Proactive Mindfulness
Self-Improvement
About
Exploring personal growth as a living process of mindful change. Talks and thoughtful conversations with therapists and mindfulness practitioners.
Episodes
- Systemic shame & trauma healing — from isolation to connection: Merete Holm Brantbjerg
Merete Holm Brantbjerg talks about trauma, systemic shame, and the body’s hidden survival responses, starting from her own experience of female-to-female sexual perpetration at age 14.
- Janina Fisher on healing your trauma: Embracing our fragmented selves
Janina Fisher discusses healing trauma by understanding reactions as survival-oriented parts of the self, not issues to eradicate. This approach embraces fragmented selves.
- Scary Does Not Mean Powerful: Mindfulness & Politics
This episode reflects on power dynamics, vulnerability, and shared humanity through a mindful lens, encouraging attention to complex realities.
- Gentle presence with John Amodeo: The practice of welcoming what you feel
This episode features therapist John Amodeo discussing and practicing gentle presence. It explores how observing emotions such as anxiety, defensiveness, and shame non-judgmentally can alter one's inner state and interpersonal dynamics.
- Memory reconsolidation: What makes therapy work
This episode discusses memory reconsolidation and its role in therapy. It explores how corrective emotional experiences can lead to lasting change, even when clients understand their behavioral patterns.
- Meditation & beyond: Mindfulness is not a spectator sport
This episode explores mindfulness not just as a passive state but as an embodied practice of active engagement. It details how mindfulness is applied in personal meditation, therapy sessions, and various daily activities.
- Where do you feel it in your body? Embodied Therapy When the Body Doesn’t Answer
How to practice embodied therapy when the body doesn’t answer. A relational approach to somatic psychotherapy for therapists who want a practical way to stay present without forcing awareness.
- Mindful Presence & Embodiment: A Conversation with Andrew Rosenstock
Andrew Rosenstock and Serge Prengel explore the themes of mindful presence, embodiment, and the complexities of human interaction. They discuss the importance of self-regulation, the paradox of experience, and the negotiation that occurs i…
- Stephen Batchelor: Mindfulness, Ethics, Personal Growth & Freedom
- Embracing mindful connection & its transformational power
Serge Prengel and Bruce Nayowith explore the power of mindful human connections and their vital role in personal growth.
- Andrea Ruhland: Autism & Mindful Parenting
Andrea's journey as a mother to a daughter on the autism spectrum. This heartfelt conversation conveys a down-to-earth sense of the complexities and rewards of mindful parenting.
- Mindful Engagement & Personal Growth: A Practical Example
Engagement in everyday life involves being present in the moment. Here is a simple, down-to-earth example of how it works in everyday life.
- Engaging with life involves engaging with our body
Explore why embodied presence improves mindful engagement in everyday life and how to cultivate it.
- Eric Wolterstorff: How transference impacts growth & healing in therapy
We discuss how transference in the context of trauma therapy. Eric shares an experience that illustrates how this can lead to healing.
- Julie Nelson: A mindful exploration of power dynamics in spiritual communities
We delve into the importance of recognizing power dynamics and how they affect mindful living and spiritual growth.
- How to truly engage with your life: A mindfulness experiment
In this video, people reflect on their inner experience when they have difficulty engaging compared to when they can engage more.
- Steven C. Hayes: A process-based approach to therapy
Steve Hayes is a developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Here, we talk about going beyond the specifics of any given therapy
- Brenda Shoshanna: an experiential conversation about authority
Brenda Shoshanna and I are having a conversation informed by Zen, being present with our experience, as we discuss authority.
- Dan Clurman: Feldenkreis & the body as an organizing system
The Feldenkrais method teaches people to be aware of how they move so that they can change ineffective habits. Here, we're using these tools to put the method into practice, live.
- Active imagination: Leslie Ellis & Serge Prengel
I invited my friend and colleague Leslie Ellis to have a conversation about Active Imagination in therapy and in life.
- Ven. Gendun: Buddhism & the practice of freedom
Ven. Losang Gendun tells the story of a Buddhist monk who had been put in jail and tortured. The point of the story was how he responded to the situation.
- Jeff Warren: Coming into presence through connection
Jeff Warren has an iconoclastic approach to meditation and what it's like to be human. Here, we discuss coming into the present, practicing what we preach.
