Episodes
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In this episode we welcome Caverly Morgan, former Zen monk and author of The Heart of Who We Are. Caverly is also the founder of Peace in Schools, a teen-centered mindfulness curriculum for teens.
We jump right into it with a discussion of how teens very naturally want to challenge many of the culture’s bogus assumptions – in her words, teens “are on fire with wanting to dismantle what’s not real.”
We start with a beautiful breath practice that Caverly uses in high school classrooms. “Dental-mental floss”: back and forth through the center, expanding and grounding.
From there, we discuss goodies like:
* the primacy of subjective experience* letting go of the need to find the “right way”* shifting towards what works for your situation and what helps you suffer less* the role of lineages and teachers* the joys of many practices … and how none of them may even be going anywhere!
The Afterparty (Watch at www.mindbodbpod.com)
In this week’s party time, we wax excitedly about concerns that are close to our hearts, which is to say WEIRD SPIRITUAL S**T. We discuss whether there is a universal direction in the contemplative path, one true in all cultures (if so, what might that be?). We talk about how different practices are designed to address different problems or needs, and how these change from culture to culture, person to person, and even - within each person - week to week and moment to moment!
NB: there’s a lot of thumbs up emojis in this… Tasha’s macbook was going berserk and apparently fervently agreeing with everythign we said 👍🎉 Enjoy!
*The Afterparty will move behind the paywall in January! For real this time! Become a paid subscriber to continue being privy to these strange discussions…
Let us know in the comments how these practices landed for you!
K, That’s all for now. Thanks for tuning in!
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Well, this one is cool. It may change your meditation practice and – if you stay with the inquiry – your life. You’d hardly know how ambitious it is though, from our guest Kevin Schanilec’s humble, deadpan delivery.
Kevin is a long-time Buddhist practitioner from Seattle who has formalized a process for seeing through what Buddhists call “The Ten Fetters.” The fetters are fundamental (mis)beliefs we hold about how the self and world exist. Most of us don’t even realize they are beliefs – we are unconsciously inside them, which causes us to suffer in all the usual human ways.
What’s wild is that we don’t have to live according to these beliefs. With practice and commitment, we can learn to let go of each one and experience a corresponding drop in suffering and an increase in fulfillment. And Kevin shows us how…
For the purposes of this episode, we focus on the 4th and 5th fetters: desire and ill will – aka, our human compulsion to act on our various likes and dislikes. Kevin’s guided practice tries to show us that in our present experience, there is actually no inevitable reason to react to anyone, or anything.
If we are quiet and open and curious, we can follow the chain of reactivity back, and find out, as weird as it may sound, that nothing in our direct experience actually kicked it all off. We don’t have to react to anything. For Kevin, this is a freedom worth cultivating. In his words, “we get off that rollercoaster of extreme highs and extreme lows,” and start to respond to life in a more sane, effective, and compassionate way.
We get into all this and so much more! Kevin has such a refreshing perspective on the normalcy of the whole self-realization process.
Jeff says: “I now do this practice all the time – maybe more than any other Mind Bod Pod practice – and it works for me, every time. I have less reactivity in my life in general, and I consider this practice central to that.”
So give it a shot! You can also find other inquiries on Kevin’s website.
LINKS:
* Kevin’s site: simplytheseen.com* liberationunleashed.com
The Afterparty (go to www.mindbodpod.com to watch!)
In this Afterparty, Tasha and Jeff talk about how Kevin’s logical style of spiritual inquiry can be a great fit for the Western mind. They also talk about how there are many other ways and paths. And then they talk about what it means to be your own teacher: How we need the traditions and experienced guides to go deeper, but ultimately we are the ones taking care of ourselves and directing our path.
Then, to quote the AI they asked to summarize this Afterparty, “Tasha and Jeff conclude with a lighthearted reflection on the elusive and omnipresent nature of enlightenment.” 😅
Let us know in the comments how the fetters practice landed for you!
K, That’s all for now. Thanks for tuning in!
