This will be my last episode for a while.  I’ll be placing the podcast on hiatus to pursue my other interests of writing, working with individual students, and spending more time with family and friends as the pandemic lessens.  It’s been a wonderful experience creating and hosting this podcast and I’m very proud of the work.  The episodes will remain available on all the major podcast platforms as well as the Unconditional Healing website, so please share the podcast with any friends who might benefit. 

This episode is a commentary on the 5-line Aspiration for Unconditional Health that I wrote many years ago when first offering the Healing Circles. The Aspiration follows:      
                                                          ----        
                                      Aspiration for Unconditional Health

 Grant your blessing that I remain gentle, awake and strong in the midst of pain.
May I see beyond my own pain and become a beacon to others who are suffering.
May I utilize illness and adversity to develop my mind and heart, and realize my true character.
May I manifest compassion and fearlessness in all my activities,
And never waver on the path of unconditional health and well-being.  
                                                         ----

In this episode, I describe the origin and the intention of the Aspiration, and then its meaning and implications line by line.  It describes a path that views the painful circumstances in our lives as opportunities for growth and transformation, rather than outright calamities. 

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Francesca Leo and Bobby Hughes, who served as my excellent producers,  helping me put together these many episodes.  Francesca served in that role initially, and then as she left to pursue an MBA, Bobby seamlessly took on that role for the duration of the show.  This podcast would not have been possible without them. 

I’d especially like to thank all of the listeners of the show! I truly hope that you benefited from the teachings presented here by myself, and by my outstanding guests who unhesitatingly shared their real-life experiences and wisdom.  I wish you a life of self-kindness and freedom from fear, and as the Aspiration invites, may you utilize illness and adversity to develop your mind and heart and realize your true character.
                                                            ----
If you enjoy this episode or any other, please share this podcast with one other friend. Thank you! 

To learn more about Unconditional Healing, please subscribe to our newsletter here.

Jeff also hosts a twice-monthly online meeting called the Healing Circle. It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to learn and practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being. Note: You needn't be sick to benefit.

If you’d like to help support Jeff's spiritual work and teachings, please consider becoming a patron by checking out Jeff's Unconditional Healing Patreon Page. 

Jeff welcomes Toni Bernhard to talk about her journey with chronic illness, the loss of identity and self-blame that inevitably follow, and her dive into writing. To her surprise, that innocent endeavor spawned four Buddhist-inspired books -  three on living well with illness and chronic pain, and one on walking the Buddhist path.  Two of those books are on the Unconditional Healing recommended reading list.

We begin with Toni’s trip to Paris with her husband in 2001, where she shockingly developed a viral illness that continues to this day and changed her life dramatically.  Initially dropping her Buddhist practice to focus on fixing her body, Toni had a “thunderbolt moment” when she consulted with noted Buddhist author Sylvia Boorstein who advised  ‘Your body is sick, your mind isn’t sick'.  From that moment, Toni related to her illness in a completely different way and her healing journey began in earnest.

 She began to write as a way of checking in and touching her own pain, but Toni soon found that her writings had a universal value that would become her first book, How to Be Sick. In that book, Toni calls upon Buddhist teachings and resources as her guide, while also developing her own unique approach and practices to benefit those who are ill.

 Some of the many gems from Toni that were “mined” in this episode:

 Compassion as an antidote to suffering -  “What I recommend that people do is to focus on the actual facts in their life that are the source of suffering and bring compassion to it by crafting phrases that address that. I have found nothing alleviates suffering more than being able to speak, silently or whispering, to yourself about whatever is a source of suffering for you at the moment.”

On working with the medical system -  “What I recommend about any kind of illness is gather information. Instead of just grabbing at the first thing you hear and then shutting down around it.” 

The loss of self-identity that accompanies a serious illness -  “I would lie in bed and say, ‘if I’m not a law professor, who am I?’ I just felt worthless.  And it’s interesting that what I learned from that is not to attach to any identity.”

The present moment as a refuge – “When you bring yourself to the present, there’s no suffering, even if you’re in pain there’s no suffering. Because all there is, is what you’re experiencing right now.”

Thoughts on death and dying -  “One thing the Buddha taught me was to rely on my experience. And I don’t have experience of it (dying). I think it can be comforting for people to believe that there’s a continuation of some sort at death and I think that’s wonderful, but I can’t force that on myself, so I’m left with ’I don’t know',  and trying to be ok with that.”

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If you enjoy this episode, please share this podcast with one other friend. Thank you! 

