This is our final memosode of season four, and it arrived, as the best ones do, with big news.

Jamie opens with a ceremony. The list — 46 active items, 5,705 completed — has been deleted. She stood at the altar she and Ty had just set up in their new home, said a few words, scrolled through five to seven years of her own life, and let it go. She woke up the next morning having started her bleed. Her body, as usual, had been waiting.

Joan responds with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you feel like you were there. She also shares her own experience of that same week — a ribbon cutting ceremony for a teaching site she helped build, a graduation keynote that landed exactly the way she hoped, a faculty development session where she got to talk about the things she loves most. The dream, as she puts it, keeps happening.

And then Jamie sends one more memo. This one is about what has been reorganizing itself since the list went away. New colors in her wardrobe. New shapes in her body. A new way of structuring her days where creating comes first and responding comes after. A growing sense of herself not just as a service provider, but as someone who is alive to bring forth big, beautiful, impactful things.

Joan closes the season the way she started it — with something that surprises even her. A book of poetry, apparently. A speaking pitch submitted. A conference full of women physicians who listen to this podcast and came up to say so.

This is what it looks like when pleasure leads to creation.

And we’re so excited to see you soon, in Season Five for Creation!

But if you’re still not ready to say goodbye… we recorded a spicy lil bonus episode Q&A just for you!

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Once we recovered from our delighted shock, it only got better from there.

This is our spicy, saucy season four Q&A (Part 1, at least 😉) and we answered some supremely excellent questions! We start with the one the spirit moved Joan to lead with: how do you actually stay present in your body during sex? We both meandered our way to a few honest shares/ recommendations…

We talk about the role of fantasies, the power of a meditation practice, and we take a brief detour into the idea of sex as a playground with no prescribed order of ceremony. It was all very delicious.

Then we get into birth control. Jamie has strong feelings. Joan has strong feelings of a different kind. What happens between them is a really good example of what we mean when we talk about generative conflict — two people with different roles, different paradigms, and different lived experiences, managing to stay in the room with each other and say true things without collapsing into either agreement or offense. It’s one of our favorite conversations of the season.

We didn’t get to vibrators… yet. That’s for another time/ possibly Part 2?

🔒 This final Season 4 bonus episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers… upgrade to listen + receive access to the mid-season content we’ll be rolling out between now and the birth of Season 5, all about Creation!

What an incredible journey this Pleasure season has been… we are so grateful you’ve been here with us for all of it. ❤️

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

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Season four is almost complete, and we’re spending this final full episode the way we love best: telling the truth and finding out, in real time, where it takes us.

Jamie opens with a healing phase that won’t quit, a sound that came out of her in dance that she still can’t quite explain, and a revelation about The List. The perpetual, monstrous To-Do list that’s been subtly telling her what a piece of shit she is for at least 6 years. Joan responds with the most practical and radical productivity advice we’ve ever given on this podcast.

From there, we go meta. We talk about what it actually looked like to create this season — the false starts, the drafts that nobody will ever read, the moment we both realized we wanted more direct ownership of this project and what happened when we took it. We talk about why pleasure had to be the guiding principle through all of it, especially the parts that weren’t pleasurable at all.

And then we announce the theme for Season Five. Which, once you hear it, will feel like it could only ever have been what comes next.

We’ll see you on Substack for part two. Joan may or may not play you something on the ukulele. No promises.

Some promises. 😉

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Jamie shares what they’re planning, what they’re not planning, and why the whole thing feels like its own indicator of how much has healed. Joan shares the story of her own proposal — on a stone patio they built together, a slideshow already waiting on her laptop — and what it felt like to plan a wedding as an early experiment in making something that was actually for her.

Then we get into creative practices. Joan is rewriting the lyrics to songs she loves and singing them to her own body. Jamie reads a poem that she wrote at a kitchen sink that made us both go still for a second. We talk about worship music, about what makes poetry different from everything else, about what gets lost when the lists take over and the right brain goes offline.

