Bliss And Grit

[Flashback Tuesday] In this episode we’re excited to catch up with each other and integrate some of what we have experienced recently in the presence of so many amazing guest conversations, in particular our recent one with David Thomas. We’re exploring conditioning, again, but after being with David we’re posing the question to ourselves “what if it’s all conditioning?” What if, while we are in ego consciousness, all of our thoughts are simply products of our culture and lineage that become habitual? And if so, what would that mean about how we can shift out of our chronic patterns of suffering? For more information on Bliss + Grit, or to get information about one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please visit www.blissandgrit.com. To become a supporting member and join our forum please visit www.patreon.com/blissandgrit

[Flashback Tuesday] Today we are talking with David Thomas. David is a self-realization teacher, speaker, and writer living in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Through the practice of Self-inquiry and meditation, he has acquired a deeper understanding of the inner self and true liberation. David now seeks to support individuals in their pursuit of self-realization through his writing and speaking. The insights he shares within his videos, quotes, and poems are created to help nurture the healing of individuals seeking release from their pain and suffering. All of his teachings come from his personal experience, so he gives an inside perspective from being lost in ignorance to finding the truth within. We were both immediately struck by what a bright light David is. He has a very clear way of pointing out what conditioning actually is- how we are programmed and how we lose connection to life. His clarity on what the Being is- what direct experience is- versus our thoughts about ourselves can really rock your world in

[Flashback Tuesday] John J. Prendergast, PhD, is a psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and founder and editor-in-chief of Undivided: The Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychology. John met his first teacher, Advaita master Jean Klein, in 1983 and began studying with one of our favorite teachers, Adyashanti, in 2001. For 23 years John was also a professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where Vanessa Scotto went to grad school. He is the author of an amazing book called In Touch; How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. We first came across John on the Buddha at the Gas Pump podcast where we were immediately drawn to his simple, yet profound, integration of Psychology and Spirituality. After Brooke Thomas sat with him on a weekend retreat a few months back we knew we needed to bring him on for a conversation we could share with all of you. In this conversation we cover so many topics including how to trust yourself and tune into your

[Flashback Tuesday] Today we are having a conversation with Loch Kelly. Loch is the author of Shift into Freedom, and the creator of the recent audio course offering through Sounds True, Effortless Mindfulness Now. He is a meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and founder of the non-profit, Open-Hearted Awareness Institute. Loch has collaborated with neuroscientists at Yale, UPenn and NYU. He has been teaching seminars, supervising clinicians and practicing awareness psychotherapy in New York for 30 years. It’s also worth mentioning that he teaches in our favorite lineage, the human being lineage! Which makes him a perfect teacher to have on Bliss+Grit. We so admire how he talks about awakening as a normal developmental potential for all human beings, and how his approach is so practical and available. We talk about how the answer to any question related to relieving suffering is always the same: shift. We also discuss how to shift, and Loch offers several experiential practices throughout our conversation. So

For this episode we zoomed out and explored: What is Bliss+Grit about exactly? More specifically, after nearly three years, 127 episodes and lots of personal healing, inquiry, and exposure to different teachers and practices: What is our working model of healing and transformation? How does conditioning store in us and how to we untangle that? And, importantly, if we aren’t our conditioning, what are we? It’s an ongoing lived inquiry more than a nailed down blueprint, and it’s more about building bridges between systems that are evocative of human potential rather than of picking a team and declaring it the winner. But here you go, at this juncture, this is where we’re at!  In this episode we talk about:  How conditioning stores in the body, the mind, and our energetic patterns What do we consider optional suffering?  How do we de-condition ourselves?  What the nervous system has to do with it.  What are we when we aren’t our conditioning?  Our view of building bridges and connecting disciplines so that each

In this episode we are sharing our conversation with our guest Jill Blakeway.  Jill is the founder and director of The YinOva Center in New York City and the author of several books, including her most recent book Energy Medicine. She is the host of CBS Radio’s popular weekly podcast, “Grow, Cook, Heal”, which Vanessa Scotto has been a guest on, a teacher of gynecology and obstetrics at the Doctoral Program at Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and a renowned authority on alternative medicine and women’s health. For more information on Jill Blakeway go to www.yinovacenter.com. In this week’s episode with Jill, we discuss her new book Energy Medicine.  Together we discuss:  What resonant bonds are and why they’re important to understand Research that shows how the power of our minds can affect machines  Teachings Neale Donald Walsh with Jill on manifestation and choosing love vs fear  Proven healings that can happen through energy fields How interconnected we all are and the research that proves it How to

This is one of our favorite kinds of conversations: where the nervous system, trauma responses, and the spiritual path intersect. We are looking at the four F’s of trauma response: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We are talking about how these normal, healthy responses can become identities and therefore keep us from fully nourishing lives. And in particular we are honing in on fawn, also called please, appease, or tend and befriend, since we haven’t spoken in as much detail about this particular response. But boy howdy do we know it from the inside out! If you consider yourself an empath, this one might strike a chord for you too.   In this episode we discuss:  The fawn trauma response, also known as please, appease, placate, or “tend and befriend”.  How we can continue acting out “stuck” trauma responses so frequently that they become meshed with our personalities and identities.  Examples of what the 4 F’s look like as identities.  How shame holds these responses in place.  How you can’t put down by swin

This is the second part to last week’s conversation with the author, speaker, and teacher Will Pye on his newest book, The Gratitude Prescription. We first interviewed Will almost a year back on his book Blessed with a Brain Tumor and enjoyed our talk so much that we invited him back to hear more about what he calls ‘radical gratitude.’ As someone who had a spiritual awakening in the aftermath of receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, we find his teachings and recommended practices of gratitude to be very embodied, grounded and deep.  We left off last week discussing why truth can be difficult to meet if we don’t have self-compassion. We pick up again with Vanessa asking Will to speak more on how personalizing our suffering can be problematic.  In this episode we are speaking about:  How personalizing our narratives and experiences of suffering can increase our pain  How Will dealt with his own suicidal thoughts and depression  How removing the label from experiences like depression can shift our relationshi

Today we are speaking with Will Pye for a second time! Will is an author, speaker, and teacher, and we had our first conversation with him about his first book, Blessed with a Brain Tumor, and today we are talking about his most recent book, The Gratitude Prescription.  The embodied practice of gratitude has become a centrally important part of our own practices this year, and so we wanted to talk with Will about the deeply experiential practice of gratitude and how it is fundamental to the functioning of the human being, and how it can actually change your life.  We had so much fun talking with Will that this is a conversation in two parts. Part 2 will air next week. And if you want to find more of Will’s work, visit willpye.com. In this episode we are talking about:  Gratitude as the realized state of God: the peace, love, and joy of what we are.   The setup of this realm that we tend not to look for the good or the abundance.  Gratitude as the mental practice of clarity.  The data on gratitude as a remedy

Today we are sharing the second part of our conversation with our guest Lisa Wimberger. Lisa is the creator of Neurosculpting, which is a self-directed neuroplasticity protocol. Specifically, it is a mental training process that quiets our fight-or-flight center and activates our prefrontal cortex, which is the mind’s seat of our compassion and empathy. We had so much to discuss that we made this interview a two-parter.  In this episode we are talking about:  How energy relates to your nervous system. The importance of focusing on your body in your spiritual practice.  How our past narratives filter our present moment experiences.  The trouble technology creates for your vagus nerve. How your “spirits design” can influence your choices.  To find out more information about Lisa and Neurosculpting please visit https://neurosculptinginstitute.com/ For more information on Bliss + Grit, to become a show patron, or to get information about one-on-one coaching with Brooke Thomas or Vanessa Scotto, please go to ww

We have a special guest today: Lisa Wimberger. Lisa is the creator of Neurosculpting, which is a self-directed neuroplasticity protocol. Specifically, it is a mental training process that quiets our fight-or-flight center and activates our prefrontal cortex, which is the mind’s seat of our compassion and empathy. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about. In fact, We so many shared passions and inquiries in common with Lisa that we are airing this conversation as a 2-parter. Stay tuned next week.  If you want more information on Neurosculpting you can visit neurosculptinginstitute.com In this episode we are talking about:  How meditation and spiritual paths can be used to dissociate further into a freeze pattern of the nervous system. Lisa’s extreme experience of a nervous system caught in freeze, and how recovering from this adaptation is different than someone recovering from flight or fight patterns.  Why going from freeze to “bliss” is too big a step.  How to consciously choose when we need to be in ou

Have you ever worried that if you were to truly shine as bright as you could you would make others uncomfortable? Or have you noticed moments where you shut down your own potential or thriving? You also may believe that your needs, your emotions or your presence is just simply too much for people. The fear of “being too much” can be a very common one, especially in empathic circles, and can create patterns of inhibition that keep us settling for less-than. We’ve experienced this fear in our own lives, in our own ways, and that’s why in this episode we’re speaking about: How we can manage our own aliveness to make others comfortable  How fear can tell us that our thriving will take away from others or cost us our connection  How to spot those protective strategies and move through them into embodying more wholeness in your life   How sometimes we can be “too much” for others, but that has nothing to do with our essential self  For more information on Bliss + Grit, on becoming a show supporter or on coaching

Today we are talking about the rules we may have made in our lives, that at some point, gave us a frame of reference in how to navigate life in a sane and mature way. Also, those moments in life when we are asked to figure out if those rules are to be followed to the letter, or if a more subtle discernment is called for.  In our discussion:  The benefit of “rules” and how they can help us navigate new territory. How rules can also keep us in needlessly small lives. How to discern the difference between a useful rule and one that no longer applies. Learning how to trust ourselves and have faith in our discernment. How to let go of holding on to, “I hope I don’t screw up” and move forward in life. For more information on Bliss + Grit go to www.blissandgrit.com

In this episode,we are speaking about the phenomenon of spiritual teacher misconduct. From shaming and judgment to outright abuse, there is a long history of spiritual figures engaging inappropriately with those they’re meant to guide. Yet these days it seems as if there is a new teacher exposed every few months. This is a big topic, that we could barely scratch the surface on, but in light of our recent discussions on relationships and safety, and because we do speak about so many teachers, we felt like it was time to add our voices to the conversation. We touch on how this can happen, but more so, what signs we may look for to identify an unethical, unsafe or ego-driven teacher.    In our discussion, we cover many topics including:  How a spiritual teacher can benefit us  Polyvagal theory Intergenerational trauma  Co-dependency  The importance of recognizing the humanity in awakened teachers   We know that people within this community may have been harmed by a teacher and we want you to know that

This week is a flashback Tuesday! This episode, titled The Implications of Basic Trust, originally aired in September of 2018. We both remember this conversation as the beginning of what felt like a big shift for each of us, the kind of epiphany that seems so obvious, but is in fact quite huge: that we can trust this life. Even when it’s agony. Even when it’s joy. Even when it’s boring...    By the time this began to be a real lived experience for us, we had sat with the phrase “trust your life” for at least a couple of years. So it was fun to listen back and note that understanding things and experiencing things are really different.    It was also maybe the first time that we mentioned what felt like a side project at the time: connecting the dots between nervous system states and awakening. Something that now feels very front and center to our mission, and is something you have heard a lot about in the last few episodes.

Our last several episodes have been circling around the theme of relationship and connection. This week we’re continuing the conversation by sharing our thoughts on what we could call, “the love language of presence”. We’ve noticed personally that what truly bonds us to others, and lets us feel loved, is presence in the form of interest and curiosity. Yet, our cultural and familial models are often missing this key ingredient. In this talk, we cover a tangible way to look at if you’re present, how ego-agendas can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, how an overstimulated nervous system can pull you away from presence, ways to experience genuine connection and how the conversation of ‘doing vs being’ can also apply to the way we communicate.

Today we are honing in on how we find safety in the world and in our relationships, whether those relationships are with intimate partners, or our children, friends, coworkers,etc. We are deepening the conversation from our last two episodes: the episode on awakened relating with Lynn Marie Lumiere, and last week’s episode on the “how” of self-love.    In particular we are using the lens of Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal theory to look more closely at what happens when we don’t detect safety, and the magical things that can happen when our nervous systems do detect safety and therefore do not have to be defensive. We ponder what even is defensive behavior beyond the caricatures we typically think of? What are the cultural stories that keep us from experiences of safety? How do we get out of the “you’re a problem, or I’m a problem” binary loop? Then we look at how healing really begins to happen, and how healing really takes care of itself, the more we can self-regulate and co-regulate.

If you’ve listened to the podcast in the past you know how much we value the practice of meeting ourselves with tenderness and love. In this episode, we are going into much greater detail about what it tangibly looks and feels like to heal through self-love. Our conversation covers everything, from neuroscience to personal experiences, to practical exercises where we can learn how to bring love to the parts of ourselves that need it the most. As we shift to meeting ourselves with a genuine experience of loving-kindness we can rewire and release the conditioning that has created so much suffering and havoc in our lives and step into a new, brighter experience of life.

Today we are having a conversation with Lynn Marie Lumiere, a psychotherapist and the author of the book Awakened Relating: A Guide to Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships. Reading from the description of Lynn Marie’s book: Our natural state is to love and be loved. From deep within, we’re compelled to seek connection. Yet relationships remain a struggle—even for the most spiritually enlightened among us. Traumatic experiences, insecure attachment, and especially the false but commonly held belief that we are separate, both from each other and from the love we seek, can cause endless problems in our relationships. As long as our connections are built on this untruth, lasting love and harmony in relationship will elude us. In our conversation with Lynn Marie,we greatly enjoy shedding some light on how being able to contact the experience of awake awareness, or unity consciousness can take us way beyond the endless compromise push-pull game of the separate self, and the ways that“consciousrela

Today we’re showing our age by speaking about a concept from the book, The Seat of the Soul, that was written 25 years ago by physicist and author Gary Zukav that was just re-released. In this book, Gary describes the difference between what he calls the vertical path, or the path of the spirit, and the horizontal path, the path of form, and how where we choose to put our attention and energy can impact our lives. We thought this would be a fun and relevant conversation as so many of us, even on a spiritual path, still can get hung up on the horizontal “realm” looking a certain way. We also bring in wisdom from Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, as well as personal examples of how we began to view life through the lens of the Soul, rather than the Ego.    Find our more information about us and Bliss + Grit at www.blissandgrit.com