In this classic episode, Andrew speaks with coach and teacher Dena Justice about the work she does with women experiencing burnout in their careers and relationships.

Despite loving her career, Dena hit a point where she felt empty - she was a classic case of a high performer and leader hitting burnout. That led her to choose a powerful pivot out of conventional employment and into her own business.

At the same time, Dena also consciously decided to up-level ALL of her relationships, including spending 3 years intentionally single so she could identify and change the patterns she was repeating that were contributing to relationship dissatisfaction.

Combining all of her experience, Dena now helps other women who are high performers hitting burnout and are scared to admit they’ve hit a plateau or a wall. She helps them get out of their own way and move to the next level to increase their impact so they feel fulfilled and inspired again, as well as helping them create the relationships they want in their lives.

Dena Justice is a coach, mentor and teacher. She is the creator of The Ecstatic Collective. Dena’s lifelong interest in mentoring and coaching began at age seven, when she took her first social-emotional training program. At 15, she taught her first personal development course. She has undertaken years of training in conflict management and mediation, leadership, communication, facilitation, and has two Master’s degrees.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• Three Things Dena Justice knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Take a look at the courses Dena Justice offers in NLP and anxiety management, on her website

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

Can the ancient teachings of Zen Buddhism help us engage with the challenges work, family and relationships throw our way? Teacher, author and Zen Buddhist priest Peter Coyote believes that they can: his new book, Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is, argues that Zen can be both a creative problem-solving mechanism and a moral guide; ideal for the stresses and problems we face day-to-day.

Andrew and Peter discuss:

• How Peter found Buddhism and became a Zen Buddhist priest.
• Why Buddhism ISN’T about turning away from the world.
• Why we need more than just “self-help”.
• How Zen Buddhism helps us engage with the suffering we see in the world.
• The importance of meditation.
• The usefulness of Buddhist teachings like The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.

Peter Coyote is an award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen teacher. He is recognized for his acting in 160 films including E.T., Outrageous Fortune, Bitter Moon and Cross Creek, and his narration work in over 140 documentaries. He narrated the PBS series The Pacific Century, winning an Emmy Award, as well as fourteen Ken Burns documentaries, including The Roosevelts, for which he won a second Emmy. In 2011 he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and in 2015 received “transmission” from his teacher, making him an independent Zen teacher who has ordained his own priests. His latest book is Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is, and he is also the author of several volumes of poetry.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Read Peter Coyote’s book Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is

Visit Peter Coyote’s website

Follow Peter Coyote on Facebook @AuthenticPeterCoyote

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50: https://www.patreon.com/andrewgmarshall

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

It isn’t hard as a parent to find advice on breastfeeding, your child’s education or managing their behaviour. What’s rarer is insight into how the parenting journey changes us as a person. Yet, becoming a mother is a unique opportunity to realise the self more fully.

In this reissue of a classic episode, Andrew and Lisa take a deep dive into motherhood: how it connects us to previous and next generations, how easy it is to be “devoured” by the experience of mothering, and what it means to feel rage as a mother.

Lisa Marchiano is a Jungian therapist from Philadelphia, the co-host of the podcast This Jungian Life, and the author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself. Lisa is also the parent of two young adults.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• Three things Lisa Marchiano knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Take a look at Lisa Marchiano’s book Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself

Listen to the podcast This Jungian Life

Find out about Dream School, This Jungian Life’s twelve-month online course that teaches people how to work with their own dreams.

Follow Lisa Marchiano on Twitter and Instagram @lisamarchiano

Find James Hollis’ essay “Free your children from you” in his book Living an Examined Life.

Read Andrew’s book on making meaningful change in your life Wake Up and Change Your Life: How to Survive a Crisis and be Stronger, Wiser and Happier.

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50: https://www.patreon.com/andrewgmarshall

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

Many couples come to me complaining of a dissatisfying love life: some are in a low-sex or no-sex relationship, while others experience sex as boring and mechanical. In this episode, Diana Richardson shares her “Slow Sex” program, and suggests how you can create a more loving sexual partnership, well into old age.

We discuss:

• Tantric sex, love and sexual fulfilment.
• How to make sex a conscious decision, not an accidental encounter
• How slowness increases sensitivity and awakens the body’s innate mechanism for ecstasy
• The healing spiritual power of slow sex.

Diana Richardson is considered one of today’s leading authorities on human sexuality, and she is known as the pioneer of Slow Sex. She has written eight books on how a person can experience a more fulfilling sex and love life.

Born in South Africa in 1954, she first qualified as a lawyer and then trained as a massage therapist in the UK. Her interest in the body and healing prompted an intense personal exploration into the union of sex and meditation - the essence of Tantra. Since 1993, together with her partner, Michael, she has been sharing her insights and experiences with couples who travel from many different parts of the world to participate in their informative and life changing ‘Making Love’ Retreats in Switzerland.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• How to Discuss Sex With Your Partner
• Three things Diana Richardson knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools https://courses.andrewgmarshall.com/relationship-tools

Visit Diana Richardson’s website.

Watch Diana Richardson’s TEDx talk on The Power of Mindful Sex

Read Diana Richardson’s books, including

• Tantric Sex for Lovers
• Tantric Orgasm for Women
• Tantric Sex for Men
• Slow Sex

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

Guardian columnist Tim Dowling has spent decades chronicling his marriage and family life for the Weekend magazine. His self-deprecating humour and determinedly cynical approach have made him hugely popular with readers.

In this classic episode, Tim and Andrew discuss the layers that go into a joke. What exactly is it that we’re doing when we laugh at ourselves and our own life? Humour can be about storytelling, making sense of the past, finding honesty and creating meaning. It can be a defence mechanism, and a form of self-protection for the intensely shy.

Tim’s readers have watched him move from the chaos of working and parenting younger children to a different stage of midlife. The column has changed, and so has everyone featured in it. Andrew and Tim discuss new hobbies, the relaxation that can come with being older, and the boundaries that need to go up when writing about family for so long.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• Three things Tim Dowling knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Listen to Tim Dowling’s audiobook How To Be Happy All The Time: The Unexpected Joys of Being a Cynic: Everything Bad Is Good for You

Find out more about dealing with midlife and the relationship issues it can cause in Andrew’s book It’s Not a Midlife Crisis, It’s an Opportunity.

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

As children we were probably taught that being selfish was a great evil, to be avoided at all costs. Jungian analyst and author Bud Harris, however, feels that “sacred selfishness” can be a path to genuine self-love, forgiveness and the wholeness we crave.

In this episode, Andrew and Bud discuss

• How to value ourselves and live meaningful lives we love.

• How to become authentic humans, who give back vitality and hope to others.

• How to love others without losing ourselves.

• What true self-love and self-forgiveness mean.

Bud Harris, PhD, is one of the most prolific Jungian authors of our time. He has authored and co-authored over 20 books, and has been in the field of Jungian psychology for more than 40 years. After an early career in business, he experienced a call to become a Jungian analyst, and moved to Zurich, Switzerland, for his training. Now in his 80s, he lives and practices in North Carolina.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• The Transforming Power of Suffering.
• Three things Bud Harris knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Read Bud Harris’s book Sacred Selfishness

Visit Bud Harris’ website

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

Some of us try our best never to think about death, while some of us “live in death’s basement”. Composer, academic and psychoanalyst Paul Attinello lived through the suffering and loss of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. After testing positive for HIV/AIDS, he built a creative and achievement-filled life, over which death nevertheless always loomed.

Then, the advent of lifesaving medications changed everything. Paul had to define a whole new relationship with mortality, as well as experiencing a profound sense of loss for what life might have been like without the spectre of HIV/AIDS.

In this reissued classic episode, Andrew and Paul discuss music, psychoanalysis, and the different ways humans live with the knowledge of their own mortality.

Paul Attinello is an academic and psychoanalyst based in Newcastle University’s International Centre for Music Studies. He also taught at the University of Hong Kong and UCLA, living and working on four continents in the past three decades.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• Three things Paul Attinello knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Find out more about Paul Attinello here

Take a look at Paul Attinello’s research work

Watch Psychosocial Wednesdays, a YouTube channel hosted by Paul Attinello and his colleagues. It offers weekly salons on Jungian ideas and other aspects of psychoanalysis.

Read Andrew’s memoir on grieving the loss of his partner, My Mourning Year

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall

Modern life - careers, technology, the pressures of parenting - can get in the way of our need to form strong attachments to other humans.

According to therapist and author Charisse Cooke, when it comes to our intimate relationships, we are increasingly acting from a place of fear. We're scared we will choose the wrong person, or the person we are with doesn't love us enough. We're scared to get close. We're scared to be on our own. We're scared the one we love is pulling away. We are not securely attached.

Often, our childhood experiences are at the root of our attachment difficulties, meaning that our need to protect ourselves can become greater than our need to love.

In this episode, Andrew and Charisse explore different attachment styles, as well as tools and strategies to create positive and secure attachments.

Subscriber Content This Week

If you’re a subscriber to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Patreon), this week you’ll be hearing:

• How to Nurture Trust
• Three things Charisse Cooke knows to be true.
• AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees.

Follow Up

Get Andrew’s free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things

Take a look at Andrew’s new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools

Read Charisse Cooke’s book, The Attachment Solution

Visit Charisse Cooke’s website

Follow Charisse Cooke on Instagram @charissecooke and on X/Twitter @CharisseCooke3

Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.

Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall