I have noticed the prevalence of two difficult emotions both in my own life as well as in my conversations with others - grief & anxiety. Difficult emotions to be sure. Over the next four episodes, I want to explore working with difficult emotions in our meditation practice.

Join me for today’s episode of The Mindful Minute as we talk about:

• What is real and what is untrue

• The forethought of grief

• Why there is always a place for your emotions, no matter how big, in meditation

Today, Tracee joins The Mindful Minute to talk about her new book, The Luminous Self, and share some of the profound practices included within.

The Luminous Self is a book that answers the questions on how to inquire into our suffering and past conditioning, empowering ourselves to turn towards truth and power. It begins with the essential question : Who am I?

In this series, I named three things that regularly inspire awe for me-

Birds

Books

Meditation

All 3 regularly stop me in my tracks, and they make my jaw drop. They make me smile, wonder, and listen. They weave their way into my conversations and my dreams. In short, they inspire awe within me.

We sit with the intention of meandering through the caverns of our mind and the lake of our heart. We don’t rush, we don’t brush things off, or ignore them.

We taste. We savor. We experience.

Our practice, like ourselves, is boundless. Limits are useless here. And often so is language.

Books have their place. They point us to something.

But experience is the only path forward… The only knowing.

In this class, we explore books, language, signs and symbols as a way to relate to our practice and to accept its ambiguity. Join me for a brief discussion and 20-minute guided meditation.

We added a few bird feeders and a bird bath to our backyard garden at the start of the year, and the bird population has absolutely exploded. And, since I sit outside to meditate everyday, I have a front row seat to the show.

At first, I found the constant birdsong a distraction to my practice, but I QUICKLY found that it became a soundtrack of upliftment and positive feelings. It is only natural then that I began to ask.. Why?

**Trigger warning: this conversation contains a brief mention of child molestation**

What if emotions weren't a problem? What if you didn’t need to fix or change your emotions? What if they were actually not only helpful but vital to our survival?

This conversation is rich with helpful tools for embodying and embracing our emotional life. Be sure to listen all the way to the end - Karla shares a practice that is simple and powerfully effective for identifying and establishing boundaries and space.

This last class in the Resilience & Reciprocity series will ask us to shift from an independent to an intra-dependent point of view of ourselves, others, and the natural world. All 3 ask for our grief, our gratitude and our reciprocal action. And, all 3 are uplifted and clarified through our meditation practice.

Our meditation practice isn’t only for sacred halls and silent incense-filled air. It is also for dogs barking and children crying and the many experiences that make up a life. In short, meditation practice is for you.

Last week, we talked about really ‘seeing’ the earth, and today, we will talk about really ‘seeing’ others, people that are different from ourselves in some way. One of the premises in this series is that comfort equals loneliness.

Let’s remove the blinders as a pathway to healing and wholeness. Let’s explore how meditation strengthens our capacity to see others, to see ourselves, and to see a path forward that is rich in connection and reciprocity.