Walking the Path of Love

What does your relationship with technology look like, and what are you really handing over with each scroll, email, or voice note?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn is digging into those questions and more with Joni Staaf-Stamford, a professional counselor, mindfulness teacher, author, and retreat leader. Joni’s work brings together mindfulness and our daily interactions with technology to understand how we can remain authentic in a tech-driven world. For this conversation, the two explore the timely discussion of artificial intelligence and the questions that go far beyond technology.From GPS and sleep trackers to couples using ChatGPT to talk to each other, she shows how people outsource decisions, awareness, and even relationships. She moves on to an alarming finding by the Surgeon General that reports chronic loneliness as the same health risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The bottom line: Human connection isn't just nice-to-have. It is vital to our health, well-being, happiness, and mental and emotional health.Instead of abandoning technology, Joni offers practical ways to use AI skillfully. The key, she says, is applying an 80/20 balance and, most importantly, releasing the urge to turn to AI for emotional comfort. She also opens up about her path from anxiety and panic attacks to a non-negotiable daily practice and why curiosity and presence may be the most important human qualities we can protect.Episode takeawaysThe two things AI is inviting us to reclaim: human agency and human connection (09:34)How wearables and devices can erode our trust in our own bodies and intuition (13:25)Why we need friction and struggle to build emotional intelligence and confidence (16:59)How outsourcing a conversation to AI can quietly erode our relationships (22:53)Using AI as a thinking partner: ask it for questions, not answers (35:39)From panic attacks to daily practice: the mantra that transformed Joni (43:14)Why curiosity is the one human quality we can't afford to lose (51:06)Connect with Joni Staaf-Stamford:Website: https://insightwithjoni.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonisturgillYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdPOmNlSqILAcgL5mn490CAInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/insightwithjoni/Let's connect:Website: https://www.charlynreihman.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlyn.peartInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/charlyn.reihman/?hl=enGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What has love taught you that you couldn't have learned any other way? And what does it really take to live without fear?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Devarshi Steven Hartman, a yogi and spiritual leader whose work has shaped many students, including her own. He’s the founder of the Pranotthan Yoga School and the former director of professional training and dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga. He’s taught thousands of yogis and joins Charlyn to talk about his new book, The Three Essentials.As a longtime spiritual teacher, Devarshi offers his wisdom for spiritual advancement, drawing on his experiences for context. He shares the teachings that have shaped his work, breaking them down into three main pillars: the practice of conscious breathing, the five koshas as they relate to habitual patterns, and the belief that we are infinite, eternal, and whole. Then he speaks about the importance of community and how surrounding yourself with like-minded people can be crucial to your personal growth. It takes years to master yoga’s principles, breathing practices, and the spiritual teachings behind them. But Devarshi has managed to uncomplicate the path without losing sight of the messages. Throughout this rich conversation, he unpacks what it means to tear down the walls, choose a more peaceful, fearless way of living, and ultimately what true transformation looks like.Episode takeawaysWhy love is a vibration and a transmission, not just an action (07:51)The five koshas, and how our habitual, unconscious patterns get held in the body, breath, and mind (11:54)Why peace and fear cannot coexist, and what it means to walk a genuinely fearless path (19:48)The importance of community and relationship as a mirror we can't give ourselves (25:36)The five causes of suffering, and why "you are infinite, eternal, and whole" is the essential belief underneath them all (21:15)How loss and brushes with mortality reshaped Devarshi's relationship to the present moment (37:23)Conscious breathing as the foundation, and the doorway, of all yoga practice (43:07)Practical first steps for integrating the Three Essentials into daily life (46:37)Connect with Devarshi Steven Hartman:WebsiteInstagramFacebookGet the book, The Three EssentialsLet's connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if the most devastating thing that ever happened to you turned out to be the doorway into the deepest love you have ever known?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, an award-winning poet, teacher, and speaker whose work has appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post Book Club, on the Carnegie Hall stage, and on A Prairie Home Companion. Since 2006, Rosemerry has written a poem every single day, and what began as a writing practice has become something closer to a way of life: a daily act of showing up, staying open, and letting the world teach her what she did not yet know.This conversation moves through many rooms. There is the room of devotion versus ambition, where a quiet but radical difference exists between striving to get somewhere and being so in love with the world that you want to show up completely right. Then there is the room of poetry as permission, the way a poem read aloud in a yoga class can make someone feel that their anger, fear, and grief are not only acceptable but worthy of being named.What Rosemerry describes is not healing in the tidy, linear sense. It is something more honest. For example, the tidal wave of love she felt the day after Finn died. Or the moment she began to understand that her husband's grief was his to carry, not hers to take on. Ultimately, she discovered that gifts can be hidden inside loss. Though she didn't go looking for it, peace found her, again and again, even during her most difficult moments.You’ll leave this episode with a question that a friend once gave Rosemerry: Is this the path of love? There is no fixed answer. Instead, the question becomes a compass, one that Rosemerry carries through every ordinary hour of her day. By the end of this episode, you might just find yourself asking it too.Episode Takeaways:An opening poem, Faith, and what it means to trust not the knowing but the becoming (02:30)The difference between ambition and devotion, and why one sustains a practice while the other depletes it (03:51)How poetry taught Rosemerry to write past what she knows to reach the unknown where the real discoveries live (08:54)Why grief and joy are not opposites, and what opens up when we stop insisting they should be (16:55)The tidal wave of love she felt the day after her son Finn died, and how it changed her forever (38:47)Why there are infinite ways to grieve and what compassion looks like when we stop expecting others to do it the way we do (24:52)The six-word question that became her compass for every ordinary moment of her day (46:01)Connect with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:WebsiteInstagramGet Rosemerry’s books!Let’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if the teachings that could change your life were sitting in a drawer, waiting for someone brave enough to finish the work?