April 21, 2026
Are You Using Spiritual Practice to Hide? The Truth About Spiritual Bypassing (VIDEO)
Have you ever wondered if your spiritual practice is actually holding you back?
In this rare solo episode, Harmony Slater opens up about something she has sat with for years: spiritual bypassing — the subtle, socially praised way we use meditation, yoga, journaling, and ritual to sidestep the emotional work we most need to do.
This conversation is deeply personal. Harmony shares her own journey from ballet-driven anorexia to years of devoted Ashtanga practice, and how all of it — every early morning practice, every pose, every certification — was also, in part, a way of hiding. From her body. From her feelings. From herself.
In this episode, you will hear:
- What spiritual bypassing actually is — and why it is so hard to see in yourself.
- How yoga, meditation, and breathwork can become sophisticated tools for avoidance.
- Why discipline and control can shrink your world without you realizing it.
- The difference between observing your experience and truly feeling it from within.
- How healing actually happens — and why it requires relationship, not solo practice.
- The moment Harmony's body finally said enough through burnout and autoimmune illness.
- A simple 'Do Nothing' practice that reveals more than any technique.
- Why life itself is the real practice.
- Whether you have been on the spiritual path for two years or twenty, this episode will meet you where you are.
- With honesty, compassion, and an invitation to stop performing and start feeling.
The Inner Rejuvenation Codes: https://harmonyslater.kit.com/inner-rejuvenation-codes-mc
Join the Lightworker Mastermind: https://harmonyslater.com/lightworker-mastermind
FIND Harmony online: https://harmonyslater.com/
Harmony on IG: https://www.instagram.com/harmonyslaterofficial/
Finding Harmony Podcast on IG: https://www.instagram.com/findingharmonypodcast/
FREE Manifestation Activation: https://harmonyslater.kit.com/manifestation-activation
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Welcome.
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I'm Harmony Slater, your host of the Finding Harmony podcast.
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Over the past 20 years, I've taught thousands of yoga teachers and students to explore the intersection between ancient wisdom and modern everyday life, using mind body practices to heal, awaken, and manifest their dreams from the inside out.
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This podcast is a sanctuary for those feeling overwhelmed by life's challenges.
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Are you ready to jump? In and discover how these challenges aren't actually in the way, but are the way to finding harmony.
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Let's invite the magic back in.
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Well, hello, welcome back to the Fighting Harmony podcast Today.
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It's just you and me and I wanna talk to you about something that I've been sitting with for quite a while.
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I actually wrote an email about it a couple weeks back and got a lot of responses from the reader.
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And it's something that I haven't always had the language for, but I'm starting to develop it now and I'm starting to look back on my life and see this thread, running through it of everything that sort of has not just.
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It kept me stuck because it's not really stuck, but that obstacle, right? Like in the introduction I say the obstacle isn't in the way.
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It is the way.
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And so the things that we're trying to avoid the most are actually the things that are in our lives and in our path for our liberation.
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And so.
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Often what I see, the patterns I see showing up in spiritual communities, I mean in everybody, but we're specifically talking about spiritual communities today.
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And, even that I've experienced throughout my life 'cause I've been involved in different spiritual communities, since I was a child, is this idea of spiritual bypassing that I wanna really look at and examine with you and start to talk about today.
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And I just wanna say this, that if you have a meditation practice, a pranayama or breath work practice, a yoga practice, a yoga asana, practice.
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If you light candles, if you pull cards, if you do morning rituals, if you write in your journal, if you have some interest in connecting with that God or universe or energy or life force.
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That is beyond just yourself, then this episode is really for you.
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You're in the right place today.
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because I love all of those things.
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I do all of those things.
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I think all of those things are so valuable and they've helped me so much at different points in my life.
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And so there's nothing wrong with these spiritual practices or self-care practices.
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I.
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I love them.
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I spent decades doing them, and yet what I see and have noticed is that you can still be doing all of the things and trying to do everything a.
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Correctly or still have a very earnest heart, a desire to connect to God or to, the energy field or to something beyond yourself and still be completely hiding.
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And that's what I've noticed.
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And for most of my life, I was incredibly good at being focused and being disciplined and determined and having.
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All of my energy going into my spiritual practices, whether it was Asana or pranayam or meditation or all three of them, plus journaling, plus reading spiritual texts, trying or doing the work.
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What I perceived to be the work of trying to get free of enlightenment, of liberation.
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And yet the more I was doing the work, the more I was.
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Actively pursuing this, the more I was placing this freedom, this liberation, this enlightenment in some future time and place, and it was always just repeating that pattern that.
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I had to be better, do better, get somewhere other than the place where I actually was.
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And so all of that is really looking at how we have these patterns.
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They're so subtle and so tricky, but this feeling like I need to perform or I'm not good enough, or, I need to be perfect or, I'll never get there until whatever.
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Fill in the blank.
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And for me, it was always really geared towards success and performance.
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These have very special places in my own wounded, heart and self-image.
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They seem like they're the medicine.
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They seem like if I'm successful enough then, or when my performance is the best or good enough or when I get that certification, then I'll be complete.
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I'll be free.
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I'll really understand, what enlightenment is or whatever that thing is that you're chasing.
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They feel like medicine.
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But really they're a mask.
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They're just masking the problem and you get so busy in doing the work, working towards that thing, whatever it is, or performing, trying to improve your performance at the thing.
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And Asana is a great example, yoga Asana, because especially in Ashtanga yoga, there's so much energy directed towards perfecting poses and.
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I always like to ask students in a loving way, like, where are you going? Where are you gonna get to? Because all of that energy of trying to have the perfect practice, the perfect pose, or to have the sense that you are good enough, when is always again just projecting.
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Yourself into some future state.
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That's never going to arrive because you don't live in the future.
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You only live here now.
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And so for me, this pattern showed up in all kinds of different ways in my life.
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You know, I started off as a ballet dancer, and I always did very well in school, and it was no different.
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When I came into the discipline of yoga first, it was very healing for me.
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It felt very embodied.
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It felt like connecting to my body, and it felt.
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It was delicious because I wasn't doing it for any reason except to heal and to be embodied and to feel.
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My body from the inside out.
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But of course, like everything, as soon as you're like, okay, you love it, you're enjoying good results, and then you want to maybe make a career of it, you turn it into something.
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And now again, we've othered the practice, right? So whether it's meditation or breath work or yoga, all of it, the dedication from the outside.
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Gives the impression that the practitioner is someone who has it all together.
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Someone who's doing their work, I'm practicing four hours a day, right? That seems pretty impressive.
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But underneath it all, all of that practice, all of that control, all of that discipline is actually just another form of avoiding or running away.
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and in a weird way, you start to shrink your world so that you can control your environment, so that you can have the perfect practice or have the right conditions for yoga to arise spontaneously from within, or whatever it is that you.
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Think that, getting to bed at seven or 8:00 PM and not eating this food, and not eating that food and waking up at three or 4:00 AM and you know, not engaging in too much social activity or deciding not to have children because.
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that's complete chaos or whatever it is that you're trying to control, right? Your rule starts to shrink and you're actually just getting further and further from yourself.
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You're running away from yourself, and that's also what I noticed.
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I think that's probably why Patabi Joyce always said, you should have children because you have to face what it's like to.
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Be in true relationship with another human being that you can't control.
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And so early on in my yoga practice, I didn't know these things.
