Free Love: Recent Episodes
Audra Carmine
The Free Love Podcast is devoted to potent spiritual practices for the purpose of becoming free. It's a collection of Dharma talks given by Free Love Founder, Audra Carmine. Enjoy. At Free Love we love community, meditation, laughter, mantra, meditation, and truth telling. We seek to become so free that expansive love flows through everything we do. Kindness, loving-awareness, and an ever-widening lense of compassion keep us connected to the creative impulse to do good--not the spiritual bypassing, ignoring reality, living in pretend-land kind of good, but the kind of good that comes from a wise knowing to love all of it so much that you are willing to be brave enough to shed your fear, act, tell the truth, serve, change, and grow.
An Easter Sunday talk about the cycle of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.
A good one to listen to over the holidays where we can tend to move from indulgence to aestheticism, from over doing it to trying to give everything up in the New Year.
Our second week of Metta meditation practice focuses on a neutral person in our lives. Audra shares a miracle story and some tools for dissolving our protective suits.
We live in a time where there is emphasis on division. On anger. On conspiracy -- on believing in a time of uncertainty that we have an answer that others don’t, that we see something that others cannot. We live in a time that is riddled with fear. We live in a time that is highlighting separation--highlighting the very essence of the experience of the material world--that we have been separated, that we have been kicked out of the garden. To practice, is to participate in a remembering. A re-membering of our togetherness. Of our own wholeness. To practice is to remember our own belonging. It is to cultivate a particular kind of love that is beyond attachment, beyond preference.
This episode explores the question of whether or not practice supports living an awakened life or not? You get to find out for yourself. What a miracle! Audra uses the five precepts as a tool to discuss what an inquiry like this might look like.
People pleasing, judgment and how to work with it. An exploration of the anatomy of judgment, perfectionism and the promise of our inner genius. Please excuse me, there is a part where I have to yell at my kid for using the internet while I am making live tv and podcasting. This is just life right now:) living and working at home with kids right there. We are in it together. Love you!
In the yoga/wellness industrial complex there can exist a stuckness around acceptance, self-acceptance, acceptance of truth, and acceptance of what is. The next step in the evolution of awakening is to honor our truth, AND to engage with life from a place of integrity, passion, & purpose. Audra offers a few questions to help guide you toward your intuition, integrity, and love so that you might be peaceful, awake, and free.
This interview led us to a realization that blew both of our minds and made me, Audra, cry a little. Wait for it, it's at the endish, but you have to listen to the whole banana to really understand the revelation. This interview was deep, vulnerable, and rooted in truth. We hope it helps you on your journey to compassionate, embodied freedom.
A real vulnerable share from Audra and from the community. It's so hard to be with what's here that many times we protect ourselves with limiting belief systems, and intellectualized meaning making. Practice helps us to come back to our own intuition, to trusing ourselves and one another, and identifying with our soul, our own largeness, and expansive capacity to love.
When we get tied to the idea of things needing to be a certain way, a perfect way, we miss the expansive possibility of what's here. The universe is always waiting, right here, to rise up and meet us, even if things aren't going the way we would have imagined or prefered. In Mark Nepo's words, "Now when things don't go the way I want, I try to kiss what waits beneath all want." What waits beneath all want?
The energy of mother is so big that it contains both life and death simultaneously. As one thing begins another ends. As one thing ends another begins. What is more personal than living and dying? What is more personal than creating something? What is more personal than being able to hold the tension between life and death in one body? In Mother we have both the archetype of rejection and the archetype of nurture, The mother lives in all of us. It is light and dark, yin and yang simultaneously. The mother holds the key to the eternal challenge of unconditional love because of it's capacity to hold the complexity of both. It is here that we experience directly the very key to liberation. We see this mirrored in nature. The forest is alive and dying together all at once all the time. The sea is alive and dead. The site where a whale dies becomes a prolific source of food and life. It is all entangled and mysterious and real. Even a mountain top gives us the grace of a widened perspective, and yet reminds us how perilous our life is simultaneously.
