Hella Rader Interview on What Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Catches Up
- Aug 5
- 7 min read
Hella Rader hosts Stories That Sparkle, a long-form interview podcast featuring intimate conversations with women as they navigate grief, reclaim their voices, and start over in life, love, or career. She is also a somatic coach at Embody & Create, where she helps women use the body, rather than the mind, as a guide to build a life they love.
Across three decades in media and entertainment and, more recently, through her podcast and her one-on-one coaching work, Hella has spent her career shaping other people’s stories and, in time, learning to trust her own. That range gives her insight into what it takes to create a safe space in which a woman feels heard and seen. In this interview, Hella talks about what her body knew before her mind caught up, why she looks for stories in unexpected places, and the one thing she hopes every woman remembers about herself.
Hella Rader, Podcast Host & Somatic Coach
What inspired you to create both Embody & Create and Stories That Sparkle as spaces for women navigating life's biggest transitions?
Within four years, my twenty-year marriage ended in divorce, my spiritual mom and mentor died, and my job ended. With no real sense of what was next, I leaned on the twenty-plus years I’d spent learning to live, not just get through, my own life. With the support of other women who were willing to share the messy truth about what they’d gone through, I felt safe to just be where I was. Because they did not try to fix me. They did not rush me. It was a game-changer. Then I began working with a somatic practitioner who helped me, for the first time, inhabit my own body and listen to what it was telling me. It unlocked something in me, and I got inspired to build something to give back. I launched the Stories That Sparkle podcast focused on other women’s stories and then Embody & Create, my somatic coaching practice, which focuses on the body as the entry point. Both serve the same purpose: creating a space in which women know they are not alone.
You often describe the body as a guide rather than an obstacle. How did that perspective change the way you support your clients?
For a long time, I treated my body as something to manage, override, or fix when it got in the way of what I was trying to accomplish. For me, that meant shutting it down, trying to escape it, controlling it with over-exercising or food deprivation. When I learned to ask it questions instead of issuing it orders, everything began to shift. The body holds information the mind hasn’t caught up to yet. It remembers anniversaries we’ve consciously forgotten. It tenses before we can name what we’re afraid of. It exhales when something true finally gets said out loud. Once I started treating that as intelligence instead of noise, my life, and what I wanted to do with it, shifted too. With clients, I don’t ask what they think they should do. I ask what they notice in their body. Where does it sit, and what does it have to say? That single shift changes the quality of the work. It slows it down and makes it more honest. Clients stop performing insight and start locating it. The body was never the obstacle. It was the guide we’d been trained to ignore.
How has your own experience with grief and reinvention shaped the way you define expertise today?
For most of my adult life, expertise meant credentials, the degree, the title, the years logged in an industry. My own experience with grief and reinvention rearranged that completely. I’ve spent more than twenty years navigating loss, rebuilding identity, and learning what it takes to be in my life, not effort to prove myself. That’s not a resume line. It’s lived experience. It’s the thing my clients need most from me – not just my training. They know I am someone who’s walked through something similar and can share honestly what worked and what didn’t. So for me, expertise is the ability to sit with someone in the mess without needing to rush them out of it. That’s harder to certify than a specific program, but it’s what builds trust with a woman who has been given plenty of advice and not enough company. Out of that trust, she will build the confidence to know, for herself, the best way to proceed.
After years spent helping tell other people's stories, what have you learned about the power of creating space for women to tell their own?
Before the podcast and the coaching practice, I spent three decades in PR, arts management, tour management, and radio. It was all about storytelling – in writing, music, or performance. I learned that whether someone is struggling or has cause to celebrate, whether they have community or feel alone, they have a story. And our stories are our greatest assets. I’ve sat with women who shared, sometimes for the first time, their story out loud. Not just with me, but on the podcast. Each one had something important to share that someone else, including me, needed to hear. I know that based on the feedback from guests and listeners alike, who often tell me they heard the one thing that made them feel less alone in the world. More importantly, she needed to hear her own voice, her own story, not just in the headphones but also out in the world. Letting someone claim that for themselves and offer it to others – that is the power of giving women this kind of space.
