Author: Ally Hamilton

Happily Ever After…

stephenkingA lot of people do life like a movie. You know how it is when two characters come together, and then a conflict arises, and they separate, or they fight, or there’s a misunderstanding, and then some other event pushes the story forward and there’s a shift, and maybe the two people come back together and we have our “happy ending”, and then the credits roll? Like, they get married, and ride off into the proverbial sunset?

 

Really, in life, that’s the beginning of the story, not the end, but a lot of people think that way. If I just meet the right person, I’ll be happy. The end. If I just graduate from a good school and get a great job, I’ll be happy. The end. If I just buy a big house and have a few kids, I’ll be happy. The end. Did you ever see those National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, where the Griswolds head to Walley World, and have this insane journey to get there, only to find that it’s closed when they arrive? Or the one where they head to the Grand Canyon, and are so furious and frazzled and exhausted when they get there, they look for two seconds and go? This is pretty much what happens when we get so caught up in our destination, we forget to enjoy, or even take in, the experience of traveling and connecting and observing and being, and when we finally get to wherever it is we’ve been going, we don’t really know what to do.

 

The chapters are always unfolding. If you think the happy ending begins when you say “I do”, you’re forgetting that a relationship is a living, breathing, entity that needs to be fed or it will die. So many people get wedding fever, and then they experience marital depression the day after the big event. Or kids work like crazy to get into a good college, and are burnt out by the time they get there and end up partying for four years. Maybe the graduation day from said college is exuberant, the key-note speech is poignant, but the year after is like ice-water in the face. Often, the way we’ve envisioned something is not the way it turns out to be, and when reality fails to meet our expectations, we freeze, or we numb, or we panic or we internalize the experience. We think it must be just us flailing and floundering around, confused and surprised and, weirdly, unprepared, because college doesn’t really give us the tools for life, any more than dating prepares us for marriage, or pregnancy prepares us for that first year of motherhood. Most of the biggest, most dramatic changes in our lives require on the job training. We learn as we go, and there isn’t a lot of time to process our inexperience or fear or surprise.

 

Life is not waiting for any of us. It’s happening right here, right now, and we are in the flow, or we’re out of it, but the flow doesn’t stop and it doesn’t care if it’s meeting your expectations or mine. I think there are some life skills it would be smart for us to teach, like how to balance a check book. Just practical, necessary stuff. How to create a budget. How to be a good partner. How to listen, and how to communicate with kindness and compassion. How to recognize the voice of your intuition. How to nap with your baby when you have a newborn. How to ask for help when you need it. It would be great if these things were taught at home. The other night I took my kids to see “Into the Woods”. It turns the classic fairytales on their heads. They loved it, and I enjoyed it, except for the part where (spoiler alert!) Prince Charming cheats on Cinderella with the Baker’s Wife. And the Baker’s Wife, it should also be noted, cheats on the Baker, who happens to be caring for their newborn at the time. Anyway, I talked to my kids about this after the movie. I told them I wanted to be sure they understood it’s not cool or okay to be kissing other people when you have a husband or wife, girlfriend or boyfriend. They assured me that they knew this, and my daughter, who’s five, then said, “Don’t worry about it, Mommy. You can’t find a real prince in this world, anyway.”

Of course, she meant we don’t have royalty in our country, but I thought it was pretty hilarious, and I told her that, actually, you can find a real prince in this world, but you have to look carefully, and that people show you who they are by what they do. Anyway, I don’t get it right in every moment, or anything, but my point is, a lot of this stuff does have to happen at home. We can’t hope our kids’ teachers are going to take care of the difficult or awkward conversations, or that they’re going to teach our kids to be compassionate and kind and fully present. Many of them do. Many of our teachers are absolute godsends. I’m just saying, none of us can afford to shirk our responsibility when it comes to creating a generation of people who, hopefully, do it better than we have so far.

 

I really do feel there’s a shift happening. I think a tremendous number of people are recognizing the old formulas we were sold and taught just don’t pan out. They don’t lead to that happy ending. I think a lot of people are hip to the fact that nothing external brings long-term peace and fulfillment. We all have to work for that, we have to dig for it. But just in case anyone reading this is still thinking that happiness is something you chase, I figured I’d go ahead and turn that fairytale inside out. We are always in process. We are always changing, and so is everything around us. If you want a happy ending, you really have to figure out how to live each day well. Then the days will end well, and so will the weeks and months and years, and one day, hopefully one day way out ahead of us, the happy ending will come because life has been so full of love.

Wishing that for you,

Ally Hamilton

With Strong Determination…

thichIn large part, our ability to be at peace requires our resolve and our discipline. I am not suggesting that’s all that’s required. There are things that happen in life that would bring anyone to his or her knees. I’m not a yogi who’s going to tell you that you can choose to be happy in every moment, because I believe that’s unrealistic and alienating for people who are suffering great loss. Grief is a healthy response to heartbreak, but short of tragedies that befall us in life, much of our suffering does, indeed, come from our thoughts.

A lot of the time, happiness is a choice. Of course we all want to be happy, we even addressed it as a given right in our Declaration of Independence, but often, in our pursuit, we get snagged on our attachment to a particular outcome, and we suffer if anything else should come to pass. Sometimes we spend a lot of energy worrying about things that never happen, and that’s time we won’t get back. Sometimes we boil ourselves replaying old situations as if we could rewrite them or turn back time. The trick is to catch yourself as fast as you can, and to be vigilant. The days are precious. The moments are precious. We really don’t want to lose too many of them traveling into our past and future, because life isn’t happening in either of those places.

Awareness is clearly part of the equation. If you know you have a tendency to “future-trip” and make yourself sick over all the things that “could” happen, or you recognize your predilection toward revisionist history, you want to be on the alert. That way if you’re driving somewhere, or folding your laundry, or washing the dishes, you can catch yourself if you start to spin, and bring yourself back to the present moment. In order to choose the thoughts and habits that strengthen you, you have to understand you have a choice. This is a huge gift of a consistent yoga and seated meditation practice. We train the mind to focus on what is happening right here, right now. We use the breath as an anchor point because it’s always happening in the present moment. If we pull out our meditation cushions, and sit up and become aware of our inhales and exhales, and somewhere along the way we notice the mind is drifting, we pick it up, and begin again. There’s always the potential to do that, on a cushion, or at your kitchen sink, or behind the wheel of your car.

There’s a Pali word, “Addithana”, and it means “resolve”, or, with “strong determination”. If you practice Vipassana (Insight) meditation, as I do, then you already know this word, because we use it to refer to those meditation sessions where we’ve decided we are not going to move. Maybe the back aches or the knees hurt after we’ve been sitting for a time, but we don’t move, we just observe sensation, and notice that it’s always changing. It might not be comfortable, but it’s interesting, and that practice truly mirrors life. Even if we do nothing, things are always in motion, things are always evolving and changing and shifting. Not all of those changes are wanted, but we don’t have control over that. We just have the opportunity to work on the way we respond. If we aren’t paying attention, we miss the shifts, and we lose the power to make a choice. We’re carried along, being pulled this way and that, up and down, victims of circumstance; that’s how the mind is wired, but you can rewire it.

The thing is, we can make all the plans in the world, and it’s fine to do that if it gives you a sense of direction. In fact, I would encourage anyone to live with intention. It’s a relief to uncover your particular gifts and set about the business of sharing them. That, in itself, is fulfilling, but I wouldn’t get too caught up in making longterm plans, because your plans are likely to change. This is true in big ways, and in small ways. When I go to teach a class, for example, I always have a plan. I think about what we’ve been working on, what we did in the prior class, what themes feel right, what parts of the body I’m targeting, potential peak poses, all of it. Then I walk into the room and look around and see who’s there, and whether or not my plan makes sense. Sometimes I know immediately I have to scrap it. Sometimes I modify as we go, based on the energy in the room, and a ton of other factors. Maybe there are three pregnant mamas in the room, and I’d planned a deep twisting class. I’m not going to follow that plan. Again, that’s just a tiny example, but it’s really true of everything in life. We set our course, we have our intentions, but we always have to factor in the unknown. The unexpected. The curve ball. The moment of inspiration. The shifting circumstances around us. The way everything can change in a split second. We always have to deal with what’s in front of us, and leave room to be surprised and amazed and grateful. Life is not obligated to bend to our will, and it probably won’t. Our best bet is to stay present, to develop a practice that keeps us in tune with our intuition, that leaves room for curiosity and non-attachment, and that teaches us not to waste time.

In order to have a great year, for example, I’d really focus on having great days. What can you do to nurture and strengthen yourself today? What can you do to support the people in your life today? What would bring you joy, right now? Is there a chance you could make someone else’s day by picking up the phone to catch up? Is there anything you could do, even for twenty minutes, that would make your life easier? Anything you’re allowing to pile up, that’s going to be much harder to deal with than it would if you just marked a small amount of time each day to tackle it? Maybe you could start the day by thinking of one thing or one person or one quality you possess that brings a smile to your face, and maybe you could end the day like that, too. I’m just saying, there’s so much potential to cultivate some beauty and some love, and if we do that every day, if we string together a bunch of days in which we feel alive and engaged and present, then we don’t waste time, we celebrate it, and those days turn into weeks and months, and really, I believe that’s how we have a happy week, month, year, decade, and so on; that’s how we live our lives in a way that feels good. That’s how I try to do it, anyway.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Happy New Year!

Ive-learned-that-youAs we close out the year today and set ourselves up to begin again tomorrow, it’s a good time to think about what you might release that isn’t serving you. It could be an attachment to a certain outcome that just isn’t going to happen. This can be difficult or even heartbreaking to relinquish, but sometimes we’re gripping so much, we’re using up a lot of energy that would better be spent opening and trusting and allowing. As always, we cannot control circumstances, or other people, or what anyone else will want or say or do or need. We can simply work on the way we respond to what we’re given, and on the way we’re showing up, without looking away, or pretending that things are different. That doesn’t serve anyone. Maybe it’s a way of being that’s creating obstacles for you; a particular stance, or lens you’re looking through that’s coloring everything you do and say as you move through the world. Maybe it’s the way you’re thinking of yourself, or the way you’re treating yourself, or it could be a habit that’s weakening you or taking you prisoner. It’s possible that you’re holding up your rage and blame as a shield, and it’s also possible you’re pushing your anger down. There are all kinds of ways we can sabotage ourselves.

The thing is, life doesn’t wait for any of us to get it together. We do or we don’t, and either way, the clock strikes midnight tonight, and a new year begins. This is a gift, regardless of what’s happening in your life, because as long as you’re alive, there’s potential. There’s potential for joy, for peace, for love, for laughter, for the feel of the sun on your face. There’s the possibility of love so deep and mind-blowing, it will take the breath right out of your lungs, and fill your whole being with gratitude. There’s the chance that you could help someone, in big ways or small. There’s the chance that you’ll do the work to know, accept, honor and celebrate yourself, so you can uncover your gifts and share them with everything you’ve got. There’s the prospect that you could create something gorgeous and unexpected and needed, like incredible love within you, and love all around you.

If things aren’t unfolding the way you’d hoped or wanted or envisioned, I’d get really concrete about your goals and objectives. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions because they tend to be vague, and they usually address symptoms rather than root issues. “This year I’m going to lose ten pounds” might sound concrete, but it’s not meaningful. Are you having an adversarial relationship with your body? Do you struggle with your body image? What’s your relationship with food? Are you in a constant state of deprivation, with occasional binging because you feel so starved? Are you carrying an extra ten pounds around, or are you buying into some insane vision of thinness? Do you eat when you feel afraid, lonely, angry or bored? If you don’t get at the underlying issue, the “resolution” will be out of reach, and anything you write down on a piece of paper will probably lead to feelings of disappointment, shame and self-loathing. No one needs to start the year with a list like that.

Most New Year’s Resolutions fall under that umbrella. “This year I’ll meet someone.” Why do you want to meet someone? Are you feeling good about yourself, and longing for connection and the chance to share the love you’ve cultivated? In that case, a better objective would be, “This year I’m going to take a cooking class, or sign up for salsa dancing, or play golf on Saturday mornings, or fill-in-the-blank with something you love to do.” Because if you get out there and do the things you love, you’ll meet other people who also love those things, and you’ll connect on a deep level, whether we’re talking about friendship, or something romantic. If you want to meet someone because you feel desperate since all your friends are getting married, or you feel empty inside, or you think someone else is going to complete you, you’re in trouble, and you’re setting yourself up for heartache. We always have to get at the “why” of things. Why do we want what we want? What’s driving us? We have to know ourselves, and that’s another reason I love yoga so much. It’s a process of coming to terms with who you are, and figuring out how to integrate everything. Everything you’ve been through, everything you want, everything that’s true for you. If you’re in pain, make it a priority to explore healing modalities. Make an appointment with a therapist. Find your local yoga studio and try a class. Book a massage. Go for a hike. Listen to music that feeds your soul. Connect with yourself.

My point is, try to get very clear about what’s blocking you or holding you back, and then avail yourself of the tools you need to start healing. We’re always in process, but sometimes people avoid their pain and run from that kind of work because they think they’ll be overwhelmed. The reality is, the longer we run from our pain, the longer it rules our lives. That is a fact. The more we work with it, acknowledge it, deal with it, the more we take our power back. Your life belongs to you. It doesn’t belong to your past.It belongs to you, and what you do with it is up to you. I believe your very first priority is getting right with yourself. Nothing else flows until we do that. If we aren’t happy on the inside, if we aren’t at peace with ourselves, nothing external will make it right.

If you’ve been chasing love, approval, affection or self-worth, figure out why you’re doing that, and get yourself some support, so that you can have the feelings and urges and impulses without acting on them. Obviously, I teach yoga because it changed my life, and I believe if it could do that for me, it could do that for anyone. I love sharing the tools that helped me make the biggest and most important shifts in my life, and continue to help me to do that. But maybe there’s a different path for you. Get passionate about figuring out what you need to be at peace with yourself, and don’t stop pursuing that until you’re able to live your life in a way that feels good to you. If you’re struggling and suffering, and have been for quite some time, then you know you’re not going to solve that by midnight tonight, nor do you need to feel any pressure to do that. But take a step today. Do one solid, tangible thing to nurture yourself. Remember that there’s always the potential to start again, in every moment, in every breath. Begin again. Wishing you the happiest New Year, and a 2015 full of love, laughter, hugs, joy, great surprises, good health, and healing if you need it. I’m so grateful to be in conversation with you all, you have no idea. Here’s to more love in the coming year,

Untie the Knot in Your Heart

We-all-have-an-old-knotThe holidays can be a beautiful time of year filled with family, friends, laughter, and a little more time to relax and enjoy, but they can also be a time of loneliness and longing, of regret and despair, and of too much time on our hands to dwell on the “what if’s” and “if only’s”. You can make yourself sick with that stuff.

A lot of people suffer from the holiday blues. If you’ve recently lost a loved one, they’re particularly painful. The grief is compounded by the intense longing to share more time with the person we wish we could hug, when it seems everyone else gets to be with family and friends. Basically, the holidays magnify everything. If you’re happy right now, that happiness is multiplied in the sharing of the experience. If you’re in pain, the pain feels even larger, and more defeating and overwhelming.

Sometimes we’re derailed by our expectations and “shoulds”. We have ideas about how things should be, how life should be, how people should be, and how we should feel. And sometimes our expectations are not realistic. Remind yourself that no feeling is forever, and that you don’t have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes. And also, short of grieving the loss of someone due to death, or heartbreak of any kind, try to be disciplined. Again, this does not apply to people who are grieving, because I’m a firm believer that you have to allow yourself to feel your feelings and lean into reality as it is. But short of those knifing losses, be disciplined with your mind. Don’t allow yourself to spiral down, or feed a sad story, or contract against your experience. Open to it, acknowledge your pain or envy or longing, but don’t feed it or wallow in it, because it will become hard to breathe.

If you notice that you’re doing a number on yourself, pick your mind up and choose some thoughts that will strengthen you. Maybe this holiday season will be tough, but who knows what 2015 has in store? I’ve certainly lived through some challenging and lonely holidays. It’s not easy, but then they’re over and life moves forward, and the truth is, you really never know what’s around the bend. Your world could be turned upside down in good ways or difficult ones, on any given day, and with no warning. That’s how life is.

Maybe today is challenging, but tomorrow, anything could happen. You might have an idea that lights you up and inspires you and sends you down a road you’d never have imagined taking. Maybe you’ll meet someone, and you won’t even recognize the way your life looks six months from now. I’m not necessarily talking about romance. I’m just saying, leave room to heal. Leave space to be surprised and amazed. If this holiday season is rough, and you have it in you, find a way to uplift someone else. That will definitely lift your spirits. And do take some time to focus on what you do have, right now. When we feed gratitude, we remember the gifts in our life, and how many things are going right, and that sets us up to come from a place of abundance, rather than fear or neediness. We really can take so much for granted. It’s a gift to wake up, even if you’re in the midst of despair. Just having this experience of being human is a gift. Having a healthy body, a place to call home, food in your fridge, people you love beyond words, who also love you and see you and cherish you. These are the most important gifts in life. Just the potential for connection is huge.

Hang in there if you’re having a tough time. You’re not alone. Sending you love, and extra hugs, Ally Hamilton

Celebrate the Light

We-all-walk-in-the-darkWe like to label things and keep them neat and clearly defined, but most of life takes place in the grey areas. We really wouldn’t know despair if we’d never felt joy. We wouldn’t appreciate loyalty if we hadn’t been stabbed in the back. We wouldn’t receive the gifts of being seen and understood unless we’d felt invisible and discarded at some point. We wouldn’t celebrate the light if we hadn’t wandered so long in the darkness. But sometimes we want to make our experiences, or other people, all one way, or another. All good. All bad.

You can feel a person’s actions or choices leave a lot to be desired, but still allow for the possibility of remorse and evolution. We’re always in process, and most of us learn the hard lessons by screwing things up. Usually, how it is around us is a reflection of how it is within us, so if we’re rigid or unforgiving or harsh or judgmental, it’s likely we’re all of those things with ourselves, first. And that isn’t a fun way to live. Constant abuse and torment from the inside is a prison. But I think a lot of people live this way. Don’t you hear people say things casually and often, like, “I’m such an idiot! I can’t believe I did that!”, or, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just can’t get it together.” If we said those things to other people under similar circumstances, we, and they, would probably be horrified. Imagine if a close friend made a minor mistake, like taking a left instead of a right, and you called her an idiot, and wondered aloud at how she could have been so dumb. Not super nice, and she probably wouldn’t want you driving shotgun very often. Imagine if your bestie was going though a tough chapter and you said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you and why you just can’t seem to get your sh&t together.” No more bestie for you! Why we might believe it’s okay to talk to ourselves this way is a mystery worth solving. Feeding a loving inner voice is a gift you give to yourself, and everyone you encounter.

The point is, none of us is perfect. We are such solitary creatures in many ways, and we’re all complex and loaded with history and triggers and unconscious drives unless we work to bring this stuff into the light. We all have our “default settings”, or the potential to play an old tape before we realize what’s happening. I’m not saying we shouldn’t get to work, or do our very best to avail ourselves of any and all healing modalities until we figure out what we need to get right with ourselves. I’m just saying we’re always going to be in process, and our growth will be aided by self-compassion, or hindered by self-loathing and shame. Also, the more we can be accepting of ourselves, the more we can do that for others.

Today is the winter solstice. It marks the return of the light. The sun is at its weakest now, but it will grow stronger and stronger until the summer solstice. We’re invited to come home to ourselves, to feed that spark within us until it becomes a flame, a blaze that burns away anything that is inauthentic, untrue, or not working for us. It’s an invitation to shed ways of being, thoughts, ideas and habits that are weakening us instead of strengthening us. I’m not talking about New Year’s Resolutions, I’m talking about getting real with ourselves. It’s a good time to set realistic goals and objectives that are concrete and attainable, not to make a list of things that will ultimately feed our guilt and feelings of disgust and disappointment. That’s no way to stoke your fire.

Begin on the inside. It’s never too late to begin again. Make the world within you a safe space. Feed kindness, and if you’re going to crave something, crave the truth. You’ll make yourself nuts if you try to chase happiness, but if you get really clear about what is true for you, and what is true for the people closest to you, life gets a lot easier, and you’ll find you can show up for yourself and other people in a way that feels good. Shine the light on anything that might be blocking you from living life out loud. And feed that light until you’re lit up from the inside. The world needs more of that. Sending you love, and Happy Solstice! Ally Hamilton

Finding Peace in the Storm

allylifecolorSometimes there’s an intense desire to be anywhere but where we find ourselves, especially if we find ourselves in the middle of a truly challenging situation. Life will offer each of us no shortage of opportunities to practice patience, grace, awareness, strength, compassion and clear-seeing. The only question is only what we’ll do with the opportunities. Of course, there are some opportunities we’d rather not have, some lessons we’d rather not learn, but we don’t get to choose. In yogic philosophy, “dvesha” is defined as “aversion”, and it’s one of the “kleshas”, or five poisons that cloud the mind and lead to suffering. When we resist the reality of our current situation, we will surely suffer.

Case in point: recently I was contacted by a young man who’s sister was diagnosed with cancer. He and his mom have been with her every step of the way. It’s just the three of them. There have been ups and downs, surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation, and all the pain that comes along with the disease, and the battle against it, but he’s been showing up for his sister and his mother as best he can. Now, his mother has been diagnosed with cancer, too, and he wrote to me because he’s terrified of losing the only family he has, and he’s upset with himself for being scared when he knows he, “needs to be strong for them”. The truth is, it is terrifying to think you could lose the two people you hold dearest, and that it could happen all at once, and to deny that it’s scary and enough to make a person feel completely vulnerable and powerless, is to compound the pain. Now, not only are you scared and humbled and at a total loss, you’re also disappointed in yourself for feeling those things.

Sometimes we underestimate ourselves. You can be scared and brave at the same time. You can be scared and strong at the same time. You don’t have to reject one thing to be another.

Let’s make it less life-and-death for a moment. You can be in a committed relationship, you can be totally in love, and still feel passing attraction for other people. You can be happy, and still wonder how it would be if you were single and free. It’s what you do with your feelings that defines you. It’s how much energy you feed them, how much time you allow them, how seriously you take them. Human beings are complex, and life is wildly interesting, but it’s not easy. It’s understandable that we want to categorize things, clean them up, put them in neat boxes with clear labels, but so much of what we experience happens in the grey areas.

If you’re scared out of your wits, and the voice inside your head is yelling at you to be strong, that’s brutal. Now, you don’t even have a safe haven within yourself to feel whatever you need to feel. We’d do ourselves and each other an enormous favor if we could hold a space to feel many conflicting things at once, so that we could calmly take a look at what’s real. Facing reality as it is takes bravery, there’s no doubt about that, and sometimes reality is tough to bear, but trying to “buck up” and muscle your way through the parts that break your heart will just make the experience that much harder.

One of the greatest gifts of a regular yoga practice is that you learn to quiet the storm that rages in the mind. Seated meditation offers us a chance to create space between our thoughts, and also to identify with them less strongly. We all have crazy, strange, fleeting thoughts and feelings. Ideally, you get to a place where you choose the thoughts that strengthen you. You decide what to feed, but self-acceptance is key, it’s essential if you want to be at peace. You don’t have to feel shame about your passing feelings. If you notice a pattern, or you observe that you’re always heading in a direction that’s going to bring you down, of course you perk up and pay attention. You examine why you’re heading down a path that will bring you pain, so you can crawl out of that groove and pick a road with potential for healing. Short of habitual thinking that’s weakening you, go easy on yourself. It’s your actions that define you.

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

The Weight of Regret

disciplineregretHere’s the thing: it feels awful when we aren’t treating ourselves well, or we’re allowing ourselves to be treated badly by someone else, and it also feels terrible when we’re treating other people poorly. The number one thing you need in order to be at peace, is the feeling that you’re a good, kind person who’s doing your best. If you know that about yourself, it sets you up to be forgiving when you make mistakes, and it also creates a foundation for you to be forgiving of others. It’s hard for love to exist without the safety of knowing perfection is not expected. It’s not easy to make ourselves vulnerable, or to be completely honest if we fear that the result might be the withdrawal of love.

There are some things that are really not okay, and I’ll spell out a few of them. If you know someone is in love with you, and you don’t feel the same, it’s not okay to accept their gifts, and when I say gifts, I mean literal, physical or material gifts, including jewelry, expensive dinners, new hiking boots you really want, or any number of other goods and services, but I also mean it’s not okay to accept the gifts of their time and energy and tender heart if you don’t feel in your gut that this is the person for you. Sometimes we care about people, we enjoy their company, we have a good time when we hang out, we’re attracted, but there’s just that certain something that is not there. If you allow that to go on for too long, you are literally stealing time away from a person who may not be strong enough to leave you. Time they could be spending getting over you and moving on, and possibly finding someone who could and would love them all the way. Everyone deserves to be loved like that. Everyone deserves to be cherished. It’s so hard to walk away from people when we’re in love, or we’re “hooked in”. If you’re the stronger party, putting an end to it and sticking with that is a gift you can give, even though it won’t be readily or happily accepted, but the other party’s well-being and your own integrity hang in the balance.

It’s hard to gift someone their freedom when it means you lose your comfort, because of course it feels great when someone is in love with us. Being adored and cared for and thought of is wonderful, but it kind of stinks if you’re accepting that without feeling it in kind. Further, if you know that’s what you’re doing, you’re not going to feel good about yourself. Shame, self-loathing and regret weigh us down. Most of us have had times when we weren’t feeling good about ourselves, and we let someone treat us poorly because we were desperate for love, or a happy ending. Often, that’s really what we’re doing when we’re stuck in a painful cycle with someone; we’re trying to rewrite ancient history, which cannot be done.

It takes discipline to do the right thing, and to stick with it, for yourself, or someone else. It takes a commitment to feeling good about yourself, whether you’re the person taking advantage of someone’s love, or you’re the person giving when you know in your gut you should be walking out the door. Kidding yourself is a terrible business. The number one relationship in your life is always the one you’re having with yourself. That’s the foundation for all the other relationships. I would protect that relationship fiercely. Allowing yourself to participate in situations that make you doubt your integrity, your kindness and your compassion is a sure way to damage your ability to feel good when you look in the mirror at the end of the day, or lay your head down to sleep at night. Don’t let too much time go by like that.

Sending you love out there,

Ally Hamilton

Life is a Limited-Time Offer

limitedtimeSometimes you fight and wait for something for so long, that by the time you get it, you don’t really want it anymore. This can happen in relationships, when one person wants more than the other, and it can happen in professional settings, too. There’s only so long we can go, accepting less than we want, or allowing ourselves to be taken for granted, before it wears us down.

Part of the burnout has to do with our disappointment in ourselves; the sick feeling in our gut when we know we haven’t shown up for ourselves the way we should. That’s really the thing to examine. We can get caught up in the details, in the linear story of what happened, and why we did what we did, who said what to whom, where things took a turn for the worse, but really, the details don’t matter that much. What matters is why we participated in the dimming of our own light. Maybe you let your boss take advantage of you for years, because at least it was a steady paycheck, and no other plan seemed feasible. Or maybe you stayed in a relationship because you were in love, thinking you could change the other party, but really, in your heart, you knew they didn’t love you all the way. So now maybe you “have them”, but not really, not in the way that matters. Or maybe your boss senses a shift in you, or picks up on the fact that you’re just going through the motions, maybe she realizes she should have treated you better, but the attempts at recognition fall incredibly short, or seem empty, meaningless.

The bottom line is that there’s a difference between working hard for something you want, and kidding yourself. If the job isn’t right, if it isn’t growing, if there’s no potential for you to learn or open or pursue your passion, it’s never going to feel good letting years go by like that. If the relationship isn’t growing, if you and your partner don’t really want the same things, what’s the point? Sometimes it’s tempting to trade in short-term comfort for long-term pain. Just let me feel okay for now, just let me have one more month where I work this way and deal with this mess, and then I’ll get out. Just let me have one more weekend where I don’t have to face the pain of this reality, just give me a little more time to find the strength to accept what I already know. The thing is, in a mix like that, the longer you stay, the weaker you get.

I think life is pretty short if you’re firing on all cylinders. If you’re following your heart, and allowing yourself to be guided by your intuition, if you’re pursuing those things that light you up, if you’re moving toward people who are also moving toward you, who are excited to be on the journey with you, if you’re loving your heart out, my sense is that life goes by very, very quickly, that there probably won’t be enough time to get all the love out, all the gratitude out, there won’t be enough time to give everything you want to give. On the flip side, if you aren’t allowing yourself to be guided by your gut, if you aren’t letting yourself be pulled by the force of those things that set your soul on fire, if you’re chasing after love, affection, approval or respect, if you’re stuck in rage, blame or shame, if you’re too afraid to say what you want, loudly and without fear, then life is probably going to feel pretty long and painful. I really think those are the options.

We’re given this body, and that’s a gift. We’re given this energy, this time, this particular spark, and those are all gifts, too. You have something to give that only you can, and if you don’t get busy doing it because you’re allowing your spark to become a flicker, you’re also robbing the world of a gift only you can bring, and you’re robbing yourself of the chance to figure out what that gift is. You won’t find it when you’re loathing yourself. I mean, you might be able to identify it, but in order to fly, you cannot be weighing yourself down with guilt or shame or fear about your integrity. You have to be unencumbered in order to fly, and only you can figure out what that means. Only you know the shape of things that will work for you. Don’t waste too much of your time and energy fooling yourself, because you’ll also be squandering your gifts. Time is passing. It doesn’t wait for any of us to get it together. We do, or we don’t, and time still passes.

Sending you love, and hoping you’ll fly soon if you aren’t already,

Ally Hamilton

Bridging the Gap

In-the-End-we-willHave you ever had the occasion to look at people’s online dating profiles? Does everyone like long walks on the beach and cozy nights at home? Does everyone enjoy cooking and watching football and traveling and trying new things, like salsa dancing? Is everyone kind and affectionate and romantic and full of fun? Does everyone like to stay up late, lingering over a delicious meal, gazing into the eyes of that special someone, whiling the night away asking those deep, penetrating questions?

Actions always tell the tale, whether we’re talking about the microcosm or the macrocosm. Words are easy. A person can say they’re loving and loyal and caring, but if their deeds don’t back that up, it’s just smoke and mirrors. The same thing holds true for organizations, communities, governments, countries. We can say this is the land of the free, we can pledge justice and liberty for all, but if our actions don’t support that, it’s just words.

If we really want to be at peace, individually, or in the context of a relationship, there cannot be a huge gap between how we’re presenting ourselves, and how we’re actually living. This comes up in all areas of life. When we meet people, we’re often meeting their ambassadors. Ask anyone who’s tried online dating, or any kind of dating. Most people are not going to show up at a first meeting and say, “Here are all my weaknesses. Here’s a list of all the poor choices I’ve made, all my fearful tendencies, all the ways I’ve hurt people in the past.” I’m not suggesting any of us should do that, but if you sit down with someone and present yourself as a person who’s available for love, when the truth is that you’re available for casual sex, that kind of sucks. It’s misleading, and if we spout lies to get what we want, that’s called manipulation.

The way to bridge the gap, if there is one, is to get honest with ourselves. To ask ourselves what it is we really want, not what we think we should want, not what other people want us to want, but just, at the core, what we actually want. It’s a relief to know that about yourself, and it’s a gift you can give to everyone in your life. Clear communication, the ability to set boundaries when you need to, your willingness to act on your own behalf—all these are essential tools if you want to be happy, and known. Usually we really want that—we want to feel at least someone is seeing us and getting us and cherishing us. It’s natural to want connection and love in your life. There’s no way to get there if you’re hiding parts of yourself you find unacceptable, because you’ll know they’re there. Sometimes, it’s hard to open, to allow ourselves to be seen, because we aren’t ready to face how we are now. We aren’t ready to take a compassionate but piercing look at those raw places within us that could use some healing. It’s not easy work. Sometimes we’re rejecting something about ourselves that’s painful to face. We’re pushing it down, we’re pretending it doesn’t exist, we’re looking away. Nothing gets better like that. Ignoring our problems, or distracting ourselves, or numbing out, or running away is a road-map to the continuation of the pain. The pain is owning us at that point. We are a slave to our pain when it runs the show.

Really, reaching out is the way to create a path toward healing. If you cannot do it on your own (and most of us can’t), you have to ask for help, support, ideas, a different map. Sometimes we have to get loud, sometimes we need a safe space to cry, to let it out, to be afraid and vulnerable, to lay out those places that aren’t so pretty without fearing that we’ll be shamed or ridiculed, attacked or shunned. When we’re talking about solving our individual problems, therapy is often a great way to go. Yoga can be enormously helpful if you’re longing to come home to yourself. Seated meditation is powerful if you want to recognize that you are not your thoughts, that you do not have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes, that feelings are not facts, and they are not forever, either. That perhaps, some of your thoughts do not even belong to you. Some of them were handed down from past generations. Some of the things you’ve learned along the way may be totally untrue.

Here are some lies you may have learned: “you are not lovable, you are not worthy of love, you are broken in some unfixable and essential way, you have no business rocking the boat, you have nothing special to offer, you are better or more important than some people, you cannot trust anyone, everyone leaves, everyone cheats, if people have different beliefs than you, they’re wrong, bad, or to be feared.” Those are just some examples of lies you may have learned that you’ll have to unlearn at some point if you want to be happy. A big part of being at peace in this life is based on how well you’re able to play nicely with others. If you think kindness is not the way, you’re lost. In my mind, the truth is that we are one huge family living on a spinning planet. We may speak different languages, we may look different, we may have different beliefs, but we are all connected. If one of us is suffering, we’re all suffering. If one of us is being violated, we’re all being violated. If one of us needs help, the rest of us are naturally supposed to help. If we want to be at peace individually, or as a family, as a community, as a country, we need each other. We need to help each other understand. We need to drop our defenses and our opinions and our clutching to our ideas and ideals, and deal with what is.

This week, I was talking to an acquaintance about my feelings around the death of Eric Garner, and the bigger problems underneath his death, and I was feeling pretty down. This person looked at me and said, “You’re a yoga teacher. Where’s the positive energy?” That is not yoga, okay? I just want to be very clear about that. Yoga is a practice that’s based on facing reality as it is, and working with the truth of a thing. We do not turn away from the hard parts, we move into the center of them and we ask how we can shift, how we can move toward love, and we don’t stop asking until we figure it out, and some of that process hurts like hell, but it’s the way toward peace. It’s the same for the whole as it is for the individual. Silence won’t get us there. Fear of getting this wrong is a poor excuse to do and say nothing. We have to get it right together, and for that to happen we cannot look away, we cannot be silent, we cannot leave a huge part of our family to try to fix injustice on their own. That isn’t yoga, folks. I would love to hear from all of you. Sending you love and wishing you a peaceful heart. May we lift each other up, and not tear each other down,

Ally Hamilton

The Power of the Real Apology

Never-ruin-an-apologyWhen my son was almost six, he fell off the play structure at school one morning, and broke his elbow. He went to the nurse’s office, bawling, and she made him bend and straighten his arm a few times. She then treated the scrape he’d also gotten, and sent him back to class. At some point during the morning, he told his teacher his arm was really hurting, but since he’d been cleared by the nurse, she told him to do the best he could. Three and a half hours after he’d broken his elbow, he went to gym class, where he was asked to run laps. He made it about halfway through the first lap when he collapsed, and when his coach saw his elbow, he told him it was definitely broken, and sent him back to the nurse.

It was at this point that I got a phone call. I was at the school in under five minutes, my daughter, a toddler at the time, hanging from my hip as I raced across the school grounds to get to the office. Once inside, I saw my son, laid out in the nurse’s office, the principal brightly chatting next to him. He was pale, his pupils were dilated, and when he saw me, fat tears moved down his face with no sound. I took one look at his elbow, which was four times bigger than it should have been, and knew it was broken. I put my daughter down and picked my son up, the principal still chatting away, phrases like, “sometimes these things don’t present as that bad at first”, and “he seemed fine”, as my mind raced about where to head. The pediatrician? The ER? Did I need to call my health insurance provider? All these thoughts were flooding through my brain as I carried him to my car, his knapsack over one shoulder, my daughter toddling along to keep up, the principal continuing with her very unhelpful sing-song chatter. I finally turned to her and said, “Listen, I’m not going to sue the school. If you want to help me, grab his knapsack, or carry my daughter, but please stop talking so I can think.”

It turned out that the right order was the pediatrician, and then the hospital for X-rays and a cast. It so happened that it was Halloween, but we didn’t do any trick-or-treating that year. At no time that evening or the following day, did anyone from the school call to check on my son. Not the nurse, not the principal. I knew at that point we were switching schools. Accidents happen. Mistakes are made. But when there’s no acknowledgement, no apology, and no understanding, there’s also no future.

I’m sure there was a concern about litigation. This happens with corporations and politicians a lot, and it can also happen at the scene of a car accident. “I’m sorry” can be construed as admission of guilt, wrong-doing and culpability, so people often turn to the “non-apology apology”, which is an actual thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology

“I’m sorry you feel that way” is not the same as, “I’m sorry I blew it.” Mostly, that’s all people want when they’re feeling hurt, confused, or angry; they want to feel understood, seen, cared for and heard. They want to know that the other party realizes the legitimacy of their feelings, and wants to take responsibility for their part. That’s all most people need to forgive, to move closer, to move on. There was no part of me that wanted to sue anyone. Not for a millisecond. But without a heartfelt apology, or even a call, there was also no part of me that could stay. And that holds true for any relationship, whether we’re talking about the one you’re having with your children’s school, or the one you’re having with your partner, your mother, your child, or your best friend.

Fear is what stops us from saying we’re sorry. Maybe it’s fear of being sued in some cases, but when we’re talking about personal relationships, we’re talking about fear of being shunned or rejected or punished in some way. The fear that love will be withdrawn. The fear that we will no longer be seen as trustworthy or lovable. There are all kinds of reasons a person might be afraid to own his or her mistakes. If you grew up in a house where you were punished excessively, that would do it, for example. I don’t know when we became so afraid of each other. So afraid of being honest, of being real, of being vulnerable. Maybe it’s because we’re sold this false bill of goods that we’re all competing against one another, and only the strongest survive and thrive. Perhaps we see admission of culpability as a weakness, but really, it takes strength to own it when we screw up, which we will. No one is perfect. No one operates from her highest self in every moment. Forgiving ourselves and forgiving one another are necessary gifts we have to grant if we want to get along with each other in this world. And we could really use that right now. We need more connection, more caring, more love, and less fear. We need to be able to reach across the divide and say, “If you’re suffering, I’m suffering, too, and I’m sorry. Let’s try to make it right together.”

We get so caught up in being right, sometimes we lose sight of what it means to be human, which is so much more gratifying. Sending you love, as always, Ally Hamilton

It Doesn’t Have to Own You

fearPatience and tolerance are two qualities well worth working on if we want to move through life in a peaceful way. Sometimes things unfold the way we want them to, and at other times, we may find ourselves at a complete loss to make sense of what’s happening, what we’re doing, or which way to head. So many of the things we’ll move through are not comfortable or desirable, but it’s how we face what we’re given that most determines how life will feel.

There are certain things you can control. You can do the work to heal, and that in itself is a personal project that might take years, and a willingness to explore the tools that will be the most useful to you. Maybe it’s yoga and seated meditation, maybe it’s therapy, journaling, reading, salsa dancing, hiking, the possibilities are endless. Generally, those pursuits that put you in a state of “flow” are going to help you loosen your grip on any stance or story about your life, or why you are the way you are, that might not be serving you. That might, in fact, be blocking you from opening to joy.

Sometimes people bristle, and say, “Wow, there’s so much emphasis placed on people turning inward, like it’s all about them.” The thing is, if you want to give everything you’ve got, your first order of business is to strip away anything that’s blocking you. Like self-doubt, low self-esteem, feelings that you might not be worthy of love, or have anything special to offer. Also, you might need to lean into your rage, or stop blaming other people for your unhappiness. You might need to reclaim your power, or discover it for the first time. You might need to unlearn things like, “Everybody leaves”, or “Everybody cheats”, or “You can’t trust anyone”. You might need to mourn, to grieve. It’s also possible that you’ll find yourself way off course, and totally out of touch with your intuition. It’s more common than you might think, because so many people learn to push things down, to repress their feelings, needs, wants, ideas, to take care of other people at their own expense. The healing process is personal, but the one commonality amongst us all is that it isn’t easy. I’d argue that it’s a responsibility to undertake that journey, though, because once you’re at peace with yourself, you can move through the world in a peaceful and loving way. It might be an inward journey at the start, but it leads toward connection and the ability to live and love with your heart wide open, and those are gifts you can then bring to the world around you.

Being patient and tolerant with yourself is huge. So many people are living with a loud, relentless, shaming inner critic. It’s like living with a roommate who loathes you, who’s full of contempt and disgust, who never misses an opportunity to let you know all the ways you aren’t measuring up. Who would ever want to live like that? You can’t evict your inner voice. You might have to starve it, and learn how to feed a loving voice. That way, the inner roommate is rooting you on, not tearing you down. That’s life-changing. Being at war with yourself is heartbreaking. When you feel like crap about yourself, you aren’t going to make loving choices. You’ll find yourself in relationships where you have to shrink, or accept so much less than what you really want. You may be inclined to drown out that inner tyrant with drugs or alcohol or shopping or food or sex, but none of that works. You really have to get in there and have a face-off. A voice-off. Eventually, you’re going to have to grab that nasty voice by the throat, push it up against the wall, and say, “Enough! Enough with your crappy attitude, you don’t get to pollute my house and kick me in the head anymore.” Believe me, that feels good. caring about yourself, your well-being, your tender heart, those things feel good, and you deserve to care about yourself. It’s a gift that you’re here. Your body is a gift. Your energy is a gift. Your time here is a gift. These are not gifts you want to squander.

Life is amazing and incredible and really, really interesting, but no one would argue that it’s easy. People will do things and say things and want things that break your heart. You will break other people’s hearts, too. Mostly, people don’t do this to each other intentionally. Most people are doing the best they can with what they’ve got. They’re trying to figure it out just like you, like me, like all of us when we’re honest about it. Sometimes you’ll get the breaks, sometimes you won’t. You can’t control that, but you can work on the way you deal with it. I wouldn’t keep score in your head. I wouldn’t try to bargain with life. If you think you’re going to get a free pass from suffering because you’re a good person, it won’t take long for you to realize the error in your thinking.

The absolute best things I know are love and connection and shared experiences and giving everything you’ve got every day. Figuring out what you can do, today, that will uplift the people around you. What you can do, today, to nurture yourself, so you’re coming from a place of abundance, and not lack, or the feeling that you have to cling or grasp.

Opening to reality as it is, is the most powerful and brave way to walk through the world. No one can take that from you. If you’re able to lean into your feelings, to be with your longing, your grief, your shame, your confusion, your loneliness, your fear and anxiety, you’ll find these feelings don’t own you. They don’t overpower you. They don’t move in and plunk themselves down on your couch, or unpack their bags and take over your drawers, closets, shower. They come, you acknowledge them, you allow them, but you also keep the door open. After you’ve given them a little of your time and kind attention, you walk them to the door, and encourage them to move on. That way you can also be ready to receive joy, love, laughter, gratitude, hope. What you resist, persists, as the saying goes. Try not to resist too much, try not to worry too much. Work on your relationship with yourself, and feed the relationships in your life. Uncover your gifts and share them, freely. Don’t worry so much about your five-year plan or your ten-year plan, or what all your friends seem to be doing. Just follow your heart and do those things that set your soul on fire, and try to trust that the way will become clear. Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Happy Thanksgiving

As-we-express-ourI love this holiday. No gifts, just an excuse to gather with friends and family, contemplating all the reasons we have to feel grateful. Of course, the more we do this regularly, the happier we feel. But culturally, we’re so trained to focus on everything we don’t have, and all the ways we aren’t measuring up. The more we feed that beast of lack, the worse we feel. When we’re coming from that “never enough” place, it leads to hoarding-to feeling that we must grasp at what we’ve got, while striving to accrue more.

Left to its own devices, the mind tends to get snagged on the negative. To focus on the one person who isn’t getting us, the one insult in the sea of compliments, the one person walking away, the one family member who’s challenging, instead of all the people moving toward us. Some of this could be biological. Back in the day, we used to worry about being eaten by saber-toothed tigers. If we weren’t on the alert, if we weren’t planning ahead, and thinking about all the things that could go wrong, we might end up as lunch for some creature. Of course, we’ve certainly turned the tables at this point. There aren’t many of us who need to worry about tigers anymore, but that “negativity bias” can be hard to shake.

Some people are addicted to worry; they’re addicted to stress. The Dalai Lama has a great quote, “If there is no solution to the problem then don’t waste time. If there is a solution to the problem then don’t waste time.”

You can lose hours, days, weeks or years worrying about things that will never come to pass. You can literally make yourself sick with worry, because thoughts create chemical reactions in the body. We really aren’t made to withstand continuous stress. Short spurts when we’re on the run from that “tiger” can be pretty manageable, but a constant state of high blood pressure, anxiety and fear are depleting and debilitating.

One of the great gifts of a consistent yoga practice is that we get to hone our focus. We use “drishtis” to train the mind on one point. We use sensations in the body (the most important of which is that steady, deep breath) to stay rooted in the present, and in so doing, we create space between our thoughts. We use the breath to calm the nervous system, and to build a foundation of steadiness in a spinning world. Maybe eventually, we develop a seated meditation practice, and start to really understand that we are not our thoughts, and that we do not have to believe everything we think, as the saying goes. Sometimes we’re dwelling on thoughts that weaken us. Yoga practice helps us to pick the mind up, and place it on thoughts that are going to strengthen and nurture us.

A gratitude practice is a great form of health insurance. I’m not saying it cures everything, I’m just suggesting that when we start and end each day reminding ourselves of all the gifts in our lives, that has a huge impact on our outlook, and the way we’re moving through the day, and sleeping through the night. The more we remember how much we do have, and how many things are going well, the more we come from a place of abundance, or “Santosha” (contentment)which leads to our generosity. If we think we don’t have enough, and other people have more, and we’re never going to reach our potential, we come from a place of fear, and we are unlikely to give much when we’re afraid. When we come from a place of gratitude and love, we know we have enough to give, and the beauty there is that giving feels so good.

We could really use givers in the world right now. It would be remiss not to acknowledge the suffering, grief, confusion and division that exists when we look around. We can’t solve these problems by continuing to isolate ourselves or draw lines when we feel hopeless or heartbroken, we have to reach out. And we don’t reach out from fear, we reach out from love. If you’ve just lost someone, this holiday season will probably be painful, and my heart goes out to you. If life isn’t unfolding the way you wish it would, the holidays can magnify those feelings. It might look like everyone else has the family, the friends, the love. You never know what someone has from the outside. Maybe this is a lonely time in your life right now; I’ve certainly had lonely and painful holidays. Remember that feelings are not facts, and they are not forever, and how you feel now is not how you will always feel.

“The best things in life aren’t things,” as Art Buchwald famously said. Connection and shared experiences, the love and laughter of those we hold dearest, belief in ourselves and in the goodness of people, these are the things that allow us to relax and breathe and open. Our main job here is to uncover our particular gifts and share them, because when we do that we feel fulfilled, and we know we’re having a positive and meaningful impact on the world around us.

Wishing you the happiest Thanksgiving, and also hoping the other 364 days are filled with gratitude.

Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

It’s Not You, It’s Me

motivatingIt’s hard to see clearly when we’re in the heat of a thing. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations or relationships that are disappointing for whatever reason, and we take it personally. If people aren’t wanting what we wish they would want, or things aren’t unfolding in a way that matches the picture in our heads, we think it must be something that’s lacking within us, some way we aren’t measuring up. This is very common when we’re children, for example. If you were born into a home where you weren’t cherished for any number of reasons, including the timing of your arrival in your parents’ lives, there’s a good chance you internalized your experience. A lot of people grow up trying to earn love or praise or affection or approval. Those can be difficult habits to break.

The thing is, people can only be where they are, and they can only use the tools they’ve got. I can look back on relationships in my life, and recognize thanks to time, distance and healing, that very little is personal. Most people are not setting out to hurt us or let us down, and recognizing that is liberating, and it tends to lead toward forgiveness. You can’t really be angry with someone who doesn’t have the tools or desire to commit to you. I mean, you can be angry if you want to, but it’s not about you, and the only part that’s personal is the healing you’ll have to do around the heartache. For example, the much older man I dated in college who cheated on me throughout our relationship, did not change his stripes with the next woman. He cheated on her, and the woman after that, and the one after that, too. If he still has the energy for it, that behavior likely continues to this day, unless he’s undergone some huge transformation, or gotten himself some help (assuming he wanted any).

At the time, I was so young I thought for sure his extracurricular activities were a reflection of something lacking in me; that I must not be pretty enough or smart enough or something enough to make him want to devote himself to only me. I was seventeen, and I had low self-esteem and I was trying to rewrite my own history. It just didn’t occur to me that the lack was within him, and most painful interactions fall into that category. Most parents, for example, do not intentionally screw things up. Maybe your mom and dad were really young when they had you, maybe they suffered from abusive backgrounds themselves, maybe they struggled with addiction or depression—there’s no end to the possibilities that might prevent a person from being a present and nurturing source of love.

A lot of it has to do with a shift of perspective. If we experience the world and other people and the things that happen only as they pertain to us, we’re probably going to take everything personally. If someone cuts you off in traffic, they become a person who’s disrespected you and singled you out. No matter that they’ve already done it to twenty people behind you, and will do it to countless more before the day is over. The colleague who doesn’t smile and say hi in passing obviously doesn’t like you or think you’re worth the time of day. It might not occur to you that perhaps they were up all night with a sick kid, or that they’re stressed out about their finances, or that their partner just announced it’s over. It goes on and on.

The reality is that most people are just doing what they’re doing. Constructing stories and explanations for other people’s choices and behavior is a dangerous game. Everyone has their stuff, their fears and pain and raw, unhealed places. We all have our worries and obsessions and dreams and occasional absurdities. We’ve all had our particular life experiences which have shaped us and informed the way we feel about the world and other people. If your partner has experienced betrayal in the past, you don’t have to take their trust issues personally, and the same holds true for each of us. Look back at the times when you’ve hurt other people. Did you do it on purpose? Mostly it happens because we don’t know who we are yet; we’re unacquainted with ourselves, and we don’t yet know what we need to be at peace. Other times it happens because we’re young and we lack the tools to show up for ourselves or other people. Maybe we don’t know how to communicate honestly and with compassion just yet.

Rage is an enormous burden. Blame makes you powerless. Grudges weigh you down and suck the joy out of life. They take up space where love could be happening. Take yourself out of the center of the story, and consider yourself from the side of it, or as a strand of it. When we’re the main character, it’s all about what we’re putting out there, and what’s coming back to us. When we recognize that our stories overlap with everyone else’s, and that we might cross paths with people at unfortunate times, it frees us up to understand and move forward openly. What you need in order to heal, is personal. Everything else, not so much. The main thing to remember is that we are all worthy of love. If you don’t believe that to be true of yourself, it’s time to reach out and get some help. Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Time is a Gift

tomrobbinsBecause our time and energy are finite assets, it’s really essential that we’re careful about where we invest them. It’s so easy to get caught up in other people’s dramas, or to allow the mind to get snagged on some thoughtless or unkind thing someone said or did. We can lose hours, days or years dwelling on choices we’d like to do over, differently, or sad tales we tell ourselves about why we are the way we are, or why life is unfolding the way it is.

We can find ourselves trying to chase down love, approval or acceptance, we can allow the sting of rejection to overwhelm us, we can spend time trying to defend ourselves against lies, but it’s time we’ll never have back again. Life will bring us enough ups and downs; we really don’t need to create suffering for ourselves, but so many of us do. I am not someone who believes that there are no tragic events, or that it’s just the way we’re thinking about an event that makes it unbearable. In my view, there are things that can happen sometimes that bring you to your knees and make you doubt everything you thought you knew about heartbreak and pain and the ability to go on. Those same events remind us that there isn’t any time to waste, and that the best use of our energy is to love the people in our lives with everything we’ve got, and to follow our dreams and believe in ourselves. Life isn’t going to hand you five or ten years to be pissed at your parents or your ex or all the people you’ve ever worked for, to boil yourself and keep your rage alive by feeding it, to point your finger in blame, and then hand you back that time one day when you realize what a gift it is just to open your eyes in the morning.

People who want to be angry and bitter deserve compassion, surely, but not a lot of your time and energy. I’m not talking about people who are trying to heal or take ownership of their lives, or make big shifts. I’m talking about people who are unwilling to loosen their grip on their angry story. I had an acquaintance like this. I’d see her at different functions every five years or so, and it was always the same. She’d find a way to corner me, and tell me her tale of why she was the hero of her family and her workplace, the generous but unappreciated benefactor, the one who always got the short end of the stick. Usually she’d be quite drunk, and the more she drank, the more angry and self-righteous she became. For quite some time, I’d listen to her, even though it was exhausting. I thought maybe she just needed someone to hold a space for her to unload the pain. I really didn’t care about the details of her stories, the list of wrongs, the way this person or that person had failed her or betrayed her, but sometimes I’d try to offer up a different viewpoint, and then she’d attack me, too. You can’t help a person who’s armored themselves in bitterness. I don’t make myself available to people who don’t want to let the love in. It’s a choice.

Let me be clear: we do not get to choose what life will put in our paths. We get beautiful lessons in life, and we get brutal ones, too, and that is not a choice. Unthinkable tragedy could befall any of us. People sometimes ask, “Why me?”, but why any of us? There’s no way to predict what any of us will have to endure, and if you go through a knifing loss, I hope you don’t compound your pain by feeling that you ought to be able to get over it faster, or with fewer racking sobs or relentless tears. The more we’re present in each moment, the more we allow the feelings to wash over us and through us, the more we’re honoring our experience. Loving someone so intensely that the loss of them makes it hard to breathe, loving someone that way is a gift and an honor. The loss of the ability to express that love through hugs or phone calls or shared experiences is so painful. If it’s a sudden and unexpected loss, of course that has its own particular difficulties.

My point is, death and loss put things into sharp perspective for us. If you’re worrying about the five pounds you’ve gained, for example, perhaps that’s not the best use of your time. Hugging someone you love would feel so much better. If you’re obsessing over a call or email you haven’t gotten, maybe there’s a better use of your energy. Maybe you could do something nurturing for yourself or someone else instead. If you’re getting caught up in what other people think of you, remember it’s none of your business. When the big losses or heartaches come, you take the time to breathe, to be kind to yourself, to reach out for help if you need it. Short of those tragedies, don’t be your own obstacle by dwelling on the unimportant crap. Pick your mind up, and bring it back to right now. Choose better thoughts. Make better mistakes moving forward. Forgive yourself, and forgive other people, as much as you can. Holding grudges and carrying heavy stories around will weigh you down, and that of course, makes it harder to fly. I really wouldn’t waste too much time.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Teach People to Treat You Well

tonygaskinsSometimes we accept treatment that’s so far below what we want, it’s hard to comprehend how we’ve landed ourselves in such heartache. This can happen with our parents, it can happen with our partners, and it can happen with our children, too. When we love people with our whole hearts, we make ourselves totally vulnerable. It’s hard to create boundaries when you love like that. If it’s your child, walking away is not an option, but if you’re being abused, of course you’re going to need some support, and so are they. Allowing yourself to be mistreated never serves anyone, but those situations are particularly painful, because of course we never think we’d need to protect ourselves from people whose diapers we once changed. You simply never know what might happen down the line; you can’t say for sure how the teenage years will go, or what kind of rage you might be facing, or what will happen when your grown children find partners. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from mothers who tell me their son has married a woman who doesn’t like them, or their daughter is involved with someone who doesn’t value the family bond, and now they barely see this person who means the world to them. It’s brutal. (Don’t worry. I hear from the wives who tell me horror stories about their mothers-in-law, too. I understand there are always at least two sides to every story. I just think it’s a heartbreak to watch a family that was once close, fall apart.)

Of course this can happen with our parents. If you grew up with an elusive mom or dad, maybe you’ve been trying to earn her or his approval or attention or recognition for years. The same holds true if you were abandoned, by choice or circumstance. This stuff can run so deep. Even if you know your mom or your dad didn’t leave you “on purpose”, even if they were taken by disease or disaster, it doesn’t change the fact that you were left. Sometimes we chase love, or we run around trying to prove our worthiness, or we try to be “perfect” so we won’t be left again, or we act out all over the place. Feeling invisible hurts like hell.

Which leads to my third example, because of course this can happen with our romantic partners. Sometimes we fall hard in the beginning, when the hormones are raging and fogging up our lenses. A lot of people think, “This is it!” six weeks in, only to realize a few months later that maybe the “person of their dreams” isn’t so easy to be with. It takes time to get to know people, but by then, a lot of us fall into that trap of having already decided this person is the one we’ve been waiting for, even if all evidence starts to point to the contrary. We keep waiting for the person who was so kind and attentive and complimentary in the beginning, so romantic and affectionate and sweet. For many people, the beginning is the part they’re great at; when things get real, they want to run for the hills. I get so many emails from people who struggle with all of this stuff. The teenage child is being hurtful, the parent is punitive, even from the nursing home, the partner is treating them like an option.

The bottom line is that we teach people how to treat us. If we allow someone to be emotionally or verbally abusive, and we keep interacting with no consequences, the message is that we will tolerate that behavior. We create an understanding, a contract. You can’t expect respect from people who’ve learned that they can treat you badly, and you’ll still be there, with the exception of your children, and I want to clarify that. I don’t know if you remember your teenage years, but unless you were one of those rare, well-adjusted teens with your self-esteem intact, you probably went through some rough moments. Puberty isn’t easy for most people. We don’t know ourselves well yet, we feel pressure to conform, or at least to make it seem that we’re the same as everyone else, even if we feel sick on the inside. The hormones rage, peer pressure can be intense, and then there’s bullying, and cyber-bullying, and texting and sexting and so many other things many of us did not have to deal with. So if you’re a parent of a troubled teen, I think it’s important to draw healthy boundaries, but I think it’s equally important to make sure your child knows you will always love him no matter what. That you might have to draw the line, or get some help, but that love will never be withdrawn.

Anyone other than your child does not automatically get that same assurance. A growing kid is going to flail and make mistakes; that’s normal, understandable and expected. Your parent is not a person from whom you need to accept mistreatment, physically, verbally, psychologically, or emotionally, and neither is your partner. You are not obligated to come back with love when someone is treating you badly. I mean, you might choose to love them anyway, but you have to love yourself, that’s a non-negotiable, and that means you must protect your tender heart when necessary. You don’t have to participate in toxic, unhealthy relationships. You don’t have to accept poor treatment. You don’t have to settle for so much less than what you really want. If you’re in love with someone and it isn’t reciprocal, don’t stick around to have your heart broken again and again. Look at a person’s actions. Words are easy, but the tale is told in deeds, not words. If you want to be someone’s everything, and instead you’re their, “fine for now”, get out.

Life is short. We’re here for a blink of time, and none of us, not a single one of us, is here to be a doormat. You have a spark and it’s your job to stoke it, not to participate in its turning to ash and dying out. Teach people to treat you well, by refusing to accept anything less.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Say Yes to Yourself

paulocDepending on your personality, the way you were raised, your response to confrontation, your possible tendency toward people-pleasing, your desire to be liked, and many other factors, you may have a difficult time saying no when you need to, or setting healthy boundaries when that becomes necessary.

You can’t be all things to all people; you will never make everyone happy all the time. Some people will not get you, or dig your vibe, or want to take a spin around the dance floor with you, and that is okay. Rejection never feels good, but it’s not ever your job to chase people down to convince them of your worth. If you suffer from low self-esteem, that’s something you really want to address, otherwise you will likely find yourself saying yes to things when you’d much rather say no. You may devalue your own needs and wants in an effort to be liked or loved or cherished, but that never works, because if you aren’t being yourself, you’ll know that. Maybe you’ll “fool” the other person, but you won’t fool yourself, so even if they think you’re just awesome, it won’t relieve your feelings of being unseen.

Some people would rather drown than ask for help, and others have a funny sense of entitlement, and no qualms about asking you to extend yourself on their behalf, even if they barely know you. You are not obligated to comply. Your time is precious and finite, and so is your energy. These are the most valuable gifts we’re given, and they’re also the most valuable ones we give away. Squandering those gifts is a real shame. In order to survive and thrive in this world, you have to be strong. You have to find the tools to heal any raw places within you that may need your kind attention, so that you aren’t driven by unconscious forces. You don’t want to be leading an “unexamined life”, because not knowing yourself is the loneliest thing there is. It’s not a luxury to take “you time”, it’s a necessity. Healing requires energy.

I remember the first time I flew, listening to the flight attendant directing grown-ups to secure their own oxygen masks before helping their children, and as a kid, this made me uneasy. As an adult, of course I get it. If you pass out, you can’t help anyone. If you deplete yourself and neglect yourself, you really can’t be surprised when life’s storms knock you down. Anything you starve is going to weaken, whether we’re talking about your houseplants, or your relationship with yourself.

Maybe you grew up in a house where your needs were not considered. Perhaps you’ve grown into an adult who believes it’s selfish to think about what you need to be happy, but it’s actually selfish to avoid that work, because if you’re miserable or lost or confused, you bring to the world around you much less of what you could be sharing. We each have a particular spark, and our job is to turn that spark into a flame, a fire, a passion of any kind for something. Your passion can be helping other people; that’s beautiful, but you’ll find that the best way to be of service is to clear anything that might be blocking your ability to shine. The more you care for yourself, the more you can give.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Stop Kidding Yourself!

annlandersI know it can be painful to swallow, but for the most part, people will do what they want to do. I say this because I think many people try to fool themselves, or make excuses for someone else’s behavior, or justify certain actions. Sometimes we want to hold on to our idea of how someone is, or how we want things to be, or how we want someone else to feel, and we just refuse to see reality clearly. We think we’re going to change someone, or save another person, or we fall in love with the potential we see, which is not the same as falling in love with the person in front of us.

In order to face reality as it is, you have to be able to discern what is real from what is not real. What is you from what is not you. What you wish were happening, versus what is happening. Ideas and opinions and desires can really fog up the lenses. Often we want to see through the glasses that show the outcome we want, and no matter what happens, we press those glasses to our heads, and stick our fingers in our ears. We reject, deny or explain anything that challenges our view, or we numb the edges so that reality almost looks the way we want it to. This person would be with me if they could. Or this path is the right path because I’ve been pursuing it so long I can’t turn back, even though it just feels wrong, now. Whenever we deny reality, we set ourselves up to suffer. The truth won’t kill you. Not facing it could.

Some people agonize for months or years, grasping on to false hope, creating constructs that uphold the happy ending they desire. I know too many people who can look a person in the eye and insist something is purple when it’s clearly orange. I don’t mean it’s someone’s opinion that it’s orange, I mean it’s actually, factually orange. If you say that, though, you might be met with anguish or rage or stubbornness. Sometimes a person needs to hold onto that purple, that false version of reality. If that’s the case, there’s not much you can do. I mean, you really can’t say, “Okay, it’s purple”, and still feel good when you look in the mirror at the end of the day. You can have compassion, you can recognize the pain, you can hope eventually they can loosen their grip on the need to deny. You can love people, but you can’t save them, you can’t press their faces up to the reality of a thing and scream, “This is orange!!!” You’ll just alienate them or break their heart, and maybe they are not yet strong enough to allow their heart to break. You have to be strong to do that.

The thing is, you know in your heart if you’re desperately grasping at something, because you’ll feel sick and exhausted, and things just won’t make sense. You’ll talk yourself into accepting less than you want. You’ll hear yourself explaining the situation to your closest friends, and even to you, the story won’t add up. It’s true that many people are floundering around in the dark, trying to figure out what to do next, with no real idea of which way to turn. So you may deal with someone who doesn’t know what they want. The thing is, if a person wants to be with you, it’s not going to be a mystery to them, or to you.

Lots of things in life are complicated, but the truth isn’t one of them. When I say the truth, I just mean what is true for you, and what is true for other people. Love requires bravery and intense vulnerability and a lot of acceptance. It’s challenging, but it isn’t complicated. Joy is simple, too. So is gratitude. The paths to get to these places may be full of thorns and stopovers where you have to lean into your deepest fears and your most raw, unhealed places, your mistakes and your regrets and your desires, but if you want to be at peace, you’re going to have to get acquainted with the voice of your intuition. It can spot excuses hundreds of miles away. Its vision is so clear, it cuts right through judgements and attachments and shoulds, and just sees what is. It’s a relief, really. Working to create a false reality takes a tremendous amount of energy. Facing reality as it is leaves you the energy to move with and toward love.

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

See the Pain Beneath the Words

stephencoveyHave you ever gone to see a film with a friend, and come out to discover you have two completely different viewpoints about what you’ve just seen? Obviously, it’s not that you’ve seen two different movies, it’s that you and your friend are bringing two different perspectives to a shared experience. I think that’s clear when we’re in that context, but we seem to forget it’s the same with life.

We’re always bringing so much to the table. We have our life experiences, our histories, our opinions and feelings and things we’ve been taught, in addition to our current mood and circumstances. This is really helpful to remember when we find ourselves totally thrown by someone else’s behavior or different take on a situation. It’s also good to remember when we move through conflict with those we love.

So much of the time, we get caught up in the story, or our need to be right. If we’re not seeing eye to eye with a loved one, we might expend a lot of energy trying to convince them to see things our way. We might dig our heels in, or shake our head, or throw our hands in the air in our attempts to “win” a fight, but when we separate ourselves form those we love because being right is more important than being close, no one wins.

If, for example, your partner feels jealous, and you know in your heart there’s no need for that fear, you might become impatient or angry or indignant. Maybe you go for reassurance once or twice, but then you feel frustrated that you have to spend time and energy putting them at ease when you aren’t doing anything wrong. You could take that tack, but you could also stop and breathe and consider your partner’s life experiences. Maybe they’ve been betrayed in the past, more than once. Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m not talking about pathological jealousy, or controlling or violating behavior. I’m not suggesting it’s ever okay if the person you’re with is checking your email or your text messages, or showing up unannounced. That kind of behavior chokes the life, trust and health out of any relationship.

What I’m talking about is clear communication and compassion. When we love people, we love the whole person, with all their beauty and all their flaws and occasional absurdities, just as we hope they’ll also love us. We don’t reject the challenging parts. We don’t walk away when a person we love is in pain. One of the most loving things you can do for anyone is to try to understand their perspective, because underneath words and stories, there are always feelings. Sometimes in the middle of a charged exchange, it’s incredibly revealing to stop listening to the words, and just look at your loved one’s face. Maybe you’re going to see fear or anger, because when we love, we make ourselves vulnerable, and when we feel threatened, it’s human for us to want to protect what we love. Generally, if you can see the pain or fear beneath the words, it makes it so much easier to be kind and understanding. That’s what we all want, right? To be seen and understood, to feel that if we’ve given someone our heart, we can trust that they’ll take care of it, and that they won’t shame us or reject us for our insecurities. We all have some, after all.

The other thing that’s such a relief, and often comes with time and distance, is just the realization that so little is personal. People can only be where they are, and they can only use the tools they’ve got. We’ve all had our experiences and our life lessons, and most of us have learned at least a few things along the way that we’re going to have to unlearn. Like, maybe you learned that “everyone cheats”, or “everyone leaves”, because that’s what you saw growing up, and that’s what you’ve unconsciously sought out as an adult, in an effort to rewrite your story. Maybe it just hasn’t occurred to you yet, it isn’t that everyone cheats, it’s that all the people you’ve picked, cheat. Ugh. Not a very fun realization, but key for your healing and happiness. Anyway, my point is, if you love someone, and I don’t just mean romantically, part of your job is to help them unlearn anything that’s blocking their happiness. I mean, you don’t have to take that on, that’s advanced love, but the option is there for you to be that person.

If you can really make those closest to you feel safe to be fully themselves, and to know that you won’t walk away, you set the stage to be received in the same way. Not everyone is going to accept that invitation, but you don’t need everyone, just a handful of people is a blessing. You can always have at least one person who accepts you entirely, because you always have the power to do that for yourself, and it’s a relief, really. We all have our struggles, fears and pain. That doesn’t make us less lovable.

Sending you a huge hug, and a lot of love,

Ally Hamilton

Spiritual Bypass

hemingwayThere’s a huge difference between focusing on the good in your life, and ignoring or denying difficult or painful issues. There seems to be a manic need from the spiritual community at large to be positive and light in every moment, which is alienating to so many people, because the truth is, life is not “all good.” Part of being at peace has to do with our ability to integrate all parts of ourselves, and all chapters of our story. Part of loving other people has to do with our willingness to accept the whole person, the gorgeous parts, the quirky ones, and the stuff that’s raw and tender. Integrating the painful parts is different from dwelling upon them or magnifying them. We all have our struggles and our fears. We go through periods of confusion or despair, or we suffer because we’ve become attached to a picture in our heads of how things should be. Leaning into those uncomfortable feelings is an act of compassion, and it’s also the gateway to liberation. Pushing things down requires enormous energy, and when we repress feelings, we inadvertently give them power. They’re going to come out in other ways.

Clinging to happiness is no different than clinging to anything else—it’s going to cause you to suffer. The minute you feel anything other than positive, you’ve become a disappointment to yourself; a failure. If you reject any feeling that can’t go in the “gratitude column”, you’re going to be at war with yourself, judging yourself for those feelings and thoughts you deem to be negative or ungrateful or petty or unkind. You’ll just compound your pain with shame. We’re all human, and none of us operates from our highest self in every moment. When we sit to meditate, we don’t deny thoughts when they arise, we observe them. “Ah, I’m thinking, judging, clinging, obsessing, daydreaming…let me return to my breath.” Denying your experience is a sure way to create inner dissonance, when the whole point of a spiritual practice is to know yourself, to accept yourself, to find peace, and to feel the connection between yourself, and everyone and everything around you; to find union. Denial won’t get you there, and neither will rejection.

Imagine if you were getting to know someone, and they told you they only wanted to hear the good stuff about you. How close could you get? Yes, we always want to stay focused on all the things we do have—our good health if we’ve got it, the amazing people in our lives, the fact that we have a place to call home, and food to eat, the gifts we’ve been given, like time, our ability to feel the sun on our faces and the breeze on our skin, or that we can see the leaves blowing in the wind with their million shades of green. Laughter of the people closest to us, and also, laughter of total strangers. There’s so much to take in, and so many ways in which we’re gifted, just because we woke up today. Unless, of course, you’re going through knifing loss, and today is a day when it’s hard to breathe. We have to allow space for that possibility, too, because someone out there is dealing with that right now, this very minute, and they aren’t thinking about leaves, or their good health, or sunlight on their face, they’re trying to understand how the earth is still spinning, and people are doing things like putting gas in their cars as if everything has not changed.

A spiritual practice ought to be there for you when times are tough. It takes strength and bravery to face life head-on, and it also requires acknowledgement of our inherent vulnerability. If you want to do life well, if you want to do love well, you’re going to have to get acquainted with the underside of things. You’re going to have to be strong enough to face the dark, and also to embrace the light. If you try to pretend they don’t both exist, you’re not living in reality.

Joy and despair are flip sides of the same coin. I’m not telling you to be grateful for despair when it comes, I’m just saying we wouldn’t recognize joy the way that we do if we’d never felt bereft. If we’d never felt rejected, misunderstood, unseen or dismissed, we wouldn’t appreciate the feeling and relief of being totally accepted. I can look back on all the experiences in my life, particularly the devastating ones, and recognize how they opened me and taught me things about myself, other people, and the world at large. They were not always things I wanted to learn. There are a couple of lessons I would really, truly give back, but we don’t get to choose. Sometimes your heart breaks wide open and you think, “I won’t make it through this.” That’s when you have to hope the people in your life show up for you. Kindness matters. Caring matters. Being there matters, in fact, it matters a lot. The most insightful, kind, compassionate people I know, the most open and sensitive and trustworthy people, happen to be the same people who’ve suffered and grieved and found a way to let their experiences soften them instead of harden them.

Don’t ever let anyone shame you for your feelings. Feelings are not facts, and they aren’t forever. They arise, they peak and they subside. Some feelings take longer than others to cycle through, and if we’re going through something particularly brutal, like the loss of an entire person, we’re going to move through all kinds of feelings, many times. None of them are comfortable or positive. Shock, grief, confusion, rage, panic—those feelings are real and appropriate when we’re going through tragedy. These experiences and feelings do not have to go in a file marked, “thank you for this”; you don’t have to be grateful for everything. Just feel what you need to feel, and trust that over time you’ll be able to breathe without reminding yourself to do that. And let your suffering matter, eventually. Grow from it, and see if you can use it to be there for other people. At least, in that way, some beauty arises from the ashes.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Your Five-Year Plan

steinbeckThere’s no way to accept and embrace reality without recognizing our own vulnerability. If we’re lucky, we get seventy, eighty, ninety, maybe one hundred years to offer up whatever we’ve got. The first order of business, once we’re grown, is to make peace with our past. I’ve met maybe three people who had idyllic childhoods, so barring them, most of us are going to have some healing to do. And of course, I jest. Even if your childhood was wonderful, we all have pain, insecurities, doubts, fears and struggles. It’s part of the nature of being human, and of being part of a mystery much larger than any one of us. Yet, we have to face the journey in our own way, and we have to develop our own tools.

