A few weeks ago I received a comment on one of my most-read articles, “ From Sissy Boys to Straight-Acting Gay Men .” The person shared the following: “I don’t agree with the premise of this article that gay men have to learn to forgive themselves. The act of self-forgiveness is often promoted as a panacea for life’s ills, in this case, self-shaming as a gay man. Self-forgiveness suggests that some wrong has been perpetrated (by me).” His message was well-intentioned, and I suggested that there ...
Nov 06, 2020•16 min•Ep. 153
To argue that “religious freedom should outweigh LGBTQ rights” is a denial of the existential freedoms of LGBTQ people, which is also a slippery slope to denying freedoms to other “marginalized” peoples. 📖 Read the post here: " There Is a Profound Difference Between Human Rights and Religious Beliefs ." Did this episode inspire you in some way? I'd love to know what you thought or how you felt. What did you practice and what was the result? Send me a message at https://darrenstehle.com/contact ...
Oct 30, 2020•20 min•Ep. 152
If you want to liberate and experience your most authentic self, you will have to risk leaning into fully expressing your uniqueness, your difference, and your quirkinesses. 📖 Read the post here: " Risk Being Who You Already Are ." Did this episode inspire you in some way? I'd love to know what you thought or how you felt. What did you practice and what was the result? Send me a message at https://darrenstehle.com/contact Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Oct 23, 2020•14 min•Ep. 151
No one can make you feel the way you feel. I cannot make you angry. A politician cannot make you angry. A friend, partner, or your dog cannot make you happy. Only you can choose your feelings based on your behaviours and beliefs. It’s worth repeating... Your feelings are your own, and they are based on your unconscious patterns and beliefs. Seeing the truth of this requires self-compassion and mindfulness. Self-compassion allows you to feel kindness towards yourself to gently consider why you ar...
Oct 16, 2020•8 min•Ep. 150
Religions are constructs of the mind used to control the minds of the many. There is a reason why the bible refers to followers as sheep and the spiritual leader as a “herder.” Even the language of religion communicates corralling and controlling. If we look deeply within ourselves to study the nature of consciousness, we discover that we are all connected. We all come from the same place: this planet, earth. We are of nature like every other creature, plant, and organism. When we realize that w...
Oct 13, 2020•10 min•Ep. 149
Taoism is known for using metaphor, paradox, and dualities to express the natural world and the natural order of reality. Sometimes people find it confusing trying to understand the relationship between, for example, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ within the relative nature of the universe as described in the Tao Te Ching . The mutually arising duality in this context of this episode is humility and egocentricity. Human behaviours like egocentricity and self-importance, when taken to the extreme, have created...
Oct 06, 2020•31 min•Ep. 148
Show Notes How do you look beyond what you believe to be true, fixed, or finite? Sometimes what we see is not what we see. We most often understand polarities from extreme ends. I propose we shift our focus and look to the middle ground. Recall what I talked about in Thinking Queerly, Week 1, “ Divisiveness Is an Illusion on Either Side of Balance ,” what is the single point of origin, the middle-ground, the gap in-between both sides of the argument, polarity, or binary. Within gender identities...
Sep 30, 2020•11 min•Ep. 147
The 6 Principles for Cultivating Open-Hearted Personal LeadershipThe 1st Principle: Non-Contention The simple act of compassionate, open-hearted listening reduces the threat response for another person talking. As a result, the energy of the person speaking is mirrored back to us in ways we are not conscious of but that we sense and interpret as providing safety. This feeling of safety (the lack of threat) diffuses the potential for opposition and argument and offers the opportunity to foster an...
Sep 14, 2020•31 min•Ep. 146
Welcome to my new, year-long series, “Thinking Queerly” — a revisiting of my book, “ Think Queerly: Meditations & Critical Reflections On Liberating Humanity .” Over the next 52-weeks, I will be selecting and re-working what I hope are the most impactful 52 passages (there are about 110) to dive deep into the well of metaphor — the place of paradox where queerness dances unabashedly. After each “passage” I intend to resurface from metaphor and paradox with a clear explanation of what it is I...
Sep 10, 2020•13 min•Ep. 145
The beauty industry — which includes cosmetics, fashion, weight-loss and body-building programs — is dependent upon a conventional concept that ugly is something universal and quantifiable based on what you don’t have. This becomes a system in which one’s perceived beauty is never good enough by comparison and needs to be continually improved. Through repeated advertising of images that the beauty industry tells you are beautiful, we begin to believe it unquestionably. The models representing br...
