Getting Real: Living From The Heart Rather Than The Head with Alan Cohen

PR 64 | Getting Real

As a writer, when Alan Cohen taps into a stream of truth or wisdom or heart, it always takes a hold on him. For Alan, writing is a journey of ever deeper authenticity. In fact, ever since he wrote his first successful book, The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, writing has been Alan’s therapy. His writing is always related to topics he’s working on himself or wants to learn about, whether it be sufficiency, grace, relationships, or business. Alan has gained clarity by passing through those challenges as he writes. Alan also shares his secret to success – “getting real” and living from the heart rather than the head.Alan has striven to write as his own therapy. Everything he writes about are stuff that he’s working on and needs to learn, whether they be about sufficiency, grace, relationships, or business. Alan includes those challenges and the clarity he’s gained through passing through those challenges.

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Getting Real: Living From The Heart Rather Than The Head with Alan Cohen

I feel very honored and blessed to be here with you again. What a beautiful day. It has been a beautiful day and I don’t mean because it was a perfect day. I don’t mean because everything went according to plan or the weather was perfect, or every business meeting or email that I was involved in was perfectly executed. It’s far from the case. I do mean it was a perfect day because we are here. For me, I am here and that is an absolute blessing that I do not take for granted. As I take this breath and I receive this breath, I feel so cared for, so loved, so perfectly on point in this moment that I get to spend this time with all of you.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, you might be doing any number of things and that’s your private affair, but we’re here together. I can’t think of anything that’s more affirming or reaffirming of the fact that we are one. There’s no limit to the ways in which we can feel connected and yet at the same time, there’s one thing more than anything else that I feel connected to everything, and that is through the breath. As we’re breathing right now, whatever you’re up to, whatever you’re doing, I wish you peace, I wish you love.

What I’m about to share with you is going to be just wonderful. It’s going to be a great journey in the next little while as I have a conversation with a new friend, somebody that I met recently at a TLC meeting that we were having in Wahoo. This gentleman is no stranger to most of you, I’m sure. No stranger to me, but somebody I had never met before and I’ve already developed a great admiration for him. He’s a very authentic and wonderful human being. His name is Alan Cohen. Alan is the author of 24 popular inspirational books, including the best-selling The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the award-winning A Deep Breath of Life, and the classic Are You as Happy as Your Dog?

He is a contributing writer for the New York Times number one bestselling series, Chicken Soup for the Soul. His books have been translated into 24 foreign languages. His work has been featured on Oprah.com and in USA Today, the Washington Post and 101 Top Experts. Alan’s radio program, Get Real, is broadcast weekly on Hay House Radio and his monthly column From the Heart is featured in magazines internationally. What a beautiful blessing it is to spend some time together, Alan. Welcome to the show.

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I am honored and delighted to speak with you Adam, thank you.

The bio that I’ve just read, obviously there’s a lot that’s not in that bio. I love that it is actually so succinct, but is there anything you want to add to that? Is there’s something missing there that’s important that people know about you at the moment?

I prefer to live from my heart rather than my head. Like all of us, I’m on the journey to ever deeper authenticity. The more real I become, the happier I become, and the more successful I become. I’m doing best to keep the journey light. I like the play and laugh and not taking life seriously.

There’s a lot of serious things in the world for sure. A book that I read some time ago that I absolutely love, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Michael Brown or his book, The Presence Process, but it’s a magnificent book about the journey from presence, or I should say from pretense to presence and the distinction between those two things. It’s a wonderful concept. If the talk leads in that direction, I’d love to talk about what presence means to you and how you practice presence.

I would love to know a little bit about and have you share, not so much with me but with our listeners and our viewers, a little bit about what has inspired this body of work, 24 books. My Dad’s a fiction writer, He’s been doing it before the time that I was born and has written all my life and has been tenacious and voracious in both writing and reading. I take it that this has been a calling of yours for some time. Would you share a little bit about how it was that you got started in this?

