Cultivate Calm

Monica Rottmann
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  • 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. Jun 30

    This is what I really want you to know

    Send us Fan Mail This is the final episode of the season. It started with a text from a radiology office and ends here, with a life that looks ordinary from the outside and is irrevocably different on the inside. This episode is about what the full arc of that journey actually looks like and what the word surrender really means when it's tested against something serious. Cancer recovery, life transitions, surrender, yoga philosophy, emotional resilience, Inanna myth. The episode explores the concept of life quakes, those moments where a single phone call or diagnosis shatters the illusion of control and pushes you onto terrain you didn't choose. The central argument is that you don't recover from a life quake by reverting to who you were. You emerge as someone different. This episode is honest about what that process actually involves: rock bottom, reliance on others, long stretches of grey, and the slow quiet spark that eventually begins to lift things. Mind body connection, nervous system, emotional healing, cancer survivor and mastectomy recovery. There's also something here about what life looks like on the other side. Teaching yoga, picking Ruby up from kindy, the routines of an ordinary week held with a kind of gratitude that only comes from having lost them for a while. The transformation that followed this period included becoming a Reiki master and developing an energy healing practice that grew directly from the experience. Energy healing, Reiki, Energy Alchemy, yoga teacher, intuitive healing and inner work. The season closes with the same myth it opened with Inanna descended into the underworld and came back without the parts of herself she'd been gripping. This episode is about what gets left behind in that descent, and what becomes possible when you stop trying to control what was never yours to control. If this season has resonated, leaving a review helps others who are in their own underworld find it. Transformation, grief, acceptance, psycho-spiritual healing, surrender, life after cancer, personal growth. 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/

  2. Jun 30

    Why this felt so hard

    Send us Fan Mail This episode is about grief. Not managing it, avoiding it, or reframing it into something more comfortable, but actually sitting inside it. After a decade of cancer diagnoses, divorce, and losing her father, the emotional landscape that built up over those years is finally being examined honestly. This episode is where that examination happens. There's also something here that doesn't get talked about enough: the financial reality of serious illness. More than $100,000 in medical bills with no income during recovery. The grief of watching what your life was building toward get fundamentally disrupted. And the specific, quieter grief of living post-cancer, no longer the person who went in, without the illusion of invincibility that once made everything feel manageable. Cancer recovery, grief, financial hardship, identity loss, post-cancer life, emotional healing. The episode moves into what grief actually does when you stop trying to manage it from a distance. Drawing on the writings of John of the Cross and Rumi, there's something here about the transformative power of feeling your way through pain rather than around it. Sitting with a yoga student navigating her own breast cancer diagnosis brought this into sharp focus, as did the quieter anxiety of raising a daughter who inherits a significant family history. Mind body connection, spiritual healing, yoga philosophy, transformation, cancer survivor, emotional resilience. A decade of circumstances led somewhere that wouldn't have been chosen but can't be dismissed. The philosophical and spiritual frameworks that once felt abstract became necessities. This final reflection of the season is about what grief leaves behind when you let it move through you properly: clarity, honesty, and a kind of freedom that only comes from the inside. Inner work, psycho-spiritual healing, self-awareness, grief and loss, personal transformation, energy healing, acceptance. 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/

  3. Jun 23

    What did I do wrong?

    Send us Fan Mail After three cancer diagnoses across a decade, the question that keeps surfacing isn't about treatment or recovery. It's why. This episode is an honest look at that search, what it turned up, and what it didn't. Including Gabor Maté's work on emotional repression and physical illness, the BRCA testing process, and what it actually means to carry significant family cancer history without a clear genetic answer. The episode also gets into the limits of explanation. By the second and third diagnoses, the emotional repression framework didn't hold as neatly. The lifestyle factors were covered. The genetic testing that I did have came back inconclusive. At some point, the search for a reason becomes its own kind of suffering, and this episode is honest about that too. There's something here about the Sword of Damocles, the fear of recurrence that doesn't fully go away, and what happens when you stop organising your life around cancer-free milestones that have already failed you. Two percent is a number that appears throughout this episode in more than one context. What replaces the milestone counting is something simpler and harder to hold onto: presence. A Tuesday afternoon in the park. The sword still there, but no longer the thing you're staring at. A decade in, the answer to why me is probably never coming. This episode is about what you do with that. Not a resolution, but a reframe: less about why it happened and more about how you play what you've been dealt.  That shift is what Energy Alchemy is built on, and this episode is where it comes from.  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/

  4. Jun 16

    I was never going to fight

    Send us Fan Mail After a third cancer diagnosis, something fundamental shifted. This episode explores the myth of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who descended into the underworld, stripped of everything she possessed, and returned transformed. It's a framework that maps closely onto what 15 months of illness, surgery, and recovery actually felt like from the inside. Not a triumphant comeback. A different kind of return entirely. The episode goes into what it means to live in defence mode, gripping hard, planning relentlessly, believing that enough control can protect you from loss. And what happens when something arrives that doesn't care about your plans. By the third diagnosis, it was clear that what needed to change wasn't the strategy. It was something deeper. This episode is an honest look at what conscious surrender actually involves, and why it's harder and more useful than it sounds. There's also something here about the collective. So many people are carrying a quiet anxiety right now, a disconnection they can't quite name. The tools that used to work aren't reaching it. Inner work isn't a luxury add-on. It's the thing. This episode explores why those who have done their own descent, who have been stripped back and returned changed, carry a steadiness that can't be built any other way. Energy Alchemy, a program built on turning inner turmoil into genuine energetic shifts, grew directly from this understanding. Whatever your underworld looks like, the questions are the same: what do you leave there, and what do you come back with? This episode doesn't offer a tidy answer. It offers something more useful: the understanding that the descent itself is where the story changes. Yoga philosophy, energy healing, emotional resilience, nervous system, cancer recovery, surrender, inner work, breathwork, Inanna myth, transformation. 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/

  5. Jun 9

    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/

  6. 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/

  7. 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/

  8. 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/

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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
    36
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Cultivate Calm
  • Show Website
    Cultivate Calm