In this episode I interview the brainchild behind an increasingly influential online wiki for psychological healing, The Integral Guide to Well-Being. Levi, who prefers to stay behind-the-scenes and doesn't publicize his identity, created an interactive, graphic notebook that has between 1,600 to 1,800 pages, and has tens of thousands of unique readers each month. The Integral Guide is a choose-your-own-adventure field guide that Levi began writing to aid his personal trauma recovery and self-development and to feel empowered and better-equipped to lead an enriched life. He explains that when ..read more

This episode features Paula Marie Scatoloni, a psychotherapist that uses sound vibrations to reset hyper- or hypo-active nervous systems after trauma. This method is called psychoacoustics, and Paula uses a tool called the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) to stimulate the tiny muscles of the inner ear, "massaging" the polyvagal nerve, and activating the body's safety, belonging, and relaxation system. SSP has been shown to relieve symptoms of dissociative depression, and anxiety.  SSP was originally designed to treat Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) but has been widely used to treat a range o ..read more

I believe that therapists, doctors, nurses and psychiatrists who recommend ketamine--and more and more are doing just that--should have a firsthand experience of ketamine themselves.  Today I speak with Maria Hernandez, a psychotherapist in Philadelphia, who did just that. Maria was a participant at our Bethesda, Maryland ketamine assisted psychotherapy clinic, Calliope Health.  We talk about the personal reasons each of us was attracted to ketamine for our own mental health and the overlap between the disassociative effects of ketamine and the hypnotic technique of Internal Family S ..read more

I speak with Dr. Kristin Neff, the person perhaps most responsible for researching the effects of self-compassion. She is the author of the 2011 bestselling book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and her newest book, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive. Kristin and I talk about what she calls fierce self-compassion and how anger can be compassionate, and other questions like: Why are men better at self-compassion than women? What we do find is there’s a small but consistent gender difference ..read more

Dr. John Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.* He is also the Senior Project Scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest, most powerful and complex space telescope ever built and launched into space. It will fundamentally alter our understanding of the universe. Mather was winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics with George Smoot for their work in the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission in the mid 1970s to measure the heat radiation from the Big Bang. Mather ..read more

* Replay from S2 * Dr. Tammy Nelson is a sex and relationship expert, and author of many books on sex including Getting the Sex You Want: Shed Your Inhibitions and Reach New Heights of Passion Together. She's a psychotherapist, Director of the Integrative Sex Therapy Institute, university teacher, TEDx speaker and is the host of the podcast The Trouble with Sex. Tammy is also a Board Certified Sexologist, an AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Certified Imago Relationship therapist, and a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor. Today on The Soul of Life I sp ..read more

How do you know that you’re conscious? I mean, don’t you just kind of know? "The single thing that we know best from our own first person perspective and understand least from the perspective of objective science." But are we seeing signs of a dawning enlightenment in this field—signs of progress in how we understand and study consciousness? I think this is important for everyone—but especially professionals like me who teach people how to have healthy minds—we kind of need to know what a mind is in the first place. I talk to Dr. Jonathan Schooler, a professor of Psychological and Brain Scienc ..read more

I speak with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of an evidence-based psychotherapeutic model called Self-Leadership (also known as Internal Family System’s therapy or IFS) that is widely recognized as one of the most compassionate and comprehensive psychotherapies available. He is on the faculty of the department of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Self-Leadership is basically a sophisticated owner’s manual for the mind. It gives users a real-time pathway to routinely instigate new neural connections within their mindbody system—the holy grail of skill acquisition and learning. We also ..read more

This episode is a "best-of" replay from S1 of The Soul of Life. In this episode of The Soul of Life I speak with Dr. Michael Mithoefer, the lead investigator that has successfully piloted the first-ever study of MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, into the third and final stage of FDA approval for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Mithoefer is featured as a lead character in the 2015 book Acid Test by award-winning journalist Tom Shroder, a meticulously researched history of the controversy and unprecedented healing properties associated with psychedelics. The FDA granted Dr ..read more

"What if I could show you a way to reconnect with the whole of who you are, in service to your highest purpose as you know it? What if I could help you break out of the invisible prison in which you have been living--the one that keeps you small and scared?" Today on the Soul of Life I speak with Dr. Angela Heubner, author of Jailbreak: The Making and Breaking of Our Invisible Prisons; An IFS Informed Escape. Angela describes this beautiful model of natural multiplicity of the mind, in Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS): “We are inherently good.” And she describes just how different IFS is ..read more