The Meditation Experience – a free online course

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April 29, 2014

Have you been curious about meditation and how it helps to reduce stress and anxiety? Or how it might help you to relax, sleep better, or improve your relationships? Or how it has been shown to stimulate healing of mind and body, and bring about profound new levels of joy, peace, and well-being?

Though you may have often heard of the many benefits of meditation, perhaps you’ve not had the time or resources to learn more and to actually start a meditation practice of your own. Or even if you’ve dabbled a bit in meditation, perhaps you did not have the support to continue or to find a meditation practice suitable for you and your unique approach to life?

If any of this sounds familiar, we’d like to welcome you to The Meditation Experiencea free, eight-part online course designed for those new to meditation, as well as for those with some experience who are looking to deepen their practice or learn about other kinds of meditation. The goal of our course is to help you start meditating right away and to teach you a variety of meditation practices, so that you may experience for yourself the profound benefits of meditation in your daily life.

In addition to written material, questions for reflection, and weekly homework, each session of our course will include one or more guided meditations on audio or video, allowing the course material to come alive in your own personal experience.

*Access The Meditation Experience, a free online course, here*

The Meditation Experience was created to help you learn to meditate right now, and you can join the many millions around the planet whose lives have been radically transformed through learning the inner art of meditation.

The practice of meditation has been used for thousands of years by people in all cultures and of all religions (or no religious inclination at all) to reduce stress, to bring about relaxation, and to experience expanded states of consciousness and well-being. You need not have any background in spirituality, prayer, or religion to benefit from the practice of meditation, nor take on any new beliefs or ideologies. Meditation is a scientifically proven technique that can be applied by anyone, regardless of their religious or spiritual affiliations. Begin your own exploration of this revered art today, with The Meditation Experience.

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Six Summer Reads You Won’t Want to Miss!

After the stillness of winter and the slow waking of spring, summer is a time for getting up, getting out, and getting our hands on what inspires us the most. Here are some recent Sounds True releases for tapping into a life well lived.

1. The Biophilia Effect – Clemens G. Arvay 

Summer Super Sale - The Biophilia Effect

This is a book that celebrates our interconnection with nature and shows how to deeply engage the natural world wherever you live to dramatically improve your health. Clemens G. Arvay presents fascinating research, practical tools and activities,

inspiring stories, and more in this accessible guide to the remarkable benefits of being in nature.

Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/the-biophilia-effect.html

 

 

 

 

2. The Healing Code of Nature – Clemens G. Arvay

The Healing Code of Nature - Clemens G. Arvay

Human beings are inseparable from the natural world, coevolving with all of life. In order to thrive, we need to nourish this bond. In his latest book, biologist Clemens G. Arvay illuminates the miraculous ways that the human body interprets the living “code” of plants, animals, and our larger natural habitat for healing and sustenance.

Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/the-healing-code-of-nature.html

 

 

 

 

 

3. Book of Beasties – Sarah Seidelman

Summer Super Sale - Book of Beasties

From an ancient perspective, everything—including all natural things, like rocks, flowers, trees, insects, birds, and mammals

—is alive and infused with conscious energy or spirit,” writes Sarah Seidelmann. If you’re one of the many people looking to reconnect with the creativity, wisdom, and vital energy of the natural world, here is a fantastic guide for tapping into the power of animal totems, or “beasties.”

Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/book-of-beasties.html

 

 

 

4. No Recipe – Edward Espe Brown

Summer Super Sale - No RecipeMaking your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking,” writes renowned chef and Zen priest Edward Espe Brown, “one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, and in the eating.” With No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, Brown beautifully blends expert cooking advice with thoughtful reflections on meaning, joy, and life itself.

Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/no-recipe.html

 

 

 

 

5. Yoga Friends – Mariam Gates & Rolf Gates 

Summer Super Sale - Yoga FriendsFrom the creators of Good Night Yoga and Good Morning Yoga comes a beautifully illustrated city adventure that introduces children to the delights and benefits of partner yoga.

Perfect for teaming up with a friend, sibling, parent, or caregiver, each easy practice shows how cooperation helps us to imagine, move, and have fun in a whole new way.

Includes a back-page guide for parents and caregivers, showing how to do each pose and how to connect them into an easy-to-follow flow.

Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/yoga-friends.html

 

6. Happier Now – Nataly Kogan

Summer Super Sale - Happier Now

What if you could be happier, right now, without radically changing your life? As nationally recognized happiness expert Nataly Kogan teaches, happiness is not a nice feeling or a frivolous extra. It’s a critical, non-negotiable ingredient for living a fulfilling, meaningful, and healthy life—and it’s a skill that we can all learn and improve through practice. In Happier Now, Nataly shares an illuminating, inspiring, and science-based guide to help you build your happier skills and live with more joy, starting now.

Get it here: https://www.soundstrue.com/store/happier-now.html

 

 

 

 

 

Have other books you’ve read by the poolside or under a shade tree ended up changing the way you see the world? Tell us about those summer reads that ended up being more than you expected!

 

Singing Bowl Meditation Sounds True Spotify Playlist

Sounds True is on Spotify!

Need some tunes for rest and relaxation? Check out our Singing Bowl Meditation Playlist! A variety of artists who make a soothing mix of infinite rhythms using Tibetan singing bowls. Perfect throughout a meditative practice.

 

November New Releases and Giveaway

NOVEMBER NEW RELEASES

 

 

The Integrity Advantage by Kelly Kosow

Are you ready to open up to new levels of self-trust and self-love, to get where you want to go?

You vowed to speak up at work, and then sat silent in the meeting yet again.

You told yourself “this time the diet is going to stick,” only to watch the scale inching up.

You felt that something just wasn’t right about someone that—until you learned the hard way that your instincts were right.

“Every time you bite your tongue,” teaches Kelley Kosow, “you swallow your integrity.”

Before Kelley Kosow was a renowned life coach and CEO, she constantly second-guessed herself, let her “to-do” lists and others steer her dreams and passions, and played it “small and safe.”

Inspired by the groundbreaking principles of her renowned mentor Debbie Ford, who hand-picked Kelley to be her successor, The Integrity Advantage is Kelley’s step-by-step guide for facing the fear, shame, and false beliefs that cause us to lose our way.

Through life-changing insights, true stories, and proven strategies, this book will show you how to live on your own terms—according to you—from the inside out.

 

Daring to Rest by Karen Brody

As modern women, we’re taught that we can do it all, have it all, and be it all. While this freedom is beautiful, it’s also exhausting. Being a “worn-out woman” is now so common that we think feeling tired all the time is normal. According to Karen Brody, feeling this exhausted is not normal—and it’s holding us back. In Daring to Rest, Brody comes to the rescue with a 40-day program to help you reclaim rest and access your most powerful, authentic self through yoga nidra, a meditative practice that guides you into one of the deepest states of relaxation imaginable.

It’s time to lie down and begin the journey to waking up

 

 

 

 

Breathe and Be by Anna Emilia Laitinen and Kate Coombs

Teaching mindfulness helps kids learn to stay calm, regulate their emotions, and appreciate the world around them. With Breathe and Be, author Kate Coombs and illustrator Anna Emilia Laitinen team up to present a book of poetry and art for young readers to make mindfulness easy, natural, and beautiful. Here is a book sure to delight parents and kids alike, blending lovingly illustrated nature imagery with elegant verse about living with awareness and inner peace.

 

 

 

 

Leopard Warrior by John Lockley

A Teaching Memoir That Crosses the Barriers Between Worlds

A shaman is one who has learned to move between two worlds: our physical reality and the realm of spirits. For John Lockley, shamanic training also meant learning to cross the immense divide of race and culture in South Africa.

As a medic drafted into the South African military in 1990, John Lockley had a powerful dream. “Even though I am a white man of Irish and English descent, I knew in my bones that I had received my calling to become a sangoma, a traditional South African shaman,” John writes. “I felt blessed by the ancient spirit of Africa, and I knew that I had started on a journey filled with magic and danger.” His path took him from the hills of South Korea, where he trained as a student under Zen Master Su Bong, to the rural African landscape of the Eastern Cape and the world of the sangoma mystic healers, where he found his teacher in the medicine woman called MaMngwev

 

 

Things That Join the Sea and the Sky by Mark Nepo

A Reader for Navigating the Depths of Our Lives

The Universe holds us and tosses us about, only to hold us again. With Things That Join the Sea and the Sky, Mark Nepo brings us a compelling treasury of short prose reflections to turn to when struggling to keep our heads above water, and to breathe into all of our sorrows and joys.

Inspired by his own journal writing across 15 years, this book shares with us some of Mark’s most personal work. Many passages arise from accounts of his own life events—moments of “sinking and being lifted”—and the insights they yielded. Through these passages, we’re encouraged to navigate our own currents of sea and sky, and to discover something fundamental yet elusive: How, simply, to be here.

To be enjoyed in many ways—individually, by topic, or as an unfolding sequence—Things That Join the Sea and the Sky presents 145 contemplations gathered into 17 themes, each intended to illuminate specific situations.

 

 

                NOVEMBER GIVEAWAY

 

WIN OUR NEW RELEASE BUNDLE:The Integrity Advantage, Daring to Rest, Breathe and Be, Leopard Warrior, and Things That Join the Sea and the Sky

TO ENTER: Simply reply in the comments with why you’d like to win!

You Might Also Enjoy

Tara Brach: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times


What if the bravest thing you can do right now is refusing to close your heart?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Tara Brach—beloved meditation teacher, clinical psychologist, and bestselling author of Radical Acceptance and Trusting the Gold—about her new inner workbook with Sounds True, The Courageous Heart: Choosing to Love in Perilous Times. At a moment when so many people feel pulled between despair and action, Tara offers a grounded path through both.

Join Tami and Tara to explore:

  • How to stay spiritually engaged—without burning out or spiritually bypassing the reality of suffering
  • The bodhisattva path as a living practice: what it means to be an “awakening being” in ordinary, everyday life
  • Why grief is often covered over by anger—and how moving through grief unlocks the capacity for love and action
  • The RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) for working with armoring, fear, and excruciating pain in the heart
  • The shift from head space to heart space—and a brief guided meditation to experience it directly
  • How aspiration becomes the fuel for the spiritual path—and why Tara “sandwiches” her day with it
  • The practice of seeing basic goodness in others—including stories of Father Gregory Boyle and John Lewis that illuminate how this changes everything
  • What to do when you feel alone, disconnected, and uncertain where to start

Whether you’re overwhelmed by current events or searching for a more engaged and openhearted way to meet this moment, Tara Brach offers both the courage and the practical tools to begin.

Listen now and choose to love. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission—not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together. Originally aired on Sounds True One.

Just One Question | Thích Nhất Hạnh: What Is the ...


What if the root cause of every social problem — starvation, ecological destruction, violence — wasn’t a broken system or a corrupt institution, but a collective state of unawareness? And what if the most powerful act of social change available to you today happened in your own mind?

That’s the territory Tami Simon explores in this remarkable exchange with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master who founded Plum Village, pioneered engaged Buddhism, and became one of the most influential spiritual teachers of the twentieth century. Recorded more than two decades ago beneath a willow tree, this conversation feels astonishingly present.

Thích Nhất Hạnh’s answer to Tami’s question doesn’t point outward to policy or protest — it points inward, then ripples out. Individual awakening, he says, is collective awakening. Your practice is social action. Your light is contagious.

What you’ll hear in this exchange:

  • Why individual mindfulness practice is inseparable from social transformation
  • How collective enlightenment spreads — and how it already has, in ways we don’t always recognize
  • The role artists, teachers, economists, and politicians all play in the work of awakening
  • How to stay rooted in hope — and action — without being swallowed by despair

This is a short clip, but it carries the full weight of a lifetime of practice and teaching. It may change how you think about what you’re doing every time you sit down to meditate.

This clip is taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Thích Nhất Hạnh. Find the complete interview in this feed or at soundstrue.com.

This episode is sponsored by Omega Institute, a global gathering hub for lifelong learning and spiritual exploration. Omega offers weekend workshops, special events, rest and rejuvenation retreats, professional training, online learning, and more. Discover what calls to you at eomega.org/true.

Lodro Rinzler: Basic Goodness in a World on Fire


How do you hold true to your convictions to be good in a world that’s on fire?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Lodro Rinzler—Buddhist meditation teacher, founder of the Basic Goodness Collective, and author of seven books including the international bestseller The Buddha Walks into a Bar—about his new book, You Are Good. You Are Enough: Free Yourself from the Trap of Doubt and Return to Basic Goodness. Together, they move through the book’s three arcs: seeing the goodness in ourselves, in others, and in society itself.

Join Tami and Lodro to explore:

  • The concept of basic goodness—what it actually means, where it comes from in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and why you don’t have to be a Buddhist to recognize it in yourself
  • How capitalism profits from the lie of not-enoughness—and what it would mean to collectively stop believing it
  • The “trap of doubt”: that insidious inner voice that keeps us striving, comparing, and withholding self-acceptance
  • How to extend compassion toward people who drive us crazy—including world-threatening politicians—without excusing harm or collapsing into Pollyanna thinking
  • The parrot and the forest fire: a jataka tale about what it means to name what’s broken and show up anyway
  • Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s teaching that seeing the phenomenal world as sacred is “the first and last practice of all”
  • A closing guided meditation to help listeners touch basic goodness in their own direct experience

Whether you’ve been carrying shame for decades or are simply exhausted by a world that feels on fire, Lodro offers something rare: not a pep talk, but a genuine shift in view.

Listen now and find your way back to what was always there. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission—not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together. Originally aired on Sounds True One.

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