600 Podcasts and Counting...
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Most Recent
Ep 4: There Is No Future if We Go Numb
We recorded this conversation just after news broke of the Biden administration’s approval of the controversial Willow Project, opening up millions of wilderness acres in Alaska to new fossil fuel drilling. Jess captured in real time how Joanna processes the fresh outrage and sorrow of this insult to the planet from the very culpable powers that be. It’s a master class in being present with these feelings—feelings that can give rise to determination, courage, and recommitment to our shared purpose.
In this episode:
- As the news of the Willow Project breaks, Joanna flows through outrage and sorrow
- The second step on the spiral: what does it mean to honor our pain, and how do we do it?
- Bonus Exercise: Breathing Through
We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.
Rupert Spira: The Quiet Joy of Being
What is the treasure that we all seek? What is it that we are looking for above all else? Contemporary spiritual teacher and author Rupert Spira believes that it’s the feeling of sufficiency, of ease, of peace—or the realization of our innermost nature as being. In this podcast that is at once expansive and experiential, Tami Simon speaks with Rupert about his book You Are the Happiness You Seek and the insights he has gleaned through a lifetime of spiritual exploration and practice.
Tune in for a liberating conversation covering the practice of pausing or “going back to being”; letting go of resistance and turning toward our unhappiness; bringing a complete “yes” to your current experience; the inquiry, who is the one that’s experiencing?; the pure “I Am”; the original ADD: Awareness Deficit Disorder; the problem with the word “enlightenment”; recognizing the gaps between our thoughts and feelings; why what happens to the body doesn’t happen to our being; the absolute level and the relative level; the practical implications of deepening our recognition of being; love: the felt sense of our shared being; freedom from “the tyranny of ego”; 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.
Ep 3 Bonus: Lovingkindness Meditation
This bonus episode will support you to take the main insights from Episode 3, “We Begin with Gratitude,” deeper into your life.
In Episode 3, we talked about how in the Work That Reconnects we always start with gratitude, because it gives us the strength to speak the truth and act in service of life.
Lovingkindness meditation is a simple and powerful way to feel and express our gratitude and love for our world.
All you need to do this bonus exercise is a quiet place where you can meditate. We hope you’ll do this exercise with someone else, so that you can talk together about your experience after you finish.
We recommend starting a podcast club with friends or family to do these practices together. Links and assets to help prompt reflection and build community can be found with every episode on WeAreTheGreatTurning.com.
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Dilip Jeste, MD: Wiser, Faster
Dr. Dilip Jeste is a professor of psychiatry and neurosciences and the director of the Center for Healthy Aging at UC San Diego. He’s spent the last 20 years studying aspects of healthy aging and the neurobiological roots of wisdom. With Sounds True, Dr. Jeste has written a new book titled Wiser: The Scientific Roots of Wisdom, Compassion, and What Makes Us Good. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Jeste about wisdom—what it is, how we can cultivate more of it in our own lives, and how we can grow into a wiser society. They explore a new definition of wisdom that incorporates neurobiological and evolutionary components of what makes us wise, as well as the social and cultural ones we might be more familiar with. Dr. Jeste and Tami also discuss the future of wisdom, including the potential of a metaphorical “wisdom pill.” Finally, they speak on the importance of helping our society become wiser, faster.
Making the darkness conscious
Much is being said these days about spiritual awakening, and the causeless joy, clarity, and peace that are inevitable milestones of the inner journey. Not all that much is mentioned, however, about the disappointment of awakening, or of the ways it can break our hearts, cracking us open to the reality of the crucifixion, the resurrection, *and* the transfiguration we are likely to encounter along the way. In the full embrace of life—right inside the yucky, messy, shadowy nether regions of the heart—we are invited to meet the wholeness of what we are, which includes the dark *and* the light, the movement of separation *and* union, and the entirety of what it means to be an embodied human being.
As Carl Jung so poignantly reminds us, we do not become enlightened by “imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” He went on to say that the integral journey of the dark *and* the light is one that is often “disagreeable” and thus would never be popular. I believe Jung is offering very important guidance for us and the voyage of the heart in contemporary times.
The ancient path of love may never conform to our hopes, fears, dreams, and fantasies, for it is emerging in the here and now as an emissary of the unknown itself. Let us rest in the aching truth that one of the primary roles of the beloved is to seed deflation in the field of separation. Yes, awakening may always be a disappointment, from the perspective of egoic organization. In this sense, the journey is eternally hopeless, but it is in the creation of a home for our hopelessness—and allowing it to be illuminated within us—that we are finally able to step into a world beyond our wildest imagination.
As we journey together as fellow travelers, let us find a way to embrace both the joy *and* the heartbreak of spiritual awakening, and bear witness to the wisdom shining out of our immediate experience, whether it appears as sadness, bliss, despair, or great joy. It is true that grace will appear in both sweet *and* fierce forms, but regardless of its particular manifestation, it is still grace, sent from beyond to open us to the radiant fullness of being.
– Matt Licata, from the Preface to the forthcoming, It’s Okay to Be Broken: Embracing the Joy and Heartbreak of Spiritual Awakening.
Jonathan Foust: The Issues Are in Your Tissues
Jonathan Foust is a longtime teacher of yoga and meditation who has guided learners at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health and the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, DC for more than 20 years. He is a featured presenter for Sounds True’s Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Jonathan discuss the practice of body-centered inquiry—specifically the surprising ways it can be applied to pain. Jonathan explains how he has worked with body-centered inquiry to explore his own migraines, and how he has discovered a curious freedom therein. Finally, Jonathan and Tami talk about using body-centered inquiry for decision-making and interrogating the self-made obstacles to our own freedom. (61 minutes)