We’re all teaching what we need to learn. All those books are depictions of the cutting edge in my own spiritual growth. I started way back in 1980 or so. I woke up one morning and a voice said, “Sit down and wait.” I was lying in bed but I didn’t want to get up. I said to the voice, “I don’t want to get up.” The voice said, “It’s not one of the quotes.” I get up and I started with some ideas about what was going on in me and around my heart, my challenges, my joys and my sorrows, and the writing took over. As a writer, I’m sure you understand this process where when you tap into a stream of truth or wisdom or heart, it takes you over. Wayne Dyer said that motivation is when you take hold of an idea and inspiration is when the idea takes hold of you. That’s exactly what happened to me. I wrote almost constantly for about nine months or so and then I have this book in my hand. I told my mother about it. She said, “You’re crazy. Why would you write a book?” The next day she called me back and said, “Would you like the money to publish it?” I took it. One thing led to the next and it became a popular book.

Ever since that day I have striven to write as my own therapy. Everything I write about, the stuff that I’m working on, every stuff that I need to learn, one was a book on sufficiency, another one was on grace, another one was on relationship, another one was on business. These are all my cutting edge of growth where my challenge was, and as I have mastered pieces of those challenges I have broken through into a certain degree of clarity. In my books, I include my challenges and the clarity I gained to passing through those challenges. It seems to be a good combination. People seem to like it. James Mitchell said, “I’ll be writing for another twenty years, and then you die but you have twenty more books in it for sure.” I could write for the rest of my life and many more lifetimes because this urge, this passion to share what’s real to me is compelling. It’s more fun than just about anything else I do.

What a blessing that your mom was willing to both question at the same time and support in one breath. That’s pretty incredible.

In those days she was not a wealthy woman by any means. All she had to her name was $5,000. That was her whole life savings and she said, “Just take it.” She says, “You have it when I die, I might as well have it for something positive now.” I invested that in self-publishing, which is a big deal at the time; it’s easy now. Then the book took off and I remember vibrantly the day when I went back to her safe deposit box with her and I showed her the $5,000 is back there and doubled and tripled. She said, “You keep it anyway. I don’t care about it.” That was a poignant moment for me to acknowledge that her investment and belief in me and had come back in many ways.

Paid dividends and then some. What book was that, the first one?

That was the first one, The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

I haven’t read that book, but would you share a little bit about that book? What was the essence of the book?

It was the beginnings of my realization that fear was the liar and love is the truth. I wrote it when I was 30 years old. I did not speak after many years by that time. I talked about the monsters that I’d faced in my own psyche and how I confronted them, challenged them, and loved my way through them, and recognized that, as A Course in Miracles says, “Only the creations of light are real. Everything else is your own nightmare.” It’s basically the story of me confronting my fears and moving past them.

I love Chapter 30 in A Course in Miracles: The New Beginning. There’s this beautiful exposition on decision making. That section’s changed my life as well because it talks about each of us making decisions consciously or unconsciously but continuously, and we either make them with love or fear.

I opened up my new book, A Course in Miracles Made Easy, with this story about a friend of mine who was living in Brooklyn. He was sitting alone when he heard a guy breaking into his bedroom window and he went in and there was a crook. The guy started to run. He said to the guy, “Wait, you don’t need to be afraid. What’s going on in your life? What would make you want to break into somebody’s house and steal?” The guy said, “I lost my job. My girlfriend left me and my life is in the pits.” The guy said, “Let’s sit down and talk about this.” He walked him through a coaching session. He gave him some cash and said, “Come back so that I can help you.” This is a model that every moment is a choice between fear and love.

A Course in Miracles Made Easy: Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love

I’m going to ask you an odd question. We all have fears obviously. I never met anybody that doesn’t have fear. In fact one gentleman recently that I met he says, “No, I’m not afraid of anything.” I thought to myself, “This guy is so full of shit.” He was an older guy and very successful. I got to know him later in his obstreperousness was more of an act than anything else. He’s actually a gentle kind man, but it’s also his defense mechanism that he doesn’t wish to acknowledge any fear. Alan, has there been one fear more than any other that has been the dragon for you?

I’ve always been a guy who wanted everybody to like me. I’ve been pretty good at getting most people to like me. If there was some underlying fear, it was that I would not be accepted or liked for who I am. I’m asked to do some kind of dance to make sure everybody’s happy. If I’m in a room with 30 people and somebody is unhappy, I feel like it’s my job to make them happy, which of course is dysfunctional. A lot of it may have been taking back the power that I have attributed to other people to determine my happiness. I’ve learned that I have to free people to make your own decisions, including maybe not liking me. I’ll ponder on that for a few years and get back to you.

I’m not sure turning the question on myself how I would answer that, but I will say I’ve probably been more afraid that I’d be punished. I don’t know that I made any greater number of mistakes. I probably made more mistakes than most people just because I know that my success is a result of having made enough mistakes to learn and on some level what not to do. That’s one of those crazy things we work with people who are changing aspects of their business life and people who are making career transitions and changes or striking out on new exciting adventures like writing a book.

So many people I’ve spoken to and been around with, when I’ve asked them, “Do you feel like there’s a book inside of you?” almost every hand always gets raised. “Why haven’t you written it?” All the usual stuff comes up, whatever those things are that people are striking out. In any event, I’ve struck out quite a lot in my life, which I know is part and parcel for learning. Yet, at the root, I’m most afraid that any of my harder lessons in life were there because I deserved that or been punished or somehow it’s a karmic thing. Interesting that that’s what just came up.

Let’s look at that. It’s a good point. Did you grow up Jewish like I did by any chance?

I did, yes.

They say that Jews invented guilt and Catholics perfected it. Being Jewish and feeling a great deal of guilt myself for no good reason has sent me to A Course In Miracles. What I love about the Course is that it affirms over and over again the thousand ways that guilt is always a fictitious story or made up. While we believe that our guilt are just errors and God is not a punishing God, it says over and over again that there’s not one thing that you or I deserve to be punished for. That whole idea of punishment is just a projection of human wrath onto a loving God. That’s a good item to tinker with. What is it about us that thinks we deserved to be punished? Who made up that story and why does it continue? That’s a fruitful path of inquiry.

It is. I love the Emmet Fox. I love his work and his beautiful book called Around the Year with Emmet Fox and the several others that I’ve enjoyed. He dives into a number of sections of the Bible and explains them from a metaphysical standpoint but also from a real common sense standpoint. Even the Lord’s Prayer as it begins “our Father,” it’s not my father, it’s ours. There’s a brotherhood of man and women, of all of us.

A brotherhood and a fatherhood that to think of any God that we believe in as not loving and forgiving flies in the face of everything that I know about being a father. I’m fortunate to be a father. It doesn’t make sense that it would be otherwise, yet you’re right. We arrived in this place of fear and guilt for things. I wonder how much of that is passed through DNA, the thing that Eckhart Tolle called the collective pain body that gets passed generation to generation. Is it?

Voltaire said that God created us in his image and likeness and we return the compliment. We made up God and the story of a flawed person, when really God sees flawed people in his own image and perfection. Someone once said we’re doing time for imaginary crimes. My definition of guilt is punishing yourself before God doesn’t. In other words, I believe I’m going to be punished. I’m going to beat myself up and then maybe I can avoid God punishing me. We never waited around long enough to find out if God would punish us. If we did, we’d find that punishment never comes and all punishment are self-inflicted. That’s a big one. As far as I can see, that’s the hurdle we need to get over to break out into the clear and be home.

Does it start with love, with understanding and a better, deeper, and more truthful level what unconditional love actually is? That’s the place of where the inquiry begins for me.

That’s where it ends for me. When I drop into that place of self-love, everything becomes clear. All of a sudden, I get to forgive people I held grudges against because my greatest against them which is my self-hatred projected outward. The Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, said, “When I was a young man, I respected the people who were wise. Now that I’m old, I respect people who are kind. The older I get, the more appreciate the value of simple human kindness beginning the kindness to ourselves.” Most of my coaching is based on bringing people to a place of loving and accepting themselves just as they are without any self-improvement and fixing. That place is so simple and yet so profound that it’s life-changing when we hit on it. That’s where the cookies are as far as I can tell.

We can’t give anything we don’t possess ourselves. It’s in that same piece of A Course in Miracles where it says something along the lines of as we receive, so shall we give. We can’t give anything that we’ve not been willing to receive ourselves. How can we forgive anyone else if we’ve not forgiven ourselves? How can we love anyone if we don’t know and understand love for ourselves?

I mentioned that our conference, this was one of my favorite lines in my speech. I have thought about whether you’ve heard it before like this, but I’m sure you want to hear it. I said, “I graduated from self-improvement and now I’m into self-acceptance.” It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. It means that who is it that thinks I have to improve? Who is it that thinks that I have faults I need to change before I can be worthy? If you can just get that you’re a lovable, whole acceptable, and beautiful, that cuts through years of a lifetime self-improvement? Then you’re very close to home. That’s where the big piece of the work then.

[Tweet “My definition of guilt is punishing yourself before God doesn’t.”]

This idea that we’re seeking completion or that there’s something broken. It screws up the work of a lot of psychologists and personal development industry will probably fall apart if everybody thought somehow they didn’t require fixing. I would love to get a sense of where it is that you’ve transitioned many times in your life. I know that intuitively. Is there one particular transition pivot that strikes you as being important to share in this moment?

There have been many transitions, Adam, but the one that always comes to mind is when I was in graduate school. That was the beginning of the human potential movement, encounter groups, and Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers, and lots of doors are opening. They had this retreat that was called the Human Relations Laboratory where they take a bunch of college students and go where you could sit in a cabin and you basically relate. You talk about what’s in your heart, your challenges, you make yourself naked emotionally, like the stuff we do now, but it was in seminal form then. I sat in this group for four days and it was many hours a day. I just bullshitted my way through the group. I was in my head or playing games. I didn’t know it, but I was posturing myself in a hundred ways that I would sleep.

The last night of the group was an all-nighter, a marathon. The group got around to me and somebody said, “Tell us what you’re feeling.” I said, “I feel pretty comfortable.” One by one, each person of the group said. “You don’t seem real comfortable to me. I don’t think that you’re a comfortable guy at the moment.” After about the fourth person said this, something inside me clicked and said, “You haven’t fooled anybody. Your presentation has gotten you no mileage whatsoever.” Then it was followed by a little voice, and once again it wasn’t a real voice, but it was sense and it said, “You can let go now.” I remember this girl next to me who was holding my hand very sweetly and I felt comforted, and she said, “Just be who you are. Quit trying to prove something.” I said, “Guys, you’re right because I’m not comfortable at this moment.” Everybody went, “He finally he told the truth. We like you now.”

It sounds like a very tiny little moment, Adam, but it was huge for me because it was the end of 21 years of hustling and bustling and manipulating to look cool and to be acceptable, to be attractive. In that moment, I had the first inkling, like the first light that I can live my life and be who I am and not have to worry. Being who I am was going to get me a lot more mileage than posturing and image management. My whole life shifted 180 degrees. I started going to guru seminars, trainers, and teachers. That was the beginning of my true spiritual path. It was a noble and salvatory pivotal moment in my life. It’s funny that40 years later, I’m still thinking about it because a journey of a thousand miles begins in one step, and that was my one little step. Of course there’s been many since then, but that’s one I remember.

That one step, did it change your professional direction as well?

Yes.

It informs what you wanted to write about. So many things occurred in a moment where somebody said to you, honestly, they didn’t call you a fake, but basically.

They told me they love me enough beyond my fakeness, that they were willing to speak to the higher part of me that knew I would get it. I was teaching psychology and assistant training with those groups. I was nervous and reticent about bringing my spiritual values that were growing at that time into my group. I was teaching and doing straight psychology. Then I began to find the courage to bring spirituality into my work. Meditation, prayer, yoga, I chose to acknowledge and accept. At first I was afraid that I would bomb doing it, but my work took off because I was being authentic and I was meeting people where they lived in that place. The whole chemistry of what I was doing exploded because I was incorporating higher power and I was being real and passionate about it. That was a big course of action for me.

I’m in a place similar to that. I’ve been sharing things that have been on my heart when I’ve spoken and trained. I’ve had the blessing to do that a lot over the years, speak to a lot of people. My spiritual path, if I call it that, but the things I’ve been interested in and following have been things I’ve shared with people. Its caused the greatest inspiration in myself in those moments to go deeper and to be more real and to connect at a level that has been the most profound. It’s been the most profound integration or resolution for myself.

My challenge is my problems and all my shit has had an opportunity to be resolved in those environments where I’ve let spirit in, where I’ve invited spirit to join and, I would say, God. I look at my work and people have said to me, “Adam, I would love more of your spiritual teachings show up in what it is you’re doing.” Yet I still have that little voice that says, “Is this my path and is it my place to impose my views? “I still have this little voice inside of my head that says, “Just don’t be a manipulative preacher. Don’t preach.” I know that’s just in my head, but it does come up from time to time and I’ve been thinking about it more seriously.

