There’s a teacher by the name of Dr. Robert Svoboda, who has spent his life studying spiritual work and practicing it himself. He talks about Aghora—he has a trilogy of books based on the Aghori teachings. Aghora is a Sanskrit word which means “not terrible,” “not dreadful,” or “not dread-inspiring.”

The Aghoris—the true Aghoris—are people who have given up any standard way through life and spend time in cremation grounds and cemeteries. They cover themselves with the ashes of the dead. Their cooking fires are made from logs taken from the cremation grounds. They eat food, rice, cooked in a human skull and wear only clothing taken from a corpse.

It sounds awful. It sounds dreadful. But the point of living this kind of a lifestyle—if it can be called a lifestyle—the point of practicing this sadhana or spiritual work, is to be exposed to these dreadful experiences but not be in a state of dread. To be surrounded by the terrible, but not take it terribly. To, as they say in 12-step programs, wear life like a loose garment. Not ignoring what’s going on, nor having our faces pressed up against it.

There are things in the world right now that I wish were different. Personally, I’ve just stopped listening to the news, watching the news, reading the news—just for the moment, just for today—because I don’t want to have to work through my emotional reaction to the news. I don’t want to be horrified every time I look at it. I don’t want to have to calm myself down every time I’m activated by something.

I want to do the work that I want to do—I want to make my world a better place. I want to make it a better place from this center outward. I want to know how to be in this world and not be at the mercy of someone else’s bad behavior, or someone else’s idea of right and wrong. I want to be at the effect of—and in the expression of—the truth I know in here, that I’ve discovered in here. Not the one I’ve been taught, not the one someone else has told me, not the one I’ve had to argue for, but the one that lives inside of me.

When there’s so much going on out here, I can’t hear this. So I keep bringing my attention back to here. Again, I’m not ignoring anything. I’m being here.

Dr. Svoboda puts it this way: According to Aghora, you must burn down all concepts so that you can perceive reality in as unobstructed, unfiltered a way as possible.

What is reality? The reality we can all agree on is: I’m here. And one step further along than “I’m here” is: What am I here for? Based on the way it resonates for me, I’m here to learn how to love. I’m here to learn how to be grounded in the deepest experience of what I am, and then to offer my attention, myself, my heart, my love, outward from here. And to, as much as possible and as often as possible, recognize in everyone and everything around me that same truth out here that lives within here, within me.

To find myself as that flow of energy and life from center to center. And when we do that, we start to build an experience of the world that is so much more powerful than the experience of hatred, and the experience of despair, and the experience of “we’re all going to die.”

Yep, we’re all going to die. I’m not going to suffer about dying until I have to go through it.

So, I want to get busy living today.

Let go of the concept of how it should be, how it shouldn’t be, how you should be, how I should be, and discover what love feels like from this place, in this moment, today. And to clear my mind of all the reasons that love is not available so I can find—not whether love is available, but how love is available.

That’s a great question to ask. Thanks for listening. Hope you have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and authored the book Embracing Bliss.

"If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never be lost."

Today we’re talking about ways to get through the day—one day at a time—and ultimately, to get through our lives.

A lot of us are really challenged right now, trying to accept reality as it is. We wish things were different than they are. We wish it felt different than it feels. We wish something hadn’t happened or that something else had. I’m not trying to speak in code—this is just the way we live most of the time. There’s always something wrong. What is it? Let me figure it out, and as soon as I figure it out, I’ll fix it, change it, and then I’ll be okay.

But we’ve never been successful at this. I just have to say, this is not an equation that works. I can’t change what happened at the beginning of this recording, let alone what happened last week, last year, or when I was 10 years old, or 5 years old, or whenever it was. I can’t change any of it. And when I live in the idea that it should be different, I’m living in the idea that if only I were good enough, I could change it. If only I were better at XYZ, it wouldn’t have happened—or it would’ve happened differently. And on and on it goes.

We end up never being where we actually are. And why do we want to be where we are, when it’s so uncomfortable, when it’s so frightening, when it feels so hopeless?

Well, if I never let myself be where I am, I never get to move from where I am.

As my dear sister Bird says, "You can’t jump from air to air. You have to get here." You have to be here. You have to feel the hopelessness, the despair, the anger, the rage, the sorrow, the sadness, the disgust. Have it all. Have it big. But have it here. Not up here in your head. This is the place of no change. The mind generates thoughts—always telling me how to change that which can’t be changed, and then spinning stories about what it means that this is happening or that is happening, or that they’re doing this, or that I’m doing that. It’s making it all up.

Get here. Be here. Find the courage, or the wherewithal, to feel how desperately uncomfortable it might feel right now—how ugly, how sorrowful. But let yourself be here. And take a breath. Because when we’re trying to get away from it, we don’t get to take a breath. When we’re trying to escape, we lose the ability to breathe.

Be here. And then, once I am here, all the swirling pieces of it can begin to settle down. I can begin to feel that place of "okay"—the truth of me, the center of me, the essence of me. From that place, I will be grounded in reality, and that reality will show me what the next right action might be. One step in the direction of better, in the direction of healing, in the direction of "What the hell do I do now?"

I’ll never figure it out. But when I trust enough to settle into those feelings—to get to the very deepest experience of that discomfort that I can—and then just ask something greater than my thinking, "What’s the next right action? What can I do?" The answer might be the dishes. It might be to have a nap, because I haven’t slept in days. It might be to call a friend and ask how they’re doing. I guarantee that each of us knows at least one person who is having an even more difficult time right now than we are. They could really use our help. They could really use someone to just reflect back, "Yeah, I know. It sucks, doesn’t it?"

I hope you have a beautiful day. And remember:

The only thing we have any choice over in this moment is the attitude we’re going to step forward with today.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and authored the book Embracing Bliss.

I’ve found a lot of help in recovery programs. Some people have problems with recovery programs because they tend to talk a lot about God, and some people have associations with God that are less than ideal. They’ve had bad experiences with parents, churches, or communities that weren’t really living the ideals of true religiosity or spirituality. But the truth is, we have to have something bigger than ourselves to solve our problems.

