Tag: wellness

Life Without Love

When I look back on my life so far, I’ll tell you what stands out for me: relationships. Relationships to people, and to the things that bring me joy. My parents, my grandmother, my aunt and uncle, and my amazing cousins. My first best friend and her family, and their cat, Muffin. My little brother who’s now taller than I am and has been making me proud since the moment I laid eyes on him. Girlfriends I’ve had since high school who are like sisters to me. My first crush. My first love. Every love I’ve ever had. Teachers who changed my life. People who’ve practiced with me for years and are now like family. The women in my life who are strong and compassionate, and there when there matters. My beloved dog, and most of all, my two incredible children. Life is about love. That’s the stuff, that’s the glue and the point. There’s the love that you give to all the people in your life, and the love you receive, and then there’s what you love. That thing that lights you up, whatever it may be (and maybe you haven’t discovered it yet), but that’s the joy in life, to share what you love. To the extent that you’re able to open your heart and follow your heart, and give and receive from your heart, you will love this life.

That doesn’t mean you won’t suffer. The more you open your heart, the more you allow yourself to love deeply, all the way, with everything you’ve got, the more you take the chance that you could be hurt, devastated. My grandmother is gone, and way too soon. She taught me about hugs where your face gets crushed into huge, perfumed bosoms and you don’t care because you’re three and you understand this is what safety feels like, and about singing someone to sleep even if you’re totally off-key, just because you love them, while you trace their face with your fingertips. She taught me about iced tea in summer, from a pitcher, with some kind of magic mixed in, and the smell of tomatoes growing on the vine, and she taught me about loss, because even though she died just before my fourth birthday, the world I knew changed so profoundly there was no way to miss it, even at that age. I think of my mother, who’d lost her dad at thirteen, and then her mom at twenty-eight, when she still needed her, with a four year old on her hands. I still think of my grandmother every day, with gratitude and the hope that I’m teaching my kids about love the way that she taught me.

Earlier today as I was walking with my four year old daughter on the street, a man stood to the side, watching us. My girl was telling me about something very important to her, waving her other little hand around and I was listening intently. Sometimes she comes out with stuff that blows my mind. The man had all of his belongings in a shopping cart, and as we passed he smiled a huge smile and revealed a missing front tooth. “That’s it,” he said, “that’s right,” and I smiled back and said, “It is, isn’t it?”

Without love, you’re sunk in my opinion; you may as well throw in the towel, but it need never come to that because you are love. That’s really what I believe. I believe we’re made of energy, and the energy is love, and if you open to that, life will make all kinds of sense. If you don’t, it will be like a puzzle where none of the pieces fit, no matter how many times you turn them this way or that, or try to jam them in out of frustration. The pieces don’t always fit, the puzzle may never come together exactly as you see it in your head, but if you open to love, you also open to the possibility that life might bring all kinds of wonders in your direction. I could never have imagined my son’s smile, or my daughter’s, and how they would light me up and bring me to my knees at the same time. The feeling of those little arms wrapped around my neck, the emotion that rises to the surface and out the corners of my eyes at the craziest times, without warning, over moments that might seem meaningless from the outside. Love makes you face your own vulnerability, acknowledge it, tip your hat to it, and plunge forward regardless.

It’s really easy to get caught up in the details, worries and responsibilities, in the deadlines, plans and work, and lose sight of the whole thing. It’s trite to talk about what will be on your gravestone, but sometimes that’s not a bad way to check in with yourself and your priorities. Life and love can be found in the details, as long as you’re paying attention to the right ones. Look closely, and may your tree bear all kinds of fruit and blossoms.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Your Life Belongs to You

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Underneath the Words

In the heat of conflict, so much can get lost in translation. When we feel attacked, wronged or misunderstood, it’s so hard to pause, breathe and listen, but if you think back to your angriest moments, underneath the rage there was pain. When people yell it’s because they don’t feel heard, seen or understood. Some part of them is crying out for recognition, for help.

Sometimes we’re like a bunch of talking heads. We get so caught up in the story we forget to see the person; to look into their eyes and maybe put a hand on their arm. Sometimes we all need a tether, a way back to the moment. We need to know we’re being seen and felt, but too often people spend time together and there’s no real connection, just a lot of words, a lot of editorializing. Have you ever walked away from lunch with a friend you love feeling lonely? Maybe you went with a story on your mind and you told your story and you guys talked about it, but your lunch never really gelled because you went with a plan, and didn’t allow for the possibility that maybe your story didn’t need to be told. Maybe you’d already told it too many times. Maybe something beautiful could have happened if you showed up and opened to the moment. Maybe you missed the fact that your friend had an energy about them. Maybe they needed you. Maybe there was a glimmer of mischief or pain or restlessness you missed and cannot have back.

People say things they don’t mean all the time, especially if they haven’t worked on healthy ways to express their feelings. Lots of people push things down until it’s too much and then they explode. Words can be very powerful; I’m not suggesting you don’t want to work on the way you communicate if what you’ve been doing so far isn’t working for you or the people in your life. Learning how to handle your anger in a way that doesn’t burn the place down, and everyone in it including you, is essential if you want to be happy, but no one operates from her highest self in every moment. I know people who write off relationships with family members because someone said something when they were drunk at a wedding eight years ago. Try to see underneath the words. Look for the pain because if you can see that in another person it will soften you and then at least you create the possibility that you can forgive them and release yourself from the burden of carrying all that anger around with you.

Last year a woman wrote in and asked how she could stay on the Facebook fan page, but not see the “inspirational posts” I was writing. She sent an email to me personally to ask. I told her the page was mostly the blog posts, and if she didn’t want to see them, she could just unlike the page. She wrote back and said she wanted to see the “other stuff” but not the posts. I was intrigued by the fact that she wanted to be sure that I knew that she didn’t like what I was writing so I went to her page and saw that she was a writer and a teacher, and I understood something about my posting and the community we have going here was difficult for her to see. I couldn’t say exactly what was going on with her, but there was pain there. So I just responded nicely because it’s terrible to feel frustrated, resentful or unseen, so much so that you want to lash out at a stranger.

A lot of the time we take things personally. It’s hard not to, especially when you feel criticized or rejected. The truth is, most of the time it has nothing to do with you, and once in awhile, someone will just not get you. I would say, always look for the feeling. Words can be misleading, but feelings are fairly clear. You don’t have to respond to someone’s pain with anger. You don’t have to take on their view as if it’s true. You don’t have to defend yourself over every slight. Most people have a lot of pain. Sometimes a hug, literal or figurative, goes a lot further than a thousand words.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

One Small Step

If you’re like most people, you’ll have times in your life when you’re feeling really low; perhaps you’re having one of those times right now. There’s pain in this thing, whether your careful plans unfold the way you’d hoped, or they don’t. Sometimes we create a real mess with the choices we’ve made and other times life puts obstacles in our paths that feel insurmountable. It’s important to remember the temporary nature of all things, including your feelings. How you feel now is not how you’ll always feel. How things are now is not how they’ll always be.

There’s no greater paralyzing force than hopelessness. Without hope, simply getting out of bed is hard. If you’re really devastated, just breathing in and breathing out is an effort, finding a reason to take a shower, eat anything, or do anything other than allow the tears to slip from the corners of your eyes seems like too much. If your pain is coming from an external source — the loss of someone you love beyond words, for example — then time will carry you to a place where you can begin to put the pieces of your life back together. Not the way they were, though, in a new way that leaves space for your loss, that allows some room for your grief. It may be something you carry with you from now on, but as you find your way, you’ll realize there’s also some space for joy, that not all is lost.

If you’re in the midst of it, be kind to yourself. I get emails from people sometimes who are really going through it, and they compound their pain by feeling guilty about how it’s affecting them. “I stayed in my pajamas all day watching old movies,” wrote a woman whose sister died suddenly a few weeks ago. “I know she wouldn’t want me to spend my days like this, but I can’t move. I can’t leave the house, I haven’t done the dishes or laundry in a week…” Now she has the pain of her loss, and the pain of feeling she isn’t handling it well. But to me, these seem like perfectly natural reactions. She’s in shock. She’s dealing with trauma. The last thing she needs is to feel badly about it.

There are less extreme examples every day. People berating themselves for not measuring up in one way or another. I got an email from a man who lost his job and is now scrambling to figure out how to take care of his family, and feeling like a “loser.” Countless people going through break-ups and feeling like they failed, are stuck, or aren’t sure if they should be moving backward or forward. Sometimes the thing is not to move at all. Not to force yourself to have the answers when you’re in a state of despair. The more you beat yourself up, the more you loathe yourself, the less likely it is you’ll find the strength to pull yourself out of the hole. Sometimes it’s easier to feel compassion for other people, but there’s a disconnect when it comes to ourselves. You’re a human being on a spinning planet. You have your own, personal pain that has to do with your own journey, and then you have the collective pain of not knowing exactly what we’re doing here, or what happens after this. So go a little easier on yourself and just start where you are. There’s a Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step.” If you need to, try that on for size. One small step is usually doable even in the worst of circumstances.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

The Best Day is Today

There are so many people out there who feel trapped by their choices or their lack of action thus far. People who look at their lives and think, “Is this it? Is this all there is? Is this all I am, and all I’m going to do with my life?” People living in quiet desperation, feeling scared and small and unseen, and like it’s too late.

The thing is, as long as you’re breathing, it is never too late. You may look in your rear-view mirror and recognize some forks in the road that make you wish you could go back and make the other choice, but you can only be where you are, and other people can only be where they are. If you went back, and everyone was working with those same tools they had then, you’d almost certainly end up heading the way you went, and arriving where you are. There is pain on the path, that’s simply how it is. Sometimes we create more pain for ourselves because of our choices, and of course that can be hard to face. We either grow from the pain and allow it to soften us, or we run from it and allow it to harden us. I highly recommend softening. There’s no point berating yourself or hating yourself, and there’s nothing that will make you feel more miserable or alone if you do.

You start again, and you start now, that’s all. You take what you now know, and you use the tools you now have, and you plant yourself a tree. It doesn’t matter if you’re only going to live long enough to see a tiny green leaf pop through; that’s good enough. In fact, just sticking your hands in the dirt is enough because in order to plant anything that will grow, you have to be working with love and focus and a willingness to be present, to give and to nurture. While I’m talking about a tree here, it could be anything. Maybe you feel totally stuck in your job, but this is how you pay your bills, and yes, it’s awful, but you’re sixty and there’s no point trying anything new now. You can retire in five years and enjoy life then. In the meantime you can live for those two weeks of vacation time. I got an email from a man who feels that way just a few days ago. Doesn’t that sound depressing? What if you don’t make it five years? I mean, I hope you make it another forty, but I’m just saying, what if you don’t? Am I suggesting you turn in your resignation and join the Peace Corps? No, because your entire family would probably come after me, but I think you have to find something that fulfills you every single day. Something you can feed, because as you feed that something that makes you feel a sense of purpose and meaning, you’ll find you’re also feeding that love within you. I don’t think it matters much if you get one day of that, or two weeks, or twenty years. Obviously the more, the better, but something is better than nothing. Dying with the feeling that you never lived is a tragedy. Coming to the end of your life with the knowledge that too many things have been left undone and unsaid must feel torturously bad, and we don’t have an expiration date stamped on our a$$es, so who’s to say when any of us are coming to the end of our lives? If you’re ninety-seven, I’d say you probably want to get your affairs in order and make sure the people you love know you love them, and then I’ll hope for ten more good years for you, but I don’t think it makes sense to wait until we’re ninety-seven.

If you feel stuck in a relationship, start with communication. So many people live in fear of saying what’s true for them; the consequences seem too big and there’s a lack of faith that something new could emerge. Maybe you’ve resigned yourself to “how things are”, but nothing living stays the same. If “how things are” feels really bad to you, open your mind to the idea that honesty is always liberating, and “how things are” could change. You can’t change other people, but sometimes if you change, it creates an effect that might surprise you. I get a lot of emails from people talking about their partners. If only they would be different, everything would be great. This person does this or that, or doesn’t do this or that. You can’t touch any of that stuff. You may have communicated how you feel, and been clear about what you want, but sometimes showing someone is a lot more powerful. You be loving and kind and thoughtful. You do something surprising and romantic for no reason even if you don’t feel like it. Do it as an experiment if you must. Make a special dinner, or plan a date night and get a sitter and surprise your partner. Do something different and see what happens. If you’ve tried all that, and you’ve tried communicating and you’re still in trouble, then you’re going to have to have a more challenging conversation, that maybe starts with, “I’m in pain,” and you go from there. But nothing can grow in an environment that lacks hope. One day of living with your heart wide open is better than zero days. You may have to go through a considerable amount of pain to start living a life that feels good to you, but that’s better than a lifetime of despair.

Start today if you need to. Pick something, anything that will make you feel a little sense of hope or excitement. Volunteering is always good. Giving of yourself is the fastest way to feel fulfilled. If that doesn’t speak to you, sign up for a cooking class, or take yourself out for a nice meal. Shake things up. Clearly, I’m not talking to people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads right now. That’s a whole other set of circumstances. Short of that, find a way to start planting your tree today. Anything will do. Trees that are planted with hope and love and a little bit of trust blossom more quickly than you might think. Don’t wait.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Get Cooking!

I’d guess that most “real” chefs don’t work this way, but for me, I clean as I go when I’m cooking. Of course there will always be pots and pans at the end of the meal, and the dishes you eat on, but everything else I wash as I’m done. I’d just prefer to have less of a mess to clean later. I wouldn’t try to convince anyone else of that, maybe you like to make a huge mess in your kitchen because doing it any other way would disrupt your flow, but in life, it’s definitely the way to go.

For lots of people, the pain of acknowledging that they’ve screwed up is so great, they’d rather hold it in, push it down or run from it. As we’re all human, we will all make mistakes, have moments when we don’t act from our highest selves, make choices we’d love to do over again, and differently. If you come from a background where you paid dearly if you screwed up, the words, “I’m sorry, I blew it,” may get strangled in your throat, they may get choked off by fear. The more you can take ownership of your actions and apologize quickly and from your heart, the less energy you’ll have to spend trying to convince yourself or others that you’re never wrong. The ability to forgive yourself and other people is in direct relation to your chances of opening to love and true intimacy.

Most people want nothing more than to be understood. Most arguments stem from the sense that we’re not being seen clearly, we’re not being heard; this is why people raise their voices. Maybe if I just say it louder, this person will remember who I am, or see things the way I want them to, or admit that they’re wrong. Very often, people dig their heels in and fight for their position. Defenses take over, and the object becomes winning the fight, but there aren’t any winners when two people who love each other hurt each other and compound things by standing their ground. I know so many people who’ve lost years of time with family members over arguments that were completely meaningless.

There are other ways people create a huge mess for themselves. Sometimes a person’s addiction takes over her life, much to the dismay of those people who love her. Sometimes a person’s rage is so intense, it drives away the very people who love him, and want nothing for him but his happiness and peace. Sometimes we do things we know we shouldn’t, but we convince ourselves it’s okay. Making a mess is part of being human. The more you can own it and do your best to make it right, the less energy you’ll spend kicking yourself, or feeling guilty, beholden or resentful. It’s not uncommon for people to shun those they love because they’ve gotten a glimpse of something that’s not so pretty. Years ago, I had a teacher I idolized. Eventually we became friends and I realized he was just a human being like everyone else, but he didn’t like that. He liked the adoration. I offered real friendship, but he wasn’t interested in that. He didn’t want people around who had really seen him, or who poked a hole through the perfect facade. Not everything is pretty and light. Everyone has pain. If you want people to know you, see you and accept you, you’re going to have to be willing to let them see your pain, too. They’ll either receive it and understand and move closer, or they’ll flee. If they flee, they aren’t part of your crew; better to know that.

Life is really too short to let things fester. The more you open to what’s true for you, the more you accept yourself, the easier it is to live in alignment with what’s in your heart. When you’re living in a state of peace with yourself, you’ll screw up a lot less. You’ll never be mistake-free, it’s just that you’ll get used to speaking your truth calmly and with compassion. It’s a lot easier to move through the world without having to hide how you really feel; you’ll make a lot less of a mess that way. Don’t overuse the words, “I’m sorry,” or they’ll lose their power. If you have to be sorry a lot, figure out why that is and get busy working on it. As much as you can, forgive yourself when you blow it, and forgive others, too. This is a challenging stew we’re in, after all. If you want to boil something, get out a pot and make yourself a nice soup. Don’t boil yourself, though. Don’t give yourself a meal of disappointment that you serve over and over again. Clean up what you can, savor everything else and eat good chocolate sometimes.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

The Story is Pretty Good

If-you-want-a-happyIt’s totally unsurprising that we think in terms of happy endings. Many children’s books start with the words, “Once upon a time…” and end with the line (that screws us all), “And they lived happily ever after.” We’re taught and trained to think this way, and it’s reinforced in every romantic comedy and dumb sitcom, too. But happiness is not a place. You can’t take some “right” train and end up there. Happiness is a process, it stems from work you do within yourself, and most of the time (not all of the time, though), it’s a choice.

We have some crazy idea that at some point we’ll be done. Depending on how old you are, that “done” point will keep shifting to a time out ahead of you. When you’re a kid, you might think you’ll be done at thirty–with that right job and that right partner, in that right house driving that right car, feeling….right. Life will make sense at that point, you’ll know what you’re doing, and everything will fall into place. When you’re thirty, you might think, well…I’ve got some of it figured out, there are just a few pieces of the puzzle I need to figure out. Maybe I’ve got a great person in my life, but professionally there’s a strain. Or vice versa. Once I solve the missing piece, I’ll be done and happy. You can keep having some variation of that conversation with yourself for your entire life. When I retire, I can take trips and relax and life will be good. When this happens or that happens, and before you know it, thirty years have gone by and you haven’t been enjoying the story, you’ve been waiting. As if this isn’t it. Then you can allow yourself to be startled when you catch a glimpse of your seventy-five year old reflection in a mirror, still not “done”. We are always in process, and the story is always unfolding. I think when we look back on our lives, we’ll realize they’ve been shaped by whatever life has put in our paths, and defined by our choices and our actions. That as the story is unfolding, we are also unfolding, shifting, growing, responding and evolving. There’s not going to be an end until we exhale for the final time, and it’s my belief that’s not going to be the end, either. It’s going to be the beginning of something else. Because energy doesn’t die, it just changes form.

