Caring for patients with kindness and connection
Bear Psychology Podcast
This guide for mental health professionals offers an insightful, conversational approach to mastering empathic communication with clients. Dr. Douglas Flemons invites readers to join him in a dialogue that incorporates voices from clinical research and practice, philosophy (both Eastern and Western), neuroscience, and the arts. In his book, “Empathic Engagement in Clinical Practice,” Douglas explains the nuts and bolts of empathy and offers guidelines for how therapists can make sense of clients’ thoughts, feelings, and choices from inside their worldview. He also shows how the...
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The Strength to Serve: Mental Health for First Responders & Care Providers
Bear Psychology Podcast
First responders and healthcare professionals are trained to manage crisis — but repeated exposure to trauma, loss, and high-stakes decision-making can take a cumulative toll. Over time, this can lead to emotional exhaustion, sleep disruption, irritability, and disconnection — not because of weakness, but because the nervous system has been under sustained demand without adequate recovery. In this podcast, psychologist and author Tania Bielak, Ph.D. shares insights from her book The Strength to Serve, offering practical, evidence-based strategies to support mental health in...
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Addiction and the Journey to Enlightenment
Bear Psychology Podcast
Addiction isn’t just about pain—it can also be a call to something greater. The darkest paths can sometimes lead to the brightest truths by walking the path from suffering to self-discovery. In his book, “The Shadow of a Figure of Light: The Archetype of the Alcoholic and the Journey to Enlightenment” (2024) Cody Peterson explores the essence of Psycho-Spiritual transformation. Peterson looks at addiction as a pathway to wholeness. His book serves as both a guide and a mirror for those seeking to understand the hidden patterns behind self-destruction and the redemptive power...
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Using Polyvagal Theory for Healing
Bear Psychology Podcast
Listen to us as we discuss how you can rewire your nervous system for lasting calm, connection, and resilience with cutting-edge, polyvagal theory-based activities. Whether you have suffered a single traumatic experience or faced repeated difficult life events, you can be left feeling hypervigilant, irritable, and disconnected. Daily tasks like attending a work meeting or social gathering can feel overwhelming or even frightening. Most therapies for treating trauma require you to “revisit” your traumatic experience in potentially triggering ways. Best-selling author Dr. Arielle Schwartz...
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The Relationships Workbook for BPD
Bear Psychology Podcast
The Relationships Workbook for BPD - Bear Psychology Radio hosted by Dr. Anna Baranowsky with guest Dr. Daniel J. Fox. When intense emotions, fear of abandonment, or distorted expectations consume you, relationships can slowly erode, replaced by feelings of resentment and hostility. Unstable and high-conflict relationships are a hallmark of borderline personality disorder (BPD). In his book, “The Relationships Workbook for BPD”, Daniel J. Fox guides you step-by-step to help explore beliefs, behaviours and patterns that sabotage connection. Instead you learn how to repair relationships...
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Inner Growth for emotional healing
Bear Psychology Podcast
Many people associate the term "enlightenment" with images of a solitary figure sitting atop a distant mountain peak or a monk focused intently on meditation, but what does this concept look like when navigating our lives in today’s complex society? Enlightment, at its core, is about gaining awareness and awakening ourselves to the interconnected nature of existence. Dr. Steve Taylor, a renowned spiritual psychologist, has devoted his life to investigating spiritual awakening. His previous bestselling books provided case histories of dozens of people who experienced profound shifts in...
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The Power of Psychoanalysis
Bear Psychology Podcast
From alleviating recurring nightmares to finding oneself by discovering your family’s secret past, psychoanalysis is a turbulent but rewarding form of psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis establishing it in the 1890’s. The approach includes a focus on the unconscious mind, dream interpretation and talk therapy for addressing mental disturbances. Psychoanalysis continues to be a valuable path for gaining inner freedom from a host of mental struggles. In her book, “Untangling: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis” Joan Peters takes us through her journey of...
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Divorce and New Beginnings
Bear Psychology Podcast
Using Self-Compassion practices after divorce can help both parents and children. Divorce and/or separation is a stressful but quite common experience for both parents and children. Children often carry guilt, shame, and anger along with many other big feelings that parents often feel ill-equipped to address. In her book, “Two Times as Much Love” Eileen Beltzner tells the story of Alexander, a third-grader struggling with the emotional aftermath of his parents’ divorce, and his journey toward self-understanding and personal growth. Beltzner uses engaging storytelling and...
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Schizoid Personality Disorder and a life of challenge
Bear Psychology Podcast
Blair Sorrel shares her journey of living with Schizoid Personality Disorder and learning to accept and love herself. She undercovers further elements of her life growing up in a family of origin where she experienced ridicule leading to low self-worth, social anxiety and a debilitating fear of authority figures. She explores a home life with “poor parenting” which undermined her academic and career disappointments. She reflects on the importance of nurturing caregivers to allow the flourishing of Intelligence and genetics toward success. In her book, “A Schizoid at Smith: How...
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Your Historical Trauma
Bear Psychology Podcast
Looking for a new approach for self-help or to support individual or group therapy for those who experienced childhood trauma? In his guidebook, “The Historical Trauma Programme - For Self-help or to Support Individual Therapy” Bill Wahl introduces a comprehensive and science-based model of working with trauma. With over ten years in the field, Counselling Psychologist Bill Wahl and 3 dozen NHS colleagues developed workbook-based models of trauma therapy which can be used for self-help, to support individual therapy, or as a comprehensive model of group therapy. The approach is reflected...
info_outlineAfter years of excellent health as an ultra-marathon runner and athlete and a good life in a stable marriage Katie Arnold’s life flipped from stable to unrecognizable. Arnold experienced a significant injury while on a rafting trip that left her with a broken leg and big life changes. She takes us through her life as an ultra-runner and a “seething but adequate” married woman before the accident. The things she relied on before her accident were ripped away from her leaving her wondering who she really is.
After her accident, she sought solace through a Zen meditation practice she experimented with earlier in life. She immersed herself in a Zen meditation practice in an effort to find healing. This is the journey she shares in her memoir “Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World”.
Katie Arnold shares her story of exploring wilderness a quest for quiet. Over the course of 2 years, from before her injury, to the uncertain recovery of both her leg and her marriage, it is a personal account of a turbulent period nestled among Zen meditations.
Listen to our conversation with Katie Arnold as we unpack her powerful personal narrative of this tumultuous time in her life and how Zen meditations helped guide her through.
Katie Arnold is an author, contributing editor at Outside magazine, journalist and athlete. She published her first critically-acclaimed memoir, Running Home, in 2019 and has worked for Outside magazine for the past 12 years creating popular columns about bringing up adventurous children. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Runner’s World, ESPN: The Magazine, Elle, and many others. Arnold is also an ultra-runner having won the 2018 women's Leadville Trail 100 Run. She holds multiple course records and victories at every distance from 5K to 100 miles.
Over the course of a decade, Katie went from being a reluctant spiritualist to a Zen meditation practitioner. In her new book, Arnold offers unique company for those seeking nature's exquisite highs, as well as for creatives, spiritualists, and sensualists who want to slow down and explore the possibilities of a well-lived life. Arnold takes readers on a journey of both destruction and healing as she details her struggles to make it to the other side of a life-shattering injury with her body, sanity, and her marriage, intact.
If you are interested in learning how to experience these brief moments of enlightenment when they come, and what they mean for our lives, this podcast is for you.
Links & Resources:
- To purchase Arnold’s book “Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World”: https://amzn.to/4qunBrG
- To learn more about Katie Arnold: https://katiearnold.net/about
- For more information about Arnold’s other books: https://katiearnold.net/books
Materials to Reference:
- Arnold’s other writing pieces: https://katiearnold.net/writing
- How to Know if Zen Meditation Is Right for You: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-zen-meditation-4586721
- What is Zen Meditation?: https://mindworks.org/blog/what-is-zen-meditation-benefits-techniques/