If I have a problem with food, drugs, alcohol, sex—there are over 130 12-step programs in the United States, so I can’t possibly name all the things we can hurt ourselves with or soothe ourselves with, as the case may be. But in order to find a way free from those addictions, those things that have a hold on us, that cause us to behave in ways we don’t want to behave or do things we don’t want to do, we must find a power greater than ourselves. The shorthand for that is God.

I remember a day in recovery work, hearing something I’d heard 100, 500, maybe 1,000 times before: We have this problem, we can’t manage our own lives, and probably no human power can relieve us of this problem of alcoholic thinking, of torturing ourselves in the mind. God could and would if God were sought. That day, I heard the word sought. I realized I didn’t have to find God—I was meant simply to seek God.

Then I realized: every major religion, every spiritual stream, speaks of God as being omnipresent—every place, every time. So where do I seek God? Where do I not seek God? I seek God everywhere. I seek God in this moment. I seek God in your eyes. I seek God within myself. I seek God everywhere.

But there’s one place where God is never found: in the speculating mind. The speculating mind rehashes what has already been experienced, and God is not something that happened—God is something that is. The one place I will never find God is in my thinking. The one place I can find God is in this present moment.

My job is to get out of my thinking and get here. Not to beat myself up for falling back into my thinking, but simply to come back to this moment, again and again and again, with the idea that there’s something here for me—something useful, something helpful. Healing happens here.

As I began to change and grow spiritually, I realized I had spent a great portion of my life in hell. Yesterday, I looked up hell, just to see what people had to say about it. My favorite definition of hell wasn’t about St. Augustine’s lakes of fire or Dante’s nine circles of hell. My favorite description was: hell is the place where God is not.

Hell does exist—in my thinking, in my conceptualizing mind that can only build an experience of life from what it has already experienced. We don’t thrive on the old and used up; we thrive on the new. We thrive on the new and ever-unfolding now.

So get here. It’s not a bad place to be.

Much love. Thanks for reading.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and authored the book Embracing Bliss.

Most of the way we feel on a daily basis is a habit. We wake up with a certain reset, a certain feeling throughout most of the day. We have ideas of what needs to happen in order for us to feel better. It rarely happens—it never happens the way it’s supposed to. We have this idea that our fulfillment, our happiness, is just on the other side of some accomplishment, some as soon as. But fulfillment isn’t “over there.” Fulfillment is in here.

According to the ancients—the rishis, the seers, the wise women and men of antiquity who felt deeply into the movement of the laws of nature—fulfillment is the truth of what I am. It’s not my job to build it; it’s my job to discover it, and to discover it where it is, which is in here.

Now, if it’s the deepest truth of me—if fulfillment is the truth of me—sat-chit-ananda is the Sanskrit term: existence, consciousness, and bliss. Ananda—that’s the truth of me. If it’s the truth of me, why am I not feeling it?

The answer lies in the fact that everything in this world tells me that I am this nervous system. I am this history. I am this gender, this sexuality. I am this ball of needs and wants and desires, despairs, guilts, shames, and hopes. I am all this. And every one of those needs, wants, desires, shames, guilts, and hopes has been layered into the cells of my body by my experiences in the world. Experiences where I wanted something to happen and it didn’t, where I desperately needed love in a moment and didn’t get it, where someone said something to me that hit me just the wrong way and I took it as a message that I’m unworthy.

These experiences—these mini-traumas, if you will—got layered into the cells of my body so that every time anything similar to that experience occurs, I go into that same feeling, that same litany of “What’s wrong with me?” I am at the effect of these stresses constantly throughout the day.

By the time I’m 18 years old, those who know how to count such things tell me that I have some 200,000 of these so-called stress triggers stored in the cells of my body. What that means is that I’m seeing the world through the lens of “It’s not good. Might be good for someone, but it’s not good for me.” It’s like I have orange sunglasses on. It doesn’t matter what color the world is—it’s all orange, various shades of orange. Except the sunglasses I have on are the glasses of “not me.”

I have to have some way of getting free of these stresses. This is why meditation, why the movement of psychedelics, why trauma recovery is so alive in our Zeitgeist today. Because we’re meant to be happy, joyous, and free. And we are happy, joyous, and free underneath this shell of habituated thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the world.

I can choose away from these reactions again and again and again. But meditation is the thing that, twofold: number one, begins to soften up the field in which all these stresses are stored; and number two, offers me a glimpse of—and sometimes an entire feeling of—what I am absent all these stresses. Sat-chit-ananda—the truth of me, bliss itself, the feeling of “Ah, everything’s okay.”

So I offer you the idea that just once today, you can give yourself that feeling. You can allow yourself that feeling. Let go of all these stories of hopelessness and despair, take a breath, and know that you’re meant to take that breath—and meant to enjoy it.

Find a meditation practice. Offer yourself 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes a day where you’re not worried about anything.

Thanks for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and authored the book Embracing Bliss.

When we talk about surrender, it’s a giving up—a waving of the white flag. It’s a letting go of old ideas. For me, when I’ve had the big surrenders in my life, it’s been: “All right, clearly I don’t know what I’m doing here. I give up. I quit. Please, somebody—something.” Surrender is vital because when I don’t surrender, I’m at the effect of all of my ideas about how this is supposed to be going: how I’m supposed to be going, what I’m supposed to be doing, how it’s supposed to feel. All of it is made up.

But then there’s another step. I don’t surrender into a state of neutrality and then just hope for the best. I’m not a leaf on the stream of life. I surrender, and I let myself be in that state of not knowing. I let myself exist in the space within, or the space within which all of this is occurring. And then I find one of the very few places where I have agency, where I have choice. That’s in: Where do I place my attention now? And for what reason?

The answer to that question—Where do I place my attention now?—is: settle into what it feels like to be here, and then place my attention out here. And why am I placing my attention out here? To listen to the world, to listen to you, to see what’s going on out here. And to see it through the lens of a belief system that has, as its main tenet, the idea that I belong here. That I’m meant to be here. That I’m meant to be doing something here. And that there’s some knowledge, some truth, some flow of life far greater than this small self that wants to guide me.

