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

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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 🌿❤️

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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:

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K, That’s all for now! Thanks for tuning in.

Love always,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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Lodro’s Links

Book: You Are Good, You Are Enough (Shambhala)

Website: lodrorinzler.com

The Basic Goodness Collective

Hi friends! The Mind Bod Squad is BACK!

After a few months apart (Jeff squirreled away up in BC, Tasha bummin’ around in Toronto), we’re returning to you on this, America’s birthweek. And we’re here to celebrate INTERdependence instead of independence.

This week we’re hanging with Jeremy David Engels — Penn State rhetoric professor, yoga teacher, student of meditation, and author of the gorgeous little book On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, Jeremy has done an audacious thing: he rewrote it as a Declaration of Interdependence. His new iteration has the same word count and same shape, but where the original lists “27 grievances against the king”, Jeremy offers 27 insights into democracy as a practice of care: caring for ourselves, caring for each other, and caring for the life we share. After all, he argues, there’s already enough grievances to go around. Maybe it’s time for a change.

And Americans, as your loving continental siblings to the north, we can definitively say, we like this version better. 😅

We talk about:

- What it means to treat democracy as a daily practice of care

- How to find common ground with someone you’re sure you disagree with

- Why conflict is part of being human… and how to hold it well

- Modeling a different way of being, instead of arguing people into it

- Hope as something you practice, not a mood you wait around for

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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 🌿

www.Mindbodpod.com

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The Adventure:

This week the practice is the reading itself. Jeremy reads us the closing crescendo of his Declaration of Interdependence and reminds us the original was made to be spoken aloud. So we slow down and let the lines land in the body: our independence has always been interdependence.

Let us know in the comments what you think!

K, That’s all for this week. Happy to be back & Thanks for tuning in.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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Watch this in video at mindbodpod.com

This week we’re hanging with Ivan Bercholz, co-owner of Shambhala Publications, publisher of Bala Kids, and co-author (with illustrator Lasha Mutual) of My Friend Tara, a children’s book that introduces kids to Tara, the Buddhist archetype of compassion.

Ivan set out to create a book that gets straight to the heart of practice: how can kids actually relate to an archetypal quality? How do you help them imagine compassion as something fun, alive, and embodied? How do you make an ancient practice feel natural for modern kiddos?

When Jeff’s rambunctious six-year-old Eden stumbled on the book, he flipped through, chose his favorite of the colorful Taras and, while playing with the visualization, had a profound, whole-body shift.

Jeff describes it as a “rainbow-candy version of internal regulation” that honors children’s natural inclination towards imagination. Kids are naturals at this stuff. Ask them to picture beams of warmth radiating from the heart and they just do it, while adults tie themselves in knots worrying about doing it “right”.

That might be the core thread of our conversation: practice is really about getting open enough to let what’s naturally here come through. Kids, wild lil portals that they are, let that wisdom stream through all the time. Books like this can give them language for what they already know.

We talk about:

* Visualization as a practice playground for kids and adults

* The 5 Taras and their different archetypal qualities (white for calm, green for protection, blue for difficult emotions...)

* Why mantra might be our oldest human practice

* How books can become spiritual oases when teachers aren’t accessible

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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 🌿

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The Adventure:

Ivan walks us through a Green Tara visualization and mantra practice.

We breathe, settle, imagine Tara’s smile and the rays of warmth coming toward us, and repeat her mantra: Om Tare Tu Tare Ture Soha. Then we let those qualities dissolve into us and send them back out to others.

Ivan calls it the workout before the Savasana: the color, sound, imagery build up the energy… and then you release and relax, held in the felt sense of deep meaning.

This is medicine for all of us - not just the kiddos!

Let us know in the comments how the practice lands - is it your first time doing mantra or visualization?

Till next time,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

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Know a parent (or a kid at heart) who might dig this? Pass it along 💫

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Ivan’s Links:

* Book: My Friend Tara: And Her Rainbow of Compassion

* Shambhala Publications: shambhala.com

* Bala Kids: shambhala.com/balakids