Authentic Living

Based on my book, "Letting Go of Good," endorsed by Caroline Myss, Dr. Larry Dossey and others, today we are going to talk about the difference between being good and being real. Since the time when we were toddlers we've heard "Be good" from our parents. Even was they waved us off to college, with tears in their eyes, they gave us the same tired advice, "Be good." But first, being good is a dubious concept, since what is good to one is not so good to another. Further, there are many ways in which we think we are being good, by following all of the dictates of society for duty, obligation, loyalty, should, have to, ought to but we are also filled with a sense of meaninglessness or even resentment. So, is any of that genuine. Regardless of how it looks to others, and even to ourselves, being good can be done from very insincere motivations. Further, people who are always striving to be good as a method of gaining or maintaining a sense of worthiness are often taken advantage of by controllig and even abusive people. Sometimes that idea means we are not using skills such as intuition and discernment. So, tune in today and let's find out how to stop being good and start being real.

We typically think of duality in terms of its spiritual consequence. But today we are talking about duality in terms of its PSYCHOSPIRITUAL consequence. Psychospiritual duality has created a split between consciousness and unconsciousnesss so that, since we are not fully either, we live in a semi-conscious state. The fact that we cannot fully be either does, in and of itself, argue against that duality that says that everything is polarized into "either/or" rather than "both/and." But since we can't really be "both/and" when we are semi-conscious, we will need to do something about that. Semi-consciousness is not a state we can call truly alive. So, it is essential that we begin to talk about it. And today, we will. We will talk about how that split happened and what we can do about it.

As we come to the end of 2025 and look back over the devastation and fear of more devastation that many, if not most, of us have experienced this year, it is hard to imagine feeling any hope for 2026. But there is hope. There is HOPE. This show will expose that hope for what it is and facilitate its expansion.

Most of us would say that "No one is perfect." We say, "Strive for progress, not perfection." But even as we are saying that, many of us are still striving for perfection. Much of this is unconscious to us, but sometimes we recognize at least the tail end of this dragon when it shows up in our anxiety, even in our depression. Perfectionism births a loud and obnoxious inner critic that just will not let go. We know that when we live with someone who is hypercritical that this is a form of emotional abuse. But we do not realize that that same hypercritical voice is within us emotionally abusing us. And it turns out that, after all, perfection is actually a myth, a myth we can live out of as if it is the only reality there is. In fact, perfectionism can scew our entire version of reality into something that is not realistic at all. Today we will talk about perfectionism and some ways to release its strangle hold on our thinking, feeling, believing, and emoting. Don't miss it.

It is very hard for us to compute, but it is possible to live out an identity--which we might even call a personality--that is not who we really are as a Self. That Self--with a capital S--is different from the self--with a lowercase s. The self is who we believe that we are as a personality, which often turns out to only be an identity. The Self is the deepest essence of who we really are. So, today, we are talking about the various identities, how they are formed, how they live out their introjections, how they interact with others and how they might start the pathway to the more authentic Self.

Today we are talking to Dr. Don St. John, author of the book "Healing the Wounds of Childhood," as this is one of the most important of all of the subjects we could discuss. Very often it is these wounds that keep us trapped, even as we are striving to get past them in some kind of way. WE simply do not realize how our past is invading our present. Or, if we do, we believe that those wounds somehow define us. How can we grow into our full potential while these wounds remain yet unhealed? How do we increase our ability to receive and absorb love, enjoy more life-giving love connections, deal more effectively with stress and improve our resilience and health all while expanding our sense of who we are? These questions and more will be answered during today's show. Don't miss it.

It's natural for us to want to get what we want. Unfortunately, we often use bargaining as a way to get what we want and to seek a sense of safety--that might not actually be safe. When we are trying to get to acceptance of any difficult reality, we might reach the stage in which we bargain. So, if I'm dying of cancer, I might bargain with life by saying "I'll never do that again if you just let me live." And this is natural, for we really want to live. However, bargaining can become toxic, in that it may keep us stuck in a ever shrinking loop of "IF I... THEN he'll...". We might, for example, stay for years in a toxic relationship or situation bargaining and bargaining with the same reality, looking for different results. So, "IF I can just say it right, THEN she'll stop drinking." "IF he would just treat me better, THEN I can finally feel loved." "IF I stay and become very loving, THEN he won't hit me again." "IF I hang into this heinous job for ten more years THEN I can retire and finally get to do what I want.""You can see her that there is always an IF/THEN. That's what makes it a bargain. And as you can see, we can stay trapped in really bad situations and relationships through such bargaining. We can get stuck for entire lifetimes in these toxic bargains. These are bargains with the devil in which we sell our souls for a magic trick. Come learn how to stop bargaining and start LIVING!

