Wisdom Without The Guru

Certified Holistic Practitioner, Michelle Nermerich joins me from Canada to talk about identity, chronic pain, domestic abuse, and the healing practices that eventually became part of her work with others.

Michelle’s story moves through several major turning points:

Ashley Holmes, a holistic fertility coach whose work grew out of her own experience with grief, unexplained infertility, motherhood, yoga, Ayurveda, and nervous system healing, joins me this week.

Ashley grew up on a farm in a small Canadian town. After the sudden death of her older brother, her family life changed dramatically, and she later left Canada for New Zealand in search of a fresh start. That time abroad deepened her love of children and eventually led her to meet her husband.

Years later, Ashley and her husband faced unexplained infertility. She shares what...

Yoga therapist Mandy Mona speaks about family, faith, motherhood, body image, relationship strain, yoga therapy, pregnancy loss, and learning how to support yourself and others through difficult seasons of life.

Mandy shares how early losses in her family left her with questions about faith, God, and grief that she did not yet have the language to understand. She also reflects on growing up in a large, busy family, becoming a young mother, navigating a complicated relationship that later became her marriage, and learning how childhood experiences can follow people into adult relationships.

Yoga first entered...

Wellness coach Amanda Bearce joins me to talk about growing up with fear, instability, and a nervous system that never fully learned how to rest.

Amanda shares how her father’s severe mental health struggles shaped her childhood, including years of stalking, disrupted sleep, and a constant sense of uncertainty. She reflects on how those early experiences followed her into adolescence and adulthood — through school, relationships, anxiety, self-blame, and an abusive relationship that mirrored some of the instability she had known before.

We touch on Amanda’s healing process, including therapy, EMDR, an ADHD diagnosis, and he...

In this special episode, I welcome back Angela Jamieson to talk about her unusually titled book, Using No. 2 to Get to No. 1: The Shockingly Insightful, Full-of-Crap Self-Help Book.

Yes, the book really does connect poop and personal development — and, as Angela explains, that is exactly the point. Through humour, digestive metaphors, personal stories, and very relatable observations, Angela explores how letting go is not only something the body does but also something we often need to do, emotionally, mentally, and in the way we approach life.

Angela shares how the idea for the book first ap...

Author and creator of Relaxed Productivity, Angela Jamieson, joins me to speak about identity, culture, ambition, family history, grief, creativity, and what it means to redefine success.

Born in Canada to Chinese immigrant parents, Angela grew up between cultures, with family roots connected to the building of the Canadian railroad and prairie life in Saskatchewan. Her early love of maths, music, writing, and travel eventually led her into engineering — a career that took her from Canada to the Netherlands and Brunei, while raising children abroad and building a life across continents.

We explore:

In this special episode, I welcome back Megan Malick to discuss her book A New Path — a workbook and planner created to support people navigating grief while also managing the practical realities that follow the death of a loved one. 

After losing both of her parents within three months of each other, Megan found herself overwhelmed not only by grief, but by the paperwork, legal processes, financial accounts, and responsibilities involved in settling an estate. That experience led her to create a resource combining emotional support, grief education, practical tools, planning systems, and reflective exercises. 

The...

What do we actually mean when we talk about grief—and what happens when the beliefs that once grounded us begin to shift?

Megan Malick shares experiences from across her life that connect to different forms of grief—some recognised at the time, others only understood later.

From early disruption and loss of stability, to navigating bullying and coping responses in childhood, through to uncovering trauma in adulthood, changes in relationships, and the physical and emotional impact of infertility, her story moves through multiple moments where something changed, ended, or no longer felt the same.

In this episode, Debi Barr joins me to discuss her book The Call of the Sacred Rebel and the path that led her to write it.

We talk about how the book evolved over time—from early ideas during her corporate career to a later shift toward questioning expectations and choosing a different way of living. 

We begin with her earlier work on Reiki, where she shares her perspective that it’s not something you simply do, but something you live. That distinction carries through into this book and the way she approaches both her work...

Debi Barr describes herself as “feral at 50” — but that phrase only makes sense when you understand the path that led her there.

Raised in Northern Ireland in a strict religious environment, Debi learned early how to be the “good girl”: quiet, compliant, and careful not to disrupt the fragile emotional balance around her. Beneath that, she was already experiencing the world differently — sensing energy, questioning beliefs, and noticing things she couldn’t explain.

As she grew older, that part of her life was gradually set aside. She built what looked like a stable, successful life: career, marria...

In this compelling interview, Dr. Chris Nirvelorron shares their extraordinary journey from a strict Southern Baptist upbringing, academic struggles, and military service to discovering their spiritual calling and healing abilities. 

