Authentic Living

For the first time in the history of the world, we are beginning to explore intimacy as the essential ingredient to healthy, whole relationships. But intimacy is not really all about sex. It's about "dancing core to core"—as Judith Blackstone, PhD puts it in her lovely book The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others. Judith is an innovative, and internationally re...

On several previous shows we have referred listeners to meditation as one of the most effective of ways to get in touch with the authentic Self. Today, we are going to be examining some meditation tools created by Michel Pascal, and used by Google, Harvard University and other major organizations to reduce stress. We will explore this from the angle of spirituality as well as physicality, mind and...

To date, most religions have wanted to claim their own God. In the West the Christian religion has claimed that their God is the only God. That every other God is actually a false god. But what if, like Pope Francis says, we are all meeting the same God in different ways. What if, in fact, each religion, each language of each religion, each ritual, each path, each prayer is but a different languag...

Our guest today is Dr. Larry Dossey, author of several books including: The Power of Premonitions; The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things; Healing Beyond the Body; Reinventing Medicine and his latest and the topic of our discussion today: One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Mind and Why It Matters. Dr. Dossey is an internal medicine physician, former Chief of Staff o...

Over the past 20 years or so, there has arisen among spiritual teachers a certain mythology that has sunk its teeth into the psyche of the New Age, New Thought, Human Potential Movement adherents along with those who call themselves spiritual but not religious. It is the idea that fear opposes love. This idea is translated to mean that when one loves, one should not feel fear, and vice versa. It i...

It is true that one of the things we fear the most is our own fear. We want it to go away and leave us alone. We want to feel safe, warm and cared for. We want to trust life. But fear just keeps getting in the way. We may try to outweigh it by being tough, strong and loud. We may try to erase it with drinking/drugging. We may cave to it by living in a small little hole for a lifetime. But fear--it...

So, you are trying…right? You are working really hard on your career and financial goals, working really hard on that relationship, working really hard on meditating and thinking only positive thoughts. But you keep slipping. You keep wondering why you are slipping. And every time you slip, you feel more uncertain, more shameful and more resistant to trying. But you have to keep trying, right? Bec...

This is that time of year when we talk about it. We sing about it. We even pray about it. But no one really believes that we are actually going to have peace on earth, right? I mean, look around man! You can't really believe that this crazy place is going to one day be all peace, love and joy, right? We are not those people. We are not the people who can facilitate this. We are people who are weak...

We generally belief that "livin' the good life" means having lots of money to buy all the things that give us pleasure. That's because we don't know that pleasure is not the same as joy. We also believe that avoiding difficult (currently called "negative") emotions is a way to develop a good and happy life. That's because we do not understand that there's no such thing as a good or bad emotion—nor...

We go around all the time telling each other and ourselves that we should "be" more loving. Be more kind. Be more respectful. But how do we make these shoulds into reality. The truth is that anytime we put the word "should" in front of the word love, it ceases to be love and becomes instead a duty, an ought to, a have to. We think that we should be more loving, and we chastise ourselves when we ar...

Today there are many Americans who are frightened, angry and being chased around by some of the more primal emotions regarding survival. Short of everyone in the country immigrating to Canada, what can we do about these emotions? Many tell us that we should somehow make these emotions go away because they are negative. But what if there is no such thing as a negative or a positive emotion? What if...

One of the most difficult challenges of any relationship is communication. How do we say what we mean without lashing out, or hurting the ones we love the most? Unfortunately, we tend to go to the extremes on this one: We either shut-down, or we lash out. Neither of those two options work, however, to create the intimacy that a relationship needs to grow. Nancy Dreyfus has come to our aid here wit...

What does it mean to be a woman in today's Western society? How advanced are we really over countries where women have no rights at all? The perpetuation of the Western rape culture would deny our advances regarding respect for feminine consciousness as well as the female herself. Feminine consciousness is consciousness of the inner human. It takes us inward. But many women today spend much of the...

We have lived, since our beginnings, from the good vs. evil paradigm. If a thing isn't good, it's bad: and if a thing isn't bad, it's good. We have divided all of life up this way, with but a very few things ending up in the neutral category. But what if good vs. evil is the wrong paradigm? What if the correct paradigm to live from is the one that measures truth and lies, rather than goodness and...

There are many people out there telling us today, that the shadow is the bad, sabotaging part of us, and that because it is, we need to clean it out. Those same people tell us that the ego, though also bad, is the opposite of shadow and what we need to do with ego is to get rid of it altogether. But what if the divine Self is also in the unconscious, and the ego is just a liaison between the consc...

We still hear a lot about how it is that we should control our thoughts so that we can get what we want. There are memes on social media sites every day about this idea. We are constantly being advised to watch what we are thinking, because the Universe is listening and responding to our thoughts as if they were direct orders for the Universe to follow. But our wicked thoughts, called by most "neg...

The global thinking has, since the beginning of time it seems, divided everything in the world up into good or bad, good or evil. The current euphemisms for this same divided thinking are the terms "positive" and "negative." We eat good food or bad food, we have positive or negative experiences or thoughts…everything is divided this way. But if we removed these terms from our vocabulary what could...

One of the most important tasks of maturity is learning to live with and accept another person as is, while simultaneously holding on to one's own authenticity. But most of us go through a few relationships with Mr. or Mrs. Wrong before we get involved with someone with whom we can actually complete that task. This should be someone we cannot control and who cannot control us. It should be someone...

We Westerners got hold of this concept of Karma and turned it into a Western motif. One that has everything to do with our own dualistic thinking about good and evil. One in which if we are bad in one lifetime, then that same kind of badness will happen to us in the next life. And if we are good in a lifetime then that same kind of goodness will happen to us in the next life. This creates a kind o...

The most fascinating truth is that both detachment and Oneness are realities of living. We talk about detachment, letting go, as if we really can let go of something or someone and, thereby, be separate from it. But the reality is that when we detach we tell the paradoxical truth of Oneness. We are never really separate from anyone or anything—though we may detach ourselves from their control over...

We have arrived at adolescence in our understanding of relationship—in other words, we have a long way to go. But, well, what do we expect? Only 150 years ago, we were still often arranging marriages. We arranged for a good dowry, good property, money, inheritance, prestige, even good teeth and good hips. So this thing of marrying someone we love is new, and we have only begun the work of understa...

People say it all the time, right? You hear it almost every day: Let it go, man, just let it go. But what they forget to tell you is HOW to let it go. It's easier said than done, right? If you are holding on to something, obsessed with it, ruminating over it, worried about it and generally upset over the whole thing, then letting go is going to seem like dropping from the top of the Grand Canyon....

In order to answer that question we first have to understand that Self is not the same as self. Indeed, what we consider to be self or personality is commonly made up identity. Identity is formed by introjecting the projections of those who were most significant to us in our early upbringing. It is not who we actually are. Rather it is a mask and costume we put on in order to feel that we belong i...

I remember watching Star Trek on TV as a teenager and wondering what it would be like to be able to read the minds of other people. Back then that's what I thought telepathy was all about—sneaking into the thoughts of another person without their knowledge, so that you could outwit, or out-compete them. But our guest today, Colleen Mauro is here to talk to us about the kind of intuition that she c...

Typically we don't think of surrender as a form of empowerment. We think of surrender in terms of defeat, waving the white flag and feeling forever after that like the loser. But surrender is allowing the soul to be itself. Surrender is allowing the authentic Self to run the life. Surrender is getting in the zone. The problem is most of us don't know how or when to do it. We don't know how to "let...