We like to make things linear, but my sense is really that time folds in on itself, and also expands out, simultaneously. I can go back to any vivid moment of my life at any time. I can be three, on my grandmother’s soft and cozy lap, I can feel her fingertips tracing my face, and I can smell the mix of powder and perfume and love, just by closing my eyes. I can be fourteen, in the living room of the boy I adored, being kissed for the first time with sunlight streaming through the window, my heart pounding, every sense on fire. I can be sixteen, walking away from the boy I loved, who sat on a bench and watched me leave, sobbing as I went, because he said he had to go away. I can see the blurry trees through my tears, the statue of Balto in Central Park, I can feel the biting cold on my face, on my fingers, in my heart. I can be at the funeral of my cousin’s little boy, with that impossibly tiny coffin, and I can still see the way my cousin’s hand flew to his mouth when our eyes met. Just like that, I’m there, and I’m crying. I can be with that same cousin when I was five years old, and he and his brother threw me in a pool in Bermuda, much to my delight, even though my thumb was broken and I had a cast up to my upper arm. I can see that same cousin, with his head thrown back, laughing, before, way before the coffin and the loss and the grief. I can be at the emergency veterinarian’s hospital with my dog, and doctors I’d never met before, holding his head and watching the light go out of his eyes as I thanked him and tried to wrap my head around the fact that he was here, and then he wasn’t, ten years of history, ten years of being my best friend, holding the ceramic paw print they gave me as I walked out the door, about to give birth to my son, joyous and bereft all at once. I can be in the delivery room with my son, a week later, terrified, wondering if we were going to make it, and I can be in the delivery room with my daughter, too, although the births were two and a half years apart. I can also be right here, right now, with both kids asleep, a different dog curled up on the floor, people walking by on the street outside. If you can’t acknowledge the vulnerability of this thing, I think you’re going to be in some trouble.

A few years ago, I went to a meeting, and someone asked me what my five year plan was, and I didn’t mean to, but I laughed, loudly. I might have accidentally snorted. When I look back on the last five years of my life, almost none of it has gone according to any plan I had. You heal. You make peace with your past. You use your wounds as entryways to understanding and insight and compassion. You figure out what lights you up, what it is, you, in particular, have to offer, and you get busy figuring out how best to do that. Hopefully at some point you realize that it’s what you give, and not what you have, that’s going to define your life. You follow your passion and you share your gifts, and you keep your heart open. You evolve as everything around you evolves, and you keep putting one foot in front of the other. That’s the plan as far as I know.

I’m not saying you have to burn your vision board, or that you shouldn’t have goals. Living intentionally is the way to go. Thinking about where you’re going to spend your time and energy makes sense. It’s not like those are infinite gifts, after all, and you don’t want to squander them, but I wouldn’t get too attached to a picture in your head of “how things should be”, or how people should be, or how life should look, because reality is not obligated to bend to your will, and it probably won’t. If you want to pin something on a board, I’d make two columns. Under the first, “Things I Can Control”, under the second, you guessed it, “Things I Cannot Control”. There’s only one thing that goes under the first list, and here it is: “I can control the way I respond to what I’m given (if I work on it a lot).” Under the second list, go ahead and put everything else, including, “other people (and there are some sub-topics here, like what other people will want, or do, or say, or need), circumstances, the weather, when and if I’m going to meet someone amazing (here’s an asterisk for you— *YOU are someone amazing), how long I have here, how long anyone else has here, timing, and whether I’ll get the “breaks” I need.” There are a lot of other things that can go on that second list, that was just off the top of my head.

Here are some things I know for sure: When I’m coming from a loving, open, generous place, life feels pretty awesome, and when I’m in fear, when I’m anxious or worrying or feeling resentful or bitter, or I’m blaming someone else, life feels pretty crappy. When I focus on what I can give, it reminds me that I’m coming from a place of abundance, and that makes me feel really grateful, and when I focus on what I don’t have, or what I’m not getting, that makes me feel like I don’t have enough, and other people have more, and that, in turn, makes me feel that I ought to grasp whatever I’ve got which makes me feel small and petty and like I’m coming from a place of lack, which feels bad. Also, when I focus on the days instead of the years, that feels manageable. When I think about what I can do today to support my own healing if I need it (that has to come first), or what I can do to possibly uplift someone else, I’m on track to have a meaningful and fulfilling day. If I can string a bunch of those days together, I’m having a meaningful and fulfilling life. If I start to future trip and worry about what could happen or what someone else might or might not do, if I start imagining different scenarios, then it all feels overwhelming. What can you do in service to your dreams and the dreams of those you love, today? What can you do to strengthen and nurture yourself, and everyone you encounter, today? I think those are useful questions.

Grateful, as ever, to be in conversation with you all, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Let the Hundredth Person Go

olinmillerA couple of years ago, a woman emailed me and asked how she could stay on the Facebook page without seeing the posts. She said she wanted to see the yoga-related information, but not the “inspirational” writings, which she did not like. Of course that didn’t feel good, and my mouth fell into an “O”, but not everyone is going to dig us, right? I told her she could simply unlike the page, and just go directly to the website for classes, but she wrote back again, and said she wanted to stay on the page, but really didn’t want to see the writing. I told her I couldn’t navigate or control her Facebook feed, and I was pretty sure her best bet was just to unlike the page, or stay on it, and ignore the writing.

She wrote back a third time to reiterate how much she didn’t like my writing, and said she’d figure out what to do. At that point, I was kind of laughing and shaking my head, but I was also intrigued. What would inspire someone to take the time to find my email to repeatedly let me know they didn’t like my writing? So I went to her page, and discovered that she was a writer. Clearly she was in some kind of pain, and wanted to share that with me. Perhaps she wanted to lash out with her frustration and see if she could make me feel badly, too. After the initial sting, I just felt badly for her. I ended up writing back a final time, letting her know that I’d received her message clearly, and that it seemed important to her that I understand how much she didn’t like my writing, and I wished her the best with her own endeavors and I left it at that. Sometimes people feel trapped or angry or like life is unfair and other people are getting breaks they deserve. Sometimes people feel so hopeless or frustrated or lost, they just flail. It’s not about you, you just represent something. You can have compassion when someone is suffering like that, and I hope you do, but you can’t save anyone. We each have to do our own journey.

There are a few things that are important to remember. We are all accountable for the energy we spread as we move through the world. We’re either adding to the love, or we’re adding to the pain. Of course, when we’re suffering, we’re probably going to have a difficult time, and that’s okay. I’m not suggesting you have to go around smiling for the world when you’re hurting. The more you open yourself, the more deeply you’re going to feel things, but try not to get bogged down in someone else’s nastiness or rage. That’s no reflection on you, that’s solely a reflection on the other party. The only reason you’ d ever let an insult “land” is if part of you feared it might be true. Of course we all have our insecurities and doubts, and we all have healing to do. If someone close to you kindly holds up a mirror and suggests maybe you aren’t doing your best, I think it’s important to take a good look, but people who are intentionally trying to bring you down are reflecting where they’re at; they’re down. You don’t have to joint them.

Generally speaking, try not to worry about what people might be thinking of you, because most of the time they aren’t! Just keep your eye on the ball. The “ball” being whatever it is that feeds your soul and sets you on fire. Your time and energy are the most precious gifts you get, and they’re also the most meaningful ones you can offer. Help people in pain whenever you can, but don’t squander your gifts on people who are cruel and punishing. Screw that. I mean, let’s all hope that anyone who’s full of venom will find some relief and some help and some healing, but in the meantime, let’s also go about the business of making the world a kinder, gentler place.

If there are one hundred people in a room, and ninety-nine of them love you, give your energy to them. The one person who doesn’t get you or understand you or like you or dig your vibe is not a challenge for you to overcome. You don’t have to chase or cajole or convince or dance like a monkey to make people like you. Do you like everyone? It’s fine. It would be nice if we could all be respectful, but not everyone is up to that, and that’s fine, too. It’s not like it’s fun to move through the world with a huge chip on your shoulder. You don’t have to participate in carrying anyone else’s chip. Just be you. That’s enough, and that’s a lot.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Raise Your Words, Not Your Voice

rumiWords are powerful. They can be used as tools for healing, communication, connection, understanding, comfort, gratitude, joy and love, or they can be used as weapons, knives, arrows, or bullets. As with any tool, it’s how you wield it.

Sometimes people grow up in homes where words are used as tools of pain and destruction. It doesn’t take much to make a kid doubt his own worth, or come to know the taste of fear. The holding of breath, the desire to be invisible, or safe, wanted, protected or loved. We only know what we know. We each have a frame of reference. If you grew up in a house where your parents fought like enemies, where they cursed at each other, or at you, or threw things, or stormed out the door, you’re going to have to develop a communication style that’s different from what you saw if you want to have healthy relationships in your life, not just with lovers, but with your children, your friends, and your colleagues. Try to imagine how terrified you’d be right now if giants tore through your house screaming, and multiply that times a million, because as a kid, you can’t reassure yourself, or understand that it’s no reflection on you.

It’s a very confusing experience when we don’t know what to expect from the people who are supposed to love us and nurture us. It’s even more troublesome if they’re sometimes loving, affectionate and kind, and other times reactive, abusive or nasty. There’s no way to feel secure. There’s actually a name for this, and it’s called “disorganized attachment”, and it can follow you into your adult life, and probably will. It’s hard to relax with people if you’re always waiting for the other shoe to come crashing down over your head.

People tend to go in two directions; they either repeat the cycle of abuse, or they go in the absolute opposite direction. Either way, if you didn’t have a model of healthy communication, you’re almost definitely going to need some help with that. You don’t have to use the map you’ve got; in many instances it would do a person good to burn that map and chart a new one, but it isn’t easy to rewire the system. It takes enormous desire and dedication and herculean effort. If you come out of terror, it’’s likely you either shut down when conflict arises, or you go for the jugular. Neither of these options are going to lead you toward healthy communication.

This is one of the great gifts of a consistent yoga practice. So much of what we do is about breathing through intense sensation. I know we don’t think about emotion this way, but when we say we’re “enraged”, we’re not talking about an abstract concept; we’re not talking about some idea. We’re describing the feelings we have when our bodies are flooded with sensation. The racing heart rate, the rising blood pressure, the tense shoulders, the shortness of breath, the clenched jaw or fists, these are all physical sensations. This is why it’s so powerful to breathe deeply while you’re holding a lunge and your quadriceps are on fire. You’re training both your nervous system and your mind to stay centered, to keep breathing, and to stay curious. If you stick with the physical practice long enough, and if you use your practice in this way, you ought to find you’re becoming less reactive and more responsive. Which is really what we’re talking about. (You can take my “Yoga for Anger Management” class, here: http://pages.yogisanonymous.com/preview/1529)

When we’re reactive, something within us gets triggered. Someone says something or does something that taps some raw, unhealed place within us, and BAM! We’re exploding. Cruelty and mean-spiritedness have no place in loving relationships. They have no place anywhere. Sometimes people say things that are so knifing, they leave a scar as deep as any blade. Or sometimes someone says something or does something that taps a place of intense pain, like the pain of being abandoned or neglected or unseen, and we shut down, or we flee the scene. Those are examples of reactivity. An event from our present ignites pain from our past, and it’s as if the prior event is happening all over again. All of our pain, or all of our rage comes crashing to the surface. A response comes out of the present. We might feel triggered, but we remember to breathe and to stay calm and to listen. We create a little space between the event, and what we decide to do or say about it. We take in the person in front of us. We recognize that we’re feeling hurt or angry, and we speak about what’s happening within us. Maybe we tell the other party we’re feeling overwhelmed and we need a minute. Or we explain our heart is racing and we don’t want to say something we’ll regret. We communicate rather than annihilate.

You don’t have to be ruled by your past. There are tools you can use to reverse the damage. You can create a life out of ideas you have about how you’d like to show up in the world. If you want to start to shift the way you’re speaking to other people, start with your inner dialogue. If you berate yourself relentlessly, you’re going to be filled with pain, and you’re going to spread it. Feed a loving voice. That’s something else you can do on your mat. So what if you fall? So what if your hamstrings aren’t as open as the person next to you? You aren’t here to balance on one leg, or put your ankle behind your head. You’re here to be at peace with yourself, to uncover your gifts, to share them freely, and to connect and love and give everything you’ve got. Fill your tank with love, so you can spread it wherever you go. The world needs more of that.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

What You Give

victorhugoThe best things in life spring from what you give, not what you have or what you get. Giving from your heart feels great. Keeping score is not what it’s about. If that’s how you’re doing your relationships and your life, focusing on whether you’re getting as much as you’re giving, wondering about whether you’re being “shorted”, or holding on to lists of past transgressions or disappointments, you’re probably not going to feel very happy.

Some of this has to do with your outlook in general. If you’re the victim of a hit-and-run, and six people stop to make sure you’re okay, to wait with you until the police arrive so they can give their accounts, too, if one of them runs to get you ice, or holds your hand or your head, who are you going to focus on after the fact? The person who hit you, or the people who helped you? I mean, of course you’re going to tell the story of what happened, but when you think about the world at large, are you going to say, “This person hit me in my car and took off, and people suck”? Or are you going to say, “This person hit me in my car and took off, but a half-dozen other people, total strangers, dropped everything and made sure I was okay, and people are really kind”? What’s your takeaway going to be? What are you holding onto in general? I mean, we all have stories; things we carry around, sometimes like a talisman, that explain who we are to ourselves, and sometimes to other people. “I’m this way because…” And some of these stories strengthen us, and some of them weaken us. If you carry too many weakening stories around, what you really end up with are excuses.

I know this might be a little confrontational, but sometimes it’s really good to consider the quality of our thinking. A lot of our suffering is created in our own minds. Not all of it, so bear with me. There are devastating things that happen in this life that can bring you to your knees, so I want to be clear about that. Sometimes we suffer because someone we love more than words is ripped from us. Grief is real, and appropriate and it’s a healthy response when we’ve lost someone we don’t know how to live without. Sometimes I hear people spout platitudes like, “There are no bad events, there’s just the way we’re relating to the things that are happening.” Tell that to a grieving parents who’ve lost their child in a violent act. There are events that are simply brutal, and they are real, and we will suffer, but short of those tragedies, a lot of our suffering is created by our thoughts.

If you always focus on what you don’t have, you’re going to be miserable. If you always focus on the ways your partner is blowing it, you’re going to feel lousy, and chances are, your partner will, too. It never feels good to be constantly criticized, rejected or ignored. If you throw an epic and ancient list of past mistakes into the mix every time your partner forgets to bring home apples, that’s probably going to weaken your bond, not strengthen it. If you’re giving with a motive, it’s not really giving, it’s giving to get. Am I saying you should never consider how you’re being treated or whether your partner is seeing you? Of course not. A healthy, happy relationship is one in which both people look out for each other. Each party wants the other to grow and expand and be more of themselves, not less, so if you’re in something with someone who’s mistreating you, you really have to look at that, and take some action.

I’m not talking about that, here. It never feels good when we’re small and petty and calculating. Manipulation is a poor use of your time and energy. Directing your thoughts to everything you do have makes you feel good; it makes you feel full, and like you’re coming from a place of abundance. Moving through the world focusing on what you don’t have is going to make you feel terrible, and you’ll be coming from a place of lack. That leads to greediness and hoarding, whether we’re talking about hoarding stuff, or other people’s time, attention and affection. Neediness is a poor foundation for a relationship of any kind; you can’t expect anyone else to solve your happiness issue, that’s your work. Culturally we’re trained to think that we need only meet our soul-mates, and everything will fall into place, we’ll be “complete” and happy. You are your soul-mate. I think we all need to get really clear about that, because it liberates us, and the people closest to us. We get to take ownership of our happiness issue. The Cliff Notes, if you want them, are that giving makes us happy. Be your own soul-mate, and check the catalog of stories you’re toting around, so you can be sure you aren’t focusing on the doom and gloom, instead of the love and light.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You Don’t Have to Have Braids

emersonLast week, I took my daughter when I went to get my toenails painted, and they always do her nails, too. It’s a little ritual once in awhile, while her brother is in school, and I pick her up earlier from Kindergarten. As I was paying for my pedicure, I noticed that the woman who’d painted my daughter’s nails was now finishing a second braid in her hair. I went and stood next to her, and when she was done, we thanked her, and we left. We weren’t three feet out of the salon when my daughter looked up at me and said, “I didn’t want braids.” When I asked her why she didn’t just say that, she kind of shrugged her shoulders at me. My daughter is a firecracker at home. She has no problem telling any of us what she wants or does not want, in a strong, assertive way. Just ask her brother. But when she doesn’t know people, she can be shy and quiet. She’s also sensitive and caring. She’s a watcher. She asked me if she could take the braids out, and of course I told her she could.

When we got in the car, I told her it was really important that she understand that she gets to decide what happens to her own hair. Her own body. Her own nails, and that it’s okay to say, “No thank you, I don’t want braids.” I asked her to say it to me a few times, for practice. I asked her to say it a little more loudly each time. By the third or fourth time, she was yelling it out the window, laughing, and I was yelling it with her, “I don’t want braids!!” It’s so simple, right? But it’s not always so easy to say what we want, or do not want, or to ask for what we need. I will not stop working with my daughter on this, because it’s a big part of our self-esteem, understanding that we should value our feelings and act on our own behalf.

Sometimes we take care of other people at our own expense. We feel something inside, but we keep it inside because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or we tell ourselves it isn’t that big of a deal. If you make a habit out of that, you’re making a habit out of putting other people’s needs and wants ahead of your own. When we make sacrifices for those we love because it feels good, that’s one thing, but when we make it a way of life to always put other people’s feelings ahead of ours, we’re in trouble. It won’t be long before we can’t even identify what we’re feeling, let alone act on it.

There’s a difference between generosity, and care-taking or people pleasing. If you grew up feeling you needed to earn love, this may easily have followed you into your adult life. You may fear speaking up, or standing up for yourself, because you think if you do, love may be withdrawn, or people might not like you. Maybe it’s such an ingrained way of being, you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Do you say, “Sorry!” when someone bumps into you? I’m laughing, because I do that sometimes, and then, two seconds later, I’m like, “Why am I apologizing?” Am I saying, “I’m sorry you aren’t paying attention”? Or am I saying, “I’m sorry I’m taking up space”? That’s a pretty important distinction, right?

You don’t have to apologize for your feelings. You may not get everything you want or need, but it never hurts to ask. At least that way, you’ve communicated clearly, and that makes everything simpler. If a person doesn’t care about how you feel, you can then decide whether it’s a relationship you want to pursue, or one to which you want to be devoting time and energy, or not so much. If you speak up and a person cannot give you what you need or want, at least you both understand that. You aren’t left in the murky waters of wondering whether you’ve been misunderstood or disrespected or unseen.

Being accountable for how we feel and what’s happening within us is a gift we give ourselves, and everyone we encounter. There are enough mysteries in life. Even if you’re clear about how you feel in every given moment, you’re still going to be part of the mystery that’s happening around us, and you’re still going to surprise yourself by the things you sometimes want or think or dwell upon. Knowing yourself takes work and time, and so does knowing other people. Don’t ever be sorry for taking up space, and don’t ever get braids if you don’t want them. Say it with me if you need to, “I don’t want braids!!”

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

For People Who Suffer from “Needing to Be Right Disease”, and Those Who Love Them

nietzscheSometimes it’s easier to be forgiving with other people than it is with ourselves. This has a lot to do with your personality, and your history with making mistakes. If, for example, you were badly punished when you made mistakes growing up, whether they were big or small, you might have a lot of fear around screwing up. If you felt that love and affection and approval were withdrawn when you blew it, the stakes become even higher. If that resonates with you, you might also find that you’re invested in being “right”, because if you aren’t right, you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong, you’ve made a mistake and there will be painful consequences. Fear usually drives the need to be right, and people who suffer from “Needing to Be Right Disease” often have a very hard time saying, “I’m sorry.” Which is, of course, the antidote.

If you’re dealing with someone who has to win every argument, or can’t ever say they’re sorry or see their part in a misunderstanding, you might be dealing with narcissistic pride, but you might also be dealing with fear. If this is someone you love, or someone you’re still getting to know, it might be worth your time to investigate the source of their need. Obviously, no one is always right, and most of the time, if there’s a miscommunication, it’s a two-party deal. Not always, so don’t freak on me, here. Sometimes you’re dealing with personality disorders and it doesn’t matter what you do or say; logic has no bearing, but I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about people who are normally kind and considerate, thoughtful and reasonable, until they feel they might have screwed up. Then this other entity comes out, this person who digs his heels in, or who can’t hear you because she’s raising her voice, or storming out the door. Clearly, that’s not a sustainable way to communicate, or try to work out problems. I’m just offering a possible explanation. Sometimes if we can understand that underneath anger and defensiveness, what we’re really dealing with is fear and pain, it inspires us to be kind, compassionate, and patient.

You will never get through to someone if they’re in the middle of a fight or flight reaction. That isn’t the time to offer your insights about what might be driving their need to be right. In fact, if you bring it up then, good luck to you! But if you care enough to understand, when things are calm and your friend is not feeling threatened or attacked or backed into a corner, you might ask how it was handled when they made mistakes as a kid. What did discipline look like in their house? How were they punished, and over what? This is the kind of conversation that might bring you a lot closer to someone you love, and it also might enable you to help them grow, to create a safe space to make mistakes, and to show them that you aren’t going to run out the door, or stop loving them, or “make them pay.”

People who fear being wrong berate themselves more than you ever could when they blow it, they obsess over it. And let me be clear, it’s not always the way someone was raised. Sometimes a person is a perfectionist. Maybe they had a parent who was very hard on her or himself, and they ingrained that behavior, so anything less than perfection is intolerable. Type A personalities suffer from this. Anyway, I know a lot about beating the crap out of yourself when you blow it, because I did that for years and years. I often say that after twenty or so years of yoga, pretty much six days a week, I am a mostly recovered Type A personality. 93% recovered on a good day, but it’s a hard way to live, if you’re expecting to never make a mistake, because obviously, you will, and probably you will a lot. It’s kind of an intrinsic part of being human. So if you feel disappointed in yourself, or disgusted with yourself, or like you want to jump out of your own intolerable skin, life is going to be pretty rough. You can lose days, weeks, months, even, over mistakes you’ve made. You can keep “boiling yourself”, traveling into the past, replaying what you’ve done, rewriting the scene so you don’t blow it, and lose all kinds of precious time you could have been enjoying the present.

Learning to expect that you’ll make mistakes is essential, and learning to own your mistakes and be accountable for your actions and choices is also imperative if you want to have healthy, lasting relationships of any kind in your life. Saying, “I’m so sorry”, and meaning it, is so freeing. It frees you, and usually, it’s all the other person needs or wants to hear. We all just long to be seen and understood by the people we love. We want to be known. It’s not about winning or being right. It’s about being seen and cherished and safe. Give yourself the gift of an inner voice that roots you on, don’t keep living with one that tears you down. There’s no need for that. A loud inner critic is a roommate who needs an eviction notice. That’s a voice that needs to be starved so you can have some peace. For me, I did most of that work on my yoga mat. If that shaming, critical voice spoke up, I didn’t give it any credence. I came back to my breath, reminded myself to be kind, and got back to the business of healing. It’s not a magic bullet, but I don’t know of anything that is when it comes to healing. Forgive yourself. Be reasonable with yourself. Let the love in.

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

Self-Pity is a Thief

gardnerSocial media can be amazing when it comes to connecting with people you might never have encountered otherwise. It can be a beautiful forum for sharing ideas, laughter, concerns, gratitude, tools for living well, and beauty. I’m in contact with people I haven’t seen for twenty years because of Facebook. I get on this page every day and am blown away by you people, and how thoughtful, kind, compassionate, enthusiastic, honest, intelligent, funny and thought-provoking you are. I get emails from people that are raw and brave, and I have zero doubt this is one way we can show up for each other. We can reassure each other that we’re not alone, and people care, and more importantly, strangers care. I think that’s huge to know, because it restores our faith in the goodness of people, if we need to have our faith restored. I see people rooting each other on in the comment threads, offering support, or condolences, or ideas. So those are some of the ways this world is not virtual at all, and can be a real blessing.

Having said all of that, sometimes social media, and I’m including Twitter and Instagram and whatever else you might be doing, can be a source of pain for people, if they’re feeling badly about themselves, or moving through a dark time. It can really seem like everyone else is having this idyllic, carefree, fulfilling life with their bare feet in the sand, and their annoyingly perfect dog in the background. Or that everyone is wittier, more cutting edge, better informed, more engaged, cooler or hipper or hotter or glossier or whatever-er. It can become a source of feeling “less than”.

Social media is certainly not the only contributing factor that might make a person wonder if they’re measuring up. Most media is designed to do that, after all. If you want people to buy products, apparently you have to barrage them every day with messages that they just don’t cut it. They don’t look right or smell right or feel right, and there are a million products, diets, supplements, cars, pills, and different kinds of beer that can help. We could talk for hours about the way women are relentlessly encouraged to be as tiny as possible. Perhaps we should all disappear, and don’t even think about getting angry around that topic, because then you’re really taking up too much space. Men don’t fare much better. They’re supposed to be virile and unafraid and able to take charge under all circumstances. Video games start to look awfully appealing if those are the standards men are supposed to meet. In a virtual world, that might be possible, but in the real world, it’s asinine to think we’ll never be afraid, or we’ll always have the answers, or know the next right thing to do, and that goes for both genders. Anyway, my point is, most advertising is designed to make us all feel like we’re blowing it, in all kinds of ways, and if you’re feeling vulnerable, you can get sucked down the rabbit hole.

Self-pity and self-doubt are thieves. They rob you of your power, of your belief in yourself, of the desire to take ownership of your life. Blame and shame and rage are poor traveling companions, but sometimes it’s hard to take action when we’re already feeling like we should just give up. It’s easier to point our fingers, and make other people the cause of our unhappiness, or to feel angry at the world at large because it’s so unfair. And you know what? It is unfair. It’s not a level playing field. Some people are born into loving, nurturing families where there’s no concern about health insurance, or keeping a roof over everyone’s head, and other people are born into abusive environments where they weren’t wanted, or their parents were too young to be responsible for themselves, let alone a baby. Some people have to deal with loss and grief and mourning that just brings you to your knees, and other people have a path that’s a lot smoother. Here’s the thing. There might be a few people living a life where their hair is always done, and their cars are sleek, and they talk to their housekeeper about the meals for the week. That doesn’t add up to a happy life if there isn’t happiness on the inside. Most of the crap we see that’s designed to sell us something, is just so far removed from most people’s reality, it’s laughable. I think most people know this, it’s just easy to get sucked in when you’re feeling tested, down on yourself, rejected, hopeless or really confused. It’s a distorted perception of reality when we’re moving through times like that, and believing we’re not good enough. Or that other people are more deserving, or more likely to get the breaks, or the girl or the guy or the promotion.

If you ever find yourself thinking, “No one likes me”, or “People suck”, or, “Everyone cheats”, you know you’re hanging out with the White Rabbit. Extreme thinking, sentences that involve “always” and “never”, are good indicators that you’re not thinking clearly, that you’re allowing yourself to spiral downward, or spin out of control. When we feed self-pity, we make ourselves sick. It’s likely we’re all going to feel sorry for ourselves at one time or another, so please don’t misunderstand me. Sometimes horrendous, deeply painful things happen to beautiful people, and it’s hard not to feel like we’re being “singled out”, especially if many unfortunate things happen at once. I’m just talking about self-pity as a way of life, as a way of moving through the world. There’s no possible way you’re going to uncover your gifts and share them freely, and light yourself up, if you’re in the blame/shame/rage cycle. You really have to step off that wheel, dust yourself off, and start again. That’s the beauty of being human. It’s never too late to start where you are, until your final exhale.

You are not less than. Less than what? Other people? You’re you. You cannot be less than you. We have about seven billion people on this planet, but we only have one you. So what are you going to do with your spark? What are you going to offer up? Whatever it is, you’re the only one who can do it, and you can’t buy that knowledge, you have to dig for it. You really don’t want to move through life feeling bitter and resentful, and unable to be happy for other people’s good fortune. I can’t think of too many things that would feel more unfulfilling than that. There’s so much beauty inside you. If you’ve been hurt, disappointed, heartbroken, allow those experiences to open you and make you a more compassionate, understanding, empathetic, patient person. Don’t believe the hype. You aren’t missing anything. You don’t have to be anything other than yourself, your authentic self. Let your pain inspire you to grow, let it mean something. And stick with the social media that lifts you up! 

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Grief, Healing & Connection

fallapartSometimes we grip and cling and refuse to accept reality as it is. We reject the truth. The more we contract against our experience, the more we suffer. It’s just that sometimes, reality really hurts, and our mind isn’t ready to integrate and accept it. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say our minds and our hearts aren’t ready.

We can do this in big ways and small. Maybe we’re dealing with the pain of rejection, and keep writing a script in our heads about what’s really happening, and how we’re going to get our happy ending down the line. Or maybe we’ve lost someone we don’t know how to live without, and it’s happened so suddenly, we’re in a state of shock. The limbs work, we can put one foot in front of the other, we seem okay to those around us, but inside we’re bargaining with the universe. We’re coming up with some way we might get back the person we’ve lost, as if that might be possible.

Some things are so painful, we look for another way, a different route, a formula that creates a livable outcome. We might do this by retracing our steps. If only we’d done or said “this”, maybe these other events wouldn’t have transpired, and life would still make sense. If only we could go back in time and redo one decision, perhaps that would have all kinds of implications that would save us from the current pain, and here’s the thing. When you’re dealing with those big losses, the loss of an entire person, for example, it’s a process, like anything else. It’s not something you can rush, and there isn’t any “how-to” book. You just have to move through your pain in whatever way you can, and hope that the people in your life show up for you, feed you, make sure you get a little sun on your face. Sometimes we go through experiences that make us feel we’re in a bubble, like there’s an impenetrable film between us, and everyone in the “living world”. Regina Brett has a quote, “You have to give time, time.” Time doesn’t heal every wound, but it helps lessen the crushing, incomprehensible nature of sudden grief. That waking up, and having to “re-remember” what’s happened goes away over time, because eventually you will integrate it, you will know it in your bones. You won’t wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented, panicked, feeling as though you’ve forgotten something urgent.

We deal with all kinds of losses in life. The loss of our innocence, whenever that comes. The loss of our trust when someone betrays us for the first time. The loss of the idea that we’re invincible. Sometimes we deal with the loss of our faith in ourselves, or the world at large. Losing your keys is just a moment you get to practice not panicking. Dealing with a car that won’t start is a chance to realize the things you take for granted won’t always work the way you want them to, or think they should. The more we accept that life is really another word for energy, and that energy is always in motion, the less we’ll expect things to be stable and predictable and safe. We all know we’re going to die, but that isn’t a comfortable thought, so we don’t always live like we know that. It’s as if we know, but we somehow don’t really believe it. That won’t really happen to us, or to those we love. Sometimes we live as though we have all the time in the world. We “waste” time, or “kill” time as if it isn’t precious. Death puts things in perspective. It shocks us into awareness, but grief is so overwhelming, and we don’t create a safe space for people to move through it. We’ve become so attached to positivity and light, it’s as if we’re supposed to feel ashamed when we feel dark and hopeless, like we should stay home until we’re ready to smile again. People who are grieving and need support more than ever, are often left to manage on their own, because grief reminds people of their own mortality.

None of us is going to live forever in the bodies we have right now, that much we know for sure, and we can allow ourselves to be crushed and devastated and paralyzed by that, or we can allow that to inspire us to really be living and loving and giving and seeing and listening and tasting and hugging and crying and laughing and grieving and cherishing the whole experience, every facet of it. If we’re grieving, it’s because we loved deeply, and there’s beauty in that. Some people will never allow themselves to be vulnerable that way, they’ll never really open, or let themselves be seen and understood. I don’t believe you have to feel grateful about everything that’s ever happened to you, but I do think every experience is a chance to grow and learn and soften. I think we can become more empathetic, understanding and compassionate. If we’re going to suffer from time to time, let’s at least put that suffering to good use. Let’s help each other. We don’t do that by rejecting the uncomfortable feelings. We don’t do it when we reject them internally, and we don’t do it when we refuse to meet people where they are. Most of the time, a person dealing with loss will appreciate your kindness, your presence, your thoughtfulness. These aren’t huge things to give, and at some point, we’ll all need to lean on each other.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

The Illusion of Control

angeloureducedIf you want to be at peace, you have to let go of the illusion that you’re in control, because the truth is, you’re in control of very, very little. You cannot control circumstances, for example. You can’t control what other people are going to do, or say, or want, or need, but you can work on the way you respond to what you’re given, and there’s a lot of power in that.

Our time and energy are the most precious gifts we’re given, and they’re also the most precious gifts we have to offer. They happen to be finite, and we don’t get to know when our time will be up, or how long we have with the people we love. It’s a tough gig, in many ways. Some people will love us, others will leave us, delight us, surprise us, shame us, uplift us, inspire us and betray us. These things are all likely. There are other possibilities, of course. We might be abused, neglected, abandoned, marked by grief and loss that’s hard to bear. We may also be nurtured and loved and protected and celebrated. Life may unfold in a delicious and incredible way, and we may also experience storms and obstacles and times when everything feels dark and impossible. Sometimes painful, unimaginable things happen to beautiful, kind people. Sometimes people who have trouble being kind and compassionate still get the breaks. It’s not a level playing field, after all.

Often we have pain, and our pain controls us. If we don’t do the work to heal, if we don’t know ourselves, we’re going to careen through life, crashing into things and people, like the woman I saw today, who rammed her car into the back of the car in front of her. I don’t know if she was texting, or distracted, or thinking about something her husband said on the way out the door. I just know she totaled her car, and was lucky to be relatively unharmed. When we’re moving through life in an unconscious way and we don’t have any real sense of what lights us up, what scares us, what excites us or inspires us, or where we might be blocked, life can really be a confusing mess where we accidentally hurt ourselves and others. We all long to heal, but often we go about healing in all the wrong ways. We think we have to chase what’s outside of us, to cure the hole that’s inside of us. We might try to fill it with relationships or money or things or ideas. We might repeat painful patterns in an effort to win that happiness. We might think we’d be happy, we’d be at peace if only we’d lose ten pounds, or meet someone amazing, or have a different job, house, car, or personality. Maybe if we had better hair, or whiter teeth, or bigger boobs or biceps. This is what it looks like to be controlled by pain. It sends us on an outward hunt, when we should really be digging and unearthing what’s within us.

Sometimes we become attached to a picture in our heads of how things should be, or how people should be, or how life should be unfolding. When reality doesn’t match that picture, we suffer. And this is my point: you cannot bend reality to your will. That is not within your control, but you can work on the way you show up for yourself, and all the people in your life.

If you’re expending a lot of energy trying to force, control, or manipulate an outcome or another human being, that’s time and energy you could be using to heal, and free yourself. When you stop and think about how hard it is to control yourself sometimes, it makes it easier to grasp how futile it is to try to control someone else. You’re never going to make another person, “see the light”, nor can you ever be sure that what feels right for you is, or would be, right for anyone else. Sometimes people need to screw up in order to learn and grow. When you jump in to save the day, you might, instead, be robbing your friend of a lesson they would have gotten had you not grabbed your cape and run out the door. Sometimes we over-inflate our power, or we relate to the world and the people in it as they pertain to us. As if everything and everyone is in orbit around us, and things are happening to us, when the truth is, we are one tiny strand in a huge story, and our strand is no more important than anyone else’s. Other times we underestimate our power, and the impact we could be having. Discerning what is within your power, and what is not is the best way to figure out how to spend your time, and upon what to direct your energy. If you want the world around you to be more peaceful, loving, compassionate, kind, honest, patient, awake and aware, start by cultivating those qualities within yourself. Start with that world, because that’s a place within your jurisdiction.

Too many people waste too much time trying to force. Anything in life that’s worthwhile is going to require work, time, effort, commitment, patience, presence and passion, whether we’re talking about a long-term relationship, or the blossoming of your dreams, but working hard is a lot different than forcing. Working hard feels really good, because you know your devotion is in service to your dreams. Forcing feels awful, because there’s a sales pitch involved. You have to convince yourself or someone else that everything is great, when you know it isn’t. Don’t chase love. Don’t chase people. Don’t bend over backwards and try to be perfect for anyone. Don’t run after people who reject you. Don’t bury your head in the sand when a person shows you with their actions that they do not want what you want, and they do not feel what you feel. All of these things are a poor use of your time and energy, plus they hurt your tender heart. They deplete you. They make you feel less than, when the truth is you are more than enough, and you are capable of healing, but it takes time and energy, and you won’t have enough if you’ve spent it all chasing. Life is not a race. It’s a journey, it’s a process, it’s a story that’s co-written by the things that happen and the way you respond.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Motivations

ruizWe never know what’s motivating someone unless they tell us, and even then, people are not always honest. No one wants to say, “I’m making this decision because I’m scared and weak, and it’s the safer and easier thing to do.” I mean, seriously. Who wants to have to own that? Sometimes people make choices, and they don’t communicate about what’s driving them because they can’t face it themselves.

We’re human, and most of us long to understand, especially if things happen that are hurtful. Few things feel worse than being ignored. If we make ourselves vulnerable with someone, if we reach out in an effort to make sense of something, and are left in a vacuum to figure it out on our own, it adds insult to injury. We feel we aren’t even worth a response to someone who was, or is, important to us. There’s nothing kind or compassionate about leaving someone in a communication void, and let me be clear. I’m not talking about situations with people who are unbalanced or have a total lack of boundaries, or who refuse to accept what you’ve already said a million times. Sometimes you really have no choice but to draw a hard line. While I’m at it, let me also say that you can never be the one to help heal the heart of your inconsolable ex. Meeting for one more tea, taking one more walk, answering one more call, writing one last email…it just keeps the other party hanging on and hoping. Your intentions are probably good, but you can’t and won’t help anyone that way. If you’ve explained yourself, if you’ve communicated openly and honestly, and given the other party the chance to say whatever needs to be said, you’re both going to need some time and space. It’s hard to heal when we keep throwing salt in the wound. I’m not talking about those cases, though. I’m talking about times when we’ve been close to someone, and they make choices that are mind-boggling, unexpected, completely out of left field, and then they refuse to help us understand what’s happened.

This occurs with romantic relationships, it happens between family members, and it happens with friends. Sometimes there’s a willingness to talk, but it’s not coupled with the ability to be truthful. You can only do what you can do, after all. You can create a safe space. You can say that you just want to understand. You can invite the other party to open up and share with you, even if it isn’t pretty. You can reassure someone that there’s nothing they could say that would make you stop loving them, but you can’t force someone to accept your invitation to be intimate, because that’s what we’re talking about, here.

Sometimes people feel threatened or envious, and they can’t imagine saying that out loud, so instead they withdraw, or they lash out, or they act out. Friendships that were once thriving are lost, because we’ve decided some feelings are ugly or shameful. Can we really tell a friend we feel jealous or insecure? What’s funny, is that the more we’re able to be truthful, the less these emotions overpower us. When we repress something, we’re actually feeding it power. The more we push it down or reject it, the harder it comes back up. Most people would rather have an uncomfortable conversation than lose a friend, and some people might actually see bold-faced ownership of your feelings as an opportunity to deepen your bond. If you want someone to know you, you have to be willing to show yourself, even the parts that aren’t so pretty; especially those. If you internalize your confusion and pain about the choices being made by someone close to you, you also lose a chance to see what the friendship can sustain.

Also, let’s talk about rejection. Since we never know what’s motivating someone unless they tell us and they’re honest about it, it’s really inadvisable to assume it’s a reflection of anything lacking within you. If you’re in a romantic triangle with someone, if you have a friend who you wish would be so much more, and they choose the other party, of course that can feel like the other party must be better than you, but the reality is just that the other person is different than you, and maybe in ways that work better for your friend. Maybe you’re scary in some way. Maybe you demand a level of honesty and intimacy that feels too intense for them. Maybe the other person offers more stability, and your friend comes from a really unstable background. Maybe your friend doesn’t want a real partner, maybe they prefer to be the big personality. Maybe a million things.

The point is, try not to expend too much time or energy trying to understand what someone else is doing, or has done. The story to examine is always the story of our participation. What did we bring to the mix? Do we feel good about it? Did we show up the way we wanted to? Is there anything we can learn that will help us moving forward? Do we need to apologize to the other person, or to ourselves for anything we might have done or not done? Once you have those questions answered, move on and try to trust. I realize it isn’t always easy, but if a person is meant to be in your life, they’re going to find a way. If they can’t, you just need different things. Try to be at peace with that.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

Addiction

kalwarSometimes in the name of love, we seek to control. We may do this because we can see a loved one is about to head into a brick wall, and we long to save them from getting hurt. Parents do this all the time, especially with their firstborn children. It’s a natural instinct to want to protect your children from pain; if you don’t have that instinct, I worry for you and your little ones, but if a parent is always there to say “no!” and “stop!” and “don’t!”, what results is a fearful child. You don’t want to scare the curiosity out of your kid, or rob them of any sense that they can trust themselves. Eventually, we all have to learn that if we run too quickly, we’re probably going to trip and fall, and it’s going to hurt. That’s how we learn.

Sometimes we see a friend stuck in a painful cycle, and we throw our hands in the air. What are they doing? How can they not realize they’re repeating this destructive pattern? How many times will we have to be there when it all falls apart? I’m not saying we shouldn’t kindly hold up a mirror when someone we love is hurting themselves, but you can’t force a person to see something they aren’t ready to see. You can’t manage another person’s journey, and you never know what someone else needs in order to learn and grow and strengthen. Sometimes we need painful lessons over and over again before we get it. Sometimes we have to have our hearts broken badly and repeatedly, until we finally say, “That’s it. Enough.”

You can’t save anyone, anyway. Communication is beautiful. “I love you, and it hurts me to see you treating yourself so badly. It hurts me to see you in such a self-loathing place, because I see you so clearly, and you’re beautiful.” Say it, go ahead. Maybe, hopefully, some part of that will seep in there. Maybe a tiny little root will grow, and one day the person will start to see themselves the way you do. If you’re dealing with someone who’s harming themselves, of course do everything you can to get them help, but understand, ultimately, everyone has to do their own journey. Healing is inside work. A person has to be open to help, or no help is available.

Also, try not to judge. None of us knows the interior world of another person. We only ever know what someone is willing to show us. We all have pain. Some people do a better job managing their pain than others. Some people have more pain handed to them, that’s a fact. Sometimes a person is up against so much grief and despair they reach for anything to numb it, anything to avoid feeling that abyss. Desperation and loneliness and a certain kind of personality, along with possible trauma, a person’s resiliency, and so many other factors can lead to the kind of numbing that’s hard to comprehend. No one wants to be addicted to something that has the potential to ruin or end their lives. Addicts are prisoners of the object of their desire. They get hijacked by it. Their pain owns them, and the agent that numbs the pain owns them, unless they find the enormous will and strength and tenacity and love for themselves to fight back, and even then, it takes a Herculean effort, a lot of support, and a decision every day to choose love. To choose health. To choose freedom. Sometimes people just don’t win the fight. They get tired. It’s heartbreaking. Addiction robs us of so much beauty.

Have you ever been in a destructive, abusive relationship that you wanted to end, but you just couldn’t find the strength? You just weren’t feeling good enough about yourself to say, “F&ck this. I don’t deserve this”? Maybe you tried to end it a bunch of times, but the pull was so strong, you found yourself dialing that number, even when every part of your being was screaming, “No!” It’s not easy being a human being. It can be gorgeous and beautiful and wildly interesting, but it isn’t easy. Love the people in your life. I mean, really love them. Honor them, cherish them, see them, hear them, support their growth and their joy. That’s all you can do. Sometimes, you’ll have to do it from afar if someone you love is hurting themselves and won’t be stopped. Don’t ever think a person is choosing between you and a drug, and that you must not mean much to them if they’re choosing a drug over you. You’re not even in the fight. You’re not in the mix. It’s not about you, so don’t get confused. You’ve been left on the shore. They’re out to sea with this thing, fighting for their lives. You’re outside the thing, so try to grasp that. How much they love you has nothing to do with it. It’s how much they’re able to care about themselves. May all beings be free from suffering.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

A Leg is a Leg

lincolnSometimes people come into our lives and there’s an instant and real connection there, but circumstances prevent us from exploring it. There’s no need to agonize over this. You can’t pursue every road; life is full of choices. There’s a reason we have the word “bittersweet.” Also, understand that there are times we idealize someone, or the feeling we have when we’re with them, simply because we’ll never get to really test it. Fantasy is easy, even with a real bond. Meeting once a decade for tea, or reconnecting on Facebook with someone you knew twenty years ago can bring you back. It can make you feel like you’re in a time warp, but if you really want to know how things would be with someone, you have to be in the foxhole with them at some point. Otherwise, it’s easy to feel like this would have been the person for you, if only things had worked out. Sending messages, meeting at Grand Central Station for an hour-long wistful coffee while you’re in town on business, that’s easy. Holding your baby at 3 o’clock in the morning as he’s throwing up for the sixth time in four hours, covering you both in vomit until you finally strip down to your underwear to lessen the laundry load, that’s something. Especially if your partner is there to take shifts with you, to discuss the merits of a trip to the ER, to hold you, too, because you’re on the verge of collapse—that’s when you really know, one way or the other.

Focus on what’s real in your life. Try not to take people for granted, or to be reckless with the heart of someone you say you love. If there are problems, welcome to real relationships. Life will never fail to put challenges in your path, it’s how you handle them that defines your relationship with yourself, and anyone else. It’s easy to lose the thread. You wake up with someone, day in and day out, for weeks, months, years, decades, and it’s easy to stop seeing them. I mean, to really take them in, and not just glance and nod your head like you’ve got it all figured out, because guess what? We’re all changing, all the time. Every single one of us. The person you chose to share your life with ten years ago, is not the same person today, and neither are you. We like to “peg” people, to think we “have them down”, but we’re always in process, and so are they; if you stop paying attention, you’re going to miss a lot, and no one likes to feel unseen or unheard. If two people stop showing up for each other, but continue living under the same roof, you can bet problems will follow.

A relationship exists in the space between you and the other person, whether we’re talking about your partner, your child, your parent, or the person behind the counter at the juice bar. What you put into that space is up to you. If we’re talking about intimate, longterm relationships, you have to be especially mindful about what you’re contributing, because complacency won’t get you there. Boredom, rage, frustration, blame and criticism won’t do it, either. You can’t control other people, or where they are on their own path. You can only do your end, you can only work to keep your side of the street clean, but you can inspire other people to be kind, compassionate, caring and present, by being those things yourself. If they don’t follow suit, if you try to communicate but find it’s falling on deaf ears, you may not be able to walk the distance together. It takes two people to make that third thing beautiful; that third thing being the relationship.

Maybe it can’t work, and that’s hard. It hurts. Depending upon circumstances, it can hurt a lot. If there are children in the picture, for example, it’s brutal, but understand that they live in that space between you and your partner, and if it’s polluted, they’re going to suffer. If you can’t make the space safe, loving, healthy and nurturing, it’s time to come up with a new plan. Turning your attention to fantasy won’t help anyone, but people do it all the time. They allow a flirtation at work to grow into a full-fledged situation, with heated emotion, and lying and desperation. It’s easy to justify poor behavior when you’ve felt discarded or rejected for years, but that just adds to the mess. It involves a whole other person, with all their feelings and complexities. It adds a layer of guilt and shame and hopelessness to a situation that’s already bleak. You really have to go to the source. If you’re unhappy, unfulfilled, misunderstood, it’s time to have a conversation. It’s time to sit down and get real with your partner, who already knows things are not okay. If it’s so bad you’re ready to trade in your integrity, and your ability to feel good about yourself, communication is long overdue. Some things are just not sustainable. Sometimes the foxhole is full of broken promises, dreams, hopes and potential. All that stuff has been shot up over the years, and now it’s time to see if you can piece things back together. If there’s enough there to start again, and start new, as you are now, and maybe you’re going to find that you can’t. But dealing with reality as it is, is always the place to start.

When we struggle in a relationship, we all like to think that things would be different if we had a different partner. And let me say this—maybe you chose someone when you were too young to really know yourself. Maybe you got hitched because you turned thirty and it seemed like the thing to do. Maybe you thought you knew your partner, but found out once you were in it, that so much had been edited out. Maybe you thought you wanted intimacy, but once you had it, you realized it isn’t for you. It isn’t for everyone, and that’s just reality, but if the truth is that if you’re not happy on the inside, finding a new partner won’t fix that. It’ll catch up with you. We can’t run from our pain, or gloss it over, or push it down or numb it out, and expect life to feel good. It won’t. Whatever it is, deal with it. Take it by the horns, and own it, because you don’t have all the time in the world. You want to be at peace, and you want the people you love to be at peace, and you want to be able to face yourself in the mirror when you’re brushing your teeth at the end of the day and feel you can look yourself in the eye. These things are really important. There’s no judgement here. People screw up royally, all the time. Someone is making a huge, messy mistake right this second. Sometimes that’s what we need to learn a painful lesson, or own the fact that we’re miserable, and start to make hard choices. So don’t go to self-loathing, because you’ll get stuck there. Just start where you are. Yoga is great for this, by the way. One of the biggest things we work on is the ability to lean into our uncomfortable feelings, and to work with reality as it is, to breathe when we feel challenged, to trust that everything is always in flux, to understand that how we feel now is not how we will always feel, and to pause and listen before we act. When you follow your intuition, the way becomes clear.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

Let Inspiration be Your Hook

thichFor many people, rejection is like a hook. They might be dating someone and feeling kind of “on the fence” about it, but if their potential partner starts to lose interest, it’s like an instant fever; now this person becomes enticing and coveted and the one they have to have. The same thing can happen with new friendships, it can happen amongst colleagues, it can even happen with strangers. If we harbor doubt about our own worth at our very core, having that doubt reflected back at us is almost intolerable. It’s like a message from the universe being delivered through this unavailable person: “It’s as you thought, you are not good enough, and you are not truly lovable.” It can be brutal.

What happens when we feel excluded, shunned, ignored, disrespected, discarded or unseen? These things never feel good, of course, but if we’re in a healthy, stable place, we can probably talk ourselves off the ledge. Not everyone is going to understand us, or see us clearly or dig our vibe, and that’s okay, it really is. Also, if a person is rude or haughty or demeaning or demanding, that’s a reflection of where they are on their own path, it’s not a reflection of anything lacking in us, but if we’re suffering from low self-esteem, if we’re having a hard time believing we’re worthy of happiness and love and peace, then feeling rejected by someone, even a stranger, can set us on the run. We might think if we can just convince this person that we’re actually amazing, then we’ll feel better, but the minute you’re in that kind of power struggle with another person (even if they have no idea it’s happening), you’re doomed because you aren’t going to be your authentic self. You’re going to be jumping around, chasing them down, waving your arms and dancing like a monkey to show how great you are, and that’s going to make you feel sick, as it should. Why should that make you feel sick? Because it’s the worst kind of betrayal; it’s the betrayal of self. It is never, ever your job to sell yourself. If someone is dismissive or unkind or unsure about whether they want to give you their time and energy, move along.

Sometimes we pick unavailable people because we have deep fear of intimacy. We think if we open and trust, we’ll surely be hurt, so we choose people who can’t commit. That’s not the only reason we might chase people who don’t have the capacity or interest to take us in, in all our entirety, with all our flaws and beauty and occasional absurdites. Sometimes a thing starts out hot and strong and we get swept up in the intensity and fall in love, only to find when the lust/dust clears, that we’ve chosen someone who could only give us their all in the beginning. Maybe we stay because we think this person is capable of being present and hot for us, and fully “in it”, because they displayed that when we started, so we wait and hope that person will show up again, but hormones and the frenzy of something new do not add up to true intimacy. That takes time, and fearlessness and commitment, and a willingness to look at our own raw, unhealed places; not everyone is up to that, and not everyone wants to do that kind of work. When we’re in love, we tend to excuse behavior that hurts, because we hope. We hope and we hope, and time passes, and we feel smaller and smaller, and more and more hurt. We feel rejected by this person who once seemed so into us, and we can’t understand how that could be, so we stay and we try and we bend over backwards and see if we can be perfect or different or better, or we see if we can accept what little is being offered, and somehow be okay with it. This is not a healthy scenario, and it isn’t good for your heart.

People change and grow, but it’s never our job to manage anyone else’s path. People are ready if and when they’re ready, and it isn’t loving to try to manipulate or force or control an outcome that we want, but our partner or friend or family member does not. Love is accepting, and sometimes that means you have to accept that what you want is just not what someone else wants, and you have to let it go, even though it hurts like hell. The alternative is not livable or sustainable. You can’t allow your light to be dimmed and your spirit to be crushed, and expect that life will feel good, or that you’ll blossom the way you could. Maybe your paths will cross in the future, or maybe something else will unfold that you never could have imagined. It’s impossible to know, but one thing you can know is that you have to be you. You really can’t compromise on that. You can make adjustments, and work with the people you love so you can coexist harmoniously, so you can respect one another’s needs and space and dreams and necessary solitude, but you can’t try to be something other than who you are, because there’s only one of you. I don’t know if I can get across how amazing that is, but there are roughly seven billion people on this planet, and yet, we only get one you, for one blaze of time. Don’t let rejection be your hook. Really, you don’t have time for that. Let inspiration be your hook. Let that be the thing that sets you off running to show what you’ve got, not because you have anything to prove, or any doubt to undo, but because you have so much to give.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Trust and Release

ramdassSometimes you have to let go of a relationship, not because you don’t care about the person or people with whom you were once close, but because there’s nothing growing or good or real or substantial holding things together anymore. We grow together and sometimes we grow apart, and this happens in romantic relationships and long-term friendships, as well. Sometimes we cling or we grasp because we just can’t bear the idea of having things change. Most of us tend to resist the unknown until circumstances become unbearable, or we find ourselves dreading plans, or feeling resentful about time and energy we’re spending on a situation that just doesn’t feel right anymore.

Sometimes connections are borne from circumstances; you meet another mom in your prenatal yoga class, and go through the end of your pregnancy together, and maybe you meet for tea that first year, and compare notes on motherhood, lack of sleep, aching boobies, your partner’s support, or lack of it, how much sex you’re having, and when to start solid food. Maybe your babies become friends, and then one day, years later, that little toddler who was once so cute starts bashing your kid in the face with his toy truck, or hitting him over the head with his bag of beach toys, and your friend just stands there. Maybe you decide to step in, rescue your kid, and parent your friend’s child, and that isn’t received well. Or maybe you try to talk to your friend when it happens for the fourth or fifth time, and your friend becomes defensive and angry.

Other examples—you date someone and you think “this is it!” because the first three months are so amazing, so amazing, and no one has ever understood you this way, or been so attentive and present and hot for you, and in your face, and then eight months later you don’t even recognize this person who’s too busy to take your call during the day, and too swamped to make plans on the weekends. Or maybe you make a friend at work, and you’re both dealing with the same unreasonable boss, and you bond over lunches and text each other at night, things like, “Can you believe what she said at that meeting?” and, “Someday she’ll work for us!” And then one day you quit, or you’re fired because you had the audacity to say no, you would not go and get coffee, that was not in your job description, and this is not why your parents took two jobs and a second mortgage on their house, and now you work somewhere else, and you and your friend have nothing to talk about anymore. Or maybe you bond with a friend while you’re both single. Maybe you find a great wing-man, and you’re on the town every weekend, beach volleyball by day, bars and clubs by night, until your buddy meets some girl, and now you’re on your own again.

The point is, things change and people change, and sometimes we bond in times of stress or duress or excitement. Some things are lasting and real and deep, and some are of the moment, of the time, of an era. Also, people change and shift and grow. How someone was when you met them five years ago is not how they are today. You are not who you were five years ago, either. Transitions are hard. Goodbyes are hard. Acceptance is hard. Sometimes people feel all this stuff but they just don’t want to put the words to it, they want you to figure it out. Maybe you’ve been that person who just didn’t know how to have the awkward conversation, so you just let something fade. No one wants to be the person to say, “I don’t want to pursue this friendship anymore,” and no one wants to be on the receiving end of that, either. Sometimes we long for closure. We aren’t having the same experience as our friend. We aren’t feeling that distance or dissonance, or maybe we are, but we just don’t want to accept it. The truth is, some things will never be explained, and our best hope for closure is acceptance.

We love for things to be stable. We want to count on some things, and some people. Hopefully you have a few true friends who’ve been with you through thick and thin, and are more like family than anything. Hopefully you have some family members you adore, but if you want to count on something, count on the reality that people and circumstances are always shifting. Count on your ability to show up for yourself, and to open to reality as it is, or work on that. Spend your time and energy on those things that light you up. Share your gifts, even as the ground moves beneath your feet, and you aren’t sure what will happen next. Give it everything you’ve got, and trust that when it’s time to release something, it’s okay. Life is full of loss, and it’s probably good that we understand that, and practice dealing with it. It’s also full of joy and beauty. Our work is to shift and move and open and breathe, not to cling and grasp. Trust your process. Wishing you the strength to be true to yourself, to trust your gut, to say the hard things when they need to be said, but to do it with compassion, and to keep your heart open. Wish people well as they enter and exit your life, or as they stay on the path with you, grinning from time to time, weeping from time to time, and sharing in the adventure. As Ram Dass says, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

Get Sweaty

sweatyI think many people out there are miserable because their expectations are unrealistic. If, for example, you’re thinking you’re going to reach some point in your evolution when you’re ecstatic every moment of every day, I think you’re going to be disappointed, and I don’t believe you’re ever going to reach that place. It seems many people are searching for the “high highs”, and as a result, they find themselves dealing with the “low lows.” We’ve all heard it a million times, but it bears repeating: happiness is not a destination, it’s borne from your process.

When we get caught up in the externals, in the results, in the material proof of our successes, we’re way off the path of what brings us fulfillment and true satisfaction. An object will never be able to provide you with feelings of worth or meaning for long. Neither will an altered state of consciousness. Nor will another human being. What do you spend most of your time doing? Really look at that, because most of your time adds up to most of your life, and if you’re spending a large majority of it feeling dissatisfied, or like you’re just punching a clock, or doing what you’re “supposed” to be doing, I wouldn’t expect life to feel very good for you, regardless of your bank account. In other words, you might be making lots of money and accruing lots of stuff, but if you don’t love the way you’re spending your days, it won’t amount to a happy life.

Happy doesn’t mean ecstatic. I know we see all of our friends with their shiny Instagram lives and pithy status updates, but please understand everyone goes through the same stuff. The people who are genuinely happy with their lives still have their struggles, their challenges, their days when they don’t feel like getting out of their pajamas. It’s not “all good”, and it’s not all positive, and you don’t have to be grateful for every experience you’ve ever been through, or every loss you’ve yet to endure. It’s a tough gig, being human. It’s awesome, it’s wonderful, it’s interesting, but it’s not easy. We get sold a false bill of goods, and sent down an unfulfilling path until we wise up and get right with ourselves.

Take a look at what you’re contributing, and how you feel about it. Working toward something you believe in feels great, but it’s not easy. Take a look at the people with whom you’re spending your time. It’s one of your most precious gifts–that, and your energy. Sometimes when we step back from the “grind”, or the “rat-race”, we realize we’re giving our time and energy to pursuits and people who weaken us, rather than strengthen us, and maybe we remember it shouldn’t be a grind, and we aren’t rats. Obviously there are the practicalities of life. We have to be able to feed and clothe ourselves, we have to keep a roof over our heads, and if we’re responsible for other people, we have to make sure they’re taken care of as well. But what lights you up? What feeds your soul? What excites you, scares you, inspires you? These are questions you’ll have to answer if you want to be at peace. That’s my definition of what it means to be happy. It means you’re feeling good about the way you’re living your life. It means you’ve figured out what your particular gifts are, and you’ve found a way to share them. Does that way have to be the thing that keeps a roof over your head? No, not necessarily. I think that’s ideal, but I think the main thing is to be sure you’re devoting a nice chunk of your time to those paths that bring you joy, and that offer you an opportunity to share what’s in your heart.

Self-acceptance is another huge part of the puzzle. If you despise yourself, you’re not going to be happy. Obvious, yes? If you have healing to do, there’s simply no avoiding it. If you’re enraged, ashamed, in a cycle of blame and shame, you’re going to have to move right into the center of your pain and have a seat. You do not have to stay there for the rest of your life, so don’t tell yourself it’s too hard. What’s too hard is living your whole life feeling frustrated and lost. Sitting with, examining, and understanding your issues, your pitfalls, your raw places and those tendencies that aren’t serving you, are the very things you need to do to liberate yourself from a lifetime of suffering. You can’t avoid your rage, or internalize it, or attach it to people outside yourself, or numb it out and think it’s going to go away, because it won’t. You have to deal with the source, and that’s deeply uncomfortable, painful work, but it’s also finite. Once you have a thorough understanding of why you feel and have felt the way you do and have, it will lose its grip on you. I promise you, this is the way it works. I’m not saying you’ll never have to deal with it again, I’m just saying this stuff will not own you anymore, it won’t rule your life, your behavior, and your choices. It won’t show up in its unrelenting way and block you from feeling a sustained sense of meaning, purpose and peace. Then you can go about the business of figuring out how you want to spend your time, and with whom, and how you’re going to share your gifts, and if you start to do your days like that, you’ll find you’re having some pretty happy and fulfilling weeks, months, years and decades. It’s not what we have, it’s what we give. Focus on giving, and the having takes care of itself. You’ll always have enough with this formula, because what you’ll have is meaning and purpose.

Lastly, take this literally several times a week–get sweaty. Feel your heart pumping. Remember you have a body, and use it and move it. Become your breath and your heartbeat and your sensations, and get out of your loud mind with it’s relentless and obsessive thoughts. Yoga is great for that; that is actually the purpose of yoga–to calm the storm that rages in the mind. It’s not about turning yourself into a pretzel, it’s a way of moving through life. It’s about the quality you’re bringing to whatever it is you’re doing. We practice being present on our mats, so we can be present in our lives.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Speak Out

kuhnClear communication is so important when we’re looking for understanding, but it’s not always easy. Sometimes people don’t say what they feel out of fear that the truth will hurt, that there will be repercussions for themselves or others, or because they know if they say this particular thing, the ground underneath them is sure to shift. We resist change, but it’s the only thing we can count on, and it’s the only chance we have for connection when we’re feeling misunderstood, disrespected, or unheard. Of course, when you’re sharing something with someone, you want to express yourself with as much compassion as you can muster. Hopefully, when you go to share something with someone you love, you do that because you’re hoping to be closer, you’re hoping to be seen. 

In-person communication is always the best bet when you’re expressing something that’s emotional, sensitive in nature, or has a “charge” to it. So much can get lost in translation with emails and texts. If you can’t meet face-to-face, a phone call is your next best bet; at least you can hear the person’s voice, you can hear the tone, or their voice cracking, you can hear the frustration, and the pain underneath it. Words on a screen are impersonal, people get reckless with their fingertips; they write things they’d never say. A text is not a place to break up with someone, or to express rage or despair about anything, and neither is an email. If you’re frustrated or angry, go ahead and write it down if you need to get clear about the storm that’s raging in your mind, but don’t hit “send” until you’re in a calm state of mind. Words are powerful. Once you put them out there, you can’t take them back, and some things are so hurtful, they may be forgiven, but it’s unlikely they’ll be forgotten. This is true personally and globally–part of the pain so many people are in right now is a result of words that have been spoken and cannot be forgotten.

Manipulation is no way to go about getting what you want. If you want something, or you need something, ask for it. You may not get it, but take the mystery and agony out of things for yourself, and the people in your life. No one can read your mind, or mine. Being passive aggressive is also not a fabulous communication style. Expecting people to try to figure out what’s wrong or what you need makes it harder on everyone. If you’re angry, disappointed, scared, sad, hurt or confused, try saying that out loud.

When we’re angry, it’s almost always just a cover for our pain, or intense feeling of vulnerability. If we’re defensive, it’s because we feel attacked, even if that’s just our perception. Many people cannot receive anything but positive feedback. If you offer any kind of constructive input, that, too, might be received as an attack. Sometimes this happens with personality disorders like narcissism. Sometimes it happens because a person grew up in an abusive household, and an admission of error was met with incredible pain and punishment. You really don’t know what someone is dealing with unless they tell you, but you can work on the way you express yourself. You can work toward clear, truthful, compassionate communication. That’s really all you can do. As with everything, you can never control what someone else does.

There’s no hope for our personal relationships if we can’t speak clearly, and there’s no hope for healing rifts and divides with people we may not know, unless we can call it out when we see things that are not okay. Sometimes we have to speak up on behalf of someone else, and sometimes we need to act on our own behalf, but having no voice for either is no way to go through life.

Sometimes we keep quiet because we don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations, or we think we already know what the other person will say. Let me say this: If you have a long history with someone, and you know that sane, satisfying communication isn’t possible, then don’t bark up that tree. A lot of people are struggling with family members and close friends right now, who may have wildly different ideas about what we need in this world at the moment. It’s very painful when your entire ideology or life philosophy is rejected or ridiculed by those closest to you. Having said that, anyone who refuses to make an effort to understand your point of view is a person who is also struggling to understand what it means to love. Ridicule and disrespect have no place in that arena. You don’t have to agree with the people close to you all the time, but there needs to be some effort to grasp, to understand. Accept people where they are and how they are, or don’t have them in your life, or have them in your life, but create boundaries. In general, though, if you struggle with being assertive, work on it. Most people will really appreciate your honesty, if you’re kind; being truthful and mean is crappy, it’s not funny or brave or strong or tough. It’s crappy. So there’s that.

Maybe you grew up and no one ever asked you how you felt, or what you needed or wanted. Perhaps you’re still trying to figure that out. Maybe it doesn’t occur to you that how you feel is important and worth sharing. Maybe you feel invisible, or believe your worth lies in what you can do for other people. Those are all lies. Maybe you think it’s better for you to be in pain, and silent, than it is for you to express yourself, and disappoint someone else. What kind of relationship can possibly result? There’s no intimacy without honesty. Find your truth, and then find your voice. It really matters. If you struggle to say what’s real for you, get some help with it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Hungry for the Truth

mandyhaleAttachment leads to suffering. As human beings, we are going to be attached to our loved ones, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to avoid that. We’re going to be attached to wanting our families to be happy and healthy and living in a way that feels good and right to them. Connection and love and shared experiences are the best things in life. It’s just that when we allow ourselves to be attached, we also allow ourselves to be vulnerable. You can’t have one without the other, and the reality is, we are going to lose people we don’t know how to live without. Sometimes this happens because we’re in these bodies with their unknown expiration dates, and we just don’t know how much time we have with each other, and sometimes it happens because we grow apart from people with whom we were once so close, this eventuality seems impossible.

Few things cause us greater suffering than attachment to a picture we have in our heads of “how things should be”, or “how people should be”, or “how life should look.” That “should” is such a dangerous word. Sometimes we’ve attached our happiness to a particular outcome, and anything less, or anything else, just won’t do. So many people attach their happiness to externals. It’s the old, “I’ll-Be-Happy-When” formula. “I’ll be happy when I lose ten pounds, or have a different job, or a bigger house, or a faster car. I’ll be happy when I meet the ‘right’ person, or win the approval of my parents, or book that big gig…” It goes on and on, and I’ll tell you what. If that’s the formula you’re working with, happiness will always be just out of reach because it will never be enough. Anything outside of you will never equal your happiness. You plus the right person won’t do it. You plus the big house won’t do it, either. You minus the ten, fifteen, twenty pounds won’t get you there. It’s inside work.

I know this from my own personal experience. I tried the “me plus lots of external stuff” way for many years, and I exhausted myself. The funny thing is, while we’re out there in hot pursuit of that place called happy, inside it never feels right. We know, intuitively, it’s pointless, but we’re taught that this is the way, so many of us hang in there hoping, for many years. At a certain point, I stopped chasing happiness, and I got hungry for the truth. When I say “the truth”, I’m not talking about it like there’s one truth for everyone. I mean, I got hungry for my own truth, the truth of my own experience. Sometimes we think, “If only I could get this person to love me and see me and understand me and cherish me, then I’d be happy!!” And “this person” is not necessarily a romantic partner (although that’s often the case). It might be your mother or your father, or your mercurial Uncle Howard. Sometimes we start out with a parent who seems out of our reach and we repeat the pattern later in life by choosing partners who can’t or won’t commit to us. You can literally make yourself sick trying to be perfect for other people, trying to make yourself worthy, trying to dance like a monkey to earn love, trying to be something other than what you are just to get that thing you so desperately want—your happiness. But you’ll never be happy by trying to be something you are not. The alternative is to lean into the truth of whatever is real.

Maybe you have a parent who will never be able to love you in the way you long to be loved, perhaps they’re just not capable. You can receive that fact as a reflection of something lacking within you, but the much likelier reality is that it’s a deficit within them. People can only be where they are, and they can only use the tools they’ve got. If you’ve chosen a partner who can’t commit, you could interpret that data as an indication that there’s something about you that just isn’t good enough, or you could accept that perhaps this person has deep fears around intimacy, or maybe it’s just not where they’re at at this particular moment in time. Accepting reality as it is, without taking it personally, is such a huge relief. Getting hungry for the truth is a liberation. Setting yourself free of the idea that only one outcome can lead to your happiness opens you to a whole new world of possibilities. And yes, accepting that someone might not love you the way you love them, or might not want to commit to you is going to hurt, but it’s also going to allow you to breathe again, and to feel like your feet are planted solidly on the ground. It’s going to give you back your self-respect and your self-esteem, which you have to check at the bars of your prison cell when you make yourself unable to release your attachment to a happy ending that isn’t in the cards.

The other thing is, opening to reality as it is, gives you power and peace. You’re not busy telling yourself stories, or pretending things are other than what they are. You aren’t spending your time or energy pretending that you are other than what you are, and I have to say, that’s a pretty happy feeling. It puts you at ease. It allows you to release your grip, to stop your grasping and clinging. It relieves you of any notion that things are “happening to you.” It puts you back in the power seat. There’s no desire to force or manipulate or cajole. Why would you do any of that? You just allow things to flow, and trust that when they’re right, it’s clear, and if you have to force, it isn’t right. So much simpler, so much happier. I highly recommend it.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

P.S. If this was helpful, you can buy Ally’s books here.

You Betray Yourself Before You Betray Anyone Else

aesopYou are not your thoughts, and you are not your feelings. You are you; your thoughts and feelings come and go. Some of them are wonderful and inspiring, and hopefully you act on those. Some of them are untrue and unkind, and those are the ones best left to arise, peak, and subside. Witnessing your experience is always a powerful way to be in tune with how things are for you from moment to moment. Not every feeling deserves your energy. You don’t have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes, nor must you act on every feeling you have.

Years ago, one of my closest girlfriends was dating a man who cheated on her while he was at an ashram, and said he was “honoring the truth of what he felt.” He said it was a deeply spiritual experience, and that he was a “mysterious and enigmatic being.” There’s nothing spiritual or particularly mysterious about that. Honoring the truth of your experience in that scenario means observing your attraction toward someone other than the person with whom you’re in a committed relationship, without acting on it. It’s either a normal, passing attraction borne of the fact that you’re a human being, a mammal, a person with desires and fantasies, or it’s an indication that you need to regroup with your partner. Regrouping might mean taking a compassionate but honest look at the state of your relationship. Maybe you’ve been taking it for granted, and both you and your partner need to direct your energy toward the space between you. If you don’t feed and water it, it’s going to starve and die, after all. Maybe it’s already dead, and there’s no hope for resuscitation, and it’s time to have that conversation. Maybe this other person really is someone with whom you’re going to have a long, meaningful, lasting relationship, but starting out with deceit and a lack of integrity doesn’t bode well for anyone.

Uncomfortable conversations are hard, but most people, given the choice, would opt for painful conversation over betrayal. Betrayal is awful, because it can only happen at the hands of those we trust, and nothing shakes your faith in your own judgement more, than the sting of having made yourself vulnerable only to realize that your heart was not so important to the person with whom you entrusted it, after all.

Having said all of that, none of us will act from our highest selves in every moment. Sometimes we screw up in a huge way, and learn a painful lesson. There are all kinds of betrayals, after all. The truth is, the only way to break someone else’s trust, is to break your faith in yourself, first. We all want to feel in our hearts that we’re good people. Not perfect, but that we’re doing our best to be kind, that we know how to be a good friend, that we understand right from wrong. When we behave in a way that goes against what we know to be right or okay, we’re letting ourselves down. We’re showing a lack of self-respect. It’s really hard to feel good about yourself when you know your actions would cause pain to someone else if they knew what you were doing. That includes unkind things you might say behind the back of someone you purport to love, or an inability to be happy for the success of someone you care about. When we’re in a petty, judgmental place, that’s always an outward expression of inner pain. Something within us feels unworthy, not good enough, less than, and instead of leaning into that and having compassion for ourselves, we point it outward, and put it on someone else, but that feels even worse. Nothing makes us want to shower more than the stink and weight of gossip and mean-spiritedness.

If you’re in a stinking ditch of your own creation, it’s really time to climb, claw, and drag yourself out. If you can’t feel good about yourself, everything else is going to erode. That’s your foundation. If you’ve made huge mistakes, own them. Apologize. I’m not talking about unburdening yourself of guilt, here, so you can feel better and someone else has to suffer. Sometimes things are better left unsaid. It really depends on the situation, but if you’ve done something for which you feel terrible, and an apology is in order, have at it. If it’s something you have to grapple with on your own, get some support. Figure out what went wrong. Maybe you acted out of desperation. Maybe you’ve been putting your own needs on the back burner for so long, you justified one reckless act. Maybe you’ll receive forgiveness, maybe you won’t, but eventually, when you’ve learned everything you can about why you didn’t show up the way you wanted to, or the way you’d like to moving forward, you really have to forgive yourself. We all make mistakes, it’s part of the gig of being human. If you were selfish, thoughtless, reckless with someone else’s heart, try to make amends, and do better moving forward. One of the things that gives us compassion and a forgiving nature with others, is our own ability to forgive ourselves for those times we made poor choices.

It’s not realistic or desirable to control every thought and feeling you have; in fact, anything you reject will push back four times harder. You don’t have to be horrified by your thoughts, you just want to observe them, and choose the ones that strengthen and nurture you, and take into account the feelings of those you love. Sometimes we behave poorly because we’ve refused to accept what’s true for us, and that’s like sitting on an active volcano. You can’t deny who you are, or the song in your heart. If the people around you have asked you to do that, they’re asking too much. You have to be you. The more you’re able to do that, the less likely it is you’ll act in ways you’ll regret, because your whole life will be directed by knowing who you are and what you need to be at peace. We really only get in trouble when we aren’t clear about that.

Sending you love, and a huge hug,

Ally Hamilton

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Direct Your Energy

churchillNot everyone is going to like you, or me, that’s just a reality of life. Sometimes we’ll be misunderstood, judged, rejected, excluded, or ignored. None of these things feels good, but human beings are complex. Some people need to be angry, or they need for you to be the bad guy, or they need to rewrite history so they can live with themselves. There’s nothing you can do about that. If a person won’t or can’t communicate in a respectful and compassionate way, there isn’t a lot of hope for mutual understanding or closure. On the flip side, sometimes we’ll screw up, and we may not be met with forgiveness. Once you’ve owned your mistakes and apologized, there’s not much more you can do, except try to do it differently next time.

Sometimes we spend our energy on the people who are looking to bring us down, thereby using up energy we could have spent on the people who can see us clearly. And look, I’m not saying we’re all wonderful. We all have work to do, places to heal, ways we could show up for ourselves and the people in our lives that might be infused with more enthusiasm or presence or gratitude. I’m talking about the tendency to get snagged on those people who are full of venom. Sometimes you’re dealing with a personality disorder, but if you try to rationalize with someone who cannot hear reason, you’re as nuts as they are. It’s not like we have all the time in the world, and where and how you direct your energy has the biggest impact on how your life will feel.

By this same token, sometimes we dwell on all the things we don’t have, and all the ways life is presenting its challenges, when we could be focusing on those things that are flowing, and are fulfilling. I’m not saying we should shun people who are struggling, in pain, or full of rage. Compassion when possible is always the path, but to spend hours, days, weeks, years getting caught up in other people’s dramas is not the best use of your time. You have a song to sing. You have dreams, fears, things that inspire you, scare you, excite you. You probably have a vision of how you’d like life to be or to feel, gifts within you that you long to share, ideas that you’d love to see blossom into being. That’s where you want to direct your energy. There will always be barking dogs, or, in the vernacular of our time, “haters gonna hate.” Don’t allow too much of your precious time and energy to go toward that stuff, and try not to dwell on what you’re lacking at this particular point in time.

It’s not always a choice, but the more we can choose to be grateful for all we have, the better we’re going to feel. This is not realistic when you’re dealing with heartache, rage, grief, jealousy, guilt or shame. I’m not one of those, “It’s always in your power to be happy” kind of yogis. Real, actual, devastating things happen sometimes, and your best bet is to feel all of your feelings. We don’t take the road marked, “Spiritual Bypass” on this page, but short of tragedies and great losses, direct your energy toward the good stuff. You’re not going to get to the end of your life and think, “I wish I’d been angry and defensive more. I wish I’d held onto my righteousness a little more fervently. Too bad I didn’t judge and gossip more of the time.”

Open your heart. Nurture yourself and the people close to you. Care about everyone, but don’t get stuck in a ditch with people who do nothing but hurt you. You aren’t here for that.

Sending you love, as always!

Ally Hamilton

Love More, Judge Less

All-differences-in-thisOn Tuesday mornings I volunteer for an hour in my daughter’s Kindergarten class. It’s extremely fun. I love my daughter’s teacher. She’s very warm, but very firm, and she maintains standards in the room. The kids have to listen to each other. They have to keep their hands to themselves. They don’t have to agree with each other, but they have to be respectful. She’s really setting them up with great tools for life. Last week when I was there, one of the little girls was sitting at my table, and she crossed herself when an ambulance went by, and said something under her breath. I knew what she was doing, but she looked up at me with this little smile, and said, “I’m praying that everyone is okay.” She’s five. I told her that I do that, too, but I don’t use my hands. One of the other kids asked what she was doing with her hands, and she explained that she was asking God to take care of anyone who might be hurt. One of the kids asked what “God” was. I said it was a word that meant different things to different people, and that was a topic she could explore with her mom or dad, and we had a conversation about what it means to care about people, whether we know them or not. It was easily the best conversation of my week.

We get so caught up with labels and separation. We try to figure out who’s like us, and who’s different. We’re so prone to create an us and a them, but true spirituality doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t separate. It asks us to care about everyone, because we’re all part of the same family. I know it’s not easy, but if we start to expand that same idea to all living creatures, and the planet itself, we start to shift the way we’ve been moving through the world. Sometimes we learn things at home, like hatred. Hatred can be passed down from generation to generation, just like eye-color. When we’re little, our parents are god-like creatures, and it doesn’t occur to us to challenge what we’re being taught or told until we get old enough to realize we’re our own beings. We have our own minds and our own hearts and our own ability to discern and intuit and make sense of the world.

Hatred is a great divider, and it weakens its host. When we hate, we’re blind. In my opinion, it’s also unnatural to us. I spend a lot of time with little kids, not just because I have two of my own. I always have, because my little brother is eleven years younger than me. I’ve had a little person trailing around after me asking why questions for most of my life. We come into this world full of love and curiosity. We’re trusting and open, unless or until we have a reason not to be. Kids might ask guileless questions, like why someone has a different skin color, or why they observe different holidays, but it’s never with contempt. It’s with a genuine desire to understand, and kids do what we do, not what we say, as we well know. Maybe you don’t have kids, and maybe you don’t want them, but you were a child once, and it’s good to examine your beliefs about yourself, about other people, and about the world around you. Sometimes something we’ve learned is so ingrained, we don’t even question it. I get emails from people who were told they were mistakes. That they’d never amount to anything. That they were meant to be seen and not heard. That their parents wanted a boy, not a girl. That they’re a disappointment.

Also, you can preach compassion all day long, but if you’re hard on yourself, don’t think that will go unnoticed by your kids. We internalize everything. We’re energetic creatures, and we both emit and absorb energy wherever we go. If your mother was always dieting and scrunching up her face when she looked at herself in the mirror, even if she always told you you were beautiful, don’t be surprised if you have body-image issues. If you were taught that people who didn’t believe the same things your family believed were wrong or not to be trusted, you’re going to have some unlearning to do.

The outside might look different, and I mean this for all of us. We may be male or female, short or tall, thin or stocky, dark or light. We may believe in one god, many gods, or no god at all. We may believe in a continuation of consciousness, or we may believe we’re worm food when it all ends. We may be rich, or we may struggle to put food on the table. The bottom line is that we all deal with certain parameters. We have a finite amount of time in the body we’re in. We have the capacity to love people wildly, openly, with everything we’ve got. We have our attachments, our fears, our dreams, our heartbreaks, our nights when we cry ourselves to sleep, or wonder what we’re doing here, or flail about trying to find our place in the world. The more we look for the vulnerability behind the mask, the kid underneath the grown-up, the similarities instead of the differences, the kinder we become, and the world could really use that right about now.

Yes, there are some people who’ve closed their hearts and fed their hatred, and are so far off the grid, there’s not much hope for any kind of epiphany at this point, but that’s a tiny percentage of human beings on planet earth. The vast majority of people recognize that an us versus them mentality isn’t getting the job done. It isn’t creating a world that’s safe for us, or for our children, and it also doesn’t have to be this way.

Examine your thoughts, your words and your actions. Maybe you’re already operating from a place of love the vast majority of the time, but maybe you’re still struggling with this. Start with your own internal dialogue. Since there’s no (good) escape from the voice in your head, start to starve a loud inner critic if you have one. You don’t have to believe everything you think. Sometimes our thoughts about ourselves are so violent, so unforgiving, so relentless, it’s a wonder we can get out of bed in the morning, and if you’re that hard on yourself, I guarantee you’re hard on other people, too. Perhaps not as harsh as you are with yourself, but whatever we have within us is what we spread. Start there. It might seem like a small thing, but if everyone worked on creating a peaceful and loving world within themselves, the whole landscape around us would change. If you’re in the habit of saying things like, “I’m such an idiot” when you make a mistake, shift that thought to something like, “I’m human and I make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay, and very normal. Let me take a deep breath and see what I can do.” Find a nickname for yourself that makes you smile, like, “Chief”, or, “Sport”, or “Tiger”, and whenever you feel that self-loathing come up, catch yourself, with an, “Okay, Sport, that didn’t go the way we wanted it to, but it’s no big deal.” What I’m trying to say is that you really want an inner voice that roots you on, not one that tears you down. May we all send good thoughts and love when we hear an ambulance go by. May we all care about each other more, and judge each other less. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be happy.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Use Your Gifts Wisely

twainOur time and energy are our most precious gifts to give, and they’re also finite. Sometimes it’s really a practice in itself to direct your energy toward thoughts that strengthen you, rather than those that weaken you. It’s easy to get caught up, or snagged on someone else’s thoughtless comment or careless act, to become embroiled in other people’s dramas, or to allow yourself to spin over mistakes you’ve made. Rejection creates this scenario for many people, as does feeling disrespected, unseen, unheard, ignored, excluded, or harshly judged. We can lose hours, days, weeks obsessing over how other people feel about us, when our time would have been better spent getting right with ourselves.

Human beings are complex. We all have our interior worlds, our inner dialogues; in many ways, being human requires our ability to deal with solitude. Obviously, we can reach out. We can seek connection, love, joy, shared experiences. We can uncover our gifts and spread them in whatever ways are available to us. But if you aren’t happy on the inside, no person and no thing can fix that for you. Often, we’re so focused on the externals, we neglect to do the work that would really bring us peace and joy. So many people spend the large majority of their lives trying to prove that they’re here and they’re worthwhile by pointing to things outside themselves. A lot of people have their identities wrapped up in what they do and what they have. If your self-esteem is determined by factors outside your control, you can see how this leads to trouble.

It’s not what we have, it’s what we give, and it doesn’t have to be grandiose. You can change a person’s day by really taking them in, even just for a moment. You can smile at a stranger, hold open a door, allow someone to merge in traffic. These are small things, but they have a huge effect. When we move through the world and people are kind and considerate, it really fills us with a sense of hope and well-being, but having said that, if someone cuts us off in traffic, we don’t want to let that experience rob us of our own peace. There’s no need to let a stranger raise your blood pressure.

Sometimes we have to draw a line with someone. Maybe you have people in your life who struggle, and as a result they can be inconsiderate or self-absorbed or sometimes thoughtless. The truth is, we can all display these tendencies from time to time, and we probably will. Sometimes we have a day or a week, or many years when we feel victimized or angry or lost, and we lash out because we’re unhappy and we can’t figure out how to fix it. We point fingers and come up with our reasons, and make it about other people or circumstances, and as we flail and rage about, we unintentionally hurt those around us. Some people live their whole lives this way. You are certainly free to direct your time and energy toward making other people responsible for your lack of peace, but I don’t recommend it. No one is going to save you, but you. We each have to do our own work, and for most of us, that gives us plenty to do. Anne Lamott has this great phrase for those who suffer from, “Good Ideas for Other People’s Disease.” Isn’t that awesome? Aren’t we all great at figuring out what other people should do to get it together?

You can’t control people or circumstances, nor do you want to try. The more you let go and practice acceptance (which doesn’t mean you allow yourself to be disrespected or abused), the less you suffer. The more you seek to create steadiness and peace inside yourself, the better off you’ll handle the inevitable and ceaseless ups and downs of life. The more you direct your mind to the present moment, the more peace you’ll find. Breathing deeply feels good. Being awake and aware feels good. Being enraged or depressed or anxious for extended periods of time, obviously does not feel good. Are heartbreaking things going to happen? Yes. To some degree or another we’re all going to face loss, grief, confusion, shame, guilt, envy, jealousy, fear and rage. We’re all going to lose people. We’re all going to have to move and shift with changing circumstance, and sometimes we’ll be grieving, mourning, heartbroken and listless, and those feelings will be understandable and appropriate. This is when you hope you have a spiritual practice that’s going to be there for you, along with the people in your life whom you love. This is the dance. You can fight it. Of course we’d all like to be able to count on things, but the only thing we can truly count on is that everything is always changing.

Think carefully about where you’re sharing those gifts of time and energy. You’re not going to save other people, so I wouldn’t squander your resources there. That doesn’t mean you don’t try to find help or support for those in need, but it does mean you don’t try to manage someone else’s path; usually when we do that, it’s because we’re avoiding our own. Things that will surely bring you down—gossip, violent thoughts or actions, self-loathing, clinging to your anger. Things that will absolutely lift you up- remembering all the good that’s present in your life right now. Taking ownership of your story, and righting the ship if necessary. Doing the work to heal, and seeking out whatever tools you need to help you with that endeavor. Reaching out when you need help, and offering it when you’re in a position to give it. Trying to help those you love be their best selves by celebrating them and encouraging them when times are tough. Doing that for strangers, too. These are all great uses of your time and energy, and the beautiful thing is, the more you direct your energy toward helping others, the more you’ll feel meaning and purpose and fulfillment in your own life. Good for you, good for everyone else.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Stop the Cycle

oprahSometimes we get into a pattern with someone that just isn’t serving our highest good, or theirs. This happens a lot with toxic relationships. Usually, something in the dynamic is harkening back to old wounds for both parties. We’re driven to heal, but we often go about it in all the wrong ways.

Unacknowledged pain swims below the surface of everything we do, and until we bring this stuff into the light, we’ll keep calling it into our lives in unconscious ways. You know when you feel very triggered by someone? There’s an excellent chance they’re hitting a painful nerve. The thing is, when we attract people into our spheres so we can play out an ancient drama, we also attract people who are going to be very unlikely to help us rewrite the script.

If your dad left when you were four and you have abandonment issues you haven’t dealt with, it’s likely you’re going to be attracted to men or women who can’t commit. That way, your fear of being left is now in play, and you can go about the business of trying to claim your prize and procure your happy ending by getting your partner to be “yours”, but a person who has trouble committing is going to run like hell from that scenario. It could be they grew up feeling smothered by one parent or the other, so they’re both attracted and repelled by your neediness. We want to overcome those feelings and situations we couldn’t master as children, and our attachment styles play a big role in how we go about trying to do that.

Anyway, the point is, you won’t heal this way, you’ll just relive that old pain, and throw salt in a wound you’ve never addressed. You’ll take your partner’s inability to commit to you (or whatever issue it is you keep replaying), as a sign that you are in fact, unlovable, or easy to leave, or invisible, or whatever it is you fear the most, when the truth is, they have their own story and their own wounds. A person with fear of commitment fears all commitment. It’s what you represent, it isn’t you they’re rejecting, but that doesn’t matter, because if your heart is broken, it’s broken.

You’ll save yourself a lot of time and heartache if you simply face your pain. If you notice you keep repeating patterns in your life with family members, friends, partners, colleagues and strangers, it’s time to get some help. Identifying your issues is half the battle; you don’t want to stop there. You want to be able to rewire the system, and put a time-stamp on those things from your past that are still haunting you today. If you had a parent who overpowered you or made love a conditional thing, you don’t have to be afraid of intimacy for the rest of your life. You can work with your fear. You can meet it head on. You can be aware of it without acting on it, but it takes work, and you’ll almost definitely need support.

I highly recommend the combination of yoga and therapy. Therapy to me is the “top-down” part. You identify your issues and get really clear about your tendencies, weak spots, and potential pitfalls. Yoga is the “bottom-up” part. You get in your body and you breathe. Whatever your tendencies are, believe me they’ll follow you onto your mat. Yoga is confrontational by nature. You’ll get to deal with your habitual responses to challenge, frustration, and intense, uncomfortable sensation. Intense emotions create intense sensations—deal with this in on your mat, and you’ll be able to deal with it in your life. Over time, when you feel triggered, you’ll be able to breathe through those feelings without acting on them—running out the door, or lashing out, or saying or doing things you’ll later regret. Now you’re not stuck in the identification phase, you’re actually taking ownership of your issues, and refusing to let your past ruin your present and future. If you have a loud inner critic, you’ll become aware of that, and in so doing, you’ll give yourself the power to starve it. You’ll get to rewire your system from the ground up. Does it take dedication and determination? Yes. Is it easy? No. But you know what’s a lot harder? Not doing it and replaying your pain like you’re in a real-life version of “Groundhog’s Day.” Great movie, but no way to move through life.

Break the cycle and create something new for yourself that feels good. I’d trade short-term pain and discomfort for a lifetime of suffering any day of the week. I’d love to meet you in your living room and see if I can help you with this.

Sending you love, and wishing you peace,

Ally Hamilton

Give it Time

stripyourgearsSometimes our expectations of ourselves are so unrealistic. We have ideas about how we should feel, or where we should be at any given point in time, and if we aren’t meeting those markers, we feel disappointed in ourselves, or frustrated, or we wonder what’s wrong with us. This comes up a lot around grieving, mourning, and recovering from heartbreak of any kind. There’s no timer for this stuff; there’s no formula. It’s different for everyone, and dependent upon so many factors. But the last thing you need when you’re suffering, is to feel badly about yourself because you aren’t done suffering quickly enough.

Obviously it’s no fun to be pining or longing or missing people we cherish. Death is the most extreme version of this, of course. Grieving has no time limit. As Earl Grollman says, “The only cure for grief is to grieve.” No matter how much we understand we’ll all die eventually, it’s still almost incomprehensible when someone we love is ripped from us. It’s natural to want to hug the people we love, to hear their voices, their laughter, to hold their hands. The loss of a person is like the loss of a whole, beautiful world. There’s a shock to it, it seems impossible that the earth could keep spinning, and depending upon who’s been lost to you, and in what way they were taken, and at what point in your life and theirs, the impact may bring you to your knees. The only thing at a time like that, is to ask for help. Hopefully, you don’t even have to do that. Hopefully the people in your life know how to show up for you, at least some of them, so that you know you aren’t alone.

For many people, grief is difficult to witness, because it reminds them of their own mortality, the fragility of life, and the potential that they, too, could have to hold a sorrow so great. The people who are the most uncomfortable holding a space for your pain, are likely the same people who will tell you you “should be feeling better by now.” What they’re really saying is, “I’m having a hard time being around you when you’re in pain, and I’d like you to make it easier for me.” The thing is, when you’re mourning, your only job is to allow yourself to feel whatever you need to feel, for as long as you need to feel it. Anyone who can’t honor that or understand it is probably not going to be one of your cronies when you’re ninety-five, sipping lemonade in your rocker, but you don’t need tons of close friends. You just need a few.

The same goes for the loss of any relationship. You have to factor in all kinds of things. How much time and energy you invested, how many memories, shared experiences, heartaches and growing pains you went through. If you had a family with this person, it gets exponentially more complicated, but even if we’re talking about someone you dated for a few months, having a broken heart never feels good. You just have to give yourself time. Examine what happened, especially if you’re disappointed with the way you showed up, but try not to obsess. Glean the information from the experience that’s going to help you grow, and make different choices the next time. If you’re recovering from a toxic relationship, understand your oldest, deepest wounds were probably in play, and that it’s very likely you could use some support. It might be a great time to find a good therapist, and do some deep and needed work toward healing, but don’t beat yourself up because you aren’t over your ex. Some days will be better than others, and these are just natural feelings. Don’t stalk their social media making yourself sick, and try not to invest too much of your time or energy wondering what they’re doing. Focus on your own healing. As Regina Brett says, you have to “give time, time.” You know that anything you resist, persists. Of course we don’t want to marinate in pain, but denying it or running from it or numbing it out just prolongs the inevitable. Eventually you have to face it, and the more you’re willing to acknowledge and work with your pain, the faster you’ll move through it.

Be kind to yourself. Gravitate toward people who don’t try to fix things or tell you how to feel, but are simply able to listen and to be there. Nurture yourself, and spend time doing those things that bring you joy and fulfillment. Volunteer if you have it in you. Try to move your body and sweat and breathe once a day. Weep. Feed yourself well, and I don’t just mean food—pay attention to what you’re watching, reading, telling yourself, and try to have patience. One day, you’ll wake up, and the weight and heaviness of your grief won’t come crashing down upon you as you blink your eyes open and remember where you are. In the meantime, have some compassion for yourself. Life is a constant lesson in impermanence and loss. There’s also incredible beauty and joy and love, but it isn’t easy.

Sending you a huge hug,

Ally Hamilton

Get Busy Living

stephenkingEverything worth doing involves sacrifice. If you have a dream, you’re going to have to work if you want to see it come to fruition, and any choice we make involves loss. When we choose one path, we walk away from another. Eventually, you have to figure out what’s important to you, and where you want to direct your time and energy.

People agonize over this stuff. They pick something, and then they wonder if they made the right choice. They look back over their shoulders, or they look ahead to see if something better is on the horizon that they’re now going to miss. Single people do this. They’re single for years, lamenting the loneliness and lack of a partner, of someone who sees them and understands them and is there for them, and then they meet someone, and six months later they’re agonizing over the loss of their freedom. Freedom to do what? Sit home on a Saturday night binge-watching tv? Married people do it, too. They choose commitment, and then envy their single friends out at the clubs. Yes, when we make a choice, we agree to not choose something else. This is why it’s called a “choice.”

The saying goes, “the grass is always greener on the other side”, but of course I’m talking about the other saying, “the grass is always greener where you water it.” We can drive ourselves nuts with this stuff, but the truth is, if you made a decision, you made it for a reason. If that reason doesn’t hold true anymore, or you doubt its validity, or it hasn’t played out the way you thought it would, then you’ll have to make some other choices, and hopefully you do that with serious deliberation, and maybe some support. We’re never done, we’re always in process and you can choose to have a good attitude about that, or not. Either way, the reality is the same. I’m not saying anything is fair game. Obviously we want to make choices carefully, especially where they involve other people. You never want to be reckless with another person’s tender heart. If you’ve made a mess, you have to do your best to clean it up with honesty and compassion, but most people would not want you to live a lie. Most people would not ask you to choose pity or guilt over what’s true in your heart and almost everyone I know would choose honest communication over betrayal.

What I’m saying is that you’ll never give your choices room to grow and blossom if you spend all your energy looking over your shoulder. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated into choosing things you don’t want, and by the same token, when you say you want something, mean it. Don’t make your decisions someone else’s fault. We spend way too much time blaming circumstances and other people for our own unhappiness. Blame keeps you stuck. It’s liberating to take responsibility for your life and your choices, to take ownership of the whole thing. You’re going to make unfortunate choices sometimes. Another word for those is “mistakes.” That’s part of being human, it’s how we grow. If you don’t ever choose anything, your paths will be chosen for you. You’ll meet other strong-willed people, and they’ll tell you what they want you to want, and what they think you should do, but that’s not the same thing as living your life. That’s living someone else’s life. That’s becoming part of someone else’s story. Yes, we can co-create a story with another person in a healthy and loving way, but that’s when two people come together out of choice. You’re not a leaf on the wind. You’re a particular human being with your own intrinsic gifts to share. Choose wisely.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Don’t Force It

pemaWhenever you find yourself forcing anything—a yoga pose, a relationship, a way of being—it’s really an invitation to perk up and pay attention. When we force a pose in yoga, for example, going for a “full bind” at the expense of a long spine and/or our ability to breathe deeply and easily, we’ve also started to practice aggression on our yoga mats. When we force in life, it’s also aggressive, because it almost always involves the betrayal of self.

There’s a huge difference between working your a$$ off in pursuit of your dreams, and clinging to a picture in your head, even when nothing is flowing toward that picture. Sometimes we fall in love with someone, or we fall in love with an idea of who someone could be, and we chase, cajole, or manipulate so we don’t have to face the pain of unrequited love, or so we don’t have to open our hands, our hearts and our minds, and let them go. That’s a betrayal of self. That’s forcing.

Sometimes we’ve chosen a path that felt right at one time, but doesn’t anymore, like the guy who completed eight years of med school, only to come to the realization that somewhere along the way, he lost his zeal for the medical profession. It’s so hard to forge another path when we’ve invested time, energy and hard work, but we’re always shifting. Ultimately, you have this one life in the body you’re in, and I think your job is to live in alignment with what’s true for you; to uncover your gifts, your joy, your passion, and to spread them, to live life in a way that feels good to you. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t include connection; reaching out to people, offering your hand, your heart, you ear, whatever you’ve got.

