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The Daring to Rest Yoga Nidra Meditation Program

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4 Ways to Rest This Holiday Season

Karen Brody — December 19, 2019

Giving yourself permission to rest during the holiday time is perhaps the most radical—and life-saving—act you can do. Here are a few easy ways to give yourself the gift of rest. Your family and friends will thank you—and might just lie down too!

Meditate Every Morning or Evening

If you have 15-minutes, try practicing yoga nidra meditation, a guided meditation also known as yogic sleep. This is supreme relaxation. You can find yoga nidra online. If you don’t have that kind of time, silent meditation for even just 3 minutes every day can feel restful. Close your eyes, and notice your breath. You can repeat a mantra or a relaxing word as you breathe in and out. If family is visiting and you don’t have a quiet spot in the house, meditate in your car or even in the bathroom!

Breath Counting

We tend to forget just how restful it can feel to breathe. Breath counting pulls the mind away from stress and towards a more centered, balanced feeling. To practice, count backwards slowly, with rhythmic inhalations and exhalations, and say to yourself as you breathe, “Breathing in, 11, breathing out, 11, breathing in, 10, breathing out, 10.” And so on, counting down to one. You do this while breathing the whole body or engage a chakra and breathe into that area. Befriend the breath.

Walking Meditation (extra points for bare feet!)

If you’re stressed over the holidays, walk in silence on the ground for five minutes or more. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Walk as if your feet are kissing the earth.” Walking bare-footed is ideal—outside or in your home. More and more evidence suggests that we need the Earth’s electrons for our well-being—it improves sleep, pain management, and stress. If you can’t walk in silence, try cooking your holiday meal mindfully in bare feet, Your body will thank you.

Watch the Sun Set or Rise

Sunrise and sunset are mystical times of the day. Busy lives don’t easily give us access to the soul. During sunset and sunrise the veils of illusions, which pull us away from our truest self, are thin. We can see ourselves more clearly and feel more intuitive and creative. If you can, watch the sun set or rise in silence. Your nervous system will thank you.

Karen Brody is a women’s well-being and leadership expert who helps women journey from worn out to well rested and then dream big in their work and lives. A certified yoga nidra instructor, she is the author of Daring to Rest: Reclaim Your Power with Yoga Nidra Rest Meditation, founder of Daring to Rest, a yoga nidra-based self-empowerment program for women. She has an MA in Women and International Development from the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, and a BA in sociology from Vassar. Karen is also a playwright, and Birth, her theater-for-social-change play has been seen in over 75 cities around the world. She is the mother of two boys and met her husband in the Peace Corps. She resides in Washington, DC, but considers the world her home.

The community here at Sounds True wishes you a lovely holiday season! We are happy to collaborate with some of our Sounds True authors to offer you wisdom and practices as we move into this time together; please enjoy this blog series for your holiday season.

To help encourage you and your loved ones to explore new possibilities this holiday season, we’re offering 40% off nearly all of our programs, books, and courses sitewide. May you find the wisdom to light your way.

EXPLORE NOW

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We Dare You to Rest This Holiday Season

Karen Brody — November 20, 2017

When to say “No” & “Yes”

One of the most exhausting stress loops for women starts with saying “yes” when we feel “no”. Becoming your most authentic self is the first step to learning what a “no” and a “yes” feel like in your body. We often tell women to say no more, but equally as troublesome is that we also don’t feel and then follow our yeses.

Here’s a quick way to practice sensing what “yes” and “no” feel like to you:

Put your hand on your heart and gut.
Place your attention at the space between your eyebrows (your third eye).
Inhale from the space between your eyebrows to the base of your spine, while mentally saying “Sooooo.” Then exhale from the base of your spine to the space between your eyebrows while mentally saying the sound, “Hummmmm.” Repeat twice more.
Be still as you rest your attention on your third eye for 20 to 30 seconds.
Call up a question you want an answer to, and see if you feel a “yes” or “no.”

For women who have lots of decisions to make, like mothers, I often suggest making a list of all the things stressing them out, and then, on the same day every week, doing this practice, seeing if they get a “yes” or “no” for each item on the list. This is also a great practice to do weekly when you’re pregnant, because giving birth centered in your true self, knowing your “yes” and “no,” is the best gift you can give your baby.

