Rebel Buddhist

This week’s pod is all about how to fail – and do it well… and fair warning, it’s got some tough love in it!   Now, many of us give up too easily and we complain about our perceived failures way too much, right? And we both know that what I teach is all about freedom -  to free your mind and free your life.   The thing is: avoiding failure – having low failure resilience - is costing you your drea...

This past weekend was my BIRTHDAY! Normally, when it comes to celebrating a big day in our lives, my family goes exploring or takes a wild trip somewhere. So when my husband asked me what I wanted to do and I just said I wanted to go to our yurt and relax, he was more than just surprised. He didn’t even quite understand the concept.    To him, doing nothing meant doing something mellow.     After...

If you’ve been around me for any time at all, you’ve definitely heard me talk about Ziji. Ziji is all about confidence. But not just any confidence.   Ziji is a Tibetan word that means radiant inner confidence.   What makes it so...essential to a full, meaningful life of freedom, adventure and purpose?   Let’s start by imagining what life was like before anything “bad” ever happened to us. As we g...

How many of you think life can often be a little...difficult?  Yeah, me too. But what I’ve found is that when I stop resisting that life can be hard sometimes, and when I stop thinking something has gone terribly wrong just because things aren’t easy or I’m not happy, then I can start embracing life more fully and savor the good times even more. Today I want to talk about how while being a human i...

I’m sitting here looking at Blackburn Mountain and the Staircase ice falls - one of the biggest ice falls in the world - and I was reminded of all the hard things I’ve experienced on mountaineering trips and how amazing it felt to achieve our goals...or sometimes, to even have just survived.   And that inspired me to talk about massive action vs passive action and how that all relates to commitmen...

I’ve always loved learning. In high school, I would even leave my friends while we were partying to do homework as they shouted out “stoner nerd!” In college, I’d bring my books with me to the beach and spend most of the day reading with occasional dips in the ocean. I went on to go to graduate school (not just once!), including getting my doctorate. As a mom, I don’t dig playing with dolls with m...

I’m all about living life to the fullest. From mountain climbing to hiking to enjoying a week at the yurt to jamming to some seriously amazing music at a local festival… But one thing that I see getting in the way of that is that we, silly humans, turn on ourselves a lot .   Like when someone says something shitty to us and when we are reacting in anger or whatever emotion, we’re also ultimately d...

We got the parent wound from whomever took care of us the most during our formative years. Despite their best intentions, they messed us up. Or at least that's how we often think of it. In reality, it also has a lot to do with how we relate to our experience with them.   The mother/father/parent wound comes in all shapes and sizes: They can involve one parent or both. They can also be caused by a...

Anxiety and I go wayyyy back... I can remember these mild OCD tendencies and weird tics I had as a kid, like blinking all the time or not wanting to step on cracks in the sidewalk or needing things to be symmetrical. And I freakin’ loved counting things! Over time, I learned how to manage my anxiety, but I still get waves of it. A lot of us (nearly 1 in 5 adults in the United States) are living wi...

I'm a type-O blood type and am usually good with biological challenges - viruses, bacterial infections, street food in foreign countries. I almost never get sick. So when all of a sudden I had laryngitis and no other symptoms...I was confused. And BUMMED.  I was about to launch my podcast and had blocked out a complete week to record, my Freedom School launch was going so well, and I was spending...

In college I had a friend who, whenever I was relaying something challenging in my life, she would say, “Don’t worry. It’s all good!” And then she’d glide away on her rollerblades with a big smile on her face. I loved that damned girl, and I know she had good intentions, but when she said that it would totally piss me off and I’d want to shake her and be like, “It is NOT ALL GOOD!” Spiritual bypas...

So many of us - myself included - have had the wrong idea of what will truly set us free. On some level we know it’s not things like paying off the debt, finding your soul mate, being location independent, losing the weight, finding the perfect job...(ask me how I know). But we forget this and we think, well sh*t, maybe it IS all that stuff. Or maybe it IS about that once you have kids. Or get old...

