Episodes

What can you expect to happen next in your life?Will you get that job or relationship you want? Or not. What if it doesn’t happen? What will you do then?

If you are like most people, at some point in your life you begin to think that lasting peace or happiness will forever elude you. You may have had periods of satisfaction or contentment but deep, abiding peace seem to be impossible. This is a profound moment of possibility, because for the first time you are wondering about one of the most basic elements of the living experience—our own peace. Why is it that peace is so elusive? Is it possible for us to really have and own our peace? If so, how...

We still hear a lot about how it is that we should control our thoughts so that we can get what we want. There are memes on social media sites every day about this idea. We are constantly being advised to watch what we are thinking, because the Universe is listening and responding to our thoughts as if they were direct orders for the Universe to follow. But our wicked thoughts, called by most “negative thoughts” do not have the power to manipulate the Universe—surely we know that the Universe is...

Typically we don’t think of surrender as a form of empowerment. We think of surrender in terms of defeat, waving the white flag and feeling forever after that like the loser. But surrender is allowing the soul to be itself. Surrender is allowing the authentic Self to run the life. Surrender is getting in the zone. The problem is most of us don’t know how or when to do it. We don’t know how to “let go.” We don’t know how to get into the flow of our own authenticity. This show is not only going to...

We all have major life transitions, which come in many different forms. But these difficult times can be thresholds to a new adventure. How do we take the challenge to turn what appears to be a block or even a death, into a threshold? Rabbi Sherre Hirsch has come today to talk to us about her 2nd book, Thresholds: How to Thrive Through Life’s Transitions. Rabbi Hirsch is the first female Rabbi, who served for 8 years as the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. She has since left the more tradit...

Have you ever looked back over your life and thought to yourself, “I’ve been had?” Well, don’t feel alone, many of us have experienced deliberate gotcha’s perpetrated by those who want to manipulate, abuse or control us. But there’s a bigger story—a more global story to this whole thing of manipulation, and Eldon Taylor is here today to tell us about it, and how we may avoid falling prey to it. His latest book, “Gotcha!” tells us all about the silent battle that has been raging for more than a c...

Joan Borysenko is back this week for the third time to talk with us about guilt, for guilt can be a major block to our resilience factor. Her latest book, “It’s Not the End of the World: Developing Resilience in Times of Change” will be combined with one of her earlier books, “Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson” in an in-depth discussion of this devilish master craftsman of our lives. In the extreme, many of us live whole lifetimes driven by guilt and responsibility for other people’s stuf...

We have arrived at adolescence in our understanding of relationship—in other words, we have a long way to go. But, well, what do we expect? Only 150 years ago, we were still often arranging marriages. We arranged for a good dowry, good property, money, inheritance, prestige, even good teeth and good hips. So this thing of marrying someone we love is new, and we have only begun the work of understanding how to do it. But you know what happens typically in adolescence: we fall in love and out of l...

What is it that keeps us from living authentically? Well at least a part of it is the illusions, delusions and lies we believe that keep us from even considering that there is such a thing as the authentic Self, or that we can live an authentic life. We are so encumbered with these illusions, delusions and lies that we cannot see, are literally blind, to the authentic Self and its messages and urgings. This show is going to expose those illusions, delusions and lies for what they are, and tell t...

When we experience a loss or a defeat, we often feel a great deal of pain. Added to that pain is also a self-judgment, self-recrimination, that has to do with our effort to spiritually by-pass grief altogether. Many are teaching that to have the typical feelings of grief means that we are unwilling to let go, or that we are “ staying stuck” in anger—one of the natural phases of acceptance of any difficult reality. But grief that is allowed its full array of phases and stages has a very natural t...

Today we are so honored to have Iyanla Vanzant here to talk to us about her latest book, Forgiveness: 21 Days to Forgive Everyone for Everything. Iyanla Vanzant, NY Times Bestselling author; host of the number one reality show on the OWN network, Iyanla: Fix My Life; and frequent guest on Super Soul Sunday and Oprah’s Life Class, is easily one of America’s most profound spiritual leaders, who empowers individuals all across the globe to live into the truest self. Her body of work spans over thre...

We get lost in the holes in the sidewalk of our psyches. These holes are like the traps made for wild animals in the wilderness, all covered up with brush and dirt, so that we think we are just continuing on the path. But suddenly and without our knowing how, we fall into the hole—we are lost again. We’ve fallen into that old complex, that old default position. We don’t know how we got there, we don’t know how to get out—heck, we don’t even know that we are in it. We’re just doing what we’ve alw...

In this day in which we are being taught to build self-confidence without even making reference to an authentic Self, we think that vulnerabilities make us weak. But actually, just the reverse is true. For, how might one come to know one’s self completely without getting intimate with one’s own vulnerabilities? How will we know our deepest needs, and most authentic desires, without coming to know our vulnerabilities? And isn’t it our vulnerabilities that allow us to take loving care of ourselves...

Most of us have been taught that loving others is our job, our duty—that we must love others in order to be considered to be good citizens of the world. But love, real love, is not a function of striving. It is not a function of “should,” or duty or loyalty or any other of those favorite words we use to shame ourselves into compliance with the duty of love. Love is not a duty. Love is an impulse. A deep, abiding and authentic impulse to behave in loving, kind, caring ways to self and others. We ...

Rosanne Cash comes to the Authentic Living show this week to discuss her latest book, Composed: A Memoir, the powerful, poetic and poignant story of her own inner journey, which touches us at a deep essential and spiritual core. Rosanne is one of America’s preeminent singers and song writers with fourteen albums and eleven # 1 singles to her credit. Her albums, which reach people from across the various music genres, include: Right or Wrong, Seven Year Ache, Somewhere in the Stars, Rhythm and Ro...

With so much information floating around out there in the spiritual world about how to manifest abundance and, in the secular world about how to attain your goals, it’s difficult to consider such concepts as staying in the moment. Michael Brown, our guest today, helps us bridge the gaps. Author of two books we’ll be talking about today, “The Presence Process” and “Alchemy of the Heart,” as well as a DVD entitled “Awakening to Innocence / Inner Sense,” Michael can teach us all how to both release...

Today we are very fortunate to get an opportunity to talk to bestselling author Andrew Solomon, writer and lecturer on psychology, politics, and the arts and winner of the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. He is an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. His latest NY Times bestselling book, and the subject of our interview today, entitled Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, is also the winner of several awards, includi...

Most of us have been raised to be good. We were to share, be kind, be loving, say thank you when we didn’t feel grateful, say I’m sorry when we weren’t, hug people we didn’t want to hug and say we loved people we didn’t even know, much less love. But the idea of goodness held a magical quality for most of us. We thought that IF we were good enough, THEN we would be worthy, we would be loved and we could finally rest secure. We assume, therefore, that being real means being less than good—and the...

The first question before that, of course, is “Can people really change?” Well the answer is “yes,” but we’ve all heard about those Road to Damascus changes that leave us scratching our heads and waiting for them to change back, right? Well, Bruce Grierson, author of the book, all about these kinds of changes, and entitled “U-Turn,” is going to talk to us about the mystery of this kind of complete 180 degree shift in a person’s consciousness. I read his wonderful article in the March 15, 2015 is...

When we experience a loss or a defeat, we often feel a great deal of pain. Added to that pain is also a self-judgment, self-recrimination, that has to do with our effort to spiritually by-pass grief altogether. Many are teaching that to have the typical feelings of grief means that we are unwilling to let go, or that we are “ staying stuck” in anger—one of the natural phases of acceptance of any difficult reality. But grief that is allowed its full array of phases and stages has a very natural t...

Joan Borysenko is back this week for the third time to talk with us about guilt, for guilt can be a major block to our resilience factor. Her latest book, “It’s Not the End of the World: Developing Resilience in Times of Change” will be combined with one of her earlier books, “Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson” in an in-depth discussion of this devilish master craftsman of our lives. In the extreme, many of us live whole lifetimes driven by guilt and responsibility for other people’s stuf...

One of the most important aspects of adult life is the journey to finding a soulmate. This is an urgent mission for so many in our world. And now with the addition of online dating sites we are making the mission an E-mission in many cases. So many of us think we have found Mr. or Ms. Right, when in fact we have just found again the same Mr. or Ms. Wrong we found the last time we looked. Simran Singh teaches us how to take the spiritual journey to your soul’s true mate, in her latest book “Your ...

We hear the word “abundant” quite a bit these days. Mostly we think of this word in terms of money. We can’t seem to help it. Our world is virtually run by money. When we want something, the first thing we think of is whether or not we can afford it. When we want to go somewhere, the first thing we think of is how we will pay for it. This is the way the world works. But it is not the way abundance works. In fact, abundance is the truth of our existence—we just don’t see it. During this one hour ...

In our third week of our Countdown to Heaven, we are talking to Bruce Lipton, bestselling author of The Biology of Belief about his latest book, The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth. We all understand either the actuality of the honeymoon effect, or the dream of it. But most of us see it as temporary—because we have to get back to “real life.” The Honeymoon Effect is a state of bliss, passion, energy and health resulting from huge love. But we cannot imagine that we can ...