Flowing East and West: The Perfectly Imperfect Journey to a Fulfilled Life Anne Robie and Sherry Essig

It is not a recipe she would recommend, but Fanny Slater mixed one part alcohol, one part low self esteem, a dash of fame, and a sprinkle of insecurity, and ultimately found herself spiraling down a tunnel headed straight for rock bottom.  Luckily Fanny also had a heap of support and love from friends and family which helped her when she needed it most.  This is a story about reinvention from the winner of a cooking contest on the Rachel Ray show to an aspiring sobriety mentor. Hers is a story about finding herself, after almost losing everything.  
 
Bio:
Fanny Slater has food flowing through her genes. Her mom founded the nationally acclaimed bakery business Rachel’s Brownies in 1975, and together—her parents created an enormously successful corporation that would live on for decades. Fanny grew up in Raleigh where, at age four, she began her home-taught kitchen apprenticeship when her dad pulled up a chair next to the stove and handed her a spatula. She worked in restaurants and prep kitchens to receive culinary exposure, but was equally drawn to performing arts. At twenty-five, Fanny moved to Hollywood, California to pursue acting and improv training with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. Several years later, she followed her stomach back to the east coast to open her own catering company. She moved to Wilmington, North Carolina in 2012.
In 2014, she beat out nearly 1,000 other hopefuls from across the country who entered Rachael Ray’s Great American Cookbook Competition. Fanny won the grand prize of a publishing contract under Rachael’s imprint, and Simon & Schuster published her cookbook, Orange, Lavender & Figs: Deliciously Different Recipes from a Passionate Eater, in 2016. In the following years, Fanny co-hosted the Food Network series, Kitchen Sink and became a regular on Cooking Channel’s longtime popular series, Best Thing I Ever Ate. 
In 2020, Fanny was living in Illinois with her husband when her longtime issues with alcohol came to a head. Within one year, she would move back to North Carolina, get a divorce, come out of the closet, and attend a 40-day rehab program. Today, Fanny is 3+ years sober and living near the beach in Wilmington with her girlfriend, two dogs, and a cat. She works as a food and beverage writer specializing in recipe development, food photography, and content creation for social media. As of recent, Fanny has pivoted her focus towards being a sobriety enthusiast who encourages others to speak up about their struggles. She uses her Instagram platform @fannyslater to bluntly share her journey of going from a self-destructive addict to an advocate for mental health, recovery, and self-love.

What started as a mishap - trying to catch an exhibit at a local museum, only to find out it was closed that day -  turned into a mindfulness practice.  How does this happen?  Take two inspiring, creative women and set them loose in San Francisco with an unexpected few hours, and a whole new way of living their days was born.  An amazing Instagram page, a book and many workshops later, Willow and Deborah join the podcast to share what they’ve learned and engage Sherry and Anne in an impromptu “Today I Noticed” practice.  
 
Bio:
Willow Older and Deborah Huber are the founders of Today I Noticed, a creative mindfulness practice, and the authors of Today I Noticed: A Little Book of Mindfulness that Will Change the Way You See the World and the 2025 Today I Noticed: A Year of Inspiration and Mindfulness daily desk calendar. They lead mindfulness workshops for companies, teams, and conferences of all sizes.
 
Willow is an internationally published writer who runs her own editorial services business.
Deborah has spent her career in various creative and management roles in the tech industry designing and managing the development of digital products.
 

Sue Lambert survived her abusive childhood by numbing her pain with alcohol as she tried to live up to an idealized perfection standard.  Through pure guts and determination, Sue left home, did well at work, and started a family, but always felt that she was not “normal.” After undergoing surgery, Sue became addicted to pain pills in addition to her alcohol addiction, spiraled downwards, and eventually landed in prison. One of the classes she signed up for while incarcerated was with the Enneagram Prison Project. In this unlikeliest of places, she found a doorway to examine her ingrained ways of operating in the world and ultimately found hope.  Sue now knows true perfection lies within the imperfect.  
 
Bio
Sue Lambert is an Enneagram Prison Project (EPP) Ambassador. She is also a retired EPP Faculty Member and Guide, a Life Coach, certified ACE (adverse childhood experiences) trainer, an IEA (International Enneagram Association) Accredited Professional, and Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher. Sue identifies with Type 1 on the Enneagram and is passionate and driven to support others as they navigate their personal growth and development post-incarceration. She finds joy and fulfillment in nurturing others to reach their highest potential. Sue lives with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandkids and is “Nanny Granny” to them all. She feels a strong connection to her essential self when she is outside and enjoying nature and animals (horses/dogs/wildlife), where she knows in her heart that everything is “perfect” the way it is. Sue learned about the Enneagram and EPP behind bars and exemplifies the work, inspiring people worldwide to find inner freedom. Sue’s story includes what she describes as a dark time in her life, where she was also able to find light, and one of those light beams was the union she found with EPP, the Enneagram, and her true self, an impact she says saved her life.
Oprah Daily article on Sue: https://www.oprahdaily.com/life/health/a60583312/enneagram-test-prison-program/ 
Enneagram Prison Project: https://www.enneagramprisonproject.org/

She was at the top of her game with one of the world’s most iconic brands, doing the work that had taken her across the world and back multiple times. From the outside looking in, things looked really good for Shelley Paxton.
But, she had a secret.  Shelley would be awoken every night by the same nightmare and walked through her days with anxiety, both of which she tried to numb with busyness and alcohol. She finally reached a point where she couldn’t tolerate the pain of playing to someone else’s version of success and went on a journey to find her lost soul.  Shelley no longer believes in following the rules, and wants to lead a revolution for all of us to reclaim our rebel nature and fully dance to the beat of our own music.  
 
Bio
 
Think Brené Brown meets Biker Babe, with a dash of Liz Gilbert. As former Chief
Marketing Officer of Harley-Davidson, Shelley Paxton found herself at the top of the
proverbial mountain feeling success-EMPTY instead of success-FULL. That awakening led
her on a profound journey that became her mission, business, and Simon & Schuster-
published bestselling book, Soulbbatical: A Corporate Rebel's Guide to Finding Your Best Life. 
 
She’s leading a REBELution to rewrite the script of success.
 
Shelley’s inspiring work has been featured on NBC, CBS, Forbes, Thrive Global, Inc.,
Business Insider, Yahoo!, and a TEDx stage.
 
Her signature keynote – “Where Soul Meets Success” – is an essential roadmap for
leaders and organizations to redefine success in ways that celebrate humanity, well-
being, and fulfillment. It’s the post-pandemic antidote to burnout and seeking.
 
She’s based in Chicago (when not indulging her wanderlust) and is obsessed with mental
health advocacy and the color orange.
 
Soulbbatical: A Corporate Rebel's Guide to Finding Your Best Life at Amazon 
For more info and booking: www.shelleypaxton.comIG: @theshelleypaxton

As children, play was a fundamental part of how we lived our days - whether it was an impromptu game with neighborhood friends, recess at school, or creating secret worlds with dolls or army figurines.  There was no agenda, there was just fun for the sake of it.  What we didn’t know then was how important play was to our development, creativity, and overall health.As we get older, something shifts and we are increasingly asked to “act like a grown-up.”  We lose play as a regular part of our lives, and with it, a tool that can be so helpful in our continued growth, and happiness.  In this episode, Sherry and Anne explore the importance of play as adults and how to welcome more of it back into our lives. 

When Suzanne Beaumont saw an advertisement for a marathon that invited readers to “change their life,” she was 49 and not much of a runner.  But something called to her and she started lacing up her trainers.  Several months later she finished that marathon and had the realization that doing hard things was not only possible, but could also propel her to move out of her comfort zone in other ways.  Suzanne feels like she has had a brand new beginning at midlife and now follows her passions wherever they take her - writing, traveling, and discovering herself.  Listen in to Suzanne’s perfectly imperfect journey.  
 
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard
 
Bio
Suzanne Beaumont has lived in Wake Forest, NC for 25 years, raised three beautiful children there, and has been writing for the past eight years. She writes to simply know herself and explore the world around her. She studied writing with Natalie Goldberg and is currently studying haiku with Clark Strand.
As Suzanne reads or listens, phrases will often catch her attention and she'll discover a poem or essay that she didn’t know was inside her. And so it goes.
She began running in 2006, and stepped way out of her comfort zone when she signed up to run her first marathon with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s team in training (TNT) program. She’s since run a half-dozen marathons, a handful of ultra marathons, and too many half-marathons to count, and served as a TNT volunteer coach for ten years.
Suzanne recently retired from her long-term career as a software architect, at organizations including Alcatel-Lucent, Research in Motion, Lenovo, and most recently, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.
She writes most days just like she runs most days; these are her practices that keep her grounded and moving forward.