Reflections of a Decade

Over the past decade
I stopped smoking cigarettes.

I fell in love at least three major times.
I loved with all of my heart,
and each time
felt that all of my heart was broken...

This past decade
one of those loves took his own life.

This past decade,
I lived with a partner
for the first time.

This past decade
I got a Master’s Degree
became a therapist,
and started a business.

This past decade,
I learned how to clear energy
with my hands,
and how to hypnotize people
into their past lives.

This past decade,
I became so much more aware
of myself and others.

I stopped eating meat and dairy.

I started to love myself more.

I stopped practicing Bikram yoga,
and starting dancing my ass off.

I traveled to India and Nepal alone,
and hiked Kallalau Valley with friends.

This past decade I left my home
in the busy, pulsating grids of New York City
and created a wonderful life here
in Hawai’i Nei.

This past decade some things happened
that I had only dreamed of before.

This past decade some things happened
that I would never had expected.

This past decade
felt like it had
more ups and downs
than ever before.

I rode Life
like a rollercoaster.
This past decade.

STEPPING INTO NEPAL

One of my most favorite things is the first inhale I take when I step off the plane and into a new country. It’s that moment when I can ingest a whole new world, and allow it to permeate into all of the cells of my body.

Similar to India, Nepal has a sweet and earthly smell to it to me, with a little hint of incense that must be imprinted from years of ritual. The smell instantly felt both familiar and foreign...

Early morning chanting and random firecrackers that send pigeons and monkeys into chaos puts smiles on my face, and the smiles continue as I exchange a “Namaste” with the eyes of local Nepalese in a true moment of acknowledgment of the light within us both.

At the monkey temple in Swoyambu, a Nepalese family temporarily adopts me for a few hours and we marvel at our connection. I feel like a true part of their ohana (family) and as we watch hundreds of monkeys stealing plastic water bottles and picking bugs out of each other’s hair. we acknowledged those monkeys as our ancestors as well. Everything feels inter-connected...

One monkey was climbing the temple walls while gripping and dragging its’ dead baby — a saddening, powerful and shocking reminder of my own resistance to letting go of attachments.

In the stunningly energetic Durbar Square in Patan, I pray to ancient depictions of Ganesha to remove any obstacles of this journey and I notice the rumblings of a sour stomach disappear almost immediately after I left the sacred Museum where he stays.

The statues of the Hindu and Buddhist Gods and Goddesses resting in Patan seem to be sending me downloads and energetic messages about my future. They speak to

me in a way that no other statue has spoken before...

The smell of fire here in Nepal — like India — touches my Soul with delight. It’s different than the smell of a fire in the West.  I’m certain I’ve had many happy nights in other incarnations staring into the flames or use them to cook food with my loved ones in this part of the world.

Katmandu is a rich City but the pollution and smog there is quite unbearable, and my lungs could only stand it one full day so I’m heading West to Pokhara, a hippie village / City that I’ve felt drawn to since planning my visit here...

It’s so wonderful to feel the freedom to go with the Flow here and follow my intuitions that lead me to the most perfect people who aide and guide me on this journey.

I wonder why it’s sometimes easy for me to lose that capacity to flow in the humdrum routine of the Life I’ve created in Hawaii...

Everything has been magical and seamless so far and I’m so incredibly grateful for that.

Insidious Emotional Trauma & Lessons of LOVE

I recently started working with my own talk therapist to dive deeper and heal my own emotional trauma.

The thing about emotional trauma, is that it is insidious...and sometimes we can go through life not even realizing that there were profound moments in our lives that have had a tremendous impact on us.

Most trauma is *relational*, as my dear friend and colleague Somatic Experiencing therapist & trauma expert Lauryn Arkin-Kimmel recently pointed out to me.

Even when encountering a trauma like a car accident, we feel the deep emotional pain of feeling alone and isolated in our recovery.

And the way we love often becomes colored by the way our loved ones loved us and the way we perceived and interpreted love. We often re-enact those patterns in our current relationships.

Whatever your wounds are, it’s futile to get angry at someone else for not showing up the way you want them to.

Accept others for who they are and who they aren’t. That’s REAL LOVE.

Find compassion in another's limitations, and first and foremost find compassion with your own limitations.

Everyone has their emotional trauma that they bring to the table. If you take it personally, you’re just creating a space for victimhood and suffering.

When you truly know your own wounds, you break free of the cycle. You can give yourself what you’re looking for from others...and then don’t be surprised if they end up giving you what you wanted all along.

Relationships are complicated, but the simplest formula for success is to treat yourself with the utmost compassion and respect.

Treat yourself as if you were your only child. Have reverence for your pain, but know that it’s only old stories being resurfaced.

You get to choose whether to keep playing the story over again or whether it’s just old energy coming up to clear.

