Sensing the Sacred: Food, Chant, and the Spirit of Hospitality with Aliye Aydin

In this heartfelt and nourishing conversation, Dr. Habīb welcomes chef, spiritual facilitator, and podcast host Aliye Aydin (@soulspacechef) to explore the deep connections between food, spirituality, and the senses. From her Turkish-American heritage to her spiritual awakening through cooking, chant, and movement, Aliye shares how she experiences connection—her definition of spirituality—in every ingredient, sound, and shared meal. Together, they reflect on the sacredness of nourishment, the healing power of radical hospitality, and the role of embodied practices like chanting and gratitude in cultivating inner light.

Transcript

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Welcome to Beyond Names — I’m Dr. Habib.

This is a space for spiritual seekers and soulful misfits, for the curious and the committed, for those grounded in a tradition and those who aren’t sure what they believe.
 Whether you call the Divine Allah, Yahweh, Elohim, Brahman, Higher Power — or you’re still searching for language that fits — you are welcome here.
 Together, we’ll explore the intersection of spirituality and daily life, the wisdom of many traditions, and the ways we return to our True Selves, to our Source, to the light we carry within.
 I’m so glad you’re here. 

Let's begin with an introduction to our guest for this episode.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Aliye Aydin, you are the host of the Cooking From Scratch Podcast. You are inspiring others to create nourishing from scratch meals that heal the body and the soul. You yourself have been a professional chef and are professionally trained, and you, on your podcast, engage in conversations with others who are chefs, who are health coaches, doctors, nutritionists, so on and so forth. And you also are a certified facilitator in spiritual literacy and transformative practices, and you incorporate spiritual practices, like hospitality and gratitude and being present, and listening into your cooking into, I believe, your relationship with food.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And people can find out more about you at soulspacechef.com. Yes, that is it.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: No, thank you for being here, so I wondered if you would just tell us a little bit about your spiritual story as a way of letting us get to know you and get to know a little bit about you.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Oh, man, how much time do we have? Let's see my spiritual story. I mean, it's multifaceted definitely. But as related to food, I will say that it started with a health diagnosis that I received when I was a teenager. When I was instructed -- it was an autoimmune kidney condition -- and I was instructed to eat a different way. Watch your sodium intake. That was about it. This was in the early nineties, so there wasn't a lot known about this autoimmune condition. Eat, eat more ... eat less sodium. You may have to have a kidney transplant when you're older. That's what I was told.

And so I started cooking, basically because I was eating canned soups and more processed food. So I started paying more attention to what I was eating. And that's what really got me into cooking. And then I started to realize how much I actually really love to cook. And that's what started me on that, in retrospect, very much that path of cooking.

It also connected me to my heritage. So my father was Turkish, and I grew up eating.... My mom's American. But I grew up eating a lot of -- she learned how to cook a lot of traditional Turkish foods. So I grew up eating a lot of traditional Turkish foods, but also a lot of very traditional American foods. So from a cultural and I believe spiritual perspective, learning to cook also helped connect me to just what I had always grown up with, that I had never thought of as something separate from me. It was just who I was. My father was half Turkish. My mom was American. I was raised in California. That's just how it was. But again, in retrospect, I have come to see that this has been the greater part of my bigger spiritual journey in general, because connecting to your culture, I think, is definitely a part of connecting to your spirit and your spirituality. And my dad was Sufi too, which is, I think, part of the connection that you and I have as well a lot of your teachings are very familiar for me in that way.

That's the best way to describe it. Just a lot of the things that you talk about were infused with how I was raised. If that makes sense. A lot of the teaching stories. So yeah, I think that's the short answer of the spirituality. And then, as I've gone on, I mean, this is when I was a teenager, right? So this was 30 plus years ago, and then I went on to pursue a career in food, but also always searching for that component. I didn't want to just be a chef in a restaurant. That was always lacking for me. I didn't just want to go to work and come home. There was this deeper component to cooking that included nourishment and culture and healing.

