Explore Spirituality

From a very young age, Jacqueline Suskin felt called to the path of poetry. Her most recent book is Every Day is a Poem (Sounds True, 2020), and she is the author of six other books including The Collected, Go Ahead & Like It, The Edge of The Continent Volume One, The Edge of The Continent Volume Two, Help in the Dark Season, and The Edge of The Continent Volume Three.With her project Poem Store, Suskin has composed over 40,000 improvisational poems for people who chose a topic in exchange for a unique verse. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is also featured on the cover of the November-December 2020 issue of Spirituality & Health.Poetry is having a huge renaissance. Suskin credits this partly due to shorter attention spans among the reading public, but also a desire to reach the heart of the matter, to connect more quickly with that which is vital. Poetry is an accessible tool for people, she notes, that can help us “sift through the chaos and enjoy being alive.”It is the combination of micro and macro content that makes poetry so special, Suskin says. She and Rabbi Rami also talk about how poetry is similar to prayer, and how it can translate suffering into something meaningful.Listen to the whole podcast to hear this beautiful conversation.For more on Suskin’s poetry, teaching and other work, visit her website.And please subscribe to Essential Conversations (always free) so you will never miss an episode! Here is how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist minister, activist, yoga instructor and authorized Lama (Buddhist teacher) in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. Owens holds a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School and has given talks, retreats and workshops around the U.S. and internationally. He is considered a leading teacher of his generation.In this week's podcast, he and Rabbi Rami discuss Owens' latest book, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this electrifying conversation, Rabbi Rami talks with the Most Rev. Michael Curry. He is the presiding bishop and primate of the Episcopal Church.They discuss his new book, Love is the Way, and how Jesus has over the millennia been turned into a meeker and milder version than the radical figure he may have actually been at the time. He was founding a nonviolent movement, true, but he was challenging the status quo.“I think it would have been lovingly unsettling to be around Jesus,” says Curry.“The way of love calls out injustice. I grew up hearing the language of love within the context of the civil rights movement,” explains Curry. “This is how we were intended to live, and this is why it has such positive energy.”Do not miss listening to this amazing conversation between Rabbi Rami and Bishop Curry.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rabbi Rami’s guest this week is Jaimal Yogis. Yogis is an award-winning writer and frequent speaker, and we are delighted to have him gracing our September/October 2020 cover, along with his insanely cute son. A graduate of Columbia Journalism school, Yogis is featured in our annual Books We Love feature. He has an impressive body of work, including three coming-of-age/journalistic memoirs: Saltwater Buddha, The Fear Project, and All Our Waves Are Water. His latest is a children’s picture book, Mop Rides the Waves of Life. It is about a free-spirited kid (hmm, that hair looks familiar...) who loves to surf. His mom teaches him how to meditate, and he makes the connection between sitting on his surfboard and meditating, learning how to ride emotions and allowing them to pass like waves. He and Rabbi Rami discuss the metaphor of the ocean and how it relates to the divine and how we are all connected. “The Rumi saying,‘You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a single drop,’is something I always come back to, both on a spiritual level and also on a quantum physics level,” says Yogis. And Rabbi Rami adds, “Just as it is never too late to learn to surf, it is never too late to learn to be spiritual.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Rabbi Rami puts on his wellies and garden gloves to interview celebrated gardener Sue Stuart-Smith. She is also a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and the author of the book The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature. It weaves together stories about neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and how gardening can heal us mentally and physically.The book is especially timely in the time of COVID-19, she and Rabbi Rami discuss, as planting seeds and caring for living things helps us feel grounded when the future feels so uncertain. To feel calmer and more relaxed in a flourishing landscape may even be hard-wired into our brains from our earliest days as a species, explaining our continued enjoyment of the therapeutic effects of horticulture today.Being fully present in a garden is also much like meditating, says Stuart-Smith, as it is a mindful focus. After 20 to 30 minutes out in the garden or nature, the human body experiences lowered stress hormones and blood pressure. Raising our own food also provides people with a sense of pride and connection, providing community-strengthening benefits, she says.What if you live in a urban high rise and have no patch of soil to call your own? Indoor potted plants can provide benefits, too, assures Stuart-Smith. “They boost mood and concentration, and just the effect of caring for a plant has tremendous importance,” she says. “Caring for something, nurturing something ... can sustain us.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you know we can reverse-engineer happiness and contentment by warming up our body’s own neural circuitry? That is the essence of the new book, Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness, by Rick Hanson, PhD.In this episode of the podcast, he and Rabbi Rami have a very deep conversation about Buddhism, the Buddha (who Hanson likes to see kind of as a coach), and Reality with a capital R. But there is practical, actionable advice here, too. Listen and enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Our birthright is innate resilience,” Dr. Rangel says. The question is how to build that up, and nurture it.This week, Rabbi Rami is talking with one of Spirituality and Health’s newest contributors, Dr. Josefa Rangel. Dr. Rangel is a board-certified internist and integrative medicine specialist who trained at Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of California San Francisco, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine. She also recently completed training in medical advocacy.Dr. Rangel has practiced integrative medicine since 2005. Her belief in the body’s innate capacity to heal led her to establish the Innate Medicine Clinic, in search of a new paradigm in medical care.“Sickness and death are part of life,” she discusses with Rabbi Rami. From her perspective as a healer, the goal is to tap into inner vitality, as opposed to try to be well at all times, which is simply not realistic.“We have inner knowing that any living thing wants to thrive, so that is view we want to take. We respond with skillful means.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week’s guest is Sarah Bowen. Bowen is an award-winning author, multifaith spiritual educator, animal chaplain, and is completing postgraduate work at Chicago Theological Seminary on the intersection of human spiritual values and animal welfare.She and Rabbi Rami discuss how we humans tend to categorize animals into groups, such as the ones we love, the ones we eat, the ones we wear... Bowen says, “Those of us who are interested in theo-ethics are really keen on trying to have conversations and figure out how far do we extend compassion, rights, relationships,” to animals other than ourselves, becoming, basically, less species-centric.A lot of people’s theology leaves out many sentient beings, Rabbi Rami and Bowen discuss, but if we expand compassion outward from ourselves, it is inevitable that we need to examine our behavior and ethics toward animals.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“We were doing spine surgeries on anxiety, and it doesn’t work,” David Hanscom, M.D. tells Rabbi Rami. Hanscom is former spinal surgeon. His most recent book is Do You Really Need Spine Surgery? Take Control with a Surgeon’s Advice.After more than 32 years of surgical practice (and 15 years of suffering through chronic pain himself) he quit in 2018 to focus on teaching people how to break through cycles of chronic mental and physical pain, without undergoing surgery.Hanscom teaches pain-sufferers to use a variety of techniques, such as expressive writing, meditation, how to make use of sensory input, and here is an interesting one: Never talking about chronic pain with anyone except your doctor. Listen to the podcast to find out why.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the final episode in Rabbi Rami’s special four-part series on how to stay healthy from social, psychological, and spiritual perspectives during the COVID-19 crisis. This week, Rabbi Rami focuses on the Buddhist practice of metta, or lovingkindness, which fosters compassion. This practice encourages us to wish others well, and allows us to be free from fear.Rabbi Rami bases some of the conversation on the work of Sharon Salzberg, and her seminal book, Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness.As Salzberg explains metta, “We open continuously to the truth of our actual experience ... metta is the sense of love that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend things are other than the way they are overcomes the illusion of separateness, of not being a part of the whole. Metta overcomes all the states that accompany this fundamental error of separateness: Fear, alienation, loneliness, and despair.”Metta softens your heart and allows you to act compassionately. It will change how you engage with others, Rabbi Rami promises us, which may actually change how others interact with us in turn. In this podcast, he will teach you how to try the metta practice. Listen to the podcast to give it a go.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices