Pedram Shojai: Meet the Urban Monk

    —
September 19, 2017

Pedram Shojai: Meet the Urban Monk

Pedram Shojai — September 19, 2017

Pedram Shojai is a former Taoist monk, Qi Gong master, physician, and bestselling author known as The Urban Monk. Renowned for his diverse and direct teachings, Pedram has teamed with Sounds True to release The Urban Monk Inner Stillness Training Program: How to Open Up and Awaken to the Infinite River of Life. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Pedram about the awakening that led him to Eastern esoteric practices and why he decided to bring those practices out of the monastery and into the world at large. Pedram and Tami talk about the practices of Taoist inner alchemy and how these can initiate profound personal change on many levels. They also discuss Pedram’s experiences with documentary filmmaking and how they have informed his view that conscious capitalism needs to take a more active, focused role in helping the world in these turbulent times. Finally, Pedram leads listeners in a breathing exercise intended to settle the body and bring a glimpse of timelessness. (64 minutes)

Pedram Shojai, OMD, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Urban Monk and The Art of Stopping Time. He is the founder Well.Org, the producer of the movies Vitality, Origins, and Prosperity, and the host of The Urban Monk podcast. An ordained priest of the Yellow Dragon Monastery in China, Shojai is an acclaimed qi gong master, master herbalist, and Doctor of Oriental Medicine. His no-nonsense approach teaches esoteric concepts to Western readers in an easy-to-understand way. Shojai’s DVD series, The Alchemy of Qi Gong, received acclaim at the COVR awards, and he is currently involved in a number of philanthropic causes that revolve around public health, fair trade, and education. For more, visit theurbanmonk.com.

900 Episodes and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Each week on Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon interviews leading voices in the Mind/Body/Spirit space about a vast spectrum of fascinating ideas. Since 2009, Tami and her guests have been exploring the edge of understanding, nearly 1,000 episodes on the honest work of change, including spiritual discovery, awakening, intuition, purpose, trauma, and grief.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Pedram Shojai: Meet the Urban Monk

Pedram Shojai is a former Taoist monk, Qi Gong master, physician, and bestselling author known as The Urban Monk. Renowned for his diverse and direct teachings, Pedram has teamed with Sounds True to release The Urban Monk Inner Stillness Training Program: How to Open Up and Awaken to the Infinite River of Life. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Pedram about the awakening that led him to Eastern esoteric practices and why he decided to bring those practices out of the monastery and into the world at large. Pedram and Tami talk about the practices of Taoist inner alchemy and how these can initiate profound personal change on many levels. They also discuss Pedram’s experiences with documentary filmmaking and how they have informed his view that conscious capitalism needs to take a more active, focused role in helping the world in these turbulent times. Finally, Pedram leads listeners in a breathing exercise intended to settle the body and bring a glimpse of timelessness. (64 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

Tracee Stanley: What We Need in These Threshold Times

What if the antidote to a world coming apart isn’t a bigger plan, but a smaller, daily act of devotion?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tracee Stanley—teacher of yoga nidra, meditation, and self-inquiry, founder of Empowered Life Circle, and author of the new Sounds True book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit—about why ritual may be the most important practice we have during what she calls threshold times.

Join Tami and Tracee to explore:

  • The threshold question at the heart of ritual: what within me is dying, and what is waiting to be born?
  • Why devotion, not discipline, is the doorway—and how to weave practice through an ordinary householder’s day without shame
  • Tracee’s shard of light in Cape Town, and the years it took to find language for it
  • The body as shrine: the origins of yoga nidra in nyasa, the ancient practice of anointing the body as a divine temple
  • Earth dreaming—lying on the land and letting the land dream through you
  • Her reframe of the four Purusharthas, turning prosperity into support and pleasure into relationship
  • Sankalpa as a vow that leads to dharma, not a manifestation wish list
  • The analog cocoon and the night school: reclaiming sleep and dream time from the phone
  • Why enlightenment may be less a permanent state than a moment available in the space between two breaths

Tracee also speaks candidly about walking away from a successful film career, and what a surgery taught her about the ego that refuses to let the body rest.

Tracee opens and closes this interview with a short guided ritual you can practice along with.

Listen now, and let something be reshaped. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

Get a FREE month of membership at https://bit.ly/STOne-Free-Month.

[ENCORE EPISODE] Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: “In Lo...

A nine-year-old asks his father how to fight his panic attacks. His father says: don’t.

That answer set the course of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s life—and, twenty-seven years later, sent him out of his monastery in the middle of the night.

In this encore presentation, Tami Simon speaks with Rinpoche—beloved Tibetan Buddhist teacher in the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, guiding teacher of the Tergar meditation community, and author of In Love with the World—about the four-and-a-half-year wandering retreat that nearly killed him, and the teaching he calls “adding wood to the fire.”

Raised as a tulku with attendants at his side, he left at 36 with almost no money. Within weeks he was begging for food, sleeping on a train station floor, and severely ill—and when he believed he was dying, he chose not to reach for rescue.

Join Tami and Mingyur Rinpoche to explore:

  • “Adding wood to the fire”: how obstacles become opportunity, and poison becomes medicine
  • His father’s teaching on the sky: why no storm can change the nature of awareness
  • Why banging your head against the wall isn’t courage, and what acceptance actually opens
  • The bardo as everyday experience: job loss, breakups, falling asleep, and the gaps between
  • The four steps of the dying practice—offering, dedication, intention, and prayer
  • Child luminosity meeting mother luminosity, and what he directly experienced that night
  • Why he titled the book In Love with the World: “If you love the world, world loves you back”

Rinpoche is now partnering with Sounds True on a brand-new course, Wild World, Steady Mind: 21 Days to Embrace Modern Reality with Clarity and Calm, filmed on location at his monastery in Nepal.

Listen now, and find the sky behind the storm. →

Raj Sisodia: “Business Leaders, You Have a Sacre...

“Is it okay that we are hurting people in order to make money?”

That’s the question Raj Sisodia has been putting to business leaders for two decades—and he isn’t asking rhetorically. This week, Tami Simon speaks with the prolific author, professor, and cofounder of the conscious capitalism movement about his new book, Healing Leaders, and the seven-step spiral that took him from a successful academic career into the deepest healing work of his life at age 60.

Join Tami and Raj to explore:

  • Why “false profits” mask the real cost of business as usual—in burnout, stress, and lives
  • The four pillars of conscious capitalism, and why doing all of them together changes everything
  • Strength without love is tyranny; love without strength is ineffective—the leaders who held both
  • What happened when four women asked Raj how he could write a book on healing without healing himself
  • LIST: the acronym for love, innocence, simplicity, and truth that arrived in the Amazon
  • “Choose your past”—the counterintuitive step that moves a leader out of victimhood
  • Why your trauma isn’t your fault, but healing it is your responsibility—especially if you lead
  • How to conduct a layoff with love, and the company that furloughed instead of firing
  • Why this backlash moment is a test of how deeply we actually believe in these principles

Whether you lead a team of three or three thousand, Raj offers a bracing case that the inner work you keep postponing is the most generous thing you can do for the people who depend on you.

Raj Sisodia is guest faculty for Sounds True’s Inner MBA®, a six-month immersion program created in collaboration with the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Learn more at innermba.soundstrue.com. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and originally aired on Sounds True One.