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Missing episodes?
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Today we head off the rails and into the spiritual undergrowth, where the wild things are. Our guest is Diana Piruzevska, aka Neon Dreamer – psychic, medium, healer. Yup – all that! Not her choice - at least not at first…
Skeptics might scoff at these intuitions, experiences, and capacities, but that doesn’t change the fact that they kept happening to Diana and have always happened to some of her older family members. After years of battling it, she’s come out the other side and embraced her witchy Macedonian heritage. Diana now shares her talents with others via her radio show and her professional healing practice.
For her guided meditation, Diana takes us through a grounding and opening breath practice that she uses with clients before a session. Then, to demo what her psychic process is like, she does a reading for Tasha, sharing out loud what she’s noticing about Tasha’s neat and orderly brain.
Diana talks about what it feels like to lock into a client, to get an embodied feeling for their experience. Sometimes it’s very visual, other times more kinaesthetic – she unpacks the whole creative thing for us, leading to a lively discussion on doing magic on creepy dudes, trauma and disembodiment, and how others can navigate the stormy waters between mental illness and spiritual insight.
Enjoy!
LINKS:
* neondreamer.com
* IG: @neonandroid
* Substack: Neon Dreamer
* Spiritual Emergence Network
The Afterparty
In this here Après le Part-AY, your hosts discuss why women and people of colour have higher incidences of empathy and intuition, how hyper-masculinity shuts the whole thing down, and then … a bunch about neurodiversity, since that’s their thing right now.
Let us know in the comments how your witchy psychic vibes are doing these days!
K, That’s all for now. Thanks for tuning in & see you again in 2 weeks (we’re still doing biweekly episodes until life slows down a bit!)
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome Tim Hwang, an occupational therapist in New York City's public school system. Tim’s specialty is teaching mindfulness to young people with “disabilities classifications” - Autism, ADHD, and so on. Some of these teens are into the practice, some are bored by it, and some are highly resistant to it. And that’s what we get into!
Tim, Tasha, and Jeff all have experience teaching meditation to young people, so there’s much insight-sharing and general tomfoolery. Unsurprisingly, Tasha and Jeff revert to their rebellious teen selves when Tim starts guiding them in his GROW practice - an acronym that means Ground, Relax, Open, Warm (the heart).
Good times! This episode is for anyone interested in supporting young people - whether you’re an educator, a parent, or a teen yourself.
We get into:
* emotional regulation
* customizing meditation for neurodiversity & ADHD
* how to use “five-finger breathing” to calm down
* the role of community,
* and how teens can find their own unique pathways to practice.
Tim - thank you, friend! And to all teens: feel free to ignore everything we say and do it your own way 😅 One-finger breathing!
Then join us for The Afterparty video! And let us know in the comments at www.mindbodpod.com how you liked the GROW practice!
K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
This episode is a transmission, no doubt about. Our guest wandered out of the Ontario forest and is here to challenge how we think about ourselves and meditation and nature and agriculture and the old crafts and a lot more. Welcome, Steven Martyn, founder of The Sacred Gardener School.
While living alone in the bush - mediating, surviving - Steven came to understand meditation as a form of hunting for the origin of thoughts, looking for the “I within the I.” His relationship to nature changed. More intimate, more connected to nature’s gifts. He found the old ways of agriculture, of grafting, of building – all of them sacred practices. And now he teaches this in his forest mystery school.
For our first guided exercise, we go back to being little kids and receive blessings from our elders, our ancestors. “There’s so much animosity and stress out there these days, we need to take care of our little child,” says Steven.
For the second exercise — near the end of the episode — we practice seeing the natural world in a way that may push us out of our idea of being a small, separate self.
We talk leadership, authority, hierarchy. Steven describes the power of the group at his school and how he helps participants move deeper into their relationship with nature.
Lots of good stuff – maybe life-changing if you let it in!