Using this practice to help make decisions will help you stop overdoing. You begin with feeling, drop your ego, and then, from your true nature, make decisions that end the worn-out feeling. Beware of mistaking things you love to do as a “yes.” For example, many of the creative moms I work with love to cook, but when they use this practice to ask whether they want to stay up cooking cupcakes late at night for their children’s school when they have work the next day, the answer they get might well be “no.”

Sometimes you may be faced with a difficult “no”: your inner wisdom will tell you that saying “no” to something will liberate time, but saying “no” may not feel good right away or may disappoint someone. If this happens, I encourage you to say “no” anyway. If you want to feel well-rested, you need to make the choice that supports your wholeness.

Love Yourself First

Most of us have heard flight attendants on an airplane say, “Put your own oxygen mask on first, and then secure your loved one’s.” This is an important message that well-rested women get in every bone of their bodies: love yourself first. The first thing your loved ones need is a healthy you. Here are two ways to do that.

Give Kindness
- When you’re spinning in mental loops and stressed out, it’s hard to be kind to yourself or others. But as I always say after yoga nidra, I feel like I drank a cup of kindness. To capitalize on and reinforce this feeling, repeat this loving-kindness meditation.
  - Say to yourself:
    - May I be happy.
    - May I be safe.
    - May I be free of physical pain and suffering.
    - May I be able to recognize and touch harmony and joy in myself.
    - May I nourish wholesome seeds in myself.
    - May I be healthy, peaceful, and strong.

Notice how you feel in your body. When you’re ready, you can move on to saying the words for others: May (name of a loved one) be happy. May (he/she) be safe.

Go on Wonder Dates
- Schedule quiet time for yourself. My friend and colleague Jeffrey Davis, of Tracking Wonder, a creative branding company, loves to say, “Wonder is not kid’s stuff. It’s radical grown-up stuff.” That’s right, taking time for wonder is an essential multi-vitamin for adults, too. It helps clear your mind and relax the body.
- What’s wonder? It’s a time to be curious, to not know something. It’s the gratitude and amazement we feel when we see a shooting star or a beautiful full moon. Try finding a quiet space to read poetry, or sitting in a tree and then journaling about what you see and how it makes you feel. Many spots in nature call up wonder. Wonder sparks ideas, so the more time you spend in wonder, the juicer you will feel when you return to your everyday life.
- And if you think you don’t have time, think again. Jeffrey has two little girls, and as he says, he “sculpts time” for wonder by intentionally planning space to wonder into his calendar.

Looking for more great reads?

Excerpted from Daring to Rest, by Karen Brody.

Karen Brody is a speaker and the founder of Bold Tranquility, a company offering yoga nidra meditation for the modern women via downloadable products and workshops. Her work has been featured in Better Homes & Gardens, and she’s a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. She’s also a critically acclaimed playwright. Karen had a long personal history of severe panic attacks until she found yoga nidra meditation over a decade ago. At that time, she was a sleep-deprived mother of two small children on anti-anxiety medication. She signed up for a yoga nidra meditation class simply looking to lie down for a nap. What she got was “the best nap of her life.” As she continued to practice yoga nidra regularly, her deep fatigue lifted; she wrote a critically acclaimed play, got off anti-anxiety pills, and started to teach this yoga nidra “power nap” to every exhausted mother she knew.

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Vital Emotions at Work: An excerpt from Power of Emoti...

Karla McLaren — March 20, 2025

Emotions are Vital Aspects of Thinking, Acting, and Working

People once believed that emotions were the opposite of rationality, or that they were lower than or inferior to our allegedly logical processes. But decades of research on emotions and the brain have overturned those outdated beliefs, and we understand now that emotions are indispensable parts of rationality, logic, and consciousness itself. In fact, emotions contain their own internal logic, and they help us orient ourselves successfully within our social environments. Emotions help us attach meaning to data, they help us understand ourselves and others, and they help us identify problems and opportunities. Emotions don’t get in the way of rationality; they lead the way, because they’re vital to everything we think and everything we do. Emotions aren’t the problem; they’re pointing to the problem, and they’re trying to bring us the precise intelligence and energy we need to deal with the problem.

In [The Power of Emotions at Work], we’ll learn how to listen to emotions as uniquely intelligent carriers of information, and how to build healthy and effective social and emotional environments at work – not by ignoring or silencing emotions (you can’t), but by listening to them closely, learning their language, and creating a communal set of emotional skills that everyone can rely on. This work is not difficult at all, but it can be unusual in an environment that wrongly treats emotions as soft, irrational, or unprofessional.

The serious problems we’ve baked into the workplace don’t come from any specific management style or ideology, so I won’t focus on managers or leaders as if they’re uniquely powerful or uniquely to blame. These problems also aren’t limited to specific occupations or income brackets (though low-wage work is regularly dehumanizing and hazardous); these are long-term, widespread problems based on a failed workplace model – and on an outdated social and emotional approach that does not support (or in many cases, even comprehend) human relationships and human needs.

This book is the result of decades of exploration and study into how the workplace got to be so unworkable, plus decades of experience in how to access the existing genius in people’s emotional responses (in surprisingly simple ways once you understand how emotions and empathy work). With the help of the genius in our emotions, we can create emotionally well-regulated and worthwhile places for all of us to earn our living and spend our lives.

Luckily, we don’t have to do anything special to welcome emotions into the workplace, or even to make room for them, because emotions are and always have been in the workplace. They’re in the responses people have to workplace abuses; they’re in disengaged workers; they’re in workers seeking other jobs while on the job; they’re in workers who rightly avoid communicating upward about serious problems; they’re in low-wage workers who learn how to survive in hellscapes like call centers, fast-food restaurants, gig work, and robot-like warehouse jobs; they’re in living-wage workers who tolerate unhealthy workplaces because they can’t afford to leave their health insurance behind; and they’re in high-wage workers who may have to bow down to their superiors and compete with their colleagues to be seen as “winners” – and whose experiences of workplace abuse may not be taken seriously because they make so much money and therefore have no right to complain.

We can also see the emotions in our responses to workplace successes; in our healthy working relationships; in the ways we gather together to solve problems; in the ways empathic workers and leaders empower everyone around them; in the ways our colleagues support us when we’re struggling; in the ways businesses step up in times of loss; in the ways we create open communication and humane workflows; in the ways we teach each other; in the benefits, support, flexibility, and living wages we provide for our workers; in the honest sharing of business difficulties or financial losses; and in the laughter we share on great days and rotten days.

Emotions are everywhere in the workplace because emotions are a central feature of human nature. They aren’t removable, and in fact, trying to remove them is a huge part of what created the failed workplace model we have today. Emotions are crucial to everything we do and to every aspect of our work; therefore, we’ll learn how to listen to emotions, work with them, and respect their intelligence. And in so doing, we’ll build a better workplace – and a better world – from the ground up.

Karla McLaren, M.Ed.

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Bringing Your Soul Force to Work: Why Being Yourself C...

Tami Simon — March 20, 2025

Each of us has a somewhat mysterious inner power that could be called a “soul force.” In my experience, our soul force feels unstoppable, and it carries with it our uniqueness and what we care the most about. You could say it is the most essential part of us, that which we cannot be “talked out of,” that which demands expression.

Many people believe that this soul force, if it even exists, is not necessarily related to our work in the world. I am proposing just the opposite: that if we are to find our deepest fulfillment at work and achieve the highest potential in our career, in whatever field that might be, we need to engage and unleash this power.

What does it feel like to “work from our soul”? In my experience, there is a sense of drawing on a source of pure potential that is self-renewing and feels electrically charged. I don’t feel like I am working from a thin and limited layer of thoughts or strategy, but instead, there is a sense of being tapped into a charged energetic system of support and creativity.

Your Belly, Heart, and Head

For many years, I practiced somatic meditation, a type of meditation where we practice (among other things) inhabiting the inner space of the body and developing what’s known as interoception (being aware of internal bodily sensations). One of the things I discovered was the felt experience of three energy centers—the belly, heart, and head—that are referenced in many different systems of spiritual practice, and how these three centers can help us in engaging our soul force at work.

This might sound esoteric, but I actually think these three inner energy centers (called the “three brains” or “tan tiens” in Chinese medicine or “elixir fields” in certain types of qigong) are very discoverable and accessible to people who start to turn their attention inward.

To say more, when our belly center is open and energy is flowing through it in an unimpeded way, we can feel a sense of grounded power. We feel anchored and sense that we can weather the storms of life like a strong tree that is rooted deeply in the earth.

When our heart center is open, we can feel a sense of love streaming from us in every direction. This stream carries with it our care and concern for others. You could even say that we sense a stream of well wishes pouring out from our heart. Our work becomes imbued with a motivation to be of service to others and our world.

