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The Mystery of Thanksgiving

Sounds True — November 27, 2014

We are quite sure that tomorrow will come, that the most sacred breath will be there, that grace will take shape as the sun falling into the ocean, as the moon in the sky, and as the crystals in the newly fallen snow. That the particles of love will continue to configure as the precious deer that we run into on our morning walk. It is so easy to take for granted that we will be given one more opportunity to touch and hold another, and fill them with our love.

But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so precarious, so extraordinary – that something is happening that is so very precious, rare, and outrageous – and that it will not be here for much longer. Recognizing this, let us give thanks on this new day by doing whatever we can to help others, by being willing to burn for love, never apologizing for our uniqueness, sensitivity, and vulnerability.

At the end of this life – which is sure to come much, much sooner than we’d like – it is quite unlikely we’ll be asking if we accomplished the tasks on our to-do lists, if we completed some mythical spiritual journey, perfected ourselves, played it safe, or achieved all of our goals. Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?

Did I pause each day to behold the movement of grace as it has unfolded in each and every radiant here and now moment? Did I look with awe into the miracle sunset and the glory of the stars and give my raw beating heart to this world? Did I risk everything to know the preciousness of what is truly happening here? Was I willing to feel more, care so deeply, let everyone matter, and be utterly devastated at even the possibility of one more sunrise? Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love?

Did I spend my time here in this star of love wisely, with my heart open and available, knowing it could be broken in any moment? Did I dance with the beloved around the moon, wander with her into the desert and into the darkness, play with her in the depths of the oceans, and give everything for just one glimpse of the mysteries of separation and union?

I hope I make it all the way through this sweetest of ever thanksgiving days, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.

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Photographer unknown

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The MindBody Code, Part 2

Mario Martinez — November 25, 2014

Lessons from Centenarians

During the process of researching the roots of biocognitive science, neuropsychologist Mario Martinez interviewed dozens of centenarians—people who live healthily past 100. In the second part of their conversation about Mario’s new book, The MindBody Code: How to Change the Beliefs that Limit Your Health, Longevity, and Success, Mario and Tami Simon discussed these centenarians and the four essential beliefs that they all share. They also talked about the different ways that various cultures view aging and how these views impact health. Finally, Mario and Tami spoke on forgiveness and its potential to positively affect our well-being. (61 minutes)

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The MindBody Code, Part 1

Mario Martinez — November 18, 2014

Archetypal Wounds and Their Healing Fields

Mario Martinez is a clinical neuropsychologist and the founder of biocognitive science—a new paradigm that identifies complex discoveries of how our cultural beliefs affect our immune, nervous, and endocrine systems. With Sounds True, he has written a new book called The MindBody Code. In the first half of a two-part interview, Mario spoke with Tami Simon about how our cultural assumptions can affect our health and well-being. They also talked about archetypal wounds of shame, betrayal, and abandonment—as well as their corresponding healing fields of honor, loyalty, and commitment. Finally, Mario and Tami spoke on what means to feel worthy of making meaningful change in one’s life. (61 minutes)

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Mindfulness for Beginners with Jon Kabat-Zinn

Jon Kabat-Zinn — November 18, 2014

An Invitation to the Practice of Mindfulness

Enjoy this sample recording from the acclaimed and inspiring new book and CD by Jon Kabat-Zinn entitled Mindfulness for Beginners. We may long for wholeness, suggests Jon, but the truth is that it is already here and already ours. The practice of mindfulness holds the possibility of not just a fleeting sense of contentment, but a true embracing of a deeper unity that envelops and permeates our lives. With Mindfulness for Beginners you are invited to learn how to transform your relationship to the way you think, feel, love, work, and play—and thereby awaken to and embody more completely who you really are.

Here, the teacher, scientist, and clinician who first demonstrated the benefits of mindfulness within mainstream Western medicine offers a book that you can use in three unique ways: as a collection of reflections and practices to be opened and explored at random; as an illuminating and engaging start-to-finish read; or as an unfolding “lesson-a-day” primer on mindfulness practice.

