Yogis Anonymous

Don’t Force It

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

It’s Not a Failure if You Grow from It

failure I 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

Sometimes “Rejection is Protection”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love, and a giant hug,

Ally Hamilton

The Cycle of Abuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Remembering

For me, like so many others, this is always going to be a day of remembering. I was born and raised in NYC, and there that morning, thirteen years ago. And I can remember every detail, including every minute of the four and a half hours we didn’t know if my stepdad was okay (he was), because he worked in the World Trade Center, and all the phone lines in the city went dead. But I don’t want to talk about the specifics. I’ve done that before. I want to talk about what it’s like to be shocked by violence, because so many people in the world right now are living that experience every day.

You might not have had an idyllic childhood. Maybe you lost your innocence too soon. Maybe burdens were placed upon you at an early age, or you had to take the role of parenting your parents, or you saw and heard things no child should have to see or hear. That’s one way of being stripped of your innocence. Once you know something, you can’t not know it. And it’s the same when we’re shocked as a people, as a culture. I believe we all thought we were invincible in that way, that we were the super-cop of the world, that we were impervious to violation. But because of the way we’ve set things up, no one is immune. And no one is innocent. When we turn our backs, we aren’t innocent. We have a cultural idea that only the strongest survive, and that we have to compete if we want to succeed. We have lots of ideas that have led us to where we find ourselves today, with too many innocent children dying, too many parents grieving in the streets, too many people suffering.

How it is within us, is how it is around us. If you’re filled with love, you’re going to spread love. If you’re filled with pain or rage, so too, you’re going to spread those things. Anything we see around us is a reflection of something that exists within us, either personally, or culturally. This is why I believe it’s essential that each of us does the healing and the work to make the worlds within us loving and peaceful places to be. Of course that makes each of our individual lives easier and happier and more fulfilling, but it’s also a gift we give to each other. We love to blame “society’ for its ills, but society is made up of human beings.

There are some people who will never do this work. They’re too far gone. Rage has infected their hearts and eaten their brains and made them capable of inhumane thinking and actions. So be it. But that’s a small percentage of the human population. And I have no doubt that if the large majority of us got to work doing a better job of finding peace and steadiness within, we’d begin to do a great job of spreading that around. It’s not the tiny percentage of violent extremists who pose the biggest threat to our well-being. It’s the huge percentage of people who numb out so they don’t have to feel the pain of being human. Because it is painful. It’s also incredibly beautiful. It’s wildly interesting and unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen from day to day, and you can let that reality terrify you or inspire you to live fully. We’re afraid of pain. We’re averse to discomfort, let alone suffering. But we’re all going to suffer to some degree or another, and we’re all vulnerable. It’s not a level playing field as far as what happens. Some people are born with amazing advantages. Some people endure knifing, piercing losses that make you wonder how they’re going to move forward. But as far as vulnerability goes, we all get the same parameters. We’re all going to die at some point. We all have an incredible capacity to love. Everyone we love will die eventually. We don’t know how long we have, we don’t know how long they have, we don’t know what happens after this. Welcome to the human race, these are the rules of this game. How we live up to them is what defines us.

When you numb out, you turn your back on your own precious heart, and the hearts of all the people who hold you near and dear, but you also turn your back on your place in the whole. You turn your back on all your brothers and sisters. Because as far as I’m concerned, we are one huge family living on one planet. We have some members who are bat-sh&t crazy and full of venom, and there’s no denying that. But most of our family members are decent people with beautiful hearts struggling to manage their own vulnerability and fear. And we could help each other so much by simply acknowledging that.

We don’t need more people who feel alienated and alone, we need more connection, empathy, compassion and understanding. We need that individually, and we need that as a people. Everything you do, matters. You’re an energetic being, and you spread and take in energy wherever you go. The more accountable each of us is for the energy we’re spreading, the more we mindfully try to up the happiness quotient of the world around us with our small actions every day, the more we contribute to a better and more loving world. So don’t underestimate your own power. You’re one of seven billion people, and you’re completely unique. You have a spark to offer that only you can. But if enough sparks come together, we have a raging, burning fire of love we can let loose together. And I really believe the time is now. We don’t have time to keep feeding the old story of us versus them. We need to be a we. Sending you love, and sending extra love out there to anyone who’s lost a family member to an act of violence.

You Can’t Negotiate with a Raging Bull

crazykeys People can only drive us crazy if we let them. A person can spin his or her web, but we don’t have to fly into the center of it to be stunned, stung, paralyzed and eaten. Remember that your time and your energy are the most precious gifts you have to offer anyone, and that includes those closest to you, and also total strangers. Your energy and your time are also both finite, so it’s really important to be mindful about where you’re placing those gifts.

It’s hard not to get caught up when someone we love is suffering, or thrashing around, or in so much pain they don’t know what else to do but lash out. It’s hard not to take that to heart, or to defend yourself, or to try to make things better for them. But you’re not going to walk into a ring and calm a raging bull with your well-thought out monologue, you’re just going to get kicked in the face, at best, and I use that analogy intentionally. People in pain–whether we’re talking about people with personality disorders or clinical depression, people suffering with addiction, or people who are going through mind-boggling loss–are dealing with deep wounds. They didn’t wake up this way one morning. Whether it’s a chronic issue, or an acute and immediate situation, when you’re dealing with heightened emotions including rage, jealousy, or debilitating fear, you’re not going to help when a person is in the eye of the storm. If someone is irrational, trying to reason with them makes you as irrational as they are. You can’t negotiate when someone is in the midst of a fight or flight reaction. We’re all beyond reason sometimes. We all have days when we feel everyone is against us, whether that’s based in any kind of reality or not.

You can offer your love, your patience, your kindness and your compassion if someone you care for is suffering. You can try to get them the support they need. You can make them a meal, or show up and just be there to hold their hand, or take them to the window to let in a little light. But if someone is attacking you verbally or otherwise, we’re in a different territory. You are not here to be abused, mistreated, or disrespected. You are not here to defend yourself against someone’s need to make you the villain. You don’t have to give that stuff your energy, and I’d suggest that you don’t. It’s better spent in other places.

We can lose hours and days and weeks getting caught up in drama or someone else’s manipulation. That’s time we’ll never have back. Of course things happen in life; people do and say and want things that can be crushing sometimes, but the real story to examine is always the story of our participation. If someone needs you to be the bad guy, why do you keep trying to prove you’re actually wonderful? Are you wonderful? Brilliant, get back to it. If someone has a mental illness and they are incapable of controlling themselves, keeping their word, or treating you with respect, why do you keep accepting their invitation to rumble? You already know what’s going to happen. Don’t you have a better way to spend your afternoon? My point is, life is too short.

When a person is in the kind of pain that causes them to create pain around them, your job is to create boundaries if it’s someone you want to have in your life. You figure out how to live your life and honor your own well-being, and deal with the other party in a way that creates the least disharmony for you. That means you don’t get in the ring when they put their dukes up. You don’t allow yourself to get sucked in. Do you really think this is the time you’ll finally be heard or seen or understood? People who need to be angry cannot hear you. It doesn’t matter what you do or say, they have a construct they’ve built to support a story about their life that they can live with; it doesn’t have to be based in reality. Not everyone is searching for their own truth or their own peace; some people are clinging to their rage, because that feels easier or more comfortable, or because they really, truly aren’t ready to do anything else yet. You’re not going to solve that. But you can squander your time and energy trying. You can make yourself sick that way. I just don’t recommend it.

You really don’t have to allow other people to steal your peace, whether we’re talking about those closest to you, or people you don’t even know, like the guy who cuts you off on the freeway, or the woman talking loudly on her cellphone at the bank. You don’t have to let this stuff get under your skin and agitate you. You don’t have to let someone’s thoughtless comment or action rob you of a beautiful afternoon. Of course we give our time to people who need us. I’m just saying, don’t get caught up in the drama. If you need help, try this.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Aisle 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Lean Into It

maclaren Sometimes it’s really hard to just “be where we are” because where we are is deeply uncomfortable. Maybe we’re grappling with envy, despair, rage, grief, heartbreak, rejection or feelings of being powerless. Maybe we’re frustrated because we’re making self-destructive choices, and even though we’re conscious of it, we can’t stop ourselves. Maybe we’ve screwed up and need to apologize, but instead we’re digging our heels in. This business of being human isn’t easy, and it isn’t always pretty. But when we try to skip over where we are and rush to something that feels better by running, denying, numbing, or trying to avoid, we simply prolong our pain, and miss a chance to know ourselves more deeply. We’re also less likely to be accountable for the energy we’re spreading.

Learning to witness your experience without judging it, is one of the huge gifts of a consistent yoga and/or seated meditation practice . Maybe you’re on your mat and you feel tight and tired. Maybe you’re confronted with a pose that’s challenging for you, and you decide to take a water break, instead. Maybe you go to sit, and your mind is racing and spinning, so you make a phone call or get on your computer. What we resist, persists. When we avoid, we also miss not just a chance to know ourselves, but also to know someone else. We all long to be loved for who we are and how we are, with all our beauty and all our flaws. A lot of people struggle to do that for themselves, let alone other people. Learning to lean into those uncomfortable feelings and experiences without grasping or recoiling or contracting, takes the power away from the feeling, and gives it back to us. Feelings arise and they peak and they subside. Feelings are not facts, and no feeling is forever, as the saying goes. How we feel now is not how we will always feel, and that includes the great feelings, too. That euphoria and all-consuming heat of new love would be exhausting if it never leveled out into something sustainable day-to-day. Not that you shouldn’t enjoy every second if that’s where you are, and not that you don’t want to stoke the flame every day to keep the fire burning, but that’s a choice; that’s different than being consumed.

The more we open to reality as it is, the less we suffer, and the less we create suffering. The more we accept other people as they are, and where they are, the less we create suffering for ourselves, and for them. No one wants to be a disappointment to themselves, or anyone else, but when we refuse to embrace a person as they are, we set them up to fail. I’m not saying that we don’t all have work to do, and places where we can heal more or understand more, or open more. I’m just saying when a person makes it clear to us where they are and how they feel, either through communication or through their actions, it’s not loving to try to superimpose what we want on top of that, even if we’re motivated by our feelings of love. Instead, our job in that moment is to lean into the rawness of accepting that how we feel is not how they feel. What we want is not what they want. Dancing like a monkey to try to be perfect for someone else, selling yourself, running, chasing, cajoling or manipulating, convincing yourself or them that you can settle for less than what you really want in your heart—all of these are ways we might attempt to deny or avoid the painful reality in front of us.

You will never find peace when you ignore the truth, that much I can guarantee. Of course we want what we want. Are we going to get everything we want? Is every longing going to be met? No. Is life going to unfold exactly like the picture in your head? Probably not. So how do we maintain our center, our feelings of “okayness” under these conditions? We tell ourselves this is how things are right now, for us, or for the people in our lives. We remember that everything is always in a state of flux, including ourselves, those closest to us, and perfect strangers. We remember that we never know what life has in store for us, and that perhaps it will be better than anything we could have imagined. We use our suffering to grow and open more, to become more sensitive, more empathetic, more tolerant, more patient, more forgiving, because we understand we are not alone in this experience. We all cry ourselves to sleep sometimes, or think we’ve made a total mess of everything, or have to face the fact that we haven’t been treating ourselves or others well. Shame, blame and rage will keep you stuck; they’re not a good foundation for growth. Feel your feelings so you can release the heat of them, and move onto whatever is coming next with an open heart, an open mind, and open hands.

Give yourself the gift of getting quiet, so you can hear the voice of your intuition. If it isn’t yoga or meditation for you, then find something—windsurfing, hiking, salsa dancing, something that gets you out of your head, and into your body, and into the flow and the realm of sensation and intuition. I used to long to be happy, but now I’m hungry for the truth, because somewhere along the way I realized that’s the key to peace. You won’t find it in events, milestones, or other people. You’ll find it within yourself when you get hungry for what’s true, and by that I mean, what’s true for you, and what’s true for other people. It makes life so much simpler.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Love vs. Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

May All Beings Be Happy

When we lived in tribes and villages, we were constantly connected. The whole was only as strong as each member. If one of us had food, we all had food. If one of us had a sick child, we all had a sick child. We lived off the earth, we read the stars, we respected the planet, and all the living creatures on it, but we don’t live that way anymore. We buy food in boxes. We live in boxes, and we drive in boxes with wheels, and we go sit in a box and stare at a box all day, and then we go home at night and stare at another one. We like our information in small chunks. We want instant gratification. We’re incredibly quick to create an “us” and a “them.” We’ve really separated ourselves from each other, and I believe this is why so many people are so unhappy. Do you know how many dating sites there are out there? I don’t, but I know there are a lot because somewhere, deep down we understand that happiness is tied to connection and love. It’s just that we go about finding it in such absurd ways. Maybe you’ll find it romantically, but in the meantime, it’s available every time you interact with anyone.

We think about our surroundings as they pertain to us. We get annoyed when it rains as if it’s a personal inconvenience, when we ought to be celebrating. We treat our animals horribly, except for the ones we think are cute. We cut down trees to erect more buildings. We think of the tree in our yard as ours, but it isn’t, not unless we planted it, and even then it isn’t ours. It belongs to the earth and the sun, and it provides oxygen for all, but we’ve lost the thread of connection. Your kid is sick? How awful. Let me distract myself so I don’t have to think about how horrendous that must be, or how it could happen to my kid, too. Some journalists were beheaded? That’s heartbreaking, but let me go to rage and indignation right away because I don’t know how to process the pain of that. I don’t want to sit with that and breathe that in, and think about those two mothers, those two families who are suffering and grieving and trying not to think about their children’s last moments. It’s so hard to lean into that, isn’t it? It’s messy and awful and it feels absolutely devastating, but that’s what we need to do. We need to think about all the people everywhere who are suffering as a result of violence, because regardless of race or gender or religion or culture, they are part of our tribe.

And obviously, there are grieving mothers and fathers all over the world right now. Grieving sons and daughters, sisters and brothers. Blame and rage aren’t going to help us. You know the saying, “If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting”? We need to try something else, and my suggestion would be that we attempt to understand and tolerate each other more, and let me be clear. There are some things that are incomprehensible. There are some people with whom conversation is impossible, because they’ve built walls against anything rational. They’ve created constructs to justify reprehensible actions. I’m just suggesting that wherever possible, we open the door toward more communication. If the majority of us are working together to solve our problems, it’ll be a lot easier to handle small groups of people who’ve lost their minds and closed their hearts, but when division is everywhere, our energy is scattered, and then we’re really in trouble.

