December Solluna Power Hour: A Season of Inner Light: Regulating the Nervous System & Nourishing the Soul [Episode #1025]

 

Episode Summary:

In this conversation, Kimberly Snyder discusses the importance of embracing the season of inner light, particularly during the winter solstice. She emphasizes the need for nourishing the body, emotional regulation, and spiritual growth as essential components for well-being. The discussion covers practical tips for maintaining resilience through food, emotional practices, and meditation, encouraging listeners to reflect and set intentions for the new year.

Episode Chapters

SOLLUNA PRODUCT LINKS

• Glowing Greens Powder™
• Feel Good SBO Probiotics
• Feel Good Detoxy
• Feel Good Digestive Enzymes
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• Feel Good Skincare

KIMBERLY’S BOOKS

• The Hidden Power of the Five Hearts 

• Chilla Gorilla & Lanky Lemur Journey to the Heart
• The Beauty Detox Solution
• Beauty Detox Foods
• Beauty Detox Power
• Radical Beauty
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• You Are More Than You Think You Are 

OTHER PODCASTS YOU MAY ENJOY!

• How to Believe in Your Self Worth with Jamie Kern Lima [Episode 907]
• How to Raise Your Standards In Your Love Life with Matthew Hussey [Episode 883]
• How to Eat to Beat Your Diet with New York Times best selling author Dr. William Li [Epsiode 913]
• The issues with consuming vegetable and seed oils with Dr. Catherine Shanahan [Episode #899]
• How the Power Foods Diet helps with Weight Loss with Dr. Neal Barnard [Episode #877]
• How Not to Age with New York Times best-selling author Dr. Michael Greger [Episode #873]
• How to eat to reduce anxiety with Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo [Episode #867]
• How to Optimize Your Metabolic Health with Dr. Casey Means [Episode 889]

TRANSCRIPT:

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (00:00.526)
Hi loves and welcome back to our December Power Hour where our theme this month is a season of inner light, regulating the nervous system and nourishing the soul. I believe that this period between Thanksgiving all the way up to Christmas is a very sacred period for us to really reflect and clarify our intentions for the new year. This is the period where winter solstice is, which is around December 21st.

which is known as the darkest day, but it’s also when the outer light starts to grow and grow and grow. So this is such an amazing period to go within and to connect to this inner light. This is where we plant the seeds for the new year. know, Western society puts so much emphasis on this manmade holiday of January 1st and the new year, which is great, but when we really tune into nature.

our great mother nature and what’s happening on a planetary level. There is the solstice. This is the natural time. Maybe you’ve been feeling it naturally. I know I have. We were just in Hawaii. We rebuilt our tree nursery, our greenhouse where we house all our baby cacao. That’s how we say it, our family cacao. Cacao plants, trees.

which come into the field when they get a little bit more mature. But it had gotten really run down. There were scrub trees growing up and the wood had started to become really dilapidated. So over the holiday, we took everything out. We threw out the old wood. We cut the grass and the scrub trees and we rebuilt it from scratch. And it felt like in me a preparation for new energy and new life to come into the new year.

So we’re going to cover our four cornerstones as usual today and practices and tips and tools because this is a season. This is a moment that you really want to take advantage of. This is also a period where it’s more cozy. It’s more internal. We can make great strides, as I mentioned in our title, for internal stillness and regulation of the nervous system, which in yogic Vedic terms is equanimity. And that’s the place from which

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (02:15.182)
clarity, abundance, creative power can really birth and of course incredible physical health and vitality. So let’s jump right in before we do a quick reminder that the show notes will be at mysaluna.com where I highly recommend you join our newsletter for lots of community happenings and articles and recipes that we put out every single month.

And it’s a great place to connect deeper. We’re going to have some upcoming community Zooms. I’m doing a retreat in Mexico at the end of February and another one in California in June. So please come deeper in the community. I welcome you in. And I also want to thank you in advance for our review. You can leave it on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to our show. And that’s also an amazing way to support the show. So thank you so much in advance.

And also please pass this episode of the show on to anyone that you think would benefit. Okay, let’s get right into our power hour, which again is about this season of inner light and how we can work with the inner light to create more regulation, equanimity, which births creativity, health and nourishment. And I’m talking about deep nourishment on a soul level.

We need our bodies to come online and to be deeply nourished as well. And everything works together, which is really the genesis of the Four Quarterstones. I can say on my own journey, I had to focus on food and I had to focus on my body because there was so much imbalance, so much bloating, so much confusion, so much negativity that I was putting on myself about my weight and how I looked.

And it really was the healing process started in a physical level and it just kept expanding to where we really include our emotional well-being, our mental health and our spiritual growth. And then everything flows in and out and it starts to create more of this continuum of wholeness and wholesomeness and nourishment, which cannot just come from food, but food is a part of it. has to come from all these different

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (04:36.788)
aspects working together. So we’ve just come into a period where there’s been a lot of different spiritual traditions celebrating light. Diwali was some weeks ago and I loved giving a presentation at my younger son’s school, his kindergarten class, about Diwali. I told the story of the Ramayana and we lit candles. Of course there’s Hanukkah.

There may be lot of lights on in your neighborhood for Christmas and Kwanzaa, many different spiritual traditions are celebrating this time, this really sacred period. And whilst there is all this outer celebration, maybe you have a lot of school parties, office parties, holiday parties in general, it’s a time that we really want to create space.

for reflection and starting to cultivate really great habits and daily rituals that will carry us into the new year instead of suddenly feeling like, the new year’s here. Let me create a couple of resolutions, which research shows don’t really last for most people past the second week in January. Instead, this is the time of rooting down and creating this long lasting change that we want.

to feel that freshness of life and health and vitality into the new year. And again, I felt it so strongly in the last few days, which is why another reason I’m really excited to shoot this show today, just rebirthing the greenhouse, planting new trees. We were giving some tree saplings to some of our loved ones out there, sharing life. When we go back in December in a few weeks, we’re actually gonna be doing a honey harvest as well. So.

However, you can start to feel fresh energy coming in now before we even get into the cornerstones. That could mean cleaning out a closet, giving some old clothes away, really going through your kitchen pantries now, maybe cleaning out the garage or starting to reflect on the life that you want to breathe into in the new year. Any practice that calls you organically for clearing out the old and bringing in new life.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (06:57.492)
is a really potent time right now. And there is this concept that I talked about in the Hidden Powers of the Five Hearts. I’m sorry, this blue jay just flew outside my window, symbolically almost just sees dancing outside the windows I’m speaking to you. Caught my attention for a moment. This idea of steadiness, which comes from the inside.

So one of the aspects that we can start to cultivate through the cornerstones is resilience. Resilience means no matter what’s happening, whether that’s a busyness in your schedule for the day or someone says something that could be potentially triggering or you see a relative you don’t usually see at a holiday event or get together or a gift isn’t what you expected it to be or something, there’s some sort of upheaval in your external environment, we create more and more stability.

in our foods, in our body, down to our bones, our cellular level, in our emotional regulation strategies, which we’ll talk about, and our spiritual growth. And then this starts to become the solid roots with which our trees can flourish in the New Year, create amazing new branches, amazing buds of creative endeavors, materially, spiritually, in our relationships, and so on.

So let’s get into our cornerstones now. And the first one that we usually get into, a very tangible one, is food. And we want to definitely create stability right now, again, to carry us through this period of deep reflection into the new year. We want to boost our moods. We want to make sure that our immunity is in check, and then to also create nervous system stability. Right now,

our bodies and our digestion is wanting warmth on the inside. So we wanna really go for a lot of soups and stews, warming foods, warming spices like ginger and turmeric. We wanna have stable blood sugar levels as well. So we don’t wanna start getting into too much sugar, which can happen this time of year with all the treats around. We wanna start to be cognizant.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (09:17.29)
If we are having an extra cookie or an extra piece of pie, maybe we cut sugar in other areas. You know, it could even be as simple as drinking your coffee close or your tea close to black instead of adding in sugary creamers, right? We just want to look at the diet overall and make sure that stability and groundedness is a big theme. And of course, as always, this relates to fiber and whole foods.

When we are in balance this time of year, it manifests in a bit of irritation. We can start to feel like we’re being fussy or nitpicky or getting caught up in little daily squabbles and details and things that don’t really matter. We can also start to feel cold, depleted, maybe a bit constipated, and that our digestion is sluggish.

When we’re eating on point, in turn, we can start to feel warmth going through the body. We’re starting to feel really nourished inside, so there’s fewer cravings, which is amazing, and stronger digestion, and this feeling of groundedness, which is part of being present. If we’re constantly wanting to snack on little treats, our thoughts are going everywhere, we’re in more incoherence.

We’re following thought patterns, we’re more susceptible to fear, triggers, that doesn’t feel good. So groundedness is something that happens on a dietary level and also an emotional and energetic level. We support it in all ways. So one of the strategies that I want to highlight for you because it’s been a really big part of my life, especially lately, is the glowing greens powder. And this is because it contains

seven key plants which are so deeply nourishing including spirulina and amalocchi, moringa, ashitaba. When you only have seven plants which is similar to what you would do in an Ayurvedic herbal creation for you which I used to get and also make with Vaidya J, my teacher in the lab, we would never mix more than seven plants. And when I was in Hawaii, I was actually having two scoops a day and it was just feeling very

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (11:36.684)
grounding for me as again we were building the greenhouse and I was doing so much physical labor cutting down scrub trees. I had my own handsaw hauling to the part of our farm where there’s the green waste just physicality, resilience and these plants are very strengthening. Spirulina in particular is very high in protein and iron and in this synergistic mix which is based on some arubated concepts there’s plants from the sea

the water, plants that are grown high up in the air, plants or ingredients, because it’s not a plant, cordyceps, mushrooms, which is also very strengthening, grown close to the earth, you start to really nourish your body. And it’s really easy because it’s a powder that you can just mix in water or put in your glowing green smoothie. So I definitely recommend that as a daily staple. I also recommend root vegetables. So even in Hawaii, I was roasting there, I roast different

Cabocha squash, we did acorn squash at Thanksgiving. I eat sweet potatoes several times a week, especially this time of year. I love them. Sometimes I put cinnamon on them. Sometimes I put organic ketchup because I used to love french fries and they definitely have that aspect when I roast them in coconut oil. And I’ll call out a study in a moment on ginger and turmeric, but these warming spices in general, the cinnamon, the carnamom,

You can check out some of our amazing elixir recipes at mysaluna.com. Otherwise, you can just work them into your soup. You can work them into your stir fry. You can grate ginger into salad dressing. There’s so many ways to work with these amazing roots and you will feel it in your body. The thing about these spices and these herbs is that when you really tune into how you feel while you’re eating them and consuming them and afterwards,

you will start to notice how tangibly they bring your energy towards warmth, towards warming your agony, your digestive fire, and how intuitively that just feels so right this time of year. It is off to drink lots of icy cold beverages and ice cream, which my kids still want to scoop up here and there. It makes me laugh. I said actually yesterday.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (13:57.196)
My little one just took one spoon of coconut chocolate ice cream and I was having a soup next to him and I said, wow, my body feels so good having hot soup. And he was like, my body feels so good having ice cream. So it’s okay to have these treats as long as we balance everything. And then he went on to have soup and sweet potatoes as well. So there is that balance in his little body as well.

Also, whole grains mixed with legumes and vegetables are amazing. I’m a big believer in the Blue Zones philosophy. I’m actually bringing Dan Buettner back on next week, recording the interview next week to talk about this phenomenon of longevity around the world where people are consuming lots of grains and vegetables and legumes and beans, despite some fad diets now, which

are shedding some of these foods. Everybody’s body is different. You may do better with quinoa versus gluten. You may do really well with red lentils as I do. You may need to soak your beans to remove some compounds that make them more gassy. It will also help to remove some of the phytic acid. So it’s the way in which we prepare food, but these foods are amazing to prepare soups and stews, which I believe

from this whole period starting now, all the way through the winter is the amazing and easy way to create dinners. I wanna call out some really great recipes that we have on our website. Our pumpkin curry stew is on there, and many different stews and recipes, kichiri, and you can make different versions with different vegetables. All of this is fantastic and definitely what I’m having for dinner most nights.

We also need quite a bit of healthy fat right now. So avocados, I just had my avocado wrap for brunch, which I have mid-morning after a smoothie, which by the way, I don’t drink icy cold. I’ll make it and sort of, you know, the greens are the greens. Then the water I’m using doesn’t have ice in it. It’s coming out of our filter, so it’s cool. And then the fruit.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (16:17.644)
but it’s not icy cold. And people ask me sometimes about drinking the glowing green smoothie in the winter. And we’re starting with hot water with lemon or lemon and ginger. So you’re having something warming in the body. But I do believe we still need some raw fruits and vegetables all year. Although again, we’re balancing that with the hot soups and stews and warming spices, which we could have in elixirs and other meals throughout the day.

There’s also a really great winter persimmon kale salad that I want to call out and our winter glowing green smoothie recipe, which you can check out and our winter dandelion green salad is also really great. So some of these recipes you’ll get in the show note links directly at mysaluna.com. Otherwise you can search on our website and mysaluna.com as well. Now let’s go to our second cornerstone, which is body.

Now our bodies need to be maintained in nourishment to carry us through this period to feel that resilience and that anchoring for the temples. We are these are our bodily temples to create a auspicious space for our souls to really come back home, back home to our hearts, back home to full alignment with spirit.

with God, with the great intelligence that runs through us, however you like to think of it, with universal energy. It’s an interesting dynamic because we’re both form and formless. And so our bodies, if they are imbalanced, inflamed, agitated, right, nervous energy running through our nervous system, it distracts us and it blocks us from our

abundance and our expansiveness on a soul level, which is where we can create success in amazing ways in our careers and our relationships and our clarity and our growth. So when we are in balance this time of year, we can feel cold in our hands and feet or stiff and heavy, start to feel sluggish, like we just want to sit on the couch or, you know, tune out on screens.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (18:37.4)
We don’t sleep so well and we just sort of feel that agitation that is emotional but also physical, right? It’s like, that energy that we don’t want to feel. But when we’re in balance in our bodies, we feel circulation, movement, which is going to be synonymous with more circulation and movement in our lives, right? Our bodies reflect what’s going to happen on a larger

level in our external environment. We feel more easeful and flexible. There is more relaxation when we’re resting in our face. We don’t feel so tight in our jaw. Remember there’s fascia that runs from our jaw down to our lower back. So when turn our backs, can start to feel more easeful, there’s more physical steady energy. So some of the ways in which we can support our bodies include first of all,

wearing really cozy clothing. If you’re watching this on our YouTube channel, you’ll see me wearing one of my favorite warm, fuzzy blue sweaters. I love scarves. It’s really important, our UVA says, to protect the throat because of all the vata energy, the air and the wind. And this is just a really important place for our limb system, for our immunity, hats, warm footwear, cozy socks, cozy blankets.

colors that feel really calming and inspiring and uplifting whatever those colors are for you. I think color has a really big impact on how we feel and you want to use it intentionally I believe in your clothing and in your home environment in your furniture. We’ve even done some podcasts specifically on this with some interesting research if you want to check them out as well. It’s also a great time of year to focus on

dry brushing to support lymphatic drainage, right? It can be really simple, as simple as getting a dry brush for 20 bucks or so and brushing your body for a couple minutes, upward strokes towards your heart before you get in the shower. You can also try some Abhyanga self massage, which I’ve talked about in the Radical Beauty book, which I co-authored with Deepak Chopra. And we have more information on our website and steps as well if you’d like to check it out.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (21:02.84)
Keeping the body well moisturized and well oiled is an, and lubricated is the word, are you better uses a lot is a really key part of health in the body. Right now I’m using two layers every night and every morning of our saloon is feel good moisturizer. I just feel like I need that extra nourishment on my skin. put it on after our vitamin C serum.

And it feels really good because none of us want that dryness in our skin. I’m putting extra oil on the tips of my hair, starting to take more cognizant care of my hair and prevent breakage because, you know, to be honest, farm life, getting in and out of the ocean every day, the winds, you may live in a place where there’s a lot of coldness and snow. So this is a time we want to put more oils in the hair as well and just give love.

to your hair and your body externally and doing it with loving touch, of course. This is just a wonderful time as well to try some red light exposure. Now you can do it in different ways. There’s red light masks. There are red lights, which you can even put on your desk while you’re working or you can put on bigger areas of your body. There’s so much research now around red light to support mitochondrial and cellular function.

A 2023 study on injury found that near infrared light helped to improve mitochondrial structure and cellular recovery following tissue stress. So this was studying injury, but any part of our body is going to benefit on a mitochondrial level. Also for moods, I think light is a really powerful way to work with the body and also with our state of being, our state of mind as well.

So also another great thing to do is bundle up and get outside in some natural light, some natural movement. If you want to start to carry weight, I’m a big fan of rucking, which is to carry a weighted backpack or a vest just to put a little bit more weight, to make it more of a weight bearing exercise.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (23:22.966)
And the light is just amazing to get out in that fresh air, get a little bit of sunshine, get it into your eyes, look around, feel expansive. And then on the other end, I think it’s really great to stretch. I know that we, you know, just by nature of the weather and this time of year, there’s probably more sitting in your life, right?

And it could be wonderful sitting having a cup of tea and having a cozy chat with a friend or watching a movie snuggled up with the family. But we definitely want to keep tightness away, right? So just some stretching, you can make it fun. You could stretch with your kids or your partner. I definitely need to get back into that with hubby. He can get tight as well. And twists feel so good.

And we have some gentle stretching videos as well on YouTube if you want to check out some of my videos and some other places that I’ve talked about yin yoga and stretching on our website. Some heart opening would be really great this time of year. Just so much forward bending over our devices and our computers that it’s really great to open the pathways back up. So

There was a really great, let’s see one more study I wanted to talk to you about. 2023 experimental study in frontiers in neuroscience found that red light helped to reduce inflammatory cytokines and increased anti-inflammatory signaling, supporting the mechanism behind enhanced cellular recovery and inflammation reduction. So there’s a lot of research around red light.

but I’m a big fan of natural light and getting up and moving and stretching. And it doesn’t have to be a big session. You could also just stretch for five, 10 minutes when you have a break and then a couple of minutes before bed and just work it as a daily habit into your lifestyle. Okay, our third cornerstone in this season of light is emotional wellbeing. And this is such a big one because…

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (25:32.818)
With the darkening happening outside, we may feel a lot coming up. And remember that your feelings, if they were ever pushed down, if there were ever events that minor ones and major ones that you couldn’t quite process, and we pushed them down into our being, encrypted it inside of us, so to speak, different levels of trauma, it’s going to come up.

And what we want to do is we want to be able to greet our feelings and our emotions with more and more steadiness or in Vedic terms equanimity. This means that we start to go beyond having such a strong idea of I like being, you know, feeling uplifted and joyful and I really don’t like

feeling down or this or that, right? It’s natural that certain emotions, all emotions have different vibrations. But the more we can be steady in ourselves and feel when irritation is coming in or anger or a bit of sadness or joy or whatever it is, we just feel and find that steady place inside of us where we can digest, we can process. So that means that instead of being really up,

and really down, we just start to find more inner equanimity. This is the real way to regulate your nervous system is with emotional regulation tools. And I certainly didn’t learn this growing up and maybe you didn’t either. I don’t think a lot of us did. So a lot of the tools that I teach in the hidden power of the five hearts, including the steady in life practice, this is real life. This is not just when we’re sitting in meditation.

can be very beneficial and create a higher baseline in life when you’re driving in your car and a thought comes up or triggering text comes up or you know and your best friend says something that throws you off or you see someone that you had a past experience with that didn’t feel very positive at a holiday party you want to not externalize and push out that

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (27:44.878)
emotional energy, you want to find ways to process it inside. And this creates amazing levels of physical health and vitality. And I didn’t get this part for a long time either. How much our psychological becomes the physiological. We all know that there’s so many harmful effects of stress, right, from affecting our cardiovascular health and hormonal disruption. But it’s a

something that we need to work with within ourselves day in and day out. If we’re pushing away negative emotions and distracting ourselves by going on TikTok or turning on music or just calling a friend or eating chips, then we’re disempowering ourselves. Oneness and this greater sense of connecting to allness means

We need to greet the negative emotions and digest them just as we greet the positive emotions. And some ways that we can start to work on this is pausing before we react, before we say something, before we write something back. We want to start to take this sacred pause. And I have a little mantra, which is pause is power, right? We don’t have to answer right away. We want to pause.

and do a simple practice. First, you can just start focusing on your heart, taking some deep breaths, follow the steady in life practice steps, which are in the Hidden Power of the Five Hearts book.

