Sarah Blondin

Sarah Blondin is an internationally beloved spiritual teacher. Her guided meditations on the app InsightTimer have received nearly 10 million plays. She hosts the popular podcast Live Awake, as well as the online course Coming Home to Yourself. Her work has been translated into many languages and is in use in prison, recovery, and wellness programs. For more, visit sarahblondin.com.

Author photo © Britgill Photography

Also By Author

Sarah Blondin: Heart Minded

Is your heart asking you for a more meaningful conversation? Are you longing to engage a different kind of awareness than the thinking mind? Sarah Blondin is beloved by millions for her online guided meditations that invite us to come back home to our hearts and to embrace the fullness of our experience. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Sarah about her new book, Heart Minded, and how we can each take up residence in the intelligence and strength of our hearts. 

Tune in as Tami and Sarah discuss the practice of softening and releasing inner rigidity, overcoming defensiveness and resistance, witnessing the rivalry between the emotional heart and the spiritual heart, discovering the voice of your own heart, the practice of flow writing, self-intimacy as the source of true safety, finding your authentic “yes to life,” trust in the face of initiatory experiences, normalizing the challenging nature of the spiritual journey, the mysterious force of grace, the interplay between our sensitivity and our strength, a meditation for welcoming joy, and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

Building the Bridge Between the Heart and the Mind

How can we drop what we are holding on to, if we do not first look for the hand that is grasping so tightly?

Have you ever noticed that you have two distinctly different personae and tend to vacillate between them?

One is very rigid and concerned with the outcome of everything. It worries and frets, its gaze mostly downcast. It doesn’t rest easily, even keeps you up at night sometimes. It acts almost like a dog chasing its tail. It circles obsessively over every detail and unknowable outcome, chasing the same things in a constant repeated pattern. It is cunning, convincing, and tyrannical in nature. It is feverish and ungrounded. Changing, morphing, and flopping from one story or idea to the next. This is your unharnessed mind. The persona you take on when your mind is not connected to the compass of the heart.

For most of us, that’s the dominant persona. But the other aspect of you, as if by some divine intervention, will from time to time slip past the censor of the mind and cheerfully take over your being with its boundless and uninhibited spirit. This personality doesn’t worry. Its face is often lifted, looking in wonder at the shifting sky and swollen moon. Lips curled into a slight smile. It is fluid and flowing, as if it’s on a river of unending joy. It acts like water and reflects light. You feel buoyant. This is your heart-centered self, your true self.

Because most of us moved into our mind long, long ago as a way of protecting our hearts, we now live most of our time in that rigid, concerned first persona. Without even realizing it, we allow our minds to stand between us and our true nature. We have no (conscious) idea how much our minds are acting as a defensive block against our soft and tender core, constantly at work trying to find ways to keep us from feeling, from hurt, from heartache. The price we are paying, however, is that we are also kept from accessing source.

In order to be heart minded, we need to bring the heart and mind into harmony and partnership with one another. For this to happen, we have to train the mind not to fear and close off from the heart, and instead, serve our heart and implement its wishes. In order to do this, we have to undo our mind’s association of feelings of the heart with hurt and harm. In situations that would ordinarily have us retreat or retaliate, we need to remain conscious of what’s happening and choose to soften and lean into our heart’s center. Each time we practice this softening, we send a new message to the mind that signals that we are safe, willing, and wanting to live in this more open, more sensitive way.

Over time, if we are resolute in our intention to step into our heart, our mind will become less rigid in its defenses against feelings and tenderness, and gradually we will become more heart centered.

Remember, we are not trying to pit the heart and mind against one another; we are trying to marry their aptitudes.

Let’s say a wave of anxiety washes through you. You notice your mind begin to race and attach to fearful thoughts. The anxiety then morphs into panic, which courses through you and makes you feel like jumping out of your skin. You begin reaching for an escape, resorting to some form of substance or distraction that can act as a numbing balm.

What just happened? Because you avoided your distress, you are only slightly comforted. A part of you remains braced under the distraction, in fear of the next time this could happen. Your mind’s instinct to protect and defend has been confirmed.

Your heart is neglected and still aching.

But let’s say a wave of anxiety washes through you and instead of looking for an escape route, you go to a quiet room to confront the feeling. You let go of the notion that something is wrong and respond as if something very right is taking place. You know some part of you is calling out for your love and attention.

Let’s say you close your eyes and open your heart to the bigness of the feeling. You create space around it simply by looking without resistance at its contours. You know the only antidote is self-love and hospitality. The mind stops racing away from the distress, which makes room for the heart to begin healing and soothing the body. Your mind learns a new route. You are gifted with courage and resilience.

The only difference between these scenarios was one simple choice: to remain a bystander as the mind continues to ignore the call of the body and heart or to act in ways that support leading from the heart, so the mind can follow.

The two can be wonderful allies if we let them.

As we become heart minded, we begin transforming our human experience from something out of our hands to something very much in them. We begin to cultivate joy instead of haphazardly stumbling upon it when we are willing.

Each moment, our bodies are counseling us to make choices that bring us closer to love. The wisdom of the heart and body is there for us, always, if we listen and let it lead.

For a guided practice in learning to stay in our hearts during difficult times, follow along with Sarah in this video.

 

This is an adapted excerpt from Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love by Sarah Blondin.

 

Sarah Blondin

Sarah Blondin is an internationally beloved spiritual teacher. Her guided meditations on the app InsightTimer have received nearly 10 million plays. She hosts the popular podcast Live Awake, as well as the online course Coming Home to Yourself. Her work has been translated into many languages and is in use in prison, recovery, and wellness programs. For more, visit sarahblondin.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Learn More

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

A Grounding Meditation to Start Living From Your Heart

I would like to open with a grounding meditation. Feel free to listen to the meditation here or you can read along with the text below.

If I may, I’d like to guide you someplace warm. To an island not too far away. It won’t take much effort, just a few conscious breaths. And all I need for you to do is to stop. For this moment, stop seeking, stop solving, stop gritting and grinding. All you need is to close your eyes and receive. 

Quiet now, like water or sand. Settle now, like dusk and dew drop. One breath in, one breath out. One breath in, one breath out. Reorient yourself to face toward what is immovable inside you. Just look now. Trust and you shall see. It is there, to the left of your right lung, tucked just under your left rib, a warm small island, beating like a drum.  If you stand here long enough, you will feel the song inside being written, maybe even prayed over you. Moment by moment, it never stops. 

Can you feel you are unlacing something? Or better, something is unlacing you? Can you feel the fight stopping? The fear quieting? Can you feel your edges becoming more like wind or water, rather than shale and stone? Can you feel the light coming? The waves of warmth rising? 

Now move into this current of grace that your heart has created for you, and feel the great hush wash over you. Feel the substance of love holding your very atoms together. This is your heart, dear one. Never forget this is yours. Kneel here, whenever you are thirsty, whenever your feet are tired, or your hands are sore. Kneel here when you can’t see love any longer. Kneel here, dear one. Reorient yourself toward what is immovable in you.

My new book, Heart Minded: How to Hold Yourself and Others in Love, was written to help remind us, reconnect us, reorient us with our hearts. Through story and guided meditation, I lead you through the fraught and sometimes frightening places holding you separate from your heart. It is a journey of healing that teaches you how to see and feel not from the mind, but from the wise seat of your very heart.

Now more than ever, we are being asked to move into the consciousness of the heart. Where love, compassion, “at-one-ment” become our governing virtues. When we see through the eyes of the heart, when we become heart minded, we stand as a beacon of light, burning back the dark.

Please join me in the heart-minded revolution. 

This originally appeared as an author letter to the Sounds True audience from Sarah Blondin.

 

sarah blondinSarah Blondin is an internationally beloved spiritual teacher. Her guided meditations on the app InsightTimer have received nearly 10 million plays. She hosts the popular podcast Live Awake, as well as the online course Coming Home to Yourself. Her work has been translated into many languages and is in use in prison, recovery, and wellness programs. For more, visit sarahblondin.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

book cover

Learn More

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

You Might Also Enjoy

Get ready to live the Magick every day

You will attract Magick into your day when you see everything and every place as alive and in constant communication with you.

A Box of Magick: A Guided Journey to Crafting a Magickal Life through Witchcraft, Ritual Herbalism and Spellcrafting is a bold invitation to activate the deepest part of yourself with two magickal guides―myself, and my Elder Wiccan High Priestess and mentor Connie DeMasters.

At the onset of the 2020 pandemic, fifteen years after Connie’s passing, I received a literal box of Magick on my doorstep―23 pounds of my mentor’s rituals, hymns, spells, charts, astrology, and more. Help from beyond the veil materialized exactly when I needed strong arms around me and the Magick of hope.

At first, I was overwhelmed with this honor and the exclusive peek into my mentor’s instruction and teachings until I heard Connie say, “Tell them about us.” Afterall, Magick is crafted through the relationships and intentions we carry in our heart.

A Box of Magick inspires you to accept and honor our Divine Essence, develop abiding self-love, and stand with a sword of personal truth held ready. It demonstrates how an inspired mentor can help us make the connections between the messages, omens, and signs and our life choices and opportunities. Stories help us apply magickal insights to our own experiences and allow the lessons to settle deep into our bones. Rituals evoke the innate knowledge that Magick lives within us.

Thirteen illustrations depict setting up sacred space and altar, working with elementals, divination, archetypes, gods and goddesses, shadow work, universal influences, circle magick, spellcrafting and coming out of the broom closet—empowered and ready to live the Magick every day.

This book is a tribute to the power within us all and the Magick makers whose shoulders we stand upon. We are never alone on our Witchcraft journey. We can all learn the cosmic language of energy and vibration in nature and throughout the universe.

What Magick could you create if you joined the cosmic conversation?

Bright Blessings,

Jamie Della


Jamie Della is a priestess, healer, Xicana witch, and creativity mentor. She is the author of nine books, including most recently The Book of Spells: The Magick of Witchcraft, and is the author of the Herbal Journeys column in Witches & Pagans magazine. Learn more at jamiedella.com.

A Path to Embodied Nonduality

We find ourselves in a time that is rich with paths toward spiritual awakening, especially that pinnacle of awakening called “nonduality.”

The Fullness of the Ground is my contribution to that abundance. It describes in detail the lived experience of nondual realization.

In the book, I offer a series of gentle attunement practices, called the Realization Process, for uncovering and knowing ourselves as a fundamental, undivided dimension of consciousness, pervading our whole body and environment. Pervading our body, fundamental consciousness is experienced as the authentic ground of our individual being. Pervading our body and environment, it is the basis of our oneness with everyone and everything around us. This means that we become whole as individuals at the same time as we transcend our individuality and experience unity with our surroundings.

As a longtime spiritual teacher and psychotherapist, I feel that there is not enough emphasis in some of the nonduality teachings about how this realization enriches our lives. I have been particularly concerned about teachings that encourage people to disconnect from themselves as individuals or to suppress their emotional responses to the world around them. In this book, I instead offer a path to nondual realization that is deeply embodied and that matures us as individuals, at the same time that it opens us to self–other oneness. Far from erasing us as individuals, nondual realization enhances our experience of our own unique existence. It deepens all of our human capacities, including our ability to feel, to think, and to enjoy our lives. It can help heal and enhance our relationships with other people by enabling us to experience deep contact with others without losing inward contact with ourselves.

Central to the method in this book is the important difference between being aware of the body and inhabiting the body. So I often begin with this simple exercise for experiencing this distinction:

Sit upright with your hands in your lap.

Take a moment to become aware of your hands. You may notice how warm or cold they are or how tense or relaxed they are. This is becoming aware of your hands.

Now enter into your hands. Experience yourself as present, living within your hands. This is inhabiting your hands.

You can go on to inhabiting different parts of your body and, finally, your body as a whole. See if you can feel present everywhere within your body, rather than aware of it from the outside.

In the Realization Process, we go through several steps, taking around 30 minutes, to reach this next part. But, for a very shortened version, if you can feel that you are living within your body, then next find the space outside of your body, the space in your environment.

Let yourself experience that the space inside and outside of your body is the same undivided space. Without leaving your body, experience that the space that pervades your body also pervades your whole environment. This is the spacious expanse of fundamental consciousness.

Judith Blackstone, PhD

Judith Blackstone, PhD, is a psychotherapist and innovative teacher in contemporary spirituality. She developed the Realization Process®, an embodied approach to personal and relational healing and nondual realization. She is the author of Trauma and the Unbound Body, Belonging Here, The Intimate Life, The Enlightenment Process, and The Empathic Ground.

Tami Simon: Being a Spiritual Entrepreneur

A magazine article about Sounds True founder Tami Simon referred to her as a “spiritual entrepreneur.” At first, Tami wasn’t sure about the label. Yet over time, she came to appreciate and embrace it. Today, the art of spiritual entrepreneurship is a central facet of Sounds True’s Inner MBA® program. 

In this host-only episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami shares her thoughts and feelings about what it means to lead a company dedicated to the well-being of its employees as equally as it is to business success. For anyone looking to bridge their innermost values with how they make a living, Tami reveals seven principles of the spiritual entrepreneur, with insightful guidance on honoring the voice of the heart; leading with presence; why relationships need to come first; creating a culture of care, engagement, and well-being; alternating between high performance and good rest; how to embrace challenges as growth opportunities; claiming our personal agency and doing the work of “cleaning up”; business as a means to address real social needs; maintaining trust in the unfolding process; making a commitment to “lift each other up” in the way we do business; recognizing our interdependence; and more.

>