Noah Rasheta Podcasts

The 5 remembrances are wake-up calls that help us to see more clearly, the nature of reality. They are wake-up calls that help us to live more intentionally and skillfully.By Noah Rasheta

If we want lasting change, emotions may be our strongest opponent. When forced to change, people feel fear, rage, anxiety, and other emotions. Emotions are designed to satisfy basic needs: defend, fight, flight, reproduce. But when they overwhelm us, they shut down logic. They’re great when we’re suddenly confronted by a lion in the African savanna…

Nurse Heather's four year old son, Jack, likes to put his fingers in his mouth. But this can lead to dental problems in the future. She heard the episode about Matt learning to keep track of his keys, by noticing that he was setting them down and saying "I'm putting my keys on the counter." Heather wondered whether it could help her son. We also di…

In this episode, I will share my thoughts about the 84,000 gates and the notion of Emptiness. In the last 2 episodes, I shared my thoughts around Signlessness and Aimlessness and now I will share my thoughts around Emptiness.By Noah Rasheta

We all have hapless friends who would lose their head if it wasn't attached. Maybe we are that friend! Matt recently moved in with his girlfriend, Mirela Petalli (our co-host), and Matt realized losing his keys kept making them late. Can mindful agility help? Matt and Mirela worked together. Matt is familiar with Scrum, an agile technique; Mirela i…

The three doors of liberation refer to Formlessless, Signlessness, and Aimlessness. In this episode, I will talk about signlessness and what this teaching means to me and how we can practice signlessness in our day-to-day lives.By Noah Rasheta

Our stories provide a shorthand self, which gives us focus while the stories make sense, but they put our happiness at risk. If we imagine them to be complete and permanent we are doomed to suffer. When we release our attachment to our stories, we create freedom. Only through our actions will we transform ourselves and our world. The stories are on…

The three doors of liberation refer to Formlessless, Signlessness, and Aimlessness. In this episode, I will talk about Aimlessness and what this teaching means to me.By Noah Rasheta

When we choose ambitious goals, we're going to create stories about them. But nothing lasts forever: our jobs, our achievements, our friends, our relationships... or our stories. If we attach our identities to ephemeral stories (and aren't all our stories ephemeral?), we will suffer. Noah Rasheta, the host of the Secular Buddhism podcast and author…

The Russian war on Ukraine is in full force. The Mindful Agility co-hosts have ties to Eastern Europe. We are contending with our own reactivity, as we interact with others less familiar with the region. Our friend, Rob Coles, discusses how he employed an agile strategy to direct funds to individuals on the ground in Ukraine. He ran several iterati…

Craving for and attachment to feelings is what leads to suffering; on the flip side of that, awareness and understanding of our feelings can lead to Enlightenment. In this episode, I will share my thoughts around the Buddhist concept of feelings tones / Vedana.By Noah Rasheta

"A student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something every day." What does it mean to "unlearn"? In this episode, I will share my thoughts around the notion of learning and unlearning in the context of practicing Buddhism.By Noah Rasheta

Today we're discussing goals, interdependence and compassion. Nurse Heather faced a challenge that the rest of us encounter. She had a goal that seemed incompatible with her family and environment. Our goals and our social environment often conflict. In our personal lives, if we want to stop smoking, focus more on studying, or lose weight, our fami…

One of the final teachings the Buddha gave, had to do with becoming an island unto yourself. In a way, he was telling his followers that it was time to leave the nest and to take refuge in themselves. In this episode, I will share my thoughts on this teaching.By Noah Rasheta

Improvement is hard enough, whether we're trying to fix a Fortune 100 company or quit smoking. Our reactivity can create unrealistic expectations and then encourage others to dictate our futures. Reactivity tells us to give up when our first attempts fall short. It tells us to feel guilty, which can sideline us further. Mindfulness meditation teach…

In this episode, I will talk about the story of Sundari, an ascetic who was killed in an attempt to frame Sidhartha and bring dishonor to him and his followers. How the Buddha handled this ordeal sheds light on the Buddhist approach to words and accusations.By Noah Rasheta

The games we play...some thoughts about Right View. Thich Nhat Hanh says: "Our happiness and the happiness of those around us depend on our degree of Right View. Touching reality deeply -- knowing what is going on inside and outside of ourselves -- is the way to liberate ourselves from the suffering that is caused by wrong perceptions. Right View i…

Many systems exhibit self-similarity. If you zoom in or out, you keep seeing similar patterns. Recognizing self-similarity can help us become more agile at different scales of our lives and work. We can discover new insights, even when our limited language and perspective gets in the way. Meditation is a big part of mindfulness. This episode experi…

Welcome to the Mindful Agility podcast. Mindfulness and agile can help you lead a more fulfilled life, at work and at home. Mindfulness practices help us gain insight and clarity, while agile practices help us forge new paths. We explore both. Support us Rate the podcast and its episodes. Share the podcast with friends. Follow and comment in our Fa…

The backwards law proposes that the more we chase after something, the more difficult it becomes to catch it and the more disappointed we feel. In other words, the harder we try, the less likely we are to succeed.By Noah Rasheta

In a culture that tends to feel gratitude for only the pleasant things in our life, the Buddhist approach is to feel gratitude for all things, even the unpleasant ones. Gratitude develops patience and patience is an antidote to the poison of greed.By Noah Rasheta

The nature of reality is that things come together and things fall apart and then things come together and things fall apart and that cycle goes on and on. Instead of running from the difficulties and the pain, the Buddhist approach is to move toward the painful situations and become intimate with them.…

Mara is "the personification of the forces antagonistic to enlightenment." Mara wants to be feared. We tend to run from the things that we fear, but what happens when we stop running and we look at Mara and say "I see you, Mara!"In this episode, I will share my thoughts about the interaction between the Buddha and Mara.…

Dependent Origination is a Buddhist notion that is common among all schools of Buddhism. It's the doctrine that states that all phenomena arise in dependence upon other phenomena. In other words, "this is because that is and this is not because that is not". In this episode, I will share my thoughts about how this concept can be beneficial in our d…

Within any given discipline, we all have a circle of skills. In order to grow the circle of skills, we need to do things that are just outside the circle and once we master a new skill, that circle grows. The key to safely growing the circle is to go slowly and not attempt skills that are too far outside the current circle we have. I believe this i…

In this episode, I will talk about "The First Meditation" a story about an experience that Siddhartha (the Buddha) had when he was 9 years old. I believe this experience shaped his understanding of the importance of experiential vs intellectual understanding and I believe there are some good lessons to be learned by us as we hear this story.…

It can be easy to get caught up "in the thick of thin things" when our perspective is too narrow or zoomed in. When we take the long view, we learn to zoom out and see things from a different perspective. In this podcast episode, I will talk about taking the long view and also discuss the parable of the lute and the analogy of tuning the strings of…

Zen Master Seung Sahn said "I do not teach Buddhism. I only teach don't know." The beauty of not knowing arises when we understand that reality is unknowable as a complete picture. First, because it's always changing, and second, we are limited in our perspective in terms of space and time.By Noah Rasheta

Liberation is not a destination we strive to reach, it's a state of mind that is available to us right here and right now. When we fully understand the reality of emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness, we become liberated from the type of thinking that has us trapped in the prison of our own mind.…

Observation in Buddhist practice is an active thing, it's not passive and it's not a form of resignation. The skilled observer, observes precisely in order to be able to act more skillfully.By Noah Rasheta