The decision to walk away from years of professional training may not feel rational in the moment. Sometimes the path we’ve invested a lot of time in becomes the very thing standing between us and the work we’re meant to do. For those who’ve spent years building expertise only to feel increasingly misaligned with their field, the question isn’t whether to leave—it’s how to trust yourself enough to start over.
Kimberly Brown’s story explores this tension. After four years of intensive psychoanalytic training that required seeing patients under supervision, undergoing personal psychoanalysis, and completing rigorous coursework, she realized the theoretical framework she was learning didn’t match her beliefs about healing. The decision to leave wasn’t just about abandoning a career path—it was about choosing authenticity over sunk costs, even when that choice looked like failure to everyone around her.
If you’re questioning a career you’ve invested years training for, or if you’re navigating the shame and uncertainty that comes with starting over in your 30s or beyond, Brown’s experience offers a window into what happens when you honor the misalignment instead of pushing through it. Her journey from psychoanalysis to meditation teaching didn’t follow a linear path, but it revealed something essential about the difference between the work we think we should do and the work that actually serves both us and the people we’re trying to help.
When the Training Reveals the Wrong Fit
Brown didn’t set out to become a psychoanalyst on a whim. Her path made perfect sense on paper. She had experienced profound healing through her own therapy in her 20s and was working in human resources when she decided to pursue psychoanalytic training in her 30s. “I had a really wonderful psychotherapist that had helped me so much when I was young, you know, around 30,” Brown said. “And so it just seemed like, oh, and I worked in human resources. That’s what I was doing for a living. And it felt like, well, I’d really like to use everything I’ve learned from my therapist and from life and perhaps also learn to work with people and support them.”
The training itself was no small commitment. Psychoanalytic programs typically require four to six years of intensive study at private institutes, and students must hold a graduate degree before enrollment. Brown brought a master’s degree in English and an undergraduate background in physics—evidence of someone intellectually curious and academically capable. The program demanded that she see patients under supervision, discuss cases with her supervisor, and undergo personal psychoanalysis herself.
But as Brown moved deeper into the training, discomfort began to surface. The emphasis on medical coding and diagnostic labeling didn’t sit well with her. “I was uncomfortable with a lot of the coding, the kind of diagnosis, right?” Brown said. “The patients I was working with, you know, I’m in a room, I’m, quote unquote, supposed to be the expert as to what’s going on with somebody.” The theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis—rooted in Freudian concepts of drives and diagnosis—felt increasingly at odds with what she believed about human nature and healing.
The conflict wasn’t just intellectual. It touched on something fundamental about how she wanted to relate to the people she worked with. When asked about the nature of the therapist-patient relationship, Brown articulated the tension clearly: “Can you love your client? Like, this is a question. And so there’s this, there’s this intimacy in the room, but it’s not. Yeah. But there’s also this other stance, which was very divorced from, I think what I believe is being human, which is when two beings meet and there’s this quality of relating and resonance and vulnerability.”
The Courage to Acknowledge Misalignment
Recognizing that something doesn’t fit is one thing. Acting on that recognition when you’ve already invested years is another. Brown spent about four years in the program before she fully acknowledged she needed to leave. The decision came with its own complications: she had patients she was responsible for, relationships within the program, and the reactions of family and friends to navigate.
“I had to also, you know, tell the institute that I was leaving, and I had to also explain that to all of my patients,” Brown said. The practical logistics of withdrawal meant managing transitions carefully and ethically. But perhaps more challenging was confronting the internal narrative about wasted time and the external perception of failure.
The reaction from her inner circle varied. Some people understood; others questioned the decision. The cultural expectation that we should finish what we start, that we should follow through on our commitments regardless of personal cost, creates real pressure to stay in situations that aren’t serving us. Brown had to reckon with the feeling that she had somehow wasted four years of her life.
What followed wasn’t immediate clarity or relief. After leaving the program, Brown found herself in what she described as “limbo”—a period without clear direction. Worse, the anxiety and panic attacks she thought she’d resolved through talk therapy returned with intensity. “I, after I left the program, I kind of went into this limbo where I didn’t know quite what I was gonna do, and I started to have really bad anxiety again and panic attacks, even though I’d spent all of this time in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy,” Brown said.
This return of symptoms forced her to acknowledge something difficult: the therapeutic approach she’d been immersed in for years had limitations when it came to her own healing. “It just made me realize that there are. There were certain things that talk therapy couldn’t touch for me,” Brown said. She needed different tools.
Finding a New Path Through Practice
Brown’s introduction to meditation and mindfulness didn’t happen in a classroom or through a deliberate career pivot. It emerged organically through yoga classes and visits to Buddhist centers in New York City. What began as a personal practice for managing her anxiety gradually revealed itself as both a healing modality and a professional calling.
The fit felt different immediately. “It was just like, oh, this is where I belong,” Brown said. “This is where I feel it. I just, you know, it was this surprise to myself that I was almost like, who am I?” The practices offered something that psychoanalytic theory hadn’t: a direct, experiential approach to working with the mind and emotions.
Brown immersed herself in meditation practice, attending retreats and deepening her understanding of Buddhist philosophy. The teachings resonated in ways the psychoanalytic framework never had. Rather than emphasizing diagnosis and pathology, Buddhist approaches focused on the universality of suffering and the cultivation of compassion—both for others and for oneself.
The philosophical differences were significant. Buddhism acknowledges that suffering is an inherent part of human existence, not something to be fixed or cured but something to relate to differently. “In Buddhism, one of the key ideas is that life is difficult and that things are always changing and that, you know, we’re always going to have some level of suffering,” Brown said. This acceptance-based approach contrasted sharply with the medical model she’d been studying, which positioned the therapist as expert working to eliminate symptoms.
The concept of compassion in Buddhist teaching also aligned more closely with how Brown wanted to work with people. She pointed to research by Dr. Richard Davidson showing that compassion is an innate human capacity that can be developed through practice, much like language acquisition. “He found that it’s there. It’s there in all of us,” Brown said. “And it’s very similar to the ability to speak a language. It needs to be fostered through the environment.”
Integrating Experience into New Work
Brown’s path to becoming a meditation teacher didn’t erase her psychoanalytic training—it recontextualized it. She now works with students individually, drawing on both her understanding of therapeutic relationship and her meditation practice. “All of that training that I had as a psychoanalyst, I also now use it with my students and I teach a lot of people privately and individually how to use these practices, you know, to connect with themselves in a kinder and wiser way,” Brown said.
Her work focuses on developing self-compassion and what she calls “a steady mind”—the capacity to be present with whatever arises without being overwhelmed by it. She’s written several books on meditation, including one titled “Happy Relationships,” and teaches both through a Substack newsletter with audio meditations and through private instruction.