The point is, living intentionally is the thing. Being awake and understanding this is the story, this is your life, and where you are right now is just a point in time. If you’re not embracing the journey, you’re missing the plot. When I say we’re all screwed by the line, “And they lived happily ever after”, it’s because the end of one chapter is the beginning of another. If you meet someone and fall in love and one day you decide to get married, for example, the story doesn’t end as you drive off into the sunset with your family and friends waving you off. That’s the beginning of the next phase. Because you’re always changing, and other people are as well, you can never expect to settle in and take for granted that your “happy ending” is a given.

Every story has its sunshine and its storms, its demons, its quests, its confusion, its beauty, its joy. Any good story has all of that. People who are motivated by different feelings and desires, plot twists, bumps and forks in the road. What you do with all that goes a long way toward determining what the experience of it will be for you. If you can open to the ride, to the not knowing of the thing, if you can accept that the ground beneath you will keep shifting, and that you’ll never know exactly what’s around the bend, you’ll probably have a pretty good time. If you keep choosing love, you’ll find it’s there for you when times get tough. And they will. If you take the time to truly know yourself, and know the people closest to you, and if you follow your heart, you’re probably not going to get too lost along the way. When I say happiness is a choice most of the time, I say that because horrendous things happen to extraordinarily beautiful people, and sometimes it’s just not possible to choose happiness. Sometimes you will have to accept that you’re in a chapter of despair, of un-rooting, of pain. But hopefully your foundation of love is strong enough that you’ll pick up the plot again when you’re able. That there will be some hands there to help you up, to hold you, to cry with you. And to remind you that it still is not the end of the story.

Life has everything. It’s a mystery, it has some science fiction, some adventure, some action, some tragedy, some romance, and a lot of comedy. But if you’re looking for a happy ending, think again. That will always be out ahead of you somewhere, because there’s no such thing. Don’t miss the story, I think it’s pretty good. Sending you love. Ally

Nothing Stays the Same

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Live Under the Roof of Your Hope

I think most people simply want to be happy, to live a life that feels good to them, to love and be loved, to find a purpose, to feel passionate about what they’re contributing, to feel that life has meaning. It took me a long time to understand that seeking happiness for myself was bound to make me miserable. Thinking of the world and of your life in particular with the mindset of, “How can I be happy? Why aren’t I happy? What do I need to do to get happy?” is like having blinders on. Seeking happiness for other people is a shortcut to all kinds of amazing stuff, like the feeling of being fulfilled, fired up, and full of gratitude. I think we all experience this to some degree. I’ve always been more excited to give someone a gift than I am to receive one. There’s something so awesome about creating or finding the perfect something to give someone and it’s even better if you get to be there when they open it. It’s a way of saying, “I see you. Your particular spark has not gone unnoticed. I know you. I know what will make you laugh or feel understood.” It’s beautiful to give that to someone. You could give a version of that to any stranger you encounter today just by being present. You could say hello, and how are you, and you could care, and you might just turn someone’s day around. Maybe more than that.

What I didn’t realize until I started teaching yoga, was that there’s no end to that. The more you focus your energy on uplifting other people with anything you’ve got, the better you feel, but that’s the reverse of what we’re taught and lots of people end up in despair, feeling hopeless because the “me formula” doesn’t work. Of course you have to take care of yourself, practice compassion for yourself, and learn to love yourself if you aren’t already, but it is absolutely the case that the more time and attention you place on how and what you might contribute, and the more you act on those feelings, the happier you’ll be. If you doubt that, make today about eliciting as many smiles as you can from other people. Extra points for strangers. I guarantee if you do that, by the end of the day you’re going to feel at least a glimmer of hope, if not an avalanche because people are good, they really are. And yes, this world can break your heart, and there are things we need to fix for the sake of our kids and their kids, the planet, and all the creatures who live on it, but directing your attention to how you might contribute to the well-being of others is definitely a huge step in that direction. Good for others, good for the planet, good for you — there’s no downside. Also, you’re wired for that. We have something called mirror neurons; compassion and empathy are natural to us. If you’ve hardened yourself against that, it’s time to allow your heart to break open to the world again. It won’t kill you, it will free you.

Today I don’t hope to be happy, because I am happy. Not everything in my life is perfect, but I have two beautiful, healthy children and tons of love in my life, and I get to spend time doing what I love. What I hope for is the strength to face reality as it is. To accept the truth. To see clearly, and by that I mean, to see myself clearly, to see others clearly, to see the world clearly. I’m hungry for the truth, not happiness. It’s not all going to be happy. Some of it is going to break your heart right down the middle. If you’re attached to being happy all the time, you’re going to suffer even more when those storms come because you’ll have the pain of the circumstances, but also the pain of your resistance to them. If you hope to open to things as they unfold, and if you hope for the grace to accept both the beautiful and the heart-wrenching, you’re probably going to do quite well.

Sending you love, and the hope that you recognize your potential to give and receive love. Pretty sure that’s why we’re here!

Ally Hamilton

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

Trust

Yesterday I received an email from a woman who told me she’s never been in a relationship for longer than three months, and it’s because, “all men lie and cheat, or they leave.” I asked her how she came to that conclusion, and she said, “Because it’s true.” It turns out her dad left her mom for another woman when she was six, and then had several girlfriends while he carried on this relationship with the woman who eventually became her stepmother. Her mom also remarried, and her stepfather had a roving eye as well. She remembers her mom putting her in the back of the car one night to follow her step-dad and see if he was really going to a card game and she remembers her mom bawling as they watched her step-dad enter a house when a woman opened the door and let him in with an embrace. She said she can still locate that sick feeling in her stomach, just like she had as she held her crying mother in that car all those years ago. (I could write a whole post about the damage done to children when they’re forced to be in the parental role.)

She said that every guy she’s ever dated has cheated on her or left. The same thing happened in college and continues to this day. She’ll meet someone she likes and everything will seem okay in the beginning. She doesn’t have a problem letting herself fall, but once that happens she starts to panic. She said it never lasts once the hormones wear off, because no guy wants to deal with all the constant scrutiny and need for reassurance. She’ll get a vibe early on, this one likes a woman at work, this guy still talks to his ex, this one goes out with his buddies a few times a week, and she’ll start looking for clues. Asking questions. Checking their cellphones when they leave the room. Grilling them about their comings and goings. She said it’s not unusual for her to go through a guy’s closets or drawers given the opportunity, to check recent searches on his computer, or to go through his email account if it isn’t protected with a password. She tries to make friends with his friends right away, not just in life, but on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else so she can “keep tabs” more easily. She has “tests” that she doesn’t talk about, but they’re there. Is he calling once a day? Asking her out for Saturday nights? Talking about the future? She said some guys are up front about their commitment issues, and others aren’t, but she assumes they’re there, either way.

There’s no way a relationship can grow in an environment like that. If there isn’t any trust, there’s no foundation and it’s only a matter of time before it crumbles. No one likes to feel like they’re being tested or spied on or paying the tab for someone else’s transgressions. Your current boyfriend doesn’t deserve anger that’s really about your dad, and you can easily flip the genders around here. People drag their past into their present all the time. That’s a great way to keep it alive, and keep yourself triggered, and end up creating the very circumstances you want to avoid. If you want someone to feel like they want to build something with you, violating their privacy is not the way to go. Trust. If you need support with that, reach out, but trust unless or until there’s a reason not to trust. The worst that happens is that you’re disappointed and your heart is broken. That’s okay, it won’t kill you; you’ll learn more about yourself, you’ll grow and you’ll strengthen. The best that happens is you create something beautiful with someone that helps you go deeper and also learn about yourself so you can open up even more to love. If you’re looking for a committed relationship, don’t pick people who tell you they can’t commit, or that they have a history of always being unfaithful. If someone shares that with you, believe them and move on. You’re not going to be the one to change them, because that’s something in them, it has nothing to do with you. Pick wisely, and then open up.

I told the woman who wrote in that all men do not lie and cheat, just the ones she’s picking. We only know what we know. We can only have the frame of reference we have. The first step is to recognize your frame may be severely bent. The glass across your frame may be distorted. You might need to trash that frame altogether, and start building yourself a new one. Believe me, this goes for men and women. I’ve had guys write in who’ve said all women are liars and users. Remember the guy I met last year with the tattoo on his hand, “Trust No B!tch”? If you walk into a situation in defense mode, don’t expect anyone to be able to get to know you. That is the point of trying to connect, is it not? To be seen and understood and cherished, with all your beauty and all your flaws? To be embraced, and held so you can relax? If you have the impetus to want to get close to people, that’s a natural, healthy feeling. Bringing distrust and fear into the equation right off the bat is like deciding you’re going to bake a cake, and blowing up the oven before you start.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Let it Break Your Heart Wide Open

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Don’t Sleep Through the Dream

Human beings are social creatures, and we all want to feel a sense of connection. We come into this world needing someone to hold us, to feed us, to wrap us in something warm, to talk to us, nurture us and let us know we are not alone. (Not everyone gets those things, but we all arrive needing them.) The other night as I was tucking my six-year old into bed he said, “Is this a dream?” And I said, “Is what a dream, buddy?” He said, “This life, this whole thing, is it a dream?” And I thought about it for a second, because, really, what a question and I said, “If it is, it’s a great dream, because I get to be your mom,” and he laughed.

Sometimes we’re so hungry for connection, we accept just about anything. A warm body, someone to share some space with. This is especially true for people who were not received with love when they came into this world. Years ago I used to volunteer at a hospital where they needed people to come in and hold babies who were born to mothers addicted to crack and other narcotics. Most of them were very tiny, and extremely uncomfortable. They’d just writhe and cry, and it was enough to break your heart if you let it, but every so often they’d settle and sigh, and fall asleep for a bit and I’d always whisper stories of all the things they were going to do, all the beautiful places they’d see one day, all the adventures they’d have because we all need hope. Without hope, I think life gets pretty dark.

If you were born to people who didn’t know how to love you well, or couldn’t for whatever reason, if you grew up in an abusive household, or were told you were unwanted, if you somehow received the message that you didn’t matter and no one cared if you were here or you weren’t, you have your work cut out for you because you’re going to have to unlearn those lies, and eventually you’re going to have to understand that it had, and has, nothing to do with you. Not everyone understands how to love well. Some people have very little frame of reference for that. It doesn’t reflect on you, but it will affect you, and you will have to seek out the tools to heal yourself.

The world is not a cold place. There are so many people who care and who do know how to love, but if you believe you’re worthless, you’re probably not going to seek those people out until you get right with yourself. It’s much more likely you’ll go after more people who can’t love you well, or won’t love you, so you can set up the dynamic that’s familiar to you, and try to wrangle yourself a different outcome. You are better off alone, taking stock of where you are, and where you want to be, learning how to feed a loving voice and choose one thought over another, than you are giving yourself to people who will continue to make you feel you are somehow easy to reject or discard. And by the way, if you enter a relationship trying to get something (your happy ending, validation from the other person, loyalty, love, stability), you set yourself up and you set them up, too. If you’re coming from a place of neediness, you’re likely to sell yourself, to bend over backwards showing the person how awesome you are, how much they need you. That’s not the same as giving with a free heart.

It’s a cycle and it’s a dangerous one because if you repeat it enough it will start to drain you of hope. Hurt people hurt people as the saying goes. Your parents may not have been able to love you, and the people you’ve been picking to get close to might not, either. Some people are terrified of real intimacy. They may have grown up with the lie that if you get close to people they’ll hurt you. They may be playing out their own past as well. It’s a big mess when two people come together who have no idea what’s motivating them, what they want, what they need, what lights them up, or what they need to do to heal individually. Everybody’s dragons come out to play, and everyone gets burned.

Solitude and the deep work of healing are where you want to head if you have lies to unlearn. Remember that what you know, and what you’ve known, is not all there is. I learned that the first time I went scuba diving. I was astonished to discover there was a whole, unbelievably gorgeous world right underneath the world I’d been living in. Our emotional life is like that, too. There are whole worlds that can open up to you and blow you away. It may, indeed, be lonely for awhile, but if you want connection in this world, you have to be willing to move through the fire of your pain to get there. If it’s all a dream, it isn’t the kind you want to sleep through.

Sending you love and a hug,

Ally Hamilton

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

Don’t Grip the Pen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you some love right now,

Ally Hamilton

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

Don’t Let the “No’s” Stop You

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Longing

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

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

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

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

Sending you love, as always,

Ally Hamilton

Letting Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Live Out of Your Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

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

It Takes Courage to Surrender

Rejection is one of the worst feelings known to humans. It starts when we’re little — the first time you weren’t invited to a party or a sleepover, the first time your best friend decided she wanted lots of friends and not just you. The first time you were left out of a game, or were the last person picked for dodgeball. Maybe you grew up being bullied or teased or excluded or you’ve always had a tough time making friends. We’ve all had our hearts broken at least once, badly. You could have experienced feelings of rejection from your own parents or siblings.

There’s research that suggests the same part of the brain that responds to physical pain is also triggered when we feel rejected (the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC if you’re interested in these things); that we are as distressed by feelings of being excluded as we are to a physical injury. That could explain the level of panic and desperation many people feel when they’ve been left, and of course there’s always personal history that can compound the situation. Many people experience heartbreak as an actual sensation or mix of sensations in the body — a heaviness, an emptiness, the lack of appetite or motivation to get out of bed, the exhaustion, and physical pain deep in the belly or around the heart.

Have you ever been rejected by someone you didn’t even like that much? Even in that case it doesn’t feel good. If you have any deep-seated doubts about whether you are truly lovable, it’s highly likely you’re going to feel the desire to run toward people who reflect those doubts back to you because if you can convince them, maybe you can convince yourself and heal an old wound. If you’ve tried that, you know it doesn’t work.

Here’s the thing. If someone wants to walk out the door or throw in the towel, or if a person expresses doubt in word or in action about their feelings for you early in a relationship, the only truly loving thing you can do is let them go. Trying to sell yourself is damaging to your soul, it’s going to make you feel sick. Running or chasing after people also makes you sick, like you’re hooked, and can be yanked in any direction. Like you’ve lost your power.

Love with your heart, your mind, and your hands open. People may change or leave, they may disappoint you in many ways. In order to love yourself, you cannot allow yourself to be abused. When you feel like your light is being crushed, and when you participate in the crushing, you really can’t nurture anyone else. If a person doesn’t see you or understand you or get you or celebrate you, let them go and do your best to wish them well. Do that for yourself and the other person, because love does not force or manipulate or control. It doesn’t run people down. I know we all have our visions or ideas of “how things should be,” but you have to meet people where they are. Too many people get caught up in the potential. “I’m so in love with the way I know this person could be, if only…” That’s not the same as, ” I’m so in love with this person.”

Your story may not unfold the way you’ve written it in your mind. You cannot control what other people will do or say or want, but you can heal yourself and if you do that, you will happily walk to the door anyone who doesn’t seem fully psyched to be with you. You’ll do that for you, and you’ll also do that for them. Thich Nhat Hanh on this, “You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.” Not every lid is meant to fit your pot. No point forcing it.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Sit on Your Hands, Please!

Public-ServiceYears ago I had lunch with a guy who was fairly well known in the yoga community. He’d just come back from a month at an ashram, and I met up with him because he was passing through Los Angeles on his way back to Chicago where he lived with one of my closest girlfriends. She asked me to meet with him because she had a bad feeling and she wanted me to be the one to break the news to her if there was news to be broken. She said while he’d been gone their communication had been odd, and she sensed he may have met another woman. She hadn’t asked him directly, and I think part of her didn’t want to know, and was hoping it wasn’t true. So off I went to have a meal with this guy I’d never really vibed with, to have a conversation that could have been extremely awkward.

As it turned out, it wasn’t so much awkward as it was enlightening. He started telling me about his trip, and how transformational it had been and he alluded to a deep spiritual connection he’d developed with this woman while he was there. So I asked him if he meant he’d had sex with her, and he choked on his tea and laughed, and said he supposed so, if that was how I needed to put it. He said it was an elevated experience, and that the feelings were so strong and so deep, he’d had to “honor his truth.” He expected my friend would understand. I told him I thought he was mistaken, and that I believed my friend was going to be heartbroken because she was in love with him, and because they were in a committed, monogamous relationship. In fact, he’d been possessive of her, and threatened by any contact between her and her most recent ex, who happened to be the father of her little girl. They’d been living together for six months at this point, and had started looking at houses. My girlfriend had put a deposit down on a place he said he loved before he left for the ashram, and they were about to close on it.

I asked him how he could reconcile the concept of non-harming with his actions at the ashram, but he said because he was aligned with his truth, no harm could result. Then he said, “I guess I’m just an enigmatic and mysterious creature.” I told him as far as I knew, there was nothing elevated or spiritual about cheating on a person you claimed to love, and that you could dress it up in mala beads all day long, but it was still crappy behavior. I said I thought, “honoring his truth” would have involved observing his feelings without acting on them, or discussing it with my friend before he acted so that maybe they could regroup, or come to some kind of understanding together. Then maybe the experience could have brought them closer, but not this way. I also asked him who describes themselves as enigmatic and mysterious? Because really, there are few things in life that leave me speechless, but I think my brain froze for a good minute after he said that.

Here’s the thing. If you want to be at peace, you’re going to have to figure out how to get right with yourself. How to heal those places that are raw and in need of your kind attention. You’re going to have to learn to observe your thoughts without getting carried away by them. Feelings are not facts, and you don’t have to act on every feeling you have. Not all of them are worthy of your energy, time, attention, or action. The feelings aren’t bad, they don’t make you a bad person. We’re all human and we’re going to have all kinds of feelings and thoughts and ideas and fantasies. It’s how much energy you decide to feed that stuff. How much importance you grant to the thoughts you’re having.

Restraint is a tough one for most people. We all want to do what we want to do, but if you want to talk about being “on the path,” if you’re trying to “do the work,” then you’re going to have to find some discipline. Especially when other people are involved. If your path is causing you to become egregiously self-absorbed, it’s probably not a great path. If you’ve gotten to a place where you think you’re justified in doing whatever you want because you’re honoring your truth or following your calling, you’ve really gotten lost along the way. A huge part of this thing is kindness and compassion. Honesty and integrity. Keeping your word. Thinking about the impact of your choices on other people. I don’t expect everyone to want to work this way, but I cringe when people twist a beautiful and demanding practice to suit their own desires. Call it what it is, and I have no issue with it. Say, “I went to an ashram, and I was really attracted to this woman, and I cheated on your friend even though I knew it would hurt her and I have no regrets, but I do have a huge mess to clean up.” That’s truthful, but don’t call it elevated or spiritual because it isn’t either of those things. As it turned out, the other woman was also devastated, because she thought it was going to be a long-term thing. My friend broke it off, and then had to work to make sure her daughter was okay because she’d become attached to this guy as well. When you leave a wake of pain behind you and describe yourself as an enigma, you’ve taken a wrong turn on your path.

I think people get confused sometimes, because the initial movement when you’re healing is inward. If you want to know yourself well and deeply, you have to examine your pain, your resulting tendencies, your coping mechanisms, the way your nervous system responds to stress, stories you might tell yourself about your life or why you are the way you are, areas where you’re stuck in rage or blame or bitterness. You have to figure out what’s true for you. You do all this internal work so you can understand yourself, so you can be accountable for the energy you’re spreading as you move through the world, and for the way you’re treating yourself and everyone in your life. When you become well-acquainted with yourself, and you figure out what brings you peace and what lights you up, what particular gifts are yours to share, then you can take that information on the road. That’s where the joy happens, in the connection, in the sharing. You can bring it out into the world and shine. The ultimate purpose of all that internal work is to help you uncover your connection to everyone and everything. To recognize that while our stories may be different, in so many ways we’re the same. We’re connected. We’ve all suffered. We’ve all been selfish, and hurt people carelessly or unintentionally. We all have choices we’d love to make again, and differently. That’s all part of the process of growing up. So there’s no need to kick yourself if you were the guy or gal at the ashram. We’ve all hung out there. The thing is not to let yourself off the hook. Not to cloak it in sage and walk out the door and pretend to yourself or anyone else that you’re good to go. You’ll never feel great about yourself if you’re living a life that’s all about you and every desire you have. You’ll never satisfy that beast. You can feed it for awhile if you need to, but you’ll find the hunger never goes away. It will never be enough, you’ll always be ready for more. Mass-consumption has gotten us into all kinds of trouble, both personally and globally. It doesn’t work and it doesn’t feed your soul.

In my view, being, “on the path” means you’re trying to see yourself and others clearly. You’re aware of what’s true for you, and you’re able to express it calmly and with compassion. When “what’s true for you” may end up hurting someone else, you handle it with integrity, sensitivity and honesty. You’re thinking about what you’re saying and doing, and how it will affect those people around you. You’re thinking about the path, too. The literal path, the one you’re walking on. The planet, in other words. Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it with as much consciousness as possible. And when you blow it and don’t show up the way you want to, which will happen, you examine it and figure out what went wrong so you can own it, and make a different choice the next time. It’s not perfection we’re after, it’s a practice. But it does require a discerning mind and a willingness to be honest with yourself.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Follow Your Yes

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

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

See the Soul

dontberecklesswurheartYour heart is as precious as anyone else’s, and anyone else you meet is no less a miracle than you are. They may not be your miracle, but they are just as worthy of love and respect and their own dignity as you, or me, or anyone you’re going to encounter. These ought to be obvious statements, but I don’t believe they are based on many of the emails I receive. So many people lie to each other. If you go out with someone and you have no intention of calling them ever again, guess what? Don’t say, “I’ll call you.” Man up or woman up, and say, “This was a lovely night, but I’m not feeling that certain spark and I don’t want to waste your time.” Ouch. It hurts for a second, or the rest of the night, but then it’s over. It’s better than two weeks of Facebook-stalking and replaying the night in every miniscule detail, trying to unravel the mystery of not getting a call. There are white lies, big lies, total omissions of huge pieces of information. People trying to recover from affairs, from whole other relationships that were happening behind their backs for years. Spouses who find out later their partners have teenage children they knew nothing about.

There are family members and friends who say or do things that are knifing, that are not coming from a place of love. Look at everyone and try to see their five-year old self. That little person in overalls trying to make sense of the world. Knowing everything you really needed to know, and being taught to forget it, to bury it, to cover it over with harder, tougher stuff because the world isn’t fair and people can hurt you. Don’t be one of those people that validates someone’s cynicism, be a person who pokes a gaping hole through the middle of it. See the soul of the person standing in front of you, and treat it with kindness and recognition the way you’d want someone to treat you. It’s really so much simpler than we make it. Don’t lie to people you purport to love. If you aren’t feeling it for your partner anymore, speak up. Try to save it if it seems possible, if you’re motivated to do that, if it feels like there’s any hope at all. If you have children, give it everything you’ve got before you think about splitting up, but don’t lie and cheat and sneak around and justify it to yourself, because you’re really just damaging your own ability to respect yourself, to feel good about who you are.

No one deserves to be abused or ignored. There are few things more cruel than denying a person in pain the ability to let it out. I know people who break up over text messages. Really? Nothing of any emotional import belongs in a text unless it’s happy emotion. You can text a person loving stuff all day long, but you can’t break up over a text with a person you’ve shared a bed with and think that’s okay. Making yourself busy and being vague until a person gives up is also not operating with a lot of integrity. The truth might hurt, but I’d take it any day over a bunch of b.s. or radio silence. A person you were once close to should not find out on Facebook that your mother loves your new partner days after you texted your break-up message. Especially if you’re driving around with a “Coexist” bumper sticker.

I have friends who used to hang out with a couple they’d known for years. The families vacationed together, had dinner once a week, play dates, the kids were like siblings, and one day it all changed without explanation. No dinner this week, we’re busy. We have to cancel our vacation this summer, it’s too far in advance. No play dates this month, we’re overbooked. When my friends asked what was wrong and what was going on, they were told they were being sensitive. Months went by like this, and because they live around the corner from one another, contact was inevitable. Things deteriorated to the point where neither family could bear to say hi to the other, and the kids who were once so close have suffered the most.

Uncomfortable, painful conversations are so hard. Often people avoid them because they don’t want to hurt anyone, but leaving a person in the dark is the most hurtful thing you can do. In a vacuum, people have no recourse but to fill in the blanks themselves. Any doubts, insecurities, fears, self-loathing…anything the person may suffer from is going to slither out from underneath the the stones of their mind and say, “This is why. It’s because you’re not good enough.” Don’t participate in the suffering of another person. If it doesn’t work for you, liberate them, and yourself. It’s not like it feels good to leave a person hanging, or to be dishonest, or sneak around. If you want to be able to look yourself in the eye when you’re brushing your teeth at the end of the day, if you want to be able to enjoy your own company, you really need to learn how to speak your truth calmly and with compassion if you haven’t already. It’s a gift you give to yourself, and to everyone in your life. “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all knowledge.” ~Aristotle.

Sending you love.

Ally Hamilton

Your Heart is So Precious

caringformyselfA couple of days ago I wrote about someone suffering over the loss of a painful relationship and I’ve received a torrential downpour of emails from people in similar situations since then. A man wrote in and said his wife had invited a man from work to a party at their house. She spent the whole afternoon with him, introducing him to all their friends, sitting next to him, endlessly putting her hand on his arm or leaning into him, swimming in the pool when he wanted to swim. He said the vibe was definitely flirtatious, and that many of his guy friends asked if he needed back up. Some of the wives asked him if he was okay. He pulled his wife aside at one point and told her he was extremely uncomfortable and so were many of their friends, but she rolled her eyes and said he was just being jealous again.

He told me the last time this happened he’d discovered she’d been texting and emailing with another guy from work who lives in another state. She sees him at conferences, but for the most part their relationship was happening over their laptops and cellphones. He told me he had checked her phone and her emails, because he had a very definite feeling something was off and he found pictures she’d sent of herself in a bikini sitting by their pool, and pictures of her curled up on their sofa. He saw an email in which she told this guy her husband was very possessive and she might not be able to write as much because it was making him crazier than usual. When he confronted her about that, she again said he was being jealous, and that it showed a real lack of integrity for him to be checking her emails and phone. She put passwords on everything, insisted this guy was a friend, and carried on. Anyway, at the end of the party, it was just the husband, the wife, and this guy left alone in the pool. The colleague did make small talk with the husband, but his attention was definitely on the wife, as hers was on him. She opened another bottle of wine and handed this guy a glass, and asked her husband if he wanted one, too. He said he was tired, and she told him he could go to bed anytime. At that point, he asked the guy to leave. He said he was polite, but he just told him it was late, and he needed to kick him out. That he had to get up early to drop their boys off at school. The guy gets his stuff and goes, and the wife goes to bed without saying a word to her husband. They’re in therapy because she thinks he needs help. As far as she’s concerned, she doesn’t have any problems.

Someone else wrote in feeling pain because she’s in love with a man who wants to keep their relationship hidden. He told her at the outset that he wasn’t looking for anything serious, but she fell for him anyway, and now when she runs into him in public, it crushes her that he acts like she’s just a friend. That he could go from being so close to so cold in a matter of hours. It’s brutal when someone pulls you in and then pushes you away, and for some people that’s their modus operandi. If you get too close, you’re going to get burned because for some, getting close is a dangerous proposition. There’s the possibility that you could find a tender spot and tap into something so painful they fear they couldn’t survive it. Or it enrages them that you’re asking for that kind of intimacy. Not because they don’t want it, but because they aren’t willing to be that vulnerable. If you fall in love with a person’s potential, that’s not the same as falling in love with them as they are. Accept people as you find them. Not as you see they could be or might be one day, and either love them the way they are, or set them free. Otherwise the love you’re offering is a form of rejection. It’s a kind of manipulation. It assumes your love will be enough to save them or change them. You’re going to break your own heart that way. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing where a person has room to grow, but it’s not loving to expect and ask someone to be somewhere they aren’t.

Lots of people wrote in saying they know they’re in something that isn’t healthy but they can’t get out. Some of them have children, and that always complicates things and in those cases it makes a lot of sense to go slowly and make sure you’re clear about the impact your choices are going to have on those around you. Counseling is a really excellent idea, because sometimes your feelings are so intense, they cloud your vision. This is true whether there are kids in the picture or not. How you see a person is not necessarily how they are and how someone sees you isn’t always accurate. A third, objective and compassionate set of eyes can be incredibly helpful. Two people can weave a very intricate web over time, and untangling it is not easy. People frequently become attached to their list of wrongs. Dig their heels in and recount every awful thing that’s ever happened in the history of the thing. The anger is so great, it colors everything.

If you know you’re in something that isn’t growing and isn’t loving, if you’re allowing yourself to be degraded, disrespected, neglected or abused, you really need to find yourself some help and support. Sometimes the way we’re coloring things in the rear-view mirror is also really inaccurate. When I finally left that much older man I dated when I was in college, I suffered intensely for over a year, and he was pretty awful to me. Not because he was a terrible person (although in retrospect I think it’s very selfish for a 37 year old man to chase down a seventeen year old girl), but because he was in an incredible amount of pain himself. Nonetheless, I loved him and thought I could save him and I tried to heal some of my deepest wounds in the context of that relationship, but instead, I drove the stake into my heart a little more deeply. We suffer those relationships the most because not only have we lost this person we thought we loved so much, we’ve also betrayed ourselves. The tendency is to look back and think, “If only…”, this, that, or the other thing. If I’d said this, or done that, or been more this way or that way. You know I’m going to say the work is always inside. You have to wrangle your own dragons and know yourself if you expect to be able to handle yourself well in the context of intimate relationships. If you don’t know who you are or what you want or how you feel or what makes you happy, it’s very hard to figure those things out as you try to factor in what someone else wants or needs in order to be at peace. There are exceptions to that rule. I know a couple who’ve been dating since they were fifteen years old and now they’re thirty and married with kids and very happy. They grew up together and figured it out together, but it’s highly unusual.

The bottom line is if you’re suffering it is your work to solve that and heal it, on your own or in the context of a relationship. You can’t wait for your partner to fix it, nor can you keep pointing your finger in their direction. You have to take care of yourself if you want to be able to nurture anyone else. If you’re depleted, you won’t have much to give. Please don’t allow yourself to be abused. Life can be so beautiful, but not if you allow yourself to stay stuck. Reach out if you need help.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

Love Does Not Degrade You

Recentlysomeoneworthyofurlove I received a message from a woman who’s suffering over the loss of a relationship. She hooked up with this guy a couple of years after her divorce, and at first everything seemed wonderful. He was kind and attentive, and she felt that heat she hadn’t experienced in years. She fell hard. Little by little, things started to deteriorate. He began comparing her to the three hundred women who came before. He’s 62, so I guess he put the time in. He measured her breasts (take a minute with that if you need one — I did), and he told her she needed to get her boobs done to satisfy him and stack up to his prior girlfriends. Then he began to complain that she took too long to orgasm, and that he never had to scramble anyone else’s eggs for such a long time before (insert all the non-yogic things I’d like to say, here). He timed her. With. A. Stopwatch. Nothing like a clock going to relax you!! He let her know he would be going out to flirt with other women and chat them up, and he might even exchange numbers and hang out, because that’s what he needed to feel good as a man. Eventually she discovered he’d made plans with an ex-girlfriend to take a trip behind her back, even though she’d asked if they might take a weekend away somewhere for her birthday, and he said he couldn’t afford to travel. She ended it, even though she says she still loves him and wants him back. Because, I mean, who wouldn’t want a prince like that?! And it seems she went and had that breast augmentation. To make matters worse, he told all their mutual friends that he ended it because she’s jealous and crazy and needs to be medicated, and they believed him because he’s charismatic and the life of the party, and she’s more soft-spoken. I guess he posts things about his current girlfriend and her private parts on his Twitter account, so you’d think maybe his friends would realize he might not be such a fabulous guy to date. Anyway, our friend was emotionally abused and lost all her friends, and moved to the other side of the country to get away from all the pain, but of course, “wherever you go, there you are” as Jon Kabat-Zinn so eloquently puts it.

We could all focus on the guy (and go ahead if you’d like to, because there’s plenty to say there). He’s clearly got some rage toward women, and a deep insecurity underneath all that bravado, some self-loathing, and a lot of pain. But the more interesting thing to look at for her, is why she participated in a relationship like that, and why she thinks she still loves him and wants him back. This is a smart, very attractive woman and she’s convinced she’d go back to him given the chance. Love does not cut you down, okay? It does not ask you to prove your worthiness. It does not bring measuring tape and stopwatches to bed and it does not make you feel, “less than”. If you’re attracted to relationships like that, you have some deep pain. Some seriously unhealed wounds that tell you you aren’t worthy of love or consideration or respect. You don’t love the person who’s making you suffer, you’re addicted to the interaction. Some part of you believes you aren’t worthy, and you’re thinking if you can only attain the love and approval of this person who’s seeing the “truth” (LIE) about you, then you’d be healed, but you won’t heal that way. You’ll just increase your pain.

When you’re stuck in a web like this, you really need to get yourself some support. Someone to help you untangle yourself before your heart is so strangled the light starts to go out around you. This woman who wrote in feels suicidal. How could you not when you’ve participated in your own destruction, and feel compelled to continue? That’s a very dark place to be, and you may need some good people to help you find your way back to yourself. A great therapist would be a very good call. Any healing modality that helps you find your power again, whether it’s yoga, seated meditation, long hikes, journaling, or reading a book that helps you shed some light on your situation. Going back for more is asking for more pain and more darkness. Life is too short for that. Love will never degrade you.

Sending you a hug and some love right now,

Ally Hamilton

Do You Need a New Rx?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

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

Worry Too Much?

Do you ever “boil yourself”? Obsess over a conversation that’s behind you that didn’t go the way you wanted it to? Or worry endlessly about situations that might or might not come to pass in the future? When we look back at a set of circumstances around which we feel unsettled, sad or disappointed, it’s so tempting to try to rewrite history in our minds. If only I’d said this instead of that. If only this person had wanted X and not Y. If only I’d stayed home instead of going out. Thoughts create a chemical reaction in the body. There’s not a lot of difference in the way the nervous system responds to events we’re concocting in our minds, versus those challenging interactions or circumstances that are actually happening.

I think we get fixated when we’re feeling vulnerable or depleted in some way. When we’re tired, or overwhelmed, or feeling hurt. Those seem to be the times the mind latches onto something painful or unsettling, whether it’s real or imagined. So there we are folding the laundry, except we’re not. We’re in some imaginary conversation about something that hasn’t happened and might not ever happen. We’ve conjured our worst-case scenario, and we let our minds run wild. So we’re folding that t-shirt, but our shoulders are up around our ears and our breath is shallow and our brow is furrowed and maybe our jaw is clenching. If you work hard enough at it, you might even raise your blood pressure or get an adrenaline rush. Meanwhile, you’ve missed the chance to practice a little Zen and the Art of Folding Laundry. Maybe you missed hearing your kids laughing in the other room. Or you didn’t see how the sun was setting right outside your door.

Left unchecked, the mind tends to head into the past or the future, but it’s sad because there’s no potential left in the past. I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for examining and understanding in what ways your past might be affecting your present. I’m simply saying there’s not much point in using up too much of today looking backward and trying to do it differently. It already unfolded the way it did. When we race into the future, we often do that with anxiety. Playing out our worst fears, thinking about what we’ll say or do, making ourselves literally sick with worry. There is no predicting the future and most people spend way too much time upsetting themselves over things that never come to pass, anyway.

There’s a real power in being able to pick up the mind and bring it back to this moment. Back to this t-shirt or sunset or laughter in the other room. Your breath is a great tool for that. Your inhales and exhales happen in the now. You can use them to arrive in the moment and open to it. Life is full of pain sometimes. You don’t have to create it in your mind. It’s also full of joy. But you can miss it if you’re somewhere else. Sending you love, and the hope that you’ll experience a little zen and the art of breathing.

Ally Hamilton

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

The Stuff That Isn’t Chasing You

Sometimes people go through experiences that lead to questions like, “What’s the point of it all?” Most people asking this kind of question have faced desperate situations. There are people coming out of physical, emotional or sexual abuse. People who’ve endured the kind of loss that makes you weep if your heart is open and you allow yourself to stand in their shoes for just a moment. Sometimes the pain is really old; I have a friend who watched his father die of a heart attack when he was eight. That will never be okay. My cousin lost his six year old son to brain tumors, and my cousin is one of the best and kindest people I’ve ever known, and so is his wife. I know a woman who drove her daughter to the school bus and watched her get hit by a car as she crossed the street. The parents in Newtown Connecticut who are still suffering and still trying to put their lives back together in some kind of way so they can get through today and tackle it the same way tomorrow. I don’t think everything happens for a reason, or that everything happens for you and not to you. I think some things just happen, end of sentence. I think all kinds of things happen. I know how much we want things to make sense, but some things fall so outside the lines of sense, sense is just an idea. Things happen, and then there’s the way you rise up in the face of the things that happen, and you may be able to grow beauty out of your pain at some point, but it will probably be the kind of beauty and understanding you’d gladly give back to undo the thing that happened.

I wrote something about horrendous things happening to good people recently, and most of the responses were compassionate and kind, but one person said it was Karma, and life is fair, and people get what they deserve. No they don’t, not always, and that’s not a true understanding of karma, either. People who believe in karma and reincarnation feel the soul is going to get the lessons it needs for its evolution, it’s not a vengeful thing. It’s very hard to imagine anyone needs to lose their child violently for their soul to evolve, or that 40 of those parents happened to all live in the same town in Connecticut, and needed the same lesson. Someone else said it’s a person’s thoughts, that what you think about is what you attract, and that you will create what you believe you deserve spiritually. Can anyone truly believe people create that kind of devastation because they think that’s what they deserve? Or that anyone could have thought a thing like that into being? Yes, your thoughts affect your reality. Fear will shut you down, and tremendous amounts of worry and anxiety will create dis-ease within you, there’s no doubt about that. If you suffer from anxiety or are recovering from trauma, there are so many ways you can work with your nervous system, and there are different healing modalities available to you. (If you need help with that, feel free to message me privately). If you’re optimistic and you feel that life can be full of pain, but that it can also be full of joy, and you head into the world with an open heart and a lot of gratitude for what you do have, it will have an effect on your day, on the way you’re moving through the world, on the way people respond to you. But if you have worries about dropping your child off at school from time to time because we are living in a world where some people are slipping through the cracks, you are not creating a horrible outcome for your children or yourself. You’re simply awake. You cannot wrap life up into a neat little box any more than you can go gift wrap a wave from the ocean.

On Friday I had just finished teaching and someone at the studio told me to call my kids’ dad right away. He picks the kids up from school on Fridays while I’m teaching. When I went to get my cellphone I saw a text from a friend saying he hoped my kids were okay and then I saw a text from their dad saying nothing had happened at my son’s school, but they wouldn’t let any parents in, or kids out. A mom at my son’s school had texted saying we were on lockdown, and then a student in my class said there had been a school shooting. I felt the blood drain to my feet. I’ve never felt anything quite like that. The room went a little hazy, and I lost my peripheral vision. My hands shook so much I struggled to hit the right buttons to reach their dad. I didn’t get through right away, so I looked online to see if I could get the story. The shooting happened about fifteen blocks away, and at first they reported the possibility of more than one shooter. I felt personally reassured that it hadn’t happened at my son’s school, but to be honest, I really wanted some kind of visual. Someone to tell me they’d seen my boy and he was okay. Until I saw him myself, I really didn’t breathe normally. My heart went out and goes out to the families of people who were killed on Friday, who did not get to end the day feeling thankful. My six year old spent two hours in a bathroom with eighteen of his friends and their teacher while all this was going on. She played quiet games with the kids. I love her. My son said he wasn’t scared or worried. They didn’t say much to the kids about what was happening. This has become so commonplace, there’s now a procedure for school shootings. That’s the part that might break your heart if you let it. i hope you let it.

You have your wounds in this life. Some are greater than others. Some strip you right down to the bone without mercy, and level you so have to remind yourself to breathe in and breathe out, and sometimes you’d rather not even do that. I understand, but I’m going to tell you something. Just as much as there’s incomprehensible grief, loss and suffering, so too is there joy, love and fulfillment. You get everything in this life, and some people get more of the pain, and others get more of the joy. And maybe everything is happening for a reason, but you’ll never hear me say that because to a person grieving, what could be a more alienating thing to hear than, “I’m sorry for your loss, but it happened for a reason.” Or, ” I’m sorry you’re gutted but it will make sense to you one day” ? Some things will never, ever make sense, and some things will never be okay. Accepting that is often the doorway to surviving it. Staring it dead in the face and realizing you’ll have to carry this with you. This part of you that’s been changed. This scar. But as much as possible, allow your wounds to open you instead of close you. Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Leonard Cohen on the subject, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” You might wish for less of a wound and less light, so to speak, but we don’t get to choose.

What happens after this? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. I can tell you what I believe. I do not believe this is it and then we’re worm food, but I can’t prove that to you, it’s just my hunch and my hope. I wouldn’t even try to prove it because you have to figure out what makes sense to you. Sometimes people scream from rooftops or mountaintops or their Facebook page or the subway platform about what they think. A person who thinks this is it, when we die it’s over, can’t prove that to you, either. You just have to wrestle with these questions yourself and figure out what feels right to you, but also try to open to other points of view. Then you really have to get down to the business of making this life beautiful, even with all of its pain, of connecting and loving and giving and receiving and experiencing. Of being as awake as possible in each moment. Of opening to your own kindness, and to the kindness of other travelers. Of discovering your gifts, and giving them away. Of laughing with those you love until your eyes well up. They will if you let them. Have chocolate sometimes. Go for a hike, feel the breeze on your face. Watch the sunrise or the sunset, or stay up and be amazed by the next full moon or the stars in the sky when you can see them. Go to the ocean and let yourself be humbled by your smallness and your limitlessness, all at once. Take your heart, your open, wounded, gorgeous heart out into the world without fear, and without any delusion that you won’t suffer sometimes. If you come out of abuse, you may have to unlearn the idea that you are unworthy of love, because that is a lie, and you might need help with that.

Love is where it’s at, love is the point of it all. I’m pretty positive about that. If you miss out on opening to the limitless well of love within you and around you, then I think you will have to wonder what the point is. Because it surely isn’t amassing stuff or being a size zero or driving a fast car or keeping yourself relentlessly busy, numbed out or on the run. It isn’t about your bank account. No amount of money can save you from the vulnerability of this thing, but a lot of strength comes from accepting it. You are vulnerable. So am I. We could make ourselves less vulnerable in this world if we opened more to love, within ourselves, and with each other. There’s such an incredible amount of joy to be experienced and understood. I think it’s easy to miss if you buy the hype. If you think you can outrun the experience of being human. People do it all the time. They run from stuff that isn’t even chasing them. Stop. Stand and open to it all, hold it all. Some of it is so achingly beautiful, it would be a real shame to miss. It’s the stuff that makes it all worthwhile. It’s the point of it all.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

There’s No Quid Pro Quo for Life

Sometimes I get emails from people who’ve been through the kind of loss that makes it hard to get up in the morning; the kind where you open your eyes and it all comes crashing back and you just want to disappear, go back to sleep and go back in time and not live in the current reality with its crushing pain and lack of light or hope. Without your effort, without even an inhale to power them, the tears just stream from your eyes, and even that feels like too much life. Everything becomes an effort, to breathe in and breathe out, to find a reason to get in the shower, eat, put one foot in front of the other. The kind of loss that makes you question everything and think, “No. Not this. This I can’t do.” Those are the emails that break my heart, and they’d break yours, too. Because the absolute truth is, sometimes horrendous things happen to very good people.

We all want to order things, to feel things make sense, and that we have some control in this world, some say over our destiny or what might befall us. If I do this, then this will happen, and if I do that, this other thing will happen. But how well does any of that work out for us, really? Don’t we have a whole bunch of stuff we’re taught to do, with the promise that we’ll be happy if we see it through? Aren’t we told if we work hard, and go to good schools, and get a good job and make lots of money, then we’ll be happy? If we look right, then we’ll meet the “right person” and then they’ll “complete” us and then we’ll be happy? It all ends with us being happy, but none of it works, and anyone who’s toed the line can tell you that. You find the answers inside, and there is no formula for the human heart. So this quid pro quo system we’re fed from day one is a lie, and most people find this out after exhausting themselves trying to get it right.

We don’t just fall prey to this ideology when it comes to external factors. If we’re good people and we think good thoughts and we do good deeds, then we’ll be rewarded with a good life, right? Well, yes, as long as you derive fulfillment from doing good for the sake of doing good, because it gives life meaning and you feel a sense of purpose when you extend yourself and lend someone a hand or an ear or your shoulder. The joy in life lies in connection, in uncovering your gifts and giving them away freely. But if you start to think that this protects you, that there’s some kind of good person account you can draw from that will save you from loss, grief, shock and pain, then you’re in some very dangerous territory.

There’s such a thing as chaos, just as we see it in nature. (There are your choices, too, of course. Sometimes people pick the storm, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.) There are tornadoes out of nowhere, and hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis, and they don’t hit the places where the “bad people” live (although some very confused people have made suggestions to the contrary); they are equal opportunity levelers. They hit where they hit, and they wipe out homes where troubled people are living, and where kind, loving people are living. They knock down the doors of lonely people who set the table for one every night, and for families that have too many mouths to feed. This is the nature of life, it brings everything to everyone, and it’s not a level playing field. Some people will lose those they love most in this world violently, suddenly, and with no time for goodbyes. Some will lose loved ones slowly, and wrestle with the reality of their absolute powerlessness to stop it, and other people will not face grief like that.

To think you can earn points against calamity, to think you might rack up some frequent kindness miles is really just misguided. You get the reward from the action itself. You give of yourself, and it feels amazing, and that is all (and that’s a lot). You figure out at some point that the best you can do is create a loving world within you, so that you spread love as you move through the world around you. You let go of the idea that you can control anything but yourself, and even that you won’t do successfully all the time. Have as much compassion for yourself and for every other person you encounter as you can muster because it’s a vulnerable undertaking, this business of being human. Some people open to that reality, and others steel themselves against it, but somewhere underneath the surface we all understand it’s there. Those who try to toughen themselves against the knowledge that we can’t order things are the same people who have a difficult time when someone close to them goes through an incomprehensible loss. People who are grieving are often left to go it alone, because those closest to them don’t want to face the reality that it could also happen to them. They want to run from that idea, and in so doing, they run from the person who really needs that hug, that dinner to be made, that help getting into the shower, or running a comb through their hair, or making it over to the window just to see the sun for a moment. We don’t know. We are not in control. Given that, I say love your heart out. Show up all the way. Don’t let fear stop you from living a life that feels right for you, because you have this moment. What are you going to do with it?

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

Ally Hamilton

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

No One Will Fix This For You

If you find yourself chasing after someone who isn’t making time for you, isn’t treating you well, or seems to be on the fence about diving in or taking off, listen up. When we aren’t loving ourselves, it’s hard to imagine why anyone else would love us, either. If, at your very core, you doubt whether you are truly lovable, you’re going to be susceptible to people who don’t seem overly interested in being your friend or your lover because that tiny part of you that worries you may not be enough will want to conquer the people who are reflecting that doubt back to you. If you can convince them, maybe you can convince yourself. Except it doesn’t work that way. We all want to heal, and we all want to feel worthy of love, but you can’t chase that down. You’ll never find the satisfaction you’re looking for in another person, because that need is too big, that hole is too deep. You’ll drive people away if you look to them to solve that for you. It’s like getting to know someone and asking them right away to please carry a huge elephant around for you. The weight is crushing, and the burden is too much to bear.

It’s easy to see when a person is coming from that fearful, longing place because there’s a desperation and a neediness that’s palpable. It’s a very different energy than a person who’s in love. That requires vulnerability, bravery, and a willingness to be soft, to open and to trust. There’s an excitement to that because you can’t feel it by yourself when it’s real, both people are going to feel it. When there’s something else at play, there’s a sick feeling to it. The need for a fix. The hope that you’ll get that call instead of the confidence to pick up the phone and make it yourself because you know the person you’re calling will love and want to hear from you.

I have two children, a son and a daughter. I look at them with such total love. When they speak, I want to listen. I don’t take a smile or a laugh or a scrape that needs a band-aid for granted, because I treasure them. I cherish them. Everyone deserves that kind of love, but maybe you didn’t get that growing up. Maybe your parents weren’t loving themselves well, and didn’t understand how to love you well, either. Or maybe nine hundred other things happened. If you somehow got the message that you weren’t enough (and if you’ve ever watched television or picked up a “beauty” or “health” magazine, you certainly haven’t been helped with your doubts and fears), then you really have to unlearn that. Because if you don’t, you’ll keep trying to chase down love, and let me just let you know, in case you don’t, love is not something you can own. It’s something you give and you receive, but you don’t get to own it. Even if you heal yourself and make the world within you a loving and beautiful place, that’s not a possession. It’s a gift, and your job and your joy will be to give it away freely. So you can run as fast as you like, but all you’ll get for that is your exhaustion, and a broken and battered heart.

If you need unconditional love twenty-four hours a day, go rescue a puppy, and after you do that, get yourself a great therapist. There’s my Rx for you. Don’t date for awhile, don’t chase after friends who are “crazybusy”, just work on your relationship with yourself. I did that for a year and a half many years ago, after another relationship crashed and burned in the aisle of Whole Foods. I did my practice in the morning, taught all day, took my dog hiking in between classes, and came home to my dog and a good book at night. I wrote in my journal and I meditated and I got my sh&t together so that I truly enjoyed being on my own. It wasn’t comfortable, and I’m not going to tell you I didn’t spend the first few months of that time weeping a lot. But after that, it was actually quite nice, and then it became awesome, and then it became so awesome, I thought, only someone amazing could make me want to change this up. That’s how you enter a relationship coming from a place of curiosity, and not need, so it’s a choice you make and not a problem you’re trying to solve. If someone is running from you, by all means, let them go. You have you. You get to have you. Make that a great thing. Realize what a gift that is so that you value yourself, your time and energy, and would never dream of giving any of that to anyone who wasn’t running in your direction.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Life Does Not Suck

Do you know people whose mantra is “life sucks” or “people suck” or “I suck”? Most of us have been that person at some time or another, even if only for a moment, but some people get stuck there. That perspective usually shows up after we’ve been knocked around by life for awhile — had our hearts broken romantically, in relation to a family member or friend, or in a professional situation. If all those things happen at once, it’s like a perfect storm of suckiness and that can really effect a person’s outlook.

Sometimes I think of life in terms of “birth cycles” and “death cycles.” Birth cycles are times of incredible growth, creation, productivity and expansion, and although they usually involve lots of transition and can be uncomfortable, there’s the underlying feeling of excitement. Death cycles are times when things are stagnant, we feel stuck or trapped, nothing seems to be moving or opening, it’s hard to breathe or see the light, and the path is not clear. These are usually times when we are refusing to acknowledge that something is coming to an end, be it a relationship, a job, or a way of being in the world. Or we realize, but struggle to accept. Death cycles mark the journey from the moment we know something is over in our hearts and in our gut, to the moment we accept it in our minds and start to map out a different route. Then we are on to another cycle of growth. Birth cycles feel better, but we are going to get both in this life and riding the waves is part of the gig. Also, the degree to which we allow ourselves to open to despair is the same degree we will be able to open to joy. They’re flip sides of a coin; you need one to appreciate and understand the other. Pain is often the catalyst for action. When we try to avoid the pain, we disempower ourselves.

This is not to say there isn’t overlap. There are certainly times when one facet of our life is going really well, and other parts, not so much. We have a great relationship, but professionally we feel stuck. Or we have our work life in order, we feel we’ve found our calling, life has meaning and we have purpose here, but romantically it’s a wash. I’m simply talking about those times for people when it all feels hopeless. It’s tough to maintain an optimistic attitude when nothing seems to be flowing, but allowing a perfect or sustained storm of suckiness to affect your overall outlook is dangerous business because it changes the way you walk through the world. A couple of years ago, I drove behind a car with the bumper sticker, “People Suck”, and I was so struck that someone wanted to drive around with that message. What happens in someone’s life that makes them want to buy that and stick it on their car? Disappointment, betrayal, abuse? Heartbreak? Being neglected, left, ignored? All these things can happen to any of us. Not everyone is able to love well; some people are in incredible pain and it spills over onto the people around them. Maybe your parents weren’t able to love you well, and it set you off on a cycle of repeating that pattern in all your relationships, and now you think no one can love and no one can give, but really, it’s just no one you’re choosing. There are beautiful, loving, amazing people in the world who don’t suck at all, not even a tiny little bit.

About a year ago I met a guy with a tattoo on the top of his hand that said, “Trust No Bitch”, and that also blew my mind. Can you imagine going on a first date with that guy? I mean, you’re done before you start, aren’t you? And if you aren’t, then I’d have to think there’s something going on with you, too. Maybe you think, this seems like a fun project! You’ll be the one to change him, right? Or you’re not looking for anything where you have to trust, either. At least he was “out there” with it, at least he was stating it loud and clear, “I don’t trust women and I’m angry.” A lot of times people have tattoos like that, but they’re on the heart, not the hand, so it takes a long time to see them. Nonetheless, they might as well be on the forehead because if you really feel that way, it’s going to affect the way you see the world and interact with everyone. If you think all guys cheat, and you walk into a relationship like that, it’s going to affect everything. How much you open. How willing you are to let yourself be seen, known and understood. How much you relax into it. If you think all women are liars and users, it’s going to permeate all your interactions with women, romantic or otherwise. If you think people suck, you’re going to take that with you to the grocery store, on the freeway, to the barista behind the counter. We’re energetic beings so even if a person might not be able to articulate your “tattoo”, they’re going to feel it and respond accordingly. If someone feels the energy from you of contempt, they’re probably not going to respond with love (unless they’re your yoga teacher ;)). And so wherever you go, you perpetuate the idea that people suck, or no one likes you, but that’s just your lens, that’s the way you’re seeing the world being reflected back to you. If you think life sucks, that’s so all-encompassing it’s going to be hard to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes you really need to get your lenses wiped.

