Thorns, Roses, and The Courage To Receive with Dre & Em
Circle This
In this year-end episode, Dre and Em record under the final full moon in Gemini and reflect on the year through their own version of the rose, thorn, and bud. Emily shares the joy of getting engaged and fully moving in with her fiancé, alongside the challenge of caretaking after a sudden injury. Dre reflects on the podcast as both her greatest joy and greatest stretch, a year shaped by learning, connection, and creative devotion. Together, they talk about love without fixing, receiving without minimizing, entering the holidays aligned instead of...
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Integrative Tools for Overwhelm: Breathwork, Embodiment, and the End of Spiritual Burnout with Natalie Kuhn
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Dre sits down with writer, teacher, and embodiment leader Natalie Kuhn, founder of Make the Sun and former Co-CEO of The Class. Natalie shares how her early experiences with conditional love shaped her sense of self, and how her current work in seminary and Al-Anon is revealing a different understanding of belonging and internal safety. They explore the pressures of spiritual overload, the tendency to turn healing into constant self-improvement, and the impact this has on the nervous system. Natalie breaks down how breath and sound support emotional release, why the body...
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What Adversity Reveals: Nyakio Grieco on Projection, Self-Awareness & Spiritual Strength
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In this episode, beloved friend of the show, entrepreneur and founder, Nyakio “Kio” Grieco returns for a hard-won conversation about resilience, faith, and what adversity can reveal. After being named in a lawsuit nine months ago—and recently cleared with a full retraction—Kio shares publicly for the first time, what it was like to sit in the unknown, navigate loneliness, and how she managed to maintain her role as a leader throughout it all. Together they explore gangster gratitude, shadow work, and how gossip or cross-talk create toxic...
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Start Now, Why Wait: Gen Z Truth & Entrepreneurship with Strummer Rouse & Bonus Guest Jack Jiang
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In this special episode, Dre sits down with her 16-year-old son, the one and only Strummer James Rouse, for a tender, funny, and surprisingly profound look into the emotional world, entrepreneurial drive, and connection language of Gen Z. Later, they’re joined by Strummer’s friend and collaborator, 19-year-old entrepreneur Jack Jiang, for an eye-opening second chapter on credibility, reputation, and the real cost of building a brand at a young age. Sitting together in Tribeca, Dre and Strummer talk about everything from change-of-scenery...
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The Unexpected Pregnancy & The Birth of a Conscious Community with Tylah Jordan
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In this episode, Dre welcomes storyteller and community-builder Tylah Jordan for full circle conversation about the unexpected pregnancy that changed the entire trajectory of her life. Tylah opens up about discovering she was pregnant just one month into a new relationship, while navigating the weight of secrecy, shame, and a religious upbringing where she had never known anyone who became a mother outside of marriage. What could have been an isolating chapter instead became the doorway into a new identity, a deeper spiritual maturity, and the beginnings of Unfiltered...
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Sobriety, Self-Discovery & the Truth About “Fun” with Abby Calabrese
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In this episode, Dre sits down with influencer, speaker, and sober-living advocate Abby Calabrese to explore what happens when we stop numbing and start feeling. What began as a 100-day challenge for Abby became a life-changing journey back to her truest self. Together, she and Dre unpack how our culture glorifies alcohol as a social glue, how “performing vulnerability” has replaced true emotional honesty, and how radical self-truth can set us free. This episode invites listeners to look at their own attachments, whether to...
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Call To Connection: It’s Time To Take It Offline with Dre & Em
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Recorded in New York City where it all began, Dre and Em reflect on how everything in life unfolds in systems, patterns, seasons, and cycles. They circle around their love–hate relationship with social media, exploring the irony of creating a podcast about connection while spending so much time in virtual spaces and what happens to our nervous systems, creativity, and sense of belonging when we finally gather in person. They also touch on the rise of “outsourced intimacy” from dating apps to digital wellness and how we’re losing the art...
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No Permission Needed: Processing Pain through Creativity with Alicia Coppola
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In this episode, Dre welcomes actor, writer, director and all around creator, Alicia Coppola, a woman whose artistry and honesty are inseparable from her healing. They reflect on meeting and circling in countless audition rooms, and how they intuitively unsubscribed from the narrative of competition and scarcity. Alicia opens up about grief, loss, and how creating art has always been her way to understand and alchemize pain. She shares about her latest chapter: relocating her family to support her child’s athletic dreams, giving away nearly everything...
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Space, Grace & the Secret Sauce to Lifelong Friendship with Leigh Kilton Smith & Kristin Hahn
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In this episode, Dre is joined by two beloved friends and returning guests: producer and screenwriter Kristin Hahn and acting coach Leigh Kilton Smith. Together, they circle around how they’ve navigated decades of friendship—through grief, distance, conflict, and reconciliation—and what it really takes to sustain intimacy over time. They speak to the discipline of giving one another space and grace, the courage of telling hard truths, and the sacred act of creating magic with and for one another. Beyond friendship, this conversation dives into the realities of...
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The Art and Science of Circling: How Real Connection Can Heal Us with Dr. Avanti
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In this powerful episode of The Healing Catalyst, Dr. Avanti Kumar Singh welcomes Dre, to explain the profound impact of women's circles on healing and connection, drawn from her two decades of facilitating these communal story-sharing experiences. Dre shares how this ancient practice is making a modern-day comeback, and why it's more essential than ever. The conversation explores the science behind communal experiences, such as the role of mirror neurons and the release of oxytocin, often called the “bonding hormone,” which is released during emotionally safe,...
info_outlineIn this episode, Dre circles with artist, intuitive coach, and spiritual midwife Anne Emerson to explore the power of re-patterning the beliefs that keep us stuck in old stories.
For over five decades, Anne has guided people through Holographic Repatterning™, a therapeutic technology that uses applied kinesiology to trace issues and blockages that appear as problems in our present experience. These blocks can be emotional, mental and even physical, and seem impossible to unravel. The issues are anchored in our unconscious from past traumas, but appear in our present as goals that can’t be met, issues that don’t get resolved no matter how hard we try, negative patterns that occur again and again whenever there is stress in our lives.
HR (Holographic Repatterning™) uses the technique of muscle checking to access the unconscious, and in a very accurate and non-dramatic way allows client and practitioner to trace the history of the present issue to its root in the past, and release it through the combination of awareness and vibrational healing techniques. By the end of a session, there is a noticeable release of tension around the issue(s) that are keeping the client stuck. The client can then move more easily in the direction of positive change, with more profound and permanent results. Together, Dre and Anne explore the ways our limiting beliefs show up as repeated patterns, how anger can actually be a sacred tool for transformation, and why our quirks often hold the keys to our superpowers.
Anne invites us to meet the subtleties of our emotions—especially the ones we resist—and to embrace anger not as something to fear, but as a boundary-setting force that begins the process of transformation. They also circle around themes of astrology, human design, manifestation, and the myth of “purpose”—revealing how our true purpose isn’t about doing, but about being.
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This conversation is a reminder that when we clear the stories keeping us small, we return to our authentic selves—whole, free, and connected.
Follow: @anneemersonart
Learn more: thepassionatejourney.com
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Stay connected with the
Circle This team:
@andreabendewald @circlethispodcast
@emkratter @goodmessmedia @talkwithtrace
Sponsorships: circlethispod@gmail.com