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 for the origin of thoughts, looking for the “I within the I.” His relationship to nature changed. More intimate, more connected to nature’s gifts. He found the old ways of agriculture, of grafting, of building – all of them sacred practices. And now he teaches this in his forest mystery school.

For our first guided exercise, we go back to being little kids and receive blessings from our elders, our ancestors. “There’s so much animosity and stress out there these days, we need to take care of our little child,” says Steven.

For the second exercise — near the end of the episode — we practice seeing the natural world in a way that may push us out of our idea of being a small, separate self.

We talk leadership, authority, hierarchy. Steven describes the power of the group at his school and how he helps participants move deeper into their relationship with nature.

Lots of good stuff – maybe life-changing if you let it in!

Then join us for The Afterparty (at www.mindbodpod.com), where your hosts discuss the natural world and plunging nondual fuckery unto infinity. Then we talk about losing connection to the blissful interconnectivity of nature, talking to plants, Jeff’s discarded book ideas, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Let us know in the comments how your bond with nature’s going these days!

K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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 condition worldwide. Stress makes the condition worse… fortunately, this also works in the other direction! In moments of overwhelm, we can learn to send an anti-inflammatory cascade back through the nervous system.

And that’s what we practice today! Eileen guides us in a soothing meditation of self-compassion, both working with pain and befriending the body.

In our discussion afterwards we explore:

* how to work with pain and find safe places in the body

* the relationship between sensitivity and autoimmune conditions

* how to notice early warning signals

* how Eileen supports herself via daily routines

* and much more…

Take the practice for a spin and tell us in the comments how it went!

Eileen, thank you for writing your book and for supporting so many people through your incredible podcast.

LINKS:

* Healing Mindset Book

* The Phoenix Helix Podcast

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 creativity of meditation, how we can mix and match the core skills to build practices that work for us.

We chat about so much more! Like:

* What’s the minimum amount of meditation for stress relief vs more enduring transformation?

* How is one view of meditation and practice limiting?

* How do we work with cringe moments?

* And so on, and so forth, unto infinity!!!!

Take these practices for a spin in your own nervous system, then join us for the official Afterparty, and tell us how it went!

K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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 age, its protective and permeable nature, its colour, and its history. Afterwards, Tasha shares how profound this was for her, feeling her mixed white and Black heritage, which at times can feel like a battlefield playing out on her own skin.

Our conversation afterward is frank and open: on race and ancestry, on how every person - regardless of skin color - has a role to play in healing the collective trauma of racism and colonialism. We talk about the larger “skin” of community - the role community has to play in offering support and safety, and yet also how hard that can be to find in a culture whose values so often separate and isolate. Is this changing? There are signs it may be. As Thich Nhat Hanh used to say, there is no more noble task than true community building.

Hopefully, this podcast can be a place of community for our listeners - a place where we can explore together the many different ways of being human.

Let us know in the comments how this practice was for you!

Then join us over at www.mindbodpod.com for our riveting afterparty!

That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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 different ways for people in different cultures, the value and traps of using a map to find your way, the primordial mistake of separation (what Tasha’s teacher Lama Lena calls “the original oops”), and other excellent topics for consciousness nerds.

Then, 30 minutes in, he takes us to Frank Yang Land — a WONDERFUL and very impactful guided practice that merges mindful noting with surrendering to effortlessness. We hit the sweet spot between doing and non-doing.

Then, join us at www.mindbodpod.com for The Afterparty, where we discuss what percentage of our suffering has actually been reduced through practice. Is it 99%, like Frank says for himself, or some other number? How does this change with external intensities (like having kids)? Would the Buddha have gotten his ass kicked if he had to raise two kids in our 21st-century urban insanity? Probably!

Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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 mini-meditation that addresses a specific challenge. The white pill – “Ah” – is awareness of stillness in our body, which can protect us against unskilful physical action. The red pill – “Om” – is awareness of silence, which can protect us against saying something stupid. And the blue pill – “Hung” – is awareness of spaciousness in the heart, which can protect us from making decisions out of anger or urgency.

For eight ethereal minutes, Wangyal Rinpoche sings these three syllables to us again and again. You can let them wash through you as you sit with us or sing along.

“Ah…”

“Om…”

“Hung…”

The audio isn’t perfect, but who cares?! Can you feel each vibration? Can you feel each blessing? Jeff cries, as usual. It’s an honor to experience such venerable medicine.

Let us know how the pills went to work on you and tune into the video afterparty over at www.mindbodpod.com

That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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 fulfilling artistic flow and create beautiful works of pattern, shape, and color.

Then we chat about:

* how nothing is a mistake

* the equanimity training of going with the flow

* the balance of freedom vs constraints in art

* the therapeutic and healing benefits of “tangling,”

* and much more

Share your Zentangly thoughts with us in the comments! Then watch The Afterparty over at www.mindbodpod.com

That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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! at www.mindbodpod.com**

In today’s episode, he reads from a sequence of poems he wrote called “Seven Deadly Songs” – sonic booms of verse that recreate some of the impossibly hard things that happened to Ó Tuama growing up gay in Ireland.

Maybe we can feel ourselves into these poems too, feel the sounds of the words inside us, feel something – anger, sacrilege, indifference, recognition. We growl at God, because sometimes, in Ó Tuama’s words “the God character of our narrative needs to be undone in order for something new to open.”

We talk The Lord of the Rings, N.K. Jemisin and world-building, about Tasha’s deep childhood desire to be Batman, and Ó Tuama’s deep childhood desire to be Wonder Woman!

What questions can we ask of our stories that will take us deeper into them?

Let us know in the comments!

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Then join us for the Afterparty video: In which Jeff says he feels dumb, and poetry is hard, and Tasha says reading a poem is like watching a gas cloud condense into a planet. We talk about the practice of finding yourself in the landscape of a story, and also of finding story in the landscape of your life. Then, we talk about prayer. Tasha recites a childhood prayer in German, and Jeff exclaims, “Ezekiel comes through with $10,000!” 😄

That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️