Friday, March 23, 2012

What is your body trying to communicate to you???

Being healthy is vital to living a joyous life!  Being someone who has healed myself of many things physically, mentally and emotionally I feel like it's part of my duty to let others know that they can truely heal themselves.  All of the answers are within us, not outside.  This takes some time, getting to know ourselves and uniting the body, mind and spirit.

Good health is being active and having high energy, eating a balanced diet, being free of worry and fear, going to sleep and awakening easily, having a good memory, having a sound mind, having a light heart, having our thoughts match our actions, having supportive friends and family, and being honest, considerate, compassionate and loving to everyone in our lives.

Disease, aches and pains are the body's way of getting our attention and communicating with us.  Unfortunately, when this happens most of us run to the medicine cabinet or drugstore and take a pill.  This is a way of ignoring what the body is trying to tell you and opting for a short term solution. Instead, when this happens, it is the perfect opportunity to sit quietly and ask your body what it is trying to tell you.  Sometimes a headache is just dehydration that can be solved with more water. Anxiety may be there because we just need to deal with some old fears.  This can be true of life threatening illesses as well.  If we want long term health we have to start listening to our bodies.

I want to share a few stories of my own relating to my health.  About 6yrs ago I was laying on the table in my friend Andrea's office.  It was the first time I had met her and I was recommended by a dear friend to go and experience her healing.  I didn't know what to expect and my friend really didn't know how to describe what kind of work she actually does.  She just said "trust me", so I went.  Andrea started to massage my feet and immediately said "you have Gallstones" what are you so angry about, what are you holding onto?"  She was practicing a healing modality called Reflexology.  I said, "what do you mean?"  She explained that the every organ in the body has an emotional and psychological counterpart and when we are not healed and balanced in those areas they disease will manifest physically.

She pointed our that the Liver/Gallbladder were anger/resentment vessels and prescribed me a meditation to do each morning upon awakening.  I left her office and every morning I did my meditation, which was asking my higher self to reveal to me what I was holding onto and what I was so anrgy about.  I also  used this meditation while moving through my yoga asana practice and one morning I remembered that I had experienced sharp pains in the center of my chest on many occasions over the last couple of years.  Pains that I had dismissed as anxiety and indigestion.  I decided to make an appointement with my doctor out of curiosity, but of course I didn't tell her that I had seen a healer.  I just mentioned that I had pains in my chest that I thought may be gallstone related, after some research, and asked her to order me an ultrasound.  Low and behold I had Gallstones!  The first question doctor's ask is about your diet, because this could also be a cause, but my doctor knew that I was vegetarian and eating very healthy for years, so she was stumped.  I, of course, knew exactly what it was.

I continued to see Andrea so that she could guide me, in many ways, how to listen to my body and release whatever it was I was holding onto.  This was such a powerful process!  During the same time I was recommended to see a surgeon to remove my gallbladder.  I explored all of my options and in the end I listened to my intuition and I decided to take the longer harder route, which was to face why Gallstones formed to begin with.  Considering myself a pretty happy person I still had many things that I was angry with that had formed over the years, resentments that weren't dealt with fully, relationships that weren't healthy and also just old belief systems that no longer worked for me, but I still felt responsible for. I also struggled because I thought it was wrong to be angry so I even had to let go of the shame involved with that.  I believed that if I removed the gallbladder it would only manifest somewhere else in the future so I needed to do the emotional work if I wanted to be healed.

Little by little I began to let go, on the table, in meditation, on the mat and then in life.  I had to face each thing and work on forgiveness and letting go.  This took much longer than the few hours it would have taken to have the Gallbladder removed but I trusted in the process.  From that moment on I never had another pain in my chest.

By bringing my awareness and attention to that particular part of my body everything I needed to know was revealed to me.  We live in a society now that when something is uncomfortable we get rid of it instead of taking an opportunity to work on it.  Everyone and everything is our teacher but we must humble ourselves enough to listen.  I am full of gratitude for all of the ways my body and mind communicate to me helping me realize just how connected everything is.

What is your body trying to communicate to you?

Andrea Vlaco-Christos: 215-620-1413

Book Reccomendation:  You Can Heal Your Life by: Louise Hay

All the Love
Danielle

Monday, March 12, 2012

Dharma.....Your Life's Purpose

Yesterday I led a workshop on Manifesting in Business and Beyond with my lovely friend Bridget Morris. It was the 2nd session of a series of workshops called The Ladies Luv Sessions created by my dear friend Julia Horn of Forma Yoga and hosted by the divine Lilavati at Temple of the Lotus. These are practices created by women, for women and done in the company of other women to foster, nurture and radically unleash the Divine Feminine.  We are meeting every Sunday in March.  So far I am blown away by the magic that is being spun in these sessions and am full of gratitude to be able to participate in such a big way.

One of the main teachings in the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, is the importance of the realization of Dharma (Duty or Life's Purpose). This teaching is conveyed through a conversation that takes place between Krishna ( God) and Arjun ( a Warrior).  Arjun is conflicted because he is fighting in a war between families and is being asked to kill.  He doesn't want to carry out his Warrior duties because he feels it is wrong but Krishna explains that it is his Dharma and there is no right or wrong when it comes to duty.  So, sometimes our duty may not be exactly what we want to do, but it is why we are here, and if we don't play the part everything else will not carry out as it's supposed to.  So recognizing your part and where you fit into the larger picture is a key component to your happiness.

I spent most of my time talking about Dharma yesterday and how this is a vital part in achieving happiness and abundance and necessary in order to manifest anything great in your life.  The question "what do I want to be when I grow up" can be replaced with " what am I here to do?"  By answering this we are lining up with the universe and coming from a place of intention.  We are all here to contribute something very special and only we can contirbute our gifts, no one else.  It's only when we synchronize our actions with this energy that everything else falls into place effortlessly.  So in other words, if you are feeling stuck and lacking in joy and abundance chances are you are not aligned with your Dharma!

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with my amazing Father 10yrs ago.  He has since passed but I still am reminded of all of his teachings.  We were stopped at a red light and I was sharing how I was bored and uninspired in my cosmetology teaching job.  This was something I had been doing for a little over a year after leaving the salon industry for various reasons.  I was sharing how even though I was unhappy other people were telling me that teaching was a wiser choice than being a hairdresser because it provided more reliability, steady pay and health insurance.  He responded with, " people tried to tell me the same thing about bartending and being an entrepreneur but I'm glad I didn't listen because for the last 50 years I have woken up happy, successful and loving what I do....who cares about reliability and health insurance.  I do what I do because I love the people and so do you!" He was a simple man who managed to give a major life teaching in 2 sentences!  It was at that moment that I understood Dharma and recognized that it was a very natural thing for me to be a hairdresser and time to get back to that.  But, there was another element that was missing and that was why I left the industry.

I realized that people were walking away with much more than a hairstyle when they left my chair.  My clients were feeling good about themselves( and not just esthetically) and inspired.  It was from there that I knew I had to create a space ( hair studio) for this to happen on a much greater level in order to carry out my Dharma, which is to provide and hold a space for people to heal.  So, I started to explore what this would look like, what this would feel like through a simple process called manifesting.  It was from there that I discovered that my desire had to be followed up with intention and taking a risk, something I saw my Dad do all of the time.  No matter what my father always jumped at an opportunity when he felt strongly about it.  So that's what I did, it was scary, very scary, but I knew this was a part of the process so I kept on.  It took almost a year but after setting the foundation everything started to fall into place.  The right people showed up to work there and the clients just kept coming.  After being in business for about a year and a half I realized that my Dharma needed to be stretched a little further.  I needed to provide a space for my staff to grow and heal, as well.  So, at that point I decided to step away from the chair on Thursday's. I now coach my staff on many things, not just to reach business goals but to reach their personal goals and to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of their happiness and abundance.  I have had the opportunity to witness such amazing growth in them and feel blessed to be on this journey with them.  I draw so much inspiration from the clients and the staff.

I am sure my Dharma will continue to expand because I am in complete sychronicity with my purpose, "why I am here."  I continue to follow the signs and take risks as they arise.  That is something else I realized on this journey, when you are aligned with your true purpose the Universe will conspire to support you and continue to affim that you are in the right place!

Are you feeling stuck?  Are you living your Dharma?  What is your Dharma?  Are you recognizing the signs the Universe is giving you?

From my experience a daily practice of Yoga or meditation can be an amazing tool in realizing this.

All the Love ~*~

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Clarity

As you can tell from my profile I like to keep busy with my creative pursuits, sometimes getting caught up in a dream/astral world to the point where I have to ground myself.  That being said I do a pretty good job maintaining my reality.  I returned from Colombia 2 1/2 weeks ago and just hit the ground running with projects.  I spoke to an MBA class on Leadership, began working on a painting for a show in May and have been preparing for a workshop on Manifesting for this upcoming weekend.  The objective for the painting is to translate how in order to truely be our authentic selves we must embrace our shadow, not ignore it.  So, in other words, we must accept our negative traits along with the positive, the yin/yang, so to speak.

The saying is "Art imitates life" but my experience was the opposite this last week.  After starting the painting I found myself facing my shadow on quite a few occassions with my significant other.  This tends to happen often while I'm working on something, the universe gives me some material for inspiration.  Like they say in 12 Step programs, if you want to know your defects of character get into a relationship!  Observing my reactions I became embarrassed and then proceeded to get angry at myself and full of shame for still responding the same way I have for years.  How could it be that after all of these years of self-analysis and practice I could still be facing these things, on a much smaller scale, of course?  This, I realized, was self-defeating and instead I decided to explore it in my meditation.  What came to me was that these reactions are based on events, samskaras (imprints on the soul) or karmas (deeds from the past) and have nothing to do with the person I am in the relationship with now.  Whether I keep it in this lifetime and say that these reactions developed as a child through my relationship with my parents or if I go deeper and say that I brought these behaviors came with me from previous lives,  either way I have to look at it as my own stuff, my karma!  Our natural state of being is love,  it's all of the other stuff that causes the fear.  Learning to come from a place of gentleness and compassion with myself, not force or shame because without darkness we could not appreciate the light.  This is Tantra Yoga!

I have had the awareness for quite sometime but it's no longer enough, now I have an opportunity to do something different and change my reaction to things.  Not react the same over and over and just apologize!  I need to continuously come back to that place of love, while in these moments, before reacting, not a place of fear.  Responding as Danielle now, not the 3yr old inner child with these vritti's (fluctuations of the mind) that are telling her a false story.  We are not the mind, we are much greater than that!  Recognizing that this beautiful soul, and every other soul for that matter, is here to show me where I can be better, they are my teacher.  Trying to move past the situation and on to the lesson, this is my goal.  Healthy relationships inspire us to communicate better and grow and I am fortunate to be experiencing that today.

Needless to say the week ended with me feeling pretty good about myself and grateful for my relationships, my practice and all of the tools I have been given over the years. This helps me to live a life of reflection and guarantees that I will become a better version of myself everyday.  I will continue to polish this beautiful soul of mine.  And also, to take myself a little more lightly because everyone has "their stuff", not just me!  Now off to finish my workshop planning for Sunday:)

All the Love ~*~