It’s been a couple of weeks since we last had tea and guess what????  The windows in the tree house are all open and the breeze is wafting through the apartment for the first time in what feels like FOREVER!  They say it’s supposed to hit 70 degrees today but that may be a little bit of a stretch.  Either way it feels completely refreshing to be able to breathe fresh air.  Sorry for the absence, I have been extremely busy writing articles for publication and creating a workshop for presentation.  Life has taken me on a roller coaster lately of steep ups and downs.  This seems to be have been the case for the past two years.  Those astrologers say that 2016 will be a less bumpy right…I could use that.  Nausea is getting to be quite a drag.  I can say that all in all I am coming off of this recent “joy ride” with a deep sense of insight and release.  Life has definitely served up some seemingly amazing opportunities lately as well as some things that unfortunately didn’t work out as I would have hoped.  Detachment from my expectations has been a constant life lesson along the way and staying present for what could be even better than I would have intended.  Yesterday I came upon a realization that was quite profound.  Along the journey in creating Soba Yoga http://yourwholehealing.com/soba-yoga/  I have been able to work through a life long struggle with self doubt, self judgment and lack of confidence.  In being presented with one of the situations that worked out to be not so great, I found myself capable of detaching from it and finding acceptance of what is truly going on in a way that I never could have before.  These issues have haunted me since I was young and have caused roadblocks for me for most of my life.  So what suddenly occurred?  Some clap of thunder?  Perhaps lightening or a burning bush?  NOPE.  I believe what occurred is that I began to chart a path away from the old garbage a handful of years ago that culminated in me beginning Soba Yoga last year.

You say…”how did you do that?  I want some of that.”  Well, to the best of my ability to process, here’s what I believe occurred.  I started to get fed up with my own shit.  For those of you that know me…you know I give it to you straight up.  I don’t sugar coat anything and have worked hard to reinforce a mindful edit chip from my brain to my mouth so not everything I think comes out like verbal diarrhea.  We have discussed how many life circumstances made me take a leap out on faith a couple years ago to start my own business. This morning I read this New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html?_r=0 and it reminded me of the internal process that lead to that external change.  A friend had told me about four years ago about this book The Four Desires by Rod Stryker.  I bought the book and read it cover to cover.  I couldn’t get enough about his philosophy that living a spiritual life also meant being able to provide for oneself in the real world.  Having been a struggling social worker for 16 years I really like the concept of helping people and helping myself at the same time.  Stryker had an exercise in the book where he asked you to write a eulogy in the voice of someone who knew you well and could speak to your loss from the standpoint of what your soul desired.  That was one of the single most powerful experiences that catapulted me forward.  I chose someone who knows me better than I know myself sometimes and wrote about what they would say if I passed away back then.  What was I leaving behind at that point you ask?  A lot of fear and lack of potential in fulfillment of dreams and aspirations.  I was leaving behind a legacy of not going after what I wanted in life and of being angry and resentful for it.  Seeing that down on paper was heart wrenching but inspiring.  It motivated me to take a look at what I was doing with my life and why I was spending so much time desiring a life I wasn’t going after.

Fast forward to the past six months.  I could never have imagined that Soba Yoga was actually related to that eulogy written several years back.  I now see how it is.  Moving forward and manifesting something that helps provide healing that is not being provided has in turn helped me heal a very fragile part of myself.  When I first started with the concept of creating yoga for recovery last summer I was just hoping that somehow someway someone would believe enough in it to give it a chance.  I think that was I also was really trying to believe in it so I could give it a chance.  Today, I don’t feel so entangled with it’s success.  It is shifting and changing and so is the vision.  It is building, not as fast or big as I would have liked to see, but it is building in the way it is supposed to.  In a world that is so focused on building business through attachment with the ego it is easy to see how I started by being the parent whose child was a bit of a narcissistic extension of herself.  Much like the Times article states, the way you get to the core of true bliss is by stripping away the layers of the status and branding symbols and getting to the core of “eulogy virtues.”  What do you want people to remember about you?  What message are you giving to people by the way you live?  As therapists we are taught to notice that the unspoken is often so much more telling than the spoken.  When we say one thing but do another not only is that confusing for others but it slowly begins to erode our character.  Our spirit begins it’s slow decent into a dark, dank hole.  I am now seeing that by rising out from the ashes like the phoenix and claiming that I had gifts that I wanted to offer that were not being offered, I began my assent out of the hole of my past baggage that was weighing me down.

Today, on this beautiful spring day, I notice a lighter feel to the way in which I move forward.  The more confident I am about where I am heading, the clearer decisions are that would have been gut wrenching in the past.  I move more freely knowing that ultimately none of this is really even about me.  It is about something much larger than me.  What people think, all the status and image means nothing in life.  It’s all a cloak that we wear; a shield of armor really.  As we strip back the shield, we get deeper into what really matters…and that is the beauty of transformation!

Cheers!