Spiral Bridge

Leili McKinley & Tesz Millan

Transformation isn’t a straight road. It’s a spiral bridge — one you climb, circling back to the same questions from higher ground each time. A pull you can’t explain. A leap you almost don’t take. A breaking-open in the middle. Then a larger you steps off the far side — just in time to feel the next pull begin. Spiral Bridge is a podcast that walks that story stage by stage. Over twelve movements — drawn from Joseph Campbell’s hero’s and hera’s journey and woven together with Jungian psychology, mythology, and the science of flow — hosts LEILI MCKINLEY and TESZ MILLAN follow the whole arc of becoming. The call that won’t leave you alone. The costly decision to answer it. The first uncertain steps, the push to your edges, the fall that cracks the old self open. Then the rebuilding, the harmony that follows, the gift you carry back to the world — and the freedom and clarity that turn one person’s transformation into something they can spark in others. The spiral is the point: you don’t cross this bridge once. You return to it, again and again, and each pass goes deeper. Wherever you are on it right now — sensing a first stirring, standing in the wreckage of a life that fell apart, quietly rebuilding, or living in what you fought to reach — the show is built to meet you there. Leili and Tesz make unlikely, easy company. Leili, who created the framework beneath the show, carries the ideas and tells the stories that give them weight. Tesz is your seat in the room — a fellow traveler who pulls the story out, asks what you’d ask, and answers back with her own. Together they turn a map of human change into a conversation you can actually feel. This is not a self-help show, a personality test, or a lecture. No formulas, no five-step routes to a better you. Just two people chasing big questions in the open, grounding every idea in real, lived experience and in the lives of people across history and myth who climbed the same bridge — Frida Kahlo, Harriet Tubman, and more to come. A calling has never really been about a title or a plan. It’s the pull toward becoming more fully yourself, in every corner of your life. If something in you has been asking to be heard, this is where you start listening. New episodes move through the journey stage by stage, with essays, historical portraits, and the visual map of the framework alongside the show. Welcome to Spiral Bridge. Discover more at https://substack.com/@identitype/

Episodes

  1. 5d ago

    COMMENCEMENT: Using Your No to Get to Your Yes

    What happens when the dream you've worked so hard to begin becomes the very thing that burns you out? In this episode of the Spiral Bridge Podcast, Leili McKinley and Tesz Millan explore Commencement, the fourth stage of the Identitype journey, where becoming who you are gives way to the challenge of sustaining what you've begun. Commencement asks a simple question: Can you care for yourself well enough to actually begin the journey? Leili introduces Careciprocity, a concept that brings care and reciprocity together into a continuous exchange of giving and receiving. Because even when we're pursuing something meaningful, passion and determination alone cannot sustain us if we're constantly giving more than we have. Tesz brings this struggle into sharp focus through her experience launching a YouTube series that began with extraordinary excitement and purpose but eventually led to profound creative burnout. What begins as a conversation about the relentless demands of content creation reveals something much deeper: how patterns of seeking love, recognition, and belonging through achievement can follow us from childhood into adulthood. Together, Leili and Tesz explore the subtle distinctions between generosity, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom - and how resentment, exhaustion, and self-blame can signal that the balance between giving and receiving has been lost. Along the way, Leili shares the creative ritual that helped her navigate financial challenges as a young adult, while Tesz reflects on an unexpected source of comfort: a beloved plushie pigeon named Geon that has become part of her journey toward rediscovering joy. Different experiences. Different ways of learning to care for ourselves. But underneath them is the same essential work: recognizing what genuinely nurtures us, establishing boundaries that protect our energy, and making enough space for the life we're trying to build. In This Episode Why Commencement is both an ending and a beginning in the Identitype journeyThe meaning of Careciprocity and why care requires both giving and receivingHow passion and purpose can become pathways to creative burnoutTesz's experience building her YouTube series and confronting the pressure of social media algorithmsThe difference between generosity, self-sacrifice, and martyrdomHow childhood experiences and first-generation family expectations can shape adult patterns of achievement and validationWhy resentment can reveal where generosity has become unsustainableLeili's money-tree ritual and the importance of creating meaningful ways to nurture ourselvesThe relationship between emotional awareness, boundaries, and self-careTesz's unexpected connection with a plushie pigeon and her journey toward rediscovering joyWhy saying no is sometimes the most important step toward a meaningful yesIf you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywords Commencement, Careciprocity, Identitype System, Spiral Bridge Podcast, creative burnout, self-care, reciprocity, generosity, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, boundaries, emotional awareness, first-generation experiences, childhood patterns, social media burnout, content creation, personal growth, identity, self-discovery, nurturing, resilience, finding joy, sustainable creativity, saying no, new beginnings, hero's journey, Hera's journey

