Healing At The Edge with RamDev Dale Borglum

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

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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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RamDev shares his thoughts on approaching subtle grief and feelings of separateness through a Tantric lens.

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

• Dealing with the subtle grief of being in the body
• The illusion of self
• Directly experiencing emptiness
• Relaxing into perfection and the boundless nature of the heart
• Tantra and seeing the beloved in everything
• Finding opportunities in neutral moments
• The Tantric 3-step and nakedly contacting anger and difficult emotions
• Repression and creating space for what must be released
• A guided meditation

“We’re going from this grief because we’re feeling separate to compassion for this grief. This compassion reveals the empty nature of the heart, and then this Tantric understanding begins to awaken. Maybe that sounds like a lot of words, but it’s a very somatic, immediate, intimate process that can be experienced right now.” – RamDev

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RamDev offers wisdom on receiving the body as an energetic entity we can utilize to enter into non-dual awareness.

This time on Healing at the Edge, RamDev offers some wisdom on:

• The challenge of making our life a practice
• Experiencing this in the body for full presence
• Embodiment perceived as emptiness
• How unresolved trauma can get locked in the body
• Relaxation as a way to surrender
• Regular stress versus mindful stress
• Samskaras and psychological imprints on the body
• A somatic angle to the tantric-three-step
• The inherent wakefulness within the body
• Receiving the body as an energetic entity
• Ways that we can be in a flow state with our body
• A guided practice to enter into beingness

“Resting in the body is difficult because unresolved trauma is locked in the body. There are sensations in the body, painful sensations. Relaxation is really an act of faith. Relaxation is about trust and surrender and trust and surrender are difficult as long as there’s trauma there.” – RamDev

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Whether it is Christ, a guru, a loved one, or neighbor, RamDev helps us find the object of our devotion in each passing moment.

In this episode of Healing at the Edge, RamDev explains:

• The inner and outer guru
• Letting go of identification with suffering
• Seeing the forest versus getting lost in the trees
• The grace within devotion
• How our psychological integration determines what level of intimacy we will have with God
• Inhabiting the body and opening the heart
• Worshiping God in every form
• Conscious grieving and deepening devotion
• Spaciousness and non-grasping as an antidote to fear

“The guru isn’t just something outside that we’re in relationship with. Its everything, it’s the whole universe. And, it’s the practitioner. It’s you, it’s me. It’s not something that’s only there when we’re feeling holy and sacred. Suppose you’re saying a mantra, you’re saying ram ram ram. From the standpoint of tantra, each time you say ram, it is ram. Each time you look in the mirror, it is ram. Each time you look at your partner or your child or your neighbor, it is ram. It is the mother.” – RamDev

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RamDev analyzes how distraction prevents us from experiencing boundless awareness and the ways we can develop qualities of spaciousness.

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This time on Healing at the Edge, RamDev explains:

• How to deal with distraction
• The ways that war and politics can consume our minds
• Shifting between boredom and distraction/entertainment
• What is behind our ongoing restlessness
• The fear of spaciousness and emptiness
• Noticing the impulse to fill up space
• How compassion comes from having a heart that is spacious
• Doing Mantras as a vehicle for emptiness
• Alternative ways to experience openness

“The path of the dharma really requires that we develop the courage to look beyond our distractedness, to find what lies behind it, and to not necessarily feed ourselves with ongoing entertainment.” – RamDev

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Sharing her personal story with loss, yoga therapist Wendy Stern joins RamDev to talk about somatic grieving through yoga and mindfulness.

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In this moving episode, RamDev and Wendy Stern converse about:

• Wendy’s journey with yoga therapy
• How the loss of her first born child, Noah, propelled Wendy into working with grief
• Turning to yoga as a sanctuary for exploring difficult emotions
• How visiting Bali and Thailand showed Wendy that death is just a part of life
• The way that grief can open our hearts
• A new appreciation for life after loss
• What blocks westerners from enlightenment
• The split between the intellectual body and the emotional body
• The tantric 3-step and mindful breathing curriculum
• The profound changes that come from grieving in community
• Evolving our cultural understanding of grief
• Accepting and acknowledging grief
• How retreats can accelerate healing
• Yoga postures for grief

About Wendy Stern:

Wendy dedicates her life’s work to supporting people to heal and transform through the process of grief. Wendy has devoted the last 20 years to being a student and teacher of yoga. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and is certified as a yoga therapist, teacher, reiki practitioner and facilitator of yoga therapy groups for grief support and self-empowerment. Wendy offers a unique fusion of prana flow yoga and Phoenix Rising, interweaving deep, personal reflection into a vinyasa style class. Through Wendy’s own personal journey with loss, she found herself deepened in her commitment to support others and birthed the Center for Somatic Grieving and the Grief Support Network.

“Until you really have felt loss, until you’ve really inhabited your humanity in that way, for most people there is a place in the heart that hasn’t broken open yet. It’s in those broken places that God can come into each of us.” – RamDev

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Ram Dass joins RamDev for a moving conversation about their work with the dying and the importance of practice in the living/dying process that each of us will go through.

In this revamped episode, RamDev and Ram Dass connect on:

• The formation of the living dying center
• The four Tibetan mind-turning truths
• How all fear can be tracked to a fear of death
• Ego and the importance of faith in life and death
• Spiritual bypassing and moving to a more centered place of being
• How the practices Ram Dass was given by Maharaj-ji helped him find his true self
• A story about letting go and a mushroom trip in India
• Why we don’t have to wait until we are dying to be honest
• The interface between living and dying
• The practice of Bhakti

“I find that light is your guru. Your guru meets you as you die.” – Ram Dass

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Using mindful awareness and compassion, RamDev walks listeners through the pathways to emotional freedom.

Check out Ram Dev’s new online course, A Practical Guide to Freedom: The Stages of Awakening, where you will come away with the wisdom and practices to integrate and embody the stages of the spiritual path so you can begin to surrender into the boundless nature of the heart.

This time on Healing at the Edge, Ram Dev looks into:

• Using emotions to dive into deeper parts of ourselves
• Peeling through the layers of emotions
• Ways to be with our emotions
• Being with our sensations without getting lost in the story
• Love and the ability to forgive
• I am afraid versus I have fear
• Creating space between the emotion and the one who observes
• The superego (our inner judge, jury, and executioner)
• Embodied mindfulness and compassion
• Having compassion for our emotional demons
• Tantra and all emotions as awakened energy
• Turning obstacles into practice and presence
• The benefits of anxiety, anger, and sadness
• The sacred nature of all experiences

“With attention, with being centered, we move from being reactive to a place where we can be with an emotion without either automatically pushing it away or automatically getting lost in that.” – RamDev

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Concentrating on devotion, RamDev describes healing feelings of inadequacy and holding a deep compassion for the self and others.

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

- Devotion as the easiest way to open the heart

- Self-worth and offering Compassion to ourselves

- Trusting that everything is the Dharma unfolding

- Becoming attached to God and Surrendering the false self

- Intimacy with our teachings and guru via devotion

- The relative deity versus the absolute deity

- An evolution into Tantric devotion

- Receiving grace in every moment

- The four heavenly abodes in Buddhism and their enemies

- Our tendency to be bothered and taking responsibility

- A brief self-compassion and mindfulness practice

- Imperfection as a part of the shared human experience

- A quick Q and A with listeners on keeping an open heart and more

“The far enemy of love is hatred, but the near enemy of love is attachment. It looks like love, it smells like love, but it causes suffering. Very often our love, which we can extend here to our devotion, is a mixture of true love and attachment.” – RamDev

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