Episode #131: Betsy By Herself on How To Write Blasphemy (When It Serves)
The Discomfort Practice
In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy explores a slightly amusing and powerful idea: What if blasphemy is exactly what we need right now? Drawing from the line “Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy,” Betsy looks at the beliefs, systems, and assumptions we treat as sacred… and asks a simple but disruptive question: Does this actually serve? From workplace norms to wellness culture, politics to personal identity, many of the stories we defend most fiercely are simply habits we stopped questioning. When something becomes sacred, curiosity disappears… and systems...
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Episode #130: Betsy By Herself on Joy as Anarchy: The Subversive Power of Enjoying Your Life
The Discomfort Practice
In this solo episode, Betsy explores a provocative idea for strange times: Joy might be a form of anarchy. We are living in an era saturated with catastrophe, outrage cycles, environmental grief, economic anxiety, and a constant sense that the world is tilting toward something darker. In that atmosphere, many of us quietly absorb an unspoken rule: if you care about the world, you should feel bad about it all the time. But what if that equation is wrong? What if joy is not denial or privilege or distraction, but a form of resistance? In this episode, Betsy explores how fear-driven systems rely...
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Episode #129: Adam Kahane on Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Like, Trust or Agree With
The Discomfort Practice
What do you do when the people you most need to work with are the ones you most fundamentally disagree with? In this episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy sits down with renowned facilitator and systems thinker Adam Kahane, whose work has brought together politicians, activists, CEOs, guerrilla fighters and community leaders in some of the most polarized environments in the world. From South Africa’s transition out of apartheid to complex global conflicts today, Adam has spent decades working in the uncomfortable middle: helping people collaborate across profound differences...
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Bonus Meditation: Being Human in Crunchy Times
The Discomfort Practice
"The world doesn't need us to be perfect; it just needs us to be present." Betsy has been a meditation teacher for 10 years, and in that time, her own practice has changed. Before leading a 'Senses Meditation,' she swears a bit, she quotes singer Billy Bragg and invites you to meditate. The answer to 'crunchy times' is not to escape them, to seek to 'ascend' and get away from the very real discomfort happening to you. The answer is sometimes to just be human in the midst of it, to realise that a regulated nervous system doesn't necessarily mean you're calm. So step into your body, set aside...
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Episode #128: Betsy By Herself - The World Is Evolving and So, Apparently, Am I
The Discomfort Practice
What happens when you revisit something you once said with conviction… and realise you’d express it differently today? In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy reflects on the strange experience of discovering that one of her older episodes, The World Is Evolving. Are You?, has quietly become the most downloaded episode in the 5 years this podcast has been produced. So she went back and listened. And cringed. This episode is about the discomfort of encountering your past thinking in public, and the quiet, ongoing work of evolving how we speak about the world and our place in...
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Episode #127: Betsy by Herself on Intentional Indifference as a Leadership Practice
The Discomfort Practice
What if indifference isn’t always apathy, but is sometimes rooted in discernment? In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy explores intentional indifference as a mature, regulated response to a world that constantly pulls for reaction, access, and emotional labour. Not the numb, checked-out kind, but the kind that comes from knowing where your energy actually belongs. This episode is about withdrawing attention without withdrawing integrity. About choosing not to engage - not because you can’t, but because you won’t. In this episode, Betsy explores: The difference between...
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Episode #126: Betsy by Herself on Thich Nat Hanh and Internal War Loops
The Discomfort Practice
In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy speaks directly into the current moment: politically, socially and somatically. Recorded in February 2026, amid rising authoritarianism, surveillance and collective nervous system overload, this episode is a grounded, unsmoothed reflection on what it means to stay human, regulated and ethically awake when the world feels volatile. Anchored by a teaching from Thích Nhất Hạnh, Betsy explores the idea of war loops: the internal patterns of fear, urgency, compliance, reactivity and self-betrayal that quietly rehearse the very dynamics we...
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Episode #125: James Murray on Climate Change, Tipping Points & Practicing Optimism
The Discomfort Practice
In this expansive and clear-eyed conversation, host Betsy Reed is joined by journalist and leading sustainability commentator James Murray, founding Editor-in-Chief of BusinessGreen. Together, they explore what it means to stay awake, human and oriented in the face of accelerating climate risk, AI and systemic uncertainty. Recorded at a moment when climate tipping points are no longer abstract projections but lived realities, their dialogue flows between science, politics, technology and psychology. Betsy and James examine how climate change has become a kind of “theory of everything”,...
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Episode #124: Betsy by Herself - A Love Letter to Anyone Doing Anything Alone
The Discomfort Practice
In this intimate solo episode, Betsy records from the threshold: posting unscripted, later than planned and exactly when it needed to be shared. Recorded in January 2026, after what she calls the personal “meat-grinder” year of 2025, this episode is a love letter to anyone doing something alone: building, healing, choosing integrity, setting boundaries or standing between versions of themselves in a quiet, liminal space. This is not a pep talk. It’s a nervous system-level offering for those moments when life goes quiet and the stories about aloneness get loud. In this episode, Betsy...
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Episode #123: Betsy by Herself on Navigating Your Own Threshold Moments in a Time of Monsters
The Discomfort Practice
In this powerful solo episode, Betsy explores what it means to live, lead, and stay human in what philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously called “the time of monsters” - the in-between space where the old world is dying and the new world is still struggling to be born. Recorded at the close of 2025, this episode is an invitation for anyone standing at a threshold: the end of a year, a relationship, a job, an identity, or an old way of being. Betsy reframes overwhelm, grief, and exhaustion not as personal failure, but as signs of initiation - evidence that you are awake, feeling, and...
info_outline"The world doesn't need us to be perfect; it just needs us to be present."
Betsy has been a meditation teacher for 10 years, and in that time, her own practice has changed. Before leading a 'Senses Meditation,' she swears a bit, she quotes singer Billy Bragg and invites you to meditate.
The answer to 'crunchy times' is not to escape them, to seek to 'ascend' and get away from the very real discomfort happening to you. The answer is sometimes to just be human in the midst of it, to realise that a regulated nervous system doesn't necessarily mean you're calm.
So step into your body, set aside 10 minutes or so to do this meditation - whether walking, driving, in the gym or sitting in your bed - and enjoy being with yourself. Whatever that feels like right now.
If you'd like more:
- Betsy records bespoke meditations, so if you'd like to commission some to accompany you through life right now, get in touch.
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Follow and message Betsy on Instagram @thebetsyreed
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Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five-star review (it truly helps)
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Join her on Substack at The Betsy Reed for (Voice) Notes from the Edge - some public, some subscriber-only: substack.com/thebetsyreed