One time, years ago at a super fancy dinner, I made an entire room of rich people UNBELIEVABLY uncomfortable. The beginning of the dinner was great. Until… I’m entertaining those around me with a story about an avalanche in the Himalayas when I hear someone saying, “What are black people complaining about anyway? Slavery ended over 200 years ago. It’s not our fault anymore. It’s time to get over i...

Guilt sucks. I was raised in a devoted Catholic family, and while there were some things I really appreciated about it, it also came with a healthy dose of guilt. I was constantly wondering if I was a bad person because of having to go to confession on a regular basis. I remember making stuff up during confession because we had to go so often, and I didn’t always think there was anything I did “wr...

Today we’re talking about gossip and mindful speech. Gossip may at first seem to be something others do - but not “us.” However, it’s more prevalent than you might think. Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pabongka Rinpoche, says, “Idle gossip is the best way to waste our human lives.” Kind of a serious stateent, right? So I thought it might be worth spending some time on. First, what is “gossip?” One defi...

As a first-generation Filipinx-American, I was raised to believe that when things get hard, you push through, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, get tough and work harder. So when I first heard of self-compassion, I thought it was just for people that didn't know what “real” suffering was like.    I thought self-compassion was for wimps.   As I’ve worked with many clients over the years, I’ve fo...

What is true success? What is a truly “rich life”? What is a life of true FREEDOM? We all may have our own preconceived notions of what the answers to these questions look like – notions that are subliminally based on societal norms, familial or cultural expectations and the systems of power that order our world… Today, we’re digging into what “living a life of freedom” means to you – and how to m...

I grew up with parents who both had mental health diagnoses: PTSD, depression, schizoaffective disorder… and it was FAR from easy. I remember how scared and embarrassed I'd be when my dad would be found walking around the block of the 'hood naked. Or the time he slipped a knife under my mattress telling me I had to be protected "just in case." I remember how unloved I felt and how scared I was whe...

In 2012, my husband and I took a cargo boat, which was way overloaded and inches from taking on water, for 3 days on the Niger river to Timbuktu. It was the most amazing adventure.    If you look at the photo for this podcast (taken in the Sahara), we look so in love - but what’s not apparent is that we are fleeing a Touareg takeover in Timbuktu and driving across the Sahara to escape. We stopped...

You may or may not know that my jam is helping people live a life of no regrets. Literally, it’s the first thing you see on my website. It says, “live a life of no regrets” because I’ve learned that it’s one of the things I do NOT want to feel after I’ve lived my life.    And people will often say, “How can you...even say that’s possible ?” Do you really believe we can not have regrets?    Hell ye...

One time I was complaining to one of my teachers that it was so much harder for me to progress spiritually since I became a mama. I wasn’t willing to leave my daughter for months to go on a retreat, and I barely found time to sleep, let alone meditate daily. I asked the teacher, whom I deeply trusted, “What should I do?”    My teacher asked me if I had heard of Dipa Ma. Of course, I hadn’t. She ex...

A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a friend who thinks the whole thoughts-feelings-actions thing is too cerebral, and she said, “emotions are intelligent and show us deep truths!” And I thought, totally! They show us our thoughts which show us our most deeply held beliefs -some of which we may not be conscious of. Deep truths. Emotions and thoughts: They aren’t mutually exclusive. But I ALSO add...

Karma... it's not necessarily a concept that many of us think of every day. More than likely, that word pops into our heads when we've caught ourselves acting like a bitch to someone who definitely didn't observe it. "Just wait till karma catches up with you...!" Others, myself included, have had some serious introspective moments when faced with our own mortality... or the death of someone close...

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I was in graduate school, living in a friend’s basement. Suddenly, I was overcome with nausea, and I felt...awful. Instead of being with that, my brain went into planning mode. I started researching the web for answers and networking about creating an action plan. There was no pause, just diving into control mode.    Thankfully, my years meditation practice...

Today we talk about those times when it’s hard to feel good about other people’s good luck and abundance, and maybe feeling a little - or a lot - jealous. Sometimes we don’t feel good about when a friend gets a new car, or the book deal we’ve been waiting years for, or the soulmate that we still haven’t met. But today you’ll learn that it’s totally normal, and that feeling “sympathetic joy,” or mu...