Comedian, Mike Finoia, joins Raghu to share his difficult patch with mental health and the tools that have helped him cultivate inner peace.
“I realized that there’s only two ways of operating: It’s either from a place of love or a place of fear. If you’re operating from a place of fear, you really can’t be open to the love there is around us. But if you’re operating from a place of love, fear doesn’t stand a chance.” – Mike Finoia
Mike and Raghu go deep about:
- Anxiety and finding the tools that work to manage it
- Being vocal about the rough patches on Mike’s public platform
- Practices for changing our internal landscapes
- Buddhist perspectives on anger, fear, good-enoughness, and emptiness
- Having a sense of humor about our “self-cherishing”
- “Mother recognition,” or the essence of motherly compassion
“It takes way more courage to break through the constriction that we have in this society. And it takes courage to say, ‘I need some help.’” – Raghu Markus
Connect with Mike on his website or on social media @mikefinoia
Learn more about Vipassana meditation with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg here
Check out The Zen of Therapy by Mark Epstein here
About Mike Finoia:
Mike Finoia is a stand-up comedian based out of New York City. He is a writer for TruTV’s Impractical Jokers, host of the podcast Amigo’s with Mike Finoia and a regular on Sirius XM’s The Bonfire on Comedy Central Radio. Mike has been featured in the NY Comedy Festival, the Oddball Comedy Tour, and the Impractical Jokers National Tour.
About Raghu Markus:
Raghu Markus spent 18 months in India with Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass. He has been involved in music and transformational media since the early 1970s when he was the program director of CKGM-FM in Montreal.
In 1974, he collaborated with Ram Dass on the box set Love Serve Remember. In 1990, he launched Triloka Records, which established itself as a critical leader in the development of world music. For 17 years, Triloka was home to such artists as Krishna Das, Hugh Masekela, Walela, Jai Uttal and transformational media projects that featured Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra, and Les Nubians.
Raghu lives in Ojai, California, and is the Executive Director of the Love Serve Remember Foundation. In 2016, he co-founded the Be Here Now Network, where he hosts the Ram Dass Here & Now podcast, as well as his own Mindrolling podcast. He is the producer of Becoming Nobody, a Ram Dass documentary feature film that was released in 2019.
Check Out More From The Mindrolling Podcast:
Devotional Musician Jai Uttal joins Raghu to chat about his new album, which explores the deepest spiritual longings of the human psyche: Dust & Tears
Check out Ep. 335 of Mindrolling: Courage, Trust, and Love with Ram Dass and Duncan Trussell
Listen to Ep. 289 of Mindrolling featuring lessons from Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Photo via mikefinoia.com