The One You Feed - Seifu Singh-Molares on Spiritual Direction

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Reverand Seifu Singh-Molares is the Executive Director of Spiritual Directors International and an ordained Zen Buddhist Priest. He’s a practicing Spiritual Director and Companion and motivational speaker. In a previous life, he was an executive at Microsoft where he successfully grew international groups and divisions and provided leadership to multicultural teams around the world.In this episode, Eric and Seifu talk about the role of a Spiritual Director or Spiritual Companion in helping us find our way on our own spiritual path.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Seifu Singh-Molares and I Discuss Spiritual Direction and …That we have choices and we become our intentionsWhat the terms Spiritual Direction or Spiritual Companion meansThe role of deep listening in Spiritual DirectionThe intimate infiniteThe difference between a Spiritual Companion and a Priest or ReverendWhat goes on during a Spiritual Direction sessionThe role of relaxing into the unknowing to find our own wayLearning to live into and love the questions of our lifeFinding authenticity in the world’s great religionsThe mystery of the truth that love permeates the universeWhat the word spiritual means to himThe role of music in his spiritual journeyHis experiential shamanic educationSeifu Singh-Molares Links:Seifu’s WebsiteSDI WorldTwitterInstagramFacebookBiOptimizers: Just 2 capsules of their Magnesium Breakthrough taken before bed gives you all 7 forms of magnesium so that you sleep better at night. Go to www.magbreakthrough.com/wolf and use the promo code WOLF10 at checkout to save 10%.Ana Luisa Jewelry makes beautiful, high-quality, and sustainably crafted jewelry pieces that are also affordable! Visit analuisa.com/wolf and enter Promo code: WOLF for 10% off your purchaseIf you enjoyed this conversation with Seifu Singh-Molares on Spiritual Direction, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Scott Edelstein on Finding a Spiritual TeacherHenry Shukman on Spiritual AwakeningSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the things we say at the One You Feed A Lot is that there's no shortcut to lasting happiness, right? We've got to do the work to improve our lives. But this can be really challenging to do without some support. Our lives are busy, there's a lot of things clawing at our attention, and we might have ways of working with our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are not very good for our well-being. So if you'd like help working on any or all of those things, I've got a couple of spots that have just opened up in my one-on-one coaching practice. You can book a free 30-minute call to talk with me, no pressure, and we get to

know each other at oneufeed.net slash coach. Rather than flail desperately for knowledge, why don't we just accept that one way of apprehending all of that is just to accept that there's so much we don't know and to become comfortable with it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Reverend Seifu Anil Singh Morales, the Executive Director of Spiritual Directors International and an ordained Zen Buddhist priest. He's a practicing spiritual director

and companion and motivational speaker. In a previous life, he was also an executive at Microsoft, where he successfully grew international groups and divisions and provided leadership to multicultural teams around the world. Hi, Seifu. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. You are the Executive Director of Spiritual Directors International and have a wide background in a lot of areas. And we're going to get into really what spiritual direction is in general in a moment, but we're going to start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather

who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. And she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Thank you for that wonderful parable. My response to it is we have choices.

We become our intentions, right? If our intention is to model kindness, compassion, so that we can become kindness and compassion incarnate, you know, to become it, then we have to work at it and we have to practice it and we have to build on it. And if we choose for a variety of reasons to go in the other direction, you know, it's usually childhood trauma or actually sometimes willful choices in a negative direction, then we become those negative intentions as well.

So for me, it basically speaks to, we have choices in life, not as many as we think, but we have have choices in life, not as many as we think, but we have some choices in life. And the choice to be a good person, an ethical person, a responsible person, is something that we choose and something that we need to practice. Wonderful. I think that's a great starting place for us. I'd like to start with just the basics. You know, for people who are not familiar, what is spiritual direction? Or I know another term that is used a lot is spiritual companionship.

