Lisa Littlebird sits down for part 2 of 3 conversations this season with collaborating song weaver and composer Lyndsey Scott, to explore the lived experience behind Wholehearted Chorus’s 2026 season theme: “In an overwhelming world, what is mine to do?”

Lyndsey and Lisa reveal some of the hidden layers inside their experience this season… the resistance, vulnerability, and learning to hold the parts of ourselves that simply don’t want to do the work. Together, they acknowledge the value of being witnessed as whole human beings on a spiritual journey—not as polished or perfected versions of ourselves.

Two songs are centered, “Love is My Name” and “The Way Knows” in this conversation about listening deeply—to our bodies, our lives, one another, and whatever wisdom may be moving through us.

Lisa Littlebird sits down with songwriter and community songleader Brian "Yam" M. Dwyer, a devoted song man living in Bellingham, Washington, whose songs “A Way is Being Made” and “Servant of Love” are woven into the heart of Wholehearted Chorus's 2026 concert season.

Lisa and Yam are becoming friends in real time — and you get to listen in as they discover just how much they share: a belief that song is a birthright, a direct route to the divine, and sometimes a lifeline. They explore the etymology of the word music (the art of remembering), the wisdom of full-body intuition versus the endless loop of the mind, and what it truly means to be a servant of love.

In this opening episode of Season 2, host Lisa Littlebird sits down in person with her longtime friend and songleading collaborator Lyndsey Scott, who is supporting this 2026 season of Wholehearted Chorus. 

Over more than a decade of friendship forged in the fires of the Midwest singing community, Lisa and Lyndsey have shaped a shared philosophy: that song is medicine, that it moves us from complexity into presence, and that it can resource us for the hard and beautiful work of showing up in the world.

In this episode, Lisa and Lyndsey share two of Lyndsey’s songs that are resourcing Wholehearted Chorus this season: "Earth You Hold Us" — a prayer born around a campfire at Joshua Tree in preparation for justice work — and the deeply calming "As I Relax", a song seeded by a single affirmation and designed to help us soften into the uncertainty we all carry.

“To end my pain fully, I have to go to another level beyond the rational mind. The key lies in understanding the basis of all pain, the illusion that we are separated from the source of all life. All our specific instances of hurt are only tiny instances of a single enormous hurt. As long as we remain at this level, we are dealing merely with the little branches and stems of a central root.”

Host Lisa Littlebird (Wholehearted Chorus) welcomes Martha Rosenthal, co-author of Learning to Love: From Conflict to Lasting Harmony.

They explore moving from polarization to peace through Open-Hearted Listening— a simple, usable practice for couples, friends, and communities. One person speaks, the other mirrors and validates.

“I feel like your gratitude practice and the the Dharma of gratitude that you've lived has also been so impactful in our relationship – it really contributes to that culture of compassion for each other because we have a generous lens to start the conversation from. And that's certainly what I would wish for all of us on this planet.”

Lisa Littlebird is joined by her fiancé John Halcyon Styn for a raw and uplifting conversation about love, growth, vulnerability, and gratitude in relationship. Together they explore what it means to “stay in harmony” — both literally (as choir members) and emotionally, through the everyday work of partnership.

“If you think about OM as all sound… there's a harmonic wholeness that contains within it the polarity and the push and the pull and the dark and the light. And it's completely a form of arrogance for us to think we know better about how this is all supposed to go and who should be thinking what and how they should be acting. I think the first sound of harmony is the acknowledgement that I'm not positive that anybody should be acting, thinking or talking differently than they are.”

In this intimate dialogue, Lisa Littlebird sits down with friend and Wholehearted Chorus member Alexis Davis to explore the evolutionary path from arrogance to true humility as a pathway to healing collective division.

“What consciousness always is doing is offering love from one aspect of itself to another aspect of itself. And I want to be on that train. I want to be about that business because I can come up with ideas about what's right for me and what should I be doing with my life, but it's guesswork, it's hearsay and speculation. But if I line up with… the flow of love, then whatever it is that I'm doing is going to be moving in the direction of my highest good and the highest good for the situation and the highest good for the whole.”

In this heart-opening conversation, choir leader and podcast host Lisa Littlebird sits down with actor and Vedic meditation teacher Jeff Kober to ask how we move from polarization toward lasting harmony. Jeff shares how daily meditation practice has helped him dis-identify from fear, and together they reframe spiritual practice as process over product, anchored in service and community—where a shared purpose creates a field that lifts everyone.

”From the siddhic level of the 50th Gene Key, everything is experienced as music. Individual notes are threaded along a universal score that gradually becomes sweeter and sweeter to the ear as evolution reveals deeper and deeper harmonies.”
– Richard Rudd

In this episode, Lisa speaks with Richard Rudd, the author of The Gene Keys, about the intersection between spiritual contemplation and music. This beautiful and optimistic conversation centers how the The Gene Keys can be used to expand our exploration of how we might move from polarized division to harmony.  In the process, they cover a range of terrain, including their late, mutual friend Don Rosenthal and virtues of empathy, refinement, and even marriage on a path of devotion.

“If we can explicitly name our differences and be excited about them… if we can take pride in that and bring that forward as something to share… if we can feel the excitement in that, then we can have more understanding of where we’re each coming from and it can be celebrated. Belonging doesn’t mean that we all have to be the same.”
- Sorah Nutting

In this episode, Lisa talks with Sorah Nutting, one of the singer-songwriters in the group MaMuse.  We talk about how the songs grow us up, the wisdom of humor, revealing our shadows as a liberatory practice, our lives as a microcosm of the whole, and how the complex search for lineage can help us come closer to home.

In this short intro episode, Lisa explains the intention of this series and some of the recurring concepts and themes that will weave through the upcoming conversations.