The Mind Bod Adventure Pod

Hi Mind Bod Squad!!This week we’re hanging with Kazu Haga, a nonviolence trainer, restorative justice practitioner, and author of Healing Resistance and Fierce Vulnerability. Our friend Sebene put us onto his wonderful essays and we went straight down the rabbit hole!Kazu’s work weaves together spiritual practice, healing, and social change. It’s work that lives between two truths. There is real injustice in the world, and it has to be stopped. And the people causing it still belong to us.He’s spent over a decade inside prisons, hearing the stories of incarcerated men. He has also run healing circles with prison guards and police officers, and found the guards’ stories often sounded just like those of the men they watched over.Holding both truths at once takes practice, and in our conversation it becomes a rhythm of oscillation between action and integration. Activist spaces tend to get stuck on the out-breath and healing spaces on the in-breath. Kazu advocates for both, along with a much wider sense of what counts as action: a movement as varied as an ecosystem, where singing, parenting, and teaching people to breathe all belong.He lives this out at Canticle Farm, an intentional community in Oakland built around the one thing humans have yet to figure out: how to live in healthy conflict with each other.----------------------------------------------We talk about:- The two truths: holding the relative reality of injustice and the ultimate reality of interconnection at the same time, without collapsing into spiritual bypassing- Why activist communities and healing communities tend to get stuck in only half the rhythm- Bayo Akomolafe’s line that “the times are urgent, we must slow down,” and why slowing down is about deepening awareness, not hitting pause- Schools of fish, starling murmurations, and why some things only happen locally- Life inside Canticle Farm: a community that lives, heals, and practices restorative justice together----------------------------------------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription at mindbodpod.com 🌿❤️----------------------------------------------The AdventureKazu leads a grounding practice designed for wherever listeners happen to be: driving, walking, or sitting still.It starts with the breath, then moves to a place of tension or discomfort in the body. The aim isn’t to fix it but to ask what it’s pointing toward: Grief for the state of the world? Fear for the people we love? Anxiety about what’s ahead? We’re invited to ground into the earth and realize that whatever the body is carrying, it’s being held alongside every ancestor and everything that has ever lived.----------------------------------------------So which side of the oscillation do you tend to get stuck on: the in-breath or the out-breath? Let us know in the comments!Till next time, 🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️----------------------------------------------Subscribe here: mindbodpod.com Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we’re hanging with the legendary Sam Bercholz: refugee kid turned founder of Shambhala Publications, the prolific dharma press behind many of the books on your shelf. In 1968, a London publisher handed him a manuscript by a Tibetan lama in Scotland whom Sam had never heard of. He read it sitting on the bed of a five-pound-a-night room, and it felt like it was speaking straight to him. It was Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action, and it became Shambhala’s first book. Thousands followed.Sam’s path started with a burlesque-house-singing Chan teacher who’d break into song mid-teaching. It deepened over decades as a close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Kyabje Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, who empowered him to teach. Sam calls himself irreverent but totally orthodox, and you can see where he got both. His new book Rude Awakenings: An Unconventional Guide to the Buddhist Path opens in the spirit of an AA meeting: he’s addicted… to believing his own thoughts! “I am like this total mess that’s cheerful,” he tells us.Under the jokes is real conviction. Sam is orthodox about the integrity of practice because the dharma took shape through centuries of trial and error by people who were practicing deeply. He takes the practice seriously. Himself, not so much, as you’ll see from all the fun we have together 🙂We talk about:- How a manuscript from Chögyam Trungpa in 1968 became the first Shambhala Publications book- Why Sam had a “panic breakdown” working in Washington politics, and how that sent him looking for something genuine- Emptiness vs. fullness: how the word shunyata might be better translated as “full” than “empty”- Why becoming “helpful, cheerful humans” is the real measure of the path- What gets lost when practice skips the foundational groundwork- Why meditation isn’t for lowering your blood pressure (as Sam puts it, you can just go to the drugstore for that!)---------------------------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿❤️---------------------------------The AdventureSam strips vajrayana visualization meditation down to the elemental heart. Eyes open, gaze tilted slightly up, he guides us through a clouded sky that slowly clears until the sun comes through. We rest there, feeling the whole body in that light as thoughts come and go. Then the turn: the sun comes down behind the senses and settles in the heart, so the light that was in the sky is now inside. From there, we look back out at the world, radiant and alive.