East Forest recounts his powerful experience meeting and recording with Ram Dass, and offers a live set of transcendent music seamlessly interwoven with Ram Dass’s timeless teachings.

Check out more music from this spiritual collaboration: East Forest x Ram Dass

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In this episode, hear East Forest perform and learn more about:

• East Forest’s profound and intimate collaboration with Ram Dass
• How the peace of nature can be a spiritual tool for us
• The integral role of psilocybin and psychedelics in Ram Dass’s awakening and teachings
• The synergistic relationship between the audience and the performer during live music
• Relating to the wilderness within our own hearts through music
• The technology of our breath and how it calms us down into the present moment
• The human connection to nature and nature as a manifestation of God
• Loving all beings and all elements of the world around us
• Letting go of everything within ourselves that we do not need

This episode was recorded at the 2022 Summer Mountain Retreat. Join us for the Open Your Heart in Paradise retreat this December in Maui!

About East Forest:

East Forest is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and ceremony guide. Since 2008, East Forest’s “lush” (Rolling Stone) and “blissful” (NPR) music has blended ambient, neoclassical, electronic, and avant-pop to explore sound as a tool for inner journeys and consciousness expansion. Known for being the first musician to collaborate with Ram Dass, his latest endeavor is the feature-length film Music for Mushrooms, a narrative documentary showcasing the transformative power of psychedelics, music, and community.

"I'm not up here generating something and presenting something for you to passively receive. It’s more that your attention into this space, the Bhakti space, the love space, the emptiness, it feeds the emptiness itself for me to hopefully channel that back out. It’s like surfing: we go in, we go out. In that, we can have a real experience together that can be whatever it needs to be right now.” –East Forest

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Familiarizing listeners with the five Buddhist hindrances, Trudy Goodman suggests a compassionate return to mindfulness of the senses.

Today’s podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/beherenow and get on your way to being your best self.

In this episode, Trudy Goodman outlines:

• The 5 Buddhist hindrances: desire, aversion, sloth and torpor, restlessness/worry, and doubt
• Remembering that being affected by the hindrances is not a mistake or our fault, but instead is an opportunity to practice mindfulness
• How craving pulls us out of the present moment and how our senses can ground us back into awareness
• Reflecting on the feeling of wanting something, and whether our desires truly align with our core values
• The four kinds of suffering, most of which we have all experienced
• Understanding that aversion is not inherently ‘bad’ and how it can be a kindness to turn away from something that causes us pain
• Shifting our attention away from hostility and turning towards curiosity about our emotions
• Practicing walking meditation as a remedy to sloth and torpor
• Getting to the root of our restlessness and discovering what we are trying to change about the present moment
• How, beneath the paralysis of doubt and inner cynicism, there is often a lack of inner confidence
• Living our lives fully, not wasting a moment, and being completely present as often as we can

“We each have our favorites of the hindrances, but again, these are not mistakes, these are not your fault, they’re part of the practice. When the mind gets lost in them, the doorway back to being present is through coming to our senses. What we see here, taste, feel, in this particular moment of our life. We know this is actually the only real moment of our life.” – Trudy Goodman

About Trudy Goodman:

Trudy is a Vipassana teacher in the Theravada lineage and the Founding Teacher of InsightLA. For 25 years, in Cambridge, MA, Trudy practiced mindfulness-based psychotherapy with children, teenagers, couples and individuals. Trudy conducts retreats, engages in activism work, and teaches workshops worldwide and online. She is also the voice of Trudy the Love Barbarian in the Netflix series, The Midnight Gospel. You can learn more about Trudy’s flourishing array of wonderful offerings at TrudyGoodman.com

Aversion is also here to protect us from things that are painful in this life, the problem is that aversion doesn’t understand what true protection is. True protection comes from understanding that we can meet our suffering, that we have strong enough mindfulness and strong enough ability to be present, that we can hold it, that we can meet it, that it isn't going to flood us, overwhelm us, and destroy us, which is often the fear.” – Trudy Goodman

This recording was originally published on Dharmaseed.org

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.