2020 was a incredible year for upheaval, awakening, change and shedding light on personal, cultural and global issues, dysfunctions and imbalances. In my life time, I have definitely gone through my own trials and transformations, but to do so along side the world at large was a wild, crazy and enlightening experience.
From a global pandemic, political, economical and environmental challenges. I don’t think anyone could catch a break or a breath edge wise. We all were truly hanging on by the seat of our pants, with lots of “oh fu@&s!” and anticipations.
In my little world, I lost jobs, switched careers, taught Yoga online, quit teaching yoga, started a you-tube channel, taught yoga again with masks and social distancing, rebranded my business, started a new job wellness coaching at a doctors office, got married, went on honeymoon, bought a sprinter van, traveled all over california, gained weight, lost weight, landed somewhere in the middle. I had a few health scares, my dog had a health scare, I made mistakes, I forgave, sold and gave away half our belongings, and planned and packed a move to Southern California in early 2021.
I don’t know if I am a glass half empty or glass half full kinda gal.. it depends! But I do believe in balance, universal sovereignty, and the power of love and believing all will work out for the greater good. This year was a mega soul booster, propelling us in to new dimensions of seeing and new paradigms of being.
I don’t expect the clock to strike 12:00a tonight and poof! 2021 all my problems and anxieties will disappear. But I do feel a flood of hope, new beginnings and healing coming into being. I am grateful for my family’s health and well-being, and all the challenging lessons and upheavals in 2020. Which in hindsight, guided myself and family closer together and moved us forward to our place and purpose.
I am looking forward to new adventures, challenges, blessings and whatever 2021 is ready and willing to dish out. Cheers to a year that propelled our growth and a humble bow to a new year drawing us more near to hope and healing.
I’ll end the post with a poem that helps reflect upon and digest 2020 in a metaphorical nutshell, Enjoy!
I believe deep within our beings, is a light that is connected to the all. Through this light, we can transmute information, connect to different levels of consciousness and tap into our innate knowledge and wisdom.
It took me a while to learn how to trust myself and knowing. to be honest, it’s a skill I’m still acquiring and fine tuning. Being empathic and sensitive is a gift, but can feel like a burden. To feel everything so intensely, and to see clearly can actually be quite a muddy and confusing experience. Tapping into our intuition takes practice and patience. Learning to discern intuition from fear or fantasy is a focused dive into the abyss of the soul and psyche.
A lot of my life I remember being very sensitive and raw. Life just hurt. I could feel life and energy traverse through my being as a young girl. This made me shy, and a bit of a quiet loner. Looking back, I believe it was hard for me to distinguish my energy or thought from “the other”. It made it challenging to listen to myself, trust my intuition, when I had the noise of everyone else inside my mind and heart.
When I was a teenager, until I got sober at 30 I used drugs and alcohol to numb my sensitivities. It worked! For a while.. until it caused more suffering than feeling all the feels.
Deep in my being, I knew it was a gift. A intuitive nudge. I began studying yoga, metaphysics and the healing arts more in depth through out my 20’s and 30’s. This exploration guided me to understand my empathic qualities and to discover there are others out there that struggle and THRIVE with this same experience!
As I get older, I am able to hone in and harness the gift of sensitivity in a helpful way to myself and others. Being sensitive is like a energetic exposure to the world, a raw receptivity. More information comes through. It’s like my personal “antenna” is sky high; picking up on random info from all directions. The dial of the soul, calibrated, fine tuned to subtler frequencies.
We all have this ability to tune in.
I believe this ability to tune in with our sensitivity is our intuition. And our intuition is our soul speaking to us. How do we discern the information that’s coming through? Often our intuition is not something we “want” to do, yet feel “called” to do. When I check in and try to discern if the feeling, sensation or message I am getting is intuition, fear or fantasy? I ask my body, I see where I feel it. I try to sense it’s intention, and “where” that sensation is coming from.
If there is peace around it, heart spacious with a resonance of knowing-it’s often my soul speaking. Even if intuitively I am being asked to live beyond my comfort level, or to do something new and scary.. there is peace around it, a deep sense of OK-ness.
If there is mad, frantic anxiety around a thought or message coming in.. it’s often ego not intuition. If I begin to get in my head, instead of in my heart around an issue. That’s definitely ego and fear not intuition. Lots of different stories created in the mind, fantasies and such.
This isn’t usually the soul speaking, rather a grasping from my ego out of fear.
However, sometimes visions- bursts of insight come through as truth. That is intuition. A message from the higher self.
Intuition is tuning “in-to-it” tuning into yourself. Listening, paying attention and acting from a place of alignment within.
Listening to your soul speak, trusting it and acting upon it is a practice. It takes getting to know oneself on a intimate level. A relationship with ourselves (and soul) is the foundation for all other relationships we attract and interact with in this lifetime.
A few powerful ways to touch in is through prayer, meditation, yoga or journaling. Quiet the mind, get still. Ask yourself lots of questions, get curious about what comes up. Notice where you feel the information in your body. What’s the energy around the information you are experiencing in your atmosphere of being?
The body is a physical storehouse for the mind, emotions and soul. Check in, listen and trust your knowing.
The intuition is a scared gift, a nudge to walk the path of your highest truth and self.
My first Yoga experience was back in 1998, Chandler Arizona. I was about 17 years old. In some ways I am the same as I was then, but very different from who I am now.
At the time I was athletic, but also a bit of a troublemaker and an artist. I’ve always lived between these two worlds of health and fitness but having a bit of a rebellious streak. Exploring alternatives, living outside the box and challenging the norms.
Which is probably why the Yoga practice resonated with me so deeply right away. Yoga is strength building internally and externally. Also, I feel like to be a Yogi or a Yogini, in a the way, you gotta rebel against old ways of thinking and being in order to grow into your true nature.
My first class was at the YMCA at 17 years old. There is something special that I felt about the practice of yoga. At the time I was studying astrology and metaphysics as I always have! it has been a great interest to me. I love the balance of science and spirituality that Yoga brought to the table even back then through my perception of it.
10 years later, at 27 years old I stepped into my first 200 hour yoga teacher training in Tempe Arizona. Alongside that, I studied therapeutic massage therapy. It was quite a unique program. Within a year I had a 200 hour yoga teaching certificate and also credentials to work as a massage therapist. I did this work in combination for close to a decade.
I wasn’t always in my practice. There were gaps of time even years where I didn’t practice at all, especially in my 20s. However there was something about the practice that kept calling me back; time and time again. I would land on my yoga mat and meet myself at different ages, stages and forms of self.
Often I would seek refuge in the practice when I was going through something challenging or traumatic in my life. It often, with great grace, got me through the other side, a whole person. A more integrated human.
My first Yoga community was in Portland Oregon. The studio was called Santosha Yoga and it was owned by these two lovely women that played an integral part of my growth, healing and teaching. I practiced at the studio for eight years and I taught there for six. Most of my friends came from that community, it was my family.
Living in Portland I had access to many amazing teachers, studios and even famous guest teachers that would often travel through the city and teach workshops.
As each teacher (seasoned and green) had something unique to share in a different perspective to be known, I felt the same about the practice of Yoga. The practice brought me great peace, helping me to align with truth and coax me back home to my center.
Being a Yoga practitioner for almost 2 decades and teaching for nine years I have walked through many challenges and adversities on and off my Yoga mat. I would have to say that the one thing that kept me whole, even in the perceived brokenness was the light of the Yoga practice.
Often we think that Yoga is just a physical manifestation in our body. The more I practiced and learned about myself, I found that the real practice is the one that cannot be seen physically within a Yoga pose. Rather; the radiance of ourselves, our light and aura, is the marker on the road to emerging and awakening within.
The practice becomes the heart of how we live our lives from a place of presence, alignment, true purpose and calling.
Yoga is a Sanskrit word that can translate roughly to wholeness, to unite or integrate. Ultimately this practice, I believe; is a healing practice that allows us to be who we are, as we are. Cultivating compassion, acceptance and humility along our trajectory of growth and expansion.
Accepting ourselves fully, with great love even the dark things! Even the hard things! Especially those things! Brings us hOMe to the freedom within.
