This roundtable on cultivating equanimity psychologically, with my esteemed friends from Nettwerk Music, explored many implications of the podcast: that you can always exert some control over your response to the world; that playing the victim keeps us stuck and is a psychological trap that extends our suffering; that the Fundamental Attribution Error feeds into polarisation and hatred; that mindfulness is at the core of slowing down and magnifying mental contents so they can be recognised and changed; that we must start with self before we try to change others and the world, and thereby we can better infleunce others; and that choosing our repsonse is circumscribed by the very real constraints on our access to high qulaity information and knowledge, and by the pressures to 'choose a side' and not take more nuanced and middle-gound positions. As always with my colleagues from Nettwerk, thsi was a wonderful conversation!

Many of us are finding contemporary life unsettling. This second podcast in the series focuses on psychological pathways to equanimity. We cover a lot of gground: the Serenity Prayer and the freedom that potentially lies in the space betwen stimulus and response; the power to choose as exemplified by Viktor Frankl; The role of courage and of Mindfulness in equanimity; the Buddhist notion of the Sacred Pause and how this can be applied using the 2 Conditions Test and finally, how all of these strategies are 'defusion' techinques as we defuse our identity from our automatic thoughts and feelings.

This roundtable with my colleagues from Nettwerk Music explores the podcast with Martin Kerr, a British Canadian singer songwriter based in Edmonton, Canada. It was a broad-ranging discussion on topics including: creativity as a connection to the ‘undermind’ or unconscious intelligence; the central role of intuition in this process; the role intuition has in life decisions and career moves; the importance of learning from one’s own experience and the problem that others can’t really tell you what you should do; the centrality of music in communal spirit; how music can be a mirror window into the human experience that allows that listener to connect to the artist through this feeling; collective effervescence in a group as a feeling that transcends you, but includes you; eudemonic joy being based in meaning and purpose beyond self; and how the latter relates to the purpose at Nettwerk of connecting people and artists. A great discussion!