Then join us for The Afterparty (at www.mindbodpod.com), where your hosts discuss the natural world and plunging nondual fuckery unto infinity. Then we talk about losing connection to the blissful interconnectivity of nature, talking to plants, Jeff’s discarded book ideas, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Let us know in the comments how your bond with nature’s going these days!
K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome Eileen Laird, author of Healing Mindset. This episode, we target autoimmune disease and the role that the mind-body connection can play in reducing pain, increasing resilience, and living a more vital life.
There are over a hundred different autoimmune conditions — from rheumatoid arthritis to lupus to Grave’s disease to multiple sclerosis and more — one in ten people have an autoimmune condition worldwide. Stress makes the condition worse… fortunately, this also works in the other direction! In moments of overwhelm, we can learn to send an anti-inflammatory cascade back through the nervous system.
And that’s what we practice today! Eileen guides us in a soothing meditation of self-compassion, both working with pain and befriending the body.
In our discussion afterwards we explore:
* how to work with pain and find safe places in the body
* the relationship between sensitivity and autoimmune conditions
* how to notice early warning signals
* how Eileen supports herself via daily routines
* and much more…
Take the practice for a spin and tell us in the comments how it went!
Eileen, thank you for writing your book and for supporting so many people through your incredible podcast.
LINKS:
* Healing Mindset Book
* The Phoenix Helix Podcast
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Toby Sola is founder of the Brightmind Meditation app and an old friend of Jeff’s. In this episode, we chew on some tasty mini-meditation snacks – yum yum!
We get all Jedi-mind and try splitting our attention between chatting and meditating. Finally, we explore an inventive and beautiful practice of nurturing our own sense of trustworthiness.
All of these are ways of highlighting the basic creativity of meditation, how we can mix and match the core skills to build practices that work for us.
We chat about so much more! Like:
* What’s the minimum amount of meditation for stress relief vs more enduring transformation?
* How is one view of meditation and practice limiting?
* How do we work with cringe moments?
* And so on, and so forth, unto infinity!!!!
Take these practices for a spin in your own nervous system, then join us for the official Afterparty, and tell us how it went!
K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of We Were Made for These Times and coauthor of Healing Our Way Home. Kyra shares her journey from a communal upbringing and monastic life with Thich Nhat Hanh, her work in nurturing community, and her exploration of racial identity in spiritual practice.
Her gentle guided practice is beautiful and completely original. We notice the experience of our skin - its age, its protective and permeable nature, its colour, and its history. Afterwards, Tasha shares how profound this was for her, feeling her mixed white and Black heritage, which at times can feel like a battlefield playing out on her own skin.
Our conversation afterward is frank and open: on race and ancestry, on how every person - regardless of skin color - has a role to play in healing the collective trauma of racism and colonialism. We talk about the larger “skin” of community - the role community has to play in offering support and safety, and yet also how hard that can be to find in a culture whose values so often separate and isolate. Is this changing? There are signs it may be. As Thich Nhat Hanh used to say, there is no more noble task than true community building.
Hopefully, this podcast can be a place of community for our listeners - a place where we can explore together the many different ways of being human.
Let us know in the comments how this practice was for you!
Then join us over at www.mindbodpod.com for our riveting afterparty!
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome, Frank Yang – we love you! Frank is an “Infinite Brah” – a true bodybuilder of consciousness who shares his “journey, insights and practices for accessing the highest states of consciousness, awakening and beyond” to quote his fresh and wildly kinetic YouTube channel.
So, there’s lots of talk about the experience (and health benefits!) of non-duality and awakening, whether it shows up in different ways for people in different cultures, the value and traps of using a map to find your way, the primordial mistake of separation (what Tasha’s teacher Lama Lena calls “the original oops”), and other excellent topics for consciousness nerds.
Then, 30 minutes in, he takes us to Frank Yang Land — a WONDERFUL and very impactful guided practice that merges mindful noting with surrendering to effortlessness. We hit the sweet spot between doing and non-doing.
Then, join us at www.mindbodpod.com for The Afterparty, where we discuss what percentage of our suffering has actually been reduced through practice. Is it 99%, like Frank says for himself, or some other number? How does this change with external intensities (like having kids)? Would the Buddha have gotten his ass kicked if he had to raise two kids in our 21st-century urban insanity? Probably!
Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
This week, we welcome Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, world-renowned meditation teacher, author, and lineage holder in the Bön tradition of Tibet, one of the oldest spiritual traditions on the planet. Today, we take three protective imaginary “pills” – a white pill, a red pill, and a blue pill. “Because in the West everybody loves to eat pills!”
Each pill is both a syllable that we voice out loud and a mini-meditation that addresses a specific challenge. The white pill – “Ah” – is awareness of stillness in our body, which can protect us against unskilful physical action. The red pill – “Om” – is awareness of silence, which can protect us against saying something stupid. And the blue pill – “Hung” – is awareness of spaciousness in the heart, which can protect us from making decisions out of anger or urgency.
For eight ethereal minutes, Wangyal Rinpoche sings these three syllables to us again and again. You can let them wash through you as you sit with us or sing along.
“Ah…”
“Om…”
“Hung…”
The audio isn’t perfect, but who cares?! Can you feel each vibration? Can you feel each blessing? Jeff cries, as usual. It’s an honor to experience such venerable medicine.
Let us know how the pills went to work on you and tune into the video afterparty over at www.mindbodpod.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
OK friends, enough with the talky talky. Grab some paper and a pencil: in this episode, we’re waking up our inner artists and making Zentangle magic!
Martha Huggins and Molly Hollinbough are our sister guides. Many years ago, their romantic parents – Maria and Rick – figured out the Zentangle method together. Ever since, they’ve been teaching it to people around the world as a way to slip into a fulfilling artistic flow and create beautiful works of pattern, shape, and color.
Then we chat about:
* how nothing is a mistake
* the equanimity training of going with the flow
* the balance of freedom vs constraints in art
* the therapeutic and healing benefits of “tangling,”
* and much more
Share your Zentangly thoughts with us in the comments! Then watch The Afterparty over at www.mindbodpod.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and the host of The On Being Project's Poetry Unbound podcast. He is interested in story and storytelling, in the practice of reading ourselves into stories, and sometimes in reading our lives as stories. All of which can shake us us up in surprising ways.
**If you like these adventures in consciousness, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription! at www.mindbodpod.com**
In today’s episode, he reads from a sequence of poems he wrote called “Seven Deadly Songs” – sonic booms of verse that recreate some of the impossibly hard things that happened to Ó Tuama growing up gay in Ireland.
Maybe we can feel ourselves into these poems too, feel the sounds of the words inside us, feel something – anger, sacrilege, indifference, recognition. We growl at God, because sometimes, in Ó Tuama’s words “the God character of our narrative needs to be undone in order for something new to open.”
We talk The Lord of the Rings, N.K. Jemisin and world-building, about Tasha’s deep childhood desire to be Batman, and Ó Tuama’s deep childhood desire to be Wonder Woman!
What questions can we ask of our stories that will take us deeper into them?
Let us know in the comments!
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Then join us for the Afterparty video: In which Jeff says he feels dumb, and poetry is hard, and Tasha says reading a poem is like watching a gas cloud condense into a planet. We talk about the practice of finding yourself in the landscape of a story, and also of finding story in the landscape of your life. Then, we talk about prayer. Tasha recites a childhood prayer in German, and Jeff exclaims, “Ezekiel comes through with $10,000!” 😄
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
This week, we welcome the multi-talented Ofosu Jones-Quartey, a meditation teacher, author, and hip-hop artist. This discussion is so fun! It starts with how to share meditation and mindfulness with young people – how to stay real and relatable. Then gets into the role of the artist, creativity, and what it means to connect to your actual voice.
We do 2 practices: the first is a self-compassion practice that ends with Ofosu singing! And that leads to a second practice: an actual song - a beautiful (it made Jeff cry) hip-hop track called “Avalo” that features the voices of Ofosu’s wife and daughter. Ofosu plays the full music video for us. Definitely worth checking out the whole video episode!
How do we make being kind to ourselves an accessible practice, while also acknowledging (in Ofosu’s own words) “how stupid it can sometimes feel”?! Good to figure this out, since we’re talking to ourselves all the time anyway.
Relatedly, how can you integrate meditation into your art practice without it coming off as corny or performative? We explore the challenges and rewards of being both a meditation teacher and an artist and how both Ofosu and Tasha negotiate these roles in public.
Then join us for the Afterparty over on www.Mindbodpod.com!
In this Afterparty your hosts, Tasha the Amazon and Jeff the Non-Amazonian, continue to discuss navigating being both an artist and a meditation practitioner. We talk high-brow/low-brow, spiritual materialism, and authentic artistic expression. Then we say these phrases, not in this order: “You don’t talk about Tantra - you do it!” “Take your demon and stick it in someone else’s nut sack!” and “Tank-top, nice shirt, put in the work!”
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman, authors of Let's Talk, An Essential Guide to Skillful Communication. Mudita and Dan have been teaching people how to communicate effectively for over 40 years, so there is serious wisdom in this episode. As Mudita points out, changing how you communicate can change your entire way of perceiving and relating to others. It is a profound practice, and it’s one each of us is already involved in, so we may as well get better at it!
With that in mind, the entire episode is really one long practice of communication, with Mudita and Dan reflecting back our own questions and habits. They skillfully unpack these key principles:
* how to give feedback
* loop communication and the art of becoming more aware of how we affect the other person
* how to avoid “flooding” other people, and instead “chunk” your delivery
* the life-changing skill of reflective listening as a way to understand another’s perspective and foster connection
* positive intentions and the way this brings caring into the mix
* the importance of “provisionality,” ie, using language that acknowledges the possibility of change
* the skill of framing and how to work with emotionally triggering subjects
* understanding whether to talk or listen in the first place!
Communication shapes how we get along with others, how we achieve our goals, and ultimately is core way to add more peace and compassion into the world.
Such a fun and bouncy conversation, like improvising with two jazz pianists.
Thank you Mudita and Dan!
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Then join us at www.mindbodpod.com for The Afterparty:
Communication is what we do, and it’s something many of us also do very poorly! In this Afterparty, we talk about the various unconscious crutches we use while hanging out with others and what it might look like to connect in a more open-ended way. We also riff on the way good conversation is a kind of agreement, a world we construct that we then get to play inside! This is very different than seeing language as a route to discovering what is objectively true.
*In an effort to sustain our antics and continue paying our producer Timmy, the Afterparty will move behind ye old paywall…soon. Please join us if you can!
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
We’re joined by Jamie Pabst, founder and CEO of Spiritune, a music therapy app that supports people’s mental health. Spiritune makes explicit what most of us know implicitly: music can shift our emotional and cognitive state.
What does “clinical-grade music” sound like? We listen to two 3-minute tracks, the first designed to move us from anxious to peaceful and the second from lethargic to victorious.
Along the way, Jamie points out the different music therapy principles at work:
* the “iso-principle” of meeting people where they are
* rhythm and neural entrainment
* the power of tone to create connection
A true exploration of consciousness! We talk about emotional literacy, how music can help both shift and evoke emotions, what it means to be “genre-agnostic,” the potential role of generative AI in shaping the technology, and much more.
The Afterparty (Watch the Video at www.mindbodpod.com
In this here Afterparty, Tasha puts on her music producer hat, which leads to a fascinating discussion on the cultural specificity of musical preferences, the true nature of musical complexity and human preferences, and various other tasty morsels.
Also! Tasha’s Substack & practice community, Bodhisavage, kicks off this Thursday! Monthly live Zoom sessions start June 21, with the good vibes of the Full Moon.
