This Series Has Concluded…
For now, the interviews remain available to stream and download below.
They are also available on a USB flash drive, a PDF file, and as a three volume set both for Kindle and in paperback.
To learn more and purchase the series in any of these forms, please click the links above – thank you!
 |
Daphne Rose KingmaA leader in love and letting go explores her own romantic journey. “I want to be attached. I want more. I want longer. I want…” “Although being a pioneer about transforming the forms of relationships, my inclination for myself was to go back to a traditional form of relationship, a marriage.” “We are always healing and we are always vulnerable.” “The great romance must come to an end, does come to an end. The ending is built into the gorgeousness of the experience.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Reggie RayA Buddhist teacher and scholar discusses his hard-learned lessons of the body and the heart, as well what he’s gleaned from his own controversial teacher and the ways of indigenous spirituality. “With deep depression you see that the usual way in which you spend your time and the usual kind of pursuits that everybody engages in are fundamentally meaningless. They don’t deliver what we are hoping they will deliver.” “By not connecting the soma, the primary experience of life, we have actually lost the ability to even feel what the body knows.” “You develop a level of mindfulness through being sick that ordinary people don’t have and it becomes incredibly refined.” “We need to feel what it is like to be a mountain or an ocean or another person or an animal, and then we need to be able to act on that and translate that love in the way we go about things.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Daniel SiegelThe renowned psychiatrist and synthesizer of neuroscience and mindfulness shares from a deeply grieving heart following the recent passing of his father. “This has really been a period of deep refection and transition – sadness for my whole family and myself. And I debated whether to put off doing the interview. But I thought – you know if the topic that you’re exploring is about being present with what is – then I will be present with this experience. So that’s where I am.” “The last time I was with him, he said, ‘What’s going with me?’ And I told him he was dying, that his body was giving out, and it was getting ready to be the end. And so we sat there, I was holding his hand and I was experiencing sadness, but my observing self knew that all I could do in that unbelievably profound moment was just to be present with whatever was going in with me, whatever was going on in him, whatever was happening between us. I held his hand and it was this sense of clarity and strength and profound sadness and also a kind of – in a strange way – a celebration of life.” “I said, ‘Whatever your beliefs are, think of it this way: you’re going to the exact kind of place, very likely, where you were before you were conceived.’ And no patient has ever come to me frightened of where they were before they were conceived. And he looked very peaceful. And he said, ‘Thank you. That makes me feel comfortable.’” “Compassion is integration made visible.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Terry PattenThe founder of Integral Spiritual Practice takes a risky, brave, profound dive into his own shadow to gift us with the treasures found there. “Under the surface of everyone’s virtue is usually a submerged and utterly disowned Gollum who is the opposite of whatever that virtue is.” “A friendly relationship with shame, with your broken parts actually turns that thing you’re ashamed of not into a reason to be afraid of separation but a source of connection.” “I’m an asshole who is just trying his utmost to be loving, doing the very best imitation of an absolutely loving man I can possibly do.” “We are only fully open to healing to the degree that we let our heart break.” “We can relax, because everything that can be lost will be lost.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Tara BrachA meditation pioneer shares her powerful blend of emotional healing and spiritual awakening. “Whenever we have thoughts with any charge they are playing out in our bodies as a felt emotional sense.” “The life of an emotion is a couple of minutes. The reason we stay caught in emotions is that we keep charging them up with more and more thoughts.” “It is the trance of unworthiness for many of us that is the gateway to realizing the radiance and beauty of who we are.” “When I am in a rush my heart isn’t as responsive to myself and my world.” “There is a difference between having this very sincere aspiration to be who we are, to really come home, and this constant striving to be other than we are which really only feeds the ego self.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Caroline CaseyWhere more sober minds may fear to tread, this wild, spontaneous, passionate trickster engages and confronts us at the uneasy nexus of activism and Spirit. “If we’re not having fun, we’re just not serious enough.” “We can’t do anything by ourselves. We can’t even be who we want to be by ourselves.” “What’s going down is dominant, what’s coming up is collaboration, and then we just put the standards in place so that we don’t inadvertently serve empire or colonialism in our metaphors, our language or our story.” “Reacting is hot. The world is already too hot. We want to be agents of cool.” “I can get on my own high horse of harumphitude. Some of that comes from having been a person who has had a progressive, an activist aspect to my life for many, many years and even decades now. And often I hear about the next great thing and I realized, “Well, that was the next great thing 30 years ago.” But it’s not about having the next great thing thought up or available, but it’s about actually integrating it into the culture.” “The reason we don’t want to judge someone is that then we’re inviting the least evolved part of them to dance with the least evolve part of us and it’s just never pretty.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Isaac ShapiroA discussion about ordinary life when lived in a state nondual state of awareness; how everything gets included, even bad TV and dark chocolate. “The only human drama is not wanting the experience we are having.” “Whenever there is a movement to get rid of something or change it or fix it it actually becomes more solid because at the level of experience it is actually changing all the time.” “It seems that most of humanity lives their lives waiting for a better experience. When the attention gets finer there is a deeper noticing of where there is still subtle waiting.” “Stress diminishes our ability to pay attention.” “It feels like it’s a privilege that life has opened up like this. And that this exploration can just continue and deepen.