S2 | E15 Marisa Skolky

Marisa Skolky wears a lot of hats — transformational doula, psychedelic guide, expressive arts therapist, professional singer — and in this episode she walks me through how she got to all of them. She grew up in New Jersey immersed in music and theater, and spent 16 years quietly struggling with bulimia while climbing the ladder as an assistant vice president at an insurance brokerage, making music videos for underwriters and sneaking sound bowls into business meetings on her lunch break. It took an ibogaine flood in Costa Rica for years of accumulated tools — Reiki, hypnotherapy, IFS, somatic work — to finally take hold.

We get into some of the wilder edges of her healing story: an ayahuasca ceremony that appeared to heal a fractured tibial plateau overnight, and a DMT experience that put her back inside the moment of her own birth. Marisa also breaks down the five-part framework — identify, confront, release, change, grow — she uses with clients, blending expressive arts, somatic practices, and ritual (letters burned in fire, seeds planted during a journey, physical totems made by hand). We talk about the difference between crying into your chest and actually releasing energy out of the body, why so many people are afraid of their own anger, and what it looks like to build a life — and a business — around energetic integrity. She leaves me with a recommendation I'm passing along: Nathaniel Branden's "Six Pillars of Self-Esteem."