Shows / Embodied
Embodied
Dig into the underdiscussed corners of the human experience. Each week, host Anita Rao leads intimate conversations with people unafraid to question what we think we know about identity, relationships and health.
Follow the show on Instagram at @embodiedwunc and on Bluesky at embodiedwunc.bsky.social. You can find Anita on Bluesky at asrao.bsky.social.
Episodes
EmbodiedCo-Worked: The Good, Bad & Ambivalent Of The Office Bestie (Revisited)
Anita wouldn't have made it through her 20s without her work friends. But now that she's a manager and working in a hybrid office, she's noticed that work…
EmbodiedUncoupled: Thank U, Next (Revisited)
Anita has no qualms about being an armchair therapist for friends going through a breakup. But sometimes she wonders how her advice aligns with what…
EmbodiedHooked Up: The Myth Of Sex With No Strings Attached (Revisited)
Anita is confused about hook up culture. Is it a thing, and if so, who makes the rules? She talks to a recent college grad about her research on the sex lives…
EmbodiedMixed (Parent Edition): The Rao Family Talks Racial Identity
Anita invites her parents back to Embodied for a special bonus episode. She hears their take on our recent episode "Mixed," about growing up biracial. Then she…
EmbodiedPolished: Why We Care About Our Nails
Anita's nail habit has evolved in the past decade from $10 drop-in manicures to 90 minute appointments with a nail artist. That artist joins her for a…
EmbodiedMixed: Owning Your Multiracial Story
When Anita moved away to college, she experienced a big shift in her biracial identity. Turns out that the questions that emerged for her are ones that many…
EmbodiedPartnered: Mixing Business With Pleasure (Revisited)
Anita does not work with her boo, but after sharing home office space for two pandemic years, she's started to wonder how couples who *do* work together make…
EmbodiedSexted: Authoring Your Own Erotica
Anita is a bashful sexter, and she's ready to get over her insecurities. A pleasure enthusiast advises her on the art of a good sext; a sexting expert traces…
EmbodiedIntentioned: Parenting Ourselves And Our Kids
Guest host Omisade Burney-Scott is well aware that gentle parenting is a divisive concept. So she's gets into it! Omi talks with two other Black mothers about…
EmbodiedIsolated: The Silence Around Male Infertility
Male fertility issues make up half of all infertility cases … but you’d never know it from consuming fertility content through culture, media and even…
EmbodiedDistracted: Adulting With ADHD
Anita passes the mic to our friends at the feminist documentary podcast "Bodies" for an exploration of ADHD and identity. Producer Hannah Harris Green talks…
EmbodiedUnpartnered: Building A Full, Single Life
A growing number of American adults have the same feeling about romantic partnerships: They don’t want one. Anita meets three people who have chosen…
EmbodiedSmooched: Why You'll Never Forget Your First Kiss
Anita's highly-anticipated (and highly-awkward) first kiss was in eighth grade … but she remembers it like it was yesterday! A scientist tells her why our…
EmbodiedSobbed: Why We Cry
Anita usually feels better after a good, long cry. But why is that? She explores that question with a poet who spent years diving deeply into the science and…
EmbodiedDelivered (Part Two): No More Postpartum Silence (Revisited)
Anita treasures sleep and moments of silence. So when she hears typical narratives of early parenthood that include unending cries and restless nights, she has…
EmbodiedDelivered (Part One): Supporting A Post-Baby Body (Revisited)
Anita has been around enough postpartum folks to know that there's a whole lot they felt unprepared for when it came to how their physical bodies would…
EmbodiedObsessed: Breaking The OCD Cycle
Anita is no stranger to anxiety, but her spirals are mostly short lived. In this episode she meets folks who often get caught in loops of extreme worry and…
Embodied(Un)Circumcised: How Parents Decide
It's a small procedure, but a big question. Anita talks with a urologist about what medical advice to consider while making the circumcision decision (and…
EmbodiedDecided: Child-Free By Choice
Anita has interrogated so many aspects of parenthood. But how about the decision to become a parent at all? She talks with three women about making their…