  2. Oct 22

    HERO-HERA ALIGNMENT - THE RECORD: Two Shapes of the Inner Yes

    What happens when becoming yourself requires breaking with what you’ve been given? In this episode of the Spiral Bridge Podcast, Leili McKinley and Tesz Millan take Hero/Hera Alignment into the historical record through two lives that followed radically different paths: Carl Jung and Audre Lorde. Jung represents return. Once positioned as the heir to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic movement, he began encountering ideas that no longer fit the framework he had inherited. Following them meant losing his mentor, his standing, and much of his intellectual community – then spending years descending into the underworld of psychology. What emerged became an entirely new architecture of the psyche. Lorde represents arrival. Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet – she refused a world that repeatedly asked her to divide herself into acceptable pieces. Instead, she named herself, claimed the intersections of her identity, and built a body of work around a self for which the existing categories were not enough. Different lives. Different centuries. Different shapes. But underneath them is the same alignment work: breaking with an inheritance that no longer fits, learning to trust what is asking to emerge, finding the witness who can see it before the world does, and creating language for who you are becoming. Along the way, Tesz connects Lorde’s self-definition to her own evolving Filipino American identity – including the impact of discovering Filipina American rapper Ruby Ibarra and seeing a strength and cultural expression she had felt but had never before represented with such beauty and depth. In This Episode Carl Jung’s break with Freud and the cost of losing an intellectual inheritanceJung’s six-year “confrontation with the unconscious” and the work that emerged from itWhy alignment sometimes means staying with what the world hasn’t yet given you permission to valueThe role of the one witness in work the world cannot yet seeAudre Lorde and the lifelong act of naming herselfRefusing to subordinate one identity in order to belong to anotherLorde’s body, cancer, self-care, and the no that protects the yesTesz on Ruby Ibarra, Filipino American identity, and the question: “Am I Filipino enough?”Why alignment often requires new language for who you are becomingReturn and arrival – and why neither begins from nothingReferenced in this episode: Ruby Ibarra — “Us” https://youtu.be/AUfNeCozJBw?si=OXY0qoo05bKYSYFJ If you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywords Hero/Hera Alignment, Carl Jung, Audre Lorde, Identitype System, Sigmund Freud, Ruby Ibarra, Filipino American identity, return, arrival, identity, self-definition, individuation, collective unconscious, archetypes, self-care, boundaries, one witness, higher calling, becoming, alignment, hero’s journey, Hera’s journey, Spiral Bridge Podcast

  3. Oct 8

    HERO-HERA ALIGNMENT: Championing Your Yes

    You said yes. So why does it feel like nothing has changed? In this episode of the Spiral Bridge Podcast, Leili McKinley and Tesz Millan enter Stage Three of the journey: HERO/HERA ALIGNMENT – the space between answering the call and becoming the person who can fully embody it. Because saying yes doesn't instantly transform your life. The world may look exactly the same the next morning. But underneath, something has begun to shift. Leili describes two shapes this alignment can take… RETURN – when you're coming back to a part of yourself you once left behind ARRIVAL – when you're stepping into something you've never consciously been before. But both reveal the same deeper truth: you aren't necessarily creating yourself from scratch. The raw material may already be there, waiting to be recognized. For Leili, that recognition came through a vivid dream – and through a witness who could see what was happening before she could fully see it herself. For Tesz, it arrived as a fully formed idea in the middle of the night that eventually became her YouTube series Filipina. American. Creative. They explore the people and objects that help make an emerging identity real: the witness who sees you, the physical object that anchors what you're becoming, and eventually the moment you no longer need that external representation because you've begun to embody it yourself. But alignment also requires boundaries. Leili examines the pattern of keeping our attention permanently turned outward – anticipating what others need and reflexively giving away our time, attention, and energy. Sometimes the most important no is the one that protects your deeper yes. Tesz connects that pattern to her own experience of advocating publicly for Filipino heritage while privately feeling disconnected from the Filipino American community – and to the burnout that eventually forced her to recognize the physical cost of that disconnect. Because the body may recognize what's true before the mind has language for it. In This Episode What actually happens after you answer the callHero/Hera Alignment and the gap between answering and becomingReturn vs. arrival: two shapes of alignmentWhy becoming may be recognition rather than constructionThe importance of the “one witness” who sees what you're becomingAnchor objects: Leili's hat and Tesz's Philippine-inspired jacketLearning to use your no to get to your yesWhat happens when vigilance and attention stay permanently turned outwardTesz on Filipino identity, disconnection, performance, and burnoutWhy your body may recognize alignment – or misalignment – before your mind doesIf you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywords Hero/Hera Alignment, Identitype System, higher calling, answering the call, identity, becoming, self-discovery, alignment, return, arrival, boundaries, saying no, self-advocacy, burnout, Filipino American identity, embodiment, body-mind connection, one witness, anchor object, purpose, transformation, Spiral Bridge Podcast

