Embracing Mystery

Explore the profound connections between Zen, creativity, and compassion in this conversation with Amy Kisei, a Zen Buddhist priest, artist, and spiritual counselor. We discuss how Zen’s direct experience approach and the practice of paying close attention can transform your creative process and deepen your understanding of yourself and Reality. And Amy's insights on the role of attention as an ac...

In this month's Embracing Mystery podcast, we have the joy of welcoming Lorna Elliott to a conversation about the journey of learning to love who we are. She shares about her own insights from trauma training, inner child work, and connecting with her creativity. Learning to love who we are is a journey that can take a lifetime, but it is one of our most essential tasks. It is framed in different...

This episode explores the ways that creativity intersects with justice in the world, and particularly how it serves to rehumanize others who are being dehumanized and oppressed. We have a conversation with Adnan Hussain, who has intentionally sought to integrate his creative work with advocacy and giving a voice to others. In particular, he has created in relationship with the Uyghur community. Th...

Have you ever felt like creative ideas suddenly flowed through you in ways that are beyond your own conscious choices? Jaimin Rajani, our latest guest on the Embracing Mystery podcast, shares with us his own creative and spiritual journey, which led him to say there is something More involved in his creative process. For him, that meant a turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and an acknowledgment that his s...

In this episode we have the joy of welcoming our first guest, Azeem Khan. He shares with us ways his upbringing, music, art, and spirituality beautifully inhabit the liminal spaces of life. Our conversation touches on religious and cultural identity, dreams, the creative process, and Sufi practices and ways of seeing. 

 You can find his art on Instagram @surreal.fakir Listen to his albums on band...

This episode we each share our ways of relating to Mystery, responding to three questions: How did our formative spiritual contexts shape us? What kinds of disruptive experiences did we have? And how would we describe where we are at now? In all of this we surface different kinds of disruption and paths that our spiritual experiences and questions have taken us.

What is the relationship between personal growth and growth in your craft? How do they work together to shape the quality of your creative work? These are the questions we explore in this episode of the Embracing Mystery Podcast. This is also Raymond's last time, at least as a regularly contributing member of the team, and he has some real wisdom that he shares on the topic!

For artists, does it matter who you are and how you are growing as a person if an audience might not understand the experiences and emotions you are trying to communicate? In this episode Kevin explains relevance theory of communication, which looks at the interpretive worlds of symbols and meanings of a communicator (artist) and an audience as an integral part of what meaning is communicated. We...

Is there more to creativity than self-expression? Is all self-expression art? In this episode we explore why it is that more concretely personal creative expression connects more universally. We raise the question of whether there is anything More involved in the creative process and whether that affects how the audience experiences the work.

In this episode we explore inner mystery and the ways we steward, share, and cultivate our creative and spiritual lives. Is everything we create or experience spiritually meant to be shared? Are there ways we should guard or protect our inner life? How does all this affect what we choose to share?

What’s going on inside of you when you decide to share your art with others? In this episode we explore what happens when you’ve completed a finished piece. You have your new song, poem, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. But now what do you do with it? Do you share it automatically? With who, and in what spaces? And even more importantly, we talk about what goes on inside of us as we decide whether...

This episode builds on our discussion of the Source(s) of creativity in our second episode. This time we get more concrete as we discuss the ways that our view of Source and experiences of the creative process relate. Our creative processes are each different. Creativity is a conveyor belt where we combine all the various inputs from all of life. It's a chaotic process that is both random, and yet...

In this episode of the Embracing Mystery podcast, we continue our exploration of creativity by asking, "What is the source of creativity?" We begin with our single-word responses to this question. Our answers were "love," “everything”, "mystery," "chaos," and "emptiness.” Join us as we unpack these ideas, explore where we see convergence and differences, and discuss how these perspectives affect o...

Welcome to Embracing Mystery: Finding Ourselves in Compassionate, Creative Interconnection! Monthly conversations discovering the intersections of creativity and spirituality. This episode explores the origins and sources of creativity, beginning with personal reflections from Steven, Kevin, and Naz on their early creative experiences and moving towards broader discussions about where creativity c...