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3 Ways to Connect With Your Higher Self This Holiday S...

3 Ways to Connect With Your Higher Self This Holiday Season

During the holiday season, when the material can easily overshadow the spiritual, making conscious connection to the Divine within yourself can bring you back to the real reason for the season. In every spiritual tradition, the days around the Winter Solstice are a time of reflection, connection, gratitude, and devotion to the Source of love that animates all of life. To solidify the meaning that underpins winter holidays, it helps to practice connecting to what I call “Your Inner Pilot Light.”

Humbly ask for a deeper connection to your Inner Pilot Light

Connection with your Inner Pilot Light is fueled by your desire to bow before the Divine within and acknowledge that while you can engage in practices meant to deepen your connection, Divine union is a gift, given as grace, not something you can control. Try this prayer. “Dearest Inner Pilot Light, I surrender my desire to connect with You to the Divine Beloved inside of me and humbly ask for help. Let my personal will merge with Divine will and show me how I can be a vessel for your love.”

Tune in and let your Inner Pilot Light communicate with you

As a daily practice, drop into your heart and allow your mind to relax. Ask your Inner Pilot Light, “What do you want me to know today?” Then allow the words, feelings, somatic sensations or images come through. If your message comes in words, write it down as a love letter from your highest self to the parts of you in need of reassurance, guidance, comfort, or healing. If your Inner Pilot Light communicates non-verbally, just take in the guidance in whatever way is most natural.

Learn to receive, interpret, and discern your inner guidance

Your Inner Pilot Light seeks to guide you to the life of greatest love, alignment, growth, and flow, but it takes some practice to see that guidance is everywhere. It may come through an inner voice, guiding imagery, medicine dreams, synchronicity, animals that cross your path, a felt sense in your body, or direct knowing. Once you learn the way your Inner Pilot Light prefers to communicate with you, you will feel less alone, as if Love Itself is guiding you to the life you are meant to live.

 Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Your Inner Pilot LightMind Over Medicine, The Fear Cure, and The Anatomy of a Calling, is a physician, speaker, founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute, and mystic. Passionate about what makes people optimally healthy and what predisposes them to illness, she is on a mission to merge science and spirituality in a way that not only facilitates the health of the individual, but also uplifts the health of the collective. Bridging between seemingly disparate worlds, Lissa is a connector, collaborator, curator, and amplifier, broadcasting not only her unique visionary ideas, but also those of cutting-edge visionaries she discerns and trusts, especially in the field of her latest research into “Sacred Medicine.” Lissa has starred in two National Public Television specials and also leads workshops both online and at retreat centers like Esalen and Kripalu. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her daughter. She blogs at LissaRankin.com and posts regularly on Facebook.

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. Use promo code HOLIDAY10 and receive an additional 10% off your order.

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How to Cultivate Generosity in Our Children

 

Nearly every spiritual tradition has a practice of generosity and giving. We call it Dana in some traditions, Caritas in Christianity, Tzedekah in Judaism, alms or communal sharing in others, or in the United States, “The Holiday Season” stretching onward from Black Friday through the New Year. These spiritual (and commercial) practices existed long before the term “positive psychology,” but the principles overlap significantly. We know now that making a practice of kindness and generosity leads to physical and mental health and social and spiritual benefits.

In families, children are often in the “getting” role, while adults are in the “giving role,” but how can we encourage that spirit of generosity in the next generation?

We are wired to be generous, and both neuroscience and well-worn clichés tells us we feel more joy in giving than in receiving. However, our consumer culture tells us the opposite, that getting will make us feel better. These messages run counter to the spiritual and scientific wisdom showing health and happiness come more through giving than getting. Just imagine if our society received just as many messages urging us to give than get, if people camped outside stores for days just to donate to the latest charity.

Among the many benefits, generosity also builds trust between people. Studies show that the giver’s brain regions associated with trust and connection light up, fostering optimism, reducing depression, and creating healthy attachments, showing us why cultures develop practices related to gift-giving. The benefits even extend to just witnessing an act of generosity.

