True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

  1. Back in Count

    APR 12

    Back in Count

    In baseball, you count absolutely everything. Gets pretty obsessive, but if you love baseball, you learn to love counting too. Who knew it’s the same with religion? The “people of the book,” the ancient Hebrews who wrote the scriptures Christians cherish as well, counted everything. But their numbers didn’t have to be accurate to be true. Literal accuracy was not the point. Hebrew numbers, like their letters, carried meaning, and Hebrew letters were also numbered, so words had numbers that had meaning, and counts of time, people, things, had meaning too. It was a complex system for conveying meaning encoded into our scripture, and if we are to understand original intent, we need to pay attention to the counting. We just finished counting the forty days of Lent—meaning a time of trial and testing into rebirth. Now with Easter passed, Jesus risen, seems we should be done counting. But Easter Sunday started a new count, one built on the Hebrew counting between their ancient barley and wheat harvests, Passover and Shavu’ot, Exodus and giving of the Law—meaning a gradual graduation from physical liberation to spiritual freedom. Meaning built into the Christian counting between Easter and Pentecost. Both traditions count seven weeks of seven, 49 plus one day, 50. The Christian tradition breaks this down to forty plus ten: forty days with the risen Jesus on earth, ten more to integrate Jesus’ unseen spirit before Pentecost. Symbolic, not literal. We think of salvation as an event, a moment when God bestows acceptance, but scriptures show the experience of Jesus’ followers as gradually becoming ready to see that salvation is not given at all. It is experienced, realized, remembered... No one recognizes the risen Jesus until intimacy is re-experienced in a period of adjustment to altered states of awareness, from physical presence to unseen spirit—until we can remember the Pentecost moment, full awareness, is possible. All God has is already here, within. The shape of our journey is a counting until we’re ready to see. The counting gives structure, symbolic meaning, and the reminder that we’re all in the count.

    52 min
  2. Where to Look

    APR 5

    Where to Look

    Dave Brisbin 4.5.26 There’s not a single tenet of Christian doctrine that’s not contested. Even within Christianity. The Resurrection is no exception. Christians agree that Jesus lives, but not how…physically, spiritually, collectively, some way we can’t imagine? Ultimately, it’s a matter of faith shaped by how literally we read scripture, but where can we go for guidance to meaning? Of course, the gospels show us just where to look. We focus on the supernatural miracle, debating veracity and mechanics, but the gospels focus on the effect of the miracle, not the event itself. The Resurrection happens offstage, no details, the story picking up afterward. The question the gospels are implying is not whether we believe the Resurrection, but what difference it makes that we believe. And that difference is not realized in mental assent to an offstage event, but a process that stretches from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. A fascinating detail the gospels do preserve is that no one recognizes the risen Jesus. We wonder whether he looked different, but that misses the gospels’ point: that seeing the risen Jesus is a process of becoming ready to see the impossible, a process grounded in intimacy. Mary hears her name called in tones she’d heard a thousand times; Clopas sees Jesus break bread as he had a thousand more; for Peter, he’s cooking breakfast. The gospels show the process of re-experiencing intimacy—always the proof of identity for any human. The meaning of Resurrection is not out there in history or doctrine, but within us, in every intimate detail of our lives. Gospels ask: Why do you look for the living among the dead? Life is motion. No motion, no life. Set beliefs are static, dead. If we look for the risen Jesus in books and beliefs, he is not there, any more than he was in the tomb. The gospels are showing us where to look—in the heart of every day life. If we can’t find Jesus in the moving miracle of life herenow, we’ve missed the meaning of Resurrection. Jesus saw his Father in every intimate detail of his life. His friends couldn’t see he had risen until they saw him in every detail of theirs. And neither will we.

    24 min
  3. Disguised as Life

    MAR 29

    Disguised as Life

    Dave Brisbin 3.29.26 Gospels show Jesus riding into Jerusalem not on a horse, as would a conquering king, not on a donkey, which would have meant peace, but on the colt of a donkey…even more unassuming. The people cheer, beg him to save them, lay their cloaks along his path, wave palm branches—greetings for a savior king—while Roman and Jewish authorities see threat of sedition and plan accordingly. No one is paying attention, seeing reflections of their own agendas, not the person and scene playing out in the streets. What the church has called a triumphal entry, Jesus called a tragedy. He wept over the city saying the people had no idea of the things that make for peace, that they missed the hour of their visitation. The writers of the gospels, who had come to see where Jesus was pointing, wanted us not to miss our own opportunity to see something radically different, to crack the first stronghold blocking our way to the truth behind Jesus’ message. This is the significance of Palm Sunday. Seeing around our own egoic identity, past the desires, expectations, and compulsions such identity creates, seeing through our ego-filter to the truth of things as they really are, the truth of ourselves, who we really are is the first step, without which we can go no further along Jesus’ Way. Jesus is showing who he really is in action, word, symbol, every tool at hand, revealing an unassuming presence, the stance of a servant, the opposite of a powerful savior come to fix our circumstances by force. Begging Jesus to save us misses the whole point of salvation. Salvation isn’t passive, isn’t given or bestowed. It is experienced…or not. Jesus’ person and message is an invitation to follow the Way of experiencing the truth, the liberation that salvation is. Mother Teresa put it this way: I have an opportunity to be with Jesus 24 hours a day. Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, his hand in every happening…especially in the lowly appearance of the poor. Each of them is Jesus in disguise. Jesus is always riding into our lives. Every moment is Palm Sunday. Everything we need is all around us disguised as life.

