Then she started one.

That contradiction sits at the center of this conversation. Joey is a professional certified coach, facilitator and retreat host with over fifteen years behind her, living in rural Cornwall about a fifteen minute walk from the coast path, working with values-driven midlife women in sustainability and social change. She started her coaching business while moving four hundred miles from London to be with her now husband, in a part of the country where the opportunity wasn’t going to hand itself to her. She trained, she moved, and she opened the doors all at once, carrying hard beliefs around what business meant.

The work was changing her mind in public. As she puts it, business can be a real source of good, and lots of companies do real harm, and both of those are true at the same time. She didn’t resolve the contradiction by picking a side. She built her own way of doing it instead.

The world she works in runs on a particular story: the problems are hard, so the work has to be hard, so you grind, you isolate, you burn out. Joey agrees the problems are hard. She just doesn’t think approaching the work as if it’s hard makes the problem any easier to solve. “The energy that we approach something with is also the energy that it’s imbued with,” she says. Push harder and that’s the energy you build into what you make. So she works the other way: with other people instead of alone, and with some joy in it, because we’re human beings and we need joy.

Joey describes years of avoiding visibility, dodging opportunities, building reasonable stories about why staying invisible was fine. Then she describes working at it the way you’d turn an object over in your hands, looking at it from every angle, again and again, until something gave. What she landed on, she says with a laugh, is “I’m here to be seen, man. We’re all here to be seen.” A year ago she wouldn’t have accepted the invitation to this episode. She’d have had a perfectly reasonable excuse. She showed up anyway.

If you are someone doing work that matters, in a culture that keeps telling you it has to cost you everything, this conversation is for you. If you’ve been treating the grind as the price of doing good, Joey makes a great case that the joy isn’t a reward you get at the end. It’s the thing that makes the work last, and the thing that makes it worth doing at all.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why she says resilience on your own is “a bit of a mirage,” and what she puts in its place

• The Paul Simon lyric about drifting that names her whole first decade of working life

• The moment in a coaching room, not coaching, not being coached, that moved her to tears and rerouted her career

• “There is no done. There’s no destination. It’s just a chapter to a chapter to a chapter.”

• The walking retreats she’s starting this summer on the Cornwall coast path, and the three ingredients she’s putting together

• Why she calls herself “a curator of the fun,” and what changes when you hold the work that way

• What she’s most proud of, and why it has nothing to do with results

Watch the full conversation here:

If anything here lands for you, Joey’s main home is Substack, and she’d love a connection. Subscribe here:

Thriving Changemakers

with Joey Clifton. For purpose-led people writing the next chapter of their lives and leadership.

By Joey Clifton

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full Light with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Part of the medicine is in telling the story and being heard.

Jane is a women’s health nurse practitioner and a former midwife. She runs a private practice in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, sees patients by telehealth across New York State, and does health coaching for women online. She’s the founder of Wise Body Women’s Health, and she writes The Wise Body on Substack, where she describes her work as the place where medicine meets the sacred.

The center of the conversation was the midwife model, and what happens when you stop limiting it to birth. Midwives, she explained, approach birth as a process that mostly happens on its own. The job is to support it, to watch carefully for the thing that genuinely needs intervention, to trust the body first and intervene second. Then she said the line that turns a birth philosophy into a way of practicing all of medicine. We have more information than we’ve ever had. Getting information isn’t the problem anymore. Knowing what to do with it is.

She had the research to back it up, which mattered to her. She told us about Centering Pregnancy, a kind of group prenatal care where a midwife sees a whole group at once. There’s a study, she said, that found the more facilitative the midwife was, the less she talked and the more she drew the participants out, the better their birth outcomes were. Being listened to and being able to share with each other had a real, physical effect on how the births went. “If you need the science,” she said, “it is there.”

She holds the science and the invisible in the same hand, loosely, without letting either one cancel the other. The placebo effect is her favorite example. Even people who know they’re in the placebo group of a trial tend to do better than people who got nothing at all. Maybe, she said, that means our intentions and our inner energy have something to do with what physically happens in our bodies.

On her own About page, Jane calls herself the nurse, the midwife, and the witch. Not witch as charlatan. Witch as in the wise women healers who knew you can’t separate the body from the spirit. She brings the hormones and the anatomy and the pharmacology, and she brings the candle, the breath, and the willingness to sit with someone for longer than fifteen minutes. She won’t accept the choice between real medicine and real reverence, and she’s building a practice that proves you don’t have to make it. Carolina said it plainly in the conversation: she’d want Jane as her own doctor, because Jane gets the invisible and is actually qualified to speak to the science.