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I genuinely didn't know about doing this deeper work.
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I really thought I was.
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I thought all of the discipline, all of the practice, all of those hours on the mat, all of the meditation in the meditation poses the advanced asanas, the pranayama.
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The reading, the studying, the traveling, the meeting of different gurus and spiritual teachers, that all of it would culminate in self-acceptance, in self-love, and that the more I worked at it, the more I would learn to love myself or could love myself or accept myself.
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But it actually kind of was the opposite.
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All of this searching and seeking and working and, directing my focused attention and energy on something outside of myself had actually trained me in a very effective and efficient way to completely bypass what was the insecurity or the fear or the feelings underneath.
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So instead of sitting with the insecurity, the fear or the feelings, it taught me to ignore them or to transcend them to separate from my body and look down on it, and it's safe when you're out in the far reaches of the energetic field, right? You're rising above, you're transmuting, or you're enduring sensation.
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All in an attempt to shift your state from where you are now to something better, something more enlightened, something different, someone different, right? And so instead of accepting and being with yourself, you're actually, reject.
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Yourself at a very fundamental level, trying to be someone else, trying to make yourself into something else.
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And so all of this spiritual practice wasn't helping me to sit with myself and be with myself and the, uh, discomfort or the darkness, or the, insecurity or fear of failure.
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but it was training me to stay on that treadmill to keep going.
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just one more day, one more practice.
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Just one more pose, then I'll get there.
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But there is no, there, there.
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So.
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Even VA pana meditation, which I love and I think is profound and highly recommend.
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You know, Koji has a beautiful teaching, which is to witness.
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The thoughts or the sensations to see them, to notice them, to scan the body, to observe them without suppressing or expressing, to just simply be with what's arising in the moment.
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And this is a beautiful practice, but what he doesn't say and what I believe, where the real power is hidden, is that there is a difference between.
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Watching from an observer from the outside without expressing or suppressing, but just noticing.
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And that's sort of the first step, Seeing how you're not your thoughts.
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Seeing how everything arises and passes away.
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Really understanding the nature of reality, but then allowing yourself to be in your body and instead of seeing it from outside of your body, to feel it inside of your body, letting yourself truly feel what's present for you.
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What is arrived? Missing and also to respond because that's also part of the codependent or interdependent origination, right? That interdependent origination is all things culminating and arising and passing away.
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And your desire to, shift or change or respond is also part of that.
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Interdependent co origination.
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That's the way it goes.
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And so sometimes what happens when we're just watching everything from outside, we are practicing the cultivation of disassociation.
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When we start to feel and cultivate the awareness from deep inside, we start to cultivate listening with the whole body.
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At another level, we start to develop what it means to be embodied and embodiment.
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And so that is the trend that I've noticed, not just in my own seeking and spiritual practice, but also in a lot of, the patterns and trends and tendencies that I've noticed with other teachers and students is there's a lot of dissociation and there's quite a dysfunctional relationship that starts to develop with the body.
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And I can speak to this myself, you know, in childhood.
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I started to develop a real dislike for my body, a hatred actually.
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Uh, I had extreme discipline as a child with food, that culminated in anorexia and bulimia.
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I had an inner critic that was so fierce.
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So amplified by the environment, the ballet world that I had placed myself in and dreamt of becoming this, prima ballerina.
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I had so much self doubt and judgment, and it was just all there bubbling unconscious, or even if it was conscious, I just.
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Struggled to turn the volume down on those patterns of self-criticism.
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I literally hated myself.
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I hated my body.
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All I could see was imperfection.
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I didn't like the way that I moved through the world and all of that dislike, hate, criticism, self-criticism was just pushed.
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Down, hidden away.
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Constant though a perpetual stream of insecurity just running in the background, like a program.
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And it didn't feel like I had installed it myself 'cause I was quite young actually.
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but I also didn't know how to turn it off.
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And, you know, it wasn't even installed by my parents.
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It was just there, it was things I had picked up on.
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Maybe it's past lives or ancestral patterns, ancestral trauma.
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but I really didn't feel good in my own skin, in my body.
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And so I just wanna pause there for a moment because maybe if you're listening.
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Still, you have felt something familiar in my words.
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Uh, this idea that you have to earn okayness.
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That it's not your God-given, right? That it's not.
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Your birthright that you have to deserve, ease and safety and comfort inside your own body that you need to work out more or lift more weights, or go for a run or practice two hours of yoga in order to feel okay in order to feel at ease, or to feel safe.
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And I just encourage you to kind of look at that pattern and that relationship with your body.
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I definitely understand it.
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It was a pattern of mine and it ran a lot of my practices and my relationship to myself and.
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Here's how spiritual bypassing works.
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So in case you haven't heard about spiritual bypassing before, you've heard about it and maybe you're kind of aware of what it means, but it's basically using your spiritual practice, your meditation, your prayer, your high vibe thinking or ceremony or yoga or.
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Energy work or whatever it is to sidestep the actual emotional and psychological work of being with discomfort, of sitting with the real fears and anxieties and the real struggles of the world in order to create, Emotional state or a physical state of feeling good or feeling too exhausted to care about other things in your life, it looks like healing.
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It might even feel like healing because you've taught yourself how to change your emotional state or your psychological state so that you shift away and out of any.
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Discomfort or dis-ease, in your body or in your mind.
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You can feel genuinely lighter after a breathwork session or genuinely clear after a yoga class, more expanded after ceremony, and those things are real.
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But if you're using the practices.
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These spiritual practices as a tool to numb or to avoid what is truly there, what's still there for you.
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Even if you're not looking at it, seeing it, feeling it, or addressing it, then you're not actually healing it because you have to feel it in order to heal it.
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You're just numbing with a spiritual flavor.
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It's kind of a sneaky thing.
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Of course, the ego's very slippery.
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And also it's a bit funny because you get a lot of social praise too, right? You look good, you look healthy, your body's fit.
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But at some level you might start to sense that something isn't working.
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Some things starts to fall apart eventually, and so even though you look evolved and you can do extraordinary things with your body, and maybe you can sit in a meditation pose for a long, long time, you look like someone who you know isn't sweating the small stuff, who's risen above it all? Who's transcended? but what's really happening underneath is that you're slowly, quietly shrinking your world.
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You're controlling everything in your environment.
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You're limiting the people that you're interacting with, the experiences that you're having.
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You're shutting down information.
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Anything you can't control, you avoiding, so that you never have to be faced with the fact that the real work.
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Starts to happen when you realize that you are actually not in control.
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When you learn how to be resourceful enough to sit with that discomfort and with the anxiety or the fear, or the sadness, the grief, the frustration, the unpleasant emotions that we.
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Continually try to avoid by being spiritual.
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And so this pattern I noticed also came with me when I really started focusing on building my business.
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It's all there and it can show up in different ways.
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It's not just in spiritual practice that we do this right.
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We disguise self-doubt as productivity.
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We get busy rewriting our bio or creating a new website instead of actually getting into conversation with people.
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Or showing up as a leader or getting on a podcast versus, staying in our little.
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House or room planning to do something that isn't going to actually move the dial.
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We get busy getting another certification instead of trusting what we already know or the resources that we already have, and we also create a bit of a nourishment.
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Barrier, or at least I did for myself, of not letting myself receive, not letting myself really soak in the win or that certification, or the moment of reaching a big goal or the applause or the compliments from other people.
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Really allowing yourself to receive support from others, from a friend, another teacher, or a coach, right? To allow people to help you, to support you.
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The pattern of needing to protect yourself or needing to know how to do it yourself or figuring it out all by yourself, of only trusting yourself and then getting there, getting the goal, getting the certification, getting.
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The next pose and what happens? You just move on to the next mountain, the next pose, the next best thing.
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And all along, in my experience, being praised for how much I was working, how hard I was working, same pattern, slightly different arena, right? You're just feeding a hungry ghost.
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You're never gonna be satisfied when you're trying to fill that void, that hole from the outside, from anything from the outside.
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You know, in this case, with business, with work, it can look like hustle.
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It can look like productivity, but actually you're hiding behind the hustle, behind the busyness, behind the productivity.
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And then the real question is, what are you hiding from? Who are you hiding from? And so for me, the shift came when.
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I stopped trying to run away from these negative thoughts and feelings about myself when I stopped trying to transcend the pain, the emotional pain, and I slowed down long enough to actually feel it, to actually be with it, to be with the disappointment, to be, with the failure, to be with the grief, the sadness, the loss, the letting go.
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The endings to really be able to be with it.
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Not alone though.
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Not alone, but to allow someone, I trusted a coach, a therapist, a mentor, to hold space, to witness, to hold me energetically in my unraveling.
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To allow the realizations, the beliefs that were formed before I even had words.
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To let those hidden messages inside my body come to the surface and let my body really reveal its secrets, the secrets that it holds, and that it's been storing since conception, and some of them are filled with pain and sadness.
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But to feel it from the inside out without layering a story on top of it, without having to make meaning.
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This is what that means.
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That's what that means.
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This is where that came from.
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This is who that came from.
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But just being with what's here right now in my body, in my emotions, in my energetic field, in my mind as it is.
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Not as I want it to be or I wished it to be, but as it truly was, just feeling it all the way through.
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It sounds simple and it is simple, but it's not easy.
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The shift came when I stopped trying to transcend the pain or explain or just observe the sensation, and I slowed down long enough to come into my body to actually feel it.
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And it wasn't alone, wasn't by myself in a room doing solo spiritual practice, but it was in partnership because we heal in community and this work is so, so powerful.
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When we come together, you know, there's a verse in the Bible that says, when two or more are gathered together, I am there also.
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I'm there with them, and it's because when we come into relationship, a third space opens up, which is the amalgamation of our energies, of our consciousness.
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It's the union, the yoga of being with another.
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So to sit with a coach to allow her to hold space for my unraveling to be witnessed in my tears, in my anger, in my frustration, in my fear, in, in my pain, in my memories.
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To allow the realizations and the beliefs that were formed before I even had words, you know, those really foundational, fundamental beliefs that are stored in our body, around safety, around belonging, around acceptance, allowing them to surface to come up into my awareness, to let my body reveal.
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Its truths.
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These secrets, all the things that it had been storing.
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I'm sure it's still storing some, but many, many things.
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It had been storing inside the tissues for years and learning to live from the inside out.
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Without a story layered on top of it, you don't need to know what it means.
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You don't need to make meaning out of it or where it came from or what it's saying even about you, but just being with what's here right now in this space, being witnessed by another, held in safety, in true acceptance, in unconditional love and appreciation.
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An allowance for whatever it is to be without judgment, beyond right and wrong, and it sounds simple.
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It is simple, but it's not easy.
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Because it requires you to be really vulnerable.
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It requires you to get real with yourself, to be vulnerable with yourself, and to do that in the presence of someone else holding space so that you can actually reprogram your nervous system so that your nervous system has the experiential reality of it's safe to feel in the presence of another being.
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It's safe to cry.
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It's safe to be a mess.
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It doesn't mean anything about who I am, it's just what's arising right now from this particular moment, embodiment in time and to to be able to let yourself have that gift.
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Of being seen in your mess, in your discomfort and not needing to regulate your way out of it or rise above it or change it or make it go away.
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Just staying with what is truly present and genuinely feeling it.
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Through this process of being in relationship with a coach and having her see me see my greatness when I couldn't see it in myself, to hold me in my mess, and my insecurity and uncertainty, and to really just honor the being that I am.
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To know my greatness with the mess, in the mess.
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And to hold that vision for myself and my life and this embodiment of, of this energy, this consciousness, this spirit, now at this time in this lifetime, without me needing to be any different.
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Without having to change anything, just having her hold the vision allowed me to see and embody that vision.
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Within my very selves for myself, and it's so helpful.
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I still have this coach.
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I still work with her because we don't see ourselves clearly, and if I've learned anything through all of these years, through the body dysmorphia, through all of the yoga asana, it's that we do not see ourselves clearly.
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And the more we try to change ourselves and the more we try to do to make up for the lack that we're afraid to admit that we feel, the more unclear we're actually getting in the truth of who we really are.
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And here's what I've found to be true is that your body is trying to speak to you.
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It is trying to.
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Create safety.
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It's always trying to support you, and at first it whispers at first the messages are not loud, and if you don't listen to it, sometimes it does get a little bit louder through pain or through dis-ease.
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The dis-ease starts to not just be a feeling or an emotion.
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It starts to find a physical outlet.
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For me that looked like burnout.
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It looked like an autoimmune diagnosis where my body was in the most literal way, turning against itself because I wasn't listening, I wasn't honoring my body as a sacred vessel, as a portal, as an organic beautiful being.
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That's created from the earth, that's rising up from the earth and will go back into the earth.
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that's being embodied by an infinite soul, an infinite spirit.
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I was not honoring this vessel, and so I really want you to hear this because I've had whole periods of life where I didn't trust myself and I didn't listen.
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To that deeper inner knowing.
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And it's a question that comes up a lot with yoga students is how do I know when to push or when to listen to, lean back or lean in, to be committed and disciplined or to be soft and relax or let myself sleep in, right? And we can talk ourselves in and out of all kinds of things.
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Layering logic over.
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What we're actually feeling and it's takes practice.
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It takes practice to slow down and feel and notice what you are actually feeling in your body from the perspective of your body, not the perspective of your mind.
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Moving beyond the mind.
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And sometimes when we think about moving beyond the mind, we think it's like out there somewhere in the galactic realms or the celestial heavens, right? Moving beyond the mind means getting out of the body.
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But what if moving beyond the mind actually means going into the body to the depth of your being? cause the body doesn't lie.
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It tells the truth.
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And when you learn to actually listen to the body and its truth without dressing it up in any kind of spiritual practice or wrapper, and not trying to bypass what is actually arising for you in the moment, then it changes how you relate to yourself.
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Your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others.
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It changes how you make decisions, how you show up for yourself, for your family, for your students, for your clients.
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It tunes you into what is your soul calling, and you start to know what's yours, what's your energy and what's not your energy.
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What is your material to work with and what's being put on you from others? And it also opens up the possibility of allowing yourself to truly receive, to receive nourishment, to let it be so, so good.
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And I think we really struggle with this is, what happens if I don't have to work so hard? What happens if it's just so good? We fear that almost as much as we fear failure.
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What happens if it's just allowed to be beautiful and easy and instead of, feeling like we need to work hard to prove our worth, we can start to approach things from the perspective of how can I let this be easy? What if this just is allowed to feel so good? And it changes.
