This 7-minute breathing practice invites you to enhance awareness and energy by deeply breathing through the skin and the surrounding space.

Close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath. Breathe in through your nose, and out through your mouth. When you breathe in, reach for the in-breath from deep inside your belly. Your belly is soft. And when you breathe out, drop your jaw soften your lips, soften your neck, and soften your throat.

Deepen your breath, and slow your breath down. When you breathe out, make a little constriction in your throat to make the sound "haa." And when you do this, it elongates your exhalation, building power, building strength, building energy. And it's also massaging your vagus nerve, this nerve that goes from the base of your brain, wraps around your organs as it goes down through your body and it tells your parasympathetic system that it is safe, that it can heal, that your body can tap into creativity and access something new.

Bring your...

For approximately 5 to 10 minutes, I would like to do a visualization practice with you. You can keep your eyes open if you'd like, or you can keep them closed, but I'm just going to bring the energy into a holographic future, like inside of our mind's eye, so just make yourself comfortable.

Bring your attention to your breath.

Let's take a few deep breaths at your own rhythm so you can sink into yourself. Whatever you need to do to activate that connection with the wisdom in your body.

With each breath, see if you can sink your attention deeper into your body. In your own time, bring your attention down, down, down maybe all the way until it gets to the base of your spine.

Get away from thoughts, move away from logic, go into the tissues of your body, staying really connected to your body.

Wherever it feels more meaningful, maybe it's your heart right now, maybe it's your belly, maybe it's your toes.

So, know that's your anchor. That's the source of where everything else should...

This month on my podcast, Embodied, my friend Naomi Irons shares the story of the near-death experience she experienced on Christmas morning in 2021.

Her story is incredible and full of unexpected twists and turns. The insights and wisdom that spring from this conversation are the true gifts.

Naomi lives in the jungle on the Island of Hawaii. The unstable connection sometimes distorts her voice, but her message is clear: to truly live, we must let go of what has run its course.

Highlights of our hour and twenty-four-minute conversation include:

• The emotional roller coaster of letting go of physicality
• How Naomi’s experience changed her relationship to being in the present moment/showing up
• How the experience impacted Naomi and her family members and became a moment of deep, shared connection

You can listen to the podcast episode wherever you get your podcasts; you can also access the podcast player above, or visit the episode page: The Underwater Garden: A Conversation with...

Toxic Empathy
Psychologists make the distinction between “emotional empathy” and “cognitive empathy” or “social intelligence,” which is to appreciate what’s going on emotionally with another person without any contagion of feelings. Cognitive empathy allows us to understand that someone is suffering and still want to help, but without feeling what they are feeling. This distinction makes all the difference when it comes to serving and still conserving our energy.
Emotional empathy is a disembodied emotion, meaning that your attention is outside of yourself. You project yourself in the other person’s body, you feel what you perceive they feel.
Emotional empathy takes you out of yourself and places you in the other person’s shoes where you are disconnected from your inner world. You are out of your body and in an emotion that doesn’t belong to you. In the process, you contaminate your present moment awareness. In this state,...