So pick whichever of those terms you like and tell us, for people who have no idea what that is, what spiritual direction is. So they're both great terms. I, as a Buddhist priest, use the term spiritual companion, which derives from one of the oldest recorded sutras in the Tripitaka, which is the Pali Kanon, the sacred texts of Buddhism, where the Buddha says that to Ananda, who is his chief disciple, that spiritual friendship, companionship, camaraderie is the highest form of the spiritual life. It's basically the entirety of the spiritual life. And so that comes from the Buddhist tradition, but it comes also in Christianity, and it comes in Islam, and it comes in all of the world's major religions. And it has certain hallmarks that distinguish it. It's not just, let's go have a beer and talk about God. It's actually

something far more involved than that. It's based on deep listening. And deep listening is really kind of allowing the person that we companion to reveal to themselves, principally, how they want to connect with the great beyond, or God, or the universe, or Allah, however you might want to describe that. The spiritual direction relationship, spiritual companionship relationship, is one where that person is allowed to reveal to her or himself how they feel about these deeper issues of meaning and engagement, much far beyond the confines of our daily lives. So there's various modalities, but it's deep listening. It's very contemplatively grounded so that we can practice not being reactive. It's deeply respectful of the agency of the people that we're with. So those are some of

the hallmarks of that relationship. I was trained as an interfaith spiritual director. So I have that training and certification. And one of the people that helped me in that training, or I worked a lot with was somebody I'm sure you're familiar with, John Mabry, who's written extensively on spiritual direction. He has an analogy that I like, which he says that the role of a spiritual director is to be a couples counselor between the person you're working with and the divine. Now, again, we can use lots of different terms between the divine. We could say to be a couples counselor between a person and their truest reality, their deepest nature. Again, we can use the terms, but I love that analogy because it sort of points it back to the goal is to facilitate a relationship between that person and deeper reality. Not that there's not a relationship between us and the people we companion, but the more important relationship

is between the people we companion and their own essential nature or God. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that's our role as spiritual companions, spiritual directors is to be a mirror to those folks as they unfurl for themselves, you know, journey of remembering, right? Because we're all born with this innate ability to connect on the deepest level with our essence. And we're really talking about our universal essence. Again, God, Allah, whatever, however you want to describe it. And it's really allowing ourselves to remember and feel back into that most intimate. You know, we talk about the intimate infinite. As a Zen practitioner yourself, that's probably a term you may have heard. It's developing intimacy with the infinite. And it's remembering that.

And absolutely, our role as spiritual directors and spiritual companions is to walk alongside that person as they take increasing steps into that remembrance, into that greater awareness. Yeah, there's a quote I wanted to grab here real quick, because as you said it, I thought about it, and you use that phrase, the intimate infinite, which I love, which is a phrase that I think, at least I originally heard it from Genjo Marinello, who is, I think, your Zen teacher and was a spiritual director for me at one point in my life. But I came across this quote today, and it says, the practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with

something. And I love this idea in so much of Zen around intimacy. It's the way that I have most connected with Zen is this idea of becoming intimate with things by connecting to the world. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it brings up that quote from Dogen, you know, to study the self is to forget the self. And I would add another line to forget the self is to remember the self, right? I mean, there is no self, ultimately, no individual egoistic self, self, ultimately, no individual egoistic self, but there is this great splash of water that we're all a part of. It's ineffable, it's intuitively reachable. It's also intellectually reachable to some extent, although that can become an obstacle very quickly, the intellect. You know, I use the analogy of climbing up a mountain, right? And if you don't have training and you climb up a mountain, you could go off onto a path that's going to lead you to a

ravine or to a place where you don't have enough oxygen. The spiritual companion is just kind of like a trained mountain guide who walks alongside of you as you ascend the mountain. And of course, what you're going to see when you get to the top of the mountain is what you're going to see, right? It's your view. It's this beautiful view, but it's your view. And even if I'm sitting next to you as your companion, what I see is different because of who I am. The spiritual direction relationship is very similar to that. It's just a trained mountain guide who escorts you and walks alongside of you. And of course, the beautiful part of that is that if I'm your spiritual director, spiritual companion, I get to see that

view for myself too, right? So I get to walk through that door with you, even though we're both going to see very different things, and we're going to react differently to them. So let's talk about spiritual direction in contrast to a couple of other roles that it's often confused with. You know, how is a spiritual director different than my pastor, my priest, my reverend? You're in the Zen tradition, you have a Zen teacher. How is a spiritual director different than those roles? There's some similarities, which is why I think people get easily confused with that. The spiritual director, as we were

just discussing, usually happens on a one-to-one basis, although it can happen one-to-many. So that's one key distinction, right? The pastor's up there and ministering to hundreds of people or dozens of people, and it's one to many. So that intimacy that we were talking about earlier is one of the hallmarks of a good spiritual direction relationship is that it gives you a maximum amount of attention, focus, mindfulness, maximum amount of attention, focus, mindfulness, mindful attention to you and deep listening, you know, we're kind of like a cushion, if you will, a cushion for others to sit on so that they can more easily navigate their way into an exploration of the unknown, an exploration of the beyond or God. So that's one key difference. Pastors tend to minister to many folks. Spiritual directors tend to be one-on-one. But it is tied to this whole intimacy

conversation, which is it's much easier to achieve intimacy, safety, comfort, and trust in a one-to-one relationship than it usually is in a group setting. Not that there's not beauty in community and great comfort and support, but that has some complicating factors as well. Yeah, I think there's often also a difference in hierarchy or authority or power in some priest, reverend to congregation situation that the teacher's an exalted position, they are often above, or in some ways, again, that's not ideal, but it often has that connotation where I think in spiritual direction, particularly when you use the word spiritual companionship, that's not really what we're aiming for. Yeah, I think that's a very good analysis.

In my role as a Zen priest, I'm holding the container, right? I'm holding the container of Zen with all of its rituals and practices and meditation and Buddhas and all of that. In my role as a spiritual companion, you're holding your container as you develop it. And my job is to support you, not to say, use my container. That's something that good spiritual directors, spiritual companions never do. It's not a question of my container. It's your container. It's your emerging awareness of how you want to frame your spirituality, how you want to grow within it. That's a good distinction, Eric, and I agree with it. It's the difference between holding a container for others as opposed to helping

someone create or live into their own. So what sort of thing happens in a spiritual direction session? I mean, I know there's lots of different approaches, but there's some general guidelines. What do you usually see happen in a spiritual direction session as far as like, you know, by happen, I don't mean like, what's the outcome? I mean, sort of like what actually goes on during a spiritual direction session, as far as like, you know, by happen, I don't mean like, what's the outcome? I mean, sort of like what actually goes on during a spiritual direction session? I think it's different with every individual, right? Because we all have different approaches to it. So we start with the premise that we're in this relationship together, because you are coming

to me to help assist you with your exploration of the divine or God or the universe. So it starts with that. And then it's kind of like Freud or Jung, right, from a psychological standpoint. Anything you say, as unrelated as you think it is, is actually your entry point into this exploration, even if you're not consciously aware of it immediately. into this exploration, even if you're not consciously aware of it immediately. So usually people talk about their experiences with established religions, because most people have had some. Actually, in older generations, that's more often true than in younger generations. I have a bunch of kids, and they don't go to church, and they have never gone to church. But in some sense of spirituality, it starts with that, which immediately then, you know, these issues you were talking about hierarchy and authority and who gets to determine what.

And, you know, I heard so-and-so say this. And what about that? And then we unpack those things. And actually, my job as a spiritual director and spiritual companion is just to support that person as they unpack. And so you go from kind of circling around the issue very quickly to, oh, here is really what I want to address today. And this is not me as the spiritual director. It's the person that I'm with who says, I figured it out. This is what I believe about this, or this is what I'm thinking about or, I figured it out. This is what I believe about this,

or this is what I'm thinking about or questioning if they don't really know yet where they are. You circle and then we get pretty granular pretty quickly as people realize what they want to explore. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar.

You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So it looks a lot in some ways then like a therapy session. There's two people sitting in a room talking about something for usually about an hour. Again, there's variation. So that's one model of it. I know a lot of spiritual directors also bring in other tools, though, beyond just talking. Yeah. So, contemplation, that's right. I mean, there's a talk therapy element to it, which is we talk about these things. And contemplative practices are a big part of it, too, which is that a lot of what triggers us in terms of our relationship with

