Authentic Living

What is it in your life that is calling you to change—while you are calling for it to change first? Today Mike Robbins is here to talk to us about how real change really happens. Mike is the author of three books, including Focus on the Good Stuff; Be Yourself Everyone Else is Already Taken, and his latest and the focus of our talk today, Nothing Changes Until You Do: A Guide to Self-Compassion and Getting Out of Your Own Way. Mike contributes regularly to Huffington Post and Oprah.com and has been featured in several other popular magazines. He has been a guest on hundreds of TV and radio shows—including this one. And Mike brings unique and in-depth insights to the topic of self-compassion and getting out of our own way. So be here. You are not going to want to miss this one.

Do you know? How many times do you even actually consider what you want? Aren't we taught to ignore our wants. But what if you were to learn that our desires are the closest thing to the divine within us. In fact, one of the ancient root words for the divine means desire. But how do we know what we want, with all the shoulds, ought tos, have tos and obligations of everyday living to sort through? How do we know when its a real desire as opposed to a compulsion, or an ego aggrandizement? And if we start paying attention to our desires, aren't peope going to think we are selfish? Tune in this week, to learn more about what we want and why that is important.

Our guest today is Dr. Larry Dossey, author of several books including: The Power of Premonitions; The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things; Healing Beyond the Body; Reinventing Medicine and his latest and the topic of our discussion today: One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Mind and Why It Matters. Dr. Dossey is an internal medicine physician, former Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital, former co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/body Interventions, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. And he is the executive editor of the peer-previewed journal, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Dr. Dossey lectures all over the world and has appeared on TV and radio including the Oprah show.

Today we are so honored to have Iyanla Vanzant here to talk to us about her latest book, Forgiveness: 21 Days to Forgive Everyone for Everything. Iyanla Vanzant, NY Times Bestselling author; host of the number one reality show on the OWN network, Iyanla: Fix My Life; and frequent guest on Super Soul Sunday and Oprah’s Life Class, is easily one of America’s most profound spiritual leaders, who empowers individuals all across the globe to live into the truest self. Her body of work spans over three decades and includes CDs, television, radio and on stage performances, 15 published books, and 5 New York Times Bestsellers, which have been translated into 23 languages. Iyanla’s no nonsense approach to helping others to live healthy and whole demonstrates her clear capacity for delivering the absolute truth with love. She warms our hearts while pushing us to grow. Today we are going to get to talk with her about the purpose, the power and the freedom of forgiveness. Do NOT miss this show!

How do we enhance the possibility of awakening more and more to the power of our own souls while we are still in the body? Obviously there are many paths, but one that is getting more and more attention is regression therapy and hypnosis. Today we are talking to Dr. Linda Backman, licensed psychologist and regression therapist, and author of Bringing Your Soul to Light. Linda has been in private practice for more than 35 years and is committed to guiding regression clients, as well as speaking, writing, and training others in soul regression hypnotherapy, both in the US and abroad. She and her husband started The Ravenheart Center in 1997, a Mystery School in Boulder, Colorado, dedicated to guiding individuals to discover their soul path. Linda’s second book, The Evolving Soul, will be published by Llewellyn Worldwide this year. Are you in the process of awakening? Do you want to learn how to help others awaken? This show is for you.

Our guest today is Dr. Larry Dossey, author of several books including: The Power of Premonitions; The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things; Healing Beyond the Body; Reinventing Medicine and his latest and the topic of our discussion today: One Mind: How Our Individual Mind is Part of a Greater Mind and Why It Matters. Dr. Dossey is an internal medicine physician, former Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital, former co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/body Interventions, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. And he is the executive editor of the peer-previewed journal, Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Dr. Dossey lectures all over the world and has appeared on TV and radio including the Oprah show.

Telling the truth sounds like a pretty boring subject. But actually, it is the most adventurous thing we do. Telling the truth means first finding the truth, and then being willing to engage with it to explore its meaning. And finally telling the truth means really telling it, with your mouth, with your body language, with your manifestations. Telling the truth to and about yourself is singularly the most effective way to open the door to the unconscious. But telling the truth is not necessarily what we think it is. Often we think that it is self-criticism, even harsh punitive criticism. We think it is self-effacement in front of others. We think it is blunt, criticism of others. The truth is, however, that telling the truth runs, much, much deeper than any of these more shallow renditions. Tune in today and find out how to tell the truth.

