In one significant way, Ty Bollinger is like almost all of us. He lost someone he loved very dearly to cancer. His father. In the following decade, Ty lost 6 more of his family members to cancer, including his mother. Like many of us, Ty found it hard to believe that the standard medical response his father, mother and family received was the best or only solution possible. Impassioned, he took action, and began diligently to research alternatives. Learning of the body's true power to heal...

Teresa Yanaros was born into life destined to unite in service with beings beyond Earth. Child of a military family stationed at RAF Woodbridge, England in the early 1980s, she grew up hearing stories about the Rendlesham Forest incident, one of the most famous UFO sightings in history worldwide. Over the years, Teresa would variously keep an open mind and resist this revelation, taking a fairly traditional path out of childhood into college, where she majored in journalism, then held a...

What's the new way to live, lead, earn and give? Peta Kelly says it's simple -- and it begins and ends with our alignment. Peta always lived with a desire to serve others. Her interest in serving our collective health led her first to network marketing, where she sold Isagenix health products. Her belief in the product and magnificent hustle led her to become a millionaire through this business by age 26, when she retired her single mom, and began to launch her own businesses. She even...

Gerard Armond Powell ("Gerry") has always been an all-or-nothing kind of guy. To say he had an addictive personality is a gross understatement. Drugs, women, alcohol, money....you name it. Every vice known to man has written a chapter in his colorful life story. And for many years, each of these chapters had a very dark - and often catastrophic – ending. That is, until he found plant medicine. During his first ceremony, he had a chat with...the moon (of course). The moon - perhaps a vehicle...

When asking how our lives might look different if we were to follow our hearts and dreams, so many of us point to travel. For most of us, travel represents freedom in one way or another - the ability to do whatever we want to, go wherever we want to, whenever we want to do it. But many of us never do it - or do it only in the limited, accepted, prescribed way - for a couple weeks of vacation a year, here or there. We feel confined to one place, limited by time, money, and location-dependent...

Brandy Gillmore refused to take "no" for an answer. After a car accident and a fall that injured her spine, the former athlete was left bedridden with devastating, chronic pain throughout her body. She spent days - years - laying in bed, watching TV, with a constant morphine supply that couldn't even ease the pain, getting out of the house only to see doctors, and confined to a wheelchair. Determined to heal this pain, and live a full life, she simply could not - would not - believe what...

What do you think of as "normal"? From an early age, Daniel Eisenman questioned what he was told is "normal" - the standard way that he and others were supposed to be. At first, he played around with "breaking normal" - like many teenagers do - by challenging the rules set around him, and acting a bit reckless. But for the most part he stayed on track. After high school, he went to college, and chose to study pre-med, like all the good kids did, and like his parents wanted. He graduated and...

Kathleen Morton never understood why people seem to live by the same unwritten rules. As a child, she most enjoyed the sanctuary of her bedroom, where her natural creativity flourished. Like many of us, when she graduated high school and moved into the larger world, Kathleen believed, as her parents encouraged her to, that a traditional education and career path would bring her happiness, money and success in life. Returning home after college, one potential story of her life flashed before...

From childhood, Stan Hartmann lived with a nagging feeling that something about him wasn't quite right. He never liked the activities other boys did, and when he grew up, he took on his father's business with great reluctance. He married, had a family, and became a Christian. Later, he remarried, but was never able to enjoy a sexual relationship with a woman. His thirst for God was deep, and even when he quit working to focus only on his spiritual search, and reached the apex of that search -...

In 1999 the film The Matrix was released. It told the story of a small band of renegades led by Morpheus and the prodigal son, Neo, breaking loose from a synthetic, lifeless reality they called "the matrix" and the eventual collapse of this artificial and controlling system. Since, the phrase "The Matrix" has become synonymous with the toxic life path promoted to us by institutions, the media, governments...you name it. People feel controlled, mechanical, limited. Within many of us, there is...

Sometimes when we begin to meditate - and especially when our meditation practice takes off - we may feel that we are living a secret life. For Rodolfo Carrillo, the exploration of his "secret" inner life began at age 7, when his mother introduced him to meditation. He had fallen, and was experiencing some pain in his body. Until they could reach a doctor the next day to treat his injury, his mother told him to sit quietly, and together, they meditated, generating a healing energy. Despite...

Perhaps no other category of our society is in more desperate need of idealism than education. For many students, the schooling experience is one of severe anxiety and worry, of toxic and constant comparisons to others (via "grades"), the digestion and regurgitation of facts that seem far from being truly relevant to real life in our world today. Does this traditional system honor the innate gifts in a child, expressed as his or her excitement? Are we fostering innovation and inspiration, or...

