Havana Cafe Sessions Podcast

As an alternative to making a laundry list of New Year's Resolutions, we choose 3 intention words that we'll to guide us through the New Year.

In this episode, we explore some of the ideas from the book, Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Sounds like a very heavy topic, but we, of course, handle it in our normal low-key, informal way. 

In this episode, writer Cherry Williams and I have a coffee and chat about creativity and the courage to live a creative life.

On this episode, Jeremy Sadler joins me to talk about positive affirmations and why they don't work. Of course, you know they do work, but Jeremy lays out where we go wrong in making affirmations causing them not to work.

In this episode, Sarah and I explore our thoughts on Don Miguel Ruiz's book, The Four Agreements.

Excited to have as my guest host, Victoria James, founder of Mindflowers, in the studio with us to talk about self-importance and how mastering it will boost your authentic happiness by a factor of 10.

This week, Sarah returns back to the studio, and with her, she brought an interesting topic. Do you ever get the feeling that something is not quite right with the world? This feeling sometimes manifests itself in the form of dissatisfaction, anxiety, or existential dread. But is this dissatisfaction inherent? Well, that's exactly what Sarah and I dive into for episode #139. In our open-ended casual style, we examine the topic through a variety of lenses from Samsara ("wandering through, flowing on", in the sense of "aimless and directionless wandering"), to Stoicism, The Matrix, and our own personal life experiences.

In this episode, We're talking about resilience and how to bounce back from bullying. Viki has first-hand experience with bullying both as a kid and as an adult, and now as a parent whose child has had to deal with bullying. She drops some useful tips covering the problem from multiple levels.

In this episode, we're joined by Aimee Mann of CEO of Your Special Needs Family Podcast to explore the question, can women do it all?

In this episode, Sarah asks the question does manifestation, like in The Law of Attraction really work?

In this episode, we explore biohacking coffee to extend life and answer the question of how to live through learning how to die.

How do you nurture an idea from its initial conception to fully realizing it into the world? 

In this episode, we use the Star Wars saga as a lens to explore some major life themes. Also, Clay has a massive mind-shift.

In this episode, Clay and Sarah share their individual experiences of walking the Road to Santiago.

In this episode, we discuss where spirituality fits on the spectrum of personal development.

In this episode, we share our love of having conversations that matter. We share some of our backstory on how and why we do the podcast.

In this episode, Clay and Sarah share 3 books each that have influenced their lives in a major way. As Clay describes it, "Books that punch you in the face."

In this episode, we explore the idea of work. 

In this episode, we explore the philosophical idea of becoming who you are using John Kaag's book, Hiking with Nietzche as the backdrop to our conversation over coffee this week.

In this episode, we discuss how you can use the body to explore your emotions and your thoughts. 

In this episode, we discuss the cult of personality and the compulsion for everyone to be famous. 

As you gear up for Valentine's Day this week, consider this: romantic love is a modern construct that emerged in tandem with the novel. The idea of romantic love, as we know it today, came on the scene in tandem with In Madame Bovary (1856). That's one type of love. As it turns out, love has many levels. In this week's episode, we explore the 7 types of love.

In this episode, we explore Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning

In this episode, we explore the value of adventure and how adventure enhances your overall well-being.

In this week's episode, we explore the process of growing older and how to face up to the inevitable march of time.

In this episode, we explore the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi, the art of imperfection. 

In this week's episode, we explore the power of curiosity.

in this episode, we explore a couple of useful models for identifying and changing behaviors.

In this episode, we share our intention setting process for getting ready for the New Year to ensure we're set up to have a fantastic year of achievement.

In this episode, we explore how our mind plays with reality.

In this episode, we explore the 5 literacies you need to survive in the 21st century. In part II we explore our relationship to time.

This week we explore the give and take of freedom. Are we really free and is the freedom we do have, balanced? 

This week we found ourselves wondering if it's important to try or if it is better to let go and just go with the flow. To help us explore this, we delve into the Taoist concept of Wu Wei.

This week conversation at the Havana Cafe centers around intentionality and our continuing pursuit of happiness. Hi, it’s Clay and Sarah  — We’re back in action this week at the Havana Cafe drinking coffee and discussing where life has taken us on our quest to find wisdom in the messy realities of life.

In this episode, we explore the attachment we have to things and how those things sometimes demand too much of us.

In this week's episode, we explore the ancient art of wayfinding with a modern twist.

This week we enjoyed a winding conversation about how individual connections spread cultural norms, and how different cultural groups shape our lives.

This week we take a close look at the hero’s journey and how we can apply it in a practical way to our own life journeys.

This week we wax a bit lyrical about the poetics of space, the possibilities of feng shui, and what it means to ‘hold space’ for oneself and others. In this episode:

This week we're continuing our discussion of the films Ex Machina and Her, and adding on insights from the TV series Westworld and Humans, looking more closely at the question of Consciousness & Free Will.

What makes us human? Is it consciousness? Is it our emotional complexity? Is it merely our physical body? Sometimes the only way to see through our biases in perception is to consider an alternative...an opposite.  This week we are discussing our big question in the context of two great films — Ex Machina & Her.

This week Clay and Sarah reach for their cups of coffee and contemplate how and why we might rediscover the wild.

This week we use Burroughs’s famous quote “language is a virus from outer space” to contemplate language as instinct, technology or virus.

In this episode, we revisit the original idea of hedonism as ancient Greek philosophy that argued that pleasure and happiness are the primary or most important intrinsic goods and the aim of human life.  

When the very things that once excited us now feel boring and repetitive...  When we’ve achieved our big goal but now feel as if we are stagnating and wanting more... When we’ve mastered a set of skills and feel a new call to adventure and change... It’s time to ‘level up’. This week Clay and Sarah discuss what it means to ‘level up’ in life.

Hooray. We've made it to episode 100.  For this episode, we reached out to you, our listeners, to find out what their ultimate questions are.

Obstacles, difficulties, things “not going according to plan” are an inevitable part of life. But how we respond to these so-called obstacles is what defines us. This week Clay and Sarah explore the idea of obstacles as the pathway to growth and new opportunities.

Within the “consensual hallucination of cyberspace” which we call the internet, a creative explosion is taking place.  We have access to an immense range of audio-visual arts, stories, poetry, music...and new combinations of these.  And the internet has also made it possible for us to create art in new ways and then share it with, literally, the WORLD.   This week Clay and Sarah consider the multitude of ways cyberspace has transformed creativity as well as our ideas about what it means to be ‘an artist’.

This week Clay and Sarah discuss the concept of self-mastery.

Many of us feel a sense that there is more to Life than meets the eye.  Perhaps we call it God. Perhaps we consider it a Force that pervades all life.  Perhaps we don't even bother to name it. But at times we feel a yearning to know it, to experience its vast spaciousness.  This is the realm of Mysticism — the search to experience union with the Divine. This week Clay and Sarah discuss what Mysticism can tell us about the human search for the Divine.