The more we create an “us” and a “them”, the more we set the stage for division, rage, bitterness and misunderstanding. I’m sure we can all look to certain parts of the world and recognize how this thinking plays out. People suffer and people die. I posted about how sick I felt after I heard about Steven Sotloff the other day, and someone asked me why I felt sick. If it’s happening to one of our sons, it’s happening to all of our sons. This isn’t a political issue, it’s a human issue, and we need to care; to sit up and take notice and offer our empathy, because we were built for that. If you don’t know what I mean, check out “mirror neurons”. It’s natural for us to care, to extend ourselves, to reach out, but we’ve cut ourselves off.

The village doesn’t gather for dinner every night. We’ve built in so few opportunities for community. You have to seek it out. You won’t find it on line at Starbucks, because everyone’s looking at their phones. One of the reasons communities spring up over social media is that we’re all desperate to know we aren’t in this thing alone. It’s not like it’s an easy gig, but it’s so comforting when we come together and understand we’re so much more alike than we are different. Hatred is taught. Love is natural to us. The more we remind ourselves of that, the faster we change the world around us.

It occurred to me right away that the best way we can practice tolerance is by starting with those people who challenge us the very most. Those people in our lives who are suffering from personality disorders, or a lack of empathy, or the effects of their own trauma or abusive history, because those people are so hard to understand, aren’t they? Don’t we think to ourselves, “How could someone do that? I could never do that.” But maybe you could if you’d lived the life they have. We just can’t know what another person is carrying, what fears or bitterness or rage they’re harboring, what abuse or neglect they’ve endured. It takes a lot to make a person cold and hard and capable of creating knifing heartache. That doesn’t just happen overnight. I believe if we can try to find compassion for those people in our lives who trigger us to our very marrow, then we have a shot at extending compassion to strangers whose actions seem completely foreign to us. I’m not saying you need to reach out to someone who’s incapable of doing anything but lie to your face and stab you in the back. Why set yourself up for more of that?

I’m just saying, try to imagine what life must be like for people who behave with no thought of how their actions are affecting those around them. Or worse, how life must be for a person who’s intentionally and unapologetically hurting other people. That cannot be a peaceful way to move through life, filled with hatred and a thirst for vengeance. Obviously, if someone is hurting us, we do everything in our power to remove ourselves from their reach. But from a safe distance, perhaps we can see that meeting hatred with hatred won’t work. We can forcefully and fully meet hatred with love. We can take the power of that love and defend ourselves against bitterness and rage, because that stuff will erode any sense of hope we have. We can make ourselves safe, but we won’t get there by creating more division. What we need is more connection. We spread around us what we have within us. Our only power lies in our commitment to make the worlds within ourselves more loving and peaceful and compassionate, because that’s the stuff we need to be spreading. In the meantime, if it feels right, maybe we can all think together, “May all beings be free from suffering.”

Sending you so much love,

Ally Hamilton

A Bridge Takes Two

lonelywalls If you have a long history with someone, and you have healing to do around your relationship, or events of the past, understand you can never do one hundred percent of the work. I’m talking about important long-term relationships in your life, with family members, or spouses, or your best friend for years and years. Life is not easy. It’s amazing and interesting. It’s filled with incredible beauty, the potential for love so intense you feel your heart might burst, and pain that can bring you to your knees. It’s always changing, so it’s certainly an adventure, but there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty, and not everyone is able to handle that easily. Sometimes people cling to their pain or their anger because that feels safer than letting go, and the reality is, the people in the most pain are also the people who create the most pain. It’s not usually intentional. What we have within us is what we spread around us.

If you’ve been disappointed, neglected, abused or abandoned, those are all experiences which might have hardened you, or broken your trust in people. I understand that, but I think it’s important to believe in the goodness of people, and to understand when you’ve been betrayed or abandoned by someone, it’s not a reflection of you, or your worthiness or ability to receive love, it’s a reflection of where the other party is on his or her own path. That doesn’t mean it’s okay if someone abuses you or mistreats you, it just makes it easier not to take those things personally. I think the key is to be discerning, and to understand that it takes a long time to know a person. We all want love and connection, but your heart is precious and it’s important not to be reckless with it. There’s a big difference between living in fear, which is not really living, and taking your time.

The thing is, human beings are complicated. We all have our histories, our pain, our various upbringings, ways we were nurtured, loved, supported, or not so much, so when you bring any two people together, it’s exponentially more complex. And when you increase that number to three or four or five (as in, a family), you can bet the chances for different dynamics to arise just multiplies. I get emails from so many people in pain over their strained or nonexistent relationships with their mothers or fathers, sons or daughters, sisters or brothers, friends from childhood. Things happen in life. Sometimes a person is moving through pain and they lash out, or there’s a family system in place and roles are being played and maybe it’s not a healthy situation, and then one day, one of the players doesn’t like his or her role anymore, and everyone panics as the system collapses. Maybe the whole family is held hostage by one member’s addiction, depression, or mental illness. There’s no shortage of different scenarios. People fight over money (it isn’t usually really the money they’re fighting about), or something someone said at a wedding when they were drunk and full of salmon.

If you have healing to do with someone, understand you need some kind of bridge. It takes two to tango, and it takes two to mend a bridge that’s collapsed. I don’t think a person has to meet you halfway; it’s ideal, but not everyone will be up to that. A person has to step onto the bridge. If you feel motivated to walk the rest of the way, that’s enough, but if a person won’t even take that first step, you’ll be dealing with a chasm and it will be up to you how you want to manage that. Sometimes we can’t have a person in our lives, and sometimes we have to accept that a relationship will never be quite what we want it to be. Not everyone is capable of fearless and honest communication and acceptance. Not everyone can open his or her mind to a different point of view. You can’t force someone to be somewhere they aren’t.

Sometimes we have to choose between two painful options–not having someone in our lives, or having them in our lives in a way that falls incredibly short of what we know is possible. That’s a choice only you can make. You can keep your hands open. You can offer the chance for healing, but you can’t make someone take you up on it, and I know that can hurt. I think closing yourself down and shutting yourself off hurts more, though.

Sending you love, and wishing you peace,

Ally Hamilton

What You Allow

gaskins You can’t control what other people will do or say, but you can choose the way you’ll respond. This comes up in so many areas. Maybe you have a family member who has a history of being verbally and emotionally abusive, and now you’ve gotten to the point where you simply don’t want to subject yourself to that treatment any longer. Lots of things can get us to that place; we’re always evolving. Maybe you’ve reached a point in your healing process where you’re ready to set boundaries. Maybe you have children now, and you’re able to speak up on their behalf, even though you’ve never been able to stand up for yourself. Whatever it is, you won’t change the offending party, but you can definitely change the way you interact with him or her.

Speaking calmly but with confidence about your experience is a gift you give yourself, and everyone in your life. Being able to say, “When you do this, it makes me feel X, and X is not okay for me anymore. So from now on, when I come to town for a visit, I’ll stay at a hotel. We’ll see how things go. If you’re unable to not do or say X, then at least I can remove myself from the situation.” You’re taking responsibility for your feelings. You’re not blaming them or making them wrong, you’re just stating how things are for you, and how you’ll be honoring what’s true for you. If the other party tells you not to come if that’s how it’s going to be, so be it. You aren’t here to be a punching bag for anyone. If the requirement is for you to subject yourself to behavior or comments that are hurtful, that’s too great a cost. If a person can’t be kind and loving, if that’s too much to ask, they don’t belong in your life. If you want them in your life anyway, then you have to set boundaries that work for you, and if even those can’t be respected, then you’re left with no choice but to walk away.

When we start to make changes in the way we relate to the people around us, you can bet there’s going to be push-back. This is especially true if we’re shifting a role we’ve always played. I used to be a lot less assertive. Sometimes people would say hurtful or inappropriate things to me, and I’d collapse in on myself and internalize the experience. I’d have the feeling of being punched in the stomach, way down where it really hurts, but no words would come out of my mouth. When that started shifting for me, I was met with resistance and threats and rage. How dare I stand up for myself? But that’s your job, that’s your work. You carve out a place for yourself and a way of being that brings you peace and joy, and you don’t sacrifice that for anyone. Most people come around. They might scream and yell and wave their arms, but eventually, most people will quiet down and shift the way they deal with you. So you’re not changing them or teaching them or making them wrong, you’re just requiring a certain level of respect and consideration. You’re changing the rules of engagement.

This is an essential component of healing. You have to be able to act on your own behalf. You have to value your own tender heart, and your peace of mind, and your ability to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of the day when you’re brushing your teeth. When we allow ourselves to be mistreated, we also betray ourselves, and it’s hard to face that. If you grew up feeling powerless, it’s likely that you regress to that stance when you feel confronted, and when you start trying to assert yourself, it will probably come out with more force than you intend and that’s okay. You can tell the people in your life that you’re trying to change some profound things about the way you’re moving through the world, because the way you’ve been doing it so far is not working for you. You can explain that you’re working on standing up for yourself, and speaking up when things don’t feel good or right, but that this is a new experience, and you’re still birthing into this new way of being, and it isn’t all going to be pretty. Maybe they’ll take that in, and maybe they won’t. You’re not responsible for managing anyone else’s reactions or path, you’re just responsible for your own clear communication. Practice with people you trust. Like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it gets.

Moving through life allowing yourself to be disrespected is not going to work; it’s too much to bear. If you need support with this, reach out. I do coaching sessions, but I can also recommend wonderful therapists. Hitting a bag or taking a kick-boxing class might not be a bad idea, either.

Sending you love and wishing you strength and peace,

Ally Hamilton

The Voice Inside Your Head

negativecommittee Yesterday afternoon my son, who’s seven, was practicing the guitar. He’s been taking lessons for less than a year, but he’s doing really well. I love to listen to him play, it brings tears to my eyes. This week, his teacher told him to stop whenever he makes a mistake, and “loop back.” This is a new way of working; in the past, if he made a mistake he’d keep going. Anyway, he was having an “off day.” He couldn’t make his fingers move as quickly as he wanted to, and he couldn’t make the notes sound the way he wanted them to sound. After about twenty minutes, he came out of his room frustrated and in tears, and told me he was “never going to get it.”

So I went in and sat down with him, and asked him to breathe a little before he started again. I also talked to him about the voice inside his head. I asked him if he was aware of that voice, and he looked at me like I’d discovered some huge secret of his. He asked how I knew he had a voice inside his head, and I told him we all do. I told him about a ballet teacher I had when I was thirteen. No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, it was never good enough. He’d berate me in front of the whole room of dancers with scathing remarks. I felt the burn of shame so many times as I spun and spun on my toes in that room with him. In the years I studied with him, he only “broke” me once. There was an afternoon when a tear slid down my cheek, and even though I wiped it as I danced, he saw. It was the only time he asked me if I was okay. Years later, after I’d quit, I ran into him on Broadway. He asked me where I was dancing, and I told him I wasn’t. He was shocked. He said he’d always been especially hard on me because I had what it took. I told him for me, personally, hearing that then would have made all the difference in the world. I didn’t need “tough love” and I didn’t need shaming. Someone who believed in me would have worked wonders.

The thing is, we often internalize those voices we hear growing up. If we’re told we’re loved and cherished, if we’re made to feel that we have an impact on the people and the world around us, we’re likely to have a pretty kind and forgiving inner voice. If our effort is acknowledged, we learn to appreciate our process, instead of getting hung up on the results, but if we’re met with constant criticism, if we get the message that we never measure up, we’re very likely to develop a loud and relentless inner critic. My son’s guitar teacher is an incredible guy. Kind, loving, patient, encouraging, and tough in all the right ways. He’s bringing out the best in my son. Anyway, I explained to my boy that an inner voice that roots you on is a huge help as you move through life. Shame is a poor teaching tool, and it’s a horrible constant companion. Telling yourself you’re having a tough moment is a lot kinder than saying you’ll never get it, and it’s a lot more accurate.

I get lots of emails from people who are in pain, and so many of them are incredibly hard on themselves. We all make mistakes. We all have pain, and we all struggle. None of us acts from our highest self in every moment, or in every situation. Sometimes we have healing to do in a certain area, and maybe we’ve been avoiding that work, and then it springs up and bites us in the ass, this raw place within us that’s crying for our kind attention. Sometimes we make a mess of things out of sheer confusion and desperation. Beating yourself up isn’t going to serve anyone, and it isn’t going to aid you in your growth process. It really isn’t. Telling yourself you’re a terrible person who screwed up and made your own bed which you now deserve to lie in isn’t going to help you get to the source of what caused you to move in the direction you did in the first place. It’s okay. You’re human. Just start where you are and examine what happened with a compassionate eye. You’re not a terrible person who deserves to suffer. You didn’t set out to hurt anyone. If you were that kind of person, you wouldn’t torture yourself about it. You see what I mean? If you feel badly, it’s because you have a kind heart. Maybe you made some really poor choices. So be it. Get to work figuring out why you weren’t respecting yourself. Or why you didn’t speak up and say that you were feeling unseen or unheard or unloved.

Life is short and amazing, or long and painful. I’m pretty sure those are the options. And I think the key difference is how you’re talking to yourself. If the world within you is loving, it makes it so much easier to move through the world around you. I can say for myself, I worked this out on my yoga mat. I took that loud, shaming voice and I starved it. I stopped believing in it. I stopped giving it power or credibility, and I fed a loving, kind, patient, compassionate voice. I still worked my ass off, but I did it with a smile on my face, because it feels good to be in a healthy conversation with yourself.

Wishing that for you so much, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

How to Love People in Pain & Still Love Yourself

Earlier this week I wrote about being held hostage by someone else’s depression, addiction, personality disorder, or general instability, and I heard from a flood of people who wonder what to do when these challenging people are cherished loved ones. I heard from many mothers, struggling with their children, grown, or almost-grown, or very little, and from people who are having difficulty with one parent or the other, a sibling, their partner, their best friend.

