There is a fundamental difference between knowing something intellectually and experiencing it directly. In spiritual practice, realization arises not from thinking or believing but from resting in the seat of consciousness and ceasing to be distracted by thoughts, emotions, and ego. The ultimate path to enlightenment involves letting go of identification with the personal self and returning to the direct, experiential awareness of one’s divine nature. God-realization is not a belief, it is a lived experience of merging back into the ocean of universal consciousness.
For the last 15 years, I have been cooking up this question:
What does it look like to nourish YOU?
Let’s drop everything we might think this is and everything you didn’t get done today and bring our collective shoulders down from the sky.
Let’s take a minute here. We are just getting started, yet I feel we need to slow down. Will you take a deep breath with me? Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for breathing. There is nothing to do here.
You can bring your awareness to your breath with an inhale through your nose. Open your mouth slightly and exhale with a HAAAAAAAAA sound. It feels so good to drop everything and breathe. Me too. To let go, even a little, is a real lovefest for the heart and mind = heart mind.
It feels so good, can we do one more? You can close your eyes this time if you want to— I will be right here.
We are just getting here, together.
Now let me ask you again: What does it look like to nourish YOU?
What if I told you that your kitchen is a place of stories, mothers, grandmothers, imprints, and emotional weather patterns that shaped how you live now? It is also a place to deeply nourish yourself and cook up the life you have been longing to live.
Your kitchen (yes your kitchen!) is a fierce, unconditionally loving mother holding what is ripe and ready to become inside of YOU. Who would have thought that you can heal your life in your kitchen? I did! And now you can.
It invites you to bring your entire body into the kitchen, put your shame into the fire, offer your grief to the soup—allowing all you have been hungry for to begin to feed YOU. As you turn on the fire, you will come home to yourself. You will make the room you need, to hear and see and feel the stories you have been carrying.
You will begin, again and again, to become YOU. Welcome home.
In loving service to your courage, your kitchen healer, x x x x jules
Jules Blaine Davis, the Kitchen Healer, is a TED speaker and one of Goop’s leading experts on women’s healing. She has led transformational gatherings, retreats, and a private practice for over fifteen years. She has facilitated deeply nourishing experiences at OWN and on retreat with Oprah Winfrey, among many other miracles. Jules is a pioneer in her field, inviting women to awaken and rewrite the stories they have been carrying for far too long in their day-to-day lives. She is cooking up a movement to inspire and support women to discover who they are becoming.
Practicing being true to ourselves is a delicate dance of knowing ourselves, then respecting and serving that truth. This requires cultivation of both internal stability and external ease. How can we do this when we are surrounded by cultural chaos as well as our own family dramas? Here are three ways to Practice You this holiday season.
Write It Down
Set a timer for five to ten minutes; write who you are and where you’re going. Note every label and defining element of who you perceive yourself to be, and then note your vision for yourself next year, in five years and in ten years. Coming to know yourself will help you be steady when confronted, soft when you’d normally get agitated, and more kind at just the right times.
Sit With It
Nothing changes in an instant, and we can continuously and simply ask to be shown what the next step might be. If prayer is when we speak to our idea of a higher power, meditation is a moment to listen for healing, becomes a respite, a break in the day, a time to heal ourselves. Sit with it. Sit with what you learn when you listen a few minutes more.
Move More Slowly
One of the simplest ways I practice being myself is to simply slow down. I’ve learned this from every moment of deep loss, grief, or heartache–if i move more slowly, I won’t break. I can see what’s useful, what’s nourishing, what’s holy about this moment. Slowing down for myself helps me refine what I’m practicing and choosing in my life.
Elena Brower is a Mama, author of Practice You, yoga instructor, designer, and artist based in New York City. Devoted to cultivating meditation as our most healing habit, she’s created potent online coursework and produced On Meditation, a film featuring personal portraits of renowned meditators. For more, visit elenabrower.com.
Truth has a fullness to it. If we want to hold it in its essence and in its entirety, we need to acknowledge all aspects of it, even the ones we do not like. This is no easy task, but if our intention is to truly sit on the throne of our lives, then facing ourselves is essential.
When we acknowledge our shadows, we will face all the feelings that we’ve locked up inside: all the embarrassment, desire, instability, anger, or whatever has been hidden for so long. As uncomfortable as it is for a time, we also free ourselves—because then we really own ourselves. We grow in the process, becoming an example of what is possible when we take ownership of ourselves and our lives.
To get you started on your journey to your full truth and inner freedom, consider these questions for reflection taken from my new book, Freedom Is an Inside Job. I also offer you a short video on befriending your darkness.
How have you hurt people in your life? What part of your personality inflicts this hurt? Can you look at this part of yourself directly, without giving excuses or justifications for what you do?
What do you dislike the most in people’s characters? What does such dislike trigger in you?
What if instead of pointing the finger at what you don’t like in others, you pointed the finger at yourself? What might you see if you did that?
What would it take to transform your own shadow? Not destroy it, but transform it. What are the incentives to change?
Can you show compassion to your own shadow? Can you use it to ignite certain positive actions and not get stuck or entrenched in it?
Zainab Salbi is a humanitarian, author, and media personality. She’s been featured by CNN, MSNBC, Oprah, People, The Guardian, HuffPost, and more. Salbi resides in New York City. For more, visit zainabsalbi.com.
Buy your copy of Freedom Is an Inside Job at your favorite bookseller!
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.
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.
Do you have a critical voice? What do you find it saying to you?
This video is a candid, vulnerable and compelling portrait from our own folks here at Sounds True. We get their take on their own journey with self-compassion. Discover the power of self-compassion and learn simple practices to transform your moments of moments of suffering into moments of love.
