Explore Spirituality

Rabbi Rami’s guest this episode is Kyle Chayka. He is a weekly columnist for Pacific Standard. As a writer and critic, his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Rolling Stone, among many others. He began his career as an art critic, and his new book, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, is more in that vein than offering methods for organizing your spice rack. Cultivating a deep sense of self is possible through minimalism, and Chayka and Rabbi Rami discuss minimalist artists like Agnes Martin, who explored minimalism as a way to find transcendence, or Donald Judd, who used box forms to find the essence of itself, something that was true in and of itself, which has relevance in spirituality. They also discuss how living in a minimalist way can mean allowing something to be exactly what it is, without putting our own story upon it. This can be a challenge when it comes to allowing other people to live their own lives. For more of this inspiring and enlightening conversation about minimalism and how it relates to art, Buddhism, reality, and dealing with other humans, listen to the whole episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Your loss is not a test, it is not a blessing, it is not a plan. Loss it what happens in life. Meaning is what we make after,” says David Kessler. Kessler is one of the world’s foremost experts on grief. He coauthored On Grief and Grieving and Life Lessons with famed psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who pioneered the concept of the five stages of grief. He and Rabbi Rami discuss his new book, Finding Meaning. Kessler wrote the book while processing the grief over his own son’s death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Based on Maui, Jeana Naluai is a trained physical and massage therapist who shares her Native Hawaiian cultural healing practices with students through retreats and trainings, and at her spa in the town of Makawao. For the past 10 years, she has taught lomilomi, a Hawaiian traditional massage and healing tradition. She and Rabbi Rami discuss how lomilomi was used for medical treatment such as tissue massage and bone setting, but also had a spiritual and holistic purpose. Together, they explore how lomilomi can help the world today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the third episode in a four-part podcast series on maintaining spiritual and emotional wellness during the COVID-19 crisis. Rabbi Rami’s guest today is his friend and colleague at the One River Foundation, Frank Levy. Based in Alabama, Levy is the retired Bureau Chief of Public Health Preparedness for the Houston Department of Health and Human Services, and former Director of Interfaith Relations at Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston. He frequently lectures on public health preparedness. Levy makes three key recommendations for what we can do during the COVID-19 pandemic. Listen for the tips, and be well! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the second of our four-part series of short Essential Conversations podcasts. Today’s guest is Rev. Dr. Gordon Peerman. Dr. Peerman is an Episcopal priest and a psychotherapist in private practice in Nashville, TN, and the author of two books, The Body Knows the Way: Coming Home Through the Dark Night and Blessed Relief: What Christians Can Learn from Buddhists about Suffering. He and Rabbi Rami discuss how to best listen to our friends and loved ones in this time, and how we can use those same skills to observe our own emotions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special four-part series, Rabbi Rami gives counsel on how to stay healthy from social, psychological, and spiritual perspectives during the COVID-19 crisis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Rabbi Rami interviews Shauna Shapiro, Ph.D. She is a professor and clinical psychologist who is one of the leading scientists studying the effects of mindfulness and self-compassion on wellbeing. Her new book is Good Morning, I Love You: Mindfulness + Self-Compassion Practices to Rewire Your Brain for Calm, Clarity + Joy. One of the most hopeful and exciting developments in science has been the discovery of neuroplasticity—that is, our brain continues to change throughout our lives. The good news, Shapiro says, is “It’s never too late to change. No matter what has happened to us. All of us have the capacity to begin again.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Rabbi Rami interviews Spring Washam. Spring is a well-known meditation teacher and author based in California and Peru. One of the founders and core teachers at the East Bay Meditation Center in downtown Oakland, Calif., Spring has been a pioneer in bringing mindfulness-based healing practices to diverse communities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Rabbi Rami speaks with Clark Strand and Perdita Finn. They are the co-founders of The Way of the Rose, an inclusive fellowship of rosary friends dedicated to the Earth and to the Lady, “by any name we wish to call Her.” Strand is the author of numerous articles and books on spiritual practices, including Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey and Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age. Finn is a children’s book author and former high school teacher. Their most recent book is The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. While rosary beads are often associated with Catholicism, Strand and Finn are not Catholic. They note that the rosary is for all people, of many spiritual pursuits. Most of the world's religions have included beads, or worry beads, over the past 100,000 years, notes Perdita. “Holding onto the rosary is like holding on to your mother,” Perdita notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Rabbi Rami speaks with Dr. Will Cole, a functional medicine practitioner based in Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Inflammation Spectrum: Find Your Food Triggers and Reset Your System. Despite how much Americans spend on health care, we don’t rate high in health, happiness or longevity. Functional medicine, a newer approach that can complement traditional Western medicine, may be able to boost those ratings. In addition to spending a lot more time with patients than traditional doctors, functional medicine practitioners also aim to quantifying health with lab tests and optimize nutrition with lifestyle changes. “There is a difference between health span and life span,” Dr. Cole notes. The goal with functional medicine isn’t just to increase life span but also to stretch that health span out, so our bodies do not give out long before the rest of us does. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You may recognize Dr. Christian Conte from the TV show Coaching Bad, or the daily Emotional Management Minutes that air on more than 300 radio stations across the country, or his TEDx talk, “Why I Chose to Go to Prison.” He is hard to miss: a six-foot-tall, muscled, bearded, and tattooed mental health specialist. His latest book is Walking Through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World. He and Rabbi Rami discuss Conte’s Yield Theory, which he created as an effective treatment for anger issues, drawing on the more than 20,000 hours he has spent counseling people. In fact, Conte uses this in his work with violent offenders within correctional institutions, in addition to applying it with sports teams and other organizations. When dealing with an angry person, Conte says there are three key things: listening, validating, and exploring options. Listen to the podcast to hear how to apply this technique, and how to deal with anger and other powerful emotions. And yes, we all have powerful emotions. As Conte says, “There are two kinds of people in the world: There are people who have issues and dead people. So if you are currently alive, you have issues, so do I, so does everyone.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbi Rami speaks with Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University, about her latest book, The Joy of Movement. It looks at how physically moving the body is not only a way to treat depression, anxiety, and loneliness, but also a powerful way to connect and promote cooperation with other humans. It literally builds joy in the body via specific receptors and hormones, she discovered in her research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seane Corn is an internationally acclaimed yoga teacher and public speaker known for her social activism, impassioned style of teaching, and raw, honest and inspired self-expression. She's been teaching for more than 25 years, and speaks with Rabbi Rami about her very first book, which was published in the fall of 2019. "Yoga is about cracking you open," Rabbi Rami notes. "Expanding your heart." Seane and Rabbi Rami speak about this emotional shift and how yoga takes you to a whole new level and how it opens you spiritually. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbi Rami speaks with the husband-and-wife team of Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack. Primack is a distinguished professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz and a world-renowned cosmologist; Abrams is an author and speaker. Together, they explore issues about the cultural and social implications of the modern scientific understanding of the universe. The two have co-authored two books together: The New Universe and the Human Future and The View from the Center of the Universe, and Abrams wrote A God That Could Be Real. They discuss the universe, God, complexity, and their quest to understand the universe as a whole and the way humans fit in within that. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Rabbi Rami speaks with Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison. Paley Ellison is the co-founder the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, the first Zen-based organization to offer clinical chaplaincy training in America. Koshin is also the author of the new book Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up. Many of us are in what Ellison calls Zombieland. Walking down the street, staring at screens, afraid to talk with one another or to make eye contact. Intimacy, he says, is taking responsibility, both for how we think and how we stay in the present to fully see each other. Listen to the whole episode to hear Rabbi Rami’s conversation with this dynamic leader and teacher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“What does it mean to believe in a monotheistic god?” asks Scott Shay, author of the new book In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism. It in, one of his main goals is to show that it is as rational to be a monotheist as an atheist. Rabbi Rami and Scott discuss the book and Shay's views. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 2009 to 2017, Sarah Hurwitz worked in the White House, serving as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama and as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama. Her new book explores her deeper exploration of her Jewish faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast, Barbara and Rabbi Rami have a wide-ranging discussion, including talking about some of the Christian traditions that have gotten lost in Protestantism—such as early contemplative practices, and Mary/the divine feminine archetype—that are now being re-discovered and embraced. Support for this show comes from the International Yoga Festival located at Parmarth Niketan, uniting yogis of every culture, color, and creed together in a one-world yogic family. Come be a part of an expanding global consciousness by registering at https://www.internationalyogafestival.org/register/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbi Rami interviews bestselling author, podcaster and all-around happy guy, Ken Honda. Ken is helping people transform their relationships with money, and has written a new book "Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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S&H editor Ben Nussbaum turns the tables on Rabbi Rami and interviews the host of Essential Conversations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Is It OK to Hog a Table at Starbucks? A closer look at a small thing so many of us do. Rabbi Rami talks to Stuart Brody about how looking closely at our small actions can help us move closer to who we want to be. An article including a review of his latest book The Law of Small Things: Creating Habits of Integrity in a World of Mistrust is featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Spirituality & Health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rabbi Rami talks to Dr. Daniel Siegel about the nature of consciousness, the creation of his meditation practice "The Wheel of Awareness", and the clear benefits of mindfulness. A review of his latest book Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence can be found in the Sept/Oct 2018 issue of Spirituality & Health. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, founding co-director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, and executive director of the Mindsight Institute. He is also an award winning educator, Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and recipient of multiple honorary fellowships. Co-author of Parenting from the Inside Out, The Whole-Brain Child, and Mindsight, and the father of two adult children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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