Subscribe at: Bodhisavage.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Last summer, we interviewed Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis, founders of Cardea, a psychedelic-assisted care organization based in NYC. This week, we’re finally posting that conversation! Made up of therapists, space holders, artists, and musicians, Cardea focuses on cultivating what they call “aliveness”: the sense that you are vital, fully engaged in your life, and connected to the world around you.
Something we find refreshing about the Cardea crew is their playful approach to psychedelics. A lot of people are so serious about psychedelics lately, obsessing over how they might use them to “fix” what’s “wrong” with themselves. It’s a view that risks turning psychedelics into just another cog in the Western medical model. But psychedelics have always been far more interesting than that. They are, by nature, creative, and have the potential to plunge us into a direct and dynamic relationship with life. This is what we get into with Ross and Dimitri!
In this conversation, we talk about Cardea’s unique model of practice, where they engage practitioners in a specific kind of dialogue before each session. We also talk about:
* set and setting,
* the club scene
* and what a “modern” – even poetic – use of psychedelics could look like, where the practitioner doesn’t give their power away.
The conversation continues in the Q&A, so please check out our Afterparty video at https://www.mindbodpod.com. In the Q&A, we chat with the audience about:
* The use of mushrooms in palliative and supportive care.
* How to support someone who is freaking out.
* The role of intention setting before a psychedelic experience
* “Radical hospitality”
* Experiences with iboga and other psychedelics, including their effects on cravings, life review, and spiritual exploration.
* Practical considerations for individuals interested in this work, including the availability of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and the importance of support afterwards.And much more!
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
PS - Tasha and Jeff recently partook in a totally mind-blowing ketamine ceremony at Cardea’s beautiful New York space and - for posterity - recorded the whole damn thing! Stay tuned for some extra audio and visual treats coming soon ;)
CARDEA LINKS:
* Cardea.net
* Ross's essay in Time magazine, “What Psychedelics Can Teach Us About Play”
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You don’t want to miss this one! A deep dive into “the heart of healing,” as we explore how medicines like cannabis and ketamine can amplify trauma therapy. Our guest is Saj Razvi, Director of Education at the Psychedelic Somatic Institute, and one of the original MAPS researchers and clinicians responsible for bringing MDMA-assisted therapy into the world.
According to Saj, there’s a self-corrective homeostatic healing mechanism available in the body that gets amplified during altered states. The key intervention he uses with clients is called “selective inhibition.” Normally, when stressed, we calm ourselves with coping strategies like deep breathing, moving, rationalizing, dissociating, and more. These tools give us short-term relief, but the downside is they inhibit the long-term healing of trauma, which Saj says our biology “is organically trying to achieve.”
In his 10-minute guided practice, we do something different: we find a mildly stressful memory, and instead of avoiding it, we slow the whole thing down to move through the discomfort into something else.
What’s this like? We experience the full spectrum - Tasha’s pretty accustomed to emotionally triggering practices like this, while Jeff feels like a homunculus riding the bucking bronco of his nervous system! Meditation vs therapy vs psychedelics – we get right into it!
Saj also talks about:
- the amazing ability of cannabis and ketamine to heal dissociative tendencies
- how human relational wounding requires human relational healing,
- the role of the therapist as “a player in the psychedelic reality of the person.”
- A thrilling exploration into the cutting-edge of mental health – join us!
Then join us at www.mindbodpod.com for This week's Afterparty: The world premiere of our new chart-topping single, “Trauma Song”, which we unveil at the end of the video and which has already secured us a 3-album deal and is set to eclipse the entirety of Tasha’s career as a recording artist in one fell swoop.
Plus: a fun discussion on the perils of meditative dissociation and the unique power of meditation to create more permanent states of extraordinary mental health. We talk about the spiritual preferences of male-identified vs female-identified practitioners, about sitting meditation vs body-focused disciplines like yoga, and other weird noises.
