I don’t remember the first time I heard about Jessica Buchanan. I vaguely remember watching a story on the news of a woman kidnapped in Africa by Somali pirates.

But I vividly remember the second time I heard about her.

I was at breakfast in Costa Rica, sitting next to a woman who would change my life. After hearing my story, which I word vomited into her eggs and coffee, she looked at me, undeterred, and said confidently, “You need to meet my publisher.”

That publisher was Jessica Buchanan.

After frantically ordering the book recounting her ordeal, Impossible Odds, and speed reading through the highlights as I prepared for my conversation with her, I wandered what it would be like to be kidnapped.

Kidnapped.

It seemed so surreal. She seemed so surreal.

Except when it was time for our call, she was incredibly present, totally genuine, with a dry laugh and a wry sense of humor. She projected a centered confidence and a deep capacity for grace. And she offered me the chance to become a published author.

I think about that encounter a lot now when I hear people make reference to “THE Jessica Buchanan.” They, of course, mean the one who spent 93 days in the desert. But, when I say her name, I mean the one who heard my pain and helped me turn it in to purpose.

I didn’t know how to open this interview, so harkening back to my genetic counselor training where we were always encouraged to “lead with the punch line,” I decided to start with the obvious. Her kidnapping.

It’s a dumb question, but I couldn’t think of a better way to ask it, so I kicked us off with, “So, what is it like to be kidnapped?”

With her typical sarcasm, she responded, “The first thing that popped into my head was it sucks. Zero stars. Do not recommend.”

If that’s not the understatement of a lifetime.

I’ve heard her account of the kidnapping a few times, and, of course, I read about it in her NYT bestselling book, but I had never heard Jessica make the connection she does here, that her actions did not, in fact, set her up for the kidnapping. In fact, the circumstances surrounding her kidnapping were not odd. She was just going to a conference she was required to attend for work. She was not in the wrong place. She was not outside of security protocols. She was just doing her job.

I think it’s difficult for those of us who have never worked in dangerous parts of the world not to be somewhat flippant about this. Like, you were in Somalia dude, what did you think was going to happen? But there are thousands of educators, like Jessica at the time, working for NGO’s and other organizations in dangerous places who are not kidnapped, so while she was clearly aware that the danger was higher than if she was in the United States, I think assuming she “knew” she might get kidnapped is both ignorant and unfair.

Her conclusion, “I just was unlucky,” undoes me. I can’t imagine what it must be like to sit with that. To know that your life was so profoundly changed by some shitty security protocols and bad luck.

But Jessica is a faithful believer that the Universe gives us opportunities. That there are patterns that we repeat in life, and those opportunities are our chance to put the unhealthy patterns to rest. For her, that pattern was deferring, as she said, “Letting other people do my work for me.” It’s something she’d done her entire life.

The morning of the kidnapping, she awoke unsettled, having had vivid nightmares that she and her colleague would be kidnapped by pirates and still, she chose the path that she had always chosen, to let someone else dictate her actions. To defer her own intuition to someone else’s decision.

And while Jessica’s perspective on this is fascinating in its own right, her ability to see in her unluckiness the opportunity for personal growth, the part of her story that I always find most compelling is what happened after she was rescued, and what she did with that after experience.

Jessica had the benefit of accessing some of the most esteemed psychologists our government has at their disposal, but shockingly, none of them told her that surviving a kidnapping may be harder than being kidnapped itself. The months and years after her rescue weren’t just difficult for Jessica. In some ways, they were unbearable.

“I thought the anxiety itself was going to kill me.”

After finding out that she had become pregnant just weeks after her rescue, Jessica struggled mightily to rebuild her life in Kenya. Blame and anger crippled her, and it eventually became clear that she needed to be near family. While Kenya was her home, she needed to come home to heal.

But, life did not instantly get better upon her arrival back in the US. The anxiety, the abject fear were constant.

• Fear of discomfort.

• Fear of what’s next.

• Fear of being alone.

• Fear that she would have a psychotic break while taking care of her baby.

• Fear that she would never find herself, her new self, on the other side of this.

