Shows
Life Happens with Barb & Michelle207 - Unravel Your Mind: Meditation Made Easy with Mindfulness Experts Jeff Warren and Tasha SchumannImprove your mental health with Barb & Michelle through practical mindfulness, meditation, and real talks with experts Jeff Warren and Tasha Schumann. from the Mind-Bod Adventure Pod. Build ease, trust, and lasting calm—one breath at a time.In this episode of Life Happens with Barb & Michelle, mindfulness experts Jeff Warren and Tasha Schumann join the conversation to explore how meditation can transform your mental and emotional wellbeing.Meditation is often misunderstood, but at its core, it's the simple, consistent practice of returning to the present moment. This episode breaks do...
2025-05-271h 02
Consciousness Explorers PodcastThe Sensual Self with Ev'Yan WhitneyIn today’s episode (the Season 1 finale!) we get slow and personal with Ev’Yan Whitney, sexuality doula, podcast host, and author of Sensual Self. “Sensuality” often gets lumped in with sexuality… Ev’Yan wants to change that, to tease apart these two aspects of being human and demonstrate how everyone can connect with a more sensual version of themselves.Ev’Yan’s 19-minute practice is a tour of the senses. Take your time. The pacing of Ev’Yan’s guidance – the way she encourages us to pause and savor each sense – is pa...
2022-06-1650 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastDirect Pointing with Angelo DilulloOur guest today is Angelo DiLullo, a medical doctor and author of a fine book called Awake: It's Your Turn. Angelo points directly to the true nature of self / consciousness / or whatever you want to call this bizarre ululating mystery we all seem to be living inside. He probably wouldn’t even say he “teaches” this, since all he really does for his guided practice is describe his own experience of operating in a world without a sense of a panicked separate self running around going “I gotta get more stuff!” In fact, the whole conversation is a direct p...
2022-06-0956 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastThe Body's Intelligence with Philip ShepherdIn today’s episode, we’re joined by author and embodiment expert Philip Shepherd. Philip is also an actor, and thus a wonderfully entertaining tour guide. He takes us into the body’s “grounded sensitivity” – really the perfect phrase for it, a place both of exquisite intelligence and dependable common sense. Under Philip’s careful guidance, we explore how to move past the mind’s imaginary constraints, softening and merging with the world around us. It’s an ambitious itinerary with many practical take-aways. Come feel reality beyond the head! To go straight to Philip’s grounded sensitivi...
2022-06-0255 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastUnconscious Bias with Rima DibToday we’re joined by Rima Dib, a good friend of Tasha and Jeff’s who also happens to be an expert in unconscious bias and anti-oppression education. Rima teaches workshops about difference – race, age, gender, sexual preference, ability – to people around the planet. She makes it fun. Is this possible? Yes, it turns out. We laughed our asses off. In Rima’s words, “If it gets too heavy, we’re gonna want to put it down. By keeping it light, we can carry it longer.”Fun doesn’t necessarily mean comfortable. Her acting and word association practices are very...
2022-05-2657 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastSpontaneous Thinking with Shinzen YoungMeet Shinzen Young, a long-time instructor of mindfulness, author of The Science of Enlightenment, and now co-director of the “Science Enhanced Mindful Awareness” or “SEMA” Lab at the University of Arizona. Shinzen is Jeff’s OG meditation teacher. He is both a scholar of comparative mysticism, and a highly creative designer of strange and beautiful (and practical) meditation techniques.In this episode, instead of trying to banish thoughts, we drop into a "global unfixated state," and allow creative images and words and associations to spontaneously unfold. Both Shinzen’s exposition and his guided practice are quite precise – so much so tha...
2022-05-1958 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastTarot and the Imagination with Tatianna MoralesToday we hang out with the incomparable Tatianna Morales – aka @tatiannatarot – a Brooklyn-born spiritualist, priestess, and Tarot diviner! Together, we plunge into the imagination, learning how the age-old tradition of reading Tarot cards can give us insight into our personalities and our life situations. It turns out we’re meeting Tatianna at the very moment her own relationship to Tarot is changing. And not only hers: there’s a revolution happening out in the culture – artists and enthusiasts are creating their own tarot decks, imagining new archetypes to better reflect the realities of 21st century life. As we discuss...
2022-05-1252 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastEffortless Meditation with Peter RussellToday’s episode: Peter Russell. Peter started out as a theoretical physicist, a student of Stephen Hawking’s, until sometime in the early 70s he made his way to India and had his brain blown open. He became one of the West’s early proponents of meditation, and in the 80s wrote several seminal books on consciousness and technology. He’s had a big influence on the culture of meditation in general and on Jeff in particular – Jeff tells the story of meeting Peter in San Francisco back in 2008 and afterwards getting “let go” tattooed on his forearm.Appropriat...
