Rebirth Hot Yoga Studio and Yoga Birth Method Blog

I was reading a book, still my favorite book to this day, Napoleon Hills Law of Success.  At first it seemed so overwhelming and yet so simple.  I remember thinking it just isn’t as simple as he makes it sound.  Make a contract? follow his rules?  So I did.  The first thing that stood out was WOW how can I limit my goal to just one thing when I have so much going on and so much thatI want to do. How can I create a plan for each one of these things.  Again, I felt pulled in all directions.  Overwhelmed.  Honestly, I had to sit with this task for a long time.  When I finally wrote that contract it wasn’t done on a whim.  I wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rethought and so on and so on.  My main objective was to sum up all my goals into one meaningful powerful goal that encompassed everything I wanted to accomplish with out sounding scatter brained.   I wish I could sit here and tell you that it took a few hours but it didn’t it took months maybe a year.  Sitting down to that task was the best thing I ever did because it wasn’t the completing of that task that changed my life it was the process of understanding that task.  Now, understand this Napoleon Hill does not ask what do you want to achieve  he asks HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU WANT TO MAKE.  The reason I find this so brilliant is because it teaches us to value ourselves.  If I can’t write a million dollars its because I don’t feel worth that.  If you sit down to the task and feel intimidated by a dollar amount thats your first issue at realizing you have some work to do inside.

The question posed a lot turmoil for me.  The biggest one is how could I possibly write a ridiculous amount of money down and then tell people thats what I want to make?  How can I write a high amount and then set myself up to fail?  The road seems so loooooooong to even achieve such a high pay check for anything I do. The list of negativity that I complied is huge.

It dawned on me one day out of the blue, I was sitting at Starbucks in Malibu thinking God, I wish I could just stay here.  I had a weird feeling of unease and restlessness in me.  Within a few moments I just felt OMG why can’t I.  Why can’t I stay here.  Why can’t I live here.  Whose life is it anyway.  Now I can’t really tell you how I connected the dots because I don’t know. But somehow I had a mission to figure out why I felt I couldn’t do something that I really wanted to do.  And it all came back to me, the life I had been living, my personal upbringing, my need to have responsibility and yet the resentment I always felt for having responsibility.  I honestly can say I figured it out right there that afternoon.  I DON’T NEED TO EXPLAIN ANYTHING TO ANYONE.  There is no right God or wrong God, there is no burden of bearing children, there is no guilt over past relationships and things done wrong.  It’s just all me.  It’s me and its only me.  Now, I don’t want you to read this and assume that it is some perceived notion of utter and complete selfishness that came over me because it is completely the opposite.  What I discovered that day is that I want to live in California.  How was I going to do that.  Everything in my life came together.  All the work in my yoga career, my divorce, my children in some odd way I realized that I have a life and desires and dreams and they are taking ME somewhere.  Somehow I discovered this indescribable faith in something higher that was truly the only responsibility I had.

So in a nut shell I started to GPS my life by realizing my first role in writing my contract was to position myself in the vision of God.  If your reading this and trying to understand how I can help you and faith is not something you have then this might be a little bit of a challenge.  But, as I explained faith was always something that was important to me I just didn’t know how to express it in the forefront and I think that was always my problem.  Putting work first, having to struggle with a career and raising small kids on my own, overwhelming guilt and feelings of failure, guilt over making choices that effected my marriage and then feeling guilt over any success I had because I just didn’t deserve it. My karmic wheel just never stopped turning. Bottom line, it never stops turing for anyone.  That day in California I realized there is nothing wrong with wanting to be here.  There is nothing wrong with wanting anything in my life and I DO deserve anything I want.  I knew this because I just had a sudden cleanse of the past.  I had this overwhelming knowing that everything I have done in my life was never in bad conscience. Have I made mistakes, yes!  but I never set out to be selfish, hurtful or a bad mother in any way.  I just wanted to build a career and achieve goals.

Maybe I had a moment with God, I don’t know and I don’t want to get all cliche.  But I realized that the only thing really truly important is not what I wanted career wise, dollar wise or even success wise but how I was going to be seen by God.  Everything changed.

The next time I picked up Napoleon Hills book it made sense, I knew how much money I wanted to make.  I wrote $1,000,000.  Now let me break this down.  I want more than that.  I want as much as the sky allows.  But it is a number I have written because to me it holds the most value among people. It’s a realistic number that instantly opens doors for people if they thought they could have a million dollars. The reality of it is that what I truly want is not the money but the sense of worth that the money gives me.  You see if I had a million dollars it would give me the luxury to go to Africa and care for the mortality rates of pregnant mothers, I can help educate teenage women to gain self confidence, it gives me the ability to one day own a donation only studio.  To afford my children the ability to see the world.  There is so much I can do with a million dollars and don’t get me wrong, I would be shopping in Beverly Hills.  I am human and a girl.  But I have come to realize that I no longer confined to my past, I no longer have to answer to the people that have judged me my whole life, I no longer have to waste my time feeling guilty over things that I can’t change.  I no longer have an obligation to walk some moral standard that others have set up for me when most of those people have no moral compass of their own.  I have to answer to one person, thing, power what ever you want to call it; GOD.  If every thing I do from the moment I wake to the moment I sleep is done in the utmost good faith of being good with him then I AM OK.