The original plan was to interview Iyanla Vanzant today. But there was a mix-up for her and so she couldn’t make it. Good news, however: We are going to interview her next week. So consider this week’s episode a preparation for next week’s interview—when she really will be here. So this week we introduced her book Forgiveness: 21 Days to Forgive Everyone for Everything. And we discussed some of the host’s ideas on forgiveness. Listen in, and get ready for next week. You are going to love it.

Today we are very fortunate to get an opportunity to talk to bestselling author Andrew Solomon, writer and lecturer on psychology, politics, and the arts and winner of the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. He is an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. His latest NY Times bestselling book, and the subject of our interview today, entitled Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, is also the winner of several awards, including being chosen at among the NY Times Ten Best Books of 2012. It has been called “A bold and unambiguous call to redefine how we view difference… A stunning work of scholarship and compassion (Carmela Ciuraru, USA Today) distinguished similarly by many other notables for its exceptional profundity, compassion and insight. Today we are going to take an intimate look at this entire concept of loving differentness. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to gain insight into the power of love.

We’ve been talking about differentness, and how we might begin to celebrate rather than condemn it. One of the areas of most contentious difference is in the area of religion—supposedly a place in which we find our deepest spiritual roots. What started out as a pathway to the divine turned into a place of rules, in which everyone was supposed to the same. Those who didn’t follow our rules became a “they” as opposed to our “we.” So, now that we have an externally developed spiritual path for each person who grows up in a particular religious culture, how does that person go about finding an authentic spirituality? Where will we find the path if it is not decided in advance for us by a very righteous and firmly planted group of spiritual leaders? And this, of course, brings us to the very definition of spirituality. What is spirituality, and how does one live an authentic spiritual life in a world where everyone has a “right” way for us to be spiritual? Let’s talk about this today.

Last week we talked to Andrew Solomon about differences. We are going to continue that topic today as we explore what it means to an individual to be different. One of the complaints clinicians commonly hear from clients is this feeling they carry of being alien in their families of origin. This would not be true it their differences were accepted, even celebrated, by family. Unfortunately, not only does family reject us for being different but so does the social milieu in general. Children who feel the most rejected for their difference are often those who are selected by bullies for bullying. In fact, we even talk about difference in terms of its feeling: “feeling different” has become a way of describing that feeling of rejection. But what if “feeling different” could simply mean “celebrating me?” It is fascinating that in America we formulated a country out of the need for freedom to be different and then set out to obliterate it entirely. Let’s talk about that today.

Today we are very fortunate to get an opportunity to talk to bestselling author Andrew Solomon, writer and lecturer on psychology, politics, and the arts and winner of the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. He is an activist in LGBT rights, mental health, and the arts. His latest NY Times bestselling book, and the subject of our interview today, entitled Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, is also the winner of several awards, including being chosen at among the NY Times Ten Best Books of 2012. It has been called “A bold and unambiguous call to redefine how we view difference… A stunning work of scholarship and compassion (Carmela Ciuraru, USA Today) distinguished similarly by many other notables for its exceptional profundity, compassion and insight. Today we are going to take an intimate look at this entire concept of loving differentness. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to gain insight into the power of love.

There has been much said over the past several years, particular among teachers of spirituality, about so-called “negative” feelings. Most of what we hear tells us that we should be thinking and feeling “positive” thoughts and feelings. Some offer us dire warnings that if we have these negative feelings we are going to attract “negative” events and relationships into our lives. Still others have told us that if we have so-called “negative” events in our lives, we must have attracted them through our “negative” thoughts and feelings. The question to be asked here is this: If we are gifted with a range of feelings that include on one end of the continuum, joy and on the other, pain, then what is the purpose of these feelings? Today we are going to talk about the purpose of emotions. We will look for and find their divine purpose. Don’t miss this one.

In our third week of our Countdown to Heaven, we are talking to Bruce Lipton, bestselling author of The Biology of Belief about his latest book, The Honeymoon Effect: The Science of Creating Heaven on Earth. We all understand either the actuality of the honeymoon effect, or the dream of it. But most of us see it as temporary—because we have to get back to “real life.” The Honeymoon Effect is a state of bliss, passion, energy and health resulting from huge love. But we cannot imagine that we can have that on a regular basis. But Lipton tells us that the Honeymoon Effect is not a chance event that happened to us because the right circumstances collided, but rather it is a personal creation. In fact, he tells us that love is the most potent growth factor for human beings. How can we manifest this heaven on earth? Tune it to find out—and to hear the clip from Oprah’s upcoming Super Soul Sunday. Don’t miss it.

Alright, so we’ve heard that it’s possible for a person to experience heaven right here on earth, but how? How does a person stand fully inside him or her Self and live from that central organizing essence? Well, it’s a process. And this week we are going to talk about some specific case studies, that demonstrate how we can do this. Do we have to have a Near Death Experience? Do we have to have some major life changing transformational event? Do we have to meditate for hours and hours every day? Do we have to exclude all so-called negative thinking from our minds? Do we have to become an ascetic or a Guru? Don’t miss today’s show. We are going to talk about all the things you do and don’t “have to do” to inhabit heaven NOW.

What does it mean to have power? Where in our lives can we find it, where in our bodies and our minds? Do we know we have power when others cater to our needs and desires? Are we powerful finally when we are famous? What do we do with power and how do we do it? Today we are going to answer some of those questions in an interview with Rev. Raymont Anderson. Raymont is Holistic Transformational Life Coach, an Interfaith/Interspiritual and New Thought Minister. He is the founder and Senior player in three different organizations: B.E.L.I.E.V.E an American Sign Language Theatrical Performance Company, the Guang Dian Feng-Huang school of martial arts; and the Center for Living the Sacred: P.H.O.E.N.I.X. He is a Reiki Master and the author of Visual Music: Interpreting Songs in American Sign Language and Moving Mountains: The Journey of Transformation. He comes to us this week to talk to us about the power that is inherently ours. Don’t miss it.

Here we are again at another new beginning. At least it is one that most of us recognize as a new beginning. The problem, however, with new beginnings is that we think we have to throw out the old to have the new. We think of it in very black and white, purist terms. But what if you knew that you didn’t have to eliminate anything to have something new? Things don’t die when new things are born. Rather things are integrated when new things are born. But what does this mean? What does it mean to integrate something old to find something new? Aren’t we just supposed to think of something we want, stop thinking negative and start thinking positive as we work toward our new goals? Well here it is the 8th of January. Is that still working for you a little over a week into the New Year? What is the difference between a drive to a new goal, and a drive that comes from integrated material? Today we are going to learn how to begin again. Be here—you don’t want to miss this.

…how would we manage our behavior? Won’t we just fall apart? Become the evil we always suspected we were? How will we keep ourselves from hurting others, from sabotaging ourselves, from being unkind, unloving, uncertain…from becoming the worst we imagine of ourselves? Won’t we need something else, like guilt or remorse, or fear to keep us in line? Well, what if you knew that there was someone living deep inside of you who operated out of compassion and passion and who, without the external onus of morality, can guide us? What if that person has always been living inside of you trying to get out? What if, in fact, it is the most genuine you of you, the most real aspect of you? If that were true, if that truth became apparent to you, what would you do? This week, we are going to decide together whether or not this is true, and if it is, what we can do about it. AND we are going to listen to a clip from the next Super Soul Sunday.

We live in a world where failure occurs every day. Where we fail, others fail us, and life itself seems to fail. We live in a world in which we may pray for salvation, for sustenance, for safety and security, for love and relationship, but our prayers seem to fail at the doors to the gods. And what about God—has the Western version of God failed to bring about good results from his judgment, his mercy and his love? It seems to be everywhere. But what if it were actually possible that there is no failure—not one failed life, anywhere, anytime? Well, that would be heaven—wouldn’t it? We’d have everything we ever wanted, we’d never make a mistake or fail at anything. Well, that’s not exactly what it means, but on today’s show, our last in the Countdown to Heaven series, we are going to find out what it does mean—and what that has to do with Inhabiting Heaven NOW. And we are going to hear the next clip for Oprah’s upcoming Super Soul Sunday. Talk to you then.

If we really can live in heaven here on earth, where is it? Where do we find that illusive peace and bliss for which we so long? And where do we even find the door to such a place, much less build a home there? Heaven has been hidden in the unconscious, so it is there that we must travel to find it. But the point of the unconscious is to keep hidden in safety what we are not ready to approach. Yet the unconscious is also the origin of all that we have already become. Every conscious aspect was once unconscious and evolved into conscious experience through an encounter with unconscious material. And that is how we begin the process of finding heaven on earth. We receive it into conscious experience and embrace it. This show is going to open our awareness as to how we can begin to work with the unconscious instead of against it, bringing us ultimately to our own internal home in heaven. And we’ll hear another clip from Oprah’s upcoming Super Soul Sunday. Don’t miss it.