Healing Her Story with Riva Jean-Paul

This week's Healing Her Story episode welcomes a guest whose healing journey took her from traditional psychology into the depths of breathwork, somatic healing, and spiritual transformation.

Dr. Colleen Quinn is a transpersonal psychologist, breathwork practitioner, and author of Essence Merging -- a book that traces her path from health crisis to profound awakening and the discovery that love is the primary healer.

But this carries profound wisdom about what becomes possible when we stop trying to think our way through trauma and start breathing our way through it.

Riva opens...

The new moon is here, and so is a new focus. As we slowly close out Cancer season and welcome the energy of Leo next week, this week's Cycle Sync episode marks the beginning of a brand-new creative arc. Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring how to work with each phase of the lunar and menstrual cycle to support and deepen your creative practice.

In this episode, Riva shares real-time reflections from her own bleeding time, including a spontaneous visit to a contemporary art museum, what she discovered reading Her Blood Is Gold, and how indigenous...

In this episode, Riva sits down with Laura Ambrosio, founder of Aspen & Elder, to talk about what it really takes to build community in a culture that often rewards isolation. Laura shares the personal story behind her work, including her own childhood experience of navigating shame and confusion after abuse, and how that search for safety and belonging eventually led her to years of travel and self-discovery. She opens up about the contrast between individualistic Western culture and the collective, reciprocal community she experienced abroad, and how that shaped her vision for Aspen & Elder.

The conversation moves...

The waning moon is here, and your body already knows it. In this final episode of our Cancer season self-care mini series, Riva explores the premenstrual phase through the lens of nervous system science, cyclical wisdom, and honest, practical self-care. If you've ever felt irritable, overstimulated, or just done during this time of the month, this episode will give you the language and the permission to understand why.

In this episode, you'll explore:

This week's Healing Her Story episode welcomes a guest whose work lives at the intersection of attachment, parenting, and generational healing.

Amanda Hill is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and founder of Connections of Hope. With nearly twenty years of experience as a psychotherapist, she has spent her career helping individuals and families create meaningful, lasting change.

But this carries profound wisdom about where so many of our adult relationship patterns actually begin.

Amanda opens up about her own experience growing up the fifth of six children in a loving but...

This week's Healing Her Story episode tunes into the energy of the full moon, landing on the rare day when the episode airs right alongside the actual peak.

As Cancer season continues, the focus for these Monday episodes remains on care. And today's invitations apply just as much to this full moon as they do to your inner summer, your ovulation time.

But this carries profound wisdom about how to work with peak energy rather than against it.

The full moon is a time of fullness. The light is...

This week's Healing Her Story episode opens a new cycle with a focus on care. What it costs. Who provides it. And why so many women are running on empty.

Riva revisits a conversation she started on the show last year, this time with a deeper understanding, not just intellectually, but in her own body and nervous system.

But this carries profound wisdom about what happens when an entire society fails to value the work that holds it together.

In this episode, Riva breaks down the staggering economic reality of unpaid...

This week's Healing Her Story episode tunes into the energy of the waxing moon and the follicular phase, one of the most tender and misunderstood windows of the cycle.

This is a transitional energy. Estrogen is rising. The light is returning. And so often, this is exactly where women push too hard too fast, burning out before they even reach ovulation.

But this carries profound wisdom about how to move through this phase with care instead of force.

In this episode, Riva explores what the waxing moon is actually for. Not...

This week's Healing Her Story episode welcomes a guest whose life refuses to fit inside a single box.

Dr. Tavina Lynn holds a PhD in Chemistry and teaches at Sacramento City College. She is also a writer, a dancer, a creative visionary. And for years, she believed she had to choose between these parts of herself.

But this carries profound wisdom about what becomes possible when we stop choosing.

Riva and Tavina met at a mural project, and the instant connection that followed set the stage for this conversation. In honor...

The new moon is here — and so is a new focus for our Cycle Sync episodes. This week, Riva introduces the themes of Cancer season as a guiding lens for the cycles ahead, with one central question at the heart of it all: how do we actually care for ourselves?

This episode is an invitation to move away from rigid, one-size-fits-all self-care and toward something more fluid, personal, and cyclically aware. Riva shares how the new moon and menstruating phase call us toward lower energy, inward focus, and genuine rest — and what it practically looks like to crea...

What happens when you spend your life navigating between worlds?

In this Gemini season conversation, I sit down with bestselling author, yoga therapist, and Ayurvedic practitioner Serena Arora to explore the complexities of identity, belonging, family legacy, and self-worth.

Drawing from her memoir, UNBOUND: An Immigrant Daughter's Journey of Reckoning, Unraveling Shame, and Reclaiming Her Worth, Serena shares her experience growing up as a biracial, first-generation immigrant in Canada and the unique challenges of living between cultures, expectations, and identities.

Together, we explore the concept of immigrant guilt, the often unspoken pressure many...

This week's Healing Her Story episode attunes to the energy of the waning moon --- one of the most misunderstood transitions in the lunar cycle.

Because this phase is not just about slowing down.

But this carries profound wisdom about what the waning moon is actually asking for -- and why it looks different for every woman.

In this episode, Riva explores the duality of the waning moon and luteal phase through the lens of Gemini season. This is a bridge phase. Not fully yang. Not fully yin. And...

This week's Healing Her Story episode explores something that doesn't get talked about enough in healing spaces.

Curiosity.

Not as a personality trait. As a biological necessity.

In this solo episode, Riva shares one of the most fundamental shifts she made in her own healing journey -- from relentless self-judgment to genuine curiosity. And why that shift changed everything. Not just emotionally. Biologically.

She opens up about the years she spent trying to force change. Meditating more, scrolling less, thinking more positively, losing weight -- all at...

This week's Healing Her Story episode explores one of the most complex and beautiful phases of the lunar cycle: the Full Moon.

And the conversation today is not just about releasing what no longer serves you.

It is about holding both.

But this carries profound wisdom about what the full moon is actually illuminating -- and why we move past the sweetest part too quickly.

In this episode, Riva explores the duality of the full moon through the lens of Gemini season. The fullness of this phase...

This week's Healing Her Story episode dives deep into one of the most empowering truths in healing:

Your brain can change.

If you have ever felt stuck in the same thought patterns, the same ways of being, the same old stories -- this episode is for you.

In this solo episode, Riva explores how all or nothing thinking creates friction in our lives and bodies, and why the female experience is far too nuanced to fit into a neat little box. She introduces the science of neuroplasticity — th...

This week's Healing Her Story episode explores one of the most misunderstood phases of the lunar and menstrual cycle: the waxing moon and inner spring.

Online, this phase gets painted as go-go-go. Maximum productivity. Intense workouts. Non-stop socializing.

But every time Riva pushed hard through her inner spring, she burned out before ovulation.

In this episode, she shares what a year of tracking and living in her own body taught her about what this phase is actually asking for. Yes there is action. Yes there is growth. And there is also...

What if the products we use every single day are quietly impacting our hormones, fertility, nervous systems, and the health of our planet?

In this grounded and eye-opening conversation, Riva sits down with Alisha, founder of Sacramento-based Nudge Eco Store, to explore the hidden impact of plastics, the realities of low-tox living, and why sustainable living doesn’t have to mean perfection.

Alisha shares the deeply personal story that led her to create Nudge after experiencing pregnancy losses and beginning to question the environmental toxins surrounding everyday life. Together, we explore the connection between plastics an...

In this week's Cycle Sync, Riva guides you into the tender, layered energy of the new moon in Taurus as we close the chapter of Taurus season and cross the threshold into Gemini season. Drawing on cyclical wisdom, menstrual cycle awareness, and the both/and philosophy at the heart of Gemini's dual nature, this episode invites you to honor what's beginning and what's ending — at the same time.

You'll explore why the new moon isn't only a beginning but also a sacred ending, how to work with the dance between resting and nesting, and practical rituals for cl...