If I only had a year to live: A thought experiment with Ty Powers

Thank you for bearing with me while I’ve taken a short break! I’ve missed doing the podcast, and I’m so glad that Ty Powers, mindfulness guide extraordinaire, is the person to bring me back and round out this year.

"You live your values every day." I loved reflecting on this one sentence from Ty, even though so much else he shared is such a beautiful year-end gift. Ty has been working in the mindfulness, yoga, and Buddhist sphere for decades, alongside his wife Sarah who was a guest on this show in the fall. He works for ⁠Skillfullchange.org⁠ and is a change and transition strategist. We talked a lot about how modern life has blurred the seasons of our lives and how the information age has caused us to misalign our bodies from our minds. We discussed the challenges that modern life brings up and how we can continue to utilize the wisdom traditions to look inside ourselves to uncover and recover parts of ourselves we pushed to the side. Ty and Sarah call this work Internal Family Systems, in which you can imagine having a whole family inside of you with different personalities and stories.

These two episodes with Ty and Sarah, who I’ve known for almost 20 years, feel like the best way to wrap up 2023. Stay tuned for a special episode next week on my year and my plans for 2024. And let me know what you think of this episode!