2022-04-2853 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastThe Feldenkrais Method with Donna RayMeet psychotherapist and Feldenkrais teacher Donna Ray. In this episode, she makes us move! Ok, more like she makes us sit in chairs and roll our eyes and turn our heads a bit and suddenly everything feels better. Welcome to the subtle art of micro-movement. Donna shows us how small physical adjustments in the way we hold ourselves can change both our experience and our body’s overall functioning. She’s a true adept – Donna has been teaching this method for over 40 years, ever since Moshe Feldenkrais first brought his system to North America.Like much of what w...
2022-04-2145 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastAddiction & Self-Compassion with Valerie Mason-JohnToday we’re joined by the UK-based Valerie Mason-John, also known as Vimalasara, a leader in the field of mindfulness for addiction and trauma.This episode is about the ways we get disconnected from our bodies and our lives, and the role self-compassion can play in bringing us home. We explore this in the context of our addictions – even addictions we don’t realize are addictions, like, in Vimalasara’s words, “stinking thinking” and technology. And we explore it in the context of contemporary challenges like coronavirus, and the institutional racism and violence directed to Black bodies. For...
2022-04-1452 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastTechnology-Enhanced Meditation with Dr. Baron ShortToday we’re joined by Dr Baron Short, an Interventional Psychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina, and co-founder of Zendo, an electronic device that purports to enhance both the experience and the long-term benefits of meditation.How might a direct current of electricity to the brain affect our meditation? This is not a hypothetical question. All three of us – two hosts and one guide – wire up, select the highest possible setting, and ride out the hum. Tasha and Baron go to Bliss-land. Jeff goes... somewhere else!Baron’s guidance is lovely and supportive and usef...
2022-04-0758 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastHypnosis with Dr. David SpiegelToday we’re joined by Stanford psychiatry professor Dr. David Spiegel, an expert in the clinical use of hypnosis. David is co-author, along with his late father Herbert Spiegel, of Trance and Treatment, a classic work on hypnosis published by the American Psychiatric Association. And therein lies a story … almost 20 years ago, Jeff interviewed David’s 92-year old father Herbert Spiegel. Not just interviewed – Dr Spiegel managed to hypnotize Jeff, demonstrating to him first-hand the strange persuasive power of this mind-body intervention. Now listeners can get their own taste. David’s first practice is a guided hypnosis session –...
2022-03-3149 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastBreath as Medicine with Therese JornlinToday we’re joined by Jeff’s good friend Therese Jornlin, teacher of meditation, yoga, and qi gong. Much happens in this episode! Therese re-introduces us to our breath as both medicine and guide. We learn how the specific way each of us breathes reflects our particular mental patterns and habits. The breath can show us where we’re stuck, and it can show us how to find a way through. This is really an exploration of the wisdom of cycles: the inhale and the exhale, the up and the down, even life and death. We learn how The...
2022-03-2458 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastConnecting to the Land with Warren HooleyIf you live in the US or Canada, you may have noticed a movement to acknowledge local indigenous groups who've historically lived in a particular territory. For example, Tasha and I live in Toronto, Ontario, which is also where our nonprofit meditation community group – The Consciousness Explorers Club or "CEC" – operates. These days, at the beginning of every CEC retreats and meditation sits, even our virtual events, we say some version of "The CEC operates on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit, and is covered by Treaty 13." We say this as a way...
2022-03-1755 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastThe Wakeful Body with Lama WillaMeet meditation teacher Willa Blythe Baker. Willa is an authorized Lama in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and author of our new favorite book: The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom.She guides us in a practice called GROUND – an acronym that describes progressively more subtle and expansive "layers" of somatic experience. We drop from the physical body, to the subtle body, and finally into the causal or nondual “body” of awareness itself. For Willa, the whole process is about “waking down” – in her words, “metabolizing, not transcending.” We also explore how to work with...
2022-03-1051 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastRadiant Rest with Tracee StanleyToday our explorer-in-residence is Tracee Stanley, a longtime student and teacher of Yoga and Tantra, and author of Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation and Awakened Clarity. We’ve explored rest before on this pod, but not quite like this! When we sit and attempt to let go, what gets in the way? What messages about safety and worthiness are hiding in our nervous system?For Tracee, rest is about sanity, empowerment, and resistance. Resistance to our own self judgements and the pressures of dominant culture. We talk about all of this from a place of re...
2022-03-0353 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastA Psychedelic Sangha with Erik DavisToday we meet Erik Davis, award-winning journalist and author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.Erik guides us in an imagination-based open awareness practice that for him is about cultivating a very specific kind of watchful attention. This turns out to be the perfect setup to discuss one of Erik’s specialities: the defiantly unclassifiable weirdness of psychedelic experience.We explore the ins and outs of the current psychedelic revival, the heretical nature of psychedelics as “practice,” even the possibility of the Buddha himself being a psychonaut. Can we sca...
