EP 242: Arbitrary Intelligence - Tools, Limits, and the Willies of What's Coming with Stephen Jenkinson

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Dr. Ellen Vora, holistic psychiatrist, acupuncturist, yoga teacher, and author of The Anatomy of Anxiety, on the eve of her new book, Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist's Case for Magic. They begin with perception: how Ellen's credentials serve as a platform from which to question conventional medicine, and how loss, not training, is what gave her any authority of her own. Ellen explains why the title came to her in prayer, and why she expects criticism from both ends of the witchy spectrum. Speaking in the wake of the Lindsay Clancy trial, they look at how female life thresholds have been psychiatrized, what an unsupported postpartum mother actually needs, and why a prescription is often the only tool left in the room. Kimberly names the pattern of exceptions becoming rules across birth, fertility, and mental health. They turn to rites of passage and the communities that can sit with big emotions. They then turn to menopause, where Ellen offers her theory that menopausal symptoms borrow the body's postpartum software, and Kimberly describes her own transition as a portal of learning to see in the dark. They close on information overload, wearables and the atrophy of listening, Ellen's choice to join a national conversation on psychiatric medication, and what it means to stay purple. Bio Ellen Vora, MD, is a holistic psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher. She received her B.A. in English from Yale University and her M.D. from Columbia University, and she is board-certified in psychiatry and integrative holistic medicine. She takes a functional medicine approach to mental health, considering the whole person and addressing imbalance at the root, with a focus on depression, anxiety, insomnia, women's mental health, and medication withdrawal support. She is the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body's Fear Response, and of Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist's Case for Magic (Random House, October 2026), which offers five practices for reclaiming the full spectrum of our intelligence: embodiment, presence, valuing the yin, being open to mystery, and serving the collective. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. What She Shares Why her medical credentials exist so she can say "that's not the whole story"

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Dr. Vanessa Calderón, an emergency physician, master executive coach, and healer from a lineage of ancestral healers in Mexico and El Salvador. Introduced by an ER doctor Kimberly met on a flight, Vanessa traces her path from the five-year-old who dreamed of being a missionary doctor, through healthcare access activism and UCLA medical school, to the emergency room, where diagnoses like "abdominal pain, not otherwise specified" showed her the limits of Western medicine. She describes the voice that told her, mid-run on a Northern California beach, that it was time to come home, and the decade of apprenticeship with Latin American healers that followed. They talk about what med school does to the nervous system, the new language of well-being entering medical training, and the pain that told her to step away from the ER for a season. At the heart of the conversation is a practical question for anyone who listens to their body and still needs a doctor: how to advocate for yourself from regulation rather than fear. They close on rewilding, motherhood, Vanessa's vision of medicine built on power with rather than power over, and how the current framing of menopause reflects a broader shift in consciousness. Bio Dr. Vanessa Calderón is a Harvard graduate and board-certified emergency physician, a Master Executive Coach, and a Neuroplasticity Trainer with more than 20 years of leadership experience and a decade of business development expertise. A first-generation Latina from a long line of ancestral healers, she apprenticed directly with Indigenous healers of Mexico and Central America. Through Calderón Co., she coaches physicians, executives, and mission-driven leaders, weaving leadership and business strategy with nervous system work, identity work, and ancestral wisdom so they can create meaningful impact without sacrificing their health, relationships, or sense of self. She also leads Resourced Wealth, a six-week, healing-centered program on money, power, and capacity. She is the host of The Authentic Path podcast, which explores the intersection of leadership, performance science, and ancient wisdom. She continues to practice emergency medicine and lives in Atlanta with her family. What She Shares How a lineage of Mexican and Salvadoran healers, and a teenage rejection of them, led her into Western medicine

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer about the spiritual power of menopause. Pope and Wurlitzer are co-founders of Red School and authors of Wild Power and Wise Power. Each woman traces the turning point that led them to this work: for Alexandra, sudden and relentless menstrual pain at 31 and the decision to listen to her body; for Sjanie, seven years on hormonal contraception and the return of her cycle, which brought her inner life back online. Kimberly, two and a half years postmenopause, asks what women orbit once the menstrual cycle no longer guides them. They explore menopause as a great void and an initiation, the two "superpowers" of no and sight, the menstruality life arc as a turning of seasons, ego death and the dismantling of the psyche, and brain fog as the "decommissioning" of the mind. The conversation turns to what's missing culturally: elders and "secret teachers" who can dignify the passage, allies and listening partners, and a framing that doesn't pathologize. They close on choice, including the choice of medical support, as its own act of inner authority, and on Red School's October programming for Menopause Awareness Month. Bio Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer are the co-founders of Red School and pioneers of the emerging field of menstruality. They are the co-authors of Wild Power: Discover the Magic of the Menstrual Cycle and Awaken the Feminine Path to Power (Hay House, 2017) and Wise Power: Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause to Awaken Authority, Purpose and Belonging (Hay House, 2022), and the creators of the Menstruality Medicine Circle™. Drawing on backgrounds in psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, coaching, embodied movement, teaching, and facilitation, they teach a psycho-spiritual approach to health, creativity, leadership, and spiritual life rooted in menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. Alexandra, a psychotherapist, began this work in her early 30s, first sharing her discoveries in workshops at Sydney's Royal Hospital for Women. Together they have spent decades listening to thousands of women's experiences of the journey from menarche to menopause, and they teach worldwide through Red School's courses, trainings, and online events. What They Share How severe menstrual pain at 31 led Alexandra to listen to her body and begin the work that became Red School

Kimberly speaks with Carolina Mama: Argentine composer, singer-songwriter, filmmaker and photographer, calling in from Barcelona. They met in Santa Fe and worked together on the photographs for the Erotic Seasons era of Kimberly's work, and this conversation sits at the intersection of artistry, spirituality, liberation and social justice. Carolina traces her ear through the folkloric rhythms that lived in her body before she had names for them, to a full scholarship at the New School in New York and the research through Morocco that led to her debut album, Amina. They talk about making peace with being loved and hated at once, why the audience is a co-author rather than a jury, and the night at Lincoln Center when she understood that a version of herself had just died on stage. The second half provides a peek into the contemporary music industry: where artists are asked to arrive tour ready, audience ready, content ready and team ready with no infrastructure behind them. She speaks about arriving in the U.S. and discovering she was not white here, about gratitude alongside the loss of safety on a working visa, and about the Latina archetype the market keeps handing her, which she refuses. They close on synesthesia and the weave between film and music, on psychology as curiosity rather than analysis, on the trauma frame and what it costs art, on the surname she chose in order to honor her grandfather, and a long exchange about collaboration, elders, and what it means to be in service.

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Shafia Monroe, the renowned midwife, doula trainer, cultural historian, and author of Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing, with a foreword by Erykah Badu. Shafia begins with the inheritance she was raised on: a second-generation Boston Catholic mother who told her to burn the bra and not to stay anywhere she was unhappy, and a rural foot-washing Alabama father who turned an empty Boston lot into collard greens and turnips before anyone called it a community garden. From there the conversation follows the diasporic threads she has spent four decades tracing, from her father eating with his right hand to the Senegalese village where she watched women shape a newborn's head exactly as her mother had shaped her niece's. They talk about what enslavement broke in African-American postpartum culture and what was rebuilt after it: the lying-in, the warm soup, the darkened room, and a community that knew what to do without needing a book. Shafia lays out the history of the granny midwives, including the origin of the word granny itself. She and Kimberly work through the real difference between a doula and a midwife, why she trains in full circle rather than full spectrum, and why women are flock people whom Western birth deliberately separated. Shafia describes raising seven children inside the work rather than around it, and why the family that hired you has to come first. The conversation closes on money, policy, and fear: what makes birth work financially viable, what this country refuses to fund, and why she tells every woman and man she meets to stop fearing birth, to refuse the label of patient, and to trust a body that has been doing this since the beginning. Bio Shafia Monroe, MPH, is a renowned midwife, master doula trainer, cultural historian, author, and motivational speaker whose work has shaped birth and postpartum care for more than four decades. A leading subject matter expert on African American birth and postpartum traditions, she has researched the lives of twentieth century Black midwives and traveled to interview and observe them, learning traditional practices firsthand. In 1991 she founded the International Center for Traditional Childbearing, the first national nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of midwives and doulas of color and to promoting home birth in Black communities. In 2002 she created the SMC Full Circle Doula Birth Companion Training, a dual certification program built on the legacy of the twentieth century African American midwife, which has since trained thousands of birth workers worldwide. She is president of Shafia Monroe Consulting and Birthing CHANGE, which helps health care providers deliver culturally competent care. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including four lifetime achievement awards, and she was named by Scientific American in 2022 among those working to make health care more fair. Her book, Mothering the Mother: African American Postpartum Traditions, Recipes, and Healing, with a foreword by Erykah Badu, was published by Hachette Go. She draws on her Southern roots in rural Alabama, where her grandmother taught her that food is medicine. She is a mother of seven, a grandmother of nine, and a great-grandmother of two, and she lives in Portland, Oregon. What She Shares - The two worlds she was raised between: a Boston Catholic mother and a rural foot-washing Alabama father - Her father turning an empty Boston lot into a garden in the 1970s, before there was a name for it - Her mother on burning the bra, on equality at home, and on never staying where you are unhappy - Why her mother told her that what people do not want you to know is kept in a book - Diasporic recognitions: eating with the right hand, banku and cornbread, rainwater, and infant massage - Watching women in a Senegalese village do exactly what she had watched her mother do fifty years earlier - Bell