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The magical journey that changed my life
A few years ago, I suffered deeply.
I resisted everything about my life: where I lived, my work, and most agonizing of all, myself.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I blamed myself for not reaching the level of success I’d imagined, not living where I thought I would live, not having the life I always dreamed of.
I had survived cancer a few years earlier, and all I wanted was to be happy. I worried that life was too short to feel like this, and obsessed over ways I could change my life to be happy. Then, one day, I realized something powerful:
If life is too short to be miserable, then I should stop being that way.
I decided to embark on a 40-day journey of yoga, healing, and transformational reading that ended up launching me into a new of being. It changed my life. At the start, my only intention was to shift my energy. I was tired of feeling sad, tired, overwhelmed, and like a hamster constantly trying to keep up with a life that seemed stuck on the same old spin cycle.
As I journeyed through this inner transformation, I learned fascinating insights that shaped my entire life philosophy and helped me understand exactly how to heal the spirit.
Here’s how I embarked on a journey that changed my life:
40 days of kundalini yoga
Kundalini yoga is a very powerful technology designed to release inner blocks and help people reveal their innate brilliance. Practicing the same set of kriyas (exercises) for 40 days is said to unlock the full benefits of each movement while helping us form new habits that increase happiness. This was one of the key components that changed my life.
I first experienced the extraordinarily powerful benefits of kundalini yoga when healing from cancer. The practice literally moved energy through me so intensely that I could feel it percolating and eventually disappearing.
Completing the same practice for 40 days rewires not only the body, but also the mind. During the process, I felt boredom, resistance and thoughts of this doesn’t matter, I can skip just one day. As I learned to ignore these sabotaging thoughts during the 40 days, I learned they didn’t define me. That actually, paying attention to these poisonous thoughts prevented me from enjoying the peace I so desperately craved.
Meditation
I experimented with meditation before this transformational 40-day journey, but during this intense period of working to shift my energy, I meditated at intervals throughout the day, sometimes up to 20 minutes, which was previously unheard of for me.
When I first began sitting with my breath, I could barely sit for one minute without glancing at my cell phone timer. We often forget the most basic prerequisite to making positive life changes: simply deciding, in your bones, that this is the day things will change.
This journey became a ritual during which I systematically identified my biggest inner blocks and learned surefire ways to overcome them.
Transformational reading
During this journey, I read the genius book The Power of Now. This book helped me see that my problems weren’t ruining my life, my resistance to them was. This resistance consumed my life-force energy, sadly stopping me from seeing the unbelievable potential hidden on the other side.
Accepting my life circumstances was the scariest thing I’ve ever done because I feared it would doom me to a mediocre life. But instead, accepting my life and my feelings immediately opened the floodgates of healing and possibilities more expansive than I ever could have imagined. This changed my life.
The magical shifts that happened
After practicing for 40 days and clearing all the stuck, sad energy, I believed for the first time in my life that I had the power within me to be happy, to feel at peace. My journey has continued since those transformational 40 days, and always will, but taking that leap jumpstarted an entire new way of being, thinking and living.
Since then, I’ve compiled the exact spiritual practices that transformed my life and powerful insights from my own deep spiritual work into a step-by-step journey. These strategies have helped me overcome trauma from cancer, a lifetime of accumulated sadness from depression and helped me heal after cutting off a toxic relationship with an immediate family member.
This work also guided me through the underused process of clearing the energetic pain body, an essential step for accessing your natural state of peace and joy.
This process has now been systematized in my program The Big Shift. Stay tuned for the next round!
WHAT STUDENTS SAY:
– “The Big Shift was a mind blowing, deeply moving, life-altering experience for me.” Annelise D.
– “It is not an overstatement to say that I feel it has changed my life.” Louisa K.
– “The Big Shift really has been life changing! I have gotten rid of some old baggage that used to bog me down nearly every day.” Cristi V.
What spiritual practices do you find most powerful for overcoming inner blocks? Leave your tips in the comments below!
Image by StoryTravelers via Flickr
I also shared many of the same feelings five years ago living in the midwest. Years of struggle with a teenage son. Unhappy living a state that had cold weather and down on myself.
Deeply rooted in my belief in God, I prayed and prayed and prayed. Nothing changed. This started my mind thinking about the reality of such a belief. Nothing about the bible made sense when I applied it to what I know in life, e.g. virgin births, talking snakes, talking bushes.
An awakening of sorts happened after I applied the “Law Of Attraction” to my life. I made a folder of how I saw my life, leaving out the material side of things, I don’t think LOA works that way. I stopped praying to a God and started a personal mantra that included words like “you can do this”. I started a daily yoga and meditation practice, sometimes twice a day. Every morning upon awakening I thought of at least one thing I was grateful for and followed that by looking at my inspiration folder. I started saving $20 from every freelance job I did and hid the money in the closet, which in a short year afforded us a trip to California, where we now reside.
The end result, I gave up my belief in a God. Nothing about religion made sense to me when I really thought about what my parents had instilled. That in itself changed my life and empowered me. By not believing there was another place that I would go after this life, THIS life started to have MUCH more value and I live it with happiness and love more than ever.
We are now living where I feel we belong and looking back at the inspiration folder, it’s pretty remarkable how much life matches up.
My personal mantras are still my go to and by believing in myself I have been able to accomplish so much with fewer disappointments., not because disappointments don’t happen, but because my approach is more realistic. If something doesn’t happen, it just didn’t happen. Life is full of ups and downs so I don’t take the downs so personally, but rather as an opportunity to explore if I’m on the right track. Or simply accepting that sometimes life can suck, there doesn’t have to be a reason behind it.
Yoga and meditation are still a powerful part of my daily life. I love the way it feels on the inside and how it has shown me to view others with less judgement.
My son, he’s now 24 and doing well, we’re closer than ever and he sees CA as a second home. Out time together is precious and more valued.
That’s a part of my story:) I enjoyed reading yours as well.
Hi Marcie,
Thanks so much for sharing your story! I love how you created the inspiration folder and matched it with thoughts of gratitude. You mentioned that once before and I think about it often because your story of dreams come true inspired me!
Thanks also for sharing how you found more practical ways to find peace and joy in everyday after moving away from abstract religious stories. I try hard to make spirituality practical for similar reasons. Yes, I believe we’re all energy and connected, but that doesn’t change the very real disagreements and difficulties we experience day-to-day! To me, spirituality/religion is useless unless it gives us more joy NOW and helps us to better navigate real life. Because life does get oh-so real sometimes!
Thank you for sharing your inspirational story about finding joy and making spirituality work for you!
All the love. Have a wonderful holiday,
Suzanne
Hi Suzanne,
I follow your journey (most often via Instagram) and I cannot wait for your programme.
I am actually quite new to all the healing and overcoming my inner blocks, as until this January self-pity was my way to go through life. But this year something changed. I can’t quite put my finger on when and how it started, but it did. So far I have done a bit of meditating (which has helped me go through my beloved grandpa’s death) and home practice of yoga with the help of the amazing yogis I found on Instagram 😉
But I would definitely love to see your ideas in The Big Shift 😀 Let the countdown to Monday begin 😉
Love.
J.
Hi Joanna,
So glad to hear that you have enjoyed powerful shifts of perspective this year and have discovered the healing potential of yoga! It sounds like you are already experiencing more peace and happiness — so very happy for you!
The Big Shift sounds like a great fit for you. It’s full of strategies and step-by-step methods to rewire the mind and shift the energy. I hope you come check it out!
All the best,
Suzanne
I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments. We all have to find what works for us. Nature, mantras, meditation and yoga are so helpful.
Thank you for your thought provoking blog. It’s so appreciated and enjoyed.
Happy holidays to you as well Suzanne.
Amazing. Bummed I missed it. I’m supposed to be doing kundalini yoga too. So much resistance. How did you do all these things every day? Were you not working? Cuz I don’t think there’s enough time in the day for me to do all my spiritual and healing practices that I’m supposed to do, in addition to my regular responsibilities. And so I get over whoever and do nothing. 🙁 And then I get really mad at myself.
Hi Kelly,
The good news is that another journey is starting soon. The entire practice is designed to take as little as an hour a day, so often it’s just a matter of finding the time for it. Trying to fit in a lot of practices can be overwhelming, but however much time you have is enough. Even just meditating five minutes a day could unlock great shifts for you!