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Tibetan Buddhist Practice for Developing Compassion
Realizing Emptiness and Connection
Take a few minutes to sit peacefully with your eyes closed or looking down. Observe your breath as you breathe in and out.
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- Allow yourself to breathe naturally, without any modification of the breath.
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- For a few minutes, simply observe your breath in its most natural state, as it passes through your nostrils.
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- If you find that you are distracted by your thoughts or sounds, no problem; just go back to observing your breath.
In your mind, see a table.
In English, it is described by the word “table.”
This table is made up of many pieces: a top, legs, glue, nails, and varnish.
The legs and top are made up of wood from a tree. Before the tree was cut down it grew as a result of many variables—sunlight, seeds, rain, earth, and wind, to name just a few.
And before it was a tree, it was a seed from another tree, and another tree before that.
What about the nails or the varnish? Those items can also be traced backward to the people, companies, and components that went into their production.
And the people who created the components also came into being from their parents, and their parents before them.
We now see that everything around us—all phenomena—were caused by something that preceded it and can be traced back to a beginningless time.
Next time, pick another thing, place, or person and go through the same logic. As you go about your day, notice everything around you and apply the same logic.
When you walk around your work or home environment, notice that everything is empty of inherent existence. Everything has a name that refers to a thing that comes together for a time.
Zen teacher Norman Fischer said:
- In the end everything is just designation: things have a kind of reality in their being named and conceptualized, but otherwise they actually aren’t there in the way we think they are. That is, connection is all you find, with no things that are connected.[. . .] It’s the very thoroughness of the connection—without gaps or lumps in it—only the constant nexus wherever you turn—that renders everything void. So everything is empty and connected or empty because connected. Emptiness is connection.
This is an excerpt from The Tibetan Book of the Dead for Beginners: A Guide to Living and Dying by Lama Lhanang Rinpoche and Mordy Levine.
Sherianna Boyle: Energy in Action
“Focus on your thoughts.” That’s the first instruction most of us receive when we begin to explore the practice of manifestation. Sherianna Boyle has a different suggestion: focus on your emotions. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Sherianna about her new book, Energy in Action: The Power of Emotions and Intuition to Cultivate Peace and Freedom. They discuss Sherianna’s CLEANSE approach to emotional detoxing, how we can align with universal truths and our own intuition to improve our health and happiness, and how our manifestation practice can become an offering of service to all beings.
Listen in for these topics and more: clearing reactivity and toning the vagus nerve; looking inward to identify how your thoughts make you feel; the hum mantra; resting in the “I am” space; when to “allow and receive” and when to “notice and observe”; abundance, flexibility, and security; a spectrum of colors associated with spiritual laws; the teaching, “as vibration goes up, thinking goes down”; how we’re always creating something; plus, a guided meditation for our collective healing.
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.
What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You
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Karla McLaren, M.Ed., is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy innovator. She is CEO of Emotion Dynamics Inc., developer of Dynamic Emotional Integration®, and creator of EmpathyAcademy.org. Karla is the author of Embracing Anxiety, The Dynamic Emotional Integration Workbook, The Art of Empathy, The Power of Emotions at Work, and the multimedia online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions. For more, visit karlamclaren.com.
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Cate Stillman: Awakening the Power of the Five Element...
Cate Stillman teaches audiences how to create health and wellness through yoga and Ayurveda on her weekly Yogahealer Real Thrive Show. She has published two books with Sounds True: Body Thrive: Uplevel Your Body and Your Life with 10 Habits from Ayurveda and Yoga and Master of You: A Five-Point System to Synchronize Your Body, Your Home, and Your Time with Your Ambition. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Cate about the Ayurvedic concept of the five elements. Cate emphasizes that these elements aren’t external qualities, but universal constants that live within you as well. Tami and Cate also discuss what we all can learn from Ayurveda during the COVID-19 crisis, including a “first aid kit” of practices to make the most out of days in quarantine. They talk about the inherent “superpowers” of the body and how to assess what elements you should focus on during practice. Finally, Tami and Cate speak on values you can embrace for greater productivity and what it truly means to have mastery over your life.
Microdosing Bravery
Kristen Lee, EdD, LICSW, is an award-winning behavioral science and leadership professor, clinician, researcher, activist, comedian, and the author of Reset, Mentalligence, and with Sounds True, her newest book, Worth the Risk. The host of Crackin’ Up, she has over two decades of clinical experience in mental health and twelve years of teaching and leadership roles in higher education, focusing on underserved populations. She leads the Behavior Science program at Northeastern University.
In this podcast, Kristen Lee joins Sounds True founder Tami Simon to talk about how strategically “microdosing” risk can cultivate courage and resilience in the face of challenge and adversity. Kristen and Tami discuss: embodying a sense of gumption and spirit; bringing mental health out of the shadows; measuring our risks against our values; how risk can nurture resilience; the importance of safe relationships; finding the right balance between being on the edge and being safe; anxiety as a “frenemy,” and how self-acceptance and compassion support healing and change; microdosing bravery in our creative pursuits; freeing ourselves from the need for external validation; moving from being a spectator to an active changemaker in the world and looking for ways we can begin our own process of active contribution; confronting your biases and prejudices; the illusion of perfection; the cult of overachievement; the new psychological safety; and more.
Becoming a Trauma-Informed Spiritual Explorer
David Treleaven, PhD, is a writer, educator, and trauma professional working at the intersection of mindfulness and trauma. He is the author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness and a visiting scholar at Brown University. David is the founder of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (TSM), a community of practitioners committed to setting a standard of care through mindfulness-based practices, interventions, and programs.
Mindfulness meditation, yoga, and other spiritual practices bring many benefits, but for those struggling with trauma, those practices can actually amplify their symptoms. That doesn’t mean they should avoid these practices. By adopting trauma-sensitive principles, those healing from trauma often have the most to gain.
In this episode, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Dr. David Treleaven, a leading voice in Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (TSM), to explore the five principles of TSM, why the breath is not always a neutral or safe object of attention, how to tell if an intense meditation experience is helping or not, when to lean in to your practice and when to change direction, techniques to re-ground and regulate, guidance for meditation teachers, the importance of supportive relationships in TSM, and much more.
