Suicide or psychedelics?Those were the options this week's guest, Ayelet Waldman, found herself facing.A married mother of four and novelist living in Berkeley, Waldman struggled with bipolar, anxiety and depression her entire life. According to her, mental illness ran wide and deep in her family. Over the years, she'd found a pharmaceutical regime that made life tolerable, until peri-menopause destroyed her ability to time her medication and things spiraled rapidly out of control.Waldman found herself increasingly mired in suicidal ideation. Nothing seemed to be working any more. Then, she heard about decades old research on psychedelics and a non-trippy therapeutic approach called microdosing.Through a series of events, Ayelet found herself in possession of a vial of pure LSD and, seeing few others options, decided to try following a 30-day psychedelic microdosing protocol shared in James Fadiman's The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.Those 30-day changed everything. Within hours, the gray numbness began to lift. Life got more vivid, connected, stable and alive. Waldman wrote about her psychedelic microdosing journey, its affects, her fears and concerns, along with the politics, history, mythology and truths, how microdosing affected her work, mindset, relationship with her husband and kids and more in her latest book, A Really Good Day.Head's up. This is a raw, unfiltered and provocative conversation. The bigger questions, issues and potential applications extend far beyond Waldman's immediate circumstances and life. This episode is neither an endorsement, nor an indictment of her choices or the use of psychedelics, but rather an exploration of deeply-challenging, yet critical issues from mental health to parenting and drug policy to science-fiction vs. fact.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re living in uncertain times. And, that can have a pretty life-stifling effect on us. It can impact everything from state-of-mind to our physical health and even our creative and mental abilities. Question is, if you can’t change the immediate circumstance at work or in life, is there something […]The post Certainty Anchors: Finding Calm in a Stormy World appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michelle Gielan, national CBS News anchor turned positive psychology researcher, is the Founder of the Institute for Applied Positive Research.She is partnered with Arianna Huffington to study how transformative stories fuel success and is an Executive Producer of “The Happiness Advantage” Special on PBS and a featured professor in Oprah’s Happiness course.Michelle is also the best-selling author of Broadcasting Happiness.In today's episode, we dive into her journey from "coder kid" to TV anchor to positive-psychology researcher and change-maker. We explore the deeper psychology behind media, rational optimism, how the stories we hear, see and tell affect us and how we relate to each other both at work and in life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s this mythology. Go all in. Don’t dabble. Don’t play. Don’t make it a hobby, make it your “one thing.” From the very beginning. Even if you have no idea if you’ll like it, how it’ll make you feel and whether it can ever really be what you’ve told yourself and the world you’re going […]The post The Experimental Life appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born in Ghana, West Africa,Kute Blackson was the child of a Japanese mother and a Ghanaian father who was a legendary faith leader with some 300 churches across Ghana and a massive following in the U.K.By his early teens, Kute was being groomed to rise up in his father’s church, but that would all change when Blackson rejected the path his father laid out for him and chose his own instead.Estranged from both his father and his community, and feeling called to blaze his own path, Kute headed to the United States where he’d struggle on nearly every level and finally come to a place where his true hero’s journey would begin.That process of stripping away, hitting rock-bottom and eventually mounting his own search led Kute to rediscover his path to freedom, and rebuild his life and living, becoming a respected voice in spirituality and consciousness on his own terms, in his own way. His story and philosophy are detailed in his recent book, You. Are. The. One.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are taught, from a young age, to exist in the middle. Everything in moderation. Don’t be a tall poppy, nor a shrinking violet. Good enough is good enough. The middle way, middle-class, mid-tier. That’s where we want to be. Not so big that we get cut down, and not so small that we can’t […]The post The Unfortunate Middle appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You know that little button on Facebook you click to "like" something? Well, as one of the early employees at Facebook, today's guest, Leah Pearlman, came up with that idea.Actually, its original incarnation was the "awesome button," but what's more interesting is why she created it. And, what was going on in her life that led her to want it, both for herself and the millions of others flooding the platform.Turns out, Leah was leading a double life. Publicly, she was a fiercely smart, driven technologist as the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. But, privately, she battled near-debilitating perfectionism that led to a decade of bulimia. On any given day, she'd move between helping to build a revolutionary company, and purging in the women's room.Until, one day, tragic news about her father, and the way she caught herself dealing with it, led everything to fall apart. She was forced to bring her dark side into the light and find a way through. And, from that emerged something she never saw coming.Having been a devout "art-atheist" her whole life, drawing became her salvation. She began to share her simple illustrations and they touched a nerve. Thousands of people began to share them. That led her down an entirely different path in her career and life. Many of her Dharma Comics have now been published in a book entitled Drawn Together, as an offering to help others find wisdom, hope and transformation in simple moments. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s this odd thing that happens the moment after we ask for help. While we’re asking, we stand in a place of surrender. We hit a point, often deeply uncomfortable, where we’re riddled with uncertainty and we step into a place of vulnerability and say, “please, I don’t know where to go from here. Can […]The post Naked and Silent: Asking Is Not Receiving [encore] appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A pioneer in functional and integrative medicine, Dr. Frank Lipman is the founder and director of the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in New York City and the author of many New York Times-bestselling books, including 10 Reasons You Feel Old and Get Fat, The New Health Rules. and Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Start Living Again.Born into an activist family in then apartheid South Africa, he was taught to always question norms and authority. This ethos followed him into his initial training as a doctor in South Africa. In his early work in a Soweto hospital, he was exposed to non-traditional healers who were able to accomplish what a more traditional approach to medicine struggled with.He then emigrated to the United States in 1984, where he worked in the South Bronx, becoming Chief Medical Resident at Lincoln Hospital at the height of the crack epidemic. There, again, Lipman, began to see the limitations of traditional medicine in treating addiction, and embraced complimentary modalities. He deepened his study of nutrition, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, functional medicine, biofeedback, meditation, and yoga and began to form a more integrated approach to the practice of medicine and wellbeing.Frank eventually founded the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in 1992, combining cutting-edge nutritional science with age-old healing techniques from the East. In a quest to bring this unique approach to the masses, he then founded BE WELL, based on the belief that everyone should have a fundamental right to be healthy.Frank lives according to the philosophy of Ubuntu, a Xhosa word that serves as the spiritual foundation of African societies and articulates a basic understanding, caring, respect, and compassion for others. In his words, “what makes us human is the humanity we show each other.”Be sure to subscribe to our weekly Good Life Updates and listen on iTunes to make sure you never miss an episode!+++THIS WEEK’S PODCAST IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY+++Today’s episode is sponsored by Camp GLP, the ultimate summer-camp for entrepreneurs, makers and world-shakers! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when you take a social risk? Simple truth, we’re all wired for a certain level of human interaction. Some of us cannot get enough of other people. We’ll walk up to anyone, introduce ourselves, enter conversations and engage with just about anyone, even total strangers. It’s a bit like each new human is […]The post Social Risks: When is it Worth It to Say Hello? appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.