600 Podcasts and Counting...
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The Choice to Be an Artist at Work
Ari Weinzweig is the cofounder of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, which includes Zingerman’s Deli and more than a dozen other food-based businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has also published a series of books detailing his unique philosophies on leadership and transformation, titled A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach. With Sounds True, Ari is a featured presenter in the Inner MBA program. In this episode, Tami Simon speaks with Ari about his decision to forgo the franchise model and run his businesses from the heart—not unlike making art or writing poetry. They discuss the “visioning” process that Zingerman’s uses to grow in positive ways while staying true to their organizational roots. Ari also shares his personal recipe for transforming the beliefs that drive our behavior, both in business and in life.
Knowing the Connection with Those We Love Survives Dea...
Saje Dyer is a writer and speaker and the author of Good-bye, Bumps!: Talking to What’s Bugging You. She was a featured speaker in the 2014 Game Changer Global Summit. She is also the daughter of the bestselling author and teacher Dr. Wayne Dyer. In this podcast, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Saje about her new book, The Knowing: 11 Lessons to Understand the Quiet Urges of Your Soul (coauthored with her sister, Serena Dyer Pisoni). Tami and Saje discuss her relationship with her “famous dad,” the lessons she learned growing up in the Dyer family, signs that Wayne knew his time on earth was coming to an end, and Saje’s deep sense of the many ways her dad is still here with her.
Are You Feeling Connected Right Now?
Kristine Klussman, PhD, is a Harvard-trained positive health psychology researcher, clinician, and community organizer dedicated to helping individuals more effectively solve societal problems by emphasizing personal accountability and transformation. She is the founder of the Purpose Project (as well as its research arm, Connection Lab), a nonprofit think tank committed to the scientific research, exploration, education, and practice of authentic connection. In this podcast, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Klussman about her new book, Connection: How to Find the Life You’re Looking for in the Life You Have. Their conversation explores how we find meaning as we seek to live our best lives, a new approach to personal well-being known as “connection theory,” discovering meaning in the so-called mundane, the power of performing a “values inventory,” unpacking the concept of “purpose,” and much more.
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A Personal Message from Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush
Dying is the most important thing you do in your life. It’s the great frontier for every one of us. And loving is the art of living as a preparation for dying. Allowing ourselves to dissolve into the ocean of love is not just about leaving this body; it is also the route to Oneness and unity with our own inner being, the soul, while we are still here. If you know how to live and to love, you know how to die.
In this book, I talk about what I am learning about death and dying from others and from my getting closer to it. And I talk about what I have learned from being at the bedsides of friends who have died, including how to grieve and how to plan for your own death as a spiritual ceremony. I talk about our fear of death and ways to go beyond that fear so we can be identified with our spiritual selves and live more meaningful lives.
I invited my friend Mirabai Bush into a series of conversations. Mirabai and I share the bond of being together with our guru, Neem Karoli Baba, and over the years, we have taught and traveled and written together. I thought she’d be able to frame the conversations for you, the reader, and also draw in some of what I’ve said in the past about dying, while keeping my current words fresh and immediate. And I wanted to discuss her thoughts on dying as well.
From Mirabai Bush . . .
This is a book about loving and dying and friendship. It is a conversation between old friends, in which we talk about love and death in an intimate setting. I hope we’ve captured Ram Dass’s wisdom, expressed in a new way now that he is 86 and close to death himself.
“It’s about sadhana, spiritual practice, and I want both our voices to be in it,” he said. “I want it to be a conversation.”
“But I need to ask a basic question,” I said.
He nodded.
“Why are we writing this? Who are we writing it for?”
“I want to help readers get rid of their fear of death,” he answered. “So they can be,” a long pause, “identified with their spiritual selves and be ready to die. If you know how to live, you know how to die. This will be a link between my teachings about Maharaj-ji and about death. And people who are living who can see that they are dying each day, that each day is change and dying is the biggest change—it could help them live more meaningful lives.”
After a while, Ram Dass continued, “I’m also thinking about people whose loved one has died, who may live with grief, or guilt and regret, and I’m thinking about those beings who are sitting bedside with the dying . . . this could help them prepare for that role. And people who are dying, who could read this book to help prepare them for dying more consciously, more peacefully, being in the moment.”
Okay, I thought. This will be a good book to write. We’ll be exploring the edge of what we know.
From Ram Dass . . .
I have had aphasia since my stroke 20 years ago. Aphasia impairs a person’s ability to process language but does not affect intelligence. Sometimes I pause for long periods to find a word or figure out how to express a thought in just the right way. I like to say that the stroke gave me the gift of silence.
When I thought about the best way to write a book on dying while having aphasia, I knew it would be important to express these ideas and experiences clearly, subtly, truthfully. I realized that these days I have been expressing what I know best when I am in dialogue with another person—someone who is comfortable with silence and listens for new ideas as they arise. Why not create a book that way?
