My wife and I have been working with the dōTERRA essential oil company for the last seven years. When first introduced to essential oils, it was another tool in our toolkit for a healthy, holistic lifestyle. Essential oils changed our health, became our livelihood, and have become a means for us to positively affect the lives of other people. I am …

I love language. I’m a reader, a writer, a person who loves ideas. I recently watched Tolkien and loved this line from the movie. Language isn’t just the naming of things, it’s the lifeblood of a culture, a people. You can catch that clip for yourself here. Language is definitely my own lifeblood. (That, and music.) Language helps us explain the wo…

Like many people who grew up in a religious context I was taught the purpose of our faith, the meaning of life in fact, was to know God. Not only was this the goal but it was actually achievable by getting saved, reading the bible, having a personal relationship with Jesus, going to church, praying, participating in Christian community and basicall…

I recently had the opportunity to take a trip back to where I grew up in central Alberta. My immediate family members no longer live there and so the last time I was back was thirteen years ago for my grandmother’s funeral. Like most forty-somethings I’ve changed a lot since childhood. I’ve changed a lot in the last thirteen years. Sometimes we loo…

There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price to pay for living a lie. - Cornell West Sometimes I'm not sure what I was thinking about when I started this podcast. Podcasts about hosted by talkers, right? I'm a quiet, more reserved person by nature. I love to read and write, but generally speaking, I don't have a lot to sa…

As the father to three kids, September is marked with back-to-school energy. Something about the shift in season, summer turning to fall and kids back in school, inspires an air of possibility for new habits and making change in your life. In this back-to-school episode I’m diving into 3 metaphors that can help us approach and instigate changes in …

I’m a learner. I LOVE learning. I’m constantly reading, writing, listening, digesting and assimilating things I’m interested in learning. To be engaged with ideas this way is a big part of what makes me feel alive. I have a strong tendency and bias to depend on outside information and inputs, constantly seeking more knowledge to inform my choices. …

Have you ever been disappointed by your spouse, partner, child, parent, or friend? Perhaps nothing stings as much as the disappointments we face in our long-term romantic relationships, especially marriage. Unfortunately our popular culture sets us up for these disappointments and let-downs with happily ever after and other insanity like Tom Cruise…

This spring I attended a meditation retreat hosted and taught by Dr. Joe Dispenza. A fan of his work, it was amazing to experience, in person, the principles of his teaching and research. One of the thing Dispenza teaches is a modern take on chakras, the ancient Indian understanding of energy in the body. My introduction to chakras was through yoga…

Drew Brown is an award-winning singer-songwriter, music producer and a friend of mine from way back. We have a shared history of being involved in contemporary Christian music, or CCM for short. In this interview Drew and I sit down in his kitchen to talk about music and being a musician. We talk about how writing, playing, performing and producing…

For my previous episode Elvis the Theologian, I recorded my own piano playing as part of the background musical track. A first for the B-RAD Podcast. Today is another first. In this short episode I offer a meditation on Divine Love paired with that piano recording. Inspired by the imagery of the wedding scene from Crazy Rich Asians and the Elvis so…

When I was ten years old, I fell in love with the movie "The Princess Bride. After seeing it in the theatre, I must have watched it almost a dozen times in the years that followed. If you also enjoyed that movie the wedding scene may be etched in your memory as it is in mine. You’ll have to listen to the podcast for my rendition of the priest offic…

Audrey Toews

Your personality creates your personal reality. Joe Dispenza This is the second half of my two-part interview with personal friend, Enneagram Coach and Facilitator Livingston Lacroix. Listen to Part 1 here. We continue our discussion of the Enneagram and walk through the needs, focus, issues, and fears of types 5 through 9. Join me as we are challe…

Learning about the Enneagram was a light-bulb moment, or rather many moments for me, in my self-discovery and becoming. The Enneagram, like no other personality assessment I know, challenges a person to face “their stuff”. It’s a brutally honest lens, or mirror really, that allows a person to understand their core needs and fears and how that drive…

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power, our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter. So that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it. ~ Rabbi Harold Kushner Kyle Kirschbaum is a close friend and mentor of mine. In this i…