You cannot read a paragraph of modern day spiritual books or hear any spiritual speaker on the topic of the EGO without being informed that the Ego is a bad thing. From this perspective the Ego is thought to be the enemy. It is that part of us that wants us to fail, that wants us to be unloving, unkind and inconsiderate, to be afraid and to live inauthentically. In that way that old Ego sounds a whole lot like that old devil, Beelzebub, Iblis, Shaitan, the Dragon, the Serpent, Abaddon, Belial, the father of this world, the god of all lies, Lucifer, etc. This idea of the Ego has us believing that we must fight against it. In fact many would say that we need to "get rid of it" or even kill it. But wouldn't this mean that Ego fights Ego or even that Ego kills Ego? Surely the divine doesn't need to fight, right? What if we've misunderstood? What if the Ego is just a liaison between the inner and outer worlds? What if we absolutely need this balancing liaison in order to have good mental health? Wouldn't fighting it then mean losing that liaison and, therefore, our own mental health? Is it possible that this view of Ego is but another part of the dualistic trance state that has us all believing that we are not who we really are, not a constituent part of the divine? Don't miss this life-changing show.

Mark Nepo is an author, poet, philosopher, beloved teacher and cancer survivor who has, for thirty years, been exploring how we can stay awake and authentic when our wounds make us numb and hidden; how we can minimize what stands between us and our experience of life; how we can create a practice that wears down what thickens around our hearts and minds. And today we are going to talk to him about those very things, as we explore together the meanings and messages of his books, The Endless Practice and Reduced to Joy. The Endless Practice explores how the soul works in the world, and how by engaging our soul in the world, we are shaped by the endless practice of becoming who we were born to be. Reduced to Joy is a book of poems about the nature of working with what we are given until it wears us through to joy. This is a special opportunity to come closer to your own soul. Don't miss it. Mark Nepo is an author, poet, philosopher and cancer survivor who, for the past thirty years, has been braving and showing us the path to the soul, to the practice of living in soul, while in body. His voice not only tell us but sings to us of the soul and its profound gravity of joy. His books, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen; The Book of Awakening; Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art; Reduced to Joy and the Endless Practice have capture of world of people looking for meaning and the actual experience of life. They have been notice by Oprah Winfrey who has interviewed Nepo on Super Soul Sunday several times, and have won awards such as the 2012 Books for a Better Life Award. Nepo is a man whose life and words demonstrate the essential meaning of life, and who teaches us all how to find it.

One of the most difficult challenges of any relationship is communication. How do we say what we mean without lashing out, or hurting the ones we love the most? Unfortunately, we tend to go to the extremes on this one: We either shut-down, or we lash out. Neither of those two options work, however, to create the intimacy that a relationship needs to grow. Nancy Dreyfus has come to our aid here with a beautiful book, "Talk to Me Like I'm Someone You Love, Revised Edition: Relationship Repair in a Flash" (2013) containing a set flashcards that say precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. What a beautiful idea. Nancy is a Transpersonal Psychologist who works with many relationships on this very issue of communication, and came up with this idea for her clients. But now we can all benefit from it—so today we are going to be talking about the how-to of communicating at the most difficult times in relationship. You are not going to want to miss this one. Nancy Dreyfus

Most of us have been raised to be good. We were to share, be kind, be loving, say thank you when we didn't feel grateful, say I'm sorry when we weren't, hug people we didn't want to hug and say we loved people we didn't even know, much less love. But the idea of goodness held a magical quality for most of us. We thought that IF we were good enough, THEN we would be worthy, we would be loved and we could finally rest secure. We assume, therefore, that being real means being less than good—and the magic will go away. We know we have thoughts and feelings that we would call "bad." So, if we are real, does that mean that we will turn mean or "bad?" And what about worthiness? Doesn't being good make us worthy? But being real doesn't mean being bad, mean, unkind or unworthy. Being real means being genuine. And this show is not only going to clarify the difference but it will bring home the reasoning for why we can stop being good and start being real. It will reveal how we can begin to adopt and adjust to our genuine Self. Don't miss it.

This show is a rerun, but the truths haven't changed. We live in a social environment now in which hate is overt, active and visible. Not so very long ago, in fact, hate was hidden, covert, and only active in a passive/aggressive fashion. But there are many people out there today who are trying to tell us that hate is a good thing. That it is even a Christian thing. That, of course, we hate, for how could we feel any other way toward people of other races, other cultures, other skin colors and other sexual orientations, and gender identities. But hate is a response to fear. And fear is a response to ignorance. There is so much that we fear that we really have no reason to fear. So what do we do with all of this? We learn to find the love beneath the hate. This show is going to show us just how we can do that. Don't miss this important discussion.

The terms spiritual abuse have, thus far, only been used to describe how Christian leaders abuse church members. But spiritual abuse runs far deeper and wider than can be described by any one religion. Spiritual abuse is abuse of the human spirit. While it's true that your spirit--your soul--can't really be damaged, it's also true that you can be split off from any conscious awareness of your spirit--and that's what spiritual abuse does. It is possible to live a life complete bereft of any conscious awareness of one's own spirit. That's what spiritual abuse can do. It can happen in any religion, in the spiritual but not religious population, in New Age followers, in New Thought followers, in the Human Potential Movement, and in our homes, in our schools and in our workplaces. Anywhere there is spirit there can be abuse of that spirit. But it can also be healed. Let's talk about it--it's time.