A very relaxed reflection with Rachel on thinking we know the way life should go and how that ties into social anxiety. 

Bumbling along through life it's sometimes really nice to pause, look up, remember we're only here for a short time, and see what that does to our priorities. 

Many of my most delightful lessons came when no one was 'teaching' and I wasn't trying to learn anything. Desthein is a phenomenal teacher I met on Salt Spring island a few years back. Something that struck me in spending time with him is his genuine openness to seemingly all aspects of life and people despite being perhaps uniquely qualified to 'know better'. 

Listening as an art. The challenge is realizing again and again that we don't know as much as we think we know.
Today I go over recent reflections on two types of listening and two types of understanding. Both are available to us. Knowing each is an option gives us choice of which we'd like to use. 
Listening to our personal thinking is full of separation, judgement, and insecurity. Open listening makes Me-focused thoughts irrelevant.

What gets us in trouble is not what we don't know. Its what we know for sure that just ain't so. -Mark Twain 

This episode is an excerpt from a Zoom call I was recently co-hosting. 
Its easy to accumulate a knowledge base and take it with us forward in our future learnings, but this has some potential liabilities that are well worth taking a look at. 

This is part two in a series with Tessa Buttemer exploring the idea of personal boundaries. In this episode we discuss some of the challenges that come up when we start to move in this direction and the hopeful simplicity that comes from sticking with the sometimes challenging learning curve. 

You can learn more about today's guest here- https://themindfulhedonist.wixsite.com/blog

We all react to life in our own way. For some people a crowded party is a place to forget about their troubles and relax. For others that's a nightmarish scenario they'd do anything to escape. Learning to identify your own boundaries moment-by-moment and looking after your own state of mind gives you not only a nicer experience of life, but also has you better equipped to handle whatever life throws your way. This is Part 1 of the discussion where Tessa introduces the idea of boundaries.

You can learn more about today's guest here- https://themindfulhedonist.wixsite.com/blog

My first guest! Today I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Shenan about following our inclinations even when they deviate from our ideas about the direction we expected to be going. He shares a couple stories of times he made major changes in direction and what allowed that to be a relatively effortless and fruitful practice in his life.

I was recently reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear and he points out that we are inclined to mimic the habits of those we spend the most time with, our community at large, and those we see as powerful. 
It got me reflecting on how much of my life is run by fear of the perceptions of others versus a practical consideration of those perceptions.
Here I reflect on examples of being negatively controlled by this question and how that changed to a more useful understanding.

It was realizing I was scared and didn't want to be. I'd never admitted that before I opened to wanting a change. That was the start. More recently, part of 'who I am' was an inability to stay focused on a book long enough to finish it. I might be able to read a couple paragraphs, even pages, but rarely a couple chapters. I realized I wanted to be different. That was the beginning of watching what happened in myself as I chose a book, began to read...then... and as I watched my experience it transformed.