Ramdev teaches us how to adjust our practice and be a warrior of compassion during times of intense political change.

This week on Healing at the Edge, RamDev explores: 

• Non-aggressively confronting injustice
• Recognizing when we are distracted
• Not running away from feelings that are challenging
• Operating from love rather than being reactive
• Reclaiming the brain and taking responsibility for our emotions
• Devouring suffering with compassion
• How the depth of one’s mindfulness determines the depth of one’s compassion
• Remembering our universal connection and that we are all suffering
• Offering self-compassion and treating ourselves generously
• Learning to meet our edge as a path to enlightenment
• Looking into the big unknown and the next four years

“As long as we’re blaming the environment for how we’re feeling (I’m feeling really lousy because of the election, or there’s too much traffic, or the weather isn’t great), healing isn’t happening. Drive all blames into oneself means you reclaim the blame and take responsibility for how you’re feeling. The election is not making you feel a particular way, your set of conditioning in relationship to the election is creating certain emotions in you.” – RamDev

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Explaining relationships as the perfect environment to grow in our practice, Ramdev offers heart-opening wisdom.

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This time on Healing at the Edge, RamDev discusses: 

• Being in the sea of humanity and all the ways we relate to others
• Relationships as a mirror for how our practice is going
• Lessening one’s self-absorption
• How fear, guilt, and shame make it difficult to be in relationship
• Keeping our hearts open despite the chaos of the world
• Being with our feelings and not getting lost in the story
• Acknowledging when we are running away
• Using relationships to work on our spiritual growth
• Meeting the messiness of the human condition
• Seeing the love within each person

“Instead of relationship being only about comfort and enjoyment, and resenting it when it’s not there, use it as the crucible of practice. Use it as the place that is revealing to you where your heart is closing. When your heart is closing to somebody else, really it’s about not loving yourself. If you can love yourself completely, then you can be with everybody.” – RamDev

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Sharing stories of Maharaj-ji, RamDev discusses living a life of service and remembering that God, guru, and self are one.

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In this episode of the Healing at the Edge podcast, RamDev holds a talk on: 

• Worshiping God in every form and through every person
• The guru as the one who brings you to God
• God, guru, and self as one
• Love and awareness as the path to the guru
• The struggle of having blind faith in God
• Lessons on money and truth
• The Tantric teachings of Maharaj-ji
• Sacrificing thought and turning our minds to God
• Similarities between Maharaj-ji and Christ
• Maharaj-ji’s encouragement to do mantra practice
• The sense of pure consciousness that is always there

“Ram Dass actually summarized all of Maharaj-ji’s teachings in three words: love, serve, remember. Love people, serve people, remember God.” – RamDev

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Offering listeners a map to the heart, Ramdev explores how loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity interconnect.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/beherenow and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Healing at the Edge, RamDev holds a talk on: 

• The four qualities that lead to the heart (loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity)
• Finding meaning through connection to self, others, and God
• The path of the heart versus the path of inquiry
• Dying into the heart rather than attempting to find everything out
• How on-going, unprocessed grief makes it difficult to open the heart
• Trusting both the light and the pain
• Equanimity as the foundation of the heart
• Having devotion to awareness and the sangha
• The many available paths to consciousness
• Invoking that which we feel devotion to during our meditations
• Integrating practice into daily life

“In the Bible, it talks about ‘pray without ceasing’, and the only way you can do that is if your practice goes so deep into yourself that it’s happening without you doing it because other times you’re doing other things. The quality of the prayer saturates the cloth of your being, you’re colored by the prayer.” – RamDev

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Exploring conscious grief work, speaker Chris Beaudry joins Ramdev to chat about transmuting pain into compassion.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/beherenow and get on your way to being your best self.

In this episode, RamDev and Chris go over: 

• Chris’ spiritual journey through AA and sobriety
• How Chris witnessed a traumatic bus crash full of people he knew
• Seeking comfort through Ram Dass and ending up in Ojai
• Allowing oneself to be sad for awhile
• Conscious grief work and working with grief in an embodied way
• The raw sweetness of opening our hearts during painful times
• How community and compassion helps us to heal
• Accepting reality for what it is
• How familiarity with impermanence prepares us for the end of life
• The difficulty in cutting through illusions
• The importance of regular practice

About Chris Beaudry:

Chris ‘Critter’ Beaudry is a father, farmer, and public speaker who uses his lived experiences as grist for the mill for personal and spiritual growth. Read more about Chris HERE.

“Life is hard. You’re not getting out of this one alive. You’re going to grieve, you’re going to lose, that’s the nature of reality. But, that doesn’t mean we have to harden to it. That doesn’t mean we have to be cruel to each other.” – Chris Beaudry

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Explaining service as the easiest path to awakening, RamDev gives tips on developing compassion and selfless action.

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This time on Healing at the Edge, RamDev guides listeners through: 

• His favorite part of the Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 12)
• Service as the easiest path to awakening
• Hanuman as the aspect of the deity that expresses devotion through selfless service
• Naturally arising compassion and seeing God / the guru in all people
• How suffering comes from having inappropriate boundaries
• Approaching service as an expression of love and joy
• Pity as the near enemy of compassion
• Building communities that support service
• Being of service through full presence and connection
• The many levels of healing and how to support others remotely
• Learning compassion through simple moments of meditation

“Service takes on a different tone, a different feeling quality in our beings, if instead of doing it out of guilt or I need to stay busy or I’m trying to help people, it’s an act of love. It’s your relationship with the beloved, that the homeless person, your partner, even your self, is a manifestation of that which is love. Then, service is transformed. It’s an act of joy, not a responsibility.” – RamDev

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In conversation with listeners, Ramdev explains how prayer unites us with God and prepares us to receive grace.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/beherenow and get on your way to being your best self.

This week on Healing at the Edge, RamDev teaches us about: 

• Prayer as the foundation of every religion
• Having faith in the boundless qualities of God
• Loving God with passion
• Different levels of prayer
• How prayer unites us with God and prepares us for receiving grace
• Admitting our humanness within our prayers
• Listener perspectives on different styles of prayer
• Praying for help from our ancestors and for the healing of others
• Prayer as an invitation for God to enter the heart
• Healing from shame and gradually trusting our inner wholeness

“Prayer is the action of being able to receive the blessing of the sun. The warmth, the connectedness of the sunshine. We learn not only to pray for ourselves, but for all beings.” – RamDev

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Bringing the mind into the heart, Ram Dev elucidates how to let go of the ego and surrender into beingness.

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In this episode, RamDev teaches on:

• Living out concepts after we understand them
• Keeping our heart open through all of life’s mundane moments
• Separating from the chaos of the world and having an objective experience
• How a rigid attachment to the ego prevents progress in our practice
• The breath as an expression of pure wholeness
• Having enough trust to surrender into centeredness
• Dropping into the heart just as we would the breath
• Seeing God in everyone without the “I” judging everything
• The felt sense of pure awareness moment to moment
• Using devotional practices as a way to realize non-duality

“Can we begin to have a more compassionate relationship with the ‘I’, the wrong use of the ‘I’ that’s getting in the way all of the time? It’s not a civil war…it’s the surrender of the outside doer into the felt experience of standing in front of the invisible lord.” – RamDev

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Discussing why it is so difficult to open the heart, Ramdev provides practical lessons on how to rest in the heart-space more often.

Today’s episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/beherenow and get on your way to being your best self.

This week on Healing at the Edge, RamDev speaks about:

• Why it is so hard to open the heart
• The Buddhist Heart Sutra and the nature of the heart as empty
• The quality of non-self and vast openness
• The theoretical versus the practical
• How resting in the heart frees us from the abyss
• The way that emotions like fear and anger keep our heart closed
• Using mantra to drill into the heart
• Devotion and compassion as the key parts of an open heart
• Everything as a display of pure consciousness
• Receiving the grace that is always there

“When we’ve lost connection with our heart, is there anything more important than stopping, feeling the suffering intimately, with mercy and tenderness?” – RamDev

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Examining the concept of faith, Ramdev talks about awakened fearlessness and surrendering during moments of fear.

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In this episode, RamDev lectures on:

• How saints seem to have no fear
• The principal of Sub Ek (all one)
• Being fearless through seeing God everywhere
• Ramdev’s own experience with terror and surrendering
• Death and being forced to look at what you have faith in
• How we work with fear
• Resting in the ‘I am’ rather than the content of things
• Recognizing everything as the mother
• Fear as the demon of the root chakra
• How fear develops when we are infants
• Anxiety surrounding emptiness

“Fear is the demon of the root chakra. Fear is what is learned halfway through gestation to 2 years old when one doesn’t feel safe. Fear comes before anger, fear comes before sadness.” – RamDev

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