Inner Truth

People often talk about balance as the key to a good life. We need to find balance in all things, where it be work, play, relationships, attracting and receiving. But what does it mean energetically? Most of the major wisdom traditions speak of polarities, yin and yang, masculine and feminine and shiva and shakti. These are all pointing towards the same opposing forces that play out within us and allow for creativity, love and rest to take place. So how do we balance it all properly? Transformational Coach Lisa Schrader talks about what it means to reawaken our often depleted sensuality and really step into the now. If you’re interested in how to really feel fully alive, this is an episode for you.

How much do you think the way you think governs your happiness? We have, by the latest estimates, between 40,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day. How we receive, respond and act upon those thoughts can be the biggest determinant in the outcomes of our lives (both emotionally and physically). Not all of our thoughts are helpful, in fact many can be completely undermining. Some might not even be yours at all. If you’re wondering how to take better control over your thinking process and by extension your life, this episode is for you.

Start a conversation about climate change these days and most people will duck for cover. How can we overcome our normal response of fear and powerlessness? How can we become agents for transformational change in the world? If you're interested in learning a new story on confronting climate change and life in general, this episode is for you.

Are you deeply healthy? Not just free of disease or illness, but living with a profound sense of vitality that sustains you as you move through your life? This can be hard to achieve in the midst of life’s competing priorities, whether it’s our families, our careers, our social lives, or our passions, our attention and care is often focused more on those around us than on ourselves. And, as a result, we get depleted. If you’re feeling like your energy is getting run down despite your best efforts in life, this eye-opening episode on maintaining vitality is for you.

Do you ever feel as if your spiritual search is getting you nowhere? That despite sincere intention and effort, you’re reaping frustration instead of fruit? There are many pitfalls along the spiritual path, spiritual ambition, by-passing, over practicing all included. Not least of course calling it a 'journey' to begin with. If you're frustrated with your efforts or keen to understand the roadblocks to awakening, this episode is for you. In this episode we discuss our deep spiritual impulse to awaken and the ways our future-focused mind “co-opts” or veils what is timelessly free, loving, and ever present.

Mindfulness has permeated our modern lives, and with good reason—it’s been proven to boost mood, reduce stress, improve health, and maximize performance. But in our achievement-oriented culture, the practice of mindfulness can feel laborious and mechanical, like one more task on your endless to-do list. What if you could let go of effort and struggle and relax back into the happiness and ease that is your birthright—and is always readily available to you? If you're frustrated your with meditation practice, feeling too 'effortful' this episode is for you.

Ayahuasca - a psychedelic plant brew from the Amazon - is fast becoming a popular healing modality for Westerners looking to seek closure from past events and heal mental health ailments like anxiety and depression. A relatively unknown substance until twenty years ago, it was popularised by a now-famous article in the National Geographic in 2003 which saw one of its writers - Kira Salak - heal herself in a matter of days from life-long treatment-resistant depression. Fifteen years on, she remains depression-free. With miracle-healings on offer, Westerners have been fleeing to the Amazon to work with the medicine. Sometimes with great effects and often times with more than they bargained for. I spoke with ayahuasca expert Rachel Harris Ph.D. who has conducted the largest study in North America to date on the plant, to see what is what when it comes to using this powerful medicine.

How do you define 'growing up'? Does it mean you achieve certain cultural benchmarks - a steady income, paying taxes, marriage, and children? Or does it mean leaving behind the expectations of others and growing into the person you were meant to be? If you find yourself in a career, place, relationship, or crisis you never foresaw and that seems at odds with your beliefs about who you are, it means your soul is calling on you to reexamine your path. James Hollis believes that something deeper lives beneath the 'voice in our head'. Underneath the ego lies the vast forces of the unconscious – the psyche - which has its own plan for us. The responsibility of each person, is to figure out what they are, and then heed that call instead of resisting it.  This is a radical and challenging way of thinking about yourself. It means that what you think you want from life probably isn’t what life wants from you. And it means that living meaningfully is almost certainly going force you out of comfort and certainty, and in

How can we learn to master our minds? For thousands of years those deep into the Eastern wisdom traditions have espoused meditation and altered states of consciousness as the path to finding our deepest wisdom and the clearest path in life. Now - in the 21st century - a new wave of consciousness-trailblazers are bringing these ancient practices into a contemporary light with the flow state movement. This movement is concerned with helping people access flow state in their day to day to achieve peak performance in their work and personal lives. Flow state is a state of consciousness perhaps best characterised as one of no-mind, a place of no-thought and self forgetting, similar to that you might experience in surfing or snowboarding. The rational, logical mind is suspended and a deeper knowing takes over to guide you to peak performance. This transcendent state is being studied with increasing ferocity by the likes of Stephen Kotler, the author of the groundbreaking book Stealing Fire, who has found it to be a

Sound healing, through various techniques and technologies, is the conscious use of the energy of sound to promote wellness in the human system – including the expansion of consciousness. The science on how sound affects us physically is well defined and proven by traditional physics. The science on how sound affects us mentally through brainwave entrainment is also well proven and accepted as we can observe the different brainwave states through an EEG. How sound affects us emotionally is a little less clear, but there is increasing anecdotal evidence of people being dramatically transformed but it. More recently scientists have been turning their attention to how sound affects us at an even deeper level, that of consciousness. This is something that many ancient civilizations and modern indigenous cultures have been doing to access higher levels of consciousness for thousands of years. David Gibson is the President of the Globe Institute, a Sound healing centre based in San Francisco. He is the author of th

Life, death, rebirth. Expansion and contraction. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. These are the fundamentals and cycles of life as we know them.  Just as we look to the seasons and the stars for wisdom in their patterns, can we also see them within our own bodies? This is the question that has slowly unravelled within Therese Jornlin over the past 30 years as she has gone deeply into the wisdom of female biology and explored the innate intelligence of the womb cycle.  Central to Therese's work is becoming deeply conscious of the womb cycle, fully aware of this most fundamental of biological cycles, and use it as an intimate re-grounding and re-connection process both with the earth and within. In her course Women Awake, she deconstructs the cultural taboos around menstruation and our relationship to blood and instead teaches women to appreciate and elevate their cycle, to fully comprehend the mirror of their biological cycle to the ecology of the earth.

Just how important is it to ask fierce questions of yourself in life, even if you don't yet know the answers? In many ways, a life can be shaped just as much by asking the question as by having it answered.  Moving ourselves to that internal conversational frontier where we call out into the unknown, places us in a position of vulnerability and receptivity to whatever beautiful calling may come back. To go to the deepest depths of ourselves, we can think of at least three questions for our lives: What is it that you most deeply and profoundly love? What are your deepest and most profound gifts? What are your deepest and most profound responsibilities? These are the questions that Mac Macartney poses to himself and to all those he coaches in reaching their greatest potential and deepest connection with themselves and the world around them.  Having sailed into tricky seas earlier in life, Mac had a wake up call to return to nature, retrain as a gardener and then later take on the mantle of executive coaching wh

"It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing." - Carl Jung Do you ever think that there is more to life than meet's the eye? That there is a world of things hidden amongst the world of things seen? The shamanic discipline of life centers around exactly this, with practices that cultivate a way of seeing the hidden dynamics in life amongst the ordinary goings on, to turn the mirrors of form into windows of enlightenment. For the most part though it is perhaps fair to say that we live anchored largely to the physical. The scientist, shamanist and doctor Hank Wesselman believes though that our ongoing bias towards objective knowledge has come at the cost of a deeper, intuitive rapport with nature and our spiritual selves. This he says has led to a disenchantment with the way things are and that our re-enchantment with the physical and spiritual world can come from cultivating this visionary 'sha

"Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be. A thing for fools, this. And a holy thing. Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.” - Yehuda HaLevi To love is the fiercest and most essential of human callings and in our loss, our grief becomes the mirror to the depth that love. When we lose a loved one to bereavement or separation, it is often the case that we feel swallowed whole by the vastness of that grief and the pain of the loss. Making sense of this pain, weaving gold out of the suffering, is a delicate art form and an essential responsibility for us emerge with a deeper clarity, meaning and integration from our losses. In exploring this process, the popular five stage model of grief emerged in the 1960s to help people comprehend their feelings. The model speaks of a chronological step-by-step process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. To find closure, it is posited that one must go throug

At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel walked out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder and a sign that read “Walking to Listen.” He had just graduated from university and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided he’d walk and listen on a journey of 4,000 miles across the USA over the course of 11 months. What started as a quest to explore and to listen to other's perspectives, quickly became a deep, introspective journey into his own self; his fears, doubts, joys, solace and loneliness. As he navigated his way across the US, having interactions ranging from the most ordinary to the most profound, he found a world that was a mirror of himself and a journey that was a pilgrimage of the soul. Along the way, thousands of people shared their stories with him, often exposing their most intimate selves to a stranger who was deeply committed to listening. Those conversations were often tinged with threads of pain, be they from long-held division

Many people today often feel dislocated and confused about the idea of God. Since Isaac Newton’s findings of the universe and the birth of the Big Bang theory, we’ve had a hard time reconciling scientific truths of the cosmos and what the major religions tell us about both the start of the universe and the role of God. This incoherence between science and traditional views of God has left us without a creation story and a map of meaning for our lives that we so desperately yearn for as humans. Or has it? Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher of science, a lawyer and lifelong atheist believes she has found a new understanding of God that marries faith and fact. Having undergone a remarkable healing from an eating disorder, she set out to understand how and why believing in a higher power is not only beneficial but also deeply essential to our existence. In her book, A God That Could Be Real, Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about God. She dismantles several common assumptions about God and shows why

Beyond what we can understand with our rational minds, our bodies have an innate, natural sense of wisdom and truth. We can deeply feel authenticity in ourselves and in others and as we slowly learn to trust this bodily wisdom we settle deeply and peacefully into ourselves. This innate wisdom though is most often obscured by our conditioning, in particular the core limiting beliefs we hold, our reactive feelings and our somatic contractions that fuel our sense of struggle and veil who we really are. That’s where John Prendergast Ph.D., one of the foremost experts in somatic healing and psychotherapy, has bridged the latest findings in science and psychology with spirituality to present an enriched compass of our inner senses. In his book, In Touch, John peers deeply into this deeper dimension of wisdom that we all have access to. He speaks about the need to first pull back from excessive thinking and look to tune into ‘resonance’ as the launching point into this felt-sense of our lives. At the heart of his wo

Jan Engels-Smith is shamanic practitioner and the founder of the LightSong School of 21st Century Shamanism and Energy Medicine where she teaches students shamanism and journeying techniques Central to Jan’s work is the philosophy that shamanism is not the preserve of a gifted few seers or just for indigenous cultures to practice but that we all have the capacity to cultivate a shamanic skillset through journeying and practices that help move us from left brain focus into right-brain experience.  In her book, Through the Rabbit Hole, Jan talks about dominance of left-brained thinking in our culture and in particular the limiting belief that all we see is all there is. This belief keeps our imagination and our other subtler senses locked away from the wider world around us. I caught up with Jan to talk about the ways we can move out of the box, cultivate a relationship with spirits and use journeying to find greater fulfilment and peace in life.  

How do our genetics impact our energetic disposition? Were we born with a unique energetic blueprint that means we operate best in a specific way? It certainly seems that way from the wide range of preferences we all have about how we work, behave in relationships and cope with life’s trials and tribulations. In recent years, Human Design, a relatively new system for understanding our genetic and energetic blueprint, has been becoming an increasingly popular way for exploring this dimension of life. I spoke with Manex Ibar, a visionary shaman and healer who specialises in Human Design as well as a number of other modalities including energetics, shamanism and genetics. Central to our discussion was how useful it can be to have an understanding of our unique energetic blueprint, and how revelatory it can be in rearranging our lives for the greatest peace and fulfilment. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider rating Inner Truth in the Apple Podcasts app. It helps others know this is something worth listen

“Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone” wrote Paul Tillich. For millennia, great writers and thinkers have extolled the benefits of solitude, for reflection, inner peace and even to bring us closer to each other.  Yet with the most recent social research suggesting that more and more people are suffering from loneliness and that loneliness itself is worse for your physical and mental health than even alcohol and lack of sleep, there are some interesting questions that arise about the ontological nature of these two states and how we can be with both of them constructively.  To explore this I spoke with Robert Kull Ph.D., who in 2001 traveled to a remote uninhabited island on the rainy, wind-swept coast of southern Chile, more than one hundred miles from the nearest person. There he built a shelter and lived alone for a year to explore the physic