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You are not broken or in need of fixing

Sounds True — September 28, 2013

When your emotional world is on fire,
when you become lost in the story of the suffering one,
touch your heart, feel the aliveness in your body,
practice kindness, and ignite a revolution.

As a little one it was wildly creative
to turn from your embodied reality,
to protect yourself from overwhelming experience.
But love is calling you home now:
Come closer.

Will you see how much intelligence is here,
even in your confusion and in your pain?
Your sadness is a doorway into the infinite,
if you will hold it near.
Your despair is a gateway into wholeness,
if you will offer it sanctuary.
Even your anxiety is a portal into love’s world
if you will stay close.

Everything here is path, friends,
nothing is out of place.
You are not broken
and are not in need of fixing.

Stop. Just one sacred pause;
touch the ground. Look up into the sky.
Give yourself the gift of your own presence,
for this is no ordinary moment.

As you sink into the core of what you are,
notice that you can breathe in and out of your heart.
It is not air which moves in and out, though.
It is love.

autumn

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Beyond Body Image – with Sil & Eliza Reynol...

Eliza Reynolds
Sil Reynolds — April 17, 2014

Concerns about body image and physical appearance weigh heavily in the consciousness of our culture and, left unexamined, have a way of generating a tremendous amount of suffering for young women (as well as humans of all ages and genders). Enjoy this short video from mother-daughter team Sil & Eliza Reynolds as they speak about the discoveries they’ve made and the healing they’ve experienced in this area.

Sil & Eliza are the authors of the inspirational book Mothering and Daughtering: Keeping Your Bond Strong Through the Teen Years.

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Reasons to Celebrate

Jeff Foster — November 2, 2017

When you are confused, celebrate. In this moment, you’re free from having to know, liberated from the burden of expertise. There is no step from confusion to clarity; you clearly see confusion, and so clarity is already closer.

When you have doubts, celebrate. You have remained curious, and you haven’t settled for secondhand answers nor fixated on a conclusion. You’re free from certainty, the great weapon of the ego, undoubtedly.

When you feel fear, celebrate. You are moving into the unknown, leaving the known world, the dying world, the old world. Stepping into the new. Fear and excitement are so close here. The illusory armor of the separate self is breaking apart; life is flooding in. Fear is trying to protect you; bow to it.

When you feel anger, celebrate. Feel its ferocity, its power, the cry of a velociraptor. Life is surging through you, raw, unfiltered. You are on the verge of finding your song, fighting for a cause with passion, standing up for those without a voice, knowing what you deserve. Anger is related to courage, your willingness to move toward life and protect what you love, even in the face of danger.

When you get lost, celebrate. In every great journey, heroes lose their way sometimes, doubt their own power sometimes. Get lost, and find yourself. Find presence, the breath, the beating of the heart. Take the giant step of not knowing which step to take; a perfect step. Trust the doubting, too. And your path will find you, moment by moment. Your true path cannot be lost, ever.

When you feel sorrow, celebrate. You are not numb. You have not closed your heart to the unwanted. You are wide open to life, sensitive. This old, familiar friend has come to you for help. She is not a mistake. She only wants to warm herself by the fire of your presence, be given a space at the table, next to joy.

When you feel that you cannot celebrate life, celebrate. You are honest, you tell the truth of the moment, your eyes are open.

Looking for more great reads?

Excerpted from The Way of Rest by Jeff Foster

Jeff Foster shares his own awakened experience a way out of seeking fulfillment in the future and into the miracle of “all this, here and now.” He studied astrophysics at Cambridge University. Jeff’s books include The Way of Rest and The Deepest Acceptance. For more, visit lifewithoutacentre.com.

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We Dare You to Rest This Holiday Season

Karen Brody — November 20, 2017

When to say “No” & “Yes”

One of the most exhausting stress loops for women starts with saying “yes” when we feel “no”. Becoming your most authentic self is the first step to learning what a “no” and a “yes” feel like in your body. We often tell women to say no more, but equally as troublesome is that we also don’t feel and then follow our yeses.

Here’s a quick way to practice sensing what “yes” and “no” feel like to you:

Put your hand on your heart and gut.
Place your attention at the space between your eyebrows (your third eye).
Inhale from the space between your eyebrows to the base of your spine, while mentally saying “Sooooo.” Then exhale from the base of your spine to the space between your eyebrows while mentally saying the sound, “Hummmmm.” Repeat twice more.
Be still as you rest your attention on your third eye for 20 to 30 seconds.
Call up a question you want an answer to, and see if you feel a “yes” or “no.”

For women who have lots of decisions to make, like mothers, I often suggest making a list of all the things stressing them out, and then, on the same day every week, doing this practice, seeing if they get a “yes” or “no” for each item on the list. This is also a great practice to do weekly when you’re pregnant, because giving birth centered in your true self, knowing your “yes” and “no,” is the best gift you can give your baby.

Using this practice to help make decisions will help you stop overdoing. You begin with feeling, drop your ego, and then, from your true nature, make decisions that end the worn-out feeling. Beware of mistaking things you love to do as a “yes.” For example, many of the creative moms I work with love to cook, but when they use this practice to ask whether they want to stay up cooking cupcakes late at night for their children’s school when they have work the next day, the answer they get might well be “no.”

Sometimes you may be faced with a difficult “no”: your inner wisdom will tell you that saying “no” to something will liberate time, but saying “no” may not feel good right away or may disappoint someone. If this happens, I encourage you to say “no” anyway. If you want to feel well-rested, you need to make the choice that supports your wholeness.

Love Yourself First

Most of us have heard flight attendants on an airplane say, “Put your own oxygen mask on first, and then secure your loved one’s.” This is an important message that well-rested women get in every bone of their bodies: love yourself first. The first thing your loved ones need is a healthy you. Here are two ways to do that.

Give Kindness
- When you’re spinning in mental loops and stressed out, it’s hard to be kind to yourself or others. But as I always say after yoga nidra, I feel like I drank a cup of kindness. To capitalize on and reinforce this feeling, repeat this loving-kindness meditation.
  - Say to yourself:
    - May I be happy.
    - May I be safe.
    - May I be free of physical pain and suffering.
    - May I be able to recognize and touch harmony and joy in myself.
    - May I nourish wholesome seeds in myself.
    - May I be healthy, peaceful, and strong.

Notice how you feel in your body. When you’re ready, you can move on to saying the words for others: May (name of a loved one) be happy. May (he/she) be safe.

Go on Wonder Dates
- Schedule quiet time for yourself. My friend and colleague Jeffrey Davis, of Tracking Wonder, a creative branding company, loves to say, “Wonder is not kid’s stuff. It’s radical grown-up stuff.” That’s right, taking time for wonder is an essential multi-vitamin for adults, too. It helps clear your mind and relax the body.
- What’s wonder? It’s a time to be curious, to not know something. It’s the gratitude and amazement we feel when we see a shooting star or a beautiful full moon. Try finding a quiet space to read poetry, or sitting in a tree and then journaling about what you see and how it makes you feel. Many spots in nature call up wonder. Wonder sparks ideas, so the more time you spend in wonder, the juicer you will feel when you return to your everyday life.
- And if you think you don’t have time, think again. Jeffrey has two little girls, and as he says, he “sculpts time” for wonder by intentionally planning space to wonder into his calendar.

Looking for more great reads?

Excerpted from Daring to Rest, by Karen Brody.

Karen Brody is a speaker and the founder of Bold Tranquility, a company offering yoga nidra meditation for the modern women via downloadable products and workshops. Her work has been featured in Better Homes & Gardens, and she’s a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. She’s also a critically acclaimed playwright. Karen had a long personal history of severe panic attacks until she found yoga nidra meditation over a decade ago. At that time, she was a sleep-deprived mother of two small children on anti-anxiety medication. She signed up for a yoga nidra meditation class simply looking to lie down for a nap. What she got was “the best nap of her life.” As she continued to practice yoga nidra regularly, her deep fatigue lifted; she wrote a critically acclaimed play, got off anti-anxiety pills, and started to teach this yoga nidra “power nap” to every exhausted mother she knew.

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How to Enjoy the Holidays When You’re Not Well

Dr. Henry Grayson — December 7, 2017

Christmas has moved to a dramatically different kind of holiday than its beginnings: it could now be more accurately called “Stressmas.” It has truly become a time of stress: having to get the right presents for the right people; getting enough presents; how much money to spend or not to spend; expecting certain gifts from specific people, who and how many to invite to celebrations. Our attachment to people’s reactions to our gifts and our reactions to others’ gifts reminds us of what the Buddha said, “Attachment is the cause of all our suffering.” To celebrate the birth of Jesus—one who taught unconditional love, perpetual forgiveness, and said, “I came that your joy might be full!”—perhaps we need to rethink the whole picture; otherwise, we are not celebrating unconditional love but instead creating stress. And since stress causes 80% or more of our physical symptoms, this could be seen as a season we have celebrated in a way that brings illnesses or intensifies the ones we are already manifesting. It is the “ego mind” that has taken over—that internal voice which promises love, safety, peace, and joy, but always gets us to think or do that which produces the opposite.

Why not start by consciously deciding that we want to promote love, joy, and peace instead of stress and sickness during this season. Can we risk letting spiritual values—happiness, peace, and love—dominate rather than pressure, “have to’s,” guilt, and therefore, stress and possible sickness? Do we really want material objects and corporate profits to dominate our holidays and our lives? We might even tell our family and friends about our decision to make these changes. And, if we are already sick, why make it worse by creating more stress? And if we are healthy, why create stress to make ourselves sick and unhappy? We must remember that sickness is a choice; though, we often make it more unconscious by blaming it on something external. Now is the time to begin to make it conscious.

Some tools for keeping love, peace, and joy—and, therefore, health—more of a priority this holiday season:

Give priority to meditating at the beginning and end of each day. You might even keep repeating to yourself this mantra: “I choose joy, love, and peace instead of stress today.” Breathe deeply and say the mantra 30 or 40 times.
Whenever you find yourself feeling pressure, start breathing deeply, fully emptying your lungs and then breathe in fully, filling the belly, and then adding a little more into the chest. Keep repeating throughout the day, so that you do not play out the American saying: “I didn’t have time to breathe.”
Make sure that each gift you buy or give only comes from the heart—no “shoulds” or “have to’s.”
Do the thymus heart rub when you start to feel anxious, pressured, or guilty. Place your hand flatly over the upper chest. Begin to rub gently and soothingly in a circle, to the right, looking on from the outside. Then, as you continue rubbing, say, “I deeply love and accept myself even though I have started to feel stressed (pressured, guilty, etc.). I deeply love and accept myself because I am so glad I caught these negative thoughts. And I deeply love and accept myself as I choose to let these thoughts go.” Repeat this throughout the day every time you catch yourself thinking a thought that takes away your joy, peace, or love.

You might also say, “I make this a holiday of love, peace, health, and joy,” remembering that it is your thoughts that cause your pain or joy. “And I am in control of them.”

Looking for more great reads?

Excerpted from Your Power to Heal: Resolving Psychological Barriers to Your Physical Health by Henry Grayson.

Henry Grayson, PhD, has been lecturing, teaching, and providing professional training for more than 30 years. He is the founder of the Synergetic Therapy Institute, co-chairman of the PTSD division of the Stand for The Troops Foundation, and author of Your Power to Heal: Resolving Psychological Barriers to Your Physical Health. For more information, visit henrygrayson.com.

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E15: Contemplating Truth: The Path to Inner Freedom

Michael Singer — October 9, 2024

There are two fundamental truths that can help free you from the bondage of the ego. The first is your relationship to the vastness of the universe, and the other is how short your time is on this tiny planet. By acknowledging these truths, you can free yourself from the burden of personal preferences, opinions, and the mind’s fixation on past experiences. Embracing these deep truths leads you to a greater sense of perspective and a life of freedom that comes from releasing ego and harmonizing with Reality.

For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.

You are not broken or in need of fixing

Beyond Body Image – with Sil & Eliza Reynol...

Reasons to Celebrate

We Dare You to Rest This Holiday Season

When to say “No” & “Yes”

Love Yourself First

How to Enjoy the Holidays When You’re Not Well

E15: Contemplating Truth: The Path to Inner Freedom

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