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

How to Embrace Change and Leave Judgment Behind

artoflife So much of our struggle comes from our attachment to a picture of how things should be, or how life should look, or how we should feel, or what other people should want, say or do. So often, we should on ourselves and others, and end up carrying the weight of shame, or the feeling of alienation, both of which deplete us and make it hard to rise up. The truth is, there is no formula for life, no “one size fits all” for this thing, we just have to figure it out as we go along.

If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that everything is always changing, and that includes our feelings, circumstances, other people, dynamics, the seasons, our needs, dreams and desires. You are not a static creature, and neither am I, and neither is anyone we know. What you wanted five years ago may not be what you want today. The way you thought life would look versus how it actually looks right now might be jarring, surprising, unsettling, or totally delightful. You can make your plans, in other words, but don’t expect life to bend to your will. Make your vision board if you want to, but leave some open space for surprises, twists, turns, betrayals, opportunities, jobs and lovers across the country, births and deaths. You don’t write every part of the story after all, you only write your own part, and even that is not entirely up to you.

I know people who make choices they regret, but then cannot live with the idea of hurting those they love. I know for myself, I would rather hear and accept the truth than live a lie, or be the unknowing recipient of someone’s pity or guilt. If you love someone, have enough respect for them to be honest about what is real for you, and trust that they, too, may have a different path full of things, experiences and people they never imagined. At the very least, know that if you aren’t honest, the foundation of whatever you’ve built will start to crumble, and the only way to save it or give it any chance of resurrection is with the strength of your own convictions.

That’s not to say that it’s an easy thing to hurt or disappoint other people, I think it’s one of the most difficult and devastating experiences we go through. The thing is, life is complicated and messy for everyone, and we don’t get a crystal ball. Most people don’t set out to hurt you, any more than you’ve ever consciously decided to try to hurt someone else. You can put yourself through the wringer, but in the final analysis, no one can hate you for how you feel. The thing is to communicate before you act. I think for a lot of people, the feelings arise and they try to push them down, until finally there’s an explosion, or they’ve done something in response to those feelings that they now have to live with, grapple with, or explain. That’s when things get really challenging. If you can talk to those closest to you as you’re shifting, changing and evolving, you open the doorway to true intimacy, whether we’re talking about family, romantic partners, or friends. People can’t know you and understand you, they can’t cherish you and honor you if you won’t let them behind the veil.

Sometimes change is forced upon us–someone we love needs to take a path we don’t understand, or someone we love has betrayed us, or we get fired, or find out our child wishes he or she was a different gender, or nine million other things that life can put on the path in front of us that we might not have expected, foreseen, or wanted. The more you can open to people and circumstances as they are, the more you leave room for life to flow. I know it’s tempting to plant your feet and grow your roots and make your stand and try to control this wild world with your calendar and your alerts and your deadlines and schedules, and things you do on Wednesday, and at the very least, where you place your mat when you come to yoga, but the truth is, you are not in control of this story, and neither am I, and neither is anyone we know.

We are all going to face surprises, heartbreaks and joys we never planned for and didn’t expect, and we are all going to make mistakes and hurt people with our humanness, and that is okay, it’s a part of life. I would say, whenever possible, communicate with compassion, don’t assume, don’t project, and try not to hold onto lists of ways you’ve been wronged, because all that stuff will weigh you down. Try to release your grip on the story, open to the gifts when they present themselves, forgive yourself and others, and allow the story to unfold. That way you leave room for the surprises within you and around you, and you grant permission to yourself and those you love to be wildly, imperfectly human, too.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

We Need Not Wait

If-we-could-change These are strange and confusing times we’re living in. It has never been an easy thing to be human. Solitude is hard. Intimacy is hard. Not knowing how long we have here, how long our loved ones have, or what happens after this—these are all difficult parameters to deal with. We tend to be a violent species, and you have only to look back in history if you need verification. As we’ve evolved, so have our tools of destruction. As we’ve grown as a society, we’ve fed this violent undercurrent to such a degree that when our boys reach puberty, if they’re angry, if they feel alienated, isolated, insecure, different from their peers, different from all the images they see on television and at the movies (and what teenagers don’t feel some, if not all of these things?), there are so many channels open to them where they can go with their rage and their pain.

Our girls and women are just as confused and hurt, but tend not to be as violent. Deepak Chopra was recently on Conan O’Brien advocating for more women in politics. He said in general, the mantra of men is “f&ck it, or kill it”, and that we need our nurturers to come and balance things out. Of course that’s a generalization. There are plenty of kind, thoughtful, sensitive, intelligent men who have way more than two gears. He was just trying to make a point. You might not listen to Deepak Chopra, and that’s fine. You might think more violence is what we need in order to fix things in our world. It’s your right to believe that and to say that, and it’s my right to disagree, and act on my own beliefs. But our rights are not really the thing to argue about at this moment in time, although everyone gets up in arms (literally) about that. Every right has its limitations. Our world is the thing. Our world, and the way we’re moving through it.

Yesterday my kids, who are six and nine, stayed home from school because of the bomb threat, which people are today calling a hoax. It was a hoax in the sense that no bombs went off yesterday, and the claims in the email were not true. But it was not a hoax in the sense that these are the times we face, where we all believed it could have been true. Mass shootings are so commonplace, we have drills for them in our schools. Yesterday, I thought to myself, “I grew up with snow days, and my children are growing up with bomb threat days”, and I felt sick. And then I thought about how I was going to explain to them why it was they were not in school, without making them feel afraid to be in this world.

It’s hard not to despair. We’re so polarized, and we have little faith in our government and our politicians. We think to ourselves, “the system is broken, the politicians are owned by lobbyists and corporations, there’s gridlock in Washington, nothing I say or feel has a shot of making a difference”, and all of those thoughts are so awful, we shrug our shoulders and shake our heads and numb ourselves and buy holiday gifts and hope things will get better. But “things” don’t have to get better, people have to get better. We have to get better.

We’re a violent species, but we’re also capable of incredible empathy. We’re built for connection and shared experiences. We’d all choose a hug over a fist to the face, right? We’ve built pyramids, created the Louvre, The David, The Mona Lisa. We have art within us and vision and unbelievable beauty and brilliance. Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen. If you look around the world and you feel despair and depression, that’s understandable, but it won’t help anything. If you look around the world and focus on the beauty, on the incredible gift of just being here, in this insane and often mind-boggling mystery, that will affect the way you carry yourself and interact with other people, and move through your days.

We have such constricted definitions sometimes. If we love someone, we think that is a good and pretty thing. Love and flowers and running through fields, laughing like we’re in a Viagra commercial. Sometimes love rips your f&cking heart out. Sometimes we love people who don’t know how to love us back. Sometimes loving someone means accepting them as they are, even though it means you have to let them go. Love is not like a Viagra commercial, even at its best. If you want to love, you’d better be ready to get your hands dirty, and work, because that is what’s required.

Grief—we think of people grieving and throwing themselves on a grave, but grief grabs you by the throat in the night so you wake up gasping for air and wonder how to do anything. How to move, how to think, how to go on. Grief comes in waves and knocks you off your feet and pulls you under, and when it’s done with you it might let you up for air, and it might not. In the beginning of a huge loss, there’s barely any time above sea level. It’s not like a Hallmark card.

Peace—you believe in peace and you think of hippies and dandelion crowns and a group of people with long hair singing kumbaya or John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed, but sometimes peace is getting bludgeoned in the head because you went to protest peacefully and it didn’t go that way. Sometimes peace is ugly and violent and the road to peace is often strewn with bodies of great people, like Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi, neither of whom made perfect husbands, but, my god, the impact they had on this earth and on our collective well-being.

Our civilization is young compared to the rest of the world. We are the teenagers in the midst of many elders, some of whom have screwed things up so badly, we’re all suffering for it. People want to blame the guy in the Oval Office, especially if he isn’t the one they voted for, but the mess we’re in is a good century in the making, it involves both political parties, it involves the religion of money, and a mismanagement of a complex and painful history in the Middle East. Pointing fingers and shouting is a fool’s undertaking. It doesn’t help.

What helps, as far as I can decipher, is trying to stay calm in the midst of this storm. Throwing our hands up, ignoring things, praying for a miracle, digging our heels in over our political differences, none of these things helps one iota. What we see around us is a reflection of what we see within ourselves. Not all of us. There are many, many people who’ve worked hard to cultivate a peaceful inner environment, and that gives me something we need, and something that does help. You know what it is. It’s the opposite of despair, it’s hope. There are good, kind, wonderful, beautiful people in this world who are not closing their eyes to what’s happening, who are not giving up, who are not accepting that this is just the way things are, who do not want their children to be afraid to live in this world.

None of us can look our children in the eye right now and promise them they’re completely safe, but that has always been the case. I do think we’ve reached a summit. I do believe these are sad and scary times. I think we’ve let ourselves run wild for too long. I think we’ve created a society that alienates its men and women, that turns out adults who, by and large, do not know what brings them joy, peace or a sense of meaning. But I also believe more and more people are recognizing we’ve been sold a false bill of goods, that more and more people are understanding happiness and peace come from within, and that they’re passing that information on to their children. Hatred is taught at home, but so is compassion, tolerance, respect, and critical thinking. Try not to despair. Direct your attention to what you can do today to make the world around you a little better. We are all looking for reassurance, for stability, for right effort. None of us wants to live in a world where we wonder if our children are safe at school, at the mall, at a concert. None of us wants to accept mass violence as the norm, and something we can’t change.

Try to trust that there are more good people in the world than angry, hateful ones, because there are. Try to trust that most people have hit their limit, and then some, for the things we’ve been watching on the global stage. Let your heartbreak motivate you to act, to stand up for what you believe in, to participate, to engage, to get your hands dirty with love and grief, so we can unearth joy and trust. Don’t let fear be your bedfellow and constant companion. Believe in the power of one person, you, to have an impact on the world around you, because you do. Trust in that, honor that, and do something good with that. If enough people follow suit, we’ll set this thing right. Sending you so much love, Ally Hamilton

The Eye of the Storm

Sometimes we’re feeling low or vulnerable or insecure or alienated or depressed, and someone we don’t know, or someone we know well, walks right into the heart of that mess we’re in, and says something or does something that sets us off spinning even more.

It’s all well and good to say that people can’t make us feel anything unless we allow them to, and that is the truth. A person can’t drive you crazy or make you happy unless you open yourself to those feelings. Nonetheless, when we’re already feeling tested, fragile, or down, we’re not going to be in a place where it’s easy to direct our energy, or focus our minds on what we know in our hearts to be true. Namely, that another person’s cruelty, indifference, envy, or misplaced rage has nothing to do with us. It’s hard not to take things personally when we’re already walking through the fire.

When you’re spiraling, or feeling confused, scared, ashamed, guilty, or anxious, the best thing you can do is open to it. That isn’t what we’re taught, and it might feel counter-intuitive, but the more you try to run from or deny your feelings, the more you try to make them go away or numb them out, the harder they’ll push to come to the surface. The best way to stop the spinning is to sit down in the eye of the storm, because from that vantage point, you can see that you are not your thoughts. There are a lot of things we think sometimes that are just absolute garbage. Sometimes we’re getting some kind of pay-off, and from the center of the whirlwind, you might find the space to be honest with yourself about that. Is it easier to feed the idea that you’re a victim, or that there’s something broken about you, than it is to pick yourself up and get to work? If you’re doing something that isn’t serving you, there’s some kind of benefit, even if it isn’t immediately obvious. I’m not talking about depression here, so please don’t misunderstand me. Depression is not a choice you make, it’s an affliction that causes suffering, and sometimes people need medication to regulate it. I’m talking about repeating patterns or ways of being or thinking that you already know bring you nothing but pain.

Maybe you’re punishing yourself, maybe you’ve hurt people in your past, and you feel like you deserve to be treated badly. Maybe you’re lying to yourself about what you want. Maybe you’re terrified of screwing up, so you’re paralyzed. It’s all okay, seriously. This business of being human is a messy job for most people, at least at some time or another. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be honest with yourself about where you have work to do, assuming you want to be happy. And that might seem like an obvious thing, right? I mean, who doesn’t want to be happy? But I can look in my rearview mirror and remember times when I wanted to be angry more than I wanted to be happy. Times when I was more invested in my story than I was in changing it.

Shame is debilitating, and it won’t get you far. In fact, it’ll keep you stuck, and deplete you of the energy you need to do things differently. Try to let it go. Be where you are, and have some compassion for yourself. If everything is a mess, believe me, it’s not because you suck at being human, it’s because you probably have some unlearning to do. When we make a mess of things, it’s because we lack the tools to not make a mess of things. And if we lack the tools, it’s because they weren’t taught or modeled. Relationships of any kind require some tools. Communication is a huge one, as is the ability to listen with your heart, and not with the burning desire to be right. Intimacy is terrifying for some people, because maybe their past experience of love involved smothering, or a lack of control. No one likes to feel powerless or imprisoned, but if those are your fears about real relationships, they’re unfounded. Love does not imprison you, it frees you.

You don’t have to keep feeding a story about why you are the way you are, because it doesn’t really matter, and you aren’t set in stone. Is it harder to have to unlearn and relearn something than it is to learn it well the first time? Of course. But is it easier to stay stuck than it is to unstick yourself? I really don’t think so. Figure out the tools you need to dig, because time doesn’t stop and wait for anyone. Choose happiness over anger, choose compassion over shame. There’s no formula for healing, but that’s a solid foundation for anyone. Sending you love, 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

You Have to “Like” Yourself

If you’ve ever tried to save another person from his or her pain, then you already know it can’t be done. You cannot divorce a person from his past; whatever we’ve been through is going to shape us, and have an effect on the way we look at, and move through the world. If we come from a stable and loving background where we felt secure and celebrated, we’re probably going to have an easier time dealing with life’s difficult surprises, rejections and losses. But there are some things that are so knifing, it really doesn’t matter what your background was. You’re going to have to walk through the fire.

I think the large majority of people are going to struggle, and I say this because it’s rare for two healthy, happy people to come together out of love, and to remember to appreciate the gifts as they roll in every day. I’m not saying this doesn’t exist, I’m just saying I don’t believe it’s very common. They teach us about fractions in school, we spend time figuring out what happens if a train leaves Baltimore at 7:50am, traveling 40mph, and another leaves New York City at 8:20pm going 30mph, but we don’t learn about the human heart. We don’t have classes that teach us about healthy relationships, and how to be a good partner. Most people develop their skill set with on-the-job training, and that doesn’t always work out so well. If you didn’t have exposure to healthy, happy relationships growing up, if you don’t have a model for that, then you’re flying by the seat of your pants, and it’s likely you’ll have a bumpy ride.

The point is, if we come out of pain, dysfunction, confusion and instability, it’s probably going to take some time for us to find our center. And if we start having intimate relationships while we’re still totally in the dark about who we are, they aren’t likely to go well. If you were born into a situation with two people who didn’t know how to love each other well, and also didn’t do a bang-up job loving you well…welcome to the human race. I believe you’re in the majority.

On top of your own personal history, there’s the vulnerability inherent in this gig called being human. And not everyone deals with the uncertainty of this thing very well. Life is unpredictable, and sometimes explosions go off in the middle of our lives because we set them off, and other times, this happens because we lose someone unexpectedly, or we lose a job, or some other totally unforeseen thing happens. What defines us is how we deal with what we’re given. Sometimes people flail about or point fingers or develop constructs that support the idea that it isn’t their fault, whatever “it” may be. Sometimes people numb out, deny reality, or run like hell. Sometimes people are so self-destructive, you just can’t watch anymore.

The thing is, you can’t do the journey for anyone else. You can’t do it for your children or your parents or your siblings or your best friend. We all have to man up and woman up and and get serious about healing. You can’t be of any real good to anyone else if you’re miserable. You can’t blame your parents if you’re 40 and unhappy. I mean, you can, but it won’t get you anywhere you want to be.

What can you do if someone you love is hurting? You can offer your support and encouragement of course. You can learn to say less and listen more, and just be there with your love. You can reflect back to them the incredible beauty you see. You can try to find them resources so they can start to take ownership of their pain and their happiness. But you can’t fix it for them. It’s torturous to watch someone we love as they flail or doubt or fear or cling. When people have a hole they’re trying to fill, whether they try to fill it with fame or adoration or things or food or sex or they try to numb it out so the ache is less intense, there’s nothing much you can do except to tell them again and again, the only thing that fills that hole is love. And it isn’t love from other people, although that’s wonderful, it’s love from within. Sending you some right now, Ally Hamilton

Surprise!

Life always has plenty of surprises in store for us. We make our plans, and then, BAM! Something totally unforeseen happens. Sometimes these are good surprises–perhaps we meet someone who amazes us in every way, on a random Tuesday when we were just going about our business. Other times they’re challenging–we lose a job, or even worse, a whole person. We are given opportunities to practice for the unexpected every day, so that when the big twists and turns come, we aren’t knocked over by life.

The birth of anything is the death of something else. Each moment comes to an end so a new moment can arise. We contract against change, we fear the unknown, and yet, this is the one constant in life: everything is always in a state of flux. Things change, people change, our feelings change, the seasons change, you have already changed while reading this.

I try to experience the unwelcome surprises in my life as invitations to open and breathe. I don’t always succeed, of course, but I try. And I’m grateful to my yoga practice for that, because that’s less time spent suffering. There is always something to learn, and there’s no doubt challenge helps us grow. That doesn’t mean we have to be grateful for everything that happens along the way; some things will rip your heart out of your chest and bring you to your knees. But always, we have the opportunity to learn and evolve and open.

There is no pain-free birthing process, whether we’re birthing a person into this world, or we’re struggling toward a new way of being. Let the pain open you. Pause, breathe, acknowledge. When you’re ready, get up. There’s a lot of beauty in life. This is why we don’t want to resist the difficult parts. What we resist, persists, as the saying goes. Persist in love. Life feels better that way. Sending you some right now, and wishing you strength, grace and ease as you open to the surprises around the corner, Ally Hamilton

A Matter of Degree

Life is complicated and messy sometimes. It doesn’t take much to land yourself in a challenging set of circumstances; one poor choice is often all it takes. But the reality is, we all have our stuff. Some people have more than others, but I know very few people who get through 80-100 years without some serious difficulty along the way. In fact, I don’t know anyone.

What we’re talking about is degree. Break-ups are painful. Divorce is harder. Divorce with children is even more devastating. This is not to say that a heartbreak where there wasn’t a marriage is not brutal. This is not a contest about who wins the prize for suffering the most, because who would want that award? The reason divorce is harder than your average break up is because you have so many people to tell. You’ve stood up in front of everyone you know and you’ve taken vows. Now you have to acknowledge to yourself and everyone else that you are not able to keep the promises you made, and that hurts. In most cases, you’ve asked people to make a huge effort on your behalf—to travel so they can bear witness to this big decision you’ve made, to drop whatever is happening in their lives so they can be there for you. There’s a feeling of accountability around it. There are two families involved. Sometimes there’s the merging of money. So there’s your heartbreak, and then there’s all this other stuff, too. With children in the mix, you can take all of that stuff I just mentioned, and add to it your fear that your inability to keep your promise is going to cause pain to the people you love most in the world. Along with a million other things that can happen, and all the complications that arise for everyone when you have to go down that path. Losing people we love because we grow apart or can no longer tolerate certain treatment, or because we’ve had a misunderstanding, will cause us grief. Losing someone through death will cause even more because the possibility of seeing them, holding them, hearing them, touching them…it’s gone. So it’s a matter of degree, and it’s how we’re going to work with the pain. You can make it your enemy, or you can make it your friend and your teacher.

Sometimes situations are hard to navigate because the boundaries are always shifting; what worked at one point no longer does, and the peace we’d found is lost again. So be it. The river flows, and we have to flow with it. The more we contract against our feelings, the more we suffer. The more we deny reality or try to convince ourselves or other people that everything is okay, or we are okay when it isn’t and we aren’t, the more we compound our pain. There’s no pain-free option, so get over that. Pain is part of life, but you don’t have to feed it or help it to grow. If you’re going to feed something, feed love. Life will feel a lot better that way. Sometimes we make mistakes and we’re going to pay the price and that is called growing up. You may not like where you find yourself, but if you can look back and recognize that your actions and choices have landed you where you are, then you can grow from the experience and create something new. Beauty can grow out of pain. Nothing comes from nothing. That’s really the issue. Not whether you’re going to have any issues, but what you’re going to do, or not do about them.

Sometimes the pain comes from the outside. Maybe we love an addict. That’s brutal because addiction takes hostages, and it does not care how kind they are. All I’m saying is that human beings are complex and life is complex and a lot of what determines how much we’re going to suffer, and how much we’re going to be at peace, is nuance, attitude and perseverance. A spiritual practice gives you a foundation, so when times are good you have the tools to receive the gifts and take nothing for granted, and when times are tough you have some ground to stand on in that rain. In between the highs and lows, you also recognize there is no such thing as an ordinary day.

Also, there’s this: nothing comes from nothing, and nothing dies. Before the big bang, there was something. I don’t know what it was, but there was something. It’s the old chicken or the egg question, but it’s one or the other. There was a chicken, or there was an egg. There was something. You might have your birth certificate with the time of your birth stamped as the moment you took your first big inhale, but you existed before that moment. In fact, you’d already had a profound experience, a journey through the birth canal. And before that, you were in your mother’s womb, and in your mother and father before that, and in all your ancestors. You would not exist without them, you were in them, they are in you, and when you die, you will not be nothing, no matter what you believe. If you decide to be buried or cremated, eventually you will become part of the earth, you’ll be watered by the rain, you’ll grow into the trees and into the air and toward the sun. Your soul, if you believe in souls, will go on its own journey. But even if you don’t believe there’s something essential that goes on, you will not be nothing. You can never be nothing. It’s a miracle you’re here, scientific or otherwise, it’s a miracle any of us are here. And I say all this to you, because so much of our trouble comes from our strong identification with the body we’re in, with our names and our jobs and our weight and our hair color, and our huge fear that we are going to die and become nothing. This is why we cling. This is why we struggle and try to control and force. This is why we forget to live sometimes.

So what if you’ve made a mess of it? Most people do at some point. Clean it up, that’s all. You’re here. You have the capacity to love. You’re changing every second, whether you want to or not, so why not change in the ways that are going to help you to heal and thrive? Things do not have to be perfect in order for you to give freely from your heart, and have a positive impact on the world around you. If you wait for things to be perfect, you will spend most of your life waiting, because perfection comes in moments, and they’re easy to miss if you’re stuck in rage and blame and shame, or you’re numbing yourself out. There’s so much love. There’s so much beauty. Your heart can expand and so can your mind. You are not stuck. You are not nothing. You are everything. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

Take Down Your Inner Critic

If you’re suffering from self-loathing and a loud inner critic, you’re in the worst kind of prison. You can’t evict your inner voice, so if it’s harsh, shaming and unforgiving, there’s nowhere to run. If you’d categorize the way you’re speaking to yourself as abusive, were you to hear the same words coming from someone else’s mouth, then it’s time to stage a take-down. Because that’s no way to live.

Where Does Your Inner Critic Come From?

Sometimes we absorb the way we were spoken to growing up. Not everyone is received with love, not everyone is nurtured. Peggy O’Mara has a quote, “The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but it isn’t the whole truth. You may have come from an incredibly loving home, but suffered unkindness at school. Scared and confused children can be mean, as can those who feel powerless at home. Events may have occurred that made you doubt yourself, or question your ideas about your own worth. Sometimes we’re going along just fine, and then we’re completely derailed by a romantic relationship, or an interaction with someone who has power over us, and it’s a game-changer.

Other times, we learn and we grow and we look back and feel intense shame for certain choices we made, or ways we let ourselves or others down. There are all kinds of reasons that voice in our head can become critical and unrelenting. Coming out of abuse is another one. Feeling like love is conditional and can be withdrawn at any time will also do it, because any time you fail to meet your own unrealistic expectations of perfection, you’ve set yourself up for the punishing sting of pain and disappointment. There are all kinds of ways we can betray our own tender hearts.

We Are All in the Same Boat…

The thing is, in order to shine and to share, you have to have some belief in yourself. And to be straight with you, not believing in yourself is the worst kind of hubris. It’s not a level playing field, but we’ve all been given the gift of a body, some time here on earth, and the ability to love deeply. Squandering those gifts is the equivalent of hijacking your experience here. You can look back and rant and rave and point fingers. You can write a dissertation about why you are the way you are, and why it isn’t your fault, but time will keep on ticking. And you can’t have it back.

We all make mistakes. We’ve all suffered loss to some degree or another, along with heartache, grief, regret, fear, confusion, shame, doubt and longing. If we’re lucky, we’ve also tasted joy and gratitude, love, kindness and connection. It’s a mixed bag here on planet earth, but it’s a wildly interesting ride. Getting bogged down in rage is no way to travel. There are so many tools available, so many paths of liberation, so many ways to enjoy the gifts we’ve been given. You really don’t want to rob yourself of all the beauty available here.

How Do You Starve Your Inner Critic & Feed a Loving Voice?

How do you starve an inner critic and feed a loving voice? I’m sure there are many tools, but the ones I’ve tested personally are the physical yoga practice, and seated meditation. There’s a saying, “How you do anything is how you do everything”, and I believe that to be the truth. If you’re critical of yourself out in the world, the same will hold true when you’re on your yoga mat. But if you stick with it and make it about breathing deeply and consciously, and not about how you look or what’s happening around you, a miraculous thing will happen. You’ll start to take the road marked “Inward”, so you can take a look around and start dealing with anything that isn’t serving you. You can start to observe yourself from the inside out, and build the muscle called compassion. You can work on the quality of patience. You can calm your nervous system with your breath. You can create enough space between your thoughts to get a taste of something called peace. And you can develop the ability to witness your tendencies, your thoughts and your feelings. You can start to recognize that you don’t have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes. You can start to choose better thoughts. Over time, you can feed a loving voice so it grows and strengthens and takes over your life. It just takes work and determination. Feel free to reach out if you need a little nudge.

Sending you love,
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

The Part That Is Personal

Often I get emails from people who tell me their relationships would be wonderful, if only their partner would change. And sometimes they tell me they’ve been to therapy hoping that would help, but there hasn’t been any movement. Here’s the thing. We can never change other people. No one can ever change us, either, unless we want to make a shift. And you can find yourself at a real stalemate, and start to feel hopeless and stuck.

But just as we can never change other people, we are also not set in stone. You can always change what you are doing, and there’s tremendous power in that. When you look at the situations in your life, the story to pay attention to is not the one about what this person did, or how things unfolded in ways you couldn’t have imagined, or how something beautiful turned to something painful. I mean, you can examine all of that, but the thing you really want to dive into, is the story of your own participation.

Sometimes people get very clear on the “not taking things personally” part, and that’s wonderful. If someone is abusive, cruel, unkind, dismissive, thoughtless or disrespectful, that’s a reflection of where they are on their particular journey at this point in time. Is is not a reflection of anything lacking within you. But, and this is an important but, what is about you is your decision to continue to interact with people who don’t know how to do anything but hurt you. That part is the personal part, that’s the part you want to understand.

We’re not always talking about awful, abusive situations. Sometimes it’s just a matter of the spark going out. People take their partners or loved ones for granted all the time. Sometimes we think we have people “pegged”, and we don’t have to pay attention anymore. But everyone and everything is in a constant state of flux. You are not the you of five years ago, and neither is anyone else. You can’t ever peg anyone. But you can stop looking and listening and appreciating and cherishing and celebrating people, and that’s a sad but common occurrence. And if you find you’re in a relationship like that, where you feel unseen and unheard and taken for granted, you’re probably not going to turn that around by pointing fingers, and letting your partner know all the many ways he or she is blowing it. Because it’s never one person. In any relationship, there are two people, and the third thing, the space between them. That is where the relationship exists, in that space. Each person decides what’s going into the space, and this is true whether we’re speaking romantically or otherwise.

It’s easy to lose the thread. But if there was a spark in the beginning, if there was communication and vulnerability and honesty, you can find those things again, by offering them yourself. When you change what you do, things change around you, people respond to you differently. Also, your happiness is your own responsibility. You can’t put that on anyone else, that’s an inside job. If you are not at peace within yourself, if you’re not feeling inspired, if you’re not loving yourself well, no one can solve that but you. The idea in a healthy relationship is that you support your partner, you don’t look to him or her to solve your pain for you.

If you’re in an abusive relationship, and by that I mean verbally, emotionally, or physically abusive, it’s time to do something. Physical abuse demands that you create physical boundaries. In other words, you have to get out, and you’ll probably (definitely) need support in doing that. You cannot stay and expect things to change because they won’t. Or they will, but not in a good way. Your life here is a gift. It isn’t something you want to gamble. And thinking your love or patience or tolerance will finally change things is a dangerous delusion.

If we’re talking about verbal and emotional abuse, boundaries are also in order. If you’re not worried about your physical safety, it’s time to draw the line. If a person cannot treat you with care and consideration, then what is the relationship about? Are you financially dependent? Does the abuse remind you of the way you grew up? Does some part of you believe that you are not good enough to deserve love? If you get a yes to any of those questions, you need help and support. Low self-esteem is dangerous because we betray ourselves when we feel we aren’t worthy of being cherished. We put ourselves in situations that are crushing and heartbreaking, and you can only take that for so long before you become depressed or hardened, or you need to numb the pain. That’s no way to live.

There is no happily ever after without your participation and action. There is no person who’s going to sweep in and save the day and make everything okay, unless you decide to be that person. Be that person, seriously. Life is too short for anything else, and it can be so beautiful. Sending you love and a hug. Reach out if you need help, Ally Hamilton

Choose the Lesson

shannonlalder Recently, a close friend of mine was left suddenly and without explanation by her husband of less than a year. They were having the normal struggles of any newly married couple, exacerbated by the fact that neither of them had lived with romantic partners before. Just the normal communication issues, and the push-pull we all go through when we’re shifting our perspective from “I” to “we”. They’d talked about going to counseling, and about making some other changes, too. He’d expressed a desire to move to another part of the country, and she’d been open to that. Throughout the relationship, right up until the day he took off, their text messages were loving, flirtatious and affectionate, their time together was mostly fun, and she had no reason to imagine he’d bail. One morning he got up, kissed her goodbye as they left the house to go to their respective jobs, and that was the last time she saw him.

When he didn’t show up for dinner, she texted, and he said he was out with friends and that he’d probably crash with one of his buddies. She asked him where he was, but he just said he was out having fun, and he’d see her in the morning. And then he didn’t show up in the morning, and she called and got his voicemail. When she texted, he said he’d be home later in the day, and that he was running errands. It turned out he’d gotten on a plane and flown across the country. She found out from his friend’s wife, when she called to see if he knew what was going on.

She flew across the country to see him and sit down face-to-face, but he refused, and his family told her to go away. He wouldn’t even respond to her texts, his mother texted to let her know he did not want to see her. She’d spent three years with him, she’d spent plenty of time with his parents and siblings, and not one of them would meet her for a tea, or even get on the phone. Her family and all her close friends, myself included, told her to come home. When there’s no communication, there’s also no hope. And when his family also shunned her, we all understood this was their modus operandi.

Two weeks later, he served her with divorce papers, citing irreconcilable differences. Then he proceeded to make demands about all the wedding gifts and furniture he wanted. She told me when she saw the list he sent with the movers, the nine-page list of things he wanted them to collect, it finally sank in. He cared about kitchen knives, but not her heart. He wanted the garbage can, but he didn’t want to know if she was okay, or how she was coping. He just didn’t care.

And so she was left in the dark, trying to figure out what had happened. Was the whole thing a sham? Had he ever loved her? Was the huge wedding he’d wanted just for show? Had he meant anything he’d said on their wedding day, or any day? She told me she felt like she was in the “Twilight Zone”, and that at any moment, Rod Serling would step out from behind a closet door, or from around a corner, and tell her she’d entered another dimension.

Life is like this sometimes. We’re going along, and BAM! A bomb goes off in the middle of our lives, and everything we thought we knew is just blown to pieces. Sometimes it happens because we’re abandoned, like my friend, and sometimes we lose people because they’re ripped from us too soon. Sometimes circumstances create the boom. Maybe we’re fired, or our house burns down, or we’re facing some other huge turn of events we could never have seen coming.

We’d never wish that on ourselves or anyone else, but it happens. And once you feel all the feelings around the experience—the shock, the grief, the confusion, the rage—you have a chance to begin again. Some things are so brutal, you have to accept you’re never going to be the same. Some things will never make sense, some things will never be explained, some things will rip your heart out of your chest and eat it with a fine chianti. So be it.

The question is, what are you going to grow out of those ashes? People and circumstances can hurt you, but they can’t defeat you unless you let them. You can’t rush through your feelings when you’re in turmoil; in fact, I’d say that’s the moment to use every bit of the support system you have in place, or to get busy creating one. That’s when you figure out who in your life is really going to be there for you. And that’s really good information to have, because then you know where to invest your time and energy, and with whom.

All you can ever do, is start where you are. We learn and grow from every experience, but we have to choose the lesson. My friend doesn’t want anyone to speak badly of her ex, and she isn’t fighting him for stuff or money. As she said to me, “The more he takes, the less he has.” How’s that for choosing the lesson?

There are confounding things that people do to each other sometimes. I get emails from people going through divorce with children, and one partner is using the kids as pawns against the other. Who do you think pays in that scenario? But again, those kids will grow up one day, and they’ll choose the lesson. There’s a lot of power in that, so if you’re in a situation that’s making you feel weak, try looking at it from that perspective. No one can take that away from you. Pick the lessons that strengthen you and open you. We have enough hard, closed people in the world. And when things happen that you don’t understand, do your very best to have compassion and recognize there’s probably more going on than you know. We can only know another person’s interior world to the extent that they allow us access. Many, many people have pain and they don’t know how to work with it so they lash out or they take off. Some people suffer from personality disorders that render them incapable of empathy. Some people have been taught that their feelings are the only ones that matter. Imagine how life must be for them. The more they take, the less they have. Sending you love, and wishing you peace and strength,

Ally Hamilton

Not This, Not That

buckminsterfuller In yoga practice, so much of what we’re doing is about stripping away. It’s very possible, and quite common, to reach adulthood and have no clue who we are or what we need to be at peace. Culturally we’re taught to look outward for happiness; if we just meet certain “markers”, if we can look right and have the right job and the right partner and the right house and car, then we’ll be good to go. A lot of people are so focused on attaining these outer signs of happiness, they pass right by the signs that would actually lead them there.

Also, there’s the way you grew up. Maybe you were taught, in word or through actions, that your worth as a human being was based on your performance; if you did well in school, if you were a good boy or girl, then all would be well. If you screwed up or failed to reach the bar, love was withdrawn and the disapproval was palpable. Maybe punishment was swift and intense. That’s just one example, of course. There are many. Maybe you grew up in a house where you felt unsafe, and you learned to be indispensable or invisible depending on the moment. Maybe you were spoiled rotten and taught that you were the center of everything, and that other people existed in order to orbit around your needs and wants. Perhaps you were taught that your needs and wants were something you were supposed to swallow, and that your fears and dreams had very little impact on the world around you. Maybe you were parentified and got a huge lesson in care-taking and people-pleasing. It’s a huge spectrum, but the chances for knowing yourself are slim in any of these scenarios.

This is why we have so many people who reach adulthood and have no idea which way to turn. The house doesn’t do it, the diet doesn’t do it, the right partner doesn’t do it. What’s the point? Where have they gone wrong, why isn’t the formula working? The formula doesn’t work because it’s based on the stuff around us, not the stuff within us. I know someone who’s been searching for the “perfect house” for years. Money isn’t an issue, the location could be anywhere. No matter where he goes or what kind of house he buys, it’s never the right one. It never does the trick. If you want to be at peace, you have to get your true house in order. Your body is your home. If things are not well within you, they won’t be well around you, even if you buy a mansion in Bali and have people on hand to feed you fresh mango at your every whim. There’s no escaping yourself.

In the yoga practice, we’re looking for “vidya” or “clear-seeing”; being able to identify what is real from what is unreal, what is permanent from what is impermanent. You have to question everything you think you know, because you may have accepted things along the way, decades ago, that turn out not to be true for you. You may have adopted ways of being that don’t serve you, that dis-empower you, or block you from receiving love and joy. You may have a lot of unlearning to do. Maybe you’ve come to believe you aren’t lovable, or that you’re broken in some un-fixable way. Maybe you think you can’t trust anyone, or everyone lies and cheats. There are all kinds of ideas you might have developed that just aren’t true, and so you have to dig. You have to unearth. You have to do the work to heal your deepest wounds so they don’t direct your entire life. The way to peace is inside, not outside, and the sooner you start, the faster you get to a place where life feels good. Avoiding this work is the surest way to suffer. You aren’t here to suffer, although it’s part of life sometimes. You’re here to shine. I wouldn’t wait.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

What Are You Waiting For?!

There’s such a tendency to wait in life. We seem to suffer from this delusion that life is going to start somewhere out in front of us, when “things calm down”, but this is it. Life is happening right here, right now.

Sometimes we put off difficult conversations thinking we’ll wait until the situation is less intense, or hoping that circumstances will magically change on their own. We think we should wait to have a baby until we have our “ducks in a row”—a larger house or more financial stability, and don’t get me wrong. Bringing a human being into the world is a huge responsibility, and you want to be as emotionally and financially prepared as possible. You want to know yourself, and have some sense of your strengths and weaknesses (you’ll get a huge lesson in all that even if you do), but babies need love and stability. They need that a lot more than fancy stuff.

Anyway, the point is there’s never a perfect time to do a challenging thing, whether it means standing up for yourself, ending a relationship that doesn’t feel right, pursuing your dreams with everything you’ve got, committing to your partner, working on shifting a way of being that isn’t serving you, or bringing a person into the world. There is no perfect time.

Life is messy and complicated and unpredictable. You can do your best to find inner steadiness, to follow the pull of your heart, to forge a path that feels right for you. You can learn to communicate honestly and with compassion. You can do your very best not to hurt other people, to consider the impact of your speech, actions, and choices on those closest to you, and to practice empathy. But if you’re waiting for things to be less chaotic or uncertain, you’ll be waiting a very long time, because that’s the name of this game.

You create peace within you, and you can try to create it around you, by inviting people into your life who are also trying to communicate what’s real for them in a kind and loving way. But things change and people change, and life will always surprise you, sometimes in devastating ways, and sometimes in ways that expand your heart more than you could have imagined. We aren’t here to wait. We’re here to play, to explore, to make mistakes, to learn, to grow, to share, to connect, to give. But not to wait. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

Let Go and Look

johnlubbock We’re always bringing so much to the table. We all have our histories, our life experiences, our ideas, our frames of reference. Everything that happens outside of us is filtered through what we know, and what we think we know. So what is really happening? Is our perception different from reality? Can two people participate in a conversation and walk away with totally different feelings about what happened? I think we all know the answer to that question.

Yogis call clear-seeing “vidya”. It means we can differentiate between what is permanent and what is impermanent. “Avidya” is the state of ignorance about ourselves, other people, and the world around us; it’s like a sleep-walking state. The practice of yoga, and by that, I mean all eight limbs, is about wiping the lenses clean, and waking ourselves up. Examining those frames of reference we have, and seeing if they’re distorted. Letting go of our attachment to “how things should be” and allowing them to unfold as they are without fighting or clinging or denying, because there isn’t any power in that. We’re never going to control other people, nor do we want to try. We’re not going to control outcomes, or the weather, either, but we can work on facing reality as it is, and responding with bravery, honesty, compassion, awareness, patience and acceptance. We can also pick our battles this way. There are things, people, and causes we need to fight for, and times when acceptance is not the way. Discernment, “viveka”, is the thing.

We save ourselves and the people closest to us a tremendous amount of pain when we get hungry for the truth. And by that, I don’t mean there’s one truth for everyone, I mean what is true for you? What is true for the people closest to you? What is true about the situations you’re in, the dynamics between you and other people? Are there places where you’re hiding from yourself, things you don’t want to see, or feel you cannot accept? Do you have deeply ingrained ideas about yourself or other people that are weighing you down, and preventing you from opening to love, joy and gratitude? Like, “I’m not good enough”, or, “I’m unlovable or broken”, or, “You can’t trust anyone”?

Also, are you taking things and other people for granted? Are there people in your life you think you know “like the back of your hand”? When’s the last time you looked at the back of your hand, by the way? Everything alive is changing all the time. If you think you have someone pegged, even your partner of thirty years, you’re in trouble. When we stop looking, we miss so much, and we don’t leave space for life to surprise us, either. When we think we know, when our cup is full, there’s no room to learn, and if we aren’t learning, we’re dying. As much as possible, wipe the slate clean, and try to move through the world with curiosity. Life is full of extraordinary gifts, and you don’t want to miss them.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You Can’t Control the Tides

smaraboli Sometimes we’re trying to control things. It’s understandable; we’re on a spinning planet and we each have our unknown expiration dates, as do the people we love. We don’t know for sure what happens after this, so it’s a gig that makes us all inherently vulnerable, and some people have a very hard time with that. Most of us suffer great losses at some point or another, because the loss of someone we love is like the loss of a whole, gorgeous universe. It’s not hard to understand why you might want to put your mat down in the same place when you come to yoga, or why most of us thrive on some routine, some rhythm, something to count on.

Here are some other realities. We are in control of very little. We don’t control what life is going to put in our paths. We don’t control other people, nor should we try. We don’t control what anyone else is going to do, or say, or want, or need, or feel. All we can work on is the way we respond to what we’re given, and there’s tremendous power in that. Sometimes people do things that are incomprehensible. I know someone who was just abandoned in a cruel and heartless manner when it would have been just as easy to end things with dignity, and to honor the love that was there. But “just as easy” for who? For me? For you? I mean, from the outside, I can look at the situation and feel astounded. Why would someone do it like THAT? With no communication, respect, tenderness? But for me those things are obvious. And probably for you, too.

That’s where we get into so much trouble. We start to project what’s clear to us onto other people. Shouldn’t this be totally obvious to them, too? I’d argue that certain things are indisputable. You should treat people the way you’d want to be treated. You should treat other people’s children the way you’d want your child to be treated. The thing is, people can only have the tools they have, and they can only be where they are on their own journeys. Some people are so full of fear, they can’t imagine trusting and being kind and compassionate, because some part of them feels if they do that, they’re going to get screwed. I mean, you can’t project your world-view on anyone else, that’s my point. It’s easy to take things personally, especially when an intimate relationship comes to an end, and we’re left with no explanation or chance for closure, but honestly, if that’s the way your partner operates, then they aren’t ready for a real relationship with anyone. Relationships require a willingness to listen and understand, to communicate and to try; without that, there is no relationship. Someone who lacks those tools doesn’t lack them because of anything missing in you.

The very best thing any of us can do is work on inner steadiness; confidence in ourselves to hold and examine whatever life throws in our paths with strength and grace and breath and curiosity. This is how it is right now. Let me lean into it. Let me allow myself to feel whatever I need to feel, whether it’s rage, or grief or confusion or shock, or all of those things. Let me remember that how it is now, is not how it will always be. Let me understand if I missed something along the way, if I sailed by red flags because I didn’t want to accept what I knew in my gut. Let me understand if I often override my intuition, or I just got burned this time. Let me know myself. Let me honor and cherish myself. Let me learn and grow from this pain so I have that much more empathy to share when other people in my life suffer. Let me use the heartbreaks to soften and open, so I’m also ready to receive the love and the joy and the astounding beauty when it shows up. Life is full of everything. You have to be ready. Sending you love, and wishing you peace,

Ally Hamilton

Let the Heartbreaks Soften You

keats Sometimes people do things that are incomprehensible. I once knew a man who was married to one woman, while starting a family with another, two towns away. I mean, you have to know it’s only a matter of time before that explodes everywhere, right? I was once betrayed by someone I believed was a friend, someone I’d tried to help, in a way that left me in tears for weeks, trying to make sense of it. I had another friend years ago who screwed me over for a job. The thing is, it takes a really long time to know another person. Sometimes you believe you do, and then something happens and you realize you didn’t know the person at all, not really.

Sometimes this happens because we project and assume. We project our own ideas of what it means to be a friend onto the other party, without stopping to wonder whether they have the same definition. Or we project our ideas about who we think someone is, or want them to be, without allowing them the time and space to show us through their actions. Or we assume how things are for us, is how they are for other people. We imagine everyone is working with our frame of reference, and what’s obvious to us will be to them. There are all kinds of ways we can get burned.

Transitions are never easy. Even though we long for stability, we resist the one stable thing we can count on: everything is in a constant state of flux. Fear is usually at the root of our resistance to change. The devil we know is better than the one we don’t, or something like that. That very thinking keeps us stuck in situations that crush the light out of us. If everything is always changing, if people and feelings and circumstances are always in motion, it means we can never know what will happen next, and for many people that’s a scary thought, so they try to pin down the things they can. People don’t like to be pinned down, though, or taken for granted or expected to always be the same. That isn’t a fair, reasonable or rational expectation.

What we can hope for from our close family members, partners, and loved ones, is communication. Few things are worse than transition without conversation. I know a woman whose fiancé left her three months before their wedding and never looked back, never explained himself, never said a word. He just took off while she was on a business trip, and left a note that said “Sorry.” That’s it, one word, and she was left to piece together what had happened on her own. It’s cowardly to bail without explanation, and it’s also disrespectful to the tender heart of the person left in the dark. Life is hard enough when we do have answers. Maybe we’ve grown apart, or what we wanted five years ago doesn’t feel right today. You have to be where you are. You can’t force love and you can’t force life, and you cannot control what other people are going to do, or say or want or need, but you can handle yourself with integrity and have compassion for people, and think about the way you’d like to be treated. Y’know, just common human decency.

Even when we aren’t treated with respect, we’re still getting an answer, right? If someone won’t talk to you, they’re actually speaking volumes about their own limitations. Some of the most important conversations happen without words. Could words soften the blow? Undoubtedly, but you can’t manage another person’s path, and people can only have the tools they have. What you can do is recognize something very essential: if a person treats you poorly, that’s a reflection of where she is on her journey, it’s not a reflection of anything lacking within you, and then you can go about the business of healing. Your first task is going to be opening up your gorgeous heart once more. Try not to let the heartbreaks harden you. Recognize that people in pain spread pain, and that it can be no other way, and try to wish them well. In the meantime, let your own light shine.

Sending you love,

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

Swim with the Fishes

alextan Sometimes what we think we know prevents us from seeing clearly. In “Making a Friend of the Unknown”, a talk by one of my favorite poets, David Whyte, he shares about how he studied marine zoology before he dedicated himself to writing full-time. He went to the Galapagos Islands, and got in the water with the fish, and he said he was very disappointed to discover the animals had not read the same books he had, and that they had “lives of their own.” Awesome, right?

Our ideas and opinions and frame of reference color all of our experiences. We like to think we have things figured out, we have certain people “pegged”. Did it ever occur to you that your mother has a libido, and this is one of the reasons you exist? I’m not suggesting you have to dwell on your mother’s sexual drive, I’m just saying, do you think of your mother as a complete woman, with a life and feelings and mysteries all her own, heartbreaks you may know nothing about, secret hopes, dreams, longings, or do you have her in this box labeled “mom”?

We make snap judgments all the time, and let’s get clear on this–judgements are not bad; the mind is a tool of judgement. You pull up to a red light and make a judgement to stop your car. It’s pre-judging that gets us into trouble, and yet we’re so used to categorizing everything. We’re taking in so much information all the time, but we’re also missing so much. Maybe we see someone with a yoga mat slung over her shoulder and we think, “She’s like me”, or we notice someone’s cool tattoo, or their smile, or the way they’re carrying themselves and we think, “confident”, “charismatic”. Do you know a lot of sociopaths have those characteristics? I’m just saying.

I’ve been teaching so long at this point, mostly the room is full of people I know, with new faces showing up all the time, and I love that. It’s rare for me to deal with a room full of people I don’t know, who don’t know me, unless I’m traveling to teach a workshop somewhere. Sometimes in those instances, I can feel the energy in the room. The withholding, the resistance, the pause before the judgement. “Am I going to like this? Am I going to be happy I chose to spend my afternoon this way? Am I going to sweat? Is it only going to be about whether I sweat?” The mind is constantly pulling us out of our experience so we can make decisions about the experience we’re having, but the minute you label how you’re feeling, you aren’t feeling it anymore, you’re thinking.

My mother today is not the mother of my childhood, and my father today is not the same father I grew up with; people change and things change but sometimes our ideas do not change along with them. I’m not the same teacher I was ten years ago, nor do I want to be. We’re always learning and growing, and hopefully we’re allowing life to open us and strengthen us so we have more to give, but we stunt that process when we place our ideas and opinions all over everything. It’s like a grid or a screen we can’t see through. We’ve decided things have to be one way, and we reject anything that doesn’t match our vision.

There was a time, years ago when I’d first moved to L.A., when I took over the classes of a very popular teacher at a very popular gym. For a few weeks, I had to deal with that resistant and withholding energy in the room, until everybody decided it was going to be okay, and I had made the grade, so to speak. Except for this one guy who always stood at the front of the room, rolling his eyes at me throughout class, or shaking his head, or sighing loudly. It was clear to me that he couldn’t stand me, but that he was there because the time slot worked for him, and he liked the workout. This went on for months, and though I wanted to speak with him about it, he always came right on time, and left right after.

One day I ran into him on the way to class, and I said hi. We spoke for a few minutes. He seemed shy, maybe a little aloof, but not like a person who despised me. Nonetheless, the eye-rolling and huffy breaths continued, as did the head shaking. Then, one day he asked if we could go for a hike, and it turned out he’d been shaking his head at himself. The things I was saying were hitting a nerve, and resonating with him, and he had been rolling his eyes because he couldn’t believe he hadn’t been dealing with his deep need to heal. So this whole time, I’d thought he couldn’t stand me, and it turned out he followed me all over L.A. to take class, even after I left the gym and moved to a studio in Santa Monica. He’s since moved away, but once in awhile he’ll surprise me and show up in class. He’s my oldest regular, this guy who couldn’t stand my guts.

The more you can drop what you think you know, and just open to things as they are, the less you’ll struggle. Moving through life and interacting with people with curiosity is such a great way to go. We aren’t here to peg people, or to compete with them. We’re here to see, to share, to learn, to understand, to grow, to celebrate, to cherish. Life isn’t about surviving, it’s about thriving and shifting and opening. A lot of the time, we get in our own way and become our own obstacles. Drop the stance, remove the blinders, try not to cling to a picture in your head of how things should be or how people should be. Don’t be so sure that you already know what someone will say. Do not assume you’ve gathered all there is to know about your partner, even if, and especially if, you’ve been together for years. Try not to make snap judgements about people based on one conversation, one interaction, no matter how wonderful or miserable. Get in the water and swim and observe all the animals having lives of their own.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Let the Disappointments Strengthen You

shannona Few things feel worse than being used or duped, especially at the hands of someone we believed was a friend, but these things happen in life. Betrayal stings because we trusted, and we were wrong. Not only are we disappointed and sometimes disgusted with the other party, we’re also angry with ourselves for not having seen more clearly. Also, when we feel disgusted, it’s usually because we are really, really hurt.

The trap in these situations is to ask ourselves, “How can this person have done this to me?”, and begin to make our list of all the ways we’ve shown up and been a great and loyal friend, partner, or colleague. The reality is, it’s not about you. This person would do this to anyone in similar circumstances. This is where this person happens to be on his or her path at the present moment. You just crossed paths at the wrong time.

Now, how do you wrap your head around that if it’s your partner? How not to take it to heart in that scenario? It always takes two. In any relationship, the dynamic exists between the two parties. There’s you, your partner, and the space between you, and the relationship lives in that space. You are each responsible for what you contribute, whether it’s your care, your attention, your energy, your time, your love, your presence, your patience, compassion and forgiveness, your sense of fun, your willingness to keep learning about the other person, or not so much. You are responsible if you neglected that space, if you stopped looking or caring or listening, if you filled that space with your rage, resentment, boredom, fear, frustration, or if you didn’t fill the space at all. That’s the part to examine.

A lot of the time, we’re taking things personally that have nothing to do with us. If someone behaves in a way that lacks integrity, that’s their issue. The part that’s personal is the healing you’ll have to do if you got stung. Also, it’s helpful to remember those times when we did not show up the way we wish we had. No one operates from his or her highest self in every moment. We all make mistakes, we all blow it sometimes. Learning from our mistakes so we can make better ones moving forward is the thing. Practicing forgiveness for ourselves and others creates the environment for change and growth. Don’t get me wrong, there are some things that are just over the line. You can forgive people for your own well-being, and still choose not to have them in your life.

The thing is, life is short and precious. You can get really caught up feeling injured, wronged, or victimized, but that’s time you’ll never have back, and that isn’t a stance that’s going to serve you. Most people are just doing the best they can with what they’ve got. Sometimes people are really young, selfish, confused, or immature. We’ve all been those things at some point. No need to take it personally, because it’s not a reflection of anything lacking within you. As soon as you can, pick yourself up, because there’s a lot of beauty in this world, and there are a lot of wonderful human beings. As far as the people who’d walk through fire for you, don’t expect a roomful. Maybe a handful. For sure, one. You can always walk through the fire on your own behalf, and sometimes life asks that of us.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

What We Do with What We’re Given

Sometimes things happen that turn everything we thought we knew upside down and inside out. Recently, a woman wrote to me because she found out her husband had another family “on the side”. She and her husband have a son who’s five. She believed their son was her husband’s first child, but it turns out he has a daughter a year older. She told me she’d been impressed with her husband’s ability to change diapers and his ideas about breastfeeding, and just generally how comfortable he’d been when their son was an infant. She didn’t realize he’d been through it before. And when she approached him about wanting a second baby, he told her he really felt he was a “one-and-done” kind of guy, but it turns out he has another son, too. He had a second baby with the other woman.

You might wonder how he was able to pull this off for so many years, but he travels on business all the time, and she never thought to worry. She said she believed they were happy. That in their social circle, they were the couple everyone envied because they were still so romantic and seemingly in love with each other. College sweethearts, the whole nine. She found out because the other woman called her. She didn’t want to live in hiding anymore. She wanted to be able to have a normal life. She wanted to post pictures of her kids on Facebook, and go to school gatherings with the father of her children. I mean, it was only a matter of time before this whole thing exploded. The kids are getting older. He has three children calling him Daddy, in two different states.

Anyway, it’s a total mess. And clearly, this man needs some serious help. I don’t know enough about him, his background, his pain, his mental condition, and nine hundred other factors to even begin to comment on what could drive a person to wreak havoc on so many lives, including his own.

The wife is reeling. She’s trying to keep it together for the sake of her son. She told her husband to get out, and she called a lawyer. But it’s the emotional part that’s brutal. A lawyer can’t help you negotiate an earthquake that shakes the foundation of your life. That makes you search back and relive every moment that didn’t quite add up, to replay every conversation, to find the thread that began to unravel when you didn’t notice. In addition to a lawyer, she also called a therapist, her entire family, and her closest friends. She asked me to write about it. She needs support, and she’s reaching out, which is good.

Obviously, this is an extreme example, but most of us have experienced betrayal of some kind. Or we’ve been blindsided when something ended and we just did not see it coming. Or we thought we knew someone and it turns out we didn’t, not really. The hardest part in all of that is feeling like you cannot trust your own judgement. Do you remember that inane conversation about the color of that dress a few weeks ago? Was it black and blue or white and gold? What an extraordinary amount of time we wasted on that. But that’s what it’s like when something rocks the foundation of everything you believed you could count on. Was my marriage real? Was anything he said real? Was the love real? Was the family real? I’m looking at this and it looks purple, but is it? I mean, you just can’t trust anything anymore.

The key toward putting your world back together in times like those is just to take it one breath at a time, and to allow yourself to feel whatever you need to feel. Heartbroken. Enraged, Astounded. Depressed, scared. She told me she feels ashamed and humiliated, amongst many other emotions. We talked about the shame part. I told her there’s never any shame in loving all the way, and trusting and giving. There is a clear lack of self-respect when someone lies and betrays and sneaks around, and I told her those are things her soon-to-be ex-husband will have to grapple with, but she has nothing to feel ashamed about.

Humiliation is another thing, though. That word comes from the Latin “humus”, which means ground, soil, or earth. As if we’re being returned to the ground, to the dirt. And I’ve felt that way before myself. As much as we wouldn’t wish it on ourselves or anyone else, there’s something freeing about being returned to the earth. And about questioning everything. I’m definitely not suggesting this is some blessing in disguise, although clearly she’s been building her life with a person who has deep-rooted problems, I’m just saying once she allows herself the time and space to grieve and heal, she can start to build something new. She can begin again, from the ground up. And there’s no doubt this experience is going to make her grow and open and strengthen in ways she wouldn’t have without out. It always comes down to what we do with what we’re given.

Life is full of curve-balls, and many people are in unfathomable pain. There are also beautiful people in this world who would never, ever betray you, and there are experiences that take your breath away with the sheer force of their awesomeness. We never know what life has in store for us. It is humbling, but it’s also interesting and amazing. Whatever’s happening in your world, remember there’s only one you in the known universe. Only one. Feed your spark, and try to trust in your process. Leave room for life to show up with the joy, too. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

Don’t Consent to Poor Treatment

eleanorr Not all friendships or romantic relationships will stand the test of time, and that is okay. Of course it hurts, but it’s just the way of things. People change, circumstances change, everything in the known universe is in constant motion. Sometimes we think something is “for life”, but it turns out not to be. Certain people are going to turn out to be “somebody that you used to know.” Yes, you can thank me for having that song stuck in your head for the next little while. But it’s really the truth.

Of course it doesn’t feel good when someone rejects us or ditches us or treats us with very little respect or concern. Especially if there’s a history of kindness and shared memories, of times when you really went out of your way to show up or to help, but if you are suddenly discarded, you’ll probably look back and realize you were dealing with a mostly one-way street. Someone who genuinely cares about you will not treat you carelessly, no matter how caught up he or she might be with other interests.

If someone is behaving in a disappointing way, that’s no reflection on you, it’s a reflection of where that person happens to be on her or his own path. You don’t have to take it to heart. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting or hurt, it just means you don’t have to take it as a sign that you’re easy to discard. There’s another great Eleanor Roosevelt quote, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”

Generally, you’re dealing with one of two things: either you have some part in the dissolution of what was once a beautiful bond, but the other party is unwilling or unable to communicate in a respectful way so you can understand a differing point of view, and apologize if the situation warrants that, or, you’re dealing with a person who truly doesn’t give a sh%t. And either way, it takes two to make a “thing go right”. There’s another song for you, you’re welcome.

If a person won’t tell you what’s up, don’t lose sleep over it. I mean, in order to own your end of a thing, a person has to be willing to tell you what the thing is, and if they won’t, it really has to go in your, “no time for this” folder. Because that’s okay in high school, but otherwise, not so much. If a person doesn’t care enough to communicate, why waste your precious time and energy on it?

The thing is, life is so short. All you can do is manage the way you show up, and pay attention to what you do. If you blow it, own it, apologize, and take some time for self-inquiry so you can learn and grow and do it better the next time. Try not to hurt people. If you’re the person doing the leaving, whether we’re talking about the end of a friendship or a romantic relationship, communication is always a good way to go. I mean, if you went on one date with someone and it wasn’t a match, I’m not saying you have to spend an hour talking about why that is, but don’t say you’ll call if you have no intention of calling, because that’s also only okay in high school, and not really even then. If someone is into you and it isn’t mutual, don’t leave them hanging in the wind. People are precious and the human heart is tender. Take care of your own, and be kind to others.

Sending you love, lovers,

Ally Hamilton

That’s How the Light Gets In

leonardcohen I remember the morning my mom told me my dad didn’t live with us anymore. I was almost four, and we were sitting at the dining room table at breakfast, and she told me he was going to be living somewhere else, and that eventually I would visit him there. I went into their bedroom, and looked through all his drawers and closets. His denim shirts were gone, his sun lamp was gone, and so were the styrofoam heads that held his different wigs; he was an actor. When I saw he’d left his robe, I thought he’d have to come back, but I was wrong.

It had been a confusing time already. My beloved grandma had died the week before, and I’d been too young to visit in her hospital room that last day, which was probably good. I remember my grandma laughing, and hugging me, full of life. But suddenly it seemed people were disappearing, and not peripheral players, either. We’d seen my grandma almost every day of my life. She and my mom were really close. She and I were really close. It amazes me to think about the impact she’s had on my life, and to realize I didn’t even get four full years with her. Now my dad had gone to some unknown place, and I had no real sense of time. I don’t know how my mom got through that conversation with me without crying.

For years, I lived in fear of being left. I didn’t realize I was doing this, of course, but it’s obvious in the rear-view mirror. I tried to be a good girl. I thought if I got straight-A’s and looked right and behaved well, then maybe I’d be safe, and that followed me into my adulthood. I entered into relationships with people not thinking about what I wanted or needed, or even if I was having fun, but solely focused on how I could be perfect for them; how I could make myself indispensable. Un-leave-able.

I’m sharing this with you not because it’s a heartbreaking tale. I hear worse stories every day. Lots of people get divorced (not that it makes it easy on the children involved), lots of people lose their grandparents. The proximity in my case was unfortunate because it was like a bomb went off, or an earthquake shook the foundation of what I’d known, but my parents had been keeping up appearances because my grandma was sick that last year, and they didn’t want her to worry. I know someone who watched his father die at eight years old while they were playing. I know someone who’s dad left when she was seven and never looked back. I can’t even wrap my head around how you could leave your kid and never look back. And then there are stories of abuse and neglect and all kinds of things that would leave you on your knees. My point in sharing is that our pain does not just magically disappear. If we don’t examine it when we become conscious adults, it swims beneath the surface of everything we do, wreaking havoc on our lives, and life doesn’t have to be that way. We all want to heal. We all want to be happy. We wrote it into our Declaration of Independence, so there’s not much doubt that we value happiness. It’s just that the large majority of us will seek to heal in all the ways that make things worse.

Because we long to heal, we call into our lives those dynamics that reflect our deepest wounds. Most of the time, we don’t even know we’re doing that. If you’re afraid of being left, you probably have an excellent, uncanny, perverse knack for picking people who struggle to commit. This is no coincidence, because, presto! Now you have your chance to heal, right? All you have to do is get your partner to want to be with you, and that will be the balm for your original wound. Except it won’t, because if you pick people who struggle to commit, you set yourself up to be left again, thus confirming your deepest fear that you are the kind of person it’s easy to leave. Or worse, that you just aren’t worthy of love. You’re leave-able, not lovable.

There’s the hard, long road, and there’s the hard, short road. I’m not going to lie about that, those are the choices. I mean, those are the choices unless you happen to be one of the three people in the world who had idyllic childhoods, and even if you are, someone else has probably come along and broken your heart by now. Chances are, you probably have some issues, some stuff to work through like any other human, and it’s not a level playing field as I mentioned above, so what you’ll need to heal, and how long it will take and what tools you’ll use are all personal. Avoiding that work is a surefire way to prolong your pain and allow unconscious drives to rule your life. The longer you wait, the longer you suffer. There’s no reason your past has to screw up your present. You are not stuck in a time-warp.

It took me a long time and a lot of work to get right with myself, and it’s still a daily practice, but at this point, I’m in the maintenance part. Of course things come up that might tap an old wound, but the wounds have scar tissue, they aren’t raw and bleeding, and they aren’t unknown to me. They’re almost like old, familiar friends. Ah, fear of abandonment. I feel you. I see you. I tip my hat to you. But you don’t own me anymore.

If you’re an adult, and you’ve had enough time as an adult to recognize patterns in your life that aren’t serving you, I’d get on that. Tools that have worked for me are a daily yoga practice (and I mean all eight limbs), seated meditation, and therapy. If you want to try some yoga with me right now, you can go here.

I’ve also read some tremendously helpful books, and I’ve done quite a lot of journaling. There are so many tools available. It’s my personal belief that it isn’t a luxury to pursue healing modalities until you find a mix that works for you; I believe it’s your responsibility. You have this life. You have a body. You have time and energy. These things are all gifts. Then, there are your own, particular gifts that are born of your own experiences and perspective and ways of looking at the world. There’s only one of you. So if you don’t figure out how to set yourself free, you rob the world of gifts only you can bring to it. That would be a tremendous shame.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Do It Anyway

susan-jeffers So much of the time, the thing that’s blocking us from being at peace, and from expanding and opening in all the ways we could, is our ability or willingness to trust, and release our hold on an idea, or a way of being, or a path that just doesn’t feel right anymore. For many people, fear of the unknown is so debilitating, they’d rather stay where they are and suffer; at least it’s a known entity, and there’s some kind of ground underneath their feet.

The truth is, life involves risk. We risk our hearts when we love people, whether we’re talking about our romantic interests, our children, our parents, or our best friends. The more invested we are, the more deeply we love, the more we know we would suffer were anything to happen to the relationship, and things do happen sometimes, as we all know. There are families that fall apart because there’s a refusal to back down, or compromise, or hear another person’s point of view. Sometimes we lose people due to an inability to accept and love people as they are, and sometimes we lose people in the most profound and painful way, but what would life be without love and connection? I wouldn’t be reckless with your heart, as it is tender, but I wouldn’t build walls around it, either.

Often, we have a picture in our heads of “how things should be”, and nothing else will satisfy us, but you know when things are flowing, and you know when they aren’t. There’s a huge difference between working your ass off in service to your dreams and your gifts, and refusing to accept reality as it is. For example, every relationship requires effort and nurturing and time and energy. If you want to love another person in a real and full way, you have to be willing to listen, to move through the storms with them, to choose them every day, and especially on the days when it would be easier to bolt, but that’s different from forcing something that doesn’t feel right anymore. You want to work on something that’s growing, that has potential. You don’t want to work on deluding yourself.

Life is not easy. I would argue that it’s gorgeous sometimes, and wildly interesting, but I don’t believe anyone would suggest it’s easy. Sometimes it breaks your heart with no warning on a normal Tuesday morning. We just never know, but one of the things that makes life a LOT easier is opening to things as they are, and following the call of your heart and the voice of your intuition. I just don’t think you can get too lost or too delayed on your path if you do that. We all hit speed bumps from time to time, or find ourselves in a ditch, but if you’re trusting and allowing more, and clinging less, it makes the journey so much more enjoyable. It’s like riding with the windows down and the wind in your hair, with no map and no destination, and good tunes playing, or the sound of the waves crashing. You know, the stuff you don’t want to miss. The stuff that makes you feel alive.

Sometimes a way of being is so ingrained, we just can’t fathom anything else. How can we leave or shift or change? What would we do? How would life look? How would our loved ones respond? Maybe you’re in a situation and you’re telling yourself it’s impossible to do anything else. Maybe you spend a lot of your time making lists in your head of all the reasons you’re stuck. Why don’t you try daydreaming for a little bit? Just drop all the reasons why not, and allow your mind to play with a different vision. Sometimes when someone is struggling with a pose in class, I’ll suggest that they see themselves doing it in their mind. This is not because I’m invested in their “getting the pose.” I’m invested in their vision of themselves, their belief in themselves, their perception of what might be possible. If you tell yourself you can’t, there’s no hope, because there’s no incentive to try. If you tell yourself, “Well, maybe…” you open up a world of possibilities. Sometimes you just have to go on faith. Sometimes you have to gather your strong center and take a chance with the understanding that you might fall on your face, and that that is okay. It’s never the falling down. It’s always the process of getting up. That’s the stuff that strengthens us and teaches us and helps us to grow.

The thing is, you cannot cling and fly simultaneously. Trusting your gut requires bravery, there’s no doubt about that, but you have to show up for yourself in this life. You have to be willing to act on your own behalf when necessary. There’s no way to predict the future, but you can screw up your present with a lot of fear. Allow life to surprise you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

With Strong Determination…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Happy New Year!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Five-Year Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

What You Give

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Grief, Healing & Connection

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Trust and Release

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

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

The Game of Life

A few weeks ago, my kids and I were introduced to “The Game of Life” when friends of ours brought it over to play one night. If you aren’t familiar with it, you start off in a car and you make choices along the way. Maybe you decide to go to college. You might pull over to get married and have babies. You might hit the jackpot, find your dream job, or lose big if you decide to take the risky route. Anyway, you get the picture. Since we’d never played before, we read the directions before we started, and under the section, “How to Win”, it says, “The person with the most money at the end wins the game of life.” So, of course, we had a big conversation about how untrue that is in real life, not that this is a new topic around our house.

But it got me to thinking. Can you imagine if the board game resembled actual life? Okay, folks, here are the rules! You’re going to start off in your little car, and the road underneath you is going to be shifting all the time, so there’s no point in giving you a map; good luck figuring out which way to turn! Maybe you’re going to get a great car, and maybe your car is going to be running on fumes, because all the players start out with different advantages. Your home might be full of love, or you might live with an abusive alcoholic, who knows?! Then, you’ll start making your choices, mostly in the dark because you’re supposed to know what you want to do and who you want to be by the time you’re eighteen. And some of you will be nurtured and supported and you’ll have good self-esteem, and some of you will be neglected or mistreated and you won’t believe in yourself at all, so you’ll all have different tools at your disposal. Also, at any time, you could be killed, and so could any of the people you hold most dear. We can’t tell you what happens after you die, or they die, and we can’t tell you how long anyone has, this is all part of the game! Okay, everybody, let’s have some fun!

I mean, seriously, who would want to play that game? It’s crazy, right? But this is the gig. Now, of course, I’m being a little facetious. Because there’s so much that’s amazing and incredible about this experience of being human. So much beauty and depth and love and light and emotion that just fills your heart with yes. Being able to love the way we do, for instance. Being able to care, to extend ourselves, to share, to connect. It’s pretty awesome. But the parameters are crazy, and for a lot of people, they make the game of life a painful journey. You don’t get to know what’s coming. You don’t get to have any reassurance that your big life decisions will pan out the way you hope they will. You don’t get to “pin people down”, or depend on any kind of stability, unless you nurture that within yourself.

And that’s really the key to this game. Figuring out what will bring us peace as we journey onward. It’s the moments. When you look back on your life so far, I’m sure there are moments that stand out. Some of them are beautiful and some of them are devastating. Time folds in on itself, and we can travel back to moments inside of a single blink, a scent on the air, something someone says that jogs a memory we haven’t thought of in years. Maybe we have moments when we felt humiliated, ashamed, caught with our pants down literally or figuratively. Maybe we have moments when our trust was betrayed and we stood in the shower at 3am, our tears and the water mixing together, the pain in our hearts overwhelming. Maybe we have moments when we thought we wouldn’t make it, only to be gifted with the greatest treasure we’ll ever know. But they’re moments that make up the fabric of each of our lives. And they’re borne of our ability to be present and engaged with our intuition. That’s the only worthwhile map you’re going to get. You can’t count on the road to curve a certain way, even if it did yesterday. You can’t count on people to stay the same, because they won’t, and neither will you. You can’t count on conditions around you, because those are also part of nature, and as such, constantly in flux. If you want to “win” this game of life, you have to be true to yourself.

This will almost undoubtedly mean you’ll have some dragons to slay. We all have pain, and our pain is our path, but most people run like hell from it, sending their cars careening this way and that, running into trees, walls, telephone poles, blowing out their tires, and stopping only to get gas. Not a fun way to journey. When you fight for peace within yourself, you might have to pull off to the side of the road for awhile, and it might be deeply uncomfortable or painful, but at least you find liberation that way. So you can get back in your car and slow down, since you now understand there’s no need to race, and that racing will actually cause you to miss precious moments that could have happened if you hadn’t been in such a rush, to what? Escape death? You’ll realize the thing is to roll down your windows and take in the sights and the smells and the colors, to feel the wind whipping through your hair, and the sunlight or the rain on your face. You’ll realize the sound of laughter always trumps the sound of a text message coming in, and that a look from the right person can take your breath away.

The rules aren’t easy, but the experience is incredible. Hoping you’re slowing down and letting in the light. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

You Have to Choose It

failurepickford We all have our stuff; ways we’ve been hurt or disappointed, longing that’s gone unmet, grieving we’ve had to do. We also have our histories, our patterns, those dynamics we grew up with that shape (but needn’t define), who we are. The more work we do to know ourselves, the easier life becomes. Otherwise we’re being pulled by unconscious drives, and are along for a bumpy, painful and confusing ride.

Having said that, consciousness is not the final destination. You might know yourself well. You might recognize your tendencies and know exactly what’s driving you. You might understand and embrace in your heart what’s true for you, what scares you, what excites you and inspires you. That’s all amazing, and what we work toward, because that way we can be accountable to ourselves and to everyone else. But in large part, happiness is a choice, and it can take enormous willpower to choose it.

Don’t get me wrong, here, because there are heartbreaking, stressful, lonely times in life when it would be unrealistic to think or expect that you could simply choose to be happy. When we lose people we love, for example, it’s appropriate and healthy to grieve. When we’re under enormous pressure to keep a roof over our heads, it lacks compassion for someone to suggest to us that we should just choose to be happy. I’m not talking about those times.

I’m talking about the day-to-day rhythm when we can easily allow the mind to get snagged on what isn’t going well, on what we don’t have that others seem to, on everything that hasn’t happened yet. You can look up “negativity bias” if you like, because we’re naturally inclined to be on the alert for any potential dangers. This is a life skill we don’t need the way we used to, but old habits die hard. Since we don’t have to worry about saber tooth tigers chasing us down for dinner, we might dwell on paying the mortgage, or our inability to feel like life is flowing the way we wish it would, and lose sight of all we do have, like our health, the ability to put our hands over our hearts and breathe in deeply and breathe out fully, which feels great (try it if you don’t believe me), the sun shining in a particular way, or the laugh of someone we love so much, the way their nose crinkles when they smile.

The other thing is, just knowing we have unhealthy tendencies in some areas is not always enough to stop us from playing them out, even though we know they lead to a head-on collision with a brick wall. This, once again, is where willpower and vigilance come in. If, for example, you have a history of dating people who are unavailable in some way, and you’ve come to understand that pursuing people like that leads to your own heartbreak, you may still feel pulled to head in that direction should the opportunity present itself, even if you’ve worked on bringing this pattern to the surface, even if you’re extremely self-aware. This little (or big) pull may always be there; it’s what you do, or don’t do about it that matters. Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen, and this goes for your habits, too. Don’t feed your pathology. If you meet someone at work and you start having a coffee here and there, and you find out along the way that they live with someone, but you’ve already developed a little crush, I would say get the f&ck out of Dodge, and do it now, no more coffees, no more flirting, just shut the thing down. If you meet someone and they’re in all kinds of pain, and you can tell they just really need to be loved, and you feel like you’re the one who can love them the way no one else has ever been able to love them before, if you tell yourself you’re the missing link, and your love can heal them and save them, even though you’ve done this in the past and you know it’s futile, I would say, get the f&ck out of Dodge, and do it now.

It’s not okay to be reckless with your heart. If you are, you’ll find your heart will harden eventually, and out of your mouth will come words like, “You can’t trust anyone”, or “People suck”, and neither of those things are true. Also, you’ll prevent yourself from diving in all the way when things are good, because some part of you will still be pulled toward those things that bring you pain. As I’m writing this, it’s 12:45am, and a woman is walking by my house on her cellphone, crying loudly between bursts of words. I don’t know who’s on the other end of the phone, but it’s clear she doesn’t feel heard because she’s raising her voice, and she’s sobbing about why it always has to be this way, why this person has to keep hurting her. The real question is why she’s choosing to participate. Because I really think life is too short to spend the wee hours of a morning that way. People can’t “keep hurting us” unless we give them the power to do that (I’m not talking about things that may have happened when you were a child. Children are powerless in abusive situations, and some adults feel that way, as well. If you fall into that category, you need to reach out for help).

Feeling pulled in an unhealthy direction is fine. Acknowledging that it’s happening is good, especially when we do that with people we can trust. Bringing our darkness into the light takes the power away from it. But feelings aren’t facts, and we don’t have to act on every feeling we have. In fact, there are a lot of feelings we’d do best to observe, because all feelings have one thing in common: they arise, they peak, and they subside. No feeling lasts forever. Once again, I’ll suggest to you that yoga is an excellent way of training yourself to sit with uncomfortable feelings, calmly. Holding Warrior II when your quad is burring, and sweat is dripping down your face, teaches your mind and your nervous system to breathe through sensation. That’s all a feeling is—it’s a sensation. If you need help with this, or want to try practicing with me online, you can sign up for a free trial here. Sending you love, and reminding you to starve your pathology. Your heart will thank you for it.

Ally Hamilton

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

Freedom

futurepast It seemed like a a good day to write about freedom. When we haven’t done the work to heal, and by that I mean, get real with ourselves and seek help if we need it, we are owned by our pain. If we have doubts about whether we are truly lovable, worthwhile, special, unique…that doubt and fear will permeate everything. Following your heart takes enormous courage, and in order to be courageous, you have to believe in your ability to shine; to offer up something only you can. So many people are owned by the idea, “Who am I to chase my dreams?”, or, “Who am I to color outside the lines?”

If you doubt your worthiness to be loved, you’ll play that out by chasing people who seem on the fence about being with you. Rejection will be like a hook, because you’ll see your own doubt in yourself reflected back at you, and in your effort to heal, you’ll pursue, thinking if you can convince other people, maybe you’ll also convince yourself. But it doesn’t work that way, and this is what I mean about being a slave to your pain. Anything we repress, deny or run from, owns us. It might be unconscious, we might not even realize what’s driving us; people suffer without knowing why, it happens all the time. You will never be free from your past, or free from your rage or your fear or your grief until you allow these feelings to catch up with you, until you turn around and sit down and allow this stuff to wash over you. I realize that doesn’t sound like fun, but it’s a lot better than the alternative, because you might be deeply uncomfortable in the short-term, but you’ll be on the path to your own liberation. The other way, you’ll be on the run your whole life.

Knowing yourself is the most freeing thing there is, and not knowing yourself is the loneliest thing I know. When we aren’t sure what lights us up, what scares us, what excites and inspires us, or where we have healing to do, we’re left to flail around in the dark. When we don’t have a strong center, the chances that we’ll betray ourselves in important ways increase exponentially. If you want to be free, you have to take ownership of your life, and you may have to abandon your way of being if it isn’t working for you. When I say “your way of being”, I mean your way of being in the world. If life doesn’t feel good, whatever you’ve been doing so far isn’t working well. Maybe you’re owned by ideas like, “Everybody leaves”, or, “Everybody cheats”, or, “You can’t trust anyone.” How about, “Life isn’t fair”? Or, “I never get any breaks”, or, “No one likes me”? If any of that sounds familiar, I’d get busy breaking those chains, because that’s a prisoner’s mentality.

We can’t control or rewrite what has already happened, any more than we can predict the future. What we can do is lean into our pain and look unflinchingly, but with compassion, at how we’ve been managing ourselves. How we’ve been showing up for ourselves and the people we love. How willing we’ve been to reach out and ask for support when we need it. How much we’re trying to control, and how much we’re able to face reality as it is. To be curious about how things are, instead of being attached to a picture in our heads of how things should be.

The more able you are to work on the things you can control (the way you respond to whatever life puts in your path), and let go of the things you cannot (pretty much everything else), the more you’ll free yourself from suffering. Wishing that for you, and for all of us. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be free.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you might like the books!

OPR (Other People’s Rage)

neededwanted Once when I was about sixteen, I was walking up Columbus Avenue with my dad. We were having a conversation about something I can’t remember, and suddenly, my dad lashed out and hit me on the side of my head with the back of his hand, hard. I was completely stunned, because I hadn’t said anything of note, and I turned to him and asked why he’d done it. It turned out he’d misheard me, and had thought I’d said something disrespectful. I know he’d take that moment back if he could. It’s one of those things I hope he’s forgotten, but to me, it stood out. The other thing that stands out for me is that I squelched my feelings about what had happened. I didn’t want him to feel any more terrible about what he’d done than he already did, so I blinked back my tears, and tried to make my voice sound normal, but I had this wave of deep pain, as low in your body as you can feel something. Even though our conversation continued, part of me was back in the middle of that block, getting smacked on the side of the head, again and again. Like instant replay in slow motion, my brain and my heart trying to make sense out of it.

Life is like that sometimes. We’re going along, doing our best to put one foot in front of the other and stay open, and BAM! We get hit upside the head, out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, or because we’ve been misunderstood. Maybe we’ve crossed paths with someone at a time when s/he is full of anger or pain or confusion. Maybe you came into your parents’ lives when they were in the midst of chaos like that. It’s so hard not to take things personally, especially when our ears are ringing or we feel we’re on the wrong end of someone’s unjustified attack.

People can only be where they are, and they can only use the tools they’ve got. If someone lashes out at you, it’s an expression of pain that exists within them, and there’s nothing you can do to fix that or cure that. You can care, and you can try to get them some help if they’re open to that, but you have to take care of your own tender heart. You are not here to be anyone’s punching bag while they figure out their stuff. We all have our stuff. It’s what we do about it that matters. When we try to take the hit for someone else’s bad behavior, we do ourselves, and them, a disservice. It would have been completely appropriate for me to tell my dad I wanted to go home, or be by myself. It would have been fine for me to hail a cab. It would have been okay for me to allow him to see how much I was hurt, but I didn’t do any of those things. I tried to spare him the consequences of what he’d done, and in doing so, I absorbed that pain and robbed him of a chance to grow. I told him it was okay, even though it was not.

If you’re like me, you feel awful when you make a mistake. I can forgive other people pretty easily, but man, do I put myself through the wringer when I don’t show up the way I want to. Part of that is appropriate, but some of it is not good. It’s taken me years to shorten the time I beat myself up when I blow it. It used to be days I’d replay a thing. Eventually I got it down to a day, then an afternoon, then a few hours. These days, I remind myself regularly that I’m a human being, and as such, I will make mistakes. I examine what was happening for me when I let myself down, so I can be more aware of who I am, and do it differently next time. When someone around me makes a mistake, I assume they’ll also have to go through this tedious and uncomfortable process of forgiving themselves, which really might not be the case.

