What happens after the brave thing? Not six months later. Not when the results are in. Immediately after.

In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy reflects on what happened in the hours after launching the very first Embodied Leadership monthly Members' Lab in July 2026. The session itself was deeply moving, but not long after the room closed and her nervous system finally let go of months of holding, an old pattern came rushing in: the urge to burn it all down, disappear, and hide before anyone could reject something deeply personal. Something that truly matters to her.

Rather than trying to fix or fight the thoughts, Betsy did what she teaches others to do: she observed them.

Because sometimes we're not just teaching the work. We ARE the homework. And, as Betsy has found, in her work teaching embodied leadership, she most often IS the homework for things she passes on to others.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Why old narratives often surface immediately after moments of courage

• The gap between what the body is experiencing and the story the mind creates

• How exhaustion can muddy the truth

• Why self-sabotage often arrives disguised as "being realistic"

• What it means to witness your patterns without becoming them

• A simple practice for noticing the story that appears after you do something brave

If you've ever launched something, had a vulnerable conversation, taken a risk, or finally put yourself out into the world, only to immediately want to retreat, this episode is for you.

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Work with Betsy

Betsy is the founder of Embodied Leadership Lab, where she works with leaders, teams and organisations to develop embodied leadership, nervous system intelligence and capacity and more personally sustainable ways of leading in complexity.

Check out Embodied Leadership Lab membership on Patreon

Find out more about the work at www.embodiedleadershiplab.com

Subscribe to Betsy's Substack: @thebetsyreed

In this solo episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy answers a comment a friend once made — "You never talk about having hobbies" — by unpacking why that's true, and what it reveals about how she actually relates to her own life.

The answer isn't that she's hobby-less. It's that she doesn't experience her life as something to escape to something better. She experiences it as a craft — a container she's devoted to, refines, and is shaped by in return. And lately, that craft has had to make room for something she didn't choose: chemotherapy.

This episode is about what happens when rest, receiving and doing less become the most demanding practice you've ever undertaken — and why a culture obsessed with visible effort has no real language for the mastery that looks like slowing down.

In this episode, Betsy explores:

• Why she doesn't have 'hobbies' and what that has revealed to her about her relationship to her own life.
• The difference between a 'hobby' and 'craft' - and why it's not about doing more.
• How chemotherapy, rest and receiving have become part of her 'craft' of living, not interruptions to it.
• Why visible effort gets rewarded and invisible work, like healing, integrating and surrender, doesn't.
• Defining 'letting life carry you' as a different kind of strength.
• Plus a closing mantra / question to sit with: where are you treating something as an interruption when it can actually be part of making your life a 'craft'?
  
  

The Discomfort Practice explores the uncomfortable edges where personal growth, leadership, embodiment and systems change intersect. Follow Betsy for more reflections on reinvention, craft, uncertainty and building a life that feels vividly alive.

Follow Betsy on Instagram: @thebetsyreed
Subscribe to The Discomfort Practice wherever you listen — and a five-star review always helps
Join her on Substack, Voice Notes from the Edge: substack.com/@thebetsyreed
Work with Betsy — coaching, the Embodied Leadership Lab membership, community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: www.embodiedleadershiplab.com

In this episode of The Discomfort Practice, Betsy is joined by Katherine Wela Bogen - scholar, activist, storyteller, and self-described "joyful little freak" - for a conversation that refuses to stay in its lane (in the best possible way). Katie, as she's known to her friends, is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology researching the intersections of bisexual identity, sexual trauma, sexual functioning, and kink. She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers, hosts the political podcast Superhumanizer, and has just released her debut novel Queering Him - the first in the Avra and Kiran trilogy.

They talk about the particular loneliness of being a multi-hyphenate; the tension of being a storyteller who is also a rigorous scientist and a justice activist; growing up queer and Jewish in rural Connecticut; the grassroots, intergenerational nature of rural queer organizing; purity culture in activist spaces (yes, that purity culture); and why the internet may be doing something genuinely sick to our capacity for human connection. Oh, and they coin a new term: queer-narc. You're welcome.

This is a rich, wide-ranging, deeply honest conversation about sovereignty, disruption, and what it means to hold a fully realized identity in a world that keeps trying to flatten you.

• The tension of being a scholar-activist-storyteller, and why each community will always think you're betraying the others

• How the skills we sharpen to keep ourselves safe become our superpowers

• Signing a "closeting contract" at boarding school, and what that taught Katie about using intellectual excellence as a shield

• Growing up queer and Jewish in a majority-Christian rural Connecticut town, and the casual antisemitism that surrounded her Holocaust-survivor grandfather

• How rural queer activism works - whisper networks, safe parents, rainbow sidewalks painted in the dark, and the teachers whose doors you know are open

• Activist perfectionism and online purity culture: "Why are you being such a cop?"

• Impact vs intent, and why a well-meaning neighbour is not your enemy

• Katie's debut novel Queering Him: two flawed, bisexual adolescents asking the hard questions about desire, kink, fetishization, and queerness, and why readers who want to cancel fictional teenagers might want to look inward

• What the kink community models about accountability, community repair, and anti-carceral approaches to harm

• COVID, the digital age, and what we've lost by moving so much of human life onto a screen

• Final thought: Don't let the internet take your humanity from you.

Katherine Wela Bogen (she/her) is a bisexual, Jewish scholar-activist and storyteller whose work sits at the intersections of consent, kink, pleasure politics, and self-advocacy. She is currently completing her doctoral degree in clinical psychology (NIH-funded research on bisexual identity, sexual trauma, sexual functioning, and kink). She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed papers and hosts the political podcast Superhumanizer. Her public-facing platform is k.w.bogen, where she reaches over 500,000 followers with millions of monthly views. Her debut novel Queering Him - the first in the Avra and Kiran trilogy - is out now. Books two and three follow in January 2027 and January 2028 respectively, with two spin-off novels to follow.

Find Katie:

• Instagram / social: @k.w.bogen

• Podcast: Superhumanizer

• Novel: Queering Him (Avra and Kiran trilogy, Book 1) - available wherever books are sold

• Queering Him by Katherine Wela Bogen (Avra and Kiran trilogy, Book 1)

• Podcast: Superhumanizer

• Katie mentioned sharing academic articles on queer rurality in shownotes; check her social platforms for those links

Follow Betsy on Instagram: @thebetsyreed

Subscribe to the podcast and leave a five-star written review - it genuinely helps get The Discomfort Practice out into the world.

Read Betsy's Substack, Voice Notes from the Edge: substack.com/@thebetsyreed

Work with Betsy - coaching, the Embodied Leadership Lab membership, community circles, and People Like Us dinners across Europe: embodiedleadershiplab.com