Confidence & Strength Training with Coach G for Athletes of All Levels
After being injured over the summer, I knew that I could either go to physical therapy or work out to get my strength back. I have been training with G for two months. I play tennis all year round and I would like to get my strength up all around to become a stronger player.…
Yoni. What does that even mean, I wondered.
It is the place from which we are all born. The sacred place. The source, shakti, the Divine Feminine. In the literal act of baptism, the baptized pass through a giant yoni and are then said to be born-again.
What comes from birth is more than your life.
It is a lot of pain. Sometimes pieces of DNA that you might not want get stuck on you or in you, like Bowen’s disease. They told me it was genetic. This was before epigenetic was a buzzword —they told me I didn’t cause it but I probably triggered it, which sounded as much like blame as anything.
I was 24. I had a precancerous growth on my vulva. What’s a vulva? See yoni.
The precancerous growth started as a virus-HPV, to be exact. So, perhaps I was born with HPV from my moms yoni, but I didn’t trigger it evidently until I was 24 and deep into the stressors of living against myself. This was long before I put the pieces together of how smoking and drinking and whatever other horrible things I was doing to my body, mind, and sprit in my youth were killing me. I just ran right smack into it.
This is life. This is how it is. There is no escape. All the things we do to escape the pain lead us right back into it.
I teach this now: how to live toward yourself versus against. I really wish I could just tell you to put down the chips, booze, device, joint, drug, whatever you are using to run away and just sit with it. There are no weapons that can win the wars we wage against our past, present, or future pains.
I built my life on avoiding pain. I know this shit inside out.
I made it another 32 years into this life before the next episode of yoni expressed herself in me. This time growing on and in my uterus—taking up space, blocking exit or entry to my uterus—my creative energy.
I had this growth removed, surgically. I sent it off to the lab for a biopsy: BENIGN.
The best we can hope for is a benign blockage. But what is growing? What I know to be true is that there is no benign anything. Biology dictates that everything is either growing or dying. Everything has a purpose. Everything is here for a reason. When I make jokes about why in the world biology thought to create mosquitos, I realize they are to feed the bats and their larva to feed to glorious angels we call dragonflies. There is purpose everywhere—even if we don’t understand it.
When I assume this to be true I can see that everything is already perfect, and everything is going from perfect to perfect versus from imperfect to perfect. It shifts my whole experience. There is so much Grace in acceptance. I can imagine that my life is emerging.
I frequently ask myself what it means to accept what is?
Acceptance for me is surrendering to what is. Surrender is not giving up—its giving over. How does an acorn know to become an oak tree? It simply emerges as itself—it does not perseverate about whether it should be a Ginkgo or a Maple or a Burr Oak, for it is already baked in the recipe of the acorn. So too, the fertilized egg. What if we imagine some upstream point where the energy chose to be an acorn or a fertilized egg? It is one possibility. For me, it is a recognition that whatever I feel about a given situation does not change the situation.
I use the example of freight trains: I am driving and then stopped at the railroad crossing—there is nothing to do. I watch the drivers around me itching to accelerate—trying to find a path through, whipping around the stopped cars, driving into oncoming traffic lanes, anything to avoid the stillness. I find it the most beautiful experience of being with what is. No one has changed the fact that there is a train blocking passage. No one has sped up the situation. But this is not the story they tell themselves—in their mind—they are smarter than the train—they know a way around it. They are making things happen!
This also applies at the grocery store. The line at the check out is long—all the lines are long—your egoic mind wants to imagine that it can calculate a quicker route—first it says—not this line, not the line you are in. Anything is better than this.
Malcolm Gladwell published a book—I cannot recall which one—that details that in fact this is false. There is no faster way. Someone will argue with this. The mental space required to edge out your perceived competition in the grocery store checkout line or at the train tracks is not small potatoes. It occupies your entire experience. You may have scored the best groceries—the freshest fruit and vegetables, the most beautiful piece of fish, full of life force energy—the ingredients to cook a delicious meal for the absolute love of your life—and all of this will be overshadowed by your need for speed.
What if you waited your turn? What if while waiting you just observed the insanity around you and discerned that you would rather have peace? What if you waited and dreamt of the meal you will be cooking, the look on your lovers’ face as they experience the cuisine you prepared with love, the ingredients hand picked and perfectly embodying the flavors you intended? That is just one thing you could occupy yourself with as you wait your turn. Instead, you might leave the grocery store full of anger or impatience and self righteous fury forgetting all about the love with which you had shopped for the food.
We live in a world of me first. There is an overwhelming sense that we are not supposed to have to wait in line, or for the internet speed, or for a train, or for anything or anyone. What is waiting? You really get to decide at every moment if you are waiting for something or if you are just being, here and now.
Our ability or inability to get still is linked with every facet of our well being. There is no way to be well if you are always thinking that you can get ahead—because with that you are never present in the now—and guess what? There is no other time than now.
I know—there are so many who will argue with that last statement, too. They say, “well you have to be thinking about your future and processing your past!” Mmmmmmmmm, perhaps integrating your experiences by being fully present in them is more important. Have you ever tried that?
The essential understanding here is that all of life is experiential. Until you stop thinking that you know the way to get “there” you are just chasing your tail. You keep doing the same thing —your mind is on a perennial treadmill and you have no awareness. The scenery never changes and you don’t even notice it. You are so attached to knowing what is coming next that you miss everything that is actually happening and you define it as waiting in line—always getting the slowest, dumbest cashier (no judgment there:), getting stopped by the train (as if it were personal—only stopping you—targeted at you, even), but really all you are doing is waiting for your life to begin.
Until you allow consciousness to rise up in your patterns—you are just a puppet on a string of your own egoic mind. You define every experience as happening to you as opposed to happening for you, or all the things you HAVE to do, instead of all the things you have chosen……..
It’s really simple—but its not easy. Everything is. Every single thing you experience is only exactly as YOU define it. So I remind you to choose again. If you are not enjoying your life, choose again. If you think you are waiting for some idiot, choose again. Start to notice how you put yourself at the absolute center of every experience —it’s all about you in your mind. But if you were to think the cashier thinks it is really all about them you’d be outraged.
There is no place where one person ends and the other begins. There is no other person out there. There is only you in there.
So I am here now with a growth in my uterus. Does it matter the origin? Does assigning it to my mother or to anything somehow save me? Does assuming I “know” the cause make me have to deal with what is happening differently? I wonder this when people say “x” is happening because “y”. This is happening because of my mother. I mean, first of all, so what. Second of all, how in the world does assigning responsibility to another person actually save me? It doesn’t. I am still here with a growth in my uterus.
What if I accept 100% responsibility for everything that is happening in my life? What if I assume the “acorn” knows what it is doing. I respond to what is emerging rather than trying to push it away, trying to not feel what comes up, or even not hate it as though it were invading my pristine body? What if I KNOW that it is supposed to be happening? What if I just wonder why? What if I wonder how I allowed something to grow and how I participated in its emergence instead of assuming it is wrong?
Nothing I think or do or say can change what is happening.
Next time you are in line waiting for anything see if you can notice how your mind assigns your impatience to other people. It says you are waiting because of someone else. You would rather blame a stranger than recognize what you are projecting out of yourself. Choose again. You can remind yourself that you are choosing to be there. You can remind yourself to stop centering your attention on roadblocks. Focusing on roadblocks will drain you of your life force energy through distraction. Whatever you are feeling is coming from inside of you. If you feel anger, rage, impatience, hate, fear, love, joy happiness, peace, grounded—these emotions are in you. If you say I am mad because……..you are assigning your feelings to other. But they are your feelings. They are in you. Events and people and situations only trigger what is already inside of us. There is no cause. Re-center your awareness on what you truly desire to experience and choose again.
I choose to see the uterine growth as an opportunity to clear away blocks to my creative power. This is a chance to next level my awareness of my physical body and the connection between my thoughts and my experiences and my feelings. This is another chance to gain some clarity on what is emerging. I can allow it to shift and change as all things do. I can be with it at every stage of it’s emergence as much as I am able. If I keep wondering it gives me space to allow for what is instead of assigning some meaning to it and then acting on it based on the meaning I have given it.
Its very different to assume that this growth is some horrible vestige of my past, or some bit of DNA from birth (which was really a long time ago, LOL) or some growth trying to zap my life, versus imagining that this is something for me to gain more awareness about my body, my life, my choices, my future. My power lies in my ability to shift my thoughts.
There is a very clear difference between force and power. Force is linear and finite. Power is infinite and non linear. Power grows with use, force is eliminated with use.
I choose to tap into the source of infinite power—to allow the field of possibility to be etheric and beyond my puny mind’s ideas and to recognize that forcing anything only makes me tired and brings me down.
What I am saying is different, but it is not difficult. What I am saying is shift.
Scott Fitzgerald is famous for his novels and for his letters. In particular, a letter to his daughter, which he penned seven years before he would succumb to alcoholism. This letter resurfaces every year or so as a reminder to parents and children of where we should focus. “Don’t worry about parents," he wrote. Best advice, in my opinion. Don’t worry about the past, it is gone, or the future, as it has yet to unfold.
Currently, I am engaged in a transformational journey through cleansing. This is a cleanse led by Debby Andersen.
These are her words regarding the cleanse: “In Ayurveda, a daily routine is emphasized as a vehicle for optimal health. This is because a consistent routine supports the nervous system to relax. When the nervous system is relaxed, our digestion improves, our mind is clear, and we feel calm and peaceful. On the other hand, when our nervous system is not relaxed, our digestion is inhibited and our body and mind become anxious and unclear.
If this seems far-fetched to you, think about how young children react when their eating or sleeping schedule is thrown off: temper tantrums and crying fits. This is what your nervous system does as well—even though as adults we are much better at suppressing these reactions.”