Embodied with Elizabeth Patricia DiAlto Figueroa

Latest Episodes:

EP 481 Die Before You Die: The Mystical Wisdom of Sufism | Salima Adelstein Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

What if the path to God started with a hug from a stranger? That's how Salima Adelstein found Sufism 31 years ago, and in this episode she breaks down what this path of the heart actually is, who it's for, and why it's not just for Muslims or mystics with a long reading list.

We get into surrender, discernment, the three voices (nafs, the whisperer, and the voice of God), the practice of Tawbah as a washing rather than a punishment, mercy, and how to build what Salima calls a ship of safety inside your heart. We also talk about desire, the Dunyā, and why knowing yourself is how you know God.

Connect with Salima and The University of Sufism:

sufiuniversity.org

sufi5.com

salimaadelstein.com

Connect with Elizabeth:

https://elizabethdialto.com/links

EP 480 People Pleasing, Boundaries & the Difference Between Compassion and Coddling | Sara Kassem Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

What if shielding people from the consequences of their behavior isn't actually compassionate? What if understanding why someone behaves the way they do doesn't require excusing it? And what happens when caring, patience, niceness, and goodwill become resources other people learn to exploit?

A lot of us don't want to lose compassion for anyone's humanity, but it's a real problem when that compassion prevents us from responding appropriately to behavior we find unacceptable.

Sara Kassem and I are back together for a conversation about boundaries, people pleasing, consequences, matching energy, spiritual bypassing, self-respect, and some of the spiritual and healing ideas we no longer believe as simply as we once did.

We start with Audre Lorde's famous idea that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" and explore what happens when wisdom that still matters meets new context, lived experience, and nuances we hadn't previously considered.

From there, we get into one of the biggest themes of the conversation: consequences.

We also unpack the difference between matching someone's energy, matching their effort, and what Sara calls "matching weapons," why overexplaining can become another drain on your life force, the freedom of no longer needing everyone to understand or approve of your choices, and why some forms of wisdom can only be earned through lived experience.

Thanks for tuning in!

—

If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and share it with someone who would appreciate the conversation.

Connect with Sara:

https://www.rebelwithacause.ca/

Connect with Elizabeth:

https://elizabethdialto.com/links

EP 479 Desire Lines: A Memoir | Kristen Millares Young Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

This episode is especially for women questioning inherited expectations around who they're supposed to be, what their bodies should look like, what they're allowed to want, and which paths they're permitted to take—and for writers, artists, and creatives navigating the vulnerability of putting deeply personal work into the world.

What if leaving the path you were given isn't a deviation from your life—but the beginning of actually living it?

Kristen Millares Young joins me on The Embodied Podcast for a conversation about women's desire, bodies, creativity, inherited shame, and the stories we've been taught not to tell.

Kristen is an award-winning journalist, novelist, essayist, and author of the memoir Desire Lines. The title comes from the architectural term for the paths people create by repeatedly leaving the prescribed concrete walkway and making another way across the ground.

That image becomes a beautiful entry point into our conversation about women whose lives, bodies, desires, and creative impulses refuse to remain inside the paths laid out for them.

We talk about Kristen's journey from investigative journalism into fiction and memoir, her decade-long investigation into the ancient goddess Cybele, being part of the Cuban diaspora, and historical forces that have shaped women's relationships with their bodies, power, sexuality, and stories.

We also get very personal about body image and aging. Kristen shares how seeing representations of Cybele across centuries helped her recognize her own changing body in the body of the goddess, while we unpack the absurd and often contradictory expectations women inherit around food, thinness, motherhood, sexuality, aging, and beauty.

And because Kristen is a writer, we talk about what it costs to tell the truth publicly: rejection, vulnerability, being perceived, perfectionism, and the emotional labor of standing with a story you were taught never to bring to light.

Thanks for tuning in!

#WomensStories #Desire #Embodiment

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If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and share it with someone who would appreciate the conversation.

Connect with Kristen Millares Young:

https://kristenmyoung.com

@kristenmillares

Get Desire Lines:

Print: https://bookshop.org/p/books/desire-lines-kristen-millares-young/af27e3462b28753c?ean=9781636285009&aid=177&listref=fall-2026

Audiobook: https://a.co/d/06dEDODC

Connect with Elizabeth:

https://elizabethdialto.com/links

EP 478 The Paradox of Wealth: How to Stop Letting Money Run Your Life Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

This episode is for anyone who wants a healthier relationship with money and wealth—whether you have plenty, need more, are navigating financial stress, or simply don't want money anxiety, striving, scarcity, or attachment to consume your life.

What if you could want more money, need more money, and pursue more money without letting money determine whether your life gets to feel rich?

This is the paradox of wealth.

In this episode of The Embodied Podcast, I'm exploring our relationship with money, wealth, enoughness, and prosperity through a mystical lens. Money can matter deeply without becoming the organizing principle of our lives.

This conversation began when I woke up on my 43rd birthday feeling extraordinarily wealthy. Nothing had changed financially. I realized how deeply I loved what I already had: my relationships, gifts, capacities, faith, city, body, work, perspective, and the life that has remained after years of change, growth, loss, healing, and becoming.

That experience brought me back to a framework I've been developing for years called Soul-Full Prosperity: prosperity rooted in sufficiency, sustainability, soulfulness, selectivity, and satisfaction.

We also explore the difference between money, currency, nourishment, exchange, and reciprocity; what happens when we become overly entangled with economic systems; and how to participate in the world without letting those systems dictate the quality or meaning of our lives.

In this episode, we discuss:

Why paradox is central to mystical life
Why money matters without being the same thing as prosperity
How financial stress can take over more of life than it deserves
The difference between currency and actual nourishment
Why loving what you already have can create a genuine experience of wealth
Sufficiency: what is actually enough for you?
Sustainability and the cost of building lives we can't maintain
Selectivity as the missing piece of Soul-Full Prosperity
Participating in economic systems without becoming completely enmeshed with them
Why your contribution and ripple effect are also forms of prosperity
Experiencing beauty, meaning, and satisfaction even when circumstances aren't ideal

If you want to explore this more deeply, I'm teaching a Soul-Full Prosperity workshop on September 30, followed by a Collective Healing Session on October 4.

Join one or both here: https://elizabethdialto.com/soulfull

If you're seeing this after those dates, you can still get the recordings at the same link.

Thanks for tuning in!

EP 477 What 15 Years of Healing & Spiritual Growth Have Taught Me | Part 2 Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

What does it actually mean to become more fully yourself without becoming self-absorbed, disconnected, or consumed by your own inner world?

In Part II of my 2026 birthday reflections, I'm continuing a conversation about healing, spiritual growth, individuation, devotion, and what it means to build a life around what has genuinely been entrusted to you.

I begin with something I've been thinking about a lot lately: what it means to be a "regular person." Someone whose choices have consequences. Someone who still has to participate in mundane reality, interact with other human beings, navigate limitations, relationships, money, health, work, and systems that don't disappear just because we've done healing or spiritual work.

We also get into some of the messages many of us have absorbed through capitalism, entrepreneurship, self-help, and spiritual spaces about being exceptional, special, unique, or set apart — and what I'm discovering after years of experimentation about simply knowing what works for me, what doesn't, and what I'm actually here to tend.

The full episode breakdown:

Being a "regular person" in a culture obsessed with exceptionalism
Consequences, privilege, and material reality
Accessibility, generosity, and learning not to overextend yourself
Reciprocity, resentment, and what happens when giving becomes unsustainable
The messages capitalism and entrepreneurship teach us about being special
Knowing yourself through experimentation and lived experience
Why becoming self-centered is different from becoming self-absorbed
Personal storytelling as a form of teaching and transmission
Oral tradition, relational healing, and learning through story
Journaling as a practice of processing rather than archiving
"Tending the nucleus" of your life
Jungian individuation and becoming more fully yourself
Sufi devotion, polishing the heart, and returning to the Beloved
The overlap between individuation and spiritual practice
Becoming particular without making yourself the center of the universe
Living your life as a form of devotion

This episode is for anyone who has spent years healing, growing, questioning inherited beliefs, or trying to become more fully themselves who's interested in doing that in a way that deepens relationship, devotion, discernment, and participation in ordinary human life rather than pulling you away from it.

Thanks for tuning in!

Connect with Elizabeth:

Website: elizabethdialto.com Instagram: @elizabethdialto

YouTube: youtube.com/@elizabethdialto

EP 476 What 15 Years of Healing & Spiritual Growth Have Taught Me | Part 1 Sep 14, 2026

Show notes

After nearly 15 years of healing and liberation work, this episode explores what still feels true and what doesn't.

This is Part I of my 2026 birthday reflections, and I'm looking back at what years of spiritual practice, healing work, personal development, and lived experience have taught me. Specifically about grief, self-love, mysticism, stewardship, and being a human being in the "real" world.

I begin with a prayer for anyone grieving — whether what has been lost is personal, relational, collective, or something you once deeply hoped for that simply isn't meant to be. One of the things I've come to believe is that grief is part of being in beautiful relationship with life: sorrow and pleasure can inhabit the same body, beauty does not need to wait for grief to end, and loving life does not betray what has been lost.

From there, I reflect on the mystical orientation that has shaped my work from the beginning: direct relationship with God, the Beloved, and what I call the Beloved Unseen. We get into surrender, trust, spiritual practice, and why I'm increasingly less interested in proving or categorizing mystical experience than I am in asking whether something brings us more deeply into aliveness, humanity, connection, and right relationship with life.

I also explore one of the biggest questions guiding me now: What has actually been entrusted to me to steward in this lifetime?

That question has changed how I think about purpose, relationships, responsibilities, healing, and liberation. Not everything we care about belongs to us to carry. Not everything entrusted to us is ours forever. And something being ours to tend doesn't necessarily mean it will always be easy, ideal, or exactly how we want it to be.

We also get into some of the distortions I've seen after years in self-help, spirituality, and personal development spaces — especially the idea that every choice we make is a direct reflection of our self-worth or how much we love ourselves. Human beings have bodies, limits, health issues, executive functioning challenges, financial realities, responsibilities, and lives shaped by systems. Self-love does not magically erase any of that.

Ultimately, this first part is about a spirituality and healing practice spacious enough to hold both the mysterious and the mundane: miracles, grief, prayer, divine connection, grocery shopping, work, money, difficult relationships, and everything else that makes up an actual human life.

This episode is for anyone who has spent years doing healing, spiritual, or personal growth work and is interested in what remains when some of the idealism falls away — and in building a relationship with spirituality that can hold grief, beauty, mystery, responsibility, imperfection, and everyday life all at once.

Thanks for tuning in!

CONNECT:

Website: elizabethdialto.com Instagram: @elizabethdialto

EP 475 Finding Midlife Joy Through Embodiment & Erotic Energy Sep 07, 2026

Show notes

What if some of the most delicious joy of your life is still waiting to find you? In this conversation with my mentor/teacher/friend Rie Katagiri, we talk about embodiment, erotic energy, menopause, friendship, play, and becoming more available for spontaneous aliveness in midlife. Rie has spent more than two decades working with the body through somatic healing, Shiatsu, yoga, Qi Gong, dance, Erotic Movement Arts®, movement coaching, choreography, and intimacy coordination. We begin by talking about something we've both got seasoning in: deep embodiment work takes time. It asks us to slow down enough to actually hear and feel what's happening in our bodies — which can be difficult in a culture increasingly organized around reels, shorts, sound bites, and highly digestible experiences. This episode is for women in midlife and beyond who want more pleasure, play, vitality, friendship, embodiment, and aliveness in their lives — especially if you've ever wondered whether certain kinds of joy belong to an earlier version of you. It's also for anyone interested in somatic movement, erotic energy, sensual embodiment, or what becomes possible when we stop compartmentalizing our aliveness.

What we discuss:

Why somatic and embodiment practices need time and continuity
What gets lost when deep work is reduced to short-form content
Grieving Shakti House and the places that once held important parts of our lives
Returning to where your work and calling first began
Rie's path from somatic bodywork and pole dance to movement coaching and intimacy coordination
The difference between movement and embodied movement
"The Great Reduction" and the dilution of embodiment work
Erotic energy as life force rather than something exclusively sexual
How embodiment creates greater availability for joy, pleasure, creativity, and play
Friendship and the shared fields of aliveness we create together
Finding unexpected joy in midlife and after menopause
The now-legendary Indestructible Pussy and Pink Pussy Moon adventure

Thanks for tuning in! Subscribe to The Embodied Podcast for more conversations about embodiment, healing, relationships, spirituality, creativity, liberation, love, beauty, and living more truthfully. CONNECT WITH RIE: https://riekatagiri.com CONNECT WITH ELIZABETH https://elizabethdialto.com/links

EP 474 Individualism, Systemic Change & the Myths We've Inherited | Elisha Tichelle Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

This week's conversation asks a question we keep returning to: how do we honor our responsibility to each other and the world without making ourselves individually responsible for everything that's wrong with it?

And how might collective change become more possible when individual people are allowed to contribute differently?

In our first official Mystical Aunties episode on The Embodied Podcast, Elisha and I start with a surprisingly practical dilemma - grocery delivery, neurodivergence, and the guilt of using more plastic - and somehow find our way into a much bigger conversation about individual responsibility, systemic change, inherited cultural myths, activism, difference, and individuation.

What happens when trying to live according to our values conflicts with meeting our actual needs? And how much have we been taught to personally compensate for problems that require structural solutions?

We explore the tension between personal responsibility and systemic responsibility without abandoning either one.

From there, the conversation opens into what Audre Lorde called the "mythical norm" and the stories we've inherited about success, survival, productivity, conformity, and what a worthwhile human life is supposed to look like.

