EP 253: Season of the Witch – Inner Authority, Menopause as Initiation, and Learning to See in the Dark with Dr. Ellen Vora

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

In this episode, Kimberly speaks with Dr. Gertrude Lyons, a master coach, podcast host, and the author of Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust, about what it takes to notice you have gone missing from your own life. Dr. Gertrude describes the moment on a pilgrimage in Nepal, with her children in high school and college, when she burst into tears in front of a shaman and understood that despite years of coaching, study, and conscious parenting, she had lost herself somewhere inside motherhood. That recognition sent her back to school for a doctorate in education and eventually produced the framework the book is built on. Kimberly and Dr. Gertrude trace how the messages get in: the primal, unconscious conviction that rocking the boat will make everything fall apart, the ordering of children and spouse and career ahead of self, and the false pretense that there is a right way to do any of it. The conversation turns to the hero myth and what it has done to mother culture, the pressure to be exceptional rather than to be on a journey, and whether twenty years of increased awareness has actually shifted anything underneath. She then tells the story of her 2025 TEDx talk, which TED would not post until she removed the birth data: the maternal mortality figures, the history of midwives being pushed out by active marketing campaigns, and the observation that not all hospital birth practice is evidence based. Kimberly picks this up and runs with it, on how the people the system appears to serve are the least likely to see it clearly, on birth as an irreducibly bodily experience that has been siloed off from the rest of a woman's life, and on what it costs to be defanged from your own animal instinct. Bio Dr. Gertrude Lyons is a master coach, podcast host, and thought leader helping women rewrite outdated narratives around motherhood, identity, and self-worth. She is the author of Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust, A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood (Rise Books, 2025), which grew out of her doctoral research into the transformational opportunity inside motherhood and has since become the foundation of a broader body of work with women at every stage of that question. She holds an Ed.D. and an M.A. in Transformational Leadership and Coaching from Wright Graduate University, an M.A. in Psychology from Antioch University McGregor, and a BBA in Finance and Accounting from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. She is a Whole Brain Living certified coach and holds a Level 3 breathwork certification through the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance. She hosts the Rewrite the Mother Code podcast, delivered a 2025 TEDx talk titled Redefining Self-Mothering: The Courage to Mother Ourselves First, and has spoken at the Glastonbury Goddess Conference. Over more than twenty years she has worked with individuals, couples, parents, and families, and she now leads retreats in Mexico and Ireland, with a first retreat in Malta planned. Her home base is Chicago. She has two daughters. What Dr. Gertrude Shares The pilgrimage in Nepal, the shaman, and the moment she understood she had lost herself inside motherhood