Podcast #7: Non-Dual Teachings, Individual Empowerment, and the End of Seeking

Daniel Shai.png

Daniel Shai

Non-dual teacher and awakening guide

“Non-dual” is a spiritual understanding in which we recognize that we as individuals are not actually separate from anyone or anything, that we are all one. 

Finding a teacher who can guide you on the path to this understanding is rare.

But what’s even rarer is finding a spiritual teacher that will also promote individual empowerment. 

Daniel Shai, the guest of this most recent podcast episode, is one such teacher. 

As Daniel put it, “Don’t suppress individuality until a certain point. The absolute should never mean we don’t take care of things on the relative level.”

We live in modern society, which means we still need to do our best to make money, maintain relationships, and uphold all our commitments. 

While it’s not practical for us to go sit in a cave or monastery all day, blissed out in meditative states, the good news is this isn’t necessary in order to find spiritual contentment. 

In fact, if you want to find real peace, you’re better off just giving up the search. 

According to Daniel, in the end, all those spiritual states turn out to be “empty promises” anyways, transitory experiences that leave you unfulfilled.  

In this episode, he shares what’s worked for him in finding true fulfillment. 

Show Highlights 

  • What non-dualism is 

  • How teenage bouts of fatigue and depletion catalyzed Daniel’s spiritual search 

  • Why “nothing works” when trying to find spiritual peace

  • How to strike a balance between practical individual needs and absolute spiritual truths

  • How to open up to your unique path and stop trying to be someone you’re not

  • Why it’s necessary to crush the hope of the spiritual seeker 

  • How to stop getting in your own way (and in the way of your peace)

  • What spiritual practices Daniel tried that proved futile and useless

  • How the body takes on physiological burdens to reinstate a sense of separateness

  • A fascinating and anti-climatic story about Daniel’s experience with a guru

  • Why it’s futile to try to maintain meditative states

  • Why is doesn’t matter if you decide to fulfill your desires or not fulfill your desires

Video Recording of the Episode

Podcast #6: Tantra, Sexuality, and Deep Healing Through Energy and Breath

Gualia Davis.jpg

Guzalia Davis

Tantric teacher and healer

Being spiritual doesn’t require that you put on a robe and live in a monastery your whole life. 

Contrary to many belief systems, you don’t have to renounce the world and all the materialism and sensuality that goes along with it. 

According to my guest today, Guzalia Davis, tantra is a way of incorporating all the normal aspects of modern-day life, including sexuality, into your spiritual practice. 

Tantra means to weave, as in threading together your daily life with your spiritual life and seeing them as one whole rather than separate. According to tantra, that’s how you expand consciousness.

Guzalia uses her deep understanding of the tantric tradition to help people heal through her private practice, Aparvarga Veda. 

There she implements a variety of healing modalities, including reiki energy healing, hypnosis, past life regression, and more. 

That allows her to help people with spiritual growth, difficulties finding a direction and purpose in life, physical and emotional pain, developing relationships, difficulties finding a partner, and intimacy challenges. 

Show Highlights

  • What tantra is 

  • How contemporary and traditional understandings of tantra differ

  • How tantra helps us live in the real world

  • How tantra implements sexuality for the purpose of spiritual growth

  • Why sensuality and material indulgences are not seen as obstacles to spirituality on the tantric path

  • How illness originate with negative emotions and what to do about it

  • Why combining various healing modalities can more effectively heal illnesses 

  • How hypnosis helps shift unhelpful belief systems 

  • How reiki practice make use of energy to heal the body

  • How reiki can help move stagnant energy 

  • How to manifest money and romantic relationships following healing work 

  • LIVE healing session with breathwork (21:38)

  • How men and women approach spirituality differently 

  • Why single people can just as easily practice tantra as couples

  • Why past life regression can assist in healing

  • Why it’s essential to be 100% present in whatever you’re doing

Video of Guzalia’s Healing Work

Connect with Guzalia

Apavarga Veda (Guzalia’s website)

Podcast #5: Bliss Through Music and Experiencing Deep Meditation Without Retreats  

Kip_Mazuy_photo.jpg

Kip Mazuy

Meditation teacher and musician

Many people looking to grow spiritually and undergo the sort of training that allows them to experience deep insights into the nature of their own being will spend thousands of dollars on extended meditation retreats or years studying with enlightened masters. 

While this is wonderful for those who have the opportunity, for many of us this is simply not possible. 

Fortunately, my guest today, Kip Mazuy, is an awakened meditation teacher and a musician who created a revolutionary sound technology that transmits kundalini shakti, the energy of unconditional peace and pure consciousness, which allows listeners to experience deep states of meditation and bliss very quickly. 

Kip has produced a variety of CDs, including the albums “Infinite Sky,” “Pure,” and “The Calling,” and thousands of people all around the world are using them. 

He currently runs a website called Bliss Music where he sells his CDs and leads virtual webinars where he connects with people from all around the world. 