The more time we spend cultivating the expansive space within us, the more the score keeper becomes a caricature. The more the score keeper becomes someone who we realize is not actually us, but a projection of processes we are living out based on systems, genetics, lineage, and ancestors. And that there is even room for them too. Oh hi scorekeeper, welcome, I see you trying so hard to try. I love you too.
Perhaps the expectation that the heart stay open and soft in the face of so much suffering is misguided. Perhaps the heart has it's seasons that are wise without us having to understand, or make meaning, of the way in which the heart protects. What if we trusted our closed hearts? What if we loved our protected places? What if we trusted that indeed our hearts will open again, and that there is actually very little we need to do, but place the teaching upon our hearts and wait for them to break open so that the wisdom of love can slip in. When Arjuna and Krishna have their talk in the center of the battlefield, and Arjuna says, "No, I will not fight, my limbs fail, mouth is dry, my whole body is tingling," Krishna does not judge him in his closed place. He takes his time, and has a conversation with him. He teaches him. He trusts that the teachings will land when Arjuna's heart is ready. He has faith. Krishna does not change his mind about Arjuna, just as God does not change it's mind about any of us. And it is in this moment of brokenness--in the center of the suffering, the ache of the broken heart--that Krishna begins to teach Arjuna about yoga. It's an offering made in love. What if we can offer love to our closed hearts as Krishna offered love to Arjuna in the form of connection, unconditional love, and the sharing of knowledge? Perhaps then, the dominate narratives of whiteness, thinness, power, money, binary gender expectations, stealing resources for our planet would lose some of their power. Perhaps there is power in re-wilding our own hearts.
Donica gets into it. We discuss studying trees, growing up in Virginia, adoption, race, being Asian, and all things yoga. What a blessing this interview is, not to be missed.
A discussion that begins with the exquisite wisdom of the equinox--that there is room for the shadow and the light. We talk about revolving around what matters and how sometimes that changes. Sometimes we need to go back to the basics, back to the wisdom of the body.
Welcome to the Free Love community, Gina. The dharma in this episode is huge. The whole episode is extremely heart opening, so much so that Audra and Gina both ride the edges of vulnerability, and I am very proud of how open we allowed ourselves to become as the conversation developed. We talk about yoga, mantra, bhakti, guru, ego, spirit guides, practice, and everything in between.
A New Year's Day talk on how the expression of difference is what opens us. We close we open, we rememeber and we forget. Plus a refelction excercise for the New Year.
Meanings arises. Meaning is revealed. Meaning is akin to a poem--it becomes. Meaning is not in our control and is not revealed through a doing, which can feel uncomfortable. It is revealed through the passage of time, the accumulation of experiences, and the letting go of ideas of who we think we need to be, or who we think other people need to be, in order for us to feel safe and loved. Enjoy. This one is a good one.
Enmeshment with another person can create suffering when we begin to think we need them to be a certain way in order for us to be happy. We loose the sweetness that exists in the dance of duality. Expansive love and acceptance happens when we stop needing the people around us to change and look inward when we feel discomfort and fear and learn that we can tolerate it. There is no ground outside of you.
It takes fortitude and strength to redirect our awareness towards love. In the beginning of any spiritual practice it can feel unbelievably good and elevating. However, yoga is also about doing hard things--both in our lives and in the practices. It's the discomfort of yoga that becomes a wise, ever-present teacher for us. Reminding us of our own resiliency and expansiveness. Yoga is about letting go of who we think we are and what we think we need to be okay, and that requires sacrifice. It requires tapas. As we slowly release the grip on our ideas of self it can feel barren. This is the middle place. It's not what it once was, and its not yet what it's going to be. That's the moment many give up. But, if we stick with it, the yoga will give back. We will experience a return to love, healthier boundaries, healthier relationships, and a deep connection with our inner wisdom and with spirit.
An extended talk from Yoga Church that explores the paradox of suffering, radical love, and heart opening. How many identities can we shed to get to the heart of who we really are?
This meditation uses four steps to help us be spacious with difficult emotions. Taped in the presence of our Love Hive community on the top of Mount Tabor 8am 9/20/20. 1. Sit and let the breath breathe itself. Welcome it as it is. 2. Name and feel the energy of your emotions. 3.Find where the difficult emotion lives in your body and let it get huge. Watch it transform. 4. Remind yourself that challenges arise to teach us, to call us back to love. Learn to accept the call. Practice it.
