Know your own heart, and trust it.

Animals instinctively know they cannot trust a person who is in fear. It’s amazing when we are able to truly grasp this understanding, this deepest knowing of the truth and make choices from that knowing. Any person who seeks to draw others into their own struggle with fear is going to spiral that fear, because actions from fear as the underlying emotion are not Divinely Inspired. Fear begets fear, and love begets love. Until we get back into our own heart and listen for what feels like light, and love and trust in ourselves, and in love being the foundation of everything. Creating a foundation of trust and faith in love and light as the fabric of everything is the only remedy to those spirals within each of us.

When we embrace the understanding that every human being has the best understanding within their own hearts to choose their own path, we stop ourselves from drawing others into our own fear based spirals. Only when we look within our own hearts and support, or at least trust, others to do the same does Divine Grace shine the light on inspired solutions. And, at least in my own experience, if a solution is divinely inspired, others will join in from their own internal seeing... that’s how it works. Like the field of dreams, if you build it they will come. If it’s built from fear, the results will show immediately. If it’s built from love it will flow, grow and flourish. That is not actually rocket science. I am not saying that difficult times do not present themselves, but that we are the only ones who are capable of knowing our own path through, and what it all means to us.

Boundaries and doing what it takes to get others to cease and desist from anything that feels not ok to us, that is self love that when practiced vigilantly builds up an internal store that enables a feeling of infinite love for others, regardless of their behavior. That is what it means to be a warrior of the heart... to me anyway. People, all beings, who can’t trust and honor boundaries are living in fear, and cannot be trusted. That’s pretty much common sense in my world. My body, my choice... my life, my choice... my mind, my choice, period. ✨💝✨🙏🏼✨💝✨

A golden key to freedom...

It has been my experience, in my own life and also working with others as an intuitive healer, that even just looking for a positive light new perspective, and/or a positive new possibility or two, can bring a shift in any situation, sometimes a big one. 99.9% of us have brains that can spin out negative thoughts at any given moment… so what. Truly, no matter how negative our thoughts get, it only takes a few light thoughts to keep the momentum floating up, because consciousness truly is the foundation of everything and consciousness is love. So even your negative thoughts are consciousness, just like everything else. A bit like the poem Footprints in the Sand, even when we feel we are in our darkest times, Divine Grace will always float us up.

Worrying about negative thoughts is a bigger problem than the negative thoughts themselves, in my opinion. For me, when I am able to accept them as simply a part of my thought process I feel much more at ease immediately and I can then process and release them more quickly. Knowing that my faith, the many positive thoughts I have and all of the moments of love and gratitude that I feel throughout my day already float everything up feels most accurate in my heart. Nothing will keep us from having any negative thoughts, or difficult times, contrast is an important part of our experience. Trusting in the nature of consciousness, trusting Divine Grace in any form, trusting the love and gratitude in our hearts… no negative thought can weigh down the light that even one tiny drop of that kind of thinking creates in our lives. That is my experience anyway. Nothing is more powerful than asking Divine Grace, in whatever form feels close to our heart, for help to keep our lives on track and trusting that it is. 

I learned from my gurus to believe that everything happens for a reason, for my highest good, as a child. Holding that belief is a brilliant antidote to any negative thinking because it spirals literally everything up. It inspires ultimate trust and gives us the space to be human, to make mistakes, to have negative thoughts and experiences and still have wonderful amazing light filled lives. In my experience, the beliefs we hold have a lot more power in what creates our world than our thoughts do. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for reframing, finding new perspectives, and opening doors to new brighter possibilities, but finding and maintaining foundational understandings that support us to have faith and to trust the world that we live in is a golden key to freedom.

Contemplating the practice of consciously choosing our information intake.

I've been contemplating the practice of consciously choosing the information and perspectives that I connect with and the factors I use to decide. How it feels emotionally, heavy or light. Does it feel like love, solution, expansive, freedom? Is it helping me support what feels accurate and helpful in my own heart for me? Does it feel like freedom or does it feel confining? How is my body reacting to the information and what does that mean. For those of us that believe that everything is consciousness, that can really only be the one true fact because consciousness is 100% malleable, so everything that it creates is as well. Embracing that understanding changes the way we navigate. The emotions that any experience or information brings up can be shifted when the experience or information is reframed. That obviously will work in either direction, which is one reason that meditation can be very helpful. It teaches us to observe our thoughts without entangling ourselves in the story so we are able to see our patterns and decide what is still working for us, and what has become outdated and can be reframed and or released.

Consciously practicing reframing information towards lighter perspectives can be what some people call finding the silver lining, or even just realizing that our information or perspective could actually be totally wrong, or outdated. That is one reason that I love to find out that I am wrong about things, to have new information shift my own perception completely. That retrains my brain to let go of things that are no longer serving the momentum that I am wishing to keep in my life towards lighter, more fun, more easeful perspectives.

It can be very easy to open up to this when you realize that being wrong can be such a wonderful gift to us, right? It can be a happy surprise! I have worked with many people that have held the understanding that being wrong was a negative thing, that being right was always best. That is clearly learned behavior because it is obviously only the ego that cares about such things. The heart loves to learn, to grow, to be surprised and opened to new possibilities. So the heart loves to be ‘wrong’, ha ha ha. Obviously, there is no such thing as right or wrong on a higher level of understanding, but when being wrong can be a joyful experience and offer us the feeling of freedom when we find new information that feels right in the now. So being wrong is a beautiful thing!

Years ago I read about Buddha heads being cut off of statues in Asia by colonials, to make them easier to transport. What I read gave the impression that this was the only reason that Buddha heads existed. So for years, I had a bit of a weird and negative feeling about Buddha heads. I recently found out that is not true, that Buddha heads symbolize the Buddha’s enlightened state and the wisdom and wealth of knowledge that he attained. Yay for being wrong! Ha ha ha! I am not interested in information that opens me to fear but I will always welcome new information that gives me a more positive, fun and light perspective on anything!

It has been my experience that internal guidance and the enlightened beings that I have known do not tend to give warnings, plant seeds of fear, or point at anything we are not wanting in our lives. They might point out or bring to the surface fears we already have so that we may walk through them and overcome those fears. That is where practicing reframing really becomes incredibly helpful, ha ha ha. Reframing with humor is one of the best ways to lighten things up quickly. Finding the humor in any situation is a fantastic gift we can give ourselves. Think of Laughing Buddha, finding the humor in everything is incredibly powerful. It has been my experience that internal guidance always shows us where we are wanting to go. It shows us open doors, solutions, exciting new possibilities and redirects us using light and sparkle, rather than giving obstacles attention and focus. I know that I am hearing my internal guidance when I am in the throes of fear, and suddenly a lighter perspective explodes the darker one and gives me a wonderful laugh or burst of joy.

The momentum of higher perspectives is always from love and a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. The higher perspectives are obviously more planted in the knowledge of the play of consciousness, of the illusion, the maya, the vibrational nature of our world. The vibrational nature of our world makes it completely malleable, vibrating energy is not stuck, it is not solid. Solid is an illusion that we enjoy, it helps us experience our world more fully. It helps us play and learn and feel the confinement that then gives us the wonderful experience of freedom! And that is why the only truth is that everything is simultaneously true and not true. And that is why information is only as useful as it’s ability to support our chosen experiences, our goals, our dreams, our heart journeys.

That is why I try to be aware of the information and perspectives that I open myself up to and to find a way to either politely walk away, or set a boundary if necessary. If I find myself dealing with something that is creating fear I will work to reframe it, to find a silver lining or perspective that releases the fear. At times I have even been able to flip information completely, into information that actually shows me the true nature of the world as I see it… Love. When I am able to do that, it is the most wonderful experience of all. It is my understanding and experience that Divine Grace is pure consciousness, everything is made of consciousness and Divine Grace is Love, so everything is Love. That understanding gives me the ability to find my way through very difficult experiences and find my way back to my heart.

Again, that is why meditation and various present moment practices can be so useful. Being able to pause, observe our thoughts and emotions in the moment helps us figure out which information feels like it is supporting us, supporting our hearts. It actually helps us to get to know our own hearts, to find out what inspires us and gives us actual joy. Boundaries are incredibly useful in this world where we all are so excited to share our experiences and perspectives with each other. That is a beautiful and wonderful desire, however, our experiences and perspectives will not serve everyone the way that they serve us. Understanding that brings so much freedom to us, to our relationships and to our world. When we understand this, communication can be so much simpler, in both directions. Judging ourselves and others, and also taking things personally becomes more and more silly when we genuinely understand this, and that right there is such a wonderful freedom! Finding silliness can be the most wonderful cure for so many issues in life, ha ha ha.

Ok, I guess that is my piece for today so… peace out everyone! Love and silliness to all y’all.

The Essence of Yoga and Divine Grace

My third trip to India was in my mid twenties, I had my twenty fifth birthday not long after arriving. My dad and I took the trip together and were pretty much best buds. I was teaching hatha yoga at that time, I was in great shape and pretty much loving life in general. One day my teacher spoke about gratitude as a spiritual practice. She said that if you even just said thank you, just for everything, once a day that it would transform your life. Her words really touched me and I decided to try it. Saying thank you to her was as natural as breathing for me, because she had given me, and my family too, so much. So that same day when I walked up to see her, I bowed as is the custom, and as I placed my forehead at her feet I quietly said thank you.

I did this every day for two weeks, and every day I would go to a particular chant with my dad afterwards. It was a very joyful fun chant, one of my favorites. On the fourteenth day, I was in that chant singing loud and proud ;-) when suddenly everything burst into golden light! I'm not kidding, it was like a joyful explosion! I grabbed my dad's arm and told him, "Dad! Everything is golden! Everyone is golden! It's incredible! Are you seeing this?" He laughed and said no, he wasn't, but he was clearly loving my reaction. I was laughing and so happy, so free and so full of love and joy! The golden light faded but I spent about two weeks feeling like I was walking on clouds! It was so beautiful!

Not long after that I remember going to see my teacher to ask her about something. Growing up I had always felt free to ask her anything. I feel so incredibly blessed to have had her in my life in this way. I've always been a very independent thinker and doer too. I don't tend to join group decisions or be swayed by peer pressure. But growing up with my teacher, I had experienced the depth of her vision and understanding many times. I knew to the core of my being that every single thing she told me was absolutely the most valuable and useful thing for me to hear and follow, in that moment. I knew from experience that if she gave me an instruction and I followed it, it would take me where I wanted to go. Even if I didn't know where I wanted to go, she always did, and she would light the way for me. I did not have this feeling or trust in anyone else, ha ha ha. My dad would get a good chuckle from that, if he were still in a body. Perhaps he is anyway. :-)

So, anyway, I went to ask her advice about... something, and she looked me square in the eyes and said, "Now it is time for you to go to your inner guru for your answers." Then she pointed at a hat that was in a pile next to the girl seated next to her and the girl handed me the hat. It was a rather comically large, beautifully crafted and quite fashionable, straw hat with a long pink crepe scarf wrapped around it and flowing down the back. It looked just like something from Alice in Wonderland, which turned out to be a bit prophetic, in my opinion. At that time I was surprised and a bit disappointed that she did not want to offer me advice, but I absolutely loved my new cool hat! I didn't understand until much later, quite recently in fact, how unusual and important that moment and her words were. 

I moved to New York City not long after that, and started working as an assistant fashion stylist. The funny thing about that is that I had said many times that I never wanted to live in New York City. I had spent a month there when I was eighteen and visited many times, it wasn't that I didn't enjoy the city. I just felt it was absolutely not for me. Then as my third stay in India was coming to a close, I simply knew that New York was my next home. I could not have given a reason, and I don't think anyone ever asked for one. I loved living there too, I was there for six years. 

About two or three years later I contemplated offering private hatha yoga lessons to make some extra cash. I wrote to my teacher, asking about this felt appropriate because I had become a hatha yoga teacher by her grace and at her behest, in fact. I received a letter back that seemed really strange at the time. It said that I had permission to teach yoga now and at any time in the future, not hatha yoga mind you just yoga. I am paraphrasing because I haven't read that letter in a couple of years, but that was the gist. I had very specifically asked about teaching hatha yoga, which is a series of postures that prepare a body for meditation and other spiritual practice. Yoga, however, is a much broader term on one hand and a much more finite term on the other. If you click on the quote below, it will take you to the page where I found it.

“The essence of yoga is to reach oneness with God.” - Pattabhi Jois

Many past moments fall together like puzzle pieces when I look back now. I have been walking towards this work for most of my life, perhaps all of it. Going to my inner gurus for answers, that is what I do now on a regular basis. Although now my inner gurus, or guides as I now call them, are pretty good at making themselves heard whether I'm trying to hear them or not. It sounds totally nuts, and it sometimes feels that way too. But I have had too many confirmations, I have heard too many weird crazy things come out of my own mouth that were totally new to me. Things that I did NOT want to say sometimes. Things I would try not to say, come out of my mouth and I am thinking, "Oh my GOD, zip your lip, girl!" From time to time I have resisted saying whatever it is that I am hearing. I've tried not to say it but it's as though the information is trying to push it's way out of me and finally I just have to let it out. Every time that has happened, it has been the perfect thing to say, and it's always ended with my client thanking me for the work. 

I've heard other people speak of this experience, of feeling information or words pushed out of them, and it felt so relieving to know I'm not the only one, ha ha ha. That good old corroborative evidence! I've questioned my sanity at various times in my life for a variety of reasons, I suppose it's par for the course, and perhaps questioning my sanity is one of the ways that I hold onto it. That being said, I absolutely love what I do, I absolutely love it when I am able to help people find their own powerful internal connection to Divine Grace, in whatever way that works for them. I am often surprised at the amazing creative ways that connection shows up for people. That connection inspires my clients and helps them to let go of old patterns and to allow new possibilities they would not have thought existed. It's magical it really is, and it is ridiculously fun too. What could be better than that?