Authentic Living

Are you a healer? Do you have a life-goal of becoming a healer? Do you see yourself healing others? Do you carry with you the healer-archetype? Are you a Chiron—Wounded Healer? The healer archetype has thrust itself again through the curtains of the collective unconscious and has basically become a buzz word for the New Age/New Thought book sellers and marketing gurus. The healer archetype presented in the form of a persona, makes a face like a healer. It informs the world around it that if that world will just come to the healer, that world will be healed. Of course, most healers would deny that they have the power to heal the world, but we do believe that we can heal others. We've put all kinds of parameters around that, including the notion that the person has to request our healing powers. But seriously, does one person really heal another? Or is all healing really self-healing? Tune in to find out.

Julia Cameron comes back to the Authentic Living Show this week for the second time, to talk to us about her upcoming online Artist's Way Course, which will be filmed from her own Santa Fe living room, and the surrounding artist community. Though for centuries it has been thought that creativity was reserved for those elected special few who were gifted with some rare talent, we are now beginning to see, and largely due to Julia's efforts, that creativity is one of our best and most available and accessible ways of connecting to the Authentic Self. Julia Cameron has been an active artist for more than thirty years and is the author of over thirty books, including bestsellers The Artist's Way, Walking in This World, and Finding Water. She's also a playwright, songwriter and poet with multiple credits in theatre, film and television. You are not going to want to miss this special show.

Okay, so we've spent a lot of time here on the Authentic Living Show talking about the Authentic Self, how to access and live out of it. But we've spent less time talking about relationships, particularly authentic relationships. Well, the time and the book have arrived, allowing us to really explore what it means to attract, achieve and maintain an authentic relationship. Our guest today is Sarah Abell, author of the book Authentic Relationships From the Inside Out. She is a relationship expert from across the pond in England. Sarah started out her career as a News Reporter for the BBC, and later became a freelance writer and an educator in the area of relationships. She has written material for courses and resources used to work with individuals, couples and families. Authentic relationships are not your run of the mill relationships—they are the real deal. So if you are wondering how to create, establish or maintain an authentic relationship—you are not going to want to miss this.

Have you ever experienced a deep longing of which the manifestation just seemed to keep eluding you? In this day and age in which many of us are vision boarding and affirming our little hind ends off trying to manifest these longings, we tend to judge ourselves for our inability to come home to these seeming soul desires. But understanding a soul desire and distinguishing it from all the other things that can mimic soul desire is an inner and heroic journey. If, for example, we can start the sentence with "I've always wanted to…" that desire could be a soul desire, or it could be a desire that comes from the need to avoid some pain, or escape some seemingly more difficult reality, or to bargain with the so-called fates. So, how do we go about the process of manifesting soul desire if we aren't even sure what soul desire is? Well, the first process is going to have to be getting to know ourselves at the level of the soul. Want to know more? Tune in—it could change your life.

Once upon a time Therapy and Religion were considered to be separate compartments of the human experience. But now, more and more, we are beginning to see a mixing and blending of religion/spirituality and therapy. Our guest this week has much to share with us about this phenomenon particularly as it relates to two things: 1) the power of relationship and 2) psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Pilar Jennings, PhD is the author of Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Obviously relationship is at the center of both the practice of religion and the practice of therapy. But how do we engage both practices in a therapeutic setting without reducing either to the terms of the other? Can we legitimately explore both in the therapeutic setting trusting that neither will be reduced to the terms of the other? Do you ever wonder if your psychological issues are really spiritual or vice versa? Tune in, you might just walk away with your answer.

The Anxiety Disorders Association of America estimates that more than 4 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 54 suffer from chronic anxiety. And according to London's "The Independent," in an 11 year period between 1993 and 2002, prescriptions for antidepressants rose by over 15 million. Further, we know that stress caused by worry contributes if not causes many of our known medical issues, including hypertension, heart attacks, diabetes, ulcers, headaches and strokes—and that's not all. It also increases the body's retention of the hormone cortisol which increases fat storage in the abdominal area. Yet, we can't seem to stop worrying. Well, our guest today comes to tell us that there is a solution and her plan to Transform Worry into Inner Calm, provided in both of her books, Calm and The Keys, gives us a four-step process to stop worry in its tracks and bring excitement, passion and personal empowerment back into life. Do you worry? This show has your name all over it.

Those are words taken from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, and are the title of Joyce Rupp's latest book, a book that draws on a rich variety of faith traditions to provide meditations on God's names for every day of the year. One of the hardest things for us to wrap our minds around seems to be this idea of a God of multiple names—a God who isn't God, but an unnamable Beingness. It is always so interesting to think that we've got God in a box when we encapsulate its character in a connotation that seems to fit us more than anything else. But here Rupp has given us a language for the name itself—if only in tiny fragments—that put us in touch with the deeper aspects of ourselves and that ultimate Beingness. With the open heart of a mystic we come to this show wanting more than that empty box someone else gave us many years ago. Don't miss this opportunity for deeper enlightenment.

Several years ago, we learned of an energetic push/pull called the law of attraction. We understood this law to mean that if we thought positive and maintained a positive attitude, then positive things would come our way. So, we tried that for a while, until we ran into shadow material. To work with "blocking shadow material" we created vision boards, and turned affirmations into mantras, to eliminate potential sabotage. But, for many affirmations and vision boards simply didn't get the desired results. What could this mean? Could it mean that there is no such thing as a law of attraction? Or, could it possibly mean that we need to revise our understanding of what this law is and what it does. Perhaps we need a giant re-think. This show and the book, coming out in September of this year, called The Law of Attraction: The Soul's Answer to Why It Isn't Working and How It Can, will grease the wheels of that re-think, radically revising our understanding of the law. Don't miss this one!

April is National Stress Awareness Month, according to the American Psychological Association, and we are going to begin our month by talking to a stress expert, Martin Boroson, author of One-Moment Meditation: Stillness for People on the Go. Two complaints people have about meditation: 1) They don't have time, and 2) they don't know how to do it. Yet 75% of adults report experiencing high levels of stress and almost half report that their stress is increased from the previous year. So, today, Martin is going to be talking about a solution to some of these issues, the One-Moment Meditation. Martin is an emerging new voice in meditation and his book has been published in 8 different languages. He's taught this radical approach in leadership seminars, hospitals, public workshops and the media and his 30-Day Program for Transforming Stress was featured on Oprah.com last year. This program has your name written all over it.

Somewhere along the way, as we evolved as a species, we developed a concept of worthiness. We decided then that we could be measured as either worthy or unworthy based on our actions, thoughts and emotions. Because we'd made that decision, we devised moral codes to align ourselves with or against, as the measuring stick we would use to determine our worthiness or unworthiness. We needed this measuring stick because we thought that our fortunes in life depended on our worthiness or unworthiness. And so we have built our entire worlds, our thoughts, our motivations and our moods around this concept, now deeply embedded in the archetypal worlds of the unconscious mind and running large portions of the conscious mind. And most of us would acknowledge that we get the short end of this stick—always ending up more unworthy than worthy. But what if this constant measuring were found to be not only unnecessary but completely false? Tune in this Wednesday to find out.