You don’t suck, and people don’t suck, and life does not suck. You have pain, and other people have pain, and life can be full of pain sometimes, but if you’re breathing, there’s still time to turn it around. If you have pain and it’s overwhelming, you need to reach out and get yourself some help and some support. There’s not a thing in the world that’s wrong with that. If the people who were supposed to love you didn’t do a bang up job of it, then you learned some stuff you’re going to need to unlearn. It’s doable. If you’ve chosen to surround yourself with people who end up hurting you, once again, the answers are inside. Your pain is running the show, and you’re trying to solve it but you can’t do that until you identify it and sit with it. When you heal yourself and love yourself, you’re going to choose to surround yourself with people who are also able to love. When you’re coming from love and surrounded by love, there’s no way you’re going to think life sucks. The answers are always inside. Tattoo love on your heart. Everything else flows from there.

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

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

You Can Do This

We do this all the time: we think we have something down, we believe we’ve explored or experienced all there is to know about a person or a place and we stop paying attention. Did you know most car accidents happen within 25 miles of a person’s house? The theory is that people go into relaxation mode. They know the streets like the back of their hands, and the brain goes on auto-pilot. Then something unforeseen happens, like the weather changes unpredictably, or another driver isn’t paying attention, and BAM. Some variation of this happens in over fifty percent of marriages, too. Or at least, over fifty percent end in divorce, and my guess is this is a big reason why. People take each other for granted in one way or another, start to believe they have their spouse’s number down, and there’s no need to really look anymore. No need to pay attention. Your partner goes out into the world every day and is seen and encountered for the first time by countless people. If you’re currently in a relationship, do you remember the first time you saw the person with whom you share your life? Do you remember the first few weeks, few months, first year? That time when you thought, “This person is so amazing. So kind and thoughtful, funny and bright. So much fun. I can’t believe how lucky I am”? I don’t know what little thoughtful things you did in the beginning, but I bet they were sweet.

Anything you starve will die. Anything living needs nurturing, care, energy and love. A relationship is alive. It happens in the space between you and the other person; you get to co-create this third, living thing that would never exist if you and your lover, friend, or child had never met. There are facets of yourself you might never have explored otherwise, places you can heal that you might not have been able to access or uncover if not for the particular dynamic between you and someone else. I’m not just talking about romance. Relationships with your parents, children, siblings, friends, and the person who brings you a menu.

Whatever the interaction, it occurs in the space between you and them. You get to decide what you put into that space. It could be your carelessness, your distraction, your resentment, your rage, your boredom. You could come home and grunt a hello and fling yourself onto the couch and turn on the television and numb out and go to bed and barely exchange a word of any meaning, and you could go on that way for years. People do it all the time. Or you could decide to fill that space with your kind attention. To be awake. To notice, with your love and your concern. With some deep listening. You could think about that space as sacred, as a place you’d never want to pollute and you could co-create something beautiful and deep and strong, with solid roots and incredible blossoms that just keep opening. Maybe that’s a lot to expect during an interaction you have with the person who brings you your lunch or is packing your groceries, but you could certainly brighten their day. You could have some real moments and reassure each other that human connection exists and is important and beautiful. You could bring your whole heart into those relationships closest to you, and not leave anything in the tank.

We are all changing all the time. I’m sure if you think about it, you’ve had serious growth in the last few years. You are not the you you were three years ago and neither is anyone else. There’s really no reason to get bored in a relationship, because if you pay attention, you’re never with the exact same person for long. We live in such a “grass is always greener” culture. It’s so easy to think things would be better with a different partner and maybe they would be. Maybe you didn’t choose well. Perhaps you picked someone and you guys are just not right for each other, but before you point your finger at your partner, check yourself. Check your own attitude, and the amount of care and consideration you’ve been extending in their direction. How much time and energy you’ve been contributing to feeding the love. Because that’s something you can change if you need to, that’s something you could affect today if you wanted to give it a shot. You could do something completely loving and unexpected and thoughtful, for absolutely no reason, even if you don’t really feel like it and then you could see how you’re received.

I get so many emails from people who tell me their partners would be perfect “if only.” You can’t change other people. You might be able to inspire them, though. You could try to awaken that excitement and appreciation and love by sending some out there yourself. Every human being is a miracle. I mean, truly, it’s amazing any of us are here, walking and talking, with our names and the clothes on our backs, and our dreams and our mistakes and our loneliness and our capacity to love. It’s easy to get caught up in what isn’t happening. What other people aren’t doing. What we don’t have. It takes strength to pick your mind up and remember what you do have. What is going well. What you could be feeding. Because I don’t think you want to feed a voice of not enough. Why strengthen that? It’s so defeating. Try feeding a voice of life is awesome. Not easy. Not happy all the time, but awesome nonetheless. See if you can feed that awesome for a little while. If you stick with that, I’d be willing to bet it will change your relationships and your life for the better.

Sending you a lot of love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Embrace the Mess

When it comes to life, the best you can do is try to keep your side of the street clean; that’s plenty of work for any of us. The first step in that process is just to know yourself, that’s a huge and necessary thing if you want to be at peace. When I say know yourself, I mean don’t be afraid to embrace and examine all aspects of who you are and what makes you tick. Don’t reject anything or look away because it’s too painful or you think some facet of yourself is ugly or unacceptable. Look at it all, hold it up to the light, take a deep breath, and understand we all have our pain. Anything you reject causes a war within you and gives power to that voice of “Not good enough. Not worthy of love.” You become the architect of your own heartache and your own suffering. Shame is a strangler.

You are not your thoughts and you are not your feelings. Your actions are the thing and even then, every single one of us has made mistakes. Maybe you’re in the process of making one right now, and you know it but you’re doing it anyway because you feel powerless to stop yourself. It’s okay, it’s called being human. Mistakes are there to help us learn and grow. Obviously you do your best not to hurt other people. You won’t always succeed with that because we are all changing all the time, and sometimes people grow apart or recognize they never really grew together. Or they come together for all the wrong reasons and at the wrong time because they’re both in pain. Knowing yourself is step one because without that, you’re working without a compass or a sense of where you need to watch your step, have extra compassion for yourself, or recognize when you’re about to repeat a pattern that causes you pain.

Feelings are not facts, and not every feeling deserves or demands our action. In fact, there are many feelings we’ll all have that we’d do best to sit with and breathe through. Sometimes someone will tell me they had to honor their truth in a particular moment. You don’t have to do anything. A lot of crappy behavior can be excused under that umbrella. Better to sit in the rain instead, because it won’t last forever, and if the feeling you’re having will cause pain to someone else you’re really better off letting it wash over you. You’ll be grateful you did. Those are the moments we build character, integrity and self-esteem. When you act instead, look at it and grow from it. Apologize when appropriate, and hope for forgiveness. Eventually, you have to forgive yourself. Guilt travels with shame, and if you host them for too long, you won’t get very far. Forgive other people their humanness, too when you can, and at a certain point you’ll look around and realize you have a group of amazing friends who really see you and truly love you.

You can do your best to be accountable for the energy you’re spreading. After doing the work to heal what needs to be healed so that your pain isn’t ruling your life (because it really doesn’t need to be that way), then you can speak and act in alignment with what’s in your heart. Keeping your word becomes easy because you won’t need to lie. You won’t be covering anything up, and you also won’t be willing to betray yourself. Once you get ahold of that one, trusting yourself, taking care of yourself, and being kind to other people is a lot easier.

Having said all of that, realize you can do all that work, heal yourself and create a loving world within you and life will still be messy because we are all complex and life brings its everything at every one of us, some more than others. Not everyone will be thinking about how to keep their side of the street clean and even if you think about it quite a lot, sometimes you’ll blow it. We will all create situations we’d never have dreamed of, because life keeps unfolding, and one choice leads to another, and suddenly you realize this is your life.

It’s full of every color and every feeling and every sorrow and joy and laughter and heartache and beauty and devastation and full moons and tornados and teenage boys who slipped through the cracks, and teenage boys who thought of something no one else ever saw and grew up to be Albert Einstein, or Jaques Cousteau and millipedes and rain forests and skyscrapers and the chair you’re sitting on. Your first love and your first broken heart and your first really bad scrape and the first time you felt ashamed and the first time you felt understood, and the last time you saw that person. Your mother, who gave birth to you, and that girl in the first grade who had a smile like the sun. Maybe she grew up and lost someone so close to her the world collapsed on that smile for a time, or maybe she’s somewhere, right now, saving the world in her own particular way like Marie Curie or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Life is full of everything. It’s incredibly gorgeous sometimes, and other times it will break your heart in ways you never thought possible. It’s amazing, but it is not clean and you can’t tie it up in a neat little box with a ribbon on top, and aren’t you really grateful for that? I am.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Let Go or Wear Bananas

When my son was about two years old, I began going to the Mommy and Me parenting group at his preschool. We met once a week to talk about child-rearing issues, but in actuality they turned out to be mostly mom issues. One woman was having a very tough time with her son in the mornings. He wanted to pick out his own clothes, and when she resisted he’d throw himself on the floor and scream until he was blue. It had been going on for months, and by the time she basically sat on him and got him dressed in the clothes she’d picked out he was exhausted and angry and wouldn’t eat breakfast, he’d throw it at the walls. Then she’d have to wrestle him into his car-seat, and once they were at school, he’d beg her not to leave. So she was pretty beaten down and most of the time she’d arrive with some kind of food in her hair. Banana, or eggs.

I’d experienced the power-struggle over getting dressed with my kid, too, and had finally just gotten him a stool so he could open his dresser drawers. I figured he was becoming autonomous, and dressing himself was part of the process. Plus, he was making it pretty clear with his exclamations of “MY do it!” I don’t mind telling you he picked out some pretty interesting outfits for awhile. There was also a period of almost a year when he wanted to be called “Kobe” even though that’s not his name. (Yes, the Lakers games were on in the house at the time.) So there he was dressing himself outlandishly, and everywhere we went, my friends good-naturedly called him Kobe. Once at a supermarket, a woman began talking to him as he sat in the cart at the checkout line. He was wearing one of his hand-picked outfits, a green and white striped shirt, some kind of plaid shorts, and black socks pulled up to his knees. The woman told him he was adorable and asked him his name and he said, “Kobe”, and I didn’t correct him because, really, what difference does it make? I’ve been enjoying my kid from moment one, and I love watching him unfold. But this woman looked at me like I had three heads and said, “Unbelievable. Good luck with your kid,” and huffed off to another line shaking her head. I started laughing, mostly from the surprise of it, and Dylan started laughing, too. I leaned down and told him my name was Derek Fisher, and we went about our day. But the mom at school wasn’t okay with letting her kid dress himself which is fine. We all have our non-starters and not everyone wants to walk around with a kid who looks like a color-blind/pattern-blind very short golfer.

However you do it, and wherever the lines are for you, you have to pick your battles and I don’t just mean with parenting, but in life. It’s important to know yourself, and to figure out what is and isn’t okay for you. If you think you can control what life is going to send in your direction, or what other people will say, do or want, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of pain. I understand that accepting the uncertainty in life is not easy. We all want to feel some sense of order in the chaos. In the, what am I doing here, and how did this come to be, and how long do I have, and when will it end, and what happens when it ends, unknowing, unknowableness of life. So we make our plans and we have our schedules and our routines. We go to yoga on these days and we put our mats in this spot, and on this day we go grocery shopping. We have our kids’ soccer practice Tuesdays, baseball Thursdays. We plan our vacation for these two weeks. We go to work and we go here for lunch and order this, or we go there, where we order that. If the person who takes our order knows our name and what we like to eat, even better.

The truth is everything can change on a dime. Your careful planning and reassuring routines can’t save you from that reality. Not everything will go the way we want it to, and sometimes our plans will get turned upside down and inside out. A few years ago I went to a meeting and this person asked me what my five year plan was. I started laughing, I think I might have snorted; I didn’t mean to, it just struck me as absurd. It’s not that I don’t have intentions, or that there’s anything wrong with a five-year plan. It’s just that she happened to ask me this not long after the birth of my son, and nothing at all went according to my carefully written birth plan. So I think it’s good to have a vision, but also important not to grasp it, to allow some room for a different plan to emerge.

Everything is in a state of flux, and we really don’t know how things will be next week, next month, next year. We don’t know how we will be, either. There are things I’d like to do, but I try to take it one moment at a time because I don’t want to get so caught up in a plan that I miss the pure joy that can happen in any moment, or the absolute heartache. I don’t want to be so focused on working my plan that I forget to live my life, or leave some room for life to surprise me. It’s not happening five years from now. It’s happening now and I can’t control whether I’ll get to accomplish every single thing I’d like to, I can only do whatever I can possibly do today. I can use every moment I’ve got wisely, and I can try to pack as much love into each moment as I have within me and as I’m ready to receive. That’s the only power I have.

I can’t control my son’s path or my daughter’s, nor do I want to. Of course I want to keep them safe, I want to nurture them and teach them to be strong and to love themselves, and to go for it in life all the way. To figure out what lights them up, and to move in that direction with everything they’ve got, but I don’t care if they wear orange and green and decide they want to be called names that never would have occurred to me.

An attempt to exert control over other people is really something to examine if you experience that pull. Love doesn’t manipulate, force or reject. It’s not conditional. This is why it’s essential to choose wisely. To know yourself, to understand what’s important to you and what you need, so that you can recognize a person you’ll find easy to love. When we love well, we liberate the objects of our love so they can be their best selves. So they can follow the pull of that inner yes and fly. When you’re loving someone, you’re wanting their happiness the way you want your own. You’re wanting them to discover what ignites them if they haven’t already, and then you want to get busy helping them stoke that flame. Loving someone well helps them become more of who they are, not less.

If you love someone and you’re afraid, then there’s a good chance you’re not loving yourself well, or you may not have chosen wisely. Perhaps you’re being reckless with your heart. Or maybe you’ve been hurt before and you’re scared you’ll be hurt again. If you keep picking people who hurt you, you have some healing to do. It’s also possible you’ve picked someone in a lot of pain themselves. Loving people bent on harming themselves is heartbreaking, and sometimes the only thing you can do is love them from a distance. Of course you try to support them and get them help if they need it, but you can’t control anyone, or manage another person’s path. You can’t save anyone, you can just love people. If you’ve picked a keeper, don’t allow fear to dismantle it and crush that liberation that could happen for both of you. Yes, love involves risk. People grow apart sometimes. Life brings pain that can change a person. We never know what’s going to reveal itself down the path a stretch. If you’re not willing to be vulnerable, you’re not going to be able to love because it requires your willingness to release control. That means you’re going to expose your jugular, the soft underbelly of your heart, but it also makes you human. If you look down and you see opposable thumbs without fur, then you know you’re human already. So you might as well get in the game.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

How to Break Free from Toxic Relationships

If someone is breaking your heart and treating you badly eventually, you are going to have to walk away. It sucks and it’s brutal, and sometimes it feels like the absolute hardest thing in the world to do, but you have to dig deep and get it done. Love will not require that you allow yourself to be abused, mistreated, betrayed, disrespected or demeaned. Apologies do not make up for that. Yes, there is no doubt when a person treats you badly it’s because they’re in pain, and they are not loving themselves well, either. You can have all the love, understanding, compassion and forgiveness in the world when you’re in love with someone who hurts you, but you can’t stay because eventually there will be nothing left of you.

I wouldn’t say this to you so strongly if I hadn’t been there myself, and more than once. I fully understand relationships like these can be intoxicating and consuming and that the passion doesn’t wear off. You want to know why it doesn’t wear off? Because you’re addicted to the interaction. You’re hooked on trying to change the person and get yourself that happy ending, and since you can never satisfy that desire, you’re never done. It never slows down or cools off to that place where you can love your heart out and also live your life. Where it’s still hot, but sustainable. Instead, you’re in that crazy, can’t-get-enough phase way past the point of hormones and those first few months. You have heart dis-ease. You wait for that fix, for that payoff, for that resolution and understanding and appreciation, but you’ll never get it from this particular source. You. Will. Not. Get. It.

What you will get is pain and suffering. You may think to yourself, “This is the love of my life. It must be because I’m so consumed. I’d do anything for this person, give anything, be anything. No matter what they do, I still love them.” You may love them. You may see them clearly, with all their pain and all their wounds and all their potential, but if a person abuses you, leaves you without explanation, cheats on you and comes back with an “I’m sorry, I love you,” they don’t understand what that really means. They might conceptually, but practically speaking, behaviorally speaking, they do not. Because let me explain this if it’s unclear to you. Someone who understands how to love is not going to go behind your back when you’re in a monogamous relationship, and sleep with someone else, or say or do things that are cruel and bring you to your knees. That is not loving. And if you hold on because you see someone’s potential and you have this beautiful vision of how it could be, if only…you are really setting yourself up for heartache that’s going to grow larger and larger. The longer you stay, the more your partner will believe you’ll always stay, no matter what they do or say, no matter how bad it gets.

Somewhere inside, they’ll direct some rage at you for that, some contempt. Because they don’t love themselves yet, and they’ll think you’re weak because you do love them. They’ll know that you’re hooked and they’ll push you to your breaking point. You’ll be along for a very heartbreaking ride, and you won’t even help them that way, if that’s what you’re after. You won’t change them or save them. You won’t change your own past, either. You won’t get your happy ending and you won’t give yourself an opportunity to heal, because whatever it is that’s got you hooked, that has you so convinced it’s them, is almost definitely something out of your distant past. Examine the interaction, and see if there’s something deeply familiar about it. That’s the real source of your addiction. That’s the place in you crying out for attention and love. But you won’t get it this way.

How do you leave? I wish I could say something great to you. Give you a path. The truth is, you will not leave a moment before you’re ready to, not a second before you open your mouth, and right from the center of your heart, the word, “enough” comes pouring out. When that happens, and even before that happens, get yourself some help. Find some support. You don’t need people yelling at you to leave. You already know you have to do that. Find someone who will help you figure out why you feel so badly about yourself you’d participate in your own crushing. Find someone who can help you remember you’re strong and innately lovable and capable of taking hold of your life. If you leave, there’s a possibility that will be the catalyst for real change and growth for your partner. That also might not happen. But the longer you stay, the longer you prolong your suffering and allow your light to be dimmed. Having said that, be kind to yourself while you muster the strength to go, because it isn’t easy to break an addiction, it isn’t easy to walk away from people we love, and it isn’t easy to recognize the source of our healing lies somewhere else.