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The radical path of space and kindness

Sounds True — November 12, 2014

As a psychotherapist who works with accomplished yogis, yoginis, meditators, and committed seekers and practitioners of all kinds, I have come to discover with my clients just how easy to use spirituality to hide from life – from intimacy, from our feelings, from our tender vulnerabilities, from our unresolved wounding around love, and from our immediate embodied experience in any of its moment-by-moment unfolding. We can deny, stuff, shut out, repress, and abandon our very real feelings of hurt, anger, disappointment, and jealousy because on some level they have been deemed very unspiritual, unacceptable, or further evidence of our own unworthiness. Or, we will act the feelings out—indulge, identify, and fuse with them – believing we are making actual contact, while spinning around their surface and doing whatever possible to discharge the disturbing energy which is seething underneath.

Depending on our specific, historic core vulnerabilities – which arose intersubjectively in our families of origin, as part of a relational matrix – certain feelings were simply not safe to embody, as they triggered anxiety in our caregivers, or otherwise led to their withdrawal of love, affection, mirroring and attunement. As young children, it was an act of kindness and creativity to split off, dissociate, and disconnect from material we were not developmentally capable of digesting and metabolizing on our own. We are wired to do whatever possible to maintain the tie to our caregivers, even if such tie is precarious, misattuned, or ultimately not in the interest of any sort of self-cohesion or integration.

As we engage over time in these strategies of denial and acting out – both pathways ultimately of fundamental aggression and chronic abandonment—we often find ourselves wondering why we are not feeling alive, connected, and truly able to open to others – why things just aren’t flowing for us in the ways we long for. We wonder why we don’t feel worthy of love, why we don’t know in some fundamental sense that we are loved or lovable exactly as we are. But a part of us senses that it is only in intimate and direct contact with our vulnerabilities, in all their forms, that we will know this aliveness and be able to truly take the risk that real embodied love will always demand. As long as we are using spirituality to avoid intimacy, contact, and the depths of our own being – as long as it has become yet another means by which we can avoid our unlived lives – we will feel lonely at our core, disconnected, and split off from love.

As we start to discover the ways we are using spiritual ideas, beliefs, language, jargon, exercises, teachings, and practices to avoid relationship (with self and other), with as much kindness, space, and compassion as possible, we can return our attention into present, embodied experience. We need not shame ourselves in this discovery or deem it some evidence of our failure or unlovability. But rather use it as an opportunity to be curious about the strategies we’ve brought into adulthood to get away from very disturbing, survival-level panic and anxiety. And begin to open our hearts to this movement as the best way we’ve known to care for ourselves until now. For it is only radical kindness and space that will melt the wounds and tangles of love.

Like any defense mechanism, this relationship with spirituality has served an adaptive function and we can honor it for the help it has provided us at a particular point on our journey. And we can start slowly and with a mighty presence and compassion, to allow the protective function to dissolve, to reclaim full experiential responsibility for every feeling and emotion we’ve intelligently split off from, and step into the mandala of integration and wholeness, which is none other than our true nature. As we journey on the path of the heart and that of metabolization by love, re-owning and re-embodying to the entirety of what we are, we weave a sanctuary for the light and the dark within. And in this we become a holding environment for ourselves and others, more and more transparent and more and more translucent to the activity of the beloved in this world.

buddhamodern

Art by Gonkar Gyatso – “Buddha in Modern Times”

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Honoring Our Returning Warriors

Edward Tick — November 11, 2014

Dr. Edward Tick is the founding director of Soldier’s Heart veterans’ Safe Return Programs. A psychotherapist and a tireless advocate for war healing and peacemaking, Dr. Tick is the author of the award-winning book War and the Soul, and with Sounds True he has published a new book called Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War. In this episode, Ed speaks with Tami about how we can heal the broken social contract between warriors and civilians in the United States, the universal warrior archetype, what it means to mature into a spiritual warrior, and his advice for speaking to returning veterans in a way that supports and honors their service. (77 minutes)

Search Results for: – Page 162

The Mystery of Thanksgiving

The MindBody Code, Part 2

The MindBody Code, Part 1

Mindfulness for Beginners with Jon Kabat-Zinn

The radical path of space and kindness

Honoring Our Returning Warriors

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