DISCLAIMER: we talk about smoking weed while meditating in this episode, and then we actually do it (its legal here in Canada) to see what it’s like. Our guide thinks there’s value in this practice, and so do we - FOR SOME PEOPLE. For others, particularly younger folks whose brains are not fully developed, cannabis can negatively affect mental health. It can also be addictive. As always, we are not endorsing; we’re exploring. You do not need to ingest marijuana in order to benefit from Will’s beautiful embodied meditation.

If you like these adventures in consciousness, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!

So who is this deviant hippy meditation guide, you ask? His name is Will Johnson, and he really is an old hippy, a beloved teacher who has been doing it his way since the 60s. In our very fun conversation, we cover the changing nature of Buddhism and its current adaption to the West, the essence of breath meditation as an invitation to breathe through the whole body, the felt “shimmer” of increased body sensitivity, and how this can train us to open at ever-deeper layers – including the layers that have us convinced we’re separate from the rest of life. So: in Will’s view, there’s definitely a path of awakening with cannabis as a support.

Are we all just … high? Decide for yourself friends! Let us know in the comments!

Check out Will’s website, along with info about his “Shimmering Seahorse Sangha”:

https://www.embodiment.net/

And now: Join us for The Afterparty… 👇

The Afterparty

In this here Afterparty, we consider the potentially deluding nature of cannabis and whether there is something a bit suspect about needing a drug to get you to someplace more “real.” On the other hand, we are always looking at reality through our own filtered experience, so maybe deliberately choosing a fun filter is Ok!

The Afterparty will eventually move behind ye olde paywall, but for now, it’s free for all :)

If this episode tickled your adventure-loving fancy, consider sharing it with a friend

Thanks for tuning in! See you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Although we recorded this interview back in September 2023, it could not be more timely. It is, in fact, about the times, about the news of the world as it comes in via our screen and newspapers, and whether there are practices that can support a more healthy relationship to that news. Our guest is Jay Michealson, writer of , who is both an excellent journalist (he appears regularly on CNN and other media outlets) and a fine meditation teacher and director of programming at New York Insight Meditation Centre.

Jay guides a practice to first notice how we’re being impacted by the news – not trying to change how we feel – and then backing up into a place of compassionate not-knowing, a place of humility about what might happen in the future, about what’s going on inside other people’s minds, even about our own certainties.

Such a good conversation! We talk about the balance of internal care and external service, environmental activism and inaction, about realism grounded in science, and much more. Thank you Rabbi Jay!

Let us know in the comments how Jay’s practice connects with you.

And now: Join us on Substack for The Afterparty…

Thanks for tuning in! See you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

In this episode of the Mind Bod Adventure Pod, we take a deep dive into the dynamics of giving, receiving, taking, and allowing with guest Betty Martin.

Why does Jeff gush that Betty is the next Buddha? Because Jeff is overly-excitable! And because Betty’s Wheel of Consent is about much more than just sex and touch. It’s about how we’re human with each other. Her model of consent is now taught in dozens of communities around the world. Among other things, the practice teaches communication and boundaries, integrity and self-awareness, generosity and gratitude, vulnerability and connection.

You don’t need a partner – or even to be into sex – in order to benefit from the understandings here. We practice with an inanimate object – a pen, a jar, a piece of wood – “waking up” our hands to receive pleasure from the world. Easy to talk about, but for many, surprisingly hard to do. That’s why this is a practice with implications for understanding ourselves and how we relate to everyone in our lives.

Let us know in the comments how this episode lands for you:

And now: Join us for The Afterparty… 👇

The Afterparty

Wherein we talk candidly about knowing what you want, patriarchy, vulnerability, play, control, mystery, and a few other things we didn’t get to say during the episode. [WATCH]

The Afterparty will eventually move behind ye olde paywall, but for now, it’s free for all :)

If this episode tickled your adventure-loving fancy, consider sharing it with a friend

Thanks for tuning in! See you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

What do struggle and resistance look like as spiritual practices? What does it take to push for change in a violent and antagonistic world?

Our guest in this week’s episode (which was recorded last summer) is Lama Rod Owens, in his words, “a fugitive” – disobedient and on the run in a culture where it’s not safe to be Black, not safe to be Queer, not safe to be an activist speaking truth to power. Sometimes, not even meditation spaces feel safe, especially where meditation is touted as a way to get comfortable and tune out the world.