God, just to use one metaphor, the relationship with the divine, relationship with the universe, is what I'm indicating, triggers things within us. And lessening our reactivity through contemplative practices is a great tool. So moments of silence, moments of mutual contemplation, kind of are interspersed with the talk therapy component or music or, you know, it can be in any number of things that people bring in. In the Zen tradition in Rinzai Zen, we act these things out through Kuon study. These Kuons where you actually have to present your understanding. If we are coming to a spiritual director, we present our understanding, and that person mirrors back to us what they see. And then we go, oh, you know,

let me think about that. Let's take a few minutes in silence. And so the contemplative part of spiritual direction is very important, whether you do it through prayer or meditation or dancing or whatever it is in the session and especially outside the session in anticipation of the session and preparing for it are other modalities that I think are part of it as well. So in some sense, spiritual direction, spiritual companionship leads us into an exploration of the unknown and the unknowable. And that's a really difficult place for most people to find themselves in, right? We like certainty in our lives. We like things that we can hold on to. We like things that give us feelings of safety and certainty. And this particular practice,

spiritual direction, actually invites us into unknown and unknowable spaces. And it's really an invitation to become comfortable with change, to become comfortable with uncertainty, to become intimate with things that normally trigger us into a defensive posture, right? Most people don't want that uncertainty in their lives. They're looking for, please tell me how to live my life. Please tell me how I should model my relationship with the divine. And really what this exploration leads is in a completely opposite direction. That's one of the things as I went through my training that was so interesting. I mean, I've got years of background as a coach. You know, as a coach, there are some similarities between coaching and spiritual direction. But there is also a place in spiritual direction where we more want to let the person find their way into their own thing. Now,

a good coach will do the same thing, ask questions and lead people around to their own conclusions. But there's also a point where it's like, well, here's what I think you might want to do. And I'm not saying there's never a role for that in spiritual direction, but that emphasis on the unknown and the relaxing into uncertainty, relaxing into silence, relaxing into that is a key part of the dynamic. You know, it can be a beautiful thing, right? I mean, most people are fearful of it, are scared of it. And for good reason, right? You're basically plunging into the abyss with no safety net, right? No harness, nothing to hold you up. We're talking about faith now, right? And that means lots of different

things to different people. But the practice of spiritual direction and spiritual companionship is really becoming comfortable with kind of floating out in space on your own and being okay with that. And if we become comfortable habitually by developing habits around it, where we become very familiar with floating in space, and I'm using this as a metaphor, floating in space alone, then, you know, things like life and death, our greatest fear is, you know, we're going to die and what's going to happen when we die, everything is over and our relationships are over, those start to dissipate. So that's a beautiful outcome of living into questions rather than looking for answers, I would say. Yeah, there's that famous Rilke quote about learning to live the questions.

Yeah, if I had some shorthand for spiritual direction, it would be just that learning to live into the question, learning to be comfortable in a questioning space and comfortable with it. That's our ultimate space anyway. You know, we are these fragments, these specks of dust in a seemingly infinite universe that we are only just beginning to understand in many ways. So rather than flail desperately for knowledge, why don't we just accept that one way of apprehending all of that is just to accept that there's so much we don't know and to become comfortable with it. Yep, that's another very Zen idea, right? Not knowing is most intimate. Let's change directions just a little bit here. I wanted to see if you could help us do a little

translation. And what I mean by translation is that you have a pretty wide spiritual background. You've got shamanic education. You've been a Zen priest for a long time. I believe you have some degrees in Christian theology. And what I thought might be fun and interesting to do would be to have you take some Christian ideas and present them in more broad spiritual terms. The reason this came to me is I've listened to a couple of the conversations that you've had in the past. I've heard you jump between these ideas very quickly. I've heard you be like, well, in Christianity, we'd say da-da-da-da-da, and in Zen, we might do da-da-da-da-da. And I know we have a lot of listeners who come from a Christian

background, and that's not really where they're at anymore. But I also know that those people love when they can hear their faith described in ways that feel less rigid and more open to them, and really connect the faith of maybe their childhood or younger years to maybe more of their mature spiritual understanding now. And so I thought maybe you could just translate a couple key Christian ideas and talk about how they look in a non, I don't even know if non-denominational is the right word, because that tends to be sort of within Christian, but you get the gist of what I'm trying to ask. Yeah, I do. So what do you think might be a couple terms we could play with here? Well, I mean, the easiest and the most complicated at the same time is this notion of God. Yeah. The Holy Spirit. There's lots of other archetypes

