What if the smartest decision you ever make begins with your body quietly refusing to board the train? That was Carmen’s turning point—a full-body no that unravelled a polished corporate life and opened a door to travel, therapy, and a community designed for belonging without armour.
We talk through the cost of conforming and the relief of naming misalignment, from ending a marriage to stepping away from a safe career. Travel becomes a lab for identity: anonymity in foreign streets, serendipity on a ferry, trust built one uncertain mile at a time. Out of that soil, SoulHub takes shape—not as a brand with a rigid roadmap, but as a sangha for like-hearted people. We dig into what it means to build a lighthouse of safety, prune back bloated systems, and let the right work emerge instead of forcing outcomes.
Love sits at the centre as practice, not plot twist. We explore the gap between Hollywood romance and deep companionship, the mirror of an honest partner, and the daily work of integrating the parts we hide. Guilt shows up—Catholic-flavoured, people-pleasing, relentless—and we examine how choosing alignment isn’t selfish but necessary. Adversity threads through the story without spectacle: plans that didn’t happen, identities shed, faith redefined. The reframe is powerful—challenge as teacher, not sentence—and it leads to service that feels human, grounded, and alive.
If you’re weighing a safe path against a true one, this conversation offers a map drawn in pencil: permission, pruning, presence. Subscribe, share with a friend who’s at a crossroads, and leave a review with one insight you’re taking into your week.
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Presenter
Carmen Rendell moved from 20 years of Corporate Communication roles of understanding humans from the outside in, to walking therapy to use nature to help self understanding.
She founded Soulhub in 2015, a wellbeing business that looks to bridge worlds and asks us to look at health from an integrated standing. She’s passionate about self understanding and getting to the core of who we are, to change how we show up in the world.
Walking therapy, or Soulwalking as she likes to call it enables us to connect to nature and ourselves in a new way. Working this way with clients for 6 years Carmen has got to understand the common themes that nature helps us understand, from diversity, wildness and unpredictability which underpins much of the pain and suffering in this world.
She will help you navigate some of the considerations to setting yourself up, but also provide ideas and tools to help you use nature with your clients.
She believes nature heals us all as we are intrinsic and connected, and so working within this space has supported many clients through change, grief, depression, anxiety, addiction and chronic conditions.
Malcolm Stern has worked as a group and individual psychotherapist for more than 30 years. He was a co-founder of Alternatives at St James’s Church in London and runs groups internationally.
He is the author of Falling in Love / Staying in Love (Piatkus 2004) and Slay Your Dragons with Compassion ( Watkins 2020). He co-presented Channel 4’s relationship series, ‘Made for Each Other’ in 2003 and 2004 and sailed on the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ with Greenpeace in the 1980s. The book he is currently writing is an exploration of the shadow and its necessity in our evolutionary development.
To become equal to the dream sewn within us, our heart must break open and usually must break more than once. That’s why they say that the only heart worth having is a broken heart. For only in breaking can it open fully and reveal what is hidden within.” – Michael Meade
This is a series of podcasts based on the premise explored in Malcolm Stern’s acclaimed book of the same name, that adversity provides us with the capacity to develop previously unexplored depths and is , in effect , a crucible for self reflection and awareness. Malcolm lost his daughter Melissa to suicide in 2014. It slowly dawned on him over the following few years that he was being educated and an opportunity was being presented where new insights helped him forge a path through his grief and despair. As part of that cathartic journey, he wrote “ Slay Your Dragons with Compassion ( Watkins 2020 ) where he was able to describe some of the practices that had helped him shed light on a way through the darkness.
