Series One

“Several years ago, Lisa Garr suffered a brain injury during a California State Championship Mountain bike race, where she was in second place, about to take over first. She fell down a long mountain to the bottom, cracking her helmet in 13 places. Lisa had a near death experience while lying on the side of the mountain until the helicopter medics came to transport her to the nearest hospital. This experience transformed her level of consciousness and was the catalyst for starting her media platform about awareness that now reaches millions of people per month worldwide. Lisa rebuilt her brain and her life using specific visualization techniques and accessing different levels of conscious awareness she calls Brain-nastics.

“Since that experience Lisa Garr created The Aware Show, a transformational radio show about natural health, cutting-edge science, personal growth and spirituality. Since 1999, Lisa has hosted a day-time talk radio program featuring best-selling authors and experts in the fields of spirituality and healing. She is considered an expert in the field of lifestyle and transformational media programming.” from https://theawareshow.com/

I was going down the wrong road. I was working in acting, I was working in television production, and I was working 24-7 and it was the wrong road here, the wrong person there. I don’t believe I was in the right place at all. I think God was saying, “Uh-uh. We put you here for another reason. Your purpose is not being fulfilled. We’re going to throw you down a mountain and knock your head around so that we can get you back on task.” I did have a brutal accident, and shattered my helmet, and had an incredible near-death experience, where I floated into an infinite, boundless state, with all that is. I saw that everything was alive and that there was no separation between anything. I realized, “How small I am living!” Also, it’s something you can’t un-see.

I started The Aware Show because the accident wiped out my memory.

Now, twenty years later I am doing the radio show, and I have these conversations with God, I say, “Look, you put me here for a reason. You saved my life multiple times. We are doing the show together. What is the next step here? What are we doing?”

In an age when telling the truth is no longer a requirement for the media, there is a parallel, unprecedented opposite movement towards truth-telling in a whole new way.

The unseen epidemics .. suicide, despair, perfectionism.

The purpose is to awaken the audience and allow that person to be a voice for a change, and if that effects one person who effects one person .. people start to make choices that brings the power back into their hands, so they’re not relying on some outside source to help them. That grassroots movement is how I believe we’re going to uplift humanity and heal as life become more and more chaotic.

Sunday papers with Marie Schreiber http://mariashriver.com/sundaypaper/
The Aware Show with Lisa Garr https://theawareshow.com/

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

We are raised to look outside ourselves to measure the meaning and value of life, and it’s only much later that we may be challenged to shift to filter for internal markers to ascertain our lives.

I so often work with clients who are being challenged, and who completely miss seeing where the problem lies. It lies with them. It’s not that they aren’t intelligent, they just don’t have the habit of looking inside. A big part of the work I do is bringing people home to themselves.

.. I was given a terminal diagnosis .. I was lying in the hospital, and I realized that life was my choice, and the life that I created was an internal thing, and the external world was a reflection of that. The world shifted on its axis for me at that moment. Knowing that I had the power to do so, I chose to live.

We have the choice in every hour of every day whether we follow our own internal truth or whether we just keep quiet and do what we think is expected of us.

We choose life – in every moment – or not.

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Shereen Sun: Speaking You Truth

There were so many ways, as I was growing up, that I felt very different. Feeling ‘other’ everywhere.

I grew up in a Muslim family in Las Vegas, I came out as queer in 7^th grade. Coming out means continually peeling away layers to reveal ourselves, to ourselves and to the world.

The first time I was in a space that was both queer and South Asian was shocking. I felt like I had to hide from other South Asians. I had to start learning that I didn’t have to hide. I didn’t have to worry that it would get back to my parents.

A sense of wonder and curiosity pervades my life, and a sense of accepting what can really start to happen when you open up to who you are. And how you are safe when you really accept ALL of yourself. It’s the kind of space I want to create for people, especially the women who are attracted to my work.

After I came out to my mom, and her initial shock, she became my greatest ally.

When I saw her pain and suffering, and said, “This must be so hard for you,” and she understood that I really did see her, everything changed. People want, above all, to be seen.

I help people speak their truth, which is why it’s so important that I come out to my dad as soon as possible. I help them make the energetic shift that helps them take risks.

Business is not just about money but about liberation.

We have to listen to what’s coming out of our own mouths and take guidance from that.

After working through the oppressions of racism, homophobia etc. we must work through the barrier of, “I am unlovable.” Regardless of who we are, our work become the work of reflecting love back to the world.

I was talking about the Buddha as transgressive, as ‘queer’ to a group of straight couples. I suggested that everyone in the room was actually ‘queer’. I witnesses this room full of straight people nodding in enthusiastic assent.

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Michele Benzamin Miki in Conversation with Dr. Scott Mills
Step Aside and Allow others to Have Their Experience

From her beautiful home at Manzanita Village, a spiritual retreat center in Southern California, Michelle Benzamin-Miki joined me for an inspiring conversation about the crossing the boundaries into a world that no longer remembers what it is to be at war — at war with ourselves, with each other and with the planet. And as soon as she began to imagine this world with me, she also provided guidance on how to begin this journey, right now, and live a life that you love.

She explains that what she’s really about is “loving life — feeling like is a gift — and staying interested in it no matter what.” Considering how many people I come across who have gotten bored with themselves and the world, I’m excited to hear how she gets there day after day.

Michele is an Aikido master as well as a gifted artist whose work has won many awards. She has taught Buddhism, meditation and deep ecology around the world with luminaries like Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Thich Nhat Hahn. And her experience as a biracial woman with a foot in Japan and a foot in the U.S. has also informed her. This has allowed her to walk between many differing worlds, mediating between what can seem like opposing forces. .

Our conversation was so rich but I want to highlight five of the life lessons that I will be reminding myself of this week.

1 Release the need to take things personally. It’s so easy to make it all about me. Of course, you are the center of your universe. I am the center of mine. But once we step out of the house in the morning our universes begin to collide. We get ourselves into trouble when we think that the person who bumped us on the street or was grumpy in the elevator is a bit player in our life rather than the center of their own universe. When we release into this truth, we gain a better perspective on life.

2 Get into agreement with yourself. What a beautiful way to remind us that all of us is okay. Many of us spend so much of our time beating ourselves up for having an errant emotion or thought. But Michelle starts from this place of self-compassion that allows us to be okay and present to whatever emotion you may be feeling. Receive it like a welcome guest rather than turning it away at the door. This allows it to complete and creates a space for something new to emerge.

3 Step aside and allow others to have their experience. This deep insight from the world of Aikido makes me want to spend my life in Michelle’s dojo. I think of all the times that I want people to act the way I would like. (It’s hard sometimes to remember that their universe is more relevant to them than mine, especially in moments of pain.) We can choose to allow for others to complete or to block the flow of their emotions most often creating escalation. Most of the time it’s not about you. It’s about them. Just as you allow your own emotions to complete, allow those of others so that something new can emerge.

4 Invite your active, fierce compassion. The notion of fierce compassion couples with allowing others to complete. It allows you to also have fierce compassion for yourself. It is about being “able to engage fully and say yes to the moment and the love you feel.” At the end of the day, fierce compassion is about being able to stand with someone in the fire of their experience, perhaps a little singed but expanded. (Of course, nowhere is Michele suggesting that someone should allow themselves to be injured or abused. As a matter of fierce compassion for yourself, if you are in danger get to safety.)

5 Unleash your inner Obasan. When I asked Michelle about how art informs her teaching she tells me a story about her grandmother (Obasan in Japanese). When she was three years old the artist impulse that every child possesses had already invited Michelle to color outside the lines. Rather than limit her, Michelle’s Obasan covered the walls with paper and encouraged her to color wherever her imagination led her. This was first time she felt “the freedom and the liberation of the line.” And this permission to fully express has travelled with her to this day. If you did not receive this permission, it’s not too late. You can give it to yourself right now!

When I asked her what is the biggest change she wants to see in the world she laughed and said, “I want a lot.” (How can you not love her?) But at the core of her wanting is a world where children don’t know what war is. Where “this notion of war becomes an old thing of the past, an old story, maybe a metaphor of how we used to deal with things.” She dreams of a day when we can be more creative in our solutions with each other and release the violence that has become an easy solution to far too many problems.

I’m excited to live in this world with Michelle! The work she does is helping to make that dream a reality.  Scott Mills 

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Diego Marmolejo and Samuel Velez: The Wisdom of the Earth and Our Ancestors
with Abraham Garcia

We’re here to receive the wisdom of the Earth and of our ancestors. Everything that surrounds us – places, people, plants – is medicine. When you understand that, you can call yourself a shaman, a medicine man.

I am the plants and the rivers and the animals. People know that about me because I can transmit that essence to others.

I remain the same person despite all the ups and downs of life.

A long time ago I had a vision that I was in a desert. I was driving and there was a lot of dust. I asked an elder, who told me that probably one day I would come to the U.S. to teach. Being here is not an accident. We have a mission here.

Much of the ancient knowledge has been lost, so we use the sacred plants to help us remember the essence, to awaken the elders that belong to every place and every life.

The land is a great master. But a human without land, without a place they know deeply, is not fully human. The first thing we must learn is how to take care of the land, of the Earth. Afterwards we learn what it can provide to us. Without a relationship with the land we have no direction.

Ultimately we are the land.

We use the sacred plants to remember the ancestral teachings and the wisdom of the earth.

The land – the specific territory where you are – is your school.

I teach my children, not by repetition, but by keeping them close to me and helping them experience the land and the inner territory. This is not something they teach in schools.

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Nancy Monson: Flow

I have been immersed in personal growth and spiritual development for the past thirty years.

Curiosity is the source of everything that is rich and excellent. It’s the source of authentic art, and of science.

When everything is in harmony a creative energy is called forth. Its intention is to experience its own bliss through you. Suddenly,  you are in a state of authentic connection with life, nature, with flow. Curiosity is the starting point.

When I tune in to who I am, I only see the person I have always been. As far back as I can remember being aware, I am still that same awareness. Though I’ve played so many different roles, and I’ve had so many experiences.

All my life my head and my heart have been in conflict with each other; What do I really want versus what’s practical? Living from my heart or for what society says is acceptable?

… the infantilism of a culture that lives on children’s’ food: chicken nuggets and ice cream …

I stood in my living room and prayed to know what unconditional love is. I learned that it is devotion to the truth of who I am. It is knowing what is ‘me’, and what is ‘not me’. The flow and momentum of that question led me to experience my life as I have.

Climbing a mountain, climbing Denali, going deeply into quantum physics, immersing yourself in spiritual practice .. all of those things can change your neurology. They change the foundation of who you are.

The antidote to resignation and existential sleep is to pursue whatever keeps you on the edge of the crevasse, whatever keeps you flowing with your life.

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Scott Mills

I’ve been exploring how to live personally in the constant now, while also asking the question, ‘Who are we now as human beings?’ and ‘Who can we become?’

There’s a difference between being in a Now based on anxiety, and being in the Now with a sense of vision. Now is the entry point to past and future. It’s also the entry point to all the possibilities of who we can be. It’s not an abstract point in time where the reality of the world, past and future, is suspended.

It’s so easy to get lost in hopelessness and frustration, in constant survival-mode; but what I’ve been more and more aware of is the amazing human spirit. I was at the march for gun control and it so filled me with such hope. There are so many people who are so endlessly resourceful. It’s fascinating to be in the middle of these two polarities, between resourcefulness and hopelessness.

Singing in the choir for the Oregon Symphony performance of Beethoven’s Ninth I used a tool that helps me expand my sense of the Now, connecting the three times:

• remembering all the people who have supported me, and this performance of Beethoven
• remembering everyone who has sung or been moved by Schiller’s Song of Joy before,
• and reflecting on everyone who will discover, and hear, or perform this song in the future.

The story of ‘everything is getting worse’ make it’s hard to feel any hope. But when we stand in our creativity and resourcefulness, we can start to imagine real change. It’s as simple as that! We have to be honest about what’s going on, and look at where are resources are. We have to get beyond the feeling that things are getting worse, that there’s no hope, because feelings are often misleading. Our brains can take us into hopelessness or resourcefulness. And the choice is ours.

When we lean into the suffering in the world we make it okay for us to open to our own suffering. We stop protecting ourselves, or hiding parts of ourselves from the world.

This choice to be fully present and available to life is a difficult choice to make. That’s what spiritual practice is, to constantly come back to the fullness of ourselves.

The choice we must make is to not put off living until tomorrow. At any moment we can stand in the place of joy and breathe and ask, “What is in this world around me?”

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Jean Marie diGiovanna

The New Renaissance means honoring the many talents that everyone has. It is the rediscovery of the individual, of human values. Renaissance painting developed ways of conveying perspective, three dimensions on a two dimensional surface. The New Renaissance is also about developing new perspectives, new ways of doing things, not just in the arts but in every arena. The Renaissance was a rediscovery of classical western roots. In the same way, in a world addicted to innovation, the New Renaissance honors continuity and renewal, rather than innovation for its own sake.

I am always looking for ways to connect things together, to understand things in new ways.

Take down a book at random from the bookshelf, open it with your eyes closed. Point to a word. Then take that word and use it to make a sentence to help you understand or solve the problem you have had so much difficulty with.

Everywhere you look there are promises for more … more money, more success, more fame. But what I think most people really want is more connection, more values, more quality .. in themselves and in the people they engage with.

There is so much talent and natural gifts within each of us that we don’t recognize.
I can’t tell you how many clients I have this conversation with, “Do you know that not everyone is able to do that?”
And they say, “I thought everyone could do it. This is nothing.”
And I reply, “Oh no. This is something special!”
If only we could just embrace our own natural gifts, and learn more about them, and develop them, and really acknowledge that we have skills and talents that really are unique to us.

Words

I don’t take your words
Merely as words.
Far from it.

I listen
To what makes you talk-
Whatever that is-
And me listen.

      — Shinkichi Takahashi

Jean Marie can be found at  www.jeanmariespeaks.com

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Nancy Marmolejo

Deep Genius answers the question, “What are you here to create?”

I am a creature of wonder. I have an insatiable curiosity. It’s the fabric of who I am. I’m always asking, ‘Let’s find a new way.’ Just by looking for it, curiosity lays down new neural pathways. It makes you smarter. It makes you connect new dots together.

I am understanding empathy on a deeper and deeper level.

In the past three years I’ve had three losses, my mom, my ex-husband, and my sister at the beginning of this year. I was anticipating all the possible responses I would get on Facebook. We tend to go into ‘fix it’ mode before we go into empathy. So I stayed off Facebook, and I ended up writing a little book, Don’t Say That, Say THIS!: Navigating Grief and Loss in the World of Social Media.

So much technology is set up to buffer us from life and the responsibility of deep listening, being a witness and being present. We so often trivialize the miraculous experience of being human by compartmentalizing our experience with platitudes.

Sit in a public place and look around. Imagine the Deep Genius residing in each person you see, just below the surface, yet plain to see when you look. It will help you bypass all your projections and judgements about them. Something in your body changes and empathy becomes like a fruit ripening inside you.

The first time I took a figure drawing class I stopped seeing the body. I started seeing lines  and shapes, and it helped me completely turn around the body-image issues I had.

Even in the face of the huge destruction we face in our time, we can only see the world as beautiful and miraculous … a beetle with its iridescent body, a bird drinking at the fountain …

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Baeth Davis

The irony was not lost on me that my purpose, which I had searched for so diligently, and with a lot of tears and agony, was to help other people find their own purpose.

Nearly every conversation I have, day in and day out, is to help people have the clarity to say yes to what they are designed to do.

Money is an energetic construct influenced by our beliefs.

The majority of people live in utter fear. There’s very little power in fear until you recognize it, and embrace it, and can move into it and transform it.

In this meaning-making process we call life there are clues everywhere with which to designate and symbolize your life purpose .. to move out of fear into a way of being that is inherently liberating for oneself and others.

When I was diagnosed with cancer I refused radiation and chemotherapy. I told the doctors I’d rather die. They looked at me like I had ten heads. I knew I was in charge of my own healing journey. I took everything people told me and also I spent hundreds of hours researching. I was going against top gynecologists and researchers and saying no. I was a heretic.

Curing cancer is like finding a cure to a thousand different illnesses most of which can be cured just by living properly – not having a toxic stressful environment, not suppressing your emotions.

Everywhere I went there were hundreds of crows. I’d never seen anything like it. It was as if the crows were in my psyche. I would talk to them, and ask them what magic they wanted me to know, and I kept hearing, “You may not know the answer yet. You may never get the answer. Just stay with the mystery. Stop always looking for answers.”

It turns out that my fear of death from this cancer was fear of my own power. That realization gave me such a sense of peace. It changed me forever.

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)

Marikit Mayeno

“You can change your story and try to change the way people perceive you, but they’re going to perceive you in a different way from the way you want to be seen anyway. So what’s the point of limiting yourself to one thing if everyone’s always going to see you in a different way from the way you want to be seen? You’ll never get be all the things you truly are.”

“I used to plan what I wanted to be for the next year – a tomboy, dressing boyish and doing Karate. The year after that I became a girly-girl. Then I went through a Goth stage. Then I just stayed in my room and drew pictures and would stay away from everyone.”

“As a teenager, I feel that there’s so much pressure to find out who you are, and what you are. Every movie you see is telling you that you need to know who you are.”

“Art and nature are the same thing.”

“I dreamed I was living in a bodhi tree, and as I walked out from the tree I saw a man walking towards me. There was so much intensity in his eyes, so much passion emanating from him. You could tell that this man truly loved life. He had so much love for everything. Then he saw me and he was immediately disappointed. It was as if I could read all his thoughts. “Oh, she’s just an ordinary girl.”  I started walking towards him. All I did was say Hello to him, and all the vibrance came back in his face. He realized, “She’s extraordinary!” Then he hugged me, and it was the best hug I’d ever received!”

Please Subscribe and Leave us a Review on iTunes 
We’ll send you a special gift

We would love you to review this Podcast on iTunes and as an expression of our appreciation we will send you a set of three brand new audio trance-journeys as our gift to you.

Subscribe on Android

 Subscribe by RSS Feed

(World we Long For is also on Stitcher, Google Play Music, and Blubrry)