Episodes

Philip Goldberg is our guest today, here to talk about his latest book, “Spiritual Practice for Crazy Times: Powerful Tools to Cultivate Calm, Clarity, and Courage.” And this is definitely the year for it! We are all hoping for an end to the pandemic in the next 6 to 8 months through the power of vaccines, but it is currently surging and there is widespread anxiety and depression regarding that, the racial problems, the on-going political divide—despite the change in leadership, the economic con...

We hear it every day now on the news, see it in our social media sites, it’s literally everywhere: we are a divided nation. So divided are we that we have two different realities, or so it seems. One media gives us one form of reality and all the other medias give us an entirely different form of reality. This has made it possible for the people on both sides of the divide to call the other side liars—and absolutely believe that they are telling the truth. There is hate on either side of this di...

Everyone is saying it these days, “When are we going to get back to normal?” We are suffering several different crises all at once, the pandemic, the economic crisis, the crisis related to the freshly seen revelations of abuse to persons of color and black people, the political crisis and the climate crisis. And all we can think about is going back to the way it used to be. But the way it used to be is what got us here. We got ourselves here through our denial and our bias and our irresponsibili...

The shadow of the American culture is exposed. We are reminded now that while we said we were a nation that supported every person’s equal right to the pursuit of happiness, rather, we were founded upon the death of over 50 million indigenous people and we built our nation on the backs of slaves. We’ve been a two-faced nation from the onset. And now we are beginning to see what we've only suspected before in all the darkness, the lies, the bribery, and the danger hidden beneath the veil of some ...

There is much that is going on right now in the United States, which is impacting the entire globe, and which would make us believe that evil has surely won—that the end of goodness and hope for goodness has come. Our President is lying to us. The Majority Leader of the Senate is lying to us and betraying his own precedent. The Attorney General has changed his entire job description in order to defend the President against charges of sexual assault. The fact that so many continue to defend the P...

We are living in very uncertain times. It is very difficult in these circumstances for we cannot seem to establish a routine that can be assumed to be “normal.” Everyone is talking about what it would be like to “return to normal.” And yet we continue to face uncertainty. But is it possible that uncertainty is one of spirituality’s best tools to facilitate our growth? Is it possible that living in uncertainty forces us to have to turn to something else on which to rely? What is that something el...

The collective that is the United States of America is currently experiencing a dark night of the soul—a night so dark that we fear we will never awaken from this nightmare. But like every dark night of the soul, this one has an end, which is a beginning. A beginning of a whole new version of that same collective. The dark night of the soul is meant to root out shadow material, expose it and deal with it appropriately so that we can awaken to a new reality. But we are just now in the darkest par...

The pain, the fear, the horror, the loss. In all of these things we experience the devastating reality of the darkness. These things cannot be minimized. They are real and have a real impact on our lives. But is it possible that by experiencing these devastations, we are being driven to the light within us? Is it possible that the intention of the darkness is to drive us to the light within us? That doesn’t mean, as many think, that God or the gods have planned your loss, your pain, your fear, y...

The darkness has come. Not, of course, for the first time, nor will it be the last, but the question is: What do we do with this darkness? And the only true answer is that we must learn how to walk through darknesses of all kind without losing our faith. That means we must learn how to not only walk through but receive the many gifts that the darkness will ultimately give us. We are in the midst of a pandemic, an economic crisis, a crisis regarding racial discrimination and abuse, a political cr...

The darkness has come. Not, of course, for the first time, nor will it be the last, but the question is: What do we do with this darkness? And the only true answer is that we must learn how to walk through darknesses of all kind without losing our faith. That means we must learn how to not only walk through but receive the many gifts that the darkness will ultimately give us. We are in the midst of a pandemic, an economic crisis, a crisis regarding racial discrimination and abuse, a political cr...

For the first time in the history of the world, we are beginning to explore intimacy as the essential ingredient to healthy, whole relationships. But intimacy is not really all about sex. It's about "dancing core to core"—as Judith Blackstone, PhD puts it in her lovely book The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others. Judith is an innovative, and internationally recognized teacher of nonduality. She is the developer of the Realization Process, a method of embodie...

During the past two live episodes, we began to look into the specific root language in the earliest parts of the sacred text Christians know as the Bible. What we have learned is that some of the most basic concepts utilized by the leaders of what I am calling the Mistaken Christianity—the literalistic teachings of fundamentalism—are based in mistranslations of that text and turn out, therefore, to be false. Today we will continue and finalize that discussion moving into what has come to be know...

Last week we began to look into the specific root language in the ancient book we know of today as the book of Genesis. What we learned was that some of the most basic concepts in the Mistaken Christianity—the literalistic teachings of fundamentalism—are based in mistranslations of that text. Today we will continue that discussion adding more to our understanding of what we are actually being told in the sacred text of the Christian Bible about being spiritual beings having a human experience. D...

On another show in the past we discussed an overall summary of some of the mistakes made even by well-intended Christians because of the mistranslations passed down to us. Today we are going to begin a process of getting more specific about some of these mistranslations. What has happened is that fundamentalism—or what many today are calling Evangelical Christianity—is based in these mistakes in translation. If we are going to consider sacred text as a viable source of wisdom and guidance, we ne...

Many of us live our entire lives in a stupor. We are far removed from our bodies, and even further removed from our own souls. What would it be like to come to know yourself as a soul right here on planet earth? Why is it that we think that we can only come to know our own souls after we die? Even those of us who are working to get rid of ego are often doing all of that work without a true connection to soul. Your soul is your own deepest essence and while we tend to think we can come to know ot...

Today we are talking to Dr. Don St. John, author of the book “Healing the Wounds of Childhood,” as this is one of the most important of all of the subjects we could discuss. Very often it is these wounds that keep us trapped, even as we are striving to get past them in some kind of way. How do we grow into our full potential while these wounds remain yet unhealed? How do we increase our ability to receive and absorb love, enjoy more life-giving love connections, deal more effectively with stress...

How safe are you really in a world full of chaos? What is safety and how do we get to feel safe--particularly in these times when there is so much upheaval and hate in the world? It seems there is so much to fear and there is so much anxiety right now individually and collectively. How do we manage to feel safe? And is feeling safe the opposite of fear? Today we are going to talk about fear and safety and come to some perhaps surprising conclusions. Don't miss it.

Just let it go! Don't we hear that all the time? But the problem is that we just can't seem to do that. We can let it go. IT has hold of us. IT controls us, for we think that we have to control IT. Letting go then, turns out to be one of the hardest things we ever do. Surrender sounds like waving a white flag and letting the IT take over. Won't it all just fall apart, our plans, our dreams, our relationships--won't they all just fall apart if we don't stay in control? But all the wise masters te...

We have always heard a lot about how we ought to love everyone, how we should love others, and lately even how we should love ourselves. But we don't hear so much about learning how to receive love, and most of us have not been taught how to do this. We've not been taught to accept loving gestures with humility. We've not been taught how to relish in the love that is constantly ours coming from the divine. We've not been taught how to receive the love that comes to us from spouses, partners and ...

When we think of empowerment, we don't generally think first of peace, but rather of things like confidence, self-assurance, assertiveness and other like traits. We think of the ability to confront others, to draw appropriate boundaries, to address and meet our own needs. And all of those things do bring empowerment, but at the base of all of these things is a sense of authentic inner peace that allows us the grace to perform with confidence, self-assurance and assertiveness. In other words the ...

Have you loved and lost? Have you been heart broken, devastated by the personal loss of a relationship due to divorce or a breakup? If you have, you have probably asked the question, “when is it safe to love again?” Well, today, we are talking to Dr. Gary Salyer, author of “Safe to Love Again: How to Release the Pain of Past Relationships and Create the Love You Deserve.” The book was written for both singles and for couples who have lost the passion. It offers a pathway to rewiring the brain to...

There's just so much out there about living in the light, living into worthiness, living into goodness, that we dismiss the value of the shadows, the darkness. We think that darkness implies evil. But we miss all the beautiful silence, the amazing mystery of darkness. And we miss the beautiful gifts that are given to us when we walk through the darkness in our lives. Somehow we've come to believe that we should live lives completely divest of darkness--that doing so makes us good people, even pr...

How do we even begin to trust a life in which there is so much worldwide suffering? People say, “Trust the process,” but what does that mean, and how do we trust it? We’ve all entered this wild, wild ride of life filled with all manner of amazing blessings and difficult challenges. Why are we here? What is the point? Given the suffering of the world, some would say that no one should ever leave home. Yet we do, we not only leave our homes but we risk falling in love, we get into committed relati...

Forgiveness turns out to be just another f-word—for it is fraught with so much misinformation, and laden with such heaviness! But forgiveness is not what we’ve thought it is. It is not something we can “should” ourselves into. It is not a duty. It is not taking someone back. It is not absolution. It is not tolerating the intolerable and accepting the unacceptable. It is not pity. It is not trying to discover why they did it. It is not a decision to be a good person by forgiving. It is not a deci...