Yogis Anonymous

You Save the Day

There’s no running from yourself. If you have pain, it’s going to surface and if you try to stop it, deny it, numb it out or run from it you’re just going to make yourself sick. People do it every day, all day long. They keep themselves so busy, so scheduled down to the minute, there isn’t any time to feel anything. Others try to feed the beast of their pain with stuff. I’ll just keep consuming until that horrible emptiness goes away. Some people numb it with drugs, alcohol, food, dieting, sex, relationships, shopping, television or video games. And weeks go by, and those weeks turn into years, and a whole life can go by that way.

If you’re on the run, you’re not going to be able to stop and take in the scenery. If you’re in a fog, you’re going to miss some exquisitely gorgeous moments. If you’re in denial, you’re also denying yourself the opportunity to figure out who you are and what you need to be at peace. You can’t reject a huge reality about where you’re at and how you feel, and simultaneously know yourself well. Chances are, eventually you’ll wonder if this is all there is. Your pain does not have to own you, but it will if you don’t face it. We all have our stuff, our histories, those places where we’re raw or jagged, where those deep wounds have left their scars. Your pain might shape you, but it can shape you in a beautiful way so that you open and become more compassionate, more able to understand the suffering of others, and more equipped to lend a hand.

Knowing yourself is some of your most important work, otherwise how can you be accountable for the energy you’re spreading? For the ways you’re contributing to the world around you, and showing up for yourself, and all the people in your life? If you refuse to face down your dragons, they’re going to run your show, and they’re going to throw flames at anyone who gets close to you. You won’t mean for that to happen, you’ll probably feel terrible about it, and yourself, which simply compounds your pain. Now you have the old stuff, and the new stuff that springs up around you in your current life. Won’t it ever release its grip on you? You can keep playing it out, hoping for that happy ending, but you’re not going to get it until you become the hero of your own story. No one is coming to save the day. That’s your job.

The thing is, saving the day is not easy, but it’s a lot better than being on the run or being in a haze or feeling desperate for someone or something to make it better. You get to do that and you’re totally capable, no matter what you’ve been through. I say that with the full understanding that you may have suffered through intense grief, neglect or abuse. Being the hero might simply mean you find your way out of bed today and make an appointment with a good therapist. That would be heroic. Just acting on your own behalf would be something huge, because you may need someone to kindly hold up a mirror and say, “Of course you can.” (You’ll still have to do it yourself.) You might need someone to acknowledge that the old pain is real, and that it’s natural you’ve been carrying it with you for so long, but that maybe you can put it down now. Maybe you can unpack it and lay it all out and hold it up to the light so that you really absorb, as you are now, the full spectrum of your feelings. So that this stuff isn’t buried in your unconscious, outside of your awareness anymore, causing you to do things or say things you wish you hadn’t. Causing you to harm yourself, or hurt other people, or make choices that are inexplicable, even to you. Maybe you’re very aware of your pain, but it’s still overtaking your life. If you feel hopeless, that’s another indication that you might want to reach out and get some back-up. You examine your pain so you can integrate it and recognize it when it shows up. So you can be kind to yourself, and take care of yourself, and empower yourself.

There’s no reason your past has to dictate your future. Rage and blame won’t liberate you, but heading into the dead center of your darkest most painful places will. You don’t have to stay there forever, just long enough to know yourself. Then you can start a new chapter where you, the hero, lay the sh&t down. Where you decide where you’re going and what you’re doing and how you’re going to spend your time and energy. How you’re going to show up. Not the dragons. The dragons are small yappy dogs now. They bark sometimes, but all it takes is one look from you, and those dogs roll over and play dead. Directing your energy and strengthening your ability to choose one thought over another are two things you can work on through a consistent yoga practice. You can learn how to feed a loving voice if you’re in prison with an unforgiving internal dialogue. There are so many healing modalities available to help you find your power again. Better get busy if you need to, and if you need help with that, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

How to Find Happiness When You’re Feeling Lost

pema The first way to find happiness when you’re feeling lost, is to stop looking for it! When we’re feeling hurt, scared, anxious, heartbroken, abandoned, rejected, insecure, envious or threatened, the trick is not to avoid the uncomfortable, painful and challenging feelings, it’s to embrace them. I know this might seem counter-intuitive. You might ask yourself, “How will leaning into my pain help me find happiness?” I’m going to tell you.

The greatest state of dis-ease, and one of the largest contributors to our stress, is being in one place, wishing we were somewhere else, or feeling one thing, and wanting to feel something else. The more we contract from our experience, the more we suffer. There are all kinds of ways we try to contract–we might numb ourselves with drugs, alcohol, food, shopping, or throwing ourselves into relationships. We might try to run from our pain by keeping ourselves busy from dawn until dusk. We might try denial on for size. None of that works, though. The minute you decide to avoid your pain, you’ve made pain your CEO. Now it’s in control, and your actions are determined by it. Screw that! If you want to be ruled by love and not fear, you have to embrace reality as it is, even when it breaks your heart.

The truth is, heartbreak is part of life, so is sadness, longing, loss, and in some cases, betrayal, abandonment or abuse. The deck is full of everything. You can decide that there’s something personal about the hand you’ve been dealt, or you can get busy playing with the hand you’ve got; trying to get different cards doesn’t work. Wishing with all your might you had the Queen of Hearts when you’re staring at the Ace of Spades won’t change a thing, it will just create more anguish, frustration, and heartache within you.

Also, forget about fair. Devastating things happen to incredible people every single day. You can do everything “right”, and still there will be some suffering. When you allow yourself to feel however you feel–lost, anxious, depressed, confused, jealous, ashamed, and so on–you liberate yourself. The feelings arise, they peak, and they subside; no feeling goes on and on for the rest of your life. The more you push down the feelings, though, the more they persist because they want to be acknowledged. Feelings are alive, they’re energetic, and like any living thing, they just want to be seen and understood. They’re ways for us to know ourselves more deeply, and to grow in patience and compassion for ourselves and our process.

Also, there’s the mind-body connection. If you refuse to deal with your feelings, they don’t just pack up and move on, they show up in your tight shoulders or hips, clenched jaw, stress headache, chronic illness, upset stomach, insomnia, lethargy, and so on. It takes a lot of energy to deny your reality, and that comes at a great cost to your mental, physical and spiritual well-being. Happiness cannot enter a false construct. Happiness arises from living in alignment with what is true for you. So if you want to find happiness when you’re feeling lost, allow yourself to feel lost! It’s very freeing to allow yourself to be as you are, and happiness follows from that freedom.

Sending you love, and wishing you strength and peace,

Ally Hamilton

The Double-Edged Sword of Attachment

Recently, my dear old dad was visiting from North Carolina. I don’t see him as much as I’d like to because of the distance, but we make the most of the time we have, and the visits are frequent enough that my kids know and adore their grandpa. They’re also infrequent enough that he really sees the leaps in growth for both kids, and I notice the changes he’s going through acutely, as well.

On this last trip, we went to the beach. It was a hot day, and I knew my kids would love to swim in the ocean and build sandcastles, and I figured my dad wouldn’t mind sticking his toes in the water, either. My dad is eighty-eight. He’s got the brainpower he’s always had, but the body is slowing down. He also spent years running six miles a day on the streets of New York City, so the knees are not what they once were. But he works out every morning, looks fit and strong, and still has that spark in his eye. Anyway, we drove to the beach instead of walking, because I knew the hill on the way home would be too much. Also, he’d just talked to me about the particulars of his will, and other things he thought I ought to know about his wishes when the time comes. That’s where we’re at now. It’s not some conceptual thing that might happen in the distant future, it’s a reality, and we both know it. I mean, my great Aunt Tess lived to 103 and was sharp as a whip until her final exhale, so I’m not counting him out. It’s just, you have to start to accept the inevitable at some point. We don’t last in the bodies we have forever and ever. And we’ll all be lucky if we make it to eighty-eight. It’s not like we can ever take anything for granted, including tomorrow. But we do it all the time. So anyway, we drove to the beach.

When we got there, I laid out a blanket, and my kids took off for the water. My dad and I followed. He was wearing shorts, not a bathing suit, so we went knee-deep, but the waves were splashing and he was getting a little wetter than he wanted, so we decided to back up a little. When my dad turned around, he lost his footing and couldn’t recover, and I watched him fall onto his side. I could see he was upset and disconcerted and maybe even a little afraid. I wasn’t sure if I should reach out and pull him up, or let him get up on his own, because he also seemed embarrassed. It’s a difficult thing to have your body betray you, and to have yourself laid out in front of your kid. But the waves kept coming and the sand was soft and uneven, and I could see that he needed help to get up, and that he was willing to receive it, so I put my hands under his arms like I’ve done for my kids a million times, and we got him back to standing. I could feel his heart racing and his body shaking.

He held onto my arm until we were back on the blanket. When I sat down next to him, he said, “Well, that was my act for the day.” And he told me that his balance has been off since he had emergency pacemaker surgery a few years ago. I was grateful neither of my kids had seen, because I think they would have been scared. For me, I just felt sad. My dad has never been a “false bravado” kind of guy; he’s always been honest with me about his struggles, and when I was little, it was way too much. I know he has regrets about that. I see the way he is with my kids, and I know if he had some things to do over again as a father, he’d do them differently. I also know he loves me to pieces. We’ve been through all that, and have nothing left to clear up, which is a gift and a relief. You don’t want to feel you’ve left things unsaid or unresolved. My dad of today is not my dad of yesteryear.

I think this is an important point, because so many people get stuck in a time warp and feed their rage, which doesn’t leave any room for change or growth, and doesn’t allow the space for something new to emerge. You are not the same you of five years ago, and five years from now, the you you are today will have evolved and shifted in ways you can’t imagine. The same is true for anyone. I know so many people who are grown adults, still blaming their parents for their unhappiness. Here’s the reality: some people should not have children because they don’t have the emotional tools, patience, maturity and resilience for it. That doesn’t mean you have to hate them and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here, shining in all your glory. It just means you may have some serious work to do to get from there to here. So that’s your work. Is that “fair”? No. It’s just what is, and you might as well deal with it, and get yourself whatever support you need to work it out. Because it won’t be that long before you’ve fallen in the ocean and can’t get up.

I think the main thing is to live your life in a way that you can feel at peace about it when you’re eighty-eight. We are all going to make mistakes, some huge and some small. The best thing I know to do is to acknowledge the mistakes when you make them, to examine what happened that resulted in your not showing up the way you wanted to, so you can do it differently the next time. It’s not about not making mistakes, it’s about making better mistakes as you go. And also, you can always try to mend fences when possible. Not everyone will be open to forgiveness. You can’t force it, and if someone won’t meet you halfway, that’s how it is. But change does happen and some people do learn, and do shift, and do want to fix things and grow beauty out of pain. I’m not saying you have to let them. Some things are unforgivable. There are certainly instances where you have to create and maintain boundaries for your own well-being. But those are extreme cases.

Lastly, we should all remember to say what’s in our hearts. Sometimes it’s tempting to think we can wait until it feels easier, or to put things off because we’re busy or immersed in our own lives. But you can’t take anyone for granted, at any age. The vulnerability of being human is just built into the experience. Fighting that, denying it, or ignoring it won’t make it go away, it’ll just exhaust you. Better to open your heart, your hands and your mind, and love the people in your life with everything you’ve got. Better to have the hard conversations that touch the raw places so you create an environment where healing can occur. Better to slow down, and appreciate the beauty, the gifts and the love, because they don’t last forever. Sending you love, as always, Ally Hamilton

Love is the Best Answer You’re Going to Get

campbell If it were possible to have irrefutable answers to life’s big questions, I’m pretty sure we’d have them by now. We arrive in this world, and we’re received with love, or we aren’t. We don’t have to worry about a roof over our heads, or we do. We’re afforded an excellent education, or we aren’t. We have a stable home life, or we live in a war zone. We grow up being told what to think, or we’re allowed to make our own way. The possibilities are endless, but we do have some things in common.

We deal with the same parameters, that’s one thing. We’re on this pale blue dot of a planet, and we don’t know how long we get to be here, or how long our loved ones get to be here, either. We don’t know for sure what happens after this. No one tells us the best use of our time and energy, or maybe lots of people do, but we all have to make sense of that on our own. We will all suffer to some degree or another, because this life, even if you have all the advantages in the world, is not an easy gig. It’s wildly interesting, and there’s always the potential for deep love, but along with that comes the potential for knifing loss, and that is not easy to face. We are inherently vulnerable. Some of us will experience the kind of loss that makes us question the point of it all.

But we have this incredible capacity to love, and a great desire to heal our old wounds. We might not have a lot of the answers, but most people who’ve been on the planet for awhile seem to agree that love and connection are the best experiences available to us. I mean, you know you have now. So what are you doing with your now? The greatest shortcut to happiness is to do whatever you can to uplift those around you. Giving feels good. Being seen and understood, cherished and celebrated not in spite of, but because of, all our flaws and all our beauty is a great gift, and it’s beautiful to give that to other people, too. Listening deeply, caring with your whole being, these things feel amazing and they’re available, every day. You can get caught up in your plans and ideas, you can join in the race, but I really think the better focus is the moments. How can you love with your whole heart, today?

If you’re brave enough to get quiet, to sit up tall for a few minutes, and to feel yourself breathing in and breathing out, you will feel a connection to everyone and everything. That simple act will bring you right into the now, and now is where you need to be if you want to feel love, joy, gratitude and peace. You can’t be in yesterday or tomorrow, you have to be in this moment. Being present feels good. You don’t need to buy anything in order to experience that calm, that steadiness. If you want answers, they don’t reside in a place or in another person. The answers you need are always inside, and those are the only answers you’re going to get. Ultimately, you have to make sense out of this world yourself. If you take the time to create peace within you, you’ll experience it around you, and you’ll be spreading it wherever you go. We have tremendous power to affect the way our lives feel. Of course there are devastating things that can happen to any of us, but it’s how we face what we’re given.

We experience our life as if it has a beginning, middle and end. We treat this like it’s our personal story, but that isn’t it. We’re joining a much larger story. We’re in the flow, and then we’re out of it. The flow goes on without us, although what we contribute while we’re here certainly affects it, and those ripples continue on. But it’s not your story, or mine. There are currently about seven billion of us contributing to this dance. What kind of dance are you doing while you’re here?

Being present means we’re opening to things as they are and trying to come back with love. We can focus on everything we don’t have, or we can direct our attention to those gifts we do have. Part of quieting the storm that rages in the mind involves choosing the thoughts that will strengthen us. Yes, there are things that can make us sick from the outside, but a lot of the time it’s our own thinking that’s causing us to suffer. We can argue about all kinds of things, but it’s pointless. We’re all in this mystery together. We can get caught up in names, borders, colors, religions and opinions, but love is the best answer you’re going to get.

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

Don’t Die on the Inside

If you want people to know you, you have to be willing to show yourself. You can’t lie, deflect, manipulate or play games, and also expect to feel close to anyone. But for so many people, fear seems to get in the way. Most of us long for connection, for shared experiences, for genuine intimacy, but then we sabotage any hope for those things by hiding our true selves, our real needs and desires. People do it in relationships all the time. They fall in love with someone, or they get hooked on an unhealthy dynamic and think it’s love. And they accept far less than what they truly want, and pretend to themselves and to their partners that it’s okay. That less is enough. That all is well.

A lot of people struggle with self-doubt. I’d say that’s a normal part of being human, and if you never doubt yourself, you’re probably in some trouble. Uninterrupted confidence that you’ve got everything figured out is not a great sign. But if doubt is an overriding issue, if you aren’t sure you’re lovable, if you fear you might not be worthy of respect or consideration, or you ask yourself questions like, “Who am I to do anything extraordinary?”, then you’re going to have a very hard time being close to people. Because in order to be close, you also have to be brave enough to expose the parts of yourself that aren’t pretty. If you fear you aren’t good enough, that you don’t measure up in some important ways, you’re going to be motivated to hide those deficiencies, not highlight them. Fear doesn’t make you brave. Of course, what you really need to do is puncture a hole in the idea that you’re less than. Because that is not real. Sometimes we learn things because they’re taught to us, and sometimes we learn things because those around us don’t have the tools to love us well. We internalize the lack as our own. Those are all lies you’ll need to unlearn if you want to free yourself from ideas that imprison you. How can anyone get in if you’ve blocked them with walls?

We all have our stuff. Our histories, our pain, our tendencies, and the way that we deal with them. If you’re constantly trying to put up a good front, or be the way you think people want you to be, then you’re going to feel alone, and rightly so. Before you can feel comfortable sharing who you really are, you have to feel comfortable with yourself. People avoid that work for years sometimes, and some people avoid it for their whole lives. You can’t solve it from the outside. No relationship will fix it if you think you might be broken. No job will ease your fears, no amount of money, no house or car or dress size. If your main house is not in order, you will take that mess with you wherever you go.

I know people who spend an inordinate amount of time promoting themselves, but underneath it, right underneath the surface, you can feel the need. “Love me, see me, tell me I’m here and I’m wonderful.” If you need that affirmation every second of every day, you are in pain. And no amount of external reassurance will solve that, because that’s what you call an inside job. No one can crash your internal hard drive but you, and that’s what you’ll need to do if you want to rewire your system. Of course that sounds scary. Most people try to keep the system running, even if they have to shore it up with denial, or numb out or keep themselves so distracted they don’t realize the system is failing. Better off to let it fail, and start doing things a different way. Some of the best stuff in life includes connection. Feeling comfortable in your own skin. Being able to love and live with your heart wide open. There are so many tools available if you need to create a new way of being, and start living your life in a way that feels good. Doing this work won’t kill you, but avoiding it makes you die on the inside, and life is too short for that. Sending you love and a hug, Ally Hamilton

Take Off the Armor

glassman There comes a time when you really have to put down the blame and the sad stories and take ownership of your life, and your own happiness. You can’t point fingers and expect to feel good, because you’re making yourself powerless, and that feels terrible. You can’t feed your despair and also wonder why you aren’t happy. We are all here for a blink of time. It’s not how long we have, although I hope we all have long and healthy lives, it’s what we do with the time we’re gifted. Stoking the flames of your rage and bitterness would be an awful way to go.

There are so many people living in fear. Maybe it’s the vulnerability of being human that terrifies them, but it seems they’ve decided a shield of anger is better than an open heart. Usually when you’re dealing with that kind of armor, it’s because the heart it’s protecting was so badly broken. The thing is, those breaks can harden us or soften us. Softening feels a lot better. I know people personally who seem determined to die angry, though. It’s almost like they want their tombstone to read, “My life was hard, and it wasn’t my fault,” with a list of people at fault underneath.

You can’t cuddle up with the “last word”. If you choose being right over being at peace, it’s going to be a long and lonely road. Sometimes people are afraid to put down the sad story, because who are they without it? I once met a woman with blazing eyes who told me she could not forgive her father because then he wouldn’t pay for what he’d done, but she hadn’t spoken to him in years. So who’s paying? I mean, some things are unforgivable. Sometimes you have to choose not to have someone in your life, but you can do that with rage or acceptance.

Pain makes us grow. The butterfly needs the struggle out of the cocoon to strengthen its wings. If you cut open the cocoon, it will never fly. We need the travel down the birth canal to squeeze the fluid out of our lungs so we can breathe easily. If you’ve never suffered, you can’t help people who are in pain, because pain creates empathy. Sometimes people have blinders on and they actually think their story is unique, but you know what? I hear stories from people every single day and they’re the same. Something happens when we’re young. Maybe we aren’t received with love. Maybe we learn the world is unsafe and our best bet is to be invisible or indispensable, or both, depending on the minute or the day. Maybe those experiences create doubt within us. Doubt about our own worth. That’s a very common story. That, and fear of abandonment. Also, people suffering over betrayal, abuse, cruelty. Almost every time I post someone says, “This was exactly what I needed to hear today.” Or, “Are you psychic?” I’m not psychic. We’re all so much more the same than we are different.

Your memories are yours. Your ideas, your experiences, your frame of reference, the way you’ve come to perceive the people and the world around you, all of these are unique to you, but if you start talking to people you will also find the themes are uncannily similar. The pain and struggles and fears and doubts and failures we face are universal. How we respond to them defines us.

Life is not easy. It’s incredible and wildly interesting. It’s full of moments that are so gorgeous they suck the air out of your lungs and make your heart expand simultaneously. There are events that will undoubtedly put you on the ground with your mouth full of dirt and your head full of why. In the world right now, there are bombs going off, shots being fired. Children are dying, or they’re watching their parents die. These things are happening and it’s hard to bear witness and there are no easy answers. Sometimes people are ripped from us when we aren’t done loving them. We aren’t done. It’s not a level playing field. Some people will suffer in ways that make your own heart ache. Don’t think you’re the only one. You’re not alone in this.

The thing is, you have a spark that is yours alone, and you can feed that spark until it becomes a roaring fire in your heart, and lights you up from the inside. You can give that fire that’s yours, you can give that away every day. Whether it’s a fire of rage or a fire of love is up to you, but I think we have enough rage in the world. Healing is a lot easier than being bitter and angry and isolated for eighty, ninety or one hundred years. When I say healing, that’s personal. What you’ll need to heal is something only you can determine, but I’d get on that, because life is ticking away right now, this minute. I don’t say that without compassion. It takes a lot of bravery to release an old story.

I tried life the angry way. I pointed fingers and made my unhappiness and frustration and disappointment the fault of other people, but it wasn’t. Things happen and they shape you, but none of us is in a time warp unless we choose to be. The earth keeps spinning, and it will continue to do so long after we’re gone. Take hold of the one thing you can—how you’re going to show up, what you’re going to offer. May all beings be free from suffering.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If you need some help, you can do this with me right now: https://yogisanonymous.com/courses/from-pain-to-peace-using-your-practice-to-change-your-life

It’s Already 8 Minutes Ago

bukowski The other night I was watching “Cosmos” on Netflix with my kids. In this particular episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson was explaining how it takes eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach the earth, so when we look at the sun, we’re really looking at the way the sun looked eight minutes ago. We never see it in real time. By the same token, when we look at a sunset, we’re seeing the image of the way the sun set eight minutes ago; what we’re watching has already happened.

The episode also covered astronomer William Herschel, and his son John, who amongst many other contributions, advanced the science of photography as we know it today. He grew up hearing about the stars from his father, who also explained to young John that many of the stars in the sky were not really there any longer. If the sun we see is really the sun from eight minutes ago, and many of the stars we see are no longer there, it’s all too understandable that we’d want to uncover what is real, and that the son of a man who spoke of such things would want to learn how to capture a moment in time.

Anyway, I’m sure I learned about the eight-minute time lapse at some point, but I guess it didn’t stick in my mind the way it did this time. I was aware of the sun a lot today, and kept thinking, “I’m looking at the past.” I mean, if we look up and the sun we’re seeing is the sun of eight minutes ago, how can any of us think we have a second to waste? Everything in the universe is in a constant state of motion. The earth, the sun, the stars the galaxies, our feelings, relationships, and us, ourselves—we come and we go.

It made me think about Instagram and our obsession with documenting everything. Some people are a little more obsessed than others, but it seems we’re all trying to say, “Look! I’m here, right?” And, “Here I am!” You go to watch your kid playing soccer or baseball, or you go to the Glee Club concert, and you wonder, “What must the kids think?” They look in the stands, or out into the audience, and they can’t make eye contact with their parents. They can’t even see mom’s or dad’s faces, all they can see are phones.

Of course it’s fine to document things from time to time. Most people enjoy looking at pictures from their childhood, or the meaningful moments in their lives as they grew into adults. But now, it’s like we’re documenting everything, all the time. “Look at this juice I just drank! I’m here! I exist!” The thing is, the second you’re talking about what you’re doing, the second you’re thinking about it, you aren’t in it anymore. You’ve taken yourself outside the experience.

I chose the quote on the poster because it made me laugh, but also because there’s a reason people (not all people, but let’s say a decent majority), love sex. You lose yourself. At least, you do if the sex is great and there’s a lot of feeling between you and your partner. You aren’t taking yourself out of the experience to document how you feel about it. “Hmmm, I’m enjoying this. This is great. Let me try to catch it from this angle so I can tweet about it.” Well, maybe some people are, but if we’re talking about truly great sex we are completely in and of the moment. Sex is not the only place we can experience this, obviously. You can get lost in nature on an incredible hike. You can unroll your yoga mat and get lost in the breath and other sensations in the body. You can get lost in a great book, you can become immersed in creating a delicious meal, you can salsa dance your way into losing yourself.

The thing is, it’s vital that you find a way to do just that, and frequently. Because when you lose that small self, that self full of ideas about who you are and who other people are and what you need and what you should have and how life should look and what that other person said or did and why that movie actually really sucked even though it won an Oscar and everyone else seems to be seeing something you aren’t, and also he looks like he gained weight since last season, and don’t you really deserve that raise, and Oh.My.God. When you can actually shut all that down and just join the flow and be present, you can also experience your true self. Your open, curious, engaged, immersed self. Your should-less self. And that is so important to do, because when you do that, you. YOU. You are present. You are present enough to recognize that the earth is spinning and some of the stars are already gone, already gone and the sun is shining the way it did eight minutes ago and you. You are part of all of that. You’re made of the same stuff as that sun and those stars and you are also spinning and moving and changing, and one day there will be a glimmer of you, a spark of you, a mark left by you, because you are here and you do matter, even if every moment of your life is not documented you are here. Don’t miss it. Don’t miss it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

The Power of the Real Apology

When 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

See the Pain Beneath the Words

stephencovey Have 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

Let the Hundredth Person Go

olinmiller A 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

Love More, Judge Less

On 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

twain Our 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

Don’t Force It

pema Whenever 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

Aisle 5

douglass At the time that I write this, I have an almost-eight year old, and a five year old, and so I spend a lot of time with little kids, and not just my own, and I’ll tell you something about kids, in case you don’t hang around with them very much: Kids know themselves. If they’re angry, they’re fully red-in-the-face angry. If they’re sad, they’re fat-tears-streaming-down-your-face sad. If they’re scared, or frustrated or confused or cranky, they’re all of these things fully, and because they allow their emotions to arise and peak and subside, they cycle through their feelings quickly, and one of the great gifts of being this way, is that you don’t push things down, or edit things out. You just feel how you feel, and you let it out. If you love someone, you wrap your arms around them, and kiss their whole face. If you don’t like something, you tell everyone within earshot how you feel about it. If you want something, you aren’t shy about asking for it. It doesn’t occur to you to shrink yourself, or question your right to take up space in this world. It doesn’t occur to you that you aren’t special and important. At least, that’s how it is if you’re loved and nurtured. These feelings are natural to us.

Now, look, I’m not suggesting that we should all behave the way we did when we were three in every area of life. If you go to the store and they’re out of your favorite brand of peanut butter, it’s not going to be appropriate for you to throw yourself on the floor of aisle 5 and wail, and pound your fists on the tiles at the injustice of it all. If you do that, you will very likely meet a whole bunch of police officers, paramedics, and firemen. Part of the reason a nurtured child lets things out, is that his or her nervous system isn’t yet developed enough to do anything else. Good parenting requires that you teach your children what is okay, and what is not okay, but as a society, I believe we ask our children to edit out and push down too much, and as result, we end up with generations of people who are lost to themselves.

Every loving parent wants her or his child to be happy, healthy, safe, joyful, confident, curious, kind, open, loving and trusting, but human beings are complex, and life is full of everything. We don’t just get the light, we get the shadows, too. We are not going to be happy in every moment. Not everything in life goes into the “positive” category. Some things are brutal, some things are devastating, some things will break your heart wide open. Sometimes, loving parents are so invested in the idea that their children are happy, it’s hard for them to hold space for them to be anything less than that, even for a moment. I hear parents all the time telling their children not to be sad, or scared, or angry. It’s not much different than treating the symptom, instead of the underlying cause. If it were as simple as saying “Don’t be sad”, if that would magically make us all happy, I’d say it myself, but of course that doesn’t work. Is it hard to watch your child struggle or cry or endure disappointment? Absolutely. But teaching your child to push down or edit out her or his emotions because they’re making you feel uncomfortable or inadequate or frustrated or ashamed or confronted, just feeds the cycle of repression. I don’t say that in any kind of shaming way. Shame is the least productive feeling we can have about places where we might need to shine some light.

Many of us received this kind of parenting, because this is what we’re taught as a culture, right? Happiness lies in external things. Push down your feelings of longing and confusion, and just make things look right on the outside, then you’ll feel better. I think we’ve all come to understand that doesn’t work. It’s just going to take time to change the conversation and the story we’re telling as a people. It’s going to take effort and awareness and a desire to check ourselves when we’re tempted to smooth things over, or distract or manage how other people are feeling, whether they’re our kids or our partners or our friends, because people do this with their friends, too. Have you ever reached out to someone when you’re in need, only to be met with advice you didn’t want, that doesn’t help to do anything but make you feel more alienated and alone? When all you wanted was to be heard and understood?

It takes time to shift and breathe when someone we love is struggling. It takes effort to be able to sit with someone’s despair or loneliness or fear without trying to fix it, and I believe the best way to make that shift, is to start with yourself. When you have moments of discomfort or jealousy, of shame or rage or blame, of despair or longing or fear, of loneliness or guilt, instead of trying to distract yourself or numb yourself or run anyway, you lean into it. You breathe into it. You acknowledge how things are for you in this particular moment, which is already morphing and shifting and changing into something else. You allow the feelings to arise and peak and subside. You allow the tears to come, or you allow yourself to feel enraged or bitter or insecure. You sit with that stuff without judging it, because they’re just feelings, they’re not you. You aren’t defined by the fleeting emotions and thoughts that cruise through your being from moment-to-moment and day-to-day. You’re defined by what you do with and about those feelings, by how willing you are to hold some space for yourself just to be human, and by how much you’re able to do that for other people, because that’s a lot more comforting than unwanted advice. That way, you aren’t lost to yourself, you’re known to yourself.

There are many great things we can learn as we grow. We can learn how to listen deeply. We can learn about compassion and empathy. We can learn about showing up for ourselves and for other people. But there are also some things we might have to unlearn. To me, this is a big part of the yoga practice. So much of it is about stripping away anything that isn’t real for you, that isn’t authentic to you, because I do think we know most of the important stuff when we arrive here. We know we need people. We know we need connection, and warmth, and touch and love. We know that it feels good to give love. We know that it’s okay for us to take our place in this world, and to shine. I don’t wish you a melt-down on aisle 5, but I do wish you the gift of coming home to yourself.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Love vs. Control

michaeljfox One of the key components to a lasting, healthy and happy relationship of any kind, is a foundation of trust and acceptance. This applies to our familial, romantic and personal relationships. The people with whom we feel closest are also the people with whom we feel we can be completely ourselves. This seems so obvious, and yet, we screw it up all the time. We start putting our shoulds on other people. For so many people there’s confusion between control and love, and if you’re dealing with someone who has a harsh inner critic, you can bet that voice is going to reach out and give you a lashing on a pretty frequent basis, too. What we have within us is what we spread around us.

Love requires our vulnerability. It’s a paradox. If you want to love, you have to be soft. You have to be willing to expose the parts of you that aren’t so pretty, that are still raw, and in order to be soft like that, you have to be really brave. Most controlling people did not become that way in a vacuum. A person who longs to control circumstances and other people has been hurt. It’s natural to want to protect your heart after you’ve been disappointed, but you can’t defend and open your heart simultaneously.

Most people believe in their own stories about themselves and other people, and controlling people do this to an even greater degree. In order to justify the need to tell you what you should or should not be doing, they have to build a construct that supports the idea that they know more about what you need to be happy than you do. For many people, “I love you” means, “I love you when you do what I want you to do”; it’s conditional. If love can be withdrawn that way, it isn’t love.

When we go and sit by the ocean, we don’t think, “Wow, the ocean would be so much more majestic if it were just a little bigger or bluer. If those waves were crashing just a little differently.” We don’t look up at the sun and think, “That’s great, but too bad the sun doesn’t shine with a little more pink or gold or orange.” We just take these miracles as they are. People are no different. We all long to be seen and heard and understood as we are. We long to be accepted and known. That doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do, or areas that might need a little more of our kind attention. It just means we long to be embraced with all our beauty and all our flaws. When someone who purports to love us can only seem to find our faults, it’s very defeating.

Fear and love do not play well together. When we’re trying to control someone else, even if we’re doing that because we think it’s in their best interest, we’ve really become confused. We humans are solitary creatures in many ways. We have interior worlds that other people can know only if we let them. I will never know what the right thing is for someone else. Obviously I can recognize if someone I love is putting himself or herself in harm’s way, and I can try to hold up a mirror with concern and compassion. If someone I care for is struggling, or feeding destructive habits, I can try to get them support and help, and offer my shoulder, my ear and my heart, but short of those situations, we each have to find our way.

Sometimes we need the struggle to break free of an old pattern, just like the butterfly needs to struggle to get out of the cocoon. The struggle strengthens the wings. Without that effort, it would never fly. When we try to jump in and tell someone we love that they’re crazy or they’re making a mistake, or they’re screwing up their lives, when we try to save someone from misery or pain, we may be robbing them of an experience they needed in order to grow and open. When we try to manage another person’s path, that’s a marker for us to step back on our own.

The same applies when we chase people down for their love, time, affection or reassurance. If a person is telling you they need space, you really have to respect that. If a person is telling you they are not where you want them to be, you really want to be able to take that in, for your sake and for theirs. It’s not loving or accepting to refuse to embrace the reality of someone we say we love. People are where they are. They want what they want. They have the tools they have. The more we open to reality as it is, the less we suffer and the less we cause those around us to suffer. Reality is not always going to meet your expectations or longings. Things are not always going to unfold like the picture in your head. In fact, most of the time they won’t.

Whenever possible, accept where you are on your journey, and accept where other people are on theirs. Work when you need to work. Give those raw places within you your kind attention. Learn to listen to yourself with an objective ear, instead of pushing away thoughts that frighten or disgust you. You are not your thoughts. You don’t have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes. You don’t have to act on every feeling you have, but you do wan’t to know yourself. You really can’t be at peace if you’re rejecting essential components of who you are, and you can’t love other people well if you’re unable to embrace them and meet them where they are.

Wishing you strength, bravery, clear-seeing, and a lot of love,

Ally Hamilton

Closure Doesn’t Save Us from Grief

goodbyehello Most of us torture ourselves at some point or another looking for closure regarding a heartbreak. Sometimes it’s something that’s happened with a family member or close friend, often it happens when we’re grieving the loss of a romantic relationship. Here’s the thing. There are some situations we’ll never understand, and our best hope for closure is acceptance of that fact.

It’s completely understandable that we’d want to know why something has happened that’s caused a rift or a split, especially when we feel devastated, bereft, confused and untethered. When these things are left shrouded in mystery, it’s so hard to let go. Sometimes we can’t wrap our heads around why someone is doing what they’re doing, because we’re on the wrong end of displaced rage. Sometimes we’re dealing with someone who’s coming from a totally different place philosophically or emotionally, and we just can’t comprehend what would make a person do, say, want or need whatever it is they’re doing, saying, wanting or needing. Sometimes we’ve blown it, and no matter how much we might apologize, the door is shut with no hope for communication or healing.

Some people communicate well, and others really struggle. There are many people who have a difficult time putting words to their feelings, and sometimes resentment or despair is mounting for ages, and one day it blows up all over the place, leaving us to wonder what’s happened, and why something so small has caused an apocalypse. We only know other people, even those closest to us, to the extent that they allow us to know them. You will only know the interior world of another person if they choose to share it with you. Sometimes, for some people, the truth feels too painful to speak, or it requires the speaker to confront weaknesses or anger they aren’t ready to face. If that’s the case, you’ve cornered a person, and even if you’ve done so inadvertently, it’s not surprising that they’ve lashed out. You can’t force a person to tell you what’s going on in their heart of hearts.

This is like a small version of how we feel when we lose someone through death. We can’t and don’t have all the answers we long for, we don’t have the information that would soothe and reassure us. We are left to hold a space in our hearts for someone we once loved. We’re invited to let the trace of that love soften us instead of harden us. We can carry some of the good stuff forward with us. We can hope this person who’s lost to us is okay, and that they know they were loved. Eventually, we’ll have to accept that some questions will simply go unanswered, and that we’ll move forward, allowing the questions to inspire us to do that with love and compassion for ourselves and other people.

When you’ve done all you can, you have to release your grip on the story, and allow it to unfold on its own. Time does not heal all wounds, but it does lessen the piercing pain of loss. Time also invites us to stop clinging and start living again. You don’t want to lose too much of today making yourself sick over what happened yesterday, last week, or last year. The day is calling, and it has its own fresh mysteries and beautiful potential. Breathe in and breathe out, and trust your heart to heal.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Consider the Source

Sometimes we invent stories out of our insecurity and the breezes going by. Maybe we haven’t heard back from someone and we start to obsess. Did we say, do, or write something inadvertently offensive? Have we been misunderstood? Has the person decided they don’t like us, after all? Did we embarrass ourselves, and if so, can we ‘save it”?

Maybe we start to second-guess ourselves, or tell stories in our heads about how we always blow stuff. If you doubt yourself, you’ll need validation from somewhere, right? Maybe you doubt your talent, or your ability to give whatever you’ve got, or whether you’re really, truly, actually lovable. If you suffer from those doubts, any rejection can bring up deep fear and anxiety.

Usually when we’re obsessing, it’s because we’re triggered. Something in the current interaction is tapping something old and unhealed. So if you’re going to spend your energy on anything, figuring out the source of your pain, doubt, shame, fear, insecurity, or tendency to chase people is really the best way to go. Because then, at least, you’re dealing with something real. Something you can get your hands around, something that exists within you, and not some amorphous upsetting thing that exists “out there”, that’s really just a projection.

When did these feelings first emerge, and around whom? What happened to make you feel you might be the kind of person easily ignored, discarded, disrespected or unwanted? If the people who were meant to love, protect, nurture and cherish you didn’t have the tools to do those things well, that’s a reflection on them. It can be a compassionate reflection, because a lot of people are ill-prepared for the task of loving all the way, and timing is a huge factor. Maybe they were hurt or made to feel invisible, themselves. So much of the time, people are just repeating and perpetuating what they know. But if you weren’t loved the way you deserved to be when you arrived here on this planet, you may find it surprisingly difficult to learn how to love yourself.

That’s really the work. We never know what’s driving other people. Maybe you’re being ignored because your email didn’t go through, or because the person has decided they don’t like you, or because they’re on vacation, or because their mother called to ask them why they aren’t married even though they’re thirty-five, and they just aren’t talking to anyone this week. All I’m saying is, deal with what’s real. Don’t guess at things and fill in the blanks as though life is some huge game of mad-libs.

The story to look at is always the story of your participation. What’s within you? What are you bringing to the party? How are you spending your time, your days, your energy? Upon what are you placing importance? Choose wisely. You’re going to be with yourself for this whole ride, so you might as well know who you are. Sending you love and wishing you peace, Ally Hamilton

Use the Block

In the physical yoga practice, props are often used to help a person find more ease and space in different poses, more room to breathe. If the hamstrings are tight, for example, one might put blocks under the hands in a stretch to “lift the floor up.” If the shoulders are a place of tension, a person might use a strap. Sometimes we put a blanket under the tailbone to create more length in the spine. Basically we use blocks (straps, blankets, bolsters, etc), to remove blocks. And as I said that in class yesterday, “Use the block to remove the block,” I realized the same holds true in life.

Buddha is credited with the quote, “The obstacle is the path.” It may not feel like it when we come face-first into a wall, but we strengthen through effort. If you look back on your life so far, you’ll probably notice you’ve learned the most about yourself when times were tough. When we’re faced with a challenge, whether it be personal or professional, we’re usually forced outside our comfort zones. We may discover that we need to develop a new skill set, or maybe the challenge for us lies in asking for help. Perhaps you’d rather endure a root canal than admit that you can’t do something on your own. It could be that you discover a place where you still have some healing to do, where things are still raw. Whatever it is, when we come up against these kinds of obstacles, turning and going the other way isn’t an option. There’s no way under, over, or around, there’s only through. Maybe we aren’t ready to face that yet and we sit and numb out, or we turn around and see if there’s anywhere to run, or we beat our fists into the dirt, or shake them up at the sky, but eventually, we understand the jig is up. And so we head through calmly, or we panic and flail, or we take one step back for every two steps forward.

Change isn’t easy for most people, so it’s not surprising that many of us wait until the proverbial sh&t has hit the fan before we get real with ourselves. The thing is, once you’re on the other side of something, you see how it’s liberated you. A lot of the time, we sabotage ourselves; we become our own obstacle. Maybe fear is stopping us, or some self-limiting belief, or idea we have that we’re unworthy of love, or not special enough to do something amazing. We can all be completely absurd in our insecurities and doubts. Having to face those places is never comfortable, but of course it’s freeing, because who wants to live life in fear? That’s a thing to be afraid of. Dying without truly living.

When you’re up against it, when you feel lost, alone, confused, scared, uncertain, see if you can also reassure yourself. It might be painful and lonely and deeply uncomfortable, but if you hang in there, you’ll use the block to remove the block. You’ll create that space so you can breathe easily.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You Are the Steward of Your Own Ship

Sometimes it’s really hard to stay centered. Maybe someone has said or done something hurtful, maybe you’re being ignored, left to figure out what’s happening on your own, in the dark. It could be that things are shifting rapidly in your life, or that you’re feeling stuck. You might be wildly in love, or going through a heartbreak. Maybe you’re under incredible pressure at work, or you’re trying to figure out how to make ends meet. You might feel judged, rejected, or invisible, or perhaps you’re the object of someone’s intense desire.

Any and all of these situations can throw us off balance, and again and again, it comes back to how much we need reassurance, affirmation and love from other people. There’s nothing wrong with wanting connection in life, with wanting to be held and seen and cherished. If you need those things because you doubt at your very center that you’re worthy of love, then you’re in trouble, because if one person says or does something that leaves you feeling rejected or discarded or “stung”, you can bet you’re going to spin for awhile.

Our time, attention and energy are the most precious gifts we have to offer. We don’t get a do-over; there is no roll-over plan for wasted moments in this life. Other people can’t make us feel anything, unless we let them. To feel love, you have to be receptive to it, you have to be ready to receive, and to give, to open and to trust. If you feel insecure, ashamed, or rejected based on the actions of another person, some deep part of you is in doubt; somewhere within you, you must not be sure of yourself, otherwise why would it bother you so much? I’m not saying it’s a minor thing if someone pushes you away, or doesn’t bother to treat you with respect, consideration, and compassion, I’m just saying you don’t have to receive the insult. If you know you’re doing your best and you’re trying not to hurt other people, then you can feel centered and at peace. It won’t matter so much if other people say nasty things behind your back, or to your face, because at the end of the day, you can face yourself, that’s what matters. Of course we care about the opinions of those nearest and dearest to us, and if one of those people tells you it’s time to do better, I’d take that into serious consideration, but ultimately, you have to trust yourself.

It doesn’t feel good to be held in someone’s contempt, and it’s even worse to feel unseen, but you are the steward of your own ship, you decide your course each day. You’re a human being, so some days you’ll come up against the rocks, or the seas will be rough, or you’ll be thrown overboard and pulled under by the current. As soon as you can, grab your compass and get back to it. If you need to dock on an island for a bit so you can explore the source of your pain, fear or doubt, by all means, get on that. Otherwise, try to direct most of your time, attention and energy toward sharing whatever you’ve got to give. As long as you’re approaching life with an open heart, and doing your best to be accountable for the energy you’re spreading, you won’t have much cause to doubt yourself. I wouldn’t let someone rob you of an afternoon, a few days, a week, or more, because time is too precious, and you won’t always know or understand another person’s pain, but you can bet we all have some.

If you’re off center because of great circumstances, enjoy every moment. Just don’t lose yourself, and don’t forget about your family and friends.

It’s not possible to understand what’s driving a person unless he or she tells you. People do things that are confusing and hurtful when they’re in pain. That’s where they are on their journey; it’s no reflection of anything lacking in you. So if you’re going through tumult around that kind of storm, try to get back on your feet.

We can be rocked by circumstance, thrilled when things are going our way, and depressed when they aren’t, or we can keep coming back to steadiness. You might call that steadiness “knowing yourself”, or inner peace.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Obsessive Thinking

mindyourownbusiness Sometimes we “boil ourselves” as my meditation teacher used to say. Something has happened, is happening, or could happen, and we obsess and spiral and get so caught up dwelling on this unwanted turn of events, we lose hours and create incredible stress and pain for ourselves.

This happens frequently around breakups, or in the context of acrimonious relationships. We feel rejected, judged or completely misunderstood, and we go over the details like a detective trying to solve a case. Where was the moment? What was that one thing we said or did that turned the tides and changed things forever? Or we tell and retell our story of how many different ways we were wronged so many times, it becomes mythic. We get caught up in defending ourselves, as if the other person’s opinion is true, even if we know in our hearts it is not. (If you need help snapping out of obsessive thinking, if you’re stuck in a cycle with yourself or someone else that’s causing you pain, try this.) We might replay a conversation that’s already happened, rewriting our lines again and again until we’ve had the perfect comeback in every moment, or we’ve said just the right thing to make everything turn out the way we wish it would have, or we might imagine a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, and get ourselves worked up as though it’s happening exactly this way, right now.

Your nervous system can’t differentiate between a painful conversation you’re actually having, or one you’re rewriting or creating in your head. If your breath is shallow and your blood pressure is going up and your shoulders are around your ears and your jaw is clenching, does it really matter if it’s real or imagined? Your thoughts create chemical reactions in your body, so allowing yourself to fixate on something outside your control can really take a toll, and if it’s happening for an extended period of time, if you find yourself dwelling on your recent or not-so-recent ex, for example, and what s/he is doing, and with whom s/he’s doing it, it’s really time to pick your mind up and come back to the now. Otherwise it’s like story hour, except the librarian is drunk and angry, the doors are locked, and she keeps reading the same story over and over again.

You can’t redo the past, and you can’t predict the future. You can make yourself sick trying to time-travel, though. There’s no point making yourself nauseated over the great relationship your ex is now having with someone else. Maybe it’s great, and maybe it’s a mess, or maybe they’re three weeks in and getting swept away by hormones, thinking, “This is it!!” People do that all the time, and then when the dust/lust clears, things get real. The truth is, it really doesn’t matter. Your work is always to manage your own mind, heart, choices and actions. If the quality of your thoughts is causing you pain, you have to come back to nurturing yourself.

Loss, fear, grief, rejection, jealousy, insecurity, loneliness, shame and guilt are not easy to lean into, but that’s the best way to release the heat of your feelings. Remembering that feelings are not forever, and they aren’t facts, either, can be enormously helpful. How you feel now is not how you will always feel. Opening to things as they are is empowering and liberating. Releasing your grip on the story and the players, and allowing people to be who they are as the plot unfolds the way it will, is the strongest stance I know. I’m not saying you shouldn’t fight for things, or stand up for yourself or others when that’s the right thing to do. Honest communication is always good; being able to express how things are for you, calmly, and with compassion is beautiful. That’s really the best you can do.

People can only be where they are, they have whatever tools they have. You’re not going to save someone with your love. You’re not going to teach someone the error of their ways. We all have to do our own journeys. Wishing you strength, love, and the hope that you’ll stop boiling yourself if you have been. Love feels a lot better.

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3

Define Your Terms

happinessgandhi I’m a big believer in “defining your terms”, especially when it comes to loving relationships, and by that, I don’t necessarily mean romantic ones, but rather any relationship that demands your vulnerability. If you love someone, you’re vulnerable; there’s a chance you could be hurt, either because we all have these bodies with unknown expiration dates, or because people grow and change, and not always in a way that merges. This happens romantically, to be sure, but it also happens in familial situations, and with close friends. Sometimes we have ideas in our heads about how things should be, or how people should be, or how a relationship should look and feel. That “should” can really bite us in the a$$, but sometimes we get hurt simply because we’re using the same words to describe different things.

My idea of what it means when I say, “I love you” to someone may not resemble your meaning. Does that seem crazy? Does it seem obvious to you what it means when you say those words? To some people it means, “I love you when you do what I want you to do.” Or, “I love you when you want what I think you should want.” It can be conditional, or about control and manipulation. For others, it’s a statement of possession, “I love you and now I own you.” It’s not so simple, and to complicate things further, sometimes what we think we mean, and what we actually mean are not in sync. Looking at yourself honestly, examining your patterns, and being truthful about what’s happening within you are essential if you want to be close to other people.

Your experiences and frame of reference and ideas about things shape the way you move through the world, the way you interact with people, and the way you define your terms. If the love you’ve known or have come to understand involves unflinching acceptance of those closest to you, you may assume your loved ones will respond in kind, and they may, or they may not. It depends on their own history and their own outlook. So many misunderstandings are the result of poor communication, assumptions and projections.

Someone does something, or does not do something, and we assume this must mean what it would if we did or did not do this same thing, and that’s just not a fair assumption. You’ll never know where someone’s coming from unless you ask them with ears that are willing to hear, and a heart that’s willing to understand and accept what’s real for them (that doesn’t mean you have to agree). Sometimes people ask questions but they only want to hear one answer, and it doesn’t really matter what the other person says or does; with enough desire, obsession and reworking, the answer will be twisted and expanded or pared down or shoved under a rug, so the “right answer” will emerge. We kid ourselves, in other words. This can happen when we fall in love, or when we have a friendship we can’t bear to lose, or when a family member is moving in a direction that scares us. Sometimes we just don’t want to accept the truth of a thing, so we intentionally reject any definition that challenges our own.

Knowing yourself is the key to knowing other people, because in order to know yourself, you have to integrate all parts of your being–the stuff that’s pretty, that you’d gladly share in a status update, and the stuff that isn’t so pretty, that you’d be embarrassed to share. If you can accept yourself without being rigid or unforgiving, you’ll be able to do the same for others and you won’t be scared to explain what you mean when you say, “I love you,” or to show it. Fear is responsible for so much that goes unsaid and undone, but what’s to fear? If you speak honestly and from your heart, you either will, or will not be embraced. What’s the point of living a lie? Knowing yourself is liberating to you, and to those closest to you. Defining your terms honestly, without trying to shove your ideas down someone’s throat is a beautiful gift.

I get so many emails from people who don’t bother to talk because they “already know what the other person will say,” or from people who are in despair because their partner isn’t loving them the way they want to be loved. If only their partner would change, they say, all would be well, but we have no control over what other people will do, or say, or want and we never know what life will put in our path. The only true power we have is to express ourselves calmly and with compassion, to face reality as it is, and to choose the way we respond to what we’ve been given. If you’ve been deeply hurt, betrayed, neglected or abused, you really want to examine what you expect from the world, and the other people in it. Define your terms for those you want to bring close to your heart. We’re part of a mystery, but you want to take the mystery out of it when it comes to your ability to say what you mean, and to share your deepest desires. The rest of it will unfold.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful you can find my books here <3

The Human Heart (A Love Story)

Yesterday morning I sat down after my kids had gone to school, and forced myself to have some tea and a piece of toast. I was trying to center myself a little, so I could teach my morning class. The house was quiet, and so was the street outside, and as I sat at my dining room table, I wondered what Elias A. Zias, M.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon I’ve never met, might have had for breakfast. Or whether he’d had any. Or if he was having a good day, or if he’d been up all night worrying about his teenage daughter. If he even has a teenage daughter. I wondered all kinds of things about this man I don’t know. I wondered if he might have sat at his dining room table, looking at his list of things to do for the day, counting amongst them holding two human hearts in his hands. Especially because one of them would be my step-dad’s. That’s crazy, right? That your job, the thing you do every day, could be to save two lives. I think I’ll mow the lawn, drop my kids off at school, break someone’s chest open, and give them twenty to thirty more years with their family and friends.

Anyway, I should back up, I guess. My stepdad was feeling some pressure in his chest and he went in for a stress test last Tuesday. I could give you all kinds of details, but yesterday, a week after his stress test, he had quadruple bypass surgery. I’ve been educating myself over the last week, so I’d know more about the procedure, the odds, the recovery, all the normal stuff you’d want to know if someone you loved was going to be on a table for six to seven hours with their heart outside their body for at least some of that time. And I spoke to a number of people who all reassured me that this is like a root canal these days. Or an appendectomy. But still. It’s the heart, right? The heart, the brain, the spine, all surgeries you can’t help but worry about.

Tuesday night, the night before the surgery, I stood on the baseball field during my son’s practice talking to my step-dad. If he was scared, he did a bang-up job of hiding it. And I didn’t want him to be scared, and I didn’t want to scare him with my own fear. But, y’know, you have to say what you have to say in a situation like that. So I tried to get everything out without crying, and then I just went ahead and cried, but I said what I needed to say. I wanted to make sure he knew how much I loved him and how grateful I was to have been watching him love my mom from the time I was seven years old. He’s taught me a lot about sticking to it. Whatever it may be. He loves my mom. We had hard times in the house like every family. But there was never a second in my entire life where he gave me any reason to question whether he loved her. Even if they were fighting. He’s taught me a lot about devotion. And about loving people at their best and their worst, which is really the thing. Loving people when they’re at their best is easy. No one is at their best all the time, and certainly not for thirty, forty, fifty years. If you want a long-term thing, you have to be willing to fight for it.

We have our ideas about how things should look or be or feel, and sometimes reality matches those pictures in our head in no way whatsoever. Love isn’t linear or pretty or glowy all the time. Love can be an act of will. I’m not talking about allowing yourself to be abused, here, so don’t get me wrong. I’m saying, if you really want to love people, you have to figure out how to see them and accept them as they are. And I think you have to do that for yourself before you can do it well for anyone else.

So I’ve been thinking about all of that. On the way home from baseball practice, my seven year old asked me if Grandpa’s operation was serious, and I said it was. I said his doctor was great, though, and that he performed these operations every day. I said I thought Grandpa would be okay. And he said, “But there’s a chance he won’t, right?” And I said yes, there’s a chance. Because you can’t lie, right? This is reality. I told him we’d call when we got home because I wanted my kids to say goodnight to him. And my son said he was going to tell him he loved him. He said, “He’s probably not going to sound scared because he won’t want me to be scared, right?” I said that was probably true. Anyway, when I picked my son up yesterday afternoon and told him Grandpa was okay, he threw his fist in the air and said, “Yes!!” And my daughter, who’s four, said she “knew it”, and hadn’t been worried.

I can’t imagine what it must feel like to hold a human heart in your hands. To understand you’re holding a life, a life full of beauty and pain and joy and heartbreak and disappointments and love. A life that overlaps with so many other lives, that affects the way a seven year old and a four year old view the world, that reduces someone to tears on a baseball field in front of strangers, that touches the lives of people all over the world. And that’s just one heart. Multiply that by seven billion, and you start to understand the potential we have to love each other and heal and grow something so unbelievably beautiful between us that we’re all in awe.

I think acceptance and clear seeing are the things. Forgiveness helps a lot. Awareness that you don’t have forever and neither does anyone else. The understanding that the absolute best thing you can do with your heart and your time and your energy is to love. I don’t know what Elias A. Zias ate for breakfast yesterday. But he has my heart and my gratitude. May we all cherish each other’s gorgeous hearts. Sending you love. Ally Hamilton

Want to Have a Happy New Year?

There are four main tools I think you need in order to be happy. You can cultivate all of them on your yoga mat. Just four, not so bad, right?

The first is a kind and compassionate internal dialogue. I really can’t emphasize what a life-changer this is, especially if you’ve been sharing your inner world with a harsh critic. Sometimes people tell me they believe they need that nasty voice in order to get things done. Without a relentless battering, they feel they’d just be sitting on the couch, letting life pass them by. But I respectfully and passionately disagree with that view. I used to have an incredibly unforgiving inner voice. If I screwed up, even in a small way, I’d berate myself for hours, days, sometimes longer. That, to me, is the definition of prison. It’s so debilitating and painful, it’s a wonder anyone can do anything that way. Full of bitter disappointment with themselves, disgust, frustration, contempt. You really want to feed and nurture a kind and compassionate inner voice. One that roots you on, not one that tears you down. None of us is perfect. We will all blow it sometimes– say or do something we wish we hadn’t, betray ourselves to avoid hurting someone else, lie to avoid confrontation, run, deny, or numb out so we don’t have to look our pain in the face. This is called being human. The idea is to learn and grow and develop tools to make the best choices you can, so you can show up the way you want to for yourself, and for everyone in your life. You’re not going to get it right every minute. Let go of perfectionism, starve a shaming inner voice, and grow a loving one.

