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Damien Echols: We Are Unconscious Angels
Damien Echols is an author and artist who teaches classes on magick around the country. The story of his wrongful murder conviction was documented in the films Paradise Lost and West of Memphis. With Sounds True, Damien has published the book High Magick and the complementary audio program A Course in High Magick. In this podcast, Sounds True founder Tami Simon speaks with Damien about his forthcoming book, Angels and Archangels,which offers us a practical set of tools for working with these timeless forces for divine wisdom and healing power.
Steven Hayes PhD: Self-Acceptance and Perspective-Taki...
Steven Hayes is a professor, the chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada, and the author of more than 35 books and 500 scientific articles. The cofounder of the acclaimed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (known as ACT), Steven is a contributor to the Sounds True book The Self Acceptance Project: How to Be Kind and Compassionate Toward Yourself in Any Situation and the author of the Sounds True audio program Acceptance and Commitment Theory. In this episode of Insights of the Edge—which previously aired as part of an interview series on self-acceptance—Tami Simon and Steven discuss his experiences living with a panic disorder at a young age, and how his own bouts with anxiety shaped his clinical studies. They talk about the practice of perspective-taking and how it can be a powerful bulwark against self-recrimination. Finally, Steven offers his perspective on spirituality and how that perspective informs the core tenets of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Heidi Smith: Bringing People to the Flowers
Heidi Smith is a psychosomatic therapist, flower essence practitioner, and registered herbalist. She is the author of The Bloom Book: A Flower Essence Guide to Cosmic Balance, a comprehensive guide for working with flower essences in order to bring about healing, transformation, and awakening, at both a personal and collective level. Heidi is Tami Simon’s guest in “Bringing People to the Flowers,” a podcast exploring humanity’s call to enter into a deeper relationship with flowers. Heidi and Tami also discuss flower essences as a “verbal and vibrational” medicine, the power of intention, how to begin working with flower essences yourself, and much more.
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Inspiration: 27 Vital Aspects of Breath
Have you ever paused to consider how amazing your breath is? Here’s a list of some inspirational aspects of breath. (The word inspiration itself means to breathe.) Some might already be familiar to you. You may feel drawn to appreciate some more than others. Devoting close attention to any one will lead to all the others. It’s all there – in a breath.
1 Present-ness
My mind wanders. My thoughts drift off. Sometimes, I could drown in regret, lost reviewing the past. Meanwhile, my breath is always precisely in the present moment.
2 Happiness
When we drop our worries and hurries, we can fully connect with our aliveness. Breathing with this joy on our lips, we learn a deeper, more enduring happiness. It’s our birthright. Conscious breathing can be a great relief, having nothing else to do but be – and a reminder there are enough simple reasons for happiness in this present moment.
3 Leadership
I’m a follower of my breath. Following my breath can tell me volumes about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking; where I am and where I need to go in my life. When I notice my mind has wandered – I simply draw attention back to my breath.
4 Constant Companion
Since my birth, no one and no thing has been as close to me, without fail, rain or shine, as my breath. No sensation has been as familiar to me. When I follow my breath, I feel myself coming home, where I’ve always belonged.
5 Best Friendship
Ultimately, no one may love me as much as I do. To remain faithful to my part of the relationship, I pay utmost attention to my breath. Sometimes, I need to take time for us to get to know each other better.
6 Relational
I say, “my breath,” but I could b breathing in your out-breath. The simple implication of breath’s merging of within and around can dramatically shift my perspective.
7 Inspirational
We have many muses in our creative life. They may take the form of rituals, people, or substances. My primary inspiration is breath.
8 Nature
Through my breath, I observe my connection to Nature and her processes. The in-and-out of breath mirrors the natural cycles – the tides, the sun and moon, life and death.
9 Slowness
Nature reminds me to slow down, since my observation reveals how slowness tends to predominate our surroundings. Paying attention to breathing, it tends to deepen and slow, of its own, naturally. Living in a culture addicted to an ever-accelerating pace, slowness can feel like salvation.
10 Calm
Paying attention to breath allows it become as deep as it wishes to be. When I feel my belly soften and breath grow deep, my vestigial instincts of flight-fright-or-fight have gone away: less stress! I am aware of how calm I feel.
11 Solidity
Without calm, my strength can dissipate, disperse, and scatter. Without calm, I cannot engage in gentle inquiry into the nature of self and reality. My reserve of calm assures my presence has solidity, even in emergency. I can show up, and be present when I show up.
12 Silent
Paying attention, I notice breath is slower than thought. Nor does it obey the restrictive patterns of verbal language. I pay close attention to each quiet breath, from beginning, middle, and end – and with a blank space, in between. This silence is not blind.
13 Anonymity
My breath is totally unconcerned whether or not I am up with latest fashion, or what I look like. I don’t need to cultivate an identity. Breath accepts as I am. In that complete acceptance, I could be nobody – or anybody. This is anonymity is a passport to the undomesticated world of the wild.
14 Impermanence
Breath is a living example of the impermanence of all things – a reminder of the importance of flow. You can never breathe the same breath twice.
15 Focus of Awareness
Meditating, I could focus on sound, which is also ever-present, but I like breath best.
16 Emotional Self-Regulation
Being intimate with how a breath arises, manifests, then falls away is a transferable skill, applicable to emotions and thoughts. These too arise, take form, and pass. Besides my recognizing they’re impermanent, it’s great to also be able to catch negative thought forms and destructive feelings at their inception – before they’ve pulled us along by the nose – learning to step away from their pull on us, understand them, and heal and transform their energies.
17 Direct
Breath isn’t symbolic nor abstract. There’s no need to look behind breath, searching for hidden meaning. Beyond anyone else’s words or labels, connecting with breath is to see for one’s self, through direct experience.
18 Intentionality
Wanting to change my behavior – my thoughts, my words, and my deeds – conscious breathing is wonderful training. To be conscious of just one breath immediately sets intention into motion. Conscious breath provides a space where I can consider how to respond, rather than react.
19 Universal
Like the wind that encircles the planet, breath is everywhere. It knows no religious denominations, national boundaries, ethnic differences, or social classes. Languages vary but they all tend to point to the vital connection to life of breath.
20 Vital
Mindful of breath, I return my attention to the fountain of life. Dead people don’t breathe. Many languages equate our personal breath with a connection to something greater than ourselves.
21 Centering
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi once likened breath to a hinge between mind and body. In present-moment awareness of breath, my body and mind find each other. In the vital spaciousness of breath, body mind spirit can align as one.
22 Interconnection
Scientists tell me my breath nourishes the green world of vegetation, and vegetation nourishes my breath. I know, first-hand, such interdependent interconnection of all things through my breath. I can feel how body conditions mind … mind conditions body … breath conditions both.
23 Letting Go
Breathing out teaches me a central lesson: letting go. I can’t breathe in without breathing out.
24 Ineffable
Breath is invisible. It has no color, no shape. It’s invisible. Breath – like mind, like life – is ineffable.
25 Selflessness
Breathing out, I let my exhalation simply fall away from my body, as if as far as to the horizon. Then I wait. I am as still as a hunter waiting for a deer. I don’t summon it, nor try to will it into existence. My next breath comes, nevertheless. As if of itself. Without fixed identity, lacking any separateness, empty of ownership. In this, it is perfectly open to anything and everything, as limitless as a big clear sky. Selfless.
26 Prayer
Mindful breathing can be a form of prayer.
27 Engaged
Breath can’t be confined to a monastery. It’s actively engaged in the world.
Gary Gach hosts Zen Mindfulness Fellowship weekly in San Francisco, since 2009. He’s author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism and editor of What Book!? ~ Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop. His most recent book is PAUSE BREATHE SMILE ~ Awakening Mindfulness When Meditation Is Not Enough. This brings mindfulness full-circle, back to its roots as a spiritual as well as secular path for complete awakening. It’s available in both paperback and as an audio book. His work has also appeared in over 150 periodicals and a couple dozen anthologies, including The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Huffington Post, In These Times, Language for a New Century, The Nation, The New Yorker, Technicians of the Sacred, and Yoga Journal. More info : GaryGach.com.
Buy your copy of PAUSE, BREATHE, SMILE at your favorite bookseller!
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Copyright © 2019 by Gary Gach.
The Self-Acceptance Project… wrap-up with Tami S...
I loved hosting The Self-Acceptance Project, a free 23-part online video series in which I interview leading spiritual teachers, psychologists, writers and researchers about how to be kind and compassionate towards ourselves in any and every situation. I learned so much from hosting this series that I even created a final wrap-up video in which I share the seven key insights that were true “take-aways” for me. If you are interested, you can watch the video here.
One of the most important lessons that I learned from the series was how important it is to TURN TOWARDS difficult emotional experiences instead of our habitual response of turning away (turning to distraction or food or our iphone or other ways we self-medicate and try to numb ourselves). This is a teaching that I hear so often in Sounds True recordings and books (and as an aside, there are a number of self-acceptance themed titles and programs on sale this week – visit our self-acceptance tools and teachings page).
What I find so interesting is how I continually need to be reminded to turn towards difficult feelings. It is such a natural tendency to try escape feeling terrible! Sounds True author Bruce Tift (who along with 22 other Sounds True authors is featured as part of the Self-Acceptance series) said that the reason for this is that it is actually COUNTER-INSTINCTUAL to turn towards what is difficult. Our natural animal instinct is to avoid pain, which of course makes a lot of sense. But if we are to be intimate with our emotions and therefore intimate with ourselves and intimate with the flow of life, we need to make the counter-instinctual move and turn towards what we are feeling, even if it is difficult and painful.
Okay, so let’s say we accept this basic premise. How do we do it? Many of the authors in the self-acceptance series offered the same advice, first become aware of what’s happening (for example, I am mindlessly surfing on the web but what is really going on inside me is that I feel a terrible ache in my stomach). The next step is to stay with the experience of the uncomfortable sensations. This can sometimes feel like staying with a fire that is burning on the inside. I love the phrase Bruce Tift uses for this – embodied vulnerability. We actually stay with the uncomfortable sensations and soften to the experience. When we do this, we are beginning to accept every emotional experience as part of the flow of life.
In the final episode of the self-acceptance series, I asked Sounds True listeners to write to me at acceptance@soundstrue.com about the main lessons they learned from the series. To date, I have received dozens and dozens of letters about how life-changing the program has been for people. One of the main themes I have heard is how NORMALIZING it has been to hear renowned spiritual teachers and esteemed psychologists talk about their own struggles with self-acceptance (of course, I got personal in the interviews because that’s where so much of the action and learning comes from). Seeing the universality of the challenge helped people to be kinder to themselves. Yes, we can release ourselves from being hard on ourselves about being hard on ourselves!
As I said, I loved hosting this free series, and I encourage you to check it out.
Thich Nhat Hanh: Meditation Is for Everyone
Tami Simon speaks with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, poet, peace activist, and the author of over 100 books and numerous Sounds True learning programs, including The Art of Mindful Living and Living Without Stress or Fear. In this interview, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about his experience as a young monk, the engaged Buddhist movement, and the core of the Buddhist teachings: liberation through mindfulness. (45 minutes)