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Florence Williams on Spending Time In Nature

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Florence Williams- Full- The One You Feed

Florence Williams shares the scientific research behind the benefit to our mood and our health when we spend time in nature as part of our daily lives. Her book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative is full of practical, intuitive wisdom that can be applied regardless of your lifestyle or circumstances. To that point, you’ll be surprised at how little time it takes to have a significant impact on things like depression, anxiety, and stress as well as things like blood pressure and cortisol levels. You may have noticed feeling better after a walk in the woods; this episode will explain why by way of some fascinating research.

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This week we talk to Florence Williams

Florence Williams is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and a freelance writer for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books,  and numerous other publications.

She is also the writer and host of the new Audible Original series, Breasts Unbound. She is fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature and a visiting scholar at George Washington University, her work focuses on the environment, health and science.

Her first book, BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology. Her latest book is called: The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative.

 

In This Interview, Florence Williams and I Discuss…

  • The Wolf Parable
  • Her book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative.
  • The research that supports the fact that when we spend time in nature it can boost our mood
  • That 15 minutes in a forest environment can reduce our cortisol levels
  • Natural Killer Cells (T-cells)
  • The roll of Cypress aerosols
  • Taking in nature as a whole as the benefit
  • That the benefit of nature as a whole being greater than the sum of its parts
  • Nature Deficit Disorder and trying to fill it with other more modern-day things
  • Nature being a better option for some people than meditation
  • Paying attention to our surroundings
  • Achieving a more relaxed, restorative state
  • The effect of the sound of birds
  • The benefits of walking alone in nature
  • The benefits of walking with others in nature
  • Attention Restoration Theory
  • The effects of spending time in nature on different parts of the brain
  • The amount of time we should spend in nature
  • Biophilia

Florence Williams Links

Danielle Laporte on Self Help vs Self Criticism

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Danielle Laporte -Full - The One You Feed

Danielle LaPorte is all about being honest when it comes to her experiences on the path to self-improvement, self-growth, and self-empowerment. In this interview, she shares so much of herself that you will remark how brave, vulnerable and real she is and how much you can relate to what she’s felt, thought and been through. If you’ve ever struggled with feeling overwhelmed by the obligations in your life or if walking on a spiritual path has felt like another item on an ever-growing checklist, then this episode is a must listen for you.

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This week we talk to Danielle Laporte

Danielle LaPorte is an invited member of Oprah’s inaugural SuperSoul 100, a group who, in Oprah Winfrey’s words, “is uniquely connecting the world together with a spiritual energy that matters.” She is also the author of The Fire Starters Sessions: A Guide to Creating Success On Your Own Terms, and The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals With Soul.

Her latest book is White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it Real On Your Spiritual Path— From One Seeker To Another. Millions of visitors go to DanielleLaPorte.com every month for her daily #Truthbombs. It has been named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes, and called “the best place online for kick-ass spirituality.” Danielle’s multi-million dollar company is made up of nine women and one lucky guy, working virtually from five countries. A powerful speaker and poet, and a former business strategist and Washington, DC think-tank exec, Entrepreneur magazine calls Danielle “equal parts poet and entrepreneurial badass…edgy, contrarian…loving and inspired.

 

In This Interview, Danielle Laporte and I Discuss…

  • The Wolf Parable
  • Her book,White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it Real On Your Spiritual Path— From One Seeker To Another
  • Reframing your obligations into conscious choices
  • Bringing our artistic or creative spirit into everything we do
  • Loosening up under the weight of obligation
  • Spiritual path as yet another thing to achieve, another obligation
  • The practice itself having some delight to it
  • Pain as a motivator, laziness as an obstacle
  • That devotion isn’t easy but it’s worth it
  • The distinction between pain and suffering
  • That the world is not comprehensible but it is embraceable by embracing the things that are in it
  • Transformation begins with the acceptance of what is
  • Short circuiting the healing process
  • That what’s repressed finds a way to sneak out
  • How we have more in common than we have differences

Danielle Laporte Links

194:Scott Stabile Mindfulness, Love, and Forgiveness

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Scott Stabile- Full- The One You Feed

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Scott Stabile has lived through some very difficult things in his lifetime, from feeling shame about his sexuality to the murder of his parents when he was just 14 years old. He can verify that life can be very hard. Yet, he has gone on to live a life full of love, empathy, compassion, and forgiveness. Learn some very practical, applicable wisdom in this episode. You will leave the conversation armed with steps to take towards a happier life for yourself.

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This week we talk to Scott Stabile

Scott Stabile’s inspirational posts and videos have attracted a huge and devoted social media following. His previous works include Just Love, Iris, and the Li’l Pet Hospital series. Scott also wrote the feature film The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, an eye-opening experience he writes about in his new book, Big Love.

A passionate speaker and love advocate, Scott runs day long empowerment workshops nationally and internationally. He lives in his home state of Michigan with his partner.

 

In This Interview, Scott Stabile and I Discuss…

  • The Wolf Parable
  • His book, Big Love: The Power of Living with a Wide Open Heart
  • How shame thrives on secrecy
  • How and when he came out as gay
  • How you help others by being yourself
  • To consider making more and more choices in your life from a place of love
  • That awareness is hard work
  • Asking yourself “what does love invite me to do in this moment?”
  • Love as an energy
  • How his parents were murdered when he was 14 years old
  • That love is an action, more so than it is a feeling
  • Choosing to act from a place of love can be an extraordinarily difficult thing as well as an extraordinarily powerful thing to do in the moment
  • The path of empathy
  • Doing your best to connect with the humanity of others, especially when they have opposing views and they’re right in front of you
  • How toxic it is to believe that something is unforgivable and that the pathway to it is empathy and compassion
  • Forgiving because not doing so takes a toll on you as a person
  • How good it feels to be loving
  • The importance of self-care
  • That there is choice in sobriety
  • Depression as a syndrome vs a disease
  • How we are all riding the fine line of addiction all the time
  • The importance of building a more fulfilling life
  • How happiness (and all feelings) is not simply a choice
  • Choosing actions that stand a chance to serve our happiness
  • That action helps assuage fear
  • That there is no cure all

Scott Stabile Links

Lisa Feldman Barrett on Emotions

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Lisa Feldman Barrett - Full- The One You Feed

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Have you ever wondered how emotions are made in our brains? This conversation with Lisa Feldman Barrett will explain this and more and as a result, you will be astounded. Full of scientifically backed concepts that you’ve probably never heard before, your view on how your brain manages how you feel at any given moment will be totally changed after hearing what this author and researcher has to say.

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This week we talk to Lisa Feldman Barrett

Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition to the book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Dr. Barrett has published over 200 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press.

Dr. Barrett received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for her revolutionary research on emotion in the brain. These highly competitive, multi-million dollar awards are given to scientists of exceptional creativity who are expected to transform biomedical and behavioral research.

Among her many accomplishments, Dr. Barrett has testified before Congress, presented her research to the FBI, consulted to the National Cancer Institute, appeared on Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and been a featured guest on public television and worldwide radio programs. She is also an elected fellow of Canada’s most prestigious national organization of scholars, the Royal Society of Canada (analogous to the National Academy in the United States).

 

In This Interview, Lisa Feldman Barrett and I Discuss…

  • The Wolf Parable
  • Her book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
  • The myth of the lizard brain
  • Emotions don’t live anywhere in the brain
  • Neurons being multi purpose
  • The idea of degeneracy
  • How complex emotions are
  • Multi purpose ingredients in your brain (like in recipes)
  • Our brains predict, rather than react, to the next immediate moment (those are our emotions and subsequent actions)
  • Confirming or Correcting those guesses (or concepts) based on your past experiences
  • How this process is your brain is trying to make sense of the sensory input of your body in the world
  • How it’s more efficient to guess in advance and correct in response than it is to react
  • The importance of keeping your body’s energy budget in balance
  • We see the world as we believe it to be, through our concepts
  • Interoception – feedback from your body on how it’s systems are working
  • Your brain is trying to anticipate what your body is going to need and then provide what’s necessary to meet those needs before they arise
  • Tragic Embodiment
  • Most of the time you don’t feel sensations from your body in a very precise way and if you do, you feel them in simple terms – “affect”
  • More intense sensations are used to make emotions whereas less intense ones are used to make thoughts and other things
  • How illness is an imbalance in systems in your body and how we experience it
  • How basic body sensations are the cause of our emotions and how we feel
  • How every waking moment of your life is simultaneously physical and mental
  • When your body budget is out of balance/disrupted, you will feel distressed
  • Reframing the feeling of anxiety as “preparing for something tough” and this is a good sign that your body is preparing for something tough
  • Take care of yourself and your body to feel better (sleep, eat, nutrition)
  • Understanding emotion and being more granular in our description is helpful because we better know what to do or not to do about it
  • When you’re depressed or anxious, the distress is not helpful if you personalize it

Lisa Feldman Barrett Links

192: Sean Carroll

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Sean Carroll- Full- The One You Feed

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Think theoretical physics is irrelevant to your everyday life and way over your head? You’ll think differently after listening to this interview with Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, poetic naturalist, and author.The meaning of life, the finitude of life, the choices we make and our experience of happiness and suffering all have a connection back to the scientific realm that will both fascinate and provoke thought in you.

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This week we talk to Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. Carroll is the author of The Particle at the End of the Universe and From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time,

He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. He has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report, PBS’s NOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television.
 

In This Interview, Sean Carroll and I Discuss…

  • The Wolf Parable
  • His book, The Big Picture; On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself
  • That who we become is a combination of the choices we make and what the Universe gives us
  • The philosophy of Poetic Naturalism – 1 world, many ways of talking about it
  • 3 Levels of Stories: Fundamental, Emergent, Comprehensive
  • What it means to be real
  • You can’t make “ought” out of “is”
  • That facts and moral values are different things
  • His perspective on life mattering – that it comes from within, that it’s not imposed on us from the outside
  • The fact that we care is the origin of things mattering in this life and world
  • Life is a process, it’s something that’s happening – always moving and changing – and that there’s always something else that we want
  • How his book lays out the design for you to decide how to live your life and what kind of person you want to be
  • The mistake of fetishizing happiness
  • How you cannot separate happiness and suffering in life – especially a life well lived
  • That our goal shouldn’t be to reach some state of happiness and stay there because life is a dynamic process and it doesn’t work like that
  • The finitude of life
  • The average human lives for three billion heartbeats
  • That the difference between right and wrong is up to us to decide and that can be scary
  • That the world – including us – is only really made up of 3 basic particles and 3 basic forces
  • That the big bang isn’t necessarily the beginning of the universe but it’s as far back as we can go
  • Physics books for the non-science people – look for books by either Brian Greene or Lisa Randall
  • Life’s Ratchet by Peter Hoffman is another interesting book for a non-science person

Sean Carroll Links

191: Spring Washam

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Spring Washam - Full- The One You Feed

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This week we talk to Spring Washam

Spring Washam is a well-known meditation and dharma teacher based in Oakland, California. She is a founding member and core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center located in downtown Oakland. She is the founder of Lotus Vine Journeys an organization that blends indigenous healing practices with Buddhist wisdom. In addition to being a teacher, she is also a healer, facilitator, spiritual activist, and writer. Her upcoming book entitled, A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment, will be available in stores on November 7th, 2017. She has studied numerous meditation practices and Buddhist philosophy since 1997. She has practiced and studied under some of the most preeminent meditation masters in both the Theravada and Tibetan schools of Buddhism. She has studied indigenous healing practices and works with students individually from around the world. She has completed a six -year teacher-training program under the guidance of Jack Kornfield and is now on the teacher’s council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Spring is considered a pioneer in bringing mindfulness based healing practices into diverse communities and is committed to enriching the lives of disenfranchised people everywhere. She currently travels and teaches workshops, classes, and retreats worldwide.

 

In This Interview, Spring Washam and I Discuss…

  • The Wolf Parable
  • Her book, A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment
  • How she became a meditation teacher
  • How self-compassion is at the heart of Buddhist teachings
  • How being with ourselves in difficult times is an act of mercy
  • How a synonym for mindfulness is remembering
  • How we are always trying to change consciousness
  • Her controversial Peru ayahuasca retreats
  • How meditation and mindfulness was not enough to deal with her trauma
  • Her first ayahuasca ceremony
  • What ayahuasca is
  • The risks of using entheogens
  • The debate in the Buddhist community about this approach
  • Whether you need to go to the jungle for this
  • How we often need multiple approaches to healing ourselves
  • How feeling like you are innately good changes the whole path

Spring Washam Links

A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other. 

One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear.

The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”

The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed 

The Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable.

This parable goes by many names including:

The Tale of Two Wolves

The Parable of the Two Wolves

Two Wolves

Which Wolf Do You Feed

Which Wolf are You Feeding

Which Wolf Will You Feed

It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.