Customer Favorites

blog

Waking Up and Turning On

LiYana Silver — August 21, 2017

Hello dear one,

I suspect you might agree with me that the world has gone stark, raving, totally loony tunes; round the bend; nutty as a fruitcake; not in its right mind; dangerously and absolutely mad—especially in the ways it views women, girls, and the “feminine.”

This insanity compels most of us to hide away and push down parts of ourselves in order to feel lovable, valuable, or be taken seriously.

Which doesn’t work, of course and only ensures we remain unfulfilled, miserable, and at war with ourselves.

But as I’ve discovered—working in depth with women over the past 14 years as a coach, teacher, and mentor (and burning in the fire of my own medicine, of course)—we’ve got it absolutely inside out and backwards.

It turns out that your confidence and joy are actually buried in the very parts you have disowned—that you have literally been sitting on your true power this whole time.

And that even when you feel you have lost your way, there is a path to the woman you are aching to become.

This is the path of Feminine Genius.

Learn to trust (and eventually love) the parts of you that you previously warred against
Embrace your intuition, sexuality, emotions, desires, and cycles for enormous effectiveness and fulfillment
Meet your Oracle, the divine, infallible wisdom of your body—and discover why I affectionately call
it the Oracle Between Your Thighs
Navigate your “dark” and work with painful, difficult experiences in healthy ways
Brighten your everyday with hands-on practices
Tap into your inner knowing so you can stop second-guessing yourself and get clear about your next steps
Explore the history, physics, theology, and biology of a universe built for harmony between “masculine” and “feminine”
Look in the mirror and see the face of the Goddess gazing back at you

In a world that might tell you ten thousand times a day how you are deficient and wrong, Feminine Genius will remind you that you are just right.

I am honored (and tail-wagging-ly happy) to invite you to dive into my new book, Feminine Genius: The Provocative Path to Waking Up and Turning On the Wisdom of Being a Woman.

I’ll see you inside,

LiYana

P.S. Come visit liyanasilver.com/newbook, where you can get bonus training with me when you order the book: a masterclass on finding your Oracle to source your clarity, deepen your confidence, and inspire your next moves. You’ll also receive your very own Book Club Kit to support you to journey through the book in a group and practice getting lit off of other women’s brilliance. I’ll see you there!

blog

Post Views: 210

The radical path of space and kindness

Sounds True — November 12, 2014

As a psychotherapist who works with accomplished yogis, yoginis, meditators, and committed seekers and practitioners of all kinds, I have come to discover with my clients just how easy to use spirituality to hide from life – from intimacy, from our feelings, from our tender vulnerabilities, from our unresolved wounding around love, and from our immediate embodied experience in any of its moment-by-moment unfolding. We can deny, stuff, shut out, repress, and abandon our very real feelings of hurt, anger, disappointment, and jealousy because on some level they have been deemed very unspiritual, unacceptable, or further evidence of our own unworthiness. Or, we will act the feelings out—indulge, identify, and fuse with them – believing we are making actual contact, while spinning around their surface and doing whatever possible to discharge the disturbing energy which is seething underneath.

Depending on our specific, historic core vulnerabilities – which arose intersubjectively in our families of origin, as part of a relational matrix – certain feelings were simply not safe to embody, as they triggered anxiety in our caregivers, or otherwise led to their withdrawal of love, affection, mirroring and attunement. As young children, it was an act of kindness and creativity to split off, dissociate, and disconnect from material we were not developmentally capable of digesting and metabolizing on our own. We are wired to do whatever possible to maintain the tie to our caregivers, even if such tie is precarious, misattuned, or ultimately not in the interest of any sort of self-cohesion or integration.

As we engage over time in these strategies of denial and acting out – both pathways ultimately of fundamental aggression and chronic abandonment—we often find ourselves wondering why we are not feeling alive, connected, and truly able to open to others – why things just aren’t flowing for us in the ways we long for. We wonder why we don’t feel worthy of love, why we don’t know in some fundamental sense that we are loved or lovable exactly as we are. But a part of us senses that it is only in intimate and direct contact with our vulnerabilities, in all their forms, that we will know this aliveness and be able to truly take the risk that real embodied love will always demand. As long as we are using spirituality to avoid intimacy, contact, and the depths of our own being – as long as it has become yet another means by which we can avoid our unlived lives – we will feel lonely at our core, disconnected, and split off from love.

As we start to discover the ways we are using spiritual ideas, beliefs, language, jargon, exercises, teachings, and practices to avoid relationship (with self and other), with as much kindness, space, and compassion as possible, we can return our attention into present, embodied experience. We need not shame ourselves in this discovery or deem it some evidence of our failure or unlovability. But rather use it as an opportunity to be curious about the strategies we’ve brought into adulthood to get away from very disturbing, survival-level panic and anxiety. And begin to open our hearts to this movement as the best way we’ve known to care for ourselves until now. For it is only radical kindness and space that will melt the wounds and tangles of love.

Like any defense mechanism, this relationship with spirituality has served an adaptive function and we can honor it for the help it has provided us at a particular point on our journey. And we can start slowly and with a mighty presence and compassion, to allow the protective function to dissolve, to reclaim full experiential responsibility for every feeling and emotion we’ve intelligently split off from, and step into the mandala of integration and wholeness, which is none other than our true nature. As we journey on the path of the heart and that of metabolization by love, re-owning and re-embodying to the entirety of what we are, we weave a sanctuary for the light and the dark within. And in this we become a holding environment for ourselves and others, more and more transparent and more and more translucent to the activity of the beloved in this world.

buddhamodern

Art by Gonkar Gyatso – “Buddha in Modern Times”

blog

Post Views: 176

There is a light alive within the darkness

Sounds True — December 27, 2013

Will you hold another who has been touched by the darkness within? Will you love them enough to allow them to fall apart in your arms? To unravel, to become unglued, and to feel unbearably lost as the wisdom of their process unfolds? Will you be the space in which they can finally meet the feelings and emotions that have been kept at bay for a lifetime?

To love another in this way you must touch everything that is unresolved within you – all of your own unmet sadness, abandoned shame, discarded grief, and deserted aloneness. You are willing to no longer stay safe on the sidelines. You are willing to get messy. Even gooey and drippy.

Will you set aside your need for the other to change, to be different, to be “cured,” to be transformed, and to be healed? Will you resist the temptation to talk them out of their embodied experience, to tell them everything will be okay, and to dishonor the creativity hidden inside the unwanted? Will you allow your heart to break with them, and endure the urge inside you to put it all back together again? Will you fall into the unknown with them, holding them close, and provide a home for their brokenness?

To care about others, yourself, and the world in this way you must stay radically embodied. You are no longer interested in transcending suffering, confusion, and neurosis, for you see these as thundering expressions of the path itself. Please don’t turn away. As your attention moves out into the conceptual world, return to the wild intelligence of your body, for it is there that love is working behind the scenes, giving birth to its sweet activity in this dimension.

It is in this factory of love, which is operating as the temple of your own body, where the sacred world is revealing its essential secrets of healing: there is no “other,” there has never been an “other,” and there could never be an “other.” There is only the reflection of your own being.

Love is taking the pieces of your heart and is using them to re-assemble the world in front of you, each as an invitation sent to reveal to you the preciousness of what is really happening here.

snow_fire2

blog

Post Views: 153

Love would never ask you to hold it all together

Sounds True — August 3, 2013

There is a movement within you to hold it all together
To know how the journey will unfold
To know what the unknown will bring
But love was never designed to provide these things
Love is out of control and wants to show you everything
It wants your ordinariness, your humility, your broken-openness, so that it may finally reach you
Love would never ask you to hold it all together, for it wants only to take you apart, to show you what is waiting to be born within you

sunrise_waterfall

podcast

Post Views: 400

Servant Leadership

Jim Hunter — October 9, 2012

Tami Simon speaks with Jim Hunter, a world-renowned business leadership consultant and author of the international bestsellers The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership and The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle. With Sounds True, Jim has created the audio program The Servant Leadership Training Course: Achieving Success Through Character, Bravery, and Influence. In this episode, Tami speaks with Jim about the keys to leading with integrity and compassion, his best advice for implementing the principles of Servant Leadership in situations where change is difficult, the importance of authenticity in creating strong communities, and the role of love in organizational life. (63 minutes)

blog

Post Views: 183

All in a flow together

Dr. Ann Marie Chiasson — May 6, 2013

What is spiritual awakening? Author, respected energy healer, and medical doctor Ann Marie Chiasson speaks of the journey as waking up to the reality that “we’re all in a flow together.” Rather than perceiving reality through the lens of what we want, we begin to see things as they are, which releases a tremendous amount of energy in our lives. Filmed live at The Wake Up Festival, Dr. Chiasson describes her experience of awakening and its implications in our lives.

We at Sounds True are committed to exploring the many faces and facets of awakening, and would love to hear from you as to your experience and understanding. Perhaps it is the case that there are 7 billion doorways into awakening, one for each human heart.

Waking Up and Turning On

The radical path of space and kindness

There is a light alive within the darkness

Love would never ask you to hold it all together

Servant Leadership

All in a flow together

Categories

Menu

Listen to Sounds True playlists on

Connect With Us