Now here is the next step in this journey, when you have resolved to follow a moral standard between you and your God, it won’t be without circumstance, judgment and chaos.  Why? because we still live among other people.  When you follow your path in good faith you will still be held back by those that will put you up against their own beliefs, you will be judged based on the standards and morals of others who don’t believe your faith is as good as theirs, they WILL call your faith SELFISH.  How do we manage this new found position in our lives.

How do we find true faith and trust it isn’t just selfishness?  How do we follow our heart feel good in our relationship in a higher power and feel different about all the things that once held us back?

What does this mean?  To mean “GPS”-ing your life is almost like connecting the dots.   Looking at where you started, facing your past,  understanding your life’s twists, the ups and the downs, establishing a sense of peace, patience and letting yourself be lead to where you are going.

I personally feel that the hardest part of life is not really grasping where your going.  I mean, its easy to set goals, its easy to have a picture of what you want to accomplish but it all becomes a race against yourself.  We seem to scramble our way to our end means not really getting the fact there is is no end.  As soon as we get somewhere our wants and needs change and we suddenly want something else.

I am the fist to admit that I thought I knew what I wanted or even what I want in life but I have taken so many side roads and the end picture seems to change for me all the time.  I have come to realize in the last year that my end is not permanent.  It never will be until it REALLY is the the END!  That end to me is crossing from this darkness and moving into true lightness.  But until that day comes, I am here and my goal is to live the best life possible.  To be the best I can be and most importantly to guide others into embracing their best as well.  I truly feel blessed that Yoga came to me in my life.  I say that it came to me because I didn’t search it out.  I didn’t even know what it was until a friend asked me to go to a class.  I was mesmerized.  Something inside me clicked and I heard this voice this is what you want.  And then came the journey.  Before I really dive into this series of blogs on how to GPS your life, I want you to understand a bit about where the words within me come from.

I won’t sit here and preach that I had some hard crazy life, and all of a sudden this yoga saved me.  In fact, it’s the opposite.  I had a good life.  A pretty stable happy life.  Yoga in a way changed me.  It took me on a path of self discovery that even I wasn’t prepared for.  More than anything I wanted to dive deep into its meaning and unravel some mystery of life.  The spiritual came a lot later into my journey, at first I tackled the poses, like most of you, the power, the strength, the stretch, the movement was so addictive that I embraced the push harder into a pose philosophy. Challenge the body, the more my students struggled the better a teacher I thought I was.  Over the years, things changed so many times.  My personal life always paralleled my business life.  Whatever I was going through personally I used it as my teaching style.  When I was up my class was fun, when I was down my classes were hard.  My teaching was an outlet to living and dealing with my circumstances.

Eventually, I started feeling empty again.  I felt I hit a place where the poses weren’t enough.  I turned to spending more time getting into buddhism…. then hinduism… then mediation retreats… for the most part these spiritual outlets bought me spiritual resolve.  Understand though I was raised to believe I’m Catholic.  As I dove into these religions, I justified Krishna, I pushed the Karmic wheel of dharma, Among many other beliefs that worked.  But, yes the big BUT… there was always this guilt that I wasn’t in a Catholic church.  that guilt really prevailed when my parents died.  Especially after my mother died.  I felt I HAD to attend mass to be close to her.  All the while, again, the void kept coming back. No matter what, as spiritual as I thought I was, something was always and I mean always… missing.  I have no doubt in my heart that something bigger than us exists.   I have never doubted that when when we die there is more.  The problem I felt inside was that I didn’t really know what to believe and how to let it truly guide me in my life.  On one hand I felt like a fraud teaching yoga and not truly embracing Hindu beliefs, or Buddhist right to compassion.  I really did try to live by it all.  but I knew it wasn’t me.  then on the other side the overwhelming guilt for not attending catholic church.  Never mind just attending but for questing the catholic faith and feeling so not in love with the concept of Catholicism that I should have been feeling.

To put that aside for a bit, I want to also share my goals as this nagging feeling inside that no matter what I did business wise, no matter how much I succeeded it was never good enough.  When I say not good enough, I am not referring to wanting more financially cause that was never the case.  Yes, I did do well financially but inside me I wanted more… and it wasn’t money.  This was the hardest thing I had to work through all these years.  This nagging lack of completion kept me stirring my brain down different paths.  From studio, to studio, to fertility clinic work, to creating the Yoga Birth Method, to developing mats, writing a books, doing DVD’s, becoming a doula, doing trainings across canada and the USA, speaking engagements. It all sounds crazy and overwhelming especially being single and having to kids that were growing up in the wild environment with me.  As I look back these are the things that I personally need to learn to connect as dots.  As many paths as I have taken, the spiritual struggle, the soul struggle, the mental struggle lead me realistically only down one path.  It’s the path that I am going to share with you.  It’s what has given me the ability to learn how to GPS my own life.