Guru Viking Podcast

In this episode I’m joined by Dr Miles Neale Buddhist psychotherapist and author of Gradual Awakening. When Dr Neale contacted me to offering appear on the podcast, I was intrigued by his impressive list of mentors - including Columbia University’s Professor Robert Thurman and Geshe Tenzin Zopa. Miles recounts how an affluent but disturbed childhood with alcoholic parents and a narcissistic father drove him to self harm and dissatisfaction, and how he found solace and healing in religious practice and a series of influential mentors. Miles tells a remarkable story of a supernatural experience with a reincarnated child master, a ‘tulku’. Miles goes on to addresses the conflicts between the view of his Western therapeutic training, which prizes healthy parental attachment, and his religious affiliation with Tibetan Buddhism, in which specially chosen boys as young as three years old are removed from their homes to undergo rigorous training to become avatars of their lineage tradition. Miles discusses th