In the world of yoga there is something called the 108 day yoga challenge. It is where an individual sets an intentions to practice yoga for 108 days in row. I have recently seen many of my friends make a commitment to this challenge and it has been incredible to be a witness to the powerful transformation that can occur when we commit to anything for 108 days.

March 1st marks my birthday month and the beginning of what I would like to call my 108 Day Writing Challenge. This month always brings up a lot of reflection for me of where I have been this past year, where am I going, and what intentions do I desire to create for myself. We often teach what we need to learn. For years I have guided my clients in showing up more authentically, more boldly, more empowered in their life and yet, I will admit, have held back my own voice for fear of being truly seen. Wounds from the past have kept my inner voice and my inner power locked inside with lingering questions of if I allowed myself to be heard what if I am not accepted? What if I am not appreciated for who I am? What if I actually have nothing to say? I am excited to embark on this challenge as when we engage in our deeper inner healing as human beings, we support others in having the space to do their inner healing as well as we begin to show up differently in our life and with others.

In the last year I planned a wedding, got married, closed on a house, and engaged in deep inner work to break down the preconceived notions of who I thought I was to gain a deeper understanding of who I actually am. Showing up differently in the world when we begin to release patterns and habits that were only set up from a place of protection to not get hurt from the world can feel messy, awkward, and uncomfortable. And yet, if we want to grow, if we want to evolve, we must step outside of our comfort zones for that transformation to occur.

So while I don't have a set intention for what I want to see happen this next year in my life, or even what I desire to occur for committing to writing for 108 days, I want to commit more to getting comfortable with feeling discomfort. I find a lot of the work I am engaging in with my clients lately has been to acknowledge and embrace our entire human experience and all the many emotions that can arise on our life journey. When we take away labels on our emotions as a "good" emotion or a "bad" emotion, we get to step into curiosity to explore what sensations arise in our body when different emotions are present. Those sensations can then guide us in how we are processing any moment without any story attached to what we are experiencing. Different emotions can produce different sensations and when we welcome in and embrace whatever is present, that is when our emotions and sensations can actually decrease in their intensity as we release any internal battle of fighting what is.

I invite you all along on this 108 day journey with me to explore embracing discomfort, embracing anxiety, embracing frustration and confusion and grief and pain and joy and elation and anything else that might arise in the next 108 days.

So I have been working on Active Therapy for many years but I have recently realized I have shared bits and pieces of my story and how I got here but I have never shared the whole thing.  After three intense years through graduate school, I have had to come to terms with my own sensitivity and thus show up more in my vulnerability and let myself be SEEN (a task that over the years has become fairly difficult).  So I would say the journey into my gut began in middle school.  I have always been a highly sensitive person (many friend's voices pop into my head at a young age telling me "don't be so sensitiveeeee.").  I didn't know how to respect and listen to my emotions and judged how intensely I felt things.  Sitting in front of the television eating an entire bag of Doritos was not an abnormal thing for me as a young teen.  So food and emotions got tied together at a really young age for me.  When I felt an emotional emptiness here came food to "save the day" and numb me out.

By the time I got to college my body was beginning to get fed up of me not listening and choosing foods that did not sit well in my body.  Digestive Disorders run in my family and with a combination of wonderful genetics and a sensitive body which was being fed disrespectfully I began to have digestive issues myself.  I first tried to ignore it and adopted a fashion style of wearing dresses all the time to cover up my bloated and pained belly.  But when the pain began to get worse in undergrad, it was the first time I thought there has got to be something I can do.

First going to the western medical route, I got a colonoscopy and endoscopy done with results that came back fine and thus I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or IBS, or just B.S.  At the time of diagnosis, I wasn't ready to delve into my gut, I wasn't ready to heal.  Instead I ran further away from myself.  I didn't know what I could or could not eat, I didn't know what would upset my stomach, and this upset my perfectionistic nature of wanting to get it "right." I ate less and less out of fear of pain and uncertainty of how my gut would react to food.  I lost way too much weight and was too embarrassed to tell others what was going on with me.  Finally, when it was too hard to walk up a flight of stairs I knew it was time to search for some help.  Therapy, nutritional counseling, physical therapy, and beginning yoga slowly started to put me back together and begin to listen to my body.

Learning Ayurveda was the first time a lightbulb went off that changing what I put in my body could change how my body expresses itself.  My journey into my gut kept getting deeper and deeper: becoming a yoga teacher, a health coach, an eating psychologist, and then deciding to go back to graduate school to study body psychotherapy. Years later after that first diagnosis of IBS, I still had not dealt with the emotions held within my gut.  The dietary changes made a huge difference in ridding myself of severe pain, but the bloating and just feeling generally uncomfortable in my gut continued at random intervals.

Delving into my gut with a somatic therapist was definitely scary at first.  I couldn't even imagine what was in there.  It was just this big black hole.  Through talking, imagining, bringing shape, color, and lots and lots of crying things that were being held within my gut began to release. And thus after three years of graduate school I studied the gut brain ( the enteric nervous system) and wrote my thesis on how to cultivate a relationship with the gut brain.

I'm not going to wrap this journey up with a neat bow.  My journey with my gut and my sensitivity continues.  Sometimes I feel like my gut and body are just a sponge for what ever is happening around me.  Sometimes I still don't listen to my gut, sometimes I still don't listen to my cravings but I learn from all of these situations.  Sometimes I still have digestive upsets but now I know how to listen to what my gut is trying to relay.  I have no idea where this journey is going to take me but I am in awe and fascination of my body and my gut.

I know I haven't written in a few weeks.  I will admit and share that falling in love kind of took me away from my commitment to writing.  Yet with Grad School starting up again next week, I need this outlet more than ever.

Have you ever been so confused by your own mind that you didn't know which is up and which is down?  Reflecting on this past summer, my existence has literally been blown out of the water.  Every single external stipulation I had set up for myself as a kid to find happiness has now been met.  It is utterly freaking me out haha.  One would think that if you finally got everything you have ever been asking for that you would jump for joy and settle into bliss and that whole movie style happily ever after stuff.  But o wait....I don't live in a movie....and there is no such thing as happily ever after.  Life keeps going (the parts we never see in a movie).

My mind gets in the way of experiencing this happiness.  I upper limit myself to my own experience of joy in my life.  It has been fascinating watching my mind reach as far out as it possibly can to create some drama or story to find something "wrong."  We as human beings can completely classically condition ourselves just like a dog and I have conditioned myself to continuously be searching for more.  While this has been beneficial, constantly pushing me to move forward and pursue more than I can sometimes physically and mentally handle, this tendency has now become somewhat of a detriment.  Now when I have the opportunity to accept myself and my body just the way it is, I find myself still searching.

My mind is running frantic, not understanding the shift that is happening.  It is holding on to its conditioned neural pathways as hard as it possibly can; just like an addiction.  We think of drugs, alcohol, food as addictions, yet we rarely talk about how our own patterns, routines, habits, and as I have coined, mental masturbations as addictions as well.  And the interesting thing is, we find support and guidance to change our external addictions to drugs, alcohol, and food, yet I see so many settle on, "this is just the way I am and the way I have always done things and that will never change" when it comes to our own mental blocks.

As yoga and meditation have taught me, thoughts are just thoughts, they are not facts.  While my thoughts can cause an emotional reaction, as they sometimes disturb me, again they are not reality.  Reality truly is within our own perception, but the one thing we can always come back to when our mind is running is what is fact.  For example right now, at 2:34 in the morning with a running mind like a hamster on a wheel that hasn't quite figured out how to get off yet, the facts are I am sitting on a medicine ball, my feet aren't totally touching the carpet entirely as I am up on my toes, my throat is really dry, and my jaw is tight.  That is truth, fact, what is happening in the present moment.  There is no interpretation, no reading into, or analysis of why.  It isn't necessary.  This is just what is happening right here and right now.  And even verbalizing the facts, coming back to my body toward what is real, brings me out of my head and back into my body.

I invite you to try this little exercise the next time you find yourself going through your own mental masturbation.  Lie on your floor, sit on your couch, and just begin to breath and notice.  Describe what is currently happening in your body and what you feel and every time your mind tries to speak up you gently soothe your monkey mind and then begin again to notice what is real.  There can be a powerful transformation and change that occurs when we begin to allow ourselves to slow down and just for a moment experience our life exactly the way it is.  Life can be rather simple after all.

Breath in.  Pause.  Breath out. Pause.  Breath in.  Pause.  Breath out.  Pause.  It is within these pauses that I come back to myself.  It is within these moments of stillness, of clarity that I see through the clutter of my mind and I am able to come back to what is real.  During the pauses within my yoga practice is when I remember that I am not alone.  That no one is truly alone.  We are always in relationship with ourselves and we always have the capacity and capability to walk outside of our door and introduce ourselves to a complete stranger or walk bare foot outside and connect back to mother earth and our relationship to the external world.  When I am flowing in between poses within yoga and I take a pause to hold myself, to stay still, to be present; that is when not only the pose unfolds before me, but my life unfolds before me reminding me to let go of control.

It is when we allow ourselves to pause, to be quiet for a moment that we come back to ourselves and what is most important.  The more we can empty ourselves out and forget about who we are, who we think we should be, and drop any definitions of ourselves that we can become open to being receptive to life just as it is.  I have experienced when I stop searching for that thing I think will "make me whole" or "make me happy" that is when I realize that my wholeness and happiness are already right there residing within me.  A friend of mine told me a story this afternoon that Wayne Dyer once told about two cats: (it went something like this but I added the exact video of Dyer telling the story if you want to listen to it)

There was an old wise cat and a small kitten in an alleyway. The old cat saw the kitten chasing its tail and asked, “Why are you chasing your tail?”

To it the kitten replied, “I’ve been attending cat philosophy school and I have learned that the most important thing for a cat is happiness, and that happiness is my tail. Therefore, I am chasing it: and when I catch it, I shall have happiness forever.”

Laughing, the wise old cat replied, “As I’ve gone through life, I too have realized that the most important thing for a cat is happiness, and indeed that it is located in my tail.  The difference I’ve found though is that whenever I chase after it, it keeps running away from me, but when I go about my business and live my life, it just seems to follow after me wherever I go.”

The answers to all of our questions, I truly believe, we already know.  It is just a matter of asking the questions to our wise selves and finding a moment of stillness to listen.  Nourishment comes in all different forms.  Sometimes it is unclear what needs to be nourished: our mind, our body, our soul.  And since food was our very first form of love in this world, ultimately the first thought we have when we need some kind of nourishment is food.  Yet, I have learned from my yoga practice, from taking that pause, that when I ask myself what I really want, a lot of the time it isn't food.  I need touch, understanding, connection, communication.  I don't have a sweet tooth but I need sweet smells, sweet hugs, sweet glances from loved ones.  Then it is a matter of cultivating acceptance; of listening to what we do need, and that perhaps what we desire isn't readily available at that moment.

And then we come back to the pause and the fact that life moves on, things change, and what we need will change too.  So I invite you, right here, right now.  Breath in.  Pause.  Breath out.  Pause.  Come into the pause with me and truly experience your emotions with all their sensations, colors, and textures, for they remind us that we are alive.