Unconventional Life – Podcast, Blog, Live Events

Category: Wellness

  • Ep276: Making the Most Out of Your Mistakes, With Vocal Coach Arden Kaywin

    Ep276: Making the Most Out of Your Mistakes, With Vocal Coach Arden Kaywin

    The struggle for self-improvement is not an easy task. We try our hardest to be the best at what we do, gathering as much knowledge and tools as we can just to be a little better than we were yesterday. However, we sometimes feel as though we’re not getting the results we want and often end up stuck in a slump. Singer-songwriter Arden Kaywin believes that this sense of not-enoughness comes from our lack of mindfulness.

    The renowned songstress and vocal coach make it a point that the real problem isn’t in the small mistakes we make, but in the lack of foundation. As a performer, technique and artistry are essential, but to be connected and impactful requires mindfulness.

    Arden says that “The mind is the thing that can—and will—sabotage all the rest of it [technique and artistry], if not addressed.” A person could have the best training and it still wouldn’t matter if we lack the proper mindset.

    Having been with experienced and inexperienced singers alike, Arden knows that the mastery of techniques is not enough. To break through the blocks that prevent you from performing at a consistent and satisfying level, she emphasizes the need for meditation and mindful practice, even for non-artistic industries.

    She compares traditional training to a rocket ship where you add new technology to it, but it would never launch if it lacks fuel.

    “They’re not able to breakthrough in their career, they’re not able to quit that side job, they’re not able to do it sustainably, and yet they’ve been in voice lessons every week for years of their life. And the reason why is because this rocket, it’s got all this kick-ass technology in it, but no fuel.”

    This fuel is what she calls the Soul Piece or the purpose of a person called to do, partnered with the right mentality.

    She makes it clear that we have to acknowledge our emotions, thoughts, and fears because as she puts it “In trusting those blocks, not only do you get the sound that you want, but then you’re empowered to move forward, much more powerfully on this journey with not just your voice, but with anything else you’re doing”.

     

    More from Arden:

  • Ep275: Purpose and Effort Driving Passion and Success, With Muse Co-Founder Ariel Garten

    Ep275: Purpose and Effort Driving Passion and Success, With Muse Co-Founder Ariel Garten

    Pursuing something meaningful is a beautiful yet seemingly difficult endeavour for most people. We are sure about wanting to make or do something impactful. But finding the direction you want to go and deciding what you want to do are hard choices.

    There’s so much I want to do but which one is worth doing first?

    The driven genius Ariel Garten shows us that it’s not about choosing what to do first, rather it’s about choosing to take action and turn your passion into results.

    Being in a multitude of industries – fashion, neuroscience, psychotherapy, and technology – she’s gone through a lot of trial and error, and to her, it was in that journey that we learned what our real purpose is—and where to pour out our effort.

    “My outlet has changed but the intention has not,” Ariel states.

    Energetic and inspired, Ariel has always had this compelling need to make meaningful things in all areas of her life. Her burning desire and enthusiasm for creation have led her to branch off into different paths. Playing both sides of arts and science, finding that connection with her passions is the reason for Ariel’s success.

    “I was really weaving these worlds, trying to find the thread between art and science and pulling them together” she points out, “we really wanted to do something that was gonna make the world a better place”.

    Her big visions and her thirst for creation made it possible for Muse to grow into what it is today.

    Considering the difficulty of her goal, Ariel’s journey was heavily criticized for its scale. She notes that at the beginning of her journey it seemed too ambitious, but the eager innovator stressed, “I just had this undying, unfettered belief in myself: that it was possible to do this and I could figure out a way.”

    For Ariel, it was not just her talent and brain that made her successful, but also her unwavering determination.

     

    More from Ariel:

  • Ep274: Food Paired with Loving Intention, with Food for Life Co-founder Paul Turner

    Ep274: Food Paired with Loving Intention, with Food for Life Co-founder Paul Turner

    Food for Life is one of the largest non-profit organizations in the world and is serving more than 2 million vegan meals daily. One of its founders, Paul Turner, started their mission with the aim to teach people that there is more to food, and more to this world, than what we perceive.

     

    Young Monk

    Other than Food for Life, Paul has also served as a senior consultant at the World Bank, an entrepreneur Holistic Life Coach, and a vegan chef. But before any of that, he was a child.

    Born in one of the poorer areas of Sydney, Australia, Paul was introduced to the bitterness of life at an early age. It’s also at this young phase that he was fascinated with spirituality.

    “My dad was a small-time criminal,” Paul shared, “the friends of the family were also criminals so we grew up in a pretty crazy situation. And at the age of 15, I became interested in astronomy. That sort of planted the seed in my heart that there must be more to life than this.”

    In his teenage years, he joined a group of people that gathered near an abandoned hotel resort. There he stayed for six months. During this time, he realized his calling and began his journey to spiritual development. He joined an ashramat the age of 19 and dedicated 14 years of his life to being a celibate monk.

    A vital part of his learning came to him after his head was shaved and he became a part of the monks. “I looked in the mirror and realized, that vanity,” Paul said, “that person that I thought I was now is on the floor. Now I’m a little different. Who am I really? I’m obviously not this body, this body is just a vehicle. It’s how I’m expressing my consciousness.”

     

    Pure Food

    Learning from a Bengali celibate monk named Swami Prabhupada, Paul discovered Bhakti—Yoga of Devotion. Building upon the concepts in this practice, he began teaching it to others and through the mission of Food for Life.

    “Food, when paired with loving intention, has the ability to nourish mind, body and soul,” Paul said, “Food can shift consciousness.” He believes that the cause for world hunger isn’t the lack of food, but the lack of humanity.

    “Our mission is to unite the world through the sharing of pure food,” Paul stresses, “If we saw ourselves as a united global family, things like hunger would disappear because you wouldn’t tolerate your brother or sister going hungry.”

    Paul also notes that they’re the most cost-effective feeding program in the world, because of their vegan diet. Feeding up to 40 people from a donation of $10. On top of this, they are also educating people about the advantages of shifting to a vegan diet, as well as getting more members to help serve with loving intent.

     

    Cultivating the Self

    Paul shares that in his journeys, a lot of young people describe success as being an influencer or YouTuber. Concerned, he notes that there should be more to what we do. Part of balancing our lives should be taking care of our spirit.

    “We have to be responsible citizens but at the same time, we have to also cultivate our real potential insider,” he shares. “Because eventually at some point in time, this body is gonna stop working, and we’re gonna have to move on.”

    He shares that reincarnation is a fact that is happening now. People change every day. Once we were children and now, we’re adults. As the spiritual being we are, it’s the inner self we should work most to develop.

     

    More from Paul:

  • Ep273: Stripping Down to Your Bare Feet, with You Enjoy Life founder Joshua Greenfield

    Ep273: Stripping Down to Your Bare Feet, with You Enjoy Life founder Joshua Greenfield

    Some of you might recall the name Joshua Greenfield from the renowned entertainment duo Brothers Green. Together with his sibling Mike, the two went viral online for their fun chemistry in the kitchen which made it to the airwaves of MTV, airing internationally.

    This was the picture of success for most entertainers and artists, but Joshua shares with us today his newfound happiness from stepping away from the spotlight.

     

    Leaving Fame

    As Joshua puts it, we’re all creating an image of who we are through some kind of channel. Whether it be YouTube or TV, or any online presence, there is a version of us there that we try to hold up. He shares that it reached a point, where he couldn’t take up the façade any longer.

    “Holding on to this idea of who I am will create suffering for myself,” Joshua shares, “putting meaning to this person who we think we’re supposed to be, created more struggle.”

    In leaving his celebrity image behind, Joshua found himself a path to rediscover his true self.

    “Leaving brothers green was one of the most freeing things that ever happened to me. I was starting to get caught on this character [and] it led me to this journey of who am I really beyond that character.”

     

    Rediscovery

    After leaving Brother Green, Joshua rekindled his love for cooking and found more purpose in his kitchen.

    “What I love about food is the connection,” he shares, “now I teach more about mindful eating and conscious consumption helping people make a healthy relationship with nature and what they’re eating. Instead of making it about the food, it’s about how it makes you feel.”

    Additionally, in this journey to self-discovery, Joshua searched for ways he could connect more to his internal self. He learned from different communities, Buddhist teaching, and on his journey, he even lost his shoes.

     

    Grounding

    Being born in a family of Podiatrists, Joshua was aware of most of the science that surrounds it. He also points out that there is a deep connection between our souls and our soles.

    Using online platforms like TikTok, and YouTube, Joshua connected with like-minded people who now join him in the Free the feet movement. Together they promote reconnecting with nature and walking barefoot.

    “I believe in Free the feet,” Joshua says, “I help people develop a relationship with their feet because our feet ground us to the Earth.”

    Learning from Clint Ober’s story in Earthing, Joshua says that people are like conduits of electricity where energy flows. Having this energy flow through and out to the ground is key because stagnant energy leads to a lot of our pains. Freeing our feet from shoes and the like is a way we can let this energy out.

    Joshua notes that when he hikes with people who don’t walk barefoot, he always talks to them about it in hopes to encourage them.

    “Recognize that your foot is a seedling,” he narrates, “when you take it out of the shoe it’s vulnerable, but if you’re smart and you take care of it, it will grow to this beautiful flower.”

    This year, Joshua and other barefoot advocates will be running a barefoot marathon, and he openly welcomes those who are interested in joining.

     

    More from Joshua:

  • Ep269: Changing the World One Step at a Time, with Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan

    Ep269: Changing the World One Step at a Time, with Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan

    Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare genetic disease that affects roughly 15,000 boys in the US. The word “boys” is used because the illness causes degeneration of the body and is fatal, without a known cure for it, most patients rarely reach adulthood.

    Compared to diseases like the flu, 15,000 is a small number but for Cure Rare Disease founder Rich Horgan these numbers shouldn’t matter, because each of those 15,000 is a life worth saving, especially his younger brother, Terry, being one of them.

    Sharing his story with us, Rich explains that growing up, he would watch other kids play and run around while his brother was growing weaker and weaker, and every doctor they went to would give them the same answer, that there was no treatment.

    “In my eyes, it just didn’t make a lot of sense,” Horgan shares, “how can we do more than just monitor decline? Terry is one of the 30 million who are impacted and there’s a number of rare diseases out there, Duchenne is one of them, there are still over 7000 others.”

     

    Knowing Why

    Like many kids, Rich didn’t know much about other diseases and didn’t quite yet understand why a hospital can’t cure his brother. As he got older and started asking bigger questions, the brutal reality dawned on him.

    “Your mind starts to wonder the question why,” he shares, “and why is a really dangerous question because then you start to understand the answers to why. As you understand as a kid, Duchenne goes from sort of this abstract, theoretical concept to this very real, very practical thing.”

    Duchenne muscular dystrophy was discovered in the 1980s by French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne, it’s been more than 40 years since then and comparing it to COVID-19, a fairly new virus, we seem to be closer to cure for it than DMD. Horgan says that the pandemic is a clear example of Pharmacoeconomics.

    To make up for the funds put into research and development, the economy of drugs needs to address illnesses that cover a wider range of buyers; the rarer the disease the less likely it has a cure—or any research into it. “This is going to kill my brother if nothing else changes.”

     

    Learning How

    Growing up around business-minded parents, Horgan took that same fondness and entered Harvard Business School, still carrying that hope that there is a way to save his brother.

    “Let’s make a lot of money so that we can take that money and put it to something that’s going to help Terry,” Rich said sharing his thought, “I got to business school in 2016 and it became very obvious very quickly that that wasn’t going to work, Terry just didn’t have enough time.”

    His brother never left his mind and he considered the disease as something that was going to shake his life and the people he loved, but rather than sit and wait, Rich acted on hope. “I could never forgive myself for not trying,” he said.

     

    What If

    With his Harvard connections, Rich was introduced to MIT’s Jonathan Fleming and later to Dr. Tim Yu, a researcher at the Boston Children’s Hospital, and with that came an even crazier idea that turned Pharmacoeconomics on its head.

    “I realized we could actually take medicine, and instead of doing one-size-fits-all, we could actually take it down to the granular level of one-is-to-one medicine, what we call n = 1”

    It was at this point that Rich rallied a team together, including his brother’s clinician of 15 years, Dr. Brenda Wong from UMass. He founded the nonprofit group Cure Rare Disease that collaborates with the FDA and other researchers, clinicians, geneticists and bioinformaticians, that aims to produce customized therapeutics.

    “It was the question What if that started this,” he said, “we know it’s a journey of a million miles, but what’s that first step? What’s the second? When you look down [at each step] by the time you lift your head up, you can get really far, and that’s exactly what happened.”

    He advises the listeners to never select themselves out of whatever it is they’re pursuing, and hang on to hope as they push forward to the next step. Rich’s younger brother Terry will later this year undergo treatment and be patient 001 for the DMD treatment.

     

    More from Rich and Cure Rare Disease:

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