Sometimes we do not need a better plan. We need enough space to hear ourselves.

In this week’s conversation, family physician Dr. Kelly Derbin shares how coaching, mindfulness, yoga, two Connect in Nature retreats, and time in nature helped her navigate burnout and the tender decision to retire from clinical practice.  Her story is a beautiful reminder that a pause is not the same as stepping away from your life. It is often how you find your way back into it.

When life feels chaotic, hope can keep us going. But hope alone cannot make the decisions, protect our energy, or help us meet reality with wisdom. In this personal episode, Jessie shares an endurance-race approach to caregiving, overwhelm, agency, and grace.

In this episode, we explore mindful communication: listening with presence rather than listening to fix, advise, correct, or rescue. The desire to help can sometimes be experienced as judgment. Simply being present can be one of the most generous things we can offer another person.

This week I’m joined by breast radiologist, Dr. Jenny Kohr. We talk about pacing, perfectionism, intuition, singing lessons, and the quiet practice of trusting yourself through change. If you are craving more alignment, ease, or room to hear yourself think, this conversation is for you.

 In this episode, Dr. Jessie Mahoney talks with psychiatrist and author Dr. Jennifer Reid about her book Guilt Free. They talk about where guilt actually comes from, why it lands especially hard on women physicians. Listen to learn what you can do to move toward decisions grounded in trust, alignment, authenticity, and sustainability.

Born on the same day, about a decade apart, Dr. Jessie Mahoney and Dr. Erica Bove reflect on what they are proud of, what they know now that they did not know a year ago, and what they want for the year ahead. Listen to explore what it looks like when self-kindness moves from a mantra into an actual decision, how surrender shows up differently in career, family, health, and relationships, and why rest and non-productivity are essential to a physician's whole health, not extras.

Pearls of Wisdom

• Coaching, career pivots, fertility, parenting, relationships: the access point differs, but the deeper work overlaps.

• Sometimes speaking up means standing tall, and sometimes it means letting other people be them.

• Patience and trust often deliver what pushing and forcing cannot.

• Female friendship is not optional. It is part of your whole health system.

Caregiving for aging parents often triggers physician overfunctioning and worry. Jessie and Ni-Cheng explore boundaries and staying buoyant instead.

Shame around failure and rejection isolates physicians and fuels burnout. This episode explores why, through the story of Dr. René Roberts, who was rejected by every medical school she applied to for three years and later failed her Step 1 board exam twice before becoming an exceptional physician.

Our conversation explores what it took to voice her dream, trust it, and finally move toward it and the role retreats and coaching played at each step along the way.

What this conversation makes clear is that the path forward does not require leaving. It does not require arriving somewhere new. It requires something more honest: the willingness to hold up a mirror, to find thought partners who will tell you the truth, to cultivate sponsors rather than wait to be discovered, and to build pausing and reflecting into the ordinary rhythm of your career.

Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang shares what a hit-and-run accident taught her about acceptance, receiving support, resilience, and choosing how to meet the unexpected with mindfulness and self-compassion.

This episode asks whether what we often dismiss as “woo” may actually be unfamiliar, embodied, evidence-informed, and deeply effective. Dr. Jessie Mahoney pulls back the curtain on the intentional methodology behind Pause & Presence retreats, where coaching, mindfulness, breathwork, yoga, nature, reflection, beauty, rest, and community are deliberately woven together.

Communication takes energy. In this episode, we explore how clarity, transparency, and mindful communication can conserve energy in medicine, and at home –  especially when projects, relationships, and systems feel clogged or inefficient.

Almost every woman in medicine has, at some point, decided she doesn't belong. In this episode, we explore why. 

What does following your inner knowing actually look like — not in theory, but with a mortgage, three kids, and twenty years inside an institution?

In this solo episode, Jessie shares more of her story from Kaiser pediatrician to successful small business owner to retreat leader to TEDx stage. Jessie shares what becomes possible when we stop overriding our inner knowing — and what changes for the people we love most when we do.

Food can become another area where we try to get it right, especially during midlife, perimenopause, and menopause. Eating can start to feel like one more project to manage, optimize, or perfect.

In the episode, Jessie is joined by Dr. Heather Awad, a family physician. They explore a kinder, simpler way to think about mindful eating in midlife and menopause. Rather than adding more rules, we suggest returning to nourishment, awareness, and self-trust. Self-compassion matters more than striving when we are trying to care for ourselves well. 

This episode also shares a peek into the approach to nourishment at Jessie’s Pause & Presence Nicasio Creek Farm CME retreats for women physicians.

Physicians are trained to accommodate. But there is no one right way — there are many. Jessie Mahoney MD, and Ni-Cheng Liang, MD on the mindful pause between compliance and conflict, and what becomes possible on the other side.

A mindful approach to charting for physicians tired of pajama-time documentation. Dr. Jessie Mahoney and Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang on EHR overwhelm, perfectionism in notes, and a sustainable way to finish charts.

Mothering on purpose is not about fixing more, doing more, or worrying harder. It's about presence. Trust. Holding your tongue. Letting them figure things out. Recognizing that your urgency is not theirs. Join us to walk through the mindfulness tenets — patience, non-judgment, trust, letting go, acceptance, curiosity, generosity, gratitude, and paying attention on purpose — as a framework for intentional mothering.

Dr. Jessie Mahoney and Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang share their slow, non-linear paths towards more aligned lives — and why there's no way to skip the uncomfortable middle.