Leave us a comment and let us know how you much you like our new song :)
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome Lama Liz Monson, spiritual co-director of the Natural Dharma Fellowship, and author of a new book on “crazy wisdom,” Tales of a Mad Yogi. Contrary to its controversial reputation, crazy wisdom is more than a spiritual shock technique – of, say, covering oneself in feces (to use a classic example), or staggering drunkenly around the Tibetan countryside. It is, in fact, a powerful and time-tested way to cut through our habitual patterns and engage with how reality actually is, as opposed to how we want it to be.
How do we practice this? By starting simple!
Liz guides us in a 10-minute meditation on the breath, the body, and the larger bandwidth of awareness. Can we allow our experience to be exactly what it is, without trying to control it? Yes, maybe, no, yes… we do our best! This doesn’t seem crazy, although it can seem impossible. And yet, the implications are radical.
Such a fun and provocative conversation on:
* the nature of trust and spontaneity
* the neutrality of things
* our own “basic goodness” (Liz tells a wonderful story about 9/11 and New Yorkers’ initial response of compassion and care)
* the free-flow of creativity
* and much more!
Let us know in the comments how this practice went for you!
Watch the Afterparty video at: https://www.mindbodpod.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome JF Martel, filmmaker, writer, and cohost of the superb podcast, Weird Studies. Sometimes, we have a guest who really gets the spirit of what we’re up to here at the Mind Bod Pod… JF is one such guest. He full-on designed a practice for us based on his love of old-school, Dungeons-and-Dragons-style role-playing games… the kind that (in JF’s words) “usually happen in dank basements.”
That’s right, in this week’s episode, JF is our Dungeon Master!
**Watch this podcast and our fun-filled afterparty in VIDEO over at www.mindbodpod.com where you can comment and let us know how the practice landed for you!
As we follow JF’s guidance, our inner vision opens, and we trek into the dark underbelly of our imaginations.
* What is the practice of surrendering to a story, especially in speculative fiction like fantasy, horror, and science fiction?
* What exactly IS imagination, anyway?
* Is there a reality here beyond our own subconscious?
* …and what happens when we take it seriously?
Join us for a discussion of dream yoga, Jungian archetypes, shadow selves, disaster scenarios, and the imagination as a sense organ. Bwwhahahahahahahahahahaha!!
The Afterparty Video (visit www.mindbodpod.com)
This week, we discuss surrendering to a story as a kind of meditation, what happens when we move towards the scary and the uncomfortable, and how we can use our existential ambition to elevate Dungeons and Dragons into a transformative spiritual practice.
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
www.mindbodpod.com
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe -
Welcome Sah D'Simone - a former “condescending spiritual c**t” (his words not ours!) who’s since grown into one of the best humans we’ve ever met. Sah is hilarious, fresh, wise and so loveable! You’ll feel all of that immediately, as we explore themes from his new book, Spiritually, We.
**Watch this podcast and our fun-filled afterparty in VIDEO over at www.mindbodpod.com where you can comment and let us know how the practice landed for you!
What themes you ask? Juicy goodies like:
* What makes a great teacher
* Understanding past traumas (Sah says: “if it’s hysterical, its historical”)
* Integrating your “darkness”* Fearlessly celebrating your own imperfections
What’s the practice? Sah guides us in an exploration of how the past might be living in our bodies right now, and helps us welcome it in (“hello old friend!”) to be loved, cared for, and seen with fresh eyes.
And it works! Jeff cries, Tasha sees her head from her heart as a weird wooden mask (yup, that happened), Sah says more delightful stuff, and twenty minutes later we’re all BFFs for life. WEEEEEEEE! 😍🥳
The Afterparty
In this week's Afterparty video (www.mindbodpod.com), we reflect with great maturity on the next generation of spiritual practitioners, make mouth sounds, and then sing a very beautiful song about becoming a low-level superhero of love and saving the s**t out of all beings. Kapow!
If this episode tickled your adventure-loving fancy, consider sharing it with a friend.
Thanks for tuning in! See you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Find Sah Online:
* Web: practice.sahdsimone.com* IG: @sahdsimone* TikTok: @sahdsimone
Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe - Show more
