Gary Gach: Pause. Breathe. Smile. Spiritual Awakening as an Art Form

Sounds True: Insights at the Edge

Tami Simon

Religion, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gary Gach is a writer, meditator, and mystic who draws on his diverse life experiences to inform his nonfiction and poetry offerings. He is the author of What Book!? and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism. With Sounds True, he has most recently published Pause, Breathe, Smile: Awakening Mindfulness When Meditation Is Not Enough. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Gary about the titular process of pausing, breathing, and smiling—how it can center you immediately, plant seeds of awakening, and help light the way on the path to peace. They talk about the "mouth yoga" of the half-smile and why meditation is only "part of the menu" of daily mindfulness practice. Gary and Tami also discuss what it means to exist in three kinds of awakening reality: the spaces of impermanence, interbeing, and selflessness. Finally, Gary shares his love of reading and writing haiku, offering a spontaneous haiku poem that arises in the course of the interview. (59 minutes)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This program is brought to you by sounds true.com.
0:04.0	At sounds true.com you can find hundreds of downloadable audio
0:08.0	learning programs, plus books, music, videos, and online courses, and events.
0:14.3	At sounds true.com, we think of ourselves
0:17.2	as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey,
0:20.2	offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom.
0:24.0	Sounds True.com, guest is Gary Gok. Gary is a writer, mystic, and lifelong
0:47.8	meditator who has engaged in many roles, actor, bookshop clerk, dishwasher, hospital admin, office temp,
0:57.3	Steve Adore, teacher and typographer.
1:01.2	Lay ordained by Tishnat Han in 2008.
1:05.0	He has authored eight previous books, including the complete
1:09.6	idiots guide to Buddhism.
1:11.6	Which sounds true, Gary has written a new book called
1:15.8	Pause, Breathe, Smile, Awakening Mindfulness when meditation is not enough, where he explains the simple process of
1:27.2	pausing, breathing, and smiling, and how it can water our innate seeds of awakening to help us pave our own path to
1:39.0	total fulfillment and peace.
1:41.8	In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Gary and I spoke about the
1:45.0	spoke about the half smile or slight smile that he calls mouth
1:51.2	yoga and can help us take mastery of our own lives.
1:56.6	We talked about the three aspects of reality that have the power to awaken us, inhabiting the space of impermanence or flow, inhabiting the space of
2:08.8	interbeing, also known as our interconnectedness and inhabiting the space of openness or selflessness.
2:18.0	We talked about Gary's first experience at the age of 10 of what is known in Buddhism as dependent origination and his view
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Tami Simon, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Tami Simon and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.