There’s a kind of woman I work with often.
She’s brilliant. Capable. The one others turn to.
She’s raised children, built businesses, held the weight of the world on her shoulders… and made it all look effortless.
But inside? She’s exhausted. Tired of holding it all together. Tired of pretending she’s okay. Tired of needing to earn her worth by doing more, fixing more, being more.
And -maybe this is you- She’s wondering what it might feel like to stop striving. To stop performing. To simply… be.
This week’s guest on the podcast, Lori Pappas, knows that woman well. She was her.
After surviving a traumatising childhood and being institutionalised at 16, Lori built a life of relentless success: launching an award-winning software company, leading huge teams, and becoming a powerhouse in a male-dominated industry.
But even with all that, she was empty. Disembodied. Alone. So she did what almost no one does. In her fifties, she walked away from it all. Moved to rural Ethiopia. Alone. Not to escape, but to serve. To listen. To get quiet.
There, among pastoral tribes and dust-covered silence, Lori began to feel. For the first time in her life, without levers of control or performance to fall back on, she surrendered. And something beautiful emerged.
“All I could do was sit, be still, and witness the raw kindness of people who had nothing. It changed everything.”
This conversation is rich with the kind of embodied wisdom that can’t be faked or fast-tracked. We speak about trauma… not as a buzzword, but as the buried survival patterns that shape our entire lives. We explore what happens when high-functioning burnout meets silence, presence, and deep service.
And we talk practically: about somatic healing, about mantras, about learning to receive, about how to start softening when your whole nervous system is rigged for vigilance.
But most of all, this episode is a reminder: There’s magic in saying yes.
Yes to love, even if you’ve given up on it.
Yes to asking for help, even if it terrifies you.
Yes to being seen, even if you’ve hidden for decades.
Lori didn’t find freedom through doing more. She found it by stopping. By listening. By letting herself feel. Now, at 75, she’s more alive, more open, more in love -with life and with herself- than she ever was in her younger years.
So if you’ve been striving for too long, if your body’s asking for a different rhythm, if your heart is hungry for truth… This episode might be a turning point.
Inside this episode:
What trauma looks like when it’s buried under high achievement
The cost of chasing worth through success
How somatic tools can reconnect you to your body and breath
Why curiosity -not control- is the path to authentic transformation
And the love story that surprised Lori… and can remind us all what’s possible
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