The Healer With a Thousand Faces

Mike talks with friend and mentor James Finely about wounds, whit, and wisdom, and what it means to be healers—both working on our own healing and sharing it with others. Jim shares stories about his own teachers—from Thomas Merton, to his grandmother, and his wife Maureen, and what he has learned from a life as a therapist and mystic, and the nature of life and death as “the road goes ever on and on.” You’ll want to listen to this one more than once! 

CAC Event Nov 13th: What Do We Do with Our Tears?

Spiritual Wanderlust Event Nov 14th: Grief Tending 

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Mike chats with activist and author of * Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways*, Dorcas Cheng-Tozen, about letting our wounds infuse our work with wisdom—by doing that work sustainably. They explore the overwhelming impact of the hurt of the world, that either leaves us thinking we can’t make a difference, or contributes to “the activist ideal” that tricks us into thinking we have to give every last drop of our blood, sweat, and tears to save the world by ourselves. They discuss how those most sensitive to the pain of others are the most driven to join the fight for justice and essential to the work of healing, but *sensitive souls* are often also the most at risk to burn up and burnt out. Finally they ask us to reconsider what it means to do our work and let it be enough, as our individual part of the many different creative contributions  it takes to make a difference in the world!

Mike gives you a quick THANK YOU and a check in on season one!

We chat with Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, about the wisdom that comes from Creativity, Chronic Illness and Contemplation, and all the ways that our artistic expressions, our bodies, and ancient traditions can be our teachers and help us to heal! 

Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, is an author,  artists, a Registered Expressive Arts Consultant and Educator (REACE), spiritual director, founder and "Abbess" of Abbey of the Arts, an online global monastic organization and community that integrates contemplative practices with creative expression. She is a Benedictine oblate who writes and teaches extensively on monastic wisdom, Celtic spirituality, and the expressive arts.

Thanatologist Dr Korie Leigh specializes in helping children deal with grief and loss. We explore how her work grieving with children can teach all of us to grieve like children, and how being in touch with death and loss can actually lead us to be more fully alive. 

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Brian McLaren - Author, activist, artist, agitator, futurist, culture critic, and all around cool guy talks with Mike about the power of good questions and how they can guide the path that our life takes, and about the power of story to evoke empathy and imagination!

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Dr Liza J. Rankow argues these apocalyptic, alchemical times make it all the more essential to find and follow the soul purpose of your path, to find the healing that is yours to live and to give, so that your life becomes Soul Medicine for a Fractured World (the title of her brilliant book that explores Healing, Justice, and the Path of Wholeness). An advocate for sustainable, effective, mystical activism, Dr Liza shares how her wounds have led her to work wisely, and shares wisdom for each of us in connecting our healing with healing the world. This one is good medicine for the moment!

Learn more at https://www.lizarankow.org/soulmedicine

Good friend Rev. Dr. Cassidy Hall, author of Queering Contemplation, chats with Mike about finding our authentic healing path and practice, getting out of the boxes that others try to put us in, and how to glean our own wisdom with our teachers even when we disagree with them or they let us down. 

“If we are not protected by a cloak of good stories, we are constantly at the mercy of stories that do not wish us well.” Mike chats with his hero, master story teller, mythologist, and wilderness rites of passage guide, Dr Martin Shaw about how we “get grown” in a culture lacking rituals of initiation, how limit and absence can be our best teachers, why praise making matters, and above all how solid sacred stories and myths make life, meaningful, in a culture over inundated with competing stories.

Mystic, monastic, teacher, and trauma survivor transformed, Tessa Bielecki shares with us insights about the mystical path, and how she survived being let down by a spiritual leader’s sexual scandals. If you’ve been hurt by a pastor, priest, politician, person in power, a parent, or a partner, this episode has some medicine for you.