I like that this format for the book draws you into the room with us, into this conversation that we all need to have. I invite you to watch this video of us talking together, to give you a sense of how our conversations unfolded.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3Tq7kLnYqIs%3Fautoplay%3D1%26utm_source%3Dbronto%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_campaign%3DR180831-Dass-Bush%26utm_content%3DA%2BPersonal%2BMessage%2Bfrom%2BRam%2BDass%2Band%2BMirabai%2BBush
With love,
Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush
The Truth of Our Existence – with Pema Chödrön
Friends, we are very happy to be releasing this new collection of teachings from Pema Chödrön entitled The Truth of Our Existence: Four Teachings from the Buddha to Illuminate Your Life.
What would happen if we looked with fresh eyes at the struggles and “impossible situations” that we face every day—and found there four gifts that changed everything?
For decades, Pema Chödrön has brought clarity and heart to the core teachings of the Buddha, helping to make them relevant and useful in our everyday lives. With The Truth of Our Existence, she immerses us in one of Buddhism’s essential distillations of written wisdom known as The Four Marks of Existence. These marks that shape all of us, teaches Pema, are like forgotten gifts waiting to be found. And while they may ring familiar to some, they hold vast layers of often unrealized understanding to both new and seasoned ears alike.
Please enjoy a free video teaching from Pema on Embracing Intensity, a core teaching how we can turn towards even the most difficult experiences in our lives—and how these experiences can serve as the doorway to our awakening.
Resurrecting Jesus: Adyashanti on the True Meaning of ...
Until this spring, the last time I’d read the New Testament was a quarter-century ago, when I was in college studying comparative religion and literature. Back then, I spent all my time reading the mystics—not just the Christian mystics, but Sufis and kabbalists too. Though I loved the desert fathers and Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross, I eventually read less and less of the Christian mystics.
I didn’t grow up in a church-going family, so I didn’t have a lot of baggage around my personal experience of Christianity. Still, I had a problem with Jesus—or rather, all the things that the church had done in Jesus’ name. I couldn’t separate my feelings about the centuries of crusades and witch hunts, about the church’s institutionalized drive for worldly power, about the repression and small-mindedness of the Christian right, from my feeling about Christianity’s ‘founder’.
Christian theology got in my way, too; as someone with a mystical bent, I couldn’t accept that my own relationship with the divine required an intermediary, and the whole doctrine of the Trinity seemed needlessly complicated. Finally, on those few occasions when I did go to church, I found the Jesus portrayed in the pulpit to be simplistic, even insipid.
Yet, in spite of all these blocks to the predominant religion of my culture, I also sensed an immense transmission of love right at the core of Jesus’ teachings, prior to any of the trappings of doctrine and theology. I sensed it, but I couldn’t access it.
Then, a few years ago, I stumbled upon one of Adyashanti’s Christmas satsangs, and a whole new view of Jesus opened up for me. The Jesus he portrayed was a spiritual revolutionary, one whose life could be read as a map of the awakening journey. This view of Jesus didn’t so much resolve my earlier issues with “church Jesus” as render them pointless. After all, if there’s only one truth and it’s only found now, all historical perspectives are moot.
The more I listened, the deeper Adya’s message on Jesus resonated for me. When it came time to brainstorm new projects with Adya, I suggested that we ask if he’d be willing to teach on Jesus. As it turned out, he was already preparing for a weeklong retreat on that very topic, and was happy to take on these new projects. That was the genesis of Adya’s current online course—and upcoming book and audio program—Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic.
This spring, I traveled with Tami Simon and Hayden Peltier (one of our audio engineers) to record Adya at a studio in the mountains above Santa Cruz. I was excited to be part of the recording, but didn’t realize just what a profound impact listening to Adya talk about the Jesus story for four days would have on me. As those who have attended satsangs or intensives with Adyashanti already know, his presence is a teaching, and his talks carry a powerful transmission.
At the end of the recording, I found myself energized and excited to work on editing the video, audio and book projects that we’d captured. In the months since, I’ve read the gospels over and over—especially the Gospel of Mark, which is the primary text Adya refers to in Resurrecting Jesus. I see clearly now how the Jesus story maps out the journey of awakening. But for me, the most exciting aspect of the project has been discovering what a fantastic story Mark tells in his gospel. The Jesus who comes through in Mark—now that I’ve heard Adya’s take on the gospel’s deeper meanings—is engaged, compelling, and totally unexpected.
I know how many people have grown disillusioned with the Christian tradition, even as they seek deeper spiritual insight through other practices and traditions. My hope is that Resurrecting Jesus will invite others to reconnect—or connect for the first time—with the deep wisdom of the Jesus story.
