The Soul-Directed Life

Big Question: How do I find the courage to sing my song? Stephen Dinan is the founder and CEO of the Shift Network, a global provider of online transformational courses and trainings. He joins us at the cusp of the American election to talk about an essential book for our time, Sacred America, Sacred World. This topic is important to all of us, but I am probably the only interviewer who grew up inside the original radical right, the John Birch Society, and raised a son who went to prison rather than cooperate with the federal government in its hunt for political activists on the left. I am living this book! It's going to be an emotional conversation for me. Please join us.

Big Question: How do I find the courage to sing my song? Matthew Fox is an internationally acclaimed theologian and spiritual maverick. He has spent 40 years revolutionizing Christian theology, reintroducing the great mystics, taking on patriarchal religion, and advocating for a creation-centered spirituality of compassion, justice, and resacralizing Mother Earth. He joins us to talk about his new book A Way to God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey. Matthew Fox and Thomas Merton! A divine combination!

Big Question: How do I find the courage to sing my song? Mark Nepo inspired readers and seekers all around the world with his No. 1 New York Times best-seller The Book of Awakening. Beloved as a poet, teacher, and storyteller, Mark has been called "one of the finest spiritual guides of our time," "a consummate storyteller," and "an eloquent spiritual teacher." Mark joins us to talk about a topic he knows deep in his bones: how to find the courage to live the life you have been given, articulated in his new book, The One Life We're Given.

Big Question: How can I create time and space for rest? Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed author, teacher, sacred activist, and mystic. He has written many classics including The Return of the Mother. Andrew and Karuna Erickson in British Columbia join us to share Heart Yoga, the marriage between physical yoga and the yogas of mystical ecstasy, visualization, meditation, and passionate energy. This is the powerful path of yoga that renews, restores, and energizes hearts awakened to love, minds instructed by wisdom, and souls alive to their transcendent origin in bodies supple to divine joy.

Big Question: How can I create time and space for rest? Dr. Paulette Kouffman Sherman is an award-winning author, relationship expert, and licensed psychologist with a doctorate degree in clinical psychology. She has been featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Early Show, and more. She is the author of more than 20 books including Dating From the Inside Out. She joins us to talk about how a bath can be a sacred ritual that revitalizes your spirit.

Big Question: How can I create time and space for rest? Rabbi Rami Shapiro is a renowned and beloved spiritual teacher, author, storyteller, columnist, and commentator. In other words, he writes and he talks. He's talked on The Soul-Directed Life about mysticism, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness, and Embracing the Divine Feminine, his beautiful translation of The Song of Songs. To kick off our month of rest, Rabbi Rami joins us to talk about his unique translation of Ecclesiastes. Is it true? Is there a time to every purpose under heaven?

Big Question: How can I create time and space for rest? Kathleen Hirsch is an award-winning journalist and author, telling the stories of the unseen in Songs From the Alley. She founded Witness: A Journal of Social Responsibility. She is a writing teacher, spiritual director, and chronicler of the inward journey to wholeness. She joins us to expand our understanding of rest beyond moments or days into a whole-life view as told in her multi-decade memoir, A Sabbath Life.

Big Question: How can I create time and space for rest? Debra Mae White is a wife, mother, grandmother, gardener, with 40 years of experience in the financial services industry. If you know anything about the world of finance, you know it's high, high, high stress. Ten-hour days are normal. You are at the beck and call of bosses and clients. Add being a woman to that mix and you have to be "superwoman." But superwoman may not exist. Debra Mae joins us to share what she has learned about how to cope with stress, cultivate a life of self-care, rejuvenate, and nurture your spirit.

Big Question: How do I recognize my personal sun? Thomas Moore has always written extraordinary books like Care of the Soul. His newest is the most extraordinary. It is a radical new translation of the Gospel of Matthew stripped of all the theological agendas, religious moralism, and dogma added throughout the centuries. I'm on fire to read this book and speak with Thomas Moore on The Soul-Directed Life. When we read Matthew with clear eyes, will we see our "sun"-our "son"?

Big Question: How do I recognize my personal sun? In 1992, I was doing toxic work, living in a toxic marriage, and, at 41, a new mother. I was parched, hungry, lost. I heard that Agni Jaya Charlotte Starfire was opening a Women's Spiritual Empowerment group. I had no idea who she was or what that meant, but I showed up in my pinstriped suit. That night a door into the mystic opened and beckoned me to begin the rich inward journey to my personal sun-the Divine Feminine. Join Agni Jaya and me in a personal conversation about how we recognize and honor the Faces of the Mother!

Big Question: How do I recognize my personal sun? Solala Towler has taught and practiced Taoist meditation and qigong for 25 years. He is the author of Tales From the Tao and Tao Paths to Love. His organization, the Abode of the Eternal Tao, publishes The Empty Vessel, a quarterly magazine offering inspiration, illumination, and advice on Chinese medicine, qigong and tai chi, meditation, the I Ching, feng shui, and other aspects of Eastern philosophy. Solala joins us to talk about his new book Practicing the Tao Te Ching and what we can learn from the East about finding our source.

Big Question: How do I recognize my personal sun? Sandra Ingerman is one of the most beloved shamanic teachers on the planet. She's the author of eight books including Awakening to the Spirit World, Walking in Light, and Soul Retrieval. In her new book and the focus of our conversation, Speaking With Nature, Sandra helps us awaken to the deep wisdom abiding in Mother Earth in her rocks, her plants, her trees, her animals, her sand, soil, and water. If you are looking for your personal "sun," your primary source of wisdom and love, there's no better place to begin than Gaia.

Big Question: How can I recognize what needs to change? Three years ago Mirabai Starr declared, "You must become friends with death," on this show. I took it as a personal command and have explored the relationship of life and death ever since. A wonderful place to start is with the phenomena of near-death experiences. People who return from death are transformed. They see and feel and hear what we, who have not touched that threshold, do not. But can we? Sheila, Dennis and Matthew Linn have explored the depth of NDE. And they've written an essential book, The Gifts of Near-Death Experiences: You Don't Have to Die to Experience Your True Home. You do not have to die to reap the benefits of an NDE! You can create a spiritual practice that helps you catch the "benign virus" of an NDE. If you want to live, practice dying!

Big Question: How can I recognize what needs to change? Cate Montana is an author, screenwriter, and intrepid explorer of inner space. A former editor of What the Bleep Do We Know!? her writing focuses on self-realization, the physics of consciousness, global reawakening to feminine heart values, and sustainable living. She's the author of Unearthing Venus: My Search for the Woman Within. Cate joins us to talk about the big thing that needs to change: our perception of our ego. It'll all be in her next book, The E-Word, but we get to hear it now.

Big Question: How can I recognize what needs to change? We speak of the divine feminine, but who is she? I know her intimately as Sophia. Others as Shakti, Shekinah, Tara, Holy Spirit, Black Madonna. She has countless names and faces. But at her essence, who is she? Lasara Firefox Allen's new book, Jailbreaking the Goddess: A Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality, probes the divine feminine essence to discover her five characteristics. When we see and love those five faces, we can see and love our own face in Hers!