Realize your fullest leadership potential, claim your boldest vision, and prioritize the well-being of your team and world with this new science-based approach to leadership. In Boundless Leadership: The Breakthrough Method to Realize Your Vision, Empower Others, and Ignite Positive Change (Shambhala, 2021), psychotherapist Joe Loizzo and executive coach Elazar Aslan offer science-based vision of leadership to help leaders cultivate clarity, compassion and fearlessness for themselves and through...
May 13, 2022•49 min•Ep. 11
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why failure is part of the hidden curriculum Why you can’t be creative or innovative without failing [sometimes a lot] How to learn from it, instead of sweeping it under the rug A failure our guest and our host each faced A discussion of the Museum of Failure Our guest is: Dr. Samuel West, a licensed psychologist (cognitive behavioral therapy) with a PhD in Organizational Psychology. His research focuses on creating climates for in...
May 12, 2022•57 min•Ep. 98
Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (Columbia UP, 2022) combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to pr...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 154
When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas , Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions – often in the most unexpected ways. Just as millions of years of evolution have helped craft the wing and d...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 12
This is the first part in a series of episodes exploring the historical roots of California Institute of Integral Studies and its foundations in Integral Yoga as brought to California in the 1950’s by Haridas Chaudhuri. In this episode we speak with Bahman Shirazi, who recounts the early history of Haridas Chaudhuri coming to the west, and the academic and cultural conditions which lead to what became CIIS. Bahman speaks about his dissertation completed in EWP in the 1980’s which develops Harida...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 6
When Mark Henick was a teenager in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, he was overwhelmed by depression and anxiety that led to a series of increasingly dangerous suicide attempts. One night, he climbed onto a bridge over an overpass and stood in the wind, clinging to a girder. Someone shouted, "Jump, you coward!" Another man, a stranger in a brown coat, talked to him quietly, calmly and with deep empathy. Just as Henick's feet touched open air, the man in the brown coat encircled his chest and pulled him...
May 09, 2022•48 min•Ep. 175
Today I interview Richard Schwartz . His friends know him as Dick. And while this is my first time speaking with him, I can’t help but feel friendly toward him. Dick is the creator of Internal Family Systems or IFS, an extraordinary and paradigm-shifting therapeutic model that changes not only the way we envision healing, but also the person being healed. Full disclosure: I am currently working with a therapist who uses IFS in their approach, and it’s been healing and revelatory, which is why I’...
May 06, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 170
Today I talked to Belinda Gannaway, co-author (with Emma Bridger) about her book Employee Experience by Design: How to Create an Effective EX for Competitive Advantage (Kogan Page, 2021). Covid-19 has drastically changed the workplace, causing “essential workers” to contemplate what they essentially want from their jobs over and above decent pay and benefits. High on such a list of priorities is gaining greater autonomy, an opportunity to learn and to achieve a sense of purpose on the job. Cast ...
May 05, 2022•34 min•Ep. 105
We are delighted to present All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks will shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Seminars are held online once per month on Wednesdays at 5pm CET/ 11am EST and free for all to attend. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental h...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 171
Today we will be chatting with core faculty Craig Chalquist about the development of Terrapsychology and his ideas on hermeticism and gnosticism as an earth honouring path. We also discuss enchantivism, fantasy and the archetypal world of myth, as well as how Craig approaches the intersection of scholarship, activism and his thoughts on the writing process and imaginal scholarship. Craig Chalquist, PhD is former Chair of East-West Psychology at CIIS. He is co-editor with Linda Buzzell of the ant...
May 02, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why doing writing and other kinds of retreats are part of the hidden curriculum How taking time for self-care is crucial to doing well at work and at school What a retreat is How to do a retreat at home Ways retreating helps you think and feel better, and the science that proves it Today’s book is: DIY Solo Retreats: A Handbook for Creating Your Space, Setting an Intention and Getting the Self-Care You Deserve , by S. A. Snyder. Wh...
