This will be my last episode for a while. I’ll be placing the podcast on hiatus to pursue my other interests of writing, working with individual students, and spending more time with family and friends as the pandemic lessens. It’s been a wonderful experience creating and hosting this podcast and I’m very proud of the work. The episodes will remain available on all the major podcast platforms as well as the Unconditional Healing website, so please share the podcast with any ...

Jeff welcomes Toni Bernhard to talk about her journey with chronic illness, the loss of identity and self-blame that inevitably follow, and her dive into writing. To her surprise, that innocent endeavor spawned four Buddhist-inspired books - three on living well with illness and chronic pain, and one on walking the Buddhist path. Two of those books are on the Unconditional Healing recommended reading list.We begin with Toni’s trip to Paris with her husband in 2001, where she shock...

This episode is another solo show, featuring a talk Jeff gave at a Healing Circle in June of 2021. The full title is “Meditation is Not Therapy, Sanity is Not What You Think”. Jeff chose this topic because in our materialistic society, everything gets filtered through the idea of winning, betterment, and constant improvement. Which at its face makes sense - no one intentionally wants to lose or trend downward. Except there is a flaw in that thinking which is an inability to ...

Gustavo Serafini was born with an extremely rare birth defect known as proximal femoral focal deficiency (PFFD). ). At birth, he had only his left arm and two shortened legs, one supported using a prosthesis and the other with a brace. In spite of that beginning, Gustavo has gone on to become a successful entrepreneur with the company he co-founded with his brother, pureaudiovideo.com, providing exceptional home entertainment experiences in South Florida and beyond. He...

This episode is a solo show, featuring a talk I gave recently at the Healing Circle. It’s entitled “Finding Your True North: Integrating Intention with Mindfulness Practice", and is especially timely given the resurgence of the pandemic. It has to do with contemplating and sussing out our most deeply held beliefs, especially when feeling uncertain and discouraged. Intentions, as I explain, are different than goals, although the latter are best served when they spring from the form...

I’ve wanted to have a cutting-edge dietary and nutritional expert on the show for a while as diet plays such a prominent role in our health and well-being, and has played a huge role in stabilizing my own chronic illness. Enter Tim James, aka The Health Hero, and founder of Chemical Free Body, through which he offers nutritional coaching, podcasts, and customized nutritional supplements. Tim learned his craft the hard way, having existed on the Standard American Diet for years (a...

Jeremy Sherman is an out-of-the-box thinker who has made it his life’s work to contemplate and write about humanity’s most challenging dilemmas. He has spent decades of study on the human condition, and is an expert on the many ways we employ language to advantage and also to make our lives more difficult and painful. Jeremy has invented over 2000 novel terms for those times when current terminology just doesn’t suffice. He has also published over 1000 articles on Psychology Today and written...

Sam Thiara is a master storyteller, using that honed skill very effectively in his role as mentor, teacher and coach to thousands of people over the years. This skill was on display in Sam’s two TEDx talks, “Discovering the Extraordinary in the Ordinary”, and “Activating the Voice Within to be Louder than the Noise Around”. Exposed to adversity as a small boy of nine years old when his father became paralyzed from the waist down, Sam learned to live in the present at an early age a...

I try never to use the word “warrior” lightly. But Dr. BJ Miller is a warrior of the first order, having overcome and thrived after a near-fatal electrical accident took half his arm and both legs below the knee. BJ talks about how that life-shattering experience proved to be a foretaste of what it means to confront death, a taboo subject in our culture. BJ utilized his accident as a launch point to pursue medicine as a career and to become one of the world’s leading experts...

Now retired, Ann Cason has spent most of her adult life cultivating, refining, and writing about the art and science of caring for the elderly and the ailing. Her book Circles of Care is generally accepted as the benchmark for how to provide at-home care for an elder, but at the time of publication (2001) was still considered somewhat revolutionary. Ann’s involvement with the elderly was an accident. Suffering from a hallucination, (not all that uncommon in the go-go 1970's)...

Laura Khoudari came by her profession as a trauma-informed personal trainer through a circuitous route. No gym rat, Laura avoided working out and weight training until the unresolved pain in her spine from a herniated disc while in college left her no choice. Today, she works exclusively with clients who identify as living with trauma and uses embodied strength training and other mindfulness practices to help them heal and transform. In Laura’s own words she describes her work as ...

This episode is a very special one! I so wanted to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11, when the World Trade Center Towers shockingly came down twenty years ago on this day. Being that I live in close proximity to New York City, it’s impossible to ignore the anniversary each year, and it is especially hard this year with the end of the “Forever War” in Afghanistan that was launched in response to the 9/11 assault. My guest this week is a gentleman who was in the Tower that day and ...

When we experience great difficulty in our life, we tend to panic and “catastrophize”, because we’re so stuck on expecting our life to unfold in a certain way. So, this talk, originally given to a Healing Circle, is very much about looking at our attitudes and realizing just how much we are addicted to comfort and security, and how little we are prepared for the opposite - discomfort and uncertainty. It is based upon Buddhist teachings first formulated by an 11th century master fr...

How does one bring spirituality to the task of counseling clients at moments of crisis or loss? Can one move beyond the standards of traditional counseling to identify what a person needs and wants in life and then design a plan to achieve it? These are the questions that Dr. Jeanne Michele attempts to answer during each of her counseling sessions with individuals and couples. Jeanne is considered part coach, part teacher, part mentor, part change agent, but spirituality is ...

Andrew Holecek is a prolific author and spiritual teacher who writes and teaches extensively on navigating the Buddhist path. He is able to present this tradition from a contemporary perspective, by skillfully marrying the ancient wisdom of the East with the scientific findings and knowledge of the West. I first encountered Andrew years ago when I read his first book, The Power and the Pain. Drawing upon his years of intensive study and practice, the book teaches the value and oppo...

This episode is about attitude. How do we face adversity when it inevitably comes into our life? What tools do we rely on when the going gets rough? In answering these questions, we need to begin where we are, by looking at our current state of mind. How much of our views of the world are wrapped up in our biases, and what others think about us? One bias that we typically share is a belief in a solid “self” that seeks to maintain control, and around which, the world re...

Playing a complicated classical piece on the piano can be amongst the most complex and difficult feats of human hand-eye coordination and cognitive processing. In attempting to master their art with painstaking diligent practice, 75% of professional musicians suffer injuries, compounded by trying to play through the pain. Enter Madeline Bruser. Raised as an exceptionally talented pianist, Madeline performed as a soloist with the Denver and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras at a yo...

Dr. Elaine Yuen is an educator, interfaith chaplain, Buddhist minister, and artist. She is the former chair of the Wisdom Traditions Department and associate professor at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Now retired, she continues to teach and write on pastoral caregiving (chaplaincy), contemplative education, and Buddhist studies. She recently moved back to Philadelphia where she was an associate professor, researcher, and interfaith chaplain at Thomas Jefferson University. Our c...

None of us openly welcomes chaos and uncertainty into our life. Even hearing those words can send a shudder through our bodies. Yet, eventually, they will come unbidden for all of us. This solo episode comprises a talk I gave right before the USA presidential election of 2020 at the New York City Shambhala meditation center when chaos and uncertainty reigned from a global pandemic and a polarized electorate in the United States. When we face adversity in our life, we often s...

Chungliang Al Huang is a human dynamo and just listening to him raises one’s spirits about what is possible. He is one of the most skilled masters of Tai Ji in the world but has also made his influence known in many other disciplines throughout his life. He was born and grew up in Shanghai in the 1930s and his family moved to Taiwan early on and he was trained in many of the classic disciplines. Longing to move to the West, he came here in the roaring ’60s ostensibly to stud...