You can call it a belief in God, a belief in the Divine. Those words trigger some people into unfortunate memories, so we can call it the flow of nature, the flow of love, the flow of evolution. But the belief is that there’s something happening here that’s for the highest good of the whole thing, which by extension is also the highest good for me. And I put my attention out here to be guided to the next right step, the next right action, the next thing that wants to be done through me. The next love that wants to occur through me. The next place where this Oneness would like me to place my loving attention.

I don’t have to figure this thing out. I just want to let go of the idea that I can figure anything out, get fully present to what’s going on here, and remind myself continually that what’s going on here is far greater than I can even imagine.

So give yourself an opportunity today to discover one moment of that far greater thing happening. Let go of the voice of cynicism and live in the silence, in the space of expectation of the Divine.

Thanks for listening. I hope you do feel better. Much luck.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and authored the book Embracing Bliss.

I recently talked here about surrender—about letting go of my ideas of my own limited nature, letting go of my ideas of my own lack of deserving, what some would call a lack of self-love or low self-esteem.

Self-esteem is a funny thing. When I really think about it, the only way I can have any kind of self-esteem, low or otherwise, is to not be who and what I am. In order for me to look at myself and see myself as coming up short, I have to be “out here” someplace. And if I’m “out here” someplace, I am immediately in speculation. I am saying, "If I were one of those people who has the capacity to judge, one of those people who’s better than me, one of those people who raised me, or who taught me in school, or who broke up with me—if I were someone else—how would I see myself?"

And then, what I’m looking at is the whole circus here: not just what I do, and how I do it, and how I am in the world, but also how it feels to be me and how it thinks to be me. Most of the thinking I have that I call low self-esteem is based on me taking these feelings, making sense of them in here, and then telling myself a story about why I have these feelings and why I’ll continue to have them.

Those stories are all something like this: a feeling arises, an "ugh" feeling, and I go into my thinking, or I’m just still in my thinking. I go, "Ah, that feels bad," and the thoughts go, "Yeah, it feels bad. Of course it feels bad—you are bad. Here’s how you’re bad." And it brings up this, and this, and this, and this—it might be that thing I said last night, or last month, or last year, or that thing I did when I was five years old. Bad, bad, bad, bad. And then I build a case against myself so that when I jump out here to speculate on what this thing is worthy of, it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s worthy of nothing. Worthy of nothing but punishment, despair, and hopelessness.

So why not have a cookie? Or another joint? Or a drink? Or, or, or—something, just to take the edge off, something just to allow a moment of grace, a moment of peace, a moment of comfort.

But we’re not meant to live like that. We’re meant to enjoy ourselves. We’re meant to know that we are worthy of love and worthy of life, and worthy of stepping forward into the unknown with the idea that there’s a reason for us to be here.

The whole idea of mindfulness is just to get out of here (the thinking mind) and come back to here (the present). Drop into the space within which all this happens, and then put our attention out into the world rather than into our thoughts about the world. Put our attention on each other, not to see how someone else is thinking about me, but to see how they’re doing. And if we’re having a moment of grace ourselves, to offer a sympathetic ear, to nod at the right time, and to say, “God, yeah, I know—I was there just yesterday or just an hour ago, and now I’m not.”

That means everything. That means the world.

So go out and offer someone today the idea that they belong here, and that their thoughts about themselves are made up from whole cloth.

It’s far more valuable to be here and to do one right thing than to write the book on why I don’t even have one right thing to do. I’ve read that book. It doesn’t end well.

Thanks so much for reading. Have a great day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Embracing Bliss.

One of the reasons I do this podcast is to tell people—to tell you, and frankly, to tell myself—that change is possible. It's the nature of being alive to feel fallible, to feel that we're not coming up to the level that we’re meant to be at, that we’re not succeeding the way we’re meant to succeed. It's the nature of life to cause us discomfort when we're not thriving.

This is how nature keeps itself going. If non-thriving life were allowed to continue, nature would not continue. This is the basis of evolution, or this is one of the prime factors—if not the prime factor—in evolution itself.

When we feel this discomfort, the problem is that our mind makes sense of it by telling us that we're different — we're the ones who don’t get to change; we’re the ones who really are separate, different, apart from. That I don’t belong; that I’ll never get it; that I missed my shot; that thing happened to me; or I happened to that thing. All these different reasons we tell ourselves why we feel stuck and hopeless.

Then someone — someone like me — says, "Well, you have to surrender." And then someone — also like me — says, "What the hell does that mean, ‘surrender’? I gave up a long time ago!"

I think one of the best ways for me to look at surrender is simply to give myself permission to let go of my ideas about what's going on here—to let go of my ideas of who I am, what I am, and really importantly, what I deserve, where I belong. Let go of all those negative ideas that I’ve built over the course of a life to explain to myself why I don’t feel better. Letting go of those ideas allows me the freedom to fall into what's actually happening here.

And what’s that? It’s the flow of the Divine. This whole world—all of it—is the Divine seeking to express itself, the Divine seeking to love itself — through me; through you; toward me; toward you. It is the light of the Divine wanting nothing more than to flow into those places where it hasn't yet flowed, or hasn't flowed fully.

Then to engage, on a daily basis, really, in teaching ourselves—by listening to others, by asking questions, by studying anything we’re attracted to in terms of spiritual teachings—that this is the truth of what's happening here. Teaching ourselves that it is not possible for me to be separate from that evolution of love that is the currency of the universe.

So, what I tell myself is:

Today, when I find myself locked in the battle of "What’s wrong with me?" or "What’s wrong with you?" or "What’s wrong with the world?" I just let go of those thoughts, take a breath, and come back to here. Come back to here with my attention outward, in order to stay out of that thinking for at least a moment, and in order to see evidence of the light of consciousness, to see evidence of the Divine at play in the world. And when I fall back into my thinking, to choose again to come back out here, and again to come back out here.

Thanks for reading. I really do hope you have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Embracing Bliss.

It’s interesting—this [series] is based on the idea that we can shift our experience of the world, our experience of this day, by shifting our thinking. More to the point, by shifting our perspective. But today, I want to talk about how we misuse thinking, and how paying too much attention to the intellect keeps us from having the life we’re meant to have.

I see life as a continual opportunity to step into an experience of the Divine, to step into an experience of the flow of life. We talk about meditation and the oneness that’s behind everything—the oneness of consciousness—but I am in this body-mind system. I’m in this nervous system that doesn’t feel itself as the oneness of what is. It feels itself in relation to everything around it: in relation to the chair I’m sitting in, in relation to you, in relation to my thinking.

That freedom—that fulfillment of consciousness—can be experienced here in the world, as this individuality in the world. The way that I can experience that freedom of consciousness, of the oneness, is in the flow of energy from here to there. Energy from here to my thinking. Energy from here to my future, to my past. The flow of consciousness in the relative world—the flow of energy and information—is what life is meant to be.

We’re meant to find ourselves stuck in the problem of "How the hell do I do this? What do I do about that?" and find the way to flow to this and flow through that.

So my idea of flow is that it’s synonymous with the idea of God in the relative world. I want to find God talking to you. I want to find God acting in a TV show. I want to find God watching a play. I want to find that experience of flow. And yet... and yet, so many things teach us to step out of that flow, to step out of that relationship with the world, and to step into a relationship with our thinking.

We step into a relationship with our thinking about the world. We step into a relationship with our thinking about each other. We step into a relationship with my thinking about your thinking about me. All of which takes me progressively further away from the one place where freedom actually exists and is available to me at every moment—right here.

The one place I will never find an experience of God is in my thinking. My thinking is a tool for solving problems. My relationship to God is not a problem; it’s a process. My relationship to you is not a problem; it’s a process. If I see it as a problem, I look at it through the problem-solving tool. Likewise, if I look at my relationship with you through the problem-solving tool, all I’m going to find is a problem.

I don’t want you to be a problem. I want you to be a place where I can express and experience the love that I’m here to express and experience. And I wish the same for you.

So today, I will notice when I’m using the mind for something other than its purpose of solving problems.

I will notice when I’m trying to figure out the next right action, when I’m thinking through my conversation of last night for the fourth time—or 14th time. I will notice when my mind starts to tell me all the reasons I’m not successful and not happy. I will notice these things and I will step out of the speculating mind and into present moment awareness, into the loving embrace of nature itself, into the presence of this oneness that wants nothing other than to guide me to my highest good.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Embracing Bliss.

If I'm not making mistakes, I'm not doing my job. And if I'm doing my job and making mistakes, I am always going to be able to see how I could have done yesterday better than I did it.

Today, I want to talk about guilt and the trouble that I’ve had with it, and that some of you might relate to.

You know, the word sin, as many of you have heard, is defined as “missing the mark” or as “an error.” That's actually the literal definition of sin: to make an error in judgment, an error calculation — to miss the mark — and then to alter the way I'm approaching my life in the next moment, based on my assessment of being someone who missed that mark.

I was once told by a psychiatrist — one of the wisest people I ever knew — that guilt is, by and large, a worthless emotion. It comes from being a herd animal, being a part of a pack. It’s the feeling that one gets when one is just far enough outside the center of the pack to attract predators, but not so far away as to have the predators attack only that one member of the pack of the herd. So guilt is this extreme discomfort that makes one either want to get back into the center of things and take a breath there, or get as far away from all these others to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling.

Another way of looking at guilt is that what's actually happening is I am judging my behavior of the past through the eyes of my present state of consciousness. In reality, everything I experience is brand new. I've done podcasts before, but I've never done this one on this day, in this configuration — having what I just had for lunch, having had the experiences that led up to this moment. This is all brand new.

When I look at this experience tomorrow, I am going to be looking through the eyes of someone who has learned by having gone through this experience. And by definition, because I am a creature of learning, not a creature of habit—I'm a creature of always evolving—I am going to see how I could have done things differently, and perhaps even better.

We're on the planet to grow. We humans grow by making mistakes. We grow by stepping into the unknown and finding out what works and what doesn’t. We step forward, we fail. We stand up, we step forward, we fail. We stand up, we step forward, we fail better. Self-forgiveness has to be a part of this equation, or we're not giving ourselves permission to be alive—permission to be what we're meant to be, which is an ever-evolving experience of consciousness.

I am consciousness having a human experience.

Consciousness is always about expanding, about becoming more of what it is meant to be—which is everything, which is wholeness, which is fulfillment. Humanness is about staying small enough not to be seen, not to be heard, not to be hurt. And between these two poles, human life is lived.

I have to find a way of letting myself off the hook. What works for me is to just imagine a consciousness far greater than my own that is the whole of what is, that is the universe itself. And is that consciousness concerned with the wrong turn made by this tiny little molecule down here? Nah. It knows that this tiny little molecule learned something by making that wrong turn, it's going to turn right the next time—or not—which is all part of the play and display of consciousness.

You know, we're here to make the mistakes and learn from them—and, God help us, enjoy them.

So today, I will at least make the effort to leave guilt and self-judgment aside. I will give myself permission to not know how to do something, and I will do it anyway, as well as I can, trusting that I have been designed to learn in just this way.

Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Embracing Bliss.

I'll start with a quote from Pema Chödrön and her recording Getting Unstuck:

One of the greatest problems in the Western world is the idea of suffering—that life is suffering, that suffering can't be avoided, that - what good is spiritual work when suffering exists? In the Veda, as well as in the Buddhist teachings, a distinction is made between suffering and discomfort—even extreme discomfort. Discomfort is the nature of the experience of being in a nervous system. It's uncomfortable to be in a body, it's uncomfortable to be sensitive to our surroundings, to be sensitive to the feelings that arise in our interactions with each other, in our interactions with ourselves.

And when we add into the equation that we are constantly evolving, constantly growing, constantly expanding into more and more and more awareness, more and more consciousness, it’s easy to see that every time we grow, we step into feeling even more. Every time we expand into an experience of more consciousness, we’re more conscious of the way it feels to be in a body, and by definition, it’s uncomfortable. Like if you've had a cast on your arm for six weeks and it comes off, the air against your skin hurts—but after a day or so, it becomes normalized. Like this, every time I grow, it hurts. It's uncomfortable. That's a given.

The problem arises, and suffering arises, when I fall into the story of “Why?” — Why me? Why now? Whose fault is it? Is it their fault? Is it my fault? I should have done this. I shouldn't have done that. They should have done this. They shouldn’t have done that. I need to do this next time… — We call that speculation. Speculation is the intellect and the ego concocting a story that —it thinks — if it just gets it right, the discomfort will cease, the pain will go away. It’s not possible.

What ends up happening is suffering. I end up telling myself a story about things that can’t be changed, and staying out of the only place where things can be changed—which is in this moment, and in the discomfort of this body, of this nervous system, leaning into the discomfort, and taking it as a given, and stepping out of the suffering mode of consciousness. Because this really amazing thing happens when you lean into the suffering. This really amazing thing happens when you lean into the discomfort of being alive, the discomfort of sorrow, the discomfort of loss, the discomfort of anger, fear, shame, guilt, sadness.

Once you lean into the discomfort, life really has not much more to throw at you. It's like, "What are you going to do—make me hurt? It already hurts. What now?" Then we begin to be able to step into life without the fear of what it’s going to do to us. And that sensitivity that a moment before felt like extreme discomfort or pain actually becomes the capacity for the joy of living.

I have to be sensitive to the way it feels to be alive in order to step into life and experience the joy of living that’s available to me here, that is just waiting for me to engage with it. I can tell myself a story later. I can tell it to my grandkids years or decades from now. I don’t need a story as to how to step into this next moment. I just need to step.

Today, I will set an aspiration to be present in the sensations of the moment: to be alive in my own skin rather than in my thinking, to be with you rather than my thoughts about you, to be in this present moment rather than in my thoughts of how this present moment should be going.

Have a great day. Thanks for being here.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

I have a quote from Dwight Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States. He was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and became a five-star General of the Army. And here's what he has to say about war:

My father was a soldier in World War II, in Okinawa. It was brutal, it was futile, it was stupid, and apparently, it was necessary. My father carried that for the whole of his life. I talked to his female cousins once, and one of them took me aside and said, 'Jeff, I just want you to know that the man who left for the war is not the man who came back.'

I never got to know the man who left for the war. I knew the man who came back, and we didn't have the best of communication. Right toward the end of his life, we went out drinking together—the only time we ever did that. We were having shots and beers at Pop's Inn in Park City, Montana. We were on our second round, and this was a month and a half before he died. He had spent the afternoon with some cousins, drinking beers, and he seemed pretty mellow, like he wanted to talk.

At a certain point, he said, 'You know...'

I was so excited. He was going to tell me something, he was going to give me the secret of life, and we were going to have that father-son conversation I had always wanted us to have. And I waited, and I waited. Then I said, 'What?'

He said, 'Nah.'

I said, 'No, really. What?'

He said, 'Forget it. You'll never understand.'

I was crushed. I took it in my self-centered way, thinking there was something wrong with me—that he couldn't really talk to me, one man to another. And I was 23 years old; I didn't know how to insist on having the conversation. I just knew the conversation was over. We finished our drinks and went home silently.

I was telling my wife this story the other day, along with another story about the end of his life, and she said, 'Oh, he didn’t want to burden you.'

It blew my mind. I suddenly realized he was going to tell me about his war experience. And then, in his way, he looked at me, this 23-year-old boy who was struggling so much just to be in the world, just to be alive and inside himself, and thought, 'No, I’m not going to do that to him. I’ve had to carry it. I’m almost done carrying it, but I’m not going to make him carry it too.'

It took me decades to come up with that idea of why things played out the way they did, but it really illustrates the point that people rarely do things to me. I just happened to be in the way. And when I’m in the way and needy, and someone does something, then whether they mean it to be directed at me or not, it is to me. I take it personally, but that’s on me, isn’t it?

It would be arrogant for me to presume to forgive my father for being the man he was. Every one of us is doing the best we know how to do. I know I haven’t done it perfectly, and he certainly didn’t do it perfectly. But he did himself absolutely perfectly. And I love him for that. I’m so grateful for the lessons I’ve gotten from him, even the ones that took me another 50 years to learn.

So today I say, let’s go into the world and imagine that the people we meet are doing it as well as they know how to do it. And by offering a smile and the feeling of, 'It’s okay,' maybe they’ll be able to smile and be okay in return.

Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

This is from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“The life is never so alive as after death.” That doesn’t make sense from the perspective of the ego. From the perspective of the ego, this is life. There is nothing other than this. There is nothing beyond this.

Those of us who have spent any time meditating know how desperately the ego does not want us to transcend it. It fights us when we simply want to let go and settle into an experience of being. Imagine how much more desperately it fights when we take on the concept of death. The ego doesn’t want to die. It cannot let itself die, and it insists on never even thinking about death. Just the fact that I’m talking about it here goes against almost everything that we have in our culture concerning death. It’s not something to be talked about; it’s something to be ignored, something to be put off for as long as possible. Then, maybe at the very end, if we have to, we’ll take a look at it and see how we’re going to walk through it. Until then, we pretend it’s not there, or we pretend that death certainly happens but is never going to happen to me.

The truth is, life is energy. Life cannot be created nor destroyed. There is this experience of me, but this experience of me was going on before this body came into existence. It’s happening as this body exists, and it continues when this body falls away. It’s a given that the life of me cannot go away.

The body is dying all the time. We’re losing skin cells constantly, and our organs are replacing themselves. Even our bones and teeth are completely different than they were seven years ago. This body is dying and replenishing itself constantly. And yet, there’s something in me that remembers being six years old and sitting next to a stream, listening to the water flow by and being comforted by it. There’s something in me that remembers being on the hood of a car during the homecoming parade when I was 16 years old. There’s something in me that remembers getting married and getting divorced. There’s something in me that was looking through these eyes at six, at 16, at 35, and is the same today.

That is the truth of me. My job, as I understand it, is to get in touch with that truth, to know myself as that truth, so I can begin to have the experience I’m meant to have here. This part of me is changing all the time, and I want to allow it to change in the direction of evolution. I want it to grow in my ability to take on life, to offer to life, to offer myself to life. I want to live this life fully, right up until the very moment life drops this body and moves on to whatever comes next. It’s really the most perfect design for living I can imagine, and it’s right here for the taking.

I remind myself that this is temporary, that there’s work to be done, and that I’m the one who’s meant to be doing it. That work has to do with love, and it has to do with life—offering that life wherever I can.

Today, I will imagine what life would feel like if I could be free of suffering, free of fear, free of death, and free of the fear of death. I will ask myself to imagine joy everlasting, and I will seek to feel some small part of it in my day, and to offer that small part of it to someone else.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

My father was in World War II, in the Pacific Theater. He never spoke about his time there, but there was evidence of it in the way he was with us, with the world, with himself. And I've been writing about my father, and I just want to read a little thing that I wrote recently.

Dad is coughing. It's bad. “Al?” He keeps coughing, his hand pressed to his mouth. "You okay?" From the kitchen, my mother looks worried, she’s edging toward the dining room. Still busy coughing, Dad can't answer. He can't speak. He can't even gesture. His brother, Uncle Tom—they farmed together—answers for him, "He's okay. Just give him a minute." Tom was in the war too, but in the Navy - communications - stationed in India. You can tell by the tattoo on his forearm, a palm tree above a banner that reads India.

We all wait, holding our breath in sympathy for my father. Finally, he stops, his face red. His shoulders dropping in relief. He's a little shaky, but he pulls in a full breath. Then he opens his hand to show us what he has caught. He looks surprised, like, "Can you believe it?" It's a piece of shrapnel—ugly, dark, twisted lead—that has worked its way through his body to the lungs and now has been expelled. Dad stands up, takes a tissue from the box on the telephone counter, wraps it up, and tosses it into the garbage underneath.

I recently read up on where my father was stationed. It was in Okinawa. It was some of, if not the worst, fighting in the Pacific toward the end of World War II. It was the last island before the island of Japan itself. And the Japanese there were making a final stand. And on Okinawa, nearly a quarter of a million people were killed over the course of 83 days, and my father was one of the 50,000 U.S. casualties there. He was blown up, got filled with shrapnel, spent a year in an army hospital. Everyone he knew, except one other guy, died.

For the longest time, I had a problem with my father. It was hard to communicate with him. He was shut down, and he seemed not to want to have much to do with me. I took that personally. Now, I'm seeing what he was carrying with himself every moment of every day, without the benefit of the spiritual tools I have, of the different modes of therapy that are available to us today, just of the recognition that war is hell and you don't have to walk through the aftermath of it alone.

You know, in World War I they had shell shock, in Vietnam they had PTSD, and in World War II, they had "Just zip it up. Don’t talk about it. Come home and act normal. Try to raise a family."

I see today that he really did the best he knew how to do, and it was a lot. There was always food on the table. There was always a roof over my head. It wasn’t touchy-feely, wasn’t even loving and kind some of the times. But he was carrying so much, and he was still able to take care of us along with it. And for that, I'm just really grateful.

I hope that if anyone has a problem with anyone in their life — you don't have to forgive them, you don't have to let them off the hook, but at least understand that they are human. And it's a given that they’re doing it as well as they know how to do it. And one day, if you're lucky, you'll understand them in a way that will allow you to take a full breath and see them as just one more soul doing the best they know how to do from one end of life to the other.

Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

I have a quote today from James Baldwin:

The whole reason we're here is to learn about how to love, and how to receive love. And the whole message that we give ourselves and that we take from the world—whether it's giving it to us or not—is that we're not worthy of love and that we're not worth offering our love to anyone else. We're taught that we're needy, and we need to get from the world in order to be okay. And love is the opposite of that. Love is about offering to the world.

There is no fulfillment I can find from the world to make me feel okay in here. There is no love I can offer to the world unless I feel okay in here, because I'll always be at the mercy of my neediness.

This is why we do spiritual work— is to get filled up in here. Because in here is already filled up. In here is the place of truth for each of us, for all of us. I am fulfillment itself — beyond all the messages of unworthiness, and lack of value, and not mattering. Underneath all of that — all the thoughts and stories of "what's wrong with me, what's wrong with you, what's wrong with the world" — the truth of me, and the truth of you, is: I am fulfillment itself. And from that place, love is the only thing I can do. Offering outward is the only thing I can do.

I would love for everyone to find some way of getting past the thinking and into that deepest truth of what we are. Because from that place — love can be challenging, love is challenging, and love is something that has to be learned and relearned and relearned — but from that place, it's the only possible reason for being here.

And, not coincidentally, but it is the actual fact that, when I find my way of doing that—of loving from that deepest part of me—then I actually do begin to experience the joy of living that I've been looking for all along.

So today, just find someone to love.

Find someone that you can't imagine ever being able to love, and see if you can just open yourself to the fact that if it's all about love, could I possibly love even that?

It's a good challenge.

Enjoy the day. Thanks for listening.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

Today, I'd like to reference James Hollis, who's a Jungian, and his book Swamplands of the Soul was really important for me back in my 40s when life looked even harder than it was looking in my 30s. I heard him speak on the Huberman Lab podcast last week, and he said some really brilliant things.

He said, "There is a bliss of aliveness that includes pain." And he says, "I feel lucky to be alive to feel heartbreak."

James Hollis has been on the planet for quite a while, and he's learned that life does include discomfort, life does include pain, and that the gift of being alive is the gift of feeling every bit of it. I've heard it said that, in the East, the Vedas says that even the devas are jealous of mankind for its ability to feel everything—grief, pain, sorrow, shame, joy, all of it. The way that Hollis is able to start his day like that, and move through his day like that, is described in another thing he said in the same podcast, which is:

That is such a perfect descriptor of me anytime I'm having a problem. I don't go to a new set of coping skills, I go to the same coping skills I learned when I was four years old. And just imagine being four years old. You're helpless, you're a victim of everyone and everything - they can do anything to you they want, and you can't stop it, and you need to please them in order to get food, in order not to be thrown out of the house. I mean, it's sheer survival without a set of rules, or tools, that are even remotely useful in later life.

Another way of saying what Hollis said there is that I'm always serving something, and it's important for me to ask myself what that is. The way I say it is if that I don't choose to be of service in the world, I will then step out into the world being of service to the ego. And the ego is always trying to get, and being of service is always trying to offer, trying to give. What is it that I want to give? I want to give what it is that I believe life is always trying to give to itself. And what life is always trying to give to itself—what consciousness is always offering to itself—is a way to be more uplifted, a way to be more hopeful, a way to expand into more and more of the truth of what we are, and offer this truth to everyone we see, everyone we meet, everyone we come into contact with, and to offer this truth to ourselves by offering it to the world (and to my dog who just came into the room).

I'm always in service to something.

What I want to be in service to is that thing that's actually happening here, that movement in the world of life loving itself, and uplifting itself, and offering to itself.

And I can do that simply by saying the truth of me is not my neediness.

The truth of me is my ability to be of service. How can I be of service here? And then discover what that is in this next situation.

Thanks for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

Today I'm speaking about a piece called Philip Marlowe and the I Ching — this is from my book, Embracing Bliss. I'll start with a quote from the I Ching:

The I Ching is all about the constant changing-ness of life. And here's a quote from Raymond Chandler, actually, from The Long Goodbye, which is

I love Raymond Chandler. He really made me feel comfortable here in Los Angeles when I first moved here, and was terribly lonely, and afraid, and unsure of what life was about. And I used the I Ching a lot to just look for some kind of guidance in life. Someone to say, “Yes, do this,” “No, don't do that,” or “Things will change,” as they always do.

And I was at an acting class downtown one night in my taxi, I was driving a taxi at the time, and someone broke into the car and stole all my books, all my notebooks. And this included the I Ching. It was a terrible loss.

A few weeks later, I was at the Counterpoint Bookstore up in Hollywood, and I started talking to someone who had just begun working there. He was a former Jesuit priest, and he had left the Brotherhood because he had taken a vow of silence for 22 years and then they said, “Oh by the way, you can talk now.” And it just blew his mind. And he didn't know what to do with his life. So he was selling books in Hollywood.

And I told him about the loss of my I Ching, and he gave me his copy. And so I found my first edition copy of The Long Goodbye, and I gave him that in exchange. Just because it was so valuable to me that someone saw my despair, and from the place of their own despair, reached out to offer me something. I had to answer that in kind.

You know, one day I went back to the bookstore, and the former priest was no longer there. I really would love to know what happened to him. I know what happened to me, and I know that both he and I were seeking an experience of the divine that was knowable, that was feel-able. And when I wasn't able to find that experience of the divine, I told myself it was because I didn't deserve it.

That's the natural thing that we humans do. “It's not happening for me, it seems to be happening for others, I must not deserve it. I must be bad. There must be something wrong with me.” What I found is that it's not possible to not belong here. It's not possible to not be worthy of life. To not be worthy of an experience of the divine.

In fact, it's not possible to have an experience that is other than an experience of the divine. But it took many, many years of seeking, and searching, and finally finding a meditation practice that allowed me to go past the mind that tells me terrible stories about myself, and past those places where someone as much in despair as Raymond Chandler was, was actually a step up from where I was.

I'm so grateful for the people in my life, those who have written things, and those who have just reached out to me here and there and said, “Here's one more moment. Stay alive for one more moment and keep moving forward. There is a place to get to.”

Which is what I want to say to you here.

Today, just remember that if you're here, you belong here. If you're here, you have a reason to be here. And life can be about finding that reason.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

The Road Less Traveled (by M. Scott Peck) is a book that was written in 1978, which is the same year I moved to Los Angeles. I was…in despair. I was lost. I was alone.

I didn't come here alone but I very quickly became alone and my life fell apart yet one more time, and someone noticing my despair recommended this book to me that had just been published. I went to The Bodhi Tree Bookstore which is where we bought our spiritual books back then (there was no “online”).

I got the book and I remember going home to my little funky apartment on Highland Avenue. It was a sub-basement that looked out onto a dirt lot. And I sat down in my salvaged-from-the-street chair and had a glass of brandy, because I was very stylish, and lit a cigarette, and opened the book, and read the first line which said, “Life is difficult.” I literally threw the book across the room.

It hit the wall and landed on the floor with a broken back and I didn't care. I was so angry. I didn't want to hear that life is difficult. I wanted to hear there's a way of doing this that doesn't hurt so much; there's a way of doing this that that feels like I belong here, that feels like there's a reason for me being here. I wanted to know that I was okay.

I just wanted to matter, and I didn't. And now this book is telling me, yep, you're right! You don't matter, nothing matters—and it's challenging.

Now, eventually I read the rest of the book. And I found that M. Scott Peck, the author, was actually right. Life is difficult. It's a real challenge to be here. It's a real challenge to find our way on a daily basis, constantly having to choose love over fear, having to choose identification as the inner truth of myself, as opposed to the ego, outer truth of myself.

I described it in here, in this book, as “Having to choose life over death and love over separation and judgment, again and again.”

And as it turns out, that's the reason we're here - is to be able to make those choices, to have to make those choices, to learn the lessons that we learn in making those choices.

The teacher David Hawkins said, “If we didn't have this world exactly as it is… to learn the lessons that are available here, we would have to go build one to have the same experience.”

The truth is life is difficult. Life is a challenge. But once we accept that, life really has nothing else to throw at us. And then we can begin to get present to the good parts.