We explore themes of faith, resilience, healing, and overcoming adversity as Chris reveals how they navigated complex personal and professional challenges,  reflecting on early questions around belief, the role of community, and the realities of military life, including the mental and emotional impact that followed. The conversation also touches on identity, family, and the experience of building a life outside of expected structures.

Over time, ea...

A follow-up conversation with Tammie Vecchiarelli on her two guidebooks exploring chakras and psychic senses.

Tammie shares how the books were created, what they cover, and how they are designed to help people understand energy, intuition, and self-awareness through simple explanations and guided exercises.

The episode also includes reflections on personal experiences, questioning perception, and learning to interpret internal signals in a grounded way.

Key Takeaways

Tammie Vecchiarelli shares her experience of growing up through loss, family change, and career shifts, and how those experiences shaped her later decisions.

She talks about losing her grandmother at a young age, followed by her parents’ divorce and the transition into blended families. She reflects on taking on a protective role within her family and navigating those changes without much emotional support at the time.

After completing a degree in interior design, she worked in several roles before deciding to change direction. She moved into early childhood education, completed a master’s degree, and late...

Certified Gut Health Coach Karlee Close shares how her ongoing gut issues developed despite following common health advice — and why years of restrictive diets, supplements, and testing didn’t resolve the problem.

After growing up with convenience-based eating habits, Karlee carried similar patterns into university life, alongside stress, lack of sleep, and frequent illness. Over time, this progressed into daily bloating, pain, and recurring digestive symptoms that began to impact her work and daily routine.

What followed was a long period of trying to identify the cause through elimination diets, food sensitivity testing, SIBO protocols, cand...

What if fear isn’t something to push through—but something to understand?

Cori Myka shares how her early experiences with mistrust, fear, and childhood trauma shaped not only her relationship with water but also her understanding of how the body holds and responds to experience.

Despite initially resisting traditional swim instruction, Cori taught herself how to swim—and later built a swim school based on a completely different approach: one that prioritises nervous system regulation, trust, and individual pacing over performance.

The conversation moves beyond swimming.

It explores how fear is exp...

Samantha Stewartz’s story doesn’t follow a simple arc of struggle and recovery. It unfolds through years of internal conflict, self-destructive patterns, and moments that forced her to question everything she believed about herself.

Growing up in what appeared to be a stable household, Samantha nevertheless felt like an outsider in her own family. Early experiences with bullying and being labelled “the fat kid” shaped how she saw herself for years. By adolescence, those feelings deepened into loneliness, emotional eating, and thoughts of suicide following the death of the one person she felt truly understood by — her grandf...

What happens when the environment you grow up in leaves emotional patterns that follow you well into adulthood?

Tenya Eickenberg shares the story of growing up in a military family where frequent moves, family conflict, and a mother struggling with mental illness shaped her early life.

Tenya describes childhood experiences that included relocating across countries, separation from siblings, and living in a household marked by tension and unpredictability. As she entered adolescence, those early experiences showed up in ways she didn’t fully understand at the time — people-pleasing, hiding parts of herself, and searching for stab...

Michael Bugary, a former elite baseball player whose life shifted after injury, addiction, and serious illness changed his direction, reflects on growing up in a military family, finding structure and recognition through baseball, and progressing through college athletics into professional baseball. He speaks openly about prescription stimulant use, injury, and the end of his playing career.

Following his release from professional baseball, Michael describes cycles of substance use, repeated attempts to return to the sport, and a family intervention that led him into treatment. He later received a diagnosis of a rare adult brain cancer and underwent...

Natasha Randolph shares her experience of growing up with instability, neglect, and abuse, alongside the early emergence in childhood of an intuitive and sensory awareness she didn’t yet have language for.

Much of Natasha’s childhood was spent without consistent adult supervision. She describes being passed between caretakers, navigating bullying, food insecurity, and abuse, and learning early how to stay quiet, adapt, and rely on herself and her sister. At school, this showed up as a stutter, difficulties with reading, and periods of withdrawal that were often misunderstood.

During the same years, Natasha began expe...

Elizabeth Kipp returns for a focused conversation on her book The Way Through Chronic Pain: Tools to Reclaim Your Healing Power.

In this special episode, Elizabeth explains why she chose to write the book after being told she would never heal from chronic pain—and how the writing process itself became part of her ongoing recovery. Rather than focusing on memoir, the book explores the lived inner experience of chronic pain, the neurological stress patterns that sustain it, and the practical tools she used to interrupt those patterns. 

Elizabeth also discusses what she has...