EmbodiedScented: Life According To Your Nose (Revisited)
Anita sniffs out what's so fascinating about the science of smell — and gets her mind blown. A psychologist shares why smell is our most emotional sense, plus…
EmbodiedStuttered: Diversifying The Way We Speak
Stuttering occurs in every culture with a spoken language. So why do many communities treat it as a source of shame? Two speech-language pathologists and a…
EmbodiedNaked: No Clothes, No Problem (Revisited)
Anita learns about non-sexual, social nudity and why opting to live life mostly in the nude could actually make her think about her body LESS. [This episode…
EmbodiedStimulated: How Vibrators Became America's Favorite Sex Toy
True or false? Victorian doctors invented the vibrator to cure women's "hysteria" by bringing them to sexual climax. The answer may surprise you...as it did…
EmbodiedSingled: Inside The Only-Child Family
Anita has many close friends who defy all stereotypes about only children. But when it comes to thinking about having her own kids, she still can't shake some…
EmbodiedDreamed: Inside Your Night Brain (Revisited)
The name Embodied came to Anita in a dream, and she's on a quest to figure out how that happened. She talks to a dreamworker about strengthening the bridge…
EmbodiedCommodified: When 'Wellness' Makes Us Unwell
Anita has fallen down her fair share of wellness rabbit holes [including a certain alliterative family's beauty and shapewear brands...]. Wellness industry…
EmbodiedSlayed: Gender Performance Beyond The Binary
After not seeing a drag show for the first 30 years of her life, Anita now dives in. She explores the history and evolution of the artform with a drag…
EmbodiedSeparated: Growing Up With An Incarcerated Father
Anita reconnects with the woman who changed her thinking on incarceration: her beloved college thesis adviser Ashley Lucas. Ashley reflects on her father's…
EmbodiedAmplified: Building Intimacy With Hearing Loss
Anita and her partner John have started talking more openly about how his hearing loss informs their relationship and how they'll continue to navigate that as…
EmbodiedRefused: When You're Too Fat For Top Surgery
Last October Anita got an e-mail that piqued her curiosity: a story pitch about how anti-fat bias affects people seeking gender-affirming surgery. She hands…
EmbodiedHypersexualized: Understanding Sex Addiction
Anita learned in the early days of this show that there's no such thing as "normal" sexual behavior. But what *is* worth considering: how your relationship…
EmbodiedSobered: Reexamining Your Relationship With Alcohol
Anita has not participated in a Dry January, but there are times when she's motivated to pay extra-close attention to her relationship with alcohol. Most…
EmbodiedInherited: Healing From Generational Trauma
Anita has been unpacking intergenerational trauma ... thanks, in part, to Hollywood. Seeing herself in movies like "Turning Red" and "Everything Everywhere All…
EmbodiedPurified: A Live Event Turned Podcast (Part Two)
Anita is a sucker for live storytelling, so when she and the Embodied team planned their first in-person event, they knew the vibe they were going for. They…
EmbodiedPurified: A Live Event Turned Podcast (Part One)
Anita met Embodied listeners IRL for the first time earlier this year at the show's first in-person event "Purified." The evening was part late night talk show…
EmbodiedNavigated: The Rao Sisters On Holiday Conversations
Anita has a lot of practice talking about taboo topics with strangers. But when it comes to having these conversations in her own family, especially around the…
EmbodiedCo-Worked: The Good, Bad & Ambivalent Of The Office Bestie
Anita wouldn't have made it through her 20s without her work friends. But now that she's a manager and working in a hybrid office, she's noticed that work…
EmbodiedInvolved: A Front-Row Seat To Your Parent’s Love Life
Anita has not lived with her parents since leaving for college. But during the pandemic, many Millennials and Gen Zers returned home. For some of them…
EmbodiedPosed: Intimate Photography Goes Beyond Nudes
Anita hasn't always loved getting her photo taken, but seeing herself through the artistic eye of a close friend and photographer has changed her perspective…
EmbodiedPlucked: The Calm And Chaos of A Hair-Pulling Disorder
Anita agrees to a suggestion posed by a listener: Explore why the hair-pulling disorder trichotillomania is so taboo. She talks with an artist who started…
EmbodiedValued: Unpacking Your Money Baggage
Anita is getting married next year, which means she's been thinking a lot about money and what kind of spending aligns with her values. Turns out that her…
EmbodiedProvided: A Gender-Inclusive Guide To Pelvic PT
The first time we did an episode about the pelvic floor, Anita learned that y'all needed that education just as much as she did. She revisits the topic with a…
EmbodiedCarried: How Surrogacy Grows Families
Anita is well aware that bringing a new baby into the world is a lotttttt of work (even though she's never done it herself). But when she heard about friends…
EmbodiedDisobeyed: Elissa Wall’s Journey To Reclaim Her Body
After Anita watched the Netflix docuseries "Keep Sweet," it was on her mind for weeks. She sat down with Elissa Wall, one of the central figures in the series…
EmbodiedHorrified: Joy, Memory & The Body In Black Horror
For most of guest host Omisade Burney-Scott's life, she was a reluctant viewer of horror films — squinting through her fingers long enough to get to the…
EmbodiedSupported: The Stories Behind Our Bras
Anita pretty much stopped wearing bras in the pandemic, and she's likely not going back. But she knows that for many, a good bra is clutch for daily comfort…
EmbodiedSecured: Health Data In A Post-Roe World
Anita has long taken a laissez-faire approach to digital security. But as she's learned (the hard way), just because she doesn't have something to hide…
EmbodiedFeminized: Aligning Your Inner And Outer Selves
Anita revisits a conversation with folks who've undergone facial feminization surgery as part of their gender confirmation process. FFS is a set of bone and…
EmbodiedDestined: Using The Stars As A Guide
Guest host Omisade Burney-Scott is a proud Aries Sun-Leo moon-Virgo rising and has been looking to the stars since the ‘70s. She and her best friend of over 50…
EmbodiedInvested: When It Gets Uncomfortable With Family
Anita shares an episode of “This Is Uncomfortable,” a podcast from Marketplace that explores the ways money messes with our relationships and life plans…
EmbodiedRenounced: Leaving A Religious Community
Anita grew up betwixt and between two religious communities and never felt like she fully belonged to either. The upside? She had a lot of room to figure…
EmbodiedUndaunted: How Abortion Doulas Support You
Before recording this episode, Anita would have turned to Google for her burning questions about abortion. But now, she knows better. She meets two abortion…
EmbodiedAged Out: Life After Foster Care
Anita had a terrible 18th birthday (she'll tell you later), but not much changed for her when she legally became an adult. For tens of thousands of young folks…
EmbodiedRemembered: How To Grieve An Animal Loved One
Anita is a dog mom. Her wire-haired, bearded terrier Oliver has been her companion through heartbreak, job changes and pandemic turmoil. She's never going to…
EmbodiedNeurodiversified: New Representation In Romance Novels
Anita's idea of relaxation often involves a good book. She's begun exploring the vast world of romance novels and was surprised to learn how much more diverse…
EmbodiedPartnered: Mixing Business With Pleasure
Anita does not work with her boo, but after sharing home office space for two pandemic years, she's started to wonder how couples who *do* work together make…
EmbodiedSobered: Reexamining Your Relationship With Alcohol
Anita has not participated in a Dry January, but there are times when she's motivated to pay extra-close attention to her relationship with alcohol. Most…
EmbodiedOverturned: Accessing Abortion Care In A Southern State Where You Still Can
Anita's now living in one of the few places in the U.S. South without an abortion ban. As her home state becomes the nearest safe provider for millions of…
EmbodiedCaffeinated: The Science & Culture Of Your Coffee Habit
Anita comes from a tea-drinking family, but she's happiest when she's holding a mug of coffee the size of her face. For years, she's been reading headlines…
EmbodiedDelivered (Part Two): No More Postpartum Silence
Anita treasures sleep and moments of silence. So when she hears typical narratives of early parenthood that include unending cries and restless nights, she has…