With a world population on the cusp of eight billion people (unbelievable!), I sometimes wonder if my single life matters. One person out of eight billion hardly seems significant. Does my presence matter? Do I deserve to exist? I live in Canada, the 14th least densely populated country on earth. We have lots of land and few people. We probably hav…

Laura Tucker started her professional life as a school teacher before transitioning to the private sector working in training, sales, and coaching. Always wanting to make a difference in people’s lives, from the time she started coaching baseball as a teenager, Laura’s leadership and communication skills helped her succeed throughout her career and…

Time can be a considerable source of stress for us in many ways. I grew up with an antique clock in my home that was wound up, by hand, once a week to keep it going. Time literally had a sound, a tick-tock, one second after another. Often it feels like time is weighing us down. It’s the persistent, subconscious tick-tock soundtrack of our lives. Ti…

I have an addiction. I'm addicted to approval. I’ve never attended an AA meeting, or had a close friendship with someone in those circles, but my guess is that at the genesis of addiction you find a desire. Without desire, none of us would do anything. It's easy to judge what we see and say “if I could just stop doing this (fill in the blank with t…

Latest episode of Audrey Toews

There's a lot of pressure in our culture to be original. And the self-actualization subculture isn't any better. It's probably worse. Do you have to be an original? What if being original is overrated? In the music world artists regularly cover other people's work. Musicians like Jamie Cullum prove that a good cover is a valuable art form, in and o…

I turned forty the same week of launching this podcast, and in honour of that milestone birthday I set a goal of releasing forty episodes this year. I didn’t quite reach that goal. I am ending my first season of the B-RAD Podcast with thirty episodes. This thirtieth and final episode of the first season feels like a good time to tell you what B-RAD…

John Maxwell, renowned leadership expert, New York Times Bestseller List author, well-known speaker and septuagenarian says that as he has matured, the things he truly “knows” can be summarized with the five digits on one hand. Those are the things he knows that he knows and he can’t be budged on those points. But he has learned to let go of everyt…

The story by David Foster Wallace goes like this; there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “what the hell is water?”…

The phrase "good enough", which is so ubiquitious in our culture, implies that there is something better than good. Perfection, something without flaws, something pristine and ideal, is better than good. Isn't it? In the beginning creation was declared good. Tov is the original Hebrew word which we translate as "good" in English. But Tov is so much…

Labels aren't bad, they're necessary for making our way through the external world. Imagine navigating city streets or an airport terminal with no labels. Labels are obviously good. Labels are also a necessary part of our internal framework and personal structure. They help us identify where we're from (Toronto, Canada) and who we are (man, husband…

Water covers 71% of the earth's surface. The average adult body is 60% water. A human can survive for weeks without food, but she'll live mere days without water. Water has no nutrition, per se but we require it, above almost all things, to live. We're not exactly sure how water arrived on the planet but scientists propose it may have arrived as ic…

Rudolf Steiner, who lived from 1861 to 1925, is remembered and revered as a prophet of renewal, asking and answering the question how do we create systems, protocols, and procedures that works alongside what nature provides humans? How do we be a part of the progress of the natural world in healthy, sustainable, and spiritual ways? One of the answe…

Home - What does it mean? Where is it? There is a sense of safety and security attached to the idea of home. The dictionary definition of the word homebody is a person who likes to stay home, especially one who is perceived as unadventurous. I'd like to challenge that idea. I think a true home body - someone at home in their body - is definitely ad…

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." - Marianne Williamson I grew up thinking that a certain four letter word - starts with an F, ends with a K, with UC in the middle - was the worst possible word. You had to stay clear of that word. All the while I was trapped by another four le…

Chewing is an integral part of our experience with food. How we chew has biological and psychological affects on our whole body. After watching the video (link on my episode blog post) by Emily Rosen on the Psychobiology of Chewing I came away with four takeaways: We're designed to chew and crunch. We eat food too fast. When we don't chew properly …

We have all been given a script in life. We are born into a culture, a community, a family that follows certain rules and norms. This script forms and informs how we live. It's how we make our way in the world as humans. This is how we survive and learn, by starting with what the past teaches us, reading our lines and playing our part. But at some …

Jorey Tessier has a passion for youth and wanted to work in a capacity where he could encourage and influence young people. So he decided to be a teacher. But when he was graduating from university and was considering his next step, the transition to teacher's college, something inside him had changed. The goal he was pursuing for the last eight ye…