And I like the way that I wrote this, so I’m just going to read it about today:

Today I will see each problem as an opportunity to find compassion for my fellows and myself. I will ask myself to love where it feels impossible to love, to accept where acceptance may feel like losing, to celebrate this life of possibility when it feels like there is no good option left for me to try.

Amid hopelessness and despair, I will say something like, “Well, it will be interesting to see how this turns out.” Help me God to stay present, and aware, and willing.

And thank you for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

“I have spent many days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”

–Rabindranath Tagore

I was told a story from ancient times about a prince who is out hunting with his retinue, and he wounds a stag and follows this deer deep into the woods and becomes separated from his people.

And when he realizes that he is separated from his people, it's already turning dark.

He's deep in the woods, but he doesn't know which way is home.

So he stops. And waits to try to figure it out. But he's so deep in the woods that he can't see where the sun is setting. He can't find his bearings, and now it’s becoming more and more fully dark.

And he's beginning to hear the animals of the forest and see their eyes looking at him. And he's imagining them seeing him as their meal for the evening. And finally he realizes that he has to move, he has to strike out for home. And he takes a step, and as he takes his step, a pathway is lighted in front of him.

And it's so astonishing that he stops and of course, the pathway disappears. So then he takes another step, and the pathway becomes lighted, and he takes another step and it becomes more lighted, and as he keeps walking forward, the pathway continues to show itself to him. And in this way he finds his way home.

The point being, of course, we have to move.

We have to be alive. We have to have our lives.

Days and nights are irresistibly passing. There's no more time to wait until it's right. Wait until we're ready. Wait until we're worthy of stepping forward. Wait until we know it's going to be a good experience. We have to move. And what direction do we move in? We have to ask the question, not “What do I need from life,” but, “What does life need from me?”

The truth is that each of us has been perfectly designed to bring something unique to the equation, to bring something true and real that can only be brought from this being, from this expression of life. How do we find out what that is? By offering what it is we think we have to offer, by moving in the direction of what feels right.

It's a version of Joseph Campbell's Follow Your Bliss. That doesn't mean look for some kind of goofy happiness, but look for what brings you alive. Look for what causes you to come more alive than you were the moment before you started doing it. Look for those things that cause you to lose track of time, to lose track of your needs, that bring you into alignment with timelessness. Do what comes naturally. Do what feels right. If nothing feels right, then just take a step and see what happens. Because one step will lead to another step. And if I am doing the work to get in touch spiritually, nature will always show me one step to take that is more in the direction of evolution than any other step.

And that's all I need — is one step — because that one step will put me in a new experience of life, and then one more step will be offered to me.

We're here to enjoy our lives. We enjoy our lives by offering to the equation, to the world, to consciousness itself, to each other, that deepest truth of what we are.

Today I will ask of something other than myself, what I have to offer. I will ask God, or love, or consciousness, or the tree outside my window: What can I offer?

And I will look for a place to offer it.

Thanks for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

I'd like to read you a poem by Mary Oliver, who was a great protector and reporter from the natural world. She spent a lot of time walking in the woods.

This is called:

The World I Live In

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
     reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
     what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
     tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
     ever, possibly, see one.

It's almost a shame to comment after reading that. It kind of says it all. The point for me is that we spend so much time in our thinking and asking ourselves —What's wrong with me? Why am I unhappy? Why did I do that thing? Why didn't I do that other thing? Why wasn't I born at a different time, to different people, as a different person? — always looking for what's wrong, for all sorts of of reasons that we could explain scientifically, but the point is: as I look at the world through my negative thinking, what I build is a negative experience of life.

What I build is an experience of life based on everything that's happened before, never open to the new. What meditation, what spiritual work, offers me, is a way by which to step out of my thinking and into the present moment with the expectation of the new, with the expectation of the divine.

Because only if we're looking for the divine in our world will we ever possibly see it.

Today I will expect the world to offer me opportunities to live, to love, to create, to fly. And I will assume that I am exactly the right person, in this moment, to accomplish what nature would want to have accomplished in this moment.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.

I have a quote from the Buddha: 

“You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are, yourself. And that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” 

This is not the way I learned to look at myself, nor most of the people I know. And, as a matter of fact, I used to treat myself as if I weren't worthy of love and affection. I used to treat myself as if I were worthy of very little. And what I used to give myself that “very little” was drugs, and alcohol, and cigarettes, and romance, and sex, and anything — anything — anything other than to feel the way it felt to be me. And, somewhere in all of that, this drive inside took me to a place of letting go, progressively, of all those ways of fixing, all those ways of avoiding life.

Something inside drove me to become an actual member of society who, apparently, is value-added to any situation I walk into because I walk into situations asking to be of service, rather than asking to get fixed. But the voice in my head — the one that used to tell me how terrible I was, and how it didn't matter if I ruined my lungs with smoking, and ruined my life with drinking, and ruined my experience of the world with taking drugs — that voice is by and large the same today as it was then.

My life has changed absolutely 180 degrees. The voice in my head still says, basically, “you suck and you should die.” So apparently doing this thing a little better, doing it a little differently, progressing over the years, doesn't change the voice. So why would I listen to it? It's making it all up and it will never tell me I'm okay.

I'm telling you: you're okay. 

I've had to learn to tell myself": I'm okay.

Why am I on the planet? Doesn't matter, I'm here to find that out.

Do I belong on the planet? Am I here? Yes. End of the question.

That's the answer: I belong here.

What am I meant to be doing? That's what this moment is meant to be about.

It's not about trying to get good enough to be okay.

It's about knowing not only that I'm okay, but that the universe needs me exactly as I am, with all of my foibles, and all of my history, and all the bad things I've done and had done to me.

The universe needs me here. And now. And finding my way to be capable of love and finding my way to acceptance of myself. And of you. And of this next moment we share together.

Today, I will find a reason to smile, if only for a moment. And I will ask of something greater than me - of nature, of God, of consciousness, of the universe, of the tree outside my window - to show me one next right step to take. And I'm going to take that step and see where it goes. 

Thanks for listening. Have a beautiful day.

Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Art That Pays.