Odyssey & Alchemy: Conversations on Spirituality, Psychology & Inner Transformation

What happens to your body when grief goes unprocessed? In this powerful episode of the Odyssey and Alchemy Podcast, host Martin Prihoda sits down with holistic health practitioner, author, and regenerative wellness coach Julie Brar to explore the profound connection between emotional trauma, autoimmune disease, and the body's innate ability to heal.

After losing her husband suddenly to a heart attack in 2012, Julie's body began breaking down — she was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto's disease, gained 50 pounds, battled chronic pain, brain fog, and depression. The medical system told her this was her life now. She refused to ac...

What if your body already knows how to heal — and the only thing standing between you and wholeness is the courage to slow down and listen? Julia Gabrielle is a Registered Clinical Counsellor based on Salt Spring Island, BC, whose practice weaves together somatic therapy, Hakomi, mindfulness-based counselling, attachment theory, and transpersonal psychology. She specialises in life transitions, grief, anxiety, and the quiet but radical work of helping people reconnect with what she calls their blueprint for health within.

In this conversation, Martin and Julia explore the body as the primary site of healing — and what becomes poss...

What does it mean to heal in a way that reconnects you — not just to yourself, but to the living world around you? Meghan Taia Jacobson is a ceremonialist, psilocybin facilitator, spiritual counsellor, and PhD student in East-West Psychology.

Trained at Naropa, Esalen, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, and deeply rooted in Amazonian shamanic tradition and the Santo Daime lineage, Taia has spent decades holding space for transformation at the intersection of plant medicine, indigenous wisdom, and ecological spirituality.

In this episode, Martin and Taia explore how psilocybin and ay...

What if midlife isn't a crisis — but an invitation? Michael Talbot-Kelly is a narrative psychologist, counsellor and men's inner work guide who has spent decades helping men rewrite the stories that are quietly running their lives. In this conversation Martin and Michael explore the Johnny story — a man who went from psychiatric ward to PhD and what that reveals about human resilience — the difference between the story you inherited and the story you actually want to live, why so many men hit 40 and feel like strangers in their own lives, the concept of soul stitching mind and body back togeth...

In this episode Martin sits down with Marcia Burton — Senior Hakomi Trainer, Registered Clinical Counsellor and Certified Teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion — for one of the most quietly powerful conversations the show has produced.

Marcia has spent 25 years doing some of the most important and least celebrated work in human healing. She trained directly with Ron Kurtz, the creator of Hakomi, until his death in 2011, and has built her entire practice on Salt Spring Island, BC — working with people in grief, crisis, trauma and terminal illness.

In this conversation they explore what Hakomi actually is and how it...

Satyen Raja has spent 40 years living at the intersection of warrior and sage — as a Kung Fu master, spiritual teacher and founder of WarriorSage, a global movement that has transformed over 100,000 people across 50 countries. His name means Truth in Sanskrit. This conversation lives up to it. Martin and Satyen explore what it means to move beyond peak performance into peak existence, why testosterone and masculine energy are under attack in modern society, how men can reclaim their purpose when life feels overwhelming, and what happens when powerful people abdicate their spirit for success. The rapid fire section at the en...

Eoin Finn is one of Canada's most celebrated yoga teachers and movement philosophers — founder of Blissology, author of the newly released Yoga Optimized, and a man who has spent 35 years bridging the science of the body with the wisdom of the soul.

In this conversation, Martin and Eoin explore what yoga actually is beyond flexibility and shapes, how our emotions live in our bodies and create physical tension, why vulnerability is the gateway to authenticity, and what it means to build a life of genuine bliss when things are hard. Eoin shares the injury that br...

James Cameron didn't want a song at the end of Titanic. Robert Kraft helped change his mind.

Robert Kraft is one of Hollywood's most storied music executives — an award-winning composer, producer, and the former President of Fox Music. Over a remarkable career spanning four decades, he helped shape some of the most beloved soundtracks in cinema history: The Little Mermaid, Titanic, Avatar, The Mambo Kings, Ice Storm, Life of Pi, and many more. He also launched Jim Henson Records, worked alongside Ang Lee and Chris Columbus, produced Seth MacFarlane's most absurd passion project, and somehow en...

What if the path to healing after the worst thing imaginable ran straight through the person who caused it?

Aaron Lyons has spent over 20 years guiding some of the most painful conversations a human being can have — between murder victims' families and the people responsible, between communities torn apart by violence, between Israeli and Palestinian youth who grew up seeing each other as the enemy. He's a director at Just Outcomes Consulting and one of Canada's leading voices in restorative justice and peace building.

In this episode, Aaron and Martin go de...

Most of us try to parent from our heads. Clara Roberts-Oss teaches from the body.

A Vancouver-based Vinyasa Flow master trained under the legendary Shiva Rea, Clara has spent decades exploring how yoga's ancient wisdom applies to the messiest, most humbling job there is — raising children consciously.

In this episode, Martin and Clara go deep on what it means to respond rather than react — in parenting, in relationships, and in a world moving faster than any of us signed up for. They explore the philosophy of tapas (discipline without rigidity), the body as a in...

Jason Jacobson built My Yoga Online from nothing, sold it to Gaia, wrote a book called Strategic Instinct, and is now building an AI company. He also tried stand-up comedy. Not everything worked. That's kind of the point.

This episode is about what it takes to bet on yourself — repeatedly, and often irrationally — and what separates people who move through fear from those who get stuck in it. Jason and Martin have history, and it shows: this conversation has the ease and honesty of two old friends who've both taken the long road.

This is not a typical wellness conversation.

Will Blunderfield is a Vancouver yogi, musician, and men's rewilding guide with a UBC psychology degree and certifications from Mantak Chia and Gabor Maté. He's led naked yoga workshops. He teaches sexual kung fu. He believes most men are leaking their life force — and he has some very specific ideas about how to stop.

In this episode, Will and Martin go into territory most podcasts won't: semen retention, the microcosmic orbit, Kundalini energy, and the cultural forces — xenoestrogens, circumcision trauma, the feminization of masculine cultu...

Joel Laforet has been coaching bodies and minds for 28 years. He founded Awaken Yoga. He's built a garage gym. He's seven years sober. And he recorded this conversation fresh off a kettlebell hike up Mount Erskine.

This is not a polished interview. It's a real conversation between two men trying to figure out what it means to be strong and soft — to train hard and sit still — to be a father, a partner, and a person still very much in progress.

Joel talks honestly about early fatherhood at 21, the years he wasn...

Something is happening to men's health — and most doctors aren't talking about it.

Dr. Rigobert Kefferputz is a naturopath who has spent his career asking the questions conventional medicine tends to skip: Why is testosterone declining across generations? What does the absence of fathers do to the body? How does the nervous system hold onto trauma that supplements can't touch?

In this wide-ranging first episode, Martin and Dr. Rigo cover everything from gut health and adaptogens to breathwork, Candida, SIBO, and the quiet epidemic of men who are physically alive but sp...