It’s just that sometimes we get stuck. Maybe we want to make a change, but fear grips us and tells us why we can’t, at 3 o’clock in the morning, when we’re longing for sleep. The mind can be loud with shoulds and can’ts. It can shame us or berate us until we feel paralyzed. If a job doesn’t feel right, it’s time to look for something that’s going to inspire you. If a relationship doesn’t feel right, it’s time for honest communication, so you can see if it’s salvageable. If you’ve been playing certain roles for so long, you don’t know how to break the mold, now is the time to get some support.

If you get to the place in life where it’s hard to breathe, where you feel constricted and desperate, you’ve just stepped off your path. You’ve taken a wrong turn or two along the way, and you’ll have to tune into your GPS, your intuition, and circle back and try something else. You are not here to shrink yourself to make other people feel better. You are not here to fulfill anyone’s unrealistic expectations of you. You are not here to repress your truth because you’re afraid of hurting other people. You really have to be you. It’s the only way life feels good.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Free Yourself and Forgive

forgiveSometimes I write about forgiveness and people get very upset. I recognize there are some things we want to put into the category of unforgivable, so let me clarify what I mean when I say I believe forgiveness is freeing and vital if you want to be at peace. I am not talking about deciding that something traumatic or hurtful that happened in your past is now okay with you. I’m not talking about picking up the phone or sending an email to a person who betrayed you, and telling them it’s water under the bridge. You don’t have to tell anyone. You don’t have to speak to the person, or see them ever again, but if you’re holding on to anger, they’re still hurting you, and that’s my point.

When we’re enraged with someone, we’re carrying them around inside our heads and our hearts because whatever happened is in the past, but in order for us to stay angry, we have to keep thinking about it, and fueling that flame, and rage is a poor constant companion. It seeps into everything. It makes it hard for us to be intimate, to trust other people, to let our guard down, because to do that, you have to be vulnerable, but to hold onto rage, you have to be tough; staying angry requires constant vigilance. We end up depleting our energy on that, when we could be spending it on opening to love, which feels so much better.

How do you forgive someone who stole any chance you had at a normal, innocent childhood, for example? That’s a difficult one, right? Because something was taken from you, and you can never have it back. You can never know what it would have been like to be in Kindergarten feeling safe and secure. You can never know how it might have felt if you’d been able to relate to kids your age, not just in Kindergarten, but in elementary school, junior high, high school, college. It turns out not having a childhood affects you for your whole life. So how do you forgive that? You can re-parent yourself. That little kid who was scared and confused and hurt and alienated is still available to you, and you already know that. If you’re an adult, you aren’t powerless anymore, and it’s never too late to heal. Maybe you get yourself some help, some support. In fact, I’d highly recommend you do that.

Healing takes dedication, time, energy, and a willingness to lean into your pain. If you refuse to work with your issues, don’t expect them to get tired and go away, they’ll just keep showing up for you in every area of your life. They’ll be bubbling right underneath the surface of everything you say and do. If you face your fears, your rage, your loss, your grief, if you allow yourself to mourn, you’ll find you don’t mourn forever. The deep feelings arise, and they hurt, and you cry and you feel raw and maybe some days you feel hopeless or alone or scared, but you hang on, and eventually the heat and the power and the strength of all that old stuff starts to subside, and you can loosen your grip and start to breathe again, maybe for the first time in a very long time.

It’s just, if you’re using a ton of energy to stay angry, you’re probably not going to have enough left to heal. Blame keeps us stuck. It places our ability to be happy in someone else’s hands, or in events over which we had, and have, no control. The past can’t be rewritten; whatever happened, happened. Some things shape us, but the only thing that defines you is what you do about what you’ve been given; how you proceed, how you live your life, and show up for yourself, and the people you love, and the people you don’t even know. Forgiveness is a gift you give to yourself. It has very little to do with anyone else.

Sometimes people balk at the word forgiveness, so let me say this. If you’re living your life and you’re happy and you don’t feel like you’re carrying someone who betrayed you within your heart, then I think you’re good to go. You don’t have to call that forgiveness, but that’s what it is in my book. You are not a prisoner of another person’s actions or inactions; you’re liberated.

The same goes for people who enter our lives later in life. Maybe you had an idyllic childhood, but something unthinkable happened later. This is your life. You get to decide how much energy you’re going to spend looking back. If you work on it enough, you can witness your experience. You can examine your thinking. You can choose one thought over another and there’s so much power in that. Choose the thoughts that strengthen you. Feed the love. Let the rest of it go, as much as you can. It doesn’t have to fit into a neat little box. You certainly don’t have to be grateful for everything that’s ever happened to you, just try to grow from your pain. Allow it to soften you and make you more insightful and compassionate, and likely to reach out to other people in pain. That way, at least, some beauty grows from it. Learn to love yourself as you are right now, and understand, you wouldn’t be you without every event that’s ever befallen you. Remind yourself that you’re strong, and unhook your journey from someone else’s past behavior. That’s their journey, it isn’t yours.

Sending you love, and a huge hug,

Ally Hamilton

It’s Not a Failure if You Grow from It

failureI think we need to re-frame our feelings about failure. You fail only if you do not learn from the experience. I find it really sad when I see the words “failed relationship”, or “failed marriage”, or “failed business venture” next to each other. We just have so much shame and feelings of defeat around this stuff.

Of course we all want to feel successful, but we have weird ideas about what that means. For me, at this point, successful means getting to do what you love all day long. Being at peace. Knowing how to show up for yourself and the people in your life. Uncovering and sharing your gifts, in whatever ways you can, and, certainly, meeting the practicalities of life. Having your health. Having people in your life whom you love beyond measure, and who see you and know you and celebrate you with all your beauty and all your flaws.

If you’ve been taught that success is bound to externals, like how much money you have, or how you look on the outside, it’s understandable, because that’s certainly what we’re taught culturally. Most of us have realized by now there’s no deep payoff with those pursuits. True happiness, true success in my book, is being at peace with yourself. Being in a state of acceptance, acknowledgement and accountability about who you are and how you are, and how things are with you, and around you, and being able to accept those people whom you love in the same way.

We’re all going to make mistakes. That’s part of being human, and it’s how we learn, especially the hard lessons. No one operates from their highest self in every moment. Sometimes we’re selfish or lazy. We just want what we want, and we don’t want to think about consequences. Sometimes we set ourselves up for hard losses that way, but we understand going forward that we never want to trade short-term gratification for long term pain. It’s only a failure if we miss the lesson and blow it again the next time.

Obviously it’s painful when things don’t work out the way we’d hoped, whether we’re talking about a romantic relationship, or a business venture. It hurts. It makes us doubt ourselves, and if we tend toward self-loathing to begin with, there’s nothing like a setback to wake that sleeping monster. As with everything, there’s no point running, denying or numbing out heartbreak. The more you lean into it, acknowledge it and allow yourself to feel your feelings, the sooner the heartache passes. Maybe you just need to shift your vision. Maybe you’ve been attached to a picture in your head, and the picture just needs a little reconfiguring. Either way, you might work on a little compassion for yourself. We don’t get handbooks for these things.

There are certain bedrocks of happy and healthy relationships we can agree upon—honest communication, the ability to listen deeply, a willingness to accept our partners as they are—but each individual person is her or his own mystery. How your tendencies and issues interact with your partner’s has a lot to do with determining the sustainability of your relationship. Timing, the way you grow together or grow apart, external stressors…there’s just no formula to follow. It takes two people who are willing to keep choosing each other every day. My point is, if something comes to an end, of course look at your side of the street. Figure out if there are places within you that could use your kind attention so you can do things differently moving forward, but don’t doubt you worth, your value, your ability to give and receive love. You are not the failure of the relationship. Maybe some of your actions or tendencies or choices need to be examined. Maybe you could use some support with that, but don’t confuse your identity with the outcome of any situation.

The same goes for business ventures. Business is made up of people, and people are complex. Maybe something came together or fell apart due to personality conflicts. Maybe you started something with a lot of passion, but with no way to predict what was going to happen. If you follow your dreams, it can’t ever be a failure, even if it doesn’t go the way you want it to. You pick yourself up, and take what you’ve learned, and you try again. You try differently. We never know what life has in store for us, what new adventures are around the bend, what gems we might glean from our missteps, our pain, our experiences. When I look back on my life so far, I can say with certainty I’ve always learned more from challenging situations than I have when everything was a bed of roses, and I’ve learned to trust my path, even when it takes a turn I wasn’t expecting.

Trust your path. Trust your gut. Hang in there.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Meditation or Electric Shock Therapy?

pemaskyDid you know there are a significant number of people who’d rather give themselves electric shocks than sit quietly in a room with nothing but their own thoughts for just 6-15 minutes? So reported Kate Murphy in Sunday’s New York Times, with her excellent article, “No Time to Think”. In an article she cites from Science Magazine, researchers were amazed with results from several different studies involving 700 people, “In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.” You can read the full, fascinating report here. Apparently, participants were interviewed before the experiment, and all said they’d pay not to be electrically shocked, but when push came to shove, 65% of the men, and 15% of the women ended up opting for self-administered shocks as opposed to just a few minutes of sitting with their feelings.

Researchers theorized that the difficulty for people arose because their thoughts tended to be negative. That does seem to be our default setting, that “negativity bias”. Back in the days when we were living in caves, this was probably a key factor to our survival. We needed to worry about things like being eaten by saber-tooth tigers. We needed to be on the alert for danger, we needed to be thinking ahead about all the things that could befall us. And even though most of us don’t have to worry about being eaten for lunch at this point, we’ve replaced those primal worries with other pressing anxieties and stresses of the day. So given the opportunity to sit quietly, without distractions, without our mobile devices, without anyone calling or texting or emailing, chances are, our minds will start to lean into those fears which are often hiding just below the surface. Maybe we worry about what we’re doing with our lives, or we feel anxious about the state of our relationships with those closest to us, or we start thinking about financial pressures. Maybe we feel lonely, or bored, or deeply unfulfilled. Maybe we’re enraged, but we keep ourselves busy enough that we don’t have to feel that often. There are all kinds of uncomfortable feelings we humans experience—shame, doubt, guilt, envy, jealousy, despair, grief—just to name a few, and no one would invite these feelings into his or her living room for tea. Nonetheless, we’ll be visited by all of these perfectly natural, human emotions form time to time. And if we distract ourselves, or numb ourselves or busy ourselves so we don’t have to face those feelings, we also lose an opportunity to know ourselves, and to grow.

We have such fear about being with what is. Maybe we think if we stop and breathe and get quiet, we’ll remember that we have a finite amount of time here, and so does everyone else, even those we treasure beyond words. Maybe we’re scared that old pain will rise to the surface and overwhelm us. But this is the stuff that keeps us miserable and suffering. The denial, the avoidance. If we refuse to look at our issues, our problems, or pain, then all of that remains bubbling below everything we do and say. Living your life on the run is no way to do things. Not knowing yourself is the loneliest thing there is. Getting quiet and allowing your feelings to arise, peak and subside, is a beautiful lesson in impermanence. No feeling is forever if you acknowledge it. If you repress it, it’ll just keep coming after you. And if you develop a practice of sitting quietly and observing your breath, your thoughts and your feelings, you’ll find such relief. You are not your thoughts. You are not your feelings. You have the ability to step back from all that white noise and take a good look and listen to your internal dialogue. You’ll find, if you haven’t already, that “you do not have to believe everything you think”. You’ll find that everything is in a constant state of flux, including you. You’ll find that you have the power to choose one thought over another, and that this power will give you your life back. To the extent that you’re able to face your pain and work with it, you’ll be able to set yourself free. Otherwise that stuff owns you. It rules your world, and there’s just no need for that.

It is true that the rules of this game are not easy to swallow. If we’re lucky, we get 80, 90, maybe 100 years, as do all the people we love, if they are also lucky. That’s not a lot of time. But it’s enough time to have a blast. It’s enough time to live with your heart wide open, and to love the people in your life with everything you’ve got. It’s enough time to take in the insane beauty that’s around you if you look up from your phone now and then. Now AND then. Yes, some of it is devastating. We’ll all be heartbroken from time to time. Some of us will endure knifing losses. But there’s also joy. There’s also the laughter of those people you adore. There’s holding hands. There are hugs. There’s the ocean and the sun on your face, and the wind in the leaves of the trees. There are moments that take your breath away and fill your heart with yes. You really can’t have one without the other. If you numb out the pain, you numb out the joy. And that’s a great way to miss what could have been 100 incredible, interesting, meaningful years. Don’t let it happen.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Sometimes “Rejection is Protection”

rejectionThere are few things in life that feel worse than being rejected by someone, whether it’s a stranger, a new romantic interest, a longtime partner, your parent, sibling, or child, or a colleague at work. When someone discards us or ignores us or excludes us, it hurts like hell. So let’s talk about it.

First of all, not everyone is going to like you, or me. That’s just reality. Also, you’ll never please everyone, nor do you want to try. It’s never good to chase love, approval, respect or worthiness; if these things are not offered freely, this is not a person with whom you want to be close, because bending yourself or shaping yourself around some idea of what you think someone else wants you to be, is an absolute betrayal of self, and it will bring you nothing but heartache. You are who you are, and who you are is a unique, one-of-a-kind human being in a world of seven billion human beings. There’s not even one other person just like you, which is remarkable and miraculous. So there’s that.

Here are other things: if someone does not return your call, your email, your feelings, they need to go in your “Not for me” file. They don’t need to go there with your contempt or bitterness, they just need to be put in that file, which you delete every time you fill it, because why would you carry around a drawer of people who don’t get you, see you, appreciate you, or deserve another ounce of your time or energy? I don’t say that in an angry way. Ideally you wish them well on their journey. You just don’t carry the weight of their opinions about you in a knapsack on your back. Life is too short for that. You have to like you. You have to be able to look yourself in the eye when you’re brushing your teeth at the end of the day.

Now, that’s an approachable idea if we’re talking about a stranger, or someone you went out with once (basically, a stranger ;)), or someone at work with whom you don’t really have to interact, but if we’re talking about heartbreak, we’re in a different situation. When family members stop speaking to one another, that’s a certain kind of sadness that’s truly unfortunate. Sometimes it can’t be helped. If a person isn’t willing to communicate with you, to try to see things from your point of view, to treat you with respect and consideration, then there’s not much you can do except to take yourself a safe distance away, and send them love from afar; maybe over time they’ll soften, and maybe they won’t. You can’t control that, but if you’re in a stand-off with your sibling or your parent or your child, really check in with yourself. If you’re the shunned party, ask yourself if you’ve done everything you can to communicate and try to heal the situation. If you have, let that be enough for now. If you haven’t, think carefully about trying again because life really is short, and we just don’t know from day-to-day. It’s one thing to go to bed feeling a little uneasy about something, to have a lack of closure around a particular topic, to have a misunderstanding that’s going to take some time to clear up. It’s another thing to have the last thing you’ve ever said to someone be an angry thing you can never take back; to let things like arguments over money, or being “right” overshadow the love you once shared with this person. Trading righteousness for love is a fool’s game.

If we’re talking about your longtime partner, or someone with whom you’re in love, you’re in for a rough go for awhile. If you have doubts about whether you’re lovable, or about your worth or value, you’re now going to be in that highly uncomfortable place of feeling like those doubts are true, and your former lover has seen the truth of them. This is not generally what’s happening when a partner walks away from us. Sometimes, and this hurts, but sometimes, they just are not in love with us the way we’re in love with them. If that’s what you’re dealing with, as bad as it feels, they’ve done you a favor, because you really deserve to be loved all the way, but you have to make space in your life to receive love like that. If you give the space to someone who doesn’t really have it for you, you’ve filled your dance card with a person who’s “just not that into you”, and I don’t know why you’d do that. Sometimes we fall into a very unhealthy dynamic with a person we feel we just never quite “have”, and we chase and run and dance like a monkey to get them to love us, until finally, they leave. Cut the time you play the monkey. You’re not a monkey, you’re a person. Trust that you’ll find the kind of love you want after you heal yourself and face those deep-rooted doubts.

More of the time, people leave because they don’t like the person they’ve become during the course of the relationship. Maybe they’re just not happy with themselves, but they’re convinced finding a new partner will solve it. People have all kinds of crazy ideas sometimes. They think they’ll be happy if they find the “right house”, or “right job”, or “right person”, but if they aren’t happy with their true house (themselves), it doesn’t matter where they go or what they do, or with whom. The pain will travel with them. It is not your job to wait around hoping they’re going to figure that out, though. It’s your job to come back to yourself, to nurture yourself and to heal. When we really truly love people, we have to want for them what they want for themselves, and this includes leaving us, if that’s what they feel they need to do. Your job then is to open the door. Your job is not to block the door, throw yourself in front of it, or wrap yourself around their ankles. There’s only one person who really has to love you, accept you, see you, understand you, honor you and celebrate you, and that person is you.

Is connection one of the best things in life? Absolutely. Warmth, love, affection? Yes. Being embraced with all your beauty and all your flaws? Of course, but do it for yourself, first, so you’re intimately acquainted with how that feels. That way you’ll recognize it when someone is feeling it for you, and you’ll be able to return it equally, too. Trust your pain. It will open you and strengthen you if you let it, and remember that no feeling is forever.

Sending you love, and a giant hug,

Ally Hamilton

The Cycle of Abuse

frogsIf you’ve never been in an abusive relationship, you’re probably going to have a hard time understanding what would keep a person in a situation that’s so unhealthy and soul-crushing. This applies whether we’re talking about emotional and verbal abuse, or physical abuse. People who find themselves in these kinds of relationships didn’t land there out of the blue. A person who’s allowing herself or himself to be abused is a person in pain, and judging or shaming someone because they aren’t strong enough to get themselves out of harm’s way, is only going to compound their pain. The last thing a person needs in that situation is to feel someone else’s disdain; people allowing themselves to be abused are already swimming in shame and guilt and low self-esteem. What they need is support.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year, and 1 in every 4 women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. It’s not just an issue for women, there are cases where men are being abused by their female partners, but it’s an overwhelmingly larger issue for women.

People who come out of abusive homes tend to seek out those relationships in their adult lives; we gravitate toward what we know, even if what we know feels terrible. So, too, do children of alcoholics tend to marry alcoholics. This might seem insane from the outside, but it’s what Freud called the “repetition compulsion”, what Jung referred to when he said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life, and you will call it fate”, and what Einstein defined as insanity, “Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.” Yogis call these “samskaras”, or grooves that we play out again and again. We all want to heal and be happy, but a lot of the time, we avoid the very work that would bring us peace. Instead of examining, facing, and working with our pain, we run from it, or deny that it’s there, or numb it out, and then we call into our lives those situations that evoke the same ancient dynamic. We don’t do it on purpose, we’re just driven to heal, to overcome, to master those feelings we couldn’t master as children.

This isn’t a formula that works. When we call an abuser into our lives so we can overcome our original pain, we simply find ourselves powerless once again. We revert back to that scared kid. We think, it must be us, it must be our fault, because look, it’s happening again. We think we don’t measure up, we must not be lovable. Sometimes people put themselves in a powerless position financially. Maybe there are kids in the mix, and they think they should take it, because at least the family is intact, and the abuse isn’t affecting the kids (of course it is). There are all kinds of reasons people stay. They might not make any sense from the outside, but if you haven’t lived someone else’s life, don’t expect to understand the way they think about things. Let’s talk about the other side, here, too. Abusers didn’t just become violent out of the blue. Most abusers were abused themselves. That doesn’t make it okay, but condemnation helps no one.

When we doubt that we’re lovable or worthwhile or of value, we’re likely to call people into our lives who reflect those doubts back to us, and if you’re in a situation like that, you might think, “If only I could get this person to love me, then I’d be happy.” Or maybe things are really, really good a lot of the time, and just every so often, your partner hauls off and punches you in the face. It’s never okay. Abusers manipulate. They sweet-talk. They’re contrite. Maybe they cry and tell you it will never happen again, but it always does. Maybe you think if you just love your partner enough, he’ll stop. Maybe you think it’s your fault because you provoke him. Whatever the stories, the bottom line is, none of us was put here to be a punching bag. Love does not abuse you, mistreat you, disrespect you, lie to you, or hit you in the face. Not ever. You can’t be in love with someone’s potential, and in the meantime, excuse his or her behavior, not if that behavior is causing you physical or emotional pain. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. We all have pain, we all suffer, and sometimes we just don’t have the tools or the strength to get ourselves to a safe space. If that’s where you’re at, you have to reach out and get yourself some help. A good therapist is a great place to start. You have to get to the root of the thing. You have to figure out when you started believing you were not worthy of love. You really need to dig that root up, and cut yourself away from it, because that root was planted in the soil of lies. If you need help, or you know someone who needs help, go to: http://www.thehotline.org/

Let me just say that most men are as outraged about this as women. It’s really important to me that these conversations don’t alienate anyone. As always, these are problems we need to solve together, and the only way we can do that is by bringing them into the light so we can help each other.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Get Hungry for the Truth

gloriaSometimes we know something but we don’t want to accept what we know. Maybe we’re attached to a certain picture in our heads of how things should or could be. Maybe we’re in love with someone’s potential and think if we just hold on and wait, eventually this painful situation will grow into something else, something beautiful. There are all kinds of reasons we might reject the truth of how things are. The thing is, it always leads to suffering.

We are energetic creatures, and we all have instincts. That’s one of our main modes of survival. What you feel in your gut can be trusted, but our hearts and our minds are also in the mix, and this is where things get complicated. When we’re attached to people, or ideas about how things could be, it makes it so hard to walk away. It’s brutal. When the mind gets involved with all its shoulds and coulds and questions and rationalizations, it gets even harder to act on what we know. We can stay and suffer for days, weeks, months, years, all the while allowing our light to be dimmed. It feels terrible to ignore, repress or deny what you know to be true. It’s like trying to lift the ocean; it’s futile, but sometimes we’re just not strong enough yet. We’re not ready to let go, to accept, to surrender, to swim.

Those are the times when it’s the least comfortable to be human. When we just suffer and feel a little sick and tired all the time. When we spend our energy developing constructs that support the version of reality we pretend to be living in. The truth is a relief. It hurts like hell sometimes, but it’s so much easier. All the white noise drops away. We can breathe again. Maybe we’re heartbroken, but we can breathe. There is no one way. There is no one person, except yourself. There is no one path. Life is not obligated to give you what you want, and neither is anyone else. Sometimes the healthiest and scariest thing you can do is trust that something else is coming. Something that looks totally different than the picture you’re grasping, or the person you’re grasping, or the identity you’re holding onto like a cat sliding off a roof.

Most people will tell you that their lives did not unfold the way they thought they would. We all have our ideas and our longings, but sometimes our attachment to them really blocks our ability to let life flow. If someone doesn’t want to be with you all the way, release them and release yourself. If someone doesn’t know how to love you the way you long to be loved, accept the way they can love you, or don’t, but love yourself in the ways that are missing. Just don’t lie to yourself. Don’t kid yourself. Don’t numb out so your reality feels less harsh. Let the harshness push you up against the wall until you can’t take it anymore and you have to try something else, because life is short and time is precious, and so are you. You don’t have time to be in denial. I mean, you can do that if you want to, but there are so many better uses of your time and energy. Being with what is, leaning into all the beauty and all the pain, is incredibly liberating.

I understand the desire to be happy. Everyone wants that, but get hungry for the truth instead. Not everything is happy. It’s not realistic to expect we’re going to be joyful in every moment. Sometimes I see quotes that say things like, “We can choose happiness in every moment.” No, we can’t. Tell that to a grieving mother. Sometimes we compound our pain by feeling guilty about not being happy. I think we set ourselves up to fail and we alienate people who are suffering huge losses when we say things like that. It’s okay to be heartbroken or enraged or in despair. It’s okay to grieve until you think you can’t possibly have any tears left. In fact, I’d recommend that a lot more than trying to force yourself to choose happiness when everything in you is looking for a way to keep breathing. Just be where you are. Lean into it, breathe into it. It will change and it will pass, and it will do those things a lot sooner if you accept where you are rather than deny it.

I know sometimes it’s painful. That’s part of the path. Pain opens us and strengthens us and teaches us about ourselves. It shows us where we still have healing to do. It softens us so we understand empathy and compassion. It gives us a sharp taste of the opposite of joy, so that when joy comes, we get to appreciate and experience that fully, as well. Spirituality is not about being positive and light in every moment, it’s about being your authentic self. It’s about honoring what’s true for you. That’s a gift you give to yourself, and also to everyone you encounter. Don’t deny yourself that gift.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton