Episodes

What does it mean to live well as a highly sensitive person without turning sensitivity into another thing to optimise? In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I’m joined by psychotherapist and author April Snow to talk about her book, Big Feelings, Big Joy: The Essential Practices to Reclaim Your Strengths as a Highly Sensitive Person. April discovered the language of high sensitivity while training to become a therapist, after years of wondering why she experienced the world so intensely...

Have you ever felt judged by standards that simply don’t fit who you are? In this episode of The Gentle Rebel, we explore Aesop’s fable of the “useless tree” and unpack why introverted and highly sensitive people internalise criticism from those who don’t understand what they bring to the table. The fable describes two travellers who find a plane tree in the midday sun. They take refuge beneath its branches but complain that it’s useless because it produces no edible fruit or nuts. In another...

I’m sure you’re aware of the controversy surrounding Ed Sheeran’s 2026 Loop Tour. The situation escalated after billionaire tycoon and sports mogul Robert Kraft blocked Ed Sheeran’s support artist, Macklemore, from performing at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, following Macklemore’s declaration of solidarity with Palestinians in the face of the genocide being perpetrated by Israel. Under pressure from other stadium owners, Sheeran dropped Macklemore from the entire tour. After the other supp...

Have you ever experienced the joy of unblocking a drain? I know, I know. But if you know, you know…it’s satisfying! Not least because a blocked drain is the opposite of satisfying. We’re not going to focus on blocked drains in this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, don’t worry. It’s just a metaphor for what happens sometimes in life, when things that feel like they’re supposed to be free-flowing get stuck, festering in a stagnant pool of unwanted water. Sometimes something gets stuck becau...

Why do we bother doing what we do? What tone do you hear in that question? To bother: taking the trouble or effort to do something. To be bothered: to be affected by something and/or to care about it. I hadn’t really thought much about this phrase until it came up in a conversation related to stuckness a few days ago. And now I can’t stop thinking about it. https://youtu.be/SSCHoKd3tCc Someone shared that, despite having written a huge number of words, they felt self-doubt, uncertainty, and...

The movie Hook begins with the premise that Peter Pan has been away from Neverland for so long that he has forgotten who he is. He is all grown up, with two children and a high-flying legal job that leaves him little time or patience for them. When Captain Hook (Peter’s arch-nemesis, whom he now has no memory of) kidnaps his kids, he quickly learns that his attempts to use the logic of his reality to buy them back or to threaten legal action aren’t going to fly here (pun intended). Instead, he ...

A post on Threads caught my attention this week. It spoke to me about a common form of stuckness that we may overlook. It felt like a good example of the insidious reach of toxic productivity. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I attempt to explain why… https://youtu.be/nBvFoHil9qM Don’t Try To Remember In his language-learning audio courses, Michel Thomas usually spoke with two participants. Every so often, he would respond to them by saying, “stop trying to remember”. His methodo...

This episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast is a bit different from normal. It contains the audio from It Just Sort of Happens, the short film I produced for the HSP Gathering in Oulu, Finland, at the start of August. You can watch it here. https://youtu.be/NWaK8O4VLuo The film is an audiovisual collage of stories from throughout my life. It has a particular focus on the role of songwriting and music-making in helping me make sense of myself, my experiences, and the way the world is. I believe c...

What do people who believe they are writing songs when they use Suno AI, YouTuber Hank Green, and Narcissus from Greek mythology all have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out. And they can help us recognise a form of stuckness that’s becoming increasingly common as people’s relationship with generative AI begins to blur the boundary between ourselves and the technologies we use, making it more difficult to know where the human ends and the machine begins. https://youtu.be/zSMwN0wKGlE Getting S...

There is something strange in the space between languages. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s fun to explore. It poses a question and presents a challenge…what am I actually trying to say here? When I started work on a video about the relationship between sensitivity and creativity for this year’s HSP Gathering in Oulu, Finland, which happened a few days ago as I’m recording this, I didn’t really think about the process of translating it from English into Finnish for the subtitles. I ass...

Imagine a piece of bait dangling in the water. A passing fish sees it. What a stroke of luck to stumble upon a free, unsuspecting meal. Believing it has found prey, it strikes, convinced it has the power and is acting on its own terms. Only after the hook pierces through does the reality set in. This fish was the target rather than the predator. It got caught in a trap that took advantage of its reactive instinct. In this episode, I talk about how leaving it there can be an act of gentle rebe...

Why nervous systems built to care about others can leave us feeling disconnected in a globally connected world. I’ve been dipping into Britt Frank’s book, The Science of Stuck, over the past week. It’s much more of a self-help book than I was hoping based on the title, but it’s providing some ideas to explore. This concept of stuckness has been on my mind recently… What does it mean to be stuck? What causes us to feel stuck? Does feeling stuck always mean we are stuck? How do we get unstuck ...