This desire to prevent those we love from having to deal with the consequences of their own actions is not actually a loving impulse, although it feels like one. Sometimes a person needs to see the pain they’ve caused in order to make a change. Robbing them of that process is not a loving act. Forgiving someone for lacking the tools to show up for you in a different way might be a loving act, as long as you don’t forget to love yourself as you do that.

When we take a thing personally, we internalize it. We process what’s happened in terms of cause and effect. If Y happened, X must have happened first, and we start to examine ourselves to see what we’ve done to cause this event, or what we haven’t done. What we are, or what we’re lacking. When really, it may have nothing at all to do with us. When we try to manage another person’s path by sparing them the suffering they might need to feel in order to grow, we are also internalizing pain. Internalized pain leads to rage and sadness. Don’t get me wrong, here. I am not talking about times when we’ve done something to hurt someone and they’ve lashed out. I’m not saying we’re always blameless. I’m saying in those situations when you really feel blindsided, when you are not guilty of doing anything but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is not a moment when you need to swallow the monster of someone else’s rage, and carry it with you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You Can’t Run

shadow Recently I was traveling, and happened to sit next to a man on a long flight. As these things go, we struck up a conversation that was interrupted several times by one or the other of my children, but over the course of the flight, I pretty much heard his life story. When he found out I was a yoga teacher, he perked up, and began asking me questions about his legs. He’s a serious runner, swimmer and cyclist, and has been for his whole life. He does triathlons and marathons and 5k’s and he’s done Ironman several times, but over the last year, his legs started giving out. He’d be running a few miles, or swimming a short distance, or cycling around his neighborhood trails, and suddenly his legs would lose their steam, cramp up, refuse to go on.

He’s been to all kinds of doctors, he’s had MRIs, been to PT, you name it, and no one can find anything physically wrong. So I asked him if anything had happened in the last year, anything emotional. He looked at me like I was a little crazy, and then admitted he’d been through a painful divorce, and lost his mother, all in the same year. I asked him if running, cycling and swimming were coping mechanisms for him. Obviously, they’re healthy activities, but like anything else, when done to the extreme, they can be debilitating. He said without a doubt, these were the resources he used to “get through his childhood and teenage years”.

It turns out he comes from an abusive and alcoholic family, and he grew up feeling unsafe, unseen and unheard. He found relief by joining the swim team, the track team, and cycling to and from school when he got old enough. He said those were the times he could forget his life, the awful stuff that was happening at home, the rage he felt toward his dad, and the powerlessness he felt regarding his mom, whom he adored but couldn’t save. He said he’d been struggling with depression for most of his life, but it had taken a turn over the last year, and that he’d sought help from a therapist. He went on antidepressants for several months, but then stopped them cold turkey, thinking they might be the reason his legs were giving out. He said he’d never really wanted to be on meds in the first place, but also that they had helped.

Anyway, he’s been off his medication for months, and still the legs won’t do what he wants them to do. He said there have been moments when he’s so frustrated on a run, or a ride, that if he had a knife with him, he would have stabbed himself in the quads. That’s grief, rage and pain for you, and I’m sharing this with you, with his permission, because I don’t think it’s all that uncommon.

The body is with us through everything. We’re energetic creatures, and we both absorb and emit energy. If you grew up in a war zone, you’re probably familiar with cowering, crouching, covering your head and face with your arms, making yourself invisible or invaluable. Children who grow up this way don’t spend time discovering who they are or what makes them happy. They’re too focused on survival and how to maneuver or help or be “good enough” to stop the abuse, to consider things like what makes them happy, or what they’d like to be doing on any particular afternoon. When you worry for your own safety, or your mother’s, when you feel terrified and helpless, believe me, this stuff gets stored in your body. Maybe you grind your teeth or you have migraines, or you walk around with your shoulders up around your ears all the time, or you have ulcers, or you’re loathe to leave the safe space of your house (if you’ve managed to create a safe space for yourself). Trauma lives in the body, and unless you give it an outlet, unless you acknowledge its existence, you will carry it with you.

We all have our coping mechanisms, and some of them are healthy, and some of them are not. Even exercise, widely accepted as a healthy outlet, can become a source of addiction for people. In this particular case, we have a man running, swimming, and cycling away from a lifetime of pain. And you know, you just can’t outrun this stuff. At a certain point, if you don’t stop, and get still, and allow the pain to wash over you, it will own you for your entire life. I think his legs are giving out because his heart is in need of his kind attention, and I think he knows that, because he sought help from a therapist. It was still hard for him to accept that the source of his frustration with his legs could be emotional. Of course I can’t know this for sure, but there’s nothing physically wrong, and my guess is that once he allows himself to really examine and lean into all that grief and rage and guilt and shame (although he’s blameless), it will lose its grip on him. I think his body is giving out so that he has no option but to try things another way, because being on the run isn’t working anymore.

For most of us, this is what it takes. Most people will not wake up one day and decide to face their pain. Most people will have to be pushed to do that, pushed into acknowledging that what they’ve been doing simply isn’t working. Life has to become unmanageable and unlivable before the large majority of people will opt to work with their grief. I think this is because we fear the pain will overwhelm us, when the reality is, not facing it is what does that. Yes, he’ll probably be deeply uncomfortable, enraged or heartbroken for the short-term; he has a lot to process. The loss of his childhood, for one. The loss of his innocence. Some things are taken from us that we can never have back, and some mourning is in order for loss like that. The loss of his mother, the loss of his marriage, his house, many of his friends, his routine, his place in the world, but this is what’s in his path. You can’t cycle over that stuff. You can’t swim underneath it. You can’t run away from it. You have to turn around, sit down, and open to it. Then you can release the heat of it, the rage of it, the burning grief of it, and then, my guess is, you can get back on your feet and find your legs are working again, and that they’ll take you where you want to go, instead of where you need to go. That makes all the difference in the world, and that isn’t something that’s going to show up in an MRI. This stuff I’m talking about is the business of your heart, your mind, and your emotional body, and if you want to be at peace, you’re going to have to get acquainted with all three.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If you like the posts, you can find my books here.

Clear Communication

millman We’ll all have times in our lives when we need to stand up for ourselves, or create boundaries with people for our own well-being. Depending on your history and your personality, this can be very challenging. So may people avoid uncomfortable or painful conversations because they fear hurting or disappointing the other person, or because they know once they speak about what’s true for them, everything will change. Maybe they’re afraid of the other party’s reaction, or they just want to do what they want to do without having to compromise or be confronted. When we try to maneuver around what’s true for us, or push those feelings away, or numb them out, we land in a world of pain.

Facing reality as it is, even when it breaks your heart, and maybe especially then, is always your most powerful option. No one wants to live a lie, or have to numb the edges every day so their fuzzy reality almost looks like what they’d hoped to create in their lives. You can’t nurture yourself, or anyone else when you’re denying what’s true in your heart, because it’s just so depleting. Letting fear stand between you, and a life that could feel good is one of the most disheartening experiences we have.

Most people would prefer the truth. Clear communication is such a gift. It’s not easy if it’s new to you, but being able to speak about how you feel calmly, and with compassion for yourself, and the other person, is a skill worth fighting for. No one likes to be kept in the dark, trying to piece together what’s really happening. If you’re close to someone, and something is off, you can feel that. Sometimes you already know a thing, you just don’t want to know it, you don’t want to accept it.

When you doubt yourself, your worth, or whether you’re lovable, it’s really time to get some help. Life is pretty short, and if it isn’t unfolding the way you’d like, you have to take ownership of those things you can control; namely, the way you respond to what you’ve been given, the way you show up for yourself and for the people in your life, and your ability to act on your own behalf. When you participate in a situation that’s crushing to you, you become lost to yourself. Trying to communicate clearly when the ground is slipping around underneath your feet is pointless. If you enter a conversation full of fear and doubt about who you are, what you want or need, what lights you up, what terrifies you, and/or what you have to offer, you can’t expect it to go well. If you’re trying to speak to someone with a strong personality or perspective, and you’re coming from a confused and weakened place, there’s a good chance how you feel will get swept under the rug.

Before you can be clear with other people, you have to get clear with yourself. How do you feel? What isn’t working for you? What changes would feel productive, and make the situation tenable for you? What are you afraid of? What do you want from the other person? Once you have those answers, you can share how you feel, but that’s the way to talk about it. It’s not pointing fingers. It’s not an attack. It’s a conversation that might start with the words, “I’m in pain”, or, “I’m scared to talk to you about this, and I hope you can help me to feel safe”, or, “I want us to be close, and in order for that to happen, I need to share how things are for me”, or, “I need to have a conversation with you, and it isn’t easy, and I don’t want to hurt you, but I have to tell you what’s in my heart.” Usually it’s starting that’s hard. Once you get those first words out, if you’ve given the situation enough thought, the rest will come.

When you’re centered and feeling strong, you can consider what you’re putting in the space between you and this other person. You can choose to fill it with rage and blame and a list of ways you’ve been wronged, or you can offer your honesty and your kindness. If you’re able to do the latter, that’s a gift you give to your own tender heart, and to that of the other party. May we all be strong, kind and clear.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You can find my books here <3

How to Stop Spiraling

pematimes Sometimes our minds take us for a very unpleasant ride. We start thinking about worst-case scenarios, about all the horrendous things that could happen, terrible tragedies that could befall us or those we love. We imagine conversations that might take place, making ourselves sick as though this interaction were real, and happening now. You can raise your blood pressure with your thoughts alone.

Maybe it’s because some primal part of us is still on the alert for predators. Negativity bias has been studied at length. Our ability to recall negative experiences is greater than our ability to remember positive ones, and this has been a major survival skill we’ve needed from the beginning of time. How to stay out of harm’s way, and how to use our past experiences to recognize and try to avoid danger in our future? Is there a saber-tooth tiger around the next corner? Are we going to have to run for our lives? Will we be able to find enough food to feed our families? Whatever the reasons, the mind can get snagged easily on the negative, even though most of us can go to the store to buy our kale, and are unlikely to find ourselves on the wrong side of a hungry tiger.

It’s not just mortal peril we obsess over. We’ve extended this sense of imminent danger to include ways we’ve been slighted, wronged, betrayed, and disappointed. We can focus on all the things we don’t have yet, and wonder why other people have them. We can dwell on all the ways we don’t measure up, all the mistakes we’ve made, all the dire consequences we’ve brought down upon ourselves.

If you find yourself spiraling in this way, chances are you’re feeling vulnerable, and one of the best ways to disrupt the cycle is to turn your attention to your breath. I know that sounds absurdly simple, and it is. It’s just not easy to catch yourself, but when you do, when you become aware that you’re in the midst of self-created agony, try placing one hand on your heart, the other on your belly. Slow down and deepen your breath, seeing if you can fill your belly first, and follow the inhale up into your chest. If this is new for you, being horizontal might be helpful, but you can definitely do this at your desk if you need to. Hold the inhale in for a beat, and then exhale slowly, emptying your chest first, then your belly, and hold the breath out for a beat. Focus on a complete out-breath. Then inhale again. Repeat the cycle several times. If you feel very anxious, see if you can go for sixty breaths. In this way, you’ll calm your nervous system; you have the power to do that. By focusing on your breath, you’ll train your mind on something real, something that is happening in the now. You’ll become present.

With presence, you can start to choose different thoughts. You can remind yourself of everything you do have. Maybe you have dreams, gifts to share, ideas that are particular to you, and grow from your own experiences in this life. Maybe you might remind yourself of some of your good traits, some kind things you’ve done. You might think about all the ways things could go right. You could imagine a conversation you want to have, and you could envision it happening with love and compassion. When we come back to the now, we also give ourselves the power to choose one thought over another, and then we can pick the thoughts that will strengthen us instead of weaken us. We can imagine for ourselves and for our loved ones, all the amazing scenarios that might unfold.

Your life is made up of moments. Worrying about what might happen in the future won’t change anything, it will just rob you of this moment. Dwelling on what’s already happened won’t change anything, it will only rob you of this moment. In this moment, there is the potential for whatever is real for you right now: joy, peace, grief, heartache, rage, envy, shame, fear, hope. There’s enormous power in being with what is, and in not allowing yourself to spiral into your past or into your imagined future. When you “stop the tape”, you give your mind a rest, and everything works better with rest. Then you might find some clarity, and an easier time figuring out what the next right step is.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Letting Go

livingellis When was the last time you told your story? You know, the “story of you” and how you came to be the way you are? I think it would be so brilliant if we could hear our take on ourselves at fifteen. If someone had recorded a conversation with us at that point, asking us about life, how things were with us, what our struggles seemed to be, why we were the way we were, that would be so interesting to hear later. Maybe again at twenty-five, and then we could all pay attention to the way we present ourselves currently. Hopefully the story would change, at least to some degree, or we would change the moments upon which we place importance.

We share these stories when we’re getting to know someone new. Sometimes it’s romantic, and in those cases it’s interesting to examine whether you offer everything up, or you edit out lots of things; which moments you choose to highlight, and which things you save for another time. When it isn’t romantic, it’s less complicated. We tend not to worry so much about how we’re received. Of course, you really just want to be yourself, either way, to be comfortable in your own skin, and to move toward people when the flow is good; when you don’t have to “work” in a conversation, or worry, or wonder.

Sometimes we’re holding onto ideas or memories or experiences we’d be wiser to release. Sometimes we’re attached to a way of thinking about ourselves that doesn’t serve us, or we have our list of ways we’ve been wronged, betrayed, or disappointed, and they dominate the story. Maybe we’re inclined to think of ourselves as damaged or broken, or easily left or hurt. We might dwell on our mistakes, regrets, paths not taken. Maybe we think eliciting sympathy is a way to get people to bond to us, or perhaps we like to think of ourselves as the hero. It’s illuminating to see what you lead with, and to examine whether it’s old stuff that you might be better off putting down, so something new and current and more accurate might emerge.

Your past shapes you, but it doesn’t have to define you. You can try to lay out your life in this linear way—this happened, and then this other thing happened, and then this happened, and so now this is the way I am—or, you can open to the reality that everything is in a constant state of flux, and although things may have happened that have shaped the way you look at the world, you don’t have to be confined by that. You could broaden your horizon by integrating those things without becoming limited by them.

Your pain is your prison, or it’s the key to your freedom. You get to choose. You can carry your pain, your history, your heartbreaks around with you like armor, and you can feed that stuff, so it grows and strengthens and follows you into every area of your life, eating away at your confidence that things might ever get better, or you can look at what’s happened and how these things have affected you, and you can decide to heal yourself. I say that like it’s easy, but it isn’t. If you decide to work with your pain, you’re setting yourself up to be deeply uncomfortable in the short-term, because taking ownership of your life takes guts. It means you aren’t going to feed the blame/shame cycle anymore, and you aren’t going to rely on your old coping mechanisms or stories about why you are the way you are. You’re going to accept and embrace all aspects of yourself, even those things that are not pretty, and maybe hard to face, so that there’s no need to run, or numb out, or reject, or deny what’s real for you.

It may be painful in the short term, because birthing anything into existence requires courage and patience and determination, and the willingness to grapple with what’s demanded. Your total vulnerability, for one thing. Your surrender, in the bravest sense. The payoff is worth it, though, because not knowing yourself is the loneliest thing there is. Understanding what scares you, what excites you, what stops you, what frees you up, what inspires you…that’s the stuff. That’s how you live a life that feels good to you. You really cannot do that if you’re clinging to that which weighs you down and eats you up. Sympathy is a poor bedfellow, and being the hero in every story is ridiculous. Being yourself is where it’s at; then you get to live the rest of your life in peace. Opening to things as they are, honoring your own tender heart, and showing up for yourself, and all the people in your life — no one can rob you of that, unless you let them. It might mean you have to search for the beauty in the aftermath of your devastation, so don’t think I’m saying this lightly. You might have to dig through your grief so you can remember it’s beautiful you loved so deeply. It isn’t all sunshine and roses, but if you face reality as it is, I think you’ll find there’s so much beauty and joy and love. In each day, there’s the potential to feel overwhelming gratitude, just for the experience of being human. Take a look at what you’re holding onto, and let go of anything that’s blocking your ability to live with your heart wide open. I don’t think any of the other alternatives are good. If you need a starting point, try this.

Sending love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

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

End with Love

tearscrymarquez Sometimes people create stories out of thin air and anger. Maybe they’ve been hurt or disappointed, maybe life isn’t unfolding the way they wanted it to, maybe they can’t stand facing the consequences of who they are or who they’ve been or what they’ve done just yet. Self-loathing is brutal, it’s a prison, and so many people think they can find liberation through blame and rage, denial and numbing out, but that stuff keeps us stuck. Horrendous things may have happened; unfair, heartbreaking loss, or neglect or abuse. The work is to heal, and to decide what we’re going to do with what we’ve been given, how we’re going to take charge of our own life and create something beautiful — what seeds we’re going to plant now, so something amazing and unexpected might grow, like the lotus flower emerging from the muck, gorgeous and unscathed and strong and also soft, able to soak in the light, and reflect it back out. We have to figure out how we’re going to refuse to let our past ruin our present, or dictate our future. We all have our stuff, and it takes courage and determination and support and desire to face it head on. Mostly, you have to want to do that, and you probably won’t, until you try everything else first.

I received an email from a woman yesterday who’s going through a very painful break-up, and is devastated because her once-love is now calling her all sorts of names, and practicing revisionist history. Of course, I’m only hearing from her, he may have an entirely different tale to tell. Regardless, intimacy isn’t easy. You have to be able to stand naked with all your beauty and all your flaws and all your history and absurdity and fear and longing and love and vulnerability. You have to be willing to offer up and acknowledge the stuff you might prefer to hide, given the option. If you want to be known, you have to drop the armor, and expose the stuff you wouldn’t put in a status update. Intimacy isn’t easy unless you’re ready for it, unless you want it. So many people think they want to be seen and understood and truly known, but then when they get into it, when they understand the piercing nature of the thing, they feel scared and trapped. They just want the good parts to be known and seen; they aren’t ready to shine a light on the raw parts. If you’re ready, if you want it, you’ll embrace the demands of being brave and soft and accountable and honest about where you have healing to do, where you might still strengthen and grow, where you tend to deny or diffuse or keep the peace instead of confronting those painful truths. We all want to hide our shadow side sometimes.

A lot of people want the movie version. Give me the heat and the love and the joy and the laughter and the montage with the great music in the background so we can all thump to the rhythm and grin like idiots, but don’t expect me to do the work of facing my dragons when they rear their spiky heads and breathe hot fire all over everything, scorching the curtains on a sunny Tuesday morning, or a cloudy Saturday afternoon, because someone said something that landed in a way that felt like an attack, that brought out something hard in me, that exists because something soft needed to be protected. Let’s not go there, shall we?

Anyway, sometimes things end in that fire, and a person has to create fiction around it to survive. That seems easier than walking back into the fire at the time, maybe. You can’t make a person want to do that. Maybe they need you to be the villain, even if you aren’t. Even if, actually, you loved them and you tried with everything you had. Even if you apologize for every way you also blew it. It feels horrible to walk away from a person with whom you were once close, with whom you were once trying to build something, knowing that they’ve created a character that bears very little resemblance to you. It would be nice if both parties could honor what once existed, and allow things to end with dignity and even love, but if a person can’t face their own flaws, sometimes someone needs to be the bad guy. Try not to worry about it too much, even though it isn’t easy. I know what it feels like when people throw daggers at you; even if you know there isn’t any truth to it, it’s hard not to defend yourself when spears are flying through the air. You won’t win that battle, because it isn’t between you and the other party. It’s between them and their pain. That’s a battle only they can fight.

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

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

The Upside of Struggling

struggleprogress Did you know that a butterfly needs that struggle to break free of its cocoon so it can strengthen its wings? If you were to cut open the cocoon to release it, you’d rob it of the ability to fly. Our own adventure through the birth canal squeezes the fluid out of our lungs so we can breathe. Nature shows us again and again that it is through effort that we empower ourselves.

And yet, it’s heart-wrenching to watch those we love struggle, strain, or make a complete mess out of things. From the outside, it’s so easy to see when someone is trapped in a cycle that continuously brings them pain. Freud called it the “repetition compulsion”; Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Jung on this, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Anything within us that is unhealed will run the show. Anything we’ve repressed, denied, run from or tried to numb out will push back four times harder. It’s my belief that we’re all longing to heal, to open, to uncover our gifts and share them freely, but sometimes in order to do that, we have to lean into our pain first. A fearful unwillingness to do that, an aversion to being with what is, leads to our suffering, so sometimes a person is struggling and straining and avoiding and acting out. Brilliant people do this; it’s not about intelligence. I say that because it’s so easy to throw our hands up and say, “S/he’s so smart!! Why does s/he keep picking unavailable people to date?” Or , “Why is she stuck on her career path when she has so much going for her?!”

This is especially difficult when we’re watching our parents, partners, siblings, grown children, or close friends. Of course when you love someone, you want to save them from pain, but sometimes in our efforts to love people, we rob them of experiences they need for their own growth. In an effort to “save” or help those we love, the tendency can be to step in and try to solve the current problem, try to diffuse the stress or end the struggle, but struggle is important. It’s not until a person has come to the conclusion that what they’re doing isn’t working, that change is possible. You can’t convince a person with logic. You can’t cajole someone into wanting to take better care of themselves, or you. You can’t make someone happy. You can’t convince another person to fall in love with you, or to be compassionate or kind or caring or patient. People are these things, or they are not. Sometimes the struggle is what gets them from a place of despair, to one of peace. There’s a saying attributed to Buddha, “The obstacle is the path.”

When you think back on your life, I’ll bet you’ve learned a lot more during those times when things were not going your way, when things did not turn out as you’d hoped, than you did when everything was rainbows and unicorns. Scaling the mountain makes us strong. It shows us where we’re scared, where we have strengthening to do. It shows us the way we’re showing up for ourselves, it sheds light on our limiting beliefs, it pushes us to be our best selves. So while it’s almost always motivated by love and good intentions, trying to save other people usually has the opposite effect. You can’t save anyone but yourself. You can love other people, that’s beautiful, but you can also unintentionally enable them to continue to do things the way they’ve been doing them. You can reinforce behavior that ends up hurting them and you, by sweeping in with your love and concern, when maybe, they’d be better off weeping through their anguish, frustration, confusion and loneliness, so that they could resolve to start doing things another way.

Sometimes the best way to love people is to believe in their own ability to realize how incredibly special they are, and to allow them their own process. You can also offer tools that have helped you, and in that way you might help them help themselves. For me, healing came through yoga and seated meditation. I hear from people every day who’ve found peace by learning to open to how things are, instead of clinging to how they’d like things to be, but you can’t manage another person’s path, and you can’t know what anyone else needs for their own growth and ultimate happiness. You sure can love them, though.

Sending love to you,

Ally Hamilton

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

Make the Shift, Session 3

We expect to encounter resistance when we’re being forced to do something we don’t want to do, but it’s a curious thing when we experience blocks in those areas where we’re looking for movement; where we want to shift or change or grow. The thing is, all change, no matter how positive, has an element of loss attached to it. In order to open to something new, we usually have to be willing to let go of something old, especially when we’re talking about our ideas or opinions or ways of doing things.

Change is not easy for most people. And yet, there’s no escaping it. Everything is shifting all the time. You are not the you you were five years ago, and neither is anyone else. You can’t predict the future any more than you can rewrite the past. All you can do is open to things as they are, and as they unfold, and develop a strong center. That’s internal work, there’s no way around it.

It’s completely understandable that we’d like to be able to count on some things. That we’d like to create some order inside all of this chaos. Some people long for that more than others. Controlling people are usually people who’ve been hurt, abandoned, traumatized or disappointed in some essential way. Of course they want to pin things down, and sometimes they want to pin people down, too. But we’re on a spinning planet, we have our bodies with their unknown expiration dates, we have our loved ones in the same situation, and there’s just no telling what’s coming down the path. At a certain point, you have to open to the ride, and let go of the things you can’t control. You can work on knowing and accepting yourself. You can figure out what lights you up, and what it is you have to offer, and you can get busy offering it. You can work on how you respond to what you’re given.

There’s enormous power in that. When we become accountable for the energy we’re spreading, when we take ownership of our lives and decide we’re going to move in a direction that feels right and good, we wouldn’t expect to come up against resistance. But if those ideas are new to you, I can almost guarantee that will happen. When you get to the point when you have to start doing things differently because the “old way” hasn’t been working out too well, it’s likely your system will revolt. Resistance isn’t always obvious; it can feel like boredom, anger, frustration, lethargy, a desire to numb out, an inability to focus, or a need to distract yourself. If you aren’t used to putting your feelings into the mix, if you haven’t been following your own intuition, a mere decision that you’d like to start doing those things isn’t going to be enough.

Rewiring our systems so we can start to live in alignment with what’s true for us, and in a way that feels good, takes determination, discipline, and a deep desire. It’s also nice to have some support, at least one person who’s rooting for you, when you can’t find the energy to root for yourself. It’s very painful to come up against all the ways you’ve been sabotaging yourself, and to uncover the reasons why. It’s inevitable you’re going to discover, or finally acknowledge some deep wounds that you’ve been carrying with you, if you haven’t been able to show up on your own behalf all these years. Before you can get to that strong center, you really have to lean into your pain, and integrate all parts of yourself. Anything you reject creates a chasm within you. A wall of shame or guilt or doubt. You really have to access your whole being. No one else is you. That’s such an incredible thing, isn’t it? Seven billion of us, and only one you. Of course you’re worth fighting for; if you don’t show up as your whole self, with all the gifts you have to offer, the world loses a gift only you can bring.

Anyway, my point is, resistance is perfectly natural, but you don’t have to let it stop you. You can lean into that, too. You can notice your lethargy, and drag yourself off the couch in spite of it. You can head out the door and walk around your block one time, with the intent of noticing just one thing that inspires you or surprises you or makes you feel happy to be alive. You can sit and meditate, and observe whatever arises calmly, with the understanding that it, too, will change. You can do your yoga practice, and feed a loving voice. You can commit to yourself, to your healing and your ability to nurture yourself and your dreams, and the people in your life. You can stay the path, even when the sleet is hitting you in the face, hard, and some voice inside your head tells you it would be easier to turn back and numb out. And you can tell that voice kindly, but with conviction, to screw off, because you know in your heart this is the way to go if you want to feel the sun shining on your face anytime soon.

Make the Shift, Session 3

This week, our third week, we deal with resistance. We face it head-on, and we move right through it. Grab your journal, your pen, and your yoga mat, and head into session 3, yogis. Rooting for you, and sending you love,

Intimacy

lovelisten One of the great gifts of an intimate relationship, and by that, I do not necessarily mean a romantic one, is that it constantly offers us the opportunity to grow; anyone you’re close to will challenge you to show up as your best possible self, for you and for them. That’s part of the joy and the pain of having people in our lives who know us and see us clearly. These people may be your parents, your siblings, your best friend, your children, or your partner. The most intimate and enduring relationship you’ll have in your whole life, though, is the one you’re having with yourself.

The thing about intimacy is that it demands honesty. There’s no hiding if we want to be seen and heard and known, and those who truly love us want us to shine. This means there will be times when we have uncomfortable conversations, because no one shows up as their highest self in every moment. We all make mistakes, say things and do things we wish we hadn’t, or get ourselves worked up over imagined or real slights or wrongdoings. Sometimes we want to hide from ourselves. Maybe there’s some tendency that doesn’t serve you, some way you’re moving through the world, or thinking about yourself or other people, some way you’re showing up for yourself or not. When we love people, we also hold them accountable, not in a cold, shaming way, but in a loving, compassionate one, “I know you and I see you, and this is not the best you can do.”

When we love, we have to want for the other person what they want for themselves, even if it’s at odds with what we want for them, what we want for ourselves, or what we wish they would want, and I believe it’s also our job to kindly hold up a mirror when someone we love is not making choices in service to their highest good. That’s intimacy. Clear seeing, and the ability to communicate when things are not clear, “Help me understand what’s happening with you. Help me see how things are for you right now.”

This isn’t the shiny, glossy stuff we’re sold in the movies. If you’re close to someone, you’ve seen them crying until their nose runs, or you’ve seen their face twisted by anger or despair or frustration. You’ve seen them in the midst of struggle, when they’re triggered and trying to come back to center, and you’ve seen them at their best, too. Maybe you’ve seen them lie to themselves, or watched them lie to your face out of fear or an inability to say the hard thing. Love isn’t always pretty. For a long time now, I’ve tried to practice unflinching acceptance of the people with whom I’m closest. Just let me see the truth of how things are for them, then I’ll deal with the truth of what that means for me. That’s a practice in and of itself, but I believe it’s worth exploring. This does not mean I allow myself to be disrespected or abused, although there have been times I’ve let the lines get blurry, because compassion for someone else can turn into abuse of oneself if you aren’t careful. I’m certainly not recommending that.

Sometimes we really fight reality. We want to stuff everything into neat little boxes that are all labeled, “My Plan.” Sometimes we try to stuff people into those boxes, too, but you’ve probably noticed, since you are a person, people don’t like that very much. Sometimes we dance like monkeys and bend over backwards and try to sell ourselves or other people on the idea that, “everything is okay”, when really, we know it is not. Sometimes, as we all know, the truth hurts, but I’d take the truth over a lie any day of the week; I’d rather deal with a painful truth than a pretty lie. I want to stand on solid ground and know I can trust myself.

The only way that happens is to know yourself, too, to do your best to see yourself clearly and understand what’s driving you, what’s blocking you, what’s lighting you up. There’s nothing wrong with getting some help if you need it, because sometimes we’re so close to a thing, we can’t see clearly, and sometimes we’ve grown up in situations where we pushed our needs and wants down, and focused on survival. You may not have a clue what you want. Maybe you’ve spent your whole life responding to what other people want, or you’ve been “shoulding” yourself for so long, you wouldn’t recognize a cry from your intuition if it was in surround sound.

I really think you have to start there — self-acceptance, self-compassion, clear-seeing, and sometimes you’ll be terrified by what you want, or paralyzed by it, or maybe even ashamed or disgusted. That is totally fine. Feelings are not facts, and you don’t have to act on every feeling you have; in fact, you’ll probably create a lot of pain and turmoil for yourself if you do. However, anything you reject within yourself is going to push back four times harder. The truth wants out. There’s a drive within all of us to heal, if we open to it. Underneath the layers of pain, confusion, darkness, doubt, rage, grief, loneliness and despair, you will find love. That’s what healing is in my opinion–it’s a return to your natural state. Love, acceptance and compassion thrive on truth, that’s how you make that stuff blossom.

Chasing happiness is like sprinkling yourself with that “flower food” they give you with cut flowers. The flowers aren’t rooted. Maybe that stuff will make things look pretty on the outside a little bit longer, but if you want to feed your soul, you have to find your roots and plant them in soil soaked in truth. Once you accept what’s real and right for you, it makes it inevitable that you want to do those things for the people you love. You want them to know you can see them and that you understand them. You don’t have to agree with how someone feels or what someone needs in order to accept that’s how it is for them, you just have to be willing to face it, and then you figure out how to love them and still honor your own tender heart. There are no boxes in this thing. Love has open hands, open eyes, open ears and open arms. May we all be strong enough and brave enough to love ourselves and the people in our lives.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Love is Not a Stranglehold

Love is not about control; that might seem obvious, but sometimes it’s good to get really clear on that concept, because we’re all only human, and when you love someone, whether it’s your child or your parent, your partner, sibling, or best friend, you become vulnerable; there’s no point fighting that reality. You have a body with an unknown expiration date, you have a gorgeous heart which is capable of incredible love. Human beings are designed to need each other, and to reach out, so loving is part of the equation, as is the inherent exposure to loss and suffering that go along with loving. We never know how much time we have, or how much time anyone else has. We never know what will happen next.

It’s human and very understandable that we want to control certain outcomes; we want to do whatever we can to make sure those we love are safe, healthy and happy. Those are good, loving desires, but things get sticky when our ideas about what is good for someone differ from their own. We can all step back and agree that certain behaviors are self-destructive, and are very likely to lead to pain, injury, or worse. If you have a loved one who’s putting himself in harm’s way, of course you try to step in and find help and support.

I’m not talking about that, though, I’m talking about the pain that ensues when we try to manage or control another person’s feelings. Have you ever told someone they shouldn’t be angry? “Don’t be mad.” “Don’t be sad.” “Don’t be scared.” Why do we think we can tell other people how to feel? There can be a difference between how you feel, and what is happening. Maybe you feel like your partner never listens to you, and your partner disagrees. It does not matter who’s “right”, you feel unheard. Now you have an opportunity to look at that together. Is this a theme in your life? Did you feel unheard or unseen as a child? Did you have any evidence that the way you felt about things had an impact on the world around you as you were growing up? Does feeling unheard make you feel disrespected? Invisible? There’s a lot to examine, and if your partner is willing to examine this stuff with you, without getting defensive about whether they actually do a good job of listening or not, there’s an opportunity for real intimacy to emerge. If your partner has to tell you that how you feel isn’t right, communication breaks down. Now they’re invested in convincing you that they do listen, and that your feelings are wrong. We don’t have to agree with how someone feels in order to work with their reality. If you love someone, you want to know them, right?

If you want to be right all the time, love is going to be a tough gig for you. If you want to possess or own another person, you’re in for a rough time there, too. You don’t own your children. They aren’t possessions, they’re people, with their own paths and ideas and needs and wants that will emerge if you allow them to, or become buried if you do not. When we bury what’s deep in our hearts, what’s true for us, we suffer. Love can be brutal; you may love someone with everything you’ve got, and they may leave you. Maybe that’s what they need for their own growth. Who’s to say? It may break your heart in a million pieces, but you can’t block the door, y’know? You can’t tell them they don’t feel the way they feel. You cannot control what another person will do, say, want or need. You can’t save anyone except yourself.

Love has open hands and open arms and an open heart and mind. It doesn’t cling or manipulate or try to control. It’s an embrace, not a stranglehold. When you love someone, you want for them what they want for themselves. You want to support their growth and expansion. It requires your bravery and your trust, and your willingness to get hurt. I’m not telling you to be reckless with your heart; choose where you put it carefully. But when you love, you might as well do it all the way.

Ally Hamilton

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

Pick Different Moments

Sometimes people write to me with awful stories about things they’ve been through that would break your heart- childhood abuse, neglect, abandonment, violence at the hands of other people, feelings of being powerless, worthless or invisible. Is that fair, when there are people who start out in a loving environment with every advantage, and two parents who want nothing more than to nurture their tender hearts and natural curiosity? Of course not, it’s not a level playing field. We’re given what we’re given, and our power lies in how we decide to respond.

“Why me?” is not where it’s at. Why not you? Why not any of us? Life is full of the kind of knifing heartbreak that can bring you to your knees without warning, and it’s also full of the kind of beauty that can rob you of breath and language and everything but awe and gratitude. If things are good in your world, cherish the people who are gifts to you and share the gifts you’ve been given. If things are not so easy, or have not been good in your world, my heart goes out to you. Sometimes it can be very dark and confusing and alienating and lonely. Sometimes you go through the kind of grief that makes it hard to imagine the muscles in your face will ever make their way into a smile again.

Here’s the thing–everyone has pain, and everyone suffers. Talk to people if you don’t believe me, even the ones whose lives look perfect on the outside. The only way to avoid pain in this world is to detach to such a degree, I don’t know what the point is of being here at all. Some people have more pain than others. Some people have endured loss that makes it hard to breathe, or put one foot in front of the other. You can look back on your life and make a list of all the things that have gone wrong, and of all the people who’ve disappointed you, or abandoned you or betrayed you. You can take your list and use it to explain why you are the way you are. I did it myself for years, so believe me, I get the desire to make it someone else’s fault. Blame lets you off the hook, you don’t have to work on yourself, you can just sit there in your anger and your righteousness and point fingers. It gets old. Also, if you’re over twenty-five, it’s time to stop, and even that is kind of late.

Your life is yours. Whatever has happened, has happened. You could also decide to look back on your life and make a list of all the people who taught you about love. Maybe you had a great teacher who cared, who saw something in you. Maybe you found solace in certain books, or when you went for long walks by yourself. Maybe you learned something about beauty from being out in nature. Maybe your best friend has been like a rock of hope and loyalty in your life. You could make a different kind of list, and use it to explain why you are the way you are. Why, against all odds, you believe in yourself. How it is that you know how to love, even though the people who were meant to love you when you arrived here, didn’t have the tools to do it. You could pick different moments to highlight.

Healing is hard; it requires your willingness to be brave and to look unflinchingly at any patterns, habits, and stories you might be carrying around with you that are keeping you stuck. It means you take those fingers you’ve been pointing at other people, and you point them back at yourself, but not in an aggressive, unforgiving way, in a kind and curious one. You take your power back. You don’t give it to the people with whom you’re angry anymore, you unhook your journey from theirs. You embark on something new, but first you have to go back and make sure you understand what happened. You go back with compassion for yourself and mourn the loss of whatever it is that was taken from you–your childhood, your innocence, your belief that people could be good and loving and trustworthy. You look at that stuff and you grieve for what it is that’s been lost to you, but after you’ve spent yourself, after you’ve examined your pain, and let it wash over you and through you, you pick yourself up. Now you understand your tendencies. Now you know yourself. You don’t have to live in your past unless you keep feeding it.

Your present is full of potential, and believe me, there can be beauty in it, and love and joy and laughter. You can use your pain, your understanding, your insight, your compassion, to help other people who are still stuck and suffering. If you want to feel that your life has meaning and value, find a way to help someone else. It’s the most fulfilling thing I know. You can shine a light, offer a hand, a shoulder, an ear, your kindness, and in that way, you help them, and you make your suffering a thing of value. It meant something, it was worth something; it made you who you are, but not in a way that closes you, not anymore. There’s beauty in that. We’ve all felt alone in this thing at times, but we aren’t.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Sweat Equity

I started practicing yoga during a very dark time in my life. I was recovering from the ending of a relationship that poured salt into every deep wound I had (abandonment issues, doubt about whether I was lovable at my core, the trigger of being cheated on over and over again, feeling I had to be perfect to earn love, I could go on). I didn’t wander into a class with the intent to heal, I simply wanted something that would challenge me physically, the way ballet had for twelve years of my life. In fact, I walked into my first class feeling pretty certain yoga wasn’t going to be “hard enough” for me; I thought it was stretching on the floor, and going to a forest with your guitar after class. I “accidentally on purpose” walked into an advanced class with my youth and my confidence. I’d been doing ballet for so long, flexibility wasn’t an issue, so I figured it was in the bag, and I promptly had my a$$ handed to me. I was humbled in every way imaginable. Yoga was nothing like what I’d envisioned.

What hooked me at first was the absolute physical challenge. I had all this flexibility, but no strength. I’d been carrying tension in my shoulders my whole life. Down dog? Agony. Chaturanga? Impossible. How the f%ck were these people doing this stuff? So I kept going back, and I noticed all the people who were doing all these things were also breathing in a very conscious way. They were focused. They seemed to be in a deep state of listening and responding, and not to the teacher, to themselves. It took me awhile to put all this together, of course, but over time, I realized it had nothing to do with flexibility in your body. I thought that was gonna get me a free ticket to the front of the line. I began to understand that yoga has to do with flexibility in your mind.

I started having the experience of breathing and feeling, and not thinking and judging, just for moments at a time, at first, but even that was amazing. Awe-inspiring. Liberating. As in, “I get a break from the relentless critic living in my head? This freaking rocks.” I started to observe my internal dialogue which was loud and shaming. If I fell out of a pose, I’d feel my whole body flush, and worry that other people might be laughing at me or judging me harshly. I experienced the world as an unsafe place, so why would it be different here? It didn’t occur to me that people were focused on their own practice and couldn’t care less, or that the environment might be safe and full of compassion.

Awareness is the first step toward change. You live with that inner voice all day, every day. It’s the most familiar thing in the world to you, so if that voice beats the crap out of you, berates you when you make mistakes, torments you when things aren’t going the way you’d hoped, tears you down when you’re already on your knees to begin with, you probably just accept that as, “the way things are.” I did. It never occurred to me to question whether that voice knew what it was talking about, or that there was any alternative, but little by little, the deeper aspects of the practice seeped in. I started to think about what it would be like to have some compassion for myself, and I decided my yoga mat would be a place where I was kind to myself, where I fed a loving voice. The truth is, whatever you feed will grow and strengthen, but without awareness, you may be feeding all kinds of things that weaken you, like ideas you have about yourself that simply aren’t true, or tendencies that aren’t serving you, or a way of being that brings you no peace or joy. You can only make a choice if you realize there’s a choice to make.

Underneath all the white noise and “shoulds”, I started to hear this small but powerful voice that was full of truth. I don’t mean “the” truth, I mean, what was true for me, because I’d reached adulthood with no clear idea of what made me happy or what lit me up, or what I was doing here. Prior to that, I’d made decisions based on what I thought I should want, or on what other people wanted me to want, and it had landed me in a world of pain. Suddenly I felt like the lights went on in an abandoned house, and someone stoked a fire and swept the floors, and flung the curtains and the windows open for the first time in a long time, so the light could get in, and that voice went running through the house yelling, “Yes!! Finally!”

Now I’m not going to tell you it was all awesome and light and shiny from there, because that was just the beginning, just the glimpse of how life could be. That kind, loving voice grew stronger, and it was also synced up with my intuition, but this was a whole new way to consider life. There was resistance. There was depression. There was the realization that a lot of the “old way” wasn’t going to work, and the “new way” wasn’t entirely clear to me yet. It took me a few years and all the courage, will, determination and dedication I could muster to keep following that yes. There were times I wanted to close the windows and the curtains and crawl under the covers and give up and go back to being numb, but I think once that yes grabs you, it’s got you.

Rebellion is normal. It’s counter-intuitive and scary to intentionally crash your own hard-drive. People you’ve known forever may look at you like you’re absolutely nuts. You may lose some friendships along the way, but I have to say, I don’t think there’s much point in doing life any other way. I’m pretty positive we’re here to love. I believe we’re made of energy, and the energy we’re made of is love, and the more we open to that, the more we embrace what we are, the more life flows. Everything I write about every single day comes out of twenty-plus years of yoga practice. It’s a tool, a science, an art, a philosophy of traveling inward so you can connect to your true nature and everyone and everything around you in an authentic and beautiful way. I teach because this practice transformed my life. There is nothing that feels better to me than sharing those tools. I think the combination of contemplation and physical practice, where you flood your system with new information and resources, is incredibly powerful.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Start Where You Are

Underneath most pain is the desire for connection. We all want to be seen and understood, cherished and explored and known, by at least one other person. Sometimes our “self” was beaten out of us, or scared out of us, or made to burrow down deep because other things were more immediate, like survival. You may have become so accustomed to swallowing your feelings, you don’t even know you’re doing it anymore. You might not know how you feel, or what you want. You may be clueless as to what makes you happy.

Sometimes we have ingrained ideas about ourselves. Maybe people told us we were smart or strong or dependable, and so that’s what we are, even though inside, we’re crumbling from the weight of it. Maybe you were made to feel your value as a person was determined by your looks or your intelligence or your ability to make people laugh, so that’s the stuff you focus on even though it feels empty and makes you a little sick inside. Do you ever feel like you landed on the wrong planet, or you’re living the wrong life? Like you took a wrong turn somewhere, and everything shifted, and now you can’t find your way back to that fork in the road so you can turn things around, so you can find your footing and a path that feels right to you?

The thing is, it’s never too late for that, and that place behind you where you took that turn that you don’t even remember really isn’t the thing. The thing is right now. How are you right now, and what do you need to be okay if you aren’t okay? Is it connection you’re longing for, and are you a stranger in your own home, in your own body? I’d really start there. You are not your body and you are not your thoughts, but you have this body, and it’s been with you from moment one, and it will be with you until your final exhale, and it’s full of wisdom about you, and how you feel and what you need. If there’s trauma in your past, your body is storing that somewhere, and tuning into that might help you discover that fork in the road. You probably weren’t even driving at the time, chances are you were a passenger. Your body is like a road-map of everything, and there’s an incredible potential to know yourself and to understand yourself. That’s the most important connection there is. If you’re detached from your own heart, or spirit, or soul or essence, or whatever you want to call it, it’s going to be very hard for you to find nurturing, lasting connection to anything else. You need a foundation. You need to be able to breathe.

A lot of people don’t breathe. I mean, they breathe enough to get by, but they never tune into the incredible feeling of really breathing. Maybe if they take a deep breath and let it out, a ton of heartache will ride out on that exhale, too. Tears and sobs that break your heart and feel like they’ll never end, like they’ll overwhelm you and do you in, but it’s the not letting them out that does that. So many people live in agony, holding on for dear life, pushing that stuff down, denying its existence, but feeling the need to numb out. Imagine living on top of an active volcano, pretending all is well and wondering why you aren’t happy. Why you feel enraged all the time, or scared, or like a giant fraud. There’s a f&cking volcano underneath you, but you put on your jeans and pop a pill or have a drink or take a hit, and go smiling out the door, even though the smile hurts and the jeans are cutting into your hopes and this dream you had about your life when you were a kid.

This is why I teach, practice, and love yoga and seated meditation. I don’t know of many things that bring you so profoundly into your body and into the now with the foundation of compassion and healing. There’s potential in the now; there isn’t any in the past. It’s over and cannot be rewritten no matter how many dysfunctional relationships you have, or how many people you try to save that way, yourself especially. When I started doing yoga, I had this feeling of finally, finally having come home. Home, and that was huge for me, because I grew up going back and forth between my mom’s and my dad’s from the time I was four. I’d been searching for that feeling of home my whole life, and it was a revelation to me to discover home inside myself. That’s connection. To be at home inside yourself. Then you can feel at home anywhere.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Are You Crossing the Line?

Sometimes when I’m teaching I’ll see people try to push beyond their flexibility, even at the expense of breathing deeply. They’ll turn purple and grimace, but they won’t back off. If you’re holding on for dear life, there’s no way you can simultaneously relax and release tension, and there’s no way you can feed a loving voice.

There are so many things that can drive people to override the messages their bodies are sending them. Culturally we’re trained to do that very thing, “No pain, no gain.” It’s suggested to us that we’re in some kind of fight with our bodies, that we have to dominate in order to win, and it’s sad because you live in your body. That’s your home. You really don’t want to be at war inside your own house, but a lot of people live that way, disconnected from the greatest source of wisdom they have.

If you grew up in a family where there were no boundaries, where you felt powerless or scared or like your feelings had no impact on the people and the world around you, you might have a very difficult time recognizing a sign to back off. What would that even look like or feel like? If you’ve been living your whole life having your feelings trampled upon, would you even recognize it if your body was asking you to stop? Or would it seem like second nature to ignore the way you feel? I mean, maybe you’re just totally used to this wrestling match between your intuition and your personality. Your body is saying no, and this “you” you identify with is saying, “hell, yes”. Maybe you don’t know how to honor your feelings, maybe that idea never occurred to you.

If you grew up thinking love was conditional, that it had to be earned, that you could lose it on a dime if you screwed up, you’re going to carry that into every aspect of your life. Sometimes people come up to me after class and apologize for being tired. “I’m sorry I couldn’t bring it today. I’m exhausted.” What? This is your practice. This is your time to nurture yourself. To listen deeply and respond with honesty and compassion. You don’t owe me anything, I’m here for you. You don’t owe me a “strong” class or a lot of energy or nine hundred chaturangas. It has nothing to do with me. You certainly don’t owe me an apology. I’ll take a hug if you want to give me one, but that’s it. We’re square. You showed up and listened to your body? I’m thrilled. Job well done. Go home and get a good night’s sleep. Let’s do it again tomorrow.

Having said all that, I understand the inclination to want to please, to earn, to push yourself so you’re worthy of love. Of course you are worthy of love, you’re made of love, I really believe that; worthiness isn’t even an issue, but you might not know that yet. I lived like that for many years. I played that out with countless teachers, in school, in ballet studios, and in yoga studios, too. I may have apologized for being tired once or twice before I understood what I was doing, before I realized I was bringing all my stuff onto my mat and turning my practice into another place where I beat myself up. It took me years to see that.

The beauty of a consistent yoga practice is that your mat becomes a mirror. It reflects back to you all the places where you still have healing to do, all the tendencies that aren’t serving you. It gives you quiet time to observe the world within you without categorizing or labeling, just some time to look around and take it in and notice the quality of the relationship you’re having with yourself. To listen to your internal dialogue from a distance, and to starve any voice within you that is unkind, that’s screaming, “Yes you will!”, when your body is saying, “Please, not yet.” Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen, and your practice is a place where you can devote yourself to feeding love, to filling your tank with patience, awareness, honesty and compassion so that you spread those things wherever you go. The beauty is that it’s a gift you give to yourself, your healing process, but it’s also a gift to everyone you encounter, which is why I believe it’s really our work to heal. It’s our responsibility to get right with ourselves so we can offer up the love. The world needs as much love as we can bring to it. It doesn’t need more aggression, denial, or repression, but if you think the world around you could be more peaceful, there’s only one place I know of to start–the world within you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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