Destroy the Trauma Keeping You Stuck & Finally Heal | Devorah Brinckerhoff
Release Date: 06/14/2026
Past Lives & Soul Purpose: Why I Chose My Hardest Lifetime | Martha Wright
Awaken Your Authentic Self
What if your soul chose this lifetime for a reason? What if your hardest experiences were preparation, not punishment? An Akashic Records reading revealed a past life of bondage, survival and a sacred assignment that changed how Jessica Rooks understands her life, her healing journey and the work she is here to do. In this deeply personal flip-the-script episode of Awaken Your Authentic Self, host Jessica Rooks takes the interviewee seat as returning guest Martha Wright leads her through her own personal Akashic Records reading and what it revealed about past lives, soul contracts and soul...
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Why You Can't Think Your Way Out of It: Somatic Healing & Nervous System Regulation | Melanie Smithson
Awaken Your Authentic Self
Why can you understand your patterns and still feel stuck in them? In this episode, somatic psychotherapist Melanie Smithson explains how somatic healing and nervous system regulation help your body release what your mind already knows - and why talk therapy alone isn't enough. This week host Jessica Rooks sits down with Melanie Smithson a Licensed Somatic Psychotherapist, Dance Movement Therapist, and author of the award-winning Stress Free in 30 Seconds and Shake Yourself Free: 81 Somatic Practices to Let Go of Limitation. Trained in somatic psychology, dance movement therapy, EDMR, and...
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Stuck in Life as a Woman? Why It's Not Your Past, It's Your Untruths | Lynda Leonce
Awaken Your Authentic Self
Why do women feel stuck in life, even when they're ready for a change? In this episode of Awaken Your Authentic Self, host Jessica Rooks sits down with Lynda Leonce, authenticity coach, mentor, and author of Inside Out Creation: Your Path to Inner Alignment, to explore limiting beliefs, subconscious conditioning, people pleasing, and the untruths that keep women disconnected from their authentic selves. Lynda explores the untruths we carry about worth, safety, love and identity - and how these internalized stories can contribute to misalignment and keep us from living from the outside in. The...
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Shadow Work: Why You Can't See Your Own Blind Spots | Indra Rinzler
Awaken Your Authentic Self
Shadow work and why you can't see your own blind spots may reveal why the same emotional patterns keep repeating, even after years of inner work. In this episode of Awaken Your Authentic Self, host Jessica Rooks sits down with spiritual teacher, Vedic astrologer, Enneagram practitioner, and author Indra Rinzler to explore the hidden aspects of ourselves we struggle to see - and how recognizing them opens the door to deeper self-awareness and spiritual awakening. What if the very thing you cannot see about yourself is the key to understanding who you truly are? With more than 50 years on the...
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She Sang on the World's Biggest Stages—But Her Real Journey Was Learning to Belong | Machan Taylor
Awaken Your Authentic Self
What if a lifetime on the world's biggest stages still leaves you asking: Who am I? Childhood trauma healing, inner child healing, and belonging with singer and author Machan Taylor (Pink Floyd, Sting, Pat Benatar) on Awaken Your Authentic Self with Jessica Rooks. In this deeply personal conversation, Machan Taylor joins host Jessica Rooks to explore identity, belonging, childhood trauma healing, self-worth, relationships, spirituality, meditation, self-awareness, and becoming your authentic self. Machan Taylor is a renowned singer and author of the memoir Naked Out Loud. Her extraordinary...
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Why Don't I Feel Like Myself Anymore? The Hidden Side of Spiritual Awakening | Helen Ye Plehn
Awaken Your Authentic Self
Why don't I feel like myself anymore? If you're in the in-between space of spiritual awakening, identity transformation, and anxiety - where who you were no longer fits but who you're becoming isn't clear yet - this conversation is for you. In this episode of Awaken Your Authentic Self, Jessica Rooks sits down with Helen Ye Plehn, founder of Helen Creates Beauty, creator of The Aura Color Wheel, and Hay House award-winning author of The Aura Color Wheel: What Your Soul's Aura Reveals About Your Inner Gifts, Wounds, and Lessons. We unpack spiritual awakening symptoms, the dark night of the...
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Healing Your Inner Child: How the Boy Who Couldn't Read Became a Bestselling Author | John R. Spender
Awaken Your Authentic Self
If you experienced childhood trauma and are still carrying the wound beneath your story, healing your inner child may be less about fixing what's broken and more about remembering who you really are. In this episode Jessica Rooks, host of Awaken Your Authentic Self a show for empaths and old souls navigating awakening and trauma healing, sits down with John R. Spender, a 45-time international bestselling author, filmmaker, transformational coach, and founder of A Journey of Riches, a global storytelling movement featuring more than 400 co-authors from over 50 countries. John couldn't read...
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The Signs You're Missing From Your Loved Ones in Spirit - And What Spirit Keeps Trying to Tell You | Chris Lippincott
Awaken Your Authentic Self
What if the people you've lost - your mother, your father, the person you never got to say goodbye to - what if they never actually left? In this episode of of Awaken Your Authentic Self, host Jessica Rooks sits down with Chris Lippincott, international evidential psychic medium, trance medium, bestselling author, spiritual teacher, and host of Spirits Beside Us, to explore mediumship, afterlife communication, signs from spirit, grief healing, spiritual awakening, intuition, consciousness, and connecting with loved ones beyond physical death. Before becoming a professional medium, Chris spent...
