We recently connected with Rachel Kaplan and have shared our conversation below.

Rachel, appreciate you joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

My mentor told me at the end of one of our healing sessions in 2015, “the healing you are receiving is a debt. There’s only way to repay it and that is to claim your life fully and to share the gifts forward.” I nodded, it was a beautiful if vague sentiment. Ultimately though, I felt confused and let the thought go.

About two years later, that healing work helped me get strong enough to leave my non-viable marriage-auspiciously and unintentionally on the 22 anniversary of my first love’s suicide. I spent the following year flexing my hard-earned emotional resilience with the backdrop of international travel and rock and roll. I realized through this year who I had become, the joy I felt and spread, the independence and well-being I had cultivated. At the end of this year, I had a moment where my mentor’s words finally landed. I was visiting Joshua Tree, California for the first time. I had a bone deep insight while watching a short video I filmed of myself for someone when I realized I had zero resistance to the vulnerable and unpolished woman on the iPhone screen. Was it possible, I wondered? Yes. Yes, I finally loved myself. Wow.

Almost as soon as I realized that my quarter century healing journey finally arrived at self-love, I felt a profound determination to spread the help and healing. I knew I needed to highlight the practices and skills that made the difference between hobbling around emotionally injured and therefore compensating versus feeling a strong and stable baseline of emotional resilience and self-love. I decided to create a podcast. It was a strange choice, since I didn’t even listen to podcasts, but I knew I needed to broadcast this often-missing understanding of effective healing.

Thus, the Healing Feeling Sh*t Show was born. I spent 9 months writing season one, my healing course disguised as a podcast. I launched in February 2019 and released almost 60 episodes in that year before pausing to begin trying to get the content into the world through a book. The journey toward getting a book published has been longer and windier including becoming an internet therapist with short form healing content on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok as well as holding regular workshops, a membership and offering DIY self-healing courses. I am happy to report that my book Feel, Heal, & Let that Sh*t Go: Your Guide to Emotional Resilience and Lasting Self-Love will be published by the New World Library on October 15, 2024.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Rachel Kaplan, MA, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist with a thriving practice in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2006. She has relentlessly studied the healing path since the traumatic suicide of her first love when she was 14. This life long journey led her on an international immersion in the world’s healing technologies finding eventually that the most important components of healing are as simple as bodily functions. After a quarter century focused on self-healing and professional study, Kaplan shared a succinct guide to the path as the Creator and host of the iTunes acclaimed “ New and Noteworthy” podcast, The Healing Feeling Sh*t Show. She is active on a variety of multimedia channels and has published multiple features in Common Ground Magazine. Kaplan has studied yoga, meditation, and hands-on healing practices in India and Nepal, earned a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, trained in cutting edge trauma modalities such as EMDR, and Brainspotting and her work is deeply influenced by a four-year relationship with an earth-based Apache initiated healer. She divides her time between the Bay Area and the desert in Joshua Tree, California. When not focusing on healing work, she can be found exercising, listening to Radiohead, dancing on Phish tour, or appreciating and curating fashion and design. To connect with Rachel’s group and individual work or be guided to her multimedia offerings, go to thefeelingsmovement.com

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Being effective as a therapist requires more than therapeutic training, a degree, and a license. A therapist must have learned how to be with themselves, their own pain, and heal through their own emotional wounds.

Some therapists may have had limited ability to truly transform said wounding, and some therapists may be limited by never having the depth of emotional challenges that would require the skills that some of their patients or clients will need them to have.

Additionally, a therapist needs to trust that they will be able to bring in new clients so they aren’t tempted to keep clients stagnant and dependent so they don’t leave. This means that a therapist needs to be interested and able to get their client beyond their comfort zone. If the therapist is too worried about being liked or not losing the client, this can be too risky, and therefore therapists collude with their client’s defenses and stagnation. To truly serve a therapy client, a tremendous amount of skill, courage, integrity, and life experience are necessary. Not all therapy is created equally.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Social media has been game changing for me as a therapist. They mysterious algorithm rewarded me in Fall of 2022, magnifying my reach from about 2,000 followers on Instagram to 112 thousand. This brought in clients and workshop participants from all over the globe and enabled me to garner the attention of a literary agent who helped me get a book deal. Social media following has helped open doors, and the platforms provide a place to offer small bites of free and truly effective wisdom to people all over the planet. Absolute game changer.

Contact Info:

• Website: thefeelingsmovement.com
• Instagram: @healingfeelingshitshow
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HFSSwithRachelKaplan
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIASsRB_-MChfKDTh9_x9YA
• Other: tiktok- @thefeelingsmovement

Image Credits
Photos by Aleksandra Dubov, Dov Love Viramontes