And, as you can see from my podcast, I love to talk to people about it. I'll interview chefs. I interview people who health is the reason that they cook. There's so many aspects to food, and how it brings us together that I don't see it as anything else besides spiritual, because I view life as this big spiritual journey and all that stuff, the culture, the health, all of it, is all just one big, happy journey in there.

Is that a good answer? I mean, that's my....

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I like that you call it a happy journey.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, I mean, it doesn't always feel happy. But at this point in my life I mean, it's a messy journey for sure, but I think it's a happy journey.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: A messy, happy journey.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes. Definitely, definitely.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I can definitely relate to the messy and the happy both. So yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: At this point in our lives. I'm just grateful for where what has been given to me along the way, you know. Talk to me in my twenties or thirties. Maybe I wouldn't feel the same way. But now that I've reached a point where I'm at, it's like, no, this is actually one big, beautiful mess, and I love it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Great. Wonderful. That's good to hear. 

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That you have embraced the big, wonderful mess.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So one of the things that I have held as an intention with this podcast is to make spirituality accessible to everyone. And part of that is just -- I'm not alone in having that experience of feeling like I didn't fit into a space. Many of us have that experience of feeling like, oh, I don't feel that I fit in my family, or I don't fit in this church, or I don't fit in this synagogue, or I don't fit in this mosque, or we've had that experience of feeling like we didn't fit in. So I feel like it's almost more like that's the more common experience.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: The fitting in is the less common experience and that feeling like you don’t is the more common. So part of my intention is saying, Hey, you don't have to necessarily fit in a place that you do associate with spirituality, really, you can engage in spirituality outside of that. And, in fact, in relation to any part of your life, there's an opportunity to engage in spirituality. So that's all of a part of me saying –one, with this intention of making spirituality accessible to anyone, do you mind sharing where you are, like where you locate yourself in relation to a tradition or no tradition.

My intention is to invite and have guests from people who consider themselves maybe spiritual but not religious, people who consider themselves devout, people who consider themselves exploring, people who consider themselves located in a tradition, and not. It's my intention to have all of that as part of the conversation -- to make -- to open up the conversation.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Part one is just saying, do you feel comfortable, or asking, Do you feel comfortable with telling us about where you locate yourself?

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, absolutely. This is interesting. So I think for a long time I felt really self-conscious that I did not have a particular known way I could identify myself spiritually. I'm like, Well, I'm not Christian. I wasn't raised Christian. I'm not familiar with that really at all. Christian was Christmas with my family. There was no Christianity actually involved besides Christmas, but then, like I said, I was raised by a father who was Sufi. But I didn't ever read a Quran. The Sufism was stories. In Turkey, Hodja is the Mullah, the unlucky fool who does all the things that teaches us all the things we need to know. So my life growing up was infused with these Hodja stories and actually comic books. We had these comic books from Turkey that were actual, like, you know, like drawn comic books with these Hodja stories in them. So that was the infusion in my life. But I didn't realize it was religious quote unquote. I didn't know. As a child that it was spiritual. It wasn't until I started studying these things later and coming across Sufi teachings. And my dad passed away 20 years ago so unfortunately, this isn't the type of thing, I can't talk to him about this stuff. Since I've had kind of my awareness into this spirituality, I haven't been able to speak with him physically about this type of stuff. So what I'm doing is, I'm taking that stuff, they're very much feelings and memories from my childhood, and then it's almost like sometimes it's a matching game. I'll come across teachings from you or other Sufi scholars that I relate to the Sufi teachings a lot, and I'm not sure if it's because of my upbringing. There's a certain language or feeling, because I don't know much about even the religions as the basics of religions. I know embarrassingly little about Islam or Christianity, or any of them. But it's this feeling that I get from certain traditions that attracts me towards them, and Sufism is one that I am always attracted towards in terms of, I guess it just feels comfortable. How do I describe it? It feels kind of accepting to me. Yeah, it feels. I don't have words for this. It feels whole, like it feels healing when I'm connected to these types of the Sufi sort of stories and things that I read continually.