If you’ve ever sat in a fifteen-minute appointment, telling your whole story to someone typing on a computer who never looked up, and walked out feeling like a collection of symptoms instead of a person, this conversation is for you. And if you’re someone who has quietly carried both a clinical mind and a spiritual one, and assumed you had to keep them in separate rooms to be taken seriously, this one is for you too.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why she left the mainstream system, and the trade-off between her own wellbeing and her patients’ that she says burns good practitioners out.

• The “secret light workers” she remembers on the labor and delivery floor, doing quiet blessings between deliveries.

• What she means when she calls industrialized medicine a game of telephone, even when it looks efficient from the top.

• Phil’s own cancer scare at the Mayo Clinic, and the new doctor who reversed everything twenty-four hours before surgery.

• The circle she wants to build into her practice, where patients heal in a group instead of one at a time.

• The one thing she says she’s most proud of, and it isn’t a result.

• Who her health coaching is actually for, no matter where they live.

Watch the full conversation here: [LINK]

You can find Jane at her Substack, The Wise Body, where she writes about women’s health, yoga philosophy, and what she calls practical mysticism.

The Wise Body

The Wise Body explores the intersection of women’s healthcare, yoga philosophy and intuitive wisdom. Readers receive tips and insights based on practical mysticism to help them reimagine wellness for the modern world.

By Jane Riccobono

Thank you , , and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full-Light live with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She has now walked the Camino de Santiago more than fifteen times.

She first heard about it back in 2000, watching Shirley MacLaine talk about a book she’d written about a walk across Spain. Rebecca filed it away as a someday thing. Twelve years later she did it for real: a thirty-seven day walk, because at the time she thought that was the only option. Three days in, she had the answer to a question she hadn’t fully known she was carrying. By then she was hooked.

For years after that, people asked if she’d ever lead trips or build a business around it. For a long time her answer was no. The Camino was hers. Then our community came across her inbox, recommended by of Zen Habits, and she decided it was time.

The part that took the longest wasn’t the logistics. It was worth. Rebecca grew up Catholic, grew up volunteering, grew up giving herself freely. So she carried a quiet assumption that her knowledge wasn’t the kind of thing people pay for. There are a thousand free resources about the Camino. What did she have to add? It took her a while to land on the obvious answer. She’s walked it fifteen times. She’s lived on it. She volunteered on it. She speaks Spanish. Carolina kept naming it back to her, plainly: your knowledge, your skill, your worth. Until Rebecca’s own question flipped. Who am I not to share this?

You can hear what that flip is worth when she talks about the people she’s helped. A family of five recently left for the Camino. The wife had never been to Europe. Neither had the kids. Rebecca planned the whole thing. And she has people now who tell her, in so many words, “I would not have done the Camino were it not for you.” She tears up saying it.

Here’s the part that maps onto anyone building something. Rebecca doesn’t build the whole program first and then go looking for people. She builds as she goes. With her first group, she made the documents as the trip needed them and sent them out. She borrows the minimum viable product idea from her teaching days, when you could pour hours into a fifteen-minute presentation only to find out it was the wrong one. “You don’t have to have it all planned perfectly in order to do it.” Her trips are even built that way: she walks with you the first three days, then leaves you to the rest, because doing it on your own is part of the point.

Most people who come to her ask the same thing first. Can I physically do this? Under that sits a quieter question. Can I do this at all? A woman on last year’s trip had a knee replaced eleven months before she walked. Rebecca once met an eighty-nine year old man walking it with his three sons. So a lot of her work isn’t logistics at all. It’s helping someone believe they can, then handing them enough real answers that the belief holds. There’s a line she first heard out on the trail: don’t let your fears load your pack.

If you’ve been carrying something you already know how to do, expertise built over years that you keep deciding you’re not ready to charge for or put in front of people, this conversation is for you. Rebecca didn’t wait until she felt ready. She started before the thing was built and let it take its shape as real people showed up.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• “You can’t plan an epiphany,” and what the Camino tends to give you instead of what you came for.

• Why she only walks people for the first three days, then lets them go.

• The one person she’s met in fourteen years who said never again.

