Yay! Day 30! Happy birthday to me! 🎂 I made it to the finish line... or did I? Today was a free form practice. Adriene didn't lead me through the asanas. She didn't even have a particular mantra, but let her viewers come up with their own. I chose the mantra "I Am Unique". I feel as if this year I am discovering my own truths and becoming the free-spirited individual that my soul craves to be. This doesn't mean that I don't have boundaries, but rather that I define the limits and where I draw the line in the sand. Taking back parts of myself that have been denied -- maybe for many lifetimes -- feels so incredibly liberating! I'm back and I'm here to stay. I'm finally discovering the real me. I Am Unique! Don't ever forget that you are to. And that is beautiful.
A few years ago, I read an amazing book by Kamal Ravikant called "Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It". I remembered this succinct advice today as I was delivered some news today that really saddened me. I sat on my bed and cried, thinking that it's one day to my birthday, and this so sucks! That's when my surviving cat Fjord (I lost one of my cat's in September) looked up at me with such unconditional love in his little green eyes and literally crawled in my lap and put both his little paws around my neck and allowed me to hug him. He just stayed there as proof that there is so much love still in the universe. I thought about Dickens Faire, which just yesterday my friend Jay had made such an awesome birthday present to me with, and how much love I felt from the whole experience of yesterday, and I thought love is all around me. It made me think of the lyrics by 90's Brit pop stars Wet Wet Wet and their hit single "Love Is All Around". Love is there, if you just look for it, and it comes in the most unexpected ways. And then I remembered to quote the late, great Whitney Houston that "learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all." Cue the dramatic musical crescendo, because this is the honest and beautiful truth." So today, I place my focus on a mantra I modified from Ravikant's self-love meditation. 'I love myself. I'm loved. And I am loving!' I recognize my value, my worth and my place in the Universe, and I send this love to everyone in the universe, to the persons places and things I have hurt, to those that have hurt me, and to everyone who supports me and my journey enough to love me right back!
With only two more days left in my yoga challenge, I have a lot to celebrate. Should it be the fact that I've come so far, The fact that I was able to reach back and grasp my ankle in a pigeon pose variation that had previously eluded my flexibility, or that fact that it's my birthday in two days and as an early birthday present a really close friend Jay treated me to my first Dickens Faire -- a Christmas, 19th century period-themed convention dedicated to the world of Charles Dickens? I have a lot to be both grateful and thankful for today. I'm basking in love, joy and appreciation. Day 28!
I really am grateful today. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm on the right track to greater abundance -- feeling the glimmers of the edge of my destiny forming from the ether. I'm hopeful. I'm starting to plan out the steps I need to walk in order to begin to create the reality I've been dreaming about. And the Universe is lining things up along my path. These are what Janet and Chris Attwood refer to as "markers" in "The Passion Test" -- goalposts that reveal themselves when you are headed in the right direction. And yes, I've had plenty of setbacks. And yes, that's all part of the road trip. I'm really grateful for all of the challenges and detours because they've taught me so much. I'm really grateful for the journey. I feel like I'll look back and find it's so much more satisfying than the destination. Time to put one foot in front of the other -- full speed ahead, dangerous curves and all!
Or rather I finished this statement because there are a few things I love to actively bring into my life -- abundance, love, peace, hope joy, and clarity? Yes clarity. In my journey things had gotten a bit cloudy I was gaining some amazing things, a musical community, honing my talents both as a writer and a singer, and making strides as a performer, but I had lost the clarity to give myself a single-minded focus and had put my spiritual lens in a blur as well. Events have happened that remind me that I also came to this plane to walk the path of the "wounder healer". I have the ability and the privilege to heal others as I am healing myself.
In today's Yoga Camp practice, Adriene said something interesting. She remarked sentiments to the effect that she had attracted her whole YouTube channel, Yoga With Adriene. I looked at her thousands of viewers and all the lives that she's affected included mine; as evidenced through these posts, and I am in awe. Apparently she is too. I felt compelled to look back at my own journey. I used to be painfully shy, I had no confidence, I lacked a purpose, and I was severely depressed. Then I moved to San Francisco under the most darkest of shadows, grappling with the sadness I was feeling behind my late sister's diagnosis with cancer. It was everything that happened from the time she was diagnosed to her death in 2014 that put my life on this sometimes devastating, and sometimes exultantly joyful road. I realized that I am finally owning that legacy and allowing more good things to come my way. It is my dream for my blog, Facebook and YouTube channel's reflections about healing to affect and help thousands of people as well. There. I said it. Cat's out of the bag. There's nowhere to go but up from here!
So today's mantra was a bit tough because I am working on letting go of my control-freak tendencies. That is to say that most them are based on how I allow myself to operate inside of the world. I am very aware that by it's very nature, control is an illusion. But I think what this mantra and practice is striving to get me to recognize is not necessarily a grasping, gripping kind of control, which is very anti-yoga in my humble opinion, but an acknowledgement that while we can't control external factors in our lives, we can control our reactions to them. I let me explore my edge, and by it's very nature, this mantra and practice actually called attention to all the places I was holding in and retaining body-mind tensions and allowed me to focus on letting them go. Today's practice was a treasure because in that very same places that I found conflict, I also found release.
So "a funny thing happened on the way to the forum..." or should I say yoga mat? I finally did what my inner control freak had been dreading, and that was transpose a practice. So for all those micro-managers like myself you will feel my pain when I tell you that today is actually day 24 and I did day 25's practice. My more 'hang loose' counterparts will be like 'so what?' LOL. What was my first reaction to this? To go all panicky and be like 'now what? The whole thing is out of order now! I failed. It's not...perfect...' Than something happened that gave me a "stop-the-presses" realization. I didn't do any of that. I didn't really care. I'm truly taking the first steps to release my monkey-mania.
I'm not going to fight Mercury Retrograde this time, but I'm going to let it work to re-form and re-fit my life, gently, sifting through, and methodically being the taste-maker of my existence; deciding what goes and what stays and what challenges I need to face up to once and for all and where I need to get clear in my life. Actually this is the second time I'm writing this because the first time my post mysteriously deleted itself. I'm guessing that Mercury Retro was at play again, helping me to refine my words for better consumption by the reader.
I decided that the mantra and yoga sequence in this practice were what I really needed more that the one that "belonged" on day 24. It just felt "right" somehow. Mercury came along to shake things up a bit and maybe even deliver a one two punch. But that's OK. The planetary alignments that are happening right now are teaching me that no matter if I get rattled or delivered a strong right hook, that I have the power to decide if it knocks me off my center or if it makes me stand stronger and more sure. I realized that I got this and so do you! The Universe, my yoga practice, meditation routine, crystal healing, belief in myself, my loyal friends and supporters, energetic healing, Mama Earth, Papa Sky, The Great Spirit, and all my guides and spirit helpers, they've all got by back to! We got this!
