Curious Hearts

Like many of my guests, Priya is a bit of a paradox: she is both pipeline engineer and a bhatki yoga teacher, an energy business executive and Vedic astrologer.

She describes her own childhood spiritual life as “chaotic” and “unorthodox.” Growing us as the child of Bengali immigrants, she had neither a traditional American experience nor a traditional Indian one.

What she did have was initiation into a bhakti tradition from birth — her grandmother singing the Hanuman Chalisa, gathering in friends houses for puja as a kid, to now leading kirtan and teaching bhakti in her own unique way.

In this conversation, we talk about our personal experiences with Neem Karoli Baba and Hanuman, how prayer contributed to her sisters miraculous recovery, and how bhakti might be treatment for C-PTSD.

I hope you enjoy this exploration of practices! Have questions about anything we talked about? I’d love to hear.

⏱️ Chapters 00:00 - Welcome + Priya’s magical path 01:45 - Growing up in a puja-filled household 06:30 - Science, spirituality, and the bhakti path 10:00 - Bhakti yoga as nervous system healing 14:30 - Feeding people as sacred practice 18:00 - Divine love, lineage, and Neem Karoli Baba 33:00 - Surrender and miracles 35:00 - Community prayer and Priya’s sister’s healing

—

🕊️ #BhaktiYoga #DivineFeminine #SpiritualHealing #Hanuman #PujaPractice #ComplexPTSD #SacredCommunity #FindingMeaning #NeemKaroliBaba #Chalisa #HanumanChalisa #miracles

→ Subscribe for more conversations with spiritual seekers, teachers, and mystics. → Learn more or work with me: www.veralester.com

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thanks for listening! Want to help me grow? Share with someone you think would appreciate this conversation.

🌀 Making Meaning is more than a spiritual principle — it might be the spiritual principle. In this episode, we dive into the human instinct to ask, “Why am I here?” and trace how our stories — inherited, imagined, and evolving — shape our personal purpose, and how our meaning shapes our choices along the path.

From existential dread to ancestral discovery, from societal myth-making to the quiet clarity of practice, this episode explores how meaning is not something we find, but something we make. I share personal stories, spiritual perspectives, and gentle invitations to look at the narratives that have shaped you — and how they might shift.

Whether you're in a moment of certainty or deep confusion, this episode is a gentle hand on your back and a reminder: meaning doesn’t stay the same. It’s a relationship with mystery — one we return to again and again with our curious hearts.

If you're in the thick of the questions right now, you're not alone. Come sit with me.

00:00 Introduction and Purpose of the Podcast

00:28 The Innate Human Curiosity

05:38 The Power of Stories in Human Connection

12:52 Personal Stories and Family Narratives

32:15 Spiritual Practice and Meaning Making

The books and references I mentioned:

* Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Hararihttps://www.ynharari.com/book/sapiens-2/

* The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

* Brene Brown - https://brenebrown.com/

 And if you or someone you love is craving support on your spiritual path or seeking meaningful work, find ways to work with me at veralester.com. To schedule a coaching inquiry, visit http://veralester.as.me/coaching-discovery.

Until next time,  stay grounded in your curiosity and keep turning towards what matters.

Welcome back, curious hearts —

This week’s episode is a tender, smart, and surprisingly funny conversation with my longtime friend Sam Brandao — a law professor, musician, and someone I’ve known since we were awkward, opinionated teenagers trying to make sense of the world. (Spoiler alert: we're still trying.)

Sam is one of those people who might surprise people with the depth of his spiritual life — which is exactly why I wanted to talk to him. On the surface, he’s a rational, level-headed law professor. He only goes to church so he can play the organ. But beneath that? He’s someone who has been asking the same questions we all are:

What do I actually believe?Can anything be trusted?What does practice look like when life keeps pulling you off-center?What if everything I built to protect me is actually a cage?

This episode moves between the philosophical and the deeply personal. We talk about grief, law school culture, non-duality, breath, the weirdness of spiritual practice, and why so many of us come back to it even when we try to run away.

We also cover:

* How Sam went from childhood atheist to weekly church organist

* The deeply spiritual experience of not listening to the sermon

* Why patriotism might have been our real “childhood religion”

* Whether safety is real — or just another illusion

* What happens when you stop trying to be right and start trying to be real

* The spiritual roots of resistance (yes, including actual war)

This is one of those conversations that surprised me as it was happening — where we followed the thread wherever it led, and wound up somewhere deeper than we expected.

Did this conversation resonate?

Here’s how to stay connected:

🌀 Subscribe (it’s free!) so you get new episodes in your inbox💬 Leave a comment or send me a message — I love hearing what lands for you🔗 Share this episode with a thoughtful friend🌿 Work with me: veralester.com — I offer spiritual coaching, work mentoring, and ceremony design for people on the edge of change

Thank you, always, for listening. May you keep turning toward what matters.

----------------------------------------

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:26 Meet Sam Brandao

03:22 Sam's Early Spiritual Life

05:38 Musical Journey in Church

09:54 Law School and Critical Thinking

18:23 Shifting Perspectives on Religion

25:30 Spirituality in Daily Life

33:52 Philosophical Reflections

36:10 Reflections on Patriotism and Impermanence

37:38 The Evolution of Patriotism in Modern Times

41:03 The Role of Law and Security in Society

43:33 Spirituality and Social Justice

53:39 Meditation and Spiritual Practices

56:16 The Paradox of Practice

01:01:53 Breath and Martial Arts

01:08:09 Final Thoughts and Farewell

Ok, Curious Hearts. It’s time.

We can’t just talk about practice. We can’t only read about it, study, or think about it.

Thinking is great, but it has never brought me the same deep peace that practice does.

Because I know how hard it can be to just sit down and do it, these practice episodes are here to keep us all honest.

Today’s practice is one of the most simple - but difficult - practices I know. And that’s sitting still.

We live in a world that favors movement, activity, and is always expecting us to produce something. Stillness doesn’t make money, and we literally have nothing to show for it.

Practicing stillness is radical, and essential, in a world on fire.

In this episode, I’ll talk about some of the things that get in the way, why stillness is important, and there’s a 10 minute guided practice that starts about the 6:00 minute mark.

So don’t just do something: Sit there!

00:00 Introduction and Purpose

00:59 The Importance of Stillness

04:01 Preparing for Stillness

06:30 Guided Stillness Practice

15:33 Reflections on Stillness

18:41 Challenges and Overcoming Resistance

23:27 Benefits of Stillness

26:46 Practical Applications

28:37 Conclusion and Encouragement

Welcome back, Curious Hearts.

Renee Blanchard is so smart, wise, and funny. If you knew her from Church Alley Coffee, the deeply soulful little shop she ran for over a decade in New Orleans, you know she’s a natural hostess. But you might not know about her incredibly deep spiritual life.

She’s navigating a brave transition right now — after going back to school in her 40s, she’s closed her business, is working in a whole new field. Her spiritual connection has been at the heart of all of it.

Together, we talk about:

💫 Growing up as a south Louisiana Catholic-- including TV Church 🌱 Nature as sacred, and environmentalism as a path of spiritual service 🔥 What it means to take courageous action for your values (including the time Renee climbed a smokestack and got arrested under the Patriot Act!) 🌀 Spiritual principles like uncertainty, optimism, grace, and paradox 🧘‍♀️ Daily practices like prayer, presence, and letting go that help us stay grounded even when we don’t know what’s next

This conversation is rich, honest, and full of heart. And hilarious. It’s about how we keep walking forward when we can’t see the whole path—and how we do it with faith, curiosity, and compassion.

📸 Follow Renee on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sweetjosephinest/ 🥗 Connect with Renee about nutrition: https://www.churchalley.store/blog 🎧 Listen to Making Good, her podcast: https://churchalleycoffeebar.podbean.com/

We’ve been sold the myth that time moves in a straight line—that if we just keep going, we’ll eventually “get there.” But anyone who’s done real healing work, grieved deeply, practiced anything with devotion, or simply paid attention knows that’s not how it works.

I’m excited to share this episode — its the first of the spiritual principles. It’s foundational, because it’s underneath everything we do: time. Our existence is not a straight line forward, it’s cyclical. I share how this shows up in nature, in our own lives, and in spiritual traditions across the world. You'll hear a story about grief and Mardi Gras, some thoughts on real time vs. invented time, and why returning to a moment isn’t a failure—it’s a deepening.

May this episode help you notice what season you're in, and remind you that there's no such thing as being behind.

00:00 Introduction & Welcome

00:43 Foundational Spiritual Principle: Time

02:04 Understanding Cyclical Time

04:15 Real Time vs. Invented Time

09:23 Mardi Gras: A Cyclical Experience

15:38 The Spiritual Significance of Time

26:22 Practical Applications and Reflections

40:58 Conclusion and Blessings

Practice is the non-negotiable anchor and safety net to help us survive this world on fire.

In this episode I share a little of my own history of practice, what elements make up a spiritual practice, and why it is such an essential lifeline.

Have any insights that come up during the episode? Let me know — comment below, or send me a message.

 I am really excited to share with you my first interview episode today with Becca Rich. Becca and I have known each other for many years, and have watched each other grow personally and spiritually along the way. Her wisdom is truly beyond her years.

She works as a holistic time coach and she really helps people to understand the way that our external understanding of time really gets in the way of what is the most important to us. What is our soul's calling?

So I was really expecting in a lot of ways our conversation to talk about time. I think that our relation to time—and time being cyclical rather than some linear notion like that, having those side by side, almost like a spiral, right? Moving forward, like a sine curve—is one of the core spiritual principles, right?

I think having a relationship with time that is cyclical rather than singular, rather than linear, is really profound in how we can experience the world. So I was really expecting that to be what naturally came out of my conversation with Becca—and I am so glad I was wrong.

We had this really beautiful sweeping conversation about the paradox between having a really deep connection to our personal spiritual world and how that allows us to then participate in the material world. Like, disconnecting from the material world is required for us to have a deep spiritual experience. And once we have that deep spiritual grounding, then we can reenter—reengage—with the material world in a more meaningful, less stressful way.

So anyway—I love Becca. I loved this conversation. I hope that you do too.

If you are interested in working with Becca, I highly recommend it—if you have your own challenges around time and/or if you want to support other people in navigating their time. I have done Becca's holistic time management training and I love to use it with my clients, helping them to understand that sometimes our relationship to time really is based on scarcity—and it doesn't have to be that way.

I hope that you enjoy this conversation. And afterwards, I hope that you have a really wholehearted day.

Enjoy!

Welcome Curious Hearts! This is the inaugural episode of "Curious Hearts: Making Meaning in a World on Fire". I created this podcast out of a deep curiosity I have about non-traditional spiritual journeys, and the everyday spiritual practices that help us get through the day. In this episode, I share a little about my intentions for the podcast, and my own spiritual life. Have Questions? Want to suggest a future guest? (Maybe you?) Shoot me an email at [email protected].

The audio companion of the story of Annie & Peter Goetzen.