• What she tells people who are eyeing a cruise to Alaska instead.

• How she helps people cut through the flood of Camino advice online, and why five hundred strangers telling you which shoes to wear is the problem, not the help.

• The monthly group she’s building to bring the Camino’s lessons home, whether or not you’ve ever walked it.

• The bet her own family placed on her first walk.

Curious about the Camino, or about the way Rebecca helps people get there? She’s at thecaminocalls.com and writes on Substack. Start as an observer. Look around. See if it moves you.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into In Full-Light with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She finally stopped trying. Now she is building something called The Joy Club Way.

On Episode 5 of In Full Light, Carolina and I sat down with Michele to talk about the work she is stepping into and the inner shift that made it possible. Michele is a developmental psychologist and an educational psychologist, with a yoga teacher certification and 30 years of spiritual study layered underneath the academic work. Her credential list is long enough that she has been questioning whether she has any business writing about joy at all. Her answer to that question is the whole episode.

Michele shared about how she volunteered to teach Intro to Psychology at a prison. She did not just teach the textbook. She showed her students how to use what they were learning to find more freedom inside their cells. Their final projects, she said, blew her away. And the line she said next was the one we kept coming back to.

“I felt more joy there than I felt in church, for sure.”

Michele is not running a positivity program. She has chronic illness. She has years of meditation she does not actually enjoy. She knows what it is to sit with grief and rage and the long stuckness that nobody’s 10-minute walk after dinner is going to fix. Her definition of joy is sturdier than that.

“Joy is a sense of being connected to your purpose, to being oriented towards growth, to being present and to being connected.”

What makes Michele rare is that she has the academic credentials to be a one-trick specialist, and she refuses. She wants the mind work, the heart work, and the body work in the same conversation. She wants developmental psychology and contemplative prayer in the same room. She references both Joe Hudson and Thomas Keating in the same sentence. The integration is the work. The thing she is moving away from is the part of her career that asked her to hide.

If you have built a career around credentials and you can feel a quieter voice asking you to bring more of yourself into the room, this conversation is for you. If you have been told to optimize, add the 10-minute walk, fit the meditation in, and you can feel that the prescription is the problem, Michele has a different way of thinking about all of it.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why Michele thinks the yoga modification is not a consolation prize, and what teachers miss when they prescribe a pose instead of meeting the point of resistance

• The Joe Hudson line she keeps coming back to: joy is the matriarch of emotions, and she will not enter the house unless her children come too

• The Steven Pressfield War of Art passage about resistance, and why scaffolding is her answer to getting unstuck

• The fourth-grade girl with the lowest IQ in the room, the poem she wrote, and the moment Michele declared her the class poet laureate

• A cold bath, a yoga modification, and a nutritionist’s diet plan walk into the same problem: when a teacher confuses the goal with the practice, students start overriding their own inner wisdom

• The Frozen 2 song Michele says brought her here, and why she still will not sing it (yet)

• The mind, heart, and body framework underneath The Joy Club Way, and the three forces that derail each of them

• Her closing line for everyone listening, which is the opposite of every productivity message you have heard this week

If you want to follow Michele work, subscribe to her Substack, The Joy Club Way. She is building in public and the goodies only reach subscribers, not followers.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 26, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Carolina and I spent close to forty minutes with Bronce for an author spotlight, and the conversation centered on a moment that changed his trajectory going forward

During the pandemic, he was limited by the number of patients he coul see. He moved to telehealth, and his calendar filled in a way it had never filled before. He capped his schedule at nine people a day, five days a week, and even at that pace he started having to turn people away. Long-time clients calling back, asking for an hour, and he had nothing left to give them. In his words, “in my world, that was a little bit of a sin.”

That sentence is the seed of his book.

The book is called The Wellbeing Equation. He has been working on it since the pandemic. He told us he wrote it to 240,000 words before he knew how to stop. He’s now cutting it down to publish at fifty or sixty thousand. He got an agent last October, after thirty years in private practice, and as we recorded this his proposal is currently in front of publishing houses.

What strikes you about Bronce, the second you start talking to him, is the rigor underneath the warmth. He spent ten years getting through his psychoanalysis training. He doesn’t speak in slogans. When we asked him for the one thing in his wellbeing framework, he gave us three (sleep, diet, exercise) and then refused to call it three things. He calls it one thing, because the body and the mind have to be functioning before any of the higher work becomes possible.

