Buddha at the Gas Pump

Leela Muse is a nonduality guide whose YouTube work explores the life‑affirming process of spiritual awakening and profoundly unowned, ordinary life. Through contemplative dialogues, she emphasizes the art of noticing, radical honesty, and open curiosity, validating the lived experience of seekers while gently challenging assumptions about what awakening is supposed to look like.

Leela joins Buddha at the Gas Pump to talk about spir...

Seeing the Aura - A New Understanding of the Human Energy Field

Keith is a teacher, author and healing practitioner with expertise in the human energy field, contemplative science and the healing arts. Initially, Keith used meditation as a vehicle to understand and refine subtle states of consciousness. Over the following decade he studied movement, breathwork, bodywork, energy work and other disparate disciplines. During t...

Ruben is the director of the Flourishing Intelligence Program (FLIP) at Linacre College, University of Oxford. Ruben is also co-director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, a Senior Researcher within Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, and fellow at Linacre College. Ruben has made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, meditation, and insight. His wor...

I didn’t set out to become a spiritual teacher. I was the kid with questions that wouldn’t let go — why are we here, what happens when we die, is this really all there is? At eleven, I had my first spiritual awakening, which introduced me to what I call my Inner Teacher, a wise guiding presence that’s been with me ever since.

Those early experiences set me on a long journey across traditions and continents, i...

Jonathan lived the definition of material excess, twenty-five years climbing the corporate ladder in marketing and technology as a C-level executive, accumulating possessions, and actively avoiding anything spiritual. That was until May 22, 2023.

On that day, Jonathan died. His skin turned yellow, his organs failed, and he was gone for three hours. What happened during those three hours wasn’t just a glimpse of white light. He...

Teaching AI to love, the physics of unconditional love, and telepathy with non-speaking autistic people all come together in this lively Buddha at the Gas Pump conversation with neuroscientist and futurist Julia Mossbridge. In this wide-ranging dialogue, we explore unconditional love as a real, foundational force in the universe and what it means for consciousness, time, technology, trauma, and disclosure.

Julia describes he...

Tammy Lee Anderson shares how three profound near-death experiences opened her to unconditional love, spiritual awakening, and a life of service as a psychotherapist, healer, and spiritual medium. In this deep conversation, she describes what near-death really felt like, how it dissolved the fear of death, and how love and awakening can be embodied in daily life through grief, trauma, and ordinary relationships.

We explore T...

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual; he is the creator, writer, host of Closer To Truth, the long-running PBS/public television series and leading digital resource on Cosmos (cosmology/physics, philosophy of science), Life (philosophy of biology), Mind (consciousness, brain/mind, philosophy of mind), and Meaning (theism/atheism/agnosticism, global philosophy of religion, critical thinking). Peter Getzels is Closer To Trut...

From my teenage years I had an unquenchable thirst to see beyond the veils that growing up had created in my mind. I tried different avenues of exploration, and soon found my spiritual home in the Zen tradition. After graduating from college, I went straight to Japan and became a Zen monk at the Bukkoku-ji monastery. For over a dozen years I practiced in the monastic context, mostly in Japan and Korea, living a life dedicated fully...

Purnima Sinha is a spiritual director and coach whose life has been shaped by meditation, near‑death experiences, and a deep commitment to seva (selfless service). Raised in a highly spiritual Indian family steeped in the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, she began meditating in her teens and was trained in Ultra Transcendental Meditation and Surat Shabd Yoga in India. She has now practiced meditation for over 50 years.

After an inten...

Kerri Lake is the founder of Generation of Harmony LLC and co-founder of the Intuitive Learning Foundation 501(c)(3). For over 20 years she has facilitated humanity's conscious re-inclusion into the family of life. She was aware of her own consciousness in infancy, and she experienced direct communication with animals and other dimensions as a toddler—she had awareness but no vocabulary. Throughout her life, her work has been...

Dr. Robert Ganung, chaplain and teacher at Taft School, joins Rick to explore how deep contemplative practice can ground a life of service, justice, and education. Drawing from Celtic Christianity, Buddhism, Vedanta, and the civil rights tradition, Robert shares how daily meditation, interspiritual study, and a sense of the sacred in all beings inform his work with students and his view of a world in crisis yet ripe for awakening. ...

Maggie Gilewicz supports those navigating the journey of awakening. Her work is devoted to humanizing awakening by bringing honesty, nuance and emotional depth to a path often clouded by spiritual idealism and bypassing. Through her one-on-one sessions, astrology and YouTube channel, Humanzing Awakening, she offers a space where the personal and impersonal aspects of human experience are explored with honesty, curiosity and compass...

George Thompson is a filmmaker, teacher, and founder of Balance is Possible!— a 15-person team on a mission to inspire balance for people and planet. His films and teachings have touched over 25 million people and he is supported by renowned changemakers including Dr. Jane Goodall, Louie Schwartzberg, Tara Brach, Stephen Fry and many more. Drawing from years of deep study in the Wudang Mountains of China, George blends ancien...

Swami Sarvapriyananda has been the Minister and spiritual leader of the Vedanta Society of New York since January 2017. He joined the Ramakrishna Math in 1994 and received sannyasa in 2004. He served as an acharya (teacher) of the monastic probationers’ training center at Belur Math, India. He also served in various capacities in different educational institutes of the Ramakrishna Mission in India and as the Assistant Ministe...

Christina Guimond has always been oriented toward the mysterious, even from early childhood. She grew up in a Catholic family in Nova Scotia, Canada, and later settled in Montreal, where she married and raised four children. When her youngest was ten, a long-dormant curiosity about the nature of existence began to take centre stage. On the 8th day of a Vipassana retreat in 2001, Christina had an awakening that deeply shifted her un...

Karyn’s spiritual journey was documented in her book Findings from the Hunting Party’s Scout, which chronicles her four most intense years of spiritual growth as an ordinary working soccer mom into an embodied awakened faith leader. After a life-changing spontaneous awakening she shared her Toltec teacher’s teachings and her own experiences as an Interfaith minister ordained by One Spirit Seminary in NYC. In 2019 ...

In this powerful interview, David Ditchfield recounts his extraordinary near-death experience (NDE) following a horrific train accident in Cambridge, UK, in 2006. Once at rock bottom as a functional alcoholic, David was transformed spiritually after being pulled under a speeding train and, just before critical surgery, encountering beings of light in the afterlife. This profound NDE awakened remarkable creative abilities, revealing...

In this conversation, Emeline Lambert shares her profound spiritual journey, beginning with her childhood experiences of feeling extremely out of place in a world that seemed illusionary and pointless. “Who am I?” was the question that was always too terrifying  to answer. She purposefully tried to cover up the truth of her deepest Self through the limitations of ego and performance art; leading to years of depress...