When Dr. Sivaranjani Penna — Siva, as she goes by — invited me onto her podcast, Hearts That Care: Stories of Compassion, I said “Yes!” before she even finished her sentence.
The question she wanted to ask — How does your own healing journey shape your capacity to genuinely care for the people you serve? — is one that I believe is core to a person’s capacity as a care professional.
If you’ve been around my blog for a while, you know that question is the through line of everything I do — my book Heal or Die, my Care Curation Coaching, and the platform we’re building at The Care We Need. So sitting down with someone who was already asking it well was exciting.
It turned out to be a delightful conversation.
First, a Word About Siva
Dr. Siva is a hospitalist physician — a doctor whose practice is based inside a hospital, caring for inpatients. As a result, she might see a patient once. Maybe twice.
That’s it.
Shes gets one or two encounters to establish trust, to assess the whole person, and to make a meaningful difference in someone’s experience — often during the worst week of that person’s life.
That context seems to have made Siva intensely, practically intentional about compassion. She’s COMMITTED to having the most impactful engagement possible with her patients, no matter how short a time she has with them, and she seems to hold every conversation with that same orientation.
I found it refreshing in a way I didn’t fully expect.
What We Covered
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube
Here are the timestamps if you’d like to find your way to a specific piece of the conversation:
- 00:00 – From Trauma to Purpose
- 00:54 – Meet Tenay Benes: Veteran, Author & Healing Advocate
- 03:45 – PTSD, Military Service & Medical Evacuation
- 08:00 – Anxiety, Depression & Years of Misdiagnosis
- 10:08 – The Hidden Risks of Psychiatric Medications
- 13:15 – Discovering Complex PTSD
- 15:51 – Trauma Starts Before We Realize It
- 17:06 – The ACEs Study Explained
- 18:58 – What Compassion Looks Like in Healthcare
- 21:04 – Why Healthcare Lost Its Human Connection
- 24:27 – Can Compassion Be Learned?
- 25:16 – A Provider Who Changed Everything
- 33:08 – Self-Healing Before Helping Others
- 34:36 – Spiritual Awakening During Illness
- 40:21 – The Moment She Chose Healing
- 44:12 – When Patients Aren’t Ready to Heal
- 47:33 – Healing Shame Through Self-Compassion
- 52:07 – What Is Complex Illness?
- 1:05:55 – Final Wisdom: Believe Healing Is Possible
If the System Has Let You Down
I want to say something directly to the overcomers reading this.
If you’ve cycled through medications, diagnoses, and providers without anyone seeming to see the whole picture — I’ve been there. And I don’t say that to be discouraging. I say it because naming what’s real is the first move in any good strategy, including a healing strategy.
The second move is harder: gentleness with yourself. Not as a feel-good supplement to the real work. As a structural requirement. I talk about healing shame through self-compassion at 52:07. Healing cannot happen in an environment of sustained shame, even when that environment is just your own internal voice.
You might not be ready for that yet. I talk at 44:12 about what it actually looks like when a patient isn’t ready to heal — without judgment, because not-readiness is an important step in someone’s healing journey. It means the timing isn’t right yet, as much as anything else.
But when the time is right, the door doesn’t close.
What I Said at the End
Siva wrapped our conversation by asking what wisdom I’d leave listeners with. What I landed on: in order to help others heal, we must believe that full healing is possible.
This is my resistance against the narratives — the ones from the illness, from the care ecosystem, or sometimes from the people we love — that suggest it isn’t.
I still believe it. On the days it’s easy. And on the days it’s not, which maybe matters more.
And if this episode resonates, you can find Siva and the whole Hearts That Care community through her LinkedIn profile. She’s worth following.
— Tenay
Want to explore more of the frameworks I reference in this episode? Grab six free chapters of Heal or Die here, find out about my two powerful talks at Keynote Speeches, or learn about working with me through Care Curation Coaching.
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