But if you were to ask me, what religion are you? I don't think I would name one, because I don't feel comfortable that I don't know these details of the religions, you know. I know the feelings of the religions, and I'm very much... As a chef, this is very obvious; I'm very much in touch with my senses. So the things that draw me towards things are sound, the five senses, basically. And the sound, smell, sight, like in my house, you can't see it, but I have Arabic writing of the different things around my house, and I have Islamic geometry stuff. Oh, you can see this one right here.

I have this [pointing at a painting]. This is what I surround myself with, because it's what I'm comfortable with. The answer of what -- spiritual but not religious, definitely.

But I don't know. I prayer beads are one of my favorites. Chanting is one of my favorites. But again it comes back to the senses. I'm always really engaged with my senses, and I grew up playing music, and that always brings me back home to Source, my senses. And that's how I ground myself always is through these types of things. Cooking has become the career. But music is also a huge part of my life.

So that was a roundabout answer. But that’s what I got.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's great. Yeah. SBNR, Spiritual But Not Religious, that you find yourself attracted to Sufism, which is beautiful.

Aliye @soulspacechef: That. And you know what's interesting. Now that I'm realizing this, I have a very close friend who's Christian and very entrenched in Christian teachings, and I would never thought in a thousand years I would have been friends with her. But we have a lot to talk about, because we think about spirituality in a lot of, we think about a lot of the same things. We've raised our family in really similar ways with really similar values. So even though she believes Jesus Christ is her Lord and Savior, she is still absolutely open and willing to talk to me and hear what I have to say, and with an openness, you know, like we find commonalities there. And that's what I really am passionate about is talking to people about different commonalities between different traditions as well like. When I was in the spiritual literacy class for that year with you, every week I'd go to her, I'd be like, Okay, this is what we talked about, and she was like waiting for me to come tell her what I learned, you know, like she's like, Oh, okay, well, in the Bible it says this, and I'm like, Oh, really, oh, cool. I learned this, and we could just talk for hours about this stuff. 

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, spiritual but not religious, is the short answer.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Wonderful, wonderful! And I'm so glad that you have a Christian friend that you can engage with.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah. She's incredible.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I’ve said so many times that I'm -- people who -- theologians who go through the process of going through the academic environment...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...but then come out of it, saying, You know, I'm really not interested in talking about theology.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right, right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I'm really interested in talking about what feeds your heart, what do we have in common, what enlivens you and brings you a sense of joy and sense of connection to what is most meaningful to you.

Aliye @soulspacechef: And I think that's what we connected over. There was a period of time when I would go to church with her every Sunday, and I was like, what am I doing? How am I going to church? And she was like, No, come to church with me, and I'd go, and she is part of this really large Mega church, where singing is a big, and it starts with this band playing like every Sunday, and I would go, and I would be so uncomfortable. What am I doing here? But then that band would play, and I was like, I am here like I was. I was so into it, and I felt sort of uncomfortable because I knew I wasn't going to accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, you know, like I knew that wasn't what was going to happen. But just back to my senses the music and the being surrounded by these people, and even my friend, who, she knows how to worship, that's all I have to say. Like just being next to her worshiping in this environment was so inspiring to me.

I don't know how else to describe it. I still get chill. I still remember the first drumbeat that like hit. I didn't know what I was walking into. And it's like a stage, and there's a huge drum kit. I mean, it's like a rock show. Get people going for the first 10 or 15 minutes, and I still remember that drumbeat. And I was like, Oh, man, this is so good I get it. Again like those using those senses to move you, you know, that's definitely effective for me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, I love that you bring up the senses because, as you know, I'm all about the chanting right.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I love the chanting. And so in Islam there's the idea that the holy texts, the holy books, like the Quran and the Gospels that were revealed to Jesus and the Torah that was revealed to Moses, and so on, that it's not just that the words have meaning, but there's also a light and a sound.

So when Muslims recite, or when Sufis chant, it's about opening through -- opening to not only to the meaning, but it's opening the heart to receive the light and the meaning that comes into it. And the sound is a means of that opening process. The sound is a means of increasing the receptivity to the light, the receptivity to a meaning. So I love that you're talking about the senses because....

Aliye @soulspacechef: That makes so much sense.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah. Because I feel like religions aren't really taught that way. They're very focused on the word and the actual, just literal word. I had never experienced anything before the class with you. And then one of my cohort members was a Buddhist, right? And so I learned at the same time, yours chanting. And then in meeting with her in the class every week, her Buddhist teachings were very powerful. She had all the voice stuff that she did, and if I had been, if religion had been presented that way to me as a child, I think it would have been a different story.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right, but I don't. It would just wasn't really presented to me as religion, you know. It was just. It was completely different, like I said before, but....

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. And I think that's why what cooking comes down to for me. That's why, like cooking, I've always felt a very divine connection with doing things with my hands and transforming ingredients into dishes, I find that to be a very divine process, and even from -- I used to own a produce delivery company. I would go to the farm, and I would choose the produce, and I would deliver it to people's homes, and then I would try to teach them how to make it via recipes, or whatever. But that entire process I found to be a devotional practice, you know, every week for nine years I was at that farmers market, talking to those farmers who, to me they were the ones who were looking after the earth. They were the ones cultivating, drawing that magic out, that stuff out of the earth that we could eat. And then I was passing it along. So just another non-conformist way of finding connection with the divine right there. And then, when I'm feeling unmotivated, or whatever with cooking, too, I also like to turn to that for the gratitude aspect of it. I mean that is what I'm talking about really is the gratitude. And that was one of my most powerful first experiences in the spirituality literacy classes. It might have been devotion -- thanking the hands that brought those items to me. It completely shifted how I was feeling in that moment. I could feel it from oh, I got to make dinner, to remembering the hands that literally brought me this thing I'm holding, you know, whoever grew it or slaughtered it, or whatever any of it was. It just completely shifts it for me. I don't know. That's where I find that is the magic of cooking right there.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, and I love that there's that awareness of the -- if we choose to look at it this way -- the awareness of the connection ... from source to table that there is sunlight, and there is water, and there is air, and there is earth, and then so there's the person who grew it, and the person who picked it, and the person who transported it, and the person who stocked it, and the person who, you know it's just all of that. And if you, from a perspective of, from a Sufi perspective, you'd be like, you know, we're all one, right, so it would be all about the interconnectedness and the sort of embracing of the oneness that's behind all of the different steps in the process.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Absolutely.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I wanted to, back to the conversation, I do want to talk more about food and cooking, but back to sort of setting the intention for the podcast and the conversation around spirituality in general, I wondered if you would speak to what spirituality means to you. How do you think of spirituality? 

Aliye @soulspacechef: Spirituality to me, I think if I could use one word, it would mean connection. That's the word that I've just continually come back to again and again and again, both connection to a feeling of a higher power. And then the connection, what you were just talking about from grow -- a connection to the process. I'll just say that that's the shortest way to say it, feeling a connection to the grower, the anything and you have that's within a process, that to me is the spirituality. It's the why behind all of it. It's just that, it's the we are one thing. It's the connection to that we all have, and it's what enables me to approach some a stranger or somebody who I admire but I might be nervous to talk to. It's a reminder like we're all connected. And even if this person, maybe they're going to be rude to me or not want to hear what I have to say. That's fine. But I remember that connection that we all have. And when I approach with that type of thing, I tend to smile, and I tend to be just happy that I'm able to talk to them. And I think that comes across. And I think that to me is spirituality is connecting with people, places, things, everything, just connection. And when I'm feeling not great in my life. Sad, unhappy. It always comes down to disconnection. Always, always. I always come back. And I'm like, Gosh! Why have you been focusing on that thing that's making you really angry, or this other thing that's really pissing you off. And I'm like, Oh, man, I really haven't been feeling connected lately. Oh, how can we feel connected? Okay, let's try to find a practice that helps us feel connected, or what is severing my connection. Maybe I'm ruminating on something I can't control that will sever my connection with anything divine or spiritually in an instant. And I don't even realize I'm doing it, and I'll do it for days and days and days at a time. And it's not until I make a conscious effort to be okay. What's going on with you? Oh, I'm feeling disconnected. And it always comes back to like a light in my heart type of thing. I'll say that I'll remember that I need to reconnect with. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You may remember that, I'm 99.9% sure that in the course, the spiritual literary course, that I shared in one of the weeks was the saying that all pain is caused by the illusion of separation.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes. Yes, I definitely remember that.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And then to take that phrase and say, Okay, well, what's the opposite of that? Then, if all pain is caused by the illusion of separation. So what's the opposite of pain? What's the opposite of illusion? What's the opposite of separation? And then we come to the idea of where we are at home is in our connectedness.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That when we -- our joy, our peace comes from our state of connection.