And when the center of our head is open, energy and information flow in through the top of our head in a way that often feels, at least in my experience, quite mysterious. New ideas come to us that can feel sparkly, such that even we are surprised by what is occurring to us. We become endlessly innovative in our work.

The Power of Letting Go

What does it take to awaken the intelligence of these three “inner brains” and allow the full power of our soul force to stream through these three energy centers? In my experience, what is required is not what you might expect. We don’t need to add anything to us. What is needed is a whole lot of letting go.

What are we letting go of? All of the ways we block ourselves, all of the ways we hold back. We are letting go of all of the ways we seek approval and are twisted up trying to appeal to others to be liked by them, the many ways we try to find acceptance and success via the unspoken and sometimes spoken rules of the status quo. We let go of twisting ourselves to fit a norm that doesn’t fit the truth of who we are. We let go of the mental construct of who we are so we can be the unique expression of the truth of who we are.

One year at Sounds True, we decided to give T-shirts out to the staff as part of our holiday gifting. Not a particularly original idea, but something we thought people would like. And our creative director put this slogan on the T-shirt: “Sounds True: Here for the Weird.” And I loved it.

Now, not everyone likes the word “weird”… but I do. A chapter was once written about me for a book on bringing your whole self to work, and the authors called it “Tami Simon: Flying Her Freak Flag.” I didn’t mind the use of the word “freak” either. The reason is that these are just words in popular culture that mean someone is willing to be themselves in all of their uniqueness and eccentricities. And that courage to step forward and be a brave truth-teller is something that I value.

Recently, I was in a discussion with a spiritual teacher about how interesting it is that we don’t become a blob of paste-like oneness when we drop deeply into what some people refer to as the “field of being,” the boundless, awake awareness that we share. Instead, we often become more uniquely expressive and can even appear a bit quirky. He shared his observation that it is our ego-construct, the veneer of “I’ve got it together,” that keeps us looking like copycats of others. When we allow that ego construct to lose its presentational grip, and perhaps even drop away, we make room for the emergence of our soul force, the innermost part of ourselves, to shine forth. We liberate our own “weird.”

As a leader of an organization, one of the things I have noticed is that when I present and speak from this innermost place without a lot of self-censorship, it naturally invites others to do the same. It is as if a “permission field” has been established. The company founder is telling it like it is—talking about what she learned in therapy this week, or something that occurred when talking with her wife (of the same sex), or a discovery that came through a sleepless night—and this sets up a new norm. This organization is actually a place where I don’t need to wear a mask at work; my truth-telling and uniqueness are welcome here. And this liberates a tremendous amount of energy and, dare I say, “soul power.”

What’s Your Genius Zone?

Several years ago, as the CEO at Sounds True, I found myself having difficulty figuring out how to best structure our organization (as our direct-to-consumer digital business began to grow rapidly with a different set of infrastructure needs from our traditional publishing business). I decided to hire an organizational consultant, Lex Sisney, the founder of Organizational Physics, whose expertise is helping midsize companies design to scale.

To my surprise, Lex started his assessment of Sounds True’s structural needs by having me do a deep-dive review of whether or not I was working in what he calls one’s “genius zone.” As I have come to understand Lex’s approach, part of what he believes contributes to organizational flourishing (and the ability to scale) is when people are in job functions that make the best use of their natural capacities and passions.

In a way, this seems utterly obvious. Like any good sporting team, you want people in the positions where they have the most natural affinity and talent. And when you have a whole team of people working in their genius zones, you have a much greater likelihood of having a winning team.

And yet as a founder, I have always had the attitude of “I will do whatever it takes. This isn’t about being in a ‘genius zone’; this is about getting done what needs to be done. All work is not enjoyable anyway, and just buck up and do the next thing needed.” This sounds very dutiful, and it is, but it is not the stance that creates the most high-functioning team, nor the most joy, nor the most soul engagement at work.

About a year and a half ago, I did an exercise where I went through my calendar for several weeks in a row and numbered every scheduled meeting on a 1-to-10 scale in terms of how excited I was for the meeting to take place. A very obvious pattern emerged: about half of the meetings in my calendar received the number 2 or 3, and about half of the meetings were an 8 or a 9 or even a 10.

The events in the calendar that received a high score related to interviews I was hosting, new partnerships that were being formed, and working directly with authors on new projects. The meetings that received a low score had to do with the business’s strategic execution in terms of finance, operations, and the coordination of various departments. This simple exercise presented a clear picture: I needed to shift my role and pass on a whole set of responsibilities so I could be free to focus on and expand the parts of my work that were exciting to me.

We have this notion that we need to trade what we really care about in order to make money. In a conversation with Rha Goddess, author of the book The Calling, I asked her about this. She said something to the effect of, “Why wouldn’t you earn the most money in your career doing what you are uniquely good at, what you excel at, what you uniquely have the ability to contribute?”

Her words landed. What if our greatest career achievement can only come from working in our area of natural genius, from letting go of all the ways we hold ourselves back and bringing our full soul force to work?

I believe that when we do, we find fulfillment at work. And also in life. And then, when our days come to an end, we find ourselves at peace, hands open and empty. We gave away all that we were given.

In support of your journey,

Tami Simon

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Love: The Shining of Being in Every Heart: A Message f...

Rupert Spira — March 5, 2025

Being is the shared element in all people, animals and things. Just as there is one universal physical space that pervades all individual buildings without being limited to them, likewise there is just one unlimited being from which everyone and everything borrows its apparent existence.

Just as the space in a room is not contained within its walls but is an apparent limitation of universal space, likewise the individual being that each of us seems to be is not contained within or generated by the body but is an apparent limitation of the one infinite being.

Infinite being is felt by each of us as the amness of our self. This feeling of ‘I am-ness’ is infinite being shining in each of our finite minds. Just as universal space seems to acquire the limitations of the four walls within which it seems to be contained, but in fact always remains the universal space,likewise infinite being – God’s being – seems to acquire the limitations of the body within which it seems to be housed, without ever actually ceasing to be infinite being. The apparent mixture of infinite being plus the content of experience seems to create a temporary finite being, a separate self or ego.

As a concession to the separate self or ego that we seem to be, most spiritual teachings give us something to do to become enlightened. This is like giving the space of a room a practice in order to become universal space. But the space needs no liberation, for it was never bound. The space inside is always and already identical to the space outside.

Likewise, our self needs no liberation or enlightenment. If we go deeply into the simple experience of being, we find no limit there – it is already infinite, already free. While thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and so on have limits, these limitations do not pertain to our being.

Even to say being is mixed with experience isn’t quite right. Just as space remains unmixed with the walls that seem to contain it and the objects that it seems to contain, our being is never really mixed with experience. It always shines in its original condition: untarnished, unmixed, unlimited, unmodified. Inherently free and at peace.

Infinite being needs no enlightenment or spiritual practice. So, for whom are the teachings and the innumerable practices that have been elaborated in the various religious and spiritual traditions? For the temporary, finite separate self we seem to be. They are, as such, compassionate concessions –legitimate ones – but ones that ultimately perpetuate the illusion of a separate self. Therefore, the highest teaching is no teaching, no teacher, no effort, no practice – just the shining of being, the one being we all are.

Imagine that the vast physical space of the universe is conscious. If you were to ask the aware space in the room in which you are sitting about its nature, it may look at the walls around it and describe itself in terms of their limitations. And it would imagine that the space outside the walls was separate from it, and might engage in various efforts to know it or unite with it. But if instead it looked only at itself, it would recognize that it contained no inherent limitation. It would recognize that it is already the vast space of the universe. All its efforts would cease with that recognition.

Similarly, our apparently finite being, seemingly located in and bound by the body, looks beyond its limitations at the vast universe and ponders the nature of its reality. It may even engage in great efforts to know that or unite with it. But all we need do is look closely, to taste the nature of our own being. If we do so, we find no limitation there – our being finds no limitation in itself. Our being is already the one infinite being, the only being there is – in religious terms, God’s being. There is just that, just this.

This utter absence of anything other than itself – this absence of otherness, separation, duality – is the experience we know as love. Love is, as such, the shining of infinite being in each of our hearts. It is the taste of God’s being in us, as us.

Rupert Spira discovered Rumi’s poetry at age fifteen, sparking a lifelong journey to understand the nature of being. He studied Advaita with Dr. Francis Roles, explored Sufism, and drew inspiration from Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, and Nisargadatta Maharaj. He also pursued an interest in ceramics, training with British pioneers before opening his own studio. Meeting teacher Francis Lucille in the 1990s deepened Rupert’s understanding, integrating the teachings of Advaita and Kashmir Shaivism. Rupert holds regular in-person retreats, as well as online retreats and webinars. For more, see rupertspira.com.

Ivana says:

November 10, 2017 at 6:19 am

Thank you for recomendations!