Born into a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Canada, Freyja (then, Catherine) was taught to keep her head down and not raise her voice. At age 15, she entered into an arranged marriage as the second wife of a 25-year-old polygamist man, and joined his community. She spent the next 28 years raising 12 children in this marriage, and abiding by the repressive rules set for women, wives and mothers in the community. One day, she attended a training to grow herself and her work, and something...

We first discovered Bentinho Massaro just after our daughter was born, nearly two years ago. We were new parents, exhausted, baffled and in need of direction. Up pops Bentinho's smiling face on Instagram and, for some reason, we clicked. We began watching and listening, and magnetized by our resonance with his message, understood that we had found a compelling contemporary translator of the ancient truth of nonduality and oneness - the teacher we had been looking for. In the nearly two years...

Often we accept things we've been taught or told, until one day something strikes us as being a bit "off", and we begin to ask questions. For Ross Lukeman, that something was the traditional story we've been taught about home ownership and freedom. That is, if you own a home, you have achieved the American Dream. It struck Ross as strange that people buy homes, believing this story, then design the rest of their lives around paying for that home - staying in jobs they don't like to pay a...

How many people talk about spending more time in nature? Yearn for time outside, in the ocean, forest, mountains? When we lived in NYC, talk of getting into nature was practically a mantra on the street. The thing is, while most people feel a call to nature, few end up spending much time there. Not so for Amy Schrift. After a heavy dinner out in the city, Amy felt a call to feed her body more naturally. That week, she discovered a living foods diet, and began eating only raw fruits and...

For Nazarah Merah, awakening from the spell of the "real world" needed to be complete. Various times in her life, she had experienced a profound blooming of consciousness, even having it penetrate her body causing her to pulse with the true force of God. But, this time, she was determined to lock into this state. No more would this be a fleeting experience, but a permanent feature of her life. The prior evening, she had been at a free talk given by the spiritual teacher Bentinho Massaro, and...

We're three weeks into our Costa Rica adventure, exploring and enjoying this gorgeous country. And, quite consciously, we're considering this special place as a future home for our family. We've felt called here, through various channels. In many ways, it feels right and true to be here. Much feels aligned to who we are and our values. But, as far as a specific place to be (i.e. city or town), we've yet to find it. What we find interesting is how clearly we have been led to Santa Teresa,...

Quite often, the quest for freedom hinges on the clear realization of its opposite - slavery. For Steven Michaels, the pivotal moment came at a bank, when, as a young entrepreneur and husband, he sought to remove the last of his money to buy groceries. Last he checked, he had around 600 bucks. No money was there. After double-checking, the teller told him that his money had been removed by the IRS. Gone. From that moment of powerlessness, Steven made it his mission to maximize his...

There are 1410 miles between Fairhope, AL and Monteverde, Costa Rica. We know this because while interviewing this week’s guest, Marvin Rockwell at his home in Monteverde, describing his epic journey there from Alabama in 1948, we pulled it up on Google maps. Of course, the internet wasn’t at the disposal of Marvin and the small community of Quakers heading south from Alabama in 1948 on their way to Costa Rica. Nor were fully completed roads. Marvin and three other men had just completed a...

Once you begin to question one area of life, the lies suddenly begin to unravel everywhere. Along the way, you are likely to encounter all sorts of characters shouting their version of the "real story" from the rooftops. When you find someone as eloquent, trustworthy and well-researched as Dr. Pam Popper, however, you grab your seat and listen. As you will find, she held nothing back in this, our second conversation (she also appears on episode #6). She starts off with a bang, describing her...

For Natalie Sisson, doing anything which doesn't feel good for too long sets off an internal alarm. So, some 10 years ago, after too many days of feeling "off" at a corporate job...she quit. What's remarkable about her decision is that she didn't have a solid plan for what to do afterwards, but took the leap anyway. What unfolded from there is truly epic: 70 countries in 7 years, multiple online programs helping other digital nomads, a very popular podcast, her own book and a vast array of...

Many dream of it, but very few actually do it: sell it all and move to paradise. For Nadine Pisani, it took her husband being hospitalized for 10 days for her to realize that their way of life as chiropractors in Pennsylvania wasn't working. A short time later, they walked off a plane in Costa Rica and knew immediately they had done the right thing. Since that time, they have stopped working so much, fostered all sorts of other creative interests and have fallen back in love with life and...

2017 was the year we created Ownstream, a new platform to amplify the message that every person can live their highest truth, joy, and excitement. The Ownstream Podcast features the stories of people doing just this—following their own resonance, and using it as direction to create new and dynamic paradigms for limitless living that are open to everyone. This episode pulls together the best of our 2017 episodes, aiming to reveal the inner beliefs, turning points and experiences of those...