I’m going to say the most excruciating thing is watching your child suffer. That’s a pain and powerlessness that’s simply brutal, and if that’s what you’re grappling with, walking away is not an option. If we’re talking about depression in a small child, you have to find help; a great therapist would be step one, there are brilliant people who specialize in working with children. If finances are an issue, and you’re here in the states, go to http://www.nami.org/ and get some support for yourself and your little one. This is a great resource for anyone suffering from mental illness, or loving someone with mental illness, at any age.

Parents who watch their grown children struggling often blame themselves. I’ve heard a lot of that over the last few days; the heartache and feelings of failure and shame, so I think the first thing I’ll say, is please try to stop beating yourself up. If you were there, if you were present, if you loved your child with everything you had and did the very best you could, you have to release yourself from feeling that you’re the root of your child’s suffering, whether your child is 19 or 49. If you didn’t do a great job with your parenting responsibilities because you were a child yourself when you had your babies, or because you were suffering from your own mental illness, personality disorder, addiction or depression, that’s a heartbreak for you and your kids, but blaming yourself just perpetuates and feeds the pain. Let go of blame.

We’re all going to suffer. This is not an easy gig. The parameters make us all vulnerable, and some people have a harder time with that reality than others. There are people who always see the glass as half empty. People who look on the dark side of things, expect the worst from people, and feel frequently disappointed in themselves. If you’re seeing that tendency in your little one, I’d get in there and point out a different perspective whenever you can. Keep re-framing things for your child, but also be sure to normalize their feelings. There’s such a desire to make everything okay for our little people, and loving, well-meaning parents say things like, “Don’t be sad”, or, “Don’t be angry”, or, “Don’t be scared,”, but the truth is, these are normal human emotions we’ll all experience. When we, as children, get the sense that certain feelings are not okay, like fear, or sadness or anger, we start to push things down. We start to edit ourselves, and that’s the beginning of loss and confusion. We become lost to ourselves. Also, show them what it looks like to be a forgiving and compassionate person. When you make a mistake, acknowledge it, but don’t berate yourself. Our kids do what we do, not what we say.

If you see your little one feeling down, you might just speak out about it, as in, “Hey buddy. You seem a little blue today. Everything okay?” If you don’t get far with that, you can get more specific. “What was the best part of your day today?” and, “What was the hardest part of your day?” Just keeping the lines of communication open is huge. Making your child understand that s/he is safe to talk to you about anything, any feeling or any situation, or any confusion that might arise creates a foundation of trust. Naming what you’re seeing in a loving way is also good. “It seems like you’re focusing on everything that isn’t going well. Can you think of three good things that happened today? Or one thing you’re really thankful for?” Basically, you are your child’s nervous system when they’re little. They can’t always self-regulate, so you’re helping them learn how to process and integrate all the things life is putting in their path, whether that’s the changing structure of your family, a friend who’s moving away, a new school, bullying or exclusionary behavior from someone else, or their own acting out. Any intense emotion that’s flooding their little nervous system might require some help from you. The steadier you are, the easier it will be for them to lean on you, and the more you’re accepting of all their feelings, the more comfortable they’ll be to share everything with you.

If you’re dealing with your older child, and this could mean your teenager, but it could also include your 50 year old child, you’re in a different area. With depression, I’m going to recommend what I did above; a great therapist is the place to start. If you’re dealing with addiction, then chances are the whole family is being held hostage, and you’re going to need help for everyone. There’s always a family system in place, roles each person is playing, a dynamic between all parties which needs to be examined and, in most instances, changed. If it’s serious, rehab may be your best hope, with additional support for every member of the family. Al-anon is a great resource here, both for people suffering with addiction, and the family members around them, but search for yourself, because there isn’t just one way, or one solution. There are obviously so many different situations with all their complexities, but understand when you’re living with and loving someone who’s addicted to drugs or alcohol, you’re also in the mix. You can’t save them, but you can do everything in your power to get them some help, and I think radical honesty is a good bet in that case, too. If you have things you want to own, own them. If there’s anything you wish you’d done differently, tell them, but also let them know they’re on their own path now, and they have the power to make it great, or to stay stuck and that you’re going to help them, but you’re not going to enable behavior that keeps them powerless.

If you’re dealing with mental illness or a personality disorder, it’s rough. Certain behaviors can’t be helped, they can only be regulated. It’s not easy to love in the first place. It requires that we make ourselves vulnerable, and it’s really hard to do that, and even reckless, when we don’t feel safe. So loving someone you cannot rely upon to be steady is no easy feat. It’s hard to love and protect yourself simultaneously. I think the best thing you can do in that case is have enormous compassion for yourself and set up a solid support system, so you don’t feel isolated in your experience. Find those people you can trust, and lean on them when you need to; sometimes our feelings of being hijacked and imprisoned make it hard to reach out. Think about what you need to feel respected and understood. This is where boundaries come into play. You can love someone who’s having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. You can love someone who careens from high highs to low lows. You can love someone who says one thing to you one day, and something completely different the next. But it’s not easy. As always, your first responsibility is to your own heart. If you betray that, you won’t be able to help anyone.

Sending you love and hugs,

Ally Hamilton

Free Yourself

Sometimes you realize you’re being held hostage by someone else’s instability, mental illness, or addiction. This can only happen if you care deeply in the first place; that is, if you’re invested in the relationship, or if this person is in your life and it’s not easy to extricate yourself from all communication or connection (your boss or colleague, for example). Often, we meet people and they may present one face to us, but inside it’s a whole different story. It takes time to get to know people, and even time won’t get the job done if a person wants to keep things from you. We only ever know the interior world of another person if they give us access to it.

If you’re a warm, trusting, open person, you probably project and assume that other people are also that way. That’s what we all tend to do, we make assumptions about other people based on how things are for us, and that’s a great way to have your eyes opened, but it probably won’t feel very good because we can never assume, and we can never project. We all have our various upbringings, experiences, ways we were supported or neglected, different tendencies and dreams, varied emotional lives, relationships, things that are driving us consciously or unconsciously, heartbreaks, levels of resiliency, disappointments, achievements and fears. How things are for me is not how they are for you, but we exist in this same world. We just cannot expect other people to see what we see, even the things that seem totally obvious to us.

People with addictive personalities are usually very good at hiding their addictions or tendencies, and I don’t say that without compassion and understanding. It’s awful to be a slave to a numbing agent, to feel like you have to have access to your “fix” at all times, whether we’re talking about drugs and alcohol, or sex, or the internet, or shopping, or eating disorders. So you might observe erratic behavior in someone you’re getting to know, but think it’s just an “off day” here and there. Mental illness can work the same way. Maybe you’re dealing with a personality disorder that renders a person unable to consider how their actions impact the people around them, but unless you’re a target, you might go a good long while before feeling like something isn’t right.

Sometimes, in order to be close to someone, you have to accept their version of reality. Maybe you’ve known people like this. I once had a girlfriend who had a serious drinking problem. When I’d try to talk to her about it, she’d say she was a social drinker, and I was over-worrying, but I poured her into a cab enough times to know this wasn’t something to sweep under the rug. I talked to her mother about it, but she wasn’t ready to face it, either, and when I refused to be quiet about it, my friend wrote me off. In certain situations, there’s nothing you can do but walk away and hope a person decides to get help before it’s too late.

There are many people attached to their stories about what’s happened in their past, and why things are the way they are, and why they are the way they are. I lived that way during my late teens and early twenties, and it was awful. Blame keeps you stuck pointing, when you really want to be digging. You’ll find most people living this way are angry or bitter or depressed, and probably all three. I once became friends with a guy who had story after story about how he’d been screwed professionally. First by this company, then by another, and I believed him, I believed he’d been unfairly overlooked, unappreciated, and mistreated. Then he went to work for close friends of mine, and I watched him blatantly sabotage every opportunity he had to grow. He was more attached to the sad story than he was to writing a new one. When I tried to point that out to him, he became enraged. Sometimes people cling to their stories because they aren’t ready to take ownership of their lives yet. They use their anger like a shield, and anything you try to say or do bounces off. It’s understandable. We all have our coping mechanisms, and you can’t make a person be somewhere they are not.

If you’re attracted to the “walking wounded”, you’re probably going to encounter people like this, and I’ll just remind you in case you need to be reminded, you cannot save anyone. You can love people and you can try to get them help and support, but you can’t make another person happy, or compassionate or kind or loving. You can’t make anyone fall in love with you. You’re not going to change the way someone moves through the world. This is all inside work; everyone has to do their own journey. You can decide who you want to bring close, and who you want to keep at a distance. Often, you won’t have to make these decisions, they’ll be made for you. If you back someone against the wall and ask them to be accountable for what they’ve done, and they aren’t ready to do that, they’ll head for the hills, anyway. Pay attention to your tendency to draw people close who aren’t able to do anything but hurt you. Don’t participate in someone else’s instability. You can’t fix it, but it also doesn’t help when you enable it. It doesn’t help them, and it doesn’t help you. Create boundaries where necessary, and defend them when you must. You can’t control what other people do or say or feel or want or need, but you can control the way you choose to respond. Just keep your own side of the street clean, the rest will take care of itself.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Grappling with Your Truth

plans Most of us know what’s true for us long before we act on it, especially when we’re talking about making huge life shifts. Sometimes we agonize for weeks, months, or even years, because so much hinges on maintaining the status quo. This can happen in our personal and professional lives. People stay in jobs that crush their souls for all kinds of reasons. Some are practical—they need to keep a roof over their heads and food in their refrigerators, or they need health insurance for themselves and their families. Sometimes the reasons have more to do with low self-esteem, or a lack of self-respect. People tell themselves every day that they are not good enough, that they don’t measure up, that they should be thankful for what they have, because who are they to think that things could be different? Who are they to pursue their dreams? There are all kinds of reasons we convince ourselves we’re stuck, and when you’re speaking about the necessities of life, of course those are real. But if you’re in a job that’s sucking the life out of you, I wouldn’t accept that as “the way things have to be.” I’d do everything in your power to seek out another opportunity somewhere, because 80 hours a week is a lot of time to spend feeling like you want to scream.

It happens in relationships, too. Sometimes two people come together, and despite all their best efforts, they grow in different directions. Maybe they came together when they both had healing to do, and attempted to cover their individual pain with a relationship. Maybe there are kids in the mix, and now it’s brutal; staying is painful, and leaving is painful. Sometimes those are your choices. It’s human to agonize when we’re faced with a decision that impacts the people we love, but ultimately, if you’re in a situation that’s crushing you, you’ll never be able to nurture yourself, or anyone else to the best of your ability. Maybe you can get creative. Maybe you can go for radical honesty with your partner, and come up with a way to stay, and not feel like you’re losing yourself, and maybe you can’t, but allowing your light to go out is never the way. Numbing yourself or editing yourself until there’s almost nothing left of you won’t serve anyone. Distracting yourself, running, denying, keeping everything on the surface level will not be sustainable for the long haul.

So what do you do? I think first you get quiet so you can really allow yourself to feel whatever it is you’re feeling, and face those realities head on. There’s no point hiding from yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to act on your feelings. It’s just that it’s such a relief to acknowledge them, to lean into them, to accept them, and accept yourself. Then, at least, you’re dealing with your own truth. Getting support from someone objective is also a great idea, and communicating honestly is a must. I don’t believe anyone would thank you for keeping them in the dark, or staying in something out of guilt, shame or pity. Maybe you can resurrect the thing, but the only chance you have of that, is if you start building with blocks of truth. You can’t build anything that lasts on top of lies, bitterness, resentment or rage. You want to be seen, right? You want someone to see you, to understand you, to cherish you for the person you are, but you give no one the opportunity to do that if you repress what’s real for you. Is it scary to start a conversation that may change the course of your life, and the lives of those you love? Absolutely, but it’s less scary than decades of betrayals, emotional or otherwise, and I’m talking about the betrayal of your own heart, as much as anything else here.

If you want to be at peace, you have to allow what is true for you to rise to the surface and spill out of your mouth, kindly, confidently, and with compassion.

Sending you love, and wishing you peace, in the coming year, and always,

Ally Hamilton

Don’t Chase Love

chaselove Whenever you find yourself trying to force or control an outcome, it’s time to perk up and take a look at what’s happening within you. We’re all going to be attached to certain ideas; this is the nature of being human. For example, we’ll all want our loved ones to be happy; perfectly understandable. But if we start to assume that we know what will make someone else happy, then we’re in trouble. The minute you try to manage someone else’s path, you’re losing a chance to keep your own side of the street clean.

A lot of the time, we’re taking things personally. Maybe there’s someone we really care for, and we’re chasing. Right there, it’s a problem. You don’t chase love, you open to it. If you have to take off after it, that’s a huge red flag. Instead of spending your time and energy wondering what you can do to be perfect for this other person so you can get their attention and make them fall in love with you, you could be examining why you’re feeling so badly about yourself you’d tie up your Nike’s and chase your worthiness. You’re worthy. You’re the only one of you we get. You think you aren’t worthy of love? If someone isn’t offering it to you fully and openly, what are you doing? Have you ever talked to a couple who’s in love, and has been for thirty, forty, fifty years? I have. I make a habit of it any chance I get. I love to see couples who make it, and not once, in all the conversations with all the people I’ve met over the years, has any couple told me a story about a beginning that involved one person feeling deeply insecure all the time, and the other not treating them well. That’s not a solid foundation, and it won’t lead anywhere good. Also, it isn’t loving to race after someone who doesn’t want to be caught. If you love someone, you have to want for them what they want for themselves. If someone is making it clear to you that they aren’t available the way you want them to be, it’s disrespectful to refuse to accept that. It’s not just disrespectful to them and their feelings, it’s disrespecting yourself to keep trying.

It can hurt like hell when people we love don’t want what we wish they would want. This happens when we relate to the world and the people around us as if it’s about us, as if we’re in the center of this thing, and everything is happening around us or to us. When you can remove yourself from the center of the story and look at it from the sidelines, you’ll see it usually has very little to do with you. People want what they want. They are where they are. They have the tools they have. They may not want you, or anyone else the way you wish that they would. It’s also a bit nuts of us to imagine we can ever know what’s right for someone else. Isn’t it hard enough to grapple with what you need for your own inner peace? As long as a person isn’t intentionally hurting you or anyone else, you really have to assume they’re doing the best they can to work life out in a way that will feel good to them. Sometimes people don’t know what they want, and that can be hard to watch and hard to walk away from if you’re hoping maybe they’ll finally realize they want you, but you aren’t here to wait, because there’s not enough time for that.

When we start to try to control situations or people, when we find ourselves attempting to manipulate or cajole, or dance like a monkey to get what we want, it’s time to stop and check ourselves. Life is not about forcing the picture in your head onto the people around you–that picture of “how things should be.” No one will thank you for trying, and not many things cause us more pain than our attachment to that picture. It can be so hard to let it go, I really understand that, but grasping and waiting and hoping and struggling and doubting and obsessing….that is no way to live.

It’s brutal to have to release an idea, or another person, or a hope we held close, but you can’t cling and fly at the same time and you don’t have all the time in the world. I wouldn’t spend too much of it refusing to accept and open to things as they are; there’s so much power in that. Your self-respect is in the mix. So is your self-esteem. This is the stuff that has far-reaching consequences for your life, the way you move through the world, and the way life feels to you, day in, and day out. Let life feel good. It might hurt a lot in the short-term, but intense pain for a little while is so much better than a lifetime of suffering.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Ways That Life Will Feel Good

innerguidance When you start to live in alignment with what’s true for you, life becomes so much simpler. It’s easier to say no when you mean no. It takes away the murkiness between people and around situations that might have left you scratching your head in the past, because now, you can just open your mouth and say, “I feel really weird. What’s going on?” It gives you the power to direct your energy, because you know what you want, and so do the people in your life. You don’t have to waste time or energy making excuses for yourself, or anyone else.

It’s not always easy to get there, and you can multiply that by nine million if you have certain tendencies, like people-pleasing, or feeling you aren’t supposed to be taking up any space. There are genuine problems in life; all we have to do is read the paper for three minutes to verify that, but a lot of the problems people grapple with are self-created. Not all of them, so let’s be clear. There are heartbreaking, piercingly painful losses we endure sometimes, and some people more than others, but I’m not talking about that right now. I’m talking about a loud inner critic you may have been living with your entire life. A relentless voice inside your head that is unforgiving and full of should. I’m talking about ideas you may have about yourself that are blocking your ability to be happy, to be at peace.

What stops us from listening to our hearts, and calmly but confidently moving in the direction we know we must if we want to rock it out in this life? Fear. Fear that we aren’t enough. Fear that our deepest desires may not be in line with what others had hoped we would want. Fear of hurting the people we love. Fear of trying, and failing. Fear of change and of loss. Fear of proving to ourselves that we aren’t able to do it, after all.

Here’s the thing. You’re alive. You’re living this life, and it’s going to feel good, or it isn’t. Ways it will definitely not feel good: If you let your shoulds rule your life. If you don’t try because you might not pull it off. If you allow yourself or other people to talk you out of your dreams. If you never act on your own behalf because you don’t feel good about yourself. If you believe everything you think, especially the nasty, mean-spirited stuff. If you marinate yourself in envy or bitterness or rage. If you keep a mental list of every way you’ve ever been wronged, betrayed, abandoned, and disappointed. If you never let anyone know you, really know you because you’re so caught up in worrying about what people would think if you dropped the mask. These are all ways life will feel very long and painful.

Ways that life will feel good: If you take ownership of the one thing you can, namely, how you face what you’ve been given. If you look your pain, losses, heartbreaks and betrayals in the face and say, okay. That happened. That hurt. Here’s what I’ve learned from these experiences, here’s how I’ve grown, here’s how I’ve become more empathetic and compassionate as a result. If you remind yourself every single day of all the things you do have, right now. If you remember to let the people in your life know how you feel about them. If you feel the fear of not being enough, but go for it, anyway. Because you’re going to be here, right? You’re going to be living these days, and living truthfully feels a lot better than living in fear or blame or powerlessness. Maybe all your dreams will come true, and maybe they won’t, but you’ll feel a lot better about yourself if you’re following your heart. It’s not like tomorrow is promised, or that life is going to start somewhere out ahead of us after we get everything figured out. Life is happening right now, this minute.

If you’re stopping yourself from following your intuition, it’s time to get some support. We all need that sometimes. It might be a teacher who inspires you, or reading something that raises your consciousness, or it might be a good time to try therapy, but I wouldn’t just wait for things to get better magically. You know the saying right? If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting. If what you’ve been doing isn’t working out so well, it’s time to try something else.

There’s only one of you. I really do not believe you’re here by accident. You have something to offer only you can, but you won’t be able to do that if fear is blocking you at every turn, or if that voice inside your head tells you you can’t. I can share with you that for me, personally, yoga was the way I eroded that inner voice that was so harsh and critical and relentless. I got on my mat, and I just didn’t feed that. I didn’t heed it, either. I kept feeding a loving, patient kind voice. For me, I needed an experience that was happening in my body. I needed the visceral feeling of hitting a challenge and seeing what came up for me. It wasn’t pretty or easy. It took a number of years, but knowing yourself and accepting yourself is certainly worth the investment of a few years, right? Developing a healthy, happy relationship with yourself is the thing, wouldn’t you say? I can tell you it feels a helluva lot better having a voice in my head that roots for me, than one that tears me down and says I’m unlovable at my core. Life does not have to feel that way, but you have to meet yourself where you are. It won’t get better unless you get off your a$$ and make it better. That’s the truth. You have to work, but what better use of your time is there than to make the world within you a more peaceful, loving, kind, compassionate place to be? So you can make the world around you, and between you and those you love, a more peaceful place to be; what’s more pressing than that? If you need help along these lines, try this series, or if you’re looking for community, interaction and support, you still have 48 hours to sign up for my next online course! See if that sparks something within you, but don’t let life go by for too long feeling stuck. We don’t have forever.

Sending you so much love,

Ally Hamilton

Just Be There

Sometimes the very best thing we can do for someone is hold some space for them to be where they are, to listen intently, and reflect back our understanding with love. To say, “Yes, of course that would hurt. I’m so sorry you’re going through this.” That’s often the best we can do for people, reassuring them that they are not alone in their experience, that we get it, that we’ve been there, or that we haven’t been there, but still, we can mourn with them, or just be there to make a meal, or take them for a walk. It’s very hard when people we love are suffering, or grieving, or enraged, or feeling bitter, or maybe all of those things at once. It’s natural to want to get in there and fix it, to brainstorm about solutions, or to offer our unsolicited opinions about what our friends should do. The reality is, we never know what another person needs for his or her own healing or grieving process or growth. Sometimes people are in so much agony, the people around them become uncomfortable, and this discomfort propels them to give their friend a push to “get back on their feet.” That’s really the last thing a person needs to hear when they have no way of doing that for themselves. As Earl Grollman rightly states, “The only cure for grief is to grieve.”

Some wounds are self-inflicted. Sometimes we need painful lessons again and again until we get it. That isn’t easy to watch, and of course if someone you love is harming themselves, we’re in a different territory. Then, you step in and do everything you can to get them some support, or you find some for yourself so you can honor your own needs and boundaries while you try to offer a hand up, or a shoulder to lean on. But you can’t save anyone, and if you’re confused about that, you’re in a precarious position. We can never carry the burden of another person’s pain, nor can we be responsible for anyone else’s happiness. Each of us must do our own journey. We all have to find a way to be at peace within ourselves, and sometimes the journey to that peace is fraught with roadblocks, self-imposed, or provided by the twists and turns and losses of life.

Whatever we have to bear, having loyal and understanding friends with whom we feel safe can be such a comfort. Knowing that there’s at least one person we can share our fears or insecurities or doubt or shame or guilt or jealousy with, without hearing a solution we didn’t ask for and don’t want, is really a gift. It’s hard to just listen. I think a lot of people feel like that isn’t enough, that if someone is coming to them in some pain or discomfort, implicit in their sharing is a request for advice. People will ask for our opinions if they want them. Most of us don’t listen to advice, anyway. We tell ourselves that’s the way it is or was for our well-meaning friend, but it’s not the way it is or will be for us. I’ve gotten into the habit of asking close friends when they share with me, “Do you want me to just listen, or do you want to know what I think?” People will tell you. Most people just want a safe space, and some understanding. Hoping we can all be, and have, friends like that, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Carpe Diem

If you’re alive, you’re vulnerable; this is the nature of reality as a human being. We have our bodies with their unknown expiration dates. We don’t know what will happen from one day to the next. We love people. They also have unknown expiration dates. We don’t know what happens after this. That right there is the stuff–what more needs to be acknowledged for all of us to embrace the fact that to be human is to be vulnerable?

A lot people run from this reality, even though we all know it’s right there, under the surface. There’s a desire to numb out, to distract ourselves with busyness, to make our plans and meet our deadlines and workworkwork, because that’s what we’re supposed to do. We’ve set it up so there isn’t a choice. If we want to keep a roof over our heads and food in the fridge, if we want to be able to pay for healthcare and send our kids to college, we need money, and lots of it. So we put our heads down and we work. We look forward to the weekend, and we (maybe) take a week or two a year and go travel somewhere and think, “this is the life.” We’re so tired most of the time, we have coffee houses on every corner, and we have our devices to save time, except they suck time. We go meet our friends and text other people, missing moments to connect, to be present, but we’ve all heard this before, right? We know this. It’s just, what’s the option?

Tomorrow isn’t promised. I know no one likes to dwell on that, and I’m not suggesting we should. Living in fear isn’t really living. There’s no point getting worked up over all the things that could happen. Hopefully we will all live to see many tomorrows, but I think if we can be brave enough to face our circumstances consciously, that can inspire us to truly live every single day, and to be kind to one another. Not everyone can meet the pain of this thing with ease or grace. For a lot of people, it’s a messy, thorny thing. A great many people struggle with the big picture, and the unanswered questions. We lose gorgeous souls every day to depression and addiction, because the weight of their despair is too much, the pain is too great.

Sometimes a person has one face for the world. Maybe that face is always lit up, always smiling or laughing, or spreading joy, but inside, the pain is crushing. We feel so shocked when we lose people with huge gifts, but everyone has an interior world, and everyone suffers to one degree or another. Loss is a constant. We lose our keys. We lose a moment to say something. We lose our innocence, maybe too soon. We lose our possibility to not know something, like what it feels like to be abused or betrayed. We lose someone we love because they need something we can’t give them. We lose someone we love because they’re taken from us. We lose, and we grieve, and you never know from the outside what someone is carrying, unless they tell you. Even then, we each carry our own pain. You can’t take it over for anyone. You can’t make things all better. We all have our demons to face, and we face them the best way we can.

It lacks empathy and understanding to suggest a person who fails to manage their pain in a healthy way is selfish. Depression robs a person of hope. Imagine feeling the worst sadness you’ve ever felt, and believing it would never, ever get better. No one wants to be in pain. No one wants to hurt the people they love with all their hearts. No one wants to be a slave to addiction. Sometimes people lose the battle. They get tired. Maybe they’ve been fighting for years, for decades, and they just can’t find the strength anymore. When depression and addiction take over a person’s life, they also stamp out the light, the beauty, the joy, the possibility to connect in a meaningful and sustainable way, and we have to understand that, and let it inspire us to reach out more, to put our phones down and connect with each other. To hold the door open, or let someone merge on the freeway, or acknowledge the person who just handed you that much-needed cup of coffee. You never know what someone is going through, but you know there’s the potential that whatever they’re facing may not be easy.

Life can be brutal, and loss is inevitable, but along with that exists so much beauty. The feeling of your child’s chubby, soft little arms around your neck. The genuine smile of someone you love. The sound of laughter, sunlight on your face, the ocean, the breeze on your check, a moment of recognition, of breakthrough, of being seen with all your flaws and all your gifts, the happiness of those you love, tears between friends, the overwhelming feeling of gratitude just for the experience of being alive, finding those things that light you up, traveling with people who understand you. All these things exist simultaneously. As much as you can, pay attention to the gifts. Try not to get caught up in racing through your life. You’re only going to have this one life in this body you’re in, that much we know, and love and connection are the best things we have here. Immerse yourself in that stuff. Uncover your gifts and share them. Open to love, give it, receive it, spread it. Celebrate the people you cherish, and celebrate yourself. Try to do each day that way, and you’ll have a beautiful life.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Take the Road Inward

dalaiactions The desire to be happy drives all of us, but sometimes it drives us in the wrong direction. Anything we do, we do because we believe it will bring us peace or contentment or feelings of joy or gratitude, even things we do for other people. I teach because I love it. I love the feeling of being in a room full of people who are breathing and sweating and focusing and looking at themselves in an honest way, in a safe space. I love the co-creation of that space, and I feel grateful that I can offer ideas that might help someone to heal, drawing from my own healing journey over the last twenty years. It feels good. Doing things for my kids makes me happy, even if I’m exhausted and have answered nine million “why” questions by the end of the day. Folding those tiny tee shirts, or pairing up those little socks makes me smile, because it’s so fleeting. Soon my son’s socks will be bigger than mine, and my daughter will be rolling her eyes as she heads out the door with some guy I’m going to vet like I work for the FBI.

Anyway, my point is, if you ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing, or why you want what you want, I can almost guarantee you’ll find it’s because you think this course of action will lead to your happiness. If you’re on a diet, maybe it’s because you haven’t been treating your body well, and are now trying to make friends with it again, eating whole foods, and drinking lots of water, and tuning in to your body’s needs and desires. Or maybe it’s because you’re buying into the insanity that you can never be skinny enough, but if only you could, you’d meet someone fabulous. See what I’m saying? Whether it’s a healthy or unhealthy motivation, you’re doing it because you believe it will lead you somewhere good.

If you’re working a ninety hour week because you think a lot of money will make you happy, and someday you’ll be able to retire and enjoy yourself, I’d say that’s not a good course of action because tomorrow isn’t promised. If you’re chasing someone who isn’t really giving you the time of day because you believe if only you could “have them”, then you’d be happy, I’d say you’re also on a thorny path, but sometimes we’re in pain, and that’s what’s motivating us. We’re coming from a place of lack, and we attach our happiness to external things, people, events or circumstances, and so here we are on this quest to be happy, but we’ve taken the road to misery. I think a lot of people are living this way.

Ask yourself why you want the things you want. It’s a good exercise, and you don’t have to share your findings with anyone (although a great therapist can be very helpful in this regard). Make a list of those things or people or brass rings you’re chasing, and hold them up to the light, because you don’t want to spend too much time racing down Misery Lane. You really might need to recalibrate your GPS, and set a new course. Happiness is inside us. You don’t have to run or race or travel to find it. You really have to get quiet, so you can hear the voice of your intuition, so you can tap into that inner knowing. It’s got a very clear voice. It will tell you “yes, this”, or “no.” It’s just that sometimes we’ve drowned it out with a lot of shoulds.

It took me a long time to be happy. I spent a lot of my young adult years convinced I’d be happy, when…and you can fill in the blanks with so much stuff. I also spent a lot of time blaming other people for my unhappiness. Those are flip sides of the same coin. If your happiness lies in something or someone outside yourself, your lack of this person or thing or event becomes responsible for your unhappiness, but the truth is, no one is responsible for your peace of mind, or lack of it, but you. We each have our own work to do to unearth our joy, our passion, our gifts, those things that light us up, or terrify us, or inspire us. We all have to look at what’s holding us back, where we might be blaming, where we might be stopping ourselves with self-limiting beliefs. You have to know yourself if you want to be happy. A huge house isn’t going to help you with that, and neither is the “right” person. You’re the right person. Knowing yourself and accepting yourself is inside work. So if you’re looking for a road to get you there, pick the road inward.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Healing After Rejection, Betrayal or Abandonment

oprah Few things feel worse than being betrayed, left, or rejected, and yet, most of us will experience all of these at least once. The first time something like this happens is the worst, because we don’t have a frame of reference for it; we’re left to piece together the “new normal”, even if it happens when we’re little. I still remember the morning I woke up and my mom told me my dad didn’t live with us anymore; I was four. I remember going to his drawers and closets, and opening everything up, and trying to make sense of this new reality. At four, you have no tools, you just have feelings, but it’s not much easier at twenty-four, or ever.

When someone hurts us, for whatever reason, particularly someone with whom we were very close, it’s knifing. If you have any doubt about your value as a beautiful human being with something special to contribute, few things will bring it into greater question than the feelings we suffer when someone leaves us, because the deep fear is that they got close enough to see the truth of our unworthiness. They got to know us, and actually, they decided we were not so special. Most of the time, that’s not at all what has happened, though.

First of all, if someone betrays you, they’re in a place where they are not respecting themselves. Anyone who lies to your face, or fails to communicate information that deeply impacts you, is lost to themselves. Lying feels terrible. Resorting to sneakiness because you’re unable to express what’s in your heart is a certain kind of agony. Even worse is when a person is in a place where they can justify terrible behavior by making everything your fault. Sometimes people are so desperate to feel something, anything, to break the chains of their own apathy or discomfort or despair, they just act out. My point is, a person who acts in a hurtful or careless way is not in a good place on his or her own path. Their current lack of kindness or integrity is not a reflection on you, or anything lacking within you. It’s a reflection of where they find themselves on their own journey.

If you’ve been left in the dark, that’s so painful, and I’m sorry you’re going through that; a lack of communication when something comes to an end is a coward’s choice. The inability to honor what was once beautiful is a real shame. No one deserves to be ignored or shunned, or left in a vacuum to try to figure out what’s happened, but sometimes it goes down that way. Understand that sometimes people are not ready or able to face themselves, and so they can’t face you. It’s nothing you did or said, it’s nothing you didn’t do, it’s not a character flaw of yours. Remember we can’t do each other’s journeys. People have the tools they have, that’s all they’ve got to use.

Also, closure is a bit overrated. Even if you understand every nuance of why something has ended, you’re still going to suffer. Do I think it’s easier if you are able to end something with respect and honesty and integrity? Of course. I’m just saying it takes two, and if you’re in a situation with someone who is unable to do that with you, your best hope of closure may be simple acceptance. I say simple, not easy.

Try to recognize there are all kinds of things that might lead a person to act in a way that’s so hard to comprehend. Maybe they’ve been so deeply hurt, they know no other way than to lash out or shut down or take off. Imagine if your choices were limited like that. There are people in the world who don’t feel empathy. There are known personality disorders that can lead a person to act in ways that make you shake your head. The lack of love when it’s most needed can do that to a person. Imagine growing up without feeling seen or heard. I’m not saying it’s okay when people treat us poorly, or unconscionably, I’m saying it might help you to consider the source. That probably wouldn’t be a happy place to find yourself.

If you’ve been hurt, your best response is to seek out the tools that will help you to heal, and learn and grow from your experience. Life gives us a choice: we can be hardened by what happens along our journeys, or we can be softened by it. I highly recommend softening. We don’t need more hard people. We need people who have insight and who understand compassion and kindness. We need more people who are willing to examine their participation in situations that dimmed their light. We need more people to understand they’re worthy, just by the fact of their own existence. Use the “stuff” of your life to open and grow. The human heart is resilient and we all naturally want to heal. Pain is part of the journey toward liberation from suffering, facing it and working with it and leaning into it. That’s how you release yourself.

Wishing that for you, and sending love,

Ally Hamilton

Believe Them

A few years ago, I went on a date with a guy who travels around the country giving talks and interviews about compassion and kindness. He’s written books, he’s been on all kinds of television shows. He’s extremely charismatic and funny and smart. We met through mutual friends and he asked me out, and of course, I was very excited. I thought we had a similar outlook on life, and I liked the fact that he seemed down-to-earth.

The night of the date came, and he picked me up, and off we went. The conversation was easy and deep. Definitely no small talk. By the time we were at the restaurant, we were so in the flow, the waiter stopped asking us if we wanted to order. We never made it past a pitcher of mint lemonade. We sat at the table for three hours, drunk on conversation. He made all kinds of references to things we had to do, friends of his I had to meet, places we had to go. There was not an inch of me wondering whether we’d be going out again. We exchanged a few emails the next day, but he didn’t mention plans, and I just assumed he was going to call to do that. So you can imagine, when I hadn’t heard from him a week later, I was surprised and confused.

I decided to be direct, and sent an email letting him know I’d had a great time. I told him I was really looking forward to getting to know him better. I told him about a public speaking engagement I’d since had, that we’d discussed the night we went out, and how I was pleased I hadn’t died from fear, after all. Radio silence. He never wrote back, and I was left with the sting of having made myself vulnerable. I didn’t say anything to our mutual friends, because I didn’t want them to feel badly, and I also didn’t want anyone else to get involved. After numerous conversations with trusted girlfriends, and a couple of close male friends, I let it go. I figured it must have been smoke and mirrors or something, because it’s one thing to talk about kindness and compassion, but it’s another thing to have some.

I found out much later he’d been dating someone off and on for a long time. When we went out, they’d been off, but at some point the week after our date, they were on again. I’ve been in those relationships before, the ones that are so hard to end. The ones where you feel so hooked in you’re convinced it must be love so you keep going back even though you know nothing will be different. Anyway, when I realized what happened, I felt a little soothed, but also angry. It would have been so easy to simply shoot me an email and let me know. It would have been kinder than leaving me to second guess my own experience, to replay the night in my mind and wonder if I’d missed something.

Anyway, who knows why he handled it that way. Probably, he wanted to keep me on the back burner for when his on again went off again, because I did get an email a few months later, asking if I’d like to have dinner but by then I was done. I would never pursue something with someone who can’t or won’t communicate honestly. Most of the time people are not setting out to hurt us, and this was not a major heartbreak, obviously. It was one date. It just so happened it was my first date out of the gate after my divorce, the first date I’d been on in eight years. So the timing wasn’t great, but it was a sting, not a wound. Usually people are doing the best they can with the tools they’ve got. Sometimes people are selfish and prioritize what’s good for them over what might be hurtful for someone else. The thing is, it’s really never okay to put your discomfort ahead of another person’s heart. Awkward conversations aren’t fun, but they’re so much better than leaving someone in the dark.

The other thing to remember, is that sometimes a person presents themselves one way, but one-on-one, it’s a whole different story. This is a guy who does a lot of good, legitimately, but his interpersonal skills need a lot of work. It was a good reminder to me that we should never look at someone’s public persona, and assume that’s what’s happening behind closed doors. Not everybody has every piston firing. It’s easy to take things personally, but most of the time, it’s just a reflection of where someone is on their own path; it’s not a reflection of anything lacking in you. I get so many emails from people struggling with this stuff. The truth is, if a person is into you, it’s not going to be a mystery, you’re not going to have to wonder, or chase, or second guess yourself. I really wouldn’t waste time with any of that, life is too short, and you are too precious. Save your time and energy for people who are coming at you with everything they’ve got, and keep your eyes, ears and mind open, so you can see clearly when there’s a disconnect between someone’s words and their actions. It’s really good to remember the Maya Angelou quote, “When people show you who they are, believe them.”

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Look Beneath the Surface

Life will never fail to offer you opportunities to practice patience and compassion. Challenging people or circumstances can be incredible teachers. We can’t control who or what shows up on the path in front of us, but we can choose our response. You can look at the surface of a person and judge or condemn them, and when I say the surface, I don’t mean their appearance, I mean their way of being. The quality they’re bringing to whatever it is they’re doing. There’s a whole complex world happening under the surface, and you may not get a glimpse into it. If you see someone on line ahead of you at the supermarket, for example, and you notice they’re talking loudly on their cellphone while the person behind the register is trying to ring them up, all kinds of thoughts and labels might stream through your mind. The minute you start thinking, “selfish, inconsiderate, unaware, self-absorbed, thoughtless”, you’ve lowered your own vibration. You’ve made a decision to become a character in their story. The disgruntled, righteous shopper! You could take that same moment to come back to your breath. To catch yourself if you’re starting to spin toward dark, hopeless thinking. To remind yourself that’s their story, and it doesn’t seem to be a very happy one. You could direct your energy to the person ringing them up, and send love. You might even smile at them and wink. When it’s your turn at the register, you could make their day by being present and kind. If you really wanted to do an advanced practice, you could send some love to the person on the phone, because how many beautiful moments must they be missing? Chances to connect in a meaningful way with other human beings, lost because they’re somewhere else.

It happens all the time, all day long. You’re driving along and someone cuts you off in an insane way. You get an adrenaline rush if it’s a dangerous move they’ve made; that can’t be helped, but some people become irate, as if it’s personal. They roll down their window and flip their traffic finger, yelling expletives and feeling their blood pressure go up. You might be thinking, it IS personal, I’m the one who was just cut off, but that’s on the other person, it’s not a story you have to join. They may have a genuine problem. Maybe they’re dealing with an emergency, and maybe they drive like that all the time. Who knows? Their driving persona may not sync up with the person they are most of the time. Some people have road rage. People who seem calm and reasonable in most cases can get behind the wheel of a car and do a fairly winning impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” Maybe your old Aunt Marge struggles with that.

Sometimes people write in about family members, and it goes something like: “This person in my life makes me feel powerless. This person makes me feel invisible. No matter what I do, this person won’t listen to me.” You can’t control other people. You can’t make someone see you or hear you or love you. It’s all a choice, but for some people they haven’t realized their own power yet. Things happen, and they react. A person says something hurtful, and they respond in kind, even though that isn’t really how they feel. We’re all having this separate experience, together. I think it’s really important to realize that. Feelings are feelings, and stories are stories. You have all these complex, often wounded people coming together interacting with each other, each with her or his own ideas about what’s happening, and all knowing that one day we will die. Not that anyone loves to think about that, but we all know it’s there. Not everyone handles it well.

Sometimes people just repeat what they know. If they weren’t treated with consideration, maybe they don’t understand the concept. Maybe they grew up in a house where no one ever stopped to really listen to them, where they had little to no impact on the world around them. Maybe they grew up thinking what they said and what they did didn’t matter much to anyone. Or maybe everything was handed to them, and perhaps they grew up thinking other people were there to serve them. Can you imagine a childhood where you thought you were to be served? Isn’t that sad? The best thing in life is being of service, of feeling you’re able to make a meaningful contribution to the people and the world around you. Imagine if no one ever taught you that. Would it be nice if you figured it out on your own along the way? Of course, but we never know what another person needs in order to grow and learn and be happy. Perhaps you’re crossing paths with them at a time when they still have a lot to understand. Does anything good come from condemning them? Is it any kind of reflection on you if a person can’t see you, or doesn’t know how to be kind and compassionate?

The thing is, you only get so many minutes in a day. Life doesn’t have a rollover plan for wasted moments. And you can let the challenging people you encounter, or the difficult situations you may face rob you of entire afternoons if you aren’t careful, but I don’t recommend it. Life will bring enough for you to deal with; it’s plenty of work keeping your own side of the street clean. You might try something if you feel like it. When I wake up in the morning, I remind myself of all the amazing gifts I have to be grateful for, starting with having another day to open my eyes and be in my body and hug my children and love people firecely and try to do something meaningful with my time, something that might be helpful to someone else. Most of the time things work out pretty well that way. I don’t succeed in every moment of every day, of course. I’m a human being, and there are times I’m deeply disappointed in myself. Especially if I realize I allowed too many moments that could have been beautiful become sour instead. But I think when you move through the world with that idea of spreading love, of being in love, you’re a lot less likely to get thrown off center for too long. It’s easy to love the people who are awesome; thoughtful and present and open and full of life. It’s harder to love those who push our buttons. But if we ever want peace, that’s the work, to love those people we can’t understand. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with them. And to remember when we’re confronted, we really never know someone’s struggles, fears, doubts, shame, or old wounds unless they share them with us. People who’ve been badly hurt usually have some pretty solid walls built up. It’s not easy for everyone to tear them down and be vulnerable. I’m saying, whenever possible, practice compassion, and then get back to the work of choosing love as your storyline. It makes the journey a lot more fun.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Be a Survivor, Not a Victim

victimvillian One of the worst things you can feed is a victim mentality, and let’s get right to it—sometimes horrendous, heartbreaking things happen to kind and beautiful people. Maybe you grew up in an unsafe environment and spent most of your childhood trying to be invisible or indispensable. Maybe you saw things and experienced things no one ever should. Maybe you grew up and had a terrifying interaction that turned everything you thought you knew inside out, and maybe you’ve endured a loss that feels impossible to comprehend. These things are all possible. I hope none of them have happened to you, but they’re all possible.

I say this to you with total compassion and empathy, I really truly get that life can break your heart sometimes, but it will never ever serve you to define yourself as a victim. Your much better option is to choose the role of survivor. Life is not fair. We all want to make it make sense, we want to create order out of chaos and uncertainty, but it can’t be done.

The pain in this life is real, and it’s not dosed out in equal amounts, so if you’re reading this and you’ve had to carry something that hurts so much it’s hard to breathe, I get it. Of course there are less dramatic events that might cause a person to feel that life isn’t fair, and that they have a rotten hand to play. Again and again, it comes down to what you’re going to feed. Of course if you’ve suffered losses you have to give yourself time and space to mourn and grieve, and how much time and how much space is completely personal, and something only you can move through.

I’m not talking about grieving, though. I’m talking about letting your losses and experiences harden you, so you move through the world bitterly. When we tell ourselves that things have happened that have “broken” us for example, when we define ourselves as broken, the implication is that we cannot be healed. When we clutch a story to our chest that explains and excuses why we are the way we are, we’re also letting ourselves off the hook for doing anything about it. You can’t control what’s happened, but you can certainly decide how you’re going to respond.

I see so many people who cling to their rage like a shield, who dig their heels in and demand that everyone acknowledge their version of reality. Who recite the list of ways they’ve been wronged. The thing is, it’s exhausting. It’s like a full-time job to be that enraged, you really can’t get much else done. It’s such a miserable state to be in, of course you want to numb out and check out, and look to external things or people to “make it better.” It’s not like bitterness tastes good.

Whatever has happened might shape you, but it doesn’t have to own you; at a certain point, at any point, you can decide to take ownership of your life. You can figure out what you might be able to change, and get to work changing it. This might be the way you interact with people, it may be the tone and message of your inner voice that needs work. Some things you won’t be able to change; other people would fall into that category. You can never change what someone else needs or wants or says or does, but you can always change the way you respond. You can decide to rise up; with every breath, there’s the potential to begin again.

If we’re pitying ourselves, we’re stuck in the past. We’re dragging the past along with us into our present, and holding it up for everyone to see, even our brand-new friends, and we’re demanding that other people reckon with our past, when that job is ours. If they want us, they have to accept this whole bunch of baggage we come with, but they don’t, and we don’t have to drag it along with us, either. A pity party isn’t very fun; you’ll probably have a tough time getting people to show up. Someone who looks their pain in the face and then deals with it (whether that means reaching out for support, or exploring healing modalities until they find something that works for them), that’s a person who’s ready to live. If you want to be free of your pain, you have to reckon with it. You don’t bow down and let it own you, you challenge it to a duel on a bright day, so you can bring all that darkness into the light and take a look at what you’re facing. Sometimes we think the face-off will do us in, but it’s the running that does it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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You Always Have Some Power

changednotreduced Few things are worse than feeling powerless. Sometimes we’re betrayed by someone we thought was a friend, sometimes our own bodies betray us, and sometimes we fail to act on our own behalf. Whatever the cause, when we feel we do not have an impact on the world around us, or that we can’t save those we love from pain and anguish related to our own situation, it’s just crushing.

The truth is, we are not in control of anything except how we respond to what we’re given; we’re certainly not in control of circumstances. You may have noticed you can’t control what other people will do or say or want or need, nor is that ever your job. Sometimes the repercussions are devastating, and yet we always have some power. If you’re at the mercy of someone else, whether that someone be an ex, a family member, a judge, or your own internal demon, the key is always compassion for yourself. This human experience is incredible and wildly interesting, but I don’t believe anyone would argue that it’s easy.

We arrive here, and our parents have whatever tools they have to love us and nurture us. We arrive here, and some of us have a cozy and safe roof over our heads, and others of us never feel safe. Right off the bat, it’s not a level playing field. Then, we have unknown expiration dates; it’s not like you can count on living to one hundred, it’s not like you can take tomorrow for granted (although we do it all the time). Every single person you know and love is in the same boat, so if you want to deny your vulnerability, have at it, but it’s still a reality.

Here are other things—so many people struggle to be happy in the face of all this. Most people take a good twenty to thirty years just to have a sense of what they might most like to do with their time. The majority of people in our culture run down paths that are supposed to lead to happiness, but don’t. As a society, we’re taught the mantra of “survival of the fittest” at an early age, and we grow up thinking we’re supposed to compete with each other, which doesn’t tend to engender happiness for other people’s good fortunes. So we breed an environment of envy and despair. Also, we do a woefully inadequate job of teaching what it means to love ourselves, and others. We have crazy notions about love that lead to disappointment and ridiculous expectations.

In short, it’s very easy to find yourself in a mess. Human beings are complex, and we each have an interior world that we choose to share or hide to varying degrees. The more you hide from yourself and others, the less likely it is that your path will be clear. Sometimes two unhealed people come together, and there’s so much happening under the surface, it’s only a matter of time before things start exploding or imploding. Unfortunately, this is how some of us learn. This is how we begin to understand what love is, and what it is not. The webs we weave can be very painful to unravel, but sometimes that’s the only chance for peace. Thread by thread, we have to dismantle the thing, and start to build something new.

Often, our hearts break as we move through an experience like this, and if you’re in the thick of it, try to remind yourself of two things: one, it’s not forever, and two, you get to decide how you’re going to respond to reality as it is. You can’t manage anyone else’s journey, but you can keep your side of the street clean. When you’re starting to head off down a new path, feeling like you’re moving with integrity is very strengthening. You don’t have to get down in the mud with anyone else, and you don’t have to condemn people if that’s where they are. If you have it in you, you can try to find compassion for people when they lash out, because a person doing that is in pain. That doesn’t excuse cruelty, manipulation or abuse, but it might help you not to take it as personally. What another person does or says is a reflection of where they are at this point in time, and not of anything lacking in you. You have the power to be kind to yourself if the picture you had in your head is now in pieces around your feet. You have the power to move through this heat with some grace and strength. You have the power to breathe deeply. You have the power to remind yourself that no feeling is final. You have the power to create a loving and nurturing environment for yourself, and anyone close to you, to blossom within. No one can take that power away from you, you just have to own it, and do your best to trust that if you do your part, the rest will be okay. That’s all you can do, anyway.

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

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

Make Peace with the Shape of Things

woolf We all have our plans and our ideas. We have a picture in our heads of “how things should be,” or “how things will be”, but most of us get the lesson early that life just doesn’t work that way. I know very few people who can say that everything has gone according to their plan. In fact, I don’t know one person who can say that.

Few things cause us to suffer more than our attachment to that picture in our minds or our hearts of how things should be or look or feel. Sometimes it’s so f&cking hard to let go of what you’d hoped for and wanted with your whole heart, but I really think a huge part of maturing, and of opening to things as they are has to do with this: at a certain point, you have to make peace with the shape of things. The shape of your world, the rhythm, the colors, the feel of it. Maybe things are more jagged or fractured than you’d hoped; maybe they’re spread out in a way you hadn’t envisioned and didn’t want. Life can be incredibly complicated sometimes. It’s not always obvious which way to turn, especially when your life and your choices and your feelings affect other people, and so you may look around at some point and wonder what exactly happened. How your life looks the way it does, when none of it was anywhere on your plan.

Sometimes the ship sails and the storms come and you do your best to go with your gut as you make decisions while you’re getting hit in the face with hail, and couldn’t find north from south even if you had a compass, because the compass wouldn’t be a crystal ball, would it? Maybe you end up in a country you’ve never traveled to before, with customs and a language you don’t understand, and you think, “I can’t do this,” but you can.

You start again, you come up with a new plan. Or maybe you’ve landed in the exact spot you were trying to avoid, and somehow, some insane way the GPS on your ship landed you right back where you began, because maybe, just maybe, your plan did not include healing yourself first, before you took off on your great adventure. Maybe the language and the customs are all too familiar, and you can’t believe you have to deal with this sh&t again, but it’s not the same, because you aren’t the same. Maybe you need to get the lesson that you can’t always change a situation, but you can change the way you deal with it.

Anyway, here’s the thing. We cling and we grip and we refuse to let go and we suffer. Or, we trust that we can forge a new way and work with a changing set of circumstances. We acknowledge that we were never in control of this thing, and our plans look funny to us, or we feel a little naked, or foolish or naive, like we got caught with our pants down because we just didn’t see the folly of it. Have your passions and pursue your dreams all the way with everything you’ve got. Set your intentions and work your a$$ off, and put some action behind what you want, because you’re here to share your gifts freely and with abandon. Just watch your attachment to things (or people) feeling the way you think they should feel, or the way you want them to feel, because people are going to feel however they need and want to feel and things are going to happen you never could have imagined, and all your fine plans could easily get turned upside down on any given morning. It could be that your plan goes flying out the window, and you watch it float, fly away, out of reach and maybe something more amazing than you ever could have imagined happens instead. It’s not all doom and gloom, life can be quite the adventure if you let it.

However things are right now, whether they look like that picture you’ve had in your head, or nothing at all like that, try to make peace with the shape of things. If you cling and grip, you will suffer. If you draw a huge heart around all of it, you’ll find your way with love. Maybe you can draw a heart so big, there’s space around things and life has the room to surprise you.

Start small if you need to—make peace with the shape of your body. We spend so much time obsessing over the external stuff. The body is a freaking miracle, but we get caught up in numbers. How many pounds is it? How many inches? Like we’re going to the butcher’s or the tailor. This is life, this is the party, it’s happening right now. It’s not the butcher. How’s your heart? Is it beating for you? Marvelous. Can you look outside and see the sun? The rain? The green of the trees? Can you walk outside because you have two working legs? Brilliant. Can you hug the people you love because you’re alive and they’re alive and you have two working arms? Oh my god, how fantastic. Make peace with the shape of things. Draw a big, huge heart around it all. See what you can grow that way.

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

You can find my books here <3

Don’t Worry

doctorow As much as possible, try not to “future-trip.” It’s so easy to get caught up in worries about things that may never come to pass, to start envisioning worst-case scenarios, to formulate conversations in your head, or come up with plans you might not ever need. While you’re busy boiling yourself this way, your nervous system is tensing up and sending cortisol through your body, as if these events are actually occurring. In other words, you can make yourself sick with worry. You can raise your blood pressure with your thoughts.

When are we most likely to do this to ourselves? When we’re feeling vulnerable, tested, or threatened, and maybe it’s part of our inclination toward negativity bias, too. We survived as a species by being alert to possible danger, but there aren’t too many sabertooth tigers waiting to chase us down to eat us for lunch these days. We aren’t built for longterm stress, we’re built for short bursts. If we’ve been hurt before, we try to set things up so we won’t be hurt again, and that’s understandable, but you don’t want to live defensively. You know the saying, right? “Hurt me once, shame on you…hurt me twice, shame on me.” But the thing is, living in fear isn’t really living, it’s gripping. When we start to spin out, and imagine all the things that could go wrong, we’re losing the potential for peace in the current moment. We’re feeding fear instead of love. If you’re dealing with survival, keeping a roof over your head, and caring for your loved ones, that’s real stress, but worrying won’t help, action will. Any small thing you can do to try to right the ship or get some momentum happening is going to make you feel more energized and hopeful, and optimism in the face of difficulty is often the difference between turning things around, or staying stuck.

The same is true when we travel back in time, with regret, despair, or longing. Whatever has happened, it’s behind us. Of course we all have treasured memories, and there’s nothing wrong with visiting old friends and cherished loved ones we can’t hug anymore, in our minds and in our hearts. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about traveling backward as if we could redo or undo something. There’s no potential left in the past. We can learn from it, we can be softened by it, but we can’t rewrite it.

For so many people, the mind catapults from one to the other. Longing and sadness over things behind them, fear and anxiety over things out ahead of them, and the poor nervous system goes along for the ride. The most powerful way I know to land yourself fully in the now, is to become aware of your breath. That’s the greatest gift of yoga, and seated meditation—they both center around your breath. Those inhales and exhales are always happening in the present moment, and if you can feel your breath, you know you’re here; awake, aware, engaged with life, which isn’t happening behind you, or out in front of you. It’s happening right now.

Worry doesn’t change the outcome of a thing. Believe me, if worrying about something could prevent it from happening, we’d know about that by now. We’ve all had the experience of making ourselves ill over something that never came to pass, right? It’s especially hard when we love people and we’re concerned for their well-being. Maybe someone you love beyond words is putting herself in harm’s way. How do you not worry about that? First of all, when we love people, we make ourselves vulnerable, so you may as well accept that. And, you can’t save anyone but yourself, and you may as well accept that, too. There are certain answers we’ll never have until we exhale for the final time, and perhaps, not even then and that also makes us vulnerable.

Anyway, my point is, we can’t control the outcome of anything except how we face what we’re given, and even that takes tremendous effort. We can love people with everything we’ve got. We can offer an ear, our shoulder, a hand up if we’re in a good position. We can listen, we can grieve with people, or make them a meal, or try to find help for them if we aren’t sure how to help them ourselves, but our worry doesn’t help anyone. If someone is afraid for themselves, you really don’t help by reflecting that fear back to them. If someone is suffering, you don’t serve them by getting down in the mud and wailing with them.

I believe you can help a lot simply by being present with someone, being able to hold a space for someone’s grief or anger or loneliness or confusion or shame. That’s a huge thing you can do, but you can only do that if you show up with open ears, an open heart and an open mind. You won’t find those things behind you or in front of you. They’re within you. When you can show up that way for yourself, and for all the people in your life, then I believe you’re really living. Life is short and precious, or it’s a long and painful; I believe those are the options. Try not to miss too many moments. Life brings enough heartbreaks of its own, we don’t have to make this stuff up. It also offers a million gifts a day if we’re paying attention. It’s easy to take it for granted that we all woke up today, right? But that is a gift. If you have your health, it’s a gift. If you have people in your life whom you love with your whole heart, that’s a gift, even if they’re causing you some pain right now. Loving people so deeply that we hurt when they hurt, is a gift. Try not to miss too many gifts if you can help it.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

If the posts are helpful to you, you might check out my books here <3

It’s Not “All Good”

changingseasons You do not have to be grateful for every experience you’ve ever had in your life. I almost feel the need to write that again. I think there’s enormous confusion around this topic, at least in the “spiritual community”, and I think it’s important to shine some light on it. You can, in retrospect, appreciate how certain tragedies may have made you a more compassionate and insightful person. You might acknowledge that you would not be the you that you are, had you not endured certain piercing heartbreaks. Maybe you’ve even taken this knowledge and used it to help people going through the same kind of loss, and perhaps you can feel grateful that something of value has risen out of the ashes of your grief. That’s all beautiful, but you do not have to look back on your life, on everything that may or may not have happened to you, and feel grateful for it all.

