Thank you for bearing with me while I’ve taken a short break. I’ve missed doing this podcast, and I’m so glad that Ty Powers, mindfulness guide extraordinaire, is the person to bring me back and round out this year.
"You live your values every day." I loved reflecting on this one sentence from Ty, even though so much else he shared is such a beautiful year-end gift. Ty has been working in the mindfulness, yoga, and Buddhist sphere for decades, alongside his wife Sarah who was a guest on this show in the fall. He works for Skillfullchange.org and is a change and transition strategist. We talked a lot about how modern life has blurred the seasons of our lives and how the information age has caused us to misalign our bodies from our minds. We discussed the challenges that modern life brings up and how we can continue to utilize the wisdom traditions to look inside ourselves to uncover and recover parts of ourselves we pushed to the side. Ty and Sarah call this work Internal Family Systems, in which you can imagine having a whole family inside of you with different personalities and stories.
These two episodes with Ty and Sarah, who I’ve known for almost 20 years, feel like the best way to wrap up 2023. Stay tuned for a special episode next week on my year and my plans for 2024. And let me know what you think of this episode!
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Terms and references:
1. Ty Powers
4. Buddhism: a religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings from the Buddha
5. The three marks of existence: in Buddhism, everything is marked by three characteristics - impermanence, suffering or dissatisfaction, and non-self
6. Internal Family Systems (IFS)
7. W.A.I.T. Why Am I Talking?
8. A Book of Silence, by Sarah Maitland
9. Lojong: a practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition which uses various lists of aphorisms for contemplative practice; mind training
10. Seven Points of Mind Training
11. Sarah Powers episode on The Weeks Well
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Episode credits:
Original music by Kim's band Governess.
Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.
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