Travis Ben Robinson on Finding Sacredness

Travis Ben Robinson is a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, psychotherapist, and co-director of the Marina Counseling Center in San Francisco. He joins us for a light-hearted, deep, kind of folksy conversation that shines a light on our way forward. He says (and we agree) that the way forward is through discovering and rediscovering that everything is sacred. He offers some excellent tools to help us along the way such as following what feels warm in the moment, waking up our body's consciousness, and finding safety. This last tool feels especially fresh, as safety is not usually talked about in spiritual circles. In this episode he also references neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor. We are including a link to her Ted page.

About Travis

Travis has been practicing Tibetan meditation for more than 15 years. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2016, speaks three languages, and has been a practicing psychotherapist since 2010. Visit http://travisbenrobinson.com and https://marinacounseling.com to connect to Travis and learn more about his work. 

Notes

• Wikipedia on "Yeshe”, a Tibetan Buddhist word that means before knowing (i.e. pure awareness that is free from concepts)
• Wikipedia on "the Dakinis" 
• Lon Jinpa (Tibetan teacher, coming soon) 
• Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk
• Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche 

Travis' Bridge solution
"I already think we're living in a perfect world. We just don't recognize it. Remembering this transforms the world."  

Quotes

“A deep recognition of our true nature, that’s what’s sacred. This sort of self-knowing - that the self is so much bigger than you can imagine - it’s beyond the word “self.” The re-recognizing of the sacred, that’s the practice. To return to the environmental question, when we start to recognize the sacred again we really honor it, protect it, become the dance of it, and know that we’re killing ourselves."
 
"Trust yourself. Trust your own guidance. Try to feel what's right for you, and not what someone else is telling you to do. That's the right thing to do." 

"How do we wake up? Through the body. Through our cells, we wake up to the infinite and this knowing extends out into the environment in subtle ways. In this way we find the sacred, and the sacred comes to us."   
 
"If we don't have safety - our home, good relationships, the basics - we can't move on spiritually."  

"I already think we're living in a perfect world. We just don't recognize it. Remembering this transforms the world."  

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Thanks for listening!
Check out more episodes of The Bridge here.

Music
Thanks so much to Alice Spencer for her song, "I Wanna Be a Buddhist," our theme. Enjoy Alice's full performance of the song here.