His central image is what stayed with us. Bronce describes everyone’s wellbeing equation as a fingerprint. The components are universal. Sleep, food, movement, connection, spirit. But the way they combine is yours alone. Most of the advice you’ve absorbed in the last decade has been someone else’s fingerprint pressed onto your life. His book is an attempt to give people permission to find their own.

There’s a moment about halfway through the conversation where he turns the questions back on us. He asks how we built what we built. How Carolina and I work together. What the experience has been like inside the container. It’s a generous move from a guest, and it’s the move of a working analyst. He doesn’t perform expertise. He listens.

A few other threads from the full episode:

The Trifecta of Wellness, and why he refuses to call it three things.

What he means when he says writing this book has become a spiritual journey.

The phrase “experiments in living,” and why he keeps returning to it.

The five-word sentence Carolina gave him near the end that he said would change how he thinks about waiting: “holding the pose.”

What he might write next, sparked by listening to us describe our partnership in real time.

Subscribe to his Substack and read his pinned essay, “Your Wellbeing Equation is Like a Fingerprint” here. When the book launches, his readers there will be the first to know.

The Wellbeing Equation | Bronce J. Rice

Psychoanalyst | Psychologist | Health & Wellness Coach dedicated to helping you understand and enhance your wellbeing.

By Dr. Bronce Rice

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

and I spent an hour with her on Episode 003 of In Full Light, and the conversation was the kind that doesn’t really leave you. Eva is the founder of Second Callings. She works with midlife professionals who built a good life, hit the markers they were told to hit, and now feel something else stirring. Her job is to help them name it, see the pattern that has been running quietly underneath everything, and build the work that fits who they’re becoming.

She did not arrive at this work in a straight line.

Eva’s father died when she was fifteen. He was a physician, a dreamer, and he left blueprints for a hospital on the dining room table. Plans he never got to build. Eva spent the next three decades trying to make her time matter in his honor. She went to business school because her mother was struggling with finances after he died and Eva promised herself she would never not understand money. She built businesses that looked successful from the outside. She fainted at her desk once from exhaustion. She gave from a cup that was empty for so long she forgot what a full one felt like.

Five years ago she started circling the work that is now Second Callings. She could not quite step into it. She kept editing, kept hiding, kept telling herself she’d be ready when she was ready. Eventually she stopped trying. She surrendered the whole thing to God, the Creator, in her words. She said whatever you want me to do, I will do it. I have no desire.

And then a door she did not expect opened. An opportunity came to manage some investments. The part of her resume she had been most ashamed of, the finance training she resented for two decades, became the thing that funded the launch of the work she was born to do. She told us she can’t quite recognize her life now.

The reason this episode matters for our community is not just the story. It’s what she’s doing with it.

There is a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what she wishes more people understood about her work. Eva’s answer is the cleanest articulation of a pattern we see constantly. Most people, she says, know the label. I’m an achiever. I’m a perfectionist. But naming the pattern doesn’t change it. You can build a whole new business with the same old energy running underneath, and it will just hustle in a different costume. The real work is slower. It’s quieter. It goes deeper than the labels.

She also said something about authority that I want to underline.

She used to equate her competence with her income. If she wasn’t earning, she wasn’t good. The marketing world made it worse by selling proof-of-competence through screenshots. What she has come to believe, and what she now offers her clients, is that the credential people actually want is lived experience. They want a guide who has been where they are standing. Not a curriculum. A witness.

If you are someone who built the life you were told to build, and you feel something quieter and truer trying to surface underneath it, this episode is the kind of conversation you’ll want to sit with twice.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• The Care framework she built during her pause year, and the moment of internal safety it depended on.

• Why play is not a reward you earn at the end. Why it has to be part of the process or the process eventually hollows out.

• The Autopilot Assessment that names the pattern running in the background, and why she designed it as the first step.

• Her 25-year vision, including the conversation she is currently having with her university about bringing this work into education.

• The phrase she used that we keep coming back to: “We are a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event. There is nobody like you.”

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This episode was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

I want to say something plainly at the top. If chronic pain came back into my life tomorrow, is the person I would call. Carolina and I just spent over an hour with him on Episode 002 of In Full Light, and I want to tell you why.

