Rudi shares why moving forward often starts with the courage to look inward and what listeners can expect from future episodes: thoughtful conversation, metaphor, and therapeutic insight to help you live with more honesty, compassion, and self-trust.

The first episodes release September 3, 2025.

In this episode of The Hidden Way, we’ll explore:

- Why the stories and spaces we’re drawn to hold surprising clues to our inner life

-How my kids’ fascination with digging for clay teaches us about the raw material (emotions, beliefs, and patterns) we all carry inside

-Why it’s our responsibility to shape that material with care and creativity

-Gentle questions to help you reflect on your own stories and spaces

As you listen, notice: What stories have always stayed with you? And what clues might they be offering about the life stirring beneath the surface?

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This podcast isn't therapy, but I hope it feels therapeutic. If something here stirs more than you can hold alone, I encourage you to seek support from a licensed professional in your area.

In this episode, I use the metaphor of fog to describe how our coping skills can mask our deepest strengths—and how noticing these patterns is often the first step toward change.

You'll hear:

- How being called "sensitive" as a child pointed to one of my greatest strengths

- Why our patterns act like weather systems that shape how we move through life

- How simply noticing a pattern can create change

- An introduction to the Enneagram and its 9 "fogs" and hidden gifts

- Gentle questions to help you notice what resonates in your own inner life

As you listen, pay attention to what stirs in you--an emotion, a recognition, a question. Those responses may be pointing toward your hidden gifts or unique patterns.

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Join the conversation on Instagram >> @thehiddenwaypod

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Holding complexity means being able to carry multiple — and often conflicting — emotions, beliefs, and desires at the same time. It’s a mark of maturity, and it’s essential for healing at every level: personal, relational, communal, even global.

In this episode, I explore:

- Why we “contain multitudes” (thank you, Walt Whitman).
- Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow, and why light and dark always come together.
- The parable of the Prodigal Son as a story of holding both/and.
- Dialectics: how two opposite truths can coexist without canceling each other out.
- What happens when we can’t hold complexity: fear, rigidity, stalled growth.
- How curiosity and compassion become the doorway and the key to transformation.

I close with a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that reminds us to let both beauty and terror shape us, and to keep going.

To go deeper into this topic & for journal prompts & additional resources >> Subscribe to my Substack newsletter

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In this reflective episode, Rudi explores how many of us (eldest daughters or not) learn to carry the emotional weight of others, mistaking responsibility for love and control for strength. Through the lens of Taylor’s songs Father Figure and Eldest Daughter, she unpacks power dynamics, perfectionism, and the quiet unraveling that comes when we finally realize we don’t have to hold it all together.

You’ll hear about the hidden cost of over-functioning, why boundaries are a form of stewardship, and how protecting your energy can make space for softness, creativity, and freedom.

For anyone who’s ever been the “capable one,” the peacekeeper, or the one everyone relies on... this one’s for you.

Together they explore why Taylor’s lyrics resonate so deeply with women in therapy, why joy is sometimes more vulnerable than sadness, how music gives language to emotions we haven’t fully named, and what it means to live with both strength and softness.

Whether you’re a therapist, a Swiftie, or just someone trying to understand your own inner world, this conversation invites you to slow down, feel deeply, and notice the parts of you that are still waiting to be heard.


Topics we explore
- The emotional maturity in The Life of a Showgirl
- Why Taylor’s storytelling feels like therapy
- Dialectics: holding two truths at once
- Why joy can feel dangerous when you’re used to protecting yourself
- The “showgirl” mask and the parts we hide
- How art mirrors our unspoken inner life
- What it looks like to be both ambitious and tender

Kati & Ashleigh — hosts of the TheraTay Podcast
Instagram: @therataypodcast
Podcast: Listen here

Instagram: @thehiddenwaypod
Substack: Read essays here

In today’s conversation, Rudi explores the tension so many of us feel this season: wanting to create moments of warmth and meaning while also feeling tired, stretched thin, or emotionally overwhelmed. She shares five gentle, practical ways to navigate the holiday season with more compassion, more wholeness, and more honesty—so you don’t burn yourself out trying to keep up with everyone else’s expectations (or your own).

