Deep Sit Podcast

I have a wonderful guest on today and I'm very excited to share this conversation with you.  In thinking about the message of today's conversation I was reminded of a comment I recently heard Jack Kornfield make when he was interviewed by Tim Ferriss.  They were talking about Tim's recent silent meditation retreat and the benefits of them, and seeking out master teacher to help with your practice.  I'll admit, taking a few days for silent retreat, even a few weeks, months maybe, sounds pretty good to me.   But I do see my desire for that experience as an example of looking for answers or solutions that are somewhere else, outside my current state or experience in life.   But as Jack says, we have the wisdom that we are seeking within ourselves. And while I might feel like I'm missing out by not having time in life for a retreat, it's important to remember that there is a reason I can't.  He said for instance if you have kids, and they take up all of your time and energy, then your kids are your practice.  And

Today on the show we are going to hit mindfulness head on and talk about how we might be getting tripped up by the practice, and how, according to my guest, we might be doing it wrong.  Now don't interpret that as a judgement or criticism, but more like permission to take some of the pressure off.  I know that over the years of practicing sitting meditation, I've had times where I get a little caught up in the practice, looking for it to do something for me, or I'm watching my meditation streak of days in a row.  Then there are these great apps and tools and podcasts to equip us with instructions and tracking and timekeeping and on and on.  Not so say these things aren't useful, but I am quite human and have desire, craving, attachment, striving, wanting to do well, wanting to improve my life...and mindfulness just starts to look like one more tool to get what I want.  Or to even change to world around me.  And to even say I've been getting better at it, by not striving, and not tracking, well that sounds lik

Congratulations, you made it to part 5, the final segment of my epic interview with Atz Kilcher.  And while each episode stands on its own, it makes sense to start from the beginning to hear it in sequence to get a full understanding of his journey and the range of wisdom you can glean from his life experience.  This episode is a great wrapper for everything we've talked about.  I called it "Getting on With It" because for one, that's how Atz ends this segment, but also because for every hardship, every bend in the road, every moment of despair, even every moment of triumph, when you start your day you need to put the doubt back to sleep, put the pain back to sleep.  As Atz says you need to grow up, get over it, and get on with it.  Acknowledge who you are, be open and honest with who you’ve been, but ultimately take ownership and responsibility over your life and get on with life.  There's only one person on the planet who can make that decision for you, and that's you.  Atz is a living testament to the p

Today is Part 4 of my interview with Atz Kilcher, and after 3 hours of digging deep into the conflict and trauma that Atz has work so hard to overcome in his life, we finally find his Mother, Ruth.  I found it interesting that it took us this long to talk about her, but even more interesting when Atz told me he originally intended to write his new memoir, Son of a Midnight Land, about her.  But maybe just as it took us 3 hours to finally talk about her, he needs more time to dig into the complexity mystery of his Mom.  Surprisingly, it looks like the whole dream of homesteading may have originated with Ruth and not Yule.  Atz tells us all about it in this segment, but we discover also that his Mom played the tragic figure of the victim, perhaps unwittingly.   And in listening back, I think this issue deserves a lot more attention than what we were able to give it here.  I think feeling victimized, or even playing the victim, is one of the most stealth ways to undermine one's ability to thrive.  It is the ult

We've made it to the half way point in my interview with Atz Kilcher, and after two and a half hours you might expect we'd be getting close to wrapping up, possibly running out of things to talk about.  Not the case here, everything up until this point was really just a warm up.  As we enter hour three of our conversation we address PTSD, a debilitating mental and emotional disorder that has gone by many names in history, but is perhaps just now getting the attention it deserves in society.  This is a topic very near and dear to Atz as he has dealt with several types of trauma throughout his life having been the victim of and witness to abuse growing up, and of course he is a veteran of the Vietnam war.    For my part, I wanted to get a better understanding of this disorder, what is it, how does it develop, can people suffer from PTSD but be totally unaware of it, and perhaps most importantly, how do you deal with it?  Something I interpreted during this conversation is that according to Atz, managing his

Today I continue my interview with Atz Kilcher.  This is Part 2 and is where Atz really started to help me personally.  I don't know if I mentioned this in the intro to Part 1, but my experience sitting with Atz for a day was life changing, and I don’t say that lightly. I don't do this podcast to report the news, or simply deliver someone else's message.  My main objective when I sit down with someone is to learn and find the guiding wisdom that I can integrate into my own life.  It sounds quite selfish when I put it that way, but when I present this podcast, you are hearing it from a beginner's mind, someone who is genuinely curious and wants to learn.  This next hour is when I really started to understand how Atz can help people.  The beauty of his delivery is that is isn't masked or diffused by what you might called new agey, hippy-dippy words, or even done in a dry academic manner.  This is straight talk, and it's on the ground floor of everyday life that we all experience. Within the first 20 minutes 

Part 1 - Hard Work:   Today I'm kicking off my interview series with Atz Kilcher. I felt like I sat down with someone, who at the age of 70, with perhaps nothing left to prove, is on the brink of discovering the true or perhaps ultimate meaning and purpose of his life.    Atz is the son of Alaskan homesteaders, gaining unexpected fame late in life on reality TV on the series Alaska: The Last Frontier, and of course he is father to Jewel Kilcher, one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time.  But amazingly, Atz might just now be hitting his stride in a way that is probably unimaginable to him. I don't need to go through his life story in the intro of course, that's pretty well-covered in the interview.  But before we jump in, you have to know that much if not most of Atz's adult life has been spent peeling back layers shame, regret, guilt, fear, anger, and anxiety.  These layers were constructed by years of mental and emotional trauma, not to mention physically demanding life of growing up on the famil

Arrive Where You Started - Part 2 Today I have someone very special on the show, one of the most respected and well-known teachers of mindfulness and meditation.  His name is Shinzen Young, and his recent book, The Science of Enlightenment, immediately caught my attention because I've never thought of enlightenment in scientific terms before, and of course what really turned me on to meditation was how neuroscience has captured what happens in the brain.  Given that the word enlightenment is even hard for some people to say without feeling they've gone full on new-aged hippy,  talking about it more practically, like an everyday occurrence, that can even be measured, well...sign me up! Shinzen is an intriguing guy, and I wanted to know what makes him tick.  Taking this path took root early in life, but also required a powerful sense of curiosity and determination.  Come to find out, for Shinzen it also involved feeling a little miserable and anxious trying to fit in to the conventional aspirations of our Weste

Arrive Where You Started - Part 1 Today I have someone very special on the show, one of the most respected and well-known teachers of mindfulness and meditation.  His name is Shinzen Young, and his recent book, The Science of Enlightenment, immediately caught my attention because I've never thought of enlightenment in scientific terms before, and of course what really turned me on to meditation was how neuroscience has captured what happens in the brain.  Given that the word enlightenment is even hard for some people to say without feeling they've gone full on new-aged hippy,  talking about it more practically, like an everyday occurrence, that can even be measured, well...sign me up! Shinzen is an intriguing guy, and I wanted to know what makes him tick.  Taking this path took root early in life, but also required a powerful sense of curiosity and determination.  Come to find out, for Shinzen it also involved feeling a little miserable and anxious trying to fit in to the conventional aspirations of our Weste

From the moment we sat down for this conversation, my guest today gave me a sense of genuine inspiration to be a better person, to be a more authentic person, living with gratitude, acceptance, and grace.  Her name is Pilar Gerasimo, and many of you know her as the founder of Experience Life Magazine, which she ran for 15 years.  But now she has embarked on some new ventures including a wonderful podcast called The Living Experimentwith her co-host Dallas Hartwig, she has developed a concept called The Healthy Deviant which forms the basis for an upcoming book.  We will get into all of that in this conversation, and her perspective on how to approach health and wellness is very exciting, but what endeared me to Pilar is that she created her life from the ground up, in complete alignment and respect to her upbringing. She grew up on a communal organic farm in western Wisconsin, which is where she now calls home and where we met for this interview.  She was the daughter of a sociologist father whose main intere

This is the first interview in a special series spotlighting the Inspiring Children Foundation. I'm starting off the series with co-founder Ryan Wolfington.  Ryan and I met during a social hour of the Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington DC where I was doing interviews for the Meditate This! Podcast.  I'm standing at my table just cleaning up and putting away my mic, and this lone wolf appears out of the crowd and asks what I'm up to, and the next thing you know we've been standing there talking for about an hour and half.  I found a lot in common with Ryan, certainly a passion for meditation and mindfulness, eating plant based, but something about him seemed a little off.  You know different from most people I've met.   As I talked to him over the next couple days of the summit, it became apparent that Ryan operates completely on intuition, doing what he feels is right, with little or no agenda.  Quite honestly, until I sat down with him for this interview two months after that initial meeting, he was a t

This is the first interview in a special series spotlighting the Inspiring Children Foundation. I'm starting off the series with co-founder Ryan Wolfington.  Ryan and I met during a social hour of the Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington DC where I was doing interviews for the Meditate This! Podcast.  I'm standing at my table just cleaning up and putting away my mic, and this lone wolf appears out of the crowd and asks what I'm up to, and the next thing you know we've been standing there talking for about an hour and half.  I found a lot in common with Ryan, certainly a passion for meditation and mindfulness, eating plant based, but something about him seemed a little off.  You know different from most people I've met.   As I talked to him over the next couple days of the summit, it became apparent that Ryan operates completely on intuition, doing what he feels is right, with little or no agenda.  Quite honestly, until I sat down with him for this interview two months after that initial meeting, he was a t

In Their Own Words - An Introduction to the Inspiring Children Foundation Today we are kicking off a series of interviews spotlighting an amazing organization called the Inspiring Children Foundation.  You are going to hear from a group of inspiring individuals, many of whom are just teenagers.  But let me be the first to tell you that these "kids" have wisdom beyond their years.    The Foundation was started by Ryan Wolfington and renowned Las Vegas tennis coach Marty Hennessy, and is designed to provide children, many of whom come from difficult and disadvantaged life situations, the tools necessary to become their very best in academics, athletics, interpersonal skills, and leadership positions.   They are becoming professionals in life. It is done using a variety of tools including mentoring, project-driven learning, entrepreneurship, a focus on education and athletics, and a special emphasis on mindfulness and self-awareness.   It started about 16 years ago, with the simple goal of helping one child mak

Today on the show I bring you someone who is bound to put a smile on your face because of his positive attitude and terrific sense of humor, but he will also challenge you to consider your relationship to what is perhaps one of the most uncomfortable and perplexing problems we face across the globe.  Mark Horvath isn't just an advocate for homeless people, he was that homeless guy, and he's now well-known for starting a non-profit media company called Invisible People, which through video offerings on it's website, YouTube, and social media channels, gets up close and personal with people living on the street.    His videos are raw and unedited, giving full transparency by focusing his lens, and our attention, on people who most of us will walk or drive past just about every day.  What he did for me with his videos was give me an opportunity to hear the answers to questions I'm basically too afraid to ask when I see a homeless person – what happened, how did you get here, and how can I help?  And he isn't try

My guest today is Emily Esfahani Smith, author of the book The Power of Meaning.  As a matter of fact, Emily was the first person I invited as a guest on this podcast and this interview really sets up the perfect framework for what's to come.  Pay special attention here as the pillars that support a meaningful life, as Emily defines them, come up time and again in the guest interviews that follow.  I spend quite a bit of time talking to Emily about self-transcendence, which I saw as a common thread throughout her book.  It seems that people find the most meaning in life, when they focus outside themselves.  Whether it's serving other people, or becoming absorbed in a specific task, not thinking or even being aware of yourself is highly correlated to sense of meaning, purpose, and ultimately enduring happiness.  We also talk about self-awareness and meditation as places to begin the search for meaning, and I ask Emily about the pros and cons of belief and ideology, and how they can fill us with meaning, bu