Walk Through Open Doors with James Henson

This is a sort of interlude episode while I fight my way through what has become a deep dive with lots of reading and listening to other podcasts to learn about the benefits of cold showers and the benefits of ditching social media. I'm excited about both of those topics so I wanted to put a little more work into them. In this episode, I talk about one of the most important things I've learned wor...

This episode was inspired by one of the questions I got most frequently over on Instagram: “What should I look for in a counselor?” This isn't an exhaustive exploration of this question, but we touch on things like the relationship, scope of practice, and professionalism in the counseling field and I think it will at least point people in the right direction in finding a good therapist. If you're...

This episode is in response to a valid criticism someone recently shared with me: this podcast claims to be about simple ways to have a good life, but I spend a lot of time talking about things like awareness and the ego. Not everyone knows how to take those concepts and turn them into actual change. I realized the person who told me this was right, so I took some time and thought about the 10 mos...

It is strange to me that this generated some pushback when I posted about it on Instagram a few months back. We only know what we know, and if we surround ourselves with people that are familiar, it's impossible for us to know more than we already know. Thick bubbles used to be the privilege of the wealthy, but the Internet has allowed us all to cultivate echo chambers that feed our own ideas back...

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Viktor Frankl It is sad that we are not taught this, but there is a difference between the things that arise in our internal experience without being invited and our response to those things. If someone wrongs us, we will feel anger, this is normal....

We live in a world that offers us thousands of distractions in the guise of opportunities. If we aren’t careful we end up doing a large number of things really poorly, and we aren’t happy with the results. We try to be everywhere and end up being nowhere. This episode of The Simple Ways to Haves a Good Life podcast is all about priorities and how we spend our time. Thanks for taking the time to ch...

We tend to overprioritize our internal experience. Our thoughts and our emotions can take a good day and turn it bad and they often claim knowledge of things they do not have knowledge of. As we look at these simple ways to have a good life, learning to meditate is one of the most important things we can do because it helps us change our relationship to all the things going on inside of us and it...

Our ego cares more about us being alive than it does about us being happy, so it operates with an inherent negativity bias. This makes sense, and it's a good thing in many situations, but it can also run amok and make our lives really difficult. In this episode of The Simple Ways to Have a Good Life Podcast we take a look at this negativity bias and its effects on our lives, and we talk about a si...

Change can be scary, and it usually requires some work. Because of this, we often choose to feel justified in what we are already doing so that we don't have to pursue the process of change. The problem with this is that it keeps us locked into the things we're already doing whether they're working or not, and this prevents us from finding freedom in life. This is all complicated by the fact that...

The things we “know” are often the source of so much of our trouble. We think we know things about how the world works, about how other people are, and about ourselves, and we allow these things to become unwritten rules that dictate and limit our lives. In this episode of The Simple Ways to Have a Good Life podcast we take a look at the things we supposedly know, talk about how to deconstruct the...

When it comes to simple ways to have a good life, the ideas that we shed are every bit as important as anything we can learn. One of the first things we have to shed is our identification with our suffering. We live in a world that encourages us to suffer, to identify with our suffering, and even to validate or justify ourselves through our suffering. This will always tie us to that suffering beca...

This is the first in what is going to be a long series about the simplest ways to have a good life. I've worked with people for close to 20 years now, and I thought it might be useful to take everything I've learned over those years and turn it into a series of episodes for the podcast. It's become clear to me over the past two decades that a majority of the things that are best for us are more ab...

This episode is all about nonattachment: what that means, what it means for the people in our lives, and how this looks when we approach it in an unhealthy way. I've studied nonattachment for close to a decade now, but even with that, it took me a while to get this podcast out because it's such an important topic. In my early life I embraced a toxic perspective on nonattachment due to my emotional...

This one is different. It is long, it is challenging, and, I think, it may reach some people who haven’t always felt a resonance with some of what I’ve offered. Kurtis Vanderpool is a Life Coach who specializes in working with people who are struggling with their faith, and in helping them deconstruct their experience to retain the things that were good. In this conversation, we talk about how peo...

If you really pay attention to your experience you’ll notice that you tense up or constrict when something that you don’t like happens – a lot of our suffering comes from this. In this final part of the series on awareness, we look at moving beyond simple acceptance and into saying “yes” to the things life brings us, especially when they are beyond our control. _______________________ Looking for...

In this episode of the podcast, we explore what it means to let go, how to actually do it, and the fact that it is a process rather a one-time thing. This can be especially difficult when it comes to other people in our lives.  _______________________ Looking for more? I write a lot - if you found this episode interesting you might enjoy my blog or the mini-blogs I post on Instagram . I also...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. The need for approval is a tough one. We are wired to care about what other members of our...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. The practice of simple awareness is powerful, but it's also simple enough to become complic...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. This is probably the most requested video/audio: an introductory guided meditation. It's al...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. This episode is in response to a question I got on Instagram: What are the best habits? I d...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. This is the first episode under the new name, and serves to catch everyone up on where I've...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. In what is the final episode of this podcast under the name Dying Daily, we explore why I a...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. In this episode of the Dying Daily podcast we take a quick look at one of the most problema...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. In this episode of the Dying Daily Podcast I tell a little bit of my story and how I found...

Quick note: I recorded this episode a long time ago and I've made a lot of changes in my life since then. What I do for a living, the name of the podcast, the website, and the contact information (among other things) are all different. The best place to find updated information about what I'm doing is here. In this episode we explore how being bothered by things is human, and how our response to b...