The Mind Bod Adventure Pod

This week we’re hanging with the legendary Sam Bercholz: refugee kid turned founder of Shambhala Publications, the prolific dharma press behind many of the books on your shelf. In 1968, a London publisher handed him a manuscript by a Tibetan lama in Scotland whom Sam had never heard of. He read it sitting on the bed of a five-pound-a-night room, and it felt like it was speaking straight to him. It was Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action, and it became Shambhala’s first book. Thousands followed.
Sam’s path started with a burlesque-house-singing Chan teacher who’d break into song mid-teaching. It deepened over decades as a close student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Kyabje Thinley Norbu Rinpoche, who empowered him to teach. Sam calls himself irreverent but totally orthodox, and you can see where he got both. His new book Rude Awakenings: An Unconventional Guide to the Buddhist Path opens in the spirit of an AA meeting: he’s addicted… to believing his own thoughts! “I am like this total mess that’s cheerful,” he tells us.
Under the jokes is real conviction. Sam is orthodox about the integrity of practice because the dharma took shape through centuries of trial and error by people who were practicing deeply. He takes the practice seriously. Himself, not so much, as you’ll see from all the fun we have together 🙂
We talk about:
- How a manuscript from Chögyam Trungpa in 1968 became the first Shambhala Publications book
- Why Sam had a “panic breakdown” working in Washington politics, and how that sent him looking for something genuine
- Emptiness vs. fullness: how the word shunyata might be better translated as “full” than “empty”
- Why becoming “helpful, cheerful humans” is the real measure of the path
- What gets lost when practice skips the foundational groundwork
- Why meditation isn’t for lowering your blood pressure (as Sam puts it, you can just go to the drugstore for that!)
---------------------------------
We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿❤️
---------------------------------
The Adventure
Sam strips vajrayana visualization meditation down to the elemental heart.
Eyes open, gaze tilted slightly up, he guides us through a clouded sky that slowly clears until the sun comes through. We rest there, feeling the whole body in that light as thoughts come and go. Then the turn: the sun comes down behind the senses and settles in the heart, so the light that was in the sky is now inside. From there, we look back out at the world, radiant and alive.
---------------------------------
Let us know in the comments what came up for you during the sun practice :)
Till next time,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Hi Mind Bod Squad!
This week we're hanging with someone extra special: Jan Winhall — psychotherapist, nervous-system nerd, and (drumroll) Jeff's former therapist. As Jeff puts it, she's the one who helped him dig out of his own mental health sinkhole. Now she's on the other side of the mic.
Jan’s spent 45 years in the trauma and addiction trenches, and along the way she built something super useful: the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, which blends Eugene Gendlin’s “felt sense” (what you notice in your body before you can name it) with Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (how your nervous system monitors whether you’re safe or not).
She’s written two books on it — Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model and 20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction — and is deep into a third, this one on couples.
For Jan, assessing trauma starts by asking: what’s actually happening in your body, right now?
--------------------------------------
We talk about:
- Trauma as a nervous system stuck in a loop, and addiction as the body’s attempt to regulate itself
- “Fun/Fired up”: how to stay grounded in a heated argument without tipping into fight
- Why growing up unseen is its own quiet trauma, even in a “privileged” home
- Why opposite nervous systems attract… and then drive each other nuts
- Healing as the slow thaw of frozen memories
--------------------------------------
We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription at mindbodpod.com 🌿❤️
--------------------------------------
The Adventure
Jan takes us on a guided tour of the nervous system, feeling our way through each state in the body, from the tight readiness of Fight-Flight to the heaviness of shutdown to the grounded ease of safety. Then she invites us to meet whatever is present in our own bodies with curiosity and care, and to ask what it needs.
--------------------------------------
If you’ve ever wanted a cheat sheet for what your body’s doing when it’s doing... whatever this is, this episode’s for you.
Let us know in the comments what state you found yourself in :)
Till next time,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we’re hanging with Michael Uebel, psychotherapist, researcher, longtime mindfulness teacher for military veterans, and author of Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being.
How did we all meet? Michael sent Jeff an email that said something like, “I hear you’re obsessed with equanimity… so am I!” Jeff read the new book and could not put it down. So here we are, nerding out about equanimity :)
Michael’s whole project pushes back on the idea of equanimity as some kind of unshakable stillness, a “sitting like a mountain” you achieve and then hold onto. Instead, drawing on Taoism, Zen, and a long line of Western thinkers from Thoreau to Heidegger, he reframes it as something much more alive: a continual rebalancing, an “essential mobility,” a relationship to the world rather than a fortress against it.
We talk about:
* Why equanimity is not stillness so much as a continuous process of rebalancing
* Uncoupling equanimity from acceptance and non-judgment
* How working with military veterans and PTSD shaped Michael’s whole approach to the practice
* The difference between “space around” an experience and “space inside” a sensation
* Letting your focal point and focal periphery trade places, and how the oscillation between the two can help keep us loose.
-------------------------
The Mind Bod Pod is a community-supported project. If you like these adventures, help us keep the lights on with a paid subscription! ❤️
-------------------------
The Adventure:
Michael leads us through a space practice: settle into your seat, let the breath be natural, and start by noticing sensation. Pressure, tingling, the air on your skin.
Then the shift: let go of the idea of arms, legs, a body at all, and turn attention instead to the space around you. Above your head. To your left and right. Below you, behind you, and finally stretching out in front as far as it can go, until there’s a sense of boundless openness with everything, thoughts, feelings, sensations, simply arising and dissolving inside it.
The throughline for the whole practice is that whatever we can give space to, can move.
-------------------------
Let us know in the comments: What shifted, lifted, or got more spacious for you in this practice?
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for tuning in!
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

This week we’re hanging with Abigail Rose Clarke, an author, artist, and somatic facilitator. Tasha’s been a fangirl of her Instagram for ages, so this one’s a long time coming. Abigail’s approach to the somatic lives in a sweet spot: grounded by science and expanded by magic and art.
Case in point: her new Body Oracle Deck that is 80 cards of juicy art and body-based invitations, anatomy, and enchantment 😍🔮✨
Our jumping-off point today is the interstitium — a network of fluid-filled space in the body. It was discovered only recently, once imaging technology finally got good enough to see tissue as it really exists in a living body, instead of squished flat under a microscope. It turns out that this space makes up about 20% of your body. You are, quite literally, one-fifth space!
What does that revelation mean for us?
It means we get to reimagine the body and reconnect with it in a truer way. From something that is solid, fixed, and defined to something that is fluid, spacious, porous, and alive. Closer to how the body actually feels from the inside.
-------------
We talk about:
- The interstitium: the spacious 20% of you that you’ve never thought about
- The difference between identifying with the “hard mass” of the body and attending to its fluidity and space instead
- Reframing bipolar rhythms, grief, and other hard states as expansion and contraction rather than pathology
- Why “unhooking” the frontal lobe, even for a minute, can shift the whole nervous system
- Abigail’s new Body Oracle Deck, and why a deck can live with you in a way a book can’t
-------------
The Mind Bod Pod is a community-supported project. If you like these adventures, consider helping us keep the lights on with a paid subscription! ❤️
-------------
The Adventure:
Abigail leads us into the interstitium through movement. She has us close our eyes and picture the body as sea kelp! Rooted to the ocean floor but swaying, floating, held by fluid on all sides. We let ourselves sway with it, feeling both anchored by gravity and lifted at the same time.
Then she guides us deeper, into the tiny channels beneath the skin carrying interstitial fluid through every part of us, and invites the brain itself to rest back into the skull, no longer working to think its way through anything.
Let us know in the comments what your floaty “sea kelp” felt like!
-------------
Send this to someone who loves to (or needs to) get into the body’s juicy spaciousness: Share
-------------
K, That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in!
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️
Subscribe on Substack: www.mindbodpod.com/


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe

Hello Mind Bod Squad!
This week we’re hanging with Lodro Rinzler, Buddhist meditation teacher, award-winning author of eight books (including the bestseller The Buddha Walks into a Bar…), and the dude behind the Basic Goodness Collective. His brand-new book, You Are Good, You Are Enough, rests on one deceptively simple idea: underneath all the self-doubt and noise, you’re already basically (you guessed it) GOOD!
Lodro’s the first to admit this can sound a little Pollyanna. But he’s not talking about “good” in a sinner-vs-saint way. More like “okay as is”: complete, fine exactly as you are right now. It’s something you probably feel fleetingly, quite often. It’s that quiet “oh, I’m fine” when the hot water hits your back in the shower, or that unremarkable beat at the end of the day when you set your bag down and, just for a second, nothing needs doing.
The work, Lodro says, is learning to notice those ordinary moments and string them together until you can start living from that ground instead of just visiting it.
We talk about:
- What “basic goodness” actually means (and what it doesn’t)
- Basic goodness as something you experience, not a doctrine you adopt (as our beloved Tenzin Bob Thurman liked to say, “Buddhism is realism”)
- Noticing your goodness in ordinary moments
- Finding the goodness in difficult people, without excusing harm
- What to do when the whole idea makes you want to scream
-----------------
We make this show with love, lols, and a lot of curiosity. If it lights you up, help us keep it going with a paid subscription 🌿❤️
-----------------
The Adventure:
Lodro leads us in a meditation that brings us into the simple immediacy of the body and breath. And there we start to notice, we’re already okay! Creaky knees, rumbly bellies, flighty mind and all. And near the end, an invitation to lift the gaze and notice the openness that’s already here. Whatever happens, we can always come back to… this.
Know someone who needs to hear they’re not a total hopeless mess? (TBH, who doesn’t need to hear that from time to time? 😅) Pass this episode along:
Share
K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in.
Love always,
🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️
----------------
Lodro’s Links
Book: You Are Good, You Are Enough (Shambhala)
Website: lodrorinzler.com
The Basic Goodness Collective


Get full access to The Mind Bod Adventure Pod at www.mindbodpod.com/subscribe