This one ends with Jamie heading back to the forest and Joan heading to bed. It’s the last EA After Dark of Season Four, and it felt exactly right.

Let us know how you’ve enjoyed this special series throughout this season, and if we should bring it back for Season 5?! And also any final submissions for our Q&A we’re recording tonight! We’ve got a solid handful of juicy questions already, but always hungry for more.

P.S. The ukelele video is waiting for you here. You’re welcome.

🔒 This episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers at exanatomy.substack.com. Upgrade to listen — and to access every EA After Dark episode this season.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

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LYRICS

Oh, got heaven on my mind
Since I was baptized
Everything’s all right
When she calls me back,
she calls me back.
Lost for a long time
Two parallel lines
Everything’s alright when
She calls me back, she calls me back yeah

Look at us lined up in pews
Hanging legs with shiny shoes
Repenting since I was age three
Heal this hole inside of me

How do I solve this mystery
To guarantee eternity
She’s the one that wants to scream
To run wild from the scene

I would lie awake restless
Scared that the demons come n get us
She was unrav’ling the edges
Of my dogmatic awareness
Was pulling on my aliveness
Tingling love down my spine it’s
Amazing how all this time
She got me through to survive it

Oh, chasing heaven in my mind
Sixteen I was baptized
Everything’s all right
When she calls me back,
she calls me back.
Lost for a long time
Two parallel lines
Everything’s alright when
She calls me back, she calls me back yeah

Leaving home for the first time
All I knew left far behind
Entered a new scene and vibe
Questioning my paradigm

Goodness wasn’t tied to faith
Kindness came in different shapes
All my friends they fell away
Identity began to fray

I would lie awake restless
Wondering where my best friend went
Slicing with sharp edges
A Venus carving out my message
That if He could never save em
Then what’s the point of righteous livin’
Not that dying’s the lesson
Given that heaven’s a legend

Oh there’s no heaven in my mind
My pain keeps me baptized
Nothing is all right
Till she calls me back
She calls me back
Lost without my guide
Marked with new scarred lines
Nothing is all right
Till she calls me back
She calls me back
She calls me back

All that faith took me away
From the one being who was living life in our footsteps
Patiently waiting for the day
I’d come home to us living life in our footsteps

Look at me up in the night
Swollen belly, child held tight
Lying still on cushioned land
Water poured by gentle hands
Dancing round a wooden floor
Bodies move to pounding score
Walking out amongst the trees
Recognize their size in me

Now I fall asleep easy
Cause she’ll be here right beside me
My cells like stars all aligning
Ground me to all that life brings
There are days I’m forgettin’
All of my hard earned life lessons
She’s always here to remind me
Deep down inside of my belly

Oh, this is heaven in my mind
I’m newly baptized
Everything’s all right
When she calls me back,
she calls me back.
Lost for a long time
Two parallel lines
Everything’s alright when
She calls me back, she calls me back yeah
She calls me back

All the pain is just her way
To call me home to living life in our footsteps
Sing this song remind me to
Never forget whose living life in our footsteps
Living life in our footsteps
Still she calls me back
Still she calls me

This memosode arrives in the afterglow of a lot — the candid sex conversation, an engagement, a healing phase finally surrendered to — and finds both Joan and Jamie still processing, together.

Joan opens with a piece of writing she composed after a run, something that came through her about her marriage. About choosing the “safe” option because she knew she wanted her relationship to feel like peace — before she even knew the framework of “attachment theory”. About all the versions of herself she has divorced from within one relationship, and how her husband has always been waiting on the other side of each one. She reads it aloud, and it’s stunning. (and you can read it right here!)

Jamie receives it on the upswing of a healing phase she finally just let herself have, and shares that Joan sent her that piece of writing mere hours before she got engaged. She also hints at a poem she’s been sitting with, about her own parallel journey, and promises it will be waiting on Substack. (it is. it’s right here. seriously, dad, please don’t read it.)

From there, both of them share stories from their work with bodies this week. Joan with a patient, and Jamie with two clients: moments where they stopped performing expertise and just showed up. Where the body led and they followed. Where something got made that neither of them could have planned.

This is what the magic of co-creation actually feels like: Not knowing the steps ahead of time, but simply following what the body says in real time. Discovering that what emerges is always better than what was planned. And finding out, of course, that the whole thing has been so enormously pleasurable.

P.S. We briefly chatted about marriage and polyamory in this week’s memosode… and we realized we had much more to say so we recorded a cutie little bonus convo for y’all this week! 🎉

We’d REALLY love to record one more bonus convo for the season, a Q&A, that airs alongside the final memosode in two weeks. In order to do that, however, we need some Q’s to A! What are your burning questions, most intense inquiries for Joan and Jamie?! The spicier the better… leave us a comment, send us a message here on substack, or shoot us an email at exanatomy@gmail.com.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

After getting engaged, Jamie received a pretty high volume of inquiry re: what this life shift means for her, considering the fact that she, and her fiancé, is/ are polyamorous.

She knew she wanted to answer thoroughly, as this is a discussion very important to her. So she took some time and sat with the idea of writing something or recording her own video to share, but realized what she most wanted to do was chat with Joan about it. Which worked out great since Joan had the same question. 😉

We hope you find as much pleasure in listening to it as we found in recording it!

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Maybe he wanted a Girlfriend
Before he wanted me

Maybe he wanted a Wife
Without really doing his homework
On what that meant
And who was accepting the job from his proposal

Maybe that could mean
That it all means less

But for me, it meant enough

It meant safety
It meant security
It meant peace
It meant solid ground
It meant a man who never cheats
It meant a man where I’m the only one holding the rip cord

Of course life laughs at guarantees
Throwing in a near death experience or two
To remind me I could still be left
On someone else’s terms

But those still feel acceptable
For a lifetime warranty
Inside this solid structure

I could have sunk into the Role
At times I couldn’t stand him
Because of who I thought I had to be
To stay his Good Wife

But the utterly astonishing and beautiful thing
Is each time I said “enough”
And divorced that old version
Of Marriage in my mind

He was ready and waiting beyond the threshold
Still readily accepting
The Me I had become next

We’ve grown together
Both up and out in parallel
But also down into the earth
Our roots utterly intertwined
Holding each other steady through
The wind and the rain

We have two saplings now
Growing up in our midst
Further anchors to our interconnectedness
Even as their presence
Also leaves our growth a little crowded

At times I do wonder
If I’m meant to have different partners
Play different roles in other lovers lives
Won’t I miss out if I haven’t sowed my wild oats?

So then I wave to the parallel universes in which
I have all the lovers, all the jobs
Become an astronaut
A ballerina
Marry a woman
Stay single forever
And I can marvel at all the me’s
I might have been
And then sink back
Into this actual real life I’m living
Where I cannot imagine
Anyone but him
As my partner
Collaborator
Friend
Lover

I chose the safe option
I have no regrets about that

Obviously, we’ve been building to this conversational climax all season (see what I did there?).

Jamie opens with something that happened at an event in Nashville — an exercise in saying true, polarizing things in front of a room full of people, and what a facilitator saw in her body before she did. It sets the tone for everything that follows.

From there, the conversation finds its way to sex. Which was always where it was going.

Joan talks about sex publicly for the first time. She does it with the kind of honesty that makes you feel less alone in your own life. Jamie shares what she didn’t know she didn’t know until she was 34, and what it took to find out. Together they go somewhere tender and honest and surprisingly funny — into the territory of what we were taught, what we unlearned, what performing costs, and what becomes possible when you stop.

There are things we say in this episode that we have never said out loud before. And by the end, neither of us wanted to stop talking.

Luckily, we didn’t have to — part two is ready and waiting. Do we even need a written teaser? Joan tells her Sex Boss origin story. Jamie shares, in detail, about her experiences with kink and BDSM. You already know you want to join us. 😉

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Joan goes first, sharing the story of how she became, in her own words, the sex boss — and why that particular arrangement has been one of the most quietly revolutionary things to happen in her marriage. It’s tender, specific, funny, and more relatable than most people would ever say out loud.

And then it’s Jamie’s turn.

What unfolds is nearly an hour of stories she has never shared publicly before. From a dungeon in London to an apartment in Rome, she shares her never-before-told experience of what it felt like to surrender and discover the edges of her capacity — and then choose to expand them.

She wrote a poem about all of it, three years ago, that’s she’s never shared publicly. Until now.

This episode is profound, intimate, and unlike anything we’ve ever released before.

And it is exactly what this paywall exists for. 😉

🔒 This episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers at exanatomy.substack.com. Upgrade to listen — and to access every EA After Dark episode this season.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

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agatha christie novels, entire days with nothing but hours of walking, and on purpose just having less to do.

in edinburgh i was easing into the idea of the thing —

came to chase the cold on purpose.

scotland in february doesn’t make much sense unless what you’re wanting to do is

go all of the way down into the ground and crawl you…

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This memosode assembled itself from a few different directions — a spacious Friday at work for Joan, a Sunday morning post-dance for Jamie — and finds its way to one of the loveliest + profound reframes we’ve landed on this season.

When Ty got injured at his soccer game, his first words were: “We don’t have insurance”. Jamie put her hand on his back and told him not to worry about it. What unfolded over the next few days — the community that showed up, the emotional pattern that got examined, the speed at which his body healed — gave her a new understanding of she found herself saying that in the first place.

Joan looks up the etymology of the word “insurance”, because of course she does and what she discovers is beautiful and inspiring.

And then, because nothing ever stays neatly in its lane around here, Joan shares a perfect seven-minute recording of her boys asking about germs, babies, birth, and contraception from the backseat of the car on Mother’s Day. It is one of the best things we have ever put in an episode.

Aaaaand now we’re pretty certain we need merch that says “it’s not a water slide, it’s my vagina.” Let us know if you agree!

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Joan is in rooms full of colleagues where the truth wants to come through her and she’s learning to let it. Jamie is sending texts to clients that she knows could go sideways and sending them anyway. Both of us are dissolving old contracts, noticing old postures, and asking what it actually feels like to stop performing and just hold it.

The overlap between what Joan experienced at a theater-in-medicine workshop that morning and what Jamie had been sitting with all week was, as usual, not a coincidence. And from there, our conversation goes somewhere we haven’t quite gone before — into what it means to perceive yourself as an integrous opposing force rather than a villain, and why the most loving thing you can do for a patient, a client, a room full of doctors, or yourself is sometimes the most uncomfortable thing to do.

🔒 This episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers at exanatomy.substack.com. Upgrade to listen — and to access every EA After Dark episode this season.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

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This week we have an extremely pleasurable full house!

Joining us are four members of the very first cohort of The Refuge — Jamie’s new group mentorship container that ran for three months this past winter into spring. Richard is calling in from Calgary. Sarah is in Seattle. Constance has just moved back to Texas after years overseas. And Jess is in Nashville, where she has been part of Jamie’s work in various forms for over five years. Together, they make up four of the twenty people who showed up to beta test something none of them, including Jamie, had ever done before.

What unfolds is a conversation about what actually happens when you find yourself in a room full of people who are learning how to tell the truth with their bodies. About the particular kind of medicine that can only be accessed in community. About longing — the word itself, broken open: a longing to simply be. About relational wounds that can only heal in relationship. About what it feels like to be seen without having to perform.

Each of them shares something personal about how their relationship to pleasure has shifted over these past three months, and to close out the episode they all dedicate the episode to a part of their body. And every single one lands like it was the only possible answer.

And finally, surprisingly, we all close with a song.

It’s chaotic.

It’s horrifying.

It’s perfect.

In our Part 2 for this week’s EA After Dark, we share our body check-ins that we normally do at the beginning of each full episode, and candidly share some recent experiences of learning how to tell the truth even when it runs the risk of being misunderstood.

And if you’re curious to learn more about the next round of The Refuge, enrollment opens in mid-July, but you can snag a spot on the waitlist right now. Waitlist folks get access to enrollment a week before everyone else, which is important because spots are limited to 20 people. We get started in August and end by Halloween! 👻

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Sometimes, the best conversations begin with a small observation that opens, unexpectedly, into much larger, richer territory. This memosode is one of those.

Joan opens with a reframe about work and rest that sets the tone: what if everything counts, including (and maybe even especially) the parts that don’t look like much of anything? It’s a warm-up for the much bigger question she brings next.

She asks Jamie how she navigates moments of conflict between Ty and the boys. What she gets back is one of the most honest and unexpected things Jamie has shared on this podcast yet — about sovereignty, about fathering, about the difference between a rupture and a threat, and about the version of herself that would have torn her own answer apart five years ago.

Joan receives it, sits with it, and responds with her own ongoing negotiation: learning to trust the other creatures in the room, including the ones she’s raising, including the man she’s raising them with.

And then Jamie shares what happened in Nashville. What she said out loud in a room full of women. What landed in those bodies. What didn’t. And why she went there in the first place.

This is a conversation about what it means to parent consciously, hold your center lovingly, and tell the truth even when it surprises you.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected

Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Joan arrives with a question that stopped us both in our tracks: if someone observed where you spend your time, energy, attention, and intention, which gods would they assume you pray to? We sit with that for a while. Our answers are uncomfortable, illuminating, and occasionally hilarious.

From there we wander into the ceremony of money: what it means to hold the frequency of wealth versus scarcity, what our rituals around resourcing are actually worshiping, and why this has everything to do with village.

Joan shares about her weekly money date.

Jamie quotes Jesus.

Somehow it works.

We also get into what it might look like to bring genuine ceremony into clinical medicine, including Joan’s revelation that her patient initiation process for a certain very-of-the-moment medication might deserve to be treated less like a spiel and more like a sacred rite of passage. These wheels are turning and we are very much here for it.

The question we’re leaving in the comments for paid subscribers: what gods are your current ceremonies honoring? We genuinely want to know. The juicier, the better.

🔒 This episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers at exanatomy.substack.com. Upgrade to listen — and to access every EA After Dark episode this season.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

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This week we welcome our first guest of Season 4: Mouse Bird! Ceremonial practitioner, (now officially retired) bodyworker of 17 years, and one of Jamie’s closest friends. We did not plan for her to be in the middle of one of the most significant transitions of her professional life when we recorded this, but, as usual, our bodies had other (better) ideas.

What unfolds is a conversation about what ceremony actually is — not the bells and whistles or the hollow, borrowed forms, but the ancient, innate human act of simply acknowledging what is happening, and inviting others to witness it with you. We talk about why transitions are so disorienting without containment. Why the antidote to disconnection has always been embarrassingly simple and somehow completely forgotten. And how naming what is true, even just to yourself, is its own kind of ritual.

Mouse shares the story of how ceremony found her, and Jamie shares how Mouse changed what she understood to be possible when Crowley was dying. Joan shares what it felt like to return from maternity leave armed simply with the phrase "transitions are hard" as a lifeline, and how even that small act of naming was its own kind of ceremony.

This episode closes with a breath, a word of gratitude, and a ghost.

You’ll understand when you get there. 😉

And don’t miss Part 2 (you know them, you love them) where we get into some very fascinating financial territory, as Joan poses a question that made Jamie’s jaw drop + we explore what the world could look like if we brought genuine ceremony into clinical medicine.

We know you’ll be eager to connect more with Mouse after listening to this incredible conversation… and you’re in luck! She offers one-on-one consultations and ceremonial facilitation through her new practice, Gaia Mara Temple, at gaiamaratemple.love.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Mousebird → gaiamaratemple.love

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

This week’s memosode finds us in the tender, sprawling aftermath.