Sending you a hug,

Ally Hamilton

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

Saddle Up!

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Hamilton

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

Love (Yourself)

artoflovingsolitaryYou’ve probably heard again and again that if you don’t love yourself, you won’t be able to love anyone else. It’s really the truth. So often, people dive into a relationship because they’re waiting to meet that “right person”, who’s going to complete them. A relationship becomes an escape from the reality of not being happy, of not feeling fulfilled, of not being at peace or having the sense that life has purpose and meaning. The Dalai Lama has a beautiful quote about this, “Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.”

Which is not to say that we don’t need each other, because we certainly do. We are built for connection, and the joy in life comes through sharing. We need touch, and nurturing. And if we have at least one person who knows us deeply and loves us for who we are, that’s a blessing. Everyone can have at least one person like that; themselves. If you can’t do that for yourself, heading into a relationship is going to churn up all kinds of insecurities and fears, defense mechanisms and editing. If you don’t feel you’re worthy of your own love, how can you openly receive it from someone else? If you aren’t accepting yourself, you’ll have no way to process the acceptance of someone else except to think there must be something wrong with them. They must not be seeing you clearly. If they really knew you, they’d ditch you and never look back. And if you’re coming from fear that way, you’ll hide those parts of yourself that you haven’t embraced, and you won’t allow yourself the true intimacy of being seen. It’s a vulnerable undertaking, and it requires bravery. And I don’t believe you can be brave and strong like that unless you’ve done a lot of that inner healing and found some compassion for yourself. Some forgiveness of those times when you weren’t operating from your highest self.

We all have stuff. Anything you’ve pushed down isn’t going to disappear. It’s going to come back four times harder. The truth will out as they say. And it’s exhausting to repress stuff, and to deny yourself love and peace because deep down you believe you aren’t lovable. There isn’t a person you’ll encounter who hasn’t made mistakes in life. Mistakes are how we grow and learn. Sometimes we make horrendous, totally ill-advised decisions. But truly, the times in life when we really screw it all up are also the doorways to growth. To understanding ourselves. Sitting there with everything blown apart, tears streaming down your face, wondering, “How did I blow things so badly? How did I end up here?” Those are such important questions to answer. When we “act out”, it’s because something in our past that isn’t resolved and isn’t healed is screaming for our attention. If it’s a pattern, you actually hit pay-dirt. It’s like a giant, burning flag saying “This is the thing! Explore this so you can be free of it.” In yoga, we call those samskaras. It’s like a groove we’re in that is echoing some old pain. Einstein said the definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Freud called it the “repetition compulsion”. Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Call it what you like, if you don’t heal it, you’re going to continue to suffer. Life does not have to be like that. You might need some help along the way, that’s another example of the importance of connection. But if you want to feel love in this life, start with yourself. Sending you some right now. Ally

Sometimes You Need to Get Out of Dodge

If you’re involved in a relationship that’s crushing you, you already know it isn’t sustainable. If someone is treating you badly, you have to get out, or you’re going to die. I don’t mean literally, though there are too many cases where physical violence is a real issue, but I mean your light will go out. Without that light, that spark, that intuition, life becomes very dark indeed and it’s nearly impossible to know which way to turn.

Sometimes the biggest problem is that relationships of this kind become addictive. If you think you’re physically attracted to someone who’s tormenting you, I’d challenge you to go a little deeper. You may be attracted to the way a person looks or smells or touches you, but if that same person demeans and abuses you, you’re hooked on something a lot more menacing than their looks. It’s the dynamic. There’s something in the interaction between you and the other person that’s familiar, and probably harkens back to something very old for you. If you don’t figure out what that original wound is you’re going to keep playing it out in your present life, looking for a happy ending, a resolution, and release from your suffering. You’ll never find it like that. You’ll just have your heart broken again. You’ll participate in the crushing of your own spirit, your own resounding yes. If you want to be liberated from your pain so it doesn’t own you anymore, you have to turn inward. You’re the only one with the key, but before you can do that, you have to create an environment where you feel safe.

You’ll never feel safe when you allow yourself to be vulnerable with someone who has a history of hurting you, and if you’re loving yourself, you’ll never be attracted to a person who belittles you. I really do understand the pull of something like this, because I’ve been there. When I was seventeen I dated a man who was thirty-seven, who came after me with everything he had. Once he had me, he was incredibly mean to me. He said hurtful things on a regular basis and he made choices that brought me to tears on more occasions than I can count. He was cruel.

I was so thankful when he was kind and loving. I craved those times, I waited for them. Then I’d tell myself, “See? He can do it. I just need to help him be more loving more of the time.” I can look back and say with absolute certainty he was in a lot of pain himself. That’s obvious to me now, but at the time I took it to heart, I believed there must be something lacking in me, I allowed his words to get inside my head and play on my deepest insecurities until they were so large I really couldn’t see anything else anymore. I got hooked on his validation. Tell me I’m lovable. Love me so I know I’m okay and I exist, and you can see me. When you’re feeling awful about yourself, it’s very difficult to act on your own behalf, to think, “I don’t deserve this, and I’m going to pick myself up and get the f&ck out of here.” So people get stuck until they’re in so much pain the survival instinct kicks in and then, with barely anything left in the tank, they drag themselves out the door and collapse somewhere and wonder how things got so bad. But that’s the beginning, that’s the entryway. As Rumi says, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” That’s the ideal time to start to figure out why you’re feeling so badly about yourself that you’d put yourself in a relationship like that and then stay there.

If you’re in a situation like this, even if it isn’t this extreme, get yourself some support. I get so many emails from people who tell me about relationships where they’re waiting for their partner to grow or change, to show up differently. They keep participating in the interaction, expecting or hoping for a different outcome even though no one is showing up with different tools. Some people will never get unstuck. Maybe because they can’t or because they think they can’t or they don’t want to enough. That part is about them, not you. If you cannot accept a person as they are, then you have to let them go. If they’re in pain, and that pain has been spilling all over you, you can love them and accept them and recognize their pain, but you have to get out of Dodge. If you allow your light to dim to nothing, you may as well be dead. You are not here to be dead. You, who could shine so brightly. You, who have everything you need to heal and forge a new path and begin again. Don’t succumb to the pull of what slices right into the most tender part of you. Protect that. That’s your gift. Don’t participate in its destruction. Don’t break your own heart. Don’t sleep with a person who would cut you down to nothing as the sun rises. You’re a gift to this world. Don’t throw yourself away.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

What’s Up, Tiger?

negativecommitteePeople-pleasers and those with a “savior” mentality, please listen up. You cannot save other people, you can only love them. You cannot manage another person’s path, nor is it advisable to try. We all have plenty of work managing our own paths. There is nothing you can do to “make” another person happy. People are happy, or they are not. If you connect with a happy person, and you are also happy, that rocks, but you can’t do it for someone else for more than three months. When the hormones start to wear off a little, so will the magic happy potion.

The problem with trying to save anyone else is that you’re going to fail. If this is a part of your personality, a trait, a learned behavior, a dynamic that’s familiar, a way that helps you to feel safe because you’re needed, then you’re really going to need to hold it up to the light so it doesn’t own you. If you keep picking people who are in serious pain, and you keep failing to save them, you are going to start to feel like it’s you, like you’re not enough. Like you need to work harder or be different or bend over backwards a little more. Also, all your energy will be going toward other people, which conveniently lets you neglect your own well-being and it’s only a matter of time before you start to feel pretty badly about yourself.

When the constant voice inside your head is telling you you’re not enough, or you blew it again, or you said something stupid, or you have no idea what you’re doing, or you’re an idiot, you, my friend, are in a world of pain. If that voice is telling you no one likes you or you don’t ever say or do the right things, or you’re going to end up alone because you don’t know how to behave the way other people behave, it’s just a prison. You’re torturing yourself in a cell of your own making. If you’d reach out and touch the bars, you’d realize they’re made of your own pain. Of all those times in your life when you didn’t receive love. Not because you didn’t deserve it, but because the people around you didn’t understand how to give it. Those bars would crumble to the ground if you just faced that and acknowledged it. If you forgave them and forgave yourself for being confused for so long, and got on with the business of embracing yourself.

In general, people-pleasers come out of a war zone. Where else would you learn the skills? How can you know yourself, if all your energy is directed toward making other people happy? When is the right time to figure out what makes you happy? Is there ever a right time? Does it get to be your turn? I’ll tell you something. If it doesn’t get to be your turn, you’re not going to have much to offer anyone, because if you don’t know yourself and love yourself, there’s no way you’re going to uncover your gifts. If you don’t discover them, you’ll never share them. That’s the only real way you can help anyone. You figure out how to love yourself, and then you understand how to do it for someone else. It’s not about dancing like a monkey, I’ll tell you that. It’s not about bending over backwards or being perfect or living up to someone else’s idea of how you should be. It’s not about following in anybody’s footsteps, unless they absolutely feel like the footsteps you’d have taken on your own. Unless they lead you down a path that sets your heart on fire. You love people by radically accepting them. If you can’t do that because they’re in self-destruct mode, then you still accept them, but not their behavior, and you love them from afar. You love people in a way that makes them feel absolutely free to be who they are, or you let them go. But you don’t try to fix them or save them. Support them, root for them, try to get them help if they need it, of course. But manage or control or think you’re going to solve someone else’s suffering? That’s not love. You listen, deeply. You offer a hand in the dark. You show up. You honor and you cherish and you celebrate, but you have to do all those things for yourself, first.

If you don’t know how, I can offer you what worked for me. There are probably other ways, I just don’t have first-hand experience with them. You get on your yoga mat and you learn how to breathe consciously if you don’t know how to do that already. You get so involved in breathing, in each inhale and exhale, you don’t have time to think about what happened earlier, or what’s happening later. You just are. And you move. And when something challenges you, you see what comes up for you. What the committee in your head has to say. If it isn’t kind, loving or compassionate, you don’t feed it any energy. You just observe your thoughts and turn your attention back to your breath.

If you notice over and over again the voice in your head is harsh or shaming, you tell it to f&ck off, but you tell it calmly, with a little smile on your face. You could even say please, and then you feed a loving voice. Maybe you come up with a nickname for yourself. Something that you find funny, that helps you take yourself less seriously, like “Okay, Tiger, it’s not a big deal. You fell out of a pose. Keep breathing.” If you don’t like Tiger, pick something else. You do that six days a week for a very long time, and suddenly you’re doing it in your car. “Okay, Chief. You took a left when you needed to take a right. No big deal.” Then you do it when you screw up at work or at home, “Okay, Sport, you blew that one. You didn’t show up they way you wanted to. Let’s apologize and hope for forgiveness. If not, let’s practice some acceptance.” And so it goes. You stop stewing for days at a time when you make a mistake. Instead you stew for a day, then an afternoon, then an hour. You examine what went wrong, and you learn and you grow so you can do it differently next time.

You also find yourself a good therapist. Someone who will kindly hold up a mirror for you so you can take a look at yourself without shame or fear or judgment, so you can know yourself, and continue to heal, with someone in your corner. Someone who also helps you feed a loving voice, by sometimes reminding you that you “don’t have to believe everything you think”, as the saying goes. That your feelings aren’t facts. That actually, you are not an idiot. If you want to go really deeply into the land of knowing yourself, you sit your asana down and meditate. Then you’ll really get to look at your thoughts and become more interested in the quality of your thinking than the thoughts themselves. You keep a journal so you can look at where you’re at and how things are with you in black and white and you realize there’s also every color in between. And you mostly heal and suddenly, (twenty years later) the voice inside your head is pretty sweet. It’s kind and forgiving and compassionate, and it doesn’t expect you to be perfect or to be able to save anyone. It’s just full of love for you, and every other perfectly imperfect person you encounter. It’s not a magic bullet. I don’t believe there is one. It’s a daily practice. But you know what? It’s actually pretty fun. And the pay-off is on most days and in most moments, you get to spread love. There are still times I need to call myself Tiger, but they’re few and far-between.

Sending you love and a hug.

Ally Hamilton

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

Uncertainty 2.0

So many times in life we search for answers, look for ways to predict the future, understand the past, or ask for signs about which way to turn now. It’s perfectly natural to want some stability, to want to know there’s a point to all this, to want to feel that your past had a purpose and that your future has one, too.

You can absolutely find your purpose while you’re here, and your life can be filled with meaning. If you allow yourself to open to the ever-changing nature of things, and to the vulnerability that’s required if you’re going to embrace reality as it is, then you also grant yourself the possibility of incredible love. It requires open hands, an open heart and an open mind, and the ability to say, “Yes, I embrace this, too. Even if it breaks my heart and I don’t understand why and every fiber of my being feels it’s unfair or senseless or tragic, I still embrace it because fighting it is pointless and I am here to open. To learn. To grow. To continue to begin again, even if right in this moment, I have no idea how to do that. I’ll start by reminding myself to breathe in, and breathe out.” If you do that, your time here, however much you have, will be beautiful. You can count on the people in your life who know how to love, to give it and receive it, for as long as you have each other. You can trust that there will be beauty and experiences that stun you into gratitude. But if you want everything wrapped up in neat little packages, and you want to understand every single thing that’s happened in your past and try to exert a lot of control over what happens in your future, you’re going to have a very tough time.

There’s a difference between having an idea of how you’d like to share your gifts, and an attachment to the idea that everything is going to unfold according to your five-year plan. You can absolutely move with intention and focus, but if you don’t also factor in the possibility that your plan could easily be turned on its head on a sunny Tuesday morning without any notice at all, or on a rainy Saturday when you planned on being at the beach, you set yourself up to be knocked over sideways by life. We never know and not everything is going to make sense. Sometimes the best you can get to is acceptance.

This is true on so many levels. I get emails from people who are trying to understand why someone hurt them or left them or betrayed them or neglected them or abused them or discarded them or were taken from them without any warning or any chance to say one last goodbye. One last, I love you so much I don’t understand how to make sense of a world without you in it. There are many times I sit at my laptop with tears streaming down my face. There are plenty of times I sit at my laptop laughing, too. But there’s never a lack of the unexplained in life.

I have close friends who were ditched suddenly and without explanation, by a couple they’d known and loved for years. Their families vacationed together, their kids grew up like brothers and sisters, they had a standing dinner Sunday nights. They were at graduations and weddings together, and one day it all ended. That’s as rough as any breakup and when my friends tried to ask what had happened, what was wrong, why they were being shunned, there was no real response. Their friends were just suddenly busy all the time. The kids are left to pick up the pieces, and thankfully they’re old enough to make their own plans, but everyone is hurt and confused, and no one understands. There is no resolution or closure. There are only so many times you can go to a person and ask to talk. Eventually you have to shed your tears and shrug your shoulders and take your ball and go home and remember other people will want to play catch with you down the road. If someone won’t communicate there is no hope of working it out. There’s just painful mystery and acceptance and the rest of your journey.

There are also people who get stuck in the past, and feed it and stoke that flame, even if the past was brutal, because it’s a familiar misery. If you work at it enough, you can feed that flame until it scorches everything, even your present. Your past may not ever make sense. Maybe there are questions you have that can never be answered. We all have some. Rilke has a beautiful quote about this, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Embrace all of it. Even the mysteries and the tragedies and the lack of closure that happens sometimes. Let it open you so other travelers who are also seeking, and will also never find answers to all their questions will know yours is a safe hand to grab in the dark and a good one to hold onto when it gets sunny again. Wishing you love through all of life’s beauty and heartache and uncertainty, and through all of its joy as well.

May we all live the questions with our hearts open,

Ally Hamilton

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

You are Invaluably You. (And You Are Awesome)

yourvalueYesterday I got an email from a guy who had an argument with a woman he’s been dating for about four months. They were out to eat and he thought she was flirting pretty heavily with the waiter. Stroking his hand while he was making suggestions about the menu, offering him a bite of her food when he came to check on them later. He told me it’s been an issue many times they’ve gone out, and he’s been keeping it to himself because she’s a flirtatious person which was one of the things that drew him in, and he thought he should handle his insecurities himself. After all, she’s been going home with him, even if she does talk to other guys while they’re out. Anyway, last weekend they went to dinner, and then to a party, and she sat in some guy’s lap. Our friend went to get her a drink, and when he came back, there she was, smiling up at him and reaching for her wine with her head nestled on this other guy’s shoulder. The guy had his arm wrapped around her with his hand on her upper thigh, making circles with his fingertips. Between the waiter earlier, and the guy who’s lap she was in, he reached his max. He asked to speak with her, and she looked at the other guy and said, “Uh-oh, I think I’m in trouble,” and followed our friend outside.

He said he asked her what was up. He told her he really cares about her, but he’s not sure she’s feeling the same way since, in his view, she seems to flirt excessively with other men. She got really angry and defensive and said she can’t deal with jealousy and insecurity, and she guessed it wasn’t going to work out. She told him she can’t be controlled, she needs to be herself, and she has to be with a guy who’s confident. He told her he is confident, but it gets a little hard when she’s letting some other guy tickle her inner thigh. She rolled her eyes and stormed off. So he left, miserably, and he’s been second-guessing himself ever since. He talked to his brother about it, and his brother said he likes when his girlfriends flirt with other guys as long as they don’t cross the line. He thought feeding the waiter, and the lap/tickling thing was too much. His buddies said he dodged a bullet. His mother said she didn’t have the feeling this was “the one,” but she could be wrong (well-played, mom!!!). But our friend is feeling awful. Wondering if he should call her and try to fix it. Checking his phone constantly to see if she’s called. Drafting and re-drafting emails and re-playing the events of the weekend in his mind relentlessly. What she did. What he did. What he said and how he said it and questioning himself.

