The Delicate Business of Being Human

In Episode 7 Jennifer Muir joins us to speak about tending grief, navigating loss, and death as an agent of awakening. Jennifer shares about her work as a death doula and grief tender, and about the experience of the sudden death of her husband while their daughter was an infant. And how this passage both ungrounded her and deepened her experience of life. We’ll speak about approaching death as a portal to the sacred and the role of storytelling to move us through the experience of grief. We contemplate what it would bring to our lives to be able to ground them into the reality that death and ageing are inevitable. Jennifer Muir, founder of Spiraling Heart Sanctuary, is a death care worker, grief tender, sound practitioner, circle facilitator, mother, and devotee of the path of the heart. Attuned to compassion, she aspires that her work in the world soften the stories that bind us, soothe fear and bring us into a more trusting relationship with life and death thereby relieving suffering for all beings in the ten directions and three times.

Episode 6 Paramita OliveiraDissecting Our Defenses; Gluttony, Compulsions and Addictions In episode two of our study, Paramita Oliveira and I continue on a micro-but-mighty odyssey. The terrain is tracing the ego’s development as a series of solutions and defense mechanisms. We’ll examine the structure of the personality, which was built around a being in development who didn’t have the protection or cognitive capacity to navigate life’s difficulties. We start to recognize these solutions and defenses as being a distortion of our essence. The same way a prism separates white light into the full spectrum, the slings and arrows of this human experience fragment our light. Our fragmentation isn’t moral, its fundamentally human, but it can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and separate from our power. We will deepen in coming episodes and create a map that will lead us back to our wholeness using what in us is most unconscious and reactive as a doorway.In this episode we explore the outermost layer of the mandala; gluttony. We’ll entertain the possibility that our compulsions and addictions exist to keep us from touching a core of pain that we believe ourselves to be incapable of withstanding. We’ll speak about the connection between what was indigestible to us as children and the need to seek for pleasure outside of ourselves.Paramita Oliviera is a psychologist focused on the study of human behavior.She feels deeply privileged to have encountered self-inquiry and self-study in 1994, and was so touched by what she learned that in 2000 she began to dedicate her life to bringing this study to others. She has given workshops all over the world, while continuing her own personal study of meditation retreats and deeply immersing herself in trainings in India, her second home. She specializes in working with the patterns that prevent us from true transformation by keeping us disconnected from our deepest truth. Instagram: @paramitaoliveiraYouTube: Paramita oliveira Amritakaya अमृतकाय is a non-profit learning platform offering tools and teachings to help us to enter into deeper relationship with ourselves, others, and life itself. Instagram: @amritakayawww.amritakaya.org

In this episode we travel to Andhra Pradesh, India, to visit a very special temple: Devipuram. We are joined by Rama Kandarpa who tells us the story of her father Guruji Amritananda Nath’s incredible life and mission. We learn of the rational nuclear scientist’s visions of the Goddess, and his wild mission to build Her a home.

In episode four we are joined by Taganyahu Swaby acupuncturist, practitioner of Eastern Medicine and the Internal Martial Arts, and founder of Yaad Wellness. Taganyahu speaks about community and the impulse behind opening his center. We speak about the difference between Qi, Shen and Jing, and the importance of feeling and of respecting the cycles of nature.

Gurumaa Dipti Rajkumar Baswar, lineage holder and teacher of Shivoham Tantra, joins us to speak about mantra, sadhana, the inner Guru, and kundalini shakti. In this episode we’ll hear the traditional perspective of the movement of the soul from multiplicity to oneness as mapped by Adi Shakti. Gurumaa will share perspectives on what Tantra is, and how attitudes of receptivity, listening, and going with the flow can help us on the path.

In this episode, Paramita Oliveira and I start on a micro-but-mighty odyssey. The terrain is tracing the ego’s development as a series of solutions and defense mechanisms. We’ll examine the structure of the personality, which was built around a being in development who didn’t have the protection or cognitive capacity to navigate life’s difficulties. In this episode we start to recognize these solutions and defenses as being a distortion of our essence.The same way a prism separates white light into the full spectrum, the slings and arrows of this human experience fragment our light. Our fragmentation isn’t moral, its fundamentally human, but it can leave us feeling disconnected from ourselves and separate from our power. We will deepen in coming episodes and create a map that will lead us back to our wholeness using what in us is most unconscious and reactive as a doorway.We welcome psychologist Paramita Oliveira for the initial conversation of a ten-part series on the study of the self. In this episode we outline a methodology that unites spirituality with psychology and understands the difficulties that present in our lives to be the result of a distortion of our essential energy into systems of defense. We'll set up for the study with an overview of the how childhood wounds create a prism effect, distorting our light, and how essential both study and feeling are to the rescue of our essence.

What are the stories that we are telling ourselves about what it is to be a person? Host Laura Carrotti speaks on the need for context and coherence in our lives. She offers her working definition of spirituality and considers why the road to transformation requires us changing the story and practicing something different.

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