You may think I’m splitting hairs, or that this is just semantics, but I assure you that’s not it. I watched a close family member lose his six year old son to brain cancer, and I can tell you, no one in my family is grateful for having gone through that, least of all his parents. Having said that, his mother helps other families facing loss like that. So is that gorgeous of her? Yes. Can she appreciate that she would not be able to comfort people going through something that horrendous in the same way had she not gone through it herself? Of course. But would she gladly give back that experience and be less insightful in that area? Yes. One hundred percent, yes.

I get really fired up when I see these quotes, or hear people spouting platitudes about everything being wonderful and positive. It’s so alienating for people who are in pain, who are grieving or suffering, to also feel they’re supposed to somehow trust that it’s “happening for a reason”, or to have faith that “someday it will all make sense to them.” Some things will never make sense. Some things fall so far outside of anything we could call sense, it’s asinine to try to put them in the same sentence.

I recognize we all want to make order out of chaos, create stability in a vulnerable world. I know we’d love to feel there’s some quid pro quo, and that it’s all cause and effect. “If I’m a good person, then nothing bad will happen to me, or to those I love,” but it doesn’t work that way. Knifing things happen to incredibly kind people sometimes. Perhaps you believe there’s a larger picture, and that it all works out in the end. Maybe you’re right, and maybe you’re wrong. We could shout our opinions from the mountaintops all day long, but ultimately we all have to figure out what makes sense to us. We all have to grapple with these questions and piece together answers we can sleep with at night. When we tell a grieving person their tragedy has befallen them for a reason, even if we believe that and we mean well, we are showing an enormous lack of understanding and compassion, and there’s nothing spiritual about that.

There’s the “normal” amount of suffering, and then there’s the kind that brings you to your knees with your mouth full of why, the pain so great it takes up all the space in your lungs, the breaking of your heart something you can feel in real-time. Then there’s the way you respond to what you’ve been given, and that’s pretty much all you can control. How do I work with my history, my pain, my fears, my tendencies, my gifts, my strengths, my joy? How do I lean into all of it, and do my life in a way that feels good and right to me? How do I learn and grow and use what I know to have a positive impact on the world around me? What within me still needs my kind attention? Where do I have room to heal more, to open more? If you force yourself to feel grateful for everything, or you feel disappointed in yourself because you can’t, you’re simply getting in your own way.

Examine your “shoulds”, as in, “I should be able to handle this.” Says who? How old is that should? Is it even yours, or is it something that was instilled in you, that you’ve internalized? You feel how you feel. You are who you are. Obviously, we want to focus our minds on all the things we do have, like our health, and the people in our lives who love us, and whom we love beyond measure. We want to feel grateful for the sound of laughter spilling from our children, our partners, our best friends, and total strangers. We want to feel grateful for the sun on our faces, or the breeze across our skin, for kindnesses bestowed upon us by those we know so well, and those we don’t know at all. Gratitude is a beautiful state that makes us feel all the abundance around us and within us, but you can’t force it, and it isn’t even a sane response in many cases. Facing reality as it is, is my religion. Give me the truth, whatever it is. Let me know myself and the people in my life well, and deeply. That way I can love them for real. When I’m angry, let me examine what’s happening within me. When I’m joyful, let me spread that far and wide. Let me start and end and fill my days with all the reasons I have to say yes, and thank you. But when I’m suffering, grant me a spiritual practice that makes space for that, too. That way I can breathe.

Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

~ Find my books here ~

You Have to Choose It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

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

Self-Forgiveness

Self-forgiveness isn’t always easy, but sometimes it’s the only forgiveness you’re going to get. It’s hard enough when someone else does something hurtful or confusing or thoughtless, but I think it’s even worse when we’re the ones who’ve blown it, and forgiveness is withheld. There’s only so much you can do.

I’d say the first thing is to examine what happened. Were you in a bad place, were you feeling triggered or raw, or what, exactly, when you failed to show up the way you wish you had. Did you allow something to fester and boil underneath the surface? Were you feeling threatened or envious or desperate or cornered? Did something in the interaction force you to look at stuff about yourself you weren’t ready to face? Did you do something in anger, without giving yourself time to breathe and reflect? These are the kinds of questions we need to answer in order to know ourselves more deeply, and so we can show up in a different way the next time.

After you’re clear on what happened, communication is your next move. Share, in whatever way you’re able, and preferably in person, what you’ve come to understand about what happened. Tell them your understanding of how they’re feeling, and ask them if you’re getting it right. Ask them what they need from you to move forward feeling good about things. And let them know you’ve really examined yourself, and this won’t happen again in the future.

If you can’t get an audience with someone, then try a voicemail, and make it short but from your heart. If that also fails, you email, but reread your email and save it as a draft, and reread it again before you hit send. Make sure it’s an apology and not a justification. Be clear that it’s your responsibility, and nothing that the other party did or said. And say you’re sorry.

You will, or will not, be forgiven. That’s out of your hands, but what is in your power is the ability to forgive yourself. We are all human and we all make mistakes, that’s just the nature of this gig. No one shows up as their highest self in every moment. Sometimes something old and raw gets tapped and we lash out, or we’re feeling vulnerable already, and we start to feed the green monster of envy. Be as unflinchingly honest as you can when you seek forgiveness. This way the other party knows you really mean it.

If you aren’t granted the chance to communicate, at a certain point you’ll have to forgive yourself. It’s a sad thing when someone with whom we were once close, suddenly pulls away and refuses to remember who we are (assuming who we are is a kind and loving person in this friend’s life), you really have to give them some space and time. There are also times a person is so attached to their anger, there’s nothing you can say or do. Except send them love and compassion. There are certain things that are very difficult to forgive. Betrayal is a big one, and if you’ve betrayed someone, chances are you’re not feeling very good about yourself, and it’s time to look at that. But we don’t do ourselves any good when we marinate in shame and rage. Look at yourself honestly but kindly, pick up the pieces, and move forward with the intention of doing it better the next time.

If you’re in a place where you’re longing for forgiveness but it isn’t forthcoming, and you’ve done all you can to own what happened and say you’re sorry, at a certain point you have to let it go. Maybe time will bring the person back to you, and maybe not. Obsessing won’t affect the outcome. If you’re in a spiral like that, you have to pull yourself out, and the best way is to choose one thought over another. Once you’ve examined a situation from every angle, continuing to turn it around in your head doesn’t serve anyway. Pick the thoughts that strengthen you. If you need help with that, seated meditation is a good place to start. That’s where we learn we are not our thoughts, we don’t have to believe everything we think, and feelings are not facts. If you need help, I have meditation classes online. Sending you love, Ally Hamilton

Closure Doesn’t Save Us from Grief

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Make Better Mistakes

failureexperience Often people think of their weaknesses or mistakes as failings or short-comings, when really, they’re just places where there’s still some healing or growing to do. If you notice patterns in your life, repeated choices you’re making that aren’t serving you, it’s actually a good thing, because we can’t change anything that’s happening outside our awareness, and many habits fall into that category.

A habit can be a habitual way of thinking about yourself that weakens you, such as, “No one likes me.” This idea may be so ingrained, you’ve come to accept it as the way of things, but if you dig a little, and get yourself some support, you’ll find you can choose a completely different thought. You could flip that idea around and say, “I’m longing for connection. I want to be seen and known and cherished, and that’s a beautiful and natural thing to desire.” Or, “I have deep doubts about my worth, and it’s time to figure out when and why that began.” Then you can get to work figuring out how to let down your defenses and reach out more. How to move outside your comfort zone, and let some love in.

The thing is, when we look back and try to organize our lives into lists of successes and failures, we really lose an opportunity to grow. I hear people describe shame when they get divorced, for example, because they feel like they failed, but usually, so much growth comes out of a situation that falls apart. Obviously no one would ask for heartbreak like that, but it isn’t a failure. It might even be a triumph, if you looked a piercingly painful situation in the eye and decided to release your grip on a story that wasn’t and isn’t yours to write. Perhaps you and your ex needed to release each other, so something beautiful and truthful could emerge. That isn’t a failure.

Maybe you quit a job with financial security to pursue your dreams, and everyone told you you were nuts. Maybe you had to downsize and simplify, but now you’re happy. Now you wake up excited about the day, and grateful to be alive. Not a failure.

Maybe you’ve had a series of romantic relationships that have ended badly. Maybe you have intense fear of commitment, or you find it hard to stay with one person because the grass always looks greener. Maybe you’ve hurt people because you’re in pain. The real issue isn’t what’s happened, it’s what you’re going to do about it. As long as you keep learning and growing and understanding more about yourself and other people, as long as you’re doing the best you can to be true to yourself without hurting anyone else, you’ll do fine. I think it’s a realistic goal to try to make better mistakes as you go along. It’s not that you’re looking for this moment when you’ll be “done”, because that doesn’t happen until your final exhale; it’s that you’re taking the information from each situation, regardless of the outcome, and learning from it. If you’ve hurt people in the past due to your fear or your anger or your confusion, you grapple with all that stuff, so that you don’t continue to hurt people out in front of you in those same ways.

Sometimes we set completely unrealistic goals for ourselves, or we have some very definite picture in our heads of how things should be, or how things should look or feel. Things are as they are. You can’t change what other people will do or want or say or need, but you can certainly work on how you respond. Getting down on yourself won’t get you far. Beating yourself up, or putting yourself down are two sure ways to stay right where you are, feeling awful. Apologize when you have something to be sorry about, be strong enough not to use people for your comfort, and move forward with the intent to take what you’ve learned and show up for yourself, and the people in your life, in a different way. That’s a realistic goal.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Courage–Take Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

OPR (Other People’s Rage)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You Can’t Run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wishing that for you, and sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Betrayal

hurttwice Betrayal 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

Clear Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You can find my books here <3

Keep Your Side of the Street Clean, Then Let Go

reber Sometimes we can get really caught up in someone else’s drama. There are all kinds of people in this world, and many of them are suffering in some way or another. You really have no idea about the interior world of another human being unless they choose to share it with you. There are people coming out of abuse, neglect and abandonment. People trying to overcome betrayal. People clinging and trying to control whatever and whomever they can so they don’t feel so afraid. People with personality disorders, people suffering from depression, people grasping onto their anger like a shield, people numbing out so they don’t have to feel anything at all. If you get too close, you’re going to get some spillover. It’s just the nature of things.

It’s possible that a person in pain has been that way for so long, it isn’t immediately obvious. Everyone has coping mechanisms, some are healthy, some are not. It takes a good long while to truly know another person. If we’re speaking romantically, it takes even longer, because you have to let the dust/lust clear before you can really see what’s there. Regardless, people will show you who they are, and/or where they are on their path if you give them enough time. Some people have walls up. Some people are angry and nasty because they’ve been hurt and disappointed so much, they can’t think of anything else to do but keep people out. You cannot negotiate with a caged animal.

When people are in fear or in anger, there’s no point trying to communicate. There’s also no need to take it personally, unless you did something hurtful intentionally, or not. If you have something to own, by all means own it. The art of the apology has gotten lost in recent years. “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not a satisfying apology, nor is yelling, “I’m sorry!”, or justifying what you did because what they did was worse. Unless you’re five, “He made me do it” isn’t going to fly, but if you haven’t done anything except cross this person’s path at a time when they can’t or won’t do anything but rage at you or shut you out, move along.

We can only manage our own side of the street. Honest communication is always good. By all means, try to speak about how you feel, or what you want, or what your fears are. Try a few times if it’s very important to you. Try in person first. An email is never as good as a face-to-face conversation, because so much can get lost in translation. You cannot see the expression on someone’s face, or hear the tone in their voice over an email, but if a person won’t see you, or get on the phone with you, that’s your next best option. Texting is never the way to go when emotions are high. Do your best to say how you feel, and then leave it. Your apology will or will not be accepted. Your attempt at connection will or will not be received. Your desire to make things better will or will not be shared.

You have power over how much time and energy you give a thing. Sometimes we want closure, or we’re attached to a particular outcome so much, we obsess. We spend hours, days, weeks, ruminating over details, replaying conversations, writing new ones in our heads. Sometimes we look back with rose-colored glasses, or we idealize someone, or we confuse our desire to be seen and heard and understood with a need to have those things happen with someone who is not available to us for whatever reason. People can only be where they are, and they can only have the tools they have. Drama is for the stage. Life is too short and too precious for that.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

You can find my books here <3

Consider the Source

praise Sometimes what you don’t say is incredibly powerful. I’m all for speaking the truth, but there are times when taking the high road speaks volumes. This is particularly difficult when you come face-to-face with someone who doesn’t wish you well, or with whom you have a long and challenging history. We can get so caught up in what people think of us, as if they have the final say on who we are, but you are not here to convince anyone of anything, especially of your value as a human being; life is too short for that. You’re here to be you, to figure out what that means, to uncover your gifts and to share them. Your actions speak for themselves. You don’t have to throw a lot of hours and words at a thing to reiterate reality.

We’re all human, and we will all make mistakes. That’s how we learn and grow, and do it better the next time; no one is exempt from this. You truly want to grasp that there are a lot of people in pain walking around on this planet, and it’s understandable, it’s not like this is an easy gig. Life is a lesson in letting go and opening up. In learning to trust yourself, and in having faith that you’ll keep growing and evolving, and that if you listen to your heart, you’ll also keep moving in the right direction. It’s also a lesson in acceptance and impermanence. It’s beautiful in so many ways, but no one would argue that it’s easy.

Not everyone wants, or is able, to face the reality of who they are, what they want, or the inherent vulnerability that comes with being a human being on planet earth. People in pain spread pain. Mostly, it’s unintentional, it’s just that whatever we have on the inside, is what spills out of us. Most people are not setting out to hurt you, but if a person isn’t happy, if they haven’t healed, or figured out what lights them up, what inspires them, what gives their life meaning and purpose, I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in their opinions about how you’re doing on your own path. Pointing fingers is easy. Pointing fingers at ourselves in a compassionate but honest way, taking ownership of our own lives and our own happiness, is not so easy.