 

So how can we encourage generosity our families? Here are a few ideas to consider.

  • Involve your kids in the decision for charitable giving, taking into account what your family’s values are: Social justice, the environment, health issues that have impacted your family, presents for children or families in need, and so on.
  • Follow the lead of my friend’s grandmother who gave the grandkids $100 each year, with $50 to spend on themselves and $50 she would donate to a charity of their choice.
  • Remember that giving can also include your time or your support. Volunteer as a family, a practice shown to boost happiness, empathy, and build closeness.
  • Give experiences; the happiness will last longer than the lifespan of a toy. Perhaps travel, theater tickets, or museum passes.
  • Donate toys to make space for the new. Notice together which toys are getting lonely and would be happier in a new home, saying thank you and goodbye to old toys, and imagining the happiness they will bring after they’ve been donated.

 

Looking for more great reads?

 

 

Excerpted from Raising Resilience by Christopher Willard, Pysd.

Christopher Willard, Psyd, is a clinical psychologist and consultant specializing in bringing mindfulness into education and psychotherapy. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaches at Harvard Medical Schools, and leads workshops worldwide. For more, visit drchristopherwillard.com.

The gift of pure rest

Please give yourself the gift of rest from trying so hard to ‘change,’ ‘heal,’ ‘transform,’ and ‘awaken.’ It can be so exhausting to chronically abandon the here and now in the name of great project of the improvement of ‘me.’ Take some time on this new day to set aside the frenetic scramble to be other than what you are.

Love yourself enough to set aside your questions and demand for understanding, even for a moment, and sink into your sacred body and senses, connect with the natural world, and with the aliveness within. Open your heart to the shimmering forms around you, blooming in front of your very own eyes and inviting you into union with natural radiant presence. Dare to consider that nothing is missing and nothing has gone wrong.

Allow today to be a day of solace from the weary journey, from finding ‘answers’ to questions, and from changing yourself from one thing into another. Whatever state of consciousness is arising now is the perfect place to start—to meet yourself, others, and the sacred world as if for the first time. You need not go anywhere else or become anyone else to know this. For love is forming as your body and your senses and your experience right here and right now.

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The Healing Pulse – a free music download!

We’re happy to offer you The Healing Pulse, a free download featuring inspiring and and expansive music for healing, relaxation, and contemplation, Includes hand-picked selections from the Sounds True archive, including tracks from our friends Deva Premal, Jai Uttal, Snatam Kaur, Glen Velez, Kimba Arem, John de Kadt, Singh Kaur, and Riley Lee.

Download The Healing Pulse now!

More music from the Sounds True archive…

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The Body Awake

Tami Simon speaks with Ann Marie Chiasson, a teacher, author, and a practitioner of energy medicine. She holds a master’s degree in public health, a doctorate in family medicine, and has worked as a primary care physician. Ann Marie currently lives in Arizona, where she has a private integrative medicine practice, and also teaches at the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. Ann Marie coauthored a Sounds True program with Dr. Andrew Weil called Self-Healing with Energy Medicine and will be releasing the home study course Energy Healing, as well as a video program called Energy Healing for Beginners. She is also teaching a six-session online course on energy healing at SoundsTrue.com. (55 minutes)

Tiffany Shlain: Taking an Empowered and Creative View ...

Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, internet pioneer, and the author of Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks. Her most recent film, 50/50: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Women + Power, debuted at the TEDWomen conference and is the inspiration for 50/50 Day, a global event devoted to bringing about greater gender balance in all sectors of life. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Tiffany about 50/50 Day—its origins, how it will be rolled out, and what steps we can take to ensure women have a better say in society. They talk about Tiffany’s approach to encouraging social change through film, including the background behind her short documentary The Science of Character. Using that film as a foundation, Tiffany comments on the difference between virtue and character, as well as why we should focus on cultivating our strengths rather than obsessing over our weaknesses. Finally, Tiffany and Tami discuss our current relationships with technology and why she recommends a “technology Shabbat” in which we spend 24 hours away from our screens. (54 minutes)

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