Feeling stuck is not always the same as being stuck. We might respond to a feeling before we’ve identified its source, and when we do, we can end up reacting to the wrong problem. If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to quit your job, transform or abandon a creative project, change direction, or start over completely, it’s worth asking a simple question: What if the thing you’re trying to change isn’t actually what’s making you feel stuck? https://youtu.be/DuUXYBeCK00 Why Feeling Stuck Isn...

In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we explore the variety of neurodiversity. I’ve been staying with friends over the past few weeks, including Lucas, who is nearly 12. He is autistic, and after spending time trawling through the Gentle Rebel Podcast episode archive, we had a chat about topics he thought would be good to explore. One of those topics was what he described as “the variety of neurodiversity”. When I asked what that meant to him, and why he felt that was an important thin...

I sometimes notice that I’m feeling stuck. When I’m frustrated, trying to figure something out. Stuck for inspiration when I’m attempting to create something or solve a problem. Stuck in thought patterns and loops. It’s tempting to give up or seek shortcuts when this feeling kicks in, as if it’s something to avoid or overcome. But stuckness can encompass a wide range of experiences and open the door to all sorts of interesting discoveries about ourselves and the things we care about. https://...

The Strangest Secret was released in 1956. Earl Nightingale’s 35-minute, six-and-a-half-thousand-word recording was one of the earliest motivational tapes. It sold more than a million copies and became the first spoken-word recording to achieve Gold Record status. The recording was released during a period of post-war economic expansion in the United States. Consumer culture was booming, and suburban home ownership was rising. The promise of upward mobility felt tangible for a growing American ...

I’ve been journaling more or less daily for the past fifteen years. As much as I love the romantic vision of pen on paper, I’ve always done it digitally because I could never keep up with a handwritten journal. I tried, but it never really worked. Over the years, I’ve come across plenty of advice on the best ways to journal, the best techniques, and the best prompts. I always think it’s worth bringing a bit of nuance to these conversations because, as far as I’m concerned, the best way to jour...

How did Norman Vincent Peale’s book, The Power of Positive Thinking, pave the way for the prosperity gospel and the law of attraction that still has its claws in today’s culture? That’s what we explore in this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast. Part One explored Peale’s foundations in the New Thought Movement of the nineteenth century and its theological departure from Puritanical Calvinism. Part Two linked Peale’s version of Positive Thinking with the corporate culture of the twentieth cent...

In the wake of burnout, Tuula Ahde found herself unable to move through the world as she previously had. And she got busy looking for ways to unfreeze. Ironically, it was ice that gave her a route back home. She found herself instinctively drawn to photography, particularly macro-photography, which zoomed in on the mysterious details of her world’s enforced smallness. She photographed flowers, fungi, and whatever else she found around her, discovering that the act of taking photographs brought ...

Walking art is a nice metaphor for the experience of experimentally oriented people. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I chat with Australian multi-form artist Amy Tsilemanis. I’ve known Amy for a few years and was excited to talk with her about the naturally curious approach she takes to her work and life, as it resonates with much of what we regularly discuss here and on Serenity Island. https://youtu.be/frOHk7C7h1Q In our conversation, we explored: What caused Amy to question w...

This episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast is an introduction to “Leave it There”, this season’s theme. I share some of the initial topics it brought to my mind. I’d love to hear from you about what it brings to yours. What Does Leave It There Mean To You? Is there something you want to leave behind? Do you want to get better at letting things go? Or maybe, the opposite, persisting with important things even when others tell you to drop it. Have you stumbled across something left somewhere, del...

The moral of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is generally that liars aren’t believed even when they tell the truth. But I wonder if that story actually tells us less about the boy and more about the village. The boy’s behaviour didn’t change. What changed was how the village responded. Each false alarm conditioned them to doubt what came next. Once that trust was gone, the villagers were living in a subtly created new reality. That feels uncannily familiar right now. In this episode of The Gentle Rebe...

What would you say makes something satisfying for you? How do you recognise that you’re satisfied? It’s not always easy to answer those questions. It’s something I’ve explored a lot over the past few years, both personally and in conversations with others who feel caught in a tug-of-war between doing what they feel they ought to do and what actually brings them an intrinsic sense of satisfaction. If you’re trying to make creativity part of your life in some way, it can be difficult to balance ...

Like other self-help gurus of the time, Norman Vincent Peal targeted the lonely travelling salesman. But his message was also marketed to corporate executives, who were promised that the true power of positive thinking lay in the great dividends it would yield if they could sell it to their workforce. This episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast builds on the first part of this mini-series, where we saw Peale’s roots in the New Thought movement of the 1800s. In this one, we examine how Peale encour...