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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.

EXPLORE NOW

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The Simple Magic of a Book

Matt Licata — December 16, 2020

One of the gifts of isolation, solitude, and social distancing is the opportunity to reconnect with pieces of soul and strands of vision that have become lost in the busyness of our ordinary lives.

Reading for many has become a lost art. We can become so used to turning on the news, scrolling through Facebook, becoming lost in hours of YouTube or Netflix, or fused with one electronic device or another. Nothing wrong with any of these, but at times an alternative portal will open.

To take a book and find a place within your home or under a tree or out in the park and go on a pilgrimage with it. Ask the stars to help you to find a place to just be for a while and open to revelation.

It need not be a “spiritual” book, though of course those are fine, too. A book of poetry, a novel, a book of art history, or of mythology.

Allow its images to come alive, its metaphors, its characters… step into the poetic landscape with the figures and enter a state of receptivity and play. Sense what they are sensing, feel what they are feeling as these correspond with the internal others dancing within you.

healing space blog graphic

Not necessarily reading for “information,” but for communion. Allow the language to open you, to uncover a feeling you haven’t felt for a long time, an ache in the heart that longs for tending, a dream you had forgotten, a vision that you sense circling around you.

Read a paragraph or two and close the book. Enter the interactional field – with the natural world, with the visions, figures, moods, feelings, and images that seek your attention, your curiosity, your care, and just a moment of your being-ness.

We can so easily forget the magic of this place, of the imaginal realms, of those liminal places in between the physical world of matter and the transcendental realm of pure spirit. In the liminal we can dance and play and see and perceive and sense and intuit something holy.

A good book can help us do this, can serve as a companion as we step into uncharted territory.

Reading has been such an important part of my life. My books are my friends, lovers, allies, guides, and they also challenge me, break me open, tenderize and marinate me in the Unknown. They reveal how little I know about this world, this soul, this heart, this place, and the unique opportunity to be here. I find this so lifegiving.

I fantasize that perhaps in other worlds there are no books. That is sad to think about. For me, at least.

This blog post originally appeared on Matt Licata’s blog, A Healing Space. Redistributed with permission.

Matt Licata, PhD, is a practicing psychotherapist and hosts in-person retreats. His work incorporates developmental, psychoanalytic, and depth psychologies, as well as contemplative, meditative, and mindfulness-based approaches for transformation and healing. He co-facilitates a monthly online membership community called Befriending Yourself, is author of The Path Is Everywhere, and is the creator of the blog A Healing Space. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. For more, visit mattlicataphd.com.

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What is Somatic Abolitionism?

Resmaa Menakem — March 7, 2024

Somatic Abolitionism is a living, embodied anti-racist practice, a form of culture building, and a way of being in the world. In this immersive audio workshop, Resmaa Menakem presents ten sessions of insights and body-based practices to help listeners liberate themselves—and all of us—from racialized trauma and the strictures of white-body supremacy.

Listen to the first 15 minutes of this audio program:

https://soundstrue-ha.s3.amazonaws.com/video/You-Me-Us-Racialized-Trauma-Excerpt.mp4#t=,15

This is an adapted excerpt from You, Me, Us and Racialized Trauma by Resmaa Menakem.

You, Me, Us, and Racialized Trauma

Somatic Abolitionism is a living, embodied anti-racist practice, a form of culture building, and a way of being in the world. In an immersive audio workshop, Resmaa Menakem presents ten sessions of insights and body-based practices to help listeners liberate themselves—and all of us—from racialized trauma and the strictures of white-body supremacy.

Learn More

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E56: From Distraction to Enlightenment: The Path of Aw...

Michael Singer — March 2, 2025

Consciousness is eternal, infinite, and the fundamental essence of life. You become lost by focusing your awareness on your thoughts, emotions, and outside experiences. This distracts you from your true nature. In the end, true spirituality lies in recognizing that you are not the sum of your experiences; you are the indwelling consciousness that had the experiences. By letting go of the false identification with your ego, you can reconnect with the universal consciousness and experience true freedom.

For more information, go to michaelsingerpodcast.com.

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Vital Emotions at Work: An excerpt from Power of Emoti...

Karla McLaren — March 20, 2025

Emotions are Vital Aspects of Thinking, Acting, and Working

People once believed that emotions were the opposite of rationality, or that they were lower than or inferior to our allegedly logical processes. But decades of research on emotions and the brain have overturned those outdated beliefs, and we understand now that emotions are indispensable parts of rationality, logic, and consciousness itself. In fact, emotions contain their own internal logic, and they help us orient ourselves successfully within our social environments. Emotions help us attach meaning to data, they help us understand ourselves and others, and they help us identify problems and opportunities. Emotions don’t get in the way of rationality; they lead the way, because they’re vital to everything we think and everything we do. Emotions aren’t the problem; they’re pointing to the problem, and they’re trying to bring us the precise intelligence and energy we need to deal with the problem.

In this book, we’ll learn how to listen to emotions as uniquely intelligent carriers of information, and how to build healthy and effective social and emotional environments at work – not by ignoring or silencing emotions (you can’t), but by listening to them closely, learning their language, and creating a communal set of emotional skills that everyone can rely on. This work is not difficult at all, but it can be unusual in an environment that wrongly treats emotions as soft, irrational, or unprofessional.

The serious problems we’ve baked into the workplace don’t come from any specific management style or ideology, so I won’t focus on managers or leaders as if they’re uniquely powerful or uniquely to blame. These problems also aren’t limited to specific occupations or income brackets (though low-wage work is regularly dehumanizing and hazardous); these are long-term, widespread problems based on a failed workplace model – and on an outdated social and emotional approach that does not support (or in many cases, even comprehend) human relationships and human needs.

This book is the result of decades of exploration and study into how the workplace got to be so unworkable, plus decades of experience in how to access the existing genius in people’s emotional responses (in surprisingly simple ways once you understand how emotions and empathy work). With the help of the genius in our emotions, we can create emotionally well-regulated and worthwhile places for all of us to earn our living and spend our lives.

Luckily, we don’t have to do anything special to welcome emotions into the workplace, or even to make room for them, because emotions are and always have been in the workplace. They’re in the responses people have to workplace abuses; they’re in disengaged workers; they’re in workers seeking other jobs while on the job; they’re in workers who rightly avoid communicating upward about serious problems; they’re in low-wage workers who learn how to survive in hellscapes like call centers, fast-food restaurants, gig work, and robot-like warehouse jobs; they’re in living-wage workers who tolerate unhealthy workplaces because they can’t afford to leave their health insurance behind; and they’re in high-wage workers who may have to bow down to their superiors and compete with their colleagues to be seen as “winners” – and whose experiences of workplace abuse may not be taken seriously because they make so much money and therefore have no right to complain.

We can also see the emotions in our responses to workplace successes; in our healthy working relationships; in the ways we gather together to solve problems; in the ways empathic workers and leaders empower everyone around them; in the ways our colleagues support us when we’re struggling; in the ways businesses step up in times of loss; in the ways we create open communication and humane workflows; in the ways we teach each other; in the benefits, support, flexibility, and living wages we provide for our workers; in the honest sharing of business difficulties or financial losses; and in the laughter we share on great days and rotten days.

Emotions are everywhere in the workplace because emotions are a central feature of human nature. They aren’t removable, and in fact, trying to remove them is a huge part of what created the failed workplace model we have today. Emotions are crucial to everything we do and to every aspect of our work; therefore, we’ll learn how to listen to emotions, work with them, and respect their intelligence. And in so doing, we’ll build a better workplace – and a better world – from the ground up.

Karla McLaren, M.Ed.

Karla McLaren, M.Ed., is an award-winning author, social science researcher, and empathy innovator. Explore her books and audios on the power of emotion and creativity here.

This is part of a Conscious Business series brought to you by The Inner MBA®. You can learn more about the program at Innermbaprogram.com

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Post Views: 8,424

E142: The Illusion of Problems and the Return to the G...

Michael Singer — December 29, 2025

Problems occur when consciousness becomes identified with external objects and forgets its own nature as pure, eternal witnessing presence. Ego emerges when we build a self-concept based on our past experiences, which leads to suffering whenever reality doesn’t align with internal expectations. The path to liberation begins by accepting what is and allowing our past stored blockages to be transmuted through spiritual practice and clarity. The true self is the unchanging observer, resting in pure consciousness beyond the personal mind, where the divine experiences creation.

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’

The Simple Magic of a Book

What is Somatic Abolitionism?

You, Me, Us, and Racialized Trauma

E56: From Distraction to Enlightenment: The Path of Aw...

Vital Emotions at Work: An excerpt from Power of Emoti...

Emotions are Vital Aspects of Thinking, Acting, and Working

E142: The Illusion of Problems and the Return to the G...

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