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The Boulder Floods

Sounds True — September 17, 2013

Thank you so much to all of you who have written in (and otherwise sent) your thoughts, prayers, and love to us here at Sounds True, and to all our friends throughout Colorado during this very difficult time. It has been a very trying week for all of us and many here have lost their homes, businesses, towns, and even lives. Like any tragedy, though, it has brought individuals and the community together in new ways, and shown us what is truly important at the end of the day.

Fortunately, the sun was out all day yesterday, and today is also looking sunny and dry. We are praying that the worst is behind. While some of the roads near Sounds True have been damaged quite extensively, we were able to re-open yesterday, and were grateful that most of our employees are doing okay. We are for the most part safe, but many of us are in touch with others who are not faring so well – friends who have lost their homes, have been air vac’d out by the National Guard, cannot find loved ones, and are experiencing great fear and despair. Many dozens are still unaccounted for in Boulder.

Here are some photos to give you a visual sense of how the flood is impacting local communities.

And here is some video footage of Longmont, a town just next to Boulder where a number of our employees live.

Finally, a rather shocking amateur video of the flood as it moves through Boulder Canyon.

If you’re interested in helping via making a donation, information may be found here.

Thank you again for thinking of us and we join you in sending our thoughts, love, and prayers to our brothers and sisters throughout the state as we move through this very challenging time.

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Choosing to Be Awake

Florence Meleo-Meyer — September 10, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Florence Meleo-Meyer, a senior teacher at the acclaimed Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she also directs Oasis Institute, a school for mindfulness-based professional education and innovation. Florence is a leading teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and with Sounds True and Saki Santorelli she has developed the upcoming MBSR Online Training Course. In this episode, Tami speaks with Florence about the practice of interpersonal mindfulness and how mindfulness helps us heal from trauma. She offers a brief mindfulness practice for when we feel the need to return to ourselves. (60 minutes)

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Embodied Awakening Practices in the Vijnana Bhairava

Sally Kempton
Sounds True — September 5, 2013

So often, we compartmentalize our lives, with the spiritual stuff over here and everything else over here. The more I’ve noted this tendency in myself, the more I’ve tried to bring the same open awareness to tasks such as shopping, work, and doing the dishes that I bring to reading sacred texts and meditation.

I’m always on the lookout for teachings that understand the essential unity of all existence, whether it manifests as the transcendent or the banal. When I first read a translation of the Vijnana Bhairava—one of the key texts of non-dual Kashmir Shaivism, the tradition from which Indian Buddhist Tantra evolved—I was delighted to find that its 112 dharanas, or practices, ranged from the subtle and obscure to the sensuous and embodied. In other words, its techniques for meditative awareness encompassed all of life.

Earlier this summer, I had the pleasure of working with one of my favorite Sounds True authors, Sally Kempton, to record a new program called Doorways to the Infinite: The Art and Practice of Tantric Meditation. In this program, to be released next spring, Sally explores the practices of the Vijnana Bhairaiva, unpacking the deeper meanings of the dharanas and offering guided meditation practices that evoke their unique flavors.

Each of the Vijnana Bhairava’s verses—which are presented as a conversation between the supreme lord Shiva and his consort Parvati—offers a doorway to expanded consciousness. Some are concerned with the space between breaths, the ascent of kundalini, and mantra practice—familiar subjects for spiritual practitioners. Other dharanas focus on the taste of food, on touch, on sexual ecstasy.

Still others point toward immediate realization of the Self as pure consciousness.

These dharanas prove that the ancients knew what we are rediscovering today—that spirituality is not something apart from all the other aspects of our lives. In Tantric teachings, the human body is a mirror of the cosmic body. When we have a felt sense of this unity of body and spirit, there’s no more gap between our spiritual lives and our ordinary lives. All life is spirit, and everything is our path to awakening.

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When Deep Faith Meets Deep Reason

Dr. Ashok Gangadean — August 27, 2013

Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Ashok Gangadean, who has been a professor of philosophy at Haverford College for more than 45 years. Ashok investigates the primal internal logic of human reason and the deep dynamics of communication between diverse worldviews. He is the author of Meditative Reason and Between Worlds, and with Sounds True has created the six-session audio course Awakening the Global Mind. In this episode, Tami speaks with Ashok about breaking out of limiting patterns of “ego-mental thinking” by deepening our dialogue with ourselves and others, and what it might mean to find the “missing grammar” of supreme universal consciousness he calls “Logos.” (57 minutes)

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Putting Your Relationship First: Lessons from Your Bra...

Dr. Stan Tatkin — July 16, 2013

In the second half of their conversation about Your Brain on Love, Tami Simon and Stan Tatkin explore how two nervous systems get along in relationship and what it might look like to fight well in times of conflict. Discover how either party can wave a flag of friendliness during a fight, core skills and attitudes to get out of any argument in five minutes or less, and the importance of making connections we can count on no matter what. (68 minutes)

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Personal, Interpersonal, Transpersonal

Robert Augustus Masters — July 12, 2013

I was recently sitting in the audience of a talk by a spiritual teacher who was pointing out, again and again, the timeless nature of being. Although I could feel the depth and profundity of the eternal moment, at a certain point, I noticed myself feeling contracted and frustrated. I thought to myself, “What about focusing on interpersonal relationships and helping us develop skills for being intimate with other people and communicating well at work, that type of thing? I am sick of timeless being!”

And then I remembered that some people are what could be called “subject matter experts” and everyone can’t be good at everything. And that the way I could benefit the most from this talk was to relax into timelessness and learn from this teacher what he is gifted at transmitting and communicating. Fortunately, that approach worked, and my critical mind relaxed.

However, I also started reflecting on something I read in a book by Robert Augustus Masters. Robert is a new author with Sounds True and has written a new book on Emotional Intimacy, and created a new audio series called Knowing Your Shadow. Robert talks about the “personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal” dimensions of experience. And when I read his description of these three different aspects or dimensions, I just loved it! I notice that whenever people just talk about the “transpersonal”, about what is formless, I begin to long for the personal and interpersonal. And when people just talk about the “personal”, about their challenges and woes, I begin to long for a bigger view that doesn’t place any limits anywhere. Maybe I am just a chronic complainer?

But actually, I think it is more than that. My sense is that the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal are always all three happening simultaneously. And if we leave any dimension out (in a chronic type of way), we are missing something. And when we include all three — how we are feeling individually, how we are experiencing inter-relating with others, and what it is like to transcend any sense of self and other and experience pure being – then we are experiencing a type of wholeness that leaves nothing out.

So I guess we could say I am happy in wholeness and cranky when transcendence is favored instead of recognized as one dimension of multi-dimensional being. And I feel cranky because I have seen people walk out of these transcendence-focused talks without any clue about how to work with difficult emotional states when they arise (and as we all know, they arise). Teachings that are wholly focused on the transpersonal dimension can be a breeding ground for what Robert Augustus Masters calls “spiritual bypassing” – using our spirituality to avoid facing aspects of our experience, particularly difficult emotional experiences. Robert’s focus is on “emotional literacy”, that we can learn to be fluent with all of our emotions, appreciating their nuances and what is being called forth in us in any given situation. To learn more about Robert’s work, you can check out this two-part podcast I did with him recently on Emotional Intimacy, here and here. Listening to Robert, I felt the opposite of “cranky”; I felt whole.

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Category: Relationships

The Boulder Floods

Choosing to Be Awake

Embodied Awakening Practices in the Vijnana Bhairava

When Deep Faith Meets Deep Reason

Putting Your Relationship First: Lessons from Your Bra...

Personal, Interpersonal, Transpersonal

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