The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #440 - 29NOV25

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This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Abby Havermann, speaker and podcaster, on the challenges of going through life in a waking dream and how practices like Self-Observation and Self-Remembering can metabolize the dream and restore our lost sense of presence. Abby Havermann is a psychotherapist, coach, and speaker who focuses on the illumination of the unconscious self-betrayals that drive our everyday challenges. A lifelong learner, Abby’s singularity resides in combining her psychology, neuroscience, spiritual, and coaching experience with her ability to transform difficult life experiences into a gratitude-worthy self-evolutionary tool — awareness done right can breed transformation. She teaches mission-driven, insight-oriented people to unlearn what no longer serves them through 1:1 and group coaching, speaking, training, and online courses. Abby’s direct signature style challenges clients to up-level while witnessing and holding compassion for the complexity of their multifaceted inner and outer worlds.

More information about Abby Havermann’s work can be found at:

Abby Havermann’s website: www.abbyhavermann.com,

Abby Havermann on Facebook: www.facebook.com.

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #439 - 15NOV25

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This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with returning guest Stephen Aronson about his new book, AS INSIDE, SO OUTSIDE, AS ABOVE, SO BELOW – Reconciling Science and Spirituality through Consciousness, published by Karnak Press in 2024. This series of essays represents perspectives from Stephen’s half-century in the study of psychotherapy and spiritual exploration. He suggests that the energy we call consciousness is an inherent aspect of the Universe, the instrument through which the deepest understandings can be experienced.

Stephen Aronson is a psychotherapist with an eclectic training background ranging from cognitive behavioral therapy to the alchemical approach of Carl Jung. His spiritual life has been a search for verification of a deeper reality underlying the ordinary world of our senses. His personal aim has been to find a way to reconcile science and spirituality which would unite the concept of Universal Intelligence with rationality. After more than a decade in Jungian analysis and over four decades of study and practice in the system of transformational psychology introduced to the West by G. I. Gurdjieff, he has sought to find an approach to illustrate these deep and complex ideas and methods in common language and universally shared experiences.

Steve lives in rural Maine where he retired in 2013 after forty-three years in the practice of psychotherapy, education and training. He is also the author of THE SEARCH FOR MEANING AND THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A Psychologist's Journey Through Gurdjieff And Jung, has published on the subject of Spiritual Psychology in the Proceedings of the annual All and Everything International Humanities Conference, and has written for Parabola, a magazine dedicated to myth, tradition and the search for meaning.

More information about Stephen Aronson's work can be found at:

AS INSIDE, SO OUTSIDE at Karnak Press: Karnak Press,

Stephen Aronson at The Gurdjieff Club: Preparation for the Third Line of Work,

Stephen Aronson on The Mystical Positivist: Show 395, Show 350, and Show 332.

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #438 - 08NOV25

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This week on the show we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Donna McLaughlin, Mahamudra teacher in the Karma Kagyu tradition. Donna was first introduced to the Dharma in her teenage years. In 1970, having finished college, she travelled overland to India. After attending retreats in Bodhgaya with S. N. Goenka, she stayed at a Buddhist mission outside Delhi. Several people had already mentioned the name of Kalu Rinpoche to her, but it wasn’t until she met Ken McLeod at that mission that she learned how to negotiate the logistical difficulties in getting to Darjeeling.

In 1971, she made the journey to Kalu Rinpoche’s monastery in Sonada, near Darjeeling. Her meeting with him was a turning point, solidifying her commitment to this branch of Buddhist practice. Along with other practices, Kalu Rinpoche encouraged her to study Mahamudra.

Instruction and guidance was difficult to come by in those days and it was only with the 1986 publication of Tashi Namgyal’s Mahamudra: The Quintessence of Mind and Meditation, that she appreciated the full scope and range of Mahamudra teaching. In the 1980’s, she attended two Mahamudra retreats with Ken McLeod. She then attended four more Mahamudra retreats with Thrangu Rinpoche, a senior scholar and meditation master in the Karma Kagyu tradition. In the course of these retreats, he became her principal teacher. Her transcriptions of the teachings he gave at those retreats were later published under the title Essentials of Mahamudra.

In 1990, with Thrangu Rinpoche’s blessing, she and Peter Barth, another student of Thrangu Rinpoche, co-taught a Mahamudra study group for four years in Sonoma County, California. In 1996 she joined with Lama Palden, a graduate of the three-year retreat, to establish the Sukhasiddhi Foundation in Marin County, California. There she continued to teach Mahamudra.

In 2006, Thrangu Rinpoche suggested she teach under his auspices in Sonoma County as part of the Vajra Vidya or Indestructible Heart Wisdom network. To this day, she continues to teach and guide students in this practice.

More information about Donna McLaughlin’s work can be found at:

 
The Practice of Mahamudra website: www.mahamudra-practice.com.

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #437 - 01NOV25

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This week on the show we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Layne Negrin, author of Gurdjieff in Tibet. Divided into three parts, Part One looks at the evidence of Gurdjieff's presence in Tibet, Part Two researches the direct students of Gurdjieff who explored Tibetan or other Buddhist sects to one degree or another, and Part Three is a collection of comparative studies showing the influence of Tibetan Buddhism upon Gurdjieff's teaching. Interspersed with the author's writing on the individuals discussed in Parts One and Two are relevant texts by them, many of which were previously unavailable in English.

Layne Negrin began his spiritual path in 1988, practicing the Gurdjieff tradition exclusively for 19 years, then Mahayana Buddhism (primarily the Soto Zen of Shunryu Suzuki but also the Shambhalian Buddhism of Trungpa Rinpoche) exclusively for the next 13 years, and since 2020, after having realized that the two ideologies are the same in essence, practices both.

More information about Layne Negrin’s work can be found at:

 
Gurdjieff in Tibet on Amazon: www.amazon.com,

 
Layne Negrin on Facebook: www.facebook.com.