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.
In this episode of The Soul of Life I speak with Dr. Michael Mithoefer, the lead investigator that has successfully piloted the first-ever study of MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, into the third and final stage of FDA approval for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Mithoefer is featured as a lead character in the 2015 book Acid Test by award-winning journalist Tom Shroder, a meticulously researched history of the controversy and unprecedented healing properties associated with psychedelics.