All of this was compounded by the fact that Jessica lost her mother unexpectedly and suddenly not long before her kidnapping. There just seemed to be no end to the loss, the devastation of her life.

It took lots and lots of therapy. And lots and lots of time. But slowly, ever so slowly, she came back to life.

It’s been almost fourteen years since Jessica was kidnapped, and, according to her, she spent much of those early years in post-traumatic stress and some of the more recent ones in post-traumatic growth. I wanted to talk about this concept of post-traumatic growth as it fascinates me how or why people choose this path. And is it a choice or just a place you end up?

Her response?

“I spent a lot of time wallowing, and I think ultimately, I just decided I didn’t want to feel that way anymore.”

Never let someone like Jessica get so sick of themselves that they feel compelled to take action! In the aftermath of her survival, Jessica found purpose. She founded Soul Speak Press, a bespoke publishing house dedicated to amplifying the voices of women who have faced challenges, gained wisdom, and are ready to share their story with the world. Through her Deserts to Mountaintops anthology series and the memoir manifesto model she created, Jessica has shepherded client after client through the work of reclaiming purpose after trauma.

Post-traumatic growth is a mindset that Jessica both espouses and studies in her latest book, How to Survive Survival, and the podcast of the same name. Her RISE framework helps survivors reckon with the pain, identify the impact, seek the meaning and embody the purpose on the other side. That’s some significant work put into understanding, amplifying, and sharing how she and others clawed their way back. I wanted to understand why this work in particular is sacred to her, what she’s seeking by putting it out in the world.

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When I pitched this interview idea to Rhaine, I said something like, “You have to come on because when I tell people you’re a hypnotist and you were in a band, it all sounds like shit I made up! 😂” Not exactly the world’s best invitation, but what I meant was, “Rhaine, you fascinate me. The people need to know you!” Thankfully, she was gracious enough to accept the invite I got out instead of the one I meant.

Rhaine Della Bosca is, in fact, a hypnotist. And, she really was in a band. But, she’s also an artist, a survivor, a creative, a photographer, and a really cool human. When I found out that Rhaine was retiring and turning her attention to her hypnosis practice, I jumped at her gracious offering of a free session. Hypnosis by Zoom. How in the world would this work?

Historically, I would sync hypnosis in the same bucket as reiki, energy work, sound baths, crystals, anything woo woo that I don’t understand and am too left brained to be open to. But, as Rhaine explained, hynposis is actually rooted in neuroscience and there’s significant research demonstrating that when we can relax the self-monitoring part of our brain, we can allow imagination to work for us, not against us. Science is my jam, and I could absolutely use some help releasing my death grip on the self-monitoring side of my brain, so this felt right up my alley.

I was also curious as to whether hypnosis could be used either to assist my daughter in managing her own anxiety or to help me in being more effective at managing my reaction to her anxiety. Turns out, anxiety is one of many conditions shown to improve following hypnosis.

I first wanted to know how in the world Rhaine got into hypnotism. That wasn’t exactly one of the top choices given to me coming out of high school. My skills finder pegged me as an engineer or a helicopter pilot, so yeah, I felt like a rebel just getting a Biology degree.

Rhaine shares that her journey to hypnosis actually began when she was a child. Growing up on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, her family didn’t have much in the way of stuff, but her mother often said to her, “You can do anything you want, and your mind is more powerful than you think.” That stuck with her, not just how powerful her mind was, but perhaps the power bound up in other people’s minds. When her band career ended (I know, I know, we’ll get there), she wanted to do something in the health industry but on the alternative side. She found and subsequently attended a two year holistic practitioner program that offered hypnosis as a specialty.

When it became clear about three years ago that retirement was on the horizon, she returned to the practice after finding that it met all of her criteria for how she wanted to spend her time in retirement. With something that was…

1. Bigger than me

2. Challenging without being overwhelming

3. Enjoyable

4. Created a way of connecting with others

5. Involved giving back

As she started using some of the techniques on herself, as you do before letting them loose on unsuspecting patients, it became clear that it wasn’t just patients she could potentially help. She was somehow healing herself too. Rhaine shared that she has suffered with some degree of PTSD most of her life - anxiety, nightmares, jumpiness - and by 2021, she was looking for something that would change her life. She began seeing a therapist, who is the one who formally diagnosed her with PTSD. But it wasn’t therapy that seemed to be working. As she implemented these hypnosis techniques on a more regular basis, she started to notice subtle but obvious changes. Improved sleep, decreased anxiety, ability to handle stressors with greater ease. Her creativity returned and her overall outlook on life improved.

