This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

NOTE: This episode includes discussion of sexual violence. Take care of yourself while you listen.

A lot of us went straight from a childhood where safety was not guaranteed into an adulthood where we assumed it never would be. So we got competent instead. We got impressive. We built whole careers on being the person who holds everything, and we never noticed that we had quietly agreed to go without.

This week, Adrienne introduces Dr. Della V. Mosley, a counseling psychologist who has spent her career building healing ecosystems for Black, queer, and trans folks. In adulthood, after an unspeakable betrayal, Della had to go find safety for herself, on purpose – work that took her into conversations most of us spend decades avoiding. What came back to her on the other side of that is the part almost nobody tells you about.

Learn more about what Della is healing from in this article.

Watch Della's TEDx talk, "Moving from Woke to Working for Black Futures."

Subscribe to Whole Wayves, Della's Substack, where she shares the practices that hold her own healing.

Visit Della's website to explore her healing-centered ecosystem for Black women, non-binary, and queer folks.

Support The WELLS Healing Center, the non-profit she leads, offering coaching, workshops, and courses grounded in counseling psychology and Black feminist principles.

Learn Academics for Black Survival and Wellness, the initiative Della co-founded with Pearis Jean.

Find Della on Instagram: @dvmosley

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ABOUT THE HOST

Adrienne Michelle, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, speaker, and the host of The Audacity to Heal. She is signed with Looking Glass Literary for her forthcoming memoir. She is a regularly featured expert in Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Betches, and the first lesbian therapist featured on Therapy for Black Girls. The podcast and the retreats are the on-ramp, and the memoir is where it all lands. Find her on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ and at ⁠adriennemichelletherapy.com⁠.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

—NOTE: This episode includes discussion of family legacy, land loss, and grief. Take care of yourself while you listen.

Adrienne Michelle sits with Gabrielle Eitienne, who left a career in fashion and marketing in New York to come home to her family's land in North Carolina with a new purpose. She’s since learned so much – how to save seed, how to put up food, how to feed people like it matters, because it does. Gabrielle shares what the garden has given her that the grind never will.

Gabrielle is a cook, artist, and cultural preservationist whose work moves through oral history, film, cooking, and textile to trace the Black experience of land, seed, and table. She was featured in the Netflix series High on the Hog and in the Oxford American short film The Seeds We Keep. She is the co-founder of Tall Grass Food Box, a CSA built to sustain Black farmers across the Triangle region of North Carolina, and the creator of Revival Taste Collective and the AfroCarolina Revival Suppers.

Watch High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America (Netflix, 2021). The series that brought Gabrielle's preservation work to the world, tracing Black foodways from West Africa to the American South.

Watch The Seeds We Keep (Oxford American). The short documentary on Gabrielle's return to her family's land in Apex and the traditions she is keeping alive there.

Support Tall Grass Food Box, the CSA Gabrielle co-founded to sustain Black farmers across the North Carolina Triangle by putting their harvest directly into community hands.

Read "My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies" by Resmaa Menakem.

Find Gabrielle Instagram: @gabrielle_eitienne · Revival Taste Collective and the AfroCarolina Revival Suppers

Visit Woodard's Garage and Grocery



Adrienne Michelle, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, speaker, and the host of The Audacity to Heal. She is signed with Looking Glass Literary for her forthcoming memoir. She is a regularly featured expert in Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Betches, and the first lesbian therapist featured on Therapy for Black Girls. The podcast and the retreats are the on-ramp, and the memoir is where it all lands. Find her on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ and at ⁠adriennemichelletherapy.com⁠.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

—NOTE: This episode includes discussion of depression and body image. Take care of yourself while you listen.

This week we talk about finding the audacity to begin healing and the nerve to keep going with someone who has been on a personal, and sometimes very public, healing journey. Yoga phenom Jessamyn Stanley joins Adrienne Michelle to talk inner child, imposter syndrome, and kink.

Jessamyn is a yoga teacher, content creator, and writer based in Northern California. She is the cofounder of The Underbelly – the coolest yoga community on the internet – and the author of Every Body Yoga and Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance.

Jessamyn teaches yoga and meditation all over the world, and shares about 21st century intersectional identity, and the pivotal role that self-acceptance plays in manifesting social change.

Read (by Jessamyn) Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance (Workman, 2021). Part memoir, part reckoning, on the daily practice of accepting yourself in real time. Her first book, Every Body Yoga, is the on-ramp for anyone who thinks yoga was never built for their body.

Listen to "I Weigh with Jameela Jamil: Jessamyn Stanley." A warm, honest conversation about her journey with her body and her mental health.

Read "Wellness Leader Jessamyn Stanley on the Power of Yoga and Embracing Your Feelings" (Modern Luxury). On leaving the performance at the door and remembering that the work is not all of who she is.

Listen to Dear Jessamyn, her advice podcast co-hosted with Jessica Blackwell, plus The Underbelly, her streaming

Watch Jessamyn’s experience with ancestral kink at the 2026 San Francisco PRIDE parade

Find Jessamyn Instagram: @mynameisjessamyn · Online: jessamynstanley.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Adrienne Michelle, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, speaker, and the host of The Audacity to Heal. She is signed with Looking Glass Literary for her forthcoming memoir. She is a regularly featured expert in Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Betches, and the first lesbian therapist featured on Therapy for Black Girls. The podcast and the retreats are the on-ramp, and the memoir is where it all lands. Find her on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ and at ⁠adriennemichelletherapy.com⁠.

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

The Audacity to Heal with Adrienne Michelle is a shot of warm, direct, clinically grounded conversation for Black and BIPOC queer women, femmes, and non-binary folks who are tired of performing okay and ready to be honest. This is a show about healing from all kinds of trauma, the kind that lives in the body, the bloodline, the relationship, the diagnosis, the silence, and the self.

In this episode, meet Adrienne, a licensed marriage, family and sex therapist on her own healing journey. She outlines her healing priorities, including what it means to live a soft, queer life, what to expect in this season of the show, and why she sees healing stories as love stories told by communities on the margins.

Find Adrienne on Instagram: @adriennemichelletherapy

Website: adriennemichelletherapy.com

Follow the show on Instagram: @audacitytohealpodcast

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MUSIC

King Sis, "Close To Heaven"

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ABOUT THE HOST

Adrienne Michelle, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, speaker, and the host of The Audacity to Heal. She is signed with Looking Glass Literary for her forthcoming memoir. She is a regularly featured expert in Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Betches, and the first lesbian therapist featured on Therapy for Black Girls. The podcast and the retreats are the on-ramp, and the memoir is where it all lands. Find her on Instagram and TikTok and at adriennemichelletherapy.com.