Discomfortable

Nail Polish   While attending the Nonviolent Communication training I mentioned a few weeks ago in Sweden, I met a fellow trainee named Max who was wearing nail polish on one of his hands. Though guys wearing nail polish is really no big deal these days, for me it was a mildly revolutionary act that I knew I needed to try.  I have been looking for ways to subtly announce my sexuality more overtly...

Compassion   This week’s episode is inspired by an ongoing debate amongst self-help gurus, social scientists, and psychologists about the relative merits of empathy vs compassion. To be honest, for the longest time I had no idea what compassion even was. I assumed it was just a fancy synonym for empathy. But after taking that 2-day self-compassion workshop with Kristin Neff an...

Excess Baggage   While I was traveling around the world with Remote Year , I took a much needed cleanse from all things cinema. I had lived, studied, and worked in the film scene since I was a child actor and it was a surprising and liberating experience to step outside of that bubble and discover that not everyone cares about movies that much. I didn’t even watch the Oscars… can...

Nonviolent Communication   About a year ago, I listened to an audiobook called  Nonviolent Communication , as read by the author  Marshall Rosenberg , and it immediately struck a chord with me. So much so that I listened to it twice! (You know, before my free Audible trial ended). In his slow, silky southern(?) drawl, Marshall outlined a very clear and simple structure for comm...

Authentic Relating   First of all, I just want to take a moment to celebrate that this is the 50th episode of Discomfortable! Which means I’ve been doing the podcast for a whole year (more or less, math nerds). I want to thank everyone who is reading this right now, everyone who has listened to any episodes of the show, and everyone who has helped spread the good word (about shame, not...

Loneliness   Last month I went to Austin, Texas to fulfill a dream of mine to see Brené Brown speak live as the keynote speaker at SXSW . I actually tried to get tickets to the shooting of her Netflix special in LA in January, but both tapings sold out too quickly for me to get one. So this was the next best thing, and while the talk was a really satisfying reminder of some of her signat...

Wisdom 2.0   Last month I went to a meditation and technology conference called Wisdom 2.0 in San Fransisco. Though I had heard mixed reviews about this conference, I was pleasantly surprised by how welcoming and friendly everyone was. I quickly felt a sense of belonging and the atmosphere and size of the event were such that I felt comfortable talking to pretty much anyone. It seemed like a...

Attention   I recently had a small shame breakthrough  and I wanted to record an episode about it immediately so that I could help clarify for you the listener (and for myself) exactly what a shame breakthrough actually is . At its core, it seems to be about unearthing a large chunk of shame-inducing conditioning from your subconscious in order to confront the fa...

Prison   A few months ago, I did an Instagram  poll asking my followers if any of them had ever been arrested. A handful of people clicked yes, including myself. Then I asked if any of them had actually gone to prison, and only one person said yes. It was an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years. So I decided to reach out and see if I could interview him for the show, and I’m...

Scarcity   A few months ago, a listener from Europe reached out and asked me to do an episode about a topic that she described as “insatiability”, though she said it wasn’t quite the right word. The word in her native language doesn’t have an English equivalent, but after a back and forth it became clear that she was referring to that feeling we all experience from tim...

Whiteness   A few weeks ago, I did a leadership training program in LA which helped me realize that what I really want to do when I grow up is become what I call a “shame educator”. I imagine it sort of like a “sex educator”, except about shame (which admittedly isn’t quite as sexy). Part of what made me realize this was a dramatic encounter with shame that...

Simulation This week’s episode was inspired by a talk I saw at SXSW a few weeks ago by hacker George Hotz , notorious for being the first person to “jailbreak” the iPhone in 2007 when he was just a teenager.  But the theme of the talk was about jailbreaking something a lot more ambitious than just a phone, it was about jailbreaking the simulation that we all live in. You can watch a slig...

Fantasies This is perhaps the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever talked about on the show. Over the last few years, I’ve become increasingly aware of something that my ego does to inflate itself on an almost daily basis. It engages in a kind of semi-conscious psychological masturbation by dreaming up all kinds of elaborate fantasies in which I am some kind of hero, or success, or celebr...

Remote Year One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “How was that travel program you did?” This refers to Remote Year , a working travel program designed for remote workers or “digital nomads” that I did in 2017-2018. This episode answers that question in depth and even includes some thoughts from two of my travel mates, editor and vlogger Justin Poore and insi...

Circumcision To celebrate my 40th episode (and the fact that I had no time to record this week), I present a special bonus micro-edition of the podcast reliving in embarrassing detail the story of my circumcision at the innocent age of 9 and how it led to me accidentally engaging in bestiality (well, sort of). I actually recorded this episode months ago but worried it was too risque to post. Despe...

Silence 3 On the third and final day of my  silent meditation retreat at the  Hridaya Yoga Centre , I made it my mission to experience one of these “heart orgasms” I’d heard so much about. It turns out that thinking about sex while meditating leads to embarrassment, not an orgasm in your heart, so I needed another strategy. I focussed instead on a method they called &#8...

Silence 2 On the second day of my 3-day silent meditation retreat at the quirky  Hridaya Yoga Centre in Mazunte, Mexico, my inner adventures took a turn for the surreal. First of all, I finally caught the “glowing football” in my mind that is my consciousness, only to accidentally dissolve it in a fountain of love. Then I faced-off against the most pleasantly sadistic torturer, ou...

Silence 1 When I started recording my reactions to the 3-day silent meditation retreat I finished last week, it took me a few hours just to get through the first day! So I decided to turn it into a trilogy, with one episode chronicling each day of this mind-expanding retreat. The retreat was actually a bit of an afterthought, a good way to kill a weekend in Mexico following my week of volunteering...

Fear This week’s podcast is all about fear, or more specifically, the surprising amount of fear I felt two weeks ago after signing up for a week of volunteering in rural Oaxaca, Mexico with a charity called All Hands and Hearts . As someone who spends most of his days “working” behind a computer, the idea of a week of hard manual labour was intimidating to say the least, especially in a rural and...

Tradition   I’m currently in rural Oaxaca, Mexico where I just finished a week of volunteering with All Hands and Hearts to rebuild an elementary school after a magnitude 8.2 earthquake destabilized the area in 2017.   There’s nothing like some hard manual labour to signal the definitive end of the holidays, and it got me thinking about the role holiday traditions like Christmas play in...

Ecstatic Dance   While I was in Bali in December, a friend recommended I try something called Ecstatic Dance in Ubud. Given that I’ve been wanting to take more dance classes after the fun of secretly dancing with closeted guys in Serbia , this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Ecstatic Dance, it turns out, is not a dance class per se. It’s not about learning how to do a specific...

The best way to appreciate existence is to try not existing at all.

Your "purpose" is not a plan for the future, it's what you're doing right here and now.

I found a Christmas album I recorded at age 8.

I interview an alcoholic on her 19th anniversary of being sober.