And so for a Sufi that's connection to the divine, either for a theistic. Excuse me.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: My Texan Mississippian accent came out there -- from a theistic perspective, that means your connection is to Gawd... 

Aliye @soulspacechef: That’s funny.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But from a non-theistic perspective, that that's the connection that's to your inner light ... you might use language of Source, or you might use the language of higher power. But you also might just use that in terms of the inner wisdom, the inner strength, inner light. 

What you said. I just love it because there's actually some -- I shouldn't say actually -- there's so much wisdom that is in what you said around, hey? Why am I off? Oh, there's something I'm doing that's creating disconnection. And how can I restore my connection.

Aliye @soulspacechef: I learned this stuff from you. Now that you're saying all this, this is your notice and nurture practice that you taught us way back at the beginning.

I’m remembering this. Yes, it was the notice and nurture. Notice what's off, nurture what needs to be nurtured.

Yeah, that's absolutely that. Yeah.

And that's also what's great about what I learned working with you, too, is that you helped give kind of words and validity to all these things I'd always been feeling, like all this stuff I'm talking about, I'd always felt my entire life. Feelings of connection or disconnection, but they were just happiness, or unhappiness, or anger, or and then I that's where it stopped. It was just. I'm angry. I could barely describe it as anger. I would just be reactive. But then you being able to say, No, there's some validity to this notice nurture. Give yourself what you need. It was validity is the only word I have, but it was just very validating to have somebody be able to say, yes, these are valid feelings, and no, it doesn't necessarily require you being a part of a particular religion to be able to feel connected, because that's, I think, a hesitation or kind of almost a shame or embarrassment I had in my whole life. I grew up in Southern California. So it was Christian by default, and kids went to church, and I always kind of felt like, why don't we go to church? I don't know. But then, in the time period that I grew up here that we didn't have a Turkish community, really, that we were connected with. We didn't have a Sufi connection here in the States, so I was kind of in the middle of both worlds. I was getting this at home but I wasn't going to church, and I just figured there wasn't anything for me. If I wasn't A and I wasn't B, there wasn't anything else, and it I really think it took and learning with you, and in that class with you as a teacher like oh, there is a way to have this spirituality and have this connection that's innate to us. 

I think that was so valuable for me, and really helped propel me forward on my journey, my spiritual journey. Definitely, and what something like the podcast. My podcast came out of it because.

You know, it's weird. My podcast is weird. It's not just about cooking. And it's not just about health. I want to talk about all the funny, like there's some episodes on there. My last episode was called Gratitude and Protein. I'm like, this is weird. But do I care? No, like these are two things that make meals and health. Really, the secrets to health and energy. I'm like having gratitude is absolutely imperative for feeling good, and so is eating enough protein. So why don't we take an episode and do both? I have another one in there. It's about hospitality that's a little bit more straightforward when it comes to cooking.

But this podcast was created out of that project that I did that connected food to all these different words, and some of them were just weird, you know, but also, I think, so cool. Like stuff you wouldn't necessarily think about connecting the two.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Would you mind speaking a bit more -- because we can throw words like gratitude and hospitality out there, and people don't necessarily connect to that with, oh, actually gratefulness, gratitude, is a spiritual practice, or oh, hospitality is a spiritual practice.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So for the folks who haven't gone through a spiritual literacy course or haven't...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...grounded themselves with that kind of language. Could you speak a bit more to that intersection for you spirituality and food, spirituality and cooking, spirituality and your everyday life.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, I mean, I think it just for me, everybody, I believe, is given a thing, and my thing that was given to me and my presence on this earth is food and cooking. I've tried to ignore it. I've tried to quit it. I've tried all the things, and I always come back to it, and it's my mirror for what I'm meant to do here. So we'll take hospitality. For example, I view hospitality, on a simple level, you might say, oh, it's like being nice to people, and especially if you're feeding them, or it's giving them, going above and beyond. But I really view hospitality as radical acceptance, right? Because when it comes to hospitality, it's not just guests that come to your table. It's just, it's the Rumi poem, right? It's like all these emotions that come in. Greet them at the door. However that poem goes, right, you greet them at the door, smiling for whatever they may bring, and you have to accept them or else they're just going to keep coming to your door. And you're not going to understand why that they keep coming, like God, Why does this keep coming up? What’s this emotion of sadness, this emotion of whatever it is. So greeting them with hospitality, or like this radical acceptance of.... Okay, you're here. They are guests you may not want. They're guests you may not have been expecting. They may be a guest you're ashamed of, or don't approve of, or any of it, but if you accept them and engage with them and offer them everything that you would offer anybody or anything else, it's a way of processing and healing. 

This is just what I know. I'm not a spiritual teacher, but these are the feelings, the experiences that I've had, and I've had it. I've had people come to my table that I couldn't wait for them to leave. but I learned a lot from them while they were there, like, so that's in the literal sense.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: And I have emotions come into my table almost every day that I don't want there. I try to push away, but they get stronger if I try to push them away. You know they don't process if that makes sense. So that, in short, is what the connection with cooking and spirituality is. Yeah, it's a mirror. It's a metaphor to me for things that happen in your everyday life. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I love that you brought up Rumi's home, The Guest House.

Aliye @soulspacechef: The Guest House. That's what it's called.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...around accepting, as you said, radical acceptance. So, accepting all of your emotions, and saying, Hey, you are welcome here, and what's happening through you Mr. Emotion and Ms. Emotion, like what's happening for you, what's happening through you? And that's that radical acceptance you're talking about, and the willingness to in the face of the guests that you don't want at your table, as well as the guests that you do want to add the table like...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...with all of them, instead of choosing to close the door, so to speak.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: But to say, Hey, What's there here for me like? What's there to learn through this? One of the things that I love, and also find very difficult to practice, is to take every emotion and say, Okay, every single thing I feel, no matter how dark it is or how wonderful it is an opportunity. It's either an opportunity to bring me closer to my ego self, my lower self, or it's an opportunity to bring me to my higher self my true self. It's an opportunity for connection...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...or an opportunity for disconnection as you mentioned earlier. So how do you be with what your emotional experience is and use it as, okay, let's go down the road to connection. So like, how can I go [down the right road], how can I accept this emotion and work with emotion to move through to connection.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, absolutely. And you're reminding me saying that in my podcast episode about gratitude, I made it a metaphor by saying, like, you're cooking something, and you're out of an ingredient. What do you do? I'm like, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to go deeper into your creativity. It's an opportunity to do something you might not have done. It's an opportunity to order takeout, I mean, maybe that's not what you want to do, but in a silly way a way to bring it around to also a way to practice gratitude. Oh, you're out of lemon. Well, I'm grateful for this opportunity to practice creativity right now, or okay, I really don't have all the ingredients. Oh, I'm grateful for this opportunity to put it all away and order a pizza. I don't know, like there's so many ways to look at it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's true, because absolutely, there are times where we need rest. And there's times where we need to be creative....

