Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin
Can a person embrace immense adversity in their life to not only cope, but to thrive and discover their most authentic self?
As a teacher of Buddhist meditation and psychology for four decades, and someone "blessed" with a chronic illness for two of those decades, Jeff Rubin has been obsessed with answering this question. This obsession led him to develop a program called Unconditional Healing, a new model of health that has helped countless people transform their relationship to pain, adversity, and illness, and unlock their own storehouse of confidence and resilience.
In this podcast, Jeff explores the principles of Unconditional Healing with talks, healing practices, and interviews with those who have discovered how to thrive in the face of adversity. He also features guests who are experts or thought leaders in a particular aspect of health and well-being. If you are dealing with an acute or chronic illness, the loss of a loved one or your livelihood, the dissolution of a relationship, or any other adverse circumstance that has you feeling anxious and confused, then this podcast is definitely for you. Especially if you’re looking for a more nuanced, more spiritual way to work with life's inevitable difficulties.
Please note the podcast is currently on hiatus, but all episodes remain available on all the major podcast platforms.
Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin
Living in the Challenge: Beyond the Comfort Zone
We all want to want to feel safe, comfortable, and free of stress. That’s universal. However, without venturing out of our so-called “comfort zone”, we grow stagnant and soft, and unable to handle setbacks and adversity. What’s more, as we know from personal experience, we need a certain amount of manageable stress to grow and learn and prosper.
In this episode, a talk I originally gave to the Healing Circle early in 2021, I discuss moving beyond our comfort zone using a model first developed by a Russian child development psychologist almost one hundred years ago.
With that model as the basis, I discuss:
- How we, as adults, can apply it when learning new skills and become aware of when we are indulging in comfort to the extreme
- How we instinctively seek our comfort zone in the way we dress, eat, and entertain ourselves
- Why seeking help from others, whether it’s with a teacher, a therapist, or a Healing Circle is often essential for moving into the learning zone
- How the right amount of manageable stress and fear always accompanies the acquisition of new skills
I give examples from my own life, and how my spiritual teacher knew instinctively when his students were making a nest out of his teachings to reinforce their ego, and that it was time to shake things up.