Grief is usually not something we plan for. In today’s special edition of The Soul of Life we remember the life of Rich Simon—a person that was like Oprah for the mental health and counseling field—a hub and changemaker that helped launch the careers of many of the masters in the clinical counseling and mental health field. On November 10th, at the age of 71, Rich died suddenly. We talk about grief with the world’s foremost expert on the subject, David Kessler, co-author and protégé to the...
With Thanksgiving and winter holidays around the corner, there’s no better time to spend than with baker and food artist Sarah Owens.
Sarah is a California-based cookbook author, baker, gardener, and instructor, and she just might have the ingredients to help us learn to come to our senses with sourdough baking that could help you practice mindfulness in physical form.
Today I talk to Sandie Angulo Chen a film critic, entertainment reporter, and book reviewer that writes for Common Sense Media, a non-profit website that gives parents in-depth reviews of movies, shows and apps so they can make informed decisions about their family’s media diet. We also dive into our favorite film picks including Watchmen, My Octopus Teacher, The Social Dilemma, and Enola Holmes.
Yuval Levin: A Human Democracy In this episode... Today on The Soul of Life I speak with a person that has been described by a centrist/liberal commentator at the Brookings Institute as “The most thoughtful conservative theorist of his generation.”It’s no overstatement to say that Yuval Levin might be working in a senior position at the White House if this were an ordinary conservative President. And while you may not have heard his name before, he’s one of a few influential thought...
Shame is like a 1950's air conditioner that costs a fortune to operate electrically in the brain. My tangle with depression is teaching me to pay attention to all the "appliances" that drain energy from the soul. Dr. Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist and the author of The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves.
I speak with Marcia Bjornerud to talk about her book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Timefulness is a call to wake up to the staggering mystery of life here on Earth, become time-literate of our storied past to live sustainably, in tune to the magnificent movements in nature that took eons to choreograph.
I speak to Moses Kushaba, LGBTQI activist who immigrated to the U.S. from Uganda to escape persecution during a time when the government was escalating anti-gay policies, leading to violence, imprisonment, and death of many accused of being homosexual. We talk about Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist and what it means to live in an anti-racist way.
If you’ve ever wondered what kind of a parent you are, and whether your kids are going to wind up spending the equivalent of a college degree in therapy (or maybe they already have), I think you’ll be grateful for my conversation with Bethany Saltman. Her journey as a mom and her book Strange Situation: A Mother’s Journey into the Science of Attachment is a gift to every parent, who like me, has been bombarded by well-intended advice about how to be the best parent in the world.
I speak to the author of Gravity’s Century: From Einstein’s Eclipse to Images of Black Holes, named one of the best science books of 2020 by NPR’s Ira Flato. The alternative title for this episode is Ex-nihilo Entanglement. This is the first of several episodes I plan to have on The Soul of Life that touches on quantum physics, the brain, and existence.