In this episode of Empowered & Out: The Career Coaching Podcast, Coach Jon sits down with Ken Breniman for a deeply honest, beautifully layered, and delightfully weird conversation about healing, grief, queer identity, mortality, psychedelics, burnout, primates, and what it really means to be human.
Ken is a licensed clinical social worker, psychedelic-assisted grief therapist, death doula, professor of thanatology, yoga therapist, and what he lovingly calls a budding primatologist. Together, Jon and Ken explore how queer identity shapes resilience, why grief can become a doorway back to purpose, what death teaches us about living more fully, and how stepping away from modern noise can help us reconnect with ourselves.
This conversation moves from childhood identity and coming out, to ancestral healing, rainforest wisdom, orangutans, psychedelic therapy, and the simple but powerful practice of taking three minutes to pause, breathe, and come back to your body.
If you’ve been feeling burned out, disconnected, overwhelmed, or unsure how to find your way back to yourself, this episode is an invitation to slow down, listen deeply, and remember that healing does not have to be linear to be real.
Chapters
00:00 — Welcome to Empowered & Out
02:09 — Ken’s energy check-in
03:35 — Ken’s beautifully chaotic healing path
04:52 — How queer identity shaped Ken’s healing work
06:08 — Leaving conformity and finding purpose
11:06 — Origin stories, creativity, and honoring your true colors
17:19 — Feeling different, animal identity, and naming the unseen parts of ourselves
20:43 — Queer resilience, queer joy, and remembering our ancestors
23:08 — Coming out, chosen family, and holding space
29:03 — Loving the parts of ourselves we were taught to reject
32:03 — Why queer stories are not one-size-fits-all
33:39 — What LGBTQ+ people need more of right now
35:24 — Silence, technology, and getting away from the noise
39:19 — Why we avoid talking about death
46:14 — How mortality can help us live more fully
49:43 — What grief teaches us about purpose
51:45 — Psychedelics, grief, and healing beyond traditional therapy
53:47 — What people misunderstand about psychedelic healing
58:41 — Ken’s sabbatical and working around orangutans
1:02:34 — Burnout, empathic distress, and learning to slow down
1:04:16 — What the rainforest teaches us about interdependence
1:09:22 — Rapid-fire questions
1:13:22 — Ken’s advice for reconnecting with yourself
1:18:31 — Final reflections and closing CTA
If this episode resonated with you, subscribe to Empowered & Out, leave a review, and share it with someone who may need a reminder that healing, purpose, and confidence are still possible.
And if you’ve been feeling burned out, disconnected, stuck, or like your career no longer feels aligned with who you are, book a free discovery call with Coach Jon here: https://linktr.ee/empoweredandout.
