How do we find peace when the world feels like it's burning around us? In this deeply moving conversation, psychotherapist Claudia Catarucci welcomes her longtime friend and Buddhist meditation teacher Luisa Montero-Diaz to explore one of life's essential paradoxes: maintaining inner calm while engaging meaningfully with a turbulent world.

Drawing from over 35 years of meditation practice, Montero-Diaz offers a perspective both ancient and radical - that life's path has always been uneven, but we can learn to walk it evenly. This isn't about spiritual bypassing or ignoring suffering, but rather developing the capacity to respond with wisdom rather than reaction. The conversation takes us through the concept of the "sacred pause" - that vital moment of awareness before action that transforms how we engage with everything from personal triggers to global crises.

The friends explore powerful metaphors including Wendell Berry's poem about planting seeds while the world burns, and the lotus flower whose roots grow in mud yet blossoms beautifully above water. Through personal stories, practical guidance, and the warmth of authentic friendship, they illuminate how sustained spiritual practice gradually raises our baseline wellbeing and shortens our recovery time from emotional difficulties.

Perhaps most powerfully, they reveal that at the bottom of all our emotional layers - beneath shame, fear, and anger - lies love itself. Heaven on Earth isn't about escaping life's challenges but bringing a quality of loving presence to them. As Montero-Diaz beautifully summarizes: heaven on earth is "relating heavenly to earthly things."

Ready to find more stability in chaotic times? Listen now, and discover how your spiritual practice can become an anchor not just for yourself, but for our world in need of healing.

Luisa Montero Diaz is a pioneer of the Washington Insight Meditation Community and a lead mentor in Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield’s two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program.

LUISA’S FREE MINDFULNESS PROGRAM (IN SPANISH)

✨ Atención Plena para Reducir el Estrés
A Free 6-Week Virtual Mindfulness Series in Spanish
🗓 Wednesdays at 6PM EST | June 4 – July 9
🌐 On Zoom | Open to Spanish-speaking migrants
No experience needed—just bring your breath.

📌 Zoom Registration:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/An65PlmNTyyaccVw819DcA#/registration
📅 Full details available on the CML calendar
https://tockify.com/cmldc/agenda?tags=Espanol&search=espanol
📧 Questions?Contact Luisa Montero at luisa.montero55@gmail.com

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#empathleader #meditation #meditacion

Ever wonder why we're so afraid of our feelings? The Era of Emotions has dawned, and it's revolutionizing how we understand leadership, connection, and what makes us uniquely human.

Emotions are our operating system—fear, grief, love, shame, anger—the features, not flaws, of being human. Yet most of us were never taught emotional literacy. We learned to run from, repress, suppress, vent, or explode our emotions rather than understand them. This avoidance creates profound ripples—anxiety, stored trauma, depression, identity confusion, and broken trust.

The sobering truth? Unprocessed emotion becomes transmitted emotion. Even when you think you're hiding feelings effectively, everyone in your energetic field absorbs them, especially children. This accumulation eventually becomes trauma that extends beyond individual suffering into our collective experience. War, environmental exploitation, and societal divisions all trace back to emotional illiteracy on a grand scale.

Emotional calibration—becoming what I call "the DJ of your internal world"—means learning to modulate your emotional landscape rather than silencing it. You're not turning the music off; you're mastering sound engineering, creating a mixtape that honors all parts of your emotional experience. This requires developing the capacity to pause and ask: What am I feeling? Why is this emotion here? What is it teaching me?

As artificial intelligence expands, our emotional capacity becomes our most distinctly human attribute. Emotions are our sacred technology—how we communicate with each other and the divine. The invitation before us is to stop fearing our emotions and start training them, with the mission of raising future generations that won't need to recover from what we were too afraid to feel.

Ready to transform your relationship with emotions? Listen now and discover why your feelings aren't the problem—avoiding them is.

Have you ever felt like you're walking in step with everyone else while silencing your own truth? That nagging feeling that you're dimming your light or holding back your power just to belong?

This transformative episode explores "mimic" – a sophisticated survival mechanism that enables us to fit in but ultimately costs us our authentic connection with self and others. As the quieter twin of gossip, mimic is the way we contour ourselves, silence our truths, and walk in lockstep to avoid being cast out from the group.

What begins as natural childhood imitation evolves into something far more insidious: a chronic override of our authentic self that creates what I call a "slow burn internal implosion." The depression you feel might not be a brain chemistry issue but your soul screaming for acknowledgment. The anxiety isn't irrational – it's your body's alarm that "this life is not mine."

Particularly for empaths, mimic manifests as dulling your shine, silencing your gifts, and shapeshifting to maintain peace. You've likely been told you're "too much" – too sensitive, too emotional, too aware – and so you learned to self-regulate by becoming smaller, more agreeable, more "normal."

Drawing on insights from New Earth visionary Amanda Flaker, we explore how the "Mimic program" functions as collective hypnosis that equates difference with danger. Yet history shows us that transformation comes through those who broke from mimicry – from Jesus to Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X.

Your uniqueness isn't self-indulgent – it's medicine for a world desperate for authentic expression. By acknowledging where you're still walking in step to stay safe, you can begin the sacred rebellion and reclaim your divine blueprint. Remember, you're not here to mimic; you're here to be the prototype of your most authentic, favorite, delicious self.

Join this journey to break free from mimic and discover that Heaven on Earth begins when you stop hating your uniqueness and start embracing the glorious paradox of your humanity.