    48 min
  4. Waking Up

    MAR 22

    Waking Up

    Dave Brisbin 3.22.26 I’ve been on the whole of Lent about how the holy grail of all spiritual work, of Jesus’ teaching, even our most ancient liturgical rites is…awareness. Waking up inside waking life. Until we can poke our heads above the waterline of our egoic selves, we’re only ever seeing the inside of our eyelids, nothing of the real that is not only all around us, but within as well. We can’t see the air; fish can’t see the water. Hopefully our odds are better than theirs. But what happens when we do wake up? Blissful sweetness and light? Jesus sounds an alarm. He didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword that would cut within our own families first. To help decode, the word for peace Jesus uses here is not shalom—he’s the prince of that—but shayna, calm, tranquility. The immediate context is the rift that inevitably stresses our closest relationships after radical transformation, but more deeply, there is an interior rift that opens when we’re no longer experiencing life the way we once did. Some authors put it this way: There's a peculiar suffering that comes with awareness. A kind of exile that happens not when you leave the world, but when you begin to truly see it. Conversations that once felt normal feel empty. Environments that once felt safe start to feel small. Awakening stretches your awareness until the old version of your life no longer fits the same way. This creates a profound loneliness—not of being physically alone, but of being awake in a world that's sleeping. If this is true, why would we ever take the red pill and wake up? Pulling off a blindfold in sunlight is painful, but as eyes adjust, would we ever opt for blindness? Becoming aware is transitionally painful, and if the awareness is merely conceptual, cognitive, it can harden into a jaded sense of separation, even condescension with life. But if we carry our awareness into momentary experience, we fall back in love with life, now with the deeper knowing we’re not above anything. We’re part of that whole. Awareness is waking up to remember who we are. Insignificant parts of an infinite whole that considers each part the center of its universe.

    49 min
  5. Pleasure as We Run

    MAR 15

    Pleasure as We Run

    Dave Brisbin 3.15.26 The earliest followers of Jesus understood that his Way of spiritual formation was about subtraction not addition—that there is nothing to acquire, no kingdom out there to make us whole. That everything there is, is already within, herenow, if we will only relinquish everything in our minds that blocks us from experiencing that reality. Our uniquely human egoic consciousness is all that separates us from everything else. Jesus’ Way offers the experience of stepping outside the torrent of thoughts our minds constantly create and into the stillness where there is no separation. How could Eric Liddel train so hard to win the 1924 Olympic 400M race, yet be so relaxed before the race he could smile and wish each competitor luck? Even at age 22, he realized all that mattered was that he felt God’s pleasure as he ran. When we’ve let go of outcomes to the point we can feel God’s pleasure as we run, what do we know we didn’t before? We know what has been called perennial wisdom, the universal truth that stands beneath all philosophy and theology, language and logic. This is the deep truth Jesus says will make us free. It can’t be put into words, but maybe we could point by saying: We are all one, and because we’re all one, nothing can exist outside of God—all that is seen and unseen is God. We emanated from and return to God, our source, and because of that, everything is truly good no matter how it appears. From that worldview, Richard Rohr extracts five more truths: Life is hard, we are not that important, our lives are not about us, we are not in control, and we are going to die. Sound brutal, but once couched in the oneness and non-separation of everything, they become consoling extensions of universal goodness: We are all parts of larger whole. Any identity apart from that whole is illusion. We are fulfilled only in the hard work of staying connected to and aware of that whole. We emanated from it and will return, but our minds actively block this reality. To experience it is to relinquish our minds’ hold, surrender self to that larger whole. Knowing this truth is feeling God’s pleasure as we run.

    54 min
  6. Radical Change Radical Acceptance

    MAR 8

    Radical Change Radical Acceptance

    Dave Brisbin 3.8.26 By all accounts, Eric Liddel, immortalized in the movie Chariots of Fire, was the embodiment of an old soul. At age 22, he won a gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the 400m race for Britain, and after over twenty years as a missionary to China, died there at age 43 in a Japanese internment camp at the end of WWII. But the real story lies beneath such events. The movie turns on the contrast between Liddel and his Olympic teammate Harold Abrahams and sister Jenny. Abrahams is obsessed with running, determined to win at any cost as revenge for antisemitic prejudice and proof of his superiority. Jenny is obsessed with religious duty and chastises her brother when he misses a prayer meeting, frivolously training for the Olympics. He tells her: I believe God made me for a purpose—for China. But he also made me fast, and I feel his pleasure when I run. Minutes before the start of his Olympic race, while the other runners are stretching and digging starting blocks, brows furrowed, intent on maintaining focus, Liddel, with a sport coat over his running shorts, is smiling and casually walking among them, shaking hands and wishing each one luck. Years later in the Japanese camp, fellow internees wrote of him: I never heard him say a bad word about anybody…he was overflowing with good humor and love for life, with enthusiasm and charm...his last words were, It’s complete surrender… Abrahams and Jenny are the same person with different agendas. Driven, anxious, identified only with what they could do. Liddel’s genius was to find within every physical task an eternal task always pointing to connection. That true meaning and purpose is found in that connection and nowhere else, and addressing that connection is to never let the hard work of change eclipse the radical acceptance of right now. That to celebrate the connections around us now is to accept ourselves and everything just as we are. Even as we train and strain toward not yet. Everything we do is meaningless… Until the moment duty is no longer obligation and running is no longer winning. Just the feeling of God’s pleasure in the breeze of our passage.

    48 min
  7. No Longer Waiting

    MAR 1

    No Longer Waiting

    Dave Brisbin 3.1.26 A few years ago, a billion painted lady butterflies fluttered over our heads migrating from inland deserts to the Pac Northwest. Was a very wet winter, and the high desert that usually get three inches of rain in a year, got that in a weekend. All the dormant seeds waiting in the cracked soil burst open, blanketing the desert floor in a spectacular bloom. Started the cycle of life that sent a billion butterflies north. Can’t miss a billion butterflies. But we can miss one. Or two. We mostly take nature for granted in our concrete cities—only dimly aware of it turning in the background behind the urgency of our tasks and thoughts. But when nature becomes intense enough, it calls attention to itself, forcing us to see again and fall back into the wonder of the child. Should we have to be called? Wait for circumstance intense enough to break us open like desert seeds waiting for spectacular rains? Are we so husked over that we can’t just get up and go find water? Desert seeds have no choice but to wait for rain. But there is water all around us, and we can bloom whenever we want. The question Lent is asking is how do we find the water? It has to do with deprivation, not as penance, but as a quieting. It has to do with prayer, not as words, but the awareness we need to be awed again by a single butterfly. Paul tells us to rejoice always, pray continuously, and in everything give thanks. Three directives that define prayer as falling into a constant state of gratitude, which always feels joyful by definition, present and aware by necessity. Unceasing prayer is engaging our entire experience in any given moment. Full presence and participation, seeing everything with all our senses without naming them in our head, aware of the connection that is God flowing beneath the level of thought. It’s letting the smile spread across our face without permission, pulling the car over to take it all in. What makes us smile, makes us pray. It really is that simple. Our way out of the desert tomb. If we’re waiting for rain, we’re not blooming. But the waiting is over, kingdom is here. We can bloom any time we want.

    45 min
  8. Withering into Truth

    FEB 22

    Withering into Truth

    Many of us who grew up with Lent hold dark memories of being forced to give up favorite things as penance for our sinfulness—even before we could really sin—with the implied punishment of self-deprivation as preparation for Easter, but more deeply as appeasing an angry God. Whatever the doctrinal intent, without further teaching, this is what we kids absorbed: a cementing of the reward/punishment paradigm that negates Jesus’ concept of a love that self-exists as the oneness at the heart of everything. Lent, the forty days of fasting and prayer before Easter, was originally the rite of passage for those approaching baptism, the transition into new life requiring a complete change of values and perception. Meant to mirror Jesus’ forty days of exhausting deprivation in the wilderness, the church and its people gradually lost the meaning behind Jesus’ suffering, letting it fall into superstition as an end in itself, the penance needed to regain God’s favor. What was Jesus really doing out there? He certainly suffered, but it was a means to an end, a self-imposed sensory deprivation to quiet the noise, remove all distraction to reveal what was true about himself, God, reality. His three symbolic temptations embrace the totality of human ego dissolution, effectively putting down the ego’s need to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular in advance of its own agenda. What Jesus discovered in the fortyness of his wilderness was an agendaless love, indiscriminate and degreeless; that he was identified with that love; that he and that love, the Father, were one. This is what Lent is really about. Deprivation, yes. Discomfort, disturbance of familiar routines, sure. Suffering, maybe. But not as penance in search of reward…as the only means by which we can realize the Father’s agendaless love already full-blown within ourselves. We don’t ascend to this love, perform for it or suffer for it. As William Butler Yeats wrote, we wither into the truth. Lent is the ritual process of intentionally withering our noisy egoic minds to the point we can see what is really true. A process Jesus says is the only Way to the Father.

    48 min
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About

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

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