Podcast Summary

Healing + Human Potential with Alyssa Nobriga

Episode: How To Hear Your Soul's Calling & Alchemize Your Pain Into Purpose | Devi Brown
Air Date: November 11, 2025
Guest: Devi Brown (healer, creative advisor, author, wellness educator)

Episode Overview

This episode explores how to rebuild trust after heartbreak and suffering, truly hear and follow your soul’s calling, and transform pain into purpose. Host Alyssa Nobriga and guest Devi Brown delve into deeper levels of trust, self-inquiry, shadow work, embracing both grief and joy, and the importance of embodying—rather than just intellectualizing—your healing journey. Through personal stories and practical advice, the conversation offers both comfort and actionable tools for anyone seeking to alchemize darkness into growth and live more authentically in alignment with their inner wisdom.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trusting the Universe After Heartbreak

• Rebuilding Trust: Devi shares that her default in times of suffering is surrender and a deep reliance on her spiritual connection (“It’s me and you, God, it’s me and you.” [00:12]).
• Surrender as Practice: She uses the chant ‘I surrender’ when she hits a limit or faces events out of her control ([02:28]).
• Reflection on Life’s Patterns: Building trust comes from reviewing the ‘historical evidence’ in your own life—what choices worked and what didn’t ([02:57]). “Trust the patterns that have played out—the good and the hard ones.” ([02:46])
• Self-Trust and God/Universe: Self-trust and trust in a higher intelligence are intertwined. “Usually when I try to control it, I bring more problems into my life...” ([05:20])

2. Inventory, Intuition, and Synchronicity

• Practical Tools for Rebuilding Self-Trust: Devi advocates for journaling intuitive hits and synchronicities; documenting when your intuition was right, even if you didn’t follow it ([08:10]).
• Synchronicities as “Winks from the Universe”: She describes noticing powerful, meaningful coincidences, giving examples of both symbolic events and chance encounters ([09:36]), e.g., “A great white heron flew into my backyard, walked by my window, stopped and stared at me...” ([08:49])
• Gratitude vs. Synchronicity Journals: Tracking synchronicities and intuitive moments over traditional gratitude lists can increase confidence in universal support ([13:00]).
• Aloneness & Guidance: Realizing you’re never alone; paying attention reveals guidance is always present ([13:13]).

3. Shadow Work – Alchemizing Pain into Purpose

• Darkness as a Teacher: Devi describes grief and darkness not as obstacles, but as integral teachers and companions that help us grow ([15:15], [16:10]).
• The “Wounded Healer” Archetype: She shares personal stories of loss and trauma, emphasizing her life’s work as “learning to dance with” grief and shadow ([17:00]).
• Fullness of Human Experience: Both light and dark are essential: “To be alive and be human, it’s always both. Both are the point of being here, and that is what Earth school is.” ([17:54])
• Self-Care during Darkness: Practical wisdom includes prioritizing sleep, avoiding over-commitment, and recognizing biological responses to stress ([18:30]).

4. Practicing Joy and “Tiny Joys”

• Joy as a Practice, Not a Performance: Many struggle to feel true joy, especially after hardship or due to guilt. Devi distinguishes between authentic joy and ‘performative happiness’ ([21:11]).
• Cultivating Micro-Moments: She intentionally seeks “tiny joys”—lying in the grass, absorbing sunlight, savoring beauty, or connecting with her son ([23:00]).
• Permission to Feel: Alyssa and Devi advocate embracing authentic emotion on the full spectrum, without self-censorship, as a healing and inspiring practice ([24:34]).

5. The Healing Journey – Moving Beyond Isolation to Embodiment

• Isolation/Hermit Phases: Seasons of withdrawal serve a purpose but eventually, real growth requires “practicing in community” and trying new ways of being through social connection ([26:49]).
• From Awareness to Embodiment: “At some point, we have to outgrow just self-awareness...You are meant to transcend that into something else, which I believe is into living your wisdom or said other ways—into embodying your healing.” ([28:55])
• Somatic/Body Practices: Embodiment comes through caring for your body: slow stretching, self-massage, deep touch, and learning to be gentle and present with yourself ([30:15]).

6. Following Your Calling: Leaving a Successful Career

• From Radio to Purpose Work: Devi outlines her journey from a high-profile radio career to finding more soul-aligned work. Key lessons:
  • Detaching self-worth from job titles ([36:00]).
  • Recognizing when the industry’s values diverged from her own.
  • The power of meaningful conversations: her pivotal Kendrick Lamar interview about depression led her to prioritize impact over popularity ([44:37]).
  • “Even if I lose my audience... it doesn’t matter, because I feel like I actually helped someone when I did that.” ([45:31])
• Embracing Professional Evolution: Skills and value are transferable. True fulfillment comes from clarity about purpose, not external measures of success ([38:41]).

7. Relationships and Seasonality

• Shedding Relationships: It’s normal and healthy to outgrow relationships as we change ([50:16]).
• Graceful Endings: Devi emphasizes the value of “graceful sheds” and honest, clarifying conversations about needs, capacity, and boundaries ([52:30]).
• Community and Reciprocity: Being open to growing and giving in community, even through discomfort, is vital for healing ([54:14]).

8. Meditation Practice: Trauma-Informed Wisdom

• Realistic Expectations: Meditation can be hard and even triggering, especially for those with trauma. Devi normalizes resistance and describes her own early annoyance with practice ([55:46]).
• Gentle Entry Points: For trauma survivors: start with breathwork (not intense forms), open-eyed practice, and use guided meditation for support ([58:50]).
• Stages of Practice: The path includes emotional discomfort and “Pandora’s box” moments, but with patience, meditation becomes effortless, nourishing, and a source of deep insight ([63:18], [65:19]).
• End Goal: “When you’re there, that’s when life really becomes about creation...so much more than you, so much more about the divine interwoven fabric of why we’re here” ([65:19]).

9. Devi’s Book: Living in Wisdom

• About the Book: Written as a companion for those who have “intellectualized all the self-help” but are ready for embodied practice. Provides actionable tools for integrating grief, joy, and wisdom ([66:22]).
• Theme: Both joy and pain are part of our calling; live with both in fullness ([68:45]).

Memorable Quotes

• On Surrender:
  “My go to is literally getting on my knees and immediately just repeating like a chant, ‘I surrender, I surrender, I surrender.’”
  — Devi Brown ([00:12], [02:28])

• On Historical Evidence:
  “Something a lot of us need to get better at is trusting the history of our lives... Trust the patterns that have played out—the good and the hard ones.”
  — Devi Brown ([02:46])

• On Synchronicity:
  "It's like a wink from the universe." — Alyssa Nobriga ([12:42])

• On Fullness of Being:
  “To be alive and be human, it’s always both. It doesn’t mean your work didn’t work. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t as healed as you thought. It means you’re alive.”
  — Devi Brown ([17:54], [18:46])

• On Practicing Joy:
  “Joy does have to be practiced. We have culturally adopted a performative joy, but it’s important we know the truth in our body of what is performative...and what is actually a feeling of bliss.”
  — Devi Brown ([21:11])

• On Healing Community:
  “When you’re coming out of that isolated journey and needing to practice in community...your practice is learning how to build relationships, learning how to give what you have to give, learning how to receive what they have to give.”
  — Devi Brown ([49:09])

• On Career Courage:
  “I have never tied my identity to one single thing or anything really since my early 20s...When it was time to walk away from that career, it wasn’t a question. It was just, ‘OK, what’s next?’”
  — Devi Brown ([36:44], [41:37])

• On Meditation for Trauma:
  “If you have had a significant amount of trauma... keep your eyes in a low gaze, keep a hazy gaze. Practice in nature or where you feel the safest. Guided meditation can be a safe companion.”
  — Devi Brown ([58:45])

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Trusting After Heartbreak — [00:07]-[06:17]
• Building Self-Trust & Intuition Journaling — [07:46]-[13:00]
• Shadow Work: Alchemizing Pain into Purpose — [15:15]-[20:57]
• Practicing Joy & Tiny Joys — [21:11]-[26:06]
• Healing Journey: Isolation and Embodiment — [26:49]-[30:15]
• Body-Based Practices for Integration — [30:15]-[35:04]
• Hearing Your Calling & Courage to Change — [35:41]-[49:06]
• Navigating Relationships & Seasons of Connection — [50:16]-[55:01]
• Meditation Practice, Trauma-Informed Approaches — [55:46]-[65:17]
• Introduction to Living in Wisdom — [66:22]-[69:46]

Final Notes

The episode is a rich, authentic dialogue teeming with insight, vulnerability, and actionable wisdom. Key takeaways include the importance of surrender and trust, practical self-reflection tools, making space to feel all emotions, and the power of community and embodied presence in creating an authentic, purpose-driven life. Devi’s personal stories—from her radio career pivot to processing deep personal grief—ground the conversation in real-life stakes and inspiration.

Devi’s new book, Living in Wisdom, invites listeners to move from intellectual knowing to embodied living, courageously integrating both pain and joy in pursuit of genuine fulfillment.