The Present Moment Project

Jill Bershad
  • 5.0 (34)
  • Mental Health

This podcast, hosted by Jill Bershad — a psychotherapist, EMDR and hypnotherapist, Reiki master, and sound healer — is a heartfelt space for healing, growth, and connection. With a blend of authenticity and compassion, Jill invites listeners to join her in real conversations about resilience, trauma, addiction, and self-discovery. Through shared stories and gentle wisdom, she reminds us that while pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, and that we can all “grow through what we go through.” More than just a podcast, it’s a supportive community built to help listeners rediscover joy, laughter, and their most authentic selves — one present moment at a time. 

  1. Aug 11

    Ep. 22 - Loving Your Child Through Change and Finding Yourself Along the Way

    Supporting a transgender child, healing from childhood wounds, and learning to love yourself are at the center of this heartfelt conversation. Jill Bershad sits down with her friend Shayna Bloom to reflect on resilience, parenting, grief, spirituality, and the courage to live authentically through life's biggest transitions. Shayna shares her family's journey as her child, Eli, transitioned and began openly documenting that experience online. Together, they talk honestly about the fear of public criticism, the importance of unconditional love, and why creating a safe, accepting home can make all the difference for a child learning to become their authentic self. They also reflect on the impact of social media, community, and choosing love over judgment. Their conversation also explores the healing work that happens within ourselves. They share stories from a recent humanitarian trip to the Dominican Republic, discuss Reiki, fire ceremonies, intuition, and the lifelong process of releasing old beliefs, setting healthier boundaries, and quieting the inner critic that often begins in childhood. Healing isn't about becoming someone new. Sometimes it's about letting go of who you were taught to be, trusting your own inner voice, and creating a life rooted in compassion for yourself and the people you love. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  2. Jul 28

    Ep. 21 - The Personal Growth Work That Changed Everything

    Personal growth, healing old patterns, and learning to trust yourself shape this honest conversation as Jill Bershad welcomes therapists and Real Course instructors Jon Waller and Stephanie Savo-Smellie. Together they reflect on the life-changing work that helped them move beyond people-pleasing, self-doubt, and childhood beliefs that continued to influence their adult relationships. Jon and Stephanie share how The Real Course uses experiential personal development to help people recognize limiting beliefs, step outside their comfort zones, practice vulnerability, and take responsibility for the lives they want to create. They also talk about how the work has transformed their relationships, careers, and the way they show up for themselves and others. Jill opens up about how this work changed her own life after years of carrying childhood wounds, and how learning about boundaries, integrity, accountability, and self-love continues to shape her healing after profound loss. Together they explore why growth often begins with discomfort, why healthy relationships require honesty, and how small shifts in awareness can create lasting change. Healing doesn't happen by pretending the past didn't matter. It begins by understanding the beliefs we've carried for years, choosing new ways to respond, and giving ourselves permission to live with greater authenticity, connection, and compassion. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  3. Jul 14

    Ep. 20 - How Do We Keep Living After Losing Someone We Love?

    Grief, resilience, and learning how to keep living after loss are at the heart of this deeply personal conversation. Jill Bershad sits down with Amy to talk about the death of Amy’s son Yossi from brain cancer and the experiences that led her to write The Wholeness of a Broken Heart. Amy shares the nine months between Yossi’s diagnosis and his death, the community that surrounded her family, and the difficult reality of being present for one child while continuing to parent and care for the rest of her family. She and Jill reflect on vulnerability, asking for help, accepting what cannot be changed, and the people who show up when life becomes too heavy to carry alone. Their conversation moves through the seven pathways Amy writes about, including acceptance, vulnerability, self-care, family and chosen family, beauty, faith, and miracles. They talk about finding comfort in nature, listening to intuition, setting boundaries, speaking to ourselves with kindness, and allowing grief and beauty to exist at the same time. There are no simple answers for moving through profound loss. Sometimes resilience begins with accepting the life that is actually in front of us, finding safe people who will sit beside us, and remaining open to the beauty, connection, and small miracles that still exist. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  4. Jun 30

    Ep. 19 - Starting Over at 45 and Building Something That Matters

    Starting over at 45, building a startup, and learning to trust yourself are at the heart of this conversation. Jill Bershad sits down with her longtime friend Nathalya to reflect on decades of friendship, raising families, navigating financial uncertainty, and finding the courage to begin again. Nathalya shares how a personal family tragedy led her to leave a successful event planning career, return to graduate school, and eventually launch Anywhere DX, a company working to develop an at-home strep test designed to make testing and treatment more accessible. Along the way, she talks honestly about self-doubt, resilience, pitching investors, and discovering confidence she didn't know she had. Their conversation moves naturally between memories of young motherhood, entrepreneurship, empty nesting, marriage, and the unexpected ways life keeps asking us to adapt. Rather than having all the answers, they reflect on what it means to keep moving forward, trust the process, and take chances on yourself even when the outcome isn't guaranteed. Sometimes resilience looks less like a dramatic moment and more like making the next decision, taking the next step, and believing that growth is possible long after life has changed. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  5. Jun 16

    Ep. 18 - When You Lose Someone and Nobody Has the Right Words

    Bryan Martin lost his partner Clayton in 2018 after a bizarre accident during yard work which led to a fungal infection, a missed diagnosis, and liver failure within months. He also lost his father that same year. What followed was grief compounded by invisibility — a doctor in the ER dismissed him because he and Clayton weren't married, and people around him minimized the loss for the same reason. Bryan talks about what it actually felt like to move through those years, including the fog of early grief, the anger of year two, and the isolation of the pandemic that eventually pushed him toward dancing in his kitchen on TikTok. That dancing became something neither of us expected. Bryan now has 1.2 million Facebook followers who show up every morning for his kitchen dance videos with a cup of coffee. He talks about how that started not as content but as survival — a way to give himself something to look forward to when the world shut down and there was nothing else. What grew out of it, including parents messaging him to say they finally understood their gay children better, is something he still doesn't fully have words for. We talk about the strange timeline of grief — how four years or eight years can feel both endless and impossibly fast, how certain moments cut through the fog without warning, and why the people who haven't been through it often say the most inadvertently hurtful things. Bryan also wrote a book, The Widow Dancer, compiled from five years of blog posts he wrote for a widowed support organization. He talks about going back and reading all of it, and crying straight through. There's also a conversation here about what it means to be widowed without being married, and why that distinction shouldn't matter but still does — in hospitals, in social circles, in how people respond to your grief. Bryan is remarried now, to Devin, who by the way is very cute. But the throughline of this whole conversation is the same one that started it: you lose your person, and that's what it is. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  6. Jun 2

    Ep. 17 - Finding Purpose After Losing a Child with Camilla Goodwin of Myla's Beleaf

    Childhood cancer, grief, and what it actually looks like to build something meaningful after the worst possible loss. Camilla Goodwin lost her daughter Myla in 2020 to a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer called Wilms tumor. She was eight years old. In the years since, Camilla and her husband Mike have opened a restaurant, started a foundation, raised over three million dollars for families facing childhood cancer diagnoses, and somehow kept showing up for their other two kids, their community, and each other. This conversation goes to a lot of honest places. Camilla talks about the adrenaline that carried her through the early months, nursing school, a psychology degree, a master's in education, all of it driven by that same force that Jill recognizes from her own experience of loss. They talk about the moment she realized she was reliving her trauma every time she sat with grieving parents, and how she had to step back from that part of the work to stay healthy enough to keep doing any of it. There is a lot in here about faith, or the loss of it, and what slowly comes back. About the ways Myla shows up for her family still, through leaves in unexpected places, through the way her kids talk about her every single day. About what it meant to keep Myla's diagnosis framed in hope rather than statistics, and how that shaped the final years of her life. Myla's Beleaf provides financial support to families navigating childhood cancer, from active treatment through end of life. They have helped 360 families in four years. The foundation is based in South Florida and operates across the state. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  7. May 26

    Ep. 16 - When Your Pain Finally Outgrows Your Fear

    First responder mental health and the silence around it is where this conversation begins — with Tim Roberto, a Marine Corps veteran with 19 years of sobriety who turned his own history into something that helps people in uniform ask for help without losing anything in the process. He founded Stomping Out the Stigma, a nonprofit that connects first responders and veterans with licensed, culturally competent therapists. No insurance. No HR. No agency reporting. First name only, and someone calls you back within 24 hours. Tim started using at 11, worked his way through everything available between then and 16, and got sober at 44. What finally moved him wasn't a program or a person — it was a quiet realization that his pain had grown bigger than his fear. For years, fear-based decisions had only produced more fear, the same drain cycling through the same dark. Recovery came through 12-step literature, morning routines, and what he calls a complete psychic change — not something he can fully explain, just something he stopped trying to figure out and started living instead. He grew up one of five boys, raised by an authoritarian Italian father who had been sent back to Italy alone at eight years old for his education, and a deeply codependent English mother. Tim spent most of his childhood trying to be anything other than himself. The episode moves through his early years, his time in the Marine Corps, the moment in a Burger King parking lot at 16 when cocaine found him and he knew immediately it was different, and the first sober Christmas when he finally told his father he loved him — a scene that takes a long time to get through and is worth every second. Jill brings her own thread in — her father, her husband's death, the boundary she set in her early 50s that she couldn't have set before, and what it finally felt like to be parented after spending most of her life without it. Both of them return again and again to the same ground: showing up for yourself in the morning before the day takes over, watching patterns instead of words, staying off the victim triangle, and choosing response over reaction. None of it is abstract. All of it is earned. Palm Beach County has one of the highest death by suicide rates among first responders in any county in Florida. Nationally, more first responders die by suicide than in the line of duty. If you or someone you know is in uniform and struggling, Tim can be reached at sotsinc24@gmail.com or sotsinc.org. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

  8. May 19

    Ep. 15 - When Life Keeps Saying No and You Keep Going Anyway

    Adventure therapy, Navy SEALs, and what happens when the path you were certain about closes on you twice. David Cohen, a therapist and founder of Invictus Psychotherapy in Boca Raton, sits down to talk about how a DWI at 19 changed the entire direction of his life, and what it took to find purpose on the other side of that. David walks through what adventure therapy actually looks like in practice, why talking about your problems in a chair only goes so far, and how taking someone rock climbing or kayaking can get to places that traditional talk therapy never reaches. The conversation moves into the body, the nervous system, and why so many people are walking around in a stress response they do not even recognize as one. Jill and David talk honestly about sitting with emotions instead of outrunning them, the difference between insight and actual change, and why the belief "I can't do it" that shows up on a ropes course is the exact same belief that shows up everywhere else in a person's life. There is also a real conversation about men and emotional expression, and what it takes to access feelings when you were conditioned not to have them. There is a lot of ground covered here, including OCD, hypnotherapy, exposure therapy, and what it means to be of genuine service versus just getting by. David is about to join the Army National Guard, has a two-month-old at home, and sees around thirty clients a week. He is doing the work, and it shows. Contact Jill K. Bershad, LMHC, CAP Email: jill@jillbershad.com Website: jillbershad.comInstagram: @jillkbershad.lmhcFacebook: jillkbershad

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5
out of 5
34 Ratings

About

This podcast, hosted by Jill Bershad — a psychotherapist, EMDR and hypnotherapist, Reiki master, and sound healer — is a heartfelt space for healing, growth, and connection. With a blend of authenticity and compassion, Jill invites listeners to join her in real conversations about resilience, trauma, addiction, and self-discovery. Through shared stories and gentle wisdom, she reminds us that while pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, and that we can all “grow through what we go through.” More than just a podcast, it’s a supportive community built to help listeners rediscover joy, laughter, and their most authentic selves — one present moment at a time. 

Information

  • Creator
    Jill Bershad
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Present Moment Project
  • Show Website
    The Present Moment Project