  4. Sep 24

    ANSWERING THE CALL - THE RECORD: The Act and The Life

    Anybody can blow something up. It takes a different kind of courage to know what you are building while you do it. In this chapter of the Spiral Bridge, Tesz Millan and Leili McKinley move from the personal into the historical record - and into two lives that reveal what it looks like to cross the threshold fully. One answered the call in a single, deliberate act. The other answered it every day for 27 years. Rosa Parks. Nelson Mandela. The act and the life. The story many of us learned about Rosa Parks leaves out the part that matters most. She wasn't simply a tired seamstress who spontaneously refused to give up her seat. She had spent more than a decade as a civil rights activist, served as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, trained at the Highlander Folk School, and studied nonviolent resistance. Her refusal wasn't an impulse. It was the culmination of years spent building toward something. And the cost came after: lost jobs, death threats, leaving Montgomery, and years without the recognition or financial security we might imagine followed such a consequential act. Nelson Mandela's answer took a different shape. His wasn't a moment, but a direction he pointed himself toward again and again - through resistance, the Rivonia Trial, 27 years of imprisonment, and repeated offers of conditional release. Through both stories, Leili draws out the deeper pattern: answering the call isn't defined by the scale of the disruption, but by its direction. What happens when we stop defining ourselves by what we're fighting against and remain oriented toward what we're trying to build? Mandela could have emerged from prison defined by bitterness and what had been done to him. Instead, he negotiated with the people who had imprisoned him and helped build a democratic South Africa. Rosa Parks stayed in her seat. Nelson Mandela stayed in his direction. Neither was defined simply by what they were against. Both were defined by what they were building toward. That is the distinction Rebelution was built to hold. In This Episode Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela: two radically different ways of answering the callThe Rosa Parks story many of us didn't learn - and the years of preparation behind her refusal to moveWhy her stillness, composure, and clarity reveal a threshold already crossedThe real cost Rosa Parks paid long after the Montgomery Bus Boycott beganTesz's own quiet crossing: boarding the plane that took her away from her music career and life in GermanyNelson Mandela and what it means to answer the call not once, but every dayLeili on staying oriented toward what you're building instead of becoming defined by the obstacleTesz on burnout, Filipina. American. Creative., and knowing the question was never if she would return, only whenThe “one witness” who sees what you're becoming before the rest of the world doesWhy some of our most isolating acts can ultimately create the deepest belongingIf you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywords answering the call, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Rebelution, crossing the threshold, hero's journey, Hera's journey, Joseph Campbell, higher calling, civil rights, apartheid, purpose, courage, leadership, transformation, identity, resilience, burnout, belonging, one witness, Spiral Bridge Podcast

  5. Sep 10

    ANSWERING THE CALL: The Revolution of Her Being

    Hearing the call and answering it are two completely different acts. Most of us live in the gap between them - sometimes for years. Chapter 2 of the Spiral Bridge podcast brings us to the threshold. In the old stories, it’s a doorway, a river, a forest the hero has to cross. But the threshold isn’t what changes you. The crossing is and almost always asks you to leave something behind: an identity, a plan, a version of yourself that once made sense. Leili McKinley shares the part of her story she hasn’t told before. In college, she discovered Joseph Campbell, myth, semiotics, and work that felt like finding the current instead of fighting against it. There was purpose in what she was creating. It felt like her. Then she graduated and went commercial. There was no dramatic abandonment of the call. Instead, it happened through a thousand small, reasonable decisions. She built a successful business and a life that worked on paper, while the deeper work stayed behind in notebooks. The refusal of a calling rarely feels like refusal. It feels like responsibility. Leili made a living, but she wasn’t making meaning. And “later” - when there was more time, more stability, better conditions - became a deferral that never ended. Until the ordinary world she had built collapsed and the refusal was no longer available. Tesz Millan recognizes her own version of the same crossing: a successful singing career in Germany that looked like a dream from the outside but increasingly felt disconnected from her own voice and identity. Therapy helped her separate what was truly hers from what she had been carrying for someone else - eventually leading her to stop singing, leave Germany, and step into the unknown. For both women, answering the call didn’t happen because the conditions finally became right. It happened when each discovered something she could no longer sacrifice. Leili gives this stage a name within the Identitype System: Rebelution. Not rebellion for the sake of tearing something down. Rebelution is disruption with a direction - breaking from what no longer fits in order to build something truer. Because crossing the threshold isn’t ultimately defined by what you’re leaving behind. It’s defined by what you’re willing to walk toward. In This EpisodeWhy hearing the call and answering it are two different actsThe threshold in the hero’s journey - and what crossing it costsWhy refusal often looks like responsibilityThe seductive promise of “later” and the difference between making a living and making meaningWhat happens when the ordinary world collapses and refusal is no longer availableThe “revolution of your being” and finding what you can no longer sacrificeWhy answering the call rarely waits for ideal conditionsRebelution: breaking from what no longer fits in order to build something truerIf you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywordsanswering the call, Rebelution, hero’s journey, Hera’s journey, Joseph Campbell, higher calling, purpose, transformation, identity, career change, creativity, finding your voice, Wonder-Trust, Identitype System

  6. Aug 28

    HIGHER CALLING - THE RECORD: Two Lives. Two Ways the Call Comes.

    What if the thing calling you has been there all along - waiting for you to recognize it? In this episode of the Spiral Bridge, Leili McKinley and Tesz Millan step into the historical record to explore two extraordinary women whose callings arrived in different ways: Frida Kahlo and Harriet Tubman. For Frida, the call came from within. At eighteen, a catastrophic bus accident shattered the future she thought she was going to have and left her immobilized in bed. With a mirror above her and a paintbrush in her hand, something that had always existed beneath the surface finally found its language. She didn’t set out to become a painter. The crisis made it impossible to ignore what was already there. Harriet’s calling came from the opposite direction. Born enslaved in Maryland, the circumstances of her world pressed upon her until freedom became more than something she wanted - it became something she had to answer. And once she escaped, her calling expanded beyond her own freedom. She went back. Two women. Two centuries. Two radically different lives. One calling emerging from the inside. The other arriving through the demands of the world outside. And yet, the same pattern appears: both carried something long before the world recognized it. Both kept going without knowing where the call would lead. And there came a point when answering stopped being something they did and became part of who they were. Along the way, Leili and Tesz explore the ancient architecture of the Hera’s journey, what happens when crisis strips away the life you thought you were supposed to live, why the world is late to recognize what you’re building, and the importance of the one person who sees what you’re carrying before everyone else does. Tesz also turns the question toward her own life - and the Filipino identity she spent her life learning to answer. Because your calling doesn’t look like anyone else’s. It’s an inner knowing you’ve been living around for years. Maybe it’s something happening in the world that you can no longer remain neutral about. Maybe it’s both. The call may already be there. The question is whether you’re willing to treat it as real. In This Episode The two ways a higher calling can arrive: from within or through the circumstances of our livesJoseph Campbell, the hero’s journey, and the ancient pattern of transformationFrida Kahlo: how crisis revealed a calling that had been there all alongWhy your calling can be real before the world recognizes what you’re buildingHarriet Tubman: when the circumstances of the world make answering the call impossible to ignoreHow a calling can grow beyond the self and become something larger than your own freedom or fulfillmentThe courage, responsibility, and isolation that can come with carrying a callingWhat Frida and Harriet teach us about recognizing whether your own calling is internal, external, or bothIf you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywords: higher calling, answering the call, finding your life purpose, hero’s journey, Hera’s journey, Joseph Campbell, Frida Kahlo, Harriet Tubman, personal transformation, self-discovery, identity, Wonder-Trust

  7. Aug 10

    HIGHER CALLING: Wonder-Trust and the First Pull

    Have you ever felt pulled toward something you couldn’t explain - something bigger than the life you’re currently living, but you couldn’t quite name? That question opens the Spiral Bridge - and the beginning of a journey we’ll walk together. Leili McKinley knows that pull. For years, she followed an unnamed thread through myth, psychology, storytelling, and the architecture beneath the stories we tell about ourselves. But it wasn’t until the life she thought she was supposed to have fell apart that those pieces came together - and she began to hear what was calling her. Tesz Millan found herself at a different threshold. After building a successful singing career around someone else’s vision of who she should be, she walked away and learned to trust her creative impulses again. Their stories may be different. Yours will be, too. But the journey is one humans have been walking for thousands of years. Today, we step onto the Spiral Bridge and explore that journey: how we recognize a calling, why our old stories sometimes have to break, and what allows us to take the first step toward who we’re becoming. It begins with a doorway Leili calls Wonder-Trust - the capacity to wonder, to ask what if?, and to trust that something more is possible. If you’ve felt the pull toward something you couldn’t name, this journey is for you. In This EpisodeWhy a higher calling isn’t necessarily a career, but a pull toward becoming more fully yourselfLeili’s early discovery of semiotics, Jung, and Joseph Campbell — and the thread she couldn’t yet nameHow the collapse of her marriage and ordinary life became a catalyst for transformationThe shadow, the performed self, and the myths that begin to fall away when life no longer fitsThe moment with Leili’s daughter that revealed how deeply disconnected she had become from her own sense of wonderReturning to a childhood experience on the playground — and discovering where her Wonder-Trust had been brokenRebuilding Wonder-Trust through practice, play, and learning to experience the world differentlyHow Leili’s personal healing revealed a larger pattern — connecting Campbell’s monomyth to the spiral journeyTesz’s experience of having her creativity “colonized,” and recognizing a calling that had been trying to reach her for yearsHow to recognize when a calling is real — and why wonder opens the door, but courage walks through itIf you're interested in learning more about the journey and the Identitype System, visit us at https://substack.com/@identitype Keywords: higher calling, purpose, Wonder-Trust, hero's journey, hera's journey, transformation, identity, self-discovery, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, play, motherhood, divorce

  • 7 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Transformation isn’t a straight road. It’s a spiral bridge — one you climb, circling back to the same questions from higher ground each time. A pull you can’t explain. A leap you almost don’t take. A breaking-open in the middle. Then a larger you steps off the far side — just in time to feel the next pull begin. Spiral Bridge is a podcast that walks that story stage by stage. Over twelve movements — drawn from Joseph Campbell’s hero’s and hera’s journey and woven together with Jungian psychology, mythology, and the science of flow — hosts LEILI MCKINLEY and TESZ MILLAN follow the whole arc of becoming. The call that won’t leave you alone. The costly decision to answer it. The first uncertain steps, the push to your edges, the fall that cracks the old self open. Then the rebuilding, the harmony that follows, the gift you carry back to the world — and the freedom and clarity that turn one person’s transformation into something they can spark in others. The spiral is the point: you don’t cross this bridge once. You return to it, again and again, and each pass goes deeper. Wherever you are on it right now — sensing a first stirring, standing in the wreckage of a life that fell apart, quietly rebuilding, or living in what you fought to reach — the show is built to meet you there. Leili and Tesz make unlikely, easy company. Leili, who created the framework beneath the show, carries the ideas and tells the stories that give them weight. Tesz is your seat in the room — a fellow traveler who pulls the story out, asks what you’d ask, and answers back with her own. Together they turn a map of human change into a conversation you can actually feel. This is not a self-help show, a personality test, or a lecture. No formulas, no five-step routes to a better you. Just two people chasing big questions in the open, grounding every idea in real, lived experience and in the lives of people across history and myth who climbed the same bridge — Frida Kahlo, Harriet Tubman, and more to come. A calling has never really been about a title or a plan. It’s the pull toward becoming more fully yourself, in every corner of your life. If something in you has been asking to be heard, this is where you start listening. New episodes move through the journey stage by stage, with essays, historical portraits, and the visual map of the framework alongside the show. Welcome to Spiral Bridge. Discover more at https://substack.com/@identitype/

Information

  • Creator
    Leili McKinley & Tesz Millan
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    7
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Leili McKinley & Tesz Millan
  • Show Website
    Spiral Bridge