Thank you for your honesty. I want to ask you a question because I want to share a point. In my mind, there’s a big difference between opposing your views and sharing what you’re passion about. To me, sharing passion is the most enlivening gift you can give to a student because you’re sharing what’s happy for you without needing them to follow along. I have been most impressed and transformed by people who just put it out there because they believed in it.

I could care less about whether I agreed with them or not. If I could give you some support and encouragement, just put it out there without defining it as imposing your views because you’re just showing up with what lights you. Which leads to my question I want to ask you, if I may be so bold, what would you be doing next or differently if you were willing to step into that broader consciousness and pull in that spiritual vantage point that you would like to share? How would that show up in your life?

I’d be speaking about this topic more. I would share more of the fact that the beginning, the middle and the end of the journey for me is about being connected to presence, to experiencing presence in every moment that I’m able to. That means for me receiving unconditional love, unconditional acceptance and attention, and unconditional forgiveness in every moment. I’m also in this place where praying and the power of prayer and the miracles that I’ve seen from the prayers that I’ve been guided to, that these are things that I would love to spend even more time doing even more than I currently do.

It’s this balancing between living in the world of things, the world of objects and all the other machinations of the human condition, and not wanting to retreat from that. I’m not looking to go to a cave. I got four kids and a wife I love and two dogs and all the rest and some. I’m not planning on a pilgrimage, but I am making my stand here now in this. In the midst of all the chaos of just human endeavor, all the fears and all the angers and everything else that shows up, I want to apply that prayer and that truth what I know to be true in each moment. I want to share it but I also want to figure it out a bit more before I have the audacity to share it in another level. I don’t know what to do with that other than I’m thrilled to be able to speak about it with you.

Getting Real: Sharing passion is the most enlivening gift you can give because you’re sharing what’s happy for you without needing them to follow along.

That’s beautiful. Thank you for your honesty. In my experience, Adam, if I wait until I perfected something to share it, to me, that’s one of the ego’s ways of holding onto the small self. I found if I’m honest about what I’ve mastered and what I’ve not, and I shared what I’ve mastered or even what I’d like to master, people get that. The world is such a screwed up place. There’s a lot of weird stuff going down. If you wait until you’re perfect before you share, you may never get around to it. Even if you can even share a smidgen of wisdom or insight or healing energy, that’s going to go a long way in a world that is darkened by people and fear. I’m always encouraging everybody to get out and show up and share what you can even if you’re not a master yet. That’s how you become a master, by sharing it.

You said it at the beginning, we teach what we most need to learn or want to learn. It’s so perfect to hear these words reflected back to me. Alan, thank you for those. That’s quite sage. I would love to ask you about the practices that you have because I believe that the quality of our lives is in some deep way related to the rituals that we keep, the things that we hold sacred. What are some of the things that you do to maintain presence or to be whatever the best version of you is on a day to day basis?

I meditate every morning. I’ve been meditating every morning for many years. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, sometimes I go shallow, sometimes I go deep, but I can’t imagine not starting my day on a conscious tone. I’m a student of A Course in Miracles. I still do lessons after many years. My dog is my therapist when I’m balled up with the computer with emails and spreadsheets. I grab my dogs and we’d go out in the field and I get sane again. I’m a big fan of dog therapy and you have two dogs so I’m sure you understand that. Those are my main practices. My writing is my therapy. I write for myself. When I write, I throw my consciousness into big ideas. I have to be in a broader spectrum in order to write. What happens to me when I write is I’m lifted and I tap into ideas I often haven’t even thought of before myself. My writing is a practice that seems like I’m doing it for other people. If people get the benefits from it, then it’s a happy overflow.

Do you write every day?

I like to write every morning when I get up between six and eight or something like that. That’s my favorite time to write. The world is quiet and there’s no email. Good stuff comes through when I can focus. I also have a special writing place. I go to a little cabin out on my land. Just getting away from electricity, the computer, stuff and the phone helps me to detach and to tune in and focus. I recommend to anybody if you can create something, even if you have an apartment, just have a chair in a little area in your apartment, you develop a frequency. When you get into the frequency, you get hooked up easily.

