The Freedom to Love – with Pema Chödrön
How can we use whatever comes into our lives as a way of opening to love? Do you want to love and connect with others more deeply, but need a little help?
With The Freedom to Love, a six-part online video course, Pema Chödrön invites you to start wherever you are—with any challenges, frustrations, or fears you may be facing—and use them as the launching pad to awaken the natural and boundless capacity of your heart.
The Freedom to Love will engage you with written teachings, video and audio sessions, weekly self-reflection practices, deep meditation, plus two revealing sessions recorded with Pema Chödrön answering questions from a live audience.
If you’ve ever had the opportunity of attending a dharma talk with her, then you know that Pema’s Q&A discussions often reveal her most unexpected, entertaining, and memorable insights.
Here you are invited to come as you are—calm, confused, or just in need of a heartfulness tune-up—to begin unfolding your natural and joyful qualities of compassion, self-acceptance, connection, and unconditional love.
6 Tips for Empaths to Survive the Holidays
Being in crowds and around energy vampires can be very challenging, almost overwhelming for empaths. During times of stress their ability to be emotional sponges heightens, which overrides their sublime capacity to absorb positive emotions and all that is beautiful. If empaths are around peace and love, their bodies assimilate these and flourish. Crowds or negativity, though, often feel assaultive, exhausting.
For empaths to fully enjoy the holiday gatherings with family and friends, they must learn to protect their sensitivity and find balance. Since I’m an empath, I want to help them cultivate this capacity and be comfortable with it.
I’ve always been hyper-attuned to other people’s moods, good and bad. Before I learned to protect my energy, I felt them lodge in my body. After being in crowds I would leave feeling anxious, depressed, or tired. When I got home, I’d just crawl into bed, yearning for peace and quiet.
Here are six strategies to help you manage empathy more effectively and stay centered without absorbing negative energies.
1. Move away. When possible, distance yourself by at least twenty feet from the suspected source. See if you feel relief. Don’t err on the side of not wanting to offend anyone. At the gathering try not to sit next to the identified energy vampire. Physical closeness increases empathy.
2. Surrender to your breath. If you suspect you are picking up someone else’s energies, concentrate on your breath for a few minutes. This is centering and connects you to your power. In contrast, holding your breath keeps negativity lodged in your body. To purify fear and pain, exhale stress and inhale calm. Picture unwholesome emotions as a gray fog lifting from your body, and wellness as a clear light entering it. This can produce quick results.
3. Practice Guerilla Meditation. Be sure to meditate before the gathering, centering yourself, connecting to spirit, feeling your heart. Get strong. If you counter emotional or physical distress while at an event, act fast and meditate for a few minutes. You can do this by taking refuge in the bathroom or an empty room. If it’s public, close the stall. Meditate there. Calm yourself. Focus on positivity and love. This has saved me many times at social functions where I feel depleted by others.
4. Set healthy limits and boundaries. Control how much time you spend listening to stressful people, and learn to say “no.” Set clear limits and boundaries with people, nicely cutting them off at the pass if they get critical or mean. Remember, “no” is a complete sentence.
5. Visualize protection around you. Research has shown that visualization is a healing mind/body technique. A practical form of protection many people use, including health care practitioners with difficult patients, involves visualizing an envelope of white light around your entire body. Or with extremely toxic people, visualize a fierce black jaguar patrolling and protecting your energy field to keep out intruders.
6. Define and honor your empathic needs. Safeguard your sensitivities. In a calm, collected moment, make a list of your top five most emotionally rattling situations. Then formulate a plan for handling them so you don’t fumble in the moment. Here are some practical examples of what to do in situations that predictably stymie empaths. If your comfort level is three hours max for socializing–even if you adore the people — take your own car or have an alternate transportation plan so you’re not stranded. If someone asks too much of you, politely tell them “no.” It’s not necessary to explain why. As the saying goes, “No is a complete sentence.”
Looking for more great reads?
Adapted from The Empath’s Survival Guide by Dr. Judith Orloff.
Judith Orloff, MD, is the author of The Empath’s Survival Guide (Sounds True, 2017). She is a leading voice in the fields of medicine, psychiatry, and intuitive development.
Planting a Moon Garden
What does the moon have to do with flower essences and ritual? As we discussed in an earlier chapter, the moon represents a time before the dominant culture came into power. While the moon has no gender, it is a metaphor for the divine feminine and a symbol for the creative, the intuitive, the unconscious, and the shadow. Before the Gregorian calendar came into use in the sixteenth century, many cycles of time were measured on a lunar basis, as are the Islamic, Chinese, and Jewish calendars today. All ancient agriculture was organized around lunar and astrological transits, which is one of the basic practices of biodynamic farming today. Many of us feel a fascination with the moon, and I feel it beckons us back to a different consciousness, where much healing potential awaits.
Creating altars or sacred spaces outdoors can be another place for ritual work. While I can’t have a moon garden in the city, I can have a few lunar plants in my windowsill to catch the moonlight.
Not all flowers bloom in the sunlight. Some plants prefer the darkness, opening to the night. Moon plants can be cultivated in any terrain. Many night bloomers are also very fragrant. I consider all plants medicinal to some degree; however, some of the moon garden plants may be more therapeutic than others. These can also be plants that you use for making your own flower essences. Or, if you like to make dried sticks of herbs to burn, you can use the plants from your moon garden, such as mugwort.
You can see the lunar signature of mugwort by observing the underside of the leaf, which is silver. The Latin name for it is Artemisia vulgaris; Artemis, if you remember, was the Greek goddess of the moon! Plants with light and white blooms work best, as well as gray and silvery leaves.
Here are some perfect moon garden plants:
The video on how to make your own flower essence medicine can be found here.
This is an excerpt from The Bloom Book: A Flower Essence Guide to Cosmic Balance by Heidi Smith.
Heidi Smith, MA, RH (AHG), is a psychosomatic therapist, registered herbalist, and flower essence practitioner. Within her private practice, Moon & Bloom, Heidi works collaboratively with her clients to empower greater balance, actualization, and soul-level healing within themselves. She is passionate about engaging both the spiritual and scientific dimensions of the plant kingdom, and sees plant medicine and ritual as radical ways to promote individual, collective, and planetary healing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her partner and two cats. For more, visit moonandbloom.com.
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Meet the Author of . . . Every Day Is a Poem
The Author
Jacqueline Suskin has composed over forty thousand poems with her ongoing improvisational writing project, Poem Store. She is the author of six books, including Help in the Dark Season. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Yes! magazine. She lives in Northern California. For more, see jacquelinesuskin.com.
The Book
How do we deal with the heaviness of everyday living? When we are surrounded by uncertainty, distrust, and destruction, how do we sift through the chaos and enjoy being alive?
In Every Day Is a Poem, Jacqueline Suskin aims to answer these questions by using poetry as a tool for finding clarity and feeling relief. With provocative questions, writing practices, and mindset exercises, this celebrated poet shows you how to focus your senses, cultivate curiosity, and create your own document of the world’s beauty. Emphasizing that the personal is inextricable from the creative, Suskin offers specific instructions on how to make a map of your past and engage with your pain to write a healing poem.
Show us a day in your life.
I’m currently the Artist in Residence at Folklife Farm, where I spend my days writing, reading, teaching online and working in the garden.
I wake up and take care of my body, dance, stretch, and harvest something for breakfast.
Then I usually work at my desk until late afternoon when I find my way back to the garden for more harvesting and chores.
When I’m working on a book, I’ll wake up around 4 am to write before anyone else is awake. I know that whenever I wake up in the dark with an idea, it’s my job as a poet to turn the light on and write it down.
With this schedule, my days are fluid; and although I make showing up at my desk a main priority, I never forget that it’s summer and there are rivers to swim in, flowers to smell, and berries to pick.
Are you learning any new tricks or skills during this time (COVID)? What’s been hardest for you? What do you miss the most? Has your book taken on a new meaning in the world’s current circumstances? Is there anything you would have included in your book if you were writing it now?
During quarantine, I had to shut down the retreat program I was running at Folk Llife Farm. This was a sad shift, as we had folks signed up to stay for months in advance. Now that I’m not spending my time hosting or interacting with my local community in person, I’m engaging with my online community in a larger capacity. I miss sitting in front of my audience, writing for people after looking them in the eye, and I really miss browsing bookstores. I miss hugging my friends, having teatime and long conversations, and I miss going on tour. But I can’t complain. Poetry has its place in the world now more than ever. I’m here to translate the communal mood, to voice our collective pain, and find the beauty in all of it. My book will help others do this as well. And if there’s one thing COVID has taught me, it’s that we all need an outlet for our emotions, especially when we feel unseen and disconnected. Poetry is this outlet and we can still share it even if we can’t be with one another in person.
What is something about you that doesn’t make it into your author bio?
I’m an ecstatic earth worshiper. Everything I do, every word I write, is attached to the idea that when my readers discover healing through my words, when they transform and become better by way of my work, they’ll in turn treat themselves, each other, and the earth better. This planet is a perfect gift and humans have ruined so much of it. Through my efforts as a poet, I hope to pay tribute to the earth and offer up ways for humans to change their relationship to our one and only home.
Photos of Jacqueline Suskin by James Adam Taylor
Photos around Folklife Farm by Jacqueline Suskin
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A Compassionate Approach to Recognizing Trauma Bonding
The theory of attachment styles became popularized in the last 15 years; now trauma is (finally) getting recognition from the mainstream. But most of us aren’t yet clear about the very deep connection that exists between trauma and certain attachment styles. This is where the concept of “trauma bonding” comes into play.
What is trauma bonding?
Trauma bonding happens when we get attached to someone who is often neglectful or abusive (physically, emotionally, or psychologically), but is also occasionally kind. When we’re attached to someone like this, we typically explain away their bad behavior, claiming “they had a hard day” or “it was my fault they got mad at me.” Rationalization offers us a semblance of protection from seeing the reality of the danger and inequality in the relationship.
It’s common to form a trauma bonding pattern when one of our parents or partners is erratic, abusive, or absent. But often the template of trauma bonding gets applied to many of our relationships.
Signs You Have a Trauma Bond
If you’re in a trauma bond relationship right now, you may make dramatic or sudden life changes or even great sacrifices for the sake of the relationship to the detriment of outside friendships, family, and your autonomy.
Even if the original, harmful relationship is now a thing of the past (e.g., you moved out, you broke up with the manipulative partner, or your former abuser has died), the trauma bonding pattern may remain embedded until you learn how to consciously uproot it.
Signs this trauma bonding template is still present can include:
- Emotionally caretaking others while your own needs and desires are swept under the rug
- Acting as if you continually need to prove your worth to others (and yourself)
- Avoiding being authentic or open because it feels like too great a risk
- Feeling frustrated, exhausted, hypervigilant, or unsupported in relationships due to perceiving pressure coming from others
- A pattern of feeling disempowered around coworkers, a spouse, or family members
What Causes Trauma Bonding?
When we experience stress and feel (consciously or unconsciously) we’re in danger, our sympathetic nervous system activates the “fight or flight” response. As long as that circuitry is activated, we’re not able to plan for the future or assess risks very clearly; our nervous system gets locked in survival mode to get through the stress. In other words, it’s not your fault that you can’t see what’s going on.
The challenge is heightened because of the intermittent reinforcement that characterizes trauma bonds: we receive occasional comfort or love in the relationship, which is sprinkled on top of the typical abuse or neglect. Like other forms of intermittent reinforcement, it’s an addictive combination to be exposed to, and one that hampers our ability to understand we’re being mistreated.
Because we focus so intently on the positive reinforcement we experience from time to time with our abuser, we contort ourselves psychologically to try to get the love as often as we can. Once this pattern is established, it is naturally hard to stop engaging it—again, because of the way our nervous system developed. Getting outside support to stop the cycle is an act of strength and wisdom.
Should You Break a Trauma Bond?
If you’re in clear and real danger, it is most important to find a way to safely remove yourself from harm. Over the longer term, the best approach is learning to create healthy relational boundaries so as not to form or reform trauma bonds.
Once you start to become aware of the trauma bonding pattern operating in you, you can recognize and address the behaviors it causes. You can uncover and listen to your buried needs and wants, and reclaim your personal power and freedom. Doing this can help you shift your nervous system out of past trauma bonding tendencies and toward new possibilities, including nurturing mutual relationships with people who are interested in your happiness and will support your thriving.
To find out more about healing traumas (including trauma bonding), please check out The Healing Trauma Program, hosted by Jeffrey Rutstein, PsyD, CHT.
Body and mind are one… with Thich Nhat Hanh
Enjoy this lovely video from our dear friend, Thich Nhat Hanh, recorded at the Body and Mind are One retreat in Colorado in the summer of 2011. There is something about Thich Nhat Hanh’s presence that just allows for an outpouring of mindfulness, love, kindness, and compassion. When we at Sounds True reflect upon mindfulness, we think immediately of our dear friend, Thich Nhat Hanh, and how fortunate we are to have the opportunity to work with him, something we’ve been blessed with over the last 20+ years. In so many ways, he embodies the work we’re doing here: our values, vision, and mission.
The beautiful and inspiring footage we gathered from Body and Mind are One was edited into a seven-hour online course, which you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home, on a schedule that works for you. More than an ordinary training course in mindfulness, Body and Mind Are One is at once a living transmission of insight from this beloved Zen master and a practical teaching series covering fundamental principles for a joyful life.
