600 Podcasts and Counting...
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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 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.
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Into the Belly of Meditation
Into the Belly of Meditation
By Jeff Foster
You are weary, friend.
Sit.
You are thirsty.
Here. Drink.
You are hungry. Here. Take this.
A piece of bread.
A small bowl of soup.
See how God has taken form!
It is all I have but it will keep you alive.
I will light a fire that will never go out.
A sacred flame. Unconditional in its burning.
To illuminate us in the darkness.
Oh. I see you are wounded.
Bruised. Bleeding.
Exhausted from the world.
You have suffered much, I know.
Come.
Take off these dirty rags.
Don’t worry. It’s safe.
There is strength in your nakedness.
Here. Wash.
Rub this medicine onto your wounds.
Put on these robes, they are clean and dry.
Lie down. Close your eyes.
I will watch over us tonight.
Listen. You have not failed.
I see new life breaking through.
I see birth. An insurrection.
The sharp edge of hope.
I have no teaching for you.
No wise words.
I only want you to trust what you are going through.
To bring this fire inside of you.
Until the end.
I have known this pain. Yes.
This courage to keep moving. Yes.
This courage to rest, too.
The sacrifice of the known world.
Friend.
Drop into the belly of meditation now.
The place you were always seeking.
The vast silence at the Earth’s core which is your own core.
Breathing into the gut now.
The throat. The chest.
Irradiating the nervous system with unspeakable
tenderness.
Flooding the body with soft, warm light.
Drenching the human form with divine love.
And sleep.
And sleep.
I may not be here when you wake.
We may not meet again in form.
Yet I leave you with all you need.
Food. Water. A bed.
A chance to rest.
A touch of kindness.
And your unbreakable Self.
This poem is excerpted from You Were Never Broken: Poems to Save Your Life by Jeff Foster.
Jeff Foster shares from his own awakened experience a way out of seeking fulfillment in the future and into the acceptance of “all this, here and now.” He studied astrophysics at Cambridge University. Following a period of depression and physical illness, he embarked on an intensive spiritual search that came to an end with the discovery that life itself was what he had always been seeking.
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However you need to grieve, that’s the right way for...
Grieving a cat—or any kind of grief—is not a one-size-fits-all experience (as though any experience or emotion were?). Some people can’t stop sobbing, while others reflect quietly. Some are comforted by hugs and rituals; others need solitude to process their loss.
There’s no “right” way to grieve, and there’s no “right” length of time. In fact, I don’t see a loss as something we “get over,” but rather something that becomes a part of our life experience. When our skin is gravely injured, it doesn’t go back to looking the way it did before; it heals, and we have a scar.
Loss changes the fabric of our lives; it changes the way we perceive and interact with the world. And like a scar, walking through grief (not trying to circumvent it) makes something in us stronger, more resilient. Grief is something to be healed, not to transcend.
Grief is nonlinear, too. Our human minds would love to make grief into a process that has a distinct beginning, middle and end…but in my experience, that’s just not true. Grief, like life, is messy and unpredictable. As Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
We all grieve, and for each of us, our grief is as unique as a fingerprint. If we try to avoid grief, it will redouble its strength and burst forth anyway. However you need to grieve, that’s the right way for you.
An original post by Sarah Chancey, the author of P.S. I Love You More Than Tuna, the first gift book for people grieving the loss of their feline friend. This originally appeared on morethantuna.com.
Sarah Chauncey has written and edited for nearly every medium over the past three decades, from print to television to digital. Her writing has been featured on EckhartTolle.com and Modern Loss, as well as in Lion’s Roar and Canadian Living. She lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, where she divides her time between writing, editing nonfiction, and walking in nature. Learn more at morethantuna.com and sarahchauncey.com.
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Seth Godin: Taking the Leap . . . and Picking Yourself
Seth Godin is a bestselling author and popular blogger who is known for his writing on marketing, the spread of ideas, and mindful business strategies. With Sounds True, he released the audio program Leap First: Creating Work That Matters. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon and Seth discuss the concept of resistance and how it must be sought out in any effective pursuit of art. They also talk about the contemporary “connection economy” and how there is no guarantee that one can make a living through genuine self-expression—but also how one should do so anyway. Finally, they spoke on the necessity of taking leaps and Seth’s concept of living a life of faith. (62 minutes)
Tami’s Takeaway: Seth Godin looks at a picture every day that depicts a person triumphantly jumping off of a third story building onto a street below. The caption: “Leap into the Void.” Seth leaps every day and inspires others to do the same. He teaches us not to wait to be discovered—for someone to choose us to come forward. Instead, we take the leap and “pick ourselves,” engaging in the creative act of being vulnerable, making art, and expressing ourselves. And whether 10 people notice or 10 million, we have the deep satisfaction of living courageously and pouring out our creative souls in ways that matter.
Plant Spirit Medicine
What is the active ingredient in plant spirit medicine? Eliot Cowan tells us that the answer is friendship. In this edition of Insights at the Edge, the author of Plant Spirit Medicine speaks with Tami about engaging in a friendship with plant spirits, and compares the act of connecting with plant spirits in your local area versus working with the spirits of plants from distant places. Tami and Eliot also discuss “great teacher plants” such as marijuana and the plants from which ayahuasca is derived, offering some of the dangers and potential benefits associated with these plants. (73 minutes)
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