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Tami SimonSeries co-presenter and founder of Sounds True steps out from her more usual role as interviewer to share with great candor about her own personal and spiritual journey. “My disappointment in spirituality came because I had believed that there was some type of Holy Grail that it would deliver. It would be my deliverance from all pain.” “How wonderful to be fluid and flexible. To be able to explore my ‘inferior functions’, the parts of me that are less developed instead of staying in my areas of strength, my ‘superior functions’.” “When I am in meditation I have this big open “knowing”. When interacting with others there is this wound in me that is easily triggered.” “I am happy to be insulted and to have my shadow pointed out to me by someone who loves me, by someone who sees my innocence and my goodness.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Harville Hendrix & Helen LaKelly HuntIn our only interview with a couple, the guiding lights behind Imago Therapy reveal their own rocky road, and even current struggles, to get the love they want. (Spoiler alert: Yes, they do use the Imago Dialogue process when one or the other is triggered.) “When you get triggered your lower brain goes off. With a structured process [like Imago Therapy] you move into the mid and upper brain and then can honor the space between you and your partner.” “I find myself moving against my resistance to approach my partner and reconnect because not doing so is so painful that I want out of it as soon as possible.” “When your partner feels unsafe and puts up their defenses, then you are not living with your partner, you live with their defenses.” “This is a spiritual discipline. You use your partner as a tool for your own spiritual strengthening and development.” “If you cannot grow your relationship and have your partner and you both thrive in relationship, you haven’t done your individual growth yet to the extent that you can.” “We are drawn into partnership with someone whose needs we cannot meet. We actually have to grow ourselves in order to meet those needs.” “You cannot learn to ski without a mountain.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Tama KievesDisarming and warm-hearted revelations from a teacher who uses her own foibles and vulnerabilities as the very basis of her offering. “I think that any time you’re going into your next evolution or your next sharing or exposure or expression of greatness, you face your own stuff. You’re inspired and you’re excited and then you’re freaked out. And so that’s what’s coming up for me – I’m starting to realize, wow, I’m freaked out again.” “The fears that come up for me are all the comparisons – you’re not normal, you’re not doing it right.” “Really, at the end of the day, what this work is really about and what it’s really for is my own healing.” “I’m going to put everything I have into it, I’m going to put the excellence in it, I’m going to put the trust in it, I’m going to go where my God leads me, my soul leads me, and I cannot determine what that looks like externally and that’s hard because, you know, I went to Harvard Law School!” “I used to rail against God, ‘Why can’t I have money?’ I waited tables for a while when I first left law and all these people would have like trust funds and I’d be thinking, ‘I’m doing something worthy in the world! Why can’t I have money?’ And then I came to believe that precisely because I didn’t have money, I was able to do this work.” “I think the path of a calling is going to take you into territories you never even dreamed of.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Mark MatousekA gifted practitioner of the spiritual memoir explores the connection between self-disclosure and awakening, and also casts a discerning eye upon the relationship between teachers and students. “It wasn’t until I started an inner journey which is prompted by a personal crisis that I really found my voice as a writer and my form as a memoirist because my work is all about asking questions.” “The deeper you go into spiritual practice, the less you know, and the same thing happens as a memoirist.” “When people read your story, they’re reading about themselves.” “Fiction is a lie that tells the truth.” “I think all good work has to have some element of the forbidden in it, and you can’t do that if you’re playing it safe.” “Once you determine that somebody is basically the real deal then you have to drop the perfectionism and remember that they are human beings.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Diane Musho HamiltonA leading light in the worlds of the Integral spirituality and American Zen shares provocatively on a wide array of topics including the use of power, 9/11, trauma, our “cosmic address”, aging, and sexuality. “A lot of times the student-teacher relationship is really predicated on entrusting someone to take you beyond the limits of what you now know to be yourself.” “As a teacher, am I able to maybe disclose and reflect on places where I’m extremely developed and places where I’m not so developed so that my students actually can make informed decisions about what they’re there to learn from me?” “Now in terms of my own blind spots, I’m very interested in power and how power is navigated…Growing up, as a child I was pretty. And the privilege that comes with being a pretty woman is something that you often take for granted. I’ve been given power because of those certain gifts that I sometimes don’t necessarily have to work for. So that I might be handed power because of those things and then not notice the privilege that has entitled me to that.” “People who’ve been traumatized sometimes have actually accessed the absolute more clearly than people who fall into the range of normal ego development. So sometimes they have very easy access through meditation to more absolute states of being, but they may have trouble integrating in the personal domain and within the personality precisely because of the same injury.” “Where we get in trouble is some of us want post-conventional privileges but we want conventional esteem.” “Human beings need attention the way a plant needs light. We don’t really talk about the fundamental need to be noticed. And to have other people recognize you.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Guy FinleyA proponent of fearless living explores the relationship between being and doing, and how every single moment, even those we most resist, offers the key to our greater realization. “Life is not about becoming a fearless person. It is about discovering that everything that frightens us serves a very distinct purpose in our transformation.” “The feel is real; the why is a lie” “A lot of the choices I’ve made were with tears falling down my chest not with chest held high and the chin up. I was kind of miserable in my majesty.” “We are all born with a sense that there is something missing and that we need to find and understand what it is. It is that divine dissatisfaction that draws the perfect mirror into our lives.” “I’ve come to see that life never says no. It says not yet and not the way you wanted perhaps, which is different than no.” “Awareness itself changes us, not what we do as a result of the awareness.” Listen Now:
Guy Finley would also like to offer a free Mp3 album called “Seven Steps To Oneness” to listeners of this interview. To learn more and retrieve your copy, visit: |
 |
Lama Surya DasThe beloved “Deli Lama” shares with incisive wit and humor about balancing East and West, his “Type A” personality, and how to dress for spiritual success. “Before I was different. Now I am the same.” “Most of what we think is wrong.” “I admit that I have no power over my thoughts and I need to rely on a higher power.” “If we are not here now we won’t be there then. There will be no heaven, there will be no peace and contentment.” “Man cannot live by spirituality alone. Take my word for it. I’ve tried.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Devaa Haley MitchellA facilitator of the Sacred Feminine shares earthy truth and honest revelation about being a woman of loving presence in our current society. “There’s this part of me that really longs for that deep mothering energy, that nurturing, holding space where I can be young, where I can be small and not have to take care of so many details.” “I was most of the time flat on my belly, laying there, other people are doing sound healing and all this magical stuff is going on for everyone else. But for me, flat on my stomach, just looking down into the grass. And I said, ‘You know, I really feel like all I can do is be a worm right now.’ ” “At a core level, there’s that question, I think, we ask as a little kid but it stays with us, which is, “Am I normal? Am I okay?” Or even deeper than that, “Am I lovable?” fully, with all of this beauty and all of this history and all of these scars and battle wounds.” “It’s more of a struggle for me to really reconnect to that part that is the Radiant Feminine, when I’m just running around, trying to get all these things done on my to-do list.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Mariana CaplanFierce and gentle compassion from one of our great guides to true spiritual integration. “I’m okay with having needs and wants but I understand that I don’t get them all and not in the timing that I would prefer.” “That’s where the practices come in. When my wants or needs aren’t being met I tune into my body and digest gently that discomfort and then still carry on with life.” “We all have pictures of how our lives should look. Even if we thought we were open and want the path to unfold, somewhere inside there was a picture of what we expected our lives to be like. Life is so rarely corresponding to our wish as exactly how we would like things to be.” “Somewhere along the way when you’re too tired for your age or illness or heartbreak or some significant obstacle lands in your path then we remember ‘The slow overcomes the fast, the soft overcomes the hard.’ “ “I drop into my body and feel as much of my totality as I can and then take care of what’s in front of me and just move forward.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Peter FennerAn incisive purveyor of non-dual awareness helps us re-think everyday assumptions about reality. “The path is slowly loosening the grip of being controlled by pleasure or pain, by what I like and what I don’t like.” “When we become more familiar with resting in the unconditioned, overall there is an expansion that happens, an expansion in terms of the connection and appreciation of our souls at the relative level.” “I feel so fortunate to be a beginner and to realize that it may be never ending.” “The ultimate or the unconditioned doesn’t have anything to say about anything.” “We don’t have to let go of any story. The ego, the I, does not get in the way of being here.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Marilyn SchlitzThe CEO of the Institute for Noetic Sciences shares with loving candor about work, family, and the trials of contemporary life. “It is confusing to be alive in this moment.” “I think any of us who are living with open minded skepticism, trying to make sense of all the things that are happening in the world right now are in a kind of challenging position.” “I was just in a conversation with one of our staff members the other day and they brought up the 100th monkey and I said, ‘You know, that’s kind of an urban folklore.’ And they were so sad. They were like, ‘Really?’ And I think that that’s part of it is there’s a way in which these metaphors are very comforting and it can be hurtful to us in our psyches when these ideas are dispelled.” “If new information comes in that supports that hypotheses, the learning center of the brain lights up and we take in that new information, we gobble it up. However, if new information comes in that refutes our hypotheses, the warning center of the brain lights up and we actually go into shutdown.” “I think that the takeaway for me for a lot of the work that I’ve done is forgiving ourselves when we haven’t done it perfectly.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Saniel BonderFounder of the International Waking Down in Mutuality movement brings humility, instinct and a full-bodied passion for life into the spiritual quest. “My sense is that God is waking down not into and not through but in some very mysterious ways as humanity and that there is an enlivening identification with our earthy nature that is now becoming more and more inclusive and seamlessly available along with the awakening and clarification of our consciousness, the expansion of our spirit, the sense of union with, deep communion with the divine.” “I’m going to be called at different moments to show up in ways that I wouldn’t have planned on or that might not be so comfortable for me.” “I sometimes refer to the process as not just divinely human realization but divinely human animal realization and there’s a learning how to harmonize with our instinctual nature and therefore to trust more and more deeply. Every person goes through this. It’s more and more of a trust in self, a trust in other in appropriate ways.” “Becoming your fullest and most authentic self is not something for which there is a preexisting manual.