About this episode

Chad Bennett and Keith Martin-Smith explore the interconnectedness of waking up, growing up, and cleaning up through a meditative inquiry.

What happens when two old Dharma brothers — both Zen priests, both former solitary practitioners, both veterans of decades on the cushion — sit down with no script and simply follow what's alive between them? This conversation is the answer. Keith Martin-Smith welcomes Chad Bennett, a Zen priest, former psychotherapist, and founder of Mitra, a practice community built around spiritual friendship and what he calls transformative companionship. Chad left the title "psychotherapist" behind for a pointed reason: he grew weary of the Western habit of turning everything — especially ourselves — into objects to be diagnosed and fixed. Mitra is his attempt to begin from wholeness rather than brokenness, though he's quick to warn that telling someone they're whole when they feel shattered only deepens the wound. The art is opening the field so wide that the broken feeling is fully allowed — because that permission is itself the medicine. At the heart of the episode is Chad's conviction that waking up, growing up, and cleaning up are not three separate projects to complete in sequence, but a single braided unfoldment that arrives all at once, in the same ordinary breath. To show rather…

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