While Mt. Agung was threatening to erupt in Bali a fellow traveler suggested hiking up Mt. Rinjani, the volcano on the island next door towering to 12,224’. It sounded intriguing however I wasn’t in shape for such a hike and was not sure I wanted to invest the time in preparing for it. I was very indecisive until I jogged around a tiny island nearby as the sun was rising. The mountain was perfectly silhouetted and magnificent. I looked at the peak at a distance away and knew I wanted to be there at the same time looking back at the little island.

I researched some tour companies online that looked good but couldn’t get clear communication with any of them. So instead I found a travel booth with a nice big map of the mountain. I confirmed they were the same company as one I had found online that was rated well. They promised me they would provide good hiking equipment, cater to my food allergies with a nourishing diet, and give me a nice private room the night...

Within the interviews with health and healing experts for my book Healing Happens: Stories of Healing Against All Odds, one of the most common reasons for someone healing is because they focused on their vision for life.

Sometimes we get dissuaded by that vision because of others’ or our own disbelief in its potential success. Or maybe you feel you are not deserving or capable so the idea never even enters your mind. Now is your chance to imagine if anything were possible in six months, what would you want to see in your life? If you had all the resources, money, time, support, tools, knowledge, confidence…to make anything happen, what would it be?

One of the other challenges people have when focusing on their vision is being in a space of wanting verses having. When we want, it assumes we don’t have it and we can feel a state of lack. Wanting and having are mutually exclusive and cannot happen at the same time. If you create a habit of wanting, you are more...

Try this for one week to help feel absolutely happy and then let us know how it went by clicking here. 

Day One: Joy is Your Natural State
Joy is our natural state yet it can be hard to access just like a beautiful stained glass window covered with dirt. One of the things that blocks us from joy is holding onto past trauma.
Paramhansa Yogananda says “Circumstances are neutral.” Much of our trauma actually comes from our definition of what happened and our response to that. Then we often hold onto a definition of our own selves and feel bad throughout our lives because of it.

As an example, I used to always hang onto a memory of a time when my father played with my brother and sister and not me. When I was three years old I could see them under the door playing the game Operation where you, as the doctor, have to take the bones out of the body without touching anything else and making the buzzer go off.

What I read from that was that my own father did not want to play...

Meditation solutions offer a very peaceful and non-invasive way to heal the body, mind, and emotions. When I was going through my health challenges with Hashimoto’s and Hypothyroidism, I did everything possible on the physical, emotional, and mental levels to live as healthy as possible. All of that steadied my symptoms. When I started to meditate, I started to heal and did not need medication anymore even though that was not what the doctors predicted. My astrologer suggested that was because I was filling myself up with light.

Imagine having a glass full of black coffee. If you continuously pour water into that glass, eventually all of the darkness is flushed out by the clear water. As we draw light into our bodies while we meditate, it leaves no room for what may be considered “darkness.” That’s an esoteric way of explaining why scientific research is revealing the health benefits of meditation. With our bodies being made of energy, what we are doing is...

Would you like to know how to align with your fullest potential? Do you want to feel a sense of freedom in every cell of your body? Would you like to have the flexibility and control to access whatever skills you need in any moment?

Me too! Actually those are the gifts that I have tapped into through my journey with movement and spirituality.

Starting before the age of five my parents put me in gymnastics programs. I liked it more than anything else and used to practice it in my backyard and create swingset circuses for the neighbors. Since the dance-like moves in the floor routines were my favorite,  as a teen I completely switched to dance.

I was in my first dance company in high school and got to choreograph for a couple of our school musicals. I majored in dance in college (alongside of Mechanical Engineering) and started teaching kids dance classes. Later I taught adult fitness dance classes and even had my own dance company briefly.

Everywhere I traveled, I...

Last week’s blog post claimed one day, meditation will be considered a drug. Maybe it already is? Doctors are now prescribing meditation. It helps calm and relax people, as well as heal disease. When some people meditate they see beautiful color formations or hear intriguing sounds. Some people gain an expanded awareness, as some people claim drugs offer them.

Warning: side effects may include:
Not caring what others think of you.
Needing less sleep.
Getting along better with others.
Enhancing the immune system.
Causing your face to glow and eyes to shine.
Making you look younger.
Reducing Pre-Menstrual Syndrome symptoms.
Developing emotional maturity.
Giving you better test scores in school.
Helping you work more efficiently.

Side effects of overdosing may include:
Becoming addicted to meditation.
Not wanting to fulfill your daily duties.
Talking in a monotone voice.
Developing pride.
Isolating yourself from others.
Using it as validation for having greater awareness than others who do...

I think most people can agree love is one of the most potent and desired experiences. I believe it is something that always exists and we can either tap into it or not regardless of the conditions of our life. Yet how well are we able to do so all the time? I want to share with you an experience I had of feeling another dimension of love from going through foot surgery a month ago.

Despite all of my experiences with natural healing, something intuitively in me felt to move forward with surgery to remove two ganglion cysts from my right foot. It is hard to know exactly why they develop. If I had to blame something, dancing in salsa shoes and pointe shoes would probably be the culprit. Although the painful bumps on my foot were teaching me a lot, when given the opportunity to get surgery for free, it felt like the right thing to do.

 It turned out to be a very blossoming experience in many ways. What had the biggest impact on me was the way I felt right after...

With eclipses, blood moons, and mercury retrograde, many people are feeling a lot of shifts right now. My hope is that we all can enjoy the process and send love to the unpleasant moments. I have been playing with how to reduce the feeling of pain and learning to be okay with pain.

 
I just read an article explaining how when we experience pain, the neurons in our body send a message through the central nervous system that something wrong has been perceived. Therefore one could draw the conclusion pain generates from an ingrained belief that something bad is happening to ourselves. What if we could shift that belief and then decrease the sensation we call pain? 

If we look back through history the moral standards of society continually change. We just made gay marriages legal in U.S. We now have equal rights for men and women and people of all skin colors in America when once we thought they should be treated differently. How commonplace is...

As I face the challenges coming up lately, it is very easy to go directly into a negative reaction. Yet around the corner keeps coming a greater desire to love. As I let it in, I feel soothed and calmed. It helps me understand where others are coming from without getting emotionally involved. I can choose my stance in the situation with greater strength and even-mindedness.  And it reminds me of when I first discovered how helpful it is for me to love and feel my love received.

I had just spent over two months in an isolated and tense situation where I felt very disconnected, even from those right around me. I was sitting in the living room in a foreign country of a family my friend worked with. The conversation revolved around complaints about politics I knew nothing about. I had no interest in engaging. I also had a growing headache.

I did not have a headache for a long time but used to get them frequently. Headaches were always a sign something was really off in myself. When...