Wayne Shorter, likely the greatest jazz composer since Thelonious Monk, was also one of the most influential tenor and soprano saxophonists in the post-John Coltrane period from the mid-1960s onward. His death on March 2, 2023, at the age of 89, marks the end of a musical life that spanned a panoply of styles and configurations, from hard bop to electronic fusion and funk to Brazilian and Caribbean to orchestral and the avant-garde, all suffused his own idiosyncratic melding of sounds and sensibilities which seemed to reach from the heat-center of the earth to the infinite expanses of the cosmos.

If we can create an AI that seems fully conscious, what does it mean for our place in the universe? Are we really conscious? If we can basically replicate consciousness, how special can life be? How special can our own lives be?

James’ teachings take us deeply into states like gratitude and compassionate presence, to where we can focus our attention on how it feels to feel good somatically, thereby creating new neural pathways that strengthen awareness and aliveness. James has witnessed a lot of people learn to love themselves and turn their lives around as a result of this teaching.

The truth is, you’re always practicing something. What is your default practice if you are not practicing consciously?

Beena Sharma, president of the Vertical Development Academy (VeDA), gives a beautifully cogent explanation of the 8-stage, full spectrum model of adult psychological development, Vertical Development — illuminating us not only to the characteristics of each stage of development, but the implications and ramifications of each stage, the process of human development as a whole, and how this model can help us face our current metacrisis.

Watch as Dr. Keith offers a "Psychotherapy Masterclass" that helps us work with various personality types as a foundation for healing, change, and self-actualization. While intended for other psychotherapy professionals, this discussion offers valuable insight for all of us, and can be immediately applied to our personal transformational work, whatever that may be.

Rebel Wisdom co-founder Alexander Beiner has his finger on the cultural pulse of our times. Here he explores key challenges we face as a global community: sensemaking and truth finding in an culture that has lost its coherence as well as its sense of the divine, and what role psychedelics might play both therapeutically and spiritually in healing our culture. He discusses the need to go beyond the intellectual to find clarity and coherence, using embodied practices like meditation and inquiry, and explains how modalities such as these are an essential container for therapeutic psychedelic experiences.

Sometimes in our psychological development the way forward requires us to go back, to re-explore earlier stages of life to see what is distorted or left unintegrated. This is the theme of the work of my guest today, developmental psychotherapist Kim Barta, who joins us to discuss his approach to personal growth.