What if the identity that built your success is the very thing you're being asked to release?

In this deeply personal 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.

Cate mirrors the parallel arc: cancer, hip replacement, tech stack overhaul, and the deliberate rebuild of Yogahealer into Club Thrive and Wellness Pro Academy. Together, they map the Medusa myth as the truest guide to what midlife identity work actually looks like — and why the offspring of Medusa (Pegasus and Chrysor, prana and tejas) are exactly what emerges when a woman finally leaves the temple, enters the cave, and prostrates to herself.

This is a conversation about what happens when leadership, motherhood, and nervous system collapse all arrive at the same threshold — and what actually gets built on the other side.

Together, Cate and Elsie explore:

• Trust the Sap, Not the Bark: Why the essence of who you are matters more than the identity culture has known you by — and why every heroine's journey requires leaving the safety of shore
• Motherhood as Forced Initiation: When your child's need for presence overrides every career trajectory, and how Elsie navigated her daughter's self-harm season while running the world's largest podcasting community for women
• The Corporate Squeeze: How Libsyn transformed from indie community to advertising machine, and the slow death of doing work that no longer aligns with your zone of genius
• Sacred Ritual as Digestion: Why the 54-day novena worked where willpower failed — and how Ayurvedic ritual, Catholic devotion, and yogic Ishvara Pranidhana all serve the same nervous system function
• The Medusa Map: Athena's temple (culture), the cave (Svadhyaya), taming Kundalini, and the offspring — Pegasus (organized prana) and Chrysor (the sword of discernment). Why this is the truest map for post-institution womanhood
• Voice-Led Leadership: Elsie's new framework for creators moving beyond "which medium" to "what's the message" — and why the tool debate keeps women stuck
• Multimodally and Small-Not-Scale: Building a media business for 200 potent people instead of 200,000 followers, and why the future belongs to modular, self-funded, integrity-led brands