Spirit Talk Show - Bedtime Stories for Grown Ups

What happens when you stop waiting for “someday” and start living the story you’re meant to tell?

In this luminous episode of Spirit Talk Show: Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups, Doyle and producer Howie welcome Teri M. Brown—a novelist, memoirist, mother, grandmother, and adventurer whose life reads like a testament to resilience, curiosity, and quiet bravery.

Born in Athens, Greece and raised as an Air Force kid all over the world, Teri learned early how to carry home within herself. After homeschooling four children, building a successful nonfiction career, and surviving a long chapter marked by emotional abuse, she made a bold decision: to finally write the fiction she had been holding inside for years.

What followed was extraordinary.

From Sunflowers Beneath the Snow, inspired by real stories of Ukraine, to An Enemy Like Me, a deeply human exploration of identity and war, to Daughters of Green Mountain Gap, Terri’s novels blend history with empathy in ways that linger long after the final page. Along the way, she and her husband pedaled a tandem bicycle more than 3,000 miles across the United States—an experience that reshaped her sense of courage and became the heart of 10 Little Rules for a Double-Butted Adventure.

In this conversation, Teri reflects on:

Writing fiction after fear and self-doubt

What long journeys teach us about strength and trust

Why stories feel like people you’d want to have lunch with

Letting go of the bucket list and choosing to begin now

How creativity, honesty, and motion can heal what once felt broken

As always, Spirit Talk Show weaves in a signature tribute story and shared reflections—creating space not just to talk about Teri’s work, but to honor the life that shaped it.

This episode feels like opening a window and letting the light in.
It’s about movement—across miles, across genres, and across the invisible lines that separate who we were from who we’re becoming.

Spirit Talk Show: now go tell a story worth telling.

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups
Hosted by Doyle

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There is a Welsh word — hiraeth — for the feeling of being homesick for a place you have never been. A longing so specific it sits in the chest. A sense, just around the next corner, that something is waiting for you. That you are always about to arrive.

Elizabeth Bromstein felt it for decades. She had the city, the career, the resume the world told her to want. And the whole time, she kept dreaming about a cabin in the forest.

Then the industry she worked in collapsed. And instead of grabbing the nearest safe shore, she let the wave carry her. She moved into the woods. She built a life out of tarot, perfume, and writing — out of the raw materials of her own what if. And the dreams finally stopped. Because she had arrived.

In this episode, Elizabeth and I talk about what it means to follow a feeling you cannot fully name, the real reason tarot works even for people who think tarot is nonsense, what a ghost ceiling can teach you about reality, and why the most interesting place to stand is always the middle ground — not believing, not disbelieving, just honestly curious.

She teaches tarot to skeptics and overthinkers, people who flinch at the word manifest, and somehow ends up teaching them more about themselves than they expected to learn from a deck of cards. She does not ask you to convert. She asks you to look.

Find Elizabeth at beaumontdriveperfumes.com

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups
Hosted by Doyle

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He comes from seven generations of doctors. Surgeons, internists, healers of the body — a family that spent over a century learning how to fix what was broken. And somewhere inside all of that, Beatty Carmichael noticed a leg of the stool that medicine kept leaving out.

Not the physical. Not the mental. The third one. The one nobody had a protocol for.

In this episode, Beatty walks me through a framework he calls the Prayer of Freedom — a process rooted in ancient Bible text that he has now used with over a thousand people dealing with chronic anxiety, chronic pain, addiction, depression, PTSD, and conditions that medication managed but never resolved. He is not asking anyone to join a church. He is not asking anyone to take anything on faith. He is asking one quiet, radical question: what if some of what we carry has a spiritual root that no prescription was ever designed to reach?

What happened in this conversation, I did not expect.

Beatty walked me through the process live, on air. I came in skeptical. I have carried a specific kind of anxiety my whole life — a low hum of dread that has no good reason to be there. And by the time we finished, something had shifted. I don't know exactly what to call it. But the tightness in my chest was gone, and in thirty years, I cannot remember a night that felt that quiet.

I am not telling you what to think about that. I am telling you it happened.

Find Beatty at beatycarmichael.com and theprayeroffreedom.com beattycarmichael.com

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups
Hosted by Doyle

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He walked into his first breathwork class and saw a sheepskin rug, crystals, and oils. He looked around and thought: what is this fresh hell that I have now stepped into? He was from Boston. He did not believe in Mercury in retrograde. He was not the guy for this.

Then Matthew Perry bought him a session with a guru, told him he was the only friend who would do it, and asked him to report back. So he went. And something happened that he could not explain. And he spent the next fifteen years figuring out why — stripping away the mysticism, finding the science, and building a method that has now certified over 3,000 practitioners worldwide and put thousands of skeptical, eye-rolling, arms-crossed human beings on the floor and cracked them open.

Jon Paul Crimi is a breathwork teacher, former Hollywood screenwriter, sobriety coach, and the guy who figured out how to bring the most woo-woo tool in the wellness world to the people who would never go near it. The SWAT captains. The firefighters. The husbands dragged to class on a Friday night who end up crying in the lobby and asking if they can give him a hug.

In this episode, Jon Paul explains what transient hypofrontality actually means — and why it is the thing you have been chasing with every drink, every meditation app, and every therapy session that did not quite get there. He talks about his close friendship with Matthew Perry, the screenplay that was stolen from him in Hollywood and made into a movie, why trauma lives in the body and not the head, and what it looks like when someone's nervous system starts telling the truth before their mind is ready to hear it.

He also calls out Doyle live on air for skipping most of the class.

Find Jon Paul and his breathwork at https://jonpaulcrimi.com

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups
Hosted by Doyle

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Some stories don't die.

They wait.

At 19 years old, Rodney Phillips began writing a novel about conflict — about how a single disagreement can fracture trust, unravel loyalty, and ignite consequences no one can control. Then life happened. Career. Coaching. Fatherhood. Leadership. And the manuscript — handwritten in notebooks and on furniture store layaway cards — sat untouched in a filing cabinet for 37 years.

Until one quiet weekend in an empty nest, he opened the drawer.

In this powerful episode of Spirit Talk Show: Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups, Rodney shares the journey behind Dissension: A Disagreement That Leads to Discord — a gripping cartel thriller set in Miami that explores loyalty, betrayal, ambition, communication breakdown, and the fragile line between order and chaos.

We explore:

What 19-year-old Rodney understood about conflict

How 37 years of life experience reshaped the story

Writing strong female characters in male-dominated worlds

Loyalty versus blind obedience — and where the line sits

The psychology of disagreement and fractured trust

Why unfinished dreams don't disappear — they wait

Rodney reads the prologue of Dissension, and we dive into the emotional core of a story that spans decades — both on the page and in the writer's life.

This episode isn't just about publishing a novel.

It's about reopening a drawer.
It's about finishing what you started.
It's about proving it's never too late to return to the dream that once defined you.

Dissension is currently ranked #9 on Goodreads under Spy Thriller.

Learn more about Rodney Phillips and his work at:
https://RodneyPhillipsAuthor.com

Because sometimes the storm you wrote at 19…
is the one you're finally strong enough to finish at 56.

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups
Hosted by Doyle

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