My Therapist Profile on Insight Timer

by Sarah Yoga

Over the years, I’ve tried many of the popular meditation apps—Calm, Headspace, Waking Up, Ten Percent Happier, and more. They all have practices and courses that I’ve appreciated and benefited from.

Right now, I am excited about the mostly free meditation app Insight Timer. Almost all the content is free—and there is a lot of content! At the time I’m writing this, they are advertising having a free library of more than 280,000 guided meditations from over 17,000 different teachers.

One challenge with having so much content, though, is knowing where to begin. Friends and clients have told me they feel overwhelmed by the number of options and aren’t sure how to find practices that fit what they’re looking for.

I have created a Therapist Profile on Insight Timer that I hope might help with that.

A Starting Place on Insight Timer

The guided practices on my profile are not recordings that I’ve created myself, and I don’t have any financial affiliation with the app. As someone who practices a lot of meditation, I’ve just been collecting guided practices that I think others may find supportive, grounding, or helpful.

I’ve organized these practices into folders based on different themes and needs. Right now, there are 14 folders, including:

  • Somatic Tracking Practices
  • Nervous System Regulation Practices
  • Different Ways of Working with Pain
  • Sleep/Evening Practices
  • Morning Meditations
  • Working with Emotions
  • Working with Thoughts
  • Body Scan Practices
  • (Self) Compassion Practices
  • Yoga Nidra Practices
  • Short Practices
  • Meditation Practices
  • Relaxation Practices
  • Mindfulness Courses

I hope that this profile will give people a place to start and help them discover practices and teachers that resonate with them personally.

You can access the profile through the app. 

If you follow my therapist profile on the app, here is what you click on to access the folders that I’ve put together: Teachers > My Teachers > Teachers > Sarah Jamieson

You can also access the profile through a web browser.

My Research on Chronic Pain Recovery

by Sarah Yoga

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to study with the legendary pain researcher Lorimer Moseley, and during one of his presentations, he said, “We need to start talking about recovery.”

That idea stuck with me—and became part of the inspiration for my Master’s thesis, which explored the experience of personal recovery from chronic pain.

Many of the people I interviewed for this research shared their stories in the hope that it would help others, and in that spirit, I created a website to share their stories, along with the key themes that emerged from the research.

If you are interested in learning more, including accessing the full thesis, you can visit: https://chronicpainrecovery.ca/

“Or this could be Hell.”

by Sarah Awareness Ishvarapranidhana Living Yoga Meditation Yoga


I attended a yoga class 10-or-so-years ago that was themed around this line from the Eagles’ Hotel California:

“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”

The intention behind the theme was to emphasize the idea that we can influence our experience of things. An experience, in this case, a set of challenging asana (yoga postures), could be heaven or hell depending on how we respond to it.

Wisdom has a way of weaving itself through our lives, and I recently had this lesson come back to me in a powerful way. I was sitting in my meditation practice, and I was feeling strong urges to get things done. My mind kept wandering to things I wanted to get done, and physically, I felt like my body was a firework about to explode. Sitting still felt out of line with everything my body wanted to do in that moment.

About midway through my practice, the lyrics popped into my head:

“This could be Heaven or this could be Hell.”

And with that thought, my body softened and my mind settled. I wasn’t going to cut my practice short to try and get more things done, so I could either sit and agonize over not being able to do other things in this moment or I could meet myself where I had committed to be.

Recalling the song lyrics reminded me that there was choice in this moment. There are many things that I can’t control, but my thoughts are not one of those things. It was completely within my power to engage differently with this experience, and so I did.

I accepted that I wasn’t going anywhere until my practice was complete. And, in accepting where I was, I found significantly more ease and even some enjoyment in the moment. I reconnected with my commitment to the practice and the powerful change it has facilitated in my life. I remembered that – for better or for worse – I chose this.

But life can throw things at us that are much more challenging than yoga. Things we didn’t choose. Things no one would choose. Things that are hard and heartbreaking.

It is still worth considering that there is wisdom in reflecting upon how we respond to things, but perhaps it might be better to say something along the lines of:

“This could be [hard and heartbreaking] or this could be Hell.”

This experience could be a challenging one that pushes me beyond what I thought were my limits, or it could be a horrible catastrophe that I can’t see myself moving through. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. We can improve our ability to cope. The ego may not love the idea that we could make changes to bring more ease into our challenging experiences, but paradoxically, we tend to feel rather proud of ourselves when we do.