The Mind Bod Adventure Pod Jeff Warren & Tasha Schumann

This week, we welcome Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, world-renowned meditation teacher, author, and lineage holder in the Bön tradition of Tibet, one of the oldest spiritual traditions on the planet. Today, we take three protective imaginary “pills” – a white pill, a red pill, and a blue pill. “Because in the West everybody loves to eat pills!”
Each pill is both a syllable that we voice out loud and a mini-meditation that addresses a specific challenge. The white pill – “Ah” – is awareness of stillness in our body, which can protect us against unskilful physical action. The red pill – “Om” – is awareness of silence, which can protect us against saying something stupid. And the blue pill – “Hung” – is awareness of spaciousness in the heart, which can protect us from making decisions out of anger or urgency.
For eight ethereal minutes, Wangyal Rinpoche sings these three syllables to us again and again. You can let them wash through you as you sit with us or sing along.
“Ah…”
“Om…”
“Hung…”
The audio isn’t perfect, but who cares?! Can you feel each vibration? Can you feel each blessing? Jeff cries, as usual. It’s an honor to experience such venerable medicine.
Let us know how the pills went to work on you and tune into the video afterparty over at www.mindbodpod.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

OK friends, enough with the talky talky. Grab some paper and a pencil: in this episode, we’re waking up our inner artists and making Zentangle magic!
Martha Huggins and Molly Hollinbough are our sister guides. Many years ago, their romantic parents – Maria and Rick – figured out the Zentangle method together. Ever since, they’ve been teaching it to people around the world as a way to slip into a fulfilling artistic flow and create beautiful works of pattern, shape, and color.
Then we chat about:
* how nothing is a mistake
* the equanimity training of going with the flow
* the balance of freedom vs constraints in art
* the therapeutic and healing benefits of “tangling,”
* and much more

Share your Zentangly thoughts with us in the comments! Then watch The Afterparty over at www.mindbodpod.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️



Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and the host of The On Being Project's Poetry Unbound podcast. He is interested in story and storytelling, in the practice of reading ourselves into stories, and sometimes in reading our lives as stories. All of which can shake us us up in surprising ways.
**If you like these adventures in consciousness, consider supporting our work with a paid subscription! at www.mindbodpod.com**
In today’s episode, he reads from a sequence of poems he wrote called “Seven Deadly Songs” – sonic booms of verse that recreate some of the impossibly hard things that happened to Ó Tuama growing up gay in Ireland.
Maybe we can feel ourselves into these poems too, feel the sounds of the words inside us, feel something – anger, sacrilege, indifference, recognition. We growl at God, because sometimes, in Ó Tuama’s words “the God character of our narrative needs to be undone in order for something new to open.”
We talk The Lord of the Rings, N.K. Jemisin and world-building, about Tasha’s deep childhood desire to be Batman, and Ó Tuama’s deep childhood desire to be Wonder Woman!
What questions can we ask of our stories that will take us deeper into them?
Let us know in the comments!
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Then join us for the Afterparty video: In which Jeff says he feels dumb, and poetry is hard, and Tasha says reading a poem is like watching a gas cloud condense into a planet. We talk about the practice of finding yourself in the landscape of a story, and also of finding story in the landscape of your life. Then, we talk about prayer. Tasha recites a childhood prayer in German, and Jeff exclaims, “Ezekiel comes through with $10,000!” 😄
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️



Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week, we welcome the multi-talented Ofosu Jones-Quartey, a meditation teacher, author, and hip-hop artist. This discussion is so fun! It starts with how to share meditation and mindfulness with young people – how to stay real and relatable. Then gets into the role of the artist, creativity, and what it means to connect to your actual voice.
We do 2 practices: the first is a self-compassion practice that ends with Ofosu singing! And that leads to a second practice: an actual song - a beautiful (it made Jeff cry) hip-hop track called “Avalo” that features the voices of Ofosu’s wife and daughter. Ofosu plays the full music video for us. Definitely worth checking out the whole video episode!
How do we make being kind to ourselves an accessible practice, while also acknowledging (in Ofosu’s own words) “how stupid it can sometimes feel”?! Good to figure this out, since we’re talking to ourselves all the time anyway.
Relatedly, how can you integrate meditation into your art practice without it coming off as corny or performative? We explore the challenges and rewards of being both a meditation teacher and an artist and how both Ofosu and Tasha negotiate these roles in public.
Then join us for the Afterparty over on www.Mindbodpod.com!
In this Afterparty your hosts, Tasha the Amazon and Jeff the Non-Amazonian, continue to discuss navigating being both an artist and a meditation practitioner. We talk high-brow/low-brow, spiritual materialism, and authentic artistic expression. Then we say these phrases, not in this order: “You don’t talk about Tantra - you do it!” “Take your demon and stick it in someone else’s nut sack!” and “Tank-top, nice shirt, put in the work!”
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Welcome Mudita Nisker and Dan Clurman, authors of Let's Talk, An Essential Guide to Skillful Communication. Mudita and Dan have been teaching people how to communicate effectively for over 40 years, so there is serious wisdom in this episode. As Mudita points out, changing how you communicate can change your entire way of perceiving and relating to others. It is a profound practice, and it’s one each of us is already involved in, so we may as well get better at it!
With that in mind, the entire episode is really one long practice of communication, with Mudita and Dan reflecting back our own questions and habits. They skillfully unpack these key principles:
* how to give feedback
* loop communication and the art of becoming more aware of how we affect the other person
* how to avoid “flooding” other people, and instead “chunk” your delivery
* the life-changing skill of reflective listening as a way to understand another’s perspective and foster connection
* positive intentions and the way this brings caring into the mix
* the importance of “provisionality,” ie, using language that acknowledges the possibility of change
* the skill of framing and how to work with emotionally triggering subjects
* understanding whether to talk or listen in the first place!
Communication shapes how we get along with others, how we achieve our goals, and ultimately is core way to add more peace and compassion into the world.
Such a fun and bouncy conversation, like improvising with two jazz pianists.
Thank you Mudita and Dan!
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Then join us at www.mindbodpod.com for The Afterparty:
Communication is what we do, and it’s something many of us also do very poorly! In this Afterparty, we talk about the various unconscious crutches we use while hanging out with others and what it might look like to connect in a more open-ended way. We also riff on the way good conversation is a kind of agreement, a world we construct that we then get to play inside! This is very different than seeing language as a route to discovering what is objectively true.
*In an effort to sustain our antics and continue paying our producer Timmy, the Afterparty will move behind ye old paywall…soon. Please join us if you can!
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

We’re joined by Jamie Pabst, founder and CEO of Spiritune, a music therapy app that supports people’s mental health. Spiritune makes explicit what most of us know implicitly: music can shift our emotional and cognitive state.
What does “clinical-grade music” sound like? We listen to two 3-minute tracks, the first designed to move us from anxious to peaceful and the second from lethargic to victorious.
Along the way, Jamie points out the different music therapy principles at work:
* the “iso-principle” of meeting people where they are
* rhythm and neural entrainment
* the power of tone to create connection
A true exploration of consciousness! We talk about emotional literacy, how music can help both shift and evoke emotions, what it means to be “genre-agnostic,” the potential role of generative AI in shaping the technology, and much more.
The Afterparty (Watch the Video at www.mindbodpod.com
In this here Afterparty, Tasha puts on her music producer hat, which leads to a fascinating discussion on the cultural specificity of musical preferences, the true nature of musical complexity and human preferences, and various other tasty morsels.
Also! Tasha’s Substack & practice community, Bodhisavage, kicks off this Thursday! Monthly live Zoom sessions start June 21, with the good vibes of the Full Moon.
Subscribe at: Bodhisavage.com
That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in & see you next week.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe