Yogis Anonymous

Our Collective Undoing

Uncertainty is the name of the game in life. This whole business of being human – arriving on a spinning planet in a vast galaxy with no idea how long we’ll have here, no clue how long anyone else will have, no idea what happens after this – none of these are easy parameters to deal with and integrate. We don’t know what kind of sudden loss we might face on a “normal” Wednesday or whether we’ll wake up in the morning. We don’t know if the person we adore will continue to adore us, we don’t know if our children will be okay when we drop them off at school (back when we used to do that), we don’t know if we’ll realize our dreams, no matter how hard we work. It’s a wonder any of us get out of bed in the morning and keep showing up, but that’s the very thing about human beings, we are a wonder.

In the face of all that vulnerability, we do get up. We brush our teeth and get dressed (pajamas count at this point) and we start the day. In “normal” times we might make a pot of coffee and start tackling our to-do list whether it’s written or not. Pack lunches for the kids, check! Get them up and make them breakfast, check! Drive to school in the nick of time, check! If it’s Monday, maybe we head to the grocery store after school drop-off and buy groceries for the week. Maybe Monday nights we go to yoga and put our mat in the same spot we like. The point is, we have our routines, our plans, our checklists, our habits, our schedule, our deadlines, our expectations and off we go. These are the things that help us forget our vulnerability, because in “normal” times and on most days, things go (mostly) the way we expect. Things go according to our plans, dammit, and this helps us feel okay on a spinning planet in a vast universe where we don’t know what the hell is going on.

In the last several weeks, all the things we count on to forget our vulnerability have been taken away from us. You can’t go to the grocery store unless you’re ready to suit up, mask up, glove up and wait on line six feet away from the nearest other person just to get in the store ten people at a time, and all of that reminds you of your intense vulnerability, so there went any comfort from your grocery routine. Maybe ordering online is better for now, you think. You can’t go on your hike because the trails are closed and you can’t go to the beach, either. You will survive this, these are small sacrifices you understand you have to make to care for the vulnerable members of your community, and yet these things help you with your mental wellness, but you’ll figure it out. You can’t meet your friend for coffee and a walk because you can’t see friends right now and there’s nowhere to have coffee and walking is really like some weird game of keep-away with strangers that is no fun at all. Hugs with anyone outside your house are not possible and if there’s no one in your house with you, there go hugs for awhile and here comes a lesson in skin hunger. Basically, what you have right now, what you get to acknowledge and roll around in and possibly avoid marinating in for a bit with a Netflix binge or three, is your vulnerability and the intense recognition of the fact that you are not driving the bus and you never, ever were.

If you make plans and your plans happen, that is called good fortune. If you have a checklist and it’s reasonable and realistic and your day goes the way you hoped it would, that is called hard work and good fortune. If you love someone and they love you back and this goes on for days and days and weeks and months and years, that is called enormous good fortune, it is called two people choosing each other again and again day after day, it is called hallelujah, and even then, one of you will be left at some point. There is no way through this life without loss and suffering, not a single one of us escapes it. There is no such thing as a “normal” day or the luxury of “wasting time” – the only sure thing we have is a lack of surety.

We all know this on some level. It’s tough to swallow, acknowledge and honor every day, but it’s real and it’s true and you can count on it and you know this in your heart of hearts and in your gut. You know this. All the plans and routines and regimens won’t change it. You can be totally ripped and gluten-free, you can do burpees or run miles or do nine hundred chaturangas a day (not recommended) and still, you can’t escape it. All the lists and deadlines in the world won’t stop it. What is different about the last several weeks, what makes this time unprecedented and unchartered as everyone has said and said and said again is that we are all going through this intense realization at the same time. Usually we experience this individually. We lose someone we love, and for us it’s like the world has stopped spinning and an entire universe has disappeared and it doesn’t seem possible people are out in the world having a good day. Our world has stopped. For a time our perspective changes and we remember how fragile we are and how fragile life is and how thin is the membrane between being here alive and being out in the ethers. We understand it for a time, but that is not easy to hold onto because it hurts, it’s painful, it makes us feel small and powerless and not in control. So eventually we “get back to living” and we make plans and lists and find a routine and a new footing and this person is still gone and sometimes the grief knocks us off our feet in the middle of a plan or a deadline and we remember again, but we get back up.

What’s different about this experience is that we have had a collective undoing, a group lesson in vulnerability and not being in control and it’s painful and it hurts and grieving and mourning make sense and there are no normal days and that is always true. There are angry people out there screaming about their rights being violated, but that anger is just the emotion on top of the pain and the rights they’re speaking of are gifts they can’t access to feel better and to feel in control. Some people deal with their vulnerability better than others. Some people try to suit up against it and armor themselves against the world, but that never helps in the long run. Your heart is meant to be broken again and again so it can keep softening and opening and you can know more and care more and have more compassion and understanding, awareness and patience and love for yourself and others. Does this mean we shouldn’t make plans or assume we’ll see our children at pick-up or pursue our dreams or try to meet our deadlines? Of course not. We are wonders after all and we should never give up on ourselves or each other or on life’s ability to surprise us with joy and adventure we never imagined. But somewhere in there, we ought to keep remembering, this is a gift, this is a gift, this is a gift.

May we all remember.

Sending you so much love and the hope that you are being gentle with yourself,

Ally Hamilton Hewitt

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

What to Do When You Feel Really Vulnerable

standthere Ah, vulnerability. Sometimes it stuns you and brings you into a state of gratitude for being able to love so deeply, and sometimes it makes you want to run screaming from the room. I am often stunned into gratitude by my children, and the way that I love them, and the way that I am humbled in the face of that love. If you’ve been on this planet for any length of time, then you know that you do not call the shots, you do not get to decide what life is going to put in your path, or the paths of those you cherish. You know that the parameters are outside of your domain, you get no insight into the number of days or years you have here, and the same holds true for everyone you hold dear, and my god, if that does not make you acknowledge your own fragility, I don’t know what will. I’m usually inspired by that. I really try to leave nothing in the tank on any given day, and by that I mean I try to make sure the people in my life know how I feel about them without any doubt by the time I put my head on the pillow. That’s a day well spent.

I share anything I’ve learned along the way that might be useful (and was often learned as the result of a poor choice that led to a painful lesson), and even the stuff that is messy or not quite figured out yet, because I think we all feel better when we realize we are not alone in this thing. I am not drawn toward people who try to wrap things up in a neat little package because life is not neat, humans are not neat, and many of the things we feel cannot be tied up with a ribbon and deposited in the “isn’t this grand?” file. I want to know what your mess is, what your fears are, what keeps you up at night, or stuck in a job or relationship that’s crushing the soul out of you, because we have all been there, and when we talk about this stuff, it’s a relief; we realize everyone is human. Otherwise everyone walks around feeling alienated, like they’re the only loser who can’t seem to get this life thing “right.” When you lay your stuff on the table, you see it’s the same stuff everyone else unpacks, it’s just got your own fingerprints on it, your own particular spin. Think you aren’t worthy of love, that there’s something essentially broken about you? Yeah, I’ve been there. Think there are things that you’ve done that are so shameful you have to keep them hidden, even from your closest friends? I’ve also been there. Know what happens when you edit yourself because you’re afraid of what people might think? You feel like a fraud. I’ve been there, too.

Maybe you’re enraged and you feel like your pain is someone else’s fault, but that’s going to keep you stuck. You’re better off making friends with your pain, and dwelling less on how you accrued it. Regardless of whose fault it is, your pain can teach you a lot about who you are and what you need to be at peace. Nothing brings your pain and fear to the surface like an intimate relationship. When you start to get close to another person, when you start to share in a real way, in a deep way, in an unguarded way, you give that person the roadmap to hurt you if they wish. So you want to be careful about the people you draw close because your heart is precious and you don’t want to be reckless with it, any more than you’d want someone you love to be reckless with theirs. You cannot get close to people if you won’t drop your guard. This applies to friendships, familial relationships, and romantic ones, which tend to be the most triggering.

Self-study is part of the yoga practice, and it’s at the heart of any spiritual practice. If you don’t know yourself, you can’t be accountable for the things you do and say; you won’t know what’s driving you. Even if you do that work, it doesn’t mean your stuff won’t come up, it just means you’ll have the insight to recognize when it’s happening, and the tools to deal with it and sit with it, instead of acting out and having to clean up the messes behind you, if and when you can. You save yourself a lot of heartache when you can lean into your discomfort instead of trying to deny it, run from it, or numb it out.

I’m having one of those days today. Feeling weird about a situation in my life and like I want to jump out of my body for a little while, because I am just so uncomfortable. But since I can’t jump out of my body, I’ve just been trying to be kind to myself all day, and stay focused on everything that is beautiful and wonderful in my life, which is a lot, while also giving myself permission to feel confused and unsettled. Part of me can laugh a little because for f&ck’s sake, I’m not eighteen, and I’ve been through this so many times it’s not new territory. Getting close to someone new, or even thinking about doing that takes guts and a willingness to wait and see, and sometimes that is really hard, walking that line. Letting your guard down, but not too much. Feeling things out, and keeping your eyes open. Trying not to control the outcome, but just letting it unfold, and then watching as all your “friends” come out to wreak a little havoc. Fear of Abandonment wants to play hopscotch! Fear of Rejection just sat down on the couch and wants to have tea! Fear of Commitment wants to take a spin on the dance floor! Defensive Debbie thinks coffee with someone else is a fine idea, because screw this vulnerability thing! I just have to laugh and shake my head and feel thankful that I have a yoga practice and a meditation practice, and the ability to distance myself from my thoughts so I can look at them without necessarily believing them. Time solves most mysteries. People show you who they are, you just have to be willing to see them. When you feel vulnerable, the best thing to do is sit with that feeling. If you struggle with that, try this. It works for me!

Sending you lots of love, and a little chuckle. We humans are funny, aren’t we?

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

Work That Doesn’t Belong to Us

There-are-things-that-we (1) Much of our pain in life comes from our inability to let go and trust. Often, we’re so attached to that picture in our heads of “how things should be”, we contract against things as they are. You may have noticed, life doesn’t feel great when we’re hunched in a little ball with our eyes squeezed shut, and our hands over our ears.

Sometimes we’re trying to do work that doesn’t belong to us. Maybe we’re attempting to save people, which is different than loving them. We might think we know what’s best for the people closest to us, and we might even be right, but everyone has to do his or her own journey. You cannot keep someone else’s side of the street clean. I mean, you can cross the street and sweep all you want, but if a person is committed to making a mess, the minute you walk away the debris will start flying again. You have to open your mind to the idea that sometimes a person has to make a mess in order to learn something essential. We’ve all experienced that.

Also, the truth is we never know what is right for other people. What seems obvious to us might not be obvious to someone else. There isn’t one path to happiness, there are about seven billion. People are complicated and messy and we all have our histories, stories we tell ourselves, ideas about things that we’ve learned from our experiences, and tendencies that help or hinder us. Most people reach a point when they have to reckon with their pain, anguish, heartache and disappointment; this is part of knowing ourselves. Some people are terrified of that work, or committed to finding ways around it, like numbing out, denying or repressing. Those are not solutions that lead to happiness, but you can’t force a person to come out of hiding. People do that if and when they’re ready, and not a moment sooner.