The integration of her previous training with her current work suggests something important about career changes: rarely is time truly wasted, even when a path doesn’t work out. The four years Brown spent in psychoanalytic training gave her skills and insights she now applies in different contexts. What changed wasn’t the knowledge she gained but the framework through which she understood and applied it.
This process of integration also speaks to a larger truth about professional development and personal growth. Academic knowledge and lived experience operate differently. Brown articulated this distinction clearly: “The difference between academically knowing something and having somebody tell you something and hearing or watching from somebody who has walked the path.”
It’s the difference between a dentist describing a root canal as “a little discomfort” and a patient who just underwent the procedure offering practical advice about pain management. Both perspectives have value, but they’re not interchangeable. Brown’s journey from studying psychoanalysis to practicing meditation gave her both the theoretical foundation and the embodied understanding that comes from personal struggle and healing.
The Permission to Start Over
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Brown’s story is what it reveals about the cultural narratives we carry regarding career paths and life choices. She named something many people feel but rarely articulate: the “implied deal” of modern life. “There is a societal culture that we all have which is that if we, some people call this the, like the deal that is the implied deal of the American society that is currently sort of not showing up, which is that if we follow the steps that we’re supposed to do and we, you know, listen to our parents and we do our homework and we get the degree and we buy the house, that happiness shows up just because we followed those steps,” Brown explained.
When happiness doesn’t materialize despite following all the prescribed steps, the default response is often self-blame. We assume something is wrong with us rather than questioning whether the steps themselves are misaligned with who we actually are. This internal pressure to find what’s broken, to get a diagnosis that will finally explain why things don’t feel right, can prevent us from recognizing that sometimes the answer isn’t fixing ourselves—it’s changing course.
Brown’s willingness to leave her psychoanalytic training after four years wasn’t a failure of commitment. It was an act of self-awareness and courage. She recognized misalignment and chose to honor it rather than push through to completion simply because that’s what she was “supposed” to do.
For anyone questioning a career they’ve invested in, Brown’s story offers both validation and a practical example. The discomfort of being in the wrong field doesn’t always announce itself loudly at the beginning. Sometimes it accumulates gradually—through small moments of philosophical disagreement, through the slow recognition that the theoretical framework doesn’t match your beliefs, through the return of symptoms you thought you’d resolved.
Starting over in your 30s or beyond doesn’t mean the previous years were wasted. It means you learned something essential about yourself and had the courage to act on that knowledge. The path from psychoanalysis to meditation teaching wasn’t direct or easy for Brown, but it led her to work that aligns with both her beliefs about healing and her own experience of what actually helps.
This article was inspired by an interview with Kimberly Brown and Amy Stone on The Art of Imperfect Adulting podcast. https://imperfect-adulting.captivate.fm/listen https://www.youtube.com/@imperfectadulting To hear more compelling conversations like this one and receive special offers from our guests directly to your inbox, join our email community today.
Career Change Interview Transcript Kimberly Brown with Amy Stone | The Art of Imperfect Adulting | February 2026
Amy Stone [00:00:04]:
Welcome to the art of imperfect adulting. Kimberly Brown, are you ready for a fun chat?
Kimberly Brown [00:00:12]:
I am indeed, Amy, and I’m really glad to be here.
Amy Stone [00:00:15]:
Oh, that’s amazing. All right. I start all of my conversations with the exact same question. What part of the world do you call home?
Kimberly Brown [00:00:23]:
Well, I am in New York, and right now I’m in New York City, although I am spending much more time and moving upstate New York.
Amy Stone [00:00:33]:
Oh, very nice. To get out of the city. To get out of the city. I get it.
Kimberly Brown [00:00:38]:
Very good.
Amy Stone [00:00:38]:
What part of upstate do you like?
Kimberly Brown [00:00:40]:
We stay in Troy, New York, which is up in the capital region, right near New York, near Albany and that area.
Amy Stone [00:00:49]:
Renson Lear. Right.
Kimberly Brown [00:00:50]:
Yes, we’re right near there. Round the block from Rensselaer Polytechnic.
Amy Stone [00:00:54]:
Yeah, There you go. There you go. I grew up in New York, so that’s the. That’s how I know the. The names of some of the towns. Although as a child, I once was asked on an actual school test, what is the capital of New York? And I said, Manhattan. So, you know, I failed. Got that one wrong.
Kimberly Brown [00:01:12]:
Well, if you ask any New Yorker, New York City person, we would tell you that is true. You should have gotten an A on that one.
Amy Stone [00:01:20]:
My. My father did not agree. He was like, let’s get you a map, and let’s review next warm up question. This is going to come out shortly before February to end of January, I think. So this is about the Valentine’s themey kind of stuff. Do you as a person enjoy getting fresh cut flowers as a present? And if you do, what is your favorite flower?
Kimberly Brown [00:01:44]:
Oh, wow. Well, I do. It is an emphatic yes. I love getting flowers. And I suppose, I mean, any flower you would give me, Amy, I’d be thrilled. Just want to make sure everybody knows that you can send me any flower, but I suppose my favorite would be peonies and ranunculus and maybe daisies.
Amy Stone [00:02:11]:
Ooh, very nice. Very, very nice. I love. I don’t know what the middle one was. I don’t know. I think I know that flower was there.
Kimberly Brown [00:02:21]:
They look like little buds, and they have a very sort of tight, tight bloom. Ranunculus. They are the little ones.
Amy Stone [00:02:31]:
That’s a fun word. Ranuncula. Okay. All right. Very good. Today we’re not talking about flowers, although that is a wonderful conversation. We’re talking about a pretty significant career change that you made in your 30s, I think. So are you ready to chat about that today?
Kimberly Brown [00:02:46]:
I am. Yeah. All right, too.
Amy Stone [00:02:49]:
Very good. So I think that what was going on. And you can correct this and tell me the correct details if I get it wrong. I think you were studying clinical psychology is where I think you might have been doing. So let me know if that’s not right, and then let’s talk a little bit about where you were in that academic path and how long you had already been invested in that study course.
Kimberly Brown [00:03:13]:
Yeah, I. What I was doing was training to be a psychoanalyst.
Amy Stone [00:03:19]:
Okay.
Kimberly Brown [00:03:20]:
Psychoanalysis training is done in the. In private institutes. It requires in general that you have some sort of graduate degree. And I had a master’s degree in English. And then in my 30s, I. This was not, you know, there were a lot of life changes that happened to me. I lived in New York during 9 11, and I had a really wonderful psychotherapist that had helped me so much when I was young, you know, around 30. And so it just seemed like, oh, and I worked in human resources. That’s what I was doing for a living. And it felt like, well, I’d really like to use everything I’ve learned from my therapist and from life and perhaps also learn to work with people and support them, you know. And so I enrolled in the course in a psychoanalytic institute here in New York City. It was called Washington Square Institute. It’s no longer in existence, and in general, it takes around between four and six years to complete the psychoanalytic program. It requires classes. It also requires that you see patients under. You know, I had a supervisor to discuss my cases, and it required that I underwent psychoanalysis with a psychoanalyst. So it was very intense. And I was in the program for about four years, maybe a little longer, when I realized it was not for me.