To learn more about Unconditional Healing, please subscribe to our newsletter here.

Jeff also hosts a twice-monthly online meeting called the Healing Circle. It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to learn and practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being. Note: You needn't be sick to benefit.

If you’d like to help support this podcast and Jeff's work and teachings, please consider becoming a patron by checking out Jeff's Unconditional Healing Patreon Page. 

This episode is another solo show, featuring a talk Jeff gave at a Healing Circle in June of 2021. The full title is “Meditation is Not Therapy, Sanity is Not What You Think”.  Jeff chose this topic because in our materialistic society, everything gets filtered through the idea of winning, betterment, and constant improvement.  Which at its face makes sense - no one intentionally wants to lose or trend downward.  Except there is a flaw in that thinking which is an inability to bravely face the truth about ourselves in the present, always being driven by future benefits. 

This attitude completely misses the point when applied to meditation practice, which objectively acts as a mirror reflecting back our current state of mind to us, rather than one more self-improvement tool.  Lately, meditation is being appropriated by some corporations that bring meditation in-house. Ostensibly promoted as a way to help employees deal with stressors and anxiety, it’s often used by management to improve the productivity of their employees and enhance the bottom line. 

On a personal level, meditation can of course benefit us, but as a byproduct of being more present with our feelings and our thought process, rather than as the goal in itself.  Focusing on the goal or outcome of who’d we like to become in the future is simply materialism wrapped in satin brocade. 

The second part of Jeff’s talk asks, “What exactly is sanity?”  We are so dependent on our thought process for everything we do, that we assume it’s the source of sanity or wisdom.  But that type of conceptual sanity is a relative notion, dependent upon who is asking, how we were brought up, where we live in the world, local customs, etc., rather than an objective reality. Is there such a thing as sanity without a thinker, without a relative reference point? 

These are some of the questions tackled in this episode, where the question IS actually the answer.

If you enjoy this episode, please share this podcast with one other friend. Thank you! 

To learn more about Unconditional Healing, please subscribe to our newsletter here.

Jeff also hosts a twice-monthly online meeting called the Healing Circle. It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to learn and practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being.

If you’d like to help support this podcast, please consider becoming a patron by checking out Jeff's Unconditional Healing Patreon Page. 

Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

Gustavo Serafini was born with an extremely rare birth defect known as proximal femoral focal deficiency (PFFD).  ).  At birth, he had only his left arm and two shortened legs, one supported using a prosthesis and the other with a brace.  In spite of that beginning, Gustavo has gone on to become a successful entrepreneur with the company he co-founded with his brother, pureaudiovideo.com, providing exceptional home entertainment experiences in South Florida and beyond.  He is also the creator and host of the Enabled Disabled podcast, a platform of love and inspiration for people with disabilities and those who support them. 

In this episode, we explore Gustavo’s journey from childhood with loving and supportive family and friends, but no real role models to emulate nor others with disabilities in his world. Helped by learning meditation at a young age, Gustavo used mindfulness practice to work through his negative thoughts and emotions by letting them be without becoming attached or repelled.  Today, he uses swimming as a moving meditation serving a similar purpose. 

 A lover of sports, Gustavo made his eighth-grade basketball team, overcoming naysaying by others (who didn’t want him hurt by rejection) in the process. Eventually, he used that as an entry into coaching, beginning with his younger brother’s basketball team and moving up to coaching high school. Of that experience, Gustavo says “I really enjoyed having twelve people who come from different backgrounds, are in different places in their lives, and trying to mold them together into a team, to become more than the sum of their parts”. Adding, “I learned so much about myself, about how to motivate people, how to bring people together, how to deal with those adversities”.

After high school, once again pushing himself beyond self-imposed limits, Gustavo made the brave step to move away from his support system of family and friends in Los Angeles to attend the University of Chicago halfway across the country.  His first experience of snow and ice, a lack of accommodations, a ton of walking, outright rejection of his right to live as a disabled individual, were just some of the challenges he faced.  In meeting them head-on, he found an “inner resourcefulness” that has carried him to this day. 

Another huge influence in Gustavo’s growth was Zen Buddhism. Specifically, he cites two books, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Zen Training: Methods and Philosophy. He found that sitting with himself was a powerful tool for self-acceptance. He also took much inspiration from Martin Luther King, Jr, eventually writing his Master’s thesis on Dr. King.  Gustavo saw Dr. King as a role model and the Civil Rights movement he led as being integrally aligned with the notion of a disabled person also being seen as an outsider, as the “other”.

Gustavo’s story has universal applications for us all and his motto of “If I can do it, so can you” resonates throughout the episode.

If you enjoy this episode, please share this podcast with one other friend. Thank you! 

To learn more about Unconditional Healing, please subscribe to our newsletter here.

I also host a twice-monthly online meeting called the Healing Circle. It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to learn and practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being.

If you’d like to help support this podcast, please consider becoming a patron by checking out my Unconditional Healing Patreon Page. 

Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

This episode is a solo show, featuring a talk I gave recently at the Healing Circle.  It’s entitled “Finding Your True North: Integrating Intention with Mindfulness Practice", and is especially timely given the resurgence of the pandemic.  It has to do with contemplating and sussing out our most deeply held beliefs, especially when feeling uncertain and discouraged. Intentions, as I explain, are different than goals, although the latter are best served when they spring from the former. 

In this talk, I differentiate between the overarching intentions that carry us throughout our life and the 24-hour intentions that help us relate to the daily challenges that we face.  The desire to live with intention leads to questions like, “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” or “Am I living the life I want and crave?”  Once we establish intentions, the process is aided and supported by mindfully checking in with ourselves as a way of staying on track and refining our values and beliefs.  I also talk about the early morning when we first awaken as (counter-intuitively) being one of the best times to carry out this investigation process.

I hope you will enjoy this episode and find it helpful with staying in touch with who you are and living by your values during these perilous times.

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·     To learn more about Unconditional Healing, please subscribe to our newsletter here with announcements, podcast links, events, etc. 

·      You can also earn about and register for our next online Healing Circle here.  It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being.

·    If you’d like to help support this podcast and my other projects like the Healing Circle, please consider becoming a patron by checking out my Unconditional Healing Patreon Page. You’ll receive first access to my talks on Unconditional Healing and admittance to events not available to the general public like group meditation instruction and practice.  

 ·      Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

I’ve wanted to have a cutting-edge dietary and nutritional expert on the show for a while as diet plays such a prominent role in our health and well-being, and has played a huge role in stabilizing my own chronic illness.   Enter Tim James, aka The Health Hero, and founder of Chemical Free Body, through which he offers nutritional coaching, podcasts, and customized nutritional supplements.  

Tim learned his craft the hard way, having existed on the Standard American Diet for years (and Tums and Rolaids) until his body literally started to break down. In this episode, Tim recounts the story of how he dramatically turned around his own health after years of his horrible diet culminating in a near-death experience while on a family vacation. Shortly thereafter, Tim made his way to the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, accompanying his close friend there who was diagnosed with (supposedly) incurable blood cancer.  This life-altering visit to the Institute changed the trajectory of Tim’s life and launched his dramatic health turnaround as well as his career. 

 Tim lays out his four core secrets, some of which you may have heard before, like drinking lots of pure water each day, but others that fly directly in the face of how and what we currently eat.  Such as avoiding liquids with meals, and doing breathwork as a de-stressor before eating. Tim also discusses food combining principles like not mixing proteins with starchy carbohydrates and not mixing fruits with vegetables at the same meal, and why these principles make sense. 

Tim is at heart an evangelist for health. His energy is contagious, and can be felt right through your speakers or headphones! You might want to take notes because the information comes fast and furious once he gets rolling.

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Before you listen, a few considerations.

·      Please subscribe to the Unconditional Healing newsletter here with announcements, podcast links, events, etc. 

·      You can learn about and register for our next online Healing Circle here.  It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being.

·      Much of my work with Unconditional Healing (like the twice-monthly Healing Circles I host that help those dealing with extreme illness and adversity) is free, and I plan to keep it that way. If you’d like to help support this podcast and my other projects like the Healing Circle, please consider becoming a patron by checking out my Unconditional Healing Patreon Page. You’ll receive first access to my talks on Unconditional Healing and admittance to events not available to the general public like group meditation instruction and practice.  Or one-time offerings can be made via PayPal.

 ·      Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

Jeremy Sherman is an out-of-the-box thinker who has made it his life’s work to contemplate and write about humanity’s most challenging dilemmas. He has spent decades of study on the human condition, and is an expert on the many ways we employ language to advantage and also to make our lives more difficult and painful. Jeremy has invented over 2000 novel terms for those times when current terminology just doesn’t suffice. He has also published over 1000 articles on Psychology Today and written two books.  His insight and irreverence really shine through in his newest book, titled “What’s Up With Assholes? How to Spot and Stop Them Without Becoming One”, which is due out this year. 

