Episodes
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Is trauma real? In what sense? These questions don't in any way deny the real suffering of people diagnosed with trauma. Instead, they ask how we might take a broader and deeper look at trauma, in order to heal and transcend it. How can we do better in reducing the emergence of traumatizing experiences, and how can we do better in supporting ourselves and other in healing from these experiences, and opening up new possibilities for evolutionary learning?
In her book Spacious Minds, anthropologist and clinical psychologist Sara E. Lewis invites us to see that resilience is not a mere absence of suffering. Sara's research reveals how those who cope most gracefully may indeed experience deep pain and loss. Looking at the Tibetan diaspora, she challenges perspectives that liken resilience to the hardiness of physical materials, suggesting people should "bounce back" from adversity. More broadly, this ethnography calls into question the tendency to use trauma as an organizing principle for all studies of conflict where suffering is understood as an individual problem rooted in psychiatric illness.
Beyond simply articulating the ways that Tibetan categories of distress are different from biomedical ones, Spacious Minds shows how Tibetan Buddhism frames new possibilities for understanding resilience. Here, the social and religious landscape encourages those exposed to violence to see past events as impermanent and illusory, where debriefing, working-through, or processing past events only solidifies suffering and may even cause illness. Resilience in Dharamsala is understood as sems pa chen po, a vast and spacious mind that does not fixate on individual problems, but rather uses suffering as an opportunity to generate compassion for others in the endless cycle of samsara. A big mind view helps to see suffering in life as ordinary. And yet, an intriguing paradox occurs. As Lewis deftly demonstrates, Tibetans in exile have learned that human rights campaigns are predicated on the creation and circulation of the trauma narrative; in this way, Tibetan activists utilize foreign trauma discourse, not for psychological healing, but as a political device and act of agency.
Sara Lewis, PhD, LCSW is co-founder and Director of Training and Research at Naropa University's Center for Psychedelic Studies. Sara earned her PhD at Columbia University in medical anthropology and public health; her research sits at the intersection of religion, culture and healing with an emphasis on non-ordinary states. As a Fulbright scholar, she conducted long term ethnographic research in India, culminating in her book, Spacious Minds: Trauma and Resilience in Tibetan Buddhism, which investigates how Buddhist concepts of mind shape traumatic memory and pathways to resilience. As a contemplative psychotherapist, she specializes in intergenerational trauma and healing through Somatic Experiencing and psychedelic-assisted therapy.
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The dominant cultural worldview is based upon extraction and exploitation practices that have brought us to the precipice of social, environmental, and climate collapse. Braiding poetic storytelling, climate justice and deep cultural analyses, and the collective knowledge of Earth-centered cultures, The Story is in Our Bones opens a portal to restoration and justice beyond the end of a world in crisis.
Author, activist, and changemaker Osprey Orielle Lake weaves together ecological, mythical, political, and cultural understandings and shares her experiences working with global leaders, systems-thinkers, climate justice activists, and Indigenous Peoples. She seeks to summon a new way of being and thinking in the Anthropocene, which includes transforming the interlocking crises of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ecocide, to build thriving Earth communities for all.
Lake calls forth historical memory of who we are in the Earth's lineage to bring into being the world we keenly long for, at the delicate threshold of great peril or great promise.
For anyone grieving our collective loss and wanting to take action, The Story is in Our Bones is a vital guide to remaking our world. This hopeful, engaging, and creatively lyrical work reminds readers that another world is possible, and provides a desperately needed antidote to the pervasive despair of our time.
Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). She works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and other publications. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Coast Miwok lands.
To learn more, go to:
https://ospreyoriellelake.earth
www.wecaninternational.org
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Missing episodes?
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A super special episode with the magical yogini Drukmo Gyal, a sonic shaman and practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism who bridges Tibetan traditions and global healing. Born into a family of Ngakpas in the culturally rich Amdo region of Tibet, Drukmo Gyal's life has been steeped in the practices of mantra and meditation from a young age. Growing up in a diverse community in Rebgong, she was immersed in an environment where spiritual practices were a daily ritual.
Her journey in traditional healing began with studies in Tibetan medicine in Amdo, after which she furthered her expertise by working for Sorig Khang Estonia (EATTM) and studying under Dr. Nida Chenatsang, a renowned Tibetan physician and lineage holder of the Yuthok Nyingthig - the spiritual healing tradition of Tibetan Medicine.
Combining her passion for singing with her knowledge of Tibetan medicine, she has sought to create healing concerts that nurture the body, speech, and mind. She has collaborated with musicians worldwide, producing five albums of Tibetan Healing Mantras and Prayers, and she has shared her work in over 30 countries through concerts, lectures, and courses.
Drukmo Gyal also serves as an international teacher and guide for Sorig Khang International and as the lead organizer of SKY Estonia. Their team is committed to establishing a Tibetan Medicine Healing & Education Centre in Estonia to bring this ancient wisdom to the Baltic states and Finland, focusing on learning, healing, and cultural exchange.
https://www.drukmogyal.com/
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An essential aspect of philosophy or LoveWisdom: How do we move forward in our lives? Maybe you have some problem or challenge in your personal life, or in your professional life. Or maybe you can sense the general stuckness of humanity, and maybe you even take that to be your own stuckness. Given all the confusion of the world, all the fear and uncertainty within our own soul and in the soul of the world, how can we find genuinely creative and beautiful ways to cultivate our lives forward, and cultivate the life of the world forward at the same time?
It turns out we can only move forward in the most vitalizing and liberating ways if we also move backward at the same time. It’s an aspect of one of the basic paradoxes of LoveWisdom, and we’re going to explore it in today’s episode.
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The Artefact: Holographic Habits and Healing, Part 1
We inquire into the nature of habit and freedom, the meaning of life, and how we can do our jobs and live together while feeling good in our mind, heart, and body, and feeling good about ourselves, about how we are living and loving.
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Dialogue with a spiritual visionary. Cynthia Jurs experienced that almost comical spiritual archetypal pattern of meeting a wise old yogi in a mountain cave. She thought long and hard about what to ask him. His reply sent her on a remarkable spiritual pilgrimage.
In this very special episode of Dangerous Wisdom, Cynthia shares her incredible journey, which she documents in her book, Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World. This is one of my favorite guests!
Cynthia Jurs received Dharmacharya transmission from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh to become a teacher in his Order of Interbeing in 1994. In 2018, she was made an honorary lama in the Vajrayana tradition of Tibetan Buddhism in recognition of her thirty years of pilgrimage into diverse communities and ecosystems around the world to carry out the Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Practice. Today Cynthia is forging a new path of dharma in service to Gaia that is deeply rooted in the feminine, honoring indigenous cultures, and devoted to collective awakening. Cynthia leads meditations, retreats, courses, and pilgrimages to support the emergence of a global community of engaged and embodied sacred activists.
You can find her teachings and connect with her global community at: www.GaiaMandala.net
and learn about her book at: www.summonedbytheearth.org
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Video version here: https://youtu.be/FtDBx1IBkoA
A spiritual pioneer, Phyllis Curott is an attorney, writer and one of America’s first public Witches. Her international best-selling memoir Book of Shadows, 5 other books and groundbreaking Witches’ Wisdom Tarot have been published in 14 languages, making her the most widely published Wiccan author in the world. An outspoken advocate in the courts and media, she handled or consulted on groundbreaking cases securing the legal rights of Witches, including cases of child custody, religious assembly, organization, expression, and free speech.
Phyllis was named one of The Ten Gutsiest Women of the Year by Jane Magazine and inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Clergy and Scholars. She received the 2018 Service to Humanity Award from the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary and the 2020 Person of the Year Award from Kindred Spirit. Phyllis is a Trustee of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, serving as Vice Chair of the 2015 Parliament, and Program Chair for the historic 2021 Parliament blessed by Pope Francis, and the 2023 Parliament with its theme of religious responsibility to resist the growing scourge of fascism. New York Magazine has called her teaching on Witchcraft the culture’s “next big idea” and Time Magazine has published her as one of America’s leading thinkers. Her You-Tube series on Wicca has almost 3 million views. Phyllis is teaching online and working on her next book on the embodied spiritual wisdom of Mother Earth, Nature’s “secret magic” and why the world needs its Witches.
Website: https://www.phylliscurott.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phylliscurott
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phylliscurott/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PhyllisCurottWitchcrafting
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The secret of entering the Way of the Wolf, the Way of the Wild, the Way of the Soul; a celebration of the Gospel of Mountains and Wolves; and a path to creating a vitalizing civilization, based on a nonduality of Nature and Culture.
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What is the truth that human credulity covers over, and what is the truth that the wild honesty of wolves seeks to reveal?
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We consider wolves as a spiritual keystone species. We have considered the horse as a spiritual keystone species, and we can learn a lot from both Wolf and Horse as archetypal currents in the soul. Wolf is part of the mandala of the Dangerous Wisdom curriculum. In light of recent events in Wyoming and more broadly, this contemplation on the spirit of Wolf seems important and overdue. Includes reflections on the books, The Philosopher and the Wolf (by Mark Rowlands), Beyond Words (by Carl Safnia), and the books on the Yellowstone wolves by Rick McIntyre, which start with The Rise of Wolf 8.
https://dangerouswisdom.org/
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Our best science and philosophy suggest very clearly that we don't know what thinking IS. If large ecologies are mind, what is thinking? If mountains think better than most human beings, how can we learn to think like a mountain?
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One of Sophia's owls of wisdom made friends with a delightful and insightful human, the author and ecologist Carl Safina. If you enjoyed My Octopus Teacher, you will love hearing about Carl Safina's fabulous feathered friend, Alfie. Carl's book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, is a wonderful work of philosophy and ecology, and I think you'll enjoy this dialogue as much as I did. It was a great pleasure to speak with him.
Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection, and a moral call to action. His writing has won a MacArthur “genius” prize; Pew, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundation Fellowships; book awards from Lannan, Orion, and the National Academies; and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He grew up raising pigeons, training hawks and owls, and spending as many days and nights in the woods and on the water as he could. Safina is now the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and is founding president of the not-for-profit Safina Center. He hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean, which can be viewed free at PBS.org. His writing appears in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, Audubon, Yale e360, and National Geographic, and on the Web at Huffington Post, CNN.com, Medium, and elsewhere. Safina is the author of ten books including the classic Song for the Blue Ocean, as well as New York Times Bestseller, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. His most recent books are, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, and Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. He lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.
Find out more at https://www.carlsafina.org/
For photos of Alfie:
https://www.instagram.com/meetalfietheowl/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551548969047
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Dr. Tawni Tidwell is an exceptional—and exceptionally interesting—person. She is the first person from the dominant culture to go through the whole Tibetan medical curriculum and earn a Tibetan medical degree. She also has a Ph.D. in bio-cultural anthropology. And her impressive experience and insight go beyond even this already remarkable education. We discuss her education and some aspects of Tibetan medicine. This is one of my favorite dialogues with one of my most favorite guests, and I look forward to having Tawni-la back to inquire further into the nature of health, healing, and liberation.
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What is it to think like a mountain? How is it that many of our decisions go wrong, sometimes producing negative side-effects?
You might remember hearing about a hole in the ozone layer that appeared last century. No one intended to create that hole. But we did it.
We didn’t intend to put mercury in our brains and lead in our bones. A recent study tested 62 samples of human placenta and found microplastics in every single one of them.
How do things go wrong on personal and planetary scales? And how can we do better?
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Lars Chittka is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying bumblebees and honeybees.
I often say that human beings have lost the sense of the mindedness all around us—that we exist fully embedded in mind. In this episode we cultivate an appreciation of the remarkable mind of a bee.
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The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind
Part 2 in an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach
What is the nature of mind? What is the mind of Nature? We inquire into some radical and revolutionary aspects of mind and ecological thinking.
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What is ecological thinking? Why does it matter? A contemplation for everyone—a series of contemplations for everyone. It’s an incredibly important series, because the idea of ecological thinking as we will approach it relates to the basic question of why we have so many problems in our world, and how we can resolve them, and it relates to the nature of mind and the mind of Nature, and how we realize our highest potentials. In other words, it’s about what we are.
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The biggest bite of knowledge fruit humanity has taken in the past millennium or two has to do with complex systems—the very stuff of life. Neil Theise has written an excellent, accessible introduction to complex systems, and we discuss the basic elements.
Neil Theise is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Dr. Theise’s studies in complexity theory have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields such as integrative medicine, consciousness studies, and science-religion dialogue. He is a senior student of Zen Buddhism at the Village Zendo in NYC. His most recent book is, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being.
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Bob Thurman, known in the academic circles as Professor Robert A.F. Thurman, is a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings and the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
A charismatic speaker and author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, Bob was named by The New York Times the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, and was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri Award in 2020, for his help in recovering India’s ancient Buddhist heritage. Time Magazine chose him as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.”
Bob served as the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University for 30 years, until 2020. A very popular professor, students always felt his classes were “life-changing”. Bob is the founder and active president of Tibet House US, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan culture, and of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important artistic and scientific Tibetan treatises.
His own search for enlightenment began while he was a university student at Harvard. After an accident in which he lost the use of an eye, Bob left school on a spiritual quest throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He found his way to India, where he first saw His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1962. After learning Tibetan and studying Buddhism, Bob became a Tibetan Buddhist monk and the first Westerner to be ordained by the Dalai Lama. Some years later, however, he offered up his robes when he realized he could be more effective in the American equivalent of a monastery: the university, returning to Harvard to finish his PhD.
As part of his long-term commitment to the Tibetan cause, at the request of H.H. the Dalai Lama, Bob co-founded Tibet House US in 1987 with Tenzin Tethong, Richard Gere, and Philip Glass, a nonprofit organization based in New York City and dedicated to the preservation and renaissance of Tibetan culture.
Inspired by his longtime good friend the Dalai Lama, Bob takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world through the prism of Tibetan Buddhism. He shares with us the sense of refuge in the Dharma, which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion, sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present, and opens a door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful, kind, and wise future.
Learn more:
https://bobthurman.com/
https://menla.org/
https://thus.org/
https://wisdomexperience.org/treasury-buddhist-sciences/
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How can we practice with Earth? How can we think with Earth? Can we allow our thinking and our practice of life to become undomesticated, wild, and indigenous again? In this dialogue, Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, philosopher in the academy and Zen priest, joins us to discuss Dogen, Gary Snyder, and the possibilities for a practice of the wild that can heal self and world in mutuality.
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