Amy Stone [00:05:04]:
So this is really interesting. This is an unexpected turn of the path because I did not realize. I didn’t know that this was even an option. So your undergraduate graduate and your first graduate. So English was your graduate work. What did you. If I had met you when you were a kid before, like a middle school, and asked you what did you want to be when you grew up, what would you say?
Kimberly Brown [00:05:27]:
What would you probably would have said? A writer. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:05:33]:
So master’s in English. Was your undergrad also in English?
Kimberly Brown [00:05:36]:
It was actually in physics.
Amy Stone [00:05:38]:
Physics. Oh, my gosh, you’ve been all over the place. Good heavens. Okay, so physics. What did you think you were going to do with that?
Kimberly Brown [00:05:46]:
Well, then I. I really just studied it because I was interested. And certain things had come very easy to me, like writing, like the humanities, like reading. You Know, I always would get A’s. It was, you know, just. I was inclined that way, but math and the sciences, I was less inclined that way. And I thought, well, I’m going to. I’m going to try something harder for me that I’m interested in to see if I can do it and to see what it would be like. And it was really hard. And it was also very humbling in the best way to not be that person that was always like, you know, in the top smarties in the class, you know, I really needed to ask for a lot of help, and I had to find people to study with. So it was an interesting endeavor. But I knew I wasn’t going to be a physicist. Right.
Amy Stone [00:06:42]:
Well, that’s, you know, so physics is a very specific thing. So with a physics degree, you can be a physics teacher, you can be an engineer, you can build bombs, you could, you know, like those. That kind of thing.
Kimberly Brown [00:06:53]:
But.
Amy Stone [00:06:54]:
And then to go from that to a master’s in English, that’s a dramatic shift. So you end up in the workplace, working in a corporate environment in hr. And did you like your job?
Kimberly Brown [00:07:08]:
I liked my job a lot. I worked in a very hectic, small boutique marketing firm. It was very. It was very like the stereotype or like you might see on an old television program of, you know, kind of a. A quirky and demanding yet interesting boss. Okay. And, you know, very smart people. I really liked it. It was very dynamic. Also, often in smaller companies, you know, get p. Hold quite as much. So although ostensibly I was hr, I was involved with lots of things, and I really like that. And what I liked about my job was. And what I’ve always been inclined toward is working with people, being, you know, talking to them, listening to them. It’s. People always interest me. And so that was a big part of my job. And I. I really did enjoy. I lived in Manhattan at the time, and, you know, I was younger. It was a nice time, except I always felt like I hadn’t found my way yet. I liked it. It was a job, but it never felt, Amy, like a career.
Amy Stone [00:08:21]:
All right, so you didn’t think that you were going to spend. It was not your forever job working for this startup. I like the way you say you don’t get pigeonholed in the startup. The other way to say that is that there’s so few people working in the company that everybody has to do everything. And it’s definitely. It’s definitely an energy that Nod everybody likes.
Kimberly Brown [00:08:39]:
Yes.
Amy Stone [00:08:40]:
But some people really. Some people really blossom in the startup, in the startup vibe. So you are pursuing. How do you talk. Walk me through how you make the decision to sign up for this psychoanalyst certification, this program, like what was going on in your mind that was drawing you to that and the work that would go with it.
Kimberly Brown [00:09:02]:
Yeah. So this would have been in around 2003. Ish. Somewhere around there. And if you lived. Well, anywhere in the. Anyone in the US was affected by 9, 11, certainly if you lived in the city, it was, it was something that even if you didn’t know it was affecting you for a long time, you know, and I, as I look back on that time, Amy, I can see not only me, but a lot of people I knew made big life decisions in the next few years after.
Amy Stone [00:09:36]:
Oh my God. Everybody got divorced, moved out of the city. Everybody moved out of the city. A bunch of people changed careers, even if they just moved to New Jersey, you know, it was like move from the city over to New Jersey. Yeah. Big changes. One of my family members was living in the Village. So it was a dramatic impact.
Kimberly Brown [00:09:55]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:09:55]:
You were dramatically impacted. They overcorrected slightly and they moved to Princeton Cranberry, New Jersey, which is not even as big as Princeton.
Kimberly Brown [00:10:04]:
Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:10:04]:
So they went from living in the biggest city, Indiana, you know, this huge, enormous city, vibrant city, to teeny, tiny, adorable, postage stamp town. And they bought a. They went from being lifelong renters to owners of a historic house completely. Their life was upside down and it was 10 years of hilarity until they got back to the city because they, they, they were all in. And they were almost instantaneously miserable with their decision. But you know, it was so overcorrection, just exactly like you’re saying. They did not realize the impact of living through that and how it is, how it happened. Yeah, yeah. So I interrupted you.
Kimberly Brown [00:10:43]:
I apologize. No, you didn’t at all, Amy, because I shared your. Did you say that your brother is.
Amy Stone [00:10:49]:
My brother in law and his wife.
Kimberly Brown [00:10:50]:
Brother in law, Yeah. I know those people and I felt that too, you know, and so I wasn’t quite understanding that was operating, but that was operating. And I became, I just felt like I have to do something. I felt kind of an urgency, you know, I, I. Am I going to stay here and work in HR forever? I don’t love it. Do I want to pursue this writing, you know, that I thought I wanted to do? And I had a psychoanalyst from the time I was probably, I don’t know, my mid to late twenties till my early thirties. Like three or four years. And she was, she kind of saved my life. Amy. I had a really difficult background and as a young adult was very insecure and had a lot of panic attacks and, and, and was very rough on myself. You know, just thought, well, I should just. What’s wrong? You know, what’s wrong with me? Why, why can’t I just be okay? And she really helped me and she really kind of supported me to bring a little understanding and softness to myself. So I felt really grateful to her. And, and she inspired me, you know, and so that was a big reason too. You know, I really, I wanted to be like her.
Amy Stone [00:12:19]:
Yeah. So what I hear you saying is you were at a point in your life where there was going to be a change. You weren’t fully fulfilled where you were and you were searching for the next, the next great thing that you would do. And you had this person in your life that was a representation of what you thought you maybe could step into. And so you, you go back to school, you go back. So were you working at the same time that you were?
Kimberly Brown [00:12:44]:
I was working at the same time and I was very lucky that the owner of the company was. She had been in psychoanalysis for years and years, like decades, and she was really supportive of me. You know, I would go at lunch to a class or, you know, really supportive of me, you know, going, being able to work and, and train as well. So I was doing both. And, and at first, you know, like any new endeavor, you know, was interesting, was exciting and I really like school. You know, when you said just a moment ago, you said, okay, you decide to go back to school. For me, that was always sort of the default. I don’t know what to do, I’ll go back to school. You know, and there’s a lot of us like that.
Amy Stone [00:13:31]:
And well, it’s a, it’s an effective way to reset. I think that sometimes, and I’ll just bring this up because we are in a bizarre economic situation in, in 20, 20, 25, and you know, a lot of people are going through non voluntary job changes and it’s a tough job market and things like that. And one of the ways to work through it, which I think that people sometimes give themselves a very hard time. They can be hard on themselves for making this choice, but it’s an effective way to do it, to go back to school and retool and relaunch through that proven system. I don’t know if that will always work because I’m not a fortune teller, but it is definitely something that I think that people should probably be more gentle on themselves about. A lot of people do it. One of the thought patterns that people knock themselves around with this, which is partially accurate, school is not really designed for people who are no longer in their 20s, like the hours and things like that. So that’s definitely a challenge. But there are lots and lots of people who do it. And so we should be. We should. We should be more enthusiastic about the opportunity that goes that. So you’re in this training, you love school, you’re learning something new. But. And one of the things you’re doing, I think, is you’re working with clients directly, with supervision, like as an academic pursuit. I think that’s the way that’s going. And something begins to happen and you work out that you’ve. You don’t actually want to do this. Walk us through and connect the dots between what happens because you’re very excited, you’re enthusiastic, you have a mentor in this field, and then you come to the conclusion that you’re. You’ve. You’ve gone down the wrong path.
Kimberly Brown [00:15:18]:
Yeah. So it took a few years for me to sort of understand that, but so few one trains for. I think I trained for almost a year before I saw patients one on one. Before that, I did things like what’s called an intake. If you ever go to any sort of psychotherapy clinic or even to a medical clinic, someone will come up and get your name and what’s going on with you and kind of assess you briefly. And then, you know, you’ll go to see the other person, you know, the people you need to see. And I was doing intake. So that was my way in to start to get comfortable with people. And then I was training. I was taking classes about psychology and about the view of mental health from this particular viewpoint, from psychoanalytic training. Now, psychoanalysis gets its roots in Sigmund Freud.
Amy Stone [00:16:28]:
Okay?
Kimberly Brown [00:16:29]:
Freud believed essentially that all people, we have these drives that were born with everybody, inherent things. And from his view, and a lot of psychoanalysis, those drives are only aggressive or sexual. That’s what we are inherently born with. And so there was that, that view, and then there was a view in my training. And it’s throughout any psychotherapy the need for diagnosis. Now that’s necessary, quote, unquote, for. Mainly for the insurance companies, but also to sort of. If we can diagnose what’s, quote, unquote, wrong with you, then we can prescribe a treatment plan.
Amy Stone [00:17:25]:
Right?
Kimberly Brown [00:17:27]:
So after a year, I started to see patients. I Saw patients, I guess, two or three years then. And, you know, the way it works in this sort of training, it’s still in any sort of psycho clinical setting. You see your patients and then you review them with your supervisor, who helps you understand and, you know, see what the person’s saying and what they mean. And I started to feel the diagnosis was really not. It wasn’t right. I didn’t feel it was compassionate. I didn’t feel that it was necessary. This isn’t to say, Amy, that people don’t have serious problems. You know, everybody. You know, people have anxiety, people have delusions, those. That is true, and it’s deep suffering. But I didn’t feel that it was right to say, oh, well, you have an anxiety disorder, or you are this ex. You’re a depressive. I just. That really started to bother me. And then I started to notice that nearly all the patients that I saw, they had a belief in themselves that was not correct. You know, they would tell me what was wrong with them. They would tell me, you know, why can’t I hold down a job? What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep picking the wrong women? What’s wrong with me? And I felt like that storyline wasn’t right because I began to feel that there was nothing wrong with anybody. And I don’t. Again, I don’t mean. That doesn’t mean we all have troubles. I just never felt like, well, anybody’s really broken, right? We just have our stuff and we have to, you know, take care of it and understand it. And finally, my supervisor, I had a patient who I really felt a lot for. She was quite young and she was in graduate school, and she had divulged to me a childhood trauma that she’d never told anyone before. And, you know, that was a big deal for her. And I guess I was seeing her six months, eight months, and she said out of the blue, and so sincerely, she said, do you love me? And like it. She really. She loved me, you know, And I paused and I said, yes, you know, I do love you. And then when I was talking with my supervisor, my supervisor said, well, when I see clients, patients, and they ask me that, I say to them, the way I’m going to love you is to help you understand you, or the way I’m going to love you is to, you know, understand you and reflect that back to you. And although I could see that that was useful, I just began to feel like, you know what, Amy? The way I’m gonna love you is to love you like, it doesn’t need to be so obscured or so you can see. The seeds were planted. And I was feeling very unsure that this was something I wanted to continue. I didn’t. I also did not feel that people were only born inherently with like aggression and sexual drives. That’s clearly not true. If you’ve been with an infant, they have a deep need to connect. We all do.
Amy Stone [00:21:19]:
Well, I was. The closed captions were playing on my face when you were talking about Freud. Only because, not because I’m an expert, but because there are, in 2025, 2026, there are jokes about. I mean, this was a long time ago. He had some, he had some ideas about humanity that are kind of hilarious in a modern lens. And I don’t mean that critically, but it was a time, right? It was a time. It was a time when cocaine was considered a healthy product that would enhance the process. Today, we still call that illegal in most of the United States. All right, so let’s. You talked about a lot of things that I think that we can go a little bit deeper on. You talked about the conflict of the industrial. These are my words here. So let’s see if they make any sense. Sort of the industrial method medical complex in the United States that requires that in order to get treatment through insurance, things have to be classified. And the terminology they use in some medical offices for this is actually medical coding where, you know, if you have a broken bone, you know, it’s like, here’s the code for that. We put it on the form. Your insurance is going to pay for an X ray and a cast and physical therapy and that kind of stuff. And so it can be very helpful, right, to get a diagnosis. You go to the doctor and they’re like, you have strep throat and here’s what we’re going to do to make it go away. But what I think I hear you saying is that where you were running into it, is that with some of these mental health situations, I mean, is it like, is this who you are, is forever or is this something you’re experiencing? Like, are you a broken bone or do you have a broken bone? Am I on the right path?
Kimberly Brown [00:23:11]:
Very much so. Very much so. And I just think it’s in terms of mental health, you can describe symptoms, right? I’m. I’m really suffering. I’m having panic attacks. I, I have lots of self criticism. All, all of that could be very true. Does that mean, oh, I have a narcissistic personality disorder? I don’t know. I Don’t.
Amy Stone [00:23:38]:
Maybe.
Kimberly Brown [00:23:39]:
Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. But I don’t even think it’ all that useful. Right. In terms of treatment, in terms of how one would approach someone. Right.
Amy Stone [00:23:51]:
I mean, sometimes I think there’s probably nuance there.
Kimberly Brown [00:23:53]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:23:53]:
Like, sometimes it probably is very helpful, and other times it’s just a data point that, you know, maybe isn’t. And I think that everybody in the audience and you and I have enough life experience to know that sometimes these people get diagnoses wrong. Usually not with a broken bone, but actually sometimes even then. I know a friend who was in an accident and went to the hospital and they said, oh, your ribs are fine. And then they went back several days later and there’s still an extreme pain. And then they’re like, oh, you have all these broken ribs. It just. It was, it was too soon, or I don’t remember what the situation is. So I think there’s benefit. And also, everything is not always so black and white. But in your instance, what you. It sounds like you were feeling was you weren’t connected deeply to embracing this particular thing, that you would then represent it and make it your next phase of livelihood. And one of the things that you’ve also touched base on is some of the therapeutic modalities have very strong rules about connection and relationships between the therapist and the patient. And I’ve talked to other people who’ve struggled with this, because what you were des. Is that there’s a very. There’s. There’s separation. And was it. Is it Freud that was the one who came up with the whole projection? Like you, of course, the patient is going to, you know, fall in love with their doctor. Like, is that where that came from or was it somewhere else?
Kimberly Brown [00:25:23]:
Well, there he said that. And others did.
Amy Stone [00:25:27]:
Others too.
Kimberly Brown [00:25:28]:
He would have said it from a Oedipal view. Right. Because yes, the reader would say, yes, that happens. You know, it’s a relationship and it.
Amy Stone [00:25:38]:
Can be very intense and require an enormous amount of trust. It’s a. You’re giving your deepest, darkest, most inner thoughts to somebody who is there to help you. Which is the most fabulous kind of intimacy between two people.
Kimberly Brown [00:25:52]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:25:52]:
To trust somebody with the. Your darkest secrets and have them say, thank you. Let’s work on that, you know. Yeah, that feels great. So I can understand that. But you were like, I don’t know if I. If this is the professional relationship that I would have with people.
Kimberly Brown [00:26:11]:
Yeah, I just felt, I mean, let me be clear. There are many ways to do psychotherapy. I have Been helped by amazing psychotherapists. And the one thing when they do research on what’s effective in psychotherapy is the only. There are all different modalities and types, but the single most effective is the relationship between the therapist and the patient or the client, however you want to say it. And so that relationship was what became important to me. And as you’re saying, I didn’t feel I could do that authentically within the framework of my training.
Amy Stone [00:26:55]:
Yeah. There’s another interview of a guest that I did, and she different. She had a different degree, but she had a similar reality. The professional. Some of the things that came with the profession didn’t align with her the way she wanted to conduct herself. And so it’s definitely a reality of some professions. And I have no judgment about it, but I think I’ve heard about it before. So you’ve put all this time in. So you’ve got a lot of education at this point. You’ve got a bachelor’s degree, you’ve got a master’s degree, You’ve got work experience. You’re significantly invested in time in working towards this degree. You decide that this is maybe not the thing you want to do. What do your friends and family begin to say to you when you’re like, oh, I don’t know.
Kimberly Brown [00:27:44]:
It was. It was amazing. Amy. I can still remember, like, people close to me. My closest, oldest friend, who I’ve known since childhood, she was, you know, she’s like a sister. She was really supportive. She said, kimmy, it’s not for you. Great. And nearly everyone else I was close to at the time were saying things like, well, you sure you only have, you know, maybe a year and a half left? You’ll be licensed. Several people said to me, wow, you wasted all that time.
Amy Stone [00:28:20]:
Well, there’s a message in that wording. Right, right.
Kimberly Brown [00:28:24]:
You know. Oh, you invested so much to throw it away. It seems like a waste. I heard that a lot. And yet I just. I really felt like I cannot be authentic to myself and continue this, you know, So I did. I. The. You know, in order to be fair to my. The patients I was seeing, you know, I withdrew from. In the program, and it was over a period of about four months, you know, to make sure that those connections were okay as they transferred to other people. And I wrapped things up, and then I was just in this sort of. It felt like a real limbo.
Amy Stone [00:29:05]:
Were you still working at the.
Kimberly Brown [00:29:07]:
I was.
Amy Stone [00:29:08]:
Okay, so you’re still working at the marketing. Okay. All right, so. But you’re out of school, you’re in limbo. And so you mentioned as we were talking that you, when you were younger, you had some personal experience with, I think, anxiety and panic. And then I think in the intake form for the interview, did you begin to experience panic attacks again at this time while you were in limbo, or do I misunderstand that?
Kimberly Brown [00:29:36]:
I did a little bit later. Okay. So that. So I withdrew from the program. And at the time, it was this very sort of liminal time. I didn’t really know what the future would look like. And I had a lot of doubt that I did the right thing or not. I also felt like, you know, that person that said, like, what a waste. You know, I was thinking that too. Like, well, what, what I did, I learned a lot. You know, you, you really learn how to be with someone, how to listen in such a important way and a. With a very special attention. You know, I, I learned all of that and, you know, I guess I’m not going to use it. I don’t know. So one thing I did, because it had been like four years of constant working, you know what it’s like, you work part time and you go to school and everybody listening. And I’m sure you’ve been through this. It was so busy. So it was kind of nice just to kind of relax for a couple years. I was in a relationship with someone that had began soon, right about the time my program was ending. And I was just saying, okay, I’m just gonna relax, Just gonna relax. I’m gonna see what happens here.
Amy Stone [00:30:49]:
Okay?
Kimberly Brown [00:30:49]:
And I guess a few years went by and I’m trying to. There. I’m not sure there was one catalyst, but many. I broke up with that man, or we broke up and I had a cat who fell out of a five story window.
Amy Stone [00:31:10]:
Oh, my goodness. That’s dramatic.
Kimberly Brown [00:31:12]:
I know, it was very dramatic. It was very New York.
Amy Stone [00:31:15]:
Didn’t land on his feet.
Kimberly Brown [00:31:16]:
He did. He survived? Yes. They call it high rise syndrome here. Really? Yes.
Amy Stone [00:31:23]:
Well, there’s that thing where cats always land on their feet. And I was like, from five stories.
Kimberly Brown [00:31:27]:
Oh, my gosh. Wow. Oh, my God. So he fell. I mean, he was injured. It was very New York story. I had to grab him, jump in a taxi. The taxi driver knows where. The 24 hour hospital. You know, vet hospital, emergency vet. Yeah, exactly. He was in an oxygen cage for a few days. So these.
Amy Stone [00:31:46]:
I’m sure that was very, very economical. And like cheap. Super cheap.