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It changes how we be in the world, how we be with ourself, and how we be with others.
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So what does this actually look like in practice? I want to challenge you with something Next time you are, thinking like, I gotta get to work, I gotta, you know, do someran or some breath work, or some yoga or journaling, or all of these spiritual self-care activities that we can get caught up in.
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I want you to pause for a moment and ask yourself, why am I doing this? Is it freedom to something or am I seeking freedom from something? Am I doing this to cultivate more awareness of what's present for me right here in this moment? Or am I trying to outrun something, some feelings, some thought, some experience? Am I trying to dissipate anxious energy so that I can just get through my day? A beautiful question is, am I practicing from a sense of fear or from love? And there's really no wrong answer, but there's honest ones.
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And the more honest you get with yourself, the more transformation will happen.
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Because sometimes we do generally need to regulate and sometimes we do need to dissipate anxious energy.
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And sometimes, you know what, we just need to outrun things right? Sometimes we need to use the tools to find balance or a sense of self-worth, and that's not bypassing if you're doing it with awareness and with wisdom, but sometimes we get addicted.
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To the work, to the practice, to the discipline, to feeling like I'm only good enough when I do X, Y, and Z.
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And I think many of us know that feeling.
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You know, we're reaching for the practice like you would reach for any substance or, habit that helps you to escape feeling the things you don't wanna feel.
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And so I.
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Often it happens when we're afraid to stop.
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When we're afraid to slow down, we think we'll get inundated or, avalanche of emotion will catch up with us.
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And so my invitation for you is to do nothing.
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It's an interesting experiment.
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Do nothing sit still.
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For 30 minutes, or you can move, but just really do nothing.
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Don't drink coffee or tea.
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Don't even necessarily people watch or analyze people or allow yourself to get distracted.
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You can look at nature, you can look at a wall, you can look at things in your room, but you don't have to accomplish anything.
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You're not writing, you're not journaling.
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Just notice how often you reach for the phone for distraction.
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Keep your phone far away from you.
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Set a timer in another room, and then just sit down and just sit there and see what happens.
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And notice what arises from the discomfort.
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How long can you literally allow yourself to sit there and do nothing? Watch the mind's habit to need to do something, to think about something, to analyze, something, to judge or criticize, and just see what arises from the body, from your heart, from your solar plexus, from your gut, from your throat.
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Notice where you feel sensation in your body.
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And ask yourself what is actually here, what is present right now, and be with yourself in your body, with your breath as it's moving in and out of the body, and you're not meditating and you're not applying any technique or specific mantra or anything like that.
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You're just being with yourself, listening.
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Waiting, noticing, observing, and do your best not to grasp at what you think should be there.
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And it's not about what you wish you felt or what you wish the experience was.
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Just be with what is actually present right here, right now, and welcome it.
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That's the work.
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Again, very simple.
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Do nothing, but it's not easy.
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It is really not easy.
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And it helps to just re-pattern some of that energy around doing, needing to always do, always accomplish, always perform, always get better, always be moving on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.
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A lot of us come from this pattern and it gets perpetuated with the Ang yoga practice because.
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It's set up that way.
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It's designed that way.
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And so this is profoundly different from what most of us were taught and the patterns that most of us have developed throughout our lifetime.
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And I wanna share one more piece because it's something central to how I teach now and how I work with clients.
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And that is when I really started doing this deeper work.
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Of connecting with my body, accepting my body as it is without trying to change it or make it different, whether that's in looks or feeling or felt sense.
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when I stopped trying to get anywhere or get somewhere, I just started seeing the world differently.
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I started seeing life as the path, life as the practice.
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When we allow things to move through us, energy, emotions, stories, beliefs, other people's expectations, our own fear or joy or love, we allow ourself to really be with the abundance of what it means to be alive.
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We become aware of so much more and we start to feel it as a river moving through us rather than something to manage or control or dam up or stop.
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And we have a choice.
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We have a choice in what we want to channel.
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And there's a difference between wanting to control and direct versus choosing what is present.
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Because choice arises out of being present in the now, we have to fully accept life as it is the raw, unfiltered, present moment, and then we can choose.
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If we can make a choice.
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This presence though, this choice requires us to be embodied, which means to feel from within our own body, not popping up into the mind, into the story, into analyzing what it means or what we think about it, but just staying in the deep sensation of it, feeling it all the way through.
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Making peace with it, welcoming it, having a conversation with it, listening to it, discovering the wisdom that's there inside of yourself.
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And this is where real transformation lives.
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It doesn't happen, at another retreat or in another certification or traveling to India or Miso, or working with this teacher or that teacher.
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Higher level of practice or a different technique, a different type of yoga or a specific type of breath work or pranayama.
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It happens when we have this willingness to be here now to slow down and to feel what's present, to drop into our feelings, our feeling state.
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Without story, the true, pure, raw sensation of it.
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And to listen to what arises from that space and that place.
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So if you've made it all the way to the end of this episode, then I wanna say something to you specifically, since you're still here.
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If any part of this resonated with you, whether it's the bypassing, the discipline, the needing to earn the right to feel okay, or not quite letting yourself receive, not feeling safe to receive or to be seen, then I really truly wanna let you know you are not broken.
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And there's nothing wrong with you.
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You've developed some great strategies and patterns that have helped to keep you safe throughout your life, and they've made sense within the context of your life, and you also don't have to continue running those patterns and programs.
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And also you can never truly outrun yourself anyway.
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You are always there.
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And so the shift isn't gonna happen.
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You know when you find the perfect practice for yourself, it's gonna happen when you stop using your spiritual practice to avoid what's uncomfortable and when you're willing to sit with uncertainty with not knowing, even if it's only for two minutes, just sit.
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With what is, without trying to fix it or solve it or transcend it or make it mean something, or make it go away or turn it into something else, just be with it.
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That's when everything changes truly.
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That's when true realizations open up from within you.
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It's when the mind and the body and the consciousness all align.
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It's when you feel spirit in your body and you come alive, and it doesn't happen because you forced it.
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It happens because you finally, finally allowed yourself to meet yourself in the present moment without any judgements or preconceived ideas about who and what you are.
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And so this.
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Work is calling to you.
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If you feel like there's a next step along your path that you're excited and encouraged to explore, then I would love to hear from you.
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This is exactly how I work with my clients.
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We go into the places that.
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We often bypass into the feelings, the unconscious, the body, through breath, through awareness, through sensation, beyond story, beyond the mind.
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Deep, deep into the present moment and slowly, safely into your own body, your own embodiment, and actually feel what's there for you.
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And learn to listen to it.
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Listen to its language, listens to its messages, its memories.
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What it's holding, not to fix them.
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You don't need to be fixed.
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You are not broken.
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But to just feel what is arising, what's there, and like little children, you know what starts to surface.
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It just wants to be seen and acknowledged and loved.
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And from that place, everything starts to shift.
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Everything starts to come into alignment, and you feel what true alignment is.
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And so if you wanna know more about how I work with people and what working with me would look like, then just send me a message on Instagram at Harmony Slater official.
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You're also welcome to send me an email or check out my website, harmony slater.com.
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I would love to have a conversation with you and.
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See if it would be a good fit, if this work would be a good fit for you.
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And so I hope that you found some inspiration from these stories and this episode.
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And until next week, continue to take good care of yourself.
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Try out that, do nothing exercise and be with yourself as is.
