heart practices for hard times with joy activist Sah D’Simone
As I settle back in from a week at Kripalu, I thought that this week I’d share with you a memorable conversation I had recently with Sah D’Simone, best-selling author of Spiritually Sassy: 8 Radical Steps to Activate Your Innate Superpowers. His heart-based healing perspective is grounded in a masterful and revolutionary synthesis of ancient Buddhism, modern contemplative psychotherapy, meditation, breathwork, and integrative nutrition.
I met Sah before we came together with amazing teachers of brain science and ancient wisdom healing for a mental reset weekend, Alchemy of the Sacred Mind, at Omega Institute.
Sah not only shares his incredible work with a tremendous amount of energy and insight, but his authenticity is inspiring.
I hope you’ll consider queuing up this conversation. One of the things that struck me about Sah is his perspective on forgiveness.
In 2014 I had the privilege of offering a TedTalk in which I spoke about how using Metta brought me to a place of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness, which transformed my relationship to my father. (You can find it here.)
Sah has an amazing perspective on forgiveness. Here’s a snippet:
“We grow up in a colonized and conditioned culture of punitive justice that says that, if you’ve done harm, you have to be punished in an equal amount because it’s only through a punishment you can discover your goodness. You have to be course corrected in order for goodness to re-emerge.
But Buddhist philosophy says something radically different. It says you’re not your behavior or your emotions. You’re something beyond all of it. This unstruck benevolence is at the baseline of each of us no matter what you've done and what was done to you. So our ability to reemerge gets us to re-emerge and re-partner and engage with that part of us that’s always benevolent.”
In our conversation, we cover:
How we have the choice to heal for others
The 3 types of forgiveness
Whether our hurt has become a fortress of our heart and an excuse to isolate ourselves
Finding our peace and joy without spiritually bypassing
How to be open to the flow of life
Inviting playfulness into our spiritual journeys and lives
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