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Video Blog Summary: Speaking your truth and genuinely expressing what you feel is natural. We only have difficulty with this when we withhold what we're prompted to say. We withhold things because we are conditioned to believe it's not safe to freely express what comes to us. It’s like the thought bubble in a cartoon comes to us, and we keep it to ourselves. When we don’t speak our truth and freely express our feelings, our throat chakra becomes blocked and does not function

Video Blog Summary: Things continue to be challenging as COVID cases increase and we continue to socially isolate. One of my favorite skills in challenging times such as these is to see yourself as moving toward something you would like to have for yourself. You may say, “It’s kind of tough to move toward things with everything shut down these days.” I hear you. But keep in mind that there may be things you can do inside yourself to prepare for when things open up externally.

Video Blog Summary: Two friends and I were doing a healing meditation to send energy for people to unify after the election. Shortly after we began meditating, an idea occurred to me to send energy to help people unify by understanding each other’s perspectives. And then I immediately heard a voice that said, “That never works.” OK... I realized that understanding perspectives quickly gets into our way of seeing things that involve our social and political views. It made sens

Video Blog Summary: I think we sometimes lack gratitude due to a misunderstanding that stems from a misperception of our relationship with life, God, spirit, or the universe. If you don’t understand the nature of the relationship with life, how can you have true gratitude toward it? Our life thrives when we have a clear partnership with life. Life and you create things together. You set an intention, life helps unfold that intention, you step into it, life supports you, and s

Video Blog Summary: Embracing Uncertainty We never really know what’s going to happen. Sometimes we create a story to tell ourselves that we know what’s going to happen. Then we feel safe again. But we never really know. COVID and its social isolation have put the fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in our face. We don’t know when COVID is going to end or when we can freely plan our lives again. So, we are left sitting with the uncertainty of life. What if we just

Written Blog: Allowing Yourself to Feel Can you feel it? The days are getting shorter, and the time change has added to that. To me, it feels like things are closing in. And visually, things are closing in with the increasing darkness. In my tradition of the medicine wheel, we call this the time of introspection. The seasonal conditions of darkness are encouraging us to look inside. And this year, it’s extra special with the prospect of a COVID winter. Some of us barely emoti

Written Blog: Unconscious Intention When people refer to intention, they are mostly referring to conscious intention. When we offer an intention, it interacts with life and opens doorways to create things in our lives. But even when we are not conscious of all of our intentions, we are still offering intentions all the time. And these unconscious intentions are often undermining our conscious intentions and creating unfortunate outcomes. Our unconscious intentions have an ene

Written Blog: Illusions are Convenient Removing illusions is a paramount practice in most spiritual paths. Some of my favorite archetypes include Shiva, being the destroyer of illusions, and Maya, as the Sanskrit word for illusion. Once we discard our illusions, we can see things as they are. However, some of these illusions turn out to be rather elusive. I have had teachers put illusions directly in front of my face, and I still could not see them. So I got to thinking, “Why

Written Blog: The Value of Outrage So what do you like least in Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Or perhaps Hillary Clinton? Amazing teachers, all of them, but not in the way we might think. Perhaps they teach us the most when we have a strong reaction to them. Many of us have been experiencing outrage around the debates and other various injustices over the past year. And rightfully so. It’s been pretty outrageous. And thank you to the people who are actively doing something about

Written Blog: Be Like Water So I’ve been noticing some things about myself of late. Despite my efforts to accept things as they are, I still tend to force things to be the way I think they should be. It’s been coming up while working on my website: one of the program's design tools isn't working the way I think it should. I often see a simple workaround to create what I want, but still spend a lot of time stubbornly getting the design tool to work the way I think it should. A

Video Blog Summary: It's the time of harvest! In order to complete this cycle of the medicine wheel, we have to claim the value we have been developing in ourselves. This video explores the value you have created this past year (even if you did not realize it). Now I am going to assume it has been an interesting year for you. With COVID, quarantines, and social distancing, our ways of socializing and interacting have been severely altered. But make no mistake, you still devel

It was the evening of Friday the 13th. The coronavirus was not going away. They closed the schools in the state of Oregon earlier that day. It was dusk and starting to snow. The weather app on my phone forecasted snow and cold temperatures for the next three days. My phone calendar showed no plans for the weekend. Everything about that moment felt like life was closing in on me. I had felt that feeling before. It was the feeling at the beginning of a silent meditation retreat