78: Rethinking Bipolar: Trauma, Awakening, Healing
Release Date: 12/18/2025
79: From Trauma to Triumph
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram ! Adriene Caldwell is a force of resilience, healing, and truth. As a former foster youth—a group of whom less than 3% attend college and 20% later enter the U.S. prison system—Adriene defied every statistic and expectation. Her life story, marked by profound trauma including abuse, sexual assault, homelessness, untreated mental illness, and foster care brutality, is not shared for shock value, but to offer real, grounded hope to anyone fighting their way out of darkness. Her book Unbroken carries one of the most extensive trigger warning lists you’ll ever...
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78: Rethinking Bipolar: Trauma, Awakening, Healing
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram ! Today’s guest is Sean Blackwell, author of Bipolar Awakenings: The Quest to Heal Bipolar Disorder, a thought leader redefining how we understand mental health, trauma, and spiritual transformation. For over a decade, Sean has shared his personal journey and taught others through his YouTube channel and international retreats, helping people explore the intersection of psychology, consciousness, and awakening. Sean challenges the mainstream psychiatric model that views bipolar disorder as a lifelong, biologically based mental illness. Instead, he presents a...
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77: Sacred Healing & Twin Flame Truth
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram ! In this powerful conversation, we meet V.C. Pitt—author of My Twin Flame Journey of Separation, Surrender, and Release and Healing Sacred Wounds While Reclaiming My Power, cancer survivor, and spiritual guide devoted to alternative healing wisdom. V.C. shares her raw, transformative journey from running a successful medical billing company to surrendering fully to her spiritual path and becoming a lightworker who helps others heal through sacred plant medicine, emotional release techniques, and deep spiritual understanding. A breast cancer survivor, V.C. opens...
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76: Inspiring One Million Acts of Self-Love
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram ! Julie Heaton spent more than 30 years as a corporate executive before following a deeper calling: guiding others back to themselves. As the author of ROAR, The Manifester’s Playbook, The Manifester’s Workbook, and the children’s series The Adventures of the Fabulous Three, Julie offers grounded, soulful tools for healing, identity work, and personal transformation. In this episode, Julie shares her powerful journey from self-loathing to self-loving—a path shaped by healing childhood wounds, breaking generational patterns, spiritual travel, meditation, and...
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75: Healing Trauma and Reclaiming Your Light
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram . In this heart-opening episode of the Open Heart Healing Podcast, I’m joined by Shannon Curtis, founder of Angel Goddess Healing and author of No More Monsters Under the Bed: Shining Your Light on the Dark. Shannon’s journey from addiction, grief, and childhood trauma to deep spiritual awakening and self-love is a testament to the power of transformation and forgiveness. Through her sanctuary, Angel Goddess Healing, Shannon helps people of all ages heal from trauma, break free from addiction, and reconnect with their higher self. She shares how embracing her...
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74: Living for a Body You Love
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram . In this empowering episode of the Open Heart Healing Podcast, I sit down with Lisa Franz, M.Sc. in Exercise Science, Health Promotion, and Nutrition, and the founder of Nutrition Coaching and Life. Lisa shares her journey from struggling with diets to becoming an evidence-based nutrition and fitness coach who helps people achieve lasting transformation. As a digital nomad who’s traveled to over 53 countries, Lisa has mastered the art of balancing a healthy, strong body with a lifestyle full of joy, food, and adventure. She explains how science-based fat loss,...
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73: Sensual Liberation: Bridging Sexuality and Spirituality
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram ! In this powerful and deeply inspiring episode, I sit down with Hani Cheng, Intimacy Transformation Facilitator, bestselling author, and founder of the YUMM Sensual Liberation Programs, to explore how embracing sensuality can transform every area of your life. With over 15 years of experience, certifications across 33 holistic modalities, and more than 800 transformational events hosted worldwide, Hani combines ancient Tantric and Taoist practices with modern leadership and emotional intelligence. Hani opens up about her own journey—from outward corporate success and...
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72: Helping Kids Regulate Big Feelings
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Jacintha Field is a Family and Child Counsellor, Art Therapist, and founder of Happy Souls Kids — a global platform helping children aged 5–12 regulate big feelings through storytelling, gamified tools, and voices of role models they admire. After surviving domestic violence and burnout, she retrained in counselling, play therapy, and somatic healing to support her own son when no services were available. What started as a personal mission has grown into a movement to reach 100,000 children by 2027. In this conversation, Jacintha shares her journey of turning pain into purpose, the...
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71: Mom Guilt and Grief: Healing Through Loss
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me on Instagram ! In this deeply personal two-part series, I open up about two of the most defining emotional experiences of my life — navigating mom guilt and processing grief two years after losing my dad. In Part 1, I share honest reflections on the constant balancing act of motherhood, the invisible pressure to “do it all,” and how I’m learning to release guilt and embrace grace. In Part 2, I talk about grief — how it changes but never fully fades, what healing has looked like over the past two years, and the surprising ways loss can expand our hearts. If you’ve...
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70: From Corporate Burnout to Hormone Health
Open Heart Healing Podcast
Follow me in Instagram . In this episode of the Open Heart Healing Podcast, I sit down with Chelsea, a corporate dropout turned hormone health coach who has made it her mission to help high-achieving women reclaim their energy, balance, and vitality. After spending over a decade running herself into the ground in corporate, Chelsea found herself battling insomnia, PCOS, high cortisol, and gut issues. Her healing journey inspired her to pivot careers and dedicate her life to helping other women overcome similar struggles. Now, as the founder of the Healthy Hustle Method, Chelsea has helped...
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Today’s guest is Sean Blackwell, author of Bipolar Awakenings: The Quest to Heal Bipolar Disorder, a thought leader redefining how we understand mental health, trauma, and spiritual transformation. For over a decade, Sean has shared his personal journey and taught others through his YouTube channel and international retreats, helping people explore the intersection of psychology, consciousness, and awakening.
Sean challenges the mainstream psychiatric model that views bipolar disorder as a lifelong, biologically based mental illness. Instead, he presents a compelling perspective: that many bipolar experiences may be misunderstood spiritual emergence processes rooted in unresolved trauma. Through this lens, extreme psychological states such as mania or psychosis are not random breakdowns, but the psyche’s attempt to heal through the body’s natural bio-energetic intelligence.
We dive deep into the somatic and energetic foundations of bipolar disorder, including the role of kundalini energy, the chakra system, and insights from transpersonal psychology pioneer Dr. Stanislav Grof. Sean explains how trauma can create bio-energetic blockages within the subtle body—and how the release of this stored energy can trigger powerful psychological and spiritual experiences often mislabeled as pathology.
Sean also shares the origins of the Bipolar Awakenings Healing Retreat and his trauma-release modality, Bipolar Breathwork, adapted from Holotropic Breathwork training. Through moving client stories, he illustrates how addressing trauma at the energetic level has led to profound healing, reduced hospitalization, freedom from chronic pain, and in some cases, complete independence from psychiatric medication.
This episode offers a radical reframe of bipolar disorder—from a life sentence to a call for deep inner healing—and invites listeners to consider how our greatest breakdowns may hold the seeds of our most meaningful spiritual breakthroughs.
More from Sean here.