You might create a lot of fear, anxiety and suffering for yourself by thinking it is your job to manage the path of your children. When they’re little, of course you want to create stability, a nurturing and loving home, a solid base from which they can grow and flourish. If you start to “future-trip”, however, and think that your current choices can somehow protect them from future heartbreak, I think you’re fooling yourself. I don’t know too many people who get through life without some heartbreak along the way. Of course we want the path for our children to be full of sunshine and flowers, joy and love, and a profound sense of belonging in the world, and hopefully we give them the tools to set them up for their adventures in the best ways possible. It’s not always in your control to make everything perfect, though. Some people stay in abusive marriages thinking it’s best for the kids, but is it? Is it good for our sons and daughters to model their relationships after the one they’re seeing day in and day out, if it’s full of pain and violence?

The more you can release your grip on the story, the more life flows. It’s not just your story, you are not the only writer. You don’t get to edit out the parts you don’t like, or force the other characters to do, say, or feel what you want. This isn’t a piece of fiction, this is life, and the other characters get to forge their own stories and do things that might surprise, infuriate, delight, scare, enrage or depress you. You don’t have to allow other people’s desires to affect you at all, but if you’re close to people and you’re human, they probably will. Nonetheless, it’s wonderful and mysterious and interesting to be human, and who’s to say what the right way is to go about this thing? Obviously, we don’t want to move through life intentionally hurting other people, that would be a really crappy way to go. Short of that, following your heart seems the clear choice. We’re here for such a burst of time. There’s never been another you, or me, there’s never been another any of us, nor will there ever be. The more space we can give each other to be who we are, the more the artwork of life shines through. We all have a particular color to splash all over the canvas. Trust in yours, and celebrate the splashing of those around you. We can figure out who was “right” after we die 😉 Sending you a ton of love, Ally Hamilton

Join the Dance

The-only-way-to-make Years ago, one of my friends called me from a gorgeous vacation spot where she was sitting at a bar, not spending time with her husband. This was a common theme—he worked constantly, and would book these amazing trips when they were supposed to have some quality time together, but then they’d get there and he’d keep working, or take off and do his own thing. They had three little kids at home, and my friend was starting to despair. A nice house and exotic vacations were not making up for a relationship that was plagued with rage, trouble and pain. It wasn’t all him; it’s rarely one person, but there wasn’t a willingness to look at the issues and work on them.

When I heard her voice on the phone she sounded small and lost, and my heart hurt for her. She told me she was flirting with the bartender for no other reason except that it was distracting her from her own desperation. Years later, after she’d made huge shifts in her life, she told me I said four words to her during that conversation, and they opened a doorway in her mind. They weren’t particularly profound, but they hit her in the right moment: “You are not stuck.”

Most of us fear change, but it’s the one constant. It’s understandable that we’d want to cling, that we’d want some things to count on. Maybe you put your mat down in the same place in your yoga class all the time. You probably have a lot of rituals, we humans like to make order out of this chaos, and try to control some of the uncertainty, and that’s okay. Put your mat where you want it, just be aware that you’re doing it. The problem arises when we seek too much insulation from the normal shifts and evolutions of life, many of which involve loss. When we’re too afraid of change, we also cease to live fully. Life happens on the edge, when we’re loving our hearts out. If you aren’t willing to risk your heart, you’re never going to find your joy or your purpose. These things don’t happen when the primary objective is safety and stability.

For many people, the idea of getting quiet is terrifying. Culturally, we’ve become addicted to busyness, to our devices, to our lists of things that need to get done, so that finding time to sit and breathe and connect to that most essential part of who we are is becoming obsolete. Why are people afraid of silence? When we get quiet, there’s space for our feelings to arise. Not every feeling we have is comfortable or desirable. The attempt to avoid or deny our feelings sets us up for the deepest alienation and isolation—our intuition is lost to us, and we are lost to ourselves.

If you’re unhappily married with three small children, is it terrifying to contemplate making a huge change that’s going to impact these people you love more than your own life? Of course it is. You don’t have to act on every feeling you have, though, and to deny yourself the opportunity to have the conversation, to entertain the possibilities, to come into contact with what is true for you—that isn’t going to lead to happiness for you or the people you love. If any relationship is going to improve, romantic or otherwise, it’s going to improve with communication and honesty. You can’t pretend for sixty or seventy years that you’re okay if you aren’t. Eventually, something is going to happen that turns over your applecart, or you’re going to numb yourself until no one can find you, until there’s no you to find. When you allow the questions to arise, you come into conversation with the answers, even if it takes awhile for the answers to emerge.

There’s no need to be afraid of yourself, and there’s no need to fear silence. I mean, you want to know yourself, right? You’re not a robot or a wind-up doll who can live a life prescribed by someone else, or many someone else’s, you are you. When we sit down to meditate, we don’t try to get rid of our thoughts, we just observe them, the same way we observe our inhales and exhales, and other sensations in the body. We notice the sensations change, the thoughts change, and we watch, and try to cultivate friendliness and compassion toward ourselves, and our passing fancies. If you’re looking to develop a sense of humor about yourself, meditation is a great place to go, because I’m sure you’re a riot. If you’re like most other human beings, you have your particular absurdities, obsessions, stories you tell yourself that may or may not be true, days you feel like a victim, hero, or victimized hero, worries about things that are meaningless and/or outside your control. And so you just observe and breathe, and little by little you come into contact with that essential part of yourself underneath all the noise and thoughts and longings, and that is what we call peace and communion. You are not so different from your neighbor, your ancestors, or the billions of people who’ve come before you and will come after you. You’re part of a grand, crazy, heartbreaking, beautiful mystery, and you’re here for the blink of an eye, so there’s not time to waste living a life that isn’t meant for you, flirting with bartenders and staving off your desperation.

Time is ticking, and there will be losses, and things will change whether you want them to or you don’t. People will love you and understand you and celebrate you, and other people won’t do any of those things. Some people will break your heart, but you get to decide whether beauty can arise from that breaking. You will grieve, you will be confused and inspired and lost and found and lost again. But don’t be lost to yourself through all that, because that would be the real shame and truest loss there is.

The truth is, it feels really good to get quiet, and if you don’t believe me, try this: https://yogisanonymous.com/previews/meditation-intro-to-meditation-ally-hamilton-2586

Sending you 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

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

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

Color-Blindness

You are the sum of all your actions, and so is everyone else. That doesn’t mean you can’t and won’t make mistakes, or that your poor choices stay on your “permanent record” forever; it’s just that what we do, the things we say, and the choices we make define us. As long as we learn and grow along the way, as long as we do our very best not to hurt other people intentionally, we’ll all do just fine.

The thing is, sometimes we want something so much, we refuse to look at a person’s actions or hear their words. Maybe what they’re saying is shocking to us, or disappointing, or hurtful, or just not at all what we’d expected. Maybe the choices they’re making are confounding. You really don’t want to brush these things under the rug, or try to talk a person out of feeling the way they do. If, for example, your partner tells you he or she is not happy in your relationship, you have to hear that. Telling a person that the way s/he feels doesn’t make sense is not the same thing as taking in what was said. It’s not.

If your loved ones say they don’t feel heard, and you respond with all the evidence about what a great listener you are, don’t expect them to feel like you’re getting it. You can’t tell someone that what he feels isn’t valid, because feelings don’t have to be true, and they don’t have to make sense. That doesn’t mean you have to agree, but if you want people who are close to you to feel like you understand them, you have to try to wrap your head around the idea that what’s clear to you may not be to other people.

Did you know that one in twelve men suffer from some degree of color-blindness? That means if you grabbed a guy off the street, there’s a one-in-twelve chance he won’t see what you’re seeing when you look around. Now, when we’re talking about being color blind, we get that there’s a real difference in perception that can’t be helped, but we’re all color blind to each other to some degree. We’ll never fully be able to look through someone else’s eyes, or live in someone else’s head. We will only know people to the extent that they allow us access to their interior worlds. And the same is true for us. How honest are you with the people in your life? You can be in a relationship and still be totally alone. You can be alone without being lonely at all.

It’s hard enough to embrace the vulnerability of this gig. The worst thing you can do is make your life and your relationships murkier and more fragile by running from what’s true for you, or what’s true for others. If someone wants to leave you, you have to let them. If someone feels unheard and it’s a someone you love, you have to hear that, and see if you can learn to listen in a different way. Sweeping things under the rug, grasping to the reality you want when it isn’t real, clinging to people who want to run, none of that is living. That’s grasping, and it’s exhausting. Open hands. Open eyes. Open mind. And most of all, open heart. Sending you love and a huge hug, 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

Be Your Own Clean-Up Crew

jimrohn Sometimes we get ourselves into difficult situations, and find we really want a way out, but the way does not seem clear. This is really common when we’re young. I certainly got myself into some tight spots along the way, and made a mess on the way out. Part of it is just that it takes time to know ourselves. It’s very easy to go through the first quarter of our lives being influenced by external factors. We might place a lot of value on what other people want for us. How other people want us to be or to feel. We might feel pressured by societal norms, or the way our friends seem to be doing things. There are countless ways to get lost on the path.

And when I say “the path”, I’m not suggesting there’s one path for everyone. I mean, your particular path. The one that’s going to lead to your deepest, truest self. The one that’s going to take you to your joy so you can swim in it and share it. The thing is, we aren’t encouraged to look inward, we’re taught to focus outside ourselves and meet certain markers, and those markers might differ from family to family, and from culture to culture, but we all have them. The expectations, the ingrained beliefs and ideas about things. Sometimes we have a lot of unlearning to do to figure out what makes sense to us, to uncover what scares us, inspires us, excites us. If you haven’t figured that out and you go ahead and make huge life decisions before you know who you are, you’re pretty much guaranteed to crash into some brick walls, and hurt yourself and others. As long as you aren’t reckless with other people, as long as you don’t set out to hurt anyone, no one can hate you for being young and confused, for thinking you want something, and then getting it, only to find out it is not what you thought it would be. That’s called being young and making mistakes, and it’s how we grow and learn.

Having said all of that, your choices and your actions define you, as does the way you make your mistakes, and the way you address them. What you do about how you feel is the stuff of character-building. Making a mistake is no crime. Handling it in a cruel or unkind way, leaving someone in the dark, showing a lack of compassion and empathy—those things are crimes. They’re crimes against your own heart and your own well-being, in addition to the harm you’re inflicting on the other party. The human heart is resilient, and most people will recover from heartbreak, abandonment or betrayal, given enough time, and assuming they avail themselves of tools that help with healing. Having to live with the fact that you treated someone poorly, though, that’s another thing. At night, in your bed, when all the noise of the day stops and you’re left with your thoughts and your internal dialogue, there’s nowhere to hide. You can’t run from yourself. You have to be able to live in your own skin, and breathe.