We talk about acknowledging what matters most, lowering expectations (twice), noticing the grief beneath the surface, honoring real limitations, and practicing surrender in a culture that tells us to keep doing more.

This episode is not a guide for getting everything done—it’s permission to do less, move slower, and show up as a human being instead of a holiday machine.

If you’re carrying a lot this year, you’re not alone. Your humanity has a place at the table too.

We talk about the difference between authentic gratitude and toxic positivity, how awe helps us feel “small in the best way,” and why remembering our place in the bigger picture brings relief, belonging, and joy.

You’ll also hear one of Rudi’s favorite poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and an invitation to look for the everyday miracles already surrounding you.

Topics include:
• The neuroscience of gratitude
• Why we fall off the “gratitude bike”
• Awe as a healing practice
• Feeling small vs. feeling insignificant
• Belonging, perspective, and slowing down
• Everyday ways to reconnect with wonder

A gentle, grounding reminder that earth is “crammed with heaven”—and that you’re one irreplaceable piece of a much larger story.

Instagram: @thehiddenwaypod
Substack: The Hidden Way

In this episode, I talk about what it means to regroup after a stretch of intensity or rest or stress (or all three). Not starting over. Not pushing forward. But gently gathering yourself back together.

We’ll explore this both practically — how to reset and find your footing again — and in a reflective way, how to find more clarity moving forward.

If you’re feeling scattered or unsure how to begin again, this episode is for you.

Instagram: @thehiddenwaypod
Substack: Read essays here

I share my own story of learning to reconnect with my inner life, and reflect on how clarity and purpose emerge when we begin bringing forth what’s been waiting within us.

A conversation about discernment, meaning, and the work that is uniquely yours to do.

Instagram: @thehiddenwaypod
Read essays on my Substack HERE.

Building on last week’s reflection on “what is within you,” this conversation invites you into a deeper understanding of how personality forms: not as your true self, but as a set of strategies shaped by your temperament, environment, and early experiences.

Drawing from Carl Jung’s depth psychology and the Enneagram, Rudi shares how our masks, coping patterns, and inner shadows develop—and how what feels like destabilization or confusion in life may actually be an invitation to wholeness.

This episode is for anyone who senses there is more to them than the roles they play, and who is ready to gently explore the self beneath the surface.

In this episode, I explore the nervous system through the metaphor of a river, and what it costs us when we chronically override or inhibit our inner experience.

Drawing on research around stress physiology, the ACEs studies, and the connection between emotional suppression and long-term health outcomes, we’ll look at two common survival strategies:

• Forcing — chronic mobilization, over-functioning, pushing through
• Holding back — suppression, people-pleasing, dampening ourselves to preserve connection

Both are intelligent adaptations. Both have physiological consequences.

This is an episode about sympathetic activation, inhibition, immune and stress responses — but also about tenderness, self-awareness, and allowing what is within you to move.

Rilke wrote, “May what I do flow from me like a river — no forcing and no holding back.”

What would it mean to live that way?

In this episode, therapist Rudi Betzold brings together Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and real-life experience to help thoughtful, overwhelmed people find clarity, steadiness, and a more sustainable way of living.

Instagram: @thehiddenwaypod
Substack: The Hidden Way

So much of the advice around productivity and decision-making focuses on doing more—more discipline, more structure, more consistency. But for thoughtful, sensitive people who tend to overthink or carry too much, that approach often leads to more stress, burnout, and confusion.

In this episode, we explore a different kind of practice for finding clarity:

This simple framework (from Amelia Roosevelt Longworth) helps you slow down, tune into your body and inner life, and discern what actually matters right now—so you can move forward without forcing, overthinking, or shutting down.

We’ll talk about how this shows up in: 
moments of overwhelm and decision fatigue  
feeling stuck or unable to start  
low motivation or scattered energy  
overfunctioning and carrying too much 

If you’ve been wondering what to do next, how to make a decision, or how to feel more clear and grounded in your life, this episode will give you a practical and compassionate place to begin.

Find me on Instagram: @thehiddenwaypod
My writing lives here: Substack