You intentionally feature everyday women on your podcast instead of well-known names. What do those conversations reveal that often gets overlooked?
It’s not that celebrities don’t have those kinds of stories. It’s that they already have a platform. The 70-year-old retired teacher next door to me does not, and, if she wants one, I want to offer it to her. Every day, women don’t have media training or a polished story. They’re just talking about their experience, often for the first time, without a filter. To make that possible, I go where they are and record most conversations in the spaces where they feel comfortable – their living rooms, sunrooms, and kitchens. And I always let them know: if you don’t want this out in the world, I will pull it. It isn’t about a gotcha moment. It’s about a real one, the one that reveals how similar we are. Like the three different women who experienced a major loss – a marriage, a child, a mother. Underneath the specifics, they had a strikingly parallel experience of grief, identity collapse, and the slow rebuilding that follows. Stories told in that kind of unguarded, conversational way carry a weight a following can’t match.
For someone who feels disconnected from themselves, what is one simple way to begin listening to their body again?
Many women come to me hoping for a full-body self-care practice – right out of the gate. I understand the impulse, but it’s too much. So, I start small. I ask women to notice just one sensation a day. Where do you feel tension right now? Is there one? It’s not about trying to solve, interpret, or fix anything. You’re just re-establishing contact. In the same way you’d check in with a friend you’d lost touch with, you don’t open with a life update; you just say hello and see what’s there. Over time, that noticing becomes a habit, and the habit becomes a vocabulary. Then you can ask yourself some questions. What happened before you noticed that thing? Is there a story connected to it? The body starts to feel less like a stranger and more like a source of information you can trust. It’s slow, deep work. And it begins with consistent, daily noticing that reveals what is already there.
What role does curiosity play when someone is trying to move forward after loss or a major life change?
Any change, good or bad, big or small, comes with loss and along with that, grief. Moving through that grief is a process. It’s not linear. It’s uncertain. And it’s messy. Curiosity creates an opening, not a five-point plan. It lets you ask, ‘what is this here to show me?’ without needing an answer right away, and without that answer needing to be inspiring. You can look at what’s happening in your body and your life without flinching away from it, which is the only way I’ve found to get real information instead of just managing symptoms. It’s also more sustainable than willpower. Willpower either runs out or runs into a wall. Either way, it only goes so far. Curiosity, accessed even a little, opens new doorways through that wall. It’s oriented toward discovery instead of performance. Or pretending everything is okay when it’s not. Curiosity allows room for all of it.
You often say that stories can bring light into dark places. What does that mean to you personally?
When I was in the middle of my hardest times, what helped wasn’t inspiration, but hearing another woman describe, in specific detail, something I thought only I had felt. That recognition is its own kind of light. It doesn’t erase the dark place. It tells me I’m not alone in it. And that changes what I believe is possible for me. Which is why, every time I sit down with a guest or a client, I don’t offer a rescue or a silver lining. I give them the felt experience of saying the true thing out loud and having it heard instead of being met with silence or advice. The moments people remember are the ones where someone said something true, something raw, and it was simply received. The light shines both ways – from the person speaking and within the person receiving. It doesn’t fix the dark place. It just means you can see in it.
What is one message you hope every woman carries with her after hearing your story or working with you?
If she takes nothing else from an hour with me, I want her to leave knowing it’s okay not to be okay. So many women come to me believing they’re too much, too sensitive, too slow to heal, too far behind. But the things she’s been calling a flaw or a failure are often the very things that kept her alive through something hard. Those things haven’t been given anywhere to go. My work, on the podcast and in coaching, is to give them somewhere to go. Not to fix. Not to shrink her back down to a size that’s easier for everyone else, but to help her recognize that what she’s carrying is worth listening to. She can trust herself. Everything else – the practices, the frameworks, the language – is just scaffolding around that one thing.
If any of this resonates, start with one episode of Stories That Sparkle, or visit hellarader.com to learn more about working with Hella one-on-one.
Hella Rader is the host of Stories That Sparkle, long-form conversations with women navigating some of the hardest chapters of their lives. As a somatic coach, she helps women build what comes next, from the inside out.
Read more from Hella Rader
