Épisodes

  • Goddess in Training | Episode 48

    Goddess in Training | Episode 48
    Jun 10 2026

    About this episode: One year ago this week, Sarah launched Goddess in Training with three episodes, a brand new set of skills, and a pull she couldn’t explain. This week she marks the anniversary not with a polished retrospective but with something rawer — a solo reflection on what 47 episodes, a new job, a new relationship, and a season of creative resistance have quietly been teaching her.

    Topics covered include the paradox of flow and structure, love as the connective tissue between all things seen and unseen, what her first three episodes were really about, plant medicine as a portal through emotion, coaching and the realization that we already hold what we’re seeking, and why an unmowed patch of lawn might be the whole point.

    Episodes referenced:

    * Episode 1 — Emmanuel on relationships and intuition

    * Episode 2 — Deborah Collins on intuition in the workplace

    * Episode 3 — Mage Marigold on mediumship

    * Jillie Clark — angelic channeler

    * Prashanthi — on paradox

    Connect with Sarah: Website | Substack | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube

    🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.

    If you’re new to this podcast, welcome. Go back into the catalog and find whatever title catches your eye. There’s no order, no required sequence. Just people who wanted the best for each other, sharing what they’ve found.

    And if you’ve been here from the beginning: you’ve watched me live what I’ve been preaching. Which is messier and more real than I planned.

    Thank you for being here.

    Sarah Stevenson is a transition doula, plant medicine facilitator, and host of Goddess in Training. She lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

    If this essay moved you, consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a cacao — it keeps this work alive.



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    29 min
  • What If Fear Is the Diagnosis?

    What If Fear Is the Diagnosis?
    May 20 2026
    Show NotesGuest: Leah Reynolds | Functional Nutritional Therapist, Certified EFT & Matrix Reimprinting Practitioner, German New Medicine Practitioner, Root-Cause Health CoachConnect with Leah: Website | Instagram | FacebookTopics covered: German New Medicine, fear as the root of disease, Takotsubo (heartbreak) syndrome, the mind-body connection, biological conflict shock, EFT tapping, plant medicine and neural pathway rewiring, reclaiming your power from the medical system🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.I have spent most of my life being afraid of things I couldn’t name.Not sharp, obvious fear. The other kind. The low hum underneath everything. The fear of not being enough. Of not being taken care of. Of needing someone and discovering, again, that they aren’t really there.I didn’t call it fear. I called it being independent. I called it I’ve got this.But the body keeps score. And mine had been keeping score for a long time.Last summer in Costa Rica, a bug bite became necrotizing fasciitis. Two weeks in a San Jose hospital. Surgery. Doctors drawing circles on my leg. And somewhere in that stillness, I saw clearly: the person beside me was physically present and emotionally absent. I had been pretending that was fine — because I had always been the one who was fine.The body, it turns out, had a different opinion.This week on Goddess in Training, I talked with Leah Reynolds of Mind Your Health Wellness. Leah was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in 2012 and went through conventional treatment while simultaneously rebuilding her life on a completely different foundation. Then she received a second diagnosis: Takotsubo syndrome. Heartbreak syndrome. An unresolved grief had manifested as literal cardiac failure.That was the moment everything shifted. If I can create this, I can uncreate this. Sit with that sentence.In German New Medicine, developed by Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer, every disease process begins with a biological conflict shock — an unexpected, isolating event for which we have no strategy. The body responds not with malfunction but with a biological program designed to adapt and survive. Where it manifests depends on how you interpret the shock. Two people nearly get hit by a car. One freezes in terror; one flips off the driver. Same event. Different organs potentially affected. Different programs initiated.Leah asked the question I keep turning over: if twenty people live in identical conditions and they all get sick, why do they all get something different? Why breast cancer and not lung cancer? Why the gut and not the skin?There has to be something that tips the scale. And underneath that tipping point, so often, is fear. Anita Moorjani, who survived a near-death experience after late-stage lymphoma, said it directly when Leah asked: fear. Bernie Siegel, the mind-body pioneer and Leah’s dear collaborator at 93, says the same. The unlived life. The marriage you stay in. The self you keep shrinking. These things erode us — not metaphorically. Literally.What plant medicine did for both of us, in different ways, was remove fear long enough to feel what we were without it. Leah describes her joy going from zero to two thousand after San Pedro ceremony. Neural pathways not slowly rewired but directly, viscerally reset. She’s not prescribing it for everyone — the container matters enormously — but for her it was the proof of concept she needed to stop being afraid to live.That’s what this whole conversation kept returning to: the fear of death as the engine underneath so much of what makes us sick. And the radical possibility that when we stop fearing death, we finally remember how to live — and the body, taking its cues from exactly that, begins to follow.We’re all dying every day, Leah reminded me. It’s what you do with the time you’re here.Find Leah at mindyourhealthwellness.com and on Instagram and Facebook. She is currently writing The Little Girl on the Porch, rooted in the belief that childhood emotional experience and adult onset illness are one continuous story.If this landed somewhere in you, please leave a comment — I read every one.With love, SarahInvocation: Hygieia — goddess not of cure, but of care. Of the daily tending. Of the understanding that healing is not the exception. It is what we are made for.Goddess in Training is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Goddess in Training at goddessintraining.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 h et 7 min
  • When the Parachute Explodes, That's the Magic

