Saturday, March 26, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #217 - 26MAR16

The Mystical Positivist is now a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. Listen live on Saturday evenings from 4:00 - 6:00pm, PST, via the web at KOWS Live Stream.
This week's podcast features:
  • An in-studio conversation with with Sonoma county Zen practitioners and teachers Elizabeth Sawyer and Barton Stone. Elizabeth is an Interfaith Minister, co-founded Back Porch Zendo, and is a lay ordained dharma teacher in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-roshi. Myozen Barton Stone studied with Suzuki-Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center, and was ordained by Jisho Warner Roshi of Stone Creek Zen Center in 2010.
More information about Elizabeth Sawyer and Barton Stone's work can be found at:

Saturday, March 19, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #216 - 19MAR16

The Mystical Positivist is now a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. Listen live on Saturday evenings from 4:00 - 6:00pm, PST, via the web at KOWS Live Stream.
This week's podcast features:
  • An in-studio conversation with Leza Lowitz, author or co-translator of a wide-ranging set of over twenty books, including Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By; Sacred Sanskrit Words: For Yoga, Chant, and Meditation; Yoga Heart: Lines on the Six Perfections; Designing With Kanji: Japanese Character Motifs for Surface, Skin and Spirit; Jet Black and The Ninja Wind, and more. Our discussion today will focus on her two latest books: Here Comes the Sun: A Journey to Adoption in 8 Chakras, a personal memoir about how she fell in love with and married a Japanese man, and came to adopt a child with him in Japan; and Up From The Sea, a young adult novel in verse about a Japanese boy whose life was overturned by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

    Leza is a California girl who lives in Tokyo. Always willing to go to any length and travel any distance to discover who she was and how to be happy, she met her soulmate at a jazz club in Yokohama, and moved to Japan to be with him. Ten years later, Leza and Shogo undertook the crazy project of opening a yoga studio in Tokyo. Three years after that, they adopted a beautiful boy and rescued two dogs, starting a family in their mid-forties.

    Leza and Shogo often write together, and only occasionally drive each other crazy. Building a bridge from East to West, they’ve collaborated on a book about kanji, a collection of poetry by a pacifist Japanese soldier, and a trilogy about a young female ninja. Other couples finish each other’s sentences. They finish each other’s books.

    From an early age Leza dreamed of being Bruce Lee or Joan Didion. She’s still working on that combination.

    For over two decades, she’s been bringing together the worlds of writing and spirituality, charting her quest in over seventeen books and in the New York Times online, Yoga Journal, Shambhala Sun, The Best Buddhist Writing 2011, The Huffington Post, The Japan Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Her award-winning poetry has been translated into Japanese, French, Spanish, Burmese and Farsi. Leza is a long-term member of SCBWI Japan (the Society for Children’s Books Writers and Editors, Japan).
More information about Leza Lowitz's can be found at: