Authentic Living

It's a question that gets asked every day. And it seems to be all about bad luck. Or maybe I'm just "screwed up." Or maybe I'll never be good enough to attract someone with whom I can really have a long-term healthy relationship. Well, if its any of those things it seems that it will just always have to be this way. But what if it doesn't? What if it's not just about being attracted to the wrong person, but about being stuck in the...

It is very hard for us to compute, but it is possible to live out an identity--which we might even call a personality--that is not who we really are as a Self. That Self--with a capital S--is different from the self--with a lowercase s. The self is who we believe that we are as a personality, which often turns out to only be an identity. The Self is the deepest essence of who we really are. So, today, we are talking about the vario...

We tend to think of blackmail with regard only to its legal ramifications. And, of course, we know that blackmail is illegal, because it is a form of extortion. From a legal prespective, blackmail means prison time and/or fines because it attempts to coerce or force someone into doing something by threatening them in some way. Emotional blackmail is the same because it carries with it an emotional threat. But in the case of emotion...

Today we are talking to Dr. Don St. John, author of the book "Healing the Wounds of Childhood," as this is one of the most important of all of the subjects we could discuss. Very often it is these wounds that keep us trapped, even as we are striving to get past them in some kind of way. WE simply do not realize how our past is invading our present. Or, if we do, we believe that those wounds somehow define us. How can we grow into o...

From our 2015 talk with Andrew Solomon, writer and lecturer on psychology, politics, and the arts and winner of the National Book Award for "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression." He is an activist in LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, and the arts. His NY Times bestselling book, and the subject of our interview today, entitled "Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity," is also the winner of several awards,...

 It's natural for us to want to get what we want. Unfortunately, we often use bargaining as a way to get what we want and to seek a sense of safety--that might not actually be safe.  When we are trying to get to acceptance of any difficult reality, we might reach the stage in which we bargain. So, if I'm dying of cancer, I might bargain with life by saying "I'll never do that again if you just let me live." And this is natural, for...

Did I just hear that "Dun-Dun" that goes off whenever "Law and Order" comes on? We do get the two mixed up quite a bit—Karma and law and order. What's been passed down to us is a definition of Karma that means that what goes around comes around. So, we can always say to that—expletives deleted—ex-husband or wife, "Yeah, well what goes around comes around!" believing with all of our hearts that they are going to get theirs. Right? A...

You cannot read a paragraph of modern day spiritual books or hear any spiritual speaker on the topic of the EGO without being informed that the Ego is a bad thing. From this perspective the Ego is thought to be the enemy. It is that part of us that wants us to fail, that wants us to be unloving, unkind and inconsiderate, to be afraid and to live inauthentically. In that way that old Ego sounds a whole lot like that old devil, Beelz...

We are excited that Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD comes this week to tell us about the unveiling of her long awaited audio work and online series called "The Dangerous Old Woman, Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype." World renowned author of "Women Who Run With the Wolves," which was on the NY Times bestseller list for 145 weeks, she is an internationally acclaimed poet, Diplomat Jungian psychoanalyst, post-trauma specialis...

Mark Nepo is an author, poet, philosopher, beloved teacher and cancer survivor who has, for thirty years, been exploring how we can stay awake and authentic when our wounds make us numb and hidden; how we can minimize what stands between us and our experience of life; how we can create a practice that wears down what thickens around our hearts and minds. And today we are going to talk to him about those very things, as we explore t...

We have arrived at adolescence in our understanding of relationship—in other words, we have a long way to go. But, well, what do we expect? Only 150 years ago, marriages were often still arranged in first world countries. We arranged for a good dowry, good property, money, inheritance, prestige, even good teeth and good hips. So this thing of marrying someone we love is new, and we have only begun the work of understanding how to d...

One of the most difficult challenges of any relationship is communication. How do we say what we mean without lashing out, or hurting the ones we love the most? Unfortunately, we tend to go to the extremes on this one: We either shut-down, or we lash out. Neither of those two options work, however, to create the intimacy that a relationship needs to grow. Nancy Dreyfus has come to our aid here with a beautiful book, "Talk to Me Lik...

Generally speaking, we think of morality as a good thing. People should, we think, honor certain codes of behavior in order to prove that they are good people, and in order to maintain order in the world. But what we don't commonly know is that morality can often be a poor substitute for authenticity. We don't know it, but we are commonly doing the right thing, instead of doing the true thing. Yep, that's right, there can be a big ...

Most of us have been raised to be good. We were to share, be kind, be loving, say thank you when we didn't feel grateful, say I'm sorry when we weren't, hug people we didn't want to hug and say we loved people we didn't even know, much less love. But the idea of goodness held a magical quality for most of us. We thought that IF we were good enough, THEN we would be worthy, we would be loved and we could finally rest secure. We assu...

What we have heard and we've read in the Bible, well it ain't necessarily so. So goes the old Porgy and Bess song. Perhaps they did not read Thomas Moore's version, Gospel The Book of John, in which regardless of religion or atheism one discovers a deeper more meaningful spirituality hidden in the root meanings of the words used. Unfortunately, much of the work of John and others has been turned into moralistic dogma. But what we f...

This show is a rerun, but the truths haven't changed.

We live in a social environment now in which hate is overt, active and visible. Not so very long ago, in fact, hate was hidden, covert, and only active in a passive/aggressive fashion. But there are many people out there today who are trying to tell us that hate is a good thing. That it is even a Christian thing. That, of course, we hate, for how could we feel any other way towa...

THE most important thing we can come to know in life is who we really are. But most of us have not been taught to know that person. Yes, we can look in the mirror and see ourselves, but most of us are looking at ourselves through what we perceive to be the image others have of us. Indeed, most of us have introjected a projection placed upon us by parents, and later others, who unconsciously need us to carry their projections for th...

The terms spiritual abuse have, thus far, only been used to describe how Christian leaders abuse church members. But spiritual abuse runs far deeper and wider than can be described by any one religion. Spiritual abuse is abuse of the human spirit. While it's true that your spirit--your soul--can't really be damaged, it's also true that you can be split off from any conscious awareness of your spirit--and that's what spiritual abuse...

Caroline Myss comes again to the Authentic Living Show to bring her own understanding of intimate conversations with the Divine. Revealing her own personal struggles and enlightenment, she discusses her book: Intimate Conversations with the Divine.

Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times bestselling author and internationally renowned speaker in the fields of human c...