---------------------------------Let us know in the comments what came up for you during the sun practice :)Till next time, 🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️ Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Hi Mind Bod Squad!This week we're hanging with someone extra special: Jan Winhall — psychotherapist, nervous-system nerd, and (drumroll) Jeff's former therapist. As Jeff puts it, she's the one who helped him dig out of his own mental health sinkhole. Now she's on the other side of the mic.Jan’s spent 45 years in the trauma and addiction trenches, and along the way she built something super useful: the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, which blends Eugene Gendlin’s “felt sense” (what you notice in your body before you can name it) with Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (how your nervous system monitors whether you’re safe or not).She’s written two books on it — Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model and 20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction — and is deep into a third, this one on couples.For Jan, assessing trauma starts by asking: what’s actually happening in your body, right now?--------------------------------------We talk about:- Trauma as a nervous system stuck in a loop, and addiction as the body’s attempt to regulate itself- “Fun/Fired up”: how to stay grounded in a heated argument without tipping into fight- Why growing up unseen is its own quiet trauma, even in a “privileged” home- Why opposite nervous systems attract… and then drive each other nuts- Healing as the slow thaw of frozen memories--------------------------------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription at mindbodpod.com 🌿❤️--------------------------------------The AdventureJan takes us on a guided tour of the nervous system, feeling our way through each state in the body, from the tight readiness of Fight-Flight to the heaviness of shutdown to the grounded ease of safety. Then she invites us to meet whatever is present in our own bodies with curiosity and care, and to ask what it needs.--------------------------------------If you’ve ever wanted a cheat sheet for what your body’s doing when it’s doing... whatever this is, this episode’s for you.Let us know in the comments what state you found yourself in :)Till next time,🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️ Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we’re hanging with Michael Uebel, psychotherapist, researcher, longtime mindfulness teacher for military veterans, and author of Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being.How did we all meet? Michael sent Jeff an email that said something like, “I hear you’re obsessed with equanimity… so am I!” Jeff read the new book and could not put it down. So here we are, nerding out about equanimity :)Michael’s whole project pushes back on the idea of equanimity as some kind of unshakable stillness, a “sitting like a mountain” you achieve and then hold onto. Instead, drawing on Taoism, Zen, and a long line of Western thinkers from Thoreau to Heidegger, he reframes it as something much more alive: a continual rebalancing, an “essential mobility,” a relationship to the world rather than a fortress against it.We talk about:* Why equanimity is not stillness so much as a continuous process of rebalancing* Uncoupling equanimity from acceptance and non-judgment* How working with military veterans and PTSD shaped Michael’s whole approach to the practice* The difference between “space around” an experience and “space inside” a sensation* Letting your focal point and focal periphery trade places, and how the oscillation between the two can help keep us loose.-------------------------The Mind Bod Pod is a community-supported project. If you like these adventures, help us keep the lights on with a paid subscription! ❤️-------------------------The Adventure:Michael leads us through a space practice: settle into your seat, let the breath be natural, and start by noticing sensation. Pressure, tingling, the air on your skin.Then the shift: let go of the idea of arms, legs, a body at all, and turn attention instead to the space around you. Above your head. To your left and right. Below you, behind you, and finally stretching out in front as far as it can go, until there’s a sense of boundless openness with everything, thoughts, feelings, sensations, simply arising and dissolving inside it.The throughline for the whole practice is that whatever we can give space to, can move.-------------------------Let us know in the comments: What shifted, lifted, or got more spacious for you in this practice?That’s all for this week.Thanks for tuning in!🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️ Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we’re hanging with Abigail Rose Clarke, an author, artist, and somatic facilitator. Tasha’s been a fangirl of her Instagram for ages, so this one’s a long time coming. Abigail’s approach to the somatic lives in a sweet spot: grounded by science and expanded by magic and art.Case in point: her new Body Oracle Deck that is 80 cards of juicy art and body-based invitations, anatomy, and enchantment 😍🔮✨Our jumping-off point today is the interstitium — a network of fluid-filled space in the body. It was discovered only recently, once imaging technology finally got good enough to see tissue as it really exists in a living body, instead of squished flat under a microscope. It turns out that this space makes up about 20% of your body. You are, quite literally, one-fifth space!What does that revelation mean for us?It means we get to reimagine the body and reconnect with it in a truer way. From something that is solid, fixed, and defined to something that is fluid, spacious, porous, and alive. Closer to how the body actually feels from the inside.