Content note: This episode discusses suicide, self-harm, and medical trauma. Please listen with care.

At 39, Susan Benoit had a stroke. Doctors found a tumour inside her heart and gave her eight months to live without open-heart surgery. She survived the surgery and then everything fell apart.

The thing that finally pulled her out? Breathwork.

Susan is a breathwork and contrast therapy facilitator who now works with women, kids, and anyone navigating anxiety, panic attacks, and trauma. In this conversation she gets real about:

• Why 80%+ of open-heart surgery patients fall into depression — and why no one warns them
• The difference between "anxiety" and actually naming the emotion underneath it
• Why your exhale matters more than your inhale (and what carbon dioxide has to do with brain function)
• The moment your breath changes before you even know you're triggered
• Why "small t" vs "big T" trauma is nonsense
• Forgiving yourself instead of waiting for closure from someone else

  
  This episode is an honest, sometimes heavy, ultimately hopeful conversation about what it actually looks like to heal.
  
  Find Susan at @susanbenoit on Instagram and https://www.submergewellness.ca/
  
  Join us on the journey to finding your bliss. ✨
  

  Follow along on socials @anandaelixirs
  

  Discover Shroom Soda® at anandaelixirs.com
  
  
  
  

On this episode we chat with Emma Terrell aka The Urban Botanist is a biologist, entrepreneur, and nature educator right here in Ottawa who's spent the last nine years helping people reconnect with the natural world.

We get into her story - going from political science to biology, working as a flight attendant while finishing her degree, and building a business that exploded during the pandemic.

We talk about what it actually means to run a business that works with nature instead of against it, why most "eco-friendly" branding is surface level, and what real sustainability looks like when you're scaling.

We also get into why we're all so disconnected from nature, what it's doing to our health, the case for growing your own food, and how something as simple as one houseplant can start to shift things. Plus Dylan and Emma discover they're both obsessed with salamanders and it kind of derails everything in the best way.

Join us on the journey to finding your bliss. ✨

Follow along on socials @anandaelixirs

Discover Shroom Soda® at anandaelixirs.com

Find Emma at @theurbanbotanist and https://theurbanbotanist.ca/

Before Sammi and Dylan ever officially met, they were eating at the same dinners, sitting at the same pool, and walking the same hallways at a resort in the Bahamas and neither had any idea.

They only figured it out years later. And they're not alone.

In this episode, Dylan and Sammi dig into the Invisible String Theory, the idea that the people who end up mattering most to you were somehow already in your orbit long before you found each other.

They share their own story, read through listener submissions and Reddit threads full of jaw-dropping coincidences, and get into the bigger question: how much of life is really as random as it seems?

Join us on the journey to finding your bliss. ✨

Follow along on socials @anandaelixirs

Discover Shroom Soda® at anandaelixirs.com