“Interrupting our destructive habits and awakening our heart is the work of a lifetime. Sometimes when things fall apart, that’s the big opportunity to change.” Pema Chodron

Our way of life breeds unhappiness. Ayurveda teaches harmony with nature and how to live in a state of balance. This requires changing how we live, think and perceive.

As we learn to use the mind like a tool, we stop being dominated by impulses & conditioning. We are able to go beyond the mind into the stillness of Consciousness itself.

Working with the five koshas, we relax our body, our breath becomes diaphragmatic and smooth, and we work more skillfully with thoughts in the lower level of the mind (mostly generated by hypervigilance). This opens the doorway to our intuitive wisdom, and to deep layers of peace in the vast silence of the mind.

In this stillness, we develop the capacity to be aware of the ever-present Witness, the part of our being that is ever pure, ever wise, ever free.

Our heart’s natural state is open and loving, so that is what we experience when it is clear of blockages. How do we remove the obstacles? Love everything you do and everyone you see. Choose to focus your awareness on the love instead of your lower self. Love is a natural force in the universe feeding us from the inside. Michael Singer, Living Untethered

“We step up and face the situation (clean pain), or we fold and shrink away. We either grow up or flee. We make an internal commitment to growing up.” Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands.

I am a small-town girl from Saskatchewan, a prairie province in Canada that most people wouldn’t know how to pronounce let alone know where it is. I grew up in a home where I was well cared for physically. No one screamed at or ridiculed us. Neither of my parents struggled with addiction to alcohol or drugs. There was no physical or sexual abuse. I was never afraid for my physical safety and I never witnessed violence at home.

There are two things I say that people are skeptical about or outright don’t believe. The first is that looking at our lives through a trauma lens reveals that most of our reactivity, compulsive thinking, anxiety, depression, fear and dread of social interaction are trauma responses driven by our primitive brain and survival system.