Cheri Huber

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Cheri Huber is the founder of Mountain View Zen Center and the Zen Monastery Practice Center, both in California, and the author of 17 books including When You're Falling, Dive (Keep It Simple Books, 2003).

Listen to Tami Simon’s interview with Cheri Huber: There is Nothing Wrong With You »

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Cheri Huber: There Is Nothing Wrong with You

Cheri Huber is the founder of Mountain View Zen Center and the Zen Monastery Practice Center in California, as well as the author of 19 books including When You’re Falling, Dive and What You Practice Is What You Have. She is the founder and director of Living Compassion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to peace and service. With Sounds True, Cheri has released the audio series Unconditional Self-Acceptance. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Cheri discuss how your life is what you give your attention to, and how to work constructively and compassionately with what Cheri calls “negative voices in the head.” (55 minutes)

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Jon Kabat-Zinn: Befriending Pain

Current statistics tell us that 20% of the US population has some form of chronic pain, defined as severe discomfort that has continued for six months or more. That’s more than 50 million people. Jon Kabat-Zinn has received international acclaim for his leading work in bringing the life-changing practices of meditation and mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society. In this inspiring podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Jon about his empowering new book, Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief, and how we can greatly improve our lives (and our entire world) by reframing the way we relate to our thoughts, our minds, and the sensations of our bodies. 

Listen in as they discuss the epidemic of chronic pain and the power of mindfulness to ease suffering of all kinds, the myth of the “good meditator,” the body as the starting point for practice, exploring your “emotionally freighted thoughts,” our longing to be who we really are, working with the mind and learning to inhabit a space of embodied awareness, the refuge that is meditation practice, letting go of our stories, befriending the sensory field of what we call pain, the miracle of life on Earth, the Buddha’s teaching on mindfulness as the direct path to liberation, surfing the waves of your own experience, unity within diversity and the arising of compassion, focusing on what’s right instead of what’s wrong, how we are all on a growth curve on life’s journey, and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

Give Yourself Permission to Take Up Space

Dearest Friend,

We live in a world full of deadlines. Alarms. Screaming kids. Nagging bosses. More on our to-do lists than we could accomplish in three lifetimes. It’s easy for your needs to get buried underneath the rubble of daily life, and figuring out how to reconnect with your authentic self can feel touch and go… at best.

I wrote Needy: How to Advocate for Your Needs and Claim Your Sovereignty to lovingly provide the space for you to better understand your needs, experiment with new habits that help you meet those needs each day, and build a resilient connection with yourself that you can rely upon for good.

You have needs—your needs matter. And yet, you’ve been taught that pushing your needs to the back burner is the only way to get things done, that your needs are an overwhelming burden, or that self-care is a luxury you can’t afford. But the presence of your needs is a fact and not a flaw. You can reclaim your energy and give yourself permission to take up space in the center of your own life.

In Needy, I share my unique approach to identifying, honoring, and advocating for the most tender and true parts of yourself that yearn to be acknowledged. It is an invitation to embody self-acceptance, which leads to meaningful growth in self-responsibility, self-care, self-trust, and self-love.

This book will be a delicious companion for your journey, but you actually can begin caring for yourself with greater tenderness and open communication right now.

I invite you to take the next three minutes to check in with yourself.

Put down your phone, close your computer, and put your hand on your heart.

Breath deeply into your belly and ask yourself:

How do I feel?

What do I need?

What does my body need from me?

What is ONE, doable need that I am ready, able, and willing to meet?

Real self-care is responsive, not prescriptive. The care you are aching for right now will be found in asking yourself those four questions. Give yourself permission to start with one, tangible action.

And repeat as necessary.

Need more? I will see you between the pages of Needy. I am so grateful to be able to share this book with you, and I hope you will share it with the humans in your life who struggle to take up space in this way.

xx Mara

Mara Glatzel, MSW, (she/her) is an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host. She is a needy human who helps other needy humans stop abandoning themselves and start reclaiming their humanity through embracing their needs and honoring their natural energy cycles. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it, and she is here to help you believe in yourself as much as she believes in you. Find out more at maraglatzel.com.

Mara Glatzel: What Do You Need?

We all have needs. Yet why is it so difficult to honor them? In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Mara Glatzel about her book, Needy: How to Advocate for Your Needs and Claim Your Sovereignty, and how we might begin to answer the profound question: What happens when we take radical responsibility for our needs? 

Tune in for an empowering and indeed much-needed conversation about “giving ourselves permission to take up space in the center of our lives,” exploring: building a working vocabulary around needs and feelings, the disempowering stories we carry about what it means to have needs, the daily practice of identifying your needs, the harmful habit of consistently putting your needs aside, asking for the fullness of what you want, developing a strong self-partnership, shifting from people-pleasing to setting boundaries, Mara’s practice of “staying low and open and receptive,” self-care and “staying in the game,” making commitments that matter, knowing your job and their job when it comes to conversations about needs, the fallacy that one person alone can meet another’s vast and myriad needs, accessing your body’s intelligence, working in your inner landscape, sovereignty amid relationship and interdependency, the challenge of receiving everything you’re asking for, and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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