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Bliss and Grit

Long time friends Vanessa Scotto and Brooke Thomas are having conversations about being spiritual practitioners in the modern world. How do you find sacredness in today's materialistic society? Is there a place for psychology in the realm of spirituality? Can embodied meditation lead to greater evolution? How do we ultimately embrace more aliveness- all the beauty and crazy, the joys and messes, the bliss and the grit that is a human life? Join us as we feel our way through the path by integrating somatic practices, psychology, spirituality, and transformation through meditation.
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Now displaying: April, 2019
Apr 30, 2019
This week is a flashback Tuesday! This episode, titled The Implications of Basic Trust, originally aired in September of 2018. We both remember this conversation as the beginning of what felt like a big shift for each of us, the kind of epiphany that seems so obvious, but is in fact quite hugethat we can trust this life. Even when it’s agony. Even when it’s joy. Even when it’s boring... 
 
By the time this began to be a real lived experience for us, we had sat with the phrase “trust your life” for at least a couple of years. So it was fun to listen back and note that understanding things and experiencing things are really different. 
 
It was also maybe the first time that we mentioned what felt like a side project at the time: connecting the dots between nervous system states and awakening. Something that now feels very front and center to our mission, and is something you have heard a lot about in the last few episodes.
Apr 23, 2019

Our last several episodes have been circling around the theme of relationship and connection. This week we’re continuing the conversation by sharing our thoughts on what we could call, “the love language of presence”. We’ve noticed personally that what truly bonds us to others, and lets us feel loved, is presence in the form of interest and curiosity. Yet, our cultural and familial models are often missing this key ingredient. In this talk, we cover a tangible way to look at if you’re present, how ego-agendas can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, how an overstimulated nervous system can pull you away from presence, ways to experience genuine connection and how the conversation of ‘doing vs being’ can also apply to the way we communicate.

Apr 22, 2019
Today we are honing in on how we find safety in the world and in our relationships, whether those relationships are with intimate partners, or our children, friends, coworkers,etc. We are deepening the conversation from our last two episodes: the episode on awakened relating with Lynn Marie Lumiere, and last week’s episode on the how” of self-love. 
 
In particular we are using the lens of Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal theory to look more closely at what happens when we don’t detect safety, and the magical things that can happen when our nervous systems do detect safety and therefore do not have to be defensive. We ponder what even is defensive behavior beyond the caricatures we typically think of? What are the cultural stories that keep us from experiences of safety? How do we get out of the “you’re a problem, or I’m a problem” binary loop? Then we look at how healing really begins to happen, and how healing really takes care of itselfthe more we can self-regulate and co-regulate.
Apr 9, 2019

If you’ve listened to the podcast in the past you know how much we value the practice of meeting ourselves with tenderness and love. In this episodewe are going into much greater detail about what it tangibly looks and feels like to heal through self-love. Our conversation covers everythingfrom neuroscience to personal experiencesto practical exercises where we can learn how to bring love to the parts of ourselves that need it the most. As we shift to meeting ourselves with a genuine experience of loving-kindness we can rewire and release the conditioning that has created so much suffering and havoc in our lives and step into a new, brighter experience of life.

Apr 2, 2019

Today we are having a conversation with Lynn Marie Lumiere, a psychotherapist and the author of the book Awakened Relating: A Guide to Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships. Reading from the description of Lynn Marie’s book: Our natural state is to love and be loved. From deep within, we’re compelled to seek connection. Yet relationships remain a struggle—even for the most spiritually enlightened among us. Traumatic experiences, insecure attachment, and especially the false but commonly held belief that we are separate, both from each other and from the love we seek, can cause endless problems in our relationships. As long as our connections are built on this untruth, lasting love and harmony in relationship will elude us. In our conversation with Lynn Marie,we greatly enjoy shedding some light on how being able to contact the experience of awake awareness, or unity consciousness can take us way beyond the endless compromise push-pull game of the separate self, and the ways that“consciousrelationship” continue to keep us limited and constricted. You can find more of Lynn’s work at lynnmarielumiere.com

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