From She Podcasts to the Cave: Identity Death and Voice-Led Leadership with Elsie Escobar

About this episode:

In this episode of the Thrive with Cate Podcast, Cate Stillman sits down with Elsie Escobar — Hall of Fame podcaster, co-founder of She Podcasts, former Director of Community and Content at Libsyn for 15+ years, and now founder of Multimodally — for a decade-in-the-making catch-up between two women who first met on yoga mats in the mid-2000s and have been building parallel arcs ever since.

Elsie opens up about the transitions that quietly reshaped her life: stepping down from She Podcasts to be fully present for her teenage daughter’s mental health crisis, being let go from Libsyn after a 54-day Catholic novena where she asked the Virgin Mary for clarity, and rebuilding from the ground up through a new brand designed around voice-led leadership and modular life design.

Together, Cate and Elsie bridge Catholic devotion, Ayurvedic ritual, podcasting career strategy, and the Medusa myth — offering a grounded, unvarnished map for women standing at the threshold of who they’ve been and who they’re becoming.

This is a conversation about what actually happens when leadership, motherhood, and nervous system collapse all arrive at the same threshold.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • Why the identity that built your success is often the very thing you’re being asked to release
  • How to trust the sap of who you are more than the bark of who you’ve been
  • What sacred ritual — Catholic novena, Ayurvedic Tarpanam, Ishvara Pranidhana — actually does for your nervous system
  • Why community heals faster than solo willpower during identity transitions
  • The Medusa myth as the truest map for post-institution womanhood
  • How voice-led leadership sidesteps the “which medium” trap that keeps creators stuck
  • Why small-not-scale is the new frontier for integrity-led media businesses

Two Podcasters, Two Decades, One Threshold

Cate Stillman and Elsie Escobar met on yoga mats sometime around 2005 — two strong, muscular yoga teachers who threw down mats next to each other and struck up the kind of friendship that outlasts most careers.

Elsie went on to build one of the most successful independent wellness podcasts of the era (Elsie’s Yoga Class, 4M+ downloads), become a foundational leader at Libsyn as Director of Community and Content, co-host The Feed, and co-found She Podcasts — the world’s largest community for women and non-binary audio creators.

Cate built Yogahealer into a global brand, authored seven books, and eventually rebuilt everything into Club Thrive and Wellness Pro Academy.

Two decades later, both women arrive at the same threshold — quietly and separately — the moment where the identity that built the success no longer fits the woman.

This is that conversation.

Trust the Sap, Not the Bark

Early in the episode, Cate offers a metaphor Elsie doesn’t let go of for the rest of the hour.

“You have to trust in the sap more than the last version of your identity, which culture wants you to perpetuate — because culture is based on you perpetuating that.”

The bark is what culture knows you by: the brand, the title, the credential, the years of expertise, the platform, the following. It’s what makes people say “Oh, you’re the one who does X.”

The sap is what actually moves through you: the essence, the aliveness, the deeper current that was there before the brand and will be there after it.

The problem?

Your current relationships, your income, your professional identity — all of it is organized around the bark. When the sap starts calling you somewhere else, the bark holds on for dear life. And so does everyone around you.

The invitation Cate and Elsie name across this episode: trust the sap enough to let the bark crack.

Motherhood as Forced Initiation

Elsie’s first exit — from She Podcasts leadership — didn’t come from a strategic career pivot.

It came from her daughter.

“My teenager needed me. I didn’t have the capacity to do anything outside of put my head down, do my job, and take care of my child. There was no ‘I can’t parent this kid right now.'”

Her daughter was struggling with self-harm. Her husband held up the mirror: “I can’t watch you do that anymore. She needs both of us.”

The insight Elsie couldn’t unsee?

“It was an easier path for me to help strangers on the internet than to help my own daughter. Culture wants us to do that.”

Cate names the pattern: modern culture systematically rewards women for pouring their wisdom outward and away from their own daughters. When a mother finally reclaims that current, an entire external structure — company, community, credentials — is often what has to give way.

Elsie stepped down from She Podcasts in January 2024.

Her daughter got a year and a half of therapy. Both of them are on the other side of it.

The Corporate Squeeze at Libsyn

The second exit — from Libsyn after 15 years — was different. Slower. More corrosive.

“With Libsyn, it was a slow death. I stayed for such a long time because it was comfortable and it provided me with health insurance — which literally was that. My kid was in therapy.”

The Libsyn Elsie joined in the 2000s was an indie community — quirky, mission-driven, run by people who genuinely loved podcasters. The Libsyn of the 2020s was different: corporatized, ad-monetization obsessed, leadership focused entirely on the top 0.1% of podcasters who could actually run programmatic ad deals.

Elsie’s zones of genius — front-facing communication, community building, education, live events, teaching — were quietly stripped from her role in favor of dashboards, Google Console, and optimization metrics she had no interest in.

She was, in Cate’s language, squeezed out.

In October 2024, a VP dressed her down for something she hadn’t even done. She had a full breakdown. Within a month, they let her go.

“It was not great. Yet it was something that everybody knew needed to happen. I knew it needed to happen. I just never made the active choice to do it.”

Cate names the pattern that lives underneath: if you don’t make the cycle change yourself, life will make it for you.

The 54-Day Novena: Sacred Ritual as Digestion

What Elsie did next is one of the most quietly radical moves in the entire episode.

She went back to her roots. Cradle Catholic. Latin American. The Virgin Mary.

“I decided to bring out the big dogs. I’m going to do the 54-day novena — 27 days of petition, 27 days of gratitude, about 45 minutes to an hour of prayer every single day.”

Not “manifestation.” Not affirmations. Not journaling.

A structured, ancient, embodied devotional practice — the same one her Latin American grandmothers had used for generations.

Somewhere in the middle of that novena, the petition dissolved. She stopped asking “please help me” and started saying “thank you so much.”

Within the arc of that ritual, she got let go from Libsyn. And she experienced it not as tragedy — but as answered prayer.

Cate offers the frame:

“Trauma is a digestive process. It’s not a get-over-it. It’s a go-through-it. The obstacle is the way.”

Ritual — Catholic novena, Ayurvedic Tarpanam, yogic Ishvara Pranidhana — all serve the same nervous system function. They metabolize what willpower cannot.

The Medusa Map: What the Cave Actually Requires

Halfway through the episode, Cate weaves in the framework she’s been developing for her forthcoming book Rewilding Medusa.

Most people know the surface story of Medusa: raped in Athena’s temple, blamed by Athena, punished with snake hair and a killing gaze.

What they miss is what came after.

  • Medusa was exiled from the temple (culture, institution, corporation)
  • She retreated to the cave — alone, misunderstood, without support
  • In the cave, she practiced Svadhyaya — self-study, self-devotion, building her own altar
  • She tamed her own Kundalini (the snakes)
  • When she was finally beheaded by Perseus, two offspring emerged: Pegasus (organized prana, lifted energy) and Chrysor (the golden sword of discernment — tejas)
“If you actually know the story of Medusa, you understand that you will be exiled from the corporation, from culture, from your past role — and you will be scared and you will not understand your physiology. And no one can come with you. And then you’ll find a cave and you’ll start to prostrate to yourself.”

Elsie’s cave was the 54-day novena.

Cate’s cave was cancer, hysterectomy, hip replacement, and rebuilding her entire tech stack and team.

The offspring? For Elsie: Multimodally, voice-led leadership, and a nervous system finally coming home. For Cate: Club Thrive, Wellness Pro Academy, AI-agent-powered curriculum delivery, and 60+ ski days and 60+ surf days a year.

The pattern is universal. The rewilding is not.

Voice-Led Leadership and the Birth of Multimodally

What Elsie is building next is worth understanding — because it’s a direct response to what she watched happen at Libsyn.

Multimodally is a media business built on two convictions:

1. Voice comes first, medium comes second.

“People get caught up asking, ‘Should I do a podcast? Should I do video?’ And I say, listen — that’s not the conversation. The conversation is: what’s the message? What do you want to say?”

When Elsie asks creators “are you a voice-led leader?” — most say “that’s me.” Then the medium question becomes trivial.

2. Your life is multimodal — your tools should be too.

Elsie designs her entire studio, notebook systems (Japanese Plotter rings), and workflows around portability and modularity. The stand-up mic boom she can drag around. The ringed notebook where pages come out and go back in as her needs change. You take the vacuum attachment off, put another one on, and clean a different surface.

She applies the same principle to identity itself:

“I’ve never been just one thing. I was a yoga teacher. That was my identity for a long time. It doesn’t necessarily mean I no longer am that — it just means this other modality turned up.”

Motherhood. Menopause. Teenage-daughter-parenting. Empty-nest preparation. Each life stage is a different modal. You don’t discard the last one. You put it in the closet until it’s needed again.

Small Is the New Scale

One of the most refreshing arcs of the episode is Elsie’s clarity on scale.

“If I can create something sustainable with 200 people — the end. Not scale. Small. What does that look like?”

She’s building Multimodally as a self-funded, privacy-first, potent-audience business. A private paid podcast for behind-the-scenes access. Deep integrity over reach. Time to align before pushing anything out.

Cate mirrors it inside Club Thrive and Wellness Pro Academy — a small, high-touch club model where 15–50 committed members generate more transformation (and more sustainable revenue) than a 200,000-follower audience ever could.

The paradigm shift both women are naming:

The next decade of women-led business is not about scale. It’s about potency, presence, and permanence.

The Nervous System Tax and What Recovery Looks Like

Toward the end of the episode, Elsie names something every woman in leadership needs to hear.

“I’m still working on my nervous system. It was turned up way too high. I find my body responding now in ways it shouldn’t be responding when I’m not in danger.”

Years of fight-or-flight leadership — the pandemic-era financial stakes at She Podcasts, the corporate squeeze at Libsyn, the daughter’s mental health crisis — left her physiology on permanent high alert. Even helping her teenager find a Google password triggers her whole body.

Cate names the pattern from Club Thrive: half the women who join come in for a Heal Badge first, before any other work. Because until the nervous system can settle, no other transformation lands.

Recovery, for Elsie, looks like:

  • More pause between things
  • The end of adrenaline addiction
  • Kinesthetic, embodied practices — analog notebooks, real books, ritual
  • Ayurvedic frameworks she learned decades ago: if you’re cold and you eat ice cream, what do you think happens?
  • The willingness to interrupt her own compulsive parenting patterns (“Did you do the thing? Did you do the thing?”)

Why This Matters Now

The women who built the first wave of independent media — podcasters, yoga teachers, coaches, wellness pros, community builders — are arriving at midlife with bodies exhausted by scaling, platforms co-opted by corporations, and identities that no longer fit.

The next chapter isn’t more content, more scale, more grind.

It’s less bark, more sap.

Small, potent, sovereign, ritual-anchored, nervous-system-first, voice-led, multimodal, and — above all — rebuilt in integrity with who you are actually becoming.

This episode is the map.

Resources & Links

🌐 Multimodally by Elsie Escobar → multimodally.com

🔗 Short link: elsi.link/MM

🎓 ELEAGUE — Elsie’s mentorship program for voice-led leaders

🌿 Wellness Pro Academy → wellnesspro.academy

🧘 Yogahealer → yogahealer.com

Books by Cate Stillman:

Referenced in this episode:

  • The 54-Day Novena (Catholic devotional practice)
  • Crowd Health
  • Plotter Japanese ringed notebook system
  • Ishvara Pranidhana (Yogic devotional surrender)
  • Pareto’s Principle (the 80/20 rule)