And also be aware, first of all, that unsteadiness has come or big emotion has come. This was huge for me just being aware, hey, there’s a bit of irritation here or I’m feeling picky. Sometimes I name it sometimes I don’t. There’s research though that if you do name your emotion, this was from

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (29:51.382)
a study in PubMed called Putting Feelings Into Words disrupts amygdala activity in response. So what this found was that if you name your emotions, it can reduce amygdala activation and increase activity in the prefrontal regulatory regions, which means it will help to make you less emotionally reactive. So you can say, hey, I’m starting to feel a bit angry if that resonates with you or ooh.

there’s a bit of triggering a bit of jealousy or sadness whatever it is so we start to create that awareness that pausing and this is huge because in the past many of us just identify with the emotion or push it down and it affects it skews the ways in which we behave in the world the ways in which we interact with other people the ways in which we respond so we want to take that time to process be aware breathe and then feel

The better we get at this, the more time goes on, start to feel expansive again.

and we absorb these emotions. And this is the power of the growing inner light, right? This is true equanimity, which means no matter what is cast at us in the external world, no matter what we’re going through, we can create a deep sense of resilience and light from the inside. And this is huge for glowing skin, great digestion, healthy hair.

all the ways in which our energy gets depleted and diverted with constant emotional upheaval and dysregulation and just ways in which we don’t really soothe ourselves and we outsource our feelings.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (31:37.804)
A 2023 randomized control trial published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that slow controlled breathing significantly improved mood and reduced anxiety. So again, back to simple basics, but it’s a retraining instead of jumping in or going, feeling overwhelmed to realize that we have a steady center. It’s okay to feel.

these emotions, but not to identify with them. We don’t have to become it. I am not sad. I am not angry. I am feeling anger. I am experiencing a sensation of overwhelm or fear. So we create a distance. We start to process it.

and then we can absorb it and digest it and then move through into more clarity. And this is just a huge, huge, huge part of wellness, which again, works with the food practices, it works with how we take care of our bodies. And if we don’t get this down, I don’t care how much, you know, organic foods you’re eating, which is amazing, of course, but you will still experience inflammation, cortisol,

stress markers, all these things in the body. So that’s why we really promote this holistic lifestyle at Saluna and in our feel good community. So lastly, I want to call out another study published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, which is about how diaphragmic breathing, which is breathing down deep into your lower belly, can improve heart rate variability, increase parasympathetic tone, and reduce arousal and stress.

So this fight or flight type of breathing, which is up in the shallow chest, has been well studied now to show that it activates, changes our perspective. It gets your brain and your heart offline so that there isn’t that coherence anymore. So first, you can take deep breaths into your belly. And just as we do in our heart align meditation, take deep breaths into your heart, which increases your coherence.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (33:50.744)
which will help you to feel more clear and more regulated. Now this leads us to our fourth cornerstone, spiritual growth. And this is where we really feel our connection to source, which can never be taken away, this inner light. I love this analogy in India where from the central altar, there’s a candle lit and from that you light the candle.

everyone else’s candle that’s sitting there meditating together or praying. So it’s coming all from one source. We all have this divine, intelligent, creative, all powerful energy running through us. And we want to start to feel that in daily life when we meditate, but also in daily life more and more. So we are less and less caught up in the chaos and the upheaval and the triggers in our external environment.

instead of seeking approval and reassurance from others or over identifying with external identities. Now I hear so many, right? I’m this, I’m a banker, I’m a menopausal woman, I’m a person with PCOS, I’m someone who…

had so much trauma in my childhood, I’m a librarian, whatever it is, these are all experiences that are part of our journey of growth and we want to have knowledge and information and tools that will help us. But at the same time, we don’t want to over identify with any of these labels because we are so much more beyond that. And the more that we can feel the inner light, the more we step out of fear and the more into trust.

