Love, Joy, Cold Water Swimming, and Resilience

Jan 29, 2025

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What do kindness and joy, swimming in cold water and sharing food, euphoria and resilience, coping mechanisms, COVID, community, compassion, and connection have to do with each other? How do we sustain our work and find joy in the face of suffering? Is it possible to make suffering lighter, without making light of suffering? What is the role and meaning of celebration when LA is burning and the roundups have started? How do each of us find the strength to keep going?

Welcome to the Pebble in the Cosmic Pond podcast, where we now, in Season Four, explore the Power of Kindness to bring you medicine from the sweet spot between Heaven and Earth, inspired still by old and new stories from China's healing traditions but really going wherever we feel pulled. We are Dr. Sabine Wilms, philosopher-poet, nerd, and goat herder, and Leo Lok, our Resident Purveyor of Multiple Perspectives. We start out this new season with what might strike you perhaps as an oddly celebratory offering, given the dark times we are currently experiencing at least in the US, if you follow the news. But it is the New Moon and the New Year of the Yin Wood Snake, of medicine and poison, of shedding skin and old self to make room for growth, of going deep into the mysterious darkness underground, of transforming and healing and honoring rest in cold Yin stillness until the Yang heat of the rising sun and spring Qi shall empower us to rise up, like bread, like singing, like kundalini energy. This episode is on “Love, joy, cold water swimming, and resilience.” Don’t blame me for this one. It was Leo’s idea to record right after I come home from one of my bitter cold naked ocean swims, to catch the euphoria flooding my system, share it with you, and explore it a bit. I have no idea if any of this makes sense to you, but if it brings a smile to your face, like swimming does to mine, and makes you want to pursue your own ways of lowering your stress level, finding joy, and restoring your equilibrium, heck yeah, it’s worth publicly exposing my quirkiness here. Desperate times call for desperate measures! My love goes out to my friends in the fires of LA, in the immigrant community in Tucson, and in all the other places where the doodoo is hitting the fan and where some of you are doing the damn hard work in the trenches. May this conversation somehow make a tiny bit of difference in your healing work by lightening your load! Let the tears flow and then crank the music and dance your heart out, not in spite of but because of it all!

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