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Shobhan Richard Faulds, a scholar, writer, and devoted practitioner who has made it his life's work to ensure that Swami Kripalu's teachings reach the people who need them most. Shobhan has been actively involved in the Kripalu lineage since 1981, served as Kripalu Center's lawyer for twenty-five years, and has written three substantive books dedicated to preserving and transmitting Swami Kripalu's teachings in a form that Western readers can truly receive.Swami Kripalu practiced ten hours a day for thirty years, driven by a vision of yoga that began with health and moved all the way through psychological well-being, effective living, and spiritual awakening. He taught that these were not separate destinations but a single, coherent path, one that any sincere practitioner could walk. Shobhan spent more than a decade studying that vision, distilling over a thousand of Swami Kripalu's quotes, and finding a way to present it whole. He describes the work as the biggest puzzle he has ever attempted to solve in his life, and this conversation is a window into what that journey cost him and what it gave back.What emerges is a portrait of a path that begins not with renunciation but with a longing. Shobhan met Swami Kripalu two days after walking across the stage to receive his college diploma, and his response was immediate and visceral: " My God, this really is possible. This yearning I feel to express my soul in a full-hearted fashion is possible.” That moment set everything in motion, including a law degree, a master's in human development, and more than a decade of distilling over a thousand of Swami Kripalu's quotes into a coherent map for the rest of us.One of the most quietly important things Shobhan offers in this conversation is a correction that matters deeply for anyone who has ever felt like they were doing spirituality wrong. The early Kripalu community made a mistake, he says plainly. The renunciate path was treated as the real path, the one that led to enlightenment, and the householder path was seen as the lesser route, the one you walked until a better lifetime came along. The more deeply Shobhan studied Swami Kripalu's actual teachings, the more clearly he saw that this was simply not true. The householder path is not a dumbed-down version of anything. It is its own complete and sacred way.Episode Takeaways:An opening breath and arrival practice led by Charlyn (00:03)What it was like to come into Swami Kripalu's presence and why Shobhan had never encountered anyone like him (02:50)The moment two days after college graduation that set Shobhan on the path of yoga (06:45)How a newsletter template became the beginning of a twelve-year writing project (11:00)Why were Swami Kripalu's teachings so difficult to understand, and what was lost when he died at sixty-nine (17:46)The crucial mistake made in the early ashram around the householder path, and why it matters (35:54)How teaching stories reveal different meanings at different stages of life, and why that is the point (23:33)What love would say, if it could speak through you right now (45:40)Let’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if your life wasn't something you planned, but something that chose you?In this episode of Walking the Path of Love, Charlyn sits down with Prem Shakti, a woman whose path defies every tidy narrative about how a spiritual life is supposed to unfold. Prem has been serving individuals and groups around the world for 52 years, blending Eastern and Western traditions into a foundation for living with confidence, inspiration, and soul alignment.She was one of the first residents at the Kripalu Ashram in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, helped invite the public into its earliest programs, and welcomed Swami Kripalu when he came to America. She has since trained thousands of bodyworkers, yoga teachers, and meditators across the globe, not to give them answers, but to help them find their own.What unfolds in this conversation is a life told in pieces: busking in the London underground, narrowly escaping a musician who nearly murdered her, running through open fields crying because suddenly she could feel God in everything. Through all of it, there is a steady undercurrent of trust. Not the tidy, affirmation-card kind. The kind that gets tested at every turn and somehow holds anyway.What stays with you most is the image of Prem on an airplane, weeping because a voice inside told her to leave the ashram she had called home for eighteen years, and her quiet, almost matter-of-fact response: I didn't ask for this. It was downloaded, and I can't argue. That quality of surrender, of being genuinely taken by something larger than herself, is the thread that runs through every story she tells. And far from being passive, it turns out to be one of the most courageous things a person can do.Episode Takeaways:An opening centering meditation: light descending from crown to earth, opening the heart with compassion and curiosity (05:24)What it felt like to sit with Swami Kripalu in darshan and dissolve into pure love in his presence (08:15)From London busker to near-murder to a Shaktipata awakening in a yoga class in New York (12:57)The booming voice on the airplane that told her to leave everything, and how she learned to trust it (21:19)Truth as courage: why facing reality frees up energy to create rather than cope (28:22)How personal practice evolves, and why what worked yesterday may not be what you need today (37:13)What love would say, if it could speak through you right now (45:45)Connect with Prem Shakti:Phone: +1 561-351-3680Email: [email protected]’s connect:WebsiteFacebookInstagramGet your copy of Walking the Path of Love: Connecting to the Kripalu Lineage and the Core Teachings of Swami Kripalu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.