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Linda Groves BonderSaniel Bonder’s full partner in the White Hot Yoga of the Heart. “There was an emptiness I felt, a void, a sense of something missing. I was desparately trying to fill that space, to make it go away.” “A deeper part of my nature was screaming to be revealed.” “I was encouraged to go deep into my shadow material, deep into all sides of who I was. It was then that the doorways started to open.” “An individual can actually fall deeply into a broken zone or a pattern and “love” through it. You can embrace it and glean the teaching from it without being swept up in it.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Ram DassA beloved devotee of presence in its purest and most exalted form shares about illness, recovery, his past, and his life right now. “I don’t mind that my memory is shot… because I dwell in the present. And the past and the future are not on my screen at all. That means I can’t say, ‘Oh damn it! I use to play golf’ … or something like that … I don’t do any of that. That’s past. That’s somebody else. And this is me now.” “I live down in my heart and I know the Judge is in my mind.” “I have roles in the society… like being a wise old man… but I don’t have to take them seriously. And I think I can substitute for role, my soul.” “In relationships, truth is gold. I remember sitting in my mother’s hospital room when she was dying and… all the relatives and nurses and doctor came in and they were all speaking phony stuff. The doctor says, ‘You’re going to be all right. Wonderful, you’re going home.’ … and then go into the corridor they’d say, ‘She won’t live a week.’ For a person that’s going through a ceremony of dying and then being surrounded by lying – boy, it hurts me.” “I have my image of my father as very complex in my mind because in his lifetime he was an achiever, and then in his death I found him to be an angel, just a sweet, soft angel.” (There are some long pauses in the recording due to Ram Dass’s stroke. We chose not to edit them out because a) they’re real; and b) they allow us to slow down and “Be Here Now” just a little more fully.) Watch Now:
Listen Now:
|
 |
James O’DeaA world-renowned peacemaker looks within to find his own personal “hot spots.” “The greatest pain that I experienced in my life was the separation and divorce with my wife.“ “The universe required me to look into the nature of my wound in my own life. How did this wound insidiously attach itself to me even though I go about the world trying to promote the release of wounding?“ “Peace is an unfolding journey and it is not a set place.” “There is a state of inner peace and wholeness that we can locate but it is not complete unless it is also vibrating and resonating out into the peace for others.” “The work you do when you pull back and withdraw you’re doing for your parents, for the ancestral line, for all the karmic relations that have gathered within you.” “It becomes an illusion of consciousness when we separate the sacred over here and…attempt to protect it.” “So I say let the bitter be bitter and let the sweet be sweet until the bitter and the sweet become one.” “I can deal with the most unfathomable levels of pain and injury when it is confronting me, when I am standing in it’s presence. When it is lurking under the carpet in innuendos and won’t reveal itself then I find my power is incapacitated.” “It seems that I give my power away still. That is my growth edge in protecting myself.” Listen Now:
|
 |
James BarazInspiring introspection from a beloved teacher of mindfulness and joy. “Waking up is not so much about going from a certain state to another state. It is more of an evolution such that your radio dial becomes a receiver for more bands of information.” “The traumas that we go through are actually gifts that as we process them we are then able share with others.” “You cannot experience well-being while you are multitasking.” “A key component of awakening and joyis to get in touch with your pressured heart and to feel underneath the outrage and the anger or the fear or frustration of how crazy life is and discover a heart that really cares and really loves goodness and loves life and wants to support well being as much as possible.” “Being humbled every now and then is not a bad thing where you see your own reactivity.” “Understand that if someone is doing something that is upsetting to you it is not that they are doing it to you it is just that their internal reality is intersecting with your internal reality in a way that is not meeting your hopes and expectations.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Sally KemptonAn Integral leader with a rich spiritual history offers hard-won insight into the teacher-student relationship and the pitfalls of radical awakening. “My deepest experience of the inner journey, the spiritual path, is that everything is a spiral.” “I saw the wound, the self esteem wound had been untouched by the experience of the god-self.” “I see the spiritual journey as a climb. There are beautiful sunny meadows and then there’s the ice cave in a dark scrambling of rock, you have no idea of what is on the other side.” “When we think we’ve got it together in one area then suddenly something pops and we realize there is so much more to learn.” “The reason that you are drawn to a particular teacher is because in some way that part of you that’s wounded is hooked by that part of the teacher which is going to both heal and trigger the wound.” “It often feels like boots are trampling on your sensitive self. The student is responsible for healing the wounds that come with radical opening.” “Trust that the energy of the universe is present in even the most tangled confused situations and that the journey of life cannot be a failure.