What brings comfort? What makes us small? How does this relate to giving ourselves the gift of presence so that we are able to be in service to and alignment with love? The poem Audra reads is Mary Oliver's "To Begin With, The Sweetgrass." On a side note, when Audra arrived home, there was a person begging at her door. Literally. Thank you universe. I see you.
Here's what's happening, we are all experiencing a collective loss. How do we say yes to this? How do we trust that we are expansive enough to integrate and be a part of even this moment?
Yoga does not center comfort. Yoga centers love and connection. How can we better take care of each other and belong to one another as we move toward revolution and re-imagining of the world not centered on whiteness? Correction: It is not Rumi who writes "The subject tonight is Love. And for tomorrow night as well, As a matter of fact." It is Hafiz. The teachers Audra cannot think of in the middle are named Lama Rod Owens and Resmaa Menakem. Both have books for purchase. Buy them!
Shame and guilt, like fear, are the cheapest room in the house. As Hafiz writes, "I would like to see you living in better conditions." If we continue to center the conversation on self, on our own worries about being messy, doing it wrong or right, or not offending anyone, we ultimately center the conversation back onto whiteness and stop learning. It is in the messiness that we learn. Let's say yes to what is and move in alignment with the heartbreak of the moment. Let's get curious about what's behind the guilt and shame that we are unwilling to feel. And in this moment, hearts are breaking, black bodies are still being brutalized and killed, and we absolutely need to engage and take action. How are you going to show up in the world? How will your inner life meet the outer world?
Audra speaks about the video of Amy Cooper faking being attacked by a black man--bird watcher Christian Cooper--and calling the police on him. Watch it. Show Notes: As white women we are terrified of being flawed. We have built a wall within that hides our racism most especially from ourselves. Instead we create an idol out of being good, spiritual, and "right." We have built an idol out of the perception of ourselves as good and righteous, which leaves no room for the reality of what is--which is that we are human, and being human, particularly being a white human in the US, means that we are racist. Period. The Buddha teaches that hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed--this is the ancient and eternal law. It doesn't mean we love only the good parts of ourselves. It means we begin to develop tolerance and eventually real spacious love for everything about ourselves. In this way we take the power of our racism back. In this way we stand in the power of love. These are my steps to healing the hate that resided within us. I am welcome to feedback and approach this from a real beginners mind so I can remain open to learning all the time. 1. Witness it. See it. 2. Name it. Call it by its name. Fear. Othering.Racism. Privilege. Etc. 3. Make space around it. How spacious can you get around it? This prevents us from engaging with our bias as if it is truth. Work with these three steps first. This might be where you stop for a while. 4. Then love these parts of yourself. Bring love to your hate. Bring love and compassion to your bias. Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed--this is the ancient and eternal law. We have to be radically honest to meet this step. 5. Say thank you. (This is controversial, but I feel passionately that gratitude is a way in which we can stop avoiding our racist tendencies and do the work of turning toward the parts of ourselves that scare us, rather than away. We have to stop othering ourselves if we want to stop othering other people. Gratitude is a way of saying and trusting that our expansive capacity for love is so big that we can be thankful, even for this most difficult aspects of ourselves--like being racist.) Thank you racism for trying to keep me safe, but this is misguided. I know better now, so I do better now. I don't need you anymore, fear, bias,racist reactions. My highest self, my most loving, most kind self is in charge now. Y I love you. Audra
We have all reached our limit with the pandemic--in our relationships, financially, and personally. How can we use our practice of connecting to our own essential goodness to be generous with ourselves rather than self-destruct? A ship that gets lost at sea doesn't blow itself up, it course corrects. Can we use that metaphor to help guide us toward expansive presence. Let's be generous with ourselves and one another so that we can move forward in relationship with what is life giving and generative.
Audra begins with a meditation, encouraging us to listen inward with humor and curiosity. She then takes you through a script that creates a no nonsense container for deep listening in relationship that helps us set aside defensiveness, the need to fix, and the need to make meaning so that we might better sit with our discomfort and encourage connection, compassion and love instead.
Something new is waiting to be born. What is containing you and keeping you from being free? Getting lost--the place where we are still leaning into limiting belief systems while at the same time our soul is yearning to grow--is an essential part of our experience of transformation. We carry the vessel of our limiting belief systems around until we see them, name them, and then lean toward the places where our heart feels broken open, where our body feels alive, where we cease to lean into what's comfortable and build our tolerance for risk and uncertainty in service to grace and awakening.
How can we begin to belong to ourselves rather than our limiting belief systems? Audra redefine's lost as the place where we are still leaning into our limiting beliefs, even as we can feel our souls urge to grow. Sue Monk Kidd says that it is on the precipice of becoming that we feel most lost. The first step is understanding what is the confining thought? What is the locked pattern?
Audra talks about the reality of being lonely and how we have to trust our own capacity for feeling and healing.
How can we cut through our limiting belief systems around asking for help and heal? With humor and love, Audra gives you a down and dirty guide to setting yourself free.
Audra speaks about her experience of Easter as a young Catholic, and decodes some of the rituals including baptism.
Topics covered-- The three stages of spiritual development 1.Construction 2.Deconstruction 3.Reconstruction
The three requirements for transformation according the the Upanishads 1. A Body 2. The Teachings 3. Thirst
The metaphor of the ocean in Shakespeare and all spiritual teachings and how that leads us to connection with a deeper wisdom and wider perspective.
Audra talks about the call to be brave enough to hold space for all of our feelings during this time of crisis, and the importance of avoiding the temptation to grade or rank suffering as judgment around suffering creates more suffering and separation. So how can we be with each other in a way that is receptive, curious and really honoring our humanity? There is no right way to weather a pandemic. Can we make space for all of it?
It's gonna be all of it, loved ones. And we need the light bringers, the artists, the musicians, the seerers, the knowers and the people who have accepted their mission in life and said yes to their souls purpose to stay steadfast in that. Keep playing the music. Keep bringing the light.
Using two stories--one experienced as positive, and one experienced as negative--Audra helps students understand the practical benefit of being able to rest in witness consciousness. When we cease to identify with the thought or feeling, we experience the truth of our beingness which is always good, always love, always divine. I am that which is always alfame.
Audra speaks about the subtle ways in which the why we have for practice gets between us and love. "Look what happens to the scale when love holds it, it stops working." Kabir
Love is learning to say yes to what is, and suffering is whenever we are not in control, according to the beloved rebel priest Richard Rohr. Audra discusses the paradox of this idea and how it relates to your life and yoga.
Audra speaks about identifying with our thoughts and how to move toward our own loving awareness as a source of our identity.
How is community a refuge for us when we feel lost from ourselves and the truth of who we really are? It takes courage to reach out from our small selves and connect, but the promise of community is the expansion of our love and our capacity to transform.
Dharma--that which supports us is resting in the truth of what is. Not resisting,accepting. This moment is perfectly designed to wake us up, call us to presence, to soften our hearts, so that we can remember the truth of who we really are, which is love.
Audra speaks about living from a place a container of our highest truth. It is better to live our own dharma poorly than another's dharma well.
When things weren't what they once were and aren't yet what they are going to be--Audra speaks about Veda coming home from college. Here's to the death of what was and the creation of space for new growth.
Audra tells a story about a coffee spill and speaks about the importance and effects of rushing toward kindness in our lives.
Audra discusses the steps to softening the inner critic in times of anxiety and confusion, and how sometimes we are the least qualified person to nurture and love yourself. We need one another to widen the net of kindness and compassion by inviting intimacy into our lives.
The teachings of yoga help us remember that we are not the sum of our cummulative human, ever-changeable, parts, rather we are something larger. We are love. Audra speaks about the power of this understanding as she moves through a relapse in her disordered eating, and how knowing that you are not diminished by your struggles lends itself to a healing process that is not driven by or rooted in shame or feeling less than.