We also talk about neurodivergence, social media, pathologizing human difference, the pressure to perform activism in recognizable ways, and why collective change doesn't require everyone to play the same role.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Individual responsibility vs. systemic responsibility • Meeting your needs when your choices aren't perfectly aligned with your values • Neurodivergence, executive functioning, and accommodation • Why individuals can't compensate for structural problems • Consumerism, capitalism, survival, and the rising cost of living • The cultural myths and "mythical norms" we've inherited • Questioning the stories we've been taught are reality • Social media, infinite scroll, and the commodification of attention • Staying informed without overexposing yourself to suffering • Why activism doesn't have to look the same for everyone • Agreements vs. requiring everyone to use the same methods • Neurodivergence, difference, and the limits of pathologizing human behavior • The Great Reduction: what happens when complex human experiences become content • Radical individualism vs. individuation • Why becoming more fully yourself matters to collective change • Finding and offering the particular medicine that's yours to contribute

Thanks for tuning in!

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Connect with Elisha: https://linktr.ee/elisha_halpin

Connect with Elizabeth: https://elizabethdialto.com/links

EP 473 ADHD and Sex: Why Desire, Kink & Intimacy Work Differently | Dr Leann Borneman Aug 24, 2026

Show notes

What if all that online sex advice never hits because it genuinely doesn't work the way your brain does?

In this episode of The Embodied Podcast, I'm joined by clinical sexologist, licensed sex therapist, and ADHD researcher Dr. Leann Borneman for an in-depth conversation about ADHD, sex, desire, relationships, kink, and what she calls "erotic accommodations."

Dr. Leann's work explores how executive functioning, nervous system regulation, stimulation thresholds, working memory, and attention can affect our ability to access desire and intimacy. Sometimes people genuinely want sex, enjoy sex once they're having it, and feel attracted to their partner—but still struggle to initiate or transition into the experience.

That distinction opens up an entirely different conversation about what "low desire" can actually mean for people with ADHD.

We also explore Dr. Leann's research into ADHD and BDSM, including her observation that kink may sometimes function as an accommodation rather than simply a sexual preference. Increased sensation, novelty, structure, explicit communication, anticipation, and clear parameters can all change the conditions under which an ADHD brain is able to engage.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How ADHD can affect sex, desire, and intimacy

• Why low desire may sometimes be an access problem

• Sex as an executive functioning demand

• Spontaneous vs. responsive desire

• Executive function barriers in relationships

• ADHD, emotional regulation, and rejection sensitivity

• Why initiation can be difficult even when you want sex

• Kink and BDSM as potential erotic accommodations

• Why intense sensation can help some ADHD brains come online

• The value of explicit communication in kink and non-monogamy

• Context-dependent desire and why your preferences can change with different people

• Parenting, overstimulation, and sexual bandwidth

• Creating an "à la carte" approach to intimacy

• Why a bridge into sex doesn't guarantee capacity for sex

• Working memory, physical cues, anticipation, and desire

• Building relationships and sexual experiences around how your brain actually works

Dr. Leann also shares practical examples from her own marriage and clinical work—from bandwidth check-ins and intimacy menus to understanding why a sexy text at noon doesn't necessarily mean an ADHD brain will still be sexually engaged at 10 PM.

This conversation offers a much wider way of thinking about sexuality and neurodivergence: instead of assuming something is wrong when sex, desire, or relationships aren't working the way we're told they "should," what happens when we get curious about the conditions our individual brains and bodies actually need?

Thanks for listening!

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Connect with Dr. Leann Borneman:

https://linktr.ee/Bornemancoaching

Connect with Elizabeth:

https://elizabethdialto.com/links

EP 472 How to Build Relationships That Fuel Your Creativity | Kelsey Grant Aug 17, 2026

Show notes

What if your relationships could fuel your creativity instead of competing with it?

In this episode of The Embodied Podcast, I'm joined by Kelsey Grant for a conversation about creativity, desire, dating, and designing relationships that genuinely support the life you're here to create.

Together, we explore why so many of us inherit relationship scripts without ever questioning whether they actually fit us. We talk about "taking lovers" as one example of intentionally designing relationships around your values, creativity, and season of life.

This conversation also explores the relationship between creativity and desire, why intuition matters in dating, how to recognize whether someone's presence expands or depletes your energy, and why building a meaningful life sometimes means letting go of the conditioning that says romantic relationships should be the center of our lives, and centering creativity instead.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How to build relationships that fuel your creativity • The connection between creativity, desire, and erotic energy • Taking lovers as one example of relationship design • Dating intentionally instead of following cultural defaults • Vetting through intuition, embodiment, and self-trust • Recognizing relationships that nourish versus deplete your energy • Why creativity deserves protection • Entrepreneurship, fulfillment, and redefining success • Designing relationships that fit your actual life • Living beyond inherited expectations around love, dating, and partnership

Whether you're dating, partnered, creatively focused, or simply questioning inherited ideas about relationships, this conversation offers a thoughtful perspective on building connections that support—not compete with—the life you're creating.

Thanks for watching!

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Connect with Kelsey: https://linktr.ee/kelseyagrant

Connect with Elizabeth: https://elizabethdialto.com/links

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