Kimberly Brown [00:31:51]:
So cheap here in New York. Yes. So these, you know, small Losses. And. And one day I started to have panic attacks. And the panic attacks would start at night. I became really fearful of being near the windows. I. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And. And just a lot. I think a lot of old trauma was arising, you know, from my childhood and things like that. And, you know, Amy, I could tell you just why it was happening. I had a real understanding of the causes and how it was manifesting and how it related to when I was young and how it felt so similar and all of those things, and I didn’t have any tools to work with it.
Amy Stone [00:32:41]:
So that is a really interesting thing. So for. I. So probably most of the people listening have had their own experiences with anxiety. Maybe they’ve also had panic attacks. They are pretty ubiquitous and common. They’re awful. I don’t. I’ve never met anybody who’s like, yay, let’s go have a panic attack and think we’re dying. And so that. So. And I think this is really interesting that you were living through it and able to apply your academic understanding of it. But also the academic understanding wasn’t helpful in moving through the moment. Moment. Correct.
Kimberly Brown [00:33:19]:
Yeah, it was. Yeah, it really wasn’t. I. The, you know, the treatment I had had was very conventional. It was just talk therapy, which was helpful. I don’t even mean to say just. It was really helpful.
Amy Stone [00:33:33]:
But not in the middle of the night when you’re in a panic.
Kimberly Brown [00:33:35]:
Not in the middle of the night when you’re in a panic. And when, you know, really, it. It’s like wild thoughts is what happens. You know, your body starts to react to these thoughts, and it becomes a, you know, real cycle of. Yeah. And so that led me to find people who might be able to help me with my mind and my panic. And that was meditation and mindfulness.
Amy Stone [00:34:04]:
And you found this through Buddhism, I think.
Kimberly Brown [00:34:07]:
Well, I found it first. I have been, you know, doing yoga for years for exercise.
Amy Stone [00:34:13]:
Okay.
Kimberly Brown [00:34:14]:
And in my yoga classes, often. Not always, Amy, but often the teacher would lead us at the end in a little meditation. So I had, like, an understanding that that might be helpful. And then in New York City, there were lots of places where you could learn to meditate, you could learn mindfulness. And I started to go. And many of them were Buddhist.
Amy Stone [00:34:37]:
Yeah. So in my. I’m not in meditation expert, but I do think. Think that the Buddhists are sort of known as kind of the best.
Kimberly Brown [00:34:46]:
Yeah, they really were like, if you want to know about how to deal with your own mind, they are experts in it. They have a system. They have a framework, they have lots of practices, and they’re effective. And so this led me into, you know, it led me into where I feel like I always belong. You know, I mentioned several times I wasn’t sure what. Where I was going to go. You know, I wanted to be a writer. And then I’m in HR and then I’m this, and I’m just not so sure. And this I felt so sure about, that I was in the right place for myself and with the right people, with the right teachings, you know. And so I started to learn and practice with a couple different Buddhist centers in the city. And then, you know, started to meet people in that world and went on retreats. You know, that’s part of a. Part of meditation practice is to, you know, be able to go away for a week and just practice and be still for, you know, a period of time. Time. And. And it was such a surprise to me. I. I hadn’t thought I would wind up in the Buddhist world at all. I didn’t. That wasn’t in my background. It wasn’t. None of my friends were involved, you know, the people I’d known for years. I now, of course, have many friends in that world. And it was such a. Just a wonderful surprise. And it was so useful to me. Really saved me in the same way that I said that my first therapist in my 20s, you know, really helped me and saved me in a certain way. The same thing happened with this practice. And so, Amy, that just. I knew that was the direction I was going to go in. Within a year or two, I was training to be a meditation teacher and a mindfulness teacher instructor. And since that time, that’s what I’ve devoted my life to. I. I stayed in the human resources for a year or two more there, and then I did leave and. And have found my way in this world, in this discipline. And it’s. In some ways, it seems so obvious that it would be my path. You know, I meet old friends and they say, oh, yeah, of course you’re inclined to that, you know, but for me, it’s still sort of a surprise. And I really feel so grateful, you know, that I kind of. My suffering led me to it.
Amy Stone [00:37:27]:
That is. I love this story in so many ways. So I want to ask your opinion about something and just your opinion and your experience. I’m not an expert on this, but I’m curious about it because I think that today, in many Western sort of psychotherapy circles, you would find practitioners who would include mindfulness and Breath work and maybe even meditation in what are very, you know, in a very, you know, non Buddhist environment. You might find this in, you know, your allergist’s office or, you know, in the training for first responders when they’re talking about how to calm down and things like that. These, these things feel to me like they have crossed over a lot of places where they weren’t. But I don’t, I don’t. I don’t think that that was the way it was a couple decades ago. I think there was more separation.
Kimberly Brown [00:38:19]:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And it’s wonderful to see it be more in the culture. When I first started practicing Buddhism and training in it, people would always say to me, like, family. My dad said something like, yes, I know someone else that does yoga thought it was the same. But Amy, no one says it anymore. People do under, you know, people will say, oh, I know what mindfulness is. My therapist does it. My child’s school does that.
Amy Stone [00:38:47]:
Yes.
Kimberly Brown [00:38:48]:
So it has much become. Because it’s a useful tool.
Amy Stone [00:38:52]:
Yeah, My, my kids had. There was a. In middle school, they did a mindful moment and they all just mocked it. And like, they just. But at the same time, as I would say to them, I was like, no, I believe in it. They’re like, well, with you, we get it, but we don’t like it when it’s on the loudspeaker at school. I was like. I was like, whatever. You know, that’s totally reasonable. Okay, so. So the practice of meditation and mindfulness, it helps you with your actual body state and the panic. Panic attacks in your own experience, this becomes such a pivotal shift in your own life that it becomes your mission and your practice. Like, you shift away from working in somebody else’s office, you do not go into physics, although, you know, all of it, I’m sure, comes all together. And as you said, you go all the way in and you train in this and this is now what you do as, as a profession. How long have you been doing this?
Kimberly Brown [00:39:45]:
I came to it about 15 years ago and I started teaching and really on this path, I guess about 12 years ago.
Amy Stone [00:39:52]:
Oh, so quite a long time. Yeah.
Kimberly Brown [00:39:54]:
Yes.
Amy Stone [00:39:55]:
So one of my favorite self help books that I like, I think it’s just really good. It’s not new, but by a long shot is Tara Brock. Radical acceptance.
Kimberly Brown [00:40:03]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:40:04]:
And she is a Buddhist practitioner, I believe, and instructor. And where I said, I was like, you know, I think the Buddhists take this very seriously. Whenever I will listen to her podcast, I Will listen to things like that. But I always tell people, when. When I talk to people who maybe have not done it, I’m like, listen, there’s a whole level of meditation with the practitioners that are Buddhists, and you may not get there right away. Like, so, you know, start with. Start with what feels good. And then, you know, just know that they are on a whole other level. But one of the things you mentioned was that you sent that. That feeling of belonging. And one of the things that I’ve heard just over the years, just anecdotally, and I may be way off the base, that’s kind of one of the. I think of that as one of the. The tenants of the Buddhist theology, the acceptance of the situation, the belonging, like the story of under the tree and allowing. Is that. Am I right about that?