Sep 03, 2020•26 min•Ep. 144
I used to think that self-sabotage made sense until I learned how to see it differently through neuroscience. There is no such thing as self-sabotage. The way we have used language to come up with such a term is a shameful way to critique and judge yourself! But if self-sabotage isn’t a real thing, then why did we come up with the term? What’s the reason for not doing what you know you need to do to get what you want in life? Comfort, Prediction, and Response. First, we need to address the shame...
Aug 27, 2020•30 min•Ep. 143
Instead, we only need to look at nature and the natural order of things to be reminded of how the world works. By the fact that we are part of the world — that we are the *stuff* of this world — so too will our delusions of power and control be washed away — whether that be in the form of social evolution or annihilation. Read the post, The Way of No Contention: One of the 6 Principles of Human-Hearted Leadership . GET VIQ! When you support the podcast, you'll get my new series, “Thinking Queerl...
Aug 19, 2020•16 min•Ep. 142
In this episode, I share an early draft introduction to my, “Six Principles of Human-Hearted Leadership.” I share why these principles are based in the Tao Te Ching, what that 2,500-year-old text can tell us about personal responsibility — not just for ourselves but also for all lives on this planet, and the role of the ego versus nature. Lastly, I share my plan to teach the core concepts of the Tao Te Ching in an easy-to-understand manner that will include thought exercises to practice leading ...
Aug 14, 2020•21 min•Ep. 141
Perhaps the question we need to ask instead is, “What is gender?”, followed by, “What are ways to describe gender?” Notice I didn’t say, “How can we describe gender?” The difference between ‘what’ and ‘how’ is subtle but an important thought exercise in the understanding of gender as an idea or a concept, and less as a label or a container, in which we might try to drop people into. The later is what most of society has tried to do for millennia, establishing a codex, written or unwritten, of wh...
Aug 07, 2020•14 min•Ep. 140
43 years ago today, on August 1, 1977, I was 11-years old. It's a significant moment in Toronto queer history and it was most certainly formative of early queer identity, albeit not in a positive way at the time. Looking back, this incident may have been the root-cause of what made me intent on making a difference in the world, especially for other queer people. Read the article on DarrenStehle.com: How the Murder of a 12-Year Old Boy Shaped My Queerness . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy...
Aug 01, 2020•19 min•Ep. 139
Over the weekend I wasn’t feeling well, worn out from the heat and humidity, and stuck in my head feeling somewhat depressed. I decided to lay low and take it easy and binged on Netflix. I was feeling a lot of stress and worry about how to make progress on some projects I’m working on when I'm feeling so scattered and unfocused all the time. I knew what the problem was. I just hadn't figured out how to address it. That worrying caused me to think deeply all day. On Sunday, I felt better after a ...
Jul 16, 2020•22 min•Ep. 138
It often feels like everyone is speaking at a level that is loud and not in a form we would call dialogue. On social media, in the news, in person we see shouting, personal attacks, and arguing to prove one’s point and seeking to be the winner of the argument. That is a deafening alarm that makes many of us want to pull back and become silent, not to pull out of the discussion, but to bear witness to what is going on to come up with a more meaningful, thoughtful, and hopefully compassionate mess...
Jul 08, 2020•29 min•Ep. 137
Happy Anniversary Think Queerly! Two years ago on June 20, 2018, I launched my first podcast. It was called, The Living OUT Podcast, a tongue-in-cheek reference to coming out and being proud to be authentically out. My focus in early episodes was the gay male experience, the uniqueness and creativity that gay men bring to the world, as well as my go-to core subject, personal development.. Concurrently, I was running my publication on Medium, Th-Ink Queerly , that had grown exponentially and was ...
Jun 30, 2020•20 min•Ep. 136
A Think Queerly Podcast Discussion with Shawn Banks Last week I published a post on my Medium publication by Shawn Banks titled, " Why White Gay Men Have Ruined LGBTQ+ Pride Month For Me ." My involvement in the comments raised a number of questions in me, so I asked Shawn if he would come on the podcast and have a conversation. We discussed the reasons that prompted him to write the article. He tells me that he was watching the momentum and social media focus on the Black Lives Matters demonstr...
Jun 26, 2020•59 min•Ep. 135
Think Queerly Discussion with Olivia Nuamah & Jeffrey Iovannone Pride will always be political so long as it continues to exist. Pride, as a celebration, because it is celebrated, is a priori political because of its origins. Even to those to whom Pride only seems a big party, the nature and existence of Pride is dependent upon its foundations as a political movement. There are multiple intersections of inequalities, systemic norms, laws, attitudes, and ideologies which demonstrate that it’s...
Jun 16, 2020•1 hr 55 min•Ep. 134
In this special edition of the Think Queerly Podcast, I speak with my friend and colleague, Shaun Proulx about the issue of shaming and judgment of those who are choosing (and needing) to have sex during the COVID-19 pandemic and social quarantine. Haven’t We Been Here Before? In this episode Shaun and I get right into the various contrasts we are witnessing in human behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic and why that reminds of our own experiences having lived through the very beginnings of the...
Jun 10, 2020•54 min•Ep. 133
Human Liberation, Planetary Respect, and the Dissolution of Power InequalityIn this episode I discuss: How those of us at the bottom of the pyramid can create social and humanitarian evolution; Why despair holds us back from making meaningful change; Is sharing a meme on social media to support a trending hashtag helpful; My thoughts on #BlackOutTuesday, and; Why the time is NOW to do whatever it takes, without shame, to put a full-stop to bigotry, oppression, racial discrimination, gender and s...
Jun 04, 2020•27 min•Ep. 132
In today's episode, I discuss the present and observable factors that explain why we respond or react to the stresses, threats, and challenges that this pandemic has brought into our lives: How “hedonic tone” affects (and controls) how we feel which affects our nervous system; The role of the amygdala (the “reptilian” brain) and how it uses our various senses to read the environment to establish the level of threat or safety to us; Why the effects of COVID-19 on society make it challenging to cr...
May 29, 2020•19 min•Ep. 131
As we bear witness to this virus and its affect on us, how can we see things differently by embracing natural phenomena for the simplicity of what it is? What we see as perfection is witnessed in the natural order of things, not in what we think or do. Perfection is a natural unfolding; the flow of life on this planet and thus even the Novel Coronavirus is a part of that unfolding or coming into being, regardless of the apparent conditions which may have helped the Novel Coronavirus come into be...
May 22, 2020•30 min•Ep. 130
If you are a creative, an entrepreneur, someone who works in the gig-economy, or a business owner, you wear many hats and do a variety of tasks in your work. If you're pulled in several directions but you need to show up in those various areas of business, the only way you can establish and keep boundaries is to make them public. You will need to tell the people you work with or service when you are available; the same goes for keeping true to your personal commitments. This goes entirely agains...
May 16, 2020•28 min•Ep. 129
COVID-19 reveals how some things change while others become more apparent The biggest challenge lately has been what some are calling, moral fatigue, which is our experience of having to make one too many morally challenging decisions. This is showing up during the pandemic as the personal responsibility and respect we have for front-line workers, paying attention to adequate physical distancing, making sure that we minimize how often we go out to all the places we used to go to without a second...
May 09, 2020•22 min•Ep. 128
This is a powerful thought experiment prompt that could reveal far more about who you are, now during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown than at any other time. “If ever there were a time to tell the truth, what do I need to say? Who do I need to say it to? Why have I avoided speaking this truth for so long?” You might not find this a difficult or challenging question. This could also be the sort of question that makes you feel immediately uncomfortable. You might get angry or feel depressed as ...
Apr 30, 2020•22 min•Ep. 127
Diversity is a gift of uniqueness and creativity When did you realize that you had to forgive yourself first, before anyone else, for your “gay shame”? Gay shame is a term used (and possibly coined) by Alan Downs, author of The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man’s World . Downs worked as a therapist for gay men, many of whom experienced a lack of validation for their identity during adolescence. When you grow up in the closet, the world around you (in the form o...
Apr 22, 2020•22 min•Ep. 126
In this Think Queerly Podcast Leadership Discussion, I speak with Jeffry Iovannone and David Butler about having lived through the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, political and social observations, human behaviour, social media, community response, ACT-UP and activism, and how we can contrast this knowledge with what we are currently experiencing in real-time with COVID-19. Historians have long argued that infectious diseases have changed the course of humanity throughout history. “HIV, a pand...
Apr 10, 2020•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 125
In this episode, I offer a mediation on Verse 29 of The Tao Te Ching in light of the COVID-19 Pandemic and how it is teaching us how little control we have of the world. We have an opportunity to respond to this pandemic in a way that will improve society and change our behaviours and actions in our attempts to control the world and other people. This is a tipping point for humanity , a time for witnessing the harm we have caused the planet and other human beings with aggressive capitalism, unsu...
Apr 02, 2020•30 min•Ep. 124
