Fearless Presence Melanie Weller

You won't find Mary Henlin's extraordinary addiction recovery story anywhere else. From federal arrest and massive physical wounds to getting clean, you will be inspired and in awe of how Mary Magdalene showed up every step of the way. It will leave you asking how Mary Magdelene is alive in your life.



Connect with Mary on Instagram @MaryHenlin 

Shop in her Etsy shop



Show Notes:


Art, spirituality, and personal growth with an artist. 3:48

Mary Henlin creates beautiful Black Madonna and dark goddess statues and figurines.
Melanie Weller and Mary Henlin reflect on their transformative journey through India, sharing stories of resilience and spiritual growth.


Art, addiction, and recovery. 7:22

In the late 90s, the Mary started their art journey by creating a controversial piece on Mary Magdalene, which led to attention and a scholarship.
Mary moved to the Bay Area to study fine art photography at Academy of Art University, where they lived above a DIY music venue and collaborated with artists and musicians.
Mary Henlin recounts a harrowing experience at a metal festival in Germany, where they fell off a platform and was rushed to a hospital without their passport or ID.
Mary Henlin hitchhiked back to the festival and later learned that the tour promoter had died in a car crash on the autobahn.
Mary Henlin describes their experience with opioid addiction, starting with a fractured spine and subsequent surgery, and how they became addicted to prescription painkillers and eventually turned to illegal drugs.
Mary Henlin's addiction led to a decline in their academic performance and photography career, and they eventually became bedridden due to their addiction.


Addiction, rehab, and recovery. 15:46

Mary describes their addiction to prescription medication and rehab experience.
Mary describes feeling lost and depressed after moving to a new house in a remote area, with numb limbs and a lack of interest in life.
Mary's symptoms improve after months, with their hands suddenly pouring sweat in the kitchen.


Addiction and recovery in Portland, Oregon. 19:58

Mary describes feeling numb and disconnected from their 20s due to addiction, leading to feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Mary moves out of their parents' house and back into the city, where they face new temptations and old habits.
Mary describes their experience with addiction in a small town, including the availability of drugs and the impact on their family.
Mary moves to Portland, Oregon to escape their past and find new opportunities, citing the city's reputation for vice and debauchery.


Addiction and mental health in Portland, Oregon. 25:58

Portland, OR has become an "open air asylum" with untreated mental health issues and drug abuse, despite making money from these issues.
Melanie Weller asks Mary Henlin about their experience in rehab and the gap between what was offered and what they needed.


Addiction, loneliness, and spirituality. 29:40

Mary Henlin describes their home as "a hoarder house of antique statues and roses" and how it became overtaken by their collection during a time of loneliness and addiction.
Mary Henlin shares experiences of being robbed and kidnapped multiple times during this period, highlighting the dangerous and unpredictable nature of their situation.


Kidnapping, addiction, and self-harm. 32:53

Mary Henlin describes being kidnapped and held captive by a man who was a gambling addict, who would force them to give him money and take their business.
Mary Henlin eventually escaped and barricaded themselves in their house, feeling traumatized and scared of everyone.
Mary Henlin describes experiencing severe foot wounds that were not healing properly, causing intense pain and discomfort.
Mary Henlin tried going to

Qigong as a nervous system regulation tool. 0:01
Melanie Weller and Scott discuss Qi Gong as a nervous system regulation tool, with a focus on energy channels and their function in modern exercise.
Melanie Weller discovers parallels between her nervous system regulation teachings and traditional Chinese energetic practices, despite politics and cultural shifts in China.
Melanie Weller and Scott discuss how art and meditation can become a threat to those in power, citing examples from history.
Exercise and its role in modern society. 6:38
Exercise may not solve the underlying problems of modern society, despite being good for mental health.
Scott highlights the importance of exercise for those who are not moving much, citing the potential negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle on the human body.
Scott expresses surprise at the high cost of some exercise classes, such as a cycling class in San Francisco, and questions the value of paying for a structured exercise session when a gym membership can provide similar benefits at a lower cost.
Idolizing a 20-year-old coach on a bicycle, revealing a lack of connectivity in society.
Exercise, loneliness, and vision with a focus on nervous system regulation. 13:05
Exercise and nature connection can alleviate loneliness and improve mental health.
Melanie Weller reflects on the impact of her surroundings on her vision, wondering if living in a different environment would have affected her need for glasses as she ages.
Weller's husband's classmate creates makeshift glasses for people in Africa, highlighting the accessibility issue for those without proper vision care.
Exercises impact five sensory systems: visual, vestibular, proprioceptive, somatosensory, and interoceptive.
Dantian and joint mobility in Qi Gong and Tai Chi. 19:42
Dantian is a concept in Qi Gong and Tai Chi, referring to a storehouse of qi in the body.
Melanie Weller discusses the importance of joint mobility in maintaining body health, citing examples from her visceral mobile mobilization training.
Scott explains that stuck qi in joints can cause pain and limit the body's functioning, and provides examples of joint mobility exercises to open up the chi flow.
Body movement and energy flow in Chinese philosophy and meditation. 24:11
Melanie Weller explains how Tai Chi movements can help treat trauma by increasing shock absorption and resolving stuckness in the body.
Master Zhang's response to his students' concerns about training after retirement is to continue doing circles, which involves moving the body in various planes to keep the energy flowing.
Melanie Weller explains how the Chinese philosophy views the body as consisting of different planes, including the coronal plane, which is involved in movement and posture.
Scott discusses the microcosmic orbit meditation practice in the secret meditative tradition, which involves moving awareness up and down the body's energy channels for optimal health and awareness.
Weller finds geometric patterns in body & cosmos, connecting alignment to cosmic rhythms.
Vedic philosophy and alignment with spirit. 31:54
Scott discusses alignment with self, family, community, nation, world, and spirit as key to achieving bliss and well-being.
Guru's plea for people's rights leads to his death by boiling.
Enlightened state is achieved when one aligns with spirit, losing desire for external things.
Melanie Weller discusses the concept of contrast in our lives, how it can be both positive and negative, and how it affects our ability to find meaning and pleasure.
Weller and Scott explore how seeking pleasure can sometimes lead to more painful experiences, and how finding healthy contrast can help us enjoy life more fully.
Spirituality, contrast, and nervous system regulation. 42:22
Scott suggests that contrast and the contrast of the collective can be soothing to the nervous system, potentially reducing drama in one's life.
Scott and Melanie discuss the idea that karma

What we bring to what we see and why. 0:01 Astrology is just a framework. Libra and Aries are opposite energies in one way, but in another way, they are very similar astrologically. Astrology has been so valuable in terms of helping with pattern recognition. There is an interplay between the pattern and what the pattern is doing over and over again. Everything is energy. The fundamental difference in yin and yang is not a pattern.
How do you shift your perspective on your story? 7:20 We are all wired for what is familiar, not what is right for us. Aries and libra are associated with the cingulate gyrus and the amygdala. Chinese medicine associates the kidneys with fear and the interplay between initiating something different and doing what is safe for you. Aries and Libra bring us to two major turning points in our earth's relationship with the rest of the universe and with our sun and the universe. Astrology of the West. Aries and Libra are very different, but they are also very alike. At each equinox, we are moving towards the light or the darkness of the great mystery. Libra is full of baggage.
Aries libra interplay and balance. 14:56 Aries and libra interplay and how they show up in her life and how she is seeing it in her charts right now. The cultural myth that Libra is the one who makes things happen. Letting go of vision boards and manifesting strategies to focus on doing something. Justice is a big word right now. Justice is a puzzle. It's a paradox. As a libra, aries feel like they are often in the balance equally with all the people they care about. Native americans had a strong principle of reciprocity in their culture.
Astrology of the West vs. Vedic astrology. 21:37 Sometimes things can come back into reciprocity or balance if at the moment one side is doing more than the other side. Egyptian and Vedic astrology The parallel energy structures that are held in different patterns by different gods like Jupiter, vishnu, shiva and Dionysus. The astrology of the west and the western way of thinking. If one wants to change the world, they have to change themselves. Astrology can help us do that. Every person on earth goes back to one mother, the mitochondrial eve.
High contrast trauma. 29:07 Our nervous systems are always seeking contrast, but the nervous system will not let you live a boring story story, one without contrast. The universe is always whacking you upside the head with a two by four. War can take people to a different and yet similar kind of edge. Dionysus and the age of terror.
Libra scales. 35:01 For a set of libra scales, there would be four platforms on it versus two, because all humans experience change through alertness, awareness, reward and rest. Nerve firing is a contrast. Aries and libra are the two spots in the zodiac where there are two times of equal balance, the equinox and the full moon. The path to wellness at all levels.
The sun is associated with the thalamus. 40:57 The sun is associated with the thalamus, the center of the brain, and is the relay station for everything. The sun fuses together two elements, hydrogen and helium. Nerve cells in the thalamus are associated with the water that is in all of the cells and that fills all of us. Neurotransmitters break down into water when fired. Full moons are the only two celestial bodies that are here on the earth without the moon to stabilize orbit and regulate the waters.
What happens when the neuron fires? 47:03 A full moon is a chance for everything to have a different stimulus and to clean house and release patterns that have been holding on to. 10 neurotransmitters do 99% of all functions, but it's more about how they cycle through them than how they live statically. Being present with the cycle is what being present is. The hardest thing as a parent is letting the child live out their own karmic journey and not trying to intervene in it. Holding the tension of the opposites is a contrast.

Pisces rules the feet and foot pain. 0:01
How saturn moved into pisces and aquarius, and how it caused her mother to come down with foot pain.
Which one of the pisces is a stronger one.
Every birth chart is designed so that life on earth is designed to be always breaking new ground. Breaking something gets broken in every breakthrough.
The challenge is to be both grounded in the mother line and individually added from it, not a state.
The importance of finding joy and pleasure in darkness.
The new story about darkness is that black holes are the most luminous structures in the universe, that your darkness is your light, and that the darkness isn't scary.
The story of the womb of darkness. 9:02
Darkness is a story that gives enormous power to a very small group of people. It is the womb of light of our birth.
Darkness and light became the thing.
There is more love in the dark than in the light. Too much light scorches everything, dries everything up, and things become too brittle.
Darkness is the space where people rest.
Where the darkness showed up as a gift, and where it showed up with opportunity in ways that she used it well or didn't have to repattern later.
How she discovered her fascination with darkness.
Seeking out the dark. 16:38
Seeking out the dark in childhood, feeling alone with the universe, retreating to her room with the shades drawn.
The pluto signature in the third house of astrology.
Our brains live in a little black box and only know the information that it gets from our bodies, eyes, ears.
The myth of Persephone, both kidnapped and rescued by Pluto.
Being rescued from the story that has mesmerized us for so long about light only light and how that leads to working 24/7 and never being able to rest.
Melanie shares her story.
Rescuing us from disempowered, disembodied bodies. 24:44
Isis and osiris, the story of how the stars moved and how Osiris got chopped into pieces as the king of egypt, but came back together.
Medicine as an institution has the worst osiris wound.
The earth is having its dark night of the soul, and that we are all participating and experiencing that with the earth.
The gift of astrology and mythology.
Zooming out to the 60,000 foot view is anxiety inducing and inspires purpose. It has been transformative for her own mental health and physical health.
Trauma has a creative role in the world.
The dark goddesses that are all transformers of trauma, and how they do not try to heal their own trauma.
The trauma-free life.
The importance of owning our traumas. 34:36
Trauma is something that comes inside of us and wants to transform us so that we are not the same person we were before it happened.
The two primary traumas in her life.
The purpose of a doula is to wake us up from thinking we are nouns, not verbs, and to support the birth process.
Melanie is a trauma doula.
Astrology has been a magic elixir for her, and the stories that go with it have been a framework to help understand what's happening.
The black Madonna tarot deck.
The power of the dark goddess. 42:24
Every birth chart is full of darkness. Life is filled with darkness, and the dark goddess invites us into it.
The first use of satan in the old testament.
Marsha defines darkness as a bigger being over time, but she loves how she redefines darkness and how it is fundamentally held in the nervous system.
Dutch teaching systems hold the stories we know and the ones that we haven't yet discovered. Story lives epigenetically in our bodies.

Exploring the meaning of life. 0:00
Chronic regional pain syndrome crps, is a leading cause in health crises and trauma, seeing them as messages, not random or divine punishment.
The role of purpose in the health crisis.
The astrologer Caroline Casey used the phrase, "My dangerous, beautiful assignment," in a conversation with Sophie Strand over a year ago.
Setting the stage for the diagnosis.
Every life is a compromise with the understanding at the time and the larger understanding of who one is moving into.
One day near Christmas, a long cashmere scarf knocked her off balance.
How did you become aware of your physical health? 7:18
She was 55 years old and had broken her right arm four times since she was six, the fifth and last time she broke it.
She was working for a private university.
She was finally diagnosed with a complex regional pain system called reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD, which is a misfiring of the nervous system.
RSD is very mysterious and can start in one part of the body and then spread to others. It is unpredictable.
She was fired from her job in her mid 50s.
How did you know you needed help? 14:49
She went to every major medical center in the south face and was all the same thing, a sad diagnosis.
She started working with an herbalist and neurofeedback.
The first several times she went over a period of months twice a week, she was fascinated by the brainwaves.
The flare-ups continued to get more and more infrequent.
The four transits beginning at 50 and ending around age 62, beginning with the chiron return and ending at 62 with the chariklo return.
Being in the window of the second saturn return.
The four transits that are our guidepost and initiators through our 50s, which is the journey when we realize we are on the track.
The four yin yang pairs.
Connecting back to the bigger picture. 24:03
As a woman in her early 50s, she relates to how this is unfolding in her own life right now.
When she stops thinking about herself, things flow the best.
The last time he had a flare-up was in 2010, and only in the last few years has he begun to realize she had lost everything.
The framework of how she lives her life.
The most devastating betrayals are the ones where the person always knew, but pretended they didn't know.
We can't get enough of what we don't really want.
Numbing yourself to pain. 30:37
We live inside a pain body where the payoffs are so large, comfortable and generous that we believe we just have to learn to live with this pain.
Success is a way of numbing.
The process of breaking her arm five times to avoid her own healing process around her complicated relationship with holidays and holidays.
The pattern of breaking one's right arm three times or four times, and how this pattern was fundamentally threatening to her.
Broken arms lead to an opening of space for the left hand pass in the right hand.
A book of Greek myths, persephone and her journey to the underworld.
How do elbows and forearms relate to saturn? 39:41
The earth rotates one degree on the ecliptic every 72 years, and the Earth rotates by one degree.
The average carrying angle of 90 degrees is 72 degrees.
Bones, crystals and rocks hold the oldest memories, and there is a whole physiology about how bones connect to the brain.
The astrology of her foot fracture was so hilarious.
We are all here to see these things and how they happen for us and for the collective vs. to us.
Black holes are the most luminous structures in the universe.

Melanie’s introduction. 0:01
Introduction of Dawson Church, phd, award-winning science writer.
Being on the leading edge of the craziness.
Bliss is feeling really good.
How do you measure happiness? 3:42
How to measure happiness on a scale.
The highest frequency wave, gamma.
The 10,000 hour process to create the EFT system.
A pivotal experience in a hotel.
Training people to acquire the brain states of zen. 8:24
Training people to acquire brain waves really fast.
How to get there in 10 minutes.
Transformation in one session or a few simple exercises.
The short path, the direct path.
How neurotransmitters are like drugs. 14:02
How neurotransmitters are like drugs, similar to pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs.
Psilocybin and morphine.
Why Dawson meditates every day.
The importance of coming back to the here and now. 18:30
Two minutes of grounding at the end of each eco-meditation.
Why feeling bad is so important.
Happiness is not necessary for evolutionary survival.
The importance of being on high alert.
Modern day society and the threat of the pandemic.
The benefits of bliss.
Different types of meditation and their benefits. 24:59
Stroke patients can still gain improvement 20 years later.
The seven distinct schools of meditation.
Seven different kinds of meditations in tibetan buddhism.
Using a visual cue in Tibetan Buddhism.
Loving kindness and compassion in meditation. 30:44
Loving kindness and compassion are the most powerful components of meditation.
Compassion fatigue.
Compassion in meditation produces quicker wiring and suppression of self-absorption.
Tibetan monk's moment of greatest danger.
Compassion. 35:34
Compassion is not just for others.
The power of self-compassion in 2017.
Wildfire racing down the hillside toward them.
The next morning they woke up to devastation.
Emergency meditation during the pandemic.
The importance of being blissfully happy every day.
How meditation and immunity work together. 43:23
Resilience is not a psychological trait, only a volume of tissue.
Meditation and mindfulness.
Immunity and meditation in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic.
EFT acupressure and meditation.
The power of energy consciousness.
The vision for basic public health.
Innovation in health care. 49:26
Innovation in healthcare is bleak.
The medical system is highly resistant to innovation.
Acupuncture is a quantum leap for mental health and pain.
The resistance to EFT.
Get a copy of bliss brain.