She asked her therapist to reevaluate her for PTSD. And guess what?!? She no longer met diagnostic criteria. I don’t think there’s a big enough “!” for my reaction to this. Who knew you could self-hypnotize your way out of PTSD?!?

This is where the neuroscience of hypnosis just fascinates me. For at least the past decade, we have known that hypnosis alters the activity of certain areas of the brain. In layman’s terms, hypnosis appears to decrease activity in the parts of the brain associated with self consciousness while upregulating the connections between the brain and the body, so that the brain can better understand and control what is going on in the body without the hyperawareness that often gets in the way.

In my own experience with Rhaine guiding me in and out of trance, I did notice that I was not nearly as self conscious as I expected to be. Even when I was tapping my head, my chest, my eyes while she watched via Zoom on the screen in front of me, I was so focused on what I was doing that I lost track of any sense of embarrassment. I was also able to see images and pictures in my minds eye much clearer than usual, and I had the uncanny ability to distort or change those images to ones I liked better, or ones that were calmer or funnier.

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If your first thought when listening to the clip above is “samesies,” trust me, you’re in the right place. Like many women of a certain age, the past two years for me have been a slow slide from “Something doesn’t feel right” to “My body is a dumpster fire.” I made the epic mistake of searching “perimenopause symptoms” on my phone one day, and now I am bombarded across all of my socials with ads for diets, workout routines, sleep aids, protein bars, and every other product or service remotely connected to #perimenopause.

To say it’s exhausting is minimizing. To say its ineffective is kind. And to say its fixed a-n-y-thing is laughable.

The Universe must have known I was near implosion status and gifted me Maya Miloski, who quite literally walked into my life, completely unaware of her Unicorn status. Maya is a certified functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, which makes her cool and official and all, but is not what fascinates me.

What fascinates me is the way Maya thinks about the body, like a Maserati, all leather like and humming right until the check engine light comes on, the tire gets a nail in it, and there’s no windshield wiper fluid, and all of a sudden it drives like a late 90’s Honda in a snow storm. Her bluntness about the level of intention it requires to be healthy in the US, which I have long believed but typically only hear echoed by the few other crabby Americans I keep in my circle. And her take on how to solve all of this…slowly, patiently. With foundational micro-habits not overhauls. THAT is what fascinates me. Maya is my antidote to the Instagram barrage.

Let’s start with the sentence that made me go “Hmmmm…🤔”

Coulda fooled me, Maya. I wanted to know where this mindset came from and whether it was something she always believed or born of her own experience. Turns out, its a little of both.

Maya was born to “kinda hippie” parents who spent the first seven years of her life living in Mexico where they were part of an agricultural development program. They lived in a hut with no running water. Her mother cooked all of their meals, and there was no such thing as “driving to the store.” At seven, she moved back to Germany, their home country, but to the Black Forest, an area of the world that is known for its outdoor activities - hiking, skiing, walking.

And then, at 20, she moved to New York City.

You can laugh here. I did. Talk about a culture shift! Maya says she loved the experience, but looking back, can see that all that noise, the lack of sleep, the stress, the food, the lifestyle was the origin of her slowly eroding health. By the time she had her first kid, she started developing allergies, anxiety, and digestive issues. With each pregnancy, the symptoms got worse, but were downplayed as the to-be-expected side effects of mothering young children. By the time she delivered her third child, she was overwhelmed all the time, routinely constipated, battling constant infections, and struggling with the spontaneous appearance of nasal polyps that grew back in force six months after having them surgically removed.

As she puts it, “my symptoms finally became loud enough that I had to listen.”

Doctors didn’t discount her, necessarily. They acknowledged that she was visibly struggling, but her labs were normal, so they passed her off to another specialist.

Let’s pause here and ask ourselves how many people we know who can raise their hand as if that story were their own? I can think of at least three off the top of my head. Add in perimenopause, and we might be close to 100% of every freaking friend I have.

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Okay, back to Maya. She asked for help, but when she found that help to be subpar, she did what women do and learned the damn thing herself. She became a functional health practitioner to heal herself first. And, in so doing, figured out that her body had been sending her messages for a long time. It was lighting up her dashboard like a Christmas tree at the same time she was trying to eek one more mile out of the gas tank, fill up that shredded tire, and whisper sweet nothings to the engine to convince it that an oil change was an unnecessary luxury.

I countered, as my experience has been slightly different. Shocking, I know. I hear my body screaming at me. I just feel like she’s barking in German. That spit-filled angry voice fires away at me on the daily. The problem is, I can’t understand what the fuck she is saying! It took me approximately two years to figure out what language she was even speaking, and so at least now I know I need a German translator, but where do you find one of those? And how much will it cost? I’m guessing insurance companies don’t pay for German translators…or for fixing Maseratis.

So, I asked Maya to explain how she translates German, so to speak, for her clients. Her initial response was what I expected - BIG intake process. Lots of questions about lifestyle, diet, stress, exercise, symptom history. Then she hit a curve ball and said, “But honestly, I generally start by pulling back.” This is the fascinating part. Calling it out blatantly just so you don’t miss it, because I almost did. What Maya has dialed in on here is that the world we live in is LOUD, and bodies were not built to handle the constant influx of information, noise, chemicals, food, and stress. It can push past all of that to keep going, but the lights are going to start popping up on the dash, so when the car starts sputtering, you don’t put the gas pedal to the floor, you SLOW DOWN.

I suck at slowing anything down, so I asked for some examples. Her first three suggestions?

1. Take three deep, slow breaths before you eat. 4 counts in - hold for 5 - 6 counts out.

2. Get some sunlight on your face as early as you can in the morning and cut the blue lights at least an hour before bed.

3. Take 10-min walks after each meal. Or do some air squats in the potty.

That’s it?!? That’s what people are paying you for? Except, then I asked myself if I actually do any of those three things.

1. Definitely not.

2. Only if I run late enough that the sun has already started to come out.

3. Does walking from my car to pick up my kid after school after downing a protein bar and a coffee count?

It sounds simple. But it’s not easy. And that’s her point.

There’s zero value in starting some big overhaul program if the foundation for healing isn’t in place. That is the recipe for throwing money away.

Maya utilizes what she calls DRESS. Of course its an acronym, which I bet you picked up on, but I didn’t until she got to the first “S”, and it finally clicked for me. Brain fog, much? Anyway…D-R-E-S-S stands for…

• Diet

• Rest

• Exercise

• Stress

• Supplements

As Maya said in the video, supplements come last for a reason. And, she doesn’t guess on which ones to recommend. This is where functional lab testing comes in. Unlike traditional lab testing where blood is drawn at one acute point in time, functional testing takes advantage of a variety of testing processes. Like urine analysis for hormones, tested at multiple points throughout the day. And hair tissue mineral analysis because the hair acts as a record of what the body has absorbed over months, not the level present in the blood at one particular moment.

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Lab testing is expensive. No lie. But here’s an example of what happens when we guess at the solution based on symptomology alone.

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is the kindest person I’ve ever met. At least, that’s what was in my head when I asked to interview her for this Fascinated article. If you don’t know, Fascinated is a series where I interview people who fascinate me about their work, their why’s, and their what the fucks and share all of that with you. I knew about Jeannie’s work, and a little about her why’s, and given the kindness thing, I wasn’t even sure she had any what the fuck’s, but I was wrong.

I was stalking Jeannie long before I ever read her writing. Checking my Notes on Substack every morning to see if she posted a new update with her daughter, Sarah. Jeannie’s daughter has a genetic condition known as Apert syndrome. As a former genetic counselor, I actually caught this while scrolling rapidly through Notes one day. It was a picture of Sarah, but her characteristic features and gentle lopsided smile had me frantically trying to undo my rapid scroll to get back to said picture.

I know its weird to stalk someone because their daughter has Apert syndrome. To be fair, it wasn’t just that. It was the content of the note. The note was Sarah’s message to the Substack community. And it was about kindness.

I began watching for those notes. And then the notes became videos. And they were always messages of kindness, love, and gratitude. Sometimes, they included raw messages of pain, the pain of being different, and of knowing you’re different. But, the point in sharing those experiences was to demonstrate the import of being kind.

When I leveled up from just digital stalker to actual reader of Jeannie’s work with her Substack, I Grow Strong Again, I realized I was dealing with radical honesty. It was refreshing and, admittedly, a little uncomfortable. We aren’t equipped with a language for grief in our culture, but damned if Jeannie wasn’t trying to use our ill-gotten words to craft a space where grief could breathe.

So, let’s jump in there. Right about the time I start thinking Jeannie was destined for Sainthood. I wanted to know what it was like raising a child with special needs, or, as Jeannie calls them, “extra needs.” I should have known the answer would be far more inclusive than the question. Jeannie is Sarah’s mother, yes, but she is also the mother to four other children. And that clouds, or, perhaps, clarifies her perspective.

What Jeannie’s talking about here is the realization that she was expected to become invisible, not because she was the mother to a child with extra needs, but because she became a mother…period. And by the time she was about to become a mother to her fifth child, As Jeannie said, “I could no longer bear that work.”

Writing became the salve, the place to process, the outlet that allowed her to self regulate, to not be as reactive.

At the time, journaling was a significant part of her day. She could become lost in it, and her kids, one in particular, noticed. Her older daughter, Felicity, confronted her one night, hurling this accusation at her, “All you do is write! You’re never with the family.” This, despite the fact of Jeannie’s constant mothering, her constant presence, and her constant attention to all of the life things that five children require.

It’s so fascinating to me that the thing Felicity chose to arm herself with is her mother’s biggest vulnerability, the cracked damn keeping the waves of grief and anger and resentment at bay became the fortress Felicity chose to attack.

It would be easy to make Felicity out to be the villain of this story, her 14-year old entitlement shouting over her still girlish pain. Of course, Jeannie’s compassion covered that ground quickly. She recognizes Felicity for who she is, a highly sensitive kid, one who looks fine on the outside, but who struggles mightily on the inside.

Jeannie tells me that compassion comes easily for people with Sarah because she looks different. Adults, especially, melt when they meet her, and they are gentle and gracious with and to her. But, when people meet Felicity, who is quiet and somewhat shy, they don’t recognize the differences she carries inside because they aren’t obvious on the outside.

Jeannie understands this invisibility. Not being seen for the work you do, the person you are, the burdens you carry. For so many, it’s the untold story of motherhood.

One of the things I find so fascinating about Jeannie’s writing is how she spits out into the atmosphere her deepest, darkest secrets, the worst things she’s said to herself and about herself, the voice of the inner critic shouting her into a corner of postpartum depression. So, I asked her a question I knew she would answer…”What’s the worst thing you said to yourself about motherhood?”

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Welcome to Fascinated! A series where I interview people who fascinate me about their work, their why’s, and their what the fucks and share all of that with you. Today, I have the sincere pleasure of introducing you to our first guest, .

The first thing you need to know about Nan is that you will not get anything past her. She does not stand on convention, she will not let you slide, and she expects that you have a reason for everything you do. Because she does. And, when questioned (or criticized), she’s happy to share said reason. Boldly, but not bitchily. Nan fascinates me because when called to the carpet for anything she’s said or done, she doesn’t lash out, she reaches in. A lifetime of therapy (from talk to shock), a more recent trip through the 12-Steps, and Grace, her name for whatever floats beyond us, has made her an unapologetic advocate for Nan. Where that could easily produce defensiveness or even arrogance, in Nan it comes out through carefully considered words that are meant to do nothing more than share her truth. Your perception is your problem, but she will entertain your perspective all day long.

That is fascinating.

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