Stop. Right here. Right now.
Take a deep breath in through your nose, and let it out your mouth.
Continue. For a moment.
Stop going so fast. Just stop.
Right here. Right now.
Your heart knows. You are here.
Breathe.
Remember who you are. In your heart.
Stop. Pause. Breathe.
Come home. Be in you.
You are here. Now. How beautiful you are.
You are here in your heart.
Breathe.
Feel. This moment. Your being. You.
You. Are. Here. Now. Breathe.
And remember.
This. Now. Is more important than anything you were doing.
Come back now. Be home.
In the centre of your chest.
Everything is there. Nothing is missing.
Breathe. Be here.
Your heart.
And if you want to relax even deeper, try this 20-minute Guided Meditation to Relax Into Greatness.
In this practice, we will be connecting ideas and thoughts with bodily sensations. I’ll walk you through all of it. Follow along and do what works for you.
What I would love for you to do is to sit with your feet on the floor. So, if you can have your feet on the ground, that will help with the intention of this meditation, which is to really connect with the earth.
For this meditation, we're going to breathe in through the nose, and we're going to breathe out through the nose, which we normally don't do. But this is the intention is to increase the energy and to build this sense of inner world. When we breathe out through the mouth, the intention is to let go and surrender it all and allow liberation. But when we breathe out through the nose, we're saying, we're going to build here, so it's different.
I'm going to guide you, we're going to do each of the chakras, but we're going to talk about a quality in the chakras—there's one specific quality I want us to...
We were born very sensitive—At first, we didn't worry about the pain such openness would create.
That is why being in the presence of a small child feels incredible. They don't hold back from showing their true sensitive self.
In that way, children are powerful.
They can shift the energy in a room in a moment, simply with their presence.
For adults with unexamined wounds, children are an easy prey.
First, the adult feels uncomfortable in the presence of so much love and light that they shut down even more. The child feels the separation and the distance. There is no more connection and connection is love.
The child experiences this as a disruption of emotional safety.
Then, in order to feel better or regain power, the adult will say or do something to hurt the child, often under the pretense of safety or discipline, e.g. "It's not how we behave.”
Eventually, the child develops a protection mechanism in order to mitigate the pain of the...
This month, I was invited to be a guest on the podcast SecondWind with Joyce Buford.
The title of the episode is Why Highly Sensitive People are Prone to Experiencing Burnout.
In our conversation, Joyce asked me how I was using the word “burnout” in the title of my new book, “The Burnout Antidote: A Spiritual Guide to Empowerment for Empaths, Over-givers, and Highly Sensitive People.”
I told Joyce that I see burnout as a crisis in meaning. What I’ve noticed in the past 10-15 years is this: even if you’ve found your path and purpose and it brings you a lot of joy, you can still burn out.
In the podcast episode, I talk about my own burnout journey, coming to understand how something that was aligned with my passion and purpose—one-on-one coaching, in particular—was causing my burnout.
Highlights of our 35-minute conversation include:
Does your day begin with other people in mind? Perhaps you wake up in the morning with the best of intentions to share your gifts with others in the best way possible. You have hopes and dreams for the people you care for, your children, your clients, your patients, your customers, your family, and your friends. You do it because you are a giver. You have a big heart with extra love to give. Nothing is more meaningful or brings you more joy than to help ease someone else’s pain, to inspire them, to care for them, to teach them, to make them feel better.
You are attentive to everyone’s needs. You spend your day, on a sort of “selfless service automatic pilot”, extending your resources to others, whether it is finding creative solutions to improve your clients’ businesses, your customers’ lives, or your patients’ health, listening to your coworkers’ marital problem around the water cooler, offering a helping hand to a charity, organizing...
Discernment is key here.
If your truth is not integrated within you, and you share it prematurely, two things will happen. First, if the person you are sharing your truth with doesn't understand it and can't see your truth, it won't feel good and you will doubt what you know to be true. Second, your truth won't have the clarity and the precision it is meant to have. It will be difficult to be clear and grounded and not get triggered. So next time you have a personal transformational experience and have understood something profound and life-changing, before you share it, make sure you have integrated the information enough to be ok with the other person's response. What you know is sacred. But not everybody around you is where you are and on a similar path as you. Honor your truth, keep it safe and nurtured with your love. You are the one to validate it. You are the one to believe you. You are the one to be the advocate and the mama bear to what you know to be true. There is a time...
Fire needs to move, to flow, to express itself. We are used to controlling it, managing it, keeping it under wrap. It eats us up, it burns us out. It’s exhausting to manage our fire. Breathe into the intensity in your solar plexus, trust that your fire is intelligent and has purpose. Allow it to disentangle from your organs and nervous system. Let it unfurl and be set free. Bring it down into your belle, follow it up to and through your throat. Your fire is sacred. Don’t be scared of it. It is to be loved and embraced
This morning when I woke up, I was thinking of the phoenix rising from the ashes, and it reminded me that loss has always brought us back to life. Always. This cycle has never failed us, even in human death. The soul continues its journey, expanding beyond the boundaries of this world. This constant renewal, rebirth, re-emerging from what has died, is the collective truth of our nature as spiritual beings here in human bodies. And right now, there is a brand new experience of reality, waiting for us on the other side of everything that is dying within and around us. How wondrous!
Contemplating our current situation, whatever it may be, not from a place of ego or achievement or results, but with a soft inquiry within our heart, is an excellent practice to help us lean into what is dying to emerge anew. It helps us get unstuck and brings momentum to our process, it brings clarity to what feels confusing.
You can ask: How is the landscape outside of me,...
On the path, there comes a time when you can no longer keep for yourself the knowledge you have acquired along the way and the gifts you were born with. Your healing journey has freed you from the weight of insecurity and doubt, and you sense a deep desire to connect with others and share your own unique medicine with the world. You are an artist in the medium of life, a leader, and you want to inspire, teach, entertain, coach, guide others.
Arriving here is such an accomplishment. We know the bravery it takes to choose the awakened path, to face adversity differently than it was modelled to us, to go against how things should be done, to create from the unknown, to commit to it, and to stay loyal to our light, no matter what. We know the immense freedom and joy we find within, the reward for our patience and our trust.
To arrive at this place is also the beginning of a whole new chapter, a whole new way of being in the world. When we choose to step out publicly with what we know,...