What if chronic pain isn’t only physical?

In this episode, Elizabeth Kipp shares how she lived with chronic pain, anxiety, and panic attacks for over 40 years — including 32 years on prescription medication and multiple spinal surgeries — before finding a path to recovery.

But this episode is not just about back pain.

Elizabeth reframes chronic pain as a nervous system condition — one shaped by trauma, hypervigilance, stress response dysregulation, ancestral imprinting, and long-standing patterns in the brain.

Born into early trauma, raised in instability, and living through Cold War fear and family dysfunct...

What happens when the environment that raises you is also the source of harm?

In this episode I speak with Laverne Friesen, a former Canadian law enforcement officer who grew up in an ultra-conservative, closed religious community in rural Alberta. From early childhood, Laverne experienced violence, scapegoating, fear-based control, and profound betrayal — including sexual assault that was never properly addressed because the church insisted on “handling it internally.”

Laverne eventually left the community as a teenager and built a career in policing and emergency response. But the nervous system that grows up in chaos...

What does grief look like when it doesn’t follow the timeline people expect?
 
In this episode I speak with Maria Belanic, a certified grief educator whose life has been shaped by cultural identity, caregiving, and profound loss.

Maria shares what it was like growing up as a first-generation Italian immigrant in Canada, raised in a traditional household with strict gender expectations, silence around emotion, and the constant pressure to be “good” and “strong.”
 
Years later, those early experiences would echo through the most difficult chapter of her life: supporting her son Stefan through an 1...

In this episode, I speak with Mylira Green, a licensed clinical social worker, therapist, Reiki master, and advocate who bridges faith-based traditions with trauma-informed healing. This is a layered interview about faith, trauma, and healing beyond rigid frameworks.

Raised in a deeply religious household, Mylira shares how early childhood experiences—many of them unspoken, misunderstood, or silenced—shaped her relationship with love, safety, faith, and her own body. She reflects on growing up with strict religious values, navigating sexual development without language or guidance, and carrying long-held secrets that affected her mental health well into adol...

In this special mini-episode, I'm joined again by Antoinette Thompson to explore the creation of her Pain to Purpose Healing Oracle.

Born from lived experience rather than theory, the deck emerged through poetry, intuitive artwork, and years of personal healing. Antoinette shares how 14 poems—written over 18 months—became the foundation for 55 oracle cards, each reflecting a specific aspect of pain, healing, belief, shadow, and insight.

Rather than offering quick affirmations, this deck invites deep self-reflection. Antoinette explains how the cards are designed to speak directly to the subconscious, encouraging users to enga...

Childhood trauma and chronic illness can shape a life in ways that are rarely visible. In this episode, Antoinette Thompson shares how early sexual abuse, years of silence, and a diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis led her into survival mode — and eventually toward a slow, honest process of healing.

Antoinette reflects on growing up in a strict Catholic Maltese household in Australia, excelling in a corporate finance career before a workplace injury and chronic pain changed everything. Alongside physical illness, she carried unspoken trauma, family expectations, and the pressure to keep appearances intact.

After the deaths of...

In this episode, Ukrainian psychologist Kateryna Bikir shares the moments that shaped her before and after the 2022 Russian invasion — growing up with limited resources, the generations of trauma from war and conflicts, the realities she confronted as a young mother, and the choices she faced when safety could no longer be taken for granted.

We explore how she and her family faced sudden displacement after years of asking the question of "what if?" became reality, what it meant to restart life in unfamiliar countries, and how her work in mental health evolved through each stage. Th...

In this special episode, we are guided through a 20-minute meditation with returning guest Mindfulness Coach Carolina Gonzalez.

During this episode, Carolina will gently lead listeners through a self-compassion meditation designed to soothe the mind, soften the body, and nurture self-trust. Carolina begins with grounding through posture, the senses, and breath. She then guides you to offer appreciation and love to each part of your body —from the head and face to the arms, organs, and everything within —acknowledging all that they are and all that they hold. This is a gentle reminder that it’s okay to fee...

Stephanie Ann Webb grew up in conservative evangelical culture, surrounded by fear, control, and purity teachings that silenced curiosity. In this candid episode, I speak with Stephanie about the lifelong effects of religious trauma, binge eating, anxiety, and being a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). 

Through therapy, critical thinking, and mindful deconstruction, Stephanie began healing from fear-based faith and rebuilding self-trust. Together we explore how trauma lives in the body, why leaving the church can feel like both grief and freedom, and how spirituality can evolve into grounded self-connection, compassion, and peace.

Key Takeaways

Carolina Gonzalez’s journey crosses continents. In this conversation, we examine themes of inner strength, grief, motherhood, and personal growth. Carolina recounts her journey from a nurturing childhood in Venezuela to facing life's challenges in Australia, including the effects of cultural change, the complexities of motherhood, and the experiences of divorce, loss, and job burnout. The discussion emphasises the importance of mindfulness, self-discovery, and the courage to embrace change, ultimately underscoring the resilience of the human spirit in overcoming adversity.

Key Takeaways

In this special Breast Cancer Awareness Month episode, I reconnect with returning guest Veronika Bubenickova, whose new book Diary of a Soul Reborn grew out of private journals kept during her treatment.

Listeners first met Veronika in the episode "How Revolution, Migration, Career
Loss & Illness Redefined Who I Am," when she spoke about growing up in the Czech Republic and rebuilding life in the UK. This conversation continues her story of facing breast cancer and journalling her way through it. She wrote to manage fear, track her reactions to treatment, and find...

Grief coach Chris Mamone returns to Wisdom Without the Guru to talk about what genuine support looks like when someone is grieving. Drawing from his own experience after the loss of his son, and from conversations on his Empowered Grief Journey podcast, Chris tells us about how the wrong words can deepen pain, and how simple presence can heal.
 
This conversation spans a wide field: the difference between empathy and comparison, why men’s grief is often overlooked, the isolation that siblings feel when their loss is minimised, and how pet loss reveals unconditional love. Chris also sha...

What happens when every familiar structure in life—country, language, health, even career—shifts at once? In this conversation, Czech-born guest Veronika Bubenickova traces a life shaped by transition. From growing up during political upheaval to rebuilding from scratch in the UK, to facing a sudden breast cancer diagnosis at the height of professional success, her story unfolds as a continuous study in adaptation and self-understanding.

Veronika reflects on:

What happens when the life you built no longer fits — and then grief shatters the rest? In this episode, Regina sits down with Chris Mamone, who spent years navigating corporate sales, toxic workplaces, and the weight of being misunderstood. But everything shifted after the loss of his son, Caden. Chris opens up about:

Host Regina Sayer and psychic medium Tracy Fance unpack the Law of Attraction without the fluff. They explore why “think happy thoughts” isn’t enough, how unconscious self-talk cancels your requests, where karma and soul contracts fit in, and how to pair intention with action. You’ll hear real stories—from prayer circles and Dr. Emoto’s water experiment to manifesting good weather and even defusing bill anxiety—with a toolkit you can start using today.

What you’ll learn

Juliana Matye, a former social worker, adoptee, mother, and now a trauma-informed coach, shares her journey from a career in child protection and social services, through personal burnout and PTSD, to finding healing through somatic practices and coaching. Her story weaves together professional insight and lived experience, offering a grounded perspective on trauma, resilience, and the slow process of rebuilding purpose.

Listeners will hear about Juliana’s early life as an adoptee, her years on the frontlines of child welfare, the emotional toll of burnout, and how she came to embrace somatic work as both a...

In this special episode, Regina welcomes back psychic medium and tarot reader Tracy Fance for an in-depth conversation on discovering your life purpose.

Whether you’re questioning your career, relationships, or calling, this episode offers insights to help you re...

In this conversation, Regina sits down with Carl Morgan, an Australian ultramarathon runner, double decathlon athlete, business owner, and aspiring coach, whose childhood was shaped by violence, instability, and loneliness. Carl opens up about his early experiences with trauma, his years in foster care, how sports and endurance challenges gave him purpose, his struggles with addiction, and the pivotal accident that changed his path. Today, he’s focused on healing, building authentic connections, and guiding others through mindset, discipline, and purpose.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

In this episode, I welcome back psychic medium and tarot reader Tracy Fance for an in-depth exploration of the world of tarot. Tracy shares her personal journey with the cards, from struggling with decks that didn’t resonate to discovering the Rider-Waite system that truly spoke to her.

We look at common misconceptions about tarot, how to choose a deck that aligns with your energy, ways to connect with your cards, and how spirit guides work alongside readings. This conversation aims to give you both practical advice and spiritual insight into making tarot a powerful intuitive tool.

In this episode, I'm joined by Angela Fernandez, who shares her turbulent childhood, toxic relationships, low self-worth, coping with alcohol and drugs, and even time in jail.  Through plant medicine, therapy, counselling, and a spiritual awakening, she gradually discovered her gifts as a healer and guide. 

This is not a story of overnight change, but of steady, imperfect steps toward self-trust and a different way of living.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in old cycles or unsure how to move toward something gentler, Angela’s story offers company and perspective for the journey.

K...