Last week, we explored what research is revealing about the mind–body connection—and how science is beginning to build a bridge toward contemplative practice and lived experience.

This week, we step into the experience itself. In this episode, Holly is joined by Marc Noël, a Belgium-based artist, therapist, and creator of Quantum Paintings, whose work sits at the intersection of energy, consciousness, and art.

Marc's paintings may be analyzed or interpreted—but ultimately, they are meant to be felt. Created through intentional presence and infused with chi, his work invites a direct, embodied experience of awareness that many describe as grounding, calming, and deeply familiar.

Working intuitively with energy and intention, Marc draws from an early understanding of presence and awareness that has been familiar to him since childhood. Also returning to the conversation is Ann Van de Winckel, PhD, founder and Director of the Brain–Body–Mind Lab at the University of Minnesota.

If you listened to last week's episode, you know that Ann is conducting research in NeuroArts and body awareness that draws directly from Marc Noël's quantum paintings—helping bridge lived experience with emerging scientific inquiry. Together, they explore how art can act as a doorway into felt experience—supporting regulation, restoring connection to the body, and offering access to states of clarity that are often difficult to reach through cognition alone.

Through Marc's creative work and Ann's research, embodied experience and scientific inquiry meet, inviting the analytical mind to soften as awareness is seen, felt, and experienced directly. This conversation moves beyond explanation and into experience. It invites listeners to consider how awareness can be felt, how healing can emerge through presence, and how art may help make the invisible visible—within the body, the mind, and the human experience itself.

In the last two episodes of Pay Attention, we explored why doing more isn't the answer—and why deeply ingrained habits can't be changed through intellectual insight or thinking alone.

So what does create real change?

In this episode, Holly McNeill is joined by somatic psychotherapist Maira Holzmann for a grounded conversation about what happens when awareness moves beyond thought and includes the body.

Together, they explore how trauma lives in the nervous system, and how insight and clarity can be supported on the path to healing through body-based approaches.

The conversation looks at how expanding awareness to include sensation, regulation, and the lived experience of the body—through practices such as somatic therapy and carefully supported psychedelic work—can help interrupt survival patterns and open the door to integration and change.

Rather than positioning psychedelics as a solution, this episode places them in proper context: as one possible support for deepening awareness when used with intention, preparation, and integration.

This episode is about remembering—not fixing. About embodiment, not effort. And about what becomes possible when awareness includes the whole system, not just the thinking mind.