What does it mean to properly inhabit our bodies? What lies within us that we can tap into through greater understanding of our feelings, emotions and biology? Embodiment Coach Nadine Lee talks about what it means to reawaken our often depleted sensuality, reconnect to our bodies and access our unique wisdom. If you're interested in how to really feel fully alive, this is an episode for you.
Poetry might not be embraced by the masses (only 5% of people read poetry in the USA), but where it is, it seems to have a transformative effect on people. Perhaps none more so than one of the most famous poets, Rumi, a 13th-century Persian sufi cleric. Why would an Islamic mystic, dead 800 years, be one of the most popular poets in the West in the 21st century. How does he connect to readers and what can we learn about ourselves from sufism and poetry in general? If you're interested in underst...
What’s going on inside our hearts? Is it all emotion, attachment, craving, or is there a constancy there? A divine light of some sort? For millennia, there has been a Indian yogic tradition that honours the divine light within each of us by meditating on the heart and its presence within each of us. Followers of the practice report incredible stillness and inner peace. So how do we tap into our heart and the divine light within? Best-selling author and heartfulness expert Joshua Pollock answers ...
How do you know when a boy has become a man? Is it measured by age or some psychological threshold through which he has passed? As men grow up, take on power and responsibility, these questions become increasingly acute, particularly in this modern era where the feminine is rising in the collective and questioning hundreds of years of masculine imbalance. In this fascinating discussion with masculinity writer and speaker Eamon Armstrong, we dive into what's happening with men today, how the loss...
What can children teach us about our own inner child? Is what they want from us (to be listened to), the same thing we all crave deep down? This week we explore these questions of listening and connection as they relate to both children and parents and adult-to-adult relationships to see how witnessing and expression of feelings is absolutely vital to an emotionally healthy past, present and future. If you're interested in how to connect more deeply to yourself and others, this fascinating episo...
How much do you write and what do you write about? Have you ever thought about it as a way to access your inner truth? Many people say that writing has saved their lives and yet often we might feel like we're not a born writer or we don't know where to start. My guest this week specialises in helping people use writing to access their innermost truths and fall in love with themselves in the process. If you've been holding off on a writing passion or want to go deeper into exploring your own imag...
Taoism is one of the oldest forms of spirituality and has a beautiful simplicity that can sometimes confound the mind. One of its seminal books – The I’Ching – stands for the ‘easy way’ and speaks about how coming into alignment with the forces of life (called the ‘Tao’) is what brings true harmony. It can be a super esoteric and abstract mode of spirituality as so do demystify it all I went back to my first ever spiritual teacher – Nilima Raichoudhury – a 30 year Taoist, to help explain things....
What does tantra mean to you? A common perspective is its just sensual sexual, some wild rituals and something practiced by a select few hedonistic people. But look a bit more deeply and tantra is actually huge body of ancient wisdom that encompasses the way we look at our body, mind and soul as well as our romantic relationships and our gifts to give to the world. To demystify things and learn about the simple tantric practices we can incorporate into our lives, I spoke with Shiva Rajaya, one o...
Yoga and meditation have exploded in popularity in the last two decades and many styles, modalities and philosophies now prevail in the West. With so much choice how do you know what works best and whether you’re doing it right? This week features meditation and yoga expert Josh Summers to talk about the differences between yin and yang approaches to both meditation and yoga and how to practice each effectively. If you’re interested in understanding yoga and meditation more deeply as well as fin...
What if everything that happens to us in life really is for our own benefit? The breakups, job losses, conflicts – all fuel for something much more profound, peace and deep insight. How can we open ourselves up to it? Amoda Maa – Spiritual Teacher and Author – discusses what it means to bring a tender openness to all our experience so that we can realize this most noble of life experiences. If you’re interested in getting deeply intimate with life, this is an episode for you....
People often talk about balance as the key to a good life. We need to find balance in all things, where it be work, play, relationships, attracting and receiving. But what does it mean energetically? Most of the major wisdom traditions speak of polarities, yin and yang, masculine and feminine and shiva and shakti. These are all pointing towards the same opposing forces that play out within us and allow for creativity, love and rest to take place. So how do we balance it all properly? Transformat...
How much do you think the way you think governs your happiness? We have, by the latest estimates, between 40,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day. How we receive, respond and act upon those thoughts can be the biggest determinant in the outcomes of our lives (both emotionally and physically). Not all of our thoughts are helpful, in fact many can be completely undermining. Some might not even be yours at all. If you’re wondering how to take better control over your thinking process and by extension your...
Start a conversation about climate change these days and most people will duck for cover. How can we overcome our normal response of fear and powerlessness? How can we become agents for transformational change in the world? If you're interested in learning a new story on confronting climate change and life in general, this episode is for you.
Are you deeply healthy? Not just free of disease or illness, but living with a profound sense of vitality that sustains you as you move through your life? This can be hard to achieve in the midst of life’s competing priorities, whether it’s our families, our careers, our social lives, or our passions, our attention and care is often focused more on those around us than on ourselves. And, as a result, we get depleted. If you’re feeling like your energy is getting run down despite your best effort...
Do you ever feel as if your spiritual search is getting you nowhere? That despite sincere intention and effort, you’re reaping frustration instead of fruit? There are many pitfalls along the spiritual path, spiritual ambition, by-passing, over practicing all included. Not least of course calling it a 'journey' to begin with. If you're frustrated with your efforts or keen to understand the roadblocks to awakening, this episode is for you. In this episode we discuss our deep spiritual impulse to a...
Mindfulness has permeated our modern lives, and with good reason—it’s been proven to boost mood, reduce stress, improve health, and maximize performance. But in our achievement-oriented culture, the practice of mindfulness can feel laborious and mechanical, like one more task on your endless to-do list. What if you could let go of effort and struggle and relax back into the happiness and ease that is your birthright—and is always readily available to you? If you're frustrated your with meditatio...
Ayahuasca - a psychedelic plant brew from the Amazon - is fast becoming a popular healing modality for Westerners looking to seek closure from past events and heal mental health ailments like anxiety and depression. A relatively unknown substance until twenty years ago, it was popularised by a now-famous article in the National Geographic in 2003 which saw one of its writers - Kira Salak - heal herself in a matter of days from life-long treatment-resistant depression. Fifteen years on, she remai...
How do you define 'growing up'? Does it mean you achieve certain cultural benchmarks - a steady income, paying taxes, marriage, and children? Or does it mean leaving behind the expectations of others and growing into the person you were meant to be? If you find yourself in a career, place, relationship, or crisis you never foresaw and that seems at odds with your beliefs about who you are, it means your soul is calling on you to reexamine your path. James Hollis believes that something deeper li...
How can we learn to master our minds? For thousands of years those deep into the Eastern wisdom traditions have espoused meditation and altered states of consciousness as the path to finding our deepest wisdom and the clearest path in life. Now - in the 21st century - a new wave of consciousness-trailblazers are bringing these ancient practices into a contemporary light with the flow state movement. This movement is concerned with helping people access flow state in their day to day to achieve p...
Sound healing, through various techniques and technologies, is the conscious use of the energy of sound to promote wellness in the human system – including the expansion of consciousness. The science on how sound affects us physically is well defined and proven by traditional physics. The science on how sound affects us mentally through brainwave entrainment is also well proven and accepted as we can observe the different brainwave states through an EEG. How sound affects us emotionally is a lit...
Life, death, rebirth. Expansion and contraction. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. These are the fundamentals and cycles of life as we know them. Just as we look to the seasons and the stars for wisdom in their patterns, can we also see them within our own bodies? This is the question that has slowly unravelled within Therese Jornlin over the past 30 years as she has gone deeply into the wisdom of female biology and explored the innate intelligence of the womb cycle. Central to Therese's work is b...
Just how important is it to ask fierce questions of yourself in life, even if you don't yet know the answers? In many ways, a life can be shaped just as much by asking the question as by having it answered. Moving ourselves to that internal conversational frontier where we call out into the unknown, places us in a position of vulnerability and receptivity to whatever beautiful calling may come back. To go to the deepest depths of ourselves, we can think of at least three questions for our lives:...
"It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing." - Carl Jung Do you ever think that there is more to life than meet's the eye? That there is a world of things hidden amongst the world of things seen? The shamanic discipline of life centers around exactly this, with practices that cultivate a way of seeing the hidden dynamics in life amongst the ordinary goings on, to turn the mirr...
"Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be. A thing for fools, this. And a holy thing. Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.” - Yehuda HaLevi To love is the fiercest and most essential of human callings and in our loss, our grief becomes the mirror to the depth that love. When we lose a loved one to bereavement or separation, it is often the case that we feel swallowed whole by the vastness of that grief a...
At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel walked out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder and a sign that read “Walking to Listen.” He had just graduated from university and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided he’d walk and listen on a journey of 4,000 miles across the USA over the course of 11 months. What started as a quest to explore and to listen to other's perspectives, quickly became a deep, introspective journey in...
Many people today often feel dislocated and confused about the idea of God. Since Isaac Newton’s findings of the universe and the birth of the Big Bang theory, we’ve had a hard time reconciling scientific truths of the cosmos and what the major religions tell us about both the start of the universe and the role of God. This incoherence between science and traditional views of God has left us without a creation story and a map of meaning for our lives that we so desperately yearn for as humans. O...
Beyond what we can understand with our rational minds, our bodies have an innate, natural sense of wisdom and truth. We can deeply feel authenticity in ourselves and in others and as we slowly learn to trust this bodily wisdom we settle deeply and peacefully into ourselves. This innate wisdom though is most often obscured by our conditioning, in particular the core limiting beliefs we hold, our reactive feelings and our somatic contractions that fuel our sense of struggle and veil who we really ...
Jan Engels-Smith is shamanic practitioner and the founder of the LightSong School of 21st Century Shamanism and Energy Medicine where she teaches students shamanism and journeying techniques Central to Jan’s work is the philosophy that shamanism is not the preserve of a gifted few seers or just for indigenous cultures to practice but that we all have the capacity to cultivate a shamanic skillset through journeying and practices that help move us from left brain focus into right-brain experience....
How do our genetics impact our energetic disposition? Were we born with a unique energetic blueprint that means we operate best in a specific way? It certainly seems that way from the wide range of preferences we all have about how we work, behave in relationships and cope with life’s trials and tribulations. In recent years, Human Design, a relatively new system for understanding our genetic and energetic blueprint, has been becoming an increasingly popular way for exploring this dimension of l...
“Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone” wrote Paul Tillich. For millennia, great writers and thinkers have extolled the benefits of solitude, for reflection, inner peace and even to bring us closer to each other. Yet with the most recent social research suggesting that more and more people are suffering from loneliness and that lon...
