New Dimensions

Page advises us to tend the soil of our body and says, “Your soil is made up of your belief systems, your perceptions.” She believes illness isn’t just a physiological episode and tells us to listen to the intuitive messages from our soul telling us it is time to change. When we keep ignoring these messages, our bodies will stop us in our tracks by getting sick. Christine Page, M.D. received her medical degree from the University of London in 1978. She’s an international seminar leader on healing and empowerment. In 1984, she founded one of the first integrative health centers within the British National Health Service, followed by a highly successful holistic private practice which included homeopathy, counseling and energy-related medicine. She also began a 10-year educational career, teaching doctors, nurses and other medical personnel about complementary therapies including mind/body and energy medicine. She became a well-known bridge builder and played an important role in the acceptance of alternative therapies in the British Health System. She is the author of Frontiers of Health (Rider 2010) and The Healing Power of the Sacred Woman: Health, Creativity, and Fertility for the Soul (Bear & Company 2013) Interview Date: 11/13/2013       Tags: MP3, Christine Page, breast cancer, reading energies, cancer, illness, beliefs, belief, guilt over being ill, divine feminine, menstrual cycles, moon time, princess Diana, Queen Bee metaphor, Mother Cow metaphor, Dragon Queen metaphor, Goddess, Health & Healing, Personal Transformation, Spirituality, Women’s Studies, Community, death & dying

Don Oscar tells us that ritual begets relationship, nature begets purpose, and Love begets life. This gentle shaman has captured the essence of how we can sustain our sacred earth walk by practicing the ritual of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition. This powerful practice can serve to help us build a life-long relationship with the sacred dimensions of life and all our relations. Oscar Miro-Quesada is a respected kamasqa curandero and shamanic adept from Peru, and has been guiding cross-cultural, ethnospiritual apprenticeship expeditions to sacred sites of the world since 1986, with special emphasis on Peru and Bolivia.  He’s been a popular faculty member at numerous U.S. colleges and universities.  He originated the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition of cross-cultural shamanism, and is the founder of the Heart of the Healer Foundation.  His works and programs have been featured on CNN, Univision, A&E and the Discovery Channel.  He is the author of Lessons in Courage, Peruvian Shamanic Wisdom for Everyday Life (co-author Bonnie Glass-Coffin) (Rainbow Ridge Publishing 2013) and Healing Light: An Apprenticeship in Peruvian Shamanism, A 6-CD Audio Set (Sounds True 2015)Interview Date: 8/26/2013       Tags: MP3, Oscar Miro-Quesada, sacred reciprocity, shamanism, Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, ritual, dark matter, Wednesday night link, Sixto Paz Wells, dogma, Heart of the Healer Foundation, Indigenous Wisdom,Spirituality, Personal Transformation, Shamanism

You will be inspired by Malden’s candor and clarity as she speaks about her experience of living through the debilitating disease and death of her husband and work partner. She likens this time in her life to being strapped in a roller coaster that you never bought a ticket for. Carla Malden has been a screenwriter and published author. She began her career as the assistant to renowned director Elia Kazan. With her husband and screen writing partner, Laurence Starkman, she co-wrote many screenplays and produced and wrote several award winning short films. She is author of When Do I Start? (coauthor, her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden) (Limelight Editions 2004), Afterimage, A Broken Hearted Memoir of a Charmed Life (Skirt! 2011)Interview Date: 9/6/2012  Tags: MP3, Carla Malden, grief, soulmate, soul mate, cancer, grieving, widowhood, Death & Dying, Health & Healing, Writing, Personal Transformation, Self Help

Gandhi once said, “The most violent weapon on Earth is the table fork.” Dr. Will Tuttle asks us to consider one of the primary driving forces behind a whole network of problems we face as human beings is the mentality of violence, exploitation, exclusion and privilege that is required for us to eat animal foods.   Will Tuttle, Ph.D., is a professional pianist, composer, and teacher who holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. For more than two decades he has presented at progressive churches, vegetarian and human potential conferences, and intentional communities throughout the United States. He trained in Korea as a Zen Buddhist Monk and has worked extensively in Tai Chi, Yoga, and meditation. He also works with his artist wife Madeleine Tuttle who contributes to his presentations, books, and albums. He is the author of many books including: Your Inner Islands: The Keys to Intuitive Living (Will Tuttle - revised 2017), The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony (Lantern Books 2005), He also has many original piano albums including: Ascension: A Journey Beyond and Islands of Light.Interview Date: 1/12/2020    Tags: Will Tuttle, vegan, veganism, vegetarian, vegetarianism, plant based eating, Stephen Gaskin, The Farm, grass fed meat, free-range chickens, animal agriculture, ahimsa, non-harmfulness, compassion, Donald Gilbert, intuition, Buddhist five precepts, Buddhist four immeasurable, microbiome, complex carbohydrates, sacred feminine, Health & Healing, Meditation, Spirituality, Social/Change/Politics, Peace/Nonviolence

Anat Baniel has created an extraordinary and effective process that leads to the improvement of brain functioning and that, in turn, translates to an improvement in motor and cognitive skills of the special needs child or adult. She has found the key to engaging the miraculous capacities of the brain to change and heal. Anat Baniel was born in Israel and worked with the great master of movement Moshe Feldenkrais, who frequently taught classes in her parents’ home. She has established an international reputation for her work with children with special needs. A clinical psychologist who, since the early 1980s, has refined her method for working with children, she now runs the Anat Baniel Method facility in Marin county in Northern California. She’s the author of: Kids Beyond Limits: Breakthrough Results for Children with Autism, Asperger’s, Brain Damage, ADHD, and Undiagnosed Developmental Delays (Perigee Books 2012)Interview Date: 4/24/2012    Tags: Anat Baniel, Anat Baniel Method, attention to movement, awakening the brain, brain, healing special needs children, mp3, special needs children, tummy time, Health & Healing

The RAIN Process (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) reminds us to pause and reconnect with a wise and compassionate presence allowing us to align our lives with our hearts. It can assist us when we get lost in unconscious, mental, emotional reactivity, fear, and are living on “autopilot.” RAIN is a healing process available to us that opens us to our inner radiance. Tara Brach, PhD, is an internationally known teacher of mindfulness, meditation, emotional healing, and spiritual awakening. Tara is the senior teacher and founder of Insight Meditation Center of Washington, DC. and she produces a weekly podcast. She is the author of many books including Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your world with the Practice of RAIN (Viking 2019), Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha (Bantam 2004) and True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (Bantam 2016) Interview Date: 1/24/2020    Tags: Tara Brach, RAIN Process, Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture, mindfulness, fear, shame, anger, somatic, allowing, Viktor Frankl, grasping, compassion, pushing away, frustration, beliefs, reactive trance, ocean of lovingkindness, Jarvis Masters, Ruby Sales, white privilege, Personal Transformation, Meditation

Here we stare down our present situation without flinching but with radical hope as Williams reminds us that love and beauty is felt in chaos and heartbreak. Healing is going beyond anger; It’s a process of eroding and evolving at once. We must let go of our certainty to come back into a place of communion and communication with each other and with the earth.  Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist, environmentalist, and award-winning author. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her work is widely taught and anthologized around the world. In 2014, on the 50th Anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Ms. Williams received the Sierra Club’s John Muir Award honoring a distinguished record of leadership in American conservation. She currently is the writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School and divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah. She is the author of many books including: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon 1991), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (Vintage Books 1995), Leap (Vintage 2001), Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert (Vintage Books 2002), The Open Space of Democracy (The Orion Society 2004), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon 2008), When Women Were Birds (Sarah Crichton Books: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012), The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016), Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019) Interview Date: 12/13/2019   Tags: Terry Tempest Williams, erosion, Bears Ears National Monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante, coal production, fossil fuel industry, Diné Bikéyah, democracy, climate change, Grand Canyon, Weather Reports, Kit Jennings, Powder River Basin, Willie Grayeyes, Frontier Mormons, Tim DeChristopher, oil and gas leases, oil & gas leases, oil & gas leasing, oil and gas leasing, Dan Dixon Tempest, Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of The Garden of Earthly Delights, Blake’s Tiger, tiger burning bright, Jonah Yellowman, Yeibichi dances, Castleton Tower Utah, anger, love, grief, Earth, certainty, Ecology/Nature/Environment, Meditation, Spirituality, Social Change/Politics, Personal Transformation, Peace/Nonviolence, Community

