Authentic Living

Currently many people are seeking a spiritual practice that offers real results, such as, personal transformation and life change. Today we are talking to Greg Marcus, PhD, practitioner and coach of American Mussar. His book 'The Spiritual Practice of Good Actions: Finding Balance Through the Soul Traits of Mussar' will be the topic of our discussion as he leads us to understand some of the specific practices that are meant to bring everyday life into alignment with spiritual values. Mussar is a thousand-year-old Jewish practice of spiritual growth based on mindful living. Don't miss this excellent example of the implementation of spiritual practice.

What does it mean to forgive? Does it mean that we absolve? That we allow them to “get away with it?” If you are thinking in these terms, then you are not yet ready to forgive. Forgiveness is a process. And it really has nothing to do with the person you are forgiving—unless you are forgiving yourself. In fact, we don’t even start out that process aiming toward forgiveness. Typically, we start it off in pain. Nanice Ellis comes back to the Authentic Living Show again this year, on the day before Thanksgiving, to talk with us about that process and its power to transform. Nanice is the author of seven books, and is a Master NLP Practitioner and Coach, whose wisdom comes from a deep well of experience. If you are worried about your family dinner tomorrow—tune into this show. You’ll be glad you did.

For the first time in the history of the world, we are beginning to explore intimacy as the essential ingredient to healthy, whole relationships. But intimacy is not really all about sex. It’s about “dancing core to core”—as Judith Blackstone, PhD puts it in her lovely book The Intimate Life: Awakening to the Spiritual Essence in Yourself and Others. Judith is an innovative, and internationally recognized teacher of nonduality. She is the developer of the Realization Process, a method of embodied nondual awakening, and a practicing psychotherapist. This book, like her others, The Empathic Ground, The Enlightenment Process and The Subtle Self, opens its readers to a deeper more true essential beingness. So, our show this week is going to be about how to awaken to that beingness both alone and in relationship. Want to know how? Don’t miss this show.

On several previous shows we have referred listeners to meditation as one of the most effective of ways to get in touch with the authentic Self. Today, we are going to be examining some meditation tools created by Michel Pascal, and used by Google, Harvard University and other major organizations to reduce stress. We will explore this from the angle of spirituality as well as physicality, mind and body. Many people say that meditation is too hard, and takes too much time. But our guest today proves neither of those to objections valid. His book, Meditations for Daily Stress, offers ten easy practices for immediate well-being. If you are stressed, or have trouble meditating, this show is for you. Don’t miss it.

To date, most religions have wanted to claim their own God. In the West the Christian religion has claimed that their God is the only God. That every other God is actually a false god. But what if, like Pope Francis says, we are all meeting the same God in different ways. What if, in fact, each religion, each language of each religion, each ritual, each path, each prayer is but a different language meant to reach but one divine entity, a universal entity who knows we each have different ways of finding our truest spirituality? Would that be such a terrible thing? Or is it that our bias is keeping us from allowing that possibility? Today we are going to learn about an interfaith/interspiritual God. Don't miss it.

Our guest today is Dr. Larry Dossey, author of several books including: The Power of Premonitions; The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things; Healing Beyond the Body; Reinventing Medicine and his latest and the topic of our discussion today: One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Mind and Why It Matters. Dr. Dossey is an internal medicine physician, former Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital, former co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/body Interventions, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. And he is the executive editor of the peer-previewed journal, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Dr. Dossey lectures all over the world and has appeared on TV and radio including the Oprah show.

Over the past 20 years or so, there has arisen among spiritual teachers a certain mythology that has sunk its teeth into the psyche of the New Age, New Thought, Human Potential Movement adherents along with those who call themselves spiritual but not religious. It is the idea that fear opposes love. This idea is translated to mean that when one loves, one should not feel fear, and vice versa. It is based in the Biblical tenet that perfect love casts out fear. But we've got some real misunderstanding about what this means, and we've added a lot of shoulds and personal judgment, that can be damaging. Let' talk about love and fear today. Don't miss it.

It is true that one of the things we fear the most is our own fear. We want it to go away and leave us alone. We want to feel safe, warm and cared for. We want to trust life. But fear just keeps getting in the way. We may try to outweigh it by being tough, strong and loud. We may try to erase it with drinking/drugging. We may cave to it by living in a small little hole for a lifetime. But fear--it is the monster in the closet. So, what can we do. This show will wisely offer solutions to the problem of fear. Particularly in this time when a majority of the country is living in fear--we need to know what to do about fear. Don't miss this important show.

So, you are trying…right? You are working really hard on your career and financial goals, working really hard on that relationship, working really hard on meditating and thinking only positive thoughts. But you keep slipping. You keep wondering why you are slipping. And every time you slip, you feel more uncertain, more shameful and more resistant to trying. But you have to keep trying, right? Because to not try means your…what? A failure? A jerk? But what if you could achieve the results you wanted without trying. And what if there were results you haven’t even considered that come from not trying? Yeah, right. What are you selling…right? Well, let’s just stay in “What if” for a moment and consider what the sacred texts and what initiations from mystic practices around the globe have to say about trying. Don’t miss this eye-opening show.

This is that time of year when we talk about it. We sing about it. We even pray about it. But no one really believes that we are actually going to have peace on earth, right? I mean, look around man! You can’t really believe that this crazy place is going to one day be all peace, love and joy, right? We are not those people. We are not the people who can facilitate this. We are people who are weak, sinful, and definitely incapable of joining forces to bring about a peaceful outcome. Naaah. It’s a nice thought and all, and we can wistfully speak of it at Christmas time, but no one in his right mind takes that stuff seriously. Well, today, we are going to take it seriously, right mind or no. We are going to really, out-loud consider it—even do a feasibility study of the possibilities and implications. Because if it’s not possible, we just need to shut-up about it. And if it is, well then, maybe we need to get busy on it. Don’t miss this one.

We generally belief that “livin’ the good life” means having lots of money to buy all the things that give us pleasure. That’s because we don’t know that pleasure is not the same as joy. We also believe that avoiding difficult (currently called “negative”) emotions is a way to develop a good and happy life. That’s because we do not understand that there’s no such thing as a good or bad emotion—nor do we understand that those emotions that seem the most difficult are frequently the ones that lead us to the capacity for the greatest joy. Coming alive is not a linear upward path to ascendance in which we bliss-out perpetually. Coming alive is the capacity to feel the blood running through your veins, to know the deep crannies and caverns of your existence intimately, so that you begin to sense joy, see joy, breathe joy—by knowing the peace in it ALL. Tune in to learn more about how to come alive.

We go around all the time telling each other and ourselves that we should “be” more loving. Be more kind. Be more respectful. But how do we make these shoulds into reality. The truth is that anytime we put the word “should” in front of the word love, it ceases to be love and becomes instead a duty, an ought to, a have to. We think that we should be more loving, and we chastise ourselves when we are not. But we don’t understand the nature of love. This show is going to facilitate a greater understanding of the nature of love, and help us understand the very important transformative process of becoming love.

Today there are many Americans who are frightened, angry and being chased around by some of the more primal emotions regarding survival. Short of everyone in the country immigrating to Canada, what can we do about these emotions? Many tell us that we should somehow make these emotions go away because they are negative. But what if there is no such thing as a negative or a positive emotion? What if we've been labeling these emotions based on societal demands for compliance for a flat-line of emotional responses? Is it possible that these difficult emotions can actually facilitate our growth? Our healing? Our ability to self-direct? Tune in to find out.

One of the most difficult challenges of any relationship is communication. How do we say what we mean without lashing out, or hurting the ones we love the most? Unfortunately, we tend to go to the extremes on this one: We either shut-down, or we lash out. Neither of those two options work, however, to create the intimacy that a relationship needs to grow. Nancy Dreyfus has come to our aid here with a beautiful book, “Talk to Me Like I’m Someone You Love,” containing a set flashcards that say precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. What a beautiful idea. Nancy is a Transpersonal Psychologist who works with many relationships on this very issue of communication, and came up with this idea for her clients. But now we can all benefit from it—so today we are going to be talking about the how-to of communicating at the most difficult times in relationship. You are not going to want to miss this one.

What does it mean to be a woman in today's Western society? How advanced are we really over countries where women have no rights at all? The perpetuation of the Western rape culture would deny our advances regarding respect for feminine consciousness as well as the female herself. Feminine consciousness is consciousness of the inner human. It takes us inward. But many women today spend much of their mental and spiritual energy taking care of the outer image. And men are frequently obsessed with how a woman presents. We live in a society in which a woman's rights to her own body are often misunderstood at best, and at worst denied. That's the bad news. But is it possible that the recent exposures can facilitate our awareness of true feminine consciousness? Tune in to find out.

We have lived, since our beginnings, from the good vs. evil paradigm. If a thing isn't good, it's bad: and if a thing isn't bad, it's good. We have divided all of life up this way, with but a very few things ending up in the neutral category. But what if good vs. evil is the wrong paradigm? What if the correct paradigm to live from is the one that measures truth and lies, rather than goodness and evil? If we could stop thinking in terms of good or bad, and start thinking in terms of what is true and what is false, would we not be able to gain more clarity about any given situation? Would we not then be able to discern fact from fiction better? We will get the answers to those questions and more on this show. Don't miss it.

There are many people out there telling us today, that the shadow is the bad, sabotaging part of us, and that because it is, we need to clean it out. Those same people tell us that the ego, though also bad, is the opposite of shadow and what we need to do with ego is to get rid of it altogether. But what if the divine Self is also in the unconscious, and the ego is just a liaison between the conscious and the unconscious? You see, since most of us have lived largely unconscious of who we actually are, the Self is hidden from us in the unconscious. Instead of living as Self, we’ve lived in an identity that isn’t at all who we are, but rather a mask and costume meant to help us cope with and survive our childhoods and families of origin. And the liaison of the ego is, in this case weighted way too heavy on the outer world. So if what we have learned about the shadow isn’t really true, how do we work with the shadow? Tune in to find out.

We still hear a lot about how it is that we should control our thoughts so that we can get what we want. There are memes on social media sites every day about this idea. We are constantly being advised to watch what we are thinking, because the Universe is listening and responding to our thoughts as if they were direct orders for the Universe to follow. But our wicked thoughts, called by most “negative thoughts” do not have the power to manipulate the Universe—surely we know that the Universe is way more intelligent than that! So what is true? What is the truth about our thoughts and their impact on the Universe? If you have been trying to get your thoughts to behave themselves and stop being so wicked, stop betraying you by making the Universe work against you, this show is for you. Don’t miss it.

The global thinking has, since the beginning of time it seems, divided everything in the world up into good or bad, good or evil. The current euphemisms for this same divided thinking are the terms “positive” and “negative.” We eat good food or bad food, we have positive or negative experiences or thoughts…everything is divided this way. But if we removed these terms from our vocabulary what could we learn about ourselves, about life, and about our own potential for Self-actualization? Tune in to find out.

One of the most important tasks of maturity is learning to live with and accept another person as is, while simultaneously holding on to one’s own authenticity. But most of us go through a few relationships with Mr. or Mrs. Wrong before we get involved with someone with whom we can actually complete that task. This should be someone we cannot control and who cannot control us. It should be someone who encourages our authenticity as we encourage theirs. But what does it take to grow to the point where we can have such a relationship? That’s the $65,000 question, as they say. Well this show is going to answer it. Be here for that.