For anyone newer here, I spent eleven years in chronic pain. From around my 29th birthday to about 40. I’m roughly four years on the other side of it now. So when I say I would hire David, I’m saying it as someone who tried a lot of things during those years, who watched a skeptic slowly emerge inside me as one modality after another didn’t deliver, and who had moments where I genuinely thought I was just slowly dying.

David is Harvard-trained. Double board certified. Almost thirty years in integrative and functional medicine, with training in rehabilitation, internal medicine, pain management, and osteopathy. He started out as an engineer in San Diego, woke up energetically during a Tai Chi class one day, and decided he needed to find out what that energy actually was. So he went to medical school. His Tai Chi teacher thought he was crazy.

What’s happened in the thirty years since is the reason I would hire him.

Here’s one story he told us. Early in his osteopathy training, he was working pain management in a 500-bed nursing home in the Bronx because he needed the job. He met a 38-year-old woman on long-term care for brain inflammation from lupus. She was on 300 milligrams of OxyContin a day, a dose that would kill most of us, plus a heavy load of Lyrica. He looked through her file. The inflammation was gone. Something else was keeping her locked in.

He had her lie down. He held her head and listened the way his teachers had taught him. The membranes around her brain felt like cardboard. He waited. He let his attention rest with whatever subtle movement was there. After a while her whole system released, and she stopped breathing for almost a minute and a half. He sat there wondering if she had just died.

Then the breath came back, slow and rolling. She opened her eyes, started laughing, and said, I hadn’t exhaled in ten years. That was the end of her pain. They tapered her off the drugs. She went home.

When you ask David about moments like that, he doesn’t oversell them. He says they took the ideas of anatomy and physiology he learned at Harvard Medical School and made him hold them more loosely.

There’s a moment later in the episode where I tell him about my own pain years and ask what he says to someone who feels like they’ve tried everything. His answer is the most honest I’ve heard a doctor give to that question. He doesn’t reach for a method. He reaches for what’s underneath despair, and he tells the truth that even there, something small is still worth believing.

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A few other threads from the conversation:

• The framework he uses called the three M’s, and why most doctors only work with two of them.

• The concept of “four worlds healing” and why most integrative medicine stops at three.

• His take on the recent wave of fallen gurus, and the word he uses for what’s missing: sovereignty.

• What he saw in a 12-year-old patient who walked in radiant despite a brain surgery five months prior.

• The 25-year vision that came out when we asked him where this is all going, and the part of it he didn’t expect.

If anything in this conversation lands for you, his Substack and drshiller.com are both worth a visit. Tell him we sent you.

Torah Healing & Medicine

Accelerate healing and recovery at the interface of science, consciousness, medicine, and lifestyle; Practical tools in the light of the ancient healing wisdom of Torah and Kabbalah.

By Andrew David Shiller, MD

If you are just tuning into this series for the first time, last week we were joined by , and up next is !

And thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into episode 002 of In Full Light w/ and !

Even with all that visibility, the real her wasn’t on show.

The moment that broke it open was a conversation with the dean of her faculty. She proposed bringing a coaching approach into how the school cared for its students and staff. The answer came back as a flat no. She fully walked away from her traditional career not long after, before she had the financial safety net to make it comfortable, because she couldn’t stay in a place that didn’t believe in possibility.

Four years into the business she’s built, we asked her what the work actually looks like in practice.

She told us about a client of hers, a very accomplished writer who was three drafts into a novel that wasn’t quite landing. Rachel never read a word of the manuscript. They worked on something else entirely. And the book that came out the other side was completely different, with a soulful quality the writer didn’t know she had in her.

That’s the kind of work Rachel does.

There’s a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what her body feels like when she’s speaking from performance versus speaking from essence. Rachel describes one as head and eyes only, disconnected from the rest of her. The other has weight in the feet, gravity in the lower body, a kind of dimensionality that opens up around her.

We’ve sat with enough practitioners doing this kind of work to know how rare it is to hear someone name it with that much precision.

A few other threads you’ll catch in the full conversation:

• Why she holds the word “coach” loosely now, even though it’s still in her bio.

• The seven-minute writing practice she gives every client, and why messy is the point.

• Why she calls the first stretch of her work closer to healing than coaching.

• What Carolina noticed when Rachel’s writing shifted, and the Zoom call where Phil watched a lightbulb go on in real time.

• The 25-year vision she reads most weeks, and what’s actually in it.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into episode 001 of In Full Light with and !