that are built in there. Jesus and Mary. Yep. Even Joseph. So take your pick. Let's start with the big one. Let's just swing for the fences with God. Yeah. You know, I think for me, and thank you for referencing my background, my father is from India and a Hindu, and my mother is from Spain and from a very Roman Catholic family. And my degrees are in comparative religions and I've been doing that for a long time. I think what I look for is,

what I think probably a lot of the people that you're referencing are looking for is authenticity. What is the authenticity behind this form, right? So I would say I wear these robes, but in our training and Zen training, it's like, you know, someday we're going to have to burn the robes before they become the weight that ties us down and prevents us from proceeding any further. weight that ties us down and prevents us from proceeding any further. And so what is this essence that all the world's great religions is pointing to? And I would say it's a mystical essence. It's a transcendent, imminent essence, right? It's what the Holy Spirit calls us to. It's what the mystery of God calls us to. It's this exploration into the unknown that we

were talking about earlier. That is my sense of the pool that connects us all. It's the essential mystery. And mystery is probably the wrong term because it is knowable intuitively, emotively. It's hard to get a handle on intellectually, but it is something that we can experience very, very viscerally and truthfully, if you will. That concept of God as expansive and loving, that's a word we could talk about a little more if you want. And how to reach into that beyond the structures, as I said, of these robes or various theologies or institutions that kind of can have the potential to pull us away from that essence rather than bring us closer to it, which should be their intention, is what I look for when I speak about mystical Christianity. The message of Jesus is that

transcendent core. And when you're using the term mystical, are you using it in the sense of largely being a direct experience of? Yeah, it's a direct experience. In fact, that's probably enough said right there, right? It's this, this, right? Just even that word, this, this essence that we are always a part of, and will always be a part of even when we are no longer in these bodies, right? And I'm not talking about reincarnation, you know, that there's lots of terms that people can give to it or the afterlife or heaven. However, it's been described theologically for hundreds, thousands of years. You can even look at it from a scientific perspective, right? It's energy that continues.

It's energy that remains imminent always. We are always a part of it in these bodies and out of these bodies. That source, that essence. I can't remember who I was talking recently about the energy that causes the trees to grow, that causes, you know, the caterpillar to turn into a butterfly, this energy that flows through everything, and this intelligence that flows through everything. And I would say even more this love that flows through everything. As you were saying, yes, I have degrees in comparative religions and theology and philosophy and all of this. And after years and years of studying, it's not a coincidence that I'm a Zen priest, which

is a reaction, if you will, to a lot of that, right? Because I know that love permeates the universe. And if you ask me to explain it to you, I mean, I could spend hours and hours trying to explain it to you, but it's something that you can feel, right? So a lot of Christians, in my experience, have a deep and intimate connection with Jesus because of the love that he represents, or God because of the love that God represents. And it is so profound and so deep and so meaningful. It's hard to explain, but it's there. And as a Buddhist, I can say the same thing. As a Zen Buddhist, I can say I have a profound connection with the love in the universe, which kind of

dictates how I live my life, which is what you want all great spiritual disciplines to do, is to help you find that purpose, that meaning. Because if we're not here to love one another, then what are we doing here, right? What's the greater purpose of us all being here? And so I really believe in that. And I think that all of the world's religions point to that essence, the essence of love.

What about Jesus? What's a way of broadening the concept of Jesus? You sort of alluded to it there a little bit. Is there any more you want to add to that beyond just love? I think Jesus is an invitation. And that's how I've always taken him. Although, you know, it's him, it's her, it's beyond both of those, something much greater than just one gender. But it's an invitation. And it's an invitation that is not just let's, you know, frolic through a field of daffodils and feel good, right? I mean, there's pain and suffering there. And that's part of the difficulties that we have to overcome. And we all experience them in our lives. There's no getting away from it, right? We're going to

experience loss and suffering and heartbreak. And that's part of the journey. That's an essential part of the journey into this love. And it's what gives love meaning, because love transcends. And I think that Jesus is such a powerful figure in representing that combination of suffering, pain, and heartbreak, and loss, and at the same time, in the same breath, the redemptory promise and invitation of love, of transcendent love. That's why I find him such a powerful and such a meaningful figure. The stories of Jesus, the ideas of Jesus are really beautiful. It sometimes feels like such a shame that in a lot of cases, it feels like that message has been co-opted.

