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3 Ways to Set Clear Boundaries to Enjoy This Holiday S...

Lauren Walker — December 30, 2019

One of the things that get us so stressed out during the holiday season is the Must Do list, the unending expectations, the anxiety that comes when we feel we’ve let people down. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The holidays can literally be Holy Days, when you feel the love and light of family, friends, community and the shared gratitude of celebration.

Here are a few ways that Energy Medicine Yoga can help you this season.

Knowing the right way to say “No”

You know you want to say No, but you don’t know how. Before you say Yes, and add one more thing to an already full plate, take a moment in silence. Tune in and see what you really want to do. Then take one hand and draw big figure 8’s all along your throat. This is the home of the 5th chakra, where you speak your truth. The figure 8’s will help you find more clarity and ease with what can be a difficult answer.

Keep your own energies intact with the Zip Up

When you’re around a lot of people, you can take on the energies of everyone around you and start to feel like you’re losing your own self. Bring your hands in front of your pubic bone, set an intention to stay calm and true to yourself, and sweep your hands up your body and over your head. Do this two more times.

Calm down your stress response with this ‘hug’

Holidays can be stressful, and your body will respond to that. You can balance the stress response with the ‘inner mom’ by doing the Spleen hug. Hug one hand around your waist, hug the other hand around the opposite elbow. You can stand like this around the punch bowl, and feel calm and grounded so you can enjoy the holiday chaos!

Lauren Walker is the author of The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription (Sounds True, Sept 2017) and Energy Medicine Yoga: Amplify the Healing Power of Your Yoga Practice (Sounds True, 2014). She’s been teaching yoga and meditation since 1997 and created Energy Medicine Yoga while teaching at Norwich University. She teaches EMYoga across the US and internationally and has been featured in Yoga Journal, Mantra Yoga + Healing, Yoga Digest, and The New York Times. She was recently named one of the top 100 most influential yoga teachers in America by Sonima. For more information, visit EMYoga.net.

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.

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This is a new day. A mindful day. Our day.

Deborah Hopkinson — January 30, 2020

It’s still dark
when one small bird
fluffs his feathers
And lifts his voice
To sing up the sun.
Snuggled deep in our dreams,
we hear his clear song.
And we open our eyes
To the gift of a new day.
This day.
Our day.

Years ago, we attended a family meditation retreat with the beloved Buddhist teacher Thich
Nhat Hanh. The children loved him. He showed them how to count their breaths from one to
ten. (The best part was finding ten perfect stones to move from one pile to another.) During
walking meditation, he urged them all ahead with a running meditation. Another time, the
children served tea to the adults, moving carefully and slowly, focused intently on the task at
hand.

Today, there is growing recognition that practicing mindfulness has benefits for children
regardless of religious or spiritual background. From preschools to middle schools, educators
are incorporating mindfulness into their learning communities as a way to help young people
cope with emotions and anxieties.

Mindfulness can also start at home. Here in Oregon, the OPEC (Oregon Parenting Education
Collaborative), a public-private parenting education effort, provides evidence-based parent
resources on mindfulness: “The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness with Children at Home.”

I hope my new picture book, Mindful Day, with gorgeous illustrations by talented California
artist Shirley Ng-Benitez, will also be helpful to families. Rather than a how-to, the story instead
follows a young girl, along with her mom and little brother, as they go about the simple,
ordinary activities of a day: eating breakfast together, getting dressed, brushing teeth, and
going to the market.

Shirley’s child-friendly artwork makes the characters come to life and examples of how to
practice mindfulness are integrated into the text. As the young girl pops a raspberry into her
mouth she says, “I chew slowly. It tastes sweet as summer.” She also practices being aware of
her breath. “Together we breathe: in out, soft slow. I look and listen. I play.”

Mindful Day was inspired by the time I’ve spent with my toddler grandson. I hope readers will embrace Mindful Day and make mindfulness part of their own family life. In this way, we can better treasure each precious moment—and help our children learn to do the same.

Thank you,
Deborah Hopkinson

Deborah Hopkinson has a master’s degree in Asian Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she studied the role of women in thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhism. She lived in Honolulu for 20 years and practiced Zen Buddhism with the late Roshi Robert Aitken, founder of the Diamond Sangha and Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She lives near Portland, Oregon. For more, visit deborahhopkinson.com.

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Transform your relationship with your kitchen—and yo...

Jules Blaine Davis — January 27, 2023

Hello gorgeous community of amazing human beings,

For the last 15 years, I have been cooking up this question:

What does it look like to nourish YOU?

Let’s drop everything we might think this is
and everything you didn’t get done today
and bring our collective shoulders down from the sky.

Let’s take a minute here. We are just getting started, yet I feel we need to slow down. Will you take a deep breath with me? Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for breathing. There is nothing to do here.

You can bring your awareness to your breath with an inhale through your nose. Open your mouth slightly and exhale with a HAAAAAAAAA sound. It feels so good to drop everything and breathe. Me too. To let go, even a little, is a real lovefest for the heart and mind = heart mind.

It feels so good, can we do one more?
You can close your eyes this time if you want to—
I will be right here.

We are just getting here, together.

Now let me ask you again:
What does it look like to nourish YOU?

What if I told you that your kitchen is a place of stories, mothers, grandmothers, imprints, and emotional weather patterns that shaped how you live now? It is also a place to deeply nourish yourself and cook up the life you have been longing to live.

Your kitchen (yes your kitchen!) is a fierce, unconditionally loving mother holding what is ripe and ready to become inside of YOU. Who would have thought that you can heal your life in your kitchen? I did! And now you can.

I am excited to share my new book: The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You.

It invites you to bring your entire body into the kitchen, put your shame into the fire, offer your grief to the soup—allowing all you have been hungry for to begin to feed YOU. As you turn on the fire, you will come home to yourself. You will make the room you need, to hear and see and feel the stories you have been carrying.

You will begin, again and again, to become YOU.
Welcome home.

In loving service to your courage, your kitchen healer,
x x x x jules

Jules Blaine Davis, the Kitchen Healer, is a TED speaker and one of Goop’s leading experts on women’s healing. She has led transformational gatherings, retreats, and a private practice for over fifteen years. She has facilitated deeply nourishing experiences at OWN and on retreat with Oprah Winfrey, among many other miracles. Jules is a pioneer in her field, inviting women to awaken and rewrite the stories they have been carrying for far too long in their day-to-day lives. She is cooking up a movement to inspire and support women to discover who they are becoming.

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Erotic Authenticity: Replacing Shame with Celebration

Stefani Goerlich — October 2, 2023

Sometime last year, I was having a conversation with a close relative of mine. I had sent them a recent news story I was quoted in and had been met with… silence. Eventually, I nudged a little bit and they responded, saying “I’m sorry, I just can’t be proud of someone who talks about sex and sex toys for a living. It’s embarrassing.” As we unpacked this statement, it became clear that they were unable to see the good—any good—in my work. As a therapist, as a writer, as an educator… my work was shameful in their eyes. In that moment, I understood my clients in a way I never had before.

With Sprinkles on Top was already finished by the time this occurred, but if it hadn’t? This conversation would have inspired me to write it. It can be incredibly painful to have someone you love tell you that “What you do is wrong. Who you are is not OK.” Many kinky people are afraid that if they share their innermost selves with the ones they love most, they too will be rejected, written off as broken or creepy or wrong. I wrote Sprinkles because I believe deeply that every single human being deserves to feel loved and worthy and whole, to know that their innermost desires are not just valid but beautiful, and to find others who can celebrate this beauty and their relationships together with them.

Sprinkles is also written for the partners of these kinky people, many of whom tell me that, if their spouse had just been willing to share their desires, they would have happily explored with them. For the spouses who don’t understand the fantasies or intimate practices they’re learning about and who need a guide to help them navigate these new relationship waters. For the men and women who call my office afraid—afraid that there’s something wrong with their partner or something inadequate in themselves.

They want me to “fix” them. I want to celebrate them.

With Sprinkles on Top is not a “how to” book. It’s a “what now?” book. My goal is to celebrate the things that make each person and each relationship unique and delightful—and to help them discover new unique qualities in themselves and new ways to delight one another. I want to celebrate vanilla relationship values while also normalizing and affirming kinky identities. I want to help my readers find new and exciting ways to enhance their own core sexual and relational “flavor” through interactive activities they do by themselves and with their partner.

Differences in desire represent an exciting opportunity to strengthen and reinforce the bonds of intimacy and trust we have created within our relationships, while also expanding the erotic playground we enjoy together. We don’t have to change who we are. We don’t have to be ashamed of what we want or embarrassed to talk about it. Sexuality, desire, and intimacy are, to me, sacred gifts. I’m honored to be able to help my readers, my clients, and others to build happier, healthier relationships with their bodies, their partners, and themselves. I hope you enjoy the process of finding your sprinkles and using them to communicate, explore, and connect with the one(s) you love.

Kol Tuv,

Stefani Goerlich

Stefani Goerlich, PhD, LMSW-Clinical, LISW, LCSW, CST, is a certified sex therapist and master social worker who specializes in working with gender, sexuality, and relationships. She is a sought-after clinical supervisor, media consultant, and conference presenter who has appeared in media ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Cosmopolitan and Teen Vogue. She is the award-winning author of the professional books The Leather Couch and Kink-Affirming Practice.

With Sprinkles on Top

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podcast

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Christina Rasmussen: Life Reentry: Exiting the Waiting...

Christina Rasmussen — July 23, 2024

There are certain experiences that are completely and utterly devastating, yet seemingly impossible to articulate and share. Grief educator and author Christina Rasmussen calls these our “invisible losses”—and they are often more perplexing and difficult to navigate than the overt tragedies we all endure in life. In this podcast, join Sounds True’s founder, Tami Simon, in conversation with Christina Rasmussen about her new book, Invisible Loss: Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief.

Filled with unique perspective and compassionate insight, this dialogue explores the place of uncertainty and stagnation known as “the waiting room”; the original self, and how we get disconnected from it; the impacts of an “us vs. them” experience; how to identify your primary invisible loss; three inner narrators—the survivor, the watcher, and the thriver; reclaiming our forgotten “thriver memories”; the cost of seeking approval; saying yes to what you’ve always wanted to do; cleansing our patterns of fear; the practice of mental stacking; the Life Reentry model; reframing our experiences and taking action from our wisdom; why the place of death is also the place of creation; and more.

podcast

Post Views: 1,565

E11: Transforming the Lower Self into Spiritual Libera...

Michael Singer — September 25, 2024

True spiritual maturity is not about seeking momentary highs but about dealing with the lows that inhibit one’s spiritual ascent. The real obstacles to spiritual fulfillment come in the form of emotional blockages and self-imposed personal limitations. By focusing on letting go of these internal tethers, we can naturally rise to higher states of consciousness without forcing the process.

For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.

Customer Favorites

3 Ways to Set Clear Boundaries to Enjoy This Holiday S...

Knowing the right way to say “No”

Keep your own energies intact with the Zip Up

Calm down your stress response with this ‘hug’

This is a new day. A mindful day. Our day.

Learn more and buy now

Sounds True | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound

Transform your relationship with your kitchen—and yo...

Erotic Authenticity: Replacing Shame with Celebration

With Sprinkles on Top

Christina Rasmussen: Life Reentry: Exiting the Waiting...

E11: Transforming the Lower Self into Spiritual Libera...

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