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What If Your Wounds Aren’t Yours? Ancestral Healing, Reiki & After-Death Communication |Cindy Bain
Awaken Your Authentic Self
What if the pain you're carrying isn't yours? What if some of the patterns, emotional wounds, grief, or energetic imprints you've spent years trying to heal began before you ever had a chance to choose them. In this conversation Cindy Bain joins host Jessica Rooks on Awaken Your Authentic Self to explore ancestral healing, Reiki healing, spiritual awakening, grief, Spiritually Transformative Experiences )STEs), near death experiences, and after-death communication - and what can happen when we begin to look at healing through both a grounded and spiritual lens. Cindy's has spent more...
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Why You’re Still Stuck After Loss - And the One Shift That Can Turn Grief Into Joy | Chanoa Inez
Awaken Your Authentic Self
Why are you still stuck after loss - even when you know you're ready to move forward? And what if the shift from grief to joy begins with reconnecting to who you truly are? In this episode of Awaken Your Authentic Self, host Jessica Rooks sits down with Chanoa Inez - personal branding advisor, copywriter, messaging strategist , and author of Dream On: How to Create the New Life of Your Dreams After Upheaval or Loss - for a deeply honest conversation about grief recovery, emotional healing, rebuilding your life after loss, personal transformation, authentic identity, and reclaiming joy. Chanoa...
info_outlineWhat if the key to emotional healing and trauma recovery isn't holding on tighter - but physically transforming it?
In this episode of the Awaken Your Authentic Self podcast, host Jessica Rooks speaks with professional artist and transformational guide Devorah Brinkerhoff to explore "Sacred Destruction" - the radical healing practice of destroying personal mementos, photos, and journals, then reconstructing them into mixed-media art that reveals your Soul Essence.
After 30 years as a successful gallery-represented artist, Devorah walked away from the traditional art world in 2019 when the product no longer fed her soul. What emerged was Soul Portraits - a guided methodolgy where trauma materials become the raw ingredients for visual self-dicovery. For anyone who has felt stuck in talk therapy, silenced by the inner critic, or trapped in an identity that no longer fits, this conversation offers a completely different entry point to healing: your hands, your eyes, and the visual language of your soul.
Together, Jessica and Devorah explore why memories can become energetic cages, how the body processes grief through tactile creation, the terror and liberation of identity death, and why the healing process matters infinitely more than the artistic product. This is the invitation to stop making your healing beautifull and start making it true.
This episode explores how stored trauma, unresolved memories, and outdated identities can keep us emotionally stuck - and how creative expression can become a powerful pathway to healing. Through nervous system regulation, somatic healing, and Devorah's Sacred Destruction process, you'll discover why transformation often begins when we stop preserving the past and start transforming our relationship to it.
What You'll Learn In This Episode:
- What "Sacred Destruction" is and why physically destroying painful memories can be more cathartic than talking about them
- What happens emotionally and somatically during the act of physically ripping or altering personal mementos - and why that visceral release unlocks what words alone cannot
- How somatic experience and nervous system regulation happen naturally through tactile creative expression
- Why visual expression can unlock truths that verbal language cannot reach
- Practical first steps for beginning your own sacred destruction process practice - even in 5-minute increments
About Our Guest:
Devorah Brinckerhoff is a professional artist and transformational guide who spent 3 decades as a successful gallery-represented artist before walking away from the traditional art world in 2019. Devorah sees the world visually rather than verbally and believes that creative expression - not artistic ability - is the bridge between trauma and self-discovery. Her work centers on the principle that the process of creation holds far more healing power than the product produces.
Connect with Devorah:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/devorah.brinkerhoff
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devorahbrinkerhoff
Website: https://soulportrait.art/
Continue Your Healing Journey:
If this conversation on sacred destruction and creative trauma healing resonated with you, these episodes will deepen your journey:
✨Healing grief or navigating the loss of a loved one?
Listen next:
Grief, Life Purpose & Nervous System healing with Stephanie Walsh - Discover how loss can become a catalyst for healing, purpose, and personal transformation
✨Feeling stuck in survival mode, burnout, or emotional exhaustion?
Listen next:
Are You Listening to Your Body? The Importance of Properly Feeding the Mind, Body and Spirit - Explore the connection between chronic stress, emotional healing, and the wisdom your body has been trying to share with you.
✨Absorbing everyone else's emotions and struggling with empath burnout?
Listen next:
Intuition Saved My Life: Empath Burnout Recovery with Christine Gold
✨New to spiritual healing and personal transformation?
Start here:
Religion vs. Spirituality: Finding YOUR Sacred Purpose - A foundational episode exploring soul purpose, identity, and awakening to your authentic self.
About Awaken Your Authentic Self:
Awaken Your Authentic Self is a podcast dedicated to spiritual healing, spiritual awakening, emotional healing, conscious living, and helping you reconnect with your authentic self.
Through transformational conversations with thought leaders, healers, authors, and spiritual teachers, each episode offers practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and compassionate guidance for navigating life's challenges and embracing meaningful transformation.
New episodes released weekly.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast platform.
Connect with Host Jessica Rooks:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessica.rooks.77377/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/1120_livingmybestlife/
Email: [email protected]
Want to be a guest: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/176184925777844125f8026e4
If this episode moved you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
Your authenticity is not a flaw to fix - it is your greatest power.