Therapeutic Spirituality: A Heart-to-Heart Conversation on the Spiritual Ninja Podcast
The following is adapted from Lorell Frysh’s appearance on The Spiritual Ninja Podcast with host Jonathan Hewitt.
One Spirit, Many Paths
Jonathan Hewitt opens every episode of The Spiritual Ninja Podcast with a simple but profound premise: that spirituality is not a retreat from the world — it’s the most practical thing in it. It’s what allows us to show up as we truly want to. And in this conversation with therapist, interfaith minister, and author Lorell Frysh, that premise comes fully alive.
For Lorell, the division between inner and outer, spiritual and practical, has never quite made sense. “We are a continuum of experience,” she says — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual all at once. The idea that one aspect of us could be separate from the rest simply has not been her experience.
What follows is a conversation that moves through continents and decades, through mystical encounters and therapeutic wisdom, through grief and humor and the deep, abiding intelligence of indigenous peoples — all circling back to the same essential truth: that we are made of love, and because of that, we cannot be anything but loving, and anything but loved.
A Childhood Shaped by Contrast
Lorell grew up in apartheid South Africa, in a family she describes as warm, liberal, and white-privileged — living at the top of an economic triangle while largely separated from the majority of people around them. That contradiction shaped her from the start.
Down the road from her childhood home, the African Church of Zion gathered every Sunday. As a small child, she would play in the fields nearby, watching people dance, sing, and enter trance states in the name of Jesus. Her mother was a yoga student whose teacher was a disciple of J. Krishnamurti, and so alongside the charismatic worship, there was also quiet meditation. Lorell has been meditating since she was a very little girl — it was, she says, her bedtime practice.
“If you say did you actively go on a spiritual journey,” she reflects, “my answer for when I was very young is that I never really actively looked for something. But things kept coming to me.”
At thirteen, skipping school in downtown Johannesburg, she wandered into a bookstore and Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi — she laughs telling it — literally flew off the shelf and hit her on the head. A Vedanta Hindu teacher who happened to be in the store saw this, laughed, and told her it meant she should come study with him. Her studies had to be clandestine, because cross-cultural gathering was illegal under apartheid. But she went. She learned the tenets of the Vedas. She kept going.
An Encounter at Rachel’s Tomb
At seventeen, traveling in Israel on a coming-of-age trip, Lorell had one of the mystical experiences that would mark her life. Her uncle — a soldier who had helped open Jerusalem in the 1967 war — drove her along the old Jerusalem road one evening, pointing out the halftracks, sharing stories of friends lost. On the way back, they passed Rachel’s Tomb.
He sent her in alone. Inside, an elderly woman was lighting candles. They talked — Lorell can’t remember most of what was said, only the end: “Just remember that you are made of love, and because of that you could be nothing but loving and nothing but loved.” The woman gave her a hug. And then, Lorell says quietly, she just kind of dissipated. Lorell walked outside alone.
When she told her uncle, he went quiet. Then he said that during the war, there had always been an old woman in that vicinity who would warn soldiers where not to go. Whenever they returned to thank her, they could never find her. The local people didn’t know who they were talking about.
“I’ve had a lot of mystical experiences in my life,” Lorell says. “But I have never considered them different or separate from the magic of meeting a little dog on the corner, or a kid who just scraped its knee. This is life. Life is full of the richness of all of that.”
Time with the Bushmen of the Kalahari
Among the experiences that have most shaped Lorell’s understanding of spirituality and interconnection is the time she has spent with the San Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert — one of the oldest indigenous peoples on earth, and some of the most spiritually attuned people she has ever met.
Her first visit came through a chain of serendipitous connections that is entirely characteristic of how her life seems to unfold: her mother heard music playing in a homeopath’s office, tracked it to an ethnomusicologist who had spent time with the bushmen, and through him — an old man in his mid-eighties — a small group made the ten-hour drive out into the desert and stopped under a random acacia tree. Half an hour later, as if by magic, children emerged from the desert. Then the fathers. The next morning, the mothers.
Their translator was sick most of the week. So for days, they communicated almost entirely beyond language. And what Lorell witnessed in that silence was extraordinary.
One of the men stood alone in the bush for a long time. When he returned, Lorell asked what he was doing. He said he was calling his brother, and that his brother would come in two sleeps. Two sleeps later, his brother walked out of the desert. The brother said simply: “You called me. That’s why I came.”
On another visit, Lorell brought a group of students. They told the bushmen they didn’t know how to get their own food. The head hunter took them out. He was an extraordinary tracker — able to read footprints for species, gender, health, age, pregnancy, and the hour the animal passed. But when they stopped at a bush and Lorell asked if he was looking for the freshest tracks, he said no. He was talking to the bush — asking it to call to one of the animals that had fed from its leaves that day, to see if it would be willing to feed his family.
When they eventually found a buck, the animal turned and presented itself. The hunter knelt. He thanked it for its gift. Afterward, Lorell asked how it felt to hunt an animal he had been in relationship with all day. He replied that when he grew old or sick, his family would say goodbye and leave him under a tree, where he would become food for the lion or the hyenas. “It’s the flow of life,” he said. “The connection of everything.”
“These are the most spiritual people I have ever met,” Lorell says. “And they all have an incredible sense of humor.”
The Pain of Separation
Jonathan asks Lorell something personal: for someone like her, born into spiritual practice and continuity, what does it feel like when separation arises? When the personal self clouds the universal one?
Lorell is honest. She speaks about the human necessity of individuation — the natural process of recognizing ourselves as distinct beings. She speaks about the paradox of being both utterly separate and utterly connected. And she speaks about pain.
“Pain is not a great leveler, but it is a great teacher,” she says. “We learn ourselves in depth through pain. It enhances our joy, our connectivity, our compassion, our ability to be present to ourselves and others.”
She does not minimize suffering. She works daily with people whose stories are, in her words, “beyond horrific.” But she holds a Sufi saying close: God created man so it could hear itself sing — and it sings every song. Some of those songs are not happy songs. But it’s still a miracle.
The Sufi practice she returns to is called zikr — which means simply to remember. Remember the essence of who you are. Through the breath, through gratitude, through the recognition that whatever you are experiencing is transitory — neurons fire for only twenty-nine to thirty-five seconds before the rest becomes memory — we can find our way back.
She tells a beloved Sufi story: a wandering dervish called Mulla Nasruddin is thrown in prison by a chief of police who is irritated by his perpetual happiness. Each morning the chief returns expecting to find him broken. Each morning Nasruddin is singing. On the third day — no bed, no food, no water, the chief keeping the key himself — the chief arrives to find the cell silent. He opens the door. Empty. He walks outside to find Nasruddin sitting on the roof, enjoying the sunshine.
“How did you get out of your cell?” the chief demands.
“What cell?” says Nasruddin.
“A lot of it,” Lorell says, “has to do with perception.”
Tools for the Inner Life
What are the actual practices — especially for people who can’t access nature, community, or a teacher? Jonathan presses gently, and Lorell offers several.
She reminds us, warmly and without apology, that we all have multiple personality disorder — many voices, many selves, many ancient stories filtering the way we see the world. The work is to become curious about those lenses. Whose voice is this? What wounded child is running the show? And then to recognize: the part of you that notices the wounded child is not the wounded child.
She works with clients on the full range of inner archetypes — the wounded child, the Peter Pan, the hero, the lover — helping them find the richness and fullness of who they are, and then cultivating the witnessing presence that can ask: which part of me do I want to activate right now?
She also invites people to work with love as an entry point. Think of someone or something you love — a person, a pet, a plant. Notice that the feeling is inside you. You used something to trigger it, but the love is yours. Now see if you can direct some of that love toward a part of yourself that’s harder to love.
Gratitude. Breath. Perspective — the practice of placing your struggles in their actual context, like the client she had arrange his problems in little boxes, then consider those boxes in relation to the table, the room, the building, the street, the city, the hemisphere, the galaxy. Not to dismiss the pain. But to remember that the pain is not all of who you are.
And nature. Always, nature. “People who really genuinely live mainly in nature are happier,” she says. “The rhythm and the flow of life is so present for them. They don’t get caught up in concepts and ideas.” She adds a note on sleep, too — sharing the research that before the industrial revolution, people always slept in two stages, rising between them to tend animals or walk or cook. The 3 a.m. waking that plagues so many of her anxious clients may not be dysfunction at all. It may be an ancient, intelligent rhythm — a remnant of the time when humans needed to be vigilant before first light, when the shadows were deepest and the predators hardest to see.
“What if we just accept that we’re in a state of semi-awake, semi-asleep?” she offers. “And not focus on why our lives are wrong, but why this could just be part of the seamless flow of our day?”
The Purpose of Life
Near the end of their conversation, Jonathan asks the question that underlies the whole podcast: across all the traditions, all the teachers, all the philosophies Lorell has encountered and taught — what is the purpose of human life?
She tells a story. A Swami she knew well was asked by her students the same question. He went around the circle. Nearly all of them said: to be happy. He replied with a challenge: if you saw a twelve-year-old boy shooting heroin in front of you, would you be happy?
“The purpose of life,” he said, “is to live life.”
And most every tradition, Lorell says, points in the same direction from there: live it from a place of listening, compassion, connection, and love. The great Rabbi Hillel, when challenged to teach the entire Torah in thirty seconds standing on one leg, stood on one leg and said: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. The rest is commentary.
She recalls her friend Bob — an Australian Aboriginal elder whose spiritual domain was Uluru, the great rock in the center of Australia. She asked him what message she should carry about life. He said, in his broad Australian accent: “Well, Lorell, you know, it’s like this. In the morning the sun rises, and at night the sun sets, and in between, you are the flower that blooms. So bloom beautifully.”
Everybody, she says, has their own way of blooming.
And finally, she shares the Ubuntu philosophy of the Zulu people: I am because you are. Or more fully: I am because we are. We are not isolated beings. The sense of isolation is painful precisely because it is unnatural. We are woven of each other.
“The we,” Jonathan reflects, “is going to make the me way happier than the me trying to be happy.”
Lorell laughs. “Yes. Exactly that.”
Bloom Beautifully
What stays with you after this conversation is not any single teaching or story, but the quality of the whole — the way Lorell holds wisdom lightly, with humor and warmth and zero pretension. The way she can speak of mystical encounters and neuroscience and Sufi poetry and bushman tracking and therapeutic archetypes in a single breath, and have it all feel coherent, because for her it is coherent. It is all the same thing seen from different angles.
She closes, as she opened, with something simple. She remembers the moment she and Jonathan first met — at a café, drawn to each other for no particular reason, sharing a hug. “That’s what it’s all about,” she says. “It’s not really about anything else.”
Lorell Frysh is a therapist, interfaith minister, and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of The Primordial Now and works at the intersection of spirituality, psychology, and the sacred arts. Learn more at LorellFrysh.com.
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