Sometimes we get desperate and it’s hard to face the mess we’ve made and so we try to run or hide or deny or deflect, and of course, that just compounds the pain and confusion, and lengthens the time it will take to heal. You cannot heal in murky waters, and you cannot heal if you lie to yourself. The sooner you face your problems head on, the sooner life will feel good again. It’s funny. Years ago I was on a play date with my son. He was about four. When we were leaving, I told him to go and help his friend clean up the mess of toys they’d created, and the other mom said her housekeeper would do it and that she preferred that anyway, because she didn’t want to end up with a nerdy kid who wore a pocket protector. I said I didn’t want to create a grown man who left his dishes and dirty laundry all over the house for his wife to pick up. I didn’t say it as a challenge, it just kind of slipped out, and we looked at each other and laughed and she sent both of our boys to go clean up. Often I see dog poop on the street. It’s the same syndrome. If you go through life expecting other people to clean up the messes you’ve made, don’t expect to be happy, because part of being happy requires that we’re accountable, that we’ve taken ownership of the way we’re going to show up in the world. Sometimes in an effort to help someone, we rob them of the opportunity to do that. Instead of helping, we’re enabling behavior that’s weakening this person we love, and true love doesn’t weaken us, it strengthens us.

Sending you some love right now,

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

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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

Courage–Take Heart

couragewayne Fear can hold us back in so many ways. It’s a completely natural feeling that we’ll all experience, but as with everything, it’s what you do with your fear (or don’t do), that matters. The root of the word “courage” is “cor”—the Latin word for heart, and when we fail to grapple with our fear, this is really what happens—we end up betraying our own hearts.

If you tell yourself that you’re irrevocably broken at some root level, if you worry that you may not be good enough, or “something” enough, you set yourself up to reject love, to doubt the sanity or judgment of the people who offer it to you. If you ask yourself who you are to follow your dreams, if you tell yourself you’re better off toeing the line because you probably aren’t special enough to do anything else, you’ve let fear stop you from exploring how life would look and feel if you were living in alignment with your intuition.

The best definition of courage or bravery I’ve ever heard is, “feeling the fear, and doing it, anyway”, whatever “it” may be. It could be that you long to ask someone on a date, or you want to ask for a raise, or quit your job, or have an uncomfortable conversation with someone. There are all kinds of situations that are challenging, that might elicit fear, and the only thing worse than someone telling you you can’t do something because you don’t have the right stuff, is telling that to yourself. Self-limiting beliefs are like the bars of a prison cell you set for yourself. If you believe in them, you’ll be stuck. If you take a chance and gather yourself up, you’ll find there’s no “there” there.

Maybe you’ve been carrying around doubt for years. Perhaps you grew up hearing that you didn’t measure up, or would never amount to anything. Maybe you’ve been hurt, betrayed, abandoned or abused, emotionally, or otherwise. So many things can damage our confidence in our ability to see things through, but feeling the fear and doing it, anyway, is such a great way to rebuild that belief in yourself.

A painful conversation might seem daunting, but it’s better than living in quiet desperation, and you’ll probably find it’s the first sentence that’s the hardest. If it’s a personal situation, you might try, “I’m in pain, and I need to talk to you.” If it’s a business associate, your boss, your colleague, or anyone else who might hold some power over you (the power to keep a roof over your head, for example), practice with someone you trust, first. You might start with, “I’m glad we have the chance to talk about something that’s been on my mind for awhile.” The same goes for asking someone on a date; practice, and remember that it’s not even the outcome that matters. What matters is that you’re feeling good enough about yourself to ask for what you want.

Few things feel worse than wanting something and being unable to act on your own behalf. Usually the fear of stepping up has to do with a lack of self-esteem, and the paradox is, if you can make yourself rise to the occasion, you’ll automatically feel better about yourself. You don’t have to repress your fear, deny it or run from it. Go ahead and feel it, but then do it, anyway. You can be scared and brave at the same time, they aren’t mutually exclusive feelings. Life is too short to leave your deepest desires unmet.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

If you enjoy the posts, you can find the books here.

Take It

Life is a contact sport, there’s really no way to get through it without injury, and it isn’t something to “get through”, anyway. If you can embrace the experience of learning and growing, life can be piercingly beautiful even when it hurts. We all make mistakes, take a wrong turn here or there, fail to show up the way we’d like to sometimes. Wrong turns aren’t even wrong, unless we’re knowingly hurting someone else, in which case we have to look at when and how we’ve lost respect for ourselves. Short of that, as long as there’s growth, we’re doing it “right”. It’s going to be a total mess sometimes. Did you ever clean out a house or a garage, or even your closet? Sometimes you have to pull everything out so you can see what you’re dealing with; you have to make an even bigger mess so you can start to clean things up. Of course we all have choices we’d love to make over again, and differently; a few things we regret, even if we learned a painful but necessary lesson. This is called being human.

“Paralysis through analysis” is particularly debilitating. Sometimes we come to a fork in the road and we just stop and stare and agonize. Whichever way we look, the paths are painful and full of their own particular thorns; that’s how life can be. This can be the result of making choices and decisions based on what we thought we should do, even if it went against what was in our hearts. It can happen when we’ve been lying to ourselves, denying the reality of a thing, running from it, or numbing it out so the edges blurred enough to make things look okay, when really, they were not. When our actions affect other people, there can be immense temptation to sit with our heads in our hands, and hope something will happen to make the choice clear to us. Maybe someone else will make a move, and then there won’t be a choice anymore, there will just be the one thorny path, and we’ll lament our inaction, because maybe the other road would have been less painful. There’s that saying, “when you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything”, and I can get behind that for awhile, but there’s a difference between taking the time to mindfully consider where you’re at and what next steps make the most sense, and giving up on yourself and your ability to have an impact on the way your life feels and unfolds.

The burden of responsibility can be crushing when a particular course of action may cause pain or anguish for those you love. The thing is, sometimes we just can’t know, and it’s not our job to manage anyone else’s journey. Obviously, you do the very best you can not to hurt other people and to consider the way your actions will impact those you love beyond words, but you can’t serve anyone if you’re allowing your own light to extinguish. What is certain is that we can’t nurture ourselves or anyone else when we feel stuck, trapped, suffocated, or paralyzed by fear or anxiety. All we can do is our very best to move from, and toward love; to take the knowledge we have about ourselves, whatever we’ve learned from past experiences, and information we have about how we’ve landed where we are now, and just put one foot in front of the other, trying to have some faith that we’ll be able to evolve as things around us will also evolve, reminding ourselves that how we feel now is not how we will always feel. Better than letting your choices dwindle, and your faith in yourself diminish. We learn so much about ourselves when we’ve blown it, when we look around and life looks nothing like we wanted it to, or hoped it would. It’s incredibly painful, but it’s also the springboard for change. If what you’ve been doing hasn’t worked out too well, ending up in a ditch might be the thing you need in order to start doing things differently.

You have a finite amount of time. No matter how much you may have blown things so far, until your final exhale it’s never too late to turn it around. Today, you could start searching for those moments of beauty. They exist. You could direct your attention and your energy to every good thing that crosses your path. You could take your good health if you have it, and remember that’s a tremendous gift. You could remember the amazing and beautiful people in your life who love you, and whom you love so much it makes your heart expand just thinking of them. You could remember yourself as a kid with an open heart and recognize that kid still exists. That heart still exists, and you could just begin to show up for yourself and for the people in your life in the best way you know how at this point. That would be huge. You could gather your courage, and start putting one foot in front of the other, and if you step on a thorn, or one is pressed into your side, you could treat yourself with love and compassion.

No one has a crystal ball. There’s no way to make both choices and see which one works out for the best. There are times in life we’re simply flying blind and hoping, but I truly believe if you’re doing your best, you won’t go too far off course. Maybe something totally unexpected will happen, and the direction of your life will shift in ways you can’t imagine. Maybe you’ll look back on this very time in your life with gratitude, even if that seems incomprehensible right now, and maybe you won’t. There are some things that never go in the, “thank you for that experience” file. You are not here to circle around that fork in the road; life is not a relentless traffic circle. Wishing you the strength to choose a road and step onto it with your heart wide open,

Ally Hamilton

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

Want to Have a Happy New Year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gift of You

There are many things that can scare us in this life, but sometimes the biggest fears we have are created in our own minds. Have you ever geared up to have a conversation with someone for weeks or months, or even years? And every time you turn it over in your head, you think you can’t. You can’t get the words out because the pain will be too much; too much for you, or the other person. Maybe you play it out in your mind, looking for some way to become clear. What you’ll say, how you’ll say it, and what you hope they’ll say in response. Maybe you imagine the worst case scenarios, too. Meanwhile, you’re in a prison, time is going by, and your whole being is in agony. Pushing down the truth, whatever it is for you, is absolutely exhausting. Any painful conversation would be easier than the suffering we inflict upon ourselves when we just won’t face what we know in our hearts.

Shame is a strangler. There is no way you’re “supposed to be”; you can only be you, fully, the most beautiful, authentic version of yourself. Other people may have expectations and ways they like to think of you. If those expectations and ways go against the very grain of who you are, if it just isn’t working for you anymore, then the people closest to you will have to change their expectations, or not. But you can’t deny the deepest longing of your soul. You can’t fight your truth and expect to win. You can make yourself sick trying, though. Sometimes we long to make changes but tell ourselves we can’t or shouldn’t. We run down the list of all the things that might go wrong, instead of all the things that might go right. We ask ourselves who we are to consider shining. The real question is, who are we to consider not shining?

Fear can be debilitating, but we’ll all feel it, it’s perfectly natural. The more you open to it, the less hold it has over you. If you can acknowledge you’re afraid, you’ll find that releases the grip and you can breathe again, there’s space again. This is not an easy gig, this business of being human. We’re vulnerable and underneath the surface of our lives exist questions we’ll never be able to answer with absolute certainty until we exhale for the final time. It’s understandable that we want to cling to our plans and visions of how things should be. Presumably that, at least, is something we can control, but it isn’t, and we can’t. We are all evolving all the time, circumstances are shifting and changing all around us, and the reality of that groundlessness can be difficult to absorb. So we make our plans, and we feel afraid when they aren’t panning out the way we’d hoped. Now we have nothing to hold onto.

There are people who cling to their pain because that’s all they’ve got. Without it, they have no clear sense of who they’d be, or how life might feel. Something we know is often more appealing than something we don’t, even if what we know, hurts. But life isn’t something to get through with our fists clenched and our eyes shut tightly. It isn’t something to be endured in quiet despair. It can be both of those things when we don’t face ourselves and embrace what’s true for us, though. It’s isolating and suffocating. The only person who can let you out of a prison you’ve created in your mind, is you.

You may have fear of disappointing people, of not being what someone else wants you to be. The worst betrayal, though, is the betrayal of yourself. Too many people spend too much time and energy trying to be something other than who they are, as if what they are isn’t miraculous. When was the last time you ran into yourself at the grocery store, or on line at the movies, or at the park, or when you were traveling on the other side of the globe? You’ve never run into yourself anywhere, because you’ve never existed before, and you’ll never exist, exactly as you are, again. You have one shot in this life, in the body that you’re in, with the experiences you’ve had and the way you look at the world. One chance to sing your song and accept yourself and shine it out. It would be a shame if you let fear stop you. Feel it, and go there, anyway. Otherwise you rob the world of a gift it can never have any other way. You rob the world of the gift of you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Swing That Bat

I think the main thing at the end of the day (and the beginning and middle…and during the night, too), is to feel good about yourself, to feel comfortable in your own skin, to know and accept yourself, to recognize what’s true for you and what you need to be at peace. To discover what lights you up, to uncover your gifts so you can share them, and to feel like you aren’t leaving anything in the tank.

So many times people get caught up in what is or isn’t happening. The result, the goal, the objective, the deadline, the five-year plan. But I think the truth is, sometimes you’ll go for it and land smack on your face, and sometimes you’ll hit it out of the park. Landing on your face doesn’t feel good, but you know what feels worse? Letting the idea of “can’t” or “shouldn’t” stop you from trying. Telling yourself you probably won’t score, so why swing the bat? I’d rather fall on my face a million times than sit on the bench with fear.

Not everything will work out. You may strike out nine hundred times. But at least you can look at yourself at the end of the day and say, “I gave it everything I had today. I’ll try again tomorrow.” I really believe if you have that attitude and you also remember to focus on what you do have, if you don’t give up on yourself or on life, you’re going to win something no one can take from you. Your fire. In life, it’s the Sportsmanship Award that counts the most. Go get it.

Ally Hamilton

Live Out of Your Imagination

A few months ago I received an email from a guy who was ending a relationship with the woman he’d been hoping to meet his entire life. They had a great thing going, looked at the world in a similar way, had no shortage of laughter, great times, passion, real conversations and the ability to relax with each other. They’d taken trips and met each other’s families (he met her entire family, she met his mom and sister, but he doesn’t speak to his dad), and everyone felt they were a great match.

However, this man had grown up watching his dad abuse his mom verbally, emotionally and physically, and he couldn’t get past the fear that eventually this great thing he had would turn into that painful thing he knew; that one day he’d find himself throwing a pan at the head of this woman he adored as their kid stood there watching, or saying things to her that he wouldn’t be able to live with, or doing things that would make him feel terrible about himself. He remembered feeling helpless and enraged as a child, and throwing himself between his mom and his dad as he got bigger. He said he did have a temper, and had managed to keep it in check for the two years he’d been with his girlfriend, but he didn’t think he’d be able to do that for 60 years. So he was going to say goodbye to her to save her from a life of pain. (I could say a lot about how we get ourselves into trouble when we try to manage other people’s paths, but that can wait for now).

The other day someone asked me to address the difference between sitting with your pain (non-reactivity), and processing it (liberation). I think this is a huge and important distinction. Sitting with your pain means you don’t run or numb out when uncomfortable and intense feelings arise, such as rage, grief, fear, shame, loneliness or despair. You don’t race out the door, pop a pill, have a drink, play a video game, go shopping, take a hit, open the refrigerator, pick up the phone in anger, or shoot off a fiery email. You just allow the feelings to arise and you observe them. You notice sensations in your body, like maybe shallow breathing, or that your shoulders are up around your ears, or there’s tension between your eyebrows, or a literal ache around your heart or deep in your belly. You let the feelings wash over you without acting, and with the understanding that they aren’t permanent and they aren’t facts. They won’t kill you, and you don’t have to act on them. They’re just feelings, and they will arise, peak and subside. By sitting with them you open to the possibility of learning something essential about yourself — the why of your rage, fear or shame — and by facing those feelings you own them, they don’t own you; they don’t run your show, you run it. You choose how you respond, you don’t allow yourself to lash out in a state of reactivity and end up with a mess you have to clean up. Working on becoming less reactive and more responsive is huge, it’s a life-changer.

If you want to process your feelings — if, for example, you find rage is coming up for you all the time, then I would recommend that you find yourself a great therapist or coach, someone you trust and feel safe with, so you can dive into the source of what’s causing you so much pain. That’s as subjective an undertaking as finding a great yoga teacher, someone who resonates with you, and with whom you feel comfortable. I know so many people who say they tried therapy once (or yoga) and it “wasn’t for them.” You may have to call a number of people to figure out the right person to work with. Having someone who can kindly hold up a mirror for you so you can see your pain clearly, but also your light, also your power, can be so helpful. Combining that with a consistent yoga practice so you can work on feeding a loving voice while you’re on your mat is really powerful. The other thing I’d highly recommend is seated meditation. When you sit, and there’s nothing coming in, and nothing going out, you start processing what’s inside you. It’s kind of like emotional fasting, not that there’s an absence of emotion, just that the emotion is arising from deep within you. Eventually, if you stick with a seated meditation practice, you become more interested in the fact that you’re thinking, and not in the thoughts themselves. Eventually you find some peace in the space between your thoughts, which will increase if you stick with it. I’ve been practicing Vipassana (insight) meditation for almost two decades, you can check it out at dhamma.org if you’re interested.

The thing is, there’s no easy way around this stuff. Whatever your pain, you’ll have to go through it, but there are so many tools and healing modalities that help. You just have to explore and figure out what’s going to be helpful to you on your path toward healing. For me, yoga, seated meditation and therapy are a great mix, along with reading and writing. For you, it may something else, but there’s no reason your particular frame of reference has to rule your life. You can only know what you know, right? Whatever you’ve been through makes up your frame — the lens through which you look at the world and process data. Sometimes that lens is bent, or cracked, or covered over with a thick layer of despair. You work with your lens so you can see clearly. That’s the liberation I mentioned above. It’s not the that pain goes away, it’s simply that you recognize it when it comes up, and the force of it has been so diminished by your work, it doesn’t rule your life anymore. You don’t assume that what you’ve known is all there is. You have the freedom to imagine something else for yourself, to create something that maybe you’ve never known or seen, but you know in your heart is possible. You have the power to forge a different path.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here. If you’d like to sign up for one-on-one online coaching with me, please email me at ally@yogisanonymous.com for more information.

Believe in Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Saddle Up!

Fear is a perfectly natural feeling none of us will escape. There’s that fear that makes the tiny hairs on the back of your neck stand up because you know you’re in danger. Then there are the very human fears we all face to some degree or another. Fear of losing those we love. Fear of saying or doing something we’ll regret because it makes us look stupid or feel ashamed. Fear of being hurt, betrayed or left. Fear of rejection. Fear that you’ll take a chance with all your heart and fail. Fear of being alone. Fear of committing. Fear of success. Fear that our past can’t be overcome, and our future will be more of the same. Fear of screwing it all up. Fear of never being seen, known or loved. Fear of death. Fear of really living. Not everyone will experience all those fears, but most people will face at least some of them.

Fear isn’t a problem, but repressing it is. “Don’t be scared” is a common mantra we’re taught in childhood, but you can’t be other than what you are, ever. You feel how you feel and denying your experience is the issue. Thinking that a feeling we’re having is wrong or that it’s socially unacceptable is where we get into trouble. It would be better if we were taught, “Feel scared, but do it anyway.” There’s an elation that comes when we head into the center of our fear, flip it the bird, and dive in. A confidence in ourselves that can’t be gained any other way. There are few things as disappointing in life as when we let apprehension, the loud voice of “I can’t” or “I shouldn’t” stop us from doing something our hearts are crying out to do. When we feel paralyzed that way, our hearts get crushed because it’s a missed opportunity to grow, learn and strengthen. To know ourselves more deeply, and to be able to move in the direction of that inner yes.

People write in with all kinds of fears. This guy is afraid to ask this woman out. This girl likes this guy but doesn’t want to tell him because maybe he just wants to be friends. This woman has a dream, but it isn’t realistic and everyone would think she was nuts for pursuing it. This mother lost her first baby and is terrified it will happen again with her second, so she isn’t loving her baby the way she could. This man wants to reach out to his dad, but they haven’t spoken for thirty years, and what if he doesn’t want to talk? What if he’s dead? This woman lost her husband and her children and is afraid to move forward because who wants to risk that kind of loss again? This guy doesn’t go to parties, ever, because he’s convinced he’s so utterly unattractive no one would want to speak with him. This man is in a marriage without any love, but is afraid to tell his wife how he feels because what then?

There are some situations in life that are so complex, you really do have to move slowly and think clearly before you head off and make decisions that will affect other people in your life, but living in fear feels terrible. It shuts us down and makes us feel there isn’t any hope, there aren’t any options, there isn’t a path that could lead us to something different. I do not believe anyone can flourish from a foundation of fear, and if you’re withering, you really can’t nurture anyone else, including yourself. If you feel stuck in fear, reach out. Get yourself some help and some support if you need it, so you can start to face it down, which is totally different than pushing it down. The very funny thing about fear is that when you have your back to it, it feels like this raging, huge, fiery dragon that could take you down with one big exhaled flame. But if you’d turn around, you’d see it’s just a huge pile of blocks you’ve erected in your mind. The kind you used to play with when you were a kid. The blocks are mostly made of pain, and the tower is teetering. You could, if you found the courage, reach out and knock the whole thing down. Then you could look at the pieces, and start to build something new. Maybe a bridge. I’m not saying the fear isn’t real. I’m just saying it’s not going to kill you.

Sending you love, and the hope that you’ll saddle up if you need to,

Ally Hamilton

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

Jump!!

I moved to Los Angeles in 2001 with my boyfriend at the time, who was also a yoga teacher. We’d only been dating about six months and of course moving 3000 miles across the country together sounds romantic and fun at that point, albeit a little nuts. I don’t regret it, he’s still a friend, but because of a piece of cheese and some other issues it fell apart six months after we moved here. He went back to New York and in order for me to pay my rent, make the car payment and feed myself and my dog, I took over all his classes. Which, combined with my own, totaled twenty-seven classes a week.

I taught from West Hollywood to Redondo and was on the freeway all day long, stopping back at my place in Miracle Mile for some seated meditation, then racing my dog up to Runyon Canyon for a quick hike. Up at the crack of dawn for my own Ashtanga practice, and getting home from teaching between 9 and 11pm every night. I did that the first three years I was out here. It was a crazy pace, but I look back on that time with some nostalgia. It was lonely in a funny way, because I was surrounded by people in my classes all day long, having this very social, communicative experience before and after class, and going home to my dog. I was on a self-imposed dating hiatus, and was just starting to find my true friends out here. There were times I’d fight rush hour traffic to go teach at the place in Redondo that was paying me $30, and by the time I drove there and back it was a wash, but I loved that class. It was just an especially sweet and dedicated group of people, a little community unto itself. I felt the same way about my WeHo group, and Westwood. There were moments I wondered if all these people from all these places would drive an hour to see me, but those were fleeting thoughts during traffic jams.

Eventually, I was offered a chance to teach at the new location of a donation-based studio I adored, full-time. No more freeway, no more need for 27 classes a week, more time with my dog, and the possibility of some down time by the beach. But in order to do it, I’d have to wipe out my checking account, because it basically meant leasing the space from the studio, first and last month’s rent, administrative fees, and some other odds and ends. I’d managed to save a few thousand dollars by working my butt off and not spending more than I absolutely needed to get by. No one knew for sure this new studio would work, and of course, the only way you make money in the donation system is if your class is pretty full. I called a few trusted friends. Most said I’d be crazy to do it, but in my gut, there was a YES. So I wrote a check and left myself with $19 in my account. No savings, no back-up plan, no way to pay rent at the end of the month if it all went badly, nothing. Another studio called right at that moment and offered me 10 classes a week if I walked away from the donation place because it was in the same neighborhood. Because, y’know, having $19 to my name wasn’t enough of a test. I passed on that offer. I had enough dog food to last a month, and I kid you not, I ate peanut butter for three days. I quit every single place I’d been teaching, and gave everyone schedules for the new studio. For many of the people who’d been taking class with me the last three years, it meant an hour’s drive in traffic each way. So now my question would be answered. The first night I taught, 45 people showed up. Fifteen of them were my crew from Redondo. West Hollywood showed up. Miracle Mile. Century City. I don’t mind telling you I went in the back and let myself cry some tears of relief. And incredible gratitude.

Almost anytime in my life I’ve been scared sh&tless to do something, it’s a sign to me it needs to be done. I’m not talking about being reckless, mind you. I just don’t want to be owned by fear. I don’t want fear to be a reason I don’t move in the direction of that yes. That yes is all you’ve got. Without it, I think we’re all lost here. When I was thirteen I had a huge crush on my English teacher, Michael Trano. (Yes, that’s his real name, and Mr. Trano, if you’re out there, I think of you often and am so grateful for all your enthusiasm about my writing and all your insight about life. And also, I used to write “Ally Trano” all over all my notebooks.) Every year, we had to give a speech, and compete for the “Doris Post Speech Award.” The first year I went through this particular hell, it was in Mr. Trano’s class. I was the kid who shook when called on to read. Hands shaking, voice shaking. I can’t tell you why, I just didn’t enjoy that kind of attention. I guess fear of speaking in public is fairly common. When the day of the speech came, I could not do it. I got up in front of Mr. Trano and all my classmates, and I shook so hard I couldn’t read my notecards and eventually I simply couldn’t speak. I ended up in tears, ashamed and unable to pull it together. He let me give him that speech one-on-one after school.

Every year after that, through middle and high school I dreaded that f&cking Doris Post speech contest. Straight-A student, plenty of friends, done in by this simple task. I always picked boring topics, and I always shook, but managed to barely get through it, until the last year, which was my Junior year. I was in an advanced placement English class, and most of the other students were Senior boys. I loved my teacher, Jayne Connell (Ms. Connell, if you’re out there, I thank you, too. For all the support and all the love and all those laughs, and for the amazing works of literature you put in front of me). I gave a speech about why it’s funny when a bunch of guys hang out and one of them farts, but a group of girls do not high-five each other for the same feat. I WON the freaking Doris Post speech contest, the last year I was in High School, before I took off for college the following year. I had to give that speech to the entire school, scared out of my mind. Every teacher I’d ever had. Every friend. I’ll tell you the truth. I still have a huge fear of speaking in public. Not when I’m teaching yoga, I can talk all day long if people are busy in down dog, and it doesn’t matter how many people there are. But if those same people sit down and stare at me in folding chairs, we’re in different territory again.

A little over a year ago I was asked to give a TEDx talk. I felt that same horrendous fear come up, same thirteen year old kid. But I did that too, simply because I was scared to do it. Screw your fear. A couple of months ago I went on a date with someone I went out with once last year. One of the best dates of my life as far as true connection. I couldn’t fathom why he didn’t call me after, but a year later I got an email from him asking to go out again. Out we went, same amazing flow. So at the end of the night, I said, “I really think you’re awesome and would love to get to know you better. Annual dating isn’t really my thing.” We laughed, talked about further plans, and zilch. But it’s okay. I was scared to be honest like that, but I don’t regret it. Fear is a lousy reason to squish your yes. Facing your fear won’t always lead to a happy ending. But kicking your fear in the nuts and living with your heart wide open feels pretty awesome. Give it a shot if you haven’t, and let me know how it goes 😉

Ally Hamilton

Your 3-Point Shot, from Downtown!!!

If you have a song in your heart (and you do), you have to sing it. It doesn’t matter if it’s off-key, if the melody needs work, or the lyrics are clunky. Whatever it is within you that sets your soul on fire is your purpose. It’s the key to finding a meaningful, fulfilling life. It might take a lot of time to figure out how best to express from within you what’s aching to come out; the thing is not to give up, and not to worry when your song isn’t received as the gift that it is. Sometimes you’re going to get thrown out of the game and have to sit on the bench and figure out what happened. And if you haven’t discovered what lights you up from the inside, don’t give up on that, either. Frequently we have to unlearn what we’ve learned. It’s totally possible you’ve been pursuing a path that doesn’t really suit you, because you feel like you should. We get inundated with so many messages about what we’re supposed to do, and how we should look and feel, it’s a wonder any of us knows anything about what we really want. But it’s in there, I guarantee it. Don’t give up on yourself, and don’t give up on life. And don’t blame the ref and get stuck in resentment and anger, you know? It’s a marathon, not a sprint, as they say.

Here’s a question for you: Do you know how many mistakes you’re going to make in your life? How many times you’re going to do something or say something you wish you hadn’t before you exhale for the last time? I don’t know either, but I bet it’s a lot. I gave up trying to be perfect a long time ago. I tried for years and finally decided I’d rather commit to being happy. I let go of the idea of perfection, because I was in a pretty constant state of disappointment. Perfection is too heavy a burden to carry. It’s such a relief to embrace the idea of being perfectly imperfect. All too human. However you want to think of it, it’s a total liberation. The thing is to find your joy, your passion, your yes, and put everything behind it. And that’s easy to do when you realize that your gifts, whatever they may be, are yours to share. There’s nothing better I know of in this life, than the feeling that comes when you realize you’ve uplifted someone else. I think that’s because it’s what we’re here to do, to spread as much love as possible with the time we’re given.

This business of being human is not easy. It’s messy and complicated, and sometimes it breaks your heart wide open, without warning, on a mild Tuesday night, or a rainy Saturday morning. The absolute best thing you can do is get right with yourself. Know yourself deeply, heal what needs to be healed, uncover those gifts, and share them with abandon and delight. If you get back to love, (and it might be buried under some rage or fear or doubt or shame or guilt), you can try and fail left and right, and it will still be okay, as long as you don’t give up.

There’s a Maori proverb, “Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.” If you’re coming from love and doing everything you can to make the world within you and the world around you a more peaceful and loving place to be, your missed shots are meaningless. If love is at your center, you’ll never be careless with another person. You’ll never turn a blind eye when someone is suffering. You won’t hit below the belt, that just won’t be in your wheelhouse. You’ll consider the impact of your choices and your words and the way you’re moving through the world. And it will never be perfect, and there will always be circumstances that blindside you from time to time, moments when you don’t show up the way you’d like to, efforts and creative endeavors that sink, times when it feels like you’re not adding to the happiness quotient as much as you’d like. As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” And achievement to me means living a life that brings you, and everyone around you, joy. Over-prepare, practice hard, pick yourself up again and again, and then go with the flow. Quitting isn’t an option, and sitting on the bench sucks!! Grab your jersey and get in the game! Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

The One You Feed

We are all capable of incredible kindness and light, and also of indifference and self-absorption. It’s easy to move through life with blinders on, thinking of the world as though it’s rotating around us. As if whatever happens is happening to us. As though we are being punished or rewarded, or as though we are owed something. Some of life is incomprehensibly painful, and some of it will crack your heart wide open with gratitude. Life is just life, it is happening, it is moving and flowing. This was true before we existed, and it will be true after we’re gone. We get a blink, you know?

With your blink, I recommend you blaze your way through. How you respond to this life is your choice. What you feed is up to you. I believe in free will. I believe in facing your fears and slaying your dragons and sitting with your pain and owning your truth. I believe in acknowledging those places where you may be weak, and turning them into places of incredible strength. I believe in knowing yourself, and I believe in accountability. I believe if you want to be happy, you need to shift your focus and consider what you might do to uplift someone else. You cannot control circumstances, but you can work on the way you respond to them. You can weigh yourself down with resentment and rage. You can do your days bitterly. Or you can feed gratitude and light and love and oh, that sunset is unbelievable. You can soak the joy out of every moment possible, and when it is time to cry, you can cry openly, freely, on your knees with a pure heart. You can fight your way through this thing, or you can open to the flow. It takes courage to surrender, to be vulnerable, to realize you are not in control, and to meet each day with your heart wide open, anyway.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not suggesting you deny your shadow (And I also don’t feel those shadow feelings are “evil”, either. They are natural, human emotions we will all experience). When you’re angry or in pain, open to those feelings, too, because if you run from them or repress them or numb them out, they will own you. I’m simply saying don’t get stuck there. Try not to stoke the flame and keep yourself boiling. You really don’t want to hold on to a sad or angry story about yourself, life, or why things are the way they are. There is always potential for growth, for change. There’s always the possibility of a new story, every day. You get to co-create it. I think the key is just to receive those darker feelings when they arise, and explore them and let them wash over you so that the heat of your rage or your heartache or your despair or grief or betrayal is released, so you can be free to move forward. You may have a wound in your heart that will never fully heal if your loss has been profound, but that doesn’t mean your heart cannot open around it. The heart is so expansive.

Watch what you feed yourself in every area. Everything you take in is your food. Some of it feeds your body, some your mind, and some your heart. You cannot exist on a steady diet of Not. Good. Enough. and expect to be able to love yourself well. You cannot feed yourself a regular stream of violence (even if it’s fictional), and think that does not seep into your being. You cannot dwell on everything that’s wrong in your life, everything that isn’t happening the way you’d like it to, and think you’ll feel any gratitude, which is one of the best feelings there is, and a very sad thing to miss. Sending you love, and hoping you will realize who and what you are. Because you are really so stunningly beautiful and so capable of shining. If I could, I’d hold up a mirror for you so you could see that blinding light within you if you’ve lost sight of it. Wishing you peace, and hoping for peace everywhere, Ally Hamilton

Live Out Loud

I think possibly the saddest thing in life is never to live; to allow years to pass without pursuing those things that feed your soul and light you up from the inside until you’re shining and blazing like the sun. There’s really no time to waste. If you put off living until tomorrow, or next week, or wait for that magical time “when things calm down” you run the risk of never getting it done, because tomorrow is not promised. And, in all likelihood, things are not going to calm down. You may have times that are more peaceful than others, but life comes in waves. Every day is an opportunity to move toward healing if you need to, or to spread some love and some light wherever you go. It’s a chance to sing your song, loudly and with abandon, even if you are way off-key. To take a chance on yourself, or someone else, to go for it, all the way, without leaving a single ounce in the tank.

Your life may look nothing like what you expected or planned for, but embrace it and own it, and shake off or face down anything that is blocking your access to that insanely limitless well of love within you. Be honest with yourself, and with everyone in your life. It’s so much simpler that way. Accept and embrace what is true for you so you can be free. When you look back on your life, I hope you’ve lived it in such a way that you smile when you think about it. That you chuckle, and shake your head, and your eyes twinkle. That you’ve spent yourself, and every gift you’ve been given, that you’ve sucked the joy out of every moment, that you’ve taken in as many sunrises and sunsets as possible. That you’ve hugged a lot. That you’ve conquered your fears and lived out loud, all the way, from your gorgeous heart. I hope you’ve said, “I love you” and, “Thank you” a million times.

The 37 trillion or so cells that are you have never and will never come together in exactly the same way again. You’re precious and miraculous and important. You are not an accident. Don’t dim your light or smother your gifts or doubt your worth. Prick up the ears of your soul every time the voice or voices inside your head say you can’t or you shouldn’t. The voice to listen for is the quiet but always truthful voice of your heart. Your inner GPS. Follow that and you will love your life. You will start to see miracles all around you, every day, in the beautiful, shimmering greens you’ll see when the sun hits the leaves of a tree whose branches are swaying in the wind. When you hear the unguarded laugh of a child. When a stranger smiles at you and you can see their heart through the light in their eyes. Don’t miss a second. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

Stand Up Eight

The key thing in life is not to give up. If finding inner peace was easy, the world would be full of happy, loving people, and we’d have a much different set of global circumstances, too. How it is outside is a reflection of how it is inside, and we simply have too many people at war within themselves at this moment in time.

In our culture, we’re taught to be against ourselves, we’re trained to have an adversarial relationship with our own bodies. In other words, we are taught to go to war at home. You’re going to live in your body for your whole life, so in a very real sense, it IS your home, and you’re going to keep the company of your internal dialogue. How sad that we’re taught that almost nothing about us is okay, and how obvious it is that we’d need some healing. This business of being human is not easy, and you may feel lost, alone and in darkness for quite some time. Yesterday in one of the threads, someone said she wished she had a set of tools for healing. The best tool for getting unstuck is knowing yourself. Figuring out what makes you tick, what lights you up, what feeds your soul. And then finding the courage to make choices that are in alignment with your big, resounding inner YES. Acknowledging and embracing your pain so it doesn’t rule your life. Accepting all parts of yourself not with shame or fear, but with grace, with compassion. Understanding that your work is not to be perfect, but to be real, to be perfectly you, perfectly human.

How do you know yourself? There are so many tools. I teach yoga because that’s the set of tools that worked, and continues to work for me, six days a week, and more than twenty years (and counting) later. Talking to at least one someone you trust is also essential. Someone who will mourn with you, but will also kindly hold up a mirror for you when you are not showing up as your highest self, or when you are acting in a way that is harmful to your own well-being. A great therapist will do those things for you. Treating yourself well, feeding yourself well, and examining relationships with people that may not be healthy. Getting out in nature, feeling the sun on your skin, the breeze on your face. Reading books that open you, that shed a little light into your darkness (anything by Pema Chodron, Sylvia Boorstein’s, “Happiness is an Inside Job”,”The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz, “The Hero’s Journey” by Joseph Campbell, “Devotion” by Dani Shapiro, and “Being Peace” by Thich Nhat Hanh are all favorites of mine, along with the poems of Mary Oliver, David Whyte, Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke…I could go on and on, but that’s a good start if you need some inspiration), and a seated meditation practice (check out http://www.dhamma.org/ if you’re interested). These are the tools in my particular shed, but knowing yourself means figuring out what you need in yours.

Falling down and staying down is a commitment to misery and darkness and rage and bitterness. It’s going to be a long, unhappy life like that. Yesterday someone else said they’d given up, but I don’t believe that, because then, what are you doing on this page? You know I’m gonna come out swinging every day about the beauty in life and the beauty in you, and that I’m going to keep talking about healing yourself and doing the work and being accountable and taking a hold of this one, amazing, gorgeous, painful, unpredictable life, and riding it all the way. Please don’t give up on yourself, or on life. That would be such a shame. Because no one else can be you. You are the only you we’ve got, and you have your own particular gifts to uncover and share. Robbing yourself of that opportunity is also robbing yourself of the joy of life, the sweetness of your purpose, the great, true laughter of your heart. It’s also robbing the world of gifts only you can offer. You may have grown up, you may shave your face every morning, or your legs, but there is still a little kid inside you who is hoping beyond hope that you will do it. That you will face the dragons and slay the sh&t out of them. That you will charge the fence with everything you’ve got and break yourself out of the illusion that you are not good enough, or that the world isn’t beautiful even with all its pain. Fall down seven times, stand up eight. Don’t let yourself down, don’t let yourself get counted out. I hope you stand up right now. Sending you love, and a very hot cattle-prod if you need one, Ally Hamilton

Make Your Art

This is pretty much how I feel about life. Every day we are granted is a chance to make art. The art of living life with your heart open. The art of moving from, and with love. The art of healing yourself, of listening deeply, of giving whatever you’ve got to spread some light, some joy, some laughter. The art of a great hug. The art of creating a space where healing is likely to occur, for yourself, and for as many other people as you can. Some of the most beautiful art I know, is the art of being present. Of giving someone your time, your attention, access to your soul. Everyone deserves that. To be truly seen, heard, experienced.

You won’t always succeed, but treating your life and the way you’re living it as your canvas, and painting it with every gorgeous color in your soul is the only way I know to make the art you’re here to share. Worrying about how you’ll be received or perceived is all too human, but it’s also a complete waste of your resources. Trying to please everyone is exhausting and impossible, and it’s also a surefire way to cut yourself off from your inspiration, your yes, your divine spark. If you make your art from a place of love, you really can’t go wrong. You may not please everyone, but as long as you aren’t intentionally hurting anyone (I’m not talking about those times when we will all inevitably hurt people because we’ve grown in a different direction. I’m talking about indifference to someone else’s well-being, feelings, situation, heart), you have to shine your light. You have to dip your brush in the well of what is true for you, and splash the stuff that lights you up from within, all over your canvas. It is not your job to convince anyone that your art is worthwhile or important or good. It’s not your job to wipe someone else’s lenses and sell them on how awesome you are. You are supposed to be awesome. You’re no different than the sun, or the ocean, or the bella luna. You’re part of all of that, with some stardust splashed in, too. There is nothing to prove. There are just many incredible and obvious things to be: Curious, loving, open, attentive, laughing, grateful, awake, amazed.

That’s your light, and you’re meant to shine it. You’re meant to uncover it and share it and spread it everywhere you go. We need to feel that connection to what is true for us, and the joy in life comes from the sharing of it. Of course it is extra special to be received with love. But you are love, so you can do that for yourself, too. Some people will come and share some of their art on your canvas in this life if you let them. And you will sometimes paint on someone else’s also. If you have children one day, you will want them to finger paint all over your stuff until they find their own canvas. Sometimes in life someone’s art complements our own so well, we decide to share a space to shine, and sometimes the art moves in two different directions. If at all possible, celebrate the process of making it, and try not to worry too much about whether it’s turning out the way you envisioned. Maybe you’ll surprise yourself. Maybe some color will come out of you that you never knew existed. Be bold. Be willing to get messy. Try not to be disturbed when every color coming out of you is dark. If you looked back on the canvases of the most happy people you know, I guarantee you somewhere you’d find the midnight blue of despair. The dark grey of loneliness. The muddy brown of confusion. The blackness of fear. And splashes of those shadow colors throughout the entire piece. How else would you see the extraordinary light if not for the darker hues? Because this work of being human is messy and complicated. Sometimes it will break your heart, and sometimes your broken heart will open in ways that create the most piercingly beautiful colors. It is all gorgeous and necessary and worthwhile. It is all your art. And it is stunning, just like you.

And just so you know, you can come paint on my canvas anytime. Sending you so much love, and flicking a little paint at you, too, Ally Hamilton

Answer the Questions that are Going to Feed Your Soul

Can you imagine if the questions were: How much money did you make? How much stuff did you accumulate? How many hours did you work? How many accolades did you receive? How much did you weigh? Would that not be INSANE??! And yet, that seems to be much of our focus. And people buy into this (literally), and live their entire lives as slaves to the wrong questions.

They’re the wrong questions if you want to be happy, anyway. I am absolutely positive life is not about accumulating money and stuff. Are there the basic necessities of keeping a roof over your head and food in your refrigerator and clothes on your back? Absolutely. But once those needs are met and you’re not scrambling to make ends meet, your happiness quotient is not going to expand in any kind of correlation to your bank account. If you’re not happy on the inside, nothing external will fix that. And if a person isn’t thankful for everything they already have, they’re not going to be satisfied with more. If you can’t take the time to eat a slice of pie and really savor it, a whole pie isn’t going to help you with that. Because it will never be enough. If you don’t fill the void with love, it’s a bottomless pit.

Loving well is an art. It takes constant practice and study and patience and a willingness to be totally vulnerable. You have to expose the soft underbelly of your heart and offer it up. It requires listening well. Seeing well. And it means figuring out how to do those things for yourself, too. Love doesn’t control or manipulate or cling. It accepts and it surrenders with grace, with understanding. Love celebrates truth, and sometimes love is required to let go. Love wants to lift us up, to say yes! Go, do that thing that’s burning within you, whether I get to come along or I’m left to watch you shine from afar. Love honors us and says, of course you can. Loving well means walking through the world with your hands, heart, mind and eyes wide open. And love is inside of everyone. Sometimes people have to dig deeply to uncover it, but I believe we’re all made of the stuff, and learning to love well simply involves realizing that.

Living fully is so much about listening to your heart, to your intuition, to that YES inside you that’s bursting to come out. About recognizing that every single day is a gift to be opened and relished, and hopefully, received as another chance to spread more love. To finding your purpose, your gifts, and sharing them everywhere you go, to the best of your ability. Living fully involves presence, awareness, engagement and a desire to take nothing for granted. No smile, no touch on the arm, no rushed goodbye on the way out the door.

And letting go is embracing the reality that everything, everything is in a constant state of change. Nothing is certain except that nothing is certain. That scares the sh&t out of most people and it’s so understandable. But we are not in control. We do not get to decide what will happen and what won’t happen. All we can do is move toward healing and love, over and over again. All we can do is love with our whole hearts and try with everything we’ve got to shine as brightly as we can for as long as we’ve got. To help each other. To lend a hand, a shoulder, whatever is needed. Each day we are given an opportunity to practice. Each day we have a chance to move from love. The more we’re able to do that, the happier the day will be. If you can string a whole bunch of those together, that’s a formula for a very happy life. Make sure you’re living answers to the questions that are going to feed your soul. And have a gorgeous day. Sending you so much love, as I always am, Ally Hamilton

Falling

When you’re in the midst of things that are falling apart, whether they be jobs or relationships or a way of being, this is a tough concept to embrace, but things fall apart so they can fall together in a different way. That doesn’t mean “everything is happening for a reason”, it just means that this is the nature of all living things–people, emotions, situations, and the leaves on the trees around us. Everything is always in flux. If a relationship ends and your heart is broken, of course you’re going to grieve and examine what happened, and depending upon circumstances, you may have a lot of healing to do. Those times when I’ve felt desperate, or paralyzed by fear, or heartbroken because I couldn’t see a path in front of me and realized I’d have to cut through the brush and create one, have also been the times when I’ve learned the most about myself and have grown in ways I never would have otherwise. That doesn’t mean you have to put everything in a box marked “thank you”, it just means we always have the choice to create beauty out of our pain.

Sometimes the thing that’s “falling apart” is you. In yoga philosophy and practice, you might come upon the concept of “The Dark Night of the Soul”, which is not a yogic concept, but rather a poem (and later a treatise about the poem) written by the Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross. In the poem, he narrates the journey of the soul from its bodily home to its union with God. In the yogic context, we have something called “isvara pranidhana”, which has a few different translations: devotion to the divine, devotion to the Ultimate Reality, devotion to your True Self.

It’s basically that time that comes when the old way of being in the world isn’t working anymore, and the new way of being isn’t clear yet. The old way may include relationships, jobs, coping mechanisms, the way you see yourself…anything that feels inauthentic, that just doesn’t “fit right” anymore, that will now have to go. It’s an extremely uncomfortable, lonely, painful, and scary process…and it takes a lot longer than a night. For me I’d say it took about five years. Any spiritual path (and there are many), will hopefully lead you to your own truth, your own peace, your realization of the incredible and limitless well of love within you. But in order to get there, you’re probably going to have to sail away from the shores you know, and head out to sea for awhile, waiting for your internal compass to kick in.Knowingly plunging yourself into darkness doesn’t usually sound appealing to people unless they’ve tried everything else first.

I’d feel comfortable saying that if the path you’re on isn’t making you a more compassionate person, it’s probably not the right path. Because ultimately, we are all so much the same. All grappling with life’s big questions: What’s the meaning of it all? What am I doing here? What happens when I die? We all breathe the same air, all live off (and on) the same planet, all love our children, all have fears and doubts and hopes and dreams and places within ourselves that need healing. So whatever you believe, I hope it opens you so that when you meet people, you really see them. And so that you realize that although they may be smiling at you, last night they could have cried into their pillow until they finally fell asleep. Because maybe everything is falling apart for them right now. It’s not easy, this business of being human. Things do fall apart. We will never know for sure if our answers to those big questions are right. And one day we will die. For me personally, I feel I’ve grappled with those questions and come up with answers that feel right to me. But you may answer those same questions with completely different answers, and you know, you may be right. We’re all just doing our best here.The only thing I’ve come up with that I believe in my heart is universal, is that we are made of energy, and that energy is love. Anything else is taught and learned. When things fall apart, whether it’s your way of being that isn’t working anymore, or it’s a relationship or a job, and you just can’t envision how things will possibly work out, see if you can open your hands and your heart and your mind instead of clenching your fists. We cannot control circumstances. We cannot control what other people will think, or do, or say. We cannot manage anyone else’s journey. But we can manage our own path, and we can keep heading toward healing and love.

What I want most in this world is for my children to be happy. I want them to live in a peaceful world. I want you and your children to be happy. I truly believe we are all family. Your children are related to my children, even if you live on the other side of the world. The only way I know to a peaceful world, is one person at a time. One person at a time taking the journey inward and doing the work to heal. One person at a time being willing to let things fall apart if they need to so that something strong and beautiful can emerge. If your house is peaceful, if you model loving behavior for your children, if you teach them what it means to be compassionate by being compassionate, they will do as you do. And if you don’t, they will also do as you do. That’s how we change the world, I’m pretty sure of that. I believe almost everyone is capable of healing. I realize our culture encourages sleepwalking but I don’t underestimate the power of a growing number of people who are awake. Engaged. On fire. When things fall apart, the desire to go to sleep, to numb out is understandable. But I’d rather be awake and in pain than asleep. And I’d rather be awake for all the incredible joy, too. Aware of all the gifts. Open to all the love. I’d rather accept that everything is always changing, and that one day I’m going to die. I hope it’s a long long time from now. But however long I’ve got, I want to use every minute to spread love. I won’t succeed. I’m a human being. I’ll get angry, or discouraged or tired or cranky or depressed sometimes. But I’ll do my best. And I know you will, too. And I hope we all live long enough to see the impact of a bunch of loving people doing their best and coming together. Wouldn’t that be freaking awesome? Sending you so much love, and a very big hug if things are falling apart for you right now, Ally Hamilton

What Are You Doing?

There’s no doubt that a train of thought will affect the way you feel. If you’re in a negative frame of mind, that’s going to create a set of circumstances within you. Some thoughts will affect your physical body–the way you’re holding yourself, the way you’re breathing, the degree to which your muscles are “holding on”, your jaw is clenching, or your brows are furrowing. Some thoughts will affect your ability to sleep or eat well, and some will have an effect on your emotional body, and lead to feelings of listlessness and hopelessness. But nothing is going to have a greater effect upon you than your own actions. At the end of the day, you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror while you’re brushing your teeth. You have to be able to live with yourself. And that’s not going to be easy if you’re acting in ways that are hurtful to you, or to other people.

Having said that, we are all going to hurt other people at some time or another. Sometimes two people grow in different directions, and there’s just no stopping the reality that someone is going to be crushed. Sometimes we’re young and we don’t know what we’re doing. Sometimes we’re selfish and immature, and don’t understand the ramifications of what we’re doing. I’m not talking about that, though. I’m talking about those actions we take even when we realize somewhere deep and real, we shouldn’t. Feelings can be powerful, but they’re just feelings. They come and go, like everything else. You don’t have to act on every feeling that comes over you. Sometimes pain is just brutal, relentless, exhausting, and it’s natural to want a break from it, an escape. But if you’re in pain, the pain is there to teach you something. I know that isn’t a pleasant reality, but it’s the truth. Again, I’m talking about the kind of pain we create for ourselves, not the kind life brings (although frequently we create pain for ourselves because we haven’t healed a wound from the kind of pain that life can bring). Avoiding it or trying to escape it will not make it go away. You can try drugs, or alcohol, or sex, or shopping, or eating or not eating. All you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable. There’s no permanent escape that’s appealing, there’s no lifelong distraction that is going to bring you peace. At a certain point you’re going to have to walk right into the center of your pain and sit your a$$ down. Your pain is your path to freedom. Avoiding it is a jail sentence you’re imposing upon yourself, with the key in your pocket and your mind full of can’t.

I don’t say this without compassion, because I certainly avoided dealing with my own stuff for many years, but it’s really self-indulgent to desist from dealing with your issues. It’s an act of ingratitude. We don’t think of it that way when we’re in the grip of fear, thinking our pain will destroy us; we think of it as survival. But that’s flawed thinking. That’s your real, actual work here–healing yourself, filling yourself with love and compassion and kindness and inspiration, so you can spread those things freely. I realize fear is a big factor. People often feel overwhelmed and defeated by their past, their past behavior, and the idea that they might be able to do anything about it. Not doing anything about it is the thing to fear. A lifetime of emptiness and loneliness and quiet desperation, or not so quiet rage is the thing to fear. A life where you want to numb yourself or distract yourself constantly is something to fear for sure. A life where no one can get close to you because then the real work has to start and you’ve chosen to bow out of that, is something that ought to make you feel a little sick to your stomach. When you refuse to plunge in, your soul gets sick. Soulsickness. Like seasickness, but it’s your heart that’s getting thrown against the rocks.

Your pain won’t defeat you. Not dealing with it will, though. The ability to sit with your feelings without reacting to them is a tool you need to develop if you want to know yourself. If you want to be close to other people. I’m talking about real intimacy, total nakedness with someone else. Trust. The ability to have an uncomfortable, deeply painful conversation with someone about how you feel before you act on your feelings, even if the conversation terrifies you.

“Developing the witness” is something we talk about in yoga and meditation. The idea that you can have your feelings without identifying with them so much. Finding the strength to pause and consider and explore a set of actions before you do anything. That’s freedom. That’s also where character develops and strengthens. In order to change your behavior, sometimes you need to change your thinking. Creating space between yourself and your thoughts, recognizing that you are not your thoughts, is step one.

It’s going to be very hard to love yourself if you aren’t living up to your potential. Because somewhere inside, you’ll know you’re not. You’ll know you’re sleepwalking. And treating yourself and other people carelessly. And you’ll also realize time is passing. You could be shining, that’s the essential thing. You could be so full of love and consciousness and kindness and yes, that it would spill out all over the place wherever you went. Please don’t deny yourself that kind of shining. You could love your life if you don’t, already. You could love yourself and everyone you encounter. You could say, “Okay, Life, let’s dance”. I really hope you do. Sending you love, as always. Ally Hamilton

Unpack Those Bags!

I don’t believe there’s any way of moving through this life without some pain, heartache, disappointment, loss, confusion, fear, and loneliness. I’ve never had the experience of getting to know anyone closely without discovering a deep well of pain within them. We all have our stories, our losses, and those places where we mourn for ourselves.The difference between happy people and unhappy people lies in their resiliency, the amount of support they find for themselves, their ability to integrate and make peace with what’s happened, and the way they respond to what they’re given. Sometimes you try to find support for yourself, and nothing seems to work. Depression is real, it’s not a choice, it’s a fight for your life. So is addiction. And sometimes people lose the battle.

There are also situations where it is a choice. You can carry your pain on your back and into every experience you have. You can keep your pain alive by feeding it and compounding it with the confusion that results from choices fueled by old wounds. The longer you allow yourself to deny, avoid, feed, or numb out from your pain, the longer your heart will wither and your soul will be crushed. Your heart is made for love. Your soul wants to dance, to expand well beyond the borders of your body. But if you’re dousing yourself with bitterness, resentment, fear, shame, guilt, doubt, insecurity and some crazy notion that you aren’t lovable, there’s just no way you’re going to be able to shine. To throw off the blinders. To realize what you know, to acknowledge what you are.

At a certain point, you’re going to have to sit down and unpack those bags if you want to find some inner peace. If you want to unhook your journey from past experiences and find the freedom and the expansion that comes from forgiveness, compassion and taking responsibility for your own happiness. You’re going to have to examine everything you’ve been carting around and find that raw place inside you that is connected to that baggage and give it your kind attention. You’re going to have to wrap your arms around your own pain and say, “I know you. I feel you. I’m right here.” And you’re going to have to let it out. To grieve until the heat of the wound is washed away by your tears. That’s the only way to stop the bleeding and start the healing. You have to honor and acknowledge that pain before you can let it go. Or it can let you go.

People who are hurting will hurt others. That’s how it works. Please get that because it’s important to grasp. If someone hurts you, betrays you, treats you with disrespect or cruelty, it’s because that is what is inside them. That’s where they are on their journey; that’s how they’re dealing with their own pain. I’m not saying that’s okay, I’m just saying you don’t have to take it on. You don’t have to accept and own it as something you caused or deserve. You don’t have to receive it as a response to you, a rejection of you. It has little to do with you, except inasmuch as you choose to participate. And if you’re in pain, you’re going to spread it. You probably won’t mean to do that, but it will happen. I have all the love and time and patience in the world for people who are struggling, who are trying in earnest to face their stuff and deal with it, because it’s difficult, painful, lonely work. I’ve been there, I know. And it’s so uncomfortable. But people who are sleepwalking through life, who refuse to own their actions, who want to point fingers or explain or justify bad behavior, who want a pass on the hard work (and we’ve all been these people at one time or another, yours truly included)…I want to get up in their mix and say, “WAKE THE EFF UP!!!” With love, of course.

Because life is going to be pretty miserable lugging heavy bags of pain around everywhere. And being too afraid or too lazy to get to work is a shabby reason to have a sad life where you end up hurting yourself and other people the whole time. What an act of total unconsciousness and ingratitude. To exist in a world where you could be living. Giving. Growing. Loving. Life is going to bring all kinds of stuff our way. Some of it is going to crush us. Some of us will go through things the mind and heart will struggle to understand and accept. And some of it is going to be amazing, heart-expanding, mind-blowingly awesome. Respond with courage. Be vulnerable. Receive it all, the storms that knock everything down, and the gorgeous sun on your face. Say, “Yes, I am Here. I am awake”. That’s all you can do. If you do the work to find your inner yes, you will be at peace even when life keeps sending you no’s. Because no one can take that kind of love away from you once you’ve found it. Please put your bags down. Don’t waste another day, another minute. Your heart, your soul, and your very life are too precious for that. Sending you so much love, Ally Hamilton

Please Do Not Feed the Fears!

Unless we’re talking about the good kind of fear that stops you from being reckless with yourself, or makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up because you’re in danger, fear is nothing more than a bully. I’m talking about the kind of fear that stops you from doing what you know in your heart you must. The kind of fear that tells you you’re not good enough, you don’t have what it takes, you can’t do it. That kind of fear can kiss my a$$, and it should kiss yours, too.

Fear puts the mind and the heart in a grip. It shuts down our vision so we can only see what isn’t going well, what could go wrong, all the reasons why we are stuck. Fear travels with doubt and resentment and envy, with a healthy side of criticism. Fear is not kind, and neither are people living in fear, because fear puts you on the defensive. Sometimes when we don’t get what we hope for, we become afraid. “I had a vision of how this thing was supposed to go, how I wanted it to go, and now what do I do?” And the mind starts racing with how awful everything is, how nothing is going right, how things are easier for other people (because fear feeds that comparing and contrasting mind). If you want to shut yourself down and close yourself up and do life in such a way that you’re always wearing blinders and feeding yourself can’t, then fear is the way to go. But, seriously, who wants to live like that? Shut down and numbed out and hopeless and frustrated? Alone and angry and confused, waiting for that magical time when “things will get better”?

Things are not going to get better unless you open to love. And you cannot do that if you are wrapped in a tight little ball with your fists clenched and your eyes scrunched up, and your head full of shouldn’t. Or stories about why you can’t. Why you’re incapable of change. Or so numb you really can’t feel anything. So addicted to distraction the weeks fly by, then the months, then the years, and oh crap, now it’s too late. Anyone who is not suffering from afflictions beyond their control can heal. I’m going to say that again. Everyone. Can. Heal. Love requires courage, participation, and ownership of your own experience.

Love is not for those who won’t be vulnerable, because when you open your heart, there is always the possibility you’re going to get hurt. But you know what? I’d rather have my heart broken fully, deeply, right through the center then live my life asleep and curled up in a ball in a corner wondering what, exactly, I’m doing here. I’d rather be awake with my heart open wide and my head full of Yes, than numbing myself out to avoid my pain. The pain is the path to healing. The pain is where you head. You walk straight into the center of it, and you do not come out until you have faced that sh&t down. Or it owns you. Those are your choices, there is no third, “Can it be a little easier because I don’t want to work that hard?” option.

I refuse to allow any person or any circumstance to rob me of my purpose here, and I hope you do, too. Because anything else is a pure waste of your time, and you aren’t given enough to waste. This is your beautiful, complicated, confusing, joyous, sometimes deeply lonely, other times amazingly incredible life, where sometimes you have your heart broken, and sometimes you feel it expand so much you think, it’s going to come right out of your chest. “This love is so much, so full, so deep it’s going to carry me up above the trees, and over the ocean, and oh, wait, it IS the ocean.” Why, why, why would you deny yourself love like that? Because of some fear? Totally not acceptable. I hope you got a taste of the love I’m sending your way. It has a side of a$$-kick, I know. But sometimes that’s the kind of love we need. If you just need a hug right now, I’m down for that, too.

Ally Hamilton

Root Down and Rise Up

In almost every pose we do in yoga we are “rooting down” and “rising up”. Whatever is touching the floor is rooting down and how we balance ourselves on top of that foundation and breathe is really when the yoga happens. We don’t always stand on our feet. Sometimes we stand on our forearms or our hands or our sit bones. We keep looking at things from different perspectives, balancing ourselves, breathing in and breathing out.

The same can be said for life. If you want to rise up, you are going to have to root down and get real with yourself. A structure is only as strong as its foundation. If your foundation is built with denial or rage or bitterness or laziness, it’s only a matter of time before the whole thing collapses in on itself.

In order to blossom into the you that has been waiting, your authentic self, you have to be willing to unravel, to unlearn, to un-think, and to unhook your journey from past experiences so you can be free to set a new course. There is an element of destruction. You do away with those things that block you from moving forward, and prevent you from letting go.

Sometimes people stand in the wind, contemplating a new way of being. We like our routines in life. We prefer to keep the seed of our being hidden, even from ourselves. But if you want to be at peace, you had better be willing to unlearn everything, and crack your seed open. Crush to the wind those ideas and ways of being that were never yours in the first place. That’s where the growth happens.

You have the seed of beauty within you. The seed of love and compassion and kindness. The seed of your own truth. Plant something that is yours alone, and rise up toward the sun, beyond the sun, add your spark to the limitless universe, why don’t you? Sending you love, a shovel, and the strength to deal with your fertilizer for awhile. You’re going to grow a gorgeous flower if you can hang in there and breathe.

Ally Hamilton

If Not You, Then Who?

We live in this crazy world where everyone wants to look the same and sound the same and dress the same, and we are taught to color inside the lines and get in line and sit down and stand up and be quiet and SMILE! when a picture is taken. To follow the rules and stay the course and buy, buy, buy!

Meanwhile our souls are crushed, that spark that’s inside every one of us, that is unique to each of us is just screaming, just bursting to come out, to sing, to dance, to own this thing, you know? That’s why you’re here, to discover that gift that is only yours and to give it away with everything you’ve got, with abandon, with delight. But you’ll never find it if you’ve loaded yourself down with the weight of should. If you’re trying to fit in and be “normal”.

You wanna know what normal looks like? Someone who works 60 hours a week at a job they don’t really like because that’s what they went to school for, or that’s what their parents were hoping for, or that’s what they thought they wanted until they realized they didn’t but were too afraid to change course. Normal looks like someone who has a horrible relationship with their own body, who wants to control it or defeat it, or fit it into those size zero jeans, or buff it out until they can’t wear a button down shirt. It looks like miserable relationships where people sit in front of the tv together all night and go to bed in a zombied-out stupor. And then one day they die. This is what we’re told is “normal”. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Do you think you’re here to be like anyone else or to do your journey the way other people tell you you should? No one can be a better you than you. You are here for a reason, you have something inside you no one else has. It may be buried under ideas and beliefs, pain and grief and shame and anger, but I guarantee you, it is there. Embrace yourself. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself. Check your internal dialogue and see if there’s room for more compassion. Discover and surprise yourself. Because you’re extraordinary, you know? You’re the only you there has ever been or will ever be. You’re miraculous and it would be such a shame to deny the world of your particular miracle. Be you. Be you all the way. Let your heart run the show, let your head follow along. Face your fears so you can see they weren’t as overwhelming as you thought. And move in the direction of your yes. Your intuition knows the way. Your whole being wants to go there. Please let it. And unless you are naturally a size zero, burn those jeans. Lots of love to you, Ally Hamilton

Don’t Miss the View!

There are two ways to do life. One way seems like the easy way. You follow the status quo and decide it’s all about what you have and how you look and who you’re with, and you devote all your time and energy to these things and find ways to numb yourself out from the absurdity of it all. You do this with food or drugs or sex or stuff, but most of the time you feel miserable and tired. You think things like, “What’s the point of it all?”

The other way seems like the hard way. You face your fears. You listen to that small but truthful voice inside you that says, “There is NO WAY this life is about how big your butt is, or your bank account, can we please get real? There’s a life to live here that is beautiful and amazing, there’s a song you need to be singing, what, exactly, are you doing???” And you get busy. You get busy paying attention, listening deeply, acknowledging your pain, doing the work. You stop chasing happiness in the form of “stuff”, and you start chasing the truth (I mean what is true for you). You probably feel sick to your stomach and lonely and scared and like you must be crazy for walking away from your comfort zone and all the people waving you back like the Wild Things. But comfort zones are located in the middle. You cannot see the incredible view from there.

That may seem like the hard way, and it is brutal for awhile, there’s no doubt. Getting real is a painful process of shedding anything you’ve taken on that isn’t authentic to you, including ways of thinking and being. It hurts. But it is so much better to move through your pain for awhile, realize what you know, remember who you are, discover why you’re here, and take your gorgeous self right out to the edge of life, where the sun is stunningly bright and yellow and orange and pink and you can be your true self. You can stand with your feet on the ground and your heart wide open, and just be awed by all the beauty and suffering, all the love and confusion, all the light and darkness. And you can sing the song of compassion and add your colors to this incredible life, this chaotic, mysterious, mind-bending experience. When it breaks your heart wide open, you can cry a real, true cry, right from your gut. And when it amazes you, you can receive the gifts with gratitude and love and delight. We have this thing backwards. The easy way is the hard way. The hard way is only hard for awhile. Then it’s awesome. Pick awesome. Start walking. Awesome won’t wait, and you do not want to miss it. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

The Picture in Your Head

Do you know people who get married because they’re thirty and the clock is ticking, and that’s where they thought they’d be by thirty, and so this guy or girl will have to be the one? Or talk to people with rigid ideas about things, like, if they’re dating someone for a year and there’s no ring, it’s over? How about people who go to medical school because that’s what their dad did and their grandfather, too, and that’s just what people in their family do? When you have a picture in your head about how something should look or feel, you are rejecting things (or people) as they are. Sometimes the person you reject is you, your authentic self.

Life rarely looks like the picture we have in our heads. Sometimes it’s so much more incredible than what we had imagined, and other times it’s way more painful than we had hoped. But there are always opportunities to grow and to open, to dig more deeply and see more clearly. I don’t know why things unfold the way they do. I have theories and ideas like we all do, but who knows if they’re right? Some things are so incomprehensibly painful you just have to let your heart be broken open.

Whatever your feelings, the ability to be with things as they are makes the journey so much easier. To look at your life as it is, with curiosity and compassion for yourself and everyone you encounter, because it’s not an easy thing, this business of being human. To be awake and aware and engaged with what is, not with a daydream or a fantasy or a memory or a picture in your head. I’m not saying thoughts aren’t powerful. The chair you’re sitting on started as a thought in someone’s head. I’m just saying, don’t think your way into a box, where nothing but the picture you’ve imagined will do. Because it might not go like that.

I had a beautiful birth plan with my first, for example. Low lights, no drugs, just a few people to support me. I ended up with a respiratory team in the room, monitors blaring, fear like I’ve never known before or since, panic everywhere. But you know what? I have the most amazing son. Like, insanely amazing. Kind and sweet and smart and funny with a smile that could light up any room. He has incredible enthusiasm for life, hunger for information, a contagious laugh. There’s more love than my heart can hold. So much laughter, so many hugs, such an adventure. And we are both okay. And there has been more joy than I ever pictured or imagined or planned for. Open to what is. Be with it. Explore it. Maybe you’ll be surprised, amazed, heartbroken, head over heels in love. I don’t know. But I do know that whatever you take in as it is, is real, is full of truth, and its own particular beauty, even if it’s the truth and beauty of having your heart broken. This is the ride, this is the best mode of transportation I know. The rest of it is numbed out illusion, a dream, a sleepwalk, an attempt to control something that is really no different than if you woke up today and decided you were going to try to manipulate the tides of the ocean. Just get in and swim. So much love to you, Ally Hamilton