You taught it to me

Do you ever feel like your good words or deeds go unnoticed? Sometimes I feel like I am just parroting myself...sharing a positive tid bit or helping individuals redirect negative energy or teaching a student I tutor about slowing downnnnnn or a new yogi in my class to protect their knee in a warrior pose....

And it feels like the words come out of my mouth...land out there in the world and just dissolve.

But sometimes someone reminds me of the power in my kind intentions and strong convictions. One of my intentions is to live in a way that is mindful and inspirational.

How do I do this?

I am constantly trying to be a better person. Searching for "the message" in challenges, and seeking to grow through joy.

One immensely helpful affirmation I continuously come back to...."I AM A MAGNET FOR DIVINE PROSPERITY"

Why does this help me?

Because it is a way of saying not only do POSITIVE experiences magnitize themselves to me, but as I walk through the world I am magnetizing opportunities, richness, joy, and peace to myself. Prosperity is not just about monetary wealth.

I was speaking to a friend of mine and she said "I have been saying that over and over ever since you taught it to me"

This friend was very skeptical of this whole affirmation thing (it sounds a little kooky, can you blame her?), but recently I noticed a shift in her. She has been more joyful, more positive, she has more self-belief. And you know what? She landed her dream job.

Coincidence? Perhaps.

But I believe the quality of your thoughts DO have an impact on the quality of your life. And they certainly did for her.

Do I take credit? Not really. This isn't about me. I am just doing what I believe I was put on earth to do. To grow through joy, to take the lessons I learn and share them.

My Dharma

Recently I find myself fine-tuning my activities, thoughts, words, and deeds in order to maximize my peace and stability. I am grateful for the many people that have taught me I have choices-every minute, every second-that contribute to the quality of my life. Life isn't happening to me it's happening for me. How true and sweet those words are. It is so easy when still and quiet to let them resonate. To really SEE.

But sometimes I forget. I come out of this glittering white cocoon I have woven and experience fear, resistance, shame, and doubt. This is just contrast. This is just a reminder that there is more to want.

This year has been full of contrast and more than any other time in my life I wanted so badly for things that have in the past seemed like they would always be there. Success, support, guidance, security. I yearned for these things with my entire being and I believed they would come. Wisdom is knowing that if there is darkness there must be light. Wisdom is knowing to ask for help. And to take help even when you did not ask for it.

I have so many guardian angels here on earth.

I have so much to live for.

Yoga has been an unbelievable support. More than yoga, my breath. The bonds I have made this year in a time of crisis and uncertainty are beyond any that I could have ever imagined. My yoga family is loving, strong, brave, and pure. The 48 person hug I received every weekend this winter was my breath when I forgot to breathe.

I believe I was able to receive this and everything amazing that has happened since (my fabulous boyfriend, my amazing new career, my job teaching amazing and strong students at google every week, my flourishing work as an educational consultant that takes me to beautiful destinations, my beautiful family, etc. etc.) because I lost things that were taking up the space. The things I did not need fell away to make room for more and better.

I especially want to mention Taylor Wells for continuing to help me through her writing. When I feel myself losing touch with my spirituality and inner guide I read her blogs on super-mom.com and on her Best Life Ever blog from the Boston Herald. They remind me I always have a choice. To breathe. To get on my mat. To listen to beautiful music and read beautiful inspiring words. That to stay present in this moment is all I really have to do because this moment is my life.

Sweet dreams to all of my old friends and new. Just one more reminder (for you and for me) that you are enough. You are beautiful as you are. It takes as much energy to be brave as it does to be afraid. Being exactly who you are is your gift. It is your dharma. To spread happiness like wildfire and inevitably have happiness return to you.

Wishing you joy, love, light, clarity, wisdom and peace. The best night. The best life. All you seek to manifest. Or more. Or Better.

Namaste

30 Things

Jack Canfield says one of the keys to having clarity about direction for your life and your greater purpose is making this list: 30 things you want to be, 30 things you want to do, and 30 things you want to have. Here goes (in no particular order):

BE
-happy
-healthy
-peaceful
-balanced
-kind
-savvy
-giving
-fun
-light
-comfortable
-calm
-loving
-confident
-compassionate
-loyal
-punctual
-worldly
-aware
-realistic
-hopeful
-pragmatic
-energetic
-helpful
-altruistic
-stylish
-pure
-genuine
-strong
-open
-courageous

DO
-Travel (New Zealand, Fiji, India, and Brazil)
-Expand my yoga life
-Keep running
-Finish training for my half marathon and run it strong
-Make lots of money doing things I enjoy
-Learn how to make sushi
-Advance at my job
-Buy a very powerful camera
-Get Lasik eye surgery
-Write and publish a book
-Read at least a few pages of a book every day
-Let go of anger and resentment that only serves to hold ME back
-Show everyone in my life how much I love and appreciate them
-Improve at my inversions
-Beat Tom at Scrabble
-Study anatomy
-Study biochemistry
-Visit Amanda and Paul in San Francisco
-Spend lots of time at the beach
-Share my life with someone I love
-Get a masters degree in science
-become a fluent Spanish speaker
-Get to Kripalu
-Get back into spinning
-Make more green juice smoothies
-Pamper myself
-Take drawing/writing classes
-See NY theater
-Hang art that I love in my room
-Meditate


HAVE
-Inner peace
-Comfortable quiet time
-Good dreams
-A sense of self
-Direction
-Great hair
-Footing beneath me
-Meaningful relationships
-Security
-Stability
-Health
-Abundance
-Prosperity
-Perspective
-Love
-Acceptance
-Clarity
-Wisdom
-Joy
-Support
-Connection
-Access to art and creativity
-The feeling of being nurtured
-Patience
-Opportunity
-Energy
-Inspiration
-Affection
-Attention
-Fun


That felt very nice.

Buddha works at the New Balance Outlet

The perfectionist inside of me is screaming out "why am I not pleasing everyone?" My inner yogi is in lotus pose chanting ohmmmmmmmm and saying "I am enough." Who do I listen to? Do I listen to the fear and dread-that perhaps I am not the perfect friend, that I don't say the right thing, that I'm guarded, I look out for myself, I'm moody, I demand an unreasonable degree of loyalty, I'm sometimes less than punctual, and I blurt out my thoughts when my friends are in the middle of really important sentences?

Or do I reaffirm that I am loving, kind, loyal, patient, giving, generous with my spirit, and full of enough sunshine or piss and vinegar depending on the moment and on the friend to make everyone feel like I have their back?

Sometimes it's easier to give in to the doubt and negative talk like I'm in quick sand and I might as well just go with the sinking...rather than struggling to grasp on to anything solid that might lift me up.

I've been running a lot. I'm training for a half marathon and it's SOON. I guess being nice to myself and giving myself credit for the good is kind of the same thing as training for a half. The first run is uncomfortable, cramps, doubt, physically and emotionally wrenching.

This slowly eases up over time. Sometimes I'm even excited to run (I can barely believe I just wrote that). And soon I'm totally in the moment. Feeling the cool air on my face...consumed by the purity of nature. I feel like I'm flying-soaring above my body soaking in the seemingly infinite expanse of glistening river.

When I'm practicing loving kindness towards myself I feel that same peace. Like I no longer have to struggle against this moment...hoping it passes quickly so I can be in the next one already. Like everything I do and say is perfection because it comes from my heart and my heart is pure.

Over the course of training I've absolutely fallen on my ass on slick steps and looked up, my body stinging, to see a stranger, puzzled as to how I could be so clumsy, and kept running. I've felt dehydrated, I've questioned myself, and I've left work in the middle of the day for an emergency PT appointment when I thought my soreness could be a stress fracture...only to realize I should probably trade in my 5 year old cross trainers for running shoes. Whoops.

That's the process sometimes. Full of falls and stinging moments. But it gets easier. Everything worth having is worth working for. Happiness is worth the practice, endurance, and heart ache that ensues on the journey. It makes the sweet sweeter.

I had such a mental block about running at first. I felt resentful that it meant giving up time in the yoga studio-a place where I have found space to develop spiritually. But there's always a lesson. Today's? We aren't human beings having spiritual experiences...we are spiritual beings having human experiences. They are always there for us to integrate and grow from...more importantly they help us heal. Life means being cracked wide open...being raw...and rebuilding...again and again and again...like my feet hitting the pavement. Sometimes you luck out and someone gives you a tip-there are shoes that will soften the blow...I'm meditating on my gratitude for the tips. For each run...the ugly ones...and the ones where I soar. Giving thanks for all of the people I have the privilege of calling my friends...whether or not I'm "getting a 4.0 in friendship."

Maybe now that I've unburdened these thoughts I'll sleep peacefully. Maybe they'll even help somebody.

Baggage

What exactly is baggage? So in literal terms it's a container filled with your things. It can be quite useful. Maybe you put your clothes in there and carry them with you on a trip, maybe it's got all of your earthly possessions and takes up enough space for a UHAUL...I personally think that airports have the right idea in how they approach this whole baggage thing. They force you to weigh your baggage and it can't be over the weight limit. If it is, not only do they charge you lots of money, but you can't take it with you on the plane. Why do they do this? Because if everyone took all of their baggage on the plane with them do you know what would happen? THE PLANE WOULD TANK. 1,000s of pounds of CRAP would literally sink the passengers quicker than the speed of a rock dropped in a pool of water.

Maybe there's something to that.

Maybe, if there was no one there to monitor us, we would just take absolutely everything we could, thinking we couldn't survive without it. And everyone would be squished together with their "die-without-them" items, sucking in air in order not to suffocate from the lack of room.

Why can't someone weigh our professional, relationship, and spiritual baggage the same way? Wouldn't it be so helpful if before we could smuggle into our new job our preconceived notions of how things will go, what others are thinking of us, and how we have struggled in the past, we could only pick a few select pertinent experiences to reference and the rest had to be relegated to the cargo area?

Or with relationships...if we couldn't drag in every fight, every tear, every painful ending, but instead pick our top three moments to reflect upon in the present...the rest could be in a storage space with a fee of 100 dollars per month and limited visitation rights or straight up thrown away.

How different would life be if that was the case?


For now, without an actual legal limit on my baggage toting, I'm going to have to use the honor's system and take a hard look at what I'm lugging on my back. The seemingly benign thoughts that tend to spiral through my head leave me feeling wound up and tense and paranoid and totally drained, so I'm proclaiming right here and now that I'll be doing self-check in. I think I'm over the limit for the day and feeling lighter already because as we speak I'm vowing to cast aside some of this dead weight.

I can feel myself breathing easier already.

Abundance

There's this thing I learned in grad school...that stress is when you have this feeling like everything that you want and need is sitting on top of you...just out of reach...on the other side of your existence...and you can feel it, but have no idea how to get to it.

That's how I've felt for a long time. I have been reading a lot of these good old PPY Teacher Training requirements, including You Can Heal Your Life, Miracles, and Moving into Stillness, and I've realized that instead of trying to claw my way out from underneath the suffocating barrier between me and all I desire, there is an entrance way through which I can walk to get there.

So you know the expression, "when the student is ready, the teacher appears." Well I am the student, I'm ready, and it feels like these books are my teachers. I've learned the lesson, thank you universe, ALAKAZAM! Where is the doorway?

So how do I get through? Well, it starts by acknowledging how silly and crazy it actually is to feel suffocated by abundance! Once you identify that that's what it actually is. That's about 80% of the battle. Otherwise we think "I deserve this anxiety. I deserve this suffering. This not knowing. This pervasive worry. It's all I've known and all I will know. Otherwise, why would I be experiencing it?"

But what we should be thinking is "I have the tools to access all that I want. It is all inside me. The universe is abundant. Once I acknowledge the abundance it is mine to access."

Well so far it's been about 2 weeks of working with these principles and the following has happened: Had the best Valentines Day ever; kicked ASS at demo-teaching and felt proud and full of light among my peers; got offered an incredible opportunity that signifies a new, wonderful chapter in my life...

Suddenly trains seem to come quicker, I feel happier, lighter, I am able to identify other people's moods and separate them from myself "cut chords of the past" and "shield my chakras" if you will.

I feel I am able to touch people with this new lightness I'm feeling and it's getting easier to meditate. I feel myself glowing, surrounded by white light, signifying the closeness of myself to the divine. And it feels so soothing. I feel so protected and rooted. Day by day I grow stronger. I am the seed unfurling and becoming a tree. Without struggle, but with grace.

I am also more sensitive to the positivity of others and how sensitive and reactive others are to my positivity. For instance, I spoke to someone today who said "well sure, bad things can always happen, but to be honest if you have faith in yourself and know what you're capable of then why would you think that they will?" It's so easy to forget how powerful our own knowledge of self can be.

My two most favorite Louise Hay affirmations are so simple:
"I approve of myself" (three or four hundred times per day until you actually do)
and
"I am a magnet for divine prosperity" (how much ass does that one kick?)

I also adore Stuart Wilde's assertion that if we believe ourselves to be wealthy and live life believing in the abundance of opportunities and joy then our lives will become our actions. The universe only knows what you tell it. So why not strongly believe in and live as your highest self? Why not embody pure potential?

Why not take 3 minutes...close your eyes...and be still...ask to be rooted, ask to be lifted...ask what your spirit loves

and do it?

Chakras, The Lumbar Spine, and French Fries

Imagine me, in typical bag-lady fashion, plopping down on my white leather sectional in my gorgeous Cambridge loft apartment, peeling off layers of sweaty spandex, and flipping furiously through my training notebook for the page with my notes on chakras, so that I can show my loving and saintly boyfriend what I've deduced is the next step for me on my path of spiritual evolution, and what his chakras mean. When I try to explain that I think he's aligned overall, with his spiritual upper chakras: his strong intution, deep compassion, ability to wrap his head around the big-picture, just as activated as his lower chakras: his groundedness, will, and stability. Whereas I live in the upper chakras, floating above the daily grind, giggling at the notion of trying to fit my round-booty-peg in the square holes all around me. As one of my fellow teacher trainees said (quoting Joan Rivers) "Just because it zips, honey, doesn't mean it fits." Just picture me jumping up and down, laying on the floor, trying to zip up and into the prescribed "right" course of action. Not a pretty sight.

So there we sat, him slowly understanding and maybe even accepting, my realization, that I could do with some grounding, but that I should never give up the amazing gift of my spirituality and ethereal mindset. Thank goodness the three upper and lower chakras are connected by the fourth, the heart. His and mine are both open, we become flooded with compassion and, in turn, humbled by loving kindness.

It kind of makes sense that the neurotic cerebral long island yoga loving surf haired flower child would meet the golf playing number crunching incense burning ohio hippy college grad and fall in love.

Which brings me to the lumbar spine...I kid! I just love when the most warm, sweet, gaga loving, guided meditation guru of a yoga instructor, Alex, comes at us with his model pelvis and talks about our vertebra like points in a game of battleship. My faves are L4 and L5...susceptible to injury and easily protected by proper alignment.

So really the functional anatomy and spiritual skeleton I'm developing through my 24 hour per weekend intensives have led me to conclude I should eat more salt. Salt comes from the earth and I was told by a reiki master I need grounding. More french fries. Sounds like a good plan to me.