Bliss And Grit

There’s a skill to relating to emotions. We’ve spoken a lot about how you should just “stop. drop and feel,” but many of us were never taught how to meet our emotional experience in a healthy manner. We’re prone to venting or repressing. Taking them out on others or taking them out on ourselves. If emotions threaten to overwhelm us or to create disturbances in our lives it becomes very hard to make space for them to exist. That’s why in this episode we begin to explore the life changing skill of how to navigate your inner world of feelings.

We are a culture of happiness chasers, as in chasing that thing in the future that is going to deliver happiness. But how is your actual life, your actual feelings, your actual shit- the stuff happening now and not in some magical future- the real path to contentment in our lives? As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said “Are you trying to liberate yourself from yourself, or are you willing to really see yourself?” because.... You actually can’t hide from yourself. We all want the same thing -which is for life to not suck! What we’re saying is that the path to life sucking less is to get really honest and feel all the feels. As Vanessa says, there’s no way through but in.

A few weeks back we spoke about relationships with a spiritual twist and we realized that no episode on love could be complete without also addressing heartbreak. Ultimately we all want to feel connected, yet the fear of feeling heart break can be so fundamental that we create obstacles to the love we desire. In this weeks episode we’re looking at how to recover from the loss of a relationship- from knowing your own resiliency, to releasing old pain from your soma that leaves you unable to tolerate more tension, to learning how to receive from a support system we’re exploring how we can heal a broken heart.

In today’s episode we dive into grief and despair- so cheery of us! But really it is cheery of us! We’re talking about how our culture doesn’t have a framework for how to really sit with and metabolize grief and despair and what the costs of that are. Nobody wants to experience these painful emotions, and so we find all kinds of ways to avoid them. Yet there is also something so alive about it. As Vanessa says in this episode, “Touching into temporality is a really potent wake up force if you let it be."

In today's episode we’re discussing teachers, sanghas and gurus behaving badly. Classically, in many spiritual traditions, you would begin your journey by following a specific teacher, but does that apply to modern times? In response to many listeners questions about how to find a path and/or a teacher we’re discussing how we got started on our way, whether people need to commit to a path or a teacher, how we found our mentors, and of course some of the pitfalls to look out for along the way.

We got a great comment on social media asking us to talk about love and relationships asking, "What role does the ego play in relationships? Specifically attraction- how do I know if my true self is attracted or my ego?" Well we have, as usual, a lot to say about that! From spiritual concepts like pain bodies to psychological concepts like attachment theory and projective identification we try to tackle some how we choose a partner and how we can switch it up in the direction of sane, loving, easy, nourishing relationships.

If you’ve been spiritually curious you’ve probably run across the word attachments at some point in your spiritual perusing. That’s because thousands of years ago Buddha stated that attachments to desire were the main cause of human suffering. Which has led to the idea that desire is negative being trickled down into our collective consciousness, but is that the full picture? In this episode of Bliss and Grit we’re breaking down our views on the pros, cons, and pitfalls of attachment and desire. From outlining the Buddhist “4 Noble Truths” to sharing our personal experiences we’re decoding our views on human desire.

In today’s episode we're talking about groundlessness. In our personal lives AND in the global collective these days things are feeling quite a lot like there isn’t much solid, predictable ground to stand on. We’re so wired to want stability. To have something bedrock and constant in our lives… however Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground..” Um… we tackle the good and bad news in the midst of our own groundlessness.

In this episode we’re on an Ego trip- what is it, why do we have it, and how does it stand in our way? Many teachers argue that the Ego is the primary structure that prevents us from knowing our true nature but are there benefits? And if we’re born to know our own sacredness why is it so hard to let go of our ego stories and come into the present? As usual this conversation will goes on a journey covering Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience and multiple spiritual traditions.

Today’s episode is another Dear Bliss and Grit show where we answer a listener’s question. This listener is talking about how beneficial meditation has been in her life, and she asks about how she can keep that expanded state while off the cushion and not keep returning to what she calls the “littleness lie”. I think it’s a common feeling that many of us can bump up against and Vanessa and I are certainly not strangers to it! We talk about the insights we have gleaned, our own frustrations, with the twists and turns of the path and ponder, as usual, what are we even up to here?

It’s a new year - and really why talk about New Year’s Resolutions when we can talk about the big root ball underneath all the goal setting - karma! What seeds are you planting, what seeds are you watering - and how did the word “karma” get oh so very misunderstood!?

Ram Dass once said- if you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family. Just in time for the holidays we’re talking about families and emotional contagion. How can you find sanity amidst the people most likely to push your buttons? What are the best ways to navigate your friends, family and loved ones? How can your own expectations and belief systems be creating havoc when all you want is peace and love? Get your hot cocoa and get ready for some holiday cheer.

Today’s episode is the first of what we hope will be many where we answer a listener's question. As you may recall, we did a couple of episodes on self love, and afterwards we got a very thoughtful question asking, essentially, “well what about selfless love?” Vanessa and I, as usual, have a lot to say about what we often define as selfless love, and what true self love and selfless love really are. As Vanessa says in the episode, “All love technically is selfless.” Boom.

After 3 episodes sitting with fear, today we’re talking about joy. And yet Joy is such a profoundly vulnerable state that we can be a bit, or a lot, phobic of it actually. First, what do we mean by this word joy? And how is what we’re talking about different than the pursuit of happiness? And why is it that even in the helpful places- like in meditation or mindfulness circles or in therapy- that we focus so heavily on the contents of the muck in the basement? If we want to welcome more joy into our lives, what are we up against really? I mean, what is up with the suppression of the sublime going on?!

In this episode we’re literally “doing the work” on our internal reactions to current events. In the aftermath of the 2016 US election there’s a lot of emotion and reactivity in the air, and we’re feeling it! We’re using this moment as an opportunity to give you an inside look at how we actually confront our own wounds and triggers that are up. From talking about our personal experience, to utilizing Byron Katie’s process called the “work,” we’re having a frank exploration of how to confront and heal old traumas.

Last week we started to talk about relating to fear, and then Vanessa’s power went out and we had a cliffhanger on our hands about what tools we use to deconstruct fear. Well it turns out we had a lot more to say about fear because we did a whole deeper layer episode on it. Ok- so fear is GOING to arise in a human life and putting on the blinders or trying Pollyanna approaches, it turns out, doesn’t really work. It just condenses and thickens fear in our systems. So when fear arises- and it usually comes on like a freight train and is totally consuming- how do we unhook it in the most honest, tender, and useful way? It can require a shocking amount of courage to relate with fear, and yet when we do it is very potent alchemy for our lives. There is actually a great deal of good news in fear.

Many spiritual traditions will say that everything in life can be recognized as either a movement of fear or a movement of love. But what does that really mean? Can fear ever be useful in life? What happens when you've learned not to hear your own internal alarm system? How would clarity or love sound different than fear? This is one of our most up close and personal talks yet. We started off this conversation with genuine questions and no preconceived notions of where the dialogue would go. Get ready to be front row center for an in-depth and intimate exploration of how the subtle workings of fear are showing up in our lives, and how they may be affecting you.

At a certain (or many) points in our lives, if we want genuine evolution in our lives then we're going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And what if we’re most comfortable being uncomfortable? Well then we need to get comfortable with how uncomfortable it is to be comfortable! My inner Dr. Seuss is out! In today's episode we’re leaning into the reality that anytime we want to make a change, we’re going to find ourselves on unfamiliar turf psychologically- and also tangibly- as our lives unfold in new directions. We always say we want to make change, but really with our ego patrolling the boundaries, we get pretty freaked out with how foreign, risky, and, well, downright uncomfortable any change feels. So how do we navigate that with kindness and keep the ego from turning it into yet another hard project to manage?

In this episode we’re opening the door to the inner world of “Sensie’s” aka Spiritually Sensitive people. What exactly is a spiritually sensitive person? How does being sensitive inform your life and your beliefs? Does it indicate a predisposition to spiritual paths? From discussions on culture and Psychology, to introversion vs. extroversion, to why a Sensey may load their suitcases full or remedies before a meditation retreat… we’re diving into the subtle realities of the Highly Sensitive Person. Get ready to be overstimulated Sensey tribe lol.

As a follow up to last week’s conversation on self-love, today we’re talking about what self-love looks like in action. Ultimately it’s about living from what is true for you, and finding a way out of all the conditioning that tells you interesting things like that what’s true for you is dangerous, what’s true for you in not to be trusted, what’s true for you simply ISN’T TRUE! We ponder if every action in our lives, large and small, gets born from either truth aka clarity, or fear and what that means for how we navigate the moment by moment present tense as it arises.