The Soul of Life

Coming soon in Season Two of The Soul of Life on February 26th, 2021. Dr. Tammy Nelson is an erotic recovery expert. She's a leading expert on infidelity and the healing of sexual relationships. Today on The Soul of Life I speak with Dr. Nelson about what it takes to have a vibrant sex life with a monogamous partner and how cheating during COVID has taken on new proportions. "If I am a mom stuck h...

Coming soon on February 19th: "Kurt Cobain had actually referred to The Dutchman as 'the grungiest place in Seattle.'" In this preview of Season Two, Episode Three, I speak with Gary Mula, former owner of The Dutchman. "Everybody has a different way of finding meaning in their life. When I found music, everything was answered." We talk about his time sharing practice space with Nirvana, his journe...

Coming soon on Season Two of The Soul of Life on February 12th, I speak with Dr. Matthew Green, a professor of political science, about cancel culture, conspiracies, and how to stay hopeful and connected to one another in an age of identity politics. "There are things in American politics now that are not pretty. But there are things that have happened that have been worse, in our history." Dr. Gr...

Can the secrets of the universe inspire and humble us to bring us together in gratitude? My conversation with Nobel laureate and top NASA scientist Dr. John Mather reminds us of how the Apollo program in the 1960s united a nation's eyes toward the heavens. Mather is the Science Director of the James Webb Space Telescope program at NASA, scheduled to launch in October of this year. He is the only m...

Like you I'm ready to wrap 2020 and move on to a new year this week. This Soul of Life bonus episode will dive into very practical ways to mindfully reflect on being who you want to be in 2021. I started this podcast when I was unmasking how my brain wasn't lighting up the way I'd always expected it to. Today, I talk about how the brain is a connection machine and how you can use moments, like lit...

At the age of sixty-six, Dierdre Wolownick became the oldest woman to climb El Capitan, the iconic 3,200-foot granite "big wall" in Yosemite National Park. * For her this wasn't just any climb. Yes, The Captain is perhaps the most prized big wall climbs in the world. It was in June that same year that Dierdre's son Alex Honnold stunned and terrified the world by climbing without ropes—a free solo...

What if you could have the eyes of God—confidence, clarity, compassion, connection, creativity—in your everyday human life? What is an "authentic connection to the Divine?" Grace. Love. Light. Peace. I know—at this time more than ever—if you're on a path of faith that leads to these things, sign me up. I'm in. But what's the difference between a spiritual life and a spiritualizing life? And why—if...

Today The Soul of Life is a crash course on medicine for the mind with Dr. Joel Bernanke, a Columbia and Cornell-trained psychiatrist. We cover the power, potential and pitfalls of psychopharmacology and its alternatives. The Mind is Your Body We try to alleviate some of the common fears of talking to a psychiatrist and expose misconceptions that stop people from treating their mind like any other...

Grief is not usually something we plan for. In today's special edition of The Soul of Life we remember the life of Rich Simon—a person that was like Oprah for the mental health and counseling field—a hub and changemaker that helped launch the careers of many of the masters in our profession. On November 10th, at the age of 71, Rich died suddenly. Rich Simon was editor of The Psychotherapy Networke...

With Thanksgiving and winter holidays around the corner, there's no better time to spend than with baker and food artist Sarah Owens. Sarah is a California-based cookbook author , baker, gardener, and instructor, and she just might have the ingredients to help us learn to come to our senses with sourdough baking that could help you practice mindfulness in physical form. Today we'll talk about our...

Today I talk to Sandie  Angulo Chen  a film critic, entertainment reporter, and book reviewer that writes for Common Sense Media , a non-profit website that gives parents in-depth reviews of movies, shows and apps so they can make informed decisions about their family's media diet. We also dive into our favorite film picks including Watchmen, My Octopus Teacher , The Social Dilemma, and others .  ...

Today on The Soul of Life I speak with a person that has been described by a centrist/liberal commentator at the Brookings Institute as "The most thoughtful conservative theorist of his generation." It's no overstatement to say that Yuval Levin might be working in a senior position at the White House if this were an ordinary conservative President. And while you may not have heard his name before,...

Shame is like a 1950's air conditioner that costs a fortune to operate electrically in the brain. My tangle with depression is teaching me to pay attention to all the "appliances" that drain energy from the soul, including my long-avoidance of a part of me that used to talk to Jesus every day. I talk with Dr. Curt Thompson, a psychiatrist and the author of The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories...

In this episode of The Soul of Life I speak with Marcia Bjornerud to talk about her book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World.  "For a society it's not so good to be preoccupied with the now. In fact it's the root of many of our problems…social, environmental, even spiritual, to be in the immediate, narcissistic moment and not understand our place in time." Timefulnes...

I speak to Moses Kushaba, a LGBTQI activist who immigrated to the U.S. from Uganda to escape persecution during a time when the government was escalating anti-gay policies, leading to violence, imprisonment, and death of many accused of being homosexual. Moses was born during a civil war in Uganda and his name comes from a dramatic moment as a newborn when floods forced his mother to flee on foot....

If you've ever wondered what kind of a parent you are, and whether your kids are going to wind up spending the equivalent of a college degree in therapy (or maybe they already have), I think you'll be grateful for my conversation with Bethany Saltman. Her journey as a mom and her book Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey into the Science of Attachment is a gift to every parent, who like me, has b...

In this episode of the soul of life I speak to the author of Gravity's Century: From Einstein's Eclipse to Images of Black Holes, named one of the best science books of 2020 by NPR's Ira Flato. Ron has a gift for making the complexities of quantum physics and technology clear and exciting. We talk about the significance of the last 100 years in astrophysics and touch on the super weird world of qu...

In this episode of The Soul of Life I speak with Dr. Michael Mithoefer, the lead investigator that has successfully piloted the first-ever study of MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, into the third and final stage of FDA approval for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Mithoefer is featured as a lead character in the 2015 book Acid Test by award-winning journalist Tom Shroder, a me...

Did you know that pregnant women are scientifically shown to become more xenophobic—fearful of outsiders—during their first trimester? Turns out, that's when they are most susceptible to infections so the body actually has what researchers call the "behavioral immune system." And there's wisdom to get from studying how we do this thing that humans love to do which is divide people into groups…to l...

I speak with Reverend Doctor Dennis Edwards, a minister in cities for 30 years, about his identity as a healer and how he stays whole as a person within Christian communities where it may not always be welcome to let your real feelings show. We talk about Black lives Matter and the awakening of White people to the uncomfortable truth about the burden of fear and mistrust towards police that Black...

I talk with songwriter and social worker, Dan Menz-Erb. Dan has played in the pop/funk band Holy Ghost Machine Gun.   If you Google that phrase, you'll see clips from an 80's televangelist who coined the rather interesting term.  However, your search results will not tell you much about the beauty of Dan's poetry in his song, John Bagwell, which he shared with me in this podcast. We discuss where...

I speak with Dr. Richard Schwartz , the founder of an evidence-based psychotherapeutic model called Self-Leadership (also known as Internal Family System's therapy or IFS) that is widely recognized as one of the most compassionate and comprehensive psychotherapies available. We discuss Mary Trump's book Too Much and Never Enough and how the abuse that Mary reports in Donald Trump's family could ex...

I speak with Dr. David Min, an oncologist that has special meaning in my life for how his personal touch and realness with me solved a mysterious neurological condition that took me to over 40 medical visits with more than 12 specialists. I asked him where he learned to practice medicine that left room for him to show up personally the way he did with me and I learned that his worldview was radica...