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Seane CornA passionate activist and yoga teacher to the starts works diligently to stay grounded, authentic, and in her true power “It’s my nature always to be more invested and interested in other people’s feelings. Even in basic conversations with my friends, if things get too close to me, I have a tendency of flipping it and start asking them questions. How are they doing? What’s going on in their life? And I do this very unconsciously.” “I have a tendency of bypassing vulnerability. . . so I have to work with people in my own life that hold me accountable so that I can tap into my own vulnerability, and so that I don’t shut down or disengage.” “I’m often very humbled by not only the people I meet but my own personal experience and how little I know and how arrogant I can be.” “Those big feelings will ultimately become the limited beliefs that will color the way that I communicate, and then therefore what I magnetize. And so, [my teacher] taught me how to do anger work, how to rinse the big feelings, how to process through the journal writing, how to get really good at the ugliness and to get unspiritual before I get to spiritual.” “She would always say, “You have to get to the ‘FU’ before you can get to the ‘bless u’.” “I’ll be dealing with my rage for the whole of my life, but my rage is also my passion.” “I’m so used to nurturing others that being nurtured in relationship in a whole another level is something that can be very scary but I’m willing and I’m available to it.” “I hope that if I ever buy my own hype, and I’m no longer being authentic, I hope someone comes and smacks me in the head and tells me to wake up because it’s never how I want to be in the world.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Sam KeenAn elder of the human potential movement still stokes the fire in his belly. “To change the inner part of a person, to change your soul, you also have to change the culture around you.” “I ask myself what unused futures do I have? What futures did you set aside early in your life? Go back to your past to find out what’s new for you.” “People who say they are way to busy to do this and do that are just lying to themselves.” “The trouble with a lot of the New Age movement is that it is just concentrated on how to make yourself feel better.” “I’m always working on that question: how to dwell in the presence of the sacred.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Brother David Steindl-RastA Christian mystic and gratitude pioneer offers a joyful vision that excludes no pain or sorrow. “Every moment, even the moment where you are confronted with things for which you cannot be grateful, offers you something to be grateful for and that is opportunity.” “But once in a while, something comes along the way that you can’t enjoy and then if you are in practice, then you ask yourself, “What’s this the opportunity for?” And it turns out to be often the opportunity to learn something.” “Love means saying yes to belonging. And not saying it with your mouth, but saying it with the way you live.” “You ought to love also your enemies but that doesn’t mean that they are no longer enemies because if they are no longer enemies, you couldn’t love your enemies. So you love them as your enemies. That means in your role, you are set up in such a way that you will be the enemy. If you stand up for something, you have enemies and if you don’t have enemies, you should ask yourself, “There must be something wrong. I am too wishy-washy.” “This is a big wedding. Everybody is mating with everybody and everybody is eating up everybody. The bugs are mating with another and eating up the plants, eating one another then come the birds eat the bugs. In the end, we are also part of that food chain, and in the end, we–– our body will also be eaten up.” “Gratefulness is the key to joy which is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Jay MichaelsonBlasts of incisive candor from a Jewish author, scholar, and LBGT advocate. “I am an eclecticist and I really feel nourished by that. There was a time in my life actually where I was really searching for a guru, like for the one teacher who was going to be my teacher and I know a lot of folks really feel that’s essential. But actually for me, giving that up was essential.” “There is a review of my book Everything is God titled “Is Jay Michaelson’s God Too Mushy?” Actually… I’m okay with a mushy God. I don’t think there’s been too many wars fought because people’s deities have been too mushy and not judgmental enough.” “Meditation doesn’t necessarily make you kinder unless you focus on kindness.” “I tend to work quickly and so I have to work on cultivating patience for people who don’t work quickly.” “A friend of mind once called me an intellectual drag queen which I’m perfectly happy to on.” “I don’t really believe in astrology, but I had my star chart done at one point a few years ago and it was––like it happens to all people who don’t believe in astrology– so eerily accurate…The astrologer said, “Well, I’ve looked at this for a long time. Basically who you are is you want to go off and be by yourself for a while and then come back and tell everyone about it.” “The Law of Attraction…does the exact opposite of what I’d like my spiritual practice to do, which is not about how can the universe meet my needs better or how can I arrange the conditions for my happiness. But how can I find the happiness that does not depend on conditions?” Listen Now:
|
 |
David RichoThe celebrated author of How to be an Adult in Relationships offers a candid assessment of his own stormy passage from reactivity to grace. “There is no such thing as conditional love. Conditional love simply means I have decided to keep my connection to you on the basis of how you please me or how you measure up to my criteria.” “I suddenly [had] the realization, “Oh, I was getting back at my mother through my wife. I was doing little retaliatory things to her, not because she deserve them, nobody does, but because I finally had a woman in my house that I could get back at. And so I saw suddenly that I was taking some old leftover hurts that came from a woman, the main woman in my life in my childhood and I was now taking them out on the new main woman in my life.” “My writing is part of my spiritual practice and so the topic that I’m working on becomes the work that I do on myself.” “The subject of my next book is the role of grace in our life. And of course, synchronicity, meaningful coincidences are the archetype of grace, grace being the assisting force that gives us wisdom and strength beyond what could be marshaled by our IQ or our ego.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Bruce TiftTough love and liberating clarity from a uniquely insightful and relationship therapist. “My commitment is actually not, first of all to my relationship, it’s actually, for me, personally, it’s more towards the experience of freedom, or open-heartedness.” “Healthy intimacy has to involve a tolerance of profoundly contradictory feelings about pretty much anything that’s important.” “I think I have seen too many situations where the therapist joins the client in their resistance, their fear, their young energy. You can spend really, really a long time waiting for that person to feel safe, so I prefer to sort of differentiate between feeling safe and being safe, so I try to always be a safe person, but I don’t try to generate a feeling of safety for the people I work with.” “It’s rare that I actually take my disturbance seriously, but I’m also committed to experiencing it, and I think it would be horrible to go into some fantasy of invulnerability, which unfortunately is floating around in the spiritual community sometimes.” “All of our young survival strategies…tend to co-create exactly what it is we initially were trying to defend against, so if I had to become independent as a defense against not having enough engagement, support from my parents which is what I think what my history was, then my very success at becoming independent confirms over and over again that there’s not anybody there for me, because I don’t put myself in a dependent position in order to receive support from others.” “I find that when I stay embodied at the sensation level with my worst fears, my most painful experience, I just find absolutely no evidence that my survival’s at risk.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Elizabeth Rabia RobertsChoosing to die, and live, in the face of inconceivable pain. “My teacher said, ‘Your nervous system can’t cope with the pain anymore.’ I simply was unable. So I told Elias and my daughter. I didn’t ask them. I said this is not your decision, this is mine, and I’ve made the decision, that within a year I would like to end my life if I hadn’t died by then.” “The world suffers and I think we make a mistake thinking that it is our happiness and our strength by which we help other people. It’s only often our own suffering and our vulnerability that also can give. And we don’t have to wait to know a lot. For me, it was just show up, be with who you are, learn to be with these people, and listen.” “And it got to that place where I couldn’t say it’s unbearable. I couldn’t say that to the world, to spirit, to myself anymore. It was just bad. And I struggled there because I had told everyone and I was embarrassed, I didn’t know how long this medication would last.” “I have spent a lifetime taking retreats within different religious traditions. I’ve worked, most recently, the last 10 years, in a non-dual tradition where you don’t talk about intention or purpose. You show up. And that’s a great teaching for me because that keeps me from thinking about my purpose or trying to make it something. But now I know, when I’m on it, as anyone does, you know when you’re aligned and you know when you’re not.” “Without a series like this where people are willing to ‘fess up, I think we pretend because we want it to be so, that there’s an end point. We’re human beings as long as we’re alive. We’re human beings. My grandson, the last five years, I’ve learned as much from him as from all my non-dual training.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Roger HousdenFierce and gentle heart wisdom from a celebrated purveyor of poetry. “Our lives unfold in ways that we cannot fathom beforehand. That condition of not knowing produces a sense of wonder and openness to what may come.” “The layers of who I take myself to be start to peel or reveal other layers and I realize that I am less and less sure of who I thought I was.” “What you think is going to be your best endeavor or most important piece of work that you give to the world turns out to be a dismal failure. It is a humbling process.” “I saw how all of us [are] desperate to place meaning on anything and everything that happens, where fundamentally something just happened.” “I shaped the whole experience into ‘This is the mate of my life and this is how we’re going to live our lives.’ And that’s not what happened. So that’s a humbling process.” “Having faith in life… includes having faith that all these apparent failures are part of an intelligent mosaic.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Thomas HublA galvanizing teacher of Transparent Communication turns his gaze inward “The past and the future are not outside of being, they are part of it.” “I am very much for a spiritual practice that will enable all of us to be present in that which always is anyway, and also be skilled in becoming because…There is a skill, which I call spiritual competency, in navigating reality and understanding how creation works, how life comes into form. The…Tao Te Ching says, “Bring things into order before they exist.”…I think we all need to make our life this practice.” “Before I was more into the place, ‘Okay. Things, if they happen, they happen. If they don’t happen, they don’t happen.’ [Now] I’m coming more and more to the place that sometimes [we]need profound, grounded, straight leadership.” “To agree to become a father was a process. It was not so easy. But now I see actually another side of it that is very different than what I could see before. I think that this is a part of me that couldn’t be touched in another way.” “I’m amazed by the maturity that I meet…When I look into [my baby daughter’s] eyes it feels like she gets everything that I say. There is a small child but there is somehow a much bigger being behind this that has an understanding” Listen Now:
|
 |
Milagros PhillipsCrucial lessons in race, culture, self-definition and healing from a remarkable teacher and activist. “I have been born into a racial cast as a black woman. I’m also Latina; I was born, and most of my formative years, in the Dominican Republic. And so I had a lot of experiences with race, but I had absorbed them and didn’t realize the impact that they were having on my life until way into my 30’s. But for me, this has been a journey of awakening, of understanding who I am, of understanding and trying to find my place in the world based on who I am rather than what the world has said I am, through this whole thing of racial casting.” “I think we’re each given an individual port to cast-off from and so mine happen to be race, where someone else’s might be alcoholism.” “She said to me, ‘Oh, you can’t be in the play because all the major parts are taken and the only parts that are left are parts for angels, and everyone knows there are no black angels.’ I didn’t realize how that impacted my life until I came to unravel it probably in my mid-30’s.” “One of the things I tell people in my workshop is that in countering racism is like someone taking a wooden dagger and stabbing you in the heart with it. And that the first time you get stabbed, you might pull it out right away. The second time you get stabbed, you just kind of go, ‘Oh, maybe I should just leave this be.’ By the third time, you just kind of leave the dagger there, thinking that, ‘If I just leave this here, then no one else can put another dagger in this particular place because there’s already one here.’ And what happens is as time goes by…flesh begins to grow around the dagger.” And so then we go around protecting the dagger, as opposed to taking it out.” “Who am I without the woundedness? Who am I without the oppression? Who am I without the pain?” “I don’t know that it’s possible to completely heal, but I do know that it is possible to become more whole.” “The best that I can do is to be conscious of where am I adding to the dysfunction and where can I pull my brick out of the wall of separation.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Elias AmidonSacred Sufi truths from a deeply kind and venerated lineage-holder. “When humans recognize God’s majesty, the response is awe. And when humans recognize God’s beauty, the response is intimacy.” “And so we’re trying to tread our way through and get more of the goodies and avoid the bad stuff. And that’s — you can never win that battle — I mean the pain and pleasure and joy and sadness — these are all mingled here. I don’t think anyone of us can escape that.” “I can easily feel blamed. And it could be then — if I’m not careful — that I blame first. Or I judge that blame, which is another form of blame, and I get into that whole mess.” “I find [myself] repeating again and again ‘Hey! You’re safe. We’re safe. No matter what, you are safe and always will be. And everything is alright forever and ever.’” “We can’t fall out of this presence that we are…this luminous aliveness…It doesn’t go anywhere…We don’t even die.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Kenny JohnsonFrom a life of crime and prison to a radical, unshakeable freedom. “As you become a criminal, you have to override feeling sorry for the person or victim. You justify by saying, ‘Well, I’ve got to make money. Nobody’s going to take care of me.’…Once you shut those systems down, pretty soon it becomes a normal way of life.” “I burst in and said, ‘Gangaji, Gangaji! It’s my understanding that we have to die before we can see God’s grace.’ She said, ‘Kenny, God’s grace is here now.’ That truth, that eternal truth, that God’s grace is here now — it was so hard. I just let go of everything. I just became totally silent, totally quiet. And the next thing I know, I was totally just sitting there being totally empty; devoid of any aspiration, devoid of any thought, just sitting there totally empty.” “In each human being there is a part, the light inside…that knows itself as God…It may be smoldering, simmering but it’s never really out.” “I find that when you’re speaking the Truth, it doesn’t really matter who you are. … And it doesn’t care about anything but connecting itself to itself.” “It’s all about waking up and being in love. Because once you have the awakening experience, you fall in love with life; you fall in love with nature; you fall in love with yourself. You just fall in love. So really, it’s a love story.” “I realize now, a lot of stuff I’m going through is a process. I have to just hang with it and not try to fix or get rid of it. Just, ‘Oh, this is a process that I’m going through. Okay, Im dealing with my integrity right now. Okay, cool!’ It might be a week, a month, or six years. I don’t know how long it will take me to deal with my integrity piece.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Bhikkhuni PannavatiA black Buddhist abbot in an all white community practices compassionate action. “I believe with all my heart that I can come up to the fullness of the measure of the stature of Jesus, and I want to know how to do that,” and it means I’m going to have to stop grovelling at the altar and I’m going to have to cultivate the qualities that he had. And where can I find instruction on how to do that? So the ideal was there in Christianity for me. Certainly the heart was there, but the instructions on how to get from A to Z, I could not find them. And so as I began to look at other spiritual disciplines.” “I don’t want to have a conversation really about race or about diversity. I want to have a conversation about human beings to human beings, exchanging self for others. And in that, we can move beyond color.” “It’s hard to be in the presence with somebody that’s free and stay bound. You’d only stay bound because you wanted to. But when you get in the presence of somebody free, you start feeling free yourself. You start looking at your own mental shackles and you start casting them off because you want that same freedom.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Paul CutrightA near-death experience vaults a renowned relationship teacher into a whole new phase of life “There was this whole psychological process that went on as well as the physical process. And one of the most surprising things was how I did not want to do the work that I’ve been doing with my wife and partner for the last 36 years. I didn’t want to do it anymore.” “All I really wanted to do was make art.” “What does this mean about the work, the business that we have devoted the last 36 years of our life to? We just . . . let that go?” “Authenticity…gives credence to anything that we might say as a teacher of any kind.” “I experience an intimate relationship between the breath and emotion. It is in relationship that we experience our deepest feelings of pain and hurt and disconnection and isolation and separation, and our deepest emotions of love and connection and transcendence and understanding and compassion.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Gail LarsenWhat do public speaking and spiritual transformation have to do with one another? “As Fritz Perls said, ‘Fear is excitement without the breath.’ And for those of us who are soft-spoken and never thought we’d be speakers, our bodies need more energy to be in front of the group.” “We all hold a piece, a strand of the web of life that requires that we step forward and claim what we know and believe. And if we don’t do it because we’re afraid, we’re missing an important piece of the puzzle that allows us to heal as a world, as a planet.” “Yes. It’s easy to be silent. And when we’re frightened and the personality says, “You know, just sit here and be comfortable. This isn’t a place to stretch,” I think only speaking from what our purpose is can move us beyond that comfort zone.” “The significant things that have shaped my direction have been the things that didn’t work well at all.” “…If you had just one minute to speak, what is it that you would say?