If we are constantly compartmentalizing or pushing all the dimensions of ourselves that we do not like, or “approve of” it is challenging to return to our intrinsic wholesness.
Each lesson in life is but a great teacher that is meant to guide us back to our soul self, the atman. Through the unification of self, we then begin to expand the matrix of unification beyond the self.
The work takes great courage. The work starts on the inside, with desire and intention. Stepping into all the unknown spaces of our mind and hearts that maybe we have suppressed or been afraid to look at as a part of our wholeness.
The practice of Yoga or wholeness can then integrate through our whole being and beyond. The practice then overtime becomes less about doing and more about being.
We already are the Yoga, and in the practice of remembrance we are assisting in peeling back the shrouds and the layers that get in the way of our light and truth.
We are already whole, complete and filled with great light and love. The Yoga practice helps us to navigate our humanness, samskaras, and tendencies with more awareness and compassion. And with practice, lots of practice! We then may find and experience all we are, and all that we are truly unified with as a whole in each moment, as it’s unfolding.
5 years post cancer treatment 2 days ago on November 18th 2020. 5 years, maybe 5 lifetimes, it seems. What I thought my was going to kill me, saved me, awakened me and gifted me life, again.
The last treatment was vincristine. A chemotherapy that made my fingers and toes go numb. It was actually the most kind of the 4 chemo’s. Numb phalanges were a walk in the park compared to debilitating diarrhea and interns staring down at you asking you to take a nauseas survey. Do I look nauseas? I’m yellow, and I can barely open one eye? A 6 question survey? 2 pages?…I just circled a 10, on a scale of 1-10 and handed it back.
I’m dying, screw nauseas.
Was that experience even real? The cancer, the torture.. I mean treatments? Maybe that’s a defense, a detachment. The dark humor, you know? You have to find ways to cope with suffering, or the suffering might kill you.. not really. But I suppose the heart break from it could.
The last 5 years have been tough and equally beautiful. 5 years was a long haul for deep healing, but I tried to have fun doing it. And in the fun department, I give myself an A++. Another coping skill. Fun, or F-ing off, maybe.
Not all fun and games, I’ve worked extremely hard to get here, alive, thriving and as healthy as I can be considering.
Every year I learned something, shit! Every day I learn so much post cancer. It’s like looking through a clearer lens, constantly rubbing my eyes after a long pointless dream, life is in technicolor and feelings too! both the sorrow and joys of this world more transparent and, just.., “Wow, ouch, damn, ok, breathe.. keep going.”
5 years cancer free from stage 4 cancer. How did that even happen or is possible? God knows, not me! I’m just down here floundering about and trying to figure it out. Maybe there is nothing to figure out, maybe the gift of it all is meant to be lived and loved.
What I know today, is that I don’t know nothing. That might be a Pennywise song lyric? Regardless, it’s true. The magic and miracle of not knowing blessed me with faith and trust. Each day is a wild adventure, even on the mundane ones.
Layers of myself is still shedding. Each day I have to remind myself, “Don’t get too attached to her! You know she’s going to be a different, changed in the next breath and the one after that”…the unraveling of the self is both certain and uncertain.
The un-spooling, death, transformation is messy and straight up awkward. The release, who I thought I was, or am.. is not her, or anything really.
I have been given another day. Healthy, alive with no evidence of disease in my body. Most of the time it feels like such a ginormous gift, I don’t know what to do with it all. God has given me so much. In ways I couldn’t possibly repay.
Even on the days that I am exhausted or unsure of myself or where all this is taking me, I give thanks and reminded that life is a series of peaks and valleys, keep walking and moving forward. When I slow down, I realize all this is happening so very fast.
Slow down, breathe it in. The hard stuff too.
I don’t want to hold on, or I’ll miss the next moment. Looking back at my life, it’s a simultaneous streak of oneness embodied in a single memory.
The future, all I see is distance along a golden hour lit shoreline. I feel peace and hope looking forward in this vision, throughout the sunset of my life.
Each day I wake up, look about and smile at the life God and I have co-created together. I am grateful.
