The James Scott Henson Podcast

This is the first episode under the new name, and serves to catch everyone up on where I've been and the things I've learned from a difficult last year.  Thanks for listening!

In what is the final episode of this podcast under the name Dying Daily, we explore why I am moving away from it and what led me to it in the first place. Over the course of this podcast we’ll talk about Seneca and his essay “On the Shortness of Life”, the ways we waste our time, the suddenness of death, and things like regret, selfishness, and destructive behavior. I promise it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. 

In this episode of the Dying Daily podcast we take a quick look at one of the most problematic expectations many people have of a mindfulness practice. 

 In this episode of the Dying Daily Podcast I tell a little bit of my story and how I found freedom from much of the suffering in my life through things like mindfulness, meditation, compassion, and gratitude.  

In this episode we explore how being bothered by things is human, and how our response to being bothered is what really matters.

What does it mean when somebody tells us to sit with our emotions? This episode of The Dying Daily Podcast explores this question and give some examples of how to do this.

A quick look at being human and dealing with difficult emotions.

I have a guest for the first time on this episode of the Dying Daily Podcast: Health Coach, Health Advocate, Experienced Yoga Teacher, and all-around cool human being Lindsay Kerr. We talk about everything from the bioindividuality of our diets and the stigma of shame associated with food in our culture to what kind of advocacy is needed for us and our children so that we can all live healthy lives (healthy, not socially-constructed-notions-of-beauty-fad-diets). It was a cool conversation, I think you will enjoy hearing it. To learn more about Lindsay look her up at www.byitsowndesign.com or find her on Instagram @byitsowndesign and @mamalinz13. Two documentaries you might want to check out after listening to this episode: In Search of Balance documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5022626/ Feel Rich: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6285404/

People who are suffering will often harm others whether they mean to or not. This episode of the Dying Daily Podcast explores how we can have boundaries and protect ourselves and those we love and still offer compassion to those who are suffering.

We are driven by what we like and what we don't like and what we want and what we don't want, but when we really examine this we find that these things are driven by emotion and conditioning and don't really matter at all. This episode of the Dying Daily Podcast explores this idea and its implications.

This is an audio version of a YouTube video talking about what we can and what we cannot control.

This is an audio version of a YouTube video talking about mindfulness and how it can help when we aren't feeling well.

This is an audio version of my first YouTube video discussing why gratitude is not only important but is the only rational response to the world.

Mindfulness is something of a fad these days, and this has it's positive and its negative implications. In this episode of the Dying Daily Podcast, we talk about what mindfulness is and look at some concrete ways to incorporate it into our lives.

We hear a lot about being passionate and motivated these days, but neither of these is sustainable or useful in the long run. This episode of The Dying Daily Podcast explores the idea that discipline and perseverance are worth cultivating because they will serve you when passion and motivation have drifted away.

Getting what we want is not always the best thing. It may even end up being harmful to us, while many of the best things in life emerge from things we would not have chosen for ourselves. This episode explores these ideas and makes suggestions for how to work with the mind's tendency to focus on what we want to the exclusion of everything else.

A lot of our suffering comes from trying to control what is not ours to control, while releasing control of the things that should get our attention. In this episode we explore these ideas, and look at some solutions to the human problem of control. 

This episode looks at the peace we can find in recognizing that many of the things we label as good or bad or right or wrong are really just neutral. Thank you for listening.

This episode explores the idea that people do what makes sense to them, even if it looks irrational or unskillful from the outside.  It asks how our judgments might affect our relationships with other people, and our relationship with ourselves. This was a tough one to get right, and I do not think I did, but my recent soapbox about the perfect as the enemy of the good didn’t leave me a lot of room to shelve it. I worked on making the cuts and edits flow better, and I tried to adjust the volume as per a suggestion I received. I would appreciate any feedback you might have about anything on this episode. Thanks for listening and helping me get this podcast off the ground.

If you try to do anything at all, people will find reasons to criticize you. If you try to avoid criticism by not doing anything at all, people will criticize you. If you try to shoot for the middle and think you can hide in mediocrity, people will criticize you for that.  The only way to avoid criticism is to be perfect, which isn’t possible. If you aim for bulletproof, then you’ll wind up with nothing at all. This episode is all about not letting perfectionism rob us of our creativity, purpose, and happiness. Thanks for listening.