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As you are, because you are a precious being of light who's here to elevate consciousness on the planet and be a beacon of love for all the beautiful souls that you come into contact with.
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For everyone you meet each and every day.
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I love you.
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If you haven't heard it today, I'm letting you know and I can't wait.
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To connect with you next week.
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Thanks for listening.
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That's it.
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We've concluded another episode of the Finding Harmony podcast.
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I just wanna thank you so much for doing the work that changes the world, starting with yourself.
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It truly does make a huge difference.
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Please make sure you have your automatic downloads turned on wherever you listen, so you don't miss any of the upcoming episodes.
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I have so much more magic I can't wait to share with you.
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Lastly, if you're on Instagram, I love connecting and hearing from you, so come on over and say hello at Finding Harmony podcast, and you can also come say hello to me personally at Harmony Slater official.
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Thank you again for being here.
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I cannot wait to share more with you in our next episode.
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Welcome.
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I'm Harmony Slater, your host of the Finding Harmony podcast.
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Over the past 20 years, I've taught thousands of yoga teachers and students to explore the intersection between ancient wisdom and modern everyday life, using mind body practices to heal, awaken, and manifest their dreams from the inside out.
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This podcast is a sanctuary for those feeling overwhelmed by life's challenges.
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Are you ready to jump? In and discover how these challenges aren't actually in the way, but are the way to finding harmony.
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Let's invite the magic back in.
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Well, hello, welcome back to the Fighting Harmony podcast Today.
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It's just you and me and I wanna talk to you about something that I've been sitting with for quite a while.
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I actually wrote an email about it a couple weeks back and got a lot of responses from the reader.
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And it's something that I haven't always had the language for, but I'm starting to develop it now and I'm starting to look back on my life and see this thread, running through it of everything that sort of has not just.
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It kept me stuck because it's not really stuck, but that obstacle, right? Like in the introduction I say the obstacle isn't in the way.
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It is the way.
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And so the things that we're trying to avoid the most are actually the things that are in our lives and in our path for our liberation.
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And so.
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Often what I see, the patterns I see showing up in spiritual communities, I mean in everybody, but we're specifically talking about spiritual communities today.
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And, even that I've experienced throughout my life 'cause I've been involved in different spiritual communities, since I was a child, is this idea of spiritual bypassing that I wanna really look at and examine with you and start to talk about today.
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And I just wanna say this, that if you have a meditation practice, a pranayama or breath work practice, a yoga practice, a yoga asana, practice.
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If you light candles, if you pull cards, if you do morning rituals, if you write in your journal, if you have some interest in connecting with that God or universe or energy or life force.
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That is beyond just yourself, then this episode is really for you.
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You're in the right place today.
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because I love all of those things.
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I do all of those things.
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I think all of those things are so valuable and they've helped me so much at different points in my life.
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And so there's nothing wrong with these spiritual practices or self-care practices.
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I.
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I love them.
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I spent decades doing them, and yet what I see and have noticed is that you can still be doing all of the things and trying to do everything a.
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Correctly or still have a very earnest heart, a desire to connect to God or to, the energy field or to something beyond yourself and still be completely hiding.
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And that's what I've noticed.
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And for most of my life, I was incredibly good at being focused and being disciplined and determined and having.
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All of my energy going into my spiritual practices, whether it was Asana or pranayam or meditation or all three of them, plus journaling, plus reading spiritual texts, trying or doing the work.
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What I perceived to be the work of trying to get free of enlightenment, of liberation.
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And yet the more I was doing the work, the more I was.
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Actively pursuing this, the more I was placing this freedom, this liberation, this enlightenment in some future time and place, and it was always just repeating that pattern that.
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I had to be better, do better, get somewhere other than the place where I actually was.
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And so all of that is really looking at how we have these patterns.
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They're so subtle and so tricky, but this feeling like I need to perform or I'm not good enough, or, I need to be perfect or, I'll never get there until whatever.
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Fill in the blank.
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And for me, it was always really geared towards success and performance.
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These have very special places in my own wounded, heart and self-image.
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They seem like they're the medicine.
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They seem like if I'm successful enough then, or when my performance is the best or good enough or when I get that certification, then I'll be complete.
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I'll be free.
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I'll really understand, what enlightenment is or whatever that thing is that you're chasing.
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They feel like medicine.
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But really they're a mask.
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They're just masking the problem and you get so busy in doing the work, working towards that thing, whatever it is, or performing, trying to improve your performance at the thing.
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And Asana is a great example, yoga Asana, because especially in Ashtanga yoga, there's so much energy directed towards perfecting poses and.
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I always like to ask students in a loving way, like, where are you going? Where are you gonna get to? Because all of that energy of trying to have the perfect practice, the perfect pose, or to have the sense that you are good enough, when is always again just projecting.
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Yourself into some future state.
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That's never going to arrive because you don't live in the future.
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You only live here now.
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And so for me, this pattern showed up in all kinds of different ways in my life.
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You know, I started off as a ballet dancer, and I always did very well in school, and it was no different.
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When I came into the discipline of yoga first, it was very healing for me.
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It felt very embodied.
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It felt like connecting to my body, and it felt.
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It was delicious because I wasn't doing it for any reason except to heal and to be embodied and to feel.
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My body from the inside out.
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But of course, like everything, as soon as you're like, okay, you love it, you're enjoying good results, and then you want to maybe make a career of it, you turn it into something.
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And now again, we've othered the practice, right? So whether it's meditation or breath work or yoga, all of it, the dedication from the outside.
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Gives the impression that the practitioner is someone who has it all together.
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Someone who's doing their work, I'm practicing four hours a day, right? That seems pretty impressive.
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But underneath it all, all of that practice, all of that control, all of that discipline is actually just another form of avoiding or running away.
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and in a weird way, you start to shrink your world so that you can control your environment, so that you can have the perfect practice or have the right conditions for yoga to arise spontaneously from within, or whatever it is that you.
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Think that, getting to bed at seven or 8:00 PM and not eating this food, and not eating that food and waking up at three or 4:00 AM and you know, not engaging in too much social activity or deciding not to have children because.
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that's complete chaos or whatever it is that you're trying to control, right? Your rule starts to shrink and you're actually just getting further and further from yourself.
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You're running away from yourself, and that's also what I noticed.
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I think that's probably why Patabi Joyce always said, you should have children because you have to face what it's like to.
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Be in true relationship with another human being that you can't control.
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And so early on in my yoga practice, I didn't know these things.
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I genuinely didn't know about doing this deeper work.
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I really thought I was.
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I thought all of the discipline, all of the practice, all of those hours on the mat, all of the meditation in the meditation poses the advanced asanas, the pranayama.
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The reading, the studying, the traveling, the meeting of different gurus and spiritual teachers, that all of it would culminate in self-acceptance, in self-love, and that the more I worked at it, the more I would learn to love myself or could love myself or accept myself.
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But it actually kind of was the opposite.
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All of this searching and seeking and working and, directing my focused attention and energy on something outside of myself had actually trained me in a very effective and efficient way to completely bypass what was the insecurity or the fear or the feelings underneath.
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So instead of sitting with the insecurity, the fear or the feelings, it taught me to ignore them or to transcend them to separate from my body and look down on it, and it's safe when you're out in the far reaches of the energetic field, right? You're rising above, you're transmuting, or you're enduring sensation.
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All in an attempt to shift your state from where you are now to something better, something more enlightened, something different, someone different, right? And so instead of accepting and being with yourself, you're actually, reject.
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Yourself at a very fundamental level, trying to be someone else, trying to make yourself into something else.
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And so all of this spiritual practice wasn't helping me to sit with myself and be with myself and the, uh, discomfort or the darkness, or the, insecurity or fear of failure.
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but it was training me to stay on that treadmill to keep going.
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just one more day, one more practice.
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Just one more pose, then I'll get there.
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But there is no, there, there.
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So.
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Even VA pana meditation, which I love and I think is profound and highly recommend.
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You know, Koji has a beautiful teaching, which is to witness.
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The thoughts or the sensations to see them, to notice them, to scan the body, to observe them without suppressing or expressing, to just simply be with what's arising in the moment.
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And this is a beautiful practice, but what he doesn't say and what I believe, where the real power is hidden, is that there is a difference between.
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Watching from an observer from the outside without expressing or suppressing, but just noticing.
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And that's sort of the first step, Seeing how you're not your thoughts.
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Seeing how everything arises and passes away.
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Really understanding the nature of reality, but then allowing yourself to be in your body and instead of seeing it from outside of your body, to feel it inside of your body, letting yourself truly feel what's present for you.
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What is arrived? Missing and also to respond because that's also part of the codependent or interdependent origination, right? That interdependent origination is all things culminating and arising and passing away.
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And your desire to, shift or change or respond is also part of that.
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Interdependent co origination.
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That's the way it goes.
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And so sometimes what happens when we're just watching everything from outside, we are practicing the cultivation of disassociation.
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When we start to feel and cultivate the awareness from deep inside, we start to cultivate listening with the whole body.
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At another level, we start to develop what it means to be embodied and embodiment.
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And so that is the trend that I've noticed, not just in my own seeking and spiritual practice, but also in a lot of, the patterns and trends and tendencies that I've noticed with other teachers and students is there's a lot of dissociation and there's quite a dysfunctional relationship that starts to develop with the body.
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And I can speak to this myself, you know, in childhood.
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I started to develop a real dislike for my body, a hatred actually.
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Uh, I had extreme discipline as a child with food, that culminated in anorexia and bulimia.
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I had an inner critic that was so fierce.
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So amplified by the environment, the ballet world that I had placed myself in and dreamt of becoming this, prima ballerina.
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I had so much self doubt and judgment, and it was just all there bubbling unconscious, or even if it was conscious, I just.
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Struggled to turn the volume down on those patterns of self-criticism.
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I literally hated myself.
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I hated my body.
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All I could see was imperfection.
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I didn't like the way that I moved through the world and all of that dislike, hate, criticism, self-criticism was just pushed.
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Down, hidden away.
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Constant though a perpetual stream of insecurity just running in the background, like a program.
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And it didn't feel like I had installed it myself 'cause I was quite young actually.
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but I also didn't know how to turn it off.
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And, you know, it wasn't even installed by my parents.
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It was just there, it was things I had picked up on.
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Maybe it's past lives or ancestral patterns, ancestral trauma.
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but I really didn't feel good in my own skin, in my body.
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And so I just wanna pause there for a moment because maybe if you're listening.
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Still, you have felt something familiar in my words.
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Uh, this idea that you have to earn okayness.
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That it's not your God-given, right? That it's not.
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Your birthright that you have to deserve, ease and safety and comfort inside your own body that you need to work out more or lift more weights, or go for a run or practice two hours of yoga in order to feel okay in order to feel at ease, or to feel safe.
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And I just encourage you to kind of look at that pattern and that relationship with your body.
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I definitely understand it.
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It was a pattern of mine and it ran a lot of my practices and my relationship to myself and.
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Here's how spiritual bypassing works.
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So in case you haven't heard about spiritual bypassing before, you've heard about it and maybe you're kind of aware of what it means, but it's basically using your spiritual practice, your meditation, your prayer, your high vibe thinking or ceremony or yoga or.
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Energy work or whatever it is to sidestep the actual emotional and psychological work of being with discomfort, of sitting with the real fears and anxieties and the real struggles of the world in order to create, Emotional state or a physical state of feeling good or feeling too exhausted to care about other things in your life, it looks like healing.
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It might even feel like healing because you've taught yourself how to change your emotional state or your psychological state so that you shift away and out of any.
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Discomfort or dis-ease, in your body or in your mind.
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You can feel genuinely lighter after a breathwork session or genuinely clear after a yoga class, more expanded after ceremony, and those things are real.
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But if you're using the practices.
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These spiritual practices as a tool to numb or to avoid what is truly there, what's still there for you.
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Even if you're not looking at it, seeing it, feeling it, or addressing it, then you're not actually healing it because you have to feel it in order to heal it.
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You're just numbing with a spiritual flavor.
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It's kind of a sneaky thing.
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Of course, the ego's very slippery.
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And also it's a bit funny because you get a lot of social praise too, right? You look good, you look healthy, your body's fit.
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But at some level you might start to sense that something isn't working.
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Some things starts to fall apart eventually, and so even though you look evolved and you can do extraordinary things with your body, and maybe you can sit in a meditation pose for a long, long time, you look like someone who you know isn't sweating the small stuff, who's risen above it all? Who's transcended? but what's really happening underneath is that you're slowly, quietly shrinking your world.
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You're controlling everything in your environment.
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You're limiting the people that you're interacting with, the experiences that you're having.
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You're shutting down information.
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Anything you can't control, you avoiding, so that you never have to be faced with the fact that the real work.
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Starts to happen when you realize that you are actually not in control.
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When you learn how to be resourceful enough to sit with that discomfort and with the anxiety or the fear, or the sadness, the grief, the frustration, the unpleasant emotions that we.
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Continually try to avoid by being spiritual.
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And so this pattern I noticed also came with me when I really started focusing on building my business.
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It's all there and it can show up in different ways.
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It's not just in spiritual practice that we do this right.
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We disguise self-doubt as productivity.
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We get busy rewriting our bio or creating a new website instead of actually getting into conversation with people.
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Or showing up as a leader or getting on a podcast versus, staying in our little.
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House or room planning to do something that isn't going to actually move the dial.
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We get busy getting another certification instead of trusting what we already know or the resources that we already have, and we also create a bit of a nourishment.
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Barrier, or at least I did for myself, of not letting myself receive, not letting myself really soak in the win or that certification, or the moment of reaching a big goal or the applause or the compliments from other people.
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Really allowing yourself to receive support from others, from a friend, another teacher, or a coach, right? To allow people to help you, to support you.
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The pattern of needing to protect yourself or needing to know how to do it yourself or figuring it out all by yourself, of only trusting yourself and then getting there, getting the goal, getting the certification, getting.
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The next pose and what happens? You just move on to the next mountain, the next pose, the next best thing.
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And all along, in my experience, being praised for how much I was working, how hard I was working, same pattern, slightly different arena, right? You're just feeding a hungry ghost.
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You're never gonna be satisfied when you're trying to fill that void, that hole from the outside, from anything from the outside.
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You know, in this case, with business, with work, it can look like hustle.
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It can look like productivity, but actually you're hiding behind the hustle, behind the busyness, behind the productivity.
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And then the real question is, what are you hiding from? Who are you hiding from? And so for me, the shift came when.
