Today we are speaking with Will Pye. Will’s first book is titled Blessed With A Brain Tumor; Realizing It’s All Gift and Learning to Receive. So needless to say, he was a perfect guest for us to have on as a follow up to our basic trust conversation from last week.
Will is a social entrepreneur, teacher, transformational coach, speaker and author. He leads workshops and retreats around the world. Will’s second book, The Gratitude Prescription; Harnessing the Power of Thankfulness for Healing and Happiness is due for release this May. He is also the founder of the community of awakening and sacred activism, with the title we very much love, The Love & Truth Party: www.loveandtruthparty.org, And of the year-long program and coaching group, Living Impeccably.
In our conversation with Will here, the thing we dove most into is surrender: of course surrender gets talked about a lot in spiritual circles, so we wanted to bring you something more useful than “I think you should surrender”. That said, we talk about what it is and what it isn’t. How life is life-ing and preparing us perfectly for our hero’s journeys, the projections we can have about someone’s terrible news, or in this case diagnosis, and how Will instead seems to be living like he’s on a really fun scavenger hunt or adventure, rather than as someone who is burdened by the reality of living with a brain tumor. That said, we also debunk some of the ideas that awakening or realization causes one to no longer have human emotions or plain old bad days. However, Will points out that he has found it possible to not suffer about his suffering. a crucial distinction. You can find more of Will's work at willpye.com
Inspired by the teachings of AH Almaas, today we’re discussing a concept he calls Basic Trust. Basic trust is the implicit sense that we are connected, safe, held and supported by life. What fascinated us the most about this concept is the revelation that when Basic trust gets ruptured spiritual aspirations such as surrender, acceptance or letting go can feel out of reach or effortful. Also, how much or how little basic trust you have can affect the quality and experience of your spiritual awakening. In this conversation we explore our experiences and perspectives on basic trust as well as Almaas’s definition, including how it is fed, how it is ruptured, and ultimately how we can go about healing.
We are happily back from our 6-week break, and in today’s conversation we are talking about what we are talking about! In our 6-weeks to integrate, reflect, and deepen what’s up here at Bliss and Grit, we realized that we haven’t spoken so directly that this show is about what we can call awakening. For many of you who are listeners, that’s no surprise at all, but if we choose to get really direct that that’s what we are devoted to, then it makes sense to talk about what IS awakening? Why does it get a bad, or weird, rap, why were we shy about admitting that in the past, and, well what is it again!?! We discuss what it means to us to “wake up” by looking at the difference between object-based reality and subject, or present-moment-experience-based reality. We get at new angles on what the ego is. And we open up about why we care about this, and why we refuse to be slaves to our own conditioning anymore.