Magic happens in the awareness. Always. 
When you really know yourself, when you can study yourself like an observer, then you *always* know exactly how to treat you...

You Are Not EVER the Same. EMBRACE CHANGE. ✨💫🌟

You can NEVER actually be stuck or stagnant. 

In fact, in Theravada Buddhist phenomenology we learn that your body is made up of kalapas, subatomic particles about 1/46,656th the size of a piece of dust.

When Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha became enlightened through Vipassana meditation, he discovered that our bodies (and this reality) are simply kalapas that arising and passing away at a rate that is so rapid it actually makes you believe that everything is solid and real.

It is not. 

You are literally never the same.

So don't think for a moment that you are stagnant or stuck.

You are ALWAYS changing.

And no matter what you are going through right now, it is guaranteed to change at some point or another. So...

What if you could be happy knowing that everything is always changing?

What if you could be happy no matter what and allow yourself to change?

What if you let yourself and Life show up differently in every moment?

Who would you Be if you really knew that you were actually wavelets of energy in this reality that are merely arising and passing away?

The Insidious Trauma of Mistrust

The great thing about being a therapist and holding space for people to clear their old shit is that I get to see my own shit right before my eyes.

We are ALL each other’s mirrors in this Life, but my line of work is designed to bring the mirror into the forefront of awareness. It’s one of the things I love best about doing what I do. I get to clear myself by holding space for others to clear too.

So many of my mirrors lately have been working with mistrust. 

And it’s been a powerful awakening to my own issues of mistrust. 

I can contextualize it: my parents grew up on the streets of Brooklyn. Every day they were exposed to the Fears of inner-city life. 

Every turn they thought someone was out to rob them, get one of over on them, take from them...in fact, they finally moved to the suburbs of New Jersey when both their car was broken into (with a note attached to saying thanks for all the great 8-tracks!) and their apartment was robbed.

I was born in the Jersey suburbs and spared the perils of City life...until I consciously chose to move there after college. 

This past summer in NYC I ended up letting go of City life that much more, and I got clear on just how much “heart hardening” there was in my own 12 years of Brooklyn life as a young adult.

Now I can’t walk by a sick stray kitty without getting incredibly upset. 

How I would ride the subway with homeless people dirty and smelling up the entire car and beginning for money and not even look at them...is beyond me. 

How could that not harden the heart and create mistrust in this world?

I see how I still carry that mistrust in my cells.

We all do in some way, shape or form.

We all grew up with some kind of trauma — whether it was ours or passed down from our lineage.

Most of us are caught in some kind of cycle of violence or abuse just by being Alive in this world. 

Some of it is so deeply hidden in the unconscious that it’s easy to miss.

The trauma of mistrust. Insidious and sneaky as the perception of it actually is. 

The beautiful thing though, is that the more we become aware of the ways our own mistrust has taken form, the more we shed Light, the looser the grip becomes on us. 

And I DO believe with 110% of my heart that we can clear this mistrust...clear it for ourselves and clear it for the collective. 

You've Come a Long Way, Baby.

Many people don’t know that I had a whole other past life in THIS life working in New York City government and politics. 

This first pic is of me sitting on the steps of City Hall, where I could often be found smoking cigarettes.

The other encapsulates what I was doing the other couple of hours when I wasn’t working 65+ hours a week — drinking at a local pub!

Past life, indeed. 

It’s interesting that Spirit has been giving me lots reminders of this old life lately...presumably for some healing.

I hated the government in college, but I wanted to move from New Jersey to NYC with the rest of my friends when I graduated school and somehow by the time June of my senior year came along I was offered a job for a State Assembly Member in Manhattan (because even then I was a powerful manifestor ;).

When I first started working in government at the ripe old age of 22 I was so naive (and still VERY much unconscious and asleep). I actually thought that maybe I would be able to create the change that I wanted to see in the world from the inside, instead of using the protest and resistance tactics that I had been accustomed to.

For a while I really did. I was a part of making some cool shit happen in New York City — like the emergency contraception pill being offered over-the-counter in City pharmacies, legalizing gay marriage in New York State, increasing transgender rights, etc.
I also saw the shadow side of government. As I worked my way to “senior staff” of the New York City Council I saw up close and personal all of the ugly of politics — the hidden agendas, the insatiable egoic desire for power, the political favoring and posturing, lies, deceit, etc.

Fortunately, I started to practice yoga at the end of my tenure in City Hall...and I began to wake up. 

I’ll never forget the moment when I first experienced a glimpse of transformation and spiritual awakening:

I am in the basement of City Hall, finishing up a conference call at some obscene hour and out of nowhere I have my first known moment of being able to step outside and observe myself. I hang up my office phone and experience a stillness like I never have before. And I think, “I don’t belong here. This is not what I want to do with my life.”

And thus, the transformation began. A couple months later I quit my job to become the therapist I had dreamed of becoming, but always wondered if I was too crazy to pull off. ;)

So here I am, ten years later. And I have declared a moratorium on anything government-related or political from my life because of the bad taste that was left in my mouth from my experiences...but maybe it’s time for a breakthrough. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the baby that I dumped out with the bathwater...

An astrologer in India told me that in the future I would teach meditation and spiritual principles in government. It would be so wonderful to contribute to the system in that way, given where I was and what I have learned since.

I am grateful for all the skills, knowledge and expertise that my previous life awarded me. It’s definitely assisted me in creating the structures and organization required to build and grow the business I have now.

And upon further reflection, I’m so grateful for how far I’ve come over the past ten years. I’m grateful for yoga which catalyzed my life transformation. I acknowledge myself for having the bravery, balls and courage to leave something that was no longer in integrity for me...and for continuing to leap and jump into different versions of myself, as I move forward to unlock who I really am.

The Divine Masculine

I’m getting very present to my masculine side and taking a look at how evolved it is.

We hear so much talk nowadays in conscious communities about women embodying the Divine Feminine...but what about the Goddess embodying the Divine Masculine as well? 

How can we take action without our old constructs of force, manipulation, and competition? How can we generate from our hearts instead of our heads?

And what about men embodying the Divine Feminine inside of them, too. We all have aspects and energies of both genders. We all harness the Sun and the Moon, the yin and the yang. How can we move towards a reality where Love prevails and the dichotomy dissolves without us even looking deeply at the dichotomy within ourselves?

True Freedom

When we remember that we are consciousness, that we are everything, that there’s only one of us here, and that love IS the answer we can unhook ourselves from the social norms and mores that keep us bound inside a box. 

When we remember who we really are, in that moment the box blows it’s lid and real freedom is possible. 

We are SO burdened with the “should” and “shouldn't” that not only do we not even realize they’re there, we end up internalizing them and imposing the shackles on ourselves.

When we remember that we are everything that IS, we rip a hole in the reality that has been, and weave a new tapestry of a reality that could be.

THIS...this is the pathway to True Freedom. 

Eyes As Slits

When I close my eyes,

I feel awareness expanded.

I see some flecks of light, 

energy moving, 

bursts of red and orange.

I feel the same awareness 

When I look inside of my body.

a tight hamstring,

Electric energy spewing from toes,

an open heart.

When I open my eyes,

I feel no "I".

I have eyes as slits,

That rip from nothing 

Into Everything.

Gates into a single perspective,

The projector of one movie,

That IS all there Is.

Back to the Basics: Polulu Valley

This was the first time I hiked to the second valley alone, and this accomplishment has showed me my progress since I first got here 3 years ago.

Sometimes I forget how FREE I need to Be in order to be in alignment, and to Be happy.

What a blessing to be reminded again. I asked Spirit how and it showed me the way. I just keep asking questions, opening up the energy and letting the journey show me the way...

And up here, at the top of this gorgeous Valley pondering how on Earth did Spirit create all this beauty, and create me, and have me stand here in my little pink shorts and grant me the grace to witness this beauty...only then do I remember that Spirit is the greatest mystery of all. Spirit is not to be understood...and I learn my lesson in humility.

Love YourSelf.

The most important thing you can do is LOVE YOURSELF. 

In essence nothing else matters, because it all stems from Self-Love.

Everything that you manifest in the outside world is simply a product of how you think of yourself. 

Your world is a product of your beliefs --nothing more and nothing less.

BEing from LOVE vs. DOing from Fear

Sometimes I have to remind myself that success does not blossom from the Doing, but from the Being. 
You can DO 1,000x from a place of Fear, or You can BE once from LOVE. 
And the choice is always yours. ❤
‪#‎reminders‬ ‪#‎BELOVE‬ ‪#‎stopdoingsomuch‬ ‪#‎nycsummer‬‪#‎unlockwhatyoualreadyknow‬

A Portal of New Fabrics Sent from the Heavens

Isn't it amazing how when you least expect it, life throws you a curveball that rocks the foundation of everything you thought you knew yourself to be?

In one split second that inexplicable yet magnetic connection to another, that unexpected situation or event, that sudden life-altering loss or gain that changes the game as you formerly knew it.

A portal of new fabrics sent from the Heavens to offer you exactly what you need to become a you-er you.

I am bewildered, awestruck and humbled by the ways in which LIFE is constantly giving us opportunities to stretch, open and release. It's all there if we choose it, and the expansion seems limitless.

What a beautiful game we all chose to come and play, and how utterly magical the mystery of it all is!