Find Your Beastie of the Year for 2018
- Print out the PDF (double-sided) and cut them each into their own little cards. We encourage you to share with family and friends! Bring them to your New Year’s eve party or to your next luncheon with friends.
- Before you select your beastie, take a few deep breaths, center yourself and do anything else that feels good to create a good atmosphere for this process (light a candle, do a few jumping jacks, stretch, sing a few bars of Dolly Parton).
- Shuffle your “cards” slowly while day dreaming for a bit about your heart’s desire.
- Set your intention: “I am going to select a beastie that inspires and guides me”.
- Choose your card.
- Look at the results.
- For even more aligning affirmations you can look up your beastie in the What the Walrus Knows app (available at iTunes) which has 10 aligning affirmations for each beastie.
- If you got a beastie you are not tooooo sure about- remember that with divination, we may not always get what we WANT but we always get what we NEED. I got cockroach one year for my beastie of the year and it was magnificent in every way (though I initially resisted!).
- Skeptical? That is perfectly OK. To explore, just set aside your skepticism for a moment and see if your results “help” you in any way. If the answer is yes, then continue to explore and work with the beasties if it feels good. The only proof in divination is if it helps you on your path. If it serves you, then why not use it?
- Ah-ha! If you received information, had an “ah-ha” moment or a new revelation from this process and it helped then, hooray! Celebrate! Bless and thank the beasties.
- Take what you like and leave the rest. If one line resonates with you then forget about the lines that don’t. If the information contained in them is important then it will come back to you again in another way.
Sarah Bamford Seidelman was a physician living a nature-starved, hectic lifestyle until a walrus entered her life and changed everything. She has trained at the Martha Beck Institute and Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and is author of Swimming with Elephants (Conari Press, 2017). She lives in northern Minnesota. For more, visit followyourfeelgood.com.Cooking as meditation… with Dr. Andrew Weil
In many contemplative traditions, it is said that we can practice meditation during the most ordinary activities, such as taking a walk, washing the dishes, or even in the midst of a busy day of emails. Here, our friend and Sounds True author Dr. Andrew Weil shows how the simple art of cooking – when engaged in a present, mindful, and open way – can offer a gateway into the experience of meditation.
We’d love to hear from you on how cooking and other so-called “ordinary” activities offer you a portal into deeper love, awakening, and aliveness in the present moment.
Walking a Path of Power
Recently, I had the pleasure of recording The Power Path Training: Living the Secrets of the Inner Shaman with husband-and-wife teachers and shamanic practitioners José and Lena Stevens. In the course of our days together in the studio, I encountered a number of concepts that I found I could immediately put into practice in my own life with powerful results.
At the core of their teaching is the idea that we are part of a vast web of relationship, and that the universe is brimming with beings and powers who can serve as allies in our own unfolding. In fact, in their view, everything in our environment—not only the spirits or totems we might normally think of as power animals, but natural forces like wind and water, heavenly bodies like the sun and stars, as well as other humans past and present—can offer us support and serve as medicine to help bring us into balance. All these sources of power are available to us at every step of the journey.
But the Stevens teach that the key to accessing that power and using it wisely lies in mastering our relationship to ourselves—as bodies, as emotional and mental beings, and as pure spirit. To act from our essence—our true nature as spirit—we must identify the fears and desires of the false personality, learning to navigate the world from a place of neutrality instead of reactivity. Shifting from the reactivity of the personality to the neutrality of spirit is not a one-time choice, but rather the result of thousands of small choices.
Since the recording, I’ve tried to remember in moments of reactivity (with varying degrees of success) that my reactions have an impact in ways I can’t possibly fathom. I’ve tried to see those situations that throw me out of neutrality not as problems, but as gifts that show me where I have work to do, where my fears and desires get in the way of clear seeing.
Perhaps the most powerful practice I’ve worked to do as I move through my day is simply to pause and recognize all the allies working on my behalf all the time. It’s easy to forget the miraculous blessing of just being here—of being on this planet in the whole vast galaxy, just far enough from the nurturing sun that we can survive; of living in a place where there is food and water and a culture which allows some degree of ease; of being among other humans who love us and whom we love; of breathing this air that sustains us. I’ve found that cultivating this underlying sense of gratitude helps me maintain equilibrium when things go “wrong” and equanimity when “problems” arise.
What habitual reactions prevent you from living from your essence? And what allies are available, right now in this moment, to support you in acting in love, from your deepest nature?
A Guide to Self-Compassion – October 2017
Welcome Dear Friend,
We are thrilled and honored to be present with you on this journey! We’d love for this space to be a map to your highest self and a beacon to creativity and expression. The coming months will be full of guide posts and inviting spaces, awaiting your contemplation’s and discoveries. We’d love to spark, share and sustain well-being with you.
Self-Compassion is our guide for the month of October! Self-compassion can be a hard thing to come by these days. Too often than not, we have an inner critic that is bigger than our inner cheerleader. It’s time to notice those thoughts and be kind to them. Self-compassion is not always innate, but it can indeed be learned.
October will be filled with weekly self-compassion content. Please check out our content guide for dates! We look forward to going on this adventure with you!
With love on the journey,
Your friends at Sounds True
Happy 78th birthday to His Holiness the Dalai Lama!
Wishing His Holiness the Dalai Lama a joyful 78th birthday today, and praying for his long life! I’ll never forget the one and only time I met the Dalai Lama, at his residence in Dharamsala many years ago. I was quite young, coming off a difficult break-up, and broken wide open alone in the mountains of northern India, just sort of wandering from place to place. He held my hand and just looked at me. He wasn’t scrambling to try to make my heartbreak go away, he wasn’t playing the wise guru offering me some subtle teaching on the empty-luminous ground of awareness, he wasn’t hurling blessings at me so that all would be made right and I could enter into some other state of consciousness. He simply spent a moment with me, all the way through, totally human, fully there with everything in the space between us. It was a short moment of time, but in another way it was totally eternal; those sorts of rare meetings, heart to heart, are rare and precious, and not easily forgotten. In my experience, the Dalai Lama is a holding environment of love, in and of himself; a totally real, humble, open-hearted, incredibly warm, authentic human being. May you live long, your Holiness!
Wake Up Festival 2014!
Friends we are so happy to announce and invite you to the 2014 Wake Up Festival!
The Wake Up Festival is a five-day immersion experience in personal and collective transformation. It’s the largest and only festival of its kind, uniting renowned spiritual teachers, bestselling authors, healers, scientists, poets, yogis, and lovers of life within the context of an open-hearted, uplifting community.
The Wake Up Festival is not your usual “festival.” It’s not about outer activities; it’s about inner exploration and discovery. We think of it as a feast of life-changing insights with just the right amount of practice to enable us to truly embody what we learn. You’ll be invited to approach awakening through meditation, personal writing, qigong, yoga, dance, shadow work, and more. And we will do it as individuals each supported by our Wake Up community.
We hope to see you all in August!