Authentic Living

On another show in the past we discussed an overall summary of some of the mistakes made even by well-intended Christians because of the mistranslations passed down to us. Today we are going to begin a process of getting more specific about some of these mistranslations. What has happened is that fundamentalism—or what many today are calling Evangelical Christianity—is based in these mistakes in t...

Today we are talking to Dr. Don St. John, author of the book "Healing the Wounds of Childhood," as this is one of the most important of all of the subjects we could discuss. Very often it is these wounds that keep us trapped, even as we are striving to get past them in some kind of way. How do we grow into our full potential while these wounds remain yet unhealed? How do we increase our ability to...

What do we mean when we speak of Oneness? What is duality? What is it like to live in Oneness? Is it possible that we are actually in a unique period of spiritual transformation that, through divisiveness leads us to unity, even to Oneness? These are some of the questions we will answer today as we speak to Robert Atkinson, PhD, and author of the book, The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interc...

We have always heard a lot about how we ought to love everyone, how we should love others, and lately even how we should love ourselves. But we don't hear so much about learning how to receive love, and most of us have not been taught how to do this. We've not been taught to accept loving gestures with humility. We've not been taught how to relish in the love that is constantly ours coming from th...

Just let it go! Don't we hear that all the time? But the problem is that we just can't seem to do that. We can let it go. IT has hold of us. IT controls us, for we think that we have to control IT. Letting go then, turns out to be one of the hardest things we ever do. Surrender sounds like waving a white flag and letting the IT take over. Won't it all just fall apart, our plans, our dreams, our re...

As we study the sacred texts of the world, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Bible—particularly in its root language—what we discover is that duality is nonduality. There simply is no such thing as separation. Yet we continue to live our lives as if we were separate from the divine, and separate from each other, and the natural world. It is very difficult for us to imagine Oneness....

How safe are you really in a world full of chaos? What is safety and how do we get to feel safe--particularly in these times when there is so much upheaval and hate in the world? It seems there is so much to fear and there is so much anxiety right now individually and collectively. How do we manage to feel safe? And is feeling safe the opposite of fear? Today we are going to talk about fear and sa...

Mark Nepo is an author, poet, philosopher, beloved teacher and cancer survivor who has, for thirty years, been exploring how we can stay awake and authentic when our wounds make us numb and hidden; how we can minimize what stands between us and our experience of life; how we can create a practice that wears down what thickens around our hearts and minds. And today we are going to talk to him about...

We welcome Lissa Coffey back to the show today to talk about her wonderful little children's book entitled "The Four Pearls and the Four Squirrels." Lissa is an Ayurveda expert, hypnotherapist, sociologist, author and life coach. And this little book brings together all of her knowledge in one easy-to-understand approach to happiness. Children are subject to so many influences and we, as parents,...

Forgiveness turns out to be just another f-word—for it is fraught with so much misinformation, and laden with such heaviness! But forgiveness is not what we've thought it is. It is not something we can "should" ourselves into. It is not a duty. It is not taking someone back. It is not absolution. It is not tolerating the intolerable and accepting the unacceptable. It is not pity. It is not trying...

There are so many ways, dictated by so many others, to be a spiritual person. Many, for example, believe that they should never allow themselves to have a so-called negative thought, or a negative feeling. They believe that doing so not only makes them less spiritual, but it means that they might attract so-called negative events into their lives. But what if there's no such thing as a negative th...

We are so happy to have Dr. E back again to the Authentic Living show to talk to us about her third part in the Sounds True online event series, The Dangerous Old Women, entitled The Joyous Body. We do tend to either focus wholly on the body as image, or leave it out entirely from our conscious experience until it acts up. And we rarely if ever think of the body as a repository of joy. It's a work...

Most of us have been taught that guilt is a good thing. A guilty conscience keeps us in line—according to that teaching. Guilt drives us to "do the right thing," or so we've been taught. But what if the human heart has enough passion and compassion to motivate correct action without the use of guilt? What if guilt has been put in place because we don't trust the authentic Self to direct us? What i...

What we have heard and we've read in the Bible, well it ain't necessarily so. So goes the old Porgy and Bess song. Perhaps they did not read Thomas Moore's version, Gospel The Book of John, in which regardless of religion or atheism one discovers a deeper more meaningful spirituality hidden in the root meanings of the words used. Unfortunately, much of the work of John and others has been turned i...

There are many spiritual teachers who are teaching us that all of life in this world is actually an illusion—that the reality of life is that there is no suffering, no pain, no drama—just the gentle peace of nirvana—the life beyond the veil of matter. Is that true? If so, what are we doing here, what is the meaning of life if it is all just an illusion anyway? But what if life is not an illusion—d...

How do we manage a culture in which there is such diversity, while maintaining unity? The current political scene has revealed much about what is yet unresolved in the collective American psyche. We've seen hatred, misogyny, abuse, and profound unwillingness to even consider the option of acceptance of diversity. So, what do we do with that? How can we find unity in that? Well, the journey to whol...

The anxious heart is the worried heart. It is often overwhelmed with a sense that life is too big to be managed, that one is alone without any help to deal with those unmanageable issues of life. Often even though the rational mind would tell us that there is nothing to worry about, we continue to worry. There are various techniques that are useful to help anxious people. But today we are going to...

Do you want to know how to engage in direct connection with the Universe? How to live a soulful life? How to tap into your soul's wisdom? Our guest today, spiritual teacher, author, psychic and musician, Sara Wiseman, brings some answers to those questions and more. We'll be talking about her latest book, "Messages from the Divine: Wisdom for the Seeker's Soul," her 11th book. So, if you want to k...

How does one manage to maintain one's spirituality, when the world seems to have turned upside down? In a world where what was previously "right" seems wrong and what was "wrong" now seems right, how does one maintain a sense of balance? How do we sort out the distinctions? What do we believe? What is real and what is "fake news?" How does one maintain authenticity when faced with toxicity? Today'...

What is the difference between spiritual guidance and spiritual abuse? Certainly, most of us would deny that when we offer spiritual guidance we might also be spiritually abusing. But it is most important that we understand the distinction if we are to serve others in any spiritual capacity. Typically, we think of abuse only in terms of its physical, emotional or sexual forms. But what is beginnin...

Dr. Robert Firestone, author, clinical psychologist and artist, has developed a special approach to working with those inner urges that motivate behaviors we later regret, or which facilitate the furtherance of dysfunctional patterns. He uses voice therapy, which gives voice to the energy that pushes us. From this we learn where our patterns developed and can begin to live life from a deeper, more...

Joan Borysenko comes back to the Authentic Living Show to discuss one of the most important features of mental health: the appropriate use of boundaries. We are only recently coming to understand the necessity of appropriate psychological, spiritual and relational boundaries. On this show we are going to really get into this discussion--for the use of boundaries could make all the difference in ou...

We tend to think of the feminine in terms of what we understand of gender. But the truth is that gender is one thing, gender identity is another, and femininity is totally another. The feminine is a psychic structure, a way of viewing self, life and other. The feminine is a way of living that has nothing whatsoever to do with gender or gender identity. It also turns out that this feminine way of v...

According to Dr. Shefahli Tsabary, conscious parenting means turning the traditional notion of parenting on its head. She believes that conscious parenting shifts the epicenter of the parent-child relationship away from the traditional parent-to-child "know it all" approach, to a mutual parent-with-child relationship in which the parent learns alongside the child. With this model, instead of being...

In an astrological chart we see a configuration called an opposition. It means that two distinct energies in the chart are acting in opposition to each other. Well, we have all kinds of oppositions in our lives, both internal and external. Betrayals, enemies, inner conflicts, closed doors, terminated relationships, our own inner demons and many more things seem to come up in opposition to where we...