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Unlocking True Happiness is an exploration of the Buddha’s teachings as they are applied in our daily lives to deepen our experience of genuine well-being. Topics combine ideas from Buddhism with those from the fields of positive psychology, Western philosophy, and current events. People from all faiths and backgrounds can apply the principles explored in this series to enhance their lives. Tenzin Chogkyi (she/her/hers) is a teacher of workshops and programs that bridge the worlds of Buddhist thought, contemplative practice, mental and emotional cultivation, and the latest research in the field of positive psychology. She is also a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training and the Cultivating Emotional Balance program. Tenzin is especially interested in bringing the wisdom of Buddhism into modern culture and into alignment with modern cultural values such as racial and gender justice and environmental awareness. She feels strongly that a genuine and meaningful spiritual path includes not only personal transformation, but social and cultural transformation as well. She loves interfaith collaboration and is a volunteer for the Interfaith Speakers Bureau of the Islamic Networks Group in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to her monthly radio show called “Reflections on Buddhism on KSQD 90.7 she also finds time to create her Unlocking True Happiness podcast which you can check out at unlockingtruehappiness.org where you will also find her current teaching schedule. She is currently based on traditional Awaswas Ohlone land, in what is now known as Santa Cruz, CA.
Tenzin and Eden spoke of a number of different resources in this episode which are listed below:
Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing aregenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, andco-creating a healthy, peaceful,and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally at schools, conferences, and festivals, and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women that share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness
Her book Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into or inhabit their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. The book draws on Simons’ own personal learning and extensive experience with women’s leadership development... to reconnect and defend people, nature and the land, both practically and spiritually.
Nina Simons is the co-founder and Chief Relationship Officer at Bioneers, and leads its Everywoman’s Leadership program. Bioneers is a nonprofit that uses media, convening, and connecting to lift up visionary and practical solutions for many of our most pressing social and ecological challenges, revealing aregenerative and equitable future that’s within our reach today. Nina is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about reinventing leadership, restoring the feminine, andco-creating a healthy, peaceful,and equitable world for all. She speaks and teaches internationally at schools, conferences, and festivals, and co-facilitates transformative workshops and retreats for women that share practices for regenerative leadership through reclaiming wholeness and relational mindfulness
Her book Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into or inhabit their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. The book draws on Simons’ own personal learning and extensive experience with women’s leadership development... to reconnect and defend people, nature and the land, both practically and spiritually.
Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown by Deborah Eden Tull is a resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing.
Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world; yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing.
Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light.
Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing, through topics such as:
• Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness
• Honoring Our Pain for Our World
• Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity
• Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination
• Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence
Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplayof both darkness and light.
About the Author
Zen meditation and mindfulness teacher, author, activist, and sustainability educator. Eden teaches the integration of compassionate awareness into every aspect of our lives. She spent seven years training as a Buddhist monk at a silent Zen monastery and has been teaching dharma for 19 years. Eden has also been living in, and teaching about, sustainable communities for over 25 years.
Her teaching style is grounded in compassionate awareness, experiential learning, inquiry, and an unwavering commitment to personal transformation. She teaches engaged awareness practice, which emphasizes the connection between personal awakening and global engagement. Eden draws upon teachings from the natural world and an embodied understanding of animism.
She is author of “Relational Mindfulness: A Handbook for Deepening Our Connection with Our Self, Each Other, and Our Planet” (Wisdom 2018) and “The Natural Kitchen: Your Guide for the Sustainable Food Revolution.” Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, Tricycle, Yogi Times, GOOP, Shambhala Times, and The Ecologist. She also teaches The Work That Reconnects, a program created by Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy, and teaches for UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Eden offers retreats, online courses, and consultations internationally.
Readers can connect with Deborah Eden Tull on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads.
To learn more, go to DeborahEdenTull.com.
Sara is a contributing author to the book The Neuroscience of Learning and Development: Enhancing Creativity, Compassion, Critical Thinking and Peace in Education, and writes for Deepak Chopra’s Center for Wellbeing website.
Sara’s new book, A Case for Compassion: What Happens When We Prioritize People and the Planet, is available now.
Dr. Joey Weber, who was raised in a Buddhist community in northern England, noticed that the focus in popular mindfulness programs was on the attentional training, and not as much emphasis was given to the “non-judgmental” aspect of mindfulness. He was so intrigued by this that he completed a PhD program devoted to the study of equanimity, the non-judgmental stance of mindfulness. His book, Mindfulness is Not Enough: Unlocking Compassion with Equanimity, is based on his research, and he also developed a six-week training program called Equanimity-based Compassionate Action.
Join us for our conversation with Dr. Weber, as we delve into the meaning of equanimity, what this quality can bring to our lives, and how it can inspire our own compassionate action.
Amanda is a wife. A mother. A blogger. A Christian.
A charming, beautiful, bubbly, young woman who lives life to the fullest.
But Amanda is dying, with a secret she doesn’t want anyone to know.
She starts a blog detailing her cancer journey, and becomes an inspiration, touching and
captivating her local community as well as followers all over the world.
Until one day investigative producer Nancy gets an anonymous tip telling her to look at Amanda’s
blog, setting Nancy on an unimaginable road to uncover Amanda’s secret.
Award winning journalist Charlie Webster explores this unbelievable and bizarre, but
all-too-real tale, of a woman from San Jose, California whose secret ripped a family apart and
left a community in shock.
Scamanda is the true story of a woman whose own words held the key to her secret.
New episodes every Monday.
Follow Scamanda on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Amanda’s blog posts are read by actor Kendall Horn.