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I stopped trying to run away from these negative thoughts and feelings about myself when I stopped trying to transcend the pain, the emotional pain, and I slowed down long enough to actually feel it, to actually be with it, to be with the disappointment, to be, with the failure, to be with the grief, the sadness, the loss, the letting go.
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The endings to really be able to be with it.
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Not alone though.
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Not alone, but to allow someone, I trusted a coach, a therapist, a mentor, to hold space, to witness, to hold me energetically in my unraveling.
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To allow the realizations, the beliefs that were formed before I even had words.
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To let those hidden messages inside my body come to the surface and let my body really reveal its secrets, the secrets that it holds, and that it's been storing since conception, and some of them are filled with pain and sadness.
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But to feel it from the inside out without layering a story on top of it, without having to make meaning.
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This is what that means.
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That's what that means.
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This is where that came from.
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This is who that came from.
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But just being with what's here right now in my body, in my emotions, in my energetic field, in my mind as it is.
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Not as I want it to be or I wished it to be, but as it truly was, just feeling it all the way through.
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It sounds simple and it is simple, but it's not easy.
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The shift came when I stopped trying to transcend the pain or explain or just observe the sensation, and I slowed down long enough to come into my body to actually feel it.
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And it wasn't alone, wasn't by myself in a room doing solo spiritual practice, but it was in partnership because we heal in community and this work is so, so powerful.
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When we come together, you know, there's a verse in the Bible that says, when two or more are gathered together, I am there also.
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I'm there with them, and it's because when we come into relationship, a third space opens up, which is the amalgamation of our energies, of our consciousness.
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It's the union, the yoga of being with another.
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So to sit with a coach to allow her to hold space for my unraveling to be witnessed in my tears, in my anger, in my frustration, in my fear, in, in my pain, in my memories.
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To allow the realizations and the beliefs that were formed before I even had words, you know, those really foundational, fundamental beliefs that are stored in our body, around safety, around belonging, around acceptance, allowing them to surface to come up into my awareness, to let my body reveal.
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Its truths.
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These secrets, all the things that it had been storing.
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I'm sure it's still storing some, but many, many things.
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It had been storing inside the tissues for years and learning to live from the inside out.
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Without a story layered on top of it, you don't need to know what it means.
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You don't need to make meaning out of it or where it came from or what it's saying even about you, but just being with what's here right now in this space, being witnessed by another, held in safety, in true acceptance, in unconditional love and appreciation.
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An allowance for whatever it is to be without judgment, beyond right and wrong, and it sounds simple.
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It is simple, but it's not easy.
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Because it requires you to be really vulnerable.
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It requires you to get real with yourself, to be vulnerable with yourself, and to do that in the presence of someone else holding space so that you can actually reprogram your nervous system so that your nervous system has the experiential reality of it's safe to feel in the presence of another being.
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It's safe to cry.
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It's safe to be a mess.
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It doesn't mean anything about who I am, it's just what's arising right now from this particular moment, embodiment in time and to to be able to let yourself have that gift.
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Of being seen in your mess, in your discomfort and not needing to regulate your way out of it or rise above it or change it or make it go away.
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Just staying with what is truly present and genuinely feeling it.
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Through this process of being in relationship with a coach and having her see me see my greatness when I couldn't see it in myself, to hold me in my mess, and my insecurity and uncertainty, and to really just honor the being that I am.
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To know my greatness with the mess, in the mess.
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And to hold that vision for myself and my life and this embodiment of, of this energy, this consciousness, this spirit, now at this time in this lifetime, without me needing to be any different.
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Without having to change anything, just having her hold the vision allowed me to see and embody that vision.
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Within my very selves for myself, and it's so helpful.
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I still have this coach.
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I still work with her because we don't see ourselves clearly, and if I've learned anything through all of these years, through the body dysmorphia, through all of the yoga asana, it's that we do not see ourselves clearly.
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And the more we try to change ourselves and the more we try to do to make up for the lack that we're afraid to admit that we feel, the more unclear we're actually getting in the truth of who we really are.
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And here's what I've found to be true is that your body is trying to speak to you.
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It is trying to.
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Create safety.
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It's always trying to support you, and at first it whispers at first the messages are not loud, and if you don't listen to it, sometimes it does get a little bit louder through pain or through dis-ease.
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The dis-ease starts to not just be a feeling or an emotion.
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It starts to find a physical outlet.
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For me that looked like burnout.
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It looked like an autoimmune diagnosis where my body was in the most literal way, turning against itself because I wasn't listening, I wasn't honoring my body as a sacred vessel, as a portal, as an organic beautiful being.
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That's created from the earth, that's rising up from the earth and will go back into the earth.
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that's being embodied by an infinite soul, an infinite spirit.
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I was not honoring this vessel, and so I really want you to hear this because I've had whole periods of life where I didn't trust myself and I didn't listen.
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To that deeper inner knowing.
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And it's a question that comes up a lot with yoga students is how do I know when to push or when to listen to, lean back or lean in, to be committed and disciplined or to be soft and relax or let myself sleep in, right? And we can talk ourselves in and out of all kinds of things.
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Layering logic over.
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What we're actually feeling and it's takes practice.
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It takes practice to slow down and feel and notice what you are actually feeling in your body from the perspective of your body, not the perspective of your mind.
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Moving beyond the mind.
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And sometimes when we think about moving beyond the mind, we think it's like out there somewhere in the galactic realms or the celestial heavens, right? Moving beyond the mind means getting out of the body.
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But what if moving beyond the mind actually means going into the body to the depth of your being? cause the body doesn't lie.
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It tells the truth.
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And when you learn to actually listen to the body and its truth without dressing it up in any kind of spiritual practice or wrapper, and not trying to bypass what is actually arising for you in the moment, then it changes how you relate to yourself.
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Your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others.
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It changes how you make decisions, how you show up for yourself, for your family, for your students, for your clients.
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It tunes you into what is your soul calling, and you start to know what's yours, what's your energy and what's not your energy.
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What is your material to work with and what's being put on you from others? And it also opens up the possibility of allowing yourself to truly receive, to receive nourishment, to let it be so, so good.
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And I think we really struggle with this is, what happens if I don't have to work so hard? What happens if it's just so good? We fear that almost as much as we fear failure.
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What happens if it's just allowed to be beautiful and easy and instead of, feeling like we need to work hard to prove our worth, we can start to approach things from the perspective of how can I let this be easy? What if this just is allowed to feel so good? And it changes.
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It changes how we be in the world, how we be with ourself, and how we be with others.
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So what does this actually look like in practice? I want to challenge you with something Next time you are, thinking like, I gotta get to work, I gotta, you know, do someran or some breath work, or some yoga or journaling, or all of these spiritual self-care activities that we can get caught up in.
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I want you to pause for a moment and ask yourself, why am I doing this? Is it freedom to something or am I seeking freedom from something? Am I doing this to cultivate more awareness of what's present for me right here in this moment? Or am I trying to outrun something, some feelings, some thought, some experience? Am I trying to dissipate anxious energy so that I can just get through my day? A beautiful question is, am I practicing from a sense of fear or from love? And there's really no wrong answer, but there's honest ones.
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And the more honest you get with yourself, the more transformation will happen.
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Because sometimes we do generally need to regulate and sometimes we do need to dissipate anxious energy.
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And sometimes, you know what, we just need to outrun things right? Sometimes we need to use the tools to find balance or a sense of self-worth, and that's not bypassing if you're doing it with awareness and with wisdom, but sometimes we get addicted.
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To the work, to the practice, to the discipline, to feeling like I'm only good enough when I do X, Y, and Z.
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And I think many of us know that feeling.
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You know, we're reaching for the practice like you would reach for any substance or, habit that helps you to escape feeling the things you don't wanna feel.
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And so I.
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Often it happens when we're afraid to stop.
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When we're afraid to slow down, we think we'll get inundated or, avalanche of emotion will catch up with us.
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And so my invitation for you is to do nothing.
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It's an interesting experiment.
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Do nothing sit still.
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For 30 minutes, or you can move, but just really do nothing.
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Don't drink coffee or tea.
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Don't even necessarily people watch or analyze people or allow yourself to get distracted.
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You can look at nature, you can look at a wall, you can look at things in your room, but you don't have to accomplish anything.
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You're not writing, you're not journaling.
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Just notice how often you reach for the phone for distraction.
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Keep your phone far away from you.
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Set a timer in another room, and then just sit down and just sit there and see what happens.
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And notice what arises from the discomfort.
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How long can you literally allow yourself to sit there and do nothing? Watch the mind's habit to need to do something, to think about something, to analyze, something, to judge or criticize, and just see what arises from the body, from your heart, from your solar plexus, from your gut, from your throat.
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Notice where you feel sensation in your body.
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And ask yourself what is actually here, what is present right now, and be with yourself in your body, with your breath as it's moving in and out of the body, and you're not meditating and you're not applying any technique or specific mantra or anything like that.
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You're just being with yourself, listening.
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Waiting, noticing, observing, and do your best not to grasp at what you think should be there.
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And it's not about what you wish you felt or what you wish the experience was.
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Just be with what is actually present right here, right now, and welcome it.
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That's the work.
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Again, very simple.
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Do nothing, but it's not easy.
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It is really not easy.
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And it helps to just re-pattern some of that energy around doing, needing to always do, always accomplish, always perform, always get better, always be moving on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.
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A lot of us come from this pattern and it gets perpetuated with the Ang yoga practice because.
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It's set up that way.
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It's designed that way.
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And so this is profoundly different from what most of us were taught and the patterns that most of us have developed throughout our lifetime.
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And I wanna share one more piece because it's something central to how I teach now and how I work with clients.
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And that is when I really started doing this deeper work.
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Of connecting with my body, accepting my body as it is without trying to change it or make it different, whether that's in looks or feeling or felt sense.
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when I stopped trying to get anywhere or get somewhere, I just started seeing the world differently.
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I started seeing life as the path, life as the practice.
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When we allow things to move through us, energy, emotions, stories, beliefs, other people's expectations, our own fear or joy or love, we allow ourself to really be with the abundance of what it means to be alive.
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We become aware of so much more and we start to feel it as a river moving through us rather than something to manage or control or dam up or stop.
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And we have a choice.
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We have a choice in what we want to channel.
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And there's a difference between wanting to control and direct versus choosing what is present.
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Because choice arises out of being present in the now, we have to fully accept life as it is the raw, unfiltered, present moment, and then we can choose.
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If we can make a choice.
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This presence though, this choice requires us to be embodied, which means to feel from within our own body, not popping up into the mind, into the story, into analyzing what it means or what we think about it, but just staying in the deep sensation of it, feeling it all the way through.
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Making peace with it, welcoming it, having a conversation with it, listening to it, discovering the wisdom that's there inside of yourself.
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And this is where real transformation lives.
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It doesn't happen, at another retreat or in another certification or traveling to India or Miso, or working with this teacher or that teacher.
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Higher level of practice or a different technique, a different type of yoga or a specific type of breath work or pranayama.
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It happens when we have this willingness to be here now to slow down and to feel what's present, to drop into our feelings, our feeling state.
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Without story, the true, pure, raw sensation of it.
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And to listen to what arises from that space and that place.
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So if you've made it all the way to the end of this episode, then I wanna say something to you specifically, since you're still here.
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If any part of this resonated with you, whether it's the bypassing, the discipline, the needing to earn the right to feel okay, or not quite letting yourself receive, not feeling safe to receive or to be seen, then I really truly wanna let you know you are not broken.
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And there's nothing wrong with you.
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You've developed some great strategies and patterns that have helped to keep you safe throughout your life, and they've made sense within the context of your life, and you also don't have to continue running those patterns and programs.
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And also you can never truly outrun yourself anyway.
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You are always there.
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And so the shift isn't gonna happen.
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You know when you find the perfect practice for yourself, it's gonna happen when you stop using your spiritual practice to avoid what's uncomfortable and when you're willing to sit with uncertainty with not knowing, even if it's only for two minutes, just sit.
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With what is, without trying to fix it or solve it or transcend it or make it mean something, or make it go away or turn it into something else, just be with it.
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That's when everything changes truly.
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That's when true realizations open up from within you.
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It's when the mind and the body and the consciousness all align.
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It's when you feel spirit in your body and you come alive, and it doesn't happen because you forced it.
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It happens because you finally, finally allowed yourself to meet yourself in the present moment without any judgements or preconceived ideas about who and what you are.
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And so this.
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Work is calling to you.
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If you feel like there's a next step along your path that you're excited and encouraged to explore, then I would love to hear from you.
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This is exactly how I work with my clients.
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We go into the places that.
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We often bypass into the feelings, the unconscious, the body, through breath, through awareness, through sensation, beyond story, beyond the mind.
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Deep, deep into the present moment and slowly, safely into your own body, your own embodiment, and actually feel what's there for you.
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And learn to listen to it.
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Listen to its language, listens to its messages, its memories.
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What it's holding, not to fix them.
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You don't need to be fixed.
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You are not broken.
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But to just feel what is arising, what's there, and like little children, you know what starts to surface.
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It just wants to be seen and acknowledged and loved.
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And from that place, everything starts to shift.
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Everything starts to come into alignment, and you feel what true alignment is.
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And so if you wanna know more about how I work with people and what working with me would look like, then just send me a message on Instagram at Harmony Slater official.
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You're also welcome to send me an email or check out my website, harmony slater.com.
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I would love to have a conversation with you and.
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See if it would be a good fit, if this work would be a good fit for you.
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And so I hope that you found some inspiration from these stories and this episode.
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And until next week, continue to take good care of yourself.
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Try out that, do nothing exercise and be with yourself as is.
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As you are, because you are a precious being of light who's here to elevate consciousness on the planet and be a beacon of love for all the beautiful souls that you come into contact with.
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For everyone you meet each and every day.
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I love you.
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If you haven't heard it today, I'm letting you know and I can't wait.
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To connect with you next week.
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Thanks for listening.
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That's it.
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We've concluded another episode of the Finding Harmony podcast.
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I just wanna thank you so much for doing the work that changes the world, starting with yourself.
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It truly does make a huge difference.
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Please make sure you have your automatic downloads turned on wherever you listen, so you don't miss any of the upcoming episodes.
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I have so much more magic I can't wait to share with you.
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Lastly, if you're on Instagram, I love connecting and hearing from you, so come on over and say hello at Finding Harmony podcast, and you can also come say hello to me personally at Harmony Slater official.
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Thank you again for being here.
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I cannot wait to share more with you in our next episode.