Apr 28, 2022•53 min•Ep. 97
A lot can be learned from scientific twin studies about the relative contributions of nature versus nurture to human experience. However, when such studies do lasting harm to its participants, what does it teach us about the dangerous power of scientific zeal? This is the subject of Dr. Nancy Segal’s latest book, Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), in which she documents the controversial methods employed by t...
Apr 27, 2022•44 min•Ep. 168
In this episode, Jun recounts her journey from growing up in China and learning Chinese medicine, to moving to the USA to study anthropology, to arriving here at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Jun starts the conversation by reciting Lao Tsu’s poetry from the Dao De Jing, and continues to share her holistic approaches to wellbeing through the Chinese wisdom traditions. Jun discusses the fundamental interconnection of Chinese medicine and Daoist philosophy, and the practices of inne...
Apr 25, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Kim talks with Michelle Rada about the death drive in psychoanalysis. Michelle references Todd McGowan’s Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis , University of Nebraska Press, 2013. She also recommends Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets , by Todd McGowan. In our longer conversation, she also quoted, What IS Sex? by Alenka Zupančič, MIT Press, 2017. She also recommends a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies on “Con...
Apr 25, 2022•16 min•Ep. 22
Kim talks to Rebecca Falkoff about hoarding. Her book on hoarding, Possessed, will be coming out with Cornell University press in April of 2021. In the episode, she references Giorgio Agamben’s Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cutltura occidentale , translated into English as Stanzas: Words and Phantasm in Western Culture . by Ronald L. Martinez (University of Minnesota Press, 1993). And Arjun Appadurai’s essay, “Mediants, Materiality, Normativity.” Public Culture 27 no. 2 (2015) doi: 10.12...
Apr 22, 2022•13 min•Ep. 16
Today I talked to DDS Dobson-Smith about You Can Be Yourself Here: Your Pocket Guide to Creating Inclusive Workplaces by Using the Psychology of Belonging (Lioncrest, 2022). While the episode’s title wasn’t directly addressed during my conversation with DDS, the answer can be found in his remark prior to taping: namely, the Great Resignation is really the Great Self-Realization. In other words, employees are realizing what matters to them and are changing jobs and careers to better align with th...
Apr 21, 2022•37 min•Ep. 103
An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson's influential "Freedom and Resentment" P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper "Freedom and Resentment" is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (Princeton UP, 2020), Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concl...
Apr 21, 2022•48 min•Ep. 143
Today I talked to Zarak Khan and Laurel Newman about their book Building Behavioral Science in an Organization (Action Design Press, 2021). As an academic discipline, behavioral science is as the book’s introduction states, an umbrella term that includes social psychology, behavioral economics, and sociology among other fields. As applied in business and government, for instance, behavioral science is often a matter of creating small “nudges” in designing changes to human behavior in hopes of ac...
Apr 21, 2022•32 min•Ep. 102
Today I talked to Morris Altman about his book Worker Satisfaction and Economic Performance (Routledge, 2021). What sometimes gets overlooked is that Adam Smith not only became the “father of capitalism” by writing The Wealth of Nations; he also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Empathy matters, and this week’s guest Morris Altman argues that sustainable capitalism practices fairness. Too often the basic, economic needs of rank-and-file workers are being overlooked in a global economic where...
Apr 19, 2022•35 min•Ep. 106
Few would disagree that inclusion is both the right thing to do and good for business. Then why are we so terrible at it? If we believe in the morality and the profitability of including people of diverse and underestimated backgrounds in the workplace, why don’t we do it? Because, explains Ruchika Tulshyan in this eye-opening book, we don’t realize that inclusion takes awareness, intention, and regular practice. Inclusion doesn’t just happen; we have to work at it. Tulshyan presents inclusion b...
Apr 18, 2022•52 min•Ep. 9
Today, we will be chatting with EWP core faculty Helge Osterhold about the uniqueness of the EWP container and how he facilitates transformative pedagogy in the classroom. We then explore Jungian notions of East-West spirituality and address the importance of individuation in contemporary approaches to the activist-scholar paradigm. The interview ends with Helge outlining his recent paper “The dance between individuation and death anxiety: an interdisciplinary reflection on cultural polarization...
Apr 18, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 3
How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame across Cultures (Princeton UP, 2021) is an expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carel...
Apr 13, 2022•55 min•Ep. 156
Today I talked to Karen Joy Hardwick about her book The Connected Leader: 7 Strategies to Empower Your True Self and Inspire Others (Post Hill Press, 2021). We are not leaders having a leadership crisis. We are leaders having a human being crisis. Connection is the antidote to this crisis—yet, many of us do not know how to connect to ourselves in a rigorously honest, self-compassionate way that enhances self-discovery and leads to creating healthy relationships with others. Without this self-con...
Apr 12, 2022•56 min•Ep. 8
Today, we will be speaking with Debashish Banerji, chair of the East-West Psychology department. We will discuss the history and mission of The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), of the East-West Psychology Department, and the nature and value of Integral Education. In the conversation, Debashish develops ideas regarding Sri Aurobindo's vision of an Integral consciousness and how that can be approached through an Integral and immanent hermeneutic based on existential goals of becom...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Nita Sweeney’s struggle with bipolar disorder and grief had overtaken her life when she decided to take her beloved dog and try running, even though she doubted she could make it around the block. Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running with My Dog Brought Me Back from the Brink (Mango Publishing, 2019) reveals Sweeney’s moving and inspiring story of how every mile she ran brought her closer to wholeness and shares her hard-won wisdom on how you can get up off the couch and take back your ...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 167
Today I talked to Roberta Moore, author of Emotion at Work: Unleashing the Secret Power of Emotional Intelligence (Conscious Choice, 2018). Much like methodologies that focus on a range of personality traits, the approach taken by today’s guest looks at 16 different skills grouped into five categories. Those categories are self-perception, self-expression, interpersonal, decision-making, and stress management. Which are you best at? Where might you falter? Compare your answers to those Moore sha...
Apr 07, 2022•35 min•Ep. 100
How do we begin to cope with loss that cannot be resolved? The COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us haunted by feelings of anxiety, despair, and even anger. In The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change (W.W. Norton, 2021), pioneering therapist Dr. Pauline Boss identifies these vague feelings of distress as caused by "ambiguous loss," losses that remain unclear and hard to pin down, and thus have no closure. Collectively the world is grieving as the pandemic continues ...
Apr 06, 2022•59 min•Ep. 166
The accusation “you’re deluded” is often used as something of a cheap shot intended to silence an opponent in debate. But what is the nature of a delusion and how can we assess rationality and irrationality? In this podcast, Owen Bennett-Jones talks to Professor Lisa Bortolotti who studies the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry at Birmingham University and is the author of among many other things, Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (Oxford UP, 2010) and most recently edited Delusions in...
Apr 05, 2022•47 min•Ep. 5
In this episode you will meet your podcast hosts, Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay and learn a little about their journey to the East-West Psychology Department of CIIS. They will introduce the goals and format of the podcast and present a framework which situates academic fields of study and psychological and philosophical questions important to the East-West Psychology discourse community. This can be understood as a mandala of 4 cardinal points: Eastern philosophy, psychology and culture Weste...
Apr 04, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 1
For half a century we have been trained to believe that our right brain hemisphere is our emotional brain, while our left brain houses our rational thinking. Now neuroscience shows that it's not that simple: in fact, our emotional limbic tissue is evenly divided between our two hemispheres. Consequently, each hemisphere has both an emotional brain and a thinking brain. In this groundbreaking new book, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor presents these four distinct modules of cells as four characters that mak...
Apr 01, 2022•51 min•Ep. 162