…Put some energy into it and see how you feel.” “When we know our medicine and our message, it’s really going to simplify and amplify everything we do.” “We must practice extreme cherishment of our precious, worthy selves because we have to be firstly sustainable to do the work of change.” “The story for me for a very long time was I’m too old to start over.” “I think one of the things that happens is if we wait to get it right, either we don’t do it or it so lacks any authenticity, it’s so prettied-up that it doesn’t have any impact. . . . You know, scripting as opposed to being fully present and in our heart just doesn’t work.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Craig TaubmanA Jewish troubador approaches life with a unique artistic and ethical flair “Tzimtzum is the notion that you should contract, you should make yourself smaller and only by making yourself smaller do you give the room for other people to grow. You give room for nature to take over. If you were always bright, if you were always light, if you were always big, then there’s no room or need for anybody or anything else.” “What a great way to go through life or go through one’s work—to always try to reinvent one’s self. You wake up in the morning and you get dressed, you brush your teeth and things like that. That’s tradition. But how do you do it differently? How do you do it in such a way that new light is shed upon what you might not have seen an hour or a day or a week or a month or a year or a decade earlier?” “Unless I am a responsible business person, unless I am aware that other people are dependent on me and I depend on myself and take care of business, then I will not have the freedom to pursue the art.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Don Miguel Ruiz“We create our reality in the language that we learn. This language creates every single agreement and every single feedback which creates our beliefs of who we believe we are.” “I focused my attention on all of the stars and all of a sudden without words I just knew that my life had come from each of those stars. I knew that there was no time and no space. There was only one being and that being is alive.” “One of my biggest blind spots is about trusting.” “I practice living like it was the last day of my life but planning like I will live forever.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Howard MartinThe voice of Heartmath offers a dispatch from the frontier of consciousness “Because we live in a field of energy, the consciousness field is reflecting back to us not just what we think in our minds but especially what we feel in our heart.” “Most of what we feel we don’t notice.” “You have to slow down to see what you are actually feeling.” “One of the highest states of consciousness we can have as human beings would be the ability to feel what we want to feel when we want to feel it.” “Powerful activism is truly coming from that higher bandwidth of heart intelligence and not some squishy heart.” Listen Now:
|
 |
Panache DesaiA new, young voice in the arena of global spirituality shares his brash blend of depth, humor, performance and eternal wisdom “For me the shift has been navigating people out spirituality into authenticity. And that shift is leaving behind the concepts, leaving behind the empty promises, leaving behind the practices, leaving behind the ideas and the opinions or trying to follow somebody else’s path.” “The spiritual community is more judgmental than any other because your average person can only judge themselves in three dimensions. Your average spiritual person can judge themselves in sixteen.” “I really have to check in with myself, ask my wife, ask my mother, and certain people I trusted, very close and very near to me that know me very well so that they can point out what it is that I’m not seeing or what it is I’m not embracing.” “A lot of what’s occurring in spirituality triggers me. It actually used to make me very angry because first and foremost the whole guru paradigm is a patriarchal system and paradigm that doesn’t work. It allows for the partial empowerment of people but it doesn’t allow for the completion that’s available.” “The Law of Attraction is basically for people who don’t trust in themselves and God.” “You should really know yourselves, folks. Like if someone says to you, ‘You’re arrogant.’ Say, ‘Yeah, I am. But it’s only because I’m insecure. I don’t love myself and I feel like I’m not good enough.’ Know yourself that well. I always say to people, ‘Know yourself so well that nobody can ever offend you.’” Listen Now:
|
 |
Larry YangA meditation teacher with a special interest in serving multicultural communities takes our understanding of safety and inclusion to a whole new level Part 1: “We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.” “Until we turn our awareness towards how our differences can create difficulty, stress, even extreme injury, we won’t know how to change it.” “ One of the realizations that I had early on in Buddhist practice was when I started really exploring these identities that I had as a Chinese American, as a man, as a gay man, and I did this exercise of just listing all of these identity categories that I identified with and associated with and I realized that none of these words or even explications of these words could really fully describe who I am as a person, who I am as this living being.” Part 2: “There’s a differential in how we experience power and privilege…The playing field is not level. And part of our collective awareness practice is being aware not just of our own experience, but being aware of other people’s.” “Sometimes privilege is [like]a fish swimming in water; the fish isn’t really aware of the water until there’s an absence of it…But being aware of what you’re not aware of is a starting point.” “Sexism is not just the problem of women or racism is just not only the problem of people of color. These are issues that are issues for all people because if we’re really going to create the safety and the healing through these experiences, everyone needs to be involved.” “We just finished the two-year training of Dharma Teachers and Dharma Leaders at Spirit Rock and there were 95 people of which 33 were from communities of color and 29 were from LGBT, Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender populations. And this is a culturally shifting program because no program has ever trained more people of color or more communities from the LGBT group in one program ever.” “When you touch these places in our collective psyche and experience, they can feel very fiery and overwhelming…Freedom really is about going through, not around.” “None of those specific groups are the end of the path because there is something beyond…our cultural identification. And that piece…we can only begin to experience in the wholeness of our joys and our sorrows, our achievements and our wounds together.” Listen to Part 1 Now:
Listen to Part 2 Now:
|