Have you ever had an idea to create something great that had the potential to make a significant change in people's lives? In this podcast I interview someone just like that. Someone with a great idea to revolutionize the charitable giving landscape. An idea that was born in an unlikely encounter, an idea that took thirteen years to come to life. W…

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." - Martin Luther King, Jr. We live in a click culture. We value comfort and convenience. We idolize the instant success stories, we look for shortcuts. The problem with the click culture mindset, wi…

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C.S. Lewis Pain as Teacher In her raw, deeply-moving and well-written memoir "Love Warrior", Glennon Doyle Melton says that pain is like a traveling professor. When pain knocks on the door — wise ones breathe deep an…

"You can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you're outscored." — John Wooden My kids love playing the game Shotgun. This is not a game with real guns, we're urban Canadians. I'm referring to the game where a person claims the front passenger seat when riding in the car. Shotgun, the game, is a finite game. It has known …

“Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.” — Booker T. Washington Have you ever installed a door? The process requires framing and positioning a doorjamb, with special attention to the hinges. When you'…

Guillaume Néry is a record-breaking freediver. In his fascinating TED Talk, he explains the life-transforming experience of the freedive. His diving adventures challenge the belief that we can only go so far and give a new meaning to the religious phrase, "born again". Néry's diving experience teaches us about what lies beneath. So too does meditat…

We often think of life as preceding death. First you live and then you die. But death also precedes life. It's a circle, not a line. The rhythm of seasons, sunrise and sunset, waking and sleeping, show us this pattern. Our very cells die and are made new. The food we eat, once living, died to sustain our lives. We see this pattern every day, every …

I talk a lot about becoming on this podcast, "be-radical in your becoming". This becoming is a metaphysical journey, where we explore the fundamental nature of our being, and what it means to both become from this being and to become into this being. We're not static. We're constantly being made. This is our becoming. What is our fundamental nature…

The scientific field of epigenetics has revolutionized how we understand why organisms are the way they are. Turns out that although a "script" for how our physiological self will develop and grow is written in our genome, we now know that different outcomes are possible because of our epigenome, which modifies how that "script" is expressed. We're…

Are you familiar with metadata? Metadata sounds high-tech or sciency, but it's simply data that gives information about other data. For example, when you listen to an audio recording of the podcast you're listening to an MP3 file. On that file is metadata about this particular episode. The show title, copyright, etc. encoded right in the file you'r…

"I’m not just one of a kind, and you’re not just one of a kind, and we are each not just one of a kind; we are one of an eternity. No pressure! Each of us has come with a gift. And if we do not give our gift, the world misses out." Mary Beth Ingham We experience our identity in three distinct spheres or points of contact. Me. You. Us. Coming into o…

Humble pie, coming right up! We humans seem to swing between two ends of the humility spectrum: false humility and forgetting humility. False humility is actually low self-esteem, low self-worth. Forgetting humility is an exaggeration of self, it's arrogance. Neither are expressions of true self. How do we find true humility? Can we land in the mid…

In the Christian tradition Lent is a period of fasting. Fasting is a way of breaking a pattern, interrupting a loop in our life; it's a tool to help us re-orient and reset our behaviours. Behaviour is rooted in desire, and though we can fast from our behaviour we can't fast from desire, nor should we. Desire can manifest in unhealthy and harmful be…

Michael Bernard Beckwith says that "Behind every problem, there's a question trying to ask itself. Behind every question, there's an answer trying to reveal itself. Behind every answer, there's an action trying to take place. And behind every action, there's a way of life trying to be born..." How does a problem have the power to lead you to "a way…

Why do we put people on pedestals? As a society and as individuals we idolize and elevate certain people. We want to hold them in a higher position, superior to ourselves and others. Why do we seek a pedestal? And can the pedestal deliver what our fragile sense of self is always hungering for - to be seen, known, and recognized? The pedestal cannot…

Doors stand as an invitation. Asking us to walk through, into a new space, a new room. Are you growing too large for the room you're in? Are you feeling confined? Maybe you're really comfortable with the familiarity of this room but you're curious about the door and what's on the other side. Your feet might be small, everyone's are, but they are ex…