“Spirtual” Takes on the Meaning that you Create for it.

Thursday // January 30 // 2014

I thought that when you lead a spiritual life, you needed to be “good” and follow a certain path in order to feel aligned. I love remembering the truth of where Don’t Tell Summer came from. It came from the fuel inside my friends and I that was ignited by this rebellious feeling. We felt like there was another way to live; free.

One day my Dad said to me, “You can lead a spiritual life and still raise Hell.” To me that meant connecting with what feels true for you in every moment, without judgment and questioning whether it’s connected to the right path.

There’s this feeling I get when I’m completely aligned and inspired. It’s wild, beautiful and free. I love hip-hop and surfer-grunge music; I love traveling with my friends into the unknown. There’s something sexy about it because you feel reckless just absorbing it. It feels real because you aren’t trying to make it any more pure than it is. It is in those moments when you feel wild and undeniably free, that inspiration pours out faster than you can write and so all there is left to do is just be; to feel the freedom that you’ve created without changing anything.

The more I allow who I really am to just be, the more I allow myself to be inspired by the things that excite my soul. This means not criticizing myself on the days when I feel more aligned listening to a lyric than an affirmation. It means meditating when I would love to, not because I think that I need to in order to live a spiritual life. That presence of an inner spark doesn’t judge anything as good or bad, it speaks loudly and truthfully. If something makes you feel alive and fuels your soul, it’s true for you. Feel the cues when you hear that song, watch that movie and drive in the car with that friend. What are you doing and who are you with when you feel that overwhelming sense of, I am alive.

Fearless Risk Taking: Embracing Vulnerability

Monday // January 20 // 2014

Nothing is more freeing than jumping into the unknown with your gut as your only road map…

But what happens after you’ve gone for it, after you’ve taken the risk?

Whenever I face a fear, I feel this sense of ownership of life. I run around feeling blissful and free, like love is on my side… but what I’ve found after that reckless feeling of “I did it” comes vulnerability. When you hide behind a fear and allow your inner power to surface it can feel a little odd. It’s almost like you have become so free, but the energy around you is suspended while the things in your life are shifting in order to mirror your fearlessness.

Something comforting to remember is that you’ve gone through this before; Risk taking is a cycle. Think about the first time that you told someone you loved them. You were probably freaking out, then expressed your feelings and felt like you were on cloud nine, then all of a sudden a wave of vulnerability flooded over you, but then you settled back into your body and felt grounded and free.

When you take a risk you’re literally agreeing to vulnerability, and there’s nothing more beautiful than that.

Manifesting: Anything is Possible When Love is Involved

Tuesday // January 14 // 2014

When I was 15, I was a competitive cheerleader living in Oregon. I had never been so in love with something, aside from my friends and family. There was something freeing about it that made me feel completely aligned with who I am.

I had a coach that pushed me and made me believe that anything is possible for me as an athlete, even though I lived in Oregon where cheerleading wasn’t as big as it was in other areas at that time. I spent hours on end watching Youtube videos of teams in Texas, feeling the inspiration and chills come over me every time. Looking back, not once did I have feelings of limitation or thought, “I wish I was there right now,” because I was happy doing what I was doing in Oregon.

Fast forward two months and one massive manifestation later, I found myself flying on a plane from Oregon to Texas for practice. I was cheering for the very team that I watched on Youtube. I spent 6 hours in travel each way and it didn’t phase me once; I was on an adventure that my mind couldn’t wrap its head around and it didn’t need to… if it did I wouldn’t have been on it.

The summer before it all happened, my coach from Oregon suggested that I go to a camp in Texas to train. I went to the camp and stayed in contact with a lot of the athletes from it. One day I was chatting with a guy from the camp who was on a team in Texas. He started talking about a dream-team that was being put together and my heart pounded at a million miles a minute as I pictured myself there with them. I was so excited about it and jokingly said, “Oh I wish I could be on it!” The next thing he said was, “Well actually, we need a replacement for one of our flyers (girl that gets thrown in the air).” Semi-jokingly, I said, “Well ask your coaches if I could fill in.”

… Wait a second, where did that come from? I’m from Oregon… The team is in Texas. HOW would that work… physically, with the time difference, how would I get there in time? How would I afford to pay for the flights?

I didn’t know and I didn’t care. It was so crazy I didn’t even let my mind chime in. I felt it in my heart; the decision was already made.

I ran and told my mom my heart-filled dream of flying to Texas to be on a cheerleading team there. We laughed about it a little, and laughter turned into what ifs, and what ifs turned into my mom saying, “Well I do have miles from all of those years from work that we didn’t use…”

Next thing I know I started practicing. I went to school in Oregon each week and lived in Texas on the weekends. Each flight was like an internal-dialogue of “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

This act of living out my dream, despite what my circumstances looked like, made an internal shift on an energetic level. I not only learned “anything is possible”, my cells learned that this was the way that I feel at home.

Reasons why this dream quickly became a reality:

Wishing: Allowing Yourself to Step Aside

Wednesday // December 4 // 2013

It is in the times when we feel that something big, something unimaginable, is conjuring up in our lives that we need to step aside. The key word is that it’s unimaginable; it’s so incredible that we literally couldn’t have thought of it. We try and manifest and create a list of steps on how what we want can come into play, but just feeling that feeling of something big coming in was actually all we needed to do. Feel it and step aside.

Self-Love: Connecting in all Circumstances

Wednesday // November 27 // 2013

Connect.

Connect with yourself, your love and your light.

I love growing, supporting, and connecting with myself. When I would get into places of discomfort I became really good at getting myself back out; I did the work. When times weren’t going the way that I planned, that’s when my practice of connecting inward would really kick in. I loved the place of routinely creating space to do what I love and connect with who I truly am. It is in the times when my body and soul would be fed up with my external circumstances that I would stop and go into self-love mode. I would enjoy waking up each morning, fully surrendering in order to embrace my assignments.

When my energy would start to kick up again, things would shift back into the flow and I would feel at ease. The more peace I felt, the more I let go of my connected practice. It felt like it did what I needed it to do and its perceived purpose was served… until something rocked me and I would come crawling back into it again.

I was in a reverse fairweather relationship with myself; I would be there, fully connected, when times were bad then ditch my inner guiding system the moment things felt good again. The mentors that I would reach out to when I was feeling distressed would suddenly slip my mind when I felt an inkling of peace. The snooze button and coffee runs quickly overturned the mornings of meditation. My external world was flowing and so I let my connected world off the hook.

The real truth is, the only reason my external world was flowing was because of my vibrating energy due to being so filled with love and connection to myself. Our external experiences are a result of our internal experiences, but I thought that if my external world was running smoothly it was ok if I felt a little disconnected to my inner source of happiness. That wasn’t going to work, and was going to be an endless cycle of disconnection, freaking out and running to my inner self for guidance.

This cycle didn’t just stop there; it was a pattern running parallel with different areas of my life. If I felt sick, I would religiously have a green juice and take all of my vitamins, then the moment I felt healthy I would ditch them. But just as my disconnectedness came, so did my health and other issues. I only chose a certain way to live when I needed it.

The more you connect with the true you, the more you want to make this connection a part of your life, every single day. You want to cherish the relationship you have with yourself and be supportive of you during those times when you’re at ease just as much as those times when you really need a helping hand. When you stay connected, you won’t feel those ups and downs and desperate calls for some self-love ignition. It will be something that is a part of you, something that you love and something that you look forward to every day all the way down to in every moment.

Find a practice that you love, choose something that you would love to do no matter what your outer-world looks like, weather that’s connecting with yourself through nature, journaling, meditation or playing a sport. If it’s something that you love when you’re feeling uneasy it just as well should be something you love when you’re living in your bliss. Love doesn’t know good or bad, love is just love. Often we look to connect to our self because we have disconnected, but if we remain connected with the space that we find in our time of connecting inward, we will find that this connectedness can withstand any circumstance.