Is trauma real? In what sense? These questions don't in any way deny the real suffering of people diagnosed with trauma. Instead, they ask how we might take a broader and deeper look at trauma, in order to heal and transcend it. How can we do better in reducing the emergence of traumatizing experiences, and how can we do better in supporting ourselves and other in healing from these experiences, and opening up new possibilities for evolutionary learning? In her book Spacious Minds,...

The dominant cultural worldview is based upon extraction and exploitation practices that have brought us to the precipice of social, environmental, and climate collapse. Braiding poetic storytelling, climate justice and deep cultural analyses, and the collective knowledge of Earth-centered cultures, The Story is in Our Bones opens a portal to restoration and justice beyond the end of a world in crisis. Author, activist, and changemaker Osprey Orielle Lake weaves together ecological, mythical,...

A super special episode with the magical yogini Drukmo Gyal, a sonic shaman and practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism who bridges Tibetan traditions and global healing. Born into a family of Ngakpas in the culturally rich Amdo region of Tibet, Drukmo Gyal's life has been steeped in the practices of mantra and meditation from a young age. Growing up in a diverse community in Rebgong, she was immersed in an environment where spiritual practices were a daily ritual. Her journey in traditional...

An essential aspect of philosophy or LoveWisdom: How do we move forward in our lives? Maybe you have some problem or challenge in your personal life, or in your professional life. Or maybe you can sense the general stuckness of humanity, and maybe you even take that to be your own stuckness. Given all the confusion of the world, all the fear and uncertainty within our own soul and in the soul of the world, how can we find genuinely creative and beautiful ways to cultivate our lives forward,...

The Artefact: Holographic Habits and Healing, Part 1 We inquire into the nature of habit and freedom, the meaning of life, and how we can do our jobs and live together while feeling good in our mind, heart, and body, and feeling good about ourselves, about how we are living and loving.

Dialogue with a spiritual visionary. Cynthia Jurs experienced that almost comical spiritual archetypal pattern of meeting a wise old yogi in a mountain cave. She thought long and hard about what to ask him. His reply sent her on a remarkable spiritual pilgrimage. In this very special episode of Dangerous Wisdom, Cynthia shares her incredible journey, which she documents in her book, Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World. This is one of my favorite guests! Cynthia...

Video version here: https://youtu.be/FtDBx1IBkoA A spiritual pioneer, Phyllis Curott is an attorney, writer and one of America’s first public Witches. Her international best-selling memoir Book of Shadows, 5 other books and groundbreaking Witches’ Wisdom Tarot have been published in 14 languages, making her the most widely published Wiccan author in the world. An outspoken advocate in the courts and media, she handled or consulted on groundbreaking cases securing the legal rights of Witches,...

The secret of entering the Way of the Wolf, the Way of the Wild, the Way of the Soul; a celebration of the Gospel of Mountains and Wolves; and a path to creating a vitalizing civilization, based on a nonduality of Nature and Culture.

What is the truth that human credulity covers over, and what is the truth that the wild honesty of wolves seeks to reveal?

We consider wolves as a spiritual keystone species. We have considered the horse as a spiritual keystone species, and we can learn a lot from both Wolf and Horse as archetypal currents in the soul. Wolf is part of the mandala of the Dangerous Wisdom curriculum. In light of recent events in Wyoming and more broadly, this contemplation on the spirit of Wolf seems important and overdue. Includes reflections on the books, The Philosopher and the Wolf (by Mark Rowlands), Beyond Words (by Carl...

Our best science and philosophy suggest very clearly that we don't know what thinking IS. If large ecologies are mind, what is thinking? If mountains think better than most human beings, how can we learn to think like a mountain?

One of Sophia's owls of wisdom made friends with a delightful and insightful human, the author and ecologist Carl Safina. If you enjoyed My Octopus Teacher, you will love hearing about Carl Safina's fabulous feathered friend, Alfie. Carl's book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe, is a wonderful work of philosophy and ecology, and I think you'll enjoy this dialogue as much as I did. It was a great pleasure to speak with him. Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores...

Dr. Tawni Tidwell is an exceptional—and exceptionally interesting—person. She is the first person from the dominant culture to go through the whole Tibetan medical curriculum and earn a Tibetan medical degree. She also has a Ph.D. in bio-cultural anthropology. And her impressive experience and insight go beyond even this already remarkable education. We discuss her education and some aspects of Tibetan medicine. This is one of my favorite dialogues with one of my most favorite guests, and I...

What is it to think like a mountain? How is it that many of our decisions go wrong, sometimes producing negative side-effects? You might remember hearing about a hole in the ozone layer that appeared last century. No one intended to create that hole. But we did it. We didn’t intend to put mercury in our brains and lead in our bones. A recent study tested 62 samples of human placenta and found microplastics in every single one of them. How do things go wrong on personal and planetary scales?...

Lars Chittka is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying...

The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind Part 2 in an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach What is the nature of mind? What is the mind of Nature? We inquire into some radical and revolutionary aspects of mind and ecological thinking.

What is ecological thinking? Why does it matter? A contemplation for everyone—a series of contemplations for everyone. It’s an incredibly important series, because the idea of ecological thinking as we will approach it relates to the basic question of why we have so many problems in our world, and how we can resolve them, and it relates to the nature of mind and the mind of Nature, and how we realize our highest potentials. In other words, it’s about what we are.

The biggest bite of knowledge fruit humanity has taken in the past millennium or two has to do with complex systems—the very stuff of life. Neil Theise has written an excellent, accessible introduction to complex systems, and we discuss the basic elements. Neil Theise is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Dr. Theise’s studies in...

Bob Thurman, known in the academic circles as Professor Robert A.F. Thurman, is a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings and the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. A charismatic speaker and author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, Bob was named by The New York Times the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, and was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri Award in 2020, for his help in recovering India’s ancient...

How can we practice with Earth? How can we think with Earth? Can we allow our thinking and our practice of life to become undomesticated, wild, and indigenous again? In this dialogue, Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, philosopher in the academy and Zen priest, joins us to discuss Dogen, Gary Snyder, and the possibilities for a practice of the wild that can heal self and world in mutuality.

If Nature is super, if superness belongs to the very character of the Cosmos, then our attempts to exclude the super and the "impossible" may contribute in fundamental ways to the mess we find ourselves in (politically, economically, spiritually, and of course ecologically). We may claim that we want to exclude the impossible because we insist on excluding "superstition" and "woo," but in fact we may discover that we have thereby excluded the superness that belongs to the nature of Nature,...

On the Winter Solstice of 2023, U.S. President Biden will sign a law that could move our entire planet a step closer to global transformation--or not. It's up to us. But the law will require the disclosure of UFO/UAP and alien encounter information held as some of the deepest secrets of the U.S. government. What does this mean for us? It may surprise you to learn that even the Vatican has formally acknowledged the existence of advanced life outside our solar system, and the need to come...

Where do we find Sophia's wild garden of awakening and love? We're it. And we can see that garden in every direction, if we look with awakening eyes, eyes of love, eyes of wisdom, eyes of beauty. And we need to cultivate that garden, with "Acts of Restorative Kindness". We find references to Sophia as a presence in the Earth, a presence in soil and soul. She calls to us to attend to Her, and to all Her sacred beings. In this episode, we enjoy a deep dialogue with Mary Reynolds, emissary of...

Our need for wholeness has revealed itself clearly in many ways, and one of them relates to trauma. And, that puts us in dangerous wisdom territory, because talking about trauma can provoke anxiety and confusion. How can we relate most skillfully to the experiences we consider traumatic, and to our lives and our world as we metabolize those experiences?