Embodied Mindfulness Meditation for Somatic and Emotional healing.
Podcast Intro – Heart Attending
Welcome.
This is a space to slow down, to arrive, and to listen — not only with the mind, but with the heart and the body.
I’m Dina A. Kushnir. My work offers a feminine, embodied approach to somatic meditation and spiritual awakening — one that begins not with effort or striving, but with tenderness, presence, and loving attention.
At the center of my guidance is a practice I call Heart Attending: an invitation to awaken the heart to awareness, to meet yourself with kindness, and to allow loving attention to become the ground of healing and awakening.
In a world that often pulls us out of ourselves — into speed, fragmentation, and self-judgment — this practice invites a return. A return to the body as an ally. A return to the breath as a home. A return to the quiet wisdom already living within you.
Through Heart Attending, the body, breath, sensations, emotions, feelings, and perceptions become doorways — not obstacles — to presence and peace. As we cultivate gentle awareness and compassion toward ourselves, somatic and emotional healing unfold naturally, forming the foundation for all spiritual growth.
The roots of my work are in Buddhist Vipassana meditation, with a deep emphasis on embodied awareness and the direct experience of body sensations. For over three decades, I have guided meditation groups, retreats, and classes, integrating this lineage with somatic, body–mind, and emotional healing modalities from both Eastern and Western traditions.
In this podcast, you are invited to rest, to feel, and to remember what it is like to be at home in yourself.
There is nothing you need to fix, achieve, or become.
Just bring your presence.
And let the heart attend.
Embodied Mindfulness Meditation for Somatic and Emotional healing.
Module 12: Episode 1 - All My Relations - The Sacred Work of Connection
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In this powerful teaching, we explore a truth that will change everything: connection is work.
The Hebrew word for "to connect" literally means taking two ropes and binding them together—it's an action, an effort, not something that just happens passively.
Many of us carry a deep wound: the baby inside who never received connection still waits for someone outside to make the effort. But here's the revelation: now we must become that mother to ourselves. We pick up our own inner baby and create the connection we've been waiting for.
The practice moves in expanding circles. We start by saying hello to our environment—literally thanking our chair, our table. Then we greet our body parts as family: "Hello, liver. Hello, lungs." The two kidneys are sisters. The two hands are sisters. Everything that comes in pairs is sisterhood within you.
From there, we expand to loved ones, then to difficult people, then to our whole town, all continents, all beings. This is "All My Relations" in shamanic wisdom—everything is family.
The truth they never told us? We are never alone. Loneliness is trauma's invention. When we come into the body, we realize: we're held by the Earth, by ancestors, by the familiar and the unfamiliar. We're not connected like the internet—we're connected like the INNER-net, through consciousness itself.
This year's intention: Become the lover you're waiting for. Not seeking love from outside, but becoming the lover to yourself first.
Because what you work on strengthens. What you don't work on disappears. And connection is the most important work there is.
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Visit Dina's website, oliveoasis.com, to learn more about her work and her sanctuary in upstate New York.
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