that our journeys are unfolding, that there is a higher intelligence, that we can always lean on and call on and feel inside of us, that we are more and more self-reliant. And yes, of course we can create, and this actually creates more closeness and connection in our relationships versus, you know, over-dependence, co-dependence. We don’t want that because it can actually push people away and create unhealthiness.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (36:16.13)
We want to feel the self-reliance and the intuition and the clarity that arises from inside of us. So some of the things that we can do is to increase our baseline of intuition and heart coherence with our heart aligned meditation. It is important to have a steady meditation practice because this again increases our level of clarity throughout the day. Now we still need tools as I was mentioning in our emotional.

Well-being cornerstone we want us to do the steady in life and breathe when triggers come up But it is this heart aligned meditation that will really help us To start the day and also end the day if you want to do it twice more anchored and more clear We also want to create more spaciousness When we’re too crowded with the noise of the world, it’s harder to connect to the inner light because there’s so much external noise

Now, even in a very full life, if you’re thinking that, and I get it, I’m working, I’ve got two kids, I’ve got the farm to manage, and here in California, it’s a lot, right? And of course, you know, just everyday life. In the car, the ride back from school is sacred time where now I try not to do any work calls or anything like that. It’s my time.

I also do a walk every day in the middle of my work day. That is me time plus my meditations. And it’s easy to fill those times with noise or being on your phone scrolling or whatever it is. But it’s really precious to fostering the inner light to create more spaciousness. And it can be micro moments, like I said, in between meetings, you can stretch, can breathe, you can just breathe into your heart for a few minutes.

but this is about the inner steadiness and the inner resilience. And the more you feel this, what naturally starts to away is judgment and comparison because we find that more and more we realize that our inner light, our journeys are unique to us and we need not judge anyone else’s journeys as well. We turn into more of a loving, giving, caring space that is our true nature.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (38:39.928)
So another thing we can do is to focus more on giving out. We naturally receive joy and love when we do that. But instead of me, me, me, this time of year, how can we serve? It could be a smile. It could be a little bit more love and friendliness when you’re interacting with someone at the bank or the coffee shop. This Thanksgiving, the focus of our holiday was I baked 10 pies.

for our friends and loved ones there and neighbors and people that really help us on the farm. And we gave them, we brought them to people and spent time with everyone. And that really made the holiday this year. And that’s a tradition that I want to and plan to continue. And it’s ways in which we can just shift into giving more energy, more of this light will flow through you. It will never run out, I promise. So the more we’re living in the heart-based.

characteristics and we can affirm this in the beginning of the day. I intend to live in more love and care, compassion, peace. I want to give more today. However you want to call that in, you can make that part of your heart aligned meditation as you create an intention for the day. It will have incredible effects through your life. Also part of the meditation is appreciation, which is a mix of thankfulness and gratitude.

and a 2023 meta-analysis entitled The Effects of Gratitude Interventions showed that gratitude practices improved mood and reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety. So there’s a lot of research around this now. Again, we’re gonna have links in the show notes at mysaluna.com to the heart aligned meditation, the recipes, other modalities, the hidden power of the five hearts.

It’s a great book to read now in soft cover and hard cover as well, to learn about these practices like the study in life. And I can’t emphasize it enough. The meditation is really important, but the tools that we have to regulate ourselves during the day are just as important because between meditations there’s this whole day and it’s a big opportunity to continue to grow as humans, to grow into our clear hearts, steady hearts and then clear hearts.

Solluna By Kimberly Snyder (40:54.286)
So I hope that this show provided much inspiration to you for this sacred time of year. Please reach out to me with comments, questions. You can also find me on Instagram at underscore Kimberly Snyder. As I mentioned earlier, I definitely recommend that you share this show with loved ones, with anyone that can use a little boost of inspiration, which is the intention of our show. So I’ll see you in the community. I’ll see you at mysalina.com.

Thank you so much for being part of our community. I appreciate you so much. I send you so much love and I’ll see you back here soon.