All of life’s experiences are manifestations of energy at one level or another. By viewing challenges as energy, you can learn to channel them in a constructive manner. To do this, you must practice allowing uncomfortable energies to flow instead of suppressing or resisting them. Through methods like mindfulness, meditation, and conscious self-reflection, you can release past energy blockages and stop creating new ones. Ultimately, this process leads to spiritual growth, inner peace, and the ability to live passionately and positively in the present moment.
Have dreams become a kind of endangered species? When a third of adults report an inability to recall their dreams, this may very well be the case. Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano has a new book to shift the tides and help readers reclaim the vast wisdom and power awaiting our discovery in the world of our dreams.
In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with the host of This Jungian Life and author of the new book Dream Wise. Enjoy this inspiring conversation about falling in love with dreaming; simple ways to boost dream recall; meeting the dream maker, the creator of your dreams; why even your worst nightmare may not really be a “bad dream”; the practice of dream incubation; curiosity and humility: two essentials for interpreting dreams; paying attention to the emotions in your dreams; fear in dreams, and what it might represent; receiving constructive criticism from the dream maker; Jung and the concept of the Self; working on your dreams in the context of community; a case study: the dream of the gold watch; the dream ego; the practice of active imagination; and more.
Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
We live on an extraordinarily amazing planet compared to any others we have seen. Yet, despite this, we are prone to complaining on a daily basis. Personal dissatisfaction arises from judging and resisting reality and suppressing past emotional pain. This creates the buildup of lifelong inner blockages that cause even more suffering and dissatisfaction. By releasing these blockages and transcending the limitations of the personal mind, we can achieve spiritual growth and experience true contentment and joy.
It’s been half my life—literally half the years of my life—lifting my chin for pictures, anticipating the critical gaze of a digital audience, offering my presence half-heartedly to the world around me to to draft a clever caption, choose a flattering filter, and watch as my phone tells me if this time my work will be rewarded with worthiness.
Too many nights avoiding myself, letting the blue-light-lullaby of my screen become a substitute for true soothing. It’s been half my life; holding up the mirror of comparison to everyone’s best days and hottest takes, highlight reels curated with effortless nonchalance, and now the mirror of comparison to a perfected self made in the algorithm’s image. It’s been half my life of fractured attention, commodified vulnerability, fury, and fear taking turns with despondence.
What if my real life stopped being my body or the land, and became the non-place I devote my hours to?
And it’s been half my life wandering daily into the galleries of artists’ and thinkers’ most beautiful ideas. Half my life keeping far-away loved ones close.
It’s true that the Internet gave me my career, my marriage. It made visible the threads of similarity across a quickly dividing globe. It showed me life-saving examples of people who survived what I needed to survive and it broke my heart open at the things no one should have to.
I like to misquote Carl Jung when he said something almost like “a paradox is our most valuable spiritual tool.” I’m not interested in finding the elusive, singular hack that will make screen time less alluring forever. I’m not interested in a lifetime of cycling through eras of detox and excess. Vacillating between the high of a new regimen and the crash of shame when social media works once again, exactly as it was designed.
I’m a therapist. I know that hacks can be tools, or bandaids. A self-help, step-by-step, sales pitch plan can feel like salvation, but it’s not the medicine of being in an evolving conversation with yourself. I am more interested in making art. I’m more interested in learning to tolerate the tension between social media’s danger and its magic. I’m more interested in learning to like myself, unsolved.
And when I’m learning the same lesson, again, the hard way, I know that my allies in finding safe passage through the digital age are art and writing. Creativity is how we imagine a different future.
So I wrote us this book. It’s a place to start that conversation with yourself about what is really happening between you and your screen; who profits from the ways it harms you, and how to protect the parts of it that are genuinely good, because parts of it are.
So if you are ready to join me—an art psychotherapist who both loves the life her phone enables and desperately needs to put it down—we’ll make some art. We’ll sit in the stunning and maddening paradox, and we’ll find creative ways to author our own definitions of real wellbeing when we choose to be on social media.
And together we’ll find the art of thriving online.
The modern workplace is a source of so much pain in so many peoples’ lives. And with the extreme challenges facing humanity, it’s easy to understand the gloom-and-doom perspective that has become prevalent today. Frederic Laloux sees things differently. “I look at it from a place of adventure,” he tells us. “If we don’t have a lens of ‘these are times that are confusing and difficult’ we can see them instead as extraordinary times for us to learn and to grow as individuals.”
In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with the renowned author of Reinventing Organizations about his life’s mission to transform our approach to business. Give a listen as Tami and Frederic discuss: becoming change makers at the systemic level; applying Ken Wilber’s Integral Model to the way we organize businesses; the “inner angle,” or the mindset and beliefs that we bring to any problem; societal leaps and the people who drive them; a polycrisis or a great adventure: how do you see it?; three cornerstones for the future of business: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose; creating fluid hierarchies at work; leadership that inspires and connects; the fundamental shift from predict and control to sense and respond (especially in these uncertain times); to budget or not to budget…; finding support and community during a “dark night of the soul”; bringing joy, pride, and courage to our social change activism; climate change and the concept of pluralistic ignorance; and more.
Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
There are certain experiences that are completely and utterly devastating, yet seemingly impossible to articulate and share. Grief educator and author Christina Rasmussen calls these our “invisible losses”—and they are often more perplexing and difficult to navigate than the overt tragedies we all endure in life. In this podcast, join Sounds True’s founder, Tami Simon, in conversation with Christina Rasmussen about her new book, Invisible Loss: Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief.
Filled with unique perspective and compassionate insight, this dialogue explores the place of uncertainty and stagnation known as “the waiting room”; the original self, and how we get disconnected from it; the impacts of an “us vs. them” experience; how to identify your primary invisible loss; three inner narrators—the survivor, the watcher, and the thriver; reclaiming our forgotten “thriver memories”; the cost of seeking approval; saying yes to what you’ve always wanted to do; cleansing our patterns of fear; the practice of mental stacking; the Life Reentry model; reframing our experiences and taking action from our wisdom; why the place of death is also the place of creation; and more.
