In this episode of Open Heart, Priya Rao, MD sits down with Fran Bell, an intuitive healer and former competitive athlete whose work bridges physical injury, lived experience, and forms of knowing that don’t fit neatly inside conventional systems. Together, they explore what it means to trust intuition in a world that asks for proof, and how healing often begins before we have language for it. In this conversation, they explore:

■ How a childhood injury disrupted Fran’s life and quietly reshaped how she understood the body and healing
■ What intuition actually feels like in lived experience, not as a concept or belief
■ How people are trained out of sensing and into over-reliance on cognition and control
■ Why many capable, rational people struggle to trust what they feel if it can’t be measured
■ The tension between evidence-based medicine and forms of healing that require participation rather than certainty
■ How physical symptoms, emotional patterns, and life direction often intersect
■ What integration can look like when medicine and intuition are allowed to work side by side
■ Why healing does not always mean “feeling better,” and how meaning, purpose, and wholeness can show up in unexpected ways

Fran Bell works with people whose symptoms, pain, or sense of disconnection have not been fully explained by conventional approaches alone. Her perspective is grounded in lived experience with injury, athletics, and years of working directly with the body. In this conversation, she offers language for experiences many people sense but hesitate to trust, especially when those experiences fall outside familiar systems of validation.

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