The Spiritual Context Podcast

What if dancing could be a path to awakening? "Meditation is not only sitting," says Prajwal Ratna Vajracharya, a Newar Buddhist priest and master of Charya Nritya, the sacred dance of Nepal's Kathmandu Valley. For him, the dance is a practice for actualizing one's awakened qualities. A 35th-generation priest, Prajwal began training at age eight under his father, who opened Chary...

The past cannot be changed. The hurt done to us cannot be undone. How do we move forward and find peace? Dr. Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects and author of Forgive for Good , offers forgiveness as a path to that peace. Drawing on decades of research, he clears up the misconceptions that make us reluctant to forgive and explains how forgiveness can be learned an...

At seventeen, Fr. Yann Vagneux knocked on the door of a Carthusian monastery and was told to come back at twenty-one. At twenty-one he was in India instead, and South Asia has been home since. Varanasi became his Carthusian monastery, and life in the holy city of the Hindus deepened his Catholic faith. In this conversation, Fr. Yann walks us through an ordinary day in Varanasi: studying Sanskrit a...

During a Sufi heart-rhythm meditation, Karen Newell encountered an existential loneliness so complete that she was inconsolable. Rather than resisting it, she allowed herself to fully experience the loneliness. What emerged was what she calls a “reservoir of support”—an unfailing love that has never left her. Karen is the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics and co-author with Dr. Eben Alexander of Livi...

Reading the Dhammapada gave Ajahn Dhammasiha the final push to renounce the world and embark on the search for Nibbāna — the Deathless, the Marvellous. Once an atheist in the West Berlin party scene, he had grown increasingly disenchanted with worldly life and traveled to India for PhD research. He abandoned the scholarship and ordained as a Theravada Buddhist monk. Ajahn Dhammasiha talks about mo...

John Butler has been meditating twice a day for more than sixty years. He was a farmer first. He fell in love with the stillness of wide-open landscapes. Meditation showed him the same wide-open space within. Now, that stillness is all-pervasive. As a young boy, it grieved him that his beloved animals and plants had to die for his sake. In church, he heard that Christ is the Lamb of God, and it ma...

Since age four, Urmila Devi Dasi sought to know God. At seventeen, while meditating, she experienced herself dissolving into oneness with God. It terrified her. Pulling back, she plunged into a life of hedonism, which thankfully didn't last long. Over five decades later, she is steeped in her devotion to God as the Supreme Person with whom she has a personal relationship, whose hand she sees in ev...

Fr. Ron Rolheiser maps the spiritual journey across three stages: getting your life together, giving your life away, and — the one no one prepares you for — giving your death away. Drawing on monastic wisdom and the mystics, he shows how marriage, the monotony of daily work, and even illness, aging, and death can each become a deep spiritual practice. In this conversation, we talk about how loneli...

Sheryle Baker lost her brother when she was sixteen after watching him live with a devastating illness throughout his childhood. That early experience of loss led her to train with pioneering psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and, eventually, to more than three decades of helping people navigate trauma, illness, death, and devastating grief. Now, living with multiple myeloma, Sheryle is confronti...

What if the thing you're trying to get rid of is actually trying to tell you something? A compulsion you can't shake. A mood you want to snap out of. Anger you're trying to talk yourself out of. Jungian analyst Morgan Stebbins argues that these aren't obstacles on the spiritual path. They're clues. A mood isn't something to eliminate — it's something to question. Anger isn't just a problem to mana...

From atheist to monk. From chasing happiness to practicing contentment. From spiritual ambition to surrender. Swami Ishadhyanananda, a Ramakrishna monk at the Vedanta Society of Sacramento, keeps arriving back at the ordinary: gratitude for small joys, sipping Darjeeling tea in the morning. A tiny, unimpressive flicker of devotion, held onto because it's real, instead of waiting for an overwhelmin...

Zen training is long. Demanding. But according to Jay Rinsen Weik Roshi, there is a far more difficult path: spending an entire lifetime sleepwalking, pushed and pulled by fear and desire, never realizing your true nature. Rinsen Roshi strips away spirituality as self-improvement, intellectual gymnastics, or feel-good emotionality. Instead, he presents authentic Zen as an embodied path of transfor...

Have you been trying to fix yourself—to eliminate all your apparent imperfections? Have you been waiting for a final, dramatic enlightenment experience? Our guest in this episode, Joan Tollifson, author of Death: The End of Self-Improvement , suggests that seeking enlightenment as a future event can become the ultimate me-trap. Instead, she points to the radical simplicity of attending to this pre...

A rare case of E. coli bacterial meningoencephalitis put Dr. Eben Alexander III, a Harvard neurosurgeon, into a week-long coma with virtually no chance of meaningful recovery. Yet while his neocortex suffered global damage, he underwent a profound near-death experience (NDE)—an encounter with a reality that was "more real than real." This experience completely shattered his former materialist worl...

A life devoted to finding peace regardless of circumstance, external or internal: sitting in a cancer center, her heart fills with gratitude; at the bedsides of the dying, her heart swells with love; even in a season of failing health, arriving at a training by wheelchair, she found wholeness and oneness; and in the depths of meditation, she settles into an infinite love beyond time and space. Ger...

A mystical experience at nineteen changed David Cassian Cole's life forever — setting him on a journey through Celtic spirituality, Christian mysticism, Eastern Orthodox hesychasm, twenty years inside a dispersed new monastic order, and now the teaching of Fr. Bede Griffiths and a recontextualization of Christianity through the Upanishads. David's is a life devoted to truth, wherever it le...

Dr. David R. Hawkins | Christ | Mystical Experience | Forgiveness | Love | Death | Devotion | Meditation | Silence | Prayer | Visions To mark the 25th episode of The Spiritual Context Podcast, I'm releasing a very special interview—one of the very first conversations I recorded when this podcast was still just an idea. My guest today is Sherry Ritley, a dear friend and someone who has deeply i...

Is there within us a Presence that knows what we need before we do? How do we hear its guidance, and how do we trust it when it asks us to abandon what we thought we wanted? At eight years old, Patricia McBee felt an overwhelming Divine Presence, and she has followed its leadings since. A Quaker mystic and elder, she has spent a lifetime learning to recognize its guidance in all its forms. The ful...

Kirya Yoga | Kirtan | Samadhi | Meditation | Enlightenment | Kundalini | Yogananda | Autobiography of a Yogi | Siddhartha by Herman Hesse | Bhakti Neti Neti | Chakras From dancing to Beatles records as a child and playing in progressive rock bands in his youth, to a distinguished academic career teaching music history and theory, John Covach achieved immense success in the material world. But his...

A 15-year-old anti-war activist arrived at the Vedanta Society in Southern California to distribute protest flyers. Upon hearing that inner peace is the prerequisite for world peace, she realized that peace requires working in a domain far deeper than politics. She was snagged by the Divine. But it wasn't until ten years later, compelled by a close encounter with death, that she finally committed...

How many of your beliefs have you really questioned? What if it is these same unquestioned beliefs that cause suffering? And what if questioning is all that's required for stressful thoughts to let go of you? Grace Bell has used The Work of Byron Katie to question the thoughts underlying her eating disorder, divorce, grief, and cancer diagnosis, and found that without the filter of these thoug...

Waking up is not a departure from ordinary life but a deeper arrival into it. Rev. Busshō Lahn, a Zen priest and spiritual director, has spent decades practicing this arrival, responding to the infinite welcoming of reality. What he finds there, and what this conversation circles, is that turning toward suffering rather than away from it may be the most honest thing we can offer — to ourselves in...

From Japanese American internment camps to a successful career in dentistry. From vision quests in the wilderness to a second calling as a Shin Buddhist (Jodo Shinshu) minister. From grief and loss to a heart filled with gratitude — Rev. Kenji Akahoshi's remarkable life has taught him that joy emerges when life is received rather than grasped. Kenji Sensei's teaching is simple but radical:...

What does it mean to truly care for another, even as they are dying? How do we move from head knowledge down into the heart, where love resides? What does it mean to lead from a place of stillness? Sister Mary Lou Mitchell has spent her life at the intersection of stillness and action. From her background in nursing and academia, to her time accompanying the elderly and those nearing death as a sp...

She sings about dishes being holy, shovels being prayer, and the astounding beauty of human beings in the humdrum of daily life. This week's guest, singer, songwriter, and poet Carrie Newcomer says that when we pay attention, we can find the divine — what she calls the Great Luminous — in everything. Songwriting has been one such practice of attention for her, alongside decades of Quaker silence....