Wake The F*ck Up Podcast

We spend our whole lives doing. Nevermind that we are called human BEINGS, for most of us, all day, every day is do, do, do. But WHY do we do anything at all? This episode explores the often elusive, subtle nature of our doing that can bring us to an utter sense of peace and contentment: doing because the act itself is sufficient unto itself.

We spend so much of our time trying to find balance, equilibrium, center. As someone who has dedicated myself to a process of growth and self-compassion, being in balance has always been a target. This is episode is all about the epiphany that has changed the balance game!

Just about anyone who talks about mindfulness will inevitably talk about learning to hold ourselves. I, personally, have been talking about and teaching this for the last 10 years. But in recent years, the power and true meaning of this practice and concept has transformed into something deep and unexpected. In this episode, journey with me through the concept changes and evolution or REvolution of what it means to truly HOLD OURSELVES, and why it is the path to ultimate freedom.

Welcome to 2024! On this episode we explore the "aha" moment of not making our minds our enemies. From how we're raised to view and judge ourselves naturally to even the language we sometimes hear on our spiritual paths, making the mind the enemy: putting it in its place or "controlling" it sometimes seems the ultimate goal. So today we work through the transformative possibility of making the mind our friend even during meditation.

Living in a society that glorifies goals and the idea of "more," this poem explores the idea of the question "what's next?"

This is the first offering of a new series on the podcast called Spoken Poetry. They are not "episodes," if you will, but rather offerings of words written in moments of inspiration and deep feeling. May they serve your spirit and awaken you to love that you already are.

In the first episode of 2023, I have a conversation with entrepreneur, spiritual enthusiast, and conscious living explorer Ash Geary around FEAR. What IS fear? How can we navigate our moments of fear in a way that brings us closer to the truth of who we are? This episode explores fear from tools and practices to lessen the pain all the way to the root of fear itself: death and the loss of everything we know and love. Such an honor to learn and explore with Ash and share his wisdom with you all.

We live our lives in a perpetual state of "doing." Every day is comprised of moving from one task to another: one thing to accomplish after the other. While this is necessary to live and survive, this episode explores untethering our worthiness from our productivity, success, and all our doings. Where can happiness and satisfaction come from if they are only attainable through what we accomplish? WHEN is it enough, and what MIGHT it feel like to define our worth by HOW we are rather than WHAT we do?

Often we devote so much energy, conscious and unconscious, to anticipating the outcomes of experience. How is something going to go? What do we want the outcome to be? What outcomes are we afraid of? We become anxious with the reality that the outcome, no matter how much we prepare, is unknown until we find ourselves alive in it as it unfolds. This episode explores the idea that WHAT we have been focusing on in the hopes of preparing and easing our suffering is actually the wrong thing. If the outcome is largely out of control, what would it be like to focus on how we want to FEEL regardless of how things play out?

We are unconsciously conditioned throughout our lives to protect ourselves. Of course we are! Being in pain...well...HURTS. This episode explores, however, the possibility that the ways we have unconsciously learned to protect (things that served us in the past) may actually be creating more harm and pain than protection. We look at a new possibility for the greatest protection imaginable (at least the greatest I've ever experienced as of yet!).

We often have experiences in our lives that "bring us back to ourselves" or some in way grant us a feeling that we had "lost" part of ourselves. For those of us on the spiritual or self-help paths, we tend to lean into feelings of needing to be better, to grow, or to constantly be moving toward some healthier version of ourselves. This episode explores what may feel like a paradigm shift toward recognizing that we already are everything we seek: already whole, never lost from ourselves. What would our experiences with ourselves and one another look like if we could trust our innate wholeness?

Most of us move through our lives with a sense of seeking. Whether it's happiness, success, satisfaction, love - it seems in all our seeking, throughout our whole journey we just have never quite found "it". This episode explores the possibility that we already ARE that which we seek. That all our seeking outside is perhaps just a confused quest because we have simply been removed from what we really need, which has been right here waiting for us all along. If you reflect on the best moments in your life, what is the one thread that weaves through them all, and could THAT possibly be the answer to all our searching?