When I was a kid, my dad taught me the phrase, “consider the source”. It’s one of the best gifts he ever gave me. I’ve encountered so many people over the years, (and have certainly fallen prey to the tendency myself), who get caught up in worrying about someone’s poor opinion of them. Especially if it’s an ex, or a family member, or someone with whom they were once close. Not many things feel worse than the idea that someone we care about thinks badly of us, but a lot of the time (not all of the time), people are blaming and shaming in an attempt to avoid their own work. I’m not saying you don’t have accountability. Only you know if you were careless or reckless with someone else’s heart, and if you know you were, I hope you own that and ask for forgiveness. When someone gives you their heart, that’s an act of trust, and not something you want to take lightly, but if you know you’ve done your best to be kind and compassionate and patient and honest, then I wouldn’t spend time or energy trying to sell anyone on how awesome you really are. Sometimes people need to make you the villain so they can get over a situation. They have to weave a story out of the ruins that they can live with, and maybe it’s a story where you’re the bad guy. So be it. It’s really not your job to get inside someone else’s head and try to rewrite their story.

If a person has terrible things or wonderful things to say about you, remember it’s really not your business. Isn’t that funny? If you do your best to be kind and compassionate, to use your time to spread as much love as you can for as long as you can, you’ll leave a wake of love behind you, and you’ll create a sea of it out in front of you. That’s your business.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Rationalization

Do you ever find yourself rationalizing, justifying, and/or selling yourself short? Sometimes we settle for a situation because the idea of changing things up seems exhausting or impossible. Maybe we’re full of doubt, and we question who we are to even think about a different kind of job, relationship, experience, life.

Fear is a perfectly natural feeling we’ll all experience, but it can be incredibly debilitating if we let it boss us around. Feeling paralyzed and powerless is no life at all, because life requires the freedom to move and expand and grow and hope.

This shows up in every facet of our lives, for almost all of us, at one time or another. Stuck in a job that isn’t inspiring because the bills have to be paid; that’s understandable, we all need a roof over our heads and food to eat. Sometimes any job is a gift, but short of that, feeling like your soul and your spark are being crushed in a professional situation without doing anything to change it because you doubt your ability to find something that might make you happy, is sentencing yourself to prison. It’s very hard to do sometimes, but trusting the pull of those things that light you up is always the way to go. Life is pretty short. You really don’t want to spend too much of it tied to a desk staring at a computer screen, unless you’re working on something that gives you a sense of meaning and purpose.

People do this in relationships, too. I hear from so many people who’ve been hurt and disappointed, and have started to harden themselves to the idea of ever finding a true partner. Sometimes when I write about this, people will respond that you don’t need a partner to be happy. I would agree. If you aren’t happy to begin with, no one else can solve that for you, and, not everyone wants to be in a romantic longterm relationship. Some people prefer to be independent, and to have a series of relationships. Being alone and happy is always better than being in a relationship that crushes the light out of you. Being alone and sad is better than that, too.

We have this sense that life is going to happen out in front of us, once we’ve figured all this stuff out. Like life will begin when we find that great job, or person, or move into a house, or get married, or have kids, or lose ten pounds, or set ourselves up so we have enough money to take vacations and enjoy our down time, but it doesn’t work like that. It’s important to really grasp that, or you might rationalize your way into wasting precious time.

Sometimes we have deep doubt about our own worth, and that’s the source of our inaction. I can’t leave this situation, because who else would have me? How could I take care of myself? How could I live with letting other people down? If you’re in something that does not feel like a yes for you, whether it’s personal or professional, the people around you can feel that even if they don’t want to. I don’t know many people who would thank you for staying in something out of fear, guilt, or pity.

Each of us has something beautiful and unique to offer, but the way has to be clear. Your heart can’t open when you betray what’s true for you, and you really don’t want to sell yourself out of living the life you were meant to live.

Wishing you strength, courage and love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Letting Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

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

Motherhood

Someone asked me recently what I thought was the best and hardest part of being a mother. The best part is having your heart expand to a degree you wouldn’t have thought possible. To love so deeply and so completely, you’d do anything and everything to support your child(ren)’s growth, happiness, well-being and joy. The gifts of those impossibly soft cheeks, those beautiful eyes staring up at you, that tufty hair and tiny little grasping hand around your finger. The first smile, the first word, the first laugh, the first step. The first time you’re asked a question and you have to pause and breathe because it cuts right through you, like, “Are you going to die someday?”

Being a mother slices you open. If you didn’t realize you were vulnerable before, you will now. All you want is to see the expansion of this person who’s come to you. You want to discover what’s going to light them up and bring them joy. You want to nurture those sparks of interest and see what blossoms. You want to be there. And if you’re awake, you’ll understand that nothing is promised. I found a lump in my breast last year that turned out to be benign, but that’s the kind of thing that brings you to your knees. Please let me be at their graduations. Let me be there when someone breaks their heart for the first time, the second, maybe the third. Let me be there when they’re teenagers and they’re confused or insecure or scared or they feel awkward or different. Let me be there for the “ordinary days’ when it’s about drop-offs and pick-ups and packing lunches and going to the park. When homework needs to be done, or they need haircuts. Let me be there. So maybe that’s the hardest part. Accepting the vulnerability of the thing.

But I also think that can be the part that inspires you to show up, all the way, every day. To give them everything you’ve got. To make sure they know their feelings matter, and you listen when they speak. To make every day full of, and about, love. Of course you’ll lose your patience sometimes, you’re a human being. So you can also learn to forgive yourself, and to show them what it looks like to apologize from your heart, so they’ll know how to own their mistakes, too.

If you do it well, you’ll end up with grown children who want to hang out with you. That’s what I hope for, anyway. That my kids will want to call, or have dinner, or take trips when they’re not living in the same house with me anymore. Then I’ll think I must have done a good job. But even more than that, I think the thing is to raise happy, kind, compassionate people who know themselves. Who understand the best thing in life is to give from your heart, and that if you feel of service, your life will have meaning and purpose.

I hope they grow into adults who won’t be attracted to people who don’t know how to be kind or how to love. I hope they honor themselves and follow their hearts and contribute in some way to raising the happiness quotient of the people around them. Motherhood asks it all of you. It asks you to give in every way possible, and it also asks you to let go. To love for real. To accept, to celebrate, to cherish and to support the happiness of your children, even if, and maybe especially if they’re traveling down a path you wouldn’t have chosen for them.

And let me say this. Sometimes you have to mother yourself. If you have healing to do, if you doubt whether you’re worthy of love, if you feel stuck, or scared or confused or frustrated, or if you’re in a state of self-loathing, you’re going to have to re-parent yourself. So that the voice inside your head shifts from one that might be full of criticism and a lack of forgiveness, to one that’s nurturing and kind. There are so many different healing modalities available to work on this—yoga, meditation, therapy, journaling, getting out in nature, reading good books. If you weren’t mothered the way you wanted to be, it’s never too late.

But if you were, I think the nicest gift you could give your mother is just to sit and meditate on all the ways she was able to show up for you, whether she’s with you, or with you in spirit. Just to sit, and allow yourself to be filled with gratitude for those qualities that exist within you, as a result of what you saw at home. Because that’s really where it starts. That’s our first experience of love. Wishing you some right now, and sending a heaping dose to all the mamas out there. Happy Mother’s Day whether you have babies, or you’re birthing something else into existence, like your art, or a different way of moving through the world. Remember that birthing anything into this world requires love, bravery, challenge, courage, faith, and compassion for yourself. Ally Hamilton

People Aren’t “Against” You

foragainst Sometimes 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

Getting Over It

standards Getting over a toxic relationship is like breaking an addiction. Something in the interaction had or has you hooked, and that something is connected to a place deep within you that is unhealed and in need of your kind attention. Sometimes we just don’t have a time stamp on a thing. Whatever the wound is, it’s as fresh as if it just happened, and we’re drawn to scenarios that will play out that pain in different ways again and again, thinking this time, we’ll get our happy ending.

You’ll never heal that way. If the people who were meant to love, nurture and protect you when you arrived in this world were unable to do that, you may have internalized the experience and organized it in such a way that you grew up doubting whether you were worthy of love. Children don’t think to question their parents. It doesn’t occur to a child that maybe they’ve shown up in mom’s or dad’s world at a time when they are ill-equipped to express love. People can only be where they are, and they can only have the tools they have, but we don’t think of our parents as fallible human beings until we get older. When we’re little, they’re god-like, all-knowing, all-powerful figures. So if they say we’re bad or unwanted or ungrateful, if they say we have a mean-streak, or we’re overly sensitive, or lazy, or that we’ll never amount to anything, if they say we’re fat and unlikeable, man do we have healing to do.

Those are extreme examples, of course. Sometimes the messages are subtle. Maybe mom or dad was elusive, always working, vaguely absent, highly critical, or never around. Maybe it wasn’t anything they said, maybe it was just a lack of interest or engagement. Our early experiences shape the way we feel about ourselves, other people, and the world at large, and if you emerged from your childhood with serious doubts about your value as a human being on planet earth, you’re very likely to act out that doubt in your adult life. Thus, many intelligent, beautiful people find themselves in relationships they never could have foreseen, accepting treatment they don’t want, and feeling powerless to walk away, act on their own behalf, or stand up for themselves.

Maybe you know people like this. You think, “What the f&ck is s/he doing?! S/he’s so smart and kind and funny and gorgeous. Why is s/he dating that awful guy or girl?” Or, “What is up with his taste in women (or men)? Why does he keep picking these critical, cold, controlling people?” And let me be really clear: these aren’t gender-specific qualities. There are controlling men and women. There are elusive people of both genders. A lot of human beings struggle with what it means to be in relationship, and not just romantically. What it means to show up for other people, or to be kind, patient, caring, and considerate, and most of these people struggle with this stuff because of their own early experiences. We tend to repeat what we know, until we know better.

So how to recover from toxic relationships, whether with an ex, your boss, an old friend who’s never really acted like one, or a family member? First, you have to figure out whether you want to have this person in your life. Sometimes it isn’t a matter of choice, and in those cases you’re looking at boundaries. How do I have this person in my life, and still honor myself? This comes up with family members. It’s not easy or desirable to write a person off. Sometimes you must, in order to love yourself well. You can’t change other people. You either accept them as they are and figure out how to interact in a way that’s okay for you, or you remove yourself from the relationship. If a person relentlessly tears you down, you’ll have to end that because your first priority must always be to care for your tender heart. The alternative is to make yourself hard and cold, and what kind of life is that?

If it’s an ex and you’ve been participating in a relationship that crushes you, you have to walk away. How do you do that when you feel hooked? It takes enormous effort, support, and vigilance. Therapy is a very good plan because you really want to identify what drew you in in the first place. What within you decided to stay the first time you saw evidence that things were not good? I’m talking about emotional or verbal abuse, and of course, there’s also physical abuse in some cases. What within you felt or feels you deserve that? Take the onus and attention off the other person and the way you related to him or her, and put it back on yourself, because you’re with you for the long haul. The story to examine is always the story of your participation.

If you have something within you that is unhealed, then your job is to look at it. That’s why you’re in pain. Love is not abusive. Love does not tear you down and make you feel like sh&t. Love doesn’t tell you how flawed you are, and how you never measure up. So if you’ve walked away from something where those dynamics were in play, it isn’t love that you’re missing. It’s the pull of that interaction, and your deep desire to get the outcome that’s going to make you feel good, but no one else can solve that or fix that for you, and certainly not someone who can’t love you. You really have to turn your attention to loving yourself, so that you aren’t continually attracted to situations that are going to deplete you and dishonor you.

Find a great therapist. Find a great yoga teacher. Hang out with your best buds. Hike. Read beautiful books. Listen to music that uplifts you. Cry. If you have anger, go hit a bag or take a kick-boxing class. Journal. But don’t tell yourself the single life sucks and this crappy treatment is better than being alone, because it isn’t. And don’t tell yourself you’re getting old and you’d better latch on to the nearest person because this is your last chance, because it isn’t. Or that this treatment you’re enduring is just the way of things. Life can be long and miserable if you participate in the destruction of your own beautiful light, or it can be short but full of fire and beauty and love. Always run toward what’s true for you. Take the time to do the work to heal so you can enjoy your life. You don’t have forever, after all.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Consider the Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sing!

birdsingsong Choice involves loss, and for many people, paralysis at a crossroads is a desire to choose without losing. It’s not always easy to let go of ideas or feelings or questions or desires, and boldly pick a path. For most people there’s some fear, and a need to grapple with all the pros and cons of moving one way or another.

Commitment to anything—another person, a job, your life’s purpose, a move to a new city, a lease on a house, or a car, or a new way of being, also involves the decision to release other options, at least for a time. If you decide to commit to a romantic partner, you’re also deciding to forego explorations with anyone else. If you live in one place, you’re giving up the culture, geographical benefits, aesthetics, flavors, smells, rhythms, and personality of any other.

If you decide you have to start living your life in a different way, and you commit to that journey, you’re also saying goodbye to your old way of being, your coping mechanisms, your comfort zone, your dynamics with all the people who’ve known you forever. Choosing and changing aren’t easy because we can’t predict the future, and sometimes fear becomes overwhelming. What if we pick the wrong path? What if we commit our time and energy to something or someone, and learn down the line that it just doesn’t feel right? How will we recover, or shift gears, or handle the guilt of disappointing the people in our lives, or ourselves?

The thing is, you go with your gut, with all the information you have at hand, and with a willingness to give a thing everything you’ve got. If it turns out it’s not the right path, then you’ve learned a tremendous amount, and you change course again. It’s never too late until your final exhale, and most people don’t have it all figured out when they graduate from college. We start asking our kids at two, three, four years old what they want to be when they grow up, and we ingrain in them this pressure to know, but we’re always in process and the story is always unfolding, and if you can’t roll with it at least a little bit, you’re going to suffer.

You’ll never know if something is right unless you give it a go, and as human beings we are fallible and vulnerable and we each grapple with our own pain. Life isn’t linear, it’s everything all at once, and so are we. We’re confident and scared and happy and lonely and full of love and judgement and beauty and shame and joy and sometimes deep insecurity or self-loathing. At the very center, I really believe there’s love, and I don’t think we have much time to waste longing for a crystal ball. I think you’re better off choosing boldly, and trying with all your heart than you are agonizing and having the same conversation nine million times. Pick Paris, and if it doesn’t work out, give Positano a go. Pick Jack, and if that doesn’t work give Sally a go. Just pick something, and go for it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Speak Your Mind

voiceshakes Clear 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.

susiesally It 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