Trauma Healing for Recovery with Cheryl Stelte

Trauma Healing for Recovery with Cheryl Stelte

Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This conversation between host Keegan Read and trauma healer and spiritual coach Cheryl Stelte centres on a simple yet challenging idea: healing starts when you’re willing to feel. Cheryl shares how a spiritual encounter with her deceased brother, who struggled with addiction and took his own life, pushed her into meditation over 30 years ago. That encounter led her off antidepressants and into a lifetime of deep inner work.

She speaks openly about being “higher than a kite” from meditation rather than substances, and how that inner high helped her leave alcohol and weed behind without cravings. A big focus of the episode is full, belly-based breathing. Cheryl explains how breathing below the navel to a slow count and squeezing the belly at the end can calm the nervous system, stimulate the vagus nerve and unlock repressed childhood emotions.

For people in recovery, she argues this kind of breathwork lets you feel the intense emotions that often drive addiction, instead of numbing them with substances, screens or sex. Cheryl also challenges the idea that we’re separate, suggesting our souls choose difficult lessons to grow and eventually serve others. She describes trauma as being stored through sensations and feelings rather than neat memories, so gaps in childhood recall aren’t a problem; what matters is breathing through the feelings that surface.

Throughout, Keegan reflects on his own recovery, the stigma around being “sensitive”, and the shock of realising life in sobriety is richer than anything addiction offered. Cheryl’s message is simple but demanding: ask yourself, “What is it I don’t want to feel?” and then stay with the breath, one inhale at a time. If you’ve tried everything and still feel stuck, this episode might nudge you to stop running from your feelings and start befriending them instead.