Ep. 223: Nick Davies — Midlife 3. Waking Up to the Life That Wants to Be Lived Through You

Ep. 228: Brett Larkin — Mindful Awareness 3. How Yoga Can Elevate Every Part of Your Life

My guest this week is Brett Larkin, yoga instructor and author ofYoga Life: : Habits, Poses, and Breathwork to Channel Joy Amidst the Chaos(affiliate link).

Topics we discussed included:

• Practicing yoga with awareness
• The appeal of yoga for helping us remember that we’re more than our minds and brains
• Yoga as a “science laboratory” to observe what’s happening internally and how one responds to life
• The moment my guest discovered what yoga can teach us about ourselves
• How to distinguish our highest Self from the inner strategist that keeps us in unhelpful patterns
• Looking for opportunities to move through life in a new way
• Crafting a yoga practice to offer you what you need
• 20 minutes as a thoroughly adequate length of yoga practice
• Self-care and being one’s own parents
• The complementary energies of the masculine (Shiva) and feminine (Shakti)
• Balancing acceptance and change, as in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
• Prioritizing the breath in yoga as a means to awareness
• The non-optimal inhibited breathing we often get trapped in
• A brief guided experience in healthy breathing
• Discovering through yoga that there is a healthier way to live

Brett Larkinisthe founder of Uplifted Yoga and the author ofYoga Life.

She has trained thousands of yoga teachers, and her training has set the standard for quality online certification since 2015.

Brett’s award-winningYouTube channelhas with over half a million subscribers, and herUplifed Yoga Podcastempowers listeners to actively design their lives using yoga’s ancient wisdom.

Yoga enthusiasts love her courses on Kundalini, Prenatal Yoga, and the Uplifted Yoga Academy.

Learn more about Brett and her practice at herwebsite.

Ep. 227: Dr. Steve Taylor — Mindful Awareness 2. Cultivating the Conditions for Spiritual Awakening

My guest this week is psychologist Dr. Steve Taylor, author of the new book,The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening(affiliate link).

Topics we discussed included:

• The practical components of “enlightenment” or “spiritual awakening”
• Commonalities across different spiritual traditions
• The unease and anxiety created by a sense of separateness from the world and others
• The fundamental background unease humans tend to feel
• The hijacking of spiritual awakening by the ego
• Aligning yourself with the organic impulse toward growth and greater awareness
• The process of waking up and transforming through intense suffering
• The naturalness of waking up, which often happens spontaneously
• Disidentification with the thought mind as the first step in spiritual awakening
• The difference between identifying vs. deidentifying with a worry
• The power of emptying one’s mind
• The relative amount of time spent in absorption, abstraction, and awareness
• A “gentle mental nudge” to spend more time in awareness
• Accepting your non-acceptance and embracing your imperfections

SteveTaylor,PhD, is the author of many bestselling books.

He’s senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and the chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.

Steve’s articles and essays have been published in over 100 academic journals, magazines, and newspapers.

He blogs forScientific AmericanandPsychology Today.

Visit him online at hiswebsite.

Ep. 226: Dr. Beth Kurland — Mindful Awareness 1. Finding Peace of Mind When Life Is Difficult

My guest this week is psychologist Dr. Beth Kurland, author of the new book,You Don’t Have to Change to Change Everything:Six Ways to Shift Your Vantage Point, Stop Striving for Happy,and Find True Well-Being(affiliate link). We begin with a calming guided meditation that Beth led.

Topics we discussed included:

• The assumption that not feeling at ease is a personal failure
• Being with our distress without being swallowed up by it
• Cultivating well-being in the absence of happiness
• The role of self-compassion in well-being
• Recognizing and connecting with a deeper part of ourselves, whether we call is Self, spirit, or soul
• Seeing the world from our Wise Self
• Living from our head vs. being more connected to and aware of the body
• Contraction vs. expansion in the area around the heart
• Why we don’t habitually run toward our body and wise Self as refuges
• A simple practice for coming back into one’s body
• Proper breathing for calming the nervous system

Beth Kurland, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with three decades of experience.

She is also a TEDx and public speaker, a mind-body coach, and an author of three award-winning books:Dancing on The Tightrope;The Transformative Power of Ten Minutes; andGifts of the Rain Puddle.

Beth blogs forPsychology Todayand is the creator of the Well-Being Toolkit online program. She lives in the Boston area.

For more, visit herwebsite.

Ep. 225: Dr. Peter Levine — The Transformative Power of Healing from Trauma

My guest this week is Dr. Peter Levine, who is well-known for being the developer of Somatic Experiencing. He’s also the author of a new book: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey(affiliate link), which we focused on in this very enjoyable and meaningful discussion.

Peter shared about how his own wounds from early in life were a big part of what led him into the field of trauma therapy. We explored how the healing continues, even now in Peter’s ninth decade.

Topics we discussed included:

• What Peter means when he describes himself as a modern “Chiron”
• Using our own wounds in life as we’re working to help others
• Getting to trauma memories and healing through embodiment in somatic experiencing
• The horrific trauma Peter experienced early in his life
• The dream that led Peter to share this book rather than writing it only for his own healing
• The significance of dreams for waking life
• Learning to attend to the promptings of the unconscious mind
• The relation between somatic experiencing and an approach like cognitive behavioral therapy
• The role of the vagus nerve in the trauma response and in healing
• Using the body to encounter our traumas in a healing way
• Why a union of the body and mind tends to reduce anxiety
• The disconnection we so often experience between our minds and bodies
• Peter’s reaction to a meditation workshop several decades ago
• The idea of “living your dying”
• Connections between death and the divine
• The promises and pitfalls of psychedelics

Peter Levine, PhD, is the renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing.

He holds a doctorate in medical and biological Physics from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in psychology from International University.

The recipient of four lifetime achievement awards, he is the author of several books, includingWaking the Tiger, which has now been printed in 33 countries and has sold over a million copies.

Learn more about:

• Peter Levine
• Somatic Experiencing
• An Autobiography of Trauma

Ep. 224: Dr. Tim Windsor — Midlife 4. How to Have the Best Possible Second Half of Life

My guest this week for part 4 of our series on midlife is Dr. Tim Windsor. Tim has done many research studies on adult development and how we change in midlife and older age. I took so much from this conversation as Tim described what we know about how to have a great second half of life.

Things we discussed included:

• My guest’s research in lifespan developmental psychology
• Optimizing one’s potential to live well in later adulthood
• How Tim came to this area of research
• The challenges and opportunities that come with an aging population
• The U-shaped curve in happiness across adulthood
• The struggles we often face in midlife
• The socio-emotional selectivity theory ofLaura Carstensenat Stanford
• The downturn in happiness that’s typical of oldest old age
• Variability in the slopes of well-being across adulthood
• Organizing our lives in ways that maximize well-being in the second half of life
• Developing psychological immunity in older age
• Emotion regulation in older age
• The benefits of using “positive reappraisal” to rethink one’s perspective
• The goodness-of-fit between situation and emotion regulation strategy
• The average increases in mindfulness with older age and theresearchofLeeann Mahlo
• Coping through accommodation or assimilation
• Using momentary ecological assessment to measure how mindful acceptance affects one’s reactions to daily hassles
• Awareness of losses and gains in older age
• How my guest’s research influences his behavior as he looks toward older age

Tim Windsor, PhD, is a Professor in Psychology and Deputy Director of the Flinders Institute of Mental Health and Wellbeing at Flinders University.

His research focuses on examining social and psychological resources that promote well-being in older adulthood, links between views on aging, health and well-being, and developing interventions to promote engagement with life.

He is Director of the Generations Research Initiative at Flinders and is a Distinguished Member the Australian Association of Gerontology, and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.

Learn more about Tim and his research at hisfaculty website.