    When the Parachute Explodes, That's the Magic
    May 6 2026

    Guest: Maritza Schäfer, Founder of Bruja School & Creator of the Liberation Magic Method

    Connect with Maritza: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Newsletter

    In this episode we explore:

    * Why manifestation culture is incomplete — and what’s actually missing

    * Magic as the craft of transforming reality, not wishful thinking

    * The three axioms of liberation magic

    * Why witches have been vilified throughout history, and why that’s not a coincidence

    * The connection between personal transformation and systemic change

    * Liberation as an inside job — but never a solo path

    * How paradox is the organizing principle of life, not just a feature of it

    🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa. Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.

    I have a confession.

    I use the word magic all the time. I always have. But for a long time, I said it a little quietly. Like it was something I believed in the way you believe in a dream you’re not quite ready to say out loud — hedging it with manifestation or intention or energy when I was in certain company. Using the safer words. The ones that come with a neuroscientific footnote attached.

    My conversation with Maritza Schäfer shifted something in me.

    Maritza grew up in Chile in a family of witches. Her grandmother initiated her into brujería. Magic wasn’t a belief system she adopted or a practice she found later in life during some searching season — it was simply the air she breathed. The sky-is-blue fact of her childhood. And when she moved to the United States at 18, she encountered something she genuinely hadn’t anticipated: a world that had forgotten how to work with the unseen.

    She told me she looked around and thought, oh, you poor babies.

    I laughed when she said it. And then I felt it land somewhere true.

    Because here’s what I’ve been sitting with since our conversation ended: we have not been taught to work magic. We’ve been taught to produce. To optimize. To measure outcomes and justify every expenditure of energy with a legible result. And somewhere inside that system, we learned to distrust anything we couldn’t explain — including ourselves.



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    53 min
  • The Costa Rica Project:

    The Costa Rica Project:
    Apr 22 2026

    Show Notes

    Host: Sarah Stevenson, Goddess in Training

    Episode type: Solo

    Topics covered: Trusting intuition when outcomes are uncertain · the Costa Rica project · necrotizing fasciitis and the stop that changed everything · sitting in liminal space · what divinely inspired energy is actually for · the energy you spend is never wasted

    🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.

    When Divinely Inspired Things Don’t Work Out

    There’s a foundation being poured in Costa Rica this week.

    Concrete and rebar going into the ground on a piece of land I helped bring to life — a project that arrived the way the best things do: suddenly, fully, like it was always meant to be mine.

    For over two years I poured everything into that vision. Time, money, heart. A romance. A business. Trips every two to three months. The kind of momentum that doesn’t feel like effort because something larger is doing the pulling.

    And then my body stopped me.

    Necrotizing fasciitis. Two weeks in a hospital. Surgery. And somewhere in all of that, the energy I’d carried for that project — the vibration, the life-giving excitement — quietly dissolved.

    I came home and ended the romance. I stopped going back. And I sat with the question I couldn’t shake:

    If it was divinely inspired, why didn’t it work out?

    That’s what this week’s episode is about. Not a tidy answer — but the honest, ongoing work of a transition doula sitting with herself in a liminal space. What does it mean when something that felt so real, so full of divine momentum, shifts? Does it shake your trust in your intuition? Does it make you question the guidance you thought you were receiving?

    I don’t think the energy was wasted. I think it was tuition.

    And I’m beginning to see what it was actually preparing me for.

    If you have your own “Costa Rica” — something that moved you, fueled you, and then stopped — this episode is for you.

    Goddess in Training is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.



