About
The goal for this podcast is simple: We want you to have more space to hear your voice, connect to your story and honor the truth of your own journey.
The podcast
Breathing Wind is about grief and loss and how we journey with these lifelong companions. We offer warm, honest and insightful conversations for the introspective at heart. Launched in 2019 as a personal grief project, the podcast struck a chord with listeners looking for a space to feel less alone in their grief. Quickly, a dedicated community grew around the candid and compelling conversations with others who knew grief just as intimately and those who offered guidance for navigating this universal human experience.
Meet the host
Julia Mark is a singer-songwriter, pianist, and educator originally from the Northeastern US. Since releasing her album Keeping You in 2019, her work has revolved around grief and gratitude, particularly following her husband's death from a rare cancer in 2023. Julia is currently based in the Seattle area.
Past hosts
Sarah Davis founded Breathing Wind.
When her dad passed away, she hiked part of the Camino de Santiago to honor him and spread his ashes. It was there that she learned the power of her voice, community and grief story sharing – and then wanted to share that with others.
By day, she works as an instructional designer in Des Moines, IA and hosts Warmly, Iowa, a podcast about Iowa and home.
You can find Sarah’s latest work at warmlyia.substack.com.
Naila Francis is a writer, grief coach, death midwife and ordained interfaith minister — and a co-host of Breathing Wind. Her dad died of esophageal cancer in 2012, the year after a beloved father figured died of pancreatic cancer. Those losses eventually led to her vocation holding space for the grieving and dying.
Through her practice This Hallowed Wilderness and her work as an officiant, Naila offers coaching, ritual and ceremony for people at many of life's sacred thresholds, including birth, marriage and death. Whether she’s one-on-one with a client or offering a workshop or other group event, she brings a love of poetry, nature and community to her work.
Naila is also a founding member of Salt Trails, a Philadelphia collective making grief public and visible through community rituals, and a Pachakuti Mesa carrier in the Indigenous Andean tradition.
Her life thus far has been one of many hats since her first job after college was as a police reporter for a local newspaper. She later went on to interview dozens of artists and entertainers as a features writer, including Pink, kd lang, Brandi Carlile and James Earl Jones.
When she’s not grief-tending or creating ritual space, you can often find her steeped in wonder (and maybe singing) in her favorite cathedral, the woods; savoring a new chocolate mug cake recipe; writing poems; and dreaming of her favorite grief allies, the grey whales she once kissed in Baja, Mexico.
Oceana Sawyer is an End of Life Doula focused on the liminal space of active dying and grief. She is currently researching and holding space in the realm of embodied grieving in a context of somatic abolitionism. Drawing upon her meditation practices, experience as a sensuality educator, earth-based spirituality, and an intensive study in the expressive arts and integral counseling psychology, she brings a grounded, compassionate presence to her work with individuals and groups. You can follow her on her website and participate in her online grief community on Patreon.
Dara Kosberg is the Program Director at the nonprofit, Reimagine, a community channeling the hardest parts of life, including loss and adversity, into meaningful action and growth. Her interest in working in the end of life and grief space was inspired by the loss of her mom at a young age and the isolation she felt from the experience. Through her work at Reimagine, she's been able to combine a number of her passions including stand-up comedy. She's produced and performed in a number of comedy shows focused on grief and loss, and brings this to her role as host this season.
Duncan Cheung is a wilderness explorer and adventure guide with over 15,000 miles of on-trail and off-trail wilderness experience. Guiding and teaching is a part of how Duncan approaches his North Star, which for the last decade has remained largely unchanged: Cultivate fulfillment with and for all beings.
Through Off Trail On Track, a nonprofit that he founded and leads, he creates learning experiences in the wilderness to enable people to disconnect with what doesn't matter and reconnect with what does: themselves, one another, and the wild. Duncan has learned that the exploration of the outer wilderness is an invitation to explore each of our inner wildernesses, which he helps leaders and executives explore through his coaching practice.
Duncan is also a seasoned business executive, facilitator, public speaker, and strategy advisor to Boards of Directors and executive teams from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Duncan has three homes: Hong Kong, where he grew up, Berkeley, where he lives, and Wilderness, where he belongs. When he’s not in the wilderness, Duncan loves to take Kiyo, his 9-year-old ninja-geologist son, mining and camping.
Deborah Szeto is an ICU and palliative care nurse for a hospital in the Bay Area.
Ken Breniman is an Oakland, CA-based Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Yoga Therapist with a passion for nudging the Western mental health paradigm in regards to safe, legal and ethical integration of sacred plant medicines or psychedelics. With a thanatological (study of mortality) approach to holding space for others, Ken has a deep reverence for Spirit while acknowledging each of us must find our own way of making sense of the experience of being human. Combining the essence of Kierkegaard's "Live life forward, understand it backwards" with Ram Dass' "We are all walking each other home" provides a hint at how Ken is attempting to understand his own being human.
Wendy is a grief counselor whose background is in birth and death doula work. She is particularly awed by grief's ability to transform and expand our lives. A long-time supporter of those in transition, Wendy brings a calm and loving presence to any situation. She believes fervently in the healing power of meditation, being in nature, yoga, music, storytelling and laughter, and is always looking for ways to incorporate these elements into her healing practice. Wendy works with ideas from Buddhist philosophy and parts therapy to help clients grow their compassion and self-awareness.
Wendy received her training with the International End of Life Doula Association and her MS in Counseling Psychology from California State University East Bay. She has three kids, three dogs, three cats and loves gardening, reading, singing and knitting.