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Home > Contemplate This! > Contemplate This! Interview with Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown
Podcast: Contemplate This!
Episode:

Contemplate This! Interview with Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown
Category: Religion & Spirituality
Duration: 01:32:48
Publish Date: 2018-08-14 10:25:14
Description:

Guest

Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown

Peace for Hearts is a website dedicated to helping people learn to live from the peace and joy in their hearts. I, Lerita Coleman Brown, am an embodied spirit, writer, speaker, heart and kidney transplant recipient, former psychology professor and I consider each day to be a walk of gratitude, trust, and hope. I am a strong advocate of forgiveness as a healing force in the world and an essential tool for experiencing the Peace and Joy in your heart. What helped me to survive a heart transplant 21 years ago and a kidney transplant nearly 11 years ago was recognizing that I needed to make a change in heart…not just a physical one but the deeper one lying at the core of who I am. I possessed a Type A personality (heart)–driven, highly competitive, hostile, and angry at anyone who might want to thwart my accomplishments. Now I know I was blocking the naturally loving, peaceful, compassionate, and joyful heart I was born with. I needed to recover the peace and joy in my heart that I had lost on my way to “success.”

A graduate of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, I serve as a *spiritual director/companion, create Friends of Silence groups, organize “listening prayer circles,” and encourage contemplative practices of all kinds. I seek to help individuals establish a regular spiritual practice, find their place on their spiritual journey and discover their purpose in life. Most of all I am called to assist all who are ready to uncover the Peace and Joy that lies buried in their hearts. Because in the end, it’s what’s in your heart that counts.

What’s in your heart? Is there something blocking your Peace and Joy? On my blog, I write about such topics as well as Howard Thurman, the contemplative, mystic and spiritual adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., promote spiritual awareness and events, and offer words and thoughts of spiritual inspiration. Join me as we travel along the ultimate road back to Love and our original state of Peace and Joy. You can also follow me on and Twitter @peace4hearts.


Lerita Coleman Brown, PhD, Professor of Psychology Emerita at Agnes Scott College, is a spiritual director/companion, writer, retreat leader, and speaker. A graduate of the Spiritual Guidance Program at the Shalem Institute (founded by Tilden Edwards, Episode 3), Lerita writes about and promotes contemplative spirituality in everyday life, the life and work of Howard Thurman, and uncovering the peace and joy in one’s heart.

Dr. Brown was the retreat director and keynote speaker at the "Sewanee Contemplative Exchange," an event that emerged after the New Contemplative Exchange in August 2017 to address the integration between contemplative prayer and compassionate social action. I was all signed up to attend, and then we bought a house and closed the weekend of the retreat:( I missed out on her retreat, but I did not miss out on her wisdom, which comes through passionately in this interview. Her website is called PeaceforHearts.com, and that is exactly what I'm still feeling after connecting with her in this conversation. I know listeners will find #peaceforhearts in this as well.
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