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah. Exactly.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And listening to and following that, yeah, comes from the radical acceptance and the hospitality that you're talking about. Yeah. And I love that you mentioned gratitude, because I think gratitude is one of those concepts in our culture that's talked about a lot, so much to the point that I think people come can become numb to it, they think, Oh, and yet it can be such a heart opening practice to continually, continually orient ourselves to gratitude, and we can think about it in ways that sort of go beyond our traditional thinking or our cultural thinking. And an example of that is one of my spiritual teachers said that a symbol of gratitude or metaphor for gratitude, or a manifestation of gratitude -- I'm not sure quite what's the best language for it -- but is that a plant gives more than it's given. So like the plant that the farmer tends, but produces more than it. You know it provides more nutrients than it received. It didn't necessarily get everything that it needed, but it still gives more than it got like it's manifesting the gratitude in kind of a mystical way. I'm not sure the best way to say it, but it's like we can, if we think about that, it's like talking about your relationship to the earth and the farmer and who grew this and your sense of connection, and your relationship to food, like, even just something is like, yeah, I'm grateful for this apple. We can take a gratitude to a whole new level depending on how deep we want to go with it.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Absolutely.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Doesn't it change our brain chemistry, too? Isn't that what's happening when we're like? Don't we get some hit of like? Because I feel it when it switches in my head. I'm like I felt about ooohhh about this apple. And now I feel, ahhhh, about this apple like, doesn't it change somehow chemistry in your head?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You get a little oxytocin.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, something.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Dopamine or something like that. It's probably oxytocin. It's one of those connection biochemicals. Based on how you talk about it and how you talk about spirituality and connection. I think for you, when you are in relationship with food like it's for you, it's a connection practice. It's probably one of those connection biochemicals where you're...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, that makes sense.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Which is wonderful. 

Aliye @soulspacechef: I just like to think of the whole picture.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well it’s great to think of the whole picture. Before we wind down...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, of course.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You did talk about connection, and you did talk about, you mentioned, inner light, or you said something about the light within, or something along those lines, which is language that I use a lot too.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I wondered if there's any. Do you have any favorites for when you notice you're not in connection that you're feeling disconnected. Do you have any favorite ways for saying, hey! How do I restore my sense of connection? How do my restore my sense of connection to the inner light, or accessing that place of....

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah. I do. Trying to pick one. 

I have these prayer beads right in front of me here. So they're like in my line of sight. So that's a big one like I was talking about for chanting. And I tend to default actually to Buddhist chanting, because that's what I learned first, years ago, so chanting always brings me back to at least a place where I can feel more open to what's going on. A sense of openness to let in that connection. So that's a big one for me like I said, it incorporates the sound, but it also least when I do it, I'm really focusing on my breathing as well.

So that's really a big one for me. And just also I would say, any kind of like dance or movement as well, because that helps me kind of get out of whatever stuckness I'm in. So even if, as goofy as it feels, just waving my arms just wildly moving sometimes is all I need to just get out of stuck or just something more formal going to a dance class or taking a dance class on Youtube, or whatever it might be, you know. So body movement and sound, I guess, are kind of 2 of my big, favorite ones.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Move that energy.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Through the body  and through sound. Love it.

Do you have a favorite Buddhist practice that you'd be willing to -- a Buddhist chant?

Aliye @soulspacechef: I don't even really know what they mean. I'm embarrassed. So there's one I was taught either years ago or by Sheinagh. I don't remember. It's Ohm mane padme hum. Do you know that one? I'm not even sure I know what it means?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: And I'm like, am I saying it wrong? I'm embarrassed. I barely know it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: No. Ohm mane padme hum. Ohm mane padme hum.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yes, this is very. This is a well-known chant. 

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Do you want to do a few?

Aliye @soulspacechef: Oh, my gosh! I don’t know. I don't know. I don't do it nearly as well as you do. I can't chant in front of the chanter.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You can't front in front of.... Well, of course, because you just told us earlier that you were a chanter.

Aliye @soulspacechef: For myself.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: For yourself. Okay? So you want to do some together?

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, we could do it together.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right, because I mean, I'm not an expert in Sanskrit by any means. So I would not ever try to translate it, but it I mean, that phrase does have to do with unity. It does have to do with wisdom. It has to do with compassion. 

So yeah. So. Yeah. Let's do a few.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Okay.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, we don't have to do a lot that you can. We can do it together. Okay.

Aliye @soulspacechef: I think I do it really fast. I don't think to do it so fast.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, so this is the difference. We're all perfectly different in our uniqueness. Right? So you want to do a few fast, and I'll do a few slow?

Aliye @soulspacechef: I don't know.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You don't know. You don't know what I want to do.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Ohm mane padme hum. I'm very methodical about it. So I have the beads right? And so I'm just. Ohm mane padme hum Ohm mane padme hum Ohm mane padme hum That's how I go through it.

Aliye @soulspacechef & Dr. Habīb Boerger: Ohm mane padme hum [repeated]

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Great.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, that's how I do it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I tend to go slow. I tend to, like my, that's just my personality. And I, there have been times in my life like in a professional setting, and I'd be interacting with somebody with a faster personality. And they'd be like, would you...? Would you talk a little faster? 

Aliye @soulspacechef: I mean, I'm not even sure. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Let me think about that. II'll get back to you once I've had time to process that.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

I mean, I even think there's all kinds of breathing stuff I'm supposed to be doing with that, like when you taught us with the La ilaha ilallah one, like you're breathing out one part and in on the other part, right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah, that's my favorite go to, because that for me like that, just that breathing sort of shifts -- you're talking about the biochemistry and the neuroscience and...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...the connection earlier,  for me the breathing that I associate with the exhale of La ilaha and the inhale of ilallah that just sort of settles my system down, like I just...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It soothes my nervous system.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I can do that whether I'm washing dishes...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...or whether I'm going to sleep, or whether I'm driving like it's like, that's that really helps with my connection, really, since fir me it brings together mind, body, heart, soul, like that's one of the things that I really love about chanting and what we talked about, as far as sound and light. It's not just words, not just meaning. There's a lot more going on, and if it changes the way we breathe, you know, so....

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right? Yeah, I just remembered another one that I used an English one that I...I like English ones, too, because sometimes I feel a disconnect from the language. I don't know. Like, even though I know what it means, it still feels different, and I will use the I don't know if this is legitimate or not, but the ho'oponopono one, that I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.

Are you familiar with that?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Can you say it? You said it so fast.

Aliye @soulspacechef: It's like Ho'oponopono. It's a Hawaiian thing.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh, yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: And apparently in Hawaii. They have, like Ho'oponopono circles, where they'll just get together for prayer, and it's just, I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Oh!

Aliye @soulspacechef: And I will. Just actually, that's when I use when I when I'm having a hard time falling asleep.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Aliye @soulspacechef: I'll chant that one to myself. I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.

That one is good for the English one.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Beautiful.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah, yeah, like, I said, I'm not an expert in any of these, just a dabbler and all. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And you don't have to be an expert. I just applaud the fact that you are dabbling. 

So yeah, one of my teachers said, depending on how you hold, basically, how you hold things, there's a way that if you're holding what you're doing with the intention of like, my intention is to grow my sense of connectivity. My intention is to grow my inner light, and my intention in doing so is so I can basically share a sense of connection and light with others like. So this is my contribution to the world is basically through, and it might be through cooking, it might, you know, be through dance, it might be through music, whatever. But it's like this is what's yours that you're saying. When you're clear on your intention...

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: ...then there is a way that we can engage in things and be in different places and different modalities that there can be a rightness to it without, if I may say so.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yes, yes. No, I think it's like a rightness for the moment, because sometimes I'll go through different chants in a moment. And I just I'm like that one's not feeling right today. And so I'll pick another one. And I'll be like, Okay, this one feels good today, for whatever reason I don't know.

Aliye @soulspacechef: But.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And I think that's that's perfect because you're listening to your you're listening to yourself.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Right.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: You’re noticing. Go back to the language you brought up earlier. You're noticing, and you're nurturing. You're saying, oh, what is it that settles my mind and grounds my body and nurtures my heart. And you're doing that. So yeah, that's beautiful.

Well, it has absolutely been a treat. Thank you for sharing what your experience is. It's very valuable to hear and thank you for engaging in the conversation.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Thank you for joining us on Beyond Names.

Before we go, I just invite you to take one breath and reflect for just one breath on what stayed with you from this conversation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I am enlivened, I love hearing how different people define or describe spirituality. So I love that you describe spirituality as connection. So that's something that's going to stick with me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So thank you.

Aliye @soulspacechef: Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart.

May you grow in compassion, clarity, and courage!

May you find your way again and again back home to yourself, back home to the divine, however you name it.

If today's conversation spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it, leave a review, or reach out.

Until next time, peace be with you.

May you be light, may you carry light, and may you share your light.