Inner Truth with David Newell

People often talk about balance as the key to a good life. We need to find balance in all things, where it be work, play, relationships, attracting and receiving.

But what does it mean energetically?

Most of the major wisdom traditions speak of polarities, yin and yang, masculine and feminine and shiva and shakti. These are all pointing towards the same opposing forces that play out within us and allow for creativity, love and rest to take place.

So how do we balance it all properly? Transformational Coach Lisa Schrader talks about what it means to reawaken our often depleted sensuality and really step into the now.

If you're interested in how to really feel fully alive, this is an episode for you.

How much do you think the way you think governs your happiness?

We have, by the latest estimates, between 40,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day. How we receive, respond and act upon those thoughts can be the biggest determinant in the outcomes of our lives (both emotionally and physically).

Not all of our thoughts are helpful, in fact many can be completely undermining. Some might not even be yours at all.

If you're wondering how to take better control over your thinking process and by extension your life, this episode is for you.

Start a conversation about climate change these days and most people will duck for cover.

How can we overcome our normal response of fear and powerlessness?

How can we become agents for transformational change in the world?

If you're interested in learning a new story on confronting climate change and life in general, this episode is for you.

Are you deeply healthy? Not just free of disease or illness, but living with a profound sense of vitality that sustains you as you move through your life?

This can be hard to achieve in the midst of life's competing priorities, whether it's our families, our careers, our social lives, or our passions, our attention and care is often focused more on those around us than on ourselves. And, as a result, we get depleted.

If you're feeling like your energy is getting run down despite your best efforts in life, this eye-opening episode on maintaining vitality is for you.

Do you ever feel as if your spiritual search is getting you nowhere? That despite sincere intention and effort, you're reaping frustration instead of fruit?

There are many pitfalls along the spiritual path, spiritual ambition, by-passing, over practicing all included. Not least of course calling it a 'journey' to begin with.

If you're frustrated with your efforts or keen to understand the roadblocks to awakening, this episode is for you.

In this episode we discuss our deep spiritual impulse to awaken and the ways our future-focused mind "co-opts" or veils what is timelessly free, loving, and ever present.

Mindfulness has permeated our modern lives, and with good reason—it's been proven to boost mood, reduce stress, improve health, and maximize performance.

But in our achievement-oriented culture, the practice of mindfulness can feel laborious and mechanical, like one more task on your endless to-do list. What if you could let go of effort and struggle and relax back into the happiness and ease that is your birthright—and is always readily available to you?

If you're frustrated your with meditation practice, feeling too 'effortful' this episode is for you.

Ayahuasca - a psychedelic plant brew from the Amazon - is fast becoming a popular healing modality for Westerners looking to seek closure from past events and heal mental health ailments like anxiety and depression.

A relatively unknown substance until twenty years ago, it was popularised by a now-famous article in the National Geographic in 2003 which saw one of its writers - Kira Salak - heal herself in a matter of days from life-long treatment-resistant depression. Fifteen years on, she remains depression-free.

With miracle-healings on offer, Westerners have been fleeing to the Amazon to work with the medicine. Sometimes with great effects and often times with more than they bargained for.

I spoke with ayahuasca expert Rachel Harris Ph.D. who has conducted the largest study in North America to date on the plant, to see what is what when it comes to using this powerful medicine.

How do you define 'growing up'?

Does it mean you achieve certain cultural benchmarks - a steady income, paying taxes, marriage, and children? Or does it mean leaving behind the expectations of others and growing into the person you were meant to be?

If you find yourself in a career, place, relationship, or crisis you never foresaw and that seems at odds with your beliefs about who you are, it means your soul is calling on you to reexamine your path.

James Hollis believes that something deeper lives beneath the 'voice in our head'. Underneath the ego lies the vast forces of the unconscious – the psyche - which has its own plan for us.

The responsibility of each person, is to figure out what they are, and then heed that call instead of resisting it.

This is a radical and challenging way of thinking about yourself. It means that what you think you want from life probably isn't what life wants from you. And it means that living meaningfully is almost certainly going force you out of comfort and certainty, and into suffering and the unknown.

Often we try to just ignore this deeper level but when suppressed, it usually surfaces somewhere eventually as depression or insomnia or bad dreams. When we are off track, the soul protests.

At any major point in life, Hollis argues we should ask of ourselves: "Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?"

The usual question we might pose in in life is "Will this make me happy?" – but few of us actually know what will make us truly happy. Ask instead whether a choice will make you larger or smaller, and surprisingly often the answer is obvious.

How can we learn to master our minds?

For thousands of years those deep into the Eastern wisdom traditions have espoused meditation and altered states of consciousness as the path to finding our deepest wisdom and the clearest path in life.

Now - in the 21st century - a new wave of consciousness-trailblazers are bringing these ancient practices into a contemporary light with the flow state movement. This movement is concerned with helping people access flow state in their day to day to achieve peak performance in their work and personal lives.

Flow state is a state of consciousness perhaps best characterised as one of no-mind, a place of no-thought and self forgetting, similar to that you might experience in surfing or snowboarding. The rational, logical mind is suspended and a deeper knowing takes over to guide you to peak performance.

This transcendent state is being studied with increasing ferocity by the likes of Stephen Kotler, the author of the groundbreaking book Stealing Fire, who has found it to be a key component of elite teams and organizations around the world.

More interesting perhaps is the deeper work that accompanies achieving these peak states of consciousness. When you tap into heightened states, you then need to find the courage and resolve to trust in these new, often scary intuitions, to affect the change in your life.

That's where flow state coaches like Jiro Taylor come into their own. Jiro, the founder of social enterprise Flowstate, is a trailblazer in the flow state movement and helps bring these teachings to technology company founders.

Laying the groundwork for peak performance with these high-performing individuals, he aims to leverage the power their disruptive companies to bring about massive societal change.

I caught up with Jiro to learn about what it takes to follow the twin-path of accessing the flow state of consciousness and then doing the soul-work needed to bring it back into your daily life.

Sound healing, through various techniques and technologies, is the conscious use of the energy of sound to promote wellness in the human system – including the expansion of consciousness.

The science on how sound affects us physically is well defined and proven by traditional physics. The science on how sound affects us mentally through brainwave entrainment is also well proven and accepted as we can observe the different brainwave states through an EEG.

How sound affects us emotionally is a little less clear, but there is increasing anecdotal evidence of people being dramatically transformed but it.

More recently scientists have been turning their attention to how sound affects us at an even deeper level, that of consciousness. This is something that many ancient civilizations and modern indigenous cultures have been doing to access higher levels of consciousness for thousands of years.

David Gibson is the President of the Globe Institute, a Sound healing centre based in San Francisco. He is the author of the Guide to Sound Healing, one of the foremost books on how sound affects us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.