In this episode, I sit down with Kasia Piascik—HR professional, fellow author in the Reclaiming Mental Health anthology, and someone who has done the deep, unglamorous work of coming home to herself. Kasia's chapter traces her life from a gifted kid in a Mississauga classroom through depression, anxiety, addiction, and the labels that tried to define her, all the way to sixteen years sober and a life she actually recognizes as her own.

We talk about what it felt like to ask for help as a child and be turned away, the diagnoses that accumulated over the years and what she eventually made of them, and how addiction became the way she drowned out pain she didn't have language for yet. We also get into the DSM, Gabor Maté, and why finding the root matters more than naming the symptom.

There's also wonderful synchronicity with Kasia ended up writing in this book also—a thread that runs all the way back to her grade five classroom and her very first teacher. And yes, she posted about all of this on LinkedIn. She works in HR. That took guts, and we talk about that too.

Resources Mentioned:
Reclaiming Mental Health anthology: https://a.co/d/0dvGcfuS
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Connect with Kasia:

Instagram: @kasiapiascikreclaims

Connect with Darrel-Lynne:

Instagram: @dee_ogsoul

Website: ogsoul.ca

Today I'm chatting with Dr. John Battye. John is an improv instructor, arts educator, professor at Grant MacEwan University, and one of my Improv 100 instructors this past winter semester. John grew up in Blyth, Ontario, a small farming town with a surprisingly big theater at its heart. His grandmother helped found the Blyth Festival, and a chance encounter with the artistic director when John was young set everything in motion. Thirty years of performing and teaching improv later, here we are.

In this conversation we talk about how improv teaches you to sort through the noise and find what actually matters in the moment, why community is the whole point, and what gets lost when arts funding disappears. John also shares what it looks like from the instructor's side: watching people walk in thinking they can't do it, and walk out knowing they can. That shift, he says, is the truest gift he's given in his work.

We also get into whether we're standing on the edge of a cultural renaissance, the strange paradox of being an introvert who's spent decades on stage, and what a giant pink Easter Bunny has to do with any of this.

At the heart of it all is something John said near the end that stayed with me: improv is a practice of understanding your own impulse and being okay with whatever that is. Radical self-acceptance. Scary, honest, and extremely rewarding.

Connect with Dr. John Battye:

Instagram: @jb3performs

Connect with Darrel-Lynne:

Instagram: @dee_ogsoul

Website: ogsoul.ca

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to John Battye

04:19 John's Journey into Improv and Theater

07:02 Teaching and Impact of Improv Classes

09:59 Long Form Improv Experiences

12:38 Nervousness and Excitement in Performance

13:46 Building Community through Improv

15:31 The Nature of Improv and Mistakes

18:24 Learning and Growth in Improv

21:06 The Transformative Power of Improv

24:34 Art as a Healing Force in Troubling Times

29:52 The Rise of Creative Exploration Post-Pandemic

36:18 Navigating the Stage: Stories from the Improv World

41:51 Embracing Playfulness and Vulnerability in Art

47:08 Final Thoughts: The Importance of Self-Acceptance and Community

Today I'm chatting with Ulrike Tooke, someone who has been on a long journey back to herself and she's sharing about some of that in this conversation.

When Ulrike lost her mother at seven, she made a quiet but life-altering decision: to be strong, to hold it together, to stop being a kid. What she uncovered decades later was that in doing so, she had left a part of herself behind entirely.

She shares what it means to finally grieve the self you abandoned, not just the people you've lost. We get into precognitive dreams, the ones that scared her enough to stop dreaming altogether for nearly a decade, and what it meant when they came back different.

We wander into Chinese medicine, heart rate variability, minerals, sleep, and the powerful intelligence of the body. And we land on discernment, how you build it, why it matters.

Ulrike is thoughtful, honest, and refreshingly unpolished in the best way.

Connect with Ulrike:
Instagram: @thelivingcompass_ | @redbirchriver
Website: luminawellnessco.ca

Connect with Darrel-Lynne:
Instagram: @dee_ogsoul
Website: ogsoul.ca