Terry Gaspard is a licensed couples therapist, college professor, and the coauthor of Daughters of Divorce. She has teamed with Sounds True to publish The Remarriage Manual: How to Make Everything Work Better the Second Time Around. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Terry about the sometimes surprising factors that go into a healthy long-term relationship. Citing years of experience counseling couples, Terry explains that physical chemistry is less important to the life span of a relationship than you might think. Tami and Terry explore how to healthily navigate relationship conflict and the steps you can take to ensure open communication of emotional needs. They talk about healing after a relationship ends and how to evaluate whether you’re ready to enter another long-term partnership. Finally, Terry and Tami discuss the stress of being a stepparent and the resilience needed to weather fresh relationship challenges. (64 minutes)
You feel special. Sometimes this feels like a curse. Like no one will understand you. Ever. Like you will always be an alien walking among regular humans, pretending to blend in. You have learned to live with this gulf, but what you really crave is community. You long to belong to the human family. To Mother Earth.
Participating in the human condition can be bewildering. It is just not always cozy and easy—rather, it’s humbling at best, downright humiliating when it is not flowing. It can seem so much simpler to ride solo, slaying your own dragons and singing the ballads you wrote about yourself. Collaboration can be tedious, and the prevailing masculine value system may have conditioned you to feel like you are giving away your power when you share it with others.
So what? Give it away. The time of the singular sage bestowing his unique wisdom is over. That was a method devised by the men in charge who sought to regulate wisdom. They taught us to suffer alone in the desert for forty years, collecting our insights in a secret box called “Esoteric Knowledge.” Then, we were supposed to dispense those insights stingily to those who proved themselves worthy by also suffering alone for the requisite forty years in the desert.
It turns out that the world is filled with special beings, grappling our way through the anxiety of solitary conundrums and tasting the occasional reprieve of connection. When you realize this, your body lets out its breath and relaxes. The curse lifts. You come in from the cold. You hold out your cup, and some other special being fills it with sweet, milky tea spiced with fragrant herbs. You drink.
Our way, the way of the feminine, is to find out what everyone is good at and praise them for it and get them to teach it to one another. Maybe you know something about the hidden meaning of the Hebrew letters, or how to build a sustainable home from recycled tires and rammed soil, or loving-kindness meditation. You, the one who knows the Islamic call to prayer, climb this minaret and call us all to prayer. You, the one who knows how to sit quietly at the bedside of the dying, show us the way to bear witness. You, the one who knows how to get us to wake up to the shadow of privilege, please wake us the #*#@ up. It will be chaotic, all this community building, but your cooperation will save the world.
Lama Tsultrim Allione is an internationally known Buddhist teacher and the founder of Tara Mandala, a mountain retreat center south of Pagosa Springs, Colorado. Lama Tsultrim was the first American woman to be ordained as a Tibetan nun by His Holiness, the 16th Karmapa. After four years as a nun, she returned her monastic vows, married, and raised three children. She is the author of several books, including Women of Wisdom, Wisdom Rising, and Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict. With Sounds True, she has released a new 10-part audio series called The Empowered Feminine: Meditating with the Dakini Mandala. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, we explore the dakini principle in Tibetan Buddhism, and Lama Tsultrim takes us into a meditation that invites us to actually become wrathful dakinis—transforming anger into wisdom and compassion. Tami Simon and Lama Tsultrim also discuss the role of the feminine in the dharma, how Buddhism might be different if it had been articulated by and for women, and why the “fierce and forceful” aspect of the feminine is so urgently needed in our world right now.
We live in a world full of deadlines. Alarms. Screaming kids. Nagging bosses. More on our to-do lists than we could accomplish in three lifetimes. It’s easy for your needs to get buried underneath the rubble of daily life, and figuring out how to reconnect with your authentic self can feel touch and go… at best.
I wrote Needy: How to Advocate for Your Needs and Claim Your Sovereignty to lovingly provide the space for you to better understand your needs, experiment with new habits that help you meet those needs each day, and build a resilient connection with yourself that you can rely upon for good.
You have needs—your needs matter. And yet, you’ve been taught that pushing your needs to the back burner is the only way to get things done, that your needs are an overwhelming burden, or that self-care is a luxury you can’t afford. But the presence of your needs is a fact and not a flaw. You can reclaim your energy and give yourself permission to take up space in the center of your own life.
In Needy, I share my unique approach to identifying, honoring, and advocating for the most tender and true parts of yourself that yearn to be acknowledged. It is an invitation to embody self-acceptance, which leads to meaningful growth in self-responsibility, self-care, self-trust, and self-love.
This book will be a delicious companion for your journey, but you actually can begin caring for yourself with greater tenderness and open communication right now.
I invite you to take the next three minutes to check in with yourself.
Put down your phone, close your computer, and put your hand on your heart.
Breath deeply into your belly and ask yourself:
How do I feel?
What do I need?
What does my body need from me?
What is ONE, doable need that I am ready, able, and willing to meet?
Real self-care is responsive, not prescriptive. The care you are aching for right now will be found in asking yourself those four questions. Give yourself permission to start with one, tangible action.
And repeat as necessary.
Need more? I will see you between the pages of Needy. I am so grateful to be able to share this book with you, and I hope you will share it with the humans in your life who struggle to take up space in this way.
xx Mara
Mara Glatzel, MSW, (she/her) is an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host. She is a needy human who helps other needy humans stop abandoning themselves and start reclaiming their humanity through embracing their needs and honoring their natural energy cycles. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it, and she is here to help you believe in yourself as much as she believes in you. Find out more at maraglatzel.com.
Bruce Tift has been a psychotherapist since 1979, a practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism for more than 35 years, and has taught at Naropa University for 25 years. He is the author of the Sounds True audio learning course Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Bruce about his perspectives on therapy as informed by Buddhist insights—examining how our “neurotic organization” exists to insulate us from legitimate suffering, why much of our growth comes from acting in ways that are counter-instinctual, and what it might mean to practice psychotherapy with the view that there is no problem we actually need to solve. (66 minutes)
Caroline Myss is a bestselling author, medical intuitive, and leading voice in the fields of energy medicine, human potential, and spiritual exploration. Together with author Andrew Harvey, Caroline has partnered with Sounds True to create The Shadow Course: An Eight-Week Journey to Know Yourself and Bring Light to the World. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Caroline about this upcoming online course and how it guides participants in a deep exploration of the aspects of themselves that they have disowned or denied. They discuss the ways that Shadow issues such as greed, entitlement, envy, and self-absorption show up in everyday life and can even manifest as symptoms of physical illness. Finally, Caroline explains how bringing awareness to our personal Shadows is the first step in initiating deeply needed social changes for our world. (72 minutes)
