Customer Favorites

blog

Post Views: 265

How Self-Compassionate Are You?

Sounds True — October 2, 2017

Do you have a critical voice? What do you find it saying to you?

This video is a candid, vulnerable and compelling portrait from our own folks here at Sounds True. We get their take on their own journey with self-compassion. Discover the power of self-compassion and learn simple practices to transform your moments of moments of suffering into moments of love.

blog

Post Views: 292

Self-Compassion & Self-Reflection: Recommended Re...

Sounds True — October 9, 2017

Exploring the Science of Self-Compassion

The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren

What if there were a single skill that could directly and radically improve your relationships and your emotional life? Empathy, teaches Karla McLaren, is that skill. With The Art of Empathy, she teaches us how to perceive and feel the experiences of others with clarity and authenticity—to connect with them more deeply and effectively.

Informed by current insights from neuroscience, social psychology, and healing traditions, this book explores some of the following:

Why empathy is not a mystical phenomenon but a natural, innate ability that we can strengthen and develop
How to identify and regulate our emotions and boundaries

The Science of Compassion by Kelly McGonigal

Stories, dynamic meditations, and innovative writing exercises to spark creativity and spiritual awakening.

The best writers say their work comes from a source beyond the thinking mind. But how do we access that source? “We must first look inside ourselves and be willing to touch that raw emotional core at the heart of a deeper creativity,” Writes Albert Flynn DeSilver. In Writing as a Path to Awakening, this renowned poet, writer, and teacher shows you how to use meditation to cultivate true depth in your writing—so your words reveal layers of profound emotional insight and revelation that inspire and move your readers.

The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren

Emotions—especially the dark and dishonored ones—hold a tremendous amount of energy. We’ve all seen what happens when we repress or blindly express them. With The Language of Emotions, empathic counselor Karla McLaren shows you how to meet your emotions and receive their life-saving wisdom to safely move toward resolution and equilibrium. Through experiential exercises covering a full spectrum of feelings from anger, fear, and shame to jealousy, grief, joy, and more, you will discover how to work with your own and others’ emotions with fluency and expertise.

Here is a much-needed resource filled with revolutionary teachings and breakthrough skills for cultivating a new and empowering relationship with your feeling states through The Language of Emotions.

Awakening Compassion by Pema Chödrön

On Awakening Compassion, Pema Chödrön, one of the Western world’s best-known lojong teachers and practitioners, shows you how to use your own painful emotions as stepping stones to wisdom, compassion, and fearlessness. You will learn how to make friends with the painful parts of your life experience and how to use your natural courage and honesty to transform even the most difficult situations.

With an informal teaching style, both playful and insightful, Pema Chödrön makes this timeless way of bringing compassion into the world easy to understand and apply to your own life. More than seven hours of practical, compassionate guidance for shedding your cocoon and meeting your world with fresh appreciation. Includes a nine-page study guide with lojong slogans and additional resources.

The Force of Kindness by Sharon Salzberg

Distill the great spiritual teachings from around the world down to their most basic principles, and one thread emerges to unite them all: kindness. In The Force of Kindness, Sharon Salzberg, one of the nation’s most respected Buddhist authors and meditation teachers, offers practical instruction on how we can cultivate this essential trait within ourselves.

Through her stories, teachings, and guided meditations, Sharon Salzberg takes readers on an exploration of what kindness truly means and the simple steps to realize its effects immediately. She reveals that kindness is not the sweet, naive sentiment that many of us assume it is, but rather an immensely powerful force that can transform individual lives and ripple out, changing and improving relationships, the environment, our communities, and ultimately the world. Readers will learn specific techniques for cultivating forgiveness; turning compassion into action; practicing speech that is truthful, helpful, and loving; and much more.

blog

Post Views: 215

Write. Reflect. Dream: Recommended Reads

Sounds True — September 25, 2017

Content to Soothe the Soul of Your Inner Writer

Practice You by Elena Brower

From yoga luminary and artist Elena Brower, Practice You, is a sacred text of your own design.

Practice You is a map to your highest self; a field guide of your own creation. The pages of this Journal are full of potent prompts and inviting spaces, awaiting your contemplation and discoveries.

Within these pages you will find a series of Explorations, one for each of nine aspects of being. Each exploration offers instructions and inquiries to help you design new attitudes, fresh perspectives, and stay on track with your intentions.

Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer & Living an Awakened Life by Albert Flynn DeSilver

Stories, dynamic meditations, and innovative writing exercises to spark creativity and spiritual awakening.

The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte

Your bucket list. Quarterly objectives. Strategic plans. Big dreams. Goals. Lots of goals and plans to achieve those goals—no matter what. Except …

You’re not chasing the goal itself, you’re actually chasing the feeling that you hope achieving that goal will give you.

Which means we have the procedures of achievement upside down. We go after the stuff we want to have, get, or accomplish, and we hope that we’ll be fulfilled when we get there. It’s backwards. And it’s burning us out.

With The Desire Map, Danielle LaPorte brings you a holistic life-planning tool that will revolutionize the way you go after what you want in life. Unapologetically passionate and with plenty of warm wit, LaPorte turns the concept of ambition inside out and offers an inspired, refreshingly practical workbook for using the Desire Map process:

Art of Attention by Elena Brower and Erica Jago

Yoga begins with physical well-being. But it can also transport us—through meditation, self-awareness, and movement—into a lifelong exploration of presence, elegance, and deeper life purpose. With Art of Attention, Elena Brower and Erica Jago show us the way. Distilled from their acclaimed workshops and training programs, this multifaceted book can be used as:

• A step-by-step workshop for merging movement-based mindfulness with traditional yoga

• A “tool kit” of asanas, meditations, self-inquiry questions, and healing practices for creating your own daily spiritual practice

• An uplifting source of visual beauty and wisdom teachings for inner reflection and elevation

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Experience a modern classic on writing as you’ve never heard it before. With nearly one million copies of Writing Down the Bones in print, Natalie Goldberg has helped change the way writing is practiced in homes, schools, and workshops across America. Through her heartfelt personal reflections and her ingenious Zen-based exercises, Goldberg makes writing available to you as a tool for personal expression, self-exploration, and healing.

Goldberg offers new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. Join her as she looks back on her life, sharing the story of how her meditation studies with Zen master Katagiri Roshi inspired her to develop practices for “writing down the bones”: the essential, awakened speech of the mind. Here is a treasury of tested ideas, suggestions, and exercises that help new writers get started, and seasoned writers keep going.

The Writing Life by Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg

In The Writing Life, Cameron and Goldberg join forces for the first time in this revealing dialogue that speaks to our common search for an everyday spirituality.

Join these two creative giants as they explode cherished misconceptions about who should write, and why they should do it, opening the door to the writer’s world for everybody, not just a chosen few. Goldberg and Cameron take us inside their personal lives as committed writers and spiritual seekers, and explore the following questions: How can writing best be practiced? What is the difference between therapeutic writing and writing for publication? How do we conquer the twin dragons of mood and time? Is it dangerous or inspirational to dabble in different arts such as music, painting, and writing? How is addiction related to the writer’s life?

Edgy, surprising, and useful for its hard-won advice, The Writing Life is an invitation to a life-transforming act that requires no more than a pen, some paper, and the will to get started.

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: 313

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.

blog

Post Views: 232

Why You Should Start Cultivating Mindfulness Now ̵...

Dr. Erin Olivo — February 13, 2014

Dear friends, please enjoy this inspiring article from clinical psychologist and Sounds True author Erin Olivo on the many benefits of cultivating mindfulness in our lives. Erin is author of the excellent audio learning program entitled Free Yourself from Anxiety: A Mind-Body Prescription, in which she offers a series of simple, yet very effective guided meditations for relaxation and resilience.

Why You Should Start Cultivating Mindfulness Now – by Erin Olivo, PhD, MPH

Have you noticed how the term mindfulness is popping up everywhere? It’s no longer just reserved for Buddhist retreats and Yoga Journal articles. Mindfulness is the hot topic at the office for coping with stress, and the media can’t seem to get enough of it—Time magazine’s cover story this week is on “The Mindful Revolution,” The Huffington Post has a “GPS for the Soul” section, and a search on The New York Times comes up with almost 200 articles on mindfulness in the past year. Mindfulness has clearly reached buzzworthy status.

The first time I heard the term mindfulness was in 1993 while I was getting my masters degree in social work. But it was after reading Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective by Mark Epstein, M.D. that I had my “aha” moment with mindfulness. This book explained the unique psychological contributions of the teachings of Buddhism (including mindfulness meditation) and how to combine them with psychotherapy. I was getting my Ph.D. in psychology at the time, and that was exactly what I wanted to do.

So why should you start cultivating mindfulness now? Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s key to Wise Mind Living. If you want to live a balanced life and make choices from Wise Mind, practicing mindfulness is one of the most fundamental skills you’ll need.

But first you need to understand exactly what mindfulness is. In its essence, mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment, accepting it without judgment, and not thinking about the past or future.

There have been countless books written about mindfulness, and you can check out my Resources section for some recommendations. However, I suggest you start by reading this article from Women’s Health that gives a concise introduction to the concept of mindfulness. As the article says, practicing mindfulness can be done any place at any time, and you can bring mindful awareness to any activity.

Over time, the more you practice mindfulness, the more focused and connected to yourself and others you’ll become. Ultimately this will lead to a sense of heightened awareness. A recent New York Times article discussed how mindfulness trains the mind to stay on task and avoid distraction:

“Your ability to recognize what your mind is engaging with, and control that, is really a core strength,” said Peter Malinowski, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. “For some people who begin mindfulness training, it’s the first time in their life where they realize that a thought or emotion is not their only reality, that they have the ability to stay focused on something else, for instance their breathing, and let that emotion or thought just pass by.”

So my homework assignment for you is to set aside 10-15 minutes each day to start your mindfulness practice. Many people find that listening to a guided meditation in the beginning is quite helpful, and you can try using my Mindfulness Practice audio meditation.

If you’d rather do it on your own without a guide, then try this simple exercise. Get into a comfortable position, sit still and just pay attention to your breath. We focus on breath because it’s always there, which means you can always observe it because it’s a part of you, and it’s neutral. When thoughts enter your mind that pull you away from concentrating on your breath, just try to let them come and go like clouds passing through the sky. Don’t try and figure out what they mean, just observe.

And don’t try to change your breath in any way, just pay attention to how it feels. Try to notice how your breath comes and goes in your body. While you’re doing this you’ll likely notice that simply observing the rise and fall of your breath gives you a feeling of calmness when you focus on it, very similar to the way you feel when watching the waves at the beach.

Ideally you’ll incorporate this practice into your everyday life, because bringing mindfulness to your choices will make you more likely to follow through and succeed! Just remember that mindfulness meditation is a skill that does require practice, and the longer you do it the greater the benefits it will produce.

Mindfully,

Erin

Contemplation

How Self-Compassionate Are You?

Self-Compassion & Self-Reflection: Recommended Re...

Exploring the Science of Self-Compassion

Write. Reflect. Dream: Recommended Reads

Content to Soothe the Soul of Your Inner Writer

The radical path of space and kindness

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

Why You Should Start Cultivating Mindfulness Now ̵...

Categories

Menu

Listen to Sounds True playlists on

Connect With Us