But Lama Rod is not interested in comfort. He’s interested in disruption. This is the real Dharma, the real “Work” – awakening from the status quo in order to become a brave force for collective freedom.

If you like these adventures in consciousness, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription!

Lama Rod offers a beautiful meditation on connecting to our sources of support and love and, from that place, exploring a personal memory of discomfort. How exactly were we uncomfortable? Were we really unsafe, or was that our trauma speaking, or our confusion, or our conformity – our desire not to rock the boat?

There’s an important link here: the clearer we can be about our own discomfort, the less it will influence us, and the better able we’ll be to stand up to injustice.

Lama Rod is a brilliant writer and thinker, part of the next generation of Buddhist teachers and leaders. His most recent book is The New Saints. Good to be connected.

Even though we recorded this episode in the summer of 2023, it continues to be powerful medicine now. Share in the comments how Lama Rod’s practice connects with you!

And now: Join us for The Afterparty… 👇

The Afterparty

In this one, we have a lively chat about escapism vs practice, art as protest, figuring out your ecological service niche, and how Tasha alchemizes her fear and discomfort before performing in front of 10,000 screaming fans.

The Afterparty will eventually move behind ye olde paywall, but for now, it’s free for all :)

If this episode tickled your adventure-loving fancy, consider sharing it with a friend

Thanks for tuning in! See you next week.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

This episode is a rocket launcher for enabling all the weird ways you already half-know stuff, ie … intuition! The way we get into the subject is curious and open and “non-expert-y” – we hope it will create an opening for you to consider the possibilities of intuition in your own life. Via the gut, via empathy, via dreams – and via a bunch of other deliciously unsanctioned ways of knowing that certain guardians of scientific respectability can’t see, can’t handle, and also have no sense of humor about. KA-POW!

Our guide in this rollicking convo is the delightful Sebene Selassie, meditation teacher, author of You Belong, and creator of the terrific Substack, Ancestors to Elements.

As artists and soulful humans, both Tasha and Sebene are already quite comfortable with their turbo-charged intuitive capacities. Jeff is a little slower on the uptake – you can literally see his (er, my) perspective expand in real-time. So thank you, Sebene, for your beautiful practice and also for your friendship!

Sebene, Jeff, and Dan Harris (and maybe Tasha too - stay tuned…) also teach a fun Omega retreat called “Meditation Party,” for those who want some in-person good vibes.

Let us know in the comments how Sebene’s guided practice lands for you!

And then join us over at MindBodPod.com for The Afterparty, where we talk about skepticism, science, art, spirituality, and everything else that didn't get said in this week's episode!

Thanks for tuning in!

~ Tasha & Jeff

In this episode, we chat with Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor and public theologian celebrated (justly - excellent Christian word) for her edgy, honest, and sometimes hilarious approach to spirituality. The titles of her three bestselling memoirs say it well: Pastrix, Accidental Saints, and Shameless. Nadia also writes the popular Substack, The Corners – in fact, as you’ll learn at the end of the episode, Nadia is the one who convinced us to move our pod to Substack in the first place – thank you, Nadia!

Nadia shares about her falling out with Christianity, and how she came back to it on her own terms. And then, for 10 minutes … we practice!

What practice, ye unbelievers? Nothing less than the “Lectio Divina,” a traditional Christian monastic practice of slowly reading a passage of scripture, and then rereading it, and then … rereading it one more time! KAPOW! Prepare to be humanistically enriched, for such is the nature of poetry. With each pass, we invite new themes and provocations to rise in awareness.

By the end of this episode, there’s lots of big belly laughter as we explore the nature of insight and healing, what it means to lead “from your scars, not your wounds,” who the heck GOD is, and more.

Let us know in the comments how this practice lands for you!

Thanks, Nadia, and thank you, friends, for adventuring with us. Now join us over at www.mindbodpod.com to check out our bouncy Afterparty!

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Hello Friends!

Jeff Warren & Tasha Schumann here with some exciting news for 2024 and beyond! The Consciousness Explorers Podcast has evolved into … *drumroll* …

🚀 The Mind Bod Adventure Pod! 🚀

Starting January 30, we’re coming at you with new weekly practice episodes, amazing guests, and rampant tomfoolery. In your inbox (and on Substack) every Tuesday.

Here’s what’s new:

* The Pod is now in VIDEO!! Audio-only is still available on all podcast platforms, but if you wanna see us hang out in Tasha’s living room every week, come over to www.mindbodpod.com

* Paid subscriptions for those who want to support our work: In addition to the weekly episode (which is free for everyone), paid subs will get access to our Afterparty videos, where we get weird and extra animated and talk about everything that didn’t get said in that week’s official episode.

* Community Space!: Thanks to this move to Substack, we now have a space to chat with you - the Mind Bod Pod Squad! Hop into the comment section and let us know your thoughts about the practice and the discussion. We’ll be lurking in there, waiting to nerd out and make friends.

- Tasha and Jeff

In today’s episode (the Season 1 finale!) we get slow and personal with Ev’Yan Whitney, sexuality doula, podcast host, and author of Sensual Self. “Sensuality” often gets lumped in with sexuality… Ev’Yan wants to change that, to tease apart these two aspects of being human and demonstrate how everyone can connect with a more sensual version of themselves.

Ev’Yan’s 19-minute practice is a tour of the senses. Take your time. The pacing of Ev’Yan’s guidance – the way she encourages us to pause and savor each sense – is part of its sensual magic.

Afterwards we have a wide-ranging conversation, from issues of sensuality and consent, to how sex changes over time in relationships, to the fundamental right of pleasure. Many of us feel guilty talking about pleasure, as though it were somehow frivolous or self-indulgent. For Ev’Yan, in a world that is continually forcing us out of our bodies, out of safety, out of softness … “Pleasure in such a world is an act of resistance.”

“When we feel good, we do good … so feel good!” It’s the perfect way to finish our season.

Season 1 Finale Message from Tasha & Jeff:

Thank you so much to all our listeners for an incredible 1st season! We’ve had so much fun this past year, creating these 23 episodes of mind-body adventure. 

We (and our awesome producer Timmy) will be back in the fall with a BRAND NEW SEASON of exploration and consciousness-expanding guests! In the meantime, drop us a note if there’s a guide or a subject you’re keen to explore with us.

And of course, if you’d like to support our time-and-resource-intense labor of love, consider contributing to our Patreon! Have a wonderful summer ❤️

Ev'Yan's Links :
• Sensual Self podcast
• Sensual Self book
• Ev'Yan's website
• Ev’Yan’s instagram

Our guest today is Angelo DiLullo, a medical doctor and author of a fine book called Awake: It's Your Turn. Angelo points directly to the true nature of self / consciousness / or whatever you want to call this bizarre ululating mystery we all seem to be living inside. He probably wouldn’t even say he “teaches” this, since all he really does for his guided practice is describe his own experience of operating in a world without a sense of a panicked separate self running around going “I gotta get more stuff!”

In fact, the whole conversation is a direct pointing. And what is Angelo pointing Tasha, Jeff, and  our listeners to? His term for it is “unfiltered reality.” Which turns out to be right here, right now, only we overlook it, on account of our enthralment to thinking and the organizing structures that lie below thinking.

This s**t is so fun. That’s why we do it. We like the existential shivers, the shiver-me-timbers, the sense of beautiful ordinary that settles all around as we get wide and full of Being (beans!), trembling righhhht at the threshold of …. of what? Of almost getting it? – but getting what? If it can’t be got, if it’s already right here? Etcetera etcetera and so on and so forth. 

What pleasurable times we had conversing about perceptual distortions and the need for emotional work and metabolizing energies and the twitchy “sphincter of the mind” and the tragic way Jeff has reified awareness and thus will probably never get enlightened and that’s fine at least he still has most of his hair (not for long Dad!).

 The End

Angelo's 12.5 minute nondual "direct pointing" begins at 9:28 and ends at 21:52.

Links:

• Angelo’s book: Awake It’s Your Turn https://books.simplyalwaysawake.com/#
• Angelo’s youtube channel, Simply Always Awake: https://www.youtube.com/c/SimplyAlwaysAwake

In today’s episode, we’re joined by author and embodiment expert Philip Shepherd. Philip is also an actor, and thus a wonderfully entertaining tour guide. He takes us into the body’s “grounded sensitivity” – really the perfect phrase for it, a place both of exquisite intelligence and dependable common sense. Under Philip’s careful guidance, we explore how to move past the mind’s imaginary constraints, softening and merging with the world around us.

It’s an ambitious itinerary with many practical take-aways. Come feel reality beyond the head!

To go straight to Philip’s grounded sensitivity practice, it begins at 3:59 and ends at 18:03.

Links:
• Philip’s website: https://embodiedpresent.com/
• Philip’s online courses: https://embodiedpresent.com/experience/online-learning/