Life is NOT under our control. Our emotions are not under our control. Often even our minds are not under our control. Yet we have given our minds the impossible task of controlling everything in lives in order to avoid hurt and pain. This episode explores the possibility that it's actually our need for control that hurts us more than anything else. By trying to control, we remove ourselves from ourselves and from our lives because we think we need ourselves and life to be a particular way in order to be happy. What would living feel like if we were capable of staying open to all of life rather than tensing against it and trying to control what we feel and experience in every moment and where we go and get to in our lives?

What is TRUE freedom? Is it having everything we want and nothing that we don't? No, then we're either dead or an awakened being. So how do we find it while still alive and fully human? This episode explores a depth of being WITH ourselves and our experiences that is REAL and accessible to us all. It is a radical awakening to the truth of ourselves and what creates our suffering and our freedom. This episode is also offered with a hopefulness that we can even learn to hold ourselves through our learning and growth until we taste this freedom for ourselves.

We live in a society that tells us we are worthy, we have made it, we are successful when we experience less and less suffering, hurting, moments of pain. Though this is a quiet undercurrent, social media and what see all around us paint a picture that to suffer means we are in some way bad or failing. This episode is all about breaking that concept - recognizing that to be human is to suffer, but suffering doesn't have to be BAD, doesn't have to be the end of the story.

It seems only human to wonder, "What gives life meaning?" Though we tend to consider this question on the larger scale, something more like "How do we lead a meaningful life?" It often does not occur to us to wonder what creates meaningful moments, the meaning we experience in people, places, and objects in our world. This episode explores just that - is there "inherent" meaning in anything at all? This episode is also dedicated to a dear friend who is constantly an emblem to me of living fully, a wild fascination with learning, and the purest outpourings of love. Scott Steiner, thank you for being you.

In this episode we explore the difference between experiences that are uncomfortable and those that deeply cause us pain. Together we tease apart the opportunities that discomfort offer us in terms of growth, leaning into our edges, and discovering new truths and wisdom in the breaking of our concepts and shells. What's your growing edge?

Welcome to our Welcome Back episode! It's been several months since the last episode, so I wanted to come back in a way that honored those of you who have shared this journey with me. This episode is an honest exploration of the experiences that led to the space between the last two episodes. I'll talk about my personal experience with depression, fear, and anxiety as well as what helped me reconnect to the beauty of the life right in front of me. We can't forget that no matter how far along this path we are, we're all still invariably human. Hardship comes, hardship goes - how we treat ourselves and others along the way is what becomes paramount.

This is episode is the second in our inter-podcast series called Happiness Hacks. Rather than giving away the hack here, you'll just have to listen to how to radically bring more happiness into your life with this hack. Learned through living, tested through experience, every Happiness Hack is (almost) guaranteed to bring more moments of joy into your wellbeing.

Happiness Hacks is a new series inside the Wake the F*ck Up offerings. This episode and future Happiness Hacks were spurred by an experience of connecting to a simple practice that I feel has tangibly changed my experience of happiness in my own life, so OF COURSE I want YOU to have it. Rather than coming up with some fancy-shmancy name...Happiness Hacks it is! Enjoy this first playful adventure in small, accessible easy ways to bring more love and happiness into your life.

We live in a time where life is anything but simple. Every day seems to be chalk full of work hours, life management tasks (like food prep, dishes, laundry, grocery shopping), and all the added tasks that come from owning more (car registrations, oil changes, mowing the lawn, weeding the garden.) You get the idea. Yet it's been encultured into us that to really live a meaningful life we must HAVE more. This episode explores this social construction and the possibility that the capacity for joy in having very little may actually be at the core of our possibility for lasting happiness.

Self-compassion is a topic I often get confused looks and head-shakes to. It is not something most of us have been taught and is often confused with narcissism and some form of laziness or not being accountable. The crazy thing is that all the research on self-compassion shows the same outcomes: better overall wellbeing, higher resilience, greater goal setting and achievement, more self-love, more happiness. But how can we actually do this? Let's explore it together!

At the beginning of any journey, it's so important to clarify our intentions and goals, yet sometimes even with the best intentions we miss the actual purpose of our endeavor. In this episode I share my own confusion around the goal of a meditation and mindfulness practice: what are we really aiming/hoping for? Who are we really trying to be? And how do these goals change our experience of ourselves and our lives?

