Healing is F*ing Hard

No one sat us down and taught us what secure love looks like. Most of us didn’t grow up watching it either, so we learned to love the way the people around us loved, which was often the best they could do under conditions that were not designed to produce safety.This episode is about attachment, how the earliest relationships of our lives become the template through which we understand love, safety, and what we can expect from other people. We go into John Bowlby’s attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth’s four attachment styles, and why BIPOC family systems specifically produce attachment wounds that have nothing to do with how much our parents loved us and everything to do with what they were surviving. We also talk about parentification, the over-functioning patterns that develop when children take on caregiving responsibilities that belong to adults, and what earned security actually looks like for people who did not receive secure attachment in childhood.And yes, I get personal. Because I think there is something important in hearing a psychotherapist say that understanding your attachment wounds clinically does not make you immune to them.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

Tomorrow is Halloween. But before you grab the candy bowl, I need to tell you what this night actually is underneath all of that, because most people genuinely have no idea.This episode is about Samhain, pronounced SOW-in, the ancient Celtic festival that Halloween was built on top of, and about what Indigenous, West African, and Mesoamerican traditions have understood about this time of year for thousands of years, which is that the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest right now. I just came back from Mexico where I witnessed Dia de los Muertos in its homeland, and I want to talk about what it means to honor the dead with genuine reverence rather than plastic skeletons and jump scares.I also want to share something I have not said publicly before, about my dog Parker, the automatic writing I did before he passed where he communicated that he was between two planes and understood what was happening to him, and what it means to be a medium who still frequently does not feel like one even after trained mediums keep telling her to own it.We close with a somatic practice for connecting with your ancestors on the night the veil is thinnest. This one is for everyone who has been quietly receiving from the other side and quietly talking themselves out of it.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

I went to Teotihuacan for a spiritual retreat and did not get what I expected. I got something I needed more.This episode is the full honest account of six days on one of the most powerful sacred sites in the Americas, the psychometry workshop where I received 100% accurate hits on a stranger's phone, the sacred cave rebirthing where I heard beloved child you are loved, love yourself and cried and breathed and felt my third eye activate, crawling through tunnels beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent that are not open to the public, the full body freeze of awe I experienced behind a temple I later learned was built for the mother of Don Miguel Ruiz, the smoke cleanse and limpia I received from local healers because I wanted my healing to come from the people whose lineage is rooted in that soil, and what it felt like to come home knowing in my bones that I am not meant for everyone and that this is not a loss but a liberation.The owner of the property where I stayed told me my energy is sweet like honey and that I need to pour into myself. I came home and took myself on a solo date. This episode is about what sacred land gives you when you approach it with genuine respect and genuine openness.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

When I was a child I discovered that if I said the words nothing is real, something would happen. A swooshing sensation, everything would begin to spin gently, and the volume of the world around me would turn down until what had been unbearable became distant and manageable. I did not know I was dissociating. I just knew I had a way out. This episode covers the full clinical spectrum of dissociation from highway hypnosis to structural dissociation, why it is so prevalent in BIPOC communities, why it gets called spacey or reserved or rude instead of what it actually is, and why the healing is not about eliminating the capacity but developing choice around it. We also talk about what a rich inner world actually looks like from the inside and why it deserves a more nuanced conversation than pathology. Somatic grounding practice included.

For most of my life I did not understand what a boundary was. What I understood was yes, because yes was how I felt accepted, how I made myself valuable, how I ensured I would be needed, which felt like the closest available approximation of being wanted. This episode is about how that pattern gets born, what it looks like in the workplace and in romantic relationships, and why BIPOC families specifically often have no blueprint for boundaries because collective survival required everyone to be available to everyone else. We go into the clinical framework of enmeshment, what healthy limits actually are and how to begin building them, and why a relationship built on the suppression of your truth is not intimacy. Somatic breathwork practice included.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

The trees do not struggle to let go. They simply respond to what the season is asking, and their roots grow deeper in the process. This episode uses autumn as a clinical and spiritual framework for understanding what the nervous system actually needs to release what it has been holding past its season, whether that is grief that never got to move, versions of ourselves that belong to a previous chapter, or the accumulated weight of navigating systems that were never built for us. We go into Peter Levine's somatic research on incomplete stress cycles, why the body holds what the mind has already processed, and what genuine release actually requires. Somatic breathwork practice included.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

This is the final episode of September's meditation series and it is about integration, which is different from summary. A summary tells you what happened. Integration lets what happened actually land in the body as something you carry forward rather than something you listened to and left behind.We close the series by returning to everything September opened, the root and the anchor, the heart and the expanding love, the ember and the inner knowing, and weaving it into one final practice that moves through all of it as a reminder rather than a beginning. The thread connecting every episode this month has been the same thing Ram Dass spent his whole life pointing toward: you already know. The practice is not giving you something new. It is returning you to something you have always had access to.We also spend time this week on how to build a practice that actually fits your real life, not the ideal version of your life but the actual one, drawing on Dr. Shelly Harrell's work on culturally responsive mindfulness and why a sustainable contemplative practice for BIPOC people needs to acknowledge systemic stress as real and external rather than asking you to simply breathe through it as though it originated inside you. October is coming. Carry September with you.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

There is a meditation called Sit Around the Fire by Jon Hopkins featuring Ram Dass that I have been returning to for years, and today I want to unpack what it actually means, section by section, in the most honest and clinical and spiritual way I know how. Ram Dass spent his entire life pointing people toward what they already knew, and this meditation is the clearest expression of that teaching I have ever encountered.We move through the polarities opening, the inner temple, the expanding love practice, and the ember passage, which I believe is one of the most important things Ram Dass ever said publicly about what healing actually looks like in its most honest form. We close with guided breathwork over the Shruti box, holding the ember image as we breathe.For the full Jon Hopkins musical experience, find Sit Around the Fire on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4kCi_ldr8&list=RD3G4kCi_ldr8&start_radio=1Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

The heart has been keeping you alive through everything. Through every hard season, every loss, every moment you were not sure you would make it through. Today's meditation starts there, with gratitude for the heart that stayed, and then moves into the practice of expanding love outward from whatever you can already love without effort, filling the room, the home, reaching the mountains in the east and the water in the west.We open with research from the HeartMath Institute on the heart's electromagnetic field and what heart coherence actually does physically, alongside Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé's research on how emotional suppression specifically affects Black women's cardiovascular health. Then we drop into the guided practice with live crystal singing bowls and five rounds of intentional breathwork over the Shruti box.This one is for every heart that has been giving more than it has been receiving.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co

September is meditation month on Healing is F*ing Hard, and we are starting at the root because you cannot expand upward into anything without first being anchored downward into the earth. This first meditation episode opens with research on what consistent meditation practice actually does to the brain and body, drawing on neuroscience from Harvard's Sara Lazar, Jon Kabat-Zinn's MBSR findings, and Dr. Cheryl Woods-Giscombé's research on the Superwoman Schema and the specific toll that chronic emotional suppression takes on Black women's nervous systems and cardiovascular health.Then we drop into the practice itself, a full chakra journey from the soles of the feet down to Mother Earth's core, drawing healing light slowly upward through the root, the sacral, the solar plexus, the heart expanding outward to fill the room and the home and all the way to the mountains in the east and the water in the west, the throat, the third eye, and the crown blossoming into the cosmos. Accompanied by live crystal singing bowls and closing with five rounds of intentional breathwork over the Shruti box.This one is for every nervous system that has been running too hard for too long and needs to remember what it feels like to be held by the earth.Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson.Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co