How can we accept the invitation pain offers us to grow? Audra begins with a recounting of an episode of Rythmn and Flow and ends discussing why it is important to allow pain to transform us rather than becoming attached to it, or averse to it, by identifying with it or pushing is away, respectively.
The teachings of yoga are in service to connection and our interconnectedness. In this confusing-unstable time politically and personally, it is important that we be in relationship to our own energy in a way that is loving. We get to choose to move from love, and fullness, and an understanding of the complex nature of the universe. There is room for all of it. Your energy matters.
The perfectionist idea that we should not act on or even experience anger, frustration and reactivity when triggered is a bad deal family. We were built for the whole spectrum of emotions and you have the RIGHT, you're BIRTH RIGHT, to feel it all. And all of it is divine. No shame needed. Plus some meditation tips.
This one is a funny one.Audra speaks about a brush with fame and how willing she was to completely sell out because she wanted something. The ego shows up when we least expect it, and we won't always get see it until later.
After a challenging week, Audra speaks about bandaids versus leaning into the inherhent contridictions of living. We explore the Batman story and using our own woundness to serve.
Audra speaks about her daughter's crucs and attempts to embarass her from 3,00 miles away while still downloading the teachings that help us remember that the universe love us so much.
Audra speaks about expereincing joy and love in our bodies rather than holding the goodness in our lives at a safe distance.
Audra speaks about the benefits of a vast perspective and how we can meet ourselves without comparison or accounting. Can we stop judging and making ourselves small/bigger and instead inhabit our full stature with grace and kindness? YOU being with YOU.
Audra speaks about our tendency to go straight down the rabbit hole into feeling not worthy of love and belonging and how sometimes when we speak truth to that we can have our own light reflected back to us by another person.
Audra discusses saying yes, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and saying no in order to burn a path to your biggest and brightest yes.
Audra speaks about the process of becoming bewildered and disoriented and how to meet ourselves there with presence and a special, expansive sort of kindness.
Part two, in which Audra discusses the benefits of presence and curiousity versus the constant desire to make meaning. Understand does not mean to know. It means to stand in the midst of.
Audra speaks about faith, trust and surrender in times of shadow through the lense of a story from the gospels about a man who is blind, yet has a clear faith and knowledge of the divine. Good pep talk for rough days.
Audra discusses the process of knowing versus doing. Acting in alignment with our values is not always comfortable, it doesn't always feel good so how do we stay in connection with our values as we engage the world, even when it is uncomfortable. Our mandate as spiritual practitioners in the world is to take the meaning from our spiritual expereinces--connection, love, compassion, forgiveness--and then be of service to that meaning.
Audra discusses understanding our hearts and minds so that we can be free. She uses the real world lenses of attachment theory and dating. After the class, a therapist approached her and explained that the healing we due as adults to become securely attached is as impactful and profound as the woundedness we receive from our care givers as children. Healing is possible.
Audra speaks about how we begin to belong to our routine rather than ourselves, and how to mindfully disrupt to make space.
Audra continues her exploration of the very beggining of the Bhagavad Gita, this episode we hear Krsna responds to Arjuna's despair.
Audra speaks on the mass exodus of women from their bodies,healing an eating disorder and the gift and power of reunifying with this portal from which we get to view the universe.
Being with,rather than fixing our pain,is the stuff healing is made of and the payoff is huge. When we are able to be with our own discomfort, we begin to understand and feel what it means to expand our capacity to love. And that is transformation.
Humor, puberty, penis size and the stories we tell ourselves. Audra speaks about the limiting belief systems we choose to believe and how to begin to touch in on our own wholeness, and the possibilty of our own expansiveness that exists beyond the to narrative we create.
Audra continues her investigation into the ways in which we try to manage our lives and relationships with a short talk on asking for forgiveness and accountability. Let go of the excuses and speak from your soul and we can let go of our need to manage and control.
"If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing continuously. I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming back from wherever I went.
Forgive me."
~Mary Oliver
Audra describes her personal expereince with a hose, a new neighbor, how she became a free bird, and why it's the exact same thing as becoming a control freak and how we can begin to soften our relationship with managing our reality and move into experiencing the freedom beingness instead.