This episode is one I might call an extension of Episode 10 - Experience vs. Reward, reframed under something we all experience all the time: WAITING. If you are really willing to take a look, you'll likely find that you live in a near permanent state of waiting. But what is it you're really waiting for? And what is it that waiting actually says to us about our experience of this very moment? Let's explore it together in this episode of The Wake The F*ck Up Podcast.

This episode of The Wake The F*ck Up Podcast was inspired by Mark Nepo's book "The Book of Awakening" and the experiences that flowed from the recognition of how often the joy of what we do is obscured by the desire to get something out of it...some reward, some accolade without which we deem the action or experience unworthy of our time and attention. How often are we bored or annoyed or anxious because we have the sense that we don't want to be doing what we're doing. In fact, we're only doing it because we have to or because there's some thing we'll attain once we get it over with? From this knowing, can we begin to imagine the feeling of our lives if the reward IS the experience itself? What might this even look like, taste like, FEEL like?

I imagine that just like me, you've frequently found yourself saying "I'm way to busy to have any extra shit to do." For so many of us, meditation becomes one of those things we just don't have time for. In this episode we explore how and why meditation is more of an UNdoing than a doing at all. Discover how meditation and mindfulness can strip you of all the unnecessary baggage the world added to our shoulders and backs over the years and how to let that shit go to find freedom in being YOU in every moment.

What is reality? What is the matrix? What's the difference? This episode explores the true nature of what we call reality and the difference between subject, object, dualism, and oneness. It invites us to the deeply open and playful state of questioning what we think we know in order to free ourselves from the tight grip of perceptions, history, and personhood.

We spend most of our lives living in the movie reel/story of our lives. This beautiful human brain does an excellent job of creating a linear, chronological continuous story of who we are based on snapshots of past experiences. We tend to experience ourselves as a solid idea of "me" and "I," yet this confused and not-actually real vision of ourselves is often the very cause of our suffering. This episode of the WTFU podcast explores selfhood, non-self, and what it means to BE without need of a historical presentation of ourselves in every moment.

We couldn't really say this is a mindfulness podcast without talking about the proverbial elephant in the room, right? This episode offers just that: what actually IS mindfulness? The word itself carries a particular connotation; it's been growing as a concept in our society, and yet actually understanding, connecting to what mindfulness is can sometimes be elusive. Let's cross that bridge of elusivity together in Episode 6 of the Wake The F*ck Up Podcast.

What makes us suffer? What catapults us from a perfectly fine moment of contentment or happiness or satisfaction into sadness, anger, frustration...suffering? This episode explores just that, the moments of friction between how life is and how we want it to be and invites the curiosity: "what would this moment feel like if I didn't see it as a problem?"

Desire: the root of all suffering or a potent, delightful experience of our humanity? This episode explores the concepts that we attach to the experience of desire that have the power to flip it from something wonderful to something painful. What does desire actually mean? How might we experience desire in a way that keeps us in equanimity and joy?

In this episode we play with the habitual New Year's resolution. What are we really saying and asking for when we set these goals? What are our deeper intentions and beliefs underlying resolutions and the habitual ways we set goals for ourselves? Let's flip that habit on its ass and start putting our energy and attention toward what actually creates lasting happiness. This doesn't mean we stop setting goals: the opposite actually! So come explore this mind shift with us in Episode 3!

In this episode we explore the intention of Wake The F*ck Up as well as some playful invitations for how to use the podcast to actually wake up! From the basics of what mindfulness is, to smashing meditation myths, and inviting you not to believe a damn thing you hear, this episode hopes to set all the expectations we can meet...so we don't have to let you down gently later.

Welcome to Wake The F*ck Up: the podcast that mingles mindfulness, Buddhism, brain science, evolutionary biology and real, authentic human experience to wake us up from our trance of unworthiness and into the beauty, love, and connection that surround us in every moment. In this episode we explore what may help us move away from this collective experience of divisiveness and difference. By looking at what connects us, at our shared humanity, can we come together in mutual respect and compassion.