Kimberly Brown [00:40:57]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and what you’re pointing to is I had a sense of belonging to the group, to the community, who were very open, and I developed a sense of belonging to myself in the sense of there isn’t anything wrong with me. Amy. Yeah. Okay. Sometimes I get mixed up. Sometimes I’m angry, sometimes I’m anxious.
Amy Stone [00:41:18]:
Yeah.
Kimberly Brown [00:41:19]:
And the relationship is very different. You know, to have a sense that I’m okay and I can breathe through this and I don’t. You know what? I don’t have to react out of it. I can get really mad and sit with it. Yeah. And say, okay, I think speaker.
Amy Stone [00:41:37]:
And you know what? I see you doing it. And I just want to allow for all the people that are hearing that you have a lot of practice, and it sometimes is not that easy. And one of the examples that I picked up at one point, it’s like. It’s like allowing the rain to fall on you and just be with the discomfort. There is another side to that, which is if you are not so enlightened in the Buddhist culture that maybe you feel the rain and you acknowledge it and you go inside because you are not yet there.
Kimberly Brown [00:42:03]:
Beautifully said. Yes.
Amy Stone [00:42:04]:
You got out of the rain.
Kimberly Brown [00:42:06]:
Absolutely. And what we’re saying in the Buddhist view is we’re not saying, go sit in the rain and be uncomfortable.
Amy Stone [00:42:13]:
Well, some people. Sounds like that is what they’re saying sometimes.
Kimberly Brown [00:42:15]:
Like. No, what we’re saying is, you know what, Amy? There are many things in your life that will be unavoidably hard.
Amy Stone [00:42:23]:
Yes. Okay. I like. Yeah.
Kimberly Brown [00:42:25]:
For all of us. You know, you’re. You know, my mom got sick. That is going to happen. I lost a job. That is going to happen. I fought with my Child. That is going to happen. Happen. How do I relate to that?
Amy Stone [00:42:38]:
Yeah, no, that. And I think that’s very powerful. So a friend of mine who’s. Who. Her name is Hunter. Years ago, we did this swim, an ocean swim. And at the time that we did the swim, the waters were just totally full of jellyfish. It was like a. It was a dramatic, very dramatic event. And I run into her after the event, and I was like, how is your swim? And she had just won an award. That was these jellyfish earrings, because everybody knew that there were so many jellyfish.
Kimberly Brown [00:43:02]:
Fish.
Amy Stone [00:43:02]:
And she’s very much into acceptance and allowance, and she’s like, you know, I’m swimming along and I’m in their space, and I just am allowing that, and it’s part of the experience. And I was like, all right, I’ve known you for a long time, Hunter, and I will accept this from you. But also, it was really painful.
Kimberly Brown [00:43:17]:
I wanted it to end. Beautiful. Yes.
Amy Stone [00:43:20]:
She was like. She was like, true. Very true. But I was like. I was like, okay.
Kimberly Brown [00:43:25]:
It’s so funny because that’s important. You know, there are. There are misrepresentations and misunderstandings sometimes about the practice and what’s the point of it? The point is not for you or me to walk around with happy, happy feelings all the time, and I’m just going to meditate till I feel great. That is not the point. The point is each of us in our humanness have all kinds of experiences and all kinds of feeling, and so how can we soften and be with them?
Amy Stone [00:44:00]:
Right? I mean.
Kimberly Brown [00:44:01]:
Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:44:02]:
Yeah. And sometimes the jellyfish are here, and that’s an anecdote that’s, like, really trivial. But in the human experience, we all have moments where it’s not jellyfish. It’s. It’s hard stuff. It’s, you know, losing jobs, needing homes. You know, the. The very nature of the human experience. People get sick. You know, the transition, big life transitions, including the one that none of us escape. Watching the people we love pass and die. Those are hard things. Those are hard things. So I think. I think I am glad that you reframed that and that you took the time to walk that path with me, because you did explain the benefits so very, very much. One of the things that I love. And we’ll wrap this up and we’ll talk about your special offer and those things.
Kimberly Brown [00:44:48]:
Things.
Amy Stone [00:44:49]:
One of the things I truly love about being alive in 2025 and 2026 is the sort of weird and synchronous connections between Very modern science and ideas that have been around for thousands of years. So, you know, now, you know, so Buddhism is not a new thing. It didn’t come out in the, you know, in the 2000s and. But it had been a tradition and a practice that had been and studied and practiced outside of the existence of, you know, functional MRI machines. But now you’ve got all these researchers who are able to, like, take these wild pictures of people’s brains while they’re meditating and actually turn around things that are that, that are like, yeah, this does change the way our brains work. It’s crazy.
Kimberly Brown [00:45:41]:
Yeah, it’s amazing. You know, people that I’m close to in the Buddhist world, you know, we will see a new study and say, oh, look, science caught up to Buddhism again.
Amy Stone [00:45:52]:
Yeah, yeah.
Kimberly Brown [00:45:53]:
And one of them that’s to me, been so important. Almost everyone that works with me, Amy, almost every person I’ve known feels there’s something wrong with them.
Amy Stone [00:46:04]:
Yeah.
Kimberly Brown [00:46:04]:
And we have a culture that’s all set up for them that. Right. Self help, get better, be improved, you know, all these things. And there’s a sense like, well, I’m not really a good person, I’m a bad person.
Amy Stone [00:46:17]:
Right.
Kimberly Brown [00:46:17]:
Or I could be better or guilt, shame, whatever. Anyway, Buddhism says, no, that that’s the opposite actually, that all of us have an inherent sense of, of wanting to connect, of wanting to treat ourselves and the world with wisdom and kindness. So, you know, that’s posited. And then there’s a researcher, his name is Dr. Richard Davidson. He is in the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a longtime student of the Dalai Lama.
Amy Stone [00:46:56]:
Okay.
Kimberly Brown [00:46:57]:
And he now he has the center for Healthy Minds. You can see that on his, on the website for anybody listening and where he’s devoted his life to seeing, well, what practices, what ways can people do to connect with this and is it even true? Okay. And what he found in his early studies was indeed, all of us are born with capacity for compassion. Compassion being, you know, to have empathy for our own and others suffering.
Amy Stone [00:47:29]:
Right. Because the people sometimes mix up compassion, which is being nice to somebody, but built into that word is that you are sharing the suffering of the other person. That’s like the, that’s the. Yeah, yeah.