Creating sacred space for some of activity. Do you write by hand because you say there’s no electricity out there.

I have my laptop.

There’s still people that are writing that way. Alan, I’ve so enjoyed our conversation and I look forward to the next opportunity that we have to converse about these things. I know that for you right now you’re working on the next thing, the next pivot. What that looks like is exciting for you, I’m sure.

For me it’s about peeling away at it, to get to it. Allow it to set in without a ching. For the worldly person, advancement is attained by acquiring. For the spiritual person, it’s all about releasing. What I’m seeking to do now is peel away the stuff that I learned that doesn’t apply to me in truth or reality and just getting naked again about who I was when I was born. I believe I came in whole. We started out fine then we get defined and now we’re getting refined. What I’m seeking to do is to return to my original innocence and to see that in everyone else.

[Tweet “We started out fine then we get defined and now we’re getting refined.”]

Road to self-acceptance. That’s a beautiful road. We’re going to bring this particular show to an end. I feel wonderful in this moment that we got to have this conversation. I don’t know who said this, I’ve said it for a number of years, but I have no designs or delusions that somehow these are my words, but the whole of life is a process of letting go. It is an interesting thing when we start to think about the things that we are attached to and what we will not take with us. On the most basic, logical level, we will not take very much with us at all.

Do you remember David Cassidy from The Partridge Family? He passed away recently. His daughter was at his side and she said her father’s last words were these four words, “So much wasted time.” She said when she heard that, she made it her absolute attention that she would not waste any more time in her life, that she’d look through her soul so when she gets to her departure point, she won’t have to say the same thing. I took that sage advice to me as well.

Thank you, Alan. Where can people find out more information? It’s AlanCohen.com. For programs, for coaching, for books that you’ve written, all of that is housed at the website?

Everything’s right there. I have a life coach training program. I have new books. I have webinars and online courses. It’s all right there.

For those of you that are enjoying this podcast and have enjoyed this and others, I love that often I hear people are binge listening and binge watching and that’s cool. If you haven’t yet subscribed, please go ahead and subscribe to the podcast. You can do that at AdamMarkel.com. On iTunes, feel free to leave a review. We read them and they’re important as feedback for us as well, so we’d love to get your thoughts.

Our Pivot community, this community of people who are reinventing themselves and are transitioning, maybe not even waiting for the transitions to occur but getting out ahead of the curve and cultivating those transitions, what a beautiful community it is. You can get there by going to PivotFB.com which takes you right to the front door of the Start My PIVOT Community on Facebook. As we end this session, I will book in with how we began which is to be in gratitude.

Take a collective breath that we get to breathe together. We’re all breathing together whether we know it or not, and that’s a wonderful thing that gives me great comfort when I think about that. I want to wish you something. I want to wish you everything that your heart desires and that all your dreams come true. I have one wish in particular for you, which is that tomorrow morning that you get to wake up a little bit more conscious, a little bit more awake and aware, and that you wake up in ways that you might not even be able to imagine.

In that waking breath, that first conscious breath that you take of the new day, we must realize and remember that there will be people at that moment taking their very last breath. In addition to that, there will be babies born who are taking their very first breath. It is certainly a sacred moment, a holy moment, if you will, and one that we can be grateful for. If for nothing else, we can be grateful for that breath. Wake up is number one. Take that breath and be grateful for it. That’s number two.

Number three, if you’re inclined to say these words out loud, they’re pretty powerful and I’ve been blessed to share them with a lot of folks and I’ve been declaring them myself for almost ten years. The words are I love my life, I love my life, I love my life. It’s been a blessing to be with all of you. I look forward to having you experience one of our podcasts very soon. Wherever you are right now, blessings to you.

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About Alan Cohen

Alan Cohen, M.A., is the author of 23 popular inspirational books, including the best-selling The Dragon Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the award-winning A Deep Breath of Life, and the classic Are You as Happy as Your Dog? He is a contributing writer for the New York Times #1 bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul, and his books have been translated into 24 foreign languages. His work has been featured on Oprah.com and in USA Today, the Washington Post, and 101 Top Experts. Alan’s radio program Get Real is broadcast weekly on Hay House Radio, and his monthly column From the Heart is featured in magazines internationally. Website:www.AlanCohen.com