3 Ways to Connect With Your Higher Self This Holiday Season
During the holiday season, when the material can easily overshadow the spiritual, making conscious connection to the Divine within yourself can bring you back to the real reason for the season. In every spiritual tradition, the days around the Winter Solstice are a time of reflection, connection, gratitude, and devotion to the Source of love that animates all of life. To solidify the meaning that underpins winter holidays, it helps to practice connecting to what I call “Your Inner Pilot Light.”
Humbly ask for a deeper connection to your Inner Pilot Light
Connection with your Inner Pilot Light is fueled by your desire to bow before the Divine within and acknowledge that while you can engage in practices meant to deepen your connection, Divine union is a gift, given as grace, not something you can control. Try this prayer. “Dearest Inner Pilot Light, I surrender my desire to connect with You to the Divine Beloved inside of me and humbly ask for help. Let my personal will merge with Divine will and show me how I can be a vessel for your love.”
Tune in and let your Inner Pilot Light communicate with you
As a daily practice, drop into your heart and allow your mind to relax. Ask your Inner Pilot Light, “What do you want me to know today?” Then allow the words, feelings, somatic sensations or images come through. If your message comes in words, write it down as a love letter from your highest self to the parts of you in need of reassurance, guidance, comfort, or healing. If your Inner Pilot Light communicates non-verbally, just take in the guidance in whatever way is most natural.
Learn to receive, interpret, and discern your inner guidance
Your Inner Pilot Light seeks to guide you to the life of greatest love, alignment, growth, and flow, but it takes some practice to see that guidance is everywhere. It may come through an inner voice, guiding imagery, medicine dreams, synchronicity, animals that cross your path, a felt sense in your body, or direct knowing. Once you learn the way your Inner Pilot Light prefers to communicate with you, you will feel less alone, as if Love Itself is guiding you to the life you are meant to live.
Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Your Inner Pilot Light, Mind Over Medicine, The Fear Cure, and The Anatomy of a Calling, is a physician, speaker, founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute, and mystic. Passionate about what makes people optimally healthy and what predisposes them to illness, she is on a mission to merge science and spirituality in a way that not only facilitates the health of the individual, but also uplifts the health of the collective. Bridging between seemingly disparate worlds, Lissa is a connector, collaborator, curator, and amplifier, broadcasting not only her unique visionary ideas, but also those of cutting-edge visionaries she discerns and trusts, especially in the field of her latest research into “Sacred Medicine.” Lissa has starred in two National Public Television specials and also leads workshops both online and at retreat centers like Esalen and Kripalu. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her daughter. She blogs at LissaRankin.com and posts regularly on Facebook.
The community here at Sounds True wishes you a lovely holiday season! We are happy to collaborate with some of our Sounds True authors to offer you wisdom and practices as we move into this time together; please enjoy this blog series for your holiday season.
To help encourage you and your loved ones to explore new possibilities this holiday season, we’re offering 40% off nearly all of our programs, books, and courses sitewide. May you find the wisdom to light your way. Use promo code HOLIDAY10 and receive an additional 10% off your order.
Staying Awake – with Mark Nepo
Most of us can remember a time when we felt completely awake—fully present, deeply engaged, our heart and mind wide open. We also know those periods of sleepiness when our purpose is unclear, we lose our way in relationship, and life’s challenges seem more than we can bear. In Staying Awake: The Ordinary Art, Mark Nepo invites us to inhabit our truest selves “in all ways in all directions,” as we find our own voices in the One Conversation in which each of our lives is a story waiting to be told.
With a poet’s keen view of the vast and often hidden territory of the inner life, Mark Nepo talks directly about what a gift it is to be here and about the resources that the mysteries of being and experience reveal. Informed by his journey through cancer, he explores the lessons brought to us by the press of love and suffering. For each of us is born awake and yet it takes courage to stay awake, to remember that all we encounter is real.
Sharing his own rich poetry along with the inspired writing of luminaries across generations, Nepo guides us in the central practice of staying awake: to be who we are, no matter what we face, and to enter our days and moments to the fullest. We do this, he teaches, by holding nothing back—by bringing all of who we are to every situation, enlivening our connection with everything life has to offer. Using teaching stories and a series of exercises and reflections, Nepo invites us to listen to our own stories and to find our own wisdom.
Enjoy this short video from Mark on staying awake.
Sounds True’s Hidden Gems – from Tami Simon
Dear friends, we are happy to offer you a 40% discount off of these “hidden gems” buried within the Sounds True archived, as identified by our founder and publisher, Tami Simon. Including some of Tami’s favorite selections, these titles represent some of the great heart of our offerings, which we are honored to share with you.
Learn more about Tami’s Hidden Gems!
A visual tour of gratitude…
We were honored at the 2012 Wake Up Festival to have with us film maker Louie Schwartzberg, to introduce and show us his short piece on gratitude. While this life has so many challenges, uncertainties and, as the Buddha has taught, will inevitably involve suffering and the breaking-open of our hearts, there is an underlying preciousness here. Just by looking up into the sky or into the eyes of someone we love, or listening to the birds, or watching a flower bloom, we enter into timelessness and eternity. Something more than meets the eye is happening here… the miracle that is this life is waiting around every corner, is part of every conversation, and is unfolding throughout every minute of every day.
Enjoy this lovely short film on the power of gratitude and the preciousness of this one sweet life, narrated by our dear friend, Brother David Steindl-Rast:
Waking Up – what does it really mean? A free online series from Sounds True
Beginning May 1, 2015. Tami Simon will speak with today’s leading teachers on the topic of spiritual awakening—what it is, why it matters, and how it changes our lives and our world. The series is yours to enjoy as often as you’d like for the entire month of May. Interviewees include Eckhart Tolle, Tara Brach, Adyashanti, Gangaji, A.H. Almaas, Sandra Ingerman, Ken Wilber, Jack Kornfield, and many others.
More information/ register for FREE here.
A growing number of people are beginning to see things in a radically different way. In other words, more and more of us are starting to “wake up” spiritually—to discover an entirely new identity beyond the usual sense of who we think we are. But what is spiritual awakening, really? How does it happen—and what are the consequences? Is it possible to attune to this dimension of experience at any moment?
In Waking Up, Sounds True publisher and founder Tami Simon speaks with over 30 of today’s leading authors and teachers who will share their personal understanding of spiritual awakening—how it takes place, what changes (and what doesn’t), and how their experiences can inspire and inform our own realization.
Free guide to meditation
When creating the (free) With Insight Guide to Meditation for Sounds True, I wanted to include a short quote for the front page, to summarize at least one way of approaching the meditative journey. When I came across the following description by my friend Shinzen Young, I knew I had found the right one. Nicely said, brother Shinzen:
“The ultimate expression of meditation comes when we can feel all the pains of the world, experience them with mindfulness and equanimity so they dissolve into energy, and then recolor that energy and radiate it out as unconditional love, moment by moment, through every pore of our being.”
Access all of the With Insight Guides here.
