We live in a fragmented culture. That means our attempts at holism, including any supposed holism of body and mind, could involve significant fragmentation and ignorance. We need holism and vision in order to make sure our practices of embodiment heal self and world at the same time.

Instead of becoming more “embodied,” we, in some crucial sense, need to become more . . . ecologied, encosmosed, and liberated into the mysteries of interwovenness, liberated into sacredness and wonder. If “embodied” signifies getting “into” our “body,” it misses our true need in a variety of ways. For a free pdf of practices to help facilitate ecosensual awareness and a more ecological embodiment, visit the Dangerous Wisdom website: https://dangerouswisdom.org/practices-of-a-sacred-place  

Embodiment and somatics are big business. But do our practices of embodiment and somatics subtly maintain the duality between mind and body, Nature and culture, human and the larger community of life? And do we lose track of the fact that what we refer to as "my body" is usually an abstraction? In the worst case scenario, “embodiment” becomes another form of spiritual materialism, in which we bypass the more serious demands of a philosophical life with rationalizations so perfect they sound...

Embodiment and somatics are big business. We need to recover our balance and our sanity, and heal our wounding in relation to embodiment. How can we do it in a way that minimizes spiritual materialism and prevents all these practices from becoming part of the self-help catastrophe and the continued elaboration of the pattern of insanity? Reflecting on some common errors of embodiment and how we can transcend them might give us some much needed nourishment.

Jay Tompt joins us for some economic reflections in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher. As part of our dialogue, Jay shares an inspiring idea you can put top use in your own community, to germinate sprouts of wisdom, love, and beauty: The One-Day Incubator. Jay is a co-founder of the Totnes REconomy Centre, a lecturer for Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College, an associate lecturer in economics at Plymouth University as well as a regular teacher on our post-graduate economics programmes. ...

What happens when two philosophers and a neuroscientist walk into a podcast? They talk about things they wish more people knew. If people only knew how magical the world is, they might take better care of it, and relate to it with a greater sense of reverence and wonder. It's not that our reverence and wonder should depend on the existence of woo-woo phenomena, but that nature's superness is palpable in every direction if we would only slow down, brush the cobwebs of dogmatism away, and relax...

Dangerous Wisdom with a friend from the Emerald Isle. Take a journey to Ireland without leaving home, and take a leap into the sacred wells of wisdom, wonder, and magic. Join us as we contemplate the power of place and the places of our empowerment. The delightful and insightful Manchán Magan and I read and reflect on passages from his book and other sources of wisdom, inviting you into your own practice of sacred place. In addition to reading Manchán's beautiful book, you can get some extra,...

Kate Rudd joins us to talk about a short and highly accessible chapter from the classic book seeking to integrate economics and wisdom: Small Is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Small Is Beautiful, Dangerous Wisdom will host a series of dialogues with faculty and alumni of Schumacher College. Schumacher's book is exceptionally relevant today, as we have continued the pattern of insanity he sought to question, and his insights and...

Mona Sobhani joins us to discuss her book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe. Mona is a cognitive neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur. A former research scientist at the University of Southern California, she holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. Her work has...

The nature and scale of ecological degradation can provoke empathy distress that devolves into depression, despair, anxiety, antipathy, avoidance, and outright denial. But ecological awareness and ecological education can help us to see how much power we have when we become attuned to spiritual and ecological realities. We can actually help to heal the world—each and every one of us, wherever we live. Imagine a national park bigger than Yosemite, bigger than Yellowstone, bigger than the Grand...

Derrick Jensen's new book is called, Marijuana: A Love Story. It details his wild romance with this oft misunderstood plant teacher and medicine, and how the dream the Marijuana once offered people (a version of "the American Dream") became ruined by the corporatized capitalistic system. From the book description: "In state after state, the wealth-building capacity of this extraordinary plant is now concentrating into the control of the already rich. From seed to smoke, legalization is...

A magnificent swindle attempts to keep us from realizing true peace and happiness. How can we overcome it? We must begin by seeing through it, with the help of Lewis Mumford, Walter Kaufmann, C.G. Jung, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. We consider addiction, domestication, distraction, and the material bribe we all must keep ratifying in order for the pattern of insanity to perpetuate itself. We can stop ratifying it here and now.

Picking up our contemplation on the feedback loop of Mind and Nature, we enter into insights and suggestions from Nietzsche and the poet-philosopher-farmer Wendell Berry. These thinkers help us to face some troubling questions: What are we not likely, or not able, to become conscious of, simply by living in the dominant culture? What does the culture make likely as our experience? What does it make likely as our world? The general answer to the latter question seems to be something degraded,...

We arise embedded in mind, with mind in every direction. Human beings in the dominant culture seem to miss the mindedness all around them. The “modern” human walks around with “ideas” “in” their head. This localization of mind remains untenable on scientific grounds, and does not fit with most of the spiritual/philosophical traditions we have inherited.  Nature is already Minded. Because of this, we need to mind Nature—that is, attend to Nature, and also allow Nature’s mindedness to...

It's something the self-help-industrial complex covers over, turning our sincere search for healing and success into the self-help catastrophe. What does our soul really want? How can we get on a path of sanity and sacredness, a path of true healing and happiness? Wisdom can help us find our way---but first we have to see things as they are, which means seeing our deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret.

In honor of Interdependence Day, celebrating the total interwovenness of all things, we speak with Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, a philosopher specializing in the anomalous. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher and interdisciplinary researcher specializing in anomalous phenomena and their implications for our understanding of consciousness. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2008, studying under Thomas Nagel, and taught at Brandeis University before leaving academia for an...

If you struggle with getting enough sleep, you aren't alone. Keep in mind: six hours or less per night on an ongoing basis seems about as bad as getting zero for two days straight. As much as 41% of adults in the U.S. report short sleep, and as much as 84% of high school students report short sleep. Worse yet, 50-70 million U.S. citizens (perhaps more) qualify for a formal diagnosis of sleep disorder, ranging from insomnia to sleep apnea. All of this should create a sense of urgent compassion...

We begin with a story, and thread all the way through the meaning of enlightenment, and the need to receive initiation into the mysteries of life, follow a path of joy, cultivate reverence for wisdom and wildness, and truly realize the inconceivable interwovenness of all things.

Love is a trainable skill, and luck is an inevitable ingredient in our lives. Our current science challenges the notion of the sovereign individual, the importance of love, and the need for a paradigm shift. The Harvard Study of Adult Development goes together with other data to invite us to question the nature and the role of love, luck, and the true wealth of nations. The Harvard Study also supports the need for a new kind of science.

In this episode we rewrite the headlines: Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations. What is the true wealth of nations? Isn’t it gross domestic product? And if nations are comprised of people, what is our true wealth? We’re thinking through the true wealth of nations in relation to our last contemplation. At that time, we considered the famous Grant Study, more formally known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. If you haven’t heard about the study, it’s worth listening...

It’s an impressive study, the longest scientific study of adult development, conducted across decades (it started in 1938). Referred to as the Grant Study or the Harvard Study of Adult Development, this famous research program has gotten several rounds of press. But the press coverage seems to miss something incredibly vital and far-reaching in this study. Even the books have failed to make it clear. In a way, we could suggest the lead researchers of the study missed this finding—didn’t...

A contemplation of healing, wholeness, the challenges of suffering, and the paradoxes of success. We consider some of the essential questions: In what sense is life a self-healing truth? What is the nature of health and healing? What is the nature of sickness—our cultural sickness and our own mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical sickness? What is the role of nondoing in our healing and in our life?

In our culture, we have placed a set of habitual notions about time on top of the soul’s instincts and intuitions about rhythm and temporality. The physicist David Bohm said that, “. . . every thought assumes time. Whether we discuss thought or anything else, we always take time for granted. And we take for granted the notion that everything exists in time. We don’t take for granted that time is an abstraction and a representation, but we take for granted that time is of the...

Leslie Ellis, Ph.D.,RCC Author, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy https://drleslieellis.com A delicious discussion of the importance of dreams and some of the basics of how to approach them. Dr. Ellis wrote a book called, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy that provides a highly accessible, yet insightful education on the nature of dreams and how to work with them. By offering a unified model, Dr. Ellis makes it possible for all of us (clinicians and non-clinicians) to begin to...

A little singing and swearing, to help us arrive at our awesome presence. Humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om share a common root, and considering their interwovenness can help us to touch our basic dignity. In this contemplation, the first to have both swearing and singing, we look at some elements of the dominant culture’s way of living that indicate how Nature has gotten pushed into the shadow. We consider the architectural manifestos of Hundertwasser, the memories of Jung, and the...