Using Jeremy’s writing and quotes as jumping-off points, our conversation runs the gamut from whether humans possess innate wisdom, to working with fear skillfully. We also discuss the two prime directives of every organism, the need to protect against things that degenerate it (us), and the need to repair what does degenerate.  

 This underlying principle applies to language and concepts as well, which leaves us humans with a confirmation bias, favoring those things that reinforce what we like to hear and filtering out concepts/language that we think threaten us. While some of us treat this as a problem to manage, others take it as a license to simply avoid things that bring up doubt. On that topic, Jeremy discerns the difference between healthy doubt and useless doubt.

 Of language, Jeremy says “We worry emotionally, the way other animals do, but we get these feedback loops going where we rev out because we can remember past horrors, and we can anticipate future horrors, we can imagine all sorts of unreal horrors.“   He adds, “That’s one thing that language does, it overwhelms us and makes us anxious.  The other thing it does is affords us easy ways to deflect that which makes us anxious.  So we’ve got climate change, but then we’ve got all these people who are worried about Dr. Seuss books being canceled, that would be an example of threat displacement.”

 There’s a lot more in this episode that we cover, of course, sprinkled throughout with Jeremy’s wry sense of self-deprecating humor.  

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Before you leave, a few considerations.

·      Why not subscribe to the Unconditional Healing newsletter here with announcements, podcast links, events, etc. 

·      You can learn about and register for our next online Healing Circle here.  It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being.

·      Much of my work with Unconditional Healing, like the Healing Circles, is free and I’d love to keep it that way. If you’d like to help support this podcast and my other projects, while also receiving access to my talks on Unconditional Healing and admittance to events not available to the general public like group meditation instruction and practice, please check out my Unconditional Healing  Patreon Page.

·      Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

Sam Thiara is a master storyteller, using that honed skill very effectively in his role as mentor, teacher and coach to thousands of people over the years.  This skill was on display in Sam’s two TEDx talks, “Discovering the Extraordinary in the Ordinary”, and “Activating the Voice Within to be Louder than the Noise Around”. 

Exposed to adversity as a small boy of nine years old when his father became paralyzed from the waist down, Sam learned to live in the present at an early age and to seek out and embrace the positive events in his life. He did that by actively pausing to reflect and choose which path to follow when faced with a fork in the road. 

Coming out of university with an attitude of “Who will be lucky to get me?”, Sam still owns and displays the eighty-six rejection letters he received when applying for employment.  He took employment as a janitor and we talk about the three huge life lessons he learned on that job. 

We discuss the difference between storytelling when teaching versus story sharing when coaching or counseling others. While the former is usually presented to groups, the latter involves dialogue and an interactive conversation. Sam has mastered the art of peeling away negative self-talk and extracting successes and strengths from the stories people share with him, and how the things we normally view as ordinary turn out to be extraordinary. We discuss one student in particular, challenged with mental health issues, who was on his way to dropping out of the University.  But Sam, by reflecting the conversation and narrative back to the student helped him to discover his real calling and passion in life.  When I asked Sam, what holds us back from telling and living our story, from essentially discovering and cultivating ourselves, he unequivocally said it was fear, specifically the fear that others won’t value our “story”, and by extension, who we are.  

We also discuss the reverse logic that many pursue in their life, placing what they do before understanding who they are.  Many of the students in the business school where Sam works place goals before intentions and we discuss the very important differences.  On that note, we delve into the importance of having non-negotiable, uncompromising foundations in one’s life and Sam talks of his own five core principles. This brings immense clarity when pursuing work, relationships, basically anything we take on. 

Sam also discusses his community work as a “self-professed do-gooder”, and of changing the world through the eyes of those he supports, helping them to see themselves and their work more clearly. Sam’s story comes full circle when we discuss his growing up as a British-born Canadian, with parents from Fiji, and a grandfather from India.  This question of self-identity propels Sam and his wife to India to find his ancient roots, working only from a picture of his grandfather’s home….only to discover the final destination paled beside the journey itself.
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Before you leave, why not subscribe to the Unconditional Healing newsletter here with announcements, podcast links, events, etc. 

You can learn about and register for our next online Healing Circle here.  It's free, and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being.

If you’d like to help support this podcast and Jeff’s other projects, while also receiving benefits and admittance to events not available to the general public, please check out our Patreon Page.
 
Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

I try never to use the word “warrior” lightly.  But Dr. BJ Miller is a warrior of the first order, having overcome and thrived after a near-fatal electrical accident took half his arm and both legs below the knee.  BJ talks about how that life-shattering experience proved to be a foretaste of what it means to confront death, a taboo subject in our culture.  BJ utilized his accident as a launch point to pursue medicine as a career and to become one of the world’s leading experts and thought leaders on palliative care and hospice, outlined in his book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. He has been featured in conversation with Oprah on her Soul Story show, and his groundbreaking TED talk has been viewed millions of times.  

We discuss BJ’s accident, the loss of identity that inevitably follows such a complete upending of one’s life, and how BJ’s own healing journey helped shape his unique approach to patient care and improving end-of-life experiences for his patients.

 After completing Medical school, BJ was selected to serve as the Executive Director of the famous Zen Hospice Project (sadly, now closed) in San Francisco, whose guest house for years served as an exemplar for the compassionate care and nurturing of individuals at life’s end. We discuss the limitations of the current health care system’s approach to hospice, which reinforces the current fear-based view of death as a defeat or failure, rather than a natural corollary of life.  

 BJ currently serves as a counselor at Mettle Health, an organization that he co-founded, consisting of physicians, counselors, and social workers that provide support and guidance for those experiencing serious illness. We talk about its mission to ameliorate the singular focus on disease adopted by our current health care system, and to shift the focus of patient care back onto the patient. 

If you are at all interested in both an enthralling story of healing and recovery and a complete reframing of the way we approach the end of life,  you owe it to yourself to have a listen.  BJ is an amazing individual and I feel blessed to have him on the Unconditional Healing show. 

After you listen, you can learn about and register for our next online Healing Circle here.  It's free,  and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being. 

If you’d like to help support this podcast and Jeff’s other projects, while also receiving benefits and admittance to events not available to the general public, please check out our Patreon page .

You are always invited to join our Unconditional Healing Facebook group here.

Thoughts?  Guest suggestions?  Email me at [email protected].

Now retired, Ann Cason has spent most of her adult life cultivating, refining, and writing about the art and science of caring for the elderly and the ailing.  Her book Circles of Care is generally accepted as the benchmark for how to provide at-home care for an elder,  but at the time of publication (2001) was still considered somewhat revolutionary.  

Ann’s involvement with the elderly was an accident. Suffering from a hallucination, (not all that uncommon in the go-go 1970's), Ann’s psychiatrist told her “I don’t think you need Psychiatry, I think what you need is a path” and introduced her to Alan Watts. From there, she made her way to Boulder, CO, then a hotbed of spirituality, where she met Chogyam Trungpa and learned to meditate.  While in Boulder, Ann started working with a friend, providing elderly women with care at their homes, a radical idea at the time, thus avoiding the move into a nursing home.

They created an around-the-clock care program for their clients, which led to them starting a business even though both were complete novices in the business world. They called the startup Dana Homecare – “Dana” being a Sanskrit word translated as “generosity”. Ironically, they soon realized that it was “ the elders in our care who were being so generous to let us into their worlds”.  Within a year, they had forty clients and soon expanded to Chicago and Boston.

Fast forward many years and Ann’s company is reborn as Circles of Care, based on the principle of creating completely coordinated care with the client in the middle surrounded by all the various roles of that person’s world. Ann brings her mindfulness and awareness practice to bear in this work writing that “you can’t just go in and look at someone… it could be as simple as asking where I should put my coat, or asking if you like tea and can I make you a cup of tea?  This soup-to-nuts approach of care included family members, caregivers, health care workers, the maid, and even the veterinarian.  As Ann says, “That was our task, to meet and take care of each other, and meet the mail carrier and all the people in that old person’s world, so that there was a little world around the elder”. 

We also talk about death and dying, where Ann feels that “expertise” is one of the worst things you can have when working with those who are dying.  Thoughts we hold about death and the actual experience of dying are often very different.  But we also discuss the very practical details of preparing for death - the power of attorney, the listing of assets and their location, etc.
 
 Finally, we discuss probably the most important element of all, bringing a sense of worthiness to the forefront of care. Ann has used situations, exercises, workshops, and other educational materials to let the persons in her care discover their own worth and self-esteem.   

Since she is now retired, the best way to reach Ann is: [email protected]

After you listen, you can learn about and register for our next online Healing Circle here.  It's free,  and you’ll find like-minded folks with whom to practice meditation and share the journey toward unconditional health and well-being. 

If you’d like to help support this podcast and Jeff’s other projects, while also receiving benefits and admittance to events not available to the general public, please check out our Patreon page .