2022-02-241h 02
10% Happier with Dan HarrisThere’s No Part of Your Life You Can’t Make More Awesome | Jeff WarrenIt is very easy to think about your meditation practice as being quarantined to those minutes when you’re dutifully sitting down with your eyes closed. But actually the point is to turn your whole life into a practice. Our guest Jeff Warren has a very broad, capacious understanding of the concept of practice. There’s formal meditation practice, but also: movement practice, work practice, relationship practice, sleep practice, art practice, and more. It’s really about the goal, which few of us will ever fully attain, of turning everything you do into something intentional and illuminating.
2022-02-2359 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastLove and Rage with Lama RodToday’s episode we’re joined by Buddhist minister and social activist Lama Rod Owens, author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger. Our subject is anger, something Lama Rod once had to suppress in order to survive as “a Black queer body in America.” He writes: “My fear of death and policing has translated into a self-policing of my anger, to such an extent that if it weren’t for my meditation practice, I wouldn’t know how to find my anger.”How do we work with the energies of anger in this intense cultural...
2022-02-171h 00
Consciousness Explorers PodcastFreeing the Voice with Debora JoyIn today’s episode we’re joined by the delightful voice coach and kundalini teacher Debora Joy. Debora guides us through an array of voice exercises, all of them meant to free us from the shackles of bodily restriction. We learn how the way we speak reflects our conditioning, and how opening up our voice can change who we are.This episode is much more interactive than usual, almost all of it a practice. We left this one feeling exhilarated, full of energy and – yes – joy.If you want to go straight to her first meditati...
2022-02-101h 07
Consciousness Explorers PodcastWake Up to Sleep with Charlie MorleyToday’s episode is an energetic dive into the healing potential of the nighttime mind with Charlie Morley. Charlie is the author of several much-loved books on lucid dreaming, including his newest: Wake Up to Sleep: 5 Practices to Transform Trauma and Stress for Peaceful Sleep. Charlie guides us in two practices: a powerful protection practice inspired by the Bön tradition of Dream Yoga, and a simple Yoga Nidra practice, meant to help reset the nervous system. Both help create a safe and supporting space for overcoming insomnia and getting a good night’s rest. We also explor...
2022-02-0359 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastLoving Kindness with Sharon SalzbergToday we’re joined by Sharon Salzberg, one of the pioneers of Western Buddhism. She’s the author of a new book: Real Change: Mindfulness to Heal Ourselves and the World.This episode is all about what’s possible when we bring a little (or a lot) more love into our lives. We explore her take on loving kindness, and learn in real-time how loving kindness can be an antidote to fear. We explore how the practice both synchronizes and conflicts with activism, and how to avoid the "Disney-ification" of loving kindness, among many other topics.To...
2022-01-2745 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastThe Deep Heart with John PrendergastIn today’s episode: psychotherapist and meditation teacher John Prendergast.John is the author of The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence, a book that explores “the convergence of psychological healing and spiritual awakening.” For John, this happens most clearly and powerfully in the depths of the heart. How do we sensitize ourselves to this subtle space? This is our guide's expertise. John shows us how to rest in the heart as a way to appreciate and embody a different way of knowing and relating. We ask our hearts about our core limiting beliefs, and what it might m...
2022-01-2059 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastThe Four Elements with Sebene SelassieToday’s episode: Sebene Selassie.Sebene is a meditation teacher, integral coach, Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy (IFOT) practitioner and author of You Belong: A Call for Connection. She’s also one of the most popular teachers on the Ten Percent Happier meditation app.Sebene guides us through the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air. This practice is both powerful and practical. Sebene shows us how to harness the elements to balance our minds and bodies, and how the elements help us understand different aspects of who we are and how we connect to the...
2022-01-1339 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastLiminal Dreaming with Jennifer DumpertMeet Jennifer Dumpert. Jennifer is a San Francisco-based dreamer and lecturer, author of Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edge of Sleep. And the edge of sleep is where we go today! We drop like stones into the weird space between dreams and ordinary waking consciousness, and then attempt to recombobulate afterwards into coherent human beings.We find out what liminal dreaming is, why it’s such a good practice, and how it can be used to great effect at the opera and with the in-laws. We also get a taste of Jennifer’s boundary-mixing pers...
2022-01-1353 min
Consciousness Explorers PodcastPodcast TrailerWelcome to our trailer, where we venture into what this pod's about, how it came to be, and most importantly, how to nerd out at a rave...The Consciousness Explorers Podcast (CEP) is an experiential sandbox for mind and body hosted by Tasha Schumann and Jeff Warren. Each episode is a real-time adventure, where a different guide takes us through a short meditation or personal growth practice. (That means you’re coming too!)Don't forget to hit subscribe and if you want to be notified for each new episode then sign up to ou...
2022-01-0507 min