Self-Compassion

In this guided meditation, you are invited to connect with a soothing quality or state, to breathe in a way that feels soothing (or calm), and to also connect with kind, wise qualities inside of you.

I recently had the opportunity to hear Celeigh Cardinal sing in person. There were many touching moments: lyrics speaking of beauty and grief, funny moments, and this song, when the audience felt a collective ‘wow.’

The YouTube video below shows a different live performance from the one I attended. The song is on Celeigh Cardinal’s album, Boundless Possibilities (2024). Brennan Cameron is on keyboard.

Thank you, Celeigh, for sharing your gifts, and thank you also to Brennan.

We are always in relationship. We are in relationship with the world around us, with other people, and with what we experience inside ourselves. One relationship we can be curious about is the relationship we have with our own emotions.

Some emotions may be easier for us to experience than others. For one person, anger might feel harder to acknowledge or be with than sadness. For someone else, the reverse might be true. Even joy, contentment, or a feeling of relaxation can sometimes be difficult to experience. What feels easier or harder is specific to each person, and it is something that can change over time.

In this meditation, you are invited to practise offering loving-kindness toward a sensation or emotion that feels easier for you to experience, and then toward one that feels more difficult. You don’t have to choose a sensation or emotion that feels like the hardest one.

This meditation also gives you an opportunity to practise offering kind wishes toward yourself.

Wanting to be outside yesterday as part of the day and also desiring to make something, I recorded this meditation while sitting by a lake. Listening later, I heard the words but also found myself getting lost in the soothing sounds of the crickets and the movement of water.

Movement.

Movement is something I often seem to have conversations about. Moving between this and that. Between pain and beauty. Between activity and rest. Between effort, courage, and taking a break. Movement as essential.

From the meditation:

I really enjoyed this book by psychologist, Lynne Henderson. You can find the book’s publication details, as well as a brief summary of my praise in the IC resource section here!

This week, I would like to share a video I came across in the spring that I found interesting and inspiring. It’s a documentary of a pilot program that was run through Veterans Affairs in Seattle teaching to veterans mindfulness meditation, loving kindness meditation, and concepts related to compassion for oneself and for others.

The veterans in the group were all suffering in various ways, which you learn snippets of over the course of the video. The group members also experience positive changes over the program, Read more ›

It’s been a while since I’ve written. The mid and late fall were taken up with seeing clients and with supervision meetings–preparing for what did end up being my final exam to complete my registration for autonomous practice with the College of Psychologists here in Ontario. (Note: I’ve passed. I’m done!) Tragically, a week later I experienced a heart-breaking loss in my life. Then it was the holidays. I’m unfolding from all of this and am both getting back to routines, as well as consciously and deliberately working to create some new ones.

Today I would like to share a quote from a wonderful little book I read in the fall by Jon Kabat-Zinn called Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness. Read more ›

Today I watched the talk “How Economic Inequality Harms Societies” given by Richard Wilkinson at TED.com and I wanted to share it. The presenter speaks of the compelling relationship between the degree of income disparity in a country and the degree of health of the individuals who live there. Over and over again, the findings suggest that the greater the disparity, the poorer will be all the people’s health in that country, including people’s mental health. Read more ›

Sitting on my counter for the past while has been a beautiful, locally, lovingly, organically grown baking pumpkin. This weekend, it was time to use it, and I opted to make gluten-free pumpkin muffins. One of the first steps, after washing it, was to cut the pumpkin open. Trials with five separate knives later, mission was accomplished.

About one-quarter to one-third of the way through trying to cut the pumpkin open–and likely while I wrestled to pull a stuck knife out of the vegetable–I began to fantasize Read more ›