The second tool is related to the first. Choose one thought over another. There’s so much power in this. Much of our suffering in this life comes from our own thoughts. Not all of it, and I think that’s really important to acknowledge. There are truly some things that will never fall into the category of, “thank you for this experience.” But short of those devastating losses, we can go a long way toward inner peace by choosing thoughts that strengthen us over the ones that weaken us. There’s no benefit to letting yourself spiral and agonize over something behind you that can’t be changed. And nothing fruitful is gained by obsessing over what could go wrong in the future. Training yourself to pick up your mind and bring it back to right now is like a superpower too few people are using. You don’t have to lose a day, an afternoon, an hour making yourself sick over something you can’t undo or control. In yoga, we use the breath as an anchor point. It’s always occurring in the now. You could pause, close your eyes, and become aware of your inhale and your exhale. Just like that, you’d be present. Awake. Engaged with the moment.

The third is the ability to sit with intense sensation, calmly. What are intense sensations, and what do I mean by “sitting with them”? Loneliness, rage, grief, jealousy, insecurity, shame, doubt, fear, feelings around being betrayed, abused, neglected, abandoned, rejected, or ignored. Those are all intense sensations. On your mat, you can practice breathing through intense physical sensation. Your quad may be on fire from holding Warrior II for twelve breaths, but if you train your mind and your nervous system to stay with it, you’ll find you can face those other emotional intense sensations off of your mat. I’m really talking about non-reactivity. So many people go through life feeling like victims of circumstance, happy when things are going according to their plans, and suffering when they are not. There’s no power in that. You can’t control what life will put on your path. You can’t make someone be something they aren’t, or want something they do not want. But you can work on the way you respond to what you’re given. On the ability to stay centered no matter what is coming at you.

The fourth tool is facing reality as it is. It’s not always going to be the way we want it to be. Sometimes we’ll be lost, heartbroken, confused. A lot of people run when they feel those feelings. Of course we all want the good stuff. We want to feel happy, in love, joyful, inspired, understood. We crave those feelings, and want to avoid the painful stuff. Life is full of both. You’re going to get all of it. You cannot outrun that reality, or deny it, or numb it out, but you can die trying. People tend to think facing those feelings will kill them. It’s the not facing them that does it. Yoga by its very nature is confrontational. Sometimes you’ll show up on your mat full of energy and feeling open and strong. Other days you’ll feel tight and tired. There will be certain poses you love, that feel great in your body, and certain poses you don’t like. The ones you don’t like are usually the ones you need. They’re reflecting back a place where you might be holding tension, physical or emotional. Practicing how we face confrontation is good, since life is full of them. Learning to listen, to respond with honesty, awareness, patience, breath, kindness–these are tools that will serve you well. If you learn to listen to your body that way, if you can give yourself the gifts of respect, understanding, nurturing and acceptance, you’ll be able to do that for other people, too.

Four tools. If you want a happiness guide from me, there you have it. Wishing you the healthiest, most loving, joyful, inspired, HAPPY New Year, yet. If you want to cultivate these tools with me online, just shoot me a comment below and I’ll give you a coupon code. Lots and lots of love, Ally

This is Orange!!!

I 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.

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. 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, and yell, “Blahblahblah” to drown out the crashing waves of truth. We reject, deny or explain anything that challenges our story, 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 my intuition is screaming at me to make a change. 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 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, they’ll find a way.

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 look in the most reflective mirrors you’ve ever seen. Mirrors that hold your deepest fears and your most raw, unhealed places. Mirrors that show you your mistakes and your regrets and your desires. You may find yourself having a layover with A Painful Event from Your Past, but if you want to be a peace, you’re going to have to get acquainted with your truest eye. It’s the voice of your intuition, and it’s got 20/20 vision. 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

Is This Love?

Nowhere is our stuff more likely to come up than in the context of an intimate relationship; anytime we’re really baring our souls to another person, trusting and opening and revealing and hoping that we’re safe, that we’re choosing wisely. You really do want to take your time when it comes to giving your heart to anyone, that’s a precious gift, and not something you want to do recklessly, or because your hormones are raging, or you’ve been waiting to connect deeply with someone, anyone, for a very long time. Longing to be seen, understood and held is understandable, but this isn’t stuff you can rush or force.

These are natural, beautiful, very human desires; we want at least one person to really see us in all our beauty, with all our flaws and uncertainty, to accept us in the face of all our past mistakes, poor choices, times we let ourselves or others down. It’s a beautiful thing to strip away the protection and stand there in all your vulnerability, but you are the safe-keeper of your tender heart, and I think part of loving yourself well involves your ability to discern what is real from what is not.

I get so many emails from people in confusion around this stuff. If your interaction with someone is making you feel “less than”, insecure, anxious, or extremely confused, there’s no way you’re going to feel safe, and it would be reckless to proceed to offer yourself up without getting some clarity about what’s happening. Honest communication is essential, games are for kids. If you can’t get clear about what’s going on no matter how much you articulate your experience, at a certain point you have to step away. You’re of no good to anyone, including yourself, if you allow your light to be dimmed for too long. Also, when you find yourself participating in a relationship that’s painful, you have an opportunity to do some healing. If someone rejects you or tells you that you don’t measure up, the only reason it hurts is if some part of you believes it to be true. At your core, do you doubt whether you’re worthy of being cherished and treated well? That would be a very good thing to look at, on your own. You can’t heal an old wound if you’re letting someone stick a knife in it all the time.

Sometimes it’s very very painful. We meet someone, and we’re attracted and maybe we’ve been lonely for a good long stretch, and we just dive in. I’d say, go ahead and enjoy yourself, be open and curious, but don’t start planning your wedding, or deciding this is “the one”, give it plenty of time. Let the drug of the beginning subside a little; you can’t really see anything well until the lust/dust clears. If you jump off the deep end and think, “This is it!” in the midst of all that intensity, there’s a decent chance you’re going to run into a brick wall in your not too distant future. Not always, of course there are times when it is, “it”, but if you’re attached to that outcome, you’re going to project all kinds of things onto this other person you really don’t know, instead of getting to know the person they are, which isn’t fair to either one of you. Much of the time, the beginning is so awesome, and then it dies down, and one party or the other is waiting for the person they hung out with in the beginning to show up again. People can wait for years.

Dealing with reality as it is, is always your best bet. It may not unfold the way you wanted it to, or thought it would. Life is full of surprises, twists, turns, disappointments, joy, heartache, loss, love that expands your heart beyond anything you could have imagined, and tears of all kinds. The more you open to the ride, the less you suffer, that’s the truth. The more you cling and try to convince or connive or manipulate or control or force or dance like a monkey to get the outcome you want, the more you rob yourself of the possibility for something authentically, organically amazing to unfold. Reality could be better than your dreams, but you have to trust in that idea, and also trust your gut. If it isn’t flowing, it’s probably not the right thing.

Relationships take nurturing and energy and effort on both sides, but the whole thing shouldn’t feel like one giant struggle, or a constant drama. Being triggered is not the same as being in love. Sometimes an interaction is so familiar, so charged because some of your deepest wounds are in play. People often mistake the intensity of that experience for true love; playing out ancient history and assuming this is it because it feels like home, even if home was nuts. Love feels good. Love is freeing and accepting and embracing. It doesn’t pull you close and push you away. People struggling to love do that. Use the tools you’ve got. Feel with your heart and your gut and see with your eyes and trust yourself. Take good care of that gorgeous heart.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3

Sing it Out

I think there are two essential questions to answer if you want to be at peace in this world–what are your gifts, and how will you share them? If you want to feel like your life has meaning, and you want to feel a sense of purpose, that’s at the heart of it. Giving feels good; to feel like you have something to offer that is of value, creates a state of inspiration and gratitude. It lights a fire under your a$$. It could be as simple and profound as the love you give to the people in your life. I don’t know of anything, really, that feels better than giving from your heart, with everything you’ve got.

There are questions in this life you’ll never answer. How much time do you have? How much time do the people you love, have? What happens after this? Some people experience “paralysis through analysis” in small ways and in large. You can think a thing to death, but your intuition never lies. There are people living in quiet agony because their heart is crying out for something, but their mind is overwhelmed with the complications around seeing it through; with can’t and shouldn’t, and who am I to think I could pull that off?

It can be challenging to separate things out sometimes. What you really want, versus what you believe you should want, or what other people want you to want. If you can quiet that storm in your mind, you’ll know what to do. You might not know how to do it, but you won’t be confused about what’s real for you. The rest of it is finding the strength to face it. It’s not always easy to accept what you know, because often that means change is necessary, and even though everything is in a state of flux, there’s a tendency to resist that. We like stability so much, we can be willing to sacrifice the song in our hearts. Sometimes people become paralyzed in a larger sense. The big questions are so overwhelming, the lack of available answers so profound, a person is left unable to see the point of being alive at all. Hopes, dreams, intentions, plans, all seem absurd, and many people end up just existing, instead of living.

There are things you can know. You can know yourself, for example. You can figure out what triggers you, where you still have some healing to do. You can figure out what lights you up and feeds your soul. You can allow the unanswerable questions to motivate you, so you don’t waste the time you have. Fear is a perfectly natural feeling we’ll all experience, but the more you allow yourself to open to it without letting it stop you, the less power it will have over you as you move forward.

Obligation is a terrible motivator. Too many people get caught up in “should.” There’s something burning within them, but they push it down or deny it because they don’t want to hurt other people with their truth. When you deny what you know in your heart to be true, it’s just soul-crushing. You get one go-around in the body you’re in, I think we know that much. You have a finite amount of time. How many years do you allow yourself to live halfway? What do you think happens to those dreams you don’t pursue because you tell yourself you shouldn’t? Where do you carry the pain of that? Somewhere in your psyche, and I’d suggest you’ll also carry those things in your body. A life half-lived will make you heartsick. Every wasted day has a pull to it, a weight, a dread, because somewhere you know this is not it, and time is passing.

The vulnerability of this thing is real, you might as well open to it. In fact, I’d say the more you embrace it, the more you liberate yourself, the less likely you are to become paralyzed. Since there are some questions we’ll never answer, live all the way. Give every last bit of love you’ve got every day, for all the days you’re here. Leave nothing in the tank. Who knows what happens next, but at least your now will be amazing, at least your now will be on fire.

Sending you love, and hoping you light it up, and sing your song,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3

Love Doesn’t Blossom in a Prison

Sometimes, in an effort to feel secure, we strangle the life out of a thing. For many, many people, facing the reality that anything living is in a constant state of flux is a hugely uncomfortable task. Nature is teaching us all the time, though. The seasons change, the leaves fall off the trees, the branches are barren and then the buds appear and the tree blooms again. Flowers grow and blossom and fade from whence they came, and new flowers spring up. You, yourself are always changing, shifting, evolving, growing; so is everyone else you know. Your body has an unknown expiration date, so does everyone else’s. We won’t know for sure what happens after this until we exhale for the last time. If you want to hide from the vulnerability and constant motion of this experience, you’re going to need to find a huge rock, earplugs and something to tie around your eyes, too.

It’s completely understandable that we’d like to be able to count on at least a few things, to create a little order out of all the uncertainty. The thing is, nature is wild and gorgeous and uncontrollable, and you are part of nature, you’re not separate from it. You can make choices about what you’d like the shape of your life to look like, and the way you’re going to show up, and you can control your behavior if you work on it. You can develop the ability to choose one thought over another. You can do the work to heal your deepest wounds, and you can uncover the limitless well of love you have within you. Then you can share it. So those are two things you can count on: everything is always changing, and your power lies in your response to what life puts in your path. But if you want to control your path or the people who may be walking it with you, you’re in for trouble.

Human beings are funny. We meet someone and we think, ohhhhh, look at this person, so beautiful, so wonderful, this is a person I want, and we enjoy the rush of the beginning. When the lust/dust clears, if something real is there we begin the process of knowing each other. It takes time and a willingness to see clearly. Right out of the gate people struggle with this. They want to see what they want to see. Maybe they’ve been waiting for love for a long time, and in the rush of hormones they’ve thought, “This is it!” They’re in love with the idea of being in love, and then the clinging begins. This has to be it, so this person has to conform to the idea I have about how my partner should be, they have to look like my vision board! They have to want what I want them to want, and anything that challenges my vision has to be rejected. The minute you cling to an outcome, you can bet you’re going to suffer. People are not possessions, and they are not obligated to want what you want, but love is a vulnerable undertaking, too, and it’s natural to want to feel like you can relax. How else to trust and open?

Two people have to keep choosing each other every day, every moment, that’s the only way. You can’t force someone to feel the way you want them to, you can’t cajole or convince anyone to fall madly in love with you; they will or they won’t. Selling yourself is a terrible price to pay for security. So is trying to be something other than what you are, in all your unique beauty. Withholding your love or attention or affection to get what you want is not loving. Setting up markers for your relationship, certain brass rings that have to be grabbed by certain deadlines is not loving, either, but when our fear outweighs our love, what ought to feel like an embrace becomes a stranglehold.

Love is not controlling or manipulative. It doesn’t need shackles, and it won’t grow in a prison. The more fear you put in the soil, the more you strangle the plant. No one wants to be owned or controlled. People long to be seen, heard, understood, cherished, but no one wants to be crushed under the weight of someone else’s insecurity. We’re all insecure enough; insecurity is a given. Also, being human, when we feel completely secure we start to take that security for granted. We don’t pay as close attention, we don’t show up the way we did. A relationship is a living, breathing thing. It needs nurturing, it needs to be fed. If you neglect it or mistreat it, it’s going to die. If you love someone, you’re making the choice to see them and to honor them, and you have to keep making that choice if you want the love to last through all the ups and downs and vulnerability inherent in the nature of all living things. I’m not just talking about romantic love, here. You can’t predict the future, you can only love in the now. When you recognize that everything is always changing, and nothing can be taken for granted, you’ll feel inspired to love with everything you’ve got, every moment you’ve got. Better get busy if you need to.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3

Use Your Key

The best way to meet fear is to allow yourself to feel it. For many people, social situations are a nightmare. What to say? What to wear? What to do if you’re left in a corner and no one is talking to you? What to say or what not to say if someone is talking to you? Whether you’ll get that call, and how badly you’ll feel if you don’t. Public speaking, lots of people are terrified about that. There’s fear of intimacy, the risks required to tear down your carefully constructed walls. Fear you’ll never live a life that feels good to you, you’ll never reach your potential. Or the fear that you will, and then what? Fear of spiders, challenging conversations, hurting other people, rejection, dying alone. There are all kinds of things that might scare you.

Being scared isn’t a problem; running from the feeling is. If you’re panicked, there’s a reason, and you have an opportunity to know something about yourself, probably something very important. All the shadow emotions are markers. They’re like burning flags, waving in the wind patiently, waiting to be examined. They’re marking those places where you still have some healing to do, but so many people are so averse to feeling uncomfortable, they flee. They fling the feeling away, or numb it out, or deny that it exists. They run from that flag like their life depended on it, when in actuality, their life depends on their willingness to walk right at it. If you can’t sit with your sadness and allow the tears to spill, how can you relieve your pain? If a close friend called you in real need, do you think you’d help them by hanging up the phone? Or getting them drunk, or taking them shopping or getting them laid? Yes, I said that, because many people seek relief from their pain in those ways, and no, none of those things would help. Dr. Earl A. Grollman on this, “The only cure for grief is to grieve.”

When I say the “shadow emotions”, I mean fear, rage, shame, guilt, doubt, insecurity, jealousy, bitterness. The feeling of having been betrayed, or judged or shunned — any of those feelings that have some heat to them. Culturally, we aren’t trained to sit with that stuff. We’re told, “Don’t be sad”, “Don’t be scared”, “Don’t be angry”, as if we could just snap our fingers and make the feelings vanish. We learn some feelings are not acceptable, some feelings make those around us uncomfortable, and so we should hide them. In our crazy framework, men aren’t supposed to show fear, and women aren’t supposed to be angry. You know what we call an angry woman. We have a word for it, and it isn’t nice, but this premise is so nuts. We will all feel everything, regardless of gender. We will all have moments when we wonder what we’re doing here, and what happens after this. We’ll all doubt our ability to have an impact on the world around us from time to time. We’ll all wish we could do certain things over again, and differently. This is called being human. We aren’t robots. We can’t edit out or shut off the parts that are unwanted.

I met an eighty-seven year old woman today. It’s not the first time I’ve met her, she’s the mother of a good friend, but it’s the first time we really talked. Her husband died this year, and her brother, and his wife. She told me she goes out every night. Goes to the theater, goes to her bridge club, volunteers. She said it doesn’t change anything, but it makes the people around her feel she’s okay. Can I tell you my heart broke a little? She was married for sixty-six years and her husband never wanted her to have lunch or tea or anything at all with any other man. She told me that while she laughed and shook her head. I told her he knew he had a good thing. My point is, this life makes you vulnerable. That’s what’s asked of you. To open your heart, even though you understand your time is finite. Feel your feelings. Feel all of it. The heartache, the despair, the uncertainty. Feel it so it doesn’t block you, because life is simply too precious for that. You don’t have years to waste being stuck. It might take you years to heal, but that’s different than time spent on the run. What you run from, owns you. That’s clear, right? Anything you won’t face controls you. You’re not meant to be controlled, that’s why it doesn’t feel good. You’re meant to be liberated, but you have to use your key. Hoping that you do, and sending so much love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3

Being Dragged Kind of Sucks

Sometimes we’re so attached to an idea, it blinds us. Maybe we’re in love with someone, and we so want them to be in love with us, we deny the nagging feeling that it doesn’t seem to be the case. We think if we chase, or hang in there, or show up exactly the way we think this person wants us to, then it will work out, then we’ll “have” them. We start to try to fit into some kind of mold. We obsess and doubt and worry about everything, and we lose ourselves.

Attachment (“raga”) is one of the five “kleshas”, or obstacles that prevent us from experiencing oneness, that deep sense of being in the flow that Patanjali lays out in the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras. That, to me, is the real peace. The surrender, in the bravest sense, to what is, and the ability to open to it and join in it. Some of it is very painful, and not at all as we’d like it to be, and some of it is so piercingly beautiful, it takes your breath away. The work is to hold it all, embrace it all, even when you don’t understand, recognizing that you are not in control of circumstances, or other people, or the way the story will unfold. Letting go of your grip on things. That’s the good kind of “losing yourself.” What you get to work on is your response to what you’re given, your ability to return to love again and again, even if your heart is broken.

The other four obstacles are ignorance (“avidya”, a disconnection from what’s real, an inability to see things clearly), egoism (“asmita”, identification with our ideas about ourselves, our judgments and “shoulds”), aversion (“dvesha”, a rejection of, or desire to avoid those things that are unwanted, whether they be particular feelings, reality as it is unfolding, other people, a certain outcome, or a way of being), and fear of death (“abhinivesha”, the fear of loss, fear of the unknown, fear that we will leave important things unsaid or undone).

The yoga practice is about stripping away those obstacles. When we’re attached to a particular outcome, we close off the possibility for anything else. We stand there with our eyes shut tightly, gripping onto our vision of how we want things to be, and anything that doesn’t fit into our picture must be rejected or denied. When you reject reality, you leave yourself in a world of darkness, you become the architect of your own suffering. If you want to know which way to go, you have to open your eyes, because there’s nothing to follow but the truth; the truth of each moment, the truth of your particular situation, the truth that’s in your heart. When you start following those truths, you pave the way to experience the bigger truth of your connection to everything, your part in the flow.

When I started practicing yoga, I was a person who was trying to chase happiness. If I just do this or that, then I’ll be happy. “This” might be meeting the right person. “That” might be losing just a little more weight, or nine million other things that all had to do with external stuff. I had this idea that happiness was somewhere out in front of me, and that it would present itself if I just worked hard and made it to certain milestones. When you live your life that way, you begin to understand that’s all a lie. You hit the milestone, and it’s still not enough. Happiness is never outside of you. It’s inside. It’s not something you need to create, it’s something that’s already there, just waiting to be uncovered.

The stripping away process can be painful. It can sear you a little, or a lot. You may have to burn away all kinds of beliefs about yourself and other people, about the world and your part in it. The gift of yoga, if you practice long enough, is that it makes you hungry for the truth, whatever it is. Even if it’s painful. Even if you have to face a reality you’d do anything to avoid. When you’re in love with someone and they aren’t in love with you, somewhere deep down you know that, you feel it. That’s what makes you feel sick and doubtful and hooked in that awful way. You’re blinding yourself to reality. You’re cutting yourself off from your own intuition. So you might go through some pain, but eventually there’s a real liberation when you just open your hands and your heart and your mind to the truth, whatever it may be. The truth burning away in your heart. The acceptance of someone else’s truth, even if it means you must let go of some vision you had.

It’s a liberation because it’s exhausting to push down what you know. It’s like trying to hold back the waves of the ocean; it simply cannot be done. When you accept that, you can relax and swim, you can be in and of the flow, and then you can devote your energy to living each day fully, to loving each person in your life fully, to sharing your gifts freely, with abandon, to leaving nothing unsaid or undone, so that if it were your last day (and I hope you have countless days ahead of you), you could end it with the sense of having done all you could today, to live with your heart wide open.

Wishing that for you, and sending so much love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here <3

What to Do with What We’re Given

Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen. We all have pain to varying degrees, we’ve all suffered loss, despair, and disappointment. Some people have lived through abuse and neglect, and losses so knifing you have to wonder about the resiliency of the human heart, and how strong it is. It’s not a level playing field, and it is a sad reality that horrendous things happen to beautiful people all the time. Maybe you believe in karma, maybe you believe in chaos theory, maybe you don’t know what you believe. Regardless, I don’t know anyone who would argue that life is easy.

You can’t change what’s happened to you, and you can’t control what life will put on the path in front of you, but you can work on how you’re going to respond. Your past does not have to define you, or determine your future. You define yourself and you co-create your future with your choices and your actions. If you’re grieving, grieve. If you’re enraged, move into that heat so you can let it burn off to an ember, and eventually to ash so you don’t have to carry the burden of something huge and painful that you’ll never get your arms around anyway. Rage is not a fabulous traveling companion, it demands everything of you, and blocks out any hope for joy or peace. Face reality as it is, even if everything in your being is crying out with the why of it. Denial is a traffic circle and so are resentment, blame and bitterness. Those are all natural feelings, but after you explore them, you really want to take the exit to acceptance or you’ll just drive in circles until you’re sick, and of no use to yourself or anyone else.

If you’ve lost someone and you don’t know how you’ll be able to live without them, see if you can open to the gift that it is to have loved that deeply; there are people who will never experience that. If you’ve lost the life you thought you were going to live, consider that eventually, you may find the strength to help other people who are looking in the face of a loss like that. If you don’t help, who will? Who else could ever understand? There’s beauty in that. Would you rather not have those skills? Would you gladly trade them in for a life where you never needed to understand what that feels like? Of course, but we don’t get to choose. We just get to figure out what we do with what we’re given.

You have this gorgeous heart. The more it breaks, the more it opens. I’ve had my heart broken in all kinds of ways. There are certain things I’d really love to give back, and to not understand. It took me years to see the potential for something beautiful to emerge in some instances, but your pain can strengthen you if you let it because the best things in life are giving, connecting, sharing, offering, loving. A person plunged in darkness will not accept a hand from someone who hasn’t been there, but if you can swim out into the center of someone’s despair because you know the way, and you also know the way out, that’s powerful. That’s when your pain turns into your light, and that’s a gorgeous thing you can share.

Some things will never be okay. I think it’s important to accept that. That does not mean that your future has to be devoid of beauty or joy or gratitude. You can hold both: the pain of your loss, and the softness and light in your heart, and you can let that light lead your way.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga courses and classes here.

Your Life Belongs to You

You cannot please everyone; if you must, go ahead and try, but when you’re done you’ll find you’ve gotten nothing for your troubles but exhaustion, despair, and resentment. People in your life may want all kinds of great stuff for you and from you, but no one else has to live your life. At the end of the day, when you’re looking in the mirror as you brush your teeth, you’re either staring at a friend or a stranger.

When we live our lives to please others, we lose all sense of self and the result is a deep feeling of disconnection. If you don’t know who you are or what you want, it’s not at all easy to chart a course and it’s very likely you’ll get caught up in someone else’s plan. If you know yourself and you’re in touch with what’s true for you, but are still unable to allow that pull to move you, it’s even worse because that’s a conscious betrayal of your true self.

All kinds of things create conditions where people are susceptible to self-sabotage — fear is a huge one, so is guilt. If I say how I feel, or do what I know in my heart I must, this person may be hurt or disappointed or angry. They may not approve of me anymore. There’s also the fear of making big changes, that stops a lot of people dead in their tracks. If I talk about the huge elephant in the room, I can’t then try to sweep it back under the rug. I’ll have to act, and I have no idea what that means for my life, or for the people in it. Sometimes it’s easier to blame other people than it is to take responsibility for the way life looks and feels. I’ll keep telling myself I can’t act because this other person would be devastated. When in reality, you’d be better off just sharing the truth for their sake and yours. You can’t sabotage yourself and expect to be at peace.

When you decide your life is your own, and you are responsible for your feelings and your actions, things get a lot easier. Harder at first, if it’s new to you, because you’re leaving your coping mechanisms in a heap on the floor behind you, and having to sit with the discomfort of creating a life that feels good to you, but easier in the long run because your inner compass is lit up. You have to be true to yourself. If you spend a lifetime pushing down your own dreams, hopes and desires so that you can measure up to someone else’s idea of how you should be, or society’s idea of how you should be, that’s a lifetime you missed. You are not here to be a martyr. You’re here to uncover your gifts and share them. You’re here to shine, but in order to do that, you really have to drop the facade that your life belongs to anyone but you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

Worry All the Time?

Telling someone not to worry is as helpful as yelling at someone to relax, but the truth is, worrying is a waste of time and energy. It does no good whatsoever. You can worry as much as you like, but it won’t make money appear in your bank account, it won’t put food on your table, it won’t change another person’s mind or future actions, it won’t save anyone and it certainly won’t affect the weather. What it will do is rob you of the present moment, and give you a diminished or inflated sense of power. It can also make you sick, literally.

The mind-body connection is not just a concept, it’s real. Your body does not distinguish between events that are actually happening, and events you’re envisioning in your mind. If you see yourself in some painful future situation (that may or may not ever come to pass), and you start to write the dialogue for some imaginary conversation in your mind, you can send your blood pressure through the roof. Pay attention the next time you catch yourself “future-tripping”, and see if your jaw is clenched or your shoulders are up around your ears. Notice your breath and whether you have that shallow chest-breathing happening that occurs for us during times of stress. If you bite your nails, or twirl your hair, or cross your arms, or grit your teeth, or your stomach gets upset when you feel threatened or scared or ashamed or guilty or enraged, notice if these same things are happening in your body when you simply imagine yourself in an unwanted situation. You can make yourself sick with thoughts.

I find in my own life I fall prey to worry when I feel vulnerable, when I doubt my power to face reality as it is, or when I start to think I might be able to spare someone I love from pain. You cannot control most things. Certainly, you cannot control other people, nor do you want to try. Everyone has work to do. It’s a huge undertaking just to try to keep your own side of the street clean. You can’t manage another person’s path. Pain is part of the human experience, it opens us. It’s how we gain insight and grow in empathy and compassion. If you haven’t suffered, it’s not very easy to understand suffering. Not that you’d ever wish it on anyone, including yourself, but if you’ve been alive long enough, you’ll recognize the truth of this.

You don’t have the power to change what life is going to put in your path, or in the paths of those you love, but you do have the power to face those things with grace and strength, and to show up for the people in your life with everything you’ve got. That might look like simply surviving for awhile, depending on the degree of loss you’re facing. Or it might look like reaching out for help if you need it. Either way, you have the power to accept reality as it unfolds, both the exquisitely beautiful, and the devastatingly brutal. Worrying about what’s already happened won’t change a thing. Worrying about what could happen won’t change a thing. Taking a deep breath right now, and putting your hand over your beautiful, beating heart, that’s a thing you could do that is so simple and so full of power. Picking your mind up, and bringing it back to this moment, which will only happen once, is another thing of great beauty you could accomplish right now. Doing that again and again, moment after moment, hour after hour, so you don’t miss any of the gifts today might have to offer you, is brilliant. Don’t waste too much of today, the only today that’s ever going to happen, worrying about tomorrow. You’re vulnerable. I’m vulnerable. It’s the nature of being human, of loving, and of living. Might as well embrace that, because worrying about it won’t change it. There’s something so piercingly gorgeous about living with that knowledge. It makes every day an opportunity to open further, to share everything you’ve got, and to love your heart out. That feels a lot better than biting your nails.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here.

Nothing Stays the Same

Nothing stays the same, not the house you grew up in, or your beloved dog, or your first crush. You aren’t the same you you were in high school, or even the same you you were last year and neither is anyone else. Do you have family or friends with kids you only see a couple of times a year? Aren’t you always astounded at how big they’ve gotten? We tend to try to keep things the way they are in our heads. This person exists this way in my mind. That guy I dated who broke my heart is a person who lacks compassion and doesn’t think about the effect of his actions on other people. Is that still true twenty years later? Maybe it is, and maybe there’s been incredible growth. My parents were this way or that way when I was growing up, and so now I’m like this. Are they still that way? Do you still need to be like this?

The earth is spinning around, and we are spinning around on it, and yet somehow we want to peg things down. I go to this grocery store and I buy these items and I eat at this time, and on these days I go to yoga and I get upset if someone else is in my spot. I know my partner, s/he is this way, and my best friend is like X, and you get the picture, right? Even your dog, who will love you consistently and unconditionally with every breath for his or her whole life, is changing, but we resist that reality, and are usually shocked and dismayed when loved ones die, even if they’re 97 years old and we knew it had to happen eventually. It’s almost like we think death happens to everyone but us. People almost always say that the loss of a loved one puts everything in perspective. Does it take death to wake us up? Do you really give a sh&t about ninety percent of the stuff you obsess over?

There are two times people seem to take action — when they’re desperate and when they’re inspired. Otherwise, you see most people simply trying to maintain the status quo. The status quo is changing, too. If it’s living, if it’s made up of energy, then it changes. When we resist the natural process of change, we strangle ourselves and others. We prevent our own growth, we limit our own potential, and we cling to things as they are, even as they’re slipping through our fingers as if we’re begging, “Please, I worked so hard to get here. Leave things alone, I’m all good.”

Things will keep shifting whether you want them to or not, so you might as well accept that; resisting it is futile and exhausting. If you’ve been participating in a situation that’s causing you deep pain and you’re feeling desperate for something to give, you need to examine your participation. The why of it is the key to your healing and the “good news” is that desperate people get things done, not that any of us would ask to get to that point. Chances are, if you haven’t been loving yourself well, that’s where you’re headed. Maybe it’s what you needed in order to start to move in a different direction. If you get to a point at work or at home where things are just intolerable, you’ll start to think of a way out. Your mind will begin with all its machinations to forge a new path and as soon as your mind begins to do that, to even consider a new way, you will figure out how to make it happen, even if you’ve been telling yourself for a long time that it’s impossible, that there is no way. There’s always a way.

If you can allow the idea that everything is in a constant state of flux to inspire you instead of terrify you, you’ll probably start to live with a little fire under your a$$, which is a good thing, I think. Too many people talk about wasting time or “killing time”, as if it’s limitless and it is. The world was spinning before we got here, and it will go on spinning after we’re gone. The real question is, what will you do with the time you’ve got? That’s finite. My feeling at this point in my life, is the more you invest your time and energy toward spreading love, the more you uncover your gifts and share them, the more you treasure those moments that are so easy to take for granted and recognize that just breathing deeply is a gift, the more you notice the beauty that’s all around you, the more your time here will have incredible meaning. Because it does. Your particular spark is not an accident. Shine it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

Breathe In and Breathe Out

There are really only a few things that cause us to suffer, but they definitely get the job done. One is clinging — there’s something or someone we desire, some particular set of circumstances, some way of thinking or being, and we simply refuse to let go. When we’re attached in any way, we’re setting ourselves up for pain. Attachment to other people (which is a by-product of being human) leads to suffering because we are all in process all the time. You can’t “peg” a person, or pin someone down, or own anybody. People will choose to be with you or they won’t. Human beings have an expiration date as well, so even if a person chooses to be with you, eventually they’ll leave you or you’ll leave them. Attachment leads to suffering, and with human beings there’s no way around it, nor do I suggest you try to find one unless you truly feel called to move to a cave. The joy in this life comes from connection, from uncovering your gifts and sharing them, from touch, from laughter, from being seen and heard and understood and cherished. I wish that for you. I hope your heart expands with so much love you have moments you think it might just burst. Otherwise, I really can’t say what the point would be. You will lose people you love and it will hurt beyond anything you can fathom, but there’s a beauty in having loved that way — that can’t be taken from you. You have a light and you’re meant to shine it with whatever time you’ve got, and attachment to an idea or a way of being leaves no room for anything else to unfold, to evolve, to open. You’ll keep growing and learning if you allow yourself to shift and change, to loosen your grip on the story. It’s natural to all of us. Stifling that is a form of death, of strangulation.

Another is avoidance or denial. We know the truth of something, but we refuse to accept it. We are so not okay with an idea or a situation, we reject it. We fling it from us, or numb ourselves to the heartbreak of the thing. We tenaciously push away the undesired outcome, or we make ourselves drunk with distraction so we can pretend it isn’t happening this way. You want the truth? You might as well because trying to push it down or push it away is simply not sustainable, it makes you sick in your soul and it’s exhausting. Denial leads to depression. Denying your own feelings takes up so much energy, you simply don’t have much for anything else. Getting out of bed feels like a herculean effort. Forget about tea with a friend. Who can muster the energy to shower and go out in public and find the facial muscles to smile?

Fear of death is the final one. Your own death, or the death of people you love beyond words. The idea that someone could be ripped from you, or you could be ripped from everyone and everything you know can be crushing or paralyzing for people. For a lot of people, there’s so much fear and anxiety around that it’s hard to function, to go out into the world with an open heart and and open mind and open arms because there are too many giant what ifs in the way. The truth is, it’s a thin, thin layer between this living life we have, and whatever it is that happens after we exhale for the final time. I think it’s like a membrane between here and there. That was my experience once, many years ago when I was sick with pneumonia and almost let myself drift off because I didn’t want to take medication. I got to this place of feeling so floaty, so peaceful, I thought, maybe I could just go now and that would be okay. Of course, I had a temperature of 104, so that may have been influencing me, but something in me wasn’t ready for that, so I got two shots of penicillin in my a$$ and here I am, so grateful.

The second time I experienced that sensation of how thin it is, the here and there of this thing, was during childbirth with my son. We didn’t have an easy time, and there were many moments I wasn’t sure which way we were headed. I’ll tell you at that time I fought with everything I had to keep us both here. I clung to this life, for him, and for myself. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to hold him, to kiss him, to look into his eyes. It is a fragile thing, so I would say let that inspire you to treasure it. Cherish it. Live it. Don’t wait and don’t hold hold your breath because you’ll miss out. If you love someone, hold their face in your hands, and make sure they know it. Life can be both piercingly beautiful and painful. Some of it will break your heart wide open. I think your job is to let it. Let it soften you and open you, so when the joy comes, when the love comes, you’re ready to receive it. You don’t get to own it, or keep it in a box, you don’t get to control it, so breathe in and breathe out, and let it wash over you and through you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga courses and classes here.

Let it Break Your Heart Wide Open

The more you open to the reality that you cannot rewrite your past and you cannot control or predict your future, the more your heart opens to the plight of being human. Inherently it’s a vulnerable undertaking and isn’t easy, especially if you’re trying to be kind, conscious and compassionate with yourself and everyone you encounter. Whatever has happened has shaped you, but it doesn’t have to define you or close you off to the possibility of joy. Whatever is coming is unknowable, but you can work on healing and knowing yourself, so the storms don’t knock you over when they come (some will no matter how much you prepare). You cannot know for certain what happens after this until you exhale for the final time. People will break your heart. Circumstances will break your heart. Let them. Hold all of that.

You can fight the groundlessness, but it will still be there. You can go down to the ocean and try to hold back the waves, too. You can allow this world, your life, your losses, your disappointments, frustrations, fear and despair to harden you. You can tell yourself other people have it easier (some do), and allow your heart to become encased in a bitter shell, but the more you toughen up against it (and aren’t we taught to do just that? Don’t cry, don’t be scared, don’t be angry), the more you also toughen yourself against joy, gratitude and the piercing yes of loving with your heart wide open. You can’t shut down the painful stuff without also closing yourself off to the incredible beauty in this world.

It actually feels good to embrace the truth of your smallness and your limitlessness. Your ability to love and to shine is what makes this life beautiful, and there’s no box, there are no circumstances that can hold you back in that regard unless you let them. It’s a relief to face both your vulnerability and your power. So many people feel alone in this thing, like they’re the only ones feeling this stuff, and everyone else is cruising along with their pithy updates and perfect glowy Instagram pictures. Everyone has grief, shame, confusion, fear and guilt. Doubt, anxiety and insecurity. Most people don’t talk about it because we’ve been taught these feelings are wrong, that they need to be dealt with and managed and hidden somewhere so as not to make other people uncomfortable. If you want to be known, seen and understood in this world, then you’re going to have to allow yourself to cry sometimes, to be scared, to be angry, to be whatever you are and to let those who are close to you see that stuff as well. If you edit out the painful parts, you’re going to feel very alone. It isn’t all going to be light.

If you want to heal yourself, and you want to support other people in their own healing process (which is how we heal the world around us, too), then you’re going to have to head toward compassion. The best way to give people permission to be fully themselves is to be fully yourself. To knock the walls down and to admit sometimes you have no f&cking idea what to do. That sometimes you fold laundry with tears streaming down your face, and your heart full of why. It’s okay, it really is. Let this world and your life break your heart wide open. It feels a lot better that way.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga courses and classes here.

Don’t Grip the Pen

Living this life well, in a way that feels good in your skin, is, indeed, an art form. You can grip the pen and sweat blood to try to get the story of “How Things Should Look” out of your head and into your reality, but you’ll only create pain that way; pain and sorrow, for yourself and those close to you. You aren’t writing this whole story. You get to manage your inner world, that’s where your masterpiece can happen. You can create a garden inside yourself, or an ocean, or canyons or waterfalls or an entire underwater world full of colors you’d never see above ground and even that is hard, by the way. Even managing yourself is enough work to keep you busy– deciding which thoughts deserve your attention, where to direct your energy. Bringing yourself into a deeper state of awareness, aligning yourself with what you know to be true for you, making your world a loving, peaceful, compassionate place to be.

The world around you is not yours to control, however. Other people are not yours to control, either. Not your family members or your own children or your friends. You own no one but yourself, and even that’s debatable; regardless, you are here for a blink of time in a body that won’t last forever.

The thing is, most of us think small. I have this body and it defines me, it’s who I am, and it needs to be controlled so it will look the way I want it to, or the way society wants it to, or the way I’ve been convinced it ought to look, which takes up a lot of my time and energy, and usually makes me feel badly about myself. I have this life, and this job, and I live in this house in this city, and I grew up here, and went to this school. Somewhere along the way, this thing happened to me, and then this other thing happened, and these things define who I am, and so this is how I look and where I live and what I do and where I’m from, and now that I’ve told you all of those things, why don’t I feel seen and understood? As if the details are the essence of you. As if you could be defined by a list of things. You are a human being on planet earth, which is a miraculous thing in itself. You are so much more than the sum of the details of your life, and upon which details do you place the importance? What are you feeding? What are you doing here? Have you figured it out yet?

Here’s what you can hold onto (and give away): your integrity, your truth, your good heart, your trust in your own journey, your ability to give love freely, your understanding that everything is in a state of flux, even you. Here are things we can all work on: our outlook, the way we’re thinking about the world and other people, our level of acceptance, and when we can’t get there, our level of tolerance, patience, compassion and understanding; discovering our particular gifts, and the best ways we can share them, figuring out how to be of service, and having faith that somehow or another we are going to keep growing and learning and becoming better and stronger. Things to let go of: attachment to what other people will think or want or need or do; attachment to the way the story will unfold, and the way we think things ought to be. Life is going to bring all kinds of circumstances. Some of them will be beautiful and some of them will take your breath away with their cruelty and devastation. We get it all in this life.

Do your thoughts create your reality? In this context, I pose the question because some people believe if they think a thing hard enough, they can bring it into existence and sometimes the thing they’re thinking has to do with what another person will do or say or want. So to that I say no, you can’t “manifest” another person’s journey and you’d be walking down a confused path if you tried. You can hope for everyone’s greatest good. You can wish people well, and hope they heal and offer you support and love, but you can’t control other people with your mind. Part of becoming spiritually and emotionally mature is learning how to face reality as it is, which is not always as we’d like it to be.

Living intentionally is powerful, and putting your action behind your intention is where it’s at. Your thoughts don’t create your reality, but they affect your reality quite a lot. If you believe the world is cold and unfair and people suck, that’s going to affect the way you move through the world and interact with other humans. If you’re coming from that dark place, the world will rise up and meet you there. People don’t respond with warmth and compassion to a person who walks around grunting and barely making eye contact, so if you walk out the door in that frame of mind, yes, it will affect your reality, because you will create the circumstances to confirm your hypothesis that the world is cold and people suck. Once in awhile, some kind-hearted person may mess with your experiment, but you’ll just peg them as nuts, or flowery, or one of those hippies, and get back to the business of despising your life.

On the other hand, if you believe the world is full of both intense pain and unbelievable joy, that people are good and kind and capable of limitless love and the potential for growth and change, that’s also going to affect the way you move through the world and interact with the people you encounter. Because you’re coming from a loving place, you’ll be spreading love, and you’ll find the world will rise up and meet you there, too. So if we take the time and make the effort to heal the worlds within ourselves, we can contribute to the world around us in a very positive way, but that does not mean that horrendous things won’t happen to good people and it isn’t because these good people called this stuff into their lives, or believed it’s what they deserved spiritually. We could talk about Karma and karmic debt, but those are ideas and beliefs and they won’t comfort everyone, and you know, that’s really what I want to do with my time here. Division is not going to get the job done. If we could pare it down to simply this: we are all human beings on planet earth, and we are all equally miraculous, and not a single one of us knows for sure what happens after this, then we’re getting somewhere. Then we can look each other in the eyes and say, “Isn’t this something? Isn’t this an insanely vulnerable state we’re in? And as such, couldn’t we love each other a bit more and let go of our need to condemn, justify, control or judge?”

We’ve lost the plot. I’m pretty sure the story is, “How Much Can You Love?”, and maybe we need to define the terms, too. Love is not controlling or manipulative or conditional — love is going to love. Whether the story unfolds like we wrote it in our heads, or pinned it on our vision boards, or were told it would from the time we could think. Love is going to love regardless. If the person you adore is walking out the door, and everything in you is breaking, love is going to love. You already know that because you’ve been through it. When you called that person names and told every single person in your life the story of how you’d been wronged, you did that because you were still loving. When you couldn’t eat or couldn’t sleep or couldn’t figure out how you were going to get out of bed and take that shower and make that breakfast and put one foot in front of the other until you were out the door and in the car and on your way into a day you could hardly face, you felt that way because you were still loving. Love makes you vulnerable. Life makes you vulnerable. You can hold onto that. Devote yourself to loving with your whole heart. If someone exits your story, let them go with love. Stay on point. If you are met with the kind of grief that makes it hard to breathe, love gives you a free pass. You do whatever you need to do to get through it. But eventually, come back to love, so you don’t die, too. Life without love is death in a walking body. That’s no way to live. Be a bold artist and paint with your love. That’s the part of the plot you get to control.

Sending you some love right now,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

Don’t Let the “No’s” Stop You

I think many people experience rejection as if it’s a “no” everywhere. As if every door is closing to them, every doubt is being confirmed, every fear is being verified. It’s never easy to put your heart out there in any context–romantically, professionally, socially or creatively–and find that you’re being turned down, but not everyone is going to see you, hear you or understand you. Not everyone is going to embrace you or celebrate you or cherish you, and you know what? You don’t need everyone to do those things. A few people who truly get you would be great, but even if you only have one person in your life who can do that, you’re blessed…and you do, because you can do those things for yourself. Believing in yourself is essential if you want to be at peace.

The problem is, if you have unexamined, deep-seeded doubts about your value as a human being, you’re going to seek out people who reflect those doubts back to you. You won’t do that intentionally, it’s simply that we all want to heal. We’re driven to heal. Trying to convince other people that you’re worthy of love won’t help to heal you, though. Running and chasing and obsessing and selling yourself will make you sick, and by the way, miracles don’t need to sell themselves. If you’ve forgotten how innately special you are, that would be the place to start.

When you make a habit of picking people who are unavailable or emotionally distant for any reason, you set yourself up for heartbreak. There’s only so much your heart can take before it starts to harden. Rejection can be a huge gift when it spares us from a reality which would have been much harder to bear than the “no,” but if you set yourself up for that experience over and over again, it starts to wear at you. You start to doubt yourself, your worth, your unique beauty; you give your power away because you’re defining yourself by someone else’s opinion instead of your own.

This world is challenging enough without feeling that you’re powerless on top of it. You aren’t. You are in charge of your inner world. You get to decide how much importance you give to your own thoughts, to other people’s opinions, to the way you’re going to respond to whatever life puts in your path, even those “no’s.” You can make the world within you a loving place to be, where you honor what’s true for you, and feed your strengths, where there’s kindness and patience and compassion, and the great beauty in that is if you’re able to make your inner world a loving place to be, you’ll naturally spread love wherever you go. Don’t let the “no’s’ stop you or make you bitter. Just keep going.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here.

Longing

It’s difficult to bear sometimes, but life may not unfold the way we envisioned or hoped. Sometimes we have an attachment to how we wanted things to look, feel or be, and sometimes we’re attached to how we want things to be for those we love, too. It’s particularly piercing as a parent to have to accept that you can’t save your children from pain; it’s part of life. Someone at school might say something or do something that crushes your little person and makes her feel small or ashamed. One day, someone will come along and break your daughter’s heart, someone else, your son’s. Life and circumstances will bring their own challenges, it’s the way of things. We all have our heartbreaks and confusion, those things we have to grapple with and accept. It isn’t possible to make it to adulthood without having some areas within us that require examination and healing. It probably wouldn’t be ideal if that happened, anyway because a big part of empathy comes from having been there.

Wanting to manage another person’s path is human and understandable, but it isn’t possible. You can love the people in your life. If you’re a parent, you can teach your children about compassion by having compassion for them, and for all the people you encounter. You can teach them the vulnerability of being human by acknowledging when you’ve made a mistake and apologizing for it, and by teaching them to appreciate each day by doing that yourself. You can show them what it looks like to be strong, and also what it is to have people in your life you can count on and lean on when times are tough. You can teach them how to show up for themselves and for other people. You can show them that they matter, that what they say or feel is important to you, and that they have an impact on the world around them. You can teach them how to listen by listening. You can give them the tools to face life with all its beauty and all its pain. You can show them what it means to love with your whole heart. But you cannot manage their paths or anyone else’s.

People try to do this all over the place, not just with their children, but with romantic partners, siblings, parents and friends. The truth is, we really don’t know what another person needs in order to learn and to grow. You can’t control what another person will do, want, say, feel or need, nor do you want to try. Accept people where they are and as they are, anything else is a set-up for pain. Everyone longs to be seen and understood, so if you claim to love someone, do that for them, see them clearly, and love them, even if they’re struggling, or flailing or walking down a path you don’t understand. I can tell you in some areas in my life, I had to ride the train into the brick wall over and over again, sometimes knowingly and without a helmet to finally understand and accept certain lessons. Do you have any friends in your life whom you look at and think, “How many times do you need to do this same thing you keep doing before the light goes on? Hello?!” Do you realize they probably have, or have had, the same thoughts about you? We learn the way we need to learn, and it isn’t always pretty, and it certainly isn’t always logical.

When things don’t unfold according to the picture in your head of how things should be, see if you can open to a new vision. Let the painting reveal itself to you. Maybe there are going to be colors you never would have imagined, adventures it wouldn’t have occurred to you to dream about. Twists and turns that take you deeper, and make you more vulnerable and compassionate than you ever could have been otherwise. Maybe you’ll discover a depth of love you didn’t know you possessed, an accepting love that opens to a new path that doesn’t look anything like the one you planned, but loves anyway. Because what else can you do, really? You can fight and cling, or you can let go and love. I really recommend the latter.

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

Letting Go

Letting go is rarely easy, whether you’re letting go of a person, a way of being, a plan you’ve been working, or an idea you’ve had about yourself, someone else, or the world at large. As Mumford and Sons so accurately stated, “Where you invest your love, you invest your life.” When we’re invested, opening to the idea that we have to loosen our grip to allow something new to emerge takes a lot of courage.

Not long ago, a guy wrote in with extreme anxiety over telling his parents he wanted to drop out of medical school. He’s in his sixth year, and they both saved every penny for years so he could pursue this dream. His dad had two jobs, and they never went on vacations or added onto their house or treated themselves in any way, but everything in him is pulled to do something else, and the weight of the guilt is crushing him as is the anger over feeling trapped. He wishes he’d realized sooner so he could have spoken up years ago, but it took this long for him to accept it himself. Now he’s afraid to tell them, he can’t sleep, can’t eat much of anything, and feels miserable every day.

I get emails from people who are in relationships that aren’t growing and don’t feel right, but they feel stuck because they’ve been together for so long. I’m not one to suggest bailing on something if there’s any hope to revive it. I’m big on giving it everything you’ve got, especially if children are involved, and even if they aren’t, but if a thing is dead, it’s dead. If you’re living in a house with someone you don’t even know anymore and there isn’t any hope for love or connection, kindness or compassion, then I’m not sure how anyone can flourish, blossom or even feel seen. So many people feel invisible. Discarded.

Sometimes you have an idea about yourself that might be really old. Maybe it wasn’t even your idea in the first place. It could be something you heard and internalized along the way. I get emails from people who were told as children that they were stupid or worthless or not measuring up, and they accepted that as truth; now it’s their own inner dialogue. Letting go of ideas like that is essential if you ever want to be at peace.

Fear of the unknown can be so overwhelming it stops you dead in your tracks. The brain might be stuck on a trajectory (“I’m going to be a doctor”), while the heart is crying out for something else and all the can’ts and shouldn’ts and reasons why it isn’t possible to shift gears come flooding in, and create paralysis.

Any time you’re thinking about a big change, it’s good to move slowly. You know in your heart if something has come to its conclusion. You may fight against what you know for quite awhile, but if you know it, eventually you’re going to have to figure out how to accept what you know. Fighting the truth is absolutely exhausting, and it’s also painful because you’re betraying yourself. You’re trying to function in a vise grip. Just getting out of bed becomes a feat. It’s not sustainable, and if you try for too long to deny your own reality, you’ll make yourself sick. I mean that physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Once you allow your mind to go ahead and imagine a different path you’ll find a deep part of you relaxes. Maybe your shoulders have been up around your ears for months. Maybe you haven’t taken a really deep breath for a long time. Maybe this is the moment.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

To Live in This World

The joy in life lies in connection — in sharing and laughing and loving, in seeing people clearly, as they are and where they are, and loving them with abandon. In being seen, and understood, and forgiven when necessary.

We are taught again and again that everything is in flux. The earth is spinning underneath us but we are spared from feeling that reality; maybe it would be better if we did. If we felt with every rising of the sun and every setting that we were different, just in a day, and that everything was different. Our cars depreciate the moment we drive them off the lot; we know this, we accept is as fact. The trees bloom in front of us every spring and blossom all summer, but every fall the leaves start to fall off and every winter when we look up, if we look up, we see the branches are bare.

People change. People we love without measure grow away from us sometimes, or stop seeing us or loving us, or maybe they never did in the first place. We have another birthday. We sing Auld Lang Syne again and say cheers, and Happy New Year, and this one will be the best one yet. We sign congratulations cards when people graduate, or get married or have babies and we also sign condolence cards when necessary, but we are still shocked when those we love die. As if we didn’t consider the possibility. As if, perhaps, we thought they might be spared. As if we had all the time in the world.

Our houses need work, our hair needs to be cut, our lawn needs to be mowed. It’s a constant lesson — everything is changing, don’t miss this moment, but somehow we don’t want to include ourselves or those we love in the mix. It’s painful to acknowledge, but it can also be so inspiring. If you can’t bear the thought of people you love with your entire heart heading off for parts unknown, I have two things to say to you. Love grants a person the freedom to be fully themselves. If someone you love wants to travel, or to leave you, or to forge a whole new path, your hands are open, your arms are open, and the door is open. Not because it won’t pain you to your very core to watch the back of them disappear, but simply because love is not a prison. And two, if you love the people in your life, give them reasons to stay. I don’t mean in a clingy, don’t leave me and don’t pursue your dreams because I can’t live without you, way. I mean, make sure you aren’t taking your loved ones for granted. People do it all the time. They don’t realize how much they love until the object of that love is done — is packing, and crying, and driving away.

The best thing in life that I know of is love. I don’t just mean romantic love, here. I mean Love. Loving people feels really good. Giving of yourself, and supporting someone else’s growth, or healing, or feeling that life is good, and the world is a beautiful place filled with people who care. Loving people you don’t know, and wanting the best for them is advanced love, but it’s the most natural thing in the world to us if we open to it, if we recognize that we do care. Love people with your whole heart. Your family, your friends, the people you share a bed with and a laugh with, the people who hold you up when things are crumbling. Hold them against your bones and take them in because we all need that, we really do. We want to be seen and understood, we want to be loved. Giving that kind of love expands your heart and quiets your mind and fills you with the feeling of yes.

We all have an expiration date. The more attached you are to people, the more you’ll suffer when they die. Be attached, anyway. Unless you want to move to a cave, you’re going to have people in your life and if you have people in your life, they deserve to be celebrated, as do you. Celebrate them so much that when their time is up, or yours is, you can look at each other and say yes. Yes, we saw each other. We saw it all. The beauty and the pain and the fear and the doubt and the courage. We took our time here and we had out hearts broken so we could let in all the light. That way you’ll be ready to go. Not filled with regret or longing or anger or what if. You will have lived those what ifs. Wishing that for you and sending you so much love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

Does This Society Make My A$$ Look Fat?

Your body is your home, it’s where you’re going to live for your entire life. If you hate your body (and I hear some variation of this from people all the time), there’s a war raging within your home.

There are all kinds of things we could say about the culture that’s breeding this kind of self-hatred. If you want to sell products, you have to make a person feel that they need what you’re selling and a lot of what’s being sold doesn’t even exist. Most of the time what people buy is the promise of how things could be if only (you’d lose ten pounds or live in a bigger house or drink this beer and have these kind of friends and always do and say the cool thing), but there’s no diet that’s going to make you happy. There’s no house, car, or hairspray that’s going to satisfy the beast of your despair if you’re in pain. You cannot buy your way to happiness. You can’t starve your way there, either. And you can do as many reps as you want to, but big biceps aren’t the key to your inner peace.

We are all inundated with images of photo-shopped people on covers of “health” magazines, and as far as I can tell, beauty magazines are designed to make women feel ugly. Like they’re not nearly enough. Men aren’t let off the hook, either. There are pills and creams for baldness and erectile dysfunction, and if the side effects happen to be death, at least you’ll look good in the coffin, although the casket might have to be closed if that blue pill works too well. I don’t buy those magazines, and I don’t watch television, but I drive around and see billboards all over the place. It’s like a constant mantra of “You suck!” and unless you do a lot of work on it, it’s very likely you’re going to internalize those messages. Did you know that Brown University conducted a study and found that 74.4% of normal-weight women said they thought about their weight or appearance “all the time” or “frequently”? And 46% of normal-weight men reported the same. When I give the cue in yoga class, “Your hands are shoulders-distance apart,” I notice almost all the men in my classes have their hands too close together because we’ve got all the men convinced they’re smaller than they are and when I say, “Separate your feet hip-distance apart,” almost all the women take their feet close to the edges of their mats. We’ve got all the women convinced they’re bigger than they are. What is more disempowering to people than the feeling that we all just can’t get it right? Can’t measure up? What drives the desire to distract people so they’re focused on how they look instead of what’s happening in the world?

The language we commonly use when talking about our bodies is aggressive, as in “battle of the bulge,” and “no pain, no gain.” I see people on their mats forcing themselves into poses their bodies aren’t ready to do because it’s so second-nature to think of the body as something we own that needs to bend to our will. I get it, because I struggled for years with body-image issues. I grew up taking ballet and learned early, the thinner the better. In fact, why eat at all? I think I started restricting calories when I was thirteen. I stopped dancing when I was sixteen, but my relationship with my body didn’t get any better. I’d over-exercise and under-eat, and still never be happy, never feel satisfied. Of course there are personality traits that lend themselves to this kind of thinking as well. If I can’t control what’s happening in my life, at least I can control what I put in my body. And so it goes.

The amount of time and energy I spent worrying about my appearance blows my mind when I think about it now. What a waste, and think of all the places that energy could have gone. It truly didn’t change until I started doing yoga. It wasn’t instantaneous, but after I’d been practicing consistently for awhile, I started to tune into my body in a different way. I’d grown up drinking diet soda and eating processed food, with no real awareness that your body doesn’t function well if you feed it a steady diet of chemicals. If something has seventeen syllables, your body really doesn’t know what to do with it. Yoga woke me up and stopped me in my tracks and made me think about things I’d never considered before, like what made me happy. What lit me up. It made me wonder what I was doing here, and what I was offering up to the world around me. Because honestly, when I started doing yoga I had blinders on. I lived in the small world of what’s happening for me? What’s not happening for me? Why isn’t it happening, and what can I do to make it happen faster? And if I wasn’t in that frame of mind, I was depressed and not getting much of anything done at all except dating older men and feeling any sense of myself moving further and further away from me.

Yoga brought me back to myself, in a way I hadn’t been since…I don’t know. I started to have a visceral experience of feeling good in my own skin, of listening and responding with the intent to heal. Of breathing in and breathing out. Little by little I started to know myself. In some ways it was amazing and in others, it was incredibly painful because not everything was pretty and light. When you’ve been hating your body for years, or exerting control over it like it’s something separate from you that needs to be feared lest it betray you, you’re also living in a house of shame.

Your body is an incredible gift. Your beating heart and your legs that get you from point A to point B (if you’re lucky to have two working legs). Your arms that can reach for people and hug them. Your smile, the light in your eyes. It’s all pretty amazing, but you rarely hear anyone say, “I love my body. My body is such a gift.” As I continued practicing, I discovered that when I fed my body well, it performed better and I felt clear in my thinking and full of energy. This was like a revelation to me. I started to educate myself about organic food. Eventually I went the vegan route. I’m not trying to convince you of a thing. What you put in your body is one of the most personal things in the world, and it’s up to you to figure out what feels right, but there’s no way to separate the way you feel about your body from the way you’re feeding it and treating it, or the way you feel about the planet. It’s all connected.

Sometimes people tell me they love food too much to make big changes. I love food. I have a completely different relationship to my body than I did twenty years ago when I started practicing. I’ve also grown two people in my body since then, and if that doesn’t make you realize your body is miraculous, nothing will. If you start to feed a loving voice, if you start to care about yourself, you’re going to want to take care of yourself in a different way, and I can tell you it feels very good. Throw out your scale and get off your diet if you need to. Unroll a yoga mat and get to know your body. Think before you eat. Close your eyes and see if you can really tune into what your body wants. It isn’t diet soda, I can promise you that. This culture of less-than will rob you of the chance to be at peace with yourself if you let it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here.

Follow Your Yes

Life brings everything to us; some of it is incredibly beautiful, and some of it is brutally painful. It’s not a level playing field. Some people will get less pain and more beauty, some people will experience the kind of grief that would split your heart wide open, and of course there’s always the way we respond to the everything life brings. People are complex and a mystery even to themselves at times. The path unfolds, and if you’re like most people at some point or another, you’ll look around and wonder how your life could look the way it does, either because the fullness of it takes your breath away, or because you’re in absolute despair.

If you haven’t had a serious face-off with your dragons, chances are you will come to a place and look around and think, “How did I land myself here, in this insane situation?” You may have chosen the exact thing you hoped to avoid. That happens more frequently than you might think because whatever your truth is, it wants out. It wants to be seen, acknowledged and dealt with, and yet we seek homeostasis. Dramatic change scares us, so it’s not uncommon to hunt down the familiar, even when it feels awful. There may be other people on the path with you who have been and will be impacted by the choices you make and life can feel very complicated. Every choice leads to a new set of circumstances. We keep evolving, or we try to keep ourselves stuck. We grip and we shut our eyes and our minds against the reality that everything is in a constant state of flux. Choices we made five years ago really might not make sense anymore.

In general, the greatest amount of pain and confusion springs up around intimate relationships especially if you don’t know yourself well. If you have no idea what lights you up, or brings you peace or makes you happy, if you aren’t well-acquainted with your tendencies and stories and tender spots where your history may have left a scar or three, then you’re bound to flail about in the darkness for awhile. Change happens gradually. It begins in the mind. Everything in us may have been rejecting the idea that we could move in a different direction, and then one day the mind opens. Just a little. Just enough to allow the thought of something else. The idea of another kind of life that feels less painful. Even good, maybe. Sometimes we tell ourselves we can’t, that there isn’t any way, that we’re stuck. But if your light is being crushed, you have to open the window enough to glimpse a new path, or you’re going to die. Not literally, but your spirit, that essential part of you that holds your gifts. If you allow that light to go out, life will become very dark and you won’t be able to nurture yourself or anyone else.

You know if you’re in a situation that needs to come to an end, whether it’s a relationship, a job, or a way of being. You don’t need anyone to tell you what to do, but you might want to find yourself someone who can help remind you of your own power, because if you’re participating in the crushing of your own light, you’re going to feel sick in your soul. Hopeless and listless and joyless. That’s no way to live, it’s not sustainable. If you’re stuck in that state close your eyes so you can envision your life in any kind of way that gives you a glimmer of hope and start feeding that glimmer. Start moving toward that light. You only need a tiny bit to find your way at first, because your heart already knows. It will start beating a little harder for you, giving you the power to keep heading toward love. If you listen closely, you might hear your heart. It will be saying, “Yes.” Wishing you the strength to follow your yes,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful you can find my books here and my yoga courses and classes here.

Reality

Your life is not what happens to you, your life is what you do in the face of what happens to you. You cannot control what life is going to put on the path in front of you, what other people are going to do, say, want, or need. You can only do your best to walk with some grace and steadiness, guided by an inner resounding, undeniable yes; that’s what you get to work with. If you’re like most humans, you’ll spend a decent amount of time walking in circles trying to find that yes, or sitting on the side of the road not doing much of anything. You may fall into a ditch and stay there for awhile, feeling alone or hopeless, wondering what you’re doing here on this planet. You might point fingers, or walk backwards on your path trying to travel into your past and rewrite it, but if you do that you’ll find the scenery has changed, you have changed, and the people with whom you’re so furious don’t exist any longer, even if they’re still alive. You may see the road ahead of you and say no f&cking way, that path looks nothing like the one I asked for. Your path will cross a million other paths. You’ll find some people you want to travel with, some of whom you’ll know for your whole life, even when your paths take you in completely different directions.

Once in awhile, someone you’ve been traveling with will throw you for a loop, and you may find yourself in a Falling Rocks Zone getting bashed over the head. Such is life. You might bleed a little, and your heart might break a little or a lot. Sometimes people do completely inexplicable things, even they don’t fully understand. You might say, “Why me?” but a better question is, “Why not me?” because we are all going to suffer to some degree, it’s part of the human condition. Some people will suffer more than others, getting a lesson in grief that would just tear your heart out and make you shake your fists at the sky, or rake your nails through the dirt with the taste of despair in your mouth.

If people leave you or lie to you, or if someone you love is taken from you too soon, you’re going to suffer, but you’re also going to grow. You might say, “I’d rather not grow, thanks very much. I’ll take the door with no growth, and a situation that plays out the way I’d like it to, instead.” We don’t get to choose, though. You get what you get, and your only true power lies in what you do with what you get. How you decide to face it. When painful things happen in your life, there are two ways to go; you can let them harden you, or you can let them soften you and open you. When your heart breaks, it opens if you let it. Or it closes if you insist. Opening feels so much better. If you’ve lost in that way that changes everything, eventually you might comfort others in the same position. If you don’t, who will? Who else could ever understand?

When people make an utter mess of things, be enraged if you need to, scream and cry and go punch a bag for awhile if it helps you. Get it out of your body. Write it down, so it’s out of your head and onto a piece of paper. Get yourself some support. Allow yourself to feel whatever you need to feel, but at a certain point, pick yourself up, dry yourself off, and keep walking. You really don’t know what’s coming next. You have your experiences in this life, and they can inform and shape the kind of person you are, but let them shape you in a way that serves you. Let your wounds open you so that you can experience deep pain, but also deep love. You want to be ready to receive that. Embrace the vulnerability of this thing because there’s no point in denying it, and allow yourself to come back to curiosity and love. I truly believe that’s the natural state of human beings. People will hurt you sometimes. Most of them won’t mean to. Life will bring pain as well. I highly doubt it’s personal.

Having said that, there’s so much beauty in this world. So much light and kindness and caring and joy and laughter. True connection. It’s available all the time if you open to it. If you don’t believe me, go and be kind to a stranger today. Hold a door open, or ask someone how they are on an elevator, but ask like you care, like you really want to know. Better yet, just want to know. Put a bunch of moments like that in a row as often as you can, on as many days as you can. Create joy as much as you’re able. You can do that. Not everyone will be able to receive it, but give love anyway, and watch how it changes the way you feel and move through the day, because you have to face reality as it is. It may not, and probably will not, always be as you’d like it to be, but it can still be beautiful. Look for the moments.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

The Power to Pause

It’s not easy to drop your feelings, opinions and ideas so you can really hear what another person has to say, where they may be coming from, or how they’re seeing and experiencing things. This is never more true than in the context of an argument. When we feel attacked, it’s perfectly natural to go into defense mode, but most of the time, no one is attacking us and deep listening can’t happen if you’re in “fight or flight” mode. People may see things differently, but if you’re in a close relationship with someone, it’s unlikely they want to go for your jugular (and if they do, you’re probably with someone who needs help figuring out how to manage their anger).

We all want to be known, seen and understood. It’s beautiful when you allow yourself to open to another person, but the more you do that, the more you have to be willing to be vulnerable and that requires trust. When you have the feeling that someone is really seeing you, and suddenly that same person seems to be misunderstanding you, it can feel like a betrayal. Sometimes we have embarrassment or unease because some of our flaws slipped out and now this person who had this image of us may be seeing something we don’t want them to see, or something we’d rather not see ourselves. There are all kinds of reasons a person gets defensive, or shuts down, or runs for the door. Often it feels safer to dig our heels in and defend our position, to “win” the fight. If you’re trying to get close to someone, though, and if you want to be seen, it’s not a fight and this isn’t your opponent. A person is either going to love and accept you with all your flaws and absurdity, or they aren’t. You can only be known if you allow yourself to be known. Most people are not going to be able to read your mind and if you’re only willing to show the shiny, status update, perfect picture version of yourself, that instagram glow, the 140-character gem that you thought of while walking your dog, then you’ll never really be seen because we’re all complex and we all make mistakes, and we all have choices we wish we could make over again and differently.

People dig their heels in when they’re attempting to hide or to hold on. Or the level of reactivity is high. That’s one of the main things a consistent yoga practice addresses and encourages — the ability to sit with intense sensation, calmly. A burning feeling in your quadriceps is not all that different than a burning feeling in your heart, like rage. It’s a temporary sensation, and if you can open to it and examine it, it will open you and strengthen you, and teach you something about yourself. If you fly off the handle every time you feel something intense, you deny yourself those opportunities to become more aware, more accountable, and more able to trust yourself.

Of course there are legitimate times when you’ll disagree with someone, or see things in a completely different way, but if you really want to know the people in your life, it’s so useful if you can learn to listen deeply. Open to it even if it’s something you don’t want to hear or accept. Maybe this person is attempting to show you something essential about who they are, or where they are on their path. Maybe you’re going to discover a new way of thinking about something. It’s possible you’re going to realize there’s some fundamental philosophical difference that you’re not going to be able to get past, but there’s no point in denying someone else’s reality, even if you disagree with it. You might as well open your heart and your mind to their point of view. Maybe you’ll go back to your own, and maybe something will shift for you, but real listening is not the same as waiting for your turn to speak and being right is not nearly as satisfying as being seen.

Wishing you love, and the power to pause, breathe, and listen,

Ally Hamilton

Do You Need a New Rx?

Everything you perceive is being processed through your particular lenses. There’s no other way for you to receive data from outside yourself, except to filter it through your own eyes, ears, heart and mind. Sometimes our receptors have gotten really clogged. Emotionally, our ability to discern what’s real is determined by how much we’ve been hurt, and to what degree we’ve been able to work with our pain, process it, integrate it and move forward with the ability to trust again and open to joy. Your pain and your willingness to examine and understand it are your tickets to an empowered and authentic life, which to me includes an ability to face reality as it is.

Sometimes you have a history with someone, and there’s so much pain or disappointment around what’s happened, it clouds your ability to see the person clearly, even years later. We are all in process all the time, it never ends. The way you were three years ago is not the way you are today. There’s been growth, change and movement. And so it is with everyone else. People make mistakes, and no one is operating from her or his highest self in every moment. We’ve all made choices we’d love to go back and redo. Sometimes people have so much frustration and resentment between them, even something small has the potential to create a huge reaction, as if every single affront from the beginning of time is also in the mix. And maybe they just forgot to pick up their socks, but suddenly an apocalypse is happening in the living room.

Sometimes the inability to see a person clearly happens at the beginning. People write to me with their lists of qualities they’d like in a partner. I think it’s good to know what you’re looking for as far as your “non-negotiables” which might include things like loyalty or a good sense of humor, but I’m talking about lists that include eye color and hair color and six-pack abs and an interest in croquet and also salsa dancing. Then they meet a person with the “right” color eyes, and start projecting the entire list onto the unsuspecting person who maybe doesn’t like croquet. And they miss the chance to get to know someone as they are and then see if it’s a good fit. This can come out of a deep desire for intimacy and connection, which is totally understandable, but can create a tendency to sweep things under the rug. Hormones can also fog your lenses right up.

It’s not just romantically, either. Familial relationships are a classic context for this stuff. You may be a full-grown adult who functions well in the world, but find when you go back to your parents’ place it’s as if you regress to the you you were when you were fifteen. Or that your parents still treat you like that kid who should get a smaller portion at dinner. Siblings often interact the way they did growing up, either supporting each other, or blasting each other, or some combination of both.

If you’re feeling incredibly lonely, that can also gum up your receptors. Maybe you think every person who says hi to you might really want to sleep with you. Or you think everyone hates you. There are all kinds of ways we mis-perceive reality, and it’s important to recognize that, or at least factor it into your mix. To ask yourself when you’re feeling heated over something, or defeated, or confused or angry or rejected or mistreated, if there’s any possibility you’re not seeing things clearly. If maybe you have some part in what’s happening, because you do. It can’t be any other way. You have your experiences and your outlook, and it’s essential to understand how those things are part of the equation as you filter the data that’s coming at you, or not. If you think you suck or people suck, your lens is distorted. If you think another person is only ever going to be the way they were with you at some given point in time, your lens is also in need of a wiping. You also might want to throw into the equation your dynamic with someone. Sometimes two people bring out the worst in each other, or push buttons or bring up past pain unintentionally. Just because your relationship didn’t work doesn’t mean other relationships will face the same destiny for you, or for them. You can’t “peg’ people. I know we love to do that, but people are in flux just like everything else is in flux and it feels awful to be pegged, right? To be unforgiven, to have every mistake you’ve ever made reflected back at you every time you talk to someone with whom you were once so close.

There are many ways to wipe your lenses clean or get a new Rx if you need one. If you practice all eight limbs of yoga (the physical part is only one eighth of the equation), you’ll be well on your way. Finding the tools that work for you for your own healing and your own willingness to examine and work with your pain are also ways you upgrade your prescription. You really do want to get on that if you find yourself living in the past, or still enraged about things that happened years ago. If that’s happening for you, then you are actively feeding your rage and dragging your past into your present. You’ll make yourself sick, you’ll miss opportunities for joy and something new, and you will alienate everyone around you. Life is too short for that.

I won’t lie to you. The world is full of pain sometimes, but it’s also full of the kind of beauty that can take your breath away if you let it. That can knock you over with gratitude and joy. I used to think the thing we all wanted was to be happy, but really, I think the thing is to be awake. To be hungry for the truth, whatever it may be, and even if it’s painful. When I say “the truth”, I’m not suggesting there’s one truth. I’m saying your truth, what’s true for you personally. Being able to discern what you need to be at peace. What’s yours and what belongs to someone else when interactions go awry. What’s real for other people. Just being able to see clearly, and accept reality as it is. It’s not easy. Sometimes we want to fight it because things aren’t unfolding the way we want them to, but it’s not up to us. We don’t get to choose everything that comes at us. We don’t get to manage what other people do or want or say or need. We just get to manage ourselves, as best we can, and hopefully with a lot of love and compassion. There’s a lot of power and a lot of peace in that. Wishing you love, and sending you a little glass cleaner if you need it. We all need it sometimes.

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

Believe in Yourself

I was talking to a friend of mine I’ve known since we were kids. I’ve known him so long, I can vaguely recollect his dad, although I haven’t seen him since I was five and neither has my friend. I remember he was tall (although everyone is tall when you’re five), and he had a beard, and in my mind he’s wearing a plaid flannel shirt. I remember he came to our Kindergarten class once and helped us paint a huge mural on the wall and that he encouraged everyone to get messy, which I thought was very unusual and very cool. And then he was gone. I don’t know what happened, and neither does my friend (I’ll call him John), because John’s mom doesn’t talk about it much. She just says his dad wasn’t able to love well at the time. That he was one of “those tortured artists” and that he thought he was doing them both a favor by leaving. She’s alluded to drug use, and she’s also encouraged John to reach out to his father if he wants to. His dad moved to Mexico, and eventually he had two more kids with someone else, and as far as John knows he’s been a good dad to those kids. He has never pursued a relationship with John, never sent birthday cards or called to check in, he’s never contacted him in any way. So you can imagine John has lots of feelings about this.

Thankfully, John’s mother is a very loving, warm, affectionate person, and so is John. But there’s a pain in his heart and a sadness that creeps into his eyes from time to time that you can spot if you know him well and are looking carefully enough. He’s had a history of longterm, monogamous relationships, but inevitably they end because John is afraid to commit for the long haul. Or maybe he’s afraid he’ll commit, and one day he’ll wake up and get on a plane, and never look back. Or she will. So he’ll only go so deep with people, only let them in so much. Not enough to devastate him if they leave. Not enough to know him completely. He told me he can remember his dad calling him buddy and playing catch with him and carrying him on his shoulders to get ice cream. He pores over pictures from when he was a kid and his family was together. But he won’t reach out to his father, because he’s also enraged. He’s enraged because he’s been living with this idea that there’s something unlovable about him at his core. Something that makes it easy to leave him even though his mother has always been there, and his step-dad has been in his life from the time he was eight years old.

Our first experience of love comes from our parents. As William Makepeace Thackery says, “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.” And so is Dad. Let’s not get caught up in language and divisiveness here. I don’t care if you replace the word God with the word Love if you want to. Regardless, this is how we come to know and understand the world, and some things are part of our nature, the way we arrive here, the way we’re wired. If you don’t believe that, go hang out in the maternity ward of your nearest hospital. (I mean, don’t do that because it’s not going to be received well if you don’t have a reason to be there, but take my word for it if you need to, not all infants are the same.) Our nature will affect the way we respond to our experiences, but the way we’re nurtured is at least equally as important.

People tend to go two ways. They either repeat what they were taught, or they go in the opposite direction. If you were taught that you’re unlovable, that’s a lie, and anything you’ve learned can be unlearned. I don’t know what John’s father was taught about love. I don’t know anything about his childhood, his experiences as he grew up, the way he was treated by the people in his life. Maybe his dad or mom left him. I don’t know anything about his nature, except that hazy recollection I have of him flinging paint at the wall and throwing his head back to laugh when we all looked shocked that we were allowed to do that, too. I don’t know what drives a person to walk away from their child and never reach out, but I can recognize the perpetuation of pain, and the potential for healing. I’m not suggesting if John got on a plane for Mexico and talked to his dad everything would be rosy and they could hug and laugh and John could come home and marry the woman he loves and live happily ever after. This isn’t a movie. I know lots of people who were left by their parents and many of them never have a relationship again. Some people are wired in such a way that they can integrate that pain and move on and be at peace, anyway. They can forge a new path, and unlearn those untruths, and move in the direction of love, and give love to their children, and maybe even eventually find compassion for their own flawed parents.

If you think you aren’t flawed, have a kid, because they will hold up the clearest and most honest mirror for you. Some people run from what they see, like John’s dad. Other people get to work. Maybe John’s dad couldn’t do it then. Not because John wasn’t worth it, but simply because he didn’t have the tools yet, hadn’t healed himself enough at the time. Hadn’t grown up enough to be responsible for someone else’s heart. Maybe he was incredibly selfish at the time. It’s possible and likely that years later when he had his other kids, he was better prepared. We’re all in a state of flux all the time. Why he never tried to make things right with John is beyond me and strikes me as very sad for both of them. Maybe he’s afraid John doesn’t want to hear from him. Maybe he thinks John’s step-dad replaced him and John is fine. People screw up in all kinds of ways, they project, make assumptions, let fear rule them, live in avoidance or denial, and spill their pain all over the paths of anyone close to them. I don’t believe in “bad people,” I believe some people have been through some horrendous things and don’t heal well. They walk around angry or worse. Lonely, isolated, confused, unable to empathize. Some people have personality disorders. Different people respond to trauma differently. Some people are nurtured so well they can overcome, and some people are not nurtured well, but have incredible resilience.

What I know for sure is that there’s always the possibility to grow beauty from our pain. It’s not a level playing field, and some people will have to work harder to get there than others. You have your nature, and you have the way you were nurtured, and you don’t have to be ruled by either of those things. If you’re anxious by nature, there are so many ways you can work with your nervous system, so many healing modalities available to you. If you were taught that life is cruel and people leave or abuse you, that you can’t trust anyone and the world is an unsafe and dark place, that you aren’t worthy of love or happiness, you can unlearn all of that. You can work with with you’ve got, from where you are, and just go slowly and find a new way. Discover a new world that’s right under the surface of the world you’ve been living in. Or right over it. I know that might sound unreal if you’re in a dark place and if you’ve never known the world to be anything but disappointing, but I can assure you the world looks completely different when you’re coming from love. You might need some help to pull the curtain back. Maybe it’s not a curtain for you, maybe you’ve erected some thick walls. But you can knock them down and let the light in. You can surprise yourself, and you can allow yourself to be surprised. It takes courage, but it’s doable. Anything you’ve built to protect yourself from pain has also blocked you from receiving love. So you’re going to have to un-build that stuff. Grab your jackhammer if you need to, and let’s get working.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Sometimes Acceptance is All the Closure You’re Going to Get

No one ever asks life to knock them down. You’re not going to hear anyone say, “Things are pretty good. I hope life throws a huge monkey wrench into my world. Maybe my husband will suddenly announce he has a girlfriend and leave! Or I’ll lose my job. Or something I never could have seen coming will bring me to my knees and break my heart wide open.” We don’t ask for these things, but sometimes these are the kind of challenges we have to face. Or worse.

Not everything in life is positive, and there are some lessons no one will ever appreciate. You might grow, strengthen or reach new levels of compassion or insight, but there are some heartbreaks that are so knifing, no one would ever say, “Thank you for this.” As a result, you’ll never hear me say, “Everything happens for a reason.” I used to say things along those lines, and maybe everything does, or maybe it’s all random, but I think spiritual sound-bytes like that are an attempt to wrap life up into a neat little package, and I think they’re incredibly alienating to people who are devastated. When you cannot recognize your life, when everything falls apart and you have nothing but the shards of glass that used to be your home in a pile around you, and old photographs and a sweater that still smells like what was, you really don’t want to hear it’s happened for some reason that will make sense to you some day. Some things will never, ever make sense, and some things will never be okay. Recognizing that is the only way you can conceive of moving forward. Sometimes acceptance is all the closure you’re going to get.

When you find yourself in a state like this, move slowly and have compassion for yourself. If you know someone who’s been knocked down, show up and make them dinner, but don’t tell them how to grieve or that it’s time to snap out of it. People mourn in their own way, whether it’s over the loss of a person, a relationship, a job or a way of being. There’s a huge difference between being there for someone and enabling self-destruction, so please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m simply saying when a person is trying to put the pieces of their life back together, they need love, not a whip. Because although no one would ask for everything to fall apart around them, when that happens there is the potential for something strong, beautiful and powerful to emerge. A new way of being, of seeing, of understanding. It takes time to birth those things, and it’s a very painful process, but when I look back at the most devastating things that have happened in my own life, I can recognize that I grew from them. That I would not be where I am now if I had not been where I was then.

There are a couple of experiences I’d give back gladly. I’d say, “No thank you, not this. Not this.” But I can see how those moments opened me, and turned me into the kind of person who cares deeply when a stranger sends a message about a loss. A broken relationship. A dark time. And I can appreciate that. I can be grateful for that. Hopefully we can all care more about each other without having to personally suffer too much. Maybe I needed those times to open me. I wouldn’t want to be closed. I say this to you in case you’re going through one of those devastating times. I’d never ask you to be grateful, but I would say you have the choice to allow it to soften you and open you, or to close you and harden you. Opening feels a lot better.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here.

You Deserve a Fence-Jumper

Are you in, “The Friendship Zone”?? My friend Sue in NYC has been spending time with someone she really likes, but doesn’t want to ask him if he’s romantically interested in her because she isn’t ready to receive the information if he isn’t. She’s hoping if they spend enough time together, he’ll see how incredible she is (she is), and fall in love with her. Last week I got an email from a man who has a history of being the guy friend. For the third or fourth time in the last year, he’s become close to a woman he finds attractive, but somehow lands himself in the “friend” zone instead of the end zone. He told me he thinks women feel safe with him because he does his best to be a “stand-up guy,” but they shouldn’t because apparently he’s horny as hell. Totally joking, but not really. The thing is, he doesn’t want to be friends. He doesn’t want to hang out and be a placeholder until some other guy comes along that his “lady-friend” wants to date. He wants to be that guy. To compound his frustration, these women are happy to have him buy dinner when they go out on a Friday or Saturday night, or help them move heavy furniture, but that’s as far as it goes. They flirt and text frequently, sometimes late at night, but there’s not a lot of reciprocity even as far as the friendship goes. It doesn’t sound like they’d help him paint his living room if he asked. The day he wrote, he was set off by the fact that his latest woman friend said, “Thanks, buddy!” and punched him lightly in the arm when he bought her a movie ticket. He felt it added insult to injury. Also worth noting, he’s not rolling in dough right now.

I’m going to say a lot of things that may be painful to read if you are in the friend zone. First of all, if you’ve been hanging out with someone for awhile and you’re not sure how they feel, they probably aren’t, either, or it’s a straight-up “no.” If someone is interested, it’s not going to be a mystery and if someone isn’t sure, you really want to move on. I recognize sometimes people play games, or they don’t really know what they want, or they’re coming off another relationship. Other times a person is simply looking for friendship and truly doesn’t realize you may feel differently or struggles with how to let you know it’s a no. It’s never fun to be in that position, either. My guess is the, “Thanks, buddy!” was an attempt to set clear boundaries, but then, buy your own movie ticket! As painful as it can be, sometimes the kindest thing you can do is look someone in the eye and say, “I think you’re great and I’d love to be your friend, but I’m not feeling the romantic thing. Are you cool with that?” It’s clear to most people when someone is interested. If you know someone likes you, but you don’t like them “that way”, then accepting gifts in the form of dinners, favors, or using them as a “crutch” until you find someone you’d like to date is not the most energetically “clean” way to be moving through life. People aren’t crutches, and no one deserves to be used.

Of course we have to address self-esteem here. If this is a pattern, something is up. Buying dinners and movie tickets for people when you can’t afford to do that, or giving tons of your time and energy to a person who doesn’t feel about you the way you’d like them to isn’t a great way to go, either, especially if you’re trying to change their mind. It’s a form of manipulation. You’re the architect of your own suffering when you willingly participate in an interaction like that. Trying to “sell” someone on how great you are is damaging to your heart and your own well-being. I don’t mean that just in terms of buying things for people, but also simply spending time with someone without any indication from them that they’re interested in a relationship, and trying to show them how amazing you are. You are truly better off alone, taking the time to do some healing. If you’re loving yourself, you’ll never be selling yourself. You are unique and precious, and you have something to offer that no one else can. You don’t need or want to be selling that. Just be that. Believe me, I know it’s hard, but try to trust and be patient. When it’s right, it won’t be a struggle.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

What’s Up, Monkey?

Sometimes life can be brutally painful. We lose someone we love beyond our ability to put it in words, way too soon. Loss like that is violent and shocking, even if it happens slowly. Or we have our hearts broken in a relationship, sometimes over and over again by the same person. If betrayal is in the mix, it’s even more painful. Or we lose a job we really loved or wanted. Or we simply can’t seem to get any traction going in any direction in life, with relationships or work, or even with how to be in this world. Maybe there’s an abusive background. A family of origin with addiction issues. A history of broken promises, emotional or physical violence. You get the picture.

Whatever you’re coming out of, you have a choice. You have the choice to ask for help if you need it. Healing is often confrontational and painful and lonely and confusing, and having someone there to hold your hand or offer an ear or a shoulder can really make all the difference. Someone who will kindly hold up a mirror for you, and make sure you’re examining your inner landscape clearly and thoroughly, because you can’t let go of those things that are blocking your ability to give and receive love without understanding them first and without allowing yourself to mourn and to grieve for what was, or what could have been. Your understanding is your path to liberation, your willingness to open to all of those emotions we’re taught to push down is the key. You actually want to pry the lid off and invite them all to come flooding in so you can swim in that stuff for awhile, and scream your heart out if you need to, and shed your tears, and exhaust yourself until there’s no denial and no fighting of reality left in you. There’s just facing it, as it is, and as it was, so you can open to how it could be. Your awareness and acceptance and compassion for yourself clear the path toward a new way of being.

Starting over is also lonely work. The old way doesn’t work, and the new way hasn’t become clear yet. Some of your closest family members and oldest friends may not like your new adventure. They may feel threatened and angry, like you’re rejecting them in an effort to take care of yourself, which really has to come first if you plan on being happy in this life. Socrates has a beautiful quote, “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

Even if you’ve been hurt and disappointed, neglected or abused, abandoned or ignored, you have the choice to live in fear, hardened and bitter and full of rage and blame, or to do the brave thing. To let go of the old handlebar you’ve been hanging off for far too long. The one that burns your hands with its heat and its pain and its why and its unfairness, and to reach out for love. To make yourself vulnerable in that space between the one and the other. To use all the strength and hope and courage you’ve got to propel yourself forward and reach out with your open hand and your open heart for that bar in front of you that’s full of promise and something new. Something different. To open to the possibility that you might do all that and slip right off the bar and land on your face and have to get back up again and start over. But that if you keep reaching and you keep trying, eventually the way will become clear. And then my dear monkey, the bars become rather fun.

Wishing you the courage to let go and reach out, and sending love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here.

It’s the Story, Not the Ending

Do you know any octogenarians? One of my closest friends is 80, he’s been a private client for eleven years. If you spoke with him you would not feel like he’s in the midst of his “ending” and he’d tell you off if you suggested such a thing. Most days when I leave he says, “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” mostly because he knows I’m going to shake my head and laugh and also because, much to his chagrin, he knows I don’t believe in bastards. I just think some people are having a really tough time with life. He can’t stand the expressions, “No worries,” or “It’s all good,” either. He’s funny and brilliant and one of the most alive people I know. He used to sing totally off-color Irish lullabies to my kids when they were babies. As they’ve gotten older, he sings the songs with the real words not the “sailor” versions. But anyway, I used to think like that. That at eighty, I’d have it all figured out. My story would be long done by then, I’d just be living it out. Now I realize there is no ending, happy or otherwise, not until your final exhale. Until then, it’s all the story. Parts of the story are going to be stunningly painful. Other parts are going to be so amazing they’ll expand your heart and you’ll feel like it’s going to burst right out of your body and there’ll be every shade of everything else in between. The real question isn’t whether you’re going to find that happy ending. The actual question is whether you’re going to be happy as you move through the unfolding story of your life, day to day.

I grew up on the same fairy-tales you did and I’ve seen the same romantic comedies. For a good long while, I bought into all that. I thought if I was somehow perfect and I did everything the way I was supposed to, straight A’s, thin enough, pretty enough, someone would come along and “save me” and I’d live happily ever after. Or something like that. And then this way older man came along, and that wasn’t a happy ending. And the Mirror Guy showed up and that wasn’t happy, either. I’d graduated from a great school and starved myself through twelve years of ballet and there I was with my diploma and my thinness and these relationships that broke my heart and there didn’t seem to be potential for that happy ending on the horizon. I started to get an inkling that it isn’t on the horizon, it isn’t going to happen one day in the future when things calm down or you meet someone or you make X amount of dollars, but I didn’t know that then, not for sure. I’d see families walking down the street and wonder, “How did they do that?” You know, because I was about twenty when I thought this way and had no actual idea of what it would take to make a relationship work. Or a life. I think lots of people reach adulthood without a clue. Without knowing themselves.

It wasn’t until I found yoga and seated meditation that I started to understand happiness was an inner journey and a process of discovery. A willingness to open to reality as it is and to do the work to heal what needs to be healed. To let go of the grip and the false notion of control. If I do everything “right” then I’ll be happy. If I’m a good person things will go my way. The “right” we’re sold is a big fat lie. The real right is what’s right for you. What’s true for you, and no prince or princess is going to show up and tell you. There isn’t going to be this magical kiss on the lips that makes your life fall into place. There isn’t going to be a big enough house or fast enough car. There isn’t going to be a job that solves it, although it goes a long way when you find something to do with your time and your energy that’s fulfilling to you. There’s just you. Looking at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day as you brush your teeth. You either look at yourself with kindness or contempt. The fairy-tales should really be about that. The fire-breathing dragons are inside us and they have nasty little voices that say, “Not good enough.” Those are the ones you face, and you slay them. You take what is real and true for you and you split them down the middle with it. Eventually they leave you alone, or you’re just too full of love to house them anymore or they’re mostly sleeping, but when they wake up once in awhile you don’t have to waste a lot of energy slaying them again, you just give them a look and they cower and go back to sleep because they don’t own you anymore. Something like that. The most essential part of your story is going to happen inside yourself and then there will be external factors and the way you respond to them. Those external factors play a significant role in your story as well, because it’s not a level playing field and sometimes the most devastating things happen to the most incredibly loving people.

I see so many people still searching for that brass ring or that “right” person to complete them. I have an inbox stuffed with emails from people trying to figure out what’s wrong with them, what they’re doing or not doing that’s causing the unhappy result they’re getting with their lives. Why they aren’t getting the breaks even though they’re doing everything “right”. This happens with people on the spiritual path, too. I’m doing my yoga. It’s been ten years. When am I going to be happy? Well, how are you doing your yoga? Are you breathing and focusing and practicing with compassion for yourself? Are you feeding a loving, kind voice? Are you listening deeply and responding honestly? Are you curious about your experience or attached to the outcome? Are you tuning in or zoning out? Because showing up on your mat consistently is great, but it’s not the whole story. Some people show up six days a week, but beat the crap out of themselves or get attached to the poses, or feel good on days when they’re full of energy and feeling open, and bad on days when it’s a struggle.

Happiness is not a destination, it’s a process. It’s an ever-unfolding choice you make. It’s equanimity in the face of life’s ups and downs. A knowingness that this is how it is now, not how it’s always going to be because everything is always in a state of flux. Sometimes you allow yourself to just be heartbroken, to suffer and grieve or to be enraged, and shake your fists at the sky, or dig your hands into the dirt of why. You embrace it all, and as much as possible, you open to the wonder of it all. There’s beauty in everything, even the most devastating losses. The fact that you’ve ever loved so much to grieve so deeply has some beauty in it. Loneliness has some beauty in it; the fact that your tender heart longs to be seen and understood is beautiful. It’s real. Love requires your bravery and your vulnerability and that’s gorgeous. The pain opens us. Generally the deepest growth springs out of the sharpest pain, and wisdom is gained through suffering. Is it human to sometimes wish for less pain, less growth, less suffering and less wisdom? Of course, but we don’t get to choose what happens, we only get to choose how we respond. The more you’re able to surrender to what is and honor the truth in your heart, the more you’ll be able to relax into the unknown of the thing and there’s a lot of peace in that. Wishing you a truthful, inspiring, exciting story, and sending you a lot of love.

So grateful to be traveling with all of you,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful you can find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here.