Episode 5: What's Essential
Welcome to 5 “What’s Essential. I’m Sissy Siero your curator, your host for an audio story- wheel that’s stopping for a brief moment to check in with how we’re doing. We’ll hear stories about shifting priorities to find the what’s essential right now. Doing, having, perhaps being less, but better; a different gauge of time and energy spent. Also balancing personal relationships and purpose - not just how we work, where we live, and why we do what we do, but teasing, out of the tangle, the new essential - a closer look into the origins of patterns, and habitual thinking and life choices. Permission and room for the voice of innate, essential wisdom to have it’s say. Cracking open secret vaults, and daring to ask uncomfortable questions- how staying with them actually gifts us with a broader capacity for more grace, love, and confidence. The chance to lean into who we are now, and becoming. What a strange buffet this moment in our collective lives. The pandemic has been slowly deleting the noise obscuring, and distorting, the music I’d been trying to dance [to] my life to for years.

First we’ll hear from Meme – what became essential in her life during the pandemic and into the uncertainty of now…
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Next up a conversation with Melissa Grogran - a Voice and Movement Expert - she’s worked with yogis, Somatic Therapists, yoga and voice teachers, and business professionals - most notably as the Dialect Coach for the AMC series The Son, starring Pierce Brosnan.
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We’ll be right back with more of episode 5 after this…
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Now a reflection on what’s essential from acclaimed Austin-based Jazz musician Dan Redner. As an active Music director, pianist, songwriter, and educator, Dan’s incredible, generous heart, talent and music continues to touch so many lives; especially during the pandemic.

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Next is an introspective share from a longtime friend and hotelier who speaks to us from her home in Uruguay. Throughout the pandemic, Laura has been a captive audience to nature’s play of seasons – I’ve lived vicariously through her brilliant daily photo journal – curating nature, and the 2 and four legged fellow travelers - enshrined in verdant landscapes. daily bike treks in the surrounding area became the through-line of her life in the off season. Opening the hotel back up brings surprising questions and insights…Here’s Laura:
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I wish to thank my listeners, and story-tellers. I hope this episode inspires you to become a contributor on this podcast. Send your voice, your story because it matters, and you need to be heard.
This podcast moves in my life as a constant challenge to go deeper, look more closely – Episode 5’s theme, in particular, has sent me careening into more questions than ever. It started with the question: “Does it matter?” Does my work matter to anyone other than me, and a few close people. Is what I do and how I do it Essential? What’s my creative work’s tangible value? I know every artist has these seasons of doubt, but…. this is different. The next part of this wave of painful questions came when I began reading : “So you want to talk about Race” by
Ieoma Oluo. It’s demanding that I pay a deeper kind of attention; turn toward and into the ache of uncomfortable, and sometimes painful new questions, new spaces. If I haven’t been consciously part of the solution,