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.
This year I have had the opportunity to dive deeper into what it means to heal and be well. A lot of my adulthood I felt like I have been recovering or healing from some thing. And I’m sure most folks can relate. Life is filled with uncertainty, and experiences that can throw us off our center.
I think so often when we visualize health we might start to think of the external manifestations of health. Possibly a lean and fit body, nice hair and nails, glowing skin vibrant, bountiful energy and so forth. And as all of this is definitely a marker on the path to being healthy it is not the whole picture.
There were times in my life where I was in great physical shape but in horrible spiritual condition. There were times in my life where my spiritual practices were on point but my physical health kind of got pushed to the wayside. There’s been a few times in my life where I did feel in complete alignment physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually- It took a lot of focus and intention however.
This year I focused a lot on my physical health, and not that I wasn’t focusing on that before I just leveled it up a couple notches. But honestly, it detoured me a bit from the inner practices of health such us creativity, spirituality, acceptance and more.
I decided to experiment recently, and let go of the reins some on my nutrition and fitness and start to introduce some of those other aspects of wellness to come back into the picture.
Within a few weeks time I began to notice a deeper state of connection and relaxation in my life and body. More congruency with my purpose and passions. I realized I was so focused on just ONE aspect of my health I actually was becoming a bit unhealthy through the imbalance of self.
Don’t get me wrong I still eat pretty clean and I have let up a bit on my physical activity besides Yoga and hiking. I have found that there are seasons and reasons to different parts of our health and wellness journey trajectory.
Ultimately to be well holistically, is a dance and a balancing act that is always in flux and shifting.
I believe to seek this balance within ourselves takes awareness, presence and reflective inquiry. A daily checking in practice to see how we are feeling and asking ourselves what part of ourselves might need a little bit more attention and what part of ourselves might need a little less attention at the moment.
The older I get The more I understand my strengths and weaknesses. There are some aspects of health that come pretty easy to me and other aspects I have struggled with as long as I can remember. We can use the strengths that we already have to nurture some of the areas we might struggle with a bit on our healing path.
Pulling from our inner resources, knowing that as we move forward into balance, it’ll probably be messy. There will be moments where we will feel aligned, and other times where we will be working hard towards balance and will question if what we’re doing is working.
Keep going, it’s working. In my experience anything that we put effort into, will reveal equal in it’s output. Sometimes we get caught up in the way we think things should look like Instead of being open to how things are unfolding before us as divinely perfect as they are.
Balance does not have a stagnant energy quality to it. It is ever moving, transforming, evolving in many forms and manifestations. I believe by checking in with ourselves daily, and asking ourselves “what do you need to feel more balanced right now?” We can move towards and into a abundant, vibrant, holistic state of being.
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.
