#127: Reconnecting to Awe & Wonder Through Life's Most Challenging Seasons with Emily Bingham#127: Reconnecting to Awe & Wonder Through Life's Most Challenging Seasons with Emily Bingham
Sun & Moon Sober Living Podcast
Mary Tilson and Emily Bingham share intertwined stories of addiction recovery, devastating loss and the surprising power of retreats, movement and awe. The conversation focuses on how grief, somatic work and everyday wonder can reshape a life during and after its hardest seasons.
1:09:53•6 Jul 2026
Awe, Retreats and Recovery: Mary Tilson & Emily Bingham on Healing Through Life’s Hardest Seasons
Episode Overview
- Retreats can interrupt stressful routines and highlight which everyday conditions keep addiction and anxiety in place.
- Somatic practices help create a felt sense of safety in the body that words alone often can’t provide.
- Movement, music and group experiences offer powerful ways to process grief without needing to talk.
- Experiences of awe — in nature, in community, and in moral courage — can shrink problems down and reconnect people to a bigger story.
- Grief may surface years after a loss, and giving space to feel it can matter more than maintaining external success.
“"Addiction is an unwillingness to meet life as it is."”
What remarkable journeys have people faced head-on against addiction? This conversation between somatic experiencing practitioner and recovery coach Mary Tilson and spiritual life coach and grief educator Emily Bingham brings together two women whose lives have been reshaped by loss, addiction, and a fierce commitment to living fully.
You’ll hear Mary share how her late-teen addiction and multiple stints in treatment eventually led her away from a "work hard, party hard" lifestyle in digital advertising and into yoga, somatic work, and facilitating retreats. Her time teaching at a rustic retreat centre in Cambodia — grass huts, no wi-fi, phones locked away — showed her how nature, community, and simple living can soothe a frazzled nervous system and loosen the grip of alcohol and drugs.
Emily offers a raw account of losing her husband Ian to cancer at 32, becoming a solo mum to their one- and three-year-olds, and channelling her pain into Move Through, a grief-and-movement community that grew into global courses, viral videos, and TV appearances. She’s honest about how hustle and online success became another survival strategy, and how, seven years on, she’s finally letting herself slow down and feel the grief that was frozen for so long.
Together, they chat about why retreats can act as a "pattern interrupt" from everyday stress, how somatic practices create a felt sense of safety beyond what talk therapy can reach, and why awe — from mountain views to whale tails to shared spin classes — can shrink problems down to size and remind you you’re part of something much bigger.
If you’re curious how grief, addiction recovery, awe, and retreats might fit into your own healing, this conversation offers real stories and practical threads to follow — where might a little more awe and wonder shift your next chapter?
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