The Mind Bod Adventure Pod

Welcome Tim Hwang, an occupational therapist in New York City's public school system. Tim’s specialty is teaching mindfulness to young people with “disabilities classifications” - Autism, ADHD, and so on. Some of these teens are into the practice, some are bored by it, and some are highly resistant to it. And that ’s what we get into! Tim, Tasha, and Jeff all have experience teaching meditation to...

This episode is a transmission, no doubt about. Our guest wandered out of the Ontario forest and is here to challenge how we think about ourselves and meditation and nature and agriculture and the old crafts and a lot more. Welcome, Steven Martyn, founder of The Sacred Gardener School. While living alone in the bush - mediating, surviving - Steven came to understand meditation as a form of hunting...

Welcome Eileen Laird, author of Healing Mindset . This episode, we target autoimmune disease and the role that the mind-body connection can play in reducing pain, increasing resilience, and living a more vital life. There are over a hundred different autoimmune conditions — from rheumatoid arthritis to lupus to Grave’s disease to multiple sclerosis and more — one in ten people have an autoimmune c...

Toby Sola is founder of the Brightmind Meditation app and an old friend of Jeff’s. In this episode, we chew on some tasty mini-meditation snacks – yum yum! We get all Jedi-mind and try splitting our attention between chatting and meditating. Finally, we explore an inventive and beautiful practice of nurturing our own sense of trustworthiness. All of these are ways of highlighting the basic creativ...

Welcome Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of We Were Made for These Times and coauthor of Healing Our Way Home . Kyra shares her journey from a communal upbringing and monastic life with Thich Nhat Hanh, her work in nurturing community, and her exploration of racial identity in spiritual practice. Her gentle guided practice is beautiful and completely original. We notice the experience of our skin - its a...

Welcome, Frank Yang – we love you! Frank is an “Infinite Brah” – a true bodybuilder of consciousness who shares his “journey, insights and practices for accessing the highest states of consciousness, awakening and beyond” to quote his fresh and wildly kinetic YouTube channel. So, there’s lots of talk about the experience (and health benefits!) of non-duality and awakening, whether it shows up in d...

This week, we welcome Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, world-renowned meditation teacher, author, and lineage holder in the Bön tradition of Tibet, one of the oldest spiritual traditions on the planet. Today, we take three protective imaginary “pills” – a white pill, a red pill, and a blue pill. “Because in the West everybody loves to eat pills!” Each pill is both a syllable that we voice out loud and a m...

OK friends, enough with the talky talky. Grab some paper and a pencil: in this episode, we’re waking up our inner artists and making Zentangle magic! Martha Huggins and Molly Hollinbough are our sister guides. Many years ago, their romantic parents – Maria and Rick – figured out the Zentangle method together. Ever since, they’ve been teaching it to people around the world as a way to slip into a f...

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and the host of The On Being Project's Poetry Unbound podcast. He is interested in story and storytelling, in the practice of reading ourselves into stories, and sometimes in reading our lives as stories. All of which can shake us us up in surprising ways. ** If you like these adventures in consciousness, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!...

This week, we welcome the multi-talented Ofosu Jones-Quartey, a meditation teacher, author, and hip-hop artist. This discussion is so fun! It starts with how to share meditation and mindfulness with young people – how to stay real and relatable. Then gets into the role of the artist, creativity, and what it means to connect to your actual voice. We do 2 practices: the first is a self-compassion pr...

Welcome Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman, authors of Let's Talk, An Essential Guide to Skillful Communication . Mudita and Dan have been teaching people how to communicate effectively for over 40 years, so there is serious wisdom in this episode. As Mudita points out, changing how you communicate can change your entire way of perceiving and relating to others. It is a profound practice, and it’s one...

We’re joined by Jamie Pabst, founder and CEO of Spiritune , a music therapy app that supports people’s mental health. Spiritune makes explicit what most of us know implicitly: music can shift our emotional and cognitive state. What does “clinical-grade music” sound like? We listen to two 3-minute tracks, the first designed to move us from anxious to peaceful and the second from lethargic to victor...

Last summer, we interviewed Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugianis, founders of Cardea , a psychedelic-assisted care organization based in NYC. This week, we’re finally posting that conversation! Made up of therapists, space holders, artists, and musicians, Cardea focuses on cultivating what they call “aliveness”: the sense that you are vital, fully engaged in your life, and connected to the world ar...

You don’t want to miss this one! A deep dive into “the heart of healing,” as we explore how medicines like cannabis and ketamine can amplify trauma therapy. Our guest is Saj Razvi, Director of Education at the Psychedelic Somatic Institute , and one of the original MAPS researchers and clinicians responsible for bringing MDMA-assisted therapy into the world. According to Saj, there’s a self-correc...

Welcome Lama Liz Monson, spiritual co-director of the Natural Dharma Fellowship, and author of a new book on “crazy wisdom,” Tales of a Mad Yogi . Contrary to its controversial reputation, crazy wisdom is more than a spiritual shock technique – of, say, covering oneself in feces (to use a classic example), or staggering drunkenly around the Tibetan countryside. It is, in fact, a powerful and time-...

Welcome JF Martel, filmmaker, writer, and cohost of the superb podcast, Weird Studies . Sometimes, we have a guest who really gets the spirit of what we’re up to here at the Mind Bod Pod … JF is one such guest. He full-on designed a practice for us based on his love of old-school, Dungeons-and-Dragons -style role-playing games… the kind that (in JF’s words) “usually happen in dank basements.” That...

Welcome Sah D'Simone - a former “condescending spiritual c**t” (his words not ours!) who’s since grown into one of the best humans we’ve ever met. Sah is hilarious, fresh, wise and so loveable! You’ll feel all of that immediately, as we explore themes from his new book, Spiritually, We. **Watch this podcast and our fun-filled afterparty in VIDEO over at www.mindbodpod.com where you can comment and...

Welcome Paula Scatoloni, a wise somatic experiencing practitioner (she’s been doing this for 30 years!). Paula uses Stephen Porges’ “Safe and Sound Protocol” as a tool to soothe and heal our frazzled nervous systems. We start by exploring how sound can be healing—in particular, how to train our systems to move out of fight-and-flight and into safety-and-connection. The more our body finds this saf...

Arch-Trickster Caroline Casey is our guest today, rapping on the subject of astrology and participatory magic. For Caroline, astrology - like all divination - is an outward expression of an inner state. We don’t need to know astrology, it’s in us. The practice here is to participate - to actively engage with Caroline’s wild flood of words and let the language of interrelatedness provoke insights,...

Watch the video episode here: https://www.mindbodpod.com/p/loch-kelly-glimpses-into-freedom “The issue of suffering is a simple case of mistaken identity,” says our guest Loch Kelly. By this, he means the you that is thinking about you, is not the real you! Then who is it, you ask? His name is Percy, he lives on a riverboat, and makes a fine fish fillet. 😅 Just kidding! That’s not true at all. Th...

This week’s guest is Casper ter Kuile, author of the excellent The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Rituals into Soulful Practices . Casper is passionate about spreading the goodness of ritual. Ritual? Isn’t that a religious thing?! HELL NO! For Casper (“Gay atheist goes to divinity school!”) a ritual is anything we do with “intention, attention and repetition.” Our rituals are a basic human need...

Tracee is the rock solid – and radiant! – author of Radiant Rest and The Luminous Self , both syncretic works that combine yoga nidra, self-inquiry, ancestor and nature practices, and much more. Tracee is truly a gem! We jump right into a practice that starts with a fresh take on alternate nostril breathing and then flows into a beautifully supportive practice that connects to gratitude, community...

Some very inventive practice exploration today, friends! We’re joined by dharma teacher and Buddhist Geeks founder Vince Fakhoury Horn, who leads us in a smorgasbord of short “social” practices, all designed to tap into the goodness of meditation in a bouncy, fun and interactive way. We explore Kenneth Folk’s social noting, try out a microdose-sized practice of loving kindness, and finally, an ima...

Do you love yourself and the world enough to risk making moves for other people’s freedom? For guest adrienne maree brown, any such movement has to be rooted in love. And that’s her practice: finding what and where we love, placing it deliberately in the centre of our lives, and then asking: what action wants to arise naturally from that ? Not based on other people’s ideas of what’s right, but fro...

DISCLAIMER : we talk about smoking weed while meditating in this episode, and then we actually do it (its legal here in Canada) to see what it’s like. Our guide thinks there’s value in this practice, and so do we - FOR SOME PEOPLE. For others, particularly younger folks whose brains are not fully developed, cannabis can negatively affect mental health. It can also be addictive. As always, we are n...