Jamie records from her office, ten days out from saying goodbye to Crowley, still in the process of understanding what she’s been through — psychologically, somatically, and spiritually. She shares what she can, which turns out to be more than she expected: a surprise invitation back to plant medicine, an initiation she describes as her grandmothers dragging her by the hair to the feet of God, and a quietly radical realization about pleasure as the antidote to a world that keeps pulling us out of our bodies.

Joan records from her car, circling the block a few extra times to finish her thoughts. She comes with her own confession: she has been temporarily consumed by an iPhone game. She is not proud. She is, however, illuminating — because what she does with that confession is turn it into one of the most clarifying things we’ve said yet about the difference between pleasure and entertainment, between scratching an itch and actually being fed.

We also talk about labor. About birth as initiation. About the sovereign version of ourselves that shows up when we stop resisting sensation and just say yes to all of it.

This conversation is rich and wandering and real. We think you’ll feel it.

P.S. Jamie did finally write that reflection about Crowley… she actually sat down and wrote it immediately after we finished recording Episode 5, releasing next week. ❤️

🎧 Listen now on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected
Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

Following the main feed episode on sovereignty, Joan brings a real-time situation to the table: a collaboration that’s gone sideways, a colleague whose behavior is causing problems behind the scenes, and a very Joan dilemma of knowing exactly what the people-pleasing, codependent thing to do would be — and wanting to choose differently.

What unfolds is part coaching session, part confession, part exploration of the difference between sovereignty and avoidance. Jamie asks the questions Joan needs to be asked. Joan arrives at answers she didn’t quite have before we started talking.

We get into what it actually looks like to sit on your hands when every instinct tells you to swoop in and fix things. Why our bodies catastrophize without data. What courage has to do with memoir. And why doing less is sometimes the most sovereign thing available to us.

If you’ve ever been the one managing everyone else’s feelings while quietly abandoning your own — this one’s for you. And if you suspect you might be the one making it hard for people to tell you the truth, we’d especially love to hear from you in the comments. 😉

🔒 This episode is available exclusively to paid subscribers at exanatomy.substack.com. Upgrade to listen — and to access every EA After Dark episode this season.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch

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This episode found its own sovereign shape in real time, and we’re so grateful to share the result with you.

Joan opens with a specific flavor of frustration she (brilliantly) names on the spot: bureaucratic rage. She danced it out in her basement before recording, which helped about 75%. The other 25% makes for good radio.

Jamie arrives the night before she says goodbye to Crowley. She shares what it’s actually like to have a dying body in her home: the way his scent has changed, the way her senses have sharpened, the way grief and presence have become the same thing. She doesn’t tidy it up, and Joan witnesses it without trying to fix it.

Then, somehow, we find our way to sovereignty. (Thank goodness for Joan’s genuine spiritual gift of a segue.)

Not a kind of sovereignty that means retreating from the world. Not non-attachment dressed up as enlightenment. The kind that absolutely necessitates other people; that is, in fact, only available in relationship. We talk about the difference between true sovereignty and avoidance, between interdependence and codependency, and about what it might mean to take somatic sovereignty seriously enough to let it dismantle some of the structures we’ve been taught to trust.

It’s one of our most expansive conversations yet: personal and political, tender and sharp, and grounded the whole way through in the body.

And don’t miss Part 2 (for paid subscribers) where Joan spills some tea about a spicy situation at work, and Jamie offers her a coaching session in real-time.

🎧 Listen to Season 4, Episode 3 now, right here, or on Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Stay Connected

Join the conversation — and get access to EA After Dark — at exanatomy.substack.com. Free subscribers never miss an episode; paid subscribers get the extended conversations and everything we’re not quite ready to say to the whole internet yet.

Dr. Joan Chan → joanchanmd.com → @joanchanmd

Jamie Lee Finch → jamieleefinch.com → @jamieleefinch