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    25 min
  • He Died Twice and Came Back Louder

    He Died Twice and Came Back Louder
    Apr 15 2026
    Guest: Dorian Slay — pop artist, leukemia survivor, witch Connect with Dorian: Spotify | Apple Music | Instagram | YouTube🎵 New album: In My Villain Era — available May 1, 2026 on all major streaming platformsTopics covered: Surviving acute myeloid leukemia and two near-death experiences, bone marrow transplant from a perfect-match donor in Wales, the ghost of a little girl named Jocelyn, witchcraft as a lifeline, making Ascension as a ritual of return, gaslighting and reclaiming your narrative, embracing your villain era, Beltane as a release date, upcoming music and LA plans🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.THE VILLAIN WHO CAME BACK TO LIFEThere’s a moment in this week’s conversation where Josh — who performs as Dorian Slay — is describing the second time he died. He’s wandering a hospital hallway with a little girl in a Dorothy costume named Jocelyn, annoyed that the floor they’re on is boring and suggesting they check out the mental ward instead. He has an IV pole. He does not yet know he is dead.That is who Josh is. Even in death, he was looking for a better party.I met Josh when I first moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains, when I wandered into a witchcraft class he was teaching — protection spells — and we became fast friends. So when he told me he was recording music, it landed as exactly right. Everything about Josh is a spell.The Road to AscensionJosh was living in Houston when he got sick. What felt like the flu turned out to be acute myeloid leukemia. By the time a neighbor found him, unresponsive on the floor, his hemoglobin was 1.8. He was airlifted, pronounced dead, placed in a medical coma. His soul, by his account and his partner’s, remained very much present in the apartment — crying in front of the mirror, not because he was dead, but because his skin was breaking out.First word out of intubation: Starbucks.The bone marrow transplant that followed brought its own near-death experience, its own ghost (ruby slippers in a cabinet, tags still on, dust an inch thick), and the slow work of relearning to walk. Twice. His debut album Ascension emerged from all of it — ethereal, witchy, released on a full moon in August 2025.Enter the VillainIn My Villain Era, arriving May 1st on Beltane, was forged in the aftermath of a relationship that left him questioning his own perception of reality.“I’m at a point now where I’m okay with being the villain in somebody’s story,” he told me. “They’re a clown in mine.”So many of us navigating midlife, the dissolution of relationships, the slow work of reclaiming our own narrative, have had to find our way to exactly that place — the moment you stop trying to control someone else’s version of you and return to your own knowing. Josh got there and made a dance album about it.The sound has evolved from the atmospheric shimmer of Ascension into something more cinematic — what he describes as what you’d get if Lady Gaga and The Weeknd had a gay baby. The songs include Villain, Spite, Misbehaving, and Peanut Butter and Jelly, which is about being dirty in the kitchen and which his mother has not yet fully heard.Songs Are SpellsWhen I asked whether he’d ever used actual spell language in his lyrics, he laughed and said songs and spells aren’t so different. Both are intentional. Both call something forward. Both carry a frequency that lands in the body before the mind catches up.Ascension was a spell for return. In My Villain Era is a spell for liberation.Near the end of our conversation, he said: “Coming back from the dead twice really changes your outlook. Life is precious. Never take it for granted. Always tell the people you love that you love them.”And then: “I know that doesn’t sound very villain of me.”It doesn’t, Josh. But I think that’s the whole point.If this episode moved you, share it with someone in their own era of reclamation. And if you want to support the work here at Goddess in Training become a paid subscriber as energy exchange. Either way, I’m so glad you’re here.Goddess in Training is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Goddess in Training! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Goddess in Training at goddessintraining.substack.com/subscribe
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    42 min
  • The Layer Underneath

    The Layer Underneath
    Apr 8 2026
    Guest: Juliana Sloane — hypnotherapist, depth hypnosis practitioner, shamanic counselor, and Buddhist meditation teacherConnect with Juliana: Website | Meditation Classes & Retreats | Guided Meditations on Insight Timer | Instagram🌿 April 30–May 3 — Women's Glamping Retreat in Northern California: Deep Rest RetreatTopics covered: Depth hypnosis, shamanic journey work, plant medicine integration, Buddhist practice, silent retreat, anxiety, trance states, evidence-based healing, spiritual emergence🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.There is a version of healing most of us know well. You talk. You trace the thread. You gain insight into why you are the way you are. And the insight is real — it matters. But sometimes you get back in the car, drive home, and the pattern is still there. You understand it now. But understanding hasn’t moved it.This is exactly where my conversation with Juliana Sloane begins.Juliana works in the space beneath conscious thought — through depth hypnosis, shamanic journey work, and Buddhist meditation. She calls her approach evidence-based magic, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that phrase. These are ancient practices now being studied in fMRI machines and controlled trials, and researchers keep finding what the lineages have always known: they reach something talk-based approaches often circle around without ever quite touching.It’s said that 95% of our habits and beliefs are subconscious. We wouldn’t build a house with only 5% of our tools. But that’s more or less how most of us approach healing.What struck me most in this conversation was how Juliana described the role of silence — of actually stopping. She referenced a 2009 study showing Americans were already consuming the equivalent of a quarter of War and Peace daily in information, before smartphones, before the scroll. Her teacher once told her before a two-month retreat: you don’t know what will happen in your life. This may be the only time you can sit like this. She took that advice. It changed everything.So many of us are running fast precisely because stopping feels dangerous. But as Juliana said so gently — the pause isn’t standing between you and your healing. The pause is the healing.We also ended somewhere unexpected: a real conversation about the world right now. Juliana brought in the Buddhist understanding that this human realm needs just the right balance of suffering and joy — enough friction to keep us motivated to wake up. And then she said quietly: I wonder if the balance has tipped. She’s not someone who traffics in despair. But she’s not someone who looks away either. Her answer kept returning to the personal — our own healing, our own practice, our own commitment to being a compassionate presence from wherever we stand.We are on a ride right now, she said. This is serious business. And also: there is still hope.Both things are true. That is, perhaps, its own kind of evidence-based magic.You can find Juliana at julianasloane.com. Her meditation classes are largely donation-based and available online. And if a few days of silence in nature is calling you, her April 30–May 3 Women’s Glamping Retreat in Northern California might be exactly what your nervous system needs. Find her guided meditations on Insight Timer and follow her on Instagram.If this conversation moved something in you, I’d love to know. And if you’ve been finding value in this space, consider becoming a paid subscriber or leaving a one-time cacao offering as energy exchange. It keeps this work alive.With love, SarahGoddess in Training is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Goddess in Training at goddessintraining.substack.com/subscribe
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    47 min
  • When the Coherence Is Gone, You Know

    When the Coherence Is Gone, You Know
    Apr 1 2026

    Guest: Mage Marigold, Psychic Medium, Music Therapist & Spiritual Mentor

    Connect with Mage: Website | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

    Topics covered: Divine partnership, love and relationships, travel as transformation, embodiment, spiritual bypassing, new relationship energy, intuition, Costa Rica retreat

    🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com 🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.

    When We’re Together, Something Always Alchemizes

    There’s something that happens when Mage and I are in the same room. Every time we come together, something in our lives moves. Something that had been waiting just beneath the surface finally breaks through.

    Costa Rica: Mage finds love in an airport coffee stand four hours after writing in her journal that she’s done looking. I realize, somewhere between the humidity and the hospital, that my own relationship has quietly come to an end. Halloween: we’re together again, and her relationship hits a real turning point. The very next day, someone new walks into my life.

    I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that’s what happens when two people committed to their own becoming keep showing up for each other.

    This episode is really about love. How our understanding of it keeps evolving — and how the body always knows before the mind catches up.

    I used to think divine connection meant the one. I hold that much more loosely now. What I’ve landed on instead is this: every person we love intimately is a mirror. Some mirrors show us what needs to heal. Some show us what we’re capable of becoming. And some grow alongside us into something neither person could have reached alone.

    The gift of my last relationship was learning what safety actually feels like in my body. Not as a concept — as a physical, unmistakable sense of coherence. And once I knew that, I could also feel clearly when it was gone. That’s what ended it. No fight, no betrayal. Just a quiet body-level knowing. And because I could generate that feeling from the inside, I didn’t need to chase it from the outside anymore.

    Mage’s journey has been its own kind of beautiful — a long-distance relationship built slowly across countries and insecurities, without the intoxicating rush of new relationship energy. Something more rooted. And she’d tell you that distinction turned out to matter more than she expected.

    We also get into new relationship energy itself — what role it actually plays, whether a relationship can succeed without it, and why it can be as dangerous as it is delicious. And we talk about the difference between real integration and spiritual bypassing: using our tools to skip the part where we actually feel what happened.

