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Podcast #9: Entrepreneurship, AI, and the Art of Surrender
In this episode of the Journey Through Meditation podcast, I interview Amy, an entrepreneur, an AI expert, a wellness advocate, and friend.
Amy Schwab
Entrepreneur, AI Community Founder, and Wellness Advocate
Some people chase success by forcing every detail to fit. But for Amy, true transformation began when she stopped forcing and started surrendering. After years of building her dog-walking business in Los Angeles, she took a leap of faith. She booked a one-way ticket to Bali, and trusting life to unfold.
Now, she’s built a new rhythm that blends entrepreneurship, mindfulness, and community. From running an AI mastermind group with hundreds of members to exploring daily meditation and Kundalini practice, Amy’s journey reflects the balance between innovation and intuition. Her story reminds us that technology and spirituality don’t have to compete, but can evolve together.
When Amy first started the Entrepreneurs Roundtable in a co-living space in Venice, she did it to counter the loneliness of running a business. “It’s very isolating,” she says. “You can have a team, but still feel like you’re doing it alone.” Those weekly gatherings—filled with brainstorming, laughter, and shared ideas—taught us that real growth happens in community. Today, she carries that same energy into her AI mastermind, connecting founders around the world who want to learn, collaborate, and expand their creative potential.
Her move to Bali, she explains, was a turning point. After several housing evictions and months of uncertainty, she felt the city pushing her out and something deeper pulling her in another direction. “I just kept saying, ‘Show me what you’ve got,’” she recalls. “That openness led me to an entirely new community of entrepreneurs, healers, and meditators.” Now, her days flow differently. Her work is balanced with yoga, spiritual practice, and long conversations in co-working cafés.
What’s striking about Amy’s perspective is how seamlessly she integrates AI and mindfulness. Rather than seeing them as opposites, she views them as complementary. “AI is a mirror,” she says. “It reflects how we use it. When guided by intention, it frees our time and mental space for creativity and presence.” For Amy, technology is helping her (and her community) automate the mechanical so they can focus on the meaningful.
Her approach captures the essence of a modern spiritual entrepreneur: grounded in presence, open to innovation, and guided by trust in the unfolding path.
Show Highlights
How community transformed Amy’s approach to entrepreneurship
What inspired her spontaneous move from Los Angeles to Bali
How surrender became her greatest business strategy
Why she sees AI as a tool for awareness, not distraction
Balancing structure (entrepreneurship) with flow (spiritual practice)
How mindfulness enhances creativity and innovation
Daily rituals that help her stay centered in a digital world
Connect with Amy
Amy on Instagram
Amy’s AI Community: The AIpreneur Academy
Amy’s Website: Betches Walking Betches
Podcast #8: Sound Baths, Tarot, and Environmental Healing Through Community
Raychel Espiritu
Sound bath facilitator, tarot card reader, and environmentalist
For many people, meditation means sitting still in silence. But sound baths offer another way in — using vibration and tone to guide the mind into stillness.
According to my guest today, Raychel Espiritu, this is what makes sound baths so powerful. After her very first session, she experienced a deep state of peace that felt both transcendent and grounding. That encounter inspired her to begin facilitating her own sessions, first by offering them freely in community spaces as a way to grow her practice.
Sound baths, she explains, aren’t about music in the traditional sense. The tones are atonal — no rhythm, no melody — and it’s this quality that helps the mind surrender. People often walk away saying they were finally able to let go, to access the kind of meditative state they had never been able to reach through sitting practice alone.
In addition to sound work, Raychel also brings tarot into her sessions. She uses it as a tool for intention-setting, a way to open people to reflection and guidance before they begin. While tarot has often been misunderstood, she describes it instead as a language of archetypes — symbols that mirror the human and spiritual journey.
Raychel is also deeply engaged in environmental advocacy. Drawing on her Filipino heritage and its indigenous view of nature as spirit, she sees caring for the Earth as inseparable from spiritual practice.
Throughout our conversation, we also returned to the theme of community. Raychel believes reciprocity is the foundation — an equal exchange of energy and support that allows both individuals and communities to thrive.
Show Highlights
How a transcendent first sound bath inspired Raychel’s journey as a facilitator
Why energy exchange is essential for practitioners and communities
The physiological changes people often experience after sound baths
Similarities and differences between sound baths and meditation
How tarot supports intention-setting and deeper spiritual reflection
Common misconceptions about tarot and how to see it as a tool for clarity
The connection between spirituality, heritage, and environmental advocacy
What community means to Raychel and how reciprocity shapes it
Her daily grounding practice of prayer, meditation, and gratitude
Resources Mentioned in the Podcast
Connect with Raychel
Podcast #7: Non-Dual Teachings, Individual Empowerment, and the End of Seekin
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
Resources and People Mentioned in Podcast
Mastering the Skill of Creating Reality: Embracing Your Power as a Creator and Taking Responsibility for Your Life by Daniel Shai
Beyond the Frontiers of the Mind by Osho
What Does the End of Suffering Mean Practically: A satsang by Daniel Shai
Connect with Daniel
Podcast #6: Tantra, Sexuality, and Deep Healing Through Energy and Breath
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
Connect with Guzalia
Apavarga Veda (Guzalia’s website)
Podcast #5: Bliss Through Music and Experiencing Deep Meditation Without Retreats
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
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
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
Relevant Books
Podcast #3: Following The Grateful Dead, Awakening Kundalini Energy, and Channeling Grace
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
Alan Steinfeld (New Realities)
Relevant Books
Podcast #2: Simplified and Demystified Meditation, Living Without Goals, and Enlightenment
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
Swami Satchidananda (“The Woodstock Guru”)
Relevant Books
Connect with Teja
Podcast #1: Empowered Loving, Embodiment Practices, and Men's Work
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
Ken Wilber and The Integral Institute
Relevant Books
