have been a part of our whole lives.

Our guest today is Ronna Detrick, author of the book, “Rewriting Eve: Rescuing women’s stories from the Bible and reclaiming them as our own”. Ronna, who has both a Master of Divinity Degree and B.A. in Business and Communication, left the church and its dogma twenty years ago and since then, has combined her love of writing into a diverse and winding career that has included coaching, spiritual direction, professional development training, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship.

You can learn more at: ronnadetrick.com and subscribe to her writing on Substack.

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Season 1, Episode 4 – Healing and Divorce, with Kate Anthony

On this episode, we are talking about the complexities of divorce. What happens when a relationship you chose to be in no longer feels like the right fit? How do you make the choice to end it? And what support do you need to help you get through such a major disruption and then heal after it’s happened?

Kate Anthony is the author of The D Word: Making the Ultimate Decision About Your Marriage, host of the critically acclaimed and New York Times recommended podcast The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast and the creator of the online coaching program, Should I Stay or Should I Go? which has helped hundreds of women make the most difficult decision of their lives using coaching tools, relationship education, geeky neuroscience, community support, and deep self-work.

Kate empowers women to find their strength, passion, and confidence even in the most disempowering of circumstances and helps them move forward with concrete plans set on a solid foundation, putting their children at the center (not in the middle) of all their decisions.

Kate is trained in various coaching modalities with two of the top coach training organizations in the world. Additionally, Kate is certified as a Domestic Violence Victim’s Advocate by the state of California, as a Co-Parenting Specialist by the Mosten Guthrie Academy, and as a High Conflict Divorce Coach by Tina Swithin’s High Conflict Divorce Coaching Certification Program.

In addition to her online programs, Kate works privately with clients all over the world. 

Kate lives in Los Angeles with her teenage son, whom she lovingly co-parents with her ex-husband.

You can find Kate at www.kateanthony.com and on Facebook and Instagram.

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Season 1, Episode 3 – Healing the Mother Wound, with Bethany Webster

On today’s episode, we’re talking about healing the trauma that’s been passed down through our lineages and disrupting the social conditioning that we inherited from the systems we are part of. More specifically, we’re exploring the mother wound and how it was shaped by patriarchy.

Our guest today is Bethany Webster. Bethany is considered a global expert on healing the Mother Wound. She is a writer, international speaker and transformational coach. Bethany started blogging in 2013 about the Mother Wound and quickly experienced worldwide demand for her work. Through blending research on intergenerational trauma, feminist theory, and psychology with her own personal story, Bethany’s work is the result of decades of research and her own journey of healing. Bethany speaks, consults and mentors around the world sharing her growing body of work that is raising the standard of women’s leadership and personal development. Learn more at www.bethanywebster.com

Listen on Spotify or Apple, or join our Substack community.

Season 1, Episode 2 – Healing with the Body you Have, with Dawn Serra

On this episode, we’re talking about body liberation. More specifically, we’re exploring what it means to navigate a fat-phobic world while living in a fat body AND how we can find pleasure and joy while doing so. We’ll also talk about how people who don’t live in fat bodies can educate themselves and become better allies.

Our guest today is Dawn Serra. Dawn Serra is a white, cis, queer, fat, disabled therapist specializing in relationships, pleasure, and body trust. She is the co-founder of Tend and Cultivate Counselling, Canada’s first mental health group practice providing trauma-informed, weight-neutral, radical mental health care for people in bigger bodies. The nexus of her work is tending to the places where we are most tender and cultivating the things that contribute to our aliveness – joy, pleasure, connection, satisfaction, and wonder.

Below are the authors, activists and works named in our conversation:
– Belly of the Beast: The politics of fatness as anti-blackness
– Fearing the Black Body: The racial origins of fat phobia
– Gloria Lucas of Nalgona Positivity Pride
– Your Fat Friend: a film by Jeanie Finlay
– Quote from scholar Lauren Munro of Toronto Metropolitan University (accidentally said Tara in the interview) writes, “Fat bodies do not simply move through hostile spaces, they are marked by them (bruises, scrapes, scars). Spatial injustice is the intentional exclusion of fat bodies in public spaces. These issues create access barriers to joy, happiness, belonging.”

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Season 1, Episode 1 – Healing with Friends, with Saleha Alsheri

On this episode, we’re talking about healing with friends.

Heather has just recently launched her book, Where Tenderness Lives, and during the writing of that book, she spent a lot of time in conversation with her close friend Saleha Alsheri.

Born and raised in Saudi Arabia for the first half of her life, Saleha came to Winnipeg as an international student in 2007. She finished her second B.A. in Psychology in Canada, then pursued her Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Netherlands, and returned to Canada for a Masters of Counselling Psychology. Saleha is now a licensed psychotherapist working with various communities and providing culturally adjusted therapy to visible minorities in two different languages. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her three kids and she thrives on deep and meaningful conversations with her friends.

In this conversation, Heather and Saleha will talk about the history of their friendship and how it became a place where they could both heal and grow.

Listen on Spotify or Apple, or join our Substack community.