Show Highlights 

  • What the energy called “shakti” is 

  • Why it can help you surpass superficial experiences of meditation 

  • How it can pull you into states of joy and awareness

  • How to feel the energy and open your sensitivity to it

  • How to meditate while listening to Kip’s music 

  • What bliss is and how it differs from terms like pleasure and happiness 

  • How Kip’s music differs from brainwave entrainment

  • What benefits we can experience from his music, including health and longevity, creativity and intelligence, focus, healing, and awakening.

  • Why humanity vibrates at such a high level of stress

  • How to manage stress

Resources and People Mentioned in Podcast

Windham Hill

Peter Gabriel 

Sample of Kip’s Music

Connect with Kip

Bliss Music (Kip’s website)

Meditation Music for Spiritual Awakening (Kip’s YouTube Channel)

Podcast #4: Earth Mother Energy, Healing Work, and Shamanic Traditions

DharmaCrafts meditation cushions
Stephen_Feely_Creek.jpeg

Stephen Feely

Shamanic Energy Medicine Practitioner

Many of us live in cities and places where we have a tendency to become very detached from our natural environments, but if we take the time to immerse ourselves in nature periodically, a whole new world can open up to us. 

According to my guest today, Stephen Feely, we can gain this sense of a greater energy of life and creation, of what he calls an earth mother energy, that will nurture us and give us a greater sense of why we are here on earth. 

The range of experience we can have in nature is so vast. Walking in the forest on a mountain, playing in the creek, touching stones with bare hands and feeling moss beneath bare feet, getting quiet, hearing songbirds, and watching foxes, deer, and bear — these are a handful of the experiences that Stephen recounts from early childhood served as a genesis for much of his later training and work in life. 

This training and work, which involves a certification in Reiki healing and 20+ of environmental education and horticulture therapy, has allowed him to empower people to transform their lives and revitalize as they undergo their journey to wholeness.

Today, Stephen is a senior faculty in The Four Winds Society, Institute for Energy Medicine. He also runs his own private practice called Pure Revitalizing Energy and is the founder of his own school, the Pampamesayok Shaman School, both of which allow him to help people gain access to ancient wisdom for modern living and become professional practitioners in the shamanic arts. 

Show Highlights 

  • How to revise and expand our inner maps that inform our lives and decisions 

  • How to be a great listener (and actually hear what someone is saying)

  • Why our greatest wisdom is often buried within the obstacles in our lives

  • Why organizations need practices that involve quiet and stillness

  • What a luminous energy field is and how it stores the story of our lives, including the imprints of either wellness or disease

  • How we can lift disease imprints from our luminous field and replace them with love, light, and wellness

  • How to return to a more conscious relationship with the present moment and reunite with our whole self 

  • What shamanism is, and why it doesn’t necessarily involve the ingestion of psychoactive plants or herbs 

  • Why ritual and ceremony play an important and valuable role in our lives

  • Why it’s important to eat food grown close to the sun

Resources and People Mentioned In Podcast

The Four Winds School

Alberto Villodo, Phd. 

Sheryl Netsky (Good Energy)

Relevant Books

Podcast #3: Following The Grateful Dead, Awakening Kundalini Energy, and Channeling Grace

Screen Shot 2019-08-19 at 1.33.59 PM.png

Kai Shanti

Awakened teacher, channeling god’s love

Up until around the 20th century, initiation into mystical traditions that involved the awakening of inner energy was reserved only for a few select devotees of a guru after they had contributed countless hours of service and practice in the presence of that guru. 

But according to my guest today, Kai Shanti, the opportunity to gain access to the direct experiences described in all of the world’s great mystical traditions has recently been opened up to a much wider audience. 

It all has to do with an energy called ‘kundalini’ and an initiation called ‘shaktipat.’ Kundalini is the force or power associated with the divine feminine, which upon awakening begins its ascent from the base of the spine all the way up to the crown of the head where it culminates in full enlightenment of the individual. Along the way, a person can expect to experience all sorts of unusual things — spontaneous yoga poses, automatic breathing, involuntary forming of hand gestures (mudras), the sound of buzzing of bees in the third eye, and much more.  

When Kai had her own experience of awakening the kundalini through her guru — following a rather chaotic period of her life in which she lived as a hippie in San Francisco and followed The Grateful Dead, and later moved to Los Angels to pursue her modeling/acting/music talents and married one of the rock stars from Guns N’ Roses — hardly anyone had heard of Kundalini and yoga was still a new phenomenon. Nowadays, a far greater number of people have heard of kundalini and people are having spontaneous awakenings all across the planet as we reach a new level of world consciousness.  

Today, Kai is a gifted teacher and a healer. She is the founder of Angel of Light Meditation where she conducts public gatherings and private sessions through various methods — especially channeling, allowing herself to be taken over by spirit for the purpose of communication, sometimes in different tongues, in order to help other people. 

Show Highlights

  • How life teaches us that happiness cannot be found through external circumstances, even our greatest dreams

  • What kundalini and shaktipat are

  • Who the two major shaktipat gurus and lineages were that came to the West

  • Why people all around the world are spontaneously awakening

  • How to find your inner voice and discover your truest potential within yourself 

  • What it means to be free, and why most people don’t experience freedom

  • How channeling works

  • How to pick a spiritual practice that resonates with you

Resources and People Mentioned in Podcast

Yogi Bajan

Baba Muktananda

Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas

Dyanyoga Centers

Siddha Yoga

Gopi Krishna

Alan Steinfeld (New Realities)

Relevant Books

Podcast #2: Simplified and Demystified Meditation, Living Without Goals, and Enlightenment

DharmaCrafts meditation cushions
Teja-Anand.jpg

Teja Anand

Lifelong Meditation and Awakening Guide

The question, “How do I meditate in order to awaken to a fuller experience of life?” is one that gets asked by thousands of seekers around the planet every single day.

Yet, according to my podcast guest today, Teja Anand, author of Watching Your Life: Meditation Simplified and Demystified, meditation is not really something that you can do, it’s actually more of a non-doing. Paradoxically, in order to reach our “goals” in meditation, we can only “get there” by having no goals at all.

According to Teja, that’s because as people we already are in our natural enlightened state, and thus you cannot try to be something that you already are. It’s only because of our identification with the mind, including all our thoughts and feelings, that we feel separate from our natural state.

In today’s podcast, Teja shares some of his own experiences of enlightenment in order to help our podcast listeners shift towards an identification with our more authentic self, which is simply awareness and being. He said,

“Awareness can’t do anything but just be the witness. So when you ask the question, ‘who are you really?’ ‘who is ‘I’ that owns this mind, this body?’ it’s that thing that is just sitting still looking, watching, noticing. So when we say go beyond the ego, it would be simply shifting your perception from believing you are the things that you have to the you that has them.”

Show Highlights

  • How the purpose of meditation extends beyond mere health benefits

  • How meditation helps reveal to us our true nature

  • What changes you could experience as a result of committing to meditation practice

  • How meditation is not a doing, but a non-doing

  • What meditation methods you can implement, including…

    • Meditation on an object (concentration approach)

    • Meditation on no object (awareness approach)

  • How meditation is like tennis

  • How to surrender and let go of the need for all practices whatsoever

  • Why to consider living without goals, even in our Western goal-driven hemisphere

  • How to implement tools of spiritual inquiry, including the question “who (or what) am I”

  • Why the main form of spirituality in India is Bhakti, or devotion

  • A story about 3 people living in New York City who sought enlightenment

  • A personal account of awakening (very interesting story!)

Resources and People Mentioned in Podcast

Meher Baba

Swami Satchidananda (“The Woodstock Guru”)

Ramana Maharshi

The Work of Byron Katie

Integral Yoga Institute

Relevant Books

Connect with Teja

DharmaCrafts meditation cushions

Podcast #1: Empowered Loving, Embodiment Practices, and Men's Work

Shems_Image.jpg

Shems Heartwell

Life and Relationship Guide

One of the most important things we can do in all of our quests of personal development is to learn how to show up more fully in life. But doing this is often easier said than done. That’s why I took some time to speak with a very special guest, Shems Heartwell, for the inaugural podcast of this series. 

According to Shems, we have a variety of tools at our disposal, as both men and women, that can help catalyze our lives to a whole new level, but most of us simply aren’t utilizing them. 

We all want to learn to become better communicators and increase our abilities to connect with others, but unfortunately many of us have not had good modeling on how to keep our hearts open during times of tension and trauma. We often look to TV, sitcoms, and movies for education and guidance on how to excel in our relationships, only to feel short-changed when dealing with difficult situations throughout our own lives. 

Men, especially, often lack some of the skills in maintaining openness, vulnerability, and authenticity that come more naturally to women, and yet men can learn these skills whilst still remaining connected to their power. He said,

“Whether we’re a man or a woman, I’m a huge believer that’s there’s a potential for us to show up more fully in all of our relationships. And women tend to do that a little easier than men, so there’s a bigger need for men to have healthy environments to learn more skills in their lives.”

Show Highlights 

  • How to show up more fully in life

  • How we can work better together in relationships 

  • Why there’s a need “healthy masculinity” 

  • How men can learn to be more open, vulnerable, and authentic, whilst staying connected to their power 

  • How to incorporate new embodiment skills, simple vitality practices, and relationship skills

  • Why most of us are overdeveloped mentally, and underdeveloped in whole being wisdom

  • How to dissolve fear 

  • How to move expressions through us that we held back

  • How to calm our nervous system when we’re with others

  • How shadow work helps resolve repeated challenges, failures, and hardships

  • How to practice qigong

Resources and People Mentioned in Podcast

The Men’s Passage: An 8-Week Powerhouse Program for Men

Gay and Kitty Hendrix and The Hendrix Institute 

Robert Agustus Masters, Phd

Alfonso de Rose

Ken Wilber and The Integral Institute 

David Deida

Mantak Chia

Win Hoffman (“The Ice Man”)

Relevant Books