Creativity, Spirituality & Making a Buck

SPECIAL EDITION – Call and Response Podcast – Creativity, Spirituality & Making a Buck

David Nichtern is a senior teacher in the lineage of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. This tradition combines a contemporary, secular approach to meditation with the ancient practices and philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism. David has created and taught meditation teacher trainer programs worldwide. He has also been a business consultant with companies creating a variety of offerings integrating meditation in a larger health and well-being context. As many of you already know, David is also a well known composer, producer and guitarist – a four-time Emmy winner and a two-time Grammy nominee, and often tours and plays with Krishna Das. In this podcast, the two chat about spirituality and making a living on the heels of the launch of David’s new book : Creativity, Spirituality & Making a Buck

If you would like, there is a video version of this podcast to watch.

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Video recording of KD and David’s discussion.

Transcription:

DAVID NICHTERN: So, the premise of this workshop and, tonight, which is based on the new book is looking at the strands of creative expression, spiritual practice and alignment, inner well-being, and our activity, livelihood. Those three strands.  So, why did I write about that? Because I’ve been really, in a way, juggling those three elements in my life for 45 years. I met my teacher, Trungpa Rinpoche, when I was at Berklee College of Music, studying yoga at the same time and it takes time to do spiritual practice. Some people go quite deeply into it. It takes time to have a music career and then we always have, you know, that sort of ongoing relationship to livelihood, what we call in Buddhism, “right livelihood” which we can talk about a little bit more. So I’ve found, in working on that puzzle myself, I would talk to a lot of people, you know, I’m mentoring a lot of students and there’s always, it lights up people’s interest because I know a lot of people, you know, for example, who are trying to start a yoga studio or you know, kind of a kirtan band, for that matter or a fitness, mindful fitness studio; and they often will be at a loss as to how to manage the business aspect of that and what ends up happening is, it runs aground at a certain point. So, lack of relationship to that kind of practical aspect, which we call “earth”.  They have a lot of heaven and a lot of vision but not much connection to earth. And then on the other hand,  you go to the other part of the world that I occupy and people are very competent and sort of together, like the people you met today, but they may not have much direct connection with creative expression in their lives and also, you know, the idea of meditating or something like that is seen as kind of a waste of time, like why would you do that? Like, I’ve got to address 450 lawyers next week and the people are telling me, “You’d better do it quick.  You’d better get to the point really quick. They’re going to want to know why they’re spending even five minutes doing something like this.” So, I see, just from where I sit, these two worlds, it’s like two gigantic ocean liners coming together and they’re about to crash into each other,