Kimberly Brown [00:47:42]:
And so he found that it’s. It’s there. It’s there in all of us. And it’s very similar to the ability to speak a language. It needs to be fostered through the environment. So it’s one of those things like, you know, I, I wouldn’t know English Unless people spoke to me as an infant. Right, right. I wouldn’ compassion unless they demonstrated that to me. And so what, what I’m saying to you and to everybody listening, no matter how old you are, you can start to develop this skill because you have the inherent ability, the capacity otherwise, you know, it’s sort of like, oh, so and so’s so loving. How did they get that way? I’m not like that.
Amy Stone [00:48:22]:
Right, you are.
Kimberly Brown [00:48:24]:
Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:48:25]:
And, and I think that really, that really touches on one of the, the, one of the roots to the reason the idea behind this show.
Kimberly Brown [00:48:34]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:48:34]:
Is the difference between academically knowing something and having somebody tell you something and hearing or watching from somebody who has walked the path.
Kimberly Brown [00:48:44]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:48:45]:
So I’ve like a lot of single line jokes about it. It’s like, you know, you talk to the guy who’s going to do the root canal and he’s like, yeah, there’s going to be a little bit of discomfort if you talk to the patient who just had it done. You’re going to get completely different story of how to walk through it because they’re going to share their experience and maybe offer you like some, you know, ask for the, ask for the pain reliever, some practical experience. And, and it makes sense. And there’s also, there’s, you know, I think when we look around there is a societal culture that we all have which is that if we, some people call this the, like the deal that is the implied deal of the American society that is currently sort of not showing up, which is that if we follow the steps that we’re supposed to do and we, you know, listen to our parents and we do our homework and we get the degree and we buy the house, that happiness shows up just because we followed those steps. And then when it doesn’t, we turn it around on ourself as clearly, I’ve done something wrong and there’s something wrong with me, and then we pursue help in finding somebody who will give us a diagnosis of what’s the thing that’s wrong with me. And I use that very loosely, the diagnosis, because it could be go back to school, get a divorce, you know, any of those things. Not necessarily a medical thing, but that does seem to be a common thread that is in the opposite, like sort of oppositionally, like a reflection of, you know, the inherent goodness and nature and humanness of people and just accepting and allowing and learning those skills that walk through it. So I think there’s a lot there and it’s really good. Okay, so, so back on track Tell everybody exactly a little bit about your business and how they can reach you and then I’ll share a special offer that you have for the audience.
Kimberly Brown [00:50:32]:
Amy so I am a meditation teacher. My work is focused on developing a sense of self, compassion and a steady mind. I’ve written several books on meditation. The most recent is called Happy Relationships and you can find those at any bookstore. I teach classes and I what I did wind up doing is all of that training that I had as a psychoanalyst. I also now use it with my students and I teach a lot of people privately and individually how to use these practices, you know, to connect with themselves in a, in a kinder and wiser way. Way.
Amy Stone [00:51:16]:
Yeah, I so.
Kimberly Brown [00:51:20]:
Yeah, so you can find me. I have a a very robust substack newsletter and when I say robust, it has a lot of audio meditations and we have a community that we practice together twice a month on the zoom. And the offer is for a paid membership for a month to my newsletter, which includes all of these audio archives and also our half hour meditation that we do twice a month in the evening or at least east coast time evening that I would love for you to to join us and see if it’s for you.
Amy Stone [00:51:57]:
That is a spectacular offer. So free one month subscription to the weekly substack newsletter Meditation with Heart. And the way people can redeem that is that you’re going to email Kim meditation with heart.com and with the subject line and the details of how to collect that are in the show. Notes, notes wherever you’re listening or watching the show. The easiest way always to get these special offers is to be a subscriber to the imperfect adulting email community because then I zap it right into your email box and you can just copy and paste or click. So thank you very, very much, Kimberly, for that very generous offer. I hope that people take you up on it. I really, really do. And so if you’re ready, are you ready for the final three questions?
Kimberly Brown [00:52:40]:
Let’s do it, Amy.
Amy Stone [00:52:41]:
Let’s do it.
Kimberly Brown [00:52:42]:
It.
Amy Stone [00:52:43]:
Can you name a song that you love so much that when you hear it you are maybe probably going to sing it out loud, whether you’re at home, in your car, or even if it’s the soundtrack playing at the grocery store while you’re shopping?
Kimberly Brown [00:52:57]:
Yes, I am going to name the old old four season song you’re just too Good to be True, which I have loved since childhood and it was played at my wedding sitting and I will probably stand up and dance a little too when the tempo goes up in the middle of the song.
Amy Stone [00:53:14]:
Love it. I do love it when I’m in the grocery store and people are singing in the aisles, and they’re like, it cracks me up. It does crack me up. I also love it when you’re driving, you stop at a traffic light, and you look at the people in other cars and they’re singing along, I love you. I do. I love it. I do. All right, so do you. You’re a writer. Do you enjoy reading? And if so, do you want to share with us a book that you’ve read or listened to? Like, because audiobooks.
Kimberly Brown [00:53:39]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:53:39]:
Everybody does that now, too. That you think that me and the audience might. Might consider for ourselves.
Kimberly Brown [00:53:46]:
Well, I. I have to recommend a book called Real Love by a teacher named Sharon Salzberg. She is actually one of my main meditation teachers, and she is really inspiring and really practical and down to earth. So it’s really just. Actually, I’m gonna correct that. It’s real happiness.
Amy Stone [00:54:11]:
Real happiness.
Kimberly Brown [00:54:12]:
Happiness. And it’s a great primer for learning meditation, and also for just simple ways to. To connect with your humanness.
Amy Stone [00:54:30]:
Very nice. Happiness can be elusive, I think. I think. I think as a child, I thought that happiness was going to be. And I, you know, I generally have a pretty annoyingly optimistic, happy sort of outlook. But, you know, it’s like happiness feels easier as a child than it does sometimes as an adult, is what I’ll say. So that’s my. That’s my own personal experience. Like, this should be easier. So that’s that. Okay, so question number three.
Kimberly Brown [00:54:52]:
Three.
Amy Stone [00:54:53]:
If I walked into your kitchen and boldly opened the refrigerator, which I reflected on as I was writing, this question, I think would be a super rude and impolite thing to do. But let’s go with it for the question. If I opened your refrigerator today, what would I find inside?
Kimberly Brown [00:55:07]:
Okay, you would find. Let me see. I’m imagining my refrigerator right now. You would find three bottles of cold Coca Cola that I put in there for my dear friend Michael, who recently visited me.
Amy Stone [00:55:23]:
Okay.
Kimberly Brown [00:55:24]:
You would find some yogurt, plain yogurt. I love it. You would find cheddar cheese and a lot of leftovers. There’s leftover lentils, there’s leftover raviolis from a few days ago, and probably some leftovers in the back that need to.
Amy Stone [00:55:43]:
Be tossed, as any. As any fridge probably has. That’s it. Kimberly Brown, thank you so much for being an amazing guest today on the show.
Kimberly Brown [00:55:52]:
Oh, Amy, this was such a treat. Well, how nice to meet you.