Naming the Real

We are often tempted to orient our lives around some sort of arrival point—enough money or fame or religion to give us certainty, to give us power, but flourishing life is about learning to live in t…

In this new series, “Scripture, Science and Spirituality,” we will explore what it takes to flourish as human beings in the midst of a culture that is increasingly disconnected and despairing. Using …

Season 3 Part II will be dropping soon, with new episodes about spirituality and what it means to be fully human. In the meantime, learn out more about the 12-week Restoried Coaching that is launchin…

In this follow-up to our series on Internal Family Systems, therapist Vanessa Trine takes us deeper into the IFS framework. She unpacks what IFS is as well as how understanding and implementing its c…

Megan Dietrick (meganraecoaching.com) is a Methodist worship director as well as a coach who helps people recover from religious-based trauma and cultures of fear. In this episode, which hits on a nu…

What if we are mistaken about what other people actually believe? Turns out...that’s often the case. In this episode, we explore the reality—and the implications—of collective illusions, which is the…

Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical, crucial for regulating human motivation, desire, and focus. Yet never in human history have so many dopamine-delivery vehicles (from sugar to social media to …

We live in a hurried age, that’s obvious. And yet we still fail to grasp how imperative slowing down and living in unhurriedness is for everything that matters in life. In this episode, we explore wh…

Brandon sits down with one of his heroes to discuss the process of becoming a fully flourishing human, even when it involves walking through trauma and grief. An exploration of mindfulness, presence,…

Are you happy right now? And what do we even mean when we use the word "happy"? Our society has implicit notions of what happiness is and how we attain it, but often these notions are incomplete at b…

When we think of the brain, what probably comes to mind (pun intentional) is our conscious thinking. And while our pre-frontal cortex and verbal processing is amazing, ninety-five percent of our inte…

We tend to think of emotions as things that “just happen,” and there’s a lot of truth in that. But it’s also true that we have far more agency to cultivate and develop our emotional life in specific …

We tend to think of emotions as things that “just happen to us,” and indeed that is part of our human experience. But we may also miss the degree to which we have a say over and agency in what emotio…

We deconstruct trauma by telling stories. In this episode—another conversation with Brandon’s cousin, Dr. Alex Gee—the story of their black and white family is told in greater detail. But this episod…

In our first interview, Brandon, a white man, sits down with Dr. Alex Gee, his black cousin, to discuss family, race, trauma, and what “woke” actually means. Because they have both been pastors (in A…

We live in a traumatized world where everyone has some degree of pain and trauma to be addressed. In this episode, we explore Peter Levine’s work around trauma and how it gets frozen in our nervous s…

This episode follows the work of neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who experienced a stroke and had her left brain (including verbal processing) go off-line in an instant. Her story leads us into an …

Classically, the purpose of a university is the pursuit of truth. But according to Jonathan Haidt and other sociologists, there is a movement in American universities to replace the quest for truth w…

Trauma can keep us from living mindfully. This episode—part 3 in a mini-series on mindful living—has two parts: we start with an exploration of what trauma is and how it gets stored in our bodies. Th…