In this debut episode of Good Mama Magic, Brooke Lark weaves together a powerful story of transformation and discovery. With a blend of creative storytelling and raw emotion, Brooke shares her journey from being a PTA-loving Mormon mom to someone who had to walk away from her religion, her marriage, and the life she once knew. Through two reflective stories, Brooke recounts a life-changing 250-mile hike and a surreal mountain retreat, each filled with moments of wonder, magic, and deep personal insights.

She introduces the idea that life, like a trip, is full of unexpected twists and turns. From her experiences with psychedelics to moments of profound connection with the divine feminine, Brooke encourages listeners to embrace the unknown, trust the journey, and find the beauty and magic that exist in everyday life.

Welcome to Good Mama Magic—a podcast about healing, motherhood, and the mystical adventure that is life.

In this raw and heartfelt episode, Brooke Lark recounts the tumultuous story of her mother’s decision to leave the family, setting off a cascade of life-altering events. Brooke shares her experiences growing up in a complex household with six sisters, navigating a father’s legal downfall, and a mother who sought solace in the arms of another man. Through vivid memories of her teenage years—filled with abandonment, scavenger hunts for food, and a once-vibrant home falling apart—Brooke explores the heartbreak of familial breakdown and the hope she clung to in the midst of chaos.

Brooke Lark dives into the aftermath of leaving the Mormon Church and the unraveling of her once perfectly scripted life. She recounts the moment she and her husband sent their resignation email, officially stepping away from the faith that had shaped their identities and family for years. Brooke shares the emotional shock of waking up in a world without the familiar structure of her religion, grappling with the loss of community, and the realization that she was now an outsider to the life she had once known.

Through vivid storytelling, Brooke explores the intense questions and doubts she faced as she began to rebuild her life without the religious script she’d relied on. As she navigates the pain of losing her marriage and the comforting certainties of her past, she finds herself on a path of learning to embrace uncertainty, rediscover herself, and create a new life outside of her previous faith.

In this raw and revealing episode, Brooke Lark takes us through the delicate process of rebuilding life after loss, only to discover that sometimes the stories we tell ourselves about love can be their own form of captivity. As forest fires rage in the Colorado mountains, Brooke and her children forge ahead into an unexpected new chapter, transforming their broken family into something beautiful and uniquely their own.

The narrative follows Brooke's journey from single motherhood to what seems like a fairy tale second chance at love. She shares how her deep-seated beliefs about love – that it must stay, suffer, and never let go – lead her into a marriage that quickly reveals its darker truths. Through intimate details and powerful metaphors, Brooke explores how her determination to love harder and give more ultimately forces her to confront the difference between love that heals and love that harms.

In this gripping episode, Brooke Lark takes us deep into the Colorado wilderness where a promised healing journey becomes the catalyst for her own liberation. When her husband invites her to join him on the Colorado Trail, claiming transformation and newfound clarity, Brooke packs her bags with hope and sixty-five pounds of gear, ready to walk into their better future together.

But as the days unfold in the high country, familiar patterns emerge between the mountain peaks. Through vivid storytelling, Brooke reveals how a 250-mile hiking adventure becomes a powerful metaphor for her marriage – each step illuminating the exhausting dance of attempting to love someone well by making herself small. Until finally, in a frost-kissed morning beside swampland, she receives an unexpected invitation to leave that becomes her permission to stay gone.

In this transformative episode, Brooke Lark explores what happens the morning after you hitchhike away from your marriage. As she stands in the wreckage of her carefully constructed life, an unexpected phone call arrives from an unlikely source: a former Republican senator with an invitation that will change everything.

Through intimate storytelling, Brooke reveals how her volunteer work with ketamine therapy leads to an introduction to ayahuasca – known as Pachamama, the Mother, the sacred plant teacher. As she confronts the quiet aftermath of her broken marriage, with her children still hidden away behind closed doors marked "No Kids Allowed," the possibility of meeting "the mother who made you" arrives like an answer to an unspoken prayer.

In this powerful episode, Brooke Lark takes us deep into her first ayahuasca ceremony, where a journey to meet "the Mother" becomes an unexpected lesson in mothering herself. As she leaves her children – still hidden behind closed doors in the aftermath of her marriage – Brooke enters a stranger's home to drink an ancient medicine, hoping to find healing in the arms of Pachamama.

Through vivid storytelling, Brooke shares how resistance transforms into revelation as the medicine shows her scenes from her own life: the trail where she left her marriage, the flea-infested floor of her teenage years, and her daughter's bedroom where music drowns out fighting. Under the guidance of a former go-go dancer turned shaman, she learns that sometimes the bravest act of mothering is asking for help, and that healing begins when we finally allow ourselves to purge the stories we were never meant to carry.

Brooke Lark returns to the medicine ceremony expecting to be filled with divine love, only to encounter a trickster spirit who shows her that sometimes the most beautiful parts of ourselves can be the most dangerous. Through vivid visions of battlefields and a defiant child insisting "the world is love," Brooke faces the painful task of cutting away her most cherished stories about herself – only to discover that what appears to be loss is actually an invitation home.

The episode culminates in a powerful homecoming, as Brooke returns to her daughter with new eyes and an unshakeable commitment to rebuild their sanctuary. Through intimate storytelling, she reveals how sometimes our deepest healing comes not from holding onto our stories of love, but from letting them go to make room for something far more magical: the simple truth of coming home to ourselves.