Soul Sisters Series 2022-2023
Embracing Spirituality and Synchronicities of Life
“To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed…That can make life a garden.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
This series is twelve episodes, 30-45 minutes each. The sessions convey sentiments from two life-long friends over 50 years Deb Roberts and Kay Holman.
They ask each other 3 questions each time they meet related to spirituality. They are interested in the broadest quest of ‘who am I’, purpose, the world and beyond.
To Deb and Kay, the beauty of spirituality is it can simply mean an acknowledgement of something more than just themselves and embrace the interconnectedness of life. It does not have to be based on religion and can be viewed just as easily in nature. The science even backs this up*.
Kay and Deb share based on personal experience, personal and professional insight, stories and anecdotes. They are serious and reflective as well as light hearted and funny making what they have to say accessible to all ages and stages and worthy of listening.
Previous Sessions
Book reference:The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller
Book reference: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. van der Kolk
Poem reference: “For Grief” by John O’Donohue
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.
There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.
It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.
“For Grief” by John O’Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us:
A Book of Blessings (Doubleday, 2008).
Soul Sisters: Episode 3 notes
Book References:
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O’Donohue
The Fall of Freddie the Leaf: A Story of Life for Life for All Ages by Leo F. Buscaglia
The Giving Tree by Shell Silverstein
Soul Sisters: Episode 5 notes
Book References:
Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living
How to live when a loved one dies by Thich That Hanh
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Reciting:
“The Leaf” - by Thich That Hanh
Soul Sisters: Episode 5. 2 April 29 2023
Soul Sisters: Episode 6 notes
The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh: The Second Arrow
The Buddha speaks about the ‘Second arrow’. When an arrow strikes you, you feel pain. If a second arrow comes and strikes you in the same spot, the pain will be ten times worse. The Buddha advised that when you have some pain in your body or your mind, breathe in and out and recognise the significance of that pain but don’t exaggerate its importance. If you stop and worry, to be fearful, to protest, to be angry about the pain, then you magnify the pain ten times or more. Your worry is the second arrow. You should protect yourself and not allow the second arrow to come, because the second arrow comes from you.
——
The path isn’t a straight line: it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.
——
The creature inside a nautilus shell can withstand immense oceanic pressures and move forward into new chambers as it grows.
Soul Sisters Episode 8: July 2023
Quotes used in Soul Sisters Episode 8:
“It doesn’t take years of practice to touch eternity in the present moment. In a split second you can touch it. Taking just one breath, or one step on the earth with mindfulness or concentration can help you transcend time.. When you touch the present moment deeply, you have an eternity to live” - Thich Nhat Hanh
from Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet Oct 14, 2021
“A human being is part of a whole called by us the “universe” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to the affection for a few persons near us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Albert Einstein
Ref From Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions quoted in Weber, ed. Dialogues with Scientists and Sages, 203.
In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 103.
Soul Sisters Episode 9: August 2023
Notes:
Pema Chodron
She relays how it’s hard to distinguish between a higher awareness and ‘our mind’. The wise self verses the neurotic mind.
She refers to ‘groundlessness’ - not grounded into any one thing versus black and white or dichotomy.
Book: When things fall apart by Pema Chodron
Related Quotes:
“Awe is the emotion we experience when we encounter vast mysteries that we don’t understand.”
“How does awe transform us? By quieting the nagging, self critical, overbearing, status-conscious voice of our self, or ego, and empowering us to collaborate, to open our minds to wonders, and to see the deep patterns of life.”
From book:
Awe. The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder By Dacher Keltner
Kay also referred to people having challenging emotional times ‘being primed’ for spiritual growth or connection’ which is from The Awakened Brain.
Book reference:The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller
Soul Sisters Episode 10 September
Soul Sisters Episode 11 October
Episode 11 notes
“What if the condition we pathologise and diagnose as depression is sometimes actually spiritual hunger – a normal and genetically derived part of human development that is unhealthy to muffle or deny?” Lisa Miller The Awakened Brain
Two quotes that my sister sent me when she was hopeful and curious about pain and suffering.
“An afflicted, broken soul might even be closer to God for having experienced pain and rejection. ‘The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.”
(Psalms 34:19)
‘You will not despise a contrite and crushed heart, not even your own”(Psalms 51:19, cited also in Leviticus 7:2)”
Soul Sisters Episode 12: November 2023
Excerpt by Pema Chodron
‘Perfection is like Death’
We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self-contained and comfortable is some kind of death. It doesn’t have any fresh air. There’s no room for something to come in an interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. Doing this is setting ourselves up for failure, because sooner or later we’re going to have an experience we can’t control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we are going to find out we have cancer or somebody’s going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit.
The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. To be fully alive, fully human and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.