New Year 2026 Special

What if the healing you’ve been searching for was never missing—only waiting to be remembered?

In this New Year 2026 episode of Rooted & Rising, Dr. Cheri and co-host Ellice explore the quiet but profound shift from seeking healing to remembering what has always lived within you.

This episode moves beyond techniques, substances, and insight alone to focus on what truly heals: safety, integration, embodiment, and love.

Through a gentle guided meditation, clinical reflection, spiritual insight, and trauma-informed conversation, this episode invites listeners to soften effort, release striving, and rest into a deeper truth—that healing is not about becoming someone new, but returning home to yourself.

Whether you’re on a healing journey, working with trauma, or simply longing for more peace and connection in the year ahead, this episode offers grounding, compassion, and a felt sense of belonging.

with Dr. Cheri & Ellice Boone

What if starting a new year didn’t require reinventing yourself… but simply choosing yourself more intentionally?

In this New Year 2026 special, Dr. Cheri and Ellice invite you into a gentler, more sustainable way of beginning again. Rather than resolutions driven by pressure or self-correction, this episode introduces the concept of a healing blueprint—a living, compassionate map that honors your nervous system, your lived experiences, and your desire for joy and wholeness.

Drawing on the wisdom from the first ten episodes of Rooted & Rising, this conversation weaves together grief, intuition, embodiment, strength, integration, and love—offering a grounded path forward that doesn’t ask you to start over, but to move forward with awareness, safety, and self-trust.

What You’ll Learn

✔ How to start anew without erasing your past

✔ Why healing is non-linear—and nothing you’ve lived is wasted

✔ The difference between goals, resolutions, and a healing blueprint

✔ How nervous system safety supports joy, love, and sustainability

✔ What empowerment looks like without force or burnout

✔ Why healing is an unfolding, not an arrival

Guided Reflection: Creating Your Healing Blueprint

Ellice leads a grounding, body-based reflection to help you tune inward.

You’ll be invited to explore:

Journal Prompts for Integration

Use these prompts to deepen your reflection after listening:

What does starting anew truly mean for me this year?

What values will guide my healing blueprint in 2026?

How do I want to feel in my body, relationships, and daily life?

What kind of love am I ready to embody and receive?

🔔 Subscribe for More

If you’re walking a path of healing, embodiment, and conscious becoming, subscribe and join us as we continue to explore what it means to live rooted in truth and rising with intention.

You don’t have to rush your becoming.

You are allowed to build a life that feels like home.

Stay rooted… and keep rising.

Root & Rising Podcast with Dr. Cheri

As the year comes to a close, Dr. Cheri guides listeners through a reflective, integrative journey of healing, growth, and self-discovery. In this expanded 45-minute episode, she revisits the core themes of the past 10 episodes—Rooting, Rebounding, Rising, and reclaiming intuition, joy, and wholeness—helping you see your growth, release what no longer serves you, and step fully into your becoming.

The episode includes a gentle, 10-minute hypnotherapy segment designed to help you:

• Release old patterns and emotional heaviness

• Anchor into your body, mind, and spirit

• Reconnect with your inner wisdom and joy

• Step into the new year with clarity, confidence, and wholeness

Journal Prompt:

Take 10–15 minutes to reflect on these questions:

1. Which part of me grew the most this year?

2. Which part of me is still waiting to become?

3. What old beliefs or patterns am I ready to release before the new year?

4. What gifts, wisdom, or strengths am I carrying forward?

Reflective Exercise:

1. Find a quiet space and place a hand on your heart.

2. Take five deep breaths, inhaling love and exhaling tension.

3. Visualize the year behind you as a gentle river flowing away, taking with it what no longer serves you.

4. Imagine the new year ahead as a golden path, illuminated with opportunities for growth, joy, and alignment.

5. End with the affirmation:

“I release, I receive, I rise.”

This episode is for you if you’re ready to:

• Reflect on a year of inner growth

• Integrate lessons of mind, body, and spirit

• Reclaim joy, purpose, and authentic connection

• Enter the new year grounded, empowered, and aligned

A soul-nourishing finale to a year of deep inner work—listen, breathe, journal, and rise.

Purposeful Contemplation — The Sacred Pause in Psychedelic Healing

with Dr. Cheri & Ellice Boone

What if the most powerful part of your psychedelic journey isn’t the experience itself… but the pause that comes afterward?

In this episode, Dr. Cheri and Ellice explore Purposeful Contemplation — the sacred, intentional stillness that turns psychedelic insight into lasting transformation. Through the Holistic Integral Therapy (HIT) framework, they reveal how slowing down, listening inward, and creating daily contemplative rituals can help your healing take root and truly evolve.

Whether you’re working with ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, or deep therapeutic practices, this episode will help you understand the integration window, support neuroplasticity, and anchor your awakening into everyday life.

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✨ What You’ll Learn

✔ Why contemplation is the key to meaningful integration

✔ How the HIT model (Root–Rebound–Rise) supports psychedelic healing

✔ What happens in the brain and body after a medicine journey

✔ How stillness deepens wisdom, embodiment, and emotional regulation

✔ Daily rituals to cultivate a contemplative, soul-led life

✔ Personal healing insights from Dr. Cheri’s own journey

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🧘 Guided Meditation: The Stillness That Reveals

Ellice leads a gentle heart-centered practice that invites you into a quiet inner space.

You’ll explore the question:

“What within me wants to be seen right now?”

Perfect for post-journey integration or anytime you need grounding.

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📝 Journal Prompts for Integration

Use these to deepen your reflection after the episode:

1. Where in my life am I being invited to pause and listen more deeply?

2. What wisdom emerges when I stop trying to figure it out and simply feel?

3. How can I create a daily ritual of contemplation to support my growth?

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🔔 Subscribe for More

If you’re on a path of healing, expansion, and embodied spirituality, subscribe and join our community of seekers learning to root and rise together.

Stay rooted… and keep rising. 🌿💛

You’ll also hear personal stories and client experiences that bring the research to life, offering both inspiration and guidance for anyone curious about these modalities.

✨ What you’ll experience in this episode:

-How mushrooms and ketamine support trauma healing and neuroplasticity

-The science of how these medicines work in the brain

-Personal reflections and client journeys of healing and growth

-Integration practices to help ground psychedelic experiences into everyday life

-Where these medicines are currently legal and accessible

Rooted & Rising is about more than just knowledge—it’s about giving you tools and practices to heal, grow, and reconnect with your truest self.

📌 Don’t forget to subscribe for more episodes, share your reflections in the comments, and email your questions to be featured in a future episode.

“Until next time—stay rooted… and keep rising.”

In this episode, Dr. Cheri and her co-host Ellice explore the powerful partnership between intuition and strength. Too often, trauma separates the two—silencing inner knowing while overactivating control, perfectionism, or force. Healing requires weaving them back together.

Through heartfelt stories, therapeutic insights, and a guided practice, you’ll discover how intuition whispers the path and strength helps you walk it. You’ll learn:

-Why intuition and strength aren’t opposites but dance partners in healing

-How trauma can mute intuition and distort strength

-Simple practices to check in with your body before taking action

-How to move from inner nudges into grounded choices without fear or over-control

You’ll also be guided through an “Inner Compass Activation”—a practice to connect with your body, trust your knowing, and anchor it with strength.

✨ Journal Prompt: Where is my intuition inviting me, and how can I support that call with my strength?

✨ Weekly Practice: Each morning, pause for one minute and ask: What is my gut asking of me today? Then take one small action in alignment.

Because healing isn’t about choosing between softness and power—it’s about weaving them together into resilience, compassion, and wholeness.

Tune in…stay rooted & keep rising

Dr. Cheri shares the science behind ketamine therapy, why she became licensed to administer it, and the results she’s witnessed with clients. Ellice opens the episode with a grounding breathwork practice, explaining how regulating the nervous system sets the stage for healing. Together, they discuss what is often missing in clinical environments: integration—the essential step of weaving insights back into daily life.

This conversation blends research, client stories, and practical tools to help you better understand how ketamine works, what the therapy process looks like, and why integration is where real change takes root.

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✨ What You’ll Learn

•How ketamine works in the brain to increase neuroplasticity and reset old patterns

•Why Dr. Cheri pursued ketamine licensure and what the process entails

•Breakthrough results and client transformations witnessed in sessions

•The vital role of integration after psychedelic therapy—and how Ellice supports clients in this process

•A guided breathwork practice you can use anytime to regulate and ground yourself

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🌀 Practice & Journal Prompt

•Practice: Breathwork to calm the nervous system and prepare for deeper exploration

•Journal Prompt: When I imagine a breakthrough in my own healing, what would it look like? What beliefs or patterns would I want to release, and what new story would I want to live?

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🔗 Call to Action

If this conversation inspired you, share it with a friend, subscribe to the podcast, and let us know your reflections. You can also send us your questions for future episodes—we’d love to hear from you.

Until next time—stay rooted… and keep rising.

✨ Inside this episode:

A guided EFT tapping practice with Ellice to ground and calm your nervous system

The science behind tapping: how it lowers cortisol and regulates the amygdala

Insights from The Body Keeps the Score on why trauma lives in the body

A discussion of somatic therapies like yoga, movement, and somatic experiencing

Dr. Cheri’s breakdown of EMDR: how bilateral stimulation rewires trauma responses in the brain

Practical tools you can try at home to reconnect with your body

A reflective journal prompt to help you listen to your soma’s wisdom

If you’ve ever felt like talk therapy wasn’t enough, this episode offers pathways to healing that engage your body, not just your mind.

👉 Take a breath, drop into your body, and join us on the journey of staying rooted… and rising.

✨ Inside this episode:

A thought-provoking opening reflection: What narrative have I written that’s keeping me from living the life I am meant to live?

A short somatic practice led by Ellice to help you feel where your story lives in your body

Dr. Cheri’s deep dive into HIT—an integrative approach blending CBT, psychodynamic therapy, existential and narrative therapy, meaning-centered therapy, and holistic practices

The science of neuroplasticity: how therapy helps rewire the brain to create new patterns of thought and behavior

Reflections on how grief, trauma, and limiting beliefs can be reframed into possibility and growth

Journal prompts to help you explore the story you’re living now—and imagine the one you want to write next

This conversation is an invitation to pause, reflect, and remember: your story isn’t fixed—it’s alive, it can grow, and you hold the pen.

👉 Subscribe and join us as we continue exploring tools for healing, growth, and authentic living.

Journal Prompt:

The part of me I’ve been afraid to welcome is…

We invite you to share your reflections by tagging us on social or messaging us privately. You don’t have to walk this path alone.

In this episode, Dr. Cheri McDonald and Ellice Boone guide you through a grounding and soul-nourishing journey back to your roots. Together, we explore how life, trauma, and cultural conditioning can pull us away from our authentic selves—and how to begin the sacred work of coming home again.

This episode is for anyone feeling lost, disconnected, or longing to live with more authenticity and clarity. You’ll walk away with both insight and tools to begin reconnecting with the powerful woman you already are.

Journal Prompt:

“What’s true about me is…”

We invite you to share your reflections by tagging us on social or messaging us privately. You don’t have to walk this path alone.

Remember:

Before we rise into who we’re meant to be, we must root into who we already are.

A raw, real, and uplifting podcast for anyone ready to rise beyond trauma.

Hosted by therapist and trauma specialist Dr. Cheri McDonald and healer/coach Ellice Boone, Rooted & Rising blends psychology, spirituality, and lived experience to support deep, lasting healing.

Expect honest conversations, real stories, and practical tools for mind, body, and soul. Topics include trauma recovery, grief, somatic healing, psychedelic integration, IFS, and more.

New episodes every Wednesday at 12 PM ET on ThePodUnityNetwork.com.

Available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

Stay rooted & keep rising.