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It's MP"Free" Monday! Get the King of Togo Togo and Other Stories with Laura Simms - free!

Between now and Wednesday evening, this incredible recording is free for our "BetterListeners." Feel free to spread the word!

Listen to The King of Togo Togo, The Flower of Life, the joyful tale of The Two Brothers and the wacky stories of the Dancing Man and the Origin of the Black Bean.

Music by Steve Gorn and Bill Usher is brilliant. Unforgettable performances!

Click here to listen to a preview and to download

Free Download Monday - A Magical Life with Thomas Moore

Throughout this month BetterListen! will offer a tribute and homage to James Hillman who passed away just last week. This month we will feature and offer free downloads from colaborators with Hillman that we have the good fortune to publish on BetterLIsten! This week our free download Monday program is from one of our favorite authors, Thomas Moore. Thomas worked closely with Hillman over the years. There is a wonderful tribute to James Hillman written by Thomas this week in the Huffington Post.

The inspirational audio program, A Magical Life, with Thomas Moore is free through Wednesday evening. Enjoy and let us know what you think after you listen.

Excerpt 1 from Chogyam Trungpa's "Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior"

This fascinating excerpt from Chogyam Trungpa's seminal work Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior explores the possibility of the actual existence of the legendary Himalayan kingdon called Shambhala -- a place where prosperity, happiness and enlightenment reign. 

Available in digital format exclusively from BetterListen!

According to the legends, this was a place of peace and prosperity governed by wise and compassionate rulers. The citizens were equally kind and learned so that in general the kingdom was a model society. This place was called Shambhala. It is said that Buddhism played an important role in the development of the Shambhala society. The legends tell us that Shakyamuni Buddha gave advanced tantric teachings to the first king of Shambhala, Dawa Sangpo. These teachings, which are preserved as a Kalacakra tantra, are considered to be among the most profound wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. After the king had received this instruction, the stories say that all of the people of Shambhala began to practice meditation and to follow the Buddhist path of loving kindness and concern for all beings. In this way, not just the rulers, but all of the subjects of the kingdom became highly developed people.
 
Among the Tibetan people, there is a popular belief that the kingdom of Shambhala can still be found hidden in a remote valley somewhere in the Himalayas. There are as well a number of Buddhists texts that give detailed but obscure directions for reaching Shambhala. But there are mixed opinions as to whether these should be taken literally or metaphorically.

Excerpt from "The King of Togo Togo and Other Stories"

Laura Simms' recording of "The King of Togo Togo and Other Stories" is a collection of truly delightful stories that the whole family will enjoy.  The following transcribed excerpt of the story about the donkey and goose who were in love will give you a taste of what to expect.

There was once a donkey and a goose and they were in love. They lived on opposite sides of a road separated by two fences and all day they would stare at each other and sigh. They wished that they could speak each other’s language so that they could tell one another how much they loved each other. 

Excerpt from Robert Bly's "What Stories Do We Need"

The following is a transcribed excerpt from "What Stories Do We Need" -- a thought provoking and timeless recording by poet and men's movement pioneer Robert Bly.  "What Stories Do We Need" reminds us that we all carry a personal mythology, but the stories we tell ourselves may not be entirely true... Recorded live at The New York Open Center.

We’re talking about mythology today. And mythology moves towards the soul in the same way that philosophy moves towards the brain. In fact, I think Joe Campbell said the other day, all philosophy is a frozen form of mythology and if you really love a philosopher, then try to recognize the philosopher as being a kind of an ice over the water on which you could walk. And that’s nice, but try to go below and see what the water is doing down there. And in that case, he believes that every philosophical idea has a mythological image underneath it, including all those ones, Heraclitus, and all of that. They come out of centuries of wild mythological imaging.

Excerpt from "Men & Women: Talking Together" with Deborah Tannen and Robert Bly

Note: this award winning  title is Free through this Wednesday evening, Enjoy!

Men's movement pioneer Robert Bly and relationship communication expert Deborah Tannen help us understand how men and women communicate differently and how they can learn to appreciate the other's point of view, as evidenced in this transcribed excerpt from Tannen and Bly's terrific program "Men & Women: Talking Together".  Recorded Live at The New York Open Center.

In a way, a conversation is a ritual. And to come home and tell everything that happened is a ritual, and it’s a ritual that women have engaged in from the time they were very little. So to feel that life is going on as it should, you just want to play out those rituals because it’s not a ritual that men understand. It’s not one that they’ve done. And I want to say right here that all evening we are going to be saying women and men. And nothing that we say will be true of every woman and every man. There are a lot of cultural differences here, too.
 
So I do hear from couples who will say the husband comes home and wants to tell everything and the wife says if it’s not a problem, don’t talk about it. Stop complaining if you don’t want to do something about it. So you hear it from both sides. But because it’s a ritual that most women understand and most men don’t, he looks for the literal reason for the talk and he doesn’t see a reason for that talk. And it’s very frustrating to do something that you don’t understand the reason for. So I’ve had people say, “Well, you know, just say to him I don’t want you to tell me what to do. Just listen to me.” And that makes perfect sense except it will drive a person crazy to sit and listen to something that they don’t understand why they’re listening and what it’s getting at.
 
So sometimes, it’s just as reasonable -- I sometimes use my own husband as an example here. I don’t think he’ll mind. He’s sitting out there. He’s smiling so far.  So I remember I was talking and he said, “Well, I know you just want to talk about it and you don’t want me to give you the solution, but it’s too frustrating for me to sit here and listen when I know the solution. So let me tell you the solution and then you can keep talking about it if you want to keep talking about it.” So that is just as good a compromise, and I’ve heard of couples, too, that compromise in the following way. Not just as you said where they both kind of find different ways of talking but they may have an understanding where she will give him a half hour to not talk and then he will give her a half hour to talk.

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Robert Bly Bio and Links

 

 

Excerpt from "Witches, Scholars, and Other Freedom Fighters" with Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem offers us this excerpt from her recording “Witches, Scholars and Other Freedom Fighters.”

 

What was true in my day is still far too true now, and so we need scholars who are revolutionaries and who dare to think what we might study if we looked at the world as if everyone mattered, and if we studied each continent in the reality of their existence instead of the political fact of their power, in our view of the world.  In fact by not doing that we are missing a very great deal. Think about what we did not learn about the Native-American cultures.  There are hundreds of sophisticated peoples, yet we are only just discovering how useful to us Native American cultures are that were already in this country before it was “discovered”.  And think about the true source of much of our democratic tradition in this country.  

I doubt very much the immigrants -- the European immigrants who came here -- knew a great deal about ancient Greece.  And in any case, in ancient Greece, only about five people voted.  It was a very limited privilege -- very limited privilege -- and in fact the source of our knowledge about democracy really came from the Native American cultures that were already here. We learned the structure of our government from the Iroquois confederacy. And those wise people advised us and were present in Philadelphia explaining that it was of course possible to allow a high degree of autonomy as they did to various nations.  The Cherokees and others still cede overall umbrella powers in a confederacy. Benjamin Franklin admitted that this is a major source of our democracy in this country, but with condescension: “Well if those savages can do it so can we.”