times feels like such a shame that in a lot of cases, it feels like that message has been co-opted. I know a lot of people who are outside of the Christian tradition who look in and they see the outward manifestations of what some Christians in America have become, and that becomes a way of sort of condemning the whole idea. But if you look at the life of Jesus, such as it was written about, the person that's described, the things that he has to say. It's a beautiful and powerful and compassionate and strong. It's kind of amazing. It's very moving. You know, I've been lucky enough where I can say things like, Jesus has touched my heart. And I'm outside of the tradition now in many ways. And I'm inside the tradition even more than ever at the same time, in the sense of outside of an institution or, you know, as a Buddhist or as a person that has no religion, the spiritual but not religious person, shall we say,

that that will lead us to a much deeper understanding of our purpose in this life. What's the word spiritual mean to you? We're talking about being a spiritual director, a spiritual companion. You're the director of Spiritual Directors International. But that term, you know, I've got a program we lead called Spiritual Habits, right? This term gets thrown around a ton. And I'm always curious what it means to individuals. What does it mean to you individually?

Thank you for that question. I mean, for me, obviously, it's words are words, right? As a Zen practitioner yourself, you can probably appreciate this. Let's be careful and not get stuck on the words, because otherwise we're going to be spinning our wheels for a lifetime, actually, not just for the length of this interview. But spiritual for me means an attempt, an invitation, a desire to commune with essence. We were just talking about mysticism and the mystical experience to some degree, and Jesus and his example, and we could talk about Muhammad and

Buddha and so many other spiritual beings living and dead. And it's really an invitation to depth and intimacy. It's basically actually a requirement. It basically says if you want to reach these deep waters, you have to immerse yourself. a walk through fields of suffering and despair on the road to a rediscovery or remembering of the ultimate love and beauty in the universe. That's what spirit means to me. But I've invested, you know, 40 years on that journey. For me, it means depth and immersion. I love that depth and immersion. a shorthand i often like is connection to what matters because i think different things matter to different people but when we're connected to what matters for me that often feels like what i may mean for we've talked

about my zen background a little bit got sober at 24 from heroin addiction so i have a recovery background and you know aa talks a lot about connection to a higher power, connection to God. And I spent a lot of time wrestling with that idea because I didn't really believe in a interventionist God. I didn't believe there was a God who was coming in and arranging my life in a certain way. And I finally just sort of over time hit on for me that it was connection to whatever it is that matters to me. Yeah, that's beautifully said. All right, I'm going to change directions again here. And I want to talk about music. You are a classical guitar player. I have heard some of your music. You and I are similar. You guys put out a podcast

and the music in the podcast. Hey, y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back

into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be, and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts....is you playing guitar. And our podcast that comes out, there are two music breaks per episode and intro music. And that music is all created by myself and my producer, Chris.

Now, you are a beautiful classical guitar player. I cannot play as well as you. But I want to talk about the role of music in your spiritual journey and the role of how music helps you maybe into that invitation to depth and intimacy. You know, my first really meaningful spiritual experience, as we're using that term, was I was living in Brussels. I grew up in Brussels before coming to the States. And I went to a school, Collège du Sacré-Cœur, which is the Holy Heart School, which was associated with the Basilic in Brussels.

The Basilic is one of the largest in the world. And with the stained glass windows and ornaments and all sorts of things. And I remember being six and walking into that basilic and having a sense of the awe and the majesty of God, if you will, right? And this little kid walking into this huge basilic, and obviously I was spiritually inclined even then, and I was so moved. And what triggered it, I mean, the enormity of the building contributed to it,

but there was a choir singing Gregorian chants. You know, these beautiful harmonies and choruses, this choir was producing these sounds that were just so moving and so powerful. They entranced me. Music helps transport us to those places. It helps kind of grease the wheels, if you will. Maybe that's a poor analogy, but it helps take us there. And it can be Gregorian chants. It could be Beethoven. It could be, you know,

classical guitar of various kinds. For me, it can often be chanting, you know, chanting Buddhist sutras. And there's a power there. It's a wonderful way to enter that space. Yeah, I find it one of the most important and powerful ways for me to connect with something more. I was trying to think of my first musical experiences that felt transcendent. And I was like, well, was it like, it's ridiculous, like, Billy Joel Glasshouse's record, or certainly wasn't wasn't a beautiful cathedral in Europe. It represents my suburban American upbringing. But I don't think the experience is any the less profound for it. It's funny, because my second thought was thinking about listening to Quiet Riot in middle school.

I was like, I don't think that that doesn qualify. We're going to disqualify Quiet Riot, banging our head. But yeah, music is a really powerful and beautiful, beautiful thing that I think is an essential part of the spiritual journey and for me, been an essential part of all my connection practices. You know, there's so many different musical entry points, right? I mean, you were talking about Quiet Riot and maybe or maybe not. I play flamenco guitar and I play classical, but I've also been a huge fan of Jimi Hendrix for, you know, 46 years as a teenager. And some of that music will take you wonderful places. And so it's great because there's a musical style to suit just about everybody, right? That's the beauty of that form is there's so many different entry points. Yeah. I also find music underestimated as a contemplative tool. And what I mean by that is

a lot of times like meditation, right? We say, okay, well just sit and pay attention to your breath, but the breath is kind of boring. It grows more interesting over time. But I don't know what's making this come to my mind right now, but I'm just kind of going with what comes up, is that sometimes you can take particularly a piece of classical music and just choose, like, I'm going to follow one instrument. I'd be curious with your depth of meditation experience, you being a Zen priest, if you agree,

but it appears to me that it trains a similar mental process of one-pointed attention, but it feels often like an easier entry point. I couldn't agree with you more. If you're listening to, I don't know, Beethoven, something with highly elaborate orchestration, and you've been listening to it for a lifetime, been listening to it for a lifetime and yet you enter into that space and you listen for a particular line as you were saying that you haven't really focused on before you're still hearing the totality of this symphony let's say but you're hearing it through a different entry point and it's giving you a different appreciation it It's like, oh, I never heard it that way before, right? Even though I might've heard it a thousand times in some cases, literally thousands of times possibly. And yet you listen to it on occasion, 2001, and you hear something

that you've never heard before because you were listening, deep listening. Yeah. Do you have a favorite song to play on classical guitar? deep listening. Yeah. Do you have a favorite song to play on classical guitar? I love Francisco Tarrega, who's the Spanish composer from the 19th century. And he has a piece called La Grima, which is tear, teardrop. And it's one of those that I've been playing for 40 years. And every time I play it, it moves me. How do you spell La Grima? La Grima, L-A-G-R-I-M-A. All right. I am going to look it up. Yeah, look it up. I think you'll enjoy it. One of the other things that as I looked at your bio, it said you had an experiential shamanic education. And I would love to hear a little bit more about that. First, explain what a shamanic education is for people who don't understand, and then just share a little bit of your experience with it

and maybe how it informs your spiritual life today. So I've been a spiritual adventurer for, you know, it really kind of started when I was 17 as a freshman in college. So I was exploring spirituality through lots of different entry points and including various rituals and practices that are, let's say, unconventional, that bring you in deep into those spaces that we've been discussing for the last hour. So I spent a lot of time playing with those rituals and those approaches, approaches, both from a Hindu and indigenous spirituality practices, lots of times in cemeteries and fields in various different states of consciousness and different states of awareness

that can be dangerous, because as you were talking about addiction, can lead you down that path if you're not careful, but can also offer you a hint or a promise or an invitation to a practice. It reveals something that is so deep and so profound. And it just confirms what we've been saying, which is there are so many different ways of approaching the universe, many different ways of approaching the universe, of approaching this intimate, infinite, or God, or Jesus, or Buddha, however you want to describe it. And these practices basically reveal the immensity of that invitation. Excellent. Well, Seifu, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you. We'll have links in the show notes to your organization, SDI World.

But I appreciate this conversation and a chance to get to know you. Thank you so much, Eric. Likewise, it's been a pleasure to start to get to know you. And I look forward to perhaps more accountants in the future. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single

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