Blissful Thinking – Details, episodes & analysis

This week's guest is Vimalasara (Valerie) Mason-John, an award winning author of 9 books,  including her most timely book published this year I'm Still Your Negro, An Homage to James Baldwin. She is the co-founder of the accredited program Mindfulness Based Addiction Recovery MBAR and of Eight Step Recovery, an alternative and addition to the 12 step recovery meetings. She is one of the leading African Descent voices in the field of mindfulness approaches for addiction.

My guest this week is Mita Mistry, a writer, mindfulness-based cognitive therapist, and acupuncturist based in the UK. Mita is an incredibly sensitive and empathic person, and in this episode she introduces us to the world of five elements acupuncture in the Taoist tradition, along with many other subjects including narcissism, codependence, and abuse south Asian families. Her website is below, and you can also find her articles at https://muckrack.com/mita-mistry/articles. She tweets @mitamistry .

https://www.mitamistry.co.uk/

This week's episode is with writer, editor and translator Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi. It's wide-ranging! We talk about Islam, spirits, tarot, ayahuasca, vipassana, and mostly about life's purpose, and social justice, and the necessity of speaking out, and why. Is it possible for one person to be happy and at peace when others are suffering? And why are we here, and who will we be when we die? 

This week's episode is with the extraordinarily insightful poet, storyteller, healer, clairvoyant, tarot reader, and psychic, Giorgia Alexander. This is a deep, sensitive, and most of all wise exploration of some of the key issues that face us all: trauma and how to heal from it, narcissism, sociopathy, and, last of all, how to develop our psychic powers.

Giorgia's linktree:

https://linktr.ee/giorgiaalexander

This week's episode is with former rapper and novelist Mutlu Ergün who is currently an anti-racist trainer, travelling across Germany. Usually with his brother, he runs People of Colour empowerment workshops, and anti-racist trainings for white people, in which he aims to gently, lovingly, separate white Germans from their whiteness, making them aware of their own racisms. It's a spiritual approach to racism that we very rarely hear, and Multu is an expert. 

Links below are to the Phoenix, the anti-racist organisation Multu works for, and to his novel:

https://www.phoenix-ev.org/en/index.html

https://www.amazon.de/Kara-G%C3%BCnl%C3%BCk-geheimen-Tageb%C3%BCcher-Sesperado/dp/3897716003

Welcome to our third interview with the truly inspirational Rikki Beadle-Blair who explains the importance of self-love, positivity and gratitude and how to get there. There's nothing preachy or bogus about this man. He lives this. And right now we need people like him more than ever. We need to be inspired and this interview is the definition of inspirational. 

Follow him on twitter @RikkiBB or instagram @rikkibeadleblair or on facebook https://www.facebook.com/rikki.beadleblair and listen, enjoy, and be uplifted! 

The award-winning novelist Nayomi Munaweera talks with us abut childhood trauma, abuse and her "spiritual toolbox" of vipassana meditation, therapy, twelve-step, and ayahuasca. Her advice to us all at this time is to be soft with ourselves, and to remember that this moment is all we have.

https://us.macmillan.com/author/nayomimunaweera/

https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/index

The first interview! And it's with my dear, wise, loving 82-year-old friend from San Francisco, Fannie-Lee. Here she talks about death, about pain, and love, and gives beautiful gentle advice to us all about how to survive this mysterious wonderful thing called life. This one is about everything, and ALL about love. 

Welcome to the Blissful Thinking podcast! In this first I episode, I, Rajeev Balasubramanyam, tell the story of how I came to spiritual practice. I talk about the need for people of colour to share pain and trauma, and ways of healing, and I offer suggestions on how to live life under lockdown with greater awareness. 

Don't forget to subscribe! And you can buy my novel here: amzn.to/38QXXWD

Royalty free music from https://www.fesliyanstudios.com

And below, some meditation resources:

https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/mindful-apps/

https://bswa.org/teachers/ajahn-brahm/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh5ii6R6LTM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xtk1kIU6Jy8

https://yourholisticpsychologist.com/

https://www.instagram.com/the.holistic.psychologist/?hl=en

http://www.kairajewel.com/audio-talks

https://www.iamsahararose.com/highestselfpodcast

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/your-own-magic/

https://mysolluna.com/blog-2/

My guest this week is my friend Kevin Martin. He is a native of the Bay Area and a practitioner of vipassana and, more recently, a student in the Dharmacharya Program under the teachings of Venerable Pannavati Bhikkhuni and Venerable Pannidipa Bhikkhu.  Kevin is a Dharma Community teacher at Insight Richmond and currently serves as a Restorative Justice Facilitator with at the Contra Costa County - Criminal Diversion Program in the Northern California, Bay Area. Kevin's take on the world is always original, and he has those essential qualities for the path: curiosity, honesty, humour, warmth, and humility.  I've only known him for four years, but I feel we are fellow travellers who have already come a long way together. Enjoy being a part of Kevin's world!

www.insightrichmond.com