Cultivate Calm

Monica Rottmann
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Alternative Health
  • Updated Weekly

This podcast will weave together ancient wisdom with modern science to share the best tools and techniques to cultivate calm in your life.  Armed with a degree in behavioural science and a decade of running a thriving yoga studio, I'm here to share my wealth of knowledge on the science of stress, the art of relaxation, yoga philosophy, breathing, and meditation, all with a hint of personal development.  Yoga transformed my life from being a stressed out IT professional to a calm and relaxed yoga teacher and throughout this podcast, I’ll be sharing my own journey and stories of my yoga clients.  My philosophy is that busyness is overrated, stress makes us stupid, and anxious living is a recipe for burnout. In this podcast, we won't just scratch the surface of relaxation techniques; we'll dive deep into the impact of stress on our minds and bodies and how to think better, feel better and live better. I'll explain why nervous system health is at the heart of our yoga classes and our overall well-being. If you’re in need of some inspiration and motivation to help you take back control of your life and find calm in the chaos, look no further. I’m so excited to share this journey with you. 

  1. 3d ago

    I didn't expect this on my return to work

    Send us Fan Mail After 15 months away from teaching, returning to the yoga studio was equal parts terrifying and clarifying. In this episode, the journey back to the mat begins, not as a triumphant comeback, but as an honest reckoning with what 14 years of teaching, a cancer diagnosis, and a long recovery actually adds up to. Yoga, healing, cancer recovery, teaching, and returning to purpose. Something has shifted in the collective. There's a quiet anxiety in people right now that's hard to name but easy to feel, and time spent in illness has made that sensitivity sharper. This episode explores what it means to truly sense what people are carrying beneath the surface, and how that informed the creation of Energy Alchemy, a new program bridging yoga philosophy and energy work for people who need something that goes deeper than surface-level wellness. There's also something in here about the wellness culture habit of forcing positivity. The idea that struggles are only valid if they're serious enough, or that gratitude and reframing are always the answer. They're not. Acknowledging the full emotional spectrum, the numbness, the stuckness, the life that looks fine on paper but feels hollow, is where real healing begins.  This episode marks the opening of a new chapter. The descent is done. What's being built now, in the studio, in the programs, and in this conversation, is something more honest and more useful than what came before it.  LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    22 min

  2. Jun 3

    I was playing the wrong game

    Send us Fan Mail 18 months of cancer, grief, surgery, and recovery, and what emerged from the other side wasn't just physical healing. It was a shift in how to relate to life itself. This episode is about what that actually looks like. A lot of it comes back to the body. There's grief for what's been lost and a genuine wonder at what remains. Not about appearance, but about resilience. The capacity to go through something that significant and still function, still move, still show up. That's where this episode starts. From there it moves into the bigger questions. Identity, control, and what's left when you strip both away. The teaching of Neti Neti from the Upanishads surfaces here, along with an honest look at what it means to stop outsourcing your sense of stability to outcomes you can't control. There's also something about the difference between empathy and rescuing, and why presence is more useful than fixing. The episode ends with what practically shifted things: active breathwork, spinal flexes, moving stagnant energy through the body rather than just thinking your way through it. And a new chapter opening. This stretch of the story, the descent, the grey months, the slow climb back, is finishing. What came out of it was unexpected. This episode is about what that is. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    25 min

  3. May 28

    I don't know why this upset me so much

    Send us Fan Mail May was a month of contradictions. Surgery recovery, grief and a rainbow unicorn birthday party. Life kept moving and I was somewhere in the middle of it, trying to keep up. This episode is about what it looked like when something finally started to shift. It started with an incident at Bunnings, a stranger's throwaway comment that hit a nerve I didn't know was still live. I talk about tamas, the yogic concept of inertia, and what it actually took to break through months of it. Spoiler: it wasn't a peaceful meditation. It was anger, and it worked. From there the episode gets into the small, unglamorous steps that followed. Bath time squats. Daily breathwork. The slow realisation that physical and emotional recovery move at completely different speeds. There's also Mother's Day, Ruby turning four, and what it felt like when the darkness started to lift. Not dramatically, but just quietly, and enough. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    18 min

  4. May 26

    What no one tells you about rock bottom

    Send us Fan Mail For months after surgery I was living in survival mode. Chest pains, persistent headaches, swollen legs, and a mirror I was avoiding. This episode is about what it actually looks like to hit rock bottom in recovery, not dramatically, just quietly and completely. There's a David Hawkins idea I came back to during this time: that it's not our emotions that cause the most suffering, it's our avoidance of them. I talk about the moment that landed for me, lying on the floor, and what I decided to do with it. Which was the opposite of what every instinct was telling me. This episode goes into what happened when I stopped moving away from the pain and moved directly into it instead. What I found there, and what was left after. It's one of the harder episodes to describe. Worth listening to rather than reading about. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    32 min

  5. May 21

    The bleak reality of misery

    Send us Fan Mail The surgery was done. I thought the hard part was over. This episode is about the long grey stretch that followed, the part nobody really talks about, where the emergencies have passed but you're still completely stuck in it. Six weeks after the double mastectomy, I got the green light to drive and do light exercise again. That first moment alone in the car felt enormous. And then I got home and realised how far I still had to go. I talk about what it was like not being able to walk or get on the yoga mat, two things that had kept me functional for years, and what that did to me as someone who teaches yoga for a living. I also talk about tamas, the yogic concept of inertia, and what it actually feels like when that takes hold in your body. The months of minimal function, watching the world move while I couldn't quite reach it, and the slow unglamorous steps that eventually started to shift something. Progress in this kind of recovery is invisible from the outside. This episode is about what it looks like from the inside. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    24 min

  6. May 21

    Into the Shitstorm

    Send us Fan Mail The mastectomy happened. This episode is about what that was actually like. The double mastectomy with PAP flap reconstruction, seven hours in theatre, and what I remember from coming around on the other side. Some of it is sharp and painful. Some of it is genuinely strange. At one point I played hangman with the nurses while on fentanyl. Recovery started in those first fragmented hours and didn't get easier quickly. The days after surgery blurred together. Constant monitoring, broken sleep, pain that didn't let up, and drains coming out of my body until they didn't. Getting upright was a project. Looking in the mirror took a specific kind of courage I had to find each time. And watching the people around me carry the weight of it all brought its own particular kind of grief. There's also something in this episode about what happens when you stop fighting what's already happening. Not giving in, but releasing the resistance. It didn't make the recovery painless. But it made it more bearable. This one is honest about the parts of surgical recovery that don't usually get talked about. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    37 min

  7. May 14

    The A-word that broke me

    Send us Fan Mail Waiting for a mastectomy is its own kind of heavy. I'd been through surgeries before and thought I had some idea of what to expect. I didn't. This episode covers the months leading up to the surgery, from a new surgeon who used a word that stopped me in my tracks, to the moments where I finally stopped holding it together. There's a lot in this one about the people who showed up. A friend who sat with me in her garden while I fell apart and who didn't try to fix it. Tim cooking through the weekends to keep things moving. Ruby being clingy in the way kids are when they know something is wrong. And a ritual I created for myself before the surgery that was messy and raw and completely necessary. I also talk about the PET scan waiting rooms, the worst-case thinking, the sleepless nights, and what I kept coming back to in the yoga texts when logic stopped working. By the night before surgery I hadn't slept and I was worn through. But something became clear in that exhaustion. This episode is about everything that happened before I found out what that was. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    23 min

  8. May 14

    F**k resilience

    Send us Fan Mail Resilience was something I wore like armour for years. Two cancer diagnoses, the end of a marriage, and a lot of pushing through. By the third diagnosis, I started questioning whether resilience was actually serving me, or just keeping me from feeling what I needed to feel. In this episode I talk about the moment I realised I didn't want to fight anymore. Not giving up, but genuinely stepping back from the warrior narrative that surrounds cancer and asking if there was another way to move through it. Michael Singer's The Surrender Experiment comes into it, as does a book I received from someone who cared about me that I simply couldn't bring myself to read. I also explore a concept from yoga, the idea of being the witness to your own experience rather than being consumed by it. What it actually looks like to stop performing strength and start being honest about what's happening. If you've ever exhausted yourself being strong, this one's for you. LINKS: Work with Monica: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/energy-alchemy/ Curious about Yoga Alchemy?: https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/yoga-alchemy/Website:https://cultivatecalmyoga.com.au/Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecalmyogabrisbane/

    17 min
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Trailer

About

This podcast will weave together ancient wisdom with modern science to share the best tools and techniques to cultivate calm in your life.  Armed with a degree in behavioural science and a decade of running a thriving yoga studio, I'm here to share my wealth of knowledge on the science of stress, the art of relaxation, yoga philosophy, breathing, and meditation, all with a hint of personal development.  Yoga transformed my life from being a stressed out IT professional to a calm and relaxed yoga teacher and throughout this podcast, I’ll be sharing my own journey and stories of my yoga clients.  My philosophy is that busyness is overrated, stress makes us stupid, and anxious living is a recipe for burnout. In this podcast, we won't just scratch the surface of relaxation techniques; we'll dive deep into the impact of stress on our minds and bodies and how to think better, feel better and live better. I'll explain why nervous system health is at the heart of our yoga classes and our overall well-being. If you’re in need of some inspiration and motivation to help you take back control of your life and find calm in the chaos, look no further. I’m so excited to share this journey with you. 

Information

  • Creator
    Monica Rottmann
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    32
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Cultivate Calm
  • Show Website
    Cultivate Calm

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