What Legacy Do We Want to Leave Behind? Practices To Access The Best of You

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In this first episode of season two, I talk with Tracee Stanley about how to have an experience of yourself through skilled and intentional rest, self-inquiry, and aligned learning.

This season is about how we learn through experience using 4 core practices: Challenging your perspective, stretching and building range, directing your learning, and reflection and inquiry. Tracee’s way of working is a deep way to learn through experience—listen to hear how our conversation touches on all four of these practices that might just change your life.

Tracee Stanley, a yoga teacher and bestselling author who transitioned from a successful filmmaking career in Hollywood to teaching Yoga Nidra and self-inquiry, challenges conventional ideas surrounding work culture and productivity by emphasizing the need for balance, rest, and reflection so we can leave a greater legacy behind us.

Key Topics:

01:24 Learning through experience to honor a less conventional path: From successful Hollywood filmmaker to yoga teacher;

08:03 Experience can offer a thread to yourself: There is a difference between knowing the self and coming into the self. Certain practices can help us peel back the layers of who we are not.

10:17 Experience opens a door: How the experience of rest practice opened new possibilities

16:30 Challenging your perspective: Understanding yourself, experimenting, and learning what you truly want;

19:11 Stretching and building range: Asking questions that allow you to learn through experience and make shifts towards what you want;

25:27 Directing your learning: Using intentional rest and the space of the liminal to capture what you already know;

28:45 Reflecting and inquiring: What legacy do we want to leave behind? How attachment, aversion, and fear are keeping us from intentionally resting and leaving a legacy of exhaustion behind us.

37:09 The group is more powerful than the individual: How community can help support you as you shift old patterns and learn through experience.

Additional Resources from Tracee Stanley

Practice: Grounding Deep Relaxation

Website: https://www.traceestanley.com/

Books: The Luminous Self: Sacred Yogic Practices and Rituals to Remember Who You Are | Radiant Rest: Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation & Awakened Clarity

About Learning Through Experience

We all want work—and life—to be better. So how do we make it happen? How can we learn from the experience we have to create a future that we want? This is the realm that much of Dr. Heidi Brooks’ work explores. As we navigate the everyday, she invites us to cultivate the capacity to learn through experience, and to apply the wisdom gained to co-create a future that is worth fighting for.

Almost all adults work and experience organizational life. Work is the common connector; it dominates where we engage with the world and where the world engages with us. And for Dr. Brooks, it’s a canvas for the great re-imagining of our humanity. So, what can we do every day to help create an experience of work that people want to be part of? This everyday leadership invitation goes beyond deliverables and tasks into thinking of work as a space that we co-create.

Season Three of the Learning Through Experience podcast echos Dr. Brooks’ course structure, centered on interpersonal and group dynamics. Even at Yale, there is a place for learning through experience—not just books. The answer you seek is not on page 4. Watch and listen as Dr. Brooks meets with colleagues and authorities in their fields about transformative experiences that shape and shift how we learn and listen, feel and connect, reinforcing that experience precedes thinking that challenges our paradigms and assumptions.

In order to challenge the status quo, we need to have experiences that open us up to learning. Are you ready? Join us for Season Three of Learning Through Experience.

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