Next to birth, death is one of our most profound experiences. Dying is not without its pain but it can be meaningful and we can decide to be more aware and more conscious in how we orient ourselves toward the inevitable end of our lives. Dr. Miller advises us to be clear on our “goals of care” and to “participate.”B.J. Miller is a hospice and palliative medicine physician who has worked in many settings, inpatient, outpatient, hospice facility and home. He now sees patients and families at U.C.S.F. Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Miller speaks all over the country and beyond on the theme of living well in the face of death. He’s also the founder of the Center for Dying and Living.  BJ Miller is co-author, with Shoshana Berger, of A Beginners Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death (Simon & Schuster 2019) Interview Date:12/3/2019     Tags: BJ Miller, hospice, medical directives, advance directives, advance care planning, silver tsunami, Health care systems, chronic pain, suffering, acute suffering, acute pain, resistance, palliative care, hospice, pain management, death certificates, prognosis, Steve Scheier, prognosis declaration, Death & Dying, Personal Transformation

Mackey writes both prose and poetry and has published many novels and books of poetry. She reveals her writing and creative process and how each kinds of writing requires a different approach and describes her process of “creative trance” that helps her to move into her own unconscious. She takes us from Western Kentucky to the Brazilian Rainforest.Mary Mackey is a novelist, screenwriter, and poet. She’s Professor Emeritus of English and former Writer-in-Residence at California State University, Sacramento. During her twenties, she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. Recently, she’s been traveling to Brazil incorporating her experiences in the tropical rainforests into her fiction and poetry. She's the author of The Year the Horses Came (HarperSanFrancisco 1993), The Horses at the Gate (Amazon Digital Services 2011), The Fires of Spring (Amazon Digital Services 2011), The Village of Bones: Sabalah’s Tale (Earthsong Series)  (Create Space Independent Publishing 2016) and Immersion (iUniverse 2013)Interview Date: 11/27/2019    Tags: Mary Mackey, poetry, Eric Hoffer Book Award, Harvard, creative trance, automatic writing, Amapa, Richard Evans Schultes, ethnobotany, the Amazon, Jaguars, Western Kentucky, the Brazilian rain forest poems, writer’s block, publishing,  Art & Creativity, Women’s Studies, writing

Unlike our knees and hips, our brains improve with age. This dialogue includes: neuroplasticity, how improving our brain power can prevent Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, why optimism is good for the brain and enhances resilience, the benefits of challenging the brain to do something new, the benefits of meditation on the brain. Michael Gelb, Ph.D. is a leading world authority on the application of genius thinking to personal and organizational development. A pioneer in the fields of creative thinking, accelerated learning, and innovative leadership, Gelb leads seminars for organizations such as DuPont, Merck, Microsoft, Nike and many others. He is the author of Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America’s Greatest Inventor (co-author Sarah Miller Caldicott) (Dutton 2007), How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci (Dell 2000), and Brain Power: Improve Your Mind as You Age (co-author Kelly Howell) (New World Library 2012).Date recorded: 2/20/2012       Tags: Michael J. Gelb, Michael Gelb, aging, Alzheimer's, brain, dementia, meditation, mental powers, mind, naps, wine, brain power, neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, optimism, pessimism, optimistic, pessimistic, humor, rewiring your brain, brain grooves, hemisinc, Mozart effect, binaural training, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, brain-sync, brain sync, Business, Health & Healing, Personal Transformation, Science