I asked him how he felt when he was with her. Did he feel good? He said he was attracted to her and that the challenge had been exciting, but it had also made him feel badly about himself. Like he always had to compete and was never really sure if she’d end up back at his place, or if he’d end up at hers, or she’d end up somewhere else. He wasn’t sure she really cared about him at all. She didn’t call or text much and he didn’t think he’d have been seeing her so much if he hadn’t made all the effort. I asked him why he thought he might want to pursue a relationship with someone whose feelings he’s unsure of four months in, who gets angry when he tries to tell her how he feels.

Sometimes it’s the rejection that causes a person to start chasing. The idea that someone could walk away so easily. Maybe I just haven’t shown them the best side of me yet. Maybe if I race and catch up and we hang out a little more, then they’ll see how great I am. You know what? It’s not about whether someone is flirting or not flirting or letting someone else paint their name with chocolate sauce on their inner thigh if you’re cool with that. There’s no need to demonize this woman who likes to flirt. I didn’t hear from her, and maybe she has a whole other point of view. The point is, it’s not working for our buddy. If you’re involved in an interaction that’s making you feel badly, don’t chase it down and ask for more. Our friend said he felt a lack of respect, consideration and sensitivity. I’m like, check, check, check. If it’s making you feel terrible and like you’re not measuring up, that’s a no. If you express yourself to someone you’re trying to build trust with and they shut you down, that’s a no, too. If you can’t communicate honestly, you’re sunk. That goes for both sides of the equation, meaning you want to be able to share the depth of your feelings, and also be able to talk about when you’re feeling vulnerable. In order to do those things, you have to feel safe, seen, heard, supported, loved. If you’re not feeling those things from someone, let it go and don’t second-guess yourself. You can’t squeeze water from a stone, as they say. Sometimes we’re looking for things we’d like in the wrong places. Keep moving. Sunshine ahead ;).

Lots of love,

Ally Hamilton

Reappear

I know sometimes things can feel really hopeless, like you’ve screwed everything up, or you can’t get any traction going, or no matter what you do, you always end up feeling isolated. Sometimes there are really ingrained coping mechanisms that keep a person at a “safe distance” from everyone else. Maybe that’s how you got through your childhood. by detaching or dissociating. If you cut yourself off from what you were feeling as a kid, if you took yourself somewhere else, somewhere safer, that can be a difficult switch to flip. I know lots of people who moved into adolescence coming out of a difficult childhood and just numbed out. Turned to drugs. Shut the thing down, so to speak. So if you have a lifetime history of cutting yourself off from what you’re feeling, and struggling to really trust or open to anyone, it’s perfectly natural to feel alienated and alone and like there’s not much point to any of it.

I have a particular soft spot for children. Some people believe we pick our parents and the exact situations we need for the evolution of our souls and other people believe it’s all random and we end up as worm food. Whatever you believe, a child in an unsafe situation breaks my heart because the tools aren’t there yet to recognize pain is underneath whatever is happening with the adults around them. Pain, and an inability to handle it in a healthy way. A child can’t process that. A child who is abused or neglected or abandoned can’t understand it isn’t about them. All they can do is figure out how to maneuver. How to exist in an unsafe environment. How to disappear.

So many people coming out of backgrounds like these suffer from depression, anxiety, and addiction. But if you’re not in an unsafe environment anymore, there’s no reason you need to repress your feelings, or be ruled by panic attacks, or create a haze to get through the day. Your way of life may have become centered around this idea of, “I Can’t Handle the Pain.” Sometimes people don’t even try anymore, they just numb. Smoke pot every day or drink wine every night or shop every afternoon, or get hooked on relationships or sex or work or exercise. Schedule every minute of the day so there’s no time to feel anything, and run like hell when a feeling slips through the cracks. Life truly doesn’t have to be like that. There are so many healing modalities available. So much conversation about trauma, and ways to work with it, and through it, so it doesn’t rule your life: yoga, meditation, therapy, different ways to work with your nervous system. But it can be scary to even consider a new way of moving through the world, and all kinds of resistance can come up.

If you’re living in this kind of pain, I really recommend you reach out because too many years can go by in a haze and it’s such a shame, because when life is in focus, it’s so beautiful it takes your breath away. I’m not saying it isn’t painful sometimes, but I am saying even the pain can open you to more beauty. It doesn’t have to close you or shut you down or make you run. And if you did grow up in an abusive environment, there’s so much healing that comes from understanding there is nothing lacking in you. Nothing.

There’s also nothing lacking in you if you love a person coming out of a history like this who hasn’t done the work to heal and develop tools to manage and understand the effects of living through trauma. You just fell in love with someone who hasn’t figured out how to love well yet. They aren’t loving themselves, so they can’t really love you. You can’t save anyone, but you can love people and support them and encourage them to get help. Sometimes you have to do that from afar in order to love yourself well.

The thing is, I think we all tend to take these things on and internalize them. If someone can’t love us well, whether it’s a parent or a romantic partner, we walk away with the feeling that there’s something unlovable about us, instead of recognizing the pain that exists in the other person. We get angry and defensive and hurt, we point fingers and tell ourselves stories, and the cycle continues. Healing is a choice every day. There are always opportunities to move toward love or to move toward fear. Choose love. Seriously.

Sending you some right now,

Ally Hamilton

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

Be a Badass

Yesterday I received an email from a guy who really likes this woman. “Likes” is an understatement. They’ve been dating for a couple of months, but he thinks he’s crazier about her than she is about him so he’s playing it cool. Not calling or texting too much, not expressing the depth of his feelings, just kind of going along, acting casually and agonizing when he’s by himself. Would she come forward more if he did? If he tells her how he feels will she run? If he doesn’t, will he lose her? Does he measure up to the picture she has in her head of the kind of guy she wants to be with?

Later in the day I got an email from a woman who’s dating this guy she really digs, but is riddled with insecurity because he’s good friends with his ex-girlfriend. She thinks the ex has a better body than she does and maybe he still really wants her. Sometimes she checks his phone to see their texts. Also, she saw him checking out another girl while they were on a date. And her ex-husband cheated on her.

At about 4pm, my friend “Sue” from New York called me and said she’d been spending time with this guy that she likes and he might like her, but he might just want to be friends, she really can’t tell. I asked her why she doesn’t just ask him and she said she wasn’t ready for the news if he just wants to be her friend.

Then my almost-four-year-old daughter came home and asked me when our puppy was going to die and also if I was. With her lip trembling.

This is reality. The more you love, the more you increase the chance that you could be devastated. We never know how much time we have or how much time we have with anyone else. Ever. You can live your life in fear and decide to keep yourself safe by not risking your heart too much or you can go for it with everything you’ve got for as long as you’ve got. Either way, one day we are all going to exhale for the last time. Hopefully it’s one day way, way out ahead of us.

In the meantime, I think the absolute best thing in life is love and connection, and the bravery it takes to open your heart all the way. To move right into the center of your fear and throw your head back and laugh and say, “I feel you, but I’m doing it, anyway!” Not to be reckless with your heart, of course, to take your time and feel things out, but if you’re in be in. Recognize your own humanness and beauty and and raw, grieving places, and offer them all up. That stuff is your song and if you don’t sing it you rob the world of a chord that only you can offer. It’s made up of every amazing thing and every heartbreaking thing that’s ever happened to you, and also the first time you skinned your knee or had a crush and wrote your name in a heart with someone else’s. It’s the nights you cried yourself to sleep, and the day you threw the winning pass and everybody cheered. It’s the time you got fired, or caught your wife and your best friend in bed and decided that was it for love. It’s the day you went to that funeral and thought, “I can’t get through this.” It’s that four-year-old you who wondered when your puppy would die and when your mom would die because you already knew everything you really needed to know when you were four. That love is it and that if you’re going to love you might get hurt.

But if you’re not going to love, you may as well be dead already. Love and be vulnerable. Holding yourself back is easy. It’s safe but it’s also sad. Love requires you to be a badass. What are you going to do with the time you have?

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Eventually, it Catches Up with You

temporaryhappinesslongtermpainRecently I received an email from a man whose wife left him suddenly one day, just shy of their ten year anniversary. She came home and said she didn’t love him anymore and he needed to move out. He was stunned and begged her to go to couples counseling. She agreed, but two weeks into it she said it was pointless and over and so he moved out, and is now seeing his children one night a week for dinner, and every other Saturday. The kids are young, one is four and the other is two. It seems mom has a new boyfriend who’s spending time with them already. So you can imagine our friend is having a tough time.

To be fair, I’m only getting one side of the story. It’s highly unlikely this happened one morning. Mom didn’t just wake up and think, “I don’t love him anymore.” There’s more to the story. Nonetheless, the ending was hard and fast, with little or no time for understanding or closure. She may not be feeling the pain of her actions just yet, but these things have a way of biting you in the ass later. The kids are in shock, particularly their four year old who is suddenly wetting the bed.

He wrote to me asking how he’s supposed to accept this. His vows meant something to him and he wanted to fight for his family and fight for his marriage. One night he went over to his old house uninvited and begged her to just talk to him, to help him understand what had happened. She called the police, so now he can only contact her about issues pertaining to the kids. It seems incredibly cruel and unfair, but again, this is only one side of the story. Whatever the other side may be and wherever the truth lies, this man is in agony. His heart is broken, his trust is shattered, and he’s tortured by thoughts of this new man spending time with his not-yet ex-wife and their children. He misses his kids and he didn’t see it coming. Maybe he missed the signs. Maybe she had a million conversations with him and he didn’t take her seriously. Maybe he took her for granted and maybe she just got involved with someone else and didn’t look back or forward. I don’t know, but I do know he’s suffering the effects of trauma and shock and that he needs some help.

Life is like this sometimes. We’re going along, we think we know what’s happening and suddenly, the rug gets pulled out from underneath us. Betrayal is one of the toughest experiences we’re asked to withstand, whether it’s betrayal of our trust, our friendship, our marriage vows, or the worst betrayal a person can suffer — the betrayal of the self. Those times when we override our intuition, or sacrifice our deepest truth, or numb out and stick our heads in the sand. Being human is sometimes a messy, painful affair. Sometimes it’s so incredible it takes your breath away. But when life hands you a set of unforeseeable circumstances, you really have to have some compassion for yourself and ask for help if you need it. There’s nothing worse than being in shock and feeling alone. Like you want to reach out in the dark, but there’s no one there to take your hand. The feeling that no one would care if you disappeared. There are always people who care. The world is full of loving folks who would happily hug our friend, or invite him over for dinner, or meet him for a hike or a tea. We’ve all been this guy at some time or another, to varying degrees. We’ve all had our everything fall apart. All you can do in times like those is sit down in the debris of what used to be your life and pick up the old photos and a letter you wrote four years ago and the sweater that still smells like what was, and just allow your heart to break. Allow yourself to be enraged and confused and shattered. There’s no magic bullet, it’s just a process and it takes time.

Also recognize you’re not alone. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in,” Leonard Cohen. “The wound is the place where the light enters you,” Rumi. I could go on and on. There wouldn’t be so much written about it if it weren’t universal. This is it, this is sometimes what’s required as we move through this experience of being alive. We will all suffer at some time or another, and some people will suffer more than others. These experiences can soften you and open you if you let them or they can harden you and close you if you let them. The choice is yours. Sometimes when it all falls apart, something newer and stronger and more real emerges. Some secret strong place in yourself that you didn’t even know existed stands up in the middle of the storm and starts to co-create the new story. But don’t tough it out alone. When you’re sitting in a pile of broken glass that used to be your life, by all means, ask for help.

Sending you so much love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Anchors Aweigh

guilttripI grew up with a guy whose mom used to tuck him in at night and say, “Goodnight, honey. I hope I see you in the morning.” This was especially difficult because his dad overdosed and died when my friend, (I’ll call him Rick), was eight years old, so he had a real and understandable fear that he could lose his mother, too. As he hit his teenage years and wanted to hang out with his friends instead of staying home with his mom, she’d say, “Okay, let’s hope this isn’t my last day on God’s green earth!” as he walked out the door. My friend started doing drugs at thirteen, I think mostly to numb out the guilt and underneath that, the rage. Sometimes he’d get drunk and end up crying about all of it. Other times he’d stay home, locked in his room, headphones blaring, because it feels awful when another person tries to make us feel responsible for their happiness or their ability to be okay. It’s too heavy a burden to bear.

Rick went to college in the city, and although he moved out of the house and lived on campus, he went to visit his mom every week and often stayed home on the weekends. He rarely brought a girl home to meet her because no one was ever good enough for him in her eyes, and because she wasn’t especially kind to the girls she did meet. Eventually he met a really lovely woman and they fell in love and decided to get married. At the wedding, his mother stood up and gave a toast, wishing Rick and her daughter-in-law well, even though she and her son’s wife had, “had their struggles”, and she also reminded everyone that she loved her Rick, “first, and best.” It was uncomfortable, to say the least.

One day not too long ago, I got a call from Rick telling me he was losing it. He and his wife have two children, eight and four. Rick’s mom and his wife have had a rough time over the years, but I have to say his wife has been incredibly patient and kind with his mom, and tried every way humanly possible to reassure her that she isn’t “taking Rick away.” They live nearby and see her every weekend, and she comes over at least once a week for dinner. But it seems it’s never enough. Rick called because his mother started saying things to the kids like, “I hope I see you tomorrow”, and both his kids have cried themselves breathless after grandma leaves, asking why she can’t just move in with them so they can keep her safe. So the cycle continues.

Guilt attacks us in two ways. Either we engage with someone who wishes to manipulate us through guilt and we allow that to happen, or we take it on ourselves. Either way, it can be crushing. Rationally speaking, it’s normal to feel guilt if you’ve done something you really wish you hadn’t that ended up hurting someone else. But we all have choices we’d love to make over again, and times when we didn’t act from our highest selves. Just like worry (another very human emotion), guilt won’t get you anywhere, and it won’t help the injured party, either. It’s not a feeling that leads to growth, it’s a feeling that keeps us stuck. It’s draining. Where joy lightens us and makes us feel we could fly, guilt is heavy and it weighs us down like an anchor. Here’s Rick, going home every weekend for years, spending tons of energy trying to be enough for his mom. Trying to hold up the load. You can’t save other people and it’s not reasonable to demand that other people try to save us.

When you experience feelings of guilt, it’s really good to examine what’s happened. Have you actually done something wrong, or are you allowing yourself to be manipulated? If you’ve hurt someone, intentionally or thoughtlessly, own it and apologize with honesty and kindness. That’s all you can do. You’ll be forgiven or you won’t. But you do have to forgive yourself. If you’re participating in a manipulative and controlling relationship, it’s probably time for some healthy boundaries and compassionate conversation. Otherwise the rage builds, and if you push it down, you’ll end up feeling depressed. It’s exhausting to repress those heavy feelings; you won’t have much energy for anything else. Somewhere inside you know you can’t make another person happy. They are or they aren’t, and if they aren’t, they need to get busy. You can be supportive, but you can’t solve it for anyone else.

Vacations are fun, but guilt trips are a waste of time, and even if you pack a bag, you won’t be going anywhere. Anchors aweigh!

Wishing you love, joy, and liberation,

Ally Hamilton

If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is!

We probably wouldn’t have survived as a species if we weren’t somewhat “wired for worry”, and though most of us no longer have to be concerned about sabertooth tigers eating us for lunch,  the mind still tends to get “snagged” on the negative. Someone says something or does something that makes us feel slighted, misunderstood or angry, and we go for a mental spin right into the abyss. Or we sit down to catch up with friends and end up focusing on what isn’t going well, and not on all the amazing things that are.

I think part of it is cultural, too. We’re constantly receiving messages that happiness lies in external stuff, that it’s a destination somewhere out ahead of us and if we just keep plugging away and trying harder and making ourselves “right” eventually we’ll be happy. The thing is, it’s not a destination. There’s no house that’s gorgeous enough, there’s no weight you could be, there’s no hairstyle or other person or car or job or amount of money in your bank account that will bring you to that place we call Happy. You can try if you want to, we have millions of people stuck on that track, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel good, either. It’s the track of, “You’re not good enough, you don’t measure up.” How could that track ever lead to Happiness? The destination if you keep moving forward in that direction is Depressionville, Despair.

It doesn’t work, because happiness is something that happens inside yourself when you stop and realize how much you do have, when you make the choice to stay rooted in that awareness of what is going well, even if life isn’t easy right this minute. It happens when you’re living in alignment with what’s true for you, when you’re living with your heart wide open. It happens when you uncover your gifts and give them away freely. It happens when you lend an ear, or your hand or your shoulder or whatever else you’ve got to someone else. It happens when you’re patient with yourself and your own process, when you have compassion for yourself and other people, through connection, and a feeling that your life has meaning and purpose. You can’t buy that stuff at a store.

Of course, even if you do tap into that, you’ll still have pain in your life, and you have to lean into that, too. Heartbreaks. Confusion, doubt, fear, shame, guilt. Part of happiness is opening to all of it. Learning and growing and saying, “Yes, this too.” (There are some things that will never fall into the category of “Yes”, though. There are some things that will break your heart wide open and then the only question is if it hardens you or softens you. I recommend softening if at all possible). Life is going to keep coming, but when you’re living from your heart and you remember who you are, you have such a solid foundation to receive the everything that life brings. You also know how to give yourself permission to stay in your pajamas all day if that’s what you need to do. It doesn’t all have to be pretty and perfect every minute; in fact, part of being at peace is knowing that it won’t be.