    You can’t think your way out of it. You can only feel your way through.

    If Costa Rica has been calling you, Mage and I have a retreat in the works. It’s all planned — we just need you. Reach out if you’re curious.

    Goddess in Training publishes every Wednesday. Essays drop on Mondays and Fridays. If this resonated, share it with someone in the middle of her own becoming.



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    45 min
  • Unlearn, Redefine, Nourish

    Unlearn, Redefine, Nourish
    Mar 25 2026
    Guest: Mihaela Telecan, Functional Nutritionist & Author of Make Peace with FatConnect with Mihaela: Website | Substack | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeBook: Make Peace with FatVideo: Lymphatic tappingTopics covered: Ancestral & traditional nutrition, functional aging, metabolic health, glucose monitoring, adrenal health, fasting, intuitive eating, mindset, the C.U.R.E. framework🎵 Music credit: Madre Ayahuasca by ArkawaUsed with permission. More at arkawamusic.com🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.What Your Body Already Knew Before the Food Industry Told You OtherwiseThere’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes from living in a world of infinite food choices and still not knowing how to eat.We have more nutrition information available than any generation before us. Studies, podcasts, books, apps that track our macros to the decimal. And yet — chronic disease is rising. Fatigue is epidemic. More women than ever feel disconnected from their bodies, unsure what to eat, swinging between protocols, afraid of the wrong ingredient.What if the information isn’t the answer? What if, underneath all of it, there’s something quieter we’ve stopped being able to hear?That’s the thread that ran through my entire conversation with Mihaela Telecan — functional nutritionist, author, and someone who has spent decades asking what it actually means to nourish a human body.Mihaela grew up in communist Romania, where the absence of a food industry turned out to be — nutritionally speaking — an accidental gift. Everything was local. Everything was seasonal. Fermented foods, bone broth, organ meats, sourdough — these weren’t wellness trends. They were just how her family ate. Nutrition wasn’t outsourced to a government agency or a cereal box. It was passed down through the hands of mothers and grandmothers who simply knew.When she moved to the United States at 28, she watched almost anthropologically as a culture of convenience unfolded around her. She went on to study nutrition, earn her dietetics credentials, and deepen her training in functional and integrative medicine — all while holding onto a thread of ancestral knowing that the curriculum kept trying to cut.Her book is called Make Peace with Fat. That title alone tells you something about the work she’s doing — and the fear she’s asking us to examine.What struck me most in our conversation was how consistently she traced everything — the weight struggles, the hormonal chaos, the exhaustion, the disconnection from hunger cues — back to the same root: fear. Fear of fat. Fear of hunger. Fear of aging. Fear of stepping outside what the system has told us is safe.And underneath that fear, a deeper disconnection. From our bodies. From our instincts. From the accumulated wisdom of the women who came before us.Mihaela talks about the way we’ve been trained to see our bodies as problems to be solved. A number on the scale to be corrected. A hormone panel to be optimized. A symptom to be eliminated. And she’s gentle about it — she understands why we got here — but she’s also clear: that framing keeps us stuck. Because when we’re in problem-solving mode, we’re in resistance. And resistance is its own kind of stress.What she offers instead is curiosity. Observation. The willingness to become, as she puts it, the observer of your own life.We talked about what food actually is — and what most of what lines our grocery store shelves actually isn’t. About fasting, and how the hunger signal we treat as an emergency is often just a pattern the body learned because we taught it to. About the way our ancestors moved between feast and famine without catastrophe, and what that tells us about our own metabolic flexibility.We talked about aging — not as a slow decline to be managed, but as something she calls functional aging. Keeping your vitality, your mobility, your aliveness, right up until the end. A plateau, then a swift transition. Not decades of diagnoses and dependency.And we talked about her C.U.R.E. framework — the method she uses with clients that, I’ll be honest, applies to a lot more than nutrition. Connect to where you actually are. Unlearn the fear and the false information running on autopilot. Redefine what health means, what food means, what this season of life means. Experiment, and elevate from there.I keep returning to something she said near the end of our conversation — that we are drowning in information and starving for wisdom. That the overload itself might be part of what makes it so hard to hear our own bodies.I think she’s right. And I think the antidote isn’t another protocol.It’s the pause. The moment before you reach for something — food, an answer, a fix — where you ask: is this what I actually need right now? It’s learning, slowly and imperfectly, to trust the knowing that was there long before any of the noise.Your ...
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    55 min