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Category: Spirituality

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Mindfulness Spirituality

Happy 78th birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama!

Sounds True — July 6, 2013

Wishing His Holiness the Dalai Lama a joyful 78th birthday today, and praying for his long life! I’ll never forget the one and only time I met the Dalai Lama, at his residence in Dharamsala many years ago. I was quite young, coming off a difficult break-up, and broken wide open alone in the mountains of northern India, just sort of wandering from place to place. He held my hand and just looked at me. He wasn’t scrambling to try to make my heartbreak go away, he wasn’t playing the wise guru offering me some subtle teaching on the empty-luminous ground of awareness, he wasn’t hurling blessings at me so that all would be made right and I could enter into some other state of consciousness. He simply spent a moment with me, all the way through, totally human, fully there with everything in the space between us. It was a short moment of time, but in another way it was totally eternal; those sorts of rare meetings, heart to heart, are rare and precious, and not easily forgotten. In my experience, the Dalai Lama is a holding environment of love, in and of himself; a totally real, humble, open-hearted, incredibly warm, authentic human being. May you live long, your Holiness!

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Self-Compassion Spirituality

Inside the broken-open heart

Sounds True — July 6, 2013

Inside the broken-open heart it is unbearably alive
The world cries out for you to mend the brokenness
Yet there is another longing to stay broken, to befriend the sadness, to hold the loneliness
There are colors in the sky that could never be seen
There is a scent in the jasmine that could never be known
There are sensations in the breeze that could never be felt… until this moment
It is only within the broken-open heart that the unseen can reveal itself

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Self-Compassion Spirituality

Embodied Vulnerability and Non-Division

Sounds True — July 3, 2013

Recorded live in our Boulder studios for the Self-Acceptance Project, Bruce shares with Tami (and viewers around the world) the importance of both psychological and spiritual approaches to the journey of freedom, love, and awareness. In my experience, Bruce is one of the most gifted and innovative therapists out there and someone I feel honored to call a friend and mentor.

As part of our free, 12-week video event series, I invited 23 psychologists, psychotherapists, neuroscientists, and spiritual teachers to speak with my friend and longtime colleague, Tami Simon, to ask the tough questions, and to explore the the relationship between self-acceptance and the larger spiritual journey.

All episodes of the Self-Acceptance Project are now posted and can be accessed as video or audio downloads, or can be streamed at no cost from the comfort of your own home. Our deep gratitude to the 35,000+ of you who registered for the series; we hope you enjoyed and benefited from it.

It is our intention to bring you more high-quality content in this area over the months and years to come. Our next series will focus on Deepening Intimacy, launching in the new year.

http://youtu.be/453_hzuzZ0I

 

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Spirituality Subtle Energy

Red Hot & Holy – up close and personal with the...

Sera Beak — June 28, 2013

Ever wonder what really happens behind the scenes at Sounds True? When the lights go down and the cameras start rolling? With our new book Red Hot & Holy, our red hot sister and friend Sera Beak offers a provocative and intimate view of what it means to get up close and personal with the divine in modern times. Sera’s luscious writing and renegade spiritual wisdom slices through religious and new age dogma, making her debut book The Red Book a breakout success. With Red Hot & Holy she offers something far more personal— an illuminating, extra-sensual, and utterly authentic portrait of the heart-opening process of mystical realization. This hot and holy book invites you to embrace your soul, unleash your true Self, and burn, baby, burn with divine love.

Learn more about Red Hot & Holy 

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Self-Compassion Spirituality

The Hobo Code (for Spiritual Pilgrims)

Sounds True — June 24, 2013

Right behind the Sounds True office backyard, just a hop over tangled barbed wire, run these local railroad tracks:

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The other day I was watching television’s most underrated exploration of the Jungian “shadow principle”—Mad Men—and it reminded me of these tracks. In the episode called “The Hobo Code,” we get a glimpse into the protagonist Don Draper’s childhood during the Great Depression. And we learn about a secret vocabulary that was chalked and carved on fence posts and telephone poles across America.

As it turns out, the hobo code was real. It varied from region to region and across the years. Countless souls used it to help each other find food and shelter and to avoid the perils of the day.

Here are some of those hobo signs (scraped from cyberspace) that still feel relevant to me, if only metaphorically:

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I spotted one of my first “hobo marks” decades ago. It came as a crackling transmission of Roy Tuckman’s legendary Pacifica Radio show “Something’s Happening.” I was homeless, hopeless, and definitely “hobo” at the time, couchsurfing in a friend’s farmhouse in Carmel, California.

The clock radio clicked to 2:00am and, drifting in and out of the night static, was the voice of Alan Watts. He was chuckling at the folly of “trying to catch an ocean wave in a bucket.” Which is exactly what I was doing with my life at that time—trying to rack up achievements and experiences that would assure my permanent, foolproof success.

Um, yeah, right.

Alan’s “hobo mark” pointed me onto the boxcar of radical self-inquiry, though I didn’t realize it until years later. And ever since, I’ve shared his humor and wisdom whenever it’s felt right to.

In fact, I had the privilege of working with Alan Watts’ son, Mark, to hand-pick the sessions for the audio set Out of Your Mind. Alan’s “catching waves in a bucket” allegory is in there.

Is the spiritual path so different from those rolling train tracks? Maybe the markers we find on our own journey—a haiku by Ikkyu, a meaningful photograph, the advice of a friend—reflect the same pilgrim’s spirit that says “we’re all in this together brothers and sisters.”

If I ever go back to visit Victoria’s family farm, I think I’m gonna chalk this symbol on their fencepost:

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So, what was your first metaphorical “hobo sign” on your life’s journey?

 

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Self-Compassion Spirituality

Sera Beak: Red Hot and Holy, Part 2

Sera Beak — June 19, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Sera Beak, a Harvard-trained scholar of comparative world religions and a dynamic new voice in modern spirituality. Sera spent years traveling the world to study with Sufi dervishes, Tibetan monks, Indian yogis, mystics, shamans, and more. She is the author of The Red Book, and with Sounds True her new book is Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. In the second part of a two-part interview, Tami speaks with Sera about her experiences with sacred touch, shadow work, the power of “cosmic family therapy” to heal the wounds of someone in a different lifetime, and the revelation of knowing deep in our being that we are beloved. (61 minutes)

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Sounds True is a multimedia publishing company founded in 1985 by Tami Simon, with the mission of disseminating spiritual wisdom. The company is based in Lafayette, Colorado.

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