What’s the biggest difference between…

... taking in yoga classes, spiritual workshops, and podcasts- only to feel unfulfilled at work, isolated in your life, and disconnected in your relationships...

... and actually living your spiritual purpose,  being part of a supportive community, and enjoying a conscious loving relationship?

OK, so what is the point of this depressing rant?

Whatever your version of not fully accessing your spiritual well-being in your daily life, it creates a HUGE amount of conflict.

Because you inevitably feel like an imposter. And that conflict and misalignment within yourself is very painful and difficult to resolve.

It challenges your happiness, well-being, spiritual integrity, and worst of all, your ability to enjoy life.

So you brush it under the carpet by distracting yourself, rationalizing it, or dumbing yourself down.

Until you can’t.

Because now you're too self-aware to delude yourself for very long. Dammit! You know too way much to pull that off anymore.

So you segment your spiritual life away from your human life in order to make the conflict and disheartening feeling go away.

So at yoga, I am spiritual Michael, and at work, I am professional Michael. (Will the real Michael please stand up?)

And just when you think you have things managed, it hits you again. Apparently, there's no hiding from it anymore.

Isn't it time you whole-heartedly enjoyed your spiritual well-being in your relationships, work, and everyday life?

If so, let's check out exactly what's getting in the way of that...

Obstacle #1: Keeping your Spiritual and Human Natures Separate

You're typically taught that spirituality happens separately from your human life. So your spiritual practice gets segmented away from your human experiences.

And of course some of those human experiences do not seem overly spiritual. Like arguing with your spouse, hurting someone’s feelings, or getting angry at your neighbor.

So as cool as the spiritual connection we had in savasana would be in our marriage, we bump into these segmented, invisible barriors. For reasons that we can’t quite explain, they just don’t seem to go with each other.

Then we make assumptions that our work place will not be open to our spiritual openness. Better keep it separate.

But most of the time we just never consider bringing our spiritual well-being into our daily life. Keeping it separate happens unconsciously. We just never think of it.

What you need:

Unification. A way to consciously bring the divergent aspects of your life together. So take your rowdy friend to your meditation class. Or tell your boss how you nailed a yoga pose. Think of it as dream where you're introducing your most radically different friends to each other.

Obstacle #2: Not Fully Accepting your Humanness

As human beings, we do some pretty silly things. So you, like me, have inevitably done some utterly ridiculous things. It’s part of being human.

Some of them may even seem to be unforgivable.

While there are a few exceptions, most spiritual practices (or therapy for that matter) do not begin to address accepting our own humanness.

Is it acceptable for you to be jealous? Greedy? Selfish? Or vindictive?

Yet as human beings, we all feel these things from time to time. Why feel ashamed of natural human feelings?

If you can’t accept your humanness, there is a tendency to segment it from the other parts of your life. 

This leads to feeling unworthy of having spiritual well-being in your actual life.

What you need:

Self-Acceptance. Find compassion and understanding for why you did what you did. Without judgement, ask yourself: Why would the person you were at that time and situation have done that? Be nice!

Obstacle #3: Equating Openness and Intimacy with Risk and Rejection

We’ve all been burned. We were honest or vulnerable, and it didn’t go well. We finally exposed something real about ourselves and then it came back to bite us on the butt.

We walk away from such experiences with the belief that it is not safe to be open about what you feel and to speak your truth.

To add to that, the openness and expansiveness we experience with our spiritual practice can be challenging to put into words.

This makes it especially challenging to share these vulnerable feelings with your husband, girlfriend, or friend at work.

What you need:

A detailed way to challenge these associations and limiting beliefs. Also, you need a new way to express your openness to create a different outcome of love and support.

Obstacle #4: Hiding your Spiritual Gifts and Purpose

Have you ever thought about what you came here to do? If you reading this, I suspect you have.

Unfortunately, most of us hide our purpose or our spiritual gifts. It’s just too risky.

It’s not your fault. Our culture doesn't often support people’s sense of purpose and spiritual gifts. 

Expressing your purpose and gifts quickly becomes threatening to people you share it with as it makes them realize they are not living true to those things in themselves. 

This makes it very difficult for them to support honor your purpose and gifts. In fact, it typically elicits criticism and judgement from them.

What you need:

Guidance and support to clarify your purpose and create a specific, effective plan to unfold it.

Obstacle #5: Not Trusting Your Heart and Intuition

It’s so much easier to integrate your spiritual nature into your relationships, work, and everyday life if you trust your heart and follow its guidance.

Your heart and intuition are wired to guide you in your everyday life.

This inner wisdom guides you in navigating relationships, making a difference, and all those ambiguous with no clear-cut-answer-type situations.

But you were not likely taught to do this. Most of us were taught to logically think our way through things. And for some things this works well.

But it is much less effective for matters such as whether to support or challenge a friend who is making an important decision.

This requires getting a feel for (and trusting) the thing she needs most at this time.

What you need:

How to sense, trust, and act upon what your heart and intuition are telling you to do.

Live Session #1: Choose an Element to Awaken in your Life

This is where we’ll create a solid foundation. You will start by determining what is most important to you in your life. Then you will identify an element of your spiritual nature you would like to awaken in your life and an area of your life that you would like to integrate that element into.

Remember, a huge reason you are not living the life you would have for yourself is because you haven’t clearly determined what you truly value, considered what you really want, and had the guidance and support to create those things in your life.

This will soon change. By the time you’re finished with Session #1, you’ll have clear sense of what you truly value, a spiritual element would like to awaken, and an area of your life you would like to integrate it into. This provides us with something solid to work with in the upcoming modules.

Here are the broad strokes of the first session:

• Determine what’s Most Important to you: Effective and lasting change begins by understanding what you truly value. This provides orientation for what you would like to awaken and allows you to align your life with what matters most to you.
• Identify an Element you would like to Awaken in your Life: Perhaps it's the oneness and intimacy you feel in meditation. Or the feeling of alignment you experience during yoga. Or maybe it’s the sense of purpose that has been arising that you have been wondering what to do with.
• Choose an Area of your Life you want to Integrate that Element into: If you want more connection and intimacy in your life, do you want that in your intimate relationship, with your kids, or in your workplace? Why not all three? You'll get there! But it's most effective to initially complete the process in one area.
• Identify the Sensation of the Element you would like to Awaken in your Life: What is the body sensation of that oneness and intimacy? What is the feeling when you consider your sense of purpose? By tuning into the actual sensation and feeling of the element you want to awaken, you'll be able to recognize it in your daily life.

Live Session #2:  Remove the Obstacles

Awesome!

You’ve set your foundation! You identified the things most important to you, an element of your spiritual nature you would like to bring into your life, and an area of your life you would like to integrate it into. You’re on a roll!

This second session is perhaps the most challenging and most powerful one of the bunch. The personal freedom and empowerment this creates is easily worth the price of the program.

It requires rigorous honesty (with yourself) which starts with the willingness to look at your life- exactly as it is. Once you see yourself clearly and objectively, the rest of your transition is inevitable.

I will start the ball rolling by asking some questions and gently pointing some things out. You will participate in the investigation looking at the things that have been holding you back. Challenging yes, but you can do this. We’re in it together!

Here are some of the things we will look at:

• Focus on the Internal Obstacles that Limit you: It often feels like someone or something outside of yourself has prevented you from having the element you want in your life. While external obstacles need to be addressed, we are going to initially focus on the internal obstacles that limit you. Once we disempower the internal obstacles, it is easier to navigate the external blocks that arise. 
• Unplug your Limiting Beliefs: We pick up various core beliefs about ourselves and the world in childhood which become reinforced and embellished as adults. While these beliefs serve us for a while, they tend to limit us as we grow spiritually. We will explore if there are any beliefs or stories you tell yourself that may be obstructing you.
• Disempower your Fear: Fear naturally arises as you get close to what you want most. Since fear is future-based, you can break each fear down to an if/then statement about what you believe will happen. This format clarifies how fear limits your life and puts it into terms that are manageable.
• See your Behavioral Patterns: These repetitive patterns rob you of your ability to choose what you want in your life, because you do them over and over without realizing it. By becoming conscious of your behavioral patterns, you get the opportunity to choose something different.

Live Session #3: Offer an Intention

Here is where things get fun - real fun :)

You’ve set your foundation and removed the obstacles, so now you can take things to a whole new level by creating and offering a clear intention to activate your new life.

Here’s what you’ll soon be activating:

• Embrace your Partnership with Life: When you offer an intention, you initiate a natural partnership with Life to create something together. Many of us have been conditioned to put ourselves below God—and by extension, below Life. This session guides and supports you to offer your intention as an equal partner with Life.
• Create a Clear Intention: When you offer your intention, it initiates and activates the new element in your life. In the first session, you identified an element you want to awaken and an area in your life you want to integrate it into. Here you will bring these components together to create a clear intention for your life.
• Offer your intention: Offering your intention is the moment of commitment to awaken the new element in your life. Offering your intention in a ceremony helps you envision your intention as a rite of passage to a new life that includes the new element you are awakening. This session will guide and support you to offer your intention.

Live Session #4:  Create a Personal Program

By this point, you have built a huge amount of self-awareness and intention. But it is also essential to create a personal program that will allow to you integrate your new spiritual element into your everyday life.

Many succumb to their resistance and stop here. This is where all the potentiality becomes real. It is where your spiritual nature takes form in your actual life.

While it's natural to feel uneasy being in new territory, let this be the grand adventure that it is. This is what you have been preparing for...

• Create your Personal Program: Together, we will design a personal program that provides a new orientation for your life. This program will keep you attuned to your heart, intuition, and internal resources and replace the external orientation you were conditioned to rely upon. It consists of the following three components:
• Establish a Spiritual Practice: A spiritual practice allows you to experience the sensation and feeling of the element that you are integrating on a regular basis so it can provide orientation for your life. By tuning into the sensation of the element on a regular basis, you can recognize it in the context of your daily life.
• Practice Noticing and Reconnecting. This allows you to stay aligned with your new element as you awaken it. Noticing is objectively observing when you are aligned with your spiritual nature, and when you are not. Reconnecting detaches you from what is distracting you and realigns you with your spiritual nature.
• Recognize the Doorways that Open: When you offer an intention, Life responds by presenting doorways for you to actualize that intention. Doorways include relationships, opportunities, connections, etc. This session supports you to recognize the doorways that open and find the courage to step into them in the spur of the moment.