Tag: forgiveness

Yes and No

We are living through such strange and tender times. There is no right way to feel, there’s just however you feel from moment-to-moment on any given day, and the amount of patience, humor and grace you’re able to offer yourself (and others). One of the best things we can do is figure out what we’re saying YES to, and what we’re saying NO to. Everyone is struggling with something most of the time, pandemic or not. Read that again if you need to. No matter how stunning, smart, funny, kind or successful a person may seem to be from the outside, you have no idea what’s happening inside unless you’re very close friends or family, or they tell you. The most gorgeous person in your orbit could have grown up in the most abusive household and struggle every day to feel worthy or unbroken.

I know people who look like they’re killing it on social media, but inwardly and in their day-to-day life they feel like they’re not enough. Or maybe their life is falling apart but they’re keeping it together on the outside. I remember when I was going through my divorce and my kids were tiny. My son was four and my daughter was 18 months old and still nursing, and I owned a business with my soon-to-be ex husband and the only thing I could focus on was making sure my kids were okay and trying to take care of the yoga community that had sprung up around the studio and online. There were many, many days I sobbed in my car on my way to teach, but I always got it together before I walked into the studio, always did my best to show up for the people who’d driven and hunted for a parking spot or ridden their bikes to come practice with me, always tried to have an ear to lend to anyone who needed it. I didn’t always succeed at all that, but I always tried. And a lot of the time my soon-to-be ex husband was the one greeting people and checking in my class. From the outside, I have no doubt it looked very Modern Family, but from inside the experience, there were many chapters that were gutting. That isn’t the stuff you post on social media, though, because it’s deeply personal and it isn’t just your story to tell. I share this with you in case you feel deeply insecure a lot of the time, or you fall into the trap of comparing and contrasting. Just assume everyone has pain they’re dealing with on some level, because you’ll never go wrong if you move through the world with kindness.

Things feel particularly painful and raw out there right now. Some people are thrilled and relieved we are coming out of the strangest sci-fi year any of us has ever lived through, and others are anxious and scared we’re opening too fast, or they feel the pace of the world starting to infringe on the slower pace they’ve adopted. Many people are a combination of all those feelings, every day. We have people exhausted, heartbroken and enraged over systemic racism and continual fear of what might happen next, wondering if things are ever really going to change. We have people working tirelessly for that change in the face of massive polarization, and often a true lack of understanding.  None of it is easy, so at the very least, could we have some compassion for ourselves and each other? Could we recognize on a good day, most of us are struggling with some legitimate fear and insecurity, and also some totally absurd and meaningless mind-stuff – and behave accordingly?

Lately I’ve been feeling more and more that the root of all anxiety is fear of death. That because we don’t often talk about the reality of how fragile it is to be human, how mind-bending it is that we don’t know how long we have or how long anyone else has and that we don’t know for sure what happens after this, we’re in a constant state of knowing all this and also not wanting to know all this. It’s like the root of an anxiety tree in your mind, whose branches grow in different directions. It’s there, and you know it’s there, but maybe if you Netflix-binge enough you can forget about it. I mean, you can’t do anything about the parameters, right? So why dwell on it? I really think when we don’t grapple with the temporary nature of our being, we don’t live with the gusto and abandon that opens us to joy, and those branches can start to overgrow the system and block out the sun. We don’t have to agree about what we’re doing here or what happens next, but I believe we do ourselves a real disservice when we don’t face those questions head on, and figure out what makes sense to us. Then we can get on with the business of living with some peace of mind, true excitement and gratitude for the days we have.

Because the parameters of being human are tough, and they are, you can expect that many people are going to struggle. Hurt people hurt people as the saying goes. You will be hurt, and you will also do the hurting along the way. Hopefully at a certain point – maybe even today – you realize life is short and painful and amazing and glorious and full of loss and hope and dreams and if you’re very lucky, tons and tons of love and laughter. Hugs. Deep feeling. Grief because you love with your whole heart and losing people is devastating. Sand between your toes and the ocean – the ocean with its waves and currents and salt and sea air all around you, seagulls flying over head. The feeling when you scrape your knee and someone tends to it, cleans it for you, puts a bandaid on your scrape and gives you a kiss. Sings you to sleep at night. Gives you reason to believe that people are, at heart, really, really good.

But if you’re going to live fully, and if you’re going to find peace, there are two essential things: what you say yes to, and what you say no to. If life is precious, and I hope we can agree on that, then our job is to show up for it and give everything we’ve got to this dance while we’re here. There are going to be people who can’t be kind, can’t feel empathy, can’t respect your boundaries, can’t be counted on to treat you with love and respect. You may have people like this in your life. I would say the best course of action is to forgive everyone you can, but to realize when we forgive people, we don’t have to have them over for dinner. We don’t have to have them in our lives. We don’t have to call and say, “I forgive you.” And forgiving doesn’t mean we’re saying whatever happened is okay. It just means we are removing that fish-hook of pain from our hearts, we are reserving our finite energy and attention for other things, we are recognizing that whatever has happened is probably a result of this person’s pain, and we are not going to keep our pain and heartache alive by feeding it. There’s what you say yes to, and there’s what you say no to, and both are equally important for your well-being. If your body is your home, and your peace of mind resides within your body, imagine you can open or close the door to people and situations…and choose wisely!

 

Sending you tons of love,

Ally Hamilton Hewitt

If the posts are helpful, you can find my books here, and my yoga classes and courses here. For private coaching, please email me: ally@yogisanonymous.com

 

 

How to Free Yourself and Forgive

Not one of us makes it through this life (or even most days) without making mistakes, occasionally saying or doing something thoughtless, taking people and things for granted when they’re truly gifts in our lives, or showing up as our best selves in every moment. Hopefully in those instances when we are all-too-human, we catch ourselves quickly, apologize from the heart when needed, and try to make better and different mistakes moving forward. If we are fortunate and wise, we both receive and extend forgiveness as a necessary means to have real intimacy with people and get through this life with open and fulfilling relationships to celebrate. There’s no intimacy without communication and forgiveness. That is not what this post is about.

This post is about people who seemingly lack empathy about how their behavior might affect those around them. People who might have lied to you, betrayed you, disrespected you or abused you emotionally or physically with little to no understanding of why their actions upset you, and no tools to offer a meaningful apology. Maybe you have people like this in your life, people who stampede over your boundaries and look at you like you’re nuts when you get upset. You might even have people very close to you who were “supposed to” look out for you, nurture you and protect you, who “should have” cherished you and received you as the miracle you are, but were completely unable to do so. I put supposed to and should have in quotes because while we might have certain expectations based on societal norms, there’s no guarantee what we expect is going to sync with what someone is able to do. How do you forgive that, and what does it mean to try?

Forgiveness does not mean you have to decide that anything and everything someone may have done is okay, or even tolerable. It does not mean you have to pick up the phone and call the person. It definitely does not mean you have to have this person in your life. It simply means if you spend a lot of time looking back over your shoulder and blaming past events or other people for your current unhappiness, you are keeping these old events alive by dwelling on them, renting space in your head to someone who has hurt you. Where our attention goes, our energy flows. So it’s good to consider how much energy you’re spending on things that have already occurred and can’t be changed or rewritten.

If you have examined your past, your patterns, the things that have happened along the way that may have shaped your worldview and your feelings about other people, if you have gleaned all the information you can from a situation, then there’s no potential left there. There’s no kernel of anything that’s going to suddenly help you find your freedom from all of it. The truth is, we show up in people’s lives whenever we show up. Sometimes they’re ready to meet us with open hearts and lots of love, and sometimes they are deeply struggling or hurt, angry or bitter or totally unprepared to receive the love we’re offering. Re-read that if you need to, because you will notice none of that has a thing to do with you. It’s not about you, it’s about the other person. This is even true if we’re talking about our parents, and perhaps most especially true there. It is so hard not to take it personally if your own mother or father didn’t love you, for example, or didn’t love you in a way that felt like love to you. What could feel more personal than that? Of course it’s understandable to feel like there must be something broken in you if your own parents can’t love you, but there’s something broken in them, not you. Do you know how many people I’ve worked with over the years grappling with that? Me neither, because I’ve lost count.

When someone lies to you, they’re disrespecting themselves first. At that particular moment in time, they are dishonest people and they know that about themselves. It’s not a good feeling to know you are a liar, or that you’re breaking your commitments. Good people make really bad decisions sometimes out of desperation, or because they find themselves in a soul-crushing situation and can’t see a decent way out. It happens all day, every day. It’s easy to sit in judgement of other people and think you would never do what they’re doing, but the truth is, if you had that person’s life and her experiences, you’d be doing exactly what she’s doing.

Hopefully we can all let the little things roll off. We can be big enough to forgive people for thoughtless moments and loving enough to easily accept heartfelt apologies for small offenses. When we’re talking about the larger things – betrayal, emotional abuse or neglect over long periods of time, a basic lack of empathy or understanding or ability to consistently show up with respect and kindness – the essential thing is to recognize it isn’t personal. When someone cuts you off on the freeway, it isn’t about you, this is how they drive all day long, and they’re going to cut off a whole bunch of people after you. Same with the above. It isn’t personal when someone lacks the tools to recognize truly hurtful behavior, this is a reflection of something lacking in the other person, not you. It can’t be easy to go through life being unable to have real intimacy with anyone. If possible, forgive people who’ve let you down. You don’t have to invite them over for dinner, just clear out the space they’re taking up in your mind, and try to wish them some healing and peace if you can.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton Hewitt

If the posts are helpful, please find my books here and my yoga classes and courses here!

How to Stop, Embrace the Moment, and Keep Going

alameddineYesterday as I was driving along Arizona Avenue, something caught my eye. There was a huge, furry spider with red markings that suddenly dropped from behind the window visor, and appeared in the compartment just next to my steering wheel, where you can place your wallet, phone and so on. It was empty but for this sudden tenant. Now, I grew up in New York City, and I freely admit, I’m a little petrified of spiders, have no idea which ones are poisonous, and am especially wary of ones with “fur”, my love for Charlotte’s Web notwithstanding. I know that spiders are amazing, I just don’t particularly want them in my house or car. I remembered that red markings were part of the black widow description, though I felt fairly certain black widows were shiny and not hairy. Nonetheless, I had a mini adrenaline rush, noticed there were cars behind and in front of me, put my blinker on, and moved to the side of the road where I decided it was okay to block a driveway for a moment if it meant saving my life. Yes, you can laugh.

I jumped out of my car and stood staring at this arachnid, wondering how to get it from my car to the street. There were two guys working on the building where I’d pulled up, and I called out to them and asked for help. I told them there was a huge spider in my car. They looked a little bewildered and started walking over, but then I thought, “Really? Do I really need help with this?” I took a look at the passenger seat, grabbed a postcard that was sitting there, and managed to flick the spider onto the card, and then gently fling it onto a bush. Neither of us died, so I consider that a success.

When I got back in my car, I realized this is the second time in a matter of weeks that I’ve dealt with big spiders, as a black furry one with a white back crawled across my desk not long ago. My kids were home, and I instructed them NOT TO MOVE while I caught it in a jar, and took it outside. No one died that time, either. My friend Jessica, who knows all about spiders, had a good laugh at my expense, though, so I also consider that a success. I have this story I tell myself, that if I were married, my husband would be dealing with the big bugs, and he’d also be there to help me unload groceries from the car. I don’t have pity parties for myself very much, but for some reason, those are the two experiences that make me feel sad that there isn’t a man in my life. So yesterday I thought, “those are some really dumb stories you’re carrying around, and maybe it’s time to check them.”

The truth is, many of my married girlfriends have told me that they deal with the big bugs and the groceries, too. Of course, there are other fabulous reasons to have a partner, so don’t get me wrong, I’m just trying to point out that sometimes we tell ourselves things that aren’t true, or that are weakening, or that might have been true at one point, but aren’t anymore.

Here’s another example: a couple of days a go, I taught a benefit class for Breast Cancer Awareness month (ladies, check your boobies!), and you never know who’s going to show up when you teach at these big events. Usually, you’ll see people you’ve known for years, and experienced yogis, along with people who’ve never done yoga before but have come out for a cause. So I’m teaching, and I look up and see this woman front and center, and she’s in Warrior 1, but she’s scrolling on her phone. Lower body in Warrior 1, upper body focused on the device, standing up on her mat. I see a few people around her looking on incredulously, and one woman made eye contact with me. My first reaction was, “Whoa. That is so rude!” I mean, I’ve seen people with their phones next to their mats, surreptitiously checking it in down dog, but this was a new one on me.

Then I looked at the woman, and she just looked sweet, and I thought, “She has no idea that that’s rude, that isn’t where she’s coming from.” Now look, I’m no saint, I’ve just been practicing yoga for twenty-five years, and the good news is, it helps you catch yourself quickly. If you feel triggered, for example, a long, consistent practice teaches you to perk up and pay attention, instead of lashing out and doing or saying something you might regret. It also reminds you that most things are not personal. She wasn’t being rude to me, her behavior had nothing to do with me. So I waited until everyone was in down dog, and went over to her and whispered, “Are you a doctor?” She looked at me in utter confusion and said no. I said, “Okay, I was just wondering if you were ‘on call’ or something, or if you’re dealing with an emergency. Otherwise, why don’t you put your phone away for a little bit so you can have some you time!” And she smiled at me and said, “Oh, okay!”, and put her phone away. After class, she came and thanked me and hugged me. Total win-win.

The thing is, a breathing practice is enormously helpful for this whole “being human” thing, because being human is not always so easy or straightforward. We’re always filtering information from the world around us through our own particular (and sometimes foggy) lenses, and we’re always dealing with our inner worlds as well, which are often full of ideas and thoughts and stories that are specious and worth examining. There’s nothing quite like developing a sense of humor about yourself, and all your occasional absurdities, and celebrating your humanness without embarrassment. Then you can shake your head, and get back to the business of opening to all the beauty around you.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love!

Ally Hamilton

breathing-practie

Make the Right List

Find-a-place-insideSo much of our ability to be at peace and to live life in a way that feels good, has to do with what we feed, and what we release. I have these two relatives, and I’ll call them uncles, although they aren’t uncles. One of them is the kindest, sweetest, most loving, joyful, affectionate, fun, generous person you’d ever want to meet. If you sit down next to him at a family function, he will share with you a list of all the amazing things you’ve ever done in your life from the time you were four, to the present. He will talk to you about the joy you’ve brought to his life, and how he knew you were special from the moment he laid eyes on you. You will tell him how much you love him, what an important person he is in your life, and how grateful you are that he is your uncle. You will want to make sure that he knows this. The family function will fly by, and you will leave feeling grateful and full and happy and inspired.

The other uncle, though, he’s a different tune altogether. If you sit down next to him, he will present you with a list of all the ways you, and every member of the family, have disappointed him over the years. If he adds alcohol to the mix, which he almost always does, he will even go back generations, and share a list of ancestral wrongs that predate you, him, and everyone you know. He will do this because he makes a hobby out of should. He’s something of an expert on what people should and should not do. If you let him, he will involve you in his should, and try to get you to should on yourself and everyone else. By the end of the family function you will feel drained and angry at the relative who did the seating arrangement.

These are two actual but disguised relatives in my family, but I’ll bet they mirror people in your own life. I’ve been watching this for years, and the kind uncle is living a life that is happy and fulfilled and full of family, while the other uncle is isolated and often feuding with family members, or writing them off altogether. He’s missed decades of time with certain cousins because he wasn’t speaking to their parents, but for him, this just adds fuel to the fire. Now he can be angry that these children were not brought to him as they grew up, and therefore do not know him, or have any real bond with him today.

The thing is, it’s really a choice. We all have heartaches and disappointments, ways we were let down, or in some cases neglected, abandoned, or abused. You know how the lotus flower grows in mud and muck, but emerges out of that as this gorgeous, white, stunning bloom? The same is true for people. We all have our mud and our muck, and it’s up to us to grow beauty out of the pain, or to wallow in it. Of course we can hold up our muck and show everyone how awful it is. We can excuse our poor choices or crappy behavior on the mess we’re coming out of, or we can get busy strengthening ourselves, and reaching toward the sunlight.

As a society and a culture, we are constantly encouraged to focus on what we don’t have, what isn’t going right, and all the ways we don’t measure up. Internally, we’re wired to worry, thanks to negativity bias, and the days when we had to avoid being eaten for lunch by saber tooth tigers. Externally and internally, we’re trained on lack, but that leaves us stuck in the mud of envy and despair, and that’s no way to live. You can point fingers like my angry uncle, or you can dig your way out of the mud like my happy uncle.

What are you focused on? Upon what do you place importance? Is it your looks? Your bank account? Your house, car, size of your boobs or biceps? Is it the latest, greatest vacation your friend took that you didn’t? Is it whether you have a partner, or whether you should get rid of the one you’ve got because s/he isn’t making you happy? Do you keep lists? If so, what’s on them? Do you have a list of ways you’ve been wronged, betrayed and let down, or a list of ways you’ve been amazed by the beauty in this world?

Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen. Is it important to acknowledge that your past has shaped you? Of course. You cannot be at peace if you don’t know yourself, and part of that work has to do with recognizing your wounds and figuring out what you need in order to heal. That doesn’t mean you dwell on your past and drag it into your present and future, it means you glean the meaning from the pain, and you allow it to open your heart and your mind so you have empathy for other people. Being human is a tough, but wonderful gig. You have to embrace your vulnerability if you want to be free, so that fear and rage don’t rule your life. Be the happy uncle. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

The Perils of the Poker Face

brenebrownWhen we don’t speak up about what we’re feeling, it comes out in other ways. This is particularly true in any intimate relationship, whether familial or romantic. Things we hide from ourselves will also swim to the surface to bite us in the a$$ and demand our attention, but you can multiply that bite by at least two when we’re talking about the way we relate to others. It’s not surprising that clear communication is so difficult for the majority of us, because we’re taught to edit our feelings from an early age. “Don’t cry”, “Don’t be sad”, “Don’t be scared, “Don’t be angry”–these are like cultural mantras we hear as early as we hit the playground, and often sooner, in our very own homes. Loving parents say these things, so I’m not throwing anyone under the bus, I’m just saying we need to understand when we love people, we have to teach them that it is okay to be sad, scared or angry, it’s what we do about the feelings that matters.

It’s never easy to watch someone we love as he or she grapples with difficult feelings. We know the pain of it from having grappled ourselves. Of course we want to spare those we care for, pain, anguish and discomfort, but these feelings are part of life, and they’re an essential part of knowing ourselves. If we learn to push down the feelings that make those around us feel uncomfortable or inadequate, you can safely bet we will also have no clue about how we feel as we reach adulthood. When we cut ourselves off from what is true and real for us, we also cut ourselves off from our intuition, and that is the surest way to get lost on the path. And when I say “the path”, I don’t mean there’s one path for everyone, I mean the path that will lead any of us to our deepest joy.

Recently, I was talking with good friends of mine who were laughing about a heated game of poker they’d played. Apparently, my friend’s wife and his mother went head-to-head, and his wife wondered if she should go easier on her fairly new mother-in-law, but my friend assured her this made her an official part of his family. Friends of theirs chimed in, and said things also got crazy and competitive in their house when the cards or board games came out. The woman turned to me and said, “You should try playing with THIS heartless prick”, and pointed her thumb at her boyfriend, whom I’d only just met. I knew from our mutual friends that she adores her boyfriend and thinks the world of him. I knew she was just trying to join in on the “heated family games joke”, but the words “heartless” and “prick” came out with a lot of force, and I watched his face change from the happy, social mask we wear when we’re meeting people for the first time, to a closed one that was obviously covering hurt and surprise. She turned to him with her eyes dancing, and saw that her words had landed in a way she didn’t intend, and she immediately apologized. He recovered but they walked away shortly after, and my heart went with them. I knew they were probably in for a difficult conversation at best, and a rough night at worst.

There’s always a little truth in a joke. I don’t think this woman believes her boyfriend is either heartless, or a prick, I think she’s in love with him. But I’d also guess there’s some anger swimming underneath the surface of whatever is happening between them, and it reared its head for an instant. If there’s anger there, it’s coming from some kind of pain. Either she perceives that he’s hurt her or disappointed her in some way, or he actually has. Either way, her pain has not been acknowledged and dealt with in a way that’s satisfying for her (maybe she hasn’t brought it up, doesn’t know it’s there, etc), and so it’s popping up at parties over card games. Isn’t it amazing how these tiny little things can turn into land-mines? Something as innocent as poker can bring up a well of pain neither party sees coming. And now he’s hurt, and probably angry.

Why do we hurt each other? We have pain, and things arise as they always do when two people are close, and we either deal with these things in the moment, or we don’t. When we don’t, it’s because we’re afraid. Maybe we’re afraid of confrontation, rejection, or heartache, but it’s fear of some kind. Our fear causes us to hurt each other. If only we could give one another the benefit of the doubt, if only we could breathe and consider whether someone we love is intentionally hurting us, or whether there’s a chance we’ve misunderstood, taken something to heart that wasn’t intended that way, are dealing with their pain that’s coming to the surface in a way that’s hard to understand, or are bringing some of our history into the present, we’d save ourselves and those who love us a lot of feelings of alienation, frustration, sadness and anger. And we’d save ourselves, as well.

It feels terrible when someone we care for deeply won’t forgive us, or is so ready to doubt our love. That alone feels like a betrayal. I saw it between those two people I barely know—he felt betrayed she’d said something hurtful to strangers in a social situation with zero provocation from him, and she felt betrayed that he would doubt her love over something that was supposed to be funny, but ended up coming out badly. Again, maybe there’s some unresolved pain on both sides there. I have no idea what’s happening inside their relationship. But I’ve seen that moment they had a million times. I’ve been in that moment myself, and I’ve watched it happen between other people more times than I can count, and it’s always the same moment with different words. It’s never about poker, that’s for sure.

The more we learn to acknowledge and deal with our own uncomfortable feelings as they arise, peak and subside, the more we can do that for the people we love. Not every feeling in life is like unicorns or leprechauns or stardust. Some feelings hurt us to the very core. Rage, grief, shame, guilt, fear, loneliness—none of these are easy, but they’re all normal human emotions we are going to deal with at some time or another. Denying that is futile. If you don’t learn to embrace and examine your painful feelings they are not going to magically disappear, they’ll just keep trying to get your attention, because that’s all we want when we’re struggling or suffering. We want someone to say, “I see you, I feel you, I understand why you feel the way you do, I’m so sorry you’re hurting. Hang in there, it won’t always be this way. “ We just want understanding. We want to be seen and held without anyone telling us that what we feel isn’t true. And the sad thing is, we can do this for ourselves, but so many people run from their feelings, or numb them, or deny them, and so pain rules their lives. It doesn’t have to be that way.

One of the main reasons I teach yoga is that it changed my entire life for the better. I was one of those numb-ers and deniers myself. I tried to manage my pain that way for years and I was anxious and depressed a large majority of the time. I kept trying to fix things from the outside. Maybe if I met the right person, or got thinner, or had a perfect job, then I’d be happy. None of these things ever worked. Until I sat down and faced my pain head on, it owned me, and at a certain point I decided I did not want to be owned by pain, I wanted to be owned by love. And then I found out love doesn’t own you, it liberates you. And so I teach, because I think if it worked for me, it could work for anyone. It’s not a magic bullet. Change is hard. It’s a practice, and it has eight limbs, and you have to work every one of them. But it’s doable and beautiful and eventually it’s inspiring and you want to see how much you can open, and what it means to really love and release your grip on the story. Sending love to all of you, Ally Hamilton

Let Go and Look

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Be Your Own Clean-Up Crew

jimrohnSometimes 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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

 

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

Rest in Your True Nature

Allyekarajkaparm-1Yoga is a process of coming home to yourself. It’s a science, an art, a philosophy of stripping away anything that isn’t part of your authentic self. So much of the time, we’ve gotten confused along the way. We’ve taken on other people’s beliefs or ideas or philosophies and accepted them as our own, without question. Hatred can be taught this way, so can compassion. If you were lucky, your first influences taught you that you were of value. That you had an impact on the world around you. That it mattered how you felt. If you were fortunate, you were also taught that being kind and thinking about how your actions affect other people and the world around you would help you to connect and thrive.

Sometimes we have a lot of unlearning to do, though. Maybe we were not so lucky, and we learned that only certain feelings were okay, and that we had to repress anything that made the people around us feel uncomfortable or inadequate, like our sadness or our anger or our loneliness. There are so many people who reach adulthood and have no clue how they really feel, because they cut themselves off from their own intuition years ago.

If you come out of an abusive background you can count on having to unlearn quite a lot. Growing up in an environment where you make yourself invisible or invaluable depending on the moment requires a total suppression of anything that has to do with what you really need or want in your heart.

So many people are on the run, owned by their painful feelings. Repressed rage turns into depression. It takes a Herculean effort to push down an active volcano. So much energy, in fact, there isn’t much left to do anything else. Thus the lethargy and hopelessness.

For some people, it’s easy to say yes when yes is in their hearts, and it’s not difficult to say no when the situation warrants, but other people have to work to figure out what a yes feels like. Those same people might have to learn to give themselves permission to say no. Feeling that your worth is determined by other people’s perceptions of you sets you up for a lifetime of powerlessness.

Anyway, my point is, there are so many differing ways people might need to come home to themselves, and all of the ways that work require determination and dedication. You have to find the discipline to show up for yourself, and to lean in when you’d rather take off. If you find that what you’ve been doing isn’t working, and by that I mean, if life is not feeling good to you, it’s time to try something new, because time waits for none of us.

There are eight “limbs” in yoga practice. The physical part, the “asana” is just one limb. It’s a very useful entry point for many of us in the west, because we value doing over being, and it takes time to undo that programming. When you connect to your breath (pranayama), you also connect to something that is happening right now, in this moment. You are present and aware. When you start to organize your body into a pose, when you focus on lengthening your spine, or relaxing your shoulders, you’re also giving the mind a focal point that’s happening in the now. So you use your body to quiet your mind. If you’re paying attention to your breath, or you feel your feet on the floor, you aren’t spinning anymore. You aren’t fretting over your past or freaking out about your future, you are present, and that’s beautiful because life isn’t happening in your past or future. When you create space between your thoughts, you also create space to connect to that most authentic part of yourself. You get to breathe in that space.

Your body is full of wisdom about who you are and what you need to be at peace. It knows where you’re holding on, resisting, or contracting from your experience. if you give it the chance and you set up a compassionate and kind inner environment, your body will give these things over, it will help you to let go of those ideas or beliefs that are weighing you down, and then you can fly. Wishing that for you, and sending you love.

Ally Hamilton

P.S. You can practice with me right now, here.

Untie the Knot in Your Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Weight of Regret

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

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

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

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

Sending you love out there,

Ally Hamilton

The Power of the Real Apology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Doesn’t Have to Own You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

Happy Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

It’s Not You, It’s Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

Time is a Gift

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

You Betray Yourself Before You Betray Anyone Else

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love, and a huge hug,

Ally Hamilton

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Use Your Gifts Wisely

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

It’s Not a Failure if You Grow from It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

OPR (Other People’s Rage)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Love Frees You

lovefreeThich Nhat Hanh also says, “To love without knowing how to love, wounds the person we love.”  We don’t all enter the world knowing how to love, though. If you were very blessed, you might have learned this at home, but even the most loving parents don’t always have the tools to love with open arms, open hearts and open minds. So many people confuse love with possession or control, or they make it conditional. And, it should be noted, there are many people who were born into violent homes, and have a lot of unlearning to do, before the learning can begin.

So yes, for most of us, we’ll spend time flailing around as we figure things out, and we are both likely to hurt, and to be hurt as we do this. Friendships may fall apart, romantic relationships may crash and burn, we may find that trusting anyone in any situation is a challenge. Whatever your past, you’ll have to reckon with it so it doesn’t determine the quality of your present and future.

Here are some things to think about, if you’ve been struggling in this area. Love is freeing. When someone loves us and sees us and accepts us, we’re safe to relax and open. True love gives us permission to be more of who we are. If you’re in a relationship and you feel diminished, that’s not love. If you’re in a relationship and you feel you have to edit yourself in significant ways, that’s not love. If you’re in a relationship and affection is given or withdrawn based on whether you do or do not show up the way the other person wants you to, that is not love. If you feel unsure of yourself, insecure at every turn, doubtful about where you stand, that is not love. If you’re being emotionally, verbally or physically abused, that is also not love.

Having said all of that, you may be with someone who’s trying to figure out what love is, and who has no frame of reference. This doesn’t make him or her a bad person, you’re dealing with someone who has deep wounds. They may be doing the best they can to love you with the tools they have. I’m not saying they don’t love you. I’m saying they don’t understand yet what love is. If you’re being abused, you cannot stick around and be a punching bag while they figure it out. You are not here to be that for anyone.

If you’re with someone and you’re both trying to figure it out, and you’re both willing to listen and communicate honestly and do the best you can to look at yourselves and each other with compassion and honesty, there’s hope. You won’t avoid hurting each other as you go along your path, but it won’t be intentional, and you may learn a great deal about giving each other the benefit of the doubt, about forgiveness, and about creating a safe space to forge ahead together. So something that starts out as “not love” can turn into love, but only if both people are willing and ready.

Other things: we’re all human and we all blow it from time to time. Learn how to say, “I’m sorry”, without excuses or justifications. Learn how to do it while you look someone in the eye and allow yourself to be vulnerable. When people feel hurt, they put their defenses up, that’s understandable. So if you do something thoughtless or selfish or weak, it’s normal for your friend or loved one or family member to feel both hurt and angry, and they may come at you. The best way to diffuse an attack is to take ownership of your part (if you’re culpable, which you will be sometimes, because you’re human). Also, forgive as easily as you can. It doesn’t feel good to hold onto anger and be “right”. Don’t make lists and keep score of all the things your friend or partner has done, unless they’re lists of the good stuff. Resentment grows like weeds and it will strangle the life out of your relationship. Bitterness tastes terrible and it eats away at your stomach lining and makes it hard to sleep and who needs that?

Listen with your heart. Don’t just wait for your turn to talk. Listen the way you’d like to be listened to. Consider that your viewpoint might be wrong, but also stand strong when you know in your gut something isn’t right. Learn to express yourself calmly and clearly. Get help if you need it. I’m always amazed at the people who resist therapy. If you tried it once and the therapist wasn’t for you, try again, try someone else. It’s subjective, but if life isn’t going well, or your relationships aren’t going well, or your ability to express yourself is limited, or you can’t figure out what you need in order to be happy, use every tool available to get right with yourself. For me it was yoga, meditation, therapy, reading, writing, and having an amazing dog. You have to be willing to weep. You have to be brave enough to face your pain and own it and examine it so it doesn’t own your a$$ for the rest of your life. You have to free yourself because no one else can.

Then you can get busy loving. Love is acceptance and understanding and forgiveness and listening and nurturing and supporting another person’s growth and well-being. It doesn’t grip, force, manipulate or punish. It’s absolutely worth fighting for.

Sending you a ton of love right now,

Ally Hamilton

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

Betrayal

hurttwiceBetrayal stings because it’s usually at the hands of someone we trusted. Of course, betrayal can happen amongst strangers; sometimes people look away when they ought to help a fellow human being. Maybe you’ve heard of “bystander syndrome”?

When someone with whom we were once close lets us down, it feels so personal, and it is, as we’ll now have some healing to do. When people lie, cheat, steal, or repress what’s happening, though, it’s a reflection of where they are on their own path, and not of anything lacking within you. I’m speaking not just of romantic relationships, here, but of familial ones, friendships, and relationships between colleagues. Not everyone is able to speak clearly about what they want, or what’s happening within them. Some people are terrified of change. Sometimes there’s an attempt or desire to communicate, but the other party just won’t have it. Of course, there are people who simply want to do what they want to do, without the pain of challenging conversations and consequences, but this kind of behavior comes out of fear, weakness, a lack of integrity, a character flaw, or a state of total desperation. Most people do not set out to hurt anyone. They just lack the tools to live openly, honestly, and in alignment with what’s true in their hearts. It takes courage to do that, and we are not always courageous.

The worst consequence of betrayal for most people, is a feeling that they can no longer trust their judgment and intuition. The idea that something has happened “behind our backs” or “under our noses” is devastating. We feel we’ve been made the fool, but in reality, the other party or parties have just shown the level at which they’re operating at this point in time, which is subject to change. I don’t want to come across as lacking empathy or understanding; we can all look back at choices we’ve made that have hurt other people. Hopefully these things happened unintentionally, or as a result of our growing in a different direction, or being too young to handle things in a better way. Not everyone knows how to handle these situations well, and sometimes we learn by blowing it badly.

If you have hurt someone, a heartfelt apology is always the way to go (unless time has passed and you fear your need to apologize may wreak havoc on the other person’s healing process), with the understanding that you may not be forgiven, depending on what’s happened. If you’re the wronged party, I recommend forgiveness.  You don’t have to say anything at all, but within yourself, I’d unhook your journey from the event that’s hurt you. I’d let go of the rage or pain or grief (after you allow yourself to feel all these things deeply, of course), because nothing productive comes from holding on to our list of ways we’ve been disappointed. That’s not something you want to carry into your future.

I think these experiences are always worth examining, so we can know ourselves, and so we can learn and grow. In cases where it’s possible, compassion goes a long way. Sometimes we humans really make a mess of things. Maybe we’re in pain, blinded by a need to cling to something, anything that will be a source of comfort. That doesn’t make it okay, but maybe eventually you can factor that in. The main thing is not to allow these experiences to harden you. You don’t want to move through life defensively, with the outlook that people will hurt you or leave you or lie to your face. Some people might do that. Maybe you’ve picked a string of people who’ve done that, and in that case, you need to look at what’s motivating your choices, but whenever possible, after you’ve allowed yourself to mourn, to examine, to understand, and maybe to forgive, you really want to get on with the business of healing and letting go so you can move forward freely.

Life is too short and too precious to swim in a sea of despair and bitterness.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

How to Stop Spiraling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Communication 101

peacealderWhen it comes to relationships of any kind, honest communication is everything. If you want other people to know you, you have to be willing to show yourself. It’s not realistic to expect others to read your mind, and as much as you might think you have someone pegged, the only way to truly know how anyone feels, is to ask. Sometimes we repress something we need to say out of fear of hurting someone else, and other times we don’t ask questions when we’re afraid of the answers, and what they might mean for our tender hearts.

We’re taught that certain emotions make people uncomfortable (“Don’t be scared”, “Don’t be angry”, “Don’t be sad”), and many of us started editing ourselves as children. If you have care-taking, codependent tendencies, you probably really need to work on your ability to honor your own feelings, and act on your own behalf when necessary, which is pretty much every day. Saying what you mean is a gift you give yourself, but it also extends to all the people in your life. It’s so nice to know where you stand with someone, and to relax, and trust that if something comes up (and it always does), they’ll talk to you. This is how we develop a bond with another person. Being able to say what’s true for you, calmly, and with compassion, is a strength worth working on, because it just simplifies everything.

Life is challenging and confusing enough without having to try to figure out where someone else is at, or how you should act in order to elicit the response you desire. Being unable to stand up for yourself feels terrible, and it’s debilitating. Playing games is fine if we’re talking about cards or chess, but if we’re talking about human emotions, that’s really not the way to go, not if you want true intimacy, anyway. If you want anyone to know you well and deeply, you have to be able to say how you feel, and ask the scary, uncomfortable questions when they arise.

Sometimes the games we’re playing have nothing to do with hurting anyone else, or being reckless with someone else’s heart. Sometimes we don’t want to admit our own vulnerability. We cover our real feelings with an air of indifference or toughness, so no one will know the depth of what we feel, or how much power they hold over us. That’s fear. That’s a fear of trusting that anyone else could hold a space to really see you, in all your beauty and occasional absurdity, with all your strengths and all your flaws, all your history and all your mistakes, and still. Still cherish you. And if you let that fear run the show, you’ll never know. You’ll never give anyone the chance to prove to you that they can do it. Not your best friend. Not your mother. Not your partner. No one.

Life does not have to be like that, but you have to be willing to stop hiding. Everyone likes to put his or her best foot forward, but we all screw up sometimes. We all have fears, some unfounded, some based on past experience, some flowing from a sea of self-doubt. If you don’t ever admit your humanness, chances are the people around you will be reluctant to own theirs, as well. But the truth is, we’re all more alike than we realize. We all cry ourselves to sleep sometimes, or despair, or have our existential crises. It’s really okay. Show yourself and free yourself, and the people strong enough to do the same will show up in your life, and those who can’t do it will fall away. But while you’re here, you might as well be you, don’t you think?

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

That’s How the Light Gets In

Ring-the-bells-thatDo you ever find yourself in a situation and wonder how you ended up there? Maybe things are happening in your life in a way you couldn’t have foreseen, and if only you’d known, you’d have made different choices? Sometimes when we’re in the heat of a thing and every path looks full of thorns, it’s really hard to imagine any beauty emerging from all the strife, but the amazing thing about most people is our resiliency. We all want to be happy, we all have a song to sing, and the drive to withstand and carry on is strong.

Yesterday my seven-year old son took my 90-minute strong vinyasa flow class. He hasn’t done that in a few years. The last time he did he was four, and about halfway through he sat down and played with his Hot Wheels. Yesterday, he took the whole class. He was totally focused, and whenever I caught his eye he smiled at me. I have to say, it was pretty f&cking awesome. At one point I wondered what would’ve happened if I’d started practicing yoga when I was really little. It occurred to me that I might have made many fewer mistakes along the way, that I might have been in touch with my intuition on a much stronger level at a much younger age. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten involved with that guy who was 20 years my senior when I was seventeen. Maybe I wouldn’t have moved across the country with a man I’d been dating for only six months. Maybe lots of things. I bet high school would have been a lot easier, and college, too. But then I thought that if my life hadn’t unfolded exactly the way it has, I wouldn’t have that particular seven year old boy beaming at me from the back row.

Every experience we have, even the most heart-wrenching and confusing, gives us an opportunity to grow and to know ourselves more deeply. I’m not saying that everything happens for a reason, or that someday, everything will make sense to you. Some things are forever hard to comprehend. I’m saying we always have the power to decide how we’re going to respond to what we’re given, and we have the power to choose how much we’re going to work with our pain, and pursue a path of healing so that we can liberate ourselves from anything that is smothering that song we must sing. Also, you just never know what beauty might grow out of your heartache.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Loosen Your Grip

Peace-cannot-be-achievedSometimes we’re convinced our way is the only way. Life presents big questions, and most of us will have to grapple with them at some time or another if we want to be at peace. Some people are born into families where beliefs are passed down, but even in those cases, most people approach near adulthood, and want to examine their own feelings and ideas about things.

None of us will have concrete answers about most of this stuff until we exhale for the final time, but the need to organize this world so that it makes sense, so that there’s some stability and some order, can be profound. So many people want a formula. If I’m a good person, only good things will happen to me. If someone does something hurtful, they’ll pay, but life doesn’t tend to unfold in this linear, logical way.

The thing is, when we grasp our ideas and opinions, we also close ourselves off to other ways of thinking about things, and we can draw proverbial lines in the sand between ourselves and other people. At the foundation of every religion, for example, there’s love. There’s a moral code of conduct. Don’t kill. Don’t Lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t gossip. Be responsible with your sexual energy. Know yourself. Most of us wouldn’t argue with any of that. Fighting happens when we cling and insist we know what the answers are, and anyone who disagrees with us, anyone who’s come up with different answers, is wrong. Fear is at the heart of “us versus them”. Fear motivates a need to be right, and many people experience someone else’s different idea as a rejection of their own.

For me, I accept help and love from any source. If it’s comforting and it makes sense to me, I could not care less about labels. Is it Jewish love? Christian love? Muslim love? Buddhist love? If it’s love, it’s good by me. We get so crazy with our labels. Labels cause friction, and friction leads to combustion. Is there female air and male air? Black air and white air? Maybe we could all just breathe together.

Sometimes hatred is taught, and that’s very very sad. Racism begins at home, as does compassion. Of course we can always un-learn and relearn if we were taught that all people were not created equal. You’re starting off with an advantage if you understand that beautiful people and damaged people come in all colors, shapes and sizes. The reality is, we’re one family on one planet. We’d get a lot further with love and respect than we do with insistence and violence.

Why do people feel threatened if someone makes a choice that’s different than their own? Maybe it creates doubt within them about what they’re doing, and what the point of it all is. Existential pain hits most of us at some time or another. What if we’re blowing it? What if we missed the memo about what we’re doing here? What if we die without having lived from our hearts? People can get pretty frightened when they perceive a different idea as an attack upon what they think. A person who’s worked hard to organize the world in a way that makes sense to her or himself might very well feel the need to cling to those answers.

The more we realize we’re with each other and not against each other, the more everything flows. If we understand we have these finite resources to share, we might be more mindful about our choices and habits. Peace is a choice. Walking a peaceful path takes guts and bravery. Loosening your grip on your own ideas can be scary, but if you have faith in yourself, there’s no need to grasp so tightly. if you have faith in the answers you’ve worked out, you can loosen your grip, and hear the hearts and minds of other people. This is how we open to each other, and it crosses every area of our lives.

When you have the choice between being right and being kind, always choose kindness. Think about your gravestone if it helps: “Here lies a person who was always right.” or, “Here lies a person who loved and listened and opened and learned. Who embraced and explored and examined.”

Sending you love, and wishing you peace,

Ally Hamilton

Letting Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

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

People Aren’t “Against” You

foragainstSometimes it’s really helpful to understand that most people are not intentionally trying to hurt you. For the most part, people are doing the best they can with the tools they have. It takes time to figure out what your gifts are, and how you want to spend the finite amount of time you’ve got. Most people flail around in the process of getting to know themselves. We all have our pain, and our healing to do, it’s not easy. Timing has so much to do with all of this. The moment you arrived in your mom’s and dad’s world, for example, has so much to do with the parenting you received. If they were ready, if they knew themselves, if they were able to accept you as the miracle you were and are, if they were in a place to understand your needs had to come first, if they were prepared to make sacrifices when necessary, if they could embrace you and cherish you, nurture you, support you, and love you in all your amazingness, or not so much.

The same holds true for any relationship, whether we’re talking about family members, friends, colleagues, romantic interests, or people you encounter in passing on any given day. It’s funny that we can feel so separate from one another, when we’re really so much the same. At some point, we all have to grapple with life’s big questions, and work them out in a way that feels right to us. Unless you want to bury your head in the sand, or numb yourself into oblivion, there comes a time when you have to acknowledge and embrace the vulnerability of being human. I think we tend to make things harder than they are. You have seventy to one hundred years if you’re lucky. You have people in your life. You have the potential to figure out what lights you up, what sets your soul on fire, and you have the ability to choose how you’re going to spend your time.

Of course there are the practicalities of life; the keeping a roof over your head and food in your fridge kind of stuff, but you can always find beauty in each day, if you make a point to look for it. The laughter of someone you love. The opportunity to say something kind. The chance to offer a hug, or your shoulder, or a hand up if someone needs it. A moment to feel the sun on your face, or the breeze on your cheek, or an honest moment with the person handing you your cup of tea. It doesn’t take much to connect if you let yourself.

Sometimes we make a mess of things as we search to find meaning and purpose. Sometimes we reject essential parts of who we are because we aren’t ready to accept what we want or need. Maybe we feel ashamed or different or we loathe ourselves for not wanting what other people seem to want. There’s no formula. You are you, and there’s only one of you, and only you can figure out what your gifts are and how you’re going to share them. If you do that, life will feel pretty good. You’ll also need to figure out what you want in your personal life. Maybe you love being in a relationship, and maybe you don’t.  Maybe you find it easy to express yourself, and maybe you struggle to say anything at all about how you feel. We all have our stuff to work through.

If you cross paths with someone, and you get burned, you really want to consider that maybe this person is just struggling. That perhaps it has less to do with you, or anything lacking within you, and more to do with where they are on their journey — compassion for yourself, and compassion for other people, belief that you have something beautiful and unique to offer. The trust that if a thing is right, it’s going to flow, and if it isn’t, it’s probably for the best. These are all good things to consider and examine if you feel stung.

And by the way, people can be for themselves and also for other people. I think that’s really the idea. Honor yourself so you can honor the people in your life, and the people you meet as you move through your days. Take the time you’ve got, and light it up. Send love whenever possible, because this is no easy gig, and you don’t have to take someone else’s struggles personally. If you get hurt during an interaction with someone else, it’s personal inasmuch as you’ll now have healing to do, but everyone has to do her own journey. You can’t walk it for anyone else, and we never know what other people need to learn and grow. As Ram Dass says, “We’re all just walking each other home.” Let’s enjoy the walk as much as possible, shall we?

Sending you love.

Ally Hamilton

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

Unlearn and Re-learn

pemaarrowheartSometimes we develop coping mechanisms in childhood, and we keep using them as we grow, even if we’ve removed ourselves from those situations that made them necessary. If you learned to push your feelings down as a child, for example, it’s highly likely you’ll grow into an adult who has difficulty expressing yourself. This stuff doesn’t just vanish, after all, and like anything else, it’s always easier to learn something the right way, than it is to unlearn one thing and relearn another. But if you’re like most people, you’ll have some unlearning to do.

Awareness isn’t the whole story, although it goes a long way. We can’t change a habit unless we know we have one, but you might be incredibly self-aware, and still feel stuck. You might realize you have abandonment issues, and you might know exactly why that is, but if you start to feel uncertain in a relationship, that overwhelming fear you’ll be left can be crippling even if you know you’re being triggered. A lot of people get stuck at this very point. They recognize their “stuff”, they’ve tried to heal by bringing these wounds into the light, but the power of the pain is undiminished when push comes to shove. Pain is still running the show.

The best way to unlearn one thing and relearn another is to work with your own experience, your own nervous system, your own mind. Reading about concepts can be very helpful, but putting them into practice is where it’s at. Thinking about high levels of reactivity and how that can disempower you is good, but working on non-reactivity and empowering yourself is better. I don’t think you can just take someone’s word for this stuff, no matter how much you trust them, or feel they “get it”. If you want to make significant shifts inside yourself, you have to get…inside yourself, right?

Yoga is brilliant for this, but only if you practice with compassion and patience, because of course you can show up on your mat and be cruel and unforgiving with yourself (I know, because I did that for years!). Only you know the quality of the voice inside your head. I mean, if you’re clearly frustrated when you fall out of a pose, your teacher doesn’t have to be a mind-reader to guess you’re dealing with a loud inner critic, but you don’t have to give that critic power. You could tell that voice to f&ck off with a little smile on your face, and find a way to come back to your breath. Maybe you could take yourself a little less seriously, and start to understand the poses are tools, and they’ll only work well if you use them wisely. Then you might start to feed a loving, compassionate voice. The kind you’d use if you were speaking to your best friend, or your child, or someone else you love with all your heart.

There’s something incredibly powerful about a visceral experience. If you feel challenged in a pose, or you feel infringed upon by the person next to you, you have a chance to work with those feelings. Maybe when you feel confronted in your day-to-day life, you run, or you dig your heels in, or you take yourself somewhere else deep within you, or you get loud or aggressive. The possibilities are endless. but if you know you have beliefs and tendencies that aren’t serving you, that are, in fact, impeding your ability to live life in a way that feels good, you do not have to accept that this is “just the way things are”, or that this is, “how you are”. You don’t have to push people away, or cut yourself off from the pain by also cutting yourself off from the love and the joy. You don’t have to give up on yourself. You just have to get busy unlearning so you can relearn. You have to watch what you feed yourself on every level. You have to choose thoughts that will strengthen you and not weaken you, and all these things take time and practice, but I really don’t know of a better endeavor. You can’t offer up the best of yourself and tear yourself down simultaneously. The world really needs each of us to offer up the best of what we’ve got right now, so healing is a gift you give to yourself, but ultimately, it’s a gift you offer to the world. You can get started right here, right now. I hope you do.

Sending you love and hugs,

Ally Hamilton

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

Speak Your Mind

voiceshakesClear communication is so important when it comes to understanding and being understood, but for many people, it isn’t easy. There are all kinds of reasons we don’t always say what we mean — maybe we don’t want to admit what it is that we want, because we feel conflicted about wanting it; we might feel ashamed, or afraid or insecure. Maybe we were taught that our feelings didn’t have an impact on the people or the world around us, so we don’t bother. We might think we already know what the other party will say. Perhaps we want to avoid confrontation or uncomfortable conversations. We might be quiet because we know if we speak up, things will have to change. So much can get lost in translation when we keep things to ourselves, hoping other people will possess the gift of telepathy.

Sometimes we avoid saying a thing, because we fear it might cause pain for someone else, but most people would really prefer to understand what’s happening, even if it hurts. I mean, of course you always want to do your best to speak kindly, and with compassion, to put yourself on the receiving end before you speak, but I don’t believe you do anyone any favors by keeping them in the dark; most people know when something is off. We may not want to know a thing, but usually if something is stirring below the surface, we know it in our hearts.

Life is pretty short, and it isn’t an easy gig. We have an unknown and finite amount of time, as do all the people we hold dear. We all have a song to sing, we have particular gifts to offer. It’s worth asking yourself, if you knew you only had a year to live, what would you do? I don’t just mean your bucket list, here, I mean, what would you say? Where would you put your energy? With whom would you spend your time? Is there something you’d stop doing or being right away? You realize you might only have a year, right? I mean, I hope you have ninety more great ones, I’m just saying, life doesn’t happen out in front of us, someday when “things calm down.” It’s happening right now, today, this is it.

I think you really make yourself sick when you deny what’s in your heart. I’m speaking mostly of big things here, the meaningful things we push down, but even in day-to-day interactions, every time you make yourself small, or shy away from saying what you mean, you weaken yourself. You can say what’s on your mind in a kind but confident way, it just takes practice. It takes more practice for some people than others, but it’s a gift to assert yourself. You won’t get everything you want, of course, but life is hard enough without adding murkiness to the equation. Even when we speak clearly and allow ourselves to be known and seen, intimacy is still challenging, but it’s completely unrealistic to hope for it if you leave too much under the rug. Dishonoring your tender heart is painful and lonely, and it will deplete you. Feeling like no one really knows you is lonely, but betraying yourself is the loneliest thing there is.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

 

Oh, Susie.

susiesallyIt is so hard not to take things personally. Sometimes a person attacks you, directly. If you have a finger pointed in your face, or someone calls you names in an email, it can be challenging to look for the pain behind the anger, but that’s what an attack is about; if there wasn’t a lot of feeling there, the person wouldn’t be so worked up. So it could be that this person cares deeply for you, or it could be that something about you, or the dynamic you have with this person has really set them off, or it could be that they need you to be the villain so they can be the victim, or it could be nine million other possibilities, and that is not about you, that’s about what’s happening within them, what it is that’s being tapped. Unless, of course, you royally screwed up, in which case a heartfelt apology may or may not do the trick. Some people hold onto their rage like it’s going to save them from death, but all it’s likely to do is bring them to their death faster. It’s debilitating to be in a constant state of anger.

We all have pain, and unless you do a lot of work to acknowledge and understand yours, certain things are likely to trigger you. If someone says something or does something that happens to hit you right in your most vulnerable spot, unless you’ve practiced sitting with intense sensation, you’re likely to strike back. I don’t mean with your fists, although there’s sadly too much of that in the world, but with your words or your actions.

Sometimes we screw up, that’s part of being human. We’ll all have moments when we wish we could undo something we’ve said or done. So of course, there are times when you’ll hurt people, hopefully inadvertently. It may also happen because you think you want something at some point, but then you grow and you change and that thing you once wanted doesn’t feel right anymore. If you do have a reason to apologize, by all means, get to it. I think it’s an enormously great quality in a person, the ability to be accountable, and to say “I’m so sorry” when and where it’s warranted. Most people want to be understood, and an apology from the heart can make all the difference in the world.

If you haven’t done anything, and you’re on the wrong end of a slew of expletives or judgements, you do not have to receive those “gifts.” If someone has decided you’re a terrible person because deep down they’re envious, or they feel threatened or jealous, let it be. If you have it in your heart, wish for them that eventually they’ll realize their own gifts and their own beauty, and release their need to write fiction about you in their head, but try not to get caught up in defending yourself, or responding, or trying to convince anyone that you’re really wonderful. You know who you are. You know what kind of person you are. That’s all you need to know. Your actions speak for themselves, and if you’ve made mistakes, welcome to the human race.

When we receive the gift of someone’s insults and start firing back, we give power to their viewpoint. If it’s a creation of someone else’s, why give it power? Why spend your energy that way? Of course it doesn’t feel good when people say things about you that are mean-spirited or flat-out lies, but that stuff doesn’t deserve one ounce of your attention or energy. There’s too much life to be living. Also, not everyone will like you or understand you (or me), and that’s okay, it really is.

The only thing that’s personal is what you think of yourself. That’s as personal as it gets. I’d say it’s good to pay attention when someone close to you holds up a mirror and challenges you to do better. Other than that, focus your energy on what it is you can give. That’s the joy in life. A lot of people struggle; this is no easy gig, this work of being human and vulnerable. When you encounter people who cling to their rage like a shield, wish them well if you have it in you, but don’t take it on. That’s not what you’re here to do.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Define Your Terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Letting Go

pastfuturekingmaSometimes we hold on to all the wrong stuff; ways we’ve been hurt, wronged, betrayed, disappointed, abused or neglected, conversations or memories that feel like a knife in the heart, something someone said or did in anger, or because they were thoughtless, or drunk, or because their head happened to be up their own a$$ in that particular moment. I’m not saying any of that is okay, I’m just saying human beings can be lost and confused and lacking tools to show up for us in a loving way. Sometimes we’re so focused on holding on to that stuff, because we want to use it to justify our feelings, our version of events, our way of being, our stance…and maybe the stance isn’t serving us. Let’s just say for a moment that your version is totally accurate (it probably isn’t, but let’s just say that it is). Does it matter that you’re “right” if you’re miserable?

I’m not saying, “forgive everything and all will be well.” If someone robbed you of your innocence, and took things from you that you can never have back again, like your childhood, for example, I’m not saying you need to sing kumbaya and invite them to sit down at your fire. I’m just saying you don’t have to drag that heavy burden around with you for the rest of your life, and use it to explain why things are the way they are, or why you are the way you are. You’re not set in stone. You’re changing every second, like everyone else. You don’t have to feed the stories that weaken you, and keep you stuck. Maybe you need to put it all down, and spread everything out and hold it up to the light so you can grieve and mourn for those things that you never got to experience. By all means, do that first, acknowledge and examine and lean into your pain so you can know yourself well, and deeply. Then, open to the possibility of joy.

We all have pain. Some people have more than others, that’s just the way of things. Some people endure losses that are so knifing, you wonder how they’re still breathing, but you can extract beauty from everything. If you’re grieving, it’s because you loved so, so deeply, and it’s beautiful that you were able to do that. That can never be taken from you. If you were robbed of your power or your innocence but you’re still here, you’re still standing, there’s beauty in your strength and your resolve, and in your ability to define yourself as a survivor and not a victim. If you were abused or neglected, there’s beauty in that resilient heart of yours, that keeps beating and still has hope.

Our experiences shape us, but they don’t have to define us. We can heal, and define ourselves. Your choices and actions are your own. The way you respond to what you’ve been given is up to you. If you want to hold on to something, hold on to your gorgeous heart. Hold on to your belief in yourself. Hold on to memories that make you smile, and shake your head. Delete nasty emails, but save birthday cards or thank you cards, or letters that make your eyes fill with tears of gratitude. Pick better moments if you need to. Life is so short. Don’t anchor yourself to pain. Life is full of everything. Feed the stuff that strengthens you and focus on those things that inspire you and give you hope and light you up. Move in that direction. Liberate yourself from your past if you need to, so your present and your future can be beautiful.

More than anything, recognize that this is your one life, and it isn’t happening behind you or in front of you, it’s happening right now. If you aren’t happy, at a certain point you have to stop pointing fingers, and start making choices.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

No One Can Save You but You

franklNothing breaks my heart more than a child in an unsafe environment, whether we’re talking about physical or emotional violence. If something happened along your journey that made you feel terrified and powerless, my heart also goes out to you. You do not have to let your past dictate your present, though, and I hope this comes across in the most compassionate way possible, but I believe it’s your work to heal. I think that really needs to be your priority, because if you don’t, you’ll never uncover and share your gifts, and you’ll also take other people down with you. You won’t mean to do that, it’s just that when a person crosses your path, and they see the beauty within you, even if you can’t see it yourself, they’re going to want to stop, and they might even fall in love with you. If you’re still struggling with things that happened to you, through no fault of your own, through nothing that was or is lacking within you, believe me when I tell you, those people who love you and see you will suffer and you might even hate them for it.

This is what abuse does. It cycles back on itself, and if you don’t break the loop, you perpetuate it. Those are your choices. Or you can try numbing yourself so you don’t feel anything, but what kind of life is that? Also, the rage seeps through, anyway. Healing is your best option by a long-shot. How you go about doing that is intensely personal. A great therapist is an excellent place to start. You can’t change anything that exists outside your awareness. If you’re in a state of misery and you can’t seem to pull yourself out of it, if you notice patterns in your life romantically or professionally that do not serve you, if you have difficulty maintaining close relationships with people, if you’re abusive and unable to control yourself when you get angry, you need to find help and support. Nothing good can blossom and sustain itself until you go back and and investigate the source of your pain; it’ll just keep rising to the surface, driving your choices and your actions, wreaking havoc in any way possible to get your attention. It won’t end unless you end it.

Awareness is only step one, though. Figuring out what happened along the way to make you hate yourself, doubt yourself, believe you’re unworthy of love, or that you’re broken…that’s the beginning. Looking at your tendencies, your belief systems, your way of being in the world, your ability to be kind consistently, or not, all these are areas that need to be brought to the surface so you can get your hands and your head around them. Step two is figuring out how to rewire your system, how to unhook your journey from something that happened long ago. How to redefine yourself, recreate your outlook, reimagine your future, rediscover your capabilities, remember who and what you are, that’s step two.

For me, yoga was, and is an essential part of the equation. I think of therapy as the “top-down” part. You get inside your head, and by that I mean what’s conscious and what may be unconscious, and you hold that stuff up to the light so you can see what the hell is going on, and you do that in a safe environment with someone you trust, and you do not look away. You look until you see and you understand what you’ve been thinking, believing and doing that’s landed you in the state you’re in. Yoga is the “bottom-up” part in my book. You get on your mat and you breathe and you move, and whatever your tendencies are, they will show up on your mat with you. So if you have a loud, harsh unforgiving inner critic, guess what voice you’ll hear as you move through your practice? And because you’re aware of your tendencies and you now understand this does not have to be the way of things, the way of you, you can choose not to feed that voice. You do not have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes. You could, if you cared to, kindly tell your inner critic to f&ck off, and you could begin to feed a loving, accepting, patient, kind, caring, compassionate voice. Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen.

Is it painful to confront your pain? Hell yes. It’s brutal and uncomfortable, and if there was a way around it, I’d advise it, but it’s not like you have to lean into your pain for the rest of your life. If you’ve been living this way for thirty or forty years, then you’re probably in for a few fairly painful ones. They might be lonely or scary or isolating. You can probably count on a lot of resistance internally and externally. Confusion, fear, and doubt will travel with you for a time, but if you flood your system with new information from the top-down and the bottom-up, believe me you can heal. You can reinvent your life so it feels good to you. You can leave your past where it belongs, and get busy co-creating your present and your future. No one else can do it for you. No one else can save you, or complete you, or solve it for you. We each have to do our own journey.

If you’re in love with someone who isn’t yet willing or able to look honestly at self-destructive habits or patterns, you can’t save them. You can love them, but you cannot fix or mend or make up for anyone else’s inability to love themselves. You can get really hurt trying, though. Don’t over-inflate yourself. You aren’t here to manage anyone else’s path. No matter how much you love someone, they’re going to have to wrestle their own demons. If we could do it for each other, of course we would. We’d do it for our children and our parents and our best friends and our partners. It simply doesn’t work that way. We struggle through the birth canal, in the dark, trying to find our way until we come into the light. Sometimes you have to rebirth yourself. Same process. Wishing you strength and love and peace and joy and good health and wholeness. If you want to practice with me online, try this. Try it for a couple of weeks, and see if you notice a shift.  I teach because this practice transformed my life, and there are few things I enjoy more than sharing the tools that worked for me. Life is not something to get through, it’s something to be experienced and celebrated and lived fully, from your heart.

Sending you love, and a hug if you need one,

Ally Hamilton

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

Say It

elvissunSometimes we have something to say, but fear stops us. It could be the fear of hurting someone, or the fear that if we speak out, things will change. Maybe we aren’t ready to face the truth, or the consequences of talking about it, but love, honesty, growth and understanding, absolutely require communication. If you can’t tell someone how you feel, you’re in a relationship where true seeing and connection just aren’t possible.

If you’re a people-pleaser, this can become very problematic, because you may sacrifice your own needs to avoid making the other party uncomfortable, or angry or disappointed; maybe you believe that’s the only way you’ll receive love. If you aren’t indispensable to someone, what’s going to keep them around? That’s not connection or love, that’s you editing yourself so that you don’t rock the boat. That’s you trying to fit yourself into some projection you have about what you think they want. It’s also a form of manipulation.

If you struggle with this kind of thing, you may have a very hard time holding someone accountable when they’ve hurt you. Maybe you’re so hard on yourself when you screw up, you assume everyone feels that way (they don’t!). Not everyone berates themselves for being imperfect. When we’re insecure in ourselves, we’ll be insecure in our dealings with other people. The tendency in this scenario is to sell yourself, to be sure you do and say nothing that might upset or confront the other person, because then they might feel angry or disrespected, or over you. So you tiptoe around and try to be some perfect idea of what you think they want, which is awful, because it isn’t really you. Where are you? Where is that authentic, unafraid, open-hearted you?

When we don’t tell people how we feel because we’re afraid they’ll feel terrible for letting us down in some big or small way, we lose the opportunity for growth on both sides of the equation. When we tell ourselves to forgive before we’re ready to do that, we repress our own feelings of anger, and we deny the other person an experience they might have needed for their own growth. Haven’t you learned more from your mistakes than you have from those times when you got everything right? Sometimes in an effort to save someone from the pain of being accountable for their actions, we steal from them a struggle they might have needed. We all screw up sometimes, it’s part of being human. Your job is not to make everything okay for everyone all the time.

Recently I was talking to a friend I’ve known for years. He’s trying to work up the courage to have a painful conversation with his dad, but he told me he’s afraid of what it might do to him. He doesn’t want to upset his dad, but he does want healing. He wants closeness, but in order to get there, he needs to revisit the past with him. He told me he doesn’t want his dad to have to grapple with what he did, and I said that was interesting, because my friend has been grappling with it for years.

Secrets make us sick. I’m not talking about trying to surprise your best friend on her birthday. Those kinds of secrets are beautiful. Anything we do to make the people in our lives feel special and celebrated is awesome. I’m talking about the other kind of secret. The kind you push down so everything looks shiny on the outside, or the kind you sit on to avoid disappointing someone else. The truth wants out. In order to heal, we have to be able to look, and not just to look, but to see. Sending you love. Wishing you the strength and bravery to speak out and up when you need to, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Tolerance

In-the-practice-ofNot everyone is going to like us, get us, understand us, see us clearly, or dig where we’re coming from, that’s just reality, and we aren’t going to understand everyone we encounter, either. I think making the attempt is the thing.

I definitely don’t expect everyone to like everything I write, for example. I put my heart out there, and sometimes I don’t do a great job of getting the feelings and thoughts from my head and my heart into words on a screen; I can live with that. I love and welcome a respectful dialogue about different ideas and opinions. Sometimes someone has a perspective that’s so unique, it makes me think about something in an entirely different way, and I’ll tell you, when I write and when I’m teaching yoga, one of my big goals is not to leave anyone out. I know that’s hoping for a lot, but I always try to think about all kinds of people — people who are happy, people who are suffering, those who’ve endured knifing losses, and those who’ve been spared, those who grew up immersed in love, and those who’ve had to teach it to themselves. I don’t want to alienate anyone.

Sometimes people cling to their ideas like a shield, you just can’t offer a differing opinion, it bounces off, and that’s okay, although I don’t think it’s ideal. It’s just that sometimes a person needs to grip their beliefs to get through. If they drop a particular idea, their whole life philosophy falls apart. Maybe they have coping mechanisms they need at this point in time, but I think it’s going to create problems for a person who can’t even entertain a different way of thinking about something over the long haul because in order to hold onto to their beliefs, in order to make the pieces fit, they have to reject anything that calls those beliefs into question. If someone doesn’t agree, they’re wrong, or they’re the enemy, or they’re blind, or lost or confused. A differing opinion or choice feels like a judgment against them.

I see this on the micro-level, between family members who stop speaking to each other because they dig their heels in. This thing happened, and they’re so attached to holding onto their story about why they’re right and their brother or sister or mother or father or son or daughter is wrong, they forget about the human being(s) they’re sacrificing in order to keep the story of their rightness. Everyone screws up. Everyone. We all say things and do things and think about things in a heated way sometimes. We get bogged down in layers of subconscious rage or pain or ideas we have about injustices that have been perpetrated against us, and sometimes we drag a lot of history into the present moment. You can’t turn back time. You can’t undo something you said or did, or something someone else said or did. You can only work with what is, and where to go from here, but angry stories aren’t going to show up by your bedside to hold your hand one day when you really need it. They aren’t going to cover you with a blanket, and rest a cool hand on your forehead. We don’t have to agree all the time to love each other, and to treat one another with respect and kindness.

If family members struggle with these things, then of course friends will, also, and acquaintances, and you can bet strangers will. Then you start adding borders and different countries and different languages, and you can see how this can lead to trouble. We’re so quick to categorize people, to assume we know, to label someone and check the box. Sometimes people rage, or vent, or call names, because they can’t see the eyes of the person they’re attacking anymore. Intolerance divides us, it creates an us, and a them and makes conversation impossible and obsolete.

When we dehumanize people, we can ignore them or hurt them. We take ourselves off the hook of doing the work to understand them or love them, or be open to anything they might want to say or share. Life is about connection, I truly believe that, and intolerance is the opposite of connection. Sometimes it’s good to examine where you’re intolerant. Maybe it’s with certain aspects of yourself. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a belief system, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying I think it’s important to make sure we aren’t clinging so hard to what we believe, we’re blinding ourselves.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

The Human Heart (A Love Story)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pants on Fire

Im-not-upset-that-youPeople lie for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they can’t face themselves; they can’t reconcile what they want with what they believe they should want, or think other people think they should want. Sometimes people want to do what they want to do, and understand they might meet with resistance if they talk about it, so they lie to avoid confrontation. People lie when they feel trapped, or when they know they’ve done something wrong and don’t want to face the consequences. People lie when they’re afraid, or ashamed. Sometimes they lie when they want power, or adoration, or control. There are people with personality disorders who lie and believe in the lies they’re telling, at least to some degree–dissociative lying. There are people who lie pathologically, or compulsively, and people who lie because they’re addicted to something and don’t know what else to do.

It feels terrible when our trust has been violated, and this is especially true when it’s at the hands of a family member, loved one, or someone we considered a friend. If you’re in a close relationship with someone who lies habitually, you can start to feel like a crazy person. Most of us can feel in our guts when something is off, so when our intuition says one thing, and the person we love says another, it can really throw us into a tailspin.

I don’t think there’s any need to demonize people who are lying, for whatever reason. A person who’s lying can’t face reality as it is, or they’re struggling to face themselves, or they’re living in pain or fear or deep confusion or shame or guilt, or they have a big, gaping hole they’re trying to fill. That doesn’t make lying okay, I’m just saying it’s painful to live life in a way that makes you feel you can’t speak about what’s true for you. Keeping secrets is exhausting, and without trust, there’s no foundation for a relationship, there’s no safe space, there’s no room to be vulnerable. You’d have to be reckless or grappling with very low self-esteem to make yourself vulnerable to someone with a track record of lying to your face. I’m not talking about a one-time thing. Sometimes people do things that are completely out of character in a desperate moment, and then they don’t know how to undo them. I’m talking about a pattern.

If you’re in a romantic relationship with someone who won’t or can’t be honest with you, you’re going to have to gather the strength to get out, because that’s a painful way to live, and you’ll end up feeling alienated and depressed. How can you feel good about yourself when you know in your heart you’re with a person who doesn’t have the respect to tell you the truth? (Assuming they can discern what the truth is. If they can’t, there’s no hope for intimacy, anyway.) There are some people we can love, who simply cannot be in our lives. If you’re dealing with a family member, a colleague, or an ex who has to remain in your life because you share children, it’s harder.

In those cases, I think boundaries are your best option. You cannot control other people, you can’t manage the other person’s side of the street, you can only work on keeping your own side clean. Try to limit contact to those things which must be discussed.  If it’s someone who has power over you (like your boss, for example), it’s time to start a job-search. If it’s a family member, create parameters that protect you to the best of your ability. Communicate how you’re feeling and how things have to be in order for you to feel comfortable with a relationship, and then stick to it. Don’t be surprised if you’re lied to; part of the pain of betrayal is that we don’t see it coming, so we end up questioning our own judgment. If you know someone struggles with honesty, but it’s someone you still want or must have in your life, remember the Coco Chanel quote, “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” People are who they are. That doesn’t mean you should close the door on hope; transformation is always possible unless you’re dealing with someone who really doesn’t have a firm grip on reality. Just don’t allow yourself to get lulled into thinking there’s change unless there’s been serious effort and a long record of consistency. If you’re dealing with an ex, that’s probably the hardest, if children are involved. In that case, you have to make sure your children’s safety is not an issue; try to keep all interactions centered around the kids.

Short of that, distance yourself from people who have a history of deceiving you, because that isn’t loving. It might not be intentional in some cases, but it still feels terrible. It’s funny, but so many people chase happiness like it’s this thing out ahead of them that they’ll get to when all the pieces fit together in this particular way; I used to do that myself, it’s what we’re taught culturally. It just happens to be a lie. Somewhere along the way I began to understand that the more I opened to the truth, and by that I mean, what was true for me, the truth of a particular situation, what was true for the people in my life, the less I had to grip, the more I could relax and breathe and accept and move forward with ease. That’s happiness — being at peace with yourself and with those in your life, discerning what is real from what is not real, knowing yourself, and seeing other people clearly. I realized happiness, in large part, is the result of facing reality as it is. There’s so much liberation in that, of being at peace with the truth, even when it breaks your heart. Understanding that everything is in a constant state of flux, and how things are now, is not how they will always be. Don’t betray yourself, and don’t allow other people to deceive you. That’ll crush the light right out of you.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Shame

We all have our moments when we don’t show up as our highest selves; choices we’d make differently, given the opportunity to choose again. Times when we were tested, and failed in our efforts to handle it well. We have people we’ve hurt, hopefully unintentionally, but also sometimes because we were young and thoughtless, or careless or selfish, or simply didn’t realize who we were yet, or the ramifications of what we were doing. Most people, given the chance to talk freely and safely, will tell you they carry shame around something. It could be the way they parent sometimes. It could be the way they show up in relationships, or don’t. It could be around a specific incident, when they had a choice to make, and regret their course of action. It could be that something happened to them and they feel broken or ugly or marred in some un-fixable way. This is life, this is being human; it isn’t easy, it isn’t always pretty, and sometimes we need help in order to see things clearly.

Shame is debilitating and nothing productive grows out of that feeling. What results is usually self-loathing or a feeling of being totally alienated, or both. You don’t have to share every dark moment from your past, but if you feel the need to hide things from those closest to you, or worse, from yourself, that’s a well of pain you’re going to have to dip into at some point if you want to be free of it. There’s a big difference between healing something so that there isn’t any need to talk about it anymore, and hiding it, running from it, numbing it out, or denying it. There’s a difference between taking your time and building trust with someone before you make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and rejecting pieces of yourself so completely, no one knows they exist, and even you deny them to yourself–rewriting history in your mind, pretending it happened a different way.

There’s something about the internet that makes people feel free to say anything. Sometimes that can be a horrible thing, when people lose all compassion and empathy for the person on the receiving end of their tirade or judgement or cruelty, because they’ve forgotten there is, in fact, a human being at the end of it. Other times, it can be liberating and beautiful, like when an email arrives from someone who shares something with me they’ve been carrying around for years. Maybe their heart is racing and their hands are shaking when they hit “send”, but at the same time, their heart is saying yes, finally. Shame is heavy; dragging it around with you requires a lot of energy and effort, energy that could be used for something productive, like living life in a way that feels good, developing the tools to heal, and realizing you are not broken.

Here’s the thing–the past is over; it can’t be rewritten or redone. If you’ve made mistakes, welcome to the human race. That’s how we learn. You might look back and wish with all your heart you hadn’t needed to learn certain lessons, but I wouldn’t get stuck looking back for too long. The thing is now. Now has a ton of potential, and it’s weightless. Nothing has happened yet. You can start again at any time. If you have regrets, I think it can be a beautiful exercise to apologize when possible, even if it’s ancient history, and you think the other party has completely moved on. You may not get forgiveness in return, but that isn’t the point. You might not even send the apology if you think it would be hurtful to disrupt the person’s life. Like anything else we long for, it really has to come from inside you. Forgiveness, I mean. Sometimes just going through the effort to write a thing down, so it’s not in your head anymore, but there on paper or on your computer screen in black and white, can be enough to cause a shift. If you’re dealing with something that happened to you, writing it down can also be powerful. Expressing your rage or your pain or the many ways this thing has affected you can be freeing. Unhooking your journey from the person who hurt you; it’s the carrying this stuff that gets you. It’s the weight of it.

There are some things that will never be okay, that’s just reality, that’s just life with all of its everything. Maybe there are things you can’t make right no matter how much you’d do or give to have it be otherwise. Maybe you’ve suffered a loss so great nothing will completely heal it, maybe it’s a scar you’re going to bear. It’s the shame you want to release, because shame brings it into the now. Shame takes a thing and makes it part of your present, even if the event or the tendency or the choice is way back behind you in your rear-view mirror. Shame says you’ll never be different and you aren’t capable, and you aren’t worthy of love or joy, and you’ll never get it right. Shame is an anchor and it can also be an excuse not to try, it can suck the try right out of you. Shame lies and it usually travels with guilt, and if you expect to be able to get far with those two as your traveling companions, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. There may be a mess behind you. That doesn’t mean there can’t be beauty out in front of you. Sometimes, you just have to take the wheel.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Good Intentions

ART-OF-DRAWINGIt’s always good to take stock from time to time, and think about what you might like to release, and what you’d like to cultivate. Sometimes we weigh ourselves down carrying around really old stuff; ideas we have that don’t fit anymore, stories about ourselves or other people that used to be true, limiting beliefs about who we are and what we can or cannot do to effect change in our lives. You can pile a whole bunch of that on top of your hope, your potential, your dreams and your possibilities; people do it all the time and keep themselves stuck, but that’s not a fun place to be.

It’s possible you developed coping mechanisms at some point that you needed at the time, but maybe you don’t need them now, maybe you’re safe but still on the run. You could be stoking a fire it would be better to extinguish, keeping yourself angry, because the alternative is to allow yourself to be vulnerable, and that seems like a reckless idea. You can fight it all you like, and the reality will still remain that you are vulnerable, that’s an inherent part of this experience of being human. There are certain things in life that will break your heart wide open, that will never fall into the category of, “thank you for that experience”; there are losses you’ll carry like scars on your heart that mark the places where you learned you were not and are not in control of circumstances. Devastating heartbreaks may shape you, but they don’t have to define you, or the amount of joy that’s possible in your future.

You can only be where you are. You move through your healing process in your own way, and in your own time. The best thing is to face reality as it is; that’s hugely liberating. Life may not unfold like the picture you have in your head of “how things should be”; in fact, it probably won’t. The more you resist, the more you suffer, and a large part of our suffering comes from our own thoughts. (Not all of it.) You can’t control what other people will want or do or say. You can’t make another person be something they aren’t, or want something they do not want. You can’t control what life will put in your path, but you do have the power to choose the way you respond to what it is you’re given. You can work on how you show up, how you proceed.

The mind is a funny thing; it’s obsessive and redundant and very fond of time-travel. It loves to head into the past and cling to those places where things went wrong, or where they were right, but aren’t any longer, or race into the future and imagine how things could go wrong. So we have waves of depression about the past, and waves of anxiety about the future. Who wants to swim in that ocean? Those are waters with relentless currents, and sharp rocks that scrape open those old wounds. If you can pick your mind up and bring it back to the Sea of Now, you’ll find it’s sunny and calm with a beautiful breeze, and that you can see all the way down to the smooth ocean floor. You can actually chill out. Float on your back and feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Take a deep breath full of gratitude. That feels so much better than treading water, going under, feeling the sting of salt in your eyes. You don’t have to stay in the ocean where you swim with the sharks.

You can work on where you place your attention. Sad stories about your past don’t serve your future, or your now. It’s painful enough that these things happened. You don’t want to feed those feelings forever so that there’s no hope for peace. Of course you mourn and you grieve when you’re suffering huge losses, but after you’ve allowed yourself to feel all your feelings and to take whatever time you need to feel like you can allow for the possibility of joy again, then it’s useful to direct your energy, to choose one thought over another. Whatever you feed will grow and strengthen. You are free to water the plant of life sucks, and I suck and people suck and you can’t trust anyone. Or you can water the plant of life is gorgeous even though it breaks your heart sometimes. Some people are damaged and have a hard time loving, but other people are so open and warm and kind it makes your eyes well up and your heart expand. There’s love in this world that is so profound it takes your breath away and the only words you have are, “thank you” and “yes”, the only feelings you have are relief and gratitude. I’d really water that plant, and let the other one starve to death. It’s roots are shot, anyway. The soil they grew in has turned to dust, so nothing new can blossom on those branches.

If you’re inclined, you might make a list of things you don’t want to feed anymore. Habits that undermine you, relationships that drain you and rob you of your power. Anything that makes you feel the life-force is being sucked out of you, thoughts that weaken you, old stories that aren’t serving you. Put all that stuff in a glass bowl or find a fireplace and burn it, and then go buy a plant that requires the right amount of light and water for your particular environment. Grab a marker, and on the ceramic planter, write down the words of things you want to feed. Ideas that strengthen you. People that see you and love you and understand you. Things that inspire you. Feelings you want to cultivate. Put it somewhere prominent, so you can never start the day without taking it in. Setting intentions once a year is fine, but if you really want to see a shift, you have to align yourself with those intentions every day. Feed that, and see what happens.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Why It’s Good if You Feel Angry, Depressed and Alone

thetruthwillsetufreebutfirstA couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about forgiveness. I got lots of emails, one from a woman who’d just found out her husband had been having an affair. This came to light just hours before the article was posted, and she told me she was struggling to forgive him. Last night I was talking to a friend of mine, and she told me that one of her closest friends had betrayed her over a business opportunity. She said she knew there was a lesson in it somewhere, that she’d known her friend operated this way, but that there were also amazing things about her. She felt the onus was on her since she’d been aware, and had remained close to her friend, anyway. Here’s the thing…

Read the rest of the article at:
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-11950/why-its-good-if-you-feel-angry-depressed-and-alone.html

Water Your Plants

Any living thing you feed will grow and strengthen, and anything you starve will die. This includes relationships. If you don’t put any effort or energy into it, it won’t sustain itself, and that happens all the time; that’s why our divorce rate is so incredibly high. A relationship is a living, breathing thing that exists in the space between two people. It’s a third thing, a singular creation that could never have occurred without the intersection of two particular lives.

I’m not just talking about romantic relationships, but also familial ones, close friendships, acquaintances, colleagues, strangers. Two people come together and each one contributes something. If you put your boredom, frustrations, rage, thoughtlessness or fear into the space between you and another person, that’s a choice you’re making. No one is perfect, and no one is going to choose well, or operate from their highest selves in every moment. Sometimes we’ll regret our contribution. That’s when the words, “I’m sorry, I blew it” are brilliant. If you’re in pain, chances are you’ll spill some of that into the space between you and the people in your life. You won’t mean to do that, it’s just natural that we spread whatever is within us. This is why your healing process is so critical. It’s not just something you do so you can be a peace within yourself, it’s a gift you give to everyone you encounter. When you’re filled with love, you’ll spill that, too and you won’t have to be sorry about it.

The thing is, it’s easy to point fingers and hard to look in the mirror sometimes. You can blame the other party if things aren’t going well, or you can choose to try adding something new to the mix. Maybe your lover or friend or mother or brother has been careless with you, or neglectful or cruel. If we’re talking about abuse, you create as much physical and emotional space as you can between you and the person who’s in that kind of pain. Short of that, you could just try a different approach. You can teach people how you want to be treated by example. You could plan something special for no reason, even if you feel the other person doesn’t deserve it. Sometimes we shut ourselves down or close ourselves off. We erect barriers because the pain has become so great we don’t know what else to do but defend ourselves against it. Walls shut out the love, too. They close off the possibility for understanding, connection, intimacy. That’s not sustainable; being in a relationship where you feel unseen, unheard and unloved is so much worse than being on your own, but sometimes we give up too soon, and miss a huge opportunity to grow.

Growth hurts. This is why we have the term “growing pains.” Blame is easy. Making ourselves right, feeling victimized, bitter, resentful, those are all stances we can choose to take, but curling up with your righteousness isn’t comforting. Making yourself powerless is draining, not inspiring. You can’t control other people, or save them or make them happy. Each person has to do her or his own journey, but you can grab someone’s attention by doing something loving and unexpected, and maybe they’ll feel so grateful, they’ll see it doesn’t take much, and they’ll grab your attention next time. That’s generally a better way to go than a constant stream of criticism. Most people will not be able to take that in after awhile. Instead of listening to you with the intent to understand, they’ll shut down or storm off or go on the defensive, and you might have discovered people on the defensive have their hands up. They don’t outstretch their arms. I’m not saying you shouldn’t communicate honestly, because of course you need to do that. I’m just saying if that hasn’t been working, try something else, something completely different. Just to see. We all just want to feel like at least one person is getting us. At least one person has our back, accepts our flaws, celebrates our beauty, cherishes us. Of course we can all have at least one person in ourselves, but connection between two people is some of the best stuff in life.

When people stop feeding the space between them it becomes empty. The roots dry up, and the plant shrivels and dies. There’s no bond left, eventually. There’s just painful history, defense mechanisms, anger, justifications, and attachments to a particular version of the story of what went wrong, and it isn’t easy to come back together at that point. It won’t save every relationship, but the more you decide to offer love, the more it will blossom up around you. You can’t control what other people will want or say or do, but you can work on the way you show up, and what is is you give. You have a gorgeous heart that was built for love. If you’ve erected walls around it, you can tear them down, too.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

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

Head for the Eye of the Storm

Many of the feelings we’re going to experience in this life are not comfortable — rage, grief, shame, fear, doubt, jealously, envy, loneliness, bitterness, feelings around being betrayed, abandoned or neglected — none of these are easy feelings. Sometimes we’re in so much avoidance around this stuff, we flee. We keep ourselves insanely busy, or we numb out all the time, or we cling to a false reality and insist those who are close to us do the same. None of that works, assuming you want to be happy and at peace.

The desire to feel good can be so strong, we excuse and explain behavior of others that we really shouldn’t tolerate. Forgiveness feels better than rage. Gratitude feels better than the feeling of lack or bitterness. Being in love feels better than acknowledging something at the core is just not right. What we know is more comfortable than what we don’t, even if what we know doesn’t feel good, but forced joy is not the same as true joy. Should you be happy because it’s the holiday season? Should you get married because you’re thirty and all your friends are doing it? Should you be careful around the word “should”? You feel how you feel, and your best bet is to deal with it.

If you’re enraged because your spouse had an extramarital affair, you can’t race to forgiveness; you have to be with all the other messy feelings that come up first, and see if you can work your way toward forgiveness later. If your grown child is determined to head down a painful path, you do a disservice to everyone if you deny that reality and insist everything is okay. Clinging to positivity is a sure recipe for suffering. It’s not all positive and light, some of it hurts like hell. Some of it makes your blood boil. Being spiritual does not mean you shun those feelings or push them down or feel shame around them, either. The greatest gift of a spiritual practice, whether it’s yoga or seated meditation, hiking or salsa dancing or cooking or whatever speaks to you (and yes, anything that you do consistently that helps you quiet your mind and tune into your own intuition, that helps you become a part of the flow, and lose your sense of separateness, can be defined as a spiritual practice), is the ability to face reality as it is. It’s not about being positive and thinking positively every second and clutching at the light like it’s going to save you. Being able to be with the darkness can save you. Sitting with what is real for you and owning it and allowing painful feelings to arise so you can understand yourself is incredibly liberating. If you don’t do that, you’ll be driven by unconscious forces, and wonder why it is you keep making choices that send you headfirst into brick walls.

The pressure to be happy is enormous. It’s all around you. Watch what you feed yourself, and I don’t just mean food. Everything you take in through your eyes and your ears is food for your mind. If you feed yourself a constant diet of “everyone else is happy and I suck”, you’re probably going to feel pretty badly. Not everyone is happy, many people are suffering in silent agony because they don’t know how to get from here (despair) to there (peace), and very few people talk about the shadow stuff. I think it’s the responsibility of people in the spiritual community to get their hands dirty and shine a light on the stuff that hurts. Knowing yourself can be a deeply painful, lonely process. You may have made a series of choices based on what you thought you should want, or what other people wanted you to want, and you may have a lot of unraveling to do to get back to what’s true for you. That hurts. You may have old wounds that are unhealed that need your kind attention, and that hurts, too. You may find that certain relationships need to be examined from the roots up, and that they may not survive the move to new soil. Birthing anything into existence is uncomfortable at best, whether it’s a new way of being, or a new life that feels more authentic to you.

Too many people are hopeless and numb, internalizing their own rage, walking around feeling depressed, and wondering how all these shiny people on Instagram are doing it. No one posts the pictures of days they shuffle around in their pajamas, feeling lame and alone. You don’t see many status updates that say, “I feel scared because my life is going by and I don’t know what I’m doing”, but everyone has pain, fear and questions. That’s the stuff you run toward, although that might not be intuitive. If you want to be at peace, you have to be willing to walk through the storms, too. They don’t kill you, they don’t wash you away. Avoiding them does.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Out to Sea

When I was seventeen I began dating a man who was twenty-one years older than I was. My parents tried to stop me, but they have nineteen years between them, and even though they divorced when I was four, I was positive my relationship was different, because I was seventeen and thought I had all the answers. My previous boyfriend, who had been kind and sweet and awesome in every way, also tried to stop me, but he had moved across the country to go to college, and the truth was, I was heartbroken. I felt abandoned, even though he was talking about Christmas break, and calling every day. No matter; he’d left, and it stirred in me something old and raw and completely unhealed. So I let this guy who was so much older come at me with his cars and his boats and his private plane to his house in the Hamptons. He had a terrible reputation for cheating on everyone he dated, and I signed myself up for the task like I’d be able to fix that. Also, something inside me was believing the idea that I was the kind of person someone could leave, so who cared, really?

The first time we were together it was strange and sad. We flew out to his house, and went directly to the beach where we got in his speedboat. He drove us out to the middle of a secluded bay area. I knew he’d done it before, all of it. It was like some kind of ritual, something to get out of the way. I knew he didn’t love me. That came a few years later, after he’d broken me and it was too late, but I let him have me, even though I felt nothing. I was hooked in, I was playing out all kinds of ancient history, but I wasn’t in love with him, and I certainly wasn’t loving myself, not even a little. When it was over and I was swimming in the ocean, tears came streaming down my face, unexpectedly, without permission. I dove underwater, trying to wash them away, trying to wash the whole thing away. I don’t remember much else about that day, or that night. I think he spent most of the afternoon working, and I curled up in front of the fire with a book. I felt dead to myself, and also strangely satisfied that I’d done something so unlike me.

I stayed with him for three years. Once he had me, he kept a tight leash on me. It’s funny how people without integrity assume other people also have none. He was threatened by the guys at Columbia who were my age. He’d drop me off on campus sometimes and get upset if I was wearing lipstick, or tight jeans, or short skirts, or pretty much anything that wasn’t a sack, but he cheated on me regularly. He was good at it, I could never prove it, but I always knew when he was with someone else because it hurt. It hurt in the way that sends you under the kitchen table, holding onto yourself as you sob and wonder what the hell you’re doing in this situation, and why you don’t get out. Getting out wasn’t even possible at that point, because I was so attached to getting my happy ending. If I could just be perfect enough to get him to love me, if I could just hang in there long enough he’d finally realize I really did love him…because after awhile, I did.

I began to see this insecure guy who felt he wasn’t enough, regardless of how many women he took to bed, or how much money he had, or how many sparkly, shiny toys. Nothing did it for him, not even the unwavering love of a good girl. I can’t call myself a woman when I think about this experience, because I wasn’t yet. I had a lot of healing to do, and a lot of growing, but I was very kind to him. The longer I stayed, the more he gave me reasons to leave. For his fortieth birthday, I planned an elaborate surprise party. I rented a pool hall, had it catered from his favorite sushi place, and ordered dessert from an amazing pastry chef. I sent invitations to all his friends. I made a reservation at a new restaurant that had opened downtown that he was dying to try, and planned to take him to the pool hall from there. I ordered a bottle of champagne to be waiting at the table. It took me months to save up the money to pull it off.

A week before the party he confronted me in the kitchen in East Hampton. He told me he knew about the party, and he wanted to see the guest list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anyone. At first I tried to deny there was a party, but he kept coming. He laughed at me. He knew it was at a pool hall. He wanted to know if I’d ordered food, and all the other details. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. I stood there in that kitchen and I felt everything fall away from me. I felt like I was made of bones that could disintegrate into a pile of dust on the floor, that his housekeeper could just come along and sweep away, out the door, into the ocean, to meet up with those tears I’d cried the first day. I told him every last detail. He took away any shred of joy I might have felt at having been able to give him something. Three days before the party, he went to the restaurant I’d made reservations at a few months before, so that the night of the party, the only surprise was that sad bottle of champagne, waiting at the table.

You cannot save anyone. All the love in the world won’t get the job done. You can’t make someone faithful or kind or compassionate or sensitive. You can’t make another person happy. They are, or they are not. You can harm yourself. You can allow yourself to be abused, mistreated, neglected and betrayed, but I don’t recommend it. A healthy, happy, secure person wouldn’t have been on that boat with him in the first place. Of course, he preyed on a seventeen year old, and when I look back on it I have all kinds of compassion for myself, but it took me years to get there. It also took a lot of yoga, therapy, weeping, writing and reading. Anything you repress, run from, or deny, owns you. It owns you. If you don’t turn and face that stuff down, you’ll call it into your life in other ways. The truth wants out. Your heart wants to heal so it can open for you again. Whatever is in your past does not have to define your future, but it probably will if you don’t do the work to liberate yourself. We have such fear. We think these things will overwhelm us, that we won’t survive, but what you won’t survive is the not facing it. That’s the part that kills you. That’s the part that makes you feel you could be swept away in the wind. Looking at your stuff hurts. It’s painful and deeply uncomfortable, but if you trust yourself enough to lean into all that pain, you’ll find it loses its grip over you. If you let yourself weep out the searing heat from those wounds, your whole being can take a real, deep breath, maybe for the first time in ages.

You can forgive those who let you down, who didn’t or couldn’t show up for you the way you would have liked or the way you deserved. You can forgive yourself for choices you might have made that were harmful to you or others. When we’re in pain, we don’t tend to treat ourselves well, and sometimes that also spills onto the people with whom we’re closest, but life can be beautiful. You can close the book on the old, painful story that was just a replaying of your past and you can start working on this new creation that gets to be your life after you’ve healed. Not that the old pain won’t show up from time to time when you’re feeling triggered or tested or vulnerable, but it won’t grab you and knock you off your feet and show you who’s boss, because it won’t be boss anymore, it won’t rule your life. You’ll just see it for what it is, an echo of a very old story that came to completion. It can’t be rewritten, it is what it is, but you get to decide where to place your energy and your attention. I highly recommend you direct it toward love; that’s your happy ending, although it doesn’t end. You get to keep choosing it every day. If you do that, you’ll never find yourself sailing out to sea with someone who doesn’t know how to do anything but hurt you. Your own ship will have sailed, and maybe someday you’ll pass your seventeen year old self, weeping in the ocean next to your ship and you’ll pull her on board and show her your future which holds so much joy, gratitude, meaning and fulfillment, maybe she’ll weep there on the deck with you, not in sadness, but in relief. If you’re allowing yourself to be mistreated and you need help, feel free to email me at ally@yogisanonymous.com.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Might As Well Open to It

Opening to your feelings, even if they’re highly uncomfortable, is the only way to release them. Anything you deny, run from, or repress absolutely owns you, and any of those actions–choosing ignorance, fleeing from what you know to be true, or taking most of your energy and using it to push down what has come to the surface–will isolate you. You can’t turn to anyone because you’re not willing to face things as they are. No one can comfort you, because you aren’t dealing with your pain, you’re avoiding it. You may be desperate for relief, but if you’re in a blaming frame of mind, you won’t find any because you’ve made yourself powerless.

We all want connection, it’s the most natural thing in the world to us. We come into this world needing each other, and we go out needing each other, and in between, of course we need each other. The surest gateway to connection is understanding. When you’re able to lean into your own feelings, especially the charged ones, you recognize pain in someone else, and you can offer compassion. Just like that, you have connection, you have a shared understanding, not just about the pain of being human, but also the joy of it.

Last week I was crossing the street on my way to meet a friend. This woman, probably a decade or so older than me, was crossing from the other side, and it wasn’t a big deal, but we made eye contact, and didn’t break it after a split second like people normally do. She didn’t look down, and she didn’t look away from me. She seemed like a happy person, like she was enjoying life, at least in that moment, and we just smiled at each other, as if to say, “Isn’t this grand?” It made my day.

When you’re on the run, or you’re dealing with your own aversion to things as they are, you’re likely to create a story that justifies your feelings and behavior. Only people willing to accept your version of reality will be allowed in, and even then they can’t do much for you because deep down you know this story isn’t the thing. It’s something you’re clinging to, it’s something you’re using to shield yourself from the truth of your painful feelings. The simpler thing would be to drop the story and just feel whatever it is you need to feel. We build this stuff up in our minds. This idea that these feelings will overwhelm us. There are some things in this world that are so knifing, you might really need help to get through. Short of that, though, most charged feelings will not destroy you. We’ve all been enraged, jealous, insecure, clinging, dishonest with ourselves or others, ashamed, scared, confused, petty, judgmental, irrational, ridden with guilt, betrayed in some way or another. Some people have been abused, neglected, abandoned. Hopefully we’ve also known love, kindness, compassion, affection, loyalty, gratitude, and joy. The idea is to lean into all of it. It won’t always be light, and it won’t always be dark. You can’t control what life will put in your path, but you can work on the way you meet whatever it is. I highly recommend open eyes, open heart, open mind, and open hands.

I used to crave happiness, but somewhere along the way I became hungry for and curious about the truth. Let me know the truth of my own experience. Let me know the truth of the people in my life. Let me see clearly. Being happy in every moment is not possible or realistic. Being aware of what you’re feeling and able to receive it, absolutely is. Either way, you’re going to get some heartbreaking stuff and some stuff that will blow the lid off what you thought you knew about love; that’s the human experience. Might as well open to it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

When Your Heart Breaks, It Opens, Too.

Some things in this life will just break your heart. The beautiful and extraordinary thing about the heart, though, is that when it breaks, it opens more if you let it; it expands. There are things that can bring us to our knees. Losing a loved one too soon, that’s at the top of the list. Going through a divorce, a breakup, any kind of rejection from a person who was once a lover and/or a friend. Being fired from a job. Being abandoned, neglected, discarded or betrayed. Dealing with someone who won’t or can’t communicate so you’re left to grope for the answers yourself, and have to learn the painful lesson that some things will never be explained, that the only closure you’ll get is acceptance.

For so many of us when we’re hurt like this, when we’re grieving and there’s nothing but tears and despair, there can be such a desire to shield the heart; to build up walls so we can’t ever be hurt this way again, to decide we won’t be putting ourselves out there anymore, we won’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable. There’s no way to be a human being in this world without being vulnerable, though, it comes with the territory. We all have a finite amount of time, and we have no idea how much time we have. The thought of that can shut you down or open you up. When you’ve learned firsthand that those you love beyond words can be ripped from you with no warning and no chance to say goodbye, you know the truth of this all too well. If you board up your heart, you serve no one. No one who loved you would ever want you to do that, because it’s a half-life. It’s not even that; it’s an existence. If someone was taken from you, live for them. Honor them by celebrating every moment you have here, and by celebrating the fact that you loved so deeply. No one is ever gone from you. You can close your eyes and be with anyone you’ve ever been close to right now if you try. I realize it isn’t the same as being able to hold the people we long to hold. It isn’t the same as being able to hug them or hear their voices, or see their eyes light up, but they aren’t gone from you, they live in your heart.

If someone has left you of their own volition, allow yourself to feel all the pain around that. Rejection makes us feel like we aren’t worthy of love. It makes us doubt ourselves at the deepest level, but if someone couldn’t see you, or treasure you or understand you, if someone couldn’t receive the incredible gift you are, allow yourself to be released. Everyone deserves to be cherished. Every single one of us is a miracle. You aren’t likely to feel that way if you’ve just been left or betrayed, but you are, truly. Seven billion people, one you. Only one.

If you’ve been fired, that can reek havoc on your self esteem, especially if you identify strongly with the kind of work you do. It can make you feel like you’ve been cut off at the knees. It’s hard to imagine it when we’re in the midst of turmoil and stress, when we’re trying to keep a roof over our heads and food in the refrigerator, but sometimes it’s a gift when our plan gets turned on its head. Maybe eventually you’ll see that this was a catalyst for something beautiful and unexpected to emerge, but in the meantime, lick your wounds.

Whatever you’re going through, keeping your heart open is so key. Shut yourself down for awhile if you need to; if you’re going through the kind of loss that’s so knifing you’re struggling to breathe in and breathe out, then just surviving this period is enough. Just crack the door open so you can receive love and support, because you’ll need it. Some things will never be okay, but accepting that is often the thing that enables you to open your heart again. Life without love is cold and dark; it’s not natural to us, we thrive on connection and closeness. Everyone is in this thing together. Some people face pain that’s hard to endure, and others face the “normal” amount of suffering, but no one gets out with zero suffering, and no one lives forever. With the time that you’ve got, live all the way. Embrace it all and try to trust in your experience here, even if you don’t understand it all the time. Just being a human being is such a gift. Just getting to have this journey is something extraordinary. Even when you feel completely alone, you aren’t. Keep your heart open and you’ll feel that reality.

Sending you so much love (and a little yoga to support your healing process.)

Ally Hamilton

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

Compassion: Tastes Great, Less Filling

Once when I was fourteen, I walked to the front of the room in my science class to hand in a paper, and I heard giggling. When I returned to my seat, this girl I had always liked leaned over and loudly whispered, “You can see your panties through your skirt. Nice flowers!” And then she and another girl I’d also thought was a friend, snickered. One of the guys in my class leaned forward from the row behind me and said, “Don’t worry about it, you’re looking good,” which only intensified my embarrassment. Shame is such a powerful, uncomfortable, debilitating feeling. It hits you in the gut and makes you feel wrong and bad and unworthy of love or kindness. I remember being annoyed with myself for blushing and making it obvious I was bothered. I wanted to be tough, to act like it didn’t phase me, to deny those girls the feeling that they had any power over me; things like that seem such a big deal when you’re fourteen. My heart was racing, and I was cursing myself for not having checked my reflection before walking out the door. I felt betrayed and confused by these girls I’d considered friends, who now seemed to be taking pleasure in humiliating me. Beyond that, I wanted the world to open and swallow me so I wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day with people laughing because they could see through my skirt. I think about it now, as a grown woman, and shake my head. I wish I could go back to my teenage self in that room and say, this is so not a big deal, but it’s funny that it stands out, all these years later.

We all have moments when we feel exposed, when we’ve shown our fallibility and our vulnerability more than we’d intended; when we’ve accidentally let people see the flowers on our undies. There’s so much I could say here. We tend to be so hard on ourselves and on each other. Gossip magazines (which I never buy and encourage you to boycott along with beauty magazines which are anything but) are nothing but mean girls gone wild. Look at this awful thing this person is doing! Here’s someone else with their life falling down around them. Here are ten ways you really suck, and even though you’ll never measure up, here are ten things you can try so that you won’t suck so much, with an occasional story about a person with a fairytale life you could never hope to live. It’s a big plate of awful.

The thing is, you’re always feeding yourself. You’re feeding your body, but you’re also feeding your mind and your heart with everything you watch, read, or dwell upon. You know the old saying, “You are what you eat.” If you focus on all the things people are doing that are terrible, and all the ways you’re disappointing yourself, it’s so defeating. You really don’t want to feed the idea that, “people suck,” because they don’t and you don’t, either. It’s simply not an easy gig, this work of being human, especially when you’re trying to be kind, conscious and compassionate. That’s why it’s important to be vigilant about what you feed yourself. If you look around and find you have contempt for people easily, it’s probably time for a change in diet: Compassion: tastes great, less filling. When you have some for yourself, you’ll find you have some for other people, too. We all make mistakes, every single one of us. We all have choices we’d love to make over again. It’s easy to be the person who points a finger and has that snarky, biting thing to say, but I don’t think it feels good at the end of the day, and it definitely doesn’t up the happiness quotient. Choose love, feed that.

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

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

Feed Love

I think it’s important to understand “hostile people” because you’re likely to run into them from time to time. Hostile people are deeply hurt; they didn’t just wake up one morning and think, “Life sucks and people suck, and you can’t trust anyone.” They didn’t decide they’d focus on every awful thing everyone else is doing or has done. They’re in a world of pain and they’re lashing out. That doesn’t make it easy to deal with if you’re on the receiving end of rage or distrust or judgment you don’t feel you deserve, but at least it makes it less personal, and somewhat understandable.

If a person is clinging to anger, blame or righteousness, there’s no point in engaging, you’ll just get burned. If someone has his fists clenched and dukes up, his mind is closed and his heart is, too. You can approach with your arms open and offer love, but you’ll probably just get punched in the gut, because it takes a long time to build walls like that. It takes a lot of disappointment, heartbreak and despair to convince a person that he’s got to enter the world with armor. If you get caught in the crossfire of someone else’s pain, the saying, “consider the source” is extremely helpful.

When there’s no room for communication, there’s really no hope. You cannot make a person loosen her grip. Some people hold onto their rage like a shield, because the thought of being vulnerable, of listening to another point of view, is terrifying. It means they have to put the weapons down for a minute, and perhaps they’ve been taught that’s when people go for their jugular, or they’re clinging to their story because that’s all they’ve got, and if they let it go they won’t know themselves anymore, they won’t know where to turn. You really never know what someone’s been through. An inability to forgive other people’s mistakes reflects an inability to forgive our own. Bitterness is like a virus. If it’s fed long enough, it overtakes the whole system. When we’re bitter and enraged and pointing fingers at other people as if they’re to blame, we’ve given up our own power. No one can make you feel anything unless you let them. There’s also the issue of spending lots of time and energy concerning yourself with another person’s path. Ramana Maharshi on this, “Let each one mind his business. All will be well.” We all have plenty of work to do keeping our own side of the street clean.

Harsh judgment, an attempt to create a lot of distance between ourselves and the “terrible mistakes” of other people usually indicates we’re recognizing something within us that we find unacceptable or even detestable, some weakness or predisposition, some part of us that recognizes the urge, and wants to shove it as far away as possible. Otherwise why spend so much time thinking and talking about how awful it is? Everyone makes mistakes, some bigger than others; no one shows up as his highest self in every moment. We can all look back on certain choices and wish we had them to do over again. Compassion is the thing, for yourself, and for others. Sometimes people have a lapse in judgment because there are incredibly painful circumstances in their lives that we know nothing about. Does that excuse behavior that may be irresponsible or unintentionally hurtful? Definitely not, but no one is here to be the morality police. You do your own work, and leave people to do theirs. You may decide for your own well-being you just can’t have certain people in your life, and that is your right. Nonetheless, mistakes are how we grow. If you inadvertently hurt someone, you do whatever you can to make it right. You own it and apologize, and hope for forgiveness. If it doesn’t come, at a certain point you have to forgive yourself.

Whatever you feed, grows. If you spend a lot of your energy focusing on everything that’s wrong with people and wrong with the world, you’re feeding yourself a diet of anger and despair. That stuff will harden you, and we aren’t here to be hard. Righteousness does not make a fabulous bedfellow, and whatever you’ve got on the inside is what you’ll spread wherever you go. What you feed yourself inevitably becomes your contribution. For many years now, my mantra has been, “Keep your eyes on your own paper, and pay attention to what you’re doing.” Not that I’m wearing blinders, I just try not to allow myself to get caught up in other people’s dramas. It’s perfectly natural to me that people are going to screw up from time to time, and sometimes badly. Everyone has to do her own work. I’ve found that the more I feed love, the happier I am, and the more I’m able to spread it. Plus, it tastes a lot better than bitterness.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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