That’s one of the main reasons it’s so important to figure out what you need in order to quiet your mind. Yoga, seated meditation, hiking, something. Because the habit-pattern of the mind is to head into the past or the future. We usually head into the past with longing or sadness. When we think about the future, it’s often with anxiety or fear. Peace is available in the present moment, but if your mind is screaming at you, it’s not easy to tap into it. Your breath is always happening in the now. That’s a powerful entry point to This Moment. Stress comes from being in one place, and wanting to be somewhere else. Wherever you are, you are home. You can breathe in and breathe out, right now, and bring yourself into the present. You live in your body. You live with your internal dialogue. So your inner world is peaceful and loving, or it’s violent and painful. If that voice is full of, “Not good enough!”, stop feeding it because it’s a liar. You are the only you, out of the roughly 7 billion people we have on this planet. That’s pretty amazing. I don’t believe you’re here to be a size 2 or to have huge biceps or to amass as much money as you can. You’re here to shine. When you notice a tree blowing in the wind, when you see the sunlight reflecting off the million different greens, and you feel the breeze on your skin, I hope you take it in. Because those are gifts, just like you are.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

Doubt is a Dream-Killer

Even after I fell in love with yoga and watched it transform my life, I thought I’d never teach. “I can’t teach, I have a huge fear of speaking in public,” I’d tell myself and anyone else who thought to suggest such a thing. I did have a huge fear about it, but I held on to this idea of myself and my limitations so tightly it strangled me. It made me unable to see the possibility of something else, and if I hadn’t been put in a situation where I felt I needed to sub a class for a teacher who didn’t show up one day, I probably never would have realized I could do it. Our ideas about ourselves are powerful, they shape our lives. They encourage us or they crush us. When you start to tap into what your gifts may be, they pull on your heart like the moon pulls on the ocean. It breaks my heart to think so many people stop themselves from just opening to that pull because a loud voice inside is saying, “You can’t.”

This shows up all over the place for people. You like someone but are afraid to express it because they’d never go out with you. You want a job, you know in your heart you could rock it, but are afraid to send your resume because so many other people are more qualified or well-suited than you. You have a dream, but who are you to do something great? That voice that has your ear (if any of this speaks to you) is a liar. It’s the voice of fear. The fact is, you may ask someone out and be rejected. You may apply for a job and not get it. You might pursue a dream and find out it’s ten million times harder than you thought it would be. None of that really matters. What matters is living with a voice inside your head that tells you you are not good enough. That you don’t measure up. That you can’t or you shouldn’t. That’s a voice that will kill your hopes and dreams before you even find the courage to pursue them. That’s a voice that will keep you down.

If you aren’t feeling good about yourself, it’s really important to figure out why. Whatever that why is for you, it’s a place where you still have some healing to do. Do you think you aren’t lovable for some reason? Or are you replaying old tapes? Did you get fired and let that crush your self-esteem? Did you grow up in an environment where you never measured up? Figure out the source of that, I can’t or I shouldn’t, the source of that belief that the person you like wouldn’t like you. The feeling that other people aren’t seeing you, getting you, or welcoming you into their mix. Then do the opposite of what we’re taught. Move toward the source of that pain and take a serious look at it. Hold it up to the light because it isn’t real. Maybe that person you’re afraid to approach would fall madly in love with you. Maybe you’d get that job. Maybe your dream would come to fruition.

Even if none of those things happened, your inner world, the place where you’re going to live every single day of your life would be a loving place to reside. A place where you believe in yourself and have compassion for yourself, because being vulnerable is a brave undertaking. Putting your heart out there in any direction involves risk, but not doing those things involves greater risk. It’s the risk that you could live your whole life and never give yourself the opportunity to fly. That would be the saddest thing. Failing is part of life. You get up, brush yourself off, and start again. Not trying is a prison. As much as any other collection of 37 trillion or so cells that have come together to form a human being, you are the only one of you there is, or ever will be. Take your particular 37 trillion cells, and live your heart out before it’s over.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

The Blame Game Has No Winners

I get emails from grown adults with children of their own who are still blaming their parents for who they are. I get emails from people who are entrenched in a battle with a family member and from those who cannot forgive a former partner. The more you dig your heels in and cling to your opinions, your version of events, your list of ways you’ve been wronged, the less chance there is to let some love in and to shine some light on your own participation and what it is you brought to the equation that led to a painful outcome. We always bring something to any situation, even if that something is our inability to stand up for ourselves, to value ourselves or to put an end to abusive treatment (assuming you weren’t a child at the time — in which case your work is simply to heal, not that it’s easy).

If you’re over 25, it’s time to stop blaming your parents no matter how bad it may have been. People do the best they can with what they’ve got. Sometimes the best they’ve got kind of sucks. This is not about you, and it does not reflect anything lacking in you. Not everyone is going to be lucky enough to have loving, mature parents who are ready or able to put their children first. We should also acknowledge timing, here. You may come into a person’s life at a time when their capacity to love, to extend themselves, to care, is just really limited. I say that in the context of parent-child relationships, friendships, and romantic partnerships. People can only be where they are. If you experienced neglect or abuse as a child, it’s hard not to feel enraged and I think you need to allow yourself that rage for awhile. I think you need to sit with whatever feelings you’ve got, whether they’re feelings of resentment, bitterness or blame and examine all of it. Mourn the childhood you didn’t have. Grieve. But if you get stuck there, if that’s as far as you take the journey, you just land yourself in a world of pain. I think very few people intend to hurt anyone, very few parents intentionally screw it up. Sometimes you just get caught in the storm of someone else’s journey through no fault of your own and you get hit in the face with a lot of hail and end up throwing up over the side of the ship, but you don’t have to stay in that storm for the rest of your life.

There are so many healing modalities available. Yoga, meditation, therapy, journaling, reading and anything else that works for you. Hiking, windsurfing, painting…whatever causes you to lose yourself for awhile, and tap into that larger feeling of being in the flow. Of course we all have different responses to trauma, not everyone handles it the same way. If you need some help, reach out. Don’t allow yourself to stay rooted in the dark, alone and shut down and in despair. There’s no need for that. There’s no reason that your past has to control your present or your future. Love can happen right now, in this moment if you let it. If you don’t believe that, put your hand on your heart and close your eyes, and when you breathe in, think, “I am whole, and I am lovable,” and exhale out some pain. You don’t have to hold onto it so tightly. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

In the context of romantic relationships, let me say this. It is never one person’s fault. If you think that’s possible, I guarantee you you’re missing a great chance to know yourself more deeply and to take some valuable information into your future partnerships. We all have stuff. We all have work to do, places where we could go deeper or show up in greater alignment with what’s true for us. The end of a relationship never tells the whole story. You can’t separate out the beginning and the middle, the alchemy between you and the other person which creates the third thing, the relationship between you. Timing, circumstances, where you were on your path, and where your partner was on theirs. Your participation. Your level of appreciation, patience, kindness, support and understanding. Your actions, things you said, did, didn’t do. What was motivating you. If you want to dig your heels in and point angry fingers that’s always a choice, but it’s not a choice that’s going to lead to growth or a deeper understanding of where you still have some healing to do.

With family members I recognize it can get complicated, but I think it’s so sad when siblings don’t speak to one another for years at a time. Over money, or someone’s spouse who said something hurtful when they were drunk at a family wedding. I know a guy who didn’t speak to his sister for ten years because they were arguing over the money their mom left behind. They both had children during this decade and countless beautiful experiences. These were siblings who grew up playing together, loving each other, sailing together over the summers, climbing trees when they were kids. And then the sister died. Horrendous. Un-dig your heels in life wherever possible so you can keep moving forward, which life asks of you every moment. So you can keep responding to what is, with your mind, heart and hands open. It’s not all going to go the way we want. People will let us down. We are all going to make choices we’d love to do over from time to time. Say things we’d love to take back. All of us. Forgive. Recognize that, and forgive. Or really, you’re in prison.

Sending you love,

Ally Hamilton

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

How Are You Walking?

howwelluwalkthroughthefireI think there are really just two choices in life: you live in love, or you live in fear. Either way, you walk through the fire. Yesterday I posted some thoughts on Monday’s bombings in Boston. Someone wrote in that she was angry. Of course. Anger is a completely sane and valid response. None of us want to live in a world where we have to wonder if it’s safe to watch our loved ones cross the finish line at a marathon or drop our kids off at school or go to a movie. These are all things we’d hope we could take for granted, but we can’t, not anymore. There’s violence all over the world, perpetrated every single day by people of all political leanings, nationalities, religions, colors, genders and ages. It’s a border-less, sadly human condition. The real question isn’t who’s at fault. The real question is, does violence exist within me, personally? Am I a peaceful human being, or am I participating in the cycle of violence? That’s what you can work on.

Trying to blame the state of the world on any one person is absurd. On any one political party. On any one country or religion or race. This is a human, global issue. We got ourselves into this mess together, and we’re going to have to get ourselves out of it together. You cannot solve it with more violence. That’s what we’ve been doing, and I would hope at this juncture we could all agree it’s not working out too well for us. We’re hurting each other and we’re hurting our planet, the place where we live.

There’s the home within us, right? The home you’re going to live in for your whole life, your body. Your internal dialogue is going to be your constant companion. Whatever you grow inside yourself is what you’re going to spread as you move through the world around you. If you’re in fear and anger, that’s what you’ll be spreading. If you’re in love, you’ll be spreading love. What do you think we need out there? More anger? More violence? More separation? The same person who said she was angry also refuted my assertion that we all love our children. She said some people strap bombs to their children and that isn’t love. I’ve never heard of a parent strapping a bomb to their child. Not ever. If that’s happened, that’s a parent who is so full of anger and hatred they can’t see straight. Who’s lost that deeply rooted evolutionary, biologically-induced determination to protect and nurture his or her child. I’ve heard about parents raising their children with the belief that Americans are terrible people who deserve to die and that life on earth is not important, it’s the after-life that matters, and I’ve heard of American parents who teach their children that people of other colors and religions who speak different languages and pray to different gods or no god should be hated and also deserve to die.

Sometimes these kids grow up to become young adults who strap bombs to themselves, under some false idea that it honors their country or their god or their parents. If you’ve raised your child to believe there’s something honorable in taking his or her own life and the lives of others in a brutal, senseless, violent way, then I’m very sorry, but you are blowing it as a person and a parent. You’re blowing it because you’re choosing fear instead of love and you’re feeding that diet to your open-minded, openhearted child and you are participating and prolonging the violence. If you didn’t teach that to your child, but you gave birth to someone who came to believe that due to circumstances, events and conditions no one could prepare for, see coming, or manage, then you did not blow it. You were given a set of circumstances no one should judge from the outside and you deserve a lot of compassion.

Fear closes us off and shuts us down. Teaching hatred is the sign of a very broken heart, and it will only perpetuate the cycle of alienation, destruction and violence. The idea that there’s an “us” and a “them.” The only way to understand where someone is coming from is to truly try to see things from their perspective. To drop your own highly ingrained beliefs, opinions, projections and assumptions for just a few minutes, and really listen and truly consider a different point of view.

How might you feel if you grew up in a completely different environment? Most people can’t listen deeply to someone with a different set of core beliefs because it’s scary or it feels intolerable to drop their viewpoint, even briefly. Who am I without my highly ingrained beliefs? Without my opinions and projections and memories? You know who you are without that stuff? You’re me. I’m you. That’s the point. You want to identify yourself as Democrat. Republican. Christian. Muslim. Jew. Palestinian. Black, White. Male. Female. American. Saudi Arabian. Chinese. Try this instead. You are a human being living on planet earth and your anger and your labels will not save you from the very vulnerable experience of being human. Of violence and loss and grief and pain so deep it makes your head spin. Of heartbreak and confusion and shame and despair. It also won’t save you from having your heart opened in ways you couldn’t imagine until you felt it happen. It won’t save you from the crushing gratitude you’d have to feel if you were awake and alive to all that’s encompassed in being a human being on planet earth. For every one person who seeks to create death and destruction, there are thousands who go running toward people in pain. To offer a hand. Their coat. Their phone, their home, the food in their refrigerator. People are good.

I don’t know who put those bombs at the finish line, and so far, neither does anyone else. It could be an American. It could be someone from another country. It doesn’t matter. Whoever it was, it’s a person in a lot of pain. Someone who’s very confused about life. About how to be a human being on the only planet we all share. As someone else said yesterday, “We aren’t okay until we’re all okay.” Please don’t go to anger and stay there. If you’re angry, I get it. Use that anger to bring yourself back to love, to get fired up about how you can help to make the world within you and around you a more peaceful place to be. Teach your children that the space between them and anyone else is sacred and shouldn’t be polluted with hatred and judgment. With anger and blame. Choose love. Again and again and again. That’s how we heal ourselves, each other, and this beautiful but hurting world we live in. That’s how we become nothing more and nothing less than what we are: Incredibly gorgeous human beings on a spinning orb. Wishing that for everyone, and sending love in all directions,

Ally Hamilton

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

The Heart Cries Out with Truth. Answer It.

When-someone-shows-youI get lots of emails from people dealing with relationship issues and they often go something like, “I love my partner, and things would be amazing if he or she could just change some essential, defining personality attribute.” I mean, they don’t say it that way, but that’s the heart of it. There are few things in life more painful than falling in love with someone, offering up the most tender parts of yourself only to find you’re being rejected slowly for who you are – what once was endearing is now disappointing – or that you’ve been misunderstood on some profound level. That if you’d just change yourself, your partner would love you again. I see people bend over backwards, or squish themselves into the tiniest amount of space possible to endure. I’ve done that myself in past years, but I’d never do that today.  Love doesn’t require you to crush yourself and betray your spirit. That’s not loving someone and that’s not the experience of being loved, either.

This takes so many forms. People fall in love with someone they want to save (change). I’m going to love this person so much, they’ll heal and all these painful places within them that also cause me to suffer will go away. Or, this person has clearly told me they have trouble committing, but that’s just because they haven’t loved me before. Oh, yeah? I’d go get your crash pads out now. Sometimes a person gives to get– I’ll love this person so well, they’ll never leave me or hurt me. I’ll accept all kinds of poor treatment and keep showing up with love and eventually they’ll appreciate me and then I’ll have them. People are not possessions. Love is not controlling or manipulative. It’s not conditional or punishing. Love is accepting and when it’s happening well, it will open you and lead to the greater expansion of your heart and your partner’s.

I think a big part of the problem for people has to do with this desire to project. I have people write in about how they’ve made lists of all the attributes they’d like in a person and then they meet someone they’re attracted to and BAM! Miraculously, this person has all these qualities, down to their eye color and political leanings. Sometimes we want love so much, we simply see what we want to see. The best gift you can give someone is your curiosity and your full, kind attention, whether you’ve known them a few weeks or many years. Most people will tell you who they are if you give them the space to do that.

You really don’t want to be pushing important things under the rug, receiving the information that’s comfortable and editing out the stuff that’s confrontational, worrisome, or confusing. I think the key is to listen deeply and open to it all. You either love and accept people for all parts of themselves, the way you have to love yourself if you want to heal and be at peace, or you don’t, in which case you find the courage to gently release them. This is not to say we don’t all have our “stuff” and our places where we can grow. A great partnership is a foundation to move through those areas in a safe and loving space, to go deeper and become more vulnerable and still be accepted and cherished. That’s when you see a person blossom in the context of a relationship (If you haven’t blossomed before the relationship, it’s highly likely you’re going to go through some serious growing pains along the way, and you’ll either grow together or apart). But too many people fall in love with someone’s potential and that’s painful for both sides of the equation.

There are other areas this shows up as well. Parents who struggle to accept their children as they are, who have such a strong vision for their son’s life or daughter’s life, it’s hard to accept their path may look completely different. The heart cries out with truth. Part of loving means answering that call, and being in support of other people as they answer it.

You can’t change other people, and you can’t save them, either, but you can love them with your whole heart. Everyone deserves to be loved like that.

Wishing that for you, and for everyone,

Ally Hamilton

Don’t Give Up.

A few weeks ago, someone messaged me on the fan page and said he was going to end his life. I can’t really explain the panic I felt, especially because his message was a few hours old by the time I saw it. He shared some details of his life over the last few years and why he’d come to the conclusion that it just wasn’t worth it. He’d suffered some devastating losses, enough that it was understandable he felt hopeless and defeated. I wrote back immediately and gave him the Suicide Prevention Hotline number (800-273-8255), my number, and also contact information for three therapists I know and trust. I begged him to write back and let me know he’d received my message and also told him there have been times in my life when I’ve felt like giving up, too. Not for many, many years, but I certainly entertained those thoughts at one time in my life. When things feel so dark you really can’t think of a reason to lift your head off your pillow, the thought, “What’s the point of it all?” is natural and understandable.

Yesterday, someone wrote in a thread, “Why can’t we talk about the miraculous sometimes, too?” and then she wrote back and rescinded her question, saying that it “all leads back to joy.” But it’s a legitimate question and there are days when I just write from my heart and send out a hit of love. Or I hope I do. I write about the shadow emotions a lot because I feel in the spiritual community there’s so much focus on being positive and spreading the light. I think it’s alienating for many people. There is so much light. There’s a limitless well of love within each of us, but to uncover that well there’s usually some digging required. A lot of people feel alone in that digging, like there must be something wrong with them and sometimes they give up. Numb out. Run, deny, try to push it all down. Or they become bitter and think other people must have it easier. The truth is some people do have it easier. We don’t all go through the same experiences. There are some people who will suffer losses that are so knifing, so brutally painful you have to hope they’re going to be able to put one foot in front of the other, and that’s usually when some well-meaning positive person will come along and smugly assert that, “everything happens for a reason,” and forget that the foundation of a true spiritual practice is compassion. There’s nothing comforting in telling a person who is trying to remember how to breathe in and breathe out that their loss has happened for a reason, or that they should focus on all the good things in their life, or that one day they’ll understand why. Some things will never, ever be okay. Some things will never make sense. There are some lessons that will never elicit gratitude. Growth, yes. If you get through it. Deeper understanding, insight and compassion? Yes. Gratitude? No. Not for some things.

It’s my belief a spiritual practice ought to be there for you whether you’re moving through beautiful, joyful, miraculous times in your life, or you’re going through blinding pain that makes you want to give up. I don’t worry about those of you feeling gratitude. I love you, but I’m not worried. I do want to reach out to those people in darkness and say you’re not alone and offer a hand. A blog post. A yoga class, a hug. An email. Whatever I’ve got. Because I really think that’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to love each other, support each other, and share and grow together and I think that is pretty miraculous. When I look at my life today, it’s hard to imagine I ever wondered what “the point of it all” was, because it’s very clear to me now. The point of it is to love your heart out. To connect. There’s an insane amount of joy in all that. I’ve been emailing with the man who was feeling desperate a few weeks ago. He’s talking to someone and getting support in many areas. Sometimes we need help. It’s not easy, this business of being human. But it is pretty amazing.

Sending you a ton of love,

Ally Hamilton

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

It’s the Story, Not the Ending

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

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

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

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

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

So grateful to be traveling with all of you,

Ally Hamilton

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