- Owen Flanagan: What it is like to be an addict
Owen Flanagan is an expert in the philosophy of mind and ethics. For many years, he was also an addict. Here, we talk about addiction from both perspectives.
- Mindfulness journey
I share here what has shaped my understanding of what I now call Proactive Mindfulness.
- Gregory Kramer: Not knowing, being present in the moment
Gregory Kramer and I set about to embody the attitude of not knowing as we stay present with what happens moment by moment.
- Shared meditation informed by Focusing
This approach blends moments of meditation and moments of sharing our experiences of meditating.
- A down-to-earth perspective on non-duality
I want to find a down-to-earth experience that helps me relate to non-duality.
- One-minute mindfulness: Embodied presence
I am going to describe to you a one-minute practice. Now, when I say one minute, it could be 50 seconds or five minutes.
- Koshin Paley Ellison: Connection as a spiritual practice
Koshin Paley Ellison and Serge Prengel talk about connecting with others as a healing spiritual practice.
- Peter Levine reflects on his life and work
Peter Levine talks with Serge Prengel about his personal journey through trauma and how he came to develop Somatic Experiencing.
- Pablo Márquez: Photography as a meditative process
Serge Prengel talks with photographer Pablo Márquez about his meditative approach to photography. Pablo describes how his art emerges from his being present.
- Linda Modaro & Nelly Kaufer: Reflective Meditation
Serge Prengel talks with Linda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer about their gentle, inspiring approach to meditation practice and self-discovery.
- Raja Selvam: Embodying emotions
Serge Prengel talks with Raja Selvam about developing the capacity for emotions by making more room for them in the body.
- Seth Zuihō Segall: In praise of Pluralism
Serge Prengel talks with Seth Zuihō Segall about his journey, making sense of life through the practice of psychology, Buddhism, and philosophy.
- Maia Szalavitz: An inspiring perspective on addiction
Maia Szalavitz blends personal experience and years of investigative research into an inspiring perspective on addiction. Conversation with Serge Prengel about her perspective on addiction.
- Kirk Schneider: Life-enhancing anxiety
We do our best to avoid anxiety, and in so doing, risk missing out on the best of the depth and mystery of existence. We also risk compounding the very anxiety we hoped to avoid and becoming destructive as a result.
- What is Polyvagal-informed Mindfulness?
How does the Polyvagal Theory affect our understanding of mindfulness? Blake O'Connor, Education Director of the Polyvagal Institute, interviews Serge Prengel.
- Elizabeth English: Gentle mindfulness
We talk about freeing meditation from pressures and welcoming every aspect of our inner experience.
- Noga Arikha: The embodied mind
Antonio Damasio described Nora Arikha as a poet and a painter with the soul of a scientist.
- A mindful take on spirituality & philosophy
We discuss how we make sense of the world and our place in it, i.e. what is usually called spirituality & philosophy.
- Bruce Gibbs: Finding the right distance from our experience
We explore a concept that is very important to Bruce Gibbs, finding the right distance from our experience.
- Ken Benau: Shame, Pride, and Relational Trauma
This conversation with Ken Benau serves as an introduction to shame and pride-informed psychotherapy with adult survivors of relational trauma
- An experiential inquiry into the nature of inquiry
We share with you what we like about the notion of "inquiry," and to do so by giving you a flavor of what we mean by it.
- Lawrence Berger: A quest for meaning
We start this conversation from the perspective that human beings are self-interpreting animals, and go on to explore what gives us a sense of meaning.
- Jacqui Lewis: Fierce Love
Jacqui Lewis & Serge Prengel talk about bringing a quality of fierce love to our life, as a person and as an agent of change.
- Jeffery Smith: How psychotherapy works
Jeffery Smith describes a 5-step pathway to go beyond the fragmentation of the different schools of psychotherapy and define how psychotherapy works.
- Salvador Moreno-Lopez: Sensing into life as a musical improvisation
We talk about metaphors that Salvador Moreno-López uses to understand and orient interaction in psychotherapy and daily life.
- Embodied spirituality: a felt sense of something larger
Serge Prengel describes an embodied perspective on how we experience a sense of being (part of) something larger.
- Cherionna Menzam-Sills: Exploring pre- and perinatal experiences
This conversation starts with a guided, experiential exploration. Then we talk about early developmental experiences, with a perspective informed by trauma therapy and mindfulness.
- Elliot Jurist on the process of mourning
We talk about the process of mourning and how it relates to the human condition