-------------We talk about:- The interstitium: the spacious 20% of you that you’ve never thought about- The difference between identifying with the “hard mass” of the body and attending to its fluidity and space instead- Reframing bipolar rhythms, grief, and other hard states as expansion and contraction rather than pathology- Why “unhooking” the frontal lobe, even for a minute, can shift the whole nervous system- Abigail’s new Body Oracle Deck, and why a deck can live with you in a way a book can’t-------------The Mind Bod Pod is a community-supported project. If you like these adventures, consider helping us keep the lights on with a paid subscription! ❤️-------------The Adventure:Abigail leads us into the interstitium through movement. She has us close our eyes and picture the body as sea kelp! Rooted to the ocean floor but swaying, floating, held by fluid on all sides. We let ourselves sway with it, feeling both anchored by gravity and lifted at the same time.Then she guides us deeper, into the tiny channels beneath the skin carrying interstitial fluid through every part of us, and invites the brain itself to rest back into the skull, no longer working to think its way through anything.Let us know in the comments what your floaty “sea kelp” felt like!-------------Send this to someone who loves to (or needs to) get into the body’s juicy spaciousness: Share-------------K, That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in!Love always,🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️Subscribe on Substack: www.mindbodpod.com/ Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Hello Mind Bod Squad!This week we’re hanging with Lodro Rinzler, Buddhist meditation teacher, award-winning author of eight books (including the bestseller The Buddha Walks into a Bar…), and the dude behind the Basic Goodness Collective. His brand-new book, You Are Good, You Are Enough, rests on one deceptively simple idea: underneath all the self-doubt and noise, you’re already basically (you guessed it) GOOD!Lodro’s the first to admit this can sound a little Pollyanna. But he’s not talking about “good” in a sinner-vs-saint way. More like “okay as is”: complete, fine exactly as you are right now. It’s something you probably feel fleetingly, quite often. It’s that quiet “oh, I’m fine” when the hot water hits your back in the shower, or that unremarkable beat at the end of the day when you set your bag down and, just for a second, nothing needs doing.The work, Lodro says, is learning to notice those ordinary moments and string them together until you can start living from that ground instead of just visiting it.We talk about:- What “basic goodness” actually means (and what it doesn’t)- Basic goodness as something you experience, not a doctrine you adopt (as our beloved Tenzin Bob Thurman liked to say, “Buddhism is realism”)- Noticing your goodness in ordinary moments- Finding the goodness in difficult people, without excusing harm- What to do when the whole idea makes you want to scream-----------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿❤️-----------------The Adventure:Lodro leads us in a meditation that brings us into the simple immediacy of the body and breath. And there we start to notice, we’re already okay! Creaky knees, rumbly bellies, flighty mind and all. And near the end, an invitation to lift the gaze and notice the openness that’s already here. Whatever happens, we can always come back to… this.Know someone who needs to hear they’re not a total hopeless mess? (TBH, who doesn’t need to hear that from time to time? 😅) Pass this episode along:ShareK, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in.Love always,🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️----------------Lodro’s LinksBook: You Are Good, You Are Enough (Shambhala)Website: lodrorinzler.comThe Basic Goodness Collective Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Hi friends! The Mind Bod Squad is BACK!After a few months apart (Jeff squirreled away up in BC, Tasha bummin’ around in Toronto), we’re returning to you on this, America’s birthweek. And we’re here to celebrate INTERdependence instead of independence.This week we’re hanging with Jeremy David Engels — Penn State rhetoric professor, yoga teacher, student of meditation, and author of the gorgeous little book On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World.Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, Jeremy has done an audacious thing: he rewrote it as a Declaration of Interdependence. His new iteration has the same word count and same shape, but where the original lists “27 grievances against the king”, Jeremy offers 27 insights into democracy as a practice of care: caring for ourselves, caring for each other, and caring for the life we share. After all, he argues, there’s already enough grievances to go around. Maybe it’s time for a change.And Americans, as your loving continental siblings to the north, we can definitively say, we like this version better. 😅We talk about:- What it means to treat democracy as a daily practice of care- How to find common ground with someone you’re sure you disagree with- Why conflict is part of being human… and how to hold it well- Modeling a different way of being, instead of arguing people into it- Hope as something you practice, not a mood you wait around for-------------------------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿www.Mindbodpod.com-------------------------------The Adventure:This week the practice is the reading itself. Jeremy reads us the closing crescendo of his Declaration of Interdependence and reminds us the original was made to be spoken aloud. So we slow down and let the lines land in the body: our independence has always been interdependence.Let us know in the comments what you think!K, That’s all for this week. Happy to be back & Thanks for tuning in.🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️-------------------------------Watch this in video at mindbodpod.com Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we’re hanging with Ivan Bercholz, co-owner of Shambhala Publications, publisher of Bala Kids, and co-author (with illustrator Lasha Mutual) of My Friend Tara, a children’s book that introduces kids to Tara, the Buddhist archetype of compassion.Ivan set out to create a book that gets straight to the heart of practice: how can kids actually relate to an archetypal quality? How do you help them imagine compassion as something fun, alive, and embodied? How do you make an ancient practice feel natural for modern kiddos?When Jeff’s rambunctious six-year-old Eden stumbled on the book, he flipped through, chose his favorite of the colorful Taras and, while playing with the visualization, had a profound, whole-body shift.Jeff describes it as a “rainbow-candy version of internal regulation” that honors children’s natural inclination towards imagination. Kids are naturals at this stuff. Ask them to picture beams of warmth radiating from the heart and they just do it, while adults tie themselves in knots worrying about doing it “right”.That might be the core thread of our conversation: practice is really about getting open enough to let what’s naturally here come through. Kids, wild lil portals that they are, let that wisdom stream through all the time. Books like this can give them language for what they already know.We talk about:* Visualization as a practice playground for kids and adults* The 5 Taras and their different archetypal qualities (white for calm, green for protection, blue for difficult emotions...)* Why mantra might be our oldest human practice* How books can become spiritual oases when teachers aren’t accessible-------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿-------------The Adventure:Ivan walks us through a Green Tara visualization and mantra practice.We breathe, settle, imagine Tara’s smile and the rays of warmth coming toward us, and repeat her mantra: Om Tare Tu Tare Ture Soha. Then we let those qualities dissolve into us and send them back out to others.Ivan calls it the workout before the Savasana: the color, sound, imagery build up the energy… and then you release and relax, held in the felt sense of deep meaning.This is medicine for all of us - not just the kiddos!Let us know in the comments how the practice lands - is it your first time doing mantra or visualization?Till next time,🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️-------------Know a parent (or a kid at heart) who might dig this? Pass it along 💫-------------Ivan’s Links:* Book: My Friend Tara: And Her Rainbow of Compassion* Shambhala Publications: shambhala.com* Bala Kids: shambhala.com/balakids Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we're hanging with wandering Celtic teacher John Philip Newell and Earth & Soul Director Cami Twilling to talk about what it means to connect to the sacred when you're living outside the bounds of formal religious tradition.John Philip is an ordained-minister-turned-spiritual-exile who spent years with one foot in the church and one foot out in the wilderness, before finally giving back his ordination. He couldn’t reconcile his experience of the sacredness of humans and nature with Christianity’s history of getting “into bed with empire.”His book The Great Search asks: What are millions of spiritual seekers actually searching for? And how can we nurture those yearnings?John Philip talks about philosopher Simone Weil's idea of 'the efficacy of desire': that getting in touch with our deepest longings actually helps bring about what we're yearning for. When we name our hungers with clarity, we become better able to serve them.We talk about:* Why the wilderness and the temple need each other* The 8 yearnings at the heart of spiritual searching* What happens when you "pray until the tears come" and tap into primal flow* Why regular retreat matters more than occasional long stints------------------------------------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿------------------------------------The Adventure:This one’s subtle and luminous. Cami and John Philip drop us into a contemplative space where the main practice is reconnecting with the light that exists at the heart of all things. We watch how the light moves, and in this simplicity, let our awareness touch eternity.------------------------------------Let us know in the comments: what does your “great search” look like right now?Till next time!🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️ Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Happy New Year!One week into 2026 and we’re already firing on all cylinders. So let’s kick it off with some destress tools to keep us all cool as cucumbers when things get spicy. 🥒😅🌶️This week we sit down with Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, physician, Harvard Medical School faculty member, and author of The 5 Resets: Rewire Your Brain for Less Stress and More Resilience. We talk about what stress actually is, why it gets so dismissed in medicine, and what to do when your diamond finally cracks.Dr. Aditi knows stress from both sides. As a medical resident working 80-hour weeks in the cardiac ICU, she was taught that "pressure makes diamonds." Then she experienced a stampede of wild horses across her chest that turned out to be... stress! Not a heart attack or low blood sugar. It was her nervous system completely losing it.When her doctor said "just relax," she realized there was a massive gap between how common stress is (60-80% of doctor visits) and how little support exists for it (only 3% of doctors counsel for stress). So she became the doctor she needed.We talk about:* Why calling it “just” stress is medical gaslighting* How doomscrolling is the modern way to scan for danger* The “popcorn brain” effect of having too much screen time* Why breathing is one of the few things you can control (and how to use it)--------We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🫶 --> www.mindbodpod.com--------The adventure:Dr. Aditi walks us through three of her Five Resets, including “Stop, Breathe, Be”, a simple practice she did 30-40 times a day as a resident.It’s a pause and reset you can use every time you turn a doorknob, before Zoom calls, picking